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"I can hardly describe the mood in which I was left by this harrowing episode--an episode at once mad and pitiful, grotesque and terrifying. The grocery boy had prepared me for it, yet the reality left me none the less bewildered and disturbed. Puerile though the story was, old Zadok's insane earnestness and horror had communicated to me a mounting unrest which joined with my earlier sense of loathing for the town and its blight of intangible shadow.

Later I might sift the tale and extract some nucleus of historic allegory; just now I wished to put it out of my head. The hour grown perilously late--my watch said 7:15, and the Arkham bus left Town Square at eight--so I tried to give my thoughts as neutral and practical a cast as possible, meanwhile walking rapidly through the deserted streets of gaping roofs and leaning houses toward the hotel where I had checked my valise and would find my bus.

Though the golden light of late afternoon gave the ancient roofs and decrepit chimneys an air of mystic loveliness and peace, I could not help glancing over my shoulder now and then. I would surely be very glad to get out of malodorous and fear-shadowed Innsmouth, and wished there were some other vehicle than the bus driven by that sinister-looking fellow Sargent. Yet I did not hurry too precipitately, for there were architectural details worth viewing at every silent corner; and I could easily, I calculated, cover the necessary distance in a half-hour.

Studying the grocery youth's map and seeking a route I had not traversed before, I chose Marsh Street instead of State for my approach to Town Square. Near the corner of Fall Street I began to see scattered groups of furtive whisperers, and when I finally reached the Square I saw that almost all the loiterers were congregated around the door of the Gilman House. It seemed as if many bulging, watery, unwinking eyes looked oddly at me as I claimed my valise in the lobby, and I hoped that none of these unpleasant creatures would be my fellow-passengers on the coach.

The bus, rather early, rattled in with three passengers somewhat before eight, and an evil-looking fellow on the sidewalk muttered a few indistinguishable words to the driver. Sargent threw out a mail-bag and a roll of newspapers, and entered the hotel; while the passengers--the same men whom I had seen arriving in Newburyport that morning--shambled to the sidewalk and exchanged some faint guttural words with a loafer in a language I could have sworn was not English. I boarded the empty coach and took the seat I had taken before, but was hardly settled before Sargent re-appeared and began mumbling in a throaty voice of peculiar repulsiveness.

I was, it appeared, in very bad luck. There had been something wrong with the engine, despite the excellent time made from Newburyport, and the bus could not complete the journey to Arkham. No, it could not possibly be repaired that night, nor was there any other way of getting transportation out of Innsmouth either to Arkham or elsewhere. Sargent was sorry, but I would have to stop over at the Gilman. Probably the clerk would make the price easy for me, but there was nothing else to do. Almost dazed by this sudden obstacle, and violently dreading the fall of night in this decaying and half-unlighted town, I left the bus and reentered the hotel lobby; where the sullen queer-looking night clerk told me I could have Room 428 on next the top floor--large, but without running water--for a dollar.

Despite what I had heard of this hotel in Newburyport, I signed the register, paid my dollar, let the clerk take my valise, and followed that sour, solitary attendant up three creaking flights of stairs past dusty corridors which seemed wholly devoid of life. My room was a dismal rear one with two windows and bare, cheap furnishings, overlooked a dingy court-yard otherwise hemmed in by low, deserted brick blocks, and commanded a view of decrepit westward-stretching roofs with a marshy countryside beyond. At the end of the corridor was a bathroom--a discouraging relique with ancient marble bowl, tin tub, faint electric light, and musty wooded paneling around all the plumbing fixtures.

It being still daylight, I descended to the Square and looked around for a dinner of some sort; noticing as I did so the strange glances I received from the unwholesome loafers. Since the grocery was closed, I was forced to patronise the restaurant I had shunned before; a stooped, narrow-headed man with staring, unwinking eyes, and a flat-nosed wench with unbelievably thick, clumsy hands being in attendance. The service was all of the counter type, and it relieved me to find that much was evidently served from cans and packages. A bowl of vegetable soup with crackers was enough for me, and I soon headed back for my cheerless room at the Gilman; getting a evening paper and a fly-specked magazine from the evil-visaged clerk at the rickety stand beside his desk.

As twilight deepened I turned on the one feeble electric bulb over the cheap, iron-framed bed, and tried as best I could to continue the reading I had begun. I felt it advisable to keep my mind wholesomely occupied, for it would not do to brood over the abnormalities of this ancient, blight-shadowed town while I was still within its borders. The insane yarn I had heard from the aged drunkard did not promise very pleasant dreams, and I felt I must keep the image of his wild, watery eyes as far as possible from my imagination.

Also, I must not dwell on what that factory inspector had told the Newburyport ticket-agent about the Gilman House and the voices of its nocturnal tenants--not on that, nor on the face beneath the tiara in the black church doorway; the face for whose horror my conscious mind could not account. It would perhaps have been easier to keep my thoughts from disturbing topics had the room not been so gruesomely musty. As it was, the lethal mustiness blended hideously with the town's general fishy odour and persistently focussed one's fancy on death and decay.

Another thing that disturbed me was the absence of a bolt on the door of my room. One had been there, as marks clearly shewed, but there were signs of recent removal. No doubt it had been out of order, like so many other things in this decrepit edifice. In my nervousness I looked around and discovered a bolt on the clothes press which seemed to be of the same size, judging from the marks, as the one formerly on the door. To gain a partial relief from the general tension I busied myself by transferring this hardware to the vacant place with the aid of a handy three-in-one device including a screwdriver which I kept on my key-ring. The bolt fitted perfectly, and I was somewhat relieved when I knew that I could shoot it firmly upon retiring. Not that I had any real apprehension of its need, but that any symbol of security was welcome in an environment of this kind. There were adequate bolts on the two lateral doors to connecting rooms, and these I proceeded to fasten.

I did not undress, but decided to read till I was sleepy and then lie down with only my coat, collar, and shoes off. Taking a pocket flash light from my valise, I placed it in my trousers, so that I could read my watch if I woke up later in the dark. Drowsiness, however, did not come; and when I stopped to analyse my thoughts I found to my disquiet that I was really unconsciously listening for something--listening for something which I dreaded but could not name. That inspector's story must have worked on my imagination more deeply than I had suspected. Again I tried to read, but found that I made no progress.

After a time I seemed to hear the stairs and corridors creak at intervals as if with footsteps, and wondered if the other rooms were beginning to fill up. There were no voices, however, and it struck me that there was something subtly furtive about the creaking. I did not like it, and debated whether I had better try to sleep at all. This town had some queer people, and there had undoubtedly been several disappearances. Was this one of those inns where travelers were slain for their money? Surely I had no look of excessive prosperity. Or were the towns folk really so resentful about curious visitors? Had my obvious sightseeing, with its frequent map-consultations, aroused unfavorable notice. It occurred to me that I must be in a highly nervous state to let a few random creakings set me off speculating in this fashion--but I regretted none the less that I was unarmed.

At length, feeling a fatigue which had nothing of drowsiness in it, I bolted the newly outfitted hall door, turned off the light, and threw myself down on the hard, uneven bed--coat, collar, shoes, and all. In the darkness every faint noise of the night seemed magnified, and a flood of doubly unpleasant thoughts swept over me. I was sorry I had put out the light, yet was too tired to rise and turn it on again. Then, after a long, dreary interval, and prefaced by a fresh creaking of stairs and corridor, there came that soft, damnably unmistakable sound which seemed like a malign fulfillment of all my apprehensions. Without the least shadow of a doubt, the lock of my door was being tried--cautiously, furtively, tentatively--with a key.

My sensations upon recognising this sign of actual peril were perhaps less rather than more tumultuous because of my previous vague fears. I had been, albeit without definite reason, instinctively on my guard--and that was to my advantage in the new and real crisis, whatever it might turn out to be. Nevertheless the change in the menace from vague premonition to immediate reality was a profound shock, and fell upon me with the force of a genuine blow. It never once occurred to me that the fumbling might be a mere mistake. Malign purpose was all I could think of, and I kept deathly quiet, awaiting the would-be intruder's next move.

After a time the cautious rattling ceased, and I heard the room to the north entered with a pass-key. Then the lock of the connecting door to my room was softly tried. The bolt held, of course, and I heard the floor creak as the prowler left the room. After a moment there came another soft rattling, and I knew that the room to the south of me was being entered. Again a furtive trying of a bolted connecting door, and again a receding creaking. This time the creaking went along the hall and down the stairs, so I knew that the prowler had realised the bolted condition of my doors and was giving up his attempt for a greater or lesser time, as the future would shew.

The readiness with which I fell into a plan of action proves that I must have been subconsciously fearing some menace and considering possible avenues of escape for hours. From the first I felt that the unseen fumbler meant a danger not to be met or dealt with, but only to be fled from as precipitately as possible. The one thing to do was to get out of that hotel alive as quickly as I could, and through some channel other than the front stairs and lobby.

Rising softly and throwing my flashlight on the switch, I sought to light the bulb over my bed in order to choose and pocket some belongings for a swift, valiseless flight. Nothing, however, happened; and I saw that the power had been cut off. Clearly, some cryptic, evil movement was afoot on a large scale--just what, I could not say. As I stood pondering with my hand on the now useless switch I heard a muffled creaking on the floor below, and thought I could barely distinguish voices in conversation. A moment later I felt less sure that the deeper sounds were voices, since the apparent hoarse barkings and loose-syllabled croakings bore so little resemblance to recognized human speech. Then I thought with renewed force of what the factory inspector had heard in the night in this mouldering and pestilential building.

Having filled my pockets with the flashlight's aid, I put on my hat and tiptoed to the windows to consider chances of descent. Despite the state's safety regulations there was no fire escape on this side of the hotel, and I saw that my windows commanded only a sheer three story drop to the cobbled courtyard. On the right and left, however, some ancient brick business blocks abutted on the hotel; their slant roofs coming up to a reasonable jumping distance from my fourth-story level. To reach either of these lines of buildings I would have to be in a room two from my own--in one case on the north and in the other case on the south--and my mind instantly set to work what chances I had of making the transfer.

I could not, I decided, risk an emergence into the corridor; where my footsteps would surely be heard, and where the difficulties of entering the desired room would be insuperable. My progress, if it was to be made at all, would have to be through the less solidly-built connecting doors of the rooms; the locks and bolts of which I would have to force violently, using my shoulder as a battering-ram whenever they were set against me. This, I thought, would be possible owing to the rickety nature of the house and its fixtures; but I realised I could not do it noiselessly. I would have to count on sheer speed, and the chance of getting to a window before any hostile forces became coordinated enough to open the right door toward me with a pass-key. My own outer door I reinforced by pushing the bureau against it--little by little, in order to make a minimum of sound.

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

Gathering from the grocery boy's map that the best route out of town was southward, I glanced first at the connecting door on the south side of the room. It was designed to open in my direction, hence I saw--after drawing the bolt and finding other fastening in place--it was not a favorable one for forcing. Accordingly abandoning it as a route, I cautiously moved the bedstead against it to hamper any attack which might be made on it later from the next room. The door on the north was hung to open away from me, and this--though a test proved it to be locked or bolted from the other side--I knew must be my route. If I could gain the roofs of the buildings in Paine Street and descend successfully to the ground level, I might perhaps dart through the courtyard and the adjacent or opposite building to Washington or Bates--or else emerge in Paine and edge around southward into Washington. In any case, I would aim to strike Washington somehow and get quickly out of the Town Square region. My preference would be to avoid Paine, since the fire station there might be open all night.

As I thought of these things I looked out over the squalid sea of decaying roofs below me, now brightened by the beams of a moon not much past full. On the right the black gash of the river-gorge clove the panorama; abandoned factories and railway station clinging barnacle-like to its sides. Beyond it the rusted railway and the Rowley road led off through a flat marshy terrain dotted with islets of higher and dryer scrub-grown land. On the left the creek-threaded country-side was nearer, the narrow road to Ipswich gleaming white in the moonlight. I could not see from my side of the hotel the southward route toward Arkham which I had determined to take.

I was irresolutely speculating on when I had better attack the northward door, and on how I could least audibly manage it, when I noticed that the vague noises underfoot had given place to a fresh and heavier creaking of the stairs. A wavering flicker of light shewed through my transom, and the boards of the corridor began to groan with a ponderous load. Muffled sounds of possible vocal origin approached, and at length a firm knock came at my outer door.

For a moment I simply held my breath and waited. Eternities seemed to elapse, and the nauseous fishy odour of my environment seemed to mount suddenly and spectacularly. Then the knocking was repeated--continuously, and with growing insistence. I knew that the time for action had come, and forthwith drew the bolt of the northward connecting door, bracing myself for the task of battering it open. The knocking waxed louder, and I hoped that its volume would cover the sound of my efforts. At last beginning my attempt, I lunged again and again at the thin paneling with my left shoulder, heedless of shock or pain. The door resisted even more than I expected, but I did not give in. And all the while the clamour at the outer door increased.

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

For an instant I felt absolute despair, since my trapping in a chamber with no window egress seemed complete. A wave of almost abnormal horror swept over me, and invested with a terrible but unexplainable singularity the flashlight-glimpsed dust prints made by the intruder who had lately tried my door from this room. Then, with a dazed automatism which persisted despite hopelessness, I made for the next connecting door and performed the blind motion of pushing at it in an effort to get through and--granting that fastenings might be as providentially intact as in this second room--bolt the hall door beyond before the lock could be turned from outside.

Sheer fortunate chance gave me my reprieve--for the connecting door before me was not only unlocked but actually ajar. In a second I was though, and had my right knee and shoulder against a hall door which was visibly opening inward. My pressure took the opener off guard, for the thing shut as I pushed, so that I could slip the well-conditioned bolt as I had done with the other door. As I gained this respite I heard the battering at the two other doors abate, while a confused clatter came from the connecting door I had shielded with the bedstead. Evidently the bulk of my assailants had entered the southerly room and were massing in a lateral attack. But at the same moment a pass-key sounded in the next door to the north, and I knew that a nearer peril was at hand.

The northward connecting door was wide open, but there was no time to think about checking the already turning lock in the hall. All I could do was to shut and bolt the open connecting door, as well as its mate on the opposite side--pushing a bedstead against the one and a bureau against the other, and moving a washstand in front of the hall door. I must, I saw, trust to such makeshift barriers to shield me till I could get out the window and on the roof of the Paine Street block. But even in this acute moment my chief horror was something apart from the immediate weakness of my defenses. I was shuddering because not one of my pursuers, despite some hideous panting, grunting, and subdued barkings at odd intervals, was uttering an unmuffled or intelligible vocal sound.

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

Surveying the conditions, I chose the more southerly of the two windows as my avenue of escape; planning to land on the inner slope of the roof and make for the nearest sky-light. Once inside one of the decrepit brick structures I would have to reckon with pursuit; but I hoped to descend and dodge in and out of yawning doorways along the shadowed courtyard, eventually getting to Washington Street and slipping out of town toward the south.

The clatter at the northerly connecting door was now terrific, and I saw that the weak panelling was beginning to splinter. Obviously, the besiegers had brought some ponderous object into play as a battering-ram. The bedstead, however, still held firm; so that I had at least a faint chance of making good my escape. As I opened the window I noticed that it was flanked by heavy velour draperies suspended from a pole by brass rings, and also that there was a large projecting catch for the shutters on the exterior. Seeing a possible means of avoiding the dangerous jump, I yanked at the hangings and brought them down, pole and all; then quickly hooking two of the rings in the shutter catch and flinging the drapery outside. The heavy folds reached fully to the abutting roof, and I saw that the rings and catch would be likely to bear my weight. So, climbing out of the window and down the improvised rope ladder, I left behind me forever the morbid and horror-infested fabric of the Gilman House.

I landed safely on the loose slates of the steep roof, and succeeded in gaining the gaping black skylight without a slip. Glancing up at the window I had left, I observed it was still dark, though far across the crumbling chimneys to the north I could see lights ominously blazing in the Order of Dagon Hall, the Baptist church, and the Congregational church which I recalled so shiveringly. There had seemed to be no one in the courtyard below, and I hoped there would be a chance to get away before the spreading of a general alarm. Flashing my pocket lamp into the skylight, I saw that there were no steps down. The distance was slight, however, so I clambered over the brink and dropped; striking a dusty floor littered with crumbling boxes and barrels.

The place was ghoulish-looking, but I was past minding such impressions and made at once for the staircase revealed by my flashlight--after a hasty glance at my watch, which shewed the hour to be 2 a.m. The steps creaked, but seemed tolerably sound; and I raced down past a barnlike second storey to the ground floor. The desolation was complete, and only echoes answered my footfalls. At length I reached the lower hall at the end of which I saw a faint luminous rectangle marking the ruined Paine Street doorway. Heading the other way, I found the back door also open; and darted out and down five stone steps to the grass-grown cobblestones of the courtyard.

The moonbeams did not reach down here, but I could just see my way about without using the flashlight. Some of the windows on the Gilman House side were faintly glowing, and I thought I heard confused sounds within. Walking softly over to the Washington Street side I perceived several open doorways, and chose the nearest as my route out. The hallway inside was black, and when I reached the opposite end I saw that the street door was wedged immovably shut. Resolved to try another building, I groped my way back toward the courtyard, but stopped short when close to the doorway.

For out of an opened door in the Gilman House a large crowd of doubtful shapes was pouring--lanterns bobbing in the darkness, and horrible croaking voices exchanging low cries in what was certainly not English. The figures moved uncertainly, and I realized to my relief that they did not know where I had gone; but for all that they sent a shiver of horror through my frame. Their features were indistinguishable, but their crouching, shambling gait was abominably repellent. And worst of all, I perceived that one figure was strangely robed, and unmistakably surmounted by a tall tiara of a design altogether too familiar. As the figures spread throughout the courtyard, I felt my fears increase. Suppose I could find no egress from this building on the street side? The fishy odour was detestable, and I wondered I could stand it without fainting. Again groping toward the street, I opened a door off the hall and came upon an empty room with closely shuttered but sashless windows. Fumbling in the rays of my flashlight, I found I could open the shutters; and in another moment had climbed outside and was fully closing the aperture in its original manner.

I was now in Washington Street, and for the moment saw no living thing nor any light save that of the moon. From several directions in the distance, however, I could hear the sound of hoarse voices, of footsteps, and of a curious kind of pattering which did not sound quite like footsteps. Plainly I had no time to lose. The points of the compass were clear to me, and I was glad that all the street lights were turned off, as is often the custom on strongly moonlit nights in prosperous rural regions. Some of the sounds came from the south, yet I retained my design of escaping in that direction. There would, I knew, be plenty of deserted doorways to shelter me in case I met any person or group who looked like pursuers.

I walked rapidly, softly, and close to the ruined houses. While hatless and dishevelled after my arduous climb, I did not look especially noticeable; and stood a good chance of passing unheeded if forced to encounter any casual wayfarer.

At Bates Street I drew into a yawning vestibule while two shambling figures crossed in front of me, but was soon on my way again and approaching the open space where Eliot Street obliquely crosses Washington at the intersection of South. Though I had never seen this space, it had looked dangerous to me on the grocery youth's map; since the moonlight would have free play there. There was no use trying to evade it, for any alternative course would involve detours of possibly disastrous visibility and delaying effect. The only thing to do was to cross it boldly and openly; imitating the typical shamble of the Innsmouth folk as best I could, and trusting that no one--or at least no pursuer of mine--would be there.

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

The open space was, as I had expected, strongly moonlit; and I saw the remains of a parklike, iron-railed green in its center. Fortunately no one was about though a curious sort of buzz or roar seemed to be increasing in the direction of Town Square. South Street was very wide, leading directly down a slight declivity to the waterfront and commanding a long view out to sea; and I hoped that no one would be glancing up it from afar as I crossed in the bright moonlight.

My progress was unimpeded, and no fresh sound arose to hint that I had been spied. Glancing about me, I involuntarily let my pace slacken for a second to take in the sight of the sea, gorgeous in the burning moonlight at the street's end. Far out beyond the breakwater was the dim, dark line of Devil Reef, and as I glimpsed it I could not help thinking of all the hideous legends I had heard in the last twenty-four hours--legends which portrayed this ragged rock as a veritable gateway to realms of unfathomed horror and inconceivable abnormality.

Then, without warning, I saw the intermittent flashes of light on the distant reef. They were definite and unmistakable, and awaked in my mind a blind horror beyond all rational proportion. My muscles tightened for panic flight, held in only by a certain unconscious caution and half-hypnotic fascination. And to make matters worse, there now flashed forth from the lofty cupola of the Gilman House, which loomed up to the northeast behind me, a series of analogous though differently spaced gleams which could be nothing less than an answering signal.

Controlling my muscles, and realising afresh--how plainly visible I was, I resumed my brisker and feignedly shambling pace; though keeping my eyes on that hellish and ominous reef as long as the opening of South Street gave me a seaward view. What the whole proceeding meant, I could not imagine; unless it involved some strange rite connected with Devil Reef, or unless some party had landed from a ship on that sinister rock. I now bent to the left around the ruinous green; still gazing toward the ocean as it blazed in the spectral summer moonlight, and watching the cryptical flashing of those nameless, unexplainable beacons.

It was then that the most horrible impression of all was borne in upon me--the impression which destroyed my last vestige of self-control and sent me running frantically southward past the yawning black doorways and fishily staring windows of that deserted nightmare street. For at a closer glance I saw that the moonlit waters between the reef and the shore were far from empty. They were alive with a teeming horde of shapes swimming inward toward the town; and even at my vast distance and in my single moment of perception I could tell that the bobbing heads and flailing arms were alien and aberrant in a way scarcely to be expressed or consciously formulated.

My frantic running ceased before I had covered a block, for at my left I began to hear something like the hue and cry of organised pursuit. There were footsteps and guttural sounds, and a rattling motor wheezed south along Federal Street. In a second all my plans were utterly changed--for if the southward highway were blocked ahead of me, I must clearly find another egress from Innsmouth. I paused and drew into a gaping doorway, reflecting how lucky I was to have left the moonlit open space before these pursuers came down the parallel street.

A second reflection was less comforting. Since the pursuit was down another street, it was plain that the party was not following me directly. It had not seen me, but was simply obeying a general plan of cutting off my escape. This, however, implied that all roads leading out of Innsmouth were similarly patrolled; for the people could not have known what route I intended to take. If this were so, I would have to make my retreat across country away from any road; but how could I do that in view of the marshy and creek-riddled nature of all the surrounding region? For a moment my brain reeled--both from sheer hopelessness and from a rapid increase in the omnipresent fishy odour.

Then I thought of the abandoned railway to Rowley, whose solid line of ballasted, weed-grown earth still stretched off to the northwest from the crumbling station on the edge at the river-gorge. There was just a chance that the townsfolk would not think of that; since its briar-choked desertion made it half-impassable, and the unlikeliest of all avenues for a fugitive to choose. I had seen it clearly from my hotel window and knew about how it lay. Most of its earlier length was uncomfortably visible from the Rowley road, and from high places in the town itself; but one could perhaps crawl inconspicuously through the undergrowth. At any rate, it would form my only chance of deliverance, and there was nothing to do but try it.

Drawing inside the hall of my deserted shelter, I once more consulted the grocery boy's map with the aid of the flashlight. The immediate problem was how to reach the ancient railway; and I now saw that the safest course was ahead to Babson Street; then west to Lafayette--there edging around but not crossing an open space homologous to the one I had traversed--and subsequently back northward and westward in a zigzagging line through Lafayette, Bates, Adam, and Bank streets--the latter skirting the river gorge--to the abandoned and dilapidated station I had seen from my window. My reason for going ahead to Babson was that I wished neither to recross the earlier open space nor to begin my westward course along a cross street as broad as South.

Starting once more, I crossed the street to the right-hand side in order to edge around into Babson as inconspicuously as possible. Noises still continued in Federal Street, and as I glanced behind me I thought I saw a gleam of light near the building through which I had escaped. Anxious to leave Washington Street, I broke into a quiet dogtrot, trusting to luck not to encounter any observing eye. Next the corner of Babson Street I saw to my alarm that one of the houses was still inhabited, as attested by curtains at the window; but there were no lights within, and I passed it without disaster.

In Babson Street, which crossed Federal and might thus reveal me to the searchers, I clung as closely as possible to the sagging, uneven buildings; twice pausing in a doorway as the noises behind me momentarily increased. The open space ahead shone wide and desolate under the moon, but my route would not force me to cross it. During my second pause I began to detect a fresh distribution of vague sounds; and upon looking cautiously out from cover beheld a motor car darting across the open space, bound outward along Eliot Street, which there intersects both Babson and Lafayette.

As I watched--choked by a sudden rise in the fishy odour after a short abatement--I saw a band of uncouth, crouching shapes loping and shambling in the same direction; and knew that this must be the party guarding the Ipswich road, since that highway forms an extension of Eliot Street. Two of the figures I glimpsed were in voluminous robes, and one wore a peaked diadem which glistened whitely in the moonlight. The gait of this figure was so odd that it sent a chill through me--for it seemed to me the creature was almost hopping.

When the last of the band was out of sight I resumed my progress; darting around the corner into Lafayette Street, and crossing Eliot very hurriedly lest stragglers of the party be still advancing along that thoroughfare. I did hear some croaking and clattering sounds far off toward Town Square, but accomplished the passage without disaster. My greatest dread was in re-crossing broad and moonlit South Street--with its seaward view--and I had to nerve myself for the ordeal. Someone might easily be looking, and possible Eliot Street stragglers could not fail to glimpse me from either of two points. At the last moment I decided I had better slacken my trot and make the crossing as before in the shambling gait of an average Innsmouth native.

When the view of the water again opened out--this time on my right--I was half-determined not to look at it at all. I could not however, resist; but cast a sidelong glance as I carefully and imitatively shambled toward the protecting shadows ahead. There was no ship visible, as I had half-expected there would be. Instead, the first thing which caught my eye was a small rowboat pulling in toward the abandoned wharves and laden with some bulky, tarpaulin-covered object. Its rowers, though distantly and indistinctly seen, were of an especially repellent aspect. Several swimmers were still discernible; while on the far black reef I could see a faint, steady glow unlike the winking beacon visible before, and of a curious colour which I could not precisely identify. Above the slant roofs ahead and to the right there loomed the tall cupola of the Gilman House, but it was completely dark. The fishy odour, dispelled for a moment by some merciful breeze, now closed in again with maddening intensity.

I had not quite crossed the street when I heard a muttering band advancing along Washington from the north. As they reached the broad open space where I had had my first disquieting glimpse of the moonlit water I could see them plainly only a block away--and was horrified by the bestial abnormality of their faces and the doglike sub-humanness of their crouching gait. One man moved in a positively simian way, with long arms frequently touching the ground; while another figure--robed and tiaraed--seemed to progress in an almost hopping fashion. I judged this party to be the one I had seen in the Gilman's courtyard--the one, therefore, most closely on my trail. As some of the figures turned to look in my direction I was transfixed with fright, yet managed to preserve the casual, shambling gait I had assumed. To this day I do not know whether they saw me or not. If they did, my stratagem must have deceived them, for they passed on across the moonlit space without varying their course--meanwhile croaking and jabbering in some hateful guttural patois I could not identify.

Once more in shadow, I resumed my former dog-trot past the leaning and decrepit houses that stared blankly into the night. Having crossed to the western sidewalk I rounded the nearest corner into Bates Street where I kept close to the buildings on the southern side. I passed two houses shewing signs of habitation, one of which had faint lights in upper rooms, yet met with no obstacle. As I turned into Adams Street I felt measurably safer, but received a shook when a man reeled out of a black doorway directly in front of me. He proved, however, too hopelessly drunk to be a menace; so that I reached the dismal ruins of the Bank Street warehouses in safety.

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

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

The vast, barnlike length of the old bridge gleamed spectrally in the moonlight, and I saw that the ties were safe for at least a few feet within. Entering, I began to use my flashlight, and was almost knocked down by the cloud of bats that flapped past me. About half-way across there was a perilous gap in the ties which I feared for a moment would halt me; but in the end I risked a desperate jump which fortunately succeeded.

I was glad to see the moonlight again when I emerged from that macabre tunnel. The old tracks crossed River Street at grade, and at once veered off into a region increasingly rural and with less and less of Innsmouth's abhorrent fishy odour. Here the dense growth of weeds and briers hindered me and cruelly tore at my clothes, but I was none the less glad that they were there to give me concealment in case of peril. I knew that much of my route must be visible from the Rowley road.

The marshy region began very abruptly, with the single track on a low, grassy embankment where the weedy growth was somewhat thinner. Then came a sort of island of higher ground, where the line passed through a shallow open cut choked with bushes and brambles. I was very glad of this partial shelter, since at this point the Rowley road was uncomfortably near according to my window view. At the end of the cut it would cross the track and swerve off to a safer distance; but meanwhile I must be exceedingly careful. I was by this time thankfully certain that the railway itself was not patrolled.

Just before entering the cut I glanced behind me, but saw no pursuer. The ancient spires and roofs of decaying Innsmouth gleamed lovely and ethereal in the magic yellow moonlight, and I thought of how they must have looked in the old days before the shadow fell. Then, as my gaze circled inland from the town, something less tranquil arrested my notice and held me immobile for a second.

What I saw--or fancied I saw--was a disturbing suggestion of undulant motion far to the south; a suggestion which made me conclude that a very large horde must be pouring out of the city along the level Ipswich road. The distance was great and I could distinguish nothing in detail; but I did not at all like the look of that moving column. It undulated too much, and glistened too brightly in the rays of the now westering moon. There was a suggestion of sound, too, though the wind was blowing the other way--a suggestion of bestial scraping and bellowing even worse than the muttering of the parties I had lately overheard.

All sorts of unpleasant conjectures crossed my mind. I thought of those very extreme Innsmouth types said to be hidden in crumbling, centuried warrens near the waterfront; I thought, too, of those nameless swimmers I had seen. Counting the parties so far glimpsed, as well as those presumably covering other roads, the number of my pursuers must be strangely large for a town as depopulated as Innsmouth.

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

I had entered the brush-grown cut and was struggling along at a very slow pace when that damnable fishy odour again waxed dominant. Had the wind suddenly changed eastward, so that it blew in from the sea and over the town? It must have, I concluded, since I now began to hear shocking guttural murmurs from that hitherto silent direction. There was another sound, too--a kind of wholesale, colossal flopping or pattering which somehow called up images of the most detestable sort. It made me think illogically of that unpleasantly undulating column on the far-off Ipswich road.

And then both stench and sounds grew stronger, so that I paused shivering and grateful for the cut's protection. It was here, I recalled, that the Rowley road drew so close to the old railway before crossing westward and diverging. Something was coming along that road, and I must lie low till its passage and vanishment in the distance. Thank heaven these creatures employed no dogs for tracking--though perhaps that would have been impossible amidst the omnipresent regional odour. Crouched in the bushes of that sandy cleft I felt reasonably safe, even though I knew the searchers would have to cross the track in front of me not much more than a hundred yards away. I would be able to see them, but they could not, except by a malign miracle, see me.

All at once I began dreading to look at them as they passed. I saw the close moonlit space where they would surge by, and had curious thoughts about the irredeemable pollution of that space. They would perhaps be the worst of all Innsmouth types--something one would not care to remember.

The stench waxed overpowering, and the noises swelled to a bestial babel of croaking, baying and barking without the least suggestion of human speech. Were these indeed the voices of my pursuers? Did they have dogs after all? So far I had seen none of the lower animals in Innsmouth. That flopping or pattering was monstrous--I could not look upon the degenerate creatures responsible for it. I would keep my eyes shut till the sound receded toward the west. The horde was very close now--air foul with their hoarse snarlings, and the ground almost shaking with their alien-rhythmed footfalls. My breath nearly ceased to come, and I put every ounce of will-power into the task of holding my eyelids down.

I am not even yet willing to say whether what followed was a hideous actuality or only a nightmare hallucination. The later action of the government, after my frantic appeals, would tend to confirm it as a monstrous truth; but could not an hallucination have been repeated under the quasi-hypnotic spell of that ancient, haunted, and shadowed town? Such places have strange properties, and the legacy of insane legend might well have acted on more than one human imagination amidst those dead, stench-cursed streets and huddles of rotting roofs and crumbling steeples. Is it not possible that the germ of an actual contagious madness lurks in the depths of that shadow over Innsmouth? Who can be sure of reality after hearing things like the tale of old Zadok Allen? The government men never found poor Zadok, and have no conjectures to make as to what became of him. Where does madness leave off and reality begin? Is it possible that even my latest fear is sheer delusion?

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

I thought I was prepared for the worst, and I really ought to have been prepared considering what I had seen before.

My other pursuers had been accursedly abnormal--so should I not have been ready to face a strengthening of the abnormal element; to look upon forms in which there was no mixture of the normal at all? I did not open my eyes until the raucous clamour came loudly from a point obviously straight ahead. Then I knew that a long section of them must be plainly in sight where the sides of the cut flattened out and the road crossed the track--and I could no longer keep myself from sampling whatever horror that leering yellow moon might have to shew.

It was the end, for whatever remains to me of life on the surface of this earth, of every vestige of mental peace and confidence in the integrity of nature and of the human mind. Nothing that I could have imagined--nothing, even, that I could have gathered had I credited old Zadok's crazy tale in the most literal way--would be in any way comparable to the demoniac, blasphemous reality that I saw--or believe I saw. I have tried to hint what it was in order to postpone the horror of writing it down baldly. Can it be possible that this planet has actually spawned such things; that human eyes have truly seen, as objective flesh, what man has hitherto known only in febrile phantasy and tenuous legend?

And yet I saw them in a limitless stream--flopping, hopping, croaking, bleating--urging inhumanly through the spectral moonlight in a grotesque, malignant saraband of fantastic nightmare. And some of them had tall tiaras of that nameless whitish-gold metal...and some were strangely robed...and one, who led the way, was clad in a ghoulishly humped black coat and striped trousers, and had a man's felt hat perched on the shapeless thing that answered for a head.

I think their predominant colour was a greyish-green, though they had white bellies. They were mostly shiny and slippery, but the ridges of their backs were scaly. Their forms vaguely suggested the anthropoid, while their heads were the heads of fish, with prodigious bulging eyes that never closed. At the sides of their necks were palpitating gills, and their long paws were webbed. They hopped irregularly, sometimes on two legs and sometimes on four. I was somehow glad that they had no more than four limbs. Their croaking, baying voices, clearly used for articulate speech, held all the dark shades of expression which their staring faces lacked.

But for all of their monstrousness they were not unfamiliar to me. I knew too well what they must be--for was not the memory of the evil tiara at Newburyport still fresh? They were the blasphemous fish-frogs of the nameless design--living and horrible--and as I saw them I knew also of what that humped, tiaraed priest in the black church basement had fearsomely reminded me. Their number was past guessing. It seemed to me that there were limitless swarms of them and certainly my momentary glimpse could have shewn only the least fraction. In another instant everything was blotted out by a merciful fit of fainting; the first I had ever had.","Only when the Nan-yang Maru sailed from Yuen-San did her terrible sense of foreboding begin to subside.

For four years, waking or sleeping, the awful subconsciousness of supreme evil had never left her.

But now, as the Korean shore, receding into darkness, grew dimmer and dimmer, fear subsided and grew vague as the half-forgotten memory of horror in a dream.

She stood near the steamer's stern apart from other passengers, a slender, lonely figure in her silver-fox furs, her ulster and smart little hat, watching the lights of Yuen-San grow paler and smaller along the horizon until they looked like a level row of stars.

Under her haunted eyes Asia was slowly dissolving to a streak of vapour in the misty lustre of the moon.

Suddenly the ancient continent disappeared, washed out by a wave against the sky; and with it vanished the last shreds of that accursed nightmare which had possessed her for four endless years. But whether during those unreal years her soul had only been held in bondage, or whether, as she had been taught, it had been irrevocably destroyed, she still remained uncertain, knowing nothing about the death of souls or how it was accomplished.

As she stood there, her sad eyes fixed on the misty East, a passenger passing—an Englishwoman—paused to say something kind to the young American; and added, ""if there is anything my husband and I can do it would give us much pleasure."" The girl had turned her head as though not comprehending. The other woman hesitated.

""This is Doctor Norne's daughter, is it not?"" she inquired in a pleasant voice.

""Yes, I am Tressa Norne.... I ask your pardon.... Thank you, madam:—I am—I seem to be—a trifle dazed——""

""What wonder, you poor child! Come to us if you feel need of companionship.""

""You are very kind.... I seem to wish to be alone, somehow.""

""I understand.... Good-night, my dear.""

Late the next morning Tressa Norne awoke, conscious for the first time in four years that it was at last her own familiar self stretched out there on the pillows where sunshine streamed through the porthole. All that day she lay in her bamboo steamer chair on deck. Sun and wind conspired to dry every tear that wet her closed lashes. Her dark, glossy hair blew about her face; scarlet tinted her full lips again; the tense hands relaxed. Peace came at sundown.

That evening she took her Yu-kin from her cabin and found a chair on the deserted hurricane deck.

And here, in the brilliant moonlight of the China Sea, she curled up cross-legged on the deck, all alone, and sounded the four futile strings of her moon-lute, and hummed to herself, in a still voice, old songs she had sung in Yian before the tragedy. She sang the tent-song called Tchinguiz. She sang Camel Bells and The Blue Bazaar,—children's songs of the Yiort. She sang the ancient Khiounnou song called ""The Saghalien"":

I
In the month of Saffar
Among the river-reeds
I saw two horsemen
Sitting on their steeds.
Tulugum!
Heitulum!
By the river-reeds
II
In the month of Saffar
A demon guards the ford.
Tokhta, my Lover!
Draw your shining sword!
Tulugum!
Heitulum!
Slay him with your sword!
III
In the month of Saffar
Among the water-weeds
I saw two horsemen
Fighting on their steeds.
Tulugum!
Heitulum!
How my lover bleeds!
IV
In the month of Saffar,
The Year I should have wed—
The Year of The Panther—
My lover lay dead,—
Tulugum!
Heitulum!
Dead without a head.
And songs like these—the one called ""Keuke Mongol,"" and an ancient air of the Tchortchas called ""The Thirty Thousand Calamities,"" and some Chinese boatmen's songs which she had heard in Yian before the tragedy; these she hummed to herself there in the moonlight playing on her round-faced, short-necked lute of four strings.

Terror indeed seemed ended for her, and in her heart a great overwhelming joy was welling up which seemed to overflow across the entire moonlit world.

She had no longer any fear; no premonition of further evil. Among the few Americans and English aboard, something of her story was already known. People were kind; and they were also considerate enough to subdue their sympathetic curiosity when they discovered that this young American girl shrank from any mention of what had happened to her during the last four years of the Great World War.

It was evident, also, that she preferred to remain aloof; and this inclination, when finally understood, was respected by her fellow passengers. The clever, efficient and polite Japanese officers and crew of the Nan-yang Maru were invariably considerate and courteous to her, and they remained nicely reticent, although they also knew the main outline of her story and very much desired to know more. And so, surrounded now by the friendly security of civilised humanity, Tressa Norne, reborn to light out of hell's own shadows, awoke from four years of nightmare which, after all, perhaps, never had seemed entirely actual.

And now God's real sun warmed her by day; His real moon bathed her in creamy coolness by night; sky and wind and wave thrilled her with their blessed assurance that this was once more the real world which stretched illimitably on every side from horizon to horizon; and the fair faces and pleasant voices of her own countrymen made the past seem only a ghastly dream that never again could enmesh her soul with its web of sorcery.

And now the days at sea fled very swiftly; and when at last the Golden Gate was not far away she had finally managed to persuade herself that nothing really can harm the human soul; that the monstrous devil-years were ended, never again to return; that in this vast, clean Western Continent there could be no occult threat to dread, no gigantic menace to destroy her body, no secret power that could consign her soul to the dreadful abysm of spiritual annihilation.

Very early that morning she came on deck. The November day was delightfully warm, the air clear save for a belt of mist low on the water to the southward.

She had been told that land would not be sighted for twenty-four hours, but she went forward and stood beside the starboard rail, searching the horizon with the enchanted eyes of hope.

As she stood there a Japanese ship's officer crossing the deck, forward, halted abruptly and stood staring at something to the southward.

At the same moment, above the belt of mist on the water, and perfectly clear against the blue sky above, the girl saw a fountain of gold fire rise from the fog, drift upward in the daylight, slowly assume the incandescent outline of a serpentine creature which leisurely uncoiled and hung there floating, its lizard-tail undulating, its feet with their five stumpy claws closing, relaxing, like those of a living reptile. For a full minute this amazing shape of fire floated there in the sky, brilliant in the morning light, then the reptilian form faded, died out, and the last spark vanished in the sunshine.

When the Japanese officer at last turned to resume his promenade, he noticed a white-faced girl gripping a stanchion behind him as though she were on the point of swooning. He crossed the deck quickly. Tressa Norne's eyes opened.

""Are you ill, Miss Norne?"" he asked.

""The—the Dragon,"" she whispered.

The officer laughed. ""Why, that was nothing but Chinese day-fireworks,"" he explained. ""The crew of some fishing boat yonder in the fog is amusing itself."" He looked at her narrowly, then with a nice little bow and smile he offered his arm: ""If you are indisposed, perhaps you might wish to go below to your stateroom, Miss Norne?""

She thanked him, managed to pull herself together and force a ghost of a smile.

He lingered a moment, said something cheerful about being nearly home, then made her a punctilious salute and went his way.

Tressa Norne leaned back against the stanchion and closed her eyes. Her pallor became deathly. She bent over and laid her white face in her folded arms.

After a while she lifted her head, and, turning very slowly, stared at the fog-belt out of frightened eyes.

And saw, rising out of the fog, a pearl-tinted sphere which gradually mounted into the clear daylight above like the full moon's phantom in the sky.

Higher, higher rose the spectral moon until at last it swam in the very zenith. Then it slowly evaporated in the blue vault above.

A great wave of despair swept her; she clung to the stanchion, staring with half-blinded eyes at the flat fog-bank in the south.

But no more ""Chinese day-fireworks"" rose out of it. And at length she summoned sufficient strength to go below to her cabin and lie there, half senseless, huddled on her bed.

When land was sighted, the following morning, Tressa Norne had lived a century in twenty-four hours. And in that space of time her agonised soul had touched all depths.

But now as the Golden Gate loomed up in the morning light, rage, terror, despair had burned themselves out. From their ashes within her mind arose the cool wrath of desperation armed for anything, wary, alert, passionately determined to survive at whatever cost, recklessly ready to fight for bodily existence.

That was her sole instinct now, to go on living, to survive, no matter at what price. And if it were indeed true that her soul had been slain, she defied its murderers to slay her body also.

That night, at her hotel in San Francisco, she double-locked her door and lay down without undressing, leaving all lights burning and an automatic pistol underneath her pillow.

Toward morning she fell asleep, slept for an hour, started up in awful fear. And saw the double-locked door opposite the foot of her bed slowly opening of its own accord.

Into the brightly illuminated room stepped a graceful young man in full evening dress carrying over his left arm an overcoat, and in his other hand a top hat and silver tipped walking-stick.

With one bound the girl swung herself from the bed to the carpet and clutched at the pistol under her pillow.

""Sanang!"" she cried in a terrible voice.

""Keuke Mongol!"" he said, smilingly.

For a moment they confronted each other in the brightly lighted bedroom, then, partly turning, he cast a calm glance at the open door behind him; and, as though moved by a wind, the door slowly closed. And she heard the key turn of itself in the lock, and saw the bolt slide smoothly into place again.

Her power of speech came back to her presently—only a broken whisper at first: ""Do you think I am afraid of your accursed magic?"" she managed to gasp. ""Do you think I am afraid of you, Sanang?""

""You are afraid,"" he said serenely.

""You lie!""

""No, I do not lie. To one another the Yezidees never lie.""

""You lie again, assassin! I am no Yezidee!""

He smiled gently. His features were pleasing, smooth, and regular; his cheek-bones high, his skin fine and of a pale and delicate ivory colour. Once his black, beautifully shaped eyes wandered to the levelled pistol which she now held clutched desperately close to her right hip, and a slightly ironical expression veiled his gaze for an instant.

""Bullets?"" he murmured. ""But you and I are of the Hassanis.""

""The third lie, Sanang!"" Her voice had regained its strength. Tense, alert, blue eyes ablaze, every faculty concentrated on the terrible business before her, the girl now seemed like some supple leopardess poised on the swift verge of murder.

""Tokhta!""[1] She spat the word. ""Any movement toward a hidden weapon, any gesture suggesting recourse to magic—and I kill you, Sanang, exactly where you stand!""

""With a pistol?"" He laughed. Then his smooth features altered subtly. He said: ""Keuke Mongol, who call yourself Tressa Norne,—Keuke—heavenly azure-blue,—named so in the temple because of the colour of your eyes—listen attentively, for this is the Yarlig which I bring to you by word of mouth from Yian, as from Yezidee to Yezidee:

""Here, in this land called the United States of America, the Temple girl, Keuke Mongol, who has witnessed the mysteries of Erlik and who understands the magic of the Sheiks-el-Djebel, and who has seen Mount Alamout and the eight castles and the fifty thousand Hassanis in white turbans and in robes of white;—you—Azure-blue eyes—heed the Yarlig!—or may thirty thousand calamities overtake you!""

There was a dead silence; then he went on seriously: ""It is decreed: You shall cease to remember that you are a Yezidee, that you are of the Hassanis, that you ever have laid eyes on Yian the Beautiful, that you ever set naked foot upon Mount Alamout. It is decreed that you remember nothing of what you have seen and heard, of what has been told and taught during the last four years reckoned as the Christians reckon from our Year of the Bull. Otherwise—my Master sends you this for your—convenience.""

Leisurely, from under his folded overcoat, the young man produced a roll of white cloth and dropped it at her feet and the girl shrank aside, shuddering, knowing that the roll of white cloth was meant for her winding-sheet.

Then the colour came back to lip and cheek; and, glancing up from the soft white shroud, she smiled at the young man: ""Have you ended your Oriental mummery?"" she asked calmly. ""Listen very seriously in your turn, Sanang, Sheik-el-Djebel, Prince of the Hassanis who, God knows when and how, have come out into the sunshine of this clean and decent country, out of a filthy darkness where devils and sorcerers make earth a hell.

""If you, or yours, threaten me, annoy me, interfere with me, I shall go to our civilised police and tell all I know concerning the Yezidees. I mean to live. Do you understand? You know what you have done to me and mine. I come back to my own country alone, without any living kin, poor, homeless, friendless,—and, perhaps, damned. I intend, nevertheless, to survive. I shall not relax my clutch on bodily existence whatever the Yezidees may pretend to have done to my soul. I am determined to live in the body, anyway.""

He nodded gravely.

She said: ""Out at sea, over the fog, I saw the sign of Yu-lao in fire floating in the day-sky. I saw his spectral moon rise and vanish in mid-heaven. I understood. But——"" And here she suddenly showed an edge of teeth under the full scarlet upper lip: ""Keep your signs and your shrouds to yourself, dog of a Yezidee!—toad!—tortoise-egg!—he-goat with three legs! Keep your threats and your messages to yourself! Keep your accursed magic to yourself! Do you think to frighten me with your sorcery by showing me the Moons of Yu-lao?—by opening a bolted door? I know more of such magic than do you, Sanang—Death Adder of Alamout!""

Suddenly she laughed aloud at him—laughed insultingly in his expressionless face:

""I saw you and Gutchlug Khan and your cowardly Tchortchas in red-lacquered jackets slink out of the Temple of Erlik where the bronze gong thundered and a cloud settled down raining little yellow snakes all over the marble steps—all over you, Prince Sanang! You were afraid, my Tougtchi!—you and Gutchlug and your red Tchortchas with their halberds all dripping with human entrails! And I saw you mount and gallop off into the woods while in the depths of the magic cloud which rained little yellow snakes all around you, we temple girls laughed and mocked at you—at you and your cowardly Tchortcha horsemen.""

A slight tinge of pink came into the young man's pale face. Tressa Norne stepped nearer, her levelled pistol resting on her hip.

""Why did you not complain of us to your Master, the Old Man of the Mountain?"" she asked jeeringly. ""And where, also, was your Yezidee magic when it rained little snakes?—What frightened you away—who had boldly come to seize a temple girl—you who had screwed up your courage sufficiently to defy Erlik in his very shrine and snatch from his temple a young thing whose naked body wrapped in gold was worth the chance of death to you?""

The young man's top-hat dropped to the floor. He bent over to pick it up. His face was quite expressionless, quite colourless, now.

""I went on no such errand,"" he said with an effort. ""I went with a thousand prayers on scarlet paper made in——""

""A lie, Yezidee! You came to seize me!""

He turned still paler. ""By Abu, Omar, Otman, and Ali, it is not true!""

""You lie!—by the Lion of God, Hassini!""

She stepped closer. ""And I'll tell you another thing you fear—you Yezidee of Alamout—you robber of Yian—you sorcerer of Sabbah Khan, and chief of his sect of Assassins! You fear this native land of mine, America; and its laws and customs, and its clear, clean sunshine; and its cities and people; and its police! Take that message back. We Americans fear nobody save the true God!—nobody—neither Yezidee nor Hassani nor Russ nor German nor that sexless monster born of hell and called the Bolshevik!""

""Tokhta!"" he cried sharply.

""Damn you!"" retorted the girl; ""get out of my room! Get out of my sight! Get out of my path! Get out of my life! Take that to your Master of Mount Alamout! I do what I please; I go where I please; I live as I please. And if I please, I turn against him!""

""In that event,"" he said hoarsely, ""there lies your winding-sheet on the floor at your feet! Take up your shroud; and make Erlik seize you!""

""Sanang,"" she said very seriously.

""I hear you, Keuke-Mongol.""

""Listen attentively. I wish to live. I have had enough of death in life. I desire to remain a living, breathing thing—even if it be true—as you Yezidees tell me, that you have caught my soul in a net and that your sorcerers really control its destiny.

""But damned or not, I passionately desire to live. And I am coward enough to hold my peace for the sake of living. So—I remain silent. I have no stomach to defy the Yezidees; because, if I do, sooner or later I shall be killed. I know it. I have no desire to die for others—to perish for the sake of the common good. I am young. I have suffered too much; I am determined to live—and let my soul take its chances between God and Erlik.""

She came close to him, looked curiously into his pale face.

""I laughed at you out of the temple cloud,"" she said. ""I know how to open bolted doors as well as you do. And I know other things. And if you ever again come to me in this life I shall first torture you, then slay you. Then I shall tell all!... and unroll my shroud.""

""I keep your word of promise until you break it,"" he interrupted hastily. ""Yarlig! It is decreed!"" And then he slowly turned as though to glance over his shoulder at the locked and bolted door.

""Permit me to open it for you, Prince Sanang,"" said the girl scornfully. And she gazed steadily at the door.

Presently, all by itself, the key turned in the lock, the bolt slid back, the door gently opened.

Toward it, white as a corpse, his overcoat on his left arm, his stick and top-hat in the other hand, crept the young man in his faultless evening garb.

Then, as he reached the threshold, he suddenly sprang aside. A small yellow snake lay coiled there on the door sill. For a full throbbing minute the young man stared at the yellow reptile in unfeigned horror. Then, very cautiously, he moved his fascinated eyes sideways and gazed in silence at Tressa Norne.

The girl laughed.

""Sorceress!"" he burst out hoarsely. ""Take that accursed thing from my path!""

""What thing, Sanang?"" At that his dark, frightened eyes stole toward the threshold again, seeking the little snake. But there was no snake there. And when he was certain of this he went, twitching and trembling all over.

Behind him the door closed softly, locking and bolting itself.

And behind the bolted door in the brightly lighted bedroom Tressa Norne fell on both knees, her pistol still clutched in her right hand, calling passionately upon Christ to forgive her for the dreadful ability she had dared to use, and begging Him to save her body from death and her soul from the snare of the Yezidee.

",False
"I can hardly describe the mood in which I was left by this harrowing episode--an episode at once mad and pitiful, grotesque and terrifying. The grocery boy had prepared me for it, yet the reality left me none the less bewildered and disturbed. Puerile though the story was, old Zadok's insane earnestness and horror had communicated to me a mounting unrest which joined with my earlier sense of loathing for the town and its blight of intangible shadow.

Later I might sift the tale and extract some nucleus of historic allegory; just now I wished to put it out of my head. The hour grown perilously late--my watch said 7:15, and the Arkham bus left Town Square at eight--so I tried to give my thoughts as neutral and practical a cast as possible, meanwhile walking rapidly through the deserted streets of gaping roofs and leaning houses toward the hotel where I had checked my valise and would find my bus.

Though the golden light of late afternoon gave the ancient roofs and decrepit chimneys an air of mystic loveliness and peace, I could not help glancing over my shoulder now and then. I would surely be very glad to get out of malodorous and fear-shadowed Innsmouth, and wished there were some other vehicle than the bus driven by that sinister-looking fellow Sargent. Yet I did not hurry too precipitately, for there were architectural details worth viewing at every silent corner; and I could easily, I calculated, cover the necessary distance in a half-hour.

Studying the grocery youth's map and seeking a route I had not traversed before, I chose Marsh Street instead of State for my approach to Town Square. Near the corner of Fall Street I began to see scattered groups of furtive whisperers, and when I finally reached the Square I saw that almost all the loiterers were congregated around the door of the Gilman House. It seemed as if many bulging, watery, unwinking eyes looked oddly at me as I claimed my valise in the lobby, and I hoped that none of these unpleasant creatures would be my fellow-passengers on the coach.

The bus, rather early, rattled in with three passengers somewhat before eight, and an evil-looking fellow on the sidewalk muttered a few indistinguishable words to the driver. Sargent threw out a mail-bag and a roll of newspapers, and entered the hotel; while the passengers--the same men whom I had seen arriving in Newburyport that morning--shambled to the sidewalk and exchanged some faint guttural words with a loafer in a language I could have sworn was not English. I boarded the empty coach and took the seat I had taken before, but was hardly settled before Sargent re-appeared and began mumbling in a throaty voice of peculiar repulsiveness.

I was, it appeared, in very bad luck. There had been something wrong with the engine, despite the excellent time made from Newburyport, and the bus could not complete the journey to Arkham. No, it could not possibly be repaired that night, nor was there any other way of getting transportation out of Innsmouth either to Arkham or elsewhere. Sargent was sorry, but I would have to stop over at the Gilman. Probably the clerk would make the price easy for me, but there was nothing else to do. Almost dazed by this sudden obstacle, and violently dreading the fall of night in this decaying and half-unlighted town, I left the bus and reentered the hotel lobby; where the sullen queer-looking night clerk told me I could have Room 428 on next the top floor--large, but without running water--for a dollar.

Despite what I had heard of this hotel in Newburyport, I signed the register, paid my dollar, let the clerk take my valise, and followed that sour, solitary attendant up three creaking flights of stairs past dusty corridors which seemed wholly devoid of life. My room was a dismal rear one with two windows and bare, cheap furnishings, overlooked a dingy court-yard otherwise hemmed in by low, deserted brick blocks, and commanded a view of decrepit westward-stretching roofs with a marshy countryside beyond. At the end of the corridor was a bathroom--a discouraging relique with ancient marble bowl, tin tub, faint electric light, and musty wooded paneling around all the plumbing fixtures.

It being still daylight, I descended to the Square and looked around for a dinner of some sort; noticing as I did so the strange glances I received from the unwholesome loafers. Since the grocery was closed, I was forced to patronise the restaurant I had shunned before; a stooped, narrow-headed man with staring, unwinking eyes, and a flat-nosed wench with unbelievably thick, clumsy hands being in attendance. The service was all of the counter type, and it relieved me to find that much was evidently served from cans and packages. A bowl of vegetable soup with crackers was enough for me, and I soon headed back for my cheerless room at the Gilman; getting a evening paper and a fly-specked magazine from the evil-visaged clerk at the rickety stand beside his desk.

As twilight deepened I turned on the one feeble electric bulb over the cheap, iron-framed bed, and tried as best I could to continue the reading I had begun. I felt it advisable to keep my mind wholesomely occupied, for it would not do to brood over the abnormalities of this ancient, blight-shadowed town while I was still within its borders. The insane yarn I had heard from the aged drunkard did not promise very pleasant dreams, and I felt I must keep the image of his wild, watery eyes as far as possible from my imagination.

Also, I must not dwell on what that factory inspector had told the Newburyport ticket-agent about the Gilman House and the voices of its nocturnal tenants--not on that, nor on the face beneath the tiara in the black church doorway; the face for whose horror my conscious mind could not account. It would perhaps have been easier to keep my thoughts from disturbing topics had the room not been so gruesomely musty. As it was, the lethal mustiness blended hideously with the town's general fishy odour and persistently focussed one's fancy on death and decay.

Another thing that disturbed me was the absence of a bolt on the door of my room. One had been there, as marks clearly shewed, but there were signs of recent removal. No doubt it had been out of order, like so many other things in this decrepit edifice. In my nervousness I looked around and discovered a bolt on the clothes press which seemed to be of the same size, judging from the marks, as the one formerly on the door. To gain a partial relief from the general tension I busied myself by transferring this hardware to the vacant place with the aid of a handy three-in-one device including a screwdriver which I kept on my key-ring. The bolt fitted perfectly, and I was somewhat relieved when I knew that I could shoot it firmly upon retiring. Not that I had any real apprehension of its need, but that any symbol of security was welcome in an environment of this kind. There were adequate bolts on the two lateral doors to connecting rooms, and these I proceeded to fasten.

I did not undress, but decided to read till I was sleepy and then lie down with only my coat, collar, and shoes off. Taking a pocket flash light from my valise, I placed it in my trousers, so that I could read my watch if I woke up later in the dark. Drowsiness, however, did not come; and when I stopped to analyse my thoughts I found to my disquiet that I was really unconsciously listening for something--listening for something which I dreaded but could not name. That inspector's story must have worked on my imagination more deeply than I had suspected. Again I tried to read, but found that I made no progress.

After a time I seemed to hear the stairs and corridors creak at intervals as if with footsteps, and wondered if the other rooms were beginning to fill up. There were no voices, however, and it struck me that there was something subtly furtive about the creaking. I did not like it, and debated whether I had better try to sleep at all. This town had some queer people, and there had undoubtedly been several disappearances. Was this one of those inns where travelers were slain for their money? Surely I had no look of excessive prosperity. Or were the towns folk really so resentful about curious visitors? Had my obvious sightseeing, with its frequent map-consultations, aroused unfavorable notice. It occurred to me that I must be in a highly nervous state to let a few random creakings set me off speculating in this fashion--but I regretted none the less that I was unarmed.

At length, feeling a fatigue which had nothing of drowsiness in it, I bolted the newly outfitted hall door, turned off the light, and threw myself down on the hard, uneven bed--coat, collar, shoes, and all. In the darkness every faint noise of the night seemed magnified, and a flood of doubly unpleasant thoughts swept over me. I was sorry I had put out the light, yet was too tired to rise and turn it on again. Then, after a long, dreary interval, and prefaced by a fresh creaking of stairs and corridor, there came that soft, damnably unmistakable sound which seemed like a malign fulfillment of all my apprehensions. Without the least shadow of a doubt, the lock of my door was being tried--cautiously, furtively, tentatively--with a key.

My sensations upon recognising this sign of actual peril were perhaps less rather than more tumultuous because of my previous vague fears. I had been, albeit without definite reason, instinctively on my guard--and that was to my advantage in the new and real crisis, whatever it might turn out to be. Nevertheless the change in the menace from vague premonition to immediate reality was a profound shock, and fell upon me with the force of a genuine blow. It never once occurred to me that the fumbling might be a mere mistake. Malign purpose was all I could think of, and I kept deathly quiet, awaiting the would-be intruder's next move.

After a time the cautious rattling ceased, and I heard the room to the north entered with a pass-key. Then the lock of the connecting door to my room was softly tried. The bolt held, of course, and I heard the floor creak as the prowler left the room. After a moment there came another soft rattling, and I knew that the room to the south of me was being entered. Again a furtive trying of a bolted connecting door, and again a receding creaking. This time the creaking went along the hall and down the stairs, so I knew that the prowler had realised the bolted condition of my doors and was giving up his attempt for a greater or lesser time, as the future would shew.

The readiness with which I fell into a plan of action proves that I must have been subconsciously fearing some menace and considering possible avenues of escape for hours. From the first I felt that the unseen fumbler meant a danger not to be met or dealt with, but only to be fled from as precipitately as possible. The one thing to do was to get out of that hotel alive as quickly as I could, and through some channel other than the front stairs and lobby.

Rising softly and throwing my flashlight on the switch, I sought to light the bulb over my bed in order to choose and pocket some belongings for a swift, valiseless flight. Nothing, however, happened; and I saw that the power had been cut off. Clearly, some cryptic, evil movement was afoot on a large scale--just what, I could not say. As I stood pondering with my hand on the now useless switch I heard a muffled creaking on the floor below, and thought I could barely distinguish voices in conversation. A moment later I felt less sure that the deeper sounds were voices, since the apparent hoarse barkings and loose-syllabled croakings bore so little resemblance to recognized human speech. Then I thought with renewed force of what the factory inspector had heard in the night in this mouldering and pestilential building.

Having filled my pockets with the flashlight's aid, I put on my hat and tiptoed to the windows to consider chances of descent. Despite the state's safety regulations there was no fire escape on this side of the hotel, and I saw that my windows commanded only a sheer three story drop to the cobbled courtyard. On the right and left, however, some ancient brick business blocks abutted on the hotel; their slant roofs coming up to a reasonable jumping distance from my fourth-story level. To reach either of these lines of buildings I would have to be in a room two from my own--in one case on the north and in the other case on the south--and my mind instantly set to work what chances I had of making the transfer.

I could not, I decided, risk an emergence into the corridor; where my footsteps would surely be heard, and where the difficulties of entering the desired room would be insuperable. My progress, if it was to be made at all, would have to be through the less solidly-built connecting doors of the rooms; the locks and bolts of which I would have to force violently, using my shoulder as a battering-ram whenever they were set against me. This, I thought, would be possible owing to the rickety nature of the house and its fixtures; but I realised I could not do it noiselessly. I would have to count on sheer speed, and the chance of getting to a window before any hostile forces became coordinated enough to open the right door toward me with a pass-key. My own outer door I reinforced by pushing the bureau against it--little by little, in order to make a minimum of sound.

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

Gathering from the grocery boy's map that the best route out of town was southward, I glanced first at the connecting door on the south side of the room. It was designed to open in my direction, hence I saw--after drawing the bolt and finding other fastening in place--it was not a favorable one for forcing. Accordingly abandoning it as a route, I cautiously moved the bedstead against it to hamper any attack which might be made on it later from the next room. The door on the north was hung to open away from me, and this--though a test proved it to be locked or bolted from the other side--I knew must be my route. If I could gain the roofs of the buildings in Paine Street and descend successfully to the ground level, I might perhaps dart through the courtyard and the adjacent or opposite building to Washington or Bates--or else emerge in Paine and edge around southward into Washington. In any case, I would aim to strike Washington somehow and get quickly out of the Town Square region. My preference would be to avoid Paine, since the fire station there might be open all night.

As I thought of these things I looked out over the squalid sea of decaying roofs below me, now brightened by the beams of a moon not much past full. On the right the black gash of the river-gorge clove the panorama; abandoned factories and railway station clinging barnacle-like to its sides. Beyond it the rusted railway and the Rowley road led off through a flat marshy terrain dotted with islets of higher and dryer scrub-grown land. On the left the creek-threaded country-side was nearer, the narrow road to Ipswich gleaming white in the moonlight. I could not see from my side of the hotel the southward route toward Arkham which I had determined to take.

I was irresolutely speculating on when I had better attack the northward door, and on how I could least audibly manage it, when I noticed that the vague noises underfoot had given place to a fresh and heavier creaking of the stairs. A wavering flicker of light shewed through my transom, and the boards of the corridor began to groan with a ponderous load. Muffled sounds of possible vocal origin approached, and at length a firm knock came at my outer door.

For a moment I simply held my breath and waited. Eternities seemed to elapse, and the nauseous fishy odour of my environment seemed to mount suddenly and spectacularly. Then the knocking was repeated--continuously, and with growing insistence. I knew that the time for action had come, and forthwith drew the bolt of the northward connecting door, bracing myself for the task of battering it open. The knocking waxed louder, and I hoped that its volume would cover the sound of my efforts. At last beginning my attempt, I lunged again and again at the thin paneling with my left shoulder, heedless of shock or pain. The door resisted even more than I expected, but I did not give in. And all the while the clamour at the outer door increased.

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

For an instant I felt absolute despair, since my trapping in a chamber with no window egress seemed complete. A wave of almost abnormal horror swept over me, and invested with a terrible but unexplainable singularity the flashlight-glimpsed dust prints made by the intruder who had lately tried my door from this room. Then, with a dazed automatism which persisted despite hopelessness, I made for the next connecting door and performed the blind motion of pushing at it in an effort to get through and--granting that fastenings might be as providentially intact as in this second room--bolt the hall door beyond before the lock could be turned from outside.

Sheer fortunate chance gave me my reprieve--for the connecting door before me was not only unlocked but actually ajar. In a second I was though, and had my right knee and shoulder against a hall door which was visibly opening inward. My pressure took the opener off guard, for the thing shut as I pushed, so that I could slip the well-conditioned bolt as I had done with the other door. As I gained this respite I heard the battering at the two other doors abate, while a confused clatter came from the connecting door I had shielded with the bedstead. Evidently the bulk of my assailants had entered the southerly room and were massing in a lateral attack. But at the same moment a pass-key sounded in the next door to the north, and I knew that a nearer peril was at hand.

The northward connecting door was wide open, but there was no time to think about checking the already turning lock in the hall. All I could do was to shut and bolt the open connecting door, as well as its mate on the opposite side--pushing a bedstead against the one and a bureau against the other, and moving a washstand in front of the hall door. I must, I saw, trust to such makeshift barriers to shield me till I could get out the window and on the roof of the Paine Street block. But even in this acute moment my chief horror was something apart from the immediate weakness of my defenses. I was shuddering because not one of my pursuers, despite some hideous panting, grunting, and subdued barkings at odd intervals, was uttering an unmuffled or intelligible vocal sound.

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

Surveying the conditions, I chose the more southerly of the two windows as my avenue of escape; planning to land on the inner slope of the roof and make for the nearest sky-light. Once inside one of the decrepit brick structures I would have to reckon with pursuit; but I hoped to descend and dodge in and out of yawning doorways along the shadowed courtyard, eventually getting to Washington Street and slipping out of town toward the south.

The clatter at the northerly connecting door was now terrific, and I saw that the weak panelling was beginning to splinter. Obviously, the besiegers had brought some ponderous object into play as a battering-ram. The bedstead, however, still held firm; so that I had at least a faint chance of making good my escape. As I opened the window I noticed that it was flanked by heavy velour draperies suspended from a pole by brass rings, and also that there was a large projecting catch for the shutters on the exterior. Seeing a possible means of avoiding the dangerous jump, I yanked at the hangings and brought them down, pole and all; then quickly hooking two of the rings in the shutter catch and flinging the drapery outside. The heavy folds reached fully to the abutting roof, and I saw that the rings and catch would be likely to bear my weight. So, climbing out of the window and down the improvised rope ladder, I left behind me forever the morbid and horror-infested fabric of the Gilman House.

I landed safely on the loose slates of the steep roof, and succeeded in gaining the gaping black skylight without a slip. Glancing up at the window I had left, I observed it was still dark, though far across the crumbling chimneys to the north I could see lights ominously blazing in the Order of Dagon Hall, the Baptist church, and the Congregational church which I recalled so shiveringly. There had seemed to be no one in the courtyard below, and I hoped there would be a chance to get away before the spreading of a general alarm. Flashing my pocket lamp into the skylight, I saw that there were no steps down. The distance was slight, however, so I clambered over the brink and dropped; striking a dusty floor littered with crumbling boxes and barrels.

The place was ghoulish-looking, but I was past minding such impressions and made at once for the staircase revealed by my flashlight--after a hasty glance at my watch, which shewed the hour to be 2 a.m. The steps creaked, but seemed tolerably sound; and I raced down past a barnlike second storey to the ground floor. The desolation was complete, and only echoes answered my footfalls. At length I reached the lower hall at the end of which I saw a faint luminous rectangle marking the ruined Paine Street doorway. Heading the other way, I found the back door also open; and darted out and down five stone steps to the grass-grown cobblestones of the courtyard.

The moonbeams did not reach down here, but I could just see my way about without using the flashlight. Some of the windows on the Gilman House side were faintly glowing, and I thought I heard confused sounds within. Walking softly over to the Washington Street side I perceived several open doorways, and chose the nearest as my route out. The hallway inside was black, and when I reached the opposite end I saw that the street door was wedged immovably shut. Resolved to try another building, I groped my way back toward the courtyard, but stopped short when close to the doorway.

For out of an opened door in the Gilman House a large crowd of doubtful shapes was pouring--lanterns bobbing in the darkness, and horrible croaking voices exchanging low cries in what was certainly not English. The figures moved uncertainly, and I realized to my relief that they did not know where I had gone; but for all that they sent a shiver of horror through my frame. Their features were indistinguishable, but their crouching, shambling gait was abominably repellent. And worst of all, I perceived that one figure was strangely robed, and unmistakably surmounted by a tall tiara of a design altogether too familiar. As the figures spread throughout the courtyard, I felt my fears increase. Suppose I could find no egress from this building on the street side? The fishy odour was detestable, and I wondered I could stand it without fainting. Again groping toward the street, I opened a door off the hall and came upon an empty room with closely shuttered but sashless windows. Fumbling in the rays of my flashlight, I found I could open the shutters; and in another moment had climbed outside and was fully closing the aperture in its original manner.

I was now in Washington Street, and for the moment saw no living thing nor any light save that of the moon. From several directions in the distance, however, I could hear the sound of hoarse voices, of footsteps, and of a curious kind of pattering which did not sound quite like footsteps. Plainly I had no time to lose. The points of the compass were clear to me, and I was glad that all the street lights were turned off, as is often the custom on strongly moonlit nights in prosperous rural regions. Some of the sounds came from the south, yet I retained my design of escaping in that direction. There would, I knew, be plenty of deserted doorways to shelter me in case I met any person or group who looked like pursuers.

I walked rapidly, softly, and close to the ruined houses. While hatless and dishevelled after my arduous climb, I did not look especially noticeable; and stood a good chance of passing unheeded if forced to encounter any casual wayfarer.

At Bates Street I drew into a yawning vestibule while two shambling figures crossed in front of me, but was soon on my way again and approaching the open space where Eliot Street obliquely crosses Washington at the intersection of South. Though I had never seen this space, it had looked dangerous to me on the grocery youth's map; since the moonlight would have free play there. There was no use trying to evade it, for any alternative course would involve detours of possibly disastrous visibility and delaying effect. The only thing to do was to cross it boldly and openly; imitating the typical shamble of the Innsmouth folk as best I could, and trusting that no one--or at least no pursuer of mine--would be there.

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

The open space was, as I had expected, strongly moonlit; and I saw the remains of a parklike, iron-railed green in its center. Fortunately no one was about though a curious sort of buzz or roar seemed to be increasing in the direction of Town Square. South Street was very wide, leading directly down a slight declivity to the waterfront and commanding a long view out to sea; and I hoped that no one would be glancing up it from afar as I crossed in the bright moonlight.

My progress was unimpeded, and no fresh sound arose to hint that I had been spied. Glancing about me, I involuntarily let my pace slacken for a second to take in the sight of the sea, gorgeous in the burning moonlight at the street's end. Far out beyond the breakwater was the dim, dark line of Devil Reef, and as I glimpsed it I could not help thinking of all the hideous legends I had heard in the last twenty-four hours--legends which portrayed this ragged rock as a veritable gateway to realms of unfathomed horror and inconceivable abnormality.

Then, without warning, I saw the intermittent flashes of light on the distant reef. They were definite and unmistakable, and awaked in my mind a blind horror beyond all rational proportion. My muscles tightened for panic flight, held in only by a certain unconscious caution and half-hypnotic fascination. And to make matters worse, there now flashed forth from the lofty cupola of the Gilman House, which loomed up to the northeast behind me, a series of analogous though differently spaced gleams which could be nothing less than an answering signal.

Controlling my muscles, and realising afresh--how plainly visible I was, I resumed my brisker and feignedly shambling pace; though keeping my eyes on that hellish and ominous reef as long as the opening of South Street gave me a seaward view. What the whole proceeding meant, I could not imagine; unless it involved some strange rite connected with Devil Reef, or unless some party had landed from a ship on that sinister rock. I now bent to the left around the ruinous green; still gazing toward the ocean as it blazed in the spectral summer moonlight, and watching the cryptical flashing of those nameless, unexplainable beacons.

It was then that the most horrible impression of all was borne in upon me--the impression which destroyed my last vestige of self-control and sent me running frantically southward past the yawning black doorways and fishily staring windows of that deserted nightmare street. For at a closer glance I saw that the moonlit waters between the reef and the shore were far from empty. They were alive with a teeming horde of shapes swimming inward toward the town; and even at my vast distance and in my single moment of perception I could tell that the bobbing heads and flailing arms were alien and aberrant in a way scarcely to be expressed or consciously formulated.

My frantic running ceased before I had covered a block, for at my left I began to hear something like the hue and cry of organised pursuit. There were footsteps and guttural sounds, and a rattling motor wheezed south along Federal Street. In a second all my plans were utterly changed--for if the southward highway were blocked ahead of me, I must clearly find another egress from Innsmouth. I paused and drew into a gaping doorway, reflecting how lucky I was to have left the moonlit open space before these pursuers came down the parallel street.

A second reflection was less comforting. Since the pursuit was down another street, it was plain that the party was not following me directly. It had not seen me, but was simply obeying a general plan of cutting off my escape. This, however, implied that all roads leading out of Innsmouth were similarly patrolled; for the people could not have known what route I intended to take. If this were so, I would have to make my retreat across country away from any road; but how could I do that in view of the marshy and creek-riddled nature of all the surrounding region? For a moment my brain reeled--both from sheer hopelessness and from a rapid increase in the omnipresent fishy odour.

Then I thought of the abandoned railway to Rowley, whose solid line of ballasted, weed-grown earth still stretched off to the northwest from the crumbling station on the edge at the river-gorge. There was just a chance that the townsfolk would not think of that; since its briar-choked desertion made it half-impassable, and the unlikeliest of all avenues for a fugitive to choose. I had seen it clearly from my hotel window and knew about how it lay. Most of its earlier length was uncomfortably visible from the Rowley road, and from high places in the town itself; but one could perhaps crawl inconspicuously through the undergrowth. At any rate, it would form my only chance of deliverance, and there was nothing to do but try it.

Drawing inside the hall of my deserted shelter, I once more consulted the grocery boy's map with the aid of the flashlight. The immediate problem was how to reach the ancient railway; and I now saw that the safest course was ahead to Babson Street; then west to Lafayette--there edging around but not crossing an open space homologous to the one I had traversed--and subsequently back northward and westward in a zigzagging line through Lafayette, Bates, Adam, and Bank streets--the latter skirting the river gorge--to the abandoned and dilapidated station I had seen from my window. My reason for going ahead to Babson was that I wished neither to recross the earlier open space nor to begin my westward course along a cross street as broad as South.

Starting once more, I crossed the street to the right-hand side in order to edge around into Babson as inconspicuously as possible. Noises still continued in Federal Street, and as I glanced behind me I thought I saw a gleam of light near the building through which I had escaped. Anxious to leave Washington Street, I broke into a quiet dogtrot, trusting to luck not to encounter any observing eye. Next the corner of Babson Street I saw to my alarm that one of the houses was still inhabited, as attested by curtains at the window; but there were no lights within, and I passed it without disaster.

In Babson Street, which crossed Federal and might thus reveal me to the searchers, I clung as closely as possible to the sagging, uneven buildings; twice pausing in a doorway as the noises behind me momentarily increased. The open space ahead shone wide and desolate under the moon, but my route would not force me to cross it. During my second pause I began to detect a fresh distribution of vague sounds; and upon looking cautiously out from cover beheld a motor car darting across the open space, bound outward along Eliot Street, which there intersects both Babson and Lafayette.

As I watched--choked by a sudden rise in the fishy odour after a short abatement--I saw a band of uncouth, crouching shapes loping and shambling in the same direction; and knew that this must be the party guarding the Ipswich road, since that highway forms an extension of Eliot Street. Two of the figures I glimpsed were in voluminous robes, and one wore a peaked diadem which glistened whitely in the moonlight. The gait of this figure was so odd that it sent a chill through me--for it seemed to me the creature was almost hopping.

When the last of the band was out of sight I resumed my progress; darting around the corner into Lafayette Street, and crossing Eliot very hurriedly lest stragglers of the party be still advancing along that thoroughfare. I did hear some croaking and clattering sounds far off toward Town Square, but accomplished the passage without disaster. My greatest dread was in re-crossing broad and moonlit South Street--with its seaward view--and I had to nerve myself for the ordeal. Someone might easily be looking, and possible Eliot Street stragglers could not fail to glimpse me from either of two points. At the last moment I decided I had better slacken my trot and make the crossing as before in the shambling gait of an average Innsmouth native.

When the view of the water again opened out--this time on my right--I was half-determined not to look at it at all. I could not however, resist; but cast a sidelong glance as I carefully and imitatively shambled toward the protecting shadows ahead. There was no ship visible, as I had half-expected there would be. Instead, the first thing which caught my eye was a small rowboat pulling in toward the abandoned wharves and laden with some bulky, tarpaulin-covered object. Its rowers, though distantly and indistinctly seen, were of an especially repellent aspect. Several swimmers were still discernible; while on the far black reef I could see a faint, steady glow unlike the winking beacon visible before, and of a curious colour which I could not precisely identify. Above the slant roofs ahead and to the right there loomed the tall cupola of the Gilman House, but it was completely dark. The fishy odour, dispelled for a moment by some merciful breeze, now closed in again with maddening intensity.

I had not quite crossed the street when I heard a muttering band advancing along Washington from the north. As they reached the broad open space where I had had my first disquieting glimpse of the moonlit water I could see them plainly only a block away--and was horrified by the bestial abnormality of their faces and the doglike sub-humanness of their crouching gait. One man moved in a positively simian way, with long arms frequently touching the ground; while another figure--robed and tiaraed--seemed to progress in an almost hopping fashion. I judged this party to be the one I had seen in the Gilman's courtyard--the one, therefore, most closely on my trail. As some of the figures turned to look in my direction I was transfixed with fright, yet managed to preserve the casual, shambling gait I had assumed. To this day I do not know whether they saw me or not. If they did, my stratagem must have deceived them, for they passed on across the moonlit space without varying their course--meanwhile croaking and jabbering in some hateful guttural patois I could not identify.

Once more in shadow, I resumed my former dog-trot past the leaning and decrepit houses that stared blankly into the night. Having crossed to the western sidewalk I rounded the nearest corner into Bates Street where I kept close to the buildings on the southern side. I passed two houses shewing signs of habitation, one of which had faint lights in upper rooms, yet met with no obstacle. As I turned into Adams Street I felt measurably safer, but received a shook when a man reeled out of a black doorway directly in front of me. He proved, however, too hopelessly drunk to be a menace; so that I reached the dismal ruins of the Bank Street warehouses in safety.

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

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

The vast, barnlike length of the old bridge gleamed spectrally in the moonlight, and I saw that the ties were safe for at least a few feet within. Entering, I began to use my flashlight, and was almost knocked down by the cloud of bats that flapped past me. About half-way across there was a perilous gap in the ties which I feared for a moment would halt me; but in the end I risked a desperate jump which fortunately succeeded.

I was glad to see the moonlight again when I emerged from that macabre tunnel. The old tracks crossed River Street at grade, and at once veered off into a region increasingly rural and with less and less of Innsmouth's abhorrent fishy odour. Here the dense growth of weeds and briers hindered me and cruelly tore at my clothes, but I was none the less glad that they were there to give me concealment in case of peril. I knew that much of my route must be visible from the Rowley road.

The marshy region began very abruptly, with the single track on a low, grassy embankment where the weedy growth was somewhat thinner. Then came a sort of island of higher ground, where the line passed through a shallow open cut choked with bushes and brambles. I was very glad of this partial shelter, since at this point the Rowley road was uncomfortably near according to my window view. At the end of the cut it would cross the track and swerve off to a safer distance; but meanwhile I must be exceedingly careful. I was by this time thankfully certain that the railway itself was not patrolled.

Just before entering the cut I glanced behind me, but saw no pursuer. The ancient spires and roofs of decaying Innsmouth gleamed lovely and ethereal in the magic yellow moonlight, and I thought of how they must have looked in the old days before the shadow fell. Then, as my gaze circled inland from the town, something less tranquil arrested my notice and held me immobile for a second.

What I saw--or fancied I saw--was a disturbing suggestion of undulant motion far to the south; a suggestion which made me conclude that a very large horde must be pouring out of the city along the level Ipswich road. The distance was great and I could distinguish nothing in detail; but I did not at all like the look of that moving column. It undulated too much, and glistened too brightly in the rays of the now westering moon. There was a suggestion of sound, too, though the wind was blowing the other way--a suggestion of bestial scraping and bellowing even worse than the muttering of the parties I had lately overheard.

All sorts of unpleasant conjectures crossed my mind. I thought of those very extreme Innsmouth types said to be hidden in crumbling, centuried warrens near the waterfront; I thought, too, of those nameless swimmers I had seen. Counting the parties so far glimpsed, as well as those presumably covering other roads, the number of my pursuers must be strangely large for a town as depopulated as Innsmouth.

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

I had entered the brush-grown cut and was struggling along at a very slow pace when that damnable fishy odour again waxed dominant. Had the wind suddenly changed eastward, so that it blew in from the sea and over the town? It must have, I concluded, since I now began to hear shocking guttural murmurs from that hitherto silent direction. There was another sound, too--a kind of wholesale, colossal flopping or pattering which somehow called up images of the most detestable sort. It made me think illogically of that unpleasantly undulating column on the far-off Ipswich road.

And then both stench and sounds grew stronger, so that I paused shivering and grateful for the cut's protection. It was here, I recalled, that the Rowley road drew so close to the old railway before crossing westward and diverging. Something was coming along that road, and I must lie low till its passage and vanishment in the distance. Thank heaven these creatures employed no dogs for tracking--though perhaps that would have been impossible amidst the omnipresent regional odour. Crouched in the bushes of that sandy cleft I felt reasonably safe, even though I knew the searchers would have to cross the track in front of me not much more than a hundred yards away. I would be able to see them, but they could not, except by a malign miracle, see me.

All at once I began dreading to look at them as they passed. I saw the close moonlit space where they would surge by, and had curious thoughts about the irredeemable pollution of that space. They would perhaps be the worst of all Innsmouth types--something one would not care to remember.

The stench waxed overpowering, and the noises swelled to a bestial babel of croaking, baying and barking without the least suggestion of human speech. Were these indeed the voices of my pursuers? Did they have dogs after all? So far I had seen none of the lower animals in Innsmouth. That flopping or pattering was monstrous--I could not look upon the degenerate creatures responsible for it. I would keep my eyes shut till the sound receded toward the west. The horde was very close now--air foul with their hoarse snarlings, and the ground almost shaking with their alien-rhythmed footfalls. My breath nearly ceased to come, and I put every ounce of will-power into the task of holding my eyelids down.

I am not even yet willing to say whether what followed was a hideous actuality or only a nightmare hallucination. The later action of the government, after my frantic appeals, would tend to confirm it as a monstrous truth; but could not an hallucination have been repeated under the quasi-hypnotic spell of that ancient, haunted, and shadowed town? Such places have strange properties, and the legacy of insane legend might well have acted on more than one human imagination amidst those dead, stench-cursed streets and huddles of rotting roofs and crumbling steeples. Is it not possible that the germ of an actual contagious madness lurks in the depths of that shadow over Innsmouth? Who can be sure of reality after hearing things like the tale of old Zadok Allen? The government men never found poor Zadok, and have no conjectures to make as to what became of him. Where does madness leave off and reality begin? Is it possible that even my latest fear is sheer delusion?

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

I thought I was prepared for the worst, and I really ought to have been prepared considering what I had seen before.

My other pursuers had been accursedly abnormal--so should I not have been ready to face a strengthening of the abnormal element; to look upon forms in which there was no mixture of the normal at all? I did not open my eyes until the raucous clamour came loudly from a point obviously straight ahead. Then I knew that a long section of them must be plainly in sight where the sides of the cut flattened out and the road crossed the track--and I could no longer keep myself from sampling whatever horror that leering yellow moon might have to shew.

It was the end, for whatever remains to me of life on the surface of this earth, of every vestige of mental peace and confidence in the integrity of nature and of the human mind. Nothing that I could have imagined--nothing, even, that I could have gathered had I credited old Zadok's crazy tale in the most literal way--would be in any way comparable to the demoniac, blasphemous reality that I saw--or believe I saw. I have tried to hint what it was in order to postpone the horror of writing it down baldly. Can it be possible that this planet has actually spawned such things; that human eyes have truly seen, as objective flesh, what man has hitherto known only in febrile phantasy and tenuous legend?

And yet I saw them in a limitless stream--flopping, hopping, croaking, bleating--urging inhumanly through the spectral moonlight in a grotesque, malignant saraband of fantastic nightmare. And some of them had tall tiaras of that nameless whitish-gold metal...and some were strangely robed...and one, who led the way, was clad in a ghoulishly humped black coat and striped trousers, and had a man's felt hat perched on the shapeless thing that answered for a head.

I think their predominant colour was a greyish-green, though they had white bellies. They were mostly shiny and slippery, but the ridges of their backs were scaly. Their forms vaguely suggested the anthropoid, while their heads were the heads of fish, with prodigious bulging eyes that never closed. At the sides of their necks were palpitating gills, and their long paws were webbed. They hopped irregularly, sometimes on two legs and sometimes on four. I was somehow glad that they had no more than four limbs. Their croaking, baying voices, clearly used for articulate speech, held all the dark shades of expression which their staring faces lacked.

But for all of their monstrousness they were not unfamiliar to me. I knew too well what they must be--for was not the memory of the evil tiara at Newburyport still fresh? They were the blasphemous fish-frogs of the nameless design--living and horrible--and as I saw them I knew also of what that humped, tiaraed priest in the black church basement had fearsomely reminded me. Their number was past guessing. It seemed to me that there were limitless swarms of them and certainly my momentary glimpse could have shewn only the least fraction. In another instant everything was blotted out by a merciful fit of fainting; the first I had ever had.","
By Their smell can men sometimes know Them near, but of Their semblance can no man know, saving only in the features of those They have begotten on mankind; and of those there are many sorts, differing in likeness from man's truest eidolon to that shape without sight or substance which is Them. They walk unseen and foul in lonely places where the Words have been spoken and the Rites howled through at their Seasons. The wind gibbers with Their voices, and the earth mutters with Their consciousness.
-- The Necronomicon

The lighthouse was a steal. Sure, it needed a little fixing up. ""Handyman's Special"" was how the realty company had listed the quaint brick cylinder. Howard knew ""Handyman's Special"" was realty-speak for ""Sucker's Money-Pit."" This was his fifth lighthouse in the last two years and he had come to understand realty-speak, and realtors quite well. He had purchased what lighthouses he could, the first in Northern California, three in Washington state, and now this one, in the small town of Timber Bay on Oregon's South coast.
He still hadn't found what he had been looking for.
Howard Flips had been many things in his forty years, nothing serious mind you, manual labor of course was below someone like Howard, but then again, when waiting for an inheritance, one can't be too picky about how one earns a living in the meantime. He'd been a librarian's assistant in Massachusetts in the 80's, a ship's cook on board a South Seas cruise ship for most of the 90's, and then it had happened. After overcoming colon cancer, prostate cancer, three strokes, a triple bypass, and the loss of most of his sight and all of his hearing, Howard's father had finally passed away.
He had choked on a chicken bone.
Then the glorious day had arrived. Howard sat in the law offices of Leach, Kling, Hammar and Kleever as Hubris Leach, his father's attorney of sixty years, informed Howard that he had inherited a sum of money somewhere in the vicinity of ten or twelve million dollars, presented him with a check in the amount of eight million dollars, and said the rest would follow pending the liquidation of all assets as per his father's specific instructions.
Eight million dollars.
Howard had plans. They had been forming since he had been helping out in the library at Miskatonic University in Arkham, Massachusetts in the 80's. Howard had read in an obscure text in an even more obscure manuscript written sometime during World War II known as the Book of Hidden Numbers, (a weighty tome which Howard had discovered alongside such dreaded volumes as the Necronomicon, the Cultes des Goules, the Revelations of Glaaki, and the Book of Eibon, all of which were kept under lock and key at the university library) of a chamber deep in the bowels of a lighthouse somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. A chamber with a tide pool, which led into an underwater cavern filled with creatures that would bestow immortality upon any and all who would agree to feed them. These creatures could not venture out of their underground dwellings to gather the unnamed food they needed to flourish. Yet, if they did not receive this food, they would go dormant, and that is what the manuscript said had happened in the early twentieth century.
According to the text, the lighthouse keeper had accidentally discovered the cavern at an unusually low tide cycle, had encountered the creatures, which the text did not describe other than to call them ""horrific"" and ""ghastly,"" and there they offered him their deal. Regular feedings for immortality. The keeper agreed, and was able to continue feeding them until his disappearance in 1928. Howard didn't know if they had acquired a new servant, the lighthouse keeper was never seen again, and the book had no copyright date, only that it had been printed in Berlin in the 30's. There was no further mention of the lighthouses or the creatures in the book.
The fact that the lighthouse keeper had disappeared made Howard wonder if the lure of immortality offered by the creatures was genuine or just a dangling carrot. It didn't matter, Howard meant to find out either way. He was drawn to the idea. He was obsessed with it. He had even dreamed about it numerous times. Strange dreams of underwater cities of alien origin, and whispering voices speaking unheard languages, chanting unknown incantations designed to foster an atmosphere conducive to the bringing forth of some great and dreadful being. He actually considered the search for the chamber beneath the lighthouse a Higher Calling. And so upon receiving his inheritance, he made a decision to tour all of the lighthouses in the Pacific Northwest, buying any and all of them that he could, and searching for the underground chamber. But until that particular autumn afternoon his search had turned up nothing but moss-covered brick towers which the Coast Guard had made obsolete with their newfangled aids to navigation, or forgotten lighthouses that had been replaced by newer, more modern structures.
But no hidden chamber.
And no creatures.
Howard slid the old-fashioned skeleton key into the rusty lock which made a low grating sound, and found to his surprise that it turned quite easily. He pushed open the old wooden door a little harder than he probably should have and the door swung open and crashed against the stone wall inside with a loud bang. There was suddenly what sounded like a fluttering of feathers overhead and Howard assumed that there was probably a whole community of bats or pigeons, or both, living in the long-abandoned lighthouse. No matter, he had no plans to move in.
Not yet anyway.
In comparison to the other lighthouses that Howard had visited in the previous months, this one was actually well lit. Long horizontal windows spiraled upward, following the narrow stairway as it wound its way around the inner walls of the old building, allowing the sun to penetrate the damp air that lingered inside. But it wasn't the lighting that struck Howard as strange; for indeed, as soon as he had stepped inside the lighthouse he could actually feel a difference from all of the other lighthouses that he had seen; but it was the absence of something so common in old buildings that one could easily overlook it, if one were not observant.
But Howard was an observant fellow.
He stamped his feet on the ground a few times and looked up at the windows, waiting. But what he was looking for was not there. There were no dust motes flitting in the rays of sunshine that spilled in through the narrow windows. No dust motes. None. Every old building he had searched had millions of dust motes swirling into the beams of sunshine that streamed through their ancient panes of glass. But not here. The place was mildewed and damp and wet and slippery and just plain cold. The chill seemed to permeate everything. Outside the temperature was a wondrous 65 degrees, but within the walls of that ancient tower of light it could easily have been half that. He started to walk further inside to get a look around and slipped. If anyone had been watching he probably would have looked like a beginning ice skater trying to keep his balance. He steadied himself by putting one hand against the wall and his hand sank into a slick, sticky substance. He quickly yanked it away. He brought the open palm to his face and sniffed.
That was the first time he threw up that day.
He tried his handkerchief, but the only thing that came off of the palm of his left hand and into the handkerchief was that horrible odor. He walked carefully over to a nearby table and tried scraping his hand clean on its edge. That helped a little. As a kid he used to smear rubber cement all over the palms of his hands and then peel it off after it had dried, making little sticky rubber balls. This stuff reminded Howard of that rubber cement, only this substance was a lot more mucilaginous. He pulled his pocket knife out of . . . his pocket and tried scraping the stuff off that way. That worked much better, and in a few minutes he had succeeded in getting most of the gummy substance off of his hand. But it was now all over the blade of his knife and so he simply left the knife on the table.
After all, the place was his. And he could afford a new knife.
A feeling of . . . separateness . . . suddenly came over Howard. This lighthouse felt more like . . . a holy place than an ancient warning beacon. Not ""holy"" in the Judeo-Christian sense of the word, but more in its meaning of sacredness. The ancient Greek and Hebrew words for ""Holy"" actually meant ""set aside; separate."" That's what this place felt like . . . holy . . . yet . . . not a good holy, more like a bad holy; a malevolent sinister evil lingered in every particle of non-dust-moted air, a diabolic ambiance that saturated every atom, every cell. Could it be possible?
Could this be the place?
A shiver ran up Howard's back and he tried not to get his hopes up. After buying five lighthouses and exploring three times as many, he had almost started to feel as if the Book of Hidden Numbers was just a hoax. A so-called sacred text created to part the proverbial fool and his proverbial money. But he just couldn't shake that feeling of . . .
Destiny.
If any place he had visited had ever exuded a wisp of anticipation and the apprehension of the object of Howard's quest, this one did. This one seemed to say, Come Howard! Come inside and find your . . .

Destiny . . . ?
Yes. Destiny. For the first time since stepping inside, Howard took a good look around. He stuffed his hands inside the pockets of his London Fog and sniffed, curls of steam spiraled out of his nostrils as he exhaled. The round room was bare save the desk which held Howard's now defiled blade. The floor was covered with a dark green algae of some sort, no doubt the cause of Howard's slip; the walls were bare, except in spots here and there was the sticky essence that had befouled Howard's palm. Upon closer inspection he noticed that the sticky stuff on the walls seemed to be a series of blotches the size of a human head. Furthermore they seemed to be evenly spaced apart, almost like . . . footprints, or hand prints, or . . .
Howard blinked. On the far side of the room he spotted a rusted iron ring laying on the concrete floor. He went over to it and saw the outline of some type of trap door surrounding the ring.
""Howard,"" a voice whispered over his shoulder.
Howard spun around. ""What's that? Who's there?"" The open door that he had entered stood out like a bright green rectangle, as Howard saw the bushes outside the lighthouse reflecting the afternoon sun standing, in stark contrast to the grey walls surrounding it. But there was no reply to his inquiry.
He continued to stare at the open door, but there was nothing there, only the overgrown blackberry vines that wound their way up the litter of pines that surrounded the lighthouse. He bent over and grabbed hold of the iron ring and gave it a slow steady pull. At first he thought that it was not going to budge, but when he had heard a slippery sucking noise, like the sound a foot makes when pulled out of deep mud, he went at it with a gusto that was actually surprising to him, and the door opened.
It was a heavy door, no question about that, but Howard had not even so much as found a basement in any of the lighthouses he had inspected previously, and like the petite mothers who lifted cars off of their newborn infants, Howard threw the door open without so much as a grunt. The black aperture gaped at him, beckoning.
Adrenaline coursed.
Destiny called.
""Howard."" The whispering voice seemed to beckon from deep within the darkened tunnel.
Howard pulled out his flashlight and turned it on, shining the beam of light down into an abyss of moss-covered stone steps and various fungi clinging to water-soaked walls. Without hesitation Howard began carefully descending the steps. His heart began beating faster, he could actually feel it increase in its palpitations. His blood pulsed loud in his ears. His mouth went dry. Could this be it? Could this really be the place? Howard tried desperately to fight off the instinct to cry, Eureka! I've found it! But he would not allow himself to be disappointed so bitterly, he had searched too long, come too far, drank too many espresso's with over-the-hill real estate saleswomen with their dyed and sprayed hair, fake fingernails and pancake make-up, spent too much money in search of this . . . this . . . what was he searching for, anyway? He had almost forgotten, the purpose lingering on the fringes of his consciousness . . . Ah yes! Servanthood for immortality, that was it! He had certainly come too far to let emotions lead him now. He must remain calm, cool-headed, reserved. After all, if it was all true, he would need to make a good impression.
Wouldn't he?
Of course. So he stopped on the steps and closed his eyes. He breathed in and out, practicing the relaxation techniques he had learned from the tapes he had in his glove compartment. In and out. Slowly, deliberately. In . . . hold for five seconds. Out . . . exhale for ten. In . . . out . . . in . . . out. There, that was better, he felt ready to continue.
Get a grip man. Do you think they'll take an emotionally unstable applicant seriously?
They didn't have to know he had been on antidepressants for months. Howard opened his eyes and peered down the beam of his flashlight into the bowels of the lighthouse. In the orifice there was only blackness, and the occasional ears of rippling fungus that grew out of the old bricks like warts. Something was different here. The air was actually getting warmer, yet at the same time that musty, nauseating odor that had filled his nostrils upstairs earlier was increasing. It was almost as if . . .
As if something actually lived down there.
By his own count Howard had descended two dozen steps when the trap door above him slammed shut. His ears popped, like when he would slam the door in his Volkswagen Beetle, and he winced at the pain.
No turning back now Howard.
Panic raced from his head to his chest and dropped into his knees like a jolt of high voltage. Howard's first instinct was to race back up the stairs, to somehow muster the strength to throw that massive trap door open and flee. Just run. It didn't matter where, just as long as it was far away from this place. Forget the money and the years he had spent in search of. . .
Just forget it.
But though he actually tried, he couldn't move. He was literally, and for the first time in all of his life, . . . paralyzed . . . incapacitated. If the Hordes of Hell had come bounding up those lichen-covered stairs he would be fortunate to even be able to let out a scream, much less try to defend himself, or attempt escape. And so Howard Flips stood there in the dank darkness. Unable to move, unable to speak, unable to do anything except perhaps let his bladder flow freely, against his will, of course. But that didn't happen. Instead, the wave of fear passed, the panic subsided like a receding tide in a time-lapsed film. And Howard was again . . . Howard. Out of habit, and an unconscious attempt at self-comfort, he adjusted his glasses on the bridge of his nose, sniffed, and stretched.
That was better. He was ready to continue.
Who locked you in here Howard?
Howard pushed the thought away. It didn't matter. He was certain that he had found what he had been looking for. He continued his descent, calmly. When he had counted seventy-five steps, he found that he had reached the bottom, or a bottom. In the distance he could hear water drip-dripping, as from a ceiling into a pool beneath. His light beam pierced the darkness, and he saw that there was a passageway. Not a natural formation, but a tunnel that had actually been dug. By human hands.
Well, Howard assumed that the hands that created this tunnel were human.
He proceeded down the narrow passageway; the fungi was thick along the walls, the stone floor was slick, and deep green. He rounded a turn and thought he saw a dim glow further down the tunnel. He stopped for a moment, switching off his flashlight and taking in his claustrophobic surroundings. There was indeed a greenish-yellow radiance off in the distance, and the sound of dripping water grew louder. He thought he heard something shuffling down the steps behind him. And then a thought struck. . . .
How can you be so sure that whatever shut that trapdoor isn't locked in here with you?
The time-lapsed film ran again and the tide of fear rose. Howard turned on his flashlight and shined its beam behind him, in the direction of the alleged noise. But there was nothing there. At least nothing he could see. He turned back around and walked toward the glow. Seconds later he found himself entering a large cavern. Splinters of sunlight sliced through the darkness at various points along one high wall, as if cracks and crevices in the cliffs that lined the ocean had purposely allowed air and light into this abysmal asylum, to nurture, or at the very least, allow to exist, some type of life forms.
The sunlight splashed on the algae-covered walls of the cavern like vandal's paint. Water dripped from overhead and landed in what Howard now saw was a small pool. A tide pool no doubt, being this close to the ocean. Howard knelt and scooped up some water, tasting his fingers. Yes. It was salt water.
This has to be it! This has to be the cave! he thought. He shut off his flashlight and let his eyes adjust to the light. As he stood there in the semi-darkness, he tried to remember what he had done with that transcript from the Book of Hidden Numbers that explained this place. He felt around in his pockets and finally found the crumpled piece of notebook paper that he had been carrying around for years. He couldn't remember the last time he had actually read the passage, and so was glad that he had found the transcript. He opened it up, switched his flashlight back on, and read:


Should they not receive their food on a regular basis, they will lapse into a dormant sleep, until the Time. This would be devastating to the cause of the Great Old Ones, and cannot be accepted in any way. There are two who are responsible for their safety and flourishing. The first is the human servant, the lighthouse keeper, whoever that may be. He must be recruited and ordained into service, his pay is the promise of immortality. The second one is the Thing from Between. He is the recruiter. He cannot venture out for the food, yet he cannot join the cavern dwellers, because of his nature. He is more foul and terrible than the cavern dwellers, and cannot be trusted to insure the lighthouse keeper's safety. Therefore, a fail-safe has been put into place. Should the servant lighthouse keeper ever be found missing, and the dwellers begin their lapse into dormancy, then the call will go out into the subconscious mind of a chosen recruit. And he shall find them, and he shall revive them.

The Thing from Between? Be recruited? The call? . . . he couldn't remember reading that part before. Howard became confused. He was certain he had never read that passage before. He only remembered that the text told of the hidden cavern and the needed lighthouse keeper. There was no mention of a ""Thing from Between"" . . . that he could remember. It was as if . . . 
A noise came from down the passageway from which he had emerged. Was there really someone, or some-thing between him and the trap door? Howard furrowed his brow. His ears began to ring and the air suddenly seemed charged with electricity. He backed away from the entrance to the tunnel and pressed himself against a wet wall. He could feel the water soaking through his trench coat, through his shirt, and finally into his skin, and a chill ran through his body.
There was no doubt in his mind now, there was something coming down the passageway. But it was not footsteps that he heard, but rather a slithering, sucking sound, as if a dwarf with a limp was slowly dragging a drenched quilt across a rough surface. The sound was getting closer, and it was all Howard could do to keep from screaming maniacally and diving into the dark tide pool at his feet. He bit down on his clenched fist, and raised his darkened flashlight above his head, as if that might protect him from . . . that . . . thing.
His eyes were fully adjusted to the dimly lit cavern and locked on the doorway to the tunnel. The noise grew louder, and then stopped.
Nothing came out of the portal.
Howard held his breath and watched. But nothing happened. Minutes passed. Still nothing. Soon, Howard's arm began to cramp from holding his flashlight above his head and so he lowered his arm. But he dared not switch on the light, or move. Maybe whatever it was stopped its pursuit of Howard because it could no longer hear him, or see his flashlight beam. Maybe it turned around and left. Maybe . . . 
It's still there, Howard.
This time Howard didn't push the thoughts away, instead, he decided to just let them flow. Perhaps they could actually help him, perhaps they would be his only salvation. He thought that whatever it was in the tunnel might possibly be waiting for him to present himself as a recruit. Yes! Maybe that it was it! Maybe it wasn't going to hurt him at all, but was just simply waiting for him to come forward and say ""Here I am!"" After all, didn't the text talk about a recruiter?
The water in the tide pool splashed.
Howard jerked in a spasm of fear, and let out a scream that no matter how hard he tried he could not contain. The water went still as the ripples lapped the dark rocky shore at Howard's feet. Then with a great splashing and sloshing of water something jumped from the tide pool to the floor next to Howard. It was like a man, yet unlike any man that he had ever seen. It raised itself up on two feet and was taller than Howard by a good yard. It was humanoid in shape, with two legs, two long and lanky arms that ended in webbed, spindly, claw-tipped fingers, a long slim torso, and sitting atop a bull-like neck was an elongated head, with two large round orbs where eyes should be, two tiny slits for a nose, and a long, ear-to-ear slice for a mouth. Its rubbery skin glistened in the little light that the cracks in the cliffs allowed through. It had webbed feet, not unlike those of a frog or a toad. But the most striking thing to Howard was the smell. Mists of the foul effluvium drifted off the top of its head. And for the second time that day, Howard vomited, all over the feet of the creature that stood before him.
When he looked up, Howard saw the creature looking over at the entrance to the tunnel, and it barked. The sound was like a cross between a lion's roar, and a lap dog's yap. Howard heard the slithering sucking noise in the tunnel again, this time growing fainter, as whatever it was in that dark hallway was retreating. The tall creature swung its head around and stooped down, putting its reptilian face mere inches from Howard's. Howard tried breathing through his mouth only, to avoid the smell, but it was no use, and he bent over and threw up again. When he looked up the creature was still there, still stooped, still in his face. Its tiny nostril slits expanded and contracted as it moved its head over the top of Howard's scalp, it was smelling him. Howard was in such a state of shock, fear, and panic, that once again, he found himself paralyzed.
Is this really happening to me? he thought.
Then, another voice spoke in his head, like his own thoughts, yet it was not his voice. ""Yes, Howard, it is happening. Did you not present yourself here for consideration of service?""
Howard let out a yelp and fell to his knees.
This time the creature spoke out of its mouth. ""Would you prefer,"" it croaked, ""that I speak to you in this manner?"" Howard saw rows and rows of nail-like teeth lining the creature's jaws. And he nodded rapidly, actually meaning to shake his head, he did not want to see those teeth or smell that putrid breath again. ""Very well then."" It grunted and continued. ""You obviously believe, Howard, or you would not be here.""
""How do you know my name?"" Howard stammered.
""Because we have been calling you, Howard. You were chosen.""
""I didn't hear anyone calling me.""
""Come now, Howard, stop with all of this foolishness. Do you wish to serve us, or not?""
Howard was silent for a moment, and in the distance, he thought he heard the slithering noise. ""Yes.""
""Very well then,"" it croaked, and reached one of its long hands down and wrapped itself around the top of Howard's skull. Sparks floated into Howard's peripheral vision, and then he blacked out.
* * *

When he awoke, Howard was in a room at the top of the lighthouse. It was still daylight, of course, but Howard wasn't sure if still was the proper term to use, for he had no idea how many days he had been unconscious or how he had gotten up to the top of the lighthouse. He ran his hand across his chin and noticed that he had grown a full beard. His clothes were tattered and torn.
He looked at his hands and they were filthy. His fingernails were long and caked with a dark substance. He was abruptly becoming aware that a considerable length of time had actually passed.
""How long have, Iâ!,"" Howard started, but was stopped in mid-sentence. There was a small wooden trap door in the floor, no doubt the access to the stairs, and Howard's attention was drawn to it because it was creaking open.
""Don't worry, Howard,"" he heard a whispering voice say. ""You have served well, and this won't hurt a bit."" Howard watched the trap door open, and saw a long tentacle, like that of a giant octopus come slithering rapidly from the crack toward his face.
It wrapped itself around Howard's neck and squeezed. His spectacles fell to the floor.
And Howard slipped into the promised immortality.
",False
"When I drew nigh the nameless city I knew it was accursed. I was traveling in a parched and terrible valley under the moon, and afar I saw it protruding uncannily above the sands as parts of a corpse may protrude from an ill-made grave. Fear spoke from the age-worn stones of this hoary survivor of the deluge, this great-grandfather of the eldest pyramid; and a viewless aura repelled me and bade me retreat from antique and sinister secrets that no man should see, and no man else had dared to see..
Remote in the desert of Araby lies the nameless city, crumbling and inarticulate, its low walls nearly hidden by the sands of uncounted ages. It must have been thus before the first stones of Memphis were laid, and while the bricks of Babylon were yet unbaked. There is no legend so old as to give it a name, or to recall that it was ever alive; but it is told of in whispers around campfires and muttered about by grandams in the tents of sheiks so that all the tribes shun it without wholly knowing why. It was of this place that Abdul Alhazred the mad poet dreamed of the night before he sang his unexplained couplet:
That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons death may die.
I should have known that the Arabs had good reason for shunning the nameless city, the city told of in strange tales but seen by no living man, yet I defied them and went into the untrodden waste with my camel. I alone have seen it, and that is why no other face bears such hideous lines of fear as mine; why no other man shivers so horribly when the night wind rattles the windows. When I came upon it in the ghastly stillness of unending sleep it looked at me, chilly from the rays of a cold moon amidst the desert's heat. And as I returned its look I forgot my triumph at finding it, and stopped still with my camel to wait for the dawn.
For hours I waited, till the east grew grey and the stars faded, and the grey turned to roseate light edged with gold. I heard a moaning and saw a storm of sand stirring among the antique stones though the sky was clear and the vast reaches of desert still. Then suddenly above the desert's far rim came the blazing edge of the sun, seen through the tiny sandstorm which was passing away, and in my fevered state I fancied that from some remote depth there came a crash of musical metal to hail the fiery disc as Memnon hails it from the banks of the Nile. My ears rang and my imagination seethed as I led my camel slowly across the sand to that unvocal place; that place which I alone of living men had seen.
In and out amongst the shapeless foundations of houses and places I wandered, finding never a carving or inscription to tell of these men, if men they were, who built this city and dwelt therein so long ago. The antiquity of the spot was unwholesome, and I longed to encounter some sign or device to prove that the city was indeed fashioned by mankind. There were certain proportions and dimensions in the ruins which I did not like. I had with me many tools, and dug much within the walls of the obliterated edifices; but progress was slow, and nothing significant was revealed. When night and the moon returned I felt a chill wind which brought new fear, so that I did not dare to remain in the city. And as I went outside the antique walls to sleep, a small sighing sandstorm gathered behind me, blowing over the grey stones though the moon was bright and most of the desert still.
I awakened just at dawn from a pageant of horrible dreams, my ears ringing as from some metallic peal. I saw the sun peering redly through the last gusts of a little sandstorm that hovered over the nameless city, and marked the quietness of the rest of the landscape. Once more I ventured within those brooding ruins that swelled beneath the sand like an ogre under a coverlet, and again dug vainly for relics of the forgotten race. At noon I rested, and in the afternoon I spent much time tracing the walls and bygone streets, and the outlines of the nearly vanished buildings. I saw that the city had been mighty indeed, and wondered at the sources of its greatness. To myself I pictured all the spendours of an age so distant that Chaldaea could not recall it, and thought of Sarnath the Doomed, that stood in the land of Mnar when mankind was young, and of Ib, that was carven of grey stone before mankind existed.
All at once I came upon a place where the bed rock rose stark through the sand and formed a low cliff; and here I saw with joy what seemed to promise further traces of the antediluvian people. Hewn rudely on the face of the cliff were the unmistakable facades of several small, squat rock houses or temples; whose interiors might preserve many secrets of ages too remote for calculation, though sandstorms had long effaced any carvings which may have been outside.
Very low and sand-choked were all the dark apertures near me, but I cleared on with my spade and crawled through it, carrying a torch to reveal whatever mysteries it might hold. When I was inside I saw that the cavern was indeed a temple, and beheld plain signs of the race that had lived and worshipped before the desert was a desert. Primitive altars, pillars, and niches, all curiously low, were not absent; and though I saw no sculptures or frescoes, there were many singular stones clearly shaped into symbols by artificial means. The lowness of the chiselled chamber was very strange, for I could hardly kneel upright; but the area was so great that my torch showed only part of it at a time. I shuddered oddly in some of the far corners; for certain altars and stones suggested forgotten rites of terrible, revolting and inexplicable nature and made me wonder what manner of men could have made and frequented such a temple. When I had seen all that the place contained, I crawled out again, avid to find what the temples might yield.
Night had now approached, yet the tangible things I had seen made curiosity stronger than fear, so that I did not flee from the long mooncast shadows that had daunted me when first I saw the nameless city. In the twilight I cleared another aperture and with a new torch crawled into it, finding more vague stones and symbols, though nothing more definite than the other temple had contained the room was just as low, but much less broad, ending in a very narrow passage crowded with obscure and cryptical shrines. About these shrines I was prying when the noise of a wind and my camel outside broke through the stillness and drew me forth to see what could have frightened the beast.
The moon was gleaming vividly over the primitive ruins, lighting a dense cloud of sand that seemed blown by a strong but decreasing wind from some point along the cliff ahead of me. I knew it was this chilly, sandy wind which had disturbed the camel and was about to lead him to a place of better shelter when I chanced to glance up and saw that there was no wind atop the cliff. This astonished me and made me fearful again, but I immediately recalled the sudden local winds that I had seen and heard before at sunrise and sunset, and judged it was a normal thing. I decided it came from some rock fissure leading to a cave, and watched the troubled sand to trace it to its source; soon perceiving that it came from the black orifice of a temple a long distance south of me, almost out of sight. Against the choking sand-cloud I plodded toward this temple, which as I neared it loomed larger than the rest, and shewed a doorway far less clogged with caked sand. I would have entered had not the terrific force of the icy wind almost quenched my torch. It poured madly out of the dark door, sighing uncannily as it ruffled the sand and spread among the weird ruins. Soon it grew fainter and the sand grew more and more still, till finally all was at rest again; but a presence seemed stalking among the spectral stones of the city, and when I glanced at the moon it seemed to quiver as though mirrored in unquiet waters. I was more afraid than I could explain, but not enough to dull my thirst for wonder; so as soon as the wind was quite gone I crossed into the dark chamber from which it had come.
This temple, as I had fancied from the outside, was larger than either of those I had visited before; and was presumably a natural cavern since it bore winds from some region beyond. Here I could stand quite upright, but saw that the stones and altars were as low as those in the other temples. On the walls and roof I beheld for the first time some traces of the pictorial art of the ancient race, curious curling streaks of paint that had almost faded or crumbled away; and on two of the altars I saw with rising excitement a maze of well-fashioned curvilinear carvings. As I held my torch aloft it seemed to me that the shape of the roof was too regular to be natural, and I wondered what the prehistoric cutters of stone had first worked upon. Their engineering skill must have been vast.
Then a brighter flare of the fantastic flame showed that form which I had been seeking, the opening to those remoter abysses whence the sudden wind had blown; and I grew faint when I saw that it was a small and plainly artificial door chiselled in the solid rock. I thrust my torch within, beholding a black tunnel with the roof arching low over a rough flight of very small, numerous and steeply descending steps. I shall always see those steps in my dreams, for I came to learn what they meant. At the time I hardly knew whether to call them steps or mere footholds in a precipitous descent. My mind was whirling with mad thoughts, and the words and warning of Arab prophets seemed to float across the desert from the land that men know to the nameless city that men dare not know. Yet I hesitated only for a moment before advancing through the portal and commencing to climb cautiously down the steep passage, feet first, as though on a ladder.
It is only in the terrible phantasms of drugs or delirium that any other man can have such a descent as mine. The narrow passage led infinitely down like some hideous haunted well, and the torch I held above my head could not light the unknown depths toward which I was crawling. I lost track of the hours and forgot to consult my watch, though I was frightened when I thought of the distance I must have be traversing. There were changes of direction and of steepness; and once I came to a long, low, level passage where I had to wriggle my feet first along the rocky floor, holding torch at arm's length beyond my head. The place was not high enough for kneeling. After that were more of the steep steps, and I was still scrambling down interminably when my failing torch died out. I do not think I noticed it at the time, for when I did notice it I was still holding it above me as if it were ablaze. I was quite unbalanced with that instinct for the strange and the unknown which had made me a wanderer upon earth and a haunter of far, ancient, and forbidden places.
In the darkness there flashed before my mind fragments of my cherished treasury of daemonic lore; sentences from Alhazred the mad Arab, paragraphs from the apocryphal nightmares of Damascius, and infamous lines from the delirious Image du Monde of Gauthier de Metz. I repeated queer extracts, and muttered of Afrasiab and the daemons that floated with him down the Oxus; later chanting over and over again a phrase from one of Lord Dunsany's tales--""The unreveberate blackness of the abyss."" Once when the descent grew amazingly steep I recited something in sing-song from Thomas Moore until I feared to recite more:
A reservoir of darkness, black
As witches' cauldrons are, when fill'd
With moon-drugs in th' eclipse distill'd
Leaning to look if foot might pass
Down thro' that chasm, I saw, beneath,
As far as vision could explore,
The jetty sides as smooth as glass,
Looking as if just varnish'd o'er
With that dark pitch the Seat of Death
Throws out upon its slimy shore.
Time had quite ceased to exist when my feet again felt a level floor, and I found myself in a place slightly higher than the rooms in the two smaller temples now so incalculably far above my head. I could not quite stand, but could kneel upright, and in the dark I shuffled and crept hither and thither at random. I soon knew that I was in a narrow passage whose walls were lined with cases of wood having glass fronts. As in that Palaeozoic and abysmal place I felt of such things as polished wood and glass I shuddered at the possible implications. The cases were apparently ranged along each side of the passage at regular intervals, and were oblong and horizontal, hideously like coffins in shape and size. When I tried to move two or three for further examination, I found that they were firmly fastened.
I saw that the passage was a long one, so floundered ahead rapidly in a creeping run that would have seemed horrible had any eye watched me in the blackness; crossing from side to side occasionally to feel of my surroundings and be sure the walls and rows of cases still stretched on. Man is so used to thinking visually that I almost forgot the darkness and pictured the endless corridor of wood and glass in its low-studded monotony as though I saw it. And then in a moment of indescribable emotion I did see it.
Just when my fancy merged into real sight I cannot tell; but there came a gradual glow ahead, and all at once I knew that I saw the dim outlines of a corridor and the cases, revealed by some unknown subterranean phosphorescence. For a little while all was exactly as I had imagined it, since the glow was very faint; but as I mechanically kept stumbling ahead into the stronger light I realised that my fancy had been but feeble. This hall was no relic of crudity like the temples in the city above, but a monument of the most magnificent and exotic art. Rich, vivid, and daringly fantastic designs and pictures formed a continuous scheme of mural paintings whose lines and colours were beyond description. The cases were of a strange golden wood, with fronts of exquisite glass, and containing the mummified forms of creatures outreaching in grotesqueness the most chaotic dreams of man.
To convey any idea of these monstrosities is impossible. They were of the reptile kind, with body lines suggestion sometimes the crocodile, sometimes the seal, but more often nothing of which either the naturalist or the palaeontologist ever heard. In size they approximated a small man, and their fore-legs bore delicate and evident feet curiously like human hands and fingers. But strangest of all were their heads, which presented a contour violating all known biological principles. To nothing can such things be well compared--in one flash I thought of comparisons as varied as the cat, the bullfrog, the mythic Satyr, and the human being. Not Jove himself had had so colossal and protuberant a forehead, yet the horns and the noselessness and the alligator-like jaw placed things outside all established categories. I debated for a time on the reality of the mummies, half suspecting they were artificial idols; but soon decided they were indeed some palaeogean species which had lived when the nameless city was alive. To crown their grotesqueness, most of them were gorgeously enrobed in the costliest of fabrics, and lavishly laden with ornaments of gold, jewels, and unknown shining metals.
The importance of these crawling creatures must have been vast, for they held first place among the wild designs on the frescoed walls and ceiling. With matchless skill had the artist drawn them in a world of their own, wherein they had cities and gardens fashioned to suit their dimensions; and I could not help but think that their pictured history was allegorical, perhaps showing the progress of the race that worshipped them. These creatures, I said to myself, were to men of the nameless city what the she-wolf was to Rome, or some totem-beast is to a tribe of Indians.
Holding this view, I could trace roughly a wonderful epic of the nameless city; the tale of a mighty seacoast metropolis that ruled the world before Africa rose out of the waves, and of its struggles as the sea shrank away, and the desert crept into the fertile valley that held it. I saw its wars and triumphs, its troubles and defeats, and afterwards its terrible fight against the desert when thousands of its people--here represented in allegory by the grotesque reptiles--were driven to chisel their way down through the rocks in some marvellous manner to another world whereof their prophets had told them. It was all vividly weird and realistic, and its connection with the awesome descent I had made was unmistakable. I even recognized the passages.
As I crept along the corridor toward the brighter light I saw later stages of the painted epic--the leave-taking of the race that had dwelt in the nameless city and the valley around for ten million years; the race whose souls shrank from quitting scenes their bodies had known so long where they had settled as nomads in the earth's youth, hewing in the virgin rock those primal shrines at which they had never ceased to worship. Now that the light was better I studied the pictures more closely and, remembering that the strange reptiles must represent the unknown men, pondered upon the customs of the nameless city. Many things were peculiar and inexplicable. The civilization, which included a written alphabet, had seemingly risen to a higher order than those immeasurably later civilizations of Egypt and Chaldaea, yet there were curious omissions. I could, for example, find no pictures to represent deaths or funeral customs, save such as were related to wars, violence, and plagues; and I wondered at the reticence shown concerning natural death. It was as though an ideal of immortality had been fostered as a cheering illusion.
Still nearer the end of the passage was painted scenes of the utmost picturesqueness and extravagance: contrasted views of the nameless city in its desertion and growing ruin, and of the strange new realm of paradise to which the race had hewed its way through the stone. In these views the city and the desert valley were shewn always by moonlight, golden nimbus hovering over the fallen walls, and half-revealing the splendid perfection of former times, shown spectrally and elusively by the artist. The paradisal scenes were almost too extravagant to be believed, portraying a hidden world of eternal day filled with glorious cities and ethereal hills and valleys. At the very last I thought I saw signs of an artistic anticlimax. The paintings were less skillful, and much more bizarre than even the wildest of the earlier scenes. They seemed to record a slow decadence of the ancient stock, coupled with a growing ferocity toward the outside world from which it was driven by the desert. The forms of the people--always represented by the sacred reptiles--appeared to be gradually wasting away, through their spirit as shewn hovering above the ruins by moonlight gained in proportion. Emaciated priests, displayed as reptiles in ornate robes, cursed the upper air and all who breathed it; and one terrible final scene shewed a primitive-looking man, perhaps a pioneer of ancient Irem, the City of Pillars, torn to pieces by members of the elder race. I remember how the Arabs fear the nameless city, and was glad that beyond this place the grey walls and ceiling were bare.
As I viewed the pageant of mural history I had approached very closely to the end of the low-ceiled hall, and was aware of a gate through which came all of the illuminating phosphorescence. Creeping up to it, I cried aloud in transcendent amazement at what lay beyond; for instead of other and brighter chambers there was only an illimitable void of uniform radiance, such one might fancy when gazing down from the peak of Mount Everest upon a sea of sunlit mist. Behind me was a passage so cramped that I could not stand upright in it; before me was an infinity of subterranean effulgence.
Reaching down from the passage into the abyss was the head of a steep flight of steps--small numerous steps like those of black passages I had traversed--but after a few feet the glowing vapours concealed everything. Swung back open against the left-hand wall of the passage was a massive door of brass, incredibly thick and decorated with fantastic bas-reliefs, which could if closed shut the whole inner world of light away from the vaults and passages of rock. I looked at the step, and for the nonce dared not try them. I touched the open brass door, and could not move it. Then I sank prone to the stone floor, my mind aflame with prodigious reflections which not even a death-like exhaustion could banish.
As I lay still with closed eyes, free to ponder, many things I had lightly noted in the frescoes came back to me with new and terrible significance--scenes representing the nameless city in its heyday--the vegetations of the valley around it, and the distant lands with which its merchants traded. The allegory of the crawling creatures puzzled me by its universal prominence, and I wondered that it would be so closely followed in a pictured history of such importance. In the frescoes the nameless city had been shewn in proportions fitted to the reptiles. I wondered what its real proportions and magnificence had been, and reflected a moment on certain oddities I had noticed in the ruins. I thought curiously of the lowness of the primal temples and of the underground corridor, which were doubtless hewn thus out of deference to the reptile deities there honoured; though it perforce reduced the worshippers to crawling. Perhaps the very rites here involved crawling in imitation of the creatures. No religious theory, however, could easily explain why the level passages in that awesome descent should be as low as the temples--or lower, since one could not even kneel in it. As I thought of the crawling creatures, whose hideous mummified forms were so close to me, I felt a new throb of fear. Mental associations are curious, and I shrank from the idea that except for the poor primitive man torn to pieces in the last painting, mine was the only human form amidst the many relics and symbols of the primordial life.
But as always in my strange and roving existence, wonder soon drove out fear; for the luminous abyss and what it might contain presented a problem worthy of the greatest explorer that a weird world of mystery lay far down that flight of peculiarly small steps I could not doubt, and I hoped to find there those human memorials which the painted corridor had failed to give. The frescoes had pictured unbelievable cities, and valleys in this lower realm, and my fancy dwelt on the rich and colossal ruins that awaited me.
My fears, indeed, concerned the past rather than the future. Not even the physical horror of my position in that cramped corridor of dead reptiles and antediluvian frescoes, miles below the world I knew and faced by another world of eery light and mist, could match the lethal dread I felt at the abysmal antiquity of the scene and its soul. An ancientness so vast that measurement is feeble seemed to leer down from the primal stones and rock-hewn temples of the nameless city, while the very latest of the astounding maps in the frescoes shewed oceans and continents that man has forgotten, with only here and there some vaguely familiar outlines. Of what could have happened in the geological ages since the paintings ceased and the death-hating race resentfully succumbed to decay, no man might say. Life had once teemed in these caverns and in the luminous realm beyond; now I was alone with vivid relics, and I trembled to think of the countless ages through which these relics had kept a silent deserted vigil.
Suddenly there came another burst of that acute fear which had intermittently seized me ever since I first saw the terrible valley and the nameless city under a cold moon, and despite my exhaustion I found myself starting frantically to a sitting posture and gazing back along the black corridor toward the tunnels that rose to the outer world. My sensations were like those which had made me shun the nameless city at night, and were as inexplicable as they were poignant. In another moment, however, I received a still greater shock in the form of a definite sound--the first which had broken the utter silence of these tomb-like depths. It was a deep, low moaning, as of a distant throng of condemned spirits, and came from the direction in which I was staring. Its volume rapidly grew, till it soon reverberated rightfully through the low passage, and at the same time I became conscious of an increasing draught of old air, likewise flowing from the tunnels and the city above. The touch of this air seemed to restore my balance, for I instantly recalled the sudden gusts which had risen around the mouth of the abyss each sunset and sunrise, one of which had indeed revealed the hidden tunnels to me. I looked at my watch and saw that sunrise was near, so bracing myself to resist the gale that was sweeping down to its cavern home as it had swept forth at evening. My fear again waned low, since a natural phenomenon tends to dispel broodings over the unknown.
More and more madly poured the shrieking, moaning night wind into the gulf of the inner earth. I dropped prone again and clutched vainly at the floor for fear of being swept bodily through the open gate into the phosphorescent abyss. Such fury I had not expected, and as I grew aware of an actual slipping of my form toward the abyss I was beset by a thousand new terrors of apprehension and imagination. The malignancy of the blast awakened incredible fancies; once more I compared myself shudderingly to the only human image in that frightful corridor, the man who was torn to pieces by the nameless race, for in the fiendish clawing of the swirling currents there seemed to abide a vindictive rage all the stronger because it was largely impotent. I think I screamed frantically near the last--I was almost mad--of the howling wind-wraiths. I tried to crawl against the murderous invisible torrent, but I could not even hold my own as I was pushed slowly and inexorably toward the unknown world. Finally reason must have wholly snapped; for I fell babbling over and over that unexplainable couplet of the mad Arab Alhazred, who dreamed of the nameless city:
That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die.
Only the grim brooding desert gods know what really took place--what indescribable struggles and scrambles in the dark I endured or what Abaddon guided me back to life, where I must always remember and shiver in the night wind till oblivion--or worse--claims me. Monstrous, unnatural, colossal, was the thing--too far beyond all the ideas of man to be believed except in the silent damnable small hours of the morning when one cannot sleep.
I have said that the fury of the rushing blast was infernal-- cacodaemoniacal--and that its voices were hideous with the pent-up viciousness of desolate eternities. Presently these voices, while still chaotic before me, seemed to my beating brain to take articulate form behind me; and down there in the grave of unnumbered aeon-dead antiquities, leagues below the dawn-lit world of men, I heard the ghastly cursing and snarling of strange-tongued fiends. Turning, I saw outlined against the luminous aether of the abyss that could not be seen against the dusk of the corridor--a nightmare horde of rushing devils; hate distorted, grotesquely panoplied, half transparent devils of a race no man might mistake--the crawling reptiles of the nameless city.
And as the wind died away I was plunged into the ghoul-pooled darkness of earth's bowels; for behind the last of the creatures the great brazen door clanged shut with a deafening peal of metallic music whose reverberations swelled out to the distant world to hail the rising sun as Memnon hails it from the banks of the Nile.
","(Found Among the Papers of the Late
Francis Wayland Thurston, of Boston)
“Of such great powers or beings there may be conceivably a survival . . . a survival of a hugely remote period when . . . consciousness was manifested, perhaps, in shapes and forms long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity . . . forms of which poetry and legend alone have caught a flying memory and called them gods, monsters, mythical beings of all sorts and kinds. . . .”
—Algernon Blackwood.

I.
The Horror in Clay.

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

II.
The Tale of Inspector Legrasse.

The older matters which had made the sculptor’s dream and bas-relief so significant to my uncle formed the subject of the second half of his long manuscript. Once before, it appears, Professor Angell had seen the hellish outlines of the nameless monstrosity, puzzled over the unknown hieroglyphics, and heard the ominous syllables which can be rendered only as “Cthulhu”; and all this in so stirring and horrible a connexion that it is small wonder he pursued young Wilcox with queries and demands for data.
      The earlier experience had come in 1908, seventeen years before, when the American Archaeological Society held its annual meeting in St. Louis. Professor Angell, as befitted one of his authority and attainments, had had a prominent part in all the deliberations; and was one of the first to be approached by the several outsiders who took advantage of the convocation to offer questions for correct answering and problems for expert solution.
      The chief of these outsiders, and in a short time the focus of interest for the entire meeting, was a commonplace-looking middle-aged man who had travelled all the way from New Orleans for certain special information unobtainable from any local source. His name was John Raymond Legrasse, and he was by profession an Inspector of Police. With him he bore the subject of his visit, a grotesque, repulsive, and apparently very ancient stone statuette whose origin he was at a loss to determine. It must not be fancied that Inspector Legrasse had the least interest in archaeology. On the contrary, his wish for enlightenment was prompted by purely professional considerations. The statuette, idol, fetish, or whatever it was, had been captured some months before in the wooded swamps south of New Orleans during a raid on a supposed voodoo meeting; and so singular and hideous were the rites connected with it, that the police could not but realise that they had stumbled on a dark cult totally unknown to them, and infinitely more diabolic than even the blackest of the African voodoo circles. Of its origin, apart from the erratic and unbelievable tales extorted from the captured members, absolutely nothing was to be discovered; hence the anxiety of the police for any antiquarian lore which might help them to place the frightful symbol, and through it track down the cult to its fountain-head.
      Inspector Legrasse was scarcely prepared for the sensation which his offering created. One sight of the thing had been enough to throw the assembled men of science into a state of tense excitement, and they lost no time in crowding around him to gaze at the diminutive figure whose utter strangeness and air of genuinely abysmal antiquity hinted so potently at unopened and archaic vistas. No recognised school of sculpture had animated this terrible object, yet centuries and even thousands of years seemed recorded in its dim and greenish surface of unplaceable stone.
      The figure, which was finally passed slowly from man to man for close and careful study, was between seven and eight inches in height, and of exquisitely artistic workmanship. It represented a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind. This thing, which seemed instinct with a fearsome and unnatural malignancy, was of a somewhat bloated corpulence, and squatted evilly on a rectangular block or pedestal covered with undecipherable characters. The tips of the wings touched the back edge of the block, the seat occupied the centre, whilst the long, curved claws of the doubled-up, crouching hind legs gripped the front edge and extended a quarter of the way down toward the bottom of the pedestal. The cephalopod head was bent forward, so that the ends of the facial feelers brushed the backs of huge fore paws which clasped the croucher’s elevated knees. The aspect of the whole was abnormally life-like, and the more subtly fearful because its source was so totally unknown. Its vast, awesome, and incalculable age was unmistakable; yet not one link did it shew with any known type of art belonging to civilisation’s youth—or indeed to any other time. Totally separate and apart, its very material was a mystery; for the soapy, greenish-black stone with its golden or iridescent flecks and striations resembled nothing familiar to geology or mineralogy. The characters along the base were equally baffling; and no member present, despite a representation of half the world’s expert learning in this field, could form the least notion of even their remotest linguistic kinship. They, like the subject and material, belonged to something horribly remote and distinct from mankind as we know it; something frightfully suggestive of old and unhallowed cycles of life in which our world and our conceptions have no part.
      And yet, as the members severally shook their heads and confessed defeat at the Inspector’s problem, there was one man in that gathering who suspected a touch of bizarre familiarity in the monstrous shape and writing, and who presently told with some diffidence of the odd trifle he knew. This person was the late William Channing Webb, Professor of Anthropology in Princeton University, and an explorer of no slight note. Professor Webb had been engaged, forty-eight years before, in a tour of Greenland and Iceland in search of some Runic inscriptions which he failed to unearth; and whilst high up on the West Greenland coast had encountered a singular tribe or cult of degenerate Esquimaux whose religion, a curious form of devil-worship, chilled him with its deliberate bloodthirstiness and repulsiveness. It was a faith of which other Esquimaux knew little, and which they mentioned only with shudders, saying that it had come down from horribly ancient aeons before ever the world was made. Besides nameless rites and human sacrifices there were certain queer hereditary rituals addressed to a supreme elder devil or tornasuk; and of this Professor Webb had taken a careful phonetic copy from an aged angekok or wizard-priest, expressing the sounds in Roman letters as best he knew how. But just now of prime significance was the fetish which this cult had cherished, and around which they danced when the aurora leaped high over the ice cliffs. It was, the professor stated, a very crude bas-relief of stone, comprising a hideous picture and some cryptic writing. And so far as he could tell, it was a rough parallel in all essential features of the bestial thing now lying before the meeting.
      This data, received with suspense and astonishment by the assembled members, proved doubly exciting to Inspector Legrasse; and he began at once to ply his informant with questions. Having noted and copied an oral ritual among the swamp cult-worshippers his men had arrested, he besought the professor to remember as best he might the syllables taken down amongst the diabolist Esquimaux. There then followed an exhaustive comparison of details, and a moment of really awed silence when both detective and scientist agreed on the virtual identity of the phrase common to two hellish rituals so many worlds of distance apart. What, in substance, both the Esquimau wizards and the Louisiana swamp-priests had chanted to their kindred idols was something very like this—the word-divisions being guessed at from traditional breaks in the phrase as chanted aloud:
      “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.”
      Legrasse had one point in advance of Professor Webb, for several among his mongrel prisoners had repeated to him what older celebrants had told them the words meant. This text, as given, ran something like this:
      “In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”
      And now, in response to a general and urgent demand, Inspector Legrasse related as fully as possible his experience with the swamp worshippers; telling a story to which I could see my uncle attached profound significance. It savoured of the wildest dreams of myth-maker and theosophist, and disclosed an astonishing degree of cosmic imagination among such half-castes and pariahs as might be least expected to possess it.
      On November 1st, 1907, there had come to the New Orleans police a frantic summons from the swamp and lagoon country to the south. The squatters there, mostly primitive but good-natured descendants of Lafitte’s men, were in the grip of stark terror from an unknown thing which had stolen upon them in the night. It was voodoo, apparently, but voodoo of a more terrible sort than they had ever known; and some of their women and children had disappeared since the malevolent tom-tom had begun its incessant beating far within the black haunted woods where no dweller ventured. There were insane shouts and harrowing screams, soul-chilling chants and dancing devil-flames; and, the frightened messenger added, the people could stand it no more.
      So a body of twenty police, filling two carriages and an automobile, had set out in the late afternoon with the shivering squatter as a guide. At the end of the passable road they alighted, and for miles splashed on in silence through the terrible cypress woods where day never came. Ugly roots and malignant hanging nooses of Spanish moss beset them, and now and then a pile of dank stones or fragment of a rotting wall intensified by its hint of morbid habitation a depression which every malformed tree and every fungous islet combined to create. At length the squatter settlement, a miserable huddle of huts, hove in sight; and hysterical dwellers ran out to cluster around the group of bobbing lanterns. The muffled beat of tom-toms was now faintly audible far, far ahead; and a curdling shriek came at infrequent intervals when the wind shifted. A reddish glare, too, seemed to filter through the pale undergrowth beyond endless avenues of forest night. Reluctant even to be left alone again, each one of the cowed squatters refused point-blank to advance another inch toward the scene of unholy worship, so Inspector Legrasse and his nineteen colleagues plunged on unguided into black arcades of horror that none of them had ever trod before.
      The region now entered by the police was one of traditionally evil repute, substantially unknown and untraversed by white men. There were legends of a hidden lake unglimpsed by mortal sight, in which dwelt a huge, formless white polypous thing with luminous eyes; and squatters whispered that bat-winged devils flew up out of caverns in inner earth to worship it at midnight. They said it had been there before D’Iberville, before La Salle, before the Indians, and before even the wholesome beasts and birds of the woods. It was nightmare itself, and to see it was to die. But it made men dream, and so they knew enough to keep away. The present voodoo orgy was, indeed, on the merest fringe of this abhorred area, but that location was bad enough; hence perhaps the very place of the worship had terrified the squatters more than the shocking sounds and incidents.
      Only poetry or madness could do justice to the noises heard by Legrasse’s men as they ploughed on through the black morass toward the red glare and the muffled tom-toms. There are vocal qualities peculiar to men, and vocal qualities peculiar to beasts; and it is terrible to hear the one when the source should yield the other. Animal fury and orgiastic licence here whipped themselves to daemoniac heights by howls and squawking ecstasies that tore and reverberated through those nighted woods like pestilential tempests from the gulfs of hell. Now and then the less organised ululation would cease, and from what seemed a well-drilled chorus of hoarse voices would rise in sing-song chant that hideous phrase or ritual:
      “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.”
Then the men, having reached a spot where the trees were thinner, came suddenly in sight of the spectacle itself. Four of them reeled, one fainted, and two were shaken into a frantic cry which the mad cacophony of the orgy fortunately deadened. Legrasse dashed swamp water on the face of the fainting man, and all stood trembling and nearly hypnotised with horror.
      In a natural glade of the swamp stood a grassy island of perhaps an acre’s extent, clear of trees and tolerably dry. On this now leaped and twisted a more indescribable horde of human abnormality than any but a Sime or an Angarola could paint. Void of clothing, this hybrid spawn were braying, bellowing, and writhing about a monstrous ring-shaped bonfire; in the centre of which, revealed by occasional rifts in the curtain of flame, stood a great granite monolith some eight feet in height; on top of which, incongruous with its diminutiveness, rested the noxious carven statuette. From a wide circle of ten scaffolds set up at regular intervals with the flame-girt monolith as a centre hung, head downward, the oddly marred bodies of the helpless squatters who had disappeared. It was inside this circle that the ring of worshippers jumped and roared, the general direction of the mass motion being from left to right in endless Bacchanal between the ring of bodies and the ring of fire.
      It may have been only imagination and it may have been only echoes which induced one of the men, an excitable Spaniard, to fancy he heard antiphonal responses to the ritual from some far and unillumined spot deeper within the wood of ancient legendry and horror. This man, Joseph D. Galvez, I later met and questioned; and he proved distractingly imaginative. He indeed went so far as to hint of the faint beating of great wings, and of a glimpse of shining eyes and a mountainous white bulk beyond the remotest trees—but I suppose he had been hearing too much native superstition.
      Actually, the horrified pause of the men was of comparatively brief duration. Duty came first; and although there must have been nearly a hundred mongrel celebrants in the throng, the police relied on their firearms and plunged determinedly into the nauseous rout. For five minutes the resultant din and chaos were beyond description. Wild blows were struck, shots were fired, and escapes were made; but in the end Legrasse was able to count some forty-seven sullen prisoners, whom he forced to dress in haste and fall into line between two rows of policemen. Five of the worshippers lay dead, and two severely wounded ones were carried away on improvised stretchers by their fellow-prisoners. The image on the monolith, of course, was carefully removed and carried back by Legrasse.
      Examined at headquarters after a trip of intense strain and weariness, the prisoners all proved to be men of a very low, mixed-blooded, and mentally aberrant type. Most were seamen, and a sprinkling of negroes and mulattoes, largely West Indians or Brava Portuguese from the Cape Verde Islands, gave a colouring of voodooism to the heterogeneous cult. But before many questions were asked, it became manifest that something far deeper and older than negro fetichism was involved. Degraded and ignorant as they were, the creatures held with surprising consistency to the central idea of their loathsome faith.
      They worshipped, so they said, the Great Old Ones who lived ages before there were any men, and who came to the young world out of the sky. Those Old Ones were gone now, inside the earth and under the sea; but their dead bodies had told their secrets in dreams to the first men, who formed a cult which had never died. This was that cult, and the prisoners said it had always existed and always would exist, hidden in distant wastes and dark places all over the world until the time when the great priest Cthulhu, from his dark house in the mighty city of R’lyeh under the waters, should rise and bring the earth again beneath his sway. Some day he would call, when the stars were ready, and the secret cult would always be waiting to liberate him.
      Meanwhile no more must be told. There was a secret which even torture could not extract. Mankind was not absolutely alone among the conscious things of earth, for shapes came out of the dark to visit the faithful few. But these were not the Great Old Ones. No man had ever seen the Old Ones. The carven idol was great Cthulhu, but none might say whether or not the others were precisely like him. No one could read the old writing now, but things were told by word of mouth. The chanted ritual was not the secret—that was never spoken aloud, only whispered. The chant meant only this: “In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”
      Only two of the prisoners were found sane enough to be hanged, and the rest were committed to various institutions. All denied a part in the ritual murders, and averred that the killing had been done by Black Winged Ones which had come to them from their immemorial meeting-place in the haunted wood. But of those mysterious allies no coherent account could ever be gained. What the police did extract, came mainly from an immensely aged mestizo named Castro, who claimed to have sailed to strange ports and talked with undying leaders of the cult in the mountains of China.
      Old Castro remembered bits of hideous legend that paled the speculations of theosophists and made man and the world seem recent and transient indeed. There had been aeons when other Things ruled on the earth, and They had had great cities. Remains of Them, he said the deathless Chinamen had told him, were still to be found as Cyclopean stones on islands in the Pacific. They all died vast epochs of time before men came, but there were arts which could revive Them when the stars had come round again to the right positions in the cycle of eternity. They had, indeed, come themselves from the stars, and brought Their images with Them.
      These Great Old Ones, Castro continued, were not composed altogether of flesh and blood. They had shape—for did not this star-fashioned image prove it?—but that shape was not made of matter. When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world through the sky; but when the stars were wrong, They could not live. But although They no longer lived, They would never really die. They all lay in stone houses in Their great city of R’lyeh, preserved by the spells of mighty Cthulhu for a glorious resurrection when the stars and the earth might once more be ready for Them. But at that time some force from outside must serve to liberate Their bodies. The spells that preserved Them intact likewise prevented Them from making an initial move, and They could only lie awake in the dark and think whilst uncounted millions of years rolled by. They knew all that was occurring in the universe, but Their mode of speech was transmitted thought. Even now They talked in Their tombs. When, after infinities of chaos, the first men came, the Great Old Ones spoke to the sensitive among them by moulding their dreams; for only thus could Their language reach the fleshly minds of mammals.
      Then, whispered Castro, those first men formed the cult around small idols which the Great Ones shewed them; idols brought in dim aeras from dark stars. That cult would never die till the stars came right again, and the secret priests would take great Cthulhu from His tomb to revive His subjects and resume His rule of earth. The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom. Meanwhile the cult, by appropriate rites, must keep alive the memory of those ancient ways and shadow forth the prophecy of their return.
      In the elder time chosen men had talked with the entombed Old Ones in dreams, but then something had happened. The great stone city R’lyeh, with its monoliths and sepulchres, had sunk beneath the waves; and the deep waters, full of the one primal mystery through which not even thought can pass, had cut off the spectral intercourse. But memory never died, and high-priests said that the city would rise again when the stars were right. Then came out of the earth the black spirits of earth, mouldy and shadowy, and full of dim rumours picked up in caverns beneath forgotten sea-bottoms. But of them old Castro dared not speak much. He cut himself off hurriedly, and no amount of persuasion or subtlety could elicit more in this direction. The size of the Old Ones, too, he curiously declined to mention. Of the cult, he said that he thought the centre lay amid the pathless deserts of Arabia, where Irem, the City of Pillars, dreams hidden and untouched. It was not allied to the European witch-cult, and was virtually unknown beyond its members. No book had ever really hinted of it, though the deathless Chinamen said that there were double meanings in the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred which the initiated might read as they chose, especially the much-discussed couplet:
 
“That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.”

      Legrasse, deeply impressed and not a little bewildered, had inquired in vain concerning the historic affiliations of the cult. Castro, apparently, had told the truth when he said that it was wholly secret. The authorities at Tulane University could shed no light upon either cult or image, and now the detective had come to the highest authorities in the country and met with no more than the Greenland tale of Professor Webb.
      The feverish interest aroused at the meeting by Legrasse’s tale, corroborated as it was by the statuette, is echoed in the subsequent correspondence of those who attended; although scant mention occurs in the formal publications of the society. Caution is the first care of those accustomed to face occasional charlatanry and imposture. Legrasse for some time lent the image to Professor Webb, but at the latter’s death it was returned to him and remains in his possession, where I viewed it not long ago. It is truly a terrible thing, and unmistakably akin to the dream-sculpture of young Wilcox.
      That my uncle was excited by the tale of the sculptor I did not wonder, for what thoughts must arise upon hearing, after a knowledge of what Legrasse had learned of the cult, of a sensitive young man who had dreamed not only the figure and exact hieroglyphics of the swamp-found image and the Greenland devil tablet, but had come in his dreams upon at least three of the precise words of the formula uttered alike by Esquimau diabolists and mongrel Louisianans? Professor Angell’s instant start on an investigation of the utmost thoroughness was eminently natural; though privately I suspected young Wilcox of having heard of the cult in some indirect way, and of having invented a series of dreams to heighten and continue the mystery at my uncle’s expense. The dream-narratives and cuttings collected by the professor were, of course, strong corroboration; but the rationalism of my mind and the extravagance of the whole subject led me to adopt what I thought the most sensible conclusions. So, after thoroughly studying the manuscript again and correlating the theosophical and anthropological notes with the cult narrative of Legrasse, I made a trip to Providence to see the sculptor and give him the rebuke I thought proper for so boldly imposing upon a learned and aged man.
      Wilcox still lived alone in the Fleur-de-Lys Building in Thomas Street, a hideous Victorian imitation of seventeenth-century Breton architecture which flaunts its stuccoed front amidst the lovely colonial houses on the ancient hill, and under the very shadow of the finest Georgian steeple in America. I found him at work in his rooms, and at once conceded from the specimens scattered about that his genius is indeed profound and authentic. He will, I believe, some time be heard from as one of the great decadents; for he has crystallised in clay and will one day mirror in marble those nightmares and phantasies which Arthur Machen evokes in prose, and Clark Ashton Smith makes visible in verse and in painting.
      Dark, frail, and somewhat unkempt in aspect, he turned languidly at my knock and asked me my business without rising. When I told him who I was, he displayed some interest; for my uncle had excited his curiosity in probing his strange dreams, yet had never explained the reason for the study. I did not enlarge his knowledge in this regard, but sought with some subtlety to draw him out. In a short time I became convinced of his absolute sincerity, for he spoke of the dreams in a manner none could mistake. They and their subconscious residuum had influenced his art profoundly, and he shewed me a morbid statue whose contours almost made me shake with the potency of its black suggestion. He could not recall having seen the original of this thing except in his own dream bas-relief, but the outlines had formed themselves insensibly under his hands. It was, no doubt, the giant shape he had raved of in delirium. That he really knew nothing of the hidden cult, save from what my uncle’s relentless catechism had let fall, he soon made clear; and again I strove to think of some way in which he could possibly have received the weird impressions.
      He talked of his dreams in a strangely poetic fashion; making me see with terrible vividness the damp Cyclopean city of slimy green stone—whose geometry, he oddly said, was all wrong—and hear with frightened expectancy the ceaseless, half-mental calling from underground: “Cthulhu fhtagn”, “Cthulhu fhtagn”. These words had formed part of that dread ritual which told of dead Cthulhu’s dream-vigil in his stone vault at R’lyeh, and I felt deeply moved despite my rational beliefs. Wilcox, I was sure, had heard of the cult in some casual way, and had soon forgotten it amidst the mass of his equally weird reading and imagining. Later, by virtue of its sheer impressiveness, it had found subconscious expression in dreams, in the bas-relief, and in the terrible statue I now beheld; so that his imposture upon my uncle had been a very innocent one. The youth was of a type, at once slightly affected and slightly ill-mannered, which I could never like; but I was willing enough now to admit both his genius and his honesty. I took leave of him amicably, and wish him all the success his talent promises.
      The matter of the cult still remained to fascinate me, and at times I had visions of personal fame from researches into its origin and connexions. I visited New Orleans, talked with Legrasse and others of that old-time raiding-party, saw the frightful image, and even questioned such of the mongrel prisoners as still survived. Old Castro, unfortunately, had been dead for some years. What I now heard so graphically at first-hand, though it was really no more than a detailed confirmation of what my uncle had written, excited me afresh; for I felt sure that I was on the track of a very real, very secret, and very ancient religion whose discovery would make me an anthropologist of note. My attitude was still one of absolute materialism, as I wish it still were, and I discounted with almost inexplicable perversity the coincidence of the dream notes and odd cuttings collected by Professor Angell.
      One thing I began to suspect, and which I now fear I know, is that my uncle’s death was far from natural. He fell on a narrow hill street leading up from an ancient waterfront swarming with foreign mongrels, after a careless push from a negro sailor. I did not forget the mixed blood and marine pursuits of the cult-members in Louisiana, and would not be surprised to learn of secret methods and poison needles as ruthless and as anciently known as the cryptic rites and beliefs. Legrasse and his men, it is true, have been let alone; but in Norway a certain seaman who saw things is dead. Might not the deeper inquiries of my uncle after encountering the sculptor’s data have come to sinister ears? I think Professor Angell died because he knew too much, or because he was likely to learn too much. Whether I shall go as he did remains to be seen, for I have learned much now.

III.
The Madness from the Sea.

If heaven ever wishes to grant me a boon, it will be a total effacing of the results of a mere chance which fixed my eye on a certain stray piece of shelf-paper. It was nothing on which I would naturally have stumbled in the course of my daily round, for it was an old number of an Australian journal, the Sydney Bulletin for April 18, 1925. It had escaped even the cutting bureau which had at the time of its issuance been avidly collecting material for my uncle’s research.
      I had largely given over my inquiries into what Professor Angell called the “Cthulhu Cult”, and was visiting a learned friend in Paterson, New Jersey; the curator of a local museum and a mineralogist of note. Examining one day the reserve specimens roughly set on the storage shelves in a rear room of the museum, my eye was caught by an odd picture in one of the old papers spread beneath the stones. It was the Sydney Bulletin I have mentioned, for my friend has wide affiliations in all conceivable foreign parts; and the picture was a half-tone cut of a hideous stone image almost identical with that which Legrasse had found in the swamp.
      Eagerly clearing the sheet of its precious contents, I scanned the item in detail; and was disappointed to find it of only moderate length. What it suggested, however, was of portentous significance to my flagging quest; and I carefully tore it out for immediate action. It read as follows:
MYSTERY DERELICT FOUND AT SEA
Vigilant Arrives With Helpless Armed New Zealand Yacht in Tow.
One Survivor and Dead Man Found Aboard. Tale of
Desperate Battle and Deaths at Sea.
Rescued Seaman Refuses
Particulars of Strange Experience.
Odd Idol Found in His Possession. Inquiry
to Follow.

The Morrison Co.’s freighter Vigilant, bound from Valparaiso, arrived this morning at its wharf in Darling Harbour, having in tow the battled and disabled but heavily armed steam yacht Alert of Dunedin, N. Z., which was sighted April 12th in S. Latitude 34° 21', W. Longitude 152° 17' with one living and one dead man aboard.
      The Vigilant left Valparaiso March 25th, and on April 2nd was driven considerably south of her course by exceptionally heavy storms and monster waves. On April 12th the derelict was sighted; and though apparently deserted, was found upon boarding to contain one survivor in a half-delirious condition and one man who had evidently been dead for more than a week. The living man was clutching a horrible stone idol of unknown origin, about a foot in height, regarding whose nature authorities at Sydney University, the Royal Society, and the Museum in College Street all profess complete bafflement, and which the survivor says he found in the cabin of the yacht, in a small carved shrine of common pattern.
      This man, after recovering his senses, told an exceedingly strange story of piracy and slaughter. He is Gustaf Johansen, a Norwegian of some intelligence, and had been second mate of the two-masted schooner Emma of Auckland, which sailed for Callao February 20th with a complement of eleven men. The Emma, he says, was delayed and thrown widely south of her course by the great storm of March 1st, and on March 22nd, in S. Latitude 49° 51', W. Longitude 128° 34', encountered the Alert, manned by a queer and evil-looking crew of Kanakas and half-castes. Being ordered peremptorily to turn back, Capt. Collins refused; whereupon the strange crew began to fire savagely and without warning upon the schooner with a peculiarly heavy battery of brass cannon forming part of the yacht’s equipment. The Emma’s men shewed fight, says the survivor, and though the schooner began to sink from shots beneath the waterline they managed to heave alongside their enemy and board her, grappling with the savage crew on the yacht’s deck, and being forced to kill them all, the number being slightly superior, because of their particularly abhorrent and desperate though rather clumsy mode of fighting.
      Three of the Emma’s men, including Capt. Collins and First Mate Green, were killed; and the remaining eight under Second Mate Johansen proceeded to navigate the captured yacht, going ahead in their original direction to see if any reason for their ordering back had existed. The next day, it appears, they raised and landed on a small island, although none is known to exist in that part of the ocean; and six of the men somehow died ashore, though Johansen is queerly reticent about this part of his story, and speaks only of their falling into a rock chasm. Later, it seems, he and one companion boarded the yacht and tried to manage her, but were beaten about by the storm of April 2nd. From that time till his rescue on the 12th the man remembers little, and he does not even recall when William Briden, his companion, died. Briden’s death reveals no apparent cause, and was probably due to excitement or exposure. Cable advices from Dunedin report that the Alert was well known there as an island trader, and bore an evil reputation along the waterfront. It was owned by a curious group of half-castes whose frequent meetings and night trips to the woods attracted no little curiosity; and it had set sail in great haste just after the storm and earth tremors of March 1st. Our Auckland correspondent gives the Emma and her crew an excellent reputation, and Johansen is described as a sober and worthy man. The admiralty will institute an inquiry on the whole matter beginning tomorrow, at which every effort will be made to induce Johansen to speak more freely than he has done hitherto.
      This was all, together with the picture of the hellish image; but what a train of ideas it started in my mind! Here were new treasuries of data on the Cthulhu Cult, and evidence that it had strange interests at sea as well as on land. What motive prompted the hybrid crew to order back the Emma as they sailed about with their hideous idol? What was the unknown island on which six of the Emma’s crew had died, and about which the mate Johansen was so secretive? What had the vice-admiralty’s investigation brought out, and what was known of the noxious cult in Dunedin? And most marvellous of all, what deep and more than natural linkage of dates was this which gave a malign and now undeniable significance to the various turns of events so carefully noted by my uncle?
      March 1st—our February 28th according to the International Date Line—the earthquake and storm had come. From Dunedin the Alert and her noisome crew had darted eagerly forth as if imperiously summoned, and on the other side of the earth poets and artists had begun to dream of a strange, dank Cyclopean city whilst a young sculptor had moulded in his sleep the form of the dreaded Cthulhu. March 23d the crew of the Emma landed on an unknown island and left six men dead; and on that date the dreams of sensitive men assumed a heightened vividness and darkened with dread of a giant monster’s malign pursuit, whilst an architect had gone mad and a sculptor had lapsed suddenly into delirium! And what of this storm of April 2nd—the date on which all dreams of the dank city ceased, and Wilcox emerged unharmed from the bondage of strange fever? What of all this—and of those hints of old Castro about the sunken, star-born Old Ones and their coming reign; their faithful cult and their mastery of dreams? Was I tottering on the brink of cosmic horrors beyond man’s power to bear? If so, they must be horrors of the mind alone, for in some way the second of April had put a stop to whatever monstrous menace had begun its siege of mankind’s soul.
      That evening, after a day of hurried cabling and arranging, I bade my host adieu and took a train for San Francisco. In less than a month I was in Dunedin; where, however, I found that little was known of the strange cult-members who had lingered in the old sea-taverns. Waterfront scum was far too common for special mention; though there was vague talk about one inland trip these mongrels had made, during which faint drumming and red flame were noted on the distant hills. In Auckland I learned that Johansen had returned with yellow hair turned white after a perfunctory and inconclusive questioning at Sydney, and had thereafter sold his cottage in West Street and sailed with his wife to his old home in Oslo. Of his stirring experience he would tell his friends no more than he had told the admiralty officials, and all they could do was to give me his Oslo address.
      After that I went to Sydney and talked profitlessly with seamen and members of the vice-admiralty court. I saw the Alert, now sold and in commercial use, at Circular Quay in Sydney Cove, but gained nothing from its non-committal bulk. The crouching image with its cuttlefish head, dragon body, scaly wings, and hieroglyphed pedestal, was preserved in the Museum at Hyde Park; and I studied it long and well, finding it a thing of balefully exquisite workmanship, and with the same utter mystery, terrible antiquity, and unearthly strangeness of material which I had noted in Legrasse’s smaller specimen. Geologists, the curator told me, had found it a monstrous puzzle; for they vowed that the world held no rock like it. Then I thought with a shudder of what old Castro had told Legrasse about the primal Great Ones: “They had come from the stars, and had brought Their images with Them.”
      Shaken with such a mental revolution as I had never before known, I now resolved to visit Mate Johansen in Oslo. Sailing for London, I reëmbarked at once for the Norwegian capital; and one autumn day landed at the trim wharves in the shadow of the Egeberg. Johansen’s address, I discovered, lay in the Old Town of King Harold Haardrada, which kept alive the name of Oslo during all the centuries that the greater city masqueraded as “Christiana”. I made the brief trip by taxicab, and knocked with palpitant heart at the door of a neat and ancient building with plastered front. A sad-faced woman in black answered my summons, and I was stung with disappointment when she told me in halting English that Gustaf Johansen was no more.
      He had not survived his return, said his wife, for the doings at sea in 1925 had broken him. He had told her no more than he had told the public, but had left a long manuscript—of “technical matters” as he said—written in English, evidently in order to safeguard her from the peril of casual perusal. During a walk through a narrow lane near the Gothenburg dock, a bundle of papers falling from an attic window had knocked him down. Two Lascar sailors at once helped him to his feet, but before the ambulance could reach him he was dead. Physicians found no adequate cause for the end, and laid it to heart trouble and a weakened constitution.
      I now felt gnawing at my vitals that dark terror which will never leave me till I, too, am at rest; “accidentally” or otherwise. Persuading the widow that my connexion with her husband’s “technical matters” was sufficient to entitle me to his manuscript, I bore the document away and began to read it on the London boat. It was a simple, rambling thing—a naive sailor’s effort at a post-facto diary—and strove to recall day by day that last awful voyage. I cannot attempt to transcribe it verbatim in all its cloudiness and redundance, but I will tell its gist enough to shew why the sound of the water against the vessel’s sides became so unendurable to me that I stopped my ears with cotton.
      Johansen, thank God, did not know quite all, even though he saw the city and the Thing, but I shall never sleep calmly again when I think of the horrors that lurk ceaselessly behind life in time and in space, and of those unhallowed blasphemies from elder stars which dream beneath the sea, known and favoured by a nightmare cult ready and eager to loose them on the world whenever another earthquake shall heave their monstrous stone city again to the sun and air.
      Johansen’s voyage had begun just as he told it to the vice-admiralty. The Emma, in ballast, had cleared Auckland on February 20th, and had felt the full force of that earthquake-born tempest which must have heaved up from the sea-bottom the horrors that filled men’s dreams. Once more under control, the ship was making good progress when held up by the Alert on March 22nd, and I could feel the mate’s regret as he wrote of her bombardment and sinking. Of the swarthy cult-fiends on the Alert he speaks with significant horror. There was some peculiarly abominable quality about them which made their destruction seem almost a duty, and Johansen shews ingenuous wonder at the charge of ruthlessness brought against his party during the proceedings of the court of inquiry. Then, driven ahead by curiosity in their captured yacht under Johansen’s command, the men sight a great stone pillar sticking out of the sea, and in S. Latitude 47° 9', W. Longitude 126° 43' come upon a coast-line of mingled mud, ooze, and weedy Cyclopean masonry which can be nothing less than the tangible substance of earth’s supreme terror—the nightmare corpse-city of R’lyeh, that was built in measureless aeons behind history by the vast, loathsome shapes that seeped down from the dark stars. There lay great Cthulhu and his hordes, hidden in green slimy vaults and sending out at last, after cycles incalculable, the thoughts that spread fear to the dreams of the sensitive and called imperiously to the faithful to come on a pilgrimage of liberation and restoration. All this Johansen did not suspect, but God knows he soon saw enough!
      I suppose that only a single mountain-top, the hideous monolith-crowned citadel whereon great Cthulhu was buried, actually emerged from the waters. When I think of the extent of all that may be brooding down there I almost wish to kill myself forthwith. Johansen and his men were awed by the cosmic majesty of this dripping Babylon of elder daemons, and must have guessed without guidance that it was nothing of this or of any sane planet. Awe at the unbelievable size of the greenish stone blocks, at the dizzying height of the great carven monolith, and at the stupefying identity of the colossal statues and bas-reliefs with the queer image found in the shrine on the Alert, is poignantly visible in every line of the mate’s frightened description.
      Without knowing what futurism is like, Johansen achieved something very close to it when he spoke of the city; for instead of describing any definite structure or building, he dwells only on broad impressions of vast angles and stone surfaces—surfaces too great to belong to any thing right or proper for this earth, and impious with horrible images and hieroglyphs. I mention his talk about angles because it suggests something Wilcox had told me of his awful dreams. He had said that the geometry of the dream-place he saw was abnormal, non-Euclidean, and loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from ours. Now an unlettered seaman felt the same thing whilst gazing at the terrible reality.
      Johansen and his men landed at a sloping mud-bank on this monstrous Acropolis, and clambered slipperily up over titan oozy blocks which could have been no mortal staircase. The very sun of heaven seemed distorted when viewed through the polarising miasma welling out from this sea-soaked perversion, and twisted menace and suspense lurked leeringly in those crazily elusive angles of carven rock where a second glance shewed concavity after the first shewed convexity.
      Something very like fright had come over all the explorers before anything more definite than rock and ooze and weed was seen. Each would have fled had he not feared the scorn of the others, and it was only half-heartedly that they searched—vainly, as it proved—for some portable souvenir to bear away.
      It was Rodriguez the Portuguese who climbed up the foot of the monolith and shouted of what he had found. The rest followed him, and looked curiously at the immense carved door with the now familiar squid-dragon bas-relief. It was, Johansen said, like a great barn-door; and they all felt that it was a door because of the ornate lintel, threshold, and jambs around it, though they could not decide whether it lay flat like a trap-door or slantwise like an outside cellar-door. As Wilcox would have said, the geometry of the place was all wrong. One could not be sure that the sea and the ground were horizontal, hence the relative position of everything else seemed phantasmally variable.
      Briden pushed at the stone in several places without result. Then Donovan felt over it delicately around the edge, pressing each point separately as he went. He climbed interminably along the grotesque stone moulding—that is, one would call it climbing if the thing was not after all horizontal—and the men wondered how any door in the universe could be so vast. Then, very softly and slowly, the acre-great panel began to give inward at the top; and they saw that it was balanced. Donovan slid or somehow propelled himself down or along the jamb and rejoined his fellows, and everyone watched the queer recession of the monstrously carven portal. In this phantasy of prismatic distortion it moved anomalously in a diagonal way, so that all the rules of matter and perspective seemed upset.
      The aperture was black with a darkness almost material. That tenebrousness was indeed a positive quality; for it obscured such parts of the inner walls as ought to have been revealed, and actually burst forth like smoke from its aeon-long imprisonment, visibly darkening the sun as it slunk away into the shrunken and gibbous sky on flapping membraneous wings. The odour arising from the newly opened depths was intolerable, and at length the quick-eared Hawkins thought he heard a nasty, slopping sound down there. Everyone listened, and everyone was listening still when It lumbered slobberingly into sight and gropingly squeezed Its gelatinous green immensity through the black doorway into the tainted outside air of that poison city of madness.
      Poor Johansen’s handwriting almost gave out when he wrote of this. Of the six men who never reached the ship, he thinks two perished of pure fright in that accursed instant. The Thing cannot be described—there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order. A mountain walked or stumbled. God! What wonder that across the earth a great architect went mad, and poor Wilcox raved with fever in that telepathic instant? The Thing of the idols, the green, sticky spawn of the stars, had awaked to claim his own. The stars were right again, and what an age-old cult had failed to do by design, a band of innocent sailors had done by accident. After vigintillions of years great Cthulhu was loose again, and ravening for delight.
      Three men were swept up by the flabby claws before anybody turned. God rest them, if there be any rest in the universe. They were Donovan, Guerrera, and Ångstrom. Parker slipped as the other three were plunging frenziedly over endless vistas of green-crusted rock to the boat, and Johansen swears he was swallowed up by an angle of masonry which shouldn’t have been there; an angle which was acute, but behaved as if it were obtuse. So only Briden and Johansen reached the boat, and pulled desperately for the Alert as the mountainous monstrosity flopped down the slimy stones and hesitated floundering at the edge of the water.
      Steam had not been suffered to go down entirely, despite the departure of all hands for the shore; and it was the work of only a few moments of feverish rushing up and down between wheel and engines to get the Alert under way. Slowly, amidst the distorted horrors of that indescribable scene, she began to churn the lethal waters; whilst on the masonry of that charnel shore that was not of earth the titan Thing from the stars slavered and gibbered like Polypheme cursing the fleeing ship of Odysseus. Then, bolder than the storied Cyclops, great Cthulhu slid greasily into the water and began to pursue with vast wave-raising strokes of cosmic potency. Briden looked back and went mad, laughing shrilly as he kept on laughing at intervals till death found him one night in the cabin whilst Johansen was wandering deliriously.
      But Johansen had not given out yet. Knowing that the Thing could surely overtake the Alert until steam was fully up, he resolved on a desperate chance; and, setting the engine for full speed, ran lightning-like on deck and reversed the wheel. There was a mighty eddying and foaming in the noisome brine, and as the steam mounted higher and higher the brave Norwegian drove his vessel head on against the pursuing jelly which rose above the unclean froth like the stern of a daemon galleon. The awful squid-head with writhing feelers came nearly up to the bowsprit of the sturdy yacht, but Johansen drove on relentlessly. There was a bursting as of an exploding bladder, a slushy nastiness as of a cloven sunfish, a stench as of a thousand opened graves, and a sound that the chronicler would not put on paper. For an instant the ship was befouled by an acrid and blinding green cloud, and then there was only a venomous seething astern; where—God in heaven!—the scattered plasticity of that nameless sky-spawn was nebulously recombining in its hateful original form, whilst its distance widened every second as the Alert gained impetus from its mounting steam.
      That was all. After that Johansen only brooded over the idol in the cabin and attended to a few matters of food for himself and the laughing maniac by his side. He did not try to navigate after the first bold flight, for the reaction had taken something out of his soul. Then came the storm of April 2nd, and a gathering of the clouds about his consciousness. There is a sense of spectral whirling through liquid gulfs of infinity, of dizzying rides through reeling universes on a comet’s tail, and of hysterical plunges from the pit to the moon and from the moon back again to the pit, all livened by a cachinnating chorus of the distorted, hilarious elder gods and the green, bat-winged mocking imps of Tartarus.
      Out of that dream came rescue—the Vigilant, the vice-admiralty court, the streets of Dunedin, and the long voyage back home to the old house by the Egeberg. He could not tell—they would think him mad. He would write of what he knew before death came, but his wife must not guess. Death would be a boon if only it could blot out the memories.
      That was the document I read, and now I have placed it in the tin box beside the bas-relief and the papers of Professor Angell. With it shall go this record of mine—this test of my own sanity, wherein is pieced together that which I hope may never be pieced together again. I have looked upon all that the universe has to hold of horror, and even the skies of spring and the flowers of summer must ever afterward be poison to me. But I do not think my life will be long. As my uncle went, as poor Johansen went, so I shall go. I know too much, and the cult still lives.
      Cthulhu still lives, too, I suppose, again in that chasm of stone which has shielded him since the sun was young. His accursed city is sunken once more, for the Vigilant sailed over the spot after the April storm; but his ministers on earth still bellow and prance and slay around idol-capped monoliths in lonely places. He must have been trapped by the sinking whilst within his black abyss, or else the world would by now be screaming with fright and frenzy. Who knows the end? What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise. Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men. A time will come—but I must not and cannot think! Let me pray that, if I do not survive this manuscript, my executors may put caution before audacity and see that it meets no other eye.
 ",True
"I WAS SITTING on the porch when my grandfather hobbled out and sank down on his favorite chair with the cushioned seat, and began to stuff tobacco in his old corncob-pipe.

""I thought you'd be goin' to the dance,"" he said.

""I'm waiting for Doc Blaine,"" I answered. ""I'm going over to old man Garfield's with him.""

My grandfather sucked at his pipe awhile before he spoke again.

""Old Jim purty bad off?""

""Doc says he hasn't a chance.""

""Who's takin' care of him?""

""Joe Braxton—­against Garfield's wishes. But somebody had to stay with him.""

My grandfather sucked his pipe noisily, and watched the heat lightning playing away off up in the hills; then he said: ""You think old Jim's the biggest liar in this county, don't you?""

""He tells some pretty tall tales,"" I admitted. ""Some of the things he claimed he took part in, must have happened before he was born.""

""I came from Tennesee to Texas in 1870,"" my grandfather said abruptly. ""I saw this town of Lost Knob grow up from nothin'. There wasn't even a log-hut store here when I came. But old Jim Garfield was here, livin' in the same place he lives now, only then it was a log cabin. He don't look a day older now than he did the first time I saw him.""

""You never mentioned that before,"" I said in some surprise.

""I knew you'd put it down to an old man's maunderin's,"" he answered. ""Old Jim was the first white man to settle in this country. He built his cabin a good fifty miles west of the frontier. God knows how he done it, for these hills swarmed with Comanches then.

""I remember the first time I ever saw him. Even then everybody called him 'old Jim.'

""I remember him tellin' me the same tales he's told you—­how he was at the battle of San Jacinto when he was a youngster, and how he'd rode with Ewen Cameron and Jack Hayes. Only I believe him, and you don't.""

""That was so long ago—­"" I protested.

""The last Indian raid through this country was in 1874,"" said my grandfather, engrossed in his own reminiscences. ""I was in on that fight, and so was old Jim. I saw him knock old Yellow Tail off his mustang at seven hundred yards with a buffalo rifle.

""But before that I was with him in a fight up near the head of Locust Creek. A band of Comanches came down Mesquital, lootin' and burnin', rode through the hills and started back up Locust Creek, and a scout of us were hot on their heels. We ran on to them just at sundown in a mesquite flat. We killed seven of them, and the rest skinned out through the brush on foot. But three of our boys were killed, and Jim Garfield got a thrust in the breast with a lance.

""It was an awful wound. He lay like a dead man, and it seemed sure nobody could live after a wound like that. But an old Indian came out of the brush, and when we aimed our guns at him, he made the peace sign and spoke to us in Spanish. I don't know why the boys didn't shoot him in his tracks, because our blood was heated with the fightin' and killin', but somethin' about him made us hold our fire. He said he wasn't a Comanche, but was an old friend of Garfield's, and wanted to help him. He asked us to carry Jim into a clump of mesquite, and leave him alone with him, and to this day I don't know why we did, but we did. It was an awful time—­the wounded moanin' and callin' for water, the starin' corpses strewn about the camp, night comin' on, and no way of knowin' that the Indians wouldn't return when dark fell.

""We made camp right there, because the horses were fagged out, and we watched all night, but the Comanches didn't come back. I don't know what went on out in the mesquite where Jim Garfield's body lay, because I never saw that strange Indian again; but durin' the night I kept hearin' a weird moanin' that wasn't made by the dyin' men, and an owl hooted from midnight till dawn.

""And at sunrise Jim Garfield came walkin' out of the mesquite, pale and haggard, but alive, and already the wound in his breast had closed and begun to heal. And since then he's never mentioned that wound, nor that fight, nor the strange Indian who came and went so mysteriously. And he hasn't aged a bit; he looks now just like he did then—­a man of about fifty.""

In the silence that followed, a car began to purr down the road, and twin shafts of light cut through the dusk.

""That's Doc Blaine,"" I said. ""When I come back I'll tell you how Garfield is.""

Doc Blaine was prompt with his predictions as we drove the three miles of post-oak covered hills that lay between Lost Knob and the Garfield farm.

""I'll be surprised to find him alive,"" he said, ""smashed up like he is. A man his age ought to have more sense than to try to break a young horse.""

""He doesn't look so old,"" I remarked.

""I'll be fifty, my next birthday,"" answered Doc Blaine. ""I've known him all my life, and he must have been at least fifty the first time I ever saw him. His looks are deceiving.""

Old Garfield's dwelling-place was reminiscent of the past. The boards of the low squat house had never known paint. Orchard fence and corrals were built of rails.

Old Jim lay on his rude bed, tended crudely but efficiently by the man Doc Blaine had hired over the old man's protests. As I looked at him, I was impressed anew by his evident vitality. His frame was stooped but unwithered, his limbs rounded out with springy muscles. In his corded neck and in his face, drawn though it was with suffering, was apparent an innate virility. His eyes, though partly glazed with pain, burned with the same unquenchable element.

""He's been ravin',"" said Joe Braxton stolidly.

""First white man in this country,"" muttered old Jim, becoming intelligible. ""Hills no white man ever set foot in before. Gettin' too old. Have to settle down. Can't move on like I used to. Settle down here. Good country before it filled up with cow-men and squatters. Wish Ewen Cameron could see this country. The Mexicans shot him. Damn 'em!""

Doc Blaine shook his head. ""He's all smashed up inside. He won't live till daylight.""

Garfield unexpectedly lifted his head and looked at us with clear eyes.

""Wrong, Doc,"" he wheezed, his breath whistling with pain. ""I'll live. What's broken bones and twisted guts? Nothin'! It's the heart that counts. Long as the heart keeps pumpin', a man can't die. My heart's sound. Listen to it! Feel of it!""

He groped painfully for Doc Blaine's wrist, dragged his hand to his bosom and held it there, staring up into the doctor's face with avid intensity.

""Regular dynamo, ain't it?"" he gasped. ""Stronger'n a gasoline engine!""

Blaine beckoned me. ""Lay your hand here,"" he said, placing my hand on the old man's bare breast. ""He does have a remarkable heart action.""

I noted, in the light of the coal-oil lamp, a great livid scar in the gaunt arching breast—­such a scar as might be made by a flint-headed spear. I laid my hand directly on this scar, and an exclamation escaped my lips.

Under my hand old Jim Garfield's heart pulsed, but its throb was like no other heart action I have ever observed. Its power was astounding; his ribs vibrated to its steady throb. It felt more like the vibrating of a dynamo than the action of a human organ. I could feel its amazing vitality radiating from his breast, stealing up into my hand and up my arm, until my own heart seemed to speed up in response.

""I can't die,"" old Jim gasped. ""Not so long as my heart's in my breast. Only a bullet through the brain can kill me. And even then I wouldn't be rightly dead, as long as my heart beats in my breast. Yet it ain't rightly mine, either. It belongs to Ghost Man, the Lipan chief. It was the heart of a god the Lipans worshipped before the Comanches drove 'em out of their native hills.

""I knew Ghost Man down on the Rio Grande, when I was with Ewen Cameron. I saved his life from the Mexicans once. He tied the string of ghost wampum between him and me—­the wampum no man but me and him can see or feel. He came when he knowed I needed him, in that fight up on the headwaters of Locust Creek, when I got this scar.

""I was dead as a man can be. My heart was sliced in two, like the heart of a butchered beef steer.

""All night Ghost Man did magic, callin' my ghost back from spirit-land. I remember that flight, a little. It was dark, and gray-like, and I drifted through gray mists and heard the dead wailin' past me in the mist. But Ghost Man brought me back.

""He took out what was left of my mortal heart, and put the heart of the god in my bosom. But it's his, and when I'm through with it, he'll come for it. It's kept me alive and strong for the lifetime of a man. Age can't touch me. What do I care if these fools around here call me an old liar? What I know, I know. But hark'ee!""

His fingers became claws, clamping fiercely on Doc Blaine's wrist. His old eyes, old yet strangely young, burned fierce as those of an eagle under his bushy brows.

""If by some mischance I should die, now or later, promise me this! Cut into my bosom and take out the heart Ghost Man lent me so long ago! It's his. And as long as it beats in my body, my spirit'll be tied to that body, though my head be crushed like an egg underfoot! A livin' thing in a rottin' body! Promise!""

""All right, I promise,"" replied Doc Blaine, to humor him, and old Jim Garfield sank back with a whistling sigh of relief.

He did not die that night, nor the next, nor the next. I well remember the next day, because it was that day that I had the fight with Jack Kirby.

People will take a good deal from a bully, rather than to spill blood. Because nobody had gone to the trouble of killing him, Kirby thought the whole countryside was afraid of him.

He had bought a steer from my father, and when my father went to collect for it, Kirby told him that he had paid the money to me—­which was a lie. I went looking for Kirby, and came upon him in a bootleg joint, boasting of his toughness, and telling the crowd that he was going to beat me up and make me say that he had paid me the money, and that I had stuck it into my own pocket. When I heard him say that, I saw red, and ran in on him with a stockman's knife, and cut him across the face, and in the neck, side, breast and belly, and the only thing that saved his life was the fact that the crowd pulled me off.

There was a preliminary hearing, and I was indicted on a charge of assault, and my trial was set for the following term of court. Kirby was as tough-fibered as a post-oak country bully ought to be, and he recovered, swearing vengeance, for he was vain of his looks, though God knows why, and I had permanently impaired them.

And while Jack Kirby was recovering, old man Garfield recovered too, to the amazement of everybody, especially Doc Blaine.

I well remember the night Doc Blaine took me again out to old Jim Garfield's farm. I was in Shifty Corlan's joint, trying to drink enough of the slop he called beer to get a kick out of it, when Doc Blaine came in and persuaded me to go with him.

As we drove along the winding old road in Doc's car, I asked: ""Why are you insistent that I go with you this particular night? This isn't a professional call, is it?""

""No,"" he said. ""You couldn't kill old Jim with a post-oak maul. He's completely recovered from injuries that ought to have killed an ox. To tell the truth, Jack Kirby is in Lost Knob, swearing he'll shoot you on sight.""

""Well, for God's sake!"" I exclaimed angrily. ""Now everybody'll think I left town because I was afraid of him. Turn around and take me back, damn it!""

""Be reasonable,"" said Doc. ""Everybody knows you're not afraid of Kirby. Nobody's afraid of him now. His bluff's broken, and that's why he's so wild against you. But you can't afford to have any more trouble with him now, and your trial only a short time off.""

I laughed and said: ""Well, if he's looking for me hard enough, he can find me as easily at old Garfield's as in town, because Shifty Corlan heard you say where we were going. And Shifty's hated me ever since I skinned him in that horse-swap last fall. He'll tell Kirby where I went.""

""I never thought of that,"" said Doc Blaine, worried.

""Hell, forget it,"" I advised. ""Kirby hasn't got guts enough to do anything but blow.""

But I was mistaken. Puncture a bully's vanity and you touch his one vital spot.

Old Jim had not gone to bed when we got there. He was sitting in the room opening on to his sagging porch, the room which was at once living-room and bedroom, smoking his old cob pipe and trying to read a newspaper by the light of his coal-oil lamp. All the windows and doors were wide open for the coolness, and the insects which swarmed in and fluttered around the lamp didn't seem to bother him.

We sat down and discussed the weather—­which isn't so inane as one might suppose, in a country where men's livelihood depends on sun and rain, and is at the mercy of wind and drouth. The talk drifted into other kindred channels, and after some time, Doc Blaine bluntly spoke of something that hung in his mind.

""Jim,"" he said, ""that night I thought you were dying, you babbled a lot of stuff about your heart, and an Indian who lent you his. How much of that was delirium?""

""None, Doc,"" said Garfield, pulling at his pipe. ""It was gospel truth. Ghost Man, the Lipan priest of the Gods of Night, replaced my dead, torn heart with one from somethin' he worshipped. I ain't sure myself just what that somethin' is—­somethin' from away back and a long way off, he said. But bein' a god, it can do without its heart for awhile. But when I die—­if I ever get my head smashed so my consciousness is destroyed—­the heart must be given back to Ghost Man.""

""You mean you were in earnest about cutting out your heart?"" demanded Doc Blaine.

""It has to be,"" answered old Garfield. ""A livin' thing in a dead thing is opposed to nat'er. That's what Ghost Man said.""

""Who the devil was Ghost Man?""

""I told you. A witch-doctor of the Lipans, who dwelt in this country before the Comanches came down from the Staked Plains and drove 'em south across the Rio Grande. I was a friend to 'em. I reckon Ghost Man is the only one left alive.""

""Alive? Now?""

""I dunno,"" confessed old Jim. ""I dunno whether he's alive or dead. I dunno whether he was alive when he came to me after the fight on Locust Creek, or even if he was alive when I knowed him in the southern country. Alive as we understand life, I mean.""

""What balderdash is this?"" demanded Doc Blaine uneasily, and I felt a slight stirring in my hair. Outside was stillness, and the stars, and the black shadows of the post-oak woods. The lamp cast old Garfield's shadow grotesquely on the wall, so that it did not at all resemble that of a human, and his words were strange as words heard in a nightmare.

""I knowed you wouldn't understand,"" said old Jim. ""I don't understand myself, and I ain't got the words to explain them things I feel and know without understandin'. The Lipans were kin to the Apaches, and the Apaches learnt curious things from the Pueblos. Ghost Man was—­that's all I can say—­alive or dead, I don't know, but he was. What's more, he is.""

""Is it you or me that's crazy?"" asked Doc Blaine.

""Well,"" said old Jim, ""I'll tell you this much—­Ghost Man knew Coronado.""

""Crazy as a loon!"" murmured Doc Blaine. Then he lifted his head. ""What's that?""

""Horse turning in from the road,"" I said. ""Sounds like it stopped.""

I stepped to the door, like a fool, and stood etched in the light behind me. I got a glimpse of a shadowy bulk I knew to be a man on a horse; then Doc Blaine yelled: ""Look out!"" and threw himself against me, knocking us both sprawling. At the same instant I heard the smashing report of a rifle, and old Garfield grunted and fell heavily.

""Jack Kirby!"" screamed Doc Blaine. ""He's killed Jim!""

I scrambled up, hearing the clatter of retreating hoofs, snatched old Jim's shotgun from the wall, rushed recklessly out on to the sagging porch and let go both barrels at the fleeing shape, dim in the starlight. The charge was too light to kill at that range, but the bird-shot stung the horse and maddened him. He swerved, crashed headlong through a rail fence and charged across the orchard, and a peach tree limb knocked his rider out of the saddle. He never moved after he hit the ground. I ran out there and looked down at him. It was Jack Kirby, right enough, and his neck was broken like a rotten branch.

I let him lie, and ran back to the house. Doc Blaine had stretched old Garfield out on a bench he'd dragged in from the porch, and Doc's face was whiter than I'd ever seen it. Old Jim was a ghastly sight; he had been shot with an old-fashioned .45-70, and at that range the heavy ball had literally torn off the top of his head. His features were masked with blood and brains. He had been directly behind me, poor old devil, and he had stopped the slug meant for me.

Doc Blaine was trembling, though he was anything but a stranger to such sights.

""Would you pronounce him dead?"" he asked.

""That's for you to say."" I answered. ""But even a fool could tell that he's dead.

""He is dead,"" said Doc Blaine in a strained unnatural voice. ""Rigor mortis is already setting in. But feel his heart!""

I did, and cried out. The flesh was already cold and clammy; but beneath it that mysterious heart still hammered steadily away, like a dynamo in a deserted house. No blood coursed through those veins; yet the heart pounded, pounded, pounded, like the pulse of Eternity.

""A living thing in a dead thing,"" whispered Doc Blaine, cold sweat on his face. ""This is opposed to nature. I am going to keep the promise I made him. I'll assume full responsibility. This is too monstrous to ignore.""

Our implements were a butcher-knife and a hack-saw. Outside only the still stars looked down on the black post-oak shadows and the dead man that lay in the orchard. Inside, the old lamp flickered, making strange shadows move and shiver and cringe in the corners, and glistened on the blood on the floor, and the red-dabbled figure on the bench. The only sound inside was the crunch of the saw-edge in bone; outside an owl began to hoot weirdly.

Doc Blaine thrust a red-stained hand into the aperture he had made, and drew out a red, pulsing object that caught the lamplight. With a choked cry he recoiled, and the thing slipped from his fingers and fell on the table. And I too cried out involuntarily. For it did not fall with a soft meaty thud, as a piece of flesh should fall. It thumped hard on the table.

Impelled by an irresistible urge, I bent and gingerly picked up old Garfield's heart. The feel of it was brittle, unyielding, like steel or stone, but smoother than either. In size and shape it was the duplicate of a human heart, but it was slick and smooth, and its crimson surface reflected the lamplight like a jewel more lambent than any ruby; and in my hand it still throbbed mightily, sending vibratory radiations of energy up my arm until my own heart seemed swelling and bursting in response. It was cosmic power, beyond my comprehension, concentrated into the likeness of a human heart.

The thought came to me that here was a dynamo of life, the nearest approach to immortality that is possible for the destructible human body, the materialization of a cosmic secret more wonderful than the fabulous fountain sought for by Ponce de Leon. My soul was drawn into that unterrestrial gleam, and I suddenly wished passionately that it hammered and thundered in my own bosom in place of my paltry heart of tissue and muscle.

Doc Blaine ejaculated incoherently. I wheeled.

The noise of his coming had been no greater than the whispering of a night wind through the corn. There in the doorway he stood, tall, dark, inscrutable—­an Indian warrior, in the paint, war bonnet, breech-clout and moccasins of an elder age. His dark eyes burned like fires gleaming deep under fathomless black lakes. Silently he extended his hand, and I dropped Jim Garfield's heart into it. Then without a word he turned and stalked into the night. But when Doc Blaine and I rushed out into the yard an instant later, there was no sign of any human being. He had vanished like a phantom of the night, and only something that looked like an owl was flying, dwindling from sight, into the rising moon.","On the wall hung a map of Mongolia, that indefinite region a million and a half square miles in area, vast sections of which have never been explored.

Turkestan and China border it on the south, and Tibet almost touches it, not quite.

Even in the twelfth century, when the wild Mongols broke loose and nearly overran the world, the Tibet infantry under Genghis, the Tchortcha horsemen drafted out of Black China, and a great cloud of Mongol cavalry under the Prince of the Vanguard commanding half a hundred Hezars, never penetrated that grisly and unknown waste. The ""Eight Towers of the Assassins"" guarded it—still guard it, possibly.

The vice-regent of Erlik, Prince of Darkness, dwelt within this unknown land. And dwells there still, perhaps.

In front of this wall-map stood Tressa Norne.

Behind her, facing the map, four men were seated—three of them under thirty.

These three were volunteers in the service of the United States Government—men of independent means, of position, who had volunteered for military duty at the outbreak of the great war. However, they had been assigned by the Government to a very different sort of duty no less exciting than service on the fighting line, but far less conspicuous, for they had been drafted into the United States Department of Justice.

The names of these three were Victor Cleves, a professor of ornithology at Harvard University before the war; Alexander Selden, junior partner in the banking firm of Milwyn, Selden, and Co., and James Benton, a New York architect.

The fourth man's name was John Recklow. He might have been over fifty, or under. He was well-built, in a square, athletic way, clear-skinned and ruddy, grey-eyed, quiet in voice and manner. His hair and moustache had turned silvery. He had been employed by the Government for many years. He seemed to be enormously interested in what Miss Norne was saying.

Also he was the only man who interrupted her narrative to ask questions. And his questions revealed a knowledge which was making the girl more sensitive and uneasy every moment.

Finally, when she spoke of the Scarlet Desert, he asked if the Scarlet Lake were there and if the Xin was still supposed to inhabit its vermilion depths. And at that she turned and looked at him, her forefinger still resting on the map.

""Where have you ever heard of the Scarlet Lake and the Xin?"" she asked as though frightened.

Recklow said quietly that as a boy he had served under Gordon and Sir Robert.

""If, as a boy, you served under Chinese Gordon, you already know much of what I have told you, Mr. Recklow. Is it not true?"" she demanded nervously.

""That makes no difference,"" he replied with a smile. ""It is all very new to these three young gentlemen. And as for myself, I am checking up what you say and comparing it with what I heard many, many years ago when my comrade Barres and I were in Yian.""

""Did you really know Sir Robert Hart?""

""Yes.""

""Then why do you not explain to these gentlemen?""

""Dear child,"" he interrupted gently, ""what did Chinese Gordon or Sir Robert Hart, or even my comrade Barres, or I myself know about occult Asia in comparison to what you know?—a girl who has actually served the mysteries of Erlik for four amazing years!""

She paled a trifle, came slowly across the room to where Recklow was seated, laid a timid hand on his sleeve.

""Do you believe there are sorcerers in Asia?"" she asked with that child-like directness which her wonderful blue eyes corroborated.

Recklow remained silent.

""Because,"" she went on, ""if, in your heart, you do not believe this to be an accursed fact, then what I have to say will mean nothing to any of you.""

Recklow touched his short, silvery moustache, hesitating. Then:

""The worship of Erlik is devil worship,"" he said. ""Also I am entirely prepared to believe that there are, among the Yezidees, adepts who employ scientific weapons against civilisation—who have probably obtained a rather terrifying knowledge of psychic laws which they use scientifically, and which to ordinary, God-fearing folk appear to be the black magic of sorcerers.""

Cleves said: ""The employment by the huns of poison gases and long-range cannon is a parallel case. Before the war we could not believe in the possibility of a cannon that threw shells a distance of seventy miles.""

The girl still addressed herself to Recklow: ""Then you do not believe there are real sorcerers in Asia, Mr. Recklow?""

""Not sorcerers with supernatural powers for evil. Only degenerate human beings who, somehow, have managed to tap invisible psychic currents, and have learned how to use terrific forces about which, so far, we know practically nothing.""

She spoke again in the same uneasy voice: ""Then you do not believe that either God or Satan is involved?""

""No,"" he replied smilingly, ""and you must not so believe.""

""Nor the—the destruction of human souls,"" she persisted; ""you do not believe it is being accomplished to-day?""

""Not in the slightest, dear young lady,"" he said cheerfully.

""Do you not believe that to have been instructed in such unlawful knowledge is damning? Do you not believe that ability to employ unknown forces is forbidden of God, and that to disobey His law means death to the soul?""

""No!""

""That it is the price one pays to Satan for occult power over people's minds?"" she insisted.

""Hypnotic suggestion is not one of the cardinal sins,"" explained Recklow, still smiling—""unless wickedly employed. The Yezidee priesthood is a band of so-called sorcerers only because of their wicked employment of whatever hypnotic and psychic knowledge they may have obtained.

""There was nothing intrinsically wicked in the huns' discovery of phosgene. But the use they made of it made devils out of them. My ability to manufacture phosgene gas is no crime. But if I manufacture it and use it to poison innocent human beings, then, in that sense, I am, perhaps, a sort of modern sorcerer.""

Tressa Norne turned paler:

""I had better tell you that I have used—forbidden knowledge—which the Yezidees taught me in the temple of Erlik.""

""Used it how?"" demanded Cleves.

""To—to earn a living.... And once or twice to defend myself.""

There was the slightest scepticism in Recklow's bland smile. ""You did quite right, Miss Norne.""

She had become very white now. She stood beside Recklow, her back toward the suspended map, and looked in a scared sort of way from one to the other of the men seated before her, turning finally to Cleves, and coming toward him.

""I—I once killed a man,"" she said with a catch in her breath.

Cleves reddened with astonishment. ""Why did you do that?"" he asked.

""He was already on his way to kill me in bed.""

""You were perfectly right,"" remarked Recklow coolly.

""I don't know ... I was in bed.... And then, on the edge of sleep, I felt his mind groping to get hold of mine—feeling about in the darkness to get hold of my brain and seize it and paralyse it.""

All colour had left her face. Cleves gripped the arm of his chair and watched her intently.

""I—I had only a moment's mental freedom,"" she went on in a ghost of a voice. ""I was just able to rouse myself, fight off those murderous brain-fingers—let loose a clear mental ray.... And then, O God! I saw him in his room with his Kalmuck knife—saw him already on his way to murder me—Gutchlug Khan, the Yezidee—looking about in his bedroom for a shroud.... And when—when he reached for the bed to draw forth a fine, white sheet for the shroud without which no Yezidee dares journey deathward—then—then I became frightened.... And I killed him—I slew him there in his hotel bedroom on the floor above mine!""

Selden moistened his lips: ""That Oriental, Gutchlug, died from heart-failure in a San Francisco hotel,"" he said. ""I was there at the time.""

""He died by the fangs of a little yellow snake,"" whispered the girl.

""There was no snake in his room,"" retorted Cleves.

""And no wound on his body,"" added Selden. ""I attended the autopsy.""

She said, faintly: ""There was no snake, and no wound, as you say.... Yet Gutchlug died of both there in his bedroom.... And before he died he heard his soul bidding him farewell; and he saw the death-adder coiled in the sheet he clutched—saw the thing strike him again and again—saw and felt the tiny wounds on his left hand; felt the fangs pricking deep, deep into the veins; died of it there within the minute—died of the swiftest poison known. And yet——""

She turned her dead-white face to Cleves—""And yet there was no snake there!... And never had been.... And so I—I ask you, gentlemen, if souls do not die when minds learn to fight death with death—and deal it so swiftly, so silently, while one's body lies, unstirring on a bed—in a locked room on the floor below——""

She swayed a little, put out one hand rather blindly.

Recklow rose and passed a muscular arm around her; Cleves, beside her, held her left hand, crushing it, without intention, until she opened her eyes with a cry of pain.

""Are you all right?"" asked Recklow bluntly.

""Yes."" She turned and looked at Cleves and he caressed her bruised hand as though dazed.

""Tell me,"" she said to Cleves—""you who know—know more about my mind than anybody living——"" a painful colour surged into her face—but she went on steadily, forcing herself to meet his gaze: ""tell me, Mr. Cleves—do you still believe that nothing can really destroy my soul? And that it shall yet win through to safety?""

He said: ""Your soul is in God's keeping, and always shall be.... And if the Yezidees have made you believe otherwise, they lie.""

Recklow added in a slow, perplexed way: ""I have no personal knowledge of psychic power. I am not psychic, not susceptible. But if you actually possess such ability, Miss Norne, and if you have employed such knowledge to defend your life, then you have done absolutely right.""

""No guilt touches you,"" added Selden with an involuntary shiver, ""if by hypnosis or psychic ability you really did put an end to that would-be murderer, Gutchlug.""

Selden said: ""If Gutchlug died by the fangs of a yellow death-adder which existed only in his own mind, and if you actually had anything to do with it you acted purely in self-defence.""

""You did your full duty,"" added Benton—""but—good God!—it seems incredible to me, that such power can actually be available in the world!""

Recklow spoke again in his pleasant, undisturbed voice: ""Go back to the map, Miss Norne, and tell us a little more about this rather terrifying thing which you believe menaces the civilised world with destruction.""

Tressa Norne laid a slim finger on the map. Her voice had become steady. She said:

""The devil-worship, of which one of the modern developments is Bolshevism, and another the terrorism of the hun, began in Asia long before Christ's advent: At least so it was taught us in the temple of Erlik.

""It has always existed, its aim always has been the annihilation of good and the elevation of evil; the subjection of right by might, and the worldwide triumph of wrong.

""Perhaps it is as old as the first battle between God and Satan. I have wondered about it, sometimes. There in the dusk of the temple when the Eight Assassins came—the eight Sheiks-el-Djebel, all in white—chanting the Yakase of Sabbah—always that dirge when they came and spread their eight white shrouds on the temple steps——""

Her voice caught; she waited to recover her composure. Then went on:

""The ambition of Genghis was to conquer the world by force of arms. It was merely of physical subjection that he dreamed. But the Slayer of Souls——""

""Who?"" asked Recklow sharply.

""The Slayer of Souls—Erlik's vice-regent on earth—Hassan Sabbah. The Old Man of the Mountain. It is of him I am speaking,"" exclaimed Tressa Norne—with quiet resolution. ""Genghis sought only physical conquest of man; the Yezidee's ambition is more awful, for he is attempting to surprise and seize the very minds of men!""

There was a dead silence. Tressa looked palely upon the four.

""The Yezidees—who you tell me are not sorcerers—are using power—which you tell me is not magic accursed by God—to waylay, capture, enslave, and destroy the minds and souls of mankind.

""It may be that what they employ is hypnotic ability and psychic power and can be, some day, explained on a scientific basis when we learn more about the occult laws which govern these phenomena.

""But could anything render the threat less awful? For there have existed for centuries—perhaps always—a sect of Satanists determined upon the destruction of everything that is pure and holy and good on earth; and they are resolved to substitute for righteousness the dreadful reign of hell.

""In the beginning there were comparatively few of these human demons. Gradually, through the eras, they have increased. In the twelfth century there were fifty thousand of the Sect of Assassins.

""Beside the castle of the Slayer of Souls on Mount Alamout——"" she laid her finger on the map—""eight other towers were erected for the Eight Chief Assassins, called Sheiks-el-Djebel.

""In the temple we were taught where these eight towers stood."" She picked up a pencil, and on eight blank spaces of unexplored and unmapped Mongolia she made eight crosses. Then she turned to the men behind her.

""It was taught to us in the temple that from these eight foci of infection the disease of evil has been spreading throughout the world; from these eight towers have gone forth every year the emissaries of evil—perverted missionaries—to spread the poisonous propaganda, to teach it, to tamper stealthily with the minds of men, dominate them, pervert them, instruct them in the creed of the Assassin of Souls.

""All over the world are people, already contaminated, whose minds are already enslaved and poisoned, and who are infecting the still healthy brains of others—stealthily possessing themselves of the minds of mankind—teaching them evil, inviting them to mock the precepts of Christ.

""Of such lost minds are the degraded brains of the Germans—the pastors and philosophers who teach that might is right.

""Of such crippled minds are the Bolsheviki, poisoned long, long ago by close contact with Asia which, before that, had infected and enslaved the minds of the ruling classes with ferocious philosophy.

""Of such minds are all anarchists of every shade and stripe—all terrorists, all disciples of violence,—the murderously envious, the slothful slinking brotherhood which prowls through the world taking every opportunity to set it afire; those mentally dulled by reason of excesses; those weak intellects become unsound through futile gabble,—parlour socialists, amateur revolutionists, theoretical incapables excited by discussion fit only for healthy minds.""

She left the map and came over to where the four men were seated terribly intent upon her every word.

""In the temple of Erlik, where my girlhood was passed after the murder of my parents, I learned what I am repeating to you,"" she said.

""I learned this, also, that the Eight Towers still exist—still stand to-day,—at least theoretically—and that from the Eight Towers pours forth across the world a stream of poison.

""I was told that, to every country, eight Yezidees were allotted—eight sorcerers—or adepts in scientific psychology if you prefer it—whose mission is to teach the gospel of hell and gradually but surely to win the minds of men to the service of the Slayer of Souls.

""That is what was taught us in the temple. We were educated in the development of occult powers—for it seems all human beings possess this psychic power latent within them—only few, even when instructed, acquire any ability to control and use this force....

""I—I learned—rapidly. I even thought, sometimes, that the Yezidees were beginning to be a little afraid of me,—even the Hassani priests.... And the Sheiks-el-Djebel, spreading their shrouds on the temple steps, looked at me with unquiet eyes, where I stood like a corpse amid the incense clouds——""

She passed her fingers over her eyelids, then framed her face between both hands for a moment's thought lost in tragic retrospection.

""Kai!"" she whispered dreamily as though to herself—""what Erlik awoke within my body that was asleep, God knows, but it was as though a twin comrade arose within me and looked out through my eyes upon a world which never before had been visible.""

Utter silence reigned in the room: Cleves's breathing seemed almost painful to him so intently was he listening and watching this girl; Benton's hands whitened with his grip on the chair-arms; Selden, tense, absorbed, kept his keen gaze of a business man fastened on her face. Recklow slowly caressed the cold bowl of his pipe with both thumbs.

Tressa Norne's strange and remote eyes subtly altered, and she lifted her head and looked calmly at the men before her.

""I think that there is nothing more for me to add,"" she said. ""The Red Spectre of Anarchy, called Bolshevism at present, threatens our country. Our Government is now awake to this menace and the Secret Service is moving everywhere.

""Great damage already has been done to the minds of many people in this Republic; poison has spread; is spreading. The Eight Towers still stand. The Eight Assassins are in America.

""But these eight Assassins know me to be their enemy.... They will surely attempt to kill me.... I don't believe I can avoid—death—very long.... But I want to serve my country and—and mankind.""

""They'll have to get me first,"" said Cleves, bluntly. ""I shall not permit you out of my sight.""

Recklow said in a musing voice: ""And these eight gentlemen, who are very likely to hurt us, also, are the first people we ought to hunt.""

""To get them,"" added Selden, ""we ought to choke the stream at its source.""

""To find out who they are is what is going to worry us,"" added Benton. Cleves had stood holding a chair for Tressa Norne. Finally she noticed it and seated herself as though tired.

""Is Sanang one of these eight?"" he asked her. The girl turned and looked up at him, and he saw the flush mounting in her face.

""Sometimes,"" she said steadily, ""I have almost believed he was Erlik's own vice-regent on earth—the Slayer of Souls himself.""

Benton and Selden had gone. Recklow left a little later. Cleves accompanied him out to the landing.

""Are you going to keep Miss Norne here with you for the present?"" inquired the older man.

""Yes. I dare not let her out of my sight, Recklow. What else can I do?""

""I don't know. Is she prepared for the consequences?""

""Gossip? Slander?""

""Of course.""

""I can get a housekeeper.""

""That only makes it look worse.""

Cleves reddened. ""Well, do you want to find her in some hotel or apartment with her throat cut?""

""No,"" replied Recklow, gently, ""I do not.""

""Then what else is there to do but keep her here in my own apartment and never let her out of my sight until we can find and lock up the eight gentlemen who are undoubtedly bent on murdering her?""

""Isn't there some woman in the Service who could help out? I could mention several.""

""I tell you I can't trust Tressa Norne to anybody except myself,"" insisted Cleves. ""I got her into this; I am responsible if she is murdered; I dare not entrust her safety to anybody else. And, Recklow, it's a ghastly responsibility for a man to induce a young girl to face death, even in the service of her country.""

""If she remains here alone with you she'll face social destruction,"" remarked Recklow.

Cleves was silent for a moment, then he burst out: ""Well, what am I to do? What is there left for me to do except to watch over her and see her through this devilish business? What other way have I to protect her, Recklow?""

""You could offer her the protection of your name,"" suggested the other, carelessly.

""What? You mean—marry her?""

""Well, nobody else would be inclined to, Cleves, if it ever becomes known she has lived here quite alone with you.""

Cleves stared at the elder man.

""This is nonsense,"" he said in a harsh voice. ""That young girl doesn't want to marry anybody. Neither do I. She doesn't wish to have her throat cut, that's all. And I'm determined she shan't.""

""There are stealthier assassins, Cleves,—the slayers of reputations. It goes badly with their victim. It does indeed.""

""Well, hang it, what do you think I ought to do?""

""I think you ought to marry her if you're going to keep her here.""

""Suppose she doesn't mind the unconventionality of it?""

""All women mind. No woman, at heart, is unconventional, Cleves.""

""She—she seems to agree with me that she ought to stay here.... Besides, she has no money, no relatives, no friends in America——""

""All the more tragic. If you really believe it to be your duty to keep her here where you can look after her bodily safety, then the other obligation is still heavier. And there may come a day when Miss Norne will wish that you had been less conscientious concerning the safety of her pretty throat.... For the knife of the Yezidee is swifter and less cruel than the tongue that slays with a smile.... And this young girl has many years to live, after this business of Bolshevism is dead and forgotten in our Republic.""

""Recklow!""

""Yes?""

""You think I might dare try to find a room somewhere else for her and let her take her chances? Do you?""

""It's your affair.""

""I know—hang it! I know it's my affair. I've unintentionally made it so. But can't you tell me what I ought to do?""

""I can't.""

""What would you do?""

""Don't ask me,"" returned Recklow, sharply. ""If you're not man enough to come to a decision you may turn her over to me.""

Cleves flushed brightly. ""Do you think you are old enough to take my job and avoid scandal?""

Recklow's cold eyes rested on him: ""If you like,"" he said, ""I'll assume your various kinds of personal responsibility toward Miss Norne.""

Cleve's visage burned. ""I'll shoulder my own burdens,"" he retorted.

""Sure. I knew you would."" And Recklow smiled and held out his hand. Cleves took it without cordiality. Standing so, Recklow, still smiling, said: ""What a rotten deal that child has had—is having. Her father and mother were fine people. Did you ever hear of Dr. Norne?""

""She mentioned him once.""

""They were up-State people of most excellent antecedents and no money.

""Dr. Norne was our Vice-Consul at Yarkand in the province of Sin Kiang. All he had was his salary, and he lost that and his post when the administration changed. Then he went into the spice trade.

""Some Jew syndicate here sent him up the Yarkand River to see what could be done about jade and gold concessions. He was on that business when the tragedy happened. The Kalmuks and Khirghiz were responsible, under Yezidee instigation. And there you are:—and here is his child, Cleves—back, by some miracle, from that flowering hell called Yian, believing in her heart that she really lost her soul there in the temple. And now, here in her own native land, she is exposed to actual and hourly danger of assassination.... Poor kid!... Did you ever hear of a rottener deal, Cleves?""

Their hands had remained clasped while Recklow was speaking. He spoke again, clearly, amiably:

""To lay down one's life for a friend is fine. I'm not sure that it's finer to offer one's honour in behalf of a girl whose honour is at stake.""

After a moment Cleves's grip tightened.

""All right,"" he said.

Recklow went downstairs.

",False
"

  ""Oh, thou who burn'st in heart for those who burn
  In Hell, whose fires thyself shall feed in turn;
  How long be crying--'Mercy on them.' God!
  Why, who art thou to teach and He to learn?""

In the Church of St. Barnabé vespers were over; the clergy left the
altar; the little choir-boys flocked across the chancel and settled in
the stalls. A Suisse in rich uniform marched down the south aisle,
sounding his staff at every fourth step on the stone pavement; behind him
came that eloquent preacher and good man, Monseigneur C----.

My chair was near the chancel rail, I now turned toward the west end of
the church. The other people between the altar and the pulpit turned too.
There was a little scraping and rustling while the congregation seated
itself again; the preacher mounted the pulpit stairs, and the organ
voluntary ceased.

I had always found the organ-playing at St. Barnabé highly interesting.
Learned and scientific it was, too much so for my small knowledge, but
expressing a vivid if cold intelligence. Moreover, it possessed the
French quality of taste: taste reigned supreme, self-controlled,
dignified and reticent.

To-day, however, from the first chord I had felt a change for the worse,
a sinister change. During vespers it had been chiefly the chancel organ
which supported the beautiful choir, but now and again, quite wantonly as
it seemed, from the west gallery where the great organ stands, a heavy
hand had struck across the church at the serene peace of those clear
voices. It was something more than harsh and dissonant, and it betrayed
no lack of skill. As it recurred again and again, it set me thinking of
what my architect's books say about the custom in early times to
consecrate the choir as soon as it was built, and that the nave, being
finished sometimes half a century later, often did not get any blessing
at all: I wondered idly if that had been the case at St. Barnabé, and
whether something not usually supposed to be at home in a Christian
church might have entered undetected and taken possession of the west
gallery. I had read of such things happening, too, but not in works on
architecture.

Then I remembered that St. Barnabé was not much more than a hundred years
old, and smiled at the incongruous association of mediaeval superstitions
with that cheerful little piece of eighteenth-century rococo.

But now vespers were over, and there should have followed a few quiet
chords, fit to accompany meditation, while we waited for the sermon.
Instead of that, the discord at the lower end of the church broke out
with the departure of the clergy, as if now nothing could control it.

I belong to those children of an older and simpler generation who do not
love to seek for psychological subtleties in art; and I have ever refused
to find in music anything more than melody and harmony, but I felt that
in the labyrinth of sounds now issuing from that instrument there was
something being hunted. Up and down the pedals chased him, while the
manuals blared approval. Poor devil! whoever he was, there seemed small
hope of escape!

My nervous annoyance changed to anger. Who was doing this? How dare he
play like that in the midst of divine service? I glanced at the people
near me: not one appeared to be in the least disturbed. The placid brows
of the kneeling nuns, still turned towards the altar, lost none of their
devout abstraction under the pale shadow of their white head-dress. The
fashionable lady beside me was looking expectantly at Monseigneur C----.
For all her face betrayed, the organ might have been singing an Ave
Maria.

But now, at last, the preacher had made the sign of the cross, and
commanded silence. I turned to him gladly. Thus far I had not found the
rest I had counted on when I entered St. Barnabé that afternoon.

I was worn out by three nights of physical suffering and mental trouble:
the last had been the worst, and it was an exhausted body, and a mind
benumbed and yet acutely sensitive, which I had brought to my favourite
church for healing. For I had been reading _The King in Yellow_.

""The sun ariseth; they gather themselves together and lay them down in
their dens."" Monseigneur C---- delivered his text in a calm voice,
glancing quietly over the congregation. My eyes turned, I knew not why,
toward the lower end of the church. The organist was coming from behind
his pipes, and passing along the gallery on his way out, I saw him
disappear by a small door that leads to some stairs which descend
directly to the street. He was a slender man, and his face was as white
as his coat was black. ""Good riddance!"" I thought, ""with your wicked
music! I hope your assistant will play the closing voluntary.""

With a feeling of relief--with a deep, calm feeling of relief, I turned
back to the mild face in the pulpit and settled myself to listen. Here,
at last, was the ease of mind I longed for.

""My children,"" said the preacher, ""one truth the human soul finds hardest
of all to learn: that it has nothing to fear. It can never be made to see
that nothing can really harm it.""

""Curious doctrine!"" I thought, ""for a Catholic priest. Let us see how he
will reconcile that with the Fathers.""

""Nothing can really harm the soul,"" he went on, in, his coolest, clearest
tones, ""because----""

But I never heard the rest; my eye left his face, I knew not for what
reason, and sought the lower end of the church. The same man was coming
out from behind the organ, and was passing along the gallery _the same
way_. But there had not been time for him to return, and if he had
returned, I must have seen him. I felt a faint chill, and my heart sank;
and yet, his going and coming were no affair of mine. I looked at him: I
could not look away from his black figure and his white face. When he was
exactly opposite to me, he turned and sent across the church straight
into my eyes, a look of hate, intense and deadly: I have never seen any
other like it; would to God I might never see it again! Then he
disappeared by the same door through which I had watched him depart less
than sixty seconds before.

I sat and tried to collect my thoughts. My first sensation was like that
of a very young child badly hurt, when it catches its breath before
crying out.

To suddenly find myself the object of such hatred was exquisitely
painful: and this man was an utter stranger. Why should he hate me
so?--me, whom he had never seen before? For the moment all other
sensation was merged in this one pang: even fear was subordinate to
grief, and for that moment I never doubted; but in the next I began to
reason, and a sense of the incongruous came to my aid.

As I have said, St. Barnabé is a modern church. It is small and well
lighted; one sees all over it almost at a glance. The organ gallery gets
a strong white light from a row of long windows in the clerestory, which
have not even coloured glass.

The pulpit being in the middle of the church, it followed that, when I
was turned toward it, whatever moved at the west end could not fail to
attract my eye. When the organist passed it was no wonder that I saw him:
I had simply miscalculated the interval between his first and his second
passing. He had come in that last time by the other side-door. As for the
look which had so upset me, there had been no such thing, and I was a
nervous fool.

I looked about. This was a likely place to harbour supernatural horrors!
That clear-cut, reasonable face of Monseigneur C----, his collected
manner and easy, graceful gestures, were they not just a little
discouraging to the notion of a gruesome mystery? I glanced above his
head, and almost laughed. That flyaway lady supporting one corner of the
pulpit canopy, which looked like a fringed damask table-cloth in a high
wind, at the first attempt of a basilisk to pose up there in the organ
loft, she would point her gold trumpet at him, and puff him out of
existence! I laughed to myself over this conceit, which, at the time, I
thought very amusing, and sat and chaffed myself and everything else,
from the old harpy outside the railing, who had made me pay ten centimes
for my chair, before she would let me in (she was more like a basilisk, I
told myself, than was my organist with the anaemic complexion): from that
grim old dame, to, yes, alas! Monseigneur C---- himself. For all
devoutness had fled. I had never yet done such a thing in my life, but
now I felt a desire to mock.

As for the sermon, I could not hear a word of it for the jingle in my
ears of

 ""The skirts of St. Paul has reached.
  Having preached us those six Lent lectures,
  More unctuous than ever he preached,""

keeping time to the most fantastic and irreverent thoughts.

It was no use to sit there any longer: I must get out of doors and shake
myself free from this hateful mood. I knew the rudeness I was committing,
but still I rose and left the church.

A spring sun was shining on the Rue St. Honoré, as I ran down the church
steps. On one corner stood a barrow full of yellow jonquils, pale violets
from the Riviera, dark Russian violets, and white Roman hyacinths in a
golden cloud of mimosa. The street was full of Sunday pleasure-seekers. I
swung my cane and laughed with the rest. Some one overtook and passed me.
He never turned, but there was the same deadly malignity in his white
profile that there had been in his eyes. I watched him as long as I could
see him. His lithe back expressed the same menace; every step that
carried him away from me seemed to bear him on some errand connected with
my destruction.

I was creeping along, my feet almost refusing to move. There began to
dawn in me a sense of responsibility for something long forgotten. It
began to seem as if I deserved that which he threatened: it reached a
long way back--a long, long way back. It had lain dormant all these
years: it was there, though, and presently it would rise and confront me.
But I would try to escape; and I stumbled as best I could into the Rue de
Rivoli, across the Place de la Concorde and on to the Quai. I looked with
sick eyes upon the sun, shining through the white foam of the fountain,
pouring over the backs of the dusky bronze river-gods, on the far-away
Arc, a structure of amethyst mist, on the countless vistas of grey stems
and bare branches faintly green. Then I saw him again coming down one of
the chestnut alleys of the Cours la Reine.

I left the river-side, plunged blindly across to the Champs Elysées and
turned toward the Arc. The setting sun was sending its rays along the
green sward of the Rond-point: in the full glow he sat on a bench,
children and young mothers all about him. He was nothing but a Sunday
lounger, like the others, like myself. I said the words almost aloud, and
all the while I gazed on the malignant hatred of his face. But he was not
looking at me. I crept past and dragged my leaden feet up the Avenue. I
knew that every time I met him brought him nearer to the accomplishment
of his purpose and my fate. And still I tried to save myself.

The last rays of sunset were pouring through the great Arc. I passed
under it, and met him face to face. I had left him far down the Champs
Elysées, and yet he came in with a stream of people who were returning
from the Bois de Boulogne. He came so close that he brushed me. His
slender frame felt like iron inside its loose black covering. He showed
no signs of haste, nor of fatigue, nor of any human feeling. His whole
being expressed one thing: the will, and the power to work me evil.

In anguish I watched him where he went down the broad crowded Avenue,
that was all flashing with wheels and the trappings of horses and the
helmets of the Garde Republicaine.

He was soon lost to sight; then I turned and fled. Into the Bois, and far
out beyond it--I know not where I went, but after a long while as it
seemed to me, night had fallen, and I found myself sitting at a table
before a small café. I had wandered back into the Bois. It was hours now
since I had seen him. Physical fatigue and mental suffering had left me
no power to think or feel. I was tired, so tired! I longed to hide away
in my own den. I resolved to go home. But that was a long way off.

I live in the Court of the Dragon, a narrow passage that leads from the
Rue de Rennes to the Rue du Dragon.

It is an ""impasse""; traversable only for foot passengers. Over the
entrance on the Rue de Rennes is a balcony, supported by an iron dragon.
Within the court tall old houses rise on either side, and close the ends
that give on the two streets. Huge gates, swung back during the day into
the walls of the deep archways, close this court, after midnight, and one
must enter then by ringing at certain small doors on the side. The sunken
pavement collects unsavoury pools. Steep stairways pitch down to doors
that open on the court. The ground floors are occupied by shops of
second-hand dealers, and by iron workers. All day long the place rings
with the clink of hammers and the clang of metal bars.

Unsavoury as it is below, there is cheerfulness, and comfort, and hard,
honest work above.

Five flights up are the ateliers of architects and painters, and the
hiding-places of middle-aged students like myself who want to live alone.
When I first came here to live I was young, and not alone.

I had to walk a while before any conveyance appeared, but at last, when I
had almost reached the Arc de Triomphe again, an empty cab came along and
I took it.

From the Arc to the Rue de Rennes is a drive of more than half an hour,
especially when one is conveyed by a tired cab horse that has been at the
mercy of Sunday fete-makers.

There had been time before I passed under the Dragon's wings to meet my
enemy over and over again, but I never saw him once, and now refuge was
close at hand.

Before the wide gateway a small mob of children were playing. Our
concierge and his wife walked among them, with their black poodle,
keeping order; some couples were waltzing on the side-walk. I returned
their greetings and hurried in.

All the inhabitants of the court had trooped out into the street. The
place was quite deserted, lighted by a few lanterns hung high up, in
which the gas burned dimly.

My apartment was at the top of a house, halfway down the court, reached
by a staircase that descended almost into the street, with only a bit of
passage-way intervening, I set my foot on the threshold of the open door,
the friendly old ruinous stairs rose before me, leading up to rest and
shelter. Looking back over my right shoulder, I saw _him,_ ten paces
off. He must have entered the court with me.

He was coming straight on, neither slowly, nor swiftly, but straight on
to me. And now he was looking at me. For the first time since our eyes
encountered across the church they met now again, and I knew that the
time had come.

Retreating backward, down the court, I faced him. I meant to escape by
the entrance on the Rue du Dragon. His eyes told me that I never should
escape.

It seemed ages while we were going, I retreating, he advancing, down the
court in perfect silence; but at last I felt the shadow of the archway,
and the next step brought me within it. I had meant to turn here and
spring through into the street. But the shadow was not that of an
archway; it was that of a vault. The great doors on the Rue du Dragon
were closed. I felt this by the blackness which surrounded me, and at the
same instant I read it in his face. How his face gleamed in the darkness,
drawing swiftly nearer! The deep vaults, the huge closed doors, their
cold iron clamps were all on his side. The thing which he had threatened
had arrived: it gathered and bore down on me from the fathomless shadows;
the point from which it would strike was his infernal eyes. Hopeless, I
set my back against the barred doors and defied him.


There was a scraping of chairs on the stone floor, and a rustling as the
congregation rose. I could hear the Suisse's staff in the south aisle,
preceding Monseigneur C---- to the sacristy.

The kneeling nuns, roused from their devout abstraction, made their
reverence and went away. The fashionable lady, my neighbour, rose also,
with graceful reserve. As she departed her glance just flitted over my
face in disapproval.

Half dead, or so it seemed to me, yet intensely alive to every trifle, I
sat among the leisurely moving crowd, then rose too and went toward the
door.

I had slept through the sermon. Had I slept through the sermon? I looked
up and saw him passing along the gallery to his place. Only his side I
saw; the thin bent arm in its black covering looked like one of those
devilish, nameless instruments which lie in the disused torture-chambers
of mediaeval castles.

But I had escaped him, though his eyes had said I should not. _Had_
I escaped him? That which gave him the power over me came back out of
oblivion, where I had hoped to keep it. For I knew him now. Death and the
awful abode of lost souls, whither my weakness long ago had sent
him--they had changed him for every other eye, but not for mine. I had
recognized him almost from the first; I had never doubted what he was
come to do; and now I knew while my body sat safe in the cheerful little
church, he had been hunting my soul in the Court of the Dragon.

I crept to the door: the organ broke out overhead with a blare. A
dazzling light filled the church, blotting the altar from my eyes. The
people faded away, the arches, the vaulted roof vanished. I raised my
seared eyes to the fathomless glare, and I saw the black stars hanging in
the heavens: and the wet winds from the lake of Hali chilled my face.

And now, far away, over leagues of tossing cloud-waves, I saw the moon
dripping with spray; and beyond, the towers of Carcosa rose behind the
moon.

Death and the awful abode of lost souls, whither my weakness long ago had
sent him, had changed him for every other eye but mine. And now I heard
_his voice_, rising, swelling, thundering through the flaring light,
and as I fell, the radiance increasing, increasing, poured over me in
waves of flame. Then I sank into the depths, and I heard the King in
Yellow whispering to my soul: ""It is a fearful thing to fall into the
hands of the living God!""


","It is said that in Ulthar, which lies beyond the river Skai, no man may kill a cat; and this I can verily believe as I gaze upon him who sitteth purring before the fire. For the cat is cryptic, and close to strange things which men cannot see. He is the soul of antique Aegyptus, and bearer of tales from forgotten cities in Meroë and Ophir. He is the kin of the jungle’s lords, and heir to the secrets of hoary and sinister Africa. The Sphinx is his cousin, and he speaks her language; but he is more ancient than the Sphinx, and remembers that which she hath forgotten.
      In Ulthar, before ever the burgesses forbade the killing of cats, there dwelt an old cotter and his wife who delighted to trap and slay the cats of their neighbours. Why they did this I know not; save that many hate the voice of the cat in the night, and take it ill that cats should run stealthily about yards and gardens at twilight. But whatever the reason, this old man and woman took pleasure in trapping and slaying every cat which came near to their hovel; and from some of the sounds heard after dark, many villagers fancied that the manner of slaying was exceedingly peculiar. But the villagers did not discuss such things with the old man and his wife; because of the habitual expression on the withered faces of the two, and because their cottage was so small and so darkly hidden under spreading oaks at the back of a neglected yard. In truth, much as the owners of cats hated these odd folk, they feared them more; and instead of berating them as brutal assassins, merely took care that no cherished pet or mouser should stray toward the remote hovel under the dark trees. When through some unavoidable oversight a cat was missed, and sounds heard after dark, the loser would lament impotently; or console himself by thanking Fate that it was not one of his children who had thus vanished. For the people of Ulthar were simple, and knew not whence it is all cats first came.
      One day a caravan of strange wanderers from the South entered the narrow cobbled streets of Ulthar. Dark wanderers they were, and unlike the other roving folk who passed through the village twice every year. In the market-place they told fortunes for silver, and bought gay beads from the merchants. What was the land of these wanderers none could tell; but it was seen that they were given to strange prayers, and that they had painted on the sides of their wagons strange figures with human bodies and the heads of cats, hawks, rams, and lions. And the leader of the caravan wore a head-dress with two horns and a curious disc betwixt the horns.
      There was in this singular caravan a little boy with no father or mother, but only a tiny black kitten to cherish. The plague had not been kind to him, yet had left him this small furry thing to mitigate his sorrow; and when one is very young, one can find great relief in the lively antics of a black kitten. So the boy whom the dark people called Menes smiled more often than he wept as he sate playing with his graceful kitten on the steps of an oddly painted wagon.
      On the third morning of the wanderers’ stay in Ulthar, Menes could not find his kitten; and as he sobbed aloud in the market-place certain villagers told him of the old man and his wife, and of sounds heard in the night. And when he heard these things his sobbing gave place to meditation, and finally to prayer. He stretched out his arms toward the sun and prayed in a tongue no villager could understand; though indeed the villagers did not try very hard to understand, since their attention was mostly taken up by the sky and the odd shapes the clouds were assuming. It was very peculiar, but as the little boy uttered his petition there seemed to form overhead the shadowy, nebulous figures of exotic things; of hybrid creatures crowned with horn-flanked discs. Nature is full of such illusions to impress the imaginative.
      That night the wanderers left Ulthar, and were never seen again. And the householders were troubled when they noticed that in all the village there was not a cat to be found. From each hearth the familiar cat had vanished; cats large and small, black, grey, striped, yellow, and white. Old Kranon, the burgomaster, swore that the dark folk had taken the cats away in revenge for the killing of Menes’ kitten; and cursed the caravan and the little boy. But Nith, the lean notary, declared that the old cotter and his wife were more likely persons to suspect; for their hatred of cats was notorious and increasingly bold. Still, no one durst complain to the sinister couple; even when little Atal, the innkeeper’s son, vowed that he had at twilight seen all the cats of Ulthar in that accursed yard under the trees, pacing very slowly and solemnly in a circle around the cottage, two abreast, as if in performance of some unheard-of rite of beasts. The villagers did not know how much to believe from so small a boy; and though they feared that the evil pair had charmed the cats to their death, they preferred not to chide the old cotter till they met him outside his dark and repellent yard.
      So Ulthar went to sleep in vain anger; and when the people awaked at dawn—behold! every cat was back at his accustomed hearth! Large and small, black, grey, striped, yellow, and white, none was missing. Very sleek and fat did the cats appear, and sonorous with purring content. The citizens talked with one another of the affair, and marvelled not a little. Old Kranon again insisted that it was the dark folk who had taken them, since cats did not return alive from the cottage of the ancient man and his wife. But all agreed on one thing: that the refusal of all the cats to eat their portions of meat or drink their saucers of milk was exceedingly curious. And for two whole days the sleek, lazy cats of Ulthar would touch no food, but only doze by the fire or in the sun.
      It was fully a week before the villagers noticed that no lights were appearing at dusk in the windows of the cottage under the trees. Then the lean Nith remarked that no one had seen the old man or his wife since the night the cats were away. In another week the burgomaster decided to overcome his fears and call at the strangely silent dwelling as a matter of duty, though in so doing he was careful to take with him Shang the blacksmith and Thul the cutter of stone as witnesses. And when they had broken down the frail door they found only this: two cleanly picked human skeletons on the earthen floor, and a number of singular beetles crawling in the shadowy corners.
      There was subsequently much talk among the burgesses of Ulthar. Zath, the coroner, disputed at length with Nith, the lean notary; and Kranon and Shang and Thul were overwhelmed with questions. Even little Atal, the innkeeper’s son, was closely questioned and given a sweetmeat as reward. They talked of the old cotter and his wife, of the caravan of dark wanderers, of small Menes and his black kitten, of the prayer of Menes and of the sky during that prayer, of the doings of the cats on the night the caravan left, and of what was later found in the cottage under the dark trees in the repellent yard.
      And in the end the burgesses passed that remarkable law which is told of by traders in Hatheg and discussed by travellers in Nir; namely, that in Ulthar no man may kill a cat.",False
"During the winter of 1927-28 officials of the Federal government made a strange and secret investigation of certain conditions in the ancient Massachusetts seaport of Innsmouth. The public first learned of it in February, when a vast series of raids and arrests occurred, followed by the deliberate burning and dynamiting--under suitable precautions--of an enormous number of crumbling, worm-eaten, and supposedly empty houses along the abandoned waterfront. Uninquiring souls let this occurrence pass as one of the major clashes in a spasmodic war on liquor.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References to decline were few, though the significance of the later record was unmistakable. After the Civil War all industrial life was confined to the Marsh Refining Company, and the marketing of gold ingots formed the only remaining bit of major commerce aside from the eternal fishing. That fishing paid less and less as the price of the commodity fell and large-scale corporations offered competition, but there was never a dearth of fish around Innsmouth Harbour. Foreigners seldom settled there, and there was some discreetly veiled evidence that a number of Poles and Portuguese who had tried it had been scattered in a peculiarly drastic fashion.

Most interesting of all was a glancing reference to the strange jewelry vaguely associated with Innsmouth. It had evidently impressed the whole countryside more than a little, for mention was made of specimens in the museum of Miskatonic University at Arkham, and in the display room of the Newburyport Historical Society. The fragmentary descriptions of these things were bald and prosaic, but they hinted to me an undercurrent of persistent strangeness. Something about them seemed so odd and provocative that I could not put them out of my mind, and despite the relative lateness of the hour I resolved to see the local sample--said to be a large, queerly-proportioned thing evidently meant for a tiara--if it could possibly be arranged.

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

It took no excessive sensitiveness to beauty to make me literally gasp at the strange, unearthly splendour of the alien, opulent phantasy that rested there on a purple velvet cushion. Even now I can hardly describe what I saw, though it was clearly enough a sort of tiara, as the description had said. It was tall in front, and with a very large and curiously irregular periphery, as if designed for a head of almost freakishly elliptical outline. The material seemed to be predominantly gold, though a weird lighter lustrousness hinted at some strange alloy with an equally beautiful and scarcely identifiable metal. Its condition was almost perfect, and one could have spent hours in studying the striking and puzzlingly untraditional designs--some simply geometrical, and some plainly marine--chased or moulded in high relief on its surface with a craftsmanship of incredible skill and grace.

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

However, I soon saw that my uneasiness had a second and perhaps equally potent source residing in the pictorial and mathematical suggestion of the strange designs. The patterns all hinted of remote secrets and unimaginable abysses in time and space, and the monotonously aquatic nature of the reliefs became almost sinister. Among these reliefs were fabulous monsters of abhorrent grotesqueness and malignity--half ichthyic and half batrachian in suggestion--which one could not dissociate from a certain haunting and uncomfortable sense of pseudomemory, as if they called up some image from deep cells and tissues whose retentive functions are wholly primal and awesomely ancestral. At times I fancied that every contour of these blasphemous fish-frogs was over-flowing with the ultimate quintessence of unknown and inhuman evil.

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

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

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

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

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

","To Victor Cleves came the following telegram in code:

""Washington
""April 14th, 1919.""
""Investigation ordered by the State Department as the result of frequent mention in despatches of Chinese troops operating with the Russian Bolsheviki forces has disclosed that the Bolsheviki are actually raising a Chinese division of 30,000 men recruited in Central Asia. This division has been guilty of the greatest cruelties. A strange rumour prevails among the Allied forces at Archangel that this Chinese division is led by Yezidee and Hassani officers belonging to the sect of devil-worshipers and that they employ black arts and magic in battle.

""From information so far gathered by the several branches of the United States Secret Service operating throughout the world, it appears possible that the various revolutionary forces of disorder, in Europe and Asia, which now are violently threatening the peace and security, of all established civilisation on earth, may have had a common origin. This origin, it is now suspected, may date back to a very remote epoch; the wide-spread forces of violence and merciless destruction may have had their beginning among some ancient and predatory race whose existence was maintained solely by robbery and murder.

""Anarchists, terrorists, Bolshevists, Reds of all shades and degrees, are now believed to represent in modern times what perhaps once was a tribe of Assassins—a sect whose religion was founded upon a common predilection for crimes of violence.

""On this theory then, for the present, the United States Government will proceed with this investigation of Bolshevism; and the Secret Service will continue to pay particular attention to all Orientals in the United States and other countries. You personally are formally instructed to keep in touch with XLY-371 (Alek Selden) and ZB-303 (James Benton), and to employ every possible means to become friendly with the girl Tressa Norne, win her confidence, and, if possible, enlist her actively in the Government Service as your particular aid and comrade.

""It is equally important that the movements of the Oriental, called Sanang, be carefully observed in order to discover the identity and whereabouts of his companions. However, until further instructions he is not to be taken into custody. M. H. 2479.

""(Signed)
""(John Recklow.)""
The long despatch from John Recklow made Cleves's duty plain enough.

For months, now, Selden and Benton had been watching Tressa Norne. And they had learned practically nothing about her.

And now the girl had come within Cleves's sphere of operation. She had been in New York for two weeks. Telegrams from Benton in Chicago, and from Selden in Buffalo, had prepared him for her arrival.

He had his men watching her boarding-house on West Twenty-eighth Street, men to follow her, men to keep their eyes on her at the theatre, where every evening, at 10:45, her entr' acte was staged. He knew where to get her. But he, himself, had been on the watch for the man Sanang; and had failed to find the slightest trace of him in New York, although warned that he had arrived.

So, for that evening, he left the hunt for Sanang to others, put on his evening clothes, and dined with fashionable friends at the Patroons' Club, who never for an instant suspected that young Victor Cleves was in the Service of the United States Government. About half-past nine he strolled around to the theatre, desiring to miss as much as possible of the popular show without being too late to see the curious little entr' acte in which this girl, Tressa Norne, appeared alone.

He had secured an aisle seat near the stage at an outrageous price; the main show was still thundering and fizzing and glittering as he entered the theatre; so he stood in the rear behind the orchestra until the descending curtain extinguished the outrageous glare and din.

Then he went down the aisle, and as he seated himself Tressa Norne stepped from the wings and stood before the lowered curtain facing an expectant but oddly undemonstrative audience.

The girl worked rapidly, seriously, and in silence. She seemed a mere child there behind the footlights, not more than sixteen anyway—her winsome eyes and wistful lips unspoiled by the world's wisdom.

Yet once or twice the mouth drooped for a second and the winning eyes darkened to a remoter blue—the brooding iris hue of far horizons.

She wore the characteristic tabard of stiff golden tissue and the gold pagoda-shaped headpiece of a Yezidee temple girl. Her flat, slipper-shaped foot-gear was of stiff gold, too, and curled upward at the toes.

All this accentuated her apparent youth. For in face and throat no firmer contours had as yet modified the soft fullness of immaturity; her limbs were boyish and frail, and her bosom more undecided still, so that the embroidered breadth of gold fell flat and straight from her chest to a few inches above the ankles.

She seemed to have no stock of paraphernalia with which to aid the performance; no assistant, no orchestral diversion, nor did she serve herself with any magician's patter. She did her work close to the footlights.

Behind her loomed a black curtain; the strip of stage in front was bare even of carpet; the orchestra remained mute.

But when she needed anything—a little table, for example—well, it was suddenly there where she required it—a tripod, for instance, evidently fitted to hold the big iridescent bubble of glass in which swarmed little tropical fishes—and which arrived neatly from nowhere. She merely placed her hands before her as though ready to support something weighty which she expected and—suddenly, the huge crystal bubble was visible, resting between her hands. And when she tired of holding it, she set it upon the empty air and let go of it; and instead of crashing to the stage with its finny rainbow swarm of swimmers, out of thin air appeared a tripod to support it.

Applause followed, not very enthusiastic, for the sort of audience which sustains the shows of which her performance was merely an entr' acte is an audience responsive only to the obvious.

Nobody ever before had seen that sort of magic in America. People scarcely knew whether or not they quite liked it. The lightning of innovation stupefies the dull; ignorance is always suspicious of innovation—always afraid to put itself on record until its mind is made up by somebody else.

So in this typical New York audience approbation was cautious, but every fascinated eye remained focused on this young girl who continued to do incredible things, which seemed to resemble ""putting something over"" on them; a thing which no uneducated American conglomeration ever quite forgives.

The girl's silence, too, perplexed them; they were accustomed to gabble, to noise, to jazz, vocal and instrumental, to that incessant metropolitan clamour which fills every second with sound in a city whose only distinction is its din. Stage, press, art, letters, social existence unless noisy mean nothing in Gotham; reticence, leisure, repose are the three lost arts. The megaphone is the city's symbol; its chiefest crime, silence.

The girl having finished with the big glass bubble full of tiny fish, picked it up and tossed it aside. For a moment it apparently floated there in space like a soap-bubble. Changing rainbow tints waxed and waned on the surface, growing deeper and more gorgeous until the floating globe glowed scarlet, then suddenly burst into flame and vanished. And only a strange, sweet perfume lingered in the air.

But she gave her perplexed audience no time to wonder; she had seated herself on the stage and was already swiftly busy unfolding a white veil with which she presently covered herself, draping it over her like a tent.

The veil seemed to be translucent; she was apparently visible seated beneath it. But the veil turned into smoke, rising into the air in a thin white cloud; and there, where she had been seated, was a statue of white stone the image of herself!—in all the frail springtide of early adolescence—a white statue, cold, opaque, exquisite in its sculptured immobility.

There came, the next moment, a sound of distant thunder; flashes lighted the blank curtain; and suddenly a vein of lightning and a sharper peal shattered the statue to fragments.

There they lay, broken bits of her own sculptured body, glistening in a heap behind the footlights. Then each fragment began to shimmer with a rosy internal light of its own, until the pile of broken marble glowed like living coals under thickening and reddening vapours. And, presently, dimly perceptible, there she was in the flesh again, seated in the fiery centre of the conflagration, stretching her arms luxuriously, yawning, seemingly awakening from refreshing slumber, her eyes unclosing to rest with a sort of confused apology upon her astounded audience.

As she rose to her feet nothing except herself remained on the stage—no débris, not a shred of smoke, not a spark.

She came down, then, across an inclined plank into the orchestra among the audience.

In the aisle seat nearest her sat Victor Cleves. His business was to be there that evening. But she didn't know that, knew nothing about him—had never before set eyes on him.

At her gesture of invitation he made a cup of both his hands. Into these she poured a double handful of unset diamonds—or what appeared to be diamonds—pressed her own hands above his for a second—and the diamonds in his palms had become pearls.

These were passed around to people in the vicinity, and finally returned to Mr. Cleves, who, at her request, covered the heap of pearls with both his hands, hiding them entirely from view.

At her nod he uncovered them. The pearls had become emeralds. Again, while he held them, and without even touching him, she changed them into rubies. Then she turned away from him, apparently forgetting that he still held the gems, and he sat very still, one cupped hand over the other, while she poured silver coins into a woman's gloved hands, turned them into gold coins, then flung each coin into the air, where it changed to a living, fragrant rose and fell among the audience.

Presently she seemed to remember Cleve, came back down the aisle, and under his close and intent gaze drew from his cupped hands, one by one, a score of brilliant little living birds, which continually flew about her and finally perched, twittering, on her golden headdress—a rainbow-crest of living jewels.

As she drew the last warm, breathing little feathered miracle from Cleves's hands and released it, he said rapidly under his breath: ""I want a word with you later. Where?""

She let her clear eyes rest on him for a moment, then with a shrug so slight that it was perceptible, perhaps, only to him, she moved on along the inclined way, stepped daintily over the footlights, caught fire, apparently, nodded to a badly rattled audience, and sauntered off, burning from head to foot.

What applause there was became merged in a dissonant instrumental outburst from the orchestra; the great god Jazz resumed direction, the mindless audience breathed freely again as the curtain rose upon a familiar, yelling turbulence, including all that Gotham really understands and cares for—legs and noise.

Victor Cleves glanced up at the stage, then continued to study the name of the girl on the programme. It was featured in rather pathetic solitude under ""Entr' acte."" And he read further: ""During the entr' acte Miss Tressa Norne will entertain you with several phases of Black Magic. This strange knowledge was acquired by Miss Norne from the Yezidees, among which almost unknown people still remain descendants of that notorious and formidable historic personage known in the twelfth century as The Old Man of the Mountain—or The Old Man of Mount Alamout.

""The pleasant profession of this historic individual was assassination; and some historians now believe that genuine occult power played a part in his dreadful record—a record which terminated only when the infantry of Genghis Khan took Mount Alamout by storm and hanged the Old Man of the Mountain and burned his body under a boulder of You-Stone.

""For Miss Norne's performance there appears to be no plausible, practical or scientific explanation.

""During her performance the curtain will remain lowered for fifteen minutes and will then rise on the last act of 'You Betcha Life.'""

The noisy show continued while Cleves, paying it scant attention, brooded over the programme. And ever his keen, grey eyes reverted to her name, Tressa Norne.

Then, for a little while, he settled back and let his absent gaze wander over the galloping battalions of painted girls and the slapstick principals whose perpetual motion evoked screams of approbation from the audience amid the din of the great god Jazz.

He had an aisle seat; he disturbed nobody when he went out and around to the stage door.

The aged man on duty took his card, called a boy and sent it off. The boy returned with the card, saying that Miss Norne had already dressed and departed.

Cleves tipped him and then tipped the doorman heavily.

""Where does she live?"" he asked.

""Say,"" said the old man, ""I dunno, and that's straight. But them ladies mostly goes up to the roof for a look in at the 'Moonlight Masque' and a dance afterward. Was you ever up there?""

""Yes.""

""Seen the new show?""

""No.""

""Well, g'wan up while you can get a table. And I bet the little girl will be somewheres around.""

""The little girl"" was ""somewheres around."" He secured a table, turned and looked about at the vast cabaret into which only a few people had yet filtered, and saw her at a distance in the carpeted corridor buying violets from one of the flower-girls.

A waiter placed a reserve card on his table; he continued on around the outer edge of the auditorium.

Miss Norne had already seated herself at a small table in the rear, and a waiter was serving her with iced orange juice and little French cakes.

When the waiter returned Cleves went up and took off his hat.

""May I talk with you for a moment, Miss Norne?"" he said.

The girl looked up, the wheat-straw still between her scarlet lips. Then, apparently recognising in him the young man in the audience who had spoken to her, she resumed her business of imbibing orange juice.

The girl seemed even frailer and younger in her hat and street gown. A silver-fox stole hung from her shoulders; a gold bag lay on the table under the bunch of violets.

She paid no attention whatever to him. Presently her wheat-straw buckled, and she selected a better one.

He said: ""There's something rather serious I'd like to speak to you about if you'll let me. I'm not the sort you evidently suppose. I'm not trying to annoy you.""

At that she looked around and upward once more.

Very, very young, but already spoiled, he thought, for the dark-blue eyes were coolly appraising him, and the droop of the mouth had become almost sullen. Besides, traces of paint still remained to incarnadine lip and cheek and there was a hint of hardness in the youthful plumpness of the features.

""Are you a professional?"" she asked without curiosity.

""A theatrical man? No.""

""Then if you haven't anything to offer me, what is it you wish?""

""I have a job to offer if you care for it and if you are up to it,"" he said.

Her eyes became slightly hostile:

""What kind of job do you mean?""

""I want to learn something about you first. Will you come over to my table and talk it over?""

""No.""

""What sort do you suppose me to be?"" he inquired, amused.

""The usual sort, I suppose.""

""You mean a Johnny?""

""Yes—of sorts.""

She let her insolent eyes sweep him once more, from head to foot.

He was a well-built young man and in his evening dress he had that something about him which placed him very definitely where he really belonged.

""Would you mind looking at my card?"" he asked.

He drew it out and laid it beside her, and without stirring she scanned it sideways.

""That's my name and address,"" he continued. ""I'm not contemplating mischief. I've enough excitement in life without seeking adventure. Besides, I'm not the sort who goes about annoying women.""

She glanced up at him again:

""You are annoying me!""

""I'm sorry. I was quite honest. Good-night.""

He took his congé with unhurried amiability; had already turned away when she said:

""Please ... what do you desire to say to me?"" He came back to her table:

""I couldn't tell you until I know a little more about you.""

""What—do you wish to know?""

""Several things. I could scarcely ask you—go over such matters with you—standing here.""

There was a pause; the girl juggled with the straw on the table for a few moments, then, partly turning, she summoned a waiter, paid him, adjusted her stole, picked up her gold bag and her violets and stood up. Then she turned to Cleves and gave him a direct look, which had in it the impersonal and searching gaze of a child.

When they were seated at the table reserved for him the place already was filling rapidly—backwash from the theatres slopped through every aisle—people not yet surfeited with noise, not yet sufficiently sodden by their worship of the great god Jazz.

""Jazz,"" said Cleves, glancing across his dinner-card at Tressa Norne—""what's the meaning of the word? Do you happen to know?""

""Doesn't it come from the French 'jaser'?""

He smiled. ""Possibly. I'm rather hungry. Are you?""

""Yes.""

""Will you indicate your preferences?""

She studied her card, and presently he gave the order.

""I'd like some champagne,"" she said, ""unless you think it's too expensive.""

He smiled at that, too, and gave the order.

""I didn't suggest any wine because you seem so young,"" he said.

""How old do I seem?""

""Sixteen perhaps.""

""I am twenty-one.""

""Then you've had no troubles.""

""I don't know what you call trouble,"" she remarked, indifferently, watching the arriving throngs.

The orchestra, too, had taken its place.

""Well,"" she said, ""now that you've picked me up, what do you really want of me?"" There was no mitigating smile to soften what she said. She dropped her elbows on the table, rested her chin between her palms and looked at him with the same searching, undisturbed expression that is so disconcerting in children. As he made no reply: ""May I have a cocktail?"" she inquired.

He gave the order. And his mind registered pessimism. ""There is nothing doing with this girl,"" he thought. ""She's already on the toboggan."" But he said aloud: ""That was beautiful work you did down in the theatre, Miss Norne.""

""Did you think so?""

""Of course. It was astounding work.""

""Thank you. But managers and audiences differ with you.""

""Then they are very stupid,"" he said.

""Possibly. But that does not help me pay my board.""

""Do you mean you have trouble in securing theatrical engagements?""

""Yes, I am through here to-night, and there's nothing else in view, so far.""

""That's incredible!"" he exclaimed.

She lifted her glass, slowly drained it.

For a few moments she caressed the stem of the empty glass, her gaze remote.

""Yes, it's that way,"" she said. ""From the beginning I felt that my audiences were not in sympathy with me. Sometimes it even amounts to hostility. Americans do not like what I do, even if it holds their attention. I don't quite understand why they don't like it, but I'm always conscious they don't. And of course that settles it—to-night has settled the whole thing, once and for all.""

""What are you going to do?""

""What others do, I presume.""

""What do others do?"" he inquired, watching the lovely sullen eyes.

""Oh, they do what I'm doing now, don't they?—let some man pick them up and feed them."" She lifted her indifferent eyes. ""I'm not criticising you. I meant to do it some day—when I had courage. That's why I just asked you if I might have some champagne—finding myself a little scared at my first step.... But you did say you might have a job for me. Didn't you?""

""Suppose I haven't. What are you going to do?""

The curtain was rising. She nodded toward the bespangled chorus. ""Probably that sort of thing. They've asked me.""

Supper was served. They both were hungry and thirsty; the music made conversation difficult, so they supped in silence and watched the imbecile show conceived by vulgarians, produced by vulgarians and served up to mental degenerates of the same species—the average metropolitan audience.

For ten minutes a pair of comedians fell up and down a flight of steps, and the audience shrieked approval.

""Miss Norne?""

The girl who had been watching the show turned in her chair and looked back at him.

""Your magic is by far the most wonderful I have ever seen or heard of. Even in India such things are not done.""

""No, not in India,"" she said, indifferently.

""Where then?""

""In China.""

""You learned to do such things there?""

""Yes.""

""Where, in China, did you learn such amazing magic?""

""In Yian.""

""I never heard of it. Is it a province?""

""A city.""

""And you lived there?""

""Fourteen years.""

""When?""

""From 1904 to 1918.""

""During the great war,"" he remarked, ""you were in China?""

""Yes.""

""Then you arrived here very recently.""

""In November, from the Coast.""

""I see. You played the theatres from the Coast eastward.""

""And went to pieces in New York,"" she added calmly, finishing her glass of champagne.

""Have you any family?"" he asked.

""No.""

""Do you care to say anything further?"" he inquired, pleasantly.

""About my family? Yes, if you wish. My father was in the spice trade in Yian. The Yezidees took Yian in 1910, threw him into a well in his own compound and filled it up with dead imperial troops. I was thirteen years old.... The Hassani did that. They held Yian nearly eight years, and I lived with my mother, in a garden pagoda, until 1914. In January of that year Germans got through from Kiaou-Chou. They had been six months on the way. I think they were Hassanis. Anyway, they persuaded the Hassanis to massacre every English-speaking prisoner. And so—my mother died in the garden pagoda of Yian.... I was not told for four years.""

""Why did they spare you?"" he asked, astonished at her story so quietly told, so utterly destitute of emotion.

""I was seventeen. A certain person had placed me among the temple girls in the temple of Erlik. It pleased this person to make of me a Mongol temple girl as a mockery at Christ. They gave me the name Keuke Mongol. I asked to serve the shrine of Kwann-an—she being like to our Madonna. But this person gave me the choice between the halberds of the Tchortchas and the sorcery of Erlik.""

She lifted her sombre eyes. ""So I learned how to do the things you saw. But—what I did there on the stage is not—respectable.""

An odd shiver passed over him. For a second he took her literally, suddenly convinced that her magic was not white but black as the demon at whose shrine she had learned it. Then he smiled and asked her pleasantly, whether indeed she employed hypnosis in her miraculous exhibitions.

But her eyes became more sombre still, and, ""I don't care to talk about it,"" she said. ""I have already said too much.""

""I'm sorry. I didn't mean to pry into professional secrets——""

""I can't talk about it,"" she repeated. ""... Please—my glass is quite empty.""

When he had refilled it:

""How did you get away from Yian?"" he asked.

""The Japanese.""

""What luck!""

""Yes. One battle was fought at Buldak. The Hassanis and Blue Flags were terribly cut up. Then, outside the walls of Yian, Prince Sanang's Tchortcha infantry made a stand. He was there with his Yezidee horsemen, all in leather and silk armour with casques and corselets of black Indian steel.

""I could see them from the temple—saw the Japanese gunners open fire. The Tchortchas were blown to shreds in the blast of the Japanese guns.... Sanang got away with some of his Yezidee horsemen.""

""Where was that battle?""

""I told you, outside the walls of Yian.""

""The newspapers never mentioned any such trouble in China,"" he said, suspiciously.

""Nobody knows about it except the Germans and the Japanese.""

""Who is this Sanang?"" he demanded.

""A Yezidee-Mongol. He is one of the Sheiks-el-Djebel—a servant of The Old Man of Mount Alamout.""

""What is he?""

""A sorcerer—assassin.""

""What!"" exclaimed Cleves incredulously.

""Why, yes,"" she said, calmly. ""Have you never heard of The Old Man of Mount Alamout?""

""Well, yes——""

""The succession has been unbroken since 1090 B.C.A Hassan Sabbah is still the present Old Man of the Mountain. His Yezidees worship Erlik. They are sorcerers. But you would not believe that.""

Cleves said with a smile, ""Who is Erlik?""

""The Mongols' Satan.""

""Oh! So these Yezidees are devil-worshipers!""

""They are more. They are actually devils.""

""You don't really believe that even in unexplored China there exists such a creature as a real sorcerer, do you?"" he inquired, smilingly.

""I don't wish to talk of it.""

To his surprise her face had flushed, and he thought her sensitive mouth quivered a little.

He watched her in silence for a moment; then, leaning a little way across the table:

""Where are you going when the show here closes?""

""To my boarding-house.""

""And then?""

""To bed,"" she said, sullenly.

""And to-morrow what do you mean to do?""

""Go out to the agencies and ask for work.""

""And if there is none?""

""The chorus,"" she said, indifferently.

""What salary have you been getting?""

She told him.

""Will you take three times that amount and work with me?""

",False
"""They say foul things of Old Times still lurk
In dark forgotten corners of the world.
And Gates still gape to loose, on certain nights.
Shapes pent in Hell.""

--Justin Geoffrey


I read of it first in the strange book of Von Junzt, the German
eccentric who lived so curiously and died in such grisly and mysterious
fashion. It was my fortune to have access to his _Nameless Cults_ in the
original edition, the so-called Black Book, published in Dusseldorf in
1839, shortly before a hounding doom overtook the author. Collectors of
rare literature were familiar with _Nameless Cults_ mainly through the
cheap and faulty translation which was pirated in London by Bridewall in
1845, and the carefully expurgated edition put out by the Golden Goblin
Press of New York, 1909. But the volume I stumbled upon was one of the
unexpurgated German copies, with heavy black leather covers and rusty
iron hasps. I doubt if there are more than half a dozen such volumes in
the entire world today, for the quantity issued was not great, and when
the manner of the author's demise was bruited about, many possessors of
the book burned their volumes in panic.

Von Junzt spent his entire life (1795-1840) delving into forbidden
subjects; he traveled in all parts of the world, gained entrance into
innumerable secret societies, and read countless little-known and
esoteric books and manuscripts in the original; and in the chapters of
the Black Book, which range from startling clarity of exposition to
murky ambiguity, there are statements and hints to freeze the blood of a
thinking man. Reading what Von Junzt _dared_ put in print arouses uneasy
speculations as to what it was that he dared _not_ tell. What dark
matters, for instance, were contained in those closely written pages
that formed the unpublished manuscript on which he worked unceasingly
for months before his death, and which lay torn and scattered all over
the floor of the locked and bolted chamber in which Von Junzt was found
dead with the marks of taloned fingers on his throat? It will never be
known, for the author's closest friend, the Frenchman Alexis Ladeau,
after having spent a whole night piecing the fragments together and
reading what was written, burnt them to ashes and cut his own throat
with a razor.

But the contents of the published matter are shuddersome enough, even if
one accepts the general view that they but represent the ravings of a
madman. There among many strange things I found mention of the Black
Stone, that curious, sinister monolith that broods among the mountains
of Hungary, and about which so many dark legends cluster. Van Junzt did
not devote much space to it--the bulk of his grim work concerns cults
and objects of dark worship which he maintained existed in his day, and
it would seem that the Black Stone represents some order or being lost
and forgotten centuries ago. But he spoke of it as one of the _keys_--a
phrase used many times by him, in various relations, and constituting
one of the obscurities of his work. And he hinted briefly at curious
sights to be seen about the monolith on Midsummer's Night. He mentioned
Otto Dostmann's theory that this monolith was a remnant of the Hunnish
invasion and had been erected to commemorate a victory of Attila over
the Goths. Von Junzt contradicted this assertion without giving any
refutory facts, merely remarking that to attribute the origin of the
Black Stone to the Huns was as logical as assuming that William the
Conqueror reared Stonehenge.

This implication of enormous antiquity piqued my interest immensely and
after some difficulty I succeeded in locating a rat-eaten and moldering
copy of Dostmann's _Remnants of Lost Empires_ (Berlin, 1809, ""Der
Drachenhaus"" Press). I was disappointed to find that Dostmann referred
to the Black Stone even more briefly than had Von Junzt, dismissing it
with a few lines as an artifact comparatively modern in contrast with
the Greco-Roman ruins of Asia Minor which were his pet theme. He
admitted his inability to make out the defaced characters on the
monolith but pronounced them unmistakably Mongoloid. However, little as
I learned from Dostmann, he did mention the name of the village adjacent
to the Black Stone--Stregoicavar--an ominous name, meaning something
like Witch-Town.

A close scrutiny of guidebooks and travel articles gave me no further
information--Stregoicavar, not on any map that I could find, lay in a
wild, little-frequented region, out of the path of casual tourists. But
I did find subject for thought in Dornly's _Magyar Folklore_. In his
chapter on _Dream Myths_ he mentions the Black Stone and tells of some
curious superstitions regarding it--especially the belief that if anyone
sleeps in the vicinity of the monolith, that person will be haunted by
monstrous nightmares forever after; and he cited tales of the peasants
regarding too-curious people who ventured to visit the Stone on
Midsummer Night and who died raving mad because of _something_ they saw
there.

That was all I could gleam from Dornly, but my interest was even more
intensely roused as I sensed a distinctly sinister aura about the Stone.
The suggestion of dark antiquity, the recurrent hint of unnatural events
on Midsummer Night, touched some slumbering instinct in my being, as one
senses, rather than hears, the flowing of some dark subterraneous river
in the night.

And I suddenly saw a connection between this Stone and a certain weird
and fantastic poem written by the mad poet, Justin Geoffrey: _The People
of the Monolith_. Inquiries led to the information that Geoffrey had
indeed written that poem while traveling in Hungary, and I could not
doubt that the Black Stone was the very monolith to which he referred in
his strange verse. Reading his stanzas again, I felt once more the
strange dim stirrings of subconscious promptings that I had noticed when
first reading of the Stone.

I had been casting about for a place to spend a short vacation and I
made up my mind. I went to Stregoicavar. A train of obsolete style
carried me from Temesvar to within striking distance, at least, of my
objective, and a three days' ride in a jouncing coach brought me to the
little village which lay in a fertile valley high up in the fir-clad
mountains. The journey itself was uneventful, but during the first day
we passed the old battlefield of Schomvaal where the brave
Polish-Hungarian knight, Count Boris Vladinoff, made his gallant and
futile stand against the victorious hosts of Suleiman the Magnificent,
when the Grand Turk swept over eastern Europe in 1526.

The driver of the coach pointed out to me a great heap of crumbling
stones on a hill nearby, under which, he said, the bones of the brave
Count lay. I remembered a passage from Larson's _Turkish Wars_. ""After
the skirmish"" (in which the Count with his small army had beaten back
the Turkish advance-guard) ""the Count was standing beneath the
half-ruined walls of the old castle on the hill, giving orders as to the
disposition of his forces, when an aide brought to him a small lacquered
case which had been taken from the body of the famous Turkish scribe and
historian, Selim Bahadur, who had fallen in the fight. The Count took
therefrom a roll of parchment and began to read, but he had not read far
before he turned very pale and, without saying a word, replaced the
parchment in the case and thrust the case into his cloak. At that very
instant a hidden Turkish battery suddenly opened fire, and the balls
striking the old castle, the Hungarians were horrified to see the walls
crash down in ruin, completely covering the brave Count. Without a
leader the gallant little army was cut to pieces, and in the war-swept
years which followed, the bones of the noblemen were never recovered.
Today the natives point out a huge and moldering pile of ruins near
Schomvaal beneath which, they say, still rests all that the centuries
have left of Count Boris Vladinoff.""

I found the village of Stregoicavar a dreamy, drowsy little village that
apparently belied its sinister cognomen--a forgotten back-eddy that
Progress had passed by. The quaint houses and the quainter dress and
manners of the people were those of an earlier century. They were
friendly, mildly curious but not inquisitive, though visitors from the
outside world were extremely rare.

""Ten years ago another American came here and stayed a few days in the
village,"" said the owner of the tavern where I had put up, ""a young
fellow and queer-acting--mumbled to himself--a poet, I think.""

I knew he must mean Justin Geoffrey.

""Yes, he was a poet,"" I answered, ""and he wrote a poem about a bit of
scenery near this very village.""

""Indeed?"" Mine host's interest was aroused. ""Then, since all great poets
are strange in their speech and actions, he must have achieved great
fame, for his actions and conversations were the strangest of any man I
ever I knew.""

""As is usual with artists,"" I answered, ""most of his recognition has
come since his death.""

""He is dead, then?""

""He died screaming in a madhouse five years ago.""

""Too bad, too bad,"" sighed mine host sympathetically. ""Poor lad--he
looked too long at the Black Stone.""

My heart gave a leap, but I masked my keen interest and said casually.
""I have heard something of this Black Stone; somewhere near this
village, is it not?""

""Nearer than Christian folk wish,"" he responded. ""Look!"" He drew me to a
latticed window and pointed up at the fir-clad slopes of the brooding
blue mountains. ""There beyond where you see the bare face of that
jutting cliff stands that accursed Stone. Would that it were ground to
powder and the powder flung into the Danube to be carried to the deepest
ocean! Once men tried to destroy the thing, but each man who laid hammer
or maul against it came to an evil end. So now the people shun it.""

""What is there so evil about it?"" I asked curiously.

""It is a demon-haunted thing,"" he answered uneasily and with the
suggestion of a shudder. ""In my childhood I knew a young man who came up
from below and laughed at our traditions--in his foolhardiness he went
to the Stone one Midsummer Night and at dawn stumbled into the village
again, stricken dumb and mad. Something had shattered his brain and
sealed his lips, for until the day of his death, which came soon after,
he spoke only to utter terrible blasphemies or to slaver gibberish.

""My own nephew when very small was lost in the mountains and slept in
the woods near the Stone, and now in his manhood he is tortured by foul
dreams, so that at times he makes the night hideous with his screams and
wakes with cold sweat upon him.

""But let us talk of something else, _Herr_; it is not good to dwell upon
such things.""

I remarked on the evident age of the tavern and he answered with pride.
""The foundations are more than four hundred years old; the original
house was the only one in the village which was not burned to the ground
when Suleiman's devil swept through the mountains. Here, in the house
that then stood on these same foundations, it is said, the scribe Selim
Bahadur had his headquarters while ravaging the country hereabouts.""

I learned then that the present inhabitants of Stregoicavar are not
descendants of the people who dwelt there before the Turkish raid of
1526. The victorious Moslems left no living human in the village or the
vicinity thereabouts when they passed over. Men, women and children they
wiped out in one red holocaust of murder, leaving a vast stretch of
country silent and utterly deserted. The present people of Stregoicavar
are descended from hardy settlers from the lower valleys who came into
the ruined village after the Turk was thrust back.

Mine host did not speak of the extermination of the original inhabitants
with any great resentment and I learned that his ancestors in the lower
levels had looked on the mountaineers with even more hatred and aversion
than they regarded the Turks. He was rather vague regarding the causes
of this feud, but said that the original inhabitants of Stregoicavar had
been in the habit of making stealthy raids on the lowlands and stealing
girls and children. Moreover, he said that they were not exactly of the
same blood as his own people; the sturdy, original Magyar-Slavic stock
had mixed and intermarried with a degraded aboriginal race until the
breeds had blended, producing an unsavory amalgamation. Who these
aborigines were, he had not the slightest idea, but maintained that they
were ""pagans"" and had dwelt in the mountains since time immemorial,
before the coming of the conquering peoples.

I attached little importance to this tale; seeing in it merely a
parallel to the amalgamation of Celtic tribes with Mediterranean
aborigines in the Galloway hills, with the resultant mixed race which,
as Picts, has such an extensive part in Scotch legendary. Time has a
curious foreshortening effect on folklore, and just as tales of the
Picts became intertwined with legends of an older Mongoloid race, so
that eventually the Picts were ascribed the repulsive appearance of the
squat primitives, whose individuality merged, in the telling, into
Pictish tales, and was forgotten; so, I felt, the supposed inhuman
attributes of the first villagers of Stregoicavar could be traced to
older, outworn myths with invading Huns and Mongols.

The morning after my arrival I received directions from mine host, who
gave them worriedly, and set out to find the Black Stone. A few hours'
tramp up the fir-covered slopes brought me to the face of the rugged,
solid stone cliff which jutted boldly from the mountainside. A narrow
trail wound up it, and mounting this, I looked out over the peaceful
valley of Stregoicavar, which seemed to drowse, guarded on either hand
by the great blue mountains. No huts or any sign of human tenancy showed
between the cliff whereon I stood and the village. I saw numbers of
scattering farms in the valley but all lay on the other side of
Stregoicavar, which itself seemed to shrink from the brooding slopes
which masked the Black Stone.

The summit of the cliffs proved to be a sort of thickly wooded plateau.
I made my way through the dense growth for a short distance and came
into a wide glade; and in the center of the glade reared a gaunt figure
of black stone.

It was octagonal in shape, some sixteen feet in height and about a foot
and a half thick. It had once evidently been highly polished, but now
the surface was thickly dinted as if savage efforts had been made to
demolish it; but the hammers had done little more than to flake off
small bits of stone and mutilate the characters which once had evidently
marched up in a spiraling line round and round the shaft to the top. Up
to ten feet from the base these characters were almost completely
blotted out, so that it was very difficult to trace their direction.
Higher up they were plainer, and I managed to squirm part of the way up
the shaft and scan them at close range. All were more or less defaced,
but I was positive that they symbolized no language now remembered on
the face of the earth. I am fairly familiar with all hieroglyphics known
to researchers and philologists and I can say, with certainty that those
characters were like nothing of which I have ever read or heard. The
nearest approach to them that I ever saw were some crude scratches on a
gigantic and strangely symmetrical rock in a lost valley of Yucatan. I
remember that when I pointed out these marks to the archeologist who was
my companion, he maintained that they either represented natural
weathering or the idle scratching of some Indian. To my theory that the
rock was really the base of a long-vanished column, he merely laughed,
calling my attention to the dimensions of it, which suggested, if it
were built with any natural rules of architectural symmetry, a column a
thousand feet high. But I was not convinced.

I will not say that the characters on the Black Stone were similar to
those on that colossal rock in Yucatan; but one suggested the other. As
to the substance of the monolith, again I was baffled. The stone of
which it was composed was a dully gleaming black, whose surface, where
it was not dinted and roughened, created a curious illusion of
semi-transparency.

I spent most of the morning there and came away baffled. No connection
of the Stone with any other artifact in the world suggested itself to
me. It was as if the monolith had been reared by alien hands, in an age
distant and apart from human ken.

I returned to the village with my interest in no way abated. Now that I
had seen the curious thing, my desire was still more keenly whetted to
investigate the matter further and seek to learn by what strange hands
and for what strange purpose the Black Stone had been reared in the long
ago.

I sought out the tavern-keeper's nephew and questioned him in regard to
his dreams, but he was vague, though willing to oblige. He did not mind
discussing them, but was unable to describe them with any clarity.
Though he dreamed the same dreams repeatedly, and though they were
hideously vivid at the time, they left no distinct impression on his
waking mind. He remembered them only as chaotic nightmares through which
huge whirling fires shot lurid tongues of flame and a black drum
bellowed incessantly. One thing only he remembered clearly--in one dream
he had seen the Black Stone, not on a mountain slope but set like a
spire on a colossal black castle.

As for the rest of the villagers I found them not inclined to talk about
the Stone, with the exception of the schoolmaster, a man of surprizing
education, who spent much more of his time out in the world than any of
the rest.

He was much interested in what I told him of Von Junzt's remarks about
the Stone, and warmly agreed with the German author in the alleged age
of the monolith. He believed that a coven had once existed in the
vicinity and that possibly all of the original villagers had been
members of that fertility cult which once threatened to undermine
European civilization and gave rise to the tales of witchcraft. He cited
the very name of the village to prove his point; it had not been
originally named Stregoicavar, he said; according to legends the
builders had called it Xuthltan, which was the aboriginal name of the
site on which the village had been built many centuries ago.

This fact roused again an indescribable feeling of uneasiness. The
barbarous name did not suggest connection with any Scythic, Slavic or
Mongolian race to which an aboriginal people of these mountains would,
under natural circumstances, have belonged.

That the Magyars and Slavs of the lower valleys believed the original
inhabitants of the village to be members of the witchcraft cult was
evident, the schoolmaster said, by the name they gave it, which name
continued to be used even after the older settlers had been massacred by
the Turks, and the village rebuilt by a cleaner and more wholesome
breed.

He did not believe that the members of the cult erected the monolith but
he did believe that they used it as a center of their activities, and
repeating vague legends which had been handed down since before the
Turkish invasion, he advanced the theory that the degenerate villagers
had used it as a sort of altar on which they offered human sacrifices,
using as victims the girls and babies stolen from his own ancestors in
the lower valleys.

He discounted the myths of weird events on Midsummer Night, as well as a
curious legend of a strange deity which the witch-people of Xuthltan
were said to have invoked with chants and wild rituals of flagellation
and slaughter.

He had never visited the Stone on Midsummer Night, he said, but he would
not fear to do so; whatever _had_ existed or taken place there in the
past, had been long engulfed in the mists of time and oblivion. The
Black Stone had lost its meaning save as a link to a dead and dusty
past.

It was while returning from a visit with this schoolmaster one night
about a week after my arrival at Stregoicavar that a sudden recollection
struck me--it was Midsummer Night! The very time that the legends linked
with grisly implications to the Black Stone. I turned away from the
tavern and strode swiftly through the village. Stregoicavar lay silent;
the villagers retired early. I saw no one as I passed rapidly out of the
village and up into the firs which masked the mountain's slopes with
whispering darkness. A broad silver moon hung above the valley, flooding
the crags and slopes in a weird light and etching the shadows blackly.
No wind blew through the firs, but a mysterious, intangible rustling and
whispering was abroad. Surely on such nights in past centuries, my
whimsical imagination told me, naked witches astride magic broomsticks
had flown across the valley, pursued by jeering demoniac familiars.

I came to the cliffs and was somewhat disquieted to note that the
illusive moonlight lent them a subtle appearance I had not noticed
before--in the weird light they appeared less like natural cliffs and
more like the ruins of cyclopean and Titan-reared battlements jutting
from the mountain-slope.

Shaking off this hallucination with difficulty I came upon the plateau
and hesitated a moment before I plunged into the brooding darkness of
the woods. A sort of breathless tenseness hung over the shadows, like an
unseen monster holding its breath lest it scare away its prey.

I shook off the sensation--a natural one, considering the eeriness of
the place and its evil reputation--and made my way through the wood,
experiencing a most unpleasant sensation that I was being followed, and
halting once, sure that something clammy and unstable had brushed
against my face in the darkness.

I came out into the glade and saw the tall monolith rearing its gaunt
height above the sward. At the edge of the woods on the side toward the
cliffs was a stone which formed a sort of natural seat. I sat down,
reflecting that it was probably while there that the mad poet, Justin
Geoffrey, had written his fantastic _People of the Monolith_. Mine host
thought that it was the Stone which had caused Geoffrey's insanity, but
the seeds of madness had been sown in the poet's brain long before he
ever came to Stregoicavar.

A glance at my watch showed that the hour of midnight was close at hand.
I leaned back, waiting whatever ghostly demonstration might appear. A
thin night wind started up among the branches of the firs, with an
uncanny suggestion of faint, unseen pipes whispering an eerie and evil
tune. The monotony of the sound and my steady gazing at the monolith
produced a sort of self-hypnosis upon me; I grew drowsy. I fought this
feeling, but sleep stole on me in spite of myself; the monolith seemed
to sway and dance, strangely distorted to my gaze, and then I slept.

I opened my eyes and sought to rise, but lay still, as if an icy hand
gripped me helpless. Cold terror stole over me. The glade was no longer
deserted. It was thronged by a silent crowd of strange people, and my
distended eyes took in strange barbaric details of costume which my
reason told me were archaic and forgotten even in this backward land.
Surely, I thought, these are villagers who have come here to hold some
fantastic conclave--but another glance told me that these people were
not the folk of Stregoicavar. They were a shorter, more squat race,
whose brows were lower, whose faces were broader and duller. Some had
Slavic and Magyar features, but those features were degraded as from a
mixture of some baser, alien strain I could not classify. Many wore the
hides of wild beasts, and their whole appearance, both men and women,
was one of sensual brutishness. They terrified and repelled me, but they
gave me no heed. They formed in a vast half-circle in front of the
monolith and began a sort of chant, flinging their arms in unison and
weaving their bodies rhythmically from the waist upward. All eyes were
fixed on the top of the Stone which they seemed to be invoking. But the
strangest of all was the dimness of their voices; not fifty yards from
me hundreds of men and women were unmistakably lifting their voices in a
wild chant, yet those voices came to me as a faint indistinguishable
murmur as if from across vast leagues of Space--or _time_.

Before the monolith stood a sort of brazier from which a vile, nauseous
yellow smoke billowed upward, curling curiously in a swaying spiral
around the black shaft, like a vast unstable snake.

On one side of this brazier lay two figures--a young girl, stark naked
and bound hand and foot, and an infant, apparently only a few months
old. On the other side of the brazier squatted a hideous old hag with a
queer sort of black drum on her lap; this drum she beat with slow light
blows of her open palms, but I could not hear the sound.

The rhythm of the swaying bodies grew faster and into the space between
the people and the monolith sprang a naked young woman, her eyes
blazing, her long black hair flying loose. Spinning dizzily on her toes,
she whirled across the open space and fell prostrate before the Stone,
where she lay motionless. The next instant a fantastic figure followed
her--a man from whose waist hung a goatskin, and whose features were
entirely hidden by a sort of mask made from a huge wolf's head, so that
he looked like a monstrous, nightmare being, horribly compounded of
elements both human and bestial. In his hand he held a bunch of long fir
switches bound together at the larger ends, and the moonlight glinted on
a chain of heavy gold looped about his neck. A smaller chain depending
from it suggested a pendant of some sort, but this was missing.

The people tossed their arms violently and seemed to redouble their
shouts as this grotesque creature loped across the open space with many
a fantastic leap and caper. Coming to the woman who lay before the
monolith, he began to lash her with the switches he bore, and she leaped
up and spun into the wild mazes of the most incredible dance I have ever
seen. And her tormentor danced with her, keeping the wild rhythm,
matching her every whirl and bound, while incessantly raining cruel
blows on her naked body. And at every blow he shouted a single word,
over and over, and all the people shouted it back. I could see the
working of their lips, and now the faint far-off murmur of their voices
merged and blended into one distant shout, repeated over and over with
slobbering ecstasy. But what the one word was, I could not make out.

In dizzy whirls spun the wild dancers, while the lookers-on, standing
still in their tracks, followed the rhythm of their dance with swaying
bodies and weaving arms. Madness grew in the eyes of the capering
votaress and was reflected in the eyes of the watchers. Wilder and more
extravagant grew the whirling frenzy of that mad dance--it became a
bestial and obscene thing, while the old hag howled and battered the
drum like a crazy woman, and the switches cracked out a devil's tune.

Blood trickled down the dancer's limbs but she seemed not to feel the
lashing save as a stimulus for further enormities of outrageous motion;
bounding into the midst of the yellow smoke which now spread out tenuous
tentacles to embrace both flying figures, she seemed to merge with that
foul fog and veil herself with it. Then emerging into plain view,
closely followed by the beast-thing that flogged her, she shot into an
indescribable, explosive burst of dynamic mad motion, and on the very
crest of that mad wave, she dropped suddenly to the sward, quivering and
panting as if completely overcome by her frenzied exertions. The lashing
continued with unabated violence and intensity and she began to wriggle
toward the monolith on her belly. The priest--or such I will call
him--followed, lashing her unprotected body with all the power of his
arm as she writhed along, leaving a heavy track of blood on the trampled
earth. She reached the monolith, and gasping and panting, flung both
arms about it and covered the cold stone with fierce hot kisses, as in
frenzied and unholy adoration.

The fantastic priest bounded high in the air, flinging away the
red-dabbled switches, and the worshippers, howling and foaming at the
mouths, turned on each other with tooth and nail, rending one another's
garments and flesh in a blind passion of bestiality. The priest swept up
the infant with a long arm, and shouting again that Name, whirled the
wailing babe high in the air and dashed its brains out against the
monolith, leaving a ghastly stain on the black surface. Cold with horror
I saw him rip the tiny body open with his bare brutish fingers and fling
handfuls of blood on the shaft, then toss the red and torn shape into
the brazier, extinguishing flame and smoke in a crimson rain, while the
maddened brutes behind him howled over and over the Name. Then suddenly
they all fell prostrate, writhing like snakes, while the priest flung
wide his gory hands as in triumph. I opened my mouth to scream my horror
and loathing, but only a dry rattle sounded; a huge monstrous toad-like
thing squatted on the top of the monolith!

I saw its bloated, repulsive and unstable outline against the moonlight
and set in what would have been the face of a natural creature, its
huge, blinking eyes which reflected all the lust, abysmal greed, obscene
cruelty and monstrous evil that has stalked the sons of men since their
ancestors moved blind and hairless in the treetops. In those grisly eyes
were mirrored all the unholy things and vile secrets that sleep in the
cities under the sea, and that skulk from the light of day in the
blackness of primordial caverns. And so that ghastly thing that the
unhallowed ritual of cruelty and sadism and blood had evoked from the
silence of the hills, leered and blinked down on its bestial
worshippers, who groveled in abhorrent abasement before it.

Now the beast-masked priest lifted the bound and weakly writhing girl in
his brutish hands and held her up toward that horror on the monolith.
And as that monstrosity sucked in its breath, lustfully and
slobberingly, something snapped in my brain and I fell into a merciful
faint.

I opened my eyes on a still white dawn. All the events of the night
rushed back on me and I sprang up, then stared about me in amazement.
The monolith brooded gaunt and silent above the sward which waved, green
and untrampled, in the morning breeze. A few quick strides took me
across the glade; here had the dancers leaped and bounded until the
ground should have been trampled bare, and here had the votaress
wriggled her painful way to the Stone, streaming blood on the earth. But
no drop of crimson showed on the uncrushed sward. I looked,
shudderingly, at the side of the monolith against which the bestial
priest had brained the stolen baby--but no dark stain nor grisly clot
showed there.

A dream! It had been a wild nightmare--or else--I shrugged my shoulders.
What vivid clarity for a dream!

I returned quietly to the village and entered the inn without being
seen. And there I sat meditating over the strange events of the night.
More and more was I prone to discard the dream-theory. That what I had
seen was illusion and without material substance, was evident. But I
believed that I had looked on the mirrored shadow of a deed perpetrated
in ghastly actuality in bygone days. But how was I to know? What proof
to show that my vision had been a gathering of foul specters rather than
a nightmare originating in my brain?

As if for answer a name flashed into my mind--Selim Bahadur! According
to legend this man, who had been a soldier as well as a scribe, had
commanded that part of Suleiman's army which had devastated
Stregoicavar; it seemed logical enough; and if so, he had gone straight
from the blotted-out countryside to the bloody field of Schomvaal, and
his doom. I sprang up with a sudden shout--that manuscript which was
taken from the Turk's body, and which Count Boris shuddered over--might
it not contain some narration of what the conquering Turks found in
Stregoicavar? What else could have shaken the iron nerves of the Polish
adventurer? And since the bones of the Count had never been recovered,
what more certain than that the lacquered case, with its mysterious
contents, still lay hidden beneath the ruins that covered Boris
Vladinoff? I began packing my bag with fierce haste.

Three days later found me ensconced in a little village a few miles from
the old battlefield, and when the moon rose I was working with savage
intensity on the great pile of crumbling stone that crowned the hill. It
was back-breaking toil--looking back now I can not see how I
accomplished it, though I labored without a pause from moonrise to dawn.
Just as the sun was coming up I tore aside the last tangle of stones and
looked on all that was mortal of Count Boris Vladinoff--only a few
pitiful fragments of crumbling bone--and among them, crushed out of all
original shape, lay a case whose lacquered surface had kept it from
complete decay through the centuries.

I seized it with frenzied eagerness, and piling back some of the stones
on the bones I hurried away; for I did not care to be discovered by the
suspicious peasants in an act of apparent desecration.

Back in my tavern chamber I opened the case and found the parchment
comparatively intact; and there was something else in the case--a small
squat object wrapped in silk. I was wild to plumb the secrets of those
yellowed pages, but weariness forbade me. Since leaving Stregoicavar I
had hardly slept at all, and the terrific exertions of the previous
night combined to overcome me. In spite of myself I was forced to
stretch myself on my bed, nor did I awake until sundown.

I snatched a hasty supper, and then in the light of a flickering candle,
I set myself to read the neat Turkish characters that covered the
parchment. It was difficult work, for I am not deeply versed in the
language and the archaic style of the narrative baffled me. But as I
toiled through it a word or a phrase here and there leaped at me and a
dimly growing horror shook me in its grip. I bent my energies fiercely
to the task, and as the tale grew clearer and took more tangible form my
blood chilled in my veins, my hair stood up and my tongue clove to my
mouth. All external things partook of the grisly madness of that
infernal manuscript until the night sounds of insects and creatures in
the woods took the form of ghastly murmurings and stealthy treadings of
ghoulish horrors and the sighing of the night wind changed to tittering
obscene gloating of evil over the souls of men.

At last when gray dawn was stealing through the latticed window, I laid
down the manuscript and took up and unwrapped the thing in the bit of
silk. Staring at it with haggard eyes I knew the truth of the matter was
clinched, even had it been possible to doubt the veracity of that
terrible manuscript.

And I replaced both obscene things in the case, nor did I rest nor sleep
nor eat until that case containing them had been weighted with stones
and flung into the deepest current of the Danube which, God grant,
carried them back into the Hell from which they came.

It was no dream I dreamed on Midsummer Midnight in the hills above
Stregoicavar. Well for Justin Geoffrey that he tarried there only in the
sunlight and went his way, for had he gazed upon that ghastly conclave,
his mad brain would have snapped before it did. How my own reason held,
I do not know.

No--it was no dream--I gazed upon a foul rout of votaries long dead,
come up from Hell to worship as of old; ghosts that bowed before a
ghost. For Hell has long claimed their hideous god. Long, long he dwelt
among the hills, a brain-shattering vestige of an outworn age, but no
longer his obscene talons clutch for the souls of living men, and his
kingdom is a dead kingdom, peopled only by the ghosts of those who
served him in his lifetime and theirs.

By what foul alchemy or godless sorcery the Gates of Hell are opened on
that one eerie night I do not know, but mine own eyes have seen. And I
know I looked on no living thing that night, for the manuscript written
in the careful hand of Selim Bahadur narrated at length what he and his
raiders found in the valley of Stregoicavar; and I read, set down in
detail, the blasphemous obscenities that torture wrung from the lips of
screaming worshippers; and I read, too, of the lost, grim black cavern
high in the hills where the horrified Turks hemmed a monstrous, bloated,
wallowing toad-like being and slew it with flame and ancient steel
blessed in old times by Muhammad, and with incantations that were old
when Arabia was young. And even staunch old Selim's hand shook as he
recorded the cataclysmic, earth-shaking death-howls of the monstrosity,
which died not alone; for half-score of his slayers perished with him,
in ways that Selim would not or could not describe.

And that squat idol carved of gold and wrapped in silk was an image of
_himself_, and Selim tore it from the golden chain that looped the neck
of the slain high priest of the mask.

Well that the Turks swept out that foul valley with torch and cleanly
steel! Such sights as those brooding mountains have looked on belong to
the darkness and abysses of lost eons. No--it is not fear of the
toad-thing that makes me shudder in the night. He is made fast in Hell
with his nauseous horde, freed only for an hour on the most weird night
of the year, as I have seen. And of his worshippers, none remains.

But it is the realization that such things once crouched beast-like
above the souls of men which brings cold sweat to my brow; and I fear to
peer again into the leaves of Von Junzt's abomination. For now I
understand his repeated phrase of _keys_!--aye! Keys to Outer
Doors--links with an abhorrent past and--who knows?--of abhorrent
spheres of the _present_. And I understand why the cliffs look like
battlements in the moonlight and why the tavern-keeper's
nightmare-haunted nephew saw in his dream, the Black Stone like a spire
on a cyclopean black castle. If men ever excavate among those mountains
they may find incredible things below those masking slopes. For the cave
wherein the Turks trapped the--_thing_--was not truly a cavern, and I
shudder to contemplate the gigantic gulf of eons which must stretch
between this age and the time when the earth shook herself and reared
up, like a wave, those blue mountains that, rising, enveloped
unthinkable things. May no man ever seek to uproot that ghastly spire
men call the Black Stone!

A Key! Aye, it is a Key, symbol of a forgotten horror. That horror has
faded into the limbo from which it crawled, loathsomely, in the black
dawn of the earth. But what of the other fiendish possibilities hinted
at by Von Junzt--what of the monstrous hand which strangled out his
life? Since reading what Selim Bahadur wrote, I can no longer doubt
anything in the Black Book. Man was not always master of the earth--_and
is he now?_

And the thought recurs to me--if such a monstrous entity as the Master
of the Monolith somehow survived its own unspeakably distant epoch so
long--_what nameless shapes may even now lurk in the dark places of the
world?_
","When the young man named Sanang left the bed-chamber of Tressa Norne he turned to the right in the carpeted corridor outside and hurried toward the hotel elevator. But he did not ring for the lift; instead he took the spiral iron stairway which circled it, and mounted hastily to the floor above.

Here was his own apartment and he entered it with a key bearing the hotel tag. A dusky-skinned powerful old man wearing a grizzled beard and a greasy broadcloth coat of old-fashioned cut known to provincials as a ""Prince Albert"" looked up from where he was seated cross-legged upon the sofa, sharpening a curved knife on a whetstone.

""Gutchlug,"" stammered Sanang, ""I am afraid of her! What happened two years ago at the temple happened again a moment since, there in her very bedroom! She made a yellow death-adder out of nothing and placed it upon the threshold, and mocked me with laughter. May Thirty Thousand Calamities overtake her! May Erlik seize her! May her eyes rot out and her limbs fester! May the seven score and three principal devils——""

""You chatter like a temple ape,"" said Gutchlug tranquilly. ""Does Keuke Mongol die or live? That alone interests me.""

""Gutchlug,"" faltered the young man, ""thou knowest that m-my heart is inclined to mercy toward this young Yezidee——""

""I know that it is inclined to lust,"" said the other bluntly.

Sanang's pale face flamed.

""Listen,"" he said. ""If I had not loved her better than life had I dared go that day to the temple to take her for my own?""

""You loved life better,"" said Gutchlug. ""You fled when it rained snakes on the temple steps—you and your Tchortcha horsemen! Kai! I also ran. But I gave every soldier thirty blows with a stick before I slept that night. And you should have had your thirty, also, conforming to the Yarlig, my Tougtchi.""

Sanang, still holding his hat and cane and carrying his overcoat over his left arm, looked down at the heavy, brutal features of Gutchlug Khan—at the cruel mouth with its crooked smile under the grizzled beard; at the huge hands—the powerful hands of a murderer—now deftly honing to a razor-edge the Kalmuck knife held so firmly yet lightly in his great blunt fingers.

""Listen attentively, Prince Sanang,"" growled Gutchlug, pausing in his monotonous task to test the blade's edge on his thumb—""Does the Yezidee Keuke Mongol live? Yes or no?""

Sanang hesitated, moistened his pallid lips. ""She dares not betray us.""

""By what pledge?""

""Fear.""

""That is no pledge. You also were afraid, yet you went to the temple!""

""She has listened to the Yarlig. She has looked upon her shroud. She has admitted that she desires to live. Therein lies her pledge to us.""

""And she placed a yellow snake at your feet!"" sneered Gutchlug. ""Prince Sanang, tell me, what man or what devil in all the chronicles of the past has ever tamed a Snow-Leopard?"" And he continued to hone his yataghan.

""Gutchlug——""

""No, she dies,"" said the other tranquilly.

""Not yet!""

""When, then?""

""Gutchlug, thou knowest me. Hear my pledge! At her first gesture toward treachery—her first thought of betrayal—I myself will end it all.""

""You promise to slay this young snow-leopardess?""

""By the four companions, I swear to kill her with my own hands!""

Gutchlug sneered. ""Kill her—yes—with the kiss that has burned thy lips to ashes for all these months. I know thee, Sanang. Leave her to me. Dead she will no longer trouble thee.""

""Gutchlug!""

""I hear, Prince Sanang.""

""Strike when I nod. Not until then.""

""I hear, Tougtchi. I understand thee, my Banneret. I whet my knife. Kai!""

Sanang looked at him, put on his top-hat and overcoat, pulled on a pair of white evening gloves.

""I go forth,"" he said more pleasantly.

""I remain here to talk to my seven ancestors and sharpen my knife,"" remarked Gutchlug.

""When the white world and the yellow world and the brown world and the black world finally fall before the Hassanis,"" said Sanang with a quick smile, ""I shall bring thee to her. Gutchlug—once—before she is veiled, thou shalt behold what is lovelier than Eve.""

The other stolidly whetted his knife.

Sanang pulled out a gold cigarette case, lighted a cigarette with an air.

""I go among Germans,"" he volunteered amiably. ""The huns swam across two oceans, but, like the unclean swine, it is their own throats they cut when they swim! Well, there is only one God. And not very many angels. Erlik is greater. And there are many million devils to do his bidding. Adieu. There is rice and there is koumiss in the frozen closet. When I return you shall have been asleep for hours.""

When Sanang left the hotel one of two young men seated in the hotel lobby got up and strolled out after him.

A few minutes later the other man went to the elevator, ascended to the fourth floor, and entered an apartment next to the one occupied by Sanang.

There was another man there, lying on the lounge and smoking a cigar. Without a word, they both went leisurely about the matter of disrobing for the night.

When the shorter man who had been in the apartment when the other entered, and who was dark and curly-headed, had attired himself in pyjamas, he sat down on one of the twin beds to enjoy his cigar to the bitter end.

""Has Sanang gone out?"" he inquired in a low voice.

""Yes. Benton went after him.""

The other man nodded. ""Cleves,"" he said, ""I guess it looks as though this Norne girl is in it, too.""

""What happened?""

""As soon as she arrived, Sanang made straight for her apartment. He remained inside for half an hour. Then he came out in a hurry and went to his own rooms, where that surly servant of his squats all day, shining up his arsenal, and drinking koumiss.""

""Did you get their conversation?""

""I've got a record of the gibberish. It requires an interpreter, of course.""

""I suppose so. I'll take the records east with me to-morrow, and by the same token I'd better notify New York that I'm leaving.""

He went, half-undressed, to the telephone, got the telegraph office, and sent the following message:

""Recklow, New York:

""Leaving to-morrow for N. Y. with samples. Retain expert in Oriental fabrics.

""Victor Cleves.""

""Report for me, too,"" said the dark young man, who was still enjoying his cigar on his pillows.

So Cleves sent another telegram, directed also to

""Recklow, New York:

""Benton and I are watching the market. Chinese importations fluctuate. Recent consignment per Nan-yang Maru will be carefully inspected and details forwarded.

""Alek Selden.""

In the next room Gutchlug could hear the voice of Cleves at the telephone, but he merely shrugged his heavy shoulders in contempt. For he had other things to do beside eavesdropping.

Also, for the last hour—in fact, ever since Sanang's departure—something had been happening to him—something that happens to a Hassani only once in a lifetime. And now this unique thing had happened to him—to him, Gutchlug Khan—to him before whose Khiounnou ancestors eighty-one thousand nations had bowed the knee.

It had come to him at last, this dread thing, unheralded, totally unexpected, a few minutes after Sanang had departed.

And he suddenly knew he was going to die.

And, when, presently, he comprehended it, he bent his grizzled head and listened seriously. And, after a little silence, he heard his soul bidding him farewell.

So the chatter of white men at a telephone in the next apartment had no longer any significance for him. Whether or not they had been spying on him; whether they were plotting, made no difference to him now.

He tested his knife's edge with his thumb and listened gravely to his soul bidding him farewell.

But, for a Yezidee, there was still a little detail to attend to before his soul departed;—two matters to regulate. One was to select his shroud. The other was to cut the white throat of this young snow-leopardess called Keuke Mongol, the Yezidee temple girl.

And he could steal down to her bedroom and finish that matter in five minutes.

But first he must choose his shroud, as is the custom of the Yezidee.

That office, however, was quickly accomplished in a country where fine white sheets of linen are to be found on every hotel bed.

So, on his way to the door, his naked knife in his right hand, he paused to fumble under the bed-covers and draw out a white linen sheet.

Something hurt his hand like a needle. He moved it, felt the thing squirm under his fingers and pierce his palm again and again. With a shriek, he tore the bedclothes from the bed.

A little yellow snake lay coiled there.

He got as far as the telephone, but could not use it. And there he fell heavily, shaking the room and dragging the instrument down with him.

There was some excitement. Cleves and Selden in their bathrobes went in to look at the body. The hotel physician diagnosed it as heart-trouble. Or, possibly, poison. Some gazed significantly at the naked knife still clutched in the dead man's hands.

Around the wrist of the other hand was twisted a pliable gold bracelet representing a little snake. It had real emeralds for eyes.

It had not been there when Gutchlug died.

But nobody except Sanang could know that. And later when Sanang came back and found Gutchlug very dead on the bed and a policeman sitting outside, he offered no information concerning the new bracelet shaped like a snake with real emeralds for eyes, which adorned the dead man's left wrist.

Toward evening, however, after an autopsy had confirmed the house physician's diagnosis that heart-disease had finished Gutchlug, Sanang mustered enough courage to go to the desk in the lobby and send up his card to Miss Norne.

It appeared, however, that Miss Norne had left for Chicago about noon.

",False
"
I

There are so many things which are impossible to explain! Why should
certain chords in music make me think of the brown and golden tints of
autumn foliage? Why should the Mass of Sainte Cécile bend my thoughts
wandering among caverns whose walls blaze with ragged masses of virgin
silver? What was it in the roar and turmoil of Broadway at six o'clock
that flashed before my eyes the picture of a still Breton forest where
sunlight filtered through spring foliage and Sylvia bent, half curiously,
half tenderly, over a small green lizard, murmuring: ""To think that this
also is a little ward of God!""

When I first saw the watchman his back was toward me. I looked at him
indifferently until he went into the church. I paid no more attention to
him than I had to any other man who lounged through Washington Square
that morning, and when I shut my window and turned back into my studio I
had forgotten him. Late in the afternoon, the day being warm, I raised
the window again and leaned out to get a sniff of air. A man was standing
in the courtyard of the church, and I noticed him again with as little
interest as I had that morning. I looked across the square to where the
fountain was playing and then, with my mind filled with vague impressions
of trees, asphalt drives, and the moving groups of nursemaids and
holiday-makers, I started to walk back to my easel. As I turned, my
listless glance included the man below in the churchyard. His face was
toward me now, and with a perfectly involuntary movement I bent to see
it. At the same moment he raised his head and looked at me. Instantly I
thought of a coffin-worm. Whatever it was about the man that repelled me
I did not know, but the impression of a plump white grave-worm was so
intense and nauseating that I must have shown it in my expression, for he
turned his puffy face away with a movement which made me think of a
disturbed grub in a chestnut.

I went back to my easel and motioned the model to resume her pose. After
working a while I was satisfied that I was spoiling what I had done as
rapidly as possible, and I took up a palette knife and scraped the colour
out again. The flesh tones were sallow and unhealthy, and I did not
understand how I could have painted such sickly colour into a study which
before that had glowed with healthy tones.

I looked at Tessie. She had not changed, and the clear flush of health
dyed her neck and cheeks as I frowned.

""Is it something I've done?"" she said.

""No,--I've made a mess of this arm, and for the life of me I can't see
how I came to paint such mud as that into the canvas,"" I replied.

""Don't I pose well?"" she insisted.

""Of course, perfectly.""

""Then it's not my fault?""

""No. It's my own.""

""I am very sorry,"" she said.

I told her she could rest while I applied rag and turpentine to the
plague spot on my canvas, and she went off to smoke a cigarette and look
over the illustrations in the _Courrier Français_.

I did not know whether it was something in the turpentine or a defect in
the canvas, but the more I scrubbed the more that gangrene seemed to
spread. I worked like a beaver to get it out, and yet the disease
appeared to creep from limb to limb of the study before me. Alarmed, I
strove to arrest it, but now the colour on the breast changed and the
whole figure seemed to absorb the infection as a sponge soaks up water.
Vigorously I plied palette-knife, turpentine, and scraper, thinking all
the time what a _séance_ I should hold with Duval who had sold me
the canvas; but soon I noticed that it was not the canvas which was
defective nor yet the colours of Edward. ""It must be the turpentine,"" I
thought angrily, ""or else my eyes have become so blurred and confused by
the afternoon light that I can't see straight."" I called Tessie, the
model. She came and leaned over my chair blowing rings of smoke into the
air.

""What _have_ you been doing to it?"" she exclaimed

""Nothing,"" I growled, ""it must be this turpentine!""

""What a horrible colour it is now,"" she continued. ""Do you think my flesh
resembles green cheese?""

""No, I don't,"" I said angrily; ""did you ever know me to paint like that
before?""

""No, indeed!""

""Well, then!""

""It must be the turpentine, or something,"" she admitted.

She slipped on a Japanese robe and walked to the window. I scraped and
rubbed until I was tired, and finally picked up my brushes and hurled
them through the canvas with a forcible expression, the tone alone of
which reached Tessie's ears.

Nevertheless she promptly began: ""That's it! Swear and act silly and ruin
your brushes! You have been three weeks on that study, and now look!
What's the good of ripping the canvas? What creatures artists are!""

I felt about as much ashamed as I usually did after such an outbreak, and
I turned the ruined canvas to the wall. Tessie helped me clean my
brushes, and then danced away to dress. From the screen she regaled me
with bits of advice concerning whole or partial loss of temper, until,
thinking, perhaps, I had been tormented sufficiently, she came out to
implore me to button her waist where she could not reach it on the
shoulder.

""Everything went wrong from the time you came back from the window and
talked about that horrid-looking man you saw in the churchyard,"" she
announced.

""Yes, he probably bewitched the picture,"" I said, yawning. I looked at my
watch.

""It's after six, I know,"" said Tessie, adjusting her hat before the
mirror.

""Yes,"" I replied, ""I didn't mean to keep you so long."" I leaned out of
the window but recoiled with disgust, for the young man with the pasty
face stood below in the churchyard. Tessie saw my gesture of disapproval
and leaned from the window.

""Is that the man you don't like?"" she whispered.

I nodded.

""I can't see his face, but he does look fat and soft. Someway or other,""
she continued, turning to look at me, ""he reminds me of a dream,--an
awful dream I once had. Or,"" she mused, looking down at her shapely
shoes, ""was it a dream after all?""

""How should I know?"" I smiled.

Tessie smiled in reply.

""You were in it,"" she said, ""so perhaps you might know something about
it.""

""Tessie! Tessie!"" I protested, ""don't you dare flatter by saying that you
dream about me!""

""But I did,"" she insisted; ""shall I tell you about it?""

""Go ahead,"" I replied, lighting a cigarette.

Tessie leaned back on the open window-sill and began very seriously.

""One night last winter I was lying in bed thinking about nothing at all
in particular. I had been posing for you and I was tired out, yet it
seemed impossible for me to sleep. I heard the bells in the city ring
ten, eleven, and midnight. I must have fallen asleep about midnight
because I don't remember hearing the bells after that. It seemed to me
that I had scarcely closed my eyes when I dreamed that something impelled
me to go to the window. I rose, and raising the sash leaned out.
Twenty-fifth Street was deserted as far as I could see. I began to be
afraid; everything outside seemed so--so black and uncomfortable. Then
the sound of wheels in the distance came to my ears, and it seemed to me
as though that was what I must wait for. Very slowly the wheels
approached, and, finally, I could make out a vehicle moving along the
street. It came nearer and nearer, and when it passed beneath my window I
saw it was a hearse. Then, as I trembled with fear, the driver turned and
looked straight at me. When I awoke I was standing by the open window
shivering with cold, but the black-plumed hearse and the driver were
gone. I dreamed this dream again in March last, and again awoke beside
the open window. Last night the dream came again. You remember how it was
raining; when I awoke, standing at the open window, my night-dress was
soaked.""

""But where did I come into the dream?"" I asked.

""You--you were in the coffin; but you were not dead.""

""In the coffin?""

""Yes.""

""How did you know? Could you see me?""

""No; I only knew you were there.""

""Had you been eating Welsh rarebits, or lobster salad?"" I began,
laughing, but the girl interrupted me with a frightened cry.

""Hello! What's up?"" I said, as she shrank into the embrasure by the
window.

""The--the man below in the churchyard;--he drove the hearse.""

""Nonsense,"" I said, but Tessie's eyes were wide with terror. I went to
the window and looked out. The man was gone. ""Come, Tessie,"" I urged,
""don't be foolish. You have posed too long; you are nervous.""

""Do you think I could forget that face?"" she murmured. ""Three times I saw
the hearse pass below my window, and every time the driver turned and
looked up at me. Oh, his face was so white and--and soft? It looked
dead--it looked as if it had been dead a long time.""

I induced the girl to sit down and swallow a glass of Marsala. Then I sat
down beside her, and tried to give her some advice.

""Look here, Tessie,"" I said, ""you go to the country for a week or two,
and you'll have no more dreams about hearses. You pose all day, and when
night comes your nerves are upset. You can't keep this up. Then again,
instead of going to bed when your day's work is done, you run off to
picnics at Sulzer's Park, or go to the Eldorado or Coney Island, and when
you come down here next morning you are fagged out. There was no real
hearse. There was a soft-shell crab dream.""

She smiled faintly.

""What about the man in the churchyard?""

""Oh, he's only an ordinary unhealthy, everyday creature.""

""As true as my name is Tessie Reardon, I swear to you, Mr. Scott, that
the face of the man below in the churchyard is the face of the man who
drove the hearse!""

""What of it?"" I said. ""It's an honest trade.""

""Then you think I _did_ see the hearse?""

""Oh,"" I said diplomatically, ""if you really did, it might not be unlikely
that the man below drove it. There is nothing in that.""

Tessie rose, unrolled her scented handkerchief, and taking a bit of gum
from a knot in the hem, placed it in her mouth. Then drawing on her
gloves she offered me her hand, with a frank, ""Good-night, Mr. Scott,""
and walked out.




II

The next morning, Thomas, the bell-boy, brought me the _Herald_ and
a bit of news. The church next door had been sold. I thanked Heaven for
it, not that being a Catholic I had any repugnance for the congregation
next door, but because my nerves were shattered by a blatant exhorter,
whose every word echoed through the aisle of the church as if it had been
my own rooms, and who insisted on his r's with a nasal persistence which
revolted my every instinct. Then, too, there was a fiend in human shape,
an organist, who reeled off some of the grand old hymns with an
interpretation of his own, and I longed for the blood of a creature who
could play the doxology with an amendment of minor chords which one hears
only in a quartet of very young undergraduates. I believe the minister
was a good man, but when he bellowed: ""And the Lorrrrd said unto Moses,
the Lorrrd is a man of war; the Lorrrd is his name. My wrath shall wax
hot and I will kill you with the sworrrrd!"" I wondered how many centuries
of purgatory it would take to atone for such a sin.

""Who bought the property?"" I asked Thomas.

""Nobody that I knows, sir. They do say the gent wot owns this 'ere
'Amilton flats was lookin' at it. 'E might be a bildin' more studios.""

I walked to the window. The young man with the unhealthy face stood by
the churchyard gate, and at the mere sight of him the same overwhelming
repugnance took possession of me.

""By the way, Thomas,"" I said, ""who is that fellow down there?""

Thomas sniffed. ""That there worm, sir? 'Es night-watchman of the church,
sir. 'E maikes me tired a-sittin' out all night on them steps and lookin'
at you insultin' like. I'd a punched 'is 'ed, sir--beg pardon, sir--""

""Go on, Thomas.""

""One night a comin' 'ome with Arry, the other English boy, I sees 'im a
sittin' there on them steps. We 'ad Molly and Jen with us, sir, the two
girls on the tray service, an' 'e looks so insultin' at us that I up and
sez: 'Wat you looking hat, you fat slug?'--beg pardon, sir, but that's
'ow I sez, sir. Then 'e don't say nothin' and I sez: 'Come out and I'll
punch that puddin' 'ed.' Then I hopens the gate an' goes in, but 'e don't
say nothin', only looks insultin' like. Then I 'its 'im one, but, ugh!
'is 'ed was that cold and mushy it ud sicken you to touch 'im.""

""What did he do then?"" I asked curiously.

""'Im? Nawthin'.""

""And you, Thomas?""

The young fellow flushed with embarrassment and smiled uneasily.

""Mr. Scott, sir, I ain't no coward, an' I can't make it out at all why I
run. I was in the 5th Lawncers, sir, bugler at Tel-el-Kebir, an' was shot
by the wells.""

""You don't mean to say you ran away?""

""Yes, sir; I run.""

""Why?""

""That's just what I want to know, sir. I grabbed Molly an' run, an' the
rest was as frightened as I.""

""But what were they frightened at?""

Thomas refused to answer for a while, but now my curiosity was aroused
about the repulsive young man below and I pressed him. Three years'
sojourn in America had not only modified Thomas' cockney dialect but had
given him the American's fear of ridicule.

""You won't believe me, Mr. Scott, sir?""

""Yes, I will.""

""You will lawf at me, sir?""

""Nonsense!""

He hesitated. ""Well, sir, it's Gawd's truth that when I 'it 'im 'e
grabbed me wrists, sir, and when I twisted 'is soft, mushy fist one of
'is fingers come off in me 'and.""

The utter loathing and horror of Thomas' face must have been reflected in
my own, for he added:

""It's orful, an' now when I see 'im I just go away. 'E maikes me hill.""

When Thomas had gone I went to the window. The man stood beside the
church-railing with both hands on the gate, but I hastily retreated to my
easel again, sickened and horrified, for I saw that the middle finger of
his right hand was missing.

At nine o'clock Tessie appeared and vanished behind the screen with a
merry ""Good morning, Mr. Scott."" When she had reappeared and taken her
pose upon the model-stand I started a new canvas, much to her delight.
She remained silent as long as I was on the drawing, but as soon as the
scrape of the charcoal ceased and I took up my fixative she began to
chatter.

""Oh, I had such a lovely time last night. We went to Tony Pastor's.""

""Who are 'we'?"" I demanded.

""Oh, Maggie, you know, Mr. Whyte's model, and Pinkie McCormick--we call
her Pinkie because she's got that beautiful red hair you artists like so
much--and Lizzie Burke.""

I sent a shower of spray from the fixative over the canvas, and said:
""Well, go on.""

""We saw Kelly and Baby Barnes the skirt-dancer and--and all the rest. I
made a mash.""

""Then you have gone back on me, Tessie?""

She laughed and shook her head.

""He's Lizzie Burke's brother, Ed. He's a perfect gen'l'man.""

I felt constrained to give her some parental advice concerning mashing,
which she took with a bright smile.

""Oh, I can take care of a strange mash,"" she said, examining her chewing
gum, ""but Ed is different. Lizzie is my best friend.""

Then she related how Ed had come back from the stocking mill in Lowell,
Massachusetts, to find her and Lizzie grown up, and what an accomplished
young man he was, and how he thought nothing of squandering half-a-dollar
for ice-cream and oysters to celebrate his entry as clerk into the
woollen department of Macy's. Before she finished I began to paint, and
she resumed the pose, smiling and chattering like a sparrow. By noon I
had the study fairly well rubbed in and Tessie came to look at it.

""That's better,"" she said.

I thought so too, and ate my lunch with a satisfied feeling that all was
going well. Tessie spread her lunch on a drawing table opposite me and we
drank our claret from the same bottle and lighted our cigarettes from the
same match. I was very much attached to Tessie. I had watched her shoot
up into a slender but exquisitely formed woman from a frail, awkward
child. She had posed for me during the last three years, and among all my
models she was my favourite. It would have troubled me very much indeed
had she become ""tough"" or ""fly,"" as the phrase goes, but I never noticed
any deterioration of her manner, and felt at heart that she was all
right. She and I never discussed morals at all, and I had no intention of
doing so, partly because I had none myself, and partly because I knew she
would do what she liked in spite of me. Still I did hope she would steer
clear of complications, because I wished her well, and then also I had a
selfish desire to retain the best model I had. I knew that mashing, as
she termed it, had no significance with girls like Tessie, and that such
things in America did not resemble in the least the same things in Paris.
Yet, having lived with my eyes open, I also knew that somebody would take
Tessie away some day, in one manner or another, and though I professed to
myself that marriage was nonsense, I sincerely hoped that, in this case,
there would be a priest at the end of the vista. I am a Catholic. When I
listen to high mass, when I sign myself, I feel that everything,
including myself, is more cheerful, and when I confess, it does me good.
A man who lives as much alone as I do, must confess to somebody. Then,
again, Sylvia was Catholic, and it was reason enough for me. But I was
speaking of Tessie, which is very different. Tessie also was Catholic and
much more devout than I, so, taking it all in all, I had little fear for
my pretty model until she should fall in love. But _then_ I knew
that fate alone would decide her future for her, and I prayed inwardly
that fate would keep her away from men like me and throw into her path
nothing but Ed Burkes and Jimmy McCormicks, bless her sweet face!

Tessie sat blowing rings of smoke up to the ceiling and tinkling the ice
in her tumbler.

""Do you know that I also had a dream last night?"" I observed.

""Not about that man,"" she laughed.

""Exactly. A dream similar to yours, only much worse.""

It was foolish and thoughtless of me to say this, but you know how little
tact the average painter has. ""I must have fallen asleep about ten
o'clock,"" I continued, ""and after a while I dreamt that I awoke. So
plainly did I hear the midnight bells, the wind in the tree-branches, and
the whistle of steamers from the bay, that even now I can scarcely
believe I was not awake. I seemed to be lying in a box which had a glass
cover. Dimly I saw the street lamps as I passed, for I must tell you,
Tessie, the box in which I reclined appeared to lie in a cushioned wagon
which jolted me over a stony pavement. After a while I became impatient
and tried to move, but the box was too narrow. My hands were crossed on
my breast, so I could not raise them to help myself. I listened and then
tried to call. My voice was gone. I could hear the trample of the horses
attached to the wagon, and even the breathing of the driver. Then another
sound broke upon my ears like the raising of a window sash. I managed to
turn my head a little, and found I could look, not only through the glass
cover of my box, but also through the glass panes in the side of the
covered vehicle. I saw houses, empty and silent, with neither light nor
life about any of them excepting one. In that house a window was open on
the first floor, and a figure all in white stood looking down into the
street. It was you.""

Tessie had turned her face away from me and leaned on the table with her
elbow.

""I could see your face,"" I resumed, ""and it seemed to me to be very
sorrowful. Then we passed on and turned into a narrow black lane.
Presently the horses stopped. I waited and waited, closing my eyes with
ear and impatience, but all was silent as the grave. After what seemed to
me hours, I began to feel uncomfortable. A sense that somebody was close
to me made me unclose my eyes. Then I saw the white face of the
hearse-driver looking at me through the coffin-lid----""

A sob from Tessie interrupted me. She was trembling like a leaf. I saw I
had made an ass of myself and attempted to repair the damage.

""Why, Tess,"" I said, ""I only told you this to show you what influence
your story might have on another person's dreams. You don't suppose I
really lay in a coffin, do you? What are you trembling for? Don't you see
that your dream and my unreasonable dislike for that inoffensive watchman
of the church simply set my brain working as soon as I fell asleep?""

She laid her head between her arms, and sobbed as if her heart would
break. What a precious triple donkey I had made of myself! But I was
about to break my record. I went over and put my arm about her.

""Tessie dear, forgive me,"" I said; ""I had no business to frighten you
with such nonsense. You are too sensible a girl, too good a Catholic to
believe in dreams.""

Her hand tightened on mine and her head fell back upon my shoulder, but
she still trembled and I petted her and comforted her.

""Come, Tess, open your eyes and smile.""

Her eyes opened with a slow languid movement and met mine, but their
expression was so queer that I hastened to reassure her again.

""It's all humbug, Tessie; you surely are not afraid that any harm will
come to you because of that.""

""No,"" she said, but her scarlet lips quivered.

""Then, what's the matter? Are you afraid?""

""Yes. Not for myself.""

""For me, then?"" I demanded gaily.

""For you,"" she murmured in a voice almost inaudible. ""I--I care for you.""

At first I started to laugh, but when I understood her, a shock passed
through me, and I sat like one turned to stone. This was the crowning bit
of idiocy I had committed. During the moment which elapsed between her
reply and my answer I thought of a thousand responses to that innocent
confession. I could pass it by with a laugh, I could misunderstand her
and assure her as to my health, I could simply point out that it was
impossible she could love me. But my reply was quicker than my thoughts,
and I might think and think now when it was too late, for I had kissed
her on the mouth.

That evening I took my usual walk in Washington Park, pondering over the
occurrences of the day. I was thoroughly committed. There was no back out
now, and I stared the future straight in the face. I was not good, not
even scrupulous, but I had no idea of deceiving either myself or Tessie.
The one passion of my life lay buried in the sunlit forests of Brittany.
Was it buried for ever? Hope cried ""No!"" For three years I had been
listening to the voice of Hope, and for three years I had waited for a
footstep on my threshold. Had Sylvia forgotten? ""No!"" cried Hope.

I said that I was no good. That is true, but still I was not exactly a
comic opera villain. I had led an easy-going reckless life, taking what
invited me of pleasure, deploring and sometimes bitterly regretting
consequences. In one thing alone, except my painting, was I serious, and
that was something which lay hidden if not lost in the Breton forests.

It was too late for me to regret what had occurred during the day.
Whatever it had been, pity, a sudden tenderness for sorrow, or the more
brutal instinct of gratified vanity, it was all the same now, and unless
I wished to bruise an innocent heart, my path lay marked before me. The
fire and strength, the depth of passion of a love which I had never even
suspected, with all my imagined experience in the world, left me no
alternative but to respond or send her away. Whether because I am so
cowardly about giving pain to others, or whether it was that I have
little of the gloomy Puritan in me, I do not know, but I shrank from
disclaiming responsibility for that thoughtless kiss, and in fact had no
time to do so before the gates of her heart opened and the flood poured
forth. Others who habitually do their duty and find a sullen satisfaction
in making themselves and everybody else unhappy, might have withstood it.
I did not. I dared not. After the storm had abated I did tell her that
she might better have loved Ed Burke and worn a plain gold ring, but she
would not hear of it, and I thought perhaps as long as she had decided to
love somebody she could not marry, it had better be me. I, at least,
could treat her with an intelligent affection, and whenever she became
tired of her infatuation she could go none the worse for it. For I was
decided on that point although I knew how hard it would be. I remembered
the usual termination of Platonic liaisons, and thought how disgusted I
had been whenever I heard of one. I knew I was undertaking a great deal
for so unscrupulous a man as I was, and I dreamed the future, but never
for one moment did I doubt that she was safe with me. Had it been anybody
but Tessie I should not have bothered my head about scruples. For it did
not occur to me to sacrifice Tessie as I would have sacrificed a woman of
the world. I looked the future squarely in the face and saw the several
probable endings to the affair. She would either tire of the whole thing,
or become so unhappy that I should have either to marry her or go away.
If I married her we would be unhappy. I with a wife unsuited to me, and
she with a husband unsuitable for any woman. For my past life could
scarcely entitle me to marry. If I went away she might either fall ill,
recover, and marry some Eddie Burke, or she might recklessly or
deliberately go and do something foolish. On the other hand, if she tired
of me, then her whole life would be before her with beautiful vistas of
Eddie Burkes and marriage rings and twins and Harlem flats and Heaven
knows what. As I strolled along through the trees by the Washington Arch,
I decided that she should find a substantial friend in me, anyway, and
the future could take care of itself. Then I went into the house and put
on my evening dress, for the little faintly-perfumed note on my dresser
said, ""Have a cab at the stage door at eleven,"" and the note was signed
""Edith Carmichel, Metropolitan Theatre.""

I took supper that night, or rather we took supper, Miss Carmichel and I,
at Solari's, and the dawn was just beginning to gild the cross on the
Memorial Church as I entered Washington Square after leaving Edith at the
Brunswick. There was not a soul in the park as I passed along the trees
and took the walk which leads from the Garibaldi statue to the Hamilton
Apartment House, but as I passed the churchyard I saw a figure sitting on
the stone steps. In spite of myself a chill crept over me at the sight of
the white puffy face, and I hastened to pass. Then he said something
which might have been addressed to me or might merely have been a mutter
to himself, but a sudden furious anger flamed up within me that such a
creature should address me. For an instant I felt like wheeling about and
smashing my stick over his head, but I walked on, and entering the
Hamilton went to my apartment. For some time I tossed about the bed
trying to get the sound of his voice out of my ears, but could not. It
filled my head, that muttering sound, like thick oily smoke from a
fat-rendering vat or an odour of noisome decay. And as I lay and tossed
about, the voice in my ears seemed more distinct, and I began to
understand the words he had muttered. They came to me slowly as if I had
forgotten them, and at last I could make some sense out of the sounds. It
was this:

""Have you found the Yellow Sign?""

""Have you found the Yellow Sign?""

""Have you found the Yellow Sign?""

I was furious. What did he mean by that? Then with a curse upon him and
his I rolled over and went to sleep, but when I awoke later I looked pale
and haggard, for I had dreamed the dream of the night before, and it
troubled me more than I cared to think.

I dressed and went down into my studio. Tessie sat by the window, but as
I came in she rose and put both arms around my neck for an innocent kiss.
She looked so sweet and dainty that I kissed her again and then sat down
before the easel.

""Hello! Where's the study I began yesterday?"" I asked.

Tessie looked conscious, but did not answer. I began to hunt among the
piles of canvases, saying, ""Hurry up, Tess, and get ready; we must take
advantage of the morning light.""

When at last I gave up the search among the other canvases and turned to
look around the room for the missing study I noticed Tessie standing by
the screen with her clothes still on.

""What's the matter,"" I asked, ""don't you feel well?""

""Yes.""

""Then hurry.""

""Do you want me to pose as--as I have always posed?""

Then I understood. Here was a new complication. I had lost, of course,
the best nude model I had ever seen. I looked at Tessie. Her face was
scarlet. Alas! Alas! We had eaten of the tree of knowledge, and Eden and
native innocence were dreams of the past--I mean for her.

I suppose she noticed the disappointment on my face, for she said: ""I
will pose if you wish. The study is behind the screen here where I put
it.""

""No,"" I said, ""we will begin something new;"" and I went into my wardrobe
and picked out a Moorish costume which fairly blazed with tinsel. It was
a genuine costume, and Tessie retired to the screen with it enchanted.
When she came forth again I was astonished. Her long black hair was bound
above her forehead with a circlet of turquoises, and the ends, curled
about her glittering girdle. Her feet were encased in the embroidered
pointed slippers and the skirt of her costume, curiously wrought with
arabesques in silver, fell to her ankles. The deep metallic blue vest
embroidered with silver and the short Mauresque jacket spangled and sewn
with turquoises became her wonderfully. She came up to me and held up her
face smiling. I slipped my hand into my pocket, and drawing out a gold
chain with a cross attached, dropped it over her head.

""It's yours, Tessie.""

""Mine?"" she faltered.

""Yours. Now go and pose,"" Then with a radiant smile she ran behind the
screen and presently reappeared with a little box on which was written my
name.

""I had intended to give it to you when I went home to-night,"" she said,
""but I can't wait now.""

I opened the box. On the pink cotton inside lay a clasp of black onyx, on
which was inlaid a curious symbol or letter in gold. It was neither
Arabic nor Chinese, nor, as I found afterwards, did it belong to any
human script.

""It's all I had to give you for a keepsake,"" she said timidly.

I was annoyed, but I told her how much I should prize it, and promised to
wear it always. She fastened it on my coat beneath the lapel.

""How foolish, Tess, to go and buy me such a beautiful thing as this,"" I
said.

""I did not buy it,"" she laughed.

""Where did you get it?""

Then she told me how she had found it one day while coming from the
Aquarium in the Battery, how she had advertised it and watched the
papers, but at last gave up all hopes of finding the owner.

""That was last winter,"" she said, ""the very day I had the first horrid
dream about the hearse.""

I remembered my dream of the previous night but said nothing, and
presently my charcoal was flying over a new canvas, and Tessie stood
motionless on the model-stand.




III

The day following was a disastrous one for me. While moving a framed
canvas from one easel to another my foot slipped on the polished floor,
and I fell heavily on both wrists. They were so badly sprained that it
was useless to attempt to hold a brush, and I was obliged to wander about
the studio, glaring at unfinished drawings and sketches, until despair
seized me and I sat down to smoke and twiddle my thumbs with rage. The
rain blew against the windows and rattled on the roof of the church,
driving me into a nervous fit with its interminable patter. Tessie sat
sewing by the window, and every now and then raised her head and looked
at me with such innocent compassion that I began to feel ashamed of my
irritation and looked about for something to occupy me. I had read all
the papers and all the books in the library, but for the sake of
something to do I went to the bookcases and shoved them open with my
elbow. I knew every volume by its colour and examined them all, passing
slowly around the library and whistling to keep up my spirits. I was
turning to go into the dining-room when my eye fell upon a book bound in
serpent skin, standing in a corner of the top shelf of the last bookcase.
I did not remember it, and from the floor could not decipher the pale
lettering on the back, so I went to the smoking-room and called Tessie.
She came in from the studio and climbed up to reach the book.

""What is it?"" I asked.

""_The King in Yellow._""

I was dumfounded. Who had placed it there? How came it in my rooms? I had
long ago decided that I should never open that book, and nothing on earth
could have persuaded me to buy it. Fearful lest curiosity might tempt me
to open it, I had never even looked at it in book-stores. If I ever had
had any curiosity to read it, the awful tragedy of young Castaigne, whom
I knew, prevented me from exploring its wicked pages. I had always
refused to listen to any description of it, and indeed, nobody ever
ventured to discuss the second part aloud, so I had absolutely no
knowledge of what those leaves might reveal. I stared at the poisonous
mottled binding as I would at a snake.

""Don't touch it, Tessie,"" I said; ""come down.""

Of course my admonition was enough to arouse her curiosity, and before I
could prevent it she took the book and, laughing, danced off into the
studio with it. I called to her, but she slipped away with a tormenting
smile at my helpless hands, and I followed her with some impatience.

""Tessie!"" I cried, entering the library, ""listen, I am serious. Put that
book away. I do not wish you to open it!"" The library was empty. I went
into both drawing-rooms, then into the bedrooms, laundry, kitchen, and
finally returned to the library and began a systematic search. She had
hidden herself so well that it was half-an-hour later when I discovered
her crouching white and silent by the latticed window in the store-room
above. At the first glance I saw she had been punished for her
foolishness. _The King in Yellow_ lay at her feet, but the book was
open at the second part. I looked at Tessie and saw it was too late. She
had opened _The King in Yellow_. Then I took her by the hand and led
her into the studio. She seemed dazed, and when I told her to lie down on
the sofa she obeyed me without a word. After a while she closed her eyes
and her breathing became regular and deep, but I could not determine
whether or not she slept. For a long while I sat silently beside her, but
she neither stirred nor spoke, and at last I rose, and, entering the
unused store-room, took the book in my least injured hand. It seemed
heavy as lead, but I carried it into the studio again, and sitting down
on the rug beside the sofa, opened it and read it through from beginning
to end.

When, faint with excess of my emotions, I dropped the volume and leaned
wearily back against the sofa, Tessie opened her eyes and looked at
me....

We had been speaking for some time in a dull monotonous strain before I
realized that we were discussing _The King in Yellow_. Oh the sin of
writing such words,--words which are clear as crystal, limpid and musical
as bubbling springs, words which sparkle and glow like the poisoned
diamonds of the Medicis! Oh the wickedness, the hopeless damnation of a
soul who could fascinate and paralyze human creatures with such
words,--words understood by the ignorant and wise alike, words which are
more precious than jewels, more soothing than music, more awful than
death!

We talked on, unmindful of the gathering shadows, and she was begging me
to throw away the clasp of black onyx quaintly inlaid with what we now
knew to be the Yellow Sign. I never shall know why I refused, though even
at this hour, here in my bedroom as I write this confession, I should be
glad to know _what_ it was that prevented me from tearing the Yellow
Sign from my breast and casting it into the fire. I am sure I wished to
do so, and yet Tessie pleaded with me in vain. Night fell and the hours
dragged on, but still we murmured to each other of the King and the
Pallid Mask, and midnight sounded from the misty spires in the
fog-wrapped city. We spoke of Hastur and of Cassilda, while outside the
fog rolled against the blank window-panes as the cloud waves roll and
break on the shores of Hali.

The house was very silent now, and not a sound came up from the misty
streets. Tessie lay among the cushions, her face a grey blot in the
gloom, but her hands were clasped in mine, and I knew that she knew and
read my thoughts as I read hers, for we had understood the mystery of the
Hyades and the Phantom of Truth was laid. Then as we answered each other,
swiftly, silently, thought on thought, the shadows stirred in the gloom
about us, and far in the distant streets we heard a sound. Nearer and
nearer it came, the dull crunching of wheels, nearer and yet nearer, and
now, outside before the door it ceased, and I dragged myself to the
window and saw a black-plumed hearse. The gate below opened and shut, and
I crept shaking to my door and bolted it, but I knew no bolts, no locks,
could keep that creature out who was coming for the Yellow Sign. And now
I heard him moving very softly along the hall. Now he was at the door,
and the bolts rotted at his touch. Now he had entered. With eyes starting
from my head I peered into the darkness, but when he came into the room I
did not see him. It was only when I felt him envelope me in his cold soft
grasp that I cried out and struggled with deadly fury, but my hands were
useless and he tore the onyx clasp from my coat and struck me full in the
face. Then, as I fell, I heard Tessie's soft cry and her spirit fled: and
even while falling I longed to follow her, for I knew that the King in
Yellow had opened his tattered mantle and there was only God to cry to
now.

I could tell more, but I cannot see what help it will be to the world. As
for me, I am past human help or hope. As I lie here, writing, careless
even whether or not I die before I finish, I can see the doctor gathering
up his powders and phials with a vague gesture to the good priest beside
me, which I understand.

They will be very curious to know the tragedy--they of the outside world
who write books and print millions of newspapers, but I shall write no
more, and the father confessor will seal my last words with the seal of
sanctity when his holy office is done. They of the outside world may send
their creatures into wrecked homes and death-smitten firesides, and their
newspapers will batten on blood and tears, but with me their spies must
halt before the confessional. They know that Tessie is dead and that I am
dying. They know how the people in the house, aroused by an infernal
scream, rushed into my room and found one living and two dead, but they
do not know what I shall tell them now; they do not know that the doctor
said as he pointed to a horrible decomposed heap on the floor--the livid
corpse of the watchman from the church: ""I have no theory, no explanation.
That man must have been dead for months!""


I think I am dying. I wish the priest would--


","In that great blizzard which, on the 4th of February, struck the eastern coast of the United States from Georgia to Maine, John Recklow and his men hunted Sanang, the last of the Yezidees.

And Sanang clung like a demon to the country which he had doomed to destruction, imbedding each claw again as it was torn loose, battling for the supremacy of evil with all his dreadful psychic power, striving still to seize, cripple, and slay the bodies and souls of a hundred million Americans.

Again he scattered the uncounted myriads of germs of the Black Plague which he and his Yezidees had brought out of Mongolia a year before; and once more the plague swept over the country, and thousands on thousands died.

But now the National, State and City governments were fighting, with physicians, nurses, and police, this gruesome epidemic which had come into the world from they knew not where. And National, State and City governments, aroused at last, were fighting the more terrible plague of anarchy.

Nation-wide raids were made from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from the Gulf to the Lakes. Thousands of terrorists of all shades and stripes whose minds had been seized and poisoned by the Yezidees were being arrested. Deportations had begun; government agents were everywhere swarming to clean out the foulness that had struck deeper into the body of the Republic than any one had supposed.

And it seemed, at last, as though the Red Plague, too, was about to be stamped out along with the Black Death called Influenza.

But only a small group of Secret Service men knew that a resurgence of these horrors was inevitable unless Sanang, the Slayer of Souls, was destroyed. And they knew, too, that only one person in America could hope to destroy Sanang, the last of the Yezidees, and that was Tressa Cleves.

Only by the sudden onset of the plague in various cities of the land had Recklow any clew concerning the whereabouts of Sanang.

In Boston, then Washington, then Kansas City, and then New York the epidemic suddenly blazed up. And in these places of death the Secret Service men always found a clew, and there they hunted Sanang, the Yezidee, to kill him without mercy where they might find him.

But they never found Sanang Noïane; only the ghastly marks of his poisoned claws on the body of the sickened nation—only minds diseased by the Red Plague and bodies dying of the Black Death—civil and social centres disorganized, disrupted, depraved, dying.

When the blizzard burst upon New York, struggling in the throes of the plague, and paralysed the metropolis for a week, John Recklow sent out a special alarm, and New York swarmed with Secret Service men searching the snow-buried city for a graceful, slender, dark young man whose eyes slanted a trifle in his amber-tinted face; who dressed fashionably, lived fastidiously, and spoke English perfectly in a delightfully modulated voice.

And to New York, thrice stricken by anarchy, by plague, and now by God, hurried, from all parts of the nation, thousands of secret agents who had been hunting Sanang in distant cities or who had been raiding the traitorous and secret gatherings of his mental dupes.

Agent ZB-303, who was volunteer agent James Benton, came from Boston with his new bride who had just arrived by way of England—a young girl named Yulun who landed swathed in sables, and stretched out both lovely little hands to Benton the instant she caught sight of him on the pier. Whereupon he took the slim figure in furs into his arms, which was interesting because they had never before met in the flesh.

So,—their honeymoon scarce begun, Benton and Yulun came from Boston in answer to Recklow's emergency call.

And all the way across from San Francisco came volunteer agent XLY-371, otherwise Alek Selden, bringing with him a girl named Sansa whom he had gone to the coast to meet, and whom he had immediately married after she had landed from the Japanese steamer Nan-yang Maru. Which, also, was remarkable, because, although they recognised each other instantly, and their hands and lips clung as they met, neither had ever before beheld the living body of the other.

The third man who came to New York at Recklow's summons was volunteer agent 53-6-26, otherwise Victor Cleves.

His young wife, suffering from nervous shock after the deaths of Togrul Khan and of the Baroulass girl, Aoula, had been convalescing in a private sanitarium in Westchester.

Until the summons came to her husband from Recklow, she had seen him only for a few moments every day. But the call to duty seemed to have effected a miraculous cure in the slender, blue-eyed girl who had lain all day long, day after day, in her still, sunny room scarcely unclosing her eyes at all save only when her husband was permitted to enter for the few minutes allowed them every day.

The physician had just left, after admitting that Mrs. Cleves seemed to be well enough to travel if she insisted; and she and her maid had already begun to pack when her husband came into her room.

She looked around over her shoulder, then rose from her knees, flung an armful of clothing into the trunk before which she had been kneeling, and came across the room to him. Then she dismissed her maid from the room. And when the girl had gone:

""I am well, Victor,"" she said in a low voice. ""Why are you troubled?""

""I can't bear to have you drawn into this horrible affair once more.""

""Who else is there to discover and overcome Sanang?"" she asked calmly.

He remained silent.

So, for a few moments they stood confronting each other there in the still, sunny chamber—husband and wife who had never even exchanged the first kiss—two young creatures more vitally and intimately bound together than any two on earth—yet utterly separated body and soul from each other—two solitary spirits which had never merged; two bodies virginal and inviolate.

Tressa spoke first: ""I must go. That was our bargain.""

The word made him wince as though it had been a sudden blow. Then his face flushed red.

""Bargain or no bargain,"" he said, ""I don't want you to go because I'm afraid you can not endure another shock like the last one.... And every time you have thrown your own mind and body between this Nation and destruction you have nearly died of it.""

""And if I die?"" she said in a low voice.

What answer she awaited—perhaps hoped for—was not the one he made. He said: ""If you die in what you believe to be your line of duty, then it will be I who have killed you.""

""That would not be true. It is you who have saved me.""

""I have not. I have done nothing except to lead you into danger of death since I first met you. If you mean spiritually, that also is untrue. You have saved yourself—if that indeed were necessary. You have redeemed yourself—if it is true you needed redemption—which I never believed——""

""Oh,"" she sighed swiftly, ""Sanang surprised my soul when it was free of my body—followed my soul into the Wood of the White Moth—caught it there all alone—and—slew it!""

His lips and throat had gone dry as he watched the pallid terror grow in her face.

Presently he recovered his voice: ""You call that Yezidee the Slayer of Souls,"" he said, ""but I tell you there is no such creature, no such power!

""I suppose I—I know what you mean—having seen what we call souls dissociated from their physical bodies—but that this Yezidee could do you any spiritual damage I do not for one instant believe. The idea is monstrous, I tell you——""

""I—I fought him—soul battling against soul——"" she stammered, breathing faster and irregularly. ""I struggled with Sanang there in the Wood of the White Moth. I called on God! I called on my two great dogs, Bars and Alaga! I recited the Fatha with all my strength—fighting convulsively whenever his soul seized mine; I cried out the name of Khidr, begging for wisdom! I called on the Ten Imaums, on Ali the Lion, on the Blessed Companions. Then I tore my spirit out of the grasp of his soul—but there was no escape!—no escape,"" she wailed. ""For on every side I saw the cloud-topped rampart of Gog and Magog, and the woods rang with Erlik's laughter—the dissonant mirth of hell——""

She began to shudder and sway a little, then with an effort she controlled herself in a measure.

""There never has been,"" she began again with lips that quivered in spite of her—""there never has been one moment in our married lives when my soul dared forget the Wood of the White Moth—dared seek yours.... God lives. But so does Erlik. There are angels; but there are as many demons.... My soul is ashamed.... And very lonely ... very lonely ... but no fit companion—for yours——""

Her hands dropped listlessly beside her and her chin sank.

""So you believe that Yezidee devil caught your soul when it was wandering somewhere out of your body, and destroyed it,"" he said.

She did not answer, did not even lift her eyes until he had stepped close to her—closer than he had ever come. Then she looked up at him, but closed her eyes as he swept her into his arms and crushed her face and body against his own.

Now her red lips were on his; now her face and heart and limbs and breast melted into his—her breath, her pulse, her strength flowed into his and became part of their single being and single pulse and breath. And she felt their two souls flame and fuse together, and burn together in one heavenly blaze—felt the swift conflagration mount, overwhelm, and sweep her clean of the last lingering taint; felt her soul, unafraid, clasp her husband's spirit in its white embrace—clung to him, uplifted out of hell, rising into the blinding light of Paradise.

Far—far away she heard her own voice in singing whispers—heard her lips pronounce The Name—""Ata—Ata! Allahou——""

Her blue eyes unclosed; through a mist, in which she saw her husband's face, grew a vast metallic clamour in her ears.

Her husband kissed her, long, silently; then, retaining her hand, he turned and lifted the receiver from the clamouring telephone.

""Yes! Yes, this is 53-6-26. Yes, V-69 is with me.... When?... To-day?... Very well.... Yes, we'll come at once.... Yes, we can get a train in a few minutes.... All right. Good-bye.""

He took his wife into his arms again.

""Dearest of all in the world,"" he said, ""Sanang is cornered in a row of houses near the East River, and Recklow has flung a cordon around the entire block. Good God! I can't take you there!""

Then Tressa smiled, drew his head down, looked into his face till the clear blue splendour of her gaze stilled the tumult in his brain.

""I alone know how to deal with Prince Sanang,"" she said quietly. ""And if John Recklow, or you, or Mr. Benton or Mr. Selden should kill him with your pistols, it would be only his body you slay, not the evil thing that would escape you and return to Erlik.""

""Must you do this thing, Tressa?""

""Yes, I must do it.""

""But—if our pistols cannot kill this sorcerer, how are you going to deal with him?""

""I know how.""

""Have you the strength?""

""Yes—the bodily and the spiritual. Don't you know that I am already part of you?""

""We shall be nearer still,"" he murmured.

She flushed but met his gaze.

""Yes.... We shall be but one being.... Utterly.... For already our hearts and souls are one. And we shall become of one mind and one body.

""I am no longer afraid of Sanang Noïane!""

""No longer afraid to slay him?"" he asked quietly.

A blue light flashed in her eyes and her face grew still and white and terrible.

""Death to the body? That is nothing, my lord!"" she said, in a hard, sweet voice. ""It is written that we belong to God and that we return to Him. All living things must die, Heart of the World! It is only the death of souls that matters. And it has arrived at a time in the history of mankind, I think, when the Slayer of Souls shall slay no more.""

She looked at him, flushed, withdrew her hand and went slowly across the room to the big bay window where potted flowers were in bloom.

From a window-box she took a pinch of dry soil and dropped it into the bosom of her gown.

Then, facing the East, with lowered arms and palms turned outward:

""There is no god but God,"" she whispered—""the merciful, the long-suffering, the compassionate, the just.

""For it is written that when the heavens are rolled together like a scroll, every soul shall know what it hath wrought.

""And those souls that are dead in Jehannum shall arise from the dead, and shall have their day in court. Nor shall Erlik stay them till all has been said.

""And on that day the soul of a girl that hath been put to death shall ask for what reason it was slain.

""Thus it has been written.""

Then Tressa dropped to her knees, touched the carpet with her forehead, straightened her lithe body and, looking over her shoulder, clapped her hands together sharply.

Her maid opened the door. ""Hasten with my lord's luggage!"" she cried happily; and, still kneeling, lifted her head to her husband and laughed up into his eyes.

""You should call the porter for we are nearly ready. Shall we go to the station in a sleigh? Oh, wonderful!""

She leaped to her feet, extended her hand and caught his.

""Horses for the lord of the Yiort!"" she cried, laughingly. ""Kosh! Take me out into this new white world that has been born to-day of the ten purities and the ten thousand felicities! It has been made anew for you and me who also have been born this day!""

He scarcely knew this sparkling, laughing girl with her quick grace and her thousand swift little moods and gaieties.

Porters came to take his luggage from his own room; and then her trunk and bags were ready, and were taken away.

The baggage sleigh drove off. Their own jingling sleigh followed; and Tressa, buried in furs, looked out upon a dazzling, unblemished world, lying silvery white under a sky as azure as her eyes.

""Keuke Mongol—Heavenly Azure,"" he whispered close to her crimsoned cheek, ""do you know how I have loved you—always—always?""

""No, I did not know that,"" she said.

""Nor I, in the beginning. Yet it happened, also, from the beginning when I first saw you.""

""That is a delicious thing to be told. Within me a most heavenly glow is spreading.... Unglove your hand.""

She slipped the glove from her own white fingers and felt for his under the furs.

""Aie,"" she sighed, ""you are more beautiful than Ali; more wonderful than the Flaming Pearl. Out of ice and fire a new world has been made for us.""

""Heavenly Azure—my darling!""

""Oh-h,"" she sighed, ""your words are sweeter than the breeze in Yian! I shall be a bride to you such as there never has been since the days of the Blessed Companions—may their names be perfumed and sweet-scented!... Shall I truly be one with you, my lord?""

""Mind, soul, and body, one being, you and I, little Heavenly Azure.""

""Between your two hands you hold me like a burning rose, my lord.""

""Your sweetness and fire penetrate my soul.""

""We shall burn together then till the sky-carpet be rolled up. Kosh! We shall be one, and on that day I shall not be afraid.""

The sleigh came to a clashing, jingling halt; the train plowed into the depot buried in vast clouds of snowy steam.

But when they had taken the places reserved for them, and the train was moving swifter and more swiftly toward New York, fear suddenly overwhelmed Victor Cleves, and his face grew grey with the menacing tumult of his thoughts.

The girl seemed to comprehend him, too, and her own features became still and serious as she leaned forward in her chair.

""It is in God's hands, Heart of the World,"" she said in a low voice. ""We are one, thou and I,—or nearly so. Nothing can harm my soul.""

""No.... But the danger—to your life——""

""I fear no Yezidee.""

""The beast will surely try to kill you. And what can I do? You say my pistol is useless.""

""Yes.... But I want you near me.""

""Do you imagine I'd leave you for a second? Good God,"" he added in a strangled voice, ""isn't there any way I can kill this wild beast? With my naked hands——?""

""You must leave him to me, Victor.""

""And you believe you can slay him? Do you?""

She remained silent for a long while, bent forward in her armchair, and her hands clasped tightly on her knees.

""My husband,"" she said at last, ""what your astronomers have but just begun to suspect is true, and has long, long been known to the Sheiks-el-Djebel.

""For, near to this world we live in, are other worlds—planets that do not reflect light. And there is a dark world called Yrimid, close to the earth—a planet wrapped in darkness—a black star.... And upon it Erlik dwells.... And it is peopled by demons.... And from it comes sickness and evil——""

She moistened her lips; sat for a while gazing vaguely straight before her.

""From this black planet comes all evil upon earth,"" she resumed in a hushed voice. ""For it is very near to the earth. It is not a hundred miles away. All strange phenomena for which our scientists can not account are due to this invisible planet,—all new and sudden pestilences; all convulsions of nature; the newly noticed radio disturbances; the new, so-called inter-planetary signals—all—all have their hidden causes within that black and demon-haunted planet long known to the Yezidees, and by them called Yrimid, or Erlik's World. And—it is to this black planet that I shall send Sanang, Slayer of Souls. I shall tear him from this earth, though he cling to it with every claw; and I shall fling his soul into darkness—out across the gulf—drive his soul forth—hurl it toward Erlik like a swift rocket charred and falling from the sky into endless night.

""So shall I strive to deal with Prince Sanang, Sorcerer of Mount Alamout, the last of the Assassins, Sheik-el-Djebel, and Slayer of Souls.... May God remember him in hell.""

Already their train was rolling into the great terminal.

Recklow was awaiting them. He took Tressa's hands in his and gazed earnestly into her face.

""Have you come to show us how to conclude this murderous business?"" he asked grimly.

""I shall try,"" she said calmly. ""Where have you cornered Sanang?""

""Could you and Victor come at once?""

""Yes."" She turned and looked at her husband, who had become quite pale.

Recklow saw the look they exchanged. There could be no misunderstanding what had happened to these two. Their tragedy had ended. They were united at last. He understood it instantly,—realised how terrible was this new and tragic situation for them both.

Yet, he knew also that the salvation of civilisation itself now depended upon this girl. She must face Sanang. There was nothing else possible.

""The streets are choked with snow,"" he said, ""but I have a coupé and two strong horses waiting.""

He nodded to one of his men standing near. Cleves gave him the hand luggage and checks.

""All right,"" he said in a low voice to Recklow; and passed one arm through Tressa's.

The coupé was waiting on Forty-second Street, guarded by a policeman. When they had entered and were seated, two mounted policemen rode ahead of the lurching vehicle, picking a way amid the monstrous snow-drifts, and headed for the East River.

""We've got him somewhere in a wretched row of empty houses not far from East River Park. I'm taking you there. I've drawn a cordon of my men around the entire block. He can't get away. But I dared take no chances with this Yezidee sorcerer—dared not let one of my men go in to look for him—go anywhere near him,—until I could lay the situation before you, Mrs. Cleves.""

""Yes,"" she said calmly, ""it was the only way, Mr. Recklow. There would have been no use shooting him—no use taking him prisoner. A prisoner, he remains as deadly as ever; dead, his mind still lives and breeds evil. You are quite right; it is for me to deal with Sanang.""

Recklow shuddered in spite of himself. ""Can you tear his claws from the vitals of the world, and free the sick brains of a million people from the slavery of this monster's mind?""

The girl said seriously:

""Even Satan was stoned. It is so written. And was cast out. And dwells forever and ever in Abaddon. No star lights that Pit. None lights the Black Planet, Yrimid. It is where evil dwells. And there Sanang Noïane belongs.""

And now, beyond the dirty edges of the snow-smothered city, under an icy mist they caught sight of the river where ships lay blockaded by frozen floes.

Gulls circled over it; ghostly factory chimneys on the further shore loomed up gigantic, ranged like minarettes.

The coupé, jolting along behind the mounted policemen, struggled up toward the sidewalk and stopped. The two horses stood steaming, knee deep in snow. Recklow sprang out; Tressa gave him one hand and stepped lithely to the sidewalk. Then Cleves got out and came and took hold of his wife's arm again.

""Well,"" he said harshly to Recklow, ""where is this damned Yezidee hidden?""

Recklow pointed in silence, but he and Tressa had already lifted their gaze to the stark, shabby row of abandoned three-story houses where every dirty blind was closed.

""They're to be demolished and model tenements built,"" he said briefly.

A man muffled in a fur overcoat came up and took Tressa's hand and kissed it.

She smiled palely at Benton, spoke of Yulun, wished him happiness. While she was yet speaking Selden approached and bent over her gloved hand. She spoke to him very sweetly of Sansa, expressing pleasure at the prospect of seeing her again in the body.

""The Seldens and ourselves have adjoining apartments at the Ritz,"" said Benton. ""We have reserved a third suite for you and Victor.""

She inclined her lovely head, gravely, then turned to Recklow, saying that she was ready.

""It makes no difference which front door I unlock,"" he said. ""All these tenements are connected by human rat-holes and hidden runways leading from one house to another.... How many men do you want?""

""I want you four men,—nobody else.""

Recklow led the way up a snow-covered stoop, drew a key from his pocket, fitted it, and pulled open the door.

A musty chill struck their faces as they entered the darkened and empty hallway. Involuntarily every man drew his pistol.

""I must ask you to do exactly what I tell you to do,"" she said calmly.

""Certainly,"" said Recklow, caressing his white moustache and striving to pierce the gloom with his keen eyes.

Then Tressa took her husband's hand. ""Come,"" she said. They mounted the stairway together; and the three others followed with pistols lifted.

There was a vague grey light on the second floor; the broken rear shutters let it in.

As though she seemed to know her way, the girl led them forward, opened a door in the wall, and disclosed a bare, dusty room in the next house.

Through this she stepped; the others crept after her with weapons ready. She opened a second door, turned to the four men.

""Wait here for me. Come only when I call,"" she whispered.

""For God's sake take me with you,"" burst out Cleves.

""In God's name stay where you are till you hear me call your name!"" she said almost breathlessly.

Then, suddenly she turned, swiftly retracing her steps; and they saw her pass through the first door and disappear into the first house they had entered.

A terrible silence fell among them. The sound of her steps on the bare boards had died away. There was not a sound in the chilly dusk.

Minute after minute dragged by. One by one the men peered fearfully at Cleves. His visage was ghastly and they could see his pistol-hand trembling.

Twice Recklow looked at his wrist watch. The third time he said, unsteadily: ""She has been gone three-quarters of an hour.""

Then, far away, they heard a heavy tread on the stairs. Nearer and nearer came the footsteps. Every pistol was levelled at the first door as a man's bulky form darkened it.

""It's one of my men,"" said Recklow in a voice like a low groan. ""Where on earth is Mrs. Cleves?""

""I came to tell you,"" said the agent, ""Mrs. Cleves came out of the first house nearly an hour ago. She got into the coupé and told the driver to go to the Ritz.""

""What!"" gasped Recklow.

""She's gone to the Ritz,"" repeated the agent. ""No one else has come out. And I began to worry—hearing nothing of you, Mr. Recklow. So I stepped in to see——""

""You say that Mrs. Cleves went out of the house we entered, got into the coupé, and told the driver to go to the Ritz?"" demanded Cleves, astounded.

""Yes, sir.""

""Where is that coupé? Did it return?""

""It had not returned when I came in here.""

""Go back and look for it. Look in the other street,"" said Recklow sharply.

The agent hurried away over the creaking boards. The four men gazed at one another.

""The thing to do is to obey her and stay where we are,"" said Recklow grimly. ""Who knows what peril we may cause her if we move from——""

His words froze on his lips as Tressa's voice rang out from the darkness beyond the door they were guarding:

""Victor I I—I need you! Come to me, my husband!""

As Cleves sprang through the door into the darkness beyond, Benton smashed a window sash with all the force of his shoulder, and, reaching out through the shattered glass, tore the rotting blinds from their hinges, letting in a flood of sickly light.

Against the bare wall stood Tressa, both arms extended, her hands flat against the plaster, and each hand transfixed and pinned to the wall by a knife.

A white sheet lay at her feet. On it rested a third knife. And, bending on one knee to pick it up, they caught a glimpse of a slender young man in fashionable afternoon attire, who, as they entered with the crash of the shattered window in their ears, sprang to his nimble feet and stood confronting them, knife in hand.

Instantly every man fired at him and the bullets whipped the plaster to a smoke behind him, but the slender, dark skinned young man stood motionless, looking at them out of brilliant eyes that slanted a trifle.

Again the racket of the fusillade swept him and filled the room with plaster dust.

Cleves, frantic with horror, laid hold of the knives that pinned his wife's hands to the wall, and dragged them out.

But there was no blood, no wound to be seen on her soft palms. She took the murderous looking blades from him, threw one terrible look at Sanang, kicked the shroud across the floor toward him, and flung both knives upon it.

The place was still dim with plaster dust and pistol fumes as she stepped forward through the acrid mist, motioning the four men aside.

""Sanang!"" she cried in a clear voice, ""may God remember you in hell, for my feet have spurned your shroud, and your knives, which could not scar my palms, shall never pierce my heart! Look out for yourself, Prince Sanang!""

""Tokhta!"" he said, calmly. ""My soul be ransom for yours!""

""That is a lie! My soul is already ransomed! My mind is the more powerful. It has already halted yours. It is conquering yours. It is seizing your mind and enslaving it. It is mastering your will, Sanang! Your mind bends before mine. You know it! You know it is bending. You feel it is breaking down!""

Sanang's eyes began to glitter but his pale brown face had grown almost white.

""I slew you once—in the Wood of the White Moth,"" he said huskily. ""There is no resurrection from such a death, little Heavenly Azure. Look upon me! My soul and yours are one!""

""You are looking upon my soul,"" she said.

""A lie! You are in your body!""

The girl laughed. ""My body lies asleep in the Ritz upon my husband's bed,"" she said. ""My body is his, my mind belongs to him, my soul is already one with his. Do you not know it, dog of a Yezidee? Look upon me, Sanang Noïane! Look upon my unwounded hands! My shroud lies at your feet. And there lie the knives that could not pierce my heart! I am thrice clean! Listen to my words, Sanang! There is no other god but God!""

The young man's visage grew pasty and loose and horrible; his lips became flaccid like dewlaps; but out of these sagging folds of livid skin his voice burst whistling, screaming, as though wrenched from his very belly:

""May Erlik strangle you! May you rot where you stand! May your face become a writhing mass of maggots and your body a corruption of living worms!

""For what you are doing to me this day may every demon in hell torment you!

""Have a care what you are about!"" he screeched. ""You are slaying my mind, you sorceress! You have seized my mind and are crushing it! You are putting out its light, you Yezidee witch!—you are quenching the last spark—of reason—in—me——""

""Sanang!""

His knife fell clattering to the floor. But he stood stock still, his hands clutching his head—stood motionless, while scream on scream tore through the loose and gaping lips, blowing them into ghastly, distorted folds.

""Sanang Noïane!"" she cried in her clear voice, ""the Eight Towers are darkened! The Rampart of Gog and Magog is fallen! On Mount Alamout nothing is living. The minds of mankind are free again!""

She stepped forward, slowly, and stood near him chanting in a low voice the Prayers for the Dead She bent down and unrolled the shroud, laid it on his shoulders and drew it up and across his face, covering his dying eyes, and swathed him so, slowly, from head to foot.

Then she gathered up the three knives, cast them upward into the air. They did not fall again. They disappeared. And all the while, under her breath, the girl was chanting the Prayers for the Dead as she moved silently about her business.

Shrouded to the forehead in its white cerements, the muffled figure of Sanang stood upright, motionless as a swathed and frozen corpse.

Outside, the daylight had become greyer. It had begun to snow again, and a few flakes blew in through the shattered windows and clung to the winding sheet of Sanang.

And now Tressa drew close to the shrouded shape and stood before it, gazing intently upon the outlined features of the last of the Yezidees.

""Sanang,"" she said very softly, ""I hear your soul bidding your body farewell. Tokhta!""

Then, under the strained gaze of the four men gathered there, the shroud fell to the floor in a loose heap of white folds. There was nobody under it; no trace of Sanang. The human shape of the Yezidee had disappeared; but a greyish mist had filled the room, wavering up like smoke from the shroud, and, like smoke, blowing in a long streamer toward the window where the draught drew it out through the falling snow and scattered the last shred of it against the greying sky.

In the room the mist thinned swiftly; the four men could now see one another. But Tressa was no longer in the room. And in place of the white shroud a piece of filthy tattered carpet lay on the floor. And a dead rat, flattened out, dry and dusty, lay upon it.

""For God's sake,"" whispered Recklow hoarsely, ""let us get out of this!""

Cleves, his pistol clutched convulsively, stared at him in terror. But Recklow took him by the arm and drew him away, muttering that Tressa was waiting for him, and might be ill, and that there was nothing further to expect in this ghastly spot.

They went with Cleves to the Ritz. At the desk the clerk said that Mrs. Cleves had the keys and was in her apartment.

The three men entered the corridor with him; watched him try the door; saw him open it; lingered a moment after it had closed; heard the key turn.

At the sound of the door closing the maid came.

""Madame is asleep in her room,"" she whispered.

""When did she come in?""

""More than two hours ago, sir. I have drawn her bath, but when I opened the door a few moments ago, Madame was still asleep.""

He nodded; he was trembling when he put off his overcoat and dropped hat and gloves on the carpet.

From the little rose and ivory reception room he could see the closed door of his wife's chamber. And for a while he stood staring at it.

Then, slowly, he crossed this room, opened the door; entered.

In her bedroom the tinted twilight was like ashes of roses. He went to the bed and looked down at her shadowy face; gazed intently; listened; then, in sudden terror, bent and laid his hand on her heart. It was beating as tranquilly as a child's; but as she stirred, turned her head, and unclosed her eyes, under his hand her heart leaped like a wild thing caught unawares and the snowy skin glowed with an exquisite and deepening tint as she lifted her arms and clasped them around her husband's, neck, drawing his quivering face against her own.",True
"Memories of Leng
Disclaimer: I do not own anything. All (or most) of the material contained herein belongs to either Howard Philip Lovecraft or August Derleth. Delta Green (such as it is) belongs to Pagan Publishing. And for concepts that come later in the story... well, creatures of legend that can totally freeze a person's brain have always had their place in the public domain, but Peter S. Beagle deserves credit for his take on the kind that inspire beatific rapture instead of gibbering terror.
Summary: Joseph Clayton always suspected that Marie Trinh was hiding something about her family, but never knew what it was. When he finally finds out what... well, the first step on the road to enlightenment is often quite a doozy. Then, the question becomes what to do with that enlightened knowledge.
Authors Note: There will be Lovecraftian horror in this story, after a fashion. However, there will also be humour and wonder and quite some affection. There will also be aspects more apropos to a Howardian barbarian story or a Burroughs Englishman than to the academics that Lovecraft sometimes wrote about: bravery, sacrifice (in more ways than one) and familiarity even in the most unlikely of places.
Glaston, upper Worcester Co., Massachusetts (roughly analogous to Gardner)
October 27, 2007.
An autumnal chill descended upon the streets of Glaston as the young man walked upon the concrete sidewalk, passing redbrick storefronts and shop windows, every surface still wet with the morning rain. Leaves, red and orange and each vibrant in their hue, were shaken loose from the trees lining the street by the wind, landing wherever they fell. For an instant in time, the spectacle of the leaves drew the attention of the man, in fact little more than a teenage boy, as he made his way toward the corner. However, Joseph Clayton, clad in bluejeans and jacket with a backpack slung from his shoulders, had far more important things to focus on than a show of falling leaves. An important test for this semester was arriving in a week or so and he needed to study.
Also, he was getting quite hungry this close to lunch.
As Joseph rounded the corner and continued toward his favorite eatery, he wondered if he would get swamped in the usual lunch crowd. However, as he saw the front of the Leng Trinh Restaurant, his thoughts turned to quiet dejection.
""Damnit!"" muttered Joseph as he approached the eatery. The reason for this turn in mood was the carpet of tempered glass fragments on the sidewalk below the picture window at the front of the establishment, which was now covered by plastic sheeting. Thuch Van Trinh, one half of the husband-and-wife ownership, was wearing a plaid jacket over his apron and usual cooking clothes and was shoveling the broken glass into a bucket. ""Hey, Mr. Trinh, how's it going?"". Joseph asked with a smile. This was more false cheer than anything, as Joseph could guess how Thuch must be feeling: anger was always a popular choice, followed closely by worry about the reason why.
Despite what he must have been feeling, Thuch Van Trinh grinned back, the black lines of his facial tattooing creasing as the muscles moved under his cheeks. ""Not so good, Mr. Clayton. If this keeps up, I may have to put in Plexiglas so that the window won't break."" The Trinhs accents, as his parents and the other adults of the town told it, had been rather strong (even unusually so) when they had immigrated to Glaston from their first home in Boston. This had usually been waved off by their purported origins in the remote hills on the Vietnam-Laos border, seemingly collaborated by how their teeth had been dyed black. On the other hand, given their rural roots, their speed in adapting local speech patterns so that they now sounded more like second generation Americans (and especially their daughter's complete lack of any accent except the local standard) did make for a puzzling situation. However, for their ease of assimilation and the food they served, they had become well-liked in the community.
So why were things like this happening to them recently? ""How many times does this make this month; two, three?"" Joseph had to ask this, wondering if things were worse than he thought.
""It's happened three times already, this time not more than an hour ago. Thanh wants to install security cameras to watch the place and with how small and cheap they are now, I think we just might."" An hour ago? They'd smashed a picture window in broad daylight? Who in town could be that stupid or that angry? Josephs train of thought was broken then, when Thuch said something of much more interest to the younger man. ""By the way, if you're looking for Marie, she's helping her mother in the kitchen. Even without a window we seem to be doing good business."" Thuch went back to his work and Joseph, not wanting to delay any longer, entered the restaurant.
Just as Thuch had said, Leng Trinh still had it's usual busy lunchtime crowd, albeit one that was concentrated near the back wall. Picking his way around tables packed with diners, Joseph finally arrived at a table set for two, a 'reserved' sign upon it. Removing his backpack and laying it beside a chair, he sat down, shuffled off his coat and went to bury his nose in the menu.
It always felt a bit odd to Joseph, eating in an ethnic restaurant where none of the diners were the same ethnicity as the cooks, or even from the same part of the world. However, none of it mattered when the food was as good as it was here.
""Now then, what would a fine, upstanding New England boy like yourself want in a place like this?"" The voice that asked this was soft, amused, female and had an almost mocking tone. It also had the accent of the New England uplands. To Joseph, it could only be one person.
""The same thing I always get here."" He answered dryly before looking up from the menu. There, holding a pad of paper and a pen, was teenage girl with almond-shaped eyes, shoulder length black hair with green streaks, a cooking apron and an amused grin. ""Hi Marie... you sure your mom's alright with you waitressing this crowd?""
""We've got enough help in the kitchen already and Dad's coming in after all the glass is cleaned up."" She glanced up at the window, plastic sheet and all, after she wrote his order down. ""I just wish we knew who was doing this. If we don't get someone else to cough up some money, our insurance company might go sour on us."" Marie went back to the kitchen to get the food for both of them.
Ten minutes later, she was laying out two place settings of food that had been prepared ahead of time. ""Alright, that's two plates of grilled pork on beds of Leng-style rice, your dish of steamed green beans with soy sauce for dipping, my bowl of soup and two cans of soda."" They'd eat lunch before studying, with Joseph paying the tab for both of them.
If anyone asked, it wasn't a date. Not in the strictest sense, anyway.
""What, no bak bon dzhow?"" Asked Joseph, decidedly disappointed at the apparent lack of the special ingredient.
To this, Marie moved a small earthen bowl from the serving tray onto the table and lifted the lid to reveal a thick gray sauce containing mushrooms and cracked black pepper. ""Would I be one to deny you the gravy of the gods?"" She asked (rhetorically) with a soft smile; Joseph couldn't help but smile back as he cracked the tab on his soda and began on his green beans.
A bit later, when his beans were gone and Marie had almost finished her soup, Joesph began formulating a question that related to a curious thought that had sprung up earlier. ""Not to sound like a nag or anything, but I'm just curious but what was all that 'upstanding' stuff about?"" The only time he had ever heard anyone talk like that was...
Oh God...
Marie swallowed the last bits of her soup. ""Oh, I don't know. Maybe It's that I had no idea that the son of insurance brokers had such deep and aristocratic roots? Maybe it's that I was surprised to find out that the Clayton's had come not from hardy New England farming stock as I had assumed, but from the urbane, wealthy ranks of those grand Brahmins of Boston? I'm sure Granny Cora could tell some fascinating stories about the old days; she sure seemed interested in mine."" If anything, Marie took the entire thing in stride, treating both the memory of the experience and the experience itself with a a great deal of interested amusement. Certainly, mocking the type of language she had encountered was almost cracking her up.
Joseph, on the other hand, had first felt bemusement at the scene in which the Clayton family reunion of the past summer had found itself, quickly turning into outright embarrassment. ""Look, I'm sorry that I didn't tell you about her, but everybody thought that she wouldn't be able to come due to health concerns. It's not my fault that a half-senile, 97 year old woman worked up enough stubbornness to drag her nurse halfway across the state!"".
""I never said anything about anyone being at fault. I just thought it was an interesting revelation about your family."" She had meant her cajoling in good humour, but Josephs defensiveness and embarrassment were never good emotions to bring out. ""Anyway, most people would be proud to have the Boston gentry in their family history: industrialists, merchants, art, culture, philanthropy, charity..."" With every word, Marie spooned a bit of ban boc dzhow onto her grilled pork.
""As well as whaling, slave trading, opium smuggling, snobbery and having your entire life guided by the expectations of your peers; exactly the sorts of things my parents taught me to loathe. The thing is, my great-great-grandmother came from a very select, very privileged and lily-white background; I was worried that she'd... well, react oddly to you."" Joseph retorted as he began spooning (or rather, pouring) the sauce onto his meat after Marie had finished with it and passed it to him. In the case of Cora Clayton (nee Coffin), Josephs fear hadn't primarily been that she would find Marie objectionable on account of her race since that prejudice had been more ingrained in her parents generation than hers. His fear had instead been that his great great grandmother, as self-proclaimed guardian of the old, aristocratic traditions, might object to their relationship because the Trinhs were restaurateurs with no history of pedigree, education or money behind them.
In Cora's world (the 1920s, where her mind was half the time), heirs had married heiresses, families had coordinated their fortunes and everyone had kept an eye on everyone else; these were rules of decorum that had lasted for her long after the Claytons had gone bust in the great Crash of '29. The fact that she had taken Joseph aside and explained her concerns to him had done nothing to soothe his embarrassment, although he had finally convinced her that, being naturalized citizens with a successful restaurant, the Trinhs were firmly in the middling classes. She had also estimated that said restaurant, with no other inheritors besides Marie, would most likely pass into Clayton hands in the fullness of time.
No one had dared explain to her the differences between modern teenage dating and the genteel courtships of her youth.
""I don't think she reacted that oddly. Sure, she was so out of date that you had to explain that I meant 'French Indochina' when I said that my parents came from Vietnam and she did seem a bit too fascinated with my families origins and, alright, it was weird hearing someone actually use the word 'courting' without trying to be funny. However, it was kind of nice to speak French with someone in this town after all the time my parents invested in me learning it."" Marie knew that while it had been terrifying for Joseph, having to put up with his relatives dissection of his relationship and fearing disapproval, she herself had enjoyed a chance to see if the old stereotypes were true. When it had become clear to Marie that the elderly woman was not about to spew racial epitaphs at her but was, indeed, fascinated as to her families background, Marie had made it a point to 'ham it up' in telling their story.
To an entranced Cora Clayton, Marie had described her parents lives before emigration as a subsistence existence in a village high up in the fog-choked mountain passes. She had woven scenes of her people worshiping strange, heathen gods far from the civilized lands of the Buddha and partaking in ghastly rituals to ensure harvests of rice from narrow mountainside terraces. She told the old woman that her parents had tired of such a life and had dreamed of something more, something in the wider world glimpsed in third-hand magazines and radio broadcasts.
After receiving a dispensation from their village shaman to leave (but promising to sent back remittances), they had made their way to Hanoi and then to Boston and finally to Glaston where, having never truly given up the more religious and symbolic aspects of their heathenish past, they nevertheless had made good names for themselves in the community. Marie had made sure that her prose had been both lurid and exotic so as to fully entrance a child of the Age of Empire as well as making proper use of tone, whether enraptured, casual or deathly serious, to emphasize mood. The end result was to make it sound as if her culture wasn't just some rural outlet of modern Vietnam or Laos, but as if it was truly unlike any other in the world.
That was an opinion that Joseph was also rapidly adopting.
They ate in relative silence for a while, the bustle of the lunch crowd beginning to die down as people left, many of them stopping to talk to Mr. Trinh at the till, expressing their concern over what had happened with the window. They were just about half done when Joseph began another conversation. ""So, did you know that there's a 'Heritage Day' coming up at school in a few weeks?""
""Yeah, and?"" Deep down in her gut, Marie was beginning to get a slightly worried feeling from the direction this conversation was going. This pretty much happened whenever the subject of her parent's past came up but, like so many times before, she could probably bluff her way through it.
""I thought that, maybe, we could do something for it. I was thinking about dredging up something from Normandy because I didn't want to clog up the schedule with another variation of British regional culture."" It sounded perfectly innocent, but Marie knew that this was a potentially tricky situation that might require misdirection, a convincing excuse and possible outright lying.
She hated lying to Joseph.
""Alright then. You can do that, I'll do the Vietnamese thing and we'll knock 'em all dead."" She answered with an enthusiasm that she hoped had betrayed nothing of her growing unease with the conversation. This seemed to provoke nothing but a non-committal murmur of agreement and thus, thinking that that was over with, she began eating again.
However, that was not the end of it.
""By Vietnamese, do you mean the standard culture from around Hanoi... or the culture from your parent's home village?"" Joseph asked, seemingly as if only for the purpose of clarification. There was much more behind it though, and whether it was just ingrained paranoia or any real danger of exposure, Marie knew that this was entering onto some very tenuous and potentially very dangerous ground. Still, the subject had to be breached.
""Aren't they pretty much the same? I mean, sure, it was pretty rural back there, but whether village or city, we were all Viet: same language, same culture, same blood, same... pretty much everything, when you think about it."" As denials went, this one wasn't half bad: sincere enough to be taken seriously and with enough internal logic that it wouldn't fall apart immediately in the face of the mildly educated mind.
On this subject, however, Joseph had become rather more than merely mildly educated. He had observed things for a long time: a lot of little things and one or two big things for the most part. And he, after long deliberation and study, had discovered that some of those things just didn't match up.
""You know, there was a time when I could believe that. But... there are just too many deviations to discount."" Joesph stopped eating all together, putting down his fork and looking his girlfriend straight in the eyes before closing and opening them again, as if to rally his thoughts. ""The food, for one thing, isn't like any kind of Vietnamese food I've read about. Yes, you have the side dishes but that's about it for similarity. Second, your parent's tattoos. Again, unlike any other group in Southeast Asia; the closest matches I could find were incised lines on bronze figurines from over two thousand years ago.""
He stopped again. ""And then there's the language you guys speak. I'm fairly sure it's in the Mon-Khmer group, but I've been doing some research and... honestly, I've seen words on this menu that I've never been able to find in any other source. And I'm not the only one who's noticed these things."" Joesph saw panic flash across Marie's eyes, though she tried to hide it. ""Most people don't pay attention and honestly don't care, and the ones who do notice just assume that you guys are either Hmong or some little minority that no-one's ever heard of... but even that doesn't match very well either. It's like you said, you're Viet... but what about all this other stuff?""
It was then that Marie could have ended it all: the doubts, the questions, the lingering curiosity... as well as twenty one centuries of secrecy, tradition and very likely her relationship with this young man. In the end, she decided to dodge again. ""What can I say? We were very rural."" When Joesph just got this frustrated look on his face, Marie sighed, reached across the table and enveloped one of his hands with hers. ""Look, I'll try and dredge something up if I can, but I can't promise anything, okay?""
Joseph mulled on this lack of answers, but as the moment dragged on, his resistance wore down. ""Alright. If you don't want to talk about your culture, that's alright; lots of people come to America to get away from stuff. But I still am sorta curious."" Then he changed the subject. ""Anyway, after we eat, we should begin studying for our tests. Do you want to go over the English or the Algebra first?""
""We should do the Math first, then we can cool off with the Shakespeare. But we better not let the food get cold, what with how the sauce gets if allowed to sit for too long."" Marie began eating again and, after a few beats, Joseph resumed as well.
They stayed at that table for many hours, going over and revising their knowledge of maths and literature. However, already Marie wondered if there was something she could reveal, something that she could show about her parent's culture that would not threaten expose them and, as the old saying went among her tribe, 'get them cut in half and buried in two graves'.
Later that night, The Trinh's upstairs apartment
To Marie's relief, her parents reaction to her plan wasn't anger. On the other hand, fear and worry could be almost as painful.
""I know how you feel about the Clayton boy. He's well-liked, intelligent and his parents are our insurance agents."" Thanh Thi Trinh began, speaking in her families particular dialect of Viet as she, Marie and Thuch Van sat around their dining room table. ""But I ask this of you: is Joesph and his interest in this celebration worth the risk of exposure and, may I add, possible death when this town realizes who we are, when they realize what we are?"" Thanh Thi had always been the more reserved, more cautious and, frankly, more paranoid spouse in this family when it came to their safety. Where her husband was the face of the restaurant, she ran the kitchen with an eye on the back door and all of their cooks. While Thuch made friendly at social gatherings, Thanh kept track of all possible escape routes and who was and wasn't looking at them. She kept track of any news about gangs and hate-group activity in the area, and about any other strange things.
The sort of things that might lure out the kind of people who hunted their people.
But Marie had prepared for this. ""Mother, I know the risks that revealing the secrets of our people would bring. However, I am counting on two circumstances to make sure that only the most benign and harmless information is portrayed."" She rallied herself, knowing that the way she handled this could make the difference on how she presented herself to nearly everyone, especially Joseph . ""First, I must inform both of you that there are some people in this town, including my boyfriend, that realize that we are not quite from the mainstream culture of modern Vietnam."" At this, both Thanh and Thuch got even more worried but they weren't shocked, seeing as any bumpkin with an Internet connection could find that tribal tattooing wasn't really the rage in downtown Hanoi. ""The good news is that while these people realize that we belong to a distinct subgroup, they often deduce that we are either rural Hmong or some other obscure ethnic group. In other words, they know nothing about who our people are and, like the rest of the town, they honestly do not care.""
""What about the nature of our traditons, Marie? What would you do, what rite of our people would be performed on that stage that would not end up with half the town vomiting and the other half trying to hang us?"" Her father had been relatively quiet in this conversation, but he knew that the rituals of his village had, during various times in history, left such a bad impression upon outsiders that they had responded in force to try to stamp them out.
Here, Marie began grasping the thick, heavy and old scrapbook that lay closed upon the table before her. It had been entrusted to them by their village and, by the blessings of the Gods and their Instrument, they had kept it safe and hidden for more than twenty years. ""Father, it is not as if I wish to set up an alter on the stage, recite the incantations of the harvest rites and slice something open; frankly, I would have no idea how. However, I believe that there is a ritual that is benign, unusual and, even according to the author of this book, beautiful enough to make people forget it's oddity."" She opened the book, filled with sepia photographs and notes written in French on yellowed paper, to the page she had bookmarked. ""I want to do the Stork Dance.""
Her parents were quiet for a minute. Admittedly, this was probably the least unusual rite of their people and it did seem to have a calming effect on its audiences. However, it took weeks of intensive training in order to do it right, the costuming and specific actions depended on whether the dancer was a man or woman and the phonograph with the instrumental music and vocals, only having been recorded once before, was on the other side of the planet. It was a tall order to pull off for anyone. ""You do realize that practicing for the dance requires grueling routine, so much so that it might effect your school work?"" Asked her mother, wondering if her daughter was truly sincere.
""I know that. I'll just have to sacrifice my time with Joesph, a sacrifice that I'm sure he'd understand."" Marie responded in English this time, the plans for her act becoming clearer. ""However, I'll need some help in creating the proper costuming and... I know that shipping items from the Old Country is like trying to smuggle Plutonium but if you could convince the shamans to release that phonograph for a month or two, I would be eternally grateful to all of them, and to you.""
Her parents wondered, not for the first time, if Marie truly comprehended what could be asked of that gratitude in the years to come. She had the opportunity to live a life completely detached from the paranoia, the fear and the constant danger that followed her people. Would she give that chance away simply for the sake of a boy?
Whatever choice she made, however, was hers to make.
In the end, they acquiesced... but not without informing their daughter of what their home village could ask of her in exchange for the items she wished. It might be years until it was asked but one day, a representative of their village would approach her and request a repayment, be it in money, information or something else.
It was that ""something else"" that truly worried Thuch and Thanh.
","
By Their smell can men sometimes know Them near, but of Their semblance can no man know, saving only in the features of those They have begotten on mankind; and of those there are many sorts, differing in likeness from man's truest eidolon to that shape without sight or substance which is Them. They walk unseen and foul in lonely places where the Words have been spoken and the Rites howled through at their Seasons. The wind gibbers with Their voices, and the earth mutters with Their consciousness.
-- The Necronomicon

The lighthouse was a steal. Sure, it needed a little fixing up. ""Handyman's Special"" was how the realty company had listed the quaint brick cylinder. Howard knew ""Handyman's Special"" was realty-speak for ""Sucker's Money-Pit."" This was his fifth lighthouse in the last two years and he had come to understand realty-speak, and realtors quite well. He had purchased what lighthouses he could, the first in Northern California, three in Washington state, and now this one, in the small town of Timber Bay on Oregon's South coast.
He still hadn't found what he had been looking for.
Howard Flips had been many things in his forty years, nothing serious mind you, manual labor of course was below someone like Howard, but then again, when waiting for an inheritance, one can't be too picky about how one earns a living in the meantime. He'd been a librarian's assistant in Massachusetts in the 80's, a ship's cook on board a South Seas cruise ship for most of the 90's, and then it had happened. After overcoming colon cancer, prostate cancer, three strokes, a triple bypass, and the loss of most of his sight and all of his hearing, Howard's father had finally passed away.
He had choked on a chicken bone.
Then the glorious day had arrived. Howard sat in the law offices of Leach, Kling, Hammar and Kleever as Hubris Leach, his father's attorney of sixty years, informed Howard that he had inherited a sum of money somewhere in the vicinity of ten or twelve million dollars, presented him with a check in the amount of eight million dollars, and said the rest would follow pending the liquidation of all assets as per his father's specific instructions.
Eight million dollars.
Howard had plans. They had been forming since he had been helping out in the library at Miskatonic University in Arkham, Massachusetts in the 80's. Howard had read in an obscure text in an even more obscure manuscript written sometime during World War II known as the Book of Hidden Numbers, (a weighty tome which Howard had discovered alongside such dreaded volumes as the Necronomicon, the Cultes des Goules, the Revelations of Glaaki, and the Book of Eibon, all of which were kept under lock and key at the university library) of a chamber deep in the bowels of a lighthouse somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. A chamber with a tide pool, which led into an underwater cavern filled with creatures that would bestow immortality upon any and all who would agree to feed them. These creatures could not venture out of their underground dwellings to gather the unnamed food they needed to flourish. Yet, if they did not receive this food, they would go dormant, and that is what the manuscript said had happened in the early twentieth century.
According to the text, the lighthouse keeper had accidentally discovered the cavern at an unusually low tide cycle, had encountered the creatures, which the text did not describe other than to call them ""horrific"" and ""ghastly,"" and there they offered him their deal. Regular feedings for immortality. The keeper agreed, and was able to continue feeding them until his disappearance in 1928. Howard didn't know if they had acquired a new servant, the lighthouse keeper was never seen again, and the book had no copyright date, only that it had been printed in Berlin in the 30's. There was no further mention of the lighthouses or the creatures in the book.
The fact that the lighthouse keeper had disappeared made Howard wonder if the lure of immortality offered by the creatures was genuine or just a dangling carrot. It didn't matter, Howard meant to find out either way. He was drawn to the idea. He was obsessed with it. He had even dreamed about it numerous times. Strange dreams of underwater cities of alien origin, and whispering voices speaking unheard languages, chanting unknown incantations designed to foster an atmosphere conducive to the bringing forth of some great and dreadful being. He actually considered the search for the chamber beneath the lighthouse a Higher Calling. And so upon receiving his inheritance, he made a decision to tour all of the lighthouses in the Pacific Northwest, buying any and all of them that he could, and searching for the underground chamber. But until that particular autumn afternoon his search had turned up nothing but moss-covered brick towers which the Coast Guard had made obsolete with their newfangled aids to navigation, or forgotten lighthouses that had been replaced by newer, more modern structures.
But no hidden chamber.
And no creatures.
Howard slid the old-fashioned skeleton key into the rusty lock which made a low grating sound, and found to his surprise that it turned quite easily. He pushed open the old wooden door a little harder than he probably should have and the door swung open and crashed against the stone wall inside with a loud bang. There was suddenly what sounded like a fluttering of feathers overhead and Howard assumed that there was probably a whole community of bats or pigeons, or both, living in the long-abandoned lighthouse. No matter, he had no plans to move in.
Not yet anyway.
In comparison to the other lighthouses that Howard had visited in the previous months, this one was actually well lit. Long horizontal windows spiraled upward, following the narrow stairway as it wound its way around the inner walls of the old building, allowing the sun to penetrate the damp air that lingered inside. But it wasn't the lighting that struck Howard as strange; for indeed, as soon as he had stepped inside the lighthouse he could actually feel a difference from all of the other lighthouses that he had seen; but it was the absence of something so common in old buildings that one could easily overlook it, if one were not observant.
But Howard was an observant fellow.
He stamped his feet on the ground a few times and looked up at the windows, waiting. But what he was looking for was not there. There were no dust motes flitting in the rays of sunshine that spilled in through the narrow windows. No dust motes. None. Every old building he had searched had millions of dust motes swirling into the beams of sunshine that streamed through their ancient panes of glass. But not here. The place was mildewed and damp and wet and slippery and just plain cold. The chill seemed to permeate everything. Outside the temperature was a wondrous 65 degrees, but within the walls of that ancient tower of light it could easily have been half that. He started to walk further inside to get a look around and slipped. If anyone had been watching he probably would have looked like a beginning ice skater trying to keep his balance. He steadied himself by putting one hand against the wall and his hand sank into a slick, sticky substance. He quickly yanked it away. He brought the open palm to his face and sniffed.
That was the first time he threw up that day.
He tried his handkerchief, but the only thing that came off of the palm of his left hand and into the handkerchief was that horrible odor. He walked carefully over to a nearby table and tried scraping his hand clean on its edge. That helped a little. As a kid he used to smear rubber cement all over the palms of his hands and then peel it off after it had dried, making little sticky rubber balls. This stuff reminded Howard of that rubber cement, only this substance was a lot more mucilaginous. He pulled his pocket knife out of . . . his pocket and tried scraping the stuff off that way. That worked much better, and in a few minutes he had succeeded in getting most of the gummy substance off of his hand. But it was now all over the blade of his knife and so he simply left the knife on the table.
After all, the place was his. And he could afford a new knife.
A feeling of . . . separateness . . . suddenly came over Howard. This lighthouse felt more like . . . a holy place than an ancient warning beacon. Not ""holy"" in the Judeo-Christian sense of the word, but more in its meaning of sacredness. The ancient Greek and Hebrew words for ""Holy"" actually meant ""set aside; separate."" That's what this place felt like . . . holy . . . yet . . . not a good holy, more like a bad holy; a malevolent sinister evil lingered in every particle of non-dust-moted air, a diabolic ambiance that saturated every atom, every cell. Could it be possible?
Could this be the place?
A shiver ran up Howard's back and he tried not to get his hopes up. After buying five lighthouses and exploring three times as many, he had almost started to feel as if the Book of Hidden Numbers was just a hoax. A so-called sacred text created to part the proverbial fool and his proverbial money. But he just couldn't shake that feeling of . . .
Destiny.
If any place he had visited had ever exuded a wisp of anticipation and the apprehension of the object of Howard's quest, this one did. This one seemed to say, Come Howard! Come inside and find your . . .

Destiny . . . ?
Yes. Destiny. For the first time since stepping inside, Howard took a good look around. He stuffed his hands inside the pockets of his London Fog and sniffed, curls of steam spiraled out of his nostrils as he exhaled. The round room was bare save the desk which held Howard's now defiled blade. The floor was covered with a dark green algae of some sort, no doubt the cause of Howard's slip; the walls were bare, except in spots here and there was the sticky essence that had befouled Howard's palm. Upon closer inspection he noticed that the sticky stuff on the walls seemed to be a series of blotches the size of a human head. Furthermore they seemed to be evenly spaced apart, almost like . . . footprints, or hand prints, or . . .
Howard blinked. On the far side of the room he spotted a rusted iron ring laying on the concrete floor. He went over to it and saw the outline of some type of trap door surrounding the ring.
""Howard,"" a voice whispered over his shoulder.
Howard spun around. ""What's that? Who's there?"" The open door that he had entered stood out like a bright green rectangle, as Howard saw the bushes outside the lighthouse reflecting the afternoon sun standing, in stark contrast to the grey walls surrounding it. But there was no reply to his inquiry.
He continued to stare at the open door, but there was nothing there, only the overgrown blackberry vines that wound their way up the litter of pines that surrounded the lighthouse. He bent over and grabbed hold of the iron ring and gave it a slow steady pull. At first he thought that it was not going to budge, but when he had heard a slippery sucking noise, like the sound a foot makes when pulled out of deep mud, he went at it with a gusto that was actually surprising to him, and the door opened.
It was a heavy door, no question about that, but Howard had not even so much as found a basement in any of the lighthouses he had inspected previously, and like the petite mothers who lifted cars off of their newborn infants, Howard threw the door open without so much as a grunt. The black aperture gaped at him, beckoning.
Adrenaline coursed.
Destiny called.
""Howard."" The whispering voice seemed to beckon from deep within the darkened tunnel.
Howard pulled out his flashlight and turned it on, shining the beam of light down into an abyss of moss-covered stone steps and various fungi clinging to water-soaked walls. Without hesitation Howard began carefully descending the steps. His heart began beating faster, he could actually feel it increase in its palpitations. His blood pulsed loud in his ears. His mouth went dry. Could this be it? Could this really be the place? Howard tried desperately to fight off the instinct to cry, Eureka! I've found it! But he would not allow himself to be disappointed so bitterly, he had searched too long, come too far, drank too many espresso's with over-the-hill real estate saleswomen with their dyed and sprayed hair, fake fingernails and pancake make-up, spent too much money in search of this . . . this . . . what was he searching for, anyway? He had almost forgotten, the purpose lingering on the fringes of his consciousness . . . Ah yes! Servanthood for immortality, that was it! He had certainly come too far to let emotions lead him now. He must remain calm, cool-headed, reserved. After all, if it was all true, he would need to make a good impression.
Wouldn't he?
Of course. So he stopped on the steps and closed his eyes. He breathed in and out, practicing the relaxation techniques he had learned from the tapes he had in his glove compartment. In and out. Slowly, deliberately. In . . . hold for five seconds. Out . . . exhale for ten. In . . . out . . . in . . . out. There, that was better, he felt ready to continue.
Get a grip man. Do you think they'll take an emotionally unstable applicant seriously?
They didn't have to know he had been on antidepressants for months. Howard opened his eyes and peered down the beam of his flashlight into the bowels of the lighthouse. In the orifice there was only blackness, and the occasional ears of rippling fungus that grew out of the old bricks like warts. Something was different here. The air was actually getting warmer, yet at the same time that musty, nauseating odor that had filled his nostrils upstairs earlier was increasing. It was almost as if . . .
As if something actually lived down there.
By his own count Howard had descended two dozen steps when the trap door above him slammed shut. His ears popped, like when he would slam the door in his Volkswagen Beetle, and he winced at the pain.
No turning back now Howard.
Panic raced from his head to his chest and dropped into his knees like a jolt of high voltage. Howard's first instinct was to race back up the stairs, to somehow muster the strength to throw that massive trap door open and flee. Just run. It didn't matter where, just as long as it was far away from this place. Forget the money and the years he had spent in search of. . .
Just forget it.
But though he actually tried, he couldn't move. He was literally, and for the first time in all of his life, . . . paralyzed . . . incapacitated. If the Hordes of Hell had come bounding up those lichen-covered stairs he would be fortunate to even be able to let out a scream, much less try to defend himself, or attempt escape. And so Howard Flips stood there in the dank darkness. Unable to move, unable to speak, unable to do anything except perhaps let his bladder flow freely, against his will, of course. But that didn't happen. Instead, the wave of fear passed, the panic subsided like a receding tide in a time-lapsed film. And Howard was again . . . Howard. Out of habit, and an unconscious attempt at self-comfort, he adjusted his glasses on the bridge of his nose, sniffed, and stretched.
That was better. He was ready to continue.
Who locked you in here Howard?
Howard pushed the thought away. It didn't matter. He was certain that he had found what he had been looking for. He continued his descent, calmly. When he had counted seventy-five steps, he found that he had reached the bottom, or a bottom. In the distance he could hear water drip-dripping, as from a ceiling into a pool beneath. His light beam pierced the darkness, and he saw that there was a passageway. Not a natural formation, but a tunnel that had actually been dug. By human hands.
Well, Howard assumed that the hands that created this tunnel were human.
He proceeded down the narrow passageway; the fungi was thick along the walls, the stone floor was slick, and deep green. He rounded a turn and thought he saw a dim glow further down the tunnel. He stopped for a moment, switching off his flashlight and taking in his claustrophobic surroundings. There was indeed a greenish-yellow radiance off in the distance, and the sound of dripping water grew louder. He thought he heard something shuffling down the steps behind him. And then a thought struck. . . .
How can you be so sure that whatever shut that trapdoor isn't locked in here with you?
The time-lapsed film ran again and the tide of fear rose. Howard turned on his flashlight and shined its beam behind him, in the direction of the alleged noise. But there was nothing there. At least nothing he could see. He turned back around and walked toward the glow. Seconds later he found himself entering a large cavern. Splinters of sunlight sliced through the darkness at various points along one high wall, as if cracks and crevices in the cliffs that lined the ocean had purposely allowed air and light into this abysmal asylum, to nurture, or at the very least, allow to exist, some type of life forms.
The sunlight splashed on the algae-covered walls of the cavern like vandal's paint. Water dripped from overhead and landed in what Howard now saw was a small pool. A tide pool no doubt, being this close to the ocean. Howard knelt and scooped up some water, tasting his fingers. Yes. It was salt water.
This has to be it! This has to be the cave! he thought. He shut off his flashlight and let his eyes adjust to the light. As he stood there in the semi-darkness, he tried to remember what he had done with that transcript from the Book of Hidden Numbers that explained this place. He felt around in his pockets and finally found the crumpled piece of notebook paper that he had been carrying around for years. He couldn't remember the last time he had actually read the passage, and so was glad that he had found the transcript. He opened it up, switched his flashlight back on, and read:


Should they not receive their food on a regular basis, they will lapse into a dormant sleep, until the Time. This would be devastating to the cause of the Great Old Ones, and cannot be accepted in any way. There are two who are responsible for their safety and flourishing. The first is the human servant, the lighthouse keeper, whoever that may be. He must be recruited and ordained into service, his pay is the promise of immortality. The second one is the Thing from Between. He is the recruiter. He cannot venture out for the food, yet he cannot join the cavern dwellers, because of his nature. He is more foul and terrible than the cavern dwellers, and cannot be trusted to insure the lighthouse keeper's safety. Therefore, a fail-safe has been put into place. Should the servant lighthouse keeper ever be found missing, and the dwellers begin their lapse into dormancy, then the call will go out into the subconscious mind of a chosen recruit. And he shall find them, and he shall revive them.

The Thing from Between? Be recruited? The call? . . . he couldn't remember reading that part before. Howard became confused. He was certain he had never read that passage before. He only remembered that the text told of the hidden cavern and the needed lighthouse keeper. There was no mention of a ""Thing from Between"" . . . that he could remember. It was as if . . . 
A noise came from down the passageway from which he had emerged. Was there really someone, or some-thing between him and the trap door? Howard furrowed his brow. His ears began to ring and the air suddenly seemed charged with electricity. He backed away from the entrance to the tunnel and pressed himself against a wet wall. He could feel the water soaking through his trench coat, through his shirt, and finally into his skin, and a chill ran through his body.
There was no doubt in his mind now, there was something coming down the passageway. But it was not footsteps that he heard, but rather a slithering, sucking sound, as if a dwarf with a limp was slowly dragging a drenched quilt across a rough surface. The sound was getting closer, and it was all Howard could do to keep from screaming maniacally and diving into the dark tide pool at his feet. He bit down on his clenched fist, and raised his darkened flashlight above his head, as if that might protect him from . . . that . . . thing.
His eyes were fully adjusted to the dimly lit cavern and locked on the doorway to the tunnel. The noise grew louder, and then stopped.
Nothing came out of the portal.
Howard held his breath and watched. But nothing happened. Minutes passed. Still nothing. Soon, Howard's arm began to cramp from holding his flashlight above his head and so he lowered his arm. But he dared not switch on the light, or move. Maybe whatever it was stopped its pursuit of Howard because it could no longer hear him, or see his flashlight beam. Maybe it turned around and left. Maybe . . . 
It's still there, Howard.
This time Howard didn't push the thoughts away, instead, he decided to just let them flow. Perhaps they could actually help him, perhaps they would be his only salvation. He thought that whatever it was in the tunnel might possibly be waiting for him to present himself as a recruit. Yes! Maybe that it was it! Maybe it wasn't going to hurt him at all, but was just simply waiting for him to come forward and say ""Here I am!"" After all, didn't the text talk about a recruiter?
The water in the tide pool splashed.
Howard jerked in a spasm of fear, and let out a scream that no matter how hard he tried he could not contain. The water went still as the ripples lapped the dark rocky shore at Howard's feet. Then with a great splashing and sloshing of water something jumped from the tide pool to the floor next to Howard. It was like a man, yet unlike any man that he had ever seen. It raised itself up on two feet and was taller than Howard by a good yard. It was humanoid in shape, with two legs, two long and lanky arms that ended in webbed, spindly, claw-tipped fingers, a long slim torso, and sitting atop a bull-like neck was an elongated head, with two large round orbs where eyes should be, two tiny slits for a nose, and a long, ear-to-ear slice for a mouth. Its rubbery skin glistened in the little light that the cracks in the cliffs allowed through. It had webbed feet, not unlike those of a frog or a toad. But the most striking thing to Howard was the smell. Mists of the foul effluvium drifted off the top of its head. And for the second time that day, Howard vomited, all over the feet of the creature that stood before him.
When he looked up, Howard saw the creature looking over at the entrance to the tunnel, and it barked. The sound was like a cross between a lion's roar, and a lap dog's yap. Howard heard the slithering sucking noise in the tunnel again, this time growing fainter, as whatever it was in that dark hallway was retreating. The tall creature swung its head around and stooped down, putting its reptilian face mere inches from Howard's. Howard tried breathing through his mouth only, to avoid the smell, but it was no use, and he bent over and threw up again. When he looked up the creature was still there, still stooped, still in his face. Its tiny nostril slits expanded and contracted as it moved its head over the top of Howard's scalp, it was smelling him. Howard was in such a state of shock, fear, and panic, that once again, he found himself paralyzed.
Is this really happening to me? he thought.
Then, another voice spoke in his head, like his own thoughts, yet it was not his voice. ""Yes, Howard, it is happening. Did you not present yourself here for consideration of service?""
Howard let out a yelp and fell to his knees.
This time the creature spoke out of its mouth. ""Would you prefer,"" it croaked, ""that I speak to you in this manner?"" Howard saw rows and rows of nail-like teeth lining the creature's jaws. And he nodded rapidly, actually meaning to shake his head, he did not want to see those teeth or smell that putrid breath again. ""Very well then."" It grunted and continued. ""You obviously believe, Howard, or you would not be here.""
""How do you know my name?"" Howard stammered.
""Because we have been calling you, Howard. You were chosen.""
""I didn't hear anyone calling me.""
""Come now, Howard, stop with all of this foolishness. Do you wish to serve us, or not?""
Howard was silent for a moment, and in the distance, he thought he heard the slithering noise. ""Yes.""
""Very well then,"" it croaked, and reached one of its long hands down and wrapped itself around the top of Howard's skull. Sparks floated into Howard's peripheral vision, and then he blacked out.
* * *

When he awoke, Howard was in a room at the top of the lighthouse. It was still daylight, of course, but Howard wasn't sure if still was the proper term to use, for he had no idea how many days he had been unconscious or how he had gotten up to the top of the lighthouse. He ran his hand across his chin and noticed that he had grown a full beard. His clothes were tattered and torn.
He looked at his hands and they were filthy. His fingernails were long and caked with a dark substance. He was abruptly becoming aware that a considerable length of time had actually passed.
""How long have, Iâ!,"" Howard started, but was stopped in mid-sentence. There was a small wooden trap door in the floor, no doubt the access to the stairs, and Howard's attention was drawn to it because it was creaking open.
""Don't worry, Howard,"" he heard a whispering voice say. ""You have served well, and this won't hurt a bit."" Howard watched the trap door open, and saw a long tentacle, like that of a giant octopus come slithering rapidly from the crack toward his face.
It wrapped itself around Howard's neck and squeezed. His spectacles fell to the floor.
And Howard slipped into the promised immortality.
",False
"It was a gentle daylight rain that awaked me front my stupor in the brush-grown railway cut, and when I staggered out to the roadway ahead I saw no trace of any prints in the fresh mud. The fishy odour, too, was gone, Innsmouth's ruined roofs and toppling steeples loomed up greyly toward the southeast, but not a living creature did I spy in all the desolate salt marshes around. My watch was still going, and told me that the hour was past noon.
The reality of what I had been through was highly uncertain in my mind, but I felt that something hideous lay in the background. I must get away from evil-shadowed Innsmouth--and accordingly I began to test my cramped, wearied powers of locomotion. Despite weakness hunger, horror, and bewilderment I found myself after a time able to walk; so started slowly along the muddy road to Rowley. Before evening I was in village, getting a meal and providing myself with presentable clothes. I caught the night train to Arkham, and the next day talked long and earnestly with government officials there; a process I later repeated in Boston. With the main result of these colloquies the public is now familiar--and I wish, for normality's sake, there were nothing more to tell. Perhaps it is madness that is overtaking me--yet perhaps a greater horror--or a greater marvel--is reaching out.
As may well be imagined, I gave up most of the foreplanned features of the rest of my tour--the scenic, architectural, and antiquarian diversions on which I had counted so heavily. Nor did I dare look for that piece of strange jewelry said to be in the Miskatonic University Museum. I did, however, improve my stay in Arkham by collecting some genealogical notes I had long wished to possess; very rough and hasty data, it is true, but capable of good use later on when I might have time to collate and codify them. The curator of the historical society there--Mr. B. Lapham Peabody--was very courteous about assisting me, and expressed unusual interest when I told him I was a grandson of Eliza Orne of Arkham, who was born in 1867 and had married James Williamson of Ohio at the age of seventeen.
It seemed that a maternal uncle of mine had been there many years before on a quest much like my own; and that my grandmother's family was a topic of some local curiosity. There had, Mr. Peabody said, been considerable discussion about the marriage of her father, Benjamin Orne, just after the Civil War; since the ancestry of the bride was peculiarly puzzling. That bride was understood to have been an orphaned Marsh of New Hampshire--a cousin of the Essex County Marshes--but her education had been in France and she knew very little of her family. A guardian had deposited funds in a Boston bank to maintain her and her French governess; but that guardian's name was unfamiliar to Arkham people, and in time he dropped out of sight, so that the governess assumed the role by court appointment. The Frenchwoman--now long dead--was very taciturn, and there were those who said she could have told more than she did.
But the most baffling thing was the inability of anyone to place the recorded parents of the young woman--Enoch and Lydia (Meserve) Marsh--among the known families of New Hampshire. Possibly, many suggested, she was the natural daughter of some Marsh of prominence--she certainly had the true Marsh eyes. Most of the puzzling was done after her early death, which took place at the birth of my grandmother--her only child. Having formed some disagreeable impressions connected with the name of Marsh, I did not welcome the news that it belonged on my own ancestral tree; nor was I pleased by Mr. Peabody's suggestion that I had the true Marsh eyes myself. However, I was grateful for data which I knew would prove valuable; and took copious notes and lists of book references regarding the well-documented Orne family.
I went directly home to Toledo from Boston, and later spent a month at Maumee recuperating from my ordeal. In September I entered Oberlin for my final year, and from then till the next June was busy with studies and other wholesome activities--reminded of the bygone terror only by occasional official visits from government men in connexion with the campaign which my pleas and evidence had started. Around the middle of July--just a year after the Innsmouth experience--I spent a week with my late mother's family in Cleveland; checking some of my new genealogical data with the various notes, traditions, and bits of heirloom material in existence there, and seeing what kind of a connected chart I could construct.
I did not exactly relish this task, for the atmosphere of the Williamson home had always depressed me. There was a strain of morbidity there, and my mother had never encouraged my visiting her parents as a child, although she always welcomed her father when he came to Toledo. My Arkham-born grandmother had seemed strange and almost terrifying to me, and I do not think I grieved when she disappeared. I was eight years old then, and it was said that she had wandered off in grief after the suicide of my Uncle Douglas, her eldest son. He had shot himself after a trip to New England--the same trip, no doubt, which had caused him to be recalled at the Arkham Historical Society.
This uncle had resembled her, and I had never liked him either. Something about the staring, unwinking expression of both of them had given me a vague, unaccountable uneasiness. My mother and Uncle Walter had not looked like that. They were like their father, though poor little cousin Lawrence--Walter's son--had been almost perfect duplicate of his grandmother before his condition took him to the permanent seclusion of a sanitarium at Canton. I had not seen him in four years, but my uncle once implied that his state, both mental and physical, was very bad. This worry had probably been a major cause of his mother's death two years before.
My grandfather and his widowed son Walter now comprised the Cleveland household, but the memory of older times hung thickly over it. I still disliked the place, and tried to get my researches done as quickly as possible. Williamson records and traditions were supplied in abundance by my grandfather; though for Orne material I had to depend on my uncle Walter, who put at my disposal the contents of all his files, including notes, letters, cuttings, heirlooms, photographs, and miniatures.
It was in going over the letters and pictures on the Orne side that I began to acquire a kind of terror of my own ancestry. As I have said, my grandmother and Uncle Douglas had always disturbed me. Now, years after their passing, I gazed at their pictured faces with a measurably heightened feeling of repulsion and alienation. I could not at first understand the change, but gradually a horrible sort of comparison began to obtrude itself on my unconscious mind despite the steady refusal of my consciousness to admit even the least suspicion of it. It was clear that the typical expression of these faces now suggested something it had not suggested before--something which would bring stark panic if too openly thought of.
But the worst shock came when my uncle shewed me the Orne jewellery in a downtown safe deposit vault. Some of the items were delicate and inspiring enough, but there was one box of strange old pieces descended from my mysterious great-grandmother which my uncle was almost reluctant to produce. They were, he said, of very grotesque and almost repulsive design, and had never to his knowledge been publicly worn; though my grandmother used to enjoy looking at them. Vague legends of bad luck clustered around them, and my great-grandmother's French governess had said they ought not to be worn in New England, though it would be quite safe to wear them in Europe.
As my uncle began slowly and grudgingly to unwrap the things he urged me not to be shocked by the strangeness and frequent hideousness of the designs. Artists and archaeologists who had seen them pronounced their workmanship superlatively and exotically exquisite, though no one seemed able to define their exact material or assign them to any specific art tradition. There were two armlets, a tiara, and a kind of pectoral; the latter having in high relief certain figures of almost unbearable extravagance.
During this description I had kept a tight rein on my emotions, but my face must have betrayed my mounting fears. My uncle looked concerned, and paused in his unwrapping to study my countenance. I motioned to him to continue, which he did with renewed signs of reluctance. He seemed to expect some demonstration when the first piece--the tiara--became visible, but I doubt if he expected quite what actually happened. I did not expect it, either, for I thought I was thoroughly forewarned regarding what the jewellery would turn out to be. What I did was to faint silently away, just as I had done in that brier-choked railway cut a year before.
From that day on my life has been a nightmare of brooding and apprehension nor do I know how much is hideous truth and how much madness. My great-grandmother had been a Marsh of unknown source whose husband lived in Arkham--and did not old Zadok say that the daughter of Obed Marsh by a monstrous mother was married to an Arkham man through trick? What was it the ancient toper had muttered about the line of my eyes to Captain Obed's? In Arkham, too, the curator had told me I had the true Marsh eyes. Was Obed Marsh my own great-great-grandfather? Who--or what--then, was my great-great-grandmother? But perhaps this was all madness. Those whitish-gold ornaments might easily have been bought from some Innsmouth sailor by the father of my great-grandmother, whoever he was. And that look in the staring-eyed faces of my grandmother and self-slain uncle might be sheer fancy on my part--sheer fancy, bolstered up by the Innsmouth shadow which had so darkly coloured my imagination. But why had my uncle killed himself after an ancestral quest in New England?
For more than two years I fought off these reflections with partial success. My father secured me a place in an insurance office, and I buried myself in routine as deeply as possible. In the winter of 1930-31, however, the dreams began. They were very sparse and insidious at first, but increased in frequency and vividness as the weeks went by. Great watery spaces opened out before me, and I seemed to wander through titanic sunken porticos and labyrinths of weedy cyclopean walls with grotesque fishes as my companions. Then the other shapes began to appear, filling me with nameless horror the moment I awoke. But during the dreams they did not horrify me at all--I was one with them; wearing their unhuman trappings, treading their aqueous ways, and praying monstrously at their evil sea-bottom temples.
There was much more than I could remember, but even what I did remember each morning would be enough to stamp me as a madman or a genius if ever I dared write it down. Some frightful influence, I felt, was seeking gradually to drag me out of the sane world of wholesome life into unnamable abysses of blackness and alienage; and the process told heavily on me. My health and appearance grew steadily worse, till finally I was forced to give up my position and adopt the static, secluded life of an invalid. Some odd nervous affliction had me in its grip, and I found myself at times almost unable to shut my eyes.
It was then that I began to study the mirror with mounting alarm. The slow ravages of disease are not pleasant to watch, but in my case there was something subtler and more puzzling in the background. My father seemed to notice it, too, for he began looking at me curiously and almost affrightedly. What was taking place in me? Could it be that I was coming to resemble my grandmother and uncle Douglas?
One night I had a frightful dream in which I met my grandmother under the sea. She lived in a phosphorescent palace of many terraces, with gardens of strange leprous corals and grotesque brachiate efflorescences, and welcomed me with a warmth that may have been sardonic. She had changed--as those who take to the water change--and told me she had never died. Instead, she had gone to a spot her dead son had learned about, and had leaped to a realm whose wonders-- destined for him as well--he had spurned with a smoking pistol. This was to be my realm, too--I could not escape it. I would never die, but would live with those who had lived since before man ever walked the earth.
I met also that which had been her grandmother. For eighty thousand years Pth'thya-l'yi had lived in Y'ha-nthlei, and thither she had gone back after Obed Marsh was dead. Y'ha-nthlei was not destroyed when the upper-earth men shot death into the sea. It was hurt, but not destroyed. The Deep Ones could never be destroyed, even though the palaeogean magic of the forgotten Old Ones might sometimes check them. For the present they would rest; but some day, if they remembered, they would rise again for the tribute Great Cthulhu craved. It would be a city greater than Innsmouth next time. They had planned to spread, and had brought up that which would help them, but now they must wait once more. For bringing the upper-earth men's death I must do a penance, but that would not be heavy. This was the dream in which I saw a shoggoth for the first time, and the sight set me awake in a frenzy of screaming. That morning the mirror definitely told me I had acquired the Innsmouth look.
So far I have not shot myself as my uncle Douglas did. I bought an automatic and almost took the step, but certain dreams deterred me. The tense extremes of horror are lessening, and I feel queerly drawn toward the unknown sea-deeps instead of fearing them. I hear and do strange things in sleep, and awake with a kind of exaltation instead of terror. I do not believe I need to wait for the full change as most have waited. If I did, my father would probably shut me up in a sanitarium as my poor little cousin is shut up. Stupendous and unheard-of splendors await me below, and I shall seek them soon. Ia-R'lyehl Cihuiha flgagnl id Ia! No, I shall not shoot myself--I cannot be made to shoot myself!
I shall plan my cousin's escape from that Canton mad-house, and together we shall go to marvel-shadowed Innsmouth. We shall swim out to that brooding reef in the sea and dive down through black abysses to Cyclopean and many-columned Y'ha-nthlei, and in that lair of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory for ever.
","(Found Among the Papers of the Late
Francis Wayland Thurston, of Boston)
“Of such great powers or beings there may be conceivably a survival . . . a survival of a hugely remote period when . . . consciousness was manifested, perhaps, in shapes and forms long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity . . . forms of which poetry and legend alone have caught a flying memory and called them gods, monsters, mythical beings of all sorts and kinds. . . .”
—Algernon Blackwood.

I.
The Horror in Clay.

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

II.
The Tale of Inspector Legrasse.

The older matters which had made the sculptor’s dream and bas-relief so significant to my uncle formed the subject of the second half of his long manuscript. Once before, it appears, Professor Angell had seen the hellish outlines of the nameless monstrosity, puzzled over the unknown hieroglyphics, and heard the ominous syllables which can be rendered only as “Cthulhu”; and all this in so stirring and horrible a connexion that it is small wonder he pursued young Wilcox with queries and demands for data.
      The earlier experience had come in 1908, seventeen years before, when the American Archaeological Society held its annual meeting in St. Louis. Professor Angell, as befitted one of his authority and attainments, had had a prominent part in all the deliberations; and was one of the first to be approached by the several outsiders who took advantage of the convocation to offer questions for correct answering and problems for expert solution.
      The chief of these outsiders, and in a short time the focus of interest for the entire meeting, was a commonplace-looking middle-aged man who had travelled all the way from New Orleans for certain special information unobtainable from any local source. His name was John Raymond Legrasse, and he was by profession an Inspector of Police. With him he bore the subject of his visit, a grotesque, repulsive, and apparently very ancient stone statuette whose origin he was at a loss to determine. It must not be fancied that Inspector Legrasse had the least interest in archaeology. On the contrary, his wish for enlightenment was prompted by purely professional considerations. The statuette, idol, fetish, or whatever it was, had been captured some months before in the wooded swamps south of New Orleans during a raid on a supposed voodoo meeting; and so singular and hideous were the rites connected with it, that the police could not but realise that they had stumbled on a dark cult totally unknown to them, and infinitely more diabolic than even the blackest of the African voodoo circles. Of its origin, apart from the erratic and unbelievable tales extorted from the captured members, absolutely nothing was to be discovered; hence the anxiety of the police for any antiquarian lore which might help them to place the frightful symbol, and through it track down the cult to its fountain-head.
      Inspector Legrasse was scarcely prepared for the sensation which his offering created. One sight of the thing had been enough to throw the assembled men of science into a state of tense excitement, and they lost no time in crowding around him to gaze at the diminutive figure whose utter strangeness and air of genuinely abysmal antiquity hinted so potently at unopened and archaic vistas. No recognised school of sculpture had animated this terrible object, yet centuries and even thousands of years seemed recorded in its dim and greenish surface of unplaceable stone.
      The figure, which was finally passed slowly from man to man for close and careful study, was between seven and eight inches in height, and of exquisitely artistic workmanship. It represented a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind. This thing, which seemed instinct with a fearsome and unnatural malignancy, was of a somewhat bloated corpulence, and squatted evilly on a rectangular block or pedestal covered with undecipherable characters. The tips of the wings touched the back edge of the block, the seat occupied the centre, whilst the long, curved claws of the doubled-up, crouching hind legs gripped the front edge and extended a quarter of the way down toward the bottom of the pedestal. The cephalopod head was bent forward, so that the ends of the facial feelers brushed the backs of huge fore paws which clasped the croucher’s elevated knees. The aspect of the whole was abnormally life-like, and the more subtly fearful because its source was so totally unknown. Its vast, awesome, and incalculable age was unmistakable; yet not one link did it shew with any known type of art belonging to civilisation’s youth—or indeed to any other time. Totally separate and apart, its very material was a mystery; for the soapy, greenish-black stone with its golden or iridescent flecks and striations resembled nothing familiar to geology or mineralogy. The characters along the base were equally baffling; and no member present, despite a representation of half the world’s expert learning in this field, could form the least notion of even their remotest linguistic kinship. They, like the subject and material, belonged to something horribly remote and distinct from mankind as we know it; something frightfully suggestive of old and unhallowed cycles of life in which our world and our conceptions have no part.
      And yet, as the members severally shook their heads and confessed defeat at the Inspector’s problem, there was one man in that gathering who suspected a touch of bizarre familiarity in the monstrous shape and writing, and who presently told with some diffidence of the odd trifle he knew. This person was the late William Channing Webb, Professor of Anthropology in Princeton University, and an explorer of no slight note. Professor Webb had been engaged, forty-eight years before, in a tour of Greenland and Iceland in search of some Runic inscriptions which he failed to unearth; and whilst high up on the West Greenland coast had encountered a singular tribe or cult of degenerate Esquimaux whose religion, a curious form of devil-worship, chilled him with its deliberate bloodthirstiness and repulsiveness. It was a faith of which other Esquimaux knew little, and which they mentioned only with shudders, saying that it had come down from horribly ancient aeons before ever the world was made. Besides nameless rites and human sacrifices there were certain queer hereditary rituals addressed to a supreme elder devil or tornasuk; and of this Professor Webb had taken a careful phonetic copy from an aged angekok or wizard-priest, expressing the sounds in Roman letters as best he knew how. But just now of prime significance was the fetish which this cult had cherished, and around which they danced when the aurora leaped high over the ice cliffs. It was, the professor stated, a very crude bas-relief of stone, comprising a hideous picture and some cryptic writing. And so far as he could tell, it was a rough parallel in all essential features of the bestial thing now lying before the meeting.
      This data, received with suspense and astonishment by the assembled members, proved doubly exciting to Inspector Legrasse; and he began at once to ply his informant with questions. Having noted and copied an oral ritual among the swamp cult-worshippers his men had arrested, he besought the professor to remember as best he might the syllables taken down amongst the diabolist Esquimaux. There then followed an exhaustive comparison of details, and a moment of really awed silence when both detective and scientist agreed on the virtual identity of the phrase common to two hellish rituals so many worlds of distance apart. What, in substance, both the Esquimau wizards and the Louisiana swamp-priests had chanted to their kindred idols was something very like this—the word-divisions being guessed at from traditional breaks in the phrase as chanted aloud:
      “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.”
      Legrasse had one point in advance of Professor Webb, for several among his mongrel prisoners had repeated to him what older celebrants had told them the words meant. This text, as given, ran something like this:
      “In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”
      And now, in response to a general and urgent demand, Inspector Legrasse related as fully as possible his experience with the swamp worshippers; telling a story to which I could see my uncle attached profound significance. It savoured of the wildest dreams of myth-maker and theosophist, and disclosed an astonishing degree of cosmic imagination among such half-castes and pariahs as might be least expected to possess it.
      On November 1st, 1907, there had come to the New Orleans police a frantic summons from the swamp and lagoon country to the south. The squatters there, mostly primitive but good-natured descendants of Lafitte’s men, were in the grip of stark terror from an unknown thing which had stolen upon them in the night. It was voodoo, apparently, but voodoo of a more terrible sort than they had ever known; and some of their women and children had disappeared since the malevolent tom-tom had begun its incessant beating far within the black haunted woods where no dweller ventured. There were insane shouts and harrowing screams, soul-chilling chants and dancing devil-flames; and, the frightened messenger added, the people could stand it no more.
      So a body of twenty police, filling two carriages and an automobile, had set out in the late afternoon with the shivering squatter as a guide. At the end of the passable road they alighted, and for miles splashed on in silence through the terrible cypress woods where day never came. Ugly roots and malignant hanging nooses of Spanish moss beset them, and now and then a pile of dank stones or fragment of a rotting wall intensified by its hint of morbid habitation a depression which every malformed tree and every fungous islet combined to create. At length the squatter settlement, a miserable huddle of huts, hove in sight; and hysterical dwellers ran out to cluster around the group of bobbing lanterns. The muffled beat of tom-toms was now faintly audible far, far ahead; and a curdling shriek came at infrequent intervals when the wind shifted. A reddish glare, too, seemed to filter through the pale undergrowth beyond endless avenues of forest night. Reluctant even to be left alone again, each one of the cowed squatters refused point-blank to advance another inch toward the scene of unholy worship, so Inspector Legrasse and his nineteen colleagues plunged on unguided into black arcades of horror that none of them had ever trod before.
      The region now entered by the police was one of traditionally evil repute, substantially unknown and untraversed by white men. There were legends of a hidden lake unglimpsed by mortal sight, in which dwelt a huge, formless white polypous thing with luminous eyes; and squatters whispered that bat-winged devils flew up out of caverns in inner earth to worship it at midnight. They said it had been there before D’Iberville, before La Salle, before the Indians, and before even the wholesome beasts and birds of the woods. It was nightmare itself, and to see it was to die. But it made men dream, and so they knew enough to keep away. The present voodoo orgy was, indeed, on the merest fringe of this abhorred area, but that location was bad enough; hence perhaps the very place of the worship had terrified the squatters more than the shocking sounds and incidents.
      Only poetry or madness could do justice to the noises heard by Legrasse’s men as they ploughed on through the black morass toward the red glare and the muffled tom-toms. There are vocal qualities peculiar to men, and vocal qualities peculiar to beasts; and it is terrible to hear the one when the source should yield the other. Animal fury and orgiastic licence here whipped themselves to daemoniac heights by howls and squawking ecstasies that tore and reverberated through those nighted woods like pestilential tempests from the gulfs of hell. Now and then the less organised ululation would cease, and from what seemed a well-drilled chorus of hoarse voices would rise in sing-song chant that hideous phrase or ritual:
      “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.”
Then the men, having reached a spot where the trees were thinner, came suddenly in sight of the spectacle itself. Four of them reeled, one fainted, and two were shaken into a frantic cry which the mad cacophony of the orgy fortunately deadened. Legrasse dashed swamp water on the face of the fainting man, and all stood trembling and nearly hypnotised with horror.
      In a natural glade of the swamp stood a grassy island of perhaps an acre’s extent, clear of trees and tolerably dry. On this now leaped and twisted a more indescribable horde of human abnormality than any but a Sime or an Angarola could paint. Void of clothing, this hybrid spawn were braying, bellowing, and writhing about a monstrous ring-shaped bonfire; in the centre of which, revealed by occasional rifts in the curtain of flame, stood a great granite monolith some eight feet in height; on top of which, incongruous with its diminutiveness, rested the noxious carven statuette. From a wide circle of ten scaffolds set up at regular intervals with the flame-girt monolith as a centre hung, head downward, the oddly marred bodies of the helpless squatters who had disappeared. It was inside this circle that the ring of worshippers jumped and roared, the general direction of the mass motion being from left to right in endless Bacchanal between the ring of bodies and the ring of fire.
      It may have been only imagination and it may have been only echoes which induced one of the men, an excitable Spaniard, to fancy he heard antiphonal responses to the ritual from some far and unillumined spot deeper within the wood of ancient legendry and horror. This man, Joseph D. Galvez, I later met and questioned; and he proved distractingly imaginative. He indeed went so far as to hint of the faint beating of great wings, and of a glimpse of shining eyes and a mountainous white bulk beyond the remotest trees—but I suppose he had been hearing too much native superstition.
      Actually, the horrified pause of the men was of comparatively brief duration. Duty came first; and although there must have been nearly a hundred mongrel celebrants in the throng, the police relied on their firearms and plunged determinedly into the nauseous rout. For five minutes the resultant din and chaos were beyond description. Wild blows were struck, shots were fired, and escapes were made; but in the end Legrasse was able to count some forty-seven sullen prisoners, whom he forced to dress in haste and fall into line between two rows of policemen. Five of the worshippers lay dead, and two severely wounded ones were carried away on improvised stretchers by their fellow-prisoners. The image on the monolith, of course, was carefully removed and carried back by Legrasse.
      Examined at headquarters after a trip of intense strain and weariness, the prisoners all proved to be men of a very low, mixed-blooded, and mentally aberrant type. Most were seamen, and a sprinkling of negroes and mulattoes, largely West Indians or Brava Portuguese from the Cape Verde Islands, gave a colouring of voodooism to the heterogeneous cult. But before many questions were asked, it became manifest that something far deeper and older than negro fetichism was involved. Degraded and ignorant as they were, the creatures held with surprising consistency to the central idea of their loathsome faith.
      They worshipped, so they said, the Great Old Ones who lived ages before there were any men, and who came to the young world out of the sky. Those Old Ones were gone now, inside the earth and under the sea; but their dead bodies had told their secrets in dreams to the first men, who formed a cult which had never died. This was that cult, and the prisoners said it had always existed and always would exist, hidden in distant wastes and dark places all over the world until the time when the great priest Cthulhu, from his dark house in the mighty city of R’lyeh under the waters, should rise and bring the earth again beneath his sway. Some day he would call, when the stars were ready, and the secret cult would always be waiting to liberate him.
      Meanwhile no more must be told. There was a secret which even torture could not extract. Mankind was not absolutely alone among the conscious things of earth, for shapes came out of the dark to visit the faithful few. But these were not the Great Old Ones. No man had ever seen the Old Ones. The carven idol was great Cthulhu, but none might say whether or not the others were precisely like him. No one could read the old writing now, but things were told by word of mouth. The chanted ritual was not the secret—that was never spoken aloud, only whispered. The chant meant only this: “In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”
      Only two of the prisoners were found sane enough to be hanged, and the rest were committed to various institutions. All denied a part in the ritual murders, and averred that the killing had been done by Black Winged Ones which had come to them from their immemorial meeting-place in the haunted wood. But of those mysterious allies no coherent account could ever be gained. What the police did extract, came mainly from an immensely aged mestizo named Castro, who claimed to have sailed to strange ports and talked with undying leaders of the cult in the mountains of China.
      Old Castro remembered bits of hideous legend that paled the speculations of theosophists and made man and the world seem recent and transient indeed. There had been aeons when other Things ruled on the earth, and They had had great cities. Remains of Them, he said the deathless Chinamen had told him, were still to be found as Cyclopean stones on islands in the Pacific. They all died vast epochs of time before men came, but there were arts which could revive Them when the stars had come round again to the right positions in the cycle of eternity. They had, indeed, come themselves from the stars, and brought Their images with Them.
      These Great Old Ones, Castro continued, were not composed altogether of flesh and blood. They had shape—for did not this star-fashioned image prove it?—but that shape was not made of matter. When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world through the sky; but when the stars were wrong, They could not live. But although They no longer lived, They would never really die. They all lay in stone houses in Their great city of R’lyeh, preserved by the spells of mighty Cthulhu for a glorious resurrection when the stars and the earth might once more be ready for Them. But at that time some force from outside must serve to liberate Their bodies. The spells that preserved Them intact likewise prevented Them from making an initial move, and They could only lie awake in the dark and think whilst uncounted millions of years rolled by. They knew all that was occurring in the universe, but Their mode of speech was transmitted thought. Even now They talked in Their tombs. When, after infinities of chaos, the first men came, the Great Old Ones spoke to the sensitive among them by moulding their dreams; for only thus could Their language reach the fleshly minds of mammals.
      Then, whispered Castro, those first men formed the cult around small idols which the Great Ones shewed them; idols brought in dim aeras from dark stars. That cult would never die till the stars came right again, and the secret priests would take great Cthulhu from His tomb to revive His subjects and resume His rule of earth. The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom. Meanwhile the cult, by appropriate rites, must keep alive the memory of those ancient ways and shadow forth the prophecy of their return.
      In the elder time chosen men had talked with the entombed Old Ones in dreams, but then something had happened. The great stone city R’lyeh, with its monoliths and sepulchres, had sunk beneath the waves; and the deep waters, full of the one primal mystery through which not even thought can pass, had cut off the spectral intercourse. But memory never died, and high-priests said that the city would rise again when the stars were right. Then came out of the earth the black spirits of earth, mouldy and shadowy, and full of dim rumours picked up in caverns beneath forgotten sea-bottoms. But of them old Castro dared not speak much. He cut himself off hurriedly, and no amount of persuasion or subtlety could elicit more in this direction. The size of the Old Ones, too, he curiously declined to mention. Of the cult, he said that he thought the centre lay amid the pathless deserts of Arabia, where Irem, the City of Pillars, dreams hidden and untouched. It was not allied to the European witch-cult, and was virtually unknown beyond its members. No book had ever really hinted of it, though the deathless Chinamen said that there were double meanings in the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred which the initiated might read as they chose, especially the much-discussed couplet:
 
“That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.”

      Legrasse, deeply impressed and not a little bewildered, had inquired in vain concerning the historic affiliations of the cult. Castro, apparently, had told the truth when he said that it was wholly secret. The authorities at Tulane University could shed no light upon either cult or image, and now the detective had come to the highest authorities in the country and met with no more than the Greenland tale of Professor Webb.
      The feverish interest aroused at the meeting by Legrasse’s tale, corroborated as it was by the statuette, is echoed in the subsequent correspondence of those who attended; although scant mention occurs in the formal publications of the society. Caution is the first care of those accustomed to face occasional charlatanry and imposture. Legrasse for some time lent the image to Professor Webb, but at the latter’s death it was returned to him and remains in his possession, where I viewed it not long ago. It is truly a terrible thing, and unmistakably akin to the dream-sculpture of young Wilcox.
      That my uncle was excited by the tale of the sculptor I did not wonder, for what thoughts must arise upon hearing, after a knowledge of what Legrasse had learned of the cult, of a sensitive young man who had dreamed not only the figure and exact hieroglyphics of the swamp-found image and the Greenland devil tablet, but had come in his dreams upon at least three of the precise words of the formula uttered alike by Esquimau diabolists and mongrel Louisianans? Professor Angell’s instant start on an investigation of the utmost thoroughness was eminently natural; though privately I suspected young Wilcox of having heard of the cult in some indirect way, and of having invented a series of dreams to heighten and continue the mystery at my uncle’s expense. The dream-narratives and cuttings collected by the professor were, of course, strong corroboration; but the rationalism of my mind and the extravagance of the whole subject led me to adopt what I thought the most sensible conclusions. So, after thoroughly studying the manuscript again and correlating the theosophical and anthropological notes with the cult narrative of Legrasse, I made a trip to Providence to see the sculptor and give him the rebuke I thought proper for so boldly imposing upon a learned and aged man.
      Wilcox still lived alone in the Fleur-de-Lys Building in Thomas Street, a hideous Victorian imitation of seventeenth-century Breton architecture which flaunts its stuccoed front amidst the lovely colonial houses on the ancient hill, and under the very shadow of the finest Georgian steeple in America. I found him at work in his rooms, and at once conceded from the specimens scattered about that his genius is indeed profound and authentic. He will, I believe, some time be heard from as one of the great decadents; for he has crystallised in clay and will one day mirror in marble those nightmares and phantasies which Arthur Machen evokes in prose, and Clark Ashton Smith makes visible in verse and in painting.
      Dark, frail, and somewhat unkempt in aspect, he turned languidly at my knock and asked me my business without rising. When I told him who I was, he displayed some interest; for my uncle had excited his curiosity in probing his strange dreams, yet had never explained the reason for the study. I did not enlarge his knowledge in this regard, but sought with some subtlety to draw him out. In a short time I became convinced of his absolute sincerity, for he spoke of the dreams in a manner none could mistake. They and their subconscious residuum had influenced his art profoundly, and he shewed me a morbid statue whose contours almost made me shake with the potency of its black suggestion. He could not recall having seen the original of this thing except in his own dream bas-relief, but the outlines had formed themselves insensibly under his hands. It was, no doubt, the giant shape he had raved of in delirium. That he really knew nothing of the hidden cult, save from what my uncle’s relentless catechism had let fall, he soon made clear; and again I strove to think of some way in which he could possibly have received the weird impressions.
      He talked of his dreams in a strangely poetic fashion; making me see with terrible vividness the damp Cyclopean city of slimy green stone—whose geometry, he oddly said, was all wrong—and hear with frightened expectancy the ceaseless, half-mental calling from underground: “Cthulhu fhtagn”, “Cthulhu fhtagn”. These words had formed part of that dread ritual which told of dead Cthulhu’s dream-vigil in his stone vault at R’lyeh, and I felt deeply moved despite my rational beliefs. Wilcox, I was sure, had heard of the cult in some casual way, and had soon forgotten it amidst the mass of his equally weird reading and imagining. Later, by virtue of its sheer impressiveness, it had found subconscious expression in dreams, in the bas-relief, and in the terrible statue I now beheld; so that his imposture upon my uncle had been a very innocent one. The youth was of a type, at once slightly affected and slightly ill-mannered, which I could never like; but I was willing enough now to admit both his genius and his honesty. I took leave of him amicably, and wish him all the success his talent promises.
      The matter of the cult still remained to fascinate me, and at times I had visions of personal fame from researches into its origin and connexions. I visited New Orleans, talked with Legrasse and others of that old-time raiding-party, saw the frightful image, and even questioned such of the mongrel prisoners as still survived. Old Castro, unfortunately, had been dead for some years. What I now heard so graphically at first-hand, though it was really no more than a detailed confirmation of what my uncle had written, excited me afresh; for I felt sure that I was on the track of a very real, very secret, and very ancient religion whose discovery would make me an anthropologist of note. My attitude was still one of absolute materialism, as I wish it still were, and I discounted with almost inexplicable perversity the coincidence of the dream notes and odd cuttings collected by Professor Angell.
      One thing I began to suspect, and which I now fear I know, is that my uncle’s death was far from natural. He fell on a narrow hill street leading up from an ancient waterfront swarming with foreign mongrels, after a careless push from a negro sailor. I did not forget the mixed blood and marine pursuits of the cult-members in Louisiana, and would not be surprised to learn of secret methods and poison needles as ruthless and as anciently known as the cryptic rites and beliefs. Legrasse and his men, it is true, have been let alone; but in Norway a certain seaman who saw things is dead. Might not the deeper inquiries of my uncle after encountering the sculptor’s data have come to sinister ears? I think Professor Angell died because he knew too much, or because he was likely to learn too much. Whether I shall go as he did remains to be seen, for I have learned much now.

III.
The Madness from the Sea.

If heaven ever wishes to grant me a boon, it will be a total effacing of the results of a mere chance which fixed my eye on a certain stray piece of shelf-paper. It was nothing on which I would naturally have stumbled in the course of my daily round, for it was an old number of an Australian journal, the Sydney Bulletin for April 18, 1925. It had escaped even the cutting bureau which had at the time of its issuance been avidly collecting material for my uncle’s research.
      I had largely given over my inquiries into what Professor Angell called the “Cthulhu Cult”, and was visiting a learned friend in Paterson, New Jersey; the curator of a local museum and a mineralogist of note. Examining one day the reserve specimens roughly set on the storage shelves in a rear room of the museum, my eye was caught by an odd picture in one of the old papers spread beneath the stones. It was the Sydney Bulletin I have mentioned, for my friend has wide affiliations in all conceivable foreign parts; and the picture was a half-tone cut of a hideous stone image almost identical with that which Legrasse had found in the swamp.
      Eagerly clearing the sheet of its precious contents, I scanned the item in detail; and was disappointed to find it of only moderate length. What it suggested, however, was of portentous significance to my flagging quest; and I carefully tore it out for immediate action. It read as follows:
MYSTERY DERELICT FOUND AT SEA
Vigilant Arrives With Helpless Armed New Zealand Yacht in Tow.
One Survivor and Dead Man Found Aboard. Tale of
Desperate Battle and Deaths at Sea.
Rescued Seaman Refuses
Particulars of Strange Experience.
Odd Idol Found in His Possession. Inquiry
to Follow.

The Morrison Co.’s freighter Vigilant, bound from Valparaiso, arrived this morning at its wharf in Darling Harbour, having in tow the battled and disabled but heavily armed steam yacht Alert of Dunedin, N. Z., which was sighted April 12th in S. Latitude 34° 21', W. Longitude 152° 17' with one living and one dead man aboard.
      The Vigilant left Valparaiso March 25th, and on April 2nd was driven considerably south of her course by exceptionally heavy storms and monster waves. On April 12th the derelict was sighted; and though apparently deserted, was found upon boarding to contain one survivor in a half-delirious condition and one man who had evidently been dead for more than a week. The living man was clutching a horrible stone idol of unknown origin, about a foot in height, regarding whose nature authorities at Sydney University, the Royal Society, and the Museum in College Street all profess complete bafflement, and which the survivor says he found in the cabin of the yacht, in a small carved shrine of common pattern.
      This man, after recovering his senses, told an exceedingly strange story of piracy and slaughter. He is Gustaf Johansen, a Norwegian of some intelligence, and had been second mate of the two-masted schooner Emma of Auckland, which sailed for Callao February 20th with a complement of eleven men. The Emma, he says, was delayed and thrown widely south of her course by the great storm of March 1st, and on March 22nd, in S. Latitude 49° 51', W. Longitude 128° 34', encountered the Alert, manned by a queer and evil-looking crew of Kanakas and half-castes. Being ordered peremptorily to turn back, Capt. Collins refused; whereupon the strange crew began to fire savagely and without warning upon the schooner with a peculiarly heavy battery of brass cannon forming part of the yacht’s equipment. The Emma’s men shewed fight, says the survivor, and though the schooner began to sink from shots beneath the waterline they managed to heave alongside their enemy and board her, grappling with the savage crew on the yacht’s deck, and being forced to kill them all, the number being slightly superior, because of their particularly abhorrent and desperate though rather clumsy mode of fighting.
      Three of the Emma’s men, including Capt. Collins and First Mate Green, were killed; and the remaining eight under Second Mate Johansen proceeded to navigate the captured yacht, going ahead in their original direction to see if any reason for their ordering back had existed. The next day, it appears, they raised and landed on a small island, although none is known to exist in that part of the ocean; and six of the men somehow died ashore, though Johansen is queerly reticent about this part of his story, and speaks only of their falling into a rock chasm. Later, it seems, he and one companion boarded the yacht and tried to manage her, but were beaten about by the storm of April 2nd. From that time till his rescue on the 12th the man remembers little, and he does not even recall when William Briden, his companion, died. Briden’s death reveals no apparent cause, and was probably due to excitement or exposure. Cable advices from Dunedin report that the Alert was well known there as an island trader, and bore an evil reputation along the waterfront. It was owned by a curious group of half-castes whose frequent meetings and night trips to the woods attracted no little curiosity; and it had set sail in great haste just after the storm and earth tremors of March 1st. Our Auckland correspondent gives the Emma and her crew an excellent reputation, and Johansen is described as a sober and worthy man. The admiralty will institute an inquiry on the whole matter beginning tomorrow, at which every effort will be made to induce Johansen to speak more freely than he has done hitherto.
      This was all, together with the picture of the hellish image; but what a train of ideas it started in my mind! Here were new treasuries of data on the Cthulhu Cult, and evidence that it had strange interests at sea as well as on land. What motive prompted the hybrid crew to order back the Emma as they sailed about with their hideous idol? What was the unknown island on which six of the Emma’s crew had died, and about which the mate Johansen was so secretive? What had the vice-admiralty’s investigation brought out, and what was known of the noxious cult in Dunedin? And most marvellous of all, what deep and more than natural linkage of dates was this which gave a malign and now undeniable significance to the various turns of events so carefully noted by my uncle?
      March 1st—our February 28th according to the International Date Line—the earthquake and storm had come. From Dunedin the Alert and her noisome crew had darted eagerly forth as if imperiously summoned, and on the other side of the earth poets and artists had begun to dream of a strange, dank Cyclopean city whilst a young sculptor had moulded in his sleep the form of the dreaded Cthulhu. March 23d the crew of the Emma landed on an unknown island and left six men dead; and on that date the dreams of sensitive men assumed a heightened vividness and darkened with dread of a giant monster’s malign pursuit, whilst an architect had gone mad and a sculptor had lapsed suddenly into delirium! And what of this storm of April 2nd—the date on which all dreams of the dank city ceased, and Wilcox emerged unharmed from the bondage of strange fever? What of all this—and of those hints of old Castro about the sunken, star-born Old Ones and their coming reign; their faithful cult and their mastery of dreams? Was I tottering on the brink of cosmic horrors beyond man’s power to bear? If so, they must be horrors of the mind alone, for in some way the second of April had put a stop to whatever monstrous menace had begun its siege of mankind’s soul.
      That evening, after a day of hurried cabling and arranging, I bade my host adieu and took a train for San Francisco. In less than a month I was in Dunedin; where, however, I found that little was known of the strange cult-members who had lingered in the old sea-taverns. Waterfront scum was far too common for special mention; though there was vague talk about one inland trip these mongrels had made, during which faint drumming and red flame were noted on the distant hills. In Auckland I learned that Johansen had returned with yellow hair turned white after a perfunctory and inconclusive questioning at Sydney, and had thereafter sold his cottage in West Street and sailed with his wife to his old home in Oslo. Of his stirring experience he would tell his friends no more than he had told the admiralty officials, and all they could do was to give me his Oslo address.
      After that I went to Sydney and talked profitlessly with seamen and members of the vice-admiralty court. I saw the Alert, now sold and in commercial use, at Circular Quay in Sydney Cove, but gained nothing from its non-committal bulk. The crouching image with its cuttlefish head, dragon body, scaly wings, and hieroglyphed pedestal, was preserved in the Museum at Hyde Park; and I studied it long and well, finding it a thing of balefully exquisite workmanship, and with the same utter mystery, terrible antiquity, and unearthly strangeness of material which I had noted in Legrasse’s smaller specimen. Geologists, the curator told me, had found it a monstrous puzzle; for they vowed that the world held no rock like it. Then I thought with a shudder of what old Castro had told Legrasse about the primal Great Ones: “They had come from the stars, and had brought Their images with Them.”
      Shaken with such a mental revolution as I had never before known, I now resolved to visit Mate Johansen in Oslo. Sailing for London, I reëmbarked at once for the Norwegian capital; and one autumn day landed at the trim wharves in the shadow of the Egeberg. Johansen’s address, I discovered, lay in the Old Town of King Harold Haardrada, which kept alive the name of Oslo during all the centuries that the greater city masqueraded as “Christiana”. I made the brief trip by taxicab, and knocked with palpitant heart at the door of a neat and ancient building with plastered front. A sad-faced woman in black answered my summons, and I was stung with disappointment when she told me in halting English that Gustaf Johansen was no more.
      He had not survived his return, said his wife, for the doings at sea in 1925 had broken him. He had told her no more than he had told the public, but had left a long manuscript—of “technical matters” as he said—written in English, evidently in order to safeguard her from the peril of casual perusal. During a walk through a narrow lane near the Gothenburg dock, a bundle of papers falling from an attic window had knocked him down. Two Lascar sailors at once helped him to his feet, but before the ambulance could reach him he was dead. Physicians found no adequate cause for the end, and laid it to heart trouble and a weakened constitution.
      I now felt gnawing at my vitals that dark terror which will never leave me till I, too, am at rest; “accidentally” or otherwise. Persuading the widow that my connexion with her husband’s “technical matters” was sufficient to entitle me to his manuscript, I bore the document away and began to read it on the London boat. It was a simple, rambling thing—a naive sailor’s effort at a post-facto diary—and strove to recall day by day that last awful voyage. I cannot attempt to transcribe it verbatim in all its cloudiness and redundance, but I will tell its gist enough to shew why the sound of the water against the vessel’s sides became so unendurable to me that I stopped my ears with cotton.
      Johansen, thank God, did not know quite all, even though he saw the city and the Thing, but I shall never sleep calmly again when I think of the horrors that lurk ceaselessly behind life in time and in space, and of those unhallowed blasphemies from elder stars which dream beneath the sea, known and favoured by a nightmare cult ready and eager to loose them on the world whenever another earthquake shall heave their monstrous stone city again to the sun and air.
      Johansen’s voyage had begun just as he told it to the vice-admiralty. The Emma, in ballast, had cleared Auckland on February 20th, and had felt the full force of that earthquake-born tempest which must have heaved up from the sea-bottom the horrors that filled men’s dreams. Once more under control, the ship was making good progress when held up by the Alert on March 22nd, and I could feel the mate’s regret as he wrote of her bombardment and sinking. Of the swarthy cult-fiends on the Alert he speaks with significant horror. There was some peculiarly abominable quality about them which made their destruction seem almost a duty, and Johansen shews ingenuous wonder at the charge of ruthlessness brought against his party during the proceedings of the court of inquiry. Then, driven ahead by curiosity in their captured yacht under Johansen’s command, the men sight a great stone pillar sticking out of the sea, and in S. Latitude 47° 9', W. Longitude 126° 43' come upon a coast-line of mingled mud, ooze, and weedy Cyclopean masonry which can be nothing less than the tangible substance of earth’s supreme terror—the nightmare corpse-city of R’lyeh, that was built in measureless aeons behind history by the vast, loathsome shapes that seeped down from the dark stars. There lay great Cthulhu and his hordes, hidden in green slimy vaults and sending out at last, after cycles incalculable, the thoughts that spread fear to the dreams of the sensitive and called imperiously to the faithful to come on a pilgrimage of liberation and restoration. All this Johansen did not suspect, but God knows he soon saw enough!
      I suppose that only a single mountain-top, the hideous monolith-crowned citadel whereon great Cthulhu was buried, actually emerged from the waters. When I think of the extent of all that may be brooding down there I almost wish to kill myself forthwith. Johansen and his men were awed by the cosmic majesty of this dripping Babylon of elder daemons, and must have guessed without guidance that it was nothing of this or of any sane planet. Awe at the unbelievable size of the greenish stone blocks, at the dizzying height of the great carven monolith, and at the stupefying identity of the colossal statues and bas-reliefs with the queer image found in the shrine on the Alert, is poignantly visible in every line of the mate’s frightened description.
      Without knowing what futurism is like, Johansen achieved something very close to it when he spoke of the city; for instead of describing any definite structure or building, he dwells only on broad impressions of vast angles and stone surfaces—surfaces too great to belong to any thing right or proper for this earth, and impious with horrible images and hieroglyphs. I mention his talk about angles because it suggests something Wilcox had told me of his awful dreams. He had said that the geometry of the dream-place he saw was abnormal, non-Euclidean, and loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from ours. Now an unlettered seaman felt the same thing whilst gazing at the terrible reality.
      Johansen and his men landed at a sloping mud-bank on this monstrous Acropolis, and clambered slipperily up over titan oozy blocks which could have been no mortal staircase. The very sun of heaven seemed distorted when viewed through the polarising miasma welling out from this sea-soaked perversion, and twisted menace and suspense lurked leeringly in those crazily elusive angles of carven rock where a second glance shewed concavity after the first shewed convexity.
      Something very like fright had come over all the explorers before anything more definite than rock and ooze and weed was seen. Each would have fled had he not feared the scorn of the others, and it was only half-heartedly that they searched—vainly, as it proved—for some portable souvenir to bear away.
      It was Rodriguez the Portuguese who climbed up the foot of the monolith and shouted of what he had found. The rest followed him, and looked curiously at the immense carved door with the now familiar squid-dragon bas-relief. It was, Johansen said, like a great barn-door; and they all felt that it was a door because of the ornate lintel, threshold, and jambs around it, though they could not decide whether it lay flat like a trap-door or slantwise like an outside cellar-door. As Wilcox would have said, the geometry of the place was all wrong. One could not be sure that the sea and the ground were horizontal, hence the relative position of everything else seemed phantasmally variable.
      Briden pushed at the stone in several places without result. Then Donovan felt over it delicately around the edge, pressing each point separately as he went. He climbed interminably along the grotesque stone moulding—that is, one would call it climbing if the thing was not after all horizontal—and the men wondered how any door in the universe could be so vast. Then, very softly and slowly, the acre-great panel began to give inward at the top; and they saw that it was balanced. Donovan slid or somehow propelled himself down or along the jamb and rejoined his fellows, and everyone watched the queer recession of the monstrously carven portal. In this phantasy of prismatic distortion it moved anomalously in a diagonal way, so that all the rules of matter and perspective seemed upset.
      The aperture was black with a darkness almost material. That tenebrousness was indeed a positive quality; for it obscured such parts of the inner walls as ought to have been revealed, and actually burst forth like smoke from its aeon-long imprisonment, visibly darkening the sun as it slunk away into the shrunken and gibbous sky on flapping membraneous wings. The odour arising from the newly opened depths was intolerable, and at length the quick-eared Hawkins thought he heard a nasty, slopping sound down there. Everyone listened, and everyone was listening still when It lumbered slobberingly into sight and gropingly squeezed Its gelatinous green immensity through the black doorway into the tainted outside air of that poison city of madness.
      Poor Johansen’s handwriting almost gave out when he wrote of this. Of the six men who never reached the ship, he thinks two perished of pure fright in that accursed instant. The Thing cannot be described—there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order. A mountain walked or stumbled. God! What wonder that across the earth a great architect went mad, and poor Wilcox raved with fever in that telepathic instant? The Thing of the idols, the green, sticky spawn of the stars, had awaked to claim his own. The stars were right again, and what an age-old cult had failed to do by design, a band of innocent sailors had done by accident. After vigintillions of years great Cthulhu was loose again, and ravening for delight.
      Three men were swept up by the flabby claws before anybody turned. God rest them, if there be any rest in the universe. They were Donovan, Guerrera, and Ångstrom. Parker slipped as the other three were plunging frenziedly over endless vistas of green-crusted rock to the boat, and Johansen swears he was swallowed up by an angle of masonry which shouldn’t have been there; an angle which was acute, but behaved as if it were obtuse. So only Briden and Johansen reached the boat, and pulled desperately for the Alert as the mountainous monstrosity flopped down the slimy stones and hesitated floundering at the edge of the water.
      Steam had not been suffered to go down entirely, despite the departure of all hands for the shore; and it was the work of only a few moments of feverish rushing up and down between wheel and engines to get the Alert under way. Slowly, amidst the distorted horrors of that indescribable scene, she began to churn the lethal waters; whilst on the masonry of that charnel shore that was not of earth the titan Thing from the stars slavered and gibbered like Polypheme cursing the fleeing ship of Odysseus. Then, bolder than the storied Cyclops, great Cthulhu slid greasily into the water and began to pursue with vast wave-raising strokes of cosmic potency. Briden looked back and went mad, laughing shrilly as he kept on laughing at intervals till death found him one night in the cabin whilst Johansen was wandering deliriously.
      But Johansen had not given out yet. Knowing that the Thing could surely overtake the Alert until steam was fully up, he resolved on a desperate chance; and, setting the engine for full speed, ran lightning-like on deck and reversed the wheel. There was a mighty eddying and foaming in the noisome brine, and as the steam mounted higher and higher the brave Norwegian drove his vessel head on against the pursuing jelly which rose above the unclean froth like the stern of a daemon galleon. The awful squid-head with writhing feelers came nearly up to the bowsprit of the sturdy yacht, but Johansen drove on relentlessly. There was a bursting as of an exploding bladder, a slushy nastiness as of a cloven sunfish, a stench as of a thousand opened graves, and a sound that the chronicler would not put on paper. For an instant the ship was befouled by an acrid and blinding green cloud, and then there was only a venomous seething astern; where—God in heaven!—the scattered plasticity of that nameless sky-spawn was nebulously recombining in its hateful original form, whilst its distance widened every second as the Alert gained impetus from its mounting steam.
      That was all. After that Johansen only brooded over the idol in the cabin and attended to a few matters of food for himself and the laughing maniac by his side. He did not try to navigate after the first bold flight, for the reaction had taken something out of his soul. Then came the storm of April 2nd, and a gathering of the clouds about his consciousness. There is a sense of spectral whirling through liquid gulfs of infinity, of dizzying rides through reeling universes on a comet’s tail, and of hysterical plunges from the pit to the moon and from the moon back again to the pit, all livened by a cachinnating chorus of the distorted, hilarious elder gods and the green, bat-winged mocking imps of Tartarus.
      Out of that dream came rescue—the Vigilant, the vice-admiralty court, the streets of Dunedin, and the long voyage back home to the old house by the Egeberg. He could not tell—they would think him mad. He would write of what he knew before death came, but his wife must not guess. Death would be a boon if only it could blot out the memories.
      That was the document I read, and now I have placed it in the tin box beside the bas-relief and the papers of Professor Angell. With it shall go this record of mine—this test of my own sanity, wherein is pieced together that which I hope may never be pieced together again. I have looked upon all that the universe has to hold of horror, and even the skies of spring and the flowers of summer must ever afterward be poison to me. But I do not think my life will be long. As my uncle went, as poor Johansen went, so I shall go. I know too much, and the cult still lives.
      Cthulhu still lives, too, I suppose, again in that chasm of stone which has shielded him since the sun was young. His accursed city is sunken once more, for the Vigilant sailed over the spot after the April storm; but his ministers on earth still bellow and prance and slay around idol-capped monoliths in lonely places. He must have been trapped by the sinking whilst within his black abyss, or else the world would by now be screaming with fright and frenzy. Who knows the end? What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise. Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men. A time will come—but I must not and cannot think! Let me pray that, if I do not survive this manuscript, my executors may put caution before audacity and see that it meets no other eye.
 ",True
"""They say foul things of Old Times still lurk
In dark forgotten corners of the world.
And Gates still gape to loose, on certain nights.
Shapes pent in Hell.""

--Justin Geoffrey


I read of it first in the strange book of Von Junzt, the German
eccentric who lived so curiously and died in such grisly and mysterious
fashion. It was my fortune to have access to his _Nameless Cults_ in the
original edition, the so-called Black Book, published in Dusseldorf in
1839, shortly before a hounding doom overtook the author. Collectors of
rare literature were familiar with _Nameless Cults_ mainly through the
cheap and faulty translation which was pirated in London by Bridewall in
1845, and the carefully expurgated edition put out by the Golden Goblin
Press of New York, 1909. But the volume I stumbled upon was one of the
unexpurgated German copies, with heavy black leather covers and rusty
iron hasps. I doubt if there are more than half a dozen such volumes in
the entire world today, for the quantity issued was not great, and when
the manner of the author's demise was bruited about, many possessors of
the book burned their volumes in panic.

Von Junzt spent his entire life (1795-1840) delving into forbidden
subjects; he traveled in all parts of the world, gained entrance into
innumerable secret societies, and read countless little-known and
esoteric books and manuscripts in the original; and in the chapters of
the Black Book, which range from startling clarity of exposition to
murky ambiguity, there are statements and hints to freeze the blood of a
thinking man. Reading what Von Junzt _dared_ put in print arouses uneasy
speculations as to what it was that he dared _not_ tell. What dark
matters, for instance, were contained in those closely written pages
that formed the unpublished manuscript on which he worked unceasingly
for months before his death, and which lay torn and scattered all over
the floor of the locked and bolted chamber in which Von Junzt was found
dead with the marks of taloned fingers on his throat? It will never be
known, for the author's closest friend, the Frenchman Alexis Ladeau,
after having spent a whole night piecing the fragments together and
reading what was written, burnt them to ashes and cut his own throat
with a razor.

But the contents of the published matter are shuddersome enough, even if
one accepts the general view that they but represent the ravings of a
madman. There among many strange things I found mention of the Black
Stone, that curious, sinister monolith that broods among the mountains
of Hungary, and about which so many dark legends cluster. Van Junzt did
not devote much space to it--the bulk of his grim work concerns cults
and objects of dark worship which he maintained existed in his day, and
it would seem that the Black Stone represents some order or being lost
and forgotten centuries ago. But he spoke of it as one of the _keys_--a
phrase used many times by him, in various relations, and constituting
one of the obscurities of his work. And he hinted briefly at curious
sights to be seen about the monolith on Midsummer's Night. He mentioned
Otto Dostmann's theory that this monolith was a remnant of the Hunnish
invasion and had been erected to commemorate a victory of Attila over
the Goths. Von Junzt contradicted this assertion without giving any
refutory facts, merely remarking that to attribute the origin of the
Black Stone to the Huns was as logical as assuming that William the
Conqueror reared Stonehenge.

This implication of enormous antiquity piqued my interest immensely and
after some difficulty I succeeded in locating a rat-eaten and moldering
copy of Dostmann's _Remnants of Lost Empires_ (Berlin, 1809, ""Der
Drachenhaus"" Press). I was disappointed to find that Dostmann referred
to the Black Stone even more briefly than had Von Junzt, dismissing it
with a few lines as an artifact comparatively modern in contrast with
the Greco-Roman ruins of Asia Minor which were his pet theme. He
admitted his inability to make out the defaced characters on the
monolith but pronounced them unmistakably Mongoloid. However, little as
I learned from Dostmann, he did mention the name of the village adjacent
to the Black Stone--Stregoicavar--an ominous name, meaning something
like Witch-Town.

A close scrutiny of guidebooks and travel articles gave me no further
information--Stregoicavar, not on any map that I could find, lay in a
wild, little-frequented region, out of the path of casual tourists. But
I did find subject for thought in Dornly's _Magyar Folklore_. In his
chapter on _Dream Myths_ he mentions the Black Stone and tells of some
curious superstitions regarding it--especially the belief that if anyone
sleeps in the vicinity of the monolith, that person will be haunted by
monstrous nightmares forever after; and he cited tales of the peasants
regarding too-curious people who ventured to visit the Stone on
Midsummer Night and who died raving mad because of _something_ they saw
there.

That was all I could gleam from Dornly, but my interest was even more
intensely roused as I sensed a distinctly sinister aura about the Stone.
The suggestion of dark antiquity, the recurrent hint of unnatural events
on Midsummer Night, touched some slumbering instinct in my being, as one
senses, rather than hears, the flowing of some dark subterraneous river
in the night.

And I suddenly saw a connection between this Stone and a certain weird
and fantastic poem written by the mad poet, Justin Geoffrey: _The People
of the Monolith_. Inquiries led to the information that Geoffrey had
indeed written that poem while traveling in Hungary, and I could not
doubt that the Black Stone was the very monolith to which he referred in
his strange verse. Reading his stanzas again, I felt once more the
strange dim stirrings of subconscious promptings that I had noticed when
first reading of the Stone.

I had been casting about for a place to spend a short vacation and I
made up my mind. I went to Stregoicavar. A train of obsolete style
carried me from Temesvar to within striking distance, at least, of my
objective, and a three days' ride in a jouncing coach brought me to the
little village which lay in a fertile valley high up in the fir-clad
mountains. The journey itself was uneventful, but during the first day
we passed the old battlefield of Schomvaal where the brave
Polish-Hungarian knight, Count Boris Vladinoff, made his gallant and
futile stand against the victorious hosts of Suleiman the Magnificent,
when the Grand Turk swept over eastern Europe in 1526.

The driver of the coach pointed out to me a great heap of crumbling
stones on a hill nearby, under which, he said, the bones of the brave
Count lay. I remembered a passage from Larson's _Turkish Wars_. ""After
the skirmish"" (in which the Count with his small army had beaten back
the Turkish advance-guard) ""the Count was standing beneath the
half-ruined walls of the old castle on the hill, giving orders as to the
disposition of his forces, when an aide brought to him a small lacquered
case which had been taken from the body of the famous Turkish scribe and
historian, Selim Bahadur, who had fallen in the fight. The Count took
therefrom a roll of parchment and began to read, but he had not read far
before he turned very pale and, without saying a word, replaced the
parchment in the case and thrust the case into his cloak. At that very
instant a hidden Turkish battery suddenly opened fire, and the balls
striking the old castle, the Hungarians were horrified to see the walls
crash down in ruin, completely covering the brave Count. Without a
leader the gallant little army was cut to pieces, and in the war-swept
years which followed, the bones of the noblemen were never recovered.
Today the natives point out a huge and moldering pile of ruins near
Schomvaal beneath which, they say, still rests all that the centuries
have left of Count Boris Vladinoff.""

I found the village of Stregoicavar a dreamy, drowsy little village that
apparently belied its sinister cognomen--a forgotten back-eddy that
Progress had passed by. The quaint houses and the quainter dress and
manners of the people were those of an earlier century. They were
friendly, mildly curious but not inquisitive, though visitors from the
outside world were extremely rare.

""Ten years ago another American came here and stayed a few days in the
village,"" said the owner of the tavern where I had put up, ""a young
fellow and queer-acting--mumbled to himself--a poet, I think.""

I knew he must mean Justin Geoffrey.

""Yes, he was a poet,"" I answered, ""and he wrote a poem about a bit of
scenery near this very village.""

""Indeed?"" Mine host's interest was aroused. ""Then, since all great poets
are strange in their speech and actions, he must have achieved great
fame, for his actions and conversations were the strangest of any man I
ever I knew.""

""As is usual with artists,"" I answered, ""most of his recognition has
come since his death.""

""He is dead, then?""

""He died screaming in a madhouse five years ago.""

""Too bad, too bad,"" sighed mine host sympathetically. ""Poor lad--he
looked too long at the Black Stone.""

My heart gave a leap, but I masked my keen interest and said casually.
""I have heard something of this Black Stone; somewhere near this
village, is it not?""

""Nearer than Christian folk wish,"" he responded. ""Look!"" He drew me to a
latticed window and pointed up at the fir-clad slopes of the brooding
blue mountains. ""There beyond where you see the bare face of that
jutting cliff stands that accursed Stone. Would that it were ground to
powder and the powder flung into the Danube to be carried to the deepest
ocean! Once men tried to destroy the thing, but each man who laid hammer
or maul against it came to an evil end. So now the people shun it.""

""What is there so evil about it?"" I asked curiously.

""It is a demon-haunted thing,"" he answered uneasily and with the
suggestion of a shudder. ""In my childhood I knew a young man who came up
from below and laughed at our traditions--in his foolhardiness he went
to the Stone one Midsummer Night and at dawn stumbled into the village
again, stricken dumb and mad. Something had shattered his brain and
sealed his lips, for until the day of his death, which came soon after,
he spoke only to utter terrible blasphemies or to slaver gibberish.

""My own nephew when very small was lost in the mountains and slept in
the woods near the Stone, and now in his manhood he is tortured by foul
dreams, so that at times he makes the night hideous with his screams and
wakes with cold sweat upon him.

""But let us talk of something else, _Herr_; it is not good to dwell upon
such things.""

I remarked on the evident age of the tavern and he answered with pride.
""The foundations are more than four hundred years old; the original
house was the only one in the village which was not burned to the ground
when Suleiman's devil swept through the mountains. Here, in the house
that then stood on these same foundations, it is said, the scribe Selim
Bahadur had his headquarters while ravaging the country hereabouts.""

I learned then that the present inhabitants of Stregoicavar are not
descendants of the people who dwelt there before the Turkish raid of
1526. The victorious Moslems left no living human in the village or the
vicinity thereabouts when they passed over. Men, women and children they
wiped out in one red holocaust of murder, leaving a vast stretch of
country silent and utterly deserted. The present people of Stregoicavar
are descended from hardy settlers from the lower valleys who came into
the ruined village after the Turk was thrust back.

Mine host did not speak of the extermination of the original inhabitants
with any great resentment and I learned that his ancestors in the lower
levels had looked on the mountaineers with even more hatred and aversion
than they regarded the Turks. He was rather vague regarding the causes
of this feud, but said that the original inhabitants of Stregoicavar had
been in the habit of making stealthy raids on the lowlands and stealing
girls and children. Moreover, he said that they were not exactly of the
same blood as his own people; the sturdy, original Magyar-Slavic stock
had mixed and intermarried with a degraded aboriginal race until the
breeds had blended, producing an unsavory amalgamation. Who these
aborigines were, he had not the slightest idea, but maintained that they
were ""pagans"" and had dwelt in the mountains since time immemorial,
before the coming of the conquering peoples.

I attached little importance to this tale; seeing in it merely a
parallel to the amalgamation of Celtic tribes with Mediterranean
aborigines in the Galloway hills, with the resultant mixed race which,
as Picts, has such an extensive part in Scotch legendary. Time has a
curious foreshortening effect on folklore, and just as tales of the
Picts became intertwined with legends of an older Mongoloid race, so
that eventually the Picts were ascribed the repulsive appearance of the
squat primitives, whose individuality merged, in the telling, into
Pictish tales, and was forgotten; so, I felt, the supposed inhuman
attributes of the first villagers of Stregoicavar could be traced to
older, outworn myths with invading Huns and Mongols.

The morning after my arrival I received directions from mine host, who
gave them worriedly, and set out to find the Black Stone. A few hours'
tramp up the fir-covered slopes brought me to the face of the rugged,
solid stone cliff which jutted boldly from the mountainside. A narrow
trail wound up it, and mounting this, I looked out over the peaceful
valley of Stregoicavar, which seemed to drowse, guarded on either hand
by the great blue mountains. No huts or any sign of human tenancy showed
between the cliff whereon I stood and the village. I saw numbers of
scattering farms in the valley but all lay on the other side of
Stregoicavar, which itself seemed to shrink from the brooding slopes
which masked the Black Stone.

The summit of the cliffs proved to be a sort of thickly wooded plateau.
I made my way through the dense growth for a short distance and came
into a wide glade; and in the center of the glade reared a gaunt figure
of black stone.

It was octagonal in shape, some sixteen feet in height and about a foot
and a half thick. It had once evidently been highly polished, but now
the surface was thickly dinted as if savage efforts had been made to
demolish it; but the hammers had done little more than to flake off
small bits of stone and mutilate the characters which once had evidently
marched up in a spiraling line round and round the shaft to the top. Up
to ten feet from the base these characters were almost completely
blotted out, so that it was very difficult to trace their direction.
Higher up they were plainer, and I managed to squirm part of the way up
the shaft and scan them at close range. All were more or less defaced,
but I was positive that they symbolized no language now remembered on
the face of the earth. I am fairly familiar with all hieroglyphics known
to researchers and philologists and I can say, with certainty that those
characters were like nothing of which I have ever read or heard. The
nearest approach to them that I ever saw were some crude scratches on a
gigantic and strangely symmetrical rock in a lost valley of Yucatan. I
remember that when I pointed out these marks to the archeologist who was
my companion, he maintained that they either represented natural
weathering or the idle scratching of some Indian. To my theory that the
rock was really the base of a long-vanished column, he merely laughed,
calling my attention to the dimensions of it, which suggested, if it
were built with any natural rules of architectural symmetry, a column a
thousand feet high. But I was not convinced.

I will not say that the characters on the Black Stone were similar to
those on that colossal rock in Yucatan; but one suggested the other. As
to the substance of the monolith, again I was baffled. The stone of
which it was composed was a dully gleaming black, whose surface, where
it was not dinted and roughened, created a curious illusion of
semi-transparency.

I spent most of the morning there and came away baffled. No connection
of the Stone with any other artifact in the world suggested itself to
me. It was as if the monolith had been reared by alien hands, in an age
distant and apart from human ken.

I returned to the village with my interest in no way abated. Now that I
had seen the curious thing, my desire was still more keenly whetted to
investigate the matter further and seek to learn by what strange hands
and for what strange purpose the Black Stone had been reared in the long
ago.

I sought out the tavern-keeper's nephew and questioned him in regard to
his dreams, but he was vague, though willing to oblige. He did not mind
discussing them, but was unable to describe them with any clarity.
Though he dreamed the same dreams repeatedly, and though they were
hideously vivid at the time, they left no distinct impression on his
waking mind. He remembered them only as chaotic nightmares through which
huge whirling fires shot lurid tongues of flame and a black drum
bellowed incessantly. One thing only he remembered clearly--in one dream
he had seen the Black Stone, not on a mountain slope but set like a
spire on a colossal black castle.

As for the rest of the villagers I found them not inclined to talk about
the Stone, with the exception of the schoolmaster, a man of surprizing
education, who spent much more of his time out in the world than any of
the rest.

He was much interested in what I told him of Von Junzt's remarks about
the Stone, and warmly agreed with the German author in the alleged age
of the monolith. He believed that a coven had once existed in the
vicinity and that possibly all of the original villagers had been
members of that fertility cult which once threatened to undermine
European civilization and gave rise to the tales of witchcraft. He cited
the very name of the village to prove his point; it had not been
originally named Stregoicavar, he said; according to legends the
builders had called it Xuthltan, which was the aboriginal name of the
site on which the village had been built many centuries ago.

This fact roused again an indescribable feeling of uneasiness. The
barbarous name did not suggest connection with any Scythic, Slavic or
Mongolian race to which an aboriginal people of these mountains would,
under natural circumstances, have belonged.

That the Magyars and Slavs of the lower valleys believed the original
inhabitants of the village to be members of the witchcraft cult was
evident, the schoolmaster said, by the name they gave it, which name
continued to be used even after the older settlers had been massacred by
the Turks, and the village rebuilt by a cleaner and more wholesome
breed.

He did not believe that the members of the cult erected the monolith but
he did believe that they used it as a center of their activities, and
repeating vague legends which had been handed down since before the
Turkish invasion, he advanced the theory that the degenerate villagers
had used it as a sort of altar on which they offered human sacrifices,
using as victims the girls and babies stolen from his own ancestors in
the lower valleys.

He discounted the myths of weird events on Midsummer Night, as well as a
curious legend of a strange deity which the witch-people of Xuthltan
were said to have invoked with chants and wild rituals of flagellation
and slaughter.

He had never visited the Stone on Midsummer Night, he said, but he would
not fear to do so; whatever _had_ existed or taken place there in the
past, had been long engulfed in the mists of time and oblivion. The
Black Stone had lost its meaning save as a link to a dead and dusty
past.

It was while returning from a visit with this schoolmaster one night
about a week after my arrival at Stregoicavar that a sudden recollection
struck me--it was Midsummer Night! The very time that the legends linked
with grisly implications to the Black Stone. I turned away from the
tavern and strode swiftly through the village. Stregoicavar lay silent;
the villagers retired early. I saw no one as I passed rapidly out of the
village and up into the firs which masked the mountain's slopes with
whispering darkness. A broad silver moon hung above the valley, flooding
the crags and slopes in a weird light and etching the shadows blackly.
No wind blew through the firs, but a mysterious, intangible rustling and
whispering was abroad. Surely on such nights in past centuries, my
whimsical imagination told me, naked witches astride magic broomsticks
had flown across the valley, pursued by jeering demoniac familiars.

I came to the cliffs and was somewhat disquieted to note that the
illusive moonlight lent them a subtle appearance I had not noticed
before--in the weird light they appeared less like natural cliffs and
more like the ruins of cyclopean and Titan-reared battlements jutting
from the mountain-slope.

Shaking off this hallucination with difficulty I came upon the plateau
and hesitated a moment before I plunged into the brooding darkness of
the woods. A sort of breathless tenseness hung over the shadows, like an
unseen monster holding its breath lest it scare away its prey.

I shook off the sensation--a natural one, considering the eeriness of
the place and its evil reputation--and made my way through the wood,
experiencing a most unpleasant sensation that I was being followed, and
halting once, sure that something clammy and unstable had brushed
against my face in the darkness.

I came out into the glade and saw the tall monolith rearing its gaunt
height above the sward. At the edge of the woods on the side toward the
cliffs was a stone which formed a sort of natural seat. I sat down,
reflecting that it was probably while there that the mad poet, Justin
Geoffrey, had written his fantastic _People of the Monolith_. Mine host
thought that it was the Stone which had caused Geoffrey's insanity, but
the seeds of madness had been sown in the poet's brain long before he
ever came to Stregoicavar.

A glance at my watch showed that the hour of midnight was close at hand.
I leaned back, waiting whatever ghostly demonstration might appear. A
thin night wind started up among the branches of the firs, with an
uncanny suggestion of faint, unseen pipes whispering an eerie and evil
tune. The monotony of the sound and my steady gazing at the monolith
produced a sort of self-hypnosis upon me; I grew drowsy. I fought this
feeling, but sleep stole on me in spite of myself; the monolith seemed
to sway and dance, strangely distorted to my gaze, and then I slept.

I opened my eyes and sought to rise, but lay still, as if an icy hand
gripped me helpless. Cold terror stole over me. The glade was no longer
deserted. It was thronged by a silent crowd of strange people, and my
distended eyes took in strange barbaric details of costume which my
reason told me were archaic and forgotten even in this backward land.
Surely, I thought, these are villagers who have come here to hold some
fantastic conclave--but another glance told me that these people were
not the folk of Stregoicavar. They were a shorter, more squat race,
whose brows were lower, whose faces were broader and duller. Some had
Slavic and Magyar features, but those features were degraded as from a
mixture of some baser, alien strain I could not classify. Many wore the
hides of wild beasts, and their whole appearance, both men and women,
was one of sensual brutishness. They terrified and repelled me, but they
gave me no heed. They formed in a vast half-circle in front of the
monolith and began a sort of chant, flinging their arms in unison and
weaving their bodies rhythmically from the waist upward. All eyes were
fixed on the top of the Stone which they seemed to be invoking. But the
strangest of all was the dimness of their voices; not fifty yards from
me hundreds of men and women were unmistakably lifting their voices in a
wild chant, yet those voices came to me as a faint indistinguishable
murmur as if from across vast leagues of Space--or _time_.

Before the monolith stood a sort of brazier from which a vile, nauseous
yellow smoke billowed upward, curling curiously in a swaying spiral
around the black shaft, like a vast unstable snake.

On one side of this brazier lay two figures--a young girl, stark naked
and bound hand and foot, and an infant, apparently only a few months
old. On the other side of the brazier squatted a hideous old hag with a
queer sort of black drum on her lap; this drum she beat with slow light
blows of her open palms, but I could not hear the sound.

The rhythm of the swaying bodies grew faster and into the space between
the people and the monolith sprang a naked young woman, her eyes
blazing, her long black hair flying loose. Spinning dizzily on her toes,
she whirled across the open space and fell prostrate before the Stone,
where she lay motionless. The next instant a fantastic figure followed
her--a man from whose waist hung a goatskin, and whose features were
entirely hidden by a sort of mask made from a huge wolf's head, so that
he looked like a monstrous, nightmare being, horribly compounded of
elements both human and bestial. In his hand he held a bunch of long fir
switches bound together at the larger ends, and the moonlight glinted on
a chain of heavy gold looped about his neck. A smaller chain depending
from it suggested a pendant of some sort, but this was missing.

The people tossed their arms violently and seemed to redouble their
shouts as this grotesque creature loped across the open space with many
a fantastic leap and caper. Coming to the woman who lay before the
monolith, he began to lash her with the switches he bore, and she leaped
up and spun into the wild mazes of the most incredible dance I have ever
seen. And her tormentor danced with her, keeping the wild rhythm,
matching her every whirl and bound, while incessantly raining cruel
blows on her naked body. And at every blow he shouted a single word,
over and over, and all the people shouted it back. I could see the
working of their lips, and now the faint far-off murmur of their voices
merged and blended into one distant shout, repeated over and over with
slobbering ecstasy. But what the one word was, I could not make out.

In dizzy whirls spun the wild dancers, while the lookers-on, standing
still in their tracks, followed the rhythm of their dance with swaying
bodies and weaving arms. Madness grew in the eyes of the capering
votaress and was reflected in the eyes of the watchers. Wilder and more
extravagant grew the whirling frenzy of that mad dance--it became a
bestial and obscene thing, while the old hag howled and battered the
drum like a crazy woman, and the switches cracked out a devil's tune.

Blood trickled down the dancer's limbs but she seemed not to feel the
lashing save as a stimulus for further enormities of outrageous motion;
bounding into the midst of the yellow smoke which now spread out tenuous
tentacles to embrace both flying figures, she seemed to merge with that
foul fog and veil herself with it. Then emerging into plain view,
closely followed by the beast-thing that flogged her, she shot into an
indescribable, explosive burst of dynamic mad motion, and on the very
crest of that mad wave, she dropped suddenly to the sward, quivering and
panting as if completely overcome by her frenzied exertions. The lashing
continued with unabated violence and intensity and she began to wriggle
toward the monolith on her belly. The priest--or such I will call
him--followed, lashing her unprotected body with all the power of his
arm as she writhed along, leaving a heavy track of blood on the trampled
earth. She reached the monolith, and gasping and panting, flung both
arms about it and covered the cold stone with fierce hot kisses, as in
frenzied and unholy adoration.

The fantastic priest bounded high in the air, flinging away the
red-dabbled switches, and the worshippers, howling and foaming at the
mouths, turned on each other with tooth and nail, rending one another's
garments and flesh in a blind passion of bestiality. The priest swept up
the infant with a long arm, and shouting again that Name, whirled the
wailing babe high in the air and dashed its brains out against the
monolith, leaving a ghastly stain on the black surface. Cold with horror
I saw him rip the tiny body open with his bare brutish fingers and fling
handfuls of blood on the shaft, then toss the red and torn shape into
the brazier, extinguishing flame and smoke in a crimson rain, while the
maddened brutes behind him howled over and over the Name. Then suddenly
they all fell prostrate, writhing like snakes, while the priest flung
wide his gory hands as in triumph. I opened my mouth to scream my horror
and loathing, but only a dry rattle sounded; a huge monstrous toad-like
thing squatted on the top of the monolith!

I saw its bloated, repulsive and unstable outline against the moonlight
and set in what would have been the face of a natural creature, its
huge, blinking eyes which reflected all the lust, abysmal greed, obscene
cruelty and monstrous evil that has stalked the sons of men since their
ancestors moved blind and hairless in the treetops. In those grisly eyes
were mirrored all the unholy things and vile secrets that sleep in the
cities under the sea, and that skulk from the light of day in the
blackness of primordial caverns. And so that ghastly thing that the
unhallowed ritual of cruelty and sadism and blood had evoked from the
silence of the hills, leered and blinked down on its bestial
worshippers, who groveled in abhorrent abasement before it.

Now the beast-masked priest lifted the bound and weakly writhing girl in
his brutish hands and held her up toward that horror on the monolith.
And as that monstrosity sucked in its breath, lustfully and
slobberingly, something snapped in my brain and I fell into a merciful
faint.

I opened my eyes on a still white dawn. All the events of the night
rushed back on me and I sprang up, then stared about me in amazement.
The monolith brooded gaunt and silent above the sward which waved, green
and untrampled, in the morning breeze. A few quick strides took me
across the glade; here had the dancers leaped and bounded until the
ground should have been trampled bare, and here had the votaress
wriggled her painful way to the Stone, streaming blood on the earth. But
no drop of crimson showed on the uncrushed sward. I looked,
shudderingly, at the side of the monolith against which the bestial
priest had brained the stolen baby--but no dark stain nor grisly clot
showed there.

A dream! It had been a wild nightmare--or else--I shrugged my shoulders.
What vivid clarity for a dream!

I returned quietly to the village and entered the inn without being
seen. And there I sat meditating over the strange events of the night.
More and more was I prone to discard the dream-theory. That what I had
seen was illusion and without material substance, was evident. But I
believed that I had looked on the mirrored shadow of a deed perpetrated
in ghastly actuality in bygone days. But how was I to know? What proof
to show that my vision had been a gathering of foul specters rather than
a nightmare originating in my brain?

As if for answer a name flashed into my mind--Selim Bahadur! According
to legend this man, who had been a soldier as well as a scribe, had
commanded that part of Suleiman's army which had devastated
Stregoicavar; it seemed logical enough; and if so, he had gone straight
from the blotted-out countryside to the bloody field of Schomvaal, and
his doom. I sprang up with a sudden shout--that manuscript which was
taken from the Turk's body, and which Count Boris shuddered over--might
it not contain some narration of what the conquering Turks found in
Stregoicavar? What else could have shaken the iron nerves of the Polish
adventurer? And since the bones of the Count had never been recovered,
what more certain than that the lacquered case, with its mysterious
contents, still lay hidden beneath the ruins that covered Boris
Vladinoff? I began packing my bag with fierce haste.

Three days later found me ensconced in a little village a few miles from
the old battlefield, and when the moon rose I was working with savage
intensity on the great pile of crumbling stone that crowned the hill. It
was back-breaking toil--looking back now I can not see how I
accomplished it, though I labored without a pause from moonrise to dawn.
Just as the sun was coming up I tore aside the last tangle of stones and
looked on all that was mortal of Count Boris Vladinoff--only a few
pitiful fragments of crumbling bone--and among them, crushed out of all
original shape, lay a case whose lacquered surface had kept it from
complete decay through the centuries.

I seized it with frenzied eagerness, and piling back some of the stones
on the bones I hurried away; for I did not care to be discovered by the
suspicious peasants in an act of apparent desecration.

Back in my tavern chamber I opened the case and found the parchment
comparatively intact; and there was something else in the case--a small
squat object wrapped in silk. I was wild to plumb the secrets of those
yellowed pages, but weariness forbade me. Since leaving Stregoicavar I
had hardly slept at all, and the terrific exertions of the previous
night combined to overcome me. In spite of myself I was forced to
stretch myself on my bed, nor did I awake until sundown.

I snatched a hasty supper, and then in the light of a flickering candle,
I set myself to read the neat Turkish characters that covered the
parchment. It was difficult work, for I am not deeply versed in the
language and the archaic style of the narrative baffled me. But as I
toiled through it a word or a phrase here and there leaped at me and a
dimly growing horror shook me in its grip. I bent my energies fiercely
to the task, and as the tale grew clearer and took more tangible form my
blood chilled in my veins, my hair stood up and my tongue clove to my
mouth. All external things partook of the grisly madness of that
infernal manuscript until the night sounds of insects and creatures in
the woods took the form of ghastly murmurings and stealthy treadings of
ghoulish horrors and the sighing of the night wind changed to tittering
obscene gloating of evil over the souls of men.

At last when gray dawn was stealing through the latticed window, I laid
down the manuscript and took up and unwrapped the thing in the bit of
silk. Staring at it with haggard eyes I knew the truth of the matter was
clinched, even had it been possible to doubt the veracity of that
terrible manuscript.

And I replaced both obscene things in the case, nor did I rest nor sleep
nor eat until that case containing them had been weighted with stones
and flung into the deepest current of the Danube which, God grant,
carried them back into the Hell from which they came.

It was no dream I dreamed on Midsummer Midnight in the hills above
Stregoicavar. Well for Justin Geoffrey that he tarried there only in the
sunlight and went his way, for had he gazed upon that ghastly conclave,
his mad brain would have snapped before it did. How my own reason held,
I do not know.

No--it was no dream--I gazed upon a foul rout of votaries long dead,
come up from Hell to worship as of old; ghosts that bowed before a
ghost. For Hell has long claimed their hideous god. Long, long he dwelt
among the hills, a brain-shattering vestige of an outworn age, but no
longer his obscene talons clutch for the souls of living men, and his
kingdom is a dead kingdom, peopled only by the ghosts of those who
served him in his lifetime and theirs.

By what foul alchemy or godless sorcery the Gates of Hell are opened on
that one eerie night I do not know, but mine own eyes have seen. And I
know I looked on no living thing that night, for the manuscript written
in the careful hand of Selim Bahadur narrated at length what he and his
raiders found in the valley of Stregoicavar; and I read, set down in
detail, the blasphemous obscenities that torture wrung from the lips of
screaming worshippers; and I read, too, of the lost, grim black cavern
high in the hills where the horrified Turks hemmed a monstrous, bloated,
wallowing toad-like being and slew it with flame and ancient steel
blessed in old times by Muhammad, and with incantations that were old
when Arabia was young. And even staunch old Selim's hand shook as he
recorded the cataclysmic, earth-shaking death-howls of the monstrosity,
which died not alone; for half-score of his slayers perished with him,
in ways that Selim would not or could not describe.

And that squat idol carved of gold and wrapped in silk was an image of
_himself_, and Selim tore it from the golden chain that looped the neck
of the slain high priest of the mask.

Well that the Turks swept out that foul valley with torch and cleanly
steel! Such sights as those brooding mountains have looked on belong to
the darkness and abysses of lost eons. No--it is not fear of the
toad-thing that makes me shudder in the night. He is made fast in Hell
with his nauseous horde, freed only for an hour on the most weird night
of the year, as I have seen. And of his worshippers, none remains.

But it is the realization that such things once crouched beast-like
above the souls of men which brings cold sweat to my brow; and I fear to
peer again into the leaves of Von Junzt's abomination. For now I
understand his repeated phrase of _keys_!--aye! Keys to Outer
Doors--links with an abhorrent past and--who knows?--of abhorrent
spheres of the _present_. And I understand why the cliffs look like
battlements in the moonlight and why the tavern-keeper's
nightmare-haunted nephew saw in his dream, the Black Stone like a spire
on a cyclopean black castle. If men ever excavate among those mountains
they may find incredible things below those masking slopes. For the cave
wherein the Turks trapped the--_thing_--was not truly a cavern, and I
shudder to contemplate the gigantic gulf of eons which must stretch
between this age and the time when the earth shook herself and reared
up, like a wave, those blue mountains that, rising, enveloped
unthinkable things. May no man ever seek to uproot that ghastly spire
men call the Black Stone!

A Key! Aye, it is a Key, symbol of a forgotten horror. That horror has
faded into the limbo from which it crawled, loathsomely, in the black
dawn of the earth. But what of the other fiendish possibilities hinted
at by Von Junzt--what of the monstrous hand which strangled out his
life? Since reading what Selim Bahadur wrote, I can no longer doubt
anything in the Black Book. Man was not always master of the earth--_and
is he now?_

And the thought recurs to me--if such a monstrous entity as the Master
of the Monolith somehow survived its own unspeakably distant epoch so
long--_what nameless shapes may even now lurk in the dark places of the
world?_
","In that great blizzard which, on the 4th of February, struck the eastern coast of the United States from Georgia to Maine, John Recklow and his men hunted Sanang, the last of the Yezidees.

And Sanang clung like a demon to the country which he had doomed to destruction, imbedding each claw again as it was torn loose, battling for the supremacy of evil with all his dreadful psychic power, striving still to seize, cripple, and slay the bodies and souls of a hundred million Americans.

Again he scattered the uncounted myriads of germs of the Black Plague which he and his Yezidees had brought out of Mongolia a year before; and once more the plague swept over the country, and thousands on thousands died.

But now the National, State and City governments were fighting, with physicians, nurses, and police, this gruesome epidemic which had come into the world from they knew not where. And National, State and City governments, aroused at last, were fighting the more terrible plague of anarchy.

Nation-wide raids were made from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from the Gulf to the Lakes. Thousands of terrorists of all shades and stripes whose minds had been seized and poisoned by the Yezidees were being arrested. Deportations had begun; government agents were everywhere swarming to clean out the foulness that had struck deeper into the body of the Republic than any one had supposed.

And it seemed, at last, as though the Red Plague, too, was about to be stamped out along with the Black Death called Influenza.

But only a small group of Secret Service men knew that a resurgence of these horrors was inevitable unless Sanang, the Slayer of Souls, was destroyed. And they knew, too, that only one person in America could hope to destroy Sanang, the last of the Yezidees, and that was Tressa Cleves.

Only by the sudden onset of the plague in various cities of the land had Recklow any clew concerning the whereabouts of Sanang.

In Boston, then Washington, then Kansas City, and then New York the epidemic suddenly blazed up. And in these places of death the Secret Service men always found a clew, and there they hunted Sanang, the Yezidee, to kill him without mercy where they might find him.

But they never found Sanang Noïane; only the ghastly marks of his poisoned claws on the body of the sickened nation—only minds diseased by the Red Plague and bodies dying of the Black Death—civil and social centres disorganized, disrupted, depraved, dying.

When the blizzard burst upon New York, struggling in the throes of the plague, and paralysed the metropolis for a week, John Recklow sent out a special alarm, and New York swarmed with Secret Service men searching the snow-buried city for a graceful, slender, dark young man whose eyes slanted a trifle in his amber-tinted face; who dressed fashionably, lived fastidiously, and spoke English perfectly in a delightfully modulated voice.

And to New York, thrice stricken by anarchy, by plague, and now by God, hurried, from all parts of the nation, thousands of secret agents who had been hunting Sanang in distant cities or who had been raiding the traitorous and secret gatherings of his mental dupes.

Agent ZB-303, who was volunteer agent James Benton, came from Boston with his new bride who had just arrived by way of England—a young girl named Yulun who landed swathed in sables, and stretched out both lovely little hands to Benton the instant she caught sight of him on the pier. Whereupon he took the slim figure in furs into his arms, which was interesting because they had never before met in the flesh.

So,—their honeymoon scarce begun, Benton and Yulun came from Boston in answer to Recklow's emergency call.

And all the way across from San Francisco came volunteer agent XLY-371, otherwise Alek Selden, bringing with him a girl named Sansa whom he had gone to the coast to meet, and whom he had immediately married after she had landed from the Japanese steamer Nan-yang Maru. Which, also, was remarkable, because, although they recognised each other instantly, and their hands and lips clung as they met, neither had ever before beheld the living body of the other.

The third man who came to New York at Recklow's summons was volunteer agent 53-6-26, otherwise Victor Cleves.

His young wife, suffering from nervous shock after the deaths of Togrul Khan and of the Baroulass girl, Aoula, had been convalescing in a private sanitarium in Westchester.

Until the summons came to her husband from Recklow, she had seen him only for a few moments every day. But the call to duty seemed to have effected a miraculous cure in the slender, blue-eyed girl who had lain all day long, day after day, in her still, sunny room scarcely unclosing her eyes at all save only when her husband was permitted to enter for the few minutes allowed them every day.

The physician had just left, after admitting that Mrs. Cleves seemed to be well enough to travel if she insisted; and she and her maid had already begun to pack when her husband came into her room.

She looked around over her shoulder, then rose from her knees, flung an armful of clothing into the trunk before which she had been kneeling, and came across the room to him. Then she dismissed her maid from the room. And when the girl had gone:

""I am well, Victor,"" she said in a low voice. ""Why are you troubled?""

""I can't bear to have you drawn into this horrible affair once more.""

""Who else is there to discover and overcome Sanang?"" she asked calmly.

He remained silent.

So, for a few moments they stood confronting each other there in the still, sunny chamber—husband and wife who had never even exchanged the first kiss—two young creatures more vitally and intimately bound together than any two on earth—yet utterly separated body and soul from each other—two solitary spirits which had never merged; two bodies virginal and inviolate.

Tressa spoke first: ""I must go. That was our bargain.""

The word made him wince as though it had been a sudden blow. Then his face flushed red.

""Bargain or no bargain,"" he said, ""I don't want you to go because I'm afraid you can not endure another shock like the last one.... And every time you have thrown your own mind and body between this Nation and destruction you have nearly died of it.""

""And if I die?"" she said in a low voice.

What answer she awaited—perhaps hoped for—was not the one he made. He said: ""If you die in what you believe to be your line of duty, then it will be I who have killed you.""

""That would not be true. It is you who have saved me.""

""I have not. I have done nothing except to lead you into danger of death since I first met you. If you mean spiritually, that also is untrue. You have saved yourself—if that indeed were necessary. You have redeemed yourself—if it is true you needed redemption—which I never believed——""

""Oh,"" she sighed swiftly, ""Sanang surprised my soul when it was free of my body—followed my soul into the Wood of the White Moth—caught it there all alone—and—slew it!""

His lips and throat had gone dry as he watched the pallid terror grow in her face.

Presently he recovered his voice: ""You call that Yezidee the Slayer of Souls,"" he said, ""but I tell you there is no such creature, no such power!

""I suppose I—I know what you mean—having seen what we call souls dissociated from their physical bodies—but that this Yezidee could do you any spiritual damage I do not for one instant believe. The idea is monstrous, I tell you——""

""I—I fought him—soul battling against soul——"" she stammered, breathing faster and irregularly. ""I struggled with Sanang there in the Wood of the White Moth. I called on God! I called on my two great dogs, Bars and Alaga! I recited the Fatha with all my strength—fighting convulsively whenever his soul seized mine; I cried out the name of Khidr, begging for wisdom! I called on the Ten Imaums, on Ali the Lion, on the Blessed Companions. Then I tore my spirit out of the grasp of his soul—but there was no escape!—no escape,"" she wailed. ""For on every side I saw the cloud-topped rampart of Gog and Magog, and the woods rang with Erlik's laughter—the dissonant mirth of hell——""

She began to shudder and sway a little, then with an effort she controlled herself in a measure.

""There never has been,"" she began again with lips that quivered in spite of her—""there never has been one moment in our married lives when my soul dared forget the Wood of the White Moth—dared seek yours.... God lives. But so does Erlik. There are angels; but there are as many demons.... My soul is ashamed.... And very lonely ... very lonely ... but no fit companion—for yours——""

Her hands dropped listlessly beside her and her chin sank.

""So you believe that Yezidee devil caught your soul when it was wandering somewhere out of your body, and destroyed it,"" he said.

She did not answer, did not even lift her eyes until he had stepped close to her—closer than he had ever come. Then she looked up at him, but closed her eyes as he swept her into his arms and crushed her face and body against his own.

Now her red lips were on his; now her face and heart and limbs and breast melted into his—her breath, her pulse, her strength flowed into his and became part of their single being and single pulse and breath. And she felt their two souls flame and fuse together, and burn together in one heavenly blaze—felt the swift conflagration mount, overwhelm, and sweep her clean of the last lingering taint; felt her soul, unafraid, clasp her husband's spirit in its white embrace—clung to him, uplifted out of hell, rising into the blinding light of Paradise.

Far—far away she heard her own voice in singing whispers—heard her lips pronounce The Name—""Ata—Ata! Allahou——""

Her blue eyes unclosed; through a mist, in which she saw her husband's face, grew a vast metallic clamour in her ears.

Her husband kissed her, long, silently; then, retaining her hand, he turned and lifted the receiver from the clamouring telephone.

""Yes! Yes, this is 53-6-26. Yes, V-69 is with me.... When?... To-day?... Very well.... Yes, we'll come at once.... Yes, we can get a train in a few minutes.... All right. Good-bye.""

He took his wife into his arms again.

""Dearest of all in the world,"" he said, ""Sanang is cornered in a row of houses near the East River, and Recklow has flung a cordon around the entire block. Good God! I can't take you there!""

Then Tressa smiled, drew his head down, looked into his face till the clear blue splendour of her gaze stilled the tumult in his brain.

""I alone know how to deal with Prince Sanang,"" she said quietly. ""And if John Recklow, or you, or Mr. Benton or Mr. Selden should kill him with your pistols, it would be only his body you slay, not the evil thing that would escape you and return to Erlik.""

""Must you do this thing, Tressa?""

""Yes, I must do it.""

""But—if our pistols cannot kill this sorcerer, how are you going to deal with him?""

""I know how.""

""Have you the strength?""

""Yes—the bodily and the spiritual. Don't you know that I am already part of you?""

""We shall be nearer still,"" he murmured.

She flushed but met his gaze.

""Yes.... We shall be but one being.... Utterly.... For already our hearts and souls are one. And we shall become of one mind and one body.

""I am no longer afraid of Sanang Noïane!""

""No longer afraid to slay him?"" he asked quietly.

A blue light flashed in her eyes and her face grew still and white and terrible.

""Death to the body? That is nothing, my lord!"" she said, in a hard, sweet voice. ""It is written that we belong to God and that we return to Him. All living things must die, Heart of the World! It is only the death of souls that matters. And it has arrived at a time in the history of mankind, I think, when the Slayer of Souls shall slay no more.""

She looked at him, flushed, withdrew her hand and went slowly across the room to the big bay window where potted flowers were in bloom.

From a window-box she took a pinch of dry soil and dropped it into the bosom of her gown.

Then, facing the East, with lowered arms and palms turned outward:

""There is no god but God,"" she whispered—""the merciful, the long-suffering, the compassionate, the just.

""For it is written that when the heavens are rolled together like a scroll, every soul shall know what it hath wrought.

""And those souls that are dead in Jehannum shall arise from the dead, and shall have their day in court. Nor shall Erlik stay them till all has been said.

""And on that day the soul of a girl that hath been put to death shall ask for what reason it was slain.

""Thus it has been written.""

Then Tressa dropped to her knees, touched the carpet with her forehead, straightened her lithe body and, looking over her shoulder, clapped her hands together sharply.

Her maid opened the door. ""Hasten with my lord's luggage!"" she cried happily; and, still kneeling, lifted her head to her husband and laughed up into his eyes.

""You should call the porter for we are nearly ready. Shall we go to the station in a sleigh? Oh, wonderful!""

She leaped to her feet, extended her hand and caught his.

""Horses for the lord of the Yiort!"" she cried, laughingly. ""Kosh! Take me out into this new white world that has been born to-day of the ten purities and the ten thousand felicities! It has been made anew for you and me who also have been born this day!""

He scarcely knew this sparkling, laughing girl with her quick grace and her thousand swift little moods and gaieties.

Porters came to take his luggage from his own room; and then her trunk and bags were ready, and were taken away.

The baggage sleigh drove off. Their own jingling sleigh followed; and Tressa, buried in furs, looked out upon a dazzling, unblemished world, lying silvery white under a sky as azure as her eyes.

""Keuke Mongol—Heavenly Azure,"" he whispered close to her crimsoned cheek, ""do you know how I have loved you—always—always?""

""No, I did not know that,"" she said.

""Nor I, in the beginning. Yet it happened, also, from the beginning when I first saw you.""

""That is a delicious thing to be told. Within me a most heavenly glow is spreading.... Unglove your hand.""

She slipped the glove from her own white fingers and felt for his under the furs.

""Aie,"" she sighed, ""you are more beautiful than Ali; more wonderful than the Flaming Pearl. Out of ice and fire a new world has been made for us.""

""Heavenly Azure—my darling!""

""Oh-h,"" she sighed, ""your words are sweeter than the breeze in Yian! I shall be a bride to you such as there never has been since the days of the Blessed Companions—may their names be perfumed and sweet-scented!... Shall I truly be one with you, my lord?""

""Mind, soul, and body, one being, you and I, little Heavenly Azure.""

""Between your two hands you hold me like a burning rose, my lord.""

""Your sweetness and fire penetrate my soul.""

""We shall burn together then till the sky-carpet be rolled up. Kosh! We shall be one, and on that day I shall not be afraid.""

The sleigh came to a clashing, jingling halt; the train plowed into the depot buried in vast clouds of snowy steam.

But when they had taken the places reserved for them, and the train was moving swifter and more swiftly toward New York, fear suddenly overwhelmed Victor Cleves, and his face grew grey with the menacing tumult of his thoughts.

The girl seemed to comprehend him, too, and her own features became still and serious as she leaned forward in her chair.

""It is in God's hands, Heart of the World,"" she said in a low voice. ""We are one, thou and I,—or nearly so. Nothing can harm my soul.""

""No.... But the danger—to your life——""

""I fear no Yezidee.""

""The beast will surely try to kill you. And what can I do? You say my pistol is useless.""

""Yes.... But I want you near me.""

""Do you imagine I'd leave you for a second? Good God,"" he added in a strangled voice, ""isn't there any way I can kill this wild beast? With my naked hands——?""

""You must leave him to me, Victor.""

""And you believe you can slay him? Do you?""

She remained silent for a long while, bent forward in her armchair, and her hands clasped tightly on her knees.

""My husband,"" she said at last, ""what your astronomers have but just begun to suspect is true, and has long, long been known to the Sheiks-el-Djebel.

""For, near to this world we live in, are other worlds—planets that do not reflect light. And there is a dark world called Yrimid, close to the earth—a planet wrapped in darkness—a black star.... And upon it Erlik dwells.... And it is peopled by demons.... And from it comes sickness and evil——""

She moistened her lips; sat for a while gazing vaguely straight before her.

""From this black planet comes all evil upon earth,"" she resumed in a hushed voice. ""For it is very near to the earth. It is not a hundred miles away. All strange phenomena for which our scientists can not account are due to this invisible planet,—all new and sudden pestilences; all convulsions of nature; the newly noticed radio disturbances; the new, so-called inter-planetary signals—all—all have their hidden causes within that black and demon-haunted planet long known to the Yezidees, and by them called Yrimid, or Erlik's World. And—it is to this black planet that I shall send Sanang, Slayer of Souls. I shall tear him from this earth, though he cling to it with every claw; and I shall fling his soul into darkness—out across the gulf—drive his soul forth—hurl it toward Erlik like a swift rocket charred and falling from the sky into endless night.

""So shall I strive to deal with Prince Sanang, Sorcerer of Mount Alamout, the last of the Assassins, Sheik-el-Djebel, and Slayer of Souls.... May God remember him in hell.""

Already their train was rolling into the great terminal.

Recklow was awaiting them. He took Tressa's hands in his and gazed earnestly into her face.

""Have you come to show us how to conclude this murderous business?"" he asked grimly.

""I shall try,"" she said calmly. ""Where have you cornered Sanang?""

""Could you and Victor come at once?""

""Yes."" She turned and looked at her husband, who had become quite pale.

Recklow saw the look they exchanged. There could be no misunderstanding what had happened to these two. Their tragedy had ended. They were united at last. He understood it instantly,—realised how terrible was this new and tragic situation for them both.

Yet, he knew also that the salvation of civilisation itself now depended upon this girl. She must face Sanang. There was nothing else possible.

""The streets are choked with snow,"" he said, ""but I have a coupé and two strong horses waiting.""

He nodded to one of his men standing near. Cleves gave him the hand luggage and checks.

""All right,"" he said in a low voice to Recklow; and passed one arm through Tressa's.

The coupé was waiting on Forty-second Street, guarded by a policeman. When they had entered and were seated, two mounted policemen rode ahead of the lurching vehicle, picking a way amid the monstrous snow-drifts, and headed for the East River.

""We've got him somewhere in a wretched row of empty houses not far from East River Park. I'm taking you there. I've drawn a cordon of my men around the entire block. He can't get away. But I dared take no chances with this Yezidee sorcerer—dared not let one of my men go in to look for him—go anywhere near him,—until I could lay the situation before you, Mrs. Cleves.""

""Yes,"" she said calmly, ""it was the only way, Mr. Recklow. There would have been no use shooting him—no use taking him prisoner. A prisoner, he remains as deadly as ever; dead, his mind still lives and breeds evil. You are quite right; it is for me to deal with Sanang.""

Recklow shuddered in spite of himself. ""Can you tear his claws from the vitals of the world, and free the sick brains of a million people from the slavery of this monster's mind?""

The girl said seriously:

""Even Satan was stoned. It is so written. And was cast out. And dwells forever and ever in Abaddon. No star lights that Pit. None lights the Black Planet, Yrimid. It is where evil dwells. And there Sanang Noïane belongs.""

And now, beyond the dirty edges of the snow-smothered city, under an icy mist they caught sight of the river where ships lay blockaded by frozen floes.

Gulls circled over it; ghostly factory chimneys on the further shore loomed up gigantic, ranged like minarettes.

The coupé, jolting along behind the mounted policemen, struggled up toward the sidewalk and stopped. The two horses stood steaming, knee deep in snow. Recklow sprang out; Tressa gave him one hand and stepped lithely to the sidewalk. Then Cleves got out and came and took hold of his wife's arm again.

""Well,"" he said harshly to Recklow, ""where is this damned Yezidee hidden?""

Recklow pointed in silence, but he and Tressa had already lifted their gaze to the stark, shabby row of abandoned three-story houses where every dirty blind was closed.

""They're to be demolished and model tenements built,"" he said briefly.

A man muffled in a fur overcoat came up and took Tressa's hand and kissed it.

She smiled palely at Benton, spoke of Yulun, wished him happiness. While she was yet speaking Selden approached and bent over her gloved hand. She spoke to him very sweetly of Sansa, expressing pleasure at the prospect of seeing her again in the body.

""The Seldens and ourselves have adjoining apartments at the Ritz,"" said Benton. ""We have reserved a third suite for you and Victor.""

She inclined her lovely head, gravely, then turned to Recklow, saying that she was ready.

""It makes no difference which front door I unlock,"" he said. ""All these tenements are connected by human rat-holes and hidden runways leading from one house to another.... How many men do you want?""

""I want you four men,—nobody else.""

Recklow led the way up a snow-covered stoop, drew a key from his pocket, fitted it, and pulled open the door.

A musty chill struck their faces as they entered the darkened and empty hallway. Involuntarily every man drew his pistol.

""I must ask you to do exactly what I tell you to do,"" she said calmly.

""Certainly,"" said Recklow, caressing his white moustache and striving to pierce the gloom with his keen eyes.

Then Tressa took her husband's hand. ""Come,"" she said. They mounted the stairway together; and the three others followed with pistols lifted.

There was a vague grey light on the second floor; the broken rear shutters let it in.

As though she seemed to know her way, the girl led them forward, opened a door in the wall, and disclosed a bare, dusty room in the next house.

Through this she stepped; the others crept after her with weapons ready. She opened a second door, turned to the four men.

""Wait here for me. Come only when I call,"" she whispered.

""For God's sake take me with you,"" burst out Cleves.

""In God's name stay where you are till you hear me call your name!"" she said almost breathlessly.

Then, suddenly she turned, swiftly retracing her steps; and they saw her pass through the first door and disappear into the first house they had entered.

A terrible silence fell among them. The sound of her steps on the bare boards had died away. There was not a sound in the chilly dusk.

Minute after minute dragged by. One by one the men peered fearfully at Cleves. His visage was ghastly and they could see his pistol-hand trembling.

Twice Recklow looked at his wrist watch. The third time he said, unsteadily: ""She has been gone three-quarters of an hour.""

Then, far away, they heard a heavy tread on the stairs. Nearer and nearer came the footsteps. Every pistol was levelled at the first door as a man's bulky form darkened it.

""It's one of my men,"" said Recklow in a voice like a low groan. ""Where on earth is Mrs. Cleves?""

""I came to tell you,"" said the agent, ""Mrs. Cleves came out of the first house nearly an hour ago. She got into the coupé and told the driver to go to the Ritz.""

""What!"" gasped Recklow.

""She's gone to the Ritz,"" repeated the agent. ""No one else has come out. And I began to worry—hearing nothing of you, Mr. Recklow. So I stepped in to see——""

""You say that Mrs. Cleves went out of the house we entered, got into the coupé, and told the driver to go to the Ritz?"" demanded Cleves, astounded.

""Yes, sir.""

""Where is that coupé? Did it return?""

""It had not returned when I came in here.""

""Go back and look for it. Look in the other street,"" said Recklow sharply.

The agent hurried away over the creaking boards. The four men gazed at one another.

""The thing to do is to obey her and stay where we are,"" said Recklow grimly. ""Who knows what peril we may cause her if we move from——""

His words froze on his lips as Tressa's voice rang out from the darkness beyond the door they were guarding:

""Victor I I—I need you! Come to me, my husband!""

As Cleves sprang through the door into the darkness beyond, Benton smashed a window sash with all the force of his shoulder, and, reaching out through the shattered glass, tore the rotting blinds from their hinges, letting in a flood of sickly light.

Against the bare wall stood Tressa, both arms extended, her hands flat against the plaster, and each hand transfixed and pinned to the wall by a knife.

A white sheet lay at her feet. On it rested a third knife. And, bending on one knee to pick it up, they caught a glimpse of a slender young man in fashionable afternoon attire, who, as they entered with the crash of the shattered window in their ears, sprang to his nimble feet and stood confronting them, knife in hand.

Instantly every man fired at him and the bullets whipped the plaster to a smoke behind him, but the slender, dark skinned young man stood motionless, looking at them out of brilliant eyes that slanted a trifle.

Again the racket of the fusillade swept him and filled the room with plaster dust.

Cleves, frantic with horror, laid hold of the knives that pinned his wife's hands to the wall, and dragged them out.

But there was no blood, no wound to be seen on her soft palms. She took the murderous looking blades from him, threw one terrible look at Sanang, kicked the shroud across the floor toward him, and flung both knives upon it.

The place was still dim with plaster dust and pistol fumes as she stepped forward through the acrid mist, motioning the four men aside.

""Sanang!"" she cried in a clear voice, ""may God remember you in hell, for my feet have spurned your shroud, and your knives, which could not scar my palms, shall never pierce my heart! Look out for yourself, Prince Sanang!""

""Tokhta!"" he said, calmly. ""My soul be ransom for yours!""

""That is a lie! My soul is already ransomed! My mind is the more powerful. It has already halted yours. It is conquering yours. It is seizing your mind and enslaving it. It is mastering your will, Sanang! Your mind bends before mine. You know it! You know it is bending. You feel it is breaking down!""

Sanang's eyes began to glitter but his pale brown face had grown almost white.

""I slew you once—in the Wood of the White Moth,"" he said huskily. ""There is no resurrection from such a death, little Heavenly Azure. Look upon me! My soul and yours are one!""

""You are looking upon my soul,"" she said.

""A lie! You are in your body!""

The girl laughed. ""My body lies asleep in the Ritz upon my husband's bed,"" she said. ""My body is his, my mind belongs to him, my soul is already one with his. Do you not know it, dog of a Yezidee? Look upon me, Sanang Noïane! Look upon my unwounded hands! My shroud lies at your feet. And there lie the knives that could not pierce my heart! I am thrice clean! Listen to my words, Sanang! There is no other god but God!""

The young man's visage grew pasty and loose and horrible; his lips became flaccid like dewlaps; but out of these sagging folds of livid skin his voice burst whistling, screaming, as though wrenched from his very belly:

""May Erlik strangle you! May you rot where you stand! May your face become a writhing mass of maggots and your body a corruption of living worms!

""For what you are doing to me this day may every demon in hell torment you!

""Have a care what you are about!"" he screeched. ""You are slaying my mind, you sorceress! You have seized my mind and are crushing it! You are putting out its light, you Yezidee witch!—you are quenching the last spark—of reason—in—me——""

""Sanang!""

His knife fell clattering to the floor. But he stood stock still, his hands clutching his head—stood motionless, while scream on scream tore through the loose and gaping lips, blowing them into ghastly, distorted folds.

""Sanang Noïane!"" she cried in her clear voice, ""the Eight Towers are darkened! The Rampart of Gog and Magog is fallen! On Mount Alamout nothing is living. The minds of mankind are free again!""

She stepped forward, slowly, and stood near him chanting in a low voice the Prayers for the Dead She bent down and unrolled the shroud, laid it on his shoulders and drew it up and across his face, covering his dying eyes, and swathed him so, slowly, from head to foot.

Then she gathered up the three knives, cast them upward into the air. They did not fall again. They disappeared. And all the while, under her breath, the girl was chanting the Prayers for the Dead as she moved silently about her business.

Shrouded to the forehead in its white cerements, the muffled figure of Sanang stood upright, motionless as a swathed and frozen corpse.

Outside, the daylight had become greyer. It had begun to snow again, and a few flakes blew in through the shattered windows and clung to the winding sheet of Sanang.

And now Tressa drew close to the shrouded shape and stood before it, gazing intently upon the outlined features of the last of the Yezidees.

""Sanang,"" she said very softly, ""I hear your soul bidding your body farewell. Tokhta!""

Then, under the strained gaze of the four men gathered there, the shroud fell to the floor in a loose heap of white folds. There was nobody under it; no trace of Sanang. The human shape of the Yezidee had disappeared; but a greyish mist had filled the room, wavering up like smoke from the shroud, and, like smoke, blowing in a long streamer toward the window where the draught drew it out through the falling snow and scattered the last shred of it against the greying sky.

In the room the mist thinned swiftly; the four men could now see one another. But Tressa was no longer in the room. And in place of the white shroud a piece of filthy tattered carpet lay on the floor. And a dead rat, flattened out, dry and dusty, lay upon it.

""For God's sake,"" whispered Recklow hoarsely, ""let us get out of this!""

Cleves, his pistol clutched convulsively, stared at him in terror. But Recklow took him by the arm and drew him away, muttering that Tressa was waiting for him, and might be ill, and that there was nothing further to expect in this ghastly spot.

They went with Cleves to the Ritz. At the desk the clerk said that Mrs. Cleves had the keys and was in her apartment.

The three men entered the corridor with him; watched him try the door; saw him open it; lingered a moment after it had closed; heard the key turn.

At the sound of the door closing the maid came.

""Madame is asleep in her room,"" she whispered.

""When did she come in?""

""More than two hours ago, sir. I have drawn her bath, but when I opened the door a few moments ago, Madame was still asleep.""

He nodded; he was trembling when he put off his overcoat and dropped hat and gloves on the carpet.

From the little rose and ivory reception room he could see the closed door of his wife's chamber. And for a while he stood staring at it.

Then, slowly, he crossed this room, opened the door; entered.

In her bedroom the tinted twilight was like ashes of roses. He went to the bed and looked down at her shadowy face; gazed intently; listened; then, in sudden terror, bent and laid his hand on her heart. It was beating as tranquilly as a child's; but as she stirred, turned her head, and unclosed her eyes, under his hand her heart leaped like a wild thing caught unawares and the snowy skin glowed with an exquisite and deepening tint as she lifted her arms and clasped them around her husband's, neck, drawing his quivering face against her own.",False
"""They say foul things of Old Times still lurk
In dark forgotten corners of the world.
And Gates still gape to loose, on certain nights.
Shapes pent in Hell.""

--Justin Geoffrey


I read of it first in the strange book of Von Junzt, the German
eccentric who lived so curiously and died in such grisly and mysterious
fashion. It was my fortune to have access to his _Nameless Cults_ in the
original edition, the so-called Black Book, published in Dusseldorf in
1839, shortly before a hounding doom overtook the author. Collectors of
rare literature were familiar with _Nameless Cults_ mainly through the
cheap and faulty translation which was pirated in London by Bridewall in
1845, and the carefully expurgated edition put out by the Golden Goblin
Press of New York, 1909. But the volume I stumbled upon was one of the
unexpurgated German copies, with heavy black leather covers and rusty
iron hasps. I doubt if there are more than half a dozen such volumes in
the entire world today, for the quantity issued was not great, and when
the manner of the author's demise was bruited about, many possessors of
the book burned their volumes in panic.

Von Junzt spent his entire life (1795-1840) delving into forbidden
subjects; he traveled in all parts of the world, gained entrance into
innumerable secret societies, and read countless little-known and
esoteric books and manuscripts in the original; and in the chapters of
the Black Book, which range from startling clarity of exposition to
murky ambiguity, there are statements and hints to freeze the blood of a
thinking man. Reading what Von Junzt _dared_ put in print arouses uneasy
speculations as to what it was that he dared _not_ tell. What dark
matters, for instance, were contained in those closely written pages
that formed the unpublished manuscript on which he worked unceasingly
for months before his death, and which lay torn and scattered all over
the floor of the locked and bolted chamber in which Von Junzt was found
dead with the marks of taloned fingers on his throat? It will never be
known, for the author's closest friend, the Frenchman Alexis Ladeau,
after having spent a whole night piecing the fragments together and
reading what was written, burnt them to ashes and cut his own throat
with a razor.

But the contents of the published matter are shuddersome enough, even if
one accepts the general view that they but represent the ravings of a
madman. There among many strange things I found mention of the Black
Stone, that curious, sinister monolith that broods among the mountains
of Hungary, and about which so many dark legends cluster. Van Junzt did
not devote much space to it--the bulk of his grim work concerns cults
and objects of dark worship which he maintained existed in his day, and
it would seem that the Black Stone represents some order or being lost
and forgotten centuries ago. But he spoke of it as one of the _keys_--a
phrase used many times by him, in various relations, and constituting
one of the obscurities of his work. And he hinted briefly at curious
sights to be seen about the monolith on Midsummer's Night. He mentioned
Otto Dostmann's theory that this monolith was a remnant of the Hunnish
invasion and had been erected to commemorate a victory of Attila over
the Goths. Von Junzt contradicted this assertion without giving any
refutory facts, merely remarking that to attribute the origin of the
Black Stone to the Huns was as logical as assuming that William the
Conqueror reared Stonehenge.

This implication of enormous antiquity piqued my interest immensely and
after some difficulty I succeeded in locating a rat-eaten and moldering
copy of Dostmann's _Remnants of Lost Empires_ (Berlin, 1809, ""Der
Drachenhaus"" Press). I was disappointed to find that Dostmann referred
to the Black Stone even more briefly than had Von Junzt, dismissing it
with a few lines as an artifact comparatively modern in contrast with
the Greco-Roman ruins of Asia Minor which were his pet theme. He
admitted his inability to make out the defaced characters on the
monolith but pronounced them unmistakably Mongoloid. However, little as
I learned from Dostmann, he did mention the name of the village adjacent
to the Black Stone--Stregoicavar--an ominous name, meaning something
like Witch-Town.

A close scrutiny of guidebooks and travel articles gave me no further
information--Stregoicavar, not on any map that I could find, lay in a
wild, little-frequented region, out of the path of casual tourists. But
I did find subject for thought in Dornly's _Magyar Folklore_. In his
chapter on _Dream Myths_ he mentions the Black Stone and tells of some
curious superstitions regarding it--especially the belief that if anyone
sleeps in the vicinity of the monolith, that person will be haunted by
monstrous nightmares forever after; and he cited tales of the peasants
regarding too-curious people who ventured to visit the Stone on
Midsummer Night and who died raving mad because of _something_ they saw
there.

That was all I could gleam from Dornly, but my interest was even more
intensely roused as I sensed a distinctly sinister aura about the Stone.
The suggestion of dark antiquity, the recurrent hint of unnatural events
on Midsummer Night, touched some slumbering instinct in my being, as one
senses, rather than hears, the flowing of some dark subterraneous river
in the night.

And I suddenly saw a connection between this Stone and a certain weird
and fantastic poem written by the mad poet, Justin Geoffrey: _The People
of the Monolith_. Inquiries led to the information that Geoffrey had
indeed written that poem while traveling in Hungary, and I could not
doubt that the Black Stone was the very monolith to which he referred in
his strange verse. Reading his stanzas again, I felt once more the
strange dim stirrings of subconscious promptings that I had noticed when
first reading of the Stone.

I had been casting about for a place to spend a short vacation and I
made up my mind. I went to Stregoicavar. A train of obsolete style
carried me from Temesvar to within striking distance, at least, of my
objective, and a three days' ride in a jouncing coach brought me to the
little village which lay in a fertile valley high up in the fir-clad
mountains. The journey itself was uneventful, but during the first day
we passed the old battlefield of Schomvaal where the brave
Polish-Hungarian knight, Count Boris Vladinoff, made his gallant and
futile stand against the victorious hosts of Suleiman the Magnificent,
when the Grand Turk swept over eastern Europe in 1526.

The driver of the coach pointed out to me a great heap of crumbling
stones on a hill nearby, under which, he said, the bones of the brave
Count lay. I remembered a passage from Larson's _Turkish Wars_. ""After
the skirmish"" (in which the Count with his small army had beaten back
the Turkish advance-guard) ""the Count was standing beneath the
half-ruined walls of the old castle on the hill, giving orders as to the
disposition of his forces, when an aide brought to him a small lacquered
case which had been taken from the body of the famous Turkish scribe and
historian, Selim Bahadur, who had fallen in the fight. The Count took
therefrom a roll of parchment and began to read, but he had not read far
before he turned very pale and, without saying a word, replaced the
parchment in the case and thrust the case into his cloak. At that very
instant a hidden Turkish battery suddenly opened fire, and the balls
striking the old castle, the Hungarians were horrified to see the walls
crash down in ruin, completely covering the brave Count. Without a
leader the gallant little army was cut to pieces, and in the war-swept
years which followed, the bones of the noblemen were never recovered.
Today the natives point out a huge and moldering pile of ruins near
Schomvaal beneath which, they say, still rests all that the centuries
have left of Count Boris Vladinoff.""

I found the village of Stregoicavar a dreamy, drowsy little village that
apparently belied its sinister cognomen--a forgotten back-eddy that
Progress had passed by. The quaint houses and the quainter dress and
manners of the people were those of an earlier century. They were
friendly, mildly curious but not inquisitive, though visitors from the
outside world were extremely rare.

""Ten years ago another American came here and stayed a few days in the
village,"" said the owner of the tavern where I had put up, ""a young
fellow and queer-acting--mumbled to himself--a poet, I think.""

I knew he must mean Justin Geoffrey.

""Yes, he was a poet,"" I answered, ""and he wrote a poem about a bit of
scenery near this very village.""

""Indeed?"" Mine host's interest was aroused. ""Then, since all great poets
are strange in their speech and actions, he must have achieved great
fame, for his actions and conversations were the strangest of any man I
ever I knew.""

""As is usual with artists,"" I answered, ""most of his recognition has
come since his death.""

""He is dead, then?""

""He died screaming in a madhouse five years ago.""

""Too bad, too bad,"" sighed mine host sympathetically. ""Poor lad--he
looked too long at the Black Stone.""

My heart gave a leap, but I masked my keen interest and said casually.
""I have heard something of this Black Stone; somewhere near this
village, is it not?""

""Nearer than Christian folk wish,"" he responded. ""Look!"" He drew me to a
latticed window and pointed up at the fir-clad slopes of the brooding
blue mountains. ""There beyond where you see the bare face of that
jutting cliff stands that accursed Stone. Would that it were ground to
powder and the powder flung into the Danube to be carried to the deepest
ocean! Once men tried to destroy the thing, but each man who laid hammer
or maul against it came to an evil end. So now the people shun it.""

""What is there so evil about it?"" I asked curiously.

""It is a demon-haunted thing,"" he answered uneasily and with the
suggestion of a shudder. ""In my childhood I knew a young man who came up
from below and laughed at our traditions--in his foolhardiness he went
to the Stone one Midsummer Night and at dawn stumbled into the village
again, stricken dumb and mad. Something had shattered his brain and
sealed his lips, for until the day of his death, which came soon after,
he spoke only to utter terrible blasphemies or to slaver gibberish.

""My own nephew when very small was lost in the mountains and slept in
the woods near the Stone, and now in his manhood he is tortured by foul
dreams, so that at times he makes the night hideous with his screams and
wakes with cold sweat upon him.

""But let us talk of something else, _Herr_; it is not good to dwell upon
such things.""

I remarked on the evident age of the tavern and he answered with pride.
""The foundations are more than four hundred years old; the original
house was the only one in the village which was not burned to the ground
when Suleiman's devil swept through the mountains. Here, in the house
that then stood on these same foundations, it is said, the scribe Selim
Bahadur had his headquarters while ravaging the country hereabouts.""

I learned then that the present inhabitants of Stregoicavar are not
descendants of the people who dwelt there before the Turkish raid of
1526. The victorious Moslems left no living human in the village or the
vicinity thereabouts when they passed over. Men, women and children they
wiped out in one red holocaust of murder, leaving a vast stretch of
country silent and utterly deserted. The present people of Stregoicavar
are descended from hardy settlers from the lower valleys who came into
the ruined village after the Turk was thrust back.

Mine host did not speak of the extermination of the original inhabitants
with any great resentment and I learned that his ancestors in the lower
levels had looked on the mountaineers with even more hatred and aversion
than they regarded the Turks. He was rather vague regarding the causes
of this feud, but said that the original inhabitants of Stregoicavar had
been in the habit of making stealthy raids on the lowlands and stealing
girls and children. Moreover, he said that they were not exactly of the
same blood as his own people; the sturdy, original Magyar-Slavic stock
had mixed and intermarried with a degraded aboriginal race until the
breeds had blended, producing an unsavory amalgamation. Who these
aborigines were, he had not the slightest idea, but maintained that they
were ""pagans"" and had dwelt in the mountains since time immemorial,
before the coming of the conquering peoples.

I attached little importance to this tale; seeing in it merely a
parallel to the amalgamation of Celtic tribes with Mediterranean
aborigines in the Galloway hills, with the resultant mixed race which,
as Picts, has such an extensive part in Scotch legendary. Time has a
curious foreshortening effect on folklore, and just as tales of the
Picts became intertwined with legends of an older Mongoloid race, so
that eventually the Picts were ascribed the repulsive appearance of the
squat primitives, whose individuality merged, in the telling, into
Pictish tales, and was forgotten; so, I felt, the supposed inhuman
attributes of the first villagers of Stregoicavar could be traced to
older, outworn myths with invading Huns and Mongols.

The morning after my arrival I received directions from mine host, who
gave them worriedly, and set out to find the Black Stone. A few hours'
tramp up the fir-covered slopes brought me to the face of the rugged,
solid stone cliff which jutted boldly from the mountainside. A narrow
trail wound up it, and mounting this, I looked out over the peaceful
valley of Stregoicavar, which seemed to drowse, guarded on either hand
by the great blue mountains. No huts or any sign of human tenancy showed
between the cliff whereon I stood and the village. I saw numbers of
scattering farms in the valley but all lay on the other side of
Stregoicavar, which itself seemed to shrink from the brooding slopes
which masked the Black Stone.

The summit of the cliffs proved to be a sort of thickly wooded plateau.
I made my way through the dense growth for a short distance and came
into a wide glade; and in the center of the glade reared a gaunt figure
of black stone.

It was octagonal in shape, some sixteen feet in height and about a foot
and a half thick. It had once evidently been highly polished, but now
the surface was thickly dinted as if savage efforts had been made to
demolish it; but the hammers had done little more than to flake off
small bits of stone and mutilate the characters which once had evidently
marched up in a spiraling line round and round the shaft to the top. Up
to ten feet from the base these characters were almost completely
blotted out, so that it was very difficult to trace their direction.
Higher up they were plainer, and I managed to squirm part of the way up
the shaft and scan them at close range. All were more or less defaced,
but I was positive that they symbolized no language now remembered on
the face of the earth. I am fairly familiar with all hieroglyphics known
to researchers and philologists and I can say, with certainty that those
characters were like nothing of which I have ever read or heard. The
nearest approach to them that I ever saw were some crude scratches on a
gigantic and strangely symmetrical rock in a lost valley of Yucatan. I
remember that when I pointed out these marks to the archeologist who was
my companion, he maintained that they either represented natural
weathering or the idle scratching of some Indian. To my theory that the
rock was really the base of a long-vanished column, he merely laughed,
calling my attention to the dimensions of it, which suggested, if it
were built with any natural rules of architectural symmetry, a column a
thousand feet high. But I was not convinced.

I will not say that the characters on the Black Stone were similar to
those on that colossal rock in Yucatan; but one suggested the other. As
to the substance of the monolith, again I was baffled. The stone of
which it was composed was a dully gleaming black, whose surface, where
it was not dinted and roughened, created a curious illusion of
semi-transparency.

I spent most of the morning there and came away baffled. No connection
of the Stone with any other artifact in the world suggested itself to
me. It was as if the monolith had been reared by alien hands, in an age
distant and apart from human ken.

I returned to the village with my interest in no way abated. Now that I
had seen the curious thing, my desire was still more keenly whetted to
investigate the matter further and seek to learn by what strange hands
and for what strange purpose the Black Stone had been reared in the long
ago.

I sought out the tavern-keeper's nephew and questioned him in regard to
his dreams, but he was vague, though willing to oblige. He did not mind
discussing them, but was unable to describe them with any clarity.
Though he dreamed the same dreams repeatedly, and though they were
hideously vivid at the time, they left no distinct impression on his
waking mind. He remembered them only as chaotic nightmares through which
huge whirling fires shot lurid tongues of flame and a black drum
bellowed incessantly. One thing only he remembered clearly--in one dream
he had seen the Black Stone, not on a mountain slope but set like a
spire on a colossal black castle.

As for the rest of the villagers I found them not inclined to talk about
the Stone, with the exception of the schoolmaster, a man of surprizing
education, who spent much more of his time out in the world than any of
the rest.

He was much interested in what I told him of Von Junzt's remarks about
the Stone, and warmly agreed with the German author in the alleged age
of the monolith. He believed that a coven had once existed in the
vicinity and that possibly all of the original villagers had been
members of that fertility cult which once threatened to undermine
European civilization and gave rise to the tales of witchcraft. He cited
the very name of the village to prove his point; it had not been
originally named Stregoicavar, he said; according to legends the
builders had called it Xuthltan, which was the aboriginal name of the
site on which the village had been built many centuries ago.

This fact roused again an indescribable feeling of uneasiness. The
barbarous name did not suggest connection with any Scythic, Slavic or
Mongolian race to which an aboriginal people of these mountains would,
under natural circumstances, have belonged.

That the Magyars and Slavs of the lower valleys believed the original
inhabitants of the village to be members of the witchcraft cult was
evident, the schoolmaster said, by the name they gave it, which name
continued to be used even after the older settlers had been massacred by
the Turks, and the village rebuilt by a cleaner and more wholesome
breed.

He did not believe that the members of the cult erected the monolith but
he did believe that they used it as a center of their activities, and
repeating vague legends which had been handed down since before the
Turkish invasion, he advanced the theory that the degenerate villagers
had used it as a sort of altar on which they offered human sacrifices,
using as victims the girls and babies stolen from his own ancestors in
the lower valleys.

He discounted the myths of weird events on Midsummer Night, as well as a
curious legend of a strange deity which the witch-people of Xuthltan
were said to have invoked with chants and wild rituals of flagellation
and slaughter.

He had never visited the Stone on Midsummer Night, he said, but he would
not fear to do so; whatever _had_ existed or taken place there in the
past, had been long engulfed in the mists of time and oblivion. The
Black Stone had lost its meaning save as a link to a dead and dusty
past.

It was while returning from a visit with this schoolmaster one night
about a week after my arrival at Stregoicavar that a sudden recollection
struck me--it was Midsummer Night! The very time that the legends linked
with grisly implications to the Black Stone. I turned away from the
tavern and strode swiftly through the village. Stregoicavar lay silent;
the villagers retired early. I saw no one as I passed rapidly out of the
village and up into the firs which masked the mountain's slopes with
whispering darkness. A broad silver moon hung above the valley, flooding
the crags and slopes in a weird light and etching the shadows blackly.
No wind blew through the firs, but a mysterious, intangible rustling and
whispering was abroad. Surely on such nights in past centuries, my
whimsical imagination told me, naked witches astride magic broomsticks
had flown across the valley, pursued by jeering demoniac familiars.

I came to the cliffs and was somewhat disquieted to note that the
illusive moonlight lent them a subtle appearance I had not noticed
before--in the weird light they appeared less like natural cliffs and
more like the ruins of cyclopean and Titan-reared battlements jutting
from the mountain-slope.

Shaking off this hallucination with difficulty I came upon the plateau
and hesitated a moment before I plunged into the brooding darkness of
the woods. A sort of breathless tenseness hung over the shadows, like an
unseen monster holding its breath lest it scare away its prey.

I shook off the sensation--a natural one, considering the eeriness of
the place and its evil reputation--and made my way through the wood,
experiencing a most unpleasant sensation that I was being followed, and
halting once, sure that something clammy and unstable had brushed
against my face in the darkness.

I came out into the glade and saw the tall monolith rearing its gaunt
height above the sward. At the edge of the woods on the side toward the
cliffs was a stone which formed a sort of natural seat. I sat down,
reflecting that it was probably while there that the mad poet, Justin
Geoffrey, had written his fantastic _People of the Monolith_. Mine host
thought that it was the Stone which had caused Geoffrey's insanity, but
the seeds of madness had been sown in the poet's brain long before he
ever came to Stregoicavar.

A glance at my watch showed that the hour of midnight was close at hand.
I leaned back, waiting whatever ghostly demonstration might appear. A
thin night wind started up among the branches of the firs, with an
uncanny suggestion of faint, unseen pipes whispering an eerie and evil
tune. The monotony of the sound and my steady gazing at the monolith
produced a sort of self-hypnosis upon me; I grew drowsy. I fought this
feeling, but sleep stole on me in spite of myself; the monolith seemed
to sway and dance, strangely distorted to my gaze, and then I slept.

I opened my eyes and sought to rise, but lay still, as if an icy hand
gripped me helpless. Cold terror stole over me. The glade was no longer
deserted. It was thronged by a silent crowd of strange people, and my
distended eyes took in strange barbaric details of costume which my
reason told me were archaic and forgotten even in this backward land.
Surely, I thought, these are villagers who have come here to hold some
fantastic conclave--but another glance told me that these people were
not the folk of Stregoicavar. They were a shorter, more squat race,
whose brows were lower, whose faces were broader and duller. Some had
Slavic and Magyar features, but those features were degraded as from a
mixture of some baser, alien strain I could not classify. Many wore the
hides of wild beasts, and their whole appearance, both men and women,
was one of sensual brutishness. They terrified and repelled me, but they
gave me no heed. They formed in a vast half-circle in front of the
monolith and began a sort of chant, flinging their arms in unison and
weaving their bodies rhythmically from the waist upward. All eyes were
fixed on the top of the Stone which they seemed to be invoking. But the
strangest of all was the dimness of their voices; not fifty yards from
me hundreds of men and women were unmistakably lifting their voices in a
wild chant, yet those voices came to me as a faint indistinguishable
murmur as if from across vast leagues of Space--or _time_.

Before the monolith stood a sort of brazier from which a vile, nauseous
yellow smoke billowed upward, curling curiously in a swaying spiral
around the black shaft, like a vast unstable snake.

On one side of this brazier lay two figures--a young girl, stark naked
and bound hand and foot, and an infant, apparently only a few months
old. On the other side of the brazier squatted a hideous old hag with a
queer sort of black drum on her lap; this drum she beat with slow light
blows of her open palms, but I could not hear the sound.

The rhythm of the swaying bodies grew faster and into the space between
the people and the monolith sprang a naked young woman, her eyes
blazing, her long black hair flying loose. Spinning dizzily on her toes,
she whirled across the open space and fell prostrate before the Stone,
where she lay motionless. The next instant a fantastic figure followed
her--a man from whose waist hung a goatskin, and whose features were
entirely hidden by a sort of mask made from a huge wolf's head, so that
he looked like a monstrous, nightmare being, horribly compounded of
elements both human and bestial. In his hand he held a bunch of long fir
switches bound together at the larger ends, and the moonlight glinted on
a chain of heavy gold looped about his neck. A smaller chain depending
from it suggested a pendant of some sort, but this was missing.

The people tossed their arms violently and seemed to redouble their
shouts as this grotesque creature loped across the open space with many
a fantastic leap and caper. Coming to the woman who lay before the
monolith, he began to lash her with the switches he bore, and she leaped
up and spun into the wild mazes of the most incredible dance I have ever
seen. And her tormentor danced with her, keeping the wild rhythm,
matching her every whirl and bound, while incessantly raining cruel
blows on her naked body. And at every blow he shouted a single word,
over and over, and all the people shouted it back. I could see the
working of their lips, and now the faint far-off murmur of their voices
merged and blended into one distant shout, repeated over and over with
slobbering ecstasy. But what the one word was, I could not make out.

In dizzy whirls spun the wild dancers, while the lookers-on, standing
still in their tracks, followed the rhythm of their dance with swaying
bodies and weaving arms. Madness grew in the eyes of the capering
votaress and was reflected in the eyes of the watchers. Wilder and more
extravagant grew the whirling frenzy of that mad dance--it became a
bestial and obscene thing, while the old hag howled and battered the
drum like a crazy woman, and the switches cracked out a devil's tune.

Blood trickled down the dancer's limbs but she seemed not to feel the
lashing save as a stimulus for further enormities of outrageous motion;
bounding into the midst of the yellow smoke which now spread out tenuous
tentacles to embrace both flying figures, she seemed to merge with that
foul fog and veil herself with it. Then emerging into plain view,
closely followed by the beast-thing that flogged her, she shot into an
indescribable, explosive burst of dynamic mad motion, and on the very
crest of that mad wave, she dropped suddenly to the sward, quivering and
panting as if completely overcome by her frenzied exertions. The lashing
continued with unabated violence and intensity and she began to wriggle
toward the monolith on her belly. The priest--or such I will call
him--followed, lashing her unprotected body with all the power of his
arm as she writhed along, leaving a heavy track of blood on the trampled
earth. She reached the monolith, and gasping and panting, flung both
arms about it and covered the cold stone with fierce hot kisses, as in
frenzied and unholy adoration.

The fantastic priest bounded high in the air, flinging away the
red-dabbled switches, and the worshippers, howling and foaming at the
mouths, turned on each other with tooth and nail, rending one another's
garments and flesh in a blind passion of bestiality. The priest swept up
the infant with a long arm, and shouting again that Name, whirled the
wailing babe high in the air and dashed its brains out against the
monolith, leaving a ghastly stain on the black surface. Cold with horror
I saw him rip the tiny body open with his bare brutish fingers and fling
handfuls of blood on the shaft, then toss the red and torn shape into
the brazier, extinguishing flame and smoke in a crimson rain, while the
maddened brutes behind him howled over and over the Name. Then suddenly
they all fell prostrate, writhing like snakes, while the priest flung
wide his gory hands as in triumph. I opened my mouth to scream my horror
and loathing, but only a dry rattle sounded; a huge monstrous toad-like
thing squatted on the top of the monolith!

I saw its bloated, repulsive and unstable outline against the moonlight
and set in what would have been the face of a natural creature, its
huge, blinking eyes which reflected all the lust, abysmal greed, obscene
cruelty and monstrous evil that has stalked the sons of men since their
ancestors moved blind and hairless in the treetops. In those grisly eyes
were mirrored all the unholy things and vile secrets that sleep in the
cities under the sea, and that skulk from the light of day in the
blackness of primordial caverns. And so that ghastly thing that the
unhallowed ritual of cruelty and sadism and blood had evoked from the
silence of the hills, leered and blinked down on its bestial
worshippers, who groveled in abhorrent abasement before it.

Now the beast-masked priest lifted the bound and weakly writhing girl in
his brutish hands and held her up toward that horror on the monolith.
And as that monstrosity sucked in its breath, lustfully and
slobberingly, something snapped in my brain and I fell into a merciful
faint.

I opened my eyes on a still white dawn. All the events of the night
rushed back on me and I sprang up, then stared about me in amazement.
The monolith brooded gaunt and silent above the sward which waved, green
and untrampled, in the morning breeze. A few quick strides took me
across the glade; here had the dancers leaped and bounded until the
ground should have been trampled bare, and here had the votaress
wriggled her painful way to the Stone, streaming blood on the earth. But
no drop of crimson showed on the uncrushed sward. I looked,
shudderingly, at the side of the monolith against which the bestial
priest had brained the stolen baby--but no dark stain nor grisly clot
showed there.

A dream! It had been a wild nightmare--or else--I shrugged my shoulders.
What vivid clarity for a dream!

I returned quietly to the village and entered the inn without being
seen. And there I sat meditating over the strange events of the night.
More and more was I prone to discard the dream-theory. That what I had
seen was illusion and without material substance, was evident. But I
believed that I had looked on the mirrored shadow of a deed perpetrated
in ghastly actuality in bygone days. But how was I to know? What proof
to show that my vision had been a gathering of foul specters rather than
a nightmare originating in my brain?

As if for answer a name flashed into my mind--Selim Bahadur! According
to legend this man, who had been a soldier as well as a scribe, had
commanded that part of Suleiman's army which had devastated
Stregoicavar; it seemed logical enough; and if so, he had gone straight
from the blotted-out countryside to the bloody field of Schomvaal, and
his doom. I sprang up with a sudden shout--that manuscript which was
taken from the Turk's body, and which Count Boris shuddered over--might
it not contain some narration of what the conquering Turks found in
Stregoicavar? What else could have shaken the iron nerves of the Polish
adventurer? And since the bones of the Count had never been recovered,
what more certain than that the lacquered case, with its mysterious
contents, still lay hidden beneath the ruins that covered Boris
Vladinoff? I began packing my bag with fierce haste.

Three days later found me ensconced in a little village a few miles from
the old battlefield, and when the moon rose I was working with savage
intensity on the great pile of crumbling stone that crowned the hill. It
was back-breaking toil--looking back now I can not see how I
accomplished it, though I labored without a pause from moonrise to dawn.
Just as the sun was coming up I tore aside the last tangle of stones and
looked on all that was mortal of Count Boris Vladinoff--only a few
pitiful fragments of crumbling bone--and among them, crushed out of all
original shape, lay a case whose lacquered surface had kept it from
complete decay through the centuries.

I seized it with frenzied eagerness, and piling back some of the stones
on the bones I hurried away; for I did not care to be discovered by the
suspicious peasants in an act of apparent desecration.

Back in my tavern chamber I opened the case and found the parchment
comparatively intact; and there was something else in the case--a small
squat object wrapped in silk. I was wild to plumb the secrets of those
yellowed pages, but weariness forbade me. Since leaving Stregoicavar I
had hardly slept at all, and the terrific exertions of the previous
night combined to overcome me. In spite of myself I was forced to
stretch myself on my bed, nor did I awake until sundown.

I snatched a hasty supper, and then in the light of a flickering candle,
I set myself to read the neat Turkish characters that covered the
parchment. It was difficult work, for I am not deeply versed in the
language and the archaic style of the narrative baffled me. But as I
toiled through it a word or a phrase here and there leaped at me and a
dimly growing horror shook me in its grip. I bent my energies fiercely
to the task, and as the tale grew clearer and took more tangible form my
blood chilled in my veins, my hair stood up and my tongue clove to my
mouth. All external things partook of the grisly madness of that
infernal manuscript until the night sounds of insects and creatures in
the woods took the form of ghastly murmurings and stealthy treadings of
ghoulish horrors and the sighing of the night wind changed to tittering
obscene gloating of evil over the souls of men.

At last when gray dawn was stealing through the latticed window, I laid
down the manuscript and took up and unwrapped the thing in the bit of
silk. Staring at it with haggard eyes I knew the truth of the matter was
clinched, even had it been possible to doubt the veracity of that
terrible manuscript.

And I replaced both obscene things in the case, nor did I rest nor sleep
nor eat until that case containing them had been weighted with stones
and flung into the deepest current of the Danube which, God grant,
carried them back into the Hell from which they came.

It was no dream I dreamed on Midsummer Midnight in the hills above
Stregoicavar. Well for Justin Geoffrey that he tarried there only in the
sunlight and went his way, for had he gazed upon that ghastly conclave,
his mad brain would have snapped before it did. How my own reason held,
I do not know.

No--it was no dream--I gazed upon a foul rout of votaries long dead,
come up from Hell to worship as of old; ghosts that bowed before a
ghost. For Hell has long claimed their hideous god. Long, long he dwelt
among the hills, a brain-shattering vestige of an outworn age, but no
longer his obscene talons clutch for the souls of living men, and his
kingdom is a dead kingdom, peopled only by the ghosts of those who
served him in his lifetime and theirs.

By what foul alchemy or godless sorcery the Gates of Hell are opened on
that one eerie night I do not know, but mine own eyes have seen. And I
know I looked on no living thing that night, for the manuscript written
in the careful hand of Selim Bahadur narrated at length what he and his
raiders found in the valley of Stregoicavar; and I read, set down in
detail, the blasphemous obscenities that torture wrung from the lips of
screaming worshippers; and I read, too, of the lost, grim black cavern
high in the hills where the horrified Turks hemmed a monstrous, bloated,
wallowing toad-like being and slew it with flame and ancient steel
blessed in old times by Muhammad, and with incantations that were old
when Arabia was young. And even staunch old Selim's hand shook as he
recorded the cataclysmic, earth-shaking death-howls of the monstrosity,
which died not alone; for half-score of his slayers perished with him,
in ways that Selim would not or could not describe.

And that squat idol carved of gold and wrapped in silk was an image of
_himself_, and Selim tore it from the golden chain that looped the neck
of the slain high priest of the mask.

Well that the Turks swept out that foul valley with torch and cleanly
steel! Such sights as those brooding mountains have looked on belong to
the darkness and abysses of lost eons. No--it is not fear of the
toad-thing that makes me shudder in the night. He is made fast in Hell
with his nauseous horde, freed only for an hour on the most weird night
of the year, as I have seen. And of his worshippers, none remains.

But it is the realization that such things once crouched beast-like
above the souls of men which brings cold sweat to my brow; and I fear to
peer again into the leaves of Von Junzt's abomination. For now I
understand his repeated phrase of _keys_!--aye! Keys to Outer
Doors--links with an abhorrent past and--who knows?--of abhorrent
spheres of the _present_. And I understand why the cliffs look like
battlements in the moonlight and why the tavern-keeper's
nightmare-haunted nephew saw in his dream, the Black Stone like a spire
on a cyclopean black castle. If men ever excavate among those mountains
they may find incredible things below those masking slopes. For the cave
wherein the Turks trapped the--_thing_--was not truly a cavern, and I
shudder to contemplate the gigantic gulf of eons which must stretch
between this age and the time when the earth shook herself and reared
up, like a wave, those blue mountains that, rising, enveloped
unthinkable things. May no man ever seek to uproot that ghastly spire
men call the Black Stone!

A Key! Aye, it is a Key, symbol of a forgotten horror. That horror has
faded into the limbo from which it crawled, loathsomely, in the black
dawn of the earth. But what of the other fiendish possibilities hinted
at by Von Junzt--what of the monstrous hand which strangled out his
life? Since reading what Selim Bahadur wrote, I can no longer doubt
anything in the Black Book. Man was not always master of the earth--_and
is he now?_

And the thought recurs to me--if such a monstrous entity as the Master
of the Monolith somehow survived its own unspeakably distant epoch so
long--_what nameless shapes may even now lurk in the dark places of the
world?_
","I.

After twenty-two years of nightmare and terror, saved only by a desperate conviction of the mythical source of certain impressions, I am unwilling to vouch for the truth of that which I think I found in Western Australia on the night of July 17–18, 1935. There is reason to hope that my experience was wholly or partly an hallucination—for which, indeed, abundant causes existed. And yet, its realism was so hideous that I sometimes find hope impossible. If the thing did happen, then man must be prepared to accept notions of the cosmos, and of his own place in the seething vortex of time, whose merest mention is paralysing. He must, too, be placed on guard against a specific lurking peril which, though it will never engulf the whole race, may impose monstrous and unguessable horrors upon certain venturesome members of it. It is for this latter reason that I urge, with all the force of my being, a final abandonment of all attempts at unearthing those fragments of unknown, primordial masonry which my expedition set out to investigate.
      Assuming that I was sane and awake, my experience on that night was such as has befallen no man before. It was, moreover, a frightful confirmation of all I had sought to dismiss as myth and dream. Mercifully there is no proof, for in my fright I lost the awesome object which would—if real and brought out of that noxious abyss—have formed irrefutable evidence. When I came upon the horror I was alone—and I have up to now told no one about it. I could not stop the others from digging in its direction, but chance and the shifting sand have so far saved them from finding it. Now I must formulate some definitive statement—not only for the sake of my own mental balance, but to warn such others as may read it seriously.
      These pages—much in whose earlier parts will be familiar to close readers of the general and scientific press—are written in the cabin of the ship that is bringing me home. I shall give them to my son, Prof. Wingate Peaslee of Miskatonic University—the only member of my family who stuck to me after my queer amnesia of long ago, and the man best informed on the inner facts of my case. Of all living persons, he is least likely to ridicule what I shall tell of that fateful night. I did not enlighten him orally before sailing, because I think he had better have the revelation in written form. Reading and re-reading at leisure will leave with him a more convincing picture than my confused tongue could hope to convey. He can do as he thinks best with this account—shewing it, with suitable comment, to any quarters where it will be likely to accomplish good. It is for the sake of such readers as are unfamiliar with the earlier phases of my case that I am prefacing the revelation itself with a fairly ample summary of its background.
      My name is Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee, and those who recall the newspaper tales of a generation back—or the letters and articles in psychological journals six or seven years ago—will know who and what I am. The press was filled with the details of my strange amnesia in 1908–13, and much was made of the traditions of horror, madness, and witchcraft which lurk behind the ancient Massachusetts town then and now forming my place of residence. Yet I would have it known that there is nothing whatever of the mad or sinister in my heredity and early life. This is a highly important fact in view of the shadow which fell so suddenly upon me from outside sources. It may be that centuries of dark brooding had given to crumbling, whisper-haunted Arkham a peculiar vulnerability as regards such shadows—though even this seems doubtful in the light of those other cases which I later came to study. But the chief point is that my own ancestry and background are altogether normal. What came, came from somewhere else—where, I even now hesitate to assert in plain words.
      I am the son of Jonathan and Hannah (Wingate) Peaslee, both of wholesome old Haverhill stock. I was born and reared in Haverhill—at the old homestead in Boardman Street near Golden Hill—and did not go to Arkham till I entered Miskatonic University at the age of eighteen. That was in 1889. After my graduation I studied economics at Harvard, and came back to Miskatonic as Instructor of Political Economy in 1895. For thirteen years more my life ran smoothly and happily. I married Alice Keezar of Haverhill in 1896, and my three children, Robert K., Wingate, and Hannah, were born in 1898, 1900, and 1903, respectively. In 1898 I became an associate professor, and in 1902 a full professor. At no time had I the least interest in either occultism or abnormal psychology.
      It was on Thursday, May 14, 1908, that the queer amnesia came. The thing was quite sudden, though later I realised that certain brief, glimmering visions of several hours previous—chaotic visions which disturbed me greatly because they were so unprecedented—must have formed premonitory symptoms. My head was aching, and I had a singular feeling—altogether new to me—that someone else was trying to get possession of my thoughts. 
      The collapse occurred about 10:20 a.m., while I was conducting a class in Political Economy VI—history and present tendencies of economics—for juniors and a few sophomores. I began to see strange shapes before my eyes, and to feel that I was in a grotesque room other than the classroom. My thoughts and speech wandered from my subject, and the students saw that something was gravely amiss. Then I slumped down, unconscious in my chair, in a stupor from which no one could arouse me. Nor did my rightful faculties again look out upon the daylight of our normal world for five years, four months, and thirteen days.
      It is, of course, from others that I have learned what followed. I shewed no sign of consciousness for sixteen and a half hours, though removed to my home at 27 Crane St. and given the best of medical attention. At 3 a.m. May 15 my eyes opened and I began to speak, but before long the doctors and my family were thoroughly frightened by the trend of my expression and language. It was clear that I had no remembrance of my identity or of my past, though for some reason I seemed anxious to conceal this lack of knowledge. My eyes gazed strangely at the persons around me, and the flexions of my facial muscles were altogether unfamiliar.
      Even my speech seemed awkward and foreign. I used my vocal organs clumsily and gropingly, and my diction had a curiously stilted quality, as if I had laboriously learned the English language from books. The pronunciation was barbarously alien, whilst the idiom seemed to include both scraps of curious archaism and expressions of a wholly incomprehensible cast. Of the latter one in particular was very potently—even terrifiedly—recalled by the youngest of the physicians twenty years afterward. For at that late period such a phrase began to have an actual currency—first in England and then in the United States—and though of much complexity and indisputable newness, it reproduced in every least particular the mystifying words of the strange Arkham patient of 1908.
      Physical strength returned at once, although I required an odd amount of re-education in the use of my hands, legs, and bodily apparatus in general. Because of this and other handicaps inherent in the mnemonic lapse, I was for some time kept under strict medical care. When I saw that my attempts to conceal the lapse had failed, I admitted it openly, and became eager for information of all sorts. Indeed, it seemed to the doctors that I had lost interest in my proper personality as soon as I found the case of amnesia accepted as a natural thing. They noticed that my chief efforts were to master certain points in history, science, art, language, and folklore—some of them tremendously abstruse, and some childishly simple—which remained, very oddly in many cases, outside my consciousness.
      At the same time they noticed that I had an inexplicable command of many almost unknown sorts of knowledge—a command which I seemed to wish to hide rather than display. I would inadvertently refer, with casual assurance, to specific events in dim ages outside the range of accepted history—passing off such references as a jest when I saw the surprise they created. And I had a way of speaking of the future which two or three times caused actual fright. These uncanny flashes soon ceased to appear, though some observers laid their vanishment more to a certain furtive caution on my part than to any waning of the strange knowledge behind them. Indeed, I seemed anomalously avid to absorb the speech, customs, and perspectives of the age around me; as if I were a studious traveller from a far, foreign land.
      As soon as permitted, I haunted the college library at all hours; and shortly began to arrange for those odd travels, and special courses at American and European universities, which evoked so much comment during the next few years. I did not at any time suffer from a lack of learned contacts, for my case had a mild celebrity among the psychologists of the period. I was lectured upon as a typical example of secondary personality—even though I seemed to puzzle the lecturers now and then with some bizarre symptom or some queer trace of carefully veiled mockery.
      Of real friendliness, however, I encountered little. Something in my aspect and speech seemed to excite vague fears and aversions in everyone I met, as if I were a being infinitely removed from all that is normal and healthful. This idea of a black, hidden horror connected with incalculable gulfs of some sort of distance was oddly widespread and persistent. My own family formed no exception. From the moment of my strange waking my wife had regarded me with extreme horror and loathing, vowing that I was some utter alien usurping the body of her husband. In 1910 she obtained a legal divorce, nor would she ever consent to see me even after my return to normalcy in 1913. These feelings were shared by my elder son and my small daughter, neither of whom I have ever seen since.
      Only my second son Wingate seemed able to conquer the terror and repulsion which my change aroused. He indeed felt that I was a stranger, but though only eight years old held fast to a faith that my proper self would return. When it did return he sought me out, and the courts gave me his custody. In succeeding years he helped me with the studies to which I was driven, and today at thirty-five he is a professor of psychology at Miskatonic. But I do not wonder at the horror I caused—for certainly, the mind, voice, and facial expression of the being that awaked on May 15, 1908 were not those of Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee.
      I will not attempt to tell much of my life from 1908 to 1913, since readers may glean all the outward essentials—as I largely had to do—from files of old newspapers and scientific journals. I was given charge of my funds, and spent them slowly and on the whole wisely, in travel and in study at various centres of learning. My travels, however, were singular in the extreme; involving long visits to remote and desolate places. In 1909 I spent a month in the Himalayas, and in 1911 aroused much attention through a camel trip into the unknown deserts of Arabia. What happened on those journeys I have never been able to learn. During the summer of 1912 I chartered a ship and sailed in the Arctic north of Spitzbergen, afterward shewing signs of disappointment. Later in that year I spent weeks alone beyond the limits of previous or subsequent exploration in the vast limestone cavern systems of western Virginia—black labyrinths so complex that no retracing of my steps could even be considered.
      My sojourns at the universities were marked by abnormally rapid assimilation, as if the secondary personality had an intelligence enormously superior to my own. I have found, also, that my rate of reading and solitary study was phenomenal. I could master every detail of a book merely by glancing over it as fast as I could turn the leaves; while my skill at interpreting complex figures in an instant was veritably awesome. At times there appeared almost ugly reports of my power to influence the thoughts and acts of others, though I seemed to have taken care to minimise displays of this faculty.
      Other ugly reports concerned my intimacy with leaders of occultist groups, and scholars suspected of connexion with nameless bands of abhorrent elder-world hierophants. These rumours, though never proved at the time, were doubtless stimulated by the known tenor of some of my reading—for the consultation of rare books at libraries cannot be effected secretly. There is tangible proof—in the form of marginal notes—that I went minutely through such things as the Comte d’Erlette’s Cultes des Goules, Ludvig Prinn’s De Vermis Mysteriis, the Unaussprechlichen Kulten of von Junzt, the surviving fragments of the puzzling Book of Eibon, and the dreaded Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred. Then, too, it is undeniable that a fresh and evil wave of underground cult activity set in about the time of my odd mutation.
      In the summer of 1913 I began to display signs of ennui and flagging interest, and to hint to various associates that a change might soon be expected in me. I spoke of returning memories of my earlier life—though most auditors judged me insincere, since all the recollections I gave were casual, and such as might have been learned from my old private papers. About the middle of August I returned to Arkham and reopened my long-closed house in Crane St. Here I installed a mechanism of the most curious aspect, constructed piecemeal by different makers of scientific apparatus in Europe and America, and guarded carefully from the sight of anyone intelligent enough to analyse it. Those who did see it—a workman, a servant, and the new housekeeper—say that it was a queer mixture of rods, wheels, and mirrors, though only about two feet tall, one foot wide, and one foot thick. The central mirror was circular and convex. All this is borne out by such makers of parts as can be located.
      On the evening of Friday, Sept. 26, I dismissed the housekeeper and the maid till noon of the next day. Lights burned in the house till late, and a lean, dark, curiously foreign-looking man called in an automobile. It was about 1 a.m. that the lights were last seen. At 2:15 a.m. a policeman observed the place in darkness, but with the stranger’s motor still at the curb. By four o’clock the motor was certainly gone. It was at six that a hesitant, foreign voice on the telephone asked Dr. Wilson to call at my house and bring me out of a peculiar faint. This call—a long-distance one—was later traced to a public booth in the North Station in Boston, but no sign of the lean foreigner was ever unearthed.
      When the doctor reached my house he found me unconscious in the sitting-room—in an easy-chair with a table drawn up before it. On the polished table-top were scratches shewing where some heavy object had rested. The queer machine was gone, nor was anything afterward heard of it. Undoubtedly the dark, lean foreigner had taken it away. In the library grate were abundant ashes evidently left from the burning of every remaining scrap of paper on which I had written since the advent of the amnesia. Dr. Wilson found my breathing very peculiar, but after an hypodermic injection it became more regular.
      At 11:15 a.m., Sept. 27, I stirred vigorously, and my hitherto mask-like face began to shew signs of expression. Dr. Wilson remarked that the expression was not that of my secondary personality, but seemed much like that of my normal self. About 11:30 I muttered some very curious syllables—syllables which seemed unrelated to any human speech. I appeared, too, to struggle against something. Then, just after noon—the housekeeper and the maid having meanwhile returned—I began to mutter in English.
      “. . . of the orthodox economists of that period, Jevons typifies the prevailing trend toward scientific correlation. His attempt to link the commercial cycle of prosperity and depression with the physical cycle of the solar spots forms perhaps the apex of . . .”
      Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee had come back—a spirit in whose time-scale it was still that Thursday morning in 1908, with the economics class gazing up at the battered desk on the platform.

II.

My reabsorption into normal life was a painful and difficult process. The loss of over five years creates more complications than can be imagined, and in my case there were countless matters to be adjusted. What I heard of my actions since 1908 astonished and disturbed me, but I tried to view the matter as philosophically as I could. At last regaining custody of my second son Wingate, I settled down with him in the Crane Street house and endeavoured to resume teaching—my old professorship having been kindly offered me by the college.
      I began work with the February, 1914, term, and kept at it just a year. By that time I realised how badly my experience had shaken me. Though perfectly sane—I hoped—and with no flaw in my original personality, I had not the nervous energy of the old days. Vague dreams and queer ideas continually haunted me, and when the outbreak of the world war turned my mind to history I found myself thinking of periods and events in the oddest possible fashion. My conception of time—my ability to distinguish between consecutiveness and simultaneousness—seemed subtly disordered; so that I formed chimerical notions about living in one age and casting one’s mind all over eternity for knowledge of past and future ages.
      The war gave me strange impressions of remembering some of its far-off consequences—as if I knew how it was coming out and could look back upon it in the light of future information. All such quasi-memories were attended with much pain, and with a feeling that some artificial psychological barrier was set against them. When I diffidently hinted to others about my impressions I met with varied responses. Some persons looked uncomfortably at me, but men in the mathematics department spoke of new developments in those theories of relativity—then discussed only in learned circles—which were later to become so famous. Dr. Albert Einstein, they said, was rapidly reducing time to the status of a mere dimension.
      But the dreams and disturbed feelings gained on me, so that I had to drop my regular work in 1915. Certain of the impressions were taking an annoying shape—giving me the persistent notion that my amnesia had formed some unholy sort of exchange; that the secondary personality had indeed been an intruding force from unknown regions, and that my own personality had suffered displacement. Thus I was driven to vague and frightful speculations concerning the whereabouts of my true self during the years that another had held my body. The curious knowledge and strange conduct of my body’s late tenant troubled me more and more as I learned further details from persons, papers, and magazines. Queernesses that had baffled others seemed to harmonise terribly with some background of black knowledge which festered in the chasms of my subconscious. I began to search feverishly for every scrap of information bearing on the studies and travels of that other one during the dark years.
      Not all of my troubles were as semi-abstract as this. There were the dreams—and these seemed to grow in vividness and concreteness. Knowing how most would regard them, I seldom mentioned them to anyone but my son or certain trusted psychologists, but eventually I commenced a scientific study of other cases in order to see how typical or non-typical such visions might be among amnesia victims. My results, aided by psychologists, historians, anthropologists, and mental specialists of wide experience, and by a study that included all records of split personalities from the days of daemoniac-possession legends to the medically realistic present, at first bothered me more than they consoled me.
      I soon found that my dreams had indeed no counterpart in the overwhelming bulk of true amnesia cases. There remained, however, a tiny residue of accounts which for years baffled and shocked me with their parallelism to my own experience. Some of them were bits of ancient folklore; others were case-histories in the annals of medicine; one or two were anecdotes obscurely buried in standard histories. It thus appeared that, while my special kind of affliction was prodigiously rare, instances of it had occurred at long intervals ever since the beginning of man’s annals. Some centuries might contain one, two, or three cases; others none—or at least none whose record survived.
      The essence was always the same—a person of keen thoughtfulness seized with a strange secondary life and leading for a greater or lesser period an utterly alien existence typified at first by vocal and bodily awkwardness, and later by a wholesale acquisition of scientific, historic, artistic, and anthropological knowledge; an acquisition carried on with feverish zest and with a wholly abnormal absorptive power. Then a sudden return of the rightful consciousness, intermittently plagued ever after with vague unplaceable dreams suggesting fragments of some hideous memory elaborately blotted out. And the close resemblance of those nightmares to my own—even in some of the smallest particulars—left no doubt in my mind of their significantly typical nature. One or two of the cases had an added ring of faint, blasphemous familiarity, as if I had heard of them before through some cosmic channel too morbid and frightful to contemplate. In three instances there was specific mention of such an unknown machine as had been in my house before the second change.
      Another thing that cloudily worried me during my investigation was the somewhat greater frequency of cases where a brief, elusive glimpse of the typical nightmares was afforded to persons not visited with well-defined amnesia. These persons were largely of mediocre mind or less—some so primitive that they could scarcely be thought of as vehicles for abnormal scholarship and preternatural mental acquisitions. For a second they would be fired with alien force—then a backward lapse and a thin, swift-fading memory of un-human horrors.
      There had been at least three such cases during the past half century—one only fifteen years before. Had something been groping blindly through time from some unsuspected abyss in Nature? Were these faint cases monstrous, sinister experiments of a kind and authorship utterly beyond sane belief? Such were a few of the formless speculations of my weaker hours—fancies abetted by myths which my studies uncovered. For I could not doubt but that certain persistent legends of immemorial antiquity, apparently unknown to the victims and physicians connected with recent amnesia cases, formed a striking and awesome elaboration of memory lapses such as mine.
      Of the nature of the dreams and impressions which were growing so clamorous I still almost fear to speak. They seemed to savour of madness, and at times I believed I was indeed going mad. Was there a special type of delusion afflicting those who had suffered lapses of memory? Conceivably, the efforts of the subconscious mind to fill up a perplexing blank with pseudo-memories might give rise to strange imaginative vagaries. This, indeed (though an alternative folklore theory finally seemed to me more plausible), was the belief of many of the alienists who helped me in my search for parallel cases, and who shared my puzzlement at the exact resemblances sometimes discovered. They did not call the condition true insanity, but classed it rather among neurotic disorders. My course in trying to track it down and analyse it, instead of vainly seeking to dismiss or forget it, they heartily endorsed as correct according to the best psychological principles. I especially valued the advice of such physicians as had studied me during my possession by the other personality.
      My first disturbances were not visual at all, but concerned the more abstract matters which I have mentioned. There was, too, a feeling of profound and inexplicable horror concerning myself. I developed a queer fear of seeing my own form, as if my eyes would find it something utterly alien and inconceivably abhorrent. When I did glance down and behold the familiar human shape in quiet grey or blue clothing I always felt a curious relief, though in order to gain this relief I had to conquer an infinite dread. I shunned mirrors as much as possible, and was always shaved at the barber’s.
      It was a long time before I correlated any of these disappointed feelings with the fleeting visual impressions which began to develop. The first such correlation had to do with the odd sensation of an external, artificial restraint on my memory. I felt that the snatches of sight I experienced had a profound and terrible meaning, and a frightful connexion with myself, but that some purposeful influence held me from grasping that meaning and that connexion. Then came that queerness about the element of time, and with it desperate efforts to place the fragmentary dream-glimpses in the chronological and spatial pattern.
      The glimpses themselves were at first merely strange rather than horrible. I would seem to be in an enormous vaulted chamber whose lofty stone groinings were well-nigh lost in the shadows overhead. In whatever time or place the scene might be, the principle of the arch was known as fully and used as extensively as by the Romans. There were colossal round windows and high arched doors, and pedestals or tables each as tall as the height of an ordinary room. Vast shelves of dark wood lined the walls, holding what seemed to be volumes of immense size with strange hieroglyphs on their backs. The exposed stonework held curious carvings, always in curvilinear mathematical designs, and there were chiselled inscriptions in the same characters that the huge books bore. The dark granite masonry was of a monstrous megalithic type, with lines of convex-topped blocks fitting the concave-bottomed courses which rested upon them. There were no chairs, but the tops of the vast pedestals were littered with books, papers, and what seemed to be writing materials—oddly figured jars of a purplish metal, and rods with stained tips. Tall as the pedestals were, I seemed at times able to view them from above. On some of them were great globes of luminous crystal serving as lamps, and inexplicable machines formed of vitreous tubes and metal rods. The windows were glazed, and latticed with stout-looking bars. Though I dared not approach and peer out them, I could see from where I was the waving tops of singular fern-like growths. The floor was of massive octagonal flagstones, while rugs and hangings were entirely lacking.
      Later I had visions of sweeping through Cyclopean corridors of stone, and up and down gigantic inclined planes of the same monstrous masonry. There were no stairs anywhere, nor was any passageway less than thirty feet wide. Some of the structures through which I floated must have towered into the sky for thousands of feet. There were multiple levels of black vaults below, and never-opened trap-doors, sealed down with metal bands and holding dim suggestions of some special peril. I seemed to be a prisoner, and horror hung broodingly over everything I saw. I felt that the mocking curvilinear hieroglyphs on the walls would blast my soul with their message were I not guarded by a merciful ignorance.
      Still later my dreams included vistas from the great round windows, and from the titanic flat roof, with its curious gardens, wide barren area, and high, scalloped parapet of stone, to which the topmost of the inclined planes led. There were almost endless leagues of giant buildings, each in its garden, and ranged along paved roads fully two hundred feet wide. They differed greatly in aspect, but few were less than five hundred feet square or a thousand feet high. Many seemed so limitless that they must have had a frontage of several thousand feet, while some shot up to mountainous altitudes in the grey, steamy heavens. They seemed to be mainly of stone or concrete, and most of them embodied the oddly curvilinear type of masonry noticeable in the building that held me. Roofs were flat and garden-covered, and tended to have scalloped parapets. Sometimes there were terraces and higher levels, and wide cleared spaces amidst the gardens. The great roads held hints of motion, but in the earlier visions I could not resolve this impression into details.
      In certain places I beheld enormous dark cylindrical towers which climbed far above any of the other structures. These appeared to be of a totally unique nature, and shewed signs of prodigious age and dilapidation. They were built of a bizarre type of square-cut basalt masonry, and tapered slightly toward their rounded tops. Nowhere in any of them could the least traces of windows or other apertures save huge doors be found. I noticed also some lower buildings—all crumbling with the weathering of aeons—which resembled these dark cylindrical towers in basic architecture. Around all these aberrant piles of square-cut masonry there hovered an inexplicable aura of menace and concentrated fear, like that bred by the sealed trap-doors.
      The omnipresent gardens were almost terrifying in their strangeness, with bizarre and unfamiliar forms of vegetation nodding over broad paths lined with curiously carven monoliths. Abnormally vast fern-like growths predominated; some green, and some of a ghastly, fungoid pallor. Among them rose great spectral things resembling calamites, whose bamboo-like trunks towered to fabulous heights. Then there were tufted forms like fabulous cycads, and grotesque dark-green shrubs and trees of coniferous aspect. Flowers were small, colourless, and unrecognisable, blooming in geometrical beds and at large among the greenery. In a few of the terrace and roof-top gardens were larger and more vivid blossoms of almost offensive contours and seeming to suggest artificial breeding. Fungi of inconceivable size, outlines, and colours speckled the scene in patterns bespeaking some unknown but well-established horticultural tradition. In the larger gardens on the ground there seemed to be some attempt to preserve the irregularities of Nature, but on the roofs there was more selectiveness, and more evidences of the topiary art.
      The skies were almost always moist and cloudy, and sometimes I would seem to witness tremendous rains. Once in a while, though, there would be glimpses of the sun—which looked abnormally large—and of the moon, whose markings held a touch of difference from the normal that I could never quite fathom. When—very rarely—the night sky was clear to any extent, I beheld constellations which were nearly beyond recognition. Known outlines were sometimes approximated, but seldom duplicated; and from the position of the few groups I could recognise, I felt I must be in the earth’s southern hemisphere, near the Tropic of Capricorn. The far horizon was always steamy and indistinct, but I could see that great jungles of unknown tree-ferns, calamites, lepidodendra, and sigillaria lay outside the city, their fantastic frondage waving mockingly in the shifting vapours. Now and then there would be suggestions of motion in the sky, but these my early visions never resolved.
      By the autumn of 1914 I began to have infrequent dreams of strange floatings over the city and through the regions around it. I saw interminable roads through forests of fearsome growths with mottled, fluted, and banded trunks, and past other cities as strange as the one which persistently haunted me. I saw monstrous constructions of black or iridescent stone in glades and clearings where perpetual twilight reigned, and traversed long causeways over swamps so dark that I could tell but little of their moist, towering vegetation. Once I saw an area of countless miles strown with age-blasted basaltic ruins whose architecture had been like that of the few windowless, round-topped towers in the haunting city. And once I saw the sea—a boundless steamy expanse beyond the colossal stone piers of an enormous town of domes and arches. Great shapeless suggestions of shadow moved over it, and here and there its surface was vexed with anomalous spoutings.

III.

As I have said, it was not immediately that these wild visions began to hold their terrifying quality. Certainly, many persons have dreamed intrinsically stranger things—things compounded of unrelated scraps of daily life, pictures, and reading, and arranged in fantastically novel forms by the unchecked caprices of sleep. For some time I accepted the visions as natural, even though I had never before been an extravagant dreamer. Many of the vague anomalies, I argued, must have come from trivial sources too numerous to track down; while others seemed to reflect a common text-book knowledge of the plants and other conditions of the primitive world of a hundred and fifty million years ago—the world of the Permian or Triassic age. In the course of some months, however, the element of terror did figure with accumulating force. This was when the dreams began so unfailingly to have the aspect of memories, and when my mind began to link them with my growing abstract disturbances—the feeling of mnemonic restraint, the curious impressions regarding time, the sense of a loathsome exchange with my secondary personality of 1908–13, and, considerably later, the inexplicable loathing of my own person.
      As certain definite details began to enter the dreams, their horror increased a thousandfold—until by October, 1915, I felt I must do something. It was then that I began an intensive study of other cases of amnesia and visions, feeling that I might thereby objectivise my trouble and shake clear of its emotional grip. However, as before mentioned, the result was at first almost exactly opposite. It disturbed me vastly to find that my dreams had been so closely duplicated; especially since some of the accounts were too early to admit of any geological knowledge—and therefore of any idea of primitive landscapes—on the subjects’ part. What is more, many of these accounts supplied very horrible details and explanations in connexion with the visions of great buildings and jungle gardens—and other things. The actual sights and vague impressions were bad enough, but what was hinted or asserted by some of the other dreamers savoured of madness and blasphemy. Worst of all, my own pseudo-memory was aroused to wilder dreams and hints of coming revelations. And yet most doctors deemed my course, on the whole, an advisable one.
      I studied psychology systematically, and under the prevailing stimulus my son Wingate did the same—his studies leading eventually to his present professorship. In 1917 and 1918 I took special courses at Miskatonic. Meanwhile my examination of medical, historical, and anthropological records became indefatigable; involving travels to distant libraries, and finally including even a reading of the hideous books of forbidden elder lore in which my secondary personality had been so disturbingly interested. Some of the latter were the actual copies I had consulted in my altered state, and I was greatly disturbed by certain marginal notations and ostensible corrections of the hideous text in a script and idiom which somehow seemed oddly un-human.
      These markings were mostly in the respective languages of the various books, all of which the writer seemed to know with equal though obviously academic facility. One note appended to von Junzt’s Unaussprechlichen Kulten, however, was alarmingly otherwise. It consisted of certain curvilinear hieroglyphs in the same ink as that of the German corrections, but following no recognised human pattern. And these hieroglyphs were closely and unmistakably akin to the characters constantly met with in my dreams—characters whose meaning I would sometimes momentarily fancy I knew or was just on the brink of recalling. To complete my black confusion, my librarians assured me that, in view of previous examinations and records of consultation of the volumes in question, all of these notations must have been made by myself in my secondary state. This despite the fact that I was and still am ignorant of three of the languages involved.
      Piecing together the scattered records, ancient and modern, anthropological and medical, I found a fairly consistent mixture of myth and hallucination whose scope and wildness left me utterly dazed. Only one thing consoled me—the fact that the myths were of such early existence. What lost knowledge could have brought pictures of the Palaeozoic or Mesozoic landscape into these primitive fables, I could not even guess, but the pictures had been there. Thus, a basis existed for the formation of a fixed type of delusion. Cases of amnesia no doubt created the general myth-pattern—but afterward the fanciful accretions of the myths must have reacted on amnesia sufferers and coloured their pseudo-memories. I myself had read and heard all the early tales during my memory lapse—my quest had amply proved that. Was it not natural, then, for my subsequent dreams and emotional impressions to become coloured and moulded by what my memory subtly held over from my secondary state? A few of the myths had significant connexions with other cloudy legends of the pre-human world, especially those Hindoo tales involving stupefying gulfs of time and forming part of the lore of modern theosophists.
      Primal myth and modern delusion joined in their assumption that mankind is only one—perhaps the least—of the highly evolved and dominant races of this planet’s long and largely unknown career. Things of inconceivable shape, they implied, had reared towers to the sky and delved into every secret of Nature before the first amphibian forbear of man had crawled out of the hot sea three hundred million years ago. Some had come down from the stars; a few were as old as the cosmos itself; others had arisen swiftly from terrene germs as far behind the first germs of our life-cycle as those germs are behind ourselves. Spans of thousands of millions of years, and linkages with other galaxies and universes, were freely spoken of. Indeed, there was no such thing as time in its humanly accepted sense.
      But most of the tales and impressions concerned a relatively late race, of a queer and intricate shape resembling no life-form known to science, which had lived till only fifty million years before the advent of man. This, they indicated, was the greatest race of all; because it alone had conquered the secret of time. It had learned all things that ever were known or ever would be known on the earth, through the power of its keener minds to project themselves into the past and future, even through gulfs of millions of years, and study the lore of every age. From the accomplishments of this race arose all legends of prophets, including those in human mythology.
      In its vast libraries were volumes of texts and pictures holding the whole of earth’s annals—histories and descriptions of every species that had ever been or that ever would be, with full records of their arts, their achievements, their languages, and their psychologies. With this aeon-embracing knowledge, the Great Race chose from every era and life-form such thoughts, arts, and processes as might suit its own nature and situation. Knowledge of the past, secured through a kind of mind-casting outside the recognised senses, was harder to glean than knowledge of the future.
      In the latter case the course was easier and more material. With suitable mechanical aid a mind would project itself forward in time, feeling its dim, extra-sensory way till it approached the desired period. Then, after preliminary trials, it would seize on the best discoverable representative of the highest of that period’s life-forms; entering the organism’s brain and setting up therein its own vibrations while the displaced mind would strike back to the period of the displacer, remaining in the latter’s body till a reverse process was set up. The projected mind, in the body of the organism of the future, would then pose as a member of the race whose outward form it wore; learning as quickly as possible all that could be learned of the chosen age and its massed information and techniques.
      Meanwhile the displaced mind, thrown back to the displacer’s age and body, would be carefully guarded. It would be kept from harming the body it occupied, and would be drained of all its knowledge by trained questioners. Often it could be questioned in its own language, when previous quests into the future had brought back records of that language. If the mind came from a body whose language the Great Race could not physically reproduce, clever machines would be made, on which the alien speech could be played as on a musical instrument. The Great Race’s members were immense rugose cones ten feet high, and with head and other organs attached to foot-thick, distensible limbs spreading from the apexes. They spoke by the clicking or scraping of huge paws or claws attached to the end of two of their four limbs, and walked by the expansion and contraction of a viscous layer attached to their vast ten-foot bases.
      When the captive mind’s amazement and resentment had worn off, and when (assuming that it came from a body vastly different from the Great Race’s) it had lost its horror at its unfamiliar temporary form, it was permitted to study its new environment and experience a wonder and wisdom approximating that of its displacer. With suitable precautions, and in exchange for suitable services, it was allowed to rove all over the habitable world in titan airships or on the huge boat-like atomic-engined vehicles which traversed the great roads, and to delve freely into the libraries containing the records of the planet’s past and future. This reconciled many captive minds to their lot; since none were other than keen, and to such minds the unveiling of hidden mysteries of earth—closed chapters of inconceivable pasts and dizzying vortices of future time which include the years ahead of their own natural ages—forms always, despite the abysmal horrors often unveiled, the supreme experience of life.
      Now and then certain captives were permitted to meet other captive minds seized from the future—to exchange thoughts with consciousnesses living a hundred or a thousand or a million years before or after their own ages. And all were urged to write copiously in their own languages of themselves and their respective periods; such documents to be filed in the great central archives.
      It may be added that there was one sad special type of captive whose privileges were far greater than those of the majority. These were the dying permanent exiles, whose bodies in the future had been seized by keen-minded members of the Great Race who, faced with death, sought to escape mental extinction. Such melancholy exiles were not as common as might be expected, since the longevity of the Great Race lessened its love of life—especially among those superior minds capable of projection. From cases of the permanent projection of elder minds arose many of those lasting changes of personality noticed in later history—including mankind’s.
      As for the ordinary cases of exploration—when the displacing mind had learned what it wished in the future, it would build an apparatus like that which had started its flight and reverse the process of projection. Once more it would be in its own body in its own age, while the lately captive mind would return to that body of the future to which it properly belonged. Only when one or the other of the bodies had died during the exchange was this restoration impossible. In such cases, of course, the exploring mind had—like those of the death-escapers—to live out an alien-bodied life in the future; or else the captive mind—like the dying permanent exiles—had to end its days in the form and past age of the Great Race.
      This fate was least horrible when the captive mind was also of the Great Race—a not infrequent occurrence, since in all its periods that race was intensely concerned with its own future. The number of dying permanent exiles of the Great Race was very slight—largely because of the tremendous penalties attached to displacements of future Great Race minds by the moribund. Through projection, arrangements were made to inflict these penalties on the offending minds in their new future bodies—and sometimes forced re-exchanges were effected. Complex cases of the displacement of exploring or already captive minds by minds in various regions of the past had been known and carefully rectified. In every age since the discovery of mind-projection, a minute but well-recognised element of the population consisted of Great Race minds from past ages, sojourning for a longer or shorter while.
      When a captive mind of alien origin was returned to its own body in the future, it was purged by an intricate mechanical hypnosis of all it had learned in the Great Race’s age—this because of certain troublesome consequences inherent in the general carrying forward of knowledge in large quantities. The few existing instances of clear transmission had caused, and would cause at known future times, great disasters. And it was largely in consequence of two cases of the kind (said the old myths) that mankind had learned what it had concerning the Great Race. Of all things surviving physically and directly from that aeon-distant world, there remained only certain ruins of great stones in far places and under the sea, and parts of the text of the frightful Pnakotic Manuscripts.
      Thus the returning mind reached its own age with only the faintest and most fragmentary visions of what it had undergone since its seizure. All memories that could be eradicated were eradicated, so that in most cases only a dream-shadowed blank stretched back to the time of the first exchange. Some minds recalled more than others, and the chance joining of memories had at rare times brought hints of the forbidden past to future ages. There probably never was a time when groups or cults did not secretly cherish certain of these hints. In the Necronomicon the presence of such a cult among human beings was suggested—a cult that sometimes gave aid to minds voyaging down the aeons from the days of the Great Race.
      And meanwhile the Great Race itself waxed well-nigh omniscient, and turned to the task of setting up exchanges with the minds of other planets, and of exploring their pasts and futures. It sought likewise to fathom the past years and origin of that black, aeon-dead orb in far space whence its own mental heritage had come—for the mind of the Great Race was older than its bodily form. The beings of a dying elder world, wise with the ultimate secrets, had looked ahead for a new world and species wherein they might have long life; and had sent their minds en masse into that future race best adapted to house them—the cone-shaped things that peopled our earth a billion years ago. Thus the Great Race came to be, while the myriad minds sent backward were left to die in the horror of strange shapes. Later the race would again face death, yet would live through another forward migration of its best minds into the bodies of others who had a longer physical span ahead of them.
      Such was the background of intertwined legend and hallucination. When, around 1920, I had my researches in coherent shape, I felt a slight lessening of the tension which their earlier stages had increased. After all, and in spite of the fancies prompted by blind emotions, were not most of my phenomena readily explainable? Any chance might have turned my mind to dark studies during the amnesia—and then I read the forbidden legends and met the members of ancient and ill-regarded cults. That, plainly, supplied the material for the dreams and disturbed feelings which came after the return of memory. As for the marginal notes in dream-hieroglyphs and languages unknown to me, but laid at my door by librarians—I might easily have picked up a smattering of the tongues during my secondary state, while the hieroglyphs were doubtless coined by my fancy from descriptions in old legends, and afterward woven into my dreams. I tried to verify certain points through conversation with known cult-leaders, but never succeeded in establishing the right connexions.
      At times the parallelism of so many cases in so many distant ages continued to worry me as it had at first, but on the other hand I reflected that the excitant folklore was undoubtedly more universal in the past than in the present. Probably all the other victims whose cases were like mine had had a long and familiar knowledge of the tales I had learned only when in my secondary state. When these victims had lost their memory, they had associated themselves with the creatures of their household myths—the fabulous invaders supposed to displace men’s minds—and had thus embarked upon quests for knowledge which they thought they could take back to a fancied, non-human past. Then when their memory returned, they reversed the associative process and thought of themselves as the former captive minds instead of as the displacers. Hence the dreams and pseudo-memories following the conventional myth-pattern.
      Despite the seeming cumbrousness of these explanations, they came finally to supersede all others in my mind—largely because of the greater weakness of any rival theory. And a substantial number of eminent psychologists and anthropologists gradually agreed with me. The more I reflected, the more convincing did my reasoning seem; till in the end I had a really effective bulwark against the visions and impressions which still assailed me. Suppose I did see strange things at night? These were only what I had heard and read of. Suppose I did have odd loathings and perspectives and pseudo-memories? These, too, were only echoes of myths absorbed in my secondary state. Nothing that I might dream, nothing that I might feel, could be of any actual significance.
      Fortified by this philosophy, I greatly improved in nervous equilibrium, even though the visions (rather than the abstract impressions) steadily became more frequent and more disturbingly detailed. In 1922 I felt able to undertake regular work again, and put my newly gained knowledge to practical use by accepting an instructorship in psychology at the university. My old chair of political economy had long been adequately filled—besides which, methods of teaching economics had changed greatly since my heyday. My son was at this time just entering on the post-graduate studies leading to his present professorship, and we worked together a great deal.

IV.

I continued, however, to keep a careful record of the outré dreams which crowded upon me so thickly and vividly. Such a record, I argued, was of genuine value as a psychological document. The glimpses still seemed damnably like memories, though I fought off this impression with a goodly measure of success. In writing, I treated the phantasmata as things seen; but at all other times I brushed them aside like any gossamer illusions of the night. I had never mentioned such matters in common conversation; though reports of them, filtering out as such things will, had aroused sundry rumours regarding my mental health. It is amusing to reflect that these rumours were confined wholly to laymen, without a single champion among physicians or psychologists.
      Of my visions after 1914 I will here mention only a few, since fuller accounts and records are at the disposal of the serious student. It is evident that with time the curious inhibitions somewhat waned, for the scope of my visions vastly increased. They have never, though, become other than disjointed fragments seemingly without clear motivation. Within the dreams I seemed gradually to acquire a greater and greater freedom of wandering. I floated through many strange buildings of stone, going from one to the other along mammoth underground passages which seemed to form the common avenues of transit. Sometimes I encountered those gigantic sealed trap-doors in the lowest level, around which such an aura of fear and forbiddenness clung. I saw tremendous tessellated pools, and rooms of curious and inexplicable utensils of myriad sorts. Then there were colossal caverns of intricate machinery whose outlines and purpose were wholly strange to me, and whose sound manifested itself only after many years of dreaming. I may here remark that sight and sound are the only senses I have ever exercised in the visionary world.
      The real horror began in May, 1915, when I first saw the living things. This was before my studies had taught me what, in view of the myths and case histories, to expect. As mental barriers wore down, I beheld great masses of thin vapour in various parts of the building and in the streets below. These steadily grew more solid and distinct, till at last I could trace their monstrous outlines with uncomfortable ease. They seemed to be enormous iridescent cones, about ten feet high and ten feet wide at the base, and made up of some ridgy, scaly, semi-elastic matter. From their apexes projected four flexible, cylindrical members, each a foot thick, and of a ridgy substance like that of the cones themselves. These members were sometimes contracted almost to nothing, and sometimes extended to any distance up to about ten feet. Terminating two of them were enormous claws or nippers. At the end of a third were four red, trumpet-like appendages. The fourth terminated in an irregular yellowish globe some two feet in diameter and having three great dark eyes ranged along its central circumference. Surmounting this head were four slender grey stalks bearing flower-like appendages, whilst from its nether side dangled eight greenish antennae or tentacles. The great base of the central cone was fringed with a rubbery, grey substance which moved the whole entity through expansion and contraction.
      Their actions, though harmless, horrified me even more than their appearance—for it is not wholesome to watch monstrous objects doing what one has known only human beings to do. These objects moved intelligently around the great rooms, getting books from the shelves and taking them to the great tables, or vice versa, and sometimes writing diligently with a peculiar rod gripped in the greenish head-tentacles. The huge nippers were used in carrying books and in conversation—speech consisting of a kind of clicking and scraping. The objects had no clothing, but wore satchels or knapsacks suspended from the top of the conical trunk. They commonly carried their head and its supporting member at the level of the cone top, although it was frequently raised or lowered. The other three great members tended to rest downward on the sides of the cone, contracted to about five feet each, when not in use. From their rate of reading, writing, and operating their machines (those on the tables seemed somehow connected with thought) I concluded that their intelligence was enormously greater than man’s.
      Afterward I saw them everywhere; swarming in all the great chambers and corridors, tending monstrous machines in vaulted crypts, and racing along the vast roads in gigantic boat-shaped cars. I ceased to be afraid of them, for they seemed to form supremely natural parts of their environment. Individual differences amongst them began to be manifest, and a few appeared to be under some kind of restraint. These latter, though shewing no physical variation, had a diversity of gestures and habits which marked them off not only from the majority, but very largely from one another. They wrote a great deal in what seemed to my cloudy vision a vast variety of characters—never the typical curvilinear hieroglyphs of the majority. A few, I fancied, used our own familiar alphabet. Most of them worked much more slowly than the general mass of the entities.
      All this time my own part in the dreams seemed to be that of a disembodied consciousness with a range of vision wider than the normal; floating freely about, yet confined to the ordinary avenues and speeds of travel. Not until August, 1915, did any suggestions of bodily existence begin to harass me. I say harass, because the first phase was a purely abstract though infinitely terrible association of my previously noted body-loathing with the scenes of my visions. For a while my chief concern during dreams was to avoid looking down at myself, and I recall how grateful I was for the total absence of large mirrors in the strange rooms. I was mightily troubled by the fact that I always saw the great tables—whose height could not be under ten feet—from a level not below that of their surfaces.
      And then the morbid temptation to look down at myself became greater and greater, till one night I could not resist it. At first my downward glance revealed nothing whatever. A moment later I perceived that this was because my head lay at the end of a flexible neck of enormous length. Retracting this neck and gazing down very sharply, I saw the scaly, rugose, iridescent bulk of a vast cone ten feet tall and ten feet wide at the base. That was when I waked half of Arkham with my screaming as I plunged madly up from the abyss of sleep.
      Only after weeks of hideous repetition did I grow half-reconciled to these visions of myself in monstrous form. In the dreams I now moved bodily among the other unknown entities, reading terrible books from the endless shelves and writing for hours at the great tables with a stylus managed by the green tentacles that hung down from my head. Snatches of what I read and wrote would linger in my memory. There were horrible annals of other worlds and other universes, and of stirrings of formless life outside of all universes. There were records of strange orders of beings which had peopled the world in forgotten pasts, and frightful chronicles of grotesque-bodied intelligences which would people it millions of years after the death of the last human being. And I learned of chapters in human history whose existence no scholar of today has ever suspected. Most of these writings were in the language of the hieroglyphs; which I studied in a queer way with the aid of droning machines, and which was evidently an agglutinative speech with root systems utterly unlike any found in human languages. Other volumes were in other unknown tongues learned in the same queer way. A very few were in languages I knew. Extremely clever pictures, both inserted in the records and forming separate collections, aided me immensely. And all the time I seemed to be setting down a history of my own age in English. On waking, I could recall only minute and meaningless scraps of the unknown tongues which my dream-self had mastered, though whole phrases of the history stayed with me.
      I learned—even before my waking self had studied the parallel cases or the old myths from which the dreams doubtless sprang—that the entities around me were of the world’s greatest race, which had conquered time and had sent exploring minds into every age. I knew, too, that I had been snatched from my age while another used my body in that age, and that a few of the other strange forms housed similarly captured minds. I seemed to talk, in some odd language of claw-clickings, with exiled intellects from every corner of the solar system.
      There was a mind from the planet we know as Venus, which would live incalculable epochs to come, and one from an outer moon of Jupiter six million years in the past. Of earthly minds there were some from the winged, star-headed, half-vegetable race of palaeogean Antarctica; one from the reptile people of fabled Valusia; three from the furry pre-human Hyperborean worshippers of Tsathoggua; one from the wholly abominable Tcho-Tchos; two from the arachnid denizens of earth’s last age; five from the hardy coleopterous species immediately following mankind, to which the Great Race was some day to transfer its keenest minds en masse in the face of horrible peril; and several from different branches of humanity.
      I talked with the mind of Yiang-Li, a philosopher from the cruel empire of Tsan-Chan, which is to come in A.D. 5000; with that of a general of the great-headed brown people who held South Africa in B.C. 50,000; with that of a twelfth-century Florentine monk named Bartolomeo Corsi; with that of a king of Lomar who had ruled that terrible polar land 100,000 years before the squat, yellow Inutos came from the west to engulf it; with that of Nug-Soth, a magician of the dark conquerors of A.D. 16,000; with that of a Roman named Titus Sempronius Blaesus, who had been a quaestor in Sulla’s time; with that of Khephnes, an Egyptian of the 14th Dynasty who told me the hideous secret of Nyarlathotep; with that of a priest of Atlantis’ middle kingdom; with that of a Suffolk gentleman of Cromwell’s day, James Woodville; with that of a court astronomer of pre-Inca Peru; with that of the Australian physicist Nevil Kingston-Brown, who will die in A.D. 2518; with that of an archimage of vanished Yhe in the Pacific; with that of Theodotides, a Graeco-Bactrian official of B.C. 200; with that of an aged Frenchman of Louis XIII’s time named Pierre-Louis Montmagny; with that of Crom-Ya, a Cimmerian chieftain of B.C. 15,000; and with so many others that my brain cannot hold the shocking secrets and dizzying marvels I learned from them.
      I awaked each morning in a fever, sometimes frantically trying to verify or discredit such information as fell within the range of modern human knowledge. Traditional facts took on new and doubtful aspects, and I marvelled at the dream-fancy which could invent such surprising addenda to history and science. I shivered at the mysteries the past may conceal, and trembled at the menaces the future may bring forth. What was hinted in the speech of post-human entities of the fate of mankind produced such an effect on me that I will not set it down here. After man there would be the mighty beetle civilisation, the bodies of whose members the cream of the Great Race would seize when the monstrous doom overtook the elder world. Later, as the earth’s span closed, the transferred minds would again migrate through time and space—to another stopping-place in the bodies of the bulbous vegetable entities of Mercury. But there would be races after them, clinging pathetically to the cold planet and burrowing to its horror-filled core, before the utter end.
      Meanwhile, in my dreams, I wrote endlessly in that history of my own age which I was preparing—half voluntarily and half through promises of increased library and travel opportunities—for the Great Race’s central archives. The archives were in a colossal subterranean structure near the city’s centre, which I came to know well through frequent labours and consultations. Meant to last as long as the race, and to withstand the fiercest of earth’s convulsions, this titan repository surpassed all other buildings in the massive, mountain-like firmness of its construction.
      The records, written or printed on great sheets of a curiously tenacious cellulose fabric, were bound into books that opened from the top, and were kept in individual cases of a strange, extremely light rustless metal of greyish hue, decorated with mathematical designs and bearing the title in the Great Race’s curvilinear hieroglyphs. These cases were stored in tiers of rectangular vaults—like closed, locked shelves—wrought of the same rustless metal and fastened by knobs with intricate turnings. My own history was assigned a specific place in the vaults of the lowest or vertebrate level—the section devoted to the culture of mankind and of the furry and reptilian races immediately preceding it in terrestrial dominance.
      But none of the dreams ever gave me a full picture of daily life. All were the merest misty, disconnected fragments, and it is certain that these fragments were not unfolded in their rightful sequence. I have, for example, a very imperfect idea of my own living arrangements in the dream-world; though I seem to have possessed a great stone room of my own. My restrictions as a prisoner gradually disappeared, so that some of the visions included vivid travels over the mighty jungle roads, sojourns in strange cities, and explorations of some of the vast dark windowless ruins from which the Great Race shrank in curious fear. There were also long sea-voyages in enormous, many-decked boats of incredible swiftness, and trips over wild regions in closed, projectile-like airships lifted and moved by electrical repulsion. Beyond the wide, warm ocean were other cities of the Great Race, and on one far continent I saw the crude villages of the black-snouted, winged creatures who would evolve as a dominant stock after the Great Race had sent its foremost minds into the future to escape the creeping horror. Flatness and exuberant green life were always the keynote of the scene. Hills were low and sparse, and usually displayed signs of volcanic forces.
      Of the animals I saw, I could write volumes. All were wild; for the Great Race’s mechanised culture had long since done away with domestic beasts, while food was wholly vegetable or synthetic. Clumsy reptiles of great bulk floundered in steaming morasses, fluttered in the heavy air, or spouted in the seas and lakes; and among these I fancied I could vaguely recognise lesser, archaic prototypes of many forms—dinosaurs, pterodactyls, ichthyosaurs, labyrinthodonts, rhamphorhynci, plesiosaurs, and the like—made familiar through palaeontology. Of birds or mammals there were none that I could discern.
      The ground and swamps were constantly alive with snakes, lizards, and crocodiles, while insects buzzed incessantly amidst the lush vegetation. And far out at sea unspied and unknown monsters spouted mountainous columns of foam into the vaporous sky. Once I was taken under the ocean in a gigantic submarine vessel with searchlights, and glimpsed some living horrors of awesome magnitude. I saw also the ruins of incredible sunken cities, and the wealth of crinoid, brachiopod, coral, and ichthyic life which everywhere abounded.
      Of the physiology, psychology, folkways, and detailed history of the Great Race my visions preserved but little information, and many of the scattered points I here set down were gleaned from my study of old legends and other cases rather than from my own dreaming. For in time, of course, my reading and research caught up with and passed the dreams in many phases; so that certain dream-fragments were explained in advance, and formed verifications of what I had learned. This consolingly established my belief that similar reading and research, accomplished by my secondary self, had formed the source of the whole terrible fabric of pseudo-memories.
      The period of my dreams, apparently, was one somewhat less than 150,000,000 years ago, when the Palaeozoic age was giving place to the Mesozoic. The bodies occupied by the Great Race represented no surviving—or even scientifically known—line of terrestrial evolution, but were of a peculiar, closely homogeneous, and highly specialised organic type inclining as much to the vegetable as to the animal state. Cell-action was of an unique sort almost precluding fatigue, and wholly eliminating the need of sleep. Nourishment, assimilated through the red trumpet-like appendages on one of the great flexible limbs, was always semi-fluid and in many aspects wholly unlike the food of existing animals. The beings had but two of the senses which we recognise—sight and hearing, the latter accomplished through the flower-like appendages on the grey stalks above their heads—but of other and incomprehensible senses (not, however, well utilisable by alien captive minds inhabiting their bodies) they possessed many. Their three eyes were so situated as to give them a range of vision wider than the normal. Their blood was a sort of deep-greenish ichor of great thickness. They had no sex, but reproduced through seeds or spores which clustered on their bases and could be developed only under water. Great, shallow tanks were used for the growth of their young—which were, however, reared only in small numbers on account of the longevity of individuals; four or five thousand years being the common life span.
      Markedly defective individuals were quietly disposed of as soon as their defects were noticed. Disease and the approach of death were, in the absence of a sense of touch or of physical pain, recognised by purely visual symptoms. The dead were incinerated with dignified ceremonies. Once in a while, as before mentioned, a keen mind would escape death by forward projection in time; but such cases were not numerous. When one did occur, the exiled mind from the future was treated with the utmost kindness till the dissolution of its unfamiliar tenement.
      The Great Race seemed to form a single loosely knit nation or league, with major institutions in common, though there were four definite divisions. The political and economic system of each unit was a sort of fascistic socialism, with major resources rationally distributed, and power delegated to a small governing board elected by the votes of all able to pass certain educational and psychological tests. Family organisation was not overstressed, though ties among persons of common descent were recognised, and the young were generally reared by their parents.
      Resemblances to human attitudes and institutions were, of course, most marked in those fields where on the one hand highly abstract elements were concerned, or where on the other hand there was a dominance of the basic, unspecialised urges common to all organic life. A few added likenesses came through conscious adoption as the Great Race probed the future and copied what it liked. Industry, highly mechanised, demanded but little time from each citizen; and the abundant leisure was filled with intellectual and aesthetic activities of various sorts. The sciences were carried to an unbelievable height of development, and art was a vital part of life, though at the period of my dreams it had passed its crest and meridian. Technology was enormously stimulated through the constant struggle to survive, and to keep in existence the physical fabric of great cities, imposed by the prodigious geologic upheavals of those primal days.
      Crime was surprisingly scanty, and was dealt with through highly efficient policing. Punishments ranged from privilege-deprivation and imprisonment to death or major emotion-wrenching, and were never administered without a careful study of the criminal’s motivations. Warfare, largely civil for the last few millennia though sometimes waged against reptilian and octopodic invaders, or against the winged, star-headed Old Ones who centred in the Antarctic, was infrequent though infinitely devastating. An enormous army, using camera-like weapons which produced tremendous electrical effects, was kept on hand for purposes seldom mentioned, but obviously connected with the ceaseless fear of the dark, windowless elder ruins and of the great sealed trap-doors in the lowest subterrene levels.
      This fear of the basalt ruins and trap-doors was largely a matter of unspoken suggestion—or, at most, of furtive quasi-whispers. Everything specific which bore on it was significantly absent from such books as were on the common shelves. It was the one subject lying altogether under a taboo among the Great Race, and seemed to be connected alike with horrible bygone struggles, and with that future peril which would some day force the race to send its keener minds ahead en masse in time. Imperfect and fragmentary as were the other things presented by dreams and legends, this matter was still more bafflingly shrouded. The vague old myths avoided it—or perhaps all allusions had for some reason been excised. And in the dreams of myself and others, the hints were peculiarly few. Members of the Great Race never intentionally referred to the matter, and what could be gleaned came only from some of the more sharply observant captive minds.
      According to these scraps of information, the basis of the fear was a horrible elder race of half-polypous, utterly alien entities which had come through space from immeasurably distant universes and had dominated the earth and three other solar planets about six hundred million years ago. They were only partly material—as we understand matter—and their type of consciousness and media of perception differed wholly from those of terrestrial organisms. For example, their senses did not include that of sight; their mental world being a strange, non-visual pattern of impressions. They were, however, sufficiently material to use implements of normal matter when in cosmic areas containing it; and they required housing—albeit of a peculiar kind. Though their senses could penetrate all material barriers, their substance could not; and certain forms of electrical energy could wholly destroy them. They had the power of aërial motion despite the absence of wings or any other visible means of levitation. Their minds were of such texture that no exchange with them could be effected by the Great Race.
      When these things had come to the earth they had built mighty basalt cities of windowless towers, and had preyed horribly upon the beings they found. Thus it was when the minds of the Great Race sped across the void from that obscure trans-galactic world known in the disturbing and debatable Eltdown Shards as Yith. The newcomers, with the instruments they created, had found it easy to subdue the predatory entities and drive them down to those caverns of inner earth which they had already joined to their abodes and begun to inhabit. Then they had sealed the entrances and left them to their fate, afterward occupying most of their great cities and preserving certain important buildings for reasons connected more with superstition than with indifference, boldness, or scientific and historical zeal.
      But as the aeons passed, there came vague, evil signs that the Elder Things were growing strong and numerous in the inner world. There were sporadic irruptions of a particularly hideous character in certain small and remote cities of the Great Race, and in some of the deserted elder cities which the Great Race had not peopled—places where the paths to the gulfs below had not been properly sealed or guarded. After that greater precautions were taken, and many of the paths were closed for ever—though a few were left with sealed trap-doors for strategic use in fighting the Elder Things if ever they broke forth in unexpected places; fresh rifts caused by that selfsame geologic change which had choked some of the paths and had slowly lessened the number of outer-world structures and ruins surviving from the conquered entities.
      The irruptions of the Elder Things must have been shocking beyond all description, since they had permanently coloured the psychology of the Great Race. Such was the fixed mood of horror that the very aspect of the creatures was left unmentioned—at no time was I able to gain a clear hint of what they looked like. There were veiled suggestions of a monstrous plasticity, and of temporary lapses of visibility, while other fragmentary whispers referred to their control and military use of great winds. Singular whistling noises, and colossal footprints made up of five circular toe-marks, seemed also to be associated with them.
      It was evident that the coming doom so desperately feared by the Great Race—the doom that was one day to send millions of keen minds across the chasm of time to strange bodies in the safer future—had to do with a final successful irruption of the Elder Beings. Mental projections down the ages had clearly foretold such a horror, and the Great Race had resolved that none who could escape should face it. That the foray would be a matter of vengeance, rather than an attempt to reoccupy the outer world, they knew from the planet’s later history—for their projections shewed the coming and going of subsequent races untroubled by the monstrous entities. Perhaps these entities had come to prefer earth’s inner abysses to the variable, storm-ravaged surface, since light meant nothing to them. Perhaps, too, they were slowly weakening with the aeons. Indeed, it was known that they would be quite dead in the time of the post-human beetle race which the fleeing minds would tenant. Meanwhile the Great Race maintained its cautious vigilance, with potent weapons ceaselessly ready despite the horrified banishing of the subject from common speech and visible records. And always the shadow of nameless fear hung about the sealed trap-doors and the dark, windowless elder towers.

V.

That is the world of which my dreams brought me dim, scattered echoes every night. I cannot hope to give any true idea of the horror and dread contained in such echoes, for it was upon a wholly intangible quality—the sharp sense of pseudo-memory—that such feelings mainly depended. As I have said, my studies gradually gave me a defence against these feelings, in the form of rational psychological explanations; and this saving influence was augmented by the subtle touch of accustomedness which comes with the passage of time. Yet in spite of everything the vague, creeping terror would return momentarily now and then. It did not, however, engulf me as it had before; and after 1922 I lived a very normal life of work and recreation.
      In the course of years I began to feel that my experience—together with the kindred cases and the related folklore—ought to be definitely summarised and published for the benefit of serious students; hence I prepared a series of articles briefly covering the whole ground and illustrated with crude sketches of some of the shapes, scenes, decorative motifs, and hieroglyphs remembered from the dreams. These appeared at various times during 1928 and 1929 in the Journal of the American Psychological Society, but did not attract much attention. Meanwhile I continued to record my dreams with the minutest care, even though the growing stack of reports attained troublesomely vast proportions.
      On July 10, 1934, there was forwarded to me by the Psychological Society the letter which opened the culminating and most horrible phase of the whole mad ordeal. It was postmarked Pilbarra, Western Australia, and bore the signature of one whom I found, upon inquiry, to be a mining engineer of considerable prominence. Enclosed were some very curious snapshots. I will reproduce the text in its entirety, and no reader can fail to understand how tremendous an effect it and the photographs had upon me.
      I was, for a time, almost stunned and incredulous; for although I had often thought that some basis of fact must underlie certain phases of the legends which had coloured my dreams, I was none the less unprepared for anything like a tangible survival from a lost world remote beyond all imagination. Most devastating of all were the photographs—for here, in cold, incontrovertible realism, there stood out against a background of sand certain worn-down, water-ridged, storm-weathered blocks of stone whose slightly convex tops and slightly concave bottoms told their own story. And when I studied them with a magnifying glass I could see all too plainly, amidst the batterings and pittings, the traces of those vast curvilinear designs and occasional hieroglyphs whose significance had become so hideous to me. But here is the letter, which speaks for itself:
49, Dampier Str.,
      Pilbarra, W. Australia,
            18 May, 1934.
Prof. N. W. Peaslee,
c/o Am. Psychological Society,
30, E. 41st Str.,
N. Y. City, U.S.A.

My dear Sir:—
      A recent conversation with Dr. E. M. Boyle of Perth, and some papers with your articles which he has just sent me, make it advisable for me to tell you about certain things I have seen in the Great Sandy Desert east of our gold field here. It would seem, in view of the peculiar legends about old cities with huge stonework and strange designs and hieroglyphs which you describe, that I have come upon something very important.
      The blackfellows have always been full of talk about “great stones with marks on them”, and seem to have a terrible fear of such things. They connect them in some way with their common racial legends about Buddai, the gigantic old man who lies asleep for ages underground with his head on his arm, and who will some day awake and eat up the world. There are some very old and half-forgotten tales of enormous underground huts of great stones, where passages lead down and down, and where horrible things have happened. The blackfellows claim that once some warriors, fleeing in battle, went down into one and never came back, but that frightful winds began to blow from the place soon after they went down. However, there usually isn’t much in what these natives say.
      But what I have to tell is more than this. Two years ago, when I was prospecting about 500 miles east in the desert, I came on a lot of queer pieces of dressed stone perhaps 3 × 2 × 2 feet in size, and weathered and pitted to the very limit. At first I couldn’t find any of the marks the blackfellows told about, but when I looked close enough I could make out some deeply carved lines in spite of the weathering. They were peculiar curves, just like what the blacks had tried to describe. I imagine there must have been 30 or 40 blocks, some nearly buried in the sand, and all within a circle perhaps a quarter of a mile’s diameter.
      When I saw some, I looked around closely for more, and made a careful reckoning of the place with my instruments. I also took pictures of 10 or 12 of the most typical blocks, and will enclose the prints for you to see. I turned my information and pictures over to the government at Perth, but they have done nothing with them. Then I met Dr. Boyle, who had read your articles in the Journal of the American Psychological Society, and in time happened to mention the stones. He was enormously interested, and became quite excited when I shewed him my snapshots, saying that the stones and markings were just like those of the masonry you had dreamed about and seen described in legends. He meant to write you, but was delayed. Meanwhile he sent me most of the magazines with your articles, and I saw at once from your drawings and descriptions that my stones are certainly the kind you mean. You can appreciate this from the enclosed prints. Later on you will hear directly from Dr. Boyle.
      Now I can understand how important all this will be to you. Without question we are faced with the remains of an unknown civilisation older than any dreamed of before, and forming a basis for your legends. As a mining engineer, I have some knowledge of geology, and can tell you that these blocks are so ancient they frighten me. They are mostly sandstone and granite, though one is almost certainly made of a queer sort of cement or concrete. They bear evidence of water action, as if this part of the world had been submerged and come up again after long ages—all since these blocks were made and used. It is a matter of hundreds of thousands of years—or heaven knows how much more. I don’t like to think about it.
      In view of your previous diligent work in tracking down the legends and everything connected with them, I cannot doubt but that you will want to lead an expedition to the desert and make some archaeological excavations. Both Dr. Boyle and I are prepared to coöperate in such work if you—or organisations known to you—can furnish the funds. I can get together a dozen miners for the heavy digging—the blacks would be of no use, for I’ve found that they have an almost maniacal fear of this particular spot. Boyle and I are saying nothing to others, for you very obviously ought to have precedence in any discoveries or credit.
      The place can be reached from Pilbarra in about 4 days by motor tractor—which we’d need for our apparatus. It is somewhat west and south of Warburton’s path of 1873, and 100 miles southeast of Joanna Spring. We could float things up the De Grey River instead of starting from Pilbarra—but all that can be talked over later. Roughly, the stones lie at a point about 22° 3' 14"" South Latitude, 125° 0' 39"" East Longitude. The climate is tropical, and the desert conditions are trying. Any expedition had better be made in winter—June or July or August. I shall welcome further correspondence upon this subject, and am keenly eager to assist in any plan you may devise. After studying your articles I am deeply impressed with the profound significance of the whole matter. Dr. Boyle will write later. When rapid communication is needed, a cable to Perth can be relayed by wireless.
      Hoping profoundly for an early message,

Believe me,
      Most faithfully yours,
            Robert B. F. Mackenzie.
      Of the immediate aftermath of this letter, much can be learned from the press. My good fortune in securing the backing of Miskatonic University was great, and both Mr. Mackenzie and Dr. Boyle proved invaluable in arranging matters at the Australian end. We were not too specific with the public about our objects, since the whole matter would have lent itself unpleasantly to sensational and jocose treatment by the cheaper newspapers. As a result, printed reports were sparing; but enough appeared to tell of our quest for reported Australian ruins and to chronicle our various preparatory steps.
      Professors William Dyer of the college’s geology department (leader of the Miskatonic Antarctic Expedition of 1930–31), Ferdinand C. Ashley of the department of ancient history, and Tyler M. Freeborn of the department of anthropology—together with my son Wingate—accompanied me. My correspondent Mackenzie came to Arkham early in 1935 and assisted in our final preparations. He proved to be a tremendously competent and affable man of about fifty, admirably well-read, and deeply familiar with all the conditions of Australian travel. He had tractors waiting at Pilbarra, and we chartered a tramp steamer of sufficiently light draught to get up the river to that point. We were prepared to excavate in the most careful and scientific fashion, sifting every particle of sand, and disturbing nothing which might seem to be in or near its original situation.
      Sailing from Boston aboard the wheezy Lexington on March 28, 1935, we had a leisurely trip across the Atlantic and Mediterranean, through the Suez Canal, down the Red Sea, and across the Indian Ocean to our goal. I need not tell how the sight of the low, sandy West Australian coast depressed me, and how I detested the crude mining town and dreary gold fields where the tractors were given their last loads. Dr. Boyle, who met us, proved to be elderly, pleasant, and intelligent—and his knowledge of psychology led him into many long discussions with my son and me.
      Discomfort and expectancy were oddly mingled in most of us when at length our party of eighteen rattled forth over the arid leagues of sand and rock. On Friday, May 31st, we forded a branch of the De Grey and entered the realm of utter desolation. A certain positive terror grew on me as we advanced to this actual site of the elder world behind the legends—a terror of course abetted by the fact that my disturbing dreams and pseudo-memories still beset me with unabated force.
      It was on Monday, June 3, that we saw the first of the half-buried blocks. I cannot describe the emotions with which I actually touched—in objective reality—a fragment of Cyclopean masonry in every respect like the blocks in the walls of my dream-buildings. There was a distinct trace of carving—and my hands trembled as I recognised part of a curvilinear decorative scheme made hellish to me through years of tormenting nightmare and baffling research.
      A month of digging brought a total of some 1250 blocks in varying stages of wear and disintegration. Most of these were carven megaliths with curved tops and bottoms. A minority were smaller, flatter, plain-surfaced, and square or octagonally cut—like those of the floors and pavements in my dreams—while a few were singularly massive and curved or slanted in such a manner as to suggest use in vaulting or groining, or as parts of arches or round window casings. The deeper—and the farther north and east—we dug, the more blocks we found; though we still failed to discover any trace of arrangement among them. Professor Dyer was appalled at the measureless age of the fragments, and Freeborn found traces of symbols which fitted darkly into certain Papuan and Polynesian legends of infinite antiquity. The condition and scattering of the blocks told mutely of vertiginous cycles of time and geologic upheavals of cosmic savagery.
      We had an aëroplane with us, and my son Wingate would often go up to different heights and scan the sand-and-rock waste for signs of dim, large-scale outlines—either differences of level or trails of scattered blocks. His results were virtually negative; for whenever he would one day think he had glimpsed some significant trend, he would on his next trip find the impression replaced by another equally insubstantial—a result of the shifting, wind-blown sand. One or two of these ephemeral suggestions, though, affected me queerly and disagreeably. They seemed, after a fashion, to dovetail horribly with something which I had dreamed or read, but which I could no longer remember. There was a terrible pseudo-familiarity about them—which somehow made me look furtively and apprehensively over the abominable, sterile terrain toward the north and northeast.
      Around the first week in July I developed an unaccountable set of mixed emotions about that general northeasterly region. There was horror, and there was curiosity—but more than that, there was a persistent and perplexing illusion of memory. I tried all sorts of psychological expedients to get these notions out of my head, but met with no success. Sleeplessness also gained upon me, but I almost welcomed this because of the resultant shortening of my dream-periods. I acquired the habit of taking long, lone walks in the desert late at night—usually to the north or northeast, whither the sum of my strange new impulses seemed subtly to pull me.
      Sometimes, on these walks, I would stumble over nearly buried fragments of the ancient masonry. Though there were fewer visible blocks here than where we had started, I felt sure that there must be a vast abundance beneath the surface. The ground was less level than at our camp, and the prevailing high winds now and then piled the sand into fantastic temporary hillocks—exposing some traces of the elder stones while it covered other traces. I was queerly anxious to have the excavations extend to this territory, yet at the same time dreaded what might be revealed. Obviously, I was getting into a rather bad state—all the worse because I could not account for it.
      An indication of my poor nervous health can be gained from my response to an odd discovery which I made on one of my nocturnal rambles. It was on the evening of July 11th, when a gibbous moon flooded the mysterious hillocks with a curious pallor. Wandering somewhat beyond my usual limits, I came upon a great stone which seemed to differ markedly from any we had yet encountered. It was almost wholly covered, but I stooped and cleared away the sand with my hands, later studying the object carefully and supplementing the moonlight with my electric torch. Unlike the other very large rocks, this one was perfectly square-cut, with no convex or concave surface. It seemed, too, to be of a dark basaltic substance wholly dissimilar to the granite and sandstone and occasional concrete of the now familiar fragments.
      Suddenly I rose, turned, and ran for the camp at top speed. It was a wholly unconscious and irrational flight, and only when I was close to my tent did I fully realise why I had run. Then it came to me. The queer dark stone was something which I had dreamed and read about, and which was linked with the uttermost horrors of the aeon-old legendry. It was one of the blocks of that basaltic elder masonry which the fabled Great Race held in such fear—the tall, windowless ruins left by those brooding, half-material, alien Things that festered in earth’s nether abysses and against whose wind-like, invisible forces the trap-doors were sealed and the sleepless sentinels posted.
      I remained awake all that night, but by dawn realised how silly I had been to let the shadow of a myth upset me. Instead of being frightened, I should have had a discoverer’s enthusiasm. The next forenoon I told the others about my find, and Dyer, Freeborn, Boyle, my son, and I set out to view the anomalous block. Failure, however, confronted us. I had formed no clear idea of the stone’s location, and a late wind had wholly altered the hillocks of shifting sand.

VI.

I come now to the crucial and most difficult part of my narrative—all the more difficult because I cannot be quite certain of its reality. At times I feel uncomfortably sure that I was not dreaming or deluded; and it is this feeling—in view of the stupendous implications which the objective truth of my experience would raise—which impels me to make this record. My son—a trained psychologist with the fullest and most sympathetic knowledge of my whole case—shall be the primary judge of what I have to tell.
      First let me outline the externals of the matter, as those at the camp know them. On the night of July 17–18, after a windy day, I retired early but could not sleep. Rising shortly before eleven, and afflicted as usual with that strange feeling regarding the northeastward terrain, I set out on one of my typical nocturnal walks; seeing and greeting only one person—an Australian miner named Tupper—as I left our precincts. The moon, slightly past full, shone from a clear sky and drenched the ancient sands with a white, leprous radiance which seemed to me somehow infinitely evil. There was no longer any wind, nor did any return for nearly five hours, as amply attested by Tupper and others who did not sleep through the night. The Australian last saw me walking rapidly across the pallid, secret-guarding hillocks toward the northeast.
      About 3:30 a.m. a violent wind blew up, waking everyone in camp and felling three of the tents. The sky was unclouded, and the desert still blazed with that leprous moonlight. As the party saw to the tents my absence was noted, but in view of my previous walks this circumstance gave no one alarm. And yet as many as three men—all Australians—seemed to feel something sinister in the air. Mackenzie explained to Prof. Freeborn that this was a fear picked up from blackfellow folklore—the natives having woven a curious fabric of malignant myth about the high winds which at long intervals sweep across the sands under a clear sky. Such winds, it is whispered, blow out of the great stone huts under the ground where terrible things have happened—and are never felt except near places where the big marked stones are scattered. Close to four the gale subsided as suddenly as it had begun, leaving the sand hills in new and unfamiliar shapes.
      It was just past five, with the bloated, fungoid moon sinking in the west, when I staggered into camp—hatless, tattered, features scratched and ensanguined, and without my electric torch. Most of the men had returned to bed, but Prof. Dyer was smoking a pipe in front of his tent. Seeing my winded and almost frenzied state, he called Dr. Boyle, and the two of them got me on my cot and made me comfortable. My son, roused by the stir, soon joined them, and they all tried to force me to lie still and attempt sleep.
      But there was no sleep for me. My psychological state was very extraordinary—different from anything I had previously suffered. After a time I insisted upon talking—nervously and elaborately explaining my condition. I told them I had become fatigued, and had lain down in the sand for a nap. There had, I said, been dreams even more frightful than usual—and when I was awaked by the sudden high wind my overwrought nerves had snapped. I had fled in panic, frequently falling over half-buried stones and thus gaining my tattered and bedraggled aspect. I must have slept long—hence the hours of my absence.
      Of anything strange either seen or experienced I hinted absolutely nothing—exercising the greatest self-control in that respect. But I spoke of a change of mind regarding the whole work of the expedition, and earnestly urged a halt in all digging toward the northeast. My reasoning was patently weak—for I mentioned a dearth of blocks, a wish not to offend the superstitious miners, a possible shortage of funds from the college, and other things either untrue or irrelevant. Naturally, no one paid the least attention to my new wishes—not even my son, whose concern for my health was very obvious.
      The next day I was up and around the camp, but took no part in the excavations. Seeing that I could not stop the work, I decided to return home as soon as possible for the sake of my nerves, and made my son promise to fly me in the plane to Perth—a thousand miles to the southwest—as soon as he had surveyed the region I wished let alone. If, I reflected, the thing I had seen was still visible, I might decide to attempt a specific warning even at the cost of ridicule. It was just conceivable that the miners who knew the local folklore might back me up. Humouring me, my son made the survey that very afternoon; flying over all the terrain my walk could possibly have covered. Yet nothing of what I had found remained in sight. It was the case of the anomalous basalt block all over again—the shifting sand had wiped out every trace. For an instant I half regretted having lost a certain awesome object in my stark fright—but now I know that the loss was merciful. I can still believe my whole experience an illusion—especially if, as I devoutly hope, that hellish abyss is never found.
      Wingate took me to Perth July 20, though declining to abandon the expedition and return home. He stayed with me until the 25th, when the steamer for Liverpool sailed. Now, in the cabin of the Empress, I am pondering long and frantically on the entire matter, and have decided that my son at least must be informed. It shall rest with him whether to diffuse the matter more widely. In order to meet any eventuality I have prepared this summary of my background—as already known in a scattered way to others—and will now tell as briefly as possible what seemed to happen during my absence from the camp that hideous night.
      Nerves on edge, and whipped into a kind of perverse eagerness by that inexplicable, dread-mingled, pseudo-mnemonic urge toward the northeast, I plodded on beneath the evil, burning moon. Here and there I saw, half-shrouded by the sand, those primal Cyclopean blocks left from nameless and forgotten aeons. The incalculable age and brooding horror of this monstrous waste began to oppress me as never before, and I could not keep from thinking of my maddening dreams, of the frightful legends which lay behind them, and of the present fears of natives and miners concerning the desert and its carven stones.
      And yet I plodded on as if to some eldritch rendezvous—more and more assailed by bewildering fancies, compulsions, and pseudo-memories. I thought of some of the possible contours of the lines of stones as seen by my son from the air, and wondered why they seemed at once so ominous and so familiar. Something was fumbling and rattling at the latch of my recollection, while another unknown force sought to keep the portal barred.
      The night was windless, and the pallid sand curved upward and downward like frozen waves of the sea. I had no goal, but somehow ploughed along as if with fate-bound assurance. My dreams welled up into the waking world, so that each sand-embedded megalith seemed part of endless rooms and corridors of pre-human masonry, carved and hieroglyphed with symbols that I knew too well from years of custom as a captive mind of the Great Race. At moments I fancied I saw those omniscient conical horrors moving about at their accustomed tasks, and I feared to look down lest I find myself one with them in aspect. Yet all the while I saw the sand-covered blocks as well as the rooms and corridors; the evil, burning moon as well as the lamps of luminous crystal; the endless desert as well as the waving ferns and cycads beyond the windows. I was awake and dreaming at the same time.
      I do not know how long or how far—or indeed, in just what direction—I had walked when I first spied the heap of blocks bared by the day’s wind. It was the largest group in one place that I had so far seen, and so sharply did it impress me that the visions of fabulous aeons faded suddenly away. Again there were only the desert and the evil moon and the shards of an unguessed past. I drew close and paused, and cast the added light of my electric torch over the tumbled pile. A hillock had blown away, leaving a low, irregularly round mass of megaliths and smaller fragments some forty feet across and from two to eight feet high.
      From the very outset I realised that there was some utterly unprecedented quality about these stones. Not only was the mere number of them quite without parallel, but something in the sand-worn traces of design arrested me as I scanned them under the mingled beams of the moon and my torch. Not that any one differed essentially from the earlier specimens we had found. It was something subtler than that. The impression did not come when I looked at one block alone, but only when I ran my eye over several almost simultaneously. Then, at last, the truth dawned upon me. The curvilinear patterns on many of these blocks were closely related—parts of one vast decorative conception. For the first time in this aeon-shaken waste I had come upon a mass of masonry in its old position—tumbled and fragmentary, it is true, but none the less existing in a very definite sense.
      Mounting at a low place, I clambered laboriously over the heap; here and there clearing away the sand with my fingers, and constantly striving to interpret varieties of size, shape, and style, and relationships of design. After a while I could vaguely guess at the nature of the bygone structure, and at the designs which had once stretched over the vast surfaces of the primal masonry. The perfect identity of the whole with some of my dream-glimpses appalled and unnerved me. This was once a Cyclopean corridor thirty feet tall, paved with octagonal blocks and solidly vaulted overhead. There would have been rooms opening off on the right, and at the farther end one of those strange inclined planes would have wound down to still lower depths.
      I started violently as these conceptions occurred to me, for there was more in them than the blocks themselves had supplied. How did I know that this level should have been far underground? How did I know that the plane leading upward should have been behind me? How did I know that the long subterrene passage to the Square of Pillars ought to lie on the left one level above me? How did I know that the room of machines, and the rightward-leading tunnel to the central archives, ought to lie two levels below? How did I know that there would be one of those horrible, metal-banded trap-doors at the very bottom, four levels down? Bewildered by this intrusion from the dream-world, I found myself shaking and bathed in a cold perspiration.
      Then, as a last, intolerable touch, I felt that faint, insidious stream of cool air trickling upward from a depressed place near the centre of the huge heap. Instantly, as once before, my visions faded, and I saw again only the evil moonlight, the brooding desert, and the spreading tumulus of palaeogean masonry. Something real and tangible, yet fraught with infinite suggestions of nighted mystery, now confronted me. For that stream of air could argue but one thing—a hidden gulf of great size beneath the disordered blocks on the surface.
      My first thought was of the sinister blackfellow legends of vast underground huts among the megaliths where horrors happen and great winds are born. Then thoughts of my own dreams came back, and I felt dim pseudo-memories tugging at my mind. What manner of place lay below me? What primal, inconceivable source of age-old myth-cycles and haunting nightmares might I be on the brink of uncovering? It was only for a moment that I hesitated, for more than curiosity and scientific zeal was driving me on and working against my growing fear.
      I seemed to move almost automatically, as if in the clutch of some compelling fate. Pocketing my torch, and struggling with a strength that I had not thought I possessed, I wrenched aside first one titan fragment of stone and then another, till there welled up a strong draught whose dampness contrasted oddly with the desert’s dry air. A black rift began to yawn, and at length—when I had pushed away every fragment small enough to budge—the leprous moonlight blazed on an aperture of ample width to admit me.
      I drew out my torch and cast a brilliant beam into the opening. Below me was a chaos of tumbled masonry, sloping roughly down toward the north at an angle of about forty-five degrees, and evidently the result of some bygone collapse from above. Between its surface and the ground level was a gulf of impenetrable blackness at whose upper edge were signs of gigantic, stress-heaved vaulting. At this point, it appeared, the desert’s sands lay directly upon a floor of some titan structure of earth’s youth—how preserved through aeons of geologic convulsion I could not then and cannot now even attempt to guess.
      In retrospect, the barest idea of a sudden, lone descent into such a doubtful abyss—and at a time when one’s whereabouts were unknown to any living soul—seems like the utter apex of insanity. Perhaps it was—yet that night I embarked without hesitancy upon such a descent. Again there was manifest that lure and driving of fatality which had all along seemed to direct my course. With torch flashing intermittently to save the battery, I commenced a mad scramble down the sinister, Cyclopean incline below the opening—sometimes facing forward as I found good hand and foot holds, and at other times turning to face the heap of megaliths as I clung and fumbled more precariously. In two directions beside me, distant walls of carven, crumbling masonry loomed dimly under the direct beams of my torch. Ahead, however, was only unbroken blackness.
      I kept no track of time during my downward scramble. So seething with baffling hints and images was my mind, that all objective matters seemed withdrawn into incalculable distances. Physical sensation was dead, and even fear remained as a wraith-like, inactive gargoyle leering impotently at me. Eventually I reached a level floor strown with fallen blocks, shapeless fragments of stone, and sand and detritus of every kind. On either side—perhaps thirty feet apart—rose massive walls culminating in huge groinings. That they were carved I could just discern, but the nature of the carvings was beyond my perception. What held me the most was the vaulting overhead. The beam from my torch could not reach the roof, but the lower parts of the monstrous arches stood out distinctly. And so perfect was their identity with what I had seen in countless dreams of the elder world, that I trembled actively for the first time.
      Behind and high above, a faint luminous blur told of the distant moonlit world outside. Some vague shred of caution warned me that I should not let it out of my sight, lest I have no guide for my return. I now advanced toward the wall on my left, where the traces of carving were plainest. The littered floor was nearly as hard to traverse as the downward heap had been, but I managed to pick my difficult way. At one place I heaved aside some blocks and kicked away the detritus to see what the pavement was like, and shuddered at the utter, fateful familiarity of the great octagonal stones whose buckled surface still held roughly together.
      Reaching a convenient distance from the wall, I cast the torchlight slowly and carefully over its worn remnants of carving. Some bygone influx of water seemed to have acted on the sandstone surface, while there were curious incrustations which I could not explain. In places the masonry was very loose and distorted, and I wondered how many aeons more this primal, hidden edifice could keep its remaining traces of form amidst earth’s heavings.
      But it was the carvings themselves that excited me most. Despite their time-crumbled state, they were relatively easy to trace at close range; and the complete, intimate familiarity of every detail almost stunned my imagination. That the major attributes of this hoary masonry should be familiar, was not beyond normal credibility. Powerfully impressing the weavers of certain myths, they had become embodied in a stream of cryptic lore which, somehow coming to my notice during the amnesic period, had evoked vivid images in my subconscious mind. But how could I explain the exact and minute fashion in which each line and spiral of these strange designs tallied with what I had dreamt for more than a score of years? What obscure, forgotten iconography could have reproduced each subtle shading and nuance which so persistently, exactly, and unvaryingly besieged my sleeping vision night after night?
      For this was no chance or remote resemblance. Definitely and absolutely, the millennially ancient, aeon-hidden corridor in which I stood was the original of something I knew in sleep as intimately as I knew my own house in Crane Street, Arkham. True, my dreams shewed the place in its undecayed prime; but the identity was no less real on that account. I was wholly and horribly oriented. The particular structure I was in was known to me. Known, too, was its place in that terrible elder city of dreams. That I could visit unerringly any point in that structure or in that city which had escaped the changes and devastations of uncounted ages, I realised with hideous and instinctive certainty. What in God’s name could all this mean? How had I come to know what I knew? And what awful reality could lie behind those antique tales of the beings who had dwelt in this labyrinth of primordial stone?
      Words can convey only fractionally the welter of dread and bewilderment which ate at my spirit. I knew this place. I knew what lay before me, and what had lain overhead before the myriad towering stories had fallen to dust and debris and the desert. No need now, I thought with a shudder, to keep that faint blur of moonlight in view. I was torn betwixt a longing to flee and a feverish mixture of burning curiosity and driving fatality. What had happened to this monstrous megalopolis of eld in the millions of years since the time of my dreams? Of the subterrene mazes which had underlain the city and linked all its titan towers, how much had still survived the writhings of earth’s crust?
      Had I come upon a whole buried world of unholy archaism? Could I still find the house of the writing-master, and the tower where S’gg’ha, a captive mind from the star-headed vegetable carnivores of Antarctica, had chiselled certain pictures on the blank spaces of the walls? Would the passage at the second level down, to the hall of the alien minds, be still unchoked and traversable? In that hall the captive mind of an incredible entity—a half-plastic denizen of the hollow interior of an unknown trans-Plutonian planet eighteen million years in the future—had kept a certain thing which it had modelled from clay.
      I shut my eyes and put my hand to my head in a vain, pitiful effort to drive these insane dream-fragments from my consciousness. Then, for the first time, I felt acutely the coolness, motion, and dampness of the surrounding air. Shuddering, I realised that a vast chain of aeon-dead black gulfs must indeed be yawning somewhere beyond and below me. I thought of the frightful chambers and corridors and inclines as I recalled them from my dreams. Would the way to the central archives still be open? Again that driving fatality tugged insistently at my brain as I recalled the awesome records that once lay cased in those rectangular vaults of rustless metal.
      There, said the dreams and legends, had reposed the whole history, past and future, of the cosmic space-time continuum—written by captive minds from every orb and every age in the solar system. Madness, of course—but had I not now stumbled into a nighted world as mad as I? I thought of the locked metal shelves, and of the curious knob-twistings needed to open each one. My own came vividly into my consciousness. How often had I gone through that intricate routine of varied turns and pressures in the terrestrial vertebrate section on the lowest level! Every detail was fresh and familiar. If there were such a vault as I had dreamed of, I could open it in a moment. It was then that madness took me utterly. An instant later, and I was leaping and stumbling over the rocky debris toward the well-remembered incline to the depths below.

VII.

From that point forward my impressions are scarcely to be relied on—indeed, I still possess a final, desperate hope that they all form parts of some daemoniac dream—or illusion born of delirium. A fever raged in my brain, and everything came to me through a kind of haze—sometimes only intermittently. The rays of my torch shot feebly into the engulfing blackness, bringing phantasmal flashes of hideously familiar walls and carvings, all blighted with the decay of ages. In one place a tremendous mass of vaulting had fallen, so that I had to clamber over a mighty mound of stones reaching almost to the ragged, grotesquely stalactited roof. It was all the ultimate apex of nightmare, made worse by the blasphemous tug of pseudo-memory. One thing only was unfamiliar, and that was my own size in relation to the monstrous masonry. I felt oppressed by a sense of unwonted smallness, as if the sight of these towering walls from a mere human body was something wholly new and abnormal. Again and again I looked nervously down at myself, vaguely disturbed by the human form I possessed.
      Onward through the blackness of the abyss I leaped, plunged, and staggered—often falling and bruising myself, and once nearly shattering my torch. Every stone and corner of that daemoniac gulf was known to me, and at many points I stopped to cast beams of light through choked and crumbling yet familiar archways. Some rooms had totally collapsed; others were bare or debris-filled. In a few I saw masses of metal—some fairly intact, some broken, and some crushed or battered—which I recognised as the colossal pedestals or tables of my dreams. What they could in truth have been, I dared not guess.
      I found the downward incline and began its descent—though after a time halted by a gaping, ragged chasm whose narrowest point could not be much less than four feet across. Here the stonework had fallen through, revealing incalculable inky depths beneath. I knew there were two more cellar levels in this titan edifice, and trembled with fresh panic as I recalled the metal-clamped trap-door on the lowest one. There could be no guards now—for what had lurked beneath had long since done its hideous work and sunk into its long decline. By the time of the post-human beetle race it would be quite dead. And yet, as I thought of the native legends, I trembled anew.
      It cost me a terrible effort to vault that yawning chasm, since the littered floor prevented a running start—but madness drove me on. I chose a place close to the left-hand wall—where the rift was least wide and the landing-spot reasonably clear of dangerous debris—and after one frantic moment reached the other side in safety. At last gaining the lower level, I stumbled on past the archway of the room of machines, within which were fantastic ruins of metal half-buried beneath fallen vaulting. Everything was where I knew it would be, and I climbed confidently over the heaps which barred the entrance of a vast transverse corridor. This, I realised, would take me under the city to the central archives.
      Endless ages seemed to unroll as I stumbled, leaped, and crawled along that debris-cluttered corridor. Now and then I could make out carvings on the age-stained walls—some familiar, others seemingly added since the period of my dreams. Since this was a subterrene house-connecting highway, there were no archways save when the route led through the lower levels of various buildings. At some of these intersections I turned aside long enough to look down well-remembered corridors and into well-remembered rooms. Twice only did I find any radical changes from what I had dreamed of—and in one of these cases I could trace the sealed-up outlines of the archway I remembered.
      I shook violently, and felt a curious surge of retarding weakness, as I steered a hurried and reluctant course through the crypt of one of those great windowless ruined towers whose alien basalt masonry bespoke a whispered and horrible origin. This primal vault was round and fully two hundred feet across, with nothing carved upon the dark-hued stonework. The floor was here free from anything save dust and sand, and I could see the apertures leading upward and downward. There were no stairs or inclines—indeed, my dreams had pictured those elder towers as wholly untouched by the fabulous Great Race. Those who had built them had not needed stairs or inclines. In the dreams, the downward aperture had been tightly sealed and nervously guarded. Now it lay open—black and yawning, and giving forth a current of cool, damp air. Of what limitless caverns of eternal night might brood below, I would not permit myself to think.
      Later, clawing my way along a badly heaped section of the corridor, I reached a place where the roof had wholly caved in. The debris rose like a mountain, and I climbed up over it, passing through a vast empty space where my torchlight could reveal neither walls nor vaulting. This, I reflected, must be the cellar of the house of the metal-purveyors, fronting on the third square not far from the archives. What had happened to it I could not conjecture.
      I found the corridor again beyond the mountain of detritus and stones, but after a short distance encountered a wholly choked place where the fallen vaulting almost touched the perilously sagging ceiling. How I managed to wrench and tear aside enough blocks to afford a passage, and how I dared disturb the tightly packed fragments when the least shift of equilibrium might have brought down all the tons of superincumbent masonry to crush me to nothingness, I do not know. It was sheer madness that impelled and guided me—if, indeed, my whole underground adventure was not—as I hope—a hellish delusion or phase of dreaming. But I did make—or dream that I made—a passage that I could squirm through. As I wriggled over the mound of debris—my torch, switched continuously on, thrust deeply within my mouth—I felt myself torn by the fantastic stalactites of the jagged floor above me.
      I was now close to the great underground archival structure which seemed to form my goal. Sliding and clambering down the farther side of the barrier, and picking my way along the remaining stretch of corridor with hand-held, intermittently flashing torch, I came at last to a low, circular crypt with arches—still in a marvellous state of preservation—opening off on every side. The walls, or such parts of them as lay within reach of my torchlight, were densely hieroglyphed and chiselled with typical curvilinear symbols—some added since the period of my dreams.
      This, I realised, was my fated destination, and I turned at once through a familiar archway on my left. That I could find a clear passage up and down the incline to all the surviving levels, I had oddly little doubt. This vast, earth-protected pile, housing the annals of all the solar system, had been built with supernal skill and strength to last as long as that system itself. Blocks of stupendous size, poised with mathematical genius and bound with cements of incredible toughness, had combined to form a mass as firm as the planet’s rocky core. Here, after ages more prodigious than I could sanely grasp, its buried bulk stood in all its essential contours; the vast, dust-drifted floors scarce sprinkled with the litter elsewhere so dominant.
      The relatively easy walking from this point onward went curiously to my head. All the frantic eagerness hitherto frustrated by obstacles now took itself out in a kind of febrile speed, and I literally raced along the low-roofed, monstrously well-remembered aisles beyond the archway. I was past being astonished by the familiarity of what I saw. On every hand the great hieroglyphed metal shelf-doors loomed monstrously; some yet in place, others sprung open, and still others bent and buckled under bygone geological stresses not quite strong enough to shatter the titan masonry. Here and there a dust-covered heap below a gaping empty shelf seemed to indicate where cases had been shaken down by earth-tremors. On occasional pillars were great symbols or letters proclaiming classes and sub-classes of volumes.
      Once I paused before an open vault where I saw some of the accustomed metal cases still in position amidst the omnipresent gritty dust. Reaching up, I dislodged one of the thinner specimens with some difficulty, and rested it on the floor for inspection. It was titled in the prevailing curvilinear hieroglyphs, though something in the arrangement of the characters seemed subtly unusual. The odd mechanism of the hooked fastener was perfectly well known to me, and I snapped up the still rustless and workable lid and drew out the book within. The latter, as expected, was some twenty by fifteen inches in area, and two inches thick; the thin metal covers opening at the top. Its tough cellulose pages seemed unaffected by the myriad cycles of time they had lived through, and I studied the queerly pigmented, brush-drawn letters of the text—symbols utterly unlike either the usual curved hieroglyphs or any alphabet known to human scholarship—with a haunting, half-aroused memory. It came to me that this was the language used by a captive mind I had known slightly in my dreams—a mind from a large asteroid on which had survived much of the archaic life and lore of the primal planet whereof it formed a fragment. At the same time I recalled that this level of the archives was devoted to volumes dealing with the non-terrestrial planets.
      As I ceased poring over this incredible document I saw that the light of my torch was beginning to fail, hence quickly inserted the extra battery I always had with me. Then, armed with the stronger radiance, I resumed my feverish racing through unending tangles of aisles and corridors—recognising now and then some familiar shelf, and vaguely annoyed by the acoustic conditions which made my footfalls echo incongruously in these catacombs of aeon-long death and silence. The very prints of my shoes behind me in the millennially untrodden dust made me shudder. Never before, if my mad dreams held anything of truth, had human feet pressed upon those immemorial pavements. Of the particular goal of my insane racing, my conscious mind held no hint. There was, however, some force of evil potency pulling at my dazed will and buried recollections, so that I vaguely felt I was not running at random.
      I came to a downward incline and followed it to profounder depths. Floors flashed by me as I raced, but I did not pause to explore them. In my whirling brain there had begun to beat a certain rhythm which set my right hand twitching in unison. I wanted to unlock something, and felt that I knew all the intricate twists and pressures needed to do it. It would be like a modern safe with a combination lock. Dream or not, I had once known and still knew. How any dream—or scrap of unconsciously absorbed legend—could have taught me a detail so minute, so intricate, and so complex, I did not attempt to explain to myself. I was beyond all coherent thought. For was not this whole experience—this shocking familiarity with a set of unknown ruins, and this monstrously exact identity of everything before me with what only dreams and scraps of myth could have suggested—a horror beyond all reason? Probably it was my basic conviction then—as it is now during my saner moments—that I was not awake at all, and that the entire buried city was a fragment of febrile hallucination.
      Eventually I reached the lowest level and struck off to the right of the incline. For some shadowy reason I tried to soften my steps, even though I lost speed thereby. There was a space I was afraid to cross on this last, deeply buried floor, and as I drew near it I recalled what thing in that space I feared. It was merely one of the metal-barred and closely guarded trap-doors. There would be no guards now, and on that account I trembled and tiptoed as I had done in passing through that black basalt vault where a similar trap-door had yawned. I felt a current of cool, damp air, as I had felt there, and wished that my course led in another direction. Why I had to take the particular course I was taking, I did not know.
      When I came to the space I saw that the trap-door yawned widely open. Ahead the shelves began again, and I glimpsed on the floor before one of them a heap very thinly covered with dust, where a number of cases had recently fallen. At the same moment a fresh wave of panic clutched me, though for some time I could not discover why. Heaps of fallen cases were not uncommon, for all through the aeons this lightless labyrinth had been racked by the heavings of earth and had echoed at intervals to the deafening clatter of toppling objects. It was only when I was nearly across the space that I realised why I shook so violently.
      Not the heap, but something about the dust of the level floor was troubling me. In the light of my torch it seemed as if that dust were not as even as it ought to be—there were places where it looked thinner, as if it had been disturbed not many months before. I could not be sure, for even the apparently thinner places were dusty enough; yet a certain suspicion of regularity in the fancied unevenness was highly disquieting. When I brought the torchlight close to one of the queer places I did not like what I saw—for the illusion of regularity became very great. It was as if there were regular lines of composite impressions—impressions that went in threes, each slightly over a foot square, and consisting of five nearly circular three-inch prints, one in advance of the other four.
      These possible lines of foot-square impressions appeared to lead in two directions, as if something had gone somewhere and returned. They were of course very faint, and may have been illusions or accidents; but there was an element of dim, fumbling terror about the way I thought they ran. For at one end of them was the heap of cases which must have clattered down not long before, while at the other end was the ominous trap-door with the cool, damp wind, yawning unguarded down to abysses past imagination.

VIII.

That my strange sense of compulsion was deep and overwhelming is shewn by its conquest of my fear. No rational motive could have drawn me on after that hideous suspicion of prints and the creeping dream-memories it excited. Yet my right hand, even as it shook with fright, still twitched rhythmically in its eagerness to turn a lock it hoped to find. Before I knew it I was past the heap of lately fallen cases and running on tiptoe through aisles of utterly unbroken dust toward a point which I seemed to know morbidly, horribly well. My mind was asking itself questions whose origin and relevancy I was only beginning to guess. Would the shelf be reachable by a human body? Could my human hand master all the aeon-remembered motions of the lock? Would the lock be undamaged and workable? And what would I do—what dare I do—with what (as I now commenced to realise) I both hoped and feared to find? Would it prove the awesome, brain-shattering truth of something past normal conception, or shew only that I was dreaming?
      The next I knew I had ceased my tiptoe racing and was standing still, staring at a row of maddeningly familiar hieroglyphed shelves. They were in a state of almost perfect preservation, and only three of the doors in this vicinity had sprung open. My feelings toward these shelves cannot be described—so utter and insistent was the sense of old acquaintance. I was looking high up, at a row near the top and wholly out of my reach, and wondering how I could climb to best advantage. An open door four rows from the bottom would help, and the locks of the closed doors formed possible holds for hands and feet. I would grip the torch between my teeth as I had in other places where both hands were needed. Above all, I must make no noise. How to get down what I wished to remove would be difficult, but I could probably hook its movable fastener in my coat collar and carry it like a knapsack. Again I wondered whether the lock would be undamaged. That I could repeat each familiar motion I had not the least doubt. But I hoped the thing would not scrape or creak—and that my hand could work it properly.
      Even as I thought these things I had taken the torch in my mouth and begun to climb. The projecting locks were poor supports; but as I had expected, the opened shelf helped greatly. I used both the difficultly swinging door and the edge of the aperture itself in my ascent, and managed to avoid any loud creaking. Balanced on the upper edge of the door, and leaning far to my right, I could just reach the lock I sought. My fingers, half-numb from climbing, were very clumsy at first; but I soon saw that they were anatomically adequate. And the memory-rhythm was strong in them. Out of unknown gulfs of time the intricate secret motions had somehow reached my brain correctly in every detail—for after less than five minutes of trying there came a click whose familiarity was all the more startling because I had not consciously anticipated it. In another instant the metal door was slowly swinging open with only the faintest grating sound.
      Dazedly I looked over the row of greyish case-ends thus exposed, and felt a tremendous surge of some wholly inexplicable emotion. Just within reach of my right hand was a case whose curving hieroglyphs made me shake with a pang infinitely more complex than one of mere fright. Still shaking, I managed to dislodge it amidst a shower of gritty flakes, and ease it over toward myself without any violent noise. Like the other case I had handled, it was slightly more than twenty by fifteen inches in size, with curved mathematical designs in low relief. In thickness it just exceeded three inches. Crudely wedging it between myself and the surface I was climbing, I fumbled with the fastener and finally got the hook free. Lifting the cover, I shifted the heavy object to my back, and let the hook catch hold of my collar. Hands now free, I awkwardly clambered down to the dusty floor, and prepared to inspect my prize.
      Kneeling in the gritty dust, I swung the case around and rested it in front of me. My hands shook, and I dreaded to draw out the book within almost as much as I longed—and felt compelled—to do so. It had very gradually become clear to me what I ought to find, and this realisation nearly paralysed my faculties. If the thing were there—and if I were not dreaming—the implications would be quite beyond the power of the human spirit to bear. What tormented me most was my momentary inability to feel that my surroundings were a dream. The sense of reality was hideous—and again becomes so as I recall the scene.
      At length I tremblingly pulled the book from its container and stared fascinatedly at the well-known hieroglyphs on the cover. It seemed to be in prime condition, and the curvilinear letters of the title held me in almost as hypnotised a state as if I could read them. Indeed, I cannot swear that I did not actually read them in some transient and terrible access of abnormal memory. I do not know how long it was before I dared to lift that thin metal cover. I temporised and made excuses to myself. I took the torch from my mouth and shut it off to save the battery. Then, in the dark, I screwed up my courage—finally lifting the cover without turning on the light. Last of all I did indeed flash the torch upon the exposed page—steeling myself in advance to suppress any sound no matter what I should find.
      I looked for an instant, then almost collapsed. Clenching my teeth, however, I kept silence. I sank wholly to the floor and put a hand to my forehead amidst the engulfing blackness. What I dreaded and expected was there. Either I was dreaming, or time and space had become a mockery. I must be dreaming—but I would test the horror by carrying this thing back and shewing it to my son if it were indeed a reality. My head swam frightfully, even though there were no visible objects in the unbroken gloom to swirl around me. Ideas and images of the starkest terror—excited by vistas which my glimpse had opened up—began to throng in upon me and cloud my senses.
      I thought of those possible prints in the dust, and trembled at the sound of my own breathing as I did so. Once again I flashed on the light and looked at the page as a serpent’s victim may look at his destroyer’s eyes and fangs. Then, with clumsy fingers in the dark, I closed the book, put it in its container, and snapped the lid and the curious hooked fastener. This was what I must carry back to the outer world if it truly existed—if the whole abyss truly existed—if I, and the world itself, truly existed.
      Just when I tottered to my feet and commenced my return I cannot be certain. It comes to me oddly—as a measure of my sense of separation from the normal world—that I did not even once look at my watch during those hideous hours underground. Torch in hand, and with the ominous case under one arm, I eventually found myself tiptoeing in a kind of silent panic past the draught-giving abyss and those lurking suggestions of prints. I lessened my precautions as I climbed up the endless inclines, but could not shake off a shadow of apprehension which I had not felt on the downward journey.
      I dreaded having to re-pass through that black basalt crypt that was older than the city itself, where cold draughts welled up from unguarded depths. I thought of that which the Great Race had feared, and of what might still be lurking—be it ever so weak and dying—down there. I thought of those possible five-circle prints and of what my dreams had told me of such prints—and of strange winds and whistling noises associated with them. And I thought of the tales of the modern blacks, wherein the horror of great winds and nameless subterrene ruins was dwelt upon.
      I knew from a carven wall symbol the right floor to enter, and came at last—after passing that other book I had examined—to the great circular space with the branching archways. On my right, and at once recognisable, was the arch through which I had arrived. This I now entered, conscious that the rest of my course would be harder because of the tumbled state of the masonry outside the archive building. My new metal-cased burden weighed upon me, and I found it harder and harder to be quiet as I stumbled among debris and fragments of every sort.
      Then I came to the ceiling-high mound of debris through which I had wrenched a scanty passage. My dread at wriggling through again was infinite; for my first passage had made some noise, and I now—after seeing those possible prints—dreaded sound above all things. The case, too, doubled the problem of traversing the narrow crevice. But I clambered up the barrier as best I could, and pushed the case through the aperture ahead of me. Then, torch in mouth, I scrambled through myself—my back torn as before by stalactites. As I tried to grasp the case again, it fell some distance ahead of me down the slope of the debris, making a disturbing clatter and arousing echoes which sent me into a cold perspiration. I lunged for it at once, and regained it without further noise—but a moment afterward the slipping of blocks under my feet raised a sudden and unprecedented din.
      The din was my undoing. For, falsely or not, I thought I heard it answered in a terrible way from spaces far behind me. I thought I heard a shrill, whistling sound, like nothing else on earth, and beyond any adequate verbal description. It may have been only my imagination. If so, what followed has a grim irony—since, save for the panic of this thing, the second thing might never have happened.
      As it was, my frenzy was absolute and unrelieved. Taking my torch in my hand and clutching feebly at the case, I leaped and bounded wildly ahead with no idea in my brain beyond a mad desire to race out of these nightmare ruins to the waking world of desert and moonlight which lay so far above. I hardly knew it when I reached the mountain of debris which towered into the vast blackness beyond the caved-in roof, and bruised and cut myself repeatedly in scrambling up its steep slope of jagged blocks and fragments. Then came the great disaster. Just as I blindly crossed the summit, unprepared for the sudden dip ahead, my feet slipped utterly and I found myself involved in a mangling avalanche of sliding masonry whose cannon-loud uproar split the black cavern air in a deafening series of earth-shaking reverberations.
      I have no recollection of emerging from this chaos, but a momentary fragment of consciousness shews me as plunging and tripping and scrambling along the corridor amidst the clangour—case and torch still with me. Then, just as I approached that primal basalt crypt I had so dreaded, utter madness came. For as the echoes of the avalanche died down, there became audible a repetition of that frightful, alien whistling I thought I had heard before. This time there was no doubt about it—and what was worse, it came from a point not behind but ahead of me.
      Probably I shrieked aloud then. I have a dim picture of myself as flying through the hellish basalt vault of the Elder Things, and hearing that damnable alien sound piping up from the open, unguarded door of limitless nether blacknesses. There was a wind, too—not merely a cool, damp draught, but a violent, purposeful blast belching savagely and frigidly from that abominable gulf whence the obscene whistling came.
      There are memories of leaping and lurching over obstacles of every sort, with that torrent of wind and shrieking sound growing moment by moment, and seeming to curl and twist purposefully around me as it struck out wickedly from the spaces behind and beneath. Though in my rear, that wind had the odd effect of hindering instead of aiding my progress; as if it acted like a noose or lasso thrown around me. Heedless of the noise I made, I clattered over a great barrier of blocks and was again in the structure that led to the surface. I recall glimpsing the archway to the room of machines and almost crying out as I saw the incline leading down to where one of those blasphemous trap-doors must be yawning two levels below. But instead of crying out I muttered over and over to myself that this was all a dream from which I must soon awake. Perhaps I was in camp—perhaps I was at home in Arkham. As these hopes bolstered up my sanity I began to mount the incline to the higher level.
      I knew, of course, that I had the four-foot cleft to re-cross, yet was too racked by other fears to realise the full horror until I came almost upon it. On my descent, the leap across had been easy—but could I clear the gap as readily when going uphill, and hampered by fright, exhaustion, the weight of the metal case, and the anomalous backward tug of that daemon wind? I thought of these things at the last moment, and thought also of the nameless entities which might be lurking in the black abysses below the chasm.
      My wavering torch was growing feeble, but I could tell by some obscure memory when I neared the cleft. The chill blasts of wind and the nauseous whistling shrieks behind me were for the moment like a merciful opiate, dulling my imagination to the horror of the yawning gulf ahead. And then I became aware of the added blasts and whistling in front of me—tides of abomination surging up through the cleft itself from depths unimagined and unimaginable.
      Now, indeed, the essence of pure nightmare was upon me. Sanity departed—and ignoring everything except the animal impulse of flight, I merely struggled and plunged upward over the incline’s debris as if no gulf had existed. Then I saw the chasm’s edge, leaped frenziedly with every ounce of strength I possessed, and was instantly engulfed in a pandaemoniac vortex of loathsome sound and utter, materially tangible blackness.
      This is the end of my experience, so far as I can recall. Any further impressions belong wholly to the domain of phantasmagoric delirium. Dream, madness, and memory merged wildly together in a series of fantastic, fragmentary delusions which can have no relation to anything real. There was a hideous fall through incalculable leagues of viscous, sentient darkness, and a babel of noises utterly alien to all that we know of the earth and its organic life. Dormant, rudimentary senses seemed to start into vitality within me, telling of pits and voids peopled by floating horrors and leading to sunless crags and oceans and teeming cities of windowless basalt towers upon which no light ever shone.
      Secrets of the primal planet and its immemorial aeons flashed through my brain without the aid of sight or sound, and there were known to me things which not even the wildest of my former dreams had ever suggested. And all the while cold fingers of damp vapour clutched and picked at me, and that eldritch, damnable whistling shrieked fiendishly above all the alternations of babel and silence in the whirlpools of darkness around.
      Afterward there were visions of the Cyclopean city of my dreams—not in ruins, but just as I had dreamed of it. I was in my conical, non-human body again, and mingled with crowds of the Great Race and the captive minds who carried books up and down the lofty corridors and vast inclines. Then, superimposed upon these pictures, were frightful momentary flashes of a non-visual consciousness involving desperate struggles, a writhing free from clutching tentacles of whistling wind, an insane, bat-like flight through half-solid air, a feverish burrowing through the cyclone-whipped dark, and a wild stumbling and scrambling over fallen masonry.
      Once there was a curious, intrusive flash of half-sight—a faint, diffuse suspicion of bluish radiance far overhead. Then there came a dream of wind-pursued climbing and crawling—of wriggling into a blaze of sardonic moonlight through a jumble of debris which slid and collapsed after me amidst a morbid hurricane. It was the evil, monotonous beating of that maddening moonlight which at last told me of the return of what I had once known as the objective, waking world.
      I was clawing prone through the sands of the Australian desert, and around me shrieked such a tumult of wind as I had never before known on our planet’s surface. My clothing was in rags, and my whole body was a mass of bruises and scratches. Full consciousness returned very slowly, and at no time could I tell just where true memory left off and delirious dream began. There had seemed to be a mound of titan blocks, an abyss beneath it, a monstrous revelation from the past, and a nightmare horror at the end—but how much of this was real? My flashlight was gone, and likewise any metal case I may have discovered. Had there been such a case—or any abyss—or any mound? Raising my head, I looked behind me, and saw only the sterile, undulant sands of the waste.
      The daemon wind died down, and the bloated, fungoid moon sank reddeningly in the west. I lurched to my feet and began to stagger southwestward toward the camp. What in truth had happened to me? Had I merely collapsed in the desert and dragged a dream-racked body over miles of sand and buried blocks? If not, how could I bear to live any longer? For in this new doubt all my faith in the myth-born unreality of my visions dissolved once more into the hellish older doubting. If that abyss was real, then the Great Race was real—and its blasphemous reachings and seizures in the cosmos-wide vortex of time were no myths or nightmares, but a terrible, soul-shattering actuality.
      Had I, in full hideous fact, been drawn back to a pre-human world of a hundred and fifty million years ago in those dark, baffling days of the amnesia? Had my present body been the vehicle of a frightful alien consciousness from palaeogean gulfs of time? Had I, as the captive mind of those shambling horrors, indeed known that accursed city of stone in its primordial heyday, and wriggled down those familiar corridors in the loathsome shape of my captor? Were those tormenting dreams of more than twenty years the offspring of stark, monstrous memories? Had I once veritably talked with minds from reachless corners of time and space, learned the universe’s secrets past and to come, and written the annals of my own world for the metal cases of those titan archives? And were those others—those shocking Elder Things of the mad winds and daemon pipings—in truth a lingering, lurking menace, waiting and slowly weakening in black abysses while varied shapes of life drag out their multimillennial courses on the planet’s age-racked surface?
      I do not know. If that abyss and what it held were real, there is no hope. Then, all too truly, there lies upon this world of man a mocking and incredible shadow out of time. But mercifully, there is no proof that these things are other than fresh phases of my myth-born dreams. I did not bring back the metal case that would have been a proof, and so far those subterrene corridors have not been found. If the laws of the universe are kind, they will never be found. But I must tell my son what I saw or thought I saw, and let him use his judgment as a psychologist in gauging the reality of my experience, and communicating this account to others.
      I have said that the awful truth behind my tortured years of dreaming hinges absolutely upon the actuality of what I thought I saw in those Cyclopean buried ruins. It has been hard for me literally to set down the crucial revelation, though no reader can have failed to guess it. Of course it lay in that book within the metal case—the case which I pried out of its forgotten lair amidst the undisturbed dust of a million centuries. No eye had seen, no hand had touched that book since the advent of man to this planet. And yet, when I flashed my torch upon it in that frightful megalithic abyss, I saw that the queerly pigmented letters on the brittle, aeon-browned cellulose pages were not indeed any nameless hieroglyphs of earth’s youth. They were, instead, the letters of our familiar alphabet, spelling out the words of the English language in my own handwriting.
",False
"
I

Although I knew nothing of chemistry, I listened fascinated. He picked up
an Easter lily which Geneviève had brought that morning from Notre Dame,
and dropped it into the basin. Instantly the liquid lost its crystalline
clearness. For a second the lily was enveloped in a milk-white foam,
which disappeared, leaving the fluid opalescent. Changing tints of orange
and crimson played over the surface, and then what seemed to be a ray of
pure sunlight struck through from the bottom where the lily was resting.
At the same instant he plunged his hand into the basin and drew out the
flower. ""There is no danger,"" he explained, ""if you choose the right
moment. That golden ray is the signal.""

He held the lily toward me, and I took it in my hand. It had turned to
stone, to the purest marble.

""You see,"" he said, ""it is without a flaw. What sculptor could reproduce
it?""

The marble was white as snow, but in its depths the veins of the lily
were tinged with palest azure, and a faint flush lingered deep in its
heart.

""Don't ask me the reason of that,"" he smiled, noticing my wonder. ""I have
no idea why the veins and heart are tinted, but they always are.
Yesterday I tried one of Geneviève's gold-fish,--there it is.""

The fish looked as if sculptured in marble. But if you held it to the
light the stone was beautifully veined with a faint blue, and from
somewhere within came a rosy light like the tint which slumbers in an
opal. I looked into the basin. Once more it seemed filled with clearest
crystal.

""If I should touch it now?"" I demanded.

""I don't know,"" he replied, ""but you had better not try.""

""There is one thing I'm curious about,"" I said, ""and that is where the
ray of sunlight came from.""

""It looked like a sunbeam true enough,"" he said. ""I don't know, it always
comes when I immerse any living thing. Perhaps,"" he continued, smiling,
""perhaps it is the vital spark of the creature escaping to the source
from whence it came.""

I saw he was mocking, and threatened him with a mahl-stick, but he only
laughed and changed the subject.

""Stay to lunch. Geneviève will be here directly.""

""I saw her going to early mass,"" I said, ""and she looked as fresh and
sweet as that lily--before you destroyed it.""

""Do you think I destroyed it?"" said Boris gravely.

""Destroyed, preserved, how can we tell?""

We sat in the corner of a studio near his unfinished group of the
""Fates."" He leaned back on the sofa, twirling a sculptor's chisel and
squinting at his work.

""By the way,"" he said, ""I have finished pointing up that old academic
Ariadne, and I suppose it will have to go to the Salon. It's all I have
ready this year, but after the success the 'Madonna' brought me I feel
ashamed to send a thing like that.""

The ""Madonna,"" an exquisite marble for which Geneviève had sat, had been
the sensation of last year's Salon. I looked at the Ariadne. It was a
magnificent piece of technical work, but I agreed with Boris that the
world would expect something better of him than that. Still, it was
impossible now to think of finishing in time for the Salon that splendid
terrible group half shrouded in the marble behind me. The ""Fates"" would
have to wait.

We were proud of Boris Yvain. We claimed him and he claimed us on the
strength of his having been born in America, although his father was
French and his mother was a Russian. Every one in the Beaux Arts called
him Boris. And yet there were only two of us whom he addressed in the
same familiar way--Jack Scott and myself.

Perhaps my being in love with Geneviève had something to do with his
affection for me. Not that it had ever been acknowledged between us. But
after all was settled, and she had told me with tears in her eyes that it
was Boris whom she loved, I went over to his house and congratulated him.
The perfect cordiality of that interview did not deceive either of us, I
always believed, although to one at least it was a great comfort. I do
not think he and Geneviève ever spoke of the matter together, but Boris
knew.

Geneviève was lovely. The Madonna-like purity of her face might have been
inspired by the Sanctus in Gounod's Mass. But I was always glad when she
changed that mood for what we called her ""April Manoeuvres."" She was
often as variable as an April day. In the morning grave, dignified and
sweet, at noon laughing, capricious, at evening whatever one least
expected. I preferred her so rather than in that Madonna-like
tranquillity which stirred the depths of my heart. I was dreaming of
Geneviève when he spoke again.

""What do you think of my discovery, Alec?""

""I think it wonderful.""

""I shall make no use of it, you know, beyond satisfying my own curiosity
so far as may be, and the secret will die with me.""

""It would be rather a blow to sculpture, would it not? We painters lose
more than we ever gain by photography.""

Boris nodded, playing with the edge of the chisel.

""This new vicious discovery would corrupt the world of art. No, I shall
never confide the secret to any one,"" he said slowly.

It would be hard to find any one less informed about such phenomena than
myself; but of course I had heard of mineral springs so saturated with
silica that the leaves and twigs which fell into them were turned to
stone after a time. I dimly comprehended the process, how the silica
replaced the vegetable matter, atom by atom, and the result was a
duplicate of the object in stone. This, I confess, had never interested
me greatly, and as for the ancient fossils thus produced, they disgusted
me. Boris, it appeared, feeling curiosity instead of repugnance, had
investigated the subject, and had accidentally stumbled on a solution
which, attacking the immersed object with a ferocity unheard of, in a
second did the work of years. This was all I could make out of the
strange story he had just been telling me. He spoke again after a long
silence.

""I am almost frightened when I think what I have found. Scientists would
go mad over the discovery. It was so simple too; it discovered itself.
When I think of that formula, and that new element precipitated in
metallic scales--""

""What new element?""

""Oh, I haven't thought of naming it, and I don't believe I ever shall.
There are enough precious metals now in the world to cut throats over.""

I pricked up my ears. ""Have you struck gold, Boris?""

""No, better;--but see here, Alec!"" he laughed, starting up. ""You and I
have all we need in this world. Ah! how sinister and covetous you look
already!"" I laughed too, and told him I was devoured by the desire for
gold, and we had better talk of something else; so when Geneviève came in
shortly after, we had turned our backs on alchemy.

Geneviève was dressed in silvery grey from head to foot. The light
glinted along the soft curves of her fair hair as she turned her cheek to
Boris; then she saw me and returned my greeting. She had never before
failed to blow me a kiss from the tips of her white fingers, and I
promptly complained of the omission. She smiled and held out her hand,
which dropped almost before it had touched mine; then she said, looking
at Boris--

""You must ask Alec to stay for luncheon."" This also was something new.
She had always asked me herself until to-day.

""I did,"" said Boris shortly.

""And you said yes, I hope?"" She turned to me with a charming conventional
smile. I might have been an acquaintance of the day before yesterday. I
made her a low bow. ""J'avais bien l'honneur, madame,"" but refusing to
take up our usual bantering tone, she murmured a hospitable commonplace
and disappeared. Boris and I looked at one another.

""I had better go home, don't you think?"" I asked.

""Hanged if I know,"" he replied frankly.

While we were discussing the advisability of my departure Geneviève
reappeared in the doorway without her bonnet. She was wonderfully
beautiful, but her colour was too deep and her lovely eyes were too
bright. She came straight up to me and took my arm.

""Luncheon is ready. Was I cross, Alec? I thought I had a headache, but I
haven't. Come here, Boris;"" and she slipped her other arm through his.
""Alec knows that after you there is no one in the world whom I like as
well as I like him, so if he sometimes feels snubbed it won't hurt him.""

""À la bonheur!"" I cried, ""who says there are no thunderstorms in April?""

""Are you ready?"" chanted Boris. ""Aye ready;"" and arm-in-arm we raced into
the dining-room, scandalizing the servants. After all we were not so much
to blame; Geneviève was eighteen, Boris was twenty-three, and I not quite
twenty-one.




II

Some work that I was doing about this time on the decorations for
Geneviève's boudoir kept me constantly at the quaint little hotel in the
Rue Sainte-Cécile. Boris and I in those days laboured hard but as we
pleased, which was fitfully, and we all three, with Jack Scott, idled a
great deal together.

One quiet afternoon I had been wandering alone over the house examining
curios, prying into odd corners, bringing out sweetmeats and cigars from
strange hiding-places, and at last I stopped in the bathing-room. Boris,
all over clay, stood there washing his hands.

The room was built of rose-coloured marble excepting the floor, which was
tessellated in rose and grey. In the centre was a square pool sunken
below the surface of the floor; steps led down into it, sculptured
pillars supported a frescoed ceiling. A delicious marble Cupid appeared
to have just alighted on his pedestal at the upper end of the room. The
whole interior was Boris' work and mine. Boris, in his working-clothes of
white canvas, scraped the traces of clay and red modelling wax from his
handsome hands, and coquetted over his shoulder with the Cupid.

""I see you,"" he insisted, ""don't try to look the other way and pretend
not to see me. You know who made you, little humbug!""

It was always my rôle to interpret Cupid's sentiments in these
conversations, and when my turn came I responded in such a manner, that
Boris seized my arm and dragged me toward the pool, declaring he would
duck me. Next instant he dropped my arm and turned pale. ""Good God!"" he
said, ""I forgot the pool is full of the solution!""

I shivered a little, and dryly advised him to remember better where he
had stored the precious liquid.

""In Heaven's name, why do you keep a small lake of that gruesome stuff
here of all places?"" I asked.

""I want to experiment on something large,"" he replied.

""On me, for instance?""

""Ah! that came too close for jesting; but I do want to watch the action
of that solution on a more highly organized living body; there is that
big white rabbit,"" he said, following me into the studio.

Jack Scott, wearing a paint-stained jacket, came wandering in,
appropriated all the Oriental sweetmeats he could lay his hands on,
looted the cigarette case, and finally he and Boris disappeared together
to visit the Luxembourg Gallery, where a new silver bronze by Rodin and a
landscape of Monet's were claiming the exclusive attention of artistic
France. I went back to the studio, and resumed my work. It was a
Renaissance screen, which Boris wanted me to paint for Geneviève's
boudoir. But the small boy who was unwillingly dawdling through a series
of poses for it, to-day refused all bribes to be good. He never rested an
instant in the same position, and inside of five minutes I had as many
different outlines of the little beggar.

""Are you posing, or are you executing a song and dance, my friend?"" I
inquired.

""Whichever monsieur pleases,"" he replied, with an angelic smile.

Of course I dismissed him for the day, and of course I paid him for the
full time, that being the way we spoil our models.

After the young imp had gone, I made a few perfunctory daubs at my work,
but was so thoroughly out of humour, that it took me the rest of the
afternoon to undo the damage I had done, so at last I scraped my palette,
stuck my brushes in a bowl of black soap, and strolled into the
smoking-room. I really believe that, excepting Geneviève's apartments, no
room in the house was so free from the perfume of tobacco as this one. It
was a queer chaos of odds and ends, hung with threadbare tapestry. A
sweet-toned old spinet in good repair stood by the window. There were
stands of weapons, some old and dull, others bright and modern, festoons
of Indian and Turkish armour over the mantel, two or three good pictures,
and a pipe-rack. It was here that we used to come for new sensations in
smoking. I doubt if any type of pipe ever existed which was not
represented in that rack. When we had selected one, we immediately
carried it somewhere else and smoked it; for the place was, on the whole,
more gloomy and less inviting than any in the house. But this afternoon,
the twilight was very soothing, the rugs and skins on the floor looked
brown and soft and drowsy; the big couch was piled with cushions--I found
my pipe and curled up there for an unaccustomed smoke in the
smoking-room. I had chosen one with a long flexible stem, and lighting it
fell to dreaming. After a while it went out, but I did not stir. I
dreamed on and presently fell asleep.

I awoke to the saddest music I had ever heard. The room was quite dark, I
had no idea what time it was. A ray of moonlight silvered one edge of the
old spinet, and the polished wood seemed to exhale the sounds as perfume
floats above a box of sandalwood. Some one rose in the darkness, and came
away weeping quietly, and I was fool enough to cry out ""Geneviève!""

She dropped at my voice, and, I had time to curse myself while I made a
light and tried to raise her from the floor. She shrank away with a
murmur of pain. She was very quiet, and asked for Boris. I carried her to
the divan, and went to look for him, but he was not in the house, and the
servants were gone to bed. Perplexed and anxious, I hurried back to
Geneviève. She lay where I had left her, looking very white.

""I can't find Boris nor any of the servants,"" I said.

""I know,"" she answered faintly, ""Boris has gone to Ept with Mr. Scott. I
did not remember when I sent you for him just now.""

""But he can't get back in that case before to-morrow afternoon, and--are
you hurt? Did I frighten you into falling? What an awful fool I am, but I
was only half awake.""

""Boris thought you had gone home before dinner. Do please excuse us for
letting you stay here all this time.""

""I have had a long nap,"" I laughed, ""so sound that I did not know whether
I was still asleep or not when I found myself staring at a figure that
was moving toward me, and called out your name. Have you been trying the
old spinet? You must have played very softly.""

I would tell a thousand more lies worse than that one to see the look of
relief that came into her face. She smiled adorably, and said in her
natural voice: ""Alec, I tripped on that wolf's head, and I think my ankle
is sprained. Please call Marie, and then go home.""

I did as she bade me, and left her there when the maid came in.




III

At noon next day when I called, I found Boris walking restlessly about
his studio.

""Geneviève is asleep just now,"" he told me, ""the sprain is nothing, but
why should she have such a high fever? The doctor can't account for it;
or else he will not,"" he muttered.

""Geneviève has a fever?"" I asked.

""I should say so, and has actually been a little light-headed at
intervals all night. The idea! gay little Geneviève, without a care in
the world,--and she keeps saying her heart's broken, and she wants to
die!""

My own heart stood still.

Boris leaned against the door of his studio, looking down, his hands in
his pockets, his kind, keen eyes clouded, a new line of trouble drawn
""over the mouth's good mark, that made the smile."" The maid had orders to
summon him the instant Geneviève opened her eyes. We waited and waited,
and Boris, growing restless, wandered about, fussing with modelling wax
and red clay. Suddenly he started for the next room. ""Come and see my
rose-coloured bath full of death!"" he cried.

""Is it death?"" I asked, to humour his mood.

""You are not prepared to call it life, I suppose,"" he answered. As he
spoke he plucked a solitary goldfish squirming and twisting out of its
globe. ""We'll send this one after the other--wherever that is,"" he said.
There was feverish excitement in his voice. A dull weight of fever lay on
my limbs and on my brain as I followed him to the fair crystal pool with
its pink-tinted sides; and he dropped the creature in. Falling, its
scales flashed with a hot orange gleam in its angry twistings and
contortions; the moment it struck the liquid it became rigid and sank
heavily to the bottom. Then came the milky foam, the splendid hues
radiating on the surface and then the shaft of pure serene light broke
through from seemingly infinite depths. Boris plunged in his hand and
drew out an exquisite marble thing, blue-veined, rose-tinted, and
glistening with opalescent drops.

""Child's play,"" he muttered, and looked wearily, longingly at me,--as if
I could answer such questions! But Jack Scott came in and entered into
the ""game,"" as he called it, with ardour. Nothing would do but to try the
experiment on the white rabbit then and there. I was willing that Boris
should find distraction from his cares, but I hated to see the life go
out of a warm, living creature and I declined to be present. Picking up a
book at random, I sat down in the studio to read. Alas! I had found
_The King in Yellow_. After a few moments, which seemed ages, I was
putting it away with a nervous shudder, when Boris and Jack came in
bringing their marble rabbit. At the same time the bell rang above, and a
cry came from the sick-room. Boris was gone like a flash, and the next
moment he called, ""Jack, run for the doctor; bring him back with you.
Alec, come here.""

I went and stood at her door. A frightened maid came out in haste and ran
away to fetch some remedy. Geneviève, sitting bolt upright, with crimson
cheeks and glittering eyes, babbled incessantly and resisted Boris'
gentle restraint. He called me to help. At my first touch she sighed and
sank back, closing her eyes, and then--then--as we still bent above her,
she opened them again, looked straight into Boris' face--poor
fever-crazed girl!--and told her secret. At the same instant our three
lives turned into new channels; the bond that held us so long together
snapped for ever and a new bond was forged in its place, for she had
spoken my name, and as the fever tortured her, her heart poured out its
load of hidden sorrow. Amazed and dumb I bowed my head, while my face
burned like a live coal, and the blood surged in my ears, stupefying me
with its clamour. Incapable of movement, incapable of speech, I listened
to her feverish words in an agony of shame and sorrow. I could not
silence her, I could not look at Boris. Then I felt an arm upon my
shoulder, and Boris turned a bloodless face to mine.

""It is not your fault, Alec; don't grieve so if she loves you--"" but he
could not finish; and as the doctor stepped swiftly into the room,
saying--""Ah, the fever!"" I seized Jack Scott and hurried him to the
street, saying, ""Boris would rather be alone."" We crossed the street to
our own apartments, and that night, seeing I was going to be ill too, he
went for the doctor again. The last thing I recollect with any
distinctness was hearing Jack say, ""For Heaven's sake, doctor, what ails
him, to wear a face like that?"" and I thought of _The King in
Yellow_ and the Pallid Mask.

I was very ill, for the strain of two years which I had endured since
that fatal May morning when Geneviève murmured, ""I love you, but I think
I love Boris best,"" told on me at last. I had never imagined that it
could become more than I could endure. Outwardly tranquil, I had deceived
myself. Although the inward battle raged night after night, and I, lying
alone in my room, cursed myself for rebellious thoughts unloyal to Boris
and unworthy of Geneviève, the morning always brought relief, and I
returned to Geneviève and to my dear Boris with a heart washed clean by
the tempests of the night.

Never in word or deed or thought while with them had I betrayed my sorrow
even to myself.

The mask of self-deception was no longer a mask for me, it was a part of
me. Night lifted it, laying bare the stifled truth below; but there was
no one to see except myself, and when the day broke the mask fell back
again of its own accord. These thoughts passed through my troubled mind
as I lay sick, but they were hopelessly entangled with visions of white
creatures, heavy as stone, crawling about in Boris' basin,--of the wolf's
head on the rug, foaming and snapping at Geneviève, who lay smiling
beside it. I thought, too, of the King in Yellow wrapped in the fantastic
colours of his tattered mantle, and that bitter cry of Cassilda, ""Not
upon us, oh King, not upon us!"" Feverishly I struggled to put it from me,
but I saw the lake of Hali, thin and blank, without a ripple or wind to
stir it, and I saw the towers of Carcosa behind the moon. Aldebaran, the
Hyades, Alar, Hastur, glided through the cloud-rifts which fluttered and
flapped as they passed like the scolloped tatters of the King in Yellow.
Among all these, one sane thought persisted. It never wavered, no matter
what else was going on in my disordered mind, that my chief reason for
existing was to meet some requirement of Boris and Geneviève. What this
obligation was, its nature, was never clear; sometimes it seemed to be
protection, sometimes support, through a great crisis. Whatever it seemed
to be for the time, its weight rested only on me, and I was never so ill
or so weak that I did not respond with my whole soul. There were always
crowds of faces about me, mostly strange, but a few I recognized, Boris
among them. Afterward they told me that this could not have been, but I
know that once at least he bent over me. It was only a touch, a faint
echo of his voice, then the clouds settled back on my senses, and I lost
him, but he _did_ stand there and bend over me _once_ at least.

At last, one morning I awoke to find the sunlight falling across my bed,
and Jack Scott reading beside me. I had not strength enough to speak
aloud, neither could I think, much less remember, but I could smile
feebly, as Jack's eye met mine, and when he jumped up and asked eagerly
if I wanted anything, I could whisper, ""Yes--Boris."" Jack moved to the
head of my bed, and leaned down to arrange my pillow: I did not see his
face, but he answered heartily, ""You must wait, Alec; you are too weak to
see even Boris.""

I waited and I grew strong; in a few days I was able to see whom I would,
but meanwhile I had thought and remembered. From the moment when all the
past grew clear again in my mind, I never doubted what I should do when
the time came, and I felt sure that Boris would have resolved upon the
same course so far as he was concerned; as for what pertained to me
alone, I knew he would see that also as I did. I no longer asked for any
one. I never inquired why no message came from them; why during the week
I lay there, waiting and growing stronger, I never heard their name
spoken. Preoccupied with my own searchings for the right way, and with my
feeble but determined fight against despair, I simply acquiesced in
Jack's reticence, taking for granted that he was afraid to speak of them,
lest I should turn unruly and insist on seeing them. Meanwhile I said
over and over to myself, how would it be when life began again for us
all? We would take up our relations exactly as they were before Geneviève
fell ill. Boris and I would look into each other's eyes, and there would
be neither rancour nor cowardice nor mistrust in that glance. I would be
with them again for a little while in the dear intimacy of their home,
and then, without pretext or explanation, I would disappear from their
lives for ever. Boris would know; Geneviève--the only comfort was that
she would never know. It seemed, as I thought it over, that I had found
the meaning of that sense of obligation which had persisted all through
my delirium, and the only possible answer to it. So, when I was quite
ready, I beckoned Jack to me one day, and said--

""Jack, I want Boris at once; and take my dearest greeting to
Geneviève....""

When at last he made me understand that they were both dead, I fell into
a wild rage that tore all my little convalescent strength to atoms. I
raved and cursed myself into a relapse, from which I crawled forth some
weeks afterward a boy of twenty-one who believed that his youth was gone
for ever. I seemed to be past the capability of further suffering, and
one day when Jack handed me a letter and the keys to Boris' house, I took
them without a tremor and asked him to tell me all. It was cruel of me to
ask him, but there was no help for it, and he leaned wearily on his thin
hands, to reopen the wound which could never entirely heal. He began very
quietly--

""Alec, unless you have a clue that I know nothing about, you will not be
able to explain any more than I what has happened. I suspect that you
would rather not hear these details, but you must learn them, else I
would spare you the relation. God knows I wish I could be spared the
telling. I shall use few words.

""That day when I left you in the doctor's care and came back to Boris, I
found him working on the 'Fates.' Geneviève, he said, was sleeping under
the influence of drugs. She had been quite out of her mind, he said. He
kept on working, not talking any more, and I watched him. Before long, I
saw that the third figure of the group--the one looking straight ahead,
out over the world--bore his face; not as you ever saw it, but as it
looked then and to the end. This is one thing for which I should like to
find an explanation, but I never shall.

""Well, he worked and I watched him in silence, and we went on that way
until nearly midnight. Then we heard the door open and shut sharply, and
a swift rush in the next room. Boris sprang through the doorway and I
followed; but we were too late. She lay at the bottom of the pool, her
hands across her breast. Then Boris shot himself through the heart."" Jack
stopped speaking, drops of sweat stood under his eyes, and his thin
cheeks twitched. ""I carried Boris to his room. Then I went back and let
that hellish fluid out of the pool, and turning on all the water, washed
the marble clean of every drop. When at length I dared descend the steps,
I found her lying there as white as snow. At last, when I had decided
what was best to do, I went into the laboratory, and first emptied the
solution in the basin into the waste-pipe; then I poured the contents of
every jar and bottle after it. There was wood in the fire-place, so I
built a fire, and breaking the locks of Boris' cabinet I burnt every
paper, notebook and letter that I found there. With a mallet from the
studio I smashed to pieces all the empty bottles, then loading them into
a coal-scuttle, I carried them to the cellar and threw them over the
red-hot bed of the furnace. Six times I made the journey, and at last,
not a vestige remained of anything which might again aid in seeking for
the formula which Boris had found. Then at last I dared call the doctor.
He is a good man, and together we struggled to keep it from the public.
Without him I never could have succeeded. At last we got the servants
paid and sent away into the country, where old Rosier keeps them quiet
with stones of Boris' and Geneviève's travels in distant lands, from
whence they will not return for years. We buried Boris in the little
cemetery of Sèvres. The doctor is a good creature, and knows when to pity
a man who can bear no more. He gave his certificate of heart disease and
asked no questions of me.""

Then, lifting his head from his hands, he said, ""Open the letter, Alec;
it is for us both.""

I tore it open. It was Boris' will dated a year before. He left
everything to Geneviève, and in case of her dying childless, I was to
take control of the house in the Rue Sainte-Cécile, and Jack Scott the
management at Ept. On our deaths the property reverted to his mother's
family in Russia, with the exception of the sculptured marbles executed
by himself. These he left to me.

The page blurred under our eyes, and Jack got up and walked to the
window. Presently he returned and sat down again. I dreaded to hear what
he was going to say, but he spoke with the same simplicity and
gentleness.

""Geneviève lies before the Madonna in the marble room. The Madonna bends
tenderly above her, and Geneviève smiles back into that calm face that
never would have been except for her.""

His voice broke, but he grasped my hand, saying, ""Courage, Alec."" Next
morning he left for Ept to fulfil his trust.




IV

The same evening I took the keys and went into the house I had known so
well. Everything was in order, but the silence was terrible. Though I
went twice to the door of the marble room, I could not force myself to
enter. It was beyond my strength. I went into the smoking-room and sat
down before the spinet. A small lace handkerchief lay on the keys, and I
turned away, choking. It was plain I could not stay, so I locked every
door, every window, and the three front and back gates, and went away.
Next morning Alcide packed my valise, and leaving him in charge of my
apartments I took the Orient express for Constantinople. During the two
years that I wandered through the East, at first, in our letters, we
never mentioned Geneviève and Boris, but gradually their names crept in.
I recollect particularly a passage in one of Jack's letters replying to
one of mine--

""What you tell me of seeing Boris bending over you while you lay ill, and
feeling his touch on your face, and hearing his voice, of course troubles
me. This that you describe must have happened a fortnight after he died.
I say to myself that you were dreaming, that it was part of your
delirium, but the explanation does not satisfy me, nor would it you.""

Toward the end of the second year a letter came from Jack to me in India
so unlike anything that I had ever known of him that I decided to return
at once to Paris. He wrote: ""I am well, and sell all my pictures as
artists do who have no need of money. I have not a care of my own, but I
am more restless than if I had. I am unable to shake off a strange
anxiety about you. It is not apprehension, it is rather a breathless
expectancy--of what, God knows! I can only say it is wearing me out.
Nights I dream always of you and Boris. I can never recall anything
afterward, but I wake in the morning with my heart beating, and all day
the excitement increases until I fall asleep at night to recall the same
experience. I am quite exhausted by it, and have determined to break up
this morbid condition. I must see you. Shall I go to Bombay, or will you
come to Paris?""

I telegraphed him to expect me by the next steamer.

When we met I thought he had changed very little; I, he insisted, looked
in splendid health. It was good to hear his voice again, and as we sat
and chatted about what life still held for us, we felt that it was
pleasant to be alive in the bright spring weather.

We stayed in Paris together a week, and then I went for a week to Ept
with him, but first of all we went to the cemetery at Sèvres, where Boris
lay.

""Shall we place the 'Fates' in the little grove above him?"" Jack asked,
and I answered--

""I think only the 'Madonna' should watch over Boris' grave."" But Jack was
none the better for my home-coming. The dreams of which he could not
retain even the least definite outline continued, and he said that at
times the sense of breathless expectancy was suffocating.

""You see I do you harm and not good,"" I said. ""Try a change without me.""
So he started alone for a ramble among the Channel Islands, and I went
back to Paris. I had not yet entered Boris' house, now mine, since my
return, but I knew it must be done. It had been kept in order by Jack;
there were servants there, so I gave up my own apartment and went there
to live. Instead of the agitation I had feared, I found myself able to
paint there tranquilly. I visited all the rooms--all but one. I could not
bring myself to enter the marble room where Geneviève lay, and yet I felt
the longing growing daily to look upon her face, to kneel beside her.

One April afternoon, I lay dreaming in the smoking-room, just as I had
lain two years before, and mechanically I looked among the tawny Eastern
rugs for the wolf-skin. At last I distinguished the pointed ears and flat
cruel head, and I thought of my dream where I saw Geneviève lying beside
it. The helmets still hung against the threadbare tapestry, among them
the old Spanish morion which I remembered Geneviève had once put on when
we were amusing ourselves with the ancient bits of mail. I turned my eyes
to the spinet; every yellow key seemed eloquent of her caressing hand,
and I rose, drawn by the strength of my life's passion to the sealed door
of the marble room. The heavy doors swung inward under my trembling
hands. Sunlight poured through the window, tipping with gold the wings of
Cupid, and lingered like a nimbus over the brows of the Madonna. Her
tender face bent in compassion over a marble form so exquisitely pure
that I knelt and signed myself. Geneviève lay in the shadow under the
Madonna, and yet, through her white arms, I saw the pale azure vein, and
beneath her softly clasped hands the folds of her dress were tinged with
rose, as if from some faint warm light within her breast.

Bending, with a breaking heart, I touched the marble drapery with my
lips, then crept back into the silent house.

A maid came and brought me a letter, and I sat down in the little
conservatory to read it; but as I was about to break the seal, seeing the
girl lingering, I asked her what she wanted.

She stammered something about a white rabbit that had been caught in the
house, and asked what should be done with it I told her to let it loose
in the walled garden behind the house, and opened my letter. It was from
Jack, but so incoherent that I thought he must have lost his reason. It
was nothing but a series of prayers to me not to leave the house until he
could get back; he could not tell me why, there were the dreams, he
said--he could explain nothing, but he was sure that I must not leave the
house in the Rue Sainte-Cécile.

As I finished reading I raised my eyes and saw the same maid-servant
standing in the doorway holding a glass dish in which two gold-fish were
swimming: ""Put them back into the tank and tell me what you mean by
interrupting me,"" I said.

With a half-suppressed whimper she emptied water and fish into an
aquarium at the end of the conservatory, and turning to me asked my
permission to leave my service. She said people were playing tricks on
her, evidently with a design of getting her into trouble; the marble
rabbit had been stolen and a live one had been brought into the house;
the two beautiful marble fish were gone, and she had just found those
common live things flopping on the dining-room floor. I reassured her and
sent her away, saying I would look about myself. I went into the studio;
there was nothing there but my canvases and some casts, except the marble
of the Easter lily. I saw it on a table across the room. Then I strode
angrily over to it. But the flower I lifted from the table was fresh and
fragile and filled the air with perfume.

Then suddenly I comprehended, and sprang through the hall-way to the
marble room. The doors flew open, the sunlight streamed into my face, and
through it, in a heavenly glory, the Madonna smiled, as Geneviève lifted
her flushed face from her marble couch and opened her sleepy eyes.

","It is said that in Ulthar, which lies beyond the river Skai, no man may kill a cat; and this I can verily believe as I gaze upon him who sitteth purring before the fire. For the cat is cryptic, and close to strange things which men cannot see. He is the soul of antique Aegyptus, and bearer of tales from forgotten cities in Meroë and Ophir. He is the kin of the jungle’s lords, and heir to the secrets of hoary and sinister Africa. The Sphinx is his cousin, and he speaks her language; but he is more ancient than the Sphinx, and remembers that which she hath forgotten.
      In Ulthar, before ever the burgesses forbade the killing of cats, there dwelt an old cotter and his wife who delighted to trap and slay the cats of their neighbours. Why they did this I know not; save that many hate the voice of the cat in the night, and take it ill that cats should run stealthily about yards and gardens at twilight. But whatever the reason, this old man and woman took pleasure in trapping and slaying every cat which came near to their hovel; and from some of the sounds heard after dark, many villagers fancied that the manner of slaying was exceedingly peculiar. But the villagers did not discuss such things with the old man and his wife; because of the habitual expression on the withered faces of the two, and because their cottage was so small and so darkly hidden under spreading oaks at the back of a neglected yard. In truth, much as the owners of cats hated these odd folk, they feared them more; and instead of berating them as brutal assassins, merely took care that no cherished pet or mouser should stray toward the remote hovel under the dark trees. When through some unavoidable oversight a cat was missed, and sounds heard after dark, the loser would lament impotently; or console himself by thanking Fate that it was not one of his children who had thus vanished. For the people of Ulthar were simple, and knew not whence it is all cats first came.
      One day a caravan of strange wanderers from the South entered the narrow cobbled streets of Ulthar. Dark wanderers they were, and unlike the other roving folk who passed through the village twice every year. In the market-place they told fortunes for silver, and bought gay beads from the merchants. What was the land of these wanderers none could tell; but it was seen that they were given to strange prayers, and that they had painted on the sides of their wagons strange figures with human bodies and the heads of cats, hawks, rams, and lions. And the leader of the caravan wore a head-dress with two horns and a curious disc betwixt the horns.
      There was in this singular caravan a little boy with no father or mother, but only a tiny black kitten to cherish. The plague had not been kind to him, yet had left him this small furry thing to mitigate his sorrow; and when one is very young, one can find great relief in the lively antics of a black kitten. So the boy whom the dark people called Menes smiled more often than he wept as he sate playing with his graceful kitten on the steps of an oddly painted wagon.
      On the third morning of the wanderers’ stay in Ulthar, Menes could not find his kitten; and as he sobbed aloud in the market-place certain villagers told him of the old man and his wife, and of sounds heard in the night. And when he heard these things his sobbing gave place to meditation, and finally to prayer. He stretched out his arms toward the sun and prayed in a tongue no villager could understand; though indeed the villagers did not try very hard to understand, since their attention was mostly taken up by the sky and the odd shapes the clouds were assuming. It was very peculiar, but as the little boy uttered his petition there seemed to form overhead the shadowy, nebulous figures of exotic things; of hybrid creatures crowned with horn-flanked discs. Nature is full of such illusions to impress the imaginative.
      That night the wanderers left Ulthar, and were never seen again. And the householders were troubled when they noticed that in all the village there was not a cat to be found. From each hearth the familiar cat had vanished; cats large and small, black, grey, striped, yellow, and white. Old Kranon, the burgomaster, swore that the dark folk had taken the cats away in revenge for the killing of Menes’ kitten; and cursed the caravan and the little boy. But Nith, the lean notary, declared that the old cotter and his wife were more likely persons to suspect; for their hatred of cats was notorious and increasingly bold. Still, no one durst complain to the sinister couple; even when little Atal, the innkeeper’s son, vowed that he had at twilight seen all the cats of Ulthar in that accursed yard under the trees, pacing very slowly and solemnly in a circle around the cottage, two abreast, as if in performance of some unheard-of rite of beasts. The villagers did not know how much to believe from so small a boy; and though they feared that the evil pair had charmed the cats to their death, they preferred not to chide the old cotter till they met him outside his dark and repellent yard.
      So Ulthar went to sleep in vain anger; and when the people awaked at dawn—behold! every cat was back at his accustomed hearth! Large and small, black, grey, striped, yellow, and white, none was missing. Very sleek and fat did the cats appear, and sonorous with purring content. The citizens talked with one another of the affair, and marvelled not a little. Old Kranon again insisted that it was the dark folk who had taken them, since cats did not return alive from the cottage of the ancient man and his wife. But all agreed on one thing: that the refusal of all the cats to eat their portions of meat or drink their saucers of milk was exceedingly curious. And for two whole days the sleek, lazy cats of Ulthar would touch no food, but only doze by the fire or in the sun.
      It was fully a week before the villagers noticed that no lights were appearing at dusk in the windows of the cottage under the trees. Then the lean Nith remarked that no one had seen the old man or his wife since the night the cats were away. In another week the burgomaster decided to overcome his fears and call at the strangely silent dwelling as a matter of duty, though in so doing he was careful to take with him Shang the blacksmith and Thul the cutter of stone as witnesses. And when they had broken down the frail door they found only this: two cleanly picked human skeletons on the earthen floor, and a number of singular beetles crawling in the shadowy corners.
      There was subsequently much talk among the burgesses of Ulthar. Zath, the coroner, disputed at length with Nith, the lean notary; and Kranon and Shang and Thul were overwhelmed with questions. Even little Atal, the innkeeper’s son, was closely questioned and given a sweetmeat as reward. They talked of the old cotter and his wife, of the caravan of dark wanderers, of small Menes and his black kitten, of the prayer of Menes and of the sky during that prayer, of the doings of the cats on the night the caravan left, and of what was later found in the cottage under the dark trees in the repellent yard.
      And in the end the burgesses passed that remarkable law which is told of by traders in Hatheg and discussed by travellers in Nir; namely, that in Ulthar no man may kill a cat.",False
"Spoonbill Village, Northernmost Quang Binh Province, SRV.
June 30, 2011.
Considering their first encounter, this meeting was going rather well.
""No, no, I assure you that I have had quite enough… well, if you insist…"" In the course of explaining his task to the household he would be staying in, Joseph Clayton had been offered tea at the behest of the mistress of the household and all three times, he had acquiesced. She was attending her husband in fine cotton clothes of white and black, the cut more resembling something out of Javanese dancing than anything worn in Indochina during the past thousand years. Their son, called from his lessons for the presentation, was sitting at the far end of the room, listening to what was going on. While he had repeated much the same spiel that Professor Andover to the house's three inhabitants, he had sipped at his bowl almost automatically as one would with water, clear onto what was now his fourth helping. Although not unpleasant, the drink had considerably more kick to it than even the strong brews typical of Vietnamese green tea.
What perplexed Joseph was that he couldn't identify the extra ingredient. It wasn't peppers, having no discernible remains or even the raw chemical heat of capsaicin. It could be ginger, but the heat was of an utterly different kind than any ginger he had ever experienced.
Then again, the additive could just as well be Tarantula venom given the figure he was giving his introduction to.
His name, as he had given it, was Noc. He was the most experience hunter, archer and scout of the village, was of an incredibly ancient lineage and, incidentally, was the first person of this strange, isolated village that he had seen. His tattoos all featured arachnid themes of legs, webbing and fangs and his eyes…
Marie had mentioned that some of the warriors practiced sorcery with mutative effects. If that was what caused Nocs eyes to become all black, seemingly all pupils and tempting Joseph to mentally refer to the man as ""Spider Eye"", then maybe those three weirdoes they caught in the biology labs back in February were onto something after all.
Sitting in the main reception area of the home, replete with decorations of strange latticed designs and black lacquer, Joseph watched carefully as Noc finished examining one of his bowstrings before his eyes darted around the room. On the wall, several bows hung in their unstrung state: the white and banded flatbow he had first witnessed, several simple bows of light colored cane and even one recurve bow made of dark red hardwood.
""So that is your request: to hear the stories of our history, to observe the operation of a household of status and to… take part in our activities?"" Throughout the introduction of this man and the repetition he had given of the Professors offer, Noc had examined all aspects of him closely… and had not been impressed. He had some muscle tone, but everything else about him absolutely screamed that he was some sort of priest or urban scribe in training. Besides, the combination of the girl's cues toward him and his reaction to his tea made it clear: if the boy had been a virgin, steam would have been pouring out of his ears. That made things difficult (and potentially dangerous) for everyone.
Besides, very few people in this village held any affection at all for someone with Joseph's skin tone.
After receiving affirmation of Joseph's duties, Noc laid out the rules. ""Know this: you will record the histories when they are told to you. You shall ask questions when you are allowed and you shall observe what you shall participate in what you are allowed to participate in. No pestering me with questions, no sneaking around trying to observe the women and children and no and I mean no trying to wheedle out information through trickery. We had quite enough trouble with that sort of thing the last time around.""
Joseph was immediately insulted, even though he did not how it as he automatically agreed. Still, two things bothered him. First, underneath the gold and bronze bangles that decorated the forearms and ankles of Nocs wife, Joseph had noticed strange scars, akin in shape to the marks that sperm whales bore from their battles with giant squid.
Second… what did Noc mean by the last time around?
That Night…
As he lay awake, Joseph realized how exhausting the day had been. As it turned out, he was probably doing to spend most of his time in this house as a sort of a servant: documenting and participating in cooking and chores, handling domestic duties and picking little things up only as Noc's wife deemed appropriate. No real questions answered, no interesting discoveries or scandals or surprises… just ordinary ethnographic work.
It wasn't made any better that his libido was getting annoyed at the 'busy' signals it kept receiving. However, there had been no real opportunity to talk with Marie after last night, with all the revelations of cannibalism and sorcery and other things that probably should have made his stomach turn.
/Maybe it would be better if they had made your stomach turn./ Came a wheedling little multi-voiced dialogue from inside his head… from inside his head, but not originating from him.
Oh no. Joseph thought with a mental groan. Not you idiots again! I thought you gave it up after the last time.
/The last time? You mean when you were in the thrall of carnal lusts, disgracing your heritage?/ The dominant voice changed from one of the old WASP lords to that of an aristocratic dowager that had been ancient even when Granny Clara had been a girl. /Maybe now that you know what her kind get up to, you will listen to reason and find a girl more suitable to a young man of your station./
Her parents are just as middle class as mine are, thank you all very much. Joseph snarked back mentally, fully knowing how these… wraiths felt about his relationship with Marie and savoring the thought of causing them anguish.
/You know full well what is meant. What is not understood is why the other girl did not so arouse your… passions./
Oh please, her family is just as drenched in sorcery as these guys, it's just that they're more polite about who they slice open. Besides, I don't really think you'd have acted any differently if it had been Tracy I'd been with that night instead of Marie, inbred and rural as she apparently is. He remembered clearly that night: how these voices (who he was fairly sure were not the products of schizophrenia despite superficially similar symptomatology), had come to him in the midst of what should have been unimaginable passion and communion with his girlfriend (though with was much more awkward, rushed and possibly painful than desired). Even as the passion mounted, their insults became worse: the taunts, the archaic, hateful rhetoric, the most vicious slurs directed against Marie and him. And yet he had forged on, continuing despite the rising chorus of insane voices inside his head… or even because of them, for as they blasphemed against all that Marie was, all the little things that made Joseph love her all the more, he could tell that his defiance was causing them actual pain and torment… and even through the pleasures of the flesh, he took small, sadistic delights in causing pain and anguish to these assholes who claimed authority as his forbearers.
Now Joseph was getting annoyed… and cranky. Look, I don't have to listen to you idiots, even if you do claim to be my ancestors. You came from a completely different world whose rules do not apply to me. Also, the instruments of your authority are gone: no money, no status, no companies or contacts or friends in high places. All that's left are a bunch of ugly little voices in the wind. Why don't you all just blow away? He was tired of his, of having to listen to these inane snobs that he had learned to loath in the abstract and now hated in the concrete. He hated their hate-filled dismissals of all other peoples and cultures, their smug superiority and the generalized arrogance that seemed to drip from the voices.
When they didn't respond, Joseph took it as a sign. ""Good."" He said aloud, as softly as his sense of satisfaction allowed.
","I repeat to you, gentlemen, that your inquisition is fruitless. Detain me here forever if you will; confine or execute me if you must have a victim to propitiate the illusion you call justice; but I can say no more than I have said already. Everything that I can remember, I have told with perfect candour. Nothing has been distorted or concealed, and if anything remains vague, it is only because of the dark cloud which has come over my mind—that cloud and the nebulous nature of the horrors which brought it upon me.
      Again I say, I do not know what has become of Harley Warren; though I think—almost hope—that he is in peaceful oblivion, if there be anywhere so blessed a thing. It is true that I have for five years been his closest friend, and a partial sharer of his terrible researches into the unknown. I will not deny, though my memory is uncertain and indistinct, that this witness of yours may have seen us together as he says, on the Gainesville pike, walking toward Big Cypress Swamp, at half past eleven on that awful night. That we bore electric lanterns, spades, and a curious coil of wire with attached instruments, I will even affirm; for these things all played a part in the single hideous scene which remains burned into my shaken recollection. But of what followed, and of the reason I was found alone and dazed on the edge of the swamp next morning, I must insist that I know nothing save what I have told you over and over again. You say to me that there is nothing in the swamp or near it which could form the setting of that frightful episode. I reply that I know nothing beyond what I saw. Vision or nightmare it may have been—vision or nightmare I fervently hope it was—yet it is all that my mind retains of what took place in those shocking hours after we left the sight of men. And why Harley Warren did not return, he or his shade—or some nameless thing I cannot describe—alone can tell.
      As I have said before, the weird studies of Harley Warren were well known to me, and to some extent shared by me. Of his vast collection of strange, rare books on forbidden subjects I have read all that are written in the languages of which I am master; but these are few as compared with those in languages I cannot understand. Most, I believe, are in Arabic; and the fiend-inspired book which brought on the end—the book which he carried in his pocket out of the world—was written in characters whose like I never saw elsewhere. Warren would never tell me just what was in that book. As to the nature of our studies—must I say again that I no longer retain full comprehension? It seems to me rather merciful that I do not, for they were terrible studies, which I pursued more through reluctant fascination than through actual inclination. Warren always dominated me, and sometimes I feared him. I remember how I shuddered at his facial expression on the night before the awful happening, when he talked so incessantly of his theory, why certain corpses never decay, but rest firm and fat in their tombs for a thousand years. But I do not fear him now, for I suspect that he has known horrors beyond my ken. Now I fear for him.
      Once more I say that I have no clear idea of our object on that night. Certainly, it had much to do with something in the book which Warren carried with him—that ancient book in undecipherable characters which had come to him from India a month before—but I swear I do not know what it was that we expected to find. Your witness says he saw us at half past eleven on the Gainesville pike, headed for Big Cypress Swamp. This is probably true, but I have no distinct memory of it. The picture seared into my soul is of one scene only, and the hour must have been long after midnight; for a waning crescent moon was high in the vaporous heavens.
      The place was an ancient cemetery; so ancient that I trembled at the manifold signs of immemorial years. It was in a deep, damp hollow, overgrown with rank grass, moss, and curious creeping weeds, and filled with a vague stench which my idle fancy associated absurdly with rotting stone. On every hand were the signs of neglect and decrepitude, and I seemed haunted by the notion that Warren and I were the first living creatures to invade a lethal silence of centuries. Over the valley’s rim a wan, waning crescent moon peered through the noisome vapours that seemed to emanate from unheard-of catacombs, and by its feeble, wavering beams I could distinguish a repellent array of antique slabs, urns, cenotaphs, and mausolean facades; all crumbling, moss-grown, and moisture-stained, and partly concealed by the gross luxuriance of the unhealthy vegetation. My first vivid impression of my own presence in this terrible necropolis concerns the act of pausing with Warren before a certain half-obliterated sepulchre, and of throwing down some burdens which we seemed to have been carrying. I now observed that I had with me an electric lantern and two spades, whilst my companion was supplied with a similar lantern and a portable telephone outfit. No word was uttered, for the spot and the task seemed known to us; and without delay we seized our spades and commenced to clear away the grass, weeds, and drifted earth from the flat, archaic mortuary. After uncovering the entire surface, which consisted of three immense granite slabs, we stepped back some distance to survey the charnel scene; and Warren appeared to make some mental calculations. Then he returned to the sepulchre, and using his spade as a lever, sought to pry up the slab lying nearest to a stony ruin which may have been a monument in its day. He did not succeed, and motioned to me to come to his assistance. Finally our combined strength loosened the stone, which we raised and tipped to one side.
      The removal of the slab revealed a black aperture, from which rushed an effluence of miasmal gases so nauseous that we started back in horror. After an interval, however, we approached the pit again, and found the exhalations less unbearable. Our lanterns disclosed the top of a flight of stone steps, dripping with some detestable ichor of the inner earth, and bordered by moist walls encrusted with nitre. And now for the first time my memory records verbal discourse, Warren addressing me at length in his mellow tenor voice; a voice singularly unperturbed by our awesome surroundings.
      “I’m sorry to have to ask you to stay on the surface,” he said, “but it would be a crime to let anyone with your frail nerves go down there. You can’t imagine, even from what you have read and from what I’ve told you, the things I shall have to see and do. It’s fiendish work, Carter, and I doubt if any man without ironclad sensibilities could ever see it through and come up alive and sane. I don’t wish to offend you, and heaven knows I’d be glad enough to have you with me; but the responsibility is in a certain sense mine, and I couldn’t drag a bundle of nerves like you down to probable death or madness. I tell you, you can’t imagine what the thing is really like! But I promise to keep you informed over the telephone of every move—you see I’ve enough wire here to reach to the centre of the earth and back!”
      I can still hear, in memory, those coolly spoken words; and I can still remember my remonstrances. I seemed desperately anxious to accompany my friend into those sepulchral depths, yet he proved inflexibly obdurate. At one time he threatened to abandon the expedition if I remained insistent; a threat which proved effective, since he alone held the key to the thing. All this I can still remember, though I no longer know what manner of thing we sought. After he had secured my reluctant acquiescence in his design, Warren picked up the reel of wire and adjusted the instruments. At his nod I took one of the latter and seated myself upon an aged, discoloured gravestone close by the newly uncovered aperture. Then he shook my hand, shouldered the coil of wire, and disappeared within that indescribable ossuary. For a moment I kept sight of the glow of his lantern, and heard the rustle of the wire as he laid it down after him; but the glow soon disappeared abruptly, as if a turn in the stone staircase had been encountered, and the sound died away almost as quickly. I was alone, yet bound to the unknown depths by those magic strands whose insulated surface lay green beneath the struggling beams of that waning crescent moon.
      In the lone silence of that hoary and deserted city of the dead, my mind conceived the most ghastly phantasies and illusions; and the grotesque shrines and monoliths seemed to assume a hideous personality—a half-sentience. Amorphous shadows seemed to lurk in the darker recesses of the weed-choked hollow and to flit as in some blasphemous ceremonial procession past the portals of the mouldering tombs in the hillside; shadows which could not have been cast by that pallid, peering crescent moon. I constantly consulted my watch by the light of my electric lantern, and listened with feverish anxiety at the receiver of the telephone; but for more than a quarter of an hour heard nothing. Then a faint clicking came from the instrument, and I called down to my friend in a tense voice. Apprehensive as I was, I was nevertheless unprepared for the words which came up from that uncanny vault in accents more alarmed and quivering than any I had heard before from Harley Warren. He who had so calmly left me a little while previously, now called from below in a shaky whisper more portentous than the loudest shriek:
      “God! If you could see what I am seeing!”
      I could not answer. Speechless, I could only wait. Then came the frenzied tones again:
      “Carter, it’s terrible—monstrous—unbelievable!”
      This time my voice did not fail me, and I poured into the transmitter a flood of excited questions. Terrified, I continued to repeat, “Warren, what is it? What is it?”
      Once more came the voice of my friend, still hoarse with fear, and now apparently tinged with despair:
      “I can’t tell you, Carter! It’s too utterly beyond thought—I dare not tell you—no man could know it and live—Great God! I never dreamed of THIS!” Stillness again, save for my now incoherent torrent of shuddering inquiry. Then the voice of Warren in a pitch of wilder consternation:
      “Carter! for the love of God, put back the slab and get out of this if you can! Quick!—leave everything else and make for the outside—it’s your only chance! Do as I say, and don’t ask me to explain!”
      I heard, yet was able only to repeat my frantic questions. Around me were the tombs and the darkness and the shadows; below me, some peril beyond the radius of the human imagination. But my friend was in greater danger than I, and through my fear I felt a vague resentment that he should deem me capable of deserting him under such circumstances. More clicking, and after a pause a piteous cry from Warren:
      “Beat it! For God’s sake, put back the slab and beat it, Carter!”
      Something in the boyish slang of my evidently stricken companion unleashed my faculties. I formed and shouted a resolution, “Warren, brace up! I’m coming down!” But at this offer the tone of my auditor changed to a scream of utter despair:
      “Don’t! You can’t understand! It’s too late—and my own fault. Put back the slab and run—there’s nothing else you or anyone can do now!” The tone changed again, this time acquiring a softer quality, as of hopeless resignation. Yet it remained tense through anxiety for me.
      “Quick—before it’s too late!” I tried not to heed him; tried to break through the paralysis which held me, and to fulfil my vow to rush down to his aid. But his next whisper found me still held inert in the chains of stark horror.
      “Carter—hurry! It’s no use—you must go—better one than two—the slab—” A pause, more clicking, then the faint voice of Warren:
      “Nearly over now—don’t make it harder—cover up those damned steps and run for your life—you’re losing time— So long, Carter—won’t see you again.” Here Warren’s whisper swelled into a cry; a cry that gradually rose to a shriek fraught with all the horror of the ages—
      “Curse these hellish things—legions— My God! Beat it! Beat it! Beat it!”
      After that was silence. I know not how many interminable aeons I sat stupefied; whispering, muttering, calling, screaming into that telephone. Over and over again through those aeons I whispered and muttered, called, shouted, and screamed, “Warren! Warren! Answer me—are you there?”
      And then there came to me the crowning horror of all—the unbelievable, unthinkable, almost unmentionable thing. I have said that aeons seemed to elapse after Warren shrieked forth his last despairing warning, and that only my own cries now broke the hideous silence. But after a while there was a further clicking in the receiver, and I strained my ears to listen. Again I called down, “Warren, are you there?”, and in answer heard the thing which has brought this cloud over my mind. I do not try, gentlemen, to account for that thing—that voice—nor can I venture to describe it in detail, since the first words took away my consciousness and created a mental blank which reaches to the time of my awakening in the hospital. Shall I say that the voice was deep; hollow; gelatinous; remote; unearthly; inhuman; disembodied? What shall I say? It was the end of my experience, and is the end of my story. I heard it, and knew no more. Heard it as I sat petrified in that unknown cemetery in the hollow, amidst the crumbling stones and the falling tombs, the rank vegetation and the miasmal vapours. Heard it well up from the innermost depths of that damnable open sepulchre as I watched amorphous, necrophagous shadows dance beneath an accursed waning moon. And this is what it said:
      “YOU FOOL, WARREN IS DEAD!”",False
"Shortly before ten the next morning I stood with one small valise in front of Hammond's Drug Store in old Market Square waiting for the Innsmouth bus. As the hour for its arrival drew near I noticed a general drift of the loungers to other places up the street, or to the Ideal Lunch across the square. Evidently the ticket-agent had not exaggerated the dislike which local People bore toward Innsmouth and its denizens. In a few moments a small motor-coach of extreme decrepitude and dirty grey colour rattled down State Street, made a turn, and drew up at the curb beside me. I felt immediately that it was the right one; a guess which the half-illegible sign on the windshield--Arkham-Innsmouth-Newburyport--soon verified.
There were only three passengers--dark, unkempt men of sullen visage and somewhat youthful cast--and when the vehicle stopped they clumsily shambled out and began walking up State Street in a silent, almost furtive fashion. The driver also alighted, and I watched him as he went into the drug store to make some purchase. This, I reflected, must be the Joe Sargent mentioned by the ticket-agent; and even before I noticed any details there spread over me a wave of spontaneous aversion which could be neither checked nor explained. It suddenly struck me as very natural that the local people should not wish to ride on a bus owned and driven by this man, or to visit any oftener than possible the habitat of such a man and his kinsfolk.
When the driver came out of the store I looked at him more carefully and tried to determine the source of my evil impression. He was a thin, stoop-shouldered man not much under six feet tall, dressed in shabby blue civilian clothes and wearing a frayed golf cap. His age was perhaps thirty-five, but the odd, deep creases in the sides of his neck made him seem older when one did not study his dull, expressionless face. He had a narrow head, bulging, watery-blue eyes that seemed never to wink, a flat nose, a receding forehead and chin, and singularly undeveloped ears. His long thick lip and coarse-pored, greyish cheeks seemed almost beardless except for some sparse yellow hairs that straggled and curled in irregular patches; and in places the surface seemed queerly irregular, as if peeling from some cutaneous disease. His hands were large and heavily veined, and had a very unusual greyish-blue tinge. The fingers were strikingly short in proportion to the rest of the structure, and seemed to have a tendency to curl closely into the huge palm. As he walked toward the bus I observed his peculiarly shambling gait and saw that his feet were inordinately immense. The more I studied them the more I wondered how he could buy any shoes to fit them.
A certain greasiness about the fellow increased my dislike. He was evidently given to working or lounging around the fish docks, and carried with him much of their characteristic smell. Just what foreign blood was in him I could not even guess. His oddities certainly did not look Asiatic, Polynesian, Levantine or negroid, yet I could see why the people found him alien. I myself would have thought of biological degeneration rather than alienage.
I was sorry when I saw there would be no other passengers on the bus. Somehow I did not like the idea of riding alone with this driver. But as leaving time obviously approached I conquered my qualms and followed the man aboard, extending him a dollar bill and murmuring the single word ""Innsmouth."" He looked curiously at me for a second as he returned forty cents change without speaking. I took a seat far behind him, but on the same side of the bus, since I wished to watch the shore during the journey.
At length the decrepit vehicle stared with a jerk, and rattled noisily past the old brick buildings of State Street amidst a cloud of vapour from the exhaust. Glancing at the people on the sidewalks, I thought I detected in them a curious wish to avoid looking at the bus--or at least a wish to avoid seeming to look at it. Then we turned to the left into High Street, where the going was smoother; flying by stately old mansions of the early republic and still older colonial farmhouses, passing the Lower Green and Parker River, and finally emerging into a long, monotonous stretch of open shore country.
The day was warm and sunny, but the landscape of sand and sedge-grass, and stunted shrubbery became more and desolate as we proceeded. Out the window I could see the blue water and the sandy line of Plum Island, and we presently drew very near the beach as our narrow road veered off from the main highway to Rowley and Ipswich. There were no visible houses, and I could tell by the state of the road that traffic was very light hereabouts. The weather-worn telephone poles carried only two wires. Now and then we crossed crude wooden bridges over tidal creeks that wound far inland and promoted the general isolation of the region.
Once in a while I noticed dead stumps and crumbling foundation-walls above the drifting sand, and recalled the old tradition quoted in one of the histories I had read, that this was once a fertile and thickly-settled countryside. The change, it was said, came simultaneously with the Innsmouth epidemic of l846, and was thought by simple folk to have a dark connection with hidden forces of evil. Actually, it was caused by the unwise cutting of woodlands near the shore, which robbed the soil of the best protection and opened the way for waves of wind-blown sand.
At last we lost sight of Plum Island and saw the vast expanse of the open Atlantic on our left. Our narrow course began to climb steeply, and I felt a singular sense of disquiet in looking at the lonely crest ahead where the rutted road-way met the sky. It was as if the bus were about to keep on in its ascent, leaving the sane earth altogether and merging with the unknown arcana of upper air and cryptical sky. The smell of the sea took on ominous implications, and the silent driver's bent, rigid back and narrow head became more and more hateful. As I looked at him I saw that the back of his head was almost as hairless as his face, having only a few straggling yellow strands upon a grey scabrous surface.
Then we reached the crest and beheld the outspread valley beyond, where the Manuxet joins the sea just north of the long line of cliffs that culminate in Kingsport Head and veer off toward Cape Ann. On the far misty horizon I could just make out the dizzy profile of the Head, topped by the queer ancient house of which so many legends are told; but for the moment all my attention was captured by the nearer panorama just below me. I had, I realized, come face to face with rumour-shadowed Innsmouth.
It was a town of wide extent and dense construction, yet one with a portentous dearth of visible life. From the tangle of chimney-pots scarcely a wisp of smoke came, and the three tall steeples loomed stark and unpainted against the seaward horizon. One of them was crumbling down at the top, and in that and another there were only black gaping holes where clock-dials should have been. The vast huddle of sagging gambrel roofs and peaked gables conveyed with offensive clearness the idea of wormy decay, and as we approached along the now descending road I could see that many roofs had wholly caved in. There were some large square Georgian houses, too, with hipped roofs, cupolas, and railed ""widow's walks."" These were mostly well back from the water, and one or two seemed to be in moderately sound condition. Stretching inland from among them I saw the rusted, grass-grown line of the abandoned railway, with leaning telegraph-poles now devoid of wires, and the half-obscured lines of the old carriage roads to Rowley and Ipswich.
The decay was worst close to the waterfront, though in its very midst I could spy the white belfry of a fairly well preserved brick structure which looked like a small factory. The harbour, long clogged with sand, was enclosed by an ancient stone breakwater; on which I could begin to discern the minute forms of a few seated fishermen, and at whose end were what looked like the foundations of a bygone lighthouse. A sandy tongue had formed inside this barrier and upon it I saw a few decrepit cabins, moored dories, and scattered lobster-pots. The only deep water seemed to be where the river poured out past the belfried structure and turned southward to join the ocean at the breakwater's end.
Here and there the ruins of wharves jutted out from the shore to end in indeterminate rottenness, those farthest south seeming the most decayed. And far out at sea, despite a high tide, I glimpsed a long, black line scarcely rising above the water yet carrying a suggestion of odd latent malignancy. This, I knew, must be Devil Reef. As I looked, a subtle, curious sense of beckoning seemed superadded to the grim repulsion; and oddly enough, I found this overtone more disturbing than the primary impression.
We met no one on the road, but presently began to pass deserted farms in varying stages of ruin. Then I noticed a few inhabited houses with rags stuffed in the broken windows and shells and dead fish lying about the littered yards. Once or twice I saw listless-looking people working in barren gardens or digging clams on the fishy-smelling beach below, and groups of dirty, simian-visaged children playing around weed-grown doorsteps. Somehow these people seemed more disquieting than the dismal buildings, for almost every one had certain peculiarities of face and motions which I instinctively disliked without being able to define or comprehend them. For a second I thought this typical physique suggested some picture I had seen, perhaps in a book, under circumstances of particular horror or melancholy; but this pseudo-recollection passed very quickly.
As the bus reached a lower level I began to catch the steady note of a waterfall through the unnatural stillness, The leaning, unpainted houses grew thicker, lined both sides of the road, and displayed more urban tendencies than did those we were leaving behind, The panorama ahead had contracted to a street scene, and in spots I could see where a cobblestone pavement and stretches of brick sidewalk had formerly existed. All the houses were apparently deserted, and there were occasional gaps where tumbledown chimneys and cellar walls told of buildings that had collapsed. Pervading everything was the most nauseous fishy odour imaginable.
Soon cross streets and junctions began to appear; those on the left leading to shoreward realms of unpaved squalor and decay, while those on the right shewed vistas of departed grandeur. So far I had seen no people in the town, but there now came signs of a sparse habitation--curtained windows here and there, and an occasional battered motorcar at the curb. Pavement and sidewalks were increasingly well-defined, and though most of the houses were quite old--wood and brick structures of the early 19th century--they were obviously kept fit for habitation. As an amateur antiquarian I almost lost my olfactory disgust and my feeling of menace and repulsion amidst this rich, unaltered survival from the past.
But I was not to reach my destination without one very strong impression of poignantly disagreeable quality. The bus had come to a sort of open concourse or radial point with churches on two sides and the bedraggled remains of a circular green in the centre, and I was looking at a large pillared hall on the right-hand junction ahead. The structure's once white paint was now gray and peeling and the black and gold sign on the pediment was so faded that I could only with difficulty make out the words ""Esoteric Order of Dagon."" This, then was the former Masonic Hall now given over to a degraded cult. As I strained to decipher this inscription my notice was distracted by the raucous tones of a cracked bell across the street, and I quickly turned to look out the window on my side of the coach.
The sound came from a squat stone church of manifestly later date than most of the houses, built in a clumsy Gothic fashion and having a disproportionately high basement with shuttered windows. Though the hands of its clock were missing on the side I glimpsed, I knew that those hoarse strokes were tolling the hour of eleven. Then suddenly all thoughts of time were blotted out by an onrushing image of sharp intensity and unaccountable horror which had seized me before I knew what it really was. The door of the church basement was open, revealing a rectangle of blackness inside. And as I looked, a certain object crossed or seemed to cross that dark rectangle; burning into my brain a momentary conception of nightmare which was all the more maddening because analysis could not shew a single nightmarish quality in it.
It was a living object--the first except the driver that I had seen since entering the compact part of the town--and had I been in a steadier mood I would have found nothing whatever of terror in it. Clearly, as I realised a moment later, it was the pastor; clad in some peculiar vestments doubtless introduced since the Order of Dagon had modified the ritual of the local churches. The thing which had probably caught my first subconscious glance and supplied the touch of bizarre horror was the tall tiara he wore; an almost exact duplicate of the one Miss Tilton had shown me the previous evening. This, acting on my imagination, had supplied namelessly sinister qualities to the indeterminate face and robed, shambling form beneath it. There was not, I soon decided, any reason why I should have felt that shuddering touch of evil pseudo-memory. Was it not natural that a local mystery cult should adopt among its regimentals an unique type of head-dress made familiar to the community in some strange way--perhaps as treasure-trove?
A very thin sprinkling of repellent-looking youngish people now became visible on the sidewalks--lone individuals, and silent knots of two or three. The lower floors of the crumbling houses sometimes harboured small shops with dingy signs, and I noticed a parked truck or two as we rattled along. The sound of waterfalls became more and more distinct, and presently I saw a fairly deep river-gorge ahead, spanned by a wide, iron-railed highway bridge beyond which a large square opened out. As we clanked over the bridge I looked out on both sides and observed some factory buildings on the edge of the grassy bluff or part way down. The water far below was very abundant, and I could see two vigorous sets of falls upstream on my right and at least one downstream on my left. From this point the noise was quite deafening. Then we rolled into the large semicircular square across the river and drew up on the right-hand side in front of a tall, cupola crowned building with remnants of yellow paint and with a half-effaced sign proclaiming it to be the Gilman House.
I was glad to get out of that bus, and at once proceeded to check my valise in the shabby hotel lobby. There was only one person in sight--an elderly man without what I had come to call the ""Innsmouth look""--and I decided not to ask him any of the questions which bothered me; remembering that odd things had been noticed in this hotel. Instead, I strolled out on the square, from which the bus had already gone, and studied the scene minutely and appraisingly.
One side of the cobblestoned open space was the straight line of the river; the other was a semicircle of slant-roofed brick buildings of about the 1800 period, from which several streets radiated away to the southeast, south, and southwest. Lamps were depressingly few and small--all low-powered incandescents--and I was glad that my plans called for departure before dark, even though I knew the moon would be bright. The buildings were all in fair condition, and included perhaps a dozen shops in current operation; of which one was a grocery of the First National chain, others a dismal restaurant, a drug store, and a wholesale fish-dealer's office, and still another, at the eastward extremity of the square near the river an office of the town's only industry--the Marsh Refining Company. There were perhaps ten people visible, and four or five automobiles and motor trucks stood scattered about. I did not need to be told that this was the civic centre of Innsmouth. Eastward I could catch blue glimpses of the harbour, against which rose the decaying remains of three once beautiful Georgian steeples. And toward the shore on the opposite bank of the river I saw the white belfry surmounting what I took to be the Marsh refinery.
For some reason or other I chose to make my first inquiries at the chain grocery, whose personnel was not likely to be native to Innsmouth. I found a solitary boy of about seventeen in charge, and was pleased to note the brightness and affability which promised cheerful information. He seemed exceptionally eager to talk, and I soon gathered that he did not like the place, its fishy smell, or its furtive people. A word with any outsider was a relief to him. He hailed from Arkham, boarded with a family who came from Ipswich, and went back whenever he got a moment off. His family did not like him to work in Innsmouth, but the chain had transferred him there and he did not wish to give up his job.
There was, he said, no public library or chamber of commerce in Innsmouth, but I could probably find my way about. The street I had come down was Federal. West of that were the fine old residence streets--Broad, Washington, Lafayette, and Adams--and east of it were the shoreward slums. It was in these slums--along Main Street--that I would find the old Georgian churches, but they were all long abandoned. It would be well not to make oneself too conspicuous in such neighbourhoods--especially north of the river since the people were sullen and hostile. Some strangers had even disappeared.
Certain spots were almost forbidden territory, as he had learned at considerable cost. One must not, for example, linger much around the Marsh refinery, or around any of the still used churches, or around the pillared Order of Dagon Hall at New Church Green. Those churches were very odd--all violently disavowed by their respective denominations elsewhere, and apparently using the queerest kind of ceremonials and clerical vestments. Their creeds were heterodox and mysterious, involving hints of certain marvelous transformations leading to bodily immorality--of a sort--on this earth. The youth's own pastor--Dr. Wallace of Asbury M. E. Church in Arkham--had gravely urged him not to join any church in Innsmouth.
As for the Innsmouth people--the youth hardly knew what to make of them. They were as furtive and seldom seen as animals that live in burrows, and one could hardly imagine how they passed the time apart from their desultory fishing. Perhaps--judging from the quantities of bootleg liquor they consumed--they lay for most of the daylight hours in an alcoholic stupor. They seemed sullenly banded together in some sort of fellowship and understanding--despising the world as if they had access to other and preferable spheres of entity. Their appearance--especially those staring, unwinking eyes which one never saw shut--was certainly shocking enough; and their voices were disgusting. It was awful to hear them chanting in their churches at night, and especially during their main festivals or revivals, which fell twice a year on April 30th and October 31st.
They were very fond of the water, and swam a great deal in both river and harbour. Swimming races out to Devil Reef were very common, and everyone in sight seemed well able to share in this arduous sport. When one came to think of it, it was generally only rather young people who were seen about in public, and of these the oldest were apt to be the most tainted-looking. When exceptions did occur, they were mostly persons with no trace of aberrancy, like the old clerk at the hotel. One wondered what became of the bulk of the older folk, and whether the ""Innsmouth look"" were not a strange and insidious disease-phenomenon which increased its hold as years advanced.
Only a very rare affliction, of course, could bring about such vast and radical anatomical changes in a single individual after maturity--changes invoking osseous factors as basic as the shape of the skull--but then, even this aspect was no more baffling and unheard-of than the visible features of the malady as a whole. It would be hard, the youth implied, to form any real conclusions regarding such a matter; since one never came to know the natives personally no matter how long one might live in Innsmouth.
The youth was certain that many specimens even worse than the worst visible ones were kept locked indoors in some places. People sometimes heard the queerest kind of sounds. The tottering waterfront hovels north of the river were reputedly connected by hidden tunnels, being thus a veritable warren of unseen abnormalities. What kind of foreign blood--if any--these beings had, it was impossible to tell. They sometimes kept certain especially repulsive characters out of sight when government and others from the outside world came to town.
It would be of no use, my informant said, to ask the natives anything about the place. The only one who would talk was a very aged but normal looking man who lived at the poorhouse on the north rim of the town and spent his time walking about or lounging around the fire station. This hoary character, Zadok Allen, was 96 years old and somewhat touched in the head, besides being the town drunkard. He was a strange, furtive creature who constantly looked over his shoulder as if afraid of something, and when sober could not be persuaded to talk at all with strangers. He was, however, unable to resist any offer of his favorite poison; and once drunk would furnish the most astonishing fragments of whispered reminiscence.
After all, though, little useful data could be gained from him; since his stories were all insane, incomplete hints of impossible marvels and horrors which could have no source save in his own disordered fancy. Nobody ever believed him, but the natives did not like him to drink and talk with strangers; and it was not always safe to be seen questioning him. It was probably from him that some of the wildest popular whispers and delusions were derived.
Several non-native residents had reported monstrous glimpses from time to time, but between old Zadok's tales and the malformed inhabitants it was no wonder such illusions were current. None of the non-natives ever stayed out late at night, there being a widespread impression that it was not wise to do so. Besides, the streets were loathsomely dark.
As for business--the abundance of fish was certainly almost uncanny, but the natives were taking less and less advantage of it. Moreover, prices were falling and competition was growing. Of course the town's real business was the refinery, whose commercial office was on the square only a few doors east of where we stood. Old Man Marsh was never seen, but sometimes went to the works in a closed, curtained car.
There were all sorts of rumors about how Marsh had come to look. He had once been a great dandy; and people said he still wore the frock-coated finery of the Edwardian age curiously adapted to certain deformities. His son had formerly conducted the office in the square, but latterly they had been keeping out of sight a good deal and leaving the brunt of affairs to the younger generation. The sons and their sisters had come to look very queer, especially the elder ones; and it was said that their health was failing.
One of the Marsh daughters was a repellent, reptilian-looking woman who wore an excess of weird jewellery clearly of the same exotic tradition as that to which the strange tiara belonged. My informant had noticed it many times, and had heard it spoken of as coming from some secret hoard, either of pirates or of demons. The clergymen--or priests, or whatever they were called nowadays--also wore this kind of ornament as a headdress; but one seldom caught glimpses of them. Other specimens the youth had not seen, though many were rumoured to exist around Innsmouth.
The Marshes, together with the other three gently bred families of the town--the Waites, the Gilmans, and the Eliots--were all very retiring. They lived in immense houses along Washington Street, and several were reputed to harbour in concealment certain living kinsfolk whose personal aspect forbade public view, and whose deaths had been reported and recorded.
Warning me that many of the street signs were down, the youth drew for my benefit a rough but ample and painstaking sketch map of the town's salient features. After a moment's study I felt sure that it would be of great help, and pocketed it with profuse thanks. Disliking the dinginess of the single restaurant I had seen, I bought a fair supply of cheese crackers and ginger wafers to serve as a lunch later on. My program, I decided, would be to thread the principal streets, talk with any non-natives I might encounter, and catch the eight o'clock coach for Arkham. The town, I could see, formed a significant and exaggerated example of communal decay; but being no sociologist I would limit my serious observations to the field of architecture.
Thus I began my systematic though half-bewildered tour of Innsmouth's narrow, shadow-blighted ways. Crossing the bridge and turning toward the roar of the lower falls, I passed close to the Marsh refinery, which seemed to be oddly free from the noise of industry. The building stood on the steep river bluff near a bridge and an open confluence of streets which I took to be the earliest civic center, displaced after the Revolution by the present Town Square.
Re-crossing the gorge on the Main Street bridge, I struck a region of utter desertion which somehow made me shudder. Collapsing huddles of gambrel roofs formed a jagged and fantastic skyline, above which rose the ghoulish, decapitated steeple of an ancient church. Some houses along Main Street were tenanted, but most were tightly boarded up. Down unpaved side streets I saw the black, gaping windows of deserted hovels, many of which leaned at perilous and incredible angles through the sinking of part of the foundations. Those windows stared so spectrally that it took courage to turn eastward toward the waterfront. Certainly, the terror of a deserted house swells in geometrical rather than arithmetical progression as houses multiply to form a city of stark desolation. The sight of such endless avenues of fishy-eyed vacancy and death, and the thought of such linked infinities of black, brooding compartments given over to cob-webs and memories and the conqueror worm, start up vestigial fears and aversions that not even the stoutest philosophy can disperse.
Fish Street was as deserted as Main, though it differed in having many brick and stone warehouses still in excellent shape. Water Street was almost its duplicate, save that there were great seaward gaps where wharves had been. Not a living thing did I see except for the scattered fishermen on the distant break-water, and not a sound did I hear save the lapping of the harbour tides and the roar of the falls in the Manuxet. The town was getting more and more on my nerves, and I looked behind me furtively as I picked my way back over the tottering Water Street bridge. The Fish Street bridge, according to the sketch, was in ruins.
North of the river there were traces of squalid life--active fish-packing houses in Water Street, smoking chimneys and patched roofs here and there, occasional sounds from indeterminate sources, and infrequent shambling forms in the dismal streets and unpaved lanes--but I seemed to find this even more oppressive than the southerly desertion. For one thing, the people were more hideous and abnormal than those near the centre of the town; so that I was several times evilly reminded of something utterly fantastic which I could not quite place. Undoubtedly the alien strain in the Innsmouth folk was stronger here than farther inland--unless, indeed, the ""Innsmouth look"" were a disease rather than a blood stain, in which case this district might be held to harbour the more advanced cases.
One detail that annoyed me was the distribution of the few faint sounds I heard. They ought naturally to have come wholly from the visibly inhabited houses, yet in reality were often strongest inside the most rigidly boarded-up facades. There were creakings, scurryings, and hoarse doubtful noises; and I thought uncomfortably about the hidden tunnels suggested by the grocery boy. Suddenly I found myself wondering what the voices of those denizens would be like. I had heard no speech so far in this quarter, and was unaccountably anxious not to do so.
Pausing only long enough to look at two fine but ruinous old churches at Main and Church Streets, I hastened out of that vile waterfront slum. My next logical goal was New Church Green, but somehow or other I could not bear to repass the church in whose basement I had glimpsed the inexplicably frightening form of that strangely diademmed priest or pastor. Besides, the grocery youth had told me that churches, as well as the Order of Dagon Hall, were not advisable neighbourhoods for strangers.
Accordingly I kept north along Main to Martin, then turning inland, crossing Federal Street safely north of the Green, and entering the decayed patrician neighbourhood of northern Broad, Washington, Lafayette, and Adams Streets. Though these stately old avenues were ill-surfaced and unkempt, their elm-shaded dignity had not entirely departed. Mansion after mansion claimed my gaze, most of them decrepit and boarded up amidst neglected grounds, but one or two in each street shewing signs of occupancy. In Washington Street there was a row of four or five in excellent repair and with finely-tended lawns and gardens. The most sumptuous of these--with wide terraced parterres extending back the whole way to Lafayette Street--I took to be the home of Old Man Marsh, the afflicted refinery owner.
In all these streets no living thing was visible, and I wondered at the complete absence of cats and dogs from Innsmouth. Another thing which puzzled and disturbed me, even in some of the best-preserved mansions, was the tightly shuttered condition of many third-story and attic windows. Furtiveness and secretiveness seemed universal in this hushed city of alienage and death, and I could not escape the sensation of being watched from ambush on every hand by sly, staring eyes that never shut.
I shivered as the cracked stroke of three sounded from a belfry on my left. Too well did I recall the squat church from which those notes came. Following Washington Street toward the river, I now faced a new zone of former industry and commerce; noting the ruins of a factory ahead, and seeing others, with the traces of an old railway station and covered railway bridge beyond, up the gorge on my right.
The uncertain bridge now before me was posted with a warning sign, but I took the risk and crossed again to the south bank where traces of life reappeared. Furtive, shambling creatures stared cryptically in my direction, and more normal faces eyed me coldly and curiously. Innsmouth was rapidly becoming intolerable, and I turned down Paine Street toward the Square in the hope of getting some vehicle to take me to Arkham before the still-distant starting-time of that sinister bus.
It was then that I saw the tumbledown fire station on my left, and noticed the red faced, bushy-bearded, watery eyed old man in nondescript rags who sat on a bench in front of it talking with a pair of unkempt but not abnormal looking firemen. This, of course, must be Zadok Allen, the half-crazed, liquorish nonagenarian whose tales of old Innsmouth and its shadow were so hideous and incredible.
","Whether the dreams brought on the fever or the fever brought on the dreams Walter Gilman did not know. Behind everything crouched the brooding, festering horror of the ancient town, and of the mouldy, unhallowed garret gable where he wrote and studied and wrestled with figures and formulae when he was not tossing on the meagre iron bed. His ears were growing sensitive to a preternatural and intolerable degree, and he had long ago stopped the cheap mantel clock whose ticking had come to seem like a thunder of artillery. At night the subtle stirring of the black city outside, the sinister scurrying of rats in the wormy partitions, and the creaking of hidden timbers in the centuried house, were enough to give him a sense of strident pandemonium. The darkness always teemed with unexplained sound—and yet he sometimes shook with fear lest the noises he heard should subside and allow him to hear certain other, fainter, noises which he suspected were lurking behind them.
      He was in the changeless, legend-haunted city of Arkham, with its clustering gambrel roofs that sway and sag over attics where witches hid from the King’s men in the dark, olden days of the Province. Nor was any spot in that city more steeped in macabre memory than the gable room which harboured him—for it was this house and this room which had likewise harboured old Keziah Mason, whose flight from Salem Gaol at the last no one was ever able to explain. That was in 1692—the gaoler had gone mad and babbled of a small, white-fanged furry thing which scuttled out of Keziah’s cell, and not even Cotton Mather could explain the curves and angles smeared on the grey stone walls with some red, sticky fluid.
      Possibly Gilman ought not to have studied so hard. Non-Euclidean calculus and quantum physics are enough to stretch any brain; and when one mixes them with folklore, and tries to trace a strange background of multi-dimensional reality behind the ghoulish hints of the Gothic tales and the wild whispers of the chimney-corner, one can hardly expect to be wholly free from mental tension. Gilman came from Haverhill, but it was only after he had entered college in Arkham that he began to connect his mathematics with the fantastic legends of elder magic. Something in the air of the hoary town worked obscurely on his imagination. The professors at Miskatonic had urged him to slacken up, and had voluntarily cut down his course at several points. Moreover, they had stopped him from consulting the dubious old books on forbidden secrets that were kept under lock and key in a vault at the university library. But all these precautions came late in the day, so that Gilman had some terrible hints from the dreaded Necronomicon of Abdul Alhazred, the fragmentary Book of Eibon, and the suppressed Unaussprechlichen Kulten of von Junzt to correlate with his abstract formulae on the properties of space and the linkage of dimensions known and unknown.
      He knew his room was in the old Witch House—that, indeed, was why he had taken it. There was much in the Essex County records about Keziah Mason’s trial, and what she had admitted under pressure to the Court of Oyer and Terminer had fascinated Gilman beyond all reason. She had told Judge Hathorne of lines and curves that could be made to point out directions leading through the walls of space to other spaces beyond, and had implied that such lines and curves were frequently used at certain midnight meetings in the dark valley of the white stone beyond Meadow Hill and on the unpeopled island in the river. She had spoken also of the Black Man, of her oath, and of her new secret name of Nahab. Then she had drawn those devices on the walls of her cell and vanished.
      Gilman believed strange things about Keziah, and had felt a queer thrill on learning that her dwelling was still standing after more than 235 years. When he heard the hushed Arkham whispers about Keziah’s persistent presence in the old house and the narrow streets, about the irregular human tooth-marks left on certain sleepers in that and other houses, about the childish cries heard near May-Eve, and Hallowmass, about the stench often noted in the old house’s attic just after those dreaded seasons, and about the small, furry, sharp-toothed thing which haunted the mouldering structure and the town and nuzzled people curiously in the black hours before dawn, he resolved to live in the place at any cost. A room was easy to secure; for the house was unpopular, hard to rent, and long given over to cheap lodgings. Gilman could not have told what he expected to find there, but he knew he wanted to be in the building where some circumstance had more or less suddenly given a mediocre old woman of the seventeenth century an insight into mathematical depths perhaps beyond the utmost modern delvings of Planck, Heisenberg, Einstein, and de Sitter.
      He studied the timber and plaster walls for traces of cryptic designs at every accessible spot where the paper had peeled, and within a week managed to get the eastern attic room where Keziah was held to have practiced her spells. It had been vacant from the first—for no one had ever been willing to stay there long—but the Polish landlord had grown wary about renting it. Yet nothing whatever happened to Gilman till about the time of the fever. No ghostly Keziah flitted through the sombre halls and chambers, no small furry thing crept into his dismal eyrie to nuzzle him, and no record of the witch’s incantations rewarded his constant search. Sometimes he would take walks through shadowy tangles of unpaved musty-smelling lanes where eldritch brown houses of unknown age leaned and tottered and leered mockingly through narrow, small-paned windows. Here he knew strange things had happened once, and there was a faint suggestion behind the surface that everything of that monstrous past might not—at least in the darkest, narrowest, and most intricately crooked alleys—have utterly perished. He also rowed out twice to the ill-regarded island in the river, and made a sketch of the singular angles described by the moss-grown rows of grey standing stones whose origin was so obscure and immemorial.
      Gilman’s room was of good size but queerly irregular shape; the north wall slanting perceptibly inward from the outer to the inner end, while the low ceiling slanted gently downward in the same direction. Aside from an obvious rat-hole and the signs of other stopped-up ones, there was no access—nor any appearance of a former avenue of access—to the space which must have existed between the slanting wall and the straight outer wall on the house’s north side, though a view from the exterior shewed where a window had been boarded up at a very remote date. The loft above the ceiling—which must have had a slanting floor—was likewise inaccessible. When Gilman climbed up a ladder to the cobwebbed level loft above the rest of the attic he found vestiges of a bygone aperture tightly and heavily covered with ancient planking and secured by the stout wooden pegs common in colonial carpentry. No amount of persuasion, however, could induce the stolid landlord to let him investigate either of these two closed spaces.
      As time wore along, his absorption in the irregular wall and ceiling of his room increased; for he began to read into the odd angles a mathematical significance which seemed to offer vague clues regarding their purpose. Old Keziah, he reflected, might have had excellent reasons for living in a room with peculiar angles; for was it not through certain angles that she claimed to have gone outside the boundaries of the world of space we know? His interest gradually veered away from the unplumbed voids beyond the slanting surfaces, since it now appeared that the purpose of those surfaces concerned the side he was already on.
      The touch of brain-fever and the dreams began early in February. For some time, apparently, the curious angles of Gilman’s room had been having a strange, almost hypnotic effect on him; and as the bleak winter advanced he had found himself staring more and more intently at the corner where the down-slanting ceiling met the inward-slanting wall. About this period his inability to concentrate on his formal studies worried him considerably, his apprehensions about the mid-year examinations being very acute. But the exaggerated sense of hearing was scarcely less annoying. Life had become an insistent and almost unendurable cacophony, and there was that constant, terrifying impression of other sounds—perhaps from regions beyond life—trembling on the very brink of audibility. So far as concrete noises went, the rats in the ancient partitions were the worst. Sometimes their scratching seemed not only furtive but deliberate. When it came from beyond the slanting north wall it was mixed with a sort of dry rattling—and when it came from the century-closed loft above the slanting ceiling Gilman always braced himself as if expecting some horror which only bided its time before descending to engulf him utterly.
      The dreams were wholly beyond the pale of sanity, and Gilman felt that they must be a result, jointly, of his studies in mathematics and in folklore. He had been thinking too much about the vague regions which his formulae told him must lie beyond the three dimensions we know, and about the possibility that old Keziah Mason—guided by some influence past all conjecture—had actually found the gate to those regions. The yellowed county records containing her testimony and that of her accusers were so damnably suggestive of things beyond human experience—and the descriptions of the darting little furry object which served as her familiar were so painfully realistic despite their incredible details.
      That object—no larger than a good-sized rat and quaintly called by the townspeople “Brown Jenkin”—seemed to have been the fruit of a remarkable case of sympathetic herd-delusion, for in 1692 no less than eleven persons had testified to glimpsing it. There were recent rumours, too, with a baffling and disconcerting amount of agreement. Witnesses said it had long hair and the shape of a rat, but that its sharp-toothed, bearded face was evilly human while its paws were like tiny human hands. It took messages betwixt old Keziah and the devil, and was nursed on the witch’s blood—which it sucked like a vampire. Its voice was a kind of loathsome titter, and it could speak all languages. Of all the bizarre monstrosities in Gilman’s dreams, nothing filled him with greater panic and nausea than this blasphemous and diminutive hybrid, whose image flitted across his vision in a form a thousandfold more hateful than anything his waking mind had deduced from the ancient records and the modern whispers.
      Gilman’s dreams consisted largely in plunges through limitless abysses of inexplicably coloured twilight and bafflingly disordered sound; abysses whose material and gravitational properties, and whose relation to his own entity, he could not even begin to explain. He did not walk or climb, fly or swim, crawl or wriggle; yet always experienced a mode of motion partly voluntary and partly involuntary. Of his own condition he could not well judge, for sight of his arms, legs, and torso seemed always cut off by some odd disarrangement of perspective; but he felt that his physical organisation and faculties were somehow marvellously transmuted and obliquely projected—though not without a certain grotesque relationship to his normal proportions and properties.
      The abysses were by no means vacant, being crowded with indescribably angled masses of alien-hued substance, some of which appeared to be organic while others seemed inorganic. A few of the organic objects tended to awake vague memories in the back of his mind, though he could form no conscious idea of what they mockingly resembled or suggested. In the later dreams he began to distinguish separate categories into which the organic objects appeared to be divided, and which seemed to involve in each case a radically different species of conduct-pattern and basic motivation. Of these categories one seemed to him to include objects slightly less illogical and irrelevant in their motions than the members of the other categories.
      All the objects—organic and inorganic alike—were totally beyond description or even comprehension. Gilman sometimes compared the inorganic masses to prisms, labyrinths, clusters of cubes and planes, and Cyclopean buildings; and the organic things struck him variously as groups of bubbles, octopi, centipedes, living Hindoo idols, and intricate Arabesques roused into a kind of ophidian animation. Everything he saw was unspeakably menacing and horrible; and whenever one of the organic entities appeared by its motions to be noticing him, he felt a stark, hideous fright which generally jolted him awake. Of how the organic entities moved, he could tell no more than of how he moved himself. In time he observed a further mystery—the tendency of certain entities to appear suddenly out of empty space, or to disappear totally with equal suddenness. The shrieking, roaring confusion of sound which permeated the abysses was past all analysis as to pitch, timbre, or rhythm; but seemed to be synchronous with vague visual changes in all the indefinite objects, organic and inorganic alike. Gilman had a constant sense of dread that it might rise to some unbearable degree of intensity during one or another of its obscure, relentlessly inevitable fluctuations.
      But it was not in these vortices of complete alienage that he saw Brown Jenkin. That shocking little horror was reserved for certain lighter, sharper dreams which assailed him just before he dropped into the fullest depths of sleep. He would be lying in the dark fighting to keep awake when a faint lambent glow would seem to shimmer around the centuried room, shewing in a violet mist the convergence of angled planes which had seized his brain so insidiously. The horror would appear to pop out of the rat-hole in the corner and patter toward him over the sagging, wide-planked floor with evil expectancy in its tiny, bearded human face—but mercifully, this dream always melted away before the object got close enough to nuzzle him. It had hellishly long, sharp, canine teeth. Gilman tried to stop up the rat-hole every day, but each night the real tenants of the partitions would gnaw away the obstruction, whatever it might be. Once he had the landlord nail tin over it, but the next night the rats gnawed a fresh hole—in making which they pushed or dragged out into the room a curious little fragment of bone.
      Gilman did not report his fever to the doctor, for he knew he could not pass the examinations if ordered to the college infirmary when every moment was needed for cramming. As it was, he failed in Calculus D and Advanced General Psychology, though not without hope of making up lost ground before the end of the term. It was in March when the fresh element entered his lighter preliminary dreaming, and the nightmare shape of Brown Jenkin began to be companioned by the nebulous blur which grew more and more to resemble a bent old woman. This addition disturbed him more than he could account for, but finally he decided that it was like an ancient crone whom he had twice actually encountered in the dark tangle of lanes near the abandoned wharves. On those occasions the evil, sardonic, and seemingly unmotivated stare of the beldame had set him almost shivering—especially the first time, when an overgrown rat darting across the shadowed mouth of a neighbouring alley had made him think irrationally of Brown Jenkin. Now, he reflected, those nervous fears were being mirrored in his disordered dreams.
      That the influence of the old house was unwholesome, he could not deny; but traces of his early morbid interest still held him there. He argued that the fever alone was responsible for his nightly phantasies, and that when the touch abated he would be free from the monstrous visions. Those visions, however, were of abhorrent vividness and convincingness, and whenever he awaked he retained a vague sense of having undergone much more than he remembered. He was hideously sure that in unrecalled dreams he had talked with both Brown Jenkin and the old woman, and that they had been urging him to go somewhere with them and to meet a third being of greater potency.
      Toward the end of March he began to pick up in his mathematics, though other studies bothered him increasingly. He was getting an intuitive knack for solving Riemannian equations, and astonished Professor Upham by his comprehension of fourth-dimensional and other problems which had floored all the rest of the class. One afternoon there was a discussion of possible freakish curvatures in space, and of theoretical points of approach or even contact between our part of the cosmos and various other regions as distant as the farthest stars or the trans-galactic gulfs themselves—or even as fabulously remote as the tentatively conceivable cosmic units beyond the whole Einsteinian space-time continuum. Gilman’s handling of this theme filled everyone with admiration, even though some of his hypothetical illustrations caused an increase in the always plentiful gossip about his nervous and solitary eccentricity. What made the students shake their heads was his sober theory that a man might—given mathematical knowledge admittedly beyond all likelihood of human acquirement—step deliberately from the earth to any other celestial body which might lie at one of an infinity of specific points in the cosmic pattern.
      Such a step, he said, would require only two stages; first, a passage out of the three-dimensional sphere we know, and second, a passage back to the three-dimensional sphere at another point, perhaps one of infinite remoteness. That this could be accomplished without loss of life was in many cases conceivable. Any being from any part of three-dimensional space could probably survive in the fourth dimension; and its survival of the second stage would depend upon what alien part of three-dimensional space it might select for its re-entry. Denizens of some planets might be able to live on certain others—even planets belonging to other galaxies, or to similar-dimensional phases of other space-time continua—though of course there must be vast numbers of mutually uninhabitable even though mathematically juxtaposed bodies or zones of space.
      It was also possible that the inhabitants of a given dimensional realm could survive entry to many unknown and incomprehensible realms of additional or indefinitely multiplied dimensions—be they within or outside the given space-time continuum—and that the converse would be likewise true. This was a matter for speculation, though one could be fairly certain that the type of mutation involved in a passage from any given dimensional plane to the next higher plane would not be destructive of biological integrity as we understand it. Gilman could not be very clear about his reasons for this last assumption, but his haziness here was more than overbalanced by his clearness on other complex points. Professor Upham especially liked his demonstration of the kinship of higher mathematics to certain phases of magical lore transmitted down the ages from an ineffable antiquity—human or pre-human—whose knowledge of the cosmos and its laws was greater than ours.
      Around the first of April Gilman worried considerably because his slow fever did not abate. He was also troubled by what some of his fellow-lodgers said about his sleep-walking. It seemed that he was often absent from his bed, and that the creaking of his floor at certain hours of the night was remarked by the man in the room below. This fellow also spoke of hearing the tread of shod feet in the night; but Gilman was sure he must have been mistaken in this, since shoes as well as other apparel were always precisely in place in the morning. One could develop all sorts of aural delusions in this morbid old house—for did not Gilman himself, even in daylight, now feel certain that noises other than rat-scratchings came from the black voids beyond the slanting wall and above the slanting ceiling? His pathologically sensitive ears began to listen for faint footfalls in the immemorially sealed loft overhead, and sometimes the illusion of such things was agonisingly realistic.
      However, he knew that he had actually become a somnambulist; for twice at night his room had been found vacant, though with all his clothing in place. Of this he had been assured by Frank Elwood, the one fellow-student whose poverty forced him to room in this squalid and unpopular house. Elwood had been studying in the small hours and had come up for help on a differential equation, only to find Gilman absent. It had been rather presumptuous of him to open the unlocked door after knocking had failed to rouse a response, but he had needed the help very badly and thought that his host would not mind a gentle prodding awake. On neither occasion, though, had Gilman been there—and when told of the matter he wondered where he could have been wandering, barefoot and with only his night-clothes on. He resolved to investigate the matter if reports of his sleep-walking continued, and thought of sprinkling flour on the floor of the corridor to see where his footsteps might lead. The door was the only conceivable egress, for there was no possible foothold outside the narrow window.
      As April advanced Gilman’s fever-sharpened ears were disturbed by the whining prayers of a superstitious loomfixer named Joe Mazurewicz, who had a room on the ground floor. Mazurewicz had told long, rambling stories about the ghost of old Keziah and the furry, sharp-fanged, nuzzling thing, and had said he was so badly haunted at times that only his silver crucifix—given him for the purpose by Father Iwanicki of St. Stanislaus’ Church—could bring him relief. Now he was praying because the Witches’ Sabbath was drawing near. May-Eve was Walpurgis-Night, when hell’s blackest evil roamed the earth and all the slaves of Satan gathered for nameless rites and deeds. It was always a very bad time in Arkham, even though the fine folks up in Miskatonic Avenue and High and Saltonstall Streets pretended to know nothing about it. There would be bad doings—and a child or two would probably be missing. Joe knew about such things, for his grandmother in the old country had heard tales from her grandmother. It was wise to pray and count one’s beads at this season. For three months Keziah and Brown Jenkin had not been near Joe’s room, nor near Paul Choynski’s room, nor anywhere else—and it meant no good when they held off like that. They must be up to something.
      Gilman dropped in at a doctor’s office on the 16th of the month, and was surprised to find his temperature was not as high as he had feared. The physician questioned him sharply, and advised him to see a nerve specialist. On reflection, he was glad he had not consulted the still more inquisitive college doctor. Old Waldron, who had curtailed his activities before, would have made him take a rest—an impossible thing now that he was so close to great results in his equations. He was certainly near the boundary between the known universe and the fourth dimension, and who could say how much farther he might go?
      But even as these thoughts came to him he wondered at the source of his strange confidence. Did all of this perilous sense of imminence come from the formulae on the sheets he covered day by day? The soft, stealthy, imaginary footsteps in the sealed loft above were unnerving. And now, too, there was a growing feeling that somebody was constantly persuading him to do something terrible which he could not do. How about the somnambulism? Where did he go sometimes in the night? And what was that faint suggestion of sound which once in a while seemed to trickle through the maddening confusion of identifiable sounds even in broad daylight and full wakefulness? Its rhythm did not correspond to anything on earth, unless perhaps to the cadence of one or two unmentionable Sabbat-chants, and sometimes he feared it corresponded to certain attributes of the vague shrieking or roaring in those wholly alien abysses of dream.
      The dreams were meanwhile getting to be atrocious. In the lighter preliminary phase the evil old woman was now of fiendish distinctness, and Gilman knew she was the one who had frightened him in the slums. Her bent back, long nose, and shrivelled chin were unmistakable, and her shapeless brown garments were like those he remembered. The expression on her face was one of hideous malevolence and exultation, and when he awaked he could recall a croaking voice that persuaded and threatened. He must meet the Black Man, and go with them all to the throne of Azathoth at the centre of ultimate Chaos. That was what she said. He must sign in his own blood the book of Azathoth and take a new secret name now that his independent delvings had gone so far. What kept him from going with her and Brown Jenkin and the other to the throne of Chaos where the thin flutes pipe mindlessly was the fact that he had seen the name “Azathoth” in the Necronomicon, and knew it stood for a primal evil too horrible for description.
      The old woman always appeared out of thin air near the corner where the downward slant met the inward slant. She seemed to crystallise at a point closer to the ceiling than to the floor, and every night she was a little nearer and more distinct before the dream shifted. Brown Jenkin, too, was always a little nearer at the last, and its yellowish-white fangs glistened shockingly in that unearthly violet phosphorescence. Its shrill loathsome tittering stuck more and more in Gilman’s head, and he could remember in the morning how it had pronounced the words “Azathoth” and “Nyarlathotep”.
      In the deeper dreams everything was likewise more distinct, and Gilman felt that the twilight abysses around him were those of the fourth dimension. Those organic entities whose motions seemed least flagrantly irrelevant and unmotivated were probably projections of life-forms from our own planet, including human beings. What the others were in their own dimensional sphere or spheres he dared not try to think. Two of the less irrelevantly moving things—a rather large congeries of iridescent, prolately spheroidal bubbles and a very much smaller polyhedron of unknown colours and rapidly shifting surface angles—seemed to take notice of him and follow him about or float ahead as he changed position among the titan prisms, labyrinths, cube-and-plane clusters, and quasi-buildings; and all the while the vague shrieking and roaring waxed louder and louder, as if approaching some monstrous climax of utterly unendurable intensity.
      During the night of April 19–20 the new development occurred. Gilman was half-involuntarily moving about in the twilight abysses with the bubble-mass and the small polyhedron floating ahead, when he noticed the peculiarly regular angles formed by the edges of some gigantic neighbouring prism-clusters. In another second he was out of the abyss and standing tremulously on a rocky hillside bathed in intense, diffused green light. He was barefooted and in his night-clothes, and when he tried to walk discovered that he could scarcely lift his feet. A swirling vapour hid everything but the immediate sloping terrain from sight, and he shrank from the thought of the sounds that might surge out of that vapour.
      Then he saw the two shapes laboriously crawling toward him—the old woman and the little furry thing. The crone strained up to her knees and managed to cross her arms in a singular fashion, while Brown Jenkin pointed in a certain direction with a horribly anthropoid fore paw which it raised with evident difficulty. Spurred by an impulse he did not originate, Gilman dragged himself forward along a course determined by the angle of the old woman’s arms and the direction of the small monstrosity’s paw, and before he had shuffled three steps he was back in the twilight abysses. Geometrical shapes seethed around him, and he fell dizzily and interminably. At last he woke in his bed in the crazily angled garret of the eldritch old house.
      He was good for nothing that morning, and stayed away from all his classes. Some unknown attraction was pulling his eyes in a seemingly irrelevant direction, for he could not help staring at a certain vacant spot on the floor. As the day advanced the focus of his unseeing eyes changed position, and by noon he had conquered the impulse to stare at vacancy. About two o’clock he went out for lunch, and as he threaded the narrow lanes of the city he found himself turning always to the southeast. Only an effort halted him at a cafeteria in Church Street, and after the meal he felt the unknown pull still more strongly.
      He would have to consult a nerve specialist after all—perhaps there was a connexion with his somnambulism—but meanwhile he might at least try to break the morbid spell himself. Undoubtedly he could still manage to walk away from the pull; so with great resolution he headed against it and dragged himself deliberately north along Garrison Street. By the time he had reached the bridge over the Miskatonic he was in a cold perspiration, and he clutched at the iron railing as he gazed upstream at the ill-regarded island whose regular lines of ancient standing stones brooded sullenly in the afternoon sunlight.
      Then he gave a start. For there was a clearly visible living figure on that desolate island, and a second glance told him it was certainly the strange old woman whose sinister aspect had worked itself so disastrously into his dreams. The tall grass near her was moving, too, as if some other living thing were crawling close to the ground. When the old woman began to turn toward him he fled precipitately off the bridge and into the shelter of the town’s labyrinthine waterfront alleys. Distant though the island was, he felt that a monstrous and invincible evil could flow from the sardonic stare of that bent, ancient figure in brown.
      The southeastward pull still held, and only with tremendous resolution could Gilman drag himself into the old house and up the rickety stairs. For hours he sat silent and aimless, with his eyes shifting gradually westward. About six o’clock his sharpened ears caught the whining prayers of Joe Mazurewicz two floors below, and in desperation he seized his hat and walked out into the sunset-golden streets, letting the now directly southward pull carry him where it might. An hour later darkness found him in the open fields beyond Hangman’s Brook, with the glimmering spring stars shining ahead. The urge to walk was gradually changing to an urge to leap mystically into space, and suddenly he realised just where the source of the pull lay.
      It was in the sky. A definite point among the stars had a claim on him and was calling him. Apparently it was a point somewhere between Hydra and Argo Navis, and he knew that he had been urged toward it ever since he had awaked soon after dawn. In the morning it had been underfoot; afternoon found it rising in the southeast, and now it was roughly south but wheeling toward the west. What was the meaning of this new thing? Was he going mad? How long would it last? Again mustering his resolution, Gilman turned and dragged himself back to the sinister old house.
      Mazurewicz was waiting for him at the door, and seemed both anxious and reluctant to whisper some fresh bit of superstition. It was about the witch light. Joe had been out celebrating the night before—it was Patriots’ Day in Massachusetts—and had come home after midnight. Looking up at the house from outside, he had thought at first that Gilman’s window was dark; but then he had seen the faint violet glow within. He wanted to warn the gentleman about that glow, for everybody in Arkham knew it was Keziah’s witch light which played near Brown Jenkin and the ghost of the old crone herself. He had not mentioned this before, but now he must tell about it because it meant that Keziah and her long-toothed familiar were haunting the young gentleman. Sometimes he and Paul Choynski and Landlord Dombrowski thought they saw that light seeping out of cracks in the sealed loft above the young gentleman’s room, but they had all agreed not to talk about that. However, it would be better for the gentleman to take another room and get a crucifix from some good priest like Father Iwanicki.
      As the man rambled on Gilman felt a nameless panic clutch at his throat. He knew that Joe must have been half drunk when he came home the night before, yet this mention of a violet light in the garret window was of frightful import. It was a lambent glow of this sort which always played about the old woman and the small furry thing in those lighter, sharper dreams which prefaced his plunge into unknown abysses, and the thought that a wakeful second person could see the dream-luminance was utterly beyond sane harbourage. Yet where had the fellow got such an odd notion? Had he himself talked as well as walked around the house in his sleep? No, Joe said, he had not—but he must check up on this. Perhaps Frank Elwood could tell him something, though he hated to ask.
      Fever—wild dreams—somnambulism—illusions of sounds—a pull toward a point in the sky—and now a suspicion of insane sleep-talking! He must stop studying, see a nerve specialist, and take himself in hand. When he climbed to the second story he paused at Elwood’s door but saw that the other youth was out. Reluctantly he continued up to his garret room and sat down in the dark. His gaze was still pulled to the southwest, but he also found himself listening intently for some sound in the closed loft above, and half imagining that an evil violet light seeped down through an infinitesimal crack in the low, slanting ceiling.
      That night as Gilman slept the violet light broke upon him with heightened intensity, and the old witch and small furry thing—getting closer than ever before—mocked him with inhuman squeals and devilish gestures. He was glad to sink into the vaguely roaring twilight abysses, though the pursuit of that iridescent bubble-congeries and that kaleidoscopic little polyhedron was menacing and irritating. Then came the shift as vast converging planes of a slippery-looking substance loomed above and below him—a shift which ended in a flash of delirium and a blaze of unknown, alien light in which yellow, carmine, and indigo were madly and inextricably blended.
      He was half lying on a high, fantastically balustraded terrace above a boundless jungle of outlandish, incredible peaks, balanced planes, domes, minarets, horizontal discs poised on pinnacles, and numberless forms of still greater wildness—some of stone and some of metal—which glittered gorgeously in the mixed, almost blistering glare from a polychromatic sky. Looking upward he saw three stupendous discs of flame, each of a different hue, and at a different height above an infinitely distant curving horizon of low mountains. Behind him tiers of higher terraces towered aloft as far as he could see. The city below stretched away to the limits of vision, and he hoped that no sound would well up from it.
      The pavement from which he easily raised himself was of a veined, polished stone beyond his power to identify, and the tiles were cut in bizarre-angled shapes which struck him as less asymmetrical than based on some unearthly symmetry whose laws he could not comprehend. The balustrade was chest-high, delicate, and fantastically wrought, while along the rail were ranged at short intervals little figures of grotesque design and exquisite workmanship. They, like the whole balustrade, seemed to be made of some sort of shining metal whose colour could not be guessed in this chaos of mixed effulgences; and their nature utterly defied conjecture. They represented some ridged, barrel-shaped object with thin horizontal arms radiating spoke-like from a central ring, and with vertical knobs or bulbs projecting from the head and base of the barrel. Each of these knobs was the hub of a system of five long, flat, triangularly tapering arms arranged around it like the arms of a starfish—nearly horizontal, but curving slightly away from the central barrel. The base of the bottom knob was fused to the long railing with so delicate a point of contact that several figures had been broken off and were missing. The figures were about four and a half inches in height, while the spiky arms gave them a maximum diameter of about two and a half inches.
      When Gilman stood up the tiles felt hot to his bare feet. He was wholly alone, and his first act was to walk to the balustrade and look dizzily down at the endless, Cyclopean city almost two thousand feet below. As he listened he thought a rhythmic confusion of faint musical pipings covering a wide tonal range welled up from the narrow streets beneath, and he wished he might discern the denizens of the place. The sight turned him giddy after a while, so that he would have fallen to the pavement had he not clutched instinctively at the lustrous balustrade. His right hand fell on one of the projecting figures, the touch seeming to steady him slightly. It was too much, however, for the exotic delicacy of the metal-work, and the spiky figure snapped off under his grasp. Still half-dazed, he continued to clutch it as his other hand seized a vacant space on the smooth railing.
      But now his oversensitive ears caught something behind him, and he looked back across the level terrace. Approaching him softly though without apparent furtiveness were five figures, two of which were the sinister old woman and the fanged, furry little animal. The other three were what sent him unconscious—for they were living entities about eight feet high, shaped precisely like the spiky images on the balustrade, and propelling themselves by a spider-like wriggling of their lower set of starfish-arms.
      Gilman awakened in his bed, drenched by a cold perspiration and with a smarting sensation in his face, hands, and feet. Springing to the floor, he washed and dressed in frantic haste, as if it were necessary for him to get out of the house as quickly as possible. He did not know where he wished to go, but felt that once more he would have to sacrifice his classes. The odd pull toward that spot in the sky between Hydra and Argo had abated, but another of even greater strength had taken its place. Now he felt that he must go north—infinitely north. He dreaded to cross the bridge that gave a view of the desolate island in the Miskatonic, so went over the Peabody Avenue bridge. Very often he stumbled, for his eyes and ears were chained to an extremely lofty point in the blank blue sky.
      After about an hour he got himself under better control, and saw that he was far from the city. All around him stretched the bleak emptiness of salt marshes, while the narrow road ahead led to Innsmouth—that ancient, half-deserted town which Arkham people were so curiously unwilling to visit. Though the northward pull had not diminished, he resisted it as he had resisted the other pull, and finally found that he could almost balance the one against the other. Plodding back to town and getting some coffee at a soda fountain, he dragged himself into the public library and browsed aimlessly among the lighter magazines. Once he met some friends who remarked how oddly sunburned he looked, but he did not tell them of his walk. At three o’clock he took some lunch at a restaurant, noting meanwhile that the pull had either lessened or divided itself. After that he killed the time at a cheap cinema show, seeing the inane performance over and over again without paying any attention to it.
      About nine at night he drifted homeward and stumbled into the ancient house. Joe Mazurewicz was whining unintelligible prayers, and Gilman hastened up to his own garret chamber without pausing to see if Elwood was in. It was when he turned on the feeble electric light that the shock came. At once he saw there was something on the table which did not belong there, and a second look left no room for doubt. Lying on its side—for it could not stand up alone—was the exotic spiky figure which in his monstrous dream he had broken off the fantastic balustrade. No detail was missing. The ridged, barrel-shaped centre, the thin, radiating arms, the knobs at each end, and the flat, slightly outward-curving starfish-arms spreading from those knobs—all were there. In the electric light the colour seemed to be a kind of iridescent grey veined with green, and Gilman could see amidst his horror and bewilderment that one of the knobs ended in a jagged break corresponding to its former point of attachment to the dream-railing.
      Only his tendency toward a dazed stupor prevented him from screaming aloud. This fusion of dream and reality was too much to bear. Still dazed, he clutched at the spiky thing and staggered downstairs to Landlord Dombrowski’s quarters. The whining prayers of the superstitious loomfixer were still sounding through the mouldy halls, but Gilman did not mind them now. The landlord was in, and greeted him pleasantly. No, he had not seen that thing before and did not know anything about it. But his wife had said she found a funny tin thing in one of the beds when she fixed the rooms at noon, and maybe that was it. Dombrowski called her, and she waddled in. Yes, that was the thing. She had found it in the young gentleman’s bed—on the side next the wall. It had looked very queer to her, but of course the young gentleman had lots of queer things in his room—books and curios and pictures and markings on paper. She certainly knew nothing about it.
      So Gilman climbed upstairs again in a mental turmoil, convinced that he was either still dreaming or that his somnambulism had run to incredible extremes and led him to depredations in unknown places. Where had he got this outré thing? He did not recall seeing it in any museum in Arkham. It must have been somewhere, though; and the sight of it as he snatched it in his sleep must have caused the odd dream-picture of the balustraded terrace. Next day he would make some very guarded inquiries—and perhaps see the nerve specialist.
      Meanwhile he would try to keep track of his somnambulism. As he went upstairs and across the garret hall he sprinkled about some flour which he had borrowed—with a frank admission as to its purpose—from the landlord. He had stopped at Elwood’s door on the way, but had found all dark within. Entering his room, he placed the spiky thing on the table, and lay down in complete mental and physical exhaustion without pausing to undress. From the closed loft above the slanting ceiling he thought he heard a faint scratching and padding, but he was too disorganised even to mind it. That cryptical pull from the north was getting very strong again, though it seemed now to come from a lower place in the sky.
      In the dazzling violet light of dream the old woman and the fanged, furry thing came again and with a greater distinctness than on any former occasion. This time they actually reached him, and he felt the crone’s withered claws clutching at him. He was pulled out of bed and into empty space, and for a moment he heard a rhythmic roaring and saw the twilight amorphousness of the vague abysses seething around him. But that moment was very brief, for presently he was in a crude, windowless little space with rough beams and planks rising to a peak just above his head, and with a curious slanting floor underfoot. Propped level on that floor were low cases full of books of every degree of antiquity and disintegration, and in the centre were a table and bench, both apparently fastened in place. Small objects of unknown shape and nature were ranged on the tops of the cases, and in the flaming violet light Gilman thought he saw a counterpart of the spiky image which had puzzled him so horribly. On the left the floor fell abruptly away, leaving a black triangular gulf out of which, after a second’s dry rattling, there presently climbed the hateful little furry thing with the yellow fangs and bearded human face.
      The evilly grinning beldame still clutched him, and beyond the table stood a figure he had never seen before—a tall, lean man of dead black colouration but without the slightest sign of negroid features; wholly devoid of either hair or beard, and wearing as his only garment a shapeless robe of some heavy black fabric. His feet were indistinguishable because of the table and bench, but he must have been shod, since there was a clicking whenever he changed position. The man did not speak, and bore no trace of expression on his small, regular features. He merely pointed to a book of prodigious size which lay open on the table, while the beldame thrust a huge grey quill into Gilman’s right hand. Over everything was a pall of intensely maddening fear, and the climax was reached when the furry thing ran up the dreamer’s clothing to his shoulders and then down his left arm, finally biting him sharply in the wrist just below his cuff. As the blood spurted from this wound Gilman lapsed into a faint.
      He awaked on the morning of the 22nd with a pain in his left wrist, and saw that his cuff was brown with dried blood. His recollections were very confused, but the scene with the black man in the unknown space stood out vividly. The rats must have bitten him as he slept, giving rise to the climax of that frightful dream. Opening the door, he saw that the flour on the corridor floor was undisturbed except for the huge prints of the loutish fellow who roomed at the other end of the garret. So he had not been sleep-walking this time. But something would have to be done about those rats. He would speak to the landlord about them. Again he tried to stop up the hole at the base of the slanting wall, wedging in a candlestick which seemed of about the right size. His ears were ringing horribly, as if with the residual echoes of some horrible noise heard in dreams.
      As he bathed and changed clothes he tried to recall what he had dreamed after the scene in the violet-litten space, but nothing definite would crystallise in his mind. That scene itself must have corresponded to the sealed loft overhead, which had begun to attack his imagination so violently, but later impressions were faint and hazy. There were suggestions of the vague, twilight abysses, and of still vaster, blacker abysses beyond them—abysses in which all fixed suggestions of form were absent. He had been taken there by the bubble-congeries and the little polyhedron which always dogged him; but they, like himself, had changed to wisps of milky, barely luminous mist in this farther void of ultimate blackness. Something else had gone on ahead—a larger wisp which now and then condensed into nameless approximations of form—and he thought that their progress had not been in a straight line, but rather along the alien curves and spirals of some ethereal vortex which obeyed laws unknown to the physics and mathematics of any conceivable cosmos. Eventually there had been a hint of vast, leaping shadows, of a monstrous, half-acoustic pulsing, and of the thin, monotonous piping of an unseen flute—but that was all. Gilman decided he had picked up that last conception from what he had read in the Necronomicon about the mindless entity Azathoth, which rules all time and space from a curiously environed black throne at the centre of Chaos.
      When the blood was washed away the wrist wound proved very slight, and Gilman puzzled over the location of the two tiny punctures. It occurred to him that there was no blood on the bedspread where he had lain—which was very curious in view of the amount on his skin and cuff. Had he been sleep-walking within his room, and had the rat bitten him as he sat in some chair or paused in some less rational position? He looked in every corner for brownish drops or stains, but did not find any. He had better, he thought, sprinkle flour within the room as well as outside the door—though after all no further proof of his sleep-walking was needed. He knew he did walk—and the thing to do now was to stop it. He must ask Frank Elwood for help. This morning the strange pulls from space seemed lessened, though they were replaced by another sensation even more inexplicable. It was a vague, insistent impulse to fly away from his present situation, but held not a hint of the specific direction in which he wished to fly. As he picked up the strange spiky image on the table he thought the older northward pull grew a trifle stronger; but even so, it was wholly overruled by the newer and more bewildering urge.
      He took the spiky image down to Elwood’s room, steeling himself against the whines of the loomfixer which welled up from the ground floor. Elwood was in, thank heaven, and appeared to be stirring about. There was time for a little conversation before leaving for breakfast and college, so Gilman hurriedly poured forth an account of his recent dreams and fears. His host was very sympathetic, and agreed that something ought to be done. He was shocked by his guest’s drawn, haggard aspect, and noticed the queer, abnormal-looking sunburn which others had remarked during the past week. There was not much, though, that he could say. He had not seen Gilman on any sleep-walking expedition, and had no idea what the curious image could be. He had, though, heard the French-Canadian who lodged just under Gilman talking to Mazurewicz one evening. They were telling each other how badly they dreaded the coming of Walpurgis-Night, now only a few days off; and were exchanging pitying comments about the poor, doomed young gentleman. Desrochers, the fellow under Gilman’s room, had spoken of nocturnal footsteps both shod and unshod, and of the violet light he saw one night when he had stolen fearfully up to peer through Gilman’s keyhole. He had not dared to peer, he told Mazurewicz, after he had glimpsed that light through the cracks around the door. There had been soft talking, too—and as he began to describe it his voice had sunk to an inaudible whisper.
      Elwood could not imagine what had set these superstitious creatures gossiping, but supposed their imaginations had been roused by Gilman’s late hours and somnolent walking and talking on the one hand, and by the nearness of traditionally feared May-Eve on the other hand. That Gilman talked in his sleep was plain, and it was obviously from Desrochers’ keyhole-listenings that the delusive notion of the violet dream-light had got abroad. These simple people were quick to imagine they had seen any odd thing they had heard about. As for a plan of action—Gilman had better move down to Elwood’s room and avoid sleeping alone. Elwood would, if awake, rouse him whenever he began to talk or rise in his sleep. Very soon, too, he must see the specialist. Meanwhile they would take the spiky image around to the various museums and to certain professors; seeking identification and stating that it had been found in a public rubbish-can. Also, Dombrowski must attend to the poisoning of those rats in the walls.
      Braced up by Elwood’s companionship, Gilman attended classes that day. Strange urges still tugged at him, but he could sidetrack them with considerable success. During a free period he shewed the queer image to several professors, all of whom were intensely interested, though none of them could shed any light upon its nature or origin. That night he slept on a couch which Elwood had had the landlord bring to the second-story room, and for the first time in weeks was wholly free from disquieting dreams. But the feverishness still hung on, and the whines of the loomfixer were an unnerving influence.
      During the next few days Gilman enjoyed an almost perfect immunity from morbid manifestations. He had, Elwood said, shewed no tendency to talk or rise in his sleep; and meanwhile the landlord was putting rat-poison everywhere. The only disturbing element was the talk among the superstitious foreigners, whose imaginations had become highly excited. Mazurewicz was always trying to make him get a crucifix, and finally forced one upon him which he said had been blessed by the good Father Iwanicki. Desrochers, too, had something to say—in fact, he insisted that cautious steps had sounded in the now vacant room above him on the first and second nights of Gilman’s absence from it. Paul Choynski thought he heard sounds in the halls and on the stairs at night, and claimed that his door had been softly tried, while Mrs. Dombrowski vowed she had seen Brown Jenkin for the first time since All-Hallows. But such naive reports could mean very little, and Gilman let the cheap metal crucifix hang idly from a knob on his host’s dresser.
      For three days Gilman and Elwood canvassed the local museums in an effort to identify the strange spiky image, but always without success. In every quarter, however, interest was intense; for the utter alienage of the thing was a tremendous challenge to scientific curiosity. One of the small radiating arms was broken off and subjected to chemical analysis, and the result is still talked about in college circles. Professor Ellery found platinum, iron, and tellurium in the strange alloy; but mixed with these were at least three other apparent elements of high atomic weight which chemistry was absolutely powerless to classify. Not only did they fail to correspond with any known element, but they did not even fit the vacant places reserved for probable elements in the periodic system. The mystery remains unsolved to this day, though the image is on exhibition at the museum of Miskatonic University.
      On the morning of April 27 a fresh rat-hole appeared in the room where Gilman was a guest, but Dombrowski tinned it up during the day. The poison was not having much effect, for scratchings and scurryings in the walls were virtually undiminished. Elwood was out late that night, and Gilman waited up for him. He did not wish to go to sleep in a room alone—especially since he thought he had glimpsed in the evening twilight the repellent old woman whose image had become so horribly transferred to his dreams. He wondered who she was, and what had been near her rattling the tin can in a rubbish-heap at the mouth of a squalid courtyard. The crone had seemed to notice him and leer evilly at him—though perhaps this was merely his imagination.
      The next day both youths felt very tired, and knew they would sleep like logs when night came. In the evening they drowsily discussed the mathematical studies which had so completely and perhaps harmfully engrossed Gilman, and speculated about the linkage with ancient magic and folklore which seemed so darkly probable. They spoke of old Keziah Mason, and Elwood agreed that Gilman had good scientific grounds for thinking she might have stumbled on strange and significant information. The hidden cults to which these witches belonged often guarded and handed down surprising secrets from elder, forgotten aeons; and it was by no means impossible that Keziah had actually mastered the art of passing through dimensional gates. Tradition emphasises the uselessness of material barriers in halting a witch’s motions; and who can say what underlies the old tales of broomstick rides through the night?
      Whether a modern student could ever gain similar powers from mathematical research alone, was still to be seen. Success, Gilman added, might lead to dangerous and unthinkable situations; for who could foretell the conditions pervading an adjacent but normally inaccessible dimension? On the other hand, the picturesque possibilities were enormous. Time could not exist in certain belts of space, and by entering and remaining in such a belt one might preserve one’s life and age indefinitely; never suffering organic metabolism or deterioration except for slight amounts incurred during visits to one’s own or similar planes. One might, for example, pass into a timeless dimension and emerge at some remote period of the earth’s history as young as before.
      Whether anybody had ever managed to do this, one could hardly conjecture with any degree of authority. Old legends are hazy and ambiguous, and in historic times all attempts at crossing forbidden gaps seem complicated by strange and terrible alliances with beings and messengers from outside. There was the immemorial figure of the deputy or messenger of hidden and terrible powers—the “Black Man” of the witch-cult, and the “Nyarlathotep” of the Necronomicon. There was, too, the baffling problem of the lesser messengers or intermediaries—the quasi-animals and queer hybrids which legend depicts as witches’ familiars. As Gilman and Elwood retired, too sleepy to argue further, they heard Joe Mazurewicz reel into the house half-drunk, and shuddered at the desperate wildness of his whining prayers.
      That night Gilman saw the violet light again. In his dream he had heard a scratching and gnawing in the partitions, and thought that someone fumbled clumsily at the latch. Then he saw the old woman and the small furry thing advancing toward him over the carpeted floor. The beldame’s face was alight with inhuman exultation, and the little yellow-toothed morbidity tittered mockingly as it pointed at the heavily sleeping form of Elwood on the other couch across the room. A paralysis of fear stifled all attempts to cry out. As once before, the hideous crone seized Gilman by the shoulders, yanking him out of bed and into empty space. Again the infinitude of the shrieking twilight abysses flashed past him, but in another second he thought he was in a dark, muddy, unknown alley of foetid odours, with the rotting walls of ancient houses towering up on every hand.
      Ahead was the robed black man he had seen in the peaked space in the other dream, while from a lesser distance the old woman was beckoning and grimacing imperiously. Brown Jenkin was rubbing itself with a kind of affectionate playfulness around the ankles of the black man, which the deep mud largely concealed. There was a dark open doorway on the right, to which the black man silently pointed. Into this the grimacing crone started, dragging Gilman after her by his pajama sleeve. There were evil-smelling staircases which creaked ominously, and on which the old woman seemed to radiate a faint violet light; and finally a door leading off a landing. The crone fumbled with the latch and pushed the door open, motioning to Gilman to wait and disappearing inside the black aperture.
      The youth’s oversensitive ears caught a hideous strangled cry, and presently the beldame came out of the room bearing a small, senseless form which she thrust at the dreamer as if ordering him to carry it. The sight of this form, and the expression on its face, broke the spell. Still too dazed to cry out, he plunged recklessly down the noisome staircase and into the mud outside; halting only when seized and choked by the waiting black man. As consciousness departed he heard the faint, shrill tittering of the fanged, rat-like abnormality.
      On the morning of the 29th Gilman awaked into a maelstrom of horror. The instant he opened his eyes he knew something was terribly wrong, for he was back in his old garret room with the slanting wall and ceiling, sprawled on the now unmade bed. His throat was aching inexplicably, and as he struggled to a sitting posture he saw with growing fright that his feet and pajama-bottoms were brown with caked mud. For the moment his recollections were hopelessly hazy, but he knew at least that he must have been sleep-walking. Elwood had been lost too deeply in slumber to hear and stop him. On the floor were confused muddy prints, but oddly enough they did not extend all the way to the door. The more Gilman looked at them, the more peculiar they seemed; for in addition to those he could recognise as his there were some smaller, almost round markings—such as the legs of a large chair or table might make, except that most of them tended to be divided into halves. There were also some curious muddy rat-tracks leading out of a fresh hole and back into it again. Utter bewilderment and the fear of madness racked Gilman as he staggered to the door and saw that there were no muddy prints outside. The more he remembered of his hideous dream the more terrified he felt, and it added to his desperation to hear Joe Mazurewicz chanting mournfully two floors below.
      Descending to Elwood’s room he roused his still-sleeping host and began telling of how he had found himself, but Elwood could form no idea of what might really have happened. Where Gilman could have been, how he got back to his room without making tracks in the hall, and how the muddy, furniture-like prints came to be mixed with his in the garret chamber, were wholly beyond conjecture. Then there were those dark, livid marks on his throat, as if he had tried to strangle himself. He put his hands up to them, but found that they did not even approximately fit. While they were talking Desrochers dropped in to say that he had heard a terrific clattering overhead in the dark small hours. No, there had been no one on the stairs after midnight—though just before midnight he had heard faint footfalls in the garret, and cautiously descending steps he did not like. It was, he added, a very bad time of year for Arkham. The young gentleman had better be sure to wear the crucifix Joe Mazurewicz had given him. Even the daytime was not safe, for after dawn there had been strange sounds in the house—especially a thin, childish wail hastily choked off.
      Gilman mechanically attended classes that morning, but was wholly unable to fix his mind on his studies. A mood of hideous apprehension and expectancy had seized him, and he seemed to be awaiting the fall of some annihilating blow. At noon he lunched at the University Spa, picking up a paper from the next seat as he waited for dessert. But he never ate that dessert; for an item on the paper’s first page left him limp, wild-eyed, and able only to pay his check and stagger back to Elwood’s room.
      There had been a strange kidnapping the night before in Orne’s Gangway, and the two-year-old child of a clod-like laundry worker named Anastasia Wolejko had completely vanished from sight. The mother, it appeared, had feared the event for some time; but the reasons she assigned for her fear were so grotesque that no one took them seriously. She had, she said, seen Brown Jenkin about the place now and then ever since early in March, and knew from its grimaces and titterings that little Ladislas must be marked for sacrifice at the awful Sabbat on Walpurgis-Night. She had asked her neighbour Mary Czanek to sleep in the room and try to protect the child, but Mary had not dared. She could not tell the police, for they never believed such things. Children had been taken that way every year ever since she could remember. And her friend Pete Stowacki would not help because he wanted the child out of the way anyhow.
      But what threw Gilman into a cold perspiration was the report of a pair of revellers who had been walking past the mouth of the gangway just after midnight. They admitted they had been drunk, but both vowed they had seen a crazily dressed trio furtively entering the dark passageway. There had, they said, been a huge robed negro, a little old woman in rags, and a young white man in his night-clothes. The old woman had been dragging the youth, while around the feet of the negro a tame rat was rubbing and weaving in the brown mud.
      Gilman sat in a daze all the afternoon, and Elwood—who had meanwhile seen the papers and formed terrible conjectures from them—found him thus when he came home. This time neither could doubt but that something hideously serious was closing in around them. Between the phantasms of nightmare and the realities of the objective world a monstrous and unthinkable relationship was crystallising, and only stupendous vigilance could avert still more direful developments. Gilman must see a specialist sooner or later, but not just now, when all the papers were full of this kidnapping business.
      Just what had really happened was maddeningly obscure, and for a moment both Gilman and Elwood exchanged whispered theories of the wildest kind. Had Gilman unconsciously succeeded better than he knew in his studies of space and its dimensions? Had he actually slipped outside our sphere to points unguessed and unimaginable? Where—if anywhere—had he been on those nights of daemoniac alienage? The roaring twilight abysses—the green hillside—the blistering terrace—the pulls from the stars—the ultimate black vortex—the black man—the muddy alley and the stairs—the old witch and the fanged, furry horror—the bubble-congeries and the little polyhedron—the strange sunburn—the wrist wound—the unexplained image—the muddy feet—the throat-marks—the tales and fears of the superstitious foreigners—what did all this mean? To what extent could the laws of sanity apply to such a case?
      There was no sleep for either of them that night, but next day they both cut classes and drowsed. This was April 30th, and with the dusk would come the hellish Sabbat-time which all the foreigners and the superstitious old folk feared. Mazurewicz came home at six o’clock and said people at the mill were whispering that the Walpurgis-revels would be held in the dark ravine beyond Meadow Hill where the old white stone stands in a place queerly void of all plant-life. Some of them had even told the police and advised them to look there for the missing Wolejko child, but they did not believe anything would be done. Joe insisted that the poor young gentleman wear his nickel-chained crucifix, and Gilman put it on and dropped it inside his shirt to humour the fellow.
      Late at night the two youths sat drowsing in their chairs, lulled by the rhythmical praying of the loomfixer on the floor below. Gilman listened as he nodded, his preternaturally sharpened hearing seeming to strain for some subtle, dreaded murmur beyond the noises in the ancient house. Unwholesome recollections of things in the Necronomicon and the Black Book welled up, and he found himself swaying to infandous rhythms said to pertain to the blackest ceremonies of the Sabbat and to have an origin outside the time and space we comprehend.
      Presently he realised what he was listening for—the hellish chant of the celebrants in the distant black valley. How did he know so much about what they expected? How did he know the time when Nahab and her acolyte were due to bear the brimming bowl which would follow the black cock and the black goat? He saw that Elwood had dropped asleep, and tried to call out and waken him. Something, however, closed his throat. He was not his own master. Had he signed the black man’s book after all?
      Then his fevered, abnormal hearing caught the distant, windborne notes. Over miles of hill and field and alley they came, but he recognised them none the less. The fires must be lit, and the dancers must be starting in. How could he keep himself from going? What was it that had enmeshed him? Mathematics—folklore—the house—old Keziah—Brown Jenkin . . . and now he saw that there was a fresh rat-hole in the wall near his couch. Above the distant chanting and the nearer praying of Joe Mazurewicz came another sound—a stealthy, determined scratching in the partitions. He hoped the electric lights would not go out. Then he saw the fanged, bearded little face in the rat-hole—the accursed little face which he at last realised bore such a shocking, mocking resemblance to old Keziah’s—and heard the faint fumbling at the door.
      The screaming twilight abysses flashed before him, and he felt himself helpless in the formless grasp of the iridescent bubble-congeries. Ahead raced the small, kaleidoscopic polyhedron, and all through the churning void there was a heightening and acceleration of the vague tonal pattern which seemed to foreshadow some unutterable and unendurable climax. He seemed to know what was coming—the monstrous burst of Walpurgis-rhythm in whose cosmic timbre would be concentrated all the primal, ultimate space-time seethings which lie behind the massed spheres of matter and sometimes break forth in measured reverberations that penetrate faintly to every layer of entity and give hideous significance throughout the worlds to certain dreaded periods.
      But all this vanished in a second. He was again in the cramped, violet-litten peaked space with the slanting floor, the low cases of ancient books, the bench and table, the queer objects, and the triangular gulf at one side. On the table lay a small white figure—an infant boy, unclothed and unconscious—while on the other side stood the monstrous, leering old woman with a gleaming, grotesque-hafted knife in her right hand, and a queerly proportioned pale metal bowl covered with curiously chased designs and having delicate lateral handles in her left. She was intoning some croaking ritual in a language which Gilman could not understand, but which seemed like something guardedly quoted in the Necronomicon.
      As the scene grew clear he saw the ancient crone bend forward and extend the empty bowl across the table—and unable to control his own motions, he reached far forward and took it in both hands, noticing as he did so its comparative lightness. At the same moment the disgusting form of Brown Jenkin scrambled up over the brink of the triangular black gulf on his left. The crone now motioned him to hold the bowl in a certain position while she raised the huge, grotesque knife above the small white victim as high as her right hand could reach. The fanged, furry thing began tittering a continuation of the unknown ritual, while the witch croaked loathsome responses. Gilman felt a gnawing, poignant abhorrence shoot through his mental and emotional paralysis, and the light metal bowl shook in his grasp. A second later the downward motion of the knife broke the spell completely, and he dropped the bowl with a resounding bell-like clangour while his hands darted out frantically to stop the monstrous deed.
      In an instant he had edged up the slanting floor around the end of the table and wrenched the knife from the old woman’s claws; sending it clattering over the brink of the narrow triangular gulf. In another instant, however, matters were reversed; for those murderous claws had locked themselves tightly around his own throat, while the wrinkled face was twisted with insane fury. He felt the chain of the cheap crucifix grinding into his neck, and in his peril wondered how the sight of the object itself would affect the evil creature. Her strength was altogether superhuman, but as she continued her choking he reached feebly in his shirt and drew out the metal symbol, snapping the chain and pulling it free.
      At sight of the device the witch seemed struck with panic, and her grip relaxed long enough to give Gilman a chance to break it entirely. He pulled the steel-like claws from his neck, and would have dragged the beldame over the edge of the gulf had not the claws received a fresh access of strength and closed in again. This time he resolved to reply in kind, and his own hands reached out for the creature’s throat. Before she saw what he was doing he had the chain of the crucifix twisted about her neck, and a moment later he had tightened it enough to cut off her breath. During her last struggle he felt something bite at his ankle, and saw that Brown Jenkin had come to her aid. With one savage kick he sent the morbidity over the edge of the gulf and heard it whimper on some level far below.
      Whether he had killed the ancient crone he did not know, but he let her rest on the floor where she had fallen. Then, as he turned away, he saw on the table a sight which nearly snapped the last thread of his reason. Brown Jenkin, tough of sinew and with four tiny hands of daemoniac dexterity, had been busy while the witch was throttling him, and his efforts had been in vain. What he had prevented the knife from doing to the victim’s chest, the yellow fangs of the furry blasphemy had done to a wrist—and the bowl so lately on the floor stood full beside the small lifeless body.
      In his dream-delirium Gilman heard the hellish, alien-rhythmed chant of the Sabbat coming from an infinite distance, and knew the black man must be there. Confused memories mixed themselves with his mathematics, and he believed his subconscious mind held the angles which he needed to guide him back to the normal world—alone and unaided for the first time. He felt sure he was in the immemorially sealed loft above his own room, but whether he could ever escape through the slanting floor or the long-stopped egress he doubted greatly. Besides, would not an escape from a dream-loft bring him merely into a dream-house—an abnormal projection of the actual place he sought? He was wholly bewildered as to the relation betwixt dream and reality in all his experiences.
      The passage through the vague abysses would be frightful, for the Walpurgis-rhythm would be vibrating, and at last he would have to hear that hitherto veiled cosmic pulsing which he so mortally dreaded. Even now he could detect a low, monstrous shaking whose tempo he suspected all too well. At Sabbat-time it always mounted and reached through to the worlds to summon the initiate to nameless rites. Half the chants of the Sabbat were patterned on this faintly overheard pulsing which no earthly ear could endure in its unveiled spatial fulness. Gilman wondered, too, whether he could trust his instinct to take him back to the right part of space. How could he be sure he would not land on that green-litten hillside of a far planet, on the tessellated terrace above the city of tentacled monsters somewhere beyond the galaxy, or in the spiral black vortices of that ultimate void of Chaos wherein reigns the mindless daemon-sultan Azathoth?
      Just before he made the plunge the violet light went out and left him in utter blackness. The witch—old Keziah—Nahab—that must have meant her death. And mixed with the distant chant of the Sabbat and the whimpers of Brown Jenkin in the gulf below he thought he heard another and wilder whine from unknown depths. Joe Mazurewicz—the prayers against the Crawling Chaos now turning to an inexplicably triumphant shriek—worlds of sardonic actuality impinging on vortices of febrile dream—Iä! Shub-Niggurath! The Goat with a Thousand Young. . . .
      They found Gilman on the floor of his queerly angled old garret room long before dawn, for the terrible cry had brought Desrochers and Choynski and Dombrowski and Mazurewicz at once, and had even wakened the soundly sleeping Elwood in his chair. He was alive, and with open, staring eyes, but seemed largely unconscious. On his throat were the marks of murderous hands, and on his left ankle was a distressing rat-bite. His clothing was badly rumpled, and Joe’s crucifix was missing. Elwood trembled, afraid even to speculate on what new form his friend’s sleep-walking had taken. Mazurewicz seemed half-dazed because of a “sign” he said he had had in response to his prayers, and he crossed himself frantically when the squealing and whimpering of a rat sounded from beyond the slanting partition.
      When the dreamer was settled on his couch in Elwood’s room they sent for Dr. Malkowski—a local practitioner who would repeat no tales where they might prove embarrassing—and he gave Gilman two hypodermic injections which caused him to relax in something like natural drowsiness. During the day the patient regained consciousness at times and whispered his newest dream disjointedly to Elwood. It was a painful process, and at its very start brought out a fresh and disconcerting fact.
      Gilman—whose ears had so lately possessed an abnormal sensitiveness—was now stone deaf. Dr. Malkowski, summoned again in haste, told Elwood that both ear-drums were ruptured, as if by the impact of some stupendous sound intense beyond all human conception or endurance. How such a sound could have been heard in the last few hours without arousing all the Miskatonic Valley was more than the honest physician could say.
      Elwood wrote his part of the colloquy on paper, so that a fairly easy communication was maintained. Neither knew what to make of the whole chaotic business, and decided it would be better if they thought as little as possible about it. Both, though, agreed that they must leave this ancient and accursed house as soon as it could be arranged. Evening papers spoke of a police raid on some curious revellers in a ravine beyond Meadow Hill just before dawn, and mentioned that the white stone there was an object of age-long superstitious regard. Nobody had been caught, but among the scattering fugitives had been glimpsed a huge negro. In another column it was stated that no trace of the missing child Ladislas Wolejko had been found.
      The crowning horror came that very night. Elwood will never forget it, and was forced to stay out of college the rest of the term because of the resulting nervous breakdown. He had thought he heard rats in the partitions all the evening, but paid little attention to them. Then, long after both he and Gilman had retired, the atrocious shrieking began. Elwood jumped up, turned on the lights, and rushed over to his guest’s couch. The occupant was emitting sounds of veritably inhuman nature, as if racked by some torment beyond description. He was writhing under the bedclothes, and a great red stain was beginning to appear on the blankets.
      Elwood scarcely dared to touch him, but gradually the screaming and writhing subsided. By this time Dombrowski, Choynski, Desrochers, Mazurewicz, and the top-floor lodger were all crowding into the doorway, and the landlord had sent his wife back to telephone for Dr. Malkowski. Everybody shrieked when a large rat-like form suddenly jumped out from beneath the ensanguined bedclothes and scuttled across the floor to a fresh, open hole close by. When the doctor arrived and began to pull down those frightful covers Walter Gilman was dead.
      It would be barbarous to do more than suggest what had killed Gilman. There had been virtually a tunnel through his body—something had eaten his heart out. Dombrowski, frantic at the failure of his constant rat-poisoning efforts, cast aside all thought of his lease and within a week had moved with all his older lodgers to a dingy but less ancient house in Walnut Street. The worst thing for a while was keeping Joe Mazurewicz quiet; for the brooding loomfixer would never stay sober, and was constantly whining and muttering about spectral and terrible things.
      It seems that on that last hideous night Joe had stooped to look at the crimson rat-tracks which led from Gilman’s couch to the nearby hole. On the carpet they were very indistinct, but a piece of open flooring intervened between the carpet’s edge and the base-board. There Mazurewicz had found something monstrous—or thought he had, for no one else could quite agree with him despite the undeniable queerness of the prints. The tracks on the flooring were certainly vastly unlike the average prints of a rat, but even Choynski and Desrochers would not admit that they were like the prints of four tiny human hands.
      The house was never rented again. As soon as Dombrowski left it the pall of its final desolation began to descend, for people shunned it both on account of its old reputation and because of the new foetid odour. Perhaps the ex-landlord’s rat-poison had worked after all, for not long after his departure the place became a neighbourhood nuisance. Health officials traced the smell to the closed spaces above and beside the eastern garret room, and agreed that the number of dead rats must be enormous. They decided, however, that it was not worth their while to hew open and disinfect the long-sealed spaces; for the foetor would soon be over, and the locality was not one which encouraged fastidious standards. Indeed, there were always vague local tales of unexplained stenches upstairs in the Witch House just after May-Eve and Hallowmass. The neighbours grumblingly acquiesced in the inertia—but the foetor none the less formed an additional count against the place. Toward the last the house was condemned as an habitation by the building inspector.
      Gilman’s dreams and their attendant circumstances have never been explained. Elwood, whose thoughts on the entire episode are sometimes almost maddening, came back to college the next autumn and graduated in the following June. He found the spectral gossip of the town much diminished, and it is indeed a fact that—notwithstanding certain reports of a ghostly tittering in the deserted house which lasted almost as long as that edifice itself—no fresh appearances either of old Keziah or of Brown Jenkin have been muttered of since Gilman’s death. It is rather fortunate that Elwood was not in Arkham in that later year when certain events abruptly renewed the local whispers about elder horrors. Of course he heard about the matter afterward and suffered untold torments of black and bewildered speculation; but even that was not as bad as actual nearness and several possible sights would have been.
      In March, 1931, a gale wrecked the roof and great chimney of the vacant Witch House, so that a chaos of crumbling bricks, blackened, moss-grown shingles, and rotting planks and timbers crashed down into the loft and broke through the floor beneath. The whole attic story was choked with debris from above, but no one took the trouble to touch the mess before the inevitable razing of the decrepit structure. That ultimate step came in the following December, and it was when Gilman’s old room was cleared out by reluctant, apprehensive workmen that the gossip began.
      Among the rubbish which had crashed through the ancient slanting ceiling were several things which made the workmen pause and call in the police. Later the police in turn called in the coroner and several professors from the university. There were bones—badly crushed and splintered, but clearly recognisable as human—whose manifestly modern date conflicted puzzlingly with the remote period at which their only possible lurking-place, the low, slant-floored loft overhead, had supposedly been sealed from all human access. The coroner’s physician decided that some belonged to a small child, while certain others—found mixed with shreds of rotten brownish cloth—belonged to a rather undersized, bent female of advanced years. Careful sifting of debris also disclosed many tiny bones of rats caught in the collapse, as well as older rat-bones gnawed by small fangs in a fashion now and then highly productive of controversy and reflection.
      Other objects found included the mingled fragments of many books and papers, together with a yellowish dust left from the total disintegration of still older books and papers. All, without exception, appeared to deal with black magic in its most advanced and horrible forms; and the evidently recent date of certain items is still a mystery as unsolved as that of the modern human bones. An even greater mystery is the absolute homogeneity of the crabbed, archaic writing found on a wide range of papers whose conditions and watermarks suggest age differences of at least 150 to 200 years. To some, though, the greatest mystery of all is the variety of utterly inexplicable objects—objects whose shapes, materials, types of workmanship, and purposes baffle all conjecture—found scattered amidst the wreckage in evidently diverse states of injury. One of these things—which excited several Miskatonic professors profoundly—is a badly damaged monstrosity plainly resembling the strange image which Gilman gave to the college museum, save that it is larger, wrought of some peculiar bluish stone instead of metal, and possessed of a singularly angled pedestal with undecipherable hieroglyphics.
      Archaeologists and anthropologists are still trying to explain the bizarre designs chased on a crushed bowl of light metal whose inner side bore ominous brownish stains when found. Foreigners and credulous grandmothers are equally garrulous about the modern nickel crucifix with broken chain mixed in the rubbish and shiveringly identified by Joe Mazurewicz as that which he had given poor Gilman many years before. Some believe this crucifix was dragged up to the sealed loft by rats, while others think it must have been on the floor in some corner of Gilman’s old room all the time. Still others, including Joe himself, have theories too wild and fantastic for sober credence.
      When the slanting wall of Gilman’s room was torn out, the once sealed triangular space between that partition and the house’s north wall was found to contain much less structural debris, even in proportion to its size, than the room itself; though it had a ghastly layer of older materials which paralysed the wreckers with horror. In brief, the floor was a veritable ossuary of the bones of small children—some fairly modern, but others extending back in infinite gradations to a period so remote that crumbling was almost complete. On this deep bony layer rested a knife of great size, obvious antiquity, and grotesque, ornate, and exotic design—above which the debris was piled.
      In the midst of this debris, wedged between a fallen plank and a cluster of cemented bricks from the ruined chimney, was an object destined to cause more bafflement, veiled fright, and openly superstitious talk in Arkham than anything else discovered in the haunted and accursed building. This object was the partly crushed skeleton of a huge, diseased rat, whose abnormalities of form are still a topic of debate and source of singular reticence among the members of Miskatonic’s department of comparative anatomy. Very little concerning this skeleton has leaked out, but the workmen who found it whisper in shocked tones about the long, brownish hairs with which it was associated.
      The bones of the tiny paws, it is rumoured, imply prehensile characteristics more typical of a diminutive monkey than of a rat; while the small skull with its savage yellow fangs is of the utmost anomalousness, appearing from certain angles like a miniature, monstrously degraded parody of a human skull. The workmen crossed themselves in fright when they came upon this blasphemy, but later burned candles of gratitude in St. Stanislaus’ Church because of the shrill, ghostly tittering they felt they would never hear again.",True
"Shortly before ten the next morning I stood with one small valise in front of Hammond's Drug Store in old Market Square waiting for the Innsmouth bus. As the hour for its arrival drew near I noticed a general drift of the loungers to other places up the street, or to the Ideal Lunch across the square. Evidently the ticket-agent had not exaggerated the dislike which local People bore toward Innsmouth and its denizens. In a few moments a small motor-coach of extreme decrepitude and dirty grey colour rattled down State Street, made a turn, and drew up at the curb beside me. I felt immediately that it was the right one; a guess which the half-illegible sign on the windshield--Arkham-Innsmouth-Newburyport--soon verified.
There were only three passengers--dark, unkempt men of sullen visage and somewhat youthful cast--and when the vehicle stopped they clumsily shambled out and began walking up State Street in a silent, almost furtive fashion. The driver also alighted, and I watched him as he went into the drug store to make some purchase. This, I reflected, must be the Joe Sargent mentioned by the ticket-agent; and even before I noticed any details there spread over me a wave of spontaneous aversion which could be neither checked nor explained. It suddenly struck me as very natural that the local people should not wish to ride on a bus owned and driven by this man, or to visit any oftener than possible the habitat of such a man and his kinsfolk.
When the driver came out of the store I looked at him more carefully and tried to determine the source of my evil impression. He was a thin, stoop-shouldered man not much under six feet tall, dressed in shabby blue civilian clothes and wearing a frayed golf cap. His age was perhaps thirty-five, but the odd, deep creases in the sides of his neck made him seem older when one did not study his dull, expressionless face. He had a narrow head, bulging, watery-blue eyes that seemed never to wink, a flat nose, a receding forehead and chin, and singularly undeveloped ears. His long thick lip and coarse-pored, greyish cheeks seemed almost beardless except for some sparse yellow hairs that straggled and curled in irregular patches; and in places the surface seemed queerly irregular, as if peeling from some cutaneous disease. His hands were large and heavily veined, and had a very unusual greyish-blue tinge. The fingers were strikingly short in proportion to the rest of the structure, and seemed to have a tendency to curl closely into the huge palm. As he walked toward the bus I observed his peculiarly shambling gait and saw that his feet were inordinately immense. The more I studied them the more I wondered how he could buy any shoes to fit them.
A certain greasiness about the fellow increased my dislike. He was evidently given to working or lounging around the fish docks, and carried with him much of their characteristic smell. Just what foreign blood was in him I could not even guess. His oddities certainly did not look Asiatic, Polynesian, Levantine or negroid, yet I could see why the people found him alien. I myself would have thought of biological degeneration rather than alienage.
I was sorry when I saw there would be no other passengers on the bus. Somehow I did not like the idea of riding alone with this driver. But as leaving time obviously approached I conquered my qualms and followed the man aboard, extending him a dollar bill and murmuring the single word ""Innsmouth."" He looked curiously at me for a second as he returned forty cents change without speaking. I took a seat far behind him, but on the same side of the bus, since I wished to watch the shore during the journey.
At length the decrepit vehicle stared with a jerk, and rattled noisily past the old brick buildings of State Street amidst a cloud of vapour from the exhaust. Glancing at the people on the sidewalks, I thought I detected in them a curious wish to avoid looking at the bus--or at least a wish to avoid seeming to look at it. Then we turned to the left into High Street, where the going was smoother; flying by stately old mansions of the early republic and still older colonial farmhouses, passing the Lower Green and Parker River, and finally emerging into a long, monotonous stretch of open shore country.
The day was warm and sunny, but the landscape of sand and sedge-grass, and stunted shrubbery became more and desolate as we proceeded. Out the window I could see the blue water and the sandy line of Plum Island, and we presently drew very near the beach as our narrow road veered off from the main highway to Rowley and Ipswich. There were no visible houses, and I could tell by the state of the road that traffic was very light hereabouts. The weather-worn telephone poles carried only two wires. Now and then we crossed crude wooden bridges over tidal creeks that wound far inland and promoted the general isolation of the region.
Once in a while I noticed dead stumps and crumbling foundation-walls above the drifting sand, and recalled the old tradition quoted in one of the histories I had read, that this was once a fertile and thickly-settled countryside. The change, it was said, came simultaneously with the Innsmouth epidemic of l846, and was thought by simple folk to have a dark connection with hidden forces of evil. Actually, it was caused by the unwise cutting of woodlands near the shore, which robbed the soil of the best protection and opened the way for waves of wind-blown sand.
At last we lost sight of Plum Island and saw the vast expanse of the open Atlantic on our left. Our narrow course began to climb steeply, and I felt a singular sense of disquiet in looking at the lonely crest ahead where the rutted road-way met the sky. It was as if the bus were about to keep on in its ascent, leaving the sane earth altogether and merging with the unknown arcana of upper air and cryptical sky. The smell of the sea took on ominous implications, and the silent driver's bent, rigid back and narrow head became more and more hateful. As I looked at him I saw that the back of his head was almost as hairless as his face, having only a few straggling yellow strands upon a grey scabrous surface.
Then we reached the crest and beheld the outspread valley beyond, where the Manuxet joins the sea just north of the long line of cliffs that culminate in Kingsport Head and veer off toward Cape Ann. On the far misty horizon I could just make out the dizzy profile of the Head, topped by the queer ancient house of which so many legends are told; but for the moment all my attention was captured by the nearer panorama just below me. I had, I realized, come face to face with rumour-shadowed Innsmouth.
It was a town of wide extent and dense construction, yet one with a portentous dearth of visible life. From the tangle of chimney-pots scarcely a wisp of smoke came, and the three tall steeples loomed stark and unpainted against the seaward horizon. One of them was crumbling down at the top, and in that and another there were only black gaping holes where clock-dials should have been. The vast huddle of sagging gambrel roofs and peaked gables conveyed with offensive clearness the idea of wormy decay, and as we approached along the now descending road I could see that many roofs had wholly caved in. There were some large square Georgian houses, too, with hipped roofs, cupolas, and railed ""widow's walks."" These were mostly well back from the water, and one or two seemed to be in moderately sound condition. Stretching inland from among them I saw the rusted, grass-grown line of the abandoned railway, with leaning telegraph-poles now devoid of wires, and the half-obscured lines of the old carriage roads to Rowley and Ipswich.
The decay was worst close to the waterfront, though in its very midst I could spy the white belfry of a fairly well preserved brick structure which looked like a small factory. The harbour, long clogged with sand, was enclosed by an ancient stone breakwater; on which I could begin to discern the minute forms of a few seated fishermen, and at whose end were what looked like the foundations of a bygone lighthouse. A sandy tongue had formed inside this barrier and upon it I saw a few decrepit cabins, moored dories, and scattered lobster-pots. The only deep water seemed to be where the river poured out past the belfried structure and turned southward to join the ocean at the breakwater's end.
Here and there the ruins of wharves jutted out from the shore to end in indeterminate rottenness, those farthest south seeming the most decayed. And far out at sea, despite a high tide, I glimpsed a long, black line scarcely rising above the water yet carrying a suggestion of odd latent malignancy. This, I knew, must be Devil Reef. As I looked, a subtle, curious sense of beckoning seemed superadded to the grim repulsion; and oddly enough, I found this overtone more disturbing than the primary impression.
We met no one on the road, but presently began to pass deserted farms in varying stages of ruin. Then I noticed a few inhabited houses with rags stuffed in the broken windows and shells and dead fish lying about the littered yards. Once or twice I saw listless-looking people working in barren gardens or digging clams on the fishy-smelling beach below, and groups of dirty, simian-visaged children playing around weed-grown doorsteps. Somehow these people seemed more disquieting than the dismal buildings, for almost every one had certain peculiarities of face and motions which I instinctively disliked without being able to define or comprehend them. For a second I thought this typical physique suggested some picture I had seen, perhaps in a book, under circumstances of particular horror or melancholy; but this pseudo-recollection passed very quickly.
As the bus reached a lower level I began to catch the steady note of a waterfall through the unnatural stillness, The leaning, unpainted houses grew thicker, lined both sides of the road, and displayed more urban tendencies than did those we were leaving behind, The panorama ahead had contracted to a street scene, and in spots I could see where a cobblestone pavement and stretches of brick sidewalk had formerly existed. All the houses were apparently deserted, and there were occasional gaps where tumbledown chimneys and cellar walls told of buildings that had collapsed. Pervading everything was the most nauseous fishy odour imaginable.
Soon cross streets and junctions began to appear; those on the left leading to shoreward realms of unpaved squalor and decay, while those on the right shewed vistas of departed grandeur. So far I had seen no people in the town, but there now came signs of a sparse habitation--curtained windows here and there, and an occasional battered motorcar at the curb. Pavement and sidewalks were increasingly well-defined, and though most of the houses were quite old--wood and brick structures of the early 19th century--they were obviously kept fit for habitation. As an amateur antiquarian I almost lost my olfactory disgust and my feeling of menace and repulsion amidst this rich, unaltered survival from the past.
But I was not to reach my destination without one very strong impression of poignantly disagreeable quality. The bus had come to a sort of open concourse or radial point with churches on two sides and the bedraggled remains of a circular green in the centre, and I was looking at a large pillared hall on the right-hand junction ahead. The structure's once white paint was now gray and peeling and the black and gold sign on the pediment was so faded that I could only with difficulty make out the words ""Esoteric Order of Dagon."" This, then was the former Masonic Hall now given over to a degraded cult. As I strained to decipher this inscription my notice was distracted by the raucous tones of a cracked bell across the street, and I quickly turned to look out the window on my side of the coach.
The sound came from a squat stone church of manifestly later date than most of the houses, built in a clumsy Gothic fashion and having a disproportionately high basement with shuttered windows. Though the hands of its clock were missing on the side I glimpsed, I knew that those hoarse strokes were tolling the hour of eleven. Then suddenly all thoughts of time were blotted out by an onrushing image of sharp intensity and unaccountable horror which had seized me before I knew what it really was. The door of the church basement was open, revealing a rectangle of blackness inside. And as I looked, a certain object crossed or seemed to cross that dark rectangle; burning into my brain a momentary conception of nightmare which was all the more maddening because analysis could not shew a single nightmarish quality in it.
It was a living object--the first except the driver that I had seen since entering the compact part of the town--and had I been in a steadier mood I would have found nothing whatever of terror in it. Clearly, as I realised a moment later, it was the pastor; clad in some peculiar vestments doubtless introduced since the Order of Dagon had modified the ritual of the local churches. The thing which had probably caught my first subconscious glance and supplied the touch of bizarre horror was the tall tiara he wore; an almost exact duplicate of the one Miss Tilton had shown me the previous evening. This, acting on my imagination, had supplied namelessly sinister qualities to the indeterminate face and robed, shambling form beneath it. There was not, I soon decided, any reason why I should have felt that shuddering touch of evil pseudo-memory. Was it not natural that a local mystery cult should adopt among its regimentals an unique type of head-dress made familiar to the community in some strange way--perhaps as treasure-trove?
A very thin sprinkling of repellent-looking youngish people now became visible on the sidewalks--lone individuals, and silent knots of two or three. The lower floors of the crumbling houses sometimes harboured small shops with dingy signs, and I noticed a parked truck or two as we rattled along. The sound of waterfalls became more and more distinct, and presently I saw a fairly deep river-gorge ahead, spanned by a wide, iron-railed highway bridge beyond which a large square opened out. As we clanked over the bridge I looked out on both sides and observed some factory buildings on the edge of the grassy bluff or part way down. The water far below was very abundant, and I could see two vigorous sets of falls upstream on my right and at least one downstream on my left. From this point the noise was quite deafening. Then we rolled into the large semicircular square across the river and drew up on the right-hand side in front of a tall, cupola crowned building with remnants of yellow paint and with a half-effaced sign proclaiming it to be the Gilman House.
I was glad to get out of that bus, and at once proceeded to check my valise in the shabby hotel lobby. There was only one person in sight--an elderly man without what I had come to call the ""Innsmouth look""--and I decided not to ask him any of the questions which bothered me; remembering that odd things had been noticed in this hotel. Instead, I strolled out on the square, from which the bus had already gone, and studied the scene minutely and appraisingly.
One side of the cobblestoned open space was the straight line of the river; the other was a semicircle of slant-roofed brick buildings of about the 1800 period, from which several streets radiated away to the southeast, south, and southwest. Lamps were depressingly few and small--all low-powered incandescents--and I was glad that my plans called for departure before dark, even though I knew the moon would be bright. The buildings were all in fair condition, and included perhaps a dozen shops in current operation; of which one was a grocery of the First National chain, others a dismal restaurant, a drug store, and a wholesale fish-dealer's office, and still another, at the eastward extremity of the square near the river an office of the town's only industry--the Marsh Refining Company. There were perhaps ten people visible, and four or five automobiles and motor trucks stood scattered about. I did not need to be told that this was the civic centre of Innsmouth. Eastward I could catch blue glimpses of the harbour, against which rose the decaying remains of three once beautiful Georgian steeples. And toward the shore on the opposite bank of the river I saw the white belfry surmounting what I took to be the Marsh refinery.
For some reason or other I chose to make my first inquiries at the chain grocery, whose personnel was not likely to be native to Innsmouth. I found a solitary boy of about seventeen in charge, and was pleased to note the brightness and affability which promised cheerful information. He seemed exceptionally eager to talk, and I soon gathered that he did not like the place, its fishy smell, or its furtive people. A word with any outsider was a relief to him. He hailed from Arkham, boarded with a family who came from Ipswich, and went back whenever he got a moment off. His family did not like him to work in Innsmouth, but the chain had transferred him there and he did not wish to give up his job.
There was, he said, no public library or chamber of commerce in Innsmouth, but I could probably find my way about. The street I had come down was Federal. West of that were the fine old residence streets--Broad, Washington, Lafayette, and Adams--and east of it were the shoreward slums. It was in these slums--along Main Street--that I would find the old Georgian churches, but they were all long abandoned. It would be well not to make oneself too conspicuous in such neighbourhoods--especially north of the river since the people were sullen and hostile. Some strangers had even disappeared.
Certain spots were almost forbidden territory, as he had learned at considerable cost. One must not, for example, linger much around the Marsh refinery, or around any of the still used churches, or around the pillared Order of Dagon Hall at New Church Green. Those churches were very odd--all violently disavowed by their respective denominations elsewhere, and apparently using the queerest kind of ceremonials and clerical vestments. Their creeds were heterodox and mysterious, involving hints of certain marvelous transformations leading to bodily immorality--of a sort--on this earth. The youth's own pastor--Dr. Wallace of Asbury M. E. Church in Arkham--had gravely urged him not to join any church in Innsmouth.
As for the Innsmouth people--the youth hardly knew what to make of them. They were as furtive and seldom seen as animals that live in burrows, and one could hardly imagine how they passed the time apart from their desultory fishing. Perhaps--judging from the quantities of bootleg liquor they consumed--they lay for most of the daylight hours in an alcoholic stupor. They seemed sullenly banded together in some sort of fellowship and understanding--despising the world as if they had access to other and preferable spheres of entity. Their appearance--especially those staring, unwinking eyes which one never saw shut--was certainly shocking enough; and their voices were disgusting. It was awful to hear them chanting in their churches at night, and especially during their main festivals or revivals, which fell twice a year on April 30th and October 31st.
They were very fond of the water, and swam a great deal in both river and harbour. Swimming races out to Devil Reef were very common, and everyone in sight seemed well able to share in this arduous sport. When one came to think of it, it was generally only rather young people who were seen about in public, and of these the oldest were apt to be the most tainted-looking. When exceptions did occur, they were mostly persons with no trace of aberrancy, like the old clerk at the hotel. One wondered what became of the bulk of the older folk, and whether the ""Innsmouth look"" were not a strange and insidious disease-phenomenon which increased its hold as years advanced.
Only a very rare affliction, of course, could bring about such vast and radical anatomical changes in a single individual after maturity--changes invoking osseous factors as basic as the shape of the skull--but then, even this aspect was no more baffling and unheard-of than the visible features of the malady as a whole. It would be hard, the youth implied, to form any real conclusions regarding such a matter; since one never came to know the natives personally no matter how long one might live in Innsmouth.
The youth was certain that many specimens even worse than the worst visible ones were kept locked indoors in some places. People sometimes heard the queerest kind of sounds. The tottering waterfront hovels north of the river were reputedly connected by hidden tunnels, being thus a veritable warren of unseen abnormalities. What kind of foreign blood--if any--these beings had, it was impossible to tell. They sometimes kept certain especially repulsive characters out of sight when government and others from the outside world came to town.
It would be of no use, my informant said, to ask the natives anything about the place. The only one who would talk was a very aged but normal looking man who lived at the poorhouse on the north rim of the town and spent his time walking about or lounging around the fire station. This hoary character, Zadok Allen, was 96 years old and somewhat touched in the head, besides being the town drunkard. He was a strange, furtive creature who constantly looked over his shoulder as if afraid of something, and when sober could not be persuaded to talk at all with strangers. He was, however, unable to resist any offer of his favorite poison; and once drunk would furnish the most astonishing fragments of whispered reminiscence.
After all, though, little useful data could be gained from him; since his stories were all insane, incomplete hints of impossible marvels and horrors which could have no source save in his own disordered fancy. Nobody ever believed him, but the natives did not like him to drink and talk with strangers; and it was not always safe to be seen questioning him. It was probably from him that some of the wildest popular whispers and delusions were derived.
Several non-native residents had reported monstrous glimpses from time to time, but between old Zadok's tales and the malformed inhabitants it was no wonder such illusions were current. None of the non-natives ever stayed out late at night, there being a widespread impression that it was not wise to do so. Besides, the streets were loathsomely dark.
As for business--the abundance of fish was certainly almost uncanny, but the natives were taking less and less advantage of it. Moreover, prices were falling and competition was growing. Of course the town's real business was the refinery, whose commercial office was on the square only a few doors east of where we stood. Old Man Marsh was never seen, but sometimes went to the works in a closed, curtained car.
There were all sorts of rumors about how Marsh had come to look. He had once been a great dandy; and people said he still wore the frock-coated finery of the Edwardian age curiously adapted to certain deformities. His son had formerly conducted the office in the square, but latterly they had been keeping out of sight a good deal and leaving the brunt of affairs to the younger generation. The sons and their sisters had come to look very queer, especially the elder ones; and it was said that their health was failing.
One of the Marsh daughters was a repellent, reptilian-looking woman who wore an excess of weird jewellery clearly of the same exotic tradition as that to which the strange tiara belonged. My informant had noticed it many times, and had heard it spoken of as coming from some secret hoard, either of pirates or of demons. The clergymen--or priests, or whatever they were called nowadays--also wore this kind of ornament as a headdress; but one seldom caught glimpses of them. Other specimens the youth had not seen, though many were rumoured to exist around Innsmouth.
The Marshes, together with the other three gently bred families of the town--the Waites, the Gilmans, and the Eliots--were all very retiring. They lived in immense houses along Washington Street, and several were reputed to harbour in concealment certain living kinsfolk whose personal aspect forbade public view, and whose deaths had been reported and recorded.
Warning me that many of the street signs were down, the youth drew for my benefit a rough but ample and painstaking sketch map of the town's salient features. After a moment's study I felt sure that it would be of great help, and pocketed it with profuse thanks. Disliking the dinginess of the single restaurant I had seen, I bought a fair supply of cheese crackers and ginger wafers to serve as a lunch later on. My program, I decided, would be to thread the principal streets, talk with any non-natives I might encounter, and catch the eight o'clock coach for Arkham. The town, I could see, formed a significant and exaggerated example of communal decay; but being no sociologist I would limit my serious observations to the field of architecture.
Thus I began my systematic though half-bewildered tour of Innsmouth's narrow, shadow-blighted ways. Crossing the bridge and turning toward the roar of the lower falls, I passed close to the Marsh refinery, which seemed to be oddly free from the noise of industry. The building stood on the steep river bluff near a bridge and an open confluence of streets which I took to be the earliest civic center, displaced after the Revolution by the present Town Square.
Re-crossing the gorge on the Main Street bridge, I struck a region of utter desertion which somehow made me shudder. Collapsing huddles of gambrel roofs formed a jagged and fantastic skyline, above which rose the ghoulish, decapitated steeple of an ancient church. Some houses along Main Street were tenanted, but most were tightly boarded up. Down unpaved side streets I saw the black, gaping windows of deserted hovels, many of which leaned at perilous and incredible angles through the sinking of part of the foundations. Those windows stared so spectrally that it took courage to turn eastward toward the waterfront. Certainly, the terror of a deserted house swells in geometrical rather than arithmetical progression as houses multiply to form a city of stark desolation. The sight of such endless avenues of fishy-eyed vacancy and death, and the thought of such linked infinities of black, brooding compartments given over to cob-webs and memories and the conqueror worm, start up vestigial fears and aversions that not even the stoutest philosophy can disperse.
Fish Street was as deserted as Main, though it differed in having many brick and stone warehouses still in excellent shape. Water Street was almost its duplicate, save that there were great seaward gaps where wharves had been. Not a living thing did I see except for the scattered fishermen on the distant break-water, and not a sound did I hear save the lapping of the harbour tides and the roar of the falls in the Manuxet. The town was getting more and more on my nerves, and I looked behind me furtively as I picked my way back over the tottering Water Street bridge. The Fish Street bridge, according to the sketch, was in ruins.
North of the river there were traces of squalid life--active fish-packing houses in Water Street, smoking chimneys and patched roofs here and there, occasional sounds from indeterminate sources, and infrequent shambling forms in the dismal streets and unpaved lanes--but I seemed to find this even more oppressive than the southerly desertion. For one thing, the people were more hideous and abnormal than those near the centre of the town; so that I was several times evilly reminded of something utterly fantastic which I could not quite place. Undoubtedly the alien strain in the Innsmouth folk was stronger here than farther inland--unless, indeed, the ""Innsmouth look"" were a disease rather than a blood stain, in which case this district might be held to harbour the more advanced cases.
One detail that annoyed me was the distribution of the few faint sounds I heard. They ought naturally to have come wholly from the visibly inhabited houses, yet in reality were often strongest inside the most rigidly boarded-up facades. There were creakings, scurryings, and hoarse doubtful noises; and I thought uncomfortably about the hidden tunnels suggested by the grocery boy. Suddenly I found myself wondering what the voices of those denizens would be like. I had heard no speech so far in this quarter, and was unaccountably anxious not to do so.
Pausing only long enough to look at two fine but ruinous old churches at Main and Church Streets, I hastened out of that vile waterfront slum. My next logical goal was New Church Green, but somehow or other I could not bear to repass the church in whose basement I had glimpsed the inexplicably frightening form of that strangely diademmed priest or pastor. Besides, the grocery youth had told me that churches, as well as the Order of Dagon Hall, were not advisable neighbourhoods for strangers.
Accordingly I kept north along Main to Martin, then turning inland, crossing Federal Street safely north of the Green, and entering the decayed patrician neighbourhood of northern Broad, Washington, Lafayette, and Adams Streets. Though these stately old avenues were ill-surfaced and unkempt, their elm-shaded dignity had not entirely departed. Mansion after mansion claimed my gaze, most of them decrepit and boarded up amidst neglected grounds, but one or two in each street shewing signs of occupancy. In Washington Street there was a row of four or five in excellent repair and with finely-tended lawns and gardens. The most sumptuous of these--with wide terraced parterres extending back the whole way to Lafayette Street--I took to be the home of Old Man Marsh, the afflicted refinery owner.
In all these streets no living thing was visible, and I wondered at the complete absence of cats and dogs from Innsmouth. Another thing which puzzled and disturbed me, even in some of the best-preserved mansions, was the tightly shuttered condition of many third-story and attic windows. Furtiveness and secretiveness seemed universal in this hushed city of alienage and death, and I could not escape the sensation of being watched from ambush on every hand by sly, staring eyes that never shut.
I shivered as the cracked stroke of three sounded from a belfry on my left. Too well did I recall the squat church from which those notes came. Following Washington Street toward the river, I now faced a new zone of former industry and commerce; noting the ruins of a factory ahead, and seeing others, with the traces of an old railway station and covered railway bridge beyond, up the gorge on my right.
The uncertain bridge now before me was posted with a warning sign, but I took the risk and crossed again to the south bank where traces of life reappeared. Furtive, shambling creatures stared cryptically in my direction, and more normal faces eyed me coldly and curiously. Innsmouth was rapidly becoming intolerable, and I turned down Paine Street toward the Square in the hope of getting some vehicle to take me to Arkham before the still-distant starting-time of that sinister bus.
It was then that I saw the tumbledown fire station on my left, and noticed the red faced, bushy-bearded, watery eyed old man in nondescript rags who sat on a bench in front of it talking with a pair of unkempt but not abnormal looking firemen. This, of course, must be Zadok Allen, the half-crazed, liquorish nonagenarian whose tales of old Innsmouth and its shadow were so hideous and incredible.
","(Found Among the Papers of the Late
Francis Wayland Thurston, of Boston)
“Of such great powers or beings there may be conceivably a survival . . . a survival of a hugely remote period when . . . consciousness was manifested, perhaps, in shapes and forms long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity . . . forms of which poetry and legend alone have caught a flying memory and called them gods, monsters, mythical beings of all sorts and kinds. . . .”
—Algernon Blackwood.

I.
The Horror in Clay.

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

II.
The Tale of Inspector Legrasse.

The older matters which had made the sculptor’s dream and bas-relief so significant to my uncle formed the subject of the second half of his long manuscript. Once before, it appears, Professor Angell had seen the hellish outlines of the nameless monstrosity, puzzled over the unknown hieroglyphics, and heard the ominous syllables which can be rendered only as “Cthulhu”; and all this in so stirring and horrible a connexion that it is small wonder he pursued young Wilcox with queries and demands for data.
      The earlier experience had come in 1908, seventeen years before, when the American Archaeological Society held its annual meeting in St. Louis. Professor Angell, as befitted one of his authority and attainments, had had a prominent part in all the deliberations; and was one of the first to be approached by the several outsiders who took advantage of the convocation to offer questions for correct answering and problems for expert solution.
      The chief of these outsiders, and in a short time the focus of interest for the entire meeting, was a commonplace-looking middle-aged man who had travelled all the way from New Orleans for certain special information unobtainable from any local source. His name was John Raymond Legrasse, and he was by profession an Inspector of Police. With him he bore the subject of his visit, a grotesque, repulsive, and apparently very ancient stone statuette whose origin he was at a loss to determine. It must not be fancied that Inspector Legrasse had the least interest in archaeology. On the contrary, his wish for enlightenment was prompted by purely professional considerations. The statuette, idol, fetish, or whatever it was, had been captured some months before in the wooded swamps south of New Orleans during a raid on a supposed voodoo meeting; and so singular and hideous were the rites connected with it, that the police could not but realise that they had stumbled on a dark cult totally unknown to them, and infinitely more diabolic than even the blackest of the African voodoo circles. Of its origin, apart from the erratic and unbelievable tales extorted from the captured members, absolutely nothing was to be discovered; hence the anxiety of the police for any antiquarian lore which might help them to place the frightful symbol, and through it track down the cult to its fountain-head.
      Inspector Legrasse was scarcely prepared for the sensation which his offering created. One sight of the thing had been enough to throw the assembled men of science into a state of tense excitement, and they lost no time in crowding around him to gaze at the diminutive figure whose utter strangeness and air of genuinely abysmal antiquity hinted so potently at unopened and archaic vistas. No recognised school of sculpture had animated this terrible object, yet centuries and even thousands of years seemed recorded in its dim and greenish surface of unplaceable stone.
      The figure, which was finally passed slowly from man to man for close and careful study, was between seven and eight inches in height, and of exquisitely artistic workmanship. It represented a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind. This thing, which seemed instinct with a fearsome and unnatural malignancy, was of a somewhat bloated corpulence, and squatted evilly on a rectangular block or pedestal covered with undecipherable characters. The tips of the wings touched the back edge of the block, the seat occupied the centre, whilst the long, curved claws of the doubled-up, crouching hind legs gripped the front edge and extended a quarter of the way down toward the bottom of the pedestal. The cephalopod head was bent forward, so that the ends of the facial feelers brushed the backs of huge fore paws which clasped the croucher’s elevated knees. The aspect of the whole was abnormally life-like, and the more subtly fearful because its source was so totally unknown. Its vast, awesome, and incalculable age was unmistakable; yet not one link did it shew with any known type of art belonging to civilisation’s youth—or indeed to any other time. Totally separate and apart, its very material was a mystery; for the soapy, greenish-black stone with its golden or iridescent flecks and striations resembled nothing familiar to geology or mineralogy. The characters along the base were equally baffling; and no member present, despite a representation of half the world’s expert learning in this field, could form the least notion of even their remotest linguistic kinship. They, like the subject and material, belonged to something horribly remote and distinct from mankind as we know it; something frightfully suggestive of old and unhallowed cycles of life in which our world and our conceptions have no part.
      And yet, as the members severally shook their heads and confessed defeat at the Inspector’s problem, there was one man in that gathering who suspected a touch of bizarre familiarity in the monstrous shape and writing, and who presently told with some diffidence of the odd trifle he knew. This person was the late William Channing Webb, Professor of Anthropology in Princeton University, and an explorer of no slight note. Professor Webb had been engaged, forty-eight years before, in a tour of Greenland and Iceland in search of some Runic inscriptions which he failed to unearth; and whilst high up on the West Greenland coast had encountered a singular tribe or cult of degenerate Esquimaux whose religion, a curious form of devil-worship, chilled him with its deliberate bloodthirstiness and repulsiveness. It was a faith of which other Esquimaux knew little, and which they mentioned only with shudders, saying that it had come down from horribly ancient aeons before ever the world was made. Besides nameless rites and human sacrifices there were certain queer hereditary rituals addressed to a supreme elder devil or tornasuk; and of this Professor Webb had taken a careful phonetic copy from an aged angekok or wizard-priest, expressing the sounds in Roman letters as best he knew how. But just now of prime significance was the fetish which this cult had cherished, and around which they danced when the aurora leaped high over the ice cliffs. It was, the professor stated, a very crude bas-relief of stone, comprising a hideous picture and some cryptic writing. And so far as he could tell, it was a rough parallel in all essential features of the bestial thing now lying before the meeting.
      This data, received with suspense and astonishment by the assembled members, proved doubly exciting to Inspector Legrasse; and he began at once to ply his informant with questions. Having noted and copied an oral ritual among the swamp cult-worshippers his men had arrested, he besought the professor to remember as best he might the syllables taken down amongst the diabolist Esquimaux. There then followed an exhaustive comparison of details, and a moment of really awed silence when both detective and scientist agreed on the virtual identity of the phrase common to two hellish rituals so many worlds of distance apart. What, in substance, both the Esquimau wizards and the Louisiana swamp-priests had chanted to their kindred idols was something very like this—the word-divisions being guessed at from traditional breaks in the phrase as chanted aloud:
      “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.”
      Legrasse had one point in advance of Professor Webb, for several among his mongrel prisoners had repeated to him what older celebrants had told them the words meant. This text, as given, ran something like this:
      “In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”
      And now, in response to a general and urgent demand, Inspector Legrasse related as fully as possible his experience with the swamp worshippers; telling a story to which I could see my uncle attached profound significance. It savoured of the wildest dreams of myth-maker and theosophist, and disclosed an astonishing degree of cosmic imagination among such half-castes and pariahs as might be least expected to possess it.
      On November 1st, 1907, there had come to the New Orleans police a frantic summons from the swamp and lagoon country to the south. The squatters there, mostly primitive but good-natured descendants of Lafitte’s men, were in the grip of stark terror from an unknown thing which had stolen upon them in the night. It was voodoo, apparently, but voodoo of a more terrible sort than they had ever known; and some of their women and children had disappeared since the malevolent tom-tom had begun its incessant beating far within the black haunted woods where no dweller ventured. There were insane shouts and harrowing screams, soul-chilling chants and dancing devil-flames; and, the frightened messenger added, the people could stand it no more.
      So a body of twenty police, filling two carriages and an automobile, had set out in the late afternoon with the shivering squatter as a guide. At the end of the passable road they alighted, and for miles splashed on in silence through the terrible cypress woods where day never came. Ugly roots and malignant hanging nooses of Spanish moss beset them, and now and then a pile of dank stones or fragment of a rotting wall intensified by its hint of morbid habitation a depression which every malformed tree and every fungous islet combined to create. At length the squatter settlement, a miserable huddle of huts, hove in sight; and hysterical dwellers ran out to cluster around the group of bobbing lanterns. The muffled beat of tom-toms was now faintly audible far, far ahead; and a curdling shriek came at infrequent intervals when the wind shifted. A reddish glare, too, seemed to filter through the pale undergrowth beyond endless avenues of forest night. Reluctant even to be left alone again, each one of the cowed squatters refused point-blank to advance another inch toward the scene of unholy worship, so Inspector Legrasse and his nineteen colleagues plunged on unguided into black arcades of horror that none of them had ever trod before.
      The region now entered by the police was one of traditionally evil repute, substantially unknown and untraversed by white men. There were legends of a hidden lake unglimpsed by mortal sight, in which dwelt a huge, formless white polypous thing with luminous eyes; and squatters whispered that bat-winged devils flew up out of caverns in inner earth to worship it at midnight. They said it had been there before D’Iberville, before La Salle, before the Indians, and before even the wholesome beasts and birds of the woods. It was nightmare itself, and to see it was to die. But it made men dream, and so they knew enough to keep away. The present voodoo orgy was, indeed, on the merest fringe of this abhorred area, but that location was bad enough; hence perhaps the very place of the worship had terrified the squatters more than the shocking sounds and incidents.
      Only poetry or madness could do justice to the noises heard by Legrasse’s men as they ploughed on through the black morass toward the red glare and the muffled tom-toms. There are vocal qualities peculiar to men, and vocal qualities peculiar to beasts; and it is terrible to hear the one when the source should yield the other. Animal fury and orgiastic licence here whipped themselves to daemoniac heights by howls and squawking ecstasies that tore and reverberated through those nighted woods like pestilential tempests from the gulfs of hell. Now and then the less organised ululation would cease, and from what seemed a well-drilled chorus of hoarse voices would rise in sing-song chant that hideous phrase or ritual:
      “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.”
Then the men, having reached a spot where the trees were thinner, came suddenly in sight of the spectacle itself. Four of them reeled, one fainted, and two were shaken into a frantic cry which the mad cacophony of the orgy fortunately deadened. Legrasse dashed swamp water on the face of the fainting man, and all stood trembling and nearly hypnotised with horror.
      In a natural glade of the swamp stood a grassy island of perhaps an acre’s extent, clear of trees and tolerably dry. On this now leaped and twisted a more indescribable horde of human abnormality than any but a Sime or an Angarola could paint. Void of clothing, this hybrid spawn were braying, bellowing, and writhing about a monstrous ring-shaped bonfire; in the centre of which, revealed by occasional rifts in the curtain of flame, stood a great granite monolith some eight feet in height; on top of which, incongruous with its diminutiveness, rested the noxious carven statuette. From a wide circle of ten scaffolds set up at regular intervals with the flame-girt monolith as a centre hung, head downward, the oddly marred bodies of the helpless squatters who had disappeared. It was inside this circle that the ring of worshippers jumped and roared, the general direction of the mass motion being from left to right in endless Bacchanal between the ring of bodies and the ring of fire.
      It may have been only imagination and it may have been only echoes which induced one of the men, an excitable Spaniard, to fancy he heard antiphonal responses to the ritual from some far and unillumined spot deeper within the wood of ancient legendry and horror. This man, Joseph D. Galvez, I later met and questioned; and he proved distractingly imaginative. He indeed went so far as to hint of the faint beating of great wings, and of a glimpse of shining eyes and a mountainous white bulk beyond the remotest trees—but I suppose he had been hearing too much native superstition.
      Actually, the horrified pause of the men was of comparatively brief duration. Duty came first; and although there must have been nearly a hundred mongrel celebrants in the throng, the police relied on their firearms and plunged determinedly into the nauseous rout. For five minutes the resultant din and chaos were beyond description. Wild blows were struck, shots were fired, and escapes were made; but in the end Legrasse was able to count some forty-seven sullen prisoners, whom he forced to dress in haste and fall into line between two rows of policemen. Five of the worshippers lay dead, and two severely wounded ones were carried away on improvised stretchers by their fellow-prisoners. The image on the monolith, of course, was carefully removed and carried back by Legrasse.
      Examined at headquarters after a trip of intense strain and weariness, the prisoners all proved to be men of a very low, mixed-blooded, and mentally aberrant type. Most were seamen, and a sprinkling of negroes and mulattoes, largely West Indians or Brava Portuguese from the Cape Verde Islands, gave a colouring of voodooism to the heterogeneous cult. But before many questions were asked, it became manifest that something far deeper and older than negro fetichism was involved. Degraded and ignorant as they were, the creatures held with surprising consistency to the central idea of their loathsome faith.
      They worshipped, so they said, the Great Old Ones who lived ages before there were any men, and who came to the young world out of the sky. Those Old Ones were gone now, inside the earth and under the sea; but their dead bodies had told their secrets in dreams to the first men, who formed a cult which had never died. This was that cult, and the prisoners said it had always existed and always would exist, hidden in distant wastes and dark places all over the world until the time when the great priest Cthulhu, from his dark house in the mighty city of R’lyeh under the waters, should rise and bring the earth again beneath his sway. Some day he would call, when the stars were ready, and the secret cult would always be waiting to liberate him.
      Meanwhile no more must be told. There was a secret which even torture could not extract. Mankind was not absolutely alone among the conscious things of earth, for shapes came out of the dark to visit the faithful few. But these were not the Great Old Ones. No man had ever seen the Old Ones. The carven idol was great Cthulhu, but none might say whether or not the others were precisely like him. No one could read the old writing now, but things were told by word of mouth. The chanted ritual was not the secret—that was never spoken aloud, only whispered. The chant meant only this: “In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”
      Only two of the prisoners were found sane enough to be hanged, and the rest were committed to various institutions. All denied a part in the ritual murders, and averred that the killing had been done by Black Winged Ones which had come to them from their immemorial meeting-place in the haunted wood. But of those mysterious allies no coherent account could ever be gained. What the police did extract, came mainly from an immensely aged mestizo named Castro, who claimed to have sailed to strange ports and talked with undying leaders of the cult in the mountains of China.
      Old Castro remembered bits of hideous legend that paled the speculations of theosophists and made man and the world seem recent and transient indeed. There had been aeons when other Things ruled on the earth, and They had had great cities. Remains of Them, he said the deathless Chinamen had told him, were still to be found as Cyclopean stones on islands in the Pacific. They all died vast epochs of time before men came, but there were arts which could revive Them when the stars had come round again to the right positions in the cycle of eternity. They had, indeed, come themselves from the stars, and brought Their images with Them.
      These Great Old Ones, Castro continued, were not composed altogether of flesh and blood. They had shape—for did not this star-fashioned image prove it?—but that shape was not made of matter. When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world through the sky; but when the stars were wrong, They could not live. But although They no longer lived, They would never really die. They all lay in stone houses in Their great city of R’lyeh, preserved by the spells of mighty Cthulhu for a glorious resurrection when the stars and the earth might once more be ready for Them. But at that time some force from outside must serve to liberate Their bodies. The spells that preserved Them intact likewise prevented Them from making an initial move, and They could only lie awake in the dark and think whilst uncounted millions of years rolled by. They knew all that was occurring in the universe, but Their mode of speech was transmitted thought. Even now They talked in Their tombs. When, after infinities of chaos, the first men came, the Great Old Ones spoke to the sensitive among them by moulding their dreams; for only thus could Their language reach the fleshly minds of mammals.
      Then, whispered Castro, those first men formed the cult around small idols which the Great Ones shewed them; idols brought in dim aeras from dark stars. That cult would never die till the stars came right again, and the secret priests would take great Cthulhu from His tomb to revive His subjects and resume His rule of earth. The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom. Meanwhile the cult, by appropriate rites, must keep alive the memory of those ancient ways and shadow forth the prophecy of their return.
      In the elder time chosen men had talked with the entombed Old Ones in dreams, but then something had happened. The great stone city R’lyeh, with its monoliths and sepulchres, had sunk beneath the waves; and the deep waters, full of the one primal mystery through which not even thought can pass, had cut off the spectral intercourse. But memory never died, and high-priests said that the city would rise again when the stars were right. Then came out of the earth the black spirits of earth, mouldy and shadowy, and full of dim rumours picked up in caverns beneath forgotten sea-bottoms. But of them old Castro dared not speak much. He cut himself off hurriedly, and no amount of persuasion or subtlety could elicit more in this direction. The size of the Old Ones, too, he curiously declined to mention. Of the cult, he said that he thought the centre lay amid the pathless deserts of Arabia, where Irem, the City of Pillars, dreams hidden and untouched. It was not allied to the European witch-cult, and was virtually unknown beyond its members. No book had ever really hinted of it, though the deathless Chinamen said that there were double meanings in the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred which the initiated might read as they chose, especially the much-discussed couplet:
 
“That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.”

      Legrasse, deeply impressed and not a little bewildered, had inquired in vain concerning the historic affiliations of the cult. Castro, apparently, had told the truth when he said that it was wholly secret. The authorities at Tulane University could shed no light upon either cult or image, and now the detective had come to the highest authorities in the country and met with no more than the Greenland tale of Professor Webb.
      The feverish interest aroused at the meeting by Legrasse’s tale, corroborated as it was by the statuette, is echoed in the subsequent correspondence of those who attended; although scant mention occurs in the formal publications of the society. Caution is the first care of those accustomed to face occasional charlatanry and imposture. Legrasse for some time lent the image to Professor Webb, but at the latter’s death it was returned to him and remains in his possession, where I viewed it not long ago. It is truly a terrible thing, and unmistakably akin to the dream-sculpture of young Wilcox.
      That my uncle was excited by the tale of the sculptor I did not wonder, for what thoughts must arise upon hearing, after a knowledge of what Legrasse had learned of the cult, of a sensitive young man who had dreamed not only the figure and exact hieroglyphics of the swamp-found image and the Greenland devil tablet, but had come in his dreams upon at least three of the precise words of the formula uttered alike by Esquimau diabolists and mongrel Louisianans? Professor Angell’s instant start on an investigation of the utmost thoroughness was eminently natural; though privately I suspected young Wilcox of having heard of the cult in some indirect way, and of having invented a series of dreams to heighten and continue the mystery at my uncle’s expense. The dream-narratives and cuttings collected by the professor were, of course, strong corroboration; but the rationalism of my mind and the extravagance of the whole subject led me to adopt what I thought the most sensible conclusions. So, after thoroughly studying the manuscript again and correlating the theosophical and anthropological notes with the cult narrative of Legrasse, I made a trip to Providence to see the sculptor and give him the rebuke I thought proper for so boldly imposing upon a learned and aged man.
      Wilcox still lived alone in the Fleur-de-Lys Building in Thomas Street, a hideous Victorian imitation of seventeenth-century Breton architecture which flaunts its stuccoed front amidst the lovely colonial houses on the ancient hill, and under the very shadow of the finest Georgian steeple in America. I found him at work in his rooms, and at once conceded from the specimens scattered about that his genius is indeed profound and authentic. He will, I believe, some time be heard from as one of the great decadents; for he has crystallised in clay and will one day mirror in marble those nightmares and phantasies which Arthur Machen evokes in prose, and Clark Ashton Smith makes visible in verse and in painting.
      Dark, frail, and somewhat unkempt in aspect, he turned languidly at my knock and asked me my business without rising. When I told him who I was, he displayed some interest; for my uncle had excited his curiosity in probing his strange dreams, yet had never explained the reason for the study. I did not enlarge his knowledge in this regard, but sought with some subtlety to draw him out. In a short time I became convinced of his absolute sincerity, for he spoke of the dreams in a manner none could mistake. They and their subconscious residuum had influenced his art profoundly, and he shewed me a morbid statue whose contours almost made me shake with the potency of its black suggestion. He could not recall having seen the original of this thing except in his own dream bas-relief, but the outlines had formed themselves insensibly under his hands. It was, no doubt, the giant shape he had raved of in delirium. That he really knew nothing of the hidden cult, save from what my uncle’s relentless catechism had let fall, he soon made clear; and again I strove to think of some way in which he could possibly have received the weird impressions.
      He talked of his dreams in a strangely poetic fashion; making me see with terrible vividness the damp Cyclopean city of slimy green stone—whose geometry, he oddly said, was all wrong—and hear with frightened expectancy the ceaseless, half-mental calling from underground: “Cthulhu fhtagn”, “Cthulhu fhtagn”. These words had formed part of that dread ritual which told of dead Cthulhu’s dream-vigil in his stone vault at R’lyeh, and I felt deeply moved despite my rational beliefs. Wilcox, I was sure, had heard of the cult in some casual way, and had soon forgotten it amidst the mass of his equally weird reading and imagining. Later, by virtue of its sheer impressiveness, it had found subconscious expression in dreams, in the bas-relief, and in the terrible statue I now beheld; so that his imposture upon my uncle had been a very innocent one. The youth was of a type, at once slightly affected and slightly ill-mannered, which I could never like; but I was willing enough now to admit both his genius and his honesty. I took leave of him amicably, and wish him all the success his talent promises.
      The matter of the cult still remained to fascinate me, and at times I had visions of personal fame from researches into its origin and connexions. I visited New Orleans, talked with Legrasse and others of that old-time raiding-party, saw the frightful image, and even questioned such of the mongrel prisoners as still survived. Old Castro, unfortunately, had been dead for some years. What I now heard so graphically at first-hand, though it was really no more than a detailed confirmation of what my uncle had written, excited me afresh; for I felt sure that I was on the track of a very real, very secret, and very ancient religion whose discovery would make me an anthropologist of note. My attitude was still one of absolute materialism, as I wish it still were, and I discounted with almost inexplicable perversity the coincidence of the dream notes and odd cuttings collected by Professor Angell.
      One thing I began to suspect, and which I now fear I know, is that my uncle’s death was far from natural. He fell on a narrow hill street leading up from an ancient waterfront swarming with foreign mongrels, after a careless push from a negro sailor. I did not forget the mixed blood and marine pursuits of the cult-members in Louisiana, and would not be surprised to learn of secret methods and poison needles as ruthless and as anciently known as the cryptic rites and beliefs. Legrasse and his men, it is true, have been let alone; but in Norway a certain seaman who saw things is dead. Might not the deeper inquiries of my uncle after encountering the sculptor’s data have come to sinister ears? I think Professor Angell died because he knew too much, or because he was likely to learn too much. Whether I shall go as he did remains to be seen, for I have learned much now.

III.
The Madness from the Sea.

If heaven ever wishes to grant me a boon, it will be a total effacing of the results of a mere chance which fixed my eye on a certain stray piece of shelf-paper. It was nothing on which I would naturally have stumbled in the course of my daily round, for it was an old number of an Australian journal, the Sydney Bulletin for April 18, 1925. It had escaped even the cutting bureau which had at the time of its issuance been avidly collecting material for my uncle’s research.
      I had largely given over my inquiries into what Professor Angell called the “Cthulhu Cult”, and was visiting a learned friend in Paterson, New Jersey; the curator of a local museum and a mineralogist of note. Examining one day the reserve specimens roughly set on the storage shelves in a rear room of the museum, my eye was caught by an odd picture in one of the old papers spread beneath the stones. It was the Sydney Bulletin I have mentioned, for my friend has wide affiliations in all conceivable foreign parts; and the picture was a half-tone cut of a hideous stone image almost identical with that which Legrasse had found in the swamp.
      Eagerly clearing the sheet of its precious contents, I scanned the item in detail; and was disappointed to find it of only moderate length. What it suggested, however, was of portentous significance to my flagging quest; and I carefully tore it out for immediate action. It read as follows:
MYSTERY DERELICT FOUND AT SEA
Vigilant Arrives With Helpless Armed New Zealand Yacht in Tow.
One Survivor and Dead Man Found Aboard. Tale of
Desperate Battle and Deaths at Sea.
Rescued Seaman Refuses
Particulars of Strange Experience.
Odd Idol Found in His Possession. Inquiry
to Follow.

The Morrison Co.’s freighter Vigilant, bound from Valparaiso, arrived this morning at its wharf in Darling Harbour, having in tow the battled and disabled but heavily armed steam yacht Alert of Dunedin, N. Z., which was sighted April 12th in S. Latitude 34° 21', W. Longitude 152° 17' with one living and one dead man aboard.
      The Vigilant left Valparaiso March 25th, and on April 2nd was driven considerably south of her course by exceptionally heavy storms and monster waves. On April 12th the derelict was sighted; and though apparently deserted, was found upon boarding to contain one survivor in a half-delirious condition and one man who had evidently been dead for more than a week. The living man was clutching a horrible stone idol of unknown origin, about a foot in height, regarding whose nature authorities at Sydney University, the Royal Society, and the Museum in College Street all profess complete bafflement, and which the survivor says he found in the cabin of the yacht, in a small carved shrine of common pattern.
      This man, after recovering his senses, told an exceedingly strange story of piracy and slaughter. He is Gustaf Johansen, a Norwegian of some intelligence, and had been second mate of the two-masted schooner Emma of Auckland, which sailed for Callao February 20th with a complement of eleven men. The Emma, he says, was delayed and thrown widely south of her course by the great storm of March 1st, and on March 22nd, in S. Latitude 49° 51', W. Longitude 128° 34', encountered the Alert, manned by a queer and evil-looking crew of Kanakas and half-castes. Being ordered peremptorily to turn back, Capt. Collins refused; whereupon the strange crew began to fire savagely and without warning upon the schooner with a peculiarly heavy battery of brass cannon forming part of the yacht’s equipment. The Emma’s men shewed fight, says the survivor, and though the schooner began to sink from shots beneath the waterline they managed to heave alongside their enemy and board her, grappling with the savage crew on the yacht’s deck, and being forced to kill them all, the number being slightly superior, because of their particularly abhorrent and desperate though rather clumsy mode of fighting.
      Three of the Emma’s men, including Capt. Collins and First Mate Green, were killed; and the remaining eight under Second Mate Johansen proceeded to navigate the captured yacht, going ahead in their original direction to see if any reason for their ordering back had existed. The next day, it appears, they raised and landed on a small island, although none is known to exist in that part of the ocean; and six of the men somehow died ashore, though Johansen is queerly reticent about this part of his story, and speaks only of their falling into a rock chasm. Later, it seems, he and one companion boarded the yacht and tried to manage her, but were beaten about by the storm of April 2nd. From that time till his rescue on the 12th the man remembers little, and he does not even recall when William Briden, his companion, died. Briden’s death reveals no apparent cause, and was probably due to excitement or exposure. Cable advices from Dunedin report that the Alert was well known there as an island trader, and bore an evil reputation along the waterfront. It was owned by a curious group of half-castes whose frequent meetings and night trips to the woods attracted no little curiosity; and it had set sail in great haste just after the storm and earth tremors of March 1st. Our Auckland correspondent gives the Emma and her crew an excellent reputation, and Johansen is described as a sober and worthy man. The admiralty will institute an inquiry on the whole matter beginning tomorrow, at which every effort will be made to induce Johansen to speak more freely than he has done hitherto.
      This was all, together with the picture of the hellish image; but what a train of ideas it started in my mind! Here were new treasuries of data on the Cthulhu Cult, and evidence that it had strange interests at sea as well as on land. What motive prompted the hybrid crew to order back the Emma as they sailed about with their hideous idol? What was the unknown island on which six of the Emma’s crew had died, and about which the mate Johansen was so secretive? What had the vice-admiralty’s investigation brought out, and what was known of the noxious cult in Dunedin? And most marvellous of all, what deep and more than natural linkage of dates was this which gave a malign and now undeniable significance to the various turns of events so carefully noted by my uncle?
      March 1st—our February 28th according to the International Date Line—the earthquake and storm had come. From Dunedin the Alert and her noisome crew had darted eagerly forth as if imperiously summoned, and on the other side of the earth poets and artists had begun to dream of a strange, dank Cyclopean city whilst a young sculptor had moulded in his sleep the form of the dreaded Cthulhu. March 23d the crew of the Emma landed on an unknown island and left six men dead; and on that date the dreams of sensitive men assumed a heightened vividness and darkened with dread of a giant monster’s malign pursuit, whilst an architect had gone mad and a sculptor had lapsed suddenly into delirium! And what of this storm of April 2nd—the date on which all dreams of the dank city ceased, and Wilcox emerged unharmed from the bondage of strange fever? What of all this—and of those hints of old Castro about the sunken, star-born Old Ones and their coming reign; their faithful cult and their mastery of dreams? Was I tottering on the brink of cosmic horrors beyond man’s power to bear? If so, they must be horrors of the mind alone, for in some way the second of April had put a stop to whatever monstrous menace had begun its siege of mankind’s soul.
      That evening, after a day of hurried cabling and arranging, I bade my host adieu and took a train for San Francisco. In less than a month I was in Dunedin; where, however, I found that little was known of the strange cult-members who had lingered in the old sea-taverns. Waterfront scum was far too common for special mention; though there was vague talk about one inland trip these mongrels had made, during which faint drumming and red flame were noted on the distant hills. In Auckland I learned that Johansen had returned with yellow hair turned white after a perfunctory and inconclusive questioning at Sydney, and had thereafter sold his cottage in West Street and sailed with his wife to his old home in Oslo. Of his stirring experience he would tell his friends no more than he had told the admiralty officials, and all they could do was to give me his Oslo address.
      After that I went to Sydney and talked profitlessly with seamen and members of the vice-admiralty court. I saw the Alert, now sold and in commercial use, at Circular Quay in Sydney Cove, but gained nothing from its non-committal bulk. The crouching image with its cuttlefish head, dragon body, scaly wings, and hieroglyphed pedestal, was preserved in the Museum at Hyde Park; and I studied it long and well, finding it a thing of balefully exquisite workmanship, and with the same utter mystery, terrible antiquity, and unearthly strangeness of material which I had noted in Legrasse’s smaller specimen. Geologists, the curator told me, had found it a monstrous puzzle; for they vowed that the world held no rock like it. Then I thought with a shudder of what old Castro had told Legrasse about the primal Great Ones: “They had come from the stars, and had brought Their images with Them.”
      Shaken with such a mental revolution as I had never before known, I now resolved to visit Mate Johansen in Oslo. Sailing for London, I reëmbarked at once for the Norwegian capital; and one autumn day landed at the trim wharves in the shadow of the Egeberg. Johansen’s address, I discovered, lay in the Old Town of King Harold Haardrada, which kept alive the name of Oslo during all the centuries that the greater city masqueraded as “Christiana”. I made the brief trip by taxicab, and knocked with palpitant heart at the door of a neat and ancient building with plastered front. A sad-faced woman in black answered my summons, and I was stung with disappointment when she told me in halting English that Gustaf Johansen was no more.
      He had not survived his return, said his wife, for the doings at sea in 1925 had broken him. He had told her no more than he had told the public, but had left a long manuscript—of “technical matters” as he said—written in English, evidently in order to safeguard her from the peril of casual perusal. During a walk through a narrow lane near the Gothenburg dock, a bundle of papers falling from an attic window had knocked him down. Two Lascar sailors at once helped him to his feet, but before the ambulance could reach him he was dead. Physicians found no adequate cause for the end, and laid it to heart trouble and a weakened constitution.
      I now felt gnawing at my vitals that dark terror which will never leave me till I, too, am at rest; “accidentally” or otherwise. Persuading the widow that my connexion with her husband’s “technical matters” was sufficient to entitle me to his manuscript, I bore the document away and began to read it on the London boat. It was a simple, rambling thing—a naive sailor’s effort at a post-facto diary—and strove to recall day by day that last awful voyage. I cannot attempt to transcribe it verbatim in all its cloudiness and redundance, but I will tell its gist enough to shew why the sound of the water against the vessel’s sides became so unendurable to me that I stopped my ears with cotton.
      Johansen, thank God, did not know quite all, even though he saw the city and the Thing, but I shall never sleep calmly again when I think of the horrors that lurk ceaselessly behind life in time and in space, and of those unhallowed blasphemies from elder stars which dream beneath the sea, known and favoured by a nightmare cult ready and eager to loose them on the world whenever another earthquake shall heave their monstrous stone city again to the sun and air.
      Johansen’s voyage had begun just as he told it to the vice-admiralty. The Emma, in ballast, had cleared Auckland on February 20th, and had felt the full force of that earthquake-born tempest which must have heaved up from the sea-bottom the horrors that filled men’s dreams. Once more under control, the ship was making good progress when held up by the Alert on March 22nd, and I could feel the mate’s regret as he wrote of her bombardment and sinking. Of the swarthy cult-fiends on the Alert he speaks with significant horror. There was some peculiarly abominable quality about them which made their destruction seem almost a duty, and Johansen shews ingenuous wonder at the charge of ruthlessness brought against his party during the proceedings of the court of inquiry. Then, driven ahead by curiosity in their captured yacht under Johansen’s command, the men sight a great stone pillar sticking out of the sea, and in S. Latitude 47° 9', W. Longitude 126° 43' come upon a coast-line of mingled mud, ooze, and weedy Cyclopean masonry which can be nothing less than the tangible substance of earth’s supreme terror—the nightmare corpse-city of R’lyeh, that was built in measureless aeons behind history by the vast, loathsome shapes that seeped down from the dark stars. There lay great Cthulhu and his hordes, hidden in green slimy vaults and sending out at last, after cycles incalculable, the thoughts that spread fear to the dreams of the sensitive and called imperiously to the faithful to come on a pilgrimage of liberation and restoration. All this Johansen did not suspect, but God knows he soon saw enough!
      I suppose that only a single mountain-top, the hideous monolith-crowned citadel whereon great Cthulhu was buried, actually emerged from the waters. When I think of the extent of all that may be brooding down there I almost wish to kill myself forthwith. Johansen and his men were awed by the cosmic majesty of this dripping Babylon of elder daemons, and must have guessed without guidance that it was nothing of this or of any sane planet. Awe at the unbelievable size of the greenish stone blocks, at the dizzying height of the great carven monolith, and at the stupefying identity of the colossal statues and bas-reliefs with the queer image found in the shrine on the Alert, is poignantly visible in every line of the mate’s frightened description.
      Without knowing what futurism is like, Johansen achieved something very close to it when he spoke of the city; for instead of describing any definite structure or building, he dwells only on broad impressions of vast angles and stone surfaces—surfaces too great to belong to any thing right or proper for this earth, and impious with horrible images and hieroglyphs. I mention his talk about angles because it suggests something Wilcox had told me of his awful dreams. He had said that the geometry of the dream-place he saw was abnormal, non-Euclidean, and loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from ours. Now an unlettered seaman felt the same thing whilst gazing at the terrible reality.
      Johansen and his men landed at a sloping mud-bank on this monstrous Acropolis, and clambered slipperily up over titan oozy blocks which could have been no mortal staircase. The very sun of heaven seemed distorted when viewed through the polarising miasma welling out from this sea-soaked perversion, and twisted menace and suspense lurked leeringly in those crazily elusive angles of carven rock where a second glance shewed concavity after the first shewed convexity.
      Something very like fright had come over all the explorers before anything more definite than rock and ooze and weed was seen. Each would have fled had he not feared the scorn of the others, and it was only half-heartedly that they searched—vainly, as it proved—for some portable souvenir to bear away.
      It was Rodriguez the Portuguese who climbed up the foot of the monolith and shouted of what he had found. The rest followed him, and looked curiously at the immense carved door with the now familiar squid-dragon bas-relief. It was, Johansen said, like a great barn-door; and they all felt that it was a door because of the ornate lintel, threshold, and jambs around it, though they could not decide whether it lay flat like a trap-door or slantwise like an outside cellar-door. As Wilcox would have said, the geometry of the place was all wrong. One could not be sure that the sea and the ground were horizontal, hence the relative position of everything else seemed phantasmally variable.
      Briden pushed at the stone in several places without result. Then Donovan felt over it delicately around the edge, pressing each point separately as he went. He climbed interminably along the grotesque stone moulding—that is, one would call it climbing if the thing was not after all horizontal—and the men wondered how any door in the universe could be so vast. Then, very softly and slowly, the acre-great panel began to give inward at the top; and they saw that it was balanced. Donovan slid or somehow propelled himself down or along the jamb and rejoined his fellows, and everyone watched the queer recession of the monstrously carven portal. In this phantasy of prismatic distortion it moved anomalously in a diagonal way, so that all the rules of matter and perspective seemed upset.
      The aperture was black with a darkness almost material. That tenebrousness was indeed a positive quality; for it obscured such parts of the inner walls as ought to have been revealed, and actually burst forth like smoke from its aeon-long imprisonment, visibly darkening the sun as it slunk away into the shrunken and gibbous sky on flapping membraneous wings. The odour arising from the newly opened depths was intolerable, and at length the quick-eared Hawkins thought he heard a nasty, slopping sound down there. Everyone listened, and everyone was listening still when It lumbered slobberingly into sight and gropingly squeezed Its gelatinous green immensity through the black doorway into the tainted outside air of that poison city of madness.
      Poor Johansen’s handwriting almost gave out when he wrote of this. Of the six men who never reached the ship, he thinks two perished of pure fright in that accursed instant. The Thing cannot be described—there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order. A mountain walked or stumbled. God! What wonder that across the earth a great architect went mad, and poor Wilcox raved with fever in that telepathic instant? The Thing of the idols, the green, sticky spawn of the stars, had awaked to claim his own. The stars were right again, and what an age-old cult had failed to do by design, a band of innocent sailors had done by accident. After vigintillions of years great Cthulhu was loose again, and ravening for delight.
      Three men were swept up by the flabby claws before anybody turned. God rest them, if there be any rest in the universe. They were Donovan, Guerrera, and Ångstrom. Parker slipped as the other three were plunging frenziedly over endless vistas of green-crusted rock to the boat, and Johansen swears he was swallowed up by an angle of masonry which shouldn’t have been there; an angle which was acute, but behaved as if it were obtuse. So only Briden and Johansen reached the boat, and pulled desperately for the Alert as the mountainous monstrosity flopped down the slimy stones and hesitated floundering at the edge of the water.
      Steam had not been suffered to go down entirely, despite the departure of all hands for the shore; and it was the work of only a few moments of feverish rushing up and down between wheel and engines to get the Alert under way. Slowly, amidst the distorted horrors of that indescribable scene, she began to churn the lethal waters; whilst on the masonry of that charnel shore that was not of earth the titan Thing from the stars slavered and gibbered like Polypheme cursing the fleeing ship of Odysseus. Then, bolder than the storied Cyclops, great Cthulhu slid greasily into the water and began to pursue with vast wave-raising strokes of cosmic potency. Briden looked back and went mad, laughing shrilly as he kept on laughing at intervals till death found him one night in the cabin whilst Johansen was wandering deliriously.
      But Johansen had not given out yet. Knowing that the Thing could surely overtake the Alert until steam was fully up, he resolved on a desperate chance; and, setting the engine for full speed, ran lightning-like on deck and reversed the wheel. There was a mighty eddying and foaming in the noisome brine, and as the steam mounted higher and higher the brave Norwegian drove his vessel head on against the pursuing jelly which rose above the unclean froth like the stern of a daemon galleon. The awful squid-head with writhing feelers came nearly up to the bowsprit of the sturdy yacht, but Johansen drove on relentlessly. There was a bursting as of an exploding bladder, a slushy nastiness as of a cloven sunfish, a stench as of a thousand opened graves, and a sound that the chronicler would not put on paper. For an instant the ship was befouled by an acrid and blinding green cloud, and then there was only a venomous seething astern; where—God in heaven!—the scattered plasticity of that nameless sky-spawn was nebulously recombining in its hateful original form, whilst its distance widened every second as the Alert gained impetus from its mounting steam.
      That was all. After that Johansen only brooded over the idol in the cabin and attended to a few matters of food for himself and the laughing maniac by his side. He did not try to navigate after the first bold flight, for the reaction had taken something out of his soul. Then came the storm of April 2nd, and a gathering of the clouds about his consciousness. There is a sense of spectral whirling through liquid gulfs of infinity, of dizzying rides through reeling universes on a comet’s tail, and of hysterical plunges from the pit to the moon and from the moon back again to the pit, all livened by a cachinnating chorus of the distorted, hilarious elder gods and the green, bat-winged mocking imps of Tartarus.
      Out of that dream came rescue—the Vigilant, the vice-admiralty court, the streets of Dunedin, and the long voyage back home to the old house by the Egeberg. He could not tell—they would think him mad. He would write of what he knew before death came, but his wife must not guess. Death would be a boon if only it could blot out the memories.
      That was the document I read, and now I have placed it in the tin box beside the bas-relief and the papers of Professor Angell. With it shall go this record of mine—this test of my own sanity, wherein is pieced together that which I hope may never be pieced together again. I have looked upon all that the universe has to hold of horror, and even the skies of spring and the flowers of summer must ever afterward be poison to me. But I do not think my life will be long. As my uncle went, as poor Johansen went, so I shall go. I know too much, and the cult still lives.
      Cthulhu still lives, too, I suppose, again in that chasm of stone which has shielded him since the sun was young. His accursed city is sunken once more, for the Vigilant sailed over the spot after the April storm; but his ministers on earth still bellow and prance and slay around idol-capped monoliths in lonely places. He must have been trapped by the sinking whilst within his black abyss, or else the world would by now be screaming with fright and frenzy. Who knows the end? What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise. Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men. A time will come—but I must not and cannot think! Let me pray that, if I do not survive this manuscript, my executors may put caution before audacity and see that it meets no other eye.
 ",True
"I can hardly describe the mood in which I was left by this harrowing episode--an episode at once mad and pitiful, grotesque and terrifying. The grocery boy had prepared me for it, yet the reality left me none the less bewildered and disturbed. Puerile though the story was, old Zadok's insane earnestness and horror had communicated to me a mounting unrest which joined with my earlier sense of loathing for the town and its blight of intangible shadow.

Later I might sift the tale and extract some nucleus of historic allegory; just now I wished to put it out of my head. The hour grown perilously late--my watch said 7:15, and the Arkham bus left Town Square at eight--so I tried to give my thoughts as neutral and practical a cast as possible, meanwhile walking rapidly through the deserted streets of gaping roofs and leaning houses toward the hotel where I had checked my valise and would find my bus.

Though the golden light of late afternoon gave the ancient roofs and decrepit chimneys an air of mystic loveliness and peace, I could not help glancing over my shoulder now and then. I would surely be very glad to get out of malodorous and fear-shadowed Innsmouth, and wished there were some other vehicle than the bus driven by that sinister-looking fellow Sargent. Yet I did not hurry too precipitately, for there were architectural details worth viewing at every silent corner; and I could easily, I calculated, cover the necessary distance in a half-hour.

Studying the grocery youth's map and seeking a route I had not traversed before, I chose Marsh Street instead of State for my approach to Town Square. Near the corner of Fall Street I began to see scattered groups of furtive whisperers, and when I finally reached the Square I saw that almost all the loiterers were congregated around the door of the Gilman House. It seemed as if many bulging, watery, unwinking eyes looked oddly at me as I claimed my valise in the lobby, and I hoped that none of these unpleasant creatures would be my fellow-passengers on the coach.

The bus, rather early, rattled in with three passengers somewhat before eight, and an evil-looking fellow on the sidewalk muttered a few indistinguishable words to the driver. Sargent threw out a mail-bag and a roll of newspapers, and entered the hotel; while the passengers--the same men whom I had seen arriving in Newburyport that morning--shambled to the sidewalk and exchanged some faint guttural words with a loafer in a language I could have sworn was not English. I boarded the empty coach and took the seat I had taken before, but was hardly settled before Sargent re-appeared and began mumbling in a throaty voice of peculiar repulsiveness.

I was, it appeared, in very bad luck. There had been something wrong with the engine, despite the excellent time made from Newburyport, and the bus could not complete the journey to Arkham. No, it could not possibly be repaired that night, nor was there any other way of getting transportation out of Innsmouth either to Arkham or elsewhere. Sargent was sorry, but I would have to stop over at the Gilman. Probably the clerk would make the price easy for me, but there was nothing else to do. Almost dazed by this sudden obstacle, and violently dreading the fall of night in this decaying and half-unlighted town, I left the bus and reentered the hotel lobby; where the sullen queer-looking night clerk told me I could have Room 428 on next the top floor--large, but without running water--for a dollar.

Despite what I had heard of this hotel in Newburyport, I signed the register, paid my dollar, let the clerk take my valise, and followed that sour, solitary attendant up three creaking flights of stairs past dusty corridors which seemed wholly devoid of life. My room was a dismal rear one with two windows and bare, cheap furnishings, overlooked a dingy court-yard otherwise hemmed in by low, deserted brick blocks, and commanded a view of decrepit westward-stretching roofs with a marshy countryside beyond. At the end of the corridor was a bathroom--a discouraging relique with ancient marble bowl, tin tub, faint electric light, and musty wooded paneling around all the plumbing fixtures.

It being still daylight, I descended to the Square and looked around for a dinner of some sort; noticing as I did so the strange glances I received from the unwholesome loafers. Since the grocery was closed, I was forced to patronise the restaurant I had shunned before; a stooped, narrow-headed man with staring, unwinking eyes, and a flat-nosed wench with unbelievably thick, clumsy hands being in attendance. The service was all of the counter type, and it relieved me to find that much was evidently served from cans and packages. A bowl of vegetable soup with crackers was enough for me, and I soon headed back for my cheerless room at the Gilman; getting a evening paper and a fly-specked magazine from the evil-visaged clerk at the rickety stand beside his desk.

As twilight deepened I turned on the one feeble electric bulb over the cheap, iron-framed bed, and tried as best I could to continue the reading I had begun. I felt it advisable to keep my mind wholesomely occupied, for it would not do to brood over the abnormalities of this ancient, blight-shadowed town while I was still within its borders. The insane yarn I had heard from the aged drunkard did not promise very pleasant dreams, and I felt I must keep the image of his wild, watery eyes as far as possible from my imagination.

Also, I must not dwell on what that factory inspector had told the Newburyport ticket-agent about the Gilman House and the voices of its nocturnal tenants--not on that, nor on the face beneath the tiara in the black church doorway; the face for whose horror my conscious mind could not account. It would perhaps have been easier to keep my thoughts from disturbing topics had the room not been so gruesomely musty. As it was, the lethal mustiness blended hideously with the town's general fishy odour and persistently focussed one's fancy on death and decay.

Another thing that disturbed me was the absence of a bolt on the door of my room. One had been there, as marks clearly shewed, but there were signs of recent removal. No doubt it had been out of order, like so many other things in this decrepit edifice. In my nervousness I looked around and discovered a bolt on the clothes press which seemed to be of the same size, judging from the marks, as the one formerly on the door. To gain a partial relief from the general tension I busied myself by transferring this hardware to the vacant place with the aid of a handy three-in-one device including a screwdriver which I kept on my key-ring. The bolt fitted perfectly, and I was somewhat relieved when I knew that I could shoot it firmly upon retiring. Not that I had any real apprehension of its need, but that any symbol of security was welcome in an environment of this kind. There were adequate bolts on the two lateral doors to connecting rooms, and these I proceeded to fasten.

I did not undress, but decided to read till I was sleepy and then lie down with only my coat, collar, and shoes off. Taking a pocket flash light from my valise, I placed it in my trousers, so that I could read my watch if I woke up later in the dark. Drowsiness, however, did not come; and when I stopped to analyse my thoughts I found to my disquiet that I was really unconsciously listening for something--listening for something which I dreaded but could not name. That inspector's story must have worked on my imagination more deeply than I had suspected. Again I tried to read, but found that I made no progress.

After a time I seemed to hear the stairs and corridors creak at intervals as if with footsteps, and wondered if the other rooms were beginning to fill up. There were no voices, however, and it struck me that there was something subtly furtive about the creaking. I did not like it, and debated whether I had better try to sleep at all. This town had some queer people, and there had undoubtedly been several disappearances. Was this one of those inns where travelers were slain for their money? Surely I had no look of excessive prosperity. Or were the towns folk really so resentful about curious visitors? Had my obvious sightseeing, with its frequent map-consultations, aroused unfavorable notice. It occurred to me that I must be in a highly nervous state to let a few random creakings set me off speculating in this fashion--but I regretted none the less that I was unarmed.

At length, feeling a fatigue which had nothing of drowsiness in it, I bolted the newly outfitted hall door, turned off the light, and threw myself down on the hard, uneven bed--coat, collar, shoes, and all. In the darkness every faint noise of the night seemed magnified, and a flood of doubly unpleasant thoughts swept over me. I was sorry I had put out the light, yet was too tired to rise and turn it on again. Then, after a long, dreary interval, and prefaced by a fresh creaking of stairs and corridor, there came that soft, damnably unmistakable sound which seemed like a malign fulfillment of all my apprehensions. Without the least shadow of a doubt, the lock of my door was being tried--cautiously, furtively, tentatively--with a key.

My sensations upon recognising this sign of actual peril were perhaps less rather than more tumultuous because of my previous vague fears. I had been, albeit without definite reason, instinctively on my guard--and that was to my advantage in the new and real crisis, whatever it might turn out to be. Nevertheless the change in the menace from vague premonition to immediate reality was a profound shock, and fell upon me with the force of a genuine blow. It never once occurred to me that the fumbling might be a mere mistake. Malign purpose was all I could think of, and I kept deathly quiet, awaiting the would-be intruder's next move.

After a time the cautious rattling ceased, and I heard the room to the north entered with a pass-key. Then the lock of the connecting door to my room was softly tried. The bolt held, of course, and I heard the floor creak as the prowler left the room. After a moment there came another soft rattling, and I knew that the room to the south of me was being entered. Again a furtive trying of a bolted connecting door, and again a receding creaking. This time the creaking went along the hall and down the stairs, so I knew that the prowler had realised the bolted condition of my doors and was giving up his attempt for a greater or lesser time, as the future would shew.

The readiness with which I fell into a plan of action proves that I must have been subconsciously fearing some menace and considering possible avenues of escape for hours. From the first I felt that the unseen fumbler meant a danger not to be met or dealt with, but only to be fled from as precipitately as possible. The one thing to do was to get out of that hotel alive as quickly as I could, and through some channel other than the front stairs and lobby.

Rising softly and throwing my flashlight on the switch, I sought to light the bulb over my bed in order to choose and pocket some belongings for a swift, valiseless flight. Nothing, however, happened; and I saw that the power had been cut off. Clearly, some cryptic, evil movement was afoot on a large scale--just what, I could not say. As I stood pondering with my hand on the now useless switch I heard a muffled creaking on the floor below, and thought I could barely distinguish voices in conversation. A moment later I felt less sure that the deeper sounds were voices, since the apparent hoarse barkings and loose-syllabled croakings bore so little resemblance to recognized human speech. Then I thought with renewed force of what the factory inspector had heard in the night in this mouldering and pestilential building.

Having filled my pockets with the flashlight's aid, I put on my hat and tiptoed to the windows to consider chances of descent. Despite the state's safety regulations there was no fire escape on this side of the hotel, and I saw that my windows commanded only a sheer three story drop to the cobbled courtyard. On the right and left, however, some ancient brick business blocks abutted on the hotel; their slant roofs coming up to a reasonable jumping distance from my fourth-story level. To reach either of these lines of buildings I would have to be in a room two from my own--in one case on the north and in the other case on the south--and my mind instantly set to work what chances I had of making the transfer.

I could not, I decided, risk an emergence into the corridor; where my footsteps would surely be heard, and where the difficulties of entering the desired room would be insuperable. My progress, if it was to be made at all, would have to be through the less solidly-built connecting doors of the rooms; the locks and bolts of which I would have to force violently, using my shoulder as a battering-ram whenever they were set against me. This, I thought, would be possible owing to the rickety nature of the house and its fixtures; but I realised I could not do it noiselessly. I would have to count on sheer speed, and the chance of getting to a window before any hostile forces became coordinated enough to open the right door toward me with a pass-key. My own outer door I reinforced by pushing the bureau against it--little by little, in order to make a minimum of sound.

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

Gathering from the grocery boy's map that the best route out of town was southward, I glanced first at the connecting door on the south side of the room. It was designed to open in my direction, hence I saw--after drawing the bolt and finding other fastening in place--it was not a favorable one for forcing. Accordingly abandoning it as a route, I cautiously moved the bedstead against it to hamper any attack which might be made on it later from the next room. The door on the north was hung to open away from me, and this--though a test proved it to be locked or bolted from the other side--I knew must be my route. If I could gain the roofs of the buildings in Paine Street and descend successfully to the ground level, I might perhaps dart through the courtyard and the adjacent or opposite building to Washington or Bates--or else emerge in Paine and edge around southward into Washington. In any case, I would aim to strike Washington somehow and get quickly out of the Town Square region. My preference would be to avoid Paine, since the fire station there might be open all night.

As I thought of these things I looked out over the squalid sea of decaying roofs below me, now brightened by the beams of a moon not much past full. On the right the black gash of the river-gorge clove the panorama; abandoned factories and railway station clinging barnacle-like to its sides. Beyond it the rusted railway and the Rowley road led off through a flat marshy terrain dotted with islets of higher and dryer scrub-grown land. On the left the creek-threaded country-side was nearer, the narrow road to Ipswich gleaming white in the moonlight. I could not see from my side of the hotel the southward route toward Arkham which I had determined to take.

I was irresolutely speculating on when I had better attack the northward door, and on how I could least audibly manage it, when I noticed that the vague noises underfoot had given place to a fresh and heavier creaking of the stairs. A wavering flicker of light shewed through my transom, and the boards of the corridor began to groan with a ponderous load. Muffled sounds of possible vocal origin approached, and at length a firm knock came at my outer door.

For a moment I simply held my breath and waited. Eternities seemed to elapse, and the nauseous fishy odour of my environment seemed to mount suddenly and spectacularly. Then the knocking was repeated--continuously, and with growing insistence. I knew that the time for action had come, and forthwith drew the bolt of the northward connecting door, bracing myself for the task of battering it open. The knocking waxed louder, and I hoped that its volume would cover the sound of my efforts. At last beginning my attempt, I lunged again and again at the thin paneling with my left shoulder, heedless of shock or pain. The door resisted even more than I expected, but I did not give in. And all the while the clamour at the outer door increased.

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

For an instant I felt absolute despair, since my trapping in a chamber with no window egress seemed complete. A wave of almost abnormal horror swept over me, and invested with a terrible but unexplainable singularity the flashlight-glimpsed dust prints made by the intruder who had lately tried my door from this room. Then, with a dazed automatism which persisted despite hopelessness, I made for the next connecting door and performed the blind motion of pushing at it in an effort to get through and--granting that fastenings might be as providentially intact as in this second room--bolt the hall door beyond before the lock could be turned from outside.

Sheer fortunate chance gave me my reprieve--for the connecting door before me was not only unlocked but actually ajar. In a second I was though, and had my right knee and shoulder against a hall door which was visibly opening inward. My pressure took the opener off guard, for the thing shut as I pushed, so that I could slip the well-conditioned bolt as I had done with the other door. As I gained this respite I heard the battering at the two other doors abate, while a confused clatter came from the connecting door I had shielded with the bedstead. Evidently the bulk of my assailants had entered the southerly room and were massing in a lateral attack. But at the same moment a pass-key sounded in the next door to the north, and I knew that a nearer peril was at hand.

The northward connecting door was wide open, but there was no time to think about checking the already turning lock in the hall. All I could do was to shut and bolt the open connecting door, as well as its mate on the opposite side--pushing a bedstead against the one and a bureau against the other, and moving a washstand in front of the hall door. I must, I saw, trust to such makeshift barriers to shield me till I could get out the window and on the roof of the Paine Street block. But even in this acute moment my chief horror was something apart from the immediate weakness of my defenses. I was shuddering because not one of my pursuers, despite some hideous panting, grunting, and subdued barkings at odd intervals, was uttering an unmuffled or intelligible vocal sound.

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

Surveying the conditions, I chose the more southerly of the two windows as my avenue of escape; planning to land on the inner slope of the roof and make for the nearest sky-light. Once inside one of the decrepit brick structures I would have to reckon with pursuit; but I hoped to descend and dodge in and out of yawning doorways along the shadowed courtyard, eventually getting to Washington Street and slipping out of town toward the south.

The clatter at the northerly connecting door was now terrific, and I saw that the weak panelling was beginning to splinter. Obviously, the besiegers had brought some ponderous object into play as a battering-ram. The bedstead, however, still held firm; so that I had at least a faint chance of making good my escape. As I opened the window I noticed that it was flanked by heavy velour draperies suspended from a pole by brass rings, and also that there was a large projecting catch for the shutters on the exterior. Seeing a possible means of avoiding the dangerous jump, I yanked at the hangings and brought them down, pole and all; then quickly hooking two of the rings in the shutter catch and flinging the drapery outside. The heavy folds reached fully to the abutting roof, and I saw that the rings and catch would be likely to bear my weight. So, climbing out of the window and down the improvised rope ladder, I left behind me forever the morbid and horror-infested fabric of the Gilman House.

I landed safely on the loose slates of the steep roof, and succeeded in gaining the gaping black skylight without a slip. Glancing up at the window I had left, I observed it was still dark, though far across the crumbling chimneys to the north I could see lights ominously blazing in the Order of Dagon Hall, the Baptist church, and the Congregational church which I recalled so shiveringly. There had seemed to be no one in the courtyard below, and I hoped there would be a chance to get away before the spreading of a general alarm. Flashing my pocket lamp into the skylight, I saw that there were no steps down. The distance was slight, however, so I clambered over the brink and dropped; striking a dusty floor littered with crumbling boxes and barrels.

The place was ghoulish-looking, but I was past minding such impressions and made at once for the staircase revealed by my flashlight--after a hasty glance at my watch, which shewed the hour to be 2 a.m. The steps creaked, but seemed tolerably sound; and I raced down past a barnlike second storey to the ground floor. The desolation was complete, and only echoes answered my footfalls. At length I reached the lower hall at the end of which I saw a faint luminous rectangle marking the ruined Paine Street doorway. Heading the other way, I found the back door also open; and darted out and down five stone steps to the grass-grown cobblestones of the courtyard.

The moonbeams did not reach down here, but I could just see my way about without using the flashlight. Some of the windows on the Gilman House side were faintly glowing, and I thought I heard confused sounds within. Walking softly over to the Washington Street side I perceived several open doorways, and chose the nearest as my route out. The hallway inside was black, and when I reached the opposite end I saw that the street door was wedged immovably shut. Resolved to try another building, I groped my way back toward the courtyard, but stopped short when close to the doorway.

For out of an opened door in the Gilman House a large crowd of doubtful shapes was pouring--lanterns bobbing in the darkness, and horrible croaking voices exchanging low cries in what was certainly not English. The figures moved uncertainly, and I realized to my relief that they did not know where I had gone; but for all that they sent a shiver of horror through my frame. Their features were indistinguishable, but their crouching, shambling gait was abominably repellent. And worst of all, I perceived that one figure was strangely robed, and unmistakably surmounted by a tall tiara of a design altogether too familiar. As the figures spread throughout the courtyard, I felt my fears increase. Suppose I could find no egress from this building on the street side? The fishy odour was detestable, and I wondered I could stand it without fainting. Again groping toward the street, I opened a door off the hall and came upon an empty room with closely shuttered but sashless windows. Fumbling in the rays of my flashlight, I found I could open the shutters; and in another moment had climbed outside and was fully closing the aperture in its original manner.

I was now in Washington Street, and for the moment saw no living thing nor any light save that of the moon. From several directions in the distance, however, I could hear the sound of hoarse voices, of footsteps, and of a curious kind of pattering which did not sound quite like footsteps. Plainly I had no time to lose. The points of the compass were clear to me, and I was glad that all the street lights were turned off, as is often the custom on strongly moonlit nights in prosperous rural regions. Some of the sounds came from the south, yet I retained my design of escaping in that direction. There would, I knew, be plenty of deserted doorways to shelter me in case I met any person or group who looked like pursuers.

I walked rapidly, softly, and close to the ruined houses. While hatless and dishevelled after my arduous climb, I did not look especially noticeable; and stood a good chance of passing unheeded if forced to encounter any casual wayfarer.

At Bates Street I drew into a yawning vestibule while two shambling figures crossed in front of me, but was soon on my way again and approaching the open space where Eliot Street obliquely crosses Washington at the intersection of South. Though I had never seen this space, it had looked dangerous to me on the grocery youth's map; since the moonlight would have free play there. There was no use trying to evade it, for any alternative course would involve detours of possibly disastrous visibility and delaying effect. The only thing to do was to cross it boldly and openly; imitating the typical shamble of the Innsmouth folk as best I could, and trusting that no one--or at least no pursuer of mine--would be there.

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

The open space was, as I had expected, strongly moonlit; and I saw the remains of a parklike, iron-railed green in its center. Fortunately no one was about though a curious sort of buzz or roar seemed to be increasing in the direction of Town Square. South Street was very wide, leading directly down a slight declivity to the waterfront and commanding a long view out to sea; and I hoped that no one would be glancing up it from afar as I crossed in the bright moonlight.

My progress was unimpeded, and no fresh sound arose to hint that I had been spied. Glancing about me, I involuntarily let my pace slacken for a second to take in the sight of the sea, gorgeous in the burning moonlight at the street's end. Far out beyond the breakwater was the dim, dark line of Devil Reef, and as I glimpsed it I could not help thinking of all the hideous legends I had heard in the last twenty-four hours--legends which portrayed this ragged rock as a veritable gateway to realms of unfathomed horror and inconceivable abnormality.

Then, without warning, I saw the intermittent flashes of light on the distant reef. They were definite and unmistakable, and awaked in my mind a blind horror beyond all rational proportion. My muscles tightened for panic flight, held in only by a certain unconscious caution and half-hypnotic fascination. And to make matters worse, there now flashed forth from the lofty cupola of the Gilman House, which loomed up to the northeast behind me, a series of analogous though differently spaced gleams which could be nothing less than an answering signal.

Controlling my muscles, and realising afresh--how plainly visible I was, I resumed my brisker and feignedly shambling pace; though keeping my eyes on that hellish and ominous reef as long as the opening of South Street gave me a seaward view. What the whole proceeding meant, I could not imagine; unless it involved some strange rite connected with Devil Reef, or unless some party had landed from a ship on that sinister rock. I now bent to the left around the ruinous green; still gazing toward the ocean as it blazed in the spectral summer moonlight, and watching the cryptical flashing of those nameless, unexplainable beacons.

It was then that the most horrible impression of all was borne in upon me--the impression which destroyed my last vestige of self-control and sent me running frantically southward past the yawning black doorways and fishily staring windows of that deserted nightmare street. For at a closer glance I saw that the moonlit waters between the reef and the shore were far from empty. They were alive with a teeming horde of shapes swimming inward toward the town; and even at my vast distance and in my single moment of perception I could tell that the bobbing heads and flailing arms were alien and aberrant in a way scarcely to be expressed or consciously formulated.

My frantic running ceased before I had covered a block, for at my left I began to hear something like the hue and cry of organised pursuit. There were footsteps and guttural sounds, and a rattling motor wheezed south along Federal Street. In a second all my plans were utterly changed--for if the southward highway were blocked ahead of me, I must clearly find another egress from Innsmouth. I paused and drew into a gaping doorway, reflecting how lucky I was to have left the moonlit open space before these pursuers came down the parallel street.

A second reflection was less comforting. Since the pursuit was down another street, it was plain that the party was not following me directly. It had not seen me, but was simply obeying a general plan of cutting off my escape. This, however, implied that all roads leading out of Innsmouth were similarly patrolled; for the people could not have known what route I intended to take. If this were so, I would have to make my retreat across country away from any road; but how could I do that in view of the marshy and creek-riddled nature of all the surrounding region? For a moment my brain reeled--both from sheer hopelessness and from a rapid increase in the omnipresent fishy odour.

Then I thought of the abandoned railway to Rowley, whose solid line of ballasted, weed-grown earth still stretched off to the northwest from the crumbling station on the edge at the river-gorge. There was just a chance that the townsfolk would not think of that; since its briar-choked desertion made it half-impassable, and the unlikeliest of all avenues for a fugitive to choose. I had seen it clearly from my hotel window and knew about how it lay. Most of its earlier length was uncomfortably visible from the Rowley road, and from high places in the town itself; but one could perhaps crawl inconspicuously through the undergrowth. At any rate, it would form my only chance of deliverance, and there was nothing to do but try it.

Drawing inside the hall of my deserted shelter, I once more consulted the grocery boy's map with the aid of the flashlight. The immediate problem was how to reach the ancient railway; and I now saw that the safest course was ahead to Babson Street; then west to Lafayette--there edging around but not crossing an open space homologous to the one I had traversed--and subsequently back northward and westward in a zigzagging line through Lafayette, Bates, Adam, and Bank streets--the latter skirting the river gorge--to the abandoned and dilapidated station I had seen from my window. My reason for going ahead to Babson was that I wished neither to recross the earlier open space nor to begin my westward course along a cross street as broad as South.

Starting once more, I crossed the street to the right-hand side in order to edge around into Babson as inconspicuously as possible. Noises still continued in Federal Street, and as I glanced behind me I thought I saw a gleam of light near the building through which I had escaped. Anxious to leave Washington Street, I broke into a quiet dogtrot, trusting to luck not to encounter any observing eye. Next the corner of Babson Street I saw to my alarm that one of the houses was still inhabited, as attested by curtains at the window; but there were no lights within, and I passed it without disaster.

In Babson Street, which crossed Federal and might thus reveal me to the searchers, I clung as closely as possible to the sagging, uneven buildings; twice pausing in a doorway as the noises behind me momentarily increased. The open space ahead shone wide and desolate under the moon, but my route would not force me to cross it. During my second pause I began to detect a fresh distribution of vague sounds; and upon looking cautiously out from cover beheld a motor car darting across the open space, bound outward along Eliot Street, which there intersects both Babson and Lafayette.

As I watched--choked by a sudden rise in the fishy odour after a short abatement--I saw a band of uncouth, crouching shapes loping and shambling in the same direction; and knew that this must be the party guarding the Ipswich road, since that highway forms an extension of Eliot Street. Two of the figures I glimpsed were in voluminous robes, and one wore a peaked diadem which glistened whitely in the moonlight. The gait of this figure was so odd that it sent a chill through me--for it seemed to me the creature was almost hopping.

When the last of the band was out of sight I resumed my progress; darting around the corner into Lafayette Street, and crossing Eliot very hurriedly lest stragglers of the party be still advancing along that thoroughfare. I did hear some croaking and clattering sounds far off toward Town Square, but accomplished the passage without disaster. My greatest dread was in re-crossing broad and moonlit South Street--with its seaward view--and I had to nerve myself for the ordeal. Someone might easily be looking, and possible Eliot Street stragglers could not fail to glimpse me from either of two points. At the last moment I decided I had better slacken my trot and make the crossing as before in the shambling gait of an average Innsmouth native.

When the view of the water again opened out--this time on my right--I was half-determined not to look at it at all. I could not however, resist; but cast a sidelong glance as I carefully and imitatively shambled toward the protecting shadows ahead. There was no ship visible, as I had half-expected there would be. Instead, the first thing which caught my eye was a small rowboat pulling in toward the abandoned wharves and laden with some bulky, tarpaulin-covered object. Its rowers, though distantly and indistinctly seen, were of an especially repellent aspect. Several swimmers were still discernible; while on the far black reef I could see a faint, steady glow unlike the winking beacon visible before, and of a curious colour which I could not precisely identify. Above the slant roofs ahead and to the right there loomed the tall cupola of the Gilman House, but it was completely dark. The fishy odour, dispelled for a moment by some merciful breeze, now closed in again with maddening intensity.

I had not quite crossed the street when I heard a muttering band advancing along Washington from the north. As they reached the broad open space where I had had my first disquieting glimpse of the moonlit water I could see them plainly only a block away--and was horrified by the bestial abnormality of their faces and the doglike sub-humanness of their crouching gait. One man moved in a positively simian way, with long arms frequently touching the ground; while another figure--robed and tiaraed--seemed to progress in an almost hopping fashion. I judged this party to be the one I had seen in the Gilman's courtyard--the one, therefore, most closely on my trail. As some of the figures turned to look in my direction I was transfixed with fright, yet managed to preserve the casual, shambling gait I had assumed. To this day I do not know whether they saw me or not. If they did, my stratagem must have deceived them, for they passed on across the moonlit space without varying their course--meanwhile croaking and jabbering in some hateful guttural patois I could not identify.

Once more in shadow, I resumed my former dog-trot past the leaning and decrepit houses that stared blankly into the night. Having crossed to the western sidewalk I rounded the nearest corner into Bates Street where I kept close to the buildings on the southern side. I passed two houses shewing signs of habitation, one of which had faint lights in upper rooms, yet met with no obstacle. As I turned into Adams Street I felt measurably safer, but received a shook when a man reeled out of a black doorway directly in front of me. He proved, however, too hopelessly drunk to be a menace; so that I reached the dismal ruins of the Bank Street warehouses in safety.

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

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

The vast, barnlike length of the old bridge gleamed spectrally in the moonlight, and I saw that the ties were safe for at least a few feet within. Entering, I began to use my flashlight, and was almost knocked down by the cloud of bats that flapped past me. About half-way across there was a perilous gap in the ties which I feared for a moment would halt me; but in the end I risked a desperate jump which fortunately succeeded.

I was glad to see the moonlight again when I emerged from that macabre tunnel. The old tracks crossed River Street at grade, and at once veered off into a region increasingly rural and with less and less of Innsmouth's abhorrent fishy odour. Here the dense growth of weeds and briers hindered me and cruelly tore at my clothes, but I was none the less glad that they were there to give me concealment in case of peril. I knew that much of my route must be visible from the Rowley road.

The marshy region began very abruptly, with the single track on a low, grassy embankment where the weedy growth was somewhat thinner. Then came a sort of island of higher ground, where the line passed through a shallow open cut choked with bushes and brambles. I was very glad of this partial shelter, since at this point the Rowley road was uncomfortably near according to my window view. At the end of the cut it would cross the track and swerve off to a safer distance; but meanwhile I must be exceedingly careful. I was by this time thankfully certain that the railway itself was not patrolled.

Just before entering the cut I glanced behind me, but saw no pursuer. The ancient spires and roofs of decaying Innsmouth gleamed lovely and ethereal in the magic yellow moonlight, and I thought of how they must have looked in the old days before the shadow fell. Then, as my gaze circled inland from the town, something less tranquil arrested my notice and held me immobile for a second.

What I saw--or fancied I saw--was a disturbing suggestion of undulant motion far to the south; a suggestion which made me conclude that a very large horde must be pouring out of the city along the level Ipswich road. The distance was great and I could distinguish nothing in detail; but I did not at all like the look of that moving column. It undulated too much, and glistened too brightly in the rays of the now westering moon. There was a suggestion of sound, too, though the wind was blowing the other way--a suggestion of bestial scraping and bellowing even worse than the muttering of the parties I had lately overheard.

All sorts of unpleasant conjectures crossed my mind. I thought of those very extreme Innsmouth types said to be hidden in crumbling, centuried warrens near the waterfront; I thought, too, of those nameless swimmers I had seen. Counting the parties so far glimpsed, as well as those presumably covering other roads, the number of my pursuers must be strangely large for a town as depopulated as Innsmouth.

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

I had entered the brush-grown cut and was struggling along at a very slow pace when that damnable fishy odour again waxed dominant. Had the wind suddenly changed eastward, so that it blew in from the sea and over the town? It must have, I concluded, since I now began to hear shocking guttural murmurs from that hitherto silent direction. There was another sound, too--a kind of wholesale, colossal flopping or pattering which somehow called up images of the most detestable sort. It made me think illogically of that unpleasantly undulating column on the far-off Ipswich road.

And then both stench and sounds grew stronger, so that I paused shivering and grateful for the cut's protection. It was here, I recalled, that the Rowley road drew so close to the old railway before crossing westward and diverging. Something was coming along that road, and I must lie low till its passage and vanishment in the distance. Thank heaven these creatures employed no dogs for tracking--though perhaps that would have been impossible amidst the omnipresent regional odour. Crouched in the bushes of that sandy cleft I felt reasonably safe, even though I knew the searchers would have to cross the track in front of me not much more than a hundred yards away. I would be able to see them, but they could not, except by a malign miracle, see me.

All at once I began dreading to look at them as they passed. I saw the close moonlit space where they would surge by, and had curious thoughts about the irredeemable pollution of that space. They would perhaps be the worst of all Innsmouth types--something one would not care to remember.

The stench waxed overpowering, and the noises swelled to a bestial babel of croaking, baying and barking without the least suggestion of human speech. Were these indeed the voices of my pursuers? Did they have dogs after all? So far I had seen none of the lower animals in Innsmouth. That flopping or pattering was monstrous--I could not look upon the degenerate creatures responsible for it. I would keep my eyes shut till the sound receded toward the west. The horde was very close now--air foul with their hoarse snarlings, and the ground almost shaking with their alien-rhythmed footfalls. My breath nearly ceased to come, and I put every ounce of will-power into the task of holding my eyelids down.

I am not even yet willing to say whether what followed was a hideous actuality or only a nightmare hallucination. The later action of the government, after my frantic appeals, would tend to confirm it as a monstrous truth; but could not an hallucination have been repeated under the quasi-hypnotic spell of that ancient, haunted, and shadowed town? Such places have strange properties, and the legacy of insane legend might well have acted on more than one human imagination amidst those dead, stench-cursed streets and huddles of rotting roofs and crumbling steeples. Is it not possible that the germ of an actual contagious madness lurks in the depths of that shadow over Innsmouth? Who can be sure of reality after hearing things like the tale of old Zadok Allen? The government men never found poor Zadok, and have no conjectures to make as to what became of him. Where does madness leave off and reality begin? Is it possible that even my latest fear is sheer delusion?

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

I thought I was prepared for the worst, and I really ought to have been prepared considering what I had seen before.

My other pursuers had been accursedly abnormal--so should I not have been ready to face a strengthening of the abnormal element; to look upon forms in which there was no mixture of the normal at all? I did not open my eyes until the raucous clamour came loudly from a point obviously straight ahead. Then I knew that a long section of them must be plainly in sight where the sides of the cut flattened out and the road crossed the track--and I could no longer keep myself from sampling whatever horror that leering yellow moon might have to shew.

It was the end, for whatever remains to me of life on the surface of this earth, of every vestige of mental peace and confidence in the integrity of nature and of the human mind. Nothing that I could have imagined--nothing, even, that I could have gathered had I credited old Zadok's crazy tale in the most literal way--would be in any way comparable to the demoniac, blasphemous reality that I saw--or believe I saw. I have tried to hint what it was in order to postpone the horror of writing it down baldly. Can it be possible that this planet has actually spawned such things; that human eyes have truly seen, as objective flesh, what man has hitherto known only in febrile phantasy and tenuous legend?

And yet I saw them in a limitless stream--flopping, hopping, croaking, bleating--urging inhumanly through the spectral moonlight in a grotesque, malignant saraband of fantastic nightmare. And some of them had tall tiaras of that nameless whitish-gold metal...and some were strangely robed...and one, who led the way, was clad in a ghoulishly humped black coat and striped trousers, and had a man's felt hat perched on the shapeless thing that answered for a head.

I think their predominant colour was a greyish-green, though they had white bellies. They were mostly shiny and slippery, but the ridges of their backs were scaly. Their forms vaguely suggested the anthropoid, while their heads were the heads of fish, with prodigious bulging eyes that never closed. At the sides of their necks were palpitating gills, and their long paws were webbed. They hopped irregularly, sometimes on two legs and sometimes on four. I was somehow glad that they had no more than four limbs. Their croaking, baying voices, clearly used for articulate speech, held all the dark shades of expression which their staring faces lacked.

But for all of their monstrousness they were not unfamiliar to me. I knew too well what they must be--for was not the memory of the evil tiara at Newburyport still fresh? They were the blasphemous fish-frogs of the nameless design--living and horrible--and as I saw them I knew also of what that humped, tiaraed priest in the black church basement had fearsomely reminded me. Their number was past guessing. It seemed to me that there were limitless swarms of them and certainly my momentary glimpse could have shewn only the least fraction. In another instant everything was blotted out by a merciful fit of fainting; the first I had ever had.","I repeat to you, gentlemen, that your inquisition is fruitless. Detain me here forever if you will; confine or execute me if you must have a victim to propitiate the illusion you call justice; but I can say no more than I have said already. Everything that I can remember, I have told with perfect candour. Nothing has been distorted or concealed, and if anything remains vague, it is only because of the dark cloud which has come over my mind—that cloud and the nebulous nature of the horrors which brought it upon me.
      Again I say, I do not know what has become of Harley Warren; though I think—almost hope—that he is in peaceful oblivion, if there be anywhere so blessed a thing. It is true that I have for five years been his closest friend, and a partial sharer of his terrible researches into the unknown. I will not deny, though my memory is uncertain and indistinct, that this witness of yours may have seen us together as he says, on the Gainesville pike, walking toward Big Cypress Swamp, at half past eleven on that awful night. That we bore electric lanterns, spades, and a curious coil of wire with attached instruments, I will even affirm; for these things all played a part in the single hideous scene which remains burned into my shaken recollection. But of what followed, and of the reason I was found alone and dazed on the edge of the swamp next morning, I must insist that I know nothing save what I have told you over and over again. You say to me that there is nothing in the swamp or near it which could form the setting of that frightful episode. I reply that I know nothing beyond what I saw. Vision or nightmare it may have been—vision or nightmare I fervently hope it was—yet it is all that my mind retains of what took place in those shocking hours after we left the sight of men. And why Harley Warren did not return, he or his shade—or some nameless thing I cannot describe—alone can tell.
      As I have said before, the weird studies of Harley Warren were well known to me, and to some extent shared by me. Of his vast collection of strange, rare books on forbidden subjects I have read all that are written in the languages of which I am master; but these are few as compared with those in languages I cannot understand. Most, I believe, are in Arabic; and the fiend-inspired book which brought on the end—the book which he carried in his pocket out of the world—was written in characters whose like I never saw elsewhere. Warren would never tell me just what was in that book. As to the nature of our studies—must I say again that I no longer retain full comprehension? It seems to me rather merciful that I do not, for they were terrible studies, which I pursued more through reluctant fascination than through actual inclination. Warren always dominated me, and sometimes I feared him. I remember how I shuddered at his facial expression on the night before the awful happening, when he talked so incessantly of his theory, why certain corpses never decay, but rest firm and fat in their tombs for a thousand years. But I do not fear him now, for I suspect that he has known horrors beyond my ken. Now I fear for him.
      Once more I say that I have no clear idea of our object on that night. Certainly, it had much to do with something in the book which Warren carried with him—that ancient book in undecipherable characters which had come to him from India a month before—but I swear I do not know what it was that we expected to find. Your witness says he saw us at half past eleven on the Gainesville pike, headed for Big Cypress Swamp. This is probably true, but I have no distinct memory of it. The picture seared into my soul is of one scene only, and the hour must have been long after midnight; for a waning crescent moon was high in the vaporous heavens.
      The place was an ancient cemetery; so ancient that I trembled at the manifold signs of immemorial years. It was in a deep, damp hollow, overgrown with rank grass, moss, and curious creeping weeds, and filled with a vague stench which my idle fancy associated absurdly with rotting stone. On every hand were the signs of neglect and decrepitude, and I seemed haunted by the notion that Warren and I were the first living creatures to invade a lethal silence of centuries. Over the valley’s rim a wan, waning crescent moon peered through the noisome vapours that seemed to emanate from unheard-of catacombs, and by its feeble, wavering beams I could distinguish a repellent array of antique slabs, urns, cenotaphs, and mausolean facades; all crumbling, moss-grown, and moisture-stained, and partly concealed by the gross luxuriance of the unhealthy vegetation. My first vivid impression of my own presence in this terrible necropolis concerns the act of pausing with Warren before a certain half-obliterated sepulchre, and of throwing down some burdens which we seemed to have been carrying. I now observed that I had with me an electric lantern and two spades, whilst my companion was supplied with a similar lantern and a portable telephone outfit. No word was uttered, for the spot and the task seemed known to us; and without delay we seized our spades and commenced to clear away the grass, weeds, and drifted earth from the flat, archaic mortuary. After uncovering the entire surface, which consisted of three immense granite slabs, we stepped back some distance to survey the charnel scene; and Warren appeared to make some mental calculations. Then he returned to the sepulchre, and using his spade as a lever, sought to pry up the slab lying nearest to a stony ruin which may have been a monument in its day. He did not succeed, and motioned to me to come to his assistance. Finally our combined strength loosened the stone, which we raised and tipped to one side.
      The removal of the slab revealed a black aperture, from which rushed an effluence of miasmal gases so nauseous that we started back in horror. After an interval, however, we approached the pit again, and found the exhalations less unbearable. Our lanterns disclosed the top of a flight of stone steps, dripping with some detestable ichor of the inner earth, and bordered by moist walls encrusted with nitre. And now for the first time my memory records verbal discourse, Warren addressing me at length in his mellow tenor voice; a voice singularly unperturbed by our awesome surroundings.
      “I’m sorry to have to ask you to stay on the surface,” he said, “but it would be a crime to let anyone with your frail nerves go down there. You can’t imagine, even from what you have read and from what I’ve told you, the things I shall have to see and do. It’s fiendish work, Carter, and I doubt if any man without ironclad sensibilities could ever see it through and come up alive and sane. I don’t wish to offend you, and heaven knows I’d be glad enough to have you with me; but the responsibility is in a certain sense mine, and I couldn’t drag a bundle of nerves like you down to probable death or madness. I tell you, you can’t imagine what the thing is really like! But I promise to keep you informed over the telephone of every move—you see I’ve enough wire here to reach to the centre of the earth and back!”
      I can still hear, in memory, those coolly spoken words; and I can still remember my remonstrances. I seemed desperately anxious to accompany my friend into those sepulchral depths, yet he proved inflexibly obdurate. At one time he threatened to abandon the expedition if I remained insistent; a threat which proved effective, since he alone held the key to the thing. All this I can still remember, though I no longer know what manner of thing we sought. After he had secured my reluctant acquiescence in his design, Warren picked up the reel of wire and adjusted the instruments. At his nod I took one of the latter and seated myself upon an aged, discoloured gravestone close by the newly uncovered aperture. Then he shook my hand, shouldered the coil of wire, and disappeared within that indescribable ossuary. For a moment I kept sight of the glow of his lantern, and heard the rustle of the wire as he laid it down after him; but the glow soon disappeared abruptly, as if a turn in the stone staircase had been encountered, and the sound died away almost as quickly. I was alone, yet bound to the unknown depths by those magic strands whose insulated surface lay green beneath the struggling beams of that waning crescent moon.
      In the lone silence of that hoary and deserted city of the dead, my mind conceived the most ghastly phantasies and illusions; and the grotesque shrines and monoliths seemed to assume a hideous personality—a half-sentience. Amorphous shadows seemed to lurk in the darker recesses of the weed-choked hollow and to flit as in some blasphemous ceremonial procession past the portals of the mouldering tombs in the hillside; shadows which could not have been cast by that pallid, peering crescent moon. I constantly consulted my watch by the light of my electric lantern, and listened with feverish anxiety at the receiver of the telephone; but for more than a quarter of an hour heard nothing. Then a faint clicking came from the instrument, and I called down to my friend in a tense voice. Apprehensive as I was, I was nevertheless unprepared for the words which came up from that uncanny vault in accents more alarmed and quivering than any I had heard before from Harley Warren. He who had so calmly left me a little while previously, now called from below in a shaky whisper more portentous than the loudest shriek:
      “God! If you could see what I am seeing!”
      I could not answer. Speechless, I could only wait. Then came the frenzied tones again:
      “Carter, it’s terrible—monstrous—unbelievable!”
      This time my voice did not fail me, and I poured into the transmitter a flood of excited questions. Terrified, I continued to repeat, “Warren, what is it? What is it?”
      Once more came the voice of my friend, still hoarse with fear, and now apparently tinged with despair:
      “I can’t tell you, Carter! It’s too utterly beyond thought—I dare not tell you—no man could know it and live—Great God! I never dreamed of THIS!” Stillness again, save for my now incoherent torrent of shuddering inquiry. Then the voice of Warren in a pitch of wilder consternation:
      “Carter! for the love of God, put back the slab and get out of this if you can! Quick!—leave everything else and make for the outside—it’s your only chance! Do as I say, and don’t ask me to explain!”
      I heard, yet was able only to repeat my frantic questions. Around me were the tombs and the darkness and the shadows; below me, some peril beyond the radius of the human imagination. But my friend was in greater danger than I, and through my fear I felt a vague resentment that he should deem me capable of deserting him under such circumstances. More clicking, and after a pause a piteous cry from Warren:
      “Beat it! For God’s sake, put back the slab and beat it, Carter!”
      Something in the boyish slang of my evidently stricken companion unleashed my faculties. I formed and shouted a resolution, “Warren, brace up! I’m coming down!” But at this offer the tone of my auditor changed to a scream of utter despair:
      “Don’t! You can’t understand! It’s too late—and my own fault. Put back the slab and run—there’s nothing else you or anyone can do now!” The tone changed again, this time acquiring a softer quality, as of hopeless resignation. Yet it remained tense through anxiety for me.
      “Quick—before it’s too late!” I tried not to heed him; tried to break through the paralysis which held me, and to fulfil my vow to rush down to his aid. But his next whisper found me still held inert in the chains of stark horror.
      “Carter—hurry! It’s no use—you must go—better one than two—the slab—” A pause, more clicking, then the faint voice of Warren:
      “Nearly over now—don’t make it harder—cover up those damned steps and run for your life—you’re losing time— So long, Carter—won’t see you again.” Here Warren’s whisper swelled into a cry; a cry that gradually rose to a shriek fraught with all the horror of the ages—
      “Curse these hellish things—legions— My God! Beat it! Beat it! Beat it!”
      After that was silence. I know not how many interminable aeons I sat stupefied; whispering, muttering, calling, screaming into that telephone. Over and over again through those aeons I whispered and muttered, called, shouted, and screamed, “Warren! Warren! Answer me—are you there?”
      And then there came to me the crowning horror of all—the unbelievable, unthinkable, almost unmentionable thing. I have said that aeons seemed to elapse after Warren shrieked forth his last despairing warning, and that only my own cries now broke the hideous silence. But after a while there was a further clicking in the receiver, and I strained my ears to listen. Again I called down, “Warren, are you there?”, and in answer heard the thing which has brought this cloud over my mind. I do not try, gentlemen, to account for that thing—that voice—nor can I venture to describe it in detail, since the first words took away my consciousness and created a mental blank which reaches to the time of my awakening in the hospital. Shall I say that the voice was deep; hollow; gelatinous; remote; unearthly; inhuman; disembodied? What shall I say? It was the end of my experience, and is the end of my story. I heard it, and knew no more. Heard it as I sat petrified in that unknown cemetery in the hollow, amidst the crumbling stones and the falling tombs, the rank vegetation and the miasmal vapours. Heard it well up from the innermost depths of that damnable open sepulchre as I watched amorphous, necrophagous shadows dance beneath an accursed waning moon. And this is what it said:
      “YOU FOOL, WARREN IS DEAD!”",True
"When I drew nigh the nameless city I knew it was accursed. I was traveling in a parched and terrible valley under the moon, and afar I saw it protruding uncannily above the sands as parts of a corpse may protrude from an ill-made grave. Fear spoke from the age-worn stones of this hoary survivor of the deluge, this great-grandfather of the eldest pyramid; and a viewless aura repelled me and bade me retreat from antique and sinister secrets that no man should see, and no man else had dared to see..
Remote in the desert of Araby lies the nameless city, crumbling and inarticulate, its low walls nearly hidden by the sands of uncounted ages. It must have been thus before the first stones of Memphis were laid, and while the bricks of Babylon were yet unbaked. There is no legend so old as to give it a name, or to recall that it was ever alive; but it is told of in whispers around campfires and muttered about by grandams in the tents of sheiks so that all the tribes shun it without wholly knowing why. It was of this place that Abdul Alhazred the mad poet dreamed of the night before he sang his unexplained couplet:
That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons death may die.
I should have known that the Arabs had good reason for shunning the nameless city, the city told of in strange tales but seen by no living man, yet I defied them and went into the untrodden waste with my camel. I alone have seen it, and that is why no other face bears such hideous lines of fear as mine; why no other man shivers so horribly when the night wind rattles the windows. When I came upon it in the ghastly stillness of unending sleep it looked at me, chilly from the rays of a cold moon amidst the desert's heat. And as I returned its look I forgot my triumph at finding it, and stopped still with my camel to wait for the dawn.
For hours I waited, till the east grew grey and the stars faded, and the grey turned to roseate light edged with gold. I heard a moaning and saw a storm of sand stirring among the antique stones though the sky was clear and the vast reaches of desert still. Then suddenly above the desert's far rim came the blazing edge of the sun, seen through the tiny sandstorm which was passing away, and in my fevered state I fancied that from some remote depth there came a crash of musical metal to hail the fiery disc as Memnon hails it from the banks of the Nile. My ears rang and my imagination seethed as I led my camel slowly across the sand to that unvocal place; that place which I alone of living men had seen.
In and out amongst the shapeless foundations of houses and places I wandered, finding never a carving or inscription to tell of these men, if men they were, who built this city and dwelt therein so long ago. The antiquity of the spot was unwholesome, and I longed to encounter some sign or device to prove that the city was indeed fashioned by mankind. There were certain proportions and dimensions in the ruins which I did not like. I had with me many tools, and dug much within the walls of the obliterated edifices; but progress was slow, and nothing significant was revealed. When night and the moon returned I felt a chill wind which brought new fear, so that I did not dare to remain in the city. And as I went outside the antique walls to sleep, a small sighing sandstorm gathered behind me, blowing over the grey stones though the moon was bright and most of the desert still.
I awakened just at dawn from a pageant of horrible dreams, my ears ringing as from some metallic peal. I saw the sun peering redly through the last gusts of a little sandstorm that hovered over the nameless city, and marked the quietness of the rest of the landscape. Once more I ventured within those brooding ruins that swelled beneath the sand like an ogre under a coverlet, and again dug vainly for relics of the forgotten race. At noon I rested, and in the afternoon I spent much time tracing the walls and bygone streets, and the outlines of the nearly vanished buildings. I saw that the city had been mighty indeed, and wondered at the sources of its greatness. To myself I pictured all the spendours of an age so distant that Chaldaea could not recall it, and thought of Sarnath the Doomed, that stood in the land of Mnar when mankind was young, and of Ib, that was carven of grey stone before mankind existed.
All at once I came upon a place where the bed rock rose stark through the sand and formed a low cliff; and here I saw with joy what seemed to promise further traces of the antediluvian people. Hewn rudely on the face of the cliff were the unmistakable facades of several small, squat rock houses or temples; whose interiors might preserve many secrets of ages too remote for calculation, though sandstorms had long effaced any carvings which may have been outside.
Very low and sand-choked were all the dark apertures near me, but I cleared on with my spade and crawled through it, carrying a torch to reveal whatever mysteries it might hold. When I was inside I saw that the cavern was indeed a temple, and beheld plain signs of the race that had lived and worshipped before the desert was a desert. Primitive altars, pillars, and niches, all curiously low, were not absent; and though I saw no sculptures or frescoes, there were many singular stones clearly shaped into symbols by artificial means. The lowness of the chiselled chamber was very strange, for I could hardly kneel upright; but the area was so great that my torch showed only part of it at a time. I shuddered oddly in some of the far corners; for certain altars and stones suggested forgotten rites of terrible, revolting and inexplicable nature and made me wonder what manner of men could have made and frequented such a temple. When I had seen all that the place contained, I crawled out again, avid to find what the temples might yield.
Night had now approached, yet the tangible things I had seen made curiosity stronger than fear, so that I did not flee from the long mooncast shadows that had daunted me when first I saw the nameless city. In the twilight I cleared another aperture and with a new torch crawled into it, finding more vague stones and symbols, though nothing more definite than the other temple had contained the room was just as low, but much less broad, ending in a very narrow passage crowded with obscure and cryptical shrines. About these shrines I was prying when the noise of a wind and my camel outside broke through the stillness and drew me forth to see what could have frightened the beast.
The moon was gleaming vividly over the primitive ruins, lighting a dense cloud of sand that seemed blown by a strong but decreasing wind from some point along the cliff ahead of me. I knew it was this chilly, sandy wind which had disturbed the camel and was about to lead him to a place of better shelter when I chanced to glance up and saw that there was no wind atop the cliff. This astonished me and made me fearful again, but I immediately recalled the sudden local winds that I had seen and heard before at sunrise and sunset, and judged it was a normal thing. I decided it came from some rock fissure leading to a cave, and watched the troubled sand to trace it to its source; soon perceiving that it came from the black orifice of a temple a long distance south of me, almost out of sight. Against the choking sand-cloud I plodded toward this temple, which as I neared it loomed larger than the rest, and shewed a doorway far less clogged with caked sand. I would have entered had not the terrific force of the icy wind almost quenched my torch. It poured madly out of the dark door, sighing uncannily as it ruffled the sand and spread among the weird ruins. Soon it grew fainter and the sand grew more and more still, till finally all was at rest again; but a presence seemed stalking among the spectral stones of the city, and when I glanced at the moon it seemed to quiver as though mirrored in unquiet waters. I was more afraid than I could explain, but not enough to dull my thirst for wonder; so as soon as the wind was quite gone I crossed into the dark chamber from which it had come.
This temple, as I had fancied from the outside, was larger than either of those I had visited before; and was presumably a natural cavern since it bore winds from some region beyond. Here I could stand quite upright, but saw that the stones and altars were as low as those in the other temples. On the walls and roof I beheld for the first time some traces of the pictorial art of the ancient race, curious curling streaks of paint that had almost faded or crumbled away; and on two of the altars I saw with rising excitement a maze of well-fashioned curvilinear carvings. As I held my torch aloft it seemed to me that the shape of the roof was too regular to be natural, and I wondered what the prehistoric cutters of stone had first worked upon. Their engineering skill must have been vast.
Then a brighter flare of the fantastic flame showed that form which I had been seeking, the opening to those remoter abysses whence the sudden wind had blown; and I grew faint when I saw that it was a small and plainly artificial door chiselled in the solid rock. I thrust my torch within, beholding a black tunnel with the roof arching low over a rough flight of very small, numerous and steeply descending steps. I shall always see those steps in my dreams, for I came to learn what they meant. At the time I hardly knew whether to call them steps or mere footholds in a precipitous descent. My mind was whirling with mad thoughts, and the words and warning of Arab prophets seemed to float across the desert from the land that men know to the nameless city that men dare not know. Yet I hesitated only for a moment before advancing through the portal and commencing to climb cautiously down the steep passage, feet first, as though on a ladder.
It is only in the terrible phantasms of drugs or delirium that any other man can have such a descent as mine. The narrow passage led infinitely down like some hideous haunted well, and the torch I held above my head could not light the unknown depths toward which I was crawling. I lost track of the hours and forgot to consult my watch, though I was frightened when I thought of the distance I must have be traversing. There were changes of direction and of steepness; and once I came to a long, low, level passage where I had to wriggle my feet first along the rocky floor, holding torch at arm's length beyond my head. The place was not high enough for kneeling. After that were more of the steep steps, and I was still scrambling down interminably when my failing torch died out. I do not think I noticed it at the time, for when I did notice it I was still holding it above me as if it were ablaze. I was quite unbalanced with that instinct for the strange and the unknown which had made me a wanderer upon earth and a haunter of far, ancient, and forbidden places.
In the darkness there flashed before my mind fragments of my cherished treasury of daemonic lore; sentences from Alhazred the mad Arab, paragraphs from the apocryphal nightmares of Damascius, and infamous lines from the delirious Image du Monde of Gauthier de Metz. I repeated queer extracts, and muttered of Afrasiab and the daemons that floated with him down the Oxus; later chanting over and over again a phrase from one of Lord Dunsany's tales--""The unreveberate blackness of the abyss."" Once when the descent grew amazingly steep I recited something in sing-song from Thomas Moore until I feared to recite more:
A reservoir of darkness, black
As witches' cauldrons are, when fill'd
With moon-drugs in th' eclipse distill'd
Leaning to look if foot might pass
Down thro' that chasm, I saw, beneath,
As far as vision could explore,
The jetty sides as smooth as glass,
Looking as if just varnish'd o'er
With that dark pitch the Seat of Death
Throws out upon its slimy shore.
Time had quite ceased to exist when my feet again felt a level floor, and I found myself in a place slightly higher than the rooms in the two smaller temples now so incalculably far above my head. I could not quite stand, but could kneel upright, and in the dark I shuffled and crept hither and thither at random. I soon knew that I was in a narrow passage whose walls were lined with cases of wood having glass fronts. As in that Palaeozoic and abysmal place I felt of such things as polished wood and glass I shuddered at the possible implications. The cases were apparently ranged along each side of the passage at regular intervals, and were oblong and horizontal, hideously like coffins in shape and size. When I tried to move two or three for further examination, I found that they were firmly fastened.
I saw that the passage was a long one, so floundered ahead rapidly in a creeping run that would have seemed horrible had any eye watched me in the blackness; crossing from side to side occasionally to feel of my surroundings and be sure the walls and rows of cases still stretched on. Man is so used to thinking visually that I almost forgot the darkness and pictured the endless corridor of wood and glass in its low-studded monotony as though I saw it. And then in a moment of indescribable emotion I did see it.
Just when my fancy merged into real sight I cannot tell; but there came a gradual glow ahead, and all at once I knew that I saw the dim outlines of a corridor and the cases, revealed by some unknown subterranean phosphorescence. For a little while all was exactly as I had imagined it, since the glow was very faint; but as I mechanically kept stumbling ahead into the stronger light I realised that my fancy had been but feeble. This hall was no relic of crudity like the temples in the city above, but a monument of the most magnificent and exotic art. Rich, vivid, and daringly fantastic designs and pictures formed a continuous scheme of mural paintings whose lines and colours were beyond description. The cases were of a strange golden wood, with fronts of exquisite glass, and containing the mummified forms of creatures outreaching in grotesqueness the most chaotic dreams of man.
To convey any idea of these monstrosities is impossible. They were of the reptile kind, with body lines suggestion sometimes the crocodile, sometimes the seal, but more often nothing of which either the naturalist or the palaeontologist ever heard. In size they approximated a small man, and their fore-legs bore delicate and evident feet curiously like human hands and fingers. But strangest of all were their heads, which presented a contour violating all known biological principles. To nothing can such things be well compared--in one flash I thought of comparisons as varied as the cat, the bullfrog, the mythic Satyr, and the human being. Not Jove himself had had so colossal and protuberant a forehead, yet the horns and the noselessness and the alligator-like jaw placed things outside all established categories. I debated for a time on the reality of the mummies, half suspecting they were artificial idols; but soon decided they were indeed some palaeogean species which had lived when the nameless city was alive. To crown their grotesqueness, most of them were gorgeously enrobed in the costliest of fabrics, and lavishly laden with ornaments of gold, jewels, and unknown shining metals.
The importance of these crawling creatures must have been vast, for they held first place among the wild designs on the frescoed walls and ceiling. With matchless skill had the artist drawn them in a world of their own, wherein they had cities and gardens fashioned to suit their dimensions; and I could not help but think that their pictured history was allegorical, perhaps showing the progress of the race that worshipped them. These creatures, I said to myself, were to men of the nameless city what the she-wolf was to Rome, or some totem-beast is to a tribe of Indians.
Holding this view, I could trace roughly a wonderful epic of the nameless city; the tale of a mighty seacoast metropolis that ruled the world before Africa rose out of the waves, and of its struggles as the sea shrank away, and the desert crept into the fertile valley that held it. I saw its wars and triumphs, its troubles and defeats, and afterwards its terrible fight against the desert when thousands of its people--here represented in allegory by the grotesque reptiles--were driven to chisel their way down through the rocks in some marvellous manner to another world whereof their prophets had told them. It was all vividly weird and realistic, and its connection with the awesome descent I had made was unmistakable. I even recognized the passages.
As I crept along the corridor toward the brighter light I saw later stages of the painted epic--the leave-taking of the race that had dwelt in the nameless city and the valley around for ten million years; the race whose souls shrank from quitting scenes their bodies had known so long where they had settled as nomads in the earth's youth, hewing in the virgin rock those primal shrines at which they had never ceased to worship. Now that the light was better I studied the pictures more closely and, remembering that the strange reptiles must represent the unknown men, pondered upon the customs of the nameless city. Many things were peculiar and inexplicable. The civilization, which included a written alphabet, had seemingly risen to a higher order than those immeasurably later civilizations of Egypt and Chaldaea, yet there were curious omissions. I could, for example, find no pictures to represent deaths or funeral customs, save such as were related to wars, violence, and plagues; and I wondered at the reticence shown concerning natural death. It was as though an ideal of immortality had been fostered as a cheering illusion.
Still nearer the end of the passage was painted scenes of the utmost picturesqueness and extravagance: contrasted views of the nameless city in its desertion and growing ruin, and of the strange new realm of paradise to which the race had hewed its way through the stone. In these views the city and the desert valley were shewn always by moonlight, golden nimbus hovering over the fallen walls, and half-revealing the splendid perfection of former times, shown spectrally and elusively by the artist. The paradisal scenes were almost too extravagant to be believed, portraying a hidden world of eternal day filled with glorious cities and ethereal hills and valleys. At the very last I thought I saw signs of an artistic anticlimax. The paintings were less skillful, and much more bizarre than even the wildest of the earlier scenes. They seemed to record a slow decadence of the ancient stock, coupled with a growing ferocity toward the outside world from which it was driven by the desert. The forms of the people--always represented by the sacred reptiles--appeared to be gradually wasting away, through their spirit as shewn hovering above the ruins by moonlight gained in proportion. Emaciated priests, displayed as reptiles in ornate robes, cursed the upper air and all who breathed it; and one terrible final scene shewed a primitive-looking man, perhaps a pioneer of ancient Irem, the City of Pillars, torn to pieces by members of the elder race. I remember how the Arabs fear the nameless city, and was glad that beyond this place the grey walls and ceiling were bare.
As I viewed the pageant of mural history I had approached very closely to the end of the low-ceiled hall, and was aware of a gate through which came all of the illuminating phosphorescence. Creeping up to it, I cried aloud in transcendent amazement at what lay beyond; for instead of other and brighter chambers there was only an illimitable void of uniform radiance, such one might fancy when gazing down from the peak of Mount Everest upon a sea of sunlit mist. Behind me was a passage so cramped that I could not stand upright in it; before me was an infinity of subterranean effulgence.
Reaching down from the passage into the abyss was the head of a steep flight of steps--small numerous steps like those of black passages I had traversed--but after a few feet the glowing vapours concealed everything. Swung back open against the left-hand wall of the passage was a massive door of brass, incredibly thick and decorated with fantastic bas-reliefs, which could if closed shut the whole inner world of light away from the vaults and passages of rock. I looked at the step, and for the nonce dared not try them. I touched the open brass door, and could not move it. Then I sank prone to the stone floor, my mind aflame with prodigious reflections which not even a death-like exhaustion could banish.
As I lay still with closed eyes, free to ponder, many things I had lightly noted in the frescoes came back to me with new and terrible significance--scenes representing the nameless city in its heyday--the vegetations of the valley around it, and the distant lands with which its merchants traded. The allegory of the crawling creatures puzzled me by its universal prominence, and I wondered that it would be so closely followed in a pictured history of such importance. In the frescoes the nameless city had been shewn in proportions fitted to the reptiles. I wondered what its real proportions and magnificence had been, and reflected a moment on certain oddities I had noticed in the ruins. I thought curiously of the lowness of the primal temples and of the underground corridor, which were doubtless hewn thus out of deference to the reptile deities there honoured; though it perforce reduced the worshippers to crawling. Perhaps the very rites here involved crawling in imitation of the creatures. No religious theory, however, could easily explain why the level passages in that awesome descent should be as low as the temples--or lower, since one could not even kneel in it. As I thought of the crawling creatures, whose hideous mummified forms were so close to me, I felt a new throb of fear. Mental associations are curious, and I shrank from the idea that except for the poor primitive man torn to pieces in the last painting, mine was the only human form amidst the many relics and symbols of the primordial life.
But as always in my strange and roving existence, wonder soon drove out fear; for the luminous abyss and what it might contain presented a problem worthy of the greatest explorer that a weird world of mystery lay far down that flight of peculiarly small steps I could not doubt, and I hoped to find there those human memorials which the painted corridor had failed to give. The frescoes had pictured unbelievable cities, and valleys in this lower realm, and my fancy dwelt on the rich and colossal ruins that awaited me.
My fears, indeed, concerned the past rather than the future. Not even the physical horror of my position in that cramped corridor of dead reptiles and antediluvian frescoes, miles below the world I knew and faced by another world of eery light and mist, could match the lethal dread I felt at the abysmal antiquity of the scene and its soul. An ancientness so vast that measurement is feeble seemed to leer down from the primal stones and rock-hewn temples of the nameless city, while the very latest of the astounding maps in the frescoes shewed oceans and continents that man has forgotten, with only here and there some vaguely familiar outlines. Of what could have happened in the geological ages since the paintings ceased and the death-hating race resentfully succumbed to decay, no man might say. Life had once teemed in these caverns and in the luminous realm beyond; now I was alone with vivid relics, and I trembled to think of the countless ages through which these relics had kept a silent deserted vigil.
Suddenly there came another burst of that acute fear which had intermittently seized me ever since I first saw the terrible valley and the nameless city under a cold moon, and despite my exhaustion I found myself starting frantically to a sitting posture and gazing back along the black corridor toward the tunnels that rose to the outer world. My sensations were like those which had made me shun the nameless city at night, and were as inexplicable as they were poignant. In another moment, however, I received a still greater shock in the form of a definite sound--the first which had broken the utter silence of these tomb-like depths. It was a deep, low moaning, as of a distant throng of condemned spirits, and came from the direction in which I was staring. Its volume rapidly grew, till it soon reverberated rightfully through the low passage, and at the same time I became conscious of an increasing draught of old air, likewise flowing from the tunnels and the city above. The touch of this air seemed to restore my balance, for I instantly recalled the sudden gusts which had risen around the mouth of the abyss each sunset and sunrise, one of which had indeed revealed the hidden tunnels to me. I looked at my watch and saw that sunrise was near, so bracing myself to resist the gale that was sweeping down to its cavern home as it had swept forth at evening. My fear again waned low, since a natural phenomenon tends to dispel broodings over the unknown.
More and more madly poured the shrieking, moaning night wind into the gulf of the inner earth. I dropped prone again and clutched vainly at the floor for fear of being swept bodily through the open gate into the phosphorescent abyss. Such fury I had not expected, and as I grew aware of an actual slipping of my form toward the abyss I was beset by a thousand new terrors of apprehension and imagination. The malignancy of the blast awakened incredible fancies; once more I compared myself shudderingly to the only human image in that frightful corridor, the man who was torn to pieces by the nameless race, for in the fiendish clawing of the swirling currents there seemed to abide a vindictive rage all the stronger because it was largely impotent. I think I screamed frantically near the last--I was almost mad--of the howling wind-wraiths. I tried to crawl against the murderous invisible torrent, but I could not even hold my own as I was pushed slowly and inexorably toward the unknown world. Finally reason must have wholly snapped; for I fell babbling over and over that unexplainable couplet of the mad Arab Alhazred, who dreamed of the nameless city:
That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die.
Only the grim brooding desert gods know what really took place--what indescribable struggles and scrambles in the dark I endured or what Abaddon guided me back to life, where I must always remember and shiver in the night wind till oblivion--or worse--claims me. Monstrous, unnatural, colossal, was the thing--too far beyond all the ideas of man to be believed except in the silent damnable small hours of the morning when one cannot sleep.
I have said that the fury of the rushing blast was infernal-- cacodaemoniacal--and that its voices were hideous with the pent-up viciousness of desolate eternities. Presently these voices, while still chaotic before me, seemed to my beating brain to take articulate form behind me; and down there in the grave of unnumbered aeon-dead antiquities, leagues below the dawn-lit world of men, I heard the ghastly cursing and snarling of strange-tongued fiends. Turning, I saw outlined against the luminous aether of the abyss that could not be seen against the dusk of the corridor--a nightmare horde of rushing devils; hate distorted, grotesquely panoplied, half transparent devils of a race no man might mistake--the crawling reptiles of the nameless city.
And as the wind died away I was plunged into the ghoul-pooled darkness of earth's bowels; for behind the last of the creatures the great brazen door clanged shut with a deafening peal of metallic music whose reverberations swelled out to the distant world to hail the rising sun as Memnon hails it from the banks of the Nile.
","Whether the dreams brought on the fever or the fever brought on the dreams Walter Gilman did not know. Behind everything crouched the brooding, festering horror of the ancient town, and of the mouldy, unhallowed garret gable where he wrote and studied and wrestled with figures and formulae when he was not tossing on the meagre iron bed. His ears were growing sensitive to a preternatural and intolerable degree, and he had long ago stopped the cheap mantel clock whose ticking had come to seem like a thunder of artillery. At night the subtle stirring of the black city outside, the sinister scurrying of rats in the wormy partitions, and the creaking of hidden timbers in the centuried house, were enough to give him a sense of strident pandemonium. The darkness always teemed with unexplained sound—and yet he sometimes shook with fear lest the noises he heard should subside and allow him to hear certain other, fainter, noises which he suspected were lurking behind them.
      He was in the changeless, legend-haunted city of Arkham, with its clustering gambrel roofs that sway and sag over attics where witches hid from the King’s men in the dark, olden days of the Province. Nor was any spot in that city more steeped in macabre memory than the gable room which harboured him—for it was this house and this room which had likewise harboured old Keziah Mason, whose flight from Salem Gaol at the last no one was ever able to explain. That was in 1692—the gaoler had gone mad and babbled of a small, white-fanged furry thing which scuttled out of Keziah’s cell, and not even Cotton Mather could explain the curves and angles smeared on the grey stone walls with some red, sticky fluid.
      Possibly Gilman ought not to have studied so hard. Non-Euclidean calculus and quantum physics are enough to stretch any brain; and when one mixes them with folklore, and tries to trace a strange background of multi-dimensional reality behind the ghoulish hints of the Gothic tales and the wild whispers of the chimney-corner, one can hardly expect to be wholly free from mental tension. Gilman came from Haverhill, but it was only after he had entered college in Arkham that he began to connect his mathematics with the fantastic legends of elder magic. Something in the air of the hoary town worked obscurely on his imagination. The professors at Miskatonic had urged him to slacken up, and had voluntarily cut down his course at several points. Moreover, they had stopped him from consulting the dubious old books on forbidden secrets that were kept under lock and key in a vault at the university library. But all these precautions came late in the day, so that Gilman had some terrible hints from the dreaded Necronomicon of Abdul Alhazred, the fragmentary Book of Eibon, and the suppressed Unaussprechlichen Kulten of von Junzt to correlate with his abstract formulae on the properties of space and the linkage of dimensions known and unknown.
      He knew his room was in the old Witch House—that, indeed, was why he had taken it. There was much in the Essex County records about Keziah Mason’s trial, and what she had admitted under pressure to the Court of Oyer and Terminer had fascinated Gilman beyond all reason. She had told Judge Hathorne of lines and curves that could be made to point out directions leading through the walls of space to other spaces beyond, and had implied that such lines and curves were frequently used at certain midnight meetings in the dark valley of the white stone beyond Meadow Hill and on the unpeopled island in the river. She had spoken also of the Black Man, of her oath, and of her new secret name of Nahab. Then she had drawn those devices on the walls of her cell and vanished.
      Gilman believed strange things about Keziah, and had felt a queer thrill on learning that her dwelling was still standing after more than 235 years. When he heard the hushed Arkham whispers about Keziah’s persistent presence in the old house and the narrow streets, about the irregular human tooth-marks left on certain sleepers in that and other houses, about the childish cries heard near May-Eve, and Hallowmass, about the stench often noted in the old house’s attic just after those dreaded seasons, and about the small, furry, sharp-toothed thing which haunted the mouldering structure and the town and nuzzled people curiously in the black hours before dawn, he resolved to live in the place at any cost. A room was easy to secure; for the house was unpopular, hard to rent, and long given over to cheap lodgings. Gilman could not have told what he expected to find there, but he knew he wanted to be in the building where some circumstance had more or less suddenly given a mediocre old woman of the seventeenth century an insight into mathematical depths perhaps beyond the utmost modern delvings of Planck, Heisenberg, Einstein, and de Sitter.
      He studied the timber and plaster walls for traces of cryptic designs at every accessible spot where the paper had peeled, and within a week managed to get the eastern attic room where Keziah was held to have practiced her spells. It had been vacant from the first—for no one had ever been willing to stay there long—but the Polish landlord had grown wary about renting it. Yet nothing whatever happened to Gilman till about the time of the fever. No ghostly Keziah flitted through the sombre halls and chambers, no small furry thing crept into his dismal eyrie to nuzzle him, and no record of the witch’s incantations rewarded his constant search. Sometimes he would take walks through shadowy tangles of unpaved musty-smelling lanes where eldritch brown houses of unknown age leaned and tottered and leered mockingly through narrow, small-paned windows. Here he knew strange things had happened once, and there was a faint suggestion behind the surface that everything of that monstrous past might not—at least in the darkest, narrowest, and most intricately crooked alleys—have utterly perished. He also rowed out twice to the ill-regarded island in the river, and made a sketch of the singular angles described by the moss-grown rows of grey standing stones whose origin was so obscure and immemorial.
      Gilman’s room was of good size but queerly irregular shape; the north wall slanting perceptibly inward from the outer to the inner end, while the low ceiling slanted gently downward in the same direction. Aside from an obvious rat-hole and the signs of other stopped-up ones, there was no access—nor any appearance of a former avenue of access—to the space which must have existed between the slanting wall and the straight outer wall on the house’s north side, though a view from the exterior shewed where a window had been boarded up at a very remote date. The loft above the ceiling—which must have had a slanting floor—was likewise inaccessible. When Gilman climbed up a ladder to the cobwebbed level loft above the rest of the attic he found vestiges of a bygone aperture tightly and heavily covered with ancient planking and secured by the stout wooden pegs common in colonial carpentry. No amount of persuasion, however, could induce the stolid landlord to let him investigate either of these two closed spaces.
      As time wore along, his absorption in the irregular wall and ceiling of his room increased; for he began to read into the odd angles a mathematical significance which seemed to offer vague clues regarding their purpose. Old Keziah, he reflected, might have had excellent reasons for living in a room with peculiar angles; for was it not through certain angles that she claimed to have gone outside the boundaries of the world of space we know? His interest gradually veered away from the unplumbed voids beyond the slanting surfaces, since it now appeared that the purpose of those surfaces concerned the side he was already on.
      The touch of brain-fever and the dreams began early in February. For some time, apparently, the curious angles of Gilman’s room had been having a strange, almost hypnotic effect on him; and as the bleak winter advanced he had found himself staring more and more intently at the corner where the down-slanting ceiling met the inward-slanting wall. About this period his inability to concentrate on his formal studies worried him considerably, his apprehensions about the mid-year examinations being very acute. But the exaggerated sense of hearing was scarcely less annoying. Life had become an insistent and almost unendurable cacophony, and there was that constant, terrifying impression of other sounds—perhaps from regions beyond life—trembling on the very brink of audibility. So far as concrete noises went, the rats in the ancient partitions were the worst. Sometimes their scratching seemed not only furtive but deliberate. When it came from beyond the slanting north wall it was mixed with a sort of dry rattling—and when it came from the century-closed loft above the slanting ceiling Gilman always braced himself as if expecting some horror which only bided its time before descending to engulf him utterly.
      The dreams were wholly beyond the pale of sanity, and Gilman felt that they must be a result, jointly, of his studies in mathematics and in folklore. He had been thinking too much about the vague regions which his formulae told him must lie beyond the three dimensions we know, and about the possibility that old Keziah Mason—guided by some influence past all conjecture—had actually found the gate to those regions. The yellowed county records containing her testimony and that of her accusers were so damnably suggestive of things beyond human experience—and the descriptions of the darting little furry object which served as her familiar were so painfully realistic despite their incredible details.
      That object—no larger than a good-sized rat and quaintly called by the townspeople “Brown Jenkin”—seemed to have been the fruit of a remarkable case of sympathetic herd-delusion, for in 1692 no less than eleven persons had testified to glimpsing it. There were recent rumours, too, with a baffling and disconcerting amount of agreement. Witnesses said it had long hair and the shape of a rat, but that its sharp-toothed, bearded face was evilly human while its paws were like tiny human hands. It took messages betwixt old Keziah and the devil, and was nursed on the witch’s blood—which it sucked like a vampire. Its voice was a kind of loathsome titter, and it could speak all languages. Of all the bizarre monstrosities in Gilman’s dreams, nothing filled him with greater panic and nausea than this blasphemous and diminutive hybrid, whose image flitted across his vision in a form a thousandfold more hateful than anything his waking mind had deduced from the ancient records and the modern whispers.
      Gilman’s dreams consisted largely in plunges through limitless abysses of inexplicably coloured twilight and bafflingly disordered sound; abysses whose material and gravitational properties, and whose relation to his own entity, he could not even begin to explain. He did not walk or climb, fly or swim, crawl or wriggle; yet always experienced a mode of motion partly voluntary and partly involuntary. Of his own condition he could not well judge, for sight of his arms, legs, and torso seemed always cut off by some odd disarrangement of perspective; but he felt that his physical organisation and faculties were somehow marvellously transmuted and obliquely projected—though not without a certain grotesque relationship to his normal proportions and properties.
      The abysses were by no means vacant, being crowded with indescribably angled masses of alien-hued substance, some of which appeared to be organic while others seemed inorganic. A few of the organic objects tended to awake vague memories in the back of his mind, though he could form no conscious idea of what they mockingly resembled or suggested. In the later dreams he began to distinguish separate categories into which the organic objects appeared to be divided, and which seemed to involve in each case a radically different species of conduct-pattern and basic motivation. Of these categories one seemed to him to include objects slightly less illogical and irrelevant in their motions than the members of the other categories.
      All the objects—organic and inorganic alike—were totally beyond description or even comprehension. Gilman sometimes compared the inorganic masses to prisms, labyrinths, clusters of cubes and planes, and Cyclopean buildings; and the organic things struck him variously as groups of bubbles, octopi, centipedes, living Hindoo idols, and intricate Arabesques roused into a kind of ophidian animation. Everything he saw was unspeakably menacing and horrible; and whenever one of the organic entities appeared by its motions to be noticing him, he felt a stark, hideous fright which generally jolted him awake. Of how the organic entities moved, he could tell no more than of how he moved himself. In time he observed a further mystery—the tendency of certain entities to appear suddenly out of empty space, or to disappear totally with equal suddenness. The shrieking, roaring confusion of sound which permeated the abysses was past all analysis as to pitch, timbre, or rhythm; but seemed to be synchronous with vague visual changes in all the indefinite objects, organic and inorganic alike. Gilman had a constant sense of dread that it might rise to some unbearable degree of intensity during one or another of its obscure, relentlessly inevitable fluctuations.
      But it was not in these vortices of complete alienage that he saw Brown Jenkin. That shocking little horror was reserved for certain lighter, sharper dreams which assailed him just before he dropped into the fullest depths of sleep. He would be lying in the dark fighting to keep awake when a faint lambent glow would seem to shimmer around the centuried room, shewing in a violet mist the convergence of angled planes which had seized his brain so insidiously. The horror would appear to pop out of the rat-hole in the corner and patter toward him over the sagging, wide-planked floor with evil expectancy in its tiny, bearded human face—but mercifully, this dream always melted away before the object got close enough to nuzzle him. It had hellishly long, sharp, canine teeth. Gilman tried to stop up the rat-hole every day, but each night the real tenants of the partitions would gnaw away the obstruction, whatever it might be. Once he had the landlord nail tin over it, but the next night the rats gnawed a fresh hole—in making which they pushed or dragged out into the room a curious little fragment of bone.
      Gilman did not report his fever to the doctor, for he knew he could not pass the examinations if ordered to the college infirmary when every moment was needed for cramming. As it was, he failed in Calculus D and Advanced General Psychology, though not without hope of making up lost ground before the end of the term. It was in March when the fresh element entered his lighter preliminary dreaming, and the nightmare shape of Brown Jenkin began to be companioned by the nebulous blur which grew more and more to resemble a bent old woman. This addition disturbed him more than he could account for, but finally he decided that it was like an ancient crone whom he had twice actually encountered in the dark tangle of lanes near the abandoned wharves. On those occasions the evil, sardonic, and seemingly unmotivated stare of the beldame had set him almost shivering—especially the first time, when an overgrown rat darting across the shadowed mouth of a neighbouring alley had made him think irrationally of Brown Jenkin. Now, he reflected, those nervous fears were being mirrored in his disordered dreams.
      That the influence of the old house was unwholesome, he could not deny; but traces of his early morbid interest still held him there. He argued that the fever alone was responsible for his nightly phantasies, and that when the touch abated he would be free from the monstrous visions. Those visions, however, were of abhorrent vividness and convincingness, and whenever he awaked he retained a vague sense of having undergone much more than he remembered. He was hideously sure that in unrecalled dreams he had talked with both Brown Jenkin and the old woman, and that they had been urging him to go somewhere with them and to meet a third being of greater potency.
      Toward the end of March he began to pick up in his mathematics, though other studies bothered him increasingly. He was getting an intuitive knack for solving Riemannian equations, and astonished Professor Upham by his comprehension of fourth-dimensional and other problems which had floored all the rest of the class. One afternoon there was a discussion of possible freakish curvatures in space, and of theoretical points of approach or even contact between our part of the cosmos and various other regions as distant as the farthest stars or the trans-galactic gulfs themselves—or even as fabulously remote as the tentatively conceivable cosmic units beyond the whole Einsteinian space-time continuum. Gilman’s handling of this theme filled everyone with admiration, even though some of his hypothetical illustrations caused an increase in the always plentiful gossip about his nervous and solitary eccentricity. What made the students shake their heads was his sober theory that a man might—given mathematical knowledge admittedly beyond all likelihood of human acquirement—step deliberately from the earth to any other celestial body which might lie at one of an infinity of specific points in the cosmic pattern.
      Such a step, he said, would require only two stages; first, a passage out of the three-dimensional sphere we know, and second, a passage back to the three-dimensional sphere at another point, perhaps one of infinite remoteness. That this could be accomplished without loss of life was in many cases conceivable. Any being from any part of three-dimensional space could probably survive in the fourth dimension; and its survival of the second stage would depend upon what alien part of three-dimensional space it might select for its re-entry. Denizens of some planets might be able to live on certain others—even planets belonging to other galaxies, or to similar-dimensional phases of other space-time continua—though of course there must be vast numbers of mutually uninhabitable even though mathematically juxtaposed bodies or zones of space.
      It was also possible that the inhabitants of a given dimensional realm could survive entry to many unknown and incomprehensible realms of additional or indefinitely multiplied dimensions—be they within or outside the given space-time continuum—and that the converse would be likewise true. This was a matter for speculation, though one could be fairly certain that the type of mutation involved in a passage from any given dimensional plane to the next higher plane would not be destructive of biological integrity as we understand it. Gilman could not be very clear about his reasons for this last assumption, but his haziness here was more than overbalanced by his clearness on other complex points. Professor Upham especially liked his demonstration of the kinship of higher mathematics to certain phases of magical lore transmitted down the ages from an ineffable antiquity—human or pre-human—whose knowledge of the cosmos and its laws was greater than ours.
      Around the first of April Gilman worried considerably because his slow fever did not abate. He was also troubled by what some of his fellow-lodgers said about his sleep-walking. It seemed that he was often absent from his bed, and that the creaking of his floor at certain hours of the night was remarked by the man in the room below. This fellow also spoke of hearing the tread of shod feet in the night; but Gilman was sure he must have been mistaken in this, since shoes as well as other apparel were always precisely in place in the morning. One could develop all sorts of aural delusions in this morbid old house—for did not Gilman himself, even in daylight, now feel certain that noises other than rat-scratchings came from the black voids beyond the slanting wall and above the slanting ceiling? His pathologically sensitive ears began to listen for faint footfalls in the immemorially sealed loft overhead, and sometimes the illusion of such things was agonisingly realistic.
      However, he knew that he had actually become a somnambulist; for twice at night his room had been found vacant, though with all his clothing in place. Of this he had been assured by Frank Elwood, the one fellow-student whose poverty forced him to room in this squalid and unpopular house. Elwood had been studying in the small hours and had come up for help on a differential equation, only to find Gilman absent. It had been rather presumptuous of him to open the unlocked door after knocking had failed to rouse a response, but he had needed the help very badly and thought that his host would not mind a gentle prodding awake. On neither occasion, though, had Gilman been there—and when told of the matter he wondered where he could have been wandering, barefoot and with only his night-clothes on. He resolved to investigate the matter if reports of his sleep-walking continued, and thought of sprinkling flour on the floor of the corridor to see where his footsteps might lead. The door was the only conceivable egress, for there was no possible foothold outside the narrow window.
      As April advanced Gilman’s fever-sharpened ears were disturbed by the whining prayers of a superstitious loomfixer named Joe Mazurewicz, who had a room on the ground floor. Mazurewicz had told long, rambling stories about the ghost of old Keziah and the furry, sharp-fanged, nuzzling thing, and had said he was so badly haunted at times that only his silver crucifix—given him for the purpose by Father Iwanicki of St. Stanislaus’ Church—could bring him relief. Now he was praying because the Witches’ Sabbath was drawing near. May-Eve was Walpurgis-Night, when hell’s blackest evil roamed the earth and all the slaves of Satan gathered for nameless rites and deeds. It was always a very bad time in Arkham, even though the fine folks up in Miskatonic Avenue and High and Saltonstall Streets pretended to know nothing about it. There would be bad doings—and a child or two would probably be missing. Joe knew about such things, for his grandmother in the old country had heard tales from her grandmother. It was wise to pray and count one’s beads at this season. For three months Keziah and Brown Jenkin had not been near Joe’s room, nor near Paul Choynski’s room, nor anywhere else—and it meant no good when they held off like that. They must be up to something.
      Gilman dropped in at a doctor’s office on the 16th of the month, and was surprised to find his temperature was not as high as he had feared. The physician questioned him sharply, and advised him to see a nerve specialist. On reflection, he was glad he had not consulted the still more inquisitive college doctor. Old Waldron, who had curtailed his activities before, would have made him take a rest—an impossible thing now that he was so close to great results in his equations. He was certainly near the boundary between the known universe and the fourth dimension, and who could say how much farther he might go?
      But even as these thoughts came to him he wondered at the source of his strange confidence. Did all of this perilous sense of imminence come from the formulae on the sheets he covered day by day? The soft, stealthy, imaginary footsteps in the sealed loft above were unnerving. And now, too, there was a growing feeling that somebody was constantly persuading him to do something terrible which he could not do. How about the somnambulism? Where did he go sometimes in the night? And what was that faint suggestion of sound which once in a while seemed to trickle through the maddening confusion of identifiable sounds even in broad daylight and full wakefulness? Its rhythm did not correspond to anything on earth, unless perhaps to the cadence of one or two unmentionable Sabbat-chants, and sometimes he feared it corresponded to certain attributes of the vague shrieking or roaring in those wholly alien abysses of dream.
      The dreams were meanwhile getting to be atrocious. In the lighter preliminary phase the evil old woman was now of fiendish distinctness, and Gilman knew she was the one who had frightened him in the slums. Her bent back, long nose, and shrivelled chin were unmistakable, and her shapeless brown garments were like those he remembered. The expression on her face was one of hideous malevolence and exultation, and when he awaked he could recall a croaking voice that persuaded and threatened. He must meet the Black Man, and go with them all to the throne of Azathoth at the centre of ultimate Chaos. That was what she said. He must sign in his own blood the book of Azathoth and take a new secret name now that his independent delvings had gone so far. What kept him from going with her and Brown Jenkin and the other to the throne of Chaos where the thin flutes pipe mindlessly was the fact that he had seen the name “Azathoth” in the Necronomicon, and knew it stood for a primal evil too horrible for description.
      The old woman always appeared out of thin air near the corner where the downward slant met the inward slant. She seemed to crystallise at a point closer to the ceiling than to the floor, and every night she was a little nearer and more distinct before the dream shifted. Brown Jenkin, too, was always a little nearer at the last, and its yellowish-white fangs glistened shockingly in that unearthly violet phosphorescence. Its shrill loathsome tittering stuck more and more in Gilman’s head, and he could remember in the morning how it had pronounced the words “Azathoth” and “Nyarlathotep”.
      In the deeper dreams everything was likewise more distinct, and Gilman felt that the twilight abysses around him were those of the fourth dimension. Those organic entities whose motions seemed least flagrantly irrelevant and unmotivated were probably projections of life-forms from our own planet, including human beings. What the others were in their own dimensional sphere or spheres he dared not try to think. Two of the less irrelevantly moving things—a rather large congeries of iridescent, prolately spheroidal bubbles and a very much smaller polyhedron of unknown colours and rapidly shifting surface angles—seemed to take notice of him and follow him about or float ahead as he changed position among the titan prisms, labyrinths, cube-and-plane clusters, and quasi-buildings; and all the while the vague shrieking and roaring waxed louder and louder, as if approaching some monstrous climax of utterly unendurable intensity.
      During the night of April 19–20 the new development occurred. Gilman was half-involuntarily moving about in the twilight abysses with the bubble-mass and the small polyhedron floating ahead, when he noticed the peculiarly regular angles formed by the edges of some gigantic neighbouring prism-clusters. In another second he was out of the abyss and standing tremulously on a rocky hillside bathed in intense, diffused green light. He was barefooted and in his night-clothes, and when he tried to walk discovered that he could scarcely lift his feet. A swirling vapour hid everything but the immediate sloping terrain from sight, and he shrank from the thought of the sounds that might surge out of that vapour.
      Then he saw the two shapes laboriously crawling toward him—the old woman and the little furry thing. The crone strained up to her knees and managed to cross her arms in a singular fashion, while Brown Jenkin pointed in a certain direction with a horribly anthropoid fore paw which it raised with evident difficulty. Spurred by an impulse he did not originate, Gilman dragged himself forward along a course determined by the angle of the old woman’s arms and the direction of the small monstrosity’s paw, and before he had shuffled three steps he was back in the twilight abysses. Geometrical shapes seethed around him, and he fell dizzily and interminably. At last he woke in his bed in the crazily angled garret of the eldritch old house.
      He was good for nothing that morning, and stayed away from all his classes. Some unknown attraction was pulling his eyes in a seemingly irrelevant direction, for he could not help staring at a certain vacant spot on the floor. As the day advanced the focus of his unseeing eyes changed position, and by noon he had conquered the impulse to stare at vacancy. About two o’clock he went out for lunch, and as he threaded the narrow lanes of the city he found himself turning always to the southeast. Only an effort halted him at a cafeteria in Church Street, and after the meal he felt the unknown pull still more strongly.
      He would have to consult a nerve specialist after all—perhaps there was a connexion with his somnambulism—but meanwhile he might at least try to break the morbid spell himself. Undoubtedly he could still manage to walk away from the pull; so with great resolution he headed against it and dragged himself deliberately north along Garrison Street. By the time he had reached the bridge over the Miskatonic he was in a cold perspiration, and he clutched at the iron railing as he gazed upstream at the ill-regarded island whose regular lines of ancient standing stones brooded sullenly in the afternoon sunlight.
      Then he gave a start. For there was a clearly visible living figure on that desolate island, and a second glance told him it was certainly the strange old woman whose sinister aspect had worked itself so disastrously into his dreams. The tall grass near her was moving, too, as if some other living thing were crawling close to the ground. When the old woman began to turn toward him he fled precipitately off the bridge and into the shelter of the town’s labyrinthine waterfront alleys. Distant though the island was, he felt that a monstrous and invincible evil could flow from the sardonic stare of that bent, ancient figure in brown.
      The southeastward pull still held, and only with tremendous resolution could Gilman drag himself into the old house and up the rickety stairs. For hours he sat silent and aimless, with his eyes shifting gradually westward. About six o’clock his sharpened ears caught the whining prayers of Joe Mazurewicz two floors below, and in desperation he seized his hat and walked out into the sunset-golden streets, letting the now directly southward pull carry him where it might. An hour later darkness found him in the open fields beyond Hangman’s Brook, with the glimmering spring stars shining ahead. The urge to walk was gradually changing to an urge to leap mystically into space, and suddenly he realised just where the source of the pull lay.
      It was in the sky. A definite point among the stars had a claim on him and was calling him. Apparently it was a point somewhere between Hydra and Argo Navis, and he knew that he had been urged toward it ever since he had awaked soon after dawn. In the morning it had been underfoot; afternoon found it rising in the southeast, and now it was roughly south but wheeling toward the west. What was the meaning of this new thing? Was he going mad? How long would it last? Again mustering his resolution, Gilman turned and dragged himself back to the sinister old house.
      Mazurewicz was waiting for him at the door, and seemed both anxious and reluctant to whisper some fresh bit of superstition. It was about the witch light. Joe had been out celebrating the night before—it was Patriots’ Day in Massachusetts—and had come home after midnight. Looking up at the house from outside, he had thought at first that Gilman’s window was dark; but then he had seen the faint violet glow within. He wanted to warn the gentleman about that glow, for everybody in Arkham knew it was Keziah’s witch light which played near Brown Jenkin and the ghost of the old crone herself. He had not mentioned this before, but now he must tell about it because it meant that Keziah and her long-toothed familiar were haunting the young gentleman. Sometimes he and Paul Choynski and Landlord Dombrowski thought they saw that light seeping out of cracks in the sealed loft above the young gentleman’s room, but they had all agreed not to talk about that. However, it would be better for the gentleman to take another room and get a crucifix from some good priest like Father Iwanicki.
      As the man rambled on Gilman felt a nameless panic clutch at his throat. He knew that Joe must have been half drunk when he came home the night before, yet this mention of a violet light in the garret window was of frightful import. It was a lambent glow of this sort which always played about the old woman and the small furry thing in those lighter, sharper dreams which prefaced his plunge into unknown abysses, and the thought that a wakeful second person could see the dream-luminance was utterly beyond sane harbourage. Yet where had the fellow got such an odd notion? Had he himself talked as well as walked around the house in his sleep? No, Joe said, he had not—but he must check up on this. Perhaps Frank Elwood could tell him something, though he hated to ask.
      Fever—wild dreams—somnambulism—illusions of sounds—a pull toward a point in the sky—and now a suspicion of insane sleep-talking! He must stop studying, see a nerve specialist, and take himself in hand. When he climbed to the second story he paused at Elwood’s door but saw that the other youth was out. Reluctantly he continued up to his garret room and sat down in the dark. His gaze was still pulled to the southwest, but he also found himself listening intently for some sound in the closed loft above, and half imagining that an evil violet light seeped down through an infinitesimal crack in the low, slanting ceiling.
      That night as Gilman slept the violet light broke upon him with heightened intensity, and the old witch and small furry thing—getting closer than ever before—mocked him with inhuman squeals and devilish gestures. He was glad to sink into the vaguely roaring twilight abysses, though the pursuit of that iridescent bubble-congeries and that kaleidoscopic little polyhedron was menacing and irritating. Then came the shift as vast converging planes of a slippery-looking substance loomed above and below him—a shift which ended in a flash of delirium and a blaze of unknown, alien light in which yellow, carmine, and indigo were madly and inextricably blended.
      He was half lying on a high, fantastically balustraded terrace above a boundless jungle of outlandish, incredible peaks, balanced planes, domes, minarets, horizontal discs poised on pinnacles, and numberless forms of still greater wildness—some of stone and some of metal—which glittered gorgeously in the mixed, almost blistering glare from a polychromatic sky. Looking upward he saw three stupendous discs of flame, each of a different hue, and at a different height above an infinitely distant curving horizon of low mountains. Behind him tiers of higher terraces towered aloft as far as he could see. The city below stretched away to the limits of vision, and he hoped that no sound would well up from it.
      The pavement from which he easily raised himself was of a veined, polished stone beyond his power to identify, and the tiles were cut in bizarre-angled shapes which struck him as less asymmetrical than based on some unearthly symmetry whose laws he could not comprehend. The balustrade was chest-high, delicate, and fantastically wrought, while along the rail were ranged at short intervals little figures of grotesque design and exquisite workmanship. They, like the whole balustrade, seemed to be made of some sort of shining metal whose colour could not be guessed in this chaos of mixed effulgences; and their nature utterly defied conjecture. They represented some ridged, barrel-shaped object with thin horizontal arms radiating spoke-like from a central ring, and with vertical knobs or bulbs projecting from the head and base of the barrel. Each of these knobs was the hub of a system of five long, flat, triangularly tapering arms arranged around it like the arms of a starfish—nearly horizontal, but curving slightly away from the central barrel. The base of the bottom knob was fused to the long railing with so delicate a point of contact that several figures had been broken off and were missing. The figures were about four and a half inches in height, while the spiky arms gave them a maximum diameter of about two and a half inches.
      When Gilman stood up the tiles felt hot to his bare feet. He was wholly alone, and his first act was to walk to the balustrade and look dizzily down at the endless, Cyclopean city almost two thousand feet below. As he listened he thought a rhythmic confusion of faint musical pipings covering a wide tonal range welled up from the narrow streets beneath, and he wished he might discern the denizens of the place. The sight turned him giddy after a while, so that he would have fallen to the pavement had he not clutched instinctively at the lustrous balustrade. His right hand fell on one of the projecting figures, the touch seeming to steady him slightly. It was too much, however, for the exotic delicacy of the metal-work, and the spiky figure snapped off under his grasp. Still half-dazed, he continued to clutch it as his other hand seized a vacant space on the smooth railing.
      But now his oversensitive ears caught something behind him, and he looked back across the level terrace. Approaching him softly though without apparent furtiveness were five figures, two of which were the sinister old woman and the fanged, furry little animal. The other three were what sent him unconscious—for they were living entities about eight feet high, shaped precisely like the spiky images on the balustrade, and propelling themselves by a spider-like wriggling of their lower set of starfish-arms.
      Gilman awakened in his bed, drenched by a cold perspiration and with a smarting sensation in his face, hands, and feet. Springing to the floor, he washed and dressed in frantic haste, as if it were necessary for him to get out of the house as quickly as possible. He did not know where he wished to go, but felt that once more he would have to sacrifice his classes. The odd pull toward that spot in the sky between Hydra and Argo had abated, but another of even greater strength had taken its place. Now he felt that he must go north—infinitely north. He dreaded to cross the bridge that gave a view of the desolate island in the Miskatonic, so went over the Peabody Avenue bridge. Very often he stumbled, for his eyes and ears were chained to an extremely lofty point in the blank blue sky.
      After about an hour he got himself under better control, and saw that he was far from the city. All around him stretched the bleak emptiness of salt marshes, while the narrow road ahead led to Innsmouth—that ancient, half-deserted town which Arkham people were so curiously unwilling to visit. Though the northward pull had not diminished, he resisted it as he had resisted the other pull, and finally found that he could almost balance the one against the other. Plodding back to town and getting some coffee at a soda fountain, he dragged himself into the public library and browsed aimlessly among the lighter magazines. Once he met some friends who remarked how oddly sunburned he looked, but he did not tell them of his walk. At three o’clock he took some lunch at a restaurant, noting meanwhile that the pull had either lessened or divided itself. After that he killed the time at a cheap cinema show, seeing the inane performance over and over again without paying any attention to it.
      About nine at night he drifted homeward and stumbled into the ancient house. Joe Mazurewicz was whining unintelligible prayers, and Gilman hastened up to his own garret chamber without pausing to see if Elwood was in. It was when he turned on the feeble electric light that the shock came. At once he saw there was something on the table which did not belong there, and a second look left no room for doubt. Lying on its side—for it could not stand up alone—was the exotic spiky figure which in his monstrous dream he had broken off the fantastic balustrade. No detail was missing. The ridged, barrel-shaped centre, the thin, radiating arms, the knobs at each end, and the flat, slightly outward-curving starfish-arms spreading from those knobs—all were there. In the electric light the colour seemed to be a kind of iridescent grey veined with green, and Gilman could see amidst his horror and bewilderment that one of the knobs ended in a jagged break corresponding to its former point of attachment to the dream-railing.
      Only his tendency toward a dazed stupor prevented him from screaming aloud. This fusion of dream and reality was too much to bear. Still dazed, he clutched at the spiky thing and staggered downstairs to Landlord Dombrowski’s quarters. The whining prayers of the superstitious loomfixer were still sounding through the mouldy halls, but Gilman did not mind them now. The landlord was in, and greeted him pleasantly. No, he had not seen that thing before and did not know anything about it. But his wife had said she found a funny tin thing in one of the beds when she fixed the rooms at noon, and maybe that was it. Dombrowski called her, and she waddled in. Yes, that was the thing. She had found it in the young gentleman’s bed—on the side next the wall. It had looked very queer to her, but of course the young gentleman had lots of queer things in his room—books and curios and pictures and markings on paper. She certainly knew nothing about it.
      So Gilman climbed upstairs again in a mental turmoil, convinced that he was either still dreaming or that his somnambulism had run to incredible extremes and led him to depredations in unknown places. Where had he got this outré thing? He did not recall seeing it in any museum in Arkham. It must have been somewhere, though; and the sight of it as he snatched it in his sleep must have caused the odd dream-picture of the balustraded terrace. Next day he would make some very guarded inquiries—and perhaps see the nerve specialist.
      Meanwhile he would try to keep track of his somnambulism. As he went upstairs and across the garret hall he sprinkled about some flour which he had borrowed—with a frank admission as to its purpose—from the landlord. He had stopped at Elwood’s door on the way, but had found all dark within. Entering his room, he placed the spiky thing on the table, and lay down in complete mental and physical exhaustion without pausing to undress. From the closed loft above the slanting ceiling he thought he heard a faint scratching and padding, but he was too disorganised even to mind it. That cryptical pull from the north was getting very strong again, though it seemed now to come from a lower place in the sky.
      In the dazzling violet light of dream the old woman and the fanged, furry thing came again and with a greater distinctness than on any former occasion. This time they actually reached him, and he felt the crone’s withered claws clutching at him. He was pulled out of bed and into empty space, and for a moment he heard a rhythmic roaring and saw the twilight amorphousness of the vague abysses seething around him. But that moment was very brief, for presently he was in a crude, windowless little space with rough beams and planks rising to a peak just above his head, and with a curious slanting floor underfoot. Propped level on that floor were low cases full of books of every degree of antiquity and disintegration, and in the centre were a table and bench, both apparently fastened in place. Small objects of unknown shape and nature were ranged on the tops of the cases, and in the flaming violet light Gilman thought he saw a counterpart of the spiky image which had puzzled him so horribly. On the left the floor fell abruptly away, leaving a black triangular gulf out of which, after a second’s dry rattling, there presently climbed the hateful little furry thing with the yellow fangs and bearded human face.
      The evilly grinning beldame still clutched him, and beyond the table stood a figure he had never seen before—a tall, lean man of dead black colouration but without the slightest sign of negroid features; wholly devoid of either hair or beard, and wearing as his only garment a shapeless robe of some heavy black fabric. His feet were indistinguishable because of the table and bench, but he must have been shod, since there was a clicking whenever he changed position. The man did not speak, and bore no trace of expression on his small, regular features. He merely pointed to a book of prodigious size which lay open on the table, while the beldame thrust a huge grey quill into Gilman’s right hand. Over everything was a pall of intensely maddening fear, and the climax was reached when the furry thing ran up the dreamer’s clothing to his shoulders and then down his left arm, finally biting him sharply in the wrist just below his cuff. As the blood spurted from this wound Gilman lapsed into a faint.
      He awaked on the morning of the 22nd with a pain in his left wrist, and saw that his cuff was brown with dried blood. His recollections were very confused, but the scene with the black man in the unknown space stood out vividly. The rats must have bitten him as he slept, giving rise to the climax of that frightful dream. Opening the door, he saw that the flour on the corridor floor was undisturbed except for the huge prints of the loutish fellow who roomed at the other end of the garret. So he had not been sleep-walking this time. But something would have to be done about those rats. He would speak to the landlord about them. Again he tried to stop up the hole at the base of the slanting wall, wedging in a candlestick which seemed of about the right size. His ears were ringing horribly, as if with the residual echoes of some horrible noise heard in dreams.
      As he bathed and changed clothes he tried to recall what he had dreamed after the scene in the violet-litten space, but nothing definite would crystallise in his mind. That scene itself must have corresponded to the sealed loft overhead, which had begun to attack his imagination so violently, but later impressions were faint and hazy. There were suggestions of the vague, twilight abysses, and of still vaster, blacker abysses beyond them—abysses in which all fixed suggestions of form were absent. He had been taken there by the bubble-congeries and the little polyhedron which always dogged him; but they, like himself, had changed to wisps of milky, barely luminous mist in this farther void of ultimate blackness. Something else had gone on ahead—a larger wisp which now and then condensed into nameless approximations of form—and he thought that their progress had not been in a straight line, but rather along the alien curves and spirals of some ethereal vortex which obeyed laws unknown to the physics and mathematics of any conceivable cosmos. Eventually there had been a hint of vast, leaping shadows, of a monstrous, half-acoustic pulsing, and of the thin, monotonous piping of an unseen flute—but that was all. Gilman decided he had picked up that last conception from what he had read in the Necronomicon about the mindless entity Azathoth, which rules all time and space from a curiously environed black throne at the centre of Chaos.
      When the blood was washed away the wrist wound proved very slight, and Gilman puzzled over the location of the two tiny punctures. It occurred to him that there was no blood on the bedspread where he had lain—which was very curious in view of the amount on his skin and cuff. Had he been sleep-walking within his room, and had the rat bitten him as he sat in some chair or paused in some less rational position? He looked in every corner for brownish drops or stains, but did not find any. He had better, he thought, sprinkle flour within the room as well as outside the door—though after all no further proof of his sleep-walking was needed. He knew he did walk—and the thing to do now was to stop it. He must ask Frank Elwood for help. This morning the strange pulls from space seemed lessened, though they were replaced by another sensation even more inexplicable. It was a vague, insistent impulse to fly away from his present situation, but held not a hint of the specific direction in which he wished to fly. As he picked up the strange spiky image on the table he thought the older northward pull grew a trifle stronger; but even so, it was wholly overruled by the newer and more bewildering urge.
      He took the spiky image down to Elwood’s room, steeling himself against the whines of the loomfixer which welled up from the ground floor. Elwood was in, thank heaven, and appeared to be stirring about. There was time for a little conversation before leaving for breakfast and college, so Gilman hurriedly poured forth an account of his recent dreams and fears. His host was very sympathetic, and agreed that something ought to be done. He was shocked by his guest’s drawn, haggard aspect, and noticed the queer, abnormal-looking sunburn which others had remarked during the past week. There was not much, though, that he could say. He had not seen Gilman on any sleep-walking expedition, and had no idea what the curious image could be. He had, though, heard the French-Canadian who lodged just under Gilman talking to Mazurewicz one evening. They were telling each other how badly they dreaded the coming of Walpurgis-Night, now only a few days off; and were exchanging pitying comments about the poor, doomed young gentleman. Desrochers, the fellow under Gilman’s room, had spoken of nocturnal footsteps both shod and unshod, and of the violet light he saw one night when he had stolen fearfully up to peer through Gilman’s keyhole. He had not dared to peer, he told Mazurewicz, after he had glimpsed that light through the cracks around the door. There had been soft talking, too—and as he began to describe it his voice had sunk to an inaudible whisper.
      Elwood could not imagine what had set these superstitious creatures gossiping, but supposed their imaginations had been roused by Gilman’s late hours and somnolent walking and talking on the one hand, and by the nearness of traditionally feared May-Eve on the other hand. That Gilman talked in his sleep was plain, and it was obviously from Desrochers’ keyhole-listenings that the delusive notion of the violet dream-light had got abroad. These simple people were quick to imagine they had seen any odd thing they had heard about. As for a plan of action—Gilman had better move down to Elwood’s room and avoid sleeping alone. Elwood would, if awake, rouse him whenever he began to talk or rise in his sleep. Very soon, too, he must see the specialist. Meanwhile they would take the spiky image around to the various museums and to certain professors; seeking identification and stating that it had been found in a public rubbish-can. Also, Dombrowski must attend to the poisoning of those rats in the walls.
      Braced up by Elwood’s companionship, Gilman attended classes that day. Strange urges still tugged at him, but he could sidetrack them with considerable success. During a free period he shewed the queer image to several professors, all of whom were intensely interested, though none of them could shed any light upon its nature or origin. That night he slept on a couch which Elwood had had the landlord bring to the second-story room, and for the first time in weeks was wholly free from disquieting dreams. But the feverishness still hung on, and the whines of the loomfixer were an unnerving influence.
      During the next few days Gilman enjoyed an almost perfect immunity from morbid manifestations. He had, Elwood said, shewed no tendency to talk or rise in his sleep; and meanwhile the landlord was putting rat-poison everywhere. The only disturbing element was the talk among the superstitious foreigners, whose imaginations had become highly excited. Mazurewicz was always trying to make him get a crucifix, and finally forced one upon him which he said had been blessed by the good Father Iwanicki. Desrochers, too, had something to say—in fact, he insisted that cautious steps had sounded in the now vacant room above him on the first and second nights of Gilman’s absence from it. Paul Choynski thought he heard sounds in the halls and on the stairs at night, and claimed that his door had been softly tried, while Mrs. Dombrowski vowed she had seen Brown Jenkin for the first time since All-Hallows. But such naive reports could mean very little, and Gilman let the cheap metal crucifix hang idly from a knob on his host’s dresser.
      For three days Gilman and Elwood canvassed the local museums in an effort to identify the strange spiky image, but always without success. In every quarter, however, interest was intense; for the utter alienage of the thing was a tremendous challenge to scientific curiosity. One of the small radiating arms was broken off and subjected to chemical analysis, and the result is still talked about in college circles. Professor Ellery found platinum, iron, and tellurium in the strange alloy; but mixed with these were at least three other apparent elements of high atomic weight which chemistry was absolutely powerless to classify. Not only did they fail to correspond with any known element, but they did not even fit the vacant places reserved for probable elements in the periodic system. The mystery remains unsolved to this day, though the image is on exhibition at the museum of Miskatonic University.
      On the morning of April 27 a fresh rat-hole appeared in the room where Gilman was a guest, but Dombrowski tinned it up during the day. The poison was not having much effect, for scratchings and scurryings in the walls were virtually undiminished. Elwood was out late that night, and Gilman waited up for him. He did not wish to go to sleep in a room alone—especially since he thought he had glimpsed in the evening twilight the repellent old woman whose image had become so horribly transferred to his dreams. He wondered who she was, and what had been near her rattling the tin can in a rubbish-heap at the mouth of a squalid courtyard. The crone had seemed to notice him and leer evilly at him—though perhaps this was merely his imagination.
      The next day both youths felt very tired, and knew they would sleep like logs when night came. In the evening they drowsily discussed the mathematical studies which had so completely and perhaps harmfully engrossed Gilman, and speculated about the linkage with ancient magic and folklore which seemed so darkly probable. They spoke of old Keziah Mason, and Elwood agreed that Gilman had good scientific grounds for thinking she might have stumbled on strange and significant information. The hidden cults to which these witches belonged often guarded and handed down surprising secrets from elder, forgotten aeons; and it was by no means impossible that Keziah had actually mastered the art of passing through dimensional gates. Tradition emphasises the uselessness of material barriers in halting a witch’s motions; and who can say what underlies the old tales of broomstick rides through the night?
      Whether a modern student could ever gain similar powers from mathematical research alone, was still to be seen. Success, Gilman added, might lead to dangerous and unthinkable situations; for who could foretell the conditions pervading an adjacent but normally inaccessible dimension? On the other hand, the picturesque possibilities were enormous. Time could not exist in certain belts of space, and by entering and remaining in such a belt one might preserve one’s life and age indefinitely; never suffering organic metabolism or deterioration except for slight amounts incurred during visits to one’s own or similar planes. One might, for example, pass into a timeless dimension and emerge at some remote period of the earth’s history as young as before.
      Whether anybody had ever managed to do this, one could hardly conjecture with any degree of authority. Old legends are hazy and ambiguous, and in historic times all attempts at crossing forbidden gaps seem complicated by strange and terrible alliances with beings and messengers from outside. There was the immemorial figure of the deputy or messenger of hidden and terrible powers—the “Black Man” of the witch-cult, and the “Nyarlathotep” of the Necronomicon. There was, too, the baffling problem of the lesser messengers or intermediaries—the quasi-animals and queer hybrids which legend depicts as witches’ familiars. As Gilman and Elwood retired, too sleepy to argue further, they heard Joe Mazurewicz reel into the house half-drunk, and shuddered at the desperate wildness of his whining prayers.
      That night Gilman saw the violet light again. In his dream he had heard a scratching and gnawing in the partitions, and thought that someone fumbled clumsily at the latch. Then he saw the old woman and the small furry thing advancing toward him over the carpeted floor. The beldame’s face was alight with inhuman exultation, and the little yellow-toothed morbidity tittered mockingly as it pointed at the heavily sleeping form of Elwood on the other couch across the room. A paralysis of fear stifled all attempts to cry out. As once before, the hideous crone seized Gilman by the shoulders, yanking him out of bed and into empty space. Again the infinitude of the shrieking twilight abysses flashed past him, but in another second he thought he was in a dark, muddy, unknown alley of foetid odours, with the rotting walls of ancient houses towering up on every hand.
      Ahead was the robed black man he had seen in the peaked space in the other dream, while from a lesser distance the old woman was beckoning and grimacing imperiously. Brown Jenkin was rubbing itself with a kind of affectionate playfulness around the ankles of the black man, which the deep mud largely concealed. There was a dark open doorway on the right, to which the black man silently pointed. Into this the grimacing crone started, dragging Gilman after her by his pajama sleeve. There were evil-smelling staircases which creaked ominously, and on which the old woman seemed to radiate a faint violet light; and finally a door leading off a landing. The crone fumbled with the latch and pushed the door open, motioning to Gilman to wait and disappearing inside the black aperture.
      The youth’s oversensitive ears caught a hideous strangled cry, and presently the beldame came out of the room bearing a small, senseless form which she thrust at the dreamer as if ordering him to carry it. The sight of this form, and the expression on its face, broke the spell. Still too dazed to cry out, he plunged recklessly down the noisome staircase and into the mud outside; halting only when seized and choked by the waiting black man. As consciousness departed he heard the faint, shrill tittering of the fanged, rat-like abnormality.
      On the morning of the 29th Gilman awaked into a maelstrom of horror. The instant he opened his eyes he knew something was terribly wrong, for he was back in his old garret room with the slanting wall and ceiling, sprawled on the now unmade bed. His throat was aching inexplicably, and as he struggled to a sitting posture he saw with growing fright that his feet and pajama-bottoms were brown with caked mud. For the moment his recollections were hopelessly hazy, but he knew at least that he must have been sleep-walking. Elwood had been lost too deeply in slumber to hear and stop him. On the floor were confused muddy prints, but oddly enough they did not extend all the way to the door. The more Gilman looked at them, the more peculiar they seemed; for in addition to those he could recognise as his there were some smaller, almost round markings—such as the legs of a large chair or table might make, except that most of them tended to be divided into halves. There were also some curious muddy rat-tracks leading out of a fresh hole and back into it again. Utter bewilderment and the fear of madness racked Gilman as he staggered to the door and saw that there were no muddy prints outside. The more he remembered of his hideous dream the more terrified he felt, and it added to his desperation to hear Joe Mazurewicz chanting mournfully two floors below.
      Descending to Elwood’s room he roused his still-sleeping host and began telling of how he had found himself, but Elwood could form no idea of what might really have happened. Where Gilman could have been, how he got back to his room without making tracks in the hall, and how the muddy, furniture-like prints came to be mixed with his in the garret chamber, were wholly beyond conjecture. Then there were those dark, livid marks on his throat, as if he had tried to strangle himself. He put his hands up to them, but found that they did not even approximately fit. While they were talking Desrochers dropped in to say that he had heard a terrific clattering overhead in the dark small hours. No, there had been no one on the stairs after midnight—though just before midnight he had heard faint footfalls in the garret, and cautiously descending steps he did not like. It was, he added, a very bad time of year for Arkham. The young gentleman had better be sure to wear the crucifix Joe Mazurewicz had given him. Even the daytime was not safe, for after dawn there had been strange sounds in the house—especially a thin, childish wail hastily choked off.
      Gilman mechanically attended classes that morning, but was wholly unable to fix his mind on his studies. A mood of hideous apprehension and expectancy had seized him, and he seemed to be awaiting the fall of some annihilating blow. At noon he lunched at the University Spa, picking up a paper from the next seat as he waited for dessert. But he never ate that dessert; for an item on the paper’s first page left him limp, wild-eyed, and able only to pay his check and stagger back to Elwood’s room.
      There had been a strange kidnapping the night before in Orne’s Gangway, and the two-year-old child of a clod-like laundry worker named Anastasia Wolejko had completely vanished from sight. The mother, it appeared, had feared the event for some time; but the reasons she assigned for her fear were so grotesque that no one took them seriously. She had, she said, seen Brown Jenkin about the place now and then ever since early in March, and knew from its grimaces and titterings that little Ladislas must be marked for sacrifice at the awful Sabbat on Walpurgis-Night. She had asked her neighbour Mary Czanek to sleep in the room and try to protect the child, but Mary had not dared. She could not tell the police, for they never believed such things. Children had been taken that way every year ever since she could remember. And her friend Pete Stowacki would not help because he wanted the child out of the way anyhow.
      But what threw Gilman into a cold perspiration was the report of a pair of revellers who had been walking past the mouth of the gangway just after midnight. They admitted they had been drunk, but both vowed they had seen a crazily dressed trio furtively entering the dark passageway. There had, they said, been a huge robed negro, a little old woman in rags, and a young white man in his night-clothes. The old woman had been dragging the youth, while around the feet of the negro a tame rat was rubbing and weaving in the brown mud.
      Gilman sat in a daze all the afternoon, and Elwood—who had meanwhile seen the papers and formed terrible conjectures from them—found him thus when he came home. This time neither could doubt but that something hideously serious was closing in around them. Between the phantasms of nightmare and the realities of the objective world a monstrous and unthinkable relationship was crystallising, and only stupendous vigilance could avert still more direful developments. Gilman must see a specialist sooner or later, but not just now, when all the papers were full of this kidnapping business.
      Just what had really happened was maddeningly obscure, and for a moment both Gilman and Elwood exchanged whispered theories of the wildest kind. Had Gilman unconsciously succeeded better than he knew in his studies of space and its dimensions? Had he actually slipped outside our sphere to points unguessed and unimaginable? Where—if anywhere—had he been on those nights of daemoniac alienage? The roaring twilight abysses—the green hillside—the blistering terrace—the pulls from the stars—the ultimate black vortex—the black man—the muddy alley and the stairs—the old witch and the fanged, furry horror—the bubble-congeries and the little polyhedron—the strange sunburn—the wrist wound—the unexplained image—the muddy feet—the throat-marks—the tales and fears of the superstitious foreigners—what did all this mean? To what extent could the laws of sanity apply to such a case?
      There was no sleep for either of them that night, but next day they both cut classes and drowsed. This was April 30th, and with the dusk would come the hellish Sabbat-time which all the foreigners and the superstitious old folk feared. Mazurewicz came home at six o’clock and said people at the mill were whispering that the Walpurgis-revels would be held in the dark ravine beyond Meadow Hill where the old white stone stands in a place queerly void of all plant-life. Some of them had even told the police and advised them to look there for the missing Wolejko child, but they did not believe anything would be done. Joe insisted that the poor young gentleman wear his nickel-chained crucifix, and Gilman put it on and dropped it inside his shirt to humour the fellow.
      Late at night the two youths sat drowsing in their chairs, lulled by the rhythmical praying of the loomfixer on the floor below. Gilman listened as he nodded, his preternaturally sharpened hearing seeming to strain for some subtle, dreaded murmur beyond the noises in the ancient house. Unwholesome recollections of things in the Necronomicon and the Black Book welled up, and he found himself swaying to infandous rhythms said to pertain to the blackest ceremonies of the Sabbat and to have an origin outside the time and space we comprehend.
      Presently he realised what he was listening for—the hellish chant of the celebrants in the distant black valley. How did he know so much about what they expected? How did he know the time when Nahab and her acolyte were due to bear the brimming bowl which would follow the black cock and the black goat? He saw that Elwood had dropped asleep, and tried to call out and waken him. Something, however, closed his throat. He was not his own master. Had he signed the black man’s book after all?
      Then his fevered, abnormal hearing caught the distant, windborne notes. Over miles of hill and field and alley they came, but he recognised them none the less. The fires must be lit, and the dancers must be starting in. How could he keep himself from going? What was it that had enmeshed him? Mathematics—folklore—the house—old Keziah—Brown Jenkin . . . and now he saw that there was a fresh rat-hole in the wall near his couch. Above the distant chanting and the nearer praying of Joe Mazurewicz came another sound—a stealthy, determined scratching in the partitions. He hoped the electric lights would not go out. Then he saw the fanged, bearded little face in the rat-hole—the accursed little face which he at last realised bore such a shocking, mocking resemblance to old Keziah’s—and heard the faint fumbling at the door.
      The screaming twilight abysses flashed before him, and he felt himself helpless in the formless grasp of the iridescent bubble-congeries. Ahead raced the small, kaleidoscopic polyhedron, and all through the churning void there was a heightening and acceleration of the vague tonal pattern which seemed to foreshadow some unutterable and unendurable climax. He seemed to know what was coming—the monstrous burst of Walpurgis-rhythm in whose cosmic timbre would be concentrated all the primal, ultimate space-time seethings which lie behind the massed spheres of matter and sometimes break forth in measured reverberations that penetrate faintly to every layer of entity and give hideous significance throughout the worlds to certain dreaded periods.
      But all this vanished in a second. He was again in the cramped, violet-litten peaked space with the slanting floor, the low cases of ancient books, the bench and table, the queer objects, and the triangular gulf at one side. On the table lay a small white figure—an infant boy, unclothed and unconscious—while on the other side stood the monstrous, leering old woman with a gleaming, grotesque-hafted knife in her right hand, and a queerly proportioned pale metal bowl covered with curiously chased designs and having delicate lateral handles in her left. She was intoning some croaking ritual in a language which Gilman could not understand, but which seemed like something guardedly quoted in the Necronomicon.
      As the scene grew clear he saw the ancient crone bend forward and extend the empty bowl across the table—and unable to control his own motions, he reached far forward and took it in both hands, noticing as he did so its comparative lightness. At the same moment the disgusting form of Brown Jenkin scrambled up over the brink of the triangular black gulf on his left. The crone now motioned him to hold the bowl in a certain position while she raised the huge, grotesque knife above the small white victim as high as her right hand could reach. The fanged, furry thing began tittering a continuation of the unknown ritual, while the witch croaked loathsome responses. Gilman felt a gnawing, poignant abhorrence shoot through his mental and emotional paralysis, and the light metal bowl shook in his grasp. A second later the downward motion of the knife broke the spell completely, and he dropped the bowl with a resounding bell-like clangour while his hands darted out frantically to stop the monstrous deed.
      In an instant he had edged up the slanting floor around the end of the table and wrenched the knife from the old woman’s claws; sending it clattering over the brink of the narrow triangular gulf. In another instant, however, matters were reversed; for those murderous claws had locked themselves tightly around his own throat, while the wrinkled face was twisted with insane fury. He felt the chain of the cheap crucifix grinding into his neck, and in his peril wondered how the sight of the object itself would affect the evil creature. Her strength was altogether superhuman, but as she continued her choking he reached feebly in his shirt and drew out the metal symbol, snapping the chain and pulling it free.
      At sight of the device the witch seemed struck with panic, and her grip relaxed long enough to give Gilman a chance to break it entirely. He pulled the steel-like claws from his neck, and would have dragged the beldame over the edge of the gulf had not the claws received a fresh access of strength and closed in again. This time he resolved to reply in kind, and his own hands reached out for the creature’s throat. Before she saw what he was doing he had the chain of the crucifix twisted about her neck, and a moment later he had tightened it enough to cut off her breath. During her last struggle he felt something bite at his ankle, and saw that Brown Jenkin had come to her aid. With one savage kick he sent the morbidity over the edge of the gulf and heard it whimper on some level far below.
      Whether he had killed the ancient crone he did not know, but he let her rest on the floor where she had fallen. Then, as he turned away, he saw on the table a sight which nearly snapped the last thread of his reason. Brown Jenkin, tough of sinew and with four tiny hands of daemoniac dexterity, had been busy while the witch was throttling him, and his efforts had been in vain. What he had prevented the knife from doing to the victim’s chest, the yellow fangs of the furry blasphemy had done to a wrist—and the bowl so lately on the floor stood full beside the small lifeless body.
      In his dream-delirium Gilman heard the hellish, alien-rhythmed chant of the Sabbat coming from an infinite distance, and knew the black man must be there. Confused memories mixed themselves with his mathematics, and he believed his subconscious mind held the angles which he needed to guide him back to the normal world—alone and unaided for the first time. He felt sure he was in the immemorially sealed loft above his own room, but whether he could ever escape through the slanting floor or the long-stopped egress he doubted greatly. Besides, would not an escape from a dream-loft bring him merely into a dream-house—an abnormal projection of the actual place he sought? He was wholly bewildered as to the relation betwixt dream and reality in all his experiences.
      The passage through the vague abysses would be frightful, for the Walpurgis-rhythm would be vibrating, and at last he would have to hear that hitherto veiled cosmic pulsing which he so mortally dreaded. Even now he could detect a low, monstrous shaking whose tempo he suspected all too well. At Sabbat-time it always mounted and reached through to the worlds to summon the initiate to nameless rites. Half the chants of the Sabbat were patterned on this faintly overheard pulsing which no earthly ear could endure in its unveiled spatial fulness. Gilman wondered, too, whether he could trust his instinct to take him back to the right part of space. How could he be sure he would not land on that green-litten hillside of a far planet, on the tessellated terrace above the city of tentacled monsters somewhere beyond the galaxy, or in the spiral black vortices of that ultimate void of Chaos wherein reigns the mindless daemon-sultan Azathoth?
      Just before he made the plunge the violet light went out and left him in utter blackness. The witch—old Keziah—Nahab—that must have meant her death. And mixed with the distant chant of the Sabbat and the whimpers of Brown Jenkin in the gulf below he thought he heard another and wilder whine from unknown depths. Joe Mazurewicz—the prayers against the Crawling Chaos now turning to an inexplicably triumphant shriek—worlds of sardonic actuality impinging on vortices of febrile dream—Iä! Shub-Niggurath! The Goat with a Thousand Young. . . .
      They found Gilman on the floor of his queerly angled old garret room long before dawn, for the terrible cry had brought Desrochers and Choynski and Dombrowski and Mazurewicz at once, and had even wakened the soundly sleeping Elwood in his chair. He was alive, and with open, staring eyes, but seemed largely unconscious. On his throat were the marks of murderous hands, and on his left ankle was a distressing rat-bite. His clothing was badly rumpled, and Joe’s crucifix was missing. Elwood trembled, afraid even to speculate on what new form his friend’s sleep-walking had taken. Mazurewicz seemed half-dazed because of a “sign” he said he had had in response to his prayers, and he crossed himself frantically when the squealing and whimpering of a rat sounded from beyond the slanting partition.
      When the dreamer was settled on his couch in Elwood’s room they sent for Dr. Malkowski—a local practitioner who would repeat no tales where they might prove embarrassing—and he gave Gilman two hypodermic injections which caused him to relax in something like natural drowsiness. During the day the patient regained consciousness at times and whispered his newest dream disjointedly to Elwood. It was a painful process, and at its very start brought out a fresh and disconcerting fact.
      Gilman—whose ears had so lately possessed an abnormal sensitiveness—was now stone deaf. Dr. Malkowski, summoned again in haste, told Elwood that both ear-drums were ruptured, as if by the impact of some stupendous sound intense beyond all human conception or endurance. How such a sound could have been heard in the last few hours without arousing all the Miskatonic Valley was more than the honest physician could say.
      Elwood wrote his part of the colloquy on paper, so that a fairly easy communication was maintained. Neither knew what to make of the whole chaotic business, and decided it would be better if they thought as little as possible about it. Both, though, agreed that they must leave this ancient and accursed house as soon as it could be arranged. Evening papers spoke of a police raid on some curious revellers in a ravine beyond Meadow Hill just before dawn, and mentioned that the white stone there was an object of age-long superstitious regard. Nobody had been caught, but among the scattering fugitives had been glimpsed a huge negro. In another column it was stated that no trace of the missing child Ladislas Wolejko had been found.
      The crowning horror came that very night. Elwood will never forget it, and was forced to stay out of college the rest of the term because of the resulting nervous breakdown. He had thought he heard rats in the partitions all the evening, but paid little attention to them. Then, long after both he and Gilman had retired, the atrocious shrieking began. Elwood jumped up, turned on the lights, and rushed over to his guest’s couch. The occupant was emitting sounds of veritably inhuman nature, as if racked by some torment beyond description. He was writhing under the bedclothes, and a great red stain was beginning to appear on the blankets.
      Elwood scarcely dared to touch him, but gradually the screaming and writhing subsided. By this time Dombrowski, Choynski, Desrochers, Mazurewicz, and the top-floor lodger were all crowding into the doorway, and the landlord had sent his wife back to telephone for Dr. Malkowski. Everybody shrieked when a large rat-like form suddenly jumped out from beneath the ensanguined bedclothes and scuttled across the floor to a fresh, open hole close by. When the doctor arrived and began to pull down those frightful covers Walter Gilman was dead.
      It would be barbarous to do more than suggest what had killed Gilman. There had been virtually a tunnel through his body—something had eaten his heart out. Dombrowski, frantic at the failure of his constant rat-poisoning efforts, cast aside all thought of his lease and within a week had moved with all his older lodgers to a dingy but less ancient house in Walnut Street. The worst thing for a while was keeping Joe Mazurewicz quiet; for the brooding loomfixer would never stay sober, and was constantly whining and muttering about spectral and terrible things.
      It seems that on that last hideous night Joe had stooped to look at the crimson rat-tracks which led from Gilman’s couch to the nearby hole. On the carpet they were very indistinct, but a piece of open flooring intervened between the carpet’s edge and the base-board. There Mazurewicz had found something monstrous—or thought he had, for no one else could quite agree with him despite the undeniable queerness of the prints. The tracks on the flooring were certainly vastly unlike the average prints of a rat, but even Choynski and Desrochers would not admit that they were like the prints of four tiny human hands.
      The house was never rented again. As soon as Dombrowski left it the pall of its final desolation began to descend, for people shunned it both on account of its old reputation and because of the new foetid odour. Perhaps the ex-landlord’s rat-poison had worked after all, for not long after his departure the place became a neighbourhood nuisance. Health officials traced the smell to the closed spaces above and beside the eastern garret room, and agreed that the number of dead rats must be enormous. They decided, however, that it was not worth their while to hew open and disinfect the long-sealed spaces; for the foetor would soon be over, and the locality was not one which encouraged fastidious standards. Indeed, there were always vague local tales of unexplained stenches upstairs in the Witch House just after May-Eve and Hallowmass. The neighbours grumblingly acquiesced in the inertia—but the foetor none the less formed an additional count against the place. Toward the last the house was condemned as an habitation by the building inspector.
      Gilman’s dreams and their attendant circumstances have never been explained. Elwood, whose thoughts on the entire episode are sometimes almost maddening, came back to college the next autumn and graduated in the following June. He found the spectral gossip of the town much diminished, and it is indeed a fact that—notwithstanding certain reports of a ghostly tittering in the deserted house which lasted almost as long as that edifice itself—no fresh appearances either of old Keziah or of Brown Jenkin have been muttered of since Gilman’s death. It is rather fortunate that Elwood was not in Arkham in that later year when certain events abruptly renewed the local whispers about elder horrors. Of course he heard about the matter afterward and suffered untold torments of black and bewildered speculation; but even that was not as bad as actual nearness and several possible sights would have been.
      In March, 1931, a gale wrecked the roof and great chimney of the vacant Witch House, so that a chaos of crumbling bricks, blackened, moss-grown shingles, and rotting planks and timbers crashed down into the loft and broke through the floor beneath. The whole attic story was choked with debris from above, but no one took the trouble to touch the mess before the inevitable razing of the decrepit structure. That ultimate step came in the following December, and it was when Gilman’s old room was cleared out by reluctant, apprehensive workmen that the gossip began.
      Among the rubbish which had crashed through the ancient slanting ceiling were several things which made the workmen pause and call in the police. Later the police in turn called in the coroner and several professors from the university. There were bones—badly crushed and splintered, but clearly recognisable as human—whose manifestly modern date conflicted puzzlingly with the remote period at which their only possible lurking-place, the low, slant-floored loft overhead, had supposedly been sealed from all human access. The coroner’s physician decided that some belonged to a small child, while certain others—found mixed with shreds of rotten brownish cloth—belonged to a rather undersized, bent female of advanced years. Careful sifting of debris also disclosed many tiny bones of rats caught in the collapse, as well as older rat-bones gnawed by small fangs in a fashion now and then highly productive of controversy and reflection.
      Other objects found included the mingled fragments of many books and papers, together with a yellowish dust left from the total disintegration of still older books and papers. All, without exception, appeared to deal with black magic in its most advanced and horrible forms; and the evidently recent date of certain items is still a mystery as unsolved as that of the modern human bones. An even greater mystery is the absolute homogeneity of the crabbed, archaic writing found on a wide range of papers whose conditions and watermarks suggest age differences of at least 150 to 200 years. To some, though, the greatest mystery of all is the variety of utterly inexplicable objects—objects whose shapes, materials, types of workmanship, and purposes baffle all conjecture—found scattered amidst the wreckage in evidently diverse states of injury. One of these things—which excited several Miskatonic professors profoundly—is a badly damaged monstrosity plainly resembling the strange image which Gilman gave to the college museum, save that it is larger, wrought of some peculiar bluish stone instead of metal, and possessed of a singularly angled pedestal with undecipherable hieroglyphics.
      Archaeologists and anthropologists are still trying to explain the bizarre designs chased on a crushed bowl of light metal whose inner side bore ominous brownish stains when found. Foreigners and credulous grandmothers are equally garrulous about the modern nickel crucifix with broken chain mixed in the rubbish and shiveringly identified by Joe Mazurewicz as that which he had given poor Gilman many years before. Some believe this crucifix was dragged up to the sealed loft by rats, while others think it must have been on the floor in some corner of Gilman’s old room all the time. Still others, including Joe himself, have theories too wild and fantastic for sober credence.
      When the slanting wall of Gilman’s room was torn out, the once sealed triangular space between that partition and the house’s north wall was found to contain much less structural debris, even in proportion to its size, than the room itself; though it had a ghastly layer of older materials which paralysed the wreckers with horror. In brief, the floor was a veritable ossuary of the bones of small children—some fairly modern, but others extending back in infinite gradations to a period so remote that crumbling was almost complete. On this deep bony layer rested a knife of great size, obvious antiquity, and grotesque, ornate, and exotic design—above which the debris was piled.
      In the midst of this debris, wedged between a fallen plank and a cluster of cemented bricks from the ruined chimney, was an object destined to cause more bafflement, veiled fright, and openly superstitious talk in Arkham than anything else discovered in the haunted and accursed building. This object was the partly crushed skeleton of a huge, diseased rat, whose abnormalities of form are still a topic of debate and source of singular reticence among the members of Miskatonic’s department of comparative anatomy. Very little concerning this skeleton has leaked out, but the workmen who found it whisper in shocked tones about the long, brownish hairs with which it was associated.
      The bones of the tiny paws, it is rumoured, imply prehensile characteristics more typical of a diminutive monkey than of a rat; while the small skull with its savage yellow fangs is of the utmost anomalousness, appearing from certain angles like a miniature, monstrously degraded parody of a human skull. The workmen crossed themselves in fright when they came upon this blasphemy, but later burned candles of gratitude in St. Stanislaus’ Church because of the shrill, ghostly tittering they felt they would never hear again.",True
"It was a gentle daylight rain that awaked me front my stupor in the brush-grown railway cut, and when I staggered out to the roadway ahead I saw no trace of any prints in the fresh mud. The fishy odour, too, was gone, Innsmouth's ruined roofs and toppling steeples loomed up greyly toward the southeast, but not a living creature did I spy in all the desolate salt marshes around. My watch was still going, and told me that the hour was past noon.
The reality of what I had been through was highly uncertain in my mind, but I felt that something hideous lay in the background. I must get away from evil-shadowed Innsmouth--and accordingly I began to test my cramped, wearied powers of locomotion. Despite weakness hunger, horror, and bewilderment I found myself after a time able to walk; so started slowly along the muddy road to Rowley. Before evening I was in village, getting a meal and providing myself with presentable clothes. I caught the night train to Arkham, and the next day talked long and earnestly with government officials there; a process I later repeated in Boston. With the main result of these colloquies the public is now familiar--and I wish, for normality's sake, there were nothing more to tell. Perhaps it is madness that is overtaking me--yet perhaps a greater horror--or a greater marvel--is reaching out.
As may well be imagined, I gave up most of the foreplanned features of the rest of my tour--the scenic, architectural, and antiquarian diversions on which I had counted so heavily. Nor did I dare look for that piece of strange jewelry said to be in the Miskatonic University Museum. I did, however, improve my stay in Arkham by collecting some genealogical notes I had long wished to possess; very rough and hasty data, it is true, but capable of good use later on when I might have time to collate and codify them. The curator of the historical society there--Mr. B. Lapham Peabody--was very courteous about assisting me, and expressed unusual interest when I told him I was a grandson of Eliza Orne of Arkham, who was born in 1867 and had married James Williamson of Ohio at the age of seventeen.
It seemed that a maternal uncle of mine had been there many years before on a quest much like my own; and that my grandmother's family was a topic of some local curiosity. There had, Mr. Peabody said, been considerable discussion about the marriage of her father, Benjamin Orne, just after the Civil War; since the ancestry of the bride was peculiarly puzzling. That bride was understood to have been an orphaned Marsh of New Hampshire--a cousin of the Essex County Marshes--but her education had been in France and she knew very little of her family. A guardian had deposited funds in a Boston bank to maintain her and her French governess; but that guardian's name was unfamiliar to Arkham people, and in time he dropped out of sight, so that the governess assumed the role by court appointment. The Frenchwoman--now long dead--was very taciturn, and there were those who said she could have told more than she did.
But the most baffling thing was the inability of anyone to place the recorded parents of the young woman--Enoch and Lydia (Meserve) Marsh--among the known families of New Hampshire. Possibly, many suggested, she was the natural daughter of some Marsh of prominence--she certainly had the true Marsh eyes. Most of the puzzling was done after her early death, which took place at the birth of my grandmother--her only child. Having formed some disagreeable impressions connected with the name of Marsh, I did not welcome the news that it belonged on my own ancestral tree; nor was I pleased by Mr. Peabody's suggestion that I had the true Marsh eyes myself. However, I was grateful for data which I knew would prove valuable; and took copious notes and lists of book references regarding the well-documented Orne family.
I went directly home to Toledo from Boston, and later spent a month at Maumee recuperating from my ordeal. In September I entered Oberlin for my final year, and from then till the next June was busy with studies and other wholesome activities--reminded of the bygone terror only by occasional official visits from government men in connexion with the campaign which my pleas and evidence had started. Around the middle of July--just a year after the Innsmouth experience--I spent a week with my late mother's family in Cleveland; checking some of my new genealogical data with the various notes, traditions, and bits of heirloom material in existence there, and seeing what kind of a connected chart I could construct.
I did not exactly relish this task, for the atmosphere of the Williamson home had always depressed me. There was a strain of morbidity there, and my mother had never encouraged my visiting her parents as a child, although she always welcomed her father when he came to Toledo. My Arkham-born grandmother had seemed strange and almost terrifying to me, and I do not think I grieved when she disappeared. I was eight years old then, and it was said that she had wandered off in grief after the suicide of my Uncle Douglas, her eldest son. He had shot himself after a trip to New England--the same trip, no doubt, which had caused him to be recalled at the Arkham Historical Society.
This uncle had resembled her, and I had never liked him either. Something about the staring, unwinking expression of both of them had given me a vague, unaccountable uneasiness. My mother and Uncle Walter had not looked like that. They were like their father, though poor little cousin Lawrence--Walter's son--had been almost perfect duplicate of his grandmother before his condition took him to the permanent seclusion of a sanitarium at Canton. I had not seen him in four years, but my uncle once implied that his state, both mental and physical, was very bad. This worry had probably been a major cause of his mother's death two years before.
My grandfather and his widowed son Walter now comprised the Cleveland household, but the memory of older times hung thickly over it. I still disliked the place, and tried to get my researches done as quickly as possible. Williamson records and traditions were supplied in abundance by my grandfather; though for Orne material I had to depend on my uncle Walter, who put at my disposal the contents of all his files, including notes, letters, cuttings, heirlooms, photographs, and miniatures.
It was in going over the letters and pictures on the Orne side that I began to acquire a kind of terror of my own ancestry. As I have said, my grandmother and Uncle Douglas had always disturbed me. Now, years after their passing, I gazed at their pictured faces with a measurably heightened feeling of repulsion and alienation. I could not at first understand the change, but gradually a horrible sort of comparison began to obtrude itself on my unconscious mind despite the steady refusal of my consciousness to admit even the least suspicion of it. It was clear that the typical expression of these faces now suggested something it had not suggested before--something which would bring stark panic if too openly thought of.
But the worst shock came when my uncle shewed me the Orne jewellery in a downtown safe deposit vault. Some of the items were delicate and inspiring enough, but there was one box of strange old pieces descended from my mysterious great-grandmother which my uncle was almost reluctant to produce. They were, he said, of very grotesque and almost repulsive design, and had never to his knowledge been publicly worn; though my grandmother used to enjoy looking at them. Vague legends of bad luck clustered around them, and my great-grandmother's French governess had said they ought not to be worn in New England, though it would be quite safe to wear them in Europe.
As my uncle began slowly and grudgingly to unwrap the things he urged me not to be shocked by the strangeness and frequent hideousness of the designs. Artists and archaeologists who had seen them pronounced their workmanship superlatively and exotically exquisite, though no one seemed able to define their exact material or assign them to any specific art tradition. There were two armlets, a tiara, and a kind of pectoral; the latter having in high relief certain figures of almost unbearable extravagance.
During this description I had kept a tight rein on my emotions, but my face must have betrayed my mounting fears. My uncle looked concerned, and paused in his unwrapping to study my countenance. I motioned to him to continue, which he did with renewed signs of reluctance. He seemed to expect some demonstration when the first piece--the tiara--became visible, but I doubt if he expected quite what actually happened. I did not expect it, either, for I thought I was thoroughly forewarned regarding what the jewellery would turn out to be. What I did was to faint silently away, just as I had done in that brier-choked railway cut a year before.
From that day on my life has been a nightmare of brooding and apprehension nor do I know how much is hideous truth and how much madness. My great-grandmother had been a Marsh of unknown source whose husband lived in Arkham--and did not old Zadok say that the daughter of Obed Marsh by a monstrous mother was married to an Arkham man through trick? What was it the ancient toper had muttered about the line of my eyes to Captain Obed's? In Arkham, too, the curator had told me I had the true Marsh eyes. Was Obed Marsh my own great-great-grandfather? Who--or what--then, was my great-great-grandmother? But perhaps this was all madness. Those whitish-gold ornaments might easily have been bought from some Innsmouth sailor by the father of my great-grandmother, whoever he was. And that look in the staring-eyed faces of my grandmother and self-slain uncle might be sheer fancy on my part--sheer fancy, bolstered up by the Innsmouth shadow which had so darkly coloured my imagination. But why had my uncle killed himself after an ancestral quest in New England?
For more than two years I fought off these reflections with partial success. My father secured me a place in an insurance office, and I buried myself in routine as deeply as possible. In the winter of 1930-31, however, the dreams began. They were very sparse and insidious at first, but increased in frequency and vividness as the weeks went by. Great watery spaces opened out before me, and I seemed to wander through titanic sunken porticos and labyrinths of weedy cyclopean walls with grotesque fishes as my companions. Then the other shapes began to appear, filling me with nameless horror the moment I awoke. But during the dreams they did not horrify me at all--I was one with them; wearing their unhuman trappings, treading their aqueous ways, and praying monstrously at their evil sea-bottom temples.
There was much more than I could remember, but even what I did remember each morning would be enough to stamp me as a madman or a genius if ever I dared write it down. Some frightful influence, I felt, was seeking gradually to drag me out of the sane world of wholesome life into unnamable abysses of blackness and alienage; and the process told heavily on me. My health and appearance grew steadily worse, till finally I was forced to give up my position and adopt the static, secluded life of an invalid. Some odd nervous affliction had me in its grip, and I found myself at times almost unable to shut my eyes.
It was then that I began to study the mirror with mounting alarm. The slow ravages of disease are not pleasant to watch, but in my case there was something subtler and more puzzling in the background. My father seemed to notice it, too, for he began looking at me curiously and almost affrightedly. What was taking place in me? Could it be that I was coming to resemble my grandmother and uncle Douglas?
One night I had a frightful dream in which I met my grandmother under the sea. She lived in a phosphorescent palace of many terraces, with gardens of strange leprous corals and grotesque brachiate efflorescences, and welcomed me with a warmth that may have been sardonic. She had changed--as those who take to the water change--and told me she had never died. Instead, she had gone to a spot her dead son had learned about, and had leaped to a realm whose wonders-- destined for him as well--he had spurned with a smoking pistol. This was to be my realm, too--I could not escape it. I would never die, but would live with those who had lived since before man ever walked the earth.
I met also that which had been her grandmother. For eighty thousand years Pth'thya-l'yi had lived in Y'ha-nthlei, and thither she had gone back after Obed Marsh was dead. Y'ha-nthlei was not destroyed when the upper-earth men shot death into the sea. It was hurt, but not destroyed. The Deep Ones could never be destroyed, even though the palaeogean magic of the forgotten Old Ones might sometimes check them. For the present they would rest; but some day, if they remembered, they would rise again for the tribute Great Cthulhu craved. It would be a city greater than Innsmouth next time. They had planned to spread, and had brought up that which would help them, but now they must wait once more. For bringing the upper-earth men's death I must do a penance, but that would not be heavy. This was the dream in which I saw a shoggoth for the first time, and the sight set me awake in a frenzy of screaming. That morning the mirror definitely told me I had acquired the Innsmouth look.
So far I have not shot myself as my uncle Douglas did. I bought an automatic and almost took the step, but certain dreams deterred me. The tense extremes of horror are lessening, and I feel queerly drawn toward the unknown sea-deeps instead of fearing them. I hear and do strange things in sleep, and awake with a kind of exaltation instead of terror. I do not believe I need to wait for the full change as most have waited. If I did, my father would probably shut me up in a sanitarium as my poor little cousin is shut up. Stupendous and unheard-of splendors await me below, and I shall seek them soon. Ia-R'lyehl Cihuiha flgagnl id Ia! No, I shall not shoot myself--I cannot be made to shoot myself!
I shall plan my cousin's escape from that Canton mad-house, and together we shall go to marvel-shadowed Innsmouth. We shall swim out to that brooding reef in the sea and dive down through black abysses to Cyclopean and many-columned Y'ha-nthlei, and in that lair of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory for ever.
","I repeat to you, gentlemen, that your inquisition is fruitless. Detain me here forever if you will; confine or execute me if you must have a victim to propitiate the illusion you call justice; but I can say no more than I have said already. Everything that I can remember, I have told with perfect candour. Nothing has been distorted or concealed, and if anything remains vague, it is only because of the dark cloud which has come over my mind—that cloud and the nebulous nature of the horrors which brought it upon me.
      Again I say, I do not know what has become of Harley Warren; though I think—almost hope—that he is in peaceful oblivion, if there be anywhere so blessed a thing. It is true that I have for five years been his closest friend, and a partial sharer of his terrible researches into the unknown. I will not deny, though my memory is uncertain and indistinct, that this witness of yours may have seen us together as he says, on the Gainesville pike, walking toward Big Cypress Swamp, at half past eleven on that awful night. That we bore electric lanterns, spades, and a curious coil of wire with attached instruments, I will even affirm; for these things all played a part in the single hideous scene which remains burned into my shaken recollection. But of what followed, and of the reason I was found alone and dazed on the edge of the swamp next morning, I must insist that I know nothing save what I have told you over and over again. You say to me that there is nothing in the swamp or near it which could form the setting of that frightful episode. I reply that I know nothing beyond what I saw. Vision or nightmare it may have been—vision or nightmare I fervently hope it was—yet it is all that my mind retains of what took place in those shocking hours after we left the sight of men. And why Harley Warren did not return, he or his shade—or some nameless thing I cannot describe—alone can tell.
      As I have said before, the weird studies of Harley Warren were well known to me, and to some extent shared by me. Of his vast collection of strange, rare books on forbidden subjects I have read all that are written in the languages of which I am master; but these are few as compared with those in languages I cannot understand. Most, I believe, are in Arabic; and the fiend-inspired book which brought on the end—the book which he carried in his pocket out of the world—was written in characters whose like I never saw elsewhere. Warren would never tell me just what was in that book. As to the nature of our studies—must I say again that I no longer retain full comprehension? It seems to me rather merciful that I do not, for they were terrible studies, which I pursued more through reluctant fascination than through actual inclination. Warren always dominated me, and sometimes I feared him. I remember how I shuddered at his facial expression on the night before the awful happening, when he talked so incessantly of his theory, why certain corpses never decay, but rest firm and fat in their tombs for a thousand years. But I do not fear him now, for I suspect that he has known horrors beyond my ken. Now I fear for him.
      Once more I say that I have no clear idea of our object on that night. Certainly, it had much to do with something in the book which Warren carried with him—that ancient book in undecipherable characters which had come to him from India a month before—but I swear I do not know what it was that we expected to find. Your witness says he saw us at half past eleven on the Gainesville pike, headed for Big Cypress Swamp. This is probably true, but I have no distinct memory of it. The picture seared into my soul is of one scene only, and the hour must have been long after midnight; for a waning crescent moon was high in the vaporous heavens.
      The place was an ancient cemetery; so ancient that I trembled at the manifold signs of immemorial years. It was in a deep, damp hollow, overgrown with rank grass, moss, and curious creeping weeds, and filled with a vague stench which my idle fancy associated absurdly with rotting stone. On every hand were the signs of neglect and decrepitude, and I seemed haunted by the notion that Warren and I were the first living creatures to invade a lethal silence of centuries. Over the valley’s rim a wan, waning crescent moon peered through the noisome vapours that seemed to emanate from unheard-of catacombs, and by its feeble, wavering beams I could distinguish a repellent array of antique slabs, urns, cenotaphs, and mausolean facades; all crumbling, moss-grown, and moisture-stained, and partly concealed by the gross luxuriance of the unhealthy vegetation. My first vivid impression of my own presence in this terrible necropolis concerns the act of pausing with Warren before a certain half-obliterated sepulchre, and of throwing down some burdens which we seemed to have been carrying. I now observed that I had with me an electric lantern and two spades, whilst my companion was supplied with a similar lantern and a portable telephone outfit. No word was uttered, for the spot and the task seemed known to us; and without delay we seized our spades and commenced to clear away the grass, weeds, and drifted earth from the flat, archaic mortuary. After uncovering the entire surface, which consisted of three immense granite slabs, we stepped back some distance to survey the charnel scene; and Warren appeared to make some mental calculations. Then he returned to the sepulchre, and using his spade as a lever, sought to pry up the slab lying nearest to a stony ruin which may have been a monument in its day. He did not succeed, and motioned to me to come to his assistance. Finally our combined strength loosened the stone, which we raised and tipped to one side.
      The removal of the slab revealed a black aperture, from which rushed an effluence of miasmal gases so nauseous that we started back in horror. After an interval, however, we approached the pit again, and found the exhalations less unbearable. Our lanterns disclosed the top of a flight of stone steps, dripping with some detestable ichor of the inner earth, and bordered by moist walls encrusted with nitre. And now for the first time my memory records verbal discourse, Warren addressing me at length in his mellow tenor voice; a voice singularly unperturbed by our awesome surroundings.
      “I’m sorry to have to ask you to stay on the surface,” he said, “but it would be a crime to let anyone with your frail nerves go down there. You can’t imagine, even from what you have read and from what I’ve told you, the things I shall have to see and do. It’s fiendish work, Carter, and I doubt if any man without ironclad sensibilities could ever see it through and come up alive and sane. I don’t wish to offend you, and heaven knows I’d be glad enough to have you with me; but the responsibility is in a certain sense mine, and I couldn’t drag a bundle of nerves like you down to probable death or madness. I tell you, you can’t imagine what the thing is really like! But I promise to keep you informed over the telephone of every move—you see I’ve enough wire here to reach to the centre of the earth and back!”
      I can still hear, in memory, those coolly spoken words; and I can still remember my remonstrances. I seemed desperately anxious to accompany my friend into those sepulchral depths, yet he proved inflexibly obdurate. At one time he threatened to abandon the expedition if I remained insistent; a threat which proved effective, since he alone held the key to the thing. All this I can still remember, though I no longer know what manner of thing we sought. After he had secured my reluctant acquiescence in his design, Warren picked up the reel of wire and adjusted the instruments. At his nod I took one of the latter and seated myself upon an aged, discoloured gravestone close by the newly uncovered aperture. Then he shook my hand, shouldered the coil of wire, and disappeared within that indescribable ossuary. For a moment I kept sight of the glow of his lantern, and heard the rustle of the wire as he laid it down after him; but the glow soon disappeared abruptly, as if a turn in the stone staircase had been encountered, and the sound died away almost as quickly. I was alone, yet bound to the unknown depths by those magic strands whose insulated surface lay green beneath the struggling beams of that waning crescent moon.
      In the lone silence of that hoary and deserted city of the dead, my mind conceived the most ghastly phantasies and illusions; and the grotesque shrines and monoliths seemed to assume a hideous personality—a half-sentience. Amorphous shadows seemed to lurk in the darker recesses of the weed-choked hollow and to flit as in some blasphemous ceremonial procession past the portals of the mouldering tombs in the hillside; shadows which could not have been cast by that pallid, peering crescent moon. I constantly consulted my watch by the light of my electric lantern, and listened with feverish anxiety at the receiver of the telephone; but for more than a quarter of an hour heard nothing. Then a faint clicking came from the instrument, and I called down to my friend in a tense voice. Apprehensive as I was, I was nevertheless unprepared for the words which came up from that uncanny vault in accents more alarmed and quivering than any I had heard before from Harley Warren. He who had so calmly left me a little while previously, now called from below in a shaky whisper more portentous than the loudest shriek:
      “God! If you could see what I am seeing!”
      I could not answer. Speechless, I could only wait. Then came the frenzied tones again:
      “Carter, it’s terrible—monstrous—unbelievable!”
      This time my voice did not fail me, and I poured into the transmitter a flood of excited questions. Terrified, I continued to repeat, “Warren, what is it? What is it?”
      Once more came the voice of my friend, still hoarse with fear, and now apparently tinged with despair:
      “I can’t tell you, Carter! It’s too utterly beyond thought—I dare not tell you—no man could know it and live—Great God! I never dreamed of THIS!” Stillness again, save for my now incoherent torrent of shuddering inquiry. Then the voice of Warren in a pitch of wilder consternation:
      “Carter! for the love of God, put back the slab and get out of this if you can! Quick!—leave everything else and make for the outside—it’s your only chance! Do as I say, and don’t ask me to explain!”
      I heard, yet was able only to repeat my frantic questions. Around me were the tombs and the darkness and the shadows; below me, some peril beyond the radius of the human imagination. But my friend was in greater danger than I, and through my fear I felt a vague resentment that he should deem me capable of deserting him under such circumstances. More clicking, and after a pause a piteous cry from Warren:
      “Beat it! For God’s sake, put back the slab and beat it, Carter!”
      Something in the boyish slang of my evidently stricken companion unleashed my faculties. I formed and shouted a resolution, “Warren, brace up! I’m coming down!” But at this offer the tone of my auditor changed to a scream of utter despair:
      “Don’t! You can’t understand! It’s too late—and my own fault. Put back the slab and run—there’s nothing else you or anyone can do now!” The tone changed again, this time acquiring a softer quality, as of hopeless resignation. Yet it remained tense through anxiety for me.
      “Quick—before it’s too late!” I tried not to heed him; tried to break through the paralysis which held me, and to fulfil my vow to rush down to his aid. But his next whisper found me still held inert in the chains of stark horror.
      “Carter—hurry! It’s no use—you must go—better one than two—the slab—” A pause, more clicking, then the faint voice of Warren:
      “Nearly over now—don’t make it harder—cover up those damned steps and run for your life—you’re losing time— So long, Carter—won’t see you again.” Here Warren’s whisper swelled into a cry; a cry that gradually rose to a shriek fraught with all the horror of the ages—
      “Curse these hellish things—legions— My God! Beat it! Beat it! Beat it!”
      After that was silence. I know not how many interminable aeons I sat stupefied; whispering, muttering, calling, screaming into that telephone. Over and over again through those aeons I whispered and muttered, called, shouted, and screamed, “Warren! Warren! Answer me—are you there?”
      And then there came to me the crowning horror of all—the unbelievable, unthinkable, almost unmentionable thing. I have said that aeons seemed to elapse after Warren shrieked forth his last despairing warning, and that only my own cries now broke the hideous silence. But after a while there was a further clicking in the receiver, and I strained my ears to listen. Again I called down, “Warren, are you there?”, and in answer heard the thing which has brought this cloud over my mind. I do not try, gentlemen, to account for that thing—that voice—nor can I venture to describe it in detail, since the first words took away my consciousness and created a mental blank which reaches to the time of my awakening in the hospital. Shall I say that the voice was deep; hollow; gelatinous; remote; unearthly; inhuman; disembodied? What shall I say? It was the end of my experience, and is the end of my story. I heard it, and knew no more. Heard it as I sat petrified in that unknown cemetery in the hollow, amidst the crumbling stones and the falling tombs, the rank vegetation and the miasmal vapours. Heard it well up from the innermost depths of that damnable open sepulchre as I watched amorphous, necrophagous shadows dance beneath an accursed waning moon. And this is what it said:
      “YOU FOOL, WARREN IS DEAD!”",True
"I
The animal paused on the threshold, interrogative alert, ready for flight if necessary. Severn laid down his palette, and held out a hand of welcome. The cat remained motionless, her yellow eyes fastened upon Severn.
""Puss,"" he said, in his low, pleasant voice, ""come in.""
The tip of her thin tail twitched uncertainly.
""Come in,"" he said again.
Apparently she found his voice reassuring, for she slowly settled upon all fours, her eyes still fastened upon him, her tail tucked under her gaunt flanks.
He rose from his easel smiling. She eyed him quietly, and when he walked toward her she watched him bend above her without a wince; her eyes followed his hand until it touched her head. Then she uttered a ragged mew.
It had long been Severn's custom to converse with animals, probably because he lived so much alone; and now he said, ""What's the matter, puss?""
Her timid eyes sought his.
""I understand,"" he said gently, ""you shall have it at once.""
Then moving quietly about he busied himself with the duties of a host, rinsed a saucer, filled it with the rest of the milk from the bottle on the window-sill, and kneeling down, crumbled a roll into the hollow of his hand.
The creature rose and crept toward the saucer.
With the handle of a palette-knife he stirred the crumbs and milk together and stepped back as she thrust her nose into the mess. He watched her in silence. From time to time the saucer clinked upon the tiled floor as she reached for a morsel on the rim; and at last the bread was all gone, and her purple tongue travelled over every unlicked spot until the saucer shone like polished marble. Then she sat up, and coolly turning her back to him, began her ablutions.
""Keep it up,"" said Severn, much interested, ""you need it.""
She flattened one ear, but neither turned nor interrupted her toilet. As the grime was slowly removed Severn observed that nature had intended her for a white cat. Her fur had disappeared in patches, from disease or the chances of war, her tail was bony and her spine sharp. But what charms she had were becoming apparent under vigorous licking, and he waited until she had finished before re-opening the conversation. When at last she closed her eyes and folded her forepaws under her breast, he began again very gently: ""Puss, tell me your troubles.""
At the sound of his voice she broke into a harsh rumbling which he recognized as an attempt to purr. He bent over to rub her cheek and she mewed again, an amiable inquiring little mew, to which he replied, ""Certainly, you are greatly improved, and when you recover your plumage you will be a gorgeous bird."" Much flattered, she stood up and marched around and around his legs, pushing her head between them and making pleased remarks, to which he responded with grave politeness.
""Now, what sent you here,"" he said—""here into the Street of the Four Winds, and up five flights to the very door where you would be welcome? What was it that prevented your meditated flight when I turned from my canvas to encounter your yellow eyes? Are you a Latin Quarter cat as I am a Latin Quarter man? And why do you wear a rose-coloured flowered garter buckled about your neck?"" The cat had climbed into his lap, and now sat purring as he passed his hand over her thin coat.
""Excuse me,"" he continued in lazy soothing tones, harmonizing with her purring, ""if I seem indelicate, but I cannot help musing on this rose-coloured garter, flowered so quaintly and fastened with a silver clasp. For the clasp is silver; I can see the mint mark on the edge, as is prescribed by the law of the French Republic. Now, why is this garter woven of rose silk and delicately embroidered,—why is this silken garter with its silver clasp about your famished throat? Am I indiscreet when I inquire if its owner is your owner? Is she some aged dame living in memory of youthful vanities, fond, doting on you, decorating you with her intimate personal attire? The circumference of the garter would suggest this, for your neck is thin, and the garter fits you. But then again I notice—I notice most things—that the garter is capable of being much enlarged. These small silver-rimmed eyelets, of which I count five, are proof of that. And now I observe that the fifth eyelet is worn out, as though the tongue of the clasp were accustomed to lie there. That seems to argue a well-rounded form.""
The cat curled her toes in contentment. The street was very still outside.
He murmured on: ""Why should your mistress decorate you with an article most necessary to her at all times? Anyway, at most times. How did she come to slip this bit of silk and silver about your neck? Was it the caprice of a moment,—when you, before you had lost your pristine plumpness, marched singing into her bedroom to bid her good-morning? Of course, and she sat up among the pillows, her coiled hair tumbling to her shoulders, as you sprang upon the bed purring: 'Good-day, my lady.' Oh, it is very easy to understand,"" he yawned, resting his head on the back of the chair. The cat still purred, tightening and relaxing her padded claws over his knee.
""Shall I tell you all about her, cat? She is very beautiful—your mistress,"" he murmured drowsily, ""and her hair is heavy as burnished gold. I could paint her,—not on canvas—for I should need shades and tones and hues and dyes more splendid than the iris of a splendid rainbow. I could only paint her with closed eyes, for in dreams alone can such colours as I need be found. For her eyes, I must have azure from skies untroubled by a cloud—the skies of dreamland. For her lips, roses from the palaces of slumberland, and for her brow, snow-drifts from mountains which tower in fantastic pinnacles to the moons;—oh, much higher than our moon here,—the crystal moons of dreamland. She is—very—beautiful, your mistress.""
The words died on his lips and his eyelids drooped.
The cat, too, was asleep, her cheek turned up upon her wasted flank, her paws relaxed and limp.
II
""It is fortunate,"" said Severn, sitting up and stretching, ""that we have tided over the dinner hour, for I have nothing to offer you for supper but what may be purchased with one silver franc.""
The cat on his knee rose, arched her back, yawned, and looked up at him.
""What shall it be? A roast chicken with salad? No? Possibly you prefer beef? Of course,—and I shall try an egg and some white bread. Now for the wines. Milk for you? Good. I shall take a little water, fresh from the wood,"" with a motion toward the bucket in the sink.
He put on his hat and left the room. The cat followed to the door, and after he had closed it behind him, she settled down, smelling at the cracks, and cocking one ear at every creak from the crazy old building.
The door below opened and shut. The cat looked serious, for a moment doubtful, and her ears flattened in nervous expectation. Presently she rose with a jerk of her tail and started on a noiseless tour of the studio. She sneezed at a pot of turpentine, hastily retreating to the table, which she presently mounted, and having satisfied her curiosity concerning a roll of red modelling wax, returned to the door and sat down with her eyes on the crack over the threshold. Then she lifted her voice in a thin plaint.
When Severn returned he looked grave, but the cat, joyous and demonstrative, marched around him, rubbing her gaunt body against his legs, driving her head enthusiastically into his hand, and purring until her voice mounted to a squeal.
He placed a bit of meat, wrapped in brown paper, upon the table, and with a penknife cut it into shreds. The milk he took from a bottle which had served for medicine, and poured it into the saucer on the hearth.
The cat crouched before it, purring and lapping at the same time.
He cooked his egg and ate it with a slice of bread, watching her busy with the shredded meat, and when he had finished, and had filled and emptied a cup of water from the bucket in the sink, he sat down, taking her into his lap, where she at once curled up and began her toilet. He began to speak again, touching her caressingly at times by way of emphasis.
""Cat, I have found out where your mistress lives. It is not very far away;—it is here, under this same leaky roof, but in the north wing which I had supposed was uninhabited. My janitor tells me this. By chance, he is almost sober this evening. The butcher on the rue de Seine, where I bought your meat, knows you, and old Cabane the baker identified you with needless sarcasm. They tell me hard tales of your mistress which I shall not believe. They say she is idle and vain and pleasure-loving; they say she is hare-brained and reckless. The little sculptor on the ground floor, who was buying rolls from old Cabane, spoke to me to-night for the first time, although we have always bowed to each other. He said she was very good and very beautiful. He has only seen her once, and does not know her name. I thanked him;—I don't know why I thanked him so warmly. Cabane said, 'Into this cursed Street of the Four Winds, the four winds blow all things evil.' The sculptor looked confused, but when he went out with his rolls, he said to me, 'I am sure, Monsieur, that she is as good as she is beautiful.'""
The cat had finished her toilet, and now, springing softly to the floor, went to the door and sniffed. He knelt beside her, and unclasping the garter held it for a moment in his hands. After a while he said: ""There is a name engraved upon the silver clasp beneath the buckle. It is a pretty name, Sylvia Elven. Sylvia is a woman's name, Elven is the name of a town. In Paris, in this quarter, above all, in this Street of the Four Winds, names are worn and put away as the fashions change with the seasons. I know the little town of Elven, for there I met Fate face to face and Fate was unkind. But do you know that in Elven Fate had another name, and that name was Sylvia?""
He replaced the garter and stood up looking down at the cat crouched before the closed door.
""The name of Elven has a charm for me. It tells me of meadows and clear rivers. The name of Sylvia troubles me like perfume from dead flowers.""
The cat mewed.
""Yes, yes,"" he said soothingly, ""I will take you back. Your Sylvia is not my Sylvia; the world is wide and Elven is not unknown. Yet in the darkness and filth of poorer Paris, in the sad shadows of this ancient house, these names are very pleasant to me.""
He lifted her in his arms and strode through the silent corridors to the stairs. Down five flights and into the moonlit court, past the little sculptor's den, and then again in at the gate of the north wing and up the worm-eaten stairs he passed, until he came to a closed door. When he had stood knocking for a long time, something moved behind the door; it opened and he went in. The room was dark. As he crossed the threshold, the cat sprang from his arms into the shadows. He listened but heard nothing. The silence was oppressive and he struck a match. At his elbow stood a table and on the table a candle in a gilded candlestick. This he lighted, then looked around. The chamber was vast, the hangings heavy with embroidery. Over the fireplace towered a carved mantel, grey with the ashes of dead fires. In a recess by the deep-set windows stood a bed, from which the bedclothes, soft and fine as lace, trailed to the polished floor. He lifted the candle above his head. A handkerchief lay at his feet. It was faintly perfumed. He turned toward the windows. In front of them was acanapé and over it were flung, pell-mell, a gown of silk, a heap of lace-like garments, white and delicate as spiders' meshes, long, crumpled gloves, and, on the floor beneath, the stockings, the little pointed shoes, and one garter of rosy silk, quaintly flowered and fitted with a silver clasp. Wondering, he stepped forward and drew the heavy curtains from the bed. For a moment the candle flared in his hand; then his eyes met two other eyes, wide open, smiling, and the candle-flame flashed over hair heavy as gold.
She was pale, but not as white as he; her eyes were untroubled as a child's; but he stared, trembling from head to foot, while the candle flickered in his hand.
At last he whispered: ""Sylvia, it is I.""
Again he said, ""It is I.""
Then, knowing that she was dead, he kissed her on the mouth. And through the long watches of the night the cat purred on his knee, tightening and relaxing her padded claws, until the sky paled above the Street of the Four Winds.
","To Victor Cleves came the following telegram in code:

""Washington
""April 14th, 1919.""
""Investigation ordered by the State Department as the result of frequent mention in despatches of Chinese troops operating with the Russian Bolsheviki forces has disclosed that the Bolsheviki are actually raising a Chinese division of 30,000 men recruited in Central Asia. This division has been guilty of the greatest cruelties. A strange rumour prevails among the Allied forces at Archangel that this Chinese division is led by Yezidee and Hassani officers belonging to the sect of devil-worshipers and that they employ black arts and magic in battle.

""From information so far gathered by the several branches of the United States Secret Service operating throughout the world, it appears possible that the various revolutionary forces of disorder, in Europe and Asia, which now are violently threatening the peace and security, of all established civilisation on earth, may have had a common origin. This origin, it is now suspected, may date back to a very remote epoch; the wide-spread forces of violence and merciless destruction may have had their beginning among some ancient and predatory race whose existence was maintained solely by robbery and murder.

""Anarchists, terrorists, Bolshevists, Reds of all shades and degrees, are now believed to represent in modern times what perhaps once was a tribe of Assassins—a sect whose religion was founded upon a common predilection for crimes of violence.

""On this theory then, for the present, the United States Government will proceed with this investigation of Bolshevism; and the Secret Service will continue to pay particular attention to all Orientals in the United States and other countries. You personally are formally instructed to keep in touch with XLY-371 (Alek Selden) and ZB-303 (James Benton), and to employ every possible means to become friendly with the girl Tressa Norne, win her confidence, and, if possible, enlist her actively in the Government Service as your particular aid and comrade.

""It is equally important that the movements of the Oriental, called Sanang, be carefully observed in order to discover the identity and whereabouts of his companions. However, until further instructions he is not to be taken into custody. M. H. 2479.

""(Signed)
""(John Recklow.)""
The long despatch from John Recklow made Cleves's duty plain enough.

For months, now, Selden and Benton had been watching Tressa Norne. And they had learned practically nothing about her.

And now the girl had come within Cleves's sphere of operation. She had been in New York for two weeks. Telegrams from Benton in Chicago, and from Selden in Buffalo, had prepared him for her arrival.

He had his men watching her boarding-house on West Twenty-eighth Street, men to follow her, men to keep their eyes on her at the theatre, where every evening, at 10:45, her entr' acte was staged. He knew where to get her. But he, himself, had been on the watch for the man Sanang; and had failed to find the slightest trace of him in New York, although warned that he had arrived.

So, for that evening, he left the hunt for Sanang to others, put on his evening clothes, and dined with fashionable friends at the Patroons' Club, who never for an instant suspected that young Victor Cleves was in the Service of the United States Government. About half-past nine he strolled around to the theatre, desiring to miss as much as possible of the popular show without being too late to see the curious little entr' acte in which this girl, Tressa Norne, appeared alone.

He had secured an aisle seat near the stage at an outrageous price; the main show was still thundering and fizzing and glittering as he entered the theatre; so he stood in the rear behind the orchestra until the descending curtain extinguished the outrageous glare and din.

Then he went down the aisle, and as he seated himself Tressa Norne stepped from the wings and stood before the lowered curtain facing an expectant but oddly undemonstrative audience.

The girl worked rapidly, seriously, and in silence. She seemed a mere child there behind the footlights, not more than sixteen anyway—her winsome eyes and wistful lips unspoiled by the world's wisdom.

Yet once or twice the mouth drooped for a second and the winning eyes darkened to a remoter blue—the brooding iris hue of far horizons.

She wore the characteristic tabard of stiff golden tissue and the gold pagoda-shaped headpiece of a Yezidee temple girl. Her flat, slipper-shaped foot-gear was of stiff gold, too, and curled upward at the toes.

All this accentuated her apparent youth. For in face and throat no firmer contours had as yet modified the soft fullness of immaturity; her limbs were boyish and frail, and her bosom more undecided still, so that the embroidered breadth of gold fell flat and straight from her chest to a few inches above the ankles.

She seemed to have no stock of paraphernalia with which to aid the performance; no assistant, no orchestral diversion, nor did she serve herself with any magician's patter. She did her work close to the footlights.

Behind her loomed a black curtain; the strip of stage in front was bare even of carpet; the orchestra remained mute.

But when she needed anything—a little table, for example—well, it was suddenly there where she required it—a tripod, for instance, evidently fitted to hold the big iridescent bubble of glass in which swarmed little tropical fishes—and which arrived neatly from nowhere. She merely placed her hands before her as though ready to support something weighty which she expected and—suddenly, the huge crystal bubble was visible, resting between her hands. And when she tired of holding it, she set it upon the empty air and let go of it; and instead of crashing to the stage with its finny rainbow swarm of swimmers, out of thin air appeared a tripod to support it.

Applause followed, not very enthusiastic, for the sort of audience which sustains the shows of which her performance was merely an entr' acte is an audience responsive only to the obvious.

Nobody ever before had seen that sort of magic in America. People scarcely knew whether or not they quite liked it. The lightning of innovation stupefies the dull; ignorance is always suspicious of innovation—always afraid to put itself on record until its mind is made up by somebody else.

So in this typical New York audience approbation was cautious, but every fascinated eye remained focused on this young girl who continued to do incredible things, which seemed to resemble ""putting something over"" on them; a thing which no uneducated American conglomeration ever quite forgives.

The girl's silence, too, perplexed them; they were accustomed to gabble, to noise, to jazz, vocal and instrumental, to that incessant metropolitan clamour which fills every second with sound in a city whose only distinction is its din. Stage, press, art, letters, social existence unless noisy mean nothing in Gotham; reticence, leisure, repose are the three lost arts. The megaphone is the city's symbol; its chiefest crime, silence.

The girl having finished with the big glass bubble full of tiny fish, picked it up and tossed it aside. For a moment it apparently floated there in space like a soap-bubble. Changing rainbow tints waxed and waned on the surface, growing deeper and more gorgeous until the floating globe glowed scarlet, then suddenly burst into flame and vanished. And only a strange, sweet perfume lingered in the air.

But she gave her perplexed audience no time to wonder; she had seated herself on the stage and was already swiftly busy unfolding a white veil with which she presently covered herself, draping it over her like a tent.

The veil seemed to be translucent; she was apparently visible seated beneath it. But the veil turned into smoke, rising into the air in a thin white cloud; and there, where she had been seated, was a statue of white stone the image of herself!—in all the frail springtide of early adolescence—a white statue, cold, opaque, exquisite in its sculptured immobility.

There came, the next moment, a sound of distant thunder; flashes lighted the blank curtain; and suddenly a vein of lightning and a sharper peal shattered the statue to fragments.

There they lay, broken bits of her own sculptured body, glistening in a heap behind the footlights. Then each fragment began to shimmer with a rosy internal light of its own, until the pile of broken marble glowed like living coals under thickening and reddening vapours. And, presently, dimly perceptible, there she was in the flesh again, seated in the fiery centre of the conflagration, stretching her arms luxuriously, yawning, seemingly awakening from refreshing slumber, her eyes unclosing to rest with a sort of confused apology upon her astounded audience.

As she rose to her feet nothing except herself remained on the stage—no débris, not a shred of smoke, not a spark.

She came down, then, across an inclined plank into the orchestra among the audience.

In the aisle seat nearest her sat Victor Cleves. His business was to be there that evening. But she didn't know that, knew nothing about him—had never before set eyes on him.

At her gesture of invitation he made a cup of both his hands. Into these she poured a double handful of unset diamonds—or what appeared to be diamonds—pressed her own hands above his for a second—and the diamonds in his palms had become pearls.

These were passed around to people in the vicinity, and finally returned to Mr. Cleves, who, at her request, covered the heap of pearls with both his hands, hiding them entirely from view.

At her nod he uncovered them. The pearls had become emeralds. Again, while he held them, and without even touching him, she changed them into rubies. Then she turned away from him, apparently forgetting that he still held the gems, and he sat very still, one cupped hand over the other, while she poured silver coins into a woman's gloved hands, turned them into gold coins, then flung each coin into the air, where it changed to a living, fragrant rose and fell among the audience.

Presently she seemed to remember Cleve, came back down the aisle, and under his close and intent gaze drew from his cupped hands, one by one, a score of brilliant little living birds, which continually flew about her and finally perched, twittering, on her golden headdress—a rainbow-crest of living jewels.

As she drew the last warm, breathing little feathered miracle from Cleves's hands and released it, he said rapidly under his breath: ""I want a word with you later. Where?""

She let her clear eyes rest on him for a moment, then with a shrug so slight that it was perceptible, perhaps, only to him, she moved on along the inclined way, stepped daintily over the footlights, caught fire, apparently, nodded to a badly rattled audience, and sauntered off, burning from head to foot.

What applause there was became merged in a dissonant instrumental outburst from the orchestra; the great god Jazz resumed direction, the mindless audience breathed freely again as the curtain rose upon a familiar, yelling turbulence, including all that Gotham really understands and cares for—legs and noise.

Victor Cleves glanced up at the stage, then continued to study the name of the girl on the programme. It was featured in rather pathetic solitude under ""Entr' acte."" And he read further: ""During the entr' acte Miss Tressa Norne will entertain you with several phases of Black Magic. This strange knowledge was acquired by Miss Norne from the Yezidees, among which almost unknown people still remain descendants of that notorious and formidable historic personage known in the twelfth century as The Old Man of the Mountain—or The Old Man of Mount Alamout.

""The pleasant profession of this historic individual was assassination; and some historians now believe that genuine occult power played a part in his dreadful record—a record which terminated only when the infantry of Genghis Khan took Mount Alamout by storm and hanged the Old Man of the Mountain and burned his body under a boulder of You-Stone.

""For Miss Norne's performance there appears to be no plausible, practical or scientific explanation.

""During her performance the curtain will remain lowered for fifteen minutes and will then rise on the last act of 'You Betcha Life.'""

The noisy show continued while Cleves, paying it scant attention, brooded over the programme. And ever his keen, grey eyes reverted to her name, Tressa Norne.

Then, for a little while, he settled back and let his absent gaze wander over the galloping battalions of painted girls and the slapstick principals whose perpetual motion evoked screams of approbation from the audience amid the din of the great god Jazz.

He had an aisle seat; he disturbed nobody when he went out and around to the stage door.

The aged man on duty took his card, called a boy and sent it off. The boy returned with the card, saying that Miss Norne had already dressed and departed.

Cleves tipped him and then tipped the doorman heavily.

""Where does she live?"" he asked.

""Say,"" said the old man, ""I dunno, and that's straight. But them ladies mostly goes up to the roof for a look in at the 'Moonlight Masque' and a dance afterward. Was you ever up there?""

""Yes.""

""Seen the new show?""

""No.""

""Well, g'wan up while you can get a table. And I bet the little girl will be somewheres around.""

""The little girl"" was ""somewheres around."" He secured a table, turned and looked about at the vast cabaret into which only a few people had yet filtered, and saw her at a distance in the carpeted corridor buying violets from one of the flower-girls.

A waiter placed a reserve card on his table; he continued on around the outer edge of the auditorium.

Miss Norne had already seated herself at a small table in the rear, and a waiter was serving her with iced orange juice and little French cakes.

When the waiter returned Cleves went up and took off his hat.

""May I talk with you for a moment, Miss Norne?"" he said.

The girl looked up, the wheat-straw still between her scarlet lips. Then, apparently recognising in him the young man in the audience who had spoken to her, she resumed her business of imbibing orange juice.

The girl seemed even frailer and younger in her hat and street gown. A silver-fox stole hung from her shoulders; a gold bag lay on the table under the bunch of violets.

She paid no attention whatever to him. Presently her wheat-straw buckled, and she selected a better one.

He said: ""There's something rather serious I'd like to speak to you about if you'll let me. I'm not the sort you evidently suppose. I'm not trying to annoy you.""

At that she looked around and upward once more.

Very, very young, but already spoiled, he thought, for the dark-blue eyes were coolly appraising him, and the droop of the mouth had become almost sullen. Besides, traces of paint still remained to incarnadine lip and cheek and there was a hint of hardness in the youthful plumpness of the features.

""Are you a professional?"" she asked without curiosity.

""A theatrical man? No.""

""Then if you haven't anything to offer me, what is it you wish?""

""I have a job to offer if you care for it and if you are up to it,"" he said.

Her eyes became slightly hostile:

""What kind of job do you mean?""

""I want to learn something about you first. Will you come over to my table and talk it over?""

""No.""

""What sort do you suppose me to be?"" he inquired, amused.

""The usual sort, I suppose.""

""You mean a Johnny?""

""Yes—of sorts.""

She let her insolent eyes sweep him once more, from head to foot.

He was a well-built young man and in his evening dress he had that something about him which placed him very definitely where he really belonged.

""Would you mind looking at my card?"" he asked.

He drew it out and laid it beside her, and without stirring she scanned it sideways.

""That's my name and address,"" he continued. ""I'm not contemplating mischief. I've enough excitement in life without seeking adventure. Besides, I'm not the sort who goes about annoying women.""

She glanced up at him again:

""You are annoying me!""

""I'm sorry. I was quite honest. Good-night.""

He took his congé with unhurried amiability; had already turned away when she said:

""Please ... what do you desire to say to me?"" He came back to her table:

""I couldn't tell you until I know a little more about you.""

""What—do you wish to know?""

""Several things. I could scarcely ask you—go over such matters with you—standing here.""

There was a pause; the girl juggled with the straw on the table for a few moments, then, partly turning, she summoned a waiter, paid him, adjusted her stole, picked up her gold bag and her violets and stood up. Then she turned to Cleves and gave him a direct look, which had in it the impersonal and searching gaze of a child.

When they were seated at the table reserved for him the place already was filling rapidly—backwash from the theatres slopped through every aisle—people not yet surfeited with noise, not yet sufficiently sodden by their worship of the great god Jazz.

""Jazz,"" said Cleves, glancing across his dinner-card at Tressa Norne—""what's the meaning of the word? Do you happen to know?""

""Doesn't it come from the French 'jaser'?""

He smiled. ""Possibly. I'm rather hungry. Are you?""

""Yes.""

""Will you indicate your preferences?""

She studied her card, and presently he gave the order.

""I'd like some champagne,"" she said, ""unless you think it's too expensive.""

He smiled at that, too, and gave the order.

""I didn't suggest any wine because you seem so young,"" he said.

""How old do I seem?""

""Sixteen perhaps.""

""I am twenty-one.""

""Then you've had no troubles.""

""I don't know what you call trouble,"" she remarked, indifferently, watching the arriving throngs.

The orchestra, too, had taken its place.

""Well,"" she said, ""now that you've picked me up, what do you really want of me?"" There was no mitigating smile to soften what she said. She dropped her elbows on the table, rested her chin between her palms and looked at him with the same searching, undisturbed expression that is so disconcerting in children. As he made no reply: ""May I have a cocktail?"" she inquired.

He gave the order. And his mind registered pessimism. ""There is nothing doing with this girl,"" he thought. ""She's already on the toboggan."" But he said aloud: ""That was beautiful work you did down in the theatre, Miss Norne.""

""Did you think so?""

""Of course. It was astounding work.""

""Thank you. But managers and audiences differ with you.""

""Then they are very stupid,"" he said.

""Possibly. But that does not help me pay my board.""

""Do you mean you have trouble in securing theatrical engagements?""

""Yes, I am through here to-night, and there's nothing else in view, so far.""

""That's incredible!"" he exclaimed.

She lifted her glass, slowly drained it.

For a few moments she caressed the stem of the empty glass, her gaze remote.

""Yes, it's that way,"" she said. ""From the beginning I felt that my audiences were not in sympathy with me. Sometimes it even amounts to hostility. Americans do not like what I do, even if it holds their attention. I don't quite understand why they don't like it, but I'm always conscious they don't. And of course that settles it—to-night has settled the whole thing, once and for all.""

""What are you going to do?""

""What others do, I presume.""

""What do others do?"" he inquired, watching the lovely sullen eyes.

""Oh, they do what I'm doing now, don't they?—let some man pick them up and feed them."" She lifted her indifferent eyes. ""I'm not criticising you. I meant to do it some day—when I had courage. That's why I just asked you if I might have some champagne—finding myself a little scared at my first step.... But you did say you might have a job for me. Didn't you?""

""Suppose I haven't. What are you going to do?""

The curtain was rising. She nodded toward the bespangled chorus. ""Probably that sort of thing. They've asked me.""

Supper was served. They both were hungry and thirsty; the music made conversation difficult, so they supped in silence and watched the imbecile show conceived by vulgarians, produced by vulgarians and served up to mental degenerates of the same species—the average metropolitan audience.

For ten minutes a pair of comedians fell up and down a flight of steps, and the audience shrieked approval.

""Miss Norne?""

The girl who had been watching the show turned in her chair and looked back at him.

""Your magic is by far the most wonderful I have ever seen or heard of. Even in India such things are not done.""

""No, not in India,"" she said, indifferently.

""Where then?""

""In China.""

""You learned to do such things there?""

""Yes.""

""Where, in China, did you learn such amazing magic?""

""In Yian.""

""I never heard of it. Is it a province?""

""A city.""

""And you lived there?""

""Fourteen years.""

""When?""

""From 1904 to 1918.""

""During the great war,"" he remarked, ""you were in China?""

""Yes.""

""Then you arrived here very recently.""

""In November, from the Coast.""

""I see. You played the theatres from the Coast eastward.""

""And went to pieces in New York,"" she added calmly, finishing her glass of champagne.

""Have you any family?"" he asked.

""No.""

""Do you care to say anything further?"" he inquired, pleasantly.

""About my family? Yes, if you wish. My father was in the spice trade in Yian. The Yezidees took Yian in 1910, threw him into a well in his own compound and filled it up with dead imperial troops. I was thirteen years old.... The Hassani did that. They held Yian nearly eight years, and I lived with my mother, in a garden pagoda, until 1914. In January of that year Germans got through from Kiaou-Chou. They had been six months on the way. I think they were Hassanis. Anyway, they persuaded the Hassanis to massacre every English-speaking prisoner. And so—my mother died in the garden pagoda of Yian.... I was not told for four years.""

""Why did they spare you?"" he asked, astonished at her story so quietly told, so utterly destitute of emotion.

""I was seventeen. A certain person had placed me among the temple girls in the temple of Erlik. It pleased this person to make of me a Mongol temple girl as a mockery at Christ. They gave me the name Keuke Mongol. I asked to serve the shrine of Kwann-an—she being like to our Madonna. But this person gave me the choice between the halberds of the Tchortchas and the sorcery of Erlik.""

She lifted her sombre eyes. ""So I learned how to do the things you saw. But—what I did there on the stage is not—respectable.""

An odd shiver passed over him. For a second he took her literally, suddenly convinced that her magic was not white but black as the demon at whose shrine she had learned it. Then he smiled and asked her pleasantly, whether indeed she employed hypnosis in her miraculous exhibitions.

But her eyes became more sombre still, and, ""I don't care to talk about it,"" she said. ""I have already said too much.""

""I'm sorry. I didn't mean to pry into professional secrets——""

""I can't talk about it,"" she repeated. ""... Please—my glass is quite empty.""

When he had refilled it:

""How did you get away from Yian?"" he asked.

""The Japanese.""

""What luck!""

""Yes. One battle was fought at Buldak. The Hassanis and Blue Flags were terribly cut up. Then, outside the walls of Yian, Prince Sanang's Tchortcha infantry made a stand. He was there with his Yezidee horsemen, all in leather and silk armour with casques and corselets of black Indian steel.

""I could see them from the temple—saw the Japanese gunners open fire. The Tchortchas were blown to shreds in the blast of the Japanese guns.... Sanang got away with some of his Yezidee horsemen.""

""Where was that battle?""

""I told you, outside the walls of Yian.""

""The newspapers never mentioned any such trouble in China,"" he said, suspiciously.

""Nobody knows about it except the Germans and the Japanese.""

""Who is this Sanang?"" he demanded.

""A Yezidee-Mongol. He is one of the Sheiks-el-Djebel—a servant of The Old Man of Mount Alamout.""

""What is he?""

""A sorcerer—assassin.""

""What!"" exclaimed Cleves incredulously.

""Why, yes,"" she said, calmly. ""Have you never heard of The Old Man of Mount Alamout?""

""Well, yes——""

""The succession has been unbroken since 1090 B.C.A Hassan Sabbah is still the present Old Man of the Mountain. His Yezidees worship Erlik. They are sorcerers. But you would not believe that.""

Cleves said with a smile, ""Who is Erlik?""

""The Mongols' Satan.""

""Oh! So these Yezidees are devil-worshipers!""

""They are more. They are actually devils.""

""You don't really believe that even in unexplored China there exists such a creature as a real sorcerer, do you?"" he inquired, smilingly.

""I don't wish to talk of it.""

To his surprise her face had flushed, and he thought her sensitive mouth quivered a little.

He watched her in silence for a moment; then, leaning a little way across the table:

""Where are you going when the show here closes?""

""To my boarding-house.""

""And then?""

""To bed,"" she said, sullenly.

""And to-morrow what do you mean to do?""

""Go out to the agencies and ask for work.""

""And if there is none?""

""The chorus,"" she said, indifferently.

""What salary have you been getting?""

She told him.

""Will you take three times that amount and work with me?""

",True
"

I

""Ne raillons pas les fous; leur folie dure plus longtemps que
la nôtre.... Voila toute la différence.""

Toward the end of the year 1920 the Government of the United States had
practically completed the programme, adopted during the last months of
President Winthrop's administration. The country was apparently tranquil.
Everybody knows how the Tariff and Labour questions were settled. The war
with Germany, incident on that country's seizure of the Samoan Islands,
had left no visible scars upon the republic, and the temporary occupation
of Norfolk by the invading army had been forgotten in the joy over
repeated naval victories, and the subsequent ridiculous plight of General
Von Gartenlaube's forces in the State of New Jersey. The Cuban and
Hawaiian investments had paid one hundred per cent and the territory of
Samoa was well worth its cost as a coaling station. The country was in a
superb state of defence. Every coast city had been well supplied with land
fortifications; the army under the parental eye of the General Staff,
organized according to the Prussian system, had been increased to 300,000
men, with a territorial reserve of a million; and six magnificent
squadrons of cruisers and battle-ships patrolled the six stations of the
navigable seas, leaving a steam reserve amply fitted to control home
waters. The gentlemen from the West had at last been constrained to
acknowledge that a college for the training of diplomats was as necessary
as law schools are for the training of barristers; consequently we were no
longer represented abroad by incompetent patriots. The nation was
prosperous; Chicago, for a moment paralyzed after a second great fire, had
risen from its ruins, white and imperial, and more beautiful than the white
city which had been built for its plaything in 1893. Everywhere good
architecture was replacing bad, and even in New York, a sudden craving for
decency had swept away a great portion of the existing horrors. Streets
had been widened, properly paved and lighted, trees had been planted,
squares laid out, elevated structures demolished and underground roads
built to replace them. The new government buildings and barracks were fine
bits of architecture, and the long system of stone quays which completely
surrounded the island had been turned into parks which proved a god-send
to the population. The subsidizing of the state theatre and state opera
brought its own reward. The United States National Academy of Design was
much like European institutions of the same kind. Nobody envied the
Secretary of Fine Arts, either his cabinet position or his portfolio. The
Secretary of Forestry and Game Preservation had a much easier time, thanks
to the new system of National Mounted Police. We had profited well by the
latest treaties with France and England; the exclusion of foreign-born
Jews as a measure of self-preservation, the settlement of the new
independent negro state of Suanee, the checking of immigration, the new
laws concerning naturalization, and the gradual centralization of power in
the executive all contributed to national calm and prosperity. When the
Government solved the Indian problem and squadrons of Indian cavalry
scouts in native costume were substituted for the pitiable organizations
tacked on to the tail of skeletonized regiments by a former Secretary of
War, the nation drew a long sigh of relief. When, after the colossal
Congress of Religions, bigotry and intolerance were laid in their graves
and kindness and charity began to draw warring sects together, many
thought the millennium had arrived, at least in the new world which after
all is a world by itself.

But self-preservation is the first law, and the United States had to look
on in helpless sorrow as Germany, Italy, Spain and Belgium writhed in the
throes of Anarchy, while Russia, watching from the Caucasus, stooped and
bound them one by one.

In the city of New York the summer of 1899 was signalized by the
dismantling of the Elevated Railroads. The summer of 1900 will live in
the memories of New York people for many a cycle; the Dodge Statue was
removed in that year. In the following winter began that agitation for
the repeal of the laws prohibiting suicide which bore its final fruit in
the month of April, 1920, when the first Government Lethal Chamber was
opened on Washington Square.

I had walked down that day from Dr. Archer's house on Madison Avenue,
where I had been as a mere formality. Ever since that fall from my horse,
four years before, I had been troubled at times with pains in the back of
my head and neck, but now for months they had been absent, and the doctor
sent me away that day saying there was nothing more to be cured in me. It
was hardly worth his fee to be told that; I knew it myself. Still I did
not grudge him the money. What I minded was the mistake which he made at
first. When they picked me up from the pavement where I lay unconscious,
and somebody had mercifully sent a bullet through my horse's head, I was
carried to Dr. Archer, and he, pronouncing my brain affected, placed me
in his private asylum where I was obliged to endure treatment for
insanity. At last he decided that I was well, and I, knowing that my mind
had always been as sound as his, if not sounder, ""paid my tuition"" as he
jokingly called it, and left. I told him, smiling, that I would get even
with him for his mistake, and he laughed heartily, and asked me to call
once in a while. I did so, hoping for a chance to even up accounts, but
he gave me none, and I told him I would wait.

The fall from my horse had fortunately left no evil results; on the
contrary it had changed my whole character for the better. From a lazy
young man about town, I had become active, energetic, temperate, and
above all--oh, above all else--ambitious. There was only one thing which
troubled me, I laughed at my own uneasiness, and yet it troubled me.

During my convalescence I had bought and read for the first time, _The
King in Yellow_. I remember after finishing the first act that it
occurred to me that I had better stop. I started up and flung the book
into the fireplace; the volume struck the barred grate and fell open on
the hearth in the firelight. If I had not caught a glimpse of the opening
words in the second act I should never have finished it, but as I stooped
to pick it up, my eyes became riveted to the open page, and with a cry of
terror, or perhaps it was of joy so poignant that I suffered in every
nerve, I snatched the thing out of the coals and crept shaking to my
bedroom, where I read it and reread it, and wept and laughed and trembled
with a horror which at times assails me yet. This is the thing that
troubles me, for I cannot forget Carcosa where black stars hang in the
heavens; where the shadows of men's thoughts lengthen in the afternoon,
when the twin suns sink into the lake of Hali; and my mind will bear for
ever the memory of the Pallid Mask. I pray God will curse the writer, as
the writer has cursed the world with this beautiful, stupendous creation,
terrible in its simplicity, irresistible in its truth--a world which now
trembles before the King in Yellow. When the French Government seized the
translated copies which had just arrived in Paris, London, of course,
became eager to read it. It is well known how the book spread like an
infectious disease, from city to city, from continent to continent,
barred out here, confiscated there, denounced by Press and pulpit,
censured even by the most advanced of literary anarchists. No definite
principles had been violated in those wicked pages, no doctrine
promulgated, no convictions outraged. It could not be judged by any known
standard, yet, although it was acknowledged that the supreme note of art
had been struck in _The King in Yellow_, all felt that human nature
could not bear the strain, nor thrive on words in which the essence of
purest poison lurked. The very banality and innocence of the first act
only allowed the blow to fall afterward with more awful effect.

It was, I remember, the 13th day of April, 1920, that the first
Government Lethal Chamber was established on the south side of Washington
Square, between Wooster Street and South Fifth Avenue. The block which
had formerly consisted of a lot of shabby old buildings, used as cafés
and restaurants for foreigners, had been acquired by the Government in
the winter of 1898. The French and Italian cafés and restaurants were
torn down; the whole block was enclosed by a gilded iron railing, and
converted into a lovely garden with lawns, flowers and fountains. In the
centre of the garden stood a small, white building, severely classical in
architecture, and surrounded by thickets of flowers. Six Ionic columns
supported the roof, and the single door was of bronze. A splendid marble
group of the ""Fates"" stood before the door, the work of a young American
sculptor, Boris Yvain, who had died in Paris when only twenty-three years
old.

The inauguration ceremonies were in progress as I crossed University
Place and entered the square. I threaded my way through the silent throng
of spectators, but was stopped at Fourth Street by a cordon of police. A
regiment of United States lancers were drawn up in a hollow square round
the Lethal Chamber. On a raised tribune facing Washington Park stood the
Governor of New York, and behind him were grouped the Mayor of New
York and Brooklyn, the Inspector-General of Police, the Commandant of
the state troops, Colonel Livingston, military aid to the President of the
United States, General Blount, commanding at Governor's Island,
Major-General Hamilton, commanding the garrison of New York and Brooklyn,
Admiral Buffby of the fleet in the North River, Surgeon-General
Lanceford, the staff of the National Free Hospital, Senators Wyse and
Franklin of New York, and the Commissioner of Public Works. The tribune
was surrounded by a squadron of hussars of the National Guard.

The Governor was finishing his reply to the short speech of the
Surgeon-General. I heard him say: ""The laws prohibiting suicide and
providing punishment for any attempt at self-destruction have been
repealed. The Government has seen fit to acknowledge the right of man to
end an existence which may have become intolerable to him, through
physical suffering or mental despair. It is believed that the community
will be benefited by the removal of such people from their midst. Since
the passage of this law, the number of suicides in the United States has
not increased. Now the Government has determined to establish a Lethal
Chamber in every city, town and village in the country, it remains to be
seen whether or not that class of human creatures from whose desponding
ranks new victims of self-destruction fall daily will accept the relief
thus provided."" He paused, and turned to the white Lethal Chamber. The
silence in the street was absolute. ""There a painless death awaits him
who can no longer bear the sorrows of this life. If death is welcome let
him seek it there."" Then quickly turning to the military aid of the
President's household, he said, ""I declare the Lethal Chamber open,"" and
again facing the vast crowd he cried in a clear voice: ""Citizens of New
York and of the United States of America, through me the Government
declares the Lethal Chamber to be open.""

The solemn hush was broken by a sharp cry of command, the squadron of
hussars filed after the Governor's carriage, the lancers wheeled and
formed along Fifth Avenue to wait for the commandant of the garrison, and
the mounted police followed them. I left the crowd to gape and stare at
the white marble Death Chamber, and, crossing South Fifth Avenue, walked
along the western side of that thoroughfare to Bleecker Street. Then I
turned to the right and stopped before a dingy shop which bore the sign:

HAWBERK, ARMOURER.

I glanced in at the doorway and saw Hawberk busy in his little shop at
the end of the hall. He looked up, and catching sight of me cried in his
deep, hearty voice, ""Come in, Mr. Castaigne!"" Constance, his daughter,
rose to meet me as I crossed the threshold, and held out her pretty
hand, but I saw the blush of disappointment on her cheeks, and knew
that it was another Castaigne she had expected, my cousin Louis. I
smiled at her confusion and complimented her on the banner she was
embroidering from a coloured plate. Old Hawberk sat riveting the worn
greaves of some ancient suit of armour, and the ting! ting! ting! of his
little hammer sounded pleasantly in the quaint shop. Presently he
dropped his hammer, and fussed about for a moment with a tiny wrench.
The soft clash of the mail sent a thrill of pleasure through me. I
loved to hear the music of steel brushing against steel, the mellow
shock of the mallet on thigh pieces, and the jingle of chain armour.
That was the only reason I went to see Hawberk. He had never interested
me personally, nor did Constance, except for the fact of her being in
love with Louis. This did occupy my attention, and sometimes even kept
me awake at night. But I knew in my heart that all would come right,
and that I should arrange their future as I expected to arrange that of
my kind doctor, John Archer. However, I should never have troubled
myself about visiting them just then, had it not been, as I say, that
the music of the tinkling hammer had for me this strong fascination. I
would sit for hours, listening and listening, and when a stray sunbeam
struck the inlaid steel, the sensation it gave me was almost too keen
to endure. My eyes would become fixed, dilating with a pleasure that
stretched every nerve almost to breaking, until some movement of the
old armourer cut off the ray of sunlight, then, still thrilling
secretly, I leaned back and listened again to the sound of the
polishing rag, swish! swish! rubbing rust from the rivets.

Constance worked with the embroidery over her knees, now and then pausing
to examine more closely the pattern in the coloured plate from the
Metropolitan Museum.

""Who is this for?"" I asked.

Hawberk explained, that in addition to the treasures of armour in the
Metropolitan Museum of which he had been appointed armourer, he also
had charge of several collections belonging to rich amateurs. This was the
missing greave of a famous suit which a client of his had traced to a
little shop in Paris on the Quai d'Orsay. He, Hawberk, had negotiated for
and secured the greave, and now the suit was complete. He laid down his
hammer and read me the history of the suit, traced since 1450 from owner
to owner until it was acquired by Thomas Stainbridge. When his superb
collection was sold, this client of Hawberk's bought the suit, and since
then the search for the missing greave had been pushed until it was,
almost by accident, located in Paris.

""Did you continue the search so persistently without any certainty of the
greave being still in existence?"" I demanded.

""Of course,"" he replied coolly.

Then for the first time I took a personal interest in Hawberk.

""It was worth something to you,"" I ventured.

""No,"" he replied, laughing, ""my pleasure in finding it was my reward.""

""Have you no ambition to be rich?"" I asked, smiling.

""My one ambition is to be the best armourer in the world,"" he answered
gravely.

Constance asked me if I had seen the ceremonies at the Lethal Chamber.
She herself had noticed cavalry passing up Broadway that morning, and had
wished to see the inauguration, but her father wanted the banner
finished, and she had stayed at his request.

""Did you see your cousin, Mr. Castaigne, there?"" she asked, with the
slightest tremor of her soft eyelashes.

""No,"" I replied carelessly. ""Louis' regiment is manoeuvring out in
Westchester County."" I rose and picked up my hat and cane.

""Are you going upstairs to see the lunatic again?"" laughed old Hawberk.
If Hawberk knew how I loathe that word ""lunatic,"" he would never use it
in my presence. It rouses certain feelings within me which I do not care
to explain. However, I answered him quietly: ""I think I shall drop in and
see Mr. Wilde for a moment or two.""

""Poor fellow,"" said Constance, with a shake of the head, ""it must be hard
to live alone year after year poor, crippled and almost demented. It is
very good of you, Mr. Castaigne, to visit him as often as you do.""

""I think he is vicious,"" observed Hawberk, beginning again with his
hammer. I listened to the golden tinkle on the greave plates; when he had
finished I replied:

""No, he is not vicious, nor is he in the least demented. His mind is a
wonder chamber, from which he can extract treasures that you and I would
give years of our life to acquire.""'

Hawberk laughed.

I continued a little impatiently: ""He knows history as no one else could
know it. Nothing, however trivial, escapes his search, and his memory is
so absolute, so precise in details, that were it known in New York that
such a man existed, the people could not honour him enough.""

""Nonsense,"" muttered Hawberk, searching on the floor for a fallen rivet.

""Is it nonsense,"" I asked, managing to suppress what I felt, ""is it
nonsense when he says that the tassets and cuissards of the enamelled
suit of armour commonly known as the 'Prince's Emblazoned' can be found
among a mass of rusty theatrical properties, broken stoves and
ragpicker's refuse in a garret in Pell Street?""

Hawberk's hammer fell to the ground, but he picked it up and asked, with
a great deal of calm, how I knew that the tassets and left cuissard were
missing from the ""Prince's Emblazoned.""

""I did not know until Mr. Wilde mentioned it to me the other day. He said
they were in the garret of 998 Pell Street.""

""Nonsense,"" he cried, but I noticed his hand trembling under his leathern
apron.

""Is this nonsense too?"" I asked pleasantly, ""is it nonsense when Mr.
Wilde continually speaks of you as the Marquis of Avonshire and of Miss
Constance--""

I did not finish, for Constance had started to her feet with terror
written on every feature. Hawberk looked at me and slowly smoothed his
leathern apron.

""That is impossible,"" he observed, ""Mr. Wilde may know a great many
things--""

""About armour, for instance, and the 'Prince's Emblazoned,'"" I
interposed, smiling.

""Yes,"" he continued, slowly, ""about armour also--may be--but he is wrong
in regard to the Marquis of Avonshire, who, as you know, killed his
wife's traducer years ago, and went to Australia where he did not long
survive his wife.""

""Mr. Wilde is wrong,"" murmured Constance. Her lips were blanched, but her
voice was sweet and calm.

""Let us agree, if you please, that in this one circumstance Mr. Wilde is
wrong,"" I said.




II

I climbed the three dilapidated flights of stairs, which I had so often
climbed before, and knocked at a small door at the end of the corridor.
Mr. Wilde opened the door and I walked in.

When he had double-locked the door and pushed a heavy chest against it,
he came and sat down beside me, peering up into my face with his little
light-coloured eyes. Half a dozen new scratches covered his nose and
cheeks, and the silver wires which supported his artificial ears had
become displaced. I thought I had never seen him so hideously
fascinating. He had no ears. The artificial ones, which now stood out at
an angle from the fine wire, were his one weakness. They were made of wax
and painted a shell pink, but the rest of his face was yellow. He might
better have revelled in the luxury of some artificial fingers for his
left hand, which was absolutely fingerless, but it seemed to cause him no
inconvenience, and he was satisfied with his wax ears. He was very small,
scarcely higher than a child of ten, but his arms were magnificently
developed, and his thighs as thick as any athlete's. Still, the most
remarkable thing about Mr. Wilde was that a man of his marvellous
intelligence and knowledge should have such a head. It was flat and
pointed, like the heads of many of those unfortunates whom people
imprison in asylums for the weak-minded. Many called him insane, but I
knew him to be as sane as I was.

I do not deny that he was eccentric; the mania he had for keeping that
cat and teasing her until she flew at his face like a demon, was
certainly eccentric. I never could understand why he kept the creature,
nor what pleasure he found in shutting himself up in his room with this
surly, vicious beast. I remember once, glancing up from the manuscript I
was studying by the light of some tallow dips, and seeing Mr. Wilde
squatting motionless on his high chair, his eyes fairly blazing with
excitement, while the cat, which had risen from her place before the
stove, came creeping across the floor right at him. Before I could move
she flattened her belly to the ground, crouched, trembled, and sprang
into his face. Howling and foaming they rolled over and over on the
floor, scratching and clawing, until the cat screamed and fled under the
cabinet, and Mr. Wilde turned over on his back, his limbs contracting and
curling up like the legs of a dying spider. He _was_ eccentric.

Mr. Wilde had climbed into his high chair, and, after studying my face,
picked up a dog's-eared ledger and opened it.

""Henry B. Matthews,"" he read, ""book-keeper with Whysot Whysot and
Company, dealers in church ornaments. Called April 3rd. Reputation
damaged on the race-track. Known as a welcher. Reputation to be repaired
by August 1st. Retainer Five Dollars."" He turned the page and ran his
fingerless knuckles down the closely-written columns.

""P. Greene Dusenberry, Minister of the Gospel, Fairbeach, New Jersey.
Reputation damaged in the Bowery. To be repaired as soon as possible.
Retainer $100.""

He coughed and added, ""Called, April 6th.""

""Then you are not in need of money, Mr. Wilde,"" I inquired.

""Listen,"" he coughed again.

""Mrs. C. Hamilton Chester, of Chester Park, New York City. Called April
7th. Reputation damaged at Dieppe, France. To be repaired by October 1st
Retainer $500.

""Note.--C. Hamilton Chester, Captain U.S.S. 'Avalanche', ordered home
from South Sea Squadron October 1st.""

""Well,"" I said, ""the profession of a Repairer of Reputations is
lucrative.""

His colourless eyes sought mine, ""I only wanted to demonstrate that I
was correct. You said it was impossible to succeed as a Repairer of
Reputations; that even if I did succeed in certain cases it would cost
me more than I would gain by it. To-day I have five hundred men in my
employ, who are poorly paid, but who pursue the work with an enthusiasm
which possibly may be born of fear. These men enter every shade and grade
of society; some even are pillars of the most exclusive social temples;
others are the prop and pride of the financial world; still others, hold
undisputed sway among the 'Fancy and the Talent.' I choose them at my
leisure from those who reply to my advertisements. It is easy enough,
they are all cowards. I could treble the number in twenty days if I
wished. So you see, those who have in their keeping the reputations of
their fellow-citizens, I have in my pay.""

""They may turn on you,"" I suggested.

He rubbed his thumb over his cropped ears, and adjusted the wax
substitutes. ""I think not,"" he murmured thoughtfully, ""I seldom have to
apply the whip, and then only once. Besides they like their wages.""

""How do you apply the whip?"" I demanded.

His face for a moment was awful to look upon. His eyes dwindled to a pair
of green sparks.

""I invite them to come and have a little chat with me,"" he said in a soft
voice.

A knock at the door interrupted him, and his face resumed its amiable
expression.

""Who is it?"" he inquired.

""Mr. Steylette,"" was the answer.

""Come to-morrow,"" replied Mr. Wilde.

""Impossible,"" began the other, but was silenced by a sort of bark from
Mr. Wilde.

""Come to-morrow,"" he repeated.

We heard somebody move away from the door and turn the corner by the
stairway.

""Who is that?"" I asked.

""Arnold Steylette, Owner and Editor in Chief of the great New York
daily.""

He drummed on the ledger with his fingerless hand adding: ""I pay him very
badly, but he thinks it a good bargain.""

""Arnold Steylette!"" I repeated amazed.

""Yes,"" said Mr. Wilde, with a self-satisfied cough.

The cat, which had entered the room as he spoke, hesitated, looked up at
him and snarled. He climbed down from the chair and squatting on the
floor, took the creature into his arms and caressed her. The cat ceased
snarling and presently began a loud purring which seemed to increase in
timbre as he stroked her. ""Where are the notes?"" I asked. He pointed to
the table, and for the hundredth time I picked up the bundle of
manuscript entitled--

""THE IMPERIAL DYNASTY OF AMERICA.""

One by one I studied the well-worn pages, worn only by my own handling,
and although I knew all by heart, from the beginning, ""When from Carcosa,
the Hyades, Hastur, and Aldebaran,"" to ""Castaigne, Louis de Calvados,
born December 19th, 1877,"" I read it with an eager, rapt attention,
pausing to repeat parts of it aloud, and dwelling especially on ""Hildred
de Calvados, only son of Hildred Castaigne and Edythe Landes Castaigne,
first in succession,"" etc., etc.

When I finished, Mr. Wilde nodded and coughed.

""Speaking of your legitimate ambition,"" he said, ""how do Constance and
Louis get along?""

""She loves him,"" I replied simply.

The cat on his knee suddenly turned and struck at his eyes, and he flung
her off and climbed on to the chair opposite me.

""And Dr. Archer! But that's a matter you can settle any time you wish,""
he added.

""Yes,"" I replied, ""Dr. Archer can wait, but it is time I saw my cousin
Louis.""

""It is time,"" he repeated. Then he took another ledger from the table and
ran over the leaves rapidly. ""We are now in communication with ten
thousand men,"" he muttered. ""We can count on one hundred thousand within
the first twenty-eight hours, and in forty-eight hours the state will
rise _en masse_. The country follows the state, and the portion that
will not, I mean California and the Northwest, might better never have
been inhabited. I shall not send them the Yellow Sign.""

The blood rushed to my head, but I only answered, ""A new broom sweeps
clean.""

""The ambition of Caesar and of Napoleon pales before that which could not
rest until it had seized the minds of men and controlled even their
unborn thoughts,"" said Mr. Wilde.

""You are speaking of the King in Yellow,"" I groaned, with a shudder.

""He is a king whom emperors have served.""

""I am content to serve him,"" I replied.

Mr. Wilde sat rubbing his ears with his crippled hand. ""Perhaps Constance
does not love him,"" he suggested.

I started to reply, but a sudden burst of military music from the street
below drowned my voice. The twentieth dragoon regiment, formerly in
garrison at Mount St. Vincent, was returning from the manoeuvres in
Westchester County, to its new barracks on East Washington Square. It was
my cousin's regiment. They were a fine lot of fellows, in their pale
blue, tight-fitting jackets, jaunty busbys and white riding breeches with
the double yellow stripe, into which their limbs seemed moulded. Every
other squadron was armed with lances, from the metal points of which
fluttered yellow and white pennons. The band passed, playing the
regimental march, then came the colonel and staff, the horses crowding
and trampling, while their heads bobbed in unison, and the pennons
fluttered from their lance points. The troopers, who rode with the
beautiful English seat, looked brown as berries from their bloodless
campaign among the farms of Westchester, and the music of their sabres
against the stirrups, and the jingle of spurs and carbines was delightful
to me. I saw Louis riding with his squadron. He was as handsome an
officer as I have ever seen. Mr. Wilde, who had mounted a chair by the
window, saw him too, but said nothing. Louis turned and looked straight
at Hawberk's shop as he passed, and I could see the flush on his brown
cheeks. I think Constance must have been at the window. When the last
troopers had clattered by, and the last pennons vanished into South Fifth
Avenue, Mr. Wilde clambered out of his chair and dragged the chest away
from the door.

""Yes,"" he said, ""it is time that you saw your cousin Louis.""

He unlocked the door and I picked up my hat and stick and stepped into
the corridor. The stairs were dark. Groping about, I set my foot on
something soft, which snarled and spit, and I aimed a murderous blow at
the cat, but my cane shivered to splinters against the balustrade, and
the beast scurried back into Mr. Wilde's room.

Passing Hawberk's door again I saw him still at work on the armour, but
I did not stop, and stepping out into Bleecker Street, I followed it to
Wooster, skirted the grounds of the Lethal Chamber, and crossing
Washington Park went straight to my rooms in the Benedick. Here I lunched
comfortably, read the _Herald_ and the _Meteor_, and finally went
to the steel safe in my bedroom and set the time combination. The
three and three-quarter minutes which it is necessary to wait, while the
time lock is opening, are to me golden moments. From the instant I set
the combination to the moment when I grasp the knobs and swing back
the solid steel doors, I live in an ecstasy of expectation. Those moments
must be like moments passed in Paradise. I know what I am to find at
the end of the time limit. I know what the massive safe holds secure for
me, for me alone, and the exquisite pleasure of waiting is hardly enhanced
when the safe opens and I lift, from its velvet crown, a diadem of purest
gold, blazing with diamonds. I do this every day, and yet the joy of
waiting and at last touching again the diadem, only seems to increase as
the days pass. It is a diadem fit for a King among kings, an Emperor
among emperors. The King in Yellow might scorn it, but it shall be worn
by his royal servant.

I held it in my arms until the alarm in the safe rang harshly, and then
tenderly, proudly, I replaced it and shut the steel doors. I walked
slowly back into my study, which faces Washington Square, and leaned on
the window sill. The afternoon sun poured into my windows, and a gentle
breeze stirred the branches of the elms and maples in the park, now
covered with buds and tender foliage. A flock of pigeons circled about
the tower of the Memorial Church; sometimes alighting on the purple tiled
roof, sometimes wheeling downward to the lotos fountain in front of the
marble arch. The gardeners were busy with the flower beds around the
fountain, and the freshly turned earth smelled sweet and spicy. A lawn
mower, drawn by a fat white horse, clinked across the green sward, and
watering-carts poured showers of spray over the asphalt drives. Around
the statue of Peter Stuyvesant, which in 1897 had replaced the
monstrosity supposed to represent Garibaldi, children played in the
spring sunshine, and nurse girls wheeled elaborate baby carriages with a
reckless disregard for the pasty-faced occupants, which could probably be
explained by the presence of half a dozen trim dragoon troopers languidly
lolling on the benches. Through the trees, the Washington Memorial Arch
glistened like silver in the sunshine, and beyond, on the eastern
extremity of the square the grey stone barracks of the dragoons, and the
white granite artillery stables were alive with colour and motion.

I looked at the Lethal Chamber on the corner of the square opposite. A
few curious people still lingered about the gilded iron railing, but
inside the grounds the paths were deserted. I watched the fountains
ripple and sparkle; the sparrows had already found this new bathing nook,
and the basins were covered with the dusty-feathered little things. Two
or three white peacocks picked their way across the lawns, and a drab
coloured pigeon sat so motionless on the arm of one of the ""Fates,"" that
it seemed to be a part of the sculptured stone.

As I was turning carelessly away, a slight commotion in the group of
curious loiterers around the gates attracted my attention. A young man
had entered, and was advancing with nervous strides along the gravel path
which leads to the bronze doors of the Lethal Chamber. He paused a moment
before the ""Fates,"" and as he raised his head to those three mysterious
faces, the pigeon rose from its sculptured perch, circled about for a
moment and wheeled to the east. The young man pressed his hand to his
face, and then with an undefinable gesture sprang up the marble steps,
the bronze doors closed behind him, and half an hour later the loiterers
slouched away, and the frightened pigeon returned to its perch in the
arms of Fate.

I put on my hat and went out into the park for a little walk before
dinner. As I crossed the central driveway a group of officers passed, and
one of them called out, ""Hello, Hildred,"" and came back to shake hands
with me. It was my cousin Louis, who stood smiling and tapping his
spurred heels with his riding-whip.

""Just back from Westchester,"" he said; ""been doing the bucolic; milk and
curds, you know, dairy-maids in sunbonnets, who say 'haeow' and 'I don't
think' when you tell them they are pretty. I'm nearly dead for a square
meal at Delmonico's. What's the news?""

""There is none,"" I replied pleasantly. ""I saw your regiment coming in this
morning.""

""Did you? I didn't see you. Where were you?""

""In Mr. Wilde's window.""

""Oh, hell!"" he began impatiently, ""that man is stark mad! I don't
understand why you--""

He saw how annoyed I felt by this outburst, and begged my pardon.

""Really, old chap,"" he said, ""I don't mean to run down a man you like,
but for the life of me I can't see what the deuce you find in common with
Mr. Wilde. He's not well bred, to put it generously; he is hideously
deformed; his head is the head of a criminally insane person. You know
yourself he's been in an asylum--""

""So have I,"" I interrupted calmly.

Louis looked startled and confused for a moment, but recovered and
slapped me heartily on the shoulder. ""You were completely cured,"" he
began; but I stopped him again.

""I suppose you mean that I was simply acknowledged never to have been
insane.""

""Of course that--that's what I meant,"" he laughed.

I disliked his laugh because I knew it was forced, but I nodded gaily and
asked him where he was going. Louis looked after his brother officers who
had now almost reached Broadway.

""We had intended to sample a Brunswick cocktail, but to tell you the
truth I was anxious for an excuse to go and see Hawberk instead. Come
along, I'll make you my excuse.""

We found old Hawberk, neatly attired in a fresh spring suit, standing at
the door of his shop and sniffing the air.

""I had just decided to take Constance for a little stroll before dinner,""
he replied to the impetuous volley of questions from Louis. ""We thought
of walking on the park terrace along the North River.""

At that moment Constance appeared and grew pale and rosy by turns as
Louis bent over her small gloved fingers. I tried to excuse myself,
alleging an engagement uptown, but Louis and Constance would not listen,
and I saw I was expected to remain and engage old Hawberk's attention.
After all it would be just as well if I kept my eye on Louis, I thought,
and when they hailed a Spring Street horse-car, I got in after them and
took my seat beside the armourer.

The beautiful line of parks and granite terraces overlooking the wharves
along the North River, which were built in 1910 and finished in the
autumn of 1917, had become one of the most popular promenades in the
metropolis. They extended from the battery to 190th Street, overlooking
the noble river and affording a fine view of the Jersey shore and the
Highlands opposite. Cafés and restaurants were scattered here and there
among the trees, and twice a week military bands from the garrison played
in the kiosques on the parapets.

We sat down in the sunshine on the bench at the foot of the equestrian
statue of General Sheridan. Constance tipped her sunshade to shield her
eyes, and she and Louis began a murmuring conversation which was
impossible to catch. Old Hawberk, leaning on his ivory headed cane,
lighted an excellent cigar, the mate to which I politely refused, and
smiled at vacancy. The sun hung low above the Staten Island woods, and
the bay was dyed with golden hues reflected from the sun-warmed sails of
the shipping in the harbour.

Brigs, schooners, yachts, clumsy ferry-boats, their decks swarming with
people, railroad transports carrying lines of brown, blue and white
freight cars, stately sound steamers, déclassé tramp steamers, coasters,
dredgers, scows, and everywhere pervading the entire bay impudent little
tugs puffing and whistling officiously;--these were the craft which
churned the sunlight waters as far as the eye could reach. In calm
contrast to the hurry of sailing vessel and steamer a silent fleet of
white warships lay motionless in midstream.

Constance's merry laugh aroused me from my reverie.

""What _are_ you staring at?"" she inquired.

""Nothing--the fleet,"" I smiled.

Then Louis told us what the vessels were, pointing out each by its
relative position to the old Red Fort on Governor's Island.

""That little cigar shaped thing is a torpedo boat,"" he explained; ""there
are four more lying close together. They are the _Tarpon_, the _Falcon_,
the _Sea Fox_, and the _Octopus_. The gun-boats just above are the
_Princeton_, the _Champlain_, the _Still Water_ and the _Erie_. Next to
them lie the cruisers _Faragut_ and _Los Angeles_, and above them the
battle ships _California_, and _Dakota_, and the _Washington_ which is
the flag ship. Those two squatty looking chunks of metal which are
anchored there off Castle William are the double turreted monitors
_Terrible_ and _Magnificent_; behind them lies the ram, _Osceola_.""

Constance looked at him with deep approval in her beautiful eyes. ""What
loads of things you know for a soldier,"" she said, and we all joined in
the laugh which followed.

Presently Louis rose with a nod to us and offered his arm to Constance,
and they strolled away along the river wall. Hawberk watched them for a
moment and then turned to me.

""Mr. Wilde was right,"" he said. ""I have found the missing tassets and
left cuissard of the 'Prince's Emblazoned,' in a vile old junk garret in
Pell Street.""

""998?"" I inquired, with a smile.

""Yes.""

""Mr. Wilde is a very intelligent man,"" I observed.

""I want to give him the credit of this most important discovery,""
continued Hawberk. ""And I intend it shall be known that he is entitled
to the fame of it.""

""He won't thank you for that,"" I answered sharply; ""please say nothing
about it.""

""Do you know what it is worth?"" said Hawberk.

""No, fifty dollars, perhaps.""

""It is valued at five hundred, but the owner of the 'Prince's Emblazoned'
will give two thousand dollars to the person who completes his suit; that
reward also belongs to Mr. Wilde.""

""He doesn't want it! He refuses it!"" I answered angrily. ""What do you
know about Mr. Wilde? He doesn't need the money. He is rich--or will
be--richer than any living man except myself. What will we care for money
then--what will we care, he and I, when--when--""

""When what?"" demanded Hawberk, astonished.

""You will see,"" I replied, on my guard again.

He looked at me narrowly, much as Doctor Archer used to, and I knew he
thought I was mentally unsound. Perhaps it was fortunate for him that he
did not use the word lunatic just then.

""No,"" I replied to his unspoken thought, ""I am not mentally weak; my mind
is as healthy as Mr. Wilde's. I do not care to explain just yet what I
have on hand, but it is an investment which will pay more than mere gold,
silver and precious stones. It will secure the happiness and prosperity
of a continent--yes, a hemisphere!""

""Oh,"" said Hawberk.

""And eventually,"" I continued more quietly, ""it will secure the happiness
of the whole world.""

""And incidentally your own happiness and prosperity as well as Mr.
Wilde's?""

""Exactly,"" I smiled. But I could have throttled him for taking that tone.

He looked at me in silence for a while and then said very gently, ""Why
don't you give up your books and studies, Mr. Castaigne, and take a tramp
among the mountains somewhere or other? You used to be fond of fishing.
Take a cast or two at the trout in the Rangelys.""

""I don't care for fishing any more,"" I answered, without a shade of
annoyance in my voice.

""You used to be fond of everything,"" he continued; ""athletics, yachting,
shooting, riding--""

""I have never cared to ride since my fall,"" I said quietly.

""Ah, yes, your fall,"" he repeated, looking away from me.

I thought this nonsense had gone far enough, so I brought the
conversation back to Mr. Wilde; but he was scanning my face again in a
manner highly offensive to me.

""Mr. Wilde,"" he repeated, ""do you know what he did this afternoon? He
came downstairs and nailed a sign over the hall door next to mine; it
read:

""MR. WILDE,
REPAIRER OF REPUTATIONS.
Third Bell.

""Do you know what a Repairer of Reputations can be?""

""I do,"" I replied, suppressing the rage within.

""Oh,"" he said again.

Louis and Constance came strolling by and stopped to ask if we would join
them. Hawberk looked at his watch. At the same moment a puff of smoke
shot from the casemates of Castle William, and the boom of the sunset gun
rolled across the water and was re-echoed from the Highlands opposite.
The flag came running down from the flag-pole, the bugles sounded on the
white decks of the warships, and the first electric light sparkled out
from the Jersey shore.

As I turned into the city with Hawberk I heard Constance murmur something
to Louis which I did not understand; but Louis whispered ""My darling,"" in
reply; and again, walking ahead with Hawberk through the square I heard a
murmur of ""sweetheart,"" and ""my own Constance,"" and I knew the time had
nearly arrived when I should speak of important matters with my cousin
Louis.




III

One morning early in May I stood before the steel safe in my bedroom,
trying on the golden jewelled crown. The diamonds flashed fire as I
turned to the mirror, and the heavy beaten gold burned like a halo about
my head. I remembered Camilla's agonized scream and the awful words
echoing through the dim streets of Carcosa. They were the last lines in
the first act, and I dared not think of what followed--dared not, even
in the spring sunshine, there in my own room, surrounded with familiar
objects, reassured by the bustle from the street and the voices of the
servants in the hallway outside. For those poisoned words had dropped
slowly into my heart, as death-sweat drops upon a bed-sheet and is
absorbed. Trembling, I put the diadem from my head and wiped my forehead,
but I thought of Hastur and of my own rightful ambition, and I remembered
Mr. Wilde as I had last left him, his face all torn and bloody from the
claws of that devil's creature, and what he said--ah, what he said. The
alarm bell in the safe began to whirr harshly, and I knew my time was up;
but I would not heed it, and replacing the flashing circlet upon my head
I turned defiantly to the mirror. I stood for a long time absorbed in the
changing expression of my own eyes. The mirror reflected a face which was
like my own, but whiter, and so thin that I hardly recognized it And all
the time I kept repeating between my clenched teeth, ""The day has come!
the day has come!"" while the alarm in the safe whirred and clamoured, and
the diamonds sparkled and flamed above my brow. I heard a door open but
did not heed it. It was only when I saw two faces in the mirror:--it was
only when another face rose over my shoulder, and two other eyes met
mine. I wheeled like a flash and seized a long knife from my
dressing-table, and my cousin sprang back very pale, crying: ""Hildred!
for God's sake!"" then as my hand fell, he said: ""It is I, Louis, don't
you know me?"" I stood silent. I could not have spoken for my life. He
walked up to me and took the knife from my hand.

""What is all this?"" he inquired, in a gentle voice. ""Are you ill?""

""No,"" I replied. But I doubt if he heard me.

""Come, come, old fellow,"" he cried, ""take off that brass crown and toddle
into the study. Are you going to a masquerade? What's all this theatrical
tinsel anyway?""

I was glad he thought the crown was made of brass and paste, yet I didn't
like him any the better for thinking so. I let him take it from my hand,
knowing it was best to humour him. He tossed the splendid diadem in the
air, and catching it, turned to me smiling.

""It's dear at fifty cents,"" he said. ""What's it for?""

I did not answer, but took the circlet from his hands, and placing it in
the safe shut the massive steel door. The alarm ceased its infernal din
at once. He watched me curiously, but did not seem to notice the sudden
ceasing of the alarm. He did, however, speak of the safe as a biscuit
box. Fearing lest he might examine the combination I led the way into my
study. Louis threw himself on the sofa and flicked at flies with his
eternal riding-whip. He wore his fatigue uniform with the braided jacket
and jaunty cap, and I noticed that his riding-boots were all splashed
with red mud.

""Where have you been?"" I inquired.

""Jumping mud creeks in Jersey,"" he said. ""I haven't had time to change
yet; I was rather in a hurry to see you. Haven't you got a glass of
something? I'm dead tired; been in the saddle twenty-four hours.""

I gave him some brandy from my medicinal store, which he drank with a
grimace.

""Damned bad stuff,"" he observed. ""I'll give you an address where they
sell brandy that is brandy.""

""It's good enough for my needs,"" I said indifferently. ""I use it to rub
my chest with."" He stared and flicked at another fly.

""See here, old fellow,"" he began, ""I've got something to suggest to you.
It's four years now that you've shut yourself up here like an owl, never
going anywhere, never taking any healthy exercise, never doing a damn
thing but poring over those books up there on the mantelpiece.""

He glanced along the row of shelves. ""Napoleon, Napoleon, Napoleon!"" he
read. ""For heaven's sake, have you nothing but Napoleons there?""

""I wish they were bound in gold,"" I said. ""But wait, yes, there is
another book, _The King in Yellow_."" I looked him steadily in the
eye.

""Have you never read it?"" I asked.

""I? No, thank God! I don't want to be driven crazy.""

I saw he regretted his speech as soon as he had uttered it. There is only
one word which I loathe more than I do lunatic and that word is crazy.
But I controlled myself and asked him why he thought _The King in
Yellow_ dangerous.

""Oh, I don't know,"" he said, hastily. ""I only remember the excitement it
created and the denunciations from pulpit and Press. I believe the author
shot himself after bringing forth this monstrosity, didn't he?""

""I understand he is still alive,"" I answered.

""That's probably true,"" he muttered; ""bullets couldn't kill a fiend like
that.""

""It is a book of great truths,"" I said.

""Yes,"" he replied, ""of 'truths' which send men frantic and blast their
lives. I don't care if the thing is, as they say, the very supreme
essence of art. It's a crime to have written it, and I for one shall
never open its pages.""

""Is that what you have come to tell me?"" I asked.

""No,"" he said, ""I came to tell you that I am going to be married.""

I believe for a moment my heart ceased to beat, but I kept my eyes on his
face.

""Yes,"" he continued, smiling happily, ""married to the sweetest girl on
earth.""

""Constance Hawberk,"" I said mechanically.

""How did you know?"" he cried, astonished. ""I didn't know it myself until
that evening last April, when we strolled down to the embankment before
dinner.""

""When is it to be?"" I asked.

""It was to have been next September, but an hour ago a despatch came
ordering our regiment to the Presidio, San Francisco. We leave at noon
to-morrow. To-morrow,"" he repeated. ""Just think, Hildred, to-morrow I
shall be the happiest fellow that ever drew breath in this jolly world,
for Constance will go with me.""

I offered him my hand in congratulation, and he seized and shook it like
the good-natured fool he was--or pretended to be.

""I am going to get my squadron as a wedding present,"" he rattled on.
""Captain and Mrs. Louis Castaigne, eh, Hildred?""

Then he told me where it was to be and who were to be there, and made me
promise to come and be best man. I set my teeth and listened to his
boyish chatter without showing what I felt, but--

I was getting to the limit of my endurance, and when he jumped up, and,
switching his spurs till they jingled, said he must go, I did not detain
him.

""There's one thing I want to ask of you,"" I said quietly.

""Out with it, it's promised,"" he laughed.

""I want you to meet me for a quarter of an hour's talk to-night.""

""Of course, if you wish,"" he said, somewhat puzzled. ""Where?""

""Anywhere, in the park there.""

""What time, Hildred?""

""Midnight.""

""What in the name of--"" he began, but checked himself and laughingly
assented. I watched him go down the stairs and hurry away, his sabre
banging at every stride. He turned into Bleecker Street, and I knew he
was going to see Constance. I gave him ten minutes to disappear and then
followed in his footsteps, taking with me the jewelled crown and the
silken robe embroidered with the Yellow Sign. When I turned into Bleecker
Street, and entered the doorway which bore the sign--

MR. WILDE,
REPAIRER OF REPUTATIONS.
Third Bell.

I saw old Hawberk moving about in his shop, and imagined I heard
Constance's voice in the parlour; but I avoided them both and hurried up
the trembling stairways to Mr. Wilde's apartment. I knocked and entered
without ceremony. Mr. Wilde lay groaning on the floor, his face covered
with blood, his clothes torn to shreds. Drops of blood were scattered
about over the carpet, which had also been ripped and frayed in the
evidently recent struggle.

""It's that cursed cat,"" he said, ceasing his groans, and turning his
colourless eyes to me; ""she attacked me while I was asleep. I believe she
will kill me yet.""

This was too much, so I went into the kitchen, and, seizing a hatchet
from the pantry, started to find the infernal beast and settle her then
and there. My search was fruitless, and after a while I gave it up and
came back to find Mr. Wilde squatting on his high chair by the table. He
had washed his face and changed his clothes. The great furrows which the
cat's claws had ploughed up in his face he had filled with collodion, and
a rag hid the wound in his throat. I told him I should kill the cat when
I came across her, but he only shook his head and turned to the open
ledger before him. He read name after name of the people who had come to
him in regard to their reputation, and the sums he had amassed were
startling.

""I put on the screws now and then,"" he explained.

""One day or other some of these people will assassinate you,"" I insisted.

""Do you think so?"" he said, rubbing his mutilated ears.

It was useless to argue with him, so I took down the manuscript entitled
Imperial Dynasty of America, for the last time I should ever take it down
in Mr. Wilde's study. I read it through, thrilling and trembling with
pleasure. When I had finished Mr. Wilde took the manuscript and, turning
to the dark passage which leads from his study to his bed-chamber,
called out in a loud voice, ""Vance."" Then for the first time, I noticed a
man crouching there in the shadow. How I had overlooked him during my
search for the cat, I cannot imagine.

""Vance, come in,"" cried Mr. Wilde.

The figure rose and crept towards us, and I shall never forget the face
that he raised to mine, as the light from the window illuminated it.

""Vance, this is Mr. Castaigne,"" said Mr. Wilde. Before he had finished
speaking, the man threw himself on the ground before the table, crying
and grasping, ""Oh, God! Oh, my God! Help me! Forgive me! Oh, Mr.
Castaigne, keep that man away. You cannot, you cannot mean it! You are
different--save me! I am broken down--I was in a madhouse and now--when
all was coming right--when I had forgotten the King--the King in Yellow
and--but I shall go mad again--I shall go mad--""

His voice died into a choking rattle, for Mr. Wilde had leapt on him and
his right hand encircled the man's throat. When Vance fell in a heap on
the floor, Mr. Wilde clambered nimbly into his chair again, and rubbing
his mangled ears with the stump of his hand, turned to me and asked me
for the ledger. I reached it down from the shelf and he opened it. After
a moment's searching among the beautifully written pages, he coughed
complacently, and pointed to the name Vance.

""Vance,"" he read aloud, ""Osgood Oswald Vance."" At the sound of his name,
the man on the floor raised his head and turned a convulsed face to Mr.
Wilde. His eyes were injected with blood, his lips tumefied. ""Called
April 28th,"" continued Mr. Wilde. ""Occupation, cashier in the Seaforth
National Bank; has served a term of forgery at Sing Sing, from whence he
was transferred to the Asylum for the Criminal Insane. Pardoned by the
Governor of New York, and discharged from the Asylum, January 19, 1918.
Reputation damaged at Sheepshead Bay. Rumours that he lives beyond his
income. Reputation to be repaired at once. Retainer $1,500.

""Note.--Has embezzled sums amounting to $30,000 since March 20, 1919,
excellent family, and secured present position through uncle's influence.
Father, President of Seaforth Bank.""

I looked at the man on the floor.

""Get up, Vance,"" said Mr. Wilde in a gentle voice. Vance rose as if
hypnotized. ""He will do as we suggest now,"" observed Mr. Wilde, and
opening the manuscript, he read the entire history of the Imperial
Dynasty of America. Then in a kind and soothing murmur he ran over the
important points with Vance, who stood like one stunned. His eyes were so
blank and vacant that I imagined he had become half-witted, and remarked
it to Mr. Wilde who replied that it was of no consequence anyway. Very
patiently we pointed out to Vance what his share in the affair would be,
and he seemed to understand after a while. Mr. Wilde explained the
manuscript, using several volumes on Heraldry, to substantiate the result
of his researches. He mentioned the establishment of the Dynasty in
Carcosa, the lakes which connected Hastur, Aldebaran and the mystery of
the Hyades. He spoke of Cassilda and Camilla, and sounded the cloudy
depths of Demhe, and the Lake of Hali. ""The scolloped tatters of the King
in Yellow must hide Yhtill forever,"" he muttered, but I do not believe
Vance heard him. Then by degrees he led Vance along the ramifications of
the Imperial family, to Uoht and Thale, from Naotalba and Phantom of
Truth, to Aldones, and then tossing aside his manuscript and notes, he
began the wonderful story of the Last King. Fascinated and thrilled I
watched him. He threw up his head, his long arms were stretched out in a
magnificent gesture of pride and power, and his eyes blazed deep in their
sockets like two emeralds. Vance listened stupefied. As for me, when at
last Mr. Wilde had finished, and pointing to me, cried, ""The cousin of
the King!"" my head swam with excitement.

Controlling myself with a superhuman effort, I explained to Vance why I
alone was worthy of the crown and why my cousin must be exiled or die.
I made him understand that my cousin must never marry, even after
renouncing all his claims, and how that least of all he should marry the
daughter of the Marquis of Avonshire and bring England into the question.
I showed him a list of thousands of names which Mr. Wilde had drawn up;
every man whose name was there had received the Yellow Sign which no
living human being dared disregard. The city, the state, the whole land,
were ready to rise and tremble before the Pallid Mask.

The time had come, the people should know the son of Hastur, and the
whole world bow to the black stars which hang in the sky over Carcosa.

Vance leaned on the table, his head buried in his hands. Mr. Wilde drew
a rough sketch on the margin of yesterday's _Herald_ with a bit of
lead pencil. It was a plan of Hawberk's rooms. Then he wrote out the
order and affixed the seal, and shaking like a palsied man I signed my
first writ of execution with my name Hildred-Rex.

Mr. Wilde clambered to the floor and unlocking the cabinet, took a long
square box from the first shelf. This he brought to the table and opened.
A new knife lay in the tissue paper inside and I picked it up and handed
it to Vance, along with the order and the plan of Hawberk's apartment.
Then Mr. Wilde told Vance he could go; and he went, shambling like an
outcast of the slums.

I sat for a while watching the daylight fade behind the square tower of
the Judson Memorial Church, and finally, gathering up the manuscript and
notes, took my hat and started for the door.

Mr. Wilde watched me in silence. When I had stepped into the hall I
looked back. Mr. Wilde's small eyes were still fixed on me. Behind him,
the shadows gathered in the fading light. Then I closed the door behind
me and went out into the darkening streets.

I had eaten nothing since breakfast, but I was not hungry. A wretched,
half-starved creature, who stood looking across the street at the Lethal
Chamber, noticed me and came up to tell me a tale of misery. I gave him
money, I don't know why, and he went away without thanking me. An
hour later another outcast approached and whined his story. I had a blank
bit of paper in my pocket, on which was traced the Yellow Sign, and I
handed it to him. He looked at it stupidly for a moment, and then with an
uncertain glance at me, folded it with what seemed to me exaggerated care
and placed it in his bosom.

The electric lights were sparkling among the trees, and the new moon
shone in the sky above the Lethal Chamber. It was tiresome waiting in the
square; I wandered from the Marble Arch to the artillery stables and back
again to the lotos fountain. The flowers and grass exhaled a fragrance
which troubled me. The jet of the fountain played in the moonlight, and
the musical splash of falling drops reminded me of the tinkle of chained
mail in Hawberk's shop. But it was not so fascinating, and the dull
sparkle of the moonlight on the water brought no such sensations of
exquisite pleasure, as when the sunshine played over the polished steel
of a corselet on Hawberk's knee. I watched the bats darting and turning
above the water plants in the fountain basin, but their rapid, jerky
flight set my nerves on edge, and I went away again to walk aimlessly to
and fro among the trees.

The artillery stables were dark, but in the cavalry barracks the
officers' windows were brilliantly lighted, and the sallyport was
constantly filled with troopers in fatigue, carrying straw and harness
and baskets filled with tin dishes.

Twice the mounted sentry at the gates was changed while I wandered up and
down the asphalt walk. I looked at my watch. It was nearly time. The
lights in the barracks went out one by one, the barred gate was closed,
and every minute or two an officer passed in through the side wicket,
leaving a rattle of accoutrements and a jingle of spurs on the night air.
The square had become very silent. The last homeless loiterer had been
driven away by the grey-coated park policeman, the car tracks along
Wooster Street were deserted, and the only sound which broke the
stillness was the stamping of the sentry's horse and the ring of his
sabre against the saddle pommel. In the barracks, the officers' quarters
were still lighted, and military servants passed and repassed before the
bay windows. Twelve o'clock sounded from the new spire of St. Francis
Xavier, and at the last stroke of the sad-toned bell a figure passed
through the wicket beside the portcullis, returned the salute of the
sentry, and crossing the street entered the square and advanced toward
the Benedick apartment house.

""Louis,"" I called.

The man pivoted on his spurred heels and came straight toward me.

""Is that you, Hildred?""

""Yes, you are on time.""

I took his offered hand, and we strolled toward the Lethal Chamber.

He rattled on about his wedding and the graces of Constance, and their
future prospects, calling my attention to his captain's shoulder-straps,
and the triple gold arabesque on his sleeve and fatigue cap. I believe I
listened as much to the music of his spurs and sabre as I did to his
boyish babble, and at last we stood under the elms on the Fourth Street
corner of the square opposite the Lethal Chamber. Then he laughed and
asked me what I wanted with him. I motioned him to a seat on a bench
under the electric light, and sat down beside him. He looked at me
curiously, with that same searching glance which I hate and fear so in
doctors. I felt the insult of his look, but he did not know it, and I
carefully concealed my feelings.

""Well, old chap,"" he inquired, ""what can I do for you?""

I drew from my pocket the manuscript and notes of the Imperial Dynasty
of America, and looking him in the eye said:

""I will tell you. On your word as a soldier, promise me to read this
manuscript from beginning to end, without asking me a question. Promise
me to read these notes in the same way, and promise me to listen to what
I have to tell later.""

""I promise, if you wish it,"" he said pleasantly. ""Give me the paper,
Hildred.""

He began to read, raising his eyebrows with a puzzled, whimsical air,
which made me tremble with suppressed anger. As he advanced his, eyebrows
contracted, and his lips seemed to form the word ""rubbish.""

Then he looked slightly bored, but apparently for my sake read, with an
attempt at interest, which presently ceased to be an effort He started
when in the closely written pages he came to his own name, and when he
came to mine he lowered the paper, and looked sharply at me for a moment
But he kept his word, and resumed his reading, and I let the half-formed
question die on his lips unanswered. When he came to the end and read the
signature of Mr. Wilde, he folded the paper carefully and returned it to
me. I handed him the notes, and he settled back, pushing his fatigue cap
up to his forehead, with a boyish gesture, which I remembered so well in
school. I watched his face as he read, and when he finished I took the
notes with the manuscript, and placed them in my pocket. Then I unfolded
a scroll marked with the Yellow Sign. He saw the sign, but he did not
seem to recognize it, and I called his attention to it somewhat sharply.

""Well,"" he said, ""I see it. What is it?""

""It is the Yellow Sign,"" I said angrily.

""Oh, that's it, is it?"" said Louis, in that flattering voice, which
Doctor Archer used to employ with me, and would probably have employed
again, had I not settled his affair for him.

I kept my rage down and answered as steadily as possible, ""Listen, you
have engaged your word?""

""I am listening, old chap,"" he replied soothingly.

I began to speak very calmly.

""Dr. Archer, having by some means become possessed of the secret of the
Imperial Succession, attempted to deprive me of my right, alleging that
because of a fall from my horse four years ago, I had become mentally
deficient. He presumed to place me under restraint in his own house in
hopes of either driving me insane or poisoning me. I have not forgotten
it. I visited him last night and the interview was final.""

Louis turned quite pale, but did not move. I resumed triumphantly, ""There
are yet three people to be interviewed in the interests of Mr. Wilde and
myself. They are my cousin Louis, Mr. Hawberk, and his daughter
Constance.""

Louis sprang to his feet and I arose also, and flung the paper marked
with the Yellow Sign to the ground.

""Oh, I don't need that to tell you what I have to say,"" I cried, with a
laugh of triumph. ""You must renounce the crown to me, do you hear, to
_me_.""

Louis looked at me with a startled air, but recovering himself said
kindly, ""Of course I renounce the--what is it I must renounce?""

""The crown,"" I said angrily.

""Of course,"" he answered, ""I renounce it. Come, old chap, I'll walk back
to your rooms with you.""

""Don't try any of your doctor's tricks on me,"" I cried, trembling with
fury. ""Don't act as if you think I am insane.""

""What nonsense,"" he replied. ""Come, it's getting late, Hildred.""

""No,"" I shouted, ""you must listen. You cannot marry, I forbid it. Do you
hear? I forbid it. You shall renounce the crown, and in reward I grant
you exile, but if you refuse you shall die.""

He tried to calm me, but I was roused at last, and drawing my long knife
barred his way.

Then I told him how they would find Dr. Archer in the cellar with his
throat open, and I laughed in his face when I thought of Vance and his
knife, and the order signed by me.

""Ah, you are the King,"" I cried, ""but I shall be King. Who are you to
keep me from Empire over all the habitable earth! I was born the cousin
of a king, but I shall be King!""

Louis stood white and rigid before me. Suddenly a man came running up
Fourth Street, entered the gate of the Lethal Temple, traversed the path
to the bronze doors at full speed, and plunged into the death chamber
with the cry of one demented, and I laughed until I wept tears, for I had
recognized Vance, and knew that Hawberk and his daughter were no longer
in my way.

""Go,"" I cried to Louis, ""you have ceased to be a menace. You will never
marry Constance now, and if you marry any one else in your exile, I will
visit you as I did my doctor last night. Mr. Wilde takes charge of you
to-morrow."" Then I turned and darted into South Fifth Avenue, and with a
cry of terror Louis dropped his belt and sabre and followed me like the
wind. I heard him close behind me at the corner of Bleecker Street, and I
dashed into the doorway under Hawberk's sign. He cried, ""Halt, or I
fire!"" but when he saw that I flew up the stairs leaving Hawberk's shop
below, he left me, and I heard him hammering and shouting at their door
as though it were possible to arouse the dead.

Mr. Wilde's door was open, and I entered crying, ""It is done, it is done!
Let the nations rise and look upon their King!"" but I could not find Mr.
Wilde, so I went to the cabinet and took the splendid diadem from its
case. Then I drew on the white silk robe, embroidered with the Yellow
Sign, and placed the crown upon my head. At last I was King, King by my
right in Hastur, King because I knew the mystery of the Hyades, and my
mind had sounded the depths of the Lake of Hali. I was King! The first
grey pencillings of dawn would raise a tempest which would shake two
hemispheres. Then as I stood, my every nerve pitched to the highest
tension, faint with the joy and splendour of my thought, without, in the
dark passage, a man groaned.

I seized the tallow dip and sprang to the door. The cat passed me like a
demon, and the tallow dip went out, but my long knife flew swifter than
she, and I heard her screech, and I knew that my knife had found her. For
a moment I listened to her tumbling and thumping about in the darkness,
and then when her frenzy ceased, I lighted a lamp and raised it over my
head. Mr. Wilde lay on the floor with his throat torn open. At first I
thought he was dead, but as I looked, a green sparkle came into his
sunken eyes, his mutilated hand trembled, and then a spasm stretched his
mouth from ear to ear. For a moment my terror and despair gave place to
hope, but as I bent over him his eyeballs rolled clean around in his
head, and he died. Then while I stood, transfixed with rage and despair,
seeing my crown, my empire, every hope and every ambition, my very life,
lying prostrate there with the dead master, _they_ came, seized me
from behind, and bound me until my veins stood out like cords, and my
voice failed with the paroxysms of my frenzied screams. But I still
raged, bleeding and infuriated among them, and more than one policeman
felt my sharp teeth. Then when I could no longer move they came nearer; I
saw old Hawberk, and behind him my cousin Louis' ghastly face, and
farther away, in the corner, a woman, Constance, weeping softly.

""Ah! I see it now!"" I shrieked. ""You have seized the throne and the
empire. Woe! woe to you who are crowned with the crown of the King in
Yellow!""


[EDITOR'S NOTE.--Mr. Castaigne died yesterday in the Asylum for Criminal
Insane.]


","Over the United States stretched an unseen network of secret intrigue woven tirelessly night and day by the busy enemies of civilisation—Reds, parlour-socialists, enemy-aliens, terrorists, Bolsheviki, pseudo-intellectuals, I. W. W.'s, social faddists, and amateur meddlers of every nuance—all the various varieties of the vicious, witless, and mentally unhinged—brought together through the ""cohesive power of plunder"" and the degeneration of cranial tissue.

All over the United States the various departmental divisions of the Secret Service were busily following up these threads of intrigue leading everywhere through the obscurity of this vast and secret maze.

To meet the constantly increasing danger of physical violence and to uncover secret plots threatening sabotage and revolution, there were capable agents in every branch of the Secret Service, both Federal and State.

But in the first months of 1919 something more terrifying than physical violence suddenly threatened civilised America,—a wild, grotesque, incredible threat of a war on human minds!

And, little by little, the United States Government became convinced that this ghastly menace was no dream of a disordered imagination, but that it was real: that among the enemies of civilisation there actually existed a few powerful but perverted minds capable of wielding psychic forces as terrific weapons: that by the sinister use of psychic knowledge controlling these mighty forces the very minds of mankind could be stealthily approached, seized, controlled and turned upon civilisation to aid in the world's destruction.

In terrible alarm the Government turned to England for advice. But Sir William Crookes was dead.

However, in England, Sir Conan Doyle immediately took up the matter, and in America Professor Hyslop was called into consultation.

And then, when the Government was beginning to realise what this awful menace meant, and that there were actually in the United States possibly half a dozen people who already had begun to carry on a diabolical warfare by means of psychic power, for the purpose of enslaving and controlling the very minds of men,—then, in the terrible moment of discovery, a young girl landed in America after fourteen years' absence in Asia.

And this was the amazing girl that Victor Cleves had just married, at Recklow's suggestion, and in the line of professional duty,—and moral duty, perhaps.

It had been a brief, matter-of-fact ceremony. John Recklow, of the Secret Service, was there; also Benton and Selden of the same service.

The bride's lips were unresponsive; cold as the touch of the groom's unsteady hand.

She looked down at her new ring in a blank sort of way, gave her hand listlessly to Recklow and to the others in turn, whispered a timidly comprehensive ""Thank you,"" and walked away beside Cleves as though dazed.

There was a taxicab waiting. Tressa entered. Recklow came out and spoke to Cleves in a low voice.

""Don't worry,"" replied Cleves dryly. ""That's why I married her.""

""Where are you going now?"" inquired Recklow.

""Back to my apartment.""

""Why don't you take her away for a month?""

Cleves flushed with annoyance: ""This is no occasion for a wedding trip. You understand that, Recklow.""

""I understand. But we ought to give her a breathing space. She's had nothing but trouble. She's worn out.""

Cleves hesitated: ""I can guard her better in the apartment. Isn't it safer to go back there, where your people are always watching the street and house day and night?""

""In a way it might be safer, perhaps. But that girl is nearly exhausted. And her value to us is unlimited. She may be the vital factor in this fight with anarchy. Her weapon is her mind. And it's got to have a chance to rest.""

Cleves, with one hand on the cab door, looked around impatiently.

""Do you, also, conclude that the psychic factor is actually part of this damned problem of Bolshevism?""

Recklow's cool eyes measured him: ""Do you?""

""My God, Recklow, I don't know—after what my own eyes have seen.""

""I don't know either,"" said the other calmly, ""but I am taking no chances. I don't attempt to explain certain things that have occurred. But if it be true that a misuse of psychic ability by foreigners—Asiatics—among the anarchists is responsible for some of the devilish things being done in the United States, then your wife's unparalleled knowledge of the occult East is absolutely vital to us. And so I say, better take her away somewhere and give her mind a chance to recover from the incessant strain of these tragic years.""

The two men stood silent for a moment, then Recklow went to the window of the taxicab.

""I have been suggesting a trip into the country, Mrs. Cleves,"" he said pleasantly, ""—into the real country, somewhere,—a month's quiet in the woods, perhaps. Wouldn't it appeal to you?""

Cleves turned to catch her low-voiced answer.

""I should like it very much,"" she said in that odd, hushed way of speaking, which seemed to have altered her own voice and manner since the ceremony a little while before.

Driving back to his apartment beside her, he strove to realise that this girl was his wife.

One of her gloves lay across her lap, and on it rested a slender hand. And on one finger was his ring.

But Victor Cleves could not bring himself to believe that this brand-new ring really signified anything to him,—that it had altered his own life in any way. But always his incredulous eyes returned to that slim finger resting there, unstirring, banded with a narrow circlet of virgin gold.

In the apartment they did not seem to know exactly what to do or say—what attitude to assume—what effort to make.

Tressa went into her own room, removed her hat and furs, and came slowly back into the living-room, where Cleves still stood gazing absently out of the window.

A fine rain was falling.

They seated themselves. There seemed nothing better to do.

He said, politely: ""In regard to going away for a rest, you wouldn't care for the North Woods, I fancy, unless you like winter sports. Do you?""

""I like sunlight and green leaves,"" she said in that odd, still voice.

""Then, if it would please you to go South for a few weeks' rest——""

""Would it inconvenience you?""

Her manner touched him.

""My dear Miss Norne,"" he began, and checked himself, flushing painfully. The girl blushed, too; then, when he began to laugh, her lovely, bashful smile glimmered for the first time.

""I really can't bring myself to realise that you and I are married,"" he explained, still embarrassed, though smiling.

Her smile became an endeavour. ""I can't believe it either, Mr. Cleves,"" she said. ""I feel rather stunned.""

""Hadn't you better call me Victor—under the circumstances?"" he suggested, striving to speak lightly.

""Yes.... It will not be very easy to say it—not for some time, I think.""

""Tressa?""

""Yes.""

""Yes—what?""

""Yes—Victor.""

""That's the idea,"" he insisted with forced gaiety.

""The thing to do is to face this rather funny situation and take it amiably and with good humour. You'll have your freedom some day, you know.""

""Yes—I—know.""

""And we're already on very good terms. We find each other interesting, don't we?""

""Yes.""

""It even seems to me,"" he ventured, ""it certainly seems to me, at times, as though we are approaching a common basis of—of mutual—er—esteem.""

""Yes. I—I do esteem you, Mr. Cleves.""

""In point of fact,"" he concluded, surprised, ""we are friends—in a way. Wouldn't you call it—friendship?""

""I think so, I think I'd call it that,"" she admitted.

""I think so, too. And that is lucky for us. That makes this crazy situation more comfortable—less—well, perhaps less ponderous.""

The girl assented with a vague smile, but her eyes remained lowered.

""You see,"" he went on, ""when two people are as oddly situated as we are, they're likely to be afraid of being in each other's way. But they ought to get on without being unhappy as long as they are quite confident of each other's friendly consideration. Don't you think so, Tressa?""

Her lowered eyes rested steadily on her ring-finger. ""Yes,"" she said. ""And I am not—unhappy, or—afraid.""

She lifted her blue gaze to his; and, somehow, he thought of her barbaric name, Keuke,—and its Yezidee significance, ""heavenly—azure.""

""Are we really going away together?"" she asked timidly.

""Certainly, if you wish.""

""If you, also, wish it, Mr. Cleves.""

He found himself saying with emphasis that he always wished to do what she desired. And he added, more gently:

""You are tired, Tressa—tired and lonely and unhappy.""

""Tired, but not the—others.""

""Not unhappy?""

""No.""

""Aren't you lonely?""

""Not with you.""

The answer came so naturally, so calmly, that the slight sensation of pleasure it gave him arrived only as an agreeable afterglow.

""We'll go South,"" he said.... ""I'm so glad that you don't feel lonely with me.""

""Will it be warmer where we are going, Mr. Cleves?""

""Yes—you poor child! You need warmth and sunshine, don't you? Was it warm in Yian, where you lived so many years?""

""It was always June in Yian,"" she said under her breath.

She seemed to have fallen into a revery; he watched the sensitive face. Almost imperceptibly it changed; became altered, younger, strangely lovely.

Presently she looked up—and it seemed to him that it was not Tressa Norne at all he saw, but little Keuke—Heavenly Azure—of the Yezidee temple, as she dropped one slim knee over the other and crossed her hands above it.

""It was very beautiful in Yian,"" she said, ""—Yian of the thousand bridges and scented gardens so full of lilies. Even after they took me to the temple, and I thought the world was ending, God's skies still remained soft overhead, and His weather fair and golden.... And when, in the month of the Snake, the Eight Sheiks-el-Djebel came to the temple to spread their shrouds on the rose-marble steps, then, after they had departed, chanting the Prayers for the Dead, each to his Tower of Silence, we temple girls were free for a week.... And once I went with Tchagane—a girl—and with Yulun—another girl—and we took our keutch, which is our luggage, and we went to the yaïlak, or summer pavilion on the Lake of the Ghost. Oh, wonderful,—a silvery world of pale-gilt suns and of moons so frail that the cloud-fleece at high-noon has more substance!""

Her voice died out; she sat gazing down at her spread fingers, on one of which gleamed her wedding-ring.

After a little, she went on dreamily:

""On that week, each three months, we were free.... If a young man should please us....""

""Free?"" he repeated.

""To love,"" she explained coolly.

""Oh."" He nodded, but his face became rather grim.

""There came to me at the yaïlak,"" she went on carelessly, ""one Khassar Noïane—Noïane means Prince—all in a surcoat of gold tissue with green vines embroidered, and wearing a green cap trimmed with dormouse, and green boots inlaid with stiff gold....

""He was so young ... a boy. I laughed. I said: 'Is this a Yaçaoul? An Urdu-envoy of Prince Erlik?'—mocking him as young and thoughtless girls mock—not in unfriendly manner—though I would not endure the touch of any man at all.

""And when I laughed at him, this Eighur boy flew into such a rage! Kai! I was amazed.

""'Sou-sou! Squirrel!' he cried angrily at me. 'Learn the Yacaz, little chatterer! Little mocker of men, it is ten blows with a stick you require, not kisses!'

""At that I whistled my two dogs, Bars and Alaga, for I did not think what he said was funny.

""I said to him: 'You had better go home, Khassar Noïane, for if no man has ever pleased me where I am at liberty to please myself, here on the Lake of the Ghost, then be very certain that no boy can please Keuke-Mongol here or anywhere!'

""And at that—kai! What did he say—that monkey?"" She looked at her husband, her splendid eyes ablaze with wrathful laughter, and made a gesture full of angry grace:

""'Squirrel!' he cries—'little malignant sorceress of Yian! May everything high about you become a sandstorm, and everything long a serpent, and everything broad a toad, and everything——'

""But I had had enough, Victor,"" she added excitedly, ""and I made a wild bee bite him on the lip! What do you think of such a courtship?"" she cried, laughing. But Cleves's face was a study in emotions.

And then, suddenly, the laughing mask seemed to slip from the bewitching features of Keuke Mongol; and there was Tressa Norne—Tressa Cleves—disconcerted, paling a little as the memory of her impulsive confidence in this man beside her began to dawn on her more clearly.

""I—I'm sorry——"" she faltered.... ""You'll think me silly—think evil of me, perhaps——""

She looked into his troubled eyes, then suddenly she took her face into both hands and covered it, sitting very still.

""We'll go South together,"" he said in an uncertain voice.... ""I hope you will try to think of me as a friend.... I'm just troubled because I am so anxious to understand you. That is all.... I'm—I'm troubled, too, because I am anxious that you should think well of me. Will you try, always?""

She nodded.

""I want to be your friend, always,"" he said.

""Thank you, Mr. Cleves.""

It was a strange spot he chose for Tressa—strange but lovely in its own unreal and rather spectral fashion—where a pearl-tinted mist veiled the St. Johns, and made exquisite ghosts of the palmettos, and softened the sun to a silver-gilt wafer pasted on a nacre sky.

It was a still country, where giant water-oaks towered, fantastic under their misty camouflage of moss, and swarming with small birds.

Among the trees the wood-ibis stole; without on the placid glass of the stream the eared grebe floated. There was no wind, no stirring of leaves, no sound save the muffled splash of silver mullet, the breathless whirr of a humming-bird, or the hushed rustle of lizards in the woods.

For Tressa this was the blessed balm that heals,—the balm of silence. And, for the first week, she slept most of the time, or lay in her hammock watching the swarms of small birds creeping and flitting amid the moss-draped labyrinths of the live-oaks at her very door.

It had been a little club house before the war, this bungalow on the St. Johns at Orchid Hammock. Its members had been few and wealthy; but some were dead in France and Flanders, and some still remained overseas, and others continued busy in the North.

And these two young people were quite alone there, save for a negro cook and a maid, and an aged negro kennel-master who wore a scarlet waistcoat and cords too large for his shrunken body, and who pottered, pottered through the fields all day, with his whip clasped behind his bent back and the pointers ranging wide, or plodding in at heel with red tongues lolling.

Twice Cleves went a little way for quail, using Benton's dogs; but even here in this remote spot he dared not move out of view of the little house where Tressa lay asleep.

So he picked up only a few brace of birds, and confined his sport to impaling too-familiar scorpions on the blade of his knife.

And all the while life remained unreal for him; his marriage seemed utterly unbelievable; he could not realise it, could not reconcile himself to conditions so incomprehensible.

Also, ever latent in his mind, was knowledge that made him restless—the knowledge that the young girl he had married had been in love with another man: Sanang.

And there were other thoughts—thoughts which had scarcely even taken the shape of questions.

One morning he came from his room and found Tressa on the veranda in her hammock. She had her moon-lute in her lap.

""You feel better—much better!"" he said gaily, saluting her extended hand.

""Yes. Isn't this heavenly? I begin to believe it is life to me, this pearl-tinted world, and the scent of orange bloom and the stillness of paradise itself.""

She gazed out over the ghostly river. Not a wing stirred its glassy surface.

""Is this dull for you?"" she asked in a low voice.

""Not if you are contented, Tressa.""

""You're so nice about it. Don't you think you might venture a day's real shooting?""

""No, I think I won't,"" he replied.

""On my account?""

""Well—yes.""

""I'm so sorry.""

""It's all right as long as you're getting rested. What is that instrument?""

""My moon-lute.""

""Oh, is that what it's called?""

She nodded, touched the strings. He watched her exquisite hands.

""Shall I?"" she inquired a little shyly.

""Go ahead. I'd like to hear it!""

""I haven't touched it in months—not since I was on the steamer."" She sat up in her hammock and began to swing there; and played and sang while swinging in the flecked shadow of the orange bloom:

""Little Isle of Cispangou,
Isle of iris, isle of cherry,
Tell your tiny maidens merry
Clouds are looming over you!
La-ē-la!
La-ē-la!
All your ocean's but a ferry;
Ships are bringing death to you!
La-ē-lou!
La-ē-lou!
""Little Isle of Cispangou,
Half a thousand ships are sailing;
Captain Death commands each crew;
Lo! the ruddy moon is paling!
La-ē-la!
La-ē-la!
Clouds the dying moon are veiling,
Every cloud a shroud for you!
La-ē-lou!
La-ē-lou!""
""Cispangou,"" she explained, ""is the very, very ancient name, among the Mongols, for Japan.""

""It's not exactly a gay song,"" he said. ""What's it about?""

""Oh, it's a very ancient song about the Mongol invasion of Japan. I know scores and scores of such songs.""

She sang some other songs. Afterward she descended from the hammock and came and sat down beside him on the veranda steps.

""I wish I could amuse you,"" she said wistfully.

""Why do you think I'm bored, Tressa? I'm not at all.""

But she only sighed, lightly, and gathered her knees in both arms.

""I don't know how young men in the Western world are entertained,"" she remarked presently.

""You don't have to entertain me,"" he said, smiling.

""I should be happy to, if I knew how.""

""How are young men entertained in the Orient?""

""Oh, they like songs and stories. But I don't think you do.""

He laughed in spite of himself.

""Do you really wish to entertain me?""

""I do,"" she said seriously.

""Then please perform some of those tricks of magic which you can do so amazingly well.""

Her dawning smile faded a trifle. ""I don't—I haven't——"" She hesitated.

""You haven't your professional paraphernalia with you,"" he suggested.

""Oh—as for that——""

""Don't you need it?""

""For some things—some kinds of things.... I could do—other things——""

He waited. She seemed disconcerted. ""Don't do anything you don't wish to do, Tressa,"" he said.

""I was only—only afraid—that if I should do some little things to amuse you, I might stir—stir up—interfere—encounter some sinister current—and betray myself—betray my whereabouts——""

""Well, for heaven's sake don't venture then!"" he said with emphasis. ""Don't do anything to stir up any other wireless—any Yezidee——""

""I am wondering,"" she reflected, ""just what I dare venture to do to amuse you.""

""Don't bother about me. I wouldn't have you try any psychic stunt down here, and run the chance of stirring up some Asiatic devil somewhere!""

She nodded absently, occupied with her own thoughts, sitting there, chin on hand, her musing eyes intensely blue.

""I think I can amuse you,"" she concluded, ""without bringing any harm to myself.""

""Don't try it, Tressa!—--""

""I'll be very careful. Now, sit quite still—closer to me, please.""

He edged closer; and became conscious of an indefinable freshness in the air that enveloped him, like the scent of something young and growing. But it was no magic odour,—merely the virginal scent of her hair and skin that even clung to her summer gown.

He heard her singing under her breath to herself:

""La-ē-la!
La-ē-la!""
and murmuring caressingly in an unknown tongue.

Then, suddenly in the pale sunshine, scores of little birds came hovering around them, alighting all over them. And he saw them swarming out of the mossy festoons of the water-oaks—scores and scores of tiny birds—Parula warblers, mostly—all flitting fearlessly down to alight upon his shoulders and knees, all keeping up their sweet, dreamy little twittering sound.

""This is wonderful,"" he whispered.

The girl laughed, took several birds on her forefinger.

""This is nothing,"" she said. ""If I only dared—wait a moment!—--"" And, to the Parula warblers:

""Go home, little friends of God!""

The air was filled with the musical whisper of wings. She passed her right arm around her husband's neck.

""Look at the river,"" she said.

""Good God!"" he blurted out. And sat dumb.

For, over the St. John's misty surface, there was the span of a bridge—a strange, marble bridge humped up high in the centre.

And over it were passing thousands of people—he could make them out vaguely—see them passing in two never-ending streams—tinted shapes on the marble bridge.

And now, on the farther shore of the river, he was aware of a city—a vast one, with spectral pagoda shapes against the sky——

Her arm tightened around his neck.

He saw boats on the river—like the grotesque shapes that decorate ancient lacquer.

She rested her face lightly against his cheek.

In his ears was a far confusion of voices—the stir and movement of multitudes—noises on ships, boatmen's cries, the creak of oars.

Then, far and sonorous, quavering across the water from the city, the din of a temple gong.

There were bells, too—very sweet and silvery—camel bells, bells from the Buddhist temples.

He strained his eyes, and thought, amid the pagodas, that there were minarets, also.

Suddenly, clear and ringing came the distant muezzin's cry: ""There is no other god but God!... It is noon. Mussulmans, pray!""

The girl's arm slipped from his neck and she shuddered and pushed him from her.

There was nothing, now, on the river or beyond it but the curtain of hanging mist; no sound except the cry of a gull, sharp and querulous in the vapours overhead.

""Have—have you been amused?"" she asked.

""What did you do to me!"" he demanded harshly.

She smiled and drew a light breath like a sigh.

""God knows what we living do to one another,—or to ourselves,"" she said. ""I only tried to amuse you—after taking counsel with the birds.""

""What was that bridge I saw!""

""The Bridge of Ten Thousand Felicities.""

""And the city?""

""Yian.""

""You lived there?""

""Yes.""

He moistened his dry lips and stole another glance at this very commonplace Florida river. Sky and water were blank and still, and the ghostly trees stood tall, reflected palely in the translucent tide.

""You merely made me visualise what you were thinking about,"" he concluded in a voice which still remained unsteady.

""Did you hear nothing?""

He was silent, remembering the bells and the enormous murmur of a living multitude.

""And—there were the birds, too."" She added, with an uncertain smile: ""I do not mean to worry you.... And you did ask me to amuse you.""

""I don't know how you did it,"" he said harshly. ""And the details—those thousands and thousands of people on the bridge!... And there was one, quite near this end of the bridge, who looked back.... A young girl who turned and laughed at us—""

""That was Yulun.""

""Who?""

""Yulun. I taught her English.""

""A temple girl?""

""Yes. From Black China.""

""How could you make me see her!"" he demanded.

""Why do you ask such things? I do not know how to tell you how I do it.""

""It's a dangerous, uncanny knowledge!"" he blurted out; and suddenly checked himself, for the girl's face went white.

""I don't mean uncanny,"" he hastened to add. ""Because it seems to me that what you did by juggling with invisible currents to which, when attuned, our five senses respond, is on the same lines as the wireless telegraph and telephone.""

She said nothing, but her colour slowly returned.

""You mustn't be so sensitive,"" he added. ""I've no doubt that it's all quite normal—quite explicable on a perfectly scientific basis. Probably it's no more mysterious than a man in an airplane over midocean conversing with people ashore on two continents.""

For the remainder of the day and evening Tressa seemed subdued—not restless, not nervous, but so quiet that, sometimes, glancing at her askance, Cleves involuntarily was reminded of some lithe young creature of the wilds, intensely alert and still, immersed in fixed and dangerous meditation.

About five in the afternoon they took their golf sticks, went down to the river, and embarked in the canoe.

The water was glassy and still. There was not a ripple ahead, save when a sleeping gull awoke and leisurely steered out of their way.

Tressa's arms and throat were bare and she wore no hat. She sat forward, wielding the bow paddle and singing to herself in a low voice.

""You feel all right, don't you?"" he asked.

""Oh, I am so well, physically, now! It's really wonderful, Victor—like being a child again,"" she replied happily.

""You're not much more,"" he muttered.

She heard him: ""Not very much more—in years,"" she said.... ""Does Scripture tell us how old Our Lord was when He descended into Hell?""

""I don't know,"" he replied, startled.

After a little while Tressa tranquilly resumed her paddling and singing:

""—And eight tall towers
Guard the route
Of human life,
Where at all hours
Death looks out,
Holding a knife
Rolled in a shroud.
For every man,
Humble or proud,
Mighty or bowed,
Death has a shroud;—for every man,—
Even for Tchingniz Khan!
Behold them pass!—lancer.
Baroulass,
Temple dancer
In tissue gold,
Khiounnou,
Karlik bold,
Christian, Jew,—
Nations swarm to the great Urdu.
Yaçaoul, with your kettledrum,
Warn your Khan that his hour is come!
Shroud and knife at his spurred feet throw,
And bid him stretch his neck for the blow!—""
""You know,"" remarked Cleves, ""that some of those songs you sing are devilish creepy.""

Tressa looked around at him over her shoulder, saw he was smiling, smiled faintly in return.

They were off Orchid Cove now. The hotel and cottages loomed dimly in the silver mist. Voices came distinctly across the water. There were people on the golf course paralleling the river; laughter sounded from the club-house veranda.

They went ashore.",True
"THEY were the brawlers and braggarts, the loud boasters and hard drinkers, of Faring town, John Kulrek and his crony Lie-lip Canool. Many a time have I, a tousle-haired lad, stolen to the tavern door to listen to their curses, their profane arguments and wild sea songs; half fearful and half in admiration of these wild rovers. Aye, all the people of Faring town gazed on them with fear and admiration, for they were not like the rest of the Faring men; they were not content to ply their trade along the coasts and among the shark-teeth shoals. No yawls, no skiffs for them! They fared far, farther than any other man in the village, for they shipped on the great sailing-ships that went out on the white tides to brave the restless grey ocean and make ports in strange lands.

Ah, I mind it was swift times in the little sea-coast village of Faring when John Kulrek came home, with the furtive Lie-lip at his side, swaggering down the gang-plank, in his tarry sea-clothes, and the broad leather belt that held his ever-ready dagger; shouting condescending greeting to some favored acquaintance, kissing some maiden who ventured too near; then up the street, roaring some scarcely decent song of the sea. How the cringers and the idlers, the hangers-on, would swarm about the two desperate heroes, flattering and smirking, guffawing hilariously at each nasty jest. For to the tavern loafers and to some of the weaker among the straightforward villagers, these men with their wild talk and their brutal deeds, their tales of the Seven Seas and the far countries, these men, I say, were valiant knights, nature's noblemen who dared to be men of blood and brawn.

And all feared them, so that when a man was beaten or a woman insulted, the villagers muttered—and did nothing. And so when Moll Farrell's niece was put to shame by John Kulrek, none dared even to put into words what all thought. Moll had never married, and she and the girl lived alone in a little hut down close to the beach, so close that in high tide the waves came almost to the door.

The people of the village accounted old Moll something of a witch, and she was a grim, gaunt old dame who had little to say to anyone. But she minded her own business, and eked out a slim living by gathering clams, and picking up bits of driftwood.

The girl was a pretty, foolish little thing, vain and easily befooled, else she had never yielded to the shark-like blandishments of John Kulrek.

I mind the day was a cold winter day with a sharp breeze out of the east when the old dame came into the village street shrieking that the girl had vanished. All scattered over the beach and back among the bleak inland hills to search for her—all save John Kulrek and his cronies who sat in the tavern dicing and toping. All the while beyond the shoals, we heard the never- ceasing droning of the heaving, restless grey monster, and in the dim light of the ghostly dawn Moll Farrell's girl came home.

The tides bore her gently across the wet sands and laid her almost at her own door. Virgin-white she was, and her arms were folded across her still bosom; calm was her face, and the grey tides sighed about her slender limbs. Moll Farrell's eyes were stones, yet she stood above her dead girl and spoke no word till John Kulrek and his crony came reeling down from the tavern, their drinking-jacks still in their hands. Drunk was John Kulrek, and the people gave back for him, murder in their souls; so he came and laughed at Moll Farrell across the body of her girl.

""Zounds!"" swore John Kulrek; ""the wench has drowned herself, Lie-lip!""

Lie-lip laughed, with the twist of his thin mouth. He always hated Moll Farrell, for it was she that had given him the name of Lie-lip.

Then John Kulrek lifted his drinking-jack, swaying on his uncertain legs. ""A health to the wench's ghost!"" he bellowed, while all stood aghast.

Then Moll Farrell spoke, and the words broke from her in a scream which sent ripples of cold up and down the spines of the throng.

""The curse of the Foul Fiend upon you, John Kulrek!"" she screamed. ""The curse of God rest upon your vile soul throughout eternity! May you gaze on sights that shall sear the eyes of you and scorch the soul of you! May you die a bloody death and writhe in hell's flames for a million and a million and yet a million years! I curse you by sea and by land, by earth and by air, by the demons of the swamplands, the fiends of the forest and the goblins of the hills! And you""—her lean finger stabbed at Lie-lip Canool and he started backward, his face paling—""you shall be the death of John Kulrek and he shall be the death of you! You shall bring John Kulrek to the doors of hell and John Kulrek shall bring you to the gallows-tree! I set the seal of death upon your brow, John Kulrek! You shall live in terror and die in horror far out upon the cold grey sea! But the sea that took the soul of innocence to her bosom shall not take you, but shall fling forth your vile carcass to the sands! Aye, John Kulrek""—and she spoke with such a terrible intensity that the drunken mockery on the man's face changed to one of swinish stupidity—""the sea roars for the victim it will not keep! There is snow upon the hills, John Kulrek, and ere it melts your corpse will lie at my feet. And I shall spit upon it and be content.""

Kulrek and his crony sailed at dawn for a long voyage, and Moll went back to her hut and her clam-gathering. She seemed to grow leaner and more grim than ever and her eyes smoldered with a light not sane. The days glided by and people whispered among themselves that Moll's days were numbered, for she faded to a ghost of a woman; but she went her way, refusing all aid.

That was a short, cold summer and the snow on the barren inland hills never melted; a thing very unusual, which caused much comment among the villagers. At dusk and at dawn Moll would come up on the beach, gaze up at the snow which glittered on the hills, then out to sea with a fierce intensity in her gaze.

Then the days grew shorter, the nights longer and darker, and the cold grey tides came sweeping along the bleak strands, bearing the rain and sleet of the sharp east breezes.

And upon a bleak day a trading-vessel sailed into the bay and anchored. And all the idlers and the wastrels flocked to the wharfs, for that was the ship upon which John Kulrek and Lie-lip Canool had sailed. Down the gang-plank came Lie-lip, more furtive than ever, but John Kulrek was not there.

To shouted queries, Canool shook his head. ""Kulrek deserted ship at a port of Sumatra,"" said he. ""He had a row with the skipper, lads; wanted me to desert, too, but no! I had to see you fine lads again, eh boys?""

Almost cringing was Lie-lip Canool, and suddenly he recoiled as Moll Farrell came through the throng. A moment they stood eyeing each other; then Moll's grim lips bent in a terrible smile.

""There's blood on your hand, Canool!"" she lashed out suddenly—so suddenly that Lie-lip started and rubbed his right hand across his left sleeve.

""Stand aside, witch!"" he snarled in sudden anger, striding through the crowd which gave back for him. His admirers followed him to the tavern.

Now, I mind that the next day was even colder; grey fogs came drifting out of the east and veiled the sea and the beaches. There would be no sailing that day, and so all the villagers were in their snug houses or matching tales at the tavern. So it came that Joe, my friend, a lad of my own age, and I, were the ones who saw the first of the strange things that happened.

Being harum-scarum lads of no wisdom, we were sitting in a small rowboat, floating at the end of the wharfs, each shivering and wishing the other would suggest leaving, there being no reason whatever for our being there, save that it was a good place to build air-castles undisturbed.

Suddenly Joe raised his hand. ""Say,"" he said, ""d'ye hear? Who can be out on the bay upon a day like this?""

""Nobody. What d'ye hear?""

""Oars. Or I'm a lubber. Listen.""

There was no seeing anything in that fog, and I heard nothing. Yet Joe swore he did, and suddenly his face assumed a strange look.

""Somebody rowing out there, I tell you! The bay is alive with oars from the sound! A score of boats at the least! Ye dolt, can ye not hear?""

Then, as I shook my head, he leaped and began to undo the painter.

""I'm off to see. Name me liar if the bay is not full of boats, all together like a close fleet. Are you with me?""

Yes, I was with him, though I heard nothing. Then out in the greyness we went, and the fog closed behind and before so that we drifted in a vague world of smoke, seeing naught and hearing naught. We were lost in no time, and I cursed Joe for leading us upon a wild goose chase that was like to end with our being swept out to sea. I thought of Moll Farrell's girl and shuddered.

How long we drifted I know not. Minutes faded into hours, hours into centuries. Still Joe swore he heard the oars, now close at hand, now far away, and for hours we followed them, steering our course toward the sound, as the noise grew or receded. This I later thought of, and could not understand.

Then, when my hands were so numb that I could no longer hold the oar, and the forerunning drowsiness of cold and exhaustion was stealing over me, Weak white stars broke through the fog which glided suddenly away, fading like a ghost of smoke, and we found ourselves afloat just outside the mouth of the bay. The waters lay smooth as a pond, all dark green and silver in the starlight, and the cold came crisper than ever. I was swinging the boat about, to put back into the bay, when Joe gave a shout, and for the first time I heard the clack of oar-locks. I glanced over my shoulder and my blood went cold.

A great beaked prow loomed above us, a weird, unfamiliar shape against the stars, and as I caught my breath, sheered sharply and swept by us, with a curious swishing I never heard any other craft make. Joe screamed and backed oars frantically, and the boat walled out of the way just in time; for though the prow missed us, still otherwise we had died. For from the sides of the ship stood long oars, bank upon bank which swept her along. Though I had never seen such a craft, I knew her for a galley. But what was she doing upon our coasts? They said, the far-farers, that such ships were still in use among the heathens of Barbary; but it was many a long, heaving mile to Barbary, and even so she did not resemble the ships described by those who had sailed far.

We started in pursuit, and this was strange, for though the waters broke about her prow, and she seemed fairly to fly through the waves, yet she was making little speed, and it was no time before we caught up with her. Making our painter fast to a chain far back beyond the reach of the swishing oars, we hailed those on deck. But there came no answer, and at last, conquering our fears, we clambered up the chain and found ourselves upon the strangest deck man has trod for many a long, roaring century.

Joe muttered fearsomely. ""Look, how old it seems! Almost ready to fall to pieces. Why, 'tis fairly rotten!""

There was no one on deck, no one at the long sweep with which the craft was steered. We stole to the hold and looked down the stair. Then and there, if ever men were on the verge of insanity, it was we. For there were rowers there, it is true; they sat upon the rowers' benches and drove the creaking oars through the grey waters. And they that rowed were skeletons!

Shrieking, we plunged across the deck, to fling ourselves into the sea. But at the rail I tripped upon something and fell headlong, and as I lay, I saw a thing which vanquished my fear of the horrors below for an instant. The thing upon which I had tripped was a human body, and in the dim grey light that was beginning to steal across the eastern waves I saw a dagger hilt standing up between his shoulders. Joe was at the rail, urging me to haste, and together we slid down the chain and cut the painter.

Then we stood off into the bay. Straight on kept the grim galley, and we followed, slowly, wondering. She seemed to be heading straight for the beach beside the wharfs, and as we approached, we saw the wharfs thronged with people. They had missed us, no doubt, and now they stood, there in the early dawn light, struck dumb by the apparition which had come up out of the night and the grim ocean.

Straight on swept the galley, her oars a-swish; then ere she reached the shallow water—crash!—a terrific reverberation shook the bay. Before our eyes the grim craft seemed to melt away; then she vanished, and the green waters seethed where she had ridden, but there floated no driftwood there, nor did there ever float any ashore. Aye, something floated ashore, but it was grim driftwood!

We made the landing amid a hum of excited conversation that stopped suddenly. Moll Farrell stood before her hut, limned gauntly against the ghostly dawn, her lean hand pointing sea-ward. And across the sighing wet sands, borne by the grey tide, something came floating; something that the waves dropped at Moll Farrell's feet. And there looked up at us, as we crowded about, a pair of unseeing eyes set in a still, white face. John Kulrek had come home.

Still and grim he lay, rocked by the tide, and as he lurched sideways, all saw the dagger hilt that stood from his back—the dagger all of us had seen a thousand times at the belt of Lie-lip Canool.

""Aye, I killed him!"" came Canool's shriek, as he writhed and groveled before our gaze. ""At sea on a still night in a drunken brawl I slew him and hurled him overboard! And from the far seas he has followed me""—his voice sank to a hideous whisper—""because—of—the—curse—the—sea— would—not—keep—his—body!""

And the wretch sank down, trembling, the shadow of the gallows already in his eyes.

""Aye!"" Strong, deep and exultant was Moll Farrell's voice. ""From the hell of lost craft Satan sent a ship of bygone ages! A ship red with gore and stained with the memory of horrid crimes! None other would bear such a vile carcass! The sea has taken vengeance and has given me mine. See now, how I spit upon the face of John Kulrek.""

And with a ghastly laugh, she pitched forward, the blood starting to her lips. And the sun came up across the restless sea.","Only when the Nan-yang Maru sailed from Yuen-San did her terrible sense of foreboding begin to subside.

For four years, waking or sleeping, the awful subconsciousness of supreme evil had never left her.

But now, as the Korean shore, receding into darkness, grew dimmer and dimmer, fear subsided and grew vague as the half-forgotten memory of horror in a dream.

She stood near the steamer's stern apart from other passengers, a slender, lonely figure in her silver-fox furs, her ulster and smart little hat, watching the lights of Yuen-San grow paler and smaller along the horizon until they looked like a level row of stars.

Under her haunted eyes Asia was slowly dissolving to a streak of vapour in the misty lustre of the moon.

Suddenly the ancient continent disappeared, washed out by a wave against the sky; and with it vanished the last shreds of that accursed nightmare which had possessed her for four endless years. But whether during those unreal years her soul had only been held in bondage, or whether, as she had been taught, it had been irrevocably destroyed, she still remained uncertain, knowing nothing about the death of souls or how it was accomplished.

As she stood there, her sad eyes fixed on the misty East, a passenger passing—an Englishwoman—paused to say something kind to the young American; and added, ""if there is anything my husband and I can do it would give us much pleasure."" The girl had turned her head as though not comprehending. The other woman hesitated.

""This is Doctor Norne's daughter, is it not?"" she inquired in a pleasant voice.

""Yes, I am Tressa Norne.... I ask your pardon.... Thank you, madam:—I am—I seem to be—a trifle dazed——""

""What wonder, you poor child! Come to us if you feel need of companionship.""

""You are very kind.... I seem to wish to be alone, somehow.""

""I understand.... Good-night, my dear.""

Late the next morning Tressa Norne awoke, conscious for the first time in four years that it was at last her own familiar self stretched out there on the pillows where sunshine streamed through the porthole. All that day she lay in her bamboo steamer chair on deck. Sun and wind conspired to dry every tear that wet her closed lashes. Her dark, glossy hair blew about her face; scarlet tinted her full lips again; the tense hands relaxed. Peace came at sundown.

That evening she took her Yu-kin from her cabin and found a chair on the deserted hurricane deck.

And here, in the brilliant moonlight of the China Sea, she curled up cross-legged on the deck, all alone, and sounded the four futile strings of her moon-lute, and hummed to herself, in a still voice, old songs she had sung in Yian before the tragedy. She sang the tent-song called Tchinguiz. She sang Camel Bells and The Blue Bazaar,—children's songs of the Yiort. She sang the ancient Khiounnou song called ""The Saghalien"":

I
In the month of Saffar
Among the river-reeds
I saw two horsemen
Sitting on their steeds.
Tulugum!
Heitulum!
By the river-reeds
II
In the month of Saffar
A demon guards the ford.
Tokhta, my Lover!
Draw your shining sword!
Tulugum!
Heitulum!
Slay him with your sword!
III
In the month of Saffar
Among the water-weeds
I saw two horsemen
Fighting on their steeds.
Tulugum!
Heitulum!
How my lover bleeds!
IV
In the month of Saffar,
The Year I should have wed—
The Year of The Panther—
My lover lay dead,—
Tulugum!
Heitulum!
Dead without a head.
And songs like these—the one called ""Keuke Mongol,"" and an ancient air of the Tchortchas called ""The Thirty Thousand Calamities,"" and some Chinese boatmen's songs which she had heard in Yian before the tragedy; these she hummed to herself there in the moonlight playing on her round-faced, short-necked lute of four strings.

Terror indeed seemed ended for her, and in her heart a great overwhelming joy was welling up which seemed to overflow across the entire moonlit world.

She had no longer any fear; no premonition of further evil. Among the few Americans and English aboard, something of her story was already known. People were kind; and they were also considerate enough to subdue their sympathetic curiosity when they discovered that this young American girl shrank from any mention of what had happened to her during the last four years of the Great World War.

It was evident, also, that she preferred to remain aloof; and this inclination, when finally understood, was respected by her fellow passengers. The clever, efficient and polite Japanese officers and crew of the Nan-yang Maru were invariably considerate and courteous to her, and they remained nicely reticent, although they also knew the main outline of her story and very much desired to know more. And so, surrounded now by the friendly security of civilised humanity, Tressa Norne, reborn to light out of hell's own shadows, awoke from four years of nightmare which, after all, perhaps, never had seemed entirely actual.

And now God's real sun warmed her by day; His real moon bathed her in creamy coolness by night; sky and wind and wave thrilled her with their blessed assurance that this was once more the real world which stretched illimitably on every side from horizon to horizon; and the fair faces and pleasant voices of her own countrymen made the past seem only a ghastly dream that never again could enmesh her soul with its web of sorcery.

And now the days at sea fled very swiftly; and when at last the Golden Gate was not far away she had finally managed to persuade herself that nothing really can harm the human soul; that the monstrous devil-years were ended, never again to return; that in this vast, clean Western Continent there could be no occult threat to dread, no gigantic menace to destroy her body, no secret power that could consign her soul to the dreadful abysm of spiritual annihilation.

Very early that morning she came on deck. The November day was delightfully warm, the air clear save for a belt of mist low on the water to the southward.

She had been told that land would not be sighted for twenty-four hours, but she went forward and stood beside the starboard rail, searching the horizon with the enchanted eyes of hope.

As she stood there a Japanese ship's officer crossing the deck, forward, halted abruptly and stood staring at something to the southward.

At the same moment, above the belt of mist on the water, and perfectly clear against the blue sky above, the girl saw a fountain of gold fire rise from the fog, drift upward in the daylight, slowly assume the incandescent outline of a serpentine creature which leisurely uncoiled and hung there floating, its lizard-tail undulating, its feet with their five stumpy claws closing, relaxing, like those of a living reptile. For a full minute this amazing shape of fire floated there in the sky, brilliant in the morning light, then the reptilian form faded, died out, and the last spark vanished in the sunshine.

When the Japanese officer at last turned to resume his promenade, he noticed a white-faced girl gripping a stanchion behind him as though she were on the point of swooning. He crossed the deck quickly. Tressa Norne's eyes opened.

""Are you ill, Miss Norne?"" he asked.

""The—the Dragon,"" she whispered.

The officer laughed. ""Why, that was nothing but Chinese day-fireworks,"" he explained. ""The crew of some fishing boat yonder in the fog is amusing itself."" He looked at her narrowly, then with a nice little bow and smile he offered his arm: ""If you are indisposed, perhaps you might wish to go below to your stateroom, Miss Norne?""

She thanked him, managed to pull herself together and force a ghost of a smile.

He lingered a moment, said something cheerful about being nearly home, then made her a punctilious salute and went his way.

Tressa Norne leaned back against the stanchion and closed her eyes. Her pallor became deathly. She bent over and laid her white face in her folded arms.

After a while she lifted her head, and, turning very slowly, stared at the fog-belt out of frightened eyes.

And saw, rising out of the fog, a pearl-tinted sphere which gradually mounted into the clear daylight above like the full moon's phantom in the sky.

Higher, higher rose the spectral moon until at last it swam in the very zenith. Then it slowly evaporated in the blue vault above.

A great wave of despair swept her; she clung to the stanchion, staring with half-blinded eyes at the flat fog-bank in the south.

But no more ""Chinese day-fireworks"" rose out of it. And at length she summoned sufficient strength to go below to her cabin and lie there, half senseless, huddled on her bed.

When land was sighted, the following morning, Tressa Norne had lived a century in twenty-four hours. And in that space of time her agonised soul had touched all depths.

But now as the Golden Gate loomed up in the morning light, rage, terror, despair had burned themselves out. From their ashes within her mind arose the cool wrath of desperation armed for anything, wary, alert, passionately determined to survive at whatever cost, recklessly ready to fight for bodily existence.

That was her sole instinct now, to go on living, to survive, no matter at what price. And if it were indeed true that her soul had been slain, she defied its murderers to slay her body also.

That night, at her hotel in San Francisco, she double-locked her door and lay down without undressing, leaving all lights burning and an automatic pistol underneath her pillow.

Toward morning she fell asleep, slept for an hour, started up in awful fear. And saw the double-locked door opposite the foot of her bed slowly opening of its own accord.

Into the brightly illuminated room stepped a graceful young man in full evening dress carrying over his left arm an overcoat, and in his other hand a top hat and silver tipped walking-stick.

With one bound the girl swung herself from the bed to the carpet and clutched at the pistol under her pillow.

""Sanang!"" she cried in a terrible voice.

""Keuke Mongol!"" he said, smilingly.

For a moment they confronted each other in the brightly lighted bedroom, then, partly turning, he cast a calm glance at the open door behind him; and, as though moved by a wind, the door slowly closed. And she heard the key turn of itself in the lock, and saw the bolt slide smoothly into place again.

Her power of speech came back to her presently—only a broken whisper at first: ""Do you think I am afraid of your accursed magic?"" she managed to gasp. ""Do you think I am afraid of you, Sanang?""

""You are afraid,"" he said serenely.

""You lie!""

""No, I do not lie. To one another the Yezidees never lie.""

""You lie again, assassin! I am no Yezidee!""

He smiled gently. His features were pleasing, smooth, and regular; his cheek-bones high, his skin fine and of a pale and delicate ivory colour. Once his black, beautifully shaped eyes wandered to the levelled pistol which she now held clutched desperately close to her right hip, and a slightly ironical expression veiled his gaze for an instant.

""Bullets?"" he murmured. ""But you and I are of the Hassanis.""

""The third lie, Sanang!"" Her voice had regained its strength. Tense, alert, blue eyes ablaze, every faculty concentrated on the terrible business before her, the girl now seemed like some supple leopardess poised on the swift verge of murder.

""Tokhta!""[1] She spat the word. ""Any movement toward a hidden weapon, any gesture suggesting recourse to magic—and I kill you, Sanang, exactly where you stand!""

""With a pistol?"" He laughed. Then his smooth features altered subtly. He said: ""Keuke Mongol, who call yourself Tressa Norne,—Keuke—heavenly azure-blue,—named so in the temple because of the colour of your eyes—listen attentively, for this is the Yarlig which I bring to you by word of mouth from Yian, as from Yezidee to Yezidee:

""Here, in this land called the United States of America, the Temple girl, Keuke Mongol, who has witnessed the mysteries of Erlik and who understands the magic of the Sheiks-el-Djebel, and who has seen Mount Alamout and the eight castles and the fifty thousand Hassanis in white turbans and in robes of white;—you—Azure-blue eyes—heed the Yarlig!—or may thirty thousand calamities overtake you!""

There was a dead silence; then he went on seriously: ""It is decreed: You shall cease to remember that you are a Yezidee, that you are of the Hassanis, that you ever have laid eyes on Yian the Beautiful, that you ever set naked foot upon Mount Alamout. It is decreed that you remember nothing of what you have seen and heard, of what has been told and taught during the last four years reckoned as the Christians reckon from our Year of the Bull. Otherwise—my Master sends you this for your—convenience.""

Leisurely, from under his folded overcoat, the young man produced a roll of white cloth and dropped it at her feet and the girl shrank aside, shuddering, knowing that the roll of white cloth was meant for her winding-sheet.

Then the colour came back to lip and cheek; and, glancing up from the soft white shroud, she smiled at the young man: ""Have you ended your Oriental mummery?"" she asked calmly. ""Listen very seriously in your turn, Sanang, Sheik-el-Djebel, Prince of the Hassanis who, God knows when and how, have come out into the sunshine of this clean and decent country, out of a filthy darkness where devils and sorcerers make earth a hell.

""If you, or yours, threaten me, annoy me, interfere with me, I shall go to our civilised police and tell all I know concerning the Yezidees. I mean to live. Do you understand? You know what you have done to me and mine. I come back to my own country alone, without any living kin, poor, homeless, friendless,—and, perhaps, damned. I intend, nevertheless, to survive. I shall not relax my clutch on bodily existence whatever the Yezidees may pretend to have done to my soul. I am determined to live in the body, anyway.""

He nodded gravely.

She said: ""Out at sea, over the fog, I saw the sign of Yu-lao in fire floating in the day-sky. I saw his spectral moon rise and vanish in mid-heaven. I understood. But——"" And here she suddenly showed an edge of teeth under the full scarlet upper lip: ""Keep your signs and your shrouds to yourself, dog of a Yezidee!—toad!—tortoise-egg!—he-goat with three legs! Keep your threats and your messages to yourself! Keep your accursed magic to yourself! Do you think to frighten me with your sorcery by showing me the Moons of Yu-lao?—by opening a bolted door? I know more of such magic than do you, Sanang—Death Adder of Alamout!""

Suddenly she laughed aloud at him—laughed insultingly in his expressionless face:

""I saw you and Gutchlug Khan and your cowardly Tchortchas in red-lacquered jackets slink out of the Temple of Erlik where the bronze gong thundered and a cloud settled down raining little yellow snakes all over the marble steps—all over you, Prince Sanang! You were afraid, my Tougtchi!—you and Gutchlug and your red Tchortchas with their halberds all dripping with human entrails! And I saw you mount and gallop off into the woods while in the depths of the magic cloud which rained little yellow snakes all around you, we temple girls laughed and mocked at you—at you and your cowardly Tchortcha horsemen.""

A slight tinge of pink came into the young man's pale face. Tressa Norne stepped nearer, her levelled pistol resting on her hip.

""Why did you not complain of us to your Master, the Old Man of the Mountain?"" she asked jeeringly. ""And where, also, was your Yezidee magic when it rained little snakes?—What frightened you away—who had boldly come to seize a temple girl—you who had screwed up your courage sufficiently to defy Erlik in his very shrine and snatch from his temple a young thing whose naked body wrapped in gold was worth the chance of death to you?""

The young man's top-hat dropped to the floor. He bent over to pick it up. His face was quite expressionless, quite colourless, now.

""I went on no such errand,"" he said with an effort. ""I went with a thousand prayers on scarlet paper made in——""

""A lie, Yezidee! You came to seize me!""

He turned still paler. ""By Abu, Omar, Otman, and Ali, it is not true!""

""You lie!—by the Lion of God, Hassini!""

She stepped closer. ""And I'll tell you another thing you fear—you Yezidee of Alamout—you robber of Yian—you sorcerer of Sabbah Khan, and chief of his sect of Assassins! You fear this native land of mine, America; and its laws and customs, and its clear, clean sunshine; and its cities and people; and its police! Take that message back. We Americans fear nobody save the true God!—nobody—neither Yezidee nor Hassani nor Russ nor German nor that sexless monster born of hell and called the Bolshevik!""

""Tokhta!"" he cried sharply.

""Damn you!"" retorted the girl; ""get out of my room! Get out of my sight! Get out of my path! Get out of my life! Take that to your Master of Mount Alamout! I do what I please; I go where I please; I live as I please. And if I please, I turn against him!""

""In that event,"" he said hoarsely, ""there lies your winding-sheet on the floor at your feet! Take up your shroud; and make Erlik seize you!""

""Sanang,"" she said very seriously.

""I hear you, Keuke-Mongol.""

""Listen attentively. I wish to live. I have had enough of death in life. I desire to remain a living, breathing thing—even if it be true—as you Yezidees tell me, that you have caught my soul in a net and that your sorcerers really control its destiny.

""But damned or not, I passionately desire to live. And I am coward enough to hold my peace for the sake of living. So—I remain silent. I have no stomach to defy the Yezidees; because, if I do, sooner or later I shall be killed. I know it. I have no desire to die for others—to perish for the sake of the common good. I am young. I have suffered too much; I am determined to live—and let my soul take its chances between God and Erlik.""

She came close to him, looked curiously into his pale face.

""I laughed at you out of the temple cloud,"" she said. ""I know how to open bolted doors as well as you do. And I know other things. And if you ever again come to me in this life I shall first torture you, then slay you. Then I shall tell all!... and unroll my shroud.""

""I keep your word of promise until you break it,"" he interrupted hastily. ""Yarlig! It is decreed!"" And then he slowly turned as though to glance over his shoulder at the locked and bolted door.

""Permit me to open it for you, Prince Sanang,"" said the girl scornfully. And she gazed steadily at the door.

Presently, all by itself, the key turned in the lock, the bolt slid back, the door gently opened.

Toward it, white as a corpse, his overcoat on his left arm, his stick and top-hat in the other hand, crept the young man in his faultless evening garb.

Then, as he reached the threshold, he suddenly sprang aside. A small yellow snake lay coiled there on the door sill. For a full throbbing minute the young man stared at the yellow reptile in unfeigned horror. Then, very cautiously, he moved his fascinated eyes sideways and gazed in silence at Tressa Norne.

The girl laughed.

""Sorceress!"" he burst out hoarsely. ""Take that accursed thing from my path!""

""What thing, Sanang?"" At that his dark, frightened eyes stole toward the threshold again, seeking the little snake. But there was no snake there. And when he was certain of this he went, twitching and trembling all over.

Behind him the door closed softly, locking and bolting itself.

And behind the bolted door in the brightly lighted bedroom Tressa Norne fell on both knees, her pistol still clutched in her right hand, calling passionately upon Christ to forgive her for the dreadful ability she had dared to use, and begging Him to save her body from death and her soul from the snare of the Yezidee.

",False
"Spoonbill Village, Northernmost Quang Binh Province, SRV.
June 30, 2011.
Considering their first encounter, this meeting was going rather well.
""No, no, I assure you that I have had quite enough… well, if you insist…"" In the course of explaining his task to the household he would be staying in, Joseph Clayton had been offered tea at the behest of the mistress of the household and all three times, he had acquiesced. She was attending her husband in fine cotton clothes of white and black, the cut more resembling something out of Javanese dancing than anything worn in Indochina during the past thousand years. Their son, called from his lessons for the presentation, was sitting at the far end of the room, listening to what was going on. While he had repeated much the same spiel that Professor Andover to the house's three inhabitants, he had sipped at his bowl almost automatically as one would with water, clear onto what was now his fourth helping. Although not unpleasant, the drink had considerably more kick to it than even the strong brews typical of Vietnamese green tea.
What perplexed Joseph was that he couldn't identify the extra ingredient. It wasn't peppers, having no discernible remains or even the raw chemical heat of capsaicin. It could be ginger, but the heat was of an utterly different kind than any ginger he had ever experienced.
Then again, the additive could just as well be Tarantula venom given the figure he was giving his introduction to.
His name, as he had given it, was Noc. He was the most experience hunter, archer and scout of the village, was of an incredibly ancient lineage and, incidentally, was the first person of this strange, isolated village that he had seen. His tattoos all featured arachnid themes of legs, webbing and fangs and his eyes…
Marie had mentioned that some of the warriors practiced sorcery with mutative effects. If that was what caused Nocs eyes to become all black, seemingly all pupils and tempting Joseph to mentally refer to the man as ""Spider Eye"", then maybe those three weirdoes they caught in the biology labs back in February were onto something after all.
Sitting in the main reception area of the home, replete with decorations of strange latticed designs and black lacquer, Joseph watched carefully as Noc finished examining one of his bowstrings before his eyes darted around the room. On the wall, several bows hung in their unstrung state: the white and banded flatbow he had first witnessed, several simple bows of light colored cane and even one recurve bow made of dark red hardwood.
""So that is your request: to hear the stories of our history, to observe the operation of a household of status and to… take part in our activities?"" Throughout the introduction of this man and the repetition he had given of the Professors offer, Noc had examined all aspects of him closely… and had not been impressed. He had some muscle tone, but everything else about him absolutely screamed that he was some sort of priest or urban scribe in training. Besides, the combination of the girl's cues toward him and his reaction to his tea made it clear: if the boy had been a virgin, steam would have been pouring out of his ears. That made things difficult (and potentially dangerous) for everyone.
Besides, very few people in this village held any affection at all for someone with Joseph's skin tone.
After receiving affirmation of Joseph's duties, Noc laid out the rules. ""Know this: you will record the histories when they are told to you. You shall ask questions when you are allowed and you shall observe what you shall participate in what you are allowed to participate in. No pestering me with questions, no sneaking around trying to observe the women and children and no and I mean no trying to wheedle out information through trickery. We had quite enough trouble with that sort of thing the last time around.""
Joseph was immediately insulted, even though he did not how it as he automatically agreed. Still, two things bothered him. First, underneath the gold and bronze bangles that decorated the forearms and ankles of Nocs wife, Joseph had noticed strange scars, akin in shape to the marks that sperm whales bore from their battles with giant squid.
Second… what did Noc mean by the last time around?
That Night…
As he lay awake, Joseph realized how exhausting the day had been. As it turned out, he was probably doing to spend most of his time in this house as a sort of a servant: documenting and participating in cooking and chores, handling domestic duties and picking little things up only as Noc's wife deemed appropriate. No real questions answered, no interesting discoveries or scandals or surprises… just ordinary ethnographic work.
It wasn't made any better that his libido was getting annoyed at the 'busy' signals it kept receiving. However, there had been no real opportunity to talk with Marie after last night, with all the revelations of cannibalism and sorcery and other things that probably should have made his stomach turn.
/Maybe it would be better if they had made your stomach turn./ Came a wheedling little multi-voiced dialogue from inside his head… from inside his head, but not originating from him.
Oh no. Joseph thought with a mental groan. Not you idiots again! I thought you gave it up after the last time.
/The last time? You mean when you were in the thrall of carnal lusts, disgracing your heritage?/ The dominant voice changed from one of the old WASP lords to that of an aristocratic dowager that had been ancient even when Granny Clara had been a girl. /Maybe now that you know what her kind get up to, you will listen to reason and find a girl more suitable to a young man of your station./
Her parents are just as middle class as mine are, thank you all very much. Joseph snarked back mentally, fully knowing how these… wraiths felt about his relationship with Marie and savoring the thought of causing them anguish.
/You know full well what is meant. What is not understood is why the other girl did not so arouse your… passions./
Oh please, her family is just as drenched in sorcery as these guys, it's just that they're more polite about who they slice open. Besides, I don't really think you'd have acted any differently if it had been Tracy I'd been with that night instead of Marie, inbred and rural as she apparently is. He remembered clearly that night: how these voices (who he was fairly sure were not the products of schizophrenia despite superficially similar symptomatology), had come to him in the midst of what should have been unimaginable passion and communion with his girlfriend (though with was much more awkward, rushed and possibly painful than desired). Even as the passion mounted, their insults became worse: the taunts, the archaic, hateful rhetoric, the most vicious slurs directed against Marie and him. And yet he had forged on, continuing despite the rising chorus of insane voices inside his head… or even because of them, for as they blasphemed against all that Marie was, all the little things that made Joseph love her all the more, he could tell that his defiance was causing them actual pain and torment… and even through the pleasures of the flesh, he took small, sadistic delights in causing pain and anguish to these assholes who claimed authority as his forbearers.
Now Joseph was getting annoyed… and cranky. Look, I don't have to listen to you idiots, even if you do claim to be my ancestors. You came from a completely different world whose rules do not apply to me. Also, the instruments of your authority are gone: no money, no status, no companies or contacts or friends in high places. All that's left are a bunch of ugly little voices in the wind. Why don't you all just blow away? He was tired of his, of having to listen to these inane snobs that he had learned to loath in the abstract and now hated in the concrete. He hated their hate-filled dismissals of all other peoples and cultures, their smug superiority and the generalized arrogance that seemed to drip from the voices.
When they didn't respond, Joseph took it as a sign. ""Good."" He said aloud, as softly as his sense of satisfaction allowed.
","I.

After twenty-two years of nightmare and terror, saved only by a desperate conviction of the mythical source of certain impressions, I am unwilling to vouch for the truth of that which I think I found in Western Australia on the night of July 17–18, 1935. There is reason to hope that my experience was wholly or partly an hallucination—for which, indeed, abundant causes existed. And yet, its realism was so hideous that I sometimes find hope impossible. If the thing did happen, then man must be prepared to accept notions of the cosmos, and of his own place in the seething vortex of time, whose merest mention is paralysing. He must, too, be placed on guard against a specific lurking peril which, though it will never engulf the whole race, may impose monstrous and unguessable horrors upon certain venturesome members of it. It is for this latter reason that I urge, with all the force of my being, a final abandonment of all attempts at unearthing those fragments of unknown, primordial masonry which my expedition set out to investigate.
      Assuming that I was sane and awake, my experience on that night was such as has befallen no man before. It was, moreover, a frightful confirmation of all I had sought to dismiss as myth and dream. Mercifully there is no proof, for in my fright I lost the awesome object which would—if real and brought out of that noxious abyss—have formed irrefutable evidence. When I came upon the horror I was alone—and I have up to now told no one about it. I could not stop the others from digging in its direction, but chance and the shifting sand have so far saved them from finding it. Now I must formulate some definitive statement—not only for the sake of my own mental balance, but to warn such others as may read it seriously.
      These pages—much in whose earlier parts will be familiar to close readers of the general and scientific press—are written in the cabin of the ship that is bringing me home. I shall give them to my son, Prof. Wingate Peaslee of Miskatonic University—the only member of my family who stuck to me after my queer amnesia of long ago, and the man best informed on the inner facts of my case. Of all living persons, he is least likely to ridicule what I shall tell of that fateful night. I did not enlighten him orally before sailing, because I think he had better have the revelation in written form. Reading and re-reading at leisure will leave with him a more convincing picture than my confused tongue could hope to convey. He can do as he thinks best with this account—shewing it, with suitable comment, to any quarters where it will be likely to accomplish good. It is for the sake of such readers as are unfamiliar with the earlier phases of my case that I am prefacing the revelation itself with a fairly ample summary of its background.
      My name is Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee, and those who recall the newspaper tales of a generation back—or the letters and articles in psychological journals six or seven years ago—will know who and what I am. The press was filled with the details of my strange amnesia in 1908–13, and much was made of the traditions of horror, madness, and witchcraft which lurk behind the ancient Massachusetts town then and now forming my place of residence. Yet I would have it known that there is nothing whatever of the mad or sinister in my heredity and early life. This is a highly important fact in view of the shadow which fell so suddenly upon me from outside sources. It may be that centuries of dark brooding had given to crumbling, whisper-haunted Arkham a peculiar vulnerability as regards such shadows—though even this seems doubtful in the light of those other cases which I later came to study. But the chief point is that my own ancestry and background are altogether normal. What came, came from somewhere else—where, I even now hesitate to assert in plain words.
      I am the son of Jonathan and Hannah (Wingate) Peaslee, both of wholesome old Haverhill stock. I was born and reared in Haverhill—at the old homestead in Boardman Street near Golden Hill—and did not go to Arkham till I entered Miskatonic University at the age of eighteen. That was in 1889. After my graduation I studied economics at Harvard, and came back to Miskatonic as Instructor of Political Economy in 1895. For thirteen years more my life ran smoothly and happily. I married Alice Keezar of Haverhill in 1896, and my three children, Robert K., Wingate, and Hannah, were born in 1898, 1900, and 1903, respectively. In 1898 I became an associate professor, and in 1902 a full professor. At no time had I the least interest in either occultism or abnormal psychology.
      It was on Thursday, May 14, 1908, that the queer amnesia came. The thing was quite sudden, though later I realised that certain brief, glimmering visions of several hours previous—chaotic visions which disturbed me greatly because they were so unprecedented—must have formed premonitory symptoms. My head was aching, and I had a singular feeling—altogether new to me—that someone else was trying to get possession of my thoughts. 
      The collapse occurred about 10:20 a.m., while I was conducting a class in Political Economy VI—history and present tendencies of economics—for juniors and a few sophomores. I began to see strange shapes before my eyes, and to feel that I was in a grotesque room other than the classroom. My thoughts and speech wandered from my subject, and the students saw that something was gravely amiss. Then I slumped down, unconscious in my chair, in a stupor from which no one could arouse me. Nor did my rightful faculties again look out upon the daylight of our normal world for five years, four months, and thirteen days.
      It is, of course, from others that I have learned what followed. I shewed no sign of consciousness for sixteen and a half hours, though removed to my home at 27 Crane St. and given the best of medical attention. At 3 a.m. May 15 my eyes opened and I began to speak, but before long the doctors and my family were thoroughly frightened by the trend of my expression and language. It was clear that I had no remembrance of my identity or of my past, though for some reason I seemed anxious to conceal this lack of knowledge. My eyes gazed strangely at the persons around me, and the flexions of my facial muscles were altogether unfamiliar.
      Even my speech seemed awkward and foreign. I used my vocal organs clumsily and gropingly, and my diction had a curiously stilted quality, as if I had laboriously learned the English language from books. The pronunciation was barbarously alien, whilst the idiom seemed to include both scraps of curious archaism and expressions of a wholly incomprehensible cast. Of the latter one in particular was very potently—even terrifiedly—recalled by the youngest of the physicians twenty years afterward. For at that late period such a phrase began to have an actual currency—first in England and then in the United States—and though of much complexity and indisputable newness, it reproduced in every least particular the mystifying words of the strange Arkham patient of 1908.
      Physical strength returned at once, although I required an odd amount of re-education in the use of my hands, legs, and bodily apparatus in general. Because of this and other handicaps inherent in the mnemonic lapse, I was for some time kept under strict medical care. When I saw that my attempts to conceal the lapse had failed, I admitted it openly, and became eager for information of all sorts. Indeed, it seemed to the doctors that I had lost interest in my proper personality as soon as I found the case of amnesia accepted as a natural thing. They noticed that my chief efforts were to master certain points in history, science, art, language, and folklore—some of them tremendously abstruse, and some childishly simple—which remained, very oddly in many cases, outside my consciousness.
      At the same time they noticed that I had an inexplicable command of many almost unknown sorts of knowledge—a command which I seemed to wish to hide rather than display. I would inadvertently refer, with casual assurance, to specific events in dim ages outside the range of accepted history—passing off such references as a jest when I saw the surprise they created. And I had a way of speaking of the future which two or three times caused actual fright. These uncanny flashes soon ceased to appear, though some observers laid their vanishment more to a certain furtive caution on my part than to any waning of the strange knowledge behind them. Indeed, I seemed anomalously avid to absorb the speech, customs, and perspectives of the age around me; as if I were a studious traveller from a far, foreign land.
      As soon as permitted, I haunted the college library at all hours; and shortly began to arrange for those odd travels, and special courses at American and European universities, which evoked so much comment during the next few years. I did not at any time suffer from a lack of learned contacts, for my case had a mild celebrity among the psychologists of the period. I was lectured upon as a typical example of secondary personality—even though I seemed to puzzle the lecturers now and then with some bizarre symptom or some queer trace of carefully veiled mockery.
      Of real friendliness, however, I encountered little. Something in my aspect and speech seemed to excite vague fears and aversions in everyone I met, as if I were a being infinitely removed from all that is normal and healthful. This idea of a black, hidden horror connected with incalculable gulfs of some sort of distance was oddly widespread and persistent. My own family formed no exception. From the moment of my strange waking my wife had regarded me with extreme horror and loathing, vowing that I was some utter alien usurping the body of her husband. In 1910 she obtained a legal divorce, nor would she ever consent to see me even after my return to normalcy in 1913. These feelings were shared by my elder son and my small daughter, neither of whom I have ever seen since.
      Only my second son Wingate seemed able to conquer the terror and repulsion which my change aroused. He indeed felt that I was a stranger, but though only eight years old held fast to a faith that my proper self would return. When it did return he sought me out, and the courts gave me his custody. In succeeding years he helped me with the studies to which I was driven, and today at thirty-five he is a professor of psychology at Miskatonic. But I do not wonder at the horror I caused—for certainly, the mind, voice, and facial expression of the being that awaked on May 15, 1908 were not those of Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee.
      I will not attempt to tell much of my life from 1908 to 1913, since readers may glean all the outward essentials—as I largely had to do—from files of old newspapers and scientific journals. I was given charge of my funds, and spent them slowly and on the whole wisely, in travel and in study at various centres of learning. My travels, however, were singular in the extreme; involving long visits to remote and desolate places. In 1909 I spent a month in the Himalayas, and in 1911 aroused much attention through a camel trip into the unknown deserts of Arabia. What happened on those journeys I have never been able to learn. During the summer of 1912 I chartered a ship and sailed in the Arctic north of Spitzbergen, afterward shewing signs of disappointment. Later in that year I spent weeks alone beyond the limits of previous or subsequent exploration in the vast limestone cavern systems of western Virginia—black labyrinths so complex that no retracing of my steps could even be considered.
      My sojourns at the universities were marked by abnormally rapid assimilation, as if the secondary personality had an intelligence enormously superior to my own. I have found, also, that my rate of reading and solitary study was phenomenal. I could master every detail of a book merely by glancing over it as fast as I could turn the leaves; while my skill at interpreting complex figures in an instant was veritably awesome. At times there appeared almost ugly reports of my power to influence the thoughts and acts of others, though I seemed to have taken care to minimise displays of this faculty.
      Other ugly reports concerned my intimacy with leaders of occultist groups, and scholars suspected of connexion with nameless bands of abhorrent elder-world hierophants. These rumours, though never proved at the time, were doubtless stimulated by the known tenor of some of my reading—for the consultation of rare books at libraries cannot be effected secretly. There is tangible proof—in the form of marginal notes—that I went minutely through such things as the Comte d’Erlette’s Cultes des Goules, Ludvig Prinn’s De Vermis Mysteriis, the Unaussprechlichen Kulten of von Junzt, the surviving fragments of the puzzling Book of Eibon, and the dreaded Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred. Then, too, it is undeniable that a fresh and evil wave of underground cult activity set in about the time of my odd mutation.
      In the summer of 1913 I began to display signs of ennui and flagging interest, and to hint to various associates that a change might soon be expected in me. I spoke of returning memories of my earlier life—though most auditors judged me insincere, since all the recollections I gave were casual, and such as might have been learned from my old private papers. About the middle of August I returned to Arkham and reopened my long-closed house in Crane St. Here I installed a mechanism of the most curious aspect, constructed piecemeal by different makers of scientific apparatus in Europe and America, and guarded carefully from the sight of anyone intelligent enough to analyse it. Those who did see it—a workman, a servant, and the new housekeeper—say that it was a queer mixture of rods, wheels, and mirrors, though only about two feet tall, one foot wide, and one foot thick. The central mirror was circular and convex. All this is borne out by such makers of parts as can be located.
      On the evening of Friday, Sept. 26, I dismissed the housekeeper and the maid till noon of the next day. Lights burned in the house till late, and a lean, dark, curiously foreign-looking man called in an automobile. It was about 1 a.m. that the lights were last seen. At 2:15 a.m. a policeman observed the place in darkness, but with the stranger’s motor still at the curb. By four o’clock the motor was certainly gone. It was at six that a hesitant, foreign voice on the telephone asked Dr. Wilson to call at my house and bring me out of a peculiar faint. This call—a long-distance one—was later traced to a public booth in the North Station in Boston, but no sign of the lean foreigner was ever unearthed.
      When the doctor reached my house he found me unconscious in the sitting-room—in an easy-chair with a table drawn up before it. On the polished table-top were scratches shewing where some heavy object had rested. The queer machine was gone, nor was anything afterward heard of it. Undoubtedly the dark, lean foreigner had taken it away. In the library grate were abundant ashes evidently left from the burning of every remaining scrap of paper on which I had written since the advent of the amnesia. Dr. Wilson found my breathing very peculiar, but after an hypodermic injection it became more regular.
      At 11:15 a.m., Sept. 27, I stirred vigorously, and my hitherto mask-like face began to shew signs of expression. Dr. Wilson remarked that the expression was not that of my secondary personality, but seemed much like that of my normal self. About 11:30 I muttered some very curious syllables—syllables which seemed unrelated to any human speech. I appeared, too, to struggle against something. Then, just after noon—the housekeeper and the maid having meanwhile returned—I began to mutter in English.
      “. . . of the orthodox economists of that period, Jevons typifies the prevailing trend toward scientific correlation. His attempt to link the commercial cycle of prosperity and depression with the physical cycle of the solar spots forms perhaps the apex of . . .”
      Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee had come back—a spirit in whose time-scale it was still that Thursday morning in 1908, with the economics class gazing up at the battered desk on the platform.

II.

My reabsorption into normal life was a painful and difficult process. The loss of over five years creates more complications than can be imagined, and in my case there were countless matters to be adjusted. What I heard of my actions since 1908 astonished and disturbed me, but I tried to view the matter as philosophically as I could. At last regaining custody of my second son Wingate, I settled down with him in the Crane Street house and endeavoured to resume teaching—my old professorship having been kindly offered me by the college.
      I began work with the February, 1914, term, and kept at it just a year. By that time I realised how badly my experience had shaken me. Though perfectly sane—I hoped—and with no flaw in my original personality, I had not the nervous energy of the old days. Vague dreams and queer ideas continually haunted me, and when the outbreak of the world war turned my mind to history I found myself thinking of periods and events in the oddest possible fashion. My conception of time—my ability to distinguish between consecutiveness and simultaneousness—seemed subtly disordered; so that I formed chimerical notions about living in one age and casting one’s mind all over eternity for knowledge of past and future ages.
      The war gave me strange impressions of remembering some of its far-off consequences—as if I knew how it was coming out and could look back upon it in the light of future information. All such quasi-memories were attended with much pain, and with a feeling that some artificial psychological barrier was set against them. When I diffidently hinted to others about my impressions I met with varied responses. Some persons looked uncomfortably at me, but men in the mathematics department spoke of new developments in those theories of relativity—then discussed only in learned circles—which were later to become so famous. Dr. Albert Einstein, they said, was rapidly reducing time to the status of a mere dimension.
      But the dreams and disturbed feelings gained on me, so that I had to drop my regular work in 1915. Certain of the impressions were taking an annoying shape—giving me the persistent notion that my amnesia had formed some unholy sort of exchange; that the secondary personality had indeed been an intruding force from unknown regions, and that my own personality had suffered displacement. Thus I was driven to vague and frightful speculations concerning the whereabouts of my true self during the years that another had held my body. The curious knowledge and strange conduct of my body’s late tenant troubled me more and more as I learned further details from persons, papers, and magazines. Queernesses that had baffled others seemed to harmonise terribly with some background of black knowledge which festered in the chasms of my subconscious. I began to search feverishly for every scrap of information bearing on the studies and travels of that other one during the dark years.
      Not all of my troubles were as semi-abstract as this. There were the dreams—and these seemed to grow in vividness and concreteness. Knowing how most would regard them, I seldom mentioned them to anyone but my son or certain trusted psychologists, but eventually I commenced a scientific study of other cases in order to see how typical or non-typical such visions might be among amnesia victims. My results, aided by psychologists, historians, anthropologists, and mental specialists of wide experience, and by a study that included all records of split personalities from the days of daemoniac-possession legends to the medically realistic present, at first bothered me more than they consoled me.
      I soon found that my dreams had indeed no counterpart in the overwhelming bulk of true amnesia cases. There remained, however, a tiny residue of accounts which for years baffled and shocked me with their parallelism to my own experience. Some of them were bits of ancient folklore; others were case-histories in the annals of medicine; one or two were anecdotes obscurely buried in standard histories. It thus appeared that, while my special kind of affliction was prodigiously rare, instances of it had occurred at long intervals ever since the beginning of man’s annals. Some centuries might contain one, two, or three cases; others none—or at least none whose record survived.
      The essence was always the same—a person of keen thoughtfulness seized with a strange secondary life and leading for a greater or lesser period an utterly alien existence typified at first by vocal and bodily awkwardness, and later by a wholesale acquisition of scientific, historic, artistic, and anthropological knowledge; an acquisition carried on with feverish zest and with a wholly abnormal absorptive power. Then a sudden return of the rightful consciousness, intermittently plagued ever after with vague unplaceable dreams suggesting fragments of some hideous memory elaborately blotted out. And the close resemblance of those nightmares to my own—even in some of the smallest particulars—left no doubt in my mind of their significantly typical nature. One or two of the cases had an added ring of faint, blasphemous familiarity, as if I had heard of them before through some cosmic channel too morbid and frightful to contemplate. In three instances there was specific mention of such an unknown machine as had been in my house before the second change.
      Another thing that cloudily worried me during my investigation was the somewhat greater frequency of cases where a brief, elusive glimpse of the typical nightmares was afforded to persons not visited with well-defined amnesia. These persons were largely of mediocre mind or less—some so primitive that they could scarcely be thought of as vehicles for abnormal scholarship and preternatural mental acquisitions. For a second they would be fired with alien force—then a backward lapse and a thin, swift-fading memory of un-human horrors.
      There had been at least three such cases during the past half century—one only fifteen years before. Had something been groping blindly through time from some unsuspected abyss in Nature? Were these faint cases monstrous, sinister experiments of a kind and authorship utterly beyond sane belief? Such were a few of the formless speculations of my weaker hours—fancies abetted by myths which my studies uncovered. For I could not doubt but that certain persistent legends of immemorial antiquity, apparently unknown to the victims and physicians connected with recent amnesia cases, formed a striking and awesome elaboration of memory lapses such as mine.
      Of the nature of the dreams and impressions which were growing so clamorous I still almost fear to speak. They seemed to savour of madness, and at times I believed I was indeed going mad. Was there a special type of delusion afflicting those who had suffered lapses of memory? Conceivably, the efforts of the subconscious mind to fill up a perplexing blank with pseudo-memories might give rise to strange imaginative vagaries. This, indeed (though an alternative folklore theory finally seemed to me more plausible), was the belief of many of the alienists who helped me in my search for parallel cases, and who shared my puzzlement at the exact resemblances sometimes discovered. They did not call the condition true insanity, but classed it rather among neurotic disorders. My course in trying to track it down and analyse it, instead of vainly seeking to dismiss or forget it, they heartily endorsed as correct according to the best psychological principles. I especially valued the advice of such physicians as had studied me during my possession by the other personality.
      My first disturbances were not visual at all, but concerned the more abstract matters which I have mentioned. There was, too, a feeling of profound and inexplicable horror concerning myself. I developed a queer fear of seeing my own form, as if my eyes would find it something utterly alien and inconceivably abhorrent. When I did glance down and behold the familiar human shape in quiet grey or blue clothing I always felt a curious relief, though in order to gain this relief I had to conquer an infinite dread. I shunned mirrors as much as possible, and was always shaved at the barber’s.
      It was a long time before I correlated any of these disappointed feelings with the fleeting visual impressions which began to develop. The first such correlation had to do with the odd sensation of an external, artificial restraint on my memory. I felt that the snatches of sight I experienced had a profound and terrible meaning, and a frightful connexion with myself, but that some purposeful influence held me from grasping that meaning and that connexion. Then came that queerness about the element of time, and with it desperate efforts to place the fragmentary dream-glimpses in the chronological and spatial pattern.
      The glimpses themselves were at first merely strange rather than horrible. I would seem to be in an enormous vaulted chamber whose lofty stone groinings were well-nigh lost in the shadows overhead. In whatever time or place the scene might be, the principle of the arch was known as fully and used as extensively as by the Romans. There were colossal round windows and high arched doors, and pedestals or tables each as tall as the height of an ordinary room. Vast shelves of dark wood lined the walls, holding what seemed to be volumes of immense size with strange hieroglyphs on their backs. The exposed stonework held curious carvings, always in curvilinear mathematical designs, and there were chiselled inscriptions in the same characters that the huge books bore. The dark granite masonry was of a monstrous megalithic type, with lines of convex-topped blocks fitting the concave-bottomed courses which rested upon them. There were no chairs, but the tops of the vast pedestals were littered with books, papers, and what seemed to be writing materials—oddly figured jars of a purplish metal, and rods with stained tips. Tall as the pedestals were, I seemed at times able to view them from above. On some of them were great globes of luminous crystal serving as lamps, and inexplicable machines formed of vitreous tubes and metal rods. The windows were glazed, and latticed with stout-looking bars. Though I dared not approach and peer out them, I could see from where I was the waving tops of singular fern-like growths. The floor was of massive octagonal flagstones, while rugs and hangings were entirely lacking.
      Later I had visions of sweeping through Cyclopean corridors of stone, and up and down gigantic inclined planes of the same monstrous masonry. There were no stairs anywhere, nor was any passageway less than thirty feet wide. Some of the structures through which I floated must have towered into the sky for thousands of feet. There were multiple levels of black vaults below, and never-opened trap-doors, sealed down with metal bands and holding dim suggestions of some special peril. I seemed to be a prisoner, and horror hung broodingly over everything I saw. I felt that the mocking curvilinear hieroglyphs on the walls would blast my soul with their message were I not guarded by a merciful ignorance.
      Still later my dreams included vistas from the great round windows, and from the titanic flat roof, with its curious gardens, wide barren area, and high, scalloped parapet of stone, to which the topmost of the inclined planes led. There were almost endless leagues of giant buildings, each in its garden, and ranged along paved roads fully two hundred feet wide. They differed greatly in aspect, but few were less than five hundred feet square or a thousand feet high. Many seemed so limitless that they must have had a frontage of several thousand feet, while some shot up to mountainous altitudes in the grey, steamy heavens. They seemed to be mainly of stone or concrete, and most of them embodied the oddly curvilinear type of masonry noticeable in the building that held me. Roofs were flat and garden-covered, and tended to have scalloped parapets. Sometimes there were terraces and higher levels, and wide cleared spaces amidst the gardens. The great roads held hints of motion, but in the earlier visions I could not resolve this impression into details.
      In certain places I beheld enormous dark cylindrical towers which climbed far above any of the other structures. These appeared to be of a totally unique nature, and shewed signs of prodigious age and dilapidation. They were built of a bizarre type of square-cut basalt masonry, and tapered slightly toward their rounded tops. Nowhere in any of them could the least traces of windows or other apertures save huge doors be found. I noticed also some lower buildings—all crumbling with the weathering of aeons—which resembled these dark cylindrical towers in basic architecture. Around all these aberrant piles of square-cut masonry there hovered an inexplicable aura of menace and concentrated fear, like that bred by the sealed trap-doors.
      The omnipresent gardens were almost terrifying in their strangeness, with bizarre and unfamiliar forms of vegetation nodding over broad paths lined with curiously carven monoliths. Abnormally vast fern-like growths predominated; some green, and some of a ghastly, fungoid pallor. Among them rose great spectral things resembling calamites, whose bamboo-like trunks towered to fabulous heights. Then there were tufted forms like fabulous cycads, and grotesque dark-green shrubs and trees of coniferous aspect. Flowers were small, colourless, and unrecognisable, blooming in geometrical beds and at large among the greenery. In a few of the terrace and roof-top gardens were larger and more vivid blossoms of almost offensive contours and seeming to suggest artificial breeding. Fungi of inconceivable size, outlines, and colours speckled the scene in patterns bespeaking some unknown but well-established horticultural tradition. In the larger gardens on the ground there seemed to be some attempt to preserve the irregularities of Nature, but on the roofs there was more selectiveness, and more evidences of the topiary art.
      The skies were almost always moist and cloudy, and sometimes I would seem to witness tremendous rains. Once in a while, though, there would be glimpses of the sun—which looked abnormally large—and of the moon, whose markings held a touch of difference from the normal that I could never quite fathom. When—very rarely—the night sky was clear to any extent, I beheld constellations which were nearly beyond recognition. Known outlines were sometimes approximated, but seldom duplicated; and from the position of the few groups I could recognise, I felt I must be in the earth’s southern hemisphere, near the Tropic of Capricorn. The far horizon was always steamy and indistinct, but I could see that great jungles of unknown tree-ferns, calamites, lepidodendra, and sigillaria lay outside the city, their fantastic frondage waving mockingly in the shifting vapours. Now and then there would be suggestions of motion in the sky, but these my early visions never resolved.
      By the autumn of 1914 I began to have infrequent dreams of strange floatings over the city and through the regions around it. I saw interminable roads through forests of fearsome growths with mottled, fluted, and banded trunks, and past other cities as strange as the one which persistently haunted me. I saw monstrous constructions of black or iridescent stone in glades and clearings where perpetual twilight reigned, and traversed long causeways over swamps so dark that I could tell but little of their moist, towering vegetation. Once I saw an area of countless miles strown with age-blasted basaltic ruins whose architecture had been like that of the few windowless, round-topped towers in the haunting city. And once I saw the sea—a boundless steamy expanse beyond the colossal stone piers of an enormous town of domes and arches. Great shapeless suggestions of shadow moved over it, and here and there its surface was vexed with anomalous spoutings.

III.

As I have said, it was not immediately that these wild visions began to hold their terrifying quality. Certainly, many persons have dreamed intrinsically stranger things—things compounded of unrelated scraps of daily life, pictures, and reading, and arranged in fantastically novel forms by the unchecked caprices of sleep. For some time I accepted the visions as natural, even though I had never before been an extravagant dreamer. Many of the vague anomalies, I argued, must have come from trivial sources too numerous to track down; while others seemed to reflect a common text-book knowledge of the plants and other conditions of the primitive world of a hundred and fifty million years ago—the world of the Permian or Triassic age. In the course of some months, however, the element of terror did figure with accumulating force. This was when the dreams began so unfailingly to have the aspect of memories, and when my mind began to link them with my growing abstract disturbances—the feeling of mnemonic restraint, the curious impressions regarding time, the sense of a loathsome exchange with my secondary personality of 1908–13, and, considerably later, the inexplicable loathing of my own person.
      As certain definite details began to enter the dreams, their horror increased a thousandfold—until by October, 1915, I felt I must do something. It was then that I began an intensive study of other cases of amnesia and visions, feeling that I might thereby objectivise my trouble and shake clear of its emotional grip. However, as before mentioned, the result was at first almost exactly opposite. It disturbed me vastly to find that my dreams had been so closely duplicated; especially since some of the accounts were too early to admit of any geological knowledge—and therefore of any idea of primitive landscapes—on the subjects’ part. What is more, many of these accounts supplied very horrible details and explanations in connexion with the visions of great buildings and jungle gardens—and other things. The actual sights and vague impressions were bad enough, but what was hinted or asserted by some of the other dreamers savoured of madness and blasphemy. Worst of all, my own pseudo-memory was aroused to wilder dreams and hints of coming revelations. And yet most doctors deemed my course, on the whole, an advisable one.
      I studied psychology systematically, and under the prevailing stimulus my son Wingate did the same—his studies leading eventually to his present professorship. In 1917 and 1918 I took special courses at Miskatonic. Meanwhile my examination of medical, historical, and anthropological records became indefatigable; involving travels to distant libraries, and finally including even a reading of the hideous books of forbidden elder lore in which my secondary personality had been so disturbingly interested. Some of the latter were the actual copies I had consulted in my altered state, and I was greatly disturbed by certain marginal notations and ostensible corrections of the hideous text in a script and idiom which somehow seemed oddly un-human.
      These markings were mostly in the respective languages of the various books, all of which the writer seemed to know with equal though obviously academic facility. One note appended to von Junzt’s Unaussprechlichen Kulten, however, was alarmingly otherwise. It consisted of certain curvilinear hieroglyphs in the same ink as that of the German corrections, but following no recognised human pattern. And these hieroglyphs were closely and unmistakably akin to the characters constantly met with in my dreams—characters whose meaning I would sometimes momentarily fancy I knew or was just on the brink of recalling. To complete my black confusion, my librarians assured me that, in view of previous examinations and records of consultation of the volumes in question, all of these notations must have been made by myself in my secondary state. This despite the fact that I was and still am ignorant of three of the languages involved.
      Piecing together the scattered records, ancient and modern, anthropological and medical, I found a fairly consistent mixture of myth and hallucination whose scope and wildness left me utterly dazed. Only one thing consoled me—the fact that the myths were of such early existence. What lost knowledge could have brought pictures of the Palaeozoic or Mesozoic landscape into these primitive fables, I could not even guess, but the pictures had been there. Thus, a basis existed for the formation of a fixed type of delusion. Cases of amnesia no doubt created the general myth-pattern—but afterward the fanciful accretions of the myths must have reacted on amnesia sufferers and coloured their pseudo-memories. I myself had read and heard all the early tales during my memory lapse—my quest had amply proved that. Was it not natural, then, for my subsequent dreams and emotional impressions to become coloured and moulded by what my memory subtly held over from my secondary state? A few of the myths had significant connexions with other cloudy legends of the pre-human world, especially those Hindoo tales involving stupefying gulfs of time and forming part of the lore of modern theosophists.
      Primal myth and modern delusion joined in their assumption that mankind is only one—perhaps the least—of the highly evolved and dominant races of this planet’s long and largely unknown career. Things of inconceivable shape, they implied, had reared towers to the sky and delved into every secret of Nature before the first amphibian forbear of man had crawled out of the hot sea three hundred million years ago. Some had come down from the stars; a few were as old as the cosmos itself; others had arisen swiftly from terrene germs as far behind the first germs of our life-cycle as those germs are behind ourselves. Spans of thousands of millions of years, and linkages with other galaxies and universes, were freely spoken of. Indeed, there was no such thing as time in its humanly accepted sense.
      But most of the tales and impressions concerned a relatively late race, of a queer and intricate shape resembling no life-form known to science, which had lived till only fifty million years before the advent of man. This, they indicated, was the greatest race of all; because it alone had conquered the secret of time. It had learned all things that ever were known or ever would be known on the earth, through the power of its keener minds to project themselves into the past and future, even through gulfs of millions of years, and study the lore of every age. From the accomplishments of this race arose all legends of prophets, including those in human mythology.
      In its vast libraries were volumes of texts and pictures holding the whole of earth’s annals—histories and descriptions of every species that had ever been or that ever would be, with full records of their arts, their achievements, their languages, and their psychologies. With this aeon-embracing knowledge, the Great Race chose from every era and life-form such thoughts, arts, and processes as might suit its own nature and situation. Knowledge of the past, secured through a kind of mind-casting outside the recognised senses, was harder to glean than knowledge of the future.
      In the latter case the course was easier and more material. With suitable mechanical aid a mind would project itself forward in time, feeling its dim, extra-sensory way till it approached the desired period. Then, after preliminary trials, it would seize on the best discoverable representative of the highest of that period’s life-forms; entering the organism’s brain and setting up therein its own vibrations while the displaced mind would strike back to the period of the displacer, remaining in the latter’s body till a reverse process was set up. The projected mind, in the body of the organism of the future, would then pose as a member of the race whose outward form it wore; learning as quickly as possible all that could be learned of the chosen age and its massed information and techniques.
      Meanwhile the displaced mind, thrown back to the displacer’s age and body, would be carefully guarded. It would be kept from harming the body it occupied, and would be drained of all its knowledge by trained questioners. Often it could be questioned in its own language, when previous quests into the future had brought back records of that language. If the mind came from a body whose language the Great Race could not physically reproduce, clever machines would be made, on which the alien speech could be played as on a musical instrument. The Great Race’s members were immense rugose cones ten feet high, and with head and other organs attached to foot-thick, distensible limbs spreading from the apexes. They spoke by the clicking or scraping of huge paws or claws attached to the end of two of their four limbs, and walked by the expansion and contraction of a viscous layer attached to their vast ten-foot bases.
      When the captive mind’s amazement and resentment had worn off, and when (assuming that it came from a body vastly different from the Great Race’s) it had lost its horror at its unfamiliar temporary form, it was permitted to study its new environment and experience a wonder and wisdom approximating that of its displacer. With suitable precautions, and in exchange for suitable services, it was allowed to rove all over the habitable world in titan airships or on the huge boat-like atomic-engined vehicles which traversed the great roads, and to delve freely into the libraries containing the records of the planet’s past and future. This reconciled many captive minds to their lot; since none were other than keen, and to such minds the unveiling of hidden mysteries of earth—closed chapters of inconceivable pasts and dizzying vortices of future time which include the years ahead of their own natural ages—forms always, despite the abysmal horrors often unveiled, the supreme experience of life.
      Now and then certain captives were permitted to meet other captive minds seized from the future—to exchange thoughts with consciousnesses living a hundred or a thousand or a million years before or after their own ages. And all were urged to write copiously in their own languages of themselves and their respective periods; such documents to be filed in the great central archives.
      It may be added that there was one sad special type of captive whose privileges were far greater than those of the majority. These were the dying permanent exiles, whose bodies in the future had been seized by keen-minded members of the Great Race who, faced with death, sought to escape mental extinction. Such melancholy exiles were not as common as might be expected, since the longevity of the Great Race lessened its love of life—especially among those superior minds capable of projection. From cases of the permanent projection of elder minds arose many of those lasting changes of personality noticed in later history—including mankind’s.
      As for the ordinary cases of exploration—when the displacing mind had learned what it wished in the future, it would build an apparatus like that which had started its flight and reverse the process of projection. Once more it would be in its own body in its own age, while the lately captive mind would return to that body of the future to which it properly belonged. Only when one or the other of the bodies had died during the exchange was this restoration impossible. In such cases, of course, the exploring mind had—like those of the death-escapers—to live out an alien-bodied life in the future; or else the captive mind—like the dying permanent exiles—had to end its days in the form and past age of the Great Race.
      This fate was least horrible when the captive mind was also of the Great Race—a not infrequent occurrence, since in all its periods that race was intensely concerned with its own future. The number of dying permanent exiles of the Great Race was very slight—largely because of the tremendous penalties attached to displacements of future Great Race minds by the moribund. Through projection, arrangements were made to inflict these penalties on the offending minds in their new future bodies—and sometimes forced re-exchanges were effected. Complex cases of the displacement of exploring or already captive minds by minds in various regions of the past had been known and carefully rectified. In every age since the discovery of mind-projection, a minute but well-recognised element of the population consisted of Great Race minds from past ages, sojourning for a longer or shorter while.
      When a captive mind of alien origin was returned to its own body in the future, it was purged by an intricate mechanical hypnosis of all it had learned in the Great Race’s age—this because of certain troublesome consequences inherent in the general carrying forward of knowledge in large quantities. The few existing instances of clear transmission had caused, and would cause at known future times, great disasters. And it was largely in consequence of two cases of the kind (said the old myths) that mankind had learned what it had concerning the Great Race. Of all things surviving physically and directly from that aeon-distant world, there remained only certain ruins of great stones in far places and under the sea, and parts of the text of the frightful Pnakotic Manuscripts.
      Thus the returning mind reached its own age with only the faintest and most fragmentary visions of what it had undergone since its seizure. All memories that could be eradicated were eradicated, so that in most cases only a dream-shadowed blank stretched back to the time of the first exchange. Some minds recalled more than others, and the chance joining of memories had at rare times brought hints of the forbidden past to future ages. There probably never was a time when groups or cults did not secretly cherish certain of these hints. In the Necronomicon the presence of such a cult among human beings was suggested—a cult that sometimes gave aid to minds voyaging down the aeons from the days of the Great Race.
      And meanwhile the Great Race itself waxed well-nigh omniscient, and turned to the task of setting up exchanges with the minds of other planets, and of exploring their pasts and futures. It sought likewise to fathom the past years and origin of that black, aeon-dead orb in far space whence its own mental heritage had come—for the mind of the Great Race was older than its bodily form. The beings of a dying elder world, wise with the ultimate secrets, had looked ahead for a new world and species wherein they might have long life; and had sent their minds en masse into that future race best adapted to house them—the cone-shaped things that peopled our earth a billion years ago. Thus the Great Race came to be, while the myriad minds sent backward were left to die in the horror of strange shapes. Later the race would again face death, yet would live through another forward migration of its best minds into the bodies of others who had a longer physical span ahead of them.
      Such was the background of intertwined legend and hallucination. When, around 1920, I had my researches in coherent shape, I felt a slight lessening of the tension which their earlier stages had increased. After all, and in spite of the fancies prompted by blind emotions, were not most of my phenomena readily explainable? Any chance might have turned my mind to dark studies during the amnesia—and then I read the forbidden legends and met the members of ancient and ill-regarded cults. That, plainly, supplied the material for the dreams and disturbed feelings which came after the return of memory. As for the marginal notes in dream-hieroglyphs and languages unknown to me, but laid at my door by librarians—I might easily have picked up a smattering of the tongues during my secondary state, while the hieroglyphs were doubtless coined by my fancy from descriptions in old legends, and afterward woven into my dreams. I tried to verify certain points through conversation with known cult-leaders, but never succeeded in establishing the right connexions.
      At times the parallelism of so many cases in so many distant ages continued to worry me as it had at first, but on the other hand I reflected that the excitant folklore was undoubtedly more universal in the past than in the present. Probably all the other victims whose cases were like mine had had a long and familiar knowledge of the tales I had learned only when in my secondary state. When these victims had lost their memory, they had associated themselves with the creatures of their household myths—the fabulous invaders supposed to displace men’s minds—and had thus embarked upon quests for knowledge which they thought they could take back to a fancied, non-human past. Then when their memory returned, they reversed the associative process and thought of themselves as the former captive minds instead of as the displacers. Hence the dreams and pseudo-memories following the conventional myth-pattern.
      Despite the seeming cumbrousness of these explanations, they came finally to supersede all others in my mind—largely because of the greater weakness of any rival theory. And a substantial number of eminent psychologists and anthropologists gradually agreed with me. The more I reflected, the more convincing did my reasoning seem; till in the end I had a really effective bulwark against the visions and impressions which still assailed me. Suppose I did see strange things at night? These were only what I had heard and read of. Suppose I did have odd loathings and perspectives and pseudo-memories? These, too, were only echoes of myths absorbed in my secondary state. Nothing that I might dream, nothing that I might feel, could be of any actual significance.
      Fortified by this philosophy, I greatly improved in nervous equilibrium, even though the visions (rather than the abstract impressions) steadily became more frequent and more disturbingly detailed. In 1922 I felt able to undertake regular work again, and put my newly gained knowledge to practical use by accepting an instructorship in psychology at the university. My old chair of political economy had long been adequately filled—besides which, methods of teaching economics had changed greatly since my heyday. My son was at this time just entering on the post-graduate studies leading to his present professorship, and we worked together a great deal.

IV.

I continued, however, to keep a careful record of the outré dreams which crowded upon me so thickly and vividly. Such a record, I argued, was of genuine value as a psychological document. The glimpses still seemed damnably like memories, though I fought off this impression with a goodly measure of success. In writing, I treated the phantasmata as things seen; but at all other times I brushed them aside like any gossamer illusions of the night. I had never mentioned such matters in common conversation; though reports of them, filtering out as such things will, had aroused sundry rumours regarding my mental health. It is amusing to reflect that these rumours were confined wholly to laymen, without a single champion among physicians or psychologists.
      Of my visions after 1914 I will here mention only a few, since fuller accounts and records are at the disposal of the serious student. It is evident that with time the curious inhibitions somewhat waned, for the scope of my visions vastly increased. They have never, though, become other than disjointed fragments seemingly without clear motivation. Within the dreams I seemed gradually to acquire a greater and greater freedom of wandering. I floated through many strange buildings of stone, going from one to the other along mammoth underground passages which seemed to form the common avenues of transit. Sometimes I encountered those gigantic sealed trap-doors in the lowest level, around which such an aura of fear and forbiddenness clung. I saw tremendous tessellated pools, and rooms of curious and inexplicable utensils of myriad sorts. Then there were colossal caverns of intricate machinery whose outlines and purpose were wholly strange to me, and whose sound manifested itself only after many years of dreaming. I may here remark that sight and sound are the only senses I have ever exercised in the visionary world.
      The real horror began in May, 1915, when I first saw the living things. This was before my studies had taught me what, in view of the myths and case histories, to expect. As mental barriers wore down, I beheld great masses of thin vapour in various parts of the building and in the streets below. These steadily grew more solid and distinct, till at last I could trace their monstrous outlines with uncomfortable ease. They seemed to be enormous iridescent cones, about ten feet high and ten feet wide at the base, and made up of some ridgy, scaly, semi-elastic matter. From their apexes projected four flexible, cylindrical members, each a foot thick, and of a ridgy substance like that of the cones themselves. These members were sometimes contracted almost to nothing, and sometimes extended to any distance up to about ten feet. Terminating two of them were enormous claws or nippers. At the end of a third were four red, trumpet-like appendages. The fourth terminated in an irregular yellowish globe some two feet in diameter and having three great dark eyes ranged along its central circumference. Surmounting this head were four slender grey stalks bearing flower-like appendages, whilst from its nether side dangled eight greenish antennae or tentacles. The great base of the central cone was fringed with a rubbery, grey substance which moved the whole entity through expansion and contraction.
      Their actions, though harmless, horrified me even more than their appearance—for it is not wholesome to watch monstrous objects doing what one has known only human beings to do. These objects moved intelligently around the great rooms, getting books from the shelves and taking them to the great tables, or vice versa, and sometimes writing diligently with a peculiar rod gripped in the greenish head-tentacles. The huge nippers were used in carrying books and in conversation—speech consisting of a kind of clicking and scraping. The objects had no clothing, but wore satchels or knapsacks suspended from the top of the conical trunk. They commonly carried their head and its supporting member at the level of the cone top, although it was frequently raised or lowered. The other three great members tended to rest downward on the sides of the cone, contracted to about five feet each, when not in use. From their rate of reading, writing, and operating their machines (those on the tables seemed somehow connected with thought) I concluded that their intelligence was enormously greater than man’s.
      Afterward I saw them everywhere; swarming in all the great chambers and corridors, tending monstrous machines in vaulted crypts, and racing along the vast roads in gigantic boat-shaped cars. I ceased to be afraid of them, for they seemed to form supremely natural parts of their environment. Individual differences amongst them began to be manifest, and a few appeared to be under some kind of restraint. These latter, though shewing no physical variation, had a diversity of gestures and habits which marked them off not only from the majority, but very largely from one another. They wrote a great deal in what seemed to my cloudy vision a vast variety of characters—never the typical curvilinear hieroglyphs of the majority. A few, I fancied, used our own familiar alphabet. Most of them worked much more slowly than the general mass of the entities.
      All this time my own part in the dreams seemed to be that of a disembodied consciousness with a range of vision wider than the normal; floating freely about, yet confined to the ordinary avenues and speeds of travel. Not until August, 1915, did any suggestions of bodily existence begin to harass me. I say harass, because the first phase was a purely abstract though infinitely terrible association of my previously noted body-loathing with the scenes of my visions. For a while my chief concern during dreams was to avoid looking down at myself, and I recall how grateful I was for the total absence of large mirrors in the strange rooms. I was mightily troubled by the fact that I always saw the great tables—whose height could not be under ten feet—from a level not below that of their surfaces.
      And then the morbid temptation to look down at myself became greater and greater, till one night I could not resist it. At first my downward glance revealed nothing whatever. A moment later I perceived that this was because my head lay at the end of a flexible neck of enormous length. Retracting this neck and gazing down very sharply, I saw the scaly, rugose, iridescent bulk of a vast cone ten feet tall and ten feet wide at the base. That was when I waked half of Arkham with my screaming as I plunged madly up from the abyss of sleep.
      Only after weeks of hideous repetition did I grow half-reconciled to these visions of myself in monstrous form. In the dreams I now moved bodily among the other unknown entities, reading terrible books from the endless shelves and writing for hours at the great tables with a stylus managed by the green tentacles that hung down from my head. Snatches of what I read and wrote would linger in my memory. There were horrible annals of other worlds and other universes, and of stirrings of formless life outside of all universes. There were records of strange orders of beings which had peopled the world in forgotten pasts, and frightful chronicles of grotesque-bodied intelligences which would people it millions of years after the death of the last human being. And I learned of chapters in human history whose existence no scholar of today has ever suspected. Most of these writings were in the language of the hieroglyphs; which I studied in a queer way with the aid of droning machines, and which was evidently an agglutinative speech with root systems utterly unlike any found in human languages. Other volumes were in other unknown tongues learned in the same queer way. A very few were in languages I knew. Extremely clever pictures, both inserted in the records and forming separate collections, aided me immensely. And all the time I seemed to be setting down a history of my own age in English. On waking, I could recall only minute and meaningless scraps of the unknown tongues which my dream-self had mastered, though whole phrases of the history stayed with me.
      I learned—even before my waking self had studied the parallel cases or the old myths from which the dreams doubtless sprang—that the entities around me were of the world’s greatest race, which had conquered time and had sent exploring minds into every age. I knew, too, that I had been snatched from my age while another used my body in that age, and that a few of the other strange forms housed similarly captured minds. I seemed to talk, in some odd language of claw-clickings, with exiled intellects from every corner of the solar system.
      There was a mind from the planet we know as Venus, which would live incalculable epochs to come, and one from an outer moon of Jupiter six million years in the past. Of earthly minds there were some from the winged, star-headed, half-vegetable race of palaeogean Antarctica; one from the reptile people of fabled Valusia; three from the furry pre-human Hyperborean worshippers of Tsathoggua; one from the wholly abominable Tcho-Tchos; two from the arachnid denizens of earth’s last age; five from the hardy coleopterous species immediately following mankind, to which the Great Race was some day to transfer its keenest minds en masse in the face of horrible peril; and several from different branches of humanity.
      I talked with the mind of Yiang-Li, a philosopher from the cruel empire of Tsan-Chan, which is to come in A.D. 5000; with that of a general of the great-headed brown people who held South Africa in B.C. 50,000; with that of a twelfth-century Florentine monk named Bartolomeo Corsi; with that of a king of Lomar who had ruled that terrible polar land 100,000 years before the squat, yellow Inutos came from the west to engulf it; with that of Nug-Soth, a magician of the dark conquerors of A.D. 16,000; with that of a Roman named Titus Sempronius Blaesus, who had been a quaestor in Sulla’s time; with that of Khephnes, an Egyptian of the 14th Dynasty who told me the hideous secret of Nyarlathotep; with that of a priest of Atlantis’ middle kingdom; with that of a Suffolk gentleman of Cromwell’s day, James Woodville; with that of a court astronomer of pre-Inca Peru; with that of the Australian physicist Nevil Kingston-Brown, who will die in A.D. 2518; with that of an archimage of vanished Yhe in the Pacific; with that of Theodotides, a Graeco-Bactrian official of B.C. 200; with that of an aged Frenchman of Louis XIII’s time named Pierre-Louis Montmagny; with that of Crom-Ya, a Cimmerian chieftain of B.C. 15,000; and with so many others that my brain cannot hold the shocking secrets and dizzying marvels I learned from them.
      I awaked each morning in a fever, sometimes frantically trying to verify or discredit such information as fell within the range of modern human knowledge. Traditional facts took on new and doubtful aspects, and I marvelled at the dream-fancy which could invent such surprising addenda to history and science. I shivered at the mysteries the past may conceal, and trembled at the menaces the future may bring forth. What was hinted in the speech of post-human entities of the fate of mankind produced such an effect on me that I will not set it down here. After man there would be the mighty beetle civilisation, the bodies of whose members the cream of the Great Race would seize when the monstrous doom overtook the elder world. Later, as the earth’s span closed, the transferred minds would again migrate through time and space—to another stopping-place in the bodies of the bulbous vegetable entities of Mercury. But there would be races after them, clinging pathetically to the cold planet and burrowing to its horror-filled core, before the utter end.
      Meanwhile, in my dreams, I wrote endlessly in that history of my own age which I was preparing—half voluntarily and half through promises of increased library and travel opportunities—for the Great Race’s central archives. The archives were in a colossal subterranean structure near the city’s centre, which I came to know well through frequent labours and consultations. Meant to last as long as the race, and to withstand the fiercest of earth’s convulsions, this titan repository surpassed all other buildings in the massive, mountain-like firmness of its construction.
      The records, written or printed on great sheets of a curiously tenacious cellulose fabric, were bound into books that opened from the top, and were kept in individual cases of a strange, extremely light rustless metal of greyish hue, decorated with mathematical designs and bearing the title in the Great Race’s curvilinear hieroglyphs. These cases were stored in tiers of rectangular vaults—like closed, locked shelves—wrought of the same rustless metal and fastened by knobs with intricate turnings. My own history was assigned a specific place in the vaults of the lowest or vertebrate level—the section devoted to the culture of mankind and of the furry and reptilian races immediately preceding it in terrestrial dominance.
      But none of the dreams ever gave me a full picture of daily life. All were the merest misty, disconnected fragments, and it is certain that these fragments were not unfolded in their rightful sequence. I have, for example, a very imperfect idea of my own living arrangements in the dream-world; though I seem to have possessed a great stone room of my own. My restrictions as a prisoner gradually disappeared, so that some of the visions included vivid travels over the mighty jungle roads, sojourns in strange cities, and explorations of some of the vast dark windowless ruins from which the Great Race shrank in curious fear. There were also long sea-voyages in enormous, many-decked boats of incredible swiftness, and trips over wild regions in closed, projectile-like airships lifted and moved by electrical repulsion. Beyond the wide, warm ocean were other cities of the Great Race, and on one far continent I saw the crude villages of the black-snouted, winged creatures who would evolve as a dominant stock after the Great Race had sent its foremost minds into the future to escape the creeping horror. Flatness and exuberant green life were always the keynote of the scene. Hills were low and sparse, and usually displayed signs of volcanic forces.
      Of the animals I saw, I could write volumes. All were wild; for the Great Race’s mechanised culture had long since done away with domestic beasts, while food was wholly vegetable or synthetic. Clumsy reptiles of great bulk floundered in steaming morasses, fluttered in the heavy air, or spouted in the seas and lakes; and among these I fancied I could vaguely recognise lesser, archaic prototypes of many forms—dinosaurs, pterodactyls, ichthyosaurs, labyrinthodonts, rhamphorhynci, plesiosaurs, and the like—made familiar through palaeontology. Of birds or mammals there were none that I could discern.
      The ground and swamps were constantly alive with snakes, lizards, and crocodiles, while insects buzzed incessantly amidst the lush vegetation. And far out at sea unspied and unknown monsters spouted mountainous columns of foam into the vaporous sky. Once I was taken under the ocean in a gigantic submarine vessel with searchlights, and glimpsed some living horrors of awesome magnitude. I saw also the ruins of incredible sunken cities, and the wealth of crinoid, brachiopod, coral, and ichthyic life which everywhere abounded.
      Of the physiology, psychology, folkways, and detailed history of the Great Race my visions preserved but little information, and many of the scattered points I here set down were gleaned from my study of old legends and other cases rather than from my own dreaming. For in time, of course, my reading and research caught up with and passed the dreams in many phases; so that certain dream-fragments were explained in advance, and formed verifications of what I had learned. This consolingly established my belief that similar reading and research, accomplished by my secondary self, had formed the source of the whole terrible fabric of pseudo-memories.
      The period of my dreams, apparently, was one somewhat less than 150,000,000 years ago, when the Palaeozoic age was giving place to the Mesozoic. The bodies occupied by the Great Race represented no surviving—or even scientifically known—line of terrestrial evolution, but were of a peculiar, closely homogeneous, and highly specialised organic type inclining as much to the vegetable as to the animal state. Cell-action was of an unique sort almost precluding fatigue, and wholly eliminating the need of sleep. Nourishment, assimilated through the red trumpet-like appendages on one of the great flexible limbs, was always semi-fluid and in many aspects wholly unlike the food of existing animals. The beings had but two of the senses which we recognise—sight and hearing, the latter accomplished through the flower-like appendages on the grey stalks above their heads—but of other and incomprehensible senses (not, however, well utilisable by alien captive minds inhabiting their bodies) they possessed many. Their three eyes were so situated as to give them a range of vision wider than the normal. Their blood was a sort of deep-greenish ichor of great thickness. They had no sex, but reproduced through seeds or spores which clustered on their bases and could be developed only under water. Great, shallow tanks were used for the growth of their young—which were, however, reared only in small numbers on account of the longevity of individuals; four or five thousand years being the common life span.
      Markedly defective individuals were quietly disposed of as soon as their defects were noticed. Disease and the approach of death were, in the absence of a sense of touch or of physical pain, recognised by purely visual symptoms. The dead were incinerated with dignified ceremonies. Once in a while, as before mentioned, a keen mind would escape death by forward projection in time; but such cases were not numerous. When one did occur, the exiled mind from the future was treated with the utmost kindness till the dissolution of its unfamiliar tenement.
      The Great Race seemed to form a single loosely knit nation or league, with major institutions in common, though there were four definite divisions. The political and economic system of each unit was a sort of fascistic socialism, with major resources rationally distributed, and power delegated to a small governing board elected by the votes of all able to pass certain educational and psychological tests. Family organisation was not overstressed, though ties among persons of common descent were recognised, and the young were generally reared by their parents.
      Resemblances to human attitudes and institutions were, of course, most marked in those fields where on the one hand highly abstract elements were concerned, or where on the other hand there was a dominance of the basic, unspecialised urges common to all organic life. A few added likenesses came through conscious adoption as the Great Race probed the future and copied what it liked. Industry, highly mechanised, demanded but little time from each citizen; and the abundant leisure was filled with intellectual and aesthetic activities of various sorts. The sciences were carried to an unbelievable height of development, and art was a vital part of life, though at the period of my dreams it had passed its crest and meridian. Technology was enormously stimulated through the constant struggle to survive, and to keep in existence the physical fabric of great cities, imposed by the prodigious geologic upheavals of those primal days.
      Crime was surprisingly scanty, and was dealt with through highly efficient policing. Punishments ranged from privilege-deprivation and imprisonment to death or major emotion-wrenching, and were never administered without a careful study of the criminal’s motivations. Warfare, largely civil for the last few millennia though sometimes waged against reptilian and octopodic invaders, or against the winged, star-headed Old Ones who centred in the Antarctic, was infrequent though infinitely devastating. An enormous army, using camera-like weapons which produced tremendous electrical effects, was kept on hand for purposes seldom mentioned, but obviously connected with the ceaseless fear of the dark, windowless elder ruins and of the great sealed trap-doors in the lowest subterrene levels.
      This fear of the basalt ruins and trap-doors was largely a matter of unspoken suggestion—or, at most, of furtive quasi-whispers. Everything specific which bore on it was significantly absent from such books as were on the common shelves. It was the one subject lying altogether under a taboo among the Great Race, and seemed to be connected alike with horrible bygone struggles, and with that future peril which would some day force the race to send its keener minds ahead en masse in time. Imperfect and fragmentary as were the other things presented by dreams and legends, this matter was still more bafflingly shrouded. The vague old myths avoided it—or perhaps all allusions had for some reason been excised. And in the dreams of myself and others, the hints were peculiarly few. Members of the Great Race never intentionally referred to the matter, and what could be gleaned came only from some of the more sharply observant captive minds.
      According to these scraps of information, the basis of the fear was a horrible elder race of half-polypous, utterly alien entities which had come through space from immeasurably distant universes and had dominated the earth and three other solar planets about six hundred million years ago. They were only partly material—as we understand matter—and their type of consciousness and media of perception differed wholly from those of terrestrial organisms. For example, their senses did not include that of sight; their mental world being a strange, non-visual pattern of impressions. They were, however, sufficiently material to use implements of normal matter when in cosmic areas containing it; and they required housing—albeit of a peculiar kind. Though their senses could penetrate all material barriers, their substance could not; and certain forms of electrical energy could wholly destroy them. They had the power of aërial motion despite the absence of wings or any other visible means of levitation. Their minds were of such texture that no exchange with them could be effected by the Great Race.
      When these things had come to the earth they had built mighty basalt cities of windowless towers, and had preyed horribly upon the beings they found. Thus it was when the minds of the Great Race sped across the void from that obscure trans-galactic world known in the disturbing and debatable Eltdown Shards as Yith. The newcomers, with the instruments they created, had found it easy to subdue the predatory entities and drive them down to those caverns of inner earth which they had already joined to their abodes and begun to inhabit. Then they had sealed the entrances and left them to their fate, afterward occupying most of their great cities and preserving certain important buildings for reasons connected more with superstition than with indifference, boldness, or scientific and historical zeal.
      But as the aeons passed, there came vague, evil signs that the Elder Things were growing strong and numerous in the inner world. There were sporadic irruptions of a particularly hideous character in certain small and remote cities of the Great Race, and in some of the deserted elder cities which the Great Race had not peopled—places where the paths to the gulfs below had not been properly sealed or guarded. After that greater precautions were taken, and many of the paths were closed for ever—though a few were left with sealed trap-doors for strategic use in fighting the Elder Things if ever they broke forth in unexpected places; fresh rifts caused by that selfsame geologic change which had choked some of the paths and had slowly lessened the number of outer-world structures and ruins surviving from the conquered entities.
      The irruptions of the Elder Things must have been shocking beyond all description, since they had permanently coloured the psychology of the Great Race. Such was the fixed mood of horror that the very aspect of the creatures was left unmentioned—at no time was I able to gain a clear hint of what they looked like. There were veiled suggestions of a monstrous plasticity, and of temporary lapses of visibility, while other fragmentary whispers referred to their control and military use of great winds. Singular whistling noises, and colossal footprints made up of five circular toe-marks, seemed also to be associated with them.
      It was evident that the coming doom so desperately feared by the Great Race—the doom that was one day to send millions of keen minds across the chasm of time to strange bodies in the safer future—had to do with a final successful irruption of the Elder Beings. Mental projections down the ages had clearly foretold such a horror, and the Great Race had resolved that none who could escape should face it. That the foray would be a matter of vengeance, rather than an attempt to reoccupy the outer world, they knew from the planet’s later history—for their projections shewed the coming and going of subsequent races untroubled by the monstrous entities. Perhaps these entities had come to prefer earth’s inner abysses to the variable, storm-ravaged surface, since light meant nothing to them. Perhaps, too, they were slowly weakening with the aeons. Indeed, it was known that they would be quite dead in the time of the post-human beetle race which the fleeing minds would tenant. Meanwhile the Great Race maintained its cautious vigilance, with potent weapons ceaselessly ready despite the horrified banishing of the subject from common speech and visible records. And always the shadow of nameless fear hung about the sealed trap-doors and the dark, windowless elder towers.

V.

That is the world of which my dreams brought me dim, scattered echoes every night. I cannot hope to give any true idea of the horror and dread contained in such echoes, for it was upon a wholly intangible quality—the sharp sense of pseudo-memory—that such feelings mainly depended. As I have said, my studies gradually gave me a defence against these feelings, in the form of rational psychological explanations; and this saving influence was augmented by the subtle touch of accustomedness which comes with the passage of time. Yet in spite of everything the vague, creeping terror would return momentarily now and then. It did not, however, engulf me as it had before; and after 1922 I lived a very normal life of work and recreation.
      In the course of years I began to feel that my experience—together with the kindred cases and the related folklore—ought to be definitely summarised and published for the benefit of serious students; hence I prepared a series of articles briefly covering the whole ground and illustrated with crude sketches of some of the shapes, scenes, decorative motifs, and hieroglyphs remembered from the dreams. These appeared at various times during 1928 and 1929 in the Journal of the American Psychological Society, but did not attract much attention. Meanwhile I continued to record my dreams with the minutest care, even though the growing stack of reports attained troublesomely vast proportions.
      On July 10, 1934, there was forwarded to me by the Psychological Society the letter which opened the culminating and most horrible phase of the whole mad ordeal. It was postmarked Pilbarra, Western Australia, and bore the signature of one whom I found, upon inquiry, to be a mining engineer of considerable prominence. Enclosed were some very curious snapshots. I will reproduce the text in its entirety, and no reader can fail to understand how tremendous an effect it and the photographs had upon me.
      I was, for a time, almost stunned and incredulous; for although I had often thought that some basis of fact must underlie certain phases of the legends which had coloured my dreams, I was none the less unprepared for anything like a tangible survival from a lost world remote beyond all imagination. Most devastating of all were the photographs—for here, in cold, incontrovertible realism, there stood out against a background of sand certain worn-down, water-ridged, storm-weathered blocks of stone whose slightly convex tops and slightly concave bottoms told their own story. And when I studied them with a magnifying glass I could see all too plainly, amidst the batterings and pittings, the traces of those vast curvilinear designs and occasional hieroglyphs whose significance had become so hideous to me. But here is the letter, which speaks for itself:
49, Dampier Str.,
      Pilbarra, W. Australia,
            18 May, 1934.
Prof. N. W. Peaslee,
c/o Am. Psychological Society,
30, E. 41st Str.,
N. Y. City, U.S.A.

My dear Sir:—
      A recent conversation with Dr. E. M. Boyle of Perth, and some papers with your articles which he has just sent me, make it advisable for me to tell you about certain things I have seen in the Great Sandy Desert east of our gold field here. It would seem, in view of the peculiar legends about old cities with huge stonework and strange designs and hieroglyphs which you describe, that I have come upon something very important.
      The blackfellows have always been full of talk about “great stones with marks on them”, and seem to have a terrible fear of such things. They connect them in some way with their common racial legends about Buddai, the gigantic old man who lies asleep for ages underground with his head on his arm, and who will some day awake and eat up the world. There are some very old and half-forgotten tales of enormous underground huts of great stones, where passages lead down and down, and where horrible things have happened. The blackfellows claim that once some warriors, fleeing in battle, went down into one and never came back, but that frightful winds began to blow from the place soon after they went down. However, there usually isn’t much in what these natives say.
      But what I have to tell is more than this. Two years ago, when I was prospecting about 500 miles east in the desert, I came on a lot of queer pieces of dressed stone perhaps 3 × 2 × 2 feet in size, and weathered and pitted to the very limit. At first I couldn’t find any of the marks the blackfellows told about, but when I looked close enough I could make out some deeply carved lines in spite of the weathering. They were peculiar curves, just like what the blacks had tried to describe. I imagine there must have been 30 or 40 blocks, some nearly buried in the sand, and all within a circle perhaps a quarter of a mile’s diameter.
      When I saw some, I looked around closely for more, and made a careful reckoning of the place with my instruments. I also took pictures of 10 or 12 of the most typical blocks, and will enclose the prints for you to see. I turned my information and pictures over to the government at Perth, but they have done nothing with them. Then I met Dr. Boyle, who had read your articles in the Journal of the American Psychological Society, and in time happened to mention the stones. He was enormously interested, and became quite excited when I shewed him my snapshots, saying that the stones and markings were just like those of the masonry you had dreamed about and seen described in legends. He meant to write you, but was delayed. Meanwhile he sent me most of the magazines with your articles, and I saw at once from your drawings and descriptions that my stones are certainly the kind you mean. You can appreciate this from the enclosed prints. Later on you will hear directly from Dr. Boyle.
      Now I can understand how important all this will be to you. Without question we are faced with the remains of an unknown civilisation older than any dreamed of before, and forming a basis for your legends. As a mining engineer, I have some knowledge of geology, and can tell you that these blocks are so ancient they frighten me. They are mostly sandstone and granite, though one is almost certainly made of a queer sort of cement or concrete. They bear evidence of water action, as if this part of the world had been submerged and come up again after long ages—all since these blocks were made and used. It is a matter of hundreds of thousands of years—or heaven knows how much more. I don’t like to think about it.
      In view of your previous diligent work in tracking down the legends and everything connected with them, I cannot doubt but that you will want to lead an expedition to the desert and make some archaeological excavations. Both Dr. Boyle and I are prepared to coöperate in such work if you—or organisations known to you—can furnish the funds. I can get together a dozen miners for the heavy digging—the blacks would be of no use, for I’ve found that they have an almost maniacal fear of this particular spot. Boyle and I are saying nothing to others, for you very obviously ought to have precedence in any discoveries or credit.
      The place can be reached from Pilbarra in about 4 days by motor tractor—which we’d need for our apparatus. It is somewhat west and south of Warburton’s path of 1873, and 100 miles southeast of Joanna Spring. We could float things up the De Grey River instead of starting from Pilbarra—but all that can be talked over later. Roughly, the stones lie at a point about 22° 3' 14"" South Latitude, 125° 0' 39"" East Longitude. The climate is tropical, and the desert conditions are trying. Any expedition had better be made in winter—June or July or August. I shall welcome further correspondence upon this subject, and am keenly eager to assist in any plan you may devise. After studying your articles I am deeply impressed with the profound significance of the whole matter. Dr. Boyle will write later. When rapid communication is needed, a cable to Perth can be relayed by wireless.
      Hoping profoundly for an early message,

Believe me,
      Most faithfully yours,
            Robert B. F. Mackenzie.
      Of the immediate aftermath of this letter, much can be learned from the press. My good fortune in securing the backing of Miskatonic University was great, and both Mr. Mackenzie and Dr. Boyle proved invaluable in arranging matters at the Australian end. We were not too specific with the public about our objects, since the whole matter would have lent itself unpleasantly to sensational and jocose treatment by the cheaper newspapers. As a result, printed reports were sparing; but enough appeared to tell of our quest for reported Australian ruins and to chronicle our various preparatory steps.
      Professors William Dyer of the college’s geology department (leader of the Miskatonic Antarctic Expedition of 1930–31), Ferdinand C. Ashley of the department of ancient history, and Tyler M. Freeborn of the department of anthropology—together with my son Wingate—accompanied me. My correspondent Mackenzie came to Arkham early in 1935 and assisted in our final preparations. He proved to be a tremendously competent and affable man of about fifty, admirably well-read, and deeply familiar with all the conditions of Australian travel. He had tractors waiting at Pilbarra, and we chartered a tramp steamer of sufficiently light draught to get up the river to that point. We were prepared to excavate in the most careful and scientific fashion, sifting every particle of sand, and disturbing nothing which might seem to be in or near its original situation.
      Sailing from Boston aboard the wheezy Lexington on March 28, 1935, we had a leisurely trip across the Atlantic and Mediterranean, through the Suez Canal, down the Red Sea, and across the Indian Ocean to our goal. I need not tell how the sight of the low, sandy West Australian coast depressed me, and how I detested the crude mining town and dreary gold fields where the tractors were given their last loads. Dr. Boyle, who met us, proved to be elderly, pleasant, and intelligent—and his knowledge of psychology led him into many long discussions with my son and me.
      Discomfort and expectancy were oddly mingled in most of us when at length our party of eighteen rattled forth over the arid leagues of sand and rock. On Friday, May 31st, we forded a branch of the De Grey and entered the realm of utter desolation. A certain positive terror grew on me as we advanced to this actual site of the elder world behind the legends—a terror of course abetted by the fact that my disturbing dreams and pseudo-memories still beset me with unabated force.
      It was on Monday, June 3, that we saw the first of the half-buried blocks. I cannot describe the emotions with which I actually touched—in objective reality—a fragment of Cyclopean masonry in every respect like the blocks in the walls of my dream-buildings. There was a distinct trace of carving—and my hands trembled as I recognised part of a curvilinear decorative scheme made hellish to me through years of tormenting nightmare and baffling research.
      A month of digging brought a total of some 1250 blocks in varying stages of wear and disintegration. Most of these were carven megaliths with curved tops and bottoms. A minority were smaller, flatter, plain-surfaced, and square or octagonally cut—like those of the floors and pavements in my dreams—while a few were singularly massive and curved or slanted in such a manner as to suggest use in vaulting or groining, or as parts of arches or round window casings. The deeper—and the farther north and east—we dug, the more blocks we found; though we still failed to discover any trace of arrangement among them. Professor Dyer was appalled at the measureless age of the fragments, and Freeborn found traces of symbols which fitted darkly into certain Papuan and Polynesian legends of infinite antiquity. The condition and scattering of the blocks told mutely of vertiginous cycles of time and geologic upheavals of cosmic savagery.
      We had an aëroplane with us, and my son Wingate would often go up to different heights and scan the sand-and-rock waste for signs of dim, large-scale outlines—either differences of level or trails of scattered blocks. His results were virtually negative; for whenever he would one day think he had glimpsed some significant trend, he would on his next trip find the impression replaced by another equally insubstantial—a result of the shifting, wind-blown sand. One or two of these ephemeral suggestions, though, affected me queerly and disagreeably. They seemed, after a fashion, to dovetail horribly with something which I had dreamed or read, but which I could no longer remember. There was a terrible pseudo-familiarity about them—which somehow made me look furtively and apprehensively over the abominable, sterile terrain toward the north and northeast.
      Around the first week in July I developed an unaccountable set of mixed emotions about that general northeasterly region. There was horror, and there was curiosity—but more than that, there was a persistent and perplexing illusion of memory. I tried all sorts of psychological expedients to get these notions out of my head, but met with no success. Sleeplessness also gained upon me, but I almost welcomed this because of the resultant shortening of my dream-periods. I acquired the habit of taking long, lone walks in the desert late at night—usually to the north or northeast, whither the sum of my strange new impulses seemed subtly to pull me.
      Sometimes, on these walks, I would stumble over nearly buried fragments of the ancient masonry. Though there were fewer visible blocks here than where we had started, I felt sure that there must be a vast abundance beneath the surface. The ground was less level than at our camp, and the prevailing high winds now and then piled the sand into fantastic temporary hillocks—exposing some traces of the elder stones while it covered other traces. I was queerly anxious to have the excavations extend to this territory, yet at the same time dreaded what might be revealed. Obviously, I was getting into a rather bad state—all the worse because I could not account for it.
      An indication of my poor nervous health can be gained from my response to an odd discovery which I made on one of my nocturnal rambles. It was on the evening of July 11th, when a gibbous moon flooded the mysterious hillocks with a curious pallor. Wandering somewhat beyond my usual limits, I came upon a great stone which seemed to differ markedly from any we had yet encountered. It was almost wholly covered, but I stooped and cleared away the sand with my hands, later studying the object carefully and supplementing the moonlight with my electric torch. Unlike the other very large rocks, this one was perfectly square-cut, with no convex or concave surface. It seemed, too, to be of a dark basaltic substance wholly dissimilar to the granite and sandstone and occasional concrete of the now familiar fragments.
      Suddenly I rose, turned, and ran for the camp at top speed. It was a wholly unconscious and irrational flight, and only when I was close to my tent did I fully realise why I had run. Then it came to me. The queer dark stone was something which I had dreamed and read about, and which was linked with the uttermost horrors of the aeon-old legendry. It was one of the blocks of that basaltic elder masonry which the fabled Great Race held in such fear—the tall, windowless ruins left by those brooding, half-material, alien Things that festered in earth’s nether abysses and against whose wind-like, invisible forces the trap-doors were sealed and the sleepless sentinels posted.
      I remained awake all that night, but by dawn realised how silly I had been to let the shadow of a myth upset me. Instead of being frightened, I should have had a discoverer’s enthusiasm. The next forenoon I told the others about my find, and Dyer, Freeborn, Boyle, my son, and I set out to view the anomalous block. Failure, however, confronted us. I had formed no clear idea of the stone’s location, and a late wind had wholly altered the hillocks of shifting sand.

VI.

I come now to the crucial and most difficult part of my narrative—all the more difficult because I cannot be quite certain of its reality. At times I feel uncomfortably sure that I was not dreaming or deluded; and it is this feeling—in view of the stupendous implications which the objective truth of my experience would raise—which impels me to make this record. My son—a trained psychologist with the fullest and most sympathetic knowledge of my whole case—shall be the primary judge of what I have to tell.
      First let me outline the externals of the matter, as those at the camp know them. On the night of July 17–18, after a windy day, I retired early but could not sleep. Rising shortly before eleven, and afflicted as usual with that strange feeling regarding the northeastward terrain, I set out on one of my typical nocturnal walks; seeing and greeting only one person—an Australian miner named Tupper—as I left our precincts. The moon, slightly past full, shone from a clear sky and drenched the ancient sands with a white, leprous radiance which seemed to me somehow infinitely evil. There was no longer any wind, nor did any return for nearly five hours, as amply attested by Tupper and others who did not sleep through the night. The Australian last saw me walking rapidly across the pallid, secret-guarding hillocks toward the northeast.
      About 3:30 a.m. a violent wind blew up, waking everyone in camp and felling three of the tents. The sky was unclouded, and the desert still blazed with that leprous moonlight. As the party saw to the tents my absence was noted, but in view of my previous walks this circumstance gave no one alarm. And yet as many as three men—all Australians—seemed to feel something sinister in the air. Mackenzie explained to Prof. Freeborn that this was a fear picked up from blackfellow folklore—the natives having woven a curious fabric of malignant myth about the high winds which at long intervals sweep across the sands under a clear sky. Such winds, it is whispered, blow out of the great stone huts under the ground where terrible things have happened—and are never felt except near places where the big marked stones are scattered. Close to four the gale subsided as suddenly as it had begun, leaving the sand hills in new and unfamiliar shapes.
      It was just past five, with the bloated, fungoid moon sinking in the west, when I staggered into camp—hatless, tattered, features scratched and ensanguined, and without my electric torch. Most of the men had returned to bed, but Prof. Dyer was smoking a pipe in front of his tent. Seeing my winded and almost frenzied state, he called Dr. Boyle, and the two of them got me on my cot and made me comfortable. My son, roused by the stir, soon joined them, and they all tried to force me to lie still and attempt sleep.
      But there was no sleep for me. My psychological state was very extraordinary—different from anything I had previously suffered. After a time I insisted upon talking—nervously and elaborately explaining my condition. I told them I had become fatigued, and had lain down in the sand for a nap. There had, I said, been dreams even more frightful than usual—and when I was awaked by the sudden high wind my overwrought nerves had snapped. I had fled in panic, frequently falling over half-buried stones and thus gaining my tattered and bedraggled aspect. I must have slept long—hence the hours of my absence.
      Of anything strange either seen or experienced I hinted absolutely nothing—exercising the greatest self-control in that respect. But I spoke of a change of mind regarding the whole work of the expedition, and earnestly urged a halt in all digging toward the northeast. My reasoning was patently weak—for I mentioned a dearth of blocks, a wish not to offend the superstitious miners, a possible shortage of funds from the college, and other things either untrue or irrelevant. Naturally, no one paid the least attention to my new wishes—not even my son, whose concern for my health was very obvious.
      The next day I was up and around the camp, but took no part in the excavations. Seeing that I could not stop the work, I decided to return home as soon as possible for the sake of my nerves, and made my son promise to fly me in the plane to Perth—a thousand miles to the southwest—as soon as he had surveyed the region I wished let alone. If, I reflected, the thing I had seen was still visible, I might decide to attempt a specific warning even at the cost of ridicule. It was just conceivable that the miners who knew the local folklore might back me up. Humouring me, my son made the survey that very afternoon; flying over all the terrain my walk could possibly have covered. Yet nothing of what I had found remained in sight. It was the case of the anomalous basalt block all over again—the shifting sand had wiped out every trace. For an instant I half regretted having lost a certain awesome object in my stark fright—but now I know that the loss was merciful. I can still believe my whole experience an illusion—especially if, as I devoutly hope, that hellish abyss is never found.
      Wingate took me to Perth July 20, though declining to abandon the expedition and return home. He stayed with me until the 25th, when the steamer for Liverpool sailed. Now, in the cabin of the Empress, I am pondering long and frantically on the entire matter, and have decided that my son at least must be informed. It shall rest with him whether to diffuse the matter more widely. In order to meet any eventuality I have prepared this summary of my background—as already known in a scattered way to others—and will now tell as briefly as possible what seemed to happen during my absence from the camp that hideous night.
      Nerves on edge, and whipped into a kind of perverse eagerness by that inexplicable, dread-mingled, pseudo-mnemonic urge toward the northeast, I plodded on beneath the evil, burning moon. Here and there I saw, half-shrouded by the sand, those primal Cyclopean blocks left from nameless and forgotten aeons. The incalculable age and brooding horror of this monstrous waste began to oppress me as never before, and I could not keep from thinking of my maddening dreams, of the frightful legends which lay behind them, and of the present fears of natives and miners concerning the desert and its carven stones.
      And yet I plodded on as if to some eldritch rendezvous—more and more assailed by bewildering fancies, compulsions, and pseudo-memories. I thought of some of the possible contours of the lines of stones as seen by my son from the air, and wondered why they seemed at once so ominous and so familiar. Something was fumbling and rattling at the latch of my recollection, while another unknown force sought to keep the portal barred.
      The night was windless, and the pallid sand curved upward and downward like frozen waves of the sea. I had no goal, but somehow ploughed along as if with fate-bound assurance. My dreams welled up into the waking world, so that each sand-embedded megalith seemed part of endless rooms and corridors of pre-human masonry, carved and hieroglyphed with symbols that I knew too well from years of custom as a captive mind of the Great Race. At moments I fancied I saw those omniscient conical horrors moving about at their accustomed tasks, and I feared to look down lest I find myself one with them in aspect. Yet all the while I saw the sand-covered blocks as well as the rooms and corridors; the evil, burning moon as well as the lamps of luminous crystal; the endless desert as well as the waving ferns and cycads beyond the windows. I was awake and dreaming at the same time.
      I do not know how long or how far—or indeed, in just what direction—I had walked when I first spied the heap of blocks bared by the day’s wind. It was the largest group in one place that I had so far seen, and so sharply did it impress me that the visions of fabulous aeons faded suddenly away. Again there were only the desert and the evil moon and the shards of an unguessed past. I drew close and paused, and cast the added light of my electric torch over the tumbled pile. A hillock had blown away, leaving a low, irregularly round mass of megaliths and smaller fragments some forty feet across and from two to eight feet high.
      From the very outset I realised that there was some utterly unprecedented quality about these stones. Not only was the mere number of them quite without parallel, but something in the sand-worn traces of design arrested me as I scanned them under the mingled beams of the moon and my torch. Not that any one differed essentially from the earlier specimens we had found. It was something subtler than that. The impression did not come when I looked at one block alone, but only when I ran my eye over several almost simultaneously. Then, at last, the truth dawned upon me. The curvilinear patterns on many of these blocks were closely related—parts of one vast decorative conception. For the first time in this aeon-shaken waste I had come upon a mass of masonry in its old position—tumbled and fragmentary, it is true, but none the less existing in a very definite sense.
      Mounting at a low place, I clambered laboriously over the heap; here and there clearing away the sand with my fingers, and constantly striving to interpret varieties of size, shape, and style, and relationships of design. After a while I could vaguely guess at the nature of the bygone structure, and at the designs which had once stretched over the vast surfaces of the primal masonry. The perfect identity of the whole with some of my dream-glimpses appalled and unnerved me. This was once a Cyclopean corridor thirty feet tall, paved with octagonal blocks and solidly vaulted overhead. There would have been rooms opening off on the right, and at the farther end one of those strange inclined planes would have wound down to still lower depths.
      I started violently as these conceptions occurred to me, for there was more in them than the blocks themselves had supplied. How did I know that this level should have been far underground? How did I know that the plane leading upward should have been behind me? How did I know that the long subterrene passage to the Square of Pillars ought to lie on the left one level above me? How did I know that the room of machines, and the rightward-leading tunnel to the central archives, ought to lie two levels below? How did I know that there would be one of those horrible, metal-banded trap-doors at the very bottom, four levels down? Bewildered by this intrusion from the dream-world, I found myself shaking and bathed in a cold perspiration.
      Then, as a last, intolerable touch, I felt that faint, insidious stream of cool air trickling upward from a depressed place near the centre of the huge heap. Instantly, as once before, my visions faded, and I saw again only the evil moonlight, the brooding desert, and the spreading tumulus of palaeogean masonry. Something real and tangible, yet fraught with infinite suggestions of nighted mystery, now confronted me. For that stream of air could argue but one thing—a hidden gulf of great size beneath the disordered blocks on the surface.
      My first thought was of the sinister blackfellow legends of vast underground huts among the megaliths where horrors happen and great winds are born. Then thoughts of my own dreams came back, and I felt dim pseudo-memories tugging at my mind. What manner of place lay below me? What primal, inconceivable source of age-old myth-cycles and haunting nightmares might I be on the brink of uncovering? It was only for a moment that I hesitated, for more than curiosity and scientific zeal was driving me on and working against my growing fear.
      I seemed to move almost automatically, as if in the clutch of some compelling fate. Pocketing my torch, and struggling with a strength that I had not thought I possessed, I wrenched aside first one titan fragment of stone and then another, till there welled up a strong draught whose dampness contrasted oddly with the desert’s dry air. A black rift began to yawn, and at length—when I had pushed away every fragment small enough to budge—the leprous moonlight blazed on an aperture of ample width to admit me.
      I drew out my torch and cast a brilliant beam into the opening. Below me was a chaos of tumbled masonry, sloping roughly down toward the north at an angle of about forty-five degrees, and evidently the result of some bygone collapse from above. Between its surface and the ground level was a gulf of impenetrable blackness at whose upper edge were signs of gigantic, stress-heaved vaulting. At this point, it appeared, the desert’s sands lay directly upon a floor of some titan structure of earth’s youth—how preserved through aeons of geologic convulsion I could not then and cannot now even attempt to guess.
      In retrospect, the barest idea of a sudden, lone descent into such a doubtful abyss—and at a time when one’s whereabouts were unknown to any living soul—seems like the utter apex of insanity. Perhaps it was—yet that night I embarked without hesitancy upon such a descent. Again there was manifest that lure and driving of fatality which had all along seemed to direct my course. With torch flashing intermittently to save the battery, I commenced a mad scramble down the sinister, Cyclopean incline below the opening—sometimes facing forward as I found good hand and foot holds, and at other times turning to face the heap of megaliths as I clung and fumbled more precariously. In two directions beside me, distant walls of carven, crumbling masonry loomed dimly under the direct beams of my torch. Ahead, however, was only unbroken blackness.
      I kept no track of time during my downward scramble. So seething with baffling hints and images was my mind, that all objective matters seemed withdrawn into incalculable distances. Physical sensation was dead, and even fear remained as a wraith-like, inactive gargoyle leering impotently at me. Eventually I reached a level floor strown with fallen blocks, shapeless fragments of stone, and sand and detritus of every kind. On either side—perhaps thirty feet apart—rose massive walls culminating in huge groinings. That they were carved I could just discern, but the nature of the carvings was beyond my perception. What held me the most was the vaulting overhead. The beam from my torch could not reach the roof, but the lower parts of the monstrous arches stood out distinctly. And so perfect was their identity with what I had seen in countless dreams of the elder world, that I trembled actively for the first time.
      Behind and high above, a faint luminous blur told of the distant moonlit world outside. Some vague shred of caution warned me that I should not let it out of my sight, lest I have no guide for my return. I now advanced toward the wall on my left, where the traces of carving were plainest. The littered floor was nearly as hard to traverse as the downward heap had been, but I managed to pick my difficult way. At one place I heaved aside some blocks and kicked away the detritus to see what the pavement was like, and shuddered at the utter, fateful familiarity of the great octagonal stones whose buckled surface still held roughly together.
      Reaching a convenient distance from the wall, I cast the torchlight slowly and carefully over its worn remnants of carving. Some bygone influx of water seemed to have acted on the sandstone surface, while there were curious incrustations which I could not explain. In places the masonry was very loose and distorted, and I wondered how many aeons more this primal, hidden edifice could keep its remaining traces of form amidst earth’s heavings.
      But it was the carvings themselves that excited me most. Despite their time-crumbled state, they were relatively easy to trace at close range; and the complete, intimate familiarity of every detail almost stunned my imagination. That the major attributes of this hoary masonry should be familiar, was not beyond normal credibility. Powerfully impressing the weavers of certain myths, they had become embodied in a stream of cryptic lore which, somehow coming to my notice during the amnesic period, had evoked vivid images in my subconscious mind. But how could I explain the exact and minute fashion in which each line and spiral of these strange designs tallied with what I had dreamt for more than a score of years? What obscure, forgotten iconography could have reproduced each subtle shading and nuance which so persistently, exactly, and unvaryingly besieged my sleeping vision night after night?
      For this was no chance or remote resemblance. Definitely and absolutely, the millennially ancient, aeon-hidden corridor in which I stood was the original of something I knew in sleep as intimately as I knew my own house in Crane Street, Arkham. True, my dreams shewed the place in its undecayed prime; but the identity was no less real on that account. I was wholly and horribly oriented. The particular structure I was in was known to me. Known, too, was its place in that terrible elder city of dreams. That I could visit unerringly any point in that structure or in that city which had escaped the changes and devastations of uncounted ages, I realised with hideous and instinctive certainty. What in God’s name could all this mean? How had I come to know what I knew? And what awful reality could lie behind those antique tales of the beings who had dwelt in this labyrinth of primordial stone?
      Words can convey only fractionally the welter of dread and bewilderment which ate at my spirit. I knew this place. I knew what lay before me, and what had lain overhead before the myriad towering stories had fallen to dust and debris and the desert. No need now, I thought with a shudder, to keep that faint blur of moonlight in view. I was torn betwixt a longing to flee and a feverish mixture of burning curiosity and driving fatality. What had happened to this monstrous megalopolis of eld in the millions of years since the time of my dreams? Of the subterrene mazes which had underlain the city and linked all its titan towers, how much had still survived the writhings of earth’s crust?
      Had I come upon a whole buried world of unholy archaism? Could I still find the house of the writing-master, and the tower where S’gg’ha, a captive mind from the star-headed vegetable carnivores of Antarctica, had chiselled certain pictures on the blank spaces of the walls? Would the passage at the second level down, to the hall of the alien minds, be still unchoked and traversable? In that hall the captive mind of an incredible entity—a half-plastic denizen of the hollow interior of an unknown trans-Plutonian planet eighteen million years in the future—had kept a certain thing which it had modelled from clay.
      I shut my eyes and put my hand to my head in a vain, pitiful effort to drive these insane dream-fragments from my consciousness. Then, for the first time, I felt acutely the coolness, motion, and dampness of the surrounding air. Shuddering, I realised that a vast chain of aeon-dead black gulfs must indeed be yawning somewhere beyond and below me. I thought of the frightful chambers and corridors and inclines as I recalled them from my dreams. Would the way to the central archives still be open? Again that driving fatality tugged insistently at my brain as I recalled the awesome records that once lay cased in those rectangular vaults of rustless metal.
      There, said the dreams and legends, had reposed the whole history, past and future, of the cosmic space-time continuum—written by captive minds from every orb and every age in the solar system. Madness, of course—but had I not now stumbled into a nighted world as mad as I? I thought of the locked metal shelves, and of the curious knob-twistings needed to open each one. My own came vividly into my consciousness. How often had I gone through that intricate routine of varied turns and pressures in the terrestrial vertebrate section on the lowest level! Every detail was fresh and familiar. If there were such a vault as I had dreamed of, I could open it in a moment. It was then that madness took me utterly. An instant later, and I was leaping and stumbling over the rocky debris toward the well-remembered incline to the depths below.

VII.

From that point forward my impressions are scarcely to be relied on—indeed, I still possess a final, desperate hope that they all form parts of some daemoniac dream—or illusion born of delirium. A fever raged in my brain, and everything came to me through a kind of haze—sometimes only intermittently. The rays of my torch shot feebly into the engulfing blackness, bringing phantasmal flashes of hideously familiar walls and carvings, all blighted with the decay of ages. In one place a tremendous mass of vaulting had fallen, so that I had to clamber over a mighty mound of stones reaching almost to the ragged, grotesquely stalactited roof. It was all the ultimate apex of nightmare, made worse by the blasphemous tug of pseudo-memory. One thing only was unfamiliar, and that was my own size in relation to the monstrous masonry. I felt oppressed by a sense of unwonted smallness, as if the sight of these towering walls from a mere human body was something wholly new and abnormal. Again and again I looked nervously down at myself, vaguely disturbed by the human form I possessed.
      Onward through the blackness of the abyss I leaped, plunged, and staggered—often falling and bruising myself, and once nearly shattering my torch. Every stone and corner of that daemoniac gulf was known to me, and at many points I stopped to cast beams of light through choked and crumbling yet familiar archways. Some rooms had totally collapsed; others were bare or debris-filled. In a few I saw masses of metal—some fairly intact, some broken, and some crushed or battered—which I recognised as the colossal pedestals or tables of my dreams. What they could in truth have been, I dared not guess.
      I found the downward incline and began its descent—though after a time halted by a gaping, ragged chasm whose narrowest point could not be much less than four feet across. Here the stonework had fallen through, revealing incalculable inky depths beneath. I knew there were two more cellar levels in this titan edifice, and trembled with fresh panic as I recalled the metal-clamped trap-door on the lowest one. There could be no guards now—for what had lurked beneath had long since done its hideous work and sunk into its long decline. By the time of the post-human beetle race it would be quite dead. And yet, as I thought of the native legends, I trembled anew.
      It cost me a terrible effort to vault that yawning chasm, since the littered floor prevented a running start—but madness drove me on. I chose a place close to the left-hand wall—where the rift was least wide and the landing-spot reasonably clear of dangerous debris—and after one frantic moment reached the other side in safety. At last gaining the lower level, I stumbled on past the archway of the room of machines, within which were fantastic ruins of metal half-buried beneath fallen vaulting. Everything was where I knew it would be, and I climbed confidently over the heaps which barred the entrance of a vast transverse corridor. This, I realised, would take me under the city to the central archives.
      Endless ages seemed to unroll as I stumbled, leaped, and crawled along that debris-cluttered corridor. Now and then I could make out carvings on the age-stained walls—some familiar, others seemingly added since the period of my dreams. Since this was a subterrene house-connecting highway, there were no archways save when the route led through the lower levels of various buildings. At some of these intersections I turned aside long enough to look down well-remembered corridors and into well-remembered rooms. Twice only did I find any radical changes from what I had dreamed of—and in one of these cases I could trace the sealed-up outlines of the archway I remembered.
      I shook violently, and felt a curious surge of retarding weakness, as I steered a hurried and reluctant course through the crypt of one of those great windowless ruined towers whose alien basalt masonry bespoke a whispered and horrible origin. This primal vault was round and fully two hundred feet across, with nothing carved upon the dark-hued stonework. The floor was here free from anything save dust and sand, and I could see the apertures leading upward and downward. There were no stairs or inclines—indeed, my dreams had pictured those elder towers as wholly untouched by the fabulous Great Race. Those who had built them had not needed stairs or inclines. In the dreams, the downward aperture had been tightly sealed and nervously guarded. Now it lay open—black and yawning, and giving forth a current of cool, damp air. Of what limitless caverns of eternal night might brood below, I would not permit myself to think.
      Later, clawing my way along a badly heaped section of the corridor, I reached a place where the roof had wholly caved in. The debris rose like a mountain, and I climbed up over it, passing through a vast empty space where my torchlight could reveal neither walls nor vaulting. This, I reflected, must be the cellar of the house of the metal-purveyors, fronting on the third square not far from the archives. What had happened to it I could not conjecture.
      I found the corridor again beyond the mountain of detritus and stones, but after a short distance encountered a wholly choked place where the fallen vaulting almost touched the perilously sagging ceiling. How I managed to wrench and tear aside enough blocks to afford a passage, and how I dared disturb the tightly packed fragments when the least shift of equilibrium might have brought down all the tons of superincumbent masonry to crush me to nothingness, I do not know. It was sheer madness that impelled and guided me—if, indeed, my whole underground adventure was not—as I hope—a hellish delusion or phase of dreaming. But I did make—or dream that I made—a passage that I could squirm through. As I wriggled over the mound of debris—my torch, switched continuously on, thrust deeply within my mouth—I felt myself torn by the fantastic stalactites of the jagged floor above me.
      I was now close to the great underground archival structure which seemed to form my goal. Sliding and clambering down the farther side of the barrier, and picking my way along the remaining stretch of corridor with hand-held, intermittently flashing torch, I came at last to a low, circular crypt with arches—still in a marvellous state of preservation—opening off on every side. The walls, or such parts of them as lay within reach of my torchlight, were densely hieroglyphed and chiselled with typical curvilinear symbols—some added since the period of my dreams.
      This, I realised, was my fated destination, and I turned at once through a familiar archway on my left. That I could find a clear passage up and down the incline to all the surviving levels, I had oddly little doubt. This vast, earth-protected pile, housing the annals of all the solar system, had been built with supernal skill and strength to last as long as that system itself. Blocks of stupendous size, poised with mathematical genius and bound with cements of incredible toughness, had combined to form a mass as firm as the planet’s rocky core. Here, after ages more prodigious than I could sanely grasp, its buried bulk stood in all its essential contours; the vast, dust-drifted floors scarce sprinkled with the litter elsewhere so dominant.
      The relatively easy walking from this point onward went curiously to my head. All the frantic eagerness hitherto frustrated by obstacles now took itself out in a kind of febrile speed, and I literally raced along the low-roofed, monstrously well-remembered aisles beyond the archway. I was past being astonished by the familiarity of what I saw. On every hand the great hieroglyphed metal shelf-doors loomed monstrously; some yet in place, others sprung open, and still others bent and buckled under bygone geological stresses not quite strong enough to shatter the titan masonry. Here and there a dust-covered heap below a gaping empty shelf seemed to indicate where cases had been shaken down by earth-tremors. On occasional pillars were great symbols or letters proclaiming classes and sub-classes of volumes.
      Once I paused before an open vault where I saw some of the accustomed metal cases still in position amidst the omnipresent gritty dust. Reaching up, I dislodged one of the thinner specimens with some difficulty, and rested it on the floor for inspection. It was titled in the prevailing curvilinear hieroglyphs, though something in the arrangement of the characters seemed subtly unusual. The odd mechanism of the hooked fastener was perfectly well known to me, and I snapped up the still rustless and workable lid and drew out the book within. The latter, as expected, was some twenty by fifteen inches in area, and two inches thick; the thin metal covers opening at the top. Its tough cellulose pages seemed unaffected by the myriad cycles of time they had lived through, and I studied the queerly pigmented, brush-drawn letters of the text—symbols utterly unlike either the usual curved hieroglyphs or any alphabet known to human scholarship—with a haunting, half-aroused memory. It came to me that this was the language used by a captive mind I had known slightly in my dreams—a mind from a large asteroid on which had survived much of the archaic life and lore of the primal planet whereof it formed a fragment. At the same time I recalled that this level of the archives was devoted to volumes dealing with the non-terrestrial planets.
      As I ceased poring over this incredible document I saw that the light of my torch was beginning to fail, hence quickly inserted the extra battery I always had with me. Then, armed with the stronger radiance, I resumed my feverish racing through unending tangles of aisles and corridors—recognising now and then some familiar shelf, and vaguely annoyed by the acoustic conditions which made my footfalls echo incongruously in these catacombs of aeon-long death and silence. The very prints of my shoes behind me in the millennially untrodden dust made me shudder. Never before, if my mad dreams held anything of truth, had human feet pressed upon those immemorial pavements. Of the particular goal of my insane racing, my conscious mind held no hint. There was, however, some force of evil potency pulling at my dazed will and buried recollections, so that I vaguely felt I was not running at random.
      I came to a downward incline and followed it to profounder depths. Floors flashed by me as I raced, but I did not pause to explore them. In my whirling brain there had begun to beat a certain rhythm which set my right hand twitching in unison. I wanted to unlock something, and felt that I knew all the intricate twists and pressures needed to do it. It would be like a modern safe with a combination lock. Dream or not, I had once known and still knew. How any dream—or scrap of unconsciously absorbed legend—could have taught me a detail so minute, so intricate, and so complex, I did not attempt to explain to myself. I was beyond all coherent thought. For was not this whole experience—this shocking familiarity with a set of unknown ruins, and this monstrously exact identity of everything before me with what only dreams and scraps of myth could have suggested—a horror beyond all reason? Probably it was my basic conviction then—as it is now during my saner moments—that I was not awake at all, and that the entire buried city was a fragment of febrile hallucination.
      Eventually I reached the lowest level and struck off to the right of the incline. For some shadowy reason I tried to soften my steps, even though I lost speed thereby. There was a space I was afraid to cross on this last, deeply buried floor, and as I drew near it I recalled what thing in that space I feared. It was merely one of the metal-barred and closely guarded trap-doors. There would be no guards now, and on that account I trembled and tiptoed as I had done in passing through that black basalt vault where a similar trap-door had yawned. I felt a current of cool, damp air, as I had felt there, and wished that my course led in another direction. Why I had to take the particular course I was taking, I did not know.
      When I came to the space I saw that the trap-door yawned widely open. Ahead the shelves began again, and I glimpsed on the floor before one of them a heap very thinly covered with dust, where a number of cases had recently fallen. At the same moment a fresh wave of panic clutched me, though for some time I could not discover why. Heaps of fallen cases were not uncommon, for all through the aeons this lightless labyrinth had been racked by the heavings of earth and had echoed at intervals to the deafening clatter of toppling objects. It was only when I was nearly across the space that I realised why I shook so violently.
      Not the heap, but something about the dust of the level floor was troubling me. In the light of my torch it seemed as if that dust were not as even as it ought to be—there were places where it looked thinner, as if it had been disturbed not many months before. I could not be sure, for even the apparently thinner places were dusty enough; yet a certain suspicion of regularity in the fancied unevenness was highly disquieting. When I brought the torchlight close to one of the queer places I did not like what I saw—for the illusion of regularity became very great. It was as if there were regular lines of composite impressions—impressions that went in threes, each slightly over a foot square, and consisting of five nearly circular three-inch prints, one in advance of the other four.
      These possible lines of foot-square impressions appeared to lead in two directions, as if something had gone somewhere and returned. They were of course very faint, and may have been illusions or accidents; but there was an element of dim, fumbling terror about the way I thought they ran. For at one end of them was the heap of cases which must have clattered down not long before, while at the other end was the ominous trap-door with the cool, damp wind, yawning unguarded down to abysses past imagination.

VIII.

That my strange sense of compulsion was deep and overwhelming is shewn by its conquest of my fear. No rational motive could have drawn me on after that hideous suspicion of prints and the creeping dream-memories it excited. Yet my right hand, even as it shook with fright, still twitched rhythmically in its eagerness to turn a lock it hoped to find. Before I knew it I was past the heap of lately fallen cases and running on tiptoe through aisles of utterly unbroken dust toward a point which I seemed to know morbidly, horribly well. My mind was asking itself questions whose origin and relevancy I was only beginning to guess. Would the shelf be reachable by a human body? Could my human hand master all the aeon-remembered motions of the lock? Would the lock be undamaged and workable? And what would I do—what dare I do—with what (as I now commenced to realise) I both hoped and feared to find? Would it prove the awesome, brain-shattering truth of something past normal conception, or shew only that I was dreaming?
      The next I knew I had ceased my tiptoe racing and was standing still, staring at a row of maddeningly familiar hieroglyphed shelves. They were in a state of almost perfect preservation, and only three of the doors in this vicinity had sprung open. My feelings toward these shelves cannot be described—so utter and insistent was the sense of old acquaintance. I was looking high up, at a row near the top and wholly out of my reach, and wondering how I could climb to best advantage. An open door four rows from the bottom would help, and the locks of the closed doors formed possible holds for hands and feet. I would grip the torch between my teeth as I had in other places where both hands were needed. Above all, I must make no noise. How to get down what I wished to remove would be difficult, but I could probably hook its movable fastener in my coat collar and carry it like a knapsack. Again I wondered whether the lock would be undamaged. That I could repeat each familiar motion I had not the least doubt. But I hoped the thing would not scrape or creak—and that my hand could work it properly.
      Even as I thought these things I had taken the torch in my mouth and begun to climb. The projecting locks were poor supports; but as I had expected, the opened shelf helped greatly. I used both the difficultly swinging door and the edge of the aperture itself in my ascent, and managed to avoid any loud creaking. Balanced on the upper edge of the door, and leaning far to my right, I could just reach the lock I sought. My fingers, half-numb from climbing, were very clumsy at first; but I soon saw that they were anatomically adequate. And the memory-rhythm was strong in them. Out of unknown gulfs of time the intricate secret motions had somehow reached my brain correctly in every detail—for after less than five minutes of trying there came a click whose familiarity was all the more startling because I had not consciously anticipated it. In another instant the metal door was slowly swinging open with only the faintest grating sound.
      Dazedly I looked over the row of greyish case-ends thus exposed, and felt a tremendous surge of some wholly inexplicable emotion. Just within reach of my right hand was a case whose curving hieroglyphs made me shake with a pang infinitely more complex than one of mere fright. Still shaking, I managed to dislodge it amidst a shower of gritty flakes, and ease it over toward myself without any violent noise. Like the other case I had handled, it was slightly more than twenty by fifteen inches in size, with curved mathematical designs in low relief. In thickness it just exceeded three inches. Crudely wedging it between myself and the surface I was climbing, I fumbled with the fastener and finally got the hook free. Lifting the cover, I shifted the heavy object to my back, and let the hook catch hold of my collar. Hands now free, I awkwardly clambered down to the dusty floor, and prepared to inspect my prize.
      Kneeling in the gritty dust, I swung the case around and rested it in front of me. My hands shook, and I dreaded to draw out the book within almost as much as I longed—and felt compelled—to do so. It had very gradually become clear to me what I ought to find, and this realisation nearly paralysed my faculties. If the thing were there—and if I were not dreaming—the implications would be quite beyond the power of the human spirit to bear. What tormented me most was my momentary inability to feel that my surroundings were a dream. The sense of reality was hideous—and again becomes so as I recall the scene.
      At length I tremblingly pulled the book from its container and stared fascinatedly at the well-known hieroglyphs on the cover. It seemed to be in prime condition, and the curvilinear letters of the title held me in almost as hypnotised a state as if I could read them. Indeed, I cannot swear that I did not actually read them in some transient and terrible access of abnormal memory. I do not know how long it was before I dared to lift that thin metal cover. I temporised and made excuses to myself. I took the torch from my mouth and shut it off to save the battery. Then, in the dark, I screwed up my courage—finally lifting the cover without turning on the light. Last of all I did indeed flash the torch upon the exposed page—steeling myself in advance to suppress any sound no matter what I should find.
      I looked for an instant, then almost collapsed. Clenching my teeth, however, I kept silence. I sank wholly to the floor and put a hand to my forehead amidst the engulfing blackness. What I dreaded and expected was there. Either I was dreaming, or time and space had become a mockery. I must be dreaming—but I would test the horror by carrying this thing back and shewing it to my son if it were indeed a reality. My head swam frightfully, even though there were no visible objects in the unbroken gloom to swirl around me. Ideas and images of the starkest terror—excited by vistas which my glimpse had opened up—began to throng in upon me and cloud my senses.
      I thought of those possible prints in the dust, and trembled at the sound of my own breathing as I did so. Once again I flashed on the light and looked at the page as a serpent’s victim may look at his destroyer’s eyes and fangs. Then, with clumsy fingers in the dark, I closed the book, put it in its container, and snapped the lid and the curious hooked fastener. This was what I must carry back to the outer world if it truly existed—if the whole abyss truly existed—if I, and the world itself, truly existed.
      Just when I tottered to my feet and commenced my return I cannot be certain. It comes to me oddly—as a measure of my sense of separation from the normal world—that I did not even once look at my watch during those hideous hours underground. Torch in hand, and with the ominous case under one arm, I eventually found myself tiptoeing in a kind of silent panic past the draught-giving abyss and those lurking suggestions of prints. I lessened my precautions as I climbed up the endless inclines, but could not shake off a shadow of apprehension which I had not felt on the downward journey.
      I dreaded having to re-pass through that black basalt crypt that was older than the city itself, where cold draughts welled up from unguarded depths. I thought of that which the Great Race had feared, and of what might still be lurking—be it ever so weak and dying—down there. I thought of those possible five-circle prints and of what my dreams had told me of such prints—and of strange winds and whistling noises associated with them. And I thought of the tales of the modern blacks, wherein the horror of great winds and nameless subterrene ruins was dwelt upon.
      I knew from a carven wall symbol the right floor to enter, and came at last—after passing that other book I had examined—to the great circular space with the branching archways. On my right, and at once recognisable, was the arch through which I had arrived. This I now entered, conscious that the rest of my course would be harder because of the tumbled state of the masonry outside the archive building. My new metal-cased burden weighed upon me, and I found it harder and harder to be quiet as I stumbled among debris and fragments of every sort.
      Then I came to the ceiling-high mound of debris through which I had wrenched a scanty passage. My dread at wriggling through again was infinite; for my first passage had made some noise, and I now—after seeing those possible prints—dreaded sound above all things. The case, too, doubled the problem of traversing the narrow crevice. But I clambered up the barrier as best I could, and pushed the case through the aperture ahead of me. Then, torch in mouth, I scrambled through myself—my back torn as before by stalactites. As I tried to grasp the case again, it fell some distance ahead of me down the slope of the debris, making a disturbing clatter and arousing echoes which sent me into a cold perspiration. I lunged for it at once, and regained it without further noise—but a moment afterward the slipping of blocks under my feet raised a sudden and unprecedented din.
      The din was my undoing. For, falsely or not, I thought I heard it answered in a terrible way from spaces far behind me. I thought I heard a shrill, whistling sound, like nothing else on earth, and beyond any adequate verbal description. It may have been only my imagination. If so, what followed has a grim irony—since, save for the panic of this thing, the second thing might never have happened.
      As it was, my frenzy was absolute and unrelieved. Taking my torch in my hand and clutching feebly at the case, I leaped and bounded wildly ahead with no idea in my brain beyond a mad desire to race out of these nightmare ruins to the waking world of desert and moonlight which lay so far above. I hardly knew it when I reached the mountain of debris which towered into the vast blackness beyond the caved-in roof, and bruised and cut myself repeatedly in scrambling up its steep slope of jagged blocks and fragments. Then came the great disaster. Just as I blindly crossed the summit, unprepared for the sudden dip ahead, my feet slipped utterly and I found myself involved in a mangling avalanche of sliding masonry whose cannon-loud uproar split the black cavern air in a deafening series of earth-shaking reverberations.
      I have no recollection of emerging from this chaos, but a momentary fragment of consciousness shews me as plunging and tripping and scrambling along the corridor amidst the clangour—case and torch still with me. Then, just as I approached that primal basalt crypt I had so dreaded, utter madness came. For as the echoes of the avalanche died down, there became audible a repetition of that frightful, alien whistling I thought I had heard before. This time there was no doubt about it—and what was worse, it came from a point not behind but ahead of me.
      Probably I shrieked aloud then. I have a dim picture of myself as flying through the hellish basalt vault of the Elder Things, and hearing that damnable alien sound piping up from the open, unguarded door of limitless nether blacknesses. There was a wind, too—not merely a cool, damp draught, but a violent, purposeful blast belching savagely and frigidly from that abominable gulf whence the obscene whistling came.
      There are memories of leaping and lurching over obstacles of every sort, with that torrent of wind and shrieking sound growing moment by moment, and seeming to curl and twist purposefully around me as it struck out wickedly from the spaces behind and beneath. Though in my rear, that wind had the odd effect of hindering instead of aiding my progress; as if it acted like a noose or lasso thrown around me. Heedless of the noise I made, I clattered over a great barrier of blocks and was again in the structure that led to the surface. I recall glimpsing the archway to the room of machines and almost crying out as I saw the incline leading down to where one of those blasphemous trap-doors must be yawning two levels below. But instead of crying out I muttered over and over to myself that this was all a dream from which I must soon awake. Perhaps I was in camp—perhaps I was at home in Arkham. As these hopes bolstered up my sanity I began to mount the incline to the higher level.
      I knew, of course, that I had the four-foot cleft to re-cross, yet was too racked by other fears to realise the full horror until I came almost upon it. On my descent, the leap across had been easy—but could I clear the gap as readily when going uphill, and hampered by fright, exhaustion, the weight of the metal case, and the anomalous backward tug of that daemon wind? I thought of these things at the last moment, and thought also of the nameless entities which might be lurking in the black abysses below the chasm.
      My wavering torch was growing feeble, but I could tell by some obscure memory when I neared the cleft. The chill blasts of wind and the nauseous whistling shrieks behind me were for the moment like a merciful opiate, dulling my imagination to the horror of the yawning gulf ahead. And then I became aware of the added blasts and whistling in front of me—tides of abomination surging up through the cleft itself from depths unimagined and unimaginable.
      Now, indeed, the essence of pure nightmare was upon me. Sanity departed—and ignoring everything except the animal impulse of flight, I merely struggled and plunged upward over the incline’s debris as if no gulf had existed. Then I saw the chasm’s edge, leaped frenziedly with every ounce of strength I possessed, and was instantly engulfed in a pandaemoniac vortex of loathsome sound and utter, materially tangible blackness.
      This is the end of my experience, so far as I can recall. Any further impressions belong wholly to the domain of phantasmagoric delirium. Dream, madness, and memory merged wildly together in a series of fantastic, fragmentary delusions which can have no relation to anything real. There was a hideous fall through incalculable leagues of viscous, sentient darkness, and a babel of noises utterly alien to all that we know of the earth and its organic life. Dormant, rudimentary senses seemed to start into vitality within me, telling of pits and voids peopled by floating horrors and leading to sunless crags and oceans and teeming cities of windowless basalt towers upon which no light ever shone.
      Secrets of the primal planet and its immemorial aeons flashed through my brain without the aid of sight or sound, and there were known to me things which not even the wildest of my former dreams had ever suggested. And all the while cold fingers of damp vapour clutched and picked at me, and that eldritch, damnable whistling shrieked fiendishly above all the alternations of babel and silence in the whirlpools of darkness around.
      Afterward there were visions of the Cyclopean city of my dreams—not in ruins, but just as I had dreamed of it. I was in my conical, non-human body again, and mingled with crowds of the Great Race and the captive minds who carried books up and down the lofty corridors and vast inclines. Then, superimposed upon these pictures, were frightful momentary flashes of a non-visual consciousness involving desperate struggles, a writhing free from clutching tentacles of whistling wind, an insane, bat-like flight through half-solid air, a feverish burrowing through the cyclone-whipped dark, and a wild stumbling and scrambling over fallen masonry.
      Once there was a curious, intrusive flash of half-sight—a faint, diffuse suspicion of bluish radiance far overhead. Then there came a dream of wind-pursued climbing and crawling—of wriggling into a blaze of sardonic moonlight through a jumble of debris which slid and collapsed after me amidst a morbid hurricane. It was the evil, monotonous beating of that maddening moonlight which at last told me of the return of what I had once known as the objective, waking world.
      I was clawing prone through the sands of the Australian desert, and around me shrieked such a tumult of wind as I had never before known on our planet’s surface. My clothing was in rags, and my whole body was a mass of bruises and scratches. Full consciousness returned very slowly, and at no time could I tell just where true memory left off and delirious dream began. There had seemed to be a mound of titan blocks, an abyss beneath it, a monstrous revelation from the past, and a nightmare horror at the end—but how much of this was real? My flashlight was gone, and likewise any metal case I may have discovered. Had there been such a case—or any abyss—or any mound? Raising my head, I looked behind me, and saw only the sterile, undulant sands of the waste.
      The daemon wind died down, and the bloated, fungoid moon sank reddeningly in the west. I lurched to my feet and began to stagger southwestward toward the camp. What in truth had happened to me? Had I merely collapsed in the desert and dragged a dream-racked body over miles of sand and buried blocks? If not, how could I bear to live any longer? For in this new doubt all my faith in the myth-born unreality of my visions dissolved once more into the hellish older doubting. If that abyss was real, then the Great Race was real—and its blasphemous reachings and seizures in the cosmos-wide vortex of time were no myths or nightmares, but a terrible, soul-shattering actuality.
      Had I, in full hideous fact, been drawn back to a pre-human world of a hundred and fifty million years ago in those dark, baffling days of the amnesia? Had my present body been the vehicle of a frightful alien consciousness from palaeogean gulfs of time? Had I, as the captive mind of those shambling horrors, indeed known that accursed city of stone in its primordial heyday, and wriggled down those familiar corridors in the loathsome shape of my captor? Were those tormenting dreams of more than twenty years the offspring of stark, monstrous memories? Had I once veritably talked with minds from reachless corners of time and space, learned the universe’s secrets past and to come, and written the annals of my own world for the metal cases of those titan archives? And were those others—those shocking Elder Things of the mad winds and daemon pipings—in truth a lingering, lurking menace, waiting and slowly weakening in black abysses while varied shapes of life drag out their multimillennial courses on the planet’s age-racked surface?
      I do not know. If that abyss and what it held were real, there is no hope. Then, all too truly, there lies upon this world of man a mocking and incredible shadow out of time. But mercifully, there is no proof that these things are other than fresh phases of my myth-born dreams. I did not bring back the metal case that would have been a proof, and so far those subterrene corridors have not been found. If the laws of the universe are kind, they will never be found. But I must tell my son what I saw or thought I saw, and let him use his judgment as a psychologist in gauging the reality of my experience, and communicating this account to others.
      I have said that the awful truth behind my tortured years of dreaming hinges absolutely upon the actuality of what I thought I saw in those Cyclopean buried ruins. It has been hard for me literally to set down the crucial revelation, though no reader can have failed to guess it. Of course it lay in that book within the metal case—the case which I pried out of its forgotten lair amidst the undisturbed dust of a million centuries. No eye had seen, no hand had touched that book since the advent of man to this planet. And yet, when I flashed my torch upon it in that frightful megalithic abyss, I saw that the queerly pigmented letters on the brittle, aeon-browned cellulose pages were not indeed any nameless hieroglyphs of earth’s youth. They were, instead, the letters of our familiar alphabet, spelling out the words of the English language in my own handwriting.
",False
"Spoonbill Village,
Northernmost Quang Binh Province, Socialist Republic of Vietnam
July 2, 2011
Two young adults walked up the path beside the bronze-casters shop to the barren hillside and the forest edge beyond. ""So, how do you like things so far?"" Marie asked as she and Joseph made their way up the rough-hewn stone steps. Their destination was the house of the village woodcutter and charcoal-burner, a place that also doubled as a furniture workshop and, importantly for this journey, the villages' firearms armory.
""Not that bad. I've been doing domestic work for the past few days but neither Noc nor his wife seems to really be a slave driver. Actually, they feel more like people who understand that they're training a new servant."" Joseph thought on something. ""I'm actually surprised that he and the other hunters allowing me to accompany them. They neither seem to respect me or anyone who would stoop to use a gun, so I wonder why they changed their attitude.""
It was here that Marie began ruminating on something, an old thought that had given her more than her share of bad dreams. ""There are some things worth surrendering pride for, Joseph. Tell me, have you seen those weird scars on the ankles and arms of Nocs wife?""
""You mean those marks that look like Giant Squid wounds? Yes, but what about them?"" Joseph suddenly stopped. ""What are they, anyway?""
Having stopped also, Marie sighed, a sense of foreboding covering her features. ""When I asked that myself, they didn't tell me much more than the stories I'd already heard when I was a kid: legends about ghosts, devils from the mist, 'shadows that drink blood' is what they called them sometimes. But what I got here is that those Shugoran priests that saved my people weren't just going to somewhere. They were running ifrom/i somewhere, someone or something, something that no one is willing to talk any further about."" Marie started forward again at such a pace that her boyfriend had to hurry to catch up.
Getting the feeling that nothing more was going to be answered on that subject for a good while, Joseph changed track. ""How are the others getting on? I've been stuck in the house most of the day and I haven't really had a chance to talk to either the Prof or my classmates.""
Happy to shift from thoughts of chilling horror, Marie chuckled with increasing mirth as she began going back up the trail. ""From what I've heard, Albert's been filming every step in the bronze making process that he can, not to mention all the casting processes and various uses of equipment. The only reason that he hasn't been thrown out yet is because the family's elder patriarch has taken a liking to… well, not just him, but all of you guys, just from the descriptions alone. Your Professor and his assistant have basically locked themselves in the temple: no word out yet, but I assume that they're observing normal operations. As for Tracy…"" Here, Marie began acting a little odd. ""She talks in her sleep, if you didn't know.""
""Really?"" Joseph responded interestedly. Not reacting the way that she had feared, Marie relaxed a little from the paranoia she had been wrangling with.
""Yeah, and the strange thing is that it's in… well, tree-ish. And then there's the tattooing on her back as well."" Marie went on talking, relieved that her fear seemed to have been senseless.
Before he could answer his girlfriends increasingly chatty descriptions, a thought crossed Josephs mind on exactly why such a thing might be mentioned. ""Why would you ask me if I knew…"" Then the realization hit him and he stopped cold. ""Were you thinking that… Tracy and I?""
Marie stopped as well. ""It's not unknown to happen, you know."" Marie answered the implied question almost defensively, as if trying to justify her momentary paranoia. ""Sweethearts get separated and sometimes… one finds companionship elsewhere. Especially with, you know."" Marie tapped the side of her head, indicating the ""visitors"" that had first cursed Joseph Claytons existence during High School.
Joseph snorted in an amused, disparaging way. ""Please don't give them that much credit. I've ignored, rebuked and insulted those jerks so many times that I've made a virtual bloodsport out of it. Besides, if I'd made any moves towards Tracy, Albert would have killed me.""
""Wait, those two… they're together?"" Marie asked, wondering how she'd missed that.
""Intimately so, yes."" This was all Joseph was willing to say, himself not wishing to examine too closely the memory of walking in on his dorm-mate and his girl when they had neglected to put a sock on the doorknob. ""Anyway, as to these voices, I went to the psychology department to see if I could discover just what was causing it.""
Marie waited a heartbeat before plunging into the vital question. ""And what did they say?"" If her boyfriend did indeed have Schizophrenia, then he needed help: drugs to control the symptoms and perhaps therapy to help him conquer whatever dark corners of his psyche were feeding these voices.
If it was something else… then perhaps the local sorcerers might need to be consulted before long.
Joseph sighed. 'Whatever is going on inside my head, the geeks with the scanning equipment are pretty sure that this isn't a case of medical Schizophrenia. They say that the symptoms are all wrong, the voices aren't persuasive enough… and that I don't have any of the telltale injuries on the brain that would suggest medical reasons. And then there was the time they hooked me up to the EEG during one of my 'episodes'."" He paused, wondering just how to proceed but, since he was already experiencing strange things, he decided just to press on. ""The guys swore that, before the equipment shorted out, at least two additional wavelengths were being read beside mine."" With a shrug, Joseph summed up his thoughts. ""Ever since I came here and heard all of the seemingly crazy stories from you and the others… I don't know, but what I've gone through just makes sense now, at least in knowing that it actually can happen.""
Marie smiled. Yes, we definitely need to consult the priests. ""Come on, we've talked enough and you need to get that rifle before you head out.""
And rifles there were, all secured inside a triple locked room in the back corner of the woodcutter's house. They looked like Berthier carbines, French bolt-action repeaters from the First World War… but they were not the only guns present. ""Is that a Hotchkiss?"" Joseph asked in a voice combining bemusement and astonishment. Among the rifles and a few, scattered revolvers sat a machine-gun still on its tripod and looking impossibly well-maintained for being kept in the back room of a house located in a tropical moist forest.
""An M1914 by the looks of it, if the pictures I've seen are at all accurate. There's a story behind it, but I only know that only the oldest elders know it."" Marie replied, having picked up of the Berthier Carbines and handing it to Joseph. The ammunition was kept in a chest under a trapdoor in the main part of the house as a safety measure so they'd have to go back to pick it up. But then she asked the question that she probably should have asked before they left the village proper. ""Speaking of guns, since when did you shoot?""
""There's a gun range in Arkham; Tracy and Albert invited me along for a few lessons before Thanksgiving. She's the one with actual hunting experience and I think he only came along to check out the engineering on the pieces. It wasn't that much fun, but I think what I learned in getting my license will help on this."" Joseph began inspecting the carbine he had been given, finding it oiled and well-maintained as any other firearm in the room. There was a question that had to be asked, however?
Where did they get all these guns?
b15 minutes Later/b
Marie walked up the stairs to her grandparent's house. She was supposed to act as a translator and informant for the expedition, having prior contacts inside the community and being a member first by blood and more recently by initiation. Truth be told, she had a feeling that old Tsan was really acting as gatekeeper in his interactions with Professor Andover while she was playing the part of a more convenient and mobile ambassador, Tsan having never left the temple save by palanquin in almost forty years.
Walking in the door, Marie was unprepared for another surprise. She saw Tracy sitting before the camera as her Grandmother and Aunt watched, waiting to begin filming the day's questions and activities, even making a short introductory statement... but not in English.
""And as soon as the translator gets here, we'll begin the second day of... Hey Marie, you almost scared me there."" Here was an audible note of guilt as Tracy hastily switched from the strange language that she had been using to the carefully modulated, Patsy Cline-accented English she had used since Marie had met her. Marie had heard it, and Tracy knew that she had heard... and Marie knew that Tracy knew.
""Yeah, I've gotten that reaction a few times since I got here."" Marie joked, knowing that humor had the power to break tension. ""So... what language were you speaking in anyway? I'm afraid I didn't recognize anything about it."" Her female elders watched closely, knowing that something had happened but being ignorant of other languages, were unsure of exactly what.
Tracy grinned bitterly. ""I'd be more surprised if you did recognize it. It's... well, it's not really a language per se, but a patois of a couple languages, with Early Modern English, Ohio Valley Shawnee, Coastal Algonquian, some Iroquoian loanwords having to do with ritual and bits of Eastern Siouan."" Tracy let out the deep breath she had been using to list all those languages. She was getting more comfortable now. ""I guess it won't do any harm if I told you, seeing as we're almost in the same boat.""
Tracy beckoned Marie to sit, turning off the camera as she did. ""The kids in my town learn it... well, sort of as a first language; English is really more of a first-and-a-half language for us. We got exposed to it through TV and then when we went to school, but most of our formative years were spent listening to and absorbing the patois around the house. Most of us never really let go of it as a language for our own private conversations.""
Marie reflected on this... but was also noting some of the features on Tracy's face: the high, rounded cheeks, her high-bridged nose, the way that her eyes were less the bright crystal blue of stereotype and more of a dark, cloudy blue resembling ultramarine. ""I hope you don't mind me saying this, Tracy but does your family have any Native American ancestry? I don't mean to pry, but you do kind of have the look.""
Tracy considered this for a moment before giving an affirmative nod. ""My father's paternal grandmother was from the Oklahoma Kiowa. My mother, as far as can be traced, is also about an eighth, this time one-eighth Shawnee, which seems to be the median for Longhouse."" She got an odd, contemplative look on my face. ""That's another one of those things that we try not to mention to outsiders, even though they tend to notice it anyway. Back in the old days, admitting it would have been a quick ticket to using a segregated washroom or worse. And now?"" Tracy shrugged. ""Now it's considered cool, while the inbreeding still makes us look like freaks.""
Marie decided to test something, just for her own sake. ""Albert doesn't seem to think you're a freak."" The more she thought about it, she had more in common with Tracy than first realized. Both of them had lived life right on the edge of themselves and their kin being recognized as something other, something foreign to the perceived natural order of the world. Both of them could sense the threat of possible revelation... and knew what it was to try to trust someone with these secrets.
""Hey, you're talking about a guy whose family has worked for alien mushroom bugs for the last hundred years. A bit of mild inbreeding is probably the most normal thing Al's ever experienced."" Here there was definitely affection to her voice, a cue that no matter what other strangeness they were involved in, there was a loving relationship between the two.
At this thought Marie smiled, thanking the ancestors for a little bit of normalcy in this year-long cavalcade of oddities that she had flung herself into. Then another question sprang forth. ""Did you know about the whole alien thing when you guys were at Miskatonic?""
Tracy shook her head. ""No, but then again, he was always kinda spacey."" Marie couldn't help but giggle at this bad pun. Tracy went on, the affection still in her voice. ""Seriously, the thing about Miskatonic is that, after awhile, you begin getting the feeling that almost everyone else is holding something close to their chest, thinking each word over before saying it. It's then that you realize that... you're not alone, that almost everyone else is as paranoid as you are, having something to hide."" She looked towards Marie. ""Everyone except for your Joseph, that is. The only thing strange about him that I noticed was that romance was nowhere on his radar at all.""
""You'd be surprised, actually."" Marie answered cryptically. Before Tracy could ask, she turned back the camera back on, signaling the beginning of the interview session.
That evening
Sweaty, hot, dirty and exhausted, Joseph Clayton exited the forest with Noc and the other hunters. Between all of them, the hunters had brought down a Sambar stag and three small muntjacs. Joseph, for his part, had escaped being gored by a wild boar only by dodging its charge, rolling into a hollow under a log and then shooting it in the head at point-blank range when it tried to go after him. For this feat, the hunters designated him ""master of the pit"" when they roasted it at tonight's feast. It had sounded like an honorable title, but Joseph could guess that they were making him little more than a cook, a traditionally female position.
Still, it was an in and it would probably be research gold.
He was entirely less enthusiastic about what else was coming back with them.
When he and the group of hunters came into the village proper, he saw Marie and the taller, paler form of Tracy coming towards him, having been up on the family terrace transplanting rice seedlings. Due to her fair skin, Tracy was wearing the largest hat she could while her arms and shins had been slathered with sunblock. Marie had already taken hers off.
As they neared him, Marie slowed to a stop, seeing the grim look on Josephs face. Tracy looked at her in confusion, then at Joseph and from his stony face understood that something was wrong. ""What is it?"" Marie asked her boyfriend.
Joseph sighed. ""When the hunters brought us in, were we supposed to be for any kind of important sacrifice?""
""Well, the Rhinoceros Festival is supposed to happen any day now. It's when we recharge the mist that surrounds the village to keep us hidden."" Marie looked around Joseph to where one of the hunters was leading a group of people into the village. They looked like quite a bedraggled bunch, many of them thin and in questionable health. There were also two women who may have been considered beautiful if not for the look in their eyes that they had been through several levels of hell before coming here.
But for all these conditions, they did not look frightened of their tattooed guides.
Noticing where Marie was looking, Joseph offered explanation. ""We met up with them about a mile down the trail. Apparently the government sent up street people as some fresh blood for you guys. And that's not all. Apparently..."" Here, he lowered his voice ""One of the families that were living incognito in Vinh got killed a few nights ago: Father, mother, twelve year old boy... from what I heard it sounded like some sort of animal tore them up inside their apartment... and no blood was spilled.""
Tracy looked like she was going to vomit at the news, while a look of dread overcame Marie, as old legends came forth out of the terrifying mist of childhood nightmare to become shadows in the waking world. ""Is there anything else?"" Marie asked quietly.
Now it was Joseph's turn to look back at the party coming out of the forest, which were now carrying a man by his hands and feet on a pole, his mouth gagged and his eyes blindfolded. ""Only that they also sent you a sacrifice. From what they said, he's a drug-runner, sexual slaver and a general bad example of low-level underworld scum.""
Marie, still in shock over the news of the murders, was perhaps not picking and choosing the words coming out of her mouth. ""Which mean he's gonna taste worse than the fish sauce.""
At these words, both gruesome and almost ridiculous, both her lover and her friend goggled at her.
","
By Their smell can men sometimes know Them near, but of Their semblance can no man know, saving only in the features of those They have begotten on mankind; and of those there are many sorts, differing in likeness from man's truest eidolon to that shape without sight or substance which is Them. They walk unseen and foul in lonely places where the Words have been spoken and the Rites howled through at their Seasons. The wind gibbers with Their voices, and the earth mutters with Their consciousness.
-- The Necronomicon

The lighthouse was a steal. Sure, it needed a little fixing up. ""Handyman's Special"" was how the realty company had listed the quaint brick cylinder. Howard knew ""Handyman's Special"" was realty-speak for ""Sucker's Money-Pit."" This was his fifth lighthouse in the last two years and he had come to understand realty-speak, and realtors quite well. He had purchased what lighthouses he could, the first in Northern California, three in Washington state, and now this one, in the small town of Timber Bay on Oregon's South coast.
He still hadn't found what he had been looking for.
Howard Flips had been many things in his forty years, nothing serious mind you, manual labor of course was below someone like Howard, but then again, when waiting for an inheritance, one can't be too picky about how one earns a living in the meantime. He'd been a librarian's assistant in Massachusetts in the 80's, a ship's cook on board a South Seas cruise ship for most of the 90's, and then it had happened. After overcoming colon cancer, prostate cancer, three strokes, a triple bypass, and the loss of most of his sight and all of his hearing, Howard's father had finally passed away.
He had choked on a chicken bone.
Then the glorious day had arrived. Howard sat in the law offices of Leach, Kling, Hammar and Kleever as Hubris Leach, his father's attorney of sixty years, informed Howard that he had inherited a sum of money somewhere in the vicinity of ten or twelve million dollars, presented him with a check in the amount of eight million dollars, and said the rest would follow pending the liquidation of all assets as per his father's specific instructions.
Eight million dollars.
Howard had plans. They had been forming since he had been helping out in the library at Miskatonic University in Arkham, Massachusetts in the 80's. Howard had read in an obscure text in an even more obscure manuscript written sometime during World War II known as the Book of Hidden Numbers, (a weighty tome which Howard had discovered alongside such dreaded volumes as the Necronomicon, the Cultes des Goules, the Revelations of Glaaki, and the Book of Eibon, all of which were kept under lock and key at the university library) of a chamber deep in the bowels of a lighthouse somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. A chamber with a tide pool, which led into an underwater cavern filled with creatures that would bestow immortality upon any and all who would agree to feed them. These creatures could not venture out of their underground dwellings to gather the unnamed food they needed to flourish. Yet, if they did not receive this food, they would go dormant, and that is what the manuscript said had happened in the early twentieth century.
According to the text, the lighthouse keeper had accidentally discovered the cavern at an unusually low tide cycle, had encountered the creatures, which the text did not describe other than to call them ""horrific"" and ""ghastly,"" and there they offered him their deal. Regular feedings for immortality. The keeper agreed, and was able to continue feeding them until his disappearance in 1928. Howard didn't know if they had acquired a new servant, the lighthouse keeper was never seen again, and the book had no copyright date, only that it had been printed in Berlin in the 30's. There was no further mention of the lighthouses or the creatures in the book.
The fact that the lighthouse keeper had disappeared made Howard wonder if the lure of immortality offered by the creatures was genuine or just a dangling carrot. It didn't matter, Howard meant to find out either way. He was drawn to the idea. He was obsessed with it. He had even dreamed about it numerous times. Strange dreams of underwater cities of alien origin, and whispering voices speaking unheard languages, chanting unknown incantations designed to foster an atmosphere conducive to the bringing forth of some great and dreadful being. He actually considered the search for the chamber beneath the lighthouse a Higher Calling. And so upon receiving his inheritance, he made a decision to tour all of the lighthouses in the Pacific Northwest, buying any and all of them that he could, and searching for the underground chamber. But until that particular autumn afternoon his search had turned up nothing but moss-covered brick towers which the Coast Guard had made obsolete with their newfangled aids to navigation, or forgotten lighthouses that had been replaced by newer, more modern structures.
But no hidden chamber.
And no creatures.
Howard slid the old-fashioned skeleton key into the rusty lock which made a low grating sound, and found to his surprise that it turned quite easily. He pushed open the old wooden door a little harder than he probably should have and the door swung open and crashed against the stone wall inside with a loud bang. There was suddenly what sounded like a fluttering of feathers overhead and Howard assumed that there was probably a whole community of bats or pigeons, or both, living in the long-abandoned lighthouse. No matter, he had no plans to move in.
Not yet anyway.
In comparison to the other lighthouses that Howard had visited in the previous months, this one was actually well lit. Long horizontal windows spiraled upward, following the narrow stairway as it wound its way around the inner walls of the old building, allowing the sun to penetrate the damp air that lingered inside. But it wasn't the lighting that struck Howard as strange; for indeed, as soon as he had stepped inside the lighthouse he could actually feel a difference from all of the other lighthouses that he had seen; but it was the absence of something so common in old buildings that one could easily overlook it, if one were not observant.
But Howard was an observant fellow.
He stamped his feet on the ground a few times and looked up at the windows, waiting. But what he was looking for was not there. There were no dust motes flitting in the rays of sunshine that spilled in through the narrow windows. No dust motes. None. Every old building he had searched had millions of dust motes swirling into the beams of sunshine that streamed through their ancient panes of glass. But not here. The place was mildewed and damp and wet and slippery and just plain cold. The chill seemed to permeate everything. Outside the temperature was a wondrous 65 degrees, but within the walls of that ancient tower of light it could easily have been half that. He started to walk further inside to get a look around and slipped. If anyone had been watching he probably would have looked like a beginning ice skater trying to keep his balance. He steadied himself by putting one hand against the wall and his hand sank into a slick, sticky substance. He quickly yanked it away. He brought the open palm to his face and sniffed.
That was the first time he threw up that day.
He tried his handkerchief, but the only thing that came off of the palm of his left hand and into the handkerchief was that horrible odor. He walked carefully over to a nearby table and tried scraping his hand clean on its edge. That helped a little. As a kid he used to smear rubber cement all over the palms of his hands and then peel it off after it had dried, making little sticky rubber balls. This stuff reminded Howard of that rubber cement, only this substance was a lot more mucilaginous. He pulled his pocket knife out of . . . his pocket and tried scraping the stuff off that way. That worked much better, and in a few minutes he had succeeded in getting most of the gummy substance off of his hand. But it was now all over the blade of his knife and so he simply left the knife on the table.
After all, the place was his. And he could afford a new knife.
A feeling of . . . separateness . . . suddenly came over Howard. This lighthouse felt more like . . . a holy place than an ancient warning beacon. Not ""holy"" in the Judeo-Christian sense of the word, but more in its meaning of sacredness. The ancient Greek and Hebrew words for ""Holy"" actually meant ""set aside; separate."" That's what this place felt like . . . holy . . . yet . . . not a good holy, more like a bad holy; a malevolent sinister evil lingered in every particle of non-dust-moted air, a diabolic ambiance that saturated every atom, every cell. Could it be possible?
Could this be the place?
A shiver ran up Howard's back and he tried not to get his hopes up. After buying five lighthouses and exploring three times as many, he had almost started to feel as if the Book of Hidden Numbers was just a hoax. A so-called sacred text created to part the proverbial fool and his proverbial money. But he just couldn't shake that feeling of . . .
Destiny.
If any place he had visited had ever exuded a wisp of anticipation and the apprehension of the object of Howard's quest, this one did. This one seemed to say, Come Howard! Come inside and find your . . .

Destiny . . . ?
Yes. Destiny. For the first time since stepping inside, Howard took a good look around. He stuffed his hands inside the pockets of his London Fog and sniffed, curls of steam spiraled out of his nostrils as he exhaled. The round room was bare save the desk which held Howard's now defiled blade. The floor was covered with a dark green algae of some sort, no doubt the cause of Howard's slip; the walls were bare, except in spots here and there was the sticky essence that had befouled Howard's palm. Upon closer inspection he noticed that the sticky stuff on the walls seemed to be a series of blotches the size of a human head. Furthermore they seemed to be evenly spaced apart, almost like . . . footprints, or hand prints, or . . .
Howard blinked. On the far side of the room he spotted a rusted iron ring laying on the concrete floor. He went over to it and saw the outline of some type of trap door surrounding the ring.
""Howard,"" a voice whispered over his shoulder.
Howard spun around. ""What's that? Who's there?"" The open door that he had entered stood out like a bright green rectangle, as Howard saw the bushes outside the lighthouse reflecting the afternoon sun standing, in stark contrast to the grey walls surrounding it. But there was no reply to his inquiry.
He continued to stare at the open door, but there was nothing there, only the overgrown blackberry vines that wound their way up the litter of pines that surrounded the lighthouse. He bent over and grabbed hold of the iron ring and gave it a slow steady pull. At first he thought that it was not going to budge, but when he had heard a slippery sucking noise, like the sound a foot makes when pulled out of deep mud, he went at it with a gusto that was actually surprising to him, and the door opened.
It was a heavy door, no question about that, but Howard had not even so much as found a basement in any of the lighthouses he had inspected previously, and like the petite mothers who lifted cars off of their newborn infants, Howard threw the door open without so much as a grunt. The black aperture gaped at him, beckoning.
Adrenaline coursed.
Destiny called.
""Howard."" The whispering voice seemed to beckon from deep within the darkened tunnel.
Howard pulled out his flashlight and turned it on, shining the beam of light down into an abyss of moss-covered stone steps and various fungi clinging to water-soaked walls. Without hesitation Howard began carefully descending the steps. His heart began beating faster, he could actually feel it increase in its palpitations. His blood pulsed loud in his ears. His mouth went dry. Could this be it? Could this really be the place? Howard tried desperately to fight off the instinct to cry, Eureka! I've found it! But he would not allow himself to be disappointed so bitterly, he had searched too long, come too far, drank too many espresso's with over-the-hill real estate saleswomen with their dyed and sprayed hair, fake fingernails and pancake make-up, spent too much money in search of this . . . this . . . what was he searching for, anyway? He had almost forgotten, the purpose lingering on the fringes of his consciousness . . . Ah yes! Servanthood for immortality, that was it! He had certainly come too far to let emotions lead him now. He must remain calm, cool-headed, reserved. After all, if it was all true, he would need to make a good impression.
Wouldn't he?
Of course. So he stopped on the steps and closed his eyes. He breathed in and out, practicing the relaxation techniques he had learned from the tapes he had in his glove compartment. In and out. Slowly, deliberately. In . . . hold for five seconds. Out . . . exhale for ten. In . . . out . . . in . . . out. There, that was better, he felt ready to continue.
Get a grip man. Do you think they'll take an emotionally unstable applicant seriously?
They didn't have to know he had been on antidepressants for months. Howard opened his eyes and peered down the beam of his flashlight into the bowels of the lighthouse. In the orifice there was only blackness, and the occasional ears of rippling fungus that grew out of the old bricks like warts. Something was different here. The air was actually getting warmer, yet at the same time that musty, nauseating odor that had filled his nostrils upstairs earlier was increasing. It was almost as if . . .
As if something actually lived down there.
By his own count Howard had descended two dozen steps when the trap door above him slammed shut. His ears popped, like when he would slam the door in his Volkswagen Beetle, and he winced at the pain.
No turning back now Howard.
Panic raced from his head to his chest and dropped into his knees like a jolt of high voltage. Howard's first instinct was to race back up the stairs, to somehow muster the strength to throw that massive trap door open and flee. Just run. It didn't matter where, just as long as it was far away from this place. Forget the money and the years he had spent in search of. . .
Just forget it.
But though he actually tried, he couldn't move. He was literally, and for the first time in all of his life, . . . paralyzed . . . incapacitated. If the Hordes of Hell had come bounding up those lichen-covered stairs he would be fortunate to even be able to let out a scream, much less try to defend himself, or attempt escape. And so Howard Flips stood there in the dank darkness. Unable to move, unable to speak, unable to do anything except perhaps let his bladder flow freely, against his will, of course. But that didn't happen. Instead, the wave of fear passed, the panic subsided like a receding tide in a time-lapsed film. And Howard was again . . . Howard. Out of habit, and an unconscious attempt at self-comfort, he adjusted his glasses on the bridge of his nose, sniffed, and stretched.
That was better. He was ready to continue.
Who locked you in here Howard?
Howard pushed the thought away. It didn't matter. He was certain that he had found what he had been looking for. He continued his descent, calmly. When he had counted seventy-five steps, he found that he had reached the bottom, or a bottom. In the distance he could hear water drip-dripping, as from a ceiling into a pool beneath. His light beam pierced the darkness, and he saw that there was a passageway. Not a natural formation, but a tunnel that had actually been dug. By human hands.
Well, Howard assumed that the hands that created this tunnel were human.
He proceeded down the narrow passageway; the fungi was thick along the walls, the stone floor was slick, and deep green. He rounded a turn and thought he saw a dim glow further down the tunnel. He stopped for a moment, switching off his flashlight and taking in his claustrophobic surroundings. There was indeed a greenish-yellow radiance off in the distance, and the sound of dripping water grew louder. He thought he heard something shuffling down the steps behind him. And then a thought struck. . . .
How can you be so sure that whatever shut that trapdoor isn't locked in here with you?
The time-lapsed film ran again and the tide of fear rose. Howard turned on his flashlight and shined its beam behind him, in the direction of the alleged noise. But there was nothing there. At least nothing he could see. He turned back around and walked toward the glow. Seconds later he found himself entering a large cavern. Splinters of sunlight sliced through the darkness at various points along one high wall, as if cracks and crevices in the cliffs that lined the ocean had purposely allowed air and light into this abysmal asylum, to nurture, or at the very least, allow to exist, some type of life forms.
The sunlight splashed on the algae-covered walls of the cavern like vandal's paint. Water dripped from overhead and landed in what Howard now saw was a small pool. A tide pool no doubt, being this close to the ocean. Howard knelt and scooped up some water, tasting his fingers. Yes. It was salt water.
This has to be it! This has to be the cave! he thought. He shut off his flashlight and let his eyes adjust to the light. As he stood there in the semi-darkness, he tried to remember what he had done with that transcript from the Book of Hidden Numbers that explained this place. He felt around in his pockets and finally found the crumpled piece of notebook paper that he had been carrying around for years. He couldn't remember the last time he had actually read the passage, and so was glad that he had found the transcript. He opened it up, switched his flashlight back on, and read:


Should they not receive their food on a regular basis, they will lapse into a dormant sleep, until the Time. This would be devastating to the cause of the Great Old Ones, and cannot be accepted in any way. There are two who are responsible for their safety and flourishing. The first is the human servant, the lighthouse keeper, whoever that may be. He must be recruited and ordained into service, his pay is the promise of immortality. The second one is the Thing from Between. He is the recruiter. He cannot venture out for the food, yet he cannot join the cavern dwellers, because of his nature. He is more foul and terrible than the cavern dwellers, and cannot be trusted to insure the lighthouse keeper's safety. Therefore, a fail-safe has been put into place. Should the servant lighthouse keeper ever be found missing, and the dwellers begin their lapse into dormancy, then the call will go out into the subconscious mind of a chosen recruit. And he shall find them, and he shall revive them.

The Thing from Between? Be recruited? The call? . . . he couldn't remember reading that part before. Howard became confused. He was certain he had never read that passage before. He only remembered that the text told of the hidden cavern and the needed lighthouse keeper. There was no mention of a ""Thing from Between"" . . . that he could remember. It was as if . . . 
A noise came from down the passageway from which he had emerged. Was there really someone, or some-thing between him and the trap door? Howard furrowed his brow. His ears began to ring and the air suddenly seemed charged with electricity. He backed away from the entrance to the tunnel and pressed himself against a wet wall. He could feel the water soaking through his trench coat, through his shirt, and finally into his skin, and a chill ran through his body.
There was no doubt in his mind now, there was something coming down the passageway. But it was not footsteps that he heard, but rather a slithering, sucking sound, as if a dwarf with a limp was slowly dragging a drenched quilt across a rough surface. The sound was getting closer, and it was all Howard could do to keep from screaming maniacally and diving into the dark tide pool at his feet. He bit down on his clenched fist, and raised his darkened flashlight above his head, as if that might protect him from . . . that . . . thing.
His eyes were fully adjusted to the dimly lit cavern and locked on the doorway to the tunnel. The noise grew louder, and then stopped.
Nothing came out of the portal.
Howard held his breath and watched. But nothing happened. Minutes passed. Still nothing. Soon, Howard's arm began to cramp from holding his flashlight above his head and so he lowered his arm. But he dared not switch on the light, or move. Maybe whatever it was stopped its pursuit of Howard because it could no longer hear him, or see his flashlight beam. Maybe it turned around and left. Maybe . . . 
It's still there, Howard.
This time Howard didn't push the thoughts away, instead, he decided to just let them flow. Perhaps they could actually help him, perhaps they would be his only salvation. He thought that whatever it was in the tunnel might possibly be waiting for him to present himself as a recruit. Yes! Maybe that it was it! Maybe it wasn't going to hurt him at all, but was just simply waiting for him to come forward and say ""Here I am!"" After all, didn't the text talk about a recruiter?
The water in the tide pool splashed.
Howard jerked in a spasm of fear, and let out a scream that no matter how hard he tried he could not contain. The water went still as the ripples lapped the dark rocky shore at Howard's feet. Then with a great splashing and sloshing of water something jumped from the tide pool to the floor next to Howard. It was like a man, yet unlike any man that he had ever seen. It raised itself up on two feet and was taller than Howard by a good yard. It was humanoid in shape, with two legs, two long and lanky arms that ended in webbed, spindly, claw-tipped fingers, a long slim torso, and sitting atop a bull-like neck was an elongated head, with two large round orbs where eyes should be, two tiny slits for a nose, and a long, ear-to-ear slice for a mouth. Its rubbery skin glistened in the little light that the cracks in the cliffs allowed through. It had webbed feet, not unlike those of a frog or a toad. But the most striking thing to Howard was the smell. Mists of the foul effluvium drifted off the top of its head. And for the second time that day, Howard vomited, all over the feet of the creature that stood before him.
When he looked up, Howard saw the creature looking over at the entrance to the tunnel, and it barked. The sound was like a cross between a lion's roar, and a lap dog's yap. Howard heard the slithering sucking noise in the tunnel again, this time growing fainter, as whatever it was in that dark hallway was retreating. The tall creature swung its head around and stooped down, putting its reptilian face mere inches from Howard's. Howard tried breathing through his mouth only, to avoid the smell, but it was no use, and he bent over and threw up again. When he looked up the creature was still there, still stooped, still in his face. Its tiny nostril slits expanded and contracted as it moved its head over the top of Howard's scalp, it was smelling him. Howard was in such a state of shock, fear, and panic, that once again, he found himself paralyzed.
Is this really happening to me? he thought.
Then, another voice spoke in his head, like his own thoughts, yet it was not his voice. ""Yes, Howard, it is happening. Did you not present yourself here for consideration of service?""
Howard let out a yelp and fell to his knees.
This time the creature spoke out of its mouth. ""Would you prefer,"" it croaked, ""that I speak to you in this manner?"" Howard saw rows and rows of nail-like teeth lining the creature's jaws. And he nodded rapidly, actually meaning to shake his head, he did not want to see those teeth or smell that putrid breath again. ""Very well then."" It grunted and continued. ""You obviously believe, Howard, or you would not be here.""
""How do you know my name?"" Howard stammered.
""Because we have been calling you, Howard. You were chosen.""
""I didn't hear anyone calling me.""
""Come now, Howard, stop with all of this foolishness. Do you wish to serve us, or not?""
Howard was silent for a moment, and in the distance, he thought he heard the slithering noise. ""Yes.""
""Very well then,"" it croaked, and reached one of its long hands down and wrapped itself around the top of Howard's skull. Sparks floated into Howard's peripheral vision, and then he blacked out.
* * *

When he awoke, Howard was in a room at the top of the lighthouse. It was still daylight, of course, but Howard wasn't sure if still was the proper term to use, for he had no idea how many days he had been unconscious or how he had gotten up to the top of the lighthouse. He ran his hand across his chin and noticed that he had grown a full beard. His clothes were tattered and torn.
He looked at his hands and they were filthy. His fingernails were long and caked with a dark substance. He was abruptly becoming aware that a considerable length of time had actually passed.
""How long have, Iâ!,"" Howard started, but was stopped in mid-sentence. There was a small wooden trap door in the floor, no doubt the access to the stairs, and Howard's attention was drawn to it because it was creaking open.
""Don't worry, Howard,"" he heard a whispering voice say. ""You have served well, and this won't hurt a bit."" Howard watched the trap door open, and saw a long tentacle, like that of a giant octopus come slithering rapidly from the crack toward his face.
It wrapped itself around Howard's neck and squeezed. His spectacles fell to the floor.
And Howard slipped into the promised immortality.
",False
"

I

""Ne raillons pas les fous; leur folie dure plus longtemps que
la nôtre.... Voila toute la différence.""

Toward the end of the year 1920 the Government of the United States had
practically completed the programme, adopted during the last months of
President Winthrop's administration. The country was apparently tranquil.
Everybody knows how the Tariff and Labour questions were settled. The war
with Germany, incident on that country's seizure of the Samoan Islands,
had left no visible scars upon the republic, and the temporary occupation
of Norfolk by the invading army had been forgotten in the joy over
repeated naval victories, and the subsequent ridiculous plight of General
Von Gartenlaube's forces in the State of New Jersey. The Cuban and
Hawaiian investments had paid one hundred per cent and the territory of
Samoa was well worth its cost as a coaling station. The country was in a
superb state of defence. Every coast city had been well supplied with land
fortifications; the army under the parental eye of the General Staff,
organized according to the Prussian system, had been increased to 300,000
men, with a territorial reserve of a million; and six magnificent
squadrons of cruisers and battle-ships patrolled the six stations of the
navigable seas, leaving a steam reserve amply fitted to control home
waters. The gentlemen from the West had at last been constrained to
acknowledge that a college for the training of diplomats was as necessary
as law schools are for the training of barristers; consequently we were no
longer represented abroad by incompetent patriots. The nation was
prosperous; Chicago, for a moment paralyzed after a second great fire, had
risen from its ruins, white and imperial, and more beautiful than the white
city which had been built for its plaything in 1893. Everywhere good
architecture was replacing bad, and even in New York, a sudden craving for
decency had swept away a great portion of the existing horrors. Streets
had been widened, properly paved and lighted, trees had been planted,
squares laid out, elevated structures demolished and underground roads
built to replace them. The new government buildings and barracks were fine
bits of architecture, and the long system of stone quays which completely
surrounded the island had been turned into parks which proved a god-send
to the population. The subsidizing of the state theatre and state opera
brought its own reward. The United States National Academy of Design was
much like European institutions of the same kind. Nobody envied the
Secretary of Fine Arts, either his cabinet position or his portfolio. The
Secretary of Forestry and Game Preservation had a much easier time, thanks
to the new system of National Mounted Police. We had profited well by the
latest treaties with France and England; the exclusion of foreign-born
Jews as a measure of self-preservation, the settlement of the new
independent negro state of Suanee, the checking of immigration, the new
laws concerning naturalization, and the gradual centralization of power in
the executive all contributed to national calm and prosperity. When the
Government solved the Indian problem and squadrons of Indian cavalry
scouts in native costume were substituted for the pitiable organizations
tacked on to the tail of skeletonized regiments by a former Secretary of
War, the nation drew a long sigh of relief. When, after the colossal
Congress of Religions, bigotry and intolerance were laid in their graves
and kindness and charity began to draw warring sects together, many
thought the millennium had arrived, at least in the new world which after
all is a world by itself.

But self-preservation is the first law, and the United States had to look
on in helpless sorrow as Germany, Italy, Spain and Belgium writhed in the
throes of Anarchy, while Russia, watching from the Caucasus, stooped and
bound them one by one.

In the city of New York the summer of 1899 was signalized by the
dismantling of the Elevated Railroads. The summer of 1900 will live in
the memories of New York people for many a cycle; the Dodge Statue was
removed in that year. In the following winter began that agitation for
the repeal of the laws prohibiting suicide which bore its final fruit in
the month of April, 1920, when the first Government Lethal Chamber was
opened on Washington Square.

I had walked down that day from Dr. Archer's house on Madison Avenue,
where I had been as a mere formality. Ever since that fall from my horse,
four years before, I had been troubled at times with pains in the back of
my head and neck, but now for months they had been absent, and the doctor
sent me away that day saying there was nothing more to be cured in me. It
was hardly worth his fee to be told that; I knew it myself. Still I did
not grudge him the money. What I minded was the mistake which he made at
first. When they picked me up from the pavement where I lay unconscious,
and somebody had mercifully sent a bullet through my horse's head, I was
carried to Dr. Archer, and he, pronouncing my brain affected, placed me
in his private asylum where I was obliged to endure treatment for
insanity. At last he decided that I was well, and I, knowing that my mind
had always been as sound as his, if not sounder, ""paid my tuition"" as he
jokingly called it, and left. I told him, smiling, that I would get even
with him for his mistake, and he laughed heartily, and asked me to call
once in a while. I did so, hoping for a chance to even up accounts, but
he gave me none, and I told him I would wait.

The fall from my horse had fortunately left no evil results; on the
contrary it had changed my whole character for the better. From a lazy
young man about town, I had become active, energetic, temperate, and
above all--oh, above all else--ambitious. There was only one thing which
troubled me, I laughed at my own uneasiness, and yet it troubled me.

During my convalescence I had bought and read for the first time, _The
King in Yellow_. I remember after finishing the first act that it
occurred to me that I had better stop. I started up and flung the book
into the fireplace; the volume struck the barred grate and fell open on
the hearth in the firelight. If I had not caught a glimpse of the opening
words in the second act I should never have finished it, but as I stooped
to pick it up, my eyes became riveted to the open page, and with a cry of
terror, or perhaps it was of joy so poignant that I suffered in every
nerve, I snatched the thing out of the coals and crept shaking to my
bedroom, where I read it and reread it, and wept and laughed and trembled
with a horror which at times assails me yet. This is the thing that
troubles me, for I cannot forget Carcosa where black stars hang in the
heavens; where the shadows of men's thoughts lengthen in the afternoon,
when the twin suns sink into the lake of Hali; and my mind will bear for
ever the memory of the Pallid Mask. I pray God will curse the writer, as
the writer has cursed the world with this beautiful, stupendous creation,
terrible in its simplicity, irresistible in its truth--a world which now
trembles before the King in Yellow. When the French Government seized the
translated copies which had just arrived in Paris, London, of course,
became eager to read it. It is well known how the book spread like an
infectious disease, from city to city, from continent to continent,
barred out here, confiscated there, denounced by Press and pulpit,
censured even by the most advanced of literary anarchists. No definite
principles had been violated in those wicked pages, no doctrine
promulgated, no convictions outraged. It could not be judged by any known
standard, yet, although it was acknowledged that the supreme note of art
had been struck in _The King in Yellow_, all felt that human nature
could not bear the strain, nor thrive on words in which the essence of
purest poison lurked. The very banality and innocence of the first act
only allowed the blow to fall afterward with more awful effect.

It was, I remember, the 13th day of April, 1920, that the first
Government Lethal Chamber was established on the south side of Washington
Square, between Wooster Street and South Fifth Avenue. The block which
had formerly consisted of a lot of shabby old buildings, used as cafés
and restaurants for foreigners, had been acquired by the Government in
the winter of 1898. The French and Italian cafés and restaurants were
torn down; the whole block was enclosed by a gilded iron railing, and
converted into a lovely garden with lawns, flowers and fountains. In the
centre of the garden stood a small, white building, severely classical in
architecture, and surrounded by thickets of flowers. Six Ionic columns
supported the roof, and the single door was of bronze. A splendid marble
group of the ""Fates"" stood before the door, the work of a young American
sculptor, Boris Yvain, who had died in Paris when only twenty-three years
old.

The inauguration ceremonies were in progress as I crossed University
Place and entered the square. I threaded my way through the silent throng
of spectators, but was stopped at Fourth Street by a cordon of police. A
regiment of United States lancers were drawn up in a hollow square round
the Lethal Chamber. On a raised tribune facing Washington Park stood the
Governor of New York, and behind him were grouped the Mayor of New
York and Brooklyn, the Inspector-General of Police, the Commandant of
the state troops, Colonel Livingston, military aid to the President of the
United States, General Blount, commanding at Governor's Island,
Major-General Hamilton, commanding the garrison of New York and Brooklyn,
Admiral Buffby of the fleet in the North River, Surgeon-General
Lanceford, the staff of the National Free Hospital, Senators Wyse and
Franklin of New York, and the Commissioner of Public Works. The tribune
was surrounded by a squadron of hussars of the National Guard.

The Governor was finishing his reply to the short speech of the
Surgeon-General. I heard him say: ""The laws prohibiting suicide and
providing punishment for any attempt at self-destruction have been
repealed. The Government has seen fit to acknowledge the right of man to
end an existence which may have become intolerable to him, through
physical suffering or mental despair. It is believed that the community
will be benefited by the removal of such people from their midst. Since
the passage of this law, the number of suicides in the United States has
not increased. Now the Government has determined to establish a Lethal
Chamber in every city, town and village in the country, it remains to be
seen whether or not that class of human creatures from whose desponding
ranks new victims of self-destruction fall daily will accept the relief
thus provided."" He paused, and turned to the white Lethal Chamber. The
silence in the street was absolute. ""There a painless death awaits him
who can no longer bear the sorrows of this life. If death is welcome let
him seek it there."" Then quickly turning to the military aid of the
President's household, he said, ""I declare the Lethal Chamber open,"" and
again facing the vast crowd he cried in a clear voice: ""Citizens of New
York and of the United States of America, through me the Government
declares the Lethal Chamber to be open.""

The solemn hush was broken by a sharp cry of command, the squadron of
hussars filed after the Governor's carriage, the lancers wheeled and
formed along Fifth Avenue to wait for the commandant of the garrison, and
the mounted police followed them. I left the crowd to gape and stare at
the white marble Death Chamber, and, crossing South Fifth Avenue, walked
along the western side of that thoroughfare to Bleecker Street. Then I
turned to the right and stopped before a dingy shop which bore the sign:

HAWBERK, ARMOURER.

I glanced in at the doorway and saw Hawberk busy in his little shop at
the end of the hall. He looked up, and catching sight of me cried in his
deep, hearty voice, ""Come in, Mr. Castaigne!"" Constance, his daughter,
rose to meet me as I crossed the threshold, and held out her pretty
hand, but I saw the blush of disappointment on her cheeks, and knew
that it was another Castaigne she had expected, my cousin Louis. I
smiled at her confusion and complimented her on the banner she was
embroidering from a coloured plate. Old Hawberk sat riveting the worn
greaves of some ancient suit of armour, and the ting! ting! ting! of his
little hammer sounded pleasantly in the quaint shop. Presently he
dropped his hammer, and fussed about for a moment with a tiny wrench.
The soft clash of the mail sent a thrill of pleasure through me. I
loved to hear the music of steel brushing against steel, the mellow
shock of the mallet on thigh pieces, and the jingle of chain armour.
That was the only reason I went to see Hawberk. He had never interested
me personally, nor did Constance, except for the fact of her being in
love with Louis. This did occupy my attention, and sometimes even kept
me awake at night. But I knew in my heart that all would come right,
and that I should arrange their future as I expected to arrange that of
my kind doctor, John Archer. However, I should never have troubled
myself about visiting them just then, had it not been, as I say, that
the music of the tinkling hammer had for me this strong fascination. I
would sit for hours, listening and listening, and when a stray sunbeam
struck the inlaid steel, the sensation it gave me was almost too keen
to endure. My eyes would become fixed, dilating with a pleasure that
stretched every nerve almost to breaking, until some movement of the
old armourer cut off the ray of sunlight, then, still thrilling
secretly, I leaned back and listened again to the sound of the
polishing rag, swish! swish! rubbing rust from the rivets.

Constance worked with the embroidery over her knees, now and then pausing
to examine more closely the pattern in the coloured plate from the
Metropolitan Museum.

""Who is this for?"" I asked.

Hawberk explained, that in addition to the treasures of armour in the
Metropolitan Museum of which he had been appointed armourer, he also
had charge of several collections belonging to rich amateurs. This was the
missing greave of a famous suit which a client of his had traced to a
little shop in Paris on the Quai d'Orsay. He, Hawberk, had negotiated for
and secured the greave, and now the suit was complete. He laid down his
hammer and read me the history of the suit, traced since 1450 from owner
to owner until it was acquired by Thomas Stainbridge. When his superb
collection was sold, this client of Hawberk's bought the suit, and since
then the search for the missing greave had been pushed until it was,
almost by accident, located in Paris.

""Did you continue the search so persistently without any certainty of the
greave being still in existence?"" I demanded.

""Of course,"" he replied coolly.

Then for the first time I took a personal interest in Hawberk.

""It was worth something to you,"" I ventured.

""No,"" he replied, laughing, ""my pleasure in finding it was my reward.""

""Have you no ambition to be rich?"" I asked, smiling.

""My one ambition is to be the best armourer in the world,"" he answered
gravely.

Constance asked me if I had seen the ceremonies at the Lethal Chamber.
She herself had noticed cavalry passing up Broadway that morning, and had
wished to see the inauguration, but her father wanted the banner
finished, and she had stayed at his request.

""Did you see your cousin, Mr. Castaigne, there?"" she asked, with the
slightest tremor of her soft eyelashes.

""No,"" I replied carelessly. ""Louis' regiment is manoeuvring out in
Westchester County."" I rose and picked up my hat and cane.

""Are you going upstairs to see the lunatic again?"" laughed old Hawberk.
If Hawberk knew how I loathe that word ""lunatic,"" he would never use it
in my presence. It rouses certain feelings within me which I do not care
to explain. However, I answered him quietly: ""I think I shall drop in and
see Mr. Wilde for a moment or two.""

""Poor fellow,"" said Constance, with a shake of the head, ""it must be hard
to live alone year after year poor, crippled and almost demented. It is
very good of you, Mr. Castaigne, to visit him as often as you do.""

""I think he is vicious,"" observed Hawberk, beginning again with his
hammer. I listened to the golden tinkle on the greave plates; when he had
finished I replied:

""No, he is not vicious, nor is he in the least demented. His mind is a
wonder chamber, from which he can extract treasures that you and I would
give years of our life to acquire.""'

Hawberk laughed.

I continued a little impatiently: ""He knows history as no one else could
know it. Nothing, however trivial, escapes his search, and his memory is
so absolute, so precise in details, that were it known in New York that
such a man existed, the people could not honour him enough.""

""Nonsense,"" muttered Hawberk, searching on the floor for a fallen rivet.

""Is it nonsense,"" I asked, managing to suppress what I felt, ""is it
nonsense when he says that the tassets and cuissards of the enamelled
suit of armour commonly known as the 'Prince's Emblazoned' can be found
among a mass of rusty theatrical properties, broken stoves and
ragpicker's refuse in a garret in Pell Street?""

Hawberk's hammer fell to the ground, but he picked it up and asked, with
a great deal of calm, how I knew that the tassets and left cuissard were
missing from the ""Prince's Emblazoned.""

""I did not know until Mr. Wilde mentioned it to me the other day. He said
they were in the garret of 998 Pell Street.""

""Nonsense,"" he cried, but I noticed his hand trembling under his leathern
apron.

""Is this nonsense too?"" I asked pleasantly, ""is it nonsense when Mr.
Wilde continually speaks of you as the Marquis of Avonshire and of Miss
Constance--""

I did not finish, for Constance had started to her feet with terror
written on every feature. Hawberk looked at me and slowly smoothed his
leathern apron.

""That is impossible,"" he observed, ""Mr. Wilde may know a great many
things--""

""About armour, for instance, and the 'Prince's Emblazoned,'"" I
interposed, smiling.

""Yes,"" he continued, slowly, ""about armour also--may be--but he is wrong
in regard to the Marquis of Avonshire, who, as you know, killed his
wife's traducer years ago, and went to Australia where he did not long
survive his wife.""

""Mr. Wilde is wrong,"" murmured Constance. Her lips were blanched, but her
voice was sweet and calm.

""Let us agree, if you please, that in this one circumstance Mr. Wilde is
wrong,"" I said.




II

I climbed the three dilapidated flights of stairs, which I had so often
climbed before, and knocked at a small door at the end of the corridor.
Mr. Wilde opened the door and I walked in.

When he had double-locked the door and pushed a heavy chest against it,
he came and sat down beside me, peering up into my face with his little
light-coloured eyes. Half a dozen new scratches covered his nose and
cheeks, and the silver wires which supported his artificial ears had
become displaced. I thought I had never seen him so hideously
fascinating. He had no ears. The artificial ones, which now stood out at
an angle from the fine wire, were his one weakness. They were made of wax
and painted a shell pink, but the rest of his face was yellow. He might
better have revelled in the luxury of some artificial fingers for his
left hand, which was absolutely fingerless, but it seemed to cause him no
inconvenience, and he was satisfied with his wax ears. He was very small,
scarcely higher than a child of ten, but his arms were magnificently
developed, and his thighs as thick as any athlete's. Still, the most
remarkable thing about Mr. Wilde was that a man of his marvellous
intelligence and knowledge should have such a head. It was flat and
pointed, like the heads of many of those unfortunates whom people
imprison in asylums for the weak-minded. Many called him insane, but I
knew him to be as sane as I was.

I do not deny that he was eccentric; the mania he had for keeping that
cat and teasing her until she flew at his face like a demon, was
certainly eccentric. I never could understand why he kept the creature,
nor what pleasure he found in shutting himself up in his room with this
surly, vicious beast. I remember once, glancing up from the manuscript I
was studying by the light of some tallow dips, and seeing Mr. Wilde
squatting motionless on his high chair, his eyes fairly blazing with
excitement, while the cat, which had risen from her place before the
stove, came creeping across the floor right at him. Before I could move
she flattened her belly to the ground, crouched, trembled, and sprang
into his face. Howling and foaming they rolled over and over on the
floor, scratching and clawing, until the cat screamed and fled under the
cabinet, and Mr. Wilde turned over on his back, his limbs contracting and
curling up like the legs of a dying spider. He _was_ eccentric.

Mr. Wilde had climbed into his high chair, and, after studying my face,
picked up a dog's-eared ledger and opened it.

""Henry B. Matthews,"" he read, ""book-keeper with Whysot Whysot and
Company, dealers in church ornaments. Called April 3rd. Reputation
damaged on the race-track. Known as a welcher. Reputation to be repaired
by August 1st. Retainer Five Dollars."" He turned the page and ran his
fingerless knuckles down the closely-written columns.

""P. Greene Dusenberry, Minister of the Gospel, Fairbeach, New Jersey.
Reputation damaged in the Bowery. To be repaired as soon as possible.
Retainer $100.""

He coughed and added, ""Called, April 6th.""

""Then you are not in need of money, Mr. Wilde,"" I inquired.

""Listen,"" he coughed again.

""Mrs. C. Hamilton Chester, of Chester Park, New York City. Called April
7th. Reputation damaged at Dieppe, France. To be repaired by October 1st
Retainer $500.

""Note.--C. Hamilton Chester, Captain U.S.S. 'Avalanche', ordered home
from South Sea Squadron October 1st.""

""Well,"" I said, ""the profession of a Repairer of Reputations is
lucrative.""

His colourless eyes sought mine, ""I only wanted to demonstrate that I
was correct. You said it was impossible to succeed as a Repairer of
Reputations; that even if I did succeed in certain cases it would cost
me more than I would gain by it. To-day I have five hundred men in my
employ, who are poorly paid, but who pursue the work with an enthusiasm
which possibly may be born of fear. These men enter every shade and grade
of society; some even are pillars of the most exclusive social temples;
others are the prop and pride of the financial world; still others, hold
undisputed sway among the 'Fancy and the Talent.' I choose them at my
leisure from those who reply to my advertisements. It is easy enough,
they are all cowards. I could treble the number in twenty days if I
wished. So you see, those who have in their keeping the reputations of
their fellow-citizens, I have in my pay.""

""They may turn on you,"" I suggested.

He rubbed his thumb over his cropped ears, and adjusted the wax
substitutes. ""I think not,"" he murmured thoughtfully, ""I seldom have to
apply the whip, and then only once. Besides they like their wages.""

""How do you apply the whip?"" I demanded.

His face for a moment was awful to look upon. His eyes dwindled to a pair
of green sparks.

""I invite them to come and have a little chat with me,"" he said in a soft
voice.

A knock at the door interrupted him, and his face resumed its amiable
expression.

""Who is it?"" he inquired.

""Mr. Steylette,"" was the answer.

""Come to-morrow,"" replied Mr. Wilde.

""Impossible,"" began the other, but was silenced by a sort of bark from
Mr. Wilde.

""Come to-morrow,"" he repeated.

We heard somebody move away from the door and turn the corner by the
stairway.

""Who is that?"" I asked.

""Arnold Steylette, Owner and Editor in Chief of the great New York
daily.""

He drummed on the ledger with his fingerless hand adding: ""I pay him very
badly, but he thinks it a good bargain.""

""Arnold Steylette!"" I repeated amazed.

""Yes,"" said Mr. Wilde, with a self-satisfied cough.

The cat, which had entered the room as he spoke, hesitated, looked up at
him and snarled. He climbed down from the chair and squatting on the
floor, took the creature into his arms and caressed her. The cat ceased
snarling and presently began a loud purring which seemed to increase in
timbre as he stroked her. ""Where are the notes?"" I asked. He pointed to
the table, and for the hundredth time I picked up the bundle of
manuscript entitled--

""THE IMPERIAL DYNASTY OF AMERICA.""

One by one I studied the well-worn pages, worn only by my own handling,
and although I knew all by heart, from the beginning, ""When from Carcosa,
the Hyades, Hastur, and Aldebaran,"" to ""Castaigne, Louis de Calvados,
born December 19th, 1877,"" I read it with an eager, rapt attention,
pausing to repeat parts of it aloud, and dwelling especially on ""Hildred
de Calvados, only son of Hildred Castaigne and Edythe Landes Castaigne,
first in succession,"" etc., etc.

When I finished, Mr. Wilde nodded and coughed.

""Speaking of your legitimate ambition,"" he said, ""how do Constance and
Louis get along?""

""She loves him,"" I replied simply.

The cat on his knee suddenly turned and struck at his eyes, and he flung
her off and climbed on to the chair opposite me.

""And Dr. Archer! But that's a matter you can settle any time you wish,""
he added.

""Yes,"" I replied, ""Dr. Archer can wait, but it is time I saw my cousin
Louis.""

""It is time,"" he repeated. Then he took another ledger from the table and
ran over the leaves rapidly. ""We are now in communication with ten
thousand men,"" he muttered. ""We can count on one hundred thousand within
the first twenty-eight hours, and in forty-eight hours the state will
rise _en masse_. The country follows the state, and the portion that
will not, I mean California and the Northwest, might better never have
been inhabited. I shall not send them the Yellow Sign.""

The blood rushed to my head, but I only answered, ""A new broom sweeps
clean.""

""The ambition of Caesar and of Napoleon pales before that which could not
rest until it had seized the minds of men and controlled even their
unborn thoughts,"" said Mr. Wilde.

""You are speaking of the King in Yellow,"" I groaned, with a shudder.

""He is a king whom emperors have served.""

""I am content to serve him,"" I replied.

Mr. Wilde sat rubbing his ears with his crippled hand. ""Perhaps Constance
does not love him,"" he suggested.

I started to reply, but a sudden burst of military music from the street
below drowned my voice. The twentieth dragoon regiment, formerly in
garrison at Mount St. Vincent, was returning from the manoeuvres in
Westchester County, to its new barracks on East Washington Square. It was
my cousin's regiment. They were a fine lot of fellows, in their pale
blue, tight-fitting jackets, jaunty busbys and white riding breeches with
the double yellow stripe, into which their limbs seemed moulded. Every
other squadron was armed with lances, from the metal points of which
fluttered yellow and white pennons. The band passed, playing the
regimental march, then came the colonel and staff, the horses crowding
and trampling, while their heads bobbed in unison, and the pennons
fluttered from their lance points. The troopers, who rode with the
beautiful English seat, looked brown as berries from their bloodless
campaign among the farms of Westchester, and the music of their sabres
against the stirrups, and the jingle of spurs and carbines was delightful
to me. I saw Louis riding with his squadron. He was as handsome an
officer as I have ever seen. Mr. Wilde, who had mounted a chair by the
window, saw him too, but said nothing. Louis turned and looked straight
at Hawberk's shop as he passed, and I could see the flush on his brown
cheeks. I think Constance must have been at the window. When the last
troopers had clattered by, and the last pennons vanished into South Fifth
Avenue, Mr. Wilde clambered out of his chair and dragged the chest away
from the door.

""Yes,"" he said, ""it is time that you saw your cousin Louis.""

He unlocked the door and I picked up my hat and stick and stepped into
the corridor. The stairs were dark. Groping about, I set my foot on
something soft, which snarled and spit, and I aimed a murderous blow at
the cat, but my cane shivered to splinters against the balustrade, and
the beast scurried back into Mr. Wilde's room.

Passing Hawberk's door again I saw him still at work on the armour, but
I did not stop, and stepping out into Bleecker Street, I followed it to
Wooster, skirted the grounds of the Lethal Chamber, and crossing
Washington Park went straight to my rooms in the Benedick. Here I lunched
comfortably, read the _Herald_ and the _Meteor_, and finally went
to the steel safe in my bedroom and set the time combination. The
three and three-quarter minutes which it is necessary to wait, while the
time lock is opening, are to me golden moments. From the instant I set
the combination to the moment when I grasp the knobs and swing back
the solid steel doors, I live in an ecstasy of expectation. Those moments
must be like moments passed in Paradise. I know what I am to find at
the end of the time limit. I know what the massive safe holds secure for
me, for me alone, and the exquisite pleasure of waiting is hardly enhanced
when the safe opens and I lift, from its velvet crown, a diadem of purest
gold, blazing with diamonds. I do this every day, and yet the joy of
waiting and at last touching again the diadem, only seems to increase as
the days pass. It is a diadem fit for a King among kings, an Emperor
among emperors. The King in Yellow might scorn it, but it shall be worn
by his royal servant.

I held it in my arms until the alarm in the safe rang harshly, and then
tenderly, proudly, I replaced it and shut the steel doors. I walked
slowly back into my study, which faces Washington Square, and leaned on
the window sill. The afternoon sun poured into my windows, and a gentle
breeze stirred the branches of the elms and maples in the park, now
covered with buds and tender foliage. A flock of pigeons circled about
the tower of the Memorial Church; sometimes alighting on the purple tiled
roof, sometimes wheeling downward to the lotos fountain in front of the
marble arch. The gardeners were busy with the flower beds around the
fountain, and the freshly turned earth smelled sweet and spicy. A lawn
mower, drawn by a fat white horse, clinked across the green sward, and
watering-carts poured showers of spray over the asphalt drives. Around
the statue of Peter Stuyvesant, which in 1897 had replaced the
monstrosity supposed to represent Garibaldi, children played in the
spring sunshine, and nurse girls wheeled elaborate baby carriages with a
reckless disregard for the pasty-faced occupants, which could probably be
explained by the presence of half a dozen trim dragoon troopers languidly
lolling on the benches. Through the trees, the Washington Memorial Arch
glistened like silver in the sunshine, and beyond, on the eastern
extremity of the square the grey stone barracks of the dragoons, and the
white granite artillery stables were alive with colour and motion.

I looked at the Lethal Chamber on the corner of the square opposite. A
few curious people still lingered about the gilded iron railing, but
inside the grounds the paths were deserted. I watched the fountains
ripple and sparkle; the sparrows had already found this new bathing nook,
and the basins were covered with the dusty-feathered little things. Two
or three white peacocks picked their way across the lawns, and a drab
coloured pigeon sat so motionless on the arm of one of the ""Fates,"" that
it seemed to be a part of the sculptured stone.

As I was turning carelessly away, a slight commotion in the group of
curious loiterers around the gates attracted my attention. A young man
had entered, and was advancing with nervous strides along the gravel path
which leads to the bronze doors of the Lethal Chamber. He paused a moment
before the ""Fates,"" and as he raised his head to those three mysterious
faces, the pigeon rose from its sculptured perch, circled about for a
moment and wheeled to the east. The young man pressed his hand to his
face, and then with an undefinable gesture sprang up the marble steps,
the bronze doors closed behind him, and half an hour later the loiterers
slouched away, and the frightened pigeon returned to its perch in the
arms of Fate.

I put on my hat and went out into the park for a little walk before
dinner. As I crossed the central driveway a group of officers passed, and
one of them called out, ""Hello, Hildred,"" and came back to shake hands
with me. It was my cousin Louis, who stood smiling and tapping his
spurred heels with his riding-whip.

""Just back from Westchester,"" he said; ""been doing the bucolic; milk and
curds, you know, dairy-maids in sunbonnets, who say 'haeow' and 'I don't
think' when you tell them they are pretty. I'm nearly dead for a square
meal at Delmonico's. What's the news?""

""There is none,"" I replied pleasantly. ""I saw your regiment coming in this
morning.""

""Did you? I didn't see you. Where were you?""

""In Mr. Wilde's window.""

""Oh, hell!"" he began impatiently, ""that man is stark mad! I don't
understand why you--""

He saw how annoyed I felt by this outburst, and begged my pardon.

""Really, old chap,"" he said, ""I don't mean to run down a man you like,
but for the life of me I can't see what the deuce you find in common with
Mr. Wilde. He's not well bred, to put it generously; he is hideously
deformed; his head is the head of a criminally insane person. You know
yourself he's been in an asylum--""

""So have I,"" I interrupted calmly.

Louis looked startled and confused for a moment, but recovered and
slapped me heartily on the shoulder. ""You were completely cured,"" he
began; but I stopped him again.

""I suppose you mean that I was simply acknowledged never to have been
insane.""

""Of course that--that's what I meant,"" he laughed.

I disliked his laugh because I knew it was forced, but I nodded gaily and
asked him where he was going. Louis looked after his brother officers who
had now almost reached Broadway.

""We had intended to sample a Brunswick cocktail, but to tell you the
truth I was anxious for an excuse to go and see Hawberk instead. Come
along, I'll make you my excuse.""

We found old Hawberk, neatly attired in a fresh spring suit, standing at
the door of his shop and sniffing the air.

""I had just decided to take Constance for a little stroll before dinner,""
he replied to the impetuous volley of questions from Louis. ""We thought
of walking on the park terrace along the North River.""

At that moment Constance appeared and grew pale and rosy by turns as
Louis bent over her small gloved fingers. I tried to excuse myself,
alleging an engagement uptown, but Louis and Constance would not listen,
and I saw I was expected to remain and engage old Hawberk's attention.
After all it would be just as well if I kept my eye on Louis, I thought,
and when they hailed a Spring Street horse-car, I got in after them and
took my seat beside the armourer.

The beautiful line of parks and granite terraces overlooking the wharves
along the North River, which were built in 1910 and finished in the
autumn of 1917, had become one of the most popular promenades in the
metropolis. They extended from the battery to 190th Street, overlooking
the noble river and affording a fine view of the Jersey shore and the
Highlands opposite. Cafés and restaurants were scattered here and there
among the trees, and twice a week military bands from the garrison played
in the kiosques on the parapets.

We sat down in the sunshine on the bench at the foot of the equestrian
statue of General Sheridan. Constance tipped her sunshade to shield her
eyes, and she and Louis began a murmuring conversation which was
impossible to catch. Old Hawberk, leaning on his ivory headed cane,
lighted an excellent cigar, the mate to which I politely refused, and
smiled at vacancy. The sun hung low above the Staten Island woods, and
the bay was dyed with golden hues reflected from the sun-warmed sails of
the shipping in the harbour.

Brigs, schooners, yachts, clumsy ferry-boats, their decks swarming with
people, railroad transports carrying lines of brown, blue and white
freight cars, stately sound steamers, déclassé tramp steamers, coasters,
dredgers, scows, and everywhere pervading the entire bay impudent little
tugs puffing and whistling officiously;--these were the craft which
churned the sunlight waters as far as the eye could reach. In calm
contrast to the hurry of sailing vessel and steamer a silent fleet of
white warships lay motionless in midstream.

Constance's merry laugh aroused me from my reverie.

""What _are_ you staring at?"" she inquired.

""Nothing--the fleet,"" I smiled.

Then Louis told us what the vessels were, pointing out each by its
relative position to the old Red Fort on Governor's Island.

""That little cigar shaped thing is a torpedo boat,"" he explained; ""there
are four more lying close together. They are the _Tarpon_, the _Falcon_,
the _Sea Fox_, and the _Octopus_. The gun-boats just above are the
_Princeton_, the _Champlain_, the _Still Water_ and the _Erie_. Next to
them lie the cruisers _Faragut_ and _Los Angeles_, and above them the
battle ships _California_, and _Dakota_, and the _Washington_ which is
the flag ship. Those two squatty looking chunks of metal which are
anchored there off Castle William are the double turreted monitors
_Terrible_ and _Magnificent_; behind them lies the ram, _Osceola_.""

Constance looked at him with deep approval in her beautiful eyes. ""What
loads of things you know for a soldier,"" she said, and we all joined in
the laugh which followed.

Presently Louis rose with a nod to us and offered his arm to Constance,
and they strolled away along the river wall. Hawberk watched them for a
moment and then turned to me.

""Mr. Wilde was right,"" he said. ""I have found the missing tassets and
left cuissard of the 'Prince's Emblazoned,' in a vile old junk garret in
Pell Street.""

""998?"" I inquired, with a smile.

""Yes.""

""Mr. Wilde is a very intelligent man,"" I observed.

""I want to give him the credit of this most important discovery,""
continued Hawberk. ""And I intend it shall be known that he is entitled
to the fame of it.""

""He won't thank you for that,"" I answered sharply; ""please say nothing
about it.""

""Do you know what it is worth?"" said Hawberk.

""No, fifty dollars, perhaps.""

""It is valued at five hundred, but the owner of the 'Prince's Emblazoned'
will give two thousand dollars to the person who completes his suit; that
reward also belongs to Mr. Wilde.""

""He doesn't want it! He refuses it!"" I answered angrily. ""What do you
know about Mr. Wilde? He doesn't need the money. He is rich--or will
be--richer than any living man except myself. What will we care for money
then--what will we care, he and I, when--when--""

""When what?"" demanded Hawberk, astonished.

""You will see,"" I replied, on my guard again.

He looked at me narrowly, much as Doctor Archer used to, and I knew he
thought I was mentally unsound. Perhaps it was fortunate for him that he
did not use the word lunatic just then.

""No,"" I replied to his unspoken thought, ""I am not mentally weak; my mind
is as healthy as Mr. Wilde's. I do not care to explain just yet what I
have on hand, but it is an investment which will pay more than mere gold,
silver and precious stones. It will secure the happiness and prosperity
of a continent--yes, a hemisphere!""

""Oh,"" said Hawberk.

""And eventually,"" I continued more quietly, ""it will secure the happiness
of the whole world.""

""And incidentally your own happiness and prosperity as well as Mr.
Wilde's?""

""Exactly,"" I smiled. But I could have throttled him for taking that tone.

He looked at me in silence for a while and then said very gently, ""Why
don't you give up your books and studies, Mr. Castaigne, and take a tramp
among the mountains somewhere or other? You used to be fond of fishing.
Take a cast or two at the trout in the Rangelys.""

""I don't care for fishing any more,"" I answered, without a shade of
annoyance in my voice.

""You used to be fond of everything,"" he continued; ""athletics, yachting,
shooting, riding--""

""I have never cared to ride since my fall,"" I said quietly.

""Ah, yes, your fall,"" he repeated, looking away from me.

I thought this nonsense had gone far enough, so I brought the
conversation back to Mr. Wilde; but he was scanning my face again in a
manner highly offensive to me.

""Mr. Wilde,"" he repeated, ""do you know what he did this afternoon? He
came downstairs and nailed a sign over the hall door next to mine; it
read:

""MR. WILDE,
REPAIRER OF REPUTATIONS.
Third Bell.

""Do you know what a Repairer of Reputations can be?""

""I do,"" I replied, suppressing the rage within.

""Oh,"" he said again.

Louis and Constance came strolling by and stopped to ask if we would join
them. Hawberk looked at his watch. At the same moment a puff of smoke
shot from the casemates of Castle William, and the boom of the sunset gun
rolled across the water and was re-echoed from the Highlands opposite.
The flag came running down from the flag-pole, the bugles sounded on the
white decks of the warships, and the first electric light sparkled out
from the Jersey shore.

As I turned into the city with Hawberk I heard Constance murmur something
to Louis which I did not understand; but Louis whispered ""My darling,"" in
reply; and again, walking ahead with Hawberk through the square I heard a
murmur of ""sweetheart,"" and ""my own Constance,"" and I knew the time had
nearly arrived when I should speak of important matters with my cousin
Louis.




III

One morning early in May I stood before the steel safe in my bedroom,
trying on the golden jewelled crown. The diamonds flashed fire as I
turned to the mirror, and the heavy beaten gold burned like a halo about
my head. I remembered Camilla's agonized scream and the awful words
echoing through the dim streets of Carcosa. They were the last lines in
the first act, and I dared not think of what followed--dared not, even
in the spring sunshine, there in my own room, surrounded with familiar
objects, reassured by the bustle from the street and the voices of the
servants in the hallway outside. For those poisoned words had dropped
slowly into my heart, as death-sweat drops upon a bed-sheet and is
absorbed. Trembling, I put the diadem from my head and wiped my forehead,
but I thought of Hastur and of my own rightful ambition, and I remembered
Mr. Wilde as I had last left him, his face all torn and bloody from the
claws of that devil's creature, and what he said--ah, what he said. The
alarm bell in the safe began to whirr harshly, and I knew my time was up;
but I would not heed it, and replacing the flashing circlet upon my head
I turned defiantly to the mirror. I stood for a long time absorbed in the
changing expression of my own eyes. The mirror reflected a face which was
like my own, but whiter, and so thin that I hardly recognized it And all
the time I kept repeating between my clenched teeth, ""The day has come!
the day has come!"" while the alarm in the safe whirred and clamoured, and
the diamonds sparkled and flamed above my brow. I heard a door open but
did not heed it. It was only when I saw two faces in the mirror:--it was
only when another face rose over my shoulder, and two other eyes met
mine. I wheeled like a flash and seized a long knife from my
dressing-table, and my cousin sprang back very pale, crying: ""Hildred!
for God's sake!"" then as my hand fell, he said: ""It is I, Louis, don't
you know me?"" I stood silent. I could not have spoken for my life. He
walked up to me and took the knife from my hand.

""What is all this?"" he inquired, in a gentle voice. ""Are you ill?""

""No,"" I replied. But I doubt if he heard me.

""Come, come, old fellow,"" he cried, ""take off that brass crown and toddle
into the study. Are you going to a masquerade? What's all this theatrical
tinsel anyway?""

I was glad he thought the crown was made of brass and paste, yet I didn't
like him any the better for thinking so. I let him take it from my hand,
knowing it was best to humour him. He tossed the splendid diadem in the
air, and catching it, turned to me smiling.

""It's dear at fifty cents,"" he said. ""What's it for?""

I did not answer, but took the circlet from his hands, and placing it in
the safe shut the massive steel door. The alarm ceased its infernal din
at once. He watched me curiously, but did not seem to notice the sudden
ceasing of the alarm. He did, however, speak of the safe as a biscuit
box. Fearing lest he might examine the combination I led the way into my
study. Louis threw himself on the sofa and flicked at flies with his
eternal riding-whip. He wore his fatigue uniform with the braided jacket
and jaunty cap, and I noticed that his riding-boots were all splashed
with red mud.

""Where have you been?"" I inquired.

""Jumping mud creeks in Jersey,"" he said. ""I haven't had time to change
yet; I was rather in a hurry to see you. Haven't you got a glass of
something? I'm dead tired; been in the saddle twenty-four hours.""

I gave him some brandy from my medicinal store, which he drank with a
grimace.

""Damned bad stuff,"" he observed. ""I'll give you an address where they
sell brandy that is brandy.""

""It's good enough for my needs,"" I said indifferently. ""I use it to rub
my chest with."" He stared and flicked at another fly.

""See here, old fellow,"" he began, ""I've got something to suggest to you.
It's four years now that you've shut yourself up here like an owl, never
going anywhere, never taking any healthy exercise, never doing a damn
thing but poring over those books up there on the mantelpiece.""

He glanced along the row of shelves. ""Napoleon, Napoleon, Napoleon!"" he
read. ""For heaven's sake, have you nothing but Napoleons there?""

""I wish they were bound in gold,"" I said. ""But wait, yes, there is
another book, _The King in Yellow_."" I looked him steadily in the
eye.

""Have you never read it?"" I asked.

""I? No, thank God! I don't want to be driven crazy.""

I saw he regretted his speech as soon as he had uttered it. There is only
one word which I loathe more than I do lunatic and that word is crazy.
But I controlled myself and asked him why he thought _The King in
Yellow_ dangerous.

""Oh, I don't know,"" he said, hastily. ""I only remember the excitement it
created and the denunciations from pulpit and Press. I believe the author
shot himself after bringing forth this monstrosity, didn't he?""

""I understand he is still alive,"" I answered.

""That's probably true,"" he muttered; ""bullets couldn't kill a fiend like
that.""

""It is a book of great truths,"" I said.

""Yes,"" he replied, ""of 'truths' which send men frantic and blast their
lives. I don't care if the thing is, as they say, the very supreme
essence of art. It's a crime to have written it, and I for one shall
never open its pages.""

""Is that what you have come to tell me?"" I asked.

""No,"" he said, ""I came to tell you that I am going to be married.""

I believe for a moment my heart ceased to beat, but I kept my eyes on his
face.

""Yes,"" he continued, smiling happily, ""married to the sweetest girl on
earth.""

""Constance Hawberk,"" I said mechanically.

""How did you know?"" he cried, astonished. ""I didn't know it myself until
that evening last April, when we strolled down to the embankment before
dinner.""

""When is it to be?"" I asked.

""It was to have been next September, but an hour ago a despatch came
ordering our regiment to the Presidio, San Francisco. We leave at noon
to-morrow. To-morrow,"" he repeated. ""Just think, Hildred, to-morrow I
shall be the happiest fellow that ever drew breath in this jolly world,
for Constance will go with me.""

I offered him my hand in congratulation, and he seized and shook it like
the good-natured fool he was--or pretended to be.

""I am going to get my squadron as a wedding present,"" he rattled on.
""Captain and Mrs. Louis Castaigne, eh, Hildred?""

Then he told me where it was to be and who were to be there, and made me
promise to come and be best man. I set my teeth and listened to his
boyish chatter without showing what I felt, but--

I was getting to the limit of my endurance, and when he jumped up, and,
switching his spurs till they jingled, said he must go, I did not detain
him.

""There's one thing I want to ask of you,"" I said quietly.

""Out with it, it's promised,"" he laughed.

""I want you to meet me for a quarter of an hour's talk to-night.""

""Of course, if you wish,"" he said, somewhat puzzled. ""Where?""

""Anywhere, in the park there.""

""What time, Hildred?""

""Midnight.""

""What in the name of--"" he began, but checked himself and laughingly
assented. I watched him go down the stairs and hurry away, his sabre
banging at every stride. He turned into Bleecker Street, and I knew he
was going to see Constance. I gave him ten minutes to disappear and then
followed in his footsteps, taking with me the jewelled crown and the
silken robe embroidered with the Yellow Sign. When I turned into Bleecker
Street, and entered the doorway which bore the sign--

MR. WILDE,
REPAIRER OF REPUTATIONS.
Third Bell.

I saw old Hawberk moving about in his shop, and imagined I heard
Constance's voice in the parlour; but I avoided them both and hurried up
the trembling stairways to Mr. Wilde's apartment. I knocked and entered
without ceremony. Mr. Wilde lay groaning on the floor, his face covered
with blood, his clothes torn to shreds. Drops of blood were scattered
about over the carpet, which had also been ripped and frayed in the
evidently recent struggle.

""It's that cursed cat,"" he said, ceasing his groans, and turning his
colourless eyes to me; ""she attacked me while I was asleep. I believe she
will kill me yet.""

This was too much, so I went into the kitchen, and, seizing a hatchet
from the pantry, started to find the infernal beast and settle her then
and there. My search was fruitless, and after a while I gave it up and
came back to find Mr. Wilde squatting on his high chair by the table. He
had washed his face and changed his clothes. The great furrows which the
cat's claws had ploughed up in his face he had filled with collodion, and
a rag hid the wound in his throat. I told him I should kill the cat when
I came across her, but he only shook his head and turned to the open
ledger before him. He read name after name of the people who had come to
him in regard to their reputation, and the sums he had amassed were
startling.

""I put on the screws now and then,"" he explained.

""One day or other some of these people will assassinate you,"" I insisted.

""Do you think so?"" he said, rubbing his mutilated ears.

It was useless to argue with him, so I took down the manuscript entitled
Imperial Dynasty of America, for the last time I should ever take it down
in Mr. Wilde's study. I read it through, thrilling and trembling with
pleasure. When I had finished Mr. Wilde took the manuscript and, turning
to the dark passage which leads from his study to his bed-chamber,
called out in a loud voice, ""Vance."" Then for the first time, I noticed a
man crouching there in the shadow. How I had overlooked him during my
search for the cat, I cannot imagine.

""Vance, come in,"" cried Mr. Wilde.

The figure rose and crept towards us, and I shall never forget the face
that he raised to mine, as the light from the window illuminated it.

""Vance, this is Mr. Castaigne,"" said Mr. Wilde. Before he had finished
speaking, the man threw himself on the ground before the table, crying
and grasping, ""Oh, God! Oh, my God! Help me! Forgive me! Oh, Mr.
Castaigne, keep that man away. You cannot, you cannot mean it! You are
different--save me! I am broken down--I was in a madhouse and now--when
all was coming right--when I had forgotten the King--the King in Yellow
and--but I shall go mad again--I shall go mad--""

His voice died into a choking rattle, for Mr. Wilde had leapt on him and
his right hand encircled the man's throat. When Vance fell in a heap on
the floor, Mr. Wilde clambered nimbly into his chair again, and rubbing
his mangled ears with the stump of his hand, turned to me and asked me
for the ledger. I reached it down from the shelf and he opened it. After
a moment's searching among the beautifully written pages, he coughed
complacently, and pointed to the name Vance.

""Vance,"" he read aloud, ""Osgood Oswald Vance."" At the sound of his name,
the man on the floor raised his head and turned a convulsed face to Mr.
Wilde. His eyes were injected with blood, his lips tumefied. ""Called
April 28th,"" continued Mr. Wilde. ""Occupation, cashier in the Seaforth
National Bank; has served a term of forgery at Sing Sing, from whence he
was transferred to the Asylum for the Criminal Insane. Pardoned by the
Governor of New York, and discharged from the Asylum, January 19, 1918.
Reputation damaged at Sheepshead Bay. Rumours that he lives beyond his
income. Reputation to be repaired at once. Retainer $1,500.

""Note.--Has embezzled sums amounting to $30,000 since March 20, 1919,
excellent family, and secured present position through uncle's influence.
Father, President of Seaforth Bank.""

I looked at the man on the floor.

""Get up, Vance,"" said Mr. Wilde in a gentle voice. Vance rose as if
hypnotized. ""He will do as we suggest now,"" observed Mr. Wilde, and
opening the manuscript, he read the entire history of the Imperial
Dynasty of America. Then in a kind and soothing murmur he ran over the
important points with Vance, who stood like one stunned. His eyes were so
blank and vacant that I imagined he had become half-witted, and remarked
it to Mr. Wilde who replied that it was of no consequence anyway. Very
patiently we pointed out to Vance what his share in the affair would be,
and he seemed to understand after a while. Mr. Wilde explained the
manuscript, using several volumes on Heraldry, to substantiate the result
of his researches. He mentioned the establishment of the Dynasty in
Carcosa, the lakes which connected Hastur, Aldebaran and the mystery of
the Hyades. He spoke of Cassilda and Camilla, and sounded the cloudy
depths of Demhe, and the Lake of Hali. ""The scolloped tatters of the King
in Yellow must hide Yhtill forever,"" he muttered, but I do not believe
Vance heard him. Then by degrees he led Vance along the ramifications of
the Imperial family, to Uoht and Thale, from Naotalba and Phantom of
Truth, to Aldones, and then tossing aside his manuscript and notes, he
began the wonderful story of the Last King. Fascinated and thrilled I
watched him. He threw up his head, his long arms were stretched out in a
magnificent gesture of pride and power, and his eyes blazed deep in their
sockets like two emeralds. Vance listened stupefied. As for me, when at
last Mr. Wilde had finished, and pointing to me, cried, ""The cousin of
the King!"" my head swam with excitement.

Controlling myself with a superhuman effort, I explained to Vance why I
alone was worthy of the crown and why my cousin must be exiled or die.
I made him understand that my cousin must never marry, even after
renouncing all his claims, and how that least of all he should marry the
daughter of the Marquis of Avonshire and bring England into the question.
I showed him a list of thousands of names which Mr. Wilde had drawn up;
every man whose name was there had received the Yellow Sign which no
living human being dared disregard. The city, the state, the whole land,
were ready to rise and tremble before the Pallid Mask.

The time had come, the people should know the son of Hastur, and the
whole world bow to the black stars which hang in the sky over Carcosa.

Vance leaned on the table, his head buried in his hands. Mr. Wilde drew
a rough sketch on the margin of yesterday's _Herald_ with a bit of
lead pencil. It was a plan of Hawberk's rooms. Then he wrote out the
order and affixed the seal, and shaking like a palsied man I signed my
first writ of execution with my name Hildred-Rex.

Mr. Wilde clambered to the floor and unlocking the cabinet, took a long
square box from the first shelf. This he brought to the table and opened.
A new knife lay in the tissue paper inside and I picked it up and handed
it to Vance, along with the order and the plan of Hawberk's apartment.
Then Mr. Wilde told Vance he could go; and he went, shambling like an
outcast of the slums.

I sat for a while watching the daylight fade behind the square tower of
the Judson Memorial Church, and finally, gathering up the manuscript and
notes, took my hat and started for the door.

Mr. Wilde watched me in silence. When I had stepped into the hall I
looked back. Mr. Wilde's small eyes were still fixed on me. Behind him,
the shadows gathered in the fading light. Then I closed the door behind
me and went out into the darkening streets.

I had eaten nothing since breakfast, but I was not hungry. A wretched,
half-starved creature, who stood looking across the street at the Lethal
Chamber, noticed me and came up to tell me a tale of misery. I gave him
money, I don't know why, and he went away without thanking me. An
hour later another outcast approached and whined his story. I had a blank
bit of paper in my pocket, on which was traced the Yellow Sign, and I
handed it to him. He looked at it stupidly for a moment, and then with an
uncertain glance at me, folded it with what seemed to me exaggerated care
and placed it in his bosom.

The electric lights were sparkling among the trees, and the new moon
shone in the sky above the Lethal Chamber. It was tiresome waiting in the
square; I wandered from the Marble Arch to the artillery stables and back
again to the lotos fountain. The flowers and grass exhaled a fragrance
which troubled me. The jet of the fountain played in the moonlight, and
the musical splash of falling drops reminded me of the tinkle of chained
mail in Hawberk's shop. But it was not so fascinating, and the dull
sparkle of the moonlight on the water brought no such sensations of
exquisite pleasure, as when the sunshine played over the polished steel
of a corselet on Hawberk's knee. I watched the bats darting and turning
above the water plants in the fountain basin, but their rapid, jerky
flight set my nerves on edge, and I went away again to walk aimlessly to
and fro among the trees.

The artillery stables were dark, but in the cavalry barracks the
officers' windows were brilliantly lighted, and the sallyport was
constantly filled with troopers in fatigue, carrying straw and harness
and baskets filled with tin dishes.

Twice the mounted sentry at the gates was changed while I wandered up and
down the asphalt walk. I looked at my watch. It was nearly time. The
lights in the barracks went out one by one, the barred gate was closed,
and every minute or two an officer passed in through the side wicket,
leaving a rattle of accoutrements and a jingle of spurs on the night air.
The square had become very silent. The last homeless loiterer had been
driven away by the grey-coated park policeman, the car tracks along
Wooster Street were deserted, and the only sound which broke the
stillness was the stamping of the sentry's horse and the ring of his
sabre against the saddle pommel. In the barracks, the officers' quarters
were still lighted, and military servants passed and repassed before the
bay windows. Twelve o'clock sounded from the new spire of St. Francis
Xavier, and at the last stroke of the sad-toned bell a figure passed
through the wicket beside the portcullis, returned the salute of the
sentry, and crossing the street entered the square and advanced toward
the Benedick apartment house.

""Louis,"" I called.

The man pivoted on his spurred heels and came straight toward me.

""Is that you, Hildred?""

""Yes, you are on time.""

I took his offered hand, and we strolled toward the Lethal Chamber.

He rattled on about his wedding and the graces of Constance, and their
future prospects, calling my attention to his captain's shoulder-straps,
and the triple gold arabesque on his sleeve and fatigue cap. I believe I
listened as much to the music of his spurs and sabre as I did to his
boyish babble, and at last we stood under the elms on the Fourth Street
corner of the square opposite the Lethal Chamber. Then he laughed and
asked me what I wanted with him. I motioned him to a seat on a bench
under the electric light, and sat down beside him. He looked at me
curiously, with that same searching glance which I hate and fear so in
doctors. I felt the insult of his look, but he did not know it, and I
carefully concealed my feelings.

""Well, old chap,"" he inquired, ""what can I do for you?""

I drew from my pocket the manuscript and notes of the Imperial Dynasty
of America, and looking him in the eye said:

""I will tell you. On your word as a soldier, promise me to read this
manuscript from beginning to end, without asking me a question. Promise
me to read these notes in the same way, and promise me to listen to what
I have to tell later.""

""I promise, if you wish it,"" he said pleasantly. ""Give me the paper,
Hildred.""

He began to read, raising his eyebrows with a puzzled, whimsical air,
which made me tremble with suppressed anger. As he advanced his, eyebrows
contracted, and his lips seemed to form the word ""rubbish.""

Then he looked slightly bored, but apparently for my sake read, with an
attempt at interest, which presently ceased to be an effort He started
when in the closely written pages he came to his own name, and when he
came to mine he lowered the paper, and looked sharply at me for a moment
But he kept his word, and resumed his reading, and I let the half-formed
question die on his lips unanswered. When he came to the end and read the
signature of Mr. Wilde, he folded the paper carefully and returned it to
me. I handed him the notes, and he settled back, pushing his fatigue cap
up to his forehead, with a boyish gesture, which I remembered so well in
school. I watched his face as he read, and when he finished I took the
notes with the manuscript, and placed them in my pocket. Then I unfolded
a scroll marked with the Yellow Sign. He saw the sign, but he did not
seem to recognize it, and I called his attention to it somewhat sharply.

""Well,"" he said, ""I see it. What is it?""

""It is the Yellow Sign,"" I said angrily.

""Oh, that's it, is it?"" said Louis, in that flattering voice, which
Doctor Archer used to employ with me, and would probably have employed
again, had I not settled his affair for him.

I kept my rage down and answered as steadily as possible, ""Listen, you
have engaged your word?""

""I am listening, old chap,"" he replied soothingly.

I began to speak very calmly.

""Dr. Archer, having by some means become possessed of the secret of the
Imperial Succession, attempted to deprive me of my right, alleging that
because of a fall from my horse four years ago, I had become mentally
deficient. He presumed to place me under restraint in his own house in
hopes of either driving me insane or poisoning me. I have not forgotten
it. I visited him last night and the interview was final.""

Louis turned quite pale, but did not move. I resumed triumphantly, ""There
are yet three people to be interviewed in the interests of Mr. Wilde and
myself. They are my cousin Louis, Mr. Hawberk, and his daughter
Constance.""

Louis sprang to his feet and I arose also, and flung the paper marked
with the Yellow Sign to the ground.

""Oh, I don't need that to tell you what I have to say,"" I cried, with a
laugh of triumph. ""You must renounce the crown to me, do you hear, to
_me_.""

Louis looked at me with a startled air, but recovering himself said
kindly, ""Of course I renounce the--what is it I must renounce?""

""The crown,"" I said angrily.

""Of course,"" he answered, ""I renounce it. Come, old chap, I'll walk back
to your rooms with you.""

""Don't try any of your doctor's tricks on me,"" I cried, trembling with
fury. ""Don't act as if you think I am insane.""

""What nonsense,"" he replied. ""Come, it's getting late, Hildred.""

""No,"" I shouted, ""you must listen. You cannot marry, I forbid it. Do you
hear? I forbid it. You shall renounce the crown, and in reward I grant
you exile, but if you refuse you shall die.""

He tried to calm me, but I was roused at last, and drawing my long knife
barred his way.

Then I told him how they would find Dr. Archer in the cellar with his
throat open, and I laughed in his face when I thought of Vance and his
knife, and the order signed by me.

""Ah, you are the King,"" I cried, ""but I shall be King. Who are you to
keep me from Empire over all the habitable earth! I was born the cousin
of a king, but I shall be King!""

Louis stood white and rigid before me. Suddenly a man came running up
Fourth Street, entered the gate of the Lethal Temple, traversed the path
to the bronze doors at full speed, and plunged into the death chamber
with the cry of one demented, and I laughed until I wept tears, for I had
recognized Vance, and knew that Hawberk and his daughter were no longer
in my way.

""Go,"" I cried to Louis, ""you have ceased to be a menace. You will never
marry Constance now, and if you marry any one else in your exile, I will
visit you as I did my doctor last night. Mr. Wilde takes charge of you
to-morrow."" Then I turned and darted into South Fifth Avenue, and with a
cry of terror Louis dropped his belt and sabre and followed me like the
wind. I heard him close behind me at the corner of Bleecker Street, and I
dashed into the doorway under Hawberk's sign. He cried, ""Halt, or I
fire!"" but when he saw that I flew up the stairs leaving Hawberk's shop
below, he left me, and I heard him hammering and shouting at their door
as though it were possible to arouse the dead.

Mr. Wilde's door was open, and I entered crying, ""It is done, it is done!
Let the nations rise and look upon their King!"" but I could not find Mr.
Wilde, so I went to the cabinet and took the splendid diadem from its
case. Then I drew on the white silk robe, embroidered with the Yellow
Sign, and placed the crown upon my head. At last I was King, King by my
right in Hastur, King because I knew the mystery of the Hyades, and my
mind had sounded the depths of the Lake of Hali. I was King! The first
grey pencillings of dawn would raise a tempest which would shake two
hemispheres. Then as I stood, my every nerve pitched to the highest
tension, faint with the joy and splendour of my thought, without, in the
dark passage, a man groaned.

I seized the tallow dip and sprang to the door. The cat passed me like a
demon, and the tallow dip went out, but my long knife flew swifter than
she, and I heard her screech, and I knew that my knife had found her. For
a moment I listened to her tumbling and thumping about in the darkness,
and then when her frenzy ceased, I lighted a lamp and raised it over my
head. Mr. Wilde lay on the floor with his throat torn open. At first I
thought he was dead, but as I looked, a green sparkle came into his
sunken eyes, his mutilated hand trembled, and then a spasm stretched his
mouth from ear to ear. For a moment my terror and despair gave place to
hope, but as I bent over him his eyeballs rolled clean around in his
head, and he died. Then while I stood, transfixed with rage and despair,
seeing my crown, my empire, every hope and every ambition, my very life,
lying prostrate there with the dead master, _they_ came, seized me
from behind, and bound me until my veins stood out like cords, and my
voice failed with the paroxysms of my frenzied screams. But I still
raged, bleeding and infuriated among them, and more than one policeman
felt my sharp teeth. Then when I could no longer move they came nearer; I
saw old Hawberk, and behind him my cousin Louis' ghastly face, and
farther away, in the corner, a woman, Constance, weeping softly.

""Ah! I see it now!"" I shrieked. ""You have seized the throne and the
empire. Woe! woe to you who are crowned with the crown of the King in
Yellow!""


[EDITOR'S NOTE.--Mr. Castaigne died yesterday in the Asylum for Criminal
Insane.]


","When the young man named Sanang left the bed-chamber of Tressa Norne he turned to the right in the carpeted corridor outside and hurried toward the hotel elevator. But he did not ring for the lift; instead he took the spiral iron stairway which circled it, and mounted hastily to the floor above.

Here was his own apartment and he entered it with a key bearing the hotel tag. A dusky-skinned powerful old man wearing a grizzled beard and a greasy broadcloth coat of old-fashioned cut known to provincials as a ""Prince Albert"" looked up from where he was seated cross-legged upon the sofa, sharpening a curved knife on a whetstone.

""Gutchlug,"" stammered Sanang, ""I am afraid of her! What happened two years ago at the temple happened again a moment since, there in her very bedroom! She made a yellow death-adder out of nothing and placed it upon the threshold, and mocked me with laughter. May Thirty Thousand Calamities overtake her! May Erlik seize her! May her eyes rot out and her limbs fester! May the seven score and three principal devils——""

""You chatter like a temple ape,"" said Gutchlug tranquilly. ""Does Keuke Mongol die or live? That alone interests me.""

""Gutchlug,"" faltered the young man, ""thou knowest that m-my heart is inclined to mercy toward this young Yezidee——""

""I know that it is inclined to lust,"" said the other bluntly.

Sanang's pale face flamed.

""Listen,"" he said. ""If I had not loved her better than life had I dared go that day to the temple to take her for my own?""

""You loved life better,"" said Gutchlug. ""You fled when it rained snakes on the temple steps—you and your Tchortcha horsemen! Kai! I also ran. But I gave every soldier thirty blows with a stick before I slept that night. And you should have had your thirty, also, conforming to the Yarlig, my Tougtchi.""

Sanang, still holding his hat and cane and carrying his overcoat over his left arm, looked down at the heavy, brutal features of Gutchlug Khan—at the cruel mouth with its crooked smile under the grizzled beard; at the huge hands—the powerful hands of a murderer—now deftly honing to a razor-edge the Kalmuck knife held so firmly yet lightly in his great blunt fingers.

""Listen attentively, Prince Sanang,"" growled Gutchlug, pausing in his monotonous task to test the blade's edge on his thumb—""Does the Yezidee Keuke Mongol live? Yes or no?""

Sanang hesitated, moistened his pallid lips. ""She dares not betray us.""

""By what pledge?""

""Fear.""

""That is no pledge. You also were afraid, yet you went to the temple!""

""She has listened to the Yarlig. She has looked upon her shroud. She has admitted that she desires to live. Therein lies her pledge to us.""

""And she placed a yellow snake at your feet!"" sneered Gutchlug. ""Prince Sanang, tell me, what man or what devil in all the chronicles of the past has ever tamed a Snow-Leopard?"" And he continued to hone his yataghan.

""Gutchlug——""

""No, she dies,"" said the other tranquilly.

""Not yet!""

""When, then?""

""Gutchlug, thou knowest me. Hear my pledge! At her first gesture toward treachery—her first thought of betrayal—I myself will end it all.""

""You promise to slay this young snow-leopardess?""

""By the four companions, I swear to kill her with my own hands!""

Gutchlug sneered. ""Kill her—yes—with the kiss that has burned thy lips to ashes for all these months. I know thee, Sanang. Leave her to me. Dead she will no longer trouble thee.""

""Gutchlug!""

""I hear, Prince Sanang.""

""Strike when I nod. Not until then.""

""I hear, Tougtchi. I understand thee, my Banneret. I whet my knife. Kai!""

Sanang looked at him, put on his top-hat and overcoat, pulled on a pair of white evening gloves.

""I go forth,"" he said more pleasantly.

""I remain here to talk to my seven ancestors and sharpen my knife,"" remarked Gutchlug.

""When the white world and the yellow world and the brown world and the black world finally fall before the Hassanis,"" said Sanang with a quick smile, ""I shall bring thee to her. Gutchlug—once—before she is veiled, thou shalt behold what is lovelier than Eve.""

The other stolidly whetted his knife.

Sanang pulled out a gold cigarette case, lighted a cigarette with an air.

""I go among Germans,"" he volunteered amiably. ""The huns swam across two oceans, but, like the unclean swine, it is their own throats they cut when they swim! Well, there is only one God. And not very many angels. Erlik is greater. And there are many million devils to do his bidding. Adieu. There is rice and there is koumiss in the frozen closet. When I return you shall have been asleep for hours.""

When Sanang left the hotel one of two young men seated in the hotel lobby got up and strolled out after him.

A few minutes later the other man went to the elevator, ascended to the fourth floor, and entered an apartment next to the one occupied by Sanang.

There was another man there, lying on the lounge and smoking a cigar. Without a word, they both went leisurely about the matter of disrobing for the night.

When the shorter man who had been in the apartment when the other entered, and who was dark and curly-headed, had attired himself in pyjamas, he sat down on one of the twin beds to enjoy his cigar to the bitter end.

""Has Sanang gone out?"" he inquired in a low voice.

""Yes. Benton went after him.""

The other man nodded. ""Cleves,"" he said, ""I guess it looks as though this Norne girl is in it, too.""

""What happened?""

""As soon as she arrived, Sanang made straight for her apartment. He remained inside for half an hour. Then he came out in a hurry and went to his own rooms, where that surly servant of his squats all day, shining up his arsenal, and drinking koumiss.""

""Did you get their conversation?""

""I've got a record of the gibberish. It requires an interpreter, of course.""

""I suppose so. I'll take the records east with me to-morrow, and by the same token I'd better notify New York that I'm leaving.""

He went, half-undressed, to the telephone, got the telegraph office, and sent the following message:

""Recklow, New York:

""Leaving to-morrow for N. Y. with samples. Retain expert in Oriental fabrics.

""Victor Cleves.""

""Report for me, too,"" said the dark young man, who was still enjoying his cigar on his pillows.

So Cleves sent another telegram, directed also to

""Recklow, New York:

""Benton and I are watching the market. Chinese importations fluctuate. Recent consignment per Nan-yang Maru will be carefully inspected and details forwarded.

""Alek Selden.""

In the next room Gutchlug could hear the voice of Cleves at the telephone, but he merely shrugged his heavy shoulders in contempt. For he had other things to do beside eavesdropping.

Also, for the last hour—in fact, ever since Sanang's departure—something had been happening to him—something that happens to a Hassani only once in a lifetime. And now this unique thing had happened to him—to him, Gutchlug Khan—to him before whose Khiounnou ancestors eighty-one thousand nations had bowed the knee.

It had come to him at last, this dread thing, unheralded, totally unexpected, a few minutes after Sanang had departed.

And he suddenly knew he was going to die.

And, when, presently, he comprehended it, he bent his grizzled head and listened seriously. And, after a little silence, he heard his soul bidding him farewell.

So the chatter of white men at a telephone in the next apartment had no longer any significance for him. Whether or not they had been spying on him; whether they were plotting, made no difference to him now.

He tested his knife's edge with his thumb and listened gravely to his soul bidding him farewell.

But, for a Yezidee, there was still a little detail to attend to before his soul departed;—two matters to regulate. One was to select his shroud. The other was to cut the white throat of this young snow-leopardess called Keuke Mongol, the Yezidee temple girl.

And he could steal down to her bedroom and finish that matter in five minutes.

But first he must choose his shroud, as is the custom of the Yezidee.

That office, however, was quickly accomplished in a country where fine white sheets of linen are to be found on every hotel bed.

So, on his way to the door, his naked knife in his right hand, he paused to fumble under the bed-covers and draw out a white linen sheet.

Something hurt his hand like a needle. He moved it, felt the thing squirm under his fingers and pierce his palm again and again. With a shriek, he tore the bedclothes from the bed.

A little yellow snake lay coiled there.

He got as far as the telephone, but could not use it. And there he fell heavily, shaking the room and dragging the instrument down with him.

There was some excitement. Cleves and Selden in their bathrobes went in to look at the body. The hotel physician diagnosed it as heart-trouble. Or, possibly, poison. Some gazed significantly at the naked knife still clutched in the dead man's hands.

Around the wrist of the other hand was twisted a pliable gold bracelet representing a little snake. It had real emeralds for eyes.

It had not been there when Gutchlug died.

But nobody except Sanang could know that. And later when Sanang came back and found Gutchlug very dead on the bed and a policeman sitting outside, he offered no information concerning the new bracelet shaped like a snake with real emeralds for eyes, which adorned the dead man's left wrist.

Toward evening, however, after an autopsy had confirmed the house physician's diagnosis that heart-disease had finished Gutchlug, Sanang mustered enough courage to go to the desk in the lobby and send up his card to Miss Norne.

It appeared, however, that Miss Norne had left for Chicago about noon.

",True
"Shortly before ten the next morning I stood with one small valise in front of Hammond's Drug Store in old Market Square waiting for the Innsmouth bus. As the hour for its arrival drew near I noticed a general drift of the loungers to other places up the street, or to the Ideal Lunch across the square. Evidently the ticket-agent had not exaggerated the dislike which local People bore toward Innsmouth and its denizens. In a few moments a small motor-coach of extreme decrepitude and dirty grey colour rattled down State Street, made a turn, and drew up at the curb beside me. I felt immediately that it was the right one; a guess which the half-illegible sign on the windshield--Arkham-Innsmouth-Newburyport--soon verified.
There were only three passengers--dark, unkempt men of sullen visage and somewhat youthful cast--and when the vehicle stopped they clumsily shambled out and began walking up State Street in a silent, almost furtive fashion. The driver also alighted, and I watched him as he went into the drug store to make some purchase. This, I reflected, must be the Joe Sargent mentioned by the ticket-agent; and even before I noticed any details there spread over me a wave of spontaneous aversion which could be neither checked nor explained. It suddenly struck me as very natural that the local people should not wish to ride on a bus owned and driven by this man, or to visit any oftener than possible the habitat of such a man and his kinsfolk.
When the driver came out of the store I looked at him more carefully and tried to determine the source of my evil impression. He was a thin, stoop-shouldered man not much under six feet tall, dressed in shabby blue civilian clothes and wearing a frayed golf cap. His age was perhaps thirty-five, but the odd, deep creases in the sides of his neck made him seem older when one did not study his dull, expressionless face. He had a narrow head, bulging, watery-blue eyes that seemed never to wink, a flat nose, a receding forehead and chin, and singularly undeveloped ears. His long thick lip and coarse-pored, greyish cheeks seemed almost beardless except for some sparse yellow hairs that straggled and curled in irregular patches; and in places the surface seemed queerly irregular, as if peeling from some cutaneous disease. His hands were large and heavily veined, and had a very unusual greyish-blue tinge. The fingers were strikingly short in proportion to the rest of the structure, and seemed to have a tendency to curl closely into the huge palm. As he walked toward the bus I observed his peculiarly shambling gait and saw that his feet were inordinately immense. The more I studied them the more I wondered how he could buy any shoes to fit them.
A certain greasiness about the fellow increased my dislike. He was evidently given to working or lounging around the fish docks, and carried with him much of their characteristic smell. Just what foreign blood was in him I could not even guess. His oddities certainly did not look Asiatic, Polynesian, Levantine or negroid, yet I could see why the people found him alien. I myself would have thought of biological degeneration rather than alienage.
I was sorry when I saw there would be no other passengers on the bus. Somehow I did not like the idea of riding alone with this driver. But as leaving time obviously approached I conquered my qualms and followed the man aboard, extending him a dollar bill and murmuring the single word ""Innsmouth."" He looked curiously at me for a second as he returned forty cents change without speaking. I took a seat far behind him, but on the same side of the bus, since I wished to watch the shore during the journey.
At length the decrepit vehicle stared with a jerk, and rattled noisily past the old brick buildings of State Street amidst a cloud of vapour from the exhaust. Glancing at the people on the sidewalks, I thought I detected in them a curious wish to avoid looking at the bus--or at least a wish to avoid seeming to look at it. Then we turned to the left into High Street, where the going was smoother; flying by stately old mansions of the early republic and still older colonial farmhouses, passing the Lower Green and Parker River, and finally emerging into a long, monotonous stretch of open shore country.
The day was warm and sunny, but the landscape of sand and sedge-grass, and stunted shrubbery became more and desolate as we proceeded. Out the window I could see the blue water and the sandy line of Plum Island, and we presently drew very near the beach as our narrow road veered off from the main highway to Rowley and Ipswich. There were no visible houses, and I could tell by the state of the road that traffic was very light hereabouts. The weather-worn telephone poles carried only two wires. Now and then we crossed crude wooden bridges over tidal creeks that wound far inland and promoted the general isolation of the region.
Once in a while I noticed dead stumps and crumbling foundation-walls above the drifting sand, and recalled the old tradition quoted in one of the histories I had read, that this was once a fertile and thickly-settled countryside. The change, it was said, came simultaneously with the Innsmouth epidemic of l846, and was thought by simple folk to have a dark connection with hidden forces of evil. Actually, it was caused by the unwise cutting of woodlands near the shore, which robbed the soil of the best protection and opened the way for waves of wind-blown sand.
At last we lost sight of Plum Island and saw the vast expanse of the open Atlantic on our left. Our narrow course began to climb steeply, and I felt a singular sense of disquiet in looking at the lonely crest ahead where the rutted road-way met the sky. It was as if the bus were about to keep on in its ascent, leaving the sane earth altogether and merging with the unknown arcana of upper air and cryptical sky. The smell of the sea took on ominous implications, and the silent driver's bent, rigid back and narrow head became more and more hateful. As I looked at him I saw that the back of his head was almost as hairless as his face, having only a few straggling yellow strands upon a grey scabrous surface.
Then we reached the crest and beheld the outspread valley beyond, where the Manuxet joins the sea just north of the long line of cliffs that culminate in Kingsport Head and veer off toward Cape Ann. On the far misty horizon I could just make out the dizzy profile of the Head, topped by the queer ancient house of which so many legends are told; but for the moment all my attention was captured by the nearer panorama just below me. I had, I realized, come face to face with rumour-shadowed Innsmouth.
It was a town of wide extent and dense construction, yet one with a portentous dearth of visible life. From the tangle of chimney-pots scarcely a wisp of smoke came, and the three tall steeples loomed stark and unpainted against the seaward horizon. One of them was crumbling down at the top, and in that and another there were only black gaping holes where clock-dials should have been. The vast huddle of sagging gambrel roofs and peaked gables conveyed with offensive clearness the idea of wormy decay, and as we approached along the now descending road I could see that many roofs had wholly caved in. There were some large square Georgian houses, too, with hipped roofs, cupolas, and railed ""widow's walks."" These were mostly well back from the water, and one or two seemed to be in moderately sound condition. Stretching inland from among them I saw the rusted, grass-grown line of the abandoned railway, with leaning telegraph-poles now devoid of wires, and the half-obscured lines of the old carriage roads to Rowley and Ipswich.
The decay was worst close to the waterfront, though in its very midst I could spy the white belfry of a fairly well preserved brick structure which looked like a small factory. The harbour, long clogged with sand, was enclosed by an ancient stone breakwater; on which I could begin to discern the minute forms of a few seated fishermen, and at whose end were what looked like the foundations of a bygone lighthouse. A sandy tongue had formed inside this barrier and upon it I saw a few decrepit cabins, moored dories, and scattered lobster-pots. The only deep water seemed to be where the river poured out past the belfried structure and turned southward to join the ocean at the breakwater's end.
Here and there the ruins of wharves jutted out from the shore to end in indeterminate rottenness, those farthest south seeming the most decayed. And far out at sea, despite a high tide, I glimpsed a long, black line scarcely rising above the water yet carrying a suggestion of odd latent malignancy. This, I knew, must be Devil Reef. As I looked, a subtle, curious sense of beckoning seemed superadded to the grim repulsion; and oddly enough, I found this overtone more disturbing than the primary impression.
We met no one on the road, but presently began to pass deserted farms in varying stages of ruin. Then I noticed a few inhabited houses with rags stuffed in the broken windows and shells and dead fish lying about the littered yards. Once or twice I saw listless-looking people working in barren gardens or digging clams on the fishy-smelling beach below, and groups of dirty, simian-visaged children playing around weed-grown doorsteps. Somehow these people seemed more disquieting than the dismal buildings, for almost every one had certain peculiarities of face and motions which I instinctively disliked without being able to define or comprehend them. For a second I thought this typical physique suggested some picture I had seen, perhaps in a book, under circumstances of particular horror or melancholy; but this pseudo-recollection passed very quickly.
As the bus reached a lower level I began to catch the steady note of a waterfall through the unnatural stillness, The leaning, unpainted houses grew thicker, lined both sides of the road, and displayed more urban tendencies than did those we were leaving behind, The panorama ahead had contracted to a street scene, and in spots I could see where a cobblestone pavement and stretches of brick sidewalk had formerly existed. All the houses were apparently deserted, and there were occasional gaps where tumbledown chimneys and cellar walls told of buildings that had collapsed. Pervading everything was the most nauseous fishy odour imaginable.
Soon cross streets and junctions began to appear; those on the left leading to shoreward realms of unpaved squalor and decay, while those on the right shewed vistas of departed grandeur. So far I had seen no people in the town, but there now came signs of a sparse habitation--curtained windows here and there, and an occasional battered motorcar at the curb. Pavement and sidewalks were increasingly well-defined, and though most of the houses were quite old--wood and brick structures of the early 19th century--they were obviously kept fit for habitation. As an amateur antiquarian I almost lost my olfactory disgust and my feeling of menace and repulsion amidst this rich, unaltered survival from the past.
But I was not to reach my destination without one very strong impression of poignantly disagreeable quality. The bus had come to a sort of open concourse or radial point with churches on two sides and the bedraggled remains of a circular green in the centre, and I was looking at a large pillared hall on the right-hand junction ahead. The structure's once white paint was now gray and peeling and the black and gold sign on the pediment was so faded that I could only with difficulty make out the words ""Esoteric Order of Dagon."" This, then was the former Masonic Hall now given over to a degraded cult. As I strained to decipher this inscription my notice was distracted by the raucous tones of a cracked bell across the street, and I quickly turned to look out the window on my side of the coach.
The sound came from a squat stone church of manifestly later date than most of the houses, built in a clumsy Gothic fashion and having a disproportionately high basement with shuttered windows. Though the hands of its clock were missing on the side I glimpsed, I knew that those hoarse strokes were tolling the hour of eleven. Then suddenly all thoughts of time were blotted out by an onrushing image of sharp intensity and unaccountable horror which had seized me before I knew what it really was. The door of the church basement was open, revealing a rectangle of blackness inside. And as I looked, a certain object crossed or seemed to cross that dark rectangle; burning into my brain a momentary conception of nightmare which was all the more maddening because analysis could not shew a single nightmarish quality in it.
It was a living object--the first except the driver that I had seen since entering the compact part of the town--and had I been in a steadier mood I would have found nothing whatever of terror in it. Clearly, as I realised a moment later, it was the pastor; clad in some peculiar vestments doubtless introduced since the Order of Dagon had modified the ritual of the local churches. The thing which had probably caught my first subconscious glance and supplied the touch of bizarre horror was the tall tiara he wore; an almost exact duplicate of the one Miss Tilton had shown me the previous evening. This, acting on my imagination, had supplied namelessly sinister qualities to the indeterminate face and robed, shambling form beneath it. There was not, I soon decided, any reason why I should have felt that shuddering touch of evil pseudo-memory. Was it not natural that a local mystery cult should adopt among its regimentals an unique type of head-dress made familiar to the community in some strange way--perhaps as treasure-trove?
A very thin sprinkling of repellent-looking youngish people now became visible on the sidewalks--lone individuals, and silent knots of two or three. The lower floors of the crumbling houses sometimes harboured small shops with dingy signs, and I noticed a parked truck or two as we rattled along. The sound of waterfalls became more and more distinct, and presently I saw a fairly deep river-gorge ahead, spanned by a wide, iron-railed highway bridge beyond which a large square opened out. As we clanked over the bridge I looked out on both sides and observed some factory buildings on the edge of the grassy bluff or part way down. The water far below was very abundant, and I could see two vigorous sets of falls upstream on my right and at least one downstream on my left. From this point the noise was quite deafening. Then we rolled into the large semicircular square across the river and drew up on the right-hand side in front of a tall, cupola crowned building with remnants of yellow paint and with a half-effaced sign proclaiming it to be the Gilman House.
I was glad to get out of that bus, and at once proceeded to check my valise in the shabby hotel lobby. There was only one person in sight--an elderly man without what I had come to call the ""Innsmouth look""--and I decided not to ask him any of the questions which bothered me; remembering that odd things had been noticed in this hotel. Instead, I strolled out on the square, from which the bus had already gone, and studied the scene minutely and appraisingly.
One side of the cobblestoned open space was the straight line of the river; the other was a semicircle of slant-roofed brick buildings of about the 1800 period, from which several streets radiated away to the southeast, south, and southwest. Lamps were depressingly few and small--all low-powered incandescents--and I was glad that my plans called for departure before dark, even though I knew the moon would be bright. The buildings were all in fair condition, and included perhaps a dozen shops in current operation; of which one was a grocery of the First National chain, others a dismal restaurant, a drug store, and a wholesale fish-dealer's office, and still another, at the eastward extremity of the square near the river an office of the town's only industry--the Marsh Refining Company. There were perhaps ten people visible, and four or five automobiles and motor trucks stood scattered about. I did not need to be told that this was the civic centre of Innsmouth. Eastward I could catch blue glimpses of the harbour, against which rose the decaying remains of three once beautiful Georgian steeples. And toward the shore on the opposite bank of the river I saw the white belfry surmounting what I took to be the Marsh refinery.
For some reason or other I chose to make my first inquiries at the chain grocery, whose personnel was not likely to be native to Innsmouth. I found a solitary boy of about seventeen in charge, and was pleased to note the brightness and affability which promised cheerful information. He seemed exceptionally eager to talk, and I soon gathered that he did not like the place, its fishy smell, or its furtive people. A word with any outsider was a relief to him. He hailed from Arkham, boarded with a family who came from Ipswich, and went back whenever he got a moment off. His family did not like him to work in Innsmouth, but the chain had transferred him there and he did not wish to give up his job.
There was, he said, no public library or chamber of commerce in Innsmouth, but I could probably find my way about. The street I had come down was Federal. West of that were the fine old residence streets--Broad, Washington, Lafayette, and Adams--and east of it were the shoreward slums. It was in these slums--along Main Street--that I would find the old Georgian churches, but they were all long abandoned. It would be well not to make oneself too conspicuous in such neighbourhoods--especially north of the river since the people were sullen and hostile. Some strangers had even disappeared.
Certain spots were almost forbidden territory, as he had learned at considerable cost. One must not, for example, linger much around the Marsh refinery, or around any of the still used churches, or around the pillared Order of Dagon Hall at New Church Green. Those churches were very odd--all violently disavowed by their respective denominations elsewhere, and apparently using the queerest kind of ceremonials and clerical vestments. Their creeds were heterodox and mysterious, involving hints of certain marvelous transformations leading to bodily immorality--of a sort--on this earth. The youth's own pastor--Dr. Wallace of Asbury M. E. Church in Arkham--had gravely urged him not to join any church in Innsmouth.
As for the Innsmouth people--the youth hardly knew what to make of them. They were as furtive and seldom seen as animals that live in burrows, and one could hardly imagine how they passed the time apart from their desultory fishing. Perhaps--judging from the quantities of bootleg liquor they consumed--they lay for most of the daylight hours in an alcoholic stupor. They seemed sullenly banded together in some sort of fellowship and understanding--despising the world as if they had access to other and preferable spheres of entity. Their appearance--especially those staring, unwinking eyes which one never saw shut--was certainly shocking enough; and their voices were disgusting. It was awful to hear them chanting in their churches at night, and especially during their main festivals or revivals, which fell twice a year on April 30th and October 31st.
They were very fond of the water, and swam a great deal in both river and harbour. Swimming races out to Devil Reef were very common, and everyone in sight seemed well able to share in this arduous sport. When one came to think of it, it was generally only rather young people who were seen about in public, and of these the oldest were apt to be the most tainted-looking. When exceptions did occur, they were mostly persons with no trace of aberrancy, like the old clerk at the hotel. One wondered what became of the bulk of the older folk, and whether the ""Innsmouth look"" were not a strange and insidious disease-phenomenon which increased its hold as years advanced.
Only a very rare affliction, of course, could bring about such vast and radical anatomical changes in a single individual after maturity--changes invoking osseous factors as basic as the shape of the skull--but then, even this aspect was no more baffling and unheard-of than the visible features of the malady as a whole. It would be hard, the youth implied, to form any real conclusions regarding such a matter; since one never came to know the natives personally no matter how long one might live in Innsmouth.
The youth was certain that many specimens even worse than the worst visible ones were kept locked indoors in some places. People sometimes heard the queerest kind of sounds. The tottering waterfront hovels north of the river were reputedly connected by hidden tunnels, being thus a veritable warren of unseen abnormalities. What kind of foreign blood--if any--these beings had, it was impossible to tell. They sometimes kept certain especially repulsive characters out of sight when government and others from the outside world came to town.
It would be of no use, my informant said, to ask the natives anything about the place. The only one who would talk was a very aged but normal looking man who lived at the poorhouse on the north rim of the town and spent his time walking about or lounging around the fire station. This hoary character, Zadok Allen, was 96 years old and somewhat touched in the head, besides being the town drunkard. He was a strange, furtive creature who constantly looked over his shoulder as if afraid of something, and when sober could not be persuaded to talk at all with strangers. He was, however, unable to resist any offer of his favorite poison; and once drunk would furnish the most astonishing fragments of whispered reminiscence.
After all, though, little useful data could be gained from him; since his stories were all insane, incomplete hints of impossible marvels and horrors which could have no source save in his own disordered fancy. Nobody ever believed him, but the natives did not like him to drink and talk with strangers; and it was not always safe to be seen questioning him. It was probably from him that some of the wildest popular whispers and delusions were derived.
Several non-native residents had reported monstrous glimpses from time to time, but between old Zadok's tales and the malformed inhabitants it was no wonder such illusions were current. None of the non-natives ever stayed out late at night, there being a widespread impression that it was not wise to do so. Besides, the streets were loathsomely dark.
As for business--the abundance of fish was certainly almost uncanny, but the natives were taking less and less advantage of it. Moreover, prices were falling and competition was growing. Of course the town's real business was the refinery, whose commercial office was on the square only a few doors east of where we stood. Old Man Marsh was never seen, but sometimes went to the works in a closed, curtained car.
There were all sorts of rumors about how Marsh had come to look. He had once been a great dandy; and people said he still wore the frock-coated finery of the Edwardian age curiously adapted to certain deformities. His son had formerly conducted the office in the square, but latterly they had been keeping out of sight a good deal and leaving the brunt of affairs to the younger generation. The sons and their sisters had come to look very queer, especially the elder ones; and it was said that their health was failing.
One of the Marsh daughters was a repellent, reptilian-looking woman who wore an excess of weird jewellery clearly of the same exotic tradition as that to which the strange tiara belonged. My informant had noticed it many times, and had heard it spoken of as coming from some secret hoard, either of pirates or of demons. The clergymen--or priests, or whatever they were called nowadays--also wore this kind of ornament as a headdress; but one seldom caught glimpses of them. Other specimens the youth had not seen, though many were rumoured to exist around Innsmouth.
The Marshes, together with the other three gently bred families of the town--the Waites, the Gilmans, and the Eliots--were all very retiring. They lived in immense houses along Washington Street, and several were reputed to harbour in concealment certain living kinsfolk whose personal aspect forbade public view, and whose deaths had been reported and recorded.
Warning me that many of the street signs were down, the youth drew for my benefit a rough but ample and painstaking sketch map of the town's salient features. After a moment's study I felt sure that it would be of great help, and pocketed it with profuse thanks. Disliking the dinginess of the single restaurant I had seen, I bought a fair supply of cheese crackers and ginger wafers to serve as a lunch later on. My program, I decided, would be to thread the principal streets, talk with any non-natives I might encounter, and catch the eight o'clock coach for Arkham. The town, I could see, formed a significant and exaggerated example of communal decay; but being no sociologist I would limit my serious observations to the field of architecture.
Thus I began my systematic though half-bewildered tour of Innsmouth's narrow, shadow-blighted ways. Crossing the bridge and turning toward the roar of the lower falls, I passed close to the Marsh refinery, which seemed to be oddly free from the noise of industry. The building stood on the steep river bluff near a bridge and an open confluence of streets which I took to be the earliest civic center, displaced after the Revolution by the present Town Square.
Re-crossing the gorge on the Main Street bridge, I struck a region of utter desertion which somehow made me shudder. Collapsing huddles of gambrel roofs formed a jagged and fantastic skyline, above which rose the ghoulish, decapitated steeple of an ancient church. Some houses along Main Street were tenanted, but most were tightly boarded up. Down unpaved side streets I saw the black, gaping windows of deserted hovels, many of which leaned at perilous and incredible angles through the sinking of part of the foundations. Those windows stared so spectrally that it took courage to turn eastward toward the waterfront. Certainly, the terror of a deserted house swells in geometrical rather than arithmetical progression as houses multiply to form a city of stark desolation. The sight of such endless avenues of fishy-eyed vacancy and death, and the thought of such linked infinities of black, brooding compartments given over to cob-webs and memories and the conqueror worm, start up vestigial fears and aversions that not even the stoutest philosophy can disperse.
Fish Street was as deserted as Main, though it differed in having many brick and stone warehouses still in excellent shape. Water Street was almost its duplicate, save that there were great seaward gaps where wharves had been. Not a living thing did I see except for the scattered fishermen on the distant break-water, and not a sound did I hear save the lapping of the harbour tides and the roar of the falls in the Manuxet. The town was getting more and more on my nerves, and I looked behind me furtively as I picked my way back over the tottering Water Street bridge. The Fish Street bridge, according to the sketch, was in ruins.
North of the river there were traces of squalid life--active fish-packing houses in Water Street, smoking chimneys and patched roofs here and there, occasional sounds from indeterminate sources, and infrequent shambling forms in the dismal streets and unpaved lanes--but I seemed to find this even more oppressive than the southerly desertion. For one thing, the people were more hideous and abnormal than those near the centre of the town; so that I was several times evilly reminded of something utterly fantastic which I could not quite place. Undoubtedly the alien strain in the Innsmouth folk was stronger here than farther inland--unless, indeed, the ""Innsmouth look"" were a disease rather than a blood stain, in which case this district might be held to harbour the more advanced cases.
One detail that annoyed me was the distribution of the few faint sounds I heard. They ought naturally to have come wholly from the visibly inhabited houses, yet in reality were often strongest inside the most rigidly boarded-up facades. There were creakings, scurryings, and hoarse doubtful noises; and I thought uncomfortably about the hidden tunnels suggested by the grocery boy. Suddenly I found myself wondering what the voices of those denizens would be like. I had heard no speech so far in this quarter, and was unaccountably anxious not to do so.
Pausing only long enough to look at two fine but ruinous old churches at Main and Church Streets, I hastened out of that vile waterfront slum. My next logical goal was New Church Green, but somehow or other I could not bear to repass the church in whose basement I had glimpsed the inexplicably frightening form of that strangely diademmed priest or pastor. Besides, the grocery youth had told me that churches, as well as the Order of Dagon Hall, were not advisable neighbourhoods for strangers.
Accordingly I kept north along Main to Martin, then turning inland, crossing Federal Street safely north of the Green, and entering the decayed patrician neighbourhood of northern Broad, Washington, Lafayette, and Adams Streets. Though these stately old avenues were ill-surfaced and unkempt, their elm-shaded dignity had not entirely departed. Mansion after mansion claimed my gaze, most of them decrepit and boarded up amidst neglected grounds, but one or two in each street shewing signs of occupancy. In Washington Street there was a row of four or five in excellent repair and with finely-tended lawns and gardens. The most sumptuous of these--with wide terraced parterres extending back the whole way to Lafayette Street--I took to be the home of Old Man Marsh, the afflicted refinery owner.
In all these streets no living thing was visible, and I wondered at the complete absence of cats and dogs from Innsmouth. Another thing which puzzled and disturbed me, even in some of the best-preserved mansions, was the tightly shuttered condition of many third-story and attic windows. Furtiveness and secretiveness seemed universal in this hushed city of alienage and death, and I could not escape the sensation of being watched from ambush on every hand by sly, staring eyes that never shut.
I shivered as the cracked stroke of three sounded from a belfry on my left. Too well did I recall the squat church from which those notes came. Following Washington Street toward the river, I now faced a new zone of former industry and commerce; noting the ruins of a factory ahead, and seeing others, with the traces of an old railway station and covered railway bridge beyond, up the gorge on my right.
The uncertain bridge now before me was posted with a warning sign, but I took the risk and crossed again to the south bank where traces of life reappeared. Furtive, shambling creatures stared cryptically in my direction, and more normal faces eyed me coldly and curiously. Innsmouth was rapidly becoming intolerable, and I turned down Paine Street toward the Square in the hope of getting some vehicle to take me to Arkham before the still-distant starting-time of that sinister bus.
It was then that I saw the tumbledown fire station on my left, and noticed the red faced, bushy-bearded, watery eyed old man in nondescript rags who sat on a bench in front of it talking with a pair of unkempt but not abnormal looking firemen. This, of course, must be Zadok Allen, the half-crazed, liquorish nonagenarian whose tales of old Innsmouth and its shadow were so hideous and incredible.
","

THERE WERE, I remember, six of us in Conrad's bizarrely fashioned study, with its queer relics from all over the world and its long rows of books which ranged from the Mandrake Press edition of Boccaccio to aMissale Romanum, bound in clasped oak boards and printed in Venice, 1740. Clemants and Professor Kirowan had just engaged in a somewhat testy anthropological argument: Clemants upholding the theory of a separate, distinct Alpine race, while the professor maintained that this so-called race was merely a deviation from an original Aryan stock—possibly the result of an admixture between the southern or Mediterranean races and the Nordic people.
""And how,"" asked Clemants, ""do you account for their brachycephalicism? The Mediterraneans were as long-headed as the Aryans: would admixture between these dolichocephalic peoples produce a broad-headed intermediate type?""
""Special conditions might bring about a change in an originally long- headed race,"" snapped Kirowan. ""Boaz has demonstrated, for instance, that in the case of immigrants to America, skull formations often change in one generation. And Flinders Petrie has shown that the Lombards changed from a long- headed to a round-headed race in a few centuries.""
""But what caused these changes?""
""Much is yet unknown to science,"" answered Kirowan, ""and we need not be dogmatic. No one knows, as yet, why people of British and Irish ancestry tend to grow unusually tall in the Darling district of Australia—Cornstalks, as they are called—or why people of such descent generally have thinner jaw-structures after a few generations in New England. The universe is full of the unexplainable.""
""And therefore the uninteresting, according to Machen,"" laughed Taverel.
Conrad shook his head. ""I must disagree. To me, the unknowable is most tantalizingly fascinating.""
""Which accounts, no doubt, for all the works on witchcraft and demonology I see on your shelves,"" said Ketrick, with a wave of his hand toward the rows of books.
And let me speak of Ketrick. Each of the six of us was of the same breed —that is to say, a Briton or an American of British descent. By British, I include all natural inhabitants of the British Isles. We represented various strains of English and Celtic blood, but basically, these strains are the same after all. But Ketrick: to me the man always seemed strangely alien. It was in his eyes that this difference showed externally. They were a sort of amber, almost yellow, and slightly oblique. At times, when one looked at his face from certain angles, they seemed to slant like a Chinaman's.
Others than I had noticed this feature, so unusual in a man of pure Anglo- Saxon descent. The usual myths ascribing his slanted eyes to some pre-natal influence had been mooted about, and I remember Professor Hendrik Brooler once remarked that Ketrick was undoubtedly an atavism, representing a reversion of type to some dim and distant ancestor of Mongolian blood—a sort of freak reversion, since none of his family showed such traces.
But Ketrick comes of the Welsh branch of the Cetrics of Sussex, and his lineage is set down in the Book of Peers. There you may read the line of his ancestry, which extends unbroken to the days of Canute. No slightest trace of Mongoloid intermixture appears in the genealogy, and how could there have been such intermixture in old Saxon England? For Ketrick is the modern form of Cedric, and though that branch fled into Wales before the invasion of the Danes, its male heirs consistently married with English families on the border marches, and it remains a pure line of the powerful Sussex Cedrics—almost pure Saxon. As for the man himself, this defect of his eyes, if it can be called a defect, is his only abnormality, except for a slight and occasional lisping of speech. He is highly intellectual and a good companion except for a slight aloofness and a rather callous indifference which may serve to mask an extremely sensitive nature.
Referring to his remark, I said with a laugh: ""Conrad pursues the obscure and mystic as some men pursue romance; his shelves throng with delightful nightmares of every variety.""
Our host nodded. ""You'll find there a number of delectable dishes—Machen, Poe, Blackwood, Maturin—look, there's a rare feast—Horrid Mysteries, by the Marquis of Grosse—the real Eighteenth Century edition.""
Taverel scanned the shelves. ""Weird fiction seems to vie with works on witchcraft, voodoo and dark magic.""
True; historians and chronicles are often dull; tale-weavers never —the masters, I mean. A voodoo sacrifice can be described in such a dull manner as to take all the real fantasy out of it, and leave it merely a sordid murder. I will admit that few writers of fiction touch the true heights of horror—most of their stuff is too concrete, given too much earthly shape and dimensions. But in such tales as Poe's Fall of the House of Usher, Machen's Black Seal and Lovecraft's Call of Cthulhu —the three master horror-tales, to my mind—the reader is borne into dark and outer realms of imagination.
""But look there,"" he continued, ""there, sandwiched between that nightmare of Huysmans', and Walpole's Castle of Otranto—Von Junzt'sNameless Cults. There's a book to keep you awake at night!""
""I've read it,"" said Taverel, ""and I'm convinced the man is mad. His work is like the conversation of a maniac—it runs with startling clarity for awhile, then suddenly merges into vagueness and disconnected ramblings.""
Conrad shook his head. ""Have you ever thought that perhaps it is his very sanity that causes him to write in that fashion? What if he dares not put on paper all he knows? What if his vague suppositions are dark and mysterious hints, keys to the puzzle, to those who know?""
""Bosh!"" This from Kirowan. ""Are you intimating that any of the nightmare cults referred to by Von Junzt survive to this day—if they ever existed save in the hag-ridden brain of a lunatic poet and philosopher?""
""Not he alone used hidden meanings,"" answered Conrad. ""If you will scan various works of certain great poets you may find double meanings. Men have stumbled onto cosmic secrets in the past and given a hint of them to the world in cryptic words. Do you remember Von Junzt's hints of 'a city in the waste'? What do you think of Flecker's line:""
'Pass not beneath! Men say there blows in stony deserts still a rose
But with no scarlet to her leaf—and from whose heart no perfume flows.'
""Men may stumble upon secret things, but Von Junzt dipped deep into forbidden mysteries. He was one of the few men, for instance, who could read the Necronomicon in the original Greek translation.""
Taverel shrugged his shoulders, and Professor Kirowan, though he snorted and puffed viciously at his pipe, made no direct reply; for he, as well as Conrad, had delved into the Latin version of the book, and had found there things not even a cold-blooded scientist could answer or refute.
""Well,"" he said presently, ""suppose we admit the former existence of cults revolving about such nameless and ghastly gods and entities as Cthulhu, Yog Sothoth, Tsathoggua, Gol-goroth, and the like, I can not find it in my mind to believe that survivals of such cults lurk in the dark corners of the world today.""
To our surprise Clemants answered. He was a tall, lean man, silent almost to the point of taciturnity, and his fierce struggles with poverty in his youth had lined his face beyond his years. Like many another artist, he lived a distinctly dual literary life, his swashbuckling novels furnishing him a generous income, and his editorial position on The Cloven Hoofaffording him full artistic expression. The Cloven Hoof was a poetry magazine whose bizarre contents had often aroused the shocked interest of the conservative critics.
""You remember Von Junzt makes mention of a so-called Bran cult,"" said Clemants, stuffing his pipe-bowl with a peculiarly villainous brand of shag tobacco. ""I think I heard you and Taverel discussing it once.""
""As I gather from his hints,"" snapped Kirowan, ""Von Junzt includes this particular cult among those still in existence. Absurd.""
Again Clemants shook his head. ""When I was a boy working my way through a certain university, I had for roommate a lad as poor and ambitious as I. If I told you his name, it would startle you. Though he came of an old Scotch line of Galloway, he was obviously of a non-Aryan type.
""This is in strictest confidence, you understand. But my roommate talked in his sleep. I began to listen and put his disjointed mumbling together. And in his mutterings I first heard of the ancient cult hinted at by Von Junzt; of the king who rules the Dark Empire, which was a revival of an older, darker empire dating back into the Stone Age; and of the great, nameless cavern where stands the Dark Man—the image of Bran Mak Morn, carved in his likeness by a master-hand while the great king yet lived, and to which each worshipper of Bran makes a pilgrimage once in his or her lifetime. Yes, that cult lives today in the descendants of Bran's people—a silent, unknown current it flows on in the great ocean of life, waiting for the stone image of the great Bran to breathe and move with sudden life, and come from the great cavern to rebuild their lost empire.""
""And who were the people of that empire?"" asked Ketrick.
""Picts,"" answered Taverel, ""doubtless the people known later as the wild Picts of Galloway were predominantly Celtic—a mixture of Gaelic, Cymric, aboriginal and possibly Teutonic elements. Whether they took their name from the older race or lent their own name to that race, is a matter yet to be decided. But when Von Junzt speaks of Picts, he refers specifically to the small, dark, garlic-eating peoples of Mediterranean blood who brought the Neolithic culture into Britain. The first settlers of that country, in fact, who gave rise to the tales of earth spirits and goblins.""
""I can not agree to that last statement,"" said Conrad. ""These legends ascribe a deformity and inhumanness of appearances to the characters. There was nothing about the Picts to excite such horror and repulsion in the Aryan peoples. I believe that the Mediterraneans were preceded by a Mongoloid type, very low in the scale of development, whence these tales—""
""Quite true,"" broke in Kirowan, ""but I hardly think they preceded the Picts, as you call them, into Britain. We find troll and dwarf legends all over the Continent, and I am inclined to think that both the Mediterranean and Aryan people brought these tales with them from the Continent. They must have been of extremely inhuman aspect, those early Mongoloids.""
""At least,"" said Conrad, ""here is a flint mallet a miner found in the Welsh hills and gave to me, which has never been fully explained. It is obviously of no ordinary Neolithic make. See how small it is, compared to most implements of that age; almost like a child's toy; yet it is surprisingly heavy and no doubt a deadly blow could be dealt with it. I fitted the handle to it, myself, and you would be surprised to know how difficult it was to carve it into a shape and balance corresponding with the head.""
We looked at the thing. It was well made, polished somewhat like the other remnants of the Neolithic I had seen, yet as Conrad said, it was strangely different. Its small size was oddly disquieting, for it had no appearance of a toy, otherwise. It was as sinister in suggestion as an Aztec sacrificial dagger. Conrad had fashioned the oaken handle with rare skill, and in carving it to fit the head, had managed to give it the same unnatural appearance as the mallet itself had. He had even copied the workmanship of primal times, fixing the head into the cleft of the haft with rawhide.
""My word!"" Taverel made a clumsy pass at an imaginary antagonist and nearly shattered a costly Shang vase. ""The balance of the thing is all off- center; I'd have to readjust all my mechanics of poise and equilibrium to handle it.""
""Let me see it,"" Ketrick took the thing and fumbled with it, trying to strike the secret of its proper handling. At length, somewhat irritated, he swung it up and struck a heavy blow at a shield which hung on the wall nearby. I was standing near it; I saw the hellish mallet twist in his hand like a live serpent, and his arm wrenched out of line; I heard a shout of alarmed warning —then darkness came with the impact of the mallet against my head.
Slowly I drifted back to consciousness. First there was dull sensation with blindness and total lack of knowledge as to where I was or what I was; then vague realization of life and being, and a hard something pressing into my ribs. Then the mists cleared and I came to myself completely.
I lay on my back half-beneath some underbrush and my head throbbed fiercely. Also my hair was caked and clotted with blood, for the scalp had been laid open. But my eyes traveled down my body and limbs, naked but for a deerskin loincloth and sandals of the same material, and found no other wound. That which pressed so uncomfortably into my ribs was my ax, on which I had fallen.
Now an abhorrent babble reached my ears and stung me into clear consciousness. The noise was faintly like language, but not such language as men are accustomed to. It sounded much like the repeated hissing of many great snakes.
I stared. I lay in a great, gloomy forest. The glade was overshadowed, so that even in the daytime it was very dark. Aye—that forest was dark, cold, silent, gigantic and utterly grisly. And I looked into the glade.
I saw a shambles. Five men lay there—at least, what had been five men. Now as I marked the abhorrent mutilations my soul sickened. And about clustered the—Things. Humans they were, of a sort, though I did not consider them so. They were short and stocky, with broad heads too large for their scrawny bodies. Their hair was snaky and stringy, their faces broad and square, with flat noses, hideously slanted eyes, a thin gash for a mouth, and pointed ears. They wore the skins of beasts, as did I, but these hides were but crudely dressed. They bore small bows and flint-tipped arrows, flint knives and cudgels. And they conversed in a speech as hideous as themselves, a hissing, reptilian speech that filled me with dread and loathing.
Oh, I hated them as I lay there; my brain flamed with white-hot fury. And now I remembered. We had hunted, we six youths of the Sword People, and wandered far into the grim forest which our people generally shunned. Weary of the chase, we had paused to rest; to me had been given the first watch, for in those days, no sleep was safe without a sentry. Now shame and revulsion shook my whole being. I had slept—I had betrayed my comrades. And now they lay gashed and mangled—butchered while they slept, by vermin who had never dared to stand before them on equal terms. I, Aryara, had betrayed my trust.
Aye—I remembered. I had slept and in the midst of a dream of the hunt, fire and sparks had exploded in my head and I had plunged into a deeper darkness where there were no dreams. And now the penalty. They who had stolen through the dense forest and smitten me senseless, had not paused to mutilate me. Thinking me dead they had hastened swiftly to their grisly work. Now perhaps they had forgotten me for a time. I had sat somewhat apart from the others, and when struck, had fallen half-under some bushes. But soon they would remember me. I would hunt no more, dance no more in the dances of hunt and love and war, see no more the wattle huts of the Sword People.
But I had no wish to escape back to my people. Should I slink back with my tale of infamy and disgrace? Should I hear the words of scorn my tribe would fling at me, see the girls point their contemptuous fingers at the youth who slept and betrayed his comrades to the knives of vermin?
Tears stung my eyes, and slow hate heaved up in my bosom, and my brain. I would never bear the sword that marked the warrior. I would never triumph over worthy foes and die gloriously beneath the arrows of the Picts or the axes of the Wolf People or the River People. I would go down to death beneath a nauseous rabble, whom the Picts had long ago driven into forest dens like rats.
And mad rage gripped me and dried my tears, giving in their stead a berserk blaze of wrath. If such reptiles were to bring about my downfall, I would make it a fall long remembered—if such beasts had memories.
Moving cautiously, I shifted until my hand was on the haft of my ax; then I called on Il-marinen and bounded up as a tiger springs. And as a tiger springs I was among my enemies and mashed a flat skull as a man crushes the head of a snake. A sudden wild clamor of fear broke from my victims and for an instant they closed round me, hacking and stabbing. A knife gashed my chest but I gave no heed. A red mist waved before my eyes, and my body and limbs moved in perfect accord with my fighting brain. Snarling, hacking and smiting, I was a tiger among reptiles. In an instant they gave way and fled, leaving me bestriding half a dozen stunted bodies. But I was not satiated.
I was close on the heels of the tallest one, whose head would perhaps come to my shoulder, and who seemed to be their chief. He fled down a sort of runway, squealing like a monstrous lizard, and when I was close at his shoulder, he dived, snake-like, into the bushes. But I was too swift for him, and I dragged him forth and butchered him in a most gory fashion.
And through the bushes I saw the trail he was striving to reach—a path winding in and out among the trees, almost too narrow to allow the traversing of it by a man of normal size. I hacked off my victim's hideous head, and carrying it in my left hand, went up the serpent-path, with my red ax in my right.
Now as I strode swiftly along the path and blood splashed beside my feet at every step from the severed jugular of my foe, I thought of those I hunted. Aye—we held them in so little esteem, we hunted by day in the forest they haunted. What they called themselves, we never knew; for none of our tribe ever learned the accursed hissing sibilances they used as speech; but we called them Children of the Night. And night-things they were indeed, for they slunk in the depths of the dark forests, and in subterraneous dwellings, venturing forth into the hills only when their conquerors slept. It was at night that they did their foul deeds—the quick flight of a flint-tipped arrow to slay cattle, or perhaps a loitering human, the snatching of a child that had wandered from the village.
But it was for more than this we gave them their name; they were, in truth, people of night and darkness and the ancient horror-ridden shadows of bygone ages. For these creatures were very old, and they represented an outworn age. They had once overrun and possessed this land, and they had been driven into hiding and obscurity by the dark, fierce little Picts with whom we contested now, and who hated and loathed them as savagely as did we.
The Picts were different from us in general appearance, being shorter of stature and dark of hair, eyes and skin, whereas we were tall and powerful, with yellow hair and light eyes. But they were cast in the same mold, for all of that. These Children of the Night seemed not human to us, with their deformed dwarfish bodies, yellow skin and hideous faces. Aye—they were reptiles—vermin.
And my brain was like to burst with fury when I thought that it was these vermin on whom I was to glut my ax and perish. Bah! There is no glory slaying snakes or dying from their bites. All this rage and fierce disappointment turned on the objects of my hatred, and with the old red mist waving in front of me I swore by all the gods I knew, to wreak such red havoc before I died as to leave a dread memory in the minds of the survivors.
My people would not honor me, in such contempt they held the Children. But those Children that I left alive would remember me and shudder. So I swore, gripping savagely my ax, which was of bronze, set in a cleft of the oaken haft and fastened securely with rawhide.
Now I heard ahead a sibilant, abhorrent murmur, and a vile stench filtered to me through the trees, human, yet less than human. A few moments more and I emerged from the deep shadows into a wide open space. I had never before seen a village of the Children. There was a cluster of earthen domes, with low doorways sunk into the ground; squalid dwelling-places, half-above and half-below the earth. And I knew from the talk of the old warriors that these dwelling-places were connected by underground corridors, so the whole village was like an ant-bed, or a system of snake holes. And I wondered if other tunnels did not run off under the ground and emerge long distances from the villages.
Before the domes clustered a vast group of the creatures, hissing and jabbering at a great rate.
I had quickened my pace, and now as I burst from cover, I was running with the fleetness of my race. A wild clamor went up from the rabble as they saw the avenger, tall, bloodstained and blazing-eyed leap from the forest, and I cried out fiercely, flung the dripping head among them and bounded like a wounded tiger into the thick of them.
Oh, there was no escape for them now! They might have taken to their tunnels but I would have followed, even to the guts of Hell. They knew they must slay me, and they closed around, a hundred strong, to do it.
There was no wild blaze of glory in my brain as there had been against worthy foes. But the old berserk madness of my race was in my blood and the smell of blood and destruction in my nostrils.
I know not how many I slew. I only know that they thronged about me in a writhing, slashing mass, like serpents about a wolf, and I smote until the ax- edge turned and bent and the ax became no more than a bludgeon; and I smashed skulls, split heads, splintered bones, scattered blood and brains in one red sacrifice to Il-marinen, god of the Sword People.
Bleeding from half a hundred wounds, blinded by a slash across the eyes, I felt a flint knife sink deep into my groin and at the same instant a cudgel laid my scalp open. I went to my knees but reeled up again, and saw in a thick red fog a ring of leering, slant-eyed faces. I lashed out as a dying tiger strikes, and the faces broke in red ruin.
And as I sagged, overbalanced by the fury of my stroke, a taloned hand clutched my throat and a flint blade was driven into my ribs and twisted venomously. Beneath a shower of blows I went down again, but the man with the knife was beneath me, and with my left hand I found him and broke his neck before he could writhe away.
Life was waning swiftly; through the hissing and howling of the Children I could hear the voice of Il-marinen. Yet once again I rose stubbornly, through a very whirlwind of cudgels and spears. I could no longer see my foes, even in a red mist. But I could feel their blows and knew they surged about me. I braced my feet, gripped my slippery ax-haft with both hands, and calling once more on Il-marinen I heaved up the ax and struck one last terrific blow. And I must have died on my feet, for there was no sensation of falling; even as I knew, with a last thrill of savagery, that slew, even as I felt the splintering of skulls beneath my ax, darkness came with oblivion.
I came suddenly to myself. I was half-reclining in a big armchair and Conrad was pouring water on me. My head ached and a trickle of blood had half- dried on my face. Kirowan, Taverel and Clemants were hovering about, anxiously, while Ketrick stood just in front of me, still holding the mallet, his face schooled to a polite perturbation which his eyes did not show. And at the sight of those cursed eyes a red madness surged up in me.
""There,"" Conrad was saying, ""I told you he'd come out of it in a moment; just a light crack. He's taken harder than that. All right now, aren't you, O'Donnel?""
At that I swept them aside, and with a single low snarl of hatred launched myself at Ketrick. Taken utterly by surprise he had no opportunity to defend himself. My hands locked on his throat and we crashed together on the ruins of a divan. The others cried out in amazement and horror and sprang to separate us—or rather, to tear me from my victim, for already Ketrick's slant eyes were beginning to start from their sockets.
""For God's sake, O'Donnel,"" exclaimed Conrad, seeking to break my grip, ""what's come over you? Ketrick didn't mean to hit you—let go, you idiot!""
A fierce wrath almost overcame me at these men who were my friends, men of my own tribe, and I swore at them and their blindness, as they finally managed to tear my strangling fingers from Ketrick's throat. He sat up and choked and explored the blue marks my fingers had left, while I raged and cursed, nearly defeating the combined efforts of the four to hold me.
""You fools!"" I screamed. ""Let me go! Let me do my duty as a tribesman! You blind fools! I care nothing for the paltry blow he dealt me—he and his dealt stronger blows than that against me, in bygone ages. You fools, he is marked with the brand of the beast—the reptile—the vermin we exterminated centuries ago! I must crush him, stamp him out, rid the clean earth of his accursed pollution!""
So I raved and struggled and Conrad gasped to Ketrick over his shoulder: ""Get out, quick! He's out of his head! His mind is unhinged! Get away from him.""
Now I look out over the ancient dreaming downs and the hills and deep forests beyond and I ponder. Somehow, that blow from that ancient accursed mallet knocked me back into another age and another life. While I was Aryara I had no cognizance of any other life. It was no dream; it was a stray bit of reality wherein I, John O'Donnel, once lived and died, and back into which I was snatched across the voids of time and space by a chance blow. Time and times are but cogwheels, unmatched, grinding on oblivious to one another. Occasionally—oh, very rarely!—the cogs fit; the pieces of the plot snap together momentarily and give men faint glimpses beyond the veil of this everyday blindness we call reality.
I am John O'Donnel and I was Aryara, who dreamed dreams of war-glory and hunt-glory and feast-glory and who died on a red heap of his victims in some lost age. But in what age and where?
The last I can answer for you. Mountains and rivers change their contours; the landscapes alter; but the downs least of all. I look out upon them now and I remember them, not only with John O'Donnel's eyes, but with the eyes of Aryara. They are but little changed. Only the great forest has shrunk and dwindled and in many, many places vanished utterly. But here on these very downs Aryara lived and fought and loved and in yonder forest he died. Kirowan was wrong. The little, fierce, dark Picts were not the first men in the Isles. There were beings before them—aye, the Children of the Night. Legends —why, the Children were not unknown to us when we came into what is now the isle of Britain. We had encountered them before, ages before. Already we had our myths of them. But we found them in Britain. Nor had the Picts totally exterminated them.
Nor had the Picts, as so many believe, preceded us by many centuries. We drove them before us as we came, in that long drift from the East. I, Aryara, knew old men who had marched on that century-long trek; who had been borne in the arms of yellow-haired women over countless miles of forest and plain, and who as youths had walked in the vanguard of the invaders.
As to the age—that I cannot say. But I, Aryara, was surely an Aryan and my people were Aryans—members of one of the thousand unknown and unrecorded drifts that scattered yellow-haired blue-eyed tribes all over the world. The Celts were not the first to come into western Europe. I, Aryara, was of the same blood and appearance as the men who sacked Rome, but mine was a much older strain. Of the language spoke, no echo remains in the waking mind of John O'Donnel, but I knew that Aryara's tongue was to ancient Celtic what ancient Celtic is to modern Gaelic.
Il-marinen! I remember the god I called upon, the ancient, ancient god who worked in metals—in bronze then. For Il-marinen was one of the base gods of the Aryans from whom many gods grew; and he was Wieland and Vulcan in the ages of iron. But to Aryara he was Il-marinen.
And Aryara—he was one of many tribes and many drifts. Not alone did the Sword People come or dwell in Britain. The River People were before us and the Wolf People came later. But they were Aryans like us, light-eyed and tall and blond. We fought them, for the reason that the various drifts of Aryans have always fought each other, just as the Achaeans fought the Dorians, just as the Celts and Germans cut each other's throats; aye, just as the Hellenes and the Persians, who were once one people and of the same drift, split in two different ways on the long trek and centuries later met and flooded Greece and Asia Minor with blood.
Now understand, all this I did not know as Aryara. I, Aryara, knew nothing of all these world-wide drifts of my race. I knew only that my people were conquerors, that a century ago my ancestors had dwelt in the great plains far to the east, plains populous with fierce, yellow-haired, light-eyed people like myself; that my ancestors had come westward in a great drift; and that in that drift, when my tribesmen met tribes of other races, they trampled and destroyed them, and when they met other yellow-haired, light-eyed people, of older or newer drifts, they fought savagely and mercilessly, according to the old, illogical custom of the Aryan people. This Aryara knew, and I, John O'Donnel, who know much more and much less than I, Aryara, knew, have combined the knowledge of these separate selves and have come to conclusions that would startle many noted scientists and historians.
Yet this fact is well known: Aryans deteriorate swiftly in sedentary and peaceful lives. Their proper existence is a nomadic one; when they settle down to an agricultural existence, they pave the way for their downfall; and when they pen themselves with city walls, they seal their doom. Why, I, Aryara, remember the tales of the old men—how the Sons of the Sword, on that long drift, found villages of white-skinned yellow-haired people who had drifted into the west centuries before and had quit the wandering life to dwell among the dark, garlic-eating people and gain their sustenance from the soil. And the old men told how soft and weak they were, and how easily they fell before the bronze blades of the Sword People.
Look—is not the whole history of the Sons of Aryan laid on those lines? Look—how swiftly has Persian followed Mede; Greek, Persian; Roman, Greek; and German, Roman. Aye, and the Norseman followed the Germanic tribes when they had grown flabby from a century or so of peace and idleness, and despoiled the spoils they had taken in the southland.
But let me speak of Ketrick. Ha—the short hairs at the back of my neck bristle at the very mention of his name. A reversion to type—but not to the type of some cleanly Chinaman or Mongol of recent times. The Danes drove his ancestors into the hills of Wales; and there, in what medieval century, and in what foul way did that cursed aboriginal taint creep into the clean Saxon blood of the Celtic line, there to lie dormant so long? The Celtic Welsh never mated with the Children any more than the Picts did. But there must have been survivals—vermin lurking in those grim hills, that had outlasted their time and age. In Aryara's day they were scarcely human. What must a thousand years of retrogression have done to the breed?
What foul shape stole into the Ketrick castle on some forgotten night, or rose out of the dusk to grip some woman of the line, straying in the hills?
The mind shrinks from such an image. But this I know: there must have been survivals of that foul, reptilian epoch when the Ketricks went into Wales. There still may be. But this changeling, this waif of darkness, this horror who bears the noble name of Ketrick, the brand of the serpent is upon him, and until he is destroyed there is no rest for me. Now that I know him for what he is, he pollutes the clean air and leaves the slime of the snake on the green earth. The sound of his lisping, hissing voice fills me with crawling horror and the sight of his slanted eyes inspires me with madness.
For I come of a royal race, and such as he is a continual insult and a threat, like a serpent underfoot. Mine is a regal race, though now it is become degraded and falls into decay by continual admixture with conquered races. The waves of alien blood have washed my hair black and my skin dark, but I still have the lordly stature and the blue eyes of a royal Aryan.
And as my ancestors—as I, Aryara, destroyed the scum that writhed beneath our heels, so shall I, John O'Donnel, exterminate the reptilian thing, the monster bred of the snaky taint that slumbered so long unguessed in clean Saxon veins, the vestigial serpent-things left to taunt the Sons of Aryan. They say the blow I received affected my mind; I know it but opened my eyes. Mine ancient enemy walks often on the moors alone, attracted, though he may not know it, by ancestral urgings. And on one of these lonely walks I shall meet him, and when I meet him, I will break his foul neck with my hands, as I, Aryara, broke the necks of foul night-things in the long, long ago.
Then they may take me and break my neck at the end of a rope if they will. I am not blind, if my friends are. And in the sight of the old Aryan god, if not in the blinded eyes of men, I will have kept faith with my tribe.
",False
"I can hardly describe the mood in which I was left by this harrowing episode--an episode at once mad and pitiful, grotesque and terrifying. The grocery boy had prepared me for it, yet the reality left me none the less bewildered and disturbed. Puerile though the story was, old Zadok's insane earnestness and horror had communicated to me a mounting unrest which joined with my earlier sense of loathing for the town and its blight of intangible shadow.

Later I might sift the tale and extract some nucleus of historic allegory; just now I wished to put it out of my head. The hour grown perilously late--my watch said 7:15, and the Arkham bus left Town Square at eight--so I tried to give my thoughts as neutral and practical a cast as possible, meanwhile walking rapidly through the deserted streets of gaping roofs and leaning houses toward the hotel where I had checked my valise and would find my bus.

Though the golden light of late afternoon gave the ancient roofs and decrepit chimneys an air of mystic loveliness and peace, I could not help glancing over my shoulder now and then. I would surely be very glad to get out of malodorous and fear-shadowed Innsmouth, and wished there were some other vehicle than the bus driven by that sinister-looking fellow Sargent. Yet I did not hurry too precipitately, for there were architectural details worth viewing at every silent corner; and I could easily, I calculated, cover the necessary distance in a half-hour.

Studying the grocery youth's map and seeking a route I had not traversed before, I chose Marsh Street instead of State for my approach to Town Square. Near the corner of Fall Street I began to see scattered groups of furtive whisperers, and when I finally reached the Square I saw that almost all the loiterers were congregated around the door of the Gilman House. It seemed as if many bulging, watery, unwinking eyes looked oddly at me as I claimed my valise in the lobby, and I hoped that none of these unpleasant creatures would be my fellow-passengers on the coach.

The bus, rather early, rattled in with three passengers somewhat before eight, and an evil-looking fellow on the sidewalk muttered a few indistinguishable words to the driver. Sargent threw out a mail-bag and a roll of newspapers, and entered the hotel; while the passengers--the same men whom I had seen arriving in Newburyport that morning--shambled to the sidewalk and exchanged some faint guttural words with a loafer in a language I could have sworn was not English. I boarded the empty coach and took the seat I had taken before, but was hardly settled before Sargent re-appeared and began mumbling in a throaty voice of peculiar repulsiveness.

I was, it appeared, in very bad luck. There had been something wrong with the engine, despite the excellent time made from Newburyport, and the bus could not complete the journey to Arkham. No, it could not possibly be repaired that night, nor was there any other way of getting transportation out of Innsmouth either to Arkham or elsewhere. Sargent was sorry, but I would have to stop over at the Gilman. Probably the clerk would make the price easy for me, but there was nothing else to do. Almost dazed by this sudden obstacle, and violently dreading the fall of night in this decaying and half-unlighted town, I left the bus and reentered the hotel lobby; where the sullen queer-looking night clerk told me I could have Room 428 on next the top floor--large, but without running water--for a dollar.

Despite what I had heard of this hotel in Newburyport, I signed the register, paid my dollar, let the clerk take my valise, and followed that sour, solitary attendant up three creaking flights of stairs past dusty corridors which seemed wholly devoid of life. My room was a dismal rear one with two windows and bare, cheap furnishings, overlooked a dingy court-yard otherwise hemmed in by low, deserted brick blocks, and commanded a view of decrepit westward-stretching roofs with a marshy countryside beyond. At the end of the corridor was a bathroom--a discouraging relique with ancient marble bowl, tin tub, faint electric light, and musty wooded paneling around all the plumbing fixtures.

It being still daylight, I descended to the Square and looked around for a dinner of some sort; noticing as I did so the strange glances I received from the unwholesome loafers. Since the grocery was closed, I was forced to patronise the restaurant I had shunned before; a stooped, narrow-headed man with staring, unwinking eyes, and a flat-nosed wench with unbelievably thick, clumsy hands being in attendance. The service was all of the counter type, and it relieved me to find that much was evidently served from cans and packages. A bowl of vegetable soup with crackers was enough for me, and I soon headed back for my cheerless room at the Gilman; getting a evening paper and a fly-specked magazine from the evil-visaged clerk at the rickety stand beside his desk.

As twilight deepened I turned on the one feeble electric bulb over the cheap, iron-framed bed, and tried as best I could to continue the reading I had begun. I felt it advisable to keep my mind wholesomely occupied, for it would not do to brood over the abnormalities of this ancient, blight-shadowed town while I was still within its borders. The insane yarn I had heard from the aged drunkard did not promise very pleasant dreams, and I felt I must keep the image of his wild, watery eyes as far as possible from my imagination.

Also, I must not dwell on what that factory inspector had told the Newburyport ticket-agent about the Gilman House and the voices of its nocturnal tenants--not on that, nor on the face beneath the tiara in the black church doorway; the face for whose horror my conscious mind could not account. It would perhaps have been easier to keep my thoughts from disturbing topics had the room not been so gruesomely musty. As it was, the lethal mustiness blended hideously with the town's general fishy odour and persistently focussed one's fancy on death and decay.

Another thing that disturbed me was the absence of a bolt on the door of my room. One had been there, as marks clearly shewed, but there were signs of recent removal. No doubt it had been out of order, like so many other things in this decrepit edifice. In my nervousness I looked around and discovered a bolt on the clothes press which seemed to be of the same size, judging from the marks, as the one formerly on the door. To gain a partial relief from the general tension I busied myself by transferring this hardware to the vacant place with the aid of a handy three-in-one device including a screwdriver which I kept on my key-ring. The bolt fitted perfectly, and I was somewhat relieved when I knew that I could shoot it firmly upon retiring. Not that I had any real apprehension of its need, but that any symbol of security was welcome in an environment of this kind. There were adequate bolts on the two lateral doors to connecting rooms, and these I proceeded to fasten.

I did not undress, but decided to read till I was sleepy and then lie down with only my coat, collar, and shoes off. Taking a pocket flash light from my valise, I placed it in my trousers, so that I could read my watch if I woke up later in the dark. Drowsiness, however, did not come; and when I stopped to analyse my thoughts I found to my disquiet that I was really unconsciously listening for something--listening for something which I dreaded but could not name. That inspector's story must have worked on my imagination more deeply than I had suspected. Again I tried to read, but found that I made no progress.

After a time I seemed to hear the stairs and corridors creak at intervals as if with footsteps, and wondered if the other rooms were beginning to fill up. There were no voices, however, and it struck me that there was something subtly furtive about the creaking. I did not like it, and debated whether I had better try to sleep at all. This town had some queer people, and there had undoubtedly been several disappearances. Was this one of those inns where travelers were slain for their money? Surely I had no look of excessive prosperity. Or were the towns folk really so resentful about curious visitors? Had my obvious sightseeing, with its frequent map-consultations, aroused unfavorable notice. It occurred to me that I must be in a highly nervous state to let a few random creakings set me off speculating in this fashion--but I regretted none the less that I was unarmed.

At length, feeling a fatigue which had nothing of drowsiness in it, I bolted the newly outfitted hall door, turned off the light, and threw myself down on the hard, uneven bed--coat, collar, shoes, and all. In the darkness every faint noise of the night seemed magnified, and a flood of doubly unpleasant thoughts swept over me. I was sorry I had put out the light, yet was too tired to rise and turn it on again. Then, after a long, dreary interval, and prefaced by a fresh creaking of stairs and corridor, there came that soft, damnably unmistakable sound which seemed like a malign fulfillment of all my apprehensions. Without the least shadow of a doubt, the lock of my door was being tried--cautiously, furtively, tentatively--with a key.

My sensations upon recognising this sign of actual peril were perhaps less rather than more tumultuous because of my previous vague fears. I had been, albeit without definite reason, instinctively on my guard--and that was to my advantage in the new and real crisis, whatever it might turn out to be. Nevertheless the change in the menace from vague premonition to immediate reality was a profound shock, and fell upon me with the force of a genuine blow. It never once occurred to me that the fumbling might be a mere mistake. Malign purpose was all I could think of, and I kept deathly quiet, awaiting the would-be intruder's next move.

After a time the cautious rattling ceased, and I heard the room to the north entered with a pass-key. Then the lock of the connecting door to my room was softly tried. The bolt held, of course, and I heard the floor creak as the prowler left the room. After a moment there came another soft rattling, and I knew that the room to the south of me was being entered. Again a furtive trying of a bolted connecting door, and again a receding creaking. This time the creaking went along the hall and down the stairs, so I knew that the prowler had realised the bolted condition of my doors and was giving up his attempt for a greater or lesser time, as the future would shew.

The readiness with which I fell into a plan of action proves that I must have been subconsciously fearing some menace and considering possible avenues of escape for hours. From the first I felt that the unseen fumbler meant a danger not to be met or dealt with, but only to be fled from as precipitately as possible. The one thing to do was to get out of that hotel alive as quickly as I could, and through some channel other than the front stairs and lobby.

Rising softly and throwing my flashlight on the switch, I sought to light the bulb over my bed in order to choose and pocket some belongings for a swift, valiseless flight. Nothing, however, happened; and I saw that the power had been cut off. Clearly, some cryptic, evil movement was afoot on a large scale--just what, I could not say. As I stood pondering with my hand on the now useless switch I heard a muffled creaking on the floor below, and thought I could barely distinguish voices in conversation. A moment later I felt less sure that the deeper sounds were voices, since the apparent hoarse barkings and loose-syllabled croakings bore so little resemblance to recognized human speech. Then I thought with renewed force of what the factory inspector had heard in the night in this mouldering and pestilential building.

Having filled my pockets with the flashlight's aid, I put on my hat and tiptoed to the windows to consider chances of descent. Despite the state's safety regulations there was no fire escape on this side of the hotel, and I saw that my windows commanded only a sheer three story drop to the cobbled courtyard. On the right and left, however, some ancient brick business blocks abutted on the hotel; their slant roofs coming up to a reasonable jumping distance from my fourth-story level. To reach either of these lines of buildings I would have to be in a room two from my own--in one case on the north and in the other case on the south--and my mind instantly set to work what chances I had of making the transfer.

I could not, I decided, risk an emergence into the corridor; where my footsteps would surely be heard, and where the difficulties of entering the desired room would be insuperable. My progress, if it was to be made at all, would have to be through the less solidly-built connecting doors of the rooms; the locks and bolts of which I would have to force violently, using my shoulder as a battering-ram whenever they were set against me. This, I thought, would be possible owing to the rickety nature of the house and its fixtures; but I realised I could not do it noiselessly. I would have to count on sheer speed, and the chance of getting to a window before any hostile forces became coordinated enough to open the right door toward me with a pass-key. My own outer door I reinforced by pushing the bureau against it--little by little, in order to make a minimum of sound.

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

Gathering from the grocery boy's map that the best route out of town was southward, I glanced first at the connecting door on the south side of the room. It was designed to open in my direction, hence I saw--after drawing the bolt and finding other fastening in place--it was not a favorable one for forcing. Accordingly abandoning it as a route, I cautiously moved the bedstead against it to hamper any attack which might be made on it later from the next room. The door on the north was hung to open away from me, and this--though a test proved it to be locked or bolted from the other side--I knew must be my route. If I could gain the roofs of the buildings in Paine Street and descend successfully to the ground level, I might perhaps dart through the courtyard and the adjacent or opposite building to Washington or Bates--or else emerge in Paine and edge around southward into Washington. In any case, I would aim to strike Washington somehow and get quickly out of the Town Square region. My preference would be to avoid Paine, since the fire station there might be open all night.

As I thought of these things I looked out over the squalid sea of decaying roofs below me, now brightened by the beams of a moon not much past full. On the right the black gash of the river-gorge clove the panorama; abandoned factories and railway station clinging barnacle-like to its sides. Beyond it the rusted railway and the Rowley road led off through a flat marshy terrain dotted with islets of higher and dryer scrub-grown land. On the left the creek-threaded country-side was nearer, the narrow road to Ipswich gleaming white in the moonlight. I could not see from my side of the hotel the southward route toward Arkham which I had determined to take.

I was irresolutely speculating on when I had better attack the northward door, and on how I could least audibly manage it, when I noticed that the vague noises underfoot had given place to a fresh and heavier creaking of the stairs. A wavering flicker of light shewed through my transom, and the boards of the corridor began to groan with a ponderous load. Muffled sounds of possible vocal origin approached, and at length a firm knock came at my outer door.

For a moment I simply held my breath and waited. Eternities seemed to elapse, and the nauseous fishy odour of my environment seemed to mount suddenly and spectacularly. Then the knocking was repeated--continuously, and with growing insistence. I knew that the time for action had come, and forthwith drew the bolt of the northward connecting door, bracing myself for the task of battering it open. The knocking waxed louder, and I hoped that its volume would cover the sound of my efforts. At last beginning my attempt, I lunged again and again at the thin paneling with my left shoulder, heedless of shock or pain. The door resisted even more than I expected, but I did not give in. And all the while the clamour at the outer door increased.

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

For an instant I felt absolute despair, since my trapping in a chamber with no window egress seemed complete. A wave of almost abnormal horror swept over me, and invested with a terrible but unexplainable singularity the flashlight-glimpsed dust prints made by the intruder who had lately tried my door from this room. Then, with a dazed automatism which persisted despite hopelessness, I made for the next connecting door and performed the blind motion of pushing at it in an effort to get through and--granting that fastenings might be as providentially intact as in this second room--bolt the hall door beyond before the lock could be turned from outside.

Sheer fortunate chance gave me my reprieve--for the connecting door before me was not only unlocked but actually ajar. In a second I was though, and had my right knee and shoulder against a hall door which was visibly opening inward. My pressure took the opener off guard, for the thing shut as I pushed, so that I could slip the well-conditioned bolt as I had done with the other door. As I gained this respite I heard the battering at the two other doors abate, while a confused clatter came from the connecting door I had shielded with the bedstead. Evidently the bulk of my assailants had entered the southerly room and were massing in a lateral attack. But at the same moment a pass-key sounded in the next door to the north, and I knew that a nearer peril was at hand.

The northward connecting door was wide open, but there was no time to think about checking the already turning lock in the hall. All I could do was to shut and bolt the open connecting door, as well as its mate on the opposite side--pushing a bedstead against the one and a bureau against the other, and moving a washstand in front of the hall door. I must, I saw, trust to such makeshift barriers to shield me till I could get out the window and on the roof of the Paine Street block. But even in this acute moment my chief horror was something apart from the immediate weakness of my defenses. I was shuddering because not one of my pursuers, despite some hideous panting, grunting, and subdued barkings at odd intervals, was uttering an unmuffled or intelligible vocal sound.

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

Surveying the conditions, I chose the more southerly of the two windows as my avenue of escape; planning to land on the inner slope of the roof and make for the nearest sky-light. Once inside one of the decrepit brick structures I would have to reckon with pursuit; but I hoped to descend and dodge in and out of yawning doorways along the shadowed courtyard, eventually getting to Washington Street and slipping out of town toward the south.

The clatter at the northerly connecting door was now terrific, and I saw that the weak panelling was beginning to splinter. Obviously, the besiegers had brought some ponderous object into play as a battering-ram. The bedstead, however, still held firm; so that I had at least a faint chance of making good my escape. As I opened the window I noticed that it was flanked by heavy velour draperies suspended from a pole by brass rings, and also that there was a large projecting catch for the shutters on the exterior. Seeing a possible means of avoiding the dangerous jump, I yanked at the hangings and brought them down, pole and all; then quickly hooking two of the rings in the shutter catch and flinging the drapery outside. The heavy folds reached fully to the abutting roof, and I saw that the rings and catch would be likely to bear my weight. So, climbing out of the window and down the improvised rope ladder, I left behind me forever the morbid and horror-infested fabric of the Gilman House.

I landed safely on the loose slates of the steep roof, and succeeded in gaining the gaping black skylight without a slip. Glancing up at the window I had left, I observed it was still dark, though far across the crumbling chimneys to the north I could see lights ominously blazing in the Order of Dagon Hall, the Baptist church, and the Congregational church which I recalled so shiveringly. There had seemed to be no one in the courtyard below, and I hoped there would be a chance to get away before the spreading of a general alarm. Flashing my pocket lamp into the skylight, I saw that there were no steps down. The distance was slight, however, so I clambered over the brink and dropped; striking a dusty floor littered with crumbling boxes and barrels.

The place was ghoulish-looking, but I was past minding such impressions and made at once for the staircase revealed by my flashlight--after a hasty glance at my watch, which shewed the hour to be 2 a.m. The steps creaked, but seemed tolerably sound; and I raced down past a barnlike second storey to the ground floor. The desolation was complete, and only echoes answered my footfalls. At length I reached the lower hall at the end of which I saw a faint luminous rectangle marking the ruined Paine Street doorway. Heading the other way, I found the back door also open; and darted out and down five stone steps to the grass-grown cobblestones of the courtyard.

The moonbeams did not reach down here, but I could just see my way about without using the flashlight. Some of the windows on the Gilman House side were faintly glowing, and I thought I heard confused sounds within. Walking softly over to the Washington Street side I perceived several open doorways, and chose the nearest as my route out. The hallway inside was black, and when I reached the opposite end I saw that the street door was wedged immovably shut. Resolved to try another building, I groped my way back toward the courtyard, but stopped short when close to the doorway.

For out of an opened door in the Gilman House a large crowd of doubtful shapes was pouring--lanterns bobbing in the darkness, and horrible croaking voices exchanging low cries in what was certainly not English. The figures moved uncertainly, and I realized to my relief that they did not know where I had gone; but for all that they sent a shiver of horror through my frame. Their features were indistinguishable, but their crouching, shambling gait was abominably repellent. And worst of all, I perceived that one figure was strangely robed, and unmistakably surmounted by a tall tiara of a design altogether too familiar. As the figures spread throughout the courtyard, I felt my fears increase. Suppose I could find no egress from this building on the street side? The fishy odour was detestable, and I wondered I could stand it without fainting. Again groping toward the street, I opened a door off the hall and came upon an empty room with closely shuttered but sashless windows. Fumbling in the rays of my flashlight, I found I could open the shutters; and in another moment had climbed outside and was fully closing the aperture in its original manner.

I was now in Washington Street, and for the moment saw no living thing nor any light save that of the moon. From several directions in the distance, however, I could hear the sound of hoarse voices, of footsteps, and of a curious kind of pattering which did not sound quite like footsteps. Plainly I had no time to lose. The points of the compass were clear to me, and I was glad that all the street lights were turned off, as is often the custom on strongly moonlit nights in prosperous rural regions. Some of the sounds came from the south, yet I retained my design of escaping in that direction. There would, I knew, be plenty of deserted doorways to shelter me in case I met any person or group who looked like pursuers.

I walked rapidly, softly, and close to the ruined houses. While hatless and dishevelled after my arduous climb, I did not look especially noticeable; and stood a good chance of passing unheeded if forced to encounter any casual wayfarer.

At Bates Street I drew into a yawning vestibule while two shambling figures crossed in front of me, but was soon on my way again and approaching the open space where Eliot Street obliquely crosses Washington at the intersection of South. Though I had never seen this space, it had looked dangerous to me on the grocery youth's map; since the moonlight would have free play there. There was no use trying to evade it, for any alternative course would involve detours of possibly disastrous visibility and delaying effect. The only thing to do was to cross it boldly and openly; imitating the typical shamble of the Innsmouth folk as best I could, and trusting that no one--or at least no pursuer of mine--would be there.

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

The open space was, as I had expected, strongly moonlit; and I saw the remains of a parklike, iron-railed green in its center. Fortunately no one was about though a curious sort of buzz or roar seemed to be increasing in the direction of Town Square. South Street was very wide, leading directly down a slight declivity to the waterfront and commanding a long view out to sea; and I hoped that no one would be glancing up it from afar as I crossed in the bright moonlight.

My progress was unimpeded, and no fresh sound arose to hint that I had been spied. Glancing about me, I involuntarily let my pace slacken for a second to take in the sight of the sea, gorgeous in the burning moonlight at the street's end. Far out beyond the breakwater was the dim, dark line of Devil Reef, and as I glimpsed it I could not help thinking of all the hideous legends I had heard in the last twenty-four hours--legends which portrayed this ragged rock as a veritable gateway to realms of unfathomed horror and inconceivable abnormality.

Then, without warning, I saw the intermittent flashes of light on the distant reef. They were definite and unmistakable, and awaked in my mind a blind horror beyond all rational proportion. My muscles tightened for panic flight, held in only by a certain unconscious caution and half-hypnotic fascination. And to make matters worse, there now flashed forth from the lofty cupola of the Gilman House, which loomed up to the northeast behind me, a series of analogous though differently spaced gleams which could be nothing less than an answering signal.

Controlling my muscles, and realising afresh--how plainly visible I was, I resumed my brisker and feignedly shambling pace; though keeping my eyes on that hellish and ominous reef as long as the opening of South Street gave me a seaward view. What the whole proceeding meant, I could not imagine; unless it involved some strange rite connected with Devil Reef, or unless some party had landed from a ship on that sinister rock. I now bent to the left around the ruinous green; still gazing toward the ocean as it blazed in the spectral summer moonlight, and watching the cryptical flashing of those nameless, unexplainable beacons.

It was then that the most horrible impression of all was borne in upon me--the impression which destroyed my last vestige of self-control and sent me running frantically southward past the yawning black doorways and fishily staring windows of that deserted nightmare street. For at a closer glance I saw that the moonlit waters between the reef and the shore were far from empty. They were alive with a teeming horde of shapes swimming inward toward the town; and even at my vast distance and in my single moment of perception I could tell that the bobbing heads and flailing arms were alien and aberrant in a way scarcely to be expressed or consciously formulated.

My frantic running ceased before I had covered a block, for at my left I began to hear something like the hue and cry of organised pursuit. There were footsteps and guttural sounds, and a rattling motor wheezed south along Federal Street. In a second all my plans were utterly changed--for if the southward highway were blocked ahead of me, I must clearly find another egress from Innsmouth. I paused and drew into a gaping doorway, reflecting how lucky I was to have left the moonlit open space before these pursuers came down the parallel street.

A second reflection was less comforting. Since the pursuit was down another street, it was plain that the party was not following me directly. It had not seen me, but was simply obeying a general plan of cutting off my escape. This, however, implied that all roads leading out of Innsmouth were similarly patrolled; for the people could not have known what route I intended to take. If this were so, I would have to make my retreat across country away from any road; but how could I do that in view of the marshy and creek-riddled nature of all the surrounding region? For a moment my brain reeled--both from sheer hopelessness and from a rapid increase in the omnipresent fishy odour.

Then I thought of the abandoned railway to Rowley, whose solid line of ballasted, weed-grown earth still stretched off to the northwest from the crumbling station on the edge at the river-gorge. There was just a chance that the townsfolk would not think of that; since its briar-choked desertion made it half-impassable, and the unlikeliest of all avenues for a fugitive to choose. I had seen it clearly from my hotel window and knew about how it lay. Most of its earlier length was uncomfortably visible from the Rowley road, and from high places in the town itself; but one could perhaps crawl inconspicuously through the undergrowth. At any rate, it would form my only chance of deliverance, and there was nothing to do but try it.

Drawing inside the hall of my deserted shelter, I once more consulted the grocery boy's map with the aid of the flashlight. The immediate problem was how to reach the ancient railway; and I now saw that the safest course was ahead to Babson Street; then west to Lafayette--there edging around but not crossing an open space homologous to the one I had traversed--and subsequently back northward and westward in a zigzagging line through Lafayette, Bates, Adam, and Bank streets--the latter skirting the river gorge--to the abandoned and dilapidated station I had seen from my window. My reason for going ahead to Babson was that I wished neither to recross the earlier open space nor to begin my westward course along a cross street as broad as South.

Starting once more, I crossed the street to the right-hand side in order to edge around into Babson as inconspicuously as possible. Noises still continued in Federal Street, and as I glanced behind me I thought I saw a gleam of light near the building through which I had escaped. Anxious to leave Washington Street, I broke into a quiet dogtrot, trusting to luck not to encounter any observing eye. Next the corner of Babson Street I saw to my alarm that one of the houses was still inhabited, as attested by curtains at the window; but there were no lights within, and I passed it without disaster.

In Babson Street, which crossed Federal and might thus reveal me to the searchers, I clung as closely as possible to the sagging, uneven buildings; twice pausing in a doorway as the noises behind me momentarily increased. The open space ahead shone wide and desolate under the moon, but my route would not force me to cross it. During my second pause I began to detect a fresh distribution of vague sounds; and upon looking cautiously out from cover beheld a motor car darting across the open space, bound outward along Eliot Street, which there intersects both Babson and Lafayette.

As I watched--choked by a sudden rise in the fishy odour after a short abatement--I saw a band of uncouth, crouching shapes loping and shambling in the same direction; and knew that this must be the party guarding the Ipswich road, since that highway forms an extension of Eliot Street. Two of the figures I glimpsed were in voluminous robes, and one wore a peaked diadem which glistened whitely in the moonlight. The gait of this figure was so odd that it sent a chill through me--for it seemed to me the creature was almost hopping.

When the last of the band was out of sight I resumed my progress; darting around the corner into Lafayette Street, and crossing Eliot very hurriedly lest stragglers of the party be still advancing along that thoroughfare. I did hear some croaking and clattering sounds far off toward Town Square, but accomplished the passage without disaster. My greatest dread was in re-crossing broad and moonlit South Street--with its seaward view--and I had to nerve myself for the ordeal. Someone might easily be looking, and possible Eliot Street stragglers could not fail to glimpse me from either of two points. At the last moment I decided I had better slacken my trot and make the crossing as before in the shambling gait of an average Innsmouth native.

When the view of the water again opened out--this time on my right--I was half-determined not to look at it at all. I could not however, resist; but cast a sidelong glance as I carefully and imitatively shambled toward the protecting shadows ahead. There was no ship visible, as I had half-expected there would be. Instead, the first thing which caught my eye was a small rowboat pulling in toward the abandoned wharves and laden with some bulky, tarpaulin-covered object. Its rowers, though distantly and indistinctly seen, were of an especially repellent aspect. Several swimmers were still discernible; while on the far black reef I could see a faint, steady glow unlike the winking beacon visible before, and of a curious colour which I could not precisely identify. Above the slant roofs ahead and to the right there loomed the tall cupola of the Gilman House, but it was completely dark. The fishy odour, dispelled for a moment by some merciful breeze, now closed in again with maddening intensity.

I had not quite crossed the street when I heard a muttering band advancing along Washington from the north. As they reached the broad open space where I had had my first disquieting glimpse of the moonlit water I could see them plainly only a block away--and was horrified by the bestial abnormality of their faces and the doglike sub-humanness of their crouching gait. One man moved in a positively simian way, with long arms frequently touching the ground; while another figure--robed and tiaraed--seemed to progress in an almost hopping fashion. I judged this party to be the one I had seen in the Gilman's courtyard--the one, therefore, most closely on my trail. As some of the figures turned to look in my direction I was transfixed with fright, yet managed to preserve the casual, shambling gait I had assumed. To this day I do not know whether they saw me or not. If they did, my stratagem must have deceived them, for they passed on across the moonlit space without varying their course--meanwhile croaking and jabbering in some hateful guttural patois I could not identify.

Once more in shadow, I resumed my former dog-trot past the leaning and decrepit houses that stared blankly into the night. Having crossed to the western sidewalk I rounded the nearest corner into Bates Street where I kept close to the buildings on the southern side. I passed two houses shewing signs of habitation, one of which had faint lights in upper rooms, yet met with no obstacle. As I turned into Adams Street I felt measurably safer, but received a shook when a man reeled out of a black doorway directly in front of me. He proved, however, too hopelessly drunk to be a menace; so that I reached the dismal ruins of the Bank Street warehouses in safety.

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

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

The vast, barnlike length of the old bridge gleamed spectrally in the moonlight, and I saw that the ties were safe for at least a few feet within. Entering, I began to use my flashlight, and was almost knocked down by the cloud of bats that flapped past me. About half-way across there was a perilous gap in the ties which I feared for a moment would halt me; but in the end I risked a desperate jump which fortunately succeeded.

I was glad to see the moonlight again when I emerged from that macabre tunnel. The old tracks crossed River Street at grade, and at once veered off into a region increasingly rural and with less and less of Innsmouth's abhorrent fishy odour. Here the dense growth of weeds and briers hindered me and cruelly tore at my clothes, but I was none the less glad that they were there to give me concealment in case of peril. I knew that much of my route must be visible from the Rowley road.

The marshy region began very abruptly, with the single track on a low, grassy embankment where the weedy growth was somewhat thinner. Then came a sort of island of higher ground, where the line passed through a shallow open cut choked with bushes and brambles. I was very glad of this partial shelter, since at this point the Rowley road was uncomfortably near according to my window view. At the end of the cut it would cross the track and swerve off to a safer distance; but meanwhile I must be exceedingly careful. I was by this time thankfully certain that the railway itself was not patrolled.

Just before entering the cut I glanced behind me, but saw no pursuer. The ancient spires and roofs of decaying Innsmouth gleamed lovely and ethereal in the magic yellow moonlight, and I thought of how they must have looked in the old days before the shadow fell. Then, as my gaze circled inland from the town, something less tranquil arrested my notice and held me immobile for a second.

What I saw--or fancied I saw--was a disturbing suggestion of undulant motion far to the south; a suggestion which made me conclude that a very large horde must be pouring out of the city along the level Ipswich road. The distance was great and I could distinguish nothing in detail; but I did not at all like the look of that moving column. It undulated too much, and glistened too brightly in the rays of the now westering moon. There was a suggestion of sound, too, though the wind was blowing the other way--a suggestion of bestial scraping and bellowing even worse than the muttering of the parties I had lately overheard.

All sorts of unpleasant conjectures crossed my mind. I thought of those very extreme Innsmouth types said to be hidden in crumbling, centuried warrens near the waterfront; I thought, too, of those nameless swimmers I had seen. Counting the parties so far glimpsed, as well as those presumably covering other roads, the number of my pursuers must be strangely large for a town as depopulated as Innsmouth.

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

I had entered the brush-grown cut and was struggling along at a very slow pace when that damnable fishy odour again waxed dominant. Had the wind suddenly changed eastward, so that it blew in from the sea and over the town? It must have, I concluded, since I now began to hear shocking guttural murmurs from that hitherto silent direction. There was another sound, too--a kind of wholesale, colossal flopping or pattering which somehow called up images of the most detestable sort. It made me think illogically of that unpleasantly undulating column on the far-off Ipswich road.

And then both stench and sounds grew stronger, so that I paused shivering and grateful for the cut's protection. It was here, I recalled, that the Rowley road drew so close to the old railway before crossing westward and diverging. Something was coming along that road, and I must lie low till its passage and vanishment in the distance. Thank heaven these creatures employed no dogs for tracking--though perhaps that would have been impossible amidst the omnipresent regional odour. Crouched in the bushes of that sandy cleft I felt reasonably safe, even though I knew the searchers would have to cross the track in front of me not much more than a hundred yards away. I would be able to see them, but they could not, except by a malign miracle, see me.

All at once I began dreading to look at them as they passed. I saw the close moonlit space where they would surge by, and had curious thoughts about the irredeemable pollution of that space. They would perhaps be the worst of all Innsmouth types--something one would not care to remember.

The stench waxed overpowering, and the noises swelled to a bestial babel of croaking, baying and barking without the least suggestion of human speech. Were these indeed the voices of my pursuers? Did they have dogs after all? So far I had seen none of the lower animals in Innsmouth. That flopping or pattering was monstrous--I could not look upon the degenerate creatures responsible for it. I would keep my eyes shut till the sound receded toward the west. The horde was very close now--air foul with their hoarse snarlings, and the ground almost shaking with their alien-rhythmed footfalls. My breath nearly ceased to come, and I put every ounce of will-power into the task of holding my eyelids down.

I am not even yet willing to say whether what followed was a hideous actuality or only a nightmare hallucination. The later action of the government, after my frantic appeals, would tend to confirm it as a monstrous truth; but could not an hallucination have been repeated under the quasi-hypnotic spell of that ancient, haunted, and shadowed town? Such places have strange properties, and the legacy of insane legend might well have acted on more than one human imagination amidst those dead, stench-cursed streets and huddles of rotting roofs and crumbling steeples. Is it not possible that the germ of an actual contagious madness lurks in the depths of that shadow over Innsmouth? Who can be sure of reality after hearing things like the tale of old Zadok Allen? The government men never found poor Zadok, and have no conjectures to make as to what became of him. Where does madness leave off and reality begin? Is it possible that even my latest fear is sheer delusion?

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

I thought I was prepared for the worst, and I really ought to have been prepared considering what I had seen before.

My other pursuers had been accursedly abnormal--so should I not have been ready to face a strengthening of the abnormal element; to look upon forms in which there was no mixture of the normal at all? I did not open my eyes until the raucous clamour came loudly from a point obviously straight ahead. Then I knew that a long section of them must be plainly in sight where the sides of the cut flattened out and the road crossed the track--and I could no longer keep myself from sampling whatever horror that leering yellow moon might have to shew.

It was the end, for whatever remains to me of life on the surface of this earth, of every vestige of mental peace and confidence in the integrity of nature and of the human mind. Nothing that I could have imagined--nothing, even, that I could have gathered had I credited old Zadok's crazy tale in the most literal way--would be in any way comparable to the demoniac, blasphemous reality that I saw--or believe I saw. I have tried to hint what it was in order to postpone the horror of writing it down baldly. Can it be possible that this planet has actually spawned such things; that human eyes have truly seen, as objective flesh, what man has hitherto known only in febrile phantasy and tenuous legend?

And yet I saw them in a limitless stream--flopping, hopping, croaking, bleating--urging inhumanly through the spectral moonlight in a grotesque, malignant saraband of fantastic nightmare. And some of them had tall tiaras of that nameless whitish-gold metal...and some were strangely robed...and one, who led the way, was clad in a ghoulishly humped black coat and striped trousers, and had a man's felt hat perched on the shapeless thing that answered for a head.

I think their predominant colour was a greyish-green, though they had white bellies. They were mostly shiny and slippery, but the ridges of their backs were scaly. Their forms vaguely suggested the anthropoid, while their heads were the heads of fish, with prodigious bulging eyes that never closed. At the sides of their necks were palpitating gills, and their long paws were webbed. They hopped irregularly, sometimes on two legs and sometimes on four. I was somehow glad that they had no more than four limbs. Their croaking, baying voices, clearly used for articulate speech, held all the dark shades of expression which their staring faces lacked.

But for all of their monstrousness they were not unfamiliar to me. I knew too well what they must be--for was not the memory of the evil tiara at Newburyport still fresh? They were the blasphemous fish-frogs of the nameless design--living and horrible--and as I saw them I knew also of what that humped, tiaraed priest in the black church basement had fearsomely reminded me. Their number was past guessing. It seemed to me that there were limitless swarms of them and certainly my momentary glimpse could have shewn only the least fraction. In another instant everything was blotted out by a merciful fit of fainting; the first I had ever had.","It is said that in Ulthar, which lies beyond the river Skai, no man may kill a cat; and this I can verily believe as I gaze upon him who sitteth purring before the fire. For the cat is cryptic, and close to strange things which men cannot see. He is the soul of antique Aegyptus, and bearer of tales from forgotten cities in Meroë and Ophir. He is the kin of the jungle’s lords, and heir to the secrets of hoary and sinister Africa. The Sphinx is his cousin, and he speaks her language; but he is more ancient than the Sphinx, and remembers that which she hath forgotten.
      In Ulthar, before ever the burgesses forbade the killing of cats, there dwelt an old cotter and his wife who delighted to trap and slay the cats of their neighbours. Why they did this I know not; save that many hate the voice of the cat in the night, and take it ill that cats should run stealthily about yards and gardens at twilight. But whatever the reason, this old man and woman took pleasure in trapping and slaying every cat which came near to their hovel; and from some of the sounds heard after dark, many villagers fancied that the manner of slaying was exceedingly peculiar. But the villagers did not discuss such things with the old man and his wife; because of the habitual expression on the withered faces of the two, and because their cottage was so small and so darkly hidden under spreading oaks at the back of a neglected yard. In truth, much as the owners of cats hated these odd folk, they feared them more; and instead of berating them as brutal assassins, merely took care that no cherished pet or mouser should stray toward the remote hovel under the dark trees. When through some unavoidable oversight a cat was missed, and sounds heard after dark, the loser would lament impotently; or console himself by thanking Fate that it was not one of his children who had thus vanished. For the people of Ulthar were simple, and knew not whence it is all cats first came.
      One day a caravan of strange wanderers from the South entered the narrow cobbled streets of Ulthar. Dark wanderers they were, and unlike the other roving folk who passed through the village twice every year. In the market-place they told fortunes for silver, and bought gay beads from the merchants. What was the land of these wanderers none could tell; but it was seen that they were given to strange prayers, and that they had painted on the sides of their wagons strange figures with human bodies and the heads of cats, hawks, rams, and lions. And the leader of the caravan wore a head-dress with two horns and a curious disc betwixt the horns.
      There was in this singular caravan a little boy with no father or mother, but only a tiny black kitten to cherish. The plague had not been kind to him, yet had left him this small furry thing to mitigate his sorrow; and when one is very young, one can find great relief in the lively antics of a black kitten. So the boy whom the dark people called Menes smiled more often than he wept as he sate playing with his graceful kitten on the steps of an oddly painted wagon.
      On the third morning of the wanderers’ stay in Ulthar, Menes could not find his kitten; and as he sobbed aloud in the market-place certain villagers told him of the old man and his wife, and of sounds heard in the night. And when he heard these things his sobbing gave place to meditation, and finally to prayer. He stretched out his arms toward the sun and prayed in a tongue no villager could understand; though indeed the villagers did not try very hard to understand, since their attention was mostly taken up by the sky and the odd shapes the clouds were assuming. It was very peculiar, but as the little boy uttered his petition there seemed to form overhead the shadowy, nebulous figures of exotic things; of hybrid creatures crowned with horn-flanked discs. Nature is full of such illusions to impress the imaginative.
      That night the wanderers left Ulthar, and were never seen again. And the householders were troubled when they noticed that in all the village there was not a cat to be found. From each hearth the familiar cat had vanished; cats large and small, black, grey, striped, yellow, and white. Old Kranon, the burgomaster, swore that the dark folk had taken the cats away in revenge for the killing of Menes’ kitten; and cursed the caravan and the little boy. But Nith, the lean notary, declared that the old cotter and his wife were more likely persons to suspect; for their hatred of cats was notorious and increasingly bold. Still, no one durst complain to the sinister couple; even when little Atal, the innkeeper’s son, vowed that he had at twilight seen all the cats of Ulthar in that accursed yard under the trees, pacing very slowly and solemnly in a circle around the cottage, two abreast, as if in performance of some unheard-of rite of beasts. The villagers did not know how much to believe from so small a boy; and though they feared that the evil pair had charmed the cats to their death, they preferred not to chide the old cotter till they met him outside his dark and repellent yard.
      So Ulthar went to sleep in vain anger; and when the people awaked at dawn—behold! every cat was back at his accustomed hearth! Large and small, black, grey, striped, yellow, and white, none was missing. Very sleek and fat did the cats appear, and sonorous with purring content. The citizens talked with one another of the affair, and marvelled not a little. Old Kranon again insisted that it was the dark folk who had taken them, since cats did not return alive from the cottage of the ancient man and his wife. But all agreed on one thing: that the refusal of all the cats to eat their portions of meat or drink their saucers of milk was exceedingly curious. And for two whole days the sleek, lazy cats of Ulthar would touch no food, but only doze by the fire or in the sun.
      It was fully a week before the villagers noticed that no lights were appearing at dusk in the windows of the cottage under the trees. Then the lean Nith remarked that no one had seen the old man or his wife since the night the cats were away. In another week the burgomaster decided to overcome his fears and call at the strangely silent dwelling as a matter of duty, though in so doing he was careful to take with him Shang the blacksmith and Thul the cutter of stone as witnesses. And when they had broken down the frail door they found only this: two cleanly picked human skeletons on the earthen floor, and a number of singular beetles crawling in the shadowy corners.
      There was subsequently much talk among the burgesses of Ulthar. Zath, the coroner, disputed at length with Nith, the lean notary; and Kranon and Shang and Thul were overwhelmed with questions. Even little Atal, the innkeeper’s son, was closely questioned and given a sweetmeat as reward. They talked of the old cotter and his wife, of the caravan of dark wanderers, of small Menes and his black kitten, of the prayer of Menes and of the sky during that prayer, of the doings of the cats on the night the caravan left, and of what was later found in the cottage under the dark trees in the repellent yard.
      And in the end the burgesses passed that remarkable law which is told of by traders in Hatheg and discussed by travellers in Nir; namely, that in Ulthar no man may kill a cat.",True
"
I

Although I knew nothing of chemistry, I listened fascinated. He picked up
an Easter lily which Geneviève had brought that morning from Notre Dame,
and dropped it into the basin. Instantly the liquid lost its crystalline
clearness. For a second the lily was enveloped in a milk-white foam,
which disappeared, leaving the fluid opalescent. Changing tints of orange
and crimson played over the surface, and then what seemed to be a ray of
pure sunlight struck through from the bottom where the lily was resting.
At the same instant he plunged his hand into the basin and drew out the
flower. ""There is no danger,"" he explained, ""if you choose the right
moment. That golden ray is the signal.""

He held the lily toward me, and I took it in my hand. It had turned to
stone, to the purest marble.

""You see,"" he said, ""it is without a flaw. What sculptor could reproduce
it?""

The marble was white as snow, but in its depths the veins of the lily
were tinged with palest azure, and a faint flush lingered deep in its
heart.

""Don't ask me the reason of that,"" he smiled, noticing my wonder. ""I have
no idea why the veins and heart are tinted, but they always are.
Yesterday I tried one of Geneviève's gold-fish,--there it is.""

The fish looked as if sculptured in marble. But if you held it to the
light the stone was beautifully veined with a faint blue, and from
somewhere within came a rosy light like the tint which slumbers in an
opal. I looked into the basin. Once more it seemed filled with clearest
crystal.

""If I should touch it now?"" I demanded.

""I don't know,"" he replied, ""but you had better not try.""

""There is one thing I'm curious about,"" I said, ""and that is where the
ray of sunlight came from.""

""It looked like a sunbeam true enough,"" he said. ""I don't know, it always
comes when I immerse any living thing. Perhaps,"" he continued, smiling,
""perhaps it is the vital spark of the creature escaping to the source
from whence it came.""

I saw he was mocking, and threatened him with a mahl-stick, but he only
laughed and changed the subject.

""Stay to lunch. Geneviève will be here directly.""

""I saw her going to early mass,"" I said, ""and she looked as fresh and
sweet as that lily--before you destroyed it.""

""Do you think I destroyed it?"" said Boris gravely.

""Destroyed, preserved, how can we tell?""

We sat in the corner of a studio near his unfinished group of the
""Fates."" He leaned back on the sofa, twirling a sculptor's chisel and
squinting at his work.

""By the way,"" he said, ""I have finished pointing up that old academic
Ariadne, and I suppose it will have to go to the Salon. It's all I have
ready this year, but after the success the 'Madonna' brought me I feel
ashamed to send a thing like that.""

The ""Madonna,"" an exquisite marble for which Geneviève had sat, had been
the sensation of last year's Salon. I looked at the Ariadne. It was a
magnificent piece of technical work, but I agreed with Boris that the
world would expect something better of him than that. Still, it was
impossible now to think of finishing in time for the Salon that splendid
terrible group half shrouded in the marble behind me. The ""Fates"" would
have to wait.

We were proud of Boris Yvain. We claimed him and he claimed us on the
strength of his having been born in America, although his father was
French and his mother was a Russian. Every one in the Beaux Arts called
him Boris. And yet there were only two of us whom he addressed in the
same familiar way--Jack Scott and myself.

Perhaps my being in love with Geneviève had something to do with his
affection for me. Not that it had ever been acknowledged between us. But
after all was settled, and she had told me with tears in her eyes that it
was Boris whom she loved, I went over to his house and congratulated him.
The perfect cordiality of that interview did not deceive either of us, I
always believed, although to one at least it was a great comfort. I do
not think he and Geneviève ever spoke of the matter together, but Boris
knew.

Geneviève was lovely. The Madonna-like purity of her face might have been
inspired by the Sanctus in Gounod's Mass. But I was always glad when she
changed that mood for what we called her ""April Manoeuvres."" She was
often as variable as an April day. In the morning grave, dignified and
sweet, at noon laughing, capricious, at evening whatever one least
expected. I preferred her so rather than in that Madonna-like
tranquillity which stirred the depths of my heart. I was dreaming of
Geneviève when he spoke again.

""What do you think of my discovery, Alec?""

""I think it wonderful.""

""I shall make no use of it, you know, beyond satisfying my own curiosity
so far as may be, and the secret will die with me.""

""It would be rather a blow to sculpture, would it not? We painters lose
more than we ever gain by photography.""

Boris nodded, playing with the edge of the chisel.

""This new vicious discovery would corrupt the world of art. No, I shall
never confide the secret to any one,"" he said slowly.

It would be hard to find any one less informed about such phenomena than
myself; but of course I had heard of mineral springs so saturated with
silica that the leaves and twigs which fell into them were turned to
stone after a time. I dimly comprehended the process, how the silica
replaced the vegetable matter, atom by atom, and the result was a
duplicate of the object in stone. This, I confess, had never interested
me greatly, and as for the ancient fossils thus produced, they disgusted
me. Boris, it appeared, feeling curiosity instead of repugnance, had
investigated the subject, and had accidentally stumbled on a solution
which, attacking the immersed object with a ferocity unheard of, in a
second did the work of years. This was all I could make out of the
strange story he had just been telling me. He spoke again after a long
silence.

""I am almost frightened when I think what I have found. Scientists would
go mad over the discovery. It was so simple too; it discovered itself.
When I think of that formula, and that new element precipitated in
metallic scales--""

""What new element?""

""Oh, I haven't thought of naming it, and I don't believe I ever shall.
There are enough precious metals now in the world to cut throats over.""

I pricked up my ears. ""Have you struck gold, Boris?""

""No, better;--but see here, Alec!"" he laughed, starting up. ""You and I
have all we need in this world. Ah! how sinister and covetous you look
already!"" I laughed too, and told him I was devoured by the desire for
gold, and we had better talk of something else; so when Geneviève came in
shortly after, we had turned our backs on alchemy.

Geneviève was dressed in silvery grey from head to foot. The light
glinted along the soft curves of her fair hair as she turned her cheek to
Boris; then she saw me and returned my greeting. She had never before
failed to blow me a kiss from the tips of her white fingers, and I
promptly complained of the omission. She smiled and held out her hand,
which dropped almost before it had touched mine; then she said, looking
at Boris--

""You must ask Alec to stay for luncheon."" This also was something new.
She had always asked me herself until to-day.

""I did,"" said Boris shortly.

""And you said yes, I hope?"" She turned to me with a charming conventional
smile. I might have been an acquaintance of the day before yesterday. I
made her a low bow. ""J'avais bien l'honneur, madame,"" but refusing to
take up our usual bantering tone, she murmured a hospitable commonplace
and disappeared. Boris and I looked at one another.

""I had better go home, don't you think?"" I asked.

""Hanged if I know,"" he replied frankly.

While we were discussing the advisability of my departure Geneviève
reappeared in the doorway without her bonnet. She was wonderfully
beautiful, but her colour was too deep and her lovely eyes were too
bright. She came straight up to me and took my arm.

""Luncheon is ready. Was I cross, Alec? I thought I had a headache, but I
haven't. Come here, Boris;"" and she slipped her other arm through his.
""Alec knows that after you there is no one in the world whom I like as
well as I like him, so if he sometimes feels snubbed it won't hurt him.""

""À la bonheur!"" I cried, ""who says there are no thunderstorms in April?""

""Are you ready?"" chanted Boris. ""Aye ready;"" and arm-in-arm we raced into
the dining-room, scandalizing the servants. After all we were not so much
to blame; Geneviève was eighteen, Boris was twenty-three, and I not quite
twenty-one.




II

Some work that I was doing about this time on the decorations for
Geneviève's boudoir kept me constantly at the quaint little hotel in the
Rue Sainte-Cécile. Boris and I in those days laboured hard but as we
pleased, which was fitfully, and we all three, with Jack Scott, idled a
great deal together.

One quiet afternoon I had been wandering alone over the house examining
curios, prying into odd corners, bringing out sweetmeats and cigars from
strange hiding-places, and at last I stopped in the bathing-room. Boris,
all over clay, stood there washing his hands.

The room was built of rose-coloured marble excepting the floor, which was
tessellated in rose and grey. In the centre was a square pool sunken
below the surface of the floor; steps led down into it, sculptured
pillars supported a frescoed ceiling. A delicious marble Cupid appeared
to have just alighted on his pedestal at the upper end of the room. The
whole interior was Boris' work and mine. Boris, in his working-clothes of
white canvas, scraped the traces of clay and red modelling wax from his
handsome hands, and coquetted over his shoulder with the Cupid.

""I see you,"" he insisted, ""don't try to look the other way and pretend
not to see me. You know who made you, little humbug!""

It was always my rôle to interpret Cupid's sentiments in these
conversations, and when my turn came I responded in such a manner, that
Boris seized my arm and dragged me toward the pool, declaring he would
duck me. Next instant he dropped my arm and turned pale. ""Good God!"" he
said, ""I forgot the pool is full of the solution!""

I shivered a little, and dryly advised him to remember better where he
had stored the precious liquid.

""In Heaven's name, why do you keep a small lake of that gruesome stuff
here of all places?"" I asked.

""I want to experiment on something large,"" he replied.

""On me, for instance?""

""Ah! that came too close for jesting; but I do want to watch the action
of that solution on a more highly organized living body; there is that
big white rabbit,"" he said, following me into the studio.

Jack Scott, wearing a paint-stained jacket, came wandering in,
appropriated all the Oriental sweetmeats he could lay his hands on,
looted the cigarette case, and finally he and Boris disappeared together
to visit the Luxembourg Gallery, where a new silver bronze by Rodin and a
landscape of Monet's were claiming the exclusive attention of artistic
France. I went back to the studio, and resumed my work. It was a
Renaissance screen, which Boris wanted me to paint for Geneviève's
boudoir. But the small boy who was unwillingly dawdling through a series
of poses for it, to-day refused all bribes to be good. He never rested an
instant in the same position, and inside of five minutes I had as many
different outlines of the little beggar.

""Are you posing, or are you executing a song and dance, my friend?"" I
inquired.

""Whichever monsieur pleases,"" he replied, with an angelic smile.

Of course I dismissed him for the day, and of course I paid him for the
full time, that being the way we spoil our models.

After the young imp had gone, I made a few perfunctory daubs at my work,
but was so thoroughly out of humour, that it took me the rest of the
afternoon to undo the damage I had done, so at last I scraped my palette,
stuck my brushes in a bowl of black soap, and strolled into the
smoking-room. I really believe that, excepting Geneviève's apartments, no
room in the house was so free from the perfume of tobacco as this one. It
was a queer chaos of odds and ends, hung with threadbare tapestry. A
sweet-toned old spinet in good repair stood by the window. There were
stands of weapons, some old and dull, others bright and modern, festoons
of Indian and Turkish armour over the mantel, two or three good pictures,
and a pipe-rack. It was here that we used to come for new sensations in
smoking. I doubt if any type of pipe ever existed which was not
represented in that rack. When we had selected one, we immediately
carried it somewhere else and smoked it; for the place was, on the whole,
more gloomy and less inviting than any in the house. But this afternoon,
the twilight was very soothing, the rugs and skins on the floor looked
brown and soft and drowsy; the big couch was piled with cushions--I found
my pipe and curled up there for an unaccustomed smoke in the
smoking-room. I had chosen one with a long flexible stem, and lighting it
fell to dreaming. After a while it went out, but I did not stir. I
dreamed on and presently fell asleep.

I awoke to the saddest music I had ever heard. The room was quite dark, I
had no idea what time it was. A ray of moonlight silvered one edge of the
old spinet, and the polished wood seemed to exhale the sounds as perfume
floats above a box of sandalwood. Some one rose in the darkness, and came
away weeping quietly, and I was fool enough to cry out ""Geneviève!""

She dropped at my voice, and, I had time to curse myself while I made a
light and tried to raise her from the floor. She shrank away with a
murmur of pain. She was very quiet, and asked for Boris. I carried her to
the divan, and went to look for him, but he was not in the house, and the
servants were gone to bed. Perplexed and anxious, I hurried back to
Geneviève. She lay where I had left her, looking very white.

""I can't find Boris nor any of the servants,"" I said.

""I know,"" she answered faintly, ""Boris has gone to Ept with Mr. Scott. I
did not remember when I sent you for him just now.""

""But he can't get back in that case before to-morrow afternoon, and--are
you hurt? Did I frighten you into falling? What an awful fool I am, but I
was only half awake.""

""Boris thought you had gone home before dinner. Do please excuse us for
letting you stay here all this time.""

""I have had a long nap,"" I laughed, ""so sound that I did not know whether
I was still asleep or not when I found myself staring at a figure that
was moving toward me, and called out your name. Have you been trying the
old spinet? You must have played very softly.""

I would tell a thousand more lies worse than that one to see the look of
relief that came into her face. She smiled adorably, and said in her
natural voice: ""Alec, I tripped on that wolf's head, and I think my ankle
is sprained. Please call Marie, and then go home.""

I did as she bade me, and left her there when the maid came in.




III

At noon next day when I called, I found Boris walking restlessly about
his studio.

""Geneviève is asleep just now,"" he told me, ""the sprain is nothing, but
why should she have such a high fever? The doctor can't account for it;
or else he will not,"" he muttered.

""Geneviève has a fever?"" I asked.

""I should say so, and has actually been a little light-headed at
intervals all night. The idea! gay little Geneviève, without a care in
the world,--and she keeps saying her heart's broken, and she wants to
die!""

My own heart stood still.

Boris leaned against the door of his studio, looking down, his hands in
his pockets, his kind, keen eyes clouded, a new line of trouble drawn
""over the mouth's good mark, that made the smile."" The maid had orders to
summon him the instant Geneviève opened her eyes. We waited and waited,
and Boris, growing restless, wandered about, fussing with modelling wax
and red clay. Suddenly he started for the next room. ""Come and see my
rose-coloured bath full of death!"" he cried.

""Is it death?"" I asked, to humour his mood.

""You are not prepared to call it life, I suppose,"" he answered. As he
spoke he plucked a solitary goldfish squirming and twisting out of its
globe. ""We'll send this one after the other--wherever that is,"" he said.
There was feverish excitement in his voice. A dull weight of fever lay on
my limbs and on my brain as I followed him to the fair crystal pool with
its pink-tinted sides; and he dropped the creature in. Falling, its
scales flashed with a hot orange gleam in its angry twistings and
contortions; the moment it struck the liquid it became rigid and sank
heavily to the bottom. Then came the milky foam, the splendid hues
radiating on the surface and then the shaft of pure serene light broke
through from seemingly infinite depths. Boris plunged in his hand and
drew out an exquisite marble thing, blue-veined, rose-tinted, and
glistening with opalescent drops.

""Child's play,"" he muttered, and looked wearily, longingly at me,--as if
I could answer such questions! But Jack Scott came in and entered into
the ""game,"" as he called it, with ardour. Nothing would do but to try the
experiment on the white rabbit then and there. I was willing that Boris
should find distraction from his cares, but I hated to see the life go
out of a warm, living creature and I declined to be present. Picking up a
book at random, I sat down in the studio to read. Alas! I had found
_The King in Yellow_. After a few moments, which seemed ages, I was
putting it away with a nervous shudder, when Boris and Jack came in
bringing their marble rabbit. At the same time the bell rang above, and a
cry came from the sick-room. Boris was gone like a flash, and the next
moment he called, ""Jack, run for the doctor; bring him back with you.
Alec, come here.""

I went and stood at her door. A frightened maid came out in haste and ran
away to fetch some remedy. Geneviève, sitting bolt upright, with crimson
cheeks and glittering eyes, babbled incessantly and resisted Boris'
gentle restraint. He called me to help. At my first touch she sighed and
sank back, closing her eyes, and then--then--as we still bent above her,
she opened them again, looked straight into Boris' face--poor
fever-crazed girl!--and told her secret. At the same instant our three
lives turned into new channels; the bond that held us so long together
snapped for ever and a new bond was forged in its place, for she had
spoken my name, and as the fever tortured her, her heart poured out its
load of hidden sorrow. Amazed and dumb I bowed my head, while my face
burned like a live coal, and the blood surged in my ears, stupefying me
with its clamour. Incapable of movement, incapable of speech, I listened
to her feverish words in an agony of shame and sorrow. I could not
silence her, I could not look at Boris. Then I felt an arm upon my
shoulder, and Boris turned a bloodless face to mine.

""It is not your fault, Alec; don't grieve so if she loves you--"" but he
could not finish; and as the doctor stepped swiftly into the room,
saying--""Ah, the fever!"" I seized Jack Scott and hurried him to the
street, saying, ""Boris would rather be alone."" We crossed the street to
our own apartments, and that night, seeing I was going to be ill too, he
went for the doctor again. The last thing I recollect with any
distinctness was hearing Jack say, ""For Heaven's sake, doctor, what ails
him, to wear a face like that?"" and I thought of _The King in
Yellow_ and the Pallid Mask.

I was very ill, for the strain of two years which I had endured since
that fatal May morning when Geneviève murmured, ""I love you, but I think
I love Boris best,"" told on me at last. I had never imagined that it
could become more than I could endure. Outwardly tranquil, I had deceived
myself. Although the inward battle raged night after night, and I, lying
alone in my room, cursed myself for rebellious thoughts unloyal to Boris
and unworthy of Geneviève, the morning always brought relief, and I
returned to Geneviève and to my dear Boris with a heart washed clean by
the tempests of the night.

Never in word or deed or thought while with them had I betrayed my sorrow
even to myself.

The mask of self-deception was no longer a mask for me, it was a part of
me. Night lifted it, laying bare the stifled truth below; but there was
no one to see except myself, and when the day broke the mask fell back
again of its own accord. These thoughts passed through my troubled mind
as I lay sick, but they were hopelessly entangled with visions of white
creatures, heavy as stone, crawling about in Boris' basin,--of the wolf's
head on the rug, foaming and snapping at Geneviève, who lay smiling
beside it. I thought, too, of the King in Yellow wrapped in the fantastic
colours of his tattered mantle, and that bitter cry of Cassilda, ""Not
upon us, oh King, not upon us!"" Feverishly I struggled to put it from me,
but I saw the lake of Hali, thin and blank, without a ripple or wind to
stir it, and I saw the towers of Carcosa behind the moon. Aldebaran, the
Hyades, Alar, Hastur, glided through the cloud-rifts which fluttered and
flapped as they passed like the scolloped tatters of the King in Yellow.
Among all these, one sane thought persisted. It never wavered, no matter
what else was going on in my disordered mind, that my chief reason for
existing was to meet some requirement of Boris and Geneviève. What this
obligation was, its nature, was never clear; sometimes it seemed to be
protection, sometimes support, through a great crisis. Whatever it seemed
to be for the time, its weight rested only on me, and I was never so ill
or so weak that I did not respond with my whole soul. There were always
crowds of faces about me, mostly strange, but a few I recognized, Boris
among them. Afterward they told me that this could not have been, but I
know that once at least he bent over me. It was only a touch, a faint
echo of his voice, then the clouds settled back on my senses, and I lost
him, but he _did_ stand there and bend over me _once_ at least.

At last, one morning I awoke to find the sunlight falling across my bed,
and Jack Scott reading beside me. I had not strength enough to speak
aloud, neither could I think, much less remember, but I could smile
feebly, as Jack's eye met mine, and when he jumped up and asked eagerly
if I wanted anything, I could whisper, ""Yes--Boris."" Jack moved to the
head of my bed, and leaned down to arrange my pillow: I did not see his
face, but he answered heartily, ""You must wait, Alec; you are too weak to
see even Boris.""

I waited and I grew strong; in a few days I was able to see whom I would,
but meanwhile I had thought and remembered. From the moment when all the
past grew clear again in my mind, I never doubted what I should do when
the time came, and I felt sure that Boris would have resolved upon the
same course so far as he was concerned; as for what pertained to me
alone, I knew he would see that also as I did. I no longer asked for any
one. I never inquired why no message came from them; why during the week
I lay there, waiting and growing stronger, I never heard their name
spoken. Preoccupied with my own searchings for the right way, and with my
feeble but determined fight against despair, I simply acquiesced in
Jack's reticence, taking for granted that he was afraid to speak of them,
lest I should turn unruly and insist on seeing them. Meanwhile I said
over and over to myself, how would it be when life began again for us
all? We would take up our relations exactly as they were before Geneviève
fell ill. Boris and I would look into each other's eyes, and there would
be neither rancour nor cowardice nor mistrust in that glance. I would be
with them again for a little while in the dear intimacy of their home,
and then, without pretext or explanation, I would disappear from their
lives for ever. Boris would know; Geneviève--the only comfort was that
she would never know. It seemed, as I thought it over, that I had found
the meaning of that sense of obligation which had persisted all through
my delirium, and the only possible answer to it. So, when I was quite
ready, I beckoned Jack to me one day, and said--

""Jack, I want Boris at once; and take my dearest greeting to
Geneviève....""

When at last he made me understand that they were both dead, I fell into
a wild rage that tore all my little convalescent strength to atoms. I
raved and cursed myself into a relapse, from which I crawled forth some
weeks afterward a boy of twenty-one who believed that his youth was gone
for ever. I seemed to be past the capability of further suffering, and
one day when Jack handed me a letter and the keys to Boris' house, I took
them without a tremor and asked him to tell me all. It was cruel of me to
ask him, but there was no help for it, and he leaned wearily on his thin
hands, to reopen the wound which could never entirely heal. He began very
quietly--

""Alec, unless you have a clue that I know nothing about, you will not be
able to explain any more than I what has happened. I suspect that you
would rather not hear these details, but you must learn them, else I
would spare you the relation. God knows I wish I could be spared the
telling. I shall use few words.

""That day when I left you in the doctor's care and came back to Boris, I
found him working on the 'Fates.' Geneviève, he said, was sleeping under
the influence of drugs. She had been quite out of her mind, he said. He
kept on working, not talking any more, and I watched him. Before long, I
saw that the third figure of the group--the one looking straight ahead,
out over the world--bore his face; not as you ever saw it, but as it
looked then and to the end. This is one thing for which I should like to
find an explanation, but I never shall.

""Well, he worked and I watched him in silence, and we went on that way
until nearly midnight. Then we heard the door open and shut sharply, and
a swift rush in the next room. Boris sprang through the doorway and I
followed; but we were too late. She lay at the bottom of the pool, her
hands across her breast. Then Boris shot himself through the heart."" Jack
stopped speaking, drops of sweat stood under his eyes, and his thin
cheeks twitched. ""I carried Boris to his room. Then I went back and let
that hellish fluid out of the pool, and turning on all the water, washed
the marble clean of every drop. When at length I dared descend the steps,
I found her lying there as white as snow. At last, when I had decided
what was best to do, I went into the laboratory, and first emptied the
solution in the basin into the waste-pipe; then I poured the contents of
every jar and bottle after it. There was wood in the fire-place, so I
built a fire, and breaking the locks of Boris' cabinet I burnt every
paper, notebook and letter that I found there. With a mallet from the
studio I smashed to pieces all the empty bottles, then loading them into
a coal-scuttle, I carried them to the cellar and threw them over the
red-hot bed of the furnace. Six times I made the journey, and at last,
not a vestige remained of anything which might again aid in seeking for
the formula which Boris had found. Then at last I dared call the doctor.
He is a good man, and together we struggled to keep it from the public.
Without him I never could have succeeded. At last we got the servants
paid and sent away into the country, where old Rosier keeps them quiet
with stones of Boris' and Geneviève's travels in distant lands, from
whence they will not return for years. We buried Boris in the little
cemetery of Sèvres. The doctor is a good creature, and knows when to pity
a man who can bear no more. He gave his certificate of heart disease and
asked no questions of me.""

Then, lifting his head from his hands, he said, ""Open the letter, Alec;
it is for us both.""

I tore it open. It was Boris' will dated a year before. He left
everything to Geneviève, and in case of her dying childless, I was to
take control of the house in the Rue Sainte-Cécile, and Jack Scott the
management at Ept. On our deaths the property reverted to his mother's
family in Russia, with the exception of the sculptured marbles executed
by himself. These he left to me.

The page blurred under our eyes, and Jack got up and walked to the
window. Presently he returned and sat down again. I dreaded to hear what
he was going to say, but he spoke with the same simplicity and
gentleness.

""Geneviève lies before the Madonna in the marble room. The Madonna bends
tenderly above her, and Geneviève smiles back into that calm face that
never would have been except for her.""

His voice broke, but he grasped my hand, saying, ""Courage, Alec."" Next
morning he left for Ept to fulfil his trust.




IV

The same evening I took the keys and went into the house I had known so
well. Everything was in order, but the silence was terrible. Though I
went twice to the door of the marble room, I could not force myself to
enter. It was beyond my strength. I went into the smoking-room and sat
down before the spinet. A small lace handkerchief lay on the keys, and I
turned away, choking. It was plain I could not stay, so I locked every
door, every window, and the three front and back gates, and went away.
Next morning Alcide packed my valise, and leaving him in charge of my
apartments I took the Orient express for Constantinople. During the two
years that I wandered through the East, at first, in our letters, we
never mentioned Geneviève and Boris, but gradually their names crept in.
I recollect particularly a passage in one of Jack's letters replying to
one of mine--

""What you tell me of seeing Boris bending over you while you lay ill, and
feeling his touch on your face, and hearing his voice, of course troubles
me. This that you describe must have happened a fortnight after he died.
I say to myself that you were dreaming, that it was part of your
delirium, but the explanation does not satisfy me, nor would it you.""

Toward the end of the second year a letter came from Jack to me in India
so unlike anything that I had ever known of him that I decided to return
at once to Paris. He wrote: ""I am well, and sell all my pictures as
artists do who have no need of money. I have not a care of my own, but I
am more restless than if I had. I am unable to shake off a strange
anxiety about you. It is not apprehension, it is rather a breathless
expectancy--of what, God knows! I can only say it is wearing me out.
Nights I dream always of you and Boris. I can never recall anything
afterward, but I wake in the morning with my heart beating, and all day
the excitement increases until I fall asleep at night to recall the same
experience. I am quite exhausted by it, and have determined to break up
this morbid condition. I must see you. Shall I go to Bombay, or will you
come to Paris?""

I telegraphed him to expect me by the next steamer.

When we met I thought he had changed very little; I, he insisted, looked
in splendid health. It was good to hear his voice again, and as we sat
and chatted about what life still held for us, we felt that it was
pleasant to be alive in the bright spring weather.

We stayed in Paris together a week, and then I went for a week to Ept
with him, but first of all we went to the cemetery at Sèvres, where Boris
lay.

""Shall we place the 'Fates' in the little grove above him?"" Jack asked,
and I answered--

""I think only the 'Madonna' should watch over Boris' grave."" But Jack was
none the better for my home-coming. The dreams of which he could not
retain even the least definite outline continued, and he said that at
times the sense of breathless expectancy was suffocating.

""You see I do you harm and not good,"" I said. ""Try a change without me.""
So he started alone for a ramble among the Channel Islands, and I went
back to Paris. I had not yet entered Boris' house, now mine, since my
return, but I knew it must be done. It had been kept in order by Jack;
there were servants there, so I gave up my own apartment and went there
to live. Instead of the agitation I had feared, I found myself able to
paint there tranquilly. I visited all the rooms--all but one. I could not
bring myself to enter the marble room where Geneviève lay, and yet I felt
the longing growing daily to look upon her face, to kneel beside her.

One April afternoon, I lay dreaming in the smoking-room, just as I had
lain two years before, and mechanically I looked among the tawny Eastern
rugs for the wolf-skin. At last I distinguished the pointed ears and flat
cruel head, and I thought of my dream where I saw Geneviève lying beside
it. The helmets still hung against the threadbare tapestry, among them
the old Spanish morion which I remembered Geneviève had once put on when
we were amusing ourselves with the ancient bits of mail. I turned my eyes
to the spinet; every yellow key seemed eloquent of her caressing hand,
and I rose, drawn by the strength of my life's passion to the sealed door
of the marble room. The heavy doors swung inward under my trembling
hands. Sunlight poured through the window, tipping with gold the wings of
Cupid, and lingered like a nimbus over the brows of the Madonna. Her
tender face bent in compassion over a marble form so exquisitely pure
that I knelt and signed myself. Geneviève lay in the shadow under the
Madonna, and yet, through her white arms, I saw the pale azure vein, and
beneath her softly clasped hands the folds of her dress were tinged with
rose, as if from some faint warm light within her breast.

Bending, with a breaking heart, I touched the marble drapery with my
lips, then crept back into the silent house.

A maid came and brought me a letter, and I sat down in the little
conservatory to read it; but as I was about to break the seal, seeing the
girl lingering, I asked her what she wanted.

She stammered something about a white rabbit that had been caught in the
house, and asked what should be done with it I told her to let it loose
in the walled garden behind the house, and opened my letter. It was from
Jack, but so incoherent that I thought he must have lost his reason. It
was nothing but a series of prayers to me not to leave the house until he
could get back; he could not tell me why, there were the dreams, he
said--he could explain nothing, but he was sure that I must not leave the
house in the Rue Sainte-Cécile.

As I finished reading I raised my eyes and saw the same maid-servant
standing in the doorway holding a glass dish in which two gold-fish were
swimming: ""Put them back into the tank and tell me what you mean by
interrupting me,"" I said.

With a half-suppressed whimper she emptied water and fish into an
aquarium at the end of the conservatory, and turning to me asked my
permission to leave my service. She said people were playing tricks on
her, evidently with a design of getting her into trouble; the marble
rabbit had been stolen and a live one had been brought into the house;
the two beautiful marble fish were gone, and she had just found those
common live things flopping on the dining-room floor. I reassured her and
sent her away, saying I would look about myself. I went into the studio;
there was nothing there but my canvases and some casts, except the marble
of the Easter lily. I saw it on a table across the room. Then I strode
angrily over to it. But the flower I lifted from the table was fresh and
fragile and filled the air with perfume.

Then suddenly I comprehended, and sprang through the hall-way to the
marble room. The doors flew open, the sunlight streamed into my face, and
through it, in a heavenly glory, the Madonna smiled, as Geneviève lifted
her flushed face from her marble couch and opened her sleepy eyes.

","Whether the dreams brought on the fever or the fever brought on the dreams Walter Gilman did not know. Behind everything crouched the brooding, festering horror of the ancient town, and of the mouldy, unhallowed garret gable where he wrote and studied and wrestled with figures and formulae when he was not tossing on the meagre iron bed. His ears were growing sensitive to a preternatural and intolerable degree, and he had long ago stopped the cheap mantel clock whose ticking had come to seem like a thunder of artillery. At night the subtle stirring of the black city outside, the sinister scurrying of rats in the wormy partitions, and the creaking of hidden timbers in the centuried house, were enough to give him a sense of strident pandemonium. The darkness always teemed with unexplained sound—and yet he sometimes shook with fear lest the noises he heard should subside and allow him to hear certain other, fainter, noises which he suspected were lurking behind them.
      He was in the changeless, legend-haunted city of Arkham, with its clustering gambrel roofs that sway and sag over attics where witches hid from the King’s men in the dark, olden days of the Province. Nor was any spot in that city more steeped in macabre memory than the gable room which harboured him—for it was this house and this room which had likewise harboured old Keziah Mason, whose flight from Salem Gaol at the last no one was ever able to explain. That was in 1692—the gaoler had gone mad and babbled of a small, white-fanged furry thing which scuttled out of Keziah’s cell, and not even Cotton Mather could explain the curves and angles smeared on the grey stone walls with some red, sticky fluid.
      Possibly Gilman ought not to have studied so hard. Non-Euclidean calculus and quantum physics are enough to stretch any brain; and when one mixes them with folklore, and tries to trace a strange background of multi-dimensional reality behind the ghoulish hints of the Gothic tales and the wild whispers of the chimney-corner, one can hardly expect to be wholly free from mental tension. Gilman came from Haverhill, but it was only after he had entered college in Arkham that he began to connect his mathematics with the fantastic legends of elder magic. Something in the air of the hoary town worked obscurely on his imagination. The professors at Miskatonic had urged him to slacken up, and had voluntarily cut down his course at several points. Moreover, they had stopped him from consulting the dubious old books on forbidden secrets that were kept under lock and key in a vault at the university library. But all these precautions came late in the day, so that Gilman had some terrible hints from the dreaded Necronomicon of Abdul Alhazred, the fragmentary Book of Eibon, and the suppressed Unaussprechlichen Kulten of von Junzt to correlate with his abstract formulae on the properties of space and the linkage of dimensions known and unknown.
      He knew his room was in the old Witch House—that, indeed, was why he had taken it. There was much in the Essex County records about Keziah Mason’s trial, and what she had admitted under pressure to the Court of Oyer and Terminer had fascinated Gilman beyond all reason. She had told Judge Hathorne of lines and curves that could be made to point out directions leading through the walls of space to other spaces beyond, and had implied that such lines and curves were frequently used at certain midnight meetings in the dark valley of the white stone beyond Meadow Hill and on the unpeopled island in the river. She had spoken also of the Black Man, of her oath, and of her new secret name of Nahab. Then she had drawn those devices on the walls of her cell and vanished.
      Gilman believed strange things about Keziah, and had felt a queer thrill on learning that her dwelling was still standing after more than 235 years. When he heard the hushed Arkham whispers about Keziah’s persistent presence in the old house and the narrow streets, about the irregular human tooth-marks left on certain sleepers in that and other houses, about the childish cries heard near May-Eve, and Hallowmass, about the stench often noted in the old house’s attic just after those dreaded seasons, and about the small, furry, sharp-toothed thing which haunted the mouldering structure and the town and nuzzled people curiously in the black hours before dawn, he resolved to live in the place at any cost. A room was easy to secure; for the house was unpopular, hard to rent, and long given over to cheap lodgings. Gilman could not have told what he expected to find there, but he knew he wanted to be in the building where some circumstance had more or less suddenly given a mediocre old woman of the seventeenth century an insight into mathematical depths perhaps beyond the utmost modern delvings of Planck, Heisenberg, Einstein, and de Sitter.
      He studied the timber and plaster walls for traces of cryptic designs at every accessible spot where the paper had peeled, and within a week managed to get the eastern attic room where Keziah was held to have practiced her spells. It had been vacant from the first—for no one had ever been willing to stay there long—but the Polish landlord had grown wary about renting it. Yet nothing whatever happened to Gilman till about the time of the fever. No ghostly Keziah flitted through the sombre halls and chambers, no small furry thing crept into his dismal eyrie to nuzzle him, and no record of the witch’s incantations rewarded his constant search. Sometimes he would take walks through shadowy tangles of unpaved musty-smelling lanes where eldritch brown houses of unknown age leaned and tottered and leered mockingly through narrow, small-paned windows. Here he knew strange things had happened once, and there was a faint suggestion behind the surface that everything of that monstrous past might not—at least in the darkest, narrowest, and most intricately crooked alleys—have utterly perished. He also rowed out twice to the ill-regarded island in the river, and made a sketch of the singular angles described by the moss-grown rows of grey standing stones whose origin was so obscure and immemorial.
      Gilman’s room was of good size but queerly irregular shape; the north wall slanting perceptibly inward from the outer to the inner end, while the low ceiling slanted gently downward in the same direction. Aside from an obvious rat-hole and the signs of other stopped-up ones, there was no access—nor any appearance of a former avenue of access—to the space which must have existed between the slanting wall and the straight outer wall on the house’s north side, though a view from the exterior shewed where a window had been boarded up at a very remote date. The loft above the ceiling—which must have had a slanting floor—was likewise inaccessible. When Gilman climbed up a ladder to the cobwebbed level loft above the rest of the attic he found vestiges of a bygone aperture tightly and heavily covered with ancient planking and secured by the stout wooden pegs common in colonial carpentry. No amount of persuasion, however, could induce the stolid landlord to let him investigate either of these two closed spaces.
      As time wore along, his absorption in the irregular wall and ceiling of his room increased; for he began to read into the odd angles a mathematical significance which seemed to offer vague clues regarding their purpose. Old Keziah, he reflected, might have had excellent reasons for living in a room with peculiar angles; for was it not through certain angles that she claimed to have gone outside the boundaries of the world of space we know? His interest gradually veered away from the unplumbed voids beyond the slanting surfaces, since it now appeared that the purpose of those surfaces concerned the side he was already on.
      The touch of brain-fever and the dreams began early in February. For some time, apparently, the curious angles of Gilman’s room had been having a strange, almost hypnotic effect on him; and as the bleak winter advanced he had found himself staring more and more intently at the corner where the down-slanting ceiling met the inward-slanting wall. About this period his inability to concentrate on his formal studies worried him considerably, his apprehensions about the mid-year examinations being very acute. But the exaggerated sense of hearing was scarcely less annoying. Life had become an insistent and almost unendurable cacophony, and there was that constant, terrifying impression of other sounds—perhaps from regions beyond life—trembling on the very brink of audibility. So far as concrete noises went, the rats in the ancient partitions were the worst. Sometimes their scratching seemed not only furtive but deliberate. When it came from beyond the slanting north wall it was mixed with a sort of dry rattling—and when it came from the century-closed loft above the slanting ceiling Gilman always braced himself as if expecting some horror which only bided its time before descending to engulf him utterly.
      The dreams were wholly beyond the pale of sanity, and Gilman felt that they must be a result, jointly, of his studies in mathematics and in folklore. He had been thinking too much about the vague regions which his formulae told him must lie beyond the three dimensions we know, and about the possibility that old Keziah Mason—guided by some influence past all conjecture—had actually found the gate to those regions. The yellowed county records containing her testimony and that of her accusers were so damnably suggestive of things beyond human experience—and the descriptions of the darting little furry object which served as her familiar were so painfully realistic despite their incredible details.
      That object—no larger than a good-sized rat and quaintly called by the townspeople “Brown Jenkin”—seemed to have been the fruit of a remarkable case of sympathetic herd-delusion, for in 1692 no less than eleven persons had testified to glimpsing it. There were recent rumours, too, with a baffling and disconcerting amount of agreement. Witnesses said it had long hair and the shape of a rat, but that its sharp-toothed, bearded face was evilly human while its paws were like tiny human hands. It took messages betwixt old Keziah and the devil, and was nursed on the witch’s blood—which it sucked like a vampire. Its voice was a kind of loathsome titter, and it could speak all languages. Of all the bizarre monstrosities in Gilman’s dreams, nothing filled him with greater panic and nausea than this blasphemous and diminutive hybrid, whose image flitted across his vision in a form a thousandfold more hateful than anything his waking mind had deduced from the ancient records and the modern whispers.
      Gilman’s dreams consisted largely in plunges through limitless abysses of inexplicably coloured twilight and bafflingly disordered sound; abysses whose material and gravitational properties, and whose relation to his own entity, he could not even begin to explain. He did not walk or climb, fly or swim, crawl or wriggle; yet always experienced a mode of motion partly voluntary and partly involuntary. Of his own condition he could not well judge, for sight of his arms, legs, and torso seemed always cut off by some odd disarrangement of perspective; but he felt that his physical organisation and faculties were somehow marvellously transmuted and obliquely projected—though not without a certain grotesque relationship to his normal proportions and properties.
      The abysses were by no means vacant, being crowded with indescribably angled masses of alien-hued substance, some of which appeared to be organic while others seemed inorganic. A few of the organic objects tended to awake vague memories in the back of his mind, though he could form no conscious idea of what they mockingly resembled or suggested. In the later dreams he began to distinguish separate categories into which the organic objects appeared to be divided, and which seemed to involve in each case a radically different species of conduct-pattern and basic motivation. Of these categories one seemed to him to include objects slightly less illogical and irrelevant in their motions than the members of the other categories.
      All the objects—organic and inorganic alike—were totally beyond description or even comprehension. Gilman sometimes compared the inorganic masses to prisms, labyrinths, clusters of cubes and planes, and Cyclopean buildings; and the organic things struck him variously as groups of bubbles, octopi, centipedes, living Hindoo idols, and intricate Arabesques roused into a kind of ophidian animation. Everything he saw was unspeakably menacing and horrible; and whenever one of the organic entities appeared by its motions to be noticing him, he felt a stark, hideous fright which generally jolted him awake. Of how the organic entities moved, he could tell no more than of how he moved himself. In time he observed a further mystery—the tendency of certain entities to appear suddenly out of empty space, or to disappear totally with equal suddenness. The shrieking, roaring confusion of sound which permeated the abysses was past all analysis as to pitch, timbre, or rhythm; but seemed to be synchronous with vague visual changes in all the indefinite objects, organic and inorganic alike. Gilman had a constant sense of dread that it might rise to some unbearable degree of intensity during one or another of its obscure, relentlessly inevitable fluctuations.
      But it was not in these vortices of complete alienage that he saw Brown Jenkin. That shocking little horror was reserved for certain lighter, sharper dreams which assailed him just before he dropped into the fullest depths of sleep. He would be lying in the dark fighting to keep awake when a faint lambent glow would seem to shimmer around the centuried room, shewing in a violet mist the convergence of angled planes which had seized his brain so insidiously. The horror would appear to pop out of the rat-hole in the corner and patter toward him over the sagging, wide-planked floor with evil expectancy in its tiny, bearded human face—but mercifully, this dream always melted away before the object got close enough to nuzzle him. It had hellishly long, sharp, canine teeth. Gilman tried to stop up the rat-hole every day, but each night the real tenants of the partitions would gnaw away the obstruction, whatever it might be. Once he had the landlord nail tin over it, but the next night the rats gnawed a fresh hole—in making which they pushed or dragged out into the room a curious little fragment of bone.
      Gilman did not report his fever to the doctor, for he knew he could not pass the examinations if ordered to the college infirmary when every moment was needed for cramming. As it was, he failed in Calculus D and Advanced General Psychology, though not without hope of making up lost ground before the end of the term. It was in March when the fresh element entered his lighter preliminary dreaming, and the nightmare shape of Brown Jenkin began to be companioned by the nebulous blur which grew more and more to resemble a bent old woman. This addition disturbed him more than he could account for, but finally he decided that it was like an ancient crone whom he had twice actually encountered in the dark tangle of lanes near the abandoned wharves. On those occasions the evil, sardonic, and seemingly unmotivated stare of the beldame had set him almost shivering—especially the first time, when an overgrown rat darting across the shadowed mouth of a neighbouring alley had made him think irrationally of Brown Jenkin. Now, he reflected, those nervous fears were being mirrored in his disordered dreams.
      That the influence of the old house was unwholesome, he could not deny; but traces of his early morbid interest still held him there. He argued that the fever alone was responsible for his nightly phantasies, and that when the touch abated he would be free from the monstrous visions. Those visions, however, were of abhorrent vividness and convincingness, and whenever he awaked he retained a vague sense of having undergone much more than he remembered. He was hideously sure that in unrecalled dreams he had talked with both Brown Jenkin and the old woman, and that they had been urging him to go somewhere with them and to meet a third being of greater potency.
      Toward the end of March he began to pick up in his mathematics, though other studies bothered him increasingly. He was getting an intuitive knack for solving Riemannian equations, and astonished Professor Upham by his comprehension of fourth-dimensional and other problems which had floored all the rest of the class. One afternoon there was a discussion of possible freakish curvatures in space, and of theoretical points of approach or even contact between our part of the cosmos and various other regions as distant as the farthest stars or the trans-galactic gulfs themselves—or even as fabulously remote as the tentatively conceivable cosmic units beyond the whole Einsteinian space-time continuum. Gilman’s handling of this theme filled everyone with admiration, even though some of his hypothetical illustrations caused an increase in the always plentiful gossip about his nervous and solitary eccentricity. What made the students shake their heads was his sober theory that a man might—given mathematical knowledge admittedly beyond all likelihood of human acquirement—step deliberately from the earth to any other celestial body which might lie at one of an infinity of specific points in the cosmic pattern.
      Such a step, he said, would require only two stages; first, a passage out of the three-dimensional sphere we know, and second, a passage back to the three-dimensional sphere at another point, perhaps one of infinite remoteness. That this could be accomplished without loss of life was in many cases conceivable. Any being from any part of three-dimensional space could probably survive in the fourth dimension; and its survival of the second stage would depend upon what alien part of three-dimensional space it might select for its re-entry. Denizens of some planets might be able to live on certain others—even planets belonging to other galaxies, or to similar-dimensional phases of other space-time continua—though of course there must be vast numbers of mutually uninhabitable even though mathematically juxtaposed bodies or zones of space.
      It was also possible that the inhabitants of a given dimensional realm could survive entry to many unknown and incomprehensible realms of additional or indefinitely multiplied dimensions—be they within or outside the given space-time continuum—and that the converse would be likewise true. This was a matter for speculation, though one could be fairly certain that the type of mutation involved in a passage from any given dimensional plane to the next higher plane would not be destructive of biological integrity as we understand it. Gilman could not be very clear about his reasons for this last assumption, but his haziness here was more than overbalanced by his clearness on other complex points. Professor Upham especially liked his demonstration of the kinship of higher mathematics to certain phases of magical lore transmitted down the ages from an ineffable antiquity—human or pre-human—whose knowledge of the cosmos and its laws was greater than ours.
      Around the first of April Gilman worried considerably because his slow fever did not abate. He was also troubled by what some of his fellow-lodgers said about his sleep-walking. It seemed that he was often absent from his bed, and that the creaking of his floor at certain hours of the night was remarked by the man in the room below. This fellow also spoke of hearing the tread of shod feet in the night; but Gilman was sure he must have been mistaken in this, since shoes as well as other apparel were always precisely in place in the morning. One could develop all sorts of aural delusions in this morbid old house—for did not Gilman himself, even in daylight, now feel certain that noises other than rat-scratchings came from the black voids beyond the slanting wall and above the slanting ceiling? His pathologically sensitive ears began to listen for faint footfalls in the immemorially sealed loft overhead, and sometimes the illusion of such things was agonisingly realistic.
      However, he knew that he had actually become a somnambulist; for twice at night his room had been found vacant, though with all his clothing in place. Of this he had been assured by Frank Elwood, the one fellow-student whose poverty forced him to room in this squalid and unpopular house. Elwood had been studying in the small hours and had come up for help on a differential equation, only to find Gilman absent. It had been rather presumptuous of him to open the unlocked door after knocking had failed to rouse a response, but he had needed the help very badly and thought that his host would not mind a gentle prodding awake. On neither occasion, though, had Gilman been there—and when told of the matter he wondered where he could have been wandering, barefoot and with only his night-clothes on. He resolved to investigate the matter if reports of his sleep-walking continued, and thought of sprinkling flour on the floor of the corridor to see where his footsteps might lead. The door was the only conceivable egress, for there was no possible foothold outside the narrow window.
      As April advanced Gilman’s fever-sharpened ears were disturbed by the whining prayers of a superstitious loomfixer named Joe Mazurewicz, who had a room on the ground floor. Mazurewicz had told long, rambling stories about the ghost of old Keziah and the furry, sharp-fanged, nuzzling thing, and had said he was so badly haunted at times that only his silver crucifix—given him for the purpose by Father Iwanicki of St. Stanislaus’ Church—could bring him relief. Now he was praying because the Witches’ Sabbath was drawing near. May-Eve was Walpurgis-Night, when hell’s blackest evil roamed the earth and all the slaves of Satan gathered for nameless rites and deeds. It was always a very bad time in Arkham, even though the fine folks up in Miskatonic Avenue and High and Saltonstall Streets pretended to know nothing about it. There would be bad doings—and a child or two would probably be missing. Joe knew about such things, for his grandmother in the old country had heard tales from her grandmother. It was wise to pray and count one’s beads at this season. For three months Keziah and Brown Jenkin had not been near Joe’s room, nor near Paul Choynski’s room, nor anywhere else—and it meant no good when they held off like that. They must be up to something.
      Gilman dropped in at a doctor’s office on the 16th of the month, and was surprised to find his temperature was not as high as he had feared. The physician questioned him sharply, and advised him to see a nerve specialist. On reflection, he was glad he had not consulted the still more inquisitive college doctor. Old Waldron, who had curtailed his activities before, would have made him take a rest—an impossible thing now that he was so close to great results in his equations. He was certainly near the boundary between the known universe and the fourth dimension, and who could say how much farther he might go?
      But even as these thoughts came to him he wondered at the source of his strange confidence. Did all of this perilous sense of imminence come from the formulae on the sheets he covered day by day? The soft, stealthy, imaginary footsteps in the sealed loft above were unnerving. And now, too, there was a growing feeling that somebody was constantly persuading him to do something terrible which he could not do. How about the somnambulism? Where did he go sometimes in the night? And what was that faint suggestion of sound which once in a while seemed to trickle through the maddening confusion of identifiable sounds even in broad daylight and full wakefulness? Its rhythm did not correspond to anything on earth, unless perhaps to the cadence of one or two unmentionable Sabbat-chants, and sometimes he feared it corresponded to certain attributes of the vague shrieking or roaring in those wholly alien abysses of dream.
      The dreams were meanwhile getting to be atrocious. In the lighter preliminary phase the evil old woman was now of fiendish distinctness, and Gilman knew she was the one who had frightened him in the slums. Her bent back, long nose, and shrivelled chin were unmistakable, and her shapeless brown garments were like those he remembered. The expression on her face was one of hideous malevolence and exultation, and when he awaked he could recall a croaking voice that persuaded and threatened. He must meet the Black Man, and go with them all to the throne of Azathoth at the centre of ultimate Chaos. That was what she said. He must sign in his own blood the book of Azathoth and take a new secret name now that his independent delvings had gone so far. What kept him from going with her and Brown Jenkin and the other to the throne of Chaos where the thin flutes pipe mindlessly was the fact that he had seen the name “Azathoth” in the Necronomicon, and knew it stood for a primal evil too horrible for description.
      The old woman always appeared out of thin air near the corner where the downward slant met the inward slant. She seemed to crystallise at a point closer to the ceiling than to the floor, and every night she was a little nearer and more distinct before the dream shifted. Brown Jenkin, too, was always a little nearer at the last, and its yellowish-white fangs glistened shockingly in that unearthly violet phosphorescence. Its shrill loathsome tittering stuck more and more in Gilman’s head, and he could remember in the morning how it had pronounced the words “Azathoth” and “Nyarlathotep”.
      In the deeper dreams everything was likewise more distinct, and Gilman felt that the twilight abysses around him were those of the fourth dimension. Those organic entities whose motions seemed least flagrantly irrelevant and unmotivated were probably projections of life-forms from our own planet, including human beings. What the others were in their own dimensional sphere or spheres he dared not try to think. Two of the less irrelevantly moving things—a rather large congeries of iridescent, prolately spheroidal bubbles and a very much smaller polyhedron of unknown colours and rapidly shifting surface angles—seemed to take notice of him and follow him about or float ahead as he changed position among the titan prisms, labyrinths, cube-and-plane clusters, and quasi-buildings; and all the while the vague shrieking and roaring waxed louder and louder, as if approaching some monstrous climax of utterly unendurable intensity.
      During the night of April 19–20 the new development occurred. Gilman was half-involuntarily moving about in the twilight abysses with the bubble-mass and the small polyhedron floating ahead, when he noticed the peculiarly regular angles formed by the edges of some gigantic neighbouring prism-clusters. In another second he was out of the abyss and standing tremulously on a rocky hillside bathed in intense, diffused green light. He was barefooted and in his night-clothes, and when he tried to walk discovered that he could scarcely lift his feet. A swirling vapour hid everything but the immediate sloping terrain from sight, and he shrank from the thought of the sounds that might surge out of that vapour.
      Then he saw the two shapes laboriously crawling toward him—the old woman and the little furry thing. The crone strained up to her knees and managed to cross her arms in a singular fashion, while Brown Jenkin pointed in a certain direction with a horribly anthropoid fore paw which it raised with evident difficulty. Spurred by an impulse he did not originate, Gilman dragged himself forward along a course determined by the angle of the old woman’s arms and the direction of the small monstrosity’s paw, and before he had shuffled three steps he was back in the twilight abysses. Geometrical shapes seethed around him, and he fell dizzily and interminably. At last he woke in his bed in the crazily angled garret of the eldritch old house.
      He was good for nothing that morning, and stayed away from all his classes. Some unknown attraction was pulling his eyes in a seemingly irrelevant direction, for he could not help staring at a certain vacant spot on the floor. As the day advanced the focus of his unseeing eyes changed position, and by noon he had conquered the impulse to stare at vacancy. About two o’clock he went out for lunch, and as he threaded the narrow lanes of the city he found himself turning always to the southeast. Only an effort halted him at a cafeteria in Church Street, and after the meal he felt the unknown pull still more strongly.
      He would have to consult a nerve specialist after all—perhaps there was a connexion with his somnambulism—but meanwhile he might at least try to break the morbid spell himself. Undoubtedly he could still manage to walk away from the pull; so with great resolution he headed against it and dragged himself deliberately north along Garrison Street. By the time he had reached the bridge over the Miskatonic he was in a cold perspiration, and he clutched at the iron railing as he gazed upstream at the ill-regarded island whose regular lines of ancient standing stones brooded sullenly in the afternoon sunlight.
      Then he gave a start. For there was a clearly visible living figure on that desolate island, and a second glance told him it was certainly the strange old woman whose sinister aspect had worked itself so disastrously into his dreams. The tall grass near her was moving, too, as if some other living thing were crawling close to the ground. When the old woman began to turn toward him he fled precipitately off the bridge and into the shelter of the town’s labyrinthine waterfront alleys. Distant though the island was, he felt that a monstrous and invincible evil could flow from the sardonic stare of that bent, ancient figure in brown.
      The southeastward pull still held, and only with tremendous resolution could Gilman drag himself into the old house and up the rickety stairs. For hours he sat silent and aimless, with his eyes shifting gradually westward. About six o’clock his sharpened ears caught the whining prayers of Joe Mazurewicz two floors below, and in desperation he seized his hat and walked out into the sunset-golden streets, letting the now directly southward pull carry him where it might. An hour later darkness found him in the open fields beyond Hangman’s Brook, with the glimmering spring stars shining ahead. The urge to walk was gradually changing to an urge to leap mystically into space, and suddenly he realised just where the source of the pull lay.
      It was in the sky. A definite point among the stars had a claim on him and was calling him. Apparently it was a point somewhere between Hydra and Argo Navis, and he knew that he had been urged toward it ever since he had awaked soon after dawn. In the morning it had been underfoot; afternoon found it rising in the southeast, and now it was roughly south but wheeling toward the west. What was the meaning of this new thing? Was he going mad? How long would it last? Again mustering his resolution, Gilman turned and dragged himself back to the sinister old house.
      Mazurewicz was waiting for him at the door, and seemed both anxious and reluctant to whisper some fresh bit of superstition. It was about the witch light. Joe had been out celebrating the night before—it was Patriots’ Day in Massachusetts—and had come home after midnight. Looking up at the house from outside, he had thought at first that Gilman’s window was dark; but then he had seen the faint violet glow within. He wanted to warn the gentleman about that glow, for everybody in Arkham knew it was Keziah’s witch light which played near Brown Jenkin and the ghost of the old crone herself. He had not mentioned this before, but now he must tell about it because it meant that Keziah and her long-toothed familiar were haunting the young gentleman. Sometimes he and Paul Choynski and Landlord Dombrowski thought they saw that light seeping out of cracks in the sealed loft above the young gentleman’s room, but they had all agreed not to talk about that. However, it would be better for the gentleman to take another room and get a crucifix from some good priest like Father Iwanicki.
      As the man rambled on Gilman felt a nameless panic clutch at his throat. He knew that Joe must have been half drunk when he came home the night before, yet this mention of a violet light in the garret window was of frightful import. It was a lambent glow of this sort which always played about the old woman and the small furry thing in those lighter, sharper dreams which prefaced his plunge into unknown abysses, and the thought that a wakeful second person could see the dream-luminance was utterly beyond sane harbourage. Yet where had the fellow got such an odd notion? Had he himself talked as well as walked around the house in his sleep? No, Joe said, he had not—but he must check up on this. Perhaps Frank Elwood could tell him something, though he hated to ask.
      Fever—wild dreams—somnambulism—illusions of sounds—a pull toward a point in the sky—and now a suspicion of insane sleep-talking! He must stop studying, see a nerve specialist, and take himself in hand. When he climbed to the second story he paused at Elwood’s door but saw that the other youth was out. Reluctantly he continued up to his garret room and sat down in the dark. His gaze was still pulled to the southwest, but he also found himself listening intently for some sound in the closed loft above, and half imagining that an evil violet light seeped down through an infinitesimal crack in the low, slanting ceiling.
      That night as Gilman slept the violet light broke upon him with heightened intensity, and the old witch and small furry thing—getting closer than ever before—mocked him with inhuman squeals and devilish gestures. He was glad to sink into the vaguely roaring twilight abysses, though the pursuit of that iridescent bubble-congeries and that kaleidoscopic little polyhedron was menacing and irritating. Then came the shift as vast converging planes of a slippery-looking substance loomed above and below him—a shift which ended in a flash of delirium and a blaze of unknown, alien light in which yellow, carmine, and indigo were madly and inextricably blended.
      He was half lying on a high, fantastically balustraded terrace above a boundless jungle of outlandish, incredible peaks, balanced planes, domes, minarets, horizontal discs poised on pinnacles, and numberless forms of still greater wildness—some of stone and some of metal—which glittered gorgeously in the mixed, almost blistering glare from a polychromatic sky. Looking upward he saw three stupendous discs of flame, each of a different hue, and at a different height above an infinitely distant curving horizon of low mountains. Behind him tiers of higher terraces towered aloft as far as he could see. The city below stretched away to the limits of vision, and he hoped that no sound would well up from it.
      The pavement from which he easily raised himself was of a veined, polished stone beyond his power to identify, and the tiles were cut in bizarre-angled shapes which struck him as less asymmetrical than based on some unearthly symmetry whose laws he could not comprehend. The balustrade was chest-high, delicate, and fantastically wrought, while along the rail were ranged at short intervals little figures of grotesque design and exquisite workmanship. They, like the whole balustrade, seemed to be made of some sort of shining metal whose colour could not be guessed in this chaos of mixed effulgences; and their nature utterly defied conjecture. They represented some ridged, barrel-shaped object with thin horizontal arms radiating spoke-like from a central ring, and with vertical knobs or bulbs projecting from the head and base of the barrel. Each of these knobs was the hub of a system of five long, flat, triangularly tapering arms arranged around it like the arms of a starfish—nearly horizontal, but curving slightly away from the central barrel. The base of the bottom knob was fused to the long railing with so delicate a point of contact that several figures had been broken off and were missing. The figures were about four and a half inches in height, while the spiky arms gave them a maximum diameter of about two and a half inches.
      When Gilman stood up the tiles felt hot to his bare feet. He was wholly alone, and his first act was to walk to the balustrade and look dizzily down at the endless, Cyclopean city almost two thousand feet below. As he listened he thought a rhythmic confusion of faint musical pipings covering a wide tonal range welled up from the narrow streets beneath, and he wished he might discern the denizens of the place. The sight turned him giddy after a while, so that he would have fallen to the pavement had he not clutched instinctively at the lustrous balustrade. His right hand fell on one of the projecting figures, the touch seeming to steady him slightly. It was too much, however, for the exotic delicacy of the metal-work, and the spiky figure snapped off under his grasp. Still half-dazed, he continued to clutch it as his other hand seized a vacant space on the smooth railing.
      But now his oversensitive ears caught something behind him, and he looked back across the level terrace. Approaching him softly though without apparent furtiveness were five figures, two of which were the sinister old woman and the fanged, furry little animal. The other three were what sent him unconscious—for they were living entities about eight feet high, shaped precisely like the spiky images on the balustrade, and propelling themselves by a spider-like wriggling of their lower set of starfish-arms.
      Gilman awakened in his bed, drenched by a cold perspiration and with a smarting sensation in his face, hands, and feet. Springing to the floor, he washed and dressed in frantic haste, as if it were necessary for him to get out of the house as quickly as possible. He did not know where he wished to go, but felt that once more he would have to sacrifice his classes. The odd pull toward that spot in the sky between Hydra and Argo had abated, but another of even greater strength had taken its place. Now he felt that he must go north—infinitely north. He dreaded to cross the bridge that gave a view of the desolate island in the Miskatonic, so went over the Peabody Avenue bridge. Very often he stumbled, for his eyes and ears were chained to an extremely lofty point in the blank blue sky.
      After about an hour he got himself under better control, and saw that he was far from the city. All around him stretched the bleak emptiness of salt marshes, while the narrow road ahead led to Innsmouth—that ancient, half-deserted town which Arkham people were so curiously unwilling to visit. Though the northward pull had not diminished, he resisted it as he had resisted the other pull, and finally found that he could almost balance the one against the other. Plodding back to town and getting some coffee at a soda fountain, he dragged himself into the public library and browsed aimlessly among the lighter magazines. Once he met some friends who remarked how oddly sunburned he looked, but he did not tell them of his walk. At three o’clock he took some lunch at a restaurant, noting meanwhile that the pull had either lessened or divided itself. After that he killed the time at a cheap cinema show, seeing the inane performance over and over again without paying any attention to it.
      About nine at night he drifted homeward and stumbled into the ancient house. Joe Mazurewicz was whining unintelligible prayers, and Gilman hastened up to his own garret chamber without pausing to see if Elwood was in. It was when he turned on the feeble electric light that the shock came. At once he saw there was something on the table which did not belong there, and a second look left no room for doubt. Lying on its side—for it could not stand up alone—was the exotic spiky figure which in his monstrous dream he had broken off the fantastic balustrade. No detail was missing. The ridged, barrel-shaped centre, the thin, radiating arms, the knobs at each end, and the flat, slightly outward-curving starfish-arms spreading from those knobs—all were there. In the electric light the colour seemed to be a kind of iridescent grey veined with green, and Gilman could see amidst his horror and bewilderment that one of the knobs ended in a jagged break corresponding to its former point of attachment to the dream-railing.
      Only his tendency toward a dazed stupor prevented him from screaming aloud. This fusion of dream and reality was too much to bear. Still dazed, he clutched at the spiky thing and staggered downstairs to Landlord Dombrowski’s quarters. The whining prayers of the superstitious loomfixer were still sounding through the mouldy halls, but Gilman did not mind them now. The landlord was in, and greeted him pleasantly. No, he had not seen that thing before and did not know anything about it. But his wife had said she found a funny tin thing in one of the beds when she fixed the rooms at noon, and maybe that was it. Dombrowski called her, and she waddled in. Yes, that was the thing. She had found it in the young gentleman’s bed—on the side next the wall. It had looked very queer to her, but of course the young gentleman had lots of queer things in his room—books and curios and pictures and markings on paper. She certainly knew nothing about it.
      So Gilman climbed upstairs again in a mental turmoil, convinced that he was either still dreaming or that his somnambulism had run to incredible extremes and led him to depredations in unknown places. Where had he got this outré thing? He did not recall seeing it in any museum in Arkham. It must have been somewhere, though; and the sight of it as he snatched it in his sleep must have caused the odd dream-picture of the balustraded terrace. Next day he would make some very guarded inquiries—and perhaps see the nerve specialist.
      Meanwhile he would try to keep track of his somnambulism. As he went upstairs and across the garret hall he sprinkled about some flour which he had borrowed—with a frank admission as to its purpose—from the landlord. He had stopped at Elwood’s door on the way, but had found all dark within. Entering his room, he placed the spiky thing on the table, and lay down in complete mental and physical exhaustion without pausing to undress. From the closed loft above the slanting ceiling he thought he heard a faint scratching and padding, but he was too disorganised even to mind it. That cryptical pull from the north was getting very strong again, though it seemed now to come from a lower place in the sky.
      In the dazzling violet light of dream the old woman and the fanged, furry thing came again and with a greater distinctness than on any former occasion. This time they actually reached him, and he felt the crone’s withered claws clutching at him. He was pulled out of bed and into empty space, and for a moment he heard a rhythmic roaring and saw the twilight amorphousness of the vague abysses seething around him. But that moment was very brief, for presently he was in a crude, windowless little space with rough beams and planks rising to a peak just above his head, and with a curious slanting floor underfoot. Propped level on that floor were low cases full of books of every degree of antiquity and disintegration, and in the centre were a table and bench, both apparently fastened in place. Small objects of unknown shape and nature were ranged on the tops of the cases, and in the flaming violet light Gilman thought he saw a counterpart of the spiky image which had puzzled him so horribly. On the left the floor fell abruptly away, leaving a black triangular gulf out of which, after a second’s dry rattling, there presently climbed the hateful little furry thing with the yellow fangs and bearded human face.
      The evilly grinning beldame still clutched him, and beyond the table stood a figure he had never seen before—a tall, lean man of dead black colouration but without the slightest sign of negroid features; wholly devoid of either hair or beard, and wearing as his only garment a shapeless robe of some heavy black fabric. His feet were indistinguishable because of the table and bench, but he must have been shod, since there was a clicking whenever he changed position. The man did not speak, and bore no trace of expression on his small, regular features. He merely pointed to a book of prodigious size which lay open on the table, while the beldame thrust a huge grey quill into Gilman’s right hand. Over everything was a pall of intensely maddening fear, and the climax was reached when the furry thing ran up the dreamer’s clothing to his shoulders and then down his left arm, finally biting him sharply in the wrist just below his cuff. As the blood spurted from this wound Gilman lapsed into a faint.
      He awaked on the morning of the 22nd with a pain in his left wrist, and saw that his cuff was brown with dried blood. His recollections were very confused, but the scene with the black man in the unknown space stood out vividly. The rats must have bitten him as he slept, giving rise to the climax of that frightful dream. Opening the door, he saw that the flour on the corridor floor was undisturbed except for the huge prints of the loutish fellow who roomed at the other end of the garret. So he had not been sleep-walking this time. But something would have to be done about those rats. He would speak to the landlord about them. Again he tried to stop up the hole at the base of the slanting wall, wedging in a candlestick which seemed of about the right size. His ears were ringing horribly, as if with the residual echoes of some horrible noise heard in dreams.
      As he bathed and changed clothes he tried to recall what he had dreamed after the scene in the violet-litten space, but nothing definite would crystallise in his mind. That scene itself must have corresponded to the sealed loft overhead, which had begun to attack his imagination so violently, but later impressions were faint and hazy. There were suggestions of the vague, twilight abysses, and of still vaster, blacker abysses beyond them—abysses in which all fixed suggestions of form were absent. He had been taken there by the bubble-congeries and the little polyhedron which always dogged him; but they, like himself, had changed to wisps of milky, barely luminous mist in this farther void of ultimate blackness. Something else had gone on ahead—a larger wisp which now and then condensed into nameless approximations of form—and he thought that their progress had not been in a straight line, but rather along the alien curves and spirals of some ethereal vortex which obeyed laws unknown to the physics and mathematics of any conceivable cosmos. Eventually there had been a hint of vast, leaping shadows, of a monstrous, half-acoustic pulsing, and of the thin, monotonous piping of an unseen flute—but that was all. Gilman decided he had picked up that last conception from what he had read in the Necronomicon about the mindless entity Azathoth, which rules all time and space from a curiously environed black throne at the centre of Chaos.
      When the blood was washed away the wrist wound proved very slight, and Gilman puzzled over the location of the two tiny punctures. It occurred to him that there was no blood on the bedspread where he had lain—which was very curious in view of the amount on his skin and cuff. Had he been sleep-walking within his room, and had the rat bitten him as he sat in some chair or paused in some less rational position? He looked in every corner for brownish drops or stains, but did not find any. He had better, he thought, sprinkle flour within the room as well as outside the door—though after all no further proof of his sleep-walking was needed. He knew he did walk—and the thing to do now was to stop it. He must ask Frank Elwood for help. This morning the strange pulls from space seemed lessened, though they were replaced by another sensation even more inexplicable. It was a vague, insistent impulse to fly away from his present situation, but held not a hint of the specific direction in which he wished to fly. As he picked up the strange spiky image on the table he thought the older northward pull grew a trifle stronger; but even so, it was wholly overruled by the newer and more bewildering urge.
      He took the spiky image down to Elwood’s room, steeling himself against the whines of the loomfixer which welled up from the ground floor. Elwood was in, thank heaven, and appeared to be stirring about. There was time for a little conversation before leaving for breakfast and college, so Gilman hurriedly poured forth an account of his recent dreams and fears. His host was very sympathetic, and agreed that something ought to be done. He was shocked by his guest’s drawn, haggard aspect, and noticed the queer, abnormal-looking sunburn which others had remarked during the past week. There was not much, though, that he could say. He had not seen Gilman on any sleep-walking expedition, and had no idea what the curious image could be. He had, though, heard the French-Canadian who lodged just under Gilman talking to Mazurewicz one evening. They were telling each other how badly they dreaded the coming of Walpurgis-Night, now only a few days off; and were exchanging pitying comments about the poor, doomed young gentleman. Desrochers, the fellow under Gilman’s room, had spoken of nocturnal footsteps both shod and unshod, and of the violet light he saw one night when he had stolen fearfully up to peer through Gilman’s keyhole. He had not dared to peer, he told Mazurewicz, after he had glimpsed that light through the cracks around the door. There had been soft talking, too—and as he began to describe it his voice had sunk to an inaudible whisper.
      Elwood could not imagine what had set these superstitious creatures gossiping, but supposed their imaginations had been roused by Gilman’s late hours and somnolent walking and talking on the one hand, and by the nearness of traditionally feared May-Eve on the other hand. That Gilman talked in his sleep was plain, and it was obviously from Desrochers’ keyhole-listenings that the delusive notion of the violet dream-light had got abroad. These simple people were quick to imagine they had seen any odd thing they had heard about. As for a plan of action—Gilman had better move down to Elwood’s room and avoid sleeping alone. Elwood would, if awake, rouse him whenever he began to talk or rise in his sleep. Very soon, too, he must see the specialist. Meanwhile they would take the spiky image around to the various museums and to certain professors; seeking identification and stating that it had been found in a public rubbish-can. Also, Dombrowski must attend to the poisoning of those rats in the walls.
      Braced up by Elwood’s companionship, Gilman attended classes that day. Strange urges still tugged at him, but he could sidetrack them with considerable success. During a free period he shewed the queer image to several professors, all of whom were intensely interested, though none of them could shed any light upon its nature or origin. That night he slept on a couch which Elwood had had the landlord bring to the second-story room, and for the first time in weeks was wholly free from disquieting dreams. But the feverishness still hung on, and the whines of the loomfixer were an unnerving influence.
      During the next few days Gilman enjoyed an almost perfect immunity from morbid manifestations. He had, Elwood said, shewed no tendency to talk or rise in his sleep; and meanwhile the landlord was putting rat-poison everywhere. The only disturbing element was the talk among the superstitious foreigners, whose imaginations had become highly excited. Mazurewicz was always trying to make him get a crucifix, and finally forced one upon him which he said had been blessed by the good Father Iwanicki. Desrochers, too, had something to say—in fact, he insisted that cautious steps had sounded in the now vacant room above him on the first and second nights of Gilman’s absence from it. Paul Choynski thought he heard sounds in the halls and on the stairs at night, and claimed that his door had been softly tried, while Mrs. Dombrowski vowed she had seen Brown Jenkin for the first time since All-Hallows. But such naive reports could mean very little, and Gilman let the cheap metal crucifix hang idly from a knob on his host’s dresser.
      For three days Gilman and Elwood canvassed the local museums in an effort to identify the strange spiky image, but always without success. In every quarter, however, interest was intense; for the utter alienage of the thing was a tremendous challenge to scientific curiosity. One of the small radiating arms was broken off and subjected to chemical analysis, and the result is still talked about in college circles. Professor Ellery found platinum, iron, and tellurium in the strange alloy; but mixed with these were at least three other apparent elements of high atomic weight which chemistry was absolutely powerless to classify. Not only did they fail to correspond with any known element, but they did not even fit the vacant places reserved for probable elements in the periodic system. The mystery remains unsolved to this day, though the image is on exhibition at the museum of Miskatonic University.
      On the morning of April 27 a fresh rat-hole appeared in the room where Gilman was a guest, but Dombrowski tinned it up during the day. The poison was not having much effect, for scratchings and scurryings in the walls were virtually undiminished. Elwood was out late that night, and Gilman waited up for him. He did not wish to go to sleep in a room alone—especially since he thought he had glimpsed in the evening twilight the repellent old woman whose image had become so horribly transferred to his dreams. He wondered who she was, and what had been near her rattling the tin can in a rubbish-heap at the mouth of a squalid courtyard. The crone had seemed to notice him and leer evilly at him—though perhaps this was merely his imagination.
      The next day both youths felt very tired, and knew they would sleep like logs when night came. In the evening they drowsily discussed the mathematical studies which had so completely and perhaps harmfully engrossed Gilman, and speculated about the linkage with ancient magic and folklore which seemed so darkly probable. They spoke of old Keziah Mason, and Elwood agreed that Gilman had good scientific grounds for thinking she might have stumbled on strange and significant information. The hidden cults to which these witches belonged often guarded and handed down surprising secrets from elder, forgotten aeons; and it was by no means impossible that Keziah had actually mastered the art of passing through dimensional gates. Tradition emphasises the uselessness of material barriers in halting a witch’s motions; and who can say what underlies the old tales of broomstick rides through the night?
      Whether a modern student could ever gain similar powers from mathematical research alone, was still to be seen. Success, Gilman added, might lead to dangerous and unthinkable situations; for who could foretell the conditions pervading an adjacent but normally inaccessible dimension? On the other hand, the picturesque possibilities were enormous. Time could not exist in certain belts of space, and by entering and remaining in such a belt one might preserve one’s life and age indefinitely; never suffering organic metabolism or deterioration except for slight amounts incurred during visits to one’s own or similar planes. One might, for example, pass into a timeless dimension and emerge at some remote period of the earth’s history as young as before.
      Whether anybody had ever managed to do this, one could hardly conjecture with any degree of authority. Old legends are hazy and ambiguous, and in historic times all attempts at crossing forbidden gaps seem complicated by strange and terrible alliances with beings and messengers from outside. There was the immemorial figure of the deputy or messenger of hidden and terrible powers—the “Black Man” of the witch-cult, and the “Nyarlathotep” of the Necronomicon. There was, too, the baffling problem of the lesser messengers or intermediaries—the quasi-animals and queer hybrids which legend depicts as witches’ familiars. As Gilman and Elwood retired, too sleepy to argue further, they heard Joe Mazurewicz reel into the house half-drunk, and shuddered at the desperate wildness of his whining prayers.
      That night Gilman saw the violet light again. In his dream he had heard a scratching and gnawing in the partitions, and thought that someone fumbled clumsily at the latch. Then he saw the old woman and the small furry thing advancing toward him over the carpeted floor. The beldame’s face was alight with inhuman exultation, and the little yellow-toothed morbidity tittered mockingly as it pointed at the heavily sleeping form of Elwood on the other couch across the room. A paralysis of fear stifled all attempts to cry out. As once before, the hideous crone seized Gilman by the shoulders, yanking him out of bed and into empty space. Again the infinitude of the shrieking twilight abysses flashed past him, but in another second he thought he was in a dark, muddy, unknown alley of foetid odours, with the rotting walls of ancient houses towering up on every hand.
      Ahead was the robed black man he had seen in the peaked space in the other dream, while from a lesser distance the old woman was beckoning and grimacing imperiously. Brown Jenkin was rubbing itself with a kind of affectionate playfulness around the ankles of the black man, which the deep mud largely concealed. There was a dark open doorway on the right, to which the black man silently pointed. Into this the grimacing crone started, dragging Gilman after her by his pajama sleeve. There were evil-smelling staircases which creaked ominously, and on which the old woman seemed to radiate a faint violet light; and finally a door leading off a landing. The crone fumbled with the latch and pushed the door open, motioning to Gilman to wait and disappearing inside the black aperture.
      The youth’s oversensitive ears caught a hideous strangled cry, and presently the beldame came out of the room bearing a small, senseless form which she thrust at the dreamer as if ordering him to carry it. The sight of this form, and the expression on its face, broke the spell. Still too dazed to cry out, he plunged recklessly down the noisome staircase and into the mud outside; halting only when seized and choked by the waiting black man. As consciousness departed he heard the faint, shrill tittering of the fanged, rat-like abnormality.
      On the morning of the 29th Gilman awaked into a maelstrom of horror. The instant he opened his eyes he knew something was terribly wrong, for he was back in his old garret room with the slanting wall and ceiling, sprawled on the now unmade bed. His throat was aching inexplicably, and as he struggled to a sitting posture he saw with growing fright that his feet and pajama-bottoms were brown with caked mud. For the moment his recollections were hopelessly hazy, but he knew at least that he must have been sleep-walking. Elwood had been lost too deeply in slumber to hear and stop him. On the floor were confused muddy prints, but oddly enough they did not extend all the way to the door. The more Gilman looked at them, the more peculiar they seemed; for in addition to those he could recognise as his there were some smaller, almost round markings—such as the legs of a large chair or table might make, except that most of them tended to be divided into halves. There were also some curious muddy rat-tracks leading out of a fresh hole and back into it again. Utter bewilderment and the fear of madness racked Gilman as he staggered to the door and saw that there were no muddy prints outside. The more he remembered of his hideous dream the more terrified he felt, and it added to his desperation to hear Joe Mazurewicz chanting mournfully two floors below.
      Descending to Elwood’s room he roused his still-sleeping host and began telling of how he had found himself, but Elwood could form no idea of what might really have happened. Where Gilman could have been, how he got back to his room without making tracks in the hall, and how the muddy, furniture-like prints came to be mixed with his in the garret chamber, were wholly beyond conjecture. Then there were those dark, livid marks on his throat, as if he had tried to strangle himself. He put his hands up to them, but found that they did not even approximately fit. While they were talking Desrochers dropped in to say that he had heard a terrific clattering overhead in the dark small hours. No, there had been no one on the stairs after midnight—though just before midnight he had heard faint footfalls in the garret, and cautiously descending steps he did not like. It was, he added, a very bad time of year for Arkham. The young gentleman had better be sure to wear the crucifix Joe Mazurewicz had given him. Even the daytime was not safe, for after dawn there had been strange sounds in the house—especially a thin, childish wail hastily choked off.
      Gilman mechanically attended classes that morning, but was wholly unable to fix his mind on his studies. A mood of hideous apprehension and expectancy had seized him, and he seemed to be awaiting the fall of some annihilating blow. At noon he lunched at the University Spa, picking up a paper from the next seat as he waited for dessert. But he never ate that dessert; for an item on the paper’s first page left him limp, wild-eyed, and able only to pay his check and stagger back to Elwood’s room.
      There had been a strange kidnapping the night before in Orne’s Gangway, and the two-year-old child of a clod-like laundry worker named Anastasia Wolejko had completely vanished from sight. The mother, it appeared, had feared the event for some time; but the reasons she assigned for her fear were so grotesque that no one took them seriously. She had, she said, seen Brown Jenkin about the place now and then ever since early in March, and knew from its grimaces and titterings that little Ladislas must be marked for sacrifice at the awful Sabbat on Walpurgis-Night. She had asked her neighbour Mary Czanek to sleep in the room and try to protect the child, but Mary had not dared. She could not tell the police, for they never believed such things. Children had been taken that way every year ever since she could remember. And her friend Pete Stowacki would not help because he wanted the child out of the way anyhow.
      But what threw Gilman into a cold perspiration was the report of a pair of revellers who had been walking past the mouth of the gangway just after midnight. They admitted they had been drunk, but both vowed they had seen a crazily dressed trio furtively entering the dark passageway. There had, they said, been a huge robed negro, a little old woman in rags, and a young white man in his night-clothes. The old woman had been dragging the youth, while around the feet of the negro a tame rat was rubbing and weaving in the brown mud.
      Gilman sat in a daze all the afternoon, and Elwood—who had meanwhile seen the papers and formed terrible conjectures from them—found him thus when he came home. This time neither could doubt but that something hideously serious was closing in around them. Between the phantasms of nightmare and the realities of the objective world a monstrous and unthinkable relationship was crystallising, and only stupendous vigilance could avert still more direful developments. Gilman must see a specialist sooner or later, but not just now, when all the papers were full of this kidnapping business.
      Just what had really happened was maddeningly obscure, and for a moment both Gilman and Elwood exchanged whispered theories of the wildest kind. Had Gilman unconsciously succeeded better than he knew in his studies of space and its dimensions? Had he actually slipped outside our sphere to points unguessed and unimaginable? Where—if anywhere—had he been on those nights of daemoniac alienage? The roaring twilight abysses—the green hillside—the blistering terrace—the pulls from the stars—the ultimate black vortex—the black man—the muddy alley and the stairs—the old witch and the fanged, furry horror—the bubble-congeries and the little polyhedron—the strange sunburn—the wrist wound—the unexplained image—the muddy feet—the throat-marks—the tales and fears of the superstitious foreigners—what did all this mean? To what extent could the laws of sanity apply to such a case?
      There was no sleep for either of them that night, but next day they both cut classes and drowsed. This was April 30th, and with the dusk would come the hellish Sabbat-time which all the foreigners and the superstitious old folk feared. Mazurewicz came home at six o’clock and said people at the mill were whispering that the Walpurgis-revels would be held in the dark ravine beyond Meadow Hill where the old white stone stands in a place queerly void of all plant-life. Some of them had even told the police and advised them to look there for the missing Wolejko child, but they did not believe anything would be done. Joe insisted that the poor young gentleman wear his nickel-chained crucifix, and Gilman put it on and dropped it inside his shirt to humour the fellow.
      Late at night the two youths sat drowsing in their chairs, lulled by the rhythmical praying of the loomfixer on the floor below. Gilman listened as he nodded, his preternaturally sharpened hearing seeming to strain for some subtle, dreaded murmur beyond the noises in the ancient house. Unwholesome recollections of things in the Necronomicon and the Black Book welled up, and he found himself swaying to infandous rhythms said to pertain to the blackest ceremonies of the Sabbat and to have an origin outside the time and space we comprehend.
      Presently he realised what he was listening for—the hellish chant of the celebrants in the distant black valley. How did he know so much about what they expected? How did he know the time when Nahab and her acolyte were due to bear the brimming bowl which would follow the black cock and the black goat? He saw that Elwood had dropped asleep, and tried to call out and waken him. Something, however, closed his throat. He was not his own master. Had he signed the black man’s book after all?
      Then his fevered, abnormal hearing caught the distant, windborne notes. Over miles of hill and field and alley they came, but he recognised them none the less. The fires must be lit, and the dancers must be starting in. How could he keep himself from going? What was it that had enmeshed him? Mathematics—folklore—the house—old Keziah—Brown Jenkin . . . and now he saw that there was a fresh rat-hole in the wall near his couch. Above the distant chanting and the nearer praying of Joe Mazurewicz came another sound—a stealthy, determined scratching in the partitions. He hoped the electric lights would not go out. Then he saw the fanged, bearded little face in the rat-hole—the accursed little face which he at last realised bore such a shocking, mocking resemblance to old Keziah’s—and heard the faint fumbling at the door.
      The screaming twilight abysses flashed before him, and he felt himself helpless in the formless grasp of the iridescent bubble-congeries. Ahead raced the small, kaleidoscopic polyhedron, and all through the churning void there was a heightening and acceleration of the vague tonal pattern which seemed to foreshadow some unutterable and unendurable climax. He seemed to know what was coming—the monstrous burst of Walpurgis-rhythm in whose cosmic timbre would be concentrated all the primal, ultimate space-time seethings which lie behind the massed spheres of matter and sometimes break forth in measured reverberations that penetrate faintly to every layer of entity and give hideous significance throughout the worlds to certain dreaded periods.
      But all this vanished in a second. He was again in the cramped, violet-litten peaked space with the slanting floor, the low cases of ancient books, the bench and table, the queer objects, and the triangular gulf at one side. On the table lay a small white figure—an infant boy, unclothed and unconscious—while on the other side stood the monstrous, leering old woman with a gleaming, grotesque-hafted knife in her right hand, and a queerly proportioned pale metal bowl covered with curiously chased designs and having delicate lateral handles in her left. She was intoning some croaking ritual in a language which Gilman could not understand, but which seemed like something guardedly quoted in the Necronomicon.
      As the scene grew clear he saw the ancient crone bend forward and extend the empty bowl across the table—and unable to control his own motions, he reached far forward and took it in both hands, noticing as he did so its comparative lightness. At the same moment the disgusting form of Brown Jenkin scrambled up over the brink of the triangular black gulf on his left. The crone now motioned him to hold the bowl in a certain position while she raised the huge, grotesque knife above the small white victim as high as her right hand could reach. The fanged, furry thing began tittering a continuation of the unknown ritual, while the witch croaked loathsome responses. Gilman felt a gnawing, poignant abhorrence shoot through his mental and emotional paralysis, and the light metal bowl shook in his grasp. A second later the downward motion of the knife broke the spell completely, and he dropped the bowl with a resounding bell-like clangour while his hands darted out frantically to stop the monstrous deed.
      In an instant he had edged up the slanting floor around the end of the table and wrenched the knife from the old woman’s claws; sending it clattering over the brink of the narrow triangular gulf. In another instant, however, matters were reversed; for those murderous claws had locked themselves tightly around his own throat, while the wrinkled face was twisted with insane fury. He felt the chain of the cheap crucifix grinding into his neck, and in his peril wondered how the sight of the object itself would affect the evil creature. Her strength was altogether superhuman, but as she continued her choking he reached feebly in his shirt and drew out the metal symbol, snapping the chain and pulling it free.
      At sight of the device the witch seemed struck with panic, and her grip relaxed long enough to give Gilman a chance to break it entirely. He pulled the steel-like claws from his neck, and would have dragged the beldame over the edge of the gulf had not the claws received a fresh access of strength and closed in again. This time he resolved to reply in kind, and his own hands reached out for the creature’s throat. Before she saw what he was doing he had the chain of the crucifix twisted about her neck, and a moment later he had tightened it enough to cut off her breath. During her last struggle he felt something bite at his ankle, and saw that Brown Jenkin had come to her aid. With one savage kick he sent the morbidity over the edge of the gulf and heard it whimper on some level far below.
      Whether he had killed the ancient crone he did not know, but he let her rest on the floor where she had fallen. Then, as he turned away, he saw on the table a sight which nearly snapped the last thread of his reason. Brown Jenkin, tough of sinew and with four tiny hands of daemoniac dexterity, had been busy while the witch was throttling him, and his efforts had been in vain. What he had prevented the knife from doing to the victim’s chest, the yellow fangs of the furry blasphemy had done to a wrist—and the bowl so lately on the floor stood full beside the small lifeless body.
      In his dream-delirium Gilman heard the hellish, alien-rhythmed chant of the Sabbat coming from an infinite distance, and knew the black man must be there. Confused memories mixed themselves with his mathematics, and he believed his subconscious mind held the angles which he needed to guide him back to the normal world—alone and unaided for the first time. He felt sure he was in the immemorially sealed loft above his own room, but whether he could ever escape through the slanting floor or the long-stopped egress he doubted greatly. Besides, would not an escape from a dream-loft bring him merely into a dream-house—an abnormal projection of the actual place he sought? He was wholly bewildered as to the relation betwixt dream and reality in all his experiences.
      The passage through the vague abysses would be frightful, for the Walpurgis-rhythm would be vibrating, and at last he would have to hear that hitherto veiled cosmic pulsing which he so mortally dreaded. Even now he could detect a low, monstrous shaking whose tempo he suspected all too well. At Sabbat-time it always mounted and reached through to the worlds to summon the initiate to nameless rites. Half the chants of the Sabbat were patterned on this faintly overheard pulsing which no earthly ear could endure in its unveiled spatial fulness. Gilman wondered, too, whether he could trust his instinct to take him back to the right part of space. How could he be sure he would not land on that green-litten hillside of a far planet, on the tessellated terrace above the city of tentacled monsters somewhere beyond the galaxy, or in the spiral black vortices of that ultimate void of Chaos wherein reigns the mindless daemon-sultan Azathoth?
      Just before he made the plunge the violet light went out and left him in utter blackness. The witch—old Keziah—Nahab—that must have meant her death. And mixed with the distant chant of the Sabbat and the whimpers of Brown Jenkin in the gulf below he thought he heard another and wilder whine from unknown depths. Joe Mazurewicz—the prayers against the Crawling Chaos now turning to an inexplicably triumphant shriek—worlds of sardonic actuality impinging on vortices of febrile dream—Iä! Shub-Niggurath! The Goat with a Thousand Young. . . .
      They found Gilman on the floor of his queerly angled old garret room long before dawn, for the terrible cry had brought Desrochers and Choynski and Dombrowski and Mazurewicz at once, and had even wakened the soundly sleeping Elwood in his chair. He was alive, and with open, staring eyes, but seemed largely unconscious. On his throat were the marks of murderous hands, and on his left ankle was a distressing rat-bite. His clothing was badly rumpled, and Joe’s crucifix was missing. Elwood trembled, afraid even to speculate on what new form his friend’s sleep-walking had taken. Mazurewicz seemed half-dazed because of a “sign” he said he had had in response to his prayers, and he crossed himself frantically when the squealing and whimpering of a rat sounded from beyond the slanting partition.
      When the dreamer was settled on his couch in Elwood’s room they sent for Dr. Malkowski—a local practitioner who would repeat no tales where they might prove embarrassing—and he gave Gilman two hypodermic injections which caused him to relax in something like natural drowsiness. During the day the patient regained consciousness at times and whispered his newest dream disjointedly to Elwood. It was a painful process, and at its very start brought out a fresh and disconcerting fact.
      Gilman—whose ears had so lately possessed an abnormal sensitiveness—was now stone deaf. Dr. Malkowski, summoned again in haste, told Elwood that both ear-drums were ruptured, as if by the impact of some stupendous sound intense beyond all human conception or endurance. How such a sound could have been heard in the last few hours without arousing all the Miskatonic Valley was more than the honest physician could say.
      Elwood wrote his part of the colloquy on paper, so that a fairly easy communication was maintained. Neither knew what to make of the whole chaotic business, and decided it would be better if they thought as little as possible about it. Both, though, agreed that they must leave this ancient and accursed house as soon as it could be arranged. Evening papers spoke of a police raid on some curious revellers in a ravine beyond Meadow Hill just before dawn, and mentioned that the white stone there was an object of age-long superstitious regard. Nobody had been caught, but among the scattering fugitives had been glimpsed a huge negro. In another column it was stated that no trace of the missing child Ladislas Wolejko had been found.
      The crowning horror came that very night. Elwood will never forget it, and was forced to stay out of college the rest of the term because of the resulting nervous breakdown. He had thought he heard rats in the partitions all the evening, but paid little attention to them. Then, long after both he and Gilman had retired, the atrocious shrieking began. Elwood jumped up, turned on the lights, and rushed over to his guest’s couch. The occupant was emitting sounds of veritably inhuman nature, as if racked by some torment beyond description. He was writhing under the bedclothes, and a great red stain was beginning to appear on the blankets.
      Elwood scarcely dared to touch him, but gradually the screaming and writhing subsided. By this time Dombrowski, Choynski, Desrochers, Mazurewicz, and the top-floor lodger were all crowding into the doorway, and the landlord had sent his wife back to telephone for Dr. Malkowski. Everybody shrieked when a large rat-like form suddenly jumped out from beneath the ensanguined bedclothes and scuttled across the floor to a fresh, open hole close by. When the doctor arrived and began to pull down those frightful covers Walter Gilman was dead.
      It would be barbarous to do more than suggest what had killed Gilman. There had been virtually a tunnel through his body—something had eaten his heart out. Dombrowski, frantic at the failure of his constant rat-poisoning efforts, cast aside all thought of his lease and within a week had moved with all his older lodgers to a dingy but less ancient house in Walnut Street. The worst thing for a while was keeping Joe Mazurewicz quiet; for the brooding loomfixer would never stay sober, and was constantly whining and muttering about spectral and terrible things.
      It seems that on that last hideous night Joe had stooped to look at the crimson rat-tracks which led from Gilman’s couch to the nearby hole. On the carpet they were very indistinct, but a piece of open flooring intervened between the carpet’s edge and the base-board. There Mazurewicz had found something monstrous—or thought he had, for no one else could quite agree with him despite the undeniable queerness of the prints. The tracks on the flooring were certainly vastly unlike the average prints of a rat, but even Choynski and Desrochers would not admit that they were like the prints of four tiny human hands.
      The house was never rented again. As soon as Dombrowski left it the pall of its final desolation began to descend, for people shunned it both on account of its old reputation and because of the new foetid odour. Perhaps the ex-landlord’s rat-poison had worked after all, for not long after his departure the place became a neighbourhood nuisance. Health officials traced the smell to the closed spaces above and beside the eastern garret room, and agreed that the number of dead rats must be enormous. They decided, however, that it was not worth their while to hew open and disinfect the long-sealed spaces; for the foetor would soon be over, and the locality was not one which encouraged fastidious standards. Indeed, there were always vague local tales of unexplained stenches upstairs in the Witch House just after May-Eve and Hallowmass. The neighbours grumblingly acquiesced in the inertia—but the foetor none the less formed an additional count against the place. Toward the last the house was condemned as an habitation by the building inspector.
      Gilman’s dreams and their attendant circumstances have never been explained. Elwood, whose thoughts on the entire episode are sometimes almost maddening, came back to college the next autumn and graduated in the following June. He found the spectral gossip of the town much diminished, and it is indeed a fact that—notwithstanding certain reports of a ghostly tittering in the deserted house which lasted almost as long as that edifice itself—no fresh appearances either of old Keziah or of Brown Jenkin have been muttered of since Gilman’s death. It is rather fortunate that Elwood was not in Arkham in that later year when certain events abruptly renewed the local whispers about elder horrors. Of course he heard about the matter afterward and suffered untold torments of black and bewildered speculation; but even that was not as bad as actual nearness and several possible sights would have been.
      In March, 1931, a gale wrecked the roof and great chimney of the vacant Witch House, so that a chaos of crumbling bricks, blackened, moss-grown shingles, and rotting planks and timbers crashed down into the loft and broke through the floor beneath. The whole attic story was choked with debris from above, but no one took the trouble to touch the mess before the inevitable razing of the decrepit structure. That ultimate step came in the following December, and it was when Gilman’s old room was cleared out by reluctant, apprehensive workmen that the gossip began.
      Among the rubbish which had crashed through the ancient slanting ceiling were several things which made the workmen pause and call in the police. Later the police in turn called in the coroner and several professors from the university. There were bones—badly crushed and splintered, but clearly recognisable as human—whose manifestly modern date conflicted puzzlingly with the remote period at which their only possible lurking-place, the low, slant-floored loft overhead, had supposedly been sealed from all human access. The coroner’s physician decided that some belonged to a small child, while certain others—found mixed with shreds of rotten brownish cloth—belonged to a rather undersized, bent female of advanced years. Careful sifting of debris also disclosed many tiny bones of rats caught in the collapse, as well as older rat-bones gnawed by small fangs in a fashion now and then highly productive of controversy and reflection.
      Other objects found included the mingled fragments of many books and papers, together with a yellowish dust left from the total disintegration of still older books and papers. All, without exception, appeared to deal with black magic in its most advanced and horrible forms; and the evidently recent date of certain items is still a mystery as unsolved as that of the modern human bones. An even greater mystery is the absolute homogeneity of the crabbed, archaic writing found on a wide range of papers whose conditions and watermarks suggest age differences of at least 150 to 200 years. To some, though, the greatest mystery of all is the variety of utterly inexplicable objects—objects whose shapes, materials, types of workmanship, and purposes baffle all conjecture—found scattered amidst the wreckage in evidently diverse states of injury. One of these things—which excited several Miskatonic professors profoundly—is a badly damaged monstrosity plainly resembling the strange image which Gilman gave to the college museum, save that it is larger, wrought of some peculiar bluish stone instead of metal, and possessed of a singularly angled pedestal with undecipherable hieroglyphics.
      Archaeologists and anthropologists are still trying to explain the bizarre designs chased on a crushed bowl of light metal whose inner side bore ominous brownish stains when found. Foreigners and credulous grandmothers are equally garrulous about the modern nickel crucifix with broken chain mixed in the rubbish and shiveringly identified by Joe Mazurewicz as that which he had given poor Gilman many years before. Some believe this crucifix was dragged up to the sealed loft by rats, while others think it must have been on the floor in some corner of Gilman’s old room all the time. Still others, including Joe himself, have theories too wild and fantastic for sober credence.
      When the slanting wall of Gilman’s room was torn out, the once sealed triangular space between that partition and the house’s north wall was found to contain much less structural debris, even in proportion to its size, than the room itself; though it had a ghastly layer of older materials which paralysed the wreckers with horror. In brief, the floor was a veritable ossuary of the bones of small children—some fairly modern, but others extending back in infinite gradations to a period so remote that crumbling was almost complete. On this deep bony layer rested a knife of great size, obvious antiquity, and grotesque, ornate, and exotic design—above which the debris was piled.
      In the midst of this debris, wedged between a fallen plank and a cluster of cemented bricks from the ruined chimney, was an object destined to cause more bafflement, veiled fright, and openly superstitious talk in Arkham than anything else discovered in the haunted and accursed building. This object was the partly crushed skeleton of a huge, diseased rat, whose abnormalities of form are still a topic of debate and source of singular reticence among the members of Miskatonic’s department of comparative anatomy. Very little concerning this skeleton has leaked out, but the workmen who found it whisper in shocked tones about the long, brownish hairs with which it was associated.
      The bones of the tiny paws, it is rumoured, imply prehensile characteristics more typical of a diminutive monkey than of a rat; while the small skull with its savage yellow fangs is of the utmost anomalousness, appearing from certain angles like a miniature, monstrously degraded parody of a human skull. The workmen crossed themselves in fright when they came upon this blasphemy, but later burned candles of gratitude in St. Stanislaus’ Church because of the shrill, ghostly tittering they felt they would never hear again.",False
"Shortly before ten the next morning I stood with one small valise in front of Hammond's Drug Store in old Market Square waiting for the Innsmouth bus. As the hour for its arrival drew near I noticed a general drift of the loungers to other places up the street, or to the Ideal Lunch across the square. Evidently the ticket-agent had not exaggerated the dislike which local People bore toward Innsmouth and its denizens. In a few moments a small motor-coach of extreme decrepitude and dirty grey colour rattled down State Street, made a turn, and drew up at the curb beside me. I felt immediately that it was the right one; a guess which the half-illegible sign on the windshield--Arkham-Innsmouth-Newburyport--soon verified.
There were only three passengers--dark, unkempt men of sullen visage and somewhat youthful cast--and when the vehicle stopped they clumsily shambled out and began walking up State Street in a silent, almost furtive fashion. The driver also alighted, and I watched him as he went into the drug store to make some purchase. This, I reflected, must be the Joe Sargent mentioned by the ticket-agent; and even before I noticed any details there spread over me a wave of spontaneous aversion which could be neither checked nor explained. It suddenly struck me as very natural that the local people should not wish to ride on a bus owned and driven by this man, or to visit any oftener than possible the habitat of such a man and his kinsfolk.
When the driver came out of the store I looked at him more carefully and tried to determine the source of my evil impression. He was a thin, stoop-shouldered man not much under six feet tall, dressed in shabby blue civilian clothes and wearing a frayed golf cap. His age was perhaps thirty-five, but the odd, deep creases in the sides of his neck made him seem older when one did not study his dull, expressionless face. He had a narrow head, bulging, watery-blue eyes that seemed never to wink, a flat nose, a receding forehead and chin, and singularly undeveloped ears. His long thick lip and coarse-pored, greyish cheeks seemed almost beardless except for some sparse yellow hairs that straggled and curled in irregular patches; and in places the surface seemed queerly irregular, as if peeling from some cutaneous disease. His hands were large and heavily veined, and had a very unusual greyish-blue tinge. The fingers were strikingly short in proportion to the rest of the structure, and seemed to have a tendency to curl closely into the huge palm. As he walked toward the bus I observed his peculiarly shambling gait and saw that his feet were inordinately immense. The more I studied them the more I wondered how he could buy any shoes to fit them.
A certain greasiness about the fellow increased my dislike. He was evidently given to working or lounging around the fish docks, and carried with him much of their characteristic smell. Just what foreign blood was in him I could not even guess. His oddities certainly did not look Asiatic, Polynesian, Levantine or negroid, yet I could see why the people found him alien. I myself would have thought of biological degeneration rather than alienage.
I was sorry when I saw there would be no other passengers on the bus. Somehow I did not like the idea of riding alone with this driver. But as leaving time obviously approached I conquered my qualms and followed the man aboard, extending him a dollar bill and murmuring the single word ""Innsmouth."" He looked curiously at me for a second as he returned forty cents change without speaking. I took a seat far behind him, but on the same side of the bus, since I wished to watch the shore during the journey.
At length the decrepit vehicle stared with a jerk, and rattled noisily past the old brick buildings of State Street amidst a cloud of vapour from the exhaust. Glancing at the people on the sidewalks, I thought I detected in them a curious wish to avoid looking at the bus--or at least a wish to avoid seeming to look at it. Then we turned to the left into High Street, where the going was smoother; flying by stately old mansions of the early republic and still older colonial farmhouses, passing the Lower Green and Parker River, and finally emerging into a long, monotonous stretch of open shore country.
The day was warm and sunny, but the landscape of sand and sedge-grass, and stunted shrubbery became more and desolate as we proceeded. Out the window I could see the blue water and the sandy line of Plum Island, and we presently drew very near the beach as our narrow road veered off from the main highway to Rowley and Ipswich. There were no visible houses, and I could tell by the state of the road that traffic was very light hereabouts. The weather-worn telephone poles carried only two wires. Now and then we crossed crude wooden bridges over tidal creeks that wound far inland and promoted the general isolation of the region.
Once in a while I noticed dead stumps and crumbling foundation-walls above the drifting sand, and recalled the old tradition quoted in one of the histories I had read, that this was once a fertile and thickly-settled countryside. The change, it was said, came simultaneously with the Innsmouth epidemic of l846, and was thought by simple folk to have a dark connection with hidden forces of evil. Actually, it was caused by the unwise cutting of woodlands near the shore, which robbed the soil of the best protection and opened the way for waves of wind-blown sand.
At last we lost sight of Plum Island and saw the vast expanse of the open Atlantic on our left. Our narrow course began to climb steeply, and I felt a singular sense of disquiet in looking at the lonely crest ahead where the rutted road-way met the sky. It was as if the bus were about to keep on in its ascent, leaving the sane earth altogether and merging with the unknown arcana of upper air and cryptical sky. The smell of the sea took on ominous implications, and the silent driver's bent, rigid back and narrow head became more and more hateful. As I looked at him I saw that the back of his head was almost as hairless as his face, having only a few straggling yellow strands upon a grey scabrous surface.
Then we reached the crest and beheld the outspread valley beyond, where the Manuxet joins the sea just north of the long line of cliffs that culminate in Kingsport Head and veer off toward Cape Ann. On the far misty horizon I could just make out the dizzy profile of the Head, topped by the queer ancient house of which so many legends are told; but for the moment all my attention was captured by the nearer panorama just below me. I had, I realized, come face to face with rumour-shadowed Innsmouth.
It was a town of wide extent and dense construction, yet one with a portentous dearth of visible life. From the tangle of chimney-pots scarcely a wisp of smoke came, and the three tall steeples loomed stark and unpainted against the seaward horizon. One of them was crumbling down at the top, and in that and another there were only black gaping holes where clock-dials should have been. The vast huddle of sagging gambrel roofs and peaked gables conveyed with offensive clearness the idea of wormy decay, and as we approached along the now descending road I could see that many roofs had wholly caved in. There were some large square Georgian houses, too, with hipped roofs, cupolas, and railed ""widow's walks."" These were mostly well back from the water, and one or two seemed to be in moderately sound condition. Stretching inland from among them I saw the rusted, grass-grown line of the abandoned railway, with leaning telegraph-poles now devoid of wires, and the half-obscured lines of the old carriage roads to Rowley and Ipswich.
The decay was worst close to the waterfront, though in its very midst I could spy the white belfry of a fairly well preserved brick structure which looked like a small factory. The harbour, long clogged with sand, was enclosed by an ancient stone breakwater; on which I could begin to discern the minute forms of a few seated fishermen, and at whose end were what looked like the foundations of a bygone lighthouse. A sandy tongue had formed inside this barrier and upon it I saw a few decrepit cabins, moored dories, and scattered lobster-pots. The only deep water seemed to be where the river poured out past the belfried structure and turned southward to join the ocean at the breakwater's end.
Here and there the ruins of wharves jutted out from the shore to end in indeterminate rottenness, those farthest south seeming the most decayed. And far out at sea, despite a high tide, I glimpsed a long, black line scarcely rising above the water yet carrying a suggestion of odd latent malignancy. This, I knew, must be Devil Reef. As I looked, a subtle, curious sense of beckoning seemed superadded to the grim repulsion; and oddly enough, I found this overtone more disturbing than the primary impression.
We met no one on the road, but presently began to pass deserted farms in varying stages of ruin. Then I noticed a few inhabited houses with rags stuffed in the broken windows and shells and dead fish lying about the littered yards. Once or twice I saw listless-looking people working in barren gardens or digging clams on the fishy-smelling beach below, and groups of dirty, simian-visaged children playing around weed-grown doorsteps. Somehow these people seemed more disquieting than the dismal buildings, for almost every one had certain peculiarities of face and motions which I instinctively disliked without being able to define or comprehend them. For a second I thought this typical physique suggested some picture I had seen, perhaps in a book, under circumstances of particular horror or melancholy; but this pseudo-recollection passed very quickly.
As the bus reached a lower level I began to catch the steady note of a waterfall through the unnatural stillness, The leaning, unpainted houses grew thicker, lined both sides of the road, and displayed more urban tendencies than did those we were leaving behind, The panorama ahead had contracted to a street scene, and in spots I could see where a cobblestone pavement and stretches of brick sidewalk had formerly existed. All the houses were apparently deserted, and there were occasional gaps where tumbledown chimneys and cellar walls told of buildings that had collapsed. Pervading everything was the most nauseous fishy odour imaginable.
Soon cross streets and junctions began to appear; those on the left leading to shoreward realms of unpaved squalor and decay, while those on the right shewed vistas of departed grandeur. So far I had seen no people in the town, but there now came signs of a sparse habitation--curtained windows here and there, and an occasional battered motorcar at the curb. Pavement and sidewalks were increasingly well-defined, and though most of the houses were quite old--wood and brick structures of the early 19th century--they were obviously kept fit for habitation. As an amateur antiquarian I almost lost my olfactory disgust and my feeling of menace and repulsion amidst this rich, unaltered survival from the past.
But I was not to reach my destination without one very strong impression of poignantly disagreeable quality. The bus had come to a sort of open concourse or radial point with churches on two sides and the bedraggled remains of a circular green in the centre, and I was looking at a large pillared hall on the right-hand junction ahead. The structure's once white paint was now gray and peeling and the black and gold sign on the pediment was so faded that I could only with difficulty make out the words ""Esoteric Order of Dagon."" This, then was the former Masonic Hall now given over to a degraded cult. As I strained to decipher this inscription my notice was distracted by the raucous tones of a cracked bell across the street, and I quickly turned to look out the window on my side of the coach.
The sound came from a squat stone church of manifestly later date than most of the houses, built in a clumsy Gothic fashion and having a disproportionately high basement with shuttered windows. Though the hands of its clock were missing on the side I glimpsed, I knew that those hoarse strokes were tolling the hour of eleven. Then suddenly all thoughts of time were blotted out by an onrushing image of sharp intensity and unaccountable horror which had seized me before I knew what it really was. The door of the church basement was open, revealing a rectangle of blackness inside. And as I looked, a certain object crossed or seemed to cross that dark rectangle; burning into my brain a momentary conception of nightmare which was all the more maddening because analysis could not shew a single nightmarish quality in it.
It was a living object--the first except the driver that I had seen since entering the compact part of the town--and had I been in a steadier mood I would have found nothing whatever of terror in it. Clearly, as I realised a moment later, it was the pastor; clad in some peculiar vestments doubtless introduced since the Order of Dagon had modified the ritual of the local churches. The thing which had probably caught my first subconscious glance and supplied the touch of bizarre horror was the tall tiara he wore; an almost exact duplicate of the one Miss Tilton had shown me the previous evening. This, acting on my imagination, had supplied namelessly sinister qualities to the indeterminate face and robed, shambling form beneath it. There was not, I soon decided, any reason why I should have felt that shuddering touch of evil pseudo-memory. Was it not natural that a local mystery cult should adopt among its regimentals an unique type of head-dress made familiar to the community in some strange way--perhaps as treasure-trove?
A very thin sprinkling of repellent-looking youngish people now became visible on the sidewalks--lone individuals, and silent knots of two or three. The lower floors of the crumbling houses sometimes harboured small shops with dingy signs, and I noticed a parked truck or two as we rattled along. The sound of waterfalls became more and more distinct, and presently I saw a fairly deep river-gorge ahead, spanned by a wide, iron-railed highway bridge beyond which a large square opened out. As we clanked over the bridge I looked out on both sides and observed some factory buildings on the edge of the grassy bluff or part way down. The water far below was very abundant, and I could see two vigorous sets of falls upstream on my right and at least one downstream on my left. From this point the noise was quite deafening. Then we rolled into the large semicircular square across the river and drew up on the right-hand side in front of a tall, cupola crowned building with remnants of yellow paint and with a half-effaced sign proclaiming it to be the Gilman House.
I was glad to get out of that bus, and at once proceeded to check my valise in the shabby hotel lobby. There was only one person in sight--an elderly man without what I had come to call the ""Innsmouth look""--and I decided not to ask him any of the questions which bothered me; remembering that odd things had been noticed in this hotel. Instead, I strolled out on the square, from which the bus had already gone, and studied the scene minutely and appraisingly.
One side of the cobblestoned open space was the straight line of the river; the other was a semicircle of slant-roofed brick buildings of about the 1800 period, from which several streets radiated away to the southeast, south, and southwest. Lamps were depressingly few and small--all low-powered incandescents--and I was glad that my plans called for departure before dark, even though I knew the moon would be bright. The buildings were all in fair condition, and included perhaps a dozen shops in current operation; of which one was a grocery of the First National chain, others a dismal restaurant, a drug store, and a wholesale fish-dealer's office, and still another, at the eastward extremity of the square near the river an office of the town's only industry--the Marsh Refining Company. There were perhaps ten people visible, and four or five automobiles and motor trucks stood scattered about. I did not need to be told that this was the civic centre of Innsmouth. Eastward I could catch blue glimpses of the harbour, against which rose the decaying remains of three once beautiful Georgian steeples. And toward the shore on the opposite bank of the river I saw the white belfry surmounting what I took to be the Marsh refinery.
For some reason or other I chose to make my first inquiries at the chain grocery, whose personnel was not likely to be native to Innsmouth. I found a solitary boy of about seventeen in charge, and was pleased to note the brightness and affability which promised cheerful information. He seemed exceptionally eager to talk, and I soon gathered that he did not like the place, its fishy smell, or its furtive people. A word with any outsider was a relief to him. He hailed from Arkham, boarded with a family who came from Ipswich, and went back whenever he got a moment off. His family did not like him to work in Innsmouth, but the chain had transferred him there and he did not wish to give up his job.
There was, he said, no public library or chamber of commerce in Innsmouth, but I could probably find my way about. The street I had come down was Federal. West of that were the fine old residence streets--Broad, Washington, Lafayette, and Adams--and east of it were the shoreward slums. It was in these slums--along Main Street--that I would find the old Georgian churches, but they were all long abandoned. It would be well not to make oneself too conspicuous in such neighbourhoods--especially north of the river since the people were sullen and hostile. Some strangers had even disappeared.
Certain spots were almost forbidden territory, as he had learned at considerable cost. One must not, for example, linger much around the Marsh refinery, or around any of the still used churches, or around the pillared Order of Dagon Hall at New Church Green. Those churches were very odd--all violently disavowed by their respective denominations elsewhere, and apparently using the queerest kind of ceremonials and clerical vestments. Their creeds were heterodox and mysterious, involving hints of certain marvelous transformations leading to bodily immorality--of a sort--on this earth. The youth's own pastor--Dr. Wallace of Asbury M. E. Church in Arkham--had gravely urged him not to join any church in Innsmouth.
As for the Innsmouth people--the youth hardly knew what to make of them. They were as furtive and seldom seen as animals that live in burrows, and one could hardly imagine how they passed the time apart from their desultory fishing. Perhaps--judging from the quantities of bootleg liquor they consumed--they lay for most of the daylight hours in an alcoholic stupor. They seemed sullenly banded together in some sort of fellowship and understanding--despising the world as if they had access to other and preferable spheres of entity. Their appearance--especially those staring, unwinking eyes which one never saw shut--was certainly shocking enough; and their voices were disgusting. It was awful to hear them chanting in their churches at night, and especially during their main festivals or revivals, which fell twice a year on April 30th and October 31st.
They were very fond of the water, and swam a great deal in both river and harbour. Swimming races out to Devil Reef were very common, and everyone in sight seemed well able to share in this arduous sport. When one came to think of it, it was generally only rather young people who were seen about in public, and of these the oldest were apt to be the most tainted-looking. When exceptions did occur, they were mostly persons with no trace of aberrancy, like the old clerk at the hotel. One wondered what became of the bulk of the older folk, and whether the ""Innsmouth look"" were not a strange and insidious disease-phenomenon which increased its hold as years advanced.
Only a very rare affliction, of course, could bring about such vast and radical anatomical changes in a single individual after maturity--changes invoking osseous factors as basic as the shape of the skull--but then, even this aspect was no more baffling and unheard-of than the visible features of the malady as a whole. It would be hard, the youth implied, to form any real conclusions regarding such a matter; since one never came to know the natives personally no matter how long one might live in Innsmouth.
The youth was certain that many specimens even worse than the worst visible ones were kept locked indoors in some places. People sometimes heard the queerest kind of sounds. The tottering waterfront hovels north of the river were reputedly connected by hidden tunnels, being thus a veritable warren of unseen abnormalities. What kind of foreign blood--if any--these beings had, it was impossible to tell. They sometimes kept certain especially repulsive characters out of sight when government and others from the outside world came to town.
It would be of no use, my informant said, to ask the natives anything about the place. The only one who would talk was a very aged but normal looking man who lived at the poorhouse on the north rim of the town and spent his time walking about or lounging around the fire station. This hoary character, Zadok Allen, was 96 years old and somewhat touched in the head, besides being the town drunkard. He was a strange, furtive creature who constantly looked over his shoulder as if afraid of something, and when sober could not be persuaded to talk at all with strangers. He was, however, unable to resist any offer of his favorite poison; and once drunk would furnish the most astonishing fragments of whispered reminiscence.
After all, though, little useful data could be gained from him; since his stories were all insane, incomplete hints of impossible marvels and horrors which could have no source save in his own disordered fancy. Nobody ever believed him, but the natives did not like him to drink and talk with strangers; and it was not always safe to be seen questioning him. It was probably from him that some of the wildest popular whispers and delusions were derived.
Several non-native residents had reported monstrous glimpses from time to time, but between old Zadok's tales and the malformed inhabitants it was no wonder such illusions were current. None of the non-natives ever stayed out late at night, there being a widespread impression that it was not wise to do so. Besides, the streets were loathsomely dark.
As for business--the abundance of fish was certainly almost uncanny, but the natives were taking less and less advantage of it. Moreover, prices were falling and competition was growing. Of course the town's real business was the refinery, whose commercial office was on the square only a few doors east of where we stood. Old Man Marsh was never seen, but sometimes went to the works in a closed, curtained car.
There were all sorts of rumors about how Marsh had come to look. He had once been a great dandy; and people said he still wore the frock-coated finery of the Edwardian age curiously adapted to certain deformities. His son had formerly conducted the office in the square, but latterly they had been keeping out of sight a good deal and leaving the brunt of affairs to the younger generation. The sons and their sisters had come to look very queer, especially the elder ones; and it was said that their health was failing.
One of the Marsh daughters was a repellent, reptilian-looking woman who wore an excess of weird jewellery clearly of the same exotic tradition as that to which the strange tiara belonged. My informant had noticed it many times, and had heard it spoken of as coming from some secret hoard, either of pirates or of demons. The clergymen--or priests, or whatever they were called nowadays--also wore this kind of ornament as a headdress; but one seldom caught glimpses of them. Other specimens the youth had not seen, though many were rumoured to exist around Innsmouth.
The Marshes, together with the other three gently bred families of the town--the Waites, the Gilmans, and the Eliots--were all very retiring. They lived in immense houses along Washington Street, and several were reputed to harbour in concealment certain living kinsfolk whose personal aspect forbade public view, and whose deaths had been reported and recorded.
Warning me that many of the street signs were down, the youth drew for my benefit a rough but ample and painstaking sketch map of the town's salient features. After a moment's study I felt sure that it would be of great help, and pocketed it with profuse thanks. Disliking the dinginess of the single restaurant I had seen, I bought a fair supply of cheese crackers and ginger wafers to serve as a lunch later on. My program, I decided, would be to thread the principal streets, talk with any non-natives I might encounter, and catch the eight o'clock coach for Arkham. The town, I could see, formed a significant and exaggerated example of communal decay; but being no sociologist I would limit my serious observations to the field of architecture.
Thus I began my systematic though half-bewildered tour of Innsmouth's narrow, shadow-blighted ways. Crossing the bridge and turning toward the roar of the lower falls, I passed close to the Marsh refinery, which seemed to be oddly free from the noise of industry. The building stood on the steep river bluff near a bridge and an open confluence of streets which I took to be the earliest civic center, displaced after the Revolution by the present Town Square.
Re-crossing the gorge on the Main Street bridge, I struck a region of utter desertion which somehow made me shudder. Collapsing huddles of gambrel roofs formed a jagged and fantastic skyline, above which rose the ghoulish, decapitated steeple of an ancient church. Some houses along Main Street were tenanted, but most were tightly boarded up. Down unpaved side streets I saw the black, gaping windows of deserted hovels, many of which leaned at perilous and incredible angles through the sinking of part of the foundations. Those windows stared so spectrally that it took courage to turn eastward toward the waterfront. Certainly, the terror of a deserted house swells in geometrical rather than arithmetical progression as houses multiply to form a city of stark desolation. The sight of such endless avenues of fishy-eyed vacancy and death, and the thought of such linked infinities of black, brooding compartments given over to cob-webs and memories and the conqueror worm, start up vestigial fears and aversions that not even the stoutest philosophy can disperse.
Fish Street was as deserted as Main, though it differed in having many brick and stone warehouses still in excellent shape. Water Street was almost its duplicate, save that there were great seaward gaps where wharves had been. Not a living thing did I see except for the scattered fishermen on the distant break-water, and not a sound did I hear save the lapping of the harbour tides and the roar of the falls in the Manuxet. The town was getting more and more on my nerves, and I looked behind me furtively as I picked my way back over the tottering Water Street bridge. The Fish Street bridge, according to the sketch, was in ruins.
North of the river there were traces of squalid life--active fish-packing houses in Water Street, smoking chimneys and patched roofs here and there, occasional sounds from indeterminate sources, and infrequent shambling forms in the dismal streets and unpaved lanes--but I seemed to find this even more oppressive than the southerly desertion. For one thing, the people were more hideous and abnormal than those near the centre of the town; so that I was several times evilly reminded of something utterly fantastic which I could not quite place. Undoubtedly the alien strain in the Innsmouth folk was stronger here than farther inland--unless, indeed, the ""Innsmouth look"" were a disease rather than a blood stain, in which case this district might be held to harbour the more advanced cases.
One detail that annoyed me was the distribution of the few faint sounds I heard. They ought naturally to have come wholly from the visibly inhabited houses, yet in reality were often strongest inside the most rigidly boarded-up facades. There were creakings, scurryings, and hoarse doubtful noises; and I thought uncomfortably about the hidden tunnels suggested by the grocery boy. Suddenly I found myself wondering what the voices of those denizens would be like. I had heard no speech so far in this quarter, and was unaccountably anxious not to do so.
Pausing only long enough to look at two fine but ruinous old churches at Main and Church Streets, I hastened out of that vile waterfront slum. My next logical goal was New Church Green, but somehow or other I could not bear to repass the church in whose basement I had glimpsed the inexplicably frightening form of that strangely diademmed priest or pastor. Besides, the grocery youth had told me that churches, as well as the Order of Dagon Hall, were not advisable neighbourhoods for strangers.
Accordingly I kept north along Main to Martin, then turning inland, crossing Federal Street safely north of the Green, and entering the decayed patrician neighbourhood of northern Broad, Washington, Lafayette, and Adams Streets. Though these stately old avenues were ill-surfaced and unkempt, their elm-shaded dignity had not entirely departed. Mansion after mansion claimed my gaze, most of them decrepit and boarded up amidst neglected grounds, but one or two in each street shewing signs of occupancy. In Washington Street there was a row of four or five in excellent repair and with finely-tended lawns and gardens. The most sumptuous of these--with wide terraced parterres extending back the whole way to Lafayette Street--I took to be the home of Old Man Marsh, the afflicted refinery owner.
In all these streets no living thing was visible, and I wondered at the complete absence of cats and dogs from Innsmouth. Another thing which puzzled and disturbed me, even in some of the best-preserved mansions, was the tightly shuttered condition of many third-story and attic windows. Furtiveness and secretiveness seemed universal in this hushed city of alienage and death, and I could not escape the sensation of being watched from ambush on every hand by sly, staring eyes that never shut.
I shivered as the cracked stroke of three sounded from a belfry on my left. Too well did I recall the squat church from which those notes came. Following Washington Street toward the river, I now faced a new zone of former industry and commerce; noting the ruins of a factory ahead, and seeing others, with the traces of an old railway station and covered railway bridge beyond, up the gorge on my right.
The uncertain bridge now before me was posted with a warning sign, but I took the risk and crossed again to the south bank where traces of life reappeared. Furtive, shambling creatures stared cryptically in my direction, and more normal faces eyed me coldly and curiously. Innsmouth was rapidly becoming intolerable, and I turned down Paine Street toward the Square in the hope of getting some vehicle to take me to Arkham before the still-distant starting-time of that sinister bus.
It was then that I saw the tumbledown fire station on my left, and noticed the red faced, bushy-bearded, watery eyed old man in nondescript rags who sat on a bench in front of it talking with a pair of unkempt but not abnormal looking firemen. This, of course, must be Zadok Allen, the half-crazed, liquorish nonagenarian whose tales of old Innsmouth and its shadow were so hideous and incredible.
","Whether the dreams brought on the fever or the fever brought on the dreams Walter Gilman did not know. Behind everything crouched the brooding, festering horror of the ancient town, and of the mouldy, unhallowed garret gable where he wrote and studied and wrestled with figures and formulae when he was not tossing on the meagre iron bed. His ears were growing sensitive to a preternatural and intolerable degree, and he had long ago stopped the cheap mantel clock whose ticking had come to seem like a thunder of artillery. At night the subtle stirring of the black city outside, the sinister scurrying of rats in the wormy partitions, and the creaking of hidden timbers in the centuried house, were enough to give him a sense of strident pandemonium. The darkness always teemed with unexplained sound—and yet he sometimes shook with fear lest the noises he heard should subside and allow him to hear certain other, fainter, noises which he suspected were lurking behind them.
      He was in the changeless, legend-haunted city of Arkham, with its clustering gambrel roofs that sway and sag over attics where witches hid from the King’s men in the dark, olden days of the Province. Nor was any spot in that city more steeped in macabre memory than the gable room which harboured him—for it was this house and this room which had likewise harboured old Keziah Mason, whose flight from Salem Gaol at the last no one was ever able to explain. That was in 1692—the gaoler had gone mad and babbled of a small, white-fanged furry thing which scuttled out of Keziah’s cell, and not even Cotton Mather could explain the curves and angles smeared on the grey stone walls with some red, sticky fluid.
      Possibly Gilman ought not to have studied so hard. Non-Euclidean calculus and quantum physics are enough to stretch any brain; and when one mixes them with folklore, and tries to trace a strange background of multi-dimensional reality behind the ghoulish hints of the Gothic tales and the wild whispers of the chimney-corner, one can hardly expect to be wholly free from mental tension. Gilman came from Haverhill, but it was only after he had entered college in Arkham that he began to connect his mathematics with the fantastic legends of elder magic. Something in the air of the hoary town worked obscurely on his imagination. The professors at Miskatonic had urged him to slacken up, and had voluntarily cut down his course at several points. Moreover, they had stopped him from consulting the dubious old books on forbidden secrets that were kept under lock and key in a vault at the university library. But all these precautions came late in the day, so that Gilman had some terrible hints from the dreaded Necronomicon of Abdul Alhazred, the fragmentary Book of Eibon, and the suppressed Unaussprechlichen Kulten of von Junzt to correlate with his abstract formulae on the properties of space and the linkage of dimensions known and unknown.
      He knew his room was in the old Witch House—that, indeed, was why he had taken it. There was much in the Essex County records about Keziah Mason’s trial, and what she had admitted under pressure to the Court of Oyer and Terminer had fascinated Gilman beyond all reason. She had told Judge Hathorne of lines and curves that could be made to point out directions leading through the walls of space to other spaces beyond, and had implied that such lines and curves were frequently used at certain midnight meetings in the dark valley of the white stone beyond Meadow Hill and on the unpeopled island in the river. She had spoken also of the Black Man, of her oath, and of her new secret name of Nahab. Then she had drawn those devices on the walls of her cell and vanished.
      Gilman believed strange things about Keziah, and had felt a queer thrill on learning that her dwelling was still standing after more than 235 years. When he heard the hushed Arkham whispers about Keziah’s persistent presence in the old house and the narrow streets, about the irregular human tooth-marks left on certain sleepers in that and other houses, about the childish cries heard near May-Eve, and Hallowmass, about the stench often noted in the old house’s attic just after those dreaded seasons, and about the small, furry, sharp-toothed thing which haunted the mouldering structure and the town and nuzzled people curiously in the black hours before dawn, he resolved to live in the place at any cost. A room was easy to secure; for the house was unpopular, hard to rent, and long given over to cheap lodgings. Gilman could not have told what he expected to find there, but he knew he wanted to be in the building where some circumstance had more or less suddenly given a mediocre old woman of the seventeenth century an insight into mathematical depths perhaps beyond the utmost modern delvings of Planck, Heisenberg, Einstein, and de Sitter.
      He studied the timber and plaster walls for traces of cryptic designs at every accessible spot where the paper had peeled, and within a week managed to get the eastern attic room where Keziah was held to have practiced her spells. It had been vacant from the first—for no one had ever been willing to stay there long—but the Polish landlord had grown wary about renting it. Yet nothing whatever happened to Gilman till about the time of the fever. No ghostly Keziah flitted through the sombre halls and chambers, no small furry thing crept into his dismal eyrie to nuzzle him, and no record of the witch’s incantations rewarded his constant search. Sometimes he would take walks through shadowy tangles of unpaved musty-smelling lanes where eldritch brown houses of unknown age leaned and tottered and leered mockingly through narrow, small-paned windows. Here he knew strange things had happened once, and there was a faint suggestion behind the surface that everything of that monstrous past might not—at least in the darkest, narrowest, and most intricately crooked alleys—have utterly perished. He also rowed out twice to the ill-regarded island in the river, and made a sketch of the singular angles described by the moss-grown rows of grey standing stones whose origin was so obscure and immemorial.
      Gilman’s room was of good size but queerly irregular shape; the north wall slanting perceptibly inward from the outer to the inner end, while the low ceiling slanted gently downward in the same direction. Aside from an obvious rat-hole and the signs of other stopped-up ones, there was no access—nor any appearance of a former avenue of access—to the space which must have existed between the slanting wall and the straight outer wall on the house’s north side, though a view from the exterior shewed where a window had been boarded up at a very remote date. The loft above the ceiling—which must have had a slanting floor—was likewise inaccessible. When Gilman climbed up a ladder to the cobwebbed level loft above the rest of the attic he found vestiges of a bygone aperture tightly and heavily covered with ancient planking and secured by the stout wooden pegs common in colonial carpentry. No amount of persuasion, however, could induce the stolid landlord to let him investigate either of these two closed spaces.
      As time wore along, his absorption in the irregular wall and ceiling of his room increased; for he began to read into the odd angles a mathematical significance which seemed to offer vague clues regarding their purpose. Old Keziah, he reflected, might have had excellent reasons for living in a room with peculiar angles; for was it not through certain angles that she claimed to have gone outside the boundaries of the world of space we know? His interest gradually veered away from the unplumbed voids beyond the slanting surfaces, since it now appeared that the purpose of those surfaces concerned the side he was already on.
      The touch of brain-fever and the dreams began early in February. For some time, apparently, the curious angles of Gilman’s room had been having a strange, almost hypnotic effect on him; and as the bleak winter advanced he had found himself staring more and more intently at the corner where the down-slanting ceiling met the inward-slanting wall. About this period his inability to concentrate on his formal studies worried him considerably, his apprehensions about the mid-year examinations being very acute. But the exaggerated sense of hearing was scarcely less annoying. Life had become an insistent and almost unendurable cacophony, and there was that constant, terrifying impression of other sounds—perhaps from regions beyond life—trembling on the very brink of audibility. So far as concrete noises went, the rats in the ancient partitions were the worst. Sometimes their scratching seemed not only furtive but deliberate. When it came from beyond the slanting north wall it was mixed with a sort of dry rattling—and when it came from the century-closed loft above the slanting ceiling Gilman always braced himself as if expecting some horror which only bided its time before descending to engulf him utterly.
      The dreams were wholly beyond the pale of sanity, and Gilman felt that they must be a result, jointly, of his studies in mathematics and in folklore. He had been thinking too much about the vague regions which his formulae told him must lie beyond the three dimensions we know, and about the possibility that old Keziah Mason—guided by some influence past all conjecture—had actually found the gate to those regions. The yellowed county records containing her testimony and that of her accusers were so damnably suggestive of things beyond human experience—and the descriptions of the darting little furry object which served as her familiar were so painfully realistic despite their incredible details.
      That object—no larger than a good-sized rat and quaintly called by the townspeople “Brown Jenkin”—seemed to have been the fruit of a remarkable case of sympathetic herd-delusion, for in 1692 no less than eleven persons had testified to glimpsing it. There were recent rumours, too, with a baffling and disconcerting amount of agreement. Witnesses said it had long hair and the shape of a rat, but that its sharp-toothed, bearded face was evilly human while its paws were like tiny human hands. It took messages betwixt old Keziah and the devil, and was nursed on the witch’s blood—which it sucked like a vampire. Its voice was a kind of loathsome titter, and it could speak all languages. Of all the bizarre monstrosities in Gilman’s dreams, nothing filled him with greater panic and nausea than this blasphemous and diminutive hybrid, whose image flitted across his vision in a form a thousandfold more hateful than anything his waking mind had deduced from the ancient records and the modern whispers.
      Gilman’s dreams consisted largely in plunges through limitless abysses of inexplicably coloured twilight and bafflingly disordered sound; abysses whose material and gravitational properties, and whose relation to his own entity, he could not even begin to explain. He did not walk or climb, fly or swim, crawl or wriggle; yet always experienced a mode of motion partly voluntary and partly involuntary. Of his own condition he could not well judge, for sight of his arms, legs, and torso seemed always cut off by some odd disarrangement of perspective; but he felt that his physical organisation and faculties were somehow marvellously transmuted and obliquely projected—though not without a certain grotesque relationship to his normal proportions and properties.
      The abysses were by no means vacant, being crowded with indescribably angled masses of alien-hued substance, some of which appeared to be organic while others seemed inorganic. A few of the organic objects tended to awake vague memories in the back of his mind, though he could form no conscious idea of what they mockingly resembled or suggested. In the later dreams he began to distinguish separate categories into which the organic objects appeared to be divided, and which seemed to involve in each case a radically different species of conduct-pattern and basic motivation. Of these categories one seemed to him to include objects slightly less illogical and irrelevant in their motions than the members of the other categories.
      All the objects—organic and inorganic alike—were totally beyond description or even comprehension. Gilman sometimes compared the inorganic masses to prisms, labyrinths, clusters of cubes and planes, and Cyclopean buildings; and the organic things struck him variously as groups of bubbles, octopi, centipedes, living Hindoo idols, and intricate Arabesques roused into a kind of ophidian animation. Everything he saw was unspeakably menacing and horrible; and whenever one of the organic entities appeared by its motions to be noticing him, he felt a stark, hideous fright which generally jolted him awake. Of how the organic entities moved, he could tell no more than of how he moved himself. In time he observed a further mystery—the tendency of certain entities to appear suddenly out of empty space, or to disappear totally with equal suddenness. The shrieking, roaring confusion of sound which permeated the abysses was past all analysis as to pitch, timbre, or rhythm; but seemed to be synchronous with vague visual changes in all the indefinite objects, organic and inorganic alike. Gilman had a constant sense of dread that it might rise to some unbearable degree of intensity during one or another of its obscure, relentlessly inevitable fluctuations.
      But it was not in these vortices of complete alienage that he saw Brown Jenkin. That shocking little horror was reserved for certain lighter, sharper dreams which assailed him just before he dropped into the fullest depths of sleep. He would be lying in the dark fighting to keep awake when a faint lambent glow would seem to shimmer around the centuried room, shewing in a violet mist the convergence of angled planes which had seized his brain so insidiously. The horror would appear to pop out of the rat-hole in the corner and patter toward him over the sagging, wide-planked floor with evil expectancy in its tiny, bearded human face—but mercifully, this dream always melted away before the object got close enough to nuzzle him. It had hellishly long, sharp, canine teeth. Gilman tried to stop up the rat-hole every day, but each night the real tenants of the partitions would gnaw away the obstruction, whatever it might be. Once he had the landlord nail tin over it, but the next night the rats gnawed a fresh hole—in making which they pushed or dragged out into the room a curious little fragment of bone.
      Gilman did not report his fever to the doctor, for he knew he could not pass the examinations if ordered to the college infirmary when every moment was needed for cramming. As it was, he failed in Calculus D and Advanced General Psychology, though not without hope of making up lost ground before the end of the term. It was in March when the fresh element entered his lighter preliminary dreaming, and the nightmare shape of Brown Jenkin began to be companioned by the nebulous blur which grew more and more to resemble a bent old woman. This addition disturbed him more than he could account for, but finally he decided that it was like an ancient crone whom he had twice actually encountered in the dark tangle of lanes near the abandoned wharves. On those occasions the evil, sardonic, and seemingly unmotivated stare of the beldame had set him almost shivering—especially the first time, when an overgrown rat darting across the shadowed mouth of a neighbouring alley had made him think irrationally of Brown Jenkin. Now, he reflected, those nervous fears were being mirrored in his disordered dreams.
      That the influence of the old house was unwholesome, he could not deny; but traces of his early morbid interest still held him there. He argued that the fever alone was responsible for his nightly phantasies, and that when the touch abated he would be free from the monstrous visions. Those visions, however, were of abhorrent vividness and convincingness, and whenever he awaked he retained a vague sense of having undergone much more than he remembered. He was hideously sure that in unrecalled dreams he had talked with both Brown Jenkin and the old woman, and that they had been urging him to go somewhere with them and to meet a third being of greater potency.
      Toward the end of March he began to pick up in his mathematics, though other studies bothered him increasingly. He was getting an intuitive knack for solving Riemannian equations, and astonished Professor Upham by his comprehension of fourth-dimensional and other problems which had floored all the rest of the class. One afternoon there was a discussion of possible freakish curvatures in space, and of theoretical points of approach or even contact between our part of the cosmos and various other regions as distant as the farthest stars or the trans-galactic gulfs themselves—or even as fabulously remote as the tentatively conceivable cosmic units beyond the whole Einsteinian space-time continuum. Gilman’s handling of this theme filled everyone with admiration, even though some of his hypothetical illustrations caused an increase in the always plentiful gossip about his nervous and solitary eccentricity. What made the students shake their heads was his sober theory that a man might—given mathematical knowledge admittedly beyond all likelihood of human acquirement—step deliberately from the earth to any other celestial body which might lie at one of an infinity of specific points in the cosmic pattern.
      Such a step, he said, would require only two stages; first, a passage out of the three-dimensional sphere we know, and second, a passage back to the three-dimensional sphere at another point, perhaps one of infinite remoteness. That this could be accomplished without loss of life was in many cases conceivable. Any being from any part of three-dimensional space could probably survive in the fourth dimension; and its survival of the second stage would depend upon what alien part of three-dimensional space it might select for its re-entry. Denizens of some planets might be able to live on certain others—even planets belonging to other galaxies, or to similar-dimensional phases of other space-time continua—though of course there must be vast numbers of mutually uninhabitable even though mathematically juxtaposed bodies or zones of space.
      It was also possible that the inhabitants of a given dimensional realm could survive entry to many unknown and incomprehensible realms of additional or indefinitely multiplied dimensions—be they within or outside the given space-time continuum—and that the converse would be likewise true. This was a matter for speculation, though one could be fairly certain that the type of mutation involved in a passage from any given dimensional plane to the next higher plane would not be destructive of biological integrity as we understand it. Gilman could not be very clear about his reasons for this last assumption, but his haziness here was more than overbalanced by his clearness on other complex points. Professor Upham especially liked his demonstration of the kinship of higher mathematics to certain phases of magical lore transmitted down the ages from an ineffable antiquity—human or pre-human—whose knowledge of the cosmos and its laws was greater than ours.
      Around the first of April Gilman worried considerably because his slow fever did not abate. He was also troubled by what some of his fellow-lodgers said about his sleep-walking. It seemed that he was often absent from his bed, and that the creaking of his floor at certain hours of the night was remarked by the man in the room below. This fellow also spoke of hearing the tread of shod feet in the night; but Gilman was sure he must have been mistaken in this, since shoes as well as other apparel were always precisely in place in the morning. One could develop all sorts of aural delusions in this morbid old house—for did not Gilman himself, even in daylight, now feel certain that noises other than rat-scratchings came from the black voids beyond the slanting wall and above the slanting ceiling? His pathologically sensitive ears began to listen for faint footfalls in the immemorially sealed loft overhead, and sometimes the illusion of such things was agonisingly realistic.
      However, he knew that he had actually become a somnambulist; for twice at night his room had been found vacant, though with all his clothing in place. Of this he had been assured by Frank Elwood, the one fellow-student whose poverty forced him to room in this squalid and unpopular house. Elwood had been studying in the small hours and had come up for help on a differential equation, only to find Gilman absent. It had been rather presumptuous of him to open the unlocked door after knocking had failed to rouse a response, but he had needed the help very badly and thought that his host would not mind a gentle prodding awake. On neither occasion, though, had Gilman been there—and when told of the matter he wondered where he could have been wandering, barefoot and with only his night-clothes on. He resolved to investigate the matter if reports of his sleep-walking continued, and thought of sprinkling flour on the floor of the corridor to see where his footsteps might lead. The door was the only conceivable egress, for there was no possible foothold outside the narrow window.
      As April advanced Gilman’s fever-sharpened ears were disturbed by the whining prayers of a superstitious loomfixer named Joe Mazurewicz, who had a room on the ground floor. Mazurewicz had told long, rambling stories about the ghost of old Keziah and the furry, sharp-fanged, nuzzling thing, and had said he was so badly haunted at times that only his silver crucifix—given him for the purpose by Father Iwanicki of St. Stanislaus’ Church—could bring him relief. Now he was praying because the Witches’ Sabbath was drawing near. May-Eve was Walpurgis-Night, when hell’s blackest evil roamed the earth and all the slaves of Satan gathered for nameless rites and deeds. It was always a very bad time in Arkham, even though the fine folks up in Miskatonic Avenue and High and Saltonstall Streets pretended to know nothing about it. There would be bad doings—and a child or two would probably be missing. Joe knew about such things, for his grandmother in the old country had heard tales from her grandmother. It was wise to pray and count one’s beads at this season. For three months Keziah and Brown Jenkin had not been near Joe’s room, nor near Paul Choynski’s room, nor anywhere else—and it meant no good when they held off like that. They must be up to something.
      Gilman dropped in at a doctor’s office on the 16th of the month, and was surprised to find his temperature was not as high as he had feared. The physician questioned him sharply, and advised him to see a nerve specialist. On reflection, he was glad he had not consulted the still more inquisitive college doctor. Old Waldron, who had curtailed his activities before, would have made him take a rest—an impossible thing now that he was so close to great results in his equations. He was certainly near the boundary between the known universe and the fourth dimension, and who could say how much farther he might go?
      But even as these thoughts came to him he wondered at the source of his strange confidence. Did all of this perilous sense of imminence come from the formulae on the sheets he covered day by day? The soft, stealthy, imaginary footsteps in the sealed loft above were unnerving. And now, too, there was a growing feeling that somebody was constantly persuading him to do something terrible which he could not do. How about the somnambulism? Where did he go sometimes in the night? And what was that faint suggestion of sound which once in a while seemed to trickle through the maddening confusion of identifiable sounds even in broad daylight and full wakefulness? Its rhythm did not correspond to anything on earth, unless perhaps to the cadence of one or two unmentionable Sabbat-chants, and sometimes he feared it corresponded to certain attributes of the vague shrieking or roaring in those wholly alien abysses of dream.
      The dreams were meanwhile getting to be atrocious. In the lighter preliminary phase the evil old woman was now of fiendish distinctness, and Gilman knew she was the one who had frightened him in the slums. Her bent back, long nose, and shrivelled chin were unmistakable, and her shapeless brown garments were like those he remembered. The expression on her face was one of hideous malevolence and exultation, and when he awaked he could recall a croaking voice that persuaded and threatened. He must meet the Black Man, and go with them all to the throne of Azathoth at the centre of ultimate Chaos. That was what she said. He must sign in his own blood the book of Azathoth and take a new secret name now that his independent delvings had gone so far. What kept him from going with her and Brown Jenkin and the other to the throne of Chaos where the thin flutes pipe mindlessly was the fact that he had seen the name “Azathoth” in the Necronomicon, and knew it stood for a primal evil too horrible for description.
      The old woman always appeared out of thin air near the corner where the downward slant met the inward slant. She seemed to crystallise at a point closer to the ceiling than to the floor, and every night she was a little nearer and more distinct before the dream shifted. Brown Jenkin, too, was always a little nearer at the last, and its yellowish-white fangs glistened shockingly in that unearthly violet phosphorescence. Its shrill loathsome tittering stuck more and more in Gilman’s head, and he could remember in the morning how it had pronounced the words “Azathoth” and “Nyarlathotep”.
      In the deeper dreams everything was likewise more distinct, and Gilman felt that the twilight abysses around him were those of the fourth dimension. Those organic entities whose motions seemed least flagrantly irrelevant and unmotivated were probably projections of life-forms from our own planet, including human beings. What the others were in their own dimensional sphere or spheres he dared not try to think. Two of the less irrelevantly moving things—a rather large congeries of iridescent, prolately spheroidal bubbles and a very much smaller polyhedron of unknown colours and rapidly shifting surface angles—seemed to take notice of him and follow him about or float ahead as he changed position among the titan prisms, labyrinths, cube-and-plane clusters, and quasi-buildings; and all the while the vague shrieking and roaring waxed louder and louder, as if approaching some monstrous climax of utterly unendurable intensity.
      During the night of April 19–20 the new development occurred. Gilman was half-involuntarily moving about in the twilight abysses with the bubble-mass and the small polyhedron floating ahead, when he noticed the peculiarly regular angles formed by the edges of some gigantic neighbouring prism-clusters. In another second he was out of the abyss and standing tremulously on a rocky hillside bathed in intense, diffused green light. He was barefooted and in his night-clothes, and when he tried to walk discovered that he could scarcely lift his feet. A swirling vapour hid everything but the immediate sloping terrain from sight, and he shrank from the thought of the sounds that might surge out of that vapour.
      Then he saw the two shapes laboriously crawling toward him—the old woman and the little furry thing. The crone strained up to her knees and managed to cross her arms in a singular fashion, while Brown Jenkin pointed in a certain direction with a horribly anthropoid fore paw which it raised with evident difficulty. Spurred by an impulse he did not originate, Gilman dragged himself forward along a course determined by the angle of the old woman’s arms and the direction of the small monstrosity’s paw, and before he had shuffled three steps he was back in the twilight abysses. Geometrical shapes seethed around him, and he fell dizzily and interminably. At last he woke in his bed in the crazily angled garret of the eldritch old house.
      He was good for nothing that morning, and stayed away from all his classes. Some unknown attraction was pulling his eyes in a seemingly irrelevant direction, for he could not help staring at a certain vacant spot on the floor. As the day advanced the focus of his unseeing eyes changed position, and by noon he had conquered the impulse to stare at vacancy. About two o’clock he went out for lunch, and as he threaded the narrow lanes of the city he found himself turning always to the southeast. Only an effort halted him at a cafeteria in Church Street, and after the meal he felt the unknown pull still more strongly.
      He would have to consult a nerve specialist after all—perhaps there was a connexion with his somnambulism—but meanwhile he might at least try to break the morbid spell himself. Undoubtedly he could still manage to walk away from the pull; so with great resolution he headed against it and dragged himself deliberately north along Garrison Street. By the time he had reached the bridge over the Miskatonic he was in a cold perspiration, and he clutched at the iron railing as he gazed upstream at the ill-regarded island whose regular lines of ancient standing stones brooded sullenly in the afternoon sunlight.
      Then he gave a start. For there was a clearly visible living figure on that desolate island, and a second glance told him it was certainly the strange old woman whose sinister aspect had worked itself so disastrously into his dreams. The tall grass near her was moving, too, as if some other living thing were crawling close to the ground. When the old woman began to turn toward him he fled precipitately off the bridge and into the shelter of the town’s labyrinthine waterfront alleys. Distant though the island was, he felt that a monstrous and invincible evil could flow from the sardonic stare of that bent, ancient figure in brown.
      The southeastward pull still held, and only with tremendous resolution could Gilman drag himself into the old house and up the rickety stairs. For hours he sat silent and aimless, with his eyes shifting gradually westward. About six o’clock his sharpened ears caught the whining prayers of Joe Mazurewicz two floors below, and in desperation he seized his hat and walked out into the sunset-golden streets, letting the now directly southward pull carry him where it might. An hour later darkness found him in the open fields beyond Hangman’s Brook, with the glimmering spring stars shining ahead. The urge to walk was gradually changing to an urge to leap mystically into space, and suddenly he realised just where the source of the pull lay.
      It was in the sky. A definite point among the stars had a claim on him and was calling him. Apparently it was a point somewhere between Hydra and Argo Navis, and he knew that he had been urged toward it ever since he had awaked soon after dawn. In the morning it had been underfoot; afternoon found it rising in the southeast, and now it was roughly south but wheeling toward the west. What was the meaning of this new thing? Was he going mad? How long would it last? Again mustering his resolution, Gilman turned and dragged himself back to the sinister old house.
      Mazurewicz was waiting for him at the door, and seemed both anxious and reluctant to whisper some fresh bit of superstition. It was about the witch light. Joe had been out celebrating the night before—it was Patriots’ Day in Massachusetts—and had come home after midnight. Looking up at the house from outside, he had thought at first that Gilman’s window was dark; but then he had seen the faint violet glow within. He wanted to warn the gentleman about that glow, for everybody in Arkham knew it was Keziah’s witch light which played near Brown Jenkin and the ghost of the old crone herself. He had not mentioned this before, but now he must tell about it because it meant that Keziah and her long-toothed familiar were haunting the young gentleman. Sometimes he and Paul Choynski and Landlord Dombrowski thought they saw that light seeping out of cracks in the sealed loft above the young gentleman’s room, but they had all agreed not to talk about that. However, it would be better for the gentleman to take another room and get a crucifix from some good priest like Father Iwanicki.
      As the man rambled on Gilman felt a nameless panic clutch at his throat. He knew that Joe must have been half drunk when he came home the night before, yet this mention of a violet light in the garret window was of frightful import. It was a lambent glow of this sort which always played about the old woman and the small furry thing in those lighter, sharper dreams which prefaced his plunge into unknown abysses, and the thought that a wakeful second person could see the dream-luminance was utterly beyond sane harbourage. Yet where had the fellow got such an odd notion? Had he himself talked as well as walked around the house in his sleep? No, Joe said, he had not—but he must check up on this. Perhaps Frank Elwood could tell him something, though he hated to ask.
      Fever—wild dreams—somnambulism—illusions of sounds—a pull toward a point in the sky—and now a suspicion of insane sleep-talking! He must stop studying, see a nerve specialist, and take himself in hand. When he climbed to the second story he paused at Elwood’s door but saw that the other youth was out. Reluctantly he continued up to his garret room and sat down in the dark. His gaze was still pulled to the southwest, but he also found himself listening intently for some sound in the closed loft above, and half imagining that an evil violet light seeped down through an infinitesimal crack in the low, slanting ceiling.
      That night as Gilman slept the violet light broke upon him with heightened intensity, and the old witch and small furry thing—getting closer than ever before—mocked him with inhuman squeals and devilish gestures. He was glad to sink into the vaguely roaring twilight abysses, though the pursuit of that iridescent bubble-congeries and that kaleidoscopic little polyhedron was menacing and irritating. Then came the shift as vast converging planes of a slippery-looking substance loomed above and below him—a shift which ended in a flash of delirium and a blaze of unknown, alien light in which yellow, carmine, and indigo were madly and inextricably blended.
      He was half lying on a high, fantastically balustraded terrace above a boundless jungle of outlandish, incredible peaks, balanced planes, domes, minarets, horizontal discs poised on pinnacles, and numberless forms of still greater wildness—some of stone and some of metal—which glittered gorgeously in the mixed, almost blistering glare from a polychromatic sky. Looking upward he saw three stupendous discs of flame, each of a different hue, and at a different height above an infinitely distant curving horizon of low mountains. Behind him tiers of higher terraces towered aloft as far as he could see. The city below stretched away to the limits of vision, and he hoped that no sound would well up from it.
      The pavement from which he easily raised himself was of a veined, polished stone beyond his power to identify, and the tiles were cut in bizarre-angled shapes which struck him as less asymmetrical than based on some unearthly symmetry whose laws he could not comprehend. The balustrade was chest-high, delicate, and fantastically wrought, while along the rail were ranged at short intervals little figures of grotesque design and exquisite workmanship. They, like the whole balustrade, seemed to be made of some sort of shining metal whose colour could not be guessed in this chaos of mixed effulgences; and their nature utterly defied conjecture. They represented some ridged, barrel-shaped object with thin horizontal arms radiating spoke-like from a central ring, and with vertical knobs or bulbs projecting from the head and base of the barrel. Each of these knobs was the hub of a system of five long, flat, triangularly tapering arms arranged around it like the arms of a starfish—nearly horizontal, but curving slightly away from the central barrel. The base of the bottom knob was fused to the long railing with so delicate a point of contact that several figures had been broken off and were missing. The figures were about four and a half inches in height, while the spiky arms gave them a maximum diameter of about two and a half inches.
      When Gilman stood up the tiles felt hot to his bare feet. He was wholly alone, and his first act was to walk to the balustrade and look dizzily down at the endless, Cyclopean city almost two thousand feet below. As he listened he thought a rhythmic confusion of faint musical pipings covering a wide tonal range welled up from the narrow streets beneath, and he wished he might discern the denizens of the place. The sight turned him giddy after a while, so that he would have fallen to the pavement had he not clutched instinctively at the lustrous balustrade. His right hand fell on one of the projecting figures, the touch seeming to steady him slightly. It was too much, however, for the exotic delicacy of the metal-work, and the spiky figure snapped off under his grasp. Still half-dazed, he continued to clutch it as his other hand seized a vacant space on the smooth railing.
      But now his oversensitive ears caught something behind him, and he looked back across the level terrace. Approaching him softly though without apparent furtiveness were five figures, two of which were the sinister old woman and the fanged, furry little animal. The other three were what sent him unconscious—for they were living entities about eight feet high, shaped precisely like the spiky images on the balustrade, and propelling themselves by a spider-like wriggling of their lower set of starfish-arms.
      Gilman awakened in his bed, drenched by a cold perspiration and with a smarting sensation in his face, hands, and feet. Springing to the floor, he washed and dressed in frantic haste, as if it were necessary for him to get out of the house as quickly as possible. He did not know where he wished to go, but felt that once more he would have to sacrifice his classes. The odd pull toward that spot in the sky between Hydra and Argo had abated, but another of even greater strength had taken its place. Now he felt that he must go north—infinitely north. He dreaded to cross the bridge that gave a view of the desolate island in the Miskatonic, so went over the Peabody Avenue bridge. Very often he stumbled, for his eyes and ears were chained to an extremely lofty point in the blank blue sky.
      After about an hour he got himself under better control, and saw that he was far from the city. All around him stretched the bleak emptiness of salt marshes, while the narrow road ahead led to Innsmouth—that ancient, half-deserted town which Arkham people were so curiously unwilling to visit. Though the northward pull had not diminished, he resisted it as he had resisted the other pull, and finally found that he could almost balance the one against the other. Plodding back to town and getting some coffee at a soda fountain, he dragged himself into the public library and browsed aimlessly among the lighter magazines. Once he met some friends who remarked how oddly sunburned he looked, but he did not tell them of his walk. At three o’clock he took some lunch at a restaurant, noting meanwhile that the pull had either lessened or divided itself. After that he killed the time at a cheap cinema show, seeing the inane performance over and over again without paying any attention to it.
      About nine at night he drifted homeward and stumbled into the ancient house. Joe Mazurewicz was whining unintelligible prayers, and Gilman hastened up to his own garret chamber without pausing to see if Elwood was in. It was when he turned on the feeble electric light that the shock came. At once he saw there was something on the table which did not belong there, and a second look left no room for doubt. Lying on its side—for it could not stand up alone—was the exotic spiky figure which in his monstrous dream he had broken off the fantastic balustrade. No detail was missing. The ridged, barrel-shaped centre, the thin, radiating arms, the knobs at each end, and the flat, slightly outward-curving starfish-arms spreading from those knobs—all were there. In the electric light the colour seemed to be a kind of iridescent grey veined with green, and Gilman could see amidst his horror and bewilderment that one of the knobs ended in a jagged break corresponding to its former point of attachment to the dream-railing.
      Only his tendency toward a dazed stupor prevented him from screaming aloud. This fusion of dream and reality was too much to bear. Still dazed, he clutched at the spiky thing and staggered downstairs to Landlord Dombrowski’s quarters. The whining prayers of the superstitious loomfixer were still sounding through the mouldy halls, but Gilman did not mind them now. The landlord was in, and greeted him pleasantly. No, he had not seen that thing before and did not know anything about it. But his wife had said she found a funny tin thing in one of the beds when she fixed the rooms at noon, and maybe that was it. Dombrowski called her, and she waddled in. Yes, that was the thing. She had found it in the young gentleman’s bed—on the side next the wall. It had looked very queer to her, but of course the young gentleman had lots of queer things in his room—books and curios and pictures and markings on paper. She certainly knew nothing about it.
      So Gilman climbed upstairs again in a mental turmoil, convinced that he was either still dreaming or that his somnambulism had run to incredible extremes and led him to depredations in unknown places. Where had he got this outré thing? He did not recall seeing it in any museum in Arkham. It must have been somewhere, though; and the sight of it as he snatched it in his sleep must have caused the odd dream-picture of the balustraded terrace. Next day he would make some very guarded inquiries—and perhaps see the nerve specialist.
      Meanwhile he would try to keep track of his somnambulism. As he went upstairs and across the garret hall he sprinkled about some flour which he had borrowed—with a frank admission as to its purpose—from the landlord. He had stopped at Elwood’s door on the way, but had found all dark within. Entering his room, he placed the spiky thing on the table, and lay down in complete mental and physical exhaustion without pausing to undress. From the closed loft above the slanting ceiling he thought he heard a faint scratching and padding, but he was too disorganised even to mind it. That cryptical pull from the north was getting very strong again, though it seemed now to come from a lower place in the sky.
      In the dazzling violet light of dream the old woman and the fanged, furry thing came again and with a greater distinctness than on any former occasion. This time they actually reached him, and he felt the crone’s withered claws clutching at him. He was pulled out of bed and into empty space, and for a moment he heard a rhythmic roaring and saw the twilight amorphousness of the vague abysses seething around him. But that moment was very brief, for presently he was in a crude, windowless little space with rough beams and planks rising to a peak just above his head, and with a curious slanting floor underfoot. Propped level on that floor were low cases full of books of every degree of antiquity and disintegration, and in the centre were a table and bench, both apparently fastened in place. Small objects of unknown shape and nature were ranged on the tops of the cases, and in the flaming violet light Gilman thought he saw a counterpart of the spiky image which had puzzled him so horribly. On the left the floor fell abruptly away, leaving a black triangular gulf out of which, after a second’s dry rattling, there presently climbed the hateful little furry thing with the yellow fangs and bearded human face.
      The evilly grinning beldame still clutched him, and beyond the table stood a figure he had never seen before—a tall, lean man of dead black colouration but without the slightest sign of negroid features; wholly devoid of either hair or beard, and wearing as his only garment a shapeless robe of some heavy black fabric. His feet were indistinguishable because of the table and bench, but he must have been shod, since there was a clicking whenever he changed position. The man did not speak, and bore no trace of expression on his small, regular features. He merely pointed to a book of prodigious size which lay open on the table, while the beldame thrust a huge grey quill into Gilman’s right hand. Over everything was a pall of intensely maddening fear, and the climax was reached when the furry thing ran up the dreamer’s clothing to his shoulders and then down his left arm, finally biting him sharply in the wrist just below his cuff. As the blood spurted from this wound Gilman lapsed into a faint.
      He awaked on the morning of the 22nd with a pain in his left wrist, and saw that his cuff was brown with dried blood. His recollections were very confused, but the scene with the black man in the unknown space stood out vividly. The rats must have bitten him as he slept, giving rise to the climax of that frightful dream. Opening the door, he saw that the flour on the corridor floor was undisturbed except for the huge prints of the loutish fellow who roomed at the other end of the garret. So he had not been sleep-walking this time. But something would have to be done about those rats. He would speak to the landlord about them. Again he tried to stop up the hole at the base of the slanting wall, wedging in a candlestick which seemed of about the right size. His ears were ringing horribly, as if with the residual echoes of some horrible noise heard in dreams.
      As he bathed and changed clothes he tried to recall what he had dreamed after the scene in the violet-litten space, but nothing definite would crystallise in his mind. That scene itself must have corresponded to the sealed loft overhead, which had begun to attack his imagination so violently, but later impressions were faint and hazy. There were suggestions of the vague, twilight abysses, and of still vaster, blacker abysses beyond them—abysses in which all fixed suggestions of form were absent. He had been taken there by the bubble-congeries and the little polyhedron which always dogged him; but they, like himself, had changed to wisps of milky, barely luminous mist in this farther void of ultimate blackness. Something else had gone on ahead—a larger wisp which now and then condensed into nameless approximations of form—and he thought that their progress had not been in a straight line, but rather along the alien curves and spirals of some ethereal vortex which obeyed laws unknown to the physics and mathematics of any conceivable cosmos. Eventually there had been a hint of vast, leaping shadows, of a monstrous, half-acoustic pulsing, and of the thin, monotonous piping of an unseen flute—but that was all. Gilman decided he had picked up that last conception from what he had read in the Necronomicon about the mindless entity Azathoth, which rules all time and space from a curiously environed black throne at the centre of Chaos.
      When the blood was washed away the wrist wound proved very slight, and Gilman puzzled over the location of the two tiny punctures. It occurred to him that there was no blood on the bedspread where he had lain—which was very curious in view of the amount on his skin and cuff. Had he been sleep-walking within his room, and had the rat bitten him as he sat in some chair or paused in some less rational position? He looked in every corner for brownish drops or stains, but did not find any. He had better, he thought, sprinkle flour within the room as well as outside the door—though after all no further proof of his sleep-walking was needed. He knew he did walk—and the thing to do now was to stop it. He must ask Frank Elwood for help. This morning the strange pulls from space seemed lessened, though they were replaced by another sensation even more inexplicable. It was a vague, insistent impulse to fly away from his present situation, but held not a hint of the specific direction in which he wished to fly. As he picked up the strange spiky image on the table he thought the older northward pull grew a trifle stronger; but even so, it was wholly overruled by the newer and more bewildering urge.
      He took the spiky image down to Elwood’s room, steeling himself against the whines of the loomfixer which welled up from the ground floor. Elwood was in, thank heaven, and appeared to be stirring about. There was time for a little conversation before leaving for breakfast and college, so Gilman hurriedly poured forth an account of his recent dreams and fears. His host was very sympathetic, and agreed that something ought to be done. He was shocked by his guest’s drawn, haggard aspect, and noticed the queer, abnormal-looking sunburn which others had remarked during the past week. There was not much, though, that he could say. He had not seen Gilman on any sleep-walking expedition, and had no idea what the curious image could be. He had, though, heard the French-Canadian who lodged just under Gilman talking to Mazurewicz one evening. They were telling each other how badly they dreaded the coming of Walpurgis-Night, now only a few days off; and were exchanging pitying comments about the poor, doomed young gentleman. Desrochers, the fellow under Gilman’s room, had spoken of nocturnal footsteps both shod and unshod, and of the violet light he saw one night when he had stolen fearfully up to peer through Gilman’s keyhole. He had not dared to peer, he told Mazurewicz, after he had glimpsed that light through the cracks around the door. There had been soft talking, too—and as he began to describe it his voice had sunk to an inaudible whisper.
      Elwood could not imagine what had set these superstitious creatures gossiping, but supposed their imaginations had been roused by Gilman’s late hours and somnolent walking and talking on the one hand, and by the nearness of traditionally feared May-Eve on the other hand. That Gilman talked in his sleep was plain, and it was obviously from Desrochers’ keyhole-listenings that the delusive notion of the violet dream-light had got abroad. These simple people were quick to imagine they had seen any odd thing they had heard about. As for a plan of action—Gilman had better move down to Elwood’s room and avoid sleeping alone. Elwood would, if awake, rouse him whenever he began to talk or rise in his sleep. Very soon, too, he must see the specialist. Meanwhile they would take the spiky image around to the various museums and to certain professors; seeking identification and stating that it had been found in a public rubbish-can. Also, Dombrowski must attend to the poisoning of those rats in the walls.
      Braced up by Elwood’s companionship, Gilman attended classes that day. Strange urges still tugged at him, but he could sidetrack them with considerable success. During a free period he shewed the queer image to several professors, all of whom were intensely interested, though none of them could shed any light upon its nature or origin. That night he slept on a couch which Elwood had had the landlord bring to the second-story room, and for the first time in weeks was wholly free from disquieting dreams. But the feverishness still hung on, and the whines of the loomfixer were an unnerving influence.
      During the next few days Gilman enjoyed an almost perfect immunity from morbid manifestations. He had, Elwood said, shewed no tendency to talk or rise in his sleep; and meanwhile the landlord was putting rat-poison everywhere. The only disturbing element was the talk among the superstitious foreigners, whose imaginations had become highly excited. Mazurewicz was always trying to make him get a crucifix, and finally forced one upon him which he said had been blessed by the good Father Iwanicki. Desrochers, too, had something to say—in fact, he insisted that cautious steps had sounded in the now vacant room above him on the first and second nights of Gilman’s absence from it. Paul Choynski thought he heard sounds in the halls and on the stairs at night, and claimed that his door had been softly tried, while Mrs. Dombrowski vowed she had seen Brown Jenkin for the first time since All-Hallows. But such naive reports could mean very little, and Gilman let the cheap metal crucifix hang idly from a knob on his host’s dresser.
      For three days Gilman and Elwood canvassed the local museums in an effort to identify the strange spiky image, but always without success. In every quarter, however, interest was intense; for the utter alienage of the thing was a tremendous challenge to scientific curiosity. One of the small radiating arms was broken off and subjected to chemical analysis, and the result is still talked about in college circles. Professor Ellery found platinum, iron, and tellurium in the strange alloy; but mixed with these were at least three other apparent elements of high atomic weight which chemistry was absolutely powerless to classify. Not only did they fail to correspond with any known element, but they did not even fit the vacant places reserved for probable elements in the periodic system. The mystery remains unsolved to this day, though the image is on exhibition at the museum of Miskatonic University.
      On the morning of April 27 a fresh rat-hole appeared in the room where Gilman was a guest, but Dombrowski tinned it up during the day. The poison was not having much effect, for scratchings and scurryings in the walls were virtually undiminished. Elwood was out late that night, and Gilman waited up for him. He did not wish to go to sleep in a room alone—especially since he thought he had glimpsed in the evening twilight the repellent old woman whose image had become so horribly transferred to his dreams. He wondered who she was, and what had been near her rattling the tin can in a rubbish-heap at the mouth of a squalid courtyard. The crone had seemed to notice him and leer evilly at him—though perhaps this was merely his imagination.
      The next day both youths felt very tired, and knew they would sleep like logs when night came. In the evening they drowsily discussed the mathematical studies which had so completely and perhaps harmfully engrossed Gilman, and speculated about the linkage with ancient magic and folklore which seemed so darkly probable. They spoke of old Keziah Mason, and Elwood agreed that Gilman had good scientific grounds for thinking she might have stumbled on strange and significant information. The hidden cults to which these witches belonged often guarded and handed down surprising secrets from elder, forgotten aeons; and it was by no means impossible that Keziah had actually mastered the art of passing through dimensional gates. Tradition emphasises the uselessness of material barriers in halting a witch’s motions; and who can say what underlies the old tales of broomstick rides through the night?
      Whether a modern student could ever gain similar powers from mathematical research alone, was still to be seen. Success, Gilman added, might lead to dangerous and unthinkable situations; for who could foretell the conditions pervading an adjacent but normally inaccessible dimension? On the other hand, the picturesque possibilities were enormous. Time could not exist in certain belts of space, and by entering and remaining in such a belt one might preserve one’s life and age indefinitely; never suffering organic metabolism or deterioration except for slight amounts incurred during visits to one’s own or similar planes. One might, for example, pass into a timeless dimension and emerge at some remote period of the earth’s history as young as before.
      Whether anybody had ever managed to do this, one could hardly conjecture with any degree of authority. Old legends are hazy and ambiguous, and in historic times all attempts at crossing forbidden gaps seem complicated by strange and terrible alliances with beings and messengers from outside. There was the immemorial figure of the deputy or messenger of hidden and terrible powers—the “Black Man” of the witch-cult, and the “Nyarlathotep” of the Necronomicon. There was, too, the baffling problem of the lesser messengers or intermediaries—the quasi-animals and queer hybrids which legend depicts as witches’ familiars. As Gilman and Elwood retired, too sleepy to argue further, they heard Joe Mazurewicz reel into the house half-drunk, and shuddered at the desperate wildness of his whining prayers.
      That night Gilman saw the violet light again. In his dream he had heard a scratching and gnawing in the partitions, and thought that someone fumbled clumsily at the latch. Then he saw the old woman and the small furry thing advancing toward him over the carpeted floor. The beldame’s face was alight with inhuman exultation, and the little yellow-toothed morbidity tittered mockingly as it pointed at the heavily sleeping form of Elwood on the other couch across the room. A paralysis of fear stifled all attempts to cry out. As once before, the hideous crone seized Gilman by the shoulders, yanking him out of bed and into empty space. Again the infinitude of the shrieking twilight abysses flashed past him, but in another second he thought he was in a dark, muddy, unknown alley of foetid odours, with the rotting walls of ancient houses towering up on every hand.
      Ahead was the robed black man he had seen in the peaked space in the other dream, while from a lesser distance the old woman was beckoning and grimacing imperiously. Brown Jenkin was rubbing itself with a kind of affectionate playfulness around the ankles of the black man, which the deep mud largely concealed. There was a dark open doorway on the right, to which the black man silently pointed. Into this the grimacing crone started, dragging Gilman after her by his pajama sleeve. There were evil-smelling staircases which creaked ominously, and on which the old woman seemed to radiate a faint violet light; and finally a door leading off a landing. The crone fumbled with the latch and pushed the door open, motioning to Gilman to wait and disappearing inside the black aperture.
      The youth’s oversensitive ears caught a hideous strangled cry, and presently the beldame came out of the room bearing a small, senseless form which she thrust at the dreamer as if ordering him to carry it. The sight of this form, and the expression on its face, broke the spell. Still too dazed to cry out, he plunged recklessly down the noisome staircase and into the mud outside; halting only when seized and choked by the waiting black man. As consciousness departed he heard the faint, shrill tittering of the fanged, rat-like abnormality.
      On the morning of the 29th Gilman awaked into a maelstrom of horror. The instant he opened his eyes he knew something was terribly wrong, for he was back in his old garret room with the slanting wall and ceiling, sprawled on the now unmade bed. His throat was aching inexplicably, and as he struggled to a sitting posture he saw with growing fright that his feet and pajama-bottoms were brown with caked mud. For the moment his recollections were hopelessly hazy, but he knew at least that he must have been sleep-walking. Elwood had been lost too deeply in slumber to hear and stop him. On the floor were confused muddy prints, but oddly enough they did not extend all the way to the door. The more Gilman looked at them, the more peculiar they seemed; for in addition to those he could recognise as his there were some smaller, almost round markings—such as the legs of a large chair or table might make, except that most of them tended to be divided into halves. There were also some curious muddy rat-tracks leading out of a fresh hole and back into it again. Utter bewilderment and the fear of madness racked Gilman as he staggered to the door and saw that there were no muddy prints outside. The more he remembered of his hideous dream the more terrified he felt, and it added to his desperation to hear Joe Mazurewicz chanting mournfully two floors below.
      Descending to Elwood’s room he roused his still-sleeping host and began telling of how he had found himself, but Elwood could form no idea of what might really have happened. Where Gilman could have been, how he got back to his room without making tracks in the hall, and how the muddy, furniture-like prints came to be mixed with his in the garret chamber, were wholly beyond conjecture. Then there were those dark, livid marks on his throat, as if he had tried to strangle himself. He put his hands up to them, but found that they did not even approximately fit. While they were talking Desrochers dropped in to say that he had heard a terrific clattering overhead in the dark small hours. No, there had been no one on the stairs after midnight—though just before midnight he had heard faint footfalls in the garret, and cautiously descending steps he did not like. It was, he added, a very bad time of year for Arkham. The young gentleman had better be sure to wear the crucifix Joe Mazurewicz had given him. Even the daytime was not safe, for after dawn there had been strange sounds in the house—especially a thin, childish wail hastily choked off.
      Gilman mechanically attended classes that morning, but was wholly unable to fix his mind on his studies. A mood of hideous apprehension and expectancy had seized him, and he seemed to be awaiting the fall of some annihilating blow. At noon he lunched at the University Spa, picking up a paper from the next seat as he waited for dessert. But he never ate that dessert; for an item on the paper’s first page left him limp, wild-eyed, and able only to pay his check and stagger back to Elwood’s room.
      There had been a strange kidnapping the night before in Orne’s Gangway, and the two-year-old child of a clod-like laundry worker named Anastasia Wolejko had completely vanished from sight. The mother, it appeared, had feared the event for some time; but the reasons she assigned for her fear were so grotesque that no one took them seriously. She had, she said, seen Brown Jenkin about the place now and then ever since early in March, and knew from its grimaces and titterings that little Ladislas must be marked for sacrifice at the awful Sabbat on Walpurgis-Night. She had asked her neighbour Mary Czanek to sleep in the room and try to protect the child, but Mary had not dared. She could not tell the police, for they never believed such things. Children had been taken that way every year ever since she could remember. And her friend Pete Stowacki would not help because he wanted the child out of the way anyhow.
      But what threw Gilman into a cold perspiration was the report of a pair of revellers who had been walking past the mouth of the gangway just after midnight. They admitted they had been drunk, but both vowed they had seen a crazily dressed trio furtively entering the dark passageway. There had, they said, been a huge robed negro, a little old woman in rags, and a young white man in his night-clothes. The old woman had been dragging the youth, while around the feet of the negro a tame rat was rubbing and weaving in the brown mud.
      Gilman sat in a daze all the afternoon, and Elwood—who had meanwhile seen the papers and formed terrible conjectures from them—found him thus when he came home. This time neither could doubt but that something hideously serious was closing in around them. Between the phantasms of nightmare and the realities of the objective world a monstrous and unthinkable relationship was crystallising, and only stupendous vigilance could avert still more direful developments. Gilman must see a specialist sooner or later, but not just now, when all the papers were full of this kidnapping business.
      Just what had really happened was maddeningly obscure, and for a moment both Gilman and Elwood exchanged whispered theories of the wildest kind. Had Gilman unconsciously succeeded better than he knew in his studies of space and its dimensions? Had he actually slipped outside our sphere to points unguessed and unimaginable? Where—if anywhere—had he been on those nights of daemoniac alienage? The roaring twilight abysses—the green hillside—the blistering terrace—the pulls from the stars—the ultimate black vortex—the black man—the muddy alley and the stairs—the old witch and the fanged, furry horror—the bubble-congeries and the little polyhedron—the strange sunburn—the wrist wound—the unexplained image—the muddy feet—the throat-marks—the tales and fears of the superstitious foreigners—what did all this mean? To what extent could the laws of sanity apply to such a case?
      There was no sleep for either of them that night, but next day they both cut classes and drowsed. This was April 30th, and with the dusk would come the hellish Sabbat-time which all the foreigners and the superstitious old folk feared. Mazurewicz came home at six o’clock and said people at the mill were whispering that the Walpurgis-revels would be held in the dark ravine beyond Meadow Hill where the old white stone stands in a place queerly void of all plant-life. Some of them had even told the police and advised them to look there for the missing Wolejko child, but they did not believe anything would be done. Joe insisted that the poor young gentleman wear his nickel-chained crucifix, and Gilman put it on and dropped it inside his shirt to humour the fellow.
      Late at night the two youths sat drowsing in their chairs, lulled by the rhythmical praying of the loomfixer on the floor below. Gilman listened as he nodded, his preternaturally sharpened hearing seeming to strain for some subtle, dreaded murmur beyond the noises in the ancient house. Unwholesome recollections of things in the Necronomicon and the Black Book welled up, and he found himself swaying to infandous rhythms said to pertain to the blackest ceremonies of the Sabbat and to have an origin outside the time and space we comprehend.
      Presently he realised what he was listening for—the hellish chant of the celebrants in the distant black valley. How did he know so much about what they expected? How did he know the time when Nahab and her acolyte were due to bear the brimming bowl which would follow the black cock and the black goat? He saw that Elwood had dropped asleep, and tried to call out and waken him. Something, however, closed his throat. He was not his own master. Had he signed the black man’s book after all?
      Then his fevered, abnormal hearing caught the distant, windborne notes. Over miles of hill and field and alley they came, but he recognised them none the less. The fires must be lit, and the dancers must be starting in. How could he keep himself from going? What was it that had enmeshed him? Mathematics—folklore—the house—old Keziah—Brown Jenkin . . . and now he saw that there was a fresh rat-hole in the wall near his couch. Above the distant chanting and the nearer praying of Joe Mazurewicz came another sound—a stealthy, determined scratching in the partitions. He hoped the electric lights would not go out. Then he saw the fanged, bearded little face in the rat-hole—the accursed little face which he at last realised bore such a shocking, mocking resemblance to old Keziah’s—and heard the faint fumbling at the door.
      The screaming twilight abysses flashed before him, and he felt himself helpless in the formless grasp of the iridescent bubble-congeries. Ahead raced the small, kaleidoscopic polyhedron, and all through the churning void there was a heightening and acceleration of the vague tonal pattern which seemed to foreshadow some unutterable and unendurable climax. He seemed to know what was coming—the monstrous burst of Walpurgis-rhythm in whose cosmic timbre would be concentrated all the primal, ultimate space-time seethings which lie behind the massed spheres of matter and sometimes break forth in measured reverberations that penetrate faintly to every layer of entity and give hideous significance throughout the worlds to certain dreaded periods.
      But all this vanished in a second. He was again in the cramped, violet-litten peaked space with the slanting floor, the low cases of ancient books, the bench and table, the queer objects, and the triangular gulf at one side. On the table lay a small white figure—an infant boy, unclothed and unconscious—while on the other side stood the monstrous, leering old woman with a gleaming, grotesque-hafted knife in her right hand, and a queerly proportioned pale metal bowl covered with curiously chased designs and having delicate lateral handles in her left. She was intoning some croaking ritual in a language which Gilman could not understand, but which seemed like something guardedly quoted in the Necronomicon.
      As the scene grew clear he saw the ancient crone bend forward and extend the empty bowl across the table—and unable to control his own motions, he reached far forward and took it in both hands, noticing as he did so its comparative lightness. At the same moment the disgusting form of Brown Jenkin scrambled up over the brink of the triangular black gulf on his left. The crone now motioned him to hold the bowl in a certain position while she raised the huge, grotesque knife above the small white victim as high as her right hand could reach. The fanged, furry thing began tittering a continuation of the unknown ritual, while the witch croaked loathsome responses. Gilman felt a gnawing, poignant abhorrence shoot through his mental and emotional paralysis, and the light metal bowl shook in his grasp. A second later the downward motion of the knife broke the spell completely, and he dropped the bowl with a resounding bell-like clangour while his hands darted out frantically to stop the monstrous deed.
      In an instant he had edged up the slanting floor around the end of the table and wrenched the knife from the old woman’s claws; sending it clattering over the brink of the narrow triangular gulf. In another instant, however, matters were reversed; for those murderous claws had locked themselves tightly around his own throat, while the wrinkled face was twisted with insane fury. He felt the chain of the cheap crucifix grinding into his neck, and in his peril wondered how the sight of the object itself would affect the evil creature. Her strength was altogether superhuman, but as she continued her choking he reached feebly in his shirt and drew out the metal symbol, snapping the chain and pulling it free.
      At sight of the device the witch seemed struck with panic, and her grip relaxed long enough to give Gilman a chance to break it entirely. He pulled the steel-like claws from his neck, and would have dragged the beldame over the edge of the gulf had not the claws received a fresh access of strength and closed in again. This time he resolved to reply in kind, and his own hands reached out for the creature’s throat. Before she saw what he was doing he had the chain of the crucifix twisted about her neck, and a moment later he had tightened it enough to cut off her breath. During her last struggle he felt something bite at his ankle, and saw that Brown Jenkin had come to her aid. With one savage kick he sent the morbidity over the edge of the gulf and heard it whimper on some level far below.
      Whether he had killed the ancient crone he did not know, but he let her rest on the floor where she had fallen. Then, as he turned away, he saw on the table a sight which nearly snapped the last thread of his reason. Brown Jenkin, tough of sinew and with four tiny hands of daemoniac dexterity, had been busy while the witch was throttling him, and his efforts had been in vain. What he had prevented the knife from doing to the victim’s chest, the yellow fangs of the furry blasphemy had done to a wrist—and the bowl so lately on the floor stood full beside the small lifeless body.
      In his dream-delirium Gilman heard the hellish, alien-rhythmed chant of the Sabbat coming from an infinite distance, and knew the black man must be there. Confused memories mixed themselves with his mathematics, and he believed his subconscious mind held the angles which he needed to guide him back to the normal world—alone and unaided for the first time. He felt sure he was in the immemorially sealed loft above his own room, but whether he could ever escape through the slanting floor or the long-stopped egress he doubted greatly. Besides, would not an escape from a dream-loft bring him merely into a dream-house—an abnormal projection of the actual place he sought? He was wholly bewildered as to the relation betwixt dream and reality in all his experiences.
      The passage through the vague abysses would be frightful, for the Walpurgis-rhythm would be vibrating, and at last he would have to hear that hitherto veiled cosmic pulsing which he so mortally dreaded. Even now he could detect a low, monstrous shaking whose tempo he suspected all too well. At Sabbat-time it always mounted and reached through to the worlds to summon the initiate to nameless rites. Half the chants of the Sabbat were patterned on this faintly overheard pulsing which no earthly ear could endure in its unveiled spatial fulness. Gilman wondered, too, whether he could trust his instinct to take him back to the right part of space. How could he be sure he would not land on that green-litten hillside of a far planet, on the tessellated terrace above the city of tentacled monsters somewhere beyond the galaxy, or in the spiral black vortices of that ultimate void of Chaos wherein reigns the mindless daemon-sultan Azathoth?
      Just before he made the plunge the violet light went out and left him in utter blackness. The witch—old Keziah—Nahab—that must have meant her death. And mixed with the distant chant of the Sabbat and the whimpers of Brown Jenkin in the gulf below he thought he heard another and wilder whine from unknown depths. Joe Mazurewicz—the prayers against the Crawling Chaos now turning to an inexplicably triumphant shriek—worlds of sardonic actuality impinging on vortices of febrile dream—Iä! Shub-Niggurath! The Goat with a Thousand Young. . . .
      They found Gilman on the floor of his queerly angled old garret room long before dawn, for the terrible cry had brought Desrochers and Choynski and Dombrowski and Mazurewicz at once, and had even wakened the soundly sleeping Elwood in his chair. He was alive, and with open, staring eyes, but seemed largely unconscious. On his throat were the marks of murderous hands, and on his left ankle was a distressing rat-bite. His clothing was badly rumpled, and Joe’s crucifix was missing. Elwood trembled, afraid even to speculate on what new form his friend’s sleep-walking had taken. Mazurewicz seemed half-dazed because of a “sign” he said he had had in response to his prayers, and he crossed himself frantically when the squealing and whimpering of a rat sounded from beyond the slanting partition.
      When the dreamer was settled on his couch in Elwood’s room they sent for Dr. Malkowski—a local practitioner who would repeat no tales where they might prove embarrassing—and he gave Gilman two hypodermic injections which caused him to relax in something like natural drowsiness. During the day the patient regained consciousness at times and whispered his newest dream disjointedly to Elwood. It was a painful process, and at its very start brought out a fresh and disconcerting fact.
      Gilman—whose ears had so lately possessed an abnormal sensitiveness—was now stone deaf. Dr. Malkowski, summoned again in haste, told Elwood that both ear-drums were ruptured, as if by the impact of some stupendous sound intense beyond all human conception or endurance. How such a sound could have been heard in the last few hours without arousing all the Miskatonic Valley was more than the honest physician could say.
      Elwood wrote his part of the colloquy on paper, so that a fairly easy communication was maintained. Neither knew what to make of the whole chaotic business, and decided it would be better if they thought as little as possible about it. Both, though, agreed that they must leave this ancient and accursed house as soon as it could be arranged. Evening papers spoke of a police raid on some curious revellers in a ravine beyond Meadow Hill just before dawn, and mentioned that the white stone there was an object of age-long superstitious regard. Nobody had been caught, but among the scattering fugitives had been glimpsed a huge negro. In another column it was stated that no trace of the missing child Ladislas Wolejko had been found.
      The crowning horror came that very night. Elwood will never forget it, and was forced to stay out of college the rest of the term because of the resulting nervous breakdown. He had thought he heard rats in the partitions all the evening, but paid little attention to them. Then, long after both he and Gilman had retired, the atrocious shrieking began. Elwood jumped up, turned on the lights, and rushed over to his guest’s couch. The occupant was emitting sounds of veritably inhuman nature, as if racked by some torment beyond description. He was writhing under the bedclothes, and a great red stain was beginning to appear on the blankets.
      Elwood scarcely dared to touch him, but gradually the screaming and writhing subsided. By this time Dombrowski, Choynski, Desrochers, Mazurewicz, and the top-floor lodger were all crowding into the doorway, and the landlord had sent his wife back to telephone for Dr. Malkowski. Everybody shrieked when a large rat-like form suddenly jumped out from beneath the ensanguined bedclothes and scuttled across the floor to a fresh, open hole close by. When the doctor arrived and began to pull down those frightful covers Walter Gilman was dead.
      It would be barbarous to do more than suggest what had killed Gilman. There had been virtually a tunnel through his body—something had eaten his heart out. Dombrowski, frantic at the failure of his constant rat-poisoning efforts, cast aside all thought of his lease and within a week had moved with all his older lodgers to a dingy but less ancient house in Walnut Street. The worst thing for a while was keeping Joe Mazurewicz quiet; for the brooding loomfixer would never stay sober, and was constantly whining and muttering about spectral and terrible things.
      It seems that on that last hideous night Joe had stooped to look at the crimson rat-tracks which led from Gilman’s couch to the nearby hole. On the carpet they were very indistinct, but a piece of open flooring intervened between the carpet’s edge and the base-board. There Mazurewicz had found something monstrous—or thought he had, for no one else could quite agree with him despite the undeniable queerness of the prints. The tracks on the flooring were certainly vastly unlike the average prints of a rat, but even Choynski and Desrochers would not admit that they were like the prints of four tiny human hands.
      The house was never rented again. As soon as Dombrowski left it the pall of its final desolation began to descend, for people shunned it both on account of its old reputation and because of the new foetid odour. Perhaps the ex-landlord’s rat-poison had worked after all, for not long after his departure the place became a neighbourhood nuisance. Health officials traced the smell to the closed spaces above and beside the eastern garret room, and agreed that the number of dead rats must be enormous. They decided, however, that it was not worth their while to hew open and disinfect the long-sealed spaces; for the foetor would soon be over, and the locality was not one which encouraged fastidious standards. Indeed, there were always vague local tales of unexplained stenches upstairs in the Witch House just after May-Eve and Hallowmass. The neighbours grumblingly acquiesced in the inertia—but the foetor none the less formed an additional count against the place. Toward the last the house was condemned as an habitation by the building inspector.
      Gilman’s dreams and their attendant circumstances have never been explained. Elwood, whose thoughts on the entire episode are sometimes almost maddening, came back to college the next autumn and graduated in the following June. He found the spectral gossip of the town much diminished, and it is indeed a fact that—notwithstanding certain reports of a ghostly tittering in the deserted house which lasted almost as long as that edifice itself—no fresh appearances either of old Keziah or of Brown Jenkin have been muttered of since Gilman’s death. It is rather fortunate that Elwood was not in Arkham in that later year when certain events abruptly renewed the local whispers about elder horrors. Of course he heard about the matter afterward and suffered untold torments of black and bewildered speculation; but even that was not as bad as actual nearness and several possible sights would have been.
      In March, 1931, a gale wrecked the roof and great chimney of the vacant Witch House, so that a chaos of crumbling bricks, blackened, moss-grown shingles, and rotting planks and timbers crashed down into the loft and broke through the floor beneath. The whole attic story was choked with debris from above, but no one took the trouble to touch the mess before the inevitable razing of the decrepit structure. That ultimate step came in the following December, and it was when Gilman’s old room was cleared out by reluctant, apprehensive workmen that the gossip began.
      Among the rubbish which had crashed through the ancient slanting ceiling were several things which made the workmen pause and call in the police. Later the police in turn called in the coroner and several professors from the university. There were bones—badly crushed and splintered, but clearly recognisable as human—whose manifestly modern date conflicted puzzlingly with the remote period at which their only possible lurking-place, the low, slant-floored loft overhead, had supposedly been sealed from all human access. The coroner’s physician decided that some belonged to a small child, while certain others—found mixed with shreds of rotten brownish cloth—belonged to a rather undersized, bent female of advanced years. Careful sifting of debris also disclosed many tiny bones of rats caught in the collapse, as well as older rat-bones gnawed by small fangs in a fashion now and then highly productive of controversy and reflection.
      Other objects found included the mingled fragments of many books and papers, together with a yellowish dust left from the total disintegration of still older books and papers. All, without exception, appeared to deal with black magic in its most advanced and horrible forms; and the evidently recent date of certain items is still a mystery as unsolved as that of the modern human bones. An even greater mystery is the absolute homogeneity of the crabbed, archaic writing found on a wide range of papers whose conditions and watermarks suggest age differences of at least 150 to 200 years. To some, though, the greatest mystery of all is the variety of utterly inexplicable objects—objects whose shapes, materials, types of workmanship, and purposes baffle all conjecture—found scattered amidst the wreckage in evidently diverse states of injury. One of these things—which excited several Miskatonic professors profoundly—is a badly damaged monstrosity plainly resembling the strange image which Gilman gave to the college museum, save that it is larger, wrought of some peculiar bluish stone instead of metal, and possessed of a singularly angled pedestal with undecipherable hieroglyphics.
      Archaeologists and anthropologists are still trying to explain the bizarre designs chased on a crushed bowl of light metal whose inner side bore ominous brownish stains when found. Foreigners and credulous grandmothers are equally garrulous about the modern nickel crucifix with broken chain mixed in the rubbish and shiveringly identified by Joe Mazurewicz as that which he had given poor Gilman many years before. Some believe this crucifix was dragged up to the sealed loft by rats, while others think it must have been on the floor in some corner of Gilman’s old room all the time. Still others, including Joe himself, have theories too wild and fantastic for sober credence.
      When the slanting wall of Gilman’s room was torn out, the once sealed triangular space between that partition and the house’s north wall was found to contain much less structural debris, even in proportion to its size, than the room itself; though it had a ghastly layer of older materials which paralysed the wreckers with horror. In brief, the floor was a veritable ossuary of the bones of small children—some fairly modern, but others extending back in infinite gradations to a period so remote that crumbling was almost complete. On this deep bony layer rested a knife of great size, obvious antiquity, and grotesque, ornate, and exotic design—above which the debris was piled.
      In the midst of this debris, wedged between a fallen plank and a cluster of cemented bricks from the ruined chimney, was an object destined to cause more bafflement, veiled fright, and openly superstitious talk in Arkham than anything else discovered in the haunted and accursed building. This object was the partly crushed skeleton of a huge, diseased rat, whose abnormalities of form are still a topic of debate and source of singular reticence among the members of Miskatonic’s department of comparative anatomy. Very little concerning this skeleton has leaked out, but the workmen who found it whisper in shocked tones about the long, brownish hairs with which it was associated.
      The bones of the tiny paws, it is rumoured, imply prehensile characteristics more typical of a diminutive monkey than of a rat; while the small skull with its savage yellow fangs is of the utmost anomalousness, appearing from certain angles like a miniature, monstrously degraded parody of a human skull. The workmen crossed themselves in fright when they came upon this blasphemy, but later burned candles of gratitude in St. Stanislaus’ Church because of the shrill, ghostly tittering they felt they would never hear again.",True
"
I

There are so many things which are impossible to explain! Why should
certain chords in music make me think of the brown and golden tints of
autumn foliage? Why should the Mass of Sainte Cécile bend my thoughts
wandering among caverns whose walls blaze with ragged masses of virgin
silver? What was it in the roar and turmoil of Broadway at six o'clock
that flashed before my eyes the picture of a still Breton forest where
sunlight filtered through spring foliage and Sylvia bent, half curiously,
half tenderly, over a small green lizard, murmuring: ""To think that this
also is a little ward of God!""

When I first saw the watchman his back was toward me. I looked at him
indifferently until he went into the church. I paid no more attention to
him than I had to any other man who lounged through Washington Square
that morning, and when I shut my window and turned back into my studio I
had forgotten him. Late in the afternoon, the day being warm, I raised
the window again and leaned out to get a sniff of air. A man was standing
in the courtyard of the church, and I noticed him again with as little
interest as I had that morning. I looked across the square to where the
fountain was playing and then, with my mind filled with vague impressions
of trees, asphalt drives, and the moving groups of nursemaids and
holiday-makers, I started to walk back to my easel. As I turned, my
listless glance included the man below in the churchyard. His face was
toward me now, and with a perfectly involuntary movement I bent to see
it. At the same moment he raised his head and looked at me. Instantly I
thought of a coffin-worm. Whatever it was about the man that repelled me
I did not know, but the impression of a plump white grave-worm was so
intense and nauseating that I must have shown it in my expression, for he
turned his puffy face away with a movement which made me think of a
disturbed grub in a chestnut.

I went back to my easel and motioned the model to resume her pose. After
working a while I was satisfied that I was spoiling what I had done as
rapidly as possible, and I took up a palette knife and scraped the colour
out again. The flesh tones were sallow and unhealthy, and I did not
understand how I could have painted such sickly colour into a study which
before that had glowed with healthy tones.

I looked at Tessie. She had not changed, and the clear flush of health
dyed her neck and cheeks as I frowned.

""Is it something I've done?"" she said.

""No,--I've made a mess of this arm, and for the life of me I can't see
how I came to paint such mud as that into the canvas,"" I replied.

""Don't I pose well?"" she insisted.

""Of course, perfectly.""

""Then it's not my fault?""

""No. It's my own.""

""I am very sorry,"" she said.

I told her she could rest while I applied rag and turpentine to the
plague spot on my canvas, and she went off to smoke a cigarette and look
over the illustrations in the _Courrier Français_.

I did not know whether it was something in the turpentine or a defect in
the canvas, but the more I scrubbed the more that gangrene seemed to
spread. I worked like a beaver to get it out, and yet the disease
appeared to creep from limb to limb of the study before me. Alarmed, I
strove to arrest it, but now the colour on the breast changed and the
whole figure seemed to absorb the infection as a sponge soaks up water.
Vigorously I plied palette-knife, turpentine, and scraper, thinking all
the time what a _séance_ I should hold with Duval who had sold me
the canvas; but soon I noticed that it was not the canvas which was
defective nor yet the colours of Edward. ""It must be the turpentine,"" I
thought angrily, ""or else my eyes have become so blurred and confused by
the afternoon light that I can't see straight."" I called Tessie, the
model. She came and leaned over my chair blowing rings of smoke into the
air.

""What _have_ you been doing to it?"" she exclaimed

""Nothing,"" I growled, ""it must be this turpentine!""

""What a horrible colour it is now,"" she continued. ""Do you think my flesh
resembles green cheese?""

""No, I don't,"" I said angrily; ""did you ever know me to paint like that
before?""

""No, indeed!""

""Well, then!""

""It must be the turpentine, or something,"" she admitted.

She slipped on a Japanese robe and walked to the window. I scraped and
rubbed until I was tired, and finally picked up my brushes and hurled
them through the canvas with a forcible expression, the tone alone of
which reached Tessie's ears.

Nevertheless she promptly began: ""That's it! Swear and act silly and ruin
your brushes! You have been three weeks on that study, and now look!
What's the good of ripping the canvas? What creatures artists are!""

I felt about as much ashamed as I usually did after such an outbreak, and
I turned the ruined canvas to the wall. Tessie helped me clean my
brushes, and then danced away to dress. From the screen she regaled me
with bits of advice concerning whole or partial loss of temper, until,
thinking, perhaps, I had been tormented sufficiently, she came out to
implore me to button her waist where she could not reach it on the
shoulder.

""Everything went wrong from the time you came back from the window and
talked about that horrid-looking man you saw in the churchyard,"" she
announced.

""Yes, he probably bewitched the picture,"" I said, yawning. I looked at my
watch.

""It's after six, I know,"" said Tessie, adjusting her hat before the
mirror.

""Yes,"" I replied, ""I didn't mean to keep you so long."" I leaned out of
the window but recoiled with disgust, for the young man with the pasty
face stood below in the churchyard. Tessie saw my gesture of disapproval
and leaned from the window.

""Is that the man you don't like?"" she whispered.

I nodded.

""I can't see his face, but he does look fat and soft. Someway or other,""
she continued, turning to look at me, ""he reminds me of a dream,--an
awful dream I once had. Or,"" she mused, looking down at her shapely
shoes, ""was it a dream after all?""

""How should I know?"" I smiled.

Tessie smiled in reply.

""You were in it,"" she said, ""so perhaps you might know something about
it.""

""Tessie! Tessie!"" I protested, ""don't you dare flatter by saying that you
dream about me!""

""But I did,"" she insisted; ""shall I tell you about it?""

""Go ahead,"" I replied, lighting a cigarette.

Tessie leaned back on the open window-sill and began very seriously.

""One night last winter I was lying in bed thinking about nothing at all
in particular. I had been posing for you and I was tired out, yet it
seemed impossible for me to sleep. I heard the bells in the city ring
ten, eleven, and midnight. I must have fallen asleep about midnight
because I don't remember hearing the bells after that. It seemed to me
that I had scarcely closed my eyes when I dreamed that something impelled
me to go to the window. I rose, and raising the sash leaned out.
Twenty-fifth Street was deserted as far as I could see. I began to be
afraid; everything outside seemed so--so black and uncomfortable. Then
the sound of wheels in the distance came to my ears, and it seemed to me
as though that was what I must wait for. Very slowly the wheels
approached, and, finally, I could make out a vehicle moving along the
street. It came nearer and nearer, and when it passed beneath my window I
saw it was a hearse. Then, as I trembled with fear, the driver turned and
looked straight at me. When I awoke I was standing by the open window
shivering with cold, but the black-plumed hearse and the driver were
gone. I dreamed this dream again in March last, and again awoke beside
the open window. Last night the dream came again. You remember how it was
raining; when I awoke, standing at the open window, my night-dress was
soaked.""

""But where did I come into the dream?"" I asked.

""You--you were in the coffin; but you were not dead.""

""In the coffin?""

""Yes.""

""How did you know? Could you see me?""

""No; I only knew you were there.""

""Had you been eating Welsh rarebits, or lobster salad?"" I began,
laughing, but the girl interrupted me with a frightened cry.

""Hello! What's up?"" I said, as she shrank into the embrasure by the
window.

""The--the man below in the churchyard;--he drove the hearse.""

""Nonsense,"" I said, but Tessie's eyes were wide with terror. I went to
the window and looked out. The man was gone. ""Come, Tessie,"" I urged,
""don't be foolish. You have posed too long; you are nervous.""

""Do you think I could forget that face?"" she murmured. ""Three times I saw
the hearse pass below my window, and every time the driver turned and
looked up at me. Oh, his face was so white and--and soft? It looked
dead--it looked as if it had been dead a long time.""

I induced the girl to sit down and swallow a glass of Marsala. Then I sat
down beside her, and tried to give her some advice.

""Look here, Tessie,"" I said, ""you go to the country for a week or two,
and you'll have no more dreams about hearses. You pose all day, and when
night comes your nerves are upset. You can't keep this up. Then again,
instead of going to bed when your day's work is done, you run off to
picnics at Sulzer's Park, or go to the Eldorado or Coney Island, and when
you come down here next morning you are fagged out. There was no real
hearse. There was a soft-shell crab dream.""

She smiled faintly.

""What about the man in the churchyard?""

""Oh, he's only an ordinary unhealthy, everyday creature.""

""As true as my name is Tessie Reardon, I swear to you, Mr. Scott, that
the face of the man below in the churchyard is the face of the man who
drove the hearse!""

""What of it?"" I said. ""It's an honest trade.""

""Then you think I _did_ see the hearse?""

""Oh,"" I said diplomatically, ""if you really did, it might not be unlikely
that the man below drove it. There is nothing in that.""

Tessie rose, unrolled her scented handkerchief, and taking a bit of gum
from a knot in the hem, placed it in her mouth. Then drawing on her
gloves she offered me her hand, with a frank, ""Good-night, Mr. Scott,""
and walked out.




II

The next morning, Thomas, the bell-boy, brought me the _Herald_ and
a bit of news. The church next door had been sold. I thanked Heaven for
it, not that being a Catholic I had any repugnance for the congregation
next door, but because my nerves were shattered by a blatant exhorter,
whose every word echoed through the aisle of the church as if it had been
my own rooms, and who insisted on his r's with a nasal persistence which
revolted my every instinct. Then, too, there was a fiend in human shape,
an organist, who reeled off some of the grand old hymns with an
interpretation of his own, and I longed for the blood of a creature who
could play the doxology with an amendment of minor chords which one hears
only in a quartet of very young undergraduates. I believe the minister
was a good man, but when he bellowed: ""And the Lorrrrd said unto Moses,
the Lorrrd is a man of war; the Lorrrd is his name. My wrath shall wax
hot and I will kill you with the sworrrrd!"" I wondered how many centuries
of purgatory it would take to atone for such a sin.

""Who bought the property?"" I asked Thomas.

""Nobody that I knows, sir. They do say the gent wot owns this 'ere
'Amilton flats was lookin' at it. 'E might be a bildin' more studios.""

I walked to the window. The young man with the unhealthy face stood by
the churchyard gate, and at the mere sight of him the same overwhelming
repugnance took possession of me.

""By the way, Thomas,"" I said, ""who is that fellow down there?""

Thomas sniffed. ""That there worm, sir? 'Es night-watchman of the church,
sir. 'E maikes me tired a-sittin' out all night on them steps and lookin'
at you insultin' like. I'd a punched 'is 'ed, sir--beg pardon, sir--""

""Go on, Thomas.""

""One night a comin' 'ome with Arry, the other English boy, I sees 'im a
sittin' there on them steps. We 'ad Molly and Jen with us, sir, the two
girls on the tray service, an' 'e looks so insultin' at us that I up and
sez: 'Wat you looking hat, you fat slug?'--beg pardon, sir, but that's
'ow I sez, sir. Then 'e don't say nothin' and I sez: 'Come out and I'll
punch that puddin' 'ed.' Then I hopens the gate an' goes in, but 'e don't
say nothin', only looks insultin' like. Then I 'its 'im one, but, ugh!
'is 'ed was that cold and mushy it ud sicken you to touch 'im.""

""What did he do then?"" I asked curiously.

""'Im? Nawthin'.""

""And you, Thomas?""

The young fellow flushed with embarrassment and smiled uneasily.

""Mr. Scott, sir, I ain't no coward, an' I can't make it out at all why I
run. I was in the 5th Lawncers, sir, bugler at Tel-el-Kebir, an' was shot
by the wells.""

""You don't mean to say you ran away?""

""Yes, sir; I run.""

""Why?""

""That's just what I want to know, sir. I grabbed Molly an' run, an' the
rest was as frightened as I.""

""But what were they frightened at?""

Thomas refused to answer for a while, but now my curiosity was aroused
about the repulsive young man below and I pressed him. Three years'
sojourn in America had not only modified Thomas' cockney dialect but had
given him the American's fear of ridicule.

""You won't believe me, Mr. Scott, sir?""

""Yes, I will.""

""You will lawf at me, sir?""

""Nonsense!""

He hesitated. ""Well, sir, it's Gawd's truth that when I 'it 'im 'e
grabbed me wrists, sir, and when I twisted 'is soft, mushy fist one of
'is fingers come off in me 'and.""

The utter loathing and horror of Thomas' face must have been reflected in
my own, for he added:

""It's orful, an' now when I see 'im I just go away. 'E maikes me hill.""

When Thomas had gone I went to the window. The man stood beside the
church-railing with both hands on the gate, but I hastily retreated to my
easel again, sickened and horrified, for I saw that the middle finger of
his right hand was missing.

At nine o'clock Tessie appeared and vanished behind the screen with a
merry ""Good morning, Mr. Scott."" When she had reappeared and taken her
pose upon the model-stand I started a new canvas, much to her delight.
She remained silent as long as I was on the drawing, but as soon as the
scrape of the charcoal ceased and I took up my fixative she began to
chatter.

""Oh, I had such a lovely time last night. We went to Tony Pastor's.""

""Who are 'we'?"" I demanded.

""Oh, Maggie, you know, Mr. Whyte's model, and Pinkie McCormick--we call
her Pinkie because she's got that beautiful red hair you artists like so
much--and Lizzie Burke.""

I sent a shower of spray from the fixative over the canvas, and said:
""Well, go on.""

""We saw Kelly and Baby Barnes the skirt-dancer and--and all the rest. I
made a mash.""

""Then you have gone back on me, Tessie?""

She laughed and shook her head.

""He's Lizzie Burke's brother, Ed. He's a perfect gen'l'man.""

I felt constrained to give her some parental advice concerning mashing,
which she took with a bright smile.

""Oh, I can take care of a strange mash,"" she said, examining her chewing
gum, ""but Ed is different. Lizzie is my best friend.""

Then she related how Ed had come back from the stocking mill in Lowell,
Massachusetts, to find her and Lizzie grown up, and what an accomplished
young man he was, and how he thought nothing of squandering half-a-dollar
for ice-cream and oysters to celebrate his entry as clerk into the
woollen department of Macy's. Before she finished I began to paint, and
she resumed the pose, smiling and chattering like a sparrow. By noon I
had the study fairly well rubbed in and Tessie came to look at it.

""That's better,"" she said.

I thought so too, and ate my lunch with a satisfied feeling that all was
going well. Tessie spread her lunch on a drawing table opposite me and we
drank our claret from the same bottle and lighted our cigarettes from the
same match. I was very much attached to Tessie. I had watched her shoot
up into a slender but exquisitely formed woman from a frail, awkward
child. She had posed for me during the last three years, and among all my
models she was my favourite. It would have troubled me very much indeed
had she become ""tough"" or ""fly,"" as the phrase goes, but I never noticed
any deterioration of her manner, and felt at heart that she was all
right. She and I never discussed morals at all, and I had no intention of
doing so, partly because I had none myself, and partly because I knew she
would do what she liked in spite of me. Still I did hope she would steer
clear of complications, because I wished her well, and then also I had a
selfish desire to retain the best model I had. I knew that mashing, as
she termed it, had no significance with girls like Tessie, and that such
things in America did not resemble in the least the same things in Paris.
Yet, having lived with my eyes open, I also knew that somebody would take
Tessie away some day, in one manner or another, and though I professed to
myself that marriage was nonsense, I sincerely hoped that, in this case,
there would be a priest at the end of the vista. I am a Catholic. When I
listen to high mass, when I sign myself, I feel that everything,
including myself, is more cheerful, and when I confess, it does me good.
A man who lives as much alone as I do, must confess to somebody. Then,
again, Sylvia was Catholic, and it was reason enough for me. But I was
speaking of Tessie, which is very different. Tessie also was Catholic and
much more devout than I, so, taking it all in all, I had little fear for
my pretty model until she should fall in love. But _then_ I knew
that fate alone would decide her future for her, and I prayed inwardly
that fate would keep her away from men like me and throw into her path
nothing but Ed Burkes and Jimmy McCormicks, bless her sweet face!

Tessie sat blowing rings of smoke up to the ceiling and tinkling the ice
in her tumbler.

""Do you know that I also had a dream last night?"" I observed.

""Not about that man,"" she laughed.

""Exactly. A dream similar to yours, only much worse.""

It was foolish and thoughtless of me to say this, but you know how little
tact the average painter has. ""I must have fallen asleep about ten
o'clock,"" I continued, ""and after a while I dreamt that I awoke. So
plainly did I hear the midnight bells, the wind in the tree-branches, and
the whistle of steamers from the bay, that even now I can scarcely
believe I was not awake. I seemed to be lying in a box which had a glass
cover. Dimly I saw the street lamps as I passed, for I must tell you,
Tessie, the box in which I reclined appeared to lie in a cushioned wagon
which jolted me over a stony pavement. After a while I became impatient
and tried to move, but the box was too narrow. My hands were crossed on
my breast, so I could not raise them to help myself. I listened and then
tried to call. My voice was gone. I could hear the trample of the horses
attached to the wagon, and even the breathing of the driver. Then another
sound broke upon my ears like the raising of a window sash. I managed to
turn my head a little, and found I could look, not only through the glass
cover of my box, but also through the glass panes in the side of the
covered vehicle. I saw houses, empty and silent, with neither light nor
life about any of them excepting one. In that house a window was open on
the first floor, and a figure all in white stood looking down into the
street. It was you.""

Tessie had turned her face away from me and leaned on the table with her
elbow.

""I could see your face,"" I resumed, ""and it seemed to me to be very
sorrowful. Then we passed on and turned into a narrow black lane.
Presently the horses stopped. I waited and waited, closing my eyes with
ear and impatience, but all was silent as the grave. After what seemed to
me hours, I began to feel uncomfortable. A sense that somebody was close
to me made me unclose my eyes. Then I saw the white face of the
hearse-driver looking at me through the coffin-lid----""

A sob from Tessie interrupted me. She was trembling like a leaf. I saw I
had made an ass of myself and attempted to repair the damage.

""Why, Tess,"" I said, ""I only told you this to show you what influence
your story might have on another person's dreams. You don't suppose I
really lay in a coffin, do you? What are you trembling for? Don't you see
that your dream and my unreasonable dislike for that inoffensive watchman
of the church simply set my brain working as soon as I fell asleep?""

She laid her head between her arms, and sobbed as if her heart would
break. What a precious triple donkey I had made of myself! But I was
about to break my record. I went over and put my arm about her.

""Tessie dear, forgive me,"" I said; ""I had no business to frighten you
with such nonsense. You are too sensible a girl, too good a Catholic to
believe in dreams.""

Her hand tightened on mine and her head fell back upon my shoulder, but
she still trembled and I petted her and comforted her.

""Come, Tess, open your eyes and smile.""

Her eyes opened with a slow languid movement and met mine, but their
expression was so queer that I hastened to reassure her again.

""It's all humbug, Tessie; you surely are not afraid that any harm will
come to you because of that.""

""No,"" she said, but her scarlet lips quivered.

""Then, what's the matter? Are you afraid?""

""Yes. Not for myself.""

""For me, then?"" I demanded gaily.

""For you,"" she murmured in a voice almost inaudible. ""I--I care for you.""

At first I started to laugh, but when I understood her, a shock passed
through me, and I sat like one turned to stone. This was the crowning bit
of idiocy I had committed. During the moment which elapsed between her
reply and my answer I thought of a thousand responses to that innocent
confession. I could pass it by with a laugh, I could misunderstand her
and assure her as to my health, I could simply point out that it was
impossible she could love me. But my reply was quicker than my thoughts,
and I might think and think now when it was too late, for I had kissed
her on the mouth.

That evening I took my usual walk in Washington Park, pondering over the
occurrences of the day. I was thoroughly committed. There was no back out
now, and I stared the future straight in the face. I was not good, not
even scrupulous, but I had no idea of deceiving either myself or Tessie.
The one passion of my life lay buried in the sunlit forests of Brittany.
Was it buried for ever? Hope cried ""No!"" For three years I had been
listening to the voice of Hope, and for three years I had waited for a
footstep on my threshold. Had Sylvia forgotten? ""No!"" cried Hope.

I said that I was no good. That is true, but still I was not exactly a
comic opera villain. I had led an easy-going reckless life, taking what
invited me of pleasure, deploring and sometimes bitterly regretting
consequences. In one thing alone, except my painting, was I serious, and
that was something which lay hidden if not lost in the Breton forests.

It was too late for me to regret what had occurred during the day.
Whatever it had been, pity, a sudden tenderness for sorrow, or the more
brutal instinct of gratified vanity, it was all the same now, and unless
I wished to bruise an innocent heart, my path lay marked before me. The
fire and strength, the depth of passion of a love which I had never even
suspected, with all my imagined experience in the world, left me no
alternative but to respond or send her away. Whether because I am so
cowardly about giving pain to others, or whether it was that I have
little of the gloomy Puritan in me, I do not know, but I shrank from
disclaiming responsibility for that thoughtless kiss, and in fact had no
time to do so before the gates of her heart opened and the flood poured
forth. Others who habitually do their duty and find a sullen satisfaction
in making themselves and everybody else unhappy, might have withstood it.
I did not. I dared not. After the storm had abated I did tell her that
she might better have loved Ed Burke and worn a plain gold ring, but she
would not hear of it, and I thought perhaps as long as she had decided to
love somebody she could not marry, it had better be me. I, at least,
could treat her with an intelligent affection, and whenever she became
tired of her infatuation she could go none the worse for it. For I was
decided on that point although I knew how hard it would be. I remembered
the usual termination of Platonic liaisons, and thought how disgusted I
had been whenever I heard of one. I knew I was undertaking a great deal
for so unscrupulous a man as I was, and I dreamed the future, but never
for one moment did I doubt that she was safe with me. Had it been anybody
but Tessie I should not have bothered my head about scruples. For it did
not occur to me to sacrifice Tessie as I would have sacrificed a woman of
the world. I looked the future squarely in the face and saw the several
probable endings to the affair. She would either tire of the whole thing,
or become so unhappy that I should have either to marry her or go away.
If I married her we would be unhappy. I with a wife unsuited to me, and
she with a husband unsuitable for any woman. For my past life could
scarcely entitle me to marry. If I went away she might either fall ill,
recover, and marry some Eddie Burke, or she might recklessly or
deliberately go and do something foolish. On the other hand, if she tired
of me, then her whole life would be before her with beautiful vistas of
Eddie Burkes and marriage rings and twins and Harlem flats and Heaven
knows what. As I strolled along through the trees by the Washington Arch,
I decided that she should find a substantial friend in me, anyway, and
the future could take care of itself. Then I went into the house and put
on my evening dress, for the little faintly-perfumed note on my dresser
said, ""Have a cab at the stage door at eleven,"" and the note was signed
""Edith Carmichel, Metropolitan Theatre.""

I took supper that night, or rather we took supper, Miss Carmichel and I,
at Solari's, and the dawn was just beginning to gild the cross on the
Memorial Church as I entered Washington Square after leaving Edith at the
Brunswick. There was not a soul in the park as I passed along the trees
and took the walk which leads from the Garibaldi statue to the Hamilton
Apartment House, but as I passed the churchyard I saw a figure sitting on
the stone steps. In spite of myself a chill crept over me at the sight of
the white puffy face, and I hastened to pass. Then he said something
which might have been addressed to me or might merely have been a mutter
to himself, but a sudden furious anger flamed up within me that such a
creature should address me. For an instant I felt like wheeling about and
smashing my stick over his head, but I walked on, and entering the
Hamilton went to my apartment. For some time I tossed about the bed
trying to get the sound of his voice out of my ears, but could not. It
filled my head, that muttering sound, like thick oily smoke from a
fat-rendering vat or an odour of noisome decay. And as I lay and tossed
about, the voice in my ears seemed more distinct, and I began to
understand the words he had muttered. They came to me slowly as if I had
forgotten them, and at last I could make some sense out of the sounds. It
was this:

""Have you found the Yellow Sign?""

""Have you found the Yellow Sign?""

""Have you found the Yellow Sign?""

I was furious. What did he mean by that? Then with a curse upon him and
his I rolled over and went to sleep, but when I awoke later I looked pale
and haggard, for I had dreamed the dream of the night before, and it
troubled me more than I cared to think.

I dressed and went down into my studio. Tessie sat by the window, but as
I came in she rose and put both arms around my neck for an innocent kiss.
She looked so sweet and dainty that I kissed her again and then sat down
before the easel.

""Hello! Where's the study I began yesterday?"" I asked.

Tessie looked conscious, but did not answer. I began to hunt among the
piles of canvases, saying, ""Hurry up, Tess, and get ready; we must take
advantage of the morning light.""

When at last I gave up the search among the other canvases and turned to
look around the room for the missing study I noticed Tessie standing by
the screen with her clothes still on.

""What's the matter,"" I asked, ""don't you feel well?""

""Yes.""

""Then hurry.""

""Do you want me to pose as--as I have always posed?""

Then I understood. Here was a new complication. I had lost, of course,
the best nude model I had ever seen. I looked at Tessie. Her face was
scarlet. Alas! Alas! We had eaten of the tree of knowledge, and Eden and
native innocence were dreams of the past--I mean for her.

I suppose she noticed the disappointment on my face, for she said: ""I
will pose if you wish. The study is behind the screen here where I put
it.""

""No,"" I said, ""we will begin something new;"" and I went into my wardrobe
and picked out a Moorish costume which fairly blazed with tinsel. It was
a genuine costume, and Tessie retired to the screen with it enchanted.
When she came forth again I was astonished. Her long black hair was bound
above her forehead with a circlet of turquoises, and the ends, curled
about her glittering girdle. Her feet were encased in the embroidered
pointed slippers and the skirt of her costume, curiously wrought with
arabesques in silver, fell to her ankles. The deep metallic blue vest
embroidered with silver and the short Mauresque jacket spangled and sewn
with turquoises became her wonderfully. She came up to me and held up her
face smiling. I slipped my hand into my pocket, and drawing out a gold
chain with a cross attached, dropped it over her head.

""It's yours, Tessie.""

""Mine?"" she faltered.

""Yours. Now go and pose,"" Then with a radiant smile she ran behind the
screen and presently reappeared with a little box on which was written my
name.

""I had intended to give it to you when I went home to-night,"" she said,
""but I can't wait now.""

I opened the box. On the pink cotton inside lay a clasp of black onyx, on
which was inlaid a curious symbol or letter in gold. It was neither
Arabic nor Chinese, nor, as I found afterwards, did it belong to any
human script.

""It's all I had to give you for a keepsake,"" she said timidly.

I was annoyed, but I told her how much I should prize it, and promised to
wear it always. She fastened it on my coat beneath the lapel.

""How foolish, Tess, to go and buy me such a beautiful thing as this,"" I
said.

""I did not buy it,"" she laughed.

""Where did you get it?""

Then she told me how she had found it one day while coming from the
Aquarium in the Battery, how she had advertised it and watched the
papers, but at last gave up all hopes of finding the owner.

""That was last winter,"" she said, ""the very day I had the first horrid
dream about the hearse.""

I remembered my dream of the previous night but said nothing, and
presently my charcoal was flying over a new canvas, and Tessie stood
motionless on the model-stand.




III

The day following was a disastrous one for me. While moving a framed
canvas from one easel to another my foot slipped on the polished floor,
and I fell heavily on both wrists. They were so badly sprained that it
was useless to attempt to hold a brush, and I was obliged to wander about
the studio, glaring at unfinished drawings and sketches, until despair
seized me and I sat down to smoke and twiddle my thumbs with rage. The
rain blew against the windows and rattled on the roof of the church,
driving me into a nervous fit with its interminable patter. Tessie sat
sewing by the window, and every now and then raised her head and looked
at me with such innocent compassion that I began to feel ashamed of my
irritation and looked about for something to occupy me. I had read all
the papers and all the books in the library, but for the sake of
something to do I went to the bookcases and shoved them open with my
elbow. I knew every volume by its colour and examined them all, passing
slowly around the library and whistling to keep up my spirits. I was
turning to go into the dining-room when my eye fell upon a book bound in
serpent skin, standing in a corner of the top shelf of the last bookcase.
I did not remember it, and from the floor could not decipher the pale
lettering on the back, so I went to the smoking-room and called Tessie.
She came in from the studio and climbed up to reach the book.

""What is it?"" I asked.

""_The King in Yellow._""

I was dumfounded. Who had placed it there? How came it in my rooms? I had
long ago decided that I should never open that book, and nothing on earth
could have persuaded me to buy it. Fearful lest curiosity might tempt me
to open it, I had never even looked at it in book-stores. If I ever had
had any curiosity to read it, the awful tragedy of young Castaigne, whom
I knew, prevented me from exploring its wicked pages. I had always
refused to listen to any description of it, and indeed, nobody ever
ventured to discuss the second part aloud, so I had absolutely no
knowledge of what those leaves might reveal. I stared at the poisonous
mottled binding as I would at a snake.

""Don't touch it, Tessie,"" I said; ""come down.""

Of course my admonition was enough to arouse her curiosity, and before I
could prevent it she took the book and, laughing, danced off into the
studio with it. I called to her, but she slipped away with a tormenting
smile at my helpless hands, and I followed her with some impatience.

""Tessie!"" I cried, entering the library, ""listen, I am serious. Put that
book away. I do not wish you to open it!"" The library was empty. I went
into both drawing-rooms, then into the bedrooms, laundry, kitchen, and
finally returned to the library and began a systematic search. She had
hidden herself so well that it was half-an-hour later when I discovered
her crouching white and silent by the latticed window in the store-room
above. At the first glance I saw she had been punished for her
foolishness. _The King in Yellow_ lay at her feet, but the book was
open at the second part. I looked at Tessie and saw it was too late. She
had opened _The King in Yellow_. Then I took her by the hand and led
her into the studio. She seemed dazed, and when I told her to lie down on
the sofa she obeyed me without a word. After a while she closed her eyes
and her breathing became regular and deep, but I could not determine
whether or not she slept. For a long while I sat silently beside her, but
she neither stirred nor spoke, and at last I rose, and, entering the
unused store-room, took the book in my least injured hand. It seemed
heavy as lead, but I carried it into the studio again, and sitting down
on the rug beside the sofa, opened it and read it through from beginning
to end.

When, faint with excess of my emotions, I dropped the volume and leaned
wearily back against the sofa, Tessie opened her eyes and looked at
me....

We had been speaking for some time in a dull monotonous strain before I
realized that we were discussing _The King in Yellow_. Oh the sin of
writing such words,--words which are clear as crystal, limpid and musical
as bubbling springs, words which sparkle and glow like the poisoned
diamonds of the Medicis! Oh the wickedness, the hopeless damnation of a
soul who could fascinate and paralyze human creatures with such
words,--words understood by the ignorant and wise alike, words which are
more precious than jewels, more soothing than music, more awful than
death!

We talked on, unmindful of the gathering shadows, and she was begging me
to throw away the clasp of black onyx quaintly inlaid with what we now
knew to be the Yellow Sign. I never shall know why I refused, though even
at this hour, here in my bedroom as I write this confession, I should be
glad to know _what_ it was that prevented me from tearing the Yellow
Sign from my breast and casting it into the fire. I am sure I wished to
do so, and yet Tessie pleaded with me in vain. Night fell and the hours
dragged on, but still we murmured to each other of the King and the
Pallid Mask, and midnight sounded from the misty spires in the
fog-wrapped city. We spoke of Hastur and of Cassilda, while outside the
fog rolled against the blank window-panes as the cloud waves roll and
break on the shores of Hali.

The house was very silent now, and not a sound came up from the misty
streets. Tessie lay among the cushions, her face a grey blot in the
gloom, but her hands were clasped in mine, and I knew that she knew and
read my thoughts as I read hers, for we had understood the mystery of the
Hyades and the Phantom of Truth was laid. Then as we answered each other,
swiftly, silently, thought on thought, the shadows stirred in the gloom
about us, and far in the distant streets we heard a sound. Nearer and
nearer it came, the dull crunching of wheels, nearer and yet nearer, and
now, outside before the door it ceased, and I dragged myself to the
window and saw a black-plumed hearse. The gate below opened and shut, and
I crept shaking to my door and bolted it, but I knew no bolts, no locks,
could keep that creature out who was coming for the Yellow Sign. And now
I heard him moving very softly along the hall. Now he was at the door,
and the bolts rotted at his touch. Now he had entered. With eyes starting
from my head I peered into the darkness, but when he came into the room I
did not see him. It was only when I felt him envelope me in his cold soft
grasp that I cried out and struggled with deadly fury, but my hands were
useless and he tore the onyx clasp from my coat and struck me full in the
face. Then, as I fell, I heard Tessie's soft cry and her spirit fled: and
even while falling I longed to follow her, for I knew that the King in
Yellow had opened his tattered mantle and there was only God to cry to
now.

I could tell more, but I cannot see what help it will be to the world. As
for me, I am past human help or hope. As I lie here, writing, careless
even whether or not I die before I finish, I can see the doctor gathering
up his powders and phials with a vague gesture to the good priest beside
me, which I understand.

They will be very curious to know the tragedy--they of the outside world
who write books and print millions of newspapers, but I shall write no
more, and the father confessor will seal my last words with the seal of
sanctity when his holy office is done. They of the outside world may send
their creatures into wrecked homes and death-smitten firesides, and their
newspapers will batten on blood and tears, but with me their spies must
halt before the confessional. They know that Tessie is dead and that I am
dying. They know how the people in the house, aroused by an infernal
scream, rushed into my room and found one living and two dead, but they
do not know what I shall tell them now; they do not know that the doctor
said as he pointed to a horrible decomposed heap on the floor--the livid
corpse of the watchman from the church: ""I have no theory, no explanation.
That man must have been dead for months!""


I think I am dying. I wish the priest would--


","On the wall hung a map of Mongolia, that indefinite region a million and a half square miles in area, vast sections of which have never been explored.

Turkestan and China border it on the south, and Tibet almost touches it, not quite.

Even in the twelfth century, when the wild Mongols broke loose and nearly overran the world, the Tibet infantry under Genghis, the Tchortcha horsemen drafted out of Black China, and a great cloud of Mongol cavalry under the Prince of the Vanguard commanding half a hundred Hezars, never penetrated that grisly and unknown waste. The ""Eight Towers of the Assassins"" guarded it—still guard it, possibly.

The vice-regent of Erlik, Prince of Darkness, dwelt within this unknown land. And dwells there still, perhaps.

In front of this wall-map stood Tressa Norne.

Behind her, facing the map, four men were seated—three of them under thirty.

These three were volunteers in the service of the United States Government—men of independent means, of position, who had volunteered for military duty at the outbreak of the great war. However, they had been assigned by the Government to a very different sort of duty no less exciting than service on the fighting line, but far less conspicuous, for they had been drafted into the United States Department of Justice.

The names of these three were Victor Cleves, a professor of ornithology at Harvard University before the war; Alexander Selden, junior partner in the banking firm of Milwyn, Selden, and Co., and James Benton, a New York architect.

The fourth man's name was John Recklow. He might have been over fifty, or under. He was well-built, in a square, athletic way, clear-skinned and ruddy, grey-eyed, quiet in voice and manner. His hair and moustache had turned silvery. He had been employed by the Government for many years. He seemed to be enormously interested in what Miss Norne was saying.

Also he was the only man who interrupted her narrative to ask questions. And his questions revealed a knowledge which was making the girl more sensitive and uneasy every moment.

Finally, when she spoke of the Scarlet Desert, he asked if the Scarlet Lake were there and if the Xin was still supposed to inhabit its vermilion depths. And at that she turned and looked at him, her forefinger still resting on the map.

""Where have you ever heard of the Scarlet Lake and the Xin?"" she asked as though frightened.

Recklow said quietly that as a boy he had served under Gordon and Sir Robert.

""If, as a boy, you served under Chinese Gordon, you already know much of what I have told you, Mr. Recklow. Is it not true?"" she demanded nervously.

""That makes no difference,"" he replied with a smile. ""It is all very new to these three young gentlemen. And as for myself, I am checking up what you say and comparing it with what I heard many, many years ago when my comrade Barres and I were in Yian.""

""Did you really know Sir Robert Hart?""

""Yes.""

""Then why do you not explain to these gentlemen?""

""Dear child,"" he interrupted gently, ""what did Chinese Gordon or Sir Robert Hart, or even my comrade Barres, or I myself know about occult Asia in comparison to what you know?—a girl who has actually served the mysteries of Erlik for four amazing years!""

She paled a trifle, came slowly across the room to where Recklow was seated, laid a timid hand on his sleeve.

""Do you believe there are sorcerers in Asia?"" she asked with that child-like directness which her wonderful blue eyes corroborated.

Recklow remained silent.

""Because,"" she went on, ""if, in your heart, you do not believe this to be an accursed fact, then what I have to say will mean nothing to any of you.""

Recklow touched his short, silvery moustache, hesitating. Then:

""The worship of Erlik is devil worship,"" he said. ""Also I am entirely prepared to believe that there are, among the Yezidees, adepts who employ scientific weapons against civilisation—who have probably obtained a rather terrifying knowledge of psychic laws which they use scientifically, and which to ordinary, God-fearing folk appear to be the black magic of sorcerers.""

Cleves said: ""The employment by the huns of poison gases and long-range cannon is a parallel case. Before the war we could not believe in the possibility of a cannon that threw shells a distance of seventy miles.""

The girl still addressed herself to Recklow: ""Then you do not believe there are real sorcerers in Asia, Mr. Recklow?""

""Not sorcerers with supernatural powers for evil. Only degenerate human beings who, somehow, have managed to tap invisible psychic currents, and have learned how to use terrific forces about which, so far, we know practically nothing.""

She spoke again in the same uneasy voice: ""Then you do not believe that either God or Satan is involved?""

""No,"" he replied smilingly, ""and you must not so believe.""

""Nor the—the destruction of human souls,"" she persisted; ""you do not believe it is being accomplished to-day?""

""Not in the slightest, dear young lady,"" he said cheerfully.

""Do you not believe that to have been instructed in such unlawful knowledge is damning? Do you not believe that ability to employ unknown forces is forbidden of God, and that to disobey His law means death to the soul?""

""No!""

""That it is the price one pays to Satan for occult power over people's minds?"" she insisted.

""Hypnotic suggestion is not one of the cardinal sins,"" explained Recklow, still smiling—""unless wickedly employed. The Yezidee priesthood is a band of so-called sorcerers only because of their wicked employment of whatever hypnotic and psychic knowledge they may have obtained.

""There was nothing intrinsically wicked in the huns' discovery of phosgene. But the use they made of it made devils out of them. My ability to manufacture phosgene gas is no crime. But if I manufacture it and use it to poison innocent human beings, then, in that sense, I am, perhaps, a sort of modern sorcerer.""

Tressa Norne turned paler:

""I had better tell you that I have used—forbidden knowledge—which the Yezidees taught me in the temple of Erlik.""

""Used it how?"" demanded Cleves.

""To—to earn a living.... And once or twice to defend myself.""

There was the slightest scepticism in Recklow's bland smile. ""You did quite right, Miss Norne.""

She had become very white now. She stood beside Recklow, her back toward the suspended map, and looked in a scared sort of way from one to the other of the men seated before her, turning finally to Cleves, and coming toward him.

""I—I once killed a man,"" she said with a catch in her breath.

Cleves reddened with astonishment. ""Why did you do that?"" he asked.

""He was already on his way to kill me in bed.""

""You were perfectly right,"" remarked Recklow coolly.

""I don't know ... I was in bed.... And then, on the edge of sleep, I felt his mind groping to get hold of mine—feeling about in the darkness to get hold of my brain and seize it and paralyse it.""

All colour had left her face. Cleves gripped the arm of his chair and watched her intently.

""I—I had only a moment's mental freedom,"" she went on in a ghost of a voice. ""I was just able to rouse myself, fight off those murderous brain-fingers—let loose a clear mental ray.... And then, O God! I saw him in his room with his Kalmuck knife—saw him already on his way to murder me—Gutchlug Khan, the Yezidee—looking about in his bedroom for a shroud.... And when—when he reached for the bed to draw forth a fine, white sheet for the shroud without which no Yezidee dares journey deathward—then—then I became frightened.... And I killed him—I slew him there in his hotel bedroom on the floor above mine!""

Selden moistened his lips: ""That Oriental, Gutchlug, died from heart-failure in a San Francisco hotel,"" he said. ""I was there at the time.""

""He died by the fangs of a little yellow snake,"" whispered the girl.

""There was no snake in his room,"" retorted Cleves.

""And no wound on his body,"" added Selden. ""I attended the autopsy.""

She said, faintly: ""There was no snake, and no wound, as you say.... Yet Gutchlug died of both there in his bedroom.... And before he died he heard his soul bidding him farewell; and he saw the death-adder coiled in the sheet he clutched—saw the thing strike him again and again—saw and felt the tiny wounds on his left hand; felt the fangs pricking deep, deep into the veins; died of it there within the minute—died of the swiftest poison known. And yet——""

She turned her dead-white face to Cleves—""And yet there was no snake there!... And never had been.... And so I—I ask you, gentlemen, if souls do not die when minds learn to fight death with death—and deal it so swiftly, so silently, while one's body lies, unstirring on a bed—in a locked room on the floor below——""

She swayed a little, put out one hand rather blindly.

Recklow rose and passed a muscular arm around her; Cleves, beside her, held her left hand, crushing it, without intention, until she opened her eyes with a cry of pain.

""Are you all right?"" asked Recklow bluntly.

""Yes."" She turned and looked at Cleves and he caressed her bruised hand as though dazed.

""Tell me,"" she said to Cleves—""you who know—know more about my mind than anybody living——"" a painful colour surged into her face—but she went on steadily, forcing herself to meet his gaze: ""tell me, Mr. Cleves—do you still believe that nothing can really destroy my soul? And that it shall yet win through to safety?""

He said: ""Your soul is in God's keeping, and always shall be.... And if the Yezidees have made you believe otherwise, they lie.""

Recklow added in a slow, perplexed way: ""I have no personal knowledge of psychic power. I am not psychic, not susceptible. But if you actually possess such ability, Miss Norne, and if you have employed such knowledge to defend your life, then you have done absolutely right.""

""No guilt touches you,"" added Selden with an involuntary shiver, ""if by hypnosis or psychic ability you really did put an end to that would-be murderer, Gutchlug.""

Selden said: ""If Gutchlug died by the fangs of a yellow death-adder which existed only in his own mind, and if you actually had anything to do with it you acted purely in self-defence.""

""You did your full duty,"" added Benton—""but—good God!—it seems incredible to me, that such power can actually be available in the world!""

Recklow spoke again in his pleasant, undisturbed voice: ""Go back to the map, Miss Norne, and tell us a little more about this rather terrifying thing which you believe menaces the civilised world with destruction.""

Tressa Norne laid a slim finger on the map. Her voice had become steady. She said:

""The devil-worship, of which one of the modern developments is Bolshevism, and another the terrorism of the hun, began in Asia long before Christ's advent: At least so it was taught us in the temple of Erlik.

""It has always existed, its aim always has been the annihilation of good and the elevation of evil; the subjection of right by might, and the worldwide triumph of wrong.

""Perhaps it is as old as the first battle between God and Satan. I have wondered about it, sometimes. There in the dusk of the temple when the Eight Assassins came—the eight Sheiks-el-Djebel, all in white—chanting the Yakase of Sabbah—always that dirge when they came and spread their eight white shrouds on the temple steps——""

Her voice caught; she waited to recover her composure. Then went on:

""The ambition of Genghis was to conquer the world by force of arms. It was merely of physical subjection that he dreamed. But the Slayer of Souls——""

""Who?"" asked Recklow sharply.

""The Slayer of Souls—Erlik's vice-regent on earth—Hassan Sabbah. The Old Man of the Mountain. It is of him I am speaking,"" exclaimed Tressa Norne—with quiet resolution. ""Genghis sought only physical conquest of man; the Yezidee's ambition is more awful, for he is attempting to surprise and seize the very minds of men!""

There was a dead silence. Tressa looked palely upon the four.

""The Yezidees—who you tell me are not sorcerers—are using power—which you tell me is not magic accursed by God—to waylay, capture, enslave, and destroy the minds and souls of mankind.

""It may be that what they employ is hypnotic ability and psychic power and can be, some day, explained on a scientific basis when we learn more about the occult laws which govern these phenomena.

""But could anything render the threat less awful? For there have existed for centuries—perhaps always—a sect of Satanists determined upon the destruction of everything that is pure and holy and good on earth; and they are resolved to substitute for righteousness the dreadful reign of hell.

""In the beginning there were comparatively few of these human demons. Gradually, through the eras, they have increased. In the twelfth century there were fifty thousand of the Sect of Assassins.

""Beside the castle of the Slayer of Souls on Mount Alamout——"" she laid her finger on the map—""eight other towers were erected for the Eight Chief Assassins, called Sheiks-el-Djebel.

""In the temple we were taught where these eight towers stood."" She picked up a pencil, and on eight blank spaces of unexplored and unmapped Mongolia she made eight crosses. Then she turned to the men behind her.

""It was taught to us in the temple that from these eight foci of infection the disease of evil has been spreading throughout the world; from these eight towers have gone forth every year the emissaries of evil—perverted missionaries—to spread the poisonous propaganda, to teach it, to tamper stealthily with the minds of men, dominate them, pervert them, instruct them in the creed of the Assassin of Souls.

""All over the world are people, already contaminated, whose minds are already enslaved and poisoned, and who are infecting the still healthy brains of others—stealthily possessing themselves of the minds of mankind—teaching them evil, inviting them to mock the precepts of Christ.

""Of such lost minds are the degraded brains of the Germans—the pastors and philosophers who teach that might is right.

""Of such crippled minds are the Bolsheviki, poisoned long, long ago by close contact with Asia which, before that, had infected and enslaved the minds of the ruling classes with ferocious philosophy.

""Of such minds are all anarchists of every shade and stripe—all terrorists, all disciples of violence,—the murderously envious, the slothful slinking brotherhood which prowls through the world taking every opportunity to set it afire; those mentally dulled by reason of excesses; those weak intellects become unsound through futile gabble,—parlour socialists, amateur revolutionists, theoretical incapables excited by discussion fit only for healthy minds.""

She left the map and came over to where the four men were seated terribly intent upon her every word.

""In the temple of Erlik, where my girlhood was passed after the murder of my parents, I learned what I am repeating to you,"" she said.

""I learned this, also, that the Eight Towers still exist—still stand to-day,—at least theoretically—and that from the Eight Towers pours forth across the world a stream of poison.

""I was told that, to every country, eight Yezidees were allotted—eight sorcerers—or adepts in scientific psychology if you prefer it—whose mission is to teach the gospel of hell and gradually but surely to win the minds of men to the service of the Slayer of Souls.

""That is what was taught us in the temple. We were educated in the development of occult powers—for it seems all human beings possess this psychic power latent within them—only few, even when instructed, acquire any ability to control and use this force....

""I—I learned—rapidly. I even thought, sometimes, that the Yezidees were beginning to be a little afraid of me,—even the Hassani priests.... And the Sheiks-el-Djebel, spreading their shrouds on the temple steps, looked at me with unquiet eyes, where I stood like a corpse amid the incense clouds——""

She passed her fingers over her eyelids, then framed her face between both hands for a moment's thought lost in tragic retrospection.

""Kai!"" she whispered dreamily as though to herself—""what Erlik awoke within my body that was asleep, God knows, but it was as though a twin comrade arose within me and looked out through my eyes upon a world which never before had been visible.""

Utter silence reigned in the room: Cleves's breathing seemed almost painful to him so intently was he listening and watching this girl; Benton's hands whitened with his grip on the chair-arms; Selden, tense, absorbed, kept his keen gaze of a business man fastened on her face. Recklow slowly caressed the cold bowl of his pipe with both thumbs.

Tressa Norne's strange and remote eyes subtly altered, and she lifted her head and looked calmly at the men before her.

""I think that there is nothing more for me to add,"" she said. ""The Red Spectre of Anarchy, called Bolshevism at present, threatens our country. Our Government is now awake to this menace and the Secret Service is moving everywhere.

""Great damage already has been done to the minds of many people in this Republic; poison has spread; is spreading. The Eight Towers still stand. The Eight Assassins are in America.

""But these eight Assassins know me to be their enemy.... They will surely attempt to kill me.... I don't believe I can avoid—death—very long.... But I want to serve my country and—and mankind.""

""They'll have to get me first,"" said Cleves, bluntly. ""I shall not permit you out of my sight.""

Recklow said in a musing voice: ""And these eight gentlemen, who are very likely to hurt us, also, are the first people we ought to hunt.""

""To get them,"" added Selden, ""we ought to choke the stream at its source.""

""To find out who they are is what is going to worry us,"" added Benton. Cleves had stood holding a chair for Tressa Norne. Finally she noticed it and seated herself as though tired.

""Is Sanang one of these eight?"" he asked her. The girl turned and looked up at him, and he saw the flush mounting in her face.

""Sometimes,"" she said steadily, ""I have almost believed he was Erlik's own vice-regent on earth—the Slayer of Souls himself.""

Benton and Selden had gone. Recklow left a little later. Cleves accompanied him out to the landing.

""Are you going to keep Miss Norne here with you for the present?"" inquired the older man.

""Yes. I dare not let her out of my sight, Recklow. What else can I do?""

""I don't know. Is she prepared for the consequences?""

""Gossip? Slander?""

""Of course.""

""I can get a housekeeper.""

""That only makes it look worse.""

Cleves reddened. ""Well, do you want to find her in some hotel or apartment with her throat cut?""

""No,"" replied Recklow, gently, ""I do not.""

""Then what else is there to do but keep her here in my own apartment and never let her out of my sight until we can find and lock up the eight gentlemen who are undoubtedly bent on murdering her?""

""Isn't there some woman in the Service who could help out? I could mention several.""

""I tell you I can't trust Tressa Norne to anybody except myself,"" insisted Cleves. ""I got her into this; I am responsible if she is murdered; I dare not entrust her safety to anybody else. And, Recklow, it's a ghastly responsibility for a man to induce a young girl to face death, even in the service of her country.""

""If she remains here alone with you she'll face social destruction,"" remarked Recklow.

Cleves was silent for a moment, then he burst out: ""Well, what am I to do? What is there left for me to do except to watch over her and see her through this devilish business? What other way have I to protect her, Recklow?""

""You could offer her the protection of your name,"" suggested the other, carelessly.

""What? You mean—marry her?""

""Well, nobody else would be inclined to, Cleves, if it ever becomes known she has lived here quite alone with you.""

Cleves stared at the elder man.

""This is nonsense,"" he said in a harsh voice. ""That young girl doesn't want to marry anybody. Neither do I. She doesn't wish to have her throat cut, that's all. And I'm determined she shan't.""

""There are stealthier assassins, Cleves,—the slayers of reputations. It goes badly with their victim. It does indeed.""

""Well, hang it, what do you think I ought to do?""

""I think you ought to marry her if you're going to keep her here.""

""Suppose she doesn't mind the unconventionality of it?""

""All women mind. No woman, at heart, is unconventional, Cleves.""

""She—she seems to agree with me that she ought to stay here.... Besides, she has no money, no relatives, no friends in America——""

""All the more tragic. If you really believe it to be your duty to keep her here where you can look after her bodily safety, then the other obligation is still heavier. And there may come a day when Miss Norne will wish that you had been less conscientious concerning the safety of her pretty throat.... For the knife of the Yezidee is swifter and less cruel than the tongue that slays with a smile.... And this young girl has many years to live, after this business of Bolshevism is dead and forgotten in our Republic.""

""Recklow!""

""Yes?""

""You think I might dare try to find a room somewhere else for her and let her take her chances? Do you?""

""It's your affair.""

""I know—hang it! I know it's my affair. I've unintentionally made it so. But can't you tell me what I ought to do?""

""I can't.""

""What would you do?""

""Don't ask me,"" returned Recklow, sharply. ""If you're not man enough to come to a decision you may turn her over to me.""

Cleves flushed brightly. ""Do you think you are old enough to take my job and avoid scandal?""

Recklow's cold eyes rested on him: ""If you like,"" he said, ""I'll assume your various kinds of personal responsibility toward Miss Norne.""

Cleve's visage burned. ""I'll shoulder my own burdens,"" he retorted.

""Sure. I knew you would."" And Recklow smiled and held out his hand. Cleves took it without cordiality. Standing so, Recklow, still smiling, said: ""What a rotten deal that child has had—is having. Her father and mother were fine people. Did you ever hear of Dr. Norne?""

""She mentioned him once.""

""They were up-State people of most excellent antecedents and no money.

""Dr. Norne was our Vice-Consul at Yarkand in the province of Sin Kiang. All he had was his salary, and he lost that and his post when the administration changed. Then he went into the spice trade.

""Some Jew syndicate here sent him up the Yarkand River to see what could be done about jade and gold concessions. He was on that business when the tragedy happened. The Kalmuks and Khirghiz were responsible, under Yezidee instigation. And there you are:—and here is his child, Cleves—back, by some miracle, from that flowering hell called Yian, believing in her heart that she really lost her soul there in the temple. And now, here in her own native land, she is exposed to actual and hourly danger of assassination.... Poor kid!... Did you ever hear of a rottener deal, Cleves?""

Their hands had remained clasped while Recklow was speaking. He spoke again, clearly, amiably:

""To lay down one's life for a friend is fine. I'm not sure that it's finer to offer one's honour in behalf of a girl whose honour is at stake.""

After a moment Cleves's grip tightened.

""All right,"" he said.

Recklow went downstairs.

",True
"I can hardly describe the mood in which I was left by this harrowing episode--an episode at once mad and pitiful, grotesque and terrifying. The grocery boy had prepared me for it, yet the reality left me none the less bewildered and disturbed. Puerile though the story was, old Zadok's insane earnestness and horror had communicated to me a mounting unrest which joined with my earlier sense of loathing for the town and its blight of intangible shadow.

Later I might sift the tale and extract some nucleus of historic allegory; just now I wished to put it out of my head. The hour grown perilously late--my watch said 7:15, and the Arkham bus left Town Square at eight--so I tried to give my thoughts as neutral and practical a cast as possible, meanwhile walking rapidly through the deserted streets of gaping roofs and leaning houses toward the hotel where I had checked my valise and would find my bus.

Though the golden light of late afternoon gave the ancient roofs and decrepit chimneys an air of mystic loveliness and peace, I could not help glancing over my shoulder now and then. I would surely be very glad to get out of malodorous and fear-shadowed Innsmouth, and wished there were some other vehicle than the bus driven by that sinister-looking fellow Sargent. Yet I did not hurry too precipitately, for there were architectural details worth viewing at every silent corner; and I could easily, I calculated, cover the necessary distance in a half-hour.

Studying the grocery youth's map and seeking a route I had not traversed before, I chose Marsh Street instead of State for my approach to Town Square. Near the corner of Fall Street I began to see scattered groups of furtive whisperers, and when I finally reached the Square I saw that almost all the loiterers were congregated around the door of the Gilman House. It seemed as if many bulging, watery, unwinking eyes looked oddly at me as I claimed my valise in the lobby, and I hoped that none of these unpleasant creatures would be my fellow-passengers on the coach.

The bus, rather early, rattled in with three passengers somewhat before eight, and an evil-looking fellow on the sidewalk muttered a few indistinguishable words to the driver. Sargent threw out a mail-bag and a roll of newspapers, and entered the hotel; while the passengers--the same men whom I had seen arriving in Newburyport that morning--shambled to the sidewalk and exchanged some faint guttural words with a loafer in a language I could have sworn was not English. I boarded the empty coach and took the seat I had taken before, but was hardly settled before Sargent re-appeared and began mumbling in a throaty voice of peculiar repulsiveness.

I was, it appeared, in very bad luck. There had been something wrong with the engine, despite the excellent time made from Newburyport, and the bus could not complete the journey to Arkham. No, it could not possibly be repaired that night, nor was there any other way of getting transportation out of Innsmouth either to Arkham or elsewhere. Sargent was sorry, but I would have to stop over at the Gilman. Probably the clerk would make the price easy for me, but there was nothing else to do. Almost dazed by this sudden obstacle, and violently dreading the fall of night in this decaying and half-unlighted town, I left the bus and reentered the hotel lobby; where the sullen queer-looking night clerk told me I could have Room 428 on next the top floor--large, but without running water--for a dollar.

Despite what I had heard of this hotel in Newburyport, I signed the register, paid my dollar, let the clerk take my valise, and followed that sour, solitary attendant up three creaking flights of stairs past dusty corridors which seemed wholly devoid of life. My room was a dismal rear one with two windows and bare, cheap furnishings, overlooked a dingy court-yard otherwise hemmed in by low, deserted brick blocks, and commanded a view of decrepit westward-stretching roofs with a marshy countryside beyond. At the end of the corridor was a bathroom--a discouraging relique with ancient marble bowl, tin tub, faint electric light, and musty wooded paneling around all the plumbing fixtures.

It being still daylight, I descended to the Square and looked around for a dinner of some sort; noticing as I did so the strange glances I received from the unwholesome loafers. Since the grocery was closed, I was forced to patronise the restaurant I had shunned before; a stooped, narrow-headed man with staring, unwinking eyes, and a flat-nosed wench with unbelievably thick, clumsy hands being in attendance. The service was all of the counter type, and it relieved me to find that much was evidently served from cans and packages. A bowl of vegetable soup with crackers was enough for me, and I soon headed back for my cheerless room at the Gilman; getting a evening paper and a fly-specked magazine from the evil-visaged clerk at the rickety stand beside his desk.

As twilight deepened I turned on the one feeble electric bulb over the cheap, iron-framed bed, and tried as best I could to continue the reading I had begun. I felt it advisable to keep my mind wholesomely occupied, for it would not do to brood over the abnormalities of this ancient, blight-shadowed town while I was still within its borders. The insane yarn I had heard from the aged drunkard did not promise very pleasant dreams, and I felt I must keep the image of his wild, watery eyes as far as possible from my imagination.

Also, I must not dwell on what that factory inspector had told the Newburyport ticket-agent about the Gilman House and the voices of its nocturnal tenants--not on that, nor on the face beneath the tiara in the black church doorway; the face for whose horror my conscious mind could not account. It would perhaps have been easier to keep my thoughts from disturbing topics had the room not been so gruesomely musty. As it was, the lethal mustiness blended hideously with the town's general fishy odour and persistently focussed one's fancy on death and decay.

Another thing that disturbed me was the absence of a bolt on the door of my room. One had been there, as marks clearly shewed, but there were signs of recent removal. No doubt it had been out of order, like so many other things in this decrepit edifice. In my nervousness I looked around and discovered a bolt on the clothes press which seemed to be of the same size, judging from the marks, as the one formerly on the door. To gain a partial relief from the general tension I busied myself by transferring this hardware to the vacant place with the aid of a handy three-in-one device including a screwdriver which I kept on my key-ring. The bolt fitted perfectly, and I was somewhat relieved when I knew that I could shoot it firmly upon retiring. Not that I had any real apprehension of its need, but that any symbol of security was welcome in an environment of this kind. There were adequate bolts on the two lateral doors to connecting rooms, and these I proceeded to fasten.

I did not undress, but decided to read till I was sleepy and then lie down with only my coat, collar, and shoes off. Taking a pocket flash light from my valise, I placed it in my trousers, so that I could read my watch if I woke up later in the dark. Drowsiness, however, did not come; and when I stopped to analyse my thoughts I found to my disquiet that I was really unconsciously listening for something--listening for something which I dreaded but could not name. That inspector's story must have worked on my imagination more deeply than I had suspected. Again I tried to read, but found that I made no progress.

After a time I seemed to hear the stairs and corridors creak at intervals as if with footsteps, and wondered if the other rooms were beginning to fill up. There were no voices, however, and it struck me that there was something subtly furtive about the creaking. I did not like it, and debated whether I had better try to sleep at all. This town had some queer people, and there had undoubtedly been several disappearances. Was this one of those inns where travelers were slain for their money? Surely I had no look of excessive prosperity. Or were the towns folk really so resentful about curious visitors? Had my obvious sightseeing, with its frequent map-consultations, aroused unfavorable notice. It occurred to me that I must be in a highly nervous state to let a few random creakings set me off speculating in this fashion--but I regretted none the less that I was unarmed.

At length, feeling a fatigue which had nothing of drowsiness in it, I bolted the newly outfitted hall door, turned off the light, and threw myself down on the hard, uneven bed--coat, collar, shoes, and all. In the darkness every faint noise of the night seemed magnified, and a flood of doubly unpleasant thoughts swept over me. I was sorry I had put out the light, yet was too tired to rise and turn it on again. Then, after a long, dreary interval, and prefaced by a fresh creaking of stairs and corridor, there came that soft, damnably unmistakable sound which seemed like a malign fulfillment of all my apprehensions. Without the least shadow of a doubt, the lock of my door was being tried--cautiously, furtively, tentatively--with a key.

My sensations upon recognising this sign of actual peril were perhaps less rather than more tumultuous because of my previous vague fears. I had been, albeit without definite reason, instinctively on my guard--and that was to my advantage in the new and real crisis, whatever it might turn out to be. Nevertheless the change in the menace from vague premonition to immediate reality was a profound shock, and fell upon me with the force of a genuine blow. It never once occurred to me that the fumbling might be a mere mistake. Malign purpose was all I could think of, and I kept deathly quiet, awaiting the would-be intruder's next move.

After a time the cautious rattling ceased, and I heard the room to the north entered with a pass-key. Then the lock of the connecting door to my room was softly tried. The bolt held, of course, and I heard the floor creak as the prowler left the room. After a moment there came another soft rattling, and I knew that the room to the south of me was being entered. Again a furtive trying of a bolted connecting door, and again a receding creaking. This time the creaking went along the hall and down the stairs, so I knew that the prowler had realised the bolted condition of my doors and was giving up his attempt for a greater or lesser time, as the future would shew.

The readiness with which I fell into a plan of action proves that I must have been subconsciously fearing some menace and considering possible avenues of escape for hours. From the first I felt that the unseen fumbler meant a danger not to be met or dealt with, but only to be fled from as precipitately as possible. The one thing to do was to get out of that hotel alive as quickly as I could, and through some channel other than the front stairs and lobby.

Rising softly and throwing my flashlight on the switch, I sought to light the bulb over my bed in order to choose and pocket some belongings for a swift, valiseless flight. Nothing, however, happened; and I saw that the power had been cut off. Clearly, some cryptic, evil movement was afoot on a large scale--just what, I could not say. As I stood pondering with my hand on the now useless switch I heard a muffled creaking on the floor below, and thought I could barely distinguish voices in conversation. A moment later I felt less sure that the deeper sounds were voices, since the apparent hoarse barkings and loose-syllabled croakings bore so little resemblance to recognized human speech. Then I thought with renewed force of what the factory inspector had heard in the night in this mouldering and pestilential building.

Having filled my pockets with the flashlight's aid, I put on my hat and tiptoed to the windows to consider chances of descent. Despite the state's safety regulations there was no fire escape on this side of the hotel, and I saw that my windows commanded only a sheer three story drop to the cobbled courtyard. On the right and left, however, some ancient brick business blocks abutted on the hotel; their slant roofs coming up to a reasonable jumping distance from my fourth-story level. To reach either of these lines of buildings I would have to be in a room two from my own--in one case on the north and in the other case on the south--and my mind instantly set to work what chances I had of making the transfer.

I could not, I decided, risk an emergence into the corridor; where my footsteps would surely be heard, and where the difficulties of entering the desired room would be insuperable. My progress, if it was to be made at all, would have to be through the less solidly-built connecting doors of the rooms; the locks and bolts of which I would have to force violently, using my shoulder as a battering-ram whenever they were set against me. This, I thought, would be possible owing to the rickety nature of the house and its fixtures; but I realised I could not do it noiselessly. I would have to count on sheer speed, and the chance of getting to a window before any hostile forces became coordinated enough to open the right door toward me with a pass-key. My own outer door I reinforced by pushing the bureau against it--little by little, in order to make a minimum of sound.

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

Gathering from the grocery boy's map that the best route out of town was southward, I glanced first at the connecting door on the south side of the room. It was designed to open in my direction, hence I saw--after drawing the bolt and finding other fastening in place--it was not a favorable one for forcing. Accordingly abandoning it as a route, I cautiously moved the bedstead against it to hamper any attack which might be made on it later from the next room. The door on the north was hung to open away from me, and this--though a test proved it to be locked or bolted from the other side--I knew must be my route. If I could gain the roofs of the buildings in Paine Street and descend successfully to the ground level, I might perhaps dart through the courtyard and the adjacent or opposite building to Washington or Bates--or else emerge in Paine and edge around southward into Washington. In any case, I would aim to strike Washington somehow and get quickly out of the Town Square region. My preference would be to avoid Paine, since the fire station there might be open all night.

As I thought of these things I looked out over the squalid sea of decaying roofs below me, now brightened by the beams of a moon not much past full. On the right the black gash of the river-gorge clove the panorama; abandoned factories and railway station clinging barnacle-like to its sides. Beyond it the rusted railway and the Rowley road led off through a flat marshy terrain dotted with islets of higher and dryer scrub-grown land. On the left the creek-threaded country-side was nearer, the narrow road to Ipswich gleaming white in the moonlight. I could not see from my side of the hotel the southward route toward Arkham which I had determined to take.

I was irresolutely speculating on when I had better attack the northward door, and on how I could least audibly manage it, when I noticed that the vague noises underfoot had given place to a fresh and heavier creaking of the stairs. A wavering flicker of light shewed through my transom, and the boards of the corridor began to groan with a ponderous load. Muffled sounds of possible vocal origin approached, and at length a firm knock came at my outer door.

For a moment I simply held my breath and waited. Eternities seemed to elapse, and the nauseous fishy odour of my environment seemed to mount suddenly and spectacularly. Then the knocking was repeated--continuously, and with growing insistence. I knew that the time for action had come, and forthwith drew the bolt of the northward connecting door, bracing myself for the task of battering it open. The knocking waxed louder, and I hoped that its volume would cover the sound of my efforts. At last beginning my attempt, I lunged again and again at the thin paneling with my left shoulder, heedless of shock or pain. The door resisted even more than I expected, but I did not give in. And all the while the clamour at the outer door increased.

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

For an instant I felt absolute despair, since my trapping in a chamber with no window egress seemed complete. A wave of almost abnormal horror swept over me, and invested with a terrible but unexplainable singularity the flashlight-glimpsed dust prints made by the intruder who had lately tried my door from this room. Then, with a dazed automatism which persisted despite hopelessness, I made for the next connecting door and performed the blind motion of pushing at it in an effort to get through and--granting that fastenings might be as providentially intact as in this second room--bolt the hall door beyond before the lock could be turned from outside.

Sheer fortunate chance gave me my reprieve--for the connecting door before me was not only unlocked but actually ajar. In a second I was though, and had my right knee and shoulder against a hall door which was visibly opening inward. My pressure took the opener off guard, for the thing shut as I pushed, so that I could slip the well-conditioned bolt as I had done with the other door. As I gained this respite I heard the battering at the two other doors abate, while a confused clatter came from the connecting door I had shielded with the bedstead. Evidently the bulk of my assailants had entered the southerly room and were massing in a lateral attack. But at the same moment a pass-key sounded in the next door to the north, and I knew that a nearer peril was at hand.

The northward connecting door was wide open, but there was no time to think about checking the already turning lock in the hall. All I could do was to shut and bolt the open connecting door, as well as its mate on the opposite side--pushing a bedstead against the one and a bureau against the other, and moving a washstand in front of the hall door. I must, I saw, trust to such makeshift barriers to shield me till I could get out the window and on the roof of the Paine Street block. But even in this acute moment my chief horror was something apart from the immediate weakness of my defenses. I was shuddering because not one of my pursuers, despite some hideous panting, grunting, and subdued barkings at odd intervals, was uttering an unmuffled or intelligible vocal sound.

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

Surveying the conditions, I chose the more southerly of the two windows as my avenue of escape; planning to land on the inner slope of the roof and make for the nearest sky-light. Once inside one of the decrepit brick structures I would have to reckon with pursuit; but I hoped to descend and dodge in and out of yawning doorways along the shadowed courtyard, eventually getting to Washington Street and slipping out of town toward the south.

The clatter at the northerly connecting door was now terrific, and I saw that the weak panelling was beginning to splinter. Obviously, the besiegers had brought some ponderous object into play as a battering-ram. The bedstead, however, still held firm; so that I had at least a faint chance of making good my escape. As I opened the window I noticed that it was flanked by heavy velour draperies suspended from a pole by brass rings, and also that there was a large projecting catch for the shutters on the exterior. Seeing a possible means of avoiding the dangerous jump, I yanked at the hangings and brought them down, pole and all; then quickly hooking two of the rings in the shutter catch and flinging the drapery outside. The heavy folds reached fully to the abutting roof, and I saw that the rings and catch would be likely to bear my weight. So, climbing out of the window and down the improvised rope ladder, I left behind me forever the morbid and horror-infested fabric of the Gilman House.

I landed safely on the loose slates of the steep roof, and succeeded in gaining the gaping black skylight without a slip. Glancing up at the window I had left, I observed it was still dark, though far across the crumbling chimneys to the north I could see lights ominously blazing in the Order of Dagon Hall, the Baptist church, and the Congregational church which I recalled so shiveringly. There had seemed to be no one in the courtyard below, and I hoped there would be a chance to get away before the spreading of a general alarm. Flashing my pocket lamp into the skylight, I saw that there were no steps down. The distance was slight, however, so I clambered over the brink and dropped; striking a dusty floor littered with crumbling boxes and barrels.

The place was ghoulish-looking, but I was past minding such impressions and made at once for the staircase revealed by my flashlight--after a hasty glance at my watch, which shewed the hour to be 2 a.m. The steps creaked, but seemed tolerably sound; and I raced down past a barnlike second storey to the ground floor. The desolation was complete, and only echoes answered my footfalls. At length I reached the lower hall at the end of which I saw a faint luminous rectangle marking the ruined Paine Street doorway. Heading the other way, I found the back door also open; and darted out and down five stone steps to the grass-grown cobblestones of the courtyard.

The moonbeams did not reach down here, but I could just see my way about without using the flashlight. Some of the windows on the Gilman House side were faintly glowing, and I thought I heard confused sounds within. Walking softly over to the Washington Street side I perceived several open doorways, and chose the nearest as my route out. The hallway inside was black, and when I reached the opposite end I saw that the street door was wedged immovably shut. Resolved to try another building, I groped my way back toward the courtyard, but stopped short when close to the doorway.

For out of an opened door in the Gilman House a large crowd of doubtful shapes was pouring--lanterns bobbing in the darkness, and horrible croaking voices exchanging low cries in what was certainly not English. The figures moved uncertainly, and I realized to my relief that they did not know where I had gone; but for all that they sent a shiver of horror through my frame. Their features were indistinguishable, but their crouching, shambling gait was abominably repellent. And worst of all, I perceived that one figure was strangely robed, and unmistakably surmounted by a tall tiara of a design altogether too familiar. As the figures spread throughout the courtyard, I felt my fears increase. Suppose I could find no egress from this building on the street side? The fishy odour was detestable, and I wondered I could stand it without fainting. Again groping toward the street, I opened a door off the hall and came upon an empty room with closely shuttered but sashless windows. Fumbling in the rays of my flashlight, I found I could open the shutters; and in another moment had climbed outside and was fully closing the aperture in its original manner.

I was now in Washington Street, and for the moment saw no living thing nor any light save that of the moon. From several directions in the distance, however, I could hear the sound of hoarse voices, of footsteps, and of a curious kind of pattering which did not sound quite like footsteps. Plainly I had no time to lose. The points of the compass were clear to me, and I was glad that all the street lights were turned off, as is often the custom on strongly moonlit nights in prosperous rural regions. Some of the sounds came from the south, yet I retained my design of escaping in that direction. There would, I knew, be plenty of deserted doorways to shelter me in case I met any person or group who looked like pursuers.

I walked rapidly, softly, and close to the ruined houses. While hatless and dishevelled after my arduous climb, I did not look especially noticeable; and stood a good chance of passing unheeded if forced to encounter any casual wayfarer.

At Bates Street I drew into a yawning vestibule while two shambling figures crossed in front of me, but was soon on my way again and approaching the open space where Eliot Street obliquely crosses Washington at the intersection of South. Though I had never seen this space, it had looked dangerous to me on the grocery youth's map; since the moonlight would have free play there. There was no use trying to evade it, for any alternative course would involve detours of possibly disastrous visibility and delaying effect. The only thing to do was to cross it boldly and openly; imitating the typical shamble of the Innsmouth folk as best I could, and trusting that no one--or at least no pursuer of mine--would be there.

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

The open space was, as I had expected, strongly moonlit; and I saw the remains of a parklike, iron-railed green in its center. Fortunately no one was about though a curious sort of buzz or roar seemed to be increasing in the direction of Town Square. South Street was very wide, leading directly down a slight declivity to the waterfront and commanding a long view out to sea; and I hoped that no one would be glancing up it from afar as I crossed in the bright moonlight.

My progress was unimpeded, and no fresh sound arose to hint that I had been spied. Glancing about me, I involuntarily let my pace slacken for a second to take in the sight of the sea, gorgeous in the burning moonlight at the street's end. Far out beyond the breakwater was the dim, dark line of Devil Reef, and as I glimpsed it I could not help thinking of all the hideous legends I had heard in the last twenty-four hours--legends which portrayed this ragged rock as a veritable gateway to realms of unfathomed horror and inconceivable abnormality.

Then, without warning, I saw the intermittent flashes of light on the distant reef. They were definite and unmistakable, and awaked in my mind a blind horror beyond all rational proportion. My muscles tightened for panic flight, held in only by a certain unconscious caution and half-hypnotic fascination. And to make matters worse, there now flashed forth from the lofty cupola of the Gilman House, which loomed up to the northeast behind me, a series of analogous though differently spaced gleams which could be nothing less than an answering signal.

Controlling my muscles, and realising afresh--how plainly visible I was, I resumed my brisker and feignedly shambling pace; though keeping my eyes on that hellish and ominous reef as long as the opening of South Street gave me a seaward view. What the whole proceeding meant, I could not imagine; unless it involved some strange rite connected with Devil Reef, or unless some party had landed from a ship on that sinister rock. I now bent to the left around the ruinous green; still gazing toward the ocean as it blazed in the spectral summer moonlight, and watching the cryptical flashing of those nameless, unexplainable beacons.

It was then that the most horrible impression of all was borne in upon me--the impression which destroyed my last vestige of self-control and sent me running frantically southward past the yawning black doorways and fishily staring windows of that deserted nightmare street. For at a closer glance I saw that the moonlit waters between the reef and the shore were far from empty. They were alive with a teeming horde of shapes swimming inward toward the town; and even at my vast distance and in my single moment of perception I could tell that the bobbing heads and flailing arms were alien and aberrant in a way scarcely to be expressed or consciously formulated.

My frantic running ceased before I had covered a block, for at my left I began to hear something like the hue and cry of organised pursuit. There were footsteps and guttural sounds, and a rattling motor wheezed south along Federal Street. In a second all my plans were utterly changed--for if the southward highway were blocked ahead of me, I must clearly find another egress from Innsmouth. I paused and drew into a gaping doorway, reflecting how lucky I was to have left the moonlit open space before these pursuers came down the parallel street.

A second reflection was less comforting. Since the pursuit was down another street, it was plain that the party was not following me directly. It had not seen me, but was simply obeying a general plan of cutting off my escape. This, however, implied that all roads leading out of Innsmouth were similarly patrolled; for the people could not have known what route I intended to take. If this were so, I would have to make my retreat across country away from any road; but how could I do that in view of the marshy and creek-riddled nature of all the surrounding region? For a moment my brain reeled--both from sheer hopelessness and from a rapid increase in the omnipresent fishy odour.

Then I thought of the abandoned railway to Rowley, whose solid line of ballasted, weed-grown earth still stretched off to the northwest from the crumbling station on the edge at the river-gorge. There was just a chance that the townsfolk would not think of that; since its briar-choked desertion made it half-impassable, and the unlikeliest of all avenues for a fugitive to choose. I had seen it clearly from my hotel window and knew about how it lay. Most of its earlier length was uncomfortably visible from the Rowley road, and from high places in the town itself; but one could perhaps crawl inconspicuously through the undergrowth. At any rate, it would form my only chance of deliverance, and there was nothing to do but try it.

Drawing inside the hall of my deserted shelter, I once more consulted the grocery boy's map with the aid of the flashlight. The immediate problem was how to reach the ancient railway; and I now saw that the safest course was ahead to Babson Street; then west to Lafayette--there edging around but not crossing an open space homologous to the one I had traversed--and subsequently back northward and westward in a zigzagging line through Lafayette, Bates, Adam, and Bank streets--the latter skirting the river gorge--to the abandoned and dilapidated station I had seen from my window. My reason for going ahead to Babson was that I wished neither to recross the earlier open space nor to begin my westward course along a cross street as broad as South.

Starting once more, I crossed the street to the right-hand side in order to edge around into Babson as inconspicuously as possible. Noises still continued in Federal Street, and as I glanced behind me I thought I saw a gleam of light near the building through which I had escaped. Anxious to leave Washington Street, I broke into a quiet dogtrot, trusting to luck not to encounter any observing eye. Next the corner of Babson Street I saw to my alarm that one of the houses was still inhabited, as attested by curtains at the window; but there were no lights within, and I passed it without disaster.

In Babson Street, which crossed Federal and might thus reveal me to the searchers, I clung as closely as possible to the sagging, uneven buildings; twice pausing in a doorway as the noises behind me momentarily increased. The open space ahead shone wide and desolate under the moon, but my route would not force me to cross it. During my second pause I began to detect a fresh distribution of vague sounds; and upon looking cautiously out from cover beheld a motor car darting across the open space, bound outward along Eliot Street, which there intersects both Babson and Lafayette.

As I watched--choked by a sudden rise in the fishy odour after a short abatement--I saw a band of uncouth, crouching shapes loping and shambling in the same direction; and knew that this must be the party guarding the Ipswich road, since that highway forms an extension of Eliot Street. Two of the figures I glimpsed were in voluminous robes, and one wore a peaked diadem which glistened whitely in the moonlight. The gait of this figure was so odd that it sent a chill through me--for it seemed to me the creature was almost hopping.

When the last of the band was out of sight I resumed my progress; darting around the corner into Lafayette Street, and crossing Eliot very hurriedly lest stragglers of the party be still advancing along that thoroughfare. I did hear some croaking and clattering sounds far off toward Town Square, but accomplished the passage without disaster. My greatest dread was in re-crossing broad and moonlit South Street--with its seaward view--and I had to nerve myself for the ordeal. Someone might easily be looking, and possible Eliot Street stragglers could not fail to glimpse me from either of two points. At the last moment I decided I had better slacken my trot and make the crossing as before in the shambling gait of an average Innsmouth native.

When the view of the water again opened out--this time on my right--I was half-determined not to look at it at all. I could not however, resist; but cast a sidelong glance as I carefully and imitatively shambled toward the protecting shadows ahead. There was no ship visible, as I had half-expected there would be. Instead, the first thing which caught my eye was a small rowboat pulling in toward the abandoned wharves and laden with some bulky, tarpaulin-covered object. Its rowers, though distantly and indistinctly seen, were of an especially repellent aspect. Several swimmers were still discernible; while on the far black reef I could see a faint, steady glow unlike the winking beacon visible before, and of a curious colour which I could not precisely identify. Above the slant roofs ahead and to the right there loomed the tall cupola of the Gilman House, but it was completely dark. The fishy odour, dispelled for a moment by some merciful breeze, now closed in again with maddening intensity.

I had not quite crossed the street when I heard a muttering band advancing along Washington from the north. As they reached the broad open space where I had had my first disquieting glimpse of the moonlit water I could see them plainly only a block away--and was horrified by the bestial abnormality of their faces and the doglike sub-humanness of their crouching gait. One man moved in a positively simian way, with long arms frequently touching the ground; while another figure--robed and tiaraed--seemed to progress in an almost hopping fashion. I judged this party to be the one I had seen in the Gilman's courtyard--the one, therefore, most closely on my trail. As some of the figures turned to look in my direction I was transfixed with fright, yet managed to preserve the casual, shambling gait I had assumed. To this day I do not know whether they saw me or not. If they did, my stratagem must have deceived them, for they passed on across the moonlit space without varying their course--meanwhile croaking and jabbering in some hateful guttural patois I could not identify.

Once more in shadow, I resumed my former dog-trot past the leaning and decrepit houses that stared blankly into the night. Having crossed to the western sidewalk I rounded the nearest corner into Bates Street where I kept close to the buildings on the southern side. I passed two houses shewing signs of habitation, one of which had faint lights in upper rooms, yet met with no obstacle. As I turned into Adams Street I felt measurably safer, but received a shook when a man reeled out of a black doorway directly in front of me. He proved, however, too hopelessly drunk to be a menace; so that I reached the dismal ruins of the Bank Street warehouses in safety.

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

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

The vast, barnlike length of the old bridge gleamed spectrally in the moonlight, and I saw that the ties were safe for at least a few feet within. Entering, I began to use my flashlight, and was almost knocked down by the cloud of bats that flapped past me. About half-way across there was a perilous gap in the ties which I feared for a moment would halt me; but in the end I risked a desperate jump which fortunately succeeded.

I was glad to see the moonlight again when I emerged from that macabre tunnel. The old tracks crossed River Street at grade, and at once veered off into a region increasingly rural and with less and less of Innsmouth's abhorrent fishy odour. Here the dense growth of weeds and briers hindered me and cruelly tore at my clothes, but I was none the less glad that they were there to give me concealment in case of peril. I knew that much of my route must be visible from the Rowley road.

The marshy region began very abruptly, with the single track on a low, grassy embankment where the weedy growth was somewhat thinner. Then came a sort of island of higher ground, where the line passed through a shallow open cut choked with bushes and brambles. I was very glad of this partial shelter, since at this point the Rowley road was uncomfortably near according to my window view. At the end of the cut it would cross the track and swerve off to a safer distance; but meanwhile I must be exceedingly careful. I was by this time thankfully certain that the railway itself was not patrolled.

Just before entering the cut I glanced behind me, but saw no pursuer. The ancient spires and roofs of decaying Innsmouth gleamed lovely and ethereal in the magic yellow moonlight, and I thought of how they must have looked in the old days before the shadow fell. Then, as my gaze circled inland from the town, something less tranquil arrested my notice and held me immobile for a second.

What I saw--or fancied I saw--was a disturbing suggestion of undulant motion far to the south; a suggestion which made me conclude that a very large horde must be pouring out of the city along the level Ipswich road. The distance was great and I could distinguish nothing in detail; but I did not at all like the look of that moving column. It undulated too much, and glistened too brightly in the rays of the now westering moon. There was a suggestion of sound, too, though the wind was blowing the other way--a suggestion of bestial scraping and bellowing even worse than the muttering of the parties I had lately overheard.

All sorts of unpleasant conjectures crossed my mind. I thought of those very extreme Innsmouth types said to be hidden in crumbling, centuried warrens near the waterfront; I thought, too, of those nameless swimmers I had seen. Counting the parties so far glimpsed, as well as those presumably covering other roads, the number of my pursuers must be strangely large for a town as depopulated as Innsmouth.

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

I had entered the brush-grown cut and was struggling along at a very slow pace when that damnable fishy odour again waxed dominant. Had the wind suddenly changed eastward, so that it blew in from the sea and over the town? It must have, I concluded, since I now began to hear shocking guttural murmurs from that hitherto silent direction. There was another sound, too--a kind of wholesale, colossal flopping or pattering which somehow called up images of the most detestable sort. It made me think illogically of that unpleasantly undulating column on the far-off Ipswich road.

And then both stench and sounds grew stronger, so that I paused shivering and grateful for the cut's protection. It was here, I recalled, that the Rowley road drew so close to the old railway before crossing westward and diverging. Something was coming along that road, and I must lie low till its passage and vanishment in the distance. Thank heaven these creatures employed no dogs for tracking--though perhaps that would have been impossible amidst the omnipresent regional odour. Crouched in the bushes of that sandy cleft I felt reasonably safe, even though I knew the searchers would have to cross the track in front of me not much more than a hundred yards away. I would be able to see them, but they could not, except by a malign miracle, see me.

All at once I began dreading to look at them as they passed. I saw the close moonlit space where they would surge by, and had curious thoughts about the irredeemable pollution of that space. They would perhaps be the worst of all Innsmouth types--something one would not care to remember.

The stench waxed overpowering, and the noises swelled to a bestial babel of croaking, baying and barking without the least suggestion of human speech. Were these indeed the voices of my pursuers? Did they have dogs after all? So far I had seen none of the lower animals in Innsmouth. That flopping or pattering was monstrous--I could not look upon the degenerate creatures responsible for it. I would keep my eyes shut till the sound receded toward the west. The horde was very close now--air foul with their hoarse snarlings, and the ground almost shaking with their alien-rhythmed footfalls. My breath nearly ceased to come, and I put every ounce of will-power into the task of holding my eyelids down.

I am not even yet willing to say whether what followed was a hideous actuality or only a nightmare hallucination. The later action of the government, after my frantic appeals, would tend to confirm it as a monstrous truth; but could not an hallucination have been repeated under the quasi-hypnotic spell of that ancient, haunted, and shadowed town? Such places have strange properties, and the legacy of insane legend might well have acted on more than one human imagination amidst those dead, stench-cursed streets and huddles of rotting roofs and crumbling steeples. Is it not possible that the germ of an actual contagious madness lurks in the depths of that shadow over Innsmouth? Who can be sure of reality after hearing things like the tale of old Zadok Allen? The government men never found poor Zadok, and have no conjectures to make as to what became of him. Where does madness leave off and reality begin? Is it possible that even my latest fear is sheer delusion?

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

I thought I was prepared for the worst, and I really ought to have been prepared considering what I had seen before.

My other pursuers had been accursedly abnormal--so should I not have been ready to face a strengthening of the abnormal element; to look upon forms in which there was no mixture of the normal at all? I did not open my eyes until the raucous clamour came loudly from a point obviously straight ahead. Then I knew that a long section of them must be plainly in sight where the sides of the cut flattened out and the road crossed the track--and I could no longer keep myself from sampling whatever horror that leering yellow moon might have to shew.

It was the end, for whatever remains to me of life on the surface of this earth, of every vestige of mental peace and confidence in the integrity of nature and of the human mind. Nothing that I could have imagined--nothing, even, that I could have gathered had I credited old Zadok's crazy tale in the most literal way--would be in any way comparable to the demoniac, blasphemous reality that I saw--or believe I saw. I have tried to hint what it was in order to postpone the horror of writing it down baldly. Can it be possible that this planet has actually spawned such things; that human eyes have truly seen, as objective flesh, what man has hitherto known only in febrile phantasy and tenuous legend?

And yet I saw them in a limitless stream--flopping, hopping, croaking, bleating--urging inhumanly through the spectral moonlight in a grotesque, malignant saraband of fantastic nightmare. And some of them had tall tiaras of that nameless whitish-gold metal...and some were strangely robed...and one, who led the way, was clad in a ghoulishly humped black coat and striped trousers, and had a man's felt hat perched on the shapeless thing that answered for a head.

I think their predominant colour was a greyish-green, though they had white bellies. They were mostly shiny and slippery, but the ridges of their backs were scaly. Their forms vaguely suggested the anthropoid, while their heads were the heads of fish, with prodigious bulging eyes that never closed. At the sides of their necks were palpitating gills, and their long paws were webbed. They hopped irregularly, sometimes on two legs and sometimes on four. I was somehow glad that they had no more than four limbs. Their croaking, baying voices, clearly used for articulate speech, held all the dark shades of expression which their staring faces lacked.

But for all of their monstrousness they were not unfamiliar to me. I knew too well what they must be--for was not the memory of the evil tiara at Newburyport still fresh? They were the blasphemous fish-frogs of the nameless design--living and horrible--and as I saw them I knew also of what that humped, tiaraed priest in the black church basement had fearsomely reminded me. Their number was past guessing. It seemed to me that there were limitless swarms of them and certainly my momentary glimpse could have shewn only the least fraction. In another instant everything was blotted out by a merciful fit of fainting; the first I had ever had.","West of Arkham the hills rise wild, and there are valleys with deep woods that no axe has ever cut. There are dark narrow glens where the trees slope fantastically, and where thin brooklets trickle without ever having caught the glint of sunlight. On the gentle slopes there are farms, ancient and rocky, with squat, moss-coated cottages brooding eternally over old New England secrets in the lee of great ledges; but these are all vacant now, the wide chimneys crumbling and the shingled sides bulging perilously beneath low gambrel roofs.
The old folk have gone away, and foreigners do not like to live there. French-Canadians have tried it, Italians have tried it, and the Poles have come and departed. It is not because of anything that can be seen or heard or handled, but because of something that is imagined. The place is not good for imagination, and does not bring restful dreams at night. It must be this which keeps the foreigners away, for old Ammi Pierce has never told them of anything he recalls from the strange days. Ammi, whose head has been a little queer for years, is the only one who still remains, or who ever talks of the strange days; and he dares to do this because his house is so near the open fields and the travelled roads around Arkham.
There was once a road over the hills and through the valleys, that ran straight where the blasted heath is now; but people ceased to use it and a new road was laid curving far toward the south. Traces of the old one can still be found amidst the weeds of a returning wilderness, and some of them will doubtless linger even when half the hollows are flooded for the new reservoir. Then the dark woods will be cut down and the blasted heath will slumber far below blue waters whose surface will mirror the sky and ripple in the sun. And the secrets of the strange days will be one with the deep's secrets; one with the hidden lore of old ocean, and all the mystery of primal earth.
When I went into the hills and vales to survey for the new reservoir they told me the place was evil. They told me this in Arkham, and because that is a very old town full of witch legends I thought the evil must be something which grandams had whispered to children through centuries. The name ""blasted heath"" seemed to me very odd and theatrical, and I wondered how it had come into the folklore of a Puritan people. Then I saw that dark westward tangle of glens and slopes for myself, and ceased to wonder at anything beside its own elder mystery. It was morning when I saw it, but shadow lurked always there. The trees grew too thickly, and their trunks were too big for any healthy New England wood. There was too much silence in the dim alleys between them, and the floor was too soft with the dank moss and mattings of infinite years of decay.
In the open spaces, mostly along the line of the old road, there were little hillside farms; sometimes with all the buildings standing, sometimes with only one or two, and sometimes with only a lone chimney or fast-filling cellar. Weeds and briers reigned, and furtive wild things rustled in the undergrowth. Upon everything was a haze of restlessness and oppression; a touch of the unreal and the grotesque, as if some vital element of perspective or chiaroscuro were awry. I did not wonder that the foreigners would not stay, for this was no region to sleep in. It was too much like a landscape of Salvator Rosa; too much like some forbidden woodcut in a tale of terror.
But even all this was not so bad as the blasted heath. I knew it the moment I came upon it at the bottom of a spacious valley; for no other name could fit such a thing, or any other thing fit such a name. It was as if the poet had coined the phrase from having seen this one particular region. It must, I thought as I viewed it, be the outcome of a fire; but why had nothing new ever grown over these five acres of grey desolation that sprawled open to the sky like a great spot eaten by acid in the woods and fields? It lay largely to the north of the ancient road line, but encroached a little on the other side. I felt an odd reluctance about approaching, and did so at last only because my business took me through and past it. There was no vegetation of any kind on that broad expanse, but only a fine grey dust or ash which no wind seemed ever to blow about. The trees near it were sickly and stunted, and many dead trunks stood or lay rotting at the rim. As I walked hurriedly by I saw the tumbled bricks and stones of an old chimney and cellar on my right, and the yawning black maw of an abandoned well whose stagnant vapours played strange tricks with the hues of the sunlight. Even the long, dark woodland climb beyond seemed welcome in contrast, and I marvelled no more at the frightened whispers of Arkham people. There had been no house or ruin near; even in the old days the place must have been lonely and remote. And at twilight, dreading to repass that ominous spot, I walked circuitously back to the town by the curious road on the south. I vaguely wished some clouds would gather, for an odd timidity about the deep skyey voids above had crept into my soul.
In the evening I asked old people in Arkham about the blasted heath, and what was meant by that phrase ""strange days"" which so many evasively muttered. I could not, however, get any good answers except that all the mystery was much more recent than I had dreamed. It was not a matter of old legendry at all, but something within the lifetime of those who spoke. It had happened in the 'eighties, and a family had disappeared or was killed. Speakers would not be exact; and because they all told me to pay no attention to old Ammi Pierce's crazy tales, I sought him out the next morning, having heard that he lived alone in the ancient tottering cottage where the trees first begin to get very thick. It was a fearsomely ancient place, and had begun to exude the faint miasmal odour which clings about houses that have stood too long. Only with persistent knocking could I rouse the aged man, and when he shuffled timidly to the door I could tell he was not glad to see me. He was not so feeble as I had expected; but his eyes drooped in a curious way, and his unkempt clothing and white beard made him seem very worn and dismal.
Not knowing just how he could best be launched on his tales, I feigned a matter of business; told him of my surveying, and asked vague questions about the district. He was far brighter and more educated than I had been led to think, and before I knew it had grasped quite as much of the subject as any man I had talked with in Arkham. He was not like other rustics I had known in the sections where reservoirs were to be. From him there were no protests at the miles of old wood and farmland to be blotted out, though perhaps there would have been had not his home lain outside the bounds of the future lake. Relief was all that he showed; relief at the doom of the dark ancient valleys through which he had roamed all his life. They were better under water now--better under water since the strange days. And with this opening his husky voice sank low, while his body leaned forward and his right forefinger began to point shakily and impressively.
It was then that I heard the story, and as the rambling voice scraped and whispered on I shivered again and again spite the summer day. Often I had to recall the speaker from ramblings, piece out scientific points which he knew only by a fading parrot memory of professors' talk, or bridge over gaps, where his sense of logic and continuity broke down. When he was done I did not wonder that his mind had snapped a trifle, or that the folk of Arkham would not speak much of the blasted heath. I hurried back before sunset to my hotel, unwilling to have the stars come out above me in the open; and the next day returned to Boston to give up my position. I could not go into that dim chaos of old forest and slope again, or face another time that grey blasted heath where the black well yawned deep beside the tumbled bricks and stones. The reservoir will soon be built now, and all those elder secrets will be safe forever under watery fathoms. But even then I do not believe I would like to visit that country by night--at least not when the sinister stars are out; and nothing could bribe me to drink the new city water of Arkham.
It all began, old Ammi said, with the meteorite. Before that time there had been no wild legends at all since the witch trials, and even then these western woods were not feared half so much as the small island in the Miskatonic where the devil held court beside a curious lone altar older than the Indians. These were not haunted woods, and their fantastic dusk was never terrible till the strange days. Then there had come that white noontide cloud, that string of explosions in the air, and that pillar of smoke from the valley far in the wood. And by night all Arkham had heard of the great rock that fell out of the sky and bedded itself in the ground beside the well at the Nahum Gardner place. That was the house which had stood where the blasted heath was to come--the trim white Nahum Gardner house amidst its fertile gardens and orchards.
Nahum had come to town to tell people about the stone, and dropped in at Ammi Pierce's on the way. Ammi was forty then, and all the queer things were fixed very strongly in his mind. He and his wife had gone with the three professors from Miskatonic University who hastened out the next morning to see the weird visitor from unknown stellar space, and had wondered why Nahum had called it so large the day before. It had shrunk, Nahum said as he pointed out the big brownish mound above the ripped earth and charred grass near the archaic well-sweep in his front yard; but the wise men answered that stones do not shrink. Its heat lingered persistently, and Nahum declared it had glowed faintly in the night. The professors tried it with a geologist's hammer and found it was oddly soft. It was, in truth, so soft as to be almost plastic; and they gouged rather than chipped a specimen to take back to the college for testing. They took it in an old pail borrowed from Nahum's kitchen, for even the small piece refused to grow cool. On the trip back they stopped at Ammi's to rest, and seemed thoughtful when Mrs. Pierce remarked that the fragment was growing smaller and burning the bottom of the pail. Truly, it was not large, but perhaps they had taken less than they thought.
The day after that--all this was in June of '82--the professors had trooped out again in a great excitement. As they passed Ammi's they told him what queer things the specimen had done, and how it had faded wholly away when they put it in a glass beaker. The beaker had gone, too, and the wise men talked of the strange stone's affinity for silicon. It had acted quite unbelievably in that well-ordered laboratory; doing nothing at all and showing no occluded gases when heated on charcoal, being wholly negative in the borax bead, and soon proving itself absolutely non-volatile at any producible temperature, including that of the oxy-hydrogen blowpipe. On an anvil it appeared highly malleable, and in the dark its luminosity was very marked. Stubbornly refusing to grow cool, it soon had the college in a state of real excitement; and when upon heating before the spectroscope it displayed shining bands unlike any known colours of the normal spectrum there was much breathless talk of new elements, bizarre optical properties, and other things which puzzled men of science are wont to say when faced by the unknown.
Hot as it was, they tested it in a crucible with all the proper reagents. Water did nothing. Hydrochloric acid was the same. Nitric acid and even aqua regia merely hissed and spattered against its torrid invulnerability. Ammi had difficulty in recalling all these things, but recognized some solvents as I mentioned them in the usual order of use. There were ammonia and caustic soda, alcohol and ether, nauseous carbon disulphide and a dozen others; but although the weight grew steadily less as time passed, and the fragment seemed to be slightly cooling, there was no change in the solvents to show that they had attacked the substance at all. It was a metal, though, beyond a doubt. It was magnetic, for one thing; and after its immersion in the acid solvents there seemed to be faint traces of the Widmanstatten figures found on meteoric iron. When the cooling had grown very considerable, the testing was carried on in glass; and it was in a glass beaker that they left all the chips made of the original fragment during the work. The next morning both chips and beaker were gone without trace, and only a charred spot marked the place on the wooden shelf where they had been.
All this the professors told Ammi as they paused at his door, and once more he went with them to see the stony messenger from the stars, though this time his wife did not accompany him. It had now most certainly shrunk, and even the sober professors could not doubt the truth of what they saw. All around the dwindling brown lump near the well was a vacant space, except where the earth had caved in; and whereas it had been a good seven feet across the day before, it was now scarcely five. It was still hot, and the sages studied its surface curiously as they detached another and larger piece with hammer and chisel. They gouged deeply this time, and as they pried away the smaller mass they saw that the core of the thing was not quite homogeneous.
They had uncovered what seemed to be the side of a large coloured globule embedded in the substance. The colour, which resembled some of the bands in the meteor's strange spectrum, was almost impossible to describe; and it was only by analogy that they called it colour at all. Its texture was glossy, and upon tapping it appeared to promise both brittleness and hollowness. One of the professors gave it a smart blow with a hammer, and it burst with a nervous little pop. Nothing was emitted, and all trace of the thing vanished with the puncturing. It left behind a hollow spherical space about three inches across, and all thought it probable that others would be discovered as the enclosing substance wasted away.
Conjecture was vain; so after a futile attempt to find additional globules by drilling, the seekers left again with their new specimen which proved, however, as baffling in the laboratory as its predecessor. Aside from being almost plastic, having heat, magnetism, and slight luminosity, cooling slightly in powerful acids, possessing an unknown spectrum, wasting away in air, and attacking silicon compounds with mutual destruction as a result, it presented no identifying features whatsoever; and at the end of the tests the college scientists were forced to own that they could not place it. It was nothing of this earth, but a piece of the great outside; and as such dowered with outside properties and obedient to outside laws.
That night there was a thunderstorm, and when the professors went out to Nahum's the next day they met with a bitter disappointment. The stone, magnetic as it had been, must have had some peculiar electrical property; for it had ""drawn the lightning,"" as Nahum said, with a singular persistence. Six times within an hour the farmer saw the lightning strike the furrow in the front yard, and when the storm was over nothing remained but a ragged pit by the ancient well-sweep, half-choked with a caved-in earth. Digging had borne no fruit, and the scientists verified the fact of the utter vanishment. The failure was total; so that nothing was left to do but go back to the laboratory and test again the disappearing fragment left carefully cased in lead. That fragment lasted a week, at the end of which nothing of value had been learned of it. When it had gone, no residue was left behind, and in time the professors felt scarcely sure they had indeed seen with waking eyes that cryptic vestige of the fathomless gulfs outside; that lone, weird message from other universes and other realms of matter, force, and entity.
As was natural, the Arkham papers made much of the incident with its collegiate sponsoring, and sent reporters to talk with Nahum Gardner and his family. At least one Boston daily also sent a scribe, and Nahum quickly became a kind of local celebrity. He was a lean, genial person of about fifty, living with his wife and three sons on the pleasant farmstead in the valley. He and Ammi exchanged visits frequently, as did their wives; and Ammi had nothing but praise for him after all these years. He seemed slightly proud of the notice his place had attracted, and talked often of the meteorite in the succeeding weeks. That July and August were hot; and Nahum worked hard at his haying in the ten-acre pasture across Chapman's Brook; his rattling wain wearing deep ruts in the shadowy lanes between. The labour tired him more than it had in other years, and he felt that age was beginning to tell on him.
Then fell the time of fruit and harvest. The pears and apples slowly ripened, and Nahum vowed that his orchards were prospering as never before. The fruit was growing to phenomenal size and unwonted gloss, and in such abundance that extra barrels were ordered to handle the future crop. But with the ripening came sore disappointment, for of all that gorgeous array of specious lusciousness not one single jot was fit to eat. Into the fine flavour of the pears and apples had crept a stealthy bitterness and sickishness, so that even the smallest bites induced a lasting disgust. It was the same with the melons and tomatoes, and Nahum sadly saw that his entire crop was lost. Quick to connect events, he declared that the meteorite had poisoned the soil, and thanked Heaven that most of the other crops were in the upland lot along the road.
Winter came early, and was very cold. Ammi saw Nahum less often than usual, and observed that he had begun to look worried. The rest of his family too, seemed to have grown taciturn; and were far from steady in their church-going or their attendance at the various social events of the countryside. For this reserve or melancholy no cause could be found, though all the household confessed now and then to poorer health and a feeling of vague disquiet. Nahum himself gave the most definite statement of anyone when he said he was disturbed about certain footprints in the snow. They were the usual winter prints of red squirrels, white rabbits, and foxes, but the brooding farmer professed to see something not quite right about their nature and arrangement. He was never specific, but appeared to think that they were not as characteristic of the anatomy and habits of squirrels and rabbits and foxes as they ought to be. Ammi listened without interest to this talk until one night when he drove past Nahum's house in his sleigh on the way back from Clark's Comer. There had been a moon, and a rabbit had run across the road, and the leaps of that rabbit were longer than either Ammi or his horse liked. The latter, indeed, had almost run away when brought up by a firm rein. Thereafter Ammi gave Nahum's tales more respect, and wondered why the Gardner dogs seemed so cowed and quivering every morning. They had, it developed, nearly lost the spirit to bark.
In February the McGregor boys from Meadow Hill were out shooting woodchucks, and not far from the Gardner place bagged a very peculiar specimen. The proportions of its body seemed slightly altered in a queer way impossible to describe, while its face had taken on an expression which no one ever saw in a woodchuck before. The boys were genuinely frightened, and threw the thing away at once, so that only their grotesque tales of it ever reached the people of the countryside. But the shying of horses near Nahum's house had now become an acknowledged thing, and all the basis for a cycle of whispered legend was fast taking form.
People vowed that the snow melted faster around Nahum's than it did anywhere else, and early in March there was an awed discussion in Potter's general store at Clark's Corners. Stephen Rice had driven past Gardner's in the morning, and had noticed the skunk-cabbages coming up through the mud by the woods across the road. Never were things of such size seen before, and they held strange colours that could not be put into any words. Their shapes were monstrous, and the horse had snorted at an odour which struck Stephen as wholly unprecedented. That afternoon several persons drove past to see the abnormal growth, and all agreed that plants of that kind ought never to sprout in a healthy world. The bad fruit of the fall before was freely mentioned, and it went from mouth to mouth that there was poison in Nahum's ground. Of course it was the meteorite; and remembering how strange the men from the college had found that stone to be, several farmers spoke about the matter to them.
One day they paid Nahum a visit; but having no love of wild tales and folklore were very conservative in what they inferred. The plants were certainly odd, but all skunk-cabbages are more or less odd in shape and hue. Perhaps some mineral element from the stone had entered the soil, but it would soon be washed away. And as for the footprints and frightened horses--of course this was mere country talk which such a phenomenon as the aerolite would be certain to start. There was really nothing for serious men to do in cases of wild gossip, for superstitious rustics will say and believe anything. And so all through the strange days the professors stayed away in contempt. Only one of them, when given two phials of dust for analysis in a police job over a year and half later, recalled that the queer colour of that skunk-cabbage had been very like one of the anomalous bands of light shown by the meteor fragment in the college spectroscope, and like the brittle globule found imbedded in the stone from the abyss. The samples in this analysis case gave the same odd bands at first, though later they lost the property.
The trees budded prematurely around Nahum's, and at night they swayed ominously in the wind. Nahum's second son Thaddeus, a lad of fifteen, swore that they swayed also when there was no wind; but even the gossips would not credit this. Certainly, however, restlessness was in the air. The entire Gardner family developed the habit of stealthy listening, though not for any sound which they could consciously name. The listening was, indeed, rather a product of moments when consciousness seemed half to slip away. Unfortunately such moments increased week by week, till it became common speech that ""something was wrong with all Nahum's folks."" When the early saxifrage came out it had another strange colour; not quite like that of the skunk-cabbage, but plainly related and equally unknown to anyone who saw it. Nahum took some blossoms to Arkham and showed them to the editor of the Gazette, but that dignitary did no more than write a humorous article about them, in which the dark fears of rustics were held up to polite ridicule. It was a mistake of Nahum's to tell a stolid city man about the way the great, overgrown mourning-cloak butterflies behaved in connection with these saxifrages.
April brought a kind of madness to the country folk, and began that disuse of the road past Nahum's which led to its ultimate abandonment. It was the vegetation. All the orchard trees blossomed forth in strange colours, and through the stony soil of the yard and adjacent pasturage there sprang up a bizarre growth which only a botanist could connect with the proper flora of the region. No sane wholesome colours were anywhere to be seen except in the green grass and leafage; but everywhere were those hectic and prismatic variants of some diseased, underlying primary tone without a place among the known tints of earth. The ""Dutchman's breeches"" became a thing of sinister menace, and the bloodroots grew insolent in their chromatic perversion. Ammi and the Gardners thought that most of the colours had a sort of haunting familiarity, and decided that they reminded one of the brittle globule in the meteor. Nahum ploughed and sowed the ten-acre pasture and the upland lot, but did nothing with the land around the house. He knew it would be of no use, and hoped that the summer's strange growths would draw all the poison from the soil. He was prepared for almost anything now, and had grown used to the sense of something near him waiting to be heard. The shunning of his house by neighbors told on him, of course; but it told on his wife more. The boys were better off, being at school each day; but they could not help being frightened by the gossip. Thaddeus, an especially sensitive youth, suffered the most.
In May the insects came, and Nahum's place became a nightmare of buzzing and crawling. Most of the creatures seemed not quite usual in their aspects and motions, and their nocturnal habits contradicted all former experience. The Gardners took to watching at night--watching in all directions at random for something--they could not tell what. It was then that they owned that Thaddeus had been right about the trees. Mrs. Gardner was the next to see it from the window as she watched the swollen boughs of a maple against a moonlit sky. The boughs surely moved, and there was no wind. It must be the sap. Strangeness had come into everything growing now. Yet it was none of Nahum's family at all who made the next discovery. Familiarity had dulled them, and what they could not see was glimpsed by a timid windmill salesman from Bolton who drove by one night in ignorance of the country legends. What he told in Arkham was given a short paragraph in the Gazette; and it was there that all the farmers, Nahum included, saw it first. The night had been dark and the buggy-lamps faint, but around a farm in the valley which everyone knew from the account must be Nahum's, the darkness had been less thick. A dim though distinct luminosity seemed to inhere in all the vegetation, grass, leaves, and blossoms alike, while at one moment a detached piece of the phosphorescence appeared to stir furtively in the yard near the barn.
The grass had so far seemed untouched, and the cows were freely pastured in the lot near the house, but toward the end of May the milk began to be bad. Then Nahum had the cows driven to the uplands, after which this trouble ceased. Not long after this the change in grass and leaves became apparent to the eye. All the verdure was going grey, and was developing a highly singular quality of brittleness. Ammi was now the only person who ever visited the place, and his visits were becoming fewer and fewer. When school closed the Gardners were virtually cut off from the world, and sometimes let Ammi do their errands in town. They were failing curiously both physically and mentally, and no one was surprised when the news of Mrs. Gardner's madness stole around.
It happened in June, about the anniversary of the meteor's fall, and the poor woman screamed about things in the air which she could not describe. In her raving there was not a single specific noun, but only verbs and pronouns. Things moved and changed and fluttered, and ears tingled to impulses which were not wholly sounds. Something was taken away--she was being drained of something--something was fastening itself on her that ought not to be--someone must make it keep off--nothing was ever still in the night--the walls and windows shifted. Nahum did not send her to the county asylum, but let her wander about the house as long as she was harmless to herself and others. Even when her expression changed he did nothing. But when the boys grew afraid of her, and Thaddeus nearly fainted at the way she made faces at him, he decided to keep her locked in the attic. By July she had ceased to speak and crawled on all fours, and before that month was over Nahum got the mad notion that she was slightly luminous in the dark, as he now clearly saw was the case with the nearby vegetation.
It was a little before this that the horses had stampeded. Something had aroused them in the night, and their neighing and kicking in their stalls had been terrible. There seemed virtually nothing to do to calm them, and when Nahum opened the stable door they all bolted out like frightened woodland deer. It took a week to track all four, and when found they were seen to be quite useless and unmanageable. Something had snapped in their brains, and each one had to be shot for its own good. Nahum borrowed a horse from Ammi for his haying, but found it would not approach the barn. It shied, balked, and whinnied, and in the end he could do nothing but drive it into the yard while the men used their own strength to get the heavy wagon near enough the hayloft for convenient pitching. And all the while the vegetation was turning grey and brittle. Even the flowers whose hues had been so strange were greying now, and the fruit was coming out grey and dwarfed and tasteless. The asters and golden-rod bloomed grey and distorted, and the roses and zinneas and hollyhocks in the front yard were such blasphemous-looking things that Nahum's oldest boy Zenas cut them down. The strangely puffed insects died about that time, even the bees that had left their hives and taken to the woods.
By September all the vegetation was fast crumbling to a greyish powder, and Nahum feared that the trees would die before the poison was out of the soil. His wife now had spells of terrific screaming, and he and the boys were in a constant state of nervous tension. They shunned people now, and when school opened the boys did not go. But it was Ammi, on one of his rare visits, who first realised that the well water was no longer good. It had an evil taste that was not exactly fetid nor exactly salty, and Ammi advised his friend to dig another well on higher ground to use till the soil was good again. Nahum, however, ignored the warning, for he had by that time become calloused to strange and unpleasant things. He and the boys continued to use the tainted supply, drinking it as listlessly and mechanically as they ate their meagre and ill-cooked meals and did their thankless and monotonous chores through the aimless days. There was something of stolid resignation about them all, as if they walked half in another world between lines of nameless guards to a certain and familiar doom.
Thaddeus went mad in September after a visit to the well. He had gone with a pail and had come back empty-handed, shrieking and waving his arms, and sometimes lapsing into an inane titter or a whisper about ""the moving colours down there."" Two in one family was pretty bad, but Nahum was very brave about it. He let the boy run about for a week until he began stumbling and hurting himself, and then he shut him in an attic room across the hall from his mother's. The way they screamed at each other from behind their locked doors was very terrible, especially to little Merwin, who fancied they talked in some terrible language that was not of earth. Merwin was getting frightfully imaginative, and his restlessness was worse after the shutting away of the brother who had been his greatest playmate.
Almost at the same time the mortality among the livestock commenced. Poultry turned greyish and died very quickly, their meat being found dry and noisome upon cutting. Hogs grew inordinately fat, then suddenly began to undergo loathsome changes which no one could explain. Their meat was of course useless, and Nahum was at his wit's end. No rural veterinary would approach his place, and the city veterinary from Arkham was openly baffled. The swine began growing grey and brittle and falling to pieces before they died, and their eyes and muzzles developed singular alterations. It was very inexplicable, for they had never been fed from the tainted vegetation. Then something struck the cows. Certain areas or sometimes the whole body would be uncannily shrivelled or compressed, and atrocious collapses or disintegrations were common. In the last stages--and death was always the result--there would be a greying and turning brittle like that which beset the hogs. There could be no question of poison, for all the cases occurred in a locked and undisturbed barn. No bites of prowling things could have brought the virus, for what live beast of earth can pass through solid obstacles? It must be only natural disease--yet what disease could wreak such results was beyond any mind's guessing. When the harvest came there was not an animal surviving on the place, for the stock and poultry were dead and the dogs had run away. These dogs, three in number, had all vanished one night and were never heard of again. The five cats had left some time before, but their going was scarcely noticed since there now seemed to be no mice, and only Mrs. Gardner had made pets of the graceful felines.
On the nineteenth of October Nahum staggered into Ammi's house with hideous news. The death had come to poor Thaddeus in his attic room, and it had come in a way which could not be told. Nahum had dug a grave in the railed family plot behind the farm, and had put therein what he found. There could have been nothing from outside, for the small barred window and locked door were intact; but it was much as it had been in the barn. Ammi and his wife consoled the stricken man as best they could, but shuddered as they did so. Stark terror seemed to cling round the Gardners and all they touched, and the very presence of one in the house was a breath from regions unnamed and unnamable. Ammi accompanied Nahum home with the greatest reluctance, and did what he might to calm the hysterical sobbing of little Merwin. Zenas needed no calming. He had come of late to do nothing but stare into space and obey what his father told him; and Ammi thought that his fate was very merciful. Now and then Merwin's screams were answered faintly from the attic, and in response to an inquiring look Nahum said that his wife was getting very feeble. When night approached, Ammi managed to get away; for not even friendship could make him stay in that spot when the faint glow of the vegetation began and the trees may or may not have swayed without wind. It was really lucky for Ammi that he was not more imaginative. Even as things were, his mind was bent ever so slightly; but had he been able to connect and reflect upon all the portents around him he must inevitably have turned a total maniac. In the twilight he hastened home, the screams of the mad woman and the nervous child ringing horribly in his ears.
Three days later Nahum burst into Ammi's kitchen in the early morning, and in the absence of his host stammered out a desperate tale once more, while Mrs. Pierce listened in a clutching fright. It was little Merwin this time. He was gone. He had gone out late at night with a lantern and pail for water, and had never come back. He'd been going to pieces for days, and hardly knew what he was about. Screamed at everything. There had been a frantic shriek from the yard then, but before the father could get to the door the boy was gone. There was no glow from the lantern he had taken, and of the child himself no trace. At the time Nahum thought the lantern and pail were gone too; but when dawn came, and the man had plodded back from his all-night search of the woods and fields, he had found some very curious things near the well. There was a crushed and apparently somewhat melted mass of iron which had certainly been the lantern; while a bent handle and twisted iron hoops beside it, both half-fused, seemed to hint at the remnants of the pail. That was all. Nahum was past imagining, Mrs. Pierce was blank, and Ammi, when he had reached home and heard the tale, could give no guess. Merwin was gone, and there would be no use in telling the people around, who shunned all Gardners now. No use, either, in telling the city people at Arkham who laughed at everything. Thad was gone, and now Merwin was gone. Something was creeping and creeping and waiting to be seen and heard. Nahum would go soon, and he wanted Ammi to look after his wife and Zenas if they survived him. It must all be a judgment of some sort; though he could not fancy what for, since he had always walked uprightly in the Lord's ways so far as he knew.
For over two weeks Ammi saw nothing of Nahum; and then, worried about what might have happened, he overcame his fears and paid the Gardner place a visit. There was no smoke from the great chimney, and for a moment the visitor was apprehensive of the worst. The aspect of the whole farm was shocking--greyish withered grass and leaves on the ground, vines falling in brittle wreckage from archaic walls and gables, and great bare trees clawing up at the grey November sky with a studied malevolence which Ammi could not but feel had come from some subtle change in the tilt of the branches. But Nahum was alive, after all. He was weak, and lying on a couch in the low-ceiled kitchen, but perfectly conscious and able to give simple orders to Zenas. The room was deadly cold; and as Ammi visibly shivered, the host shouted huskily to Zenas for more wood. Wood, indeed, was sorely needed; since the cavernous fireplace was unlit and empty, with a cloud of soot blowing about in the chill wind that came down the chimney. Presently Nahum asked him if the extra wood had made him any more comfortable, and then Ammi saw what had happened. The stoutest cord had broken at last, and the hapless farmer's mind was proof against more sorrow.
Questioning tactfully, Ammi could get no clear data at all about the missing Zenas. ""In the well--he lives in the well--"" was all that the clouded father would say. Then there flashed across the visitor's mind a sudden thought of the mad wife, and he changed his line of inquiry. ""Nabby? Why, here she is!"" was the surprised response of poor Nahum, and Ammi soon saw that he must search for himself. Leaving the harmless babbler on the couch, he took the keys from their nail beside the door and climbed the creaking stairs to the attic. It was very close and noisome up there, and no sound could be heard from any direction. Of the four doors in sight, only one was locked, and on this he tried various keys of the ring he had taken. The third key proved the right one, and after some fumbling Ammi threw open the low white door.
It was quite dark inside, for the window was small and half-obscured by the crude wooden bars; and Ammi could see nothing at all on the wide-planked floor. The stench was beyond enduring, and before proceeding further he had to retreat to another room and return with his lungs filled with breathable air. When he did enter he saw something dark in the corner, and upon seeing it more clearly he screamed outright. While he screamed he thought a momentary cloud eclipsed the window, and a second later he felt himself brushed as if by some hateful current of vapour. Strange colours danced before his eyes; and had not a present horror numbed him he would have thought of the globule in the meteor that the geologist's hammer had shattered, and of the morbid vegetation that had sprouted in the spring. As it was he thought only of the blasphemous monstrosity which confronted him, and which all too clearly had shared the nameless fate of young Thaddeus and the livestock. But the terrible thing about the horror was that it very slowly and perceptibly moved as it continued to crumble.
Ammi would give me no added particulars of this scene, but the shape in the comer does not reappear in his tale as a moving object. There are things which cannot be mentioned, and what is done in common humanity is sometimes cruelly judged by the law. I gathered that no moving thing was left in that attic room, and that to leave anything capable of motion there would have been a deed so monstrous as to damn any accountable being to eternal torment. Anyone but a stolid farmer would have fainted or gone mad, but Ammi walked conscious through that low doorway and locked the accursed secret behind him. There would be Nahum to deal with now; he must be fed and tended, and removed to some place where he could be cared for.
Commencing his descent of the dark stairs. Ammi heard a thud below him. He even thought a scream had been suddenly choked off, and recalled nervously the clammy vapour which had brushed by him in that frightful room above. What presence had his cry and entry started up? Halted by some vague fear, he heard still further sounds below. Indubitably there was a sort of heavy dragging, and a most detestably sticky noise as of some fiendish and unclean species of suction. With an associative sense goaded to feverish heights, he thought unaccountably of what he had seen upstairs. Good God! What eldritch dream-world was this into which he had blundered? He dared move neither backward nor forward, but stood there trembling at the black curve of the boxed-in staircase. Every trifle of the scene burned itself into his brain. The sounds, the sense of dread expectancy, the darkness, the steepness of the narrow step--and merciful Heaven!--the faint but unmistakable luminosity of all the woodwork in sight; steps, sides, exposed laths, and beams alike.
Then there burst forth a frantic whinny from Ammi's horse outside, followed at once by a clatter which told of a frenzied runaway. In another moment horse and buggy had gone beyond earshot, leaving the frightened man on the dark stairs to guess what had sent them. But that was not all. There had been another sound out there. A sort of liquid splash--water--it must have been the well. He had left Hero untied near it, and a buggy wheel must have brushed the coping and knocked in a stone. And still the pale phosphorescence glowed in that detestably ancient woodwork. God! how old the house was! Most of it built before 1670, and the gambrel roof no later than 1730.
A feeble scratching on the floor downstairs now sounded distinctly, and Ammi's grip tightened on a heavy stick he had picked up in the attic for some purpose. Slowly nerving himself, he finished his descent and walked boldly toward the kitchen. But he did not complete the walk, because what he sought was no longer there. It had come to meet him, and it was still alive after a fashion. Whether it had crawled or whether it had been dragged by any external forces, Ammi could not say; but the death had been at it. Everything had happened in the last half-hour, but collapse, greying, and disintegration were already far advanced. There was a horrible brittleness, and dry fragments were scaling off. Ammi could not touch it, but looked horrifiedly into the distorted parody that had been a face. ""What was it, Nahum--what was it?"" He whispered, and the cleft, bulging lips were just able to crackle out a final answer.
""Nothin'...nothin'...the colour...it burns...cold an' wet, but it burns...it lived in the well...I seen it...a kind of smoke...jest like the flowers last spring...the well shone at night...Thad an' Merwin an' Zenas...everything alive...suckin' the life out of everything...in that stone...it must a' come in that stone pizened the whole place...dun't know what it wants...that round thing them men from the college dug outen the stone...they smashed it...it was the same colour...jest the same, like the flowers an' plants...must a' ben more of 'em...seeds...seeds...they growed...I seen it the fust time this week...must a' got strong on Zenas...he was a big boy, full o' life...it beats down your mind an' then gets ye...burns ye up...in the well water...you was right about that...evil water...Zenas never come back from the well...can't git away...draws ye...ye know summ'at's comin' but tain't no use...I seen it time an' agin senct Zenas was took...whar's Nabby, Ammi?...my head's no good...dun't know how long sense I fed her...it'll git her ef we ain't keerful...jest a colour...her face is gittin' to hev that colour sometimes towards night...an' it burns an' sucks...it come from some place whar things ain't as they is here...one o' them professors said so...he was right...look out, Ammi, it'll do suthin' more...sucks the life out...""
But that was all. That which spoke could speak no more because it had completely caved in. Ammi laid a red checked tablecloth over what was left and reeled out the back door into the fields. He climbed the slope to the ten-acre pasture and stumbled home by the north road and the woods. He could not pass that well from which his horses had run away. He had looked at it through the window, and had seen that no stone was missing from the rim. Then the lurching buggy had not dislodged anything after all--the splash had been something else--something which went into the well after it had done with poor Nahum.
When Ammi reached his house the horses and buggy had arrived before him and thrown his wife into fits of anxiety. Reassuring her without explanations, he set out at once for Arkham and notified the authorities that the Gardner family was no more. He indulged in no details, but merely told of the deaths of Nahum and Nabby, that of Thaddeus being already known, and mentioned that the cause seemed to be the same strange ailment which had killed the live-stock. He also stated that Merwin and Zenas had disappeared. There was considerable questioning at the police station, and in the end Ammi was compelled to take three officers to the Gardner farm, together with the coroner, the medical examiner, and the veterinary who had treated the diseased animals. He went much against his will, for the afternoon was advancing and he feared the fall of night over that accursed place, but it was some comfort to have so many people with him.
The six men drove out in a democrat-wagon, following Ammi's buggy, and arrived at the pest-ridden farmhouse about four o'clock. Used as the officers were to gruesome experiences, not one remained unmoved at what was found in the attic and under the red checked tablecloth on the floor below. The whole aspect of the farm with its grey desolation was terrible enough, but those two crumbling objects were beyond all bounds. No one could look long at them, and even the medical examiner admitted that there was very little to examine. Specimens could be analysed, of course, so he busied himself in obtaining them--and here it develops that a very puzzling aftermath occurred at the college laboratory where the two phials of dust were finally taken. Under the spectroscope both samples gave off an unknown spectrum, in which many of the baffling bands were precisely like those which the strange meteor had yielded in the previous year. The property of emitting this spectrum vanished in a month, the dust thereafter consisting mainly of alkaline phosphates and carbonates.
Ammi would not have told the men about the well if he had thought they meant to do anything then and there. It was getting toward sunset, and he was anxious to be away. But he could not help glancing nervously at the stony curb by the great sweep, and when a detective questioned him he admitted that Nahum had feared something down there so much so that he had never even thought of searching it for Merwin or Zenas. After that nothing would do but that they empty and explore the well immediately, so Ammi had to wait trembling while pail after pail of rank water was hauled up and splashed on the soaking ground outside. The men sniffed in disgust at the fluid, and toward the last held their noses against the foetor they were uncovering. It was not so long a job as they had feared it would be, since the water was phenomenally low. There is no need to speak too exactly of what they found. Merwin and Zenas were both there, in part, though the vestiges were mainly skeletal. There were also a small deer and a large dog in about the same state, and a number of bones of small animals. The ooze and slime at the bottom seemed inexplicably porous and bubbling, and a man who descended on hand-holds with a long pole found that he could sink the wooden shaft to any depth in the mud of the floor without meeting any solid obstruction.
Twilight had now fallen, and lanterns were brought from the house. Then, when it was seen that nothing further could be gained from the well, everyone went indoors and conferred in the ancient sitting-room while the intermittent light of a spectral half-moon played wanly on the grey desolation outside. The men were frankly nonplussed by the entire case, and could find no convincing common element to link the strange vegetable conditions, the unknown disease of live-stock and humans, and the unaccountable deaths of Merwin and Zenas in the tainted well. They had heard the common country talk, it is true; but could not believe that anything contrary to natural law had occurred. No doubt the meteor had poisoned the soil, but the illness of persons and animals who had eaten nothing grown in that soil was another matter. Was it the well water? Very possibly. It might be a good idea to analyze it. But what peculiar madness could have made both boys jump into the well? Their deeds were so similar-and the fragments showed that they had both suffered from the grey brittle death. Why was everything so grey and brittle?
It was the coroner, seated near a window overlooking the yard, who first noticed the glow about the well. Night had fully set in, and all the abhorrent grounds seemed faintly luminous with more than the fitful moonbeams; but this new glow was something definite and distinct, and appeared to shoot up from the black pit like a softened ray from a searchlight, giving dull reflections in the little ground pools where the water had been emptied. It had a very queer colour, and as all the men clustered round the window Ammi gave a violent start. For this strange beam of ghastly miasma was to him of no unfamiliar hue. He had seen that colour before, and feared to think what it might mean. He had seen it in the nasty brittle globule in that aerolite two summers ago, had seen it in the crazy vegetation of the springtime, and had thought he had seen it for an instant that very morning against the small barred window of that terrible attic room where nameless things had happened. It had flashed there a second, and a clammy and hateful current of vapour had brushed past him--and then poor Nahum had been taken by something of that colour. He had said so at the last--said it was like the globule and the plants. After that had come the runaway in the yard and the splash in the well and now that well was belching forth to the night a pale insidious beam of the same demoniac tint.
It does credit to the alertness of Ammi's mind that he puzzled even at that tense moment over a point which was essentially scientific. He could not but wonder at his gleaning of the same impression from a vapour glimpsed in the daytime, against a window opening on the morning sky, and from a nocturnal exhalation seen as a phosphorescent mist against the black and blasted landscape. It wasn't right--it was against Nature--and he thought of those terrible last words of his stricken friend, ""It come from some place whar things ain't as they is here...one o' them professors said so...""
All three horses outside, tied to a pair of shrivelled saplings by the road, were now neighing and pawing frantically. The wagon driver started for the door to do something, but Ammi laid a shaky hand on his shoulder. ""Dun't go out thar,"" he whispered. ""They's more to this nor what we know. Nahum said somethin' lived in the well that sucks your life out. He said it must be some'at growed from a round ball like one we all seen in the meteor stone that fell a year ago June. Sucks an' burns, he said, an' is jest a cloud of colour like that light out thar now, that ye can hardly see an' can't tell what it is. Nahum thought it feeds on everything livin' an' gits stronger all the time. He said he seen it this last week. It must be somethin' from away off in the sky like the men from the college last year says the meteor stone was. The way it's made an' the way it works ain't like no way o' God's world. It's some'at from beyond.""
So the men paused indecisively as the light from the well grew stronger and the hitched horses pawed and whinnied in increasing frenzy. It was truly an awful moment; with terror in that ancient and accursed house itself, four monstrous sets of fragments--two from the house and two from the well--in the woodshed behind, and that shaft of unknown and unholy iridescence from the slimy depths in front. Ammi had restrained the driver on impulse, forgetting how uninjured he himself was after the clammy brushing of that coloured vapour in the attic room, but perhaps it is just as well that he acted as he did. No one will ever know what was abroad that night; and though the blasphemy from beyond had not so far hurt any human of unweakened mind, there is no telling what it might not have done at that last moment, and with its seemingly increased strength and the special signs of purpose it was soon to display beneath the half-clouded moonlit sky.
All at once one of the detectives at the window gave a short, sharp gasp. The others looked at him, and then quickly followed his own gaze upward to the point at which its idle straying had been suddenly arrested. There was no need for words. What had been disputed in country gossip was disputable no longer, and it is because of the thing which every man of that party agreed in whispering later on, that the strange days are never talked about in Arkham. It is necessary to premise that there was no wind at that hour of the evening. One did arise not long afterward, but there was absolutely none then. Even the dry tips of the lingering hedge-mustard, grey and blighted, and the fringe on the roof of the standing democrat-wagon were unstirred. And yet amid that tense godless calm the high bare boughs of all the trees in the yard were moving. They were twitching morbidly and spasmodically, clawing in convulsive and epileptic madness at the moonlit clouds; scratching impotently in the noxious air as if jerked by some allied and bodiless line of linkage with subterrene horrors writhing and struggling below the black roots.
Not a man breathed for several seconds. Then a cloud of darker depth passed over the moon, and the silhouette of clutching branches faded out momentarily. At this there was a general cry; muffled with awe, but husky and almost identical from every throat. For the terror had not faded with the silhouette, and in a fearsome instant of deeper darkness the watchers saw wriggling at that tree top height a thousand tiny points of faint and unhallowed radiance, tipping each bough like the fire of St. Elmo or the flames that come down on the apostles' heads at Pentecost. It was a monstrous constellation of unnatural light, like a glutted swarm of corpse-fed fireflies dancing hellish sarabands over an accursed marsh, and its colour was that same nameless intrusion which Ammi had come to recognize and dread. All the while the shaft of phosphorescence from the well was getting brighter and brighter, bringing to the minds of the huddled men, a sense of doom and abnormality which far outraced any image their conscious minds could form. It was no longer shining out; it was pouring out; and as the shapeless stream of unplaceable colour left the well it seemed to flow directly into the sky.
The veterinary shivered, and walked to the front door to drop the heavy extra bar across it. Ammi shook no less, and had to tug and point for lack of controllable voice when he wished to draw notice to the growing luminosity of the trees. The neighing and stamping of the horses had become utterly frightful, but not a soul of that group in the old house would have ventured forth for any earthly reward. With the moments the shining of the trees increased, while their restless branches seemed to strain more and more toward verticality. The wood of the well-sweep was shining now, and presently a policeman dumbly pointed to some wooden sheds and bee-hives near the stone wall on the west. They were commencing to shine, too, though the tethered vehicles of the visitors seemed so far unaffected. Then there was a wild commotion and clopping in the road, and as Ammi quenched the lamp for better seeing they realized that the span of frantic greys had broken their sapling and run off with the democrat-wagon.
The shock served to loosen several tongues, and embarrassed whispers were exchanged. ""It spreads on everything organic that's been around here,"" muttered the medical examiner. No one replied, but the man who had been in the well gave a hint that his long pole must have stirred up something intangible. ""It was awful,"" he added. ""There was no bottom at all. Just ooze and bubbles and the feeling of something lurking under there."" Ammi's horse still pawed and screamed deafeningly in the road outside, and nearly drowned its owner's faint quaver as he mumbled his formless reflections. ""It come from that stone--it growed down thar--it got everything livin'--it fed itself on 'em, mind and body--Thad an' Merwin, Zenas an' Nabby--Nahum was the last--they all drunk the water--it got strong on 'em--it come from beyond, whar things ain't like they be here--now it's goin' home--""
At this point, as the column of unknown colour flared suddenly stronger and began to weave itself into fantastic suggestions of shape which each spectator described differently, there came from poor tethered Hero such a sound as no man before or since ever heard from a horse. Every person in that low-pitched sitting room stopped his ears, and Ammi turned away from the window in horror and nausea. Words could not convey it--when Ammi looked out again the hapless beast lay huddled inert on the moonlit ground between the splintered shafts of the buggy. That was the last of Hero till they buried him next day. But the present was no time to mourn, for almost at this instant a detective silently called attention to something terrible in the very room with them. In the absence of the lamplight it was clear that a faint phosphorescence had begun to pervade the entire apartment. It glowed on the broad-planked floor and the fragment of rag carpet, and shimmered over the sashes of the small-paned windows. It ran up and down the exposed corner-posts, coruscated about the shelf and mantel, and infected the very doors and furniture. Each minute saw it strengthen, and at last it was very plain that healthy living things must leave that house.
Ammi showed them the back door and the path up through the fields to the ten-acre pasture. They walked and stumbled as in a dream, and did not dare look back till they were far away on the high ground. They were glad of the path, for they could not have gone the front way, by that well. It was bad enough passing the glowing barn and sheds, and those shining orchard trees with their gnarled, fiendish contours; but thank Heaven the branches did their worst twisting high up. The moon went under some very black clouds as they crossed the rustic bridge over Chapman's Brook, and it was blind groping from there to the open meadows.
When they looked back toward the valley and the distant Gardner place at the bottom they saw a fearsome sight. At the farm was shining with the hideous unknown blend of colour; trees, buildings, and even such grass and herbage as had not been wholly changed to lethal grey brittleness. The boughs were all straining skyward, tipped with tongues of foul flame, and lambent tricklings of the same monstrous fire were creeping about the ridgepoles of the house, barn and sheds. It was a scene from a vision of Fuseli, and over all the rest reigned that riot of luminous amorphousness, that alien and undimensioned rainbow of cryptic poison from the well--seething, feeling, lapping, reaching, scintillating, straining, and malignly bubbling in its cosmic and unrecognizable chromaticism.
Then without warning the hideous thing shot vertically up toward the sky like a rocket or meteor, leaving behind no trail and disappearing through a round and curiously regular hole in the clouds before any man could gasp or cry out. No watcher can ever forget that sight, and Ammi stared blankly at the stars of Cygnus, Deneb twinkling above the others, where the unknown colour had melted into the Milky Way. But his gaze was the next moment called swiftly to earth by the crackling in the valley. It was just that. Only a wooden ripping and crackling, and not an explosion, as so many others of the party vowed. Yet the outcome was the same, for in one feverish kaleidoscopic instant there burst up from that doomed and accursed farm a gleamingly eruptive cataclysm of unnatural sparks and substance; blurring the glance of the few who saw it, and sending forth to the zenith a bombarding cloudburst of such coloured and fantastic fragments as our universe must needs disown. Through quickly reclosing vapours they followed the great morbidity that had vanished, and in another second they had vanished too. Behind and below was only a darkness to which the men dared not return, and all about was a mounting wind which seemed to sweep down in black, frore gusts from interstellar space. It shrieked and howled, and lashed the fields and distorted woods in a mad cosmic frenzy, till soon the trembling party realized it would be no use waiting for the moon to show what was left down there at Nahum's.
Too awed even to hint theories, the seven shaking men trudged back toward Arkham by the north road. Ammi was worse than his fellows, and begged them to see him inside his own kitchen, instead of keeping straight on to town. He did not wish to cross the blighted, wind-whipped woods alone to his home on the main road. For he had had an added shock that the others were spared, and was crushed forever with a brooding fear he dared not even mention for many years to come. As the rest of the watchers on that tempestuous hill had stolidly set their faces toward the road, Ammi had looked back an instant at the shadowed valley of desolation so lately sheltering his ill-starred friend. And from that stricken, far-away spot he had seen something feebly rise, only to sink down again upon the place from which the great shapeless horror had shot into the sky. It was just a colour--but not any colour of our earth or heavens. And because Ammi recognized that colour, and knew that this last faint remnant must still lurk down there in the well, he has never been quite right since.
Ammi would never go near the place again. It is forty-four years now since the horror happened, but he has never been there, and will be glad when the new reservoir blots it out. I shall be glad, too, for I do not like the way the sunlight changed colour around the mouth of that abandoned well I passed. I hope the water will always be very deep--but even so, I shall never drink it. I do not think I shall visit the Arkham country hereafter. Three of the men who had been with Ammi returned the next morning to see the ruins by daylight, but there were not any real ruins. Only the bricks of the chimney, the stones of the cellar, some mineral and metallic litter here and there, and the rim of that nefandous well. Save for Ammi's dead horse, which they towed away and buried, and the buggy which they shortly returned to him, everything that had ever been living had gone. Five eldritch acres of dusty grey desert remained, nor has anything ever grown there since. To this day it sprawls open to the sky like a great spot eaten by acid in the woods and fields, and the few who have ever dared glimpse it in spite of the rural tales have named it ""the blasted heath.""
The rural tales are queer. They might be even queerer if city men and college chemists could be interested enough to analyze the water from that disused well, or the grey dust that no wind seems to disperse. Botanists, too, ought to study the stunted flora on the borders of that spot, for they might shed light on the country notion that the blight is spreading--little by little, perhaps an inch a year. People say the colour of the neighboring herbage is not quite right in the spring, and that wild things leave queer prints in the light winter snow. Snow never seems quite so heavy on the blasted heath as it is elsewhere. Horses--the few that are left in this motor age--grow skittish in the silent valley; and hunters cannot depend on their dogs too near the splotch of greyish dust.
They say the mental influences are very bad, too; numbers went queer in the years after Nahum's taking, and always they lacked the power to get away. Then the stronger-minded folk all left the region, and only the foreigners tried to live in the crumbling old homesteads. They could not stay, though; and one sometimes wonders what insight beyond ours their wild, weird stories of whispered magic have given them. Their dreams at night, they protest, are very horrible in that grotesque country; and surely the very look of the dark realm is enough to stir a morbid fancy. No traveler has ever escaped a sense of strangeness in those deep ravines, and artists shiver as they paint thick woods whose mystery is as much of the spirits as of the eye. I myself am curious about the sensation I derived from my one lone walk before Ammi told me his tale. When twilight came I had vaguely wished some clouds would gather, for an odd timidity about the deep skyey voids above had crept into my soul.
Do not ask me for my opinion. I do not know--that is all. There was no one but Ammi to question; for Arkham people will not talk about the strange days, and all three professors who saw the aerolite and its coloured globule are dead. There were other globules--depend upon that. One must have fed itself and escaped, and probably there was another which was too late. No doubt it is still down the well--I know there was something wrong with the sunlight I saw above the miasmal brink. The rustics say the blight creeps an inch a year, so perhaps there is a kind of growth or nourishment even now. But whatever demon hatchling is there, it must be tethered to something or else it would quickly spread. Is it fastened to the roots of those trees that claw the air? One of the current Arkham tales is about fat oaks that shine and move as they ought not to do at night.
What it is, only God knows. In terms of matter I suppose the thing Ammi described would be called a gas, but this gas obeyed the laws that are not of our cosmos. This was no fruit of such worlds and suns as shine on the telescopes and photographic plates of our observatories. This was no breath from the skies whose motions and dimensions our astronomers measure or deem too vast to measure. It was just a colour out of space--a frightful messenger from unformed realms of infinity beyond all Nature as we know it; from realms whose mere existence stuns the brain and numbs us with the black cosmic gulfs it throws open before our frenzied eyes.
I doubt very much if Ammi consciously lied to me, and I do not think his tale was all a freak of madness as the townsfolk had forewarned. Something terrible came to the hills and valleys on that meteor, and something terrible--though I know not in what proportion--still remains. I shall be glad to see the water come. Meanwhile I hope nothing will happen to Ammi. He saw so much of the thing--and its influence was so insidious. Why has he never been able to move away? How clearly he recalled those dying words of Nahum's--""Can't git away--draws ye--ye know summ'at's comin' but tain't no use--"". Ammi is such a good old man--when the reservoir gang gets to work I must write the chief engineer to keep a sharp watch on him. I would hate to think of him as the grey, twisted, brittle monstrosity which persists more and more in troubling my sleep.
",True
"""Once, mankind accepted a simple truth: that they were not alone in this universe.""
-Anthony Hopkins as Odin, Thor (2011).

Hanoi, Socialist Republic of Vietnam
June 24, 2011.
""Hey, we're here. Get up if you don't want to wake up in Hue!""
Joseph Clayton was shaken awake by the hand of one of his classmates on his shoulder. He was sitting in the back of a taxi van... the only one left sitting, actually, as the others had already disembarked to enter the government office they were parked in front of.
Which probably meant that he was left to pay the fare.
After he payed (as seemed to be his lot on this trip), he followed his classmates and his professor into the government office where they hoped to finally receive their travel permits. He hadn't gotten much of sleep on the plane; a mixture of excitement in the face of overseas travel and sheer jet-lag had conspired to leave him weary and light headed until he got a few hours sleep, which the taxi ride had partially afforded him.
And in that sleep...
The dream had come as a stark, clear memory. When Marie had said that she wasn't going to join him at the Miskatonic campus in Arkham for what would be their first year of university, he had been devastated. His first questions, rushed and frantic, had been about the cause of such a change. She certainly had the SAT score to qualify and student debt could be handled with relative ease. Had she decided to forgo post-secondary to concentrate on her stake in the restaurant? Had financial problems struck and prevented admissions from being paid?
Was it something about him?
Her answers, far more controlled than his frenzied speculation, had all been in the negative. Her SAT scores were good, student loans were still open and she still intended to go for a degree in Biology at Miskatonic. It was just... after she'd gotten that phonograph from her parents' home village, the repayment had been a promise to come and spend a year back in the ""Old Country"" as soon as she could. It would only be for a year and then she would return, ready for university and all accompaniments.
That had been very nearly one year before. She had promised him that she would be coming back in the summer of 2011... but after she had arrived in Vietnam, all contact had stopped cold. Her parents, when asked about her condition, always responded with affirmations that she would return and that she was fine... but as winter wore onto spring, subtle hints of doubt and worry had crept into their voices. Had they even been receiving any news from their daughter and if not, then why not? Had something gone terribly wrong?
As it happened, more baffling events awaited inside.
""What do you mean, restricted?"" Joseph asked the Communist Party bureaucrat sitting across the desk from him. Of course, due to the facts that first, said bureaucrat was a government employee and second, they were not alone in the room, Joseph had been careful not to sound too brunt in his tone. A trung sior Sergeant, wearing the forest green uniform of the Vietnam Border Defence Force (VPA), stood by the door of the office, both watching and guarding.
Relieved at being able to shed his stilted English after Joseph exhibited a decent grasp of the Vietnamese language, the bureaucrat put forth what he knew of the situation. ""Civilian access is almost completely denied inside the area you requested. To be honest, that section of the border has been troublesome ever since the war. We get reports of smugglers, poachers, bandits, H'mong insurgents... every type of violent counter-revolutionary you can think of, this region seems to have it. The local Bru farmers aren't much help, but they generally don't bother others and seem to accept the military presence we keep there."" The bureaucrat shifted his gaze from Joseph to Professor Neville Andover, the leader of this particular expedition. ""I'm sorry, but there's nothing that can be done without high level authorization.""
As a response to this, Neville Andover did not get upset. He did not resign himself to failure. He did not even try to ask if there was any other avenue of entry or way to access the information he needed. He just donned an odd, amused smile, the corners of his eyes crinkling behind his wire rim glasses. ""I assume that General Vo is still the Secretary for the Border Forces?"" He asked, almost distractedly. When the official answered yes, Professor Andover reached into the inside of his light cotton jacket and pulled out a small, metal case. From this case, he removed a single paper card of purest black, embossed with an emerald green ""Delta"" symbol and a capital ""Y"" of gold in the center of that hollow triangle. ""I have been in contact with Comrade Vo for the last six months, planning this expedition as an act of cooperation between our two governments and as a boon for my University. He knows that card; show it or describe it to him... you maywant to run it by General Tran as well. Either way, they will give you the answer you need.""
As the bureaucrat took the card and then as the Border Defense sergeant took it from him and headed out of the room, Joesph wondered about his professor and the oddities that surrounded him. The first time he had ever seen the Professor, it had been in his High School Auditorium as Marie had performed the Stork Dance... and Joseph had noticed strange things. In their senior year of High School, both he and Marie had received reference letters to Miskatonic University in Arkham, a town in Essex county. When he had arrived at Miskatonic (without Marie), he had been shocked that the professor for his Cultural Anthropology class was not only the one who had given him his reference but was also the man who had he had seen three years before.
And then there were his classmates, three of whom had also come on this expedition. Many of them had received similar letters from Prof. Andover and most of those, though not relaying specifics, had said that they had found the circumstances equally strange. Two who had gotten references were on this very trip with them. The first was Tracy Williams from the farm country of Northwest Virginia, a girl with blond hair quite a few shades lighter than Josephs own brassy brown and the class Nippon-Nut, being both obsessed with Anime and Manga as well as being Japanese-proficient. The second was Albert Noyes, a young man who has part white, part black and a little Algonquin-Indian from a small hamlet in southern Vermont. His specialties were technology, math and Mandarin Chinese. The third member of retinue was a young man named Malone who... frankly, was a mystery to the entire class. However, he had volunteered for this trip and his grades had been excellent so his place on the roster had been assured.
But there was still a nagging question at the back of his mind: why? Why had they received offers to go to an obscure if admittedly exceptional regional university when the big names had all passed them over? Why had they been gathered from all across the United States by a single professor? And why, it seemed, did it feel like there was such a big connection between the missing member of Dr. Andovers ""collection"" and the reason behind this expedition?
Why did it feel as if Marie was somehow connected to this?
Eventually, the sergeant came back and informed the bureaucrat of General Vo's express permission for the Professor and his students to enter the exclusion zone as well as General Tran's confirmation, before handing the card back to Neville Andover. Joseph knew that academics could sometimes have friends in high and unusual places, but counting on ... no, expecting the approval of not just one, but two ranking Generals in a non-allied nation? This seemed crazy, certifiably insane even.
But then, so did spectral storks and spoonbills.
Northernmost Quang Binh Province, Socialist Republic of Vietnam
June 29, 2011
Despite the calm look on the professors face, something about the current situation made Joseph Clayton distinctly ill at ease.
They had spent the last two days trudging up into the Annamite mountains after leaving the fertile coastal plain. At the last village with road access, they had ditched their vehicles and backpacked up the ridges and trails, counting on a guide from the local Bru people to lead them to... whatever Prof. Andover was looking for. The fact that the guide was now legging it quite quickly back down the misty path told Joseph that something had either gone incredibly wrong or incredibly right.
Now, Neville Andover was chanting, seemingly trying to communicate with something deep in the thick underbrush on either side of the worn, overgrown gully that had been called a trail. The language was almost intellig ible to Joseph, being a form of Mon-Khmer linked to the classical Vietnamese he had studied, perhaps with a few hints of Muong intermixed. However, the syntax and grammer were archaic to say the least. From some of the words used it even seemed to be achingly familiar, almost as if...
With a sudden realization of shock and the smell of grilled pork and Bac Bon Dzhow a memory in his nostrils, Joseph realized where he had encountered this form of Vietic before.
But the shocks were not over.
Spun around by Albert Noyes to see something, Joseph gazed upward to see a human figure standing upon the high bank, glancing down at them with hard, measuring eyes. Undoubtedly masculine, the figure was of a man of slightly darker skin than the farmers of the coast (though the features were similar) and of greater height than either them or the native Bru. Clothed only in a white cotton kilt with geometric designs in black and a leather girdle, this man carried a white flatbow decorated with bands of green, blue and red while a bronze dagger rested at his hip. His head was shaved of all hair, and black designs were tattooed from the crown of the scalp to the jawline, with more tattoos covering his arms, chest and lower legs.
The fact that an arrow was nocked in the string of his bow put the four young people on edge, with Malone and Joesph himself tightening the grips on the hilts of their machetes in anticipation of a hopeless fight. More men in similar dress and tattoos, some with bronze slashing swords, some with bronze-headed spears and others with flatbows, appeared out of the forest on either side of them. Now that Joseph could get a better look at them in the dim light filtering down through the forest canopy and the mist, their arm tattoos began looking very similar to those borne by Marie's parents while those on their faces, while different in design, were still similar in form.
All the while, Prof. Andover kept up the low chanting, of which Joseph could pick out individual words: ""friend"", ""gods"", ""village"", ""priest"", ""comrade"" and at least one invocation of Ho Chi Minh among them. To this, these strange men seemed to confer with each other though glances and nods before took one took a short, bamboo tube from his girdle, put one end to his mouth, took a deep breath and blew.
As the silvery-blue powder erupted from the tube, settled on the heads of the trekking academics and they each lost consciousness in turn, Joseph wondered if this could get any worse.
Meanwhile, Spoonbill Village
Tsan Pho Dao had been the Chief Priest of this village for many years, ever since the death of his father in the closing days of the American War. In that span of years, he had seen many futures and advised his people based on those futures. He had called down both ruin and plenty by invoking the power of the gods of his people. He alone, in a feat outside even the power of the hereditary village chiefs, had communicated with the Instrument of their gods, a being possessed of both boundless knowledge and an absolutely rotten temper. He also, most importantly, had an absolutely perfect memory of his entire life... and that of his father, and his father before him.
To be perfectly honest, he held a tremendous amount of power within this village. The ancestor shrines belonged to families while the hunters had their own little shrines up the mountain where midnight rituals were performed to gather poison for the tips of arrows and darts. But those rituals needed to be performed by the minor priests under his command. This temple was the spiritual center of his people for most of the year and the temple with it's darkened wood walls lit only by feeble braziers whose light was twisted by the smoke of rare and powerful incenses, with it's figurines of gods and demons carved from nephrite and jadeite brought from deep below the earth... was his domain. His and no one else'. He divined the future when possible, he performed the rites and as a result, it was he who had taken countless lives in sacrifice over the course of his adulthood: chickens, pigs, goats, buffalo... people.
As he sat at a low table in his private sanctuary, trying to divine some course for a question that had faced him for most of a year, he noticed something. One of the golden discs he used for divination, a coin looted from a Chinese caravan many centuries ago, stood up on its rim and began to roll. Following the curve of failing momentum, the coin finally came to rest at a specific point on the table, a place that held indication of the future.
Visitors... and not the ""ketchup"" kind of visitors.
Several Hours Later, Close to the Laos Border
The answer to Joseph Clayton's earlier question was a definite yes. When he had awoken, he had found his wrists and ankles bound, the bindings looped over a pole carried by two men with him and the other students suspended like deer carcasses. The Professor, on the other hand, had not been bound, but had found transport by sitting in a large basket suspended from one of the poles by a cord, carried by a pair of men. They had been going downhill from the crest of a ridge and were now leaving the forest, coming onto a road. First, they passed under a wooden gate where roosting spoonbills had been carved into the posts and a sun flanked by two dragons had been carved into the beams above the road.
Then Joseph saw where they were headed. A village of perhaps thirty houses was visible in the valley bottom while narrow terraces had been cut into the hills above, green with growing rice. The view quickly vanished as the men began heading into the village itself but sight was soon replaced with sound. The quiet of the forest was supplanted by the cacophony of a hundred sounds: chickens and pigs grunted and clucked as the animals rooted below the houses and around the garbage heaps while odd-looking reddish dogs, lazing in the sun on the porches of the outermost houses, whined in surprise at the new arrivals. The sounds of tools and primitive machinery clunked melodiously. The sounds of people also were audible: talking, laughing, shouting and even a few low notes of women's work songs were possible for Joseph to pick out of the general buzz... a buzz which also included Albert trying to reason with their captors and Tracy displaying an unusually foul mouth toward same.
Soon, people began to notice the men bringing in captives and a few even began to gather along the path as they entered the village, joining their dogs (or Dholes, as they were now identifiable as) who had come to sniff. It was mostly men, older boys and children who came out to watch while the women and the elderly usually went no further than windows and the porches of the stilt-houses that lined the road. Here, even hanging upside down, Joseph could notice a few things about the dress and appearance of the people
Frankly... it was a bit odd.
From what he knew, the Vietnamese national costume (in it's modern form) placed a heavy emphasis on trousers, an item of clothing that he noticed was rather conspicuously absent here. Everyone here seemed to be wearing variations on one basic outfit in either brown or black: knee-length cotton kilts, short-sleeved cotton jackets (mostly with their front fastenings closed) and either rough-woven conical hats or simple cloths tied over their heads. The men's hair appeared to be cut short to the point where one could vaguely make out the tattoos on their scalp while children varied between the same shortness for boys and a single, long braid for the girls.
Eventually they arrived in a great or square before what appeared to be the temple: a ponderous structure of wood and brick perched upon massive stone foundations, it's sloping roofs flaring outward as if to shroud the surrounding houses from the scrutiny of the heavens. Around them, a crowd had gathered on all sides, an air of excitement buzzing in the air. Men exited the house across the square from the temple entrance and despite the calm demeanour of Professor Andover, words began filtering through to Joseph that began sounding more and more disturbing; words like ""kill"", ""sacrifice"" and ""ritual"". But another word came, one that sent darker imaginings and images rambling through his sensation-saturated mind.
The word ""eat"".
""WAIT! STOP!""
Joseph knew those words as well... as well as that voice!
Out of the crowd rushed a figure dressed much like the others: brown kilt and jacket, the latter partially open to reveal a yem undergarment and with a straw hat on her head. As Joseph finally began taking in other details, he noticed the tattooed lines and whimsical designs on her lower legs and arms and on her face, lines and vaguely triangular patterns that almost resembled the features of an orangutan.
Her face... behind all the tattooing, the face of this woman was still as unmistakable to Joseph as the first day they had met in Kindergarten. To this sudden recognition, the young man could only exclaim his surprise as a soothingly familiar name.
""Marie?""
","Whether the dreams brought on the fever or the fever brought on the dreams Walter Gilman did not know. Behind everything crouched the brooding, festering horror of the ancient town, and of the mouldy, unhallowed garret gable where he wrote and studied and wrestled with figures and formulae when he was not tossing on the meagre iron bed. His ears were growing sensitive to a preternatural and intolerable degree, and he had long ago stopped the cheap mantel clock whose ticking had come to seem like a thunder of artillery. At night the subtle stirring of the black city outside, the sinister scurrying of rats in the wormy partitions, and the creaking of hidden timbers in the centuried house, were enough to give him a sense of strident pandemonium. The darkness always teemed with unexplained sound—and yet he sometimes shook with fear lest the noises he heard should subside and allow him to hear certain other, fainter, noises which he suspected were lurking behind them.
      He was in the changeless, legend-haunted city of Arkham, with its clustering gambrel roofs that sway and sag over attics where witches hid from the King’s men in the dark, olden days of the Province. Nor was any spot in that city more steeped in macabre memory than the gable room which harboured him—for it was this house and this room which had likewise harboured old Keziah Mason, whose flight from Salem Gaol at the last no one was ever able to explain. That was in 1692—the gaoler had gone mad and babbled of a small, white-fanged furry thing which scuttled out of Keziah’s cell, and not even Cotton Mather could explain the curves and angles smeared on the grey stone walls with some red, sticky fluid.
      Possibly Gilman ought not to have studied so hard. Non-Euclidean calculus and quantum physics are enough to stretch any brain; and when one mixes them with folklore, and tries to trace a strange background of multi-dimensional reality behind the ghoulish hints of the Gothic tales and the wild whispers of the chimney-corner, one can hardly expect to be wholly free from mental tension. Gilman came from Haverhill, but it was only after he had entered college in Arkham that he began to connect his mathematics with the fantastic legends of elder magic. Something in the air of the hoary town worked obscurely on his imagination. The professors at Miskatonic had urged him to slacken up, and had voluntarily cut down his course at several points. Moreover, they had stopped him from consulting the dubious old books on forbidden secrets that were kept under lock and key in a vault at the university library. But all these precautions came late in the day, so that Gilman had some terrible hints from the dreaded Necronomicon of Abdul Alhazred, the fragmentary Book of Eibon, and the suppressed Unaussprechlichen Kulten of von Junzt to correlate with his abstract formulae on the properties of space and the linkage of dimensions known and unknown.
      He knew his room was in the old Witch House—that, indeed, was why he had taken it. There was much in the Essex County records about Keziah Mason’s trial, and what she had admitted under pressure to the Court of Oyer and Terminer had fascinated Gilman beyond all reason. She had told Judge Hathorne of lines and curves that could be made to point out directions leading through the walls of space to other spaces beyond, and had implied that such lines and curves were frequently used at certain midnight meetings in the dark valley of the white stone beyond Meadow Hill and on the unpeopled island in the river. She had spoken also of the Black Man, of her oath, and of her new secret name of Nahab. Then she had drawn those devices on the walls of her cell and vanished.
      Gilman believed strange things about Keziah, and had felt a queer thrill on learning that her dwelling was still standing after more than 235 years. When he heard the hushed Arkham whispers about Keziah’s persistent presence in the old house and the narrow streets, about the irregular human tooth-marks left on certain sleepers in that and other houses, about the childish cries heard near May-Eve, and Hallowmass, about the stench often noted in the old house’s attic just after those dreaded seasons, and about the small, furry, sharp-toothed thing which haunted the mouldering structure and the town and nuzzled people curiously in the black hours before dawn, he resolved to live in the place at any cost. A room was easy to secure; for the house was unpopular, hard to rent, and long given over to cheap lodgings. Gilman could not have told what he expected to find there, but he knew he wanted to be in the building where some circumstance had more or less suddenly given a mediocre old woman of the seventeenth century an insight into mathematical depths perhaps beyond the utmost modern delvings of Planck, Heisenberg, Einstein, and de Sitter.
      He studied the timber and plaster walls for traces of cryptic designs at every accessible spot where the paper had peeled, and within a week managed to get the eastern attic room where Keziah was held to have practiced her spells. It had been vacant from the first—for no one had ever been willing to stay there long—but the Polish landlord had grown wary about renting it. Yet nothing whatever happened to Gilman till about the time of the fever. No ghostly Keziah flitted through the sombre halls and chambers, no small furry thing crept into his dismal eyrie to nuzzle him, and no record of the witch’s incantations rewarded his constant search. Sometimes he would take walks through shadowy tangles of unpaved musty-smelling lanes where eldritch brown houses of unknown age leaned and tottered and leered mockingly through narrow, small-paned windows. Here he knew strange things had happened once, and there was a faint suggestion behind the surface that everything of that monstrous past might not—at least in the darkest, narrowest, and most intricately crooked alleys—have utterly perished. He also rowed out twice to the ill-regarded island in the river, and made a sketch of the singular angles described by the moss-grown rows of grey standing stones whose origin was so obscure and immemorial.
      Gilman’s room was of good size but queerly irregular shape; the north wall slanting perceptibly inward from the outer to the inner end, while the low ceiling slanted gently downward in the same direction. Aside from an obvious rat-hole and the signs of other stopped-up ones, there was no access—nor any appearance of a former avenue of access—to the space which must have existed between the slanting wall and the straight outer wall on the house’s north side, though a view from the exterior shewed where a window had been boarded up at a very remote date. The loft above the ceiling—which must have had a slanting floor—was likewise inaccessible. When Gilman climbed up a ladder to the cobwebbed level loft above the rest of the attic he found vestiges of a bygone aperture tightly and heavily covered with ancient planking and secured by the stout wooden pegs common in colonial carpentry. No amount of persuasion, however, could induce the stolid landlord to let him investigate either of these two closed spaces.
      As time wore along, his absorption in the irregular wall and ceiling of his room increased; for he began to read into the odd angles a mathematical significance which seemed to offer vague clues regarding their purpose. Old Keziah, he reflected, might have had excellent reasons for living in a room with peculiar angles; for was it not through certain angles that she claimed to have gone outside the boundaries of the world of space we know? His interest gradually veered away from the unplumbed voids beyond the slanting surfaces, since it now appeared that the purpose of those surfaces concerned the side he was already on.
      The touch of brain-fever and the dreams began early in February. For some time, apparently, the curious angles of Gilman’s room had been having a strange, almost hypnotic effect on him; and as the bleak winter advanced he had found himself staring more and more intently at the corner where the down-slanting ceiling met the inward-slanting wall. About this period his inability to concentrate on his formal studies worried him considerably, his apprehensions about the mid-year examinations being very acute. But the exaggerated sense of hearing was scarcely less annoying. Life had become an insistent and almost unendurable cacophony, and there was that constant, terrifying impression of other sounds—perhaps from regions beyond life—trembling on the very brink of audibility. So far as concrete noises went, the rats in the ancient partitions were the worst. Sometimes their scratching seemed not only furtive but deliberate. When it came from beyond the slanting north wall it was mixed with a sort of dry rattling—and when it came from the century-closed loft above the slanting ceiling Gilman always braced himself as if expecting some horror which only bided its time before descending to engulf him utterly.
      The dreams were wholly beyond the pale of sanity, and Gilman felt that they must be a result, jointly, of his studies in mathematics and in folklore. He had been thinking too much about the vague regions which his formulae told him must lie beyond the three dimensions we know, and about the possibility that old Keziah Mason—guided by some influence past all conjecture—had actually found the gate to those regions. The yellowed county records containing her testimony and that of her accusers were so damnably suggestive of things beyond human experience—and the descriptions of the darting little furry object which served as her familiar were so painfully realistic despite their incredible details.
      That object—no larger than a good-sized rat and quaintly called by the townspeople “Brown Jenkin”—seemed to have been the fruit of a remarkable case of sympathetic herd-delusion, for in 1692 no less than eleven persons had testified to glimpsing it. There were recent rumours, too, with a baffling and disconcerting amount of agreement. Witnesses said it had long hair and the shape of a rat, but that its sharp-toothed, bearded face was evilly human while its paws were like tiny human hands. It took messages betwixt old Keziah and the devil, and was nursed on the witch’s blood—which it sucked like a vampire. Its voice was a kind of loathsome titter, and it could speak all languages. Of all the bizarre monstrosities in Gilman’s dreams, nothing filled him with greater panic and nausea than this blasphemous and diminutive hybrid, whose image flitted across his vision in a form a thousandfold more hateful than anything his waking mind had deduced from the ancient records and the modern whispers.
      Gilman’s dreams consisted largely in plunges through limitless abysses of inexplicably coloured twilight and bafflingly disordered sound; abysses whose material and gravitational properties, and whose relation to his own entity, he could not even begin to explain. He did not walk or climb, fly or swim, crawl or wriggle; yet always experienced a mode of motion partly voluntary and partly involuntary. Of his own condition he could not well judge, for sight of his arms, legs, and torso seemed always cut off by some odd disarrangement of perspective; but he felt that his physical organisation and faculties were somehow marvellously transmuted and obliquely projected—though not without a certain grotesque relationship to his normal proportions and properties.
      The abysses were by no means vacant, being crowded with indescribably angled masses of alien-hued substance, some of which appeared to be organic while others seemed inorganic. A few of the organic objects tended to awake vague memories in the back of his mind, though he could form no conscious idea of what they mockingly resembled or suggested. In the later dreams he began to distinguish separate categories into which the organic objects appeared to be divided, and which seemed to involve in each case a radically different species of conduct-pattern and basic motivation. Of these categories one seemed to him to include objects slightly less illogical and irrelevant in their motions than the members of the other categories.
      All the objects—organic and inorganic alike—were totally beyond description or even comprehension. Gilman sometimes compared the inorganic masses to prisms, labyrinths, clusters of cubes and planes, and Cyclopean buildings; and the organic things struck him variously as groups of bubbles, octopi, centipedes, living Hindoo idols, and intricate Arabesques roused into a kind of ophidian animation. Everything he saw was unspeakably menacing and horrible; and whenever one of the organic entities appeared by its motions to be noticing him, he felt a stark, hideous fright which generally jolted him awake. Of how the organic entities moved, he could tell no more than of how he moved himself. In time he observed a further mystery—the tendency of certain entities to appear suddenly out of empty space, or to disappear totally with equal suddenness. The shrieking, roaring confusion of sound which permeated the abysses was past all analysis as to pitch, timbre, or rhythm; but seemed to be synchronous with vague visual changes in all the indefinite objects, organic and inorganic alike. Gilman had a constant sense of dread that it might rise to some unbearable degree of intensity during one or another of its obscure, relentlessly inevitable fluctuations.
      But it was not in these vortices of complete alienage that he saw Brown Jenkin. That shocking little horror was reserved for certain lighter, sharper dreams which assailed him just before he dropped into the fullest depths of sleep. He would be lying in the dark fighting to keep awake when a faint lambent glow would seem to shimmer around the centuried room, shewing in a violet mist the convergence of angled planes which had seized his brain so insidiously. The horror would appear to pop out of the rat-hole in the corner and patter toward him over the sagging, wide-planked floor with evil expectancy in its tiny, bearded human face—but mercifully, this dream always melted away before the object got close enough to nuzzle him. It had hellishly long, sharp, canine teeth. Gilman tried to stop up the rat-hole every day, but each night the real tenants of the partitions would gnaw away the obstruction, whatever it might be. Once he had the landlord nail tin over it, but the next night the rats gnawed a fresh hole—in making which they pushed or dragged out into the room a curious little fragment of bone.
      Gilman did not report his fever to the doctor, for he knew he could not pass the examinations if ordered to the college infirmary when every moment was needed for cramming. As it was, he failed in Calculus D and Advanced General Psychology, though not without hope of making up lost ground before the end of the term. It was in March when the fresh element entered his lighter preliminary dreaming, and the nightmare shape of Brown Jenkin began to be companioned by the nebulous blur which grew more and more to resemble a bent old woman. This addition disturbed him more than he could account for, but finally he decided that it was like an ancient crone whom he had twice actually encountered in the dark tangle of lanes near the abandoned wharves. On those occasions the evil, sardonic, and seemingly unmotivated stare of the beldame had set him almost shivering—especially the first time, when an overgrown rat darting across the shadowed mouth of a neighbouring alley had made him think irrationally of Brown Jenkin. Now, he reflected, those nervous fears were being mirrored in his disordered dreams.
      That the influence of the old house was unwholesome, he could not deny; but traces of his early morbid interest still held him there. He argued that the fever alone was responsible for his nightly phantasies, and that when the touch abated he would be free from the monstrous visions. Those visions, however, were of abhorrent vividness and convincingness, and whenever he awaked he retained a vague sense of having undergone much more than he remembered. He was hideously sure that in unrecalled dreams he had talked with both Brown Jenkin and the old woman, and that they had been urging him to go somewhere with them and to meet a third being of greater potency.
      Toward the end of March he began to pick up in his mathematics, though other studies bothered him increasingly. He was getting an intuitive knack for solving Riemannian equations, and astonished Professor Upham by his comprehension of fourth-dimensional and other problems which had floored all the rest of the class. One afternoon there was a discussion of possible freakish curvatures in space, and of theoretical points of approach or even contact between our part of the cosmos and various other regions as distant as the farthest stars or the trans-galactic gulfs themselves—or even as fabulously remote as the tentatively conceivable cosmic units beyond the whole Einsteinian space-time continuum. Gilman’s handling of this theme filled everyone with admiration, even though some of his hypothetical illustrations caused an increase in the always plentiful gossip about his nervous and solitary eccentricity. What made the students shake their heads was his sober theory that a man might—given mathematical knowledge admittedly beyond all likelihood of human acquirement—step deliberately from the earth to any other celestial body which might lie at one of an infinity of specific points in the cosmic pattern.
      Such a step, he said, would require only two stages; first, a passage out of the three-dimensional sphere we know, and second, a passage back to the three-dimensional sphere at another point, perhaps one of infinite remoteness. That this could be accomplished without loss of life was in many cases conceivable. Any being from any part of three-dimensional space could probably survive in the fourth dimension; and its survival of the second stage would depend upon what alien part of three-dimensional space it might select for its re-entry. Denizens of some planets might be able to live on certain others—even planets belonging to other galaxies, or to similar-dimensional phases of other space-time continua—though of course there must be vast numbers of mutually uninhabitable even though mathematically juxtaposed bodies or zones of space.
      It was also possible that the inhabitants of a given dimensional realm could survive entry to many unknown and incomprehensible realms of additional or indefinitely multiplied dimensions—be they within or outside the given space-time continuum—and that the converse would be likewise true. This was a matter for speculation, though one could be fairly certain that the type of mutation involved in a passage from any given dimensional plane to the next higher plane would not be destructive of biological integrity as we understand it. Gilman could not be very clear about his reasons for this last assumption, but his haziness here was more than overbalanced by his clearness on other complex points. Professor Upham especially liked his demonstration of the kinship of higher mathematics to certain phases of magical lore transmitted down the ages from an ineffable antiquity—human or pre-human—whose knowledge of the cosmos and its laws was greater than ours.
      Around the first of April Gilman worried considerably because his slow fever did not abate. He was also troubled by what some of his fellow-lodgers said about his sleep-walking. It seemed that he was often absent from his bed, and that the creaking of his floor at certain hours of the night was remarked by the man in the room below. This fellow also spoke of hearing the tread of shod feet in the night; but Gilman was sure he must have been mistaken in this, since shoes as well as other apparel were always precisely in place in the morning. One could develop all sorts of aural delusions in this morbid old house—for did not Gilman himself, even in daylight, now feel certain that noises other than rat-scratchings came from the black voids beyond the slanting wall and above the slanting ceiling? His pathologically sensitive ears began to listen for faint footfalls in the immemorially sealed loft overhead, and sometimes the illusion of such things was agonisingly realistic.
      However, he knew that he had actually become a somnambulist; for twice at night his room had been found vacant, though with all his clothing in place. Of this he had been assured by Frank Elwood, the one fellow-student whose poverty forced him to room in this squalid and unpopular house. Elwood had been studying in the small hours and had come up for help on a differential equation, only to find Gilman absent. It had been rather presumptuous of him to open the unlocked door after knocking had failed to rouse a response, but he had needed the help very badly and thought that his host would not mind a gentle prodding awake. On neither occasion, though, had Gilman been there—and when told of the matter he wondered where he could have been wandering, barefoot and with only his night-clothes on. He resolved to investigate the matter if reports of his sleep-walking continued, and thought of sprinkling flour on the floor of the corridor to see where his footsteps might lead. The door was the only conceivable egress, for there was no possible foothold outside the narrow window.
      As April advanced Gilman’s fever-sharpened ears were disturbed by the whining prayers of a superstitious loomfixer named Joe Mazurewicz, who had a room on the ground floor. Mazurewicz had told long, rambling stories about the ghost of old Keziah and the furry, sharp-fanged, nuzzling thing, and had said he was so badly haunted at times that only his silver crucifix—given him for the purpose by Father Iwanicki of St. Stanislaus’ Church—could bring him relief. Now he was praying because the Witches’ Sabbath was drawing near. May-Eve was Walpurgis-Night, when hell’s blackest evil roamed the earth and all the slaves of Satan gathered for nameless rites and deeds. It was always a very bad time in Arkham, even though the fine folks up in Miskatonic Avenue and High and Saltonstall Streets pretended to know nothing about it. There would be bad doings—and a child or two would probably be missing. Joe knew about such things, for his grandmother in the old country had heard tales from her grandmother. It was wise to pray and count one’s beads at this season. For three months Keziah and Brown Jenkin had not been near Joe’s room, nor near Paul Choynski’s room, nor anywhere else—and it meant no good when they held off like that. They must be up to something.
      Gilman dropped in at a doctor’s office on the 16th of the month, and was surprised to find his temperature was not as high as he had feared. The physician questioned him sharply, and advised him to see a nerve specialist. On reflection, he was glad he had not consulted the still more inquisitive college doctor. Old Waldron, who had curtailed his activities before, would have made him take a rest—an impossible thing now that he was so close to great results in his equations. He was certainly near the boundary between the known universe and the fourth dimension, and who could say how much farther he might go?
      But even as these thoughts came to him he wondered at the source of his strange confidence. Did all of this perilous sense of imminence come from the formulae on the sheets he covered day by day? The soft, stealthy, imaginary footsteps in the sealed loft above were unnerving. And now, too, there was a growing feeling that somebody was constantly persuading him to do something terrible which he could not do. How about the somnambulism? Where did he go sometimes in the night? And what was that faint suggestion of sound which once in a while seemed to trickle through the maddening confusion of identifiable sounds even in broad daylight and full wakefulness? Its rhythm did not correspond to anything on earth, unless perhaps to the cadence of one or two unmentionable Sabbat-chants, and sometimes he feared it corresponded to certain attributes of the vague shrieking or roaring in those wholly alien abysses of dream.
      The dreams were meanwhile getting to be atrocious. In the lighter preliminary phase the evil old woman was now of fiendish distinctness, and Gilman knew she was the one who had frightened him in the slums. Her bent back, long nose, and shrivelled chin were unmistakable, and her shapeless brown garments were like those he remembered. The expression on her face was one of hideous malevolence and exultation, and when he awaked he could recall a croaking voice that persuaded and threatened. He must meet the Black Man, and go with them all to the throne of Azathoth at the centre of ultimate Chaos. That was what she said. He must sign in his own blood the book of Azathoth and take a new secret name now that his independent delvings had gone so far. What kept him from going with her and Brown Jenkin and the other to the throne of Chaos where the thin flutes pipe mindlessly was the fact that he had seen the name “Azathoth” in the Necronomicon, and knew it stood for a primal evil too horrible for description.
      The old woman always appeared out of thin air near the corner where the downward slant met the inward slant. She seemed to crystallise at a point closer to the ceiling than to the floor, and every night she was a little nearer and more distinct before the dream shifted. Brown Jenkin, too, was always a little nearer at the last, and its yellowish-white fangs glistened shockingly in that unearthly violet phosphorescence. Its shrill loathsome tittering stuck more and more in Gilman’s head, and he could remember in the morning how it had pronounced the words “Azathoth” and “Nyarlathotep”.
      In the deeper dreams everything was likewise more distinct, and Gilman felt that the twilight abysses around him were those of the fourth dimension. Those organic entities whose motions seemed least flagrantly irrelevant and unmotivated were probably projections of life-forms from our own planet, including human beings. What the others were in their own dimensional sphere or spheres he dared not try to think. Two of the less irrelevantly moving things—a rather large congeries of iridescent, prolately spheroidal bubbles and a very much smaller polyhedron of unknown colours and rapidly shifting surface angles—seemed to take notice of him and follow him about or float ahead as he changed position among the titan prisms, labyrinths, cube-and-plane clusters, and quasi-buildings; and all the while the vague shrieking and roaring waxed louder and louder, as if approaching some monstrous climax of utterly unendurable intensity.
      During the night of April 19–20 the new development occurred. Gilman was half-involuntarily moving about in the twilight abysses with the bubble-mass and the small polyhedron floating ahead, when he noticed the peculiarly regular angles formed by the edges of some gigantic neighbouring prism-clusters. In another second he was out of the abyss and standing tremulously on a rocky hillside bathed in intense, diffused green light. He was barefooted and in his night-clothes, and when he tried to walk discovered that he could scarcely lift his feet. A swirling vapour hid everything but the immediate sloping terrain from sight, and he shrank from the thought of the sounds that might surge out of that vapour.
      Then he saw the two shapes laboriously crawling toward him—the old woman and the little furry thing. The crone strained up to her knees and managed to cross her arms in a singular fashion, while Brown Jenkin pointed in a certain direction with a horribly anthropoid fore paw which it raised with evident difficulty. Spurred by an impulse he did not originate, Gilman dragged himself forward along a course determined by the angle of the old woman’s arms and the direction of the small monstrosity’s paw, and before he had shuffled three steps he was back in the twilight abysses. Geometrical shapes seethed around him, and he fell dizzily and interminably. At last he woke in his bed in the crazily angled garret of the eldritch old house.
      He was good for nothing that morning, and stayed away from all his classes. Some unknown attraction was pulling his eyes in a seemingly irrelevant direction, for he could not help staring at a certain vacant spot on the floor. As the day advanced the focus of his unseeing eyes changed position, and by noon he had conquered the impulse to stare at vacancy. About two o’clock he went out for lunch, and as he threaded the narrow lanes of the city he found himself turning always to the southeast. Only an effort halted him at a cafeteria in Church Street, and after the meal he felt the unknown pull still more strongly.
      He would have to consult a nerve specialist after all—perhaps there was a connexion with his somnambulism—but meanwhile he might at least try to break the morbid spell himself. Undoubtedly he could still manage to walk away from the pull; so with great resolution he headed against it and dragged himself deliberately north along Garrison Street. By the time he had reached the bridge over the Miskatonic he was in a cold perspiration, and he clutched at the iron railing as he gazed upstream at the ill-regarded island whose regular lines of ancient standing stones brooded sullenly in the afternoon sunlight.
      Then he gave a start. For there was a clearly visible living figure on that desolate island, and a second glance told him it was certainly the strange old woman whose sinister aspect had worked itself so disastrously into his dreams. The tall grass near her was moving, too, as if some other living thing were crawling close to the ground. When the old woman began to turn toward him he fled precipitately off the bridge and into the shelter of the town’s labyrinthine waterfront alleys. Distant though the island was, he felt that a monstrous and invincible evil could flow from the sardonic stare of that bent, ancient figure in brown.
      The southeastward pull still held, and only with tremendous resolution could Gilman drag himself into the old house and up the rickety stairs. For hours he sat silent and aimless, with his eyes shifting gradually westward. About six o’clock his sharpened ears caught the whining prayers of Joe Mazurewicz two floors below, and in desperation he seized his hat and walked out into the sunset-golden streets, letting the now directly southward pull carry him where it might. An hour later darkness found him in the open fields beyond Hangman’s Brook, with the glimmering spring stars shining ahead. The urge to walk was gradually changing to an urge to leap mystically into space, and suddenly he realised just where the source of the pull lay.
      It was in the sky. A definite point among the stars had a claim on him and was calling him. Apparently it was a point somewhere between Hydra and Argo Navis, and he knew that he had been urged toward it ever since he had awaked soon after dawn. In the morning it had been underfoot; afternoon found it rising in the southeast, and now it was roughly south but wheeling toward the west. What was the meaning of this new thing? Was he going mad? How long would it last? Again mustering his resolution, Gilman turned and dragged himself back to the sinister old house.
      Mazurewicz was waiting for him at the door, and seemed both anxious and reluctant to whisper some fresh bit of superstition. It was about the witch light. Joe had been out celebrating the night before—it was Patriots’ Day in Massachusetts—and had come home after midnight. Looking up at the house from outside, he had thought at first that Gilman’s window was dark; but then he had seen the faint violet glow within. He wanted to warn the gentleman about that glow, for everybody in Arkham knew it was Keziah’s witch light which played near Brown Jenkin and the ghost of the old crone herself. He had not mentioned this before, but now he must tell about it because it meant that Keziah and her long-toothed familiar were haunting the young gentleman. Sometimes he and Paul Choynski and Landlord Dombrowski thought they saw that light seeping out of cracks in the sealed loft above the young gentleman’s room, but they had all agreed not to talk about that. However, it would be better for the gentleman to take another room and get a crucifix from some good priest like Father Iwanicki.
      As the man rambled on Gilman felt a nameless panic clutch at his throat. He knew that Joe must have been half drunk when he came home the night before, yet this mention of a violet light in the garret window was of frightful import. It was a lambent glow of this sort which always played about the old woman and the small furry thing in those lighter, sharper dreams which prefaced his plunge into unknown abysses, and the thought that a wakeful second person could see the dream-luminance was utterly beyond sane harbourage. Yet where had the fellow got such an odd notion? Had he himself talked as well as walked around the house in his sleep? No, Joe said, he had not—but he must check up on this. Perhaps Frank Elwood could tell him something, though he hated to ask.
      Fever—wild dreams—somnambulism—illusions of sounds—a pull toward a point in the sky—and now a suspicion of insane sleep-talking! He must stop studying, see a nerve specialist, and take himself in hand. When he climbed to the second story he paused at Elwood’s door but saw that the other youth was out. Reluctantly he continued up to his garret room and sat down in the dark. His gaze was still pulled to the southwest, but he also found himself listening intently for some sound in the closed loft above, and half imagining that an evil violet light seeped down through an infinitesimal crack in the low, slanting ceiling.
      That night as Gilman slept the violet light broke upon him with heightened intensity, and the old witch and small furry thing—getting closer than ever before—mocked him with inhuman squeals and devilish gestures. He was glad to sink into the vaguely roaring twilight abysses, though the pursuit of that iridescent bubble-congeries and that kaleidoscopic little polyhedron was menacing and irritating. Then came the shift as vast converging planes of a slippery-looking substance loomed above and below him—a shift which ended in a flash of delirium and a blaze of unknown, alien light in which yellow, carmine, and indigo were madly and inextricably blended.
      He was half lying on a high, fantastically balustraded terrace above a boundless jungle of outlandish, incredible peaks, balanced planes, domes, minarets, horizontal discs poised on pinnacles, and numberless forms of still greater wildness—some of stone and some of metal—which glittered gorgeously in the mixed, almost blistering glare from a polychromatic sky. Looking upward he saw three stupendous discs of flame, each of a different hue, and at a different height above an infinitely distant curving horizon of low mountains. Behind him tiers of higher terraces towered aloft as far as he could see. The city below stretched away to the limits of vision, and he hoped that no sound would well up from it.
      The pavement from which he easily raised himself was of a veined, polished stone beyond his power to identify, and the tiles were cut in bizarre-angled shapes which struck him as less asymmetrical than based on some unearthly symmetry whose laws he could not comprehend. The balustrade was chest-high, delicate, and fantastically wrought, while along the rail were ranged at short intervals little figures of grotesque design and exquisite workmanship. They, like the whole balustrade, seemed to be made of some sort of shining metal whose colour could not be guessed in this chaos of mixed effulgences; and their nature utterly defied conjecture. They represented some ridged, barrel-shaped object with thin horizontal arms radiating spoke-like from a central ring, and with vertical knobs or bulbs projecting from the head and base of the barrel. Each of these knobs was the hub of a system of five long, flat, triangularly tapering arms arranged around it like the arms of a starfish—nearly horizontal, but curving slightly away from the central barrel. The base of the bottom knob was fused to the long railing with so delicate a point of contact that several figures had been broken off and were missing. The figures were about four and a half inches in height, while the spiky arms gave them a maximum diameter of about two and a half inches.
      When Gilman stood up the tiles felt hot to his bare feet. He was wholly alone, and his first act was to walk to the balustrade and look dizzily down at the endless, Cyclopean city almost two thousand feet below. As he listened he thought a rhythmic confusion of faint musical pipings covering a wide tonal range welled up from the narrow streets beneath, and he wished he might discern the denizens of the place. The sight turned him giddy after a while, so that he would have fallen to the pavement had he not clutched instinctively at the lustrous balustrade. His right hand fell on one of the projecting figures, the touch seeming to steady him slightly. It was too much, however, for the exotic delicacy of the metal-work, and the spiky figure snapped off under his grasp. Still half-dazed, he continued to clutch it as his other hand seized a vacant space on the smooth railing.
      But now his oversensitive ears caught something behind him, and he looked back across the level terrace. Approaching him softly though without apparent furtiveness were five figures, two of which were the sinister old woman and the fanged, furry little animal. The other three were what sent him unconscious—for they were living entities about eight feet high, shaped precisely like the spiky images on the balustrade, and propelling themselves by a spider-like wriggling of their lower set of starfish-arms.
      Gilman awakened in his bed, drenched by a cold perspiration and with a smarting sensation in his face, hands, and feet. Springing to the floor, he washed and dressed in frantic haste, as if it were necessary for him to get out of the house as quickly as possible. He did not know where he wished to go, but felt that once more he would have to sacrifice his classes. The odd pull toward that spot in the sky between Hydra and Argo had abated, but another of even greater strength had taken its place. Now he felt that he must go north—infinitely north. He dreaded to cross the bridge that gave a view of the desolate island in the Miskatonic, so went over the Peabody Avenue bridge. Very often he stumbled, for his eyes and ears were chained to an extremely lofty point in the blank blue sky.
      After about an hour he got himself under better control, and saw that he was far from the city. All around him stretched the bleak emptiness of salt marshes, while the narrow road ahead led to Innsmouth—that ancient, half-deserted town which Arkham people were so curiously unwilling to visit. Though the northward pull had not diminished, he resisted it as he had resisted the other pull, and finally found that he could almost balance the one against the other. Plodding back to town and getting some coffee at a soda fountain, he dragged himself into the public library and browsed aimlessly among the lighter magazines. Once he met some friends who remarked how oddly sunburned he looked, but he did not tell them of his walk. At three o’clock he took some lunch at a restaurant, noting meanwhile that the pull had either lessened or divided itself. After that he killed the time at a cheap cinema show, seeing the inane performance over and over again without paying any attention to it.
      About nine at night he drifted homeward and stumbled into the ancient house. Joe Mazurewicz was whining unintelligible prayers, and Gilman hastened up to his own garret chamber without pausing to see if Elwood was in. It was when he turned on the feeble electric light that the shock came. At once he saw there was something on the table which did not belong there, and a second look left no room for doubt. Lying on its side—for it could not stand up alone—was the exotic spiky figure which in his monstrous dream he had broken off the fantastic balustrade. No detail was missing. The ridged, barrel-shaped centre, the thin, radiating arms, the knobs at each end, and the flat, slightly outward-curving starfish-arms spreading from those knobs—all were there. In the electric light the colour seemed to be a kind of iridescent grey veined with green, and Gilman could see amidst his horror and bewilderment that one of the knobs ended in a jagged break corresponding to its former point of attachment to the dream-railing.
      Only his tendency toward a dazed stupor prevented him from screaming aloud. This fusion of dream and reality was too much to bear. Still dazed, he clutched at the spiky thing and staggered downstairs to Landlord Dombrowski’s quarters. The whining prayers of the superstitious loomfixer were still sounding through the mouldy halls, but Gilman did not mind them now. The landlord was in, and greeted him pleasantly. No, he had not seen that thing before and did not know anything about it. But his wife had said she found a funny tin thing in one of the beds when she fixed the rooms at noon, and maybe that was it. Dombrowski called her, and she waddled in. Yes, that was the thing. She had found it in the young gentleman’s bed—on the side next the wall. It had looked very queer to her, but of course the young gentleman had lots of queer things in his room—books and curios and pictures and markings on paper. She certainly knew nothing about it.
      So Gilman climbed upstairs again in a mental turmoil, convinced that he was either still dreaming or that his somnambulism had run to incredible extremes and led him to depredations in unknown places. Where had he got this outré thing? He did not recall seeing it in any museum in Arkham. It must have been somewhere, though; and the sight of it as he snatched it in his sleep must have caused the odd dream-picture of the balustraded terrace. Next day he would make some very guarded inquiries—and perhaps see the nerve specialist.
      Meanwhile he would try to keep track of his somnambulism. As he went upstairs and across the garret hall he sprinkled about some flour which he had borrowed—with a frank admission as to its purpose—from the landlord. He had stopped at Elwood’s door on the way, but had found all dark within. Entering his room, he placed the spiky thing on the table, and lay down in complete mental and physical exhaustion without pausing to undress. From the closed loft above the slanting ceiling he thought he heard a faint scratching and padding, but he was too disorganised even to mind it. That cryptical pull from the north was getting very strong again, though it seemed now to come from a lower place in the sky.
      In the dazzling violet light of dream the old woman and the fanged, furry thing came again and with a greater distinctness than on any former occasion. This time they actually reached him, and he felt the crone’s withered claws clutching at him. He was pulled out of bed and into empty space, and for a moment he heard a rhythmic roaring and saw the twilight amorphousness of the vague abysses seething around him. But that moment was very brief, for presently he was in a crude, windowless little space with rough beams and planks rising to a peak just above his head, and with a curious slanting floor underfoot. Propped level on that floor were low cases full of books of every degree of antiquity and disintegration, and in the centre were a table and bench, both apparently fastened in place. Small objects of unknown shape and nature were ranged on the tops of the cases, and in the flaming violet light Gilman thought he saw a counterpart of the spiky image which had puzzled him so horribly. On the left the floor fell abruptly away, leaving a black triangular gulf out of which, after a second’s dry rattling, there presently climbed the hateful little furry thing with the yellow fangs and bearded human face.
      The evilly grinning beldame still clutched him, and beyond the table stood a figure he had never seen before—a tall, lean man of dead black colouration but without the slightest sign of negroid features; wholly devoid of either hair or beard, and wearing as his only garment a shapeless robe of some heavy black fabric. His feet were indistinguishable because of the table and bench, but he must have been shod, since there was a clicking whenever he changed position. The man did not speak, and bore no trace of expression on his small, regular features. He merely pointed to a book of prodigious size which lay open on the table, while the beldame thrust a huge grey quill into Gilman’s right hand. Over everything was a pall of intensely maddening fear, and the climax was reached when the furry thing ran up the dreamer’s clothing to his shoulders and then down his left arm, finally biting him sharply in the wrist just below his cuff. As the blood spurted from this wound Gilman lapsed into a faint.
      He awaked on the morning of the 22nd with a pain in his left wrist, and saw that his cuff was brown with dried blood. His recollections were very confused, but the scene with the black man in the unknown space stood out vividly. The rats must have bitten him as he slept, giving rise to the climax of that frightful dream. Opening the door, he saw that the flour on the corridor floor was undisturbed except for the huge prints of the loutish fellow who roomed at the other end of the garret. So he had not been sleep-walking this time. But something would have to be done about those rats. He would speak to the landlord about them. Again he tried to stop up the hole at the base of the slanting wall, wedging in a candlestick which seemed of about the right size. His ears were ringing horribly, as if with the residual echoes of some horrible noise heard in dreams.
      As he bathed and changed clothes he tried to recall what he had dreamed after the scene in the violet-litten space, but nothing definite would crystallise in his mind. That scene itself must have corresponded to the sealed loft overhead, which had begun to attack his imagination so violently, but later impressions were faint and hazy. There were suggestions of the vague, twilight abysses, and of still vaster, blacker abysses beyond them—abysses in which all fixed suggestions of form were absent. He had been taken there by the bubble-congeries and the little polyhedron which always dogged him; but they, like himself, had changed to wisps of milky, barely luminous mist in this farther void of ultimate blackness. Something else had gone on ahead—a larger wisp which now and then condensed into nameless approximations of form—and he thought that their progress had not been in a straight line, but rather along the alien curves and spirals of some ethereal vortex which obeyed laws unknown to the physics and mathematics of any conceivable cosmos. Eventually there had been a hint of vast, leaping shadows, of a monstrous, half-acoustic pulsing, and of the thin, monotonous piping of an unseen flute—but that was all. Gilman decided he had picked up that last conception from what he had read in the Necronomicon about the mindless entity Azathoth, which rules all time and space from a curiously environed black throne at the centre of Chaos.
      When the blood was washed away the wrist wound proved very slight, and Gilman puzzled over the location of the two tiny punctures. It occurred to him that there was no blood on the bedspread where he had lain—which was very curious in view of the amount on his skin and cuff. Had he been sleep-walking within his room, and had the rat bitten him as he sat in some chair or paused in some less rational position? He looked in every corner for brownish drops or stains, but did not find any. He had better, he thought, sprinkle flour within the room as well as outside the door—though after all no further proof of his sleep-walking was needed. He knew he did walk—and the thing to do now was to stop it. He must ask Frank Elwood for help. This morning the strange pulls from space seemed lessened, though they were replaced by another sensation even more inexplicable. It was a vague, insistent impulse to fly away from his present situation, but held not a hint of the specific direction in which he wished to fly. As he picked up the strange spiky image on the table he thought the older northward pull grew a trifle stronger; but even so, it was wholly overruled by the newer and more bewildering urge.
      He took the spiky image down to Elwood’s room, steeling himself against the whines of the loomfixer which welled up from the ground floor. Elwood was in, thank heaven, and appeared to be stirring about. There was time for a little conversation before leaving for breakfast and college, so Gilman hurriedly poured forth an account of his recent dreams and fears. His host was very sympathetic, and agreed that something ought to be done. He was shocked by his guest’s drawn, haggard aspect, and noticed the queer, abnormal-looking sunburn which others had remarked during the past week. There was not much, though, that he could say. He had not seen Gilman on any sleep-walking expedition, and had no idea what the curious image could be. He had, though, heard the French-Canadian who lodged just under Gilman talking to Mazurewicz one evening. They were telling each other how badly they dreaded the coming of Walpurgis-Night, now only a few days off; and were exchanging pitying comments about the poor, doomed young gentleman. Desrochers, the fellow under Gilman’s room, had spoken of nocturnal footsteps both shod and unshod, and of the violet light he saw one night when he had stolen fearfully up to peer through Gilman’s keyhole. He had not dared to peer, he told Mazurewicz, after he had glimpsed that light through the cracks around the door. There had been soft talking, too—and as he began to describe it his voice had sunk to an inaudible whisper.
      Elwood could not imagine what had set these superstitious creatures gossiping, but supposed their imaginations had been roused by Gilman’s late hours and somnolent walking and talking on the one hand, and by the nearness of traditionally feared May-Eve on the other hand. That Gilman talked in his sleep was plain, and it was obviously from Desrochers’ keyhole-listenings that the delusive notion of the violet dream-light had got abroad. These simple people were quick to imagine they had seen any odd thing they had heard about. As for a plan of action—Gilman had better move down to Elwood’s room and avoid sleeping alone. Elwood would, if awake, rouse him whenever he began to talk or rise in his sleep. Very soon, too, he must see the specialist. Meanwhile they would take the spiky image around to the various museums and to certain professors; seeking identification and stating that it had been found in a public rubbish-can. Also, Dombrowski must attend to the poisoning of those rats in the walls.
      Braced up by Elwood’s companionship, Gilman attended classes that day. Strange urges still tugged at him, but he could sidetrack them with considerable success. During a free period he shewed the queer image to several professors, all of whom were intensely interested, though none of them could shed any light upon its nature or origin. That night he slept on a couch which Elwood had had the landlord bring to the second-story room, and for the first time in weeks was wholly free from disquieting dreams. But the feverishness still hung on, and the whines of the loomfixer were an unnerving influence.
      During the next few days Gilman enjoyed an almost perfect immunity from morbid manifestations. He had, Elwood said, shewed no tendency to talk or rise in his sleep; and meanwhile the landlord was putting rat-poison everywhere. The only disturbing element was the talk among the superstitious foreigners, whose imaginations had become highly excited. Mazurewicz was always trying to make him get a crucifix, and finally forced one upon him which he said had been blessed by the good Father Iwanicki. Desrochers, too, had something to say—in fact, he insisted that cautious steps had sounded in the now vacant room above him on the first and second nights of Gilman’s absence from it. Paul Choynski thought he heard sounds in the halls and on the stairs at night, and claimed that his door had been softly tried, while Mrs. Dombrowski vowed she had seen Brown Jenkin for the first time since All-Hallows. But such naive reports could mean very little, and Gilman let the cheap metal crucifix hang idly from a knob on his host’s dresser.
      For three days Gilman and Elwood canvassed the local museums in an effort to identify the strange spiky image, but always without success. In every quarter, however, interest was intense; for the utter alienage of the thing was a tremendous challenge to scientific curiosity. One of the small radiating arms was broken off and subjected to chemical analysis, and the result is still talked about in college circles. Professor Ellery found platinum, iron, and tellurium in the strange alloy; but mixed with these were at least three other apparent elements of high atomic weight which chemistry was absolutely powerless to classify. Not only did they fail to correspond with any known element, but they did not even fit the vacant places reserved for probable elements in the periodic system. The mystery remains unsolved to this day, though the image is on exhibition at the museum of Miskatonic University.
      On the morning of April 27 a fresh rat-hole appeared in the room where Gilman was a guest, but Dombrowski tinned it up during the day. The poison was not having much effect, for scratchings and scurryings in the walls were virtually undiminished. Elwood was out late that night, and Gilman waited up for him. He did not wish to go to sleep in a room alone—especially since he thought he had glimpsed in the evening twilight the repellent old woman whose image had become so horribly transferred to his dreams. He wondered who she was, and what had been near her rattling the tin can in a rubbish-heap at the mouth of a squalid courtyard. The crone had seemed to notice him and leer evilly at him—though perhaps this was merely his imagination.
      The next day both youths felt very tired, and knew they would sleep like logs when night came. In the evening they drowsily discussed the mathematical studies which had so completely and perhaps harmfully engrossed Gilman, and speculated about the linkage with ancient magic and folklore which seemed so darkly probable. They spoke of old Keziah Mason, and Elwood agreed that Gilman had good scientific grounds for thinking she might have stumbled on strange and significant information. The hidden cults to which these witches belonged often guarded and handed down surprising secrets from elder, forgotten aeons; and it was by no means impossible that Keziah had actually mastered the art of passing through dimensional gates. Tradition emphasises the uselessness of material barriers in halting a witch’s motions; and who can say what underlies the old tales of broomstick rides through the night?
      Whether a modern student could ever gain similar powers from mathematical research alone, was still to be seen. Success, Gilman added, might lead to dangerous and unthinkable situations; for who could foretell the conditions pervading an adjacent but normally inaccessible dimension? On the other hand, the picturesque possibilities were enormous. Time could not exist in certain belts of space, and by entering and remaining in such a belt one might preserve one’s life and age indefinitely; never suffering organic metabolism or deterioration except for slight amounts incurred during visits to one’s own or similar planes. One might, for example, pass into a timeless dimension and emerge at some remote period of the earth’s history as young as before.
      Whether anybody had ever managed to do this, one could hardly conjecture with any degree of authority. Old legends are hazy and ambiguous, and in historic times all attempts at crossing forbidden gaps seem complicated by strange and terrible alliances with beings and messengers from outside. There was the immemorial figure of the deputy or messenger of hidden and terrible powers—the “Black Man” of the witch-cult, and the “Nyarlathotep” of the Necronomicon. There was, too, the baffling problem of the lesser messengers or intermediaries—the quasi-animals and queer hybrids which legend depicts as witches’ familiars. As Gilman and Elwood retired, too sleepy to argue further, they heard Joe Mazurewicz reel into the house half-drunk, and shuddered at the desperate wildness of his whining prayers.
      That night Gilman saw the violet light again. In his dream he had heard a scratching and gnawing in the partitions, and thought that someone fumbled clumsily at the latch. Then he saw the old woman and the small furry thing advancing toward him over the carpeted floor. The beldame’s face was alight with inhuman exultation, and the little yellow-toothed morbidity tittered mockingly as it pointed at the heavily sleeping form of Elwood on the other couch across the room. A paralysis of fear stifled all attempts to cry out. As once before, the hideous crone seized Gilman by the shoulders, yanking him out of bed and into empty space. Again the infinitude of the shrieking twilight abysses flashed past him, but in another second he thought he was in a dark, muddy, unknown alley of foetid odours, with the rotting walls of ancient houses towering up on every hand.
      Ahead was the robed black man he had seen in the peaked space in the other dream, while from a lesser distance the old woman was beckoning and grimacing imperiously. Brown Jenkin was rubbing itself with a kind of affectionate playfulness around the ankles of the black man, which the deep mud largely concealed. There was a dark open doorway on the right, to which the black man silently pointed. Into this the grimacing crone started, dragging Gilman after her by his pajama sleeve. There were evil-smelling staircases which creaked ominously, and on which the old woman seemed to radiate a faint violet light; and finally a door leading off a landing. The crone fumbled with the latch and pushed the door open, motioning to Gilman to wait and disappearing inside the black aperture.
      The youth’s oversensitive ears caught a hideous strangled cry, and presently the beldame came out of the room bearing a small, senseless form which she thrust at the dreamer as if ordering him to carry it. The sight of this form, and the expression on its face, broke the spell. Still too dazed to cry out, he plunged recklessly down the noisome staircase and into the mud outside; halting only when seized and choked by the waiting black man. As consciousness departed he heard the faint, shrill tittering of the fanged, rat-like abnormality.
      On the morning of the 29th Gilman awaked into a maelstrom of horror. The instant he opened his eyes he knew something was terribly wrong, for he was back in his old garret room with the slanting wall and ceiling, sprawled on the now unmade bed. His throat was aching inexplicably, and as he struggled to a sitting posture he saw with growing fright that his feet and pajama-bottoms were brown with caked mud. For the moment his recollections were hopelessly hazy, but he knew at least that he must have been sleep-walking. Elwood had been lost too deeply in slumber to hear and stop him. On the floor were confused muddy prints, but oddly enough they did not extend all the way to the door. The more Gilman looked at them, the more peculiar they seemed; for in addition to those he could recognise as his there were some smaller, almost round markings—such as the legs of a large chair or table might make, except that most of them tended to be divided into halves. There were also some curious muddy rat-tracks leading out of a fresh hole and back into it again. Utter bewilderment and the fear of madness racked Gilman as he staggered to the door and saw that there were no muddy prints outside. The more he remembered of his hideous dream the more terrified he felt, and it added to his desperation to hear Joe Mazurewicz chanting mournfully two floors below.
      Descending to Elwood’s room he roused his still-sleeping host and began telling of how he had found himself, but Elwood could form no idea of what might really have happened. Where Gilman could have been, how he got back to his room without making tracks in the hall, and how the muddy, furniture-like prints came to be mixed with his in the garret chamber, were wholly beyond conjecture. Then there were those dark, livid marks on his throat, as if he had tried to strangle himself. He put his hands up to them, but found that they did not even approximately fit. While they were talking Desrochers dropped in to say that he had heard a terrific clattering overhead in the dark small hours. No, there had been no one on the stairs after midnight—though just before midnight he had heard faint footfalls in the garret, and cautiously descending steps he did not like. It was, he added, a very bad time of year for Arkham. The young gentleman had better be sure to wear the crucifix Joe Mazurewicz had given him. Even the daytime was not safe, for after dawn there had been strange sounds in the house—especially a thin, childish wail hastily choked off.
      Gilman mechanically attended classes that morning, but was wholly unable to fix his mind on his studies. A mood of hideous apprehension and expectancy had seized him, and he seemed to be awaiting the fall of some annihilating blow. At noon he lunched at the University Spa, picking up a paper from the next seat as he waited for dessert. But he never ate that dessert; for an item on the paper’s first page left him limp, wild-eyed, and able only to pay his check and stagger back to Elwood’s room.
      There had been a strange kidnapping the night before in Orne’s Gangway, and the two-year-old child of a clod-like laundry worker named Anastasia Wolejko had completely vanished from sight. The mother, it appeared, had feared the event for some time; but the reasons she assigned for her fear were so grotesque that no one took them seriously. She had, she said, seen Brown Jenkin about the place now and then ever since early in March, and knew from its grimaces and titterings that little Ladislas must be marked for sacrifice at the awful Sabbat on Walpurgis-Night. She had asked her neighbour Mary Czanek to sleep in the room and try to protect the child, but Mary had not dared. She could not tell the police, for they never believed such things. Children had been taken that way every year ever since she could remember. And her friend Pete Stowacki would not help because he wanted the child out of the way anyhow.
      But what threw Gilman into a cold perspiration was the report of a pair of revellers who had been walking past the mouth of the gangway just after midnight. They admitted they had been drunk, but both vowed they had seen a crazily dressed trio furtively entering the dark passageway. There had, they said, been a huge robed negro, a little old woman in rags, and a young white man in his night-clothes. The old woman had been dragging the youth, while around the feet of the negro a tame rat was rubbing and weaving in the brown mud.
      Gilman sat in a daze all the afternoon, and Elwood—who had meanwhile seen the papers and formed terrible conjectures from them—found him thus when he came home. This time neither could doubt but that something hideously serious was closing in around them. Between the phantasms of nightmare and the realities of the objective world a monstrous and unthinkable relationship was crystallising, and only stupendous vigilance could avert still more direful developments. Gilman must see a specialist sooner or later, but not just now, when all the papers were full of this kidnapping business.
      Just what had really happened was maddeningly obscure, and for a moment both Gilman and Elwood exchanged whispered theories of the wildest kind. Had Gilman unconsciously succeeded better than he knew in his studies of space and its dimensions? Had he actually slipped outside our sphere to points unguessed and unimaginable? Where—if anywhere—had he been on those nights of daemoniac alienage? The roaring twilight abysses—the green hillside—the blistering terrace—the pulls from the stars—the ultimate black vortex—the black man—the muddy alley and the stairs—the old witch and the fanged, furry horror—the bubble-congeries and the little polyhedron—the strange sunburn—the wrist wound—the unexplained image—the muddy feet—the throat-marks—the tales and fears of the superstitious foreigners—what did all this mean? To what extent could the laws of sanity apply to such a case?
      There was no sleep for either of them that night, but next day they both cut classes and drowsed. This was April 30th, and with the dusk would come the hellish Sabbat-time which all the foreigners and the superstitious old folk feared. Mazurewicz came home at six o’clock and said people at the mill were whispering that the Walpurgis-revels would be held in the dark ravine beyond Meadow Hill where the old white stone stands in a place queerly void of all plant-life. Some of them had even told the police and advised them to look there for the missing Wolejko child, but they did not believe anything would be done. Joe insisted that the poor young gentleman wear his nickel-chained crucifix, and Gilman put it on and dropped it inside his shirt to humour the fellow.
      Late at night the two youths sat drowsing in their chairs, lulled by the rhythmical praying of the loomfixer on the floor below. Gilman listened as he nodded, his preternaturally sharpened hearing seeming to strain for some subtle, dreaded murmur beyond the noises in the ancient house. Unwholesome recollections of things in the Necronomicon and the Black Book welled up, and he found himself swaying to infandous rhythms said to pertain to the blackest ceremonies of the Sabbat and to have an origin outside the time and space we comprehend.
      Presently he realised what he was listening for—the hellish chant of the celebrants in the distant black valley. How did he know so much about what they expected? How did he know the time when Nahab and her acolyte were due to bear the brimming bowl which would follow the black cock and the black goat? He saw that Elwood had dropped asleep, and tried to call out and waken him. Something, however, closed his throat. He was not his own master. Had he signed the black man’s book after all?
      Then his fevered, abnormal hearing caught the distant, windborne notes. Over miles of hill and field and alley they came, but he recognised them none the less. The fires must be lit, and the dancers must be starting in. How could he keep himself from going? What was it that had enmeshed him? Mathematics—folklore—the house—old Keziah—Brown Jenkin . . . and now he saw that there was a fresh rat-hole in the wall near his couch. Above the distant chanting and the nearer praying of Joe Mazurewicz came another sound—a stealthy, determined scratching in the partitions. He hoped the electric lights would not go out. Then he saw the fanged, bearded little face in the rat-hole—the accursed little face which he at last realised bore such a shocking, mocking resemblance to old Keziah’s—and heard the faint fumbling at the door.
      The screaming twilight abysses flashed before him, and he felt himself helpless in the formless grasp of the iridescent bubble-congeries. Ahead raced the small, kaleidoscopic polyhedron, and all through the churning void there was a heightening and acceleration of the vague tonal pattern which seemed to foreshadow some unutterable and unendurable climax. He seemed to know what was coming—the monstrous burst of Walpurgis-rhythm in whose cosmic timbre would be concentrated all the primal, ultimate space-time seethings which lie behind the massed spheres of matter and sometimes break forth in measured reverberations that penetrate faintly to every layer of entity and give hideous significance throughout the worlds to certain dreaded periods.
      But all this vanished in a second. He was again in the cramped, violet-litten peaked space with the slanting floor, the low cases of ancient books, the bench and table, the queer objects, and the triangular gulf at one side. On the table lay a small white figure—an infant boy, unclothed and unconscious—while on the other side stood the monstrous, leering old woman with a gleaming, grotesque-hafted knife in her right hand, and a queerly proportioned pale metal bowl covered with curiously chased designs and having delicate lateral handles in her left. She was intoning some croaking ritual in a language which Gilman could not understand, but which seemed like something guardedly quoted in the Necronomicon.
      As the scene grew clear he saw the ancient crone bend forward and extend the empty bowl across the table—and unable to control his own motions, he reached far forward and took it in both hands, noticing as he did so its comparative lightness. At the same moment the disgusting form of Brown Jenkin scrambled up over the brink of the triangular black gulf on his left. The crone now motioned him to hold the bowl in a certain position while she raised the huge, grotesque knife above the small white victim as high as her right hand could reach. The fanged, furry thing began tittering a continuation of the unknown ritual, while the witch croaked loathsome responses. Gilman felt a gnawing, poignant abhorrence shoot through his mental and emotional paralysis, and the light metal bowl shook in his grasp. A second later the downward motion of the knife broke the spell completely, and he dropped the bowl with a resounding bell-like clangour while his hands darted out frantically to stop the monstrous deed.
      In an instant he had edged up the slanting floor around the end of the table and wrenched the knife from the old woman’s claws; sending it clattering over the brink of the narrow triangular gulf. In another instant, however, matters were reversed; for those murderous claws had locked themselves tightly around his own throat, while the wrinkled face was twisted with insane fury. He felt the chain of the cheap crucifix grinding into his neck, and in his peril wondered how the sight of the object itself would affect the evil creature. Her strength was altogether superhuman, but as she continued her choking he reached feebly in his shirt and drew out the metal symbol, snapping the chain and pulling it free.
      At sight of the device the witch seemed struck with panic, and her grip relaxed long enough to give Gilman a chance to break it entirely. He pulled the steel-like claws from his neck, and would have dragged the beldame over the edge of the gulf had not the claws received a fresh access of strength and closed in again. This time he resolved to reply in kind, and his own hands reached out for the creature’s throat. Before she saw what he was doing he had the chain of the crucifix twisted about her neck, and a moment later he had tightened it enough to cut off her breath. During her last struggle he felt something bite at his ankle, and saw that Brown Jenkin had come to her aid. With one savage kick he sent the morbidity over the edge of the gulf and heard it whimper on some level far below.
      Whether he had killed the ancient crone he did not know, but he let her rest on the floor where she had fallen. Then, as he turned away, he saw on the table a sight which nearly snapped the last thread of his reason. Brown Jenkin, tough of sinew and with four tiny hands of daemoniac dexterity, had been busy while the witch was throttling him, and his efforts had been in vain. What he had prevented the knife from doing to the victim’s chest, the yellow fangs of the furry blasphemy had done to a wrist—and the bowl so lately on the floor stood full beside the small lifeless body.
      In his dream-delirium Gilman heard the hellish, alien-rhythmed chant of the Sabbat coming from an infinite distance, and knew the black man must be there. Confused memories mixed themselves with his mathematics, and he believed his subconscious mind held the angles which he needed to guide him back to the normal world—alone and unaided for the first time. He felt sure he was in the immemorially sealed loft above his own room, but whether he could ever escape through the slanting floor or the long-stopped egress he doubted greatly. Besides, would not an escape from a dream-loft bring him merely into a dream-house—an abnormal projection of the actual place he sought? He was wholly bewildered as to the relation betwixt dream and reality in all his experiences.
      The passage through the vague abysses would be frightful, for the Walpurgis-rhythm would be vibrating, and at last he would have to hear that hitherto veiled cosmic pulsing which he so mortally dreaded. Even now he could detect a low, monstrous shaking whose tempo he suspected all too well. At Sabbat-time it always mounted and reached through to the worlds to summon the initiate to nameless rites. Half the chants of the Sabbat were patterned on this faintly overheard pulsing which no earthly ear could endure in its unveiled spatial fulness. Gilman wondered, too, whether he could trust his instinct to take him back to the right part of space. How could he be sure he would not land on that green-litten hillside of a far planet, on the tessellated terrace above the city of tentacled monsters somewhere beyond the galaxy, or in the spiral black vortices of that ultimate void of Chaos wherein reigns the mindless daemon-sultan Azathoth?
      Just before he made the plunge the violet light went out and left him in utter blackness. The witch—old Keziah—Nahab—that must have meant her death. And mixed with the distant chant of the Sabbat and the whimpers of Brown Jenkin in the gulf below he thought he heard another and wilder whine from unknown depths. Joe Mazurewicz—the prayers against the Crawling Chaos now turning to an inexplicably triumphant shriek—worlds of sardonic actuality impinging on vortices of febrile dream—Iä! Shub-Niggurath! The Goat with a Thousand Young. . . .
      They found Gilman on the floor of his queerly angled old garret room long before dawn, for the terrible cry had brought Desrochers and Choynski and Dombrowski and Mazurewicz at once, and had even wakened the soundly sleeping Elwood in his chair. He was alive, and with open, staring eyes, but seemed largely unconscious. On his throat were the marks of murderous hands, and on his left ankle was a distressing rat-bite. His clothing was badly rumpled, and Joe’s crucifix was missing. Elwood trembled, afraid even to speculate on what new form his friend’s sleep-walking had taken. Mazurewicz seemed half-dazed because of a “sign” he said he had had in response to his prayers, and he crossed himself frantically when the squealing and whimpering of a rat sounded from beyond the slanting partition.
      When the dreamer was settled on his couch in Elwood’s room they sent for Dr. Malkowski—a local practitioner who would repeat no tales where they might prove embarrassing—and he gave Gilman two hypodermic injections which caused him to relax in something like natural drowsiness. During the day the patient regained consciousness at times and whispered his newest dream disjointedly to Elwood. It was a painful process, and at its very start brought out a fresh and disconcerting fact.
      Gilman—whose ears had so lately possessed an abnormal sensitiveness—was now stone deaf. Dr. Malkowski, summoned again in haste, told Elwood that both ear-drums were ruptured, as if by the impact of some stupendous sound intense beyond all human conception or endurance. How such a sound could have been heard in the last few hours without arousing all the Miskatonic Valley was more than the honest physician could say.
      Elwood wrote his part of the colloquy on paper, so that a fairly easy communication was maintained. Neither knew what to make of the whole chaotic business, and decided it would be better if they thought as little as possible about it. Both, though, agreed that they must leave this ancient and accursed house as soon as it could be arranged. Evening papers spoke of a police raid on some curious revellers in a ravine beyond Meadow Hill just before dawn, and mentioned that the white stone there was an object of age-long superstitious regard. Nobody had been caught, but among the scattering fugitives had been glimpsed a huge negro. In another column it was stated that no trace of the missing child Ladislas Wolejko had been found.
      The crowning horror came that very night. Elwood will never forget it, and was forced to stay out of college the rest of the term because of the resulting nervous breakdown. He had thought he heard rats in the partitions all the evening, but paid little attention to them. Then, long after both he and Gilman had retired, the atrocious shrieking began. Elwood jumped up, turned on the lights, and rushed over to his guest’s couch. The occupant was emitting sounds of veritably inhuman nature, as if racked by some torment beyond description. He was writhing under the bedclothes, and a great red stain was beginning to appear on the blankets.
      Elwood scarcely dared to touch him, but gradually the screaming and writhing subsided. By this time Dombrowski, Choynski, Desrochers, Mazurewicz, and the top-floor lodger were all crowding into the doorway, and the landlord had sent his wife back to telephone for Dr. Malkowski. Everybody shrieked when a large rat-like form suddenly jumped out from beneath the ensanguined bedclothes and scuttled across the floor to a fresh, open hole close by. When the doctor arrived and began to pull down those frightful covers Walter Gilman was dead.
      It would be barbarous to do more than suggest what had killed Gilman. There had been virtually a tunnel through his body—something had eaten his heart out. Dombrowski, frantic at the failure of his constant rat-poisoning efforts, cast aside all thought of his lease and within a week had moved with all his older lodgers to a dingy but less ancient house in Walnut Street. The worst thing for a while was keeping Joe Mazurewicz quiet; for the brooding loomfixer would never stay sober, and was constantly whining and muttering about spectral and terrible things.
      It seems that on that last hideous night Joe had stooped to look at the crimson rat-tracks which led from Gilman’s couch to the nearby hole. On the carpet they were very indistinct, but a piece of open flooring intervened between the carpet’s edge and the base-board. There Mazurewicz had found something monstrous—or thought he had, for no one else could quite agree with him despite the undeniable queerness of the prints. The tracks on the flooring were certainly vastly unlike the average prints of a rat, but even Choynski and Desrochers would not admit that they were like the prints of four tiny human hands.
      The house was never rented again. As soon as Dombrowski left it the pall of its final desolation began to descend, for people shunned it both on account of its old reputation and because of the new foetid odour. Perhaps the ex-landlord’s rat-poison had worked after all, for not long after his departure the place became a neighbourhood nuisance. Health officials traced the smell to the closed spaces above and beside the eastern garret room, and agreed that the number of dead rats must be enormous. They decided, however, that it was not worth their while to hew open and disinfect the long-sealed spaces; for the foetor would soon be over, and the locality was not one which encouraged fastidious standards. Indeed, there were always vague local tales of unexplained stenches upstairs in the Witch House just after May-Eve and Hallowmass. The neighbours grumblingly acquiesced in the inertia—but the foetor none the less formed an additional count against the place. Toward the last the house was condemned as an habitation by the building inspector.
      Gilman’s dreams and their attendant circumstances have never been explained. Elwood, whose thoughts on the entire episode are sometimes almost maddening, came back to college the next autumn and graduated in the following June. He found the spectral gossip of the town much diminished, and it is indeed a fact that—notwithstanding certain reports of a ghostly tittering in the deserted house which lasted almost as long as that edifice itself—no fresh appearances either of old Keziah or of Brown Jenkin have been muttered of since Gilman’s death. It is rather fortunate that Elwood was not in Arkham in that later year when certain events abruptly renewed the local whispers about elder horrors. Of course he heard about the matter afterward and suffered untold torments of black and bewildered speculation; but even that was not as bad as actual nearness and several possible sights would have been.
      In March, 1931, a gale wrecked the roof and great chimney of the vacant Witch House, so that a chaos of crumbling bricks, blackened, moss-grown shingles, and rotting planks and timbers crashed down into the loft and broke through the floor beneath. The whole attic story was choked with debris from above, but no one took the trouble to touch the mess before the inevitable razing of the decrepit structure. That ultimate step came in the following December, and it was when Gilman’s old room was cleared out by reluctant, apprehensive workmen that the gossip began.
      Among the rubbish which had crashed through the ancient slanting ceiling were several things which made the workmen pause and call in the police. Later the police in turn called in the coroner and several professors from the university. There were bones—badly crushed and splintered, but clearly recognisable as human—whose manifestly modern date conflicted puzzlingly with the remote period at which their only possible lurking-place, the low, slant-floored loft overhead, had supposedly been sealed from all human access. The coroner’s physician decided that some belonged to a small child, while certain others—found mixed with shreds of rotten brownish cloth—belonged to a rather undersized, bent female of advanced years. Careful sifting of debris also disclosed many tiny bones of rats caught in the collapse, as well as older rat-bones gnawed by small fangs in a fashion now and then highly productive of controversy and reflection.
      Other objects found included the mingled fragments of many books and papers, together with a yellowish dust left from the total disintegration of still older books and papers. All, without exception, appeared to deal with black magic in its most advanced and horrible forms; and the evidently recent date of certain items is still a mystery as unsolved as that of the modern human bones. An even greater mystery is the absolute homogeneity of the crabbed, archaic writing found on a wide range of papers whose conditions and watermarks suggest age differences of at least 150 to 200 years. To some, though, the greatest mystery of all is the variety of utterly inexplicable objects—objects whose shapes, materials, types of workmanship, and purposes baffle all conjecture—found scattered amidst the wreckage in evidently diverse states of injury. One of these things—which excited several Miskatonic professors profoundly—is a badly damaged monstrosity plainly resembling the strange image which Gilman gave to the college museum, save that it is larger, wrought of some peculiar bluish stone instead of metal, and possessed of a singularly angled pedestal with undecipherable hieroglyphics.
      Archaeologists and anthropologists are still trying to explain the bizarre designs chased on a crushed bowl of light metal whose inner side bore ominous brownish stains when found. Foreigners and credulous grandmothers are equally garrulous about the modern nickel crucifix with broken chain mixed in the rubbish and shiveringly identified by Joe Mazurewicz as that which he had given poor Gilman many years before. Some believe this crucifix was dragged up to the sealed loft by rats, while others think it must have been on the floor in some corner of Gilman’s old room all the time. Still others, including Joe himself, have theories too wild and fantastic for sober credence.
      When the slanting wall of Gilman’s room was torn out, the once sealed triangular space between that partition and the house’s north wall was found to contain much less structural debris, even in proportion to its size, than the room itself; though it had a ghastly layer of older materials which paralysed the wreckers with horror. In brief, the floor was a veritable ossuary of the bones of small children—some fairly modern, but others extending back in infinite gradations to a period so remote that crumbling was almost complete. On this deep bony layer rested a knife of great size, obvious antiquity, and grotesque, ornate, and exotic design—above which the debris was piled.
      In the midst of this debris, wedged between a fallen plank and a cluster of cemented bricks from the ruined chimney, was an object destined to cause more bafflement, veiled fright, and openly superstitious talk in Arkham than anything else discovered in the haunted and accursed building. This object was the partly crushed skeleton of a huge, diseased rat, whose abnormalities of form are still a topic of debate and source of singular reticence among the members of Miskatonic’s department of comparative anatomy. Very little concerning this skeleton has leaked out, but the workmen who found it whisper in shocked tones about the long, brownish hairs with which it was associated.
      The bones of the tiny paws, it is rumoured, imply prehensile characteristics more typical of a diminutive monkey than of a rat; while the small skull with its savage yellow fangs is of the utmost anomalousness, appearing from certain angles like a miniature, monstrously degraded parody of a human skull. The workmen crossed themselves in fright when they came upon this blasphemy, but later burned candles of gratitude in St. Stanislaus’ Church because of the shrill, ghostly tittering they felt they would never hear again.",False
"

I

""Ne raillons pas les fous; leur folie dure plus longtemps que
la nôtre.... Voila toute la différence.""

Toward the end of the year 1920 the Government of the United States had
practically completed the programme, adopted during the last months of
President Winthrop's administration. The country was apparently tranquil.
Everybody knows how the Tariff and Labour questions were settled. The war
with Germany, incident on that country's seizure of the Samoan Islands,
had left no visible scars upon the republic, and the temporary occupation
of Norfolk by the invading army had been forgotten in the joy over
repeated naval victories, and the subsequent ridiculous plight of General
Von Gartenlaube's forces in the State of New Jersey. The Cuban and
Hawaiian investments had paid one hundred per cent and the territory of
Samoa was well worth its cost as a coaling station. The country was in a
superb state of defence. Every coast city had been well supplied with land
fortifications; the army under the parental eye of the General Staff,
organized according to the Prussian system, had been increased to 300,000
men, with a territorial reserve of a million; and six magnificent
squadrons of cruisers and battle-ships patrolled the six stations of the
navigable seas, leaving a steam reserve amply fitted to control home
waters. The gentlemen from the West had at last been constrained to
acknowledge that a college for the training of diplomats was as necessary
as law schools are for the training of barristers; consequently we were no
longer represented abroad by incompetent patriots. The nation was
prosperous; Chicago, for a moment paralyzed after a second great fire, had
risen from its ruins, white and imperial, and more beautiful than the white
city which had been built for its plaything in 1893. Everywhere good
architecture was replacing bad, and even in New York, a sudden craving for
decency had swept away a great portion of the existing horrors. Streets
had been widened, properly paved and lighted, trees had been planted,
squares laid out, elevated structures demolished and underground roads
built to replace them. The new government buildings and barracks were fine
bits of architecture, and the long system of stone quays which completely
surrounded the island had been turned into parks which proved a god-send
to the population. The subsidizing of the state theatre and state opera
brought its own reward. The United States National Academy of Design was
much like European institutions of the same kind. Nobody envied the
Secretary of Fine Arts, either his cabinet position or his portfolio. The
Secretary of Forestry and Game Preservation had a much easier time, thanks
to the new system of National Mounted Police. We had profited well by the
latest treaties with France and England; the exclusion of foreign-born
Jews as a measure of self-preservation, the settlement of the new
independent negro state of Suanee, the checking of immigration, the new
laws concerning naturalization, and the gradual centralization of power in
the executive all contributed to national calm and prosperity. When the
Government solved the Indian problem and squadrons of Indian cavalry
scouts in native costume were substituted for the pitiable organizations
tacked on to the tail of skeletonized regiments by a former Secretary of
War, the nation drew a long sigh of relief. When, after the colossal
Congress of Religions, bigotry and intolerance were laid in their graves
and kindness and charity began to draw warring sects together, many
thought the millennium had arrived, at least in the new world which after
all is a world by itself.

But self-preservation is the first law, and the United States had to look
on in helpless sorrow as Germany, Italy, Spain and Belgium writhed in the
throes of Anarchy, while Russia, watching from the Caucasus, stooped and
bound them one by one.

In the city of New York the summer of 1899 was signalized by the
dismantling of the Elevated Railroads. The summer of 1900 will live in
the memories of New York people for many a cycle; the Dodge Statue was
removed in that year. In the following winter began that agitation for
the repeal of the laws prohibiting suicide which bore its final fruit in
the month of April, 1920, when the first Government Lethal Chamber was
opened on Washington Square.

I had walked down that day from Dr. Archer's house on Madison Avenue,
where I had been as a mere formality. Ever since that fall from my horse,
four years before, I had been troubled at times with pains in the back of
my head and neck, but now for months they had been absent, and the doctor
sent me away that day saying there was nothing more to be cured in me. It
was hardly worth his fee to be told that; I knew it myself. Still I did
not grudge him the money. What I minded was the mistake which he made at
first. When they picked me up from the pavement where I lay unconscious,
and somebody had mercifully sent a bullet through my horse's head, I was
carried to Dr. Archer, and he, pronouncing my brain affected, placed me
in his private asylum where I was obliged to endure treatment for
insanity. At last he decided that I was well, and I, knowing that my mind
had always been as sound as his, if not sounder, ""paid my tuition"" as he
jokingly called it, and left. I told him, smiling, that I would get even
with him for his mistake, and he laughed heartily, and asked me to call
once in a while. I did so, hoping for a chance to even up accounts, but
he gave me none, and I told him I would wait.

The fall from my horse had fortunately left no evil results; on the
contrary it had changed my whole character for the better. From a lazy
young man about town, I had become active, energetic, temperate, and
above all--oh, above all else--ambitious. There was only one thing which
troubled me, I laughed at my own uneasiness, and yet it troubled me.

During my convalescence I had bought and read for the first time, _The
King in Yellow_. I remember after finishing the first act that it
occurred to me that I had better stop. I started up and flung the book
into the fireplace; the volume struck the barred grate and fell open on
the hearth in the firelight. If I had not caught a glimpse of the opening
words in the second act I should never have finished it, but as I stooped
to pick it up, my eyes became riveted to the open page, and with a cry of
terror, or perhaps it was of joy so poignant that I suffered in every
nerve, I snatched the thing out of the coals and crept shaking to my
bedroom, where I read it and reread it, and wept and laughed and trembled
with a horror which at times assails me yet. This is the thing that
troubles me, for I cannot forget Carcosa where black stars hang in the
heavens; where the shadows of men's thoughts lengthen in the afternoon,
when the twin suns sink into the lake of Hali; and my mind will bear for
ever the memory of the Pallid Mask. I pray God will curse the writer, as
the writer has cursed the world with this beautiful, stupendous creation,
terrible in its simplicity, irresistible in its truth--a world which now
trembles before the King in Yellow. When the French Government seized the
translated copies which had just arrived in Paris, London, of course,
became eager to read it. It is well known how the book spread like an
infectious disease, from city to city, from continent to continent,
barred out here, confiscated there, denounced by Press and pulpit,
censured even by the most advanced of literary anarchists. No definite
principles had been violated in those wicked pages, no doctrine
promulgated, no convictions outraged. It could not be judged by any known
standard, yet, although it was acknowledged that the supreme note of art
had been struck in _The King in Yellow_, all felt that human nature
could not bear the strain, nor thrive on words in which the essence of
purest poison lurked. The very banality and innocence of the first act
only allowed the blow to fall afterward with more awful effect.

It was, I remember, the 13th day of April, 1920, that the first
Government Lethal Chamber was established on the south side of Washington
Square, between Wooster Street and South Fifth Avenue. The block which
had formerly consisted of a lot of shabby old buildings, used as cafés
and restaurants for foreigners, had been acquired by the Government in
the winter of 1898. The French and Italian cafés and restaurants were
torn down; the whole block was enclosed by a gilded iron railing, and
converted into a lovely garden with lawns, flowers and fountains. In the
centre of the garden stood a small, white building, severely classical in
architecture, and surrounded by thickets of flowers. Six Ionic columns
supported the roof, and the single door was of bronze. A splendid marble
group of the ""Fates"" stood before the door, the work of a young American
sculptor, Boris Yvain, who had died in Paris when only twenty-three years
old.

The inauguration ceremonies were in progress as I crossed University
Place and entered the square. I threaded my way through the silent throng
of spectators, but was stopped at Fourth Street by a cordon of police. A
regiment of United States lancers were drawn up in a hollow square round
the Lethal Chamber. On a raised tribune facing Washington Park stood the
Governor of New York, and behind him were grouped the Mayor of New
York and Brooklyn, the Inspector-General of Police, the Commandant of
the state troops, Colonel Livingston, military aid to the President of the
United States, General Blount, commanding at Governor's Island,
Major-General Hamilton, commanding the garrison of New York and Brooklyn,
Admiral Buffby of the fleet in the North River, Surgeon-General
Lanceford, the staff of the National Free Hospital, Senators Wyse and
Franklin of New York, and the Commissioner of Public Works. The tribune
was surrounded by a squadron of hussars of the National Guard.

The Governor was finishing his reply to the short speech of the
Surgeon-General. I heard him say: ""The laws prohibiting suicide and
providing punishment for any attempt at self-destruction have been
repealed. The Government has seen fit to acknowledge the right of man to
end an existence which may have become intolerable to him, through
physical suffering or mental despair. It is believed that the community
will be benefited by the removal of such people from their midst. Since
the passage of this law, the number of suicides in the United States has
not increased. Now the Government has determined to establish a Lethal
Chamber in every city, town and village in the country, it remains to be
seen whether or not that class of human creatures from whose desponding
ranks new victims of self-destruction fall daily will accept the relief
thus provided."" He paused, and turned to the white Lethal Chamber. The
silence in the street was absolute. ""There a painless death awaits him
who can no longer bear the sorrows of this life. If death is welcome let
him seek it there."" Then quickly turning to the military aid of the
President's household, he said, ""I declare the Lethal Chamber open,"" and
again facing the vast crowd he cried in a clear voice: ""Citizens of New
York and of the United States of America, through me the Government
declares the Lethal Chamber to be open.""

The solemn hush was broken by a sharp cry of command, the squadron of
hussars filed after the Governor's carriage, the lancers wheeled and
formed along Fifth Avenue to wait for the commandant of the garrison, and
the mounted police followed them. I left the crowd to gape and stare at
the white marble Death Chamber, and, crossing South Fifth Avenue, walked
along the western side of that thoroughfare to Bleecker Street. Then I
turned to the right and stopped before a dingy shop which bore the sign:

HAWBERK, ARMOURER.

I glanced in at the doorway and saw Hawberk busy in his little shop at
the end of the hall. He looked up, and catching sight of me cried in his
deep, hearty voice, ""Come in, Mr. Castaigne!"" Constance, his daughter,
rose to meet me as I crossed the threshold, and held out her pretty
hand, but I saw the blush of disappointment on her cheeks, and knew
that it was another Castaigne she had expected, my cousin Louis. I
smiled at her confusion and complimented her on the banner she was
embroidering from a coloured plate. Old Hawberk sat riveting the worn
greaves of some ancient suit of armour, and the ting! ting! ting! of his
little hammer sounded pleasantly in the quaint shop. Presently he
dropped his hammer, and fussed about for a moment with a tiny wrench.
The soft clash of the mail sent a thrill of pleasure through me. I
loved to hear the music of steel brushing against steel, the mellow
shock of the mallet on thigh pieces, and the jingle of chain armour.
That was the only reason I went to see Hawberk. He had never interested
me personally, nor did Constance, except for the fact of her being in
love with Louis. This did occupy my attention, and sometimes even kept
me awake at night. But I knew in my heart that all would come right,
and that I should arrange their future as I expected to arrange that of
my kind doctor, John Archer. However, I should never have troubled
myself about visiting them just then, had it not been, as I say, that
the music of the tinkling hammer had for me this strong fascination. I
would sit for hours, listening and listening, and when a stray sunbeam
struck the inlaid steel, the sensation it gave me was almost too keen
to endure. My eyes would become fixed, dilating with a pleasure that
stretched every nerve almost to breaking, until some movement of the
old armourer cut off the ray of sunlight, then, still thrilling
secretly, I leaned back and listened again to the sound of the
polishing rag, swish! swish! rubbing rust from the rivets.

Constance worked with the embroidery over her knees, now and then pausing
to examine more closely the pattern in the coloured plate from the
Metropolitan Museum.

""Who is this for?"" I asked.

Hawberk explained, that in addition to the treasures of armour in the
Metropolitan Museum of which he had been appointed armourer, he also
had charge of several collections belonging to rich amateurs. This was the
missing greave of a famous suit which a client of his had traced to a
little shop in Paris on the Quai d'Orsay. He, Hawberk, had negotiated for
and secured the greave, and now the suit was complete. He laid down his
hammer and read me the history of the suit, traced since 1450 from owner
to owner until it was acquired by Thomas Stainbridge. When his superb
collection was sold, this client of Hawberk's bought the suit, and since
then the search for the missing greave had been pushed until it was,
almost by accident, located in Paris.

""Did you continue the search so persistently without any certainty of the
greave being still in existence?"" I demanded.

""Of course,"" he replied coolly.

Then for the first time I took a personal interest in Hawberk.

""It was worth something to you,"" I ventured.

""No,"" he replied, laughing, ""my pleasure in finding it was my reward.""

""Have you no ambition to be rich?"" I asked, smiling.

""My one ambition is to be the best armourer in the world,"" he answered
gravely.

Constance asked me if I had seen the ceremonies at the Lethal Chamber.
She herself had noticed cavalry passing up Broadway that morning, and had
wished to see the inauguration, but her father wanted the banner
finished, and she had stayed at his request.

""Did you see your cousin, Mr. Castaigne, there?"" she asked, with the
slightest tremor of her soft eyelashes.

""No,"" I replied carelessly. ""Louis' regiment is manoeuvring out in
Westchester County."" I rose and picked up my hat and cane.

""Are you going upstairs to see the lunatic again?"" laughed old Hawberk.
If Hawberk knew how I loathe that word ""lunatic,"" he would never use it
in my presence. It rouses certain feelings within me which I do not care
to explain. However, I answered him quietly: ""I think I shall drop in and
see Mr. Wilde for a moment or two.""

""Poor fellow,"" said Constance, with a shake of the head, ""it must be hard
to live alone year after year poor, crippled and almost demented. It is
very good of you, Mr. Castaigne, to visit him as often as you do.""

""I think he is vicious,"" observed Hawberk, beginning again with his
hammer. I listened to the golden tinkle on the greave plates; when he had
finished I replied:

""No, he is not vicious, nor is he in the least demented. His mind is a
wonder chamber, from which he can extract treasures that you and I would
give years of our life to acquire.""'

Hawberk laughed.

I continued a little impatiently: ""He knows history as no one else could
know it. Nothing, however trivial, escapes his search, and his memory is
so absolute, so precise in details, that were it known in New York that
such a man existed, the people could not honour him enough.""

""Nonsense,"" muttered Hawberk, searching on the floor for a fallen rivet.

""Is it nonsense,"" I asked, managing to suppress what I felt, ""is it
nonsense when he says that the tassets and cuissards of the enamelled
suit of armour commonly known as the 'Prince's Emblazoned' can be found
among a mass of rusty theatrical properties, broken stoves and
ragpicker's refuse in a garret in Pell Street?""

Hawberk's hammer fell to the ground, but he picked it up and asked, with
a great deal of calm, how I knew that the tassets and left cuissard were
missing from the ""Prince's Emblazoned.""

""I did not know until Mr. Wilde mentioned it to me the other day. He said
they were in the garret of 998 Pell Street.""

""Nonsense,"" he cried, but I noticed his hand trembling under his leathern
apron.

""Is this nonsense too?"" I asked pleasantly, ""is it nonsense when Mr.
Wilde continually speaks of you as the Marquis of Avonshire and of Miss
Constance--""

I did not finish, for Constance had started to her feet with terror
written on every feature. Hawberk looked at me and slowly smoothed his
leathern apron.

""That is impossible,"" he observed, ""Mr. Wilde may know a great many
things--""

""About armour, for instance, and the 'Prince's Emblazoned,'"" I
interposed, smiling.

""Yes,"" he continued, slowly, ""about armour also--may be--but he is wrong
in regard to the Marquis of Avonshire, who, as you know, killed his
wife's traducer years ago, and went to Australia where he did not long
survive his wife.""

""Mr. Wilde is wrong,"" murmured Constance. Her lips were blanched, but her
voice was sweet and calm.

""Let us agree, if you please, that in this one circumstance Mr. Wilde is
wrong,"" I said.




II

I climbed the three dilapidated flights of stairs, which I had so often
climbed before, and knocked at a small door at the end of the corridor.
Mr. Wilde opened the door and I walked in.

When he had double-locked the door and pushed a heavy chest against it,
he came and sat down beside me, peering up into my face with his little
light-coloured eyes. Half a dozen new scratches covered his nose and
cheeks, and the silver wires which supported his artificial ears had
become displaced. I thought I had never seen him so hideously
fascinating. He had no ears. The artificial ones, which now stood out at
an angle from the fine wire, were his one weakness. They were made of wax
and painted a shell pink, but the rest of his face was yellow. He might
better have revelled in the luxury of some artificial fingers for his
left hand, which was absolutely fingerless, but it seemed to cause him no
inconvenience, and he was satisfied with his wax ears. He was very small,
scarcely higher than a child of ten, but his arms were magnificently
developed, and his thighs as thick as any athlete's. Still, the most
remarkable thing about Mr. Wilde was that a man of his marvellous
intelligence and knowledge should have such a head. It was flat and
pointed, like the heads of many of those unfortunates whom people
imprison in asylums for the weak-minded. Many called him insane, but I
knew him to be as sane as I was.

I do not deny that he was eccentric; the mania he had for keeping that
cat and teasing her until she flew at his face like a demon, was
certainly eccentric. I never could understand why he kept the creature,
nor what pleasure he found in shutting himself up in his room with this
surly, vicious beast. I remember once, glancing up from the manuscript I
was studying by the light of some tallow dips, and seeing Mr. Wilde
squatting motionless on his high chair, his eyes fairly blazing with
excitement, while the cat, which had risen from her place before the
stove, came creeping across the floor right at him. Before I could move
she flattened her belly to the ground, crouched, trembled, and sprang
into his face. Howling and foaming they rolled over and over on the
floor, scratching and clawing, until the cat screamed and fled under the
cabinet, and Mr. Wilde turned over on his back, his limbs contracting and
curling up like the legs of a dying spider. He _was_ eccentric.

Mr. Wilde had climbed into his high chair, and, after studying my face,
picked up a dog's-eared ledger and opened it.

""Henry B. Matthews,"" he read, ""book-keeper with Whysot Whysot and
Company, dealers in church ornaments. Called April 3rd. Reputation
damaged on the race-track. Known as a welcher. Reputation to be repaired
by August 1st. Retainer Five Dollars."" He turned the page and ran his
fingerless knuckles down the closely-written columns.

""P. Greene Dusenberry, Minister of the Gospel, Fairbeach, New Jersey.
Reputation damaged in the Bowery. To be repaired as soon as possible.
Retainer $100.""

He coughed and added, ""Called, April 6th.""

""Then you are not in need of money, Mr. Wilde,"" I inquired.

""Listen,"" he coughed again.

""Mrs. C. Hamilton Chester, of Chester Park, New York City. Called April
7th. Reputation damaged at Dieppe, France. To be repaired by October 1st
Retainer $500.

""Note.--C. Hamilton Chester, Captain U.S.S. 'Avalanche', ordered home
from South Sea Squadron October 1st.""

""Well,"" I said, ""the profession of a Repairer of Reputations is
lucrative.""

His colourless eyes sought mine, ""I only wanted to demonstrate that I
was correct. You said it was impossible to succeed as a Repairer of
Reputations; that even if I did succeed in certain cases it would cost
me more than I would gain by it. To-day I have five hundred men in my
employ, who are poorly paid, but who pursue the work with an enthusiasm
which possibly may be born of fear. These men enter every shade and grade
of society; some even are pillars of the most exclusive social temples;
others are the prop and pride of the financial world; still others, hold
undisputed sway among the 'Fancy and the Talent.' I choose them at my
leisure from those who reply to my advertisements. It is easy enough,
they are all cowards. I could treble the number in twenty days if I
wished. So you see, those who have in their keeping the reputations of
their fellow-citizens, I have in my pay.""

""They may turn on you,"" I suggested.

He rubbed his thumb over his cropped ears, and adjusted the wax
substitutes. ""I think not,"" he murmured thoughtfully, ""I seldom have to
apply the whip, and then only once. Besides they like their wages.""

""How do you apply the whip?"" I demanded.

His face for a moment was awful to look upon. His eyes dwindled to a pair
of green sparks.

""I invite them to come and have a little chat with me,"" he said in a soft
voice.

A knock at the door interrupted him, and his face resumed its amiable
expression.

""Who is it?"" he inquired.

""Mr. Steylette,"" was the answer.

""Come to-morrow,"" replied Mr. Wilde.

""Impossible,"" began the other, but was silenced by a sort of bark from
Mr. Wilde.

""Come to-morrow,"" he repeated.

We heard somebody move away from the door and turn the corner by the
stairway.

""Who is that?"" I asked.

""Arnold Steylette, Owner and Editor in Chief of the great New York
daily.""

He drummed on the ledger with his fingerless hand adding: ""I pay him very
badly, but he thinks it a good bargain.""

""Arnold Steylette!"" I repeated amazed.

""Yes,"" said Mr. Wilde, with a self-satisfied cough.

The cat, which had entered the room as he spoke, hesitated, looked up at
him and snarled. He climbed down from the chair and squatting on the
floor, took the creature into his arms and caressed her. The cat ceased
snarling and presently began a loud purring which seemed to increase in
timbre as he stroked her. ""Where are the notes?"" I asked. He pointed to
the table, and for the hundredth time I picked up the bundle of
manuscript entitled--

""THE IMPERIAL DYNASTY OF AMERICA.""

One by one I studied the well-worn pages, worn only by my own handling,
and although I knew all by heart, from the beginning, ""When from Carcosa,
the Hyades, Hastur, and Aldebaran,"" to ""Castaigne, Louis de Calvados,
born December 19th, 1877,"" I read it with an eager, rapt attention,
pausing to repeat parts of it aloud, and dwelling especially on ""Hildred
de Calvados, only son of Hildred Castaigne and Edythe Landes Castaigne,
first in succession,"" etc., etc.

When I finished, Mr. Wilde nodded and coughed.

""Speaking of your legitimate ambition,"" he said, ""how do Constance and
Louis get along?""

""She loves him,"" I replied simply.

The cat on his knee suddenly turned and struck at his eyes, and he flung
her off and climbed on to the chair opposite me.

""And Dr. Archer! But that's a matter you can settle any time you wish,""
he added.

""Yes,"" I replied, ""Dr. Archer can wait, but it is time I saw my cousin
Louis.""

""It is time,"" he repeated. Then he took another ledger from the table and
ran over the leaves rapidly. ""We are now in communication with ten
thousand men,"" he muttered. ""We can count on one hundred thousand within
the first twenty-eight hours, and in forty-eight hours the state will
rise _en masse_. The country follows the state, and the portion that
will not, I mean California and the Northwest, might better never have
been inhabited. I shall not send them the Yellow Sign.""

The blood rushed to my head, but I only answered, ""A new broom sweeps
clean.""

""The ambition of Caesar and of Napoleon pales before that which could not
rest until it had seized the minds of men and controlled even their
unborn thoughts,"" said Mr. Wilde.

""You are speaking of the King in Yellow,"" I groaned, with a shudder.

""He is a king whom emperors have served.""

""I am content to serve him,"" I replied.

Mr. Wilde sat rubbing his ears with his crippled hand. ""Perhaps Constance
does not love him,"" he suggested.

I started to reply, but a sudden burst of military music from the street
below drowned my voice. The twentieth dragoon regiment, formerly in
garrison at Mount St. Vincent, was returning from the manoeuvres in
Westchester County, to its new barracks on East Washington Square. It was
my cousin's regiment. They were a fine lot of fellows, in their pale
blue, tight-fitting jackets, jaunty busbys and white riding breeches with
the double yellow stripe, into which their limbs seemed moulded. Every
other squadron was armed with lances, from the metal points of which
fluttered yellow and white pennons. The band passed, playing the
regimental march, then came the colonel and staff, the horses crowding
and trampling, while their heads bobbed in unison, and the pennons
fluttered from their lance points. The troopers, who rode with the
beautiful English seat, looked brown as berries from their bloodless
campaign among the farms of Westchester, and the music of their sabres
against the stirrups, and the jingle of spurs and carbines was delightful
to me. I saw Louis riding with his squadron. He was as handsome an
officer as I have ever seen. Mr. Wilde, who had mounted a chair by the
window, saw him too, but said nothing. Louis turned and looked straight
at Hawberk's shop as he passed, and I could see the flush on his brown
cheeks. I think Constance must have been at the window. When the last
troopers had clattered by, and the last pennons vanished into South Fifth
Avenue, Mr. Wilde clambered out of his chair and dragged the chest away
from the door.

""Yes,"" he said, ""it is time that you saw your cousin Louis.""

He unlocked the door and I picked up my hat and stick and stepped into
the corridor. The stairs were dark. Groping about, I set my foot on
something soft, which snarled and spit, and I aimed a murderous blow at
the cat, but my cane shivered to splinters against the balustrade, and
the beast scurried back into Mr. Wilde's room.

Passing Hawberk's door again I saw him still at work on the armour, but
I did not stop, and stepping out into Bleecker Street, I followed it to
Wooster, skirted the grounds of the Lethal Chamber, and crossing
Washington Park went straight to my rooms in the Benedick. Here I lunched
comfortably, read the _Herald_ and the _Meteor_, and finally went
to the steel safe in my bedroom and set the time combination. The
three and three-quarter minutes which it is necessary to wait, while the
time lock is opening, are to me golden moments. From the instant I set
the combination to the moment when I grasp the knobs and swing back
the solid steel doors, I live in an ecstasy of expectation. Those moments
must be like moments passed in Paradise. I know what I am to find at
the end of the time limit. I know what the massive safe holds secure for
me, for me alone, and the exquisite pleasure of waiting is hardly enhanced
when the safe opens and I lift, from its velvet crown, a diadem of purest
gold, blazing with diamonds. I do this every day, and yet the joy of
waiting and at last touching again the diadem, only seems to increase as
the days pass. It is a diadem fit for a King among kings, an Emperor
among emperors. The King in Yellow might scorn it, but it shall be worn
by his royal servant.

I held it in my arms until the alarm in the safe rang harshly, and then
tenderly, proudly, I replaced it and shut the steel doors. I walked
slowly back into my study, which faces Washington Square, and leaned on
the window sill. The afternoon sun poured into my windows, and a gentle
breeze stirred the branches of the elms and maples in the park, now
covered with buds and tender foliage. A flock of pigeons circled about
the tower of the Memorial Church; sometimes alighting on the purple tiled
roof, sometimes wheeling downward to the lotos fountain in front of the
marble arch. The gardeners were busy with the flower beds around the
fountain, and the freshly turned earth smelled sweet and spicy. A lawn
mower, drawn by a fat white horse, clinked across the green sward, and
watering-carts poured showers of spray over the asphalt drives. Around
the statue of Peter Stuyvesant, which in 1897 had replaced the
monstrosity supposed to represent Garibaldi, children played in the
spring sunshine, and nurse girls wheeled elaborate baby carriages with a
reckless disregard for the pasty-faced occupants, which could probably be
explained by the presence of half a dozen trim dragoon troopers languidly
lolling on the benches. Through the trees, the Washington Memorial Arch
glistened like silver in the sunshine, and beyond, on the eastern
extremity of the square the grey stone barracks of the dragoons, and the
white granite artillery stables were alive with colour and motion.

I looked at the Lethal Chamber on the corner of the square opposite. A
few curious people still lingered about the gilded iron railing, but
inside the grounds the paths were deserted. I watched the fountains
ripple and sparkle; the sparrows had already found this new bathing nook,
and the basins were covered with the dusty-feathered little things. Two
or three white peacocks picked their way across the lawns, and a drab
coloured pigeon sat so motionless on the arm of one of the ""Fates,"" that
it seemed to be a part of the sculptured stone.

As I was turning carelessly away, a slight commotion in the group of
curious loiterers around the gates attracted my attention. A young man
had entered, and was advancing with nervous strides along the gravel path
which leads to the bronze doors of the Lethal Chamber. He paused a moment
before the ""Fates,"" and as he raised his head to those three mysterious
faces, the pigeon rose from its sculptured perch, circled about for a
moment and wheeled to the east. The young man pressed his hand to his
face, and then with an undefinable gesture sprang up the marble steps,
the bronze doors closed behind him, and half an hour later the loiterers
slouched away, and the frightened pigeon returned to its perch in the
arms of Fate.

I put on my hat and went out into the park for a little walk before
dinner. As I crossed the central driveway a group of officers passed, and
one of them called out, ""Hello, Hildred,"" and came back to shake hands
with me. It was my cousin Louis, who stood smiling and tapping his
spurred heels with his riding-whip.

""Just back from Westchester,"" he said; ""been doing the bucolic; milk and
curds, you know, dairy-maids in sunbonnets, who say 'haeow' and 'I don't
think' when you tell them they are pretty. I'm nearly dead for a square
meal at Delmonico's. What's the news?""

""There is none,"" I replied pleasantly. ""I saw your regiment coming in this
morning.""

""Did you? I didn't see you. Where were you?""

""In Mr. Wilde's window.""

""Oh, hell!"" he began impatiently, ""that man is stark mad! I don't
understand why you--""

He saw how annoyed I felt by this outburst, and begged my pardon.

""Really, old chap,"" he said, ""I don't mean to run down a man you like,
but for the life of me I can't see what the deuce you find in common with
Mr. Wilde. He's not well bred, to put it generously; he is hideously
deformed; his head is the head of a criminally insane person. You know
yourself he's been in an asylum--""

""So have I,"" I interrupted calmly.

Louis looked startled and confused for a moment, but recovered and
slapped me heartily on the shoulder. ""You were completely cured,"" he
began; but I stopped him again.

""I suppose you mean that I was simply acknowledged never to have been
insane.""

""Of course that--that's what I meant,"" he laughed.

I disliked his laugh because I knew it was forced, but I nodded gaily and
asked him where he was going. Louis looked after his brother officers who
had now almost reached Broadway.

""We had intended to sample a Brunswick cocktail, but to tell you the
truth I was anxious for an excuse to go and see Hawberk instead. Come
along, I'll make you my excuse.""

We found old Hawberk, neatly attired in a fresh spring suit, standing at
the door of his shop and sniffing the air.

""I had just decided to take Constance for a little stroll before dinner,""
he replied to the impetuous volley of questions from Louis. ""We thought
of walking on the park terrace along the North River.""

At that moment Constance appeared and grew pale and rosy by turns as
Louis bent over her small gloved fingers. I tried to excuse myself,
alleging an engagement uptown, but Louis and Constance would not listen,
and I saw I was expected to remain and engage old Hawberk's attention.
After all it would be just as well if I kept my eye on Louis, I thought,
and when they hailed a Spring Street horse-car, I got in after them and
took my seat beside the armourer.

The beautiful line of parks and granite terraces overlooking the wharves
along the North River, which were built in 1910 and finished in the
autumn of 1917, had become one of the most popular promenades in the
metropolis. They extended from the battery to 190th Street, overlooking
the noble river and affording a fine view of the Jersey shore and the
Highlands opposite. Cafés and restaurants were scattered here and there
among the trees, and twice a week military bands from the garrison played
in the kiosques on the parapets.

We sat down in the sunshine on the bench at the foot of the equestrian
statue of General Sheridan. Constance tipped her sunshade to shield her
eyes, and she and Louis began a murmuring conversation which was
impossible to catch. Old Hawberk, leaning on his ivory headed cane,
lighted an excellent cigar, the mate to which I politely refused, and
smiled at vacancy. The sun hung low above the Staten Island woods, and
the bay was dyed with golden hues reflected from the sun-warmed sails of
the shipping in the harbour.

Brigs, schooners, yachts, clumsy ferry-boats, their decks swarming with
people, railroad transports carrying lines of brown, blue and white
freight cars, stately sound steamers, déclassé tramp steamers, coasters,
dredgers, scows, and everywhere pervading the entire bay impudent little
tugs puffing and whistling officiously;--these were the craft which
churned the sunlight waters as far as the eye could reach. In calm
contrast to the hurry of sailing vessel and steamer a silent fleet of
white warships lay motionless in midstream.

Constance's merry laugh aroused me from my reverie.

""What _are_ you staring at?"" she inquired.

""Nothing--the fleet,"" I smiled.

Then Louis told us what the vessels were, pointing out each by its
relative position to the old Red Fort on Governor's Island.

""That little cigar shaped thing is a torpedo boat,"" he explained; ""there
are four more lying close together. They are the _Tarpon_, the _Falcon_,
the _Sea Fox_, and the _Octopus_. The gun-boats just above are the
_Princeton_, the _Champlain_, the _Still Water_ and the _Erie_. Next to
them lie the cruisers _Faragut_ and _Los Angeles_, and above them the
battle ships _California_, and _Dakota_, and the _Washington_ which is
the flag ship. Those two squatty looking chunks of metal which are
anchored there off Castle William are the double turreted monitors
_Terrible_ and _Magnificent_; behind them lies the ram, _Osceola_.""

Constance looked at him with deep approval in her beautiful eyes. ""What
loads of things you know for a soldier,"" she said, and we all joined in
the laugh which followed.

Presently Louis rose with a nod to us and offered his arm to Constance,
and they strolled away along the river wall. Hawberk watched them for a
moment and then turned to me.

""Mr. Wilde was right,"" he said. ""I have found the missing tassets and
left cuissard of the 'Prince's Emblazoned,' in a vile old junk garret in
Pell Street.""

""998?"" I inquired, with a smile.

""Yes.""

""Mr. Wilde is a very intelligent man,"" I observed.

""I want to give him the credit of this most important discovery,""
continued Hawberk. ""And I intend it shall be known that he is entitled
to the fame of it.""

""He won't thank you for that,"" I answered sharply; ""please say nothing
about it.""

""Do you know what it is worth?"" said Hawberk.

""No, fifty dollars, perhaps.""

""It is valued at five hundred, but the owner of the 'Prince's Emblazoned'
will give two thousand dollars to the person who completes his suit; that
reward also belongs to Mr. Wilde.""

""He doesn't want it! He refuses it!"" I answered angrily. ""What do you
know about Mr. Wilde? He doesn't need the money. He is rich--or will
be--richer than any living man except myself. What will we care for money
then--what will we care, he and I, when--when--""

""When what?"" demanded Hawberk, astonished.

""You will see,"" I replied, on my guard again.

He looked at me narrowly, much as Doctor Archer used to, and I knew he
thought I was mentally unsound. Perhaps it was fortunate for him that he
did not use the word lunatic just then.

""No,"" I replied to his unspoken thought, ""I am not mentally weak; my mind
is as healthy as Mr. Wilde's. I do not care to explain just yet what I
have on hand, but it is an investment which will pay more than mere gold,
silver and precious stones. It will secure the happiness and prosperity
of a continent--yes, a hemisphere!""

""Oh,"" said Hawberk.

""And eventually,"" I continued more quietly, ""it will secure the happiness
of the whole world.""

""And incidentally your own happiness and prosperity as well as Mr.
Wilde's?""

""Exactly,"" I smiled. But I could have throttled him for taking that tone.

He looked at me in silence for a while and then said very gently, ""Why
don't you give up your books and studies, Mr. Castaigne, and take a tramp
among the mountains somewhere or other? You used to be fond of fishing.
Take a cast or two at the trout in the Rangelys.""

""I don't care for fishing any more,"" I answered, without a shade of
annoyance in my voice.

""You used to be fond of everything,"" he continued; ""athletics, yachting,
shooting, riding--""

""I have never cared to ride since my fall,"" I said quietly.

""Ah, yes, your fall,"" he repeated, looking away from me.

I thought this nonsense had gone far enough, so I brought the
conversation back to Mr. Wilde; but he was scanning my face again in a
manner highly offensive to me.

""Mr. Wilde,"" he repeated, ""do you know what he did this afternoon? He
came downstairs and nailed a sign over the hall door next to mine; it
read:

""MR. WILDE,
REPAIRER OF REPUTATIONS.
Third Bell.

""Do you know what a Repairer of Reputations can be?""

""I do,"" I replied, suppressing the rage within.

""Oh,"" he said again.

Louis and Constance came strolling by and stopped to ask if we would join
them. Hawberk looked at his watch. At the same moment a puff of smoke
shot from the casemates of Castle William, and the boom of the sunset gun
rolled across the water and was re-echoed from the Highlands opposite.
The flag came running down from the flag-pole, the bugles sounded on the
white decks of the warships, and the first electric light sparkled out
from the Jersey shore.

As I turned into the city with Hawberk I heard Constance murmur something
to Louis which I did not understand; but Louis whispered ""My darling,"" in
reply; and again, walking ahead with Hawberk through the square I heard a
murmur of ""sweetheart,"" and ""my own Constance,"" and I knew the time had
nearly arrived when I should speak of important matters with my cousin
Louis.




III

One morning early in May I stood before the steel safe in my bedroom,
trying on the golden jewelled crown. The diamonds flashed fire as I
turned to the mirror, and the heavy beaten gold burned like a halo about
my head. I remembered Camilla's agonized scream and the awful words
echoing through the dim streets of Carcosa. They were the last lines in
the first act, and I dared not think of what followed--dared not, even
in the spring sunshine, there in my own room, surrounded with familiar
objects, reassured by the bustle from the street and the voices of the
servants in the hallway outside. For those poisoned words had dropped
slowly into my heart, as death-sweat drops upon a bed-sheet and is
absorbed. Trembling, I put the diadem from my head and wiped my forehead,
but I thought of Hastur and of my own rightful ambition, and I remembered
Mr. Wilde as I had last left him, his face all torn and bloody from the
claws of that devil's creature, and what he said--ah, what he said. The
alarm bell in the safe began to whirr harshly, and I knew my time was up;
but I would not heed it, and replacing the flashing circlet upon my head
I turned defiantly to the mirror. I stood for a long time absorbed in the
changing expression of my own eyes. The mirror reflected a face which was
like my own, but whiter, and so thin that I hardly recognized it And all
the time I kept repeating between my clenched teeth, ""The day has come!
the day has come!"" while the alarm in the safe whirred and clamoured, and
the diamonds sparkled and flamed above my brow. I heard a door open but
did not heed it. It was only when I saw two faces in the mirror:--it was
only when another face rose over my shoulder, and two other eyes met
mine. I wheeled like a flash and seized a long knife from my
dressing-table, and my cousin sprang back very pale, crying: ""Hildred!
for God's sake!"" then as my hand fell, he said: ""It is I, Louis, don't
you know me?"" I stood silent. I could not have spoken for my life. He
walked up to me and took the knife from my hand.

""What is all this?"" he inquired, in a gentle voice. ""Are you ill?""

""No,"" I replied. But I doubt if he heard me.

""Come, come, old fellow,"" he cried, ""take off that brass crown and toddle
into the study. Are you going to a masquerade? What's all this theatrical
tinsel anyway?""

I was glad he thought the crown was made of brass and paste, yet I didn't
like him any the better for thinking so. I let him take it from my hand,
knowing it was best to humour him. He tossed the splendid diadem in the
air, and catching it, turned to me smiling.

""It's dear at fifty cents,"" he said. ""What's it for?""

I did not answer, but took the circlet from his hands, and placing it in
the safe shut the massive steel door. The alarm ceased its infernal din
at once. He watched me curiously, but did not seem to notice the sudden
ceasing of the alarm. He did, however, speak of the safe as a biscuit
box. Fearing lest he might examine the combination I led the way into my
study. Louis threw himself on the sofa and flicked at flies with his
eternal riding-whip. He wore his fatigue uniform with the braided jacket
and jaunty cap, and I noticed that his riding-boots were all splashed
with red mud.

""Where have you been?"" I inquired.

""Jumping mud creeks in Jersey,"" he said. ""I haven't had time to change
yet; I was rather in a hurry to see you. Haven't you got a glass of
something? I'm dead tired; been in the saddle twenty-four hours.""

I gave him some brandy from my medicinal store, which he drank with a
grimace.

""Damned bad stuff,"" he observed. ""I'll give you an address where they
sell brandy that is brandy.""

""It's good enough for my needs,"" I said indifferently. ""I use it to rub
my chest with."" He stared and flicked at another fly.

""See here, old fellow,"" he began, ""I've got something to suggest to you.
It's four years now that you've shut yourself up here like an owl, never
going anywhere, never taking any healthy exercise, never doing a damn
thing but poring over those books up there on the mantelpiece.""

He glanced along the row of shelves. ""Napoleon, Napoleon, Napoleon!"" he
read. ""For heaven's sake, have you nothing but Napoleons there?""

""I wish they were bound in gold,"" I said. ""But wait, yes, there is
another book, _The King in Yellow_."" I looked him steadily in the
eye.

""Have you never read it?"" I asked.

""I? No, thank God! I don't want to be driven crazy.""

I saw he regretted his speech as soon as he had uttered it. There is only
one word which I loathe more than I do lunatic and that word is crazy.
But I controlled myself and asked him why he thought _The King in
Yellow_ dangerous.

""Oh, I don't know,"" he said, hastily. ""I only remember the excitement it
created and the denunciations from pulpit and Press. I believe the author
shot himself after bringing forth this monstrosity, didn't he?""

""I understand he is still alive,"" I answered.

""That's probably true,"" he muttered; ""bullets couldn't kill a fiend like
that.""

""It is a book of great truths,"" I said.

""Yes,"" he replied, ""of 'truths' which send men frantic and blast their
lives. I don't care if the thing is, as they say, the very supreme
essence of art. It's a crime to have written it, and I for one shall
never open its pages.""

""Is that what you have come to tell me?"" I asked.

""No,"" he said, ""I came to tell you that I am going to be married.""

I believe for a moment my heart ceased to beat, but I kept my eyes on his
face.

""Yes,"" he continued, smiling happily, ""married to the sweetest girl on
earth.""

""Constance Hawberk,"" I said mechanically.

""How did you know?"" he cried, astonished. ""I didn't know it myself until
that evening last April, when we strolled down to the embankment before
dinner.""

""When is it to be?"" I asked.

""It was to have been next September, but an hour ago a despatch came
ordering our regiment to the Presidio, San Francisco. We leave at noon
to-morrow. To-morrow,"" he repeated. ""Just think, Hildred, to-morrow I
shall be the happiest fellow that ever drew breath in this jolly world,
for Constance will go with me.""

I offered him my hand in congratulation, and he seized and shook it like
the good-natured fool he was--or pretended to be.

""I am going to get my squadron as a wedding present,"" he rattled on.
""Captain and Mrs. Louis Castaigne, eh, Hildred?""

Then he told me where it was to be and who were to be there, and made me
promise to come and be best man. I set my teeth and listened to his
boyish chatter without showing what I felt, but--

I was getting to the limit of my endurance, and when he jumped up, and,
switching his spurs till they jingled, said he must go, I did not detain
him.

""There's one thing I want to ask of you,"" I said quietly.

""Out with it, it's promised,"" he laughed.

""I want you to meet me for a quarter of an hour's talk to-night.""

""Of course, if you wish,"" he said, somewhat puzzled. ""Where?""

""Anywhere, in the park there.""

""What time, Hildred?""

""Midnight.""

""What in the name of--"" he began, but checked himself and laughingly
assented. I watched him go down the stairs and hurry away, his sabre
banging at every stride. He turned into Bleecker Street, and I knew he
was going to see Constance. I gave him ten minutes to disappear and then
followed in his footsteps, taking with me the jewelled crown and the
silken robe embroidered with the Yellow Sign. When I turned into Bleecker
Street, and entered the doorway which bore the sign--

MR. WILDE,
REPAIRER OF REPUTATIONS.
Third Bell.

I saw old Hawberk moving about in his shop, and imagined I heard
Constance's voice in the parlour; but I avoided them both and hurried up
the trembling stairways to Mr. Wilde's apartment. I knocked and entered
without ceremony. Mr. Wilde lay groaning on the floor, his face covered
with blood, his clothes torn to shreds. Drops of blood were scattered
about over the carpet, which had also been ripped and frayed in the
evidently recent struggle.

""It's that cursed cat,"" he said, ceasing his groans, and turning his
colourless eyes to me; ""she attacked me while I was asleep. I believe she
will kill me yet.""

This was too much, so I went into the kitchen, and, seizing a hatchet
from the pantry, started to find the infernal beast and settle her then
and there. My search was fruitless, and after a while I gave it up and
came back to find Mr. Wilde squatting on his high chair by the table. He
had washed his face and changed his clothes. The great furrows which the
cat's claws had ploughed up in his face he had filled with collodion, and
a rag hid the wound in his throat. I told him I should kill the cat when
I came across her, but he only shook his head and turned to the open
ledger before him. He read name after name of the people who had come to
him in regard to their reputation, and the sums he had amassed were
startling.

""I put on the screws now and then,"" he explained.

""One day or other some of these people will assassinate you,"" I insisted.

""Do you think so?"" he said, rubbing his mutilated ears.

It was useless to argue with him, so I took down the manuscript entitled
Imperial Dynasty of America, for the last time I should ever take it down
in Mr. Wilde's study. I read it through, thrilling and trembling with
pleasure. When I had finished Mr. Wilde took the manuscript and, turning
to the dark passage which leads from his study to his bed-chamber,
called out in a loud voice, ""Vance."" Then for the first time, I noticed a
man crouching there in the shadow. How I had overlooked him during my
search for the cat, I cannot imagine.

""Vance, come in,"" cried Mr. Wilde.

The figure rose and crept towards us, and I shall never forget the face
that he raised to mine, as the light from the window illuminated it.

""Vance, this is Mr. Castaigne,"" said Mr. Wilde. Before he had finished
speaking, the man threw himself on the ground before the table, crying
and grasping, ""Oh, God! Oh, my God! Help me! Forgive me! Oh, Mr.
Castaigne, keep that man away. You cannot, you cannot mean it! You are
different--save me! I am broken down--I was in a madhouse and now--when
all was coming right--when I had forgotten the King--the King in Yellow
and--but I shall go mad again--I shall go mad--""

His voice died into a choking rattle, for Mr. Wilde had leapt on him and
his right hand encircled the man's throat. When Vance fell in a heap on
the floor, Mr. Wilde clambered nimbly into his chair again, and rubbing
his mangled ears with the stump of his hand, turned to me and asked me
for the ledger. I reached it down from the shelf and he opened it. After
a moment's searching among the beautifully written pages, he coughed
complacently, and pointed to the name Vance.

""Vance,"" he read aloud, ""Osgood Oswald Vance."" At the sound of his name,
the man on the floor raised his head and turned a convulsed face to Mr.
Wilde. His eyes were injected with blood, his lips tumefied. ""Called
April 28th,"" continued Mr. Wilde. ""Occupation, cashier in the Seaforth
National Bank; has served a term of forgery at Sing Sing, from whence he
was transferred to the Asylum for the Criminal Insane. Pardoned by the
Governor of New York, and discharged from the Asylum, January 19, 1918.
Reputation damaged at Sheepshead Bay. Rumours that he lives beyond his
income. Reputation to be repaired at once. Retainer $1,500.

""Note.--Has embezzled sums amounting to $30,000 since March 20, 1919,
excellent family, and secured present position through uncle's influence.
Father, President of Seaforth Bank.""

I looked at the man on the floor.

""Get up, Vance,"" said Mr. Wilde in a gentle voice. Vance rose as if
hypnotized. ""He will do as we suggest now,"" observed Mr. Wilde, and
opening the manuscript, he read the entire history of the Imperial
Dynasty of America. Then in a kind and soothing murmur he ran over the
important points with Vance, who stood like one stunned. His eyes were so
blank and vacant that I imagined he had become half-witted, and remarked
it to Mr. Wilde who replied that it was of no consequence anyway. Very
patiently we pointed out to Vance what his share in the affair would be,
and he seemed to understand after a while. Mr. Wilde explained the
manuscript, using several volumes on Heraldry, to substantiate the result
of his researches. He mentioned the establishment of the Dynasty in
Carcosa, the lakes which connected Hastur, Aldebaran and the mystery of
the Hyades. He spoke of Cassilda and Camilla, and sounded the cloudy
depths of Demhe, and the Lake of Hali. ""The scolloped tatters of the King
in Yellow must hide Yhtill forever,"" he muttered, but I do not believe
Vance heard him. Then by degrees he led Vance along the ramifications of
the Imperial family, to Uoht and Thale, from Naotalba and Phantom of
Truth, to Aldones, and then tossing aside his manuscript and notes, he
began the wonderful story of the Last King. Fascinated and thrilled I
watched him. He threw up his head, his long arms were stretched out in a
magnificent gesture of pride and power, and his eyes blazed deep in their
sockets like two emeralds. Vance listened stupefied. As for me, when at
last Mr. Wilde had finished, and pointing to me, cried, ""The cousin of
the King!"" my head swam with excitement.

Controlling myself with a superhuman effort, I explained to Vance why I
alone was worthy of the crown and why my cousin must be exiled or die.
I made him understand that my cousin must never marry, even after
renouncing all his claims, and how that least of all he should marry the
daughter of the Marquis of Avonshire and bring England into the question.
I showed him a list of thousands of names which Mr. Wilde had drawn up;
every man whose name was there had received the Yellow Sign which no
living human being dared disregard. The city, the state, the whole land,
were ready to rise and tremble before the Pallid Mask.

The time had come, the people should know the son of Hastur, and the
whole world bow to the black stars which hang in the sky over Carcosa.

Vance leaned on the table, his head buried in his hands. Mr. Wilde drew
a rough sketch on the margin of yesterday's _Herald_ with a bit of
lead pencil. It was a plan of Hawberk's rooms. Then he wrote out the
order and affixed the seal, and shaking like a palsied man I signed my
first writ of execution with my name Hildred-Rex.

Mr. Wilde clambered to the floor and unlocking the cabinet, took a long
square box from the first shelf. This he brought to the table and opened.
A new knife lay in the tissue paper inside and I picked it up and handed
it to Vance, along with the order and the plan of Hawberk's apartment.
Then Mr. Wilde told Vance he could go; and he went, shambling like an
outcast of the slums.

I sat for a while watching the daylight fade behind the square tower of
the Judson Memorial Church, and finally, gathering up the manuscript and
notes, took my hat and started for the door.

Mr. Wilde watched me in silence. When I had stepped into the hall I
looked back. Mr. Wilde's small eyes were still fixed on me. Behind him,
the shadows gathered in the fading light. Then I closed the door behind
me and went out into the darkening streets.

I had eaten nothing since breakfast, but I was not hungry. A wretched,
half-starved creature, who stood looking across the street at the Lethal
Chamber, noticed me and came up to tell me a tale of misery. I gave him
money, I don't know why, and he went away without thanking me. An
hour later another outcast approached and whined his story. I had a blank
bit of paper in my pocket, on which was traced the Yellow Sign, and I
handed it to him. He looked at it stupidly for a moment, and then with an
uncertain glance at me, folded it with what seemed to me exaggerated care
and placed it in his bosom.

The electric lights were sparkling among the trees, and the new moon
shone in the sky above the Lethal Chamber. It was tiresome waiting in the
square; I wandered from the Marble Arch to the artillery stables and back
again to the lotos fountain. The flowers and grass exhaled a fragrance
which troubled me. The jet of the fountain played in the moonlight, and
the musical splash of falling drops reminded me of the tinkle of chained
mail in Hawberk's shop. But it was not so fascinating, and the dull
sparkle of the moonlight on the water brought no such sensations of
exquisite pleasure, as when the sunshine played over the polished steel
of a corselet on Hawberk's knee. I watched the bats darting and turning
above the water plants in the fountain basin, but their rapid, jerky
flight set my nerves on edge, and I went away again to walk aimlessly to
and fro among the trees.

The artillery stables were dark, but in the cavalry barracks the
officers' windows were brilliantly lighted, and the sallyport was
constantly filled with troopers in fatigue, carrying straw and harness
and baskets filled with tin dishes.

Twice the mounted sentry at the gates was changed while I wandered up and
down the asphalt walk. I looked at my watch. It was nearly time. The
lights in the barracks went out one by one, the barred gate was closed,
and every minute or two an officer passed in through the side wicket,
leaving a rattle of accoutrements and a jingle of spurs on the night air.
The square had become very silent. The last homeless loiterer had been
driven away by the grey-coated park policeman, the car tracks along
Wooster Street were deserted, and the only sound which broke the
stillness was the stamping of the sentry's horse and the ring of his
sabre against the saddle pommel. In the barracks, the officers' quarters
were still lighted, and military servants passed and repassed before the
bay windows. Twelve o'clock sounded from the new spire of St. Francis
Xavier, and at the last stroke of the sad-toned bell a figure passed
through the wicket beside the portcullis, returned the salute of the
sentry, and crossing the street entered the square and advanced toward
the Benedick apartment house.

""Louis,"" I called.

The man pivoted on his spurred heels and came straight toward me.

""Is that you, Hildred?""

""Yes, you are on time.""

I took his offered hand, and we strolled toward the Lethal Chamber.

He rattled on about his wedding and the graces of Constance, and their
future prospects, calling my attention to his captain's shoulder-straps,
and the triple gold arabesque on his sleeve and fatigue cap. I believe I
listened as much to the music of his spurs and sabre as I did to his
boyish babble, and at last we stood under the elms on the Fourth Street
corner of the square opposite the Lethal Chamber. Then he laughed and
asked me what I wanted with him. I motioned him to a seat on a bench
under the electric light, and sat down beside him. He looked at me
curiously, with that same searching glance which I hate and fear so in
doctors. I felt the insult of his look, but he did not know it, and I
carefully concealed my feelings.

""Well, old chap,"" he inquired, ""what can I do for you?""

I drew from my pocket the manuscript and notes of the Imperial Dynasty
of America, and looking him in the eye said:

""I will tell you. On your word as a soldier, promise me to read this
manuscript from beginning to end, without asking me a question. Promise
me to read these notes in the same way, and promise me to listen to what
I have to tell later.""

""I promise, if you wish it,"" he said pleasantly. ""Give me the paper,
Hildred.""

He began to read, raising his eyebrows with a puzzled, whimsical air,
which made me tremble with suppressed anger. As he advanced his, eyebrows
contracted, and his lips seemed to form the word ""rubbish.""

Then he looked slightly bored, but apparently for my sake read, with an
attempt at interest, which presently ceased to be an effort He started
when in the closely written pages he came to his own name, and when he
came to mine he lowered the paper, and looked sharply at me for a moment
But he kept his word, and resumed his reading, and I let the half-formed
question die on his lips unanswered. When he came to the end and read the
signature of Mr. Wilde, he folded the paper carefully and returned it to
me. I handed him the notes, and he settled back, pushing his fatigue cap
up to his forehead, with a boyish gesture, which I remembered so well in
school. I watched his face as he read, and when he finished I took the
notes with the manuscript, and placed them in my pocket. Then I unfolded
a scroll marked with the Yellow Sign. He saw the sign, but he did not
seem to recognize it, and I called his attention to it somewhat sharply.

""Well,"" he said, ""I see it. What is it?""

""It is the Yellow Sign,"" I said angrily.

""Oh, that's it, is it?"" said Louis, in that flattering voice, which
Doctor Archer used to employ with me, and would probably have employed
again, had I not settled his affair for him.

I kept my rage down and answered as steadily as possible, ""Listen, you
have engaged your word?""

""I am listening, old chap,"" he replied soothingly.

I began to speak very calmly.

""Dr. Archer, having by some means become possessed of the secret of the
Imperial Succession, attempted to deprive me of my right, alleging that
because of a fall from my horse four years ago, I had become mentally
deficient. He presumed to place me under restraint in his own house in
hopes of either driving me insane or poisoning me. I have not forgotten
it. I visited him last night and the interview was final.""

Louis turned quite pale, but did not move. I resumed triumphantly, ""There
are yet three people to be interviewed in the interests of Mr. Wilde and
myself. They are my cousin Louis, Mr. Hawberk, and his daughter
Constance.""

Louis sprang to his feet and I arose also, and flung the paper marked
with the Yellow Sign to the ground.

""Oh, I don't need that to tell you what I have to say,"" I cried, with a
laugh of triumph. ""You must renounce the crown to me, do you hear, to
_me_.""

Louis looked at me with a startled air, but recovering himself said
kindly, ""Of course I renounce the--what is it I must renounce?""

""The crown,"" I said angrily.

""Of course,"" he answered, ""I renounce it. Come, old chap, I'll walk back
to your rooms with you.""

""Don't try any of your doctor's tricks on me,"" I cried, trembling with
fury. ""Don't act as if you think I am insane.""

""What nonsense,"" he replied. ""Come, it's getting late, Hildred.""

""No,"" I shouted, ""you must listen. You cannot marry, I forbid it. Do you
hear? I forbid it. You shall renounce the crown, and in reward I grant
you exile, but if you refuse you shall die.""

He tried to calm me, but I was roused at last, and drawing my long knife
barred his way.

Then I told him how they would find Dr. Archer in the cellar with his
throat open, and I laughed in his face when I thought of Vance and his
knife, and the order signed by me.

""Ah, you are the King,"" I cried, ""but I shall be King. Who are you to
keep me from Empire over all the habitable earth! I was born the cousin
of a king, but I shall be King!""

Louis stood white and rigid before me. Suddenly a man came running up
Fourth Street, entered the gate of the Lethal Temple, traversed the path
to the bronze doors at full speed, and plunged into the death chamber
with the cry of one demented, and I laughed until I wept tears, for I had
recognized Vance, and knew that Hawberk and his daughter were no longer
in my way.

""Go,"" I cried to Louis, ""you have ceased to be a menace. You will never
marry Constance now, and if you marry any one else in your exile, I will
visit you as I did my doctor last night. Mr. Wilde takes charge of you
to-morrow."" Then I turned and darted into South Fifth Avenue, and with a
cry of terror Louis dropped his belt and sabre and followed me like the
wind. I heard him close behind me at the corner of Bleecker Street, and I
dashed into the doorway under Hawberk's sign. He cried, ""Halt, or I
fire!"" but when he saw that I flew up the stairs leaving Hawberk's shop
below, he left me, and I heard him hammering and shouting at their door
as though it were possible to arouse the dead.

Mr. Wilde's door was open, and I entered crying, ""It is done, it is done!
Let the nations rise and look upon their King!"" but I could not find Mr.
Wilde, so I went to the cabinet and took the splendid diadem from its
case. Then I drew on the white silk robe, embroidered with the Yellow
Sign, and placed the crown upon my head. At last I was King, King by my
right in Hastur, King because I knew the mystery of the Hyades, and my
mind had sounded the depths of the Lake of Hali. I was King! The first
grey pencillings of dawn would raise a tempest which would shake two
hemispheres. Then as I stood, my every nerve pitched to the highest
tension, faint with the joy and splendour of my thought, without, in the
dark passage, a man groaned.

I seized the tallow dip and sprang to the door. The cat passed me like a
demon, and the tallow dip went out, but my long knife flew swifter than
she, and I heard her screech, and I knew that my knife had found her. For
a moment I listened to her tumbling and thumping about in the darkness,
and then when her frenzy ceased, I lighted a lamp and raised it over my
head. Mr. Wilde lay on the floor with his throat torn open. At first I
thought he was dead, but as I looked, a green sparkle came into his
sunken eyes, his mutilated hand trembled, and then a spasm stretched his
mouth from ear to ear. For a moment my terror and despair gave place to
hope, but as I bent over him his eyeballs rolled clean around in his
head, and he died. Then while I stood, transfixed with rage and despair,
seeing my crown, my empire, every hope and every ambition, my very life,
lying prostrate there with the dead master, _they_ came, seized me
from behind, and bound me until my veins stood out like cords, and my
voice failed with the paroxysms of my frenzied screams. But I still
raged, bleeding and infuriated among them, and more than one policeman
felt my sharp teeth. Then when I could no longer move they came nearer; I
saw old Hawberk, and behind him my cousin Louis' ghastly face, and
farther away, in the corner, a woman, Constance, weeping softly.

""Ah! I see it now!"" I shrieked. ""You have seized the throne and the
empire. Woe! woe to you who are crowned with the crown of the King in
Yellow!""


[EDITOR'S NOTE.--Mr. Castaigne died yesterday in the Asylum for Criminal
Insane.]


","On the wall hung a map of Mongolia, that indefinite region a million and a half square miles in area, vast sections of which have never been explored.

Turkestan and China border it on the south, and Tibet almost touches it, not quite.

Even in the twelfth century, when the wild Mongols broke loose and nearly overran the world, the Tibet infantry under Genghis, the Tchortcha horsemen drafted out of Black China, and a great cloud of Mongol cavalry under the Prince of the Vanguard commanding half a hundred Hezars, never penetrated that grisly and unknown waste. The ""Eight Towers of the Assassins"" guarded it—still guard it, possibly.

The vice-regent of Erlik, Prince of Darkness, dwelt within this unknown land. And dwells there still, perhaps.

In front of this wall-map stood Tressa Norne.

Behind her, facing the map, four men were seated—three of them under thirty.

These three were volunteers in the service of the United States Government—men of independent means, of position, who had volunteered for military duty at the outbreak of the great war. However, they had been assigned by the Government to a very different sort of duty no less exciting than service on the fighting line, but far less conspicuous, for they had been drafted into the United States Department of Justice.

The names of these three were Victor Cleves, a professor of ornithology at Harvard University before the war; Alexander Selden, junior partner in the banking firm of Milwyn, Selden, and Co., and James Benton, a New York architect.

The fourth man's name was John Recklow. He might have been over fifty, or under. He was well-built, in a square, athletic way, clear-skinned and ruddy, grey-eyed, quiet in voice and manner. His hair and moustache had turned silvery. He had been employed by the Government for many years. He seemed to be enormously interested in what Miss Norne was saying.

Also he was the only man who interrupted her narrative to ask questions. And his questions revealed a knowledge which was making the girl more sensitive and uneasy every moment.

Finally, when she spoke of the Scarlet Desert, he asked if the Scarlet Lake were there and if the Xin was still supposed to inhabit its vermilion depths. And at that she turned and looked at him, her forefinger still resting on the map.

""Where have you ever heard of the Scarlet Lake and the Xin?"" she asked as though frightened.

Recklow said quietly that as a boy he had served under Gordon and Sir Robert.

""If, as a boy, you served under Chinese Gordon, you already know much of what I have told you, Mr. Recklow. Is it not true?"" she demanded nervously.

""That makes no difference,"" he replied with a smile. ""It is all very new to these three young gentlemen. And as for myself, I am checking up what you say and comparing it with what I heard many, many years ago when my comrade Barres and I were in Yian.""

""Did you really know Sir Robert Hart?""

""Yes.""

""Then why do you not explain to these gentlemen?""

""Dear child,"" he interrupted gently, ""what did Chinese Gordon or Sir Robert Hart, or even my comrade Barres, or I myself know about occult Asia in comparison to what you know?—a girl who has actually served the mysteries of Erlik for four amazing years!""

She paled a trifle, came slowly across the room to where Recklow was seated, laid a timid hand on his sleeve.

""Do you believe there are sorcerers in Asia?"" she asked with that child-like directness which her wonderful blue eyes corroborated.

Recklow remained silent.

""Because,"" she went on, ""if, in your heart, you do not believe this to be an accursed fact, then what I have to say will mean nothing to any of you.""

Recklow touched his short, silvery moustache, hesitating. Then:

""The worship of Erlik is devil worship,"" he said. ""Also I am entirely prepared to believe that there are, among the Yezidees, adepts who employ scientific weapons against civilisation—who have probably obtained a rather terrifying knowledge of psychic laws which they use scientifically, and which to ordinary, God-fearing folk appear to be the black magic of sorcerers.""

Cleves said: ""The employment by the huns of poison gases and long-range cannon is a parallel case. Before the war we could not believe in the possibility of a cannon that threw shells a distance of seventy miles.""

The girl still addressed herself to Recklow: ""Then you do not believe there are real sorcerers in Asia, Mr. Recklow?""

""Not sorcerers with supernatural powers for evil. Only degenerate human beings who, somehow, have managed to tap invisible psychic currents, and have learned how to use terrific forces about which, so far, we know practically nothing.""

She spoke again in the same uneasy voice: ""Then you do not believe that either God or Satan is involved?""

""No,"" he replied smilingly, ""and you must not so believe.""

""Nor the—the destruction of human souls,"" she persisted; ""you do not believe it is being accomplished to-day?""

""Not in the slightest, dear young lady,"" he said cheerfully.

""Do you not believe that to have been instructed in such unlawful knowledge is damning? Do you not believe that ability to employ unknown forces is forbidden of God, and that to disobey His law means death to the soul?""

""No!""

""That it is the price one pays to Satan for occult power over people's minds?"" she insisted.

""Hypnotic suggestion is not one of the cardinal sins,"" explained Recklow, still smiling—""unless wickedly employed. The Yezidee priesthood is a band of so-called sorcerers only because of their wicked employment of whatever hypnotic and psychic knowledge they may have obtained.

""There was nothing intrinsically wicked in the huns' discovery of phosgene. But the use they made of it made devils out of them. My ability to manufacture phosgene gas is no crime. But if I manufacture it and use it to poison innocent human beings, then, in that sense, I am, perhaps, a sort of modern sorcerer.""

Tressa Norne turned paler:

""I had better tell you that I have used—forbidden knowledge—which the Yezidees taught me in the temple of Erlik.""

""Used it how?"" demanded Cleves.

""To—to earn a living.... And once or twice to defend myself.""

There was the slightest scepticism in Recklow's bland smile. ""You did quite right, Miss Norne.""

She had become very white now. She stood beside Recklow, her back toward the suspended map, and looked in a scared sort of way from one to the other of the men seated before her, turning finally to Cleves, and coming toward him.

""I—I once killed a man,"" she said with a catch in her breath.

Cleves reddened with astonishment. ""Why did you do that?"" he asked.

""He was already on his way to kill me in bed.""

""You were perfectly right,"" remarked Recklow coolly.

""I don't know ... I was in bed.... And then, on the edge of sleep, I felt his mind groping to get hold of mine—feeling about in the darkness to get hold of my brain and seize it and paralyse it.""

All colour had left her face. Cleves gripped the arm of his chair and watched her intently.

""I—I had only a moment's mental freedom,"" she went on in a ghost of a voice. ""I was just able to rouse myself, fight off those murderous brain-fingers—let loose a clear mental ray.... And then, O God! I saw him in his room with his Kalmuck knife—saw him already on his way to murder me—Gutchlug Khan, the Yezidee—looking about in his bedroom for a shroud.... And when—when he reached for the bed to draw forth a fine, white sheet for the shroud without which no Yezidee dares journey deathward—then—then I became frightened.... And I killed him—I slew him there in his hotel bedroom on the floor above mine!""

Selden moistened his lips: ""That Oriental, Gutchlug, died from heart-failure in a San Francisco hotel,"" he said. ""I was there at the time.""

""He died by the fangs of a little yellow snake,"" whispered the girl.

""There was no snake in his room,"" retorted Cleves.

""And no wound on his body,"" added Selden. ""I attended the autopsy.""

She said, faintly: ""There was no snake, and no wound, as you say.... Yet Gutchlug died of both there in his bedroom.... And before he died he heard his soul bidding him farewell; and he saw the death-adder coiled in the sheet he clutched—saw the thing strike him again and again—saw and felt the tiny wounds on his left hand; felt the fangs pricking deep, deep into the veins; died of it there within the minute—died of the swiftest poison known. And yet——""

She turned her dead-white face to Cleves—""And yet there was no snake there!... And never had been.... And so I—I ask you, gentlemen, if souls do not die when minds learn to fight death with death—and deal it so swiftly, so silently, while one's body lies, unstirring on a bed—in a locked room on the floor below——""

She swayed a little, put out one hand rather blindly.

Recklow rose and passed a muscular arm around her; Cleves, beside her, held her left hand, crushing it, without intention, until she opened her eyes with a cry of pain.

""Are you all right?"" asked Recklow bluntly.

""Yes."" She turned and looked at Cleves and he caressed her bruised hand as though dazed.

""Tell me,"" she said to Cleves—""you who know—know more about my mind than anybody living——"" a painful colour surged into her face—but she went on steadily, forcing herself to meet his gaze: ""tell me, Mr. Cleves—do you still believe that nothing can really destroy my soul? And that it shall yet win through to safety?""

He said: ""Your soul is in God's keeping, and always shall be.... And if the Yezidees have made you believe otherwise, they lie.""

Recklow added in a slow, perplexed way: ""I have no personal knowledge of psychic power. I am not psychic, not susceptible. But if you actually possess such ability, Miss Norne, and if you have employed such knowledge to defend your life, then you have done absolutely right.""

""No guilt touches you,"" added Selden with an involuntary shiver, ""if by hypnosis or psychic ability you really did put an end to that would-be murderer, Gutchlug.""

Selden said: ""If Gutchlug died by the fangs of a yellow death-adder which existed only in his own mind, and if you actually had anything to do with it you acted purely in self-defence.""

""You did your full duty,"" added Benton—""but—good God!—it seems incredible to me, that such power can actually be available in the world!""

Recklow spoke again in his pleasant, undisturbed voice: ""Go back to the map, Miss Norne, and tell us a little more about this rather terrifying thing which you believe menaces the civilised world with destruction.""

Tressa Norne laid a slim finger on the map. Her voice had become steady. She said:

""The devil-worship, of which one of the modern developments is Bolshevism, and another the terrorism of the hun, began in Asia long before Christ's advent: At least so it was taught us in the temple of Erlik.

""It has always existed, its aim always has been the annihilation of good and the elevation of evil; the subjection of right by might, and the worldwide triumph of wrong.

""Perhaps it is as old as the first battle between God and Satan. I have wondered about it, sometimes. There in the dusk of the temple when the Eight Assassins came—the eight Sheiks-el-Djebel, all in white—chanting the Yakase of Sabbah—always that dirge when they came and spread their eight white shrouds on the temple steps——""

Her voice caught; she waited to recover her composure. Then went on:

""The ambition of Genghis was to conquer the world by force of arms. It was merely of physical subjection that he dreamed. But the Slayer of Souls——""

""Who?"" asked Recklow sharply.

""The Slayer of Souls—Erlik's vice-regent on earth—Hassan Sabbah. The Old Man of the Mountain. It is of him I am speaking,"" exclaimed Tressa Norne—with quiet resolution. ""Genghis sought only physical conquest of man; the Yezidee's ambition is more awful, for he is attempting to surprise and seize the very minds of men!""

There was a dead silence. Tressa looked palely upon the four.

""The Yezidees—who you tell me are not sorcerers—are using power—which you tell me is not magic accursed by God—to waylay, capture, enslave, and destroy the minds and souls of mankind.

""It may be that what they employ is hypnotic ability and psychic power and can be, some day, explained on a scientific basis when we learn more about the occult laws which govern these phenomena.

""But could anything render the threat less awful? For there have existed for centuries—perhaps always—a sect of Satanists determined upon the destruction of everything that is pure and holy and good on earth; and they are resolved to substitute for righteousness the dreadful reign of hell.

""In the beginning there were comparatively few of these human demons. Gradually, through the eras, they have increased. In the twelfth century there were fifty thousand of the Sect of Assassins.

""Beside the castle of the Slayer of Souls on Mount Alamout——"" she laid her finger on the map—""eight other towers were erected for the Eight Chief Assassins, called Sheiks-el-Djebel.

""In the temple we were taught where these eight towers stood."" She picked up a pencil, and on eight blank spaces of unexplored and unmapped Mongolia she made eight crosses. Then she turned to the men behind her.

""It was taught to us in the temple that from these eight foci of infection the disease of evil has been spreading throughout the world; from these eight towers have gone forth every year the emissaries of evil—perverted missionaries—to spread the poisonous propaganda, to teach it, to tamper stealthily with the minds of men, dominate them, pervert them, instruct them in the creed of the Assassin of Souls.

""All over the world are people, already contaminated, whose minds are already enslaved and poisoned, and who are infecting the still healthy brains of others—stealthily possessing themselves of the minds of mankind—teaching them evil, inviting them to mock the precepts of Christ.

""Of such lost minds are the degraded brains of the Germans—the pastors and philosophers who teach that might is right.

""Of such crippled minds are the Bolsheviki, poisoned long, long ago by close contact with Asia which, before that, had infected and enslaved the minds of the ruling classes with ferocious philosophy.

""Of such minds are all anarchists of every shade and stripe—all terrorists, all disciples of violence,—the murderously envious, the slothful slinking brotherhood which prowls through the world taking every opportunity to set it afire; those mentally dulled by reason of excesses; those weak intellects become unsound through futile gabble,—parlour socialists, amateur revolutionists, theoretical incapables excited by discussion fit only for healthy minds.""

She left the map and came over to where the four men were seated terribly intent upon her every word.

""In the temple of Erlik, where my girlhood was passed after the murder of my parents, I learned what I am repeating to you,"" she said.

""I learned this, also, that the Eight Towers still exist—still stand to-day,—at least theoretically—and that from the Eight Towers pours forth across the world a stream of poison.

""I was told that, to every country, eight Yezidees were allotted—eight sorcerers—or adepts in scientific psychology if you prefer it—whose mission is to teach the gospel of hell and gradually but surely to win the minds of men to the service of the Slayer of Souls.

""That is what was taught us in the temple. We were educated in the development of occult powers—for it seems all human beings possess this psychic power latent within them—only few, even when instructed, acquire any ability to control and use this force....

""I—I learned—rapidly. I even thought, sometimes, that the Yezidees were beginning to be a little afraid of me,—even the Hassani priests.... And the Sheiks-el-Djebel, spreading their shrouds on the temple steps, looked at me with unquiet eyes, where I stood like a corpse amid the incense clouds——""

She passed her fingers over her eyelids, then framed her face between both hands for a moment's thought lost in tragic retrospection.

""Kai!"" she whispered dreamily as though to herself—""what Erlik awoke within my body that was asleep, God knows, but it was as though a twin comrade arose within me and looked out through my eyes upon a world which never before had been visible.""

Utter silence reigned in the room: Cleves's breathing seemed almost painful to him so intently was he listening and watching this girl; Benton's hands whitened with his grip on the chair-arms; Selden, tense, absorbed, kept his keen gaze of a business man fastened on her face. Recklow slowly caressed the cold bowl of his pipe with both thumbs.

Tressa Norne's strange and remote eyes subtly altered, and she lifted her head and looked calmly at the men before her.

""I think that there is nothing more for me to add,"" she said. ""The Red Spectre of Anarchy, called Bolshevism at present, threatens our country. Our Government is now awake to this menace and the Secret Service is moving everywhere.

""Great damage already has been done to the minds of many people in this Republic; poison has spread; is spreading. The Eight Towers still stand. The Eight Assassins are in America.

""But these eight Assassins know me to be their enemy.... They will surely attempt to kill me.... I don't believe I can avoid—death—very long.... But I want to serve my country and—and mankind.""

""They'll have to get me first,"" said Cleves, bluntly. ""I shall not permit you out of my sight.""

Recklow said in a musing voice: ""And these eight gentlemen, who are very likely to hurt us, also, are the first people we ought to hunt.""

""To get them,"" added Selden, ""we ought to choke the stream at its source.""

""To find out who they are is what is going to worry us,"" added Benton. Cleves had stood holding a chair for Tressa Norne. Finally she noticed it and seated herself as though tired.

""Is Sanang one of these eight?"" he asked her. The girl turned and looked up at him, and he saw the flush mounting in her face.

""Sometimes,"" she said steadily, ""I have almost believed he was Erlik's own vice-regent on earth—the Slayer of Souls himself.""

Benton and Selden had gone. Recklow left a little later. Cleves accompanied him out to the landing.

""Are you going to keep Miss Norne here with you for the present?"" inquired the older man.

""Yes. I dare not let her out of my sight, Recklow. What else can I do?""

""I don't know. Is she prepared for the consequences?""

""Gossip? Slander?""

""Of course.""

""I can get a housekeeper.""

""That only makes it look worse.""

Cleves reddened. ""Well, do you want to find her in some hotel or apartment with her throat cut?""

""No,"" replied Recklow, gently, ""I do not.""

""Then what else is there to do but keep her here in my own apartment and never let her out of my sight until we can find and lock up the eight gentlemen who are undoubtedly bent on murdering her?""

""Isn't there some woman in the Service who could help out? I could mention several.""

""I tell you I can't trust Tressa Norne to anybody except myself,"" insisted Cleves. ""I got her into this; I am responsible if she is murdered; I dare not entrust her safety to anybody else. And, Recklow, it's a ghastly responsibility for a man to induce a young girl to face death, even in the service of her country.""

""If she remains here alone with you she'll face social destruction,"" remarked Recklow.

Cleves was silent for a moment, then he burst out: ""Well, what am I to do? What is there left for me to do except to watch over her and see her through this devilish business? What other way have I to protect her, Recklow?""

""You could offer her the protection of your name,"" suggested the other, carelessly.

""What? You mean—marry her?""

""Well, nobody else would be inclined to, Cleves, if it ever becomes known she has lived here quite alone with you.""

Cleves stared at the elder man.

""This is nonsense,"" he said in a harsh voice. ""That young girl doesn't want to marry anybody. Neither do I. She doesn't wish to have her throat cut, that's all. And I'm determined she shan't.""

""There are stealthier assassins, Cleves,—the slayers of reputations. It goes badly with their victim. It does indeed.""

""Well, hang it, what do you think I ought to do?""

""I think you ought to marry her if you're going to keep her here.""

""Suppose she doesn't mind the unconventionality of it?""

""All women mind. No woman, at heart, is unconventional, Cleves.""

""She—she seems to agree with me that she ought to stay here.... Besides, she has no money, no relatives, no friends in America——""

""All the more tragic. If you really believe it to be your duty to keep her here where you can look after her bodily safety, then the other obligation is still heavier. And there may come a day when Miss Norne will wish that you had been less conscientious concerning the safety of her pretty throat.... For the knife of the Yezidee is swifter and less cruel than the tongue that slays with a smile.... And this young girl has many years to live, after this business of Bolshevism is dead and forgotten in our Republic.""

""Recklow!""

""Yes?""

""You think I might dare try to find a room somewhere else for her and let her take her chances? Do you?""

""It's your affair.""

""I know—hang it! I know it's my affair. I've unintentionally made it so. But can't you tell me what I ought to do?""

""I can't.""

""What would you do?""

""Don't ask me,"" returned Recklow, sharply. ""If you're not man enough to come to a decision you may turn her over to me.""

Cleves flushed brightly. ""Do you think you are old enough to take my job and avoid scandal?""

Recklow's cold eyes rested on him: ""If you like,"" he said, ""I'll assume your various kinds of personal responsibility toward Miss Norne.""

Cleve's visage burned. ""I'll shoulder my own burdens,"" he retorted.

""Sure. I knew you would."" And Recklow smiled and held out his hand. Cleves took it without cordiality. Standing so, Recklow, still smiling, said: ""What a rotten deal that child has had—is having. Her father and mother were fine people. Did you ever hear of Dr. Norne?""

""She mentioned him once.""

""They were up-State people of most excellent antecedents and no money.

""Dr. Norne was our Vice-Consul at Yarkand in the province of Sin Kiang. All he had was his salary, and he lost that and his post when the administration changed. Then he went into the spice trade.

""Some Jew syndicate here sent him up the Yarkand River to see what could be done about jade and gold concessions. He was on that business when the tragedy happened. The Kalmuks and Khirghiz were responsible, under Yezidee instigation. And there you are:—and here is his child, Cleves—back, by some miracle, from that flowering hell called Yian, believing in her heart that she really lost her soul there in the temple. And now, here in her own native land, she is exposed to actual and hourly danger of assassination.... Poor kid!... Did you ever hear of a rottener deal, Cleves?""

Their hands had remained clasped while Recklow was speaking. He spoke again, clearly, amiably:

""To lay down one's life for a friend is fine. I'm not sure that it's finer to offer one's honour in behalf of a girl whose honour is at stake.""

After a moment Cleves's grip tightened.

""All right,"" he said.

Recklow went downstairs.

",True
"

  ""Oh, thou who burn'st in heart for those who burn
  In Hell, whose fires thyself shall feed in turn;
  How long be crying--'Mercy on them.' God!
  Why, who art thou to teach and He to learn?""

In the Church of St. Barnabé vespers were over; the clergy left the
altar; the little choir-boys flocked across the chancel and settled in
the stalls. A Suisse in rich uniform marched down the south aisle,
sounding his staff at every fourth step on the stone pavement; behind him
came that eloquent preacher and good man, Monseigneur C----.

My chair was near the chancel rail, I now turned toward the west end of
the church. The other people between the altar and the pulpit turned too.
There was a little scraping and rustling while the congregation seated
itself again; the preacher mounted the pulpit stairs, and the organ
voluntary ceased.

I had always found the organ-playing at St. Barnabé highly interesting.
Learned and scientific it was, too much so for my small knowledge, but
expressing a vivid if cold intelligence. Moreover, it possessed the
French quality of taste: taste reigned supreme, self-controlled,
dignified and reticent.

To-day, however, from the first chord I had felt a change for the worse,
a sinister change. During vespers it had been chiefly the chancel organ
which supported the beautiful choir, but now and again, quite wantonly as
it seemed, from the west gallery where the great organ stands, a heavy
hand had struck across the church at the serene peace of those clear
voices. It was something more than harsh and dissonant, and it betrayed
no lack of skill. As it recurred again and again, it set me thinking of
what my architect's books say about the custom in early times to
consecrate the choir as soon as it was built, and that the nave, being
finished sometimes half a century later, often did not get any blessing
at all: I wondered idly if that had been the case at St. Barnabé, and
whether something not usually supposed to be at home in a Christian
church might have entered undetected and taken possession of the west
gallery. I had read of such things happening, too, but not in works on
architecture.

Then I remembered that St. Barnabé was not much more than a hundred years
old, and smiled at the incongruous association of mediaeval superstitions
with that cheerful little piece of eighteenth-century rococo.

But now vespers were over, and there should have followed a few quiet
chords, fit to accompany meditation, while we waited for the sermon.
Instead of that, the discord at the lower end of the church broke out
with the departure of the clergy, as if now nothing could control it.

I belong to those children of an older and simpler generation who do not
love to seek for psychological subtleties in art; and I have ever refused
to find in music anything more than melody and harmony, but I felt that
in the labyrinth of sounds now issuing from that instrument there was
something being hunted. Up and down the pedals chased him, while the
manuals blared approval. Poor devil! whoever he was, there seemed small
hope of escape!

My nervous annoyance changed to anger. Who was doing this? How dare he
play like that in the midst of divine service? I glanced at the people
near me: not one appeared to be in the least disturbed. The placid brows
of the kneeling nuns, still turned towards the altar, lost none of their
devout abstraction under the pale shadow of their white head-dress. The
fashionable lady beside me was looking expectantly at Monseigneur C----.
For all her face betrayed, the organ might have been singing an Ave
Maria.

But now, at last, the preacher had made the sign of the cross, and
commanded silence. I turned to him gladly. Thus far I had not found the
rest I had counted on when I entered St. Barnabé that afternoon.

I was worn out by three nights of physical suffering and mental trouble:
the last had been the worst, and it was an exhausted body, and a mind
benumbed and yet acutely sensitive, which I had brought to my favourite
church for healing. For I had been reading _The King in Yellow_.

""The sun ariseth; they gather themselves together and lay them down in
their dens."" Monseigneur C---- delivered his text in a calm voice,
glancing quietly over the congregation. My eyes turned, I knew not why,
toward the lower end of the church. The organist was coming from behind
his pipes, and passing along the gallery on his way out, I saw him
disappear by a small door that leads to some stairs which descend
directly to the street. He was a slender man, and his face was as white
as his coat was black. ""Good riddance!"" I thought, ""with your wicked
music! I hope your assistant will play the closing voluntary.""

With a feeling of relief--with a deep, calm feeling of relief, I turned
back to the mild face in the pulpit and settled myself to listen. Here,
at last, was the ease of mind I longed for.

""My children,"" said the preacher, ""one truth the human soul finds hardest
of all to learn: that it has nothing to fear. It can never be made to see
that nothing can really harm it.""

""Curious doctrine!"" I thought, ""for a Catholic priest. Let us see how he
will reconcile that with the Fathers.""

""Nothing can really harm the soul,"" he went on, in, his coolest, clearest
tones, ""because----""

But I never heard the rest; my eye left his face, I knew not for what
reason, and sought the lower end of the church. The same man was coming
out from behind the organ, and was passing along the gallery _the same
way_. But there had not been time for him to return, and if he had
returned, I must have seen him. I felt a faint chill, and my heart sank;
and yet, his going and coming were no affair of mine. I looked at him: I
could not look away from his black figure and his white face. When he was
exactly opposite to me, he turned and sent across the church straight
into my eyes, a look of hate, intense and deadly: I have never seen any
other like it; would to God I might never see it again! Then he
disappeared by the same door through which I had watched him depart less
than sixty seconds before.

I sat and tried to collect my thoughts. My first sensation was like that
of a very young child badly hurt, when it catches its breath before
crying out.

To suddenly find myself the object of such hatred was exquisitely
painful: and this man was an utter stranger. Why should he hate me
so?--me, whom he had never seen before? For the moment all other
sensation was merged in this one pang: even fear was subordinate to
grief, and for that moment I never doubted; but in the next I began to
reason, and a sense of the incongruous came to my aid.

As I have said, St. Barnabé is a modern church. It is small and well
lighted; one sees all over it almost at a glance. The organ gallery gets
a strong white light from a row of long windows in the clerestory, which
have not even coloured glass.

The pulpit being in the middle of the church, it followed that, when I
was turned toward it, whatever moved at the west end could not fail to
attract my eye. When the organist passed it was no wonder that I saw him:
I had simply miscalculated the interval between his first and his second
passing. He had come in that last time by the other side-door. As for the
look which had so upset me, there had been no such thing, and I was a
nervous fool.

I looked about. This was a likely place to harbour supernatural horrors!
That clear-cut, reasonable face of Monseigneur C----, his collected
manner and easy, graceful gestures, were they not just a little
discouraging to the notion of a gruesome mystery? I glanced above his
head, and almost laughed. That flyaway lady supporting one corner of the
pulpit canopy, which looked like a fringed damask table-cloth in a high
wind, at the first attempt of a basilisk to pose up there in the organ
loft, she would point her gold trumpet at him, and puff him out of
existence! I laughed to myself over this conceit, which, at the time, I
thought very amusing, and sat and chaffed myself and everything else,
from the old harpy outside the railing, who had made me pay ten centimes
for my chair, before she would let me in (she was more like a basilisk, I
told myself, than was my organist with the anaemic complexion): from that
grim old dame, to, yes, alas! Monseigneur C---- himself. For all
devoutness had fled. I had never yet done such a thing in my life, but
now I felt a desire to mock.

As for the sermon, I could not hear a word of it for the jingle in my
ears of

 ""The skirts of St. Paul has reached.
  Having preached us those six Lent lectures,
  More unctuous than ever he preached,""

keeping time to the most fantastic and irreverent thoughts.

It was no use to sit there any longer: I must get out of doors and shake
myself free from this hateful mood. I knew the rudeness I was committing,
but still I rose and left the church.

A spring sun was shining on the Rue St. Honoré, as I ran down the church
steps. On one corner stood a barrow full of yellow jonquils, pale violets
from the Riviera, dark Russian violets, and white Roman hyacinths in a
golden cloud of mimosa. The street was full of Sunday pleasure-seekers. I
swung my cane and laughed with the rest. Some one overtook and passed me.
He never turned, but there was the same deadly malignity in his white
profile that there had been in his eyes. I watched him as long as I could
see him. His lithe back expressed the same menace; every step that
carried him away from me seemed to bear him on some errand connected with
my destruction.

I was creeping along, my feet almost refusing to move. There began to
dawn in me a sense of responsibility for something long forgotten. It
began to seem as if I deserved that which he threatened: it reached a
long way back--a long, long way back. It had lain dormant all these
years: it was there, though, and presently it would rise and confront me.
But I would try to escape; and I stumbled as best I could into the Rue de
Rivoli, across the Place de la Concorde and on to the Quai. I looked with
sick eyes upon the sun, shining through the white foam of the fountain,
pouring over the backs of the dusky bronze river-gods, on the far-away
Arc, a structure of amethyst mist, on the countless vistas of grey stems
and bare branches faintly green. Then I saw him again coming down one of
the chestnut alleys of the Cours la Reine.

I left the river-side, plunged blindly across to the Champs Elysées and
turned toward the Arc. The setting sun was sending its rays along the
green sward of the Rond-point: in the full glow he sat on a bench,
children and young mothers all about him. He was nothing but a Sunday
lounger, like the others, like myself. I said the words almost aloud, and
all the while I gazed on the malignant hatred of his face. But he was not
looking at me. I crept past and dragged my leaden feet up the Avenue. I
knew that every time I met him brought him nearer to the accomplishment
of his purpose and my fate. And still I tried to save myself.

The last rays of sunset were pouring through the great Arc. I passed
under it, and met him face to face. I had left him far down the Champs
Elysées, and yet he came in with a stream of people who were returning
from the Bois de Boulogne. He came so close that he brushed me. His
slender frame felt like iron inside its loose black covering. He showed
no signs of haste, nor of fatigue, nor of any human feeling. His whole
being expressed one thing: the will, and the power to work me evil.

In anguish I watched him where he went down the broad crowded Avenue,
that was all flashing with wheels and the trappings of horses and the
helmets of the Garde Republicaine.

He was soon lost to sight; then I turned and fled. Into the Bois, and far
out beyond it--I know not where I went, but after a long while as it
seemed to me, night had fallen, and I found myself sitting at a table
before a small café. I had wandered back into the Bois. It was hours now
since I had seen him. Physical fatigue and mental suffering had left me
no power to think or feel. I was tired, so tired! I longed to hide away
in my own den. I resolved to go home. But that was a long way off.

I live in the Court of the Dragon, a narrow passage that leads from the
Rue de Rennes to the Rue du Dragon.

It is an ""impasse""; traversable only for foot passengers. Over the
entrance on the Rue de Rennes is a balcony, supported by an iron dragon.
Within the court tall old houses rise on either side, and close the ends
that give on the two streets. Huge gates, swung back during the day into
the walls of the deep archways, close this court, after midnight, and one
must enter then by ringing at certain small doors on the side. The sunken
pavement collects unsavoury pools. Steep stairways pitch down to doors
that open on the court. The ground floors are occupied by shops of
second-hand dealers, and by iron workers. All day long the place rings
with the clink of hammers and the clang of metal bars.

Unsavoury as it is below, there is cheerfulness, and comfort, and hard,
honest work above.

Five flights up are the ateliers of architects and painters, and the
hiding-places of middle-aged students like myself who want to live alone.
When I first came here to live I was young, and not alone.

I had to walk a while before any conveyance appeared, but at last, when I
had almost reached the Arc de Triomphe again, an empty cab came along and
I took it.

From the Arc to the Rue de Rennes is a drive of more than half an hour,
especially when one is conveyed by a tired cab horse that has been at the
mercy of Sunday fete-makers.

There had been time before I passed under the Dragon's wings to meet my
enemy over and over again, but I never saw him once, and now refuge was
close at hand.

Before the wide gateway a small mob of children were playing. Our
concierge and his wife walked among them, with their black poodle,
keeping order; some couples were waltzing on the side-walk. I returned
their greetings and hurried in.

All the inhabitants of the court had trooped out into the street. The
place was quite deserted, lighted by a few lanterns hung high up, in
which the gas burned dimly.

My apartment was at the top of a house, halfway down the court, reached
by a staircase that descended almost into the street, with only a bit of
passage-way intervening, I set my foot on the threshold of the open door,
the friendly old ruinous stairs rose before me, leading up to rest and
shelter. Looking back over my right shoulder, I saw _him,_ ten paces
off. He must have entered the court with me.

He was coming straight on, neither slowly, nor swiftly, but straight on
to me. And now he was looking at me. For the first time since our eyes
encountered across the church they met now again, and I knew that the
time had come.

Retreating backward, down the court, I faced him. I meant to escape by
the entrance on the Rue du Dragon. His eyes told me that I never should
escape.

It seemed ages while we were going, I retreating, he advancing, down the
court in perfect silence; but at last I felt the shadow of the archway,
and the next step brought me within it. I had meant to turn here and
spring through into the street. But the shadow was not that of an
archway; it was that of a vault. The great doors on the Rue du Dragon
were closed. I felt this by the blackness which surrounded me, and at the
same instant I read it in his face. How his face gleamed in the darkness,
drawing swiftly nearer! The deep vaults, the huge closed doors, their
cold iron clamps were all on his side. The thing which he had threatened
had arrived: it gathered and bore down on me from the fathomless shadows;
the point from which it would strike was his infernal eyes. Hopeless, I
set my back against the barred doors and defied him.


There was a scraping of chairs on the stone floor, and a rustling as the
congregation rose. I could hear the Suisse's staff in the south aisle,
preceding Monseigneur C---- to the sacristy.

The kneeling nuns, roused from their devout abstraction, made their
reverence and went away. The fashionable lady, my neighbour, rose also,
with graceful reserve. As she departed her glance just flitted over my
face in disapproval.

Half dead, or so it seemed to me, yet intensely alive to every trifle, I
sat among the leisurely moving crowd, then rose too and went toward the
door.

I had slept through the sermon. Had I slept through the sermon? I looked
up and saw him passing along the gallery to his place. Only his side I
saw; the thin bent arm in its black covering looked like one of those
devilish, nameless instruments which lie in the disused torture-chambers
of mediaeval castles.

But I had escaped him, though his eyes had said I should not. _Had_
I escaped him? That which gave him the power over me came back out of
oblivion, where I had hoped to keep it. For I knew him now. Death and the
awful abode of lost souls, whither my weakness long ago had sent
him--they had changed him for every other eye, but not for mine. I had
recognized him almost from the first; I had never doubted what he was
come to do; and now I knew while my body sat safe in the cheerful little
church, he had been hunting my soul in the Court of the Dragon.

I crept to the door: the organ broke out overhead with a blare. A
dazzling light filled the church, blotting the altar from my eyes. The
people faded away, the arches, the vaulted roof vanished. I raised my
seared eyes to the fathomless glare, and I saw the black stars hanging in
the heavens: and the wet winds from the lake of Hali chilled my face.

And now, far away, over leagues of tossing cloud-waves, I saw the moon
dripping with spray; and beyond, the towers of Carcosa rose behind the
moon.

Death and the awful abode of lost souls, whither my weakness long ago had
sent him, had changed him for every other eye but mine. And now I heard
_his voice_, rising, swelling, thundering through the flaring light,
and as I fell, the radiance increasing, increasing, poured over me in
waves of flame. Then I sank into the depths, and I heard the King in
Yellow whispering to my soul: ""It is a fearful thing to fall into the
hands of the living God!""


","Over the United States stretched an unseen network of secret intrigue woven tirelessly night and day by the busy enemies of civilisation—Reds, parlour-socialists, enemy-aliens, terrorists, Bolsheviki, pseudo-intellectuals, I. W. W.'s, social faddists, and amateur meddlers of every nuance—all the various varieties of the vicious, witless, and mentally unhinged—brought together through the ""cohesive power of plunder"" and the degeneration of cranial tissue.

All over the United States the various departmental divisions of the Secret Service were busily following up these threads of intrigue leading everywhere through the obscurity of this vast and secret maze.

To meet the constantly increasing danger of physical violence and to uncover secret plots threatening sabotage and revolution, there were capable agents in every branch of the Secret Service, both Federal and State.

But in the first months of 1919 something more terrifying than physical violence suddenly threatened civilised America,—a wild, grotesque, incredible threat of a war on human minds!

And, little by little, the United States Government became convinced that this ghastly menace was no dream of a disordered imagination, but that it was real: that among the enemies of civilisation there actually existed a few powerful but perverted minds capable of wielding psychic forces as terrific weapons: that by the sinister use of psychic knowledge controlling these mighty forces the very minds of mankind could be stealthily approached, seized, controlled and turned upon civilisation to aid in the world's destruction.

In terrible alarm the Government turned to England for advice. But Sir William Crookes was dead.

However, in England, Sir Conan Doyle immediately took up the matter, and in America Professor Hyslop was called into consultation.

And then, when the Government was beginning to realise what this awful menace meant, and that there were actually in the United States possibly half a dozen people who already had begun to carry on a diabolical warfare by means of psychic power, for the purpose of enslaving and controlling the very minds of men,—then, in the terrible moment of discovery, a young girl landed in America after fourteen years' absence in Asia.

And this was the amazing girl that Victor Cleves had just married, at Recklow's suggestion, and in the line of professional duty,—and moral duty, perhaps.

It had been a brief, matter-of-fact ceremony. John Recklow, of the Secret Service, was there; also Benton and Selden of the same service.

The bride's lips were unresponsive; cold as the touch of the groom's unsteady hand.

She looked down at her new ring in a blank sort of way, gave her hand listlessly to Recklow and to the others in turn, whispered a timidly comprehensive ""Thank you,"" and walked away beside Cleves as though dazed.

There was a taxicab waiting. Tressa entered. Recklow came out and spoke to Cleves in a low voice.

""Don't worry,"" replied Cleves dryly. ""That's why I married her.""

""Where are you going now?"" inquired Recklow.

""Back to my apartment.""

""Why don't you take her away for a month?""

Cleves flushed with annoyance: ""This is no occasion for a wedding trip. You understand that, Recklow.""

""I understand. But we ought to give her a breathing space. She's had nothing but trouble. She's worn out.""

Cleves hesitated: ""I can guard her better in the apartment. Isn't it safer to go back there, where your people are always watching the street and house day and night?""

""In a way it might be safer, perhaps. But that girl is nearly exhausted. And her value to us is unlimited. She may be the vital factor in this fight with anarchy. Her weapon is her mind. And it's got to have a chance to rest.""

Cleves, with one hand on the cab door, looked around impatiently.

""Do you, also, conclude that the psychic factor is actually part of this damned problem of Bolshevism?""

Recklow's cool eyes measured him: ""Do you?""

""My God, Recklow, I don't know—after what my own eyes have seen.""

""I don't know either,"" said the other calmly, ""but I am taking no chances. I don't attempt to explain certain things that have occurred. But if it be true that a misuse of psychic ability by foreigners—Asiatics—among the anarchists is responsible for some of the devilish things being done in the United States, then your wife's unparalleled knowledge of the occult East is absolutely vital to us. And so I say, better take her away somewhere and give her mind a chance to recover from the incessant strain of these tragic years.""

The two men stood silent for a moment, then Recklow went to the window of the taxicab.

""I have been suggesting a trip into the country, Mrs. Cleves,"" he said pleasantly, ""—into the real country, somewhere,—a month's quiet in the woods, perhaps. Wouldn't it appeal to you?""

Cleves turned to catch her low-voiced answer.

""I should like it very much,"" she said in that odd, hushed way of speaking, which seemed to have altered her own voice and manner since the ceremony a little while before.

Driving back to his apartment beside her, he strove to realise that this girl was his wife.

One of her gloves lay across her lap, and on it rested a slender hand. And on one finger was his ring.

But Victor Cleves could not bring himself to believe that this brand-new ring really signified anything to him,—that it had altered his own life in any way. But always his incredulous eyes returned to that slim finger resting there, unstirring, banded with a narrow circlet of virgin gold.

In the apartment they did not seem to know exactly what to do or say—what attitude to assume—what effort to make.

Tressa went into her own room, removed her hat and furs, and came slowly back into the living-room, where Cleves still stood gazing absently out of the window.

A fine rain was falling.

They seated themselves. There seemed nothing better to do.

He said, politely: ""In regard to going away for a rest, you wouldn't care for the North Woods, I fancy, unless you like winter sports. Do you?""

""I like sunlight and green leaves,"" she said in that odd, still voice.

""Then, if it would please you to go South for a few weeks' rest——""

""Would it inconvenience you?""

Her manner touched him.

""My dear Miss Norne,"" he began, and checked himself, flushing painfully. The girl blushed, too; then, when he began to laugh, her lovely, bashful smile glimmered for the first time.

""I really can't bring myself to realise that you and I are married,"" he explained, still embarrassed, though smiling.

Her smile became an endeavour. ""I can't believe it either, Mr. Cleves,"" she said. ""I feel rather stunned.""

""Hadn't you better call me Victor—under the circumstances?"" he suggested, striving to speak lightly.

""Yes.... It will not be very easy to say it—not for some time, I think.""

""Tressa?""

""Yes.""

""Yes—what?""

""Yes—Victor.""

""That's the idea,"" he insisted with forced gaiety.

""The thing to do is to face this rather funny situation and take it amiably and with good humour. You'll have your freedom some day, you know.""

""Yes—I—know.""

""And we're already on very good terms. We find each other interesting, don't we?""

""Yes.""

""It even seems to me,"" he ventured, ""it certainly seems to me, at times, as though we are approaching a common basis of—of mutual—er—esteem.""

""Yes. I—I do esteem you, Mr. Cleves.""

""In point of fact,"" he concluded, surprised, ""we are friends—in a way. Wouldn't you call it—friendship?""

""I think so, I think I'd call it that,"" she admitted.

""I think so, too. And that is lucky for us. That makes this crazy situation more comfortable—less—well, perhaps less ponderous.""

The girl assented with a vague smile, but her eyes remained lowered.

""You see,"" he went on, ""when two people are as oddly situated as we are, they're likely to be afraid of being in each other's way. But they ought to get on without being unhappy as long as they are quite confident of each other's friendly consideration. Don't you think so, Tressa?""

Her lowered eyes rested steadily on her ring-finger. ""Yes,"" she said. ""And I am not—unhappy, or—afraid.""

She lifted her blue gaze to his; and, somehow, he thought of her barbaric name, Keuke,—and its Yezidee significance, ""heavenly—azure.""

""Are we really going away together?"" she asked timidly.

""Certainly, if you wish.""

""If you, also, wish it, Mr. Cleves.""

He found himself saying with emphasis that he always wished to do what she desired. And he added, more gently:

""You are tired, Tressa—tired and lonely and unhappy.""

""Tired, but not the—others.""

""Not unhappy?""

""No.""

""Aren't you lonely?""

""Not with you.""

The answer came so naturally, so calmly, that the slight sensation of pleasure it gave him arrived only as an agreeable afterglow.

""We'll go South,"" he said.... ""I'm so glad that you don't feel lonely with me.""

""Will it be warmer where we are going, Mr. Cleves?""

""Yes—you poor child! You need warmth and sunshine, don't you? Was it warm in Yian, where you lived so many years?""

""It was always June in Yian,"" she said under her breath.

She seemed to have fallen into a revery; he watched the sensitive face. Almost imperceptibly it changed; became altered, younger, strangely lovely.

Presently she looked up—and it seemed to him that it was not Tressa Norne at all he saw, but little Keuke—Heavenly Azure—of the Yezidee temple, as she dropped one slim knee over the other and crossed her hands above it.

""It was very beautiful in Yian,"" she said, ""—Yian of the thousand bridges and scented gardens so full of lilies. Even after they took me to the temple, and I thought the world was ending, God's skies still remained soft overhead, and His weather fair and golden.... And when, in the month of the Snake, the Eight Sheiks-el-Djebel came to the temple to spread their shrouds on the rose-marble steps, then, after they had departed, chanting the Prayers for the Dead, each to his Tower of Silence, we temple girls were free for a week.... And once I went with Tchagane—a girl—and with Yulun—another girl—and we took our keutch, which is our luggage, and we went to the yaïlak, or summer pavilion on the Lake of the Ghost. Oh, wonderful,—a silvery world of pale-gilt suns and of moons so frail that the cloud-fleece at high-noon has more substance!""

Her voice died out; she sat gazing down at her spread fingers, on one of which gleamed her wedding-ring.

After a little, she went on dreamily:

""On that week, each three months, we were free.... If a young man should please us....""

""Free?"" he repeated.

""To love,"" she explained coolly.

""Oh."" He nodded, but his face became rather grim.

""There came to me at the yaïlak,"" she went on carelessly, ""one Khassar Noïane—Noïane means Prince—all in a surcoat of gold tissue with green vines embroidered, and wearing a green cap trimmed with dormouse, and green boots inlaid with stiff gold....

""He was so young ... a boy. I laughed. I said: 'Is this a Yaçaoul? An Urdu-envoy of Prince Erlik?'—mocking him as young and thoughtless girls mock—not in unfriendly manner—though I would not endure the touch of any man at all.

""And when I laughed at him, this Eighur boy flew into such a rage! Kai! I was amazed.

""'Sou-sou! Squirrel!' he cried angrily at me. 'Learn the Yacaz, little chatterer! Little mocker of men, it is ten blows with a stick you require, not kisses!'

""At that I whistled my two dogs, Bars and Alaga, for I did not think what he said was funny.

""I said to him: 'You had better go home, Khassar Noïane, for if no man has ever pleased me where I am at liberty to please myself, here on the Lake of the Ghost, then be very certain that no boy can please Keuke-Mongol here or anywhere!'

""And at that—kai! What did he say—that monkey?"" She looked at her husband, her splendid eyes ablaze with wrathful laughter, and made a gesture full of angry grace:

""'Squirrel!' he cries—'little malignant sorceress of Yian! May everything high about you become a sandstorm, and everything long a serpent, and everything broad a toad, and everything——'

""But I had had enough, Victor,"" she added excitedly, ""and I made a wild bee bite him on the lip! What do you think of such a courtship?"" she cried, laughing. But Cleves's face was a study in emotions.

And then, suddenly, the laughing mask seemed to slip from the bewitching features of Keuke Mongol; and there was Tressa Norne—Tressa Cleves—disconcerted, paling a little as the memory of her impulsive confidence in this man beside her began to dawn on her more clearly.

""I—I'm sorry——"" she faltered.... ""You'll think me silly—think evil of me, perhaps——""

She looked into his troubled eyes, then suddenly she took her face into both hands and covered it, sitting very still.

""We'll go South together,"" he said in an uncertain voice.... ""I hope you will try to think of me as a friend.... I'm just troubled because I am so anxious to understand you. That is all.... I'm—I'm troubled, too, because I am anxious that you should think well of me. Will you try, always?""

She nodded.

""I want to be your friend, always,"" he said.

""Thank you, Mr. Cleves.""

It was a strange spot he chose for Tressa—strange but lovely in its own unreal and rather spectral fashion—where a pearl-tinted mist veiled the St. Johns, and made exquisite ghosts of the palmettos, and softened the sun to a silver-gilt wafer pasted on a nacre sky.

It was a still country, where giant water-oaks towered, fantastic under their misty camouflage of moss, and swarming with small birds.

Among the trees the wood-ibis stole; without on the placid glass of the stream the eared grebe floated. There was no wind, no stirring of leaves, no sound save the muffled splash of silver mullet, the breathless whirr of a humming-bird, or the hushed rustle of lizards in the woods.

For Tressa this was the blessed balm that heals,—the balm of silence. And, for the first week, she slept most of the time, or lay in her hammock watching the swarms of small birds creeping and flitting amid the moss-draped labyrinths of the live-oaks at her very door.

It had been a little club house before the war, this bungalow on the St. Johns at Orchid Hammock. Its members had been few and wealthy; but some were dead in France and Flanders, and some still remained overseas, and others continued busy in the North.

And these two young people were quite alone there, save for a negro cook and a maid, and an aged negro kennel-master who wore a scarlet waistcoat and cords too large for his shrunken body, and who pottered, pottered through the fields all day, with his whip clasped behind his bent back and the pointers ranging wide, or plodding in at heel with red tongues lolling.

Twice Cleves went a little way for quail, using Benton's dogs; but even here in this remote spot he dared not move out of view of the little house where Tressa lay asleep.

So he picked up only a few brace of birds, and confined his sport to impaling too-familiar scorpions on the blade of his knife.

And all the while life remained unreal for him; his marriage seemed utterly unbelievable; he could not realise it, could not reconcile himself to conditions so incomprehensible.

Also, ever latent in his mind, was knowledge that made him restless—the knowledge that the young girl he had married had been in love with another man: Sanang.

And there were other thoughts—thoughts which had scarcely even taken the shape of questions.

One morning he came from his room and found Tressa on the veranda in her hammock. She had her moon-lute in her lap.

""You feel better—much better!"" he said gaily, saluting her extended hand.

""Yes. Isn't this heavenly? I begin to believe it is life to me, this pearl-tinted world, and the scent of orange bloom and the stillness of paradise itself.""

She gazed out over the ghostly river. Not a wing stirred its glassy surface.

""Is this dull for you?"" she asked in a low voice.

""Not if you are contented, Tressa.""

""You're so nice about it. Don't you think you might venture a day's real shooting?""

""No, I think I won't,"" he replied.

""On my account?""

""Well—yes.""

""I'm so sorry.""

""It's all right as long as you're getting rested. What is that instrument?""

""My moon-lute.""

""Oh, is that what it's called?""

She nodded, touched the strings. He watched her exquisite hands.

""Shall I?"" she inquired a little shyly.

""Go ahead. I'd like to hear it!""

""I haven't touched it in months—not since I was on the steamer."" She sat up in her hammock and began to swing there; and played and sang while swinging in the flecked shadow of the orange bloom:

""Little Isle of Cispangou,
Isle of iris, isle of cherry,
Tell your tiny maidens merry
Clouds are looming over you!
La-ē-la!
La-ē-la!
All your ocean's but a ferry;
Ships are bringing death to you!
La-ē-lou!
La-ē-lou!
""Little Isle of Cispangou,
Half a thousand ships are sailing;
Captain Death commands each crew;
Lo! the ruddy moon is paling!
La-ē-la!
La-ē-la!
Clouds the dying moon are veiling,
Every cloud a shroud for you!
La-ē-lou!
La-ē-lou!""
""Cispangou,"" she explained, ""is the very, very ancient name, among the Mongols, for Japan.""

""It's not exactly a gay song,"" he said. ""What's it about?""

""Oh, it's a very ancient song about the Mongol invasion of Japan. I know scores and scores of such songs.""

She sang some other songs. Afterward she descended from the hammock and came and sat down beside him on the veranda steps.

""I wish I could amuse you,"" she said wistfully.

""Why do you think I'm bored, Tressa? I'm not at all.""

But she only sighed, lightly, and gathered her knees in both arms.

""I don't know how young men in the Western world are entertained,"" she remarked presently.

""You don't have to entertain me,"" he said, smiling.

""I should be happy to, if I knew how.""

""How are young men entertained in the Orient?""

""Oh, they like songs and stories. But I don't think you do.""

He laughed in spite of himself.

""Do you really wish to entertain me?""

""I do,"" she said seriously.

""Then please perform some of those tricks of magic which you can do so amazingly well.""

Her dawning smile faded a trifle. ""I don't—I haven't——"" She hesitated.

""You haven't your professional paraphernalia with you,"" he suggested.

""Oh—as for that——""

""Don't you need it?""

""For some things—some kinds of things.... I could do—other things——""

He waited. She seemed disconcerted. ""Don't do anything you don't wish to do, Tressa,"" he said.

""I was only—only afraid—that if I should do some little things to amuse you, I might stir—stir up—interfere—encounter some sinister current—and betray myself—betray my whereabouts——""

""Well, for heaven's sake don't venture then!"" he said with emphasis. ""Don't do anything to stir up any other wireless—any Yezidee——""

""I am wondering,"" she reflected, ""just what I dare venture to do to amuse you.""

""Don't bother about me. I wouldn't have you try any psychic stunt down here, and run the chance of stirring up some Asiatic devil somewhere!""

She nodded absently, occupied with her own thoughts, sitting there, chin on hand, her musing eyes intensely blue.

""I think I can amuse you,"" she concluded, ""without bringing any harm to myself.""

""Don't try it, Tressa!—--""

""I'll be very careful. Now, sit quite still—closer to me, please.""

He edged closer; and became conscious of an indefinable freshness in the air that enveloped him, like the scent of something young and growing. But it was no magic odour,—merely the virginal scent of her hair and skin that even clung to her summer gown.

He heard her singing under her breath to herself:

""La-ē-la!
La-ē-la!""
and murmuring caressingly in an unknown tongue.

Then, suddenly in the pale sunshine, scores of little birds came hovering around them, alighting all over them. And he saw them swarming out of the mossy festoons of the water-oaks—scores and scores of tiny birds—Parula warblers, mostly—all flitting fearlessly down to alight upon his shoulders and knees, all keeping up their sweet, dreamy little twittering sound.

""This is wonderful,"" he whispered.

The girl laughed, took several birds on her forefinger.

""This is nothing,"" she said. ""If I only dared—wait a moment!—--"" And, to the Parula warblers:

""Go home, little friends of God!""

The air was filled with the musical whisper of wings. She passed her right arm around her husband's neck.

""Look at the river,"" she said.

""Good God!"" he blurted out. And sat dumb.

For, over the St. John's misty surface, there was the span of a bridge—a strange, marble bridge humped up high in the centre.

And over it were passing thousands of people—he could make them out vaguely—see them passing in two never-ending streams—tinted shapes on the marble bridge.

And now, on the farther shore of the river, he was aware of a city—a vast one, with spectral pagoda shapes against the sky——

Her arm tightened around his neck.

He saw boats on the river—like the grotesque shapes that decorate ancient lacquer.

She rested her face lightly against his cheek.

In his ears was a far confusion of voices—the stir and movement of multitudes—noises on ships, boatmen's cries, the creak of oars.

Then, far and sonorous, quavering across the water from the city, the din of a temple gong.

There were bells, too—very sweet and silvery—camel bells, bells from the Buddhist temples.

He strained his eyes, and thought, amid the pagodas, that there were minarets, also.

Suddenly, clear and ringing came the distant muezzin's cry: ""There is no other god but God!... It is noon. Mussulmans, pray!""

The girl's arm slipped from his neck and she shuddered and pushed him from her.

There was nothing, now, on the river or beyond it but the curtain of hanging mist; no sound except the cry of a gull, sharp and querulous in the vapours overhead.

""Have—have you been amused?"" she asked.

""What did you do to me!"" he demanded harshly.

She smiled and drew a light breath like a sigh.

""God knows what we living do to one another,—or to ourselves,"" she said. ""I only tried to amuse you—after taking counsel with the birds.""

""What was that bridge I saw!""

""The Bridge of Ten Thousand Felicities.""

""And the city?""

""Yian.""

""You lived there?""

""Yes.""

He moistened his dry lips and stole another glance at this very commonplace Florida river. Sky and water were blank and still, and the ghostly trees stood tall, reflected palely in the translucent tide.

""You merely made me visualise what you were thinking about,"" he concluded in a voice which still remained unsteady.

""Did you hear nothing?""

He was silent, remembering the bells and the enormous murmur of a living multitude.

""And—there were the birds, too."" She added, with an uncertain smile: ""I do not mean to worry you.... And you did ask me to amuse you.""

""I don't know how you did it,"" he said harshly. ""And the details—those thousands and thousands of people on the bridge!... And there was one, quite near this end of the bridge, who looked back.... A young girl who turned and laughed at us—""

""That was Yulun.""

""Who?""

""Yulun. I taught her English.""

""A temple girl?""

""Yes. From Black China.""

""How could you make me see her!"" he demanded.

""Why do you ask such things? I do not know how to tell you how I do it.""

""It's a dangerous, uncanny knowledge!"" he blurted out; and suddenly checked himself, for the girl's face went white.

""I don't mean uncanny,"" he hastened to add. ""Because it seems to me that what you did by juggling with invisible currents to which, when attuned, our five senses respond, is on the same lines as the wireless telegraph and telephone.""

She said nothing, but her colour slowly returned.

""You mustn't be so sensitive,"" he added. ""I've no doubt that it's all quite normal—quite explicable on a perfectly scientific basis. Probably it's no more mysterious than a man in an airplane over midocean conversing with people ashore on two continents.""

For the remainder of the day and evening Tressa seemed subdued—not restless, not nervous, but so quiet that, sometimes, glancing at her askance, Cleves involuntarily was reminded of some lithe young creature of the wilds, intensely alert and still, immersed in fixed and dangerous meditation.

About five in the afternoon they took their golf sticks, went down to the river, and embarked in the canoe.

The water was glassy and still. There was not a ripple ahead, save when a sleeping gull awoke and leisurely steered out of their way.

Tressa's arms and throat were bare and she wore no hat. She sat forward, wielding the bow paddle and singing to herself in a low voice.

""You feel all right, don't you?"" he asked.

""Oh, I am so well, physically, now! It's really wonderful, Victor—like being a child again,"" she replied happily.

""You're not much more,"" he muttered.

She heard him: ""Not very much more—in years,"" she said.... ""Does Scripture tell us how old Our Lord was when He descended into Hell?""

""I don't know,"" he replied, startled.

After a little while Tressa tranquilly resumed her paddling and singing:

""—And eight tall towers
Guard the route
Of human life,
Where at all hours
Death looks out,
Holding a knife
Rolled in a shroud.
For every man,
Humble or proud,
Mighty or bowed,
Death has a shroud;—for every man,—
Even for Tchingniz Khan!
Behold them pass!—lancer.
Baroulass,
Temple dancer
In tissue gold,
Khiounnou,
Karlik bold,
Christian, Jew,—
Nations swarm to the great Urdu.
Yaçaoul, with your kettledrum,
Warn your Khan that his hour is come!
Shroud and knife at his spurred feet throw,
And bid him stretch his neck for the blow!—""
""You know,"" remarked Cleves, ""that some of those songs you sing are devilish creepy.""

Tressa looked around at him over her shoulder, saw he was smiling, smiled faintly in return.

They were off Orchid Cove now. The hotel and cottages loomed dimly in the silver mist. Voices came distinctly across the water. There were people on the golf course paralleling the river; laughter sounded from the club-house veranda.

They went ashore.",True
"I
The animal paused on the threshold, interrogative alert, ready for flight if necessary. Severn laid down his palette, and held out a hand of welcome. The cat remained motionless, her yellow eyes fastened upon Severn.
""Puss,"" he said, in his low, pleasant voice, ""come in.""
The tip of her thin tail twitched uncertainly.
""Come in,"" he said again.
Apparently she found his voice reassuring, for she slowly settled upon all fours, her eyes still fastened upon him, her tail tucked under her gaunt flanks.
He rose from his easel smiling. She eyed him quietly, and when he walked toward her she watched him bend above her without a wince; her eyes followed his hand until it touched her head. Then she uttered a ragged mew.
It had long been Severn's custom to converse with animals, probably because he lived so much alone; and now he said, ""What's the matter, puss?""
Her timid eyes sought his.
""I understand,"" he said gently, ""you shall have it at once.""
Then moving quietly about he busied himself with the duties of a host, rinsed a saucer, filled it with the rest of the milk from the bottle on the window-sill, and kneeling down, crumbled a roll into the hollow of his hand.
The creature rose and crept toward the saucer.
With the handle of a palette-knife he stirred the crumbs and milk together and stepped back as she thrust her nose into the mess. He watched her in silence. From time to time the saucer clinked upon the tiled floor as she reached for a morsel on the rim; and at last the bread was all gone, and her purple tongue travelled over every unlicked spot until the saucer shone like polished marble. Then she sat up, and coolly turning her back to him, began her ablutions.
""Keep it up,"" said Severn, much interested, ""you need it.""
She flattened one ear, but neither turned nor interrupted her toilet. As the grime was slowly removed Severn observed that nature had intended her for a white cat. Her fur had disappeared in patches, from disease or the chances of war, her tail was bony and her spine sharp. But what charms she had were becoming apparent under vigorous licking, and he waited until she had finished before re-opening the conversation. When at last she closed her eyes and folded her forepaws under her breast, he began again very gently: ""Puss, tell me your troubles.""
At the sound of his voice she broke into a harsh rumbling which he recognized as an attempt to purr. He bent over to rub her cheek and she mewed again, an amiable inquiring little mew, to which he replied, ""Certainly, you are greatly improved, and when you recover your plumage you will be a gorgeous bird."" Much flattered, she stood up and marched around and around his legs, pushing her head between them and making pleased remarks, to which he responded with grave politeness.
""Now, what sent you here,"" he said—""here into the Street of the Four Winds, and up five flights to the very door where you would be welcome? What was it that prevented your meditated flight when I turned from my canvas to encounter your yellow eyes? Are you a Latin Quarter cat as I am a Latin Quarter man? And why do you wear a rose-coloured flowered garter buckled about your neck?"" The cat had climbed into his lap, and now sat purring as he passed his hand over her thin coat.
""Excuse me,"" he continued in lazy soothing tones, harmonizing with her purring, ""if I seem indelicate, but I cannot help musing on this rose-coloured garter, flowered so quaintly and fastened with a silver clasp. For the clasp is silver; I can see the mint mark on the edge, as is prescribed by the law of the French Republic. Now, why is this garter woven of rose silk and delicately embroidered,—why is this silken garter with its silver clasp about your famished throat? Am I indiscreet when I inquire if its owner is your owner? Is she some aged dame living in memory of youthful vanities, fond, doting on you, decorating you with her intimate personal attire? The circumference of the garter would suggest this, for your neck is thin, and the garter fits you. But then again I notice—I notice most things—that the garter is capable of being much enlarged. These small silver-rimmed eyelets, of which I count five, are proof of that. And now I observe that the fifth eyelet is worn out, as though the tongue of the clasp were accustomed to lie there. That seems to argue a well-rounded form.""
The cat curled her toes in contentment. The street was very still outside.
He murmured on: ""Why should your mistress decorate you with an article most necessary to her at all times? Anyway, at most times. How did she come to slip this bit of silk and silver about your neck? Was it the caprice of a moment,—when you, before you had lost your pristine plumpness, marched singing into her bedroom to bid her good-morning? Of course, and she sat up among the pillows, her coiled hair tumbling to her shoulders, as you sprang upon the bed purring: 'Good-day, my lady.' Oh, it is very easy to understand,"" he yawned, resting his head on the back of the chair. The cat still purred, tightening and relaxing her padded claws over his knee.
""Shall I tell you all about her, cat? She is very beautiful—your mistress,"" he murmured drowsily, ""and her hair is heavy as burnished gold. I could paint her,—not on canvas—for I should need shades and tones and hues and dyes more splendid than the iris of a splendid rainbow. I could only paint her with closed eyes, for in dreams alone can such colours as I need be found. For her eyes, I must have azure from skies untroubled by a cloud—the skies of dreamland. For her lips, roses from the palaces of slumberland, and for her brow, snow-drifts from mountains which tower in fantastic pinnacles to the moons;—oh, much higher than our moon here,—the crystal moons of dreamland. She is—very—beautiful, your mistress.""
The words died on his lips and his eyelids drooped.
The cat, too, was asleep, her cheek turned up upon her wasted flank, her paws relaxed and limp.
II
""It is fortunate,"" said Severn, sitting up and stretching, ""that we have tided over the dinner hour, for I have nothing to offer you for supper but what may be purchased with one silver franc.""
The cat on his knee rose, arched her back, yawned, and looked up at him.
""What shall it be? A roast chicken with salad? No? Possibly you prefer beef? Of course,—and I shall try an egg and some white bread. Now for the wines. Milk for you? Good. I shall take a little water, fresh from the wood,"" with a motion toward the bucket in the sink.
He put on his hat and left the room. The cat followed to the door, and after he had closed it behind him, she settled down, smelling at the cracks, and cocking one ear at every creak from the crazy old building.
The door below opened and shut. The cat looked serious, for a moment doubtful, and her ears flattened in nervous expectation. Presently she rose with a jerk of her tail and started on a noiseless tour of the studio. She sneezed at a pot of turpentine, hastily retreating to the table, which she presently mounted, and having satisfied her curiosity concerning a roll of red modelling wax, returned to the door and sat down with her eyes on the crack over the threshold. Then she lifted her voice in a thin plaint.
When Severn returned he looked grave, but the cat, joyous and demonstrative, marched around him, rubbing her gaunt body against his legs, driving her head enthusiastically into his hand, and purring until her voice mounted to a squeal.
He placed a bit of meat, wrapped in brown paper, upon the table, and with a penknife cut it into shreds. The milk he took from a bottle which had served for medicine, and poured it into the saucer on the hearth.
The cat crouched before it, purring and lapping at the same time.
He cooked his egg and ate it with a slice of bread, watching her busy with the shredded meat, and when he had finished, and had filled and emptied a cup of water from the bucket in the sink, he sat down, taking her into his lap, where she at once curled up and began her toilet. He began to speak again, touching her caressingly at times by way of emphasis.
""Cat, I have found out where your mistress lives. It is not very far away;—it is here, under this same leaky roof, but in the north wing which I had supposed was uninhabited. My janitor tells me this. By chance, he is almost sober this evening. The butcher on the rue de Seine, where I bought your meat, knows you, and old Cabane the baker identified you with needless sarcasm. They tell me hard tales of your mistress which I shall not believe. They say she is idle and vain and pleasure-loving; they say she is hare-brained and reckless. The little sculptor on the ground floor, who was buying rolls from old Cabane, spoke to me to-night for the first time, although we have always bowed to each other. He said she was very good and very beautiful. He has only seen her once, and does not know her name. I thanked him;—I don't know why I thanked him so warmly. Cabane said, 'Into this cursed Street of the Four Winds, the four winds blow all things evil.' The sculptor looked confused, but when he went out with his rolls, he said to me, 'I am sure, Monsieur, that she is as good as she is beautiful.'""
The cat had finished her toilet, and now, springing softly to the floor, went to the door and sniffed. He knelt beside her, and unclasping the garter held it for a moment in his hands. After a while he said: ""There is a name engraved upon the silver clasp beneath the buckle. It is a pretty name, Sylvia Elven. Sylvia is a woman's name, Elven is the name of a town. In Paris, in this quarter, above all, in this Street of the Four Winds, names are worn and put away as the fashions change with the seasons. I know the little town of Elven, for there I met Fate face to face and Fate was unkind. But do you know that in Elven Fate had another name, and that name was Sylvia?""
He replaced the garter and stood up looking down at the cat crouched before the closed door.
""The name of Elven has a charm for me. It tells me of meadows and clear rivers. The name of Sylvia troubles me like perfume from dead flowers.""
The cat mewed.
""Yes, yes,"" he said soothingly, ""I will take you back. Your Sylvia is not my Sylvia; the world is wide and Elven is not unknown. Yet in the darkness and filth of poorer Paris, in the sad shadows of this ancient house, these names are very pleasant to me.""
He lifted her in his arms and strode through the silent corridors to the stairs. Down five flights and into the moonlit court, past the little sculptor's den, and then again in at the gate of the north wing and up the worm-eaten stairs he passed, until he came to a closed door. When he had stood knocking for a long time, something moved behind the door; it opened and he went in. The room was dark. As he crossed the threshold, the cat sprang from his arms into the shadows. He listened but heard nothing. The silence was oppressive and he struck a match. At his elbow stood a table and on the table a candle in a gilded candlestick. This he lighted, then looked around. The chamber was vast, the hangings heavy with embroidery. Over the fireplace towered a carved mantel, grey with the ashes of dead fires. In a recess by the deep-set windows stood a bed, from which the bedclothes, soft and fine as lace, trailed to the polished floor. He lifted the candle above his head. A handkerchief lay at his feet. It was faintly perfumed. He turned toward the windows. In front of them was acanapé and over it were flung, pell-mell, a gown of silk, a heap of lace-like garments, white and delicate as spiders' meshes, long, crumpled gloves, and, on the floor beneath, the stockings, the little pointed shoes, and one garter of rosy silk, quaintly flowered and fitted with a silver clasp. Wondering, he stepped forward and drew the heavy curtains from the bed. For a moment the candle flared in his hand; then his eyes met two other eyes, wide open, smiling, and the candle-flame flashed over hair heavy as gold.
She was pale, but not as white as he; her eyes were untroubled as a child's; but he stared, trembling from head to foot, while the candle flickered in his hand.
At last he whispered: ""Sylvia, it is I.""
Again he said, ""It is I.""
Then, knowing that she was dead, he kissed her on the mouth. And through the long watches of the night the cat purred on his knee, tightening and relaxing her padded claws, until the sky paled above the Street of the Four Winds.
","Cleves opened his eyes. He was lying on his left side. In the pink glow of the night-lamp he saw his wife in her night-dress, seated sideways on the farther edge of the bed, talking to a young girl.

The strange girl wore what appeared to be a chamber-robe of frail gold tissue that clung to her body and glittered as she moved. He had never before seen such a dress; but he had seen the girl; he recognised her instantly as the girl he had seen turn to look back at Tressa as she crossed the phantom bridge over that misty Florida river. And Cleves comprehended that he was looking at Yulun.

But this charming young thing was no ghost, no astral projection. This girl was warm, living, breathing flesh. The delicate scent of her strange garments and of her hair, her very breath, was in the air of the room. Her half-hushed but laughing voice was deliciously human; her delicate little hands, caressing Tressa's, were too eagerly real to doubt.

Both talked at the same time, their animated voices mingling in the breathless delight of the reunion. Their exclamations, enchanting laughter, bubbling chatter, filled his ears. But not one word of what they were saying to each other could he understand.

Suddenly Tressa looked over her shoulder and met his astonished eyes.

""Tokhta!"" she exclaimed. ""Yulun! My lord is awake!""

Yulun swung around swiftly on the edge of the bed and looked laughingly at Cleves. But when her red lips unclosed she spoke to Tressa: and, ""Darling,"" she said in English, ""I think your dear lord remembers that he saw me on the Bridge of Dreams. And heard the bells of Yian across the mist.""

Tressa said, laughing at her husband: ""This is Yulun, flame-slender, very white, loveliest in Yian. On the rose-marble steps of the Yezidee Temple she flung a stemless rose upon Djamouk's shroud, where he had spread it like a patch of snow in the sun.

""And at the Lake of the Ghosts, where there is freedom to love, for those who desire love, came Yaddin, Tougtchi to Djamouk the Fox, in search of love—and Yulun, flame-slim, and flower-white.... Tell my dear lord, Yulun!""

Yulun laughed at Cleves out of her dark eyes that slanted charmingly at the corners.

""Kai!"" she cried softly, clapping her palms. ""I took his roses and tore them with my hands till their petals rained on him and their golden hearts were a powdery cloud floating across the water.

""I said: 'Even the damned do not mate with demons, my Tougtchi! So go to the devil, my Banneret, and may Erlik seize you!'""

Cleves, his ears ringing with the sweet confusion of their girlish laughter, rose from his pillow, supporting himself on one arm.

""You are Yulun. You are alive and real——"" He looked at Tressa: ""She is real, isn't she?"" And, to Yulun: ""Where do you come from?""

The girl replied seriously: ""I come from Yian."" She turned to Tressa with a dazzling smile: ""Thou knowest, my heart's gold, how it was I came. Tell thy dear lord in thine own way, so that it shall be simple for his understanding.... And now—because my visit is ending—I think thy dear lord should sleep. Bid him sleep, my heart's gold!""

At that calm suggestion Cleves sat upright on the bed,—or attempted to. But sank back gently on his pillow and met there a dark, delicious rush of drowsiness.

He made an effort—or tried to: the smooth, sweet tide of sleep swept over him to the eyelids, leaving him still and breathing evenly on his pillow.

The two girls leaned over and looked down at him.

""Thy dear lord,"" murmured Yulun. ""Does he love thee, rose-bud of Yian?""

""No,"" said Tressa, under her breath.

""Does he know thou art damned, heart of gold?""

""He says no soul is ever really harmed,"" whispered Tressa.

""Kai! Has he never heard of the Slayer of Souls?"" exclaimed Yulun incredulously.

""My lord maintains that neither the Assassin of Khorassan nor the Sheiks-el-Djebel of the Eight Towers, nor their dark prince Erlik, can have power over God to slay the human soul.""

""Tokhta, Rose of Yian! Our souls were slain there in the Yezidee temple.""

Tressa looked down at Cleves:

""My dear lord says no,"" she said under her breath.

""And—Sanang?""

Tressa paled: ""His mind and mine did battle. I tore my heart from his grasp. I have laid it, bleeding, at my dear lord's feet. Let God judge between us, Yulun.""

""There was a day,"" whispered Yulun, ""when Prince Sanang went to the Lake of the Ghosts.""

Tressa, very pallid, looked down at her sleeping husband. She said:

""Prince Sanang came to the Lake of the Ghosts. The snow of the cherry-trees covered the young world.

""The water was clear as sunlight; and the lake was afire with scarlet carp.... Yulun—beloved—the nightingale sang all night long—all night long.... Then I saw Sanang shining, all gold, in the moonlight.... May God remember him in hell!""

""May God remember him.""

""Sanang Noïane. May he be accursed in the Namaz Ga!""

""May he be tormented in Jehaunum!—Sanang, Slayer of Souls.""

Tressa leaned forward on the bed, stretched herself out, and laid her face gently across her husband's feet, touching them with her lips.

Then she straightened herself and sat up, supported by one hand, and looking silently down at the sleeping man.

""No soul shall die,"" she said. ""Niaz!""

""Is it written?"" asked Yulun, surprised.

""My lord has said it.""

""Allahou Ekber,"" murmured Yulun; ""thy lord is only a man.""

Tressa said: ""Neither the Tekbir nor the fatha, nor the warning of Khidr, nor the Yacaz of the Khagan, nor even the prayers of the Ten Imaums are of any value to me unless my dear lord confirms the truth of them with his own lips.""

""And Erlik? Is he nothing, then?""

""Erlik!"" repeated Tressa insolently. ""Who is Erlik but the servant of Satan who was stoned?""

Her beautiful, angry lips were suddenly distorted; her blue eyes blazed. Then she spat, her mouth still tremulous with hatred. She said in a voice shaking with rage:

""Yulun, beloved! Listen attentively. I have slain two of the Slayers of the Eight Towers. With God's help I shall slay them all—all!—Djamouk, Yaddin, Arrak Sou-Sou—all!—every one!—Tiyang Khan, Togrul,—all shall I slay, even to the last one among them!""

""Sanang, also?""

""I leave him to God. It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God!""

Yulun calmly paraphrased the cant phrase of the Assassins: ""For it is written that we belong to God and we return to Him. Heart of gold, I shall execute my duty!""

Then Yulun slipped from the edge of the bed to the floor, and stood there looking oddly at Tressa, her eyes rain-bright as though choking back tears—or laughter.

""Heart of a rose,"" she said in a suppressed voice, ""my time is nearly ended.... So.... I go to the chamber of this strange young man who holds my soul like a pearl afire between his hands.... I think it it written that I shall love him.""

Tressa rose also and placed her lips close to Yulun's ear: ""His name, beloved, is Benton. His room is on this floor. Shall we make the effort together?""

""Yes,"" said Yulun. ""Lay your body down upon the bed beside your lord who sleeps so deeply.... And now stretch out.... And fold both hands.... And now put off thy body like a silken garment.... So! And leave it there beside thy lord, asleep.""

They stood together for a moment, shining like dewy shapes of tall flowers, whispering and laughing together in the soft glow of the night lamp.

Cleves slept on, unstirring. There was the white and sleeping figure of his wife lying on the bed beside him.

But Tressa and Yulun were already melting away between the wall and the confused rosy radiance of the lamp.

Benton, in night attire and chamber-robe belted in, fresh from his bath and still drying his curly hair on a rough towel, wandered back into his bedroom.

When his short, bright hair was dry, he lighted a cigarette, took the automatic from his dresser, examined the clip, and shoved it under his pillow.

Then he picked up the little leather-bound Testament, seated himself, and opened it. And read tranquilly while his cigarette burned.

When he was ready he turned out the ceiling light, leaving only the night lamp lighted. Then he knelt beside his bed,—a custom surviving the nursery period,—and rested his forehead against his folded hands.

Then, as he prayed, something snapped the thread of prayer as though somebody had spoken aloud in the still room; and, like one who has been suddenly interrupted, he opened his eyes and looked around and upward.

The silent shock of her presence passed presently. He got up from his knees, looking at her all the while.

""You are Yulun,"" he said very calmly.

The girl flushed brightly and rested one hand on the foot of the bed.

""Do you remember in the moonlight where you walked along the hedge of white hibiscus and oleander—that night you said good-bye to Tressa in the South?""

""Yes.""

""Twice,"" she said, laughing, ""you stopped to peer at the blossoms in the moonlight.""

""I thought I saw a face among them.""

""You were not sure whether it was flowers or a girl's face looking at you from the blossoming hedge of white hibiscus,"" said Yulun.

""I know now,"" he said in an odd, still voice, unlike his own.

""Yes, it was I,"" she murmured. And of a sudden the girl dropped to her knees without a sound and laid her head on the velvet carpet at his feet.

So swiftly, noiselessly was it done that he had not comprehended—had not moved—when she sat upright, resting on her knees, and grasped the collar of her tunic with both gemmed hands.

""Have pity on me, lord of my lost soul!"" she cried softly.

Benton stooped in a dazed way to lift the girl; but found himself knee deep in a snowy drift of white hibiscus blossoms—touched nothing but silken petals—waded in them as he stepped forward. And saw her standing before him still grasping the collar of her golden tunic.

A great white drift of bloom lay almost waist deep between them; the fragrance of oleander, too, was heavy in the room.

""There are years of life before the flaming gates of Jehaunum open. And I am very young,"" said Yulun wistfully.

Somebody else laughed in the room. Turning his head, he saw Tressa standing by the empty fireplace.

""What you see and hear need not disturb you,"" she said, looking at Benton out of brilliant eyes. ""There is no god but God; and His prophet has been called by many names."" And to Yulun: ""Have I not told you that nothing can harm our souls?""

Yulun's expression altered and she turned to Benton: ""Say it to me!"" she pleaded.

As in a dream he heard his own words: ""Nothing can ever really harm the soul.""

Yulun's hands fell from her tunic collar. Very slowly she lifted her head, looking at him out of lovely, proud young eyes.

She said, evenly, her still gaze on him: ""I am Yulun of the Temple. My heart is like a blazing pearl which you hold between your hands. May the four Blessed Companions witness the truth of what I say.""

Then a delicate veil of colour wrapped her white skin from throat to temple; she looked at Benton with sudden and exquisite distress, frightened and ashamed at his silence.

In the intense stillness Benton moved toward her. Into his outstretched hands her two hands fell; but, bending above them, his lips touched only two white hibiscus flowers that lay fresh and dewy in his palms.

Bewildered, he straightened up; and saw the girl standing by the mantel beside Tressa, who had caught her by the left hand.

""Tokhta! Look out!"" she said distinctly.

Suddenly he saw two men in the room, close to him—their broad faces, slanting eyes, and sparse beards thrust almost against his shoulder.

""Djamouk! Yaddin-ed-Din!"" cried Tressa in a terrible voice. But quick as a flash Yulun tore a white sheet from the bed, flung it on the floor, and, whipping a tiny, jewelled knife from her sleeve, threw it glittering upon the sheet at the feet of the two men.

""One shroud for two souls!"" she said breathlessly, ""—and a knife like that to sever them from their bodies!""

The two men sprang backward as the sheet touched their feet, and now they stood there as though confounded.

""Djamouk, Kahn of the Fifth Tower!"" cried Tressa in a clear voice, ""you have put off your body like a threadbare cloak, and your form that stands there is only your mind! And it is only the evil will of Yaddin in the shape of his body that confronts us in this room of a man you have doomed!""

Yulun, intent as a young leopardess on her prey, moved soundlessly toward Yaddin.

""Tougtchi!"" she said coldly, ""you did murder this day, my Banneret, and the Toug of Djamouk has been greased. Now look out for yourself!""

""Don't stir!"" came Tressa's warning voice, as Benton snatched his pistol from the pillow. ""Don't fire! Those men have no real substance! For God's sake don't fire! I tell you they have no bodies!""

Suddenly something—some force—flung Benton on the bed. The two men did not seem to touch him at all, but he lay there struggling, crushed, held by something that was strangling him.

Through his swimming eyes he saw Yaddin trying to drive a long nail into his skull with a hammer,—felt the piercing agony of the first crashing blow,—struggled upright, drenched in blood, his ears ringing with the screaming of Yaddin.

Then, there in the little rococo bedroom of the Ritz-Carlton, began a strange and horrible struggle—the more dreadful because the struggle was not physical and the combatants never touched each other—scarcely moved at all.

Yaddin, still screaming, confronted Yulun. The girl's eyes were ablaze, her lips parted with the violence of her breathing. And Yaddin writhed and screamed under the terrible concentration of her gaze, his inferior but ferocious mind locked with her mind in deadly battle.

The girl said slowly, showing a glimmer of white teeth: ""Your will to do evil to my young lord is breaking, Yaddin-ed-Din.... I am breaking it. The nail and hammer were but symbols. It was your brain that brooded murder—that willed he should die as though shattered by lightning when that blood-vessel burst in his brain!""

""Sorceress!"" shrieked Yaddin, ""what are you doing to my heart, where my body lies asleep in a berth on the Montreal Express!""

""Your heart is weak, Yaddin. Soon the valves shall fail. A negro porter shall discover you dead in your berth, my Banneret!""

The man's swarthy face became livid with the terrific mental battle.

""Let me go back to my body!"" he panted. ""What are you doing to me that I can not go back? I will go back! I wish it!—I——""

""Let us go back and rejoin our bodies!"" cried Djamouk in an agonised voice. ""There are teeth in my throat, deep in my throat, biting and tearing out the cords.""

""Cancer,"" said Tressa calmly. ""Your body shall die of it while your soul stumbles on through darkness.""

""My Tougtchi!"" shouted Djamouk, ""I hear my soul bidding my body farewell! I must go before my mind expires in the terrible gaze of this young sorceress!""

He turned, drifted like something misty to the solid wall.

""My soul be ransom for yours!"" cried Yulun to Tressa. ""Bar that man's path to life!""

Tressa flung out her right hand and, with her forefinger, drew a barrier through space, bar above bar.

And Benton, half swooning on his bed, saw a cage of terrible and living light penning in Djamouk, who beat upon the incandescent bars and grasped them and clawed his way about, squealing like a tortured rat in a red-hot cage.

Through the deafening tumult Yulun's voice cut like a sword:

""Their bodies are dying, Heart of a Rose!... Listen! I hear their souls bidding their minds farewell!""

And, after a dreadful silence: ""The train speeding north carries two dead men! God is God. Niaz!""

The bars of living fire faded. Two cinder-like and shapeless shadows floated and eddied like whitened ashes stirred by a wind on the hearth; then drifted through the lamp-light, fading, dissolving, lost gradually in thin air.

Tressa, leaning back against the mantel, covered her face with both hands.

Yulun crept to the bed where Benton lay, breathing evenly in deepest sleep.

With the sheer sleeve of her tunic she wiped the blood from his face. And, at her touch, the wound in the temple closed and the short, bright hair dried and curled over a forehead as clean and fresh as a boy's.

Then Yulun laid her lips against his, rested so a moment.

""Seek me, dear lord,"" she whispered. ""Or send me a sign and I shall come.""

And, after a pause, she said, her lips scarcely stirring: ""Love me. My heart is a flaming pearl burning between your hands.""

Then she lifted her head.

But Tressa had rejoined her body, where it lay asleep beside her deeply sleeping husband.

So Yulun stood a moment, her eyes remote. Then, after a while, the little rococo bedroom in the Ritz-Carlton was empty save for a young man asleep on the bed, holding in his clenched hand a white hibiscus blossom.

",True
"When I drew nigh the nameless city I knew it was accursed. I was traveling in a parched and terrible valley under the moon, and afar I saw it protruding uncannily above the sands as parts of a corpse may protrude from an ill-made grave. Fear spoke from the age-worn stones of this hoary survivor of the deluge, this great-grandfather of the eldest pyramid; and a viewless aura repelled me and bade me retreat from antique and sinister secrets that no man should see, and no man else had dared to see..
Remote in the desert of Araby lies the nameless city, crumbling and inarticulate, its low walls nearly hidden by the sands of uncounted ages. It must have been thus before the first stones of Memphis were laid, and while the bricks of Babylon were yet unbaked. There is no legend so old as to give it a name, or to recall that it was ever alive; but it is told of in whispers around campfires and muttered about by grandams in the tents of sheiks so that all the tribes shun it without wholly knowing why. It was of this place that Abdul Alhazred the mad poet dreamed of the night before he sang his unexplained couplet:
That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons death may die.
I should have known that the Arabs had good reason for shunning the nameless city, the city told of in strange tales but seen by no living man, yet I defied them and went into the untrodden waste with my camel. I alone have seen it, and that is why no other face bears such hideous lines of fear as mine; why no other man shivers so horribly when the night wind rattles the windows. When I came upon it in the ghastly stillness of unending sleep it looked at me, chilly from the rays of a cold moon amidst the desert's heat. And as I returned its look I forgot my triumph at finding it, and stopped still with my camel to wait for the dawn.
For hours I waited, till the east grew grey and the stars faded, and the grey turned to roseate light edged with gold. I heard a moaning and saw a storm of sand stirring among the antique stones though the sky was clear and the vast reaches of desert still. Then suddenly above the desert's far rim came the blazing edge of the sun, seen through the tiny sandstorm which was passing away, and in my fevered state I fancied that from some remote depth there came a crash of musical metal to hail the fiery disc as Memnon hails it from the banks of the Nile. My ears rang and my imagination seethed as I led my camel slowly across the sand to that unvocal place; that place which I alone of living men had seen.
In and out amongst the shapeless foundations of houses and places I wandered, finding never a carving or inscription to tell of these men, if men they were, who built this city and dwelt therein so long ago. The antiquity of the spot was unwholesome, and I longed to encounter some sign or device to prove that the city was indeed fashioned by mankind. There were certain proportions and dimensions in the ruins which I did not like. I had with me many tools, and dug much within the walls of the obliterated edifices; but progress was slow, and nothing significant was revealed. When night and the moon returned I felt a chill wind which brought new fear, so that I did not dare to remain in the city. And as I went outside the antique walls to sleep, a small sighing sandstorm gathered behind me, blowing over the grey stones though the moon was bright and most of the desert still.
I awakened just at dawn from a pageant of horrible dreams, my ears ringing as from some metallic peal. I saw the sun peering redly through the last gusts of a little sandstorm that hovered over the nameless city, and marked the quietness of the rest of the landscape. Once more I ventured within those brooding ruins that swelled beneath the sand like an ogre under a coverlet, and again dug vainly for relics of the forgotten race. At noon I rested, and in the afternoon I spent much time tracing the walls and bygone streets, and the outlines of the nearly vanished buildings. I saw that the city had been mighty indeed, and wondered at the sources of its greatness. To myself I pictured all the spendours of an age so distant that Chaldaea could not recall it, and thought of Sarnath the Doomed, that stood in the land of Mnar when mankind was young, and of Ib, that was carven of grey stone before mankind existed.
All at once I came upon a place where the bed rock rose stark through the sand and formed a low cliff; and here I saw with joy what seemed to promise further traces of the antediluvian people. Hewn rudely on the face of the cliff were the unmistakable facades of several small, squat rock houses or temples; whose interiors might preserve many secrets of ages too remote for calculation, though sandstorms had long effaced any carvings which may have been outside.
Very low and sand-choked were all the dark apertures near me, but I cleared on with my spade and crawled through it, carrying a torch to reveal whatever mysteries it might hold. When I was inside I saw that the cavern was indeed a temple, and beheld plain signs of the race that had lived and worshipped before the desert was a desert. Primitive altars, pillars, and niches, all curiously low, were not absent; and though I saw no sculptures or frescoes, there were many singular stones clearly shaped into symbols by artificial means. The lowness of the chiselled chamber was very strange, for I could hardly kneel upright; but the area was so great that my torch showed only part of it at a time. I shuddered oddly in some of the far corners; for certain altars and stones suggested forgotten rites of terrible, revolting and inexplicable nature and made me wonder what manner of men could have made and frequented such a temple. When I had seen all that the place contained, I crawled out again, avid to find what the temples might yield.
Night had now approached, yet the tangible things I had seen made curiosity stronger than fear, so that I did not flee from the long mooncast shadows that had daunted me when first I saw the nameless city. In the twilight I cleared another aperture and with a new torch crawled into it, finding more vague stones and symbols, though nothing more definite than the other temple had contained the room was just as low, but much less broad, ending in a very narrow passage crowded with obscure and cryptical shrines. About these shrines I was prying when the noise of a wind and my camel outside broke through the stillness and drew me forth to see what could have frightened the beast.
The moon was gleaming vividly over the primitive ruins, lighting a dense cloud of sand that seemed blown by a strong but decreasing wind from some point along the cliff ahead of me. I knew it was this chilly, sandy wind which had disturbed the camel and was about to lead him to a place of better shelter when I chanced to glance up and saw that there was no wind atop the cliff. This astonished me and made me fearful again, but I immediately recalled the sudden local winds that I had seen and heard before at sunrise and sunset, and judged it was a normal thing. I decided it came from some rock fissure leading to a cave, and watched the troubled sand to trace it to its source; soon perceiving that it came from the black orifice of a temple a long distance south of me, almost out of sight. Against the choking sand-cloud I plodded toward this temple, which as I neared it loomed larger than the rest, and shewed a doorway far less clogged with caked sand. I would have entered had not the terrific force of the icy wind almost quenched my torch. It poured madly out of the dark door, sighing uncannily as it ruffled the sand and spread among the weird ruins. Soon it grew fainter and the sand grew more and more still, till finally all was at rest again; but a presence seemed stalking among the spectral stones of the city, and when I glanced at the moon it seemed to quiver as though mirrored in unquiet waters. I was more afraid than I could explain, but not enough to dull my thirst for wonder; so as soon as the wind was quite gone I crossed into the dark chamber from which it had come.
This temple, as I had fancied from the outside, was larger than either of those I had visited before; and was presumably a natural cavern since it bore winds from some region beyond. Here I could stand quite upright, but saw that the stones and altars were as low as those in the other temples. On the walls and roof I beheld for the first time some traces of the pictorial art of the ancient race, curious curling streaks of paint that had almost faded or crumbled away; and on two of the altars I saw with rising excitement a maze of well-fashioned curvilinear carvings. As I held my torch aloft it seemed to me that the shape of the roof was too regular to be natural, and I wondered what the prehistoric cutters of stone had first worked upon. Their engineering skill must have been vast.
Then a brighter flare of the fantastic flame showed that form which I had been seeking, the opening to those remoter abysses whence the sudden wind had blown; and I grew faint when I saw that it was a small and plainly artificial door chiselled in the solid rock. I thrust my torch within, beholding a black tunnel with the roof arching low over a rough flight of very small, numerous and steeply descending steps. I shall always see those steps in my dreams, for I came to learn what they meant. At the time I hardly knew whether to call them steps or mere footholds in a precipitous descent. My mind was whirling with mad thoughts, and the words and warning of Arab prophets seemed to float across the desert from the land that men know to the nameless city that men dare not know. Yet I hesitated only for a moment before advancing through the portal and commencing to climb cautiously down the steep passage, feet first, as though on a ladder.
It is only in the terrible phantasms of drugs or delirium that any other man can have such a descent as mine. The narrow passage led infinitely down like some hideous haunted well, and the torch I held above my head could not light the unknown depths toward which I was crawling. I lost track of the hours and forgot to consult my watch, though I was frightened when I thought of the distance I must have be traversing. There were changes of direction and of steepness; and once I came to a long, low, level passage where I had to wriggle my feet first along the rocky floor, holding torch at arm's length beyond my head. The place was not high enough for kneeling. After that were more of the steep steps, and I was still scrambling down interminably when my failing torch died out. I do not think I noticed it at the time, for when I did notice it I was still holding it above me as if it were ablaze. I was quite unbalanced with that instinct for the strange and the unknown which had made me a wanderer upon earth and a haunter of far, ancient, and forbidden places.
In the darkness there flashed before my mind fragments of my cherished treasury of daemonic lore; sentences from Alhazred the mad Arab, paragraphs from the apocryphal nightmares of Damascius, and infamous lines from the delirious Image du Monde of Gauthier de Metz. I repeated queer extracts, and muttered of Afrasiab and the daemons that floated with him down the Oxus; later chanting over and over again a phrase from one of Lord Dunsany's tales--""The unreveberate blackness of the abyss."" Once when the descent grew amazingly steep I recited something in sing-song from Thomas Moore until I feared to recite more:
A reservoir of darkness, black
As witches' cauldrons are, when fill'd
With moon-drugs in th' eclipse distill'd
Leaning to look if foot might pass
Down thro' that chasm, I saw, beneath,
As far as vision could explore,
The jetty sides as smooth as glass,
Looking as if just varnish'd o'er
With that dark pitch the Seat of Death
Throws out upon its slimy shore.
Time had quite ceased to exist when my feet again felt a level floor, and I found myself in a place slightly higher than the rooms in the two smaller temples now so incalculably far above my head. I could not quite stand, but could kneel upright, and in the dark I shuffled and crept hither and thither at random. I soon knew that I was in a narrow passage whose walls were lined with cases of wood having glass fronts. As in that Palaeozoic and abysmal place I felt of such things as polished wood and glass I shuddered at the possible implications. The cases were apparently ranged along each side of the passage at regular intervals, and were oblong and horizontal, hideously like coffins in shape and size. When I tried to move two or three for further examination, I found that they were firmly fastened.
I saw that the passage was a long one, so floundered ahead rapidly in a creeping run that would have seemed horrible had any eye watched me in the blackness; crossing from side to side occasionally to feel of my surroundings and be sure the walls and rows of cases still stretched on. Man is so used to thinking visually that I almost forgot the darkness and pictured the endless corridor of wood and glass in its low-studded monotony as though I saw it. And then in a moment of indescribable emotion I did see it.
Just when my fancy merged into real sight I cannot tell; but there came a gradual glow ahead, and all at once I knew that I saw the dim outlines of a corridor and the cases, revealed by some unknown subterranean phosphorescence. For a little while all was exactly as I had imagined it, since the glow was very faint; but as I mechanically kept stumbling ahead into the stronger light I realised that my fancy had been but feeble. This hall was no relic of crudity like the temples in the city above, but a monument of the most magnificent and exotic art. Rich, vivid, and daringly fantastic designs and pictures formed a continuous scheme of mural paintings whose lines and colours were beyond description. The cases were of a strange golden wood, with fronts of exquisite glass, and containing the mummified forms of creatures outreaching in grotesqueness the most chaotic dreams of man.
To convey any idea of these monstrosities is impossible. They were of the reptile kind, with body lines suggestion sometimes the crocodile, sometimes the seal, but more often nothing of which either the naturalist or the palaeontologist ever heard. In size they approximated a small man, and their fore-legs bore delicate and evident feet curiously like human hands and fingers. But strangest of all were their heads, which presented a contour violating all known biological principles. To nothing can such things be well compared--in one flash I thought of comparisons as varied as the cat, the bullfrog, the mythic Satyr, and the human being. Not Jove himself had had so colossal and protuberant a forehead, yet the horns and the noselessness and the alligator-like jaw placed things outside all established categories. I debated for a time on the reality of the mummies, half suspecting they were artificial idols; but soon decided they were indeed some palaeogean species which had lived when the nameless city was alive. To crown their grotesqueness, most of them were gorgeously enrobed in the costliest of fabrics, and lavishly laden with ornaments of gold, jewels, and unknown shining metals.
The importance of these crawling creatures must have been vast, for they held first place among the wild designs on the frescoed walls and ceiling. With matchless skill had the artist drawn them in a world of their own, wherein they had cities and gardens fashioned to suit their dimensions; and I could not help but think that their pictured history was allegorical, perhaps showing the progress of the race that worshipped them. These creatures, I said to myself, were to men of the nameless city what the she-wolf was to Rome, or some totem-beast is to a tribe of Indians.
Holding this view, I could trace roughly a wonderful epic of the nameless city; the tale of a mighty seacoast metropolis that ruled the world before Africa rose out of the waves, and of its struggles as the sea shrank away, and the desert crept into the fertile valley that held it. I saw its wars and triumphs, its troubles and defeats, and afterwards its terrible fight against the desert when thousands of its people--here represented in allegory by the grotesque reptiles--were driven to chisel their way down through the rocks in some marvellous manner to another world whereof their prophets had told them. It was all vividly weird and realistic, and its connection with the awesome descent I had made was unmistakable. I even recognized the passages.
As I crept along the corridor toward the brighter light I saw later stages of the painted epic--the leave-taking of the race that had dwelt in the nameless city and the valley around for ten million years; the race whose souls shrank from quitting scenes their bodies had known so long where they had settled as nomads in the earth's youth, hewing in the virgin rock those primal shrines at which they had never ceased to worship. Now that the light was better I studied the pictures more closely and, remembering that the strange reptiles must represent the unknown men, pondered upon the customs of the nameless city. Many things were peculiar and inexplicable. The civilization, which included a written alphabet, had seemingly risen to a higher order than those immeasurably later civilizations of Egypt and Chaldaea, yet there were curious omissions. I could, for example, find no pictures to represent deaths or funeral customs, save such as were related to wars, violence, and plagues; and I wondered at the reticence shown concerning natural death. It was as though an ideal of immortality had been fostered as a cheering illusion.
Still nearer the end of the passage was painted scenes of the utmost picturesqueness and extravagance: contrasted views of the nameless city in its desertion and growing ruin, and of the strange new realm of paradise to which the race had hewed its way through the stone. In these views the city and the desert valley were shewn always by moonlight, golden nimbus hovering over the fallen walls, and half-revealing the splendid perfection of former times, shown spectrally and elusively by the artist. The paradisal scenes were almost too extravagant to be believed, portraying a hidden world of eternal day filled with glorious cities and ethereal hills and valleys. At the very last I thought I saw signs of an artistic anticlimax. The paintings were less skillful, and much more bizarre than even the wildest of the earlier scenes. They seemed to record a slow decadence of the ancient stock, coupled with a growing ferocity toward the outside world from which it was driven by the desert. The forms of the people--always represented by the sacred reptiles--appeared to be gradually wasting away, through their spirit as shewn hovering above the ruins by moonlight gained in proportion. Emaciated priests, displayed as reptiles in ornate robes, cursed the upper air and all who breathed it; and one terrible final scene shewed a primitive-looking man, perhaps a pioneer of ancient Irem, the City of Pillars, torn to pieces by members of the elder race. I remember how the Arabs fear the nameless city, and was glad that beyond this place the grey walls and ceiling were bare.
As I viewed the pageant of mural history I had approached very closely to the end of the low-ceiled hall, and was aware of a gate through which came all of the illuminating phosphorescence. Creeping up to it, I cried aloud in transcendent amazement at what lay beyond; for instead of other and brighter chambers there was only an illimitable void of uniform radiance, such one might fancy when gazing down from the peak of Mount Everest upon a sea of sunlit mist. Behind me was a passage so cramped that I could not stand upright in it; before me was an infinity of subterranean effulgence.
Reaching down from the passage into the abyss was the head of a steep flight of steps--small numerous steps like those of black passages I had traversed--but after a few feet the glowing vapours concealed everything. Swung back open against the left-hand wall of the passage was a massive door of brass, incredibly thick and decorated with fantastic bas-reliefs, which could if closed shut the whole inner world of light away from the vaults and passages of rock. I looked at the step, and for the nonce dared not try them. I touched the open brass door, and could not move it. Then I sank prone to the stone floor, my mind aflame with prodigious reflections which not even a death-like exhaustion could banish.
As I lay still with closed eyes, free to ponder, many things I had lightly noted in the frescoes came back to me with new and terrible significance--scenes representing the nameless city in its heyday--the vegetations of the valley around it, and the distant lands with which its merchants traded. The allegory of the crawling creatures puzzled me by its universal prominence, and I wondered that it would be so closely followed in a pictured history of such importance. In the frescoes the nameless city had been shewn in proportions fitted to the reptiles. I wondered what its real proportions and magnificence had been, and reflected a moment on certain oddities I had noticed in the ruins. I thought curiously of the lowness of the primal temples and of the underground corridor, which were doubtless hewn thus out of deference to the reptile deities there honoured; though it perforce reduced the worshippers to crawling. Perhaps the very rites here involved crawling in imitation of the creatures. No religious theory, however, could easily explain why the level passages in that awesome descent should be as low as the temples--or lower, since one could not even kneel in it. As I thought of the crawling creatures, whose hideous mummified forms were so close to me, I felt a new throb of fear. Mental associations are curious, and I shrank from the idea that except for the poor primitive man torn to pieces in the last painting, mine was the only human form amidst the many relics and symbols of the primordial life.
But as always in my strange and roving existence, wonder soon drove out fear; for the luminous abyss and what it might contain presented a problem worthy of the greatest explorer that a weird world of mystery lay far down that flight of peculiarly small steps I could not doubt, and I hoped to find there those human memorials which the painted corridor had failed to give. The frescoes had pictured unbelievable cities, and valleys in this lower realm, and my fancy dwelt on the rich and colossal ruins that awaited me.
My fears, indeed, concerned the past rather than the future. Not even the physical horror of my position in that cramped corridor of dead reptiles and antediluvian frescoes, miles below the world I knew and faced by another world of eery light and mist, could match the lethal dread I felt at the abysmal antiquity of the scene and its soul. An ancientness so vast that measurement is feeble seemed to leer down from the primal stones and rock-hewn temples of the nameless city, while the very latest of the astounding maps in the frescoes shewed oceans and continents that man has forgotten, with only here and there some vaguely familiar outlines. Of what could have happened in the geological ages since the paintings ceased and the death-hating race resentfully succumbed to decay, no man might say. Life had once teemed in these caverns and in the luminous realm beyond; now I was alone with vivid relics, and I trembled to think of the countless ages through which these relics had kept a silent deserted vigil.
Suddenly there came another burst of that acute fear which had intermittently seized me ever since I first saw the terrible valley and the nameless city under a cold moon, and despite my exhaustion I found myself starting frantically to a sitting posture and gazing back along the black corridor toward the tunnels that rose to the outer world. My sensations were like those which had made me shun the nameless city at night, and were as inexplicable as they were poignant. In another moment, however, I received a still greater shock in the form of a definite sound--the first which had broken the utter silence of these tomb-like depths. It was a deep, low moaning, as of a distant throng of condemned spirits, and came from the direction in which I was staring. Its volume rapidly grew, till it soon reverberated rightfully through the low passage, and at the same time I became conscious of an increasing draught of old air, likewise flowing from the tunnels and the city above. The touch of this air seemed to restore my balance, for I instantly recalled the sudden gusts which had risen around the mouth of the abyss each sunset and sunrise, one of which had indeed revealed the hidden tunnels to me. I looked at my watch and saw that sunrise was near, so bracing myself to resist the gale that was sweeping down to its cavern home as it had swept forth at evening. My fear again waned low, since a natural phenomenon tends to dispel broodings over the unknown.
More and more madly poured the shrieking, moaning night wind into the gulf of the inner earth. I dropped prone again and clutched vainly at the floor for fear of being swept bodily through the open gate into the phosphorescent abyss. Such fury I had not expected, and as I grew aware of an actual slipping of my form toward the abyss I was beset by a thousand new terrors of apprehension and imagination. The malignancy of the blast awakened incredible fancies; once more I compared myself shudderingly to the only human image in that frightful corridor, the man who was torn to pieces by the nameless race, for in the fiendish clawing of the swirling currents there seemed to abide a vindictive rage all the stronger because it was largely impotent. I think I screamed frantically near the last--I was almost mad--of the howling wind-wraiths. I tried to crawl against the murderous invisible torrent, but I could not even hold my own as I was pushed slowly and inexorably toward the unknown world. Finally reason must have wholly snapped; for I fell babbling over and over that unexplainable couplet of the mad Arab Alhazred, who dreamed of the nameless city:
That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die.
Only the grim brooding desert gods know what really took place--what indescribable struggles and scrambles in the dark I endured or what Abaddon guided me back to life, where I must always remember and shiver in the night wind till oblivion--or worse--claims me. Monstrous, unnatural, colossal, was the thing--too far beyond all the ideas of man to be believed except in the silent damnable small hours of the morning when one cannot sleep.
I have said that the fury of the rushing blast was infernal-- cacodaemoniacal--and that its voices were hideous with the pent-up viciousness of desolate eternities. Presently these voices, while still chaotic before me, seemed to my beating brain to take articulate form behind me; and down there in the grave of unnumbered aeon-dead antiquities, leagues below the dawn-lit world of men, I heard the ghastly cursing and snarling of strange-tongued fiends. Turning, I saw outlined against the luminous aether of the abyss that could not be seen against the dusk of the corridor--a nightmare horde of rushing devils; hate distorted, grotesquely panoplied, half transparent devils of a race no man might mistake--the crawling reptiles of the nameless city.
And as the wind died away I was plunged into the ghoul-pooled darkness of earth's bowels; for behind the last of the creatures the great brazen door clanged shut with a deafening peal of metallic music whose reverberations swelled out to the distant world to hail the rising sun as Memnon hails it from the banks of the Nile.
","I.

After twenty-two years of nightmare and terror, saved only by a desperate conviction of the mythical source of certain impressions, I am unwilling to vouch for the truth of that which I think I found in Western Australia on the night of July 17–18, 1935. There is reason to hope that my experience was wholly or partly an hallucination—for which, indeed, abundant causes existed. And yet, its realism was so hideous that I sometimes find hope impossible. If the thing did happen, then man must be prepared to accept notions of the cosmos, and of his own place in the seething vortex of time, whose merest mention is paralysing. He must, too, be placed on guard against a specific lurking peril which, though it will never engulf the whole race, may impose monstrous and unguessable horrors upon certain venturesome members of it. It is for this latter reason that I urge, with all the force of my being, a final abandonment of all attempts at unearthing those fragments of unknown, primordial masonry which my expedition set out to investigate.
      Assuming that I was sane and awake, my experience on that night was such as has befallen no man before. It was, moreover, a frightful confirmation of all I had sought to dismiss as myth and dream. Mercifully there is no proof, for in my fright I lost the awesome object which would—if real and brought out of that noxious abyss—have formed irrefutable evidence. When I came upon the horror I was alone—and I have up to now told no one about it. I could not stop the others from digging in its direction, but chance and the shifting sand have so far saved them from finding it. Now I must formulate some definitive statement—not only for the sake of my own mental balance, but to warn such others as may read it seriously.
      These pages—much in whose earlier parts will be familiar to close readers of the general and scientific press—are written in the cabin of the ship that is bringing me home. I shall give them to my son, Prof. Wingate Peaslee of Miskatonic University—the only member of my family who stuck to me after my queer amnesia of long ago, and the man best informed on the inner facts of my case. Of all living persons, he is least likely to ridicule what I shall tell of that fateful night. I did not enlighten him orally before sailing, because I think he had better have the revelation in written form. Reading and re-reading at leisure will leave with him a more convincing picture than my confused tongue could hope to convey. He can do as he thinks best with this account—shewing it, with suitable comment, to any quarters where it will be likely to accomplish good. It is for the sake of such readers as are unfamiliar with the earlier phases of my case that I am prefacing the revelation itself with a fairly ample summary of its background.
      My name is Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee, and those who recall the newspaper tales of a generation back—or the letters and articles in psychological journals six or seven years ago—will know who and what I am. The press was filled with the details of my strange amnesia in 1908–13, and much was made of the traditions of horror, madness, and witchcraft which lurk behind the ancient Massachusetts town then and now forming my place of residence. Yet I would have it known that there is nothing whatever of the mad or sinister in my heredity and early life. This is a highly important fact in view of the shadow which fell so suddenly upon me from outside sources. It may be that centuries of dark brooding had given to crumbling, whisper-haunted Arkham a peculiar vulnerability as regards such shadows—though even this seems doubtful in the light of those other cases which I later came to study. But the chief point is that my own ancestry and background are altogether normal. What came, came from somewhere else—where, I even now hesitate to assert in plain words.
      I am the son of Jonathan and Hannah (Wingate) Peaslee, both of wholesome old Haverhill stock. I was born and reared in Haverhill—at the old homestead in Boardman Street near Golden Hill—and did not go to Arkham till I entered Miskatonic University at the age of eighteen. That was in 1889. After my graduation I studied economics at Harvard, and came back to Miskatonic as Instructor of Political Economy in 1895. For thirteen years more my life ran smoothly and happily. I married Alice Keezar of Haverhill in 1896, and my three children, Robert K., Wingate, and Hannah, were born in 1898, 1900, and 1903, respectively. In 1898 I became an associate professor, and in 1902 a full professor. At no time had I the least interest in either occultism or abnormal psychology.
      It was on Thursday, May 14, 1908, that the queer amnesia came. The thing was quite sudden, though later I realised that certain brief, glimmering visions of several hours previous—chaotic visions which disturbed me greatly because they were so unprecedented—must have formed premonitory symptoms. My head was aching, and I had a singular feeling—altogether new to me—that someone else was trying to get possession of my thoughts. 
      The collapse occurred about 10:20 a.m., while I was conducting a class in Political Economy VI—history and present tendencies of economics—for juniors and a few sophomores. I began to see strange shapes before my eyes, and to feel that I was in a grotesque room other than the classroom. My thoughts and speech wandered from my subject, and the students saw that something was gravely amiss. Then I slumped down, unconscious in my chair, in a stupor from which no one could arouse me. Nor did my rightful faculties again look out upon the daylight of our normal world for five years, four months, and thirteen days.
      It is, of course, from others that I have learned what followed. I shewed no sign of consciousness for sixteen and a half hours, though removed to my home at 27 Crane St. and given the best of medical attention. At 3 a.m. May 15 my eyes opened and I began to speak, but before long the doctors and my family were thoroughly frightened by the trend of my expression and language. It was clear that I had no remembrance of my identity or of my past, though for some reason I seemed anxious to conceal this lack of knowledge. My eyes gazed strangely at the persons around me, and the flexions of my facial muscles were altogether unfamiliar.
      Even my speech seemed awkward and foreign. I used my vocal organs clumsily and gropingly, and my diction had a curiously stilted quality, as if I had laboriously learned the English language from books. The pronunciation was barbarously alien, whilst the idiom seemed to include both scraps of curious archaism and expressions of a wholly incomprehensible cast. Of the latter one in particular was very potently—even terrifiedly—recalled by the youngest of the physicians twenty years afterward. For at that late period such a phrase began to have an actual currency—first in England and then in the United States—and though of much complexity and indisputable newness, it reproduced in every least particular the mystifying words of the strange Arkham patient of 1908.
      Physical strength returned at once, although I required an odd amount of re-education in the use of my hands, legs, and bodily apparatus in general. Because of this and other handicaps inherent in the mnemonic lapse, I was for some time kept under strict medical care. When I saw that my attempts to conceal the lapse had failed, I admitted it openly, and became eager for information of all sorts. Indeed, it seemed to the doctors that I had lost interest in my proper personality as soon as I found the case of amnesia accepted as a natural thing. They noticed that my chief efforts were to master certain points in history, science, art, language, and folklore—some of them tremendously abstruse, and some childishly simple—which remained, very oddly in many cases, outside my consciousness.
      At the same time they noticed that I had an inexplicable command of many almost unknown sorts of knowledge—a command which I seemed to wish to hide rather than display. I would inadvertently refer, with casual assurance, to specific events in dim ages outside the range of accepted history—passing off such references as a jest when I saw the surprise they created. And I had a way of speaking of the future which two or three times caused actual fright. These uncanny flashes soon ceased to appear, though some observers laid their vanishment more to a certain furtive caution on my part than to any waning of the strange knowledge behind them. Indeed, I seemed anomalously avid to absorb the speech, customs, and perspectives of the age around me; as if I were a studious traveller from a far, foreign land.
      As soon as permitted, I haunted the college library at all hours; and shortly began to arrange for those odd travels, and special courses at American and European universities, which evoked so much comment during the next few years. I did not at any time suffer from a lack of learned contacts, for my case had a mild celebrity among the psychologists of the period. I was lectured upon as a typical example of secondary personality—even though I seemed to puzzle the lecturers now and then with some bizarre symptom or some queer trace of carefully veiled mockery.
      Of real friendliness, however, I encountered little. Something in my aspect and speech seemed to excite vague fears and aversions in everyone I met, as if I were a being infinitely removed from all that is normal and healthful. This idea of a black, hidden horror connected with incalculable gulfs of some sort of distance was oddly widespread and persistent. My own family formed no exception. From the moment of my strange waking my wife had regarded me with extreme horror and loathing, vowing that I was some utter alien usurping the body of her husband. In 1910 she obtained a legal divorce, nor would she ever consent to see me even after my return to normalcy in 1913. These feelings were shared by my elder son and my small daughter, neither of whom I have ever seen since.
      Only my second son Wingate seemed able to conquer the terror and repulsion which my change aroused. He indeed felt that I was a stranger, but though only eight years old held fast to a faith that my proper self would return. When it did return he sought me out, and the courts gave me his custody. In succeeding years he helped me with the studies to which I was driven, and today at thirty-five he is a professor of psychology at Miskatonic. But I do not wonder at the horror I caused—for certainly, the mind, voice, and facial expression of the being that awaked on May 15, 1908 were not those of Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee.
      I will not attempt to tell much of my life from 1908 to 1913, since readers may glean all the outward essentials—as I largely had to do—from files of old newspapers and scientific journals. I was given charge of my funds, and spent them slowly and on the whole wisely, in travel and in study at various centres of learning. My travels, however, were singular in the extreme; involving long visits to remote and desolate places. In 1909 I spent a month in the Himalayas, and in 1911 aroused much attention through a camel trip into the unknown deserts of Arabia. What happened on those journeys I have never been able to learn. During the summer of 1912 I chartered a ship and sailed in the Arctic north of Spitzbergen, afterward shewing signs of disappointment. Later in that year I spent weeks alone beyond the limits of previous or subsequent exploration in the vast limestone cavern systems of western Virginia—black labyrinths so complex that no retracing of my steps could even be considered.
      My sojourns at the universities were marked by abnormally rapid assimilation, as if the secondary personality had an intelligence enormously superior to my own. I have found, also, that my rate of reading and solitary study was phenomenal. I could master every detail of a book merely by glancing over it as fast as I could turn the leaves; while my skill at interpreting complex figures in an instant was veritably awesome. At times there appeared almost ugly reports of my power to influence the thoughts and acts of others, though I seemed to have taken care to minimise displays of this faculty.
      Other ugly reports concerned my intimacy with leaders of occultist groups, and scholars suspected of connexion with nameless bands of abhorrent elder-world hierophants. These rumours, though never proved at the time, were doubtless stimulated by the known tenor of some of my reading—for the consultation of rare books at libraries cannot be effected secretly. There is tangible proof—in the form of marginal notes—that I went minutely through such things as the Comte d’Erlette’s Cultes des Goules, Ludvig Prinn’s De Vermis Mysteriis, the Unaussprechlichen Kulten of von Junzt, the surviving fragments of the puzzling Book of Eibon, and the dreaded Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred. Then, too, it is undeniable that a fresh and evil wave of underground cult activity set in about the time of my odd mutation.
      In the summer of 1913 I began to display signs of ennui and flagging interest, and to hint to various associates that a change might soon be expected in me. I spoke of returning memories of my earlier life—though most auditors judged me insincere, since all the recollections I gave were casual, and such as might have been learned from my old private papers. About the middle of August I returned to Arkham and reopened my long-closed house in Crane St. Here I installed a mechanism of the most curious aspect, constructed piecemeal by different makers of scientific apparatus in Europe and America, and guarded carefully from the sight of anyone intelligent enough to analyse it. Those who did see it—a workman, a servant, and the new housekeeper—say that it was a queer mixture of rods, wheels, and mirrors, though only about two feet tall, one foot wide, and one foot thick. The central mirror was circular and convex. All this is borne out by such makers of parts as can be located.
      On the evening of Friday, Sept. 26, I dismissed the housekeeper and the maid till noon of the next day. Lights burned in the house till late, and a lean, dark, curiously foreign-looking man called in an automobile. It was about 1 a.m. that the lights were last seen. At 2:15 a.m. a policeman observed the place in darkness, but with the stranger’s motor still at the curb. By four o’clock the motor was certainly gone. It was at six that a hesitant, foreign voice on the telephone asked Dr. Wilson to call at my house and bring me out of a peculiar faint. This call—a long-distance one—was later traced to a public booth in the North Station in Boston, but no sign of the lean foreigner was ever unearthed.
      When the doctor reached my house he found me unconscious in the sitting-room—in an easy-chair with a table drawn up before it. On the polished table-top were scratches shewing where some heavy object had rested. The queer machine was gone, nor was anything afterward heard of it. Undoubtedly the dark, lean foreigner had taken it away. In the library grate were abundant ashes evidently left from the burning of every remaining scrap of paper on which I had written since the advent of the amnesia. Dr. Wilson found my breathing very peculiar, but after an hypodermic injection it became more regular.
      At 11:15 a.m., Sept. 27, I stirred vigorously, and my hitherto mask-like face began to shew signs of expression. Dr. Wilson remarked that the expression was not that of my secondary personality, but seemed much like that of my normal self. About 11:30 I muttered some very curious syllables—syllables which seemed unrelated to any human speech. I appeared, too, to struggle against something. Then, just after noon—the housekeeper and the maid having meanwhile returned—I began to mutter in English.
      “. . . of the orthodox economists of that period, Jevons typifies the prevailing trend toward scientific correlation. His attempt to link the commercial cycle of prosperity and depression with the physical cycle of the solar spots forms perhaps the apex of . . .”
      Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee had come back—a spirit in whose time-scale it was still that Thursday morning in 1908, with the economics class gazing up at the battered desk on the platform.

II.

My reabsorption into normal life was a painful and difficult process. The loss of over five years creates more complications than can be imagined, and in my case there were countless matters to be adjusted. What I heard of my actions since 1908 astonished and disturbed me, but I tried to view the matter as philosophically as I could. At last regaining custody of my second son Wingate, I settled down with him in the Crane Street house and endeavoured to resume teaching—my old professorship having been kindly offered me by the college.
      I began work with the February, 1914, term, and kept at it just a year. By that time I realised how badly my experience had shaken me. Though perfectly sane—I hoped—and with no flaw in my original personality, I had not the nervous energy of the old days. Vague dreams and queer ideas continually haunted me, and when the outbreak of the world war turned my mind to history I found myself thinking of periods and events in the oddest possible fashion. My conception of time—my ability to distinguish between consecutiveness and simultaneousness—seemed subtly disordered; so that I formed chimerical notions about living in one age and casting one’s mind all over eternity for knowledge of past and future ages.
      The war gave me strange impressions of remembering some of its far-off consequences—as if I knew how it was coming out and could look back upon it in the light of future information. All such quasi-memories were attended with much pain, and with a feeling that some artificial psychological barrier was set against them. When I diffidently hinted to others about my impressions I met with varied responses. Some persons looked uncomfortably at me, but men in the mathematics department spoke of new developments in those theories of relativity—then discussed only in learned circles—which were later to become so famous. Dr. Albert Einstein, they said, was rapidly reducing time to the status of a mere dimension.
      But the dreams and disturbed feelings gained on me, so that I had to drop my regular work in 1915. Certain of the impressions were taking an annoying shape—giving me the persistent notion that my amnesia had formed some unholy sort of exchange; that the secondary personality had indeed been an intruding force from unknown regions, and that my own personality had suffered displacement. Thus I was driven to vague and frightful speculations concerning the whereabouts of my true self during the years that another had held my body. The curious knowledge and strange conduct of my body’s late tenant troubled me more and more as I learned further details from persons, papers, and magazines. Queernesses that had baffled others seemed to harmonise terribly with some background of black knowledge which festered in the chasms of my subconscious. I began to search feverishly for every scrap of information bearing on the studies and travels of that other one during the dark years.
      Not all of my troubles were as semi-abstract as this. There were the dreams—and these seemed to grow in vividness and concreteness. Knowing how most would regard them, I seldom mentioned them to anyone but my son or certain trusted psychologists, but eventually I commenced a scientific study of other cases in order to see how typical or non-typical such visions might be among amnesia victims. My results, aided by psychologists, historians, anthropologists, and mental specialists of wide experience, and by a study that included all records of split personalities from the days of daemoniac-possession legends to the medically realistic present, at first bothered me more than they consoled me.
      I soon found that my dreams had indeed no counterpart in the overwhelming bulk of true amnesia cases. There remained, however, a tiny residue of accounts which for years baffled and shocked me with their parallelism to my own experience. Some of them were bits of ancient folklore; others were case-histories in the annals of medicine; one or two were anecdotes obscurely buried in standard histories. It thus appeared that, while my special kind of affliction was prodigiously rare, instances of it had occurred at long intervals ever since the beginning of man’s annals. Some centuries might contain one, two, or three cases; others none—or at least none whose record survived.
      The essence was always the same—a person of keen thoughtfulness seized with a strange secondary life and leading for a greater or lesser period an utterly alien existence typified at first by vocal and bodily awkwardness, and later by a wholesale acquisition of scientific, historic, artistic, and anthropological knowledge; an acquisition carried on with feverish zest and with a wholly abnormal absorptive power. Then a sudden return of the rightful consciousness, intermittently plagued ever after with vague unplaceable dreams suggesting fragments of some hideous memory elaborately blotted out. And the close resemblance of those nightmares to my own—even in some of the smallest particulars—left no doubt in my mind of their significantly typical nature. One or two of the cases had an added ring of faint, blasphemous familiarity, as if I had heard of them before through some cosmic channel too morbid and frightful to contemplate. In three instances there was specific mention of such an unknown machine as had been in my house before the second change.
      Another thing that cloudily worried me during my investigation was the somewhat greater frequency of cases where a brief, elusive glimpse of the typical nightmares was afforded to persons not visited with well-defined amnesia. These persons were largely of mediocre mind or less—some so primitive that they could scarcely be thought of as vehicles for abnormal scholarship and preternatural mental acquisitions. For a second they would be fired with alien force—then a backward lapse and a thin, swift-fading memory of un-human horrors.
      There had been at least three such cases during the past half century—one only fifteen years before. Had something been groping blindly through time from some unsuspected abyss in Nature? Were these faint cases monstrous, sinister experiments of a kind and authorship utterly beyond sane belief? Such were a few of the formless speculations of my weaker hours—fancies abetted by myths which my studies uncovered. For I could not doubt but that certain persistent legends of immemorial antiquity, apparently unknown to the victims and physicians connected with recent amnesia cases, formed a striking and awesome elaboration of memory lapses such as mine.
      Of the nature of the dreams and impressions which were growing so clamorous I still almost fear to speak. They seemed to savour of madness, and at times I believed I was indeed going mad. Was there a special type of delusion afflicting those who had suffered lapses of memory? Conceivably, the efforts of the subconscious mind to fill up a perplexing blank with pseudo-memories might give rise to strange imaginative vagaries. This, indeed (though an alternative folklore theory finally seemed to me more plausible), was the belief of many of the alienists who helped me in my search for parallel cases, and who shared my puzzlement at the exact resemblances sometimes discovered. They did not call the condition true insanity, but classed it rather among neurotic disorders. My course in trying to track it down and analyse it, instead of vainly seeking to dismiss or forget it, they heartily endorsed as correct according to the best psychological principles. I especially valued the advice of such physicians as had studied me during my possession by the other personality.
      My first disturbances were not visual at all, but concerned the more abstract matters which I have mentioned. There was, too, a feeling of profound and inexplicable horror concerning myself. I developed a queer fear of seeing my own form, as if my eyes would find it something utterly alien and inconceivably abhorrent. When I did glance down and behold the familiar human shape in quiet grey or blue clothing I always felt a curious relief, though in order to gain this relief I had to conquer an infinite dread. I shunned mirrors as much as possible, and was always shaved at the barber’s.
      It was a long time before I correlated any of these disappointed feelings with the fleeting visual impressions which began to develop. The first such correlation had to do with the odd sensation of an external, artificial restraint on my memory. I felt that the snatches of sight I experienced had a profound and terrible meaning, and a frightful connexion with myself, but that some purposeful influence held me from grasping that meaning and that connexion. Then came that queerness about the element of time, and with it desperate efforts to place the fragmentary dream-glimpses in the chronological and spatial pattern.
      The glimpses themselves were at first merely strange rather than horrible. I would seem to be in an enormous vaulted chamber whose lofty stone groinings were well-nigh lost in the shadows overhead. In whatever time or place the scene might be, the principle of the arch was known as fully and used as extensively as by the Romans. There were colossal round windows and high arched doors, and pedestals or tables each as tall as the height of an ordinary room. Vast shelves of dark wood lined the walls, holding what seemed to be volumes of immense size with strange hieroglyphs on their backs. The exposed stonework held curious carvings, always in curvilinear mathematical designs, and there were chiselled inscriptions in the same characters that the huge books bore. The dark granite masonry was of a monstrous megalithic type, with lines of convex-topped blocks fitting the concave-bottomed courses which rested upon them. There were no chairs, but the tops of the vast pedestals were littered with books, papers, and what seemed to be writing materials—oddly figured jars of a purplish metal, and rods with stained tips. Tall as the pedestals were, I seemed at times able to view them from above. On some of them were great globes of luminous crystal serving as lamps, and inexplicable machines formed of vitreous tubes and metal rods. The windows were glazed, and latticed with stout-looking bars. Though I dared not approach and peer out them, I could see from where I was the waving tops of singular fern-like growths. The floor was of massive octagonal flagstones, while rugs and hangings were entirely lacking.
      Later I had visions of sweeping through Cyclopean corridors of stone, and up and down gigantic inclined planes of the same monstrous masonry. There were no stairs anywhere, nor was any passageway less than thirty feet wide. Some of the structures through which I floated must have towered into the sky for thousands of feet. There were multiple levels of black vaults below, and never-opened trap-doors, sealed down with metal bands and holding dim suggestions of some special peril. I seemed to be a prisoner, and horror hung broodingly over everything I saw. I felt that the mocking curvilinear hieroglyphs on the walls would blast my soul with their message were I not guarded by a merciful ignorance.
      Still later my dreams included vistas from the great round windows, and from the titanic flat roof, with its curious gardens, wide barren area, and high, scalloped parapet of stone, to which the topmost of the inclined planes led. There were almost endless leagues of giant buildings, each in its garden, and ranged along paved roads fully two hundred feet wide. They differed greatly in aspect, but few were less than five hundred feet square or a thousand feet high. Many seemed so limitless that they must have had a frontage of several thousand feet, while some shot up to mountainous altitudes in the grey, steamy heavens. They seemed to be mainly of stone or concrete, and most of them embodied the oddly curvilinear type of masonry noticeable in the building that held me. Roofs were flat and garden-covered, and tended to have scalloped parapets. Sometimes there were terraces and higher levels, and wide cleared spaces amidst the gardens. The great roads held hints of motion, but in the earlier visions I could not resolve this impression into details.
      In certain places I beheld enormous dark cylindrical towers which climbed far above any of the other structures. These appeared to be of a totally unique nature, and shewed signs of prodigious age and dilapidation. They were built of a bizarre type of square-cut basalt masonry, and tapered slightly toward their rounded tops. Nowhere in any of them could the least traces of windows or other apertures save huge doors be found. I noticed also some lower buildings—all crumbling with the weathering of aeons—which resembled these dark cylindrical towers in basic architecture. Around all these aberrant piles of square-cut masonry there hovered an inexplicable aura of menace and concentrated fear, like that bred by the sealed trap-doors.
      The omnipresent gardens were almost terrifying in their strangeness, with bizarre and unfamiliar forms of vegetation nodding over broad paths lined with curiously carven monoliths. Abnormally vast fern-like growths predominated; some green, and some of a ghastly, fungoid pallor. Among them rose great spectral things resembling calamites, whose bamboo-like trunks towered to fabulous heights. Then there were tufted forms like fabulous cycads, and grotesque dark-green shrubs and trees of coniferous aspect. Flowers were small, colourless, and unrecognisable, blooming in geometrical beds and at large among the greenery. In a few of the terrace and roof-top gardens were larger and more vivid blossoms of almost offensive contours and seeming to suggest artificial breeding. Fungi of inconceivable size, outlines, and colours speckled the scene in patterns bespeaking some unknown but well-established horticultural tradition. In the larger gardens on the ground there seemed to be some attempt to preserve the irregularities of Nature, but on the roofs there was more selectiveness, and more evidences of the topiary art.
      The skies were almost always moist and cloudy, and sometimes I would seem to witness tremendous rains. Once in a while, though, there would be glimpses of the sun—which looked abnormally large—and of the moon, whose markings held a touch of difference from the normal that I could never quite fathom. When—very rarely—the night sky was clear to any extent, I beheld constellations which were nearly beyond recognition. Known outlines were sometimes approximated, but seldom duplicated; and from the position of the few groups I could recognise, I felt I must be in the earth’s southern hemisphere, near the Tropic of Capricorn. The far horizon was always steamy and indistinct, but I could see that great jungles of unknown tree-ferns, calamites, lepidodendra, and sigillaria lay outside the city, their fantastic frondage waving mockingly in the shifting vapours. Now and then there would be suggestions of motion in the sky, but these my early visions never resolved.
      By the autumn of 1914 I began to have infrequent dreams of strange floatings over the city and through the regions around it. I saw interminable roads through forests of fearsome growths with mottled, fluted, and banded trunks, and past other cities as strange as the one which persistently haunted me. I saw monstrous constructions of black or iridescent stone in glades and clearings where perpetual twilight reigned, and traversed long causeways over swamps so dark that I could tell but little of their moist, towering vegetation. Once I saw an area of countless miles strown with age-blasted basaltic ruins whose architecture had been like that of the few windowless, round-topped towers in the haunting city. And once I saw the sea—a boundless steamy expanse beyond the colossal stone piers of an enormous town of domes and arches. Great shapeless suggestions of shadow moved over it, and here and there its surface was vexed with anomalous spoutings.

III.

As I have said, it was not immediately that these wild visions began to hold their terrifying quality. Certainly, many persons have dreamed intrinsically stranger things—things compounded of unrelated scraps of daily life, pictures, and reading, and arranged in fantastically novel forms by the unchecked caprices of sleep. For some time I accepted the visions as natural, even though I had never before been an extravagant dreamer. Many of the vague anomalies, I argued, must have come from trivial sources too numerous to track down; while others seemed to reflect a common text-book knowledge of the plants and other conditions of the primitive world of a hundred and fifty million years ago—the world of the Permian or Triassic age. In the course of some months, however, the element of terror did figure with accumulating force. This was when the dreams began so unfailingly to have the aspect of memories, and when my mind began to link them with my growing abstract disturbances—the feeling of mnemonic restraint, the curious impressions regarding time, the sense of a loathsome exchange with my secondary personality of 1908–13, and, considerably later, the inexplicable loathing of my own person.
      As certain definite details began to enter the dreams, their horror increased a thousandfold—until by October, 1915, I felt I must do something. It was then that I began an intensive study of other cases of amnesia and visions, feeling that I might thereby objectivise my trouble and shake clear of its emotional grip. However, as before mentioned, the result was at first almost exactly opposite. It disturbed me vastly to find that my dreams had been so closely duplicated; especially since some of the accounts were too early to admit of any geological knowledge—and therefore of any idea of primitive landscapes—on the subjects’ part. What is more, many of these accounts supplied very horrible details and explanations in connexion with the visions of great buildings and jungle gardens—and other things. The actual sights and vague impressions were bad enough, but what was hinted or asserted by some of the other dreamers savoured of madness and blasphemy. Worst of all, my own pseudo-memory was aroused to wilder dreams and hints of coming revelations. And yet most doctors deemed my course, on the whole, an advisable one.
      I studied psychology systematically, and under the prevailing stimulus my son Wingate did the same—his studies leading eventually to his present professorship. In 1917 and 1918 I took special courses at Miskatonic. Meanwhile my examination of medical, historical, and anthropological records became indefatigable; involving travels to distant libraries, and finally including even a reading of the hideous books of forbidden elder lore in which my secondary personality had been so disturbingly interested. Some of the latter were the actual copies I had consulted in my altered state, and I was greatly disturbed by certain marginal notations and ostensible corrections of the hideous text in a script and idiom which somehow seemed oddly un-human.
      These markings were mostly in the respective languages of the various books, all of which the writer seemed to know with equal though obviously academic facility. One note appended to von Junzt’s Unaussprechlichen Kulten, however, was alarmingly otherwise. It consisted of certain curvilinear hieroglyphs in the same ink as that of the German corrections, but following no recognised human pattern. And these hieroglyphs were closely and unmistakably akin to the characters constantly met with in my dreams—characters whose meaning I would sometimes momentarily fancy I knew or was just on the brink of recalling. To complete my black confusion, my librarians assured me that, in view of previous examinations and records of consultation of the volumes in question, all of these notations must have been made by myself in my secondary state. This despite the fact that I was and still am ignorant of three of the languages involved.
      Piecing together the scattered records, ancient and modern, anthropological and medical, I found a fairly consistent mixture of myth and hallucination whose scope and wildness left me utterly dazed. Only one thing consoled me—the fact that the myths were of such early existence. What lost knowledge could have brought pictures of the Palaeozoic or Mesozoic landscape into these primitive fables, I could not even guess, but the pictures had been there. Thus, a basis existed for the formation of a fixed type of delusion. Cases of amnesia no doubt created the general myth-pattern—but afterward the fanciful accretions of the myths must have reacted on amnesia sufferers and coloured their pseudo-memories. I myself had read and heard all the early tales during my memory lapse—my quest had amply proved that. Was it not natural, then, for my subsequent dreams and emotional impressions to become coloured and moulded by what my memory subtly held over from my secondary state? A few of the myths had significant connexions with other cloudy legends of the pre-human world, especially those Hindoo tales involving stupefying gulfs of time and forming part of the lore of modern theosophists.
      Primal myth and modern delusion joined in their assumption that mankind is only one—perhaps the least—of the highly evolved and dominant races of this planet’s long and largely unknown career. Things of inconceivable shape, they implied, had reared towers to the sky and delved into every secret of Nature before the first amphibian forbear of man had crawled out of the hot sea three hundred million years ago. Some had come down from the stars; a few were as old as the cosmos itself; others had arisen swiftly from terrene germs as far behind the first germs of our life-cycle as those germs are behind ourselves. Spans of thousands of millions of years, and linkages with other galaxies and universes, were freely spoken of. Indeed, there was no such thing as time in its humanly accepted sense.
      But most of the tales and impressions concerned a relatively late race, of a queer and intricate shape resembling no life-form known to science, which had lived till only fifty million years before the advent of man. This, they indicated, was the greatest race of all; because it alone had conquered the secret of time. It had learned all things that ever were known or ever would be known on the earth, through the power of its keener minds to project themselves into the past and future, even through gulfs of millions of years, and study the lore of every age. From the accomplishments of this race arose all legends of prophets, including those in human mythology.
      In its vast libraries were volumes of texts and pictures holding the whole of earth’s annals—histories and descriptions of every species that had ever been or that ever would be, with full records of their arts, their achievements, their languages, and their psychologies. With this aeon-embracing knowledge, the Great Race chose from every era and life-form such thoughts, arts, and processes as might suit its own nature and situation. Knowledge of the past, secured through a kind of mind-casting outside the recognised senses, was harder to glean than knowledge of the future.
      In the latter case the course was easier and more material. With suitable mechanical aid a mind would project itself forward in time, feeling its dim, extra-sensory way till it approached the desired period. Then, after preliminary trials, it would seize on the best discoverable representative of the highest of that period’s life-forms; entering the organism’s brain and setting up therein its own vibrations while the displaced mind would strike back to the period of the displacer, remaining in the latter’s body till a reverse process was set up. The projected mind, in the body of the organism of the future, would then pose as a member of the race whose outward form it wore; learning as quickly as possible all that could be learned of the chosen age and its massed information and techniques.
      Meanwhile the displaced mind, thrown back to the displacer’s age and body, would be carefully guarded. It would be kept from harming the body it occupied, and would be drained of all its knowledge by trained questioners. Often it could be questioned in its own language, when previous quests into the future had brought back records of that language. If the mind came from a body whose language the Great Race could not physically reproduce, clever machines would be made, on which the alien speech could be played as on a musical instrument. The Great Race’s members were immense rugose cones ten feet high, and with head and other organs attached to foot-thick, distensible limbs spreading from the apexes. They spoke by the clicking or scraping of huge paws or claws attached to the end of two of their four limbs, and walked by the expansion and contraction of a viscous layer attached to their vast ten-foot bases.
      When the captive mind’s amazement and resentment had worn off, and when (assuming that it came from a body vastly different from the Great Race’s) it had lost its horror at its unfamiliar temporary form, it was permitted to study its new environment and experience a wonder and wisdom approximating that of its displacer. With suitable precautions, and in exchange for suitable services, it was allowed to rove all over the habitable world in titan airships or on the huge boat-like atomic-engined vehicles which traversed the great roads, and to delve freely into the libraries containing the records of the planet’s past and future. This reconciled many captive minds to their lot; since none were other than keen, and to such minds the unveiling of hidden mysteries of earth—closed chapters of inconceivable pasts and dizzying vortices of future time which include the years ahead of their own natural ages—forms always, despite the abysmal horrors often unveiled, the supreme experience of life.
      Now and then certain captives were permitted to meet other captive minds seized from the future—to exchange thoughts with consciousnesses living a hundred or a thousand or a million years before or after their own ages. And all were urged to write copiously in their own languages of themselves and their respective periods; such documents to be filed in the great central archives.
      It may be added that there was one sad special type of captive whose privileges were far greater than those of the majority. These were the dying permanent exiles, whose bodies in the future had been seized by keen-minded members of the Great Race who, faced with death, sought to escape mental extinction. Such melancholy exiles were not as common as might be expected, since the longevity of the Great Race lessened its love of life—especially among those superior minds capable of projection. From cases of the permanent projection of elder minds arose many of those lasting changes of personality noticed in later history—including mankind’s.
      As for the ordinary cases of exploration—when the displacing mind had learned what it wished in the future, it would build an apparatus like that which had started its flight and reverse the process of projection. Once more it would be in its own body in its own age, while the lately captive mind would return to that body of the future to which it properly belonged. Only when one or the other of the bodies had died during the exchange was this restoration impossible. In such cases, of course, the exploring mind had—like those of the death-escapers—to live out an alien-bodied life in the future; or else the captive mind—like the dying permanent exiles—had to end its days in the form and past age of the Great Race.
      This fate was least horrible when the captive mind was also of the Great Race—a not infrequent occurrence, since in all its periods that race was intensely concerned with its own future. The number of dying permanent exiles of the Great Race was very slight—largely because of the tremendous penalties attached to displacements of future Great Race minds by the moribund. Through projection, arrangements were made to inflict these penalties on the offending minds in their new future bodies—and sometimes forced re-exchanges were effected. Complex cases of the displacement of exploring or already captive minds by minds in various regions of the past had been known and carefully rectified. In every age since the discovery of mind-projection, a minute but well-recognised element of the population consisted of Great Race minds from past ages, sojourning for a longer or shorter while.
      When a captive mind of alien origin was returned to its own body in the future, it was purged by an intricate mechanical hypnosis of all it had learned in the Great Race’s age—this because of certain troublesome consequences inherent in the general carrying forward of knowledge in large quantities. The few existing instances of clear transmission had caused, and would cause at known future times, great disasters. And it was largely in consequence of two cases of the kind (said the old myths) that mankind had learned what it had concerning the Great Race. Of all things surviving physically and directly from that aeon-distant world, there remained only certain ruins of great stones in far places and under the sea, and parts of the text of the frightful Pnakotic Manuscripts.
      Thus the returning mind reached its own age with only the faintest and most fragmentary visions of what it had undergone since its seizure. All memories that could be eradicated were eradicated, so that in most cases only a dream-shadowed blank stretched back to the time of the first exchange. Some minds recalled more than others, and the chance joining of memories had at rare times brought hints of the forbidden past to future ages. There probably never was a time when groups or cults did not secretly cherish certain of these hints. In the Necronomicon the presence of such a cult among human beings was suggested—a cult that sometimes gave aid to minds voyaging down the aeons from the days of the Great Race.
      And meanwhile the Great Race itself waxed well-nigh omniscient, and turned to the task of setting up exchanges with the minds of other planets, and of exploring their pasts and futures. It sought likewise to fathom the past years and origin of that black, aeon-dead orb in far space whence its own mental heritage had come—for the mind of the Great Race was older than its bodily form. The beings of a dying elder world, wise with the ultimate secrets, had looked ahead for a new world and species wherein they might have long life; and had sent their minds en masse into that future race best adapted to house them—the cone-shaped things that peopled our earth a billion years ago. Thus the Great Race came to be, while the myriad minds sent backward were left to die in the horror of strange shapes. Later the race would again face death, yet would live through another forward migration of its best minds into the bodies of others who had a longer physical span ahead of them.
      Such was the background of intertwined legend and hallucination. When, around 1920, I had my researches in coherent shape, I felt a slight lessening of the tension which their earlier stages had increased. After all, and in spite of the fancies prompted by blind emotions, were not most of my phenomena readily explainable? Any chance might have turned my mind to dark studies during the amnesia—and then I read the forbidden legends and met the members of ancient and ill-regarded cults. That, plainly, supplied the material for the dreams and disturbed feelings which came after the return of memory. As for the marginal notes in dream-hieroglyphs and languages unknown to me, but laid at my door by librarians—I might easily have picked up a smattering of the tongues during my secondary state, while the hieroglyphs were doubtless coined by my fancy from descriptions in old legends, and afterward woven into my dreams. I tried to verify certain points through conversation with known cult-leaders, but never succeeded in establishing the right connexions.
      At times the parallelism of so many cases in so many distant ages continued to worry me as it had at first, but on the other hand I reflected that the excitant folklore was undoubtedly more universal in the past than in the present. Probably all the other victims whose cases were like mine had had a long and familiar knowledge of the tales I had learned only when in my secondary state. When these victims had lost their memory, they had associated themselves with the creatures of their household myths—the fabulous invaders supposed to displace men’s minds—and had thus embarked upon quests for knowledge which they thought they could take back to a fancied, non-human past. Then when their memory returned, they reversed the associative process and thought of themselves as the former captive minds instead of as the displacers. Hence the dreams and pseudo-memories following the conventional myth-pattern.
      Despite the seeming cumbrousness of these explanations, they came finally to supersede all others in my mind—largely because of the greater weakness of any rival theory. And a substantial number of eminent psychologists and anthropologists gradually agreed with me. The more I reflected, the more convincing did my reasoning seem; till in the end I had a really effective bulwark against the visions and impressions which still assailed me. Suppose I did see strange things at night? These were only what I had heard and read of. Suppose I did have odd loathings and perspectives and pseudo-memories? These, too, were only echoes of myths absorbed in my secondary state. Nothing that I might dream, nothing that I might feel, could be of any actual significance.
      Fortified by this philosophy, I greatly improved in nervous equilibrium, even though the visions (rather than the abstract impressions) steadily became more frequent and more disturbingly detailed. In 1922 I felt able to undertake regular work again, and put my newly gained knowledge to practical use by accepting an instructorship in psychology at the university. My old chair of political economy had long been adequately filled—besides which, methods of teaching economics had changed greatly since my heyday. My son was at this time just entering on the post-graduate studies leading to his present professorship, and we worked together a great deal.

IV.

I continued, however, to keep a careful record of the outré dreams which crowded upon me so thickly and vividly. Such a record, I argued, was of genuine value as a psychological document. The glimpses still seemed damnably like memories, though I fought off this impression with a goodly measure of success. In writing, I treated the phantasmata as things seen; but at all other times I brushed them aside like any gossamer illusions of the night. I had never mentioned such matters in common conversation; though reports of them, filtering out as such things will, had aroused sundry rumours regarding my mental health. It is amusing to reflect that these rumours were confined wholly to laymen, without a single champion among physicians or psychologists.
      Of my visions after 1914 I will here mention only a few, since fuller accounts and records are at the disposal of the serious student. It is evident that with time the curious inhibitions somewhat waned, for the scope of my visions vastly increased. They have never, though, become other than disjointed fragments seemingly without clear motivation. Within the dreams I seemed gradually to acquire a greater and greater freedom of wandering. I floated through many strange buildings of stone, going from one to the other along mammoth underground passages which seemed to form the common avenues of transit. Sometimes I encountered those gigantic sealed trap-doors in the lowest level, around which such an aura of fear and forbiddenness clung. I saw tremendous tessellated pools, and rooms of curious and inexplicable utensils of myriad sorts. Then there were colossal caverns of intricate machinery whose outlines and purpose were wholly strange to me, and whose sound manifested itself only after many years of dreaming. I may here remark that sight and sound are the only senses I have ever exercised in the visionary world.
      The real horror began in May, 1915, when I first saw the living things. This was before my studies had taught me what, in view of the myths and case histories, to expect. As mental barriers wore down, I beheld great masses of thin vapour in various parts of the building and in the streets below. These steadily grew more solid and distinct, till at last I could trace their monstrous outlines with uncomfortable ease. They seemed to be enormous iridescent cones, about ten feet high and ten feet wide at the base, and made up of some ridgy, scaly, semi-elastic matter. From their apexes projected four flexible, cylindrical members, each a foot thick, and of a ridgy substance like that of the cones themselves. These members were sometimes contracted almost to nothing, and sometimes extended to any distance up to about ten feet. Terminating two of them were enormous claws or nippers. At the end of a third were four red, trumpet-like appendages. The fourth terminated in an irregular yellowish globe some two feet in diameter and having three great dark eyes ranged along its central circumference. Surmounting this head were four slender grey stalks bearing flower-like appendages, whilst from its nether side dangled eight greenish antennae or tentacles. The great base of the central cone was fringed with a rubbery, grey substance which moved the whole entity through expansion and contraction.
      Their actions, though harmless, horrified me even more than their appearance—for it is not wholesome to watch monstrous objects doing what one has known only human beings to do. These objects moved intelligently around the great rooms, getting books from the shelves and taking them to the great tables, or vice versa, and sometimes writing diligently with a peculiar rod gripped in the greenish head-tentacles. The huge nippers were used in carrying books and in conversation—speech consisting of a kind of clicking and scraping. The objects had no clothing, but wore satchels or knapsacks suspended from the top of the conical trunk. They commonly carried their head and its supporting member at the level of the cone top, although it was frequently raised or lowered. The other three great members tended to rest downward on the sides of the cone, contracted to about five feet each, when not in use. From their rate of reading, writing, and operating their machines (those on the tables seemed somehow connected with thought) I concluded that their intelligence was enormously greater than man’s.
      Afterward I saw them everywhere; swarming in all the great chambers and corridors, tending monstrous machines in vaulted crypts, and racing along the vast roads in gigantic boat-shaped cars. I ceased to be afraid of them, for they seemed to form supremely natural parts of their environment. Individual differences amongst them began to be manifest, and a few appeared to be under some kind of restraint. These latter, though shewing no physical variation, had a diversity of gestures and habits which marked them off not only from the majority, but very largely from one another. They wrote a great deal in what seemed to my cloudy vision a vast variety of characters—never the typical curvilinear hieroglyphs of the majority. A few, I fancied, used our own familiar alphabet. Most of them worked much more slowly than the general mass of the entities.
      All this time my own part in the dreams seemed to be that of a disembodied consciousness with a range of vision wider than the normal; floating freely about, yet confined to the ordinary avenues and speeds of travel. Not until August, 1915, did any suggestions of bodily existence begin to harass me. I say harass, because the first phase was a purely abstract though infinitely terrible association of my previously noted body-loathing with the scenes of my visions. For a while my chief concern during dreams was to avoid looking down at myself, and I recall how grateful I was for the total absence of large mirrors in the strange rooms. I was mightily troubled by the fact that I always saw the great tables—whose height could not be under ten feet—from a level not below that of their surfaces.
      And then the morbid temptation to look down at myself became greater and greater, till one night I could not resist it. At first my downward glance revealed nothing whatever. A moment later I perceived that this was because my head lay at the end of a flexible neck of enormous length. Retracting this neck and gazing down very sharply, I saw the scaly, rugose, iridescent bulk of a vast cone ten feet tall and ten feet wide at the base. That was when I waked half of Arkham with my screaming as I plunged madly up from the abyss of sleep.
      Only after weeks of hideous repetition did I grow half-reconciled to these visions of myself in monstrous form. In the dreams I now moved bodily among the other unknown entities, reading terrible books from the endless shelves and writing for hours at the great tables with a stylus managed by the green tentacles that hung down from my head. Snatches of what I read and wrote would linger in my memory. There were horrible annals of other worlds and other universes, and of stirrings of formless life outside of all universes. There were records of strange orders of beings which had peopled the world in forgotten pasts, and frightful chronicles of grotesque-bodied intelligences which would people it millions of years after the death of the last human being. And I learned of chapters in human history whose existence no scholar of today has ever suspected. Most of these writings were in the language of the hieroglyphs; which I studied in a queer way with the aid of droning machines, and which was evidently an agglutinative speech with root systems utterly unlike any found in human languages. Other volumes were in other unknown tongues learned in the same queer way. A very few were in languages I knew. Extremely clever pictures, both inserted in the records and forming separate collections, aided me immensely. And all the time I seemed to be setting down a history of my own age in English. On waking, I could recall only minute and meaningless scraps of the unknown tongues which my dream-self had mastered, though whole phrases of the history stayed with me.
      I learned—even before my waking self had studied the parallel cases or the old myths from which the dreams doubtless sprang—that the entities around me were of the world’s greatest race, which had conquered time and had sent exploring minds into every age. I knew, too, that I had been snatched from my age while another used my body in that age, and that a few of the other strange forms housed similarly captured minds. I seemed to talk, in some odd language of claw-clickings, with exiled intellects from every corner of the solar system.
      There was a mind from the planet we know as Venus, which would live incalculable epochs to come, and one from an outer moon of Jupiter six million years in the past. Of earthly minds there were some from the winged, star-headed, half-vegetable race of palaeogean Antarctica; one from the reptile people of fabled Valusia; three from the furry pre-human Hyperborean worshippers of Tsathoggua; one from the wholly abominable Tcho-Tchos; two from the arachnid denizens of earth’s last age; five from the hardy coleopterous species immediately following mankind, to which the Great Race was some day to transfer its keenest minds en masse in the face of horrible peril; and several from different branches of humanity.
      I talked with the mind of Yiang-Li, a philosopher from the cruel empire of Tsan-Chan, which is to come in A.D. 5000; with that of a general of the great-headed brown people who held South Africa in B.C. 50,000; with that of a twelfth-century Florentine monk named Bartolomeo Corsi; with that of a king of Lomar who had ruled that terrible polar land 100,000 years before the squat, yellow Inutos came from the west to engulf it; with that of Nug-Soth, a magician of the dark conquerors of A.D. 16,000; with that of a Roman named Titus Sempronius Blaesus, who had been a quaestor in Sulla’s time; with that of Khephnes, an Egyptian of the 14th Dynasty who told me the hideous secret of Nyarlathotep; with that of a priest of Atlantis’ middle kingdom; with that of a Suffolk gentleman of Cromwell’s day, James Woodville; with that of a court astronomer of pre-Inca Peru; with that of the Australian physicist Nevil Kingston-Brown, who will die in A.D. 2518; with that of an archimage of vanished Yhe in the Pacific; with that of Theodotides, a Graeco-Bactrian official of B.C. 200; with that of an aged Frenchman of Louis XIII’s time named Pierre-Louis Montmagny; with that of Crom-Ya, a Cimmerian chieftain of B.C. 15,000; and with so many others that my brain cannot hold the shocking secrets and dizzying marvels I learned from them.
      I awaked each morning in a fever, sometimes frantically trying to verify or discredit such information as fell within the range of modern human knowledge. Traditional facts took on new and doubtful aspects, and I marvelled at the dream-fancy which could invent such surprising addenda to history and science. I shivered at the mysteries the past may conceal, and trembled at the menaces the future may bring forth. What was hinted in the speech of post-human entities of the fate of mankind produced such an effect on me that I will not set it down here. After man there would be the mighty beetle civilisation, the bodies of whose members the cream of the Great Race would seize when the monstrous doom overtook the elder world. Later, as the earth’s span closed, the transferred minds would again migrate through time and space—to another stopping-place in the bodies of the bulbous vegetable entities of Mercury. But there would be races after them, clinging pathetically to the cold planet and burrowing to its horror-filled core, before the utter end.
      Meanwhile, in my dreams, I wrote endlessly in that history of my own age which I was preparing—half voluntarily and half through promises of increased library and travel opportunities—for the Great Race’s central archives. The archives were in a colossal subterranean structure near the city’s centre, which I came to know well through frequent labours and consultations. Meant to last as long as the race, and to withstand the fiercest of earth’s convulsions, this titan repository surpassed all other buildings in the massive, mountain-like firmness of its construction.
      The records, written or printed on great sheets of a curiously tenacious cellulose fabric, were bound into books that opened from the top, and were kept in individual cases of a strange, extremely light rustless metal of greyish hue, decorated with mathematical designs and bearing the title in the Great Race’s curvilinear hieroglyphs. These cases were stored in tiers of rectangular vaults—like closed, locked shelves—wrought of the same rustless metal and fastened by knobs with intricate turnings. My own history was assigned a specific place in the vaults of the lowest or vertebrate level—the section devoted to the culture of mankind and of the furry and reptilian races immediately preceding it in terrestrial dominance.
      But none of the dreams ever gave me a full picture of daily life. All were the merest misty, disconnected fragments, and it is certain that these fragments were not unfolded in their rightful sequence. I have, for example, a very imperfect idea of my own living arrangements in the dream-world; though I seem to have possessed a great stone room of my own. My restrictions as a prisoner gradually disappeared, so that some of the visions included vivid travels over the mighty jungle roads, sojourns in strange cities, and explorations of some of the vast dark windowless ruins from which the Great Race shrank in curious fear. There were also long sea-voyages in enormous, many-decked boats of incredible swiftness, and trips over wild regions in closed, projectile-like airships lifted and moved by electrical repulsion. Beyond the wide, warm ocean were other cities of the Great Race, and on one far continent I saw the crude villages of the black-snouted, winged creatures who would evolve as a dominant stock after the Great Race had sent its foremost minds into the future to escape the creeping horror. Flatness and exuberant green life were always the keynote of the scene. Hills were low and sparse, and usually displayed signs of volcanic forces.
      Of the animals I saw, I could write volumes. All were wild; for the Great Race’s mechanised culture had long since done away with domestic beasts, while food was wholly vegetable or synthetic. Clumsy reptiles of great bulk floundered in steaming morasses, fluttered in the heavy air, or spouted in the seas and lakes; and among these I fancied I could vaguely recognise lesser, archaic prototypes of many forms—dinosaurs, pterodactyls, ichthyosaurs, labyrinthodonts, rhamphorhynci, plesiosaurs, and the like—made familiar through palaeontology. Of birds or mammals there were none that I could discern.
      The ground and swamps were constantly alive with snakes, lizards, and crocodiles, while insects buzzed incessantly amidst the lush vegetation. And far out at sea unspied and unknown monsters spouted mountainous columns of foam into the vaporous sky. Once I was taken under the ocean in a gigantic submarine vessel with searchlights, and glimpsed some living horrors of awesome magnitude. I saw also the ruins of incredible sunken cities, and the wealth of crinoid, brachiopod, coral, and ichthyic life which everywhere abounded.
      Of the physiology, psychology, folkways, and detailed history of the Great Race my visions preserved but little information, and many of the scattered points I here set down were gleaned from my study of old legends and other cases rather than from my own dreaming. For in time, of course, my reading and research caught up with and passed the dreams in many phases; so that certain dream-fragments were explained in advance, and formed verifications of what I had learned. This consolingly established my belief that similar reading and research, accomplished by my secondary self, had formed the source of the whole terrible fabric of pseudo-memories.
      The period of my dreams, apparently, was one somewhat less than 150,000,000 years ago, when the Palaeozoic age was giving place to the Mesozoic. The bodies occupied by the Great Race represented no surviving—or even scientifically known—line of terrestrial evolution, but were of a peculiar, closely homogeneous, and highly specialised organic type inclining as much to the vegetable as to the animal state. Cell-action was of an unique sort almost precluding fatigue, and wholly eliminating the need of sleep. Nourishment, assimilated through the red trumpet-like appendages on one of the great flexible limbs, was always semi-fluid and in many aspects wholly unlike the food of existing animals. The beings had but two of the senses which we recognise—sight and hearing, the latter accomplished through the flower-like appendages on the grey stalks above their heads—but of other and incomprehensible senses (not, however, well utilisable by alien captive minds inhabiting their bodies) they possessed many. Their three eyes were so situated as to give them a range of vision wider than the normal. Their blood was a sort of deep-greenish ichor of great thickness. They had no sex, but reproduced through seeds or spores which clustered on their bases and could be developed only under water. Great, shallow tanks were used for the growth of their young—which were, however, reared only in small numbers on account of the longevity of individuals; four or five thousand years being the common life span.
      Markedly defective individuals were quietly disposed of as soon as their defects were noticed. Disease and the approach of death were, in the absence of a sense of touch or of physical pain, recognised by purely visual symptoms. The dead were incinerated with dignified ceremonies. Once in a while, as before mentioned, a keen mind would escape death by forward projection in time; but such cases were not numerous. When one did occur, the exiled mind from the future was treated with the utmost kindness till the dissolution of its unfamiliar tenement.
      The Great Race seemed to form a single loosely knit nation or league, with major institutions in common, though there were four definite divisions. The political and economic system of each unit was a sort of fascistic socialism, with major resources rationally distributed, and power delegated to a small governing board elected by the votes of all able to pass certain educational and psychological tests. Family organisation was not overstressed, though ties among persons of common descent were recognised, and the young were generally reared by their parents.
      Resemblances to human attitudes and institutions were, of course, most marked in those fields where on the one hand highly abstract elements were concerned, or where on the other hand there was a dominance of the basic, unspecialised urges common to all organic life. A few added likenesses came through conscious adoption as the Great Race probed the future and copied what it liked. Industry, highly mechanised, demanded but little time from each citizen; and the abundant leisure was filled with intellectual and aesthetic activities of various sorts. The sciences were carried to an unbelievable height of development, and art was a vital part of life, though at the period of my dreams it had passed its crest and meridian. Technology was enormously stimulated through the constant struggle to survive, and to keep in existence the physical fabric of great cities, imposed by the prodigious geologic upheavals of those primal days.
      Crime was surprisingly scanty, and was dealt with through highly efficient policing. Punishments ranged from privilege-deprivation and imprisonment to death or major emotion-wrenching, and were never administered without a careful study of the criminal’s motivations. Warfare, largely civil for the last few millennia though sometimes waged against reptilian and octopodic invaders, or against the winged, star-headed Old Ones who centred in the Antarctic, was infrequent though infinitely devastating. An enormous army, using camera-like weapons which produced tremendous electrical effects, was kept on hand for purposes seldom mentioned, but obviously connected with the ceaseless fear of the dark, windowless elder ruins and of the great sealed trap-doors in the lowest subterrene levels.
      This fear of the basalt ruins and trap-doors was largely a matter of unspoken suggestion—or, at most, of furtive quasi-whispers. Everything specific which bore on it was significantly absent from such books as were on the common shelves. It was the one subject lying altogether under a taboo among the Great Race, and seemed to be connected alike with horrible bygone struggles, and with that future peril which would some day force the race to send its keener minds ahead en masse in time. Imperfect and fragmentary as were the other things presented by dreams and legends, this matter was still more bafflingly shrouded. The vague old myths avoided it—or perhaps all allusions had for some reason been excised. And in the dreams of myself and others, the hints were peculiarly few. Members of the Great Race never intentionally referred to the matter, and what could be gleaned came only from some of the more sharply observant captive minds.
      According to these scraps of information, the basis of the fear was a horrible elder race of half-polypous, utterly alien entities which had come through space from immeasurably distant universes and had dominated the earth and three other solar planets about six hundred million years ago. They were only partly material—as we understand matter—and their type of consciousness and media of perception differed wholly from those of terrestrial organisms. For example, their senses did not include that of sight; their mental world being a strange, non-visual pattern of impressions. They were, however, sufficiently material to use implements of normal matter when in cosmic areas containing it; and they required housing—albeit of a peculiar kind. Though their senses could penetrate all material barriers, their substance could not; and certain forms of electrical energy could wholly destroy them. They had the power of aërial motion despite the absence of wings or any other visible means of levitation. Their minds were of such texture that no exchange with them could be effected by the Great Race.
      When these things had come to the earth they had built mighty basalt cities of windowless towers, and had preyed horribly upon the beings they found. Thus it was when the minds of the Great Race sped across the void from that obscure trans-galactic world known in the disturbing and debatable Eltdown Shards as Yith. The newcomers, with the instruments they created, had found it easy to subdue the predatory entities and drive them down to those caverns of inner earth which they had already joined to their abodes and begun to inhabit. Then they had sealed the entrances and left them to their fate, afterward occupying most of their great cities and preserving certain important buildings for reasons connected more with superstition than with indifference, boldness, or scientific and historical zeal.
      But as the aeons passed, there came vague, evil signs that the Elder Things were growing strong and numerous in the inner world. There were sporadic irruptions of a particularly hideous character in certain small and remote cities of the Great Race, and in some of the deserted elder cities which the Great Race had not peopled—places where the paths to the gulfs below had not been properly sealed or guarded. After that greater precautions were taken, and many of the paths were closed for ever—though a few were left with sealed trap-doors for strategic use in fighting the Elder Things if ever they broke forth in unexpected places; fresh rifts caused by that selfsame geologic change which had choked some of the paths and had slowly lessened the number of outer-world structures and ruins surviving from the conquered entities.
      The irruptions of the Elder Things must have been shocking beyond all description, since they had permanently coloured the psychology of the Great Race. Such was the fixed mood of horror that the very aspect of the creatures was left unmentioned—at no time was I able to gain a clear hint of what they looked like. There were veiled suggestions of a monstrous plasticity, and of temporary lapses of visibility, while other fragmentary whispers referred to their control and military use of great winds. Singular whistling noises, and colossal footprints made up of five circular toe-marks, seemed also to be associated with them.
      It was evident that the coming doom so desperately feared by the Great Race—the doom that was one day to send millions of keen minds across the chasm of time to strange bodies in the safer future—had to do with a final successful irruption of the Elder Beings. Mental projections down the ages had clearly foretold such a horror, and the Great Race had resolved that none who could escape should face it. That the foray would be a matter of vengeance, rather than an attempt to reoccupy the outer world, they knew from the planet’s later history—for their projections shewed the coming and going of subsequent races untroubled by the monstrous entities. Perhaps these entities had come to prefer earth’s inner abysses to the variable, storm-ravaged surface, since light meant nothing to them. Perhaps, too, they were slowly weakening with the aeons. Indeed, it was known that they would be quite dead in the time of the post-human beetle race which the fleeing minds would tenant. Meanwhile the Great Race maintained its cautious vigilance, with potent weapons ceaselessly ready despite the horrified banishing of the subject from common speech and visible records. And always the shadow of nameless fear hung about the sealed trap-doors and the dark, windowless elder towers.

V.

That is the world of which my dreams brought me dim, scattered echoes every night. I cannot hope to give any true idea of the horror and dread contained in such echoes, for it was upon a wholly intangible quality—the sharp sense of pseudo-memory—that such feelings mainly depended. As I have said, my studies gradually gave me a defence against these feelings, in the form of rational psychological explanations; and this saving influence was augmented by the subtle touch of accustomedness which comes with the passage of time. Yet in spite of everything the vague, creeping terror would return momentarily now and then. It did not, however, engulf me as it had before; and after 1922 I lived a very normal life of work and recreation.
      In the course of years I began to feel that my experience—together with the kindred cases and the related folklore—ought to be definitely summarised and published for the benefit of serious students; hence I prepared a series of articles briefly covering the whole ground and illustrated with crude sketches of some of the shapes, scenes, decorative motifs, and hieroglyphs remembered from the dreams. These appeared at various times during 1928 and 1929 in the Journal of the American Psychological Society, but did not attract much attention. Meanwhile I continued to record my dreams with the minutest care, even though the growing stack of reports attained troublesomely vast proportions.
      On July 10, 1934, there was forwarded to me by the Psychological Society the letter which opened the culminating and most horrible phase of the whole mad ordeal. It was postmarked Pilbarra, Western Australia, and bore the signature of one whom I found, upon inquiry, to be a mining engineer of considerable prominence. Enclosed were some very curious snapshots. I will reproduce the text in its entirety, and no reader can fail to understand how tremendous an effect it and the photographs had upon me.
      I was, for a time, almost stunned and incredulous; for although I had often thought that some basis of fact must underlie certain phases of the legends which had coloured my dreams, I was none the less unprepared for anything like a tangible survival from a lost world remote beyond all imagination. Most devastating of all were the photographs—for here, in cold, incontrovertible realism, there stood out against a background of sand certain worn-down, water-ridged, storm-weathered blocks of stone whose slightly convex tops and slightly concave bottoms told their own story. And when I studied them with a magnifying glass I could see all too plainly, amidst the batterings and pittings, the traces of those vast curvilinear designs and occasional hieroglyphs whose significance had become so hideous to me. But here is the letter, which speaks for itself:
49, Dampier Str.,
      Pilbarra, W. Australia,
            18 May, 1934.
Prof. N. W. Peaslee,
c/o Am. Psychological Society,
30, E. 41st Str.,
N. Y. City, U.S.A.

My dear Sir:—
      A recent conversation with Dr. E. M. Boyle of Perth, and some papers with your articles which he has just sent me, make it advisable for me to tell you about certain things I have seen in the Great Sandy Desert east of our gold field here. It would seem, in view of the peculiar legends about old cities with huge stonework and strange designs and hieroglyphs which you describe, that I have come upon something very important.
      The blackfellows have always been full of talk about “great stones with marks on them”, and seem to have a terrible fear of such things. They connect them in some way with their common racial legends about Buddai, the gigantic old man who lies asleep for ages underground with his head on his arm, and who will some day awake and eat up the world. There are some very old and half-forgotten tales of enormous underground huts of great stones, where passages lead down and down, and where horrible things have happened. The blackfellows claim that once some warriors, fleeing in battle, went down into one and never came back, but that frightful winds began to blow from the place soon after they went down. However, there usually isn’t much in what these natives say.
      But what I have to tell is more than this. Two years ago, when I was prospecting about 500 miles east in the desert, I came on a lot of queer pieces of dressed stone perhaps 3 × 2 × 2 feet in size, and weathered and pitted to the very limit. At first I couldn’t find any of the marks the blackfellows told about, but when I looked close enough I could make out some deeply carved lines in spite of the weathering. They were peculiar curves, just like what the blacks had tried to describe. I imagine there must have been 30 or 40 blocks, some nearly buried in the sand, and all within a circle perhaps a quarter of a mile’s diameter.
      When I saw some, I looked around closely for more, and made a careful reckoning of the place with my instruments. I also took pictures of 10 or 12 of the most typical blocks, and will enclose the prints for you to see. I turned my information and pictures over to the government at Perth, but they have done nothing with them. Then I met Dr. Boyle, who had read your articles in the Journal of the American Psychological Society, and in time happened to mention the stones. He was enormously interested, and became quite excited when I shewed him my snapshots, saying that the stones and markings were just like those of the masonry you had dreamed about and seen described in legends. He meant to write you, but was delayed. Meanwhile he sent me most of the magazines with your articles, and I saw at once from your drawings and descriptions that my stones are certainly the kind you mean. You can appreciate this from the enclosed prints. Later on you will hear directly from Dr. Boyle.
      Now I can understand how important all this will be to you. Without question we are faced with the remains of an unknown civilisation older than any dreamed of before, and forming a basis for your legends. As a mining engineer, I have some knowledge of geology, and can tell you that these blocks are so ancient they frighten me. They are mostly sandstone and granite, though one is almost certainly made of a queer sort of cement or concrete. They bear evidence of water action, as if this part of the world had been submerged and come up again after long ages—all since these blocks were made and used. It is a matter of hundreds of thousands of years—or heaven knows how much more. I don’t like to think about it.
      In view of your previous diligent work in tracking down the legends and everything connected with them, I cannot doubt but that you will want to lead an expedition to the desert and make some archaeological excavations. Both Dr. Boyle and I are prepared to coöperate in such work if you—or organisations known to you—can furnish the funds. I can get together a dozen miners for the heavy digging—the blacks would be of no use, for I’ve found that they have an almost maniacal fear of this particular spot. Boyle and I are saying nothing to others, for you very obviously ought to have precedence in any discoveries or credit.
      The place can be reached from Pilbarra in about 4 days by motor tractor—which we’d need for our apparatus. It is somewhat west and south of Warburton’s path of 1873, and 100 miles southeast of Joanna Spring. We could float things up the De Grey River instead of starting from Pilbarra—but all that can be talked over later. Roughly, the stones lie at a point about 22° 3' 14"" South Latitude, 125° 0' 39"" East Longitude. The climate is tropical, and the desert conditions are trying. Any expedition had better be made in winter—June or July or August. I shall welcome further correspondence upon this subject, and am keenly eager to assist in any plan you may devise. After studying your articles I am deeply impressed with the profound significance of the whole matter. Dr. Boyle will write later. When rapid communication is needed, a cable to Perth can be relayed by wireless.
      Hoping profoundly for an early message,

Believe me,
      Most faithfully yours,
            Robert B. F. Mackenzie.
      Of the immediate aftermath of this letter, much can be learned from the press. My good fortune in securing the backing of Miskatonic University was great, and both Mr. Mackenzie and Dr. Boyle proved invaluable in arranging matters at the Australian end. We were not too specific with the public about our objects, since the whole matter would have lent itself unpleasantly to sensational and jocose treatment by the cheaper newspapers. As a result, printed reports were sparing; but enough appeared to tell of our quest for reported Australian ruins and to chronicle our various preparatory steps.
      Professors William Dyer of the college’s geology department (leader of the Miskatonic Antarctic Expedition of 1930–31), Ferdinand C. Ashley of the department of ancient history, and Tyler M. Freeborn of the department of anthropology—together with my son Wingate—accompanied me. My correspondent Mackenzie came to Arkham early in 1935 and assisted in our final preparations. He proved to be a tremendously competent and affable man of about fifty, admirably well-read, and deeply familiar with all the conditions of Australian travel. He had tractors waiting at Pilbarra, and we chartered a tramp steamer of sufficiently light draught to get up the river to that point. We were prepared to excavate in the most careful and scientific fashion, sifting every particle of sand, and disturbing nothing which might seem to be in or near its original situation.
      Sailing from Boston aboard the wheezy Lexington on March 28, 1935, we had a leisurely trip across the Atlantic and Mediterranean, through the Suez Canal, down the Red Sea, and across the Indian Ocean to our goal. I need not tell how the sight of the low, sandy West Australian coast depressed me, and how I detested the crude mining town and dreary gold fields where the tractors were given their last loads. Dr. Boyle, who met us, proved to be elderly, pleasant, and intelligent—and his knowledge of psychology led him into many long discussions with my son and me.
      Discomfort and expectancy were oddly mingled in most of us when at length our party of eighteen rattled forth over the arid leagues of sand and rock. On Friday, May 31st, we forded a branch of the De Grey and entered the realm of utter desolation. A certain positive terror grew on me as we advanced to this actual site of the elder world behind the legends—a terror of course abetted by the fact that my disturbing dreams and pseudo-memories still beset me with unabated force.
      It was on Monday, June 3, that we saw the first of the half-buried blocks. I cannot describe the emotions with which I actually touched—in objective reality—a fragment of Cyclopean masonry in every respect like the blocks in the walls of my dream-buildings. There was a distinct trace of carving—and my hands trembled as I recognised part of a curvilinear decorative scheme made hellish to me through years of tormenting nightmare and baffling research.
      A month of digging brought a total of some 1250 blocks in varying stages of wear and disintegration. Most of these were carven megaliths with curved tops and bottoms. A minority were smaller, flatter, plain-surfaced, and square or octagonally cut—like those of the floors and pavements in my dreams—while a few were singularly massive and curved or slanted in such a manner as to suggest use in vaulting or groining, or as parts of arches or round window casings. The deeper—and the farther north and east—we dug, the more blocks we found; though we still failed to discover any trace of arrangement among them. Professor Dyer was appalled at the measureless age of the fragments, and Freeborn found traces of symbols which fitted darkly into certain Papuan and Polynesian legends of infinite antiquity. The condition and scattering of the blocks told mutely of vertiginous cycles of time and geologic upheavals of cosmic savagery.
      We had an aëroplane with us, and my son Wingate would often go up to different heights and scan the sand-and-rock waste for signs of dim, large-scale outlines—either differences of level or trails of scattered blocks. His results were virtually negative; for whenever he would one day think he had glimpsed some significant trend, he would on his next trip find the impression replaced by another equally insubstantial—a result of the shifting, wind-blown sand. One or two of these ephemeral suggestions, though, affected me queerly and disagreeably. They seemed, after a fashion, to dovetail horribly with something which I had dreamed or read, but which I could no longer remember. There was a terrible pseudo-familiarity about them—which somehow made me look furtively and apprehensively over the abominable, sterile terrain toward the north and northeast.
      Around the first week in July I developed an unaccountable set of mixed emotions about that general northeasterly region. There was horror, and there was curiosity—but more than that, there was a persistent and perplexing illusion of memory. I tried all sorts of psychological expedients to get these notions out of my head, but met with no success. Sleeplessness also gained upon me, but I almost welcomed this because of the resultant shortening of my dream-periods. I acquired the habit of taking long, lone walks in the desert late at night—usually to the north or northeast, whither the sum of my strange new impulses seemed subtly to pull me.
      Sometimes, on these walks, I would stumble over nearly buried fragments of the ancient masonry. Though there were fewer visible blocks here than where we had started, I felt sure that there must be a vast abundance beneath the surface. The ground was less level than at our camp, and the prevailing high winds now and then piled the sand into fantastic temporary hillocks—exposing some traces of the elder stones while it covered other traces. I was queerly anxious to have the excavations extend to this territory, yet at the same time dreaded what might be revealed. Obviously, I was getting into a rather bad state—all the worse because I could not account for it.
      An indication of my poor nervous health can be gained from my response to an odd discovery which I made on one of my nocturnal rambles. It was on the evening of July 11th, when a gibbous moon flooded the mysterious hillocks with a curious pallor. Wandering somewhat beyond my usual limits, I came upon a great stone which seemed to differ markedly from any we had yet encountered. It was almost wholly covered, but I stooped and cleared away the sand with my hands, later studying the object carefully and supplementing the moonlight with my electric torch. Unlike the other very large rocks, this one was perfectly square-cut, with no convex or concave surface. It seemed, too, to be of a dark basaltic substance wholly dissimilar to the granite and sandstone and occasional concrete of the now familiar fragments.
      Suddenly I rose, turned, and ran for the camp at top speed. It was a wholly unconscious and irrational flight, and only when I was close to my tent did I fully realise why I had run. Then it came to me. The queer dark stone was something which I had dreamed and read about, and which was linked with the uttermost horrors of the aeon-old legendry. It was one of the blocks of that basaltic elder masonry which the fabled Great Race held in such fear—the tall, windowless ruins left by those brooding, half-material, alien Things that festered in earth’s nether abysses and against whose wind-like, invisible forces the trap-doors were sealed and the sleepless sentinels posted.
      I remained awake all that night, but by dawn realised how silly I had been to let the shadow of a myth upset me. Instead of being frightened, I should have had a discoverer’s enthusiasm. The next forenoon I told the others about my find, and Dyer, Freeborn, Boyle, my son, and I set out to view the anomalous block. Failure, however, confronted us. I had formed no clear idea of the stone’s location, and a late wind had wholly altered the hillocks of shifting sand.

VI.

I come now to the crucial and most difficult part of my narrative—all the more difficult because I cannot be quite certain of its reality. At times I feel uncomfortably sure that I was not dreaming or deluded; and it is this feeling—in view of the stupendous implications which the objective truth of my experience would raise—which impels me to make this record. My son—a trained psychologist with the fullest and most sympathetic knowledge of my whole case—shall be the primary judge of what I have to tell.
      First let me outline the externals of the matter, as those at the camp know them. On the night of July 17–18, after a windy day, I retired early but could not sleep. Rising shortly before eleven, and afflicted as usual with that strange feeling regarding the northeastward terrain, I set out on one of my typical nocturnal walks; seeing and greeting only one person—an Australian miner named Tupper—as I left our precincts. The moon, slightly past full, shone from a clear sky and drenched the ancient sands with a white, leprous radiance which seemed to me somehow infinitely evil. There was no longer any wind, nor did any return for nearly five hours, as amply attested by Tupper and others who did not sleep through the night. The Australian last saw me walking rapidly across the pallid, secret-guarding hillocks toward the northeast.
      About 3:30 a.m. a violent wind blew up, waking everyone in camp and felling three of the tents. The sky was unclouded, and the desert still blazed with that leprous moonlight. As the party saw to the tents my absence was noted, but in view of my previous walks this circumstance gave no one alarm. And yet as many as three men—all Australians—seemed to feel something sinister in the air. Mackenzie explained to Prof. Freeborn that this was a fear picked up from blackfellow folklore—the natives having woven a curious fabric of malignant myth about the high winds which at long intervals sweep across the sands under a clear sky. Such winds, it is whispered, blow out of the great stone huts under the ground where terrible things have happened—and are never felt except near places where the big marked stones are scattered. Close to four the gale subsided as suddenly as it had begun, leaving the sand hills in new and unfamiliar shapes.
      It was just past five, with the bloated, fungoid moon sinking in the west, when I staggered into camp—hatless, tattered, features scratched and ensanguined, and without my electric torch. Most of the men had returned to bed, but Prof. Dyer was smoking a pipe in front of his tent. Seeing my winded and almost frenzied state, he called Dr. Boyle, and the two of them got me on my cot and made me comfortable. My son, roused by the stir, soon joined them, and they all tried to force me to lie still and attempt sleep.
      But there was no sleep for me. My psychological state was very extraordinary—different from anything I had previously suffered. After a time I insisted upon talking—nervously and elaborately explaining my condition. I told them I had become fatigued, and had lain down in the sand for a nap. There had, I said, been dreams even more frightful than usual—and when I was awaked by the sudden high wind my overwrought nerves had snapped. I had fled in panic, frequently falling over half-buried stones and thus gaining my tattered and bedraggled aspect. I must have slept long—hence the hours of my absence.
      Of anything strange either seen or experienced I hinted absolutely nothing—exercising the greatest self-control in that respect. But I spoke of a change of mind regarding the whole work of the expedition, and earnestly urged a halt in all digging toward the northeast. My reasoning was patently weak—for I mentioned a dearth of blocks, a wish not to offend the superstitious miners, a possible shortage of funds from the college, and other things either untrue or irrelevant. Naturally, no one paid the least attention to my new wishes—not even my son, whose concern for my health was very obvious.
      The next day I was up and around the camp, but took no part in the excavations. Seeing that I could not stop the work, I decided to return home as soon as possible for the sake of my nerves, and made my son promise to fly me in the plane to Perth—a thousand miles to the southwest—as soon as he had surveyed the region I wished let alone. If, I reflected, the thing I had seen was still visible, I might decide to attempt a specific warning even at the cost of ridicule. It was just conceivable that the miners who knew the local folklore might back me up. Humouring me, my son made the survey that very afternoon; flying over all the terrain my walk could possibly have covered. Yet nothing of what I had found remained in sight. It was the case of the anomalous basalt block all over again—the shifting sand had wiped out every trace. For an instant I half regretted having lost a certain awesome object in my stark fright—but now I know that the loss was merciful. I can still believe my whole experience an illusion—especially if, as I devoutly hope, that hellish abyss is never found.
      Wingate took me to Perth July 20, though declining to abandon the expedition and return home. He stayed with me until the 25th, when the steamer for Liverpool sailed. Now, in the cabin of the Empress, I am pondering long and frantically on the entire matter, and have decided that my son at least must be informed. It shall rest with him whether to diffuse the matter more widely. In order to meet any eventuality I have prepared this summary of my background—as already known in a scattered way to others—and will now tell as briefly as possible what seemed to happen during my absence from the camp that hideous night.
      Nerves on edge, and whipped into a kind of perverse eagerness by that inexplicable, dread-mingled, pseudo-mnemonic urge toward the northeast, I plodded on beneath the evil, burning moon. Here and there I saw, half-shrouded by the sand, those primal Cyclopean blocks left from nameless and forgotten aeons. The incalculable age and brooding horror of this monstrous waste began to oppress me as never before, and I could not keep from thinking of my maddening dreams, of the frightful legends which lay behind them, and of the present fears of natives and miners concerning the desert and its carven stones.
      And yet I plodded on as if to some eldritch rendezvous—more and more assailed by bewildering fancies, compulsions, and pseudo-memories. I thought of some of the possible contours of the lines of stones as seen by my son from the air, and wondered why they seemed at once so ominous and so familiar. Something was fumbling and rattling at the latch of my recollection, while another unknown force sought to keep the portal barred.
      The night was windless, and the pallid sand curved upward and downward like frozen waves of the sea. I had no goal, but somehow ploughed along as if with fate-bound assurance. My dreams welled up into the waking world, so that each sand-embedded megalith seemed part of endless rooms and corridors of pre-human masonry, carved and hieroglyphed with symbols that I knew too well from years of custom as a captive mind of the Great Race. At moments I fancied I saw those omniscient conical horrors moving about at their accustomed tasks, and I feared to look down lest I find myself one with them in aspect. Yet all the while I saw the sand-covered blocks as well as the rooms and corridors; the evil, burning moon as well as the lamps of luminous crystal; the endless desert as well as the waving ferns and cycads beyond the windows. I was awake and dreaming at the same time.
      I do not know how long or how far—or indeed, in just what direction—I had walked when I first spied the heap of blocks bared by the day’s wind. It was the largest group in one place that I had so far seen, and so sharply did it impress me that the visions of fabulous aeons faded suddenly away. Again there were only the desert and the evil moon and the shards of an unguessed past. I drew close and paused, and cast the added light of my electric torch over the tumbled pile. A hillock had blown away, leaving a low, irregularly round mass of megaliths and smaller fragments some forty feet across and from two to eight feet high.
      From the very outset I realised that there was some utterly unprecedented quality about these stones. Not only was the mere number of them quite without parallel, but something in the sand-worn traces of design arrested me as I scanned them under the mingled beams of the moon and my torch. Not that any one differed essentially from the earlier specimens we had found. It was something subtler than that. The impression did not come when I looked at one block alone, but only when I ran my eye over several almost simultaneously. Then, at last, the truth dawned upon me. The curvilinear patterns on many of these blocks were closely related—parts of one vast decorative conception. For the first time in this aeon-shaken waste I had come upon a mass of masonry in its old position—tumbled and fragmentary, it is true, but none the less existing in a very definite sense.
      Mounting at a low place, I clambered laboriously over the heap; here and there clearing away the sand with my fingers, and constantly striving to interpret varieties of size, shape, and style, and relationships of design. After a while I could vaguely guess at the nature of the bygone structure, and at the designs which had once stretched over the vast surfaces of the primal masonry. The perfect identity of the whole with some of my dream-glimpses appalled and unnerved me. This was once a Cyclopean corridor thirty feet tall, paved with octagonal blocks and solidly vaulted overhead. There would have been rooms opening off on the right, and at the farther end one of those strange inclined planes would have wound down to still lower depths.
      I started violently as these conceptions occurred to me, for there was more in them than the blocks themselves had supplied. How did I know that this level should have been far underground? How did I know that the plane leading upward should have been behind me? How did I know that the long subterrene passage to the Square of Pillars ought to lie on the left one level above me? How did I know that the room of machines, and the rightward-leading tunnel to the central archives, ought to lie two levels below? How did I know that there would be one of those horrible, metal-banded trap-doors at the very bottom, four levels down? Bewildered by this intrusion from the dream-world, I found myself shaking and bathed in a cold perspiration.
      Then, as a last, intolerable touch, I felt that faint, insidious stream of cool air trickling upward from a depressed place near the centre of the huge heap. Instantly, as once before, my visions faded, and I saw again only the evil moonlight, the brooding desert, and the spreading tumulus of palaeogean masonry. Something real and tangible, yet fraught with infinite suggestions of nighted mystery, now confronted me. For that stream of air could argue but one thing—a hidden gulf of great size beneath the disordered blocks on the surface.
      My first thought was of the sinister blackfellow legends of vast underground huts among the megaliths where horrors happen and great winds are born. Then thoughts of my own dreams came back, and I felt dim pseudo-memories tugging at my mind. What manner of place lay below me? What primal, inconceivable source of age-old myth-cycles and haunting nightmares might I be on the brink of uncovering? It was only for a moment that I hesitated, for more than curiosity and scientific zeal was driving me on and working against my growing fear.
      I seemed to move almost automatically, as if in the clutch of some compelling fate. Pocketing my torch, and struggling with a strength that I had not thought I possessed, I wrenched aside first one titan fragment of stone and then another, till there welled up a strong draught whose dampness contrasted oddly with the desert’s dry air. A black rift began to yawn, and at length—when I had pushed away every fragment small enough to budge—the leprous moonlight blazed on an aperture of ample width to admit me.
      I drew out my torch and cast a brilliant beam into the opening. Below me was a chaos of tumbled masonry, sloping roughly down toward the north at an angle of about forty-five degrees, and evidently the result of some bygone collapse from above. Between its surface and the ground level was a gulf of impenetrable blackness at whose upper edge were signs of gigantic, stress-heaved vaulting. At this point, it appeared, the desert’s sands lay directly upon a floor of some titan structure of earth’s youth—how preserved through aeons of geologic convulsion I could not then and cannot now even attempt to guess.
      In retrospect, the barest idea of a sudden, lone descent into such a doubtful abyss—and at a time when one’s whereabouts were unknown to any living soul—seems like the utter apex of insanity. Perhaps it was—yet that night I embarked without hesitancy upon such a descent. Again there was manifest that lure and driving of fatality which had all along seemed to direct my course. With torch flashing intermittently to save the battery, I commenced a mad scramble down the sinister, Cyclopean incline below the opening—sometimes facing forward as I found good hand and foot holds, and at other times turning to face the heap of megaliths as I clung and fumbled more precariously. In two directions beside me, distant walls of carven, crumbling masonry loomed dimly under the direct beams of my torch. Ahead, however, was only unbroken blackness.
      I kept no track of time during my downward scramble. So seething with baffling hints and images was my mind, that all objective matters seemed withdrawn into incalculable distances. Physical sensation was dead, and even fear remained as a wraith-like, inactive gargoyle leering impotently at me. Eventually I reached a level floor strown with fallen blocks, shapeless fragments of stone, and sand and detritus of every kind. On either side—perhaps thirty feet apart—rose massive walls culminating in huge groinings. That they were carved I could just discern, but the nature of the carvings was beyond my perception. What held me the most was the vaulting overhead. The beam from my torch could not reach the roof, but the lower parts of the monstrous arches stood out distinctly. And so perfect was their identity with what I had seen in countless dreams of the elder world, that I trembled actively for the first time.
      Behind and high above, a faint luminous blur told of the distant moonlit world outside. Some vague shred of caution warned me that I should not let it out of my sight, lest I have no guide for my return. I now advanced toward the wall on my left, where the traces of carving were plainest. The littered floor was nearly as hard to traverse as the downward heap had been, but I managed to pick my difficult way. At one place I heaved aside some blocks and kicked away the detritus to see what the pavement was like, and shuddered at the utter, fateful familiarity of the great octagonal stones whose buckled surface still held roughly together.
      Reaching a convenient distance from the wall, I cast the torchlight slowly and carefully over its worn remnants of carving. Some bygone influx of water seemed to have acted on the sandstone surface, while there were curious incrustations which I could not explain. In places the masonry was very loose and distorted, and I wondered how many aeons more this primal, hidden edifice could keep its remaining traces of form amidst earth’s heavings.
      But it was the carvings themselves that excited me most. Despite their time-crumbled state, they were relatively easy to trace at close range; and the complete, intimate familiarity of every detail almost stunned my imagination. That the major attributes of this hoary masonry should be familiar, was not beyond normal credibility. Powerfully impressing the weavers of certain myths, they had become embodied in a stream of cryptic lore which, somehow coming to my notice during the amnesic period, had evoked vivid images in my subconscious mind. But how could I explain the exact and minute fashion in which each line and spiral of these strange designs tallied with what I had dreamt for more than a score of years? What obscure, forgotten iconography could have reproduced each subtle shading and nuance which so persistently, exactly, and unvaryingly besieged my sleeping vision night after night?
      For this was no chance or remote resemblance. Definitely and absolutely, the millennially ancient, aeon-hidden corridor in which I stood was the original of something I knew in sleep as intimately as I knew my own house in Crane Street, Arkham. True, my dreams shewed the place in its undecayed prime; but the identity was no less real on that account. I was wholly and horribly oriented. The particular structure I was in was known to me. Known, too, was its place in that terrible elder city of dreams. That I could visit unerringly any point in that structure or in that city which had escaped the changes and devastations of uncounted ages, I realised with hideous and instinctive certainty. What in God’s name could all this mean? How had I come to know what I knew? And what awful reality could lie behind those antique tales of the beings who had dwelt in this labyrinth of primordial stone?
      Words can convey only fractionally the welter of dread and bewilderment which ate at my spirit. I knew this place. I knew what lay before me, and what had lain overhead before the myriad towering stories had fallen to dust and debris and the desert. No need now, I thought with a shudder, to keep that faint blur of moonlight in view. I was torn betwixt a longing to flee and a feverish mixture of burning curiosity and driving fatality. What had happened to this monstrous megalopolis of eld in the millions of years since the time of my dreams? Of the subterrene mazes which had underlain the city and linked all its titan towers, how much had still survived the writhings of earth’s crust?
      Had I come upon a whole buried world of unholy archaism? Could I still find the house of the writing-master, and the tower where S’gg’ha, a captive mind from the star-headed vegetable carnivores of Antarctica, had chiselled certain pictures on the blank spaces of the walls? Would the passage at the second level down, to the hall of the alien minds, be still unchoked and traversable? In that hall the captive mind of an incredible entity—a half-plastic denizen of the hollow interior of an unknown trans-Plutonian planet eighteen million years in the future—had kept a certain thing which it had modelled from clay.
      I shut my eyes and put my hand to my head in a vain, pitiful effort to drive these insane dream-fragments from my consciousness. Then, for the first time, I felt acutely the coolness, motion, and dampness of the surrounding air. Shuddering, I realised that a vast chain of aeon-dead black gulfs must indeed be yawning somewhere beyond and below me. I thought of the frightful chambers and corridors and inclines as I recalled them from my dreams. Would the way to the central archives still be open? Again that driving fatality tugged insistently at my brain as I recalled the awesome records that once lay cased in those rectangular vaults of rustless metal.
      There, said the dreams and legends, had reposed the whole history, past and future, of the cosmic space-time continuum—written by captive minds from every orb and every age in the solar system. Madness, of course—but had I not now stumbled into a nighted world as mad as I? I thought of the locked metal shelves, and of the curious knob-twistings needed to open each one. My own came vividly into my consciousness. How often had I gone through that intricate routine of varied turns and pressures in the terrestrial vertebrate section on the lowest level! Every detail was fresh and familiar. If there were such a vault as I had dreamed of, I could open it in a moment. It was then that madness took me utterly. An instant later, and I was leaping and stumbling over the rocky debris toward the well-remembered incline to the depths below.

VII.

From that point forward my impressions are scarcely to be relied on—indeed, I still possess a final, desperate hope that they all form parts of some daemoniac dream—or illusion born of delirium. A fever raged in my brain, and everything came to me through a kind of haze—sometimes only intermittently. The rays of my torch shot feebly into the engulfing blackness, bringing phantasmal flashes of hideously familiar walls and carvings, all blighted with the decay of ages. In one place a tremendous mass of vaulting had fallen, so that I had to clamber over a mighty mound of stones reaching almost to the ragged, grotesquely stalactited roof. It was all the ultimate apex of nightmare, made worse by the blasphemous tug of pseudo-memory. One thing only was unfamiliar, and that was my own size in relation to the monstrous masonry. I felt oppressed by a sense of unwonted smallness, as if the sight of these towering walls from a mere human body was something wholly new and abnormal. Again and again I looked nervously down at myself, vaguely disturbed by the human form I possessed.
      Onward through the blackness of the abyss I leaped, plunged, and staggered—often falling and bruising myself, and once nearly shattering my torch. Every stone and corner of that daemoniac gulf was known to me, and at many points I stopped to cast beams of light through choked and crumbling yet familiar archways. Some rooms had totally collapsed; others were bare or debris-filled. In a few I saw masses of metal—some fairly intact, some broken, and some crushed or battered—which I recognised as the colossal pedestals or tables of my dreams. What they could in truth have been, I dared not guess.
      I found the downward incline and began its descent—though after a time halted by a gaping, ragged chasm whose narrowest point could not be much less than four feet across. Here the stonework had fallen through, revealing incalculable inky depths beneath. I knew there were two more cellar levels in this titan edifice, and trembled with fresh panic as I recalled the metal-clamped trap-door on the lowest one. There could be no guards now—for what had lurked beneath had long since done its hideous work and sunk into its long decline. By the time of the post-human beetle race it would be quite dead. And yet, as I thought of the native legends, I trembled anew.
      It cost me a terrible effort to vault that yawning chasm, since the littered floor prevented a running start—but madness drove me on. I chose a place close to the left-hand wall—where the rift was least wide and the landing-spot reasonably clear of dangerous debris—and after one frantic moment reached the other side in safety. At last gaining the lower level, I stumbled on past the archway of the room of machines, within which were fantastic ruins of metal half-buried beneath fallen vaulting. Everything was where I knew it would be, and I climbed confidently over the heaps which barred the entrance of a vast transverse corridor. This, I realised, would take me under the city to the central archives.
      Endless ages seemed to unroll as I stumbled, leaped, and crawled along that debris-cluttered corridor. Now and then I could make out carvings on the age-stained walls—some familiar, others seemingly added since the period of my dreams. Since this was a subterrene house-connecting highway, there were no archways save when the route led through the lower levels of various buildings. At some of these intersections I turned aside long enough to look down well-remembered corridors and into well-remembered rooms. Twice only did I find any radical changes from what I had dreamed of—and in one of these cases I could trace the sealed-up outlines of the archway I remembered.
      I shook violently, and felt a curious surge of retarding weakness, as I steered a hurried and reluctant course through the crypt of one of those great windowless ruined towers whose alien basalt masonry bespoke a whispered and horrible origin. This primal vault was round and fully two hundred feet across, with nothing carved upon the dark-hued stonework. The floor was here free from anything save dust and sand, and I could see the apertures leading upward and downward. There were no stairs or inclines—indeed, my dreams had pictured those elder towers as wholly untouched by the fabulous Great Race. Those who had built them had not needed stairs or inclines. In the dreams, the downward aperture had been tightly sealed and nervously guarded. Now it lay open—black and yawning, and giving forth a current of cool, damp air. Of what limitless caverns of eternal night might brood below, I would not permit myself to think.
      Later, clawing my way along a badly heaped section of the corridor, I reached a place where the roof had wholly caved in. The debris rose like a mountain, and I climbed up over it, passing through a vast empty space where my torchlight could reveal neither walls nor vaulting. This, I reflected, must be the cellar of the house of the metal-purveyors, fronting on the third square not far from the archives. What had happened to it I could not conjecture.
      I found the corridor again beyond the mountain of detritus and stones, but after a short distance encountered a wholly choked place where the fallen vaulting almost touched the perilously sagging ceiling. How I managed to wrench and tear aside enough blocks to afford a passage, and how I dared disturb the tightly packed fragments when the least shift of equilibrium might have brought down all the tons of superincumbent masonry to crush me to nothingness, I do not know. It was sheer madness that impelled and guided me—if, indeed, my whole underground adventure was not—as I hope—a hellish delusion or phase of dreaming. But I did make—or dream that I made—a passage that I could squirm through. As I wriggled over the mound of debris—my torch, switched continuously on, thrust deeply within my mouth—I felt myself torn by the fantastic stalactites of the jagged floor above me.
      I was now close to the great underground archival structure which seemed to form my goal. Sliding and clambering down the farther side of the barrier, and picking my way along the remaining stretch of corridor with hand-held, intermittently flashing torch, I came at last to a low, circular crypt with arches—still in a marvellous state of preservation—opening off on every side. The walls, or such parts of them as lay within reach of my torchlight, were densely hieroglyphed and chiselled with typical curvilinear symbols—some added since the period of my dreams.
      This, I realised, was my fated destination, and I turned at once through a familiar archway on my left. That I could find a clear passage up and down the incline to all the surviving levels, I had oddly little doubt. This vast, earth-protected pile, housing the annals of all the solar system, had been built with supernal skill and strength to last as long as that system itself. Blocks of stupendous size, poised with mathematical genius and bound with cements of incredible toughness, had combined to form a mass as firm as the planet’s rocky core. Here, after ages more prodigious than I could sanely grasp, its buried bulk stood in all its essential contours; the vast, dust-drifted floors scarce sprinkled with the litter elsewhere so dominant.
      The relatively easy walking from this point onward went curiously to my head. All the frantic eagerness hitherto frustrated by obstacles now took itself out in a kind of febrile speed, and I literally raced along the low-roofed, monstrously well-remembered aisles beyond the archway. I was past being astonished by the familiarity of what I saw. On every hand the great hieroglyphed metal shelf-doors loomed monstrously; some yet in place, others sprung open, and still others bent and buckled under bygone geological stresses not quite strong enough to shatter the titan masonry. Here and there a dust-covered heap below a gaping empty shelf seemed to indicate where cases had been shaken down by earth-tremors. On occasional pillars were great symbols or letters proclaiming classes and sub-classes of volumes.
      Once I paused before an open vault where I saw some of the accustomed metal cases still in position amidst the omnipresent gritty dust. Reaching up, I dislodged one of the thinner specimens with some difficulty, and rested it on the floor for inspection. It was titled in the prevailing curvilinear hieroglyphs, though something in the arrangement of the characters seemed subtly unusual. The odd mechanism of the hooked fastener was perfectly well known to me, and I snapped up the still rustless and workable lid and drew out the book within. The latter, as expected, was some twenty by fifteen inches in area, and two inches thick; the thin metal covers opening at the top. Its tough cellulose pages seemed unaffected by the myriad cycles of time they had lived through, and I studied the queerly pigmented, brush-drawn letters of the text—symbols utterly unlike either the usual curved hieroglyphs or any alphabet known to human scholarship—with a haunting, half-aroused memory. It came to me that this was the language used by a captive mind I had known slightly in my dreams—a mind from a large asteroid on which had survived much of the archaic life and lore of the primal planet whereof it formed a fragment. At the same time I recalled that this level of the archives was devoted to volumes dealing with the non-terrestrial planets.
      As I ceased poring over this incredible document I saw that the light of my torch was beginning to fail, hence quickly inserted the extra battery I always had with me. Then, armed with the stronger radiance, I resumed my feverish racing through unending tangles of aisles and corridors—recognising now and then some familiar shelf, and vaguely annoyed by the acoustic conditions which made my footfalls echo incongruously in these catacombs of aeon-long death and silence. The very prints of my shoes behind me in the millennially untrodden dust made me shudder. Never before, if my mad dreams held anything of truth, had human feet pressed upon those immemorial pavements. Of the particular goal of my insane racing, my conscious mind held no hint. There was, however, some force of evil potency pulling at my dazed will and buried recollections, so that I vaguely felt I was not running at random.
      I came to a downward incline and followed it to profounder depths. Floors flashed by me as I raced, but I did not pause to explore them. In my whirling brain there had begun to beat a certain rhythm which set my right hand twitching in unison. I wanted to unlock something, and felt that I knew all the intricate twists and pressures needed to do it. It would be like a modern safe with a combination lock. Dream or not, I had once known and still knew. How any dream—or scrap of unconsciously absorbed legend—could have taught me a detail so minute, so intricate, and so complex, I did not attempt to explain to myself. I was beyond all coherent thought. For was not this whole experience—this shocking familiarity with a set of unknown ruins, and this monstrously exact identity of everything before me with what only dreams and scraps of myth could have suggested—a horror beyond all reason? Probably it was my basic conviction then—as it is now during my saner moments—that I was not awake at all, and that the entire buried city was a fragment of febrile hallucination.
      Eventually I reached the lowest level and struck off to the right of the incline. For some shadowy reason I tried to soften my steps, even though I lost speed thereby. There was a space I was afraid to cross on this last, deeply buried floor, and as I drew near it I recalled what thing in that space I feared. It was merely one of the metal-barred and closely guarded trap-doors. There would be no guards now, and on that account I trembled and tiptoed as I had done in passing through that black basalt vault where a similar trap-door had yawned. I felt a current of cool, damp air, as I had felt there, and wished that my course led in another direction. Why I had to take the particular course I was taking, I did not know.
      When I came to the space I saw that the trap-door yawned widely open. Ahead the shelves began again, and I glimpsed on the floor before one of them a heap very thinly covered with dust, where a number of cases had recently fallen. At the same moment a fresh wave of panic clutched me, though for some time I could not discover why. Heaps of fallen cases were not uncommon, for all through the aeons this lightless labyrinth had been racked by the heavings of earth and had echoed at intervals to the deafening clatter of toppling objects. It was only when I was nearly across the space that I realised why I shook so violently.
      Not the heap, but something about the dust of the level floor was troubling me. In the light of my torch it seemed as if that dust were not as even as it ought to be—there were places where it looked thinner, as if it had been disturbed not many months before. I could not be sure, for even the apparently thinner places were dusty enough; yet a certain suspicion of regularity in the fancied unevenness was highly disquieting. When I brought the torchlight close to one of the queer places I did not like what I saw—for the illusion of regularity became very great. It was as if there were regular lines of composite impressions—impressions that went in threes, each slightly over a foot square, and consisting of five nearly circular three-inch prints, one in advance of the other four.
      These possible lines of foot-square impressions appeared to lead in two directions, as if something had gone somewhere and returned. They were of course very faint, and may have been illusions or accidents; but there was an element of dim, fumbling terror about the way I thought they ran. For at one end of them was the heap of cases which must have clattered down not long before, while at the other end was the ominous trap-door with the cool, damp wind, yawning unguarded down to abysses past imagination.

VIII.

That my strange sense of compulsion was deep and overwhelming is shewn by its conquest of my fear. No rational motive could have drawn me on after that hideous suspicion of prints and the creeping dream-memories it excited. Yet my right hand, even as it shook with fright, still twitched rhythmically in its eagerness to turn a lock it hoped to find. Before I knew it I was past the heap of lately fallen cases and running on tiptoe through aisles of utterly unbroken dust toward a point which I seemed to know morbidly, horribly well. My mind was asking itself questions whose origin and relevancy I was only beginning to guess. Would the shelf be reachable by a human body? Could my human hand master all the aeon-remembered motions of the lock? Would the lock be undamaged and workable? And what would I do—what dare I do—with what (as I now commenced to realise) I both hoped and feared to find? Would it prove the awesome, brain-shattering truth of something past normal conception, or shew only that I was dreaming?
      The next I knew I had ceased my tiptoe racing and was standing still, staring at a row of maddeningly familiar hieroglyphed shelves. They were in a state of almost perfect preservation, and only three of the doors in this vicinity had sprung open. My feelings toward these shelves cannot be described—so utter and insistent was the sense of old acquaintance. I was looking high up, at a row near the top and wholly out of my reach, and wondering how I could climb to best advantage. An open door four rows from the bottom would help, and the locks of the closed doors formed possible holds for hands and feet. I would grip the torch between my teeth as I had in other places where both hands were needed. Above all, I must make no noise. How to get down what I wished to remove would be difficult, but I could probably hook its movable fastener in my coat collar and carry it like a knapsack. Again I wondered whether the lock would be undamaged. That I could repeat each familiar motion I had not the least doubt. But I hoped the thing would not scrape or creak—and that my hand could work it properly.
      Even as I thought these things I had taken the torch in my mouth and begun to climb. The projecting locks were poor supports; but as I had expected, the opened shelf helped greatly. I used both the difficultly swinging door and the edge of the aperture itself in my ascent, and managed to avoid any loud creaking. Balanced on the upper edge of the door, and leaning far to my right, I could just reach the lock I sought. My fingers, half-numb from climbing, were very clumsy at first; but I soon saw that they were anatomically adequate. And the memory-rhythm was strong in them. Out of unknown gulfs of time the intricate secret motions had somehow reached my brain correctly in every detail—for after less than five minutes of trying there came a click whose familiarity was all the more startling because I had not consciously anticipated it. In another instant the metal door was slowly swinging open with only the faintest grating sound.
      Dazedly I looked over the row of greyish case-ends thus exposed, and felt a tremendous surge of some wholly inexplicable emotion. Just within reach of my right hand was a case whose curving hieroglyphs made me shake with a pang infinitely more complex than one of mere fright. Still shaking, I managed to dislodge it amidst a shower of gritty flakes, and ease it over toward myself without any violent noise. Like the other case I had handled, it was slightly more than twenty by fifteen inches in size, with curved mathematical designs in low relief. In thickness it just exceeded three inches. Crudely wedging it between myself and the surface I was climbing, I fumbled with the fastener and finally got the hook free. Lifting the cover, I shifted the heavy object to my back, and let the hook catch hold of my collar. Hands now free, I awkwardly clambered down to the dusty floor, and prepared to inspect my prize.
      Kneeling in the gritty dust, I swung the case around and rested it in front of me. My hands shook, and I dreaded to draw out the book within almost as much as I longed—and felt compelled—to do so. It had very gradually become clear to me what I ought to find, and this realisation nearly paralysed my faculties. If the thing were there—and if I were not dreaming—the implications would be quite beyond the power of the human spirit to bear. What tormented me most was my momentary inability to feel that my surroundings were a dream. The sense of reality was hideous—and again becomes so as I recall the scene.
      At length I tremblingly pulled the book from its container and stared fascinatedly at the well-known hieroglyphs on the cover. It seemed to be in prime condition, and the curvilinear letters of the title held me in almost as hypnotised a state as if I could read them. Indeed, I cannot swear that I did not actually read them in some transient and terrible access of abnormal memory. I do not know how long it was before I dared to lift that thin metal cover. I temporised and made excuses to myself. I took the torch from my mouth and shut it off to save the battery. Then, in the dark, I screwed up my courage—finally lifting the cover without turning on the light. Last of all I did indeed flash the torch upon the exposed page—steeling myself in advance to suppress any sound no matter what I should find.
      I looked for an instant, then almost collapsed. Clenching my teeth, however, I kept silence. I sank wholly to the floor and put a hand to my forehead amidst the engulfing blackness. What I dreaded and expected was there. Either I was dreaming, or time and space had become a mockery. I must be dreaming—but I would test the horror by carrying this thing back and shewing it to my son if it were indeed a reality. My head swam frightfully, even though there were no visible objects in the unbroken gloom to swirl around me. Ideas and images of the starkest terror—excited by vistas which my glimpse had opened up—began to throng in upon me and cloud my senses.
      I thought of those possible prints in the dust, and trembled at the sound of my own breathing as I did so. Once again I flashed on the light and looked at the page as a serpent’s victim may look at his destroyer’s eyes and fangs. Then, with clumsy fingers in the dark, I closed the book, put it in its container, and snapped the lid and the curious hooked fastener. This was what I must carry back to the outer world if it truly existed—if the whole abyss truly existed—if I, and the world itself, truly existed.
      Just when I tottered to my feet and commenced my return I cannot be certain. It comes to me oddly—as a measure of my sense of separation from the normal world—that I did not even once look at my watch during those hideous hours underground. Torch in hand, and with the ominous case under one arm, I eventually found myself tiptoeing in a kind of silent panic past the draught-giving abyss and those lurking suggestions of prints. I lessened my precautions as I climbed up the endless inclines, but could not shake off a shadow of apprehension which I had not felt on the downward journey.
      I dreaded having to re-pass through that black basalt crypt that was older than the city itself, where cold draughts welled up from unguarded depths. I thought of that which the Great Race had feared, and of what might still be lurking—be it ever so weak and dying—down there. I thought of those possible five-circle prints and of what my dreams had told me of such prints—and of strange winds and whistling noises associated with them. And I thought of the tales of the modern blacks, wherein the horror of great winds and nameless subterrene ruins was dwelt upon.
      I knew from a carven wall symbol the right floor to enter, and came at last—after passing that other book I had examined—to the great circular space with the branching archways. On my right, and at once recognisable, was the arch through which I had arrived. This I now entered, conscious that the rest of my course would be harder because of the tumbled state of the masonry outside the archive building. My new metal-cased burden weighed upon me, and I found it harder and harder to be quiet as I stumbled among debris and fragments of every sort.
      Then I came to the ceiling-high mound of debris through which I had wrenched a scanty passage. My dread at wriggling through again was infinite; for my first passage had made some noise, and I now—after seeing those possible prints—dreaded sound above all things. The case, too, doubled the problem of traversing the narrow crevice. But I clambered up the barrier as best I could, and pushed the case through the aperture ahead of me. Then, torch in mouth, I scrambled through myself—my back torn as before by stalactites. As I tried to grasp the case again, it fell some distance ahead of me down the slope of the debris, making a disturbing clatter and arousing echoes which sent me into a cold perspiration. I lunged for it at once, and regained it without further noise—but a moment afterward the slipping of blocks under my feet raised a sudden and unprecedented din.
      The din was my undoing. For, falsely or not, I thought I heard it answered in a terrible way from spaces far behind me. I thought I heard a shrill, whistling sound, like nothing else on earth, and beyond any adequate verbal description. It may have been only my imagination. If so, what followed has a grim irony—since, save for the panic of this thing, the second thing might never have happened.
      As it was, my frenzy was absolute and unrelieved. Taking my torch in my hand and clutching feebly at the case, I leaped and bounded wildly ahead with no idea in my brain beyond a mad desire to race out of these nightmare ruins to the waking world of desert and moonlight which lay so far above. I hardly knew it when I reached the mountain of debris which towered into the vast blackness beyond the caved-in roof, and bruised and cut myself repeatedly in scrambling up its steep slope of jagged blocks and fragments. Then came the great disaster. Just as I blindly crossed the summit, unprepared for the sudden dip ahead, my feet slipped utterly and I found myself involved in a mangling avalanche of sliding masonry whose cannon-loud uproar split the black cavern air in a deafening series of earth-shaking reverberations.
      I have no recollection of emerging from this chaos, but a momentary fragment of consciousness shews me as plunging and tripping and scrambling along the corridor amidst the clangour—case and torch still with me. Then, just as I approached that primal basalt crypt I had so dreaded, utter madness came. For as the echoes of the avalanche died down, there became audible a repetition of that frightful, alien whistling I thought I had heard before. This time there was no doubt about it—and what was worse, it came from a point not behind but ahead of me.
      Probably I shrieked aloud then. I have a dim picture of myself as flying through the hellish basalt vault of the Elder Things, and hearing that damnable alien sound piping up from the open, unguarded door of limitless nether blacknesses. There was a wind, too—not merely a cool, damp draught, but a violent, purposeful blast belching savagely and frigidly from that abominable gulf whence the obscene whistling came.
      There are memories of leaping and lurching over obstacles of every sort, with that torrent of wind and shrieking sound growing moment by moment, and seeming to curl and twist purposefully around me as it struck out wickedly from the spaces behind and beneath. Though in my rear, that wind had the odd effect of hindering instead of aiding my progress; as if it acted like a noose or lasso thrown around me. Heedless of the noise I made, I clattered over a great barrier of blocks and was again in the structure that led to the surface. I recall glimpsing the archway to the room of machines and almost crying out as I saw the incline leading down to where one of those blasphemous trap-doors must be yawning two levels below. But instead of crying out I muttered over and over to myself that this was all a dream from which I must soon awake. Perhaps I was in camp—perhaps I was at home in Arkham. As these hopes bolstered up my sanity I began to mount the incline to the higher level.
      I knew, of course, that I had the four-foot cleft to re-cross, yet was too racked by other fears to realise the full horror until I came almost upon it. On my descent, the leap across had been easy—but could I clear the gap as readily when going uphill, and hampered by fright, exhaustion, the weight of the metal case, and the anomalous backward tug of that daemon wind? I thought of these things at the last moment, and thought also of the nameless entities which might be lurking in the black abysses below the chasm.
      My wavering torch was growing feeble, but I could tell by some obscure memory when I neared the cleft. The chill blasts of wind and the nauseous whistling shrieks behind me were for the moment like a merciful opiate, dulling my imagination to the horror of the yawning gulf ahead. And then I became aware of the added blasts and whistling in front of me—tides of abomination surging up through the cleft itself from depths unimagined and unimaginable.
      Now, indeed, the essence of pure nightmare was upon me. Sanity departed—and ignoring everything except the animal impulse of flight, I merely struggled and plunged upward over the incline’s debris as if no gulf had existed. Then I saw the chasm’s edge, leaped frenziedly with every ounce of strength I possessed, and was instantly engulfed in a pandaemoniac vortex of loathsome sound and utter, materially tangible blackness.
      This is the end of my experience, so far as I can recall. Any further impressions belong wholly to the domain of phantasmagoric delirium. Dream, madness, and memory merged wildly together in a series of fantastic, fragmentary delusions which can have no relation to anything real. There was a hideous fall through incalculable leagues of viscous, sentient darkness, and a babel of noises utterly alien to all that we know of the earth and its organic life. Dormant, rudimentary senses seemed to start into vitality within me, telling of pits and voids peopled by floating horrors and leading to sunless crags and oceans and teeming cities of windowless basalt towers upon which no light ever shone.
      Secrets of the primal planet and its immemorial aeons flashed through my brain without the aid of sight or sound, and there were known to me things which not even the wildest of my former dreams had ever suggested. And all the while cold fingers of damp vapour clutched and picked at me, and that eldritch, damnable whistling shrieked fiendishly above all the alternations of babel and silence in the whirlpools of darkness around.
      Afterward there were visions of the Cyclopean city of my dreams—not in ruins, but just as I had dreamed of it. I was in my conical, non-human body again, and mingled with crowds of the Great Race and the captive minds who carried books up and down the lofty corridors and vast inclines. Then, superimposed upon these pictures, were frightful momentary flashes of a non-visual consciousness involving desperate struggles, a writhing free from clutching tentacles of whistling wind, an insane, bat-like flight through half-solid air, a feverish burrowing through the cyclone-whipped dark, and a wild stumbling and scrambling over fallen masonry.
      Once there was a curious, intrusive flash of half-sight—a faint, diffuse suspicion of bluish radiance far overhead. Then there came a dream of wind-pursued climbing and crawling—of wriggling into a blaze of sardonic moonlight through a jumble of debris which slid and collapsed after me amidst a morbid hurricane. It was the evil, monotonous beating of that maddening moonlight which at last told me of the return of what I had once known as the objective, waking world.
      I was clawing prone through the sands of the Australian desert, and around me shrieked such a tumult of wind as I had never before known on our planet’s surface. My clothing was in rags, and my whole body was a mass of bruises and scratches. Full consciousness returned very slowly, and at no time could I tell just where true memory left off and delirious dream began. There had seemed to be a mound of titan blocks, an abyss beneath it, a monstrous revelation from the past, and a nightmare horror at the end—but how much of this was real? My flashlight was gone, and likewise any metal case I may have discovered. Had there been such a case—or any abyss—or any mound? Raising my head, I looked behind me, and saw only the sterile, undulant sands of the waste.
      The daemon wind died down, and the bloated, fungoid moon sank reddeningly in the west. I lurched to my feet and began to stagger southwestward toward the camp. What in truth had happened to me? Had I merely collapsed in the desert and dragged a dream-racked body over miles of sand and buried blocks? If not, how could I bear to live any longer? For in this new doubt all my faith in the myth-born unreality of my visions dissolved once more into the hellish older doubting. If that abyss was real, then the Great Race was real—and its blasphemous reachings and seizures in the cosmos-wide vortex of time were no myths or nightmares, but a terrible, soul-shattering actuality.
      Had I, in full hideous fact, been drawn back to a pre-human world of a hundred and fifty million years ago in those dark, baffling days of the amnesia? Had my present body been the vehicle of a frightful alien consciousness from palaeogean gulfs of time? Had I, as the captive mind of those shambling horrors, indeed known that accursed city of stone in its primordial heyday, and wriggled down those familiar corridors in the loathsome shape of my captor? Were those tormenting dreams of more than twenty years the offspring of stark, monstrous memories? Had I once veritably talked with minds from reachless corners of time and space, learned the universe’s secrets past and to come, and written the annals of my own world for the metal cases of those titan archives? And were those others—those shocking Elder Things of the mad winds and daemon pipings—in truth a lingering, lurking menace, waiting and slowly weakening in black abysses while varied shapes of life drag out their multimillennial courses on the planet’s age-racked surface?
      I do not know. If that abyss and what it held were real, there is no hope. Then, all too truly, there lies upon this world of man a mocking and incredible shadow out of time. But mercifully, there is no proof that these things are other than fresh phases of my myth-born dreams. I did not bring back the metal case that would have been a proof, and so far those subterrene corridors have not been found. If the laws of the universe are kind, they will never be found. But I must tell my son what I saw or thought I saw, and let him use his judgment as a psychologist in gauging the reality of my experience, and communicating this account to others.
      I have said that the awful truth behind my tortured years of dreaming hinges absolutely upon the actuality of what I thought I saw in those Cyclopean buried ruins. It has been hard for me literally to set down the crucial revelation, though no reader can have failed to guess it. Of course it lay in that book within the metal case—the case which I pried out of its forgotten lair amidst the undisturbed dust of a million centuries. No eye had seen, no hand had touched that book since the advent of man to this planet. And yet, when I flashed my torch upon it in that frightful megalithic abyss, I saw that the queerly pigmented letters on the brittle, aeon-browned cellulose pages were not indeed any nameless hieroglyphs of earth’s youth. They were, instead, the letters of our familiar alphabet, spelling out the words of the English language in my own handwriting.
",True
"Shortly before ten the next morning I stood with one small valise in front of Hammond's Drug Store in old Market Square waiting for the Innsmouth bus. As the hour for its arrival drew near I noticed a general drift of the loungers to other places up the street, or to the Ideal Lunch across the square. Evidently the ticket-agent had not exaggerated the dislike which local People bore toward Innsmouth and its denizens. In a few moments a small motor-coach of extreme decrepitude and dirty grey colour rattled down State Street, made a turn, and drew up at the curb beside me. I felt immediately that it was the right one; a guess which the half-illegible sign on the windshield--Arkham-Innsmouth-Newburyport--soon verified.
There were only three passengers--dark, unkempt men of sullen visage and somewhat youthful cast--and when the vehicle stopped they clumsily shambled out and began walking up State Street in a silent, almost furtive fashion. The driver also alighted, and I watched him as he went into the drug store to make some purchase. This, I reflected, must be the Joe Sargent mentioned by the ticket-agent; and even before I noticed any details there spread over me a wave of spontaneous aversion which could be neither checked nor explained. It suddenly struck me as very natural that the local people should not wish to ride on a bus owned and driven by this man, or to visit any oftener than possible the habitat of such a man and his kinsfolk.
When the driver came out of the store I looked at him more carefully and tried to determine the source of my evil impression. He was a thin, stoop-shouldered man not much under six feet tall, dressed in shabby blue civilian clothes and wearing a frayed golf cap. His age was perhaps thirty-five, but the odd, deep creases in the sides of his neck made him seem older when one did not study his dull, expressionless face. He had a narrow head, bulging, watery-blue eyes that seemed never to wink, a flat nose, a receding forehead and chin, and singularly undeveloped ears. His long thick lip and coarse-pored, greyish cheeks seemed almost beardless except for some sparse yellow hairs that straggled and curled in irregular patches; and in places the surface seemed queerly irregular, as if peeling from some cutaneous disease. His hands were large and heavily veined, and had a very unusual greyish-blue tinge. The fingers were strikingly short in proportion to the rest of the structure, and seemed to have a tendency to curl closely into the huge palm. As he walked toward the bus I observed his peculiarly shambling gait and saw that his feet were inordinately immense. The more I studied them the more I wondered how he could buy any shoes to fit them.
A certain greasiness about the fellow increased my dislike. He was evidently given to working or lounging around the fish docks, and carried with him much of their characteristic smell. Just what foreign blood was in him I could not even guess. His oddities certainly did not look Asiatic, Polynesian, Levantine or negroid, yet I could see why the people found him alien. I myself would have thought of biological degeneration rather than alienage.
I was sorry when I saw there would be no other passengers on the bus. Somehow I did not like the idea of riding alone with this driver. But as leaving time obviously approached I conquered my qualms and followed the man aboard, extending him a dollar bill and murmuring the single word ""Innsmouth."" He looked curiously at me for a second as he returned forty cents change without speaking. I took a seat far behind him, but on the same side of the bus, since I wished to watch the shore during the journey.
At length the decrepit vehicle stared with a jerk, and rattled noisily past the old brick buildings of State Street amidst a cloud of vapour from the exhaust. Glancing at the people on the sidewalks, I thought I detected in them a curious wish to avoid looking at the bus--or at least a wish to avoid seeming to look at it. Then we turned to the left into High Street, where the going was smoother; flying by stately old mansions of the early republic and still older colonial farmhouses, passing the Lower Green and Parker River, and finally emerging into a long, monotonous stretch of open shore country.
The day was warm and sunny, but the landscape of sand and sedge-grass, and stunted shrubbery became more and desolate as we proceeded. Out the window I could see the blue water and the sandy line of Plum Island, and we presently drew very near the beach as our narrow road veered off from the main highway to Rowley and Ipswich. There were no visible houses, and I could tell by the state of the road that traffic was very light hereabouts. The weather-worn telephone poles carried only two wires. Now and then we crossed crude wooden bridges over tidal creeks that wound far inland and promoted the general isolation of the region.
Once in a while I noticed dead stumps and crumbling foundation-walls above the drifting sand, and recalled the old tradition quoted in one of the histories I had read, that this was once a fertile and thickly-settled countryside. The change, it was said, came simultaneously with the Innsmouth epidemic of l846, and was thought by simple folk to have a dark connection with hidden forces of evil. Actually, it was caused by the unwise cutting of woodlands near the shore, which robbed the soil of the best protection and opened the way for waves of wind-blown sand.
At last we lost sight of Plum Island and saw the vast expanse of the open Atlantic on our left. Our narrow course began to climb steeply, and I felt a singular sense of disquiet in looking at the lonely crest ahead where the rutted road-way met the sky. It was as if the bus were about to keep on in its ascent, leaving the sane earth altogether and merging with the unknown arcana of upper air and cryptical sky. The smell of the sea took on ominous implications, and the silent driver's bent, rigid back and narrow head became more and more hateful. As I looked at him I saw that the back of his head was almost as hairless as his face, having only a few straggling yellow strands upon a grey scabrous surface.
Then we reached the crest and beheld the outspread valley beyond, where the Manuxet joins the sea just north of the long line of cliffs that culminate in Kingsport Head and veer off toward Cape Ann. On the far misty horizon I could just make out the dizzy profile of the Head, topped by the queer ancient house of which so many legends are told; but for the moment all my attention was captured by the nearer panorama just below me. I had, I realized, come face to face with rumour-shadowed Innsmouth.
It was a town of wide extent and dense construction, yet one with a portentous dearth of visible life. From the tangle of chimney-pots scarcely a wisp of smoke came, and the three tall steeples loomed stark and unpainted against the seaward horizon. One of them was crumbling down at the top, and in that and another there were only black gaping holes where clock-dials should have been. The vast huddle of sagging gambrel roofs and peaked gables conveyed with offensive clearness the idea of wormy decay, and as we approached along the now descending road I could see that many roofs had wholly caved in. There were some large square Georgian houses, too, with hipped roofs, cupolas, and railed ""widow's walks."" These were mostly well back from the water, and one or two seemed to be in moderately sound condition. Stretching inland from among them I saw the rusted, grass-grown line of the abandoned railway, with leaning telegraph-poles now devoid of wires, and the half-obscured lines of the old carriage roads to Rowley and Ipswich.
The decay was worst close to the waterfront, though in its very midst I could spy the white belfry of a fairly well preserved brick structure which looked like a small factory. The harbour, long clogged with sand, was enclosed by an ancient stone breakwater; on which I could begin to discern the minute forms of a few seated fishermen, and at whose end were what looked like the foundations of a bygone lighthouse. A sandy tongue had formed inside this barrier and upon it I saw a few decrepit cabins, moored dories, and scattered lobster-pots. The only deep water seemed to be where the river poured out past the belfried structure and turned southward to join the ocean at the breakwater's end.
Here and there the ruins of wharves jutted out from the shore to end in indeterminate rottenness, those farthest south seeming the most decayed. And far out at sea, despite a high tide, I glimpsed a long, black line scarcely rising above the water yet carrying a suggestion of odd latent malignancy. This, I knew, must be Devil Reef. As I looked, a subtle, curious sense of beckoning seemed superadded to the grim repulsion; and oddly enough, I found this overtone more disturbing than the primary impression.
We met no one on the road, but presently began to pass deserted farms in varying stages of ruin. Then I noticed a few inhabited houses with rags stuffed in the broken windows and shells and dead fish lying about the littered yards. Once or twice I saw listless-looking people working in barren gardens or digging clams on the fishy-smelling beach below, and groups of dirty, simian-visaged children playing around weed-grown doorsteps. Somehow these people seemed more disquieting than the dismal buildings, for almost every one had certain peculiarities of face and motions which I instinctively disliked without being able to define or comprehend them. For a second I thought this typical physique suggested some picture I had seen, perhaps in a book, under circumstances of particular horror or melancholy; but this pseudo-recollection passed very quickly.
As the bus reached a lower level I began to catch the steady note of a waterfall through the unnatural stillness, The leaning, unpainted houses grew thicker, lined both sides of the road, and displayed more urban tendencies than did those we were leaving behind, The panorama ahead had contracted to a street scene, and in spots I could see where a cobblestone pavement and stretches of brick sidewalk had formerly existed. All the houses were apparently deserted, and there were occasional gaps where tumbledown chimneys and cellar walls told of buildings that had collapsed. Pervading everything was the most nauseous fishy odour imaginable.
Soon cross streets and junctions began to appear; those on the left leading to shoreward realms of unpaved squalor and decay, while those on the right shewed vistas of departed grandeur. So far I had seen no people in the town, but there now came signs of a sparse habitation--curtained windows here and there, and an occasional battered motorcar at the curb. Pavement and sidewalks were increasingly well-defined, and though most of the houses were quite old--wood and brick structures of the early 19th century--they were obviously kept fit for habitation. As an amateur antiquarian I almost lost my olfactory disgust and my feeling of menace and repulsion amidst this rich, unaltered survival from the past.
But I was not to reach my destination without one very strong impression of poignantly disagreeable quality. The bus had come to a sort of open concourse or radial point with churches on two sides and the bedraggled remains of a circular green in the centre, and I was looking at a large pillared hall on the right-hand junction ahead. The structure's once white paint was now gray and peeling and the black and gold sign on the pediment was so faded that I could only with difficulty make out the words ""Esoteric Order of Dagon."" This, then was the former Masonic Hall now given over to a degraded cult. As I strained to decipher this inscription my notice was distracted by the raucous tones of a cracked bell across the street, and I quickly turned to look out the window on my side of the coach.
The sound came from a squat stone church of manifestly later date than most of the houses, built in a clumsy Gothic fashion and having a disproportionately high basement with shuttered windows. Though the hands of its clock were missing on the side I glimpsed, I knew that those hoarse strokes were tolling the hour of eleven. Then suddenly all thoughts of time were blotted out by an onrushing image of sharp intensity and unaccountable horror which had seized me before I knew what it really was. The door of the church basement was open, revealing a rectangle of blackness inside. And as I looked, a certain object crossed or seemed to cross that dark rectangle; burning into my brain a momentary conception of nightmare which was all the more maddening because analysis could not shew a single nightmarish quality in it.
It was a living object--the first except the driver that I had seen since entering the compact part of the town--and had I been in a steadier mood I would have found nothing whatever of terror in it. Clearly, as I realised a moment later, it was the pastor; clad in some peculiar vestments doubtless introduced since the Order of Dagon had modified the ritual of the local churches. The thing which had probably caught my first subconscious glance and supplied the touch of bizarre horror was the tall tiara he wore; an almost exact duplicate of the one Miss Tilton had shown me the previous evening. This, acting on my imagination, had supplied namelessly sinister qualities to the indeterminate face and robed, shambling form beneath it. There was not, I soon decided, any reason why I should have felt that shuddering touch of evil pseudo-memory. Was it not natural that a local mystery cult should adopt among its regimentals an unique type of head-dress made familiar to the community in some strange way--perhaps as treasure-trove?
A very thin sprinkling of repellent-looking youngish people now became visible on the sidewalks--lone individuals, and silent knots of two or three. The lower floors of the crumbling houses sometimes harboured small shops with dingy signs, and I noticed a parked truck or two as we rattled along. The sound of waterfalls became more and more distinct, and presently I saw a fairly deep river-gorge ahead, spanned by a wide, iron-railed highway bridge beyond which a large square opened out. As we clanked over the bridge I looked out on both sides and observed some factory buildings on the edge of the grassy bluff or part way down. The water far below was very abundant, and I could see two vigorous sets of falls upstream on my right and at least one downstream on my left. From this point the noise was quite deafening. Then we rolled into the large semicircular square across the river and drew up on the right-hand side in front of a tall, cupola crowned building with remnants of yellow paint and with a half-effaced sign proclaiming it to be the Gilman House.
I was glad to get out of that bus, and at once proceeded to check my valise in the shabby hotel lobby. There was only one person in sight--an elderly man without what I had come to call the ""Innsmouth look""--and I decided not to ask him any of the questions which bothered me; remembering that odd things had been noticed in this hotel. Instead, I strolled out on the square, from which the bus had already gone, and studied the scene minutely and appraisingly.
One side of the cobblestoned open space was the straight line of the river; the other was a semicircle of slant-roofed brick buildings of about the 1800 period, from which several streets radiated away to the southeast, south, and southwest. Lamps were depressingly few and small--all low-powered incandescents--and I was glad that my plans called for departure before dark, even though I knew the moon would be bright. The buildings were all in fair condition, and included perhaps a dozen shops in current operation; of which one was a grocery of the First National chain, others a dismal restaurant, a drug store, and a wholesale fish-dealer's office, and still another, at the eastward extremity of the square near the river an office of the town's only industry--the Marsh Refining Company. There were perhaps ten people visible, and four or five automobiles and motor trucks stood scattered about. I did not need to be told that this was the civic centre of Innsmouth. Eastward I could catch blue glimpses of the harbour, against which rose the decaying remains of three once beautiful Georgian steeples. And toward the shore on the opposite bank of the river I saw the white belfry surmounting what I took to be the Marsh refinery.
For some reason or other I chose to make my first inquiries at the chain grocery, whose personnel was not likely to be native to Innsmouth. I found a solitary boy of about seventeen in charge, and was pleased to note the brightness and affability which promised cheerful information. He seemed exceptionally eager to talk, and I soon gathered that he did not like the place, its fishy smell, or its furtive people. A word with any outsider was a relief to him. He hailed from Arkham, boarded with a family who came from Ipswich, and went back whenever he got a moment off. His family did not like him to work in Innsmouth, but the chain had transferred him there and he did not wish to give up his job.
There was, he said, no public library or chamber of commerce in Innsmouth, but I could probably find my way about. The street I had come down was Federal. West of that were the fine old residence streets--Broad, Washington, Lafayette, and Adams--and east of it were the shoreward slums. It was in these slums--along Main Street--that I would find the old Georgian churches, but they were all long abandoned. It would be well not to make oneself too conspicuous in such neighbourhoods--especially north of the river since the people were sullen and hostile. Some strangers had even disappeared.
Certain spots were almost forbidden territory, as he had learned at considerable cost. One must not, for example, linger much around the Marsh refinery, or around any of the still used churches, or around the pillared Order of Dagon Hall at New Church Green. Those churches were very odd--all violently disavowed by their respective denominations elsewhere, and apparently using the queerest kind of ceremonials and clerical vestments. Their creeds were heterodox and mysterious, involving hints of certain marvelous transformations leading to bodily immorality--of a sort--on this earth. The youth's own pastor--Dr. Wallace of Asbury M. E. Church in Arkham--had gravely urged him not to join any church in Innsmouth.
As for the Innsmouth people--the youth hardly knew what to make of them. They were as furtive and seldom seen as animals that live in burrows, and one could hardly imagine how they passed the time apart from their desultory fishing. Perhaps--judging from the quantities of bootleg liquor they consumed--they lay for most of the daylight hours in an alcoholic stupor. They seemed sullenly banded together in some sort of fellowship and understanding--despising the world as if they had access to other and preferable spheres of entity. Their appearance--especially those staring, unwinking eyes which one never saw shut--was certainly shocking enough; and their voices were disgusting. It was awful to hear them chanting in their churches at night, and especially during their main festivals or revivals, which fell twice a year on April 30th and October 31st.
They were very fond of the water, and swam a great deal in both river and harbour. Swimming races out to Devil Reef were very common, and everyone in sight seemed well able to share in this arduous sport. When one came to think of it, it was generally only rather young people who were seen about in public, and of these the oldest were apt to be the most tainted-looking. When exceptions did occur, they were mostly persons with no trace of aberrancy, like the old clerk at the hotel. One wondered what became of the bulk of the older folk, and whether the ""Innsmouth look"" were not a strange and insidious disease-phenomenon which increased its hold as years advanced.
Only a very rare affliction, of course, could bring about such vast and radical anatomical changes in a single individual after maturity--changes invoking osseous factors as basic as the shape of the skull--but then, even this aspect was no more baffling and unheard-of than the visible features of the malady as a whole. It would be hard, the youth implied, to form any real conclusions regarding such a matter; since one never came to know the natives personally no matter how long one might live in Innsmouth.
The youth was certain that many specimens even worse than the worst visible ones were kept locked indoors in some places. People sometimes heard the queerest kind of sounds. The tottering waterfront hovels north of the river were reputedly connected by hidden tunnels, being thus a veritable warren of unseen abnormalities. What kind of foreign blood--if any--these beings had, it was impossible to tell. They sometimes kept certain especially repulsive characters out of sight when government and others from the outside world came to town.
It would be of no use, my informant said, to ask the natives anything about the place. The only one who would talk was a very aged but normal looking man who lived at the poorhouse on the north rim of the town and spent his time walking about or lounging around the fire station. This hoary character, Zadok Allen, was 96 years old and somewhat touched in the head, besides being the town drunkard. He was a strange, furtive creature who constantly looked over his shoulder as if afraid of something, and when sober could not be persuaded to talk at all with strangers. He was, however, unable to resist any offer of his favorite poison; and once drunk would furnish the most astonishing fragments of whispered reminiscence.
After all, though, little useful data could be gained from him; since his stories were all insane, incomplete hints of impossible marvels and horrors which could have no source save in his own disordered fancy. Nobody ever believed him, but the natives did not like him to drink and talk with strangers; and it was not always safe to be seen questioning him. It was probably from him that some of the wildest popular whispers and delusions were derived.
Several non-native residents had reported monstrous glimpses from time to time, but between old Zadok's tales and the malformed inhabitants it was no wonder such illusions were current. None of the non-natives ever stayed out late at night, there being a widespread impression that it was not wise to do so. Besides, the streets were loathsomely dark.
As for business--the abundance of fish was certainly almost uncanny, but the natives were taking less and less advantage of it. Moreover, prices were falling and competition was growing. Of course the town's real business was the refinery, whose commercial office was on the square only a few doors east of where we stood. Old Man Marsh was never seen, but sometimes went to the works in a closed, curtained car.
There were all sorts of rumors about how Marsh had come to look. He had once been a great dandy; and people said he still wore the frock-coated finery of the Edwardian age curiously adapted to certain deformities. His son had formerly conducted the office in the square, but latterly they had been keeping out of sight a good deal and leaving the brunt of affairs to the younger generation. The sons and their sisters had come to look very queer, especially the elder ones; and it was said that their health was failing.
One of the Marsh daughters was a repellent, reptilian-looking woman who wore an excess of weird jewellery clearly of the same exotic tradition as that to which the strange tiara belonged. My informant had noticed it many times, and had heard it spoken of as coming from some secret hoard, either of pirates or of demons. The clergymen--or priests, or whatever they were called nowadays--also wore this kind of ornament as a headdress; but one seldom caught glimpses of them. Other specimens the youth had not seen, though many were rumoured to exist around Innsmouth.
The Marshes, together with the other three gently bred families of the town--the Waites, the Gilmans, and the Eliots--were all very retiring. They lived in immense houses along Washington Street, and several were reputed to harbour in concealment certain living kinsfolk whose personal aspect forbade public view, and whose deaths had been reported and recorded.
Warning me that many of the street signs were down, the youth drew for my benefit a rough but ample and painstaking sketch map of the town's salient features. After a moment's study I felt sure that it would be of great help, and pocketed it with profuse thanks. Disliking the dinginess of the single restaurant I had seen, I bought a fair supply of cheese crackers and ginger wafers to serve as a lunch later on. My program, I decided, would be to thread the principal streets, talk with any non-natives I might encounter, and catch the eight o'clock coach for Arkham. The town, I could see, formed a significant and exaggerated example of communal decay; but being no sociologist I would limit my serious observations to the field of architecture.
Thus I began my systematic though half-bewildered tour of Innsmouth's narrow, shadow-blighted ways. Crossing the bridge and turning toward the roar of the lower falls, I passed close to the Marsh refinery, which seemed to be oddly free from the noise of industry. The building stood on the steep river bluff near a bridge and an open confluence of streets which I took to be the earliest civic center, displaced after the Revolution by the present Town Square.
Re-crossing the gorge on the Main Street bridge, I struck a region of utter desertion which somehow made me shudder. Collapsing huddles of gambrel roofs formed a jagged and fantastic skyline, above which rose the ghoulish, decapitated steeple of an ancient church. Some houses along Main Street were tenanted, but most were tightly boarded up. Down unpaved side streets I saw the black, gaping windows of deserted hovels, many of which leaned at perilous and incredible angles through the sinking of part of the foundations. Those windows stared so spectrally that it took courage to turn eastward toward the waterfront. Certainly, the terror of a deserted house swells in geometrical rather than arithmetical progression as houses multiply to form a city of stark desolation. The sight of such endless avenues of fishy-eyed vacancy and death, and the thought of such linked infinities of black, brooding compartments given over to cob-webs and memories and the conqueror worm, start up vestigial fears and aversions that not even the stoutest philosophy can disperse.
Fish Street was as deserted as Main, though it differed in having many brick and stone warehouses still in excellent shape. Water Street was almost its duplicate, save that there were great seaward gaps where wharves had been. Not a living thing did I see except for the scattered fishermen on the distant break-water, and not a sound did I hear save the lapping of the harbour tides and the roar of the falls in the Manuxet. The town was getting more and more on my nerves, and I looked behind me furtively as I picked my way back over the tottering Water Street bridge. The Fish Street bridge, according to the sketch, was in ruins.
North of the river there were traces of squalid life--active fish-packing houses in Water Street, smoking chimneys and patched roofs here and there, occasional sounds from indeterminate sources, and infrequent shambling forms in the dismal streets and unpaved lanes--but I seemed to find this even more oppressive than the southerly desertion. For one thing, the people were more hideous and abnormal than those near the centre of the town; so that I was several times evilly reminded of something utterly fantastic which I could not quite place. Undoubtedly the alien strain in the Innsmouth folk was stronger here than farther inland--unless, indeed, the ""Innsmouth look"" were a disease rather than a blood stain, in which case this district might be held to harbour the more advanced cases.
One detail that annoyed me was the distribution of the few faint sounds I heard. They ought naturally to have come wholly from the visibly inhabited houses, yet in reality were often strongest inside the most rigidly boarded-up facades. There were creakings, scurryings, and hoarse doubtful noises; and I thought uncomfortably about the hidden tunnels suggested by the grocery boy. Suddenly I found myself wondering what the voices of those denizens would be like. I had heard no speech so far in this quarter, and was unaccountably anxious not to do so.
Pausing only long enough to look at two fine but ruinous old churches at Main and Church Streets, I hastened out of that vile waterfront slum. My next logical goal was New Church Green, but somehow or other I could not bear to repass the church in whose basement I had glimpsed the inexplicably frightening form of that strangely diademmed priest or pastor. Besides, the grocery youth had told me that churches, as well as the Order of Dagon Hall, were not advisable neighbourhoods for strangers.
Accordingly I kept north along Main to Martin, then turning inland, crossing Federal Street safely north of the Green, and entering the decayed patrician neighbourhood of northern Broad, Washington, Lafayette, and Adams Streets. Though these stately old avenues were ill-surfaced and unkempt, their elm-shaded dignity had not entirely departed. Mansion after mansion claimed my gaze, most of them decrepit and boarded up amidst neglected grounds, but one or two in each street shewing signs of occupancy. In Washington Street there was a row of four or five in excellent repair and with finely-tended lawns and gardens. The most sumptuous of these--with wide terraced parterres extending back the whole way to Lafayette Street--I took to be the home of Old Man Marsh, the afflicted refinery owner.
In all these streets no living thing was visible, and I wondered at the complete absence of cats and dogs from Innsmouth. Another thing which puzzled and disturbed me, even in some of the best-preserved mansions, was the tightly shuttered condition of many third-story and attic windows. Furtiveness and secretiveness seemed universal in this hushed city of alienage and death, and I could not escape the sensation of being watched from ambush on every hand by sly, staring eyes that never shut.
I shivered as the cracked stroke of three sounded from a belfry on my left. Too well did I recall the squat church from which those notes came. Following Washington Street toward the river, I now faced a new zone of former industry and commerce; noting the ruins of a factory ahead, and seeing others, with the traces of an old railway station and covered railway bridge beyond, up the gorge on my right.
The uncertain bridge now before me was posted with a warning sign, but I took the risk and crossed again to the south bank where traces of life reappeared. Furtive, shambling creatures stared cryptically in my direction, and more normal faces eyed me coldly and curiously. Innsmouth was rapidly becoming intolerable, and I turned down Paine Street toward the Square in the hope of getting some vehicle to take me to Arkham before the still-distant starting-time of that sinister bus.
It was then that I saw the tumbledown fire station on my left, and noticed the red faced, bushy-bearded, watery eyed old man in nondescript rags who sat on a bench in front of it talking with a pair of unkempt but not abnormal looking firemen. This, of course, must be Zadok Allen, the half-crazed, liquorish nonagenarian whose tales of old Innsmouth and its shadow were so hideous and incredible.
","When the young man named Sanang left the bed-chamber of Tressa Norne he turned to the right in the carpeted corridor outside and hurried toward the hotel elevator. But he did not ring for the lift; instead he took the spiral iron stairway which circled it, and mounted hastily to the floor above.

Here was his own apartment and he entered it with a key bearing the hotel tag. A dusky-skinned powerful old man wearing a grizzled beard and a greasy broadcloth coat of old-fashioned cut known to provincials as a ""Prince Albert"" looked up from where he was seated cross-legged upon the sofa, sharpening a curved knife on a whetstone.

""Gutchlug,"" stammered Sanang, ""I am afraid of her! What happened two years ago at the temple happened again a moment since, there in her very bedroom! She made a yellow death-adder out of nothing and placed it upon the threshold, and mocked me with laughter. May Thirty Thousand Calamities overtake her! May Erlik seize her! May her eyes rot out and her limbs fester! May the seven score and three principal devils——""

""You chatter like a temple ape,"" said Gutchlug tranquilly. ""Does Keuke Mongol die or live? That alone interests me.""

""Gutchlug,"" faltered the young man, ""thou knowest that m-my heart is inclined to mercy toward this young Yezidee——""

""I know that it is inclined to lust,"" said the other bluntly.

Sanang's pale face flamed.

""Listen,"" he said. ""If I had not loved her better than life had I dared go that day to the temple to take her for my own?""

""You loved life better,"" said Gutchlug. ""You fled when it rained snakes on the temple steps—you and your Tchortcha horsemen! Kai! I also ran. But I gave every soldier thirty blows with a stick before I slept that night. And you should have had your thirty, also, conforming to the Yarlig, my Tougtchi.""

Sanang, still holding his hat and cane and carrying his overcoat over his left arm, looked down at the heavy, brutal features of Gutchlug Khan—at the cruel mouth with its crooked smile under the grizzled beard; at the huge hands—the powerful hands of a murderer—now deftly honing to a razor-edge the Kalmuck knife held so firmly yet lightly in his great blunt fingers.

""Listen attentively, Prince Sanang,"" growled Gutchlug, pausing in his monotonous task to test the blade's edge on his thumb—""Does the Yezidee Keuke Mongol live? Yes or no?""

Sanang hesitated, moistened his pallid lips. ""She dares not betray us.""

""By what pledge?""

""Fear.""

""That is no pledge. You also were afraid, yet you went to the temple!""

""She has listened to the Yarlig. She has looked upon her shroud. She has admitted that she desires to live. Therein lies her pledge to us.""

""And she placed a yellow snake at your feet!"" sneered Gutchlug. ""Prince Sanang, tell me, what man or what devil in all the chronicles of the past has ever tamed a Snow-Leopard?"" And he continued to hone his yataghan.

""Gutchlug——""

""No, she dies,"" said the other tranquilly.

""Not yet!""

""When, then?""

""Gutchlug, thou knowest me. Hear my pledge! At her first gesture toward treachery—her first thought of betrayal—I myself will end it all.""

""You promise to slay this young snow-leopardess?""

""By the four companions, I swear to kill her with my own hands!""

Gutchlug sneered. ""Kill her—yes—with the kiss that has burned thy lips to ashes for all these months. I know thee, Sanang. Leave her to me. Dead she will no longer trouble thee.""

""Gutchlug!""

""I hear, Prince Sanang.""

""Strike when I nod. Not until then.""

""I hear, Tougtchi. I understand thee, my Banneret. I whet my knife. Kai!""

Sanang looked at him, put on his top-hat and overcoat, pulled on a pair of white evening gloves.

""I go forth,"" he said more pleasantly.

""I remain here to talk to my seven ancestors and sharpen my knife,"" remarked Gutchlug.

""When the white world and the yellow world and the brown world and the black world finally fall before the Hassanis,"" said Sanang with a quick smile, ""I shall bring thee to her. Gutchlug—once—before she is veiled, thou shalt behold what is lovelier than Eve.""

The other stolidly whetted his knife.

Sanang pulled out a gold cigarette case, lighted a cigarette with an air.

""I go among Germans,"" he volunteered amiably. ""The huns swam across two oceans, but, like the unclean swine, it is their own throats they cut when they swim! Well, there is only one God. And not very many angels. Erlik is greater. And there are many million devils to do his bidding. Adieu. There is rice and there is koumiss in the frozen closet. When I return you shall have been asleep for hours.""

When Sanang left the hotel one of two young men seated in the hotel lobby got up and strolled out after him.

A few minutes later the other man went to the elevator, ascended to the fourth floor, and entered an apartment next to the one occupied by Sanang.

There was another man there, lying on the lounge and smoking a cigar. Without a word, they both went leisurely about the matter of disrobing for the night.

When the shorter man who had been in the apartment when the other entered, and who was dark and curly-headed, had attired himself in pyjamas, he sat down on one of the twin beds to enjoy his cigar to the bitter end.

""Has Sanang gone out?"" he inquired in a low voice.

""Yes. Benton went after him.""

The other man nodded. ""Cleves,"" he said, ""I guess it looks as though this Norne girl is in it, too.""

""What happened?""

""As soon as she arrived, Sanang made straight for her apartment. He remained inside for half an hour. Then he came out in a hurry and went to his own rooms, where that surly servant of his squats all day, shining up his arsenal, and drinking koumiss.""

""Did you get their conversation?""

""I've got a record of the gibberish. It requires an interpreter, of course.""

""I suppose so. I'll take the records east with me to-morrow, and by the same token I'd better notify New York that I'm leaving.""

He went, half-undressed, to the telephone, got the telegraph office, and sent the following message:

""Recklow, New York:

""Leaving to-morrow for N. Y. with samples. Retain expert in Oriental fabrics.

""Victor Cleves.""

""Report for me, too,"" said the dark young man, who was still enjoying his cigar on his pillows.

So Cleves sent another telegram, directed also to

""Recklow, New York:

""Benton and I are watching the market. Chinese importations fluctuate. Recent consignment per Nan-yang Maru will be carefully inspected and details forwarded.

""Alek Selden.""

In the next room Gutchlug could hear the voice of Cleves at the telephone, but he merely shrugged his heavy shoulders in contempt. For he had other things to do beside eavesdropping.

Also, for the last hour—in fact, ever since Sanang's departure—something had been happening to him—something that happens to a Hassani only once in a lifetime. And now this unique thing had happened to him—to him, Gutchlug Khan—to him before whose Khiounnou ancestors eighty-one thousand nations had bowed the knee.

It had come to him at last, this dread thing, unheralded, totally unexpected, a few minutes after Sanang had departed.

And he suddenly knew he was going to die.

And, when, presently, he comprehended it, he bent his grizzled head and listened seriously. And, after a little silence, he heard his soul bidding him farewell.

So the chatter of white men at a telephone in the next apartment had no longer any significance for him. Whether or not they had been spying on him; whether they were plotting, made no difference to him now.

He tested his knife's edge with his thumb and listened gravely to his soul bidding him farewell.

But, for a Yezidee, there was still a little detail to attend to before his soul departed;—two matters to regulate. One was to select his shroud. The other was to cut the white throat of this young snow-leopardess called Keuke Mongol, the Yezidee temple girl.

And he could steal down to her bedroom and finish that matter in five minutes.

But first he must choose his shroud, as is the custom of the Yezidee.

That office, however, was quickly accomplished in a country where fine white sheets of linen are to be found on every hotel bed.

So, on his way to the door, his naked knife in his right hand, he paused to fumble under the bed-covers and draw out a white linen sheet.

Something hurt his hand like a needle. He moved it, felt the thing squirm under his fingers and pierce his palm again and again. With a shriek, he tore the bedclothes from the bed.

A little yellow snake lay coiled there.

He got as far as the telephone, but could not use it. And there he fell heavily, shaking the room and dragging the instrument down with him.

There was some excitement. Cleves and Selden in their bathrobes went in to look at the body. The hotel physician diagnosed it as heart-trouble. Or, possibly, poison. Some gazed significantly at the naked knife still clutched in the dead man's hands.

Around the wrist of the other hand was twisted a pliable gold bracelet representing a little snake. It had real emeralds for eyes.

It had not been there when Gutchlug died.

But nobody except Sanang could know that. And later when Sanang came back and found Gutchlug very dead on the bed and a policeman sitting outside, he offered no information concerning the new bracelet shaped like a snake with real emeralds for eyes, which adorned the dead man's left wrist.

Toward evening, however, after an autopsy had confirmed the house physician's diagnosis that heart-disease had finished Gutchlug, Sanang mustered enough courage to go to the desk in the lobby and send up his card to Miss Norne.

It appeared, however, that Miss Norne had left for Chicago about noon.

",False
"

  ""Oh, thou who burn'st in heart for those who burn
  In Hell, whose fires thyself shall feed in turn;
  How long be crying--'Mercy on them.' God!
  Why, who art thou to teach and He to learn?""

In the Church of St. Barnabé vespers were over; the clergy left the
altar; the little choir-boys flocked across the chancel and settled in
the stalls. A Suisse in rich uniform marched down the south aisle,
sounding his staff at every fourth step on the stone pavement; behind him
came that eloquent preacher and good man, Monseigneur C----.

My chair was near the chancel rail, I now turned toward the west end of
the church. The other people between the altar and the pulpit turned too.
There was a little scraping and rustling while the congregation seated
itself again; the preacher mounted the pulpit stairs, and the organ
voluntary ceased.

I had always found the organ-playing at St. Barnabé highly interesting.
Learned and scientific it was, too much so for my small knowledge, but
expressing a vivid if cold intelligence. Moreover, it possessed the
French quality of taste: taste reigned supreme, self-controlled,
dignified and reticent.

To-day, however, from the first chord I had felt a change for the worse,
a sinister change. During vespers it had been chiefly the chancel organ
which supported the beautiful choir, but now and again, quite wantonly as
it seemed, from the west gallery where the great organ stands, a heavy
hand had struck across the church at the serene peace of those clear
voices. It was something more than harsh and dissonant, and it betrayed
no lack of skill. As it recurred again and again, it set me thinking of
what my architect's books say about the custom in early times to
consecrate the choir as soon as it was built, and that the nave, being
finished sometimes half a century later, often did not get any blessing
at all: I wondered idly if that had been the case at St. Barnabé, and
whether something not usually supposed to be at home in a Christian
church might have entered undetected and taken possession of the west
gallery. I had read of such things happening, too, but not in works on
architecture.

Then I remembered that St. Barnabé was not much more than a hundred years
old, and smiled at the incongruous association of mediaeval superstitions
with that cheerful little piece of eighteenth-century rococo.

But now vespers were over, and there should have followed a few quiet
chords, fit to accompany meditation, while we waited for the sermon.
Instead of that, the discord at the lower end of the church broke out
with the departure of the clergy, as if now nothing could control it.

I belong to those children of an older and simpler generation who do not
love to seek for psychological subtleties in art; and I have ever refused
to find in music anything more than melody and harmony, but I felt that
in the labyrinth of sounds now issuing from that instrument there was
something being hunted. Up and down the pedals chased him, while the
manuals blared approval. Poor devil! whoever he was, there seemed small
hope of escape!

My nervous annoyance changed to anger. Who was doing this? How dare he
play like that in the midst of divine service? I glanced at the people
near me: not one appeared to be in the least disturbed. The placid brows
of the kneeling nuns, still turned towards the altar, lost none of their
devout abstraction under the pale shadow of their white head-dress. The
fashionable lady beside me was looking expectantly at Monseigneur C----.
For all her face betrayed, the organ might have been singing an Ave
Maria.

But now, at last, the preacher had made the sign of the cross, and
commanded silence. I turned to him gladly. Thus far I had not found the
rest I had counted on when I entered St. Barnabé that afternoon.

I was worn out by three nights of physical suffering and mental trouble:
the last had been the worst, and it was an exhausted body, and a mind
benumbed and yet acutely sensitive, which I had brought to my favourite
church for healing. For I had been reading _The King in Yellow_.

""The sun ariseth; they gather themselves together and lay them down in
their dens."" Monseigneur C---- delivered his text in a calm voice,
glancing quietly over the congregation. My eyes turned, I knew not why,
toward the lower end of the church. The organist was coming from behind
his pipes, and passing along the gallery on his way out, I saw him
disappear by a small door that leads to some stairs which descend
directly to the street. He was a slender man, and his face was as white
as his coat was black. ""Good riddance!"" I thought, ""with your wicked
music! I hope your assistant will play the closing voluntary.""

With a feeling of relief--with a deep, calm feeling of relief, I turned
back to the mild face in the pulpit and settled myself to listen. Here,
at last, was the ease of mind I longed for.

""My children,"" said the preacher, ""one truth the human soul finds hardest
of all to learn: that it has nothing to fear. It can never be made to see
that nothing can really harm it.""

""Curious doctrine!"" I thought, ""for a Catholic priest. Let us see how he
will reconcile that with the Fathers.""

""Nothing can really harm the soul,"" he went on, in, his coolest, clearest
tones, ""because----""

But I never heard the rest; my eye left his face, I knew not for what
reason, and sought the lower end of the church. The same man was coming
out from behind the organ, and was passing along the gallery _the same
way_. But there had not been time for him to return, and if he had
returned, I must have seen him. I felt a faint chill, and my heart sank;
and yet, his going and coming were no affair of mine. I looked at him: I
could not look away from his black figure and his white face. When he was
exactly opposite to me, he turned and sent across the church straight
into my eyes, a look of hate, intense and deadly: I have never seen any
other like it; would to God I might never see it again! Then he
disappeared by the same door through which I had watched him depart less
than sixty seconds before.

I sat and tried to collect my thoughts. My first sensation was like that
of a very young child badly hurt, when it catches its breath before
crying out.

To suddenly find myself the object of such hatred was exquisitely
painful: and this man was an utter stranger. Why should he hate me
so?--me, whom he had never seen before? For the moment all other
sensation was merged in this one pang: even fear was subordinate to
grief, and for that moment I never doubted; but in the next I began to
reason, and a sense of the incongruous came to my aid.

As I have said, St. Barnabé is a modern church. It is small and well
lighted; one sees all over it almost at a glance. The organ gallery gets
a strong white light from a row of long windows in the clerestory, which
have not even coloured glass.

The pulpit being in the middle of the church, it followed that, when I
was turned toward it, whatever moved at the west end could not fail to
attract my eye. When the organist passed it was no wonder that I saw him:
I had simply miscalculated the interval between his first and his second
passing. He had come in that last time by the other side-door. As for the
look which had so upset me, there had been no such thing, and I was a
nervous fool.

I looked about. This was a likely place to harbour supernatural horrors!
That clear-cut, reasonable face of Monseigneur C----, his collected
manner and easy, graceful gestures, were they not just a little
discouraging to the notion of a gruesome mystery? I glanced above his
head, and almost laughed. That flyaway lady supporting one corner of the
pulpit canopy, which looked like a fringed damask table-cloth in a high
wind, at the first attempt of a basilisk to pose up there in the organ
loft, she would point her gold trumpet at him, and puff him out of
existence! I laughed to myself over this conceit, which, at the time, I
thought very amusing, and sat and chaffed myself and everything else,
from the old harpy outside the railing, who had made me pay ten centimes
for my chair, before she would let me in (she was more like a basilisk, I
told myself, than was my organist with the anaemic complexion): from that
grim old dame, to, yes, alas! Monseigneur C---- himself. For all
devoutness had fled. I had never yet done such a thing in my life, but
now I felt a desire to mock.

As for the sermon, I could not hear a word of it for the jingle in my
ears of

 ""The skirts of St. Paul has reached.
  Having preached us those six Lent lectures,
  More unctuous than ever he preached,""

keeping time to the most fantastic and irreverent thoughts.

It was no use to sit there any longer: I must get out of doors and shake
myself free from this hateful mood. I knew the rudeness I was committing,
but still I rose and left the church.

A spring sun was shining on the Rue St. Honoré, as I ran down the church
steps. On one corner stood a barrow full of yellow jonquils, pale violets
from the Riviera, dark Russian violets, and white Roman hyacinths in a
golden cloud of mimosa. The street was full of Sunday pleasure-seekers. I
swung my cane and laughed with the rest. Some one overtook and passed me.
He never turned, but there was the same deadly malignity in his white
profile that there had been in his eyes. I watched him as long as I could
see him. His lithe back expressed the same menace; every step that
carried him away from me seemed to bear him on some errand connected with
my destruction.

I was creeping along, my feet almost refusing to move. There began to
dawn in me a sense of responsibility for something long forgotten. It
began to seem as if I deserved that which he threatened: it reached a
long way back--a long, long way back. It had lain dormant all these
years: it was there, though, and presently it would rise and confront me.
But I would try to escape; and I stumbled as best I could into the Rue de
Rivoli, across the Place de la Concorde and on to the Quai. I looked with
sick eyes upon the sun, shining through the white foam of the fountain,
pouring over the backs of the dusky bronze river-gods, on the far-away
Arc, a structure of amethyst mist, on the countless vistas of grey stems
and bare branches faintly green. Then I saw him again coming down one of
the chestnut alleys of the Cours la Reine.

I left the river-side, plunged blindly across to the Champs Elysées and
turned toward the Arc. The setting sun was sending its rays along the
green sward of the Rond-point: in the full glow he sat on a bench,
children and young mothers all about him. He was nothing but a Sunday
lounger, like the others, like myself. I said the words almost aloud, and
all the while I gazed on the malignant hatred of his face. But he was not
looking at me. I crept past and dragged my leaden feet up the Avenue. I
knew that every time I met him brought him nearer to the accomplishment
of his purpose and my fate. And still I tried to save myself.

The last rays of sunset were pouring through the great Arc. I passed
under it, and met him face to face. I had left him far down the Champs
Elysées, and yet he came in with a stream of people who were returning
from the Bois de Boulogne. He came so close that he brushed me. His
slender frame felt like iron inside its loose black covering. He showed
no signs of haste, nor of fatigue, nor of any human feeling. His whole
being expressed one thing: the will, and the power to work me evil.

In anguish I watched him where he went down the broad crowded Avenue,
that was all flashing with wheels and the trappings of horses and the
helmets of the Garde Republicaine.

He was soon lost to sight; then I turned and fled. Into the Bois, and far
out beyond it--I know not where I went, but after a long while as it
seemed to me, night had fallen, and I found myself sitting at a table
before a small café. I had wandered back into the Bois. It was hours now
since I had seen him. Physical fatigue and mental suffering had left me
no power to think or feel. I was tired, so tired! I longed to hide away
in my own den. I resolved to go home. But that was a long way off.

I live in the Court of the Dragon, a narrow passage that leads from the
Rue de Rennes to the Rue du Dragon.

It is an ""impasse""; traversable only for foot passengers. Over the
entrance on the Rue de Rennes is a balcony, supported by an iron dragon.
Within the court tall old houses rise on either side, and close the ends
that give on the two streets. Huge gates, swung back during the day into
the walls of the deep archways, close this court, after midnight, and one
must enter then by ringing at certain small doors on the side. The sunken
pavement collects unsavoury pools. Steep stairways pitch down to doors
that open on the court. The ground floors are occupied by shops of
second-hand dealers, and by iron workers. All day long the place rings
with the clink of hammers and the clang of metal bars.

Unsavoury as it is below, there is cheerfulness, and comfort, and hard,
honest work above.

Five flights up are the ateliers of architects and painters, and the
hiding-places of middle-aged students like myself who want to live alone.
When I first came here to live I was young, and not alone.

I had to walk a while before any conveyance appeared, but at last, when I
had almost reached the Arc de Triomphe again, an empty cab came along and
I took it.

From the Arc to the Rue de Rennes is a drive of more than half an hour,
especially when one is conveyed by a tired cab horse that has been at the
mercy of Sunday fete-makers.

There had been time before I passed under the Dragon's wings to meet my
enemy over and over again, but I never saw him once, and now refuge was
close at hand.

Before the wide gateway a small mob of children were playing. Our
concierge and his wife walked among them, with their black poodle,
keeping order; some couples were waltzing on the side-walk. I returned
their greetings and hurried in.

All the inhabitants of the court had trooped out into the street. The
place was quite deserted, lighted by a few lanterns hung high up, in
which the gas burned dimly.

My apartment was at the top of a house, halfway down the court, reached
by a staircase that descended almost into the street, with only a bit of
passage-way intervening, I set my foot on the threshold of the open door,
the friendly old ruinous stairs rose before me, leading up to rest and
shelter. Looking back over my right shoulder, I saw _him,_ ten paces
off. He must have entered the court with me.

He was coming straight on, neither slowly, nor swiftly, but straight on
to me. And now he was looking at me. For the first time since our eyes
encountered across the church they met now again, and I knew that the
time had come.

Retreating backward, down the court, I faced him. I meant to escape by
the entrance on the Rue du Dragon. His eyes told me that I never should
escape.

It seemed ages while we were going, I retreating, he advancing, down the
court in perfect silence; but at last I felt the shadow of the archway,
and the next step brought me within it. I had meant to turn here and
spring through into the street. But the shadow was not that of an
archway; it was that of a vault. The great doors on the Rue du Dragon
were closed. I felt this by the blackness which surrounded me, and at the
same instant I read it in his face. How his face gleamed in the darkness,
drawing swiftly nearer! The deep vaults, the huge closed doors, their
cold iron clamps were all on his side. The thing which he had threatened
had arrived: it gathered and bore down on me from the fathomless shadows;
the point from which it would strike was his infernal eyes. Hopeless, I
set my back against the barred doors and defied him.


There was a scraping of chairs on the stone floor, and a rustling as the
congregation rose. I could hear the Suisse's staff in the south aisle,
preceding Monseigneur C---- to the sacristy.

The kneeling nuns, roused from their devout abstraction, made their
reverence and went away. The fashionable lady, my neighbour, rose also,
with graceful reserve. As she departed her glance just flitted over my
face in disapproval.

Half dead, or so it seemed to me, yet intensely alive to every trifle, I
sat among the leisurely moving crowd, then rose too and went toward the
door.

I had slept through the sermon. Had I slept through the sermon? I looked
up and saw him passing along the gallery to his place. Only his side I
saw; the thin bent arm in its black covering looked like one of those
devilish, nameless instruments which lie in the disused torture-chambers
of mediaeval castles.

But I had escaped him, though his eyes had said I should not. _Had_
I escaped him? That which gave him the power over me came back out of
oblivion, where I had hoped to keep it. For I knew him now. Death and the
awful abode of lost souls, whither my weakness long ago had sent
him--they had changed him for every other eye, but not for mine. I had
recognized him almost from the first; I had never doubted what he was
come to do; and now I knew while my body sat safe in the cheerful little
church, he had been hunting my soul in the Court of the Dragon.

I crept to the door: the organ broke out overhead with a blare. A
dazzling light filled the church, blotting the altar from my eyes. The
people faded away, the arches, the vaulted roof vanished. I raised my
seared eyes to the fathomless glare, and I saw the black stars hanging in
the heavens: and the wet winds from the lake of Hali chilled my face.

And now, far away, over leagues of tossing cloud-waves, I saw the moon
dripping with spray; and beyond, the towers of Carcosa rose behind the
moon.

Death and the awful abode of lost souls, whither my weakness long ago had
sent him, had changed him for every other eye but mine. And now I heard
_his voice_, rising, swelling, thundering through the flaring light,
and as I fell, the radiance increasing, increasing, poured over me in
waves of flame. Then I sank into the depths, and I heard the King in
Yellow whispering to my soul: ""It is a fearful thing to fall into the
hands of the living God!""


","On the wall hung a map of Mongolia, that indefinite region a million and a half square miles in area, vast sections of which have never been explored.

Turkestan and China border it on the south, and Tibet almost touches it, not quite.

Even in the twelfth century, when the wild Mongols broke loose and nearly overran the world, the Tibet infantry under Genghis, the Tchortcha horsemen drafted out of Black China, and a great cloud of Mongol cavalry under the Prince of the Vanguard commanding half a hundred Hezars, never penetrated that grisly and unknown waste. The ""Eight Towers of the Assassins"" guarded it—still guard it, possibly.

The vice-regent of Erlik, Prince of Darkness, dwelt within this unknown land. And dwells there still, perhaps.

In front of this wall-map stood Tressa Norne.

Behind her, facing the map, four men were seated—three of them under thirty.

These three were volunteers in the service of the United States Government—men of independent means, of position, who had volunteered for military duty at the outbreak of the great war. However, they had been assigned by the Government to a very different sort of duty no less exciting than service on the fighting line, but far less conspicuous, for they had been drafted into the United States Department of Justice.

The names of these three were Victor Cleves, a professor of ornithology at Harvard University before the war; Alexander Selden, junior partner in the banking firm of Milwyn, Selden, and Co., and James Benton, a New York architect.

The fourth man's name was John Recklow. He might have been over fifty, or under. He was well-built, in a square, athletic way, clear-skinned and ruddy, grey-eyed, quiet in voice and manner. His hair and moustache had turned silvery. He had been employed by the Government for many years. He seemed to be enormously interested in what Miss Norne was saying.

Also he was the only man who interrupted her narrative to ask questions. And his questions revealed a knowledge which was making the girl more sensitive and uneasy every moment.

Finally, when she spoke of the Scarlet Desert, he asked if the Scarlet Lake were there and if the Xin was still supposed to inhabit its vermilion depths. And at that she turned and looked at him, her forefinger still resting on the map.

""Where have you ever heard of the Scarlet Lake and the Xin?"" she asked as though frightened.

Recklow said quietly that as a boy he had served under Gordon and Sir Robert.

""If, as a boy, you served under Chinese Gordon, you already know much of what I have told you, Mr. Recklow. Is it not true?"" she demanded nervously.

""That makes no difference,"" he replied with a smile. ""It is all very new to these three young gentlemen. And as for myself, I am checking up what you say and comparing it with what I heard many, many years ago when my comrade Barres and I were in Yian.""

""Did you really know Sir Robert Hart?""

""Yes.""

""Then why do you not explain to these gentlemen?""

""Dear child,"" he interrupted gently, ""what did Chinese Gordon or Sir Robert Hart, or even my comrade Barres, or I myself know about occult Asia in comparison to what you know?—a girl who has actually served the mysteries of Erlik for four amazing years!""

She paled a trifle, came slowly across the room to where Recklow was seated, laid a timid hand on his sleeve.

""Do you believe there are sorcerers in Asia?"" she asked with that child-like directness which her wonderful blue eyes corroborated.

Recklow remained silent.

""Because,"" she went on, ""if, in your heart, you do not believe this to be an accursed fact, then what I have to say will mean nothing to any of you.""

Recklow touched his short, silvery moustache, hesitating. Then:

""The worship of Erlik is devil worship,"" he said. ""Also I am entirely prepared to believe that there are, among the Yezidees, adepts who employ scientific weapons against civilisation—who have probably obtained a rather terrifying knowledge of psychic laws which they use scientifically, and which to ordinary, God-fearing folk appear to be the black magic of sorcerers.""

Cleves said: ""The employment by the huns of poison gases and long-range cannon is a parallel case. Before the war we could not believe in the possibility of a cannon that threw shells a distance of seventy miles.""

The girl still addressed herself to Recklow: ""Then you do not believe there are real sorcerers in Asia, Mr. Recklow?""

""Not sorcerers with supernatural powers for evil. Only degenerate human beings who, somehow, have managed to tap invisible psychic currents, and have learned how to use terrific forces about which, so far, we know practically nothing.""

She spoke again in the same uneasy voice: ""Then you do not believe that either God or Satan is involved?""

""No,"" he replied smilingly, ""and you must not so believe.""

""Nor the—the destruction of human souls,"" she persisted; ""you do not believe it is being accomplished to-day?""

""Not in the slightest, dear young lady,"" he said cheerfully.

""Do you not believe that to have been instructed in such unlawful knowledge is damning? Do you not believe that ability to employ unknown forces is forbidden of God, and that to disobey His law means death to the soul?""

""No!""

""That it is the price one pays to Satan for occult power over people's minds?"" she insisted.

""Hypnotic suggestion is not one of the cardinal sins,"" explained Recklow, still smiling—""unless wickedly employed. The Yezidee priesthood is a band of so-called sorcerers only because of their wicked employment of whatever hypnotic and psychic knowledge they may have obtained.

""There was nothing intrinsically wicked in the huns' discovery of phosgene. But the use they made of it made devils out of them. My ability to manufacture phosgene gas is no crime. But if I manufacture it and use it to poison innocent human beings, then, in that sense, I am, perhaps, a sort of modern sorcerer.""

Tressa Norne turned paler:

""I had better tell you that I have used—forbidden knowledge—which the Yezidees taught me in the temple of Erlik.""

""Used it how?"" demanded Cleves.

""To—to earn a living.... And once or twice to defend myself.""

There was the slightest scepticism in Recklow's bland smile. ""You did quite right, Miss Norne.""

She had become very white now. She stood beside Recklow, her back toward the suspended map, and looked in a scared sort of way from one to the other of the men seated before her, turning finally to Cleves, and coming toward him.

""I—I once killed a man,"" she said with a catch in her breath.

Cleves reddened with astonishment. ""Why did you do that?"" he asked.

""He was already on his way to kill me in bed.""

""You were perfectly right,"" remarked Recklow coolly.

""I don't know ... I was in bed.... And then, on the edge of sleep, I felt his mind groping to get hold of mine—feeling about in the darkness to get hold of my brain and seize it and paralyse it.""

All colour had left her face. Cleves gripped the arm of his chair and watched her intently.

""I—I had only a moment's mental freedom,"" she went on in a ghost of a voice. ""I was just able to rouse myself, fight off those murderous brain-fingers—let loose a clear mental ray.... And then, O God! I saw him in his room with his Kalmuck knife—saw him already on his way to murder me—Gutchlug Khan, the Yezidee—looking about in his bedroom for a shroud.... And when—when he reached for the bed to draw forth a fine, white sheet for the shroud without which no Yezidee dares journey deathward—then—then I became frightened.... And I killed him—I slew him there in his hotel bedroom on the floor above mine!""

Selden moistened his lips: ""That Oriental, Gutchlug, died from heart-failure in a San Francisco hotel,"" he said. ""I was there at the time.""

""He died by the fangs of a little yellow snake,"" whispered the girl.

""There was no snake in his room,"" retorted Cleves.

""And no wound on his body,"" added Selden. ""I attended the autopsy.""

She said, faintly: ""There was no snake, and no wound, as you say.... Yet Gutchlug died of both there in his bedroom.... And before he died he heard his soul bidding him farewell; and he saw the death-adder coiled in the sheet he clutched—saw the thing strike him again and again—saw and felt the tiny wounds on his left hand; felt the fangs pricking deep, deep into the veins; died of it there within the minute—died of the swiftest poison known. And yet——""

She turned her dead-white face to Cleves—""And yet there was no snake there!... And never had been.... And so I—I ask you, gentlemen, if souls do not die when minds learn to fight death with death—and deal it so swiftly, so silently, while one's body lies, unstirring on a bed—in a locked room on the floor below——""

She swayed a little, put out one hand rather blindly.

Recklow rose and passed a muscular arm around her; Cleves, beside her, held her left hand, crushing it, without intention, until she opened her eyes with a cry of pain.

""Are you all right?"" asked Recklow bluntly.

""Yes."" She turned and looked at Cleves and he caressed her bruised hand as though dazed.

""Tell me,"" she said to Cleves—""you who know—know more about my mind than anybody living——"" a painful colour surged into her face—but she went on steadily, forcing herself to meet his gaze: ""tell me, Mr. Cleves—do you still believe that nothing can really destroy my soul? And that it shall yet win through to safety?""

He said: ""Your soul is in God's keeping, and always shall be.... And if the Yezidees have made you believe otherwise, they lie.""

Recklow added in a slow, perplexed way: ""I have no personal knowledge of psychic power. I am not psychic, not susceptible. But if you actually possess such ability, Miss Norne, and if you have employed such knowledge to defend your life, then you have done absolutely right.""

""No guilt touches you,"" added Selden with an involuntary shiver, ""if by hypnosis or psychic ability you really did put an end to that would-be murderer, Gutchlug.""

Selden said: ""If Gutchlug died by the fangs of a yellow death-adder which existed only in his own mind, and if you actually had anything to do with it you acted purely in self-defence.""

""You did your full duty,"" added Benton—""but—good God!—it seems incredible to me, that such power can actually be available in the world!""

Recklow spoke again in his pleasant, undisturbed voice: ""Go back to the map, Miss Norne, and tell us a little more about this rather terrifying thing which you believe menaces the civilised world with destruction.""

Tressa Norne laid a slim finger on the map. Her voice had become steady. She said:

""The devil-worship, of which one of the modern developments is Bolshevism, and another the terrorism of the hun, began in Asia long before Christ's advent: At least so it was taught us in the temple of Erlik.

""It has always existed, its aim always has been the annihilation of good and the elevation of evil; the subjection of right by might, and the worldwide triumph of wrong.

""Perhaps it is as old as the first battle between God and Satan. I have wondered about it, sometimes. There in the dusk of the temple when the Eight Assassins came—the eight Sheiks-el-Djebel, all in white—chanting the Yakase of Sabbah—always that dirge when they came and spread their eight white shrouds on the temple steps——""

Her voice caught; she waited to recover her composure. Then went on:

""The ambition of Genghis was to conquer the world by force of arms. It was merely of physical subjection that he dreamed. But the Slayer of Souls——""

""Who?"" asked Recklow sharply.

""The Slayer of Souls—Erlik's vice-regent on earth—Hassan Sabbah. The Old Man of the Mountain. It is of him I am speaking,"" exclaimed Tressa Norne—with quiet resolution. ""Genghis sought only physical conquest of man; the Yezidee's ambition is more awful, for he is attempting to surprise and seize the very minds of men!""

There was a dead silence. Tressa looked palely upon the four.

""The Yezidees—who you tell me are not sorcerers—are using power—which you tell me is not magic accursed by God—to waylay, capture, enslave, and destroy the minds and souls of mankind.

""It may be that what they employ is hypnotic ability and psychic power and can be, some day, explained on a scientific basis when we learn more about the occult laws which govern these phenomena.

""But could anything render the threat less awful? For there have existed for centuries—perhaps always—a sect of Satanists determined upon the destruction of everything that is pure and holy and good on earth; and they are resolved to substitute for righteousness the dreadful reign of hell.

""In the beginning there were comparatively few of these human demons. Gradually, through the eras, they have increased. In the twelfth century there were fifty thousand of the Sect of Assassins.

""Beside the castle of the Slayer of Souls on Mount Alamout——"" she laid her finger on the map—""eight other towers were erected for the Eight Chief Assassins, called Sheiks-el-Djebel.

""In the temple we were taught where these eight towers stood."" She picked up a pencil, and on eight blank spaces of unexplored and unmapped Mongolia she made eight crosses. Then she turned to the men behind her.

""It was taught to us in the temple that from these eight foci of infection the disease of evil has been spreading throughout the world; from these eight towers have gone forth every year the emissaries of evil—perverted missionaries—to spread the poisonous propaganda, to teach it, to tamper stealthily with the minds of men, dominate them, pervert them, instruct them in the creed of the Assassin of Souls.

""All over the world are people, already contaminated, whose minds are already enslaved and poisoned, and who are infecting the still healthy brains of others—stealthily possessing themselves of the minds of mankind—teaching them evil, inviting them to mock the precepts of Christ.

""Of such lost minds are the degraded brains of the Germans—the pastors and philosophers who teach that might is right.

""Of such crippled minds are the Bolsheviki, poisoned long, long ago by close contact with Asia which, before that, had infected and enslaved the minds of the ruling classes with ferocious philosophy.

""Of such minds are all anarchists of every shade and stripe—all terrorists, all disciples of violence,—the murderously envious, the slothful slinking brotherhood which prowls through the world taking every opportunity to set it afire; those mentally dulled by reason of excesses; those weak intellects become unsound through futile gabble,—parlour socialists, amateur revolutionists, theoretical incapables excited by discussion fit only for healthy minds.""

She left the map and came over to where the four men were seated terribly intent upon her every word.

""In the temple of Erlik, where my girlhood was passed after the murder of my parents, I learned what I am repeating to you,"" she said.

""I learned this, also, that the Eight Towers still exist—still stand to-day,—at least theoretically—and that from the Eight Towers pours forth across the world a stream of poison.

""I was told that, to every country, eight Yezidees were allotted—eight sorcerers—or adepts in scientific psychology if you prefer it—whose mission is to teach the gospel of hell and gradually but surely to win the minds of men to the service of the Slayer of Souls.

""That is what was taught us in the temple. We were educated in the development of occult powers—for it seems all human beings possess this psychic power latent within them—only few, even when instructed, acquire any ability to control and use this force....

""I—I learned—rapidly. I even thought, sometimes, that the Yezidees were beginning to be a little afraid of me,—even the Hassani priests.... And the Sheiks-el-Djebel, spreading their shrouds on the temple steps, looked at me with unquiet eyes, where I stood like a corpse amid the incense clouds——""

She passed her fingers over her eyelids, then framed her face between both hands for a moment's thought lost in tragic retrospection.

""Kai!"" she whispered dreamily as though to herself—""what Erlik awoke within my body that was asleep, God knows, but it was as though a twin comrade arose within me and looked out through my eyes upon a world which never before had been visible.""

Utter silence reigned in the room: Cleves's breathing seemed almost painful to him so intently was he listening and watching this girl; Benton's hands whitened with his grip on the chair-arms; Selden, tense, absorbed, kept his keen gaze of a business man fastened on her face. Recklow slowly caressed the cold bowl of his pipe with both thumbs.

Tressa Norne's strange and remote eyes subtly altered, and she lifted her head and looked calmly at the men before her.

""I think that there is nothing more for me to add,"" she said. ""The Red Spectre of Anarchy, called Bolshevism at present, threatens our country. Our Government is now awake to this menace and the Secret Service is moving everywhere.

""Great damage already has been done to the minds of many people in this Republic; poison has spread; is spreading. The Eight Towers still stand. The Eight Assassins are in America.

""But these eight Assassins know me to be their enemy.... They will surely attempt to kill me.... I don't believe I can avoid—death—very long.... But I want to serve my country and—and mankind.""

""They'll have to get me first,"" said Cleves, bluntly. ""I shall not permit you out of my sight.""

Recklow said in a musing voice: ""And these eight gentlemen, who are very likely to hurt us, also, are the first people we ought to hunt.""

""To get them,"" added Selden, ""we ought to choke the stream at its source.""

""To find out who they are is what is going to worry us,"" added Benton. Cleves had stood holding a chair for Tressa Norne. Finally she noticed it and seated herself as though tired.

""Is Sanang one of these eight?"" he asked her. The girl turned and looked up at him, and he saw the flush mounting in her face.

""Sometimes,"" she said steadily, ""I have almost believed he was Erlik's own vice-regent on earth—the Slayer of Souls himself.""

Benton and Selden had gone. Recklow left a little later. Cleves accompanied him out to the landing.

""Are you going to keep Miss Norne here with you for the present?"" inquired the older man.

""Yes. I dare not let her out of my sight, Recklow. What else can I do?""

""I don't know. Is she prepared for the consequences?""

""Gossip? Slander?""

""Of course.""

""I can get a housekeeper.""

""That only makes it look worse.""

Cleves reddened. ""Well, do you want to find her in some hotel or apartment with her throat cut?""

""No,"" replied Recklow, gently, ""I do not.""

""Then what else is there to do but keep her here in my own apartment and never let her out of my sight until we can find and lock up the eight gentlemen who are undoubtedly bent on murdering her?""

""Isn't there some woman in the Service who could help out? I could mention several.""

""I tell you I can't trust Tressa Norne to anybody except myself,"" insisted Cleves. ""I got her into this; I am responsible if she is murdered; I dare not entrust her safety to anybody else. And, Recklow, it's a ghastly responsibility for a man to induce a young girl to face death, even in the service of her country.""

""If she remains here alone with you she'll face social destruction,"" remarked Recklow.

Cleves was silent for a moment, then he burst out: ""Well, what am I to do? What is there left for me to do except to watch over her and see her through this devilish business? What other way have I to protect her, Recklow?""

""You could offer her the protection of your name,"" suggested the other, carelessly.

""What? You mean—marry her?""

""Well, nobody else would be inclined to, Cleves, if it ever becomes known she has lived here quite alone with you.""

Cleves stared at the elder man.

""This is nonsense,"" he said in a harsh voice. ""That young girl doesn't want to marry anybody. Neither do I. She doesn't wish to have her throat cut, that's all. And I'm determined she shan't.""

""There are stealthier assassins, Cleves,—the slayers of reputations. It goes badly with their victim. It does indeed.""

""Well, hang it, what do you think I ought to do?""

""I think you ought to marry her if you're going to keep her here.""

""Suppose she doesn't mind the unconventionality of it?""

""All women mind. No woman, at heart, is unconventional, Cleves.""

""She—she seems to agree with me that she ought to stay here.... Besides, she has no money, no relatives, no friends in America——""

""All the more tragic. If you really believe it to be your duty to keep her here where you can look after her bodily safety, then the other obligation is still heavier. And there may come a day when Miss Norne will wish that you had been less conscientious concerning the safety of her pretty throat.... For the knife of the Yezidee is swifter and less cruel than the tongue that slays with a smile.... And this young girl has many years to live, after this business of Bolshevism is dead and forgotten in our Republic.""

""Recklow!""

""Yes?""

""You think I might dare try to find a room somewhere else for her and let her take her chances? Do you?""

""It's your affair.""

""I know—hang it! I know it's my affair. I've unintentionally made it so. But can't you tell me what I ought to do?""

""I can't.""

""What would you do?""

""Don't ask me,"" returned Recklow, sharply. ""If you're not man enough to come to a decision you may turn her over to me.""

Cleves flushed brightly. ""Do you think you are old enough to take my job and avoid scandal?""

Recklow's cold eyes rested on him: ""If you like,"" he said, ""I'll assume your various kinds of personal responsibility toward Miss Norne.""

Cleve's visage burned. ""I'll shoulder my own burdens,"" he retorted.

""Sure. I knew you would."" And Recklow smiled and held out his hand. Cleves took it without cordiality. Standing so, Recklow, still smiling, said: ""What a rotten deal that child has had—is having. Her father and mother were fine people. Did you ever hear of Dr. Norne?""

""She mentioned him once.""

""They were up-State people of most excellent antecedents and no money.

""Dr. Norne was our Vice-Consul at Yarkand in the province of Sin Kiang. All he had was his salary, and he lost that and his post when the administration changed. Then he went into the spice trade.

""Some Jew syndicate here sent him up the Yarkand River to see what could be done about jade and gold concessions. He was on that business when the tragedy happened. The Kalmuks and Khirghiz were responsible, under Yezidee instigation. And there you are:—and here is his child, Cleves—back, by some miracle, from that flowering hell called Yian, believing in her heart that she really lost her soul there in the temple. And now, here in her own native land, she is exposed to actual and hourly danger of assassination.... Poor kid!... Did you ever hear of a rottener deal, Cleves?""

Their hands had remained clasped while Recklow was speaking. He spoke again, clearly, amiably:

""To lay down one's life for a friend is fine. I'm not sure that it's finer to offer one's honour in behalf of a girl whose honour is at stake.""

After a moment Cleves's grip tightened.

""All right,"" he said.

Recklow went downstairs.

",True
"
The next few days passed almost without incident. I say ""almost"" because I still had that odd sense of being watched and followed. Occasionally, I caught a brief glimpse of ""fish faces,"" usually alone or in twos, lurking in the shadows or dodging furtively around corners, but as long as they kept their distance I was quite willing to adopt an attitude of ""live and let live.""
Don Ramiro had apparently left on a business trip to Mexico City, at least that's what his wife told me when I attempted to contact him. As for Rousseau, he was gone on some errand to Brownsville, so I was quite alone. The circumstances seemed conducive to renewing my acquaintance with Doña Tencha.
I found the curandera leaving a downtown yerbería, a shop specializing in herbs, candles, potions, and other tools of the sorcerer's trade. When she saw me, she greeted me cheerily.
""Buenas tardes, have they caused you any more problems?""
""No, Doña Tencha, they haven't. They haven't bothered me since that night, thanks to you perhaps.""
""As I said, they know better than to mess with me,"" she laughed, ""so, how can I help you now?""
""As you may have heard,"" I replied, ""I am in San Facundo to study your legends and folk traditions. That's my profession. I am an anthropologist.""
""An anthropophagist? Ha! Then you should get along fine with the frog-faces!""
I was almost as surprised by her darkly humorous word play as by her use of the epithet ""frog-faces,"" so close to the pejorative that I had invented. Her association of anthropophagy with those repulsive people sent a shiver down my spine.
""Believe me, I have nothing to do with eating human flesh,"" I volunteered. ""I was hoping you might be able to enlighten me some about local beliefs, you know, concerning magical and mystical practices."" She eyed me slyly.
""What you really want, güerito, is to know what the frog-faces do up on El Tinieblo when they and their relatives from the sea call up their devil gods, is that not so?""
Her bluntness, and her insight, surprised me even more than previously.
I responded, ""Do you know what happens there? Have you seen?""
""I have seen what I have seen,"" was her reply. ""But,"" she continued, ""to know and to understand, one must see for oneself.""
I remained silent for a few seconds, trying to analyze her meaning. Was she suggesting that I attempt to spy on the rituals, no doubt hideous in nature, on my own, or was she inviting me to join her in such a dubious enterprise?
Presently, I spoke, ""How do you suggest that I accomplish that?""
Once again, Tencha smiled slyly. ""First, one must know when and how.""
""That's logical,"" I responded, ""but when and how can we get started?""
""We?"" Her eyebrows rose in mock surprise.
""Why, yes. I am supposing you intend to show me the way. Otherwise I'll doubtless blunder into some trap they've set up to catch unwelcome intruders. You know, just as happened with the federales.""
She emitted a low chuckle, ""So then, you heard about the federales. No matter, eran una bola de pendejos.""
""Which is exactly the reason I need your help if I am to learn what is going on up there. I don't want to end up a fool, much less a dead fool like them.""
""Well,"" she laughed wryly, ""you are going to need Tencha's help then.""
Doña Tencha explained to me that the strange ones conducted their principal ceremonies at the time of the solar solstices and equinoxes, and lesser ceremonies at each dark-of-the-moon and full moon. She pointed out to me that the eve of the summer solstice, la noche de San Juan, was less than a fortnight away, and this should provide an excellent opportunity to observe the ritual in all its repulsive fullness. She also warned me that the ""frog faces"" and their sea-dwelling cousins would be especially on guard against intruders, as any profanation of the ceremony would incur the wrath of the Ancient Ones, and result in terrible punishments being meted out to the worshipers for their lack of vigilance.
""Take care that you say nothing,"" she warned, ""not to your friend the gringuito, and especially not to Don Ramiro, for he is not entirely worthy of your confidence.""
""Tell me about Ramiro,"" I prodded. ""Is he in any way connected to the strange ones or the sea beings? The reason I ask is that he seems to have profound knowledge concerning their past and their origins. He also speaks almost reverently when he mentions 'Great Kutulli'.""
She quickly traced a sign, not of the cross, with her hand then responded in an uncharacteristically somber tone, ""Ramirito is not of those demons. His blood is free of that stain. Did you know that he is partly descended from the judíos? Nevertheless, his lineage was not of those who followed the book. They were only a few of the many judíos who came here to get away from the priests. The same was true of my people. Only a few agreed to mate with the sea demons, and give birth to monsters. It is from those matings, and later with the judíos that followed the book, that the frog faces come.""
""Then, why not trust Ramiro?"" I asked.
""Because, even though he is not of the demon line himself, he did have close friends among them in his youth. Even worse, he took one of their women as his lover and she bore him a son."" She paused. ""Today he professes shame for what he did as a young man, but his son still lives and runs with the other frog faces. As you know, blood is thicker than water.""
Tencha's words left me with a reeling sensation in the pit of my stomach. I had come to both like and respect Don Ramiro, but the thought of this intelligent and fairly well educated man, whom I had considered a gentleman, taking one of those repulsive creatures as a lover filled me with disgust and loathing. I wondered how he could still face other human beings, knowing that his blood ran in the veins of one of those blasphemous abnormalities.
Tencha seemed to sense my reaction. ""They have a way of messing with one's mind."" Wrinkling her nose, she continued, ""They can get inside your head when it serves them to do so. They can make real fools out of some people; probably that is what happened to Ramirito."" After a pause she added, ""Be careful they don't do it to you!""
Actually, I was far more concerned for the safety of my body than for what the strange beings might do to my mind. I have always prided myself on having a strong will capable of imposing a great deal of mental discipline. Poor Ramiro! He must have been a gullible youth, like so many, seeking new thrills and forbidden pleasures with no thought as to the outcome or consequences.
Tencha and I agreed to meet at the house of her nephew, who lived on a nearby ejido, shortly before sundown on the eve of the summer solstice. She instructed me to wear dark clothing and rubber-soled boots so as to minimize our risks of being seen or heard. In the meantime, she advised, it would be better if we had no contact so as not to arouse suspicion concerning our plans. Later that same day a small boy knocked at my door and presented me with a folded sheet of paper on which was drawn a map showing the way to the ejido and the house of Tencha's nephew. Now there was little to do but wait for the appointed day and hour.


VII

In fact, I made good use of the intervening days and evenings delving into the many books that Rousseau had accumulated in his personal library. Most of these dealt with either the history and folklore of northeastern Mexico or themes related to magic, primitive religion, and demonology. In addition to the foregoing, and the previously mentioned volume of Al Azif, which for some reason I could not bring myself to read, the collection contained several loose leaf binders. One of these was filled with Xeroxed pages, made hastily, judging from the poor alignment, listed as the original 1839 Dusseldorf edition of Friedrich von Junzt's infamous Die Unaussprechlichen Kulten. Another contained several sheets of lined notebook paper covered with handwritten scribbling in Latin and drawings of strange hieroglyphs or sigils, with the legend ""Excerpts from the Liber Ivonis"" noted in English at the top of each page. There were also numerous other pages of notes written in some cryptic script with which I was not familiar. I wondered if those pieces were authentic or merely the spurious work of some crank. In view of the horrible revelations I found in their pages, I sincerely hoped the latter was true.
Presently, I found myself leafing through a crumbling volume titled Relación verdadera de las cosas de la Real Provincia del Nuevo Santander, published in 1783 by a Padre Vicente de Santa Maria, a priest of the Order of St. Francis, who had been allowed access to records of the earlier attempts at christianizing the native Indians of the province.
Father Santa Maria's chronicle covered more than two hundred years of regional history beginning with the earliest European exploration of the province shortly after Cortés' Conquest, and continuing up to the 1770's. The first part of the volume told a repeated story of frustrated attempts at conquest and settlement, failed missionary efforts, unrelenting resistance by fierce and warlike tribes, massacres and retaliations. As I leafed through the heavy volume I came upon a passage that caught my attention. The following is my own translation of the curiously archaic eighteenth century Spanish:


In the year of Our Lord 1627, Don Martín de Zavala, acting as governor of the province by authority of His Excellency Don Rodrigo Pacheco y Osorio, Marquis of Cerralvo and Viceroy of New Spain, dispatched sixteen friars of the Order of St. Augustine, headed by Father Andrés Echevarría y Olmos to the country of the Tahualilos with the object of establishing missions to spread the gospel of Our Lord among those people, who up to then had remained ignorant of it. This group founded four missions on both sides of the San Facundo River and another between there and the Rio de las Palmas, now called the Soto la Marina. After two years had passed, no more word was received from those missions and it was feared that they had been destroyed and the friars killed at the hands of the Indians.
With this present in his mind, and desiring to save the priests if possible, and if not, to avenge them, Don Martin sent a detachment of two hundred men, commanded by Captain Luís Santiesteban y Rojas, to the region of the San Facundo River, where he found the missions abandoned and the priests, with the exception of two who had died, partaking of the brutal and barbarous rituals of the heathens, which included the eating of human flesh in a way that was cruel and worse than inhuman. Seeing what was happening, the valiant captain seized twelve of the apostate friars forthwith, two others escaping in spite of his best efforts to prevent it, and after fighting off the barbarians in a hard battle, carried those priests in chains to San Juan Bautista de Jaumave. From there they were taken to San Luís Potosí and on to the City of México and there processed before the tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, whereby they were made to suffer for their abominable crimes against God and humanity.
As for the heathens, D. Felipe Rocafuerte y Nava, Superior of the Order of St. Augustine for the province, traveled personally to the country of the Tahualilos, accompanied by a strong detachment of soldiers. There he found the Indians to truly be worshippers of Satan the Devil and to frequently summon Satan and other demons to their ceremonies by means of foul incantations and conjurations. Furthermore, he discovered that they often gave of their daughters into carnal union with devils by whom they bore children, also devils. It was also learned that certain Jews, having accepted Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior, had settled in the region and lived peacefully among the Indians without the prior knowledge of provincial or vice regal authorities, but as they professed to be Christians and caused no problems to the Church or government, were left alone. The heathens, on the other hand, had to be dealt with in the severest way for their alliance with the minions of hell. After securing permission from the highest ecclesiastical authority in New Spain, Monsignor Rocafuerte ordered that four hundred Indians and sixty of their priests and caciques be passed through the flames of purification to God's Holy Tribunal.


I felt a singular chill as I read these words written more than two centuries earlier. Here was clear documentation of the things Don Ramiro had told me.
The hot, dry, and windy days of June wore on inexorably. Rousseau returned around the middle of the month. He had been absent about twenty days, and I was beginning to feel concern lest some mishap had befallen him.
""So, what's new Carl?"" I inquired. ""I hadn't expected you to be away so long.""
""I hadn't planned to be,"" he explained. ""I had merely intended to make a quick trip to Brownsville to pick up some books I had ordered. While there, I received word that Doctor Giulio Tarentino from Milan would be speaking at a conference at the University of Texas in Austin.""
""Tarentino?"" The name of a respected colleague immediately aroused my interest. ""I haven't seen him in more than three years. How is he?""
Rousseau paused for a moment; he then replied softly, ""He's dead.""
""But . . . but how?"" I stammered, deeply shocked.
""I traveled to Austin,"" Rousseau explained, "" . . . drove instead of flying. The conference was still several days away, so I planned to spend some time at a resort nearby in the hill country. It's very pleasant there this time of year you know. There was a friend, a young woman, involved, but that's neither here nor there. At any rate, Tarentino wasn't scheduled to present his paper until the third day of the conference. As I suppose you know, he's been doing some very deep research into ancient cults and belief systems that parallels your own . . . ""
""I would prefer to say 'complements',"" I interjected.
""Okay, complements . . . , anyway, he was supposed to present a paper on some research he carried out recently in Brazil.""
""Yes,"" I interrupted, ""he was looking into a certain obscure cult of African origin rumored to still be practiced there.""
""Obscure, but horrible,"" continued Rousseau. ""Certainly not regular Candomblé or Makumba. As I was best able to gather, the cult in question practices some form of demonolatry complete with human sacrifice and God knows what else.""
""From what other colleagues told me,"" I volunteered, ""Tarentino believed the cult to be part of an extremely ancient pattern of beliefs and practices that date back to ancient Mesopotamia and beyond, to the very origins of humanity. In historical times the cult manifested itself in many guises, and in many parts of the world. We find it in the worship of Moloch, mentioned with such abhorrence in the Old Testament, and reflected in the unspeakable practices of the Carthaginians, whose sacrificial rituals dedicated to Baal Hammon caused such revulsion among the Greeks that they would not refer to them directly in their writings. The Roman destruction of Carthage was carried out, in part, to obliterate the very memory of that abominable cult from the face of the earth. Centuries later, we find the same pattern repeated in the mass ritual slaughters carried out by the Aztec priesthood.""
""Tarentino was killed, you know."" Rousseau's words abruptly shook me out of my lecture mode.
""Killed? How . . . ?""
""In Puerto Rico, while on his way to Austin,"" Rousseau stated somberly, adding, ""He had returned to Brazil to attend the funeral of one of his research assistants there, who was also killed under strange circumstances. Ironic, isn't it?""
""How was he killed?"" I asked, dreading the answer.
""In a very strange and horrible way,"" was my friend's reply. ""He apparently was attacked by some animal while walking on the beach near his hotel. Whatever it was, it dragged him bodily into an adjacent wooded area and literally stripped the flesh from his bones. Strangely, there were no identifiable tracks, although there were some odd markings on the beach nearby . . . possibly large sea turtles the police said.""
""I never heard of sea turtles coming out of the water to attack human beings,"" I responded.
""Nor I,"" agreed Rousseau. ""The more superstitious among the locals were talking about the chupacabras, or so I was told.""
My friend's description of Tarentino's death caused me to feel a deep, hollow sensation in the pit of my stomach. It sounded too much like the sacrificial practices of Kutulli's followers. The fact that Tarentino was killed while walking on the beach added another dimension of horror.


VIII

The morning of June 24th dawned hot, muggy, and overcast. I went out early to take my morning coffee and pan dulce, the delicious Mexican sweet bread that I had come to enjoy, at a small cafe near the plaza. Later, I took a casual stroll along the high banks of the San Facundo River. I did not return to the house until almost noon. The only person I found there was Alma, the middle-aged woman whom Rousseau had hired to cook for us. She also came in three times a week to tidy up the house.
""Have you seen Carlos?"" I inquired.
""No,"" she answered. ""The patrón was not here when I came, and I haven't seen him all morning.""
His absence caused me no special concern. Rousseau often came and went without advising anyone. Personally, I knew that he was involved with a local peasant girl, though I had never met her, or even seen the two together.
Actually, I hoped that Rousseau would stay away for a few hours. That would facilitate my preparations for that night's planned adventure. I had no desire to give him any accounting concerning what Tencha and I planned to do. He would want to come along, and I strongly felt that more than three people would be very unwise. Besides, if Tencha found out that Rousseau was becoming too nosy she might want to cancel the whole expedition.
I carefully assembled the items I would be taking along: a mini-video camera and recorder with low light, high speed cassettes, good hiking boots, and a black combat knife. This last item amused me somewhat. Certainly, I have no skill in hand-to-hand combat. Nevertheless, I did not want to go into a situation of unknown danger completely unprepared to defend myself.
I slept restfully for part of the afternoon, a fact that surprised me considering my natural excitement over that night's planned adventure. About two hours before sundown I set out for my meeting with Tencha and her nephew, carrying my gear as inconspicuously as possible in a large all-purpose bag of plastic mesh, of a type frequently used by the ""popular"" classes in Mexico for groceries, clothing, or most anything else. I rode part of the way in a pesera, one of the small passenger vans that serve as public transportation in many Mexican towns and cities, then walked the remaining mile or so to the ejido where I was to meet my companions.
Checking my map, I soon located the house of Tencha's nephew. No one thereabouts seemed to notice me very much, though I am sure that the presence of any stranger, especially a foreigner, in such an isolated place immediately sets the grapevine in motion. Arriving at the house, a small oblong adobe structure with a thatched roof, I hailed the people inside. Immediately, a lean, swarthy man who seemed to be in his mid-twenties appeared in the doorway.
""A quién buscas?, Who are you looking for?"" he demanded brusquely. I asked if he were, indeed Doña Tencha's nephew.
""Sí, lo soy,"" he replied. ""You then, are the Americano she said was coming? Jijos! You do not know what you are getting yourself into, but sit down,"" he motioned to a log that served as a bench. ""Mi tía Tencha will be coming ahorita.""
""Ahorita,"" or soon, turned out to be nearly an hour. An elderly woman, perhaps the young man's mother in law, brought me a clay cup of manzanilla tea while his wife and two small children peered nervously out from inside the doorway. Tencha arrived just as the sun was dipping behind the low hills to the west.
""Have you been waiting very long?"" she asked in a cheerful voice.
""Not too long,"" I lied. ""When do we get started?""
""Not until the moon comes up,"" she replied. ""But we don't want to get there until, maybe, an hour before midnight.""
""You mean to El Tinieblo? I inquired.
""Sí,"" she replied. ""In the meantime Juan Antonio and I have something to do, so try to make yourself comfortable.""
She called out to her nephew, who emerged from the shack carrying a canvass bag slung over his shoulder, and some tools, or perhaps weapons, wrapped in burlap under his arm. I noticed that the bag was moving, as if something were squirming inside. My suspicion was confirmed when a bleating cry, almost like that of a little child, issued from the bag.
The two disappeared around the house, though I could still hear their voices chattering merrily in the distance. Soon, the voices faded in the darkness, and I was left alone, sitting on my lonely log. The old woman brought me more tea as I sat, listening to the sounds of the ejido settling in for the night, and the sounds of the night itself. The sky was still overcast, but I could imagine the stars shining brightly here on a clear night. How we city dwellers lose touch with the simple, yet profound beauties of nature!
Tencha and her nephew did not return until after nine o'clock. By now the overcast had lifted somewhat and a dull moon, nearly full, could be seen just above the eastern horizon.
""Is it time yet?"" I asked impatiently.
""Sí,"" was Tencha's only reply, as she motioned with her hand toward an old Chevrolet pickup with faded light blue paint parked nearby. I sat in the bed of the pickup as we bumped and jolted along the unpaved ranch roads. Tencha and her nephew, who was driving, rode in the cab but, as the rear window had no glass, we were able to converse freely.
""How much further?"" I asked.
""Just a little further to the highway,"" responded Tencha, ""and then several kilometers to the road we take to El Tinieblo.""
After a trip that seemed endless, perhaps because of my extreme discomfort, we arrived at the end of a narrow track that seemed to just stop in the middle of an extensive clump of mesquite.
""We walk from here,"" whispered Tencha, then muttered something to her nephew that I did not understand.
The nephew, Juan Antonio, turned to me and said, ""You still have time to back out if you wish. This is going to be very dangerous.""
""I've come this far,"" I replied. ""I have no desire to back out now.""
I knew that I was not being totally honest in this last statement, but my curiosity now exceeded the undeniable terror I felt at what lay before us.
Juan Antonio produced a small jar containing ground charcoal mixed with lard.
""Smear your face with this,"" he ordered.
I did as was instructed, as did both of my companions. This homemade camouflage paint, together with our dark clothing, made us nearly invisible as we made our way along a narrow path through the night-cloaked brush. Tencha and her nephew followed the path as though they were perfectly familiar with every rock, every abrupt turn. Not so myself. I frequently stumbled or became entangled in the thick chaparral as we made our way with no light other than what was provided by the pale gibbous moon.
Presently, I realized that we were climbing. As we broke into a slight clearing in the chaparral I saw the black bulk of El Tinieblo rising up just before us. More ominously, I saw a dull reddish glow about the top, and seemed to hear a low, steady, but indistinct chanting carried on the wind. Tencha motioned for us to halt.
""It is starting now,"" she whispered very low. ""The ritual will soon begin.""
We continued our slow ascent. Nearly crawling now, we made our way around the side of the hill, gradually, very cautiously, moving closer to the summit. At length, we came to an outcropping of rocks which afforded us a view across the long, flattish top of El Tinieblo.
From this vantage point I could see seven bonfires burning in a more or less circular pattern with a much larger bonfire blazing in the center. Between the outer ring of fires and the central blaze I could see two concentric circles of shadowy figures, apparently squatting on their heels and chanting something in a low, rhythmic murmur as they swayed from side to side in time with their chanting. I started to whisper a question to Tencha, but she placed her hand over my mouth, making a sign with two fingers meaning to wait, then placed one finger to her lips in the universal sign of silence.
Time seemed suspended as we lay there on our bellies, peering out between the rocks and tangled undergrowth that concealed our position from whatever guards might be present. Hours seemed to pass before a howling, a drawn out ululation suddenly sundered the night air, faded, and rose twice again to a nerve shattering pitch. Tencha and her nephew both traced signs across their chests that were not of the cross.
Scarcely had the howling died away that another sound began to reverberate over the hill top, echoing across the dark planes and into the empty night sky beyond, the slow, steady, and deep throbbing of a huge, though unseen drum. The drumming seemed to be steadily increasing in decibels, rising gradually to a deafening crescendo, and was now accompanied by the whining, monotonous piping of unseen flutes.
Slowly, deliberately, the squatting figures rose, swaying, rising, and dipping horribly, in time with the drumming and piping. I could not make out many details of the dancers, though I could tell from their peculiar postures and movements that all but one of them were of the ""strange ones."" There, now dancing, now pausing, but always keeping close to two other figures, I made out the unmistakable form of Ramiro. A business trip to Mexico City? Most likely, his human wife actually believed it!
Presently, I became aware of other figures forming a third circle beyond the outer ring of bonfires. The latter participants in the strange ceremony had apparently come up silently after the drumming had started, filing in from the eastern slope of the hill, the slope that faced in the direction of the sea. I could barely repress a scream when I saw how those shadowy figures danced: they hopped, floundered, undulated in clumsy, hideous time to the music. I gave thanks to whatever gods might be for the night and shadows that partly concealed those horrors from my view.
The frenzy of the dancers increased as the drumming and piping grew in volume and intensity. Howls and other animal noises pierced the night air, and slowly transformed into a more organized sound . . . chanting, unintelligible at first, but gradually taking on a definite pattern of sounds:
""Ph-nglui mglw'nafh Kutulli R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.""
The smoke from the blazing bonfires rose in swirling black billows, forming into a huge cloud that covered the whole portion of sky over El Tinieblo. I could see that the hellish oily black cloud seemed to be writhing and swirling as though driven by some hideous internal will of its own. It actually seemed to be trying to form itself into a shape. In the sky above us, highlighted by the reddish glow from the bonfires, I saw something like a face gradually taking shape, coagulating would be a more accurate description. From the black, bulbous head two burning red eyes glared at the scene below. Tendrils of smoke congealed into writhing tentacles that covered the lower portion of the diabolical face. Other, vaster tentacular shapes reached out into the night sky, completely overarching the hill and surrounding countryside.
The chanting grew louder and the dancing wilder, more frenzied.
Iwwaiy! Iwwaiiy! Ia! Ia! El! Elyon! Aduad! Adua- dua- duado! Ia! Ia! Kutulli fhtagn! Iwwaaaiiiiiiyyy! Ia! Ia!
I lay there, transfixed with horror and fascination, no longer cognizant of my two companions, only of that hellish shape that brooded above us.
My trance was suddenly broken by another sound, a scream, unmistakably human, that seemed to embody the very sum of all anguish and terror. I shifted my vision to seek out the source of that nightmare scream and saw a pale figure, completely naked, being dragged into the circle of celebrants next to the central bonfire. Straining my eyes to discern the unfortunate fellow's features, I was stricken with a sudden sensation of horror beyond my ability to describe. The naked man who was being dragged into the place of sacrifice was my friend Carl Rousseau!
I wanted to call out, to do something, anything, to help my friend. Impossible! I was paralyzed, perhaps with terror, or perhaps simply overwhelmed by the enormity, the utter indescribable horror of what was happening. Rousseau was roughly thrown into the circle before the fire. Immediately, I saw a slimy, glistening black tentacle envelop him and snatch him up before the thing hovering in the sky far above us. The tentacle held the tiny white figure before the red eyes for a moment, as though the hellish entity were examining it. Seconds later, the writhing anemone-like appendages extending in a mass below the eyes seized the pitiable flailing body and thrust it into the gaping black maw that served as a mouth. A scream that was no longer human, of utter horror, pain, and madness, rent the night from far above. I stared, absolutely fixated with horror, as the thing's eyes, two searing red coals suspended in an amorphous blob of bulbous blackness, seemed to survey the scene below, fixing its gaze first on one place, then on another.
The towering black monstrosity seemed to swell in size, taking on more substance and density, as other shadowy entities, impossible to describe, filled the air, flitting and undulating about the enormous black mass of tentacles that I knew must be Kutulli. Without warning the slimy growth of appendages around the mouth spread apart, revealing again the hellish gaping maw that had consumed poor Rousseau. From that dripping hole issued a sound such as I pray no human being will ever again have to hear. I totally lost control of my senses.
I remember nothing of what happened after that, nor do I know what happened to Tencha or Juan Antonio. Even such techniques as hypnotic regression and memory enhancement drugs have failed to make me recall the aftermath of that abominable night. The records show that I wandered onto an ejido many miles from El Tinieblo on the morning of June 30th, nearly a week after the Feast of St. John. The peasants immediately summoned the state judicial police to come pick up the crazy Americano, who babbled incoherently about the ""Ultimate Blackness beyond all time and space,"" and the abominations that dwell there. The Mexican authorities only took time to verify my identity from papers they found on my person and quickly turned me over to American consular personnel in Matamoros. From there I was transported to a psychiatric hospital in Houston where I remained for several months, being discharged when I was deemed stable enough to not pose a danger to myself or others.
In spite of my continued insistence, all efforts to trace Rousseau, or at least verify his fate, have led to dead ends, providing no meaningful answers. Mexican government records indicate that my unfortunate friend renewed a permit to enter the country over one year ago, but no further records of his presence in Mexico exist. State Department officials also confirm that a number of persons were interviewed in San Facundo, but that none admitted to any recollection or knowledge of either Rousseau or myself. Apparently, those officials are dismissing the whole affair as the delusion of a severely disturbed mind.
The administration at the university has been very understanding, placing me on extended leave of absence with pay until I feel fit to resume my teaching and research. My learned colleague Levinson, Dean of the Graduate School of Social Sciences, has even suggested that I take a long vacation to the New England coast, where, he assures me, in such a beautiful and restful setting I would experience a speedy convalescence. Personally, I would not go near the seashore for any inducement.
More than anything else I would like to put the experience, with all its hideous memories and implications, behind me, but I fear I will not be allowed even that solace. The strange sense of being watched and followed, which I felt so acutely in San Facundo, has returned. More ominously, I have several times noticed shadowy hunched figures, figures that walk with an odd shuffling gait. They often lurk near my residence as nightfall approaches. What are they watching and waiting for? I strongly fear that my escape from the horror of El Tinieblo was only temporary.
I sleep with difficulty now, and always with an element of dread, for with sleep come dreams of that horrible other night and what I saw, especially of that last dreadful image that seared itself into my brain at the very moment I lost consciousness. After the hellish black abomination, the Thing called Kutulli, devoured Rousseau, after It trumpeted its hideous screech of triumph to the cosmos, It once again directed its gaze downward, fixing on the very spot where I lay hidden. What I saw reflected in those hideous red orbs, clearly, in spite of the intervening distance and the swirling black smoke, was my own face, twisted and mad with horror.
","
There are things in this world that are better left unknown and areas of knowledge better left unexplored. With my background as an anthropologist and folklorist, trained to think as a scientist, I should reject such conclusions out of hand. Pursuit of knowledge, wherever it might lead, whatever unpalatable facts might surface, has ever been my highest aspiration. Nevertheless, the things I have experienced, the abominations I have seen with my own eyes, have led me to this conclusion. How comforting it would be if the experiences I am about to relate only reflected a psychotic episode!
The events surrounding my stay in Mexico and subsequent hospitalization have already become a fertile source of gossip, rumor, and innuendo among my academic colleagues. What a pity that men and women, supposedly dedicated to science and learning, would stoop to such pastimes, stereotypically associated with the ignorant and unintelligent; nevertheless, such is the sorry case.
I feel that I must clarify the facts of my experience, set the record straight so to speak. For this reason I am writing down the present account, which many readers will no doubt dismiss as the ravings of a lunatic, or the product of some drug induced hallucination. Nevertheless, I will describe the events that transpired as I experienced them. Most of what I now write is taken from notes I recorded carefully as the events occurred. I fortunately had the intuitive foresight to mail these notes to a trusted friend and colleague at the university prior to the horrible night in June of last year, concerning which I shall presently elaborate. The reader is, of course, free to draw his or her conclusions. As for myself, I fear that I may not have much time left, and I do not want to go to whatever fate awaits me in silence.
Had I not chosen to accept the invitation, proffered by an old acquaintance of my days as a graduate student, to explore a strange legend in Mexico, I would be a saner man now. I would still be comfortably ensconced in a tenured position with a prestigious eastern university, still secure in a rational world governed by the well-understood laws and principles of physics. Lamentably, any such concept of reality is now irrevocably lost for me. I know that things exist in this world, in this universe, that all sane and rational laws decree cannot exist. I have gazed upon an abomination barely hinted at in even the darkest and most fabulous corners of myth and legend. How I envy the multitude of humanity that continues to dwell in the smug illusion of an orderly, mechanistic cosmos!
My insane odyssey began almost one year ago. I had been invited to present a paper at an international symposium on religion, mythology, and folklore being held in San Antonio, Texas. At the end of the three day session I had received a call from Carl Rousseau, a former classmate of mine at Columbia whom I had not seen in a number of years.
To my surprise, Rousseau suggested that we meet for dinner. In reality, we had never been close friends. Nevertheless, my old classmate insisted that he had a story to share with me, one that I might find very interesting, considering my recently published research. In summary, I had uncovered and documented evidence pointing to a single very ancient tradition that seems to underlie most of the world's magical and mythological systems.
We met early that same evening at a small restaurant on the famous San Antonio River walk.
""Dr. Shapiro, good to see you again."" Rousseau's greeting sounded cheery enough, though his formality surprised me somewhat. ""Go ahead and order,"" he added, ""I'm only going to have coffee.""
As I perused the menu Rousseau fumbled a bit with his napkin. ""I'll try to explain this the best I can; . . . hope you won't think I'm too crazy, but what you're about to hear is the God honest truth. I swear it.""
""Really? Go ahead,"" I replied. Rousseau's manner disquieted me a little.
""I know you must be wondering why I decided to contact you after all this time; I mean, I know we weren't ever especially close . . . ""
""No matter. How can I help you?""
""Dr. Shapiro . . . ""
""Reuben,"" I interjected.
""O.K., Reuben . . . I don't know if you'd heard, but I've been living in Mexico, also some in Central America, for the last ten years or so.""
""Yes, I knew that your area of interest lay in the pre-conquest folk traditions of that region.""
""But Doc . . . uh . . . Reuben, my interests went beyond mere anthropological studies of folklore . . . more into the esoteric and occult aspects of those traditions. I am convinced that much knowledge from the pre-Columbian civilizations survived the Conquest and the Inquisition and is still preserved in secret by groups or individuals who carefully pass the knowledge on from one generation to the next. As you probably remember, I never pursued my academic studies as far as you did. Actually, I never even finished writing my master's thesis.""
""Pity,"" I sighed, ""you have the brains to become an outstanding teacher and researcher.""
Rousseau frowned slightly. ""Yes, but that's not where my interests lie. Publish or perish, I think they call it. Anyway, I was lucky; I inherited enough money that earning a living isn't a major concern for me.""
""We should all be so fortunate . . .,"" I replied, then added, ""What can I do for you Carl?""
""I was just getting to that,"" he answered, quickly adding, ""I've recently spent some time . . . several months in fact, living in northern Mexico, a little town called San Facundo, only a couple of hours south of Brownsville, Texas. I was originally attracted to the town by some old writings I came across . . . stuff by early Spanish friars bent on christianizing the local Indians, but some really weird stuff.""
""Most likely propaganda to justify some of the atrocities they planned once the benefits of the Inquisition were made available to the natives,"" I replied, wondering where our conversation was leading.
""That was the first thing that occurred to me also, but there were other things . . . I mean twelve priests were locked away in a monastery by order of the Archbishop of Mexico City. It was stated that those priests had been blinded and their tongues cut out at the Church's behest. The Superior of the Augustinian Order operating in the province asked the Church authorities for permission to burn hundreds of Indians at the stake, a request that was granted after he explained the circumstances to a secret tribunal of the Holy Office.
""After that,"" he continued, ""any person, Spaniard or Indian, suspected of engaging in certain practices, things that were known to the investigators, but which the writers of the chronicles were explicitly forbidden to describe, was to be put to death instantly and the corpse burned to ashes.""
""Horrible,"" I grimaced, ""but not too unusual for the times. I know. Some of my own ancestors suffered at the hands of the Inquisition.""
""Yes, Reuben, but it gets stranger. A large section of landscape, several leagues in length and breadth, was declared forbidden ground. No Christian could set a foot in that area under pain of excommunication. To this very day it's known in the region as la zona maldita, 'the Cursed Zone'.""
I rolled Rousseau's account over in my mind for a moment. It did seem to have the makings of an interesting piece of folklore. I told him as much.
""But why call it to my attention specifically?"" I queried. ""I'm a specialist in mythology and folklore, that's true, but is there something special in this odd bit of history you've uncovered that you think I should take any special note of?""
""Absolutely."" Rousseau's voice seemed calmer now. ""After reading all I could find out about this . . . this strangeness, for want of a better term, I decided to actually spend some time in the area and find out what I could first hand. The town of San Facundo, founded in the early seventeen hundreds, sits right at the edge of it . . . I mean the 'Cursed Zone'.""
""Yes, go on."" I couldn't help it. My interest was growing.
""Well, the locals are a strange lot, to say the least,"" he continued. ""You know how it goes, you have an isolated rural community, for many generations, and a lot of genetic fermentation occurs.""
""Often that can be the case,"" I replied.
""Anyway,"" continued Rousseau, ""they tend to be very clannish, tightlipped with any outsiders, and with me, an Americano, well, you can imagine. But after a while I did gain the trust of a few, and what they told me really piqued my interest.""
Rousseau paused for a moment, sipped his coffee, by now almost cold, and wiped the corners of his mouth with his napkin.
""A little south of San Facundo,"" he went on, ""not too far off the main highway, there's a singular hill. It's known locally as El Tinieblo, the place of darkness . . . juts straight up some five hundred feet above the surrounding landscape. The friars regarded it as an especially evil place. It lay right in the middle of the Cursed Zone, and the locals fear it to this day, at least those who aren't part of it."" Rousseau's emphasis on the word ""part"" caused me to feel an odd sensation in the back of my neck.
""It seems,"" he continued, ""that a couple of years back some federales, federal police from the Attorney General's office, went up there to investigate reports of night time activity, you know, lights, strange noises and such. They suspected drug traffickers at work. Anyway, of fifteen federales that went up that hill, only two came back down, both of them traumatized and completely incoherent. As far as anyone knows, no bodies were ever recovered. You've got to remember, those men were all equipped with automatic weapons and were trained to deal with almost any contingency. At any rate, the Mexican government clamped a tight security lid on the whole thing.""
I thought about this for a moment, then replied, ""So you think something strange happened to them, like violent cult activity maybe?""
""I thought that at first."" he responded quickly. ""I thought, perhaps, they had stumbled onto some secret ceremony or something, and just bit off more than they could chew. People can be quite dangerous when someone threatens or interferes with their religious practices.""
He paused again, staring briefly at his lap.
""But I know now that it was something else. I truly wish that it was only a matter of some weird cult or violent religious sect.""
""So, what leads you to believe it wasn't?"" I insisted.
""The two survivors . . . they both died within a few weeks of causes that were undetermined, as best as I could find out, even after bribing a couple of government officials for information. I talked to a doctor in the state capital who had been involved in their treatment. He told me that one of them only sat, you know, drawn up into a fetal position and making meaningless whining sounds; but the other, he would stare vacantly into space most of the time, then suddenly start shrieking at the top of his lungs . . . something about 'los demonios que no tienen forma . . . que te comen el cuerpo y el alma'.""
Though my Spanish was probably not as fluent as Rousseau's, I understood the meaning of his words . . . devils without shape that feed on body and soul . . .
Rousseau continued his account, providing further details about the history of the region and the nature of its inhabitants. Especially intriguing was his mention of certain physical peculiarities, apparently genetic in nature, that characterize some elements of the local population.
""Some of the locals actually seem almost frog like, I mean, like their eyes are round and bulging, they have almost no necks or chins, and their skin . . . well, it seems oddly rough, I might even say scaly.""
""You mean something like ichthyosis,"" I suggested. ""That's a hereditary condition you know . . . ""
""Yes,"" he answered. ""I've seen examples of that in my travels, but this . . . this is well . . . different. It does seem to run in the same families though.""
I thought for a moment, then suggested, ""Probably some unusual mutation due to doubling up defective recessive genes. That sometimes happens with too much inbreeding. I've seen some real oddities in our own southern Appalachian mountains. Even back in Massachusetts, I've heard stories of a decaying fishing town on the coast just south of Newburysport, as well as certain backwaters in the central part of the state where a very high incidence of genetic anomalies seems to occur.""
""I fear there's more to it than that,"" Rousseau replied. ""The other local people, the normal ones, avoid the . . . the strange ones like the plague. They seem to actually be terrified of them.""
""Sounds like a simple case of superstitious fear to me,"" I offered, adding, ""Ignorant people often react that way to anyone who's different or strange.""
""What if the fear were justified?"" he retorted. ""There was a case I looked into personally. It seems that a rural family, . . . lived out from town a little distance . . . Anyway, they had a child who wandered onto some property owned by one of the strange families. The child disappeared. Of course, the family was frantic. Then the child turned up . . . what was left of it, only a few gnawed bones with some shreds of flesh attached. The local police said it was coyotes, but I swear that the tooth marks I saw on the bones were not those of coyotes, or any other predator found in that region. They were not exactly human teeth, but were set in a human-like jaw, judging from the spacing.""
""Hmmm . . .,"" I pondered. ""Might bear looking into, but . . . ""
""Why don't you take some time and come see for yourself?"" demanded my companion. ""There are direct flights from here to Brownsville or Harlingen. After that it's only a couple of hours driving time to San Facundo. I have a house rented there. Nothing luxurious, to be sure, but comfortable enough for a few days. You can stay there with me.""
Our meeting ended at this point, aside from the usual leave-taking remarks and exchange of business cards and hotel telephone numbers. I headed straight to my hotel and presumed that Rousseau had done the same. Arriving at my room, I proceeded almost directly to the shower (the night being very warm). Inadvertently, I left the bathroom door open, a habit born of many years of living alone. As I brushed my teeth, I caught sight in the mirror of a slight movement at the base of the hallway door. I called out, but received no answer. Quick to investigate, I discovered a sheet of paper, folded in half, inserted beneath the door.
Curious, and a little annoyed, I picked up the paper, and saw scribbled thereon, in common black ballpoint, the references Rev. 13; Rev. 13: 13, and Koran 25:29. These cryptic citations, taken from the Christian New Testament and the Muslim Qûran, puzzled me. What could such a thing mean, and why would anyone slip such a note under my door? In that instant I remembered that most hotel rooms in the United States contain copies of the New Testament, distributed by some Christian evangelical organization.
A brief search in the drawers of the end table produced the book I was looking for. I fumbled through the limp pages of the cheap copy until I found the passage in question.
The thirteenth chapter of the Book of Revelations did nothing to resolve the mystery for me, as I read, ""And I stood still upon the sand of the sea. And I saw a beast ascending out of the sea. . . ."" Reading along to the thirteenth verse, I found, ""And I saw three unclean spirits like unto frogs come out of the mouth of the dragon and out of the mouth of the beast and out of the mouth of the false prophet.""
I was perplexed by these strange passages, and even more puzzled as to the purpose of the note. Those verses meant nothing to me. How could this antique eschatological imagery possibly relate to a person such as myself, a tenured professor of anthropology and folklore at a world-renowned Ivy League university? I would have liked to dismiss the whole affair as the misplaced zeal of some ""born-again"" bellhop, just another hawker of Christian fundamentalism of the type so common these days. But a zealous Christian would hardly cite a reference from the Islamic holy book. I did recall that Rousseau had mentioned the frog-like appearance of some San Facundo natives, but failed to see any relationship between that assertion and the material I had just read.
Still curious about the Qûranic reference, I fumbled in my wallet for the card of a certain Monsignor Zacchardi, a Jesuit scholar and professor of Comparative Religion at a local Catholic university. I had met Zacchardi at the conference earlier that week.
The priest answered after several rings.
""Good evening, Doctor Zacchardi,"" I offered. ""Sorry to disturb you so late, but I have a question. Do you have a copy of the Qûran at hand?""
Answering in the affirmative, Zacchardi assured me that my inquiry was no trouble at all. He asked me to wait a minute while he brought the copy from his study. A few moments later he returned.
""What, in particular, did you want to know from the Qûran?""
""The twenty-fifth Surah, twenty-ninth verse, what does it say?""
I could hear him leafing through the book. Presently, he answered, ""This is strange. It reads 'Beware mankind, for Shaitan is Khadhulu.' I had never noticed that particular passage before. I'd have to look into it more deeply before I could give you a possible interpretation.""
""No, that's quite all right,"" I answered. ""I just saw that Surah and verse mentioned in a novel I am reading and it stirred my curiosity.""
""Yes, I understand the feeling perfectly,"" replied the priest. ""Is there anything else?""
""No. Thank you for your help, I truly appreciate it. Good night.""
This brief conversation left me even more mystified than before. Many weeks later, I would come to realize the deeper, and very sinister implications of those cryptic passages, taken from the holy writ of two major religions.
Rousseau's story had undeniably captivated my interest, even overwhelming my native skepticism. I had some vacation time coming up; why not join Rousseau on a little junket down to Mexico? I might uncover some interesting material for further research. Even if I didn't, I might continue south and spend a few days relaxing on the beaches in Veracruz. Never did I imagine how I would come to regret my acceptance of Rousseau's invitation!


II

The hour long flight to Brownsville was boringly uneventful. Rousseau was strangely quiet and seemed rather apprehensive during the brief trip. The drive across the border and into Mexico was another story. After Rousseau picked up his vehicle, a four-wheel-drive Nissan, at the airport in Brownsville, we proceeded to the new international bridge, one of three bridges linking Brownsville, Texas with its sister city of Matamoros, Mexico. Mexican customs and immigration caused us remarkably little delay. Afterwards, we wound our way through the traffic of Matamoros, perhaps chaotic to an unaccustomed American, but rather orderly by the standards of most ""third world"" cities I had experienced. Eventually, we found ourselves on the main southbound highway, passing through open countryside. Rousseau kept up a steady conversation, explaining in great detail the history and folk traditions of the region through which we were passing. He was obviously very knowledgeable about those matters.
The landscape itself was not particularly remarkable at first, consisting of flat coastal plane covered, where it had not been cleared for cultivation, with stunted, thorny vegetation of the sort typically found in semiarid regions. At irregular intervals this was relieved by meandering ribbons of lush greenery marking the course of some narrow stream. Gradually, as we traveled south, the landscape became more rolling and elevated. The dim blue outlines of mountains grew visible on the southwestern horizon.
Villages, such as they were, amounted to clusters of cinder block and adobe structures, usually with a small store or two and a school building. The inhabitants, mostly women and children it seemed, invariably appeared to be occupied outside the houses or congregating around the community bus stop. We passed through any number of such totally forgettable places until, we crested the top of a hill and the town of San Facundo, with its white Spanish colonial church tower, came into view.
San Facundo was laid out in typical Mexican fashion with the whole town extending out from a central plaza, but it was not exactly the dusty little adobe place I had imagined. The business district boasted a number of modern looking establishments, and the principal streets were paved, though often in disrepair. The people I observed on the streets were mostly of Spanish-Indian mestizo stock, with the European strain predominating somewhat, as is often the case in northern Mexico. They seemed normal enough.
""Where,"" I asked, ""are the odd ones? I see nothing abnormal about the people hereabouts.""
""They generally hang together,"" was Rousseau's answer. ""Usually, you don't see them around until late in the afternoon, about the time the sun starts to set. They seem to be more nocturnal.""
""Which doubtless adds to the suspicion and fear of the local people,"" I suggested.
Rousseau paused for a moment, then recommended that we get ourselves settled in our lodgings. ""There'll be plenty of time for taking in the local atmosphere over the next few days,"" he added. ""I am certain that you'll see even more than you bargained for, but right now let's get a shower and something to eat."" The suggestion was more than welcome, as the day was very hot and we had not eaten anything since leaving Brownsville.
The house in which we would be staying was a two-story cinder block affair, plastered over and painted a rather gaudy shade of blue-green. Rousseau had taken it on lease from a local attorney who currently held a government position in another part of the country. There were three bedrooms, one of which would be mine during my stay, and a bath on the upper floor. Rousseau would be sleeping downstairs in the family room, which he had converted into a sort of study. I noticed that he had moved most of the owner's furnishings to the two unoccupied bedrooms, which he was using for storage.
After my shower, which had been difficult due to the extremely low water pressure, I joined Rousseau in the study.
""I've called my cook and she will have us something to eat shortly,"" he said.
""Good,"" I replied, ""but what have we here . . . ?"" What attracted my attention was a large book, bound in crumbling black leather with heavy brass corners and a brass hasp so that the volume could be locked shut. Obviously, it was very old.
""May I see it?"" I asked.
""I thought you would find it interesting,"" replied Rousseau. ""Can you read it?""
I studied the strange calligraphic script for a few minutes, presently recognizing it as Hebrew, a language in which I am fluent. The writing appeared to be on parchment in an archaic Sephardic dialect, but containing a scattering of Arabic words. On the title page I deciphered the words Sepher al Azif, followed by the legend: As written by Abd el Azrada the poet of Sanaa, may Adonai grant him mercy, in the city of Dimasq three centuries past. Rendered by my hand in the tongue of the Holy Covenant of Abraham in the four thousand nine hundred and sixteenth year of the Creation of the World, invoking the protection of Adonai in His Most Holy Name, which no man may utter. Beseeching hereof, His Great and Boundless Mercy, I am Isaac bar Z'evi, scribe to the Synagogue in the city of Cordoba.
The names ""Al Azif"" and ""Abd el Azrada"" stirred up memories in the back of my mind. During the early decades of this century a New England writer of horror fiction named Howard Phillips Lovecraft had based a whole series of stories around such a tome, more frequently referred to by its Greek title, Necronomicon. According to Lovecraft, Al Azif had been written or compiled in Damascus during the eighth century of our common era by one ""Abdul Alhazred,"" apparently an Arab or Syrian magus who flourished at the time of the Umayyad Caliphs, and who was often referred to simply as the ""Mad Arab."" Though almost all serious scholars agree that such a volume had never existed outside of Lovecraft's imagination, much popular speculation had grown up around it, creating a sort of modern folklore, which was precisely the reason I was aware of it.
I also knew that several books had been published during the 1970's and '80's purporting to be the Necronomicon. I had read two of them myself, one merely a mishmash of Sumerian and Akkadian incantations and conjurations for summoning or exorcising various and sundry gods, angels, and demons, and the other a rather odd collection drawn from Elizabethan era grimoires. The latter also may have originally been derived from Mesopotamian magical texts. Nevertheless, here I had before me an apparently ancient volume that seemed to be the real thing . . . and in a hot, dusty provincial town in northern Mexico!
""Where did you get this?"" My question was unavoidable.
""The attorney from whom I rented this house,"" was Rousseau's reply. ""He, in turn, obtained it from an incredibly old gentleman who lived on a ranch near here. He gave it to my lawyer friend before he died. Said it had been in his family for many generations. God only knows where it originally came from or how it got here.""
""It seems to have been written in Muslim Spain some time during the eleventh century,"" I replied. ""But the author, or I should say translator, appears to have been a Jew."" I paused for a moment to organize my thoughts before continuing.
""The original, if this is what I think it is, was written in Arabic some centuries earlier. Supposedly, there were later Greek and Latin translations, as well as an English version attributed to John Dee, court physician and astrologer to Elizabeth I, but no mention was ever made of a Hebrew rendering."" Once again I paused. ""Good God man! Do you have any idea how rare this volume must be?""
Rousseau remained silent for a moment.
""You have just confirmed what I already suspected."" The tone of his reply was edged with fear and resignation, as one might hear from a man who has just received confirmation of a dreaded diagnosis.
""But I've always assumed that the Necronomicon was an entirely fictional work,"" I protested, ""merely a literary invention used by Lovecraft and his circle as the basis for some early twentieth century works of science fiction or whatever . . . ""
Rousseau smiled, rather sadly it seemed. ""Obviously, that was, or is, not the case. You hold the evidence right there in your hands.""
I stared at the leather bound volume I held before me. Suddenly, I felt an unexpected wave of revulsion, bordering on nausea, at the thought that such a horrible book could actually exist . . . and I had it in my own hands. Abruptly, I put the volume on the desk, exercising a fete of will not to drop it like the repulsive thing it was.
Rousseau grimaced a bit, then explained, ""Lovecraft certainly had access to information that is beyond the reach of most researchers. Either he was an initiate into certain secret societies himself, or more likely, discovered documents in his grandfather's library that provided him with information normally available only to a very limited circle of high degree initiates."" Pausing for a moment, he added, ""Lovecraft's father and grandfather were both associated with a highly esoteric Masonic rite, one not generally recognized, or even known of, by most Freemasons. At any rate, he almost certainly had access to their private papers after their deaths.""
The implications of Rousseau's words astounded me. If the dreaded Necronomicon did indeed exist, then the terrible secret cults described by Lovecraft in his series of tales probably existed too. Of course, I was not ready to accept the reality of such abominable entities as Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, or Shub-Niggurath, or places such as the sunken city of R'lyeh, that Lovecraft so often referred to in his fictional, or perhaps fictionalized stories.
""Do you really think what you've told me about this town could somehow be related to this book, or to the things described in Lovecraft's stories?"" I asked incredulously.
""I'm hoping that you'll be able to determine if that's the case,"" Rousseau replied in a voice that was little more than a whisper.
",True
"It was a gentle daylight rain that awaked me front my stupor in the brush-grown railway cut, and when I staggered out to the roadway ahead I saw no trace of any prints in the fresh mud. The fishy odour, too, was gone, Innsmouth's ruined roofs and toppling steeples loomed up greyly toward the southeast, but not a living creature did I spy in all the desolate salt marshes around. My watch was still going, and told me that the hour was past noon.
The reality of what I had been through was highly uncertain in my mind, but I felt that something hideous lay in the background. I must get away from evil-shadowed Innsmouth--and accordingly I began to test my cramped, wearied powers of locomotion. Despite weakness hunger, horror, and bewilderment I found myself after a time able to walk; so started slowly along the muddy road to Rowley. Before evening I was in village, getting a meal and providing myself with presentable clothes. I caught the night train to Arkham, and the next day talked long and earnestly with government officials there; a process I later repeated in Boston. With the main result of these colloquies the public is now familiar--and I wish, for normality's sake, there were nothing more to tell. Perhaps it is madness that is overtaking me--yet perhaps a greater horror--or a greater marvel--is reaching out.
As may well be imagined, I gave up most of the foreplanned features of the rest of my tour--the scenic, architectural, and antiquarian diversions on which I had counted so heavily. Nor did I dare look for that piece of strange jewelry said to be in the Miskatonic University Museum. I did, however, improve my stay in Arkham by collecting some genealogical notes I had long wished to possess; very rough and hasty data, it is true, but capable of good use later on when I might have time to collate and codify them. The curator of the historical society there--Mr. B. Lapham Peabody--was very courteous about assisting me, and expressed unusual interest when I told him I was a grandson of Eliza Orne of Arkham, who was born in 1867 and had married James Williamson of Ohio at the age of seventeen.
It seemed that a maternal uncle of mine had been there many years before on a quest much like my own; and that my grandmother's family was a topic of some local curiosity. There had, Mr. Peabody said, been considerable discussion about the marriage of her father, Benjamin Orne, just after the Civil War; since the ancestry of the bride was peculiarly puzzling. That bride was understood to have been an orphaned Marsh of New Hampshire--a cousin of the Essex County Marshes--but her education had been in France and she knew very little of her family. A guardian had deposited funds in a Boston bank to maintain her and her French governess; but that guardian's name was unfamiliar to Arkham people, and in time he dropped out of sight, so that the governess assumed the role by court appointment. The Frenchwoman--now long dead--was very taciturn, and there were those who said she could have told more than she did.
But the most baffling thing was the inability of anyone to place the recorded parents of the young woman--Enoch and Lydia (Meserve) Marsh--among the known families of New Hampshire. Possibly, many suggested, she was the natural daughter of some Marsh of prominence--she certainly had the true Marsh eyes. Most of the puzzling was done after her early death, which took place at the birth of my grandmother--her only child. Having formed some disagreeable impressions connected with the name of Marsh, I did not welcome the news that it belonged on my own ancestral tree; nor was I pleased by Mr. Peabody's suggestion that I had the true Marsh eyes myself. However, I was grateful for data which I knew would prove valuable; and took copious notes and lists of book references regarding the well-documented Orne family.
I went directly home to Toledo from Boston, and later spent a month at Maumee recuperating from my ordeal. In September I entered Oberlin for my final year, and from then till the next June was busy with studies and other wholesome activities--reminded of the bygone terror only by occasional official visits from government men in connexion with the campaign which my pleas and evidence had started. Around the middle of July--just a year after the Innsmouth experience--I spent a week with my late mother's family in Cleveland; checking some of my new genealogical data with the various notes, traditions, and bits of heirloom material in existence there, and seeing what kind of a connected chart I could construct.
I did not exactly relish this task, for the atmosphere of the Williamson home had always depressed me. There was a strain of morbidity there, and my mother had never encouraged my visiting her parents as a child, although she always welcomed her father when he came to Toledo. My Arkham-born grandmother had seemed strange and almost terrifying to me, and I do not think I grieved when she disappeared. I was eight years old then, and it was said that she had wandered off in grief after the suicide of my Uncle Douglas, her eldest son. He had shot himself after a trip to New England--the same trip, no doubt, which had caused him to be recalled at the Arkham Historical Society.
This uncle had resembled her, and I had never liked him either. Something about the staring, unwinking expression of both of them had given me a vague, unaccountable uneasiness. My mother and Uncle Walter had not looked like that. They were like their father, though poor little cousin Lawrence--Walter's son--had been almost perfect duplicate of his grandmother before his condition took him to the permanent seclusion of a sanitarium at Canton. I had not seen him in four years, but my uncle once implied that his state, both mental and physical, was very bad. This worry had probably been a major cause of his mother's death two years before.
My grandfather and his widowed son Walter now comprised the Cleveland household, but the memory of older times hung thickly over it. I still disliked the place, and tried to get my researches done as quickly as possible. Williamson records and traditions were supplied in abundance by my grandfather; though for Orne material I had to depend on my uncle Walter, who put at my disposal the contents of all his files, including notes, letters, cuttings, heirlooms, photographs, and miniatures.
It was in going over the letters and pictures on the Orne side that I began to acquire a kind of terror of my own ancestry. As I have said, my grandmother and Uncle Douglas had always disturbed me. Now, years after their passing, I gazed at their pictured faces with a measurably heightened feeling of repulsion and alienation. I could not at first understand the change, but gradually a horrible sort of comparison began to obtrude itself on my unconscious mind despite the steady refusal of my consciousness to admit even the least suspicion of it. It was clear that the typical expression of these faces now suggested something it had not suggested before--something which would bring stark panic if too openly thought of.
But the worst shock came when my uncle shewed me the Orne jewellery in a downtown safe deposit vault. Some of the items were delicate and inspiring enough, but there was one box of strange old pieces descended from my mysterious great-grandmother which my uncle was almost reluctant to produce. They were, he said, of very grotesque and almost repulsive design, and had never to his knowledge been publicly worn; though my grandmother used to enjoy looking at them. Vague legends of bad luck clustered around them, and my great-grandmother's French governess had said they ought not to be worn in New England, though it would be quite safe to wear them in Europe.
As my uncle began slowly and grudgingly to unwrap the things he urged me not to be shocked by the strangeness and frequent hideousness of the designs. Artists and archaeologists who had seen them pronounced their workmanship superlatively and exotically exquisite, though no one seemed able to define their exact material or assign them to any specific art tradition. There were two armlets, a tiara, and a kind of pectoral; the latter having in high relief certain figures of almost unbearable extravagance.
During this description I had kept a tight rein on my emotions, but my face must have betrayed my mounting fears. My uncle looked concerned, and paused in his unwrapping to study my countenance. I motioned to him to continue, which he did with renewed signs of reluctance. He seemed to expect some demonstration when the first piece--the tiara--became visible, but I doubt if he expected quite what actually happened. I did not expect it, either, for I thought I was thoroughly forewarned regarding what the jewellery would turn out to be. What I did was to faint silently away, just as I had done in that brier-choked railway cut a year before.
From that day on my life has been a nightmare of brooding and apprehension nor do I know how much is hideous truth and how much madness. My great-grandmother had been a Marsh of unknown source whose husband lived in Arkham--and did not old Zadok say that the daughter of Obed Marsh by a monstrous mother was married to an Arkham man through trick? What was it the ancient toper had muttered about the line of my eyes to Captain Obed's? In Arkham, too, the curator had told me I had the true Marsh eyes. Was Obed Marsh my own great-great-grandfather? Who--or what--then, was my great-great-grandmother? But perhaps this was all madness. Those whitish-gold ornaments might easily have been bought from some Innsmouth sailor by the father of my great-grandmother, whoever he was. And that look in the staring-eyed faces of my grandmother and self-slain uncle might be sheer fancy on my part--sheer fancy, bolstered up by the Innsmouth shadow which had so darkly coloured my imagination. But why had my uncle killed himself after an ancestral quest in New England?
For more than two years I fought off these reflections with partial success. My father secured me a place in an insurance office, and I buried myself in routine as deeply as possible. In the winter of 1930-31, however, the dreams began. They were very sparse and insidious at first, but increased in frequency and vividness as the weeks went by. Great watery spaces opened out before me, and I seemed to wander through titanic sunken porticos and labyrinths of weedy cyclopean walls with grotesque fishes as my companions. Then the other shapes began to appear, filling me with nameless horror the moment I awoke. But during the dreams they did not horrify me at all--I was one with them; wearing their unhuman trappings, treading their aqueous ways, and praying monstrously at their evil sea-bottom temples.
There was much more than I could remember, but even what I did remember each morning would be enough to stamp me as a madman or a genius if ever I dared write it down. Some frightful influence, I felt, was seeking gradually to drag me out of the sane world of wholesome life into unnamable abysses of blackness and alienage; and the process told heavily on me. My health and appearance grew steadily worse, till finally I was forced to give up my position and adopt the static, secluded life of an invalid. Some odd nervous affliction had me in its grip, and I found myself at times almost unable to shut my eyes.
It was then that I began to study the mirror with mounting alarm. The slow ravages of disease are not pleasant to watch, but in my case there was something subtler and more puzzling in the background. My father seemed to notice it, too, for he began looking at me curiously and almost affrightedly. What was taking place in me? Could it be that I was coming to resemble my grandmother and uncle Douglas?
One night I had a frightful dream in which I met my grandmother under the sea. She lived in a phosphorescent palace of many terraces, with gardens of strange leprous corals and grotesque brachiate efflorescences, and welcomed me with a warmth that may have been sardonic. She had changed--as those who take to the water change--and told me she had never died. Instead, she had gone to a spot her dead son had learned about, and had leaped to a realm whose wonders-- destined for him as well--he had spurned with a smoking pistol. This was to be my realm, too--I could not escape it. I would never die, but would live with those who had lived since before man ever walked the earth.
I met also that which had been her grandmother. For eighty thousand years Pth'thya-l'yi had lived in Y'ha-nthlei, and thither she had gone back after Obed Marsh was dead. Y'ha-nthlei was not destroyed when the upper-earth men shot death into the sea. It was hurt, but not destroyed. The Deep Ones could never be destroyed, even though the palaeogean magic of the forgotten Old Ones might sometimes check them. For the present they would rest; but some day, if they remembered, they would rise again for the tribute Great Cthulhu craved. It would be a city greater than Innsmouth next time. They had planned to spread, and had brought up that which would help them, but now they must wait once more. For bringing the upper-earth men's death I must do a penance, but that would not be heavy. This was the dream in which I saw a shoggoth for the first time, and the sight set me awake in a frenzy of screaming. That morning the mirror definitely told me I had acquired the Innsmouth look.
So far I have not shot myself as my uncle Douglas did. I bought an automatic and almost took the step, but certain dreams deterred me. The tense extremes of horror are lessening, and I feel queerly drawn toward the unknown sea-deeps instead of fearing them. I hear and do strange things in sleep, and awake with a kind of exaltation instead of terror. I do not believe I need to wait for the full change as most have waited. If I did, my father would probably shut me up in a sanitarium as my poor little cousin is shut up. Stupendous and unheard-of splendors await me below, and I shall seek them soon. Ia-R'lyehl Cihuiha flgagnl id Ia! No, I shall not shoot myself--I cannot be made to shoot myself!
I shall plan my cousin's escape from that Canton mad-house, and together we shall go to marvel-shadowed Innsmouth. We shall swim out to that brooding reef in the sea and dive down through black abysses to Cyclopean and many-columned Y'ha-nthlei, and in that lair of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory for ever.
","Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places. For them are the catacombs of Ptolemais, and the carven mausolea of the nightmare countries. They climb to the moonlit towers of ruined Rhine castles, and falter down black cobwebbed steps beneath the scattered stones of forgotten cities in Asia. The haunted wood and the desolate mountain are their shrines, and they linger around the sinister monoliths on uninhabited islands. But the true epicure in the terrible, to whom a new thrill of unutterable ghastliness is the chief end and justification of existence, esteems most of all the ancient, lonely farmhouses of backwoods New England; for there the dark elements of strength, solitude, grotesqueness, and ignorance combine to form the perfection of the hideous.
      Most horrible of all sights are the little unpainted wooden houses remote from travelled ways, usually squatted upon some damp, grassy slope or leaning against some gigantic outcropping of rock. Two hundred years and more they have leaned or squatted there, while the vines have crawled and the trees have swelled and spread. They are almost hidden now in lawless luxuriances of green and guardian shrouds of shadow; but the small-paned windows still stare shockingly, as if blinking through a lethal stupor which wards off madness by dulling the memory of unutterable things.
      In such houses have dwelt generations of strange people, whose like the world has never seen. Seized with a gloomy and fanatical belief which exiled them from their kind, their ancestors sought the wilderness for freedom. There the scions of a conquering race indeed flourished free from the restrictions of their fellows, but cowered in an appalling slavery to the dismal phantasms of their own minds. Divorced from the enlightenment of civilisation, the strength of these Puritans turned into singular channels; and in their isolation, morbid self-repression, and struggle for life with relentless Nature, there came to them dark furtive traits from the prehistoric depths of their cold Northern heritage. By necessity practical and by philosophy stern, these folk were not beautiful in their sins. Erring as all mortals must, they were forced by their rigid code to seek concealment above all else; so that they came to use less and less taste in what they concealed. Only the silent, sleepy, staring houses in the backwoods can tell all that has lain hidden since the early days; and they are not communicative, being loath to shake off the drowsiness which helps them forget. Sometimes one feels that it would be merciful to tear down these houses, for they must often dream.
      It was to a time-battered edifice of this description that I was driven one afternoon in November, 1896, by a rain of such chilling copiousness that any shelter was preferable to exposure. I had been travelling for some time amongst the people of the Miskatonic Valley in quest of certain genealogical data; and from the remote, devious, and problematical nature of my course, had deemed it convenient to employ a bicycle despite the lateness of the season. Now I found myself upon an apparently abandoned road which I had chosen as the shortest cut to Arkham; overtaken by the storm at a point far from any town, and confronted with no refuge save the antique and repellent wooden building which blinked with bleared windows from between two huge leafless elms near the foot of a rocky hill. Distant though it was from the remnant of a road, the house none the less impressed me unfavourably the very moment I espied it. Honest, wholesome structures do not stare at travellers so slyly and hauntingly, and in my genealogical researches I had encountered legends of a century before which biassed me against places of this kind. Yet the force of the elements was such as to overcome my scruples, and I did not hesitate to wheel my machine up the weedy rise to the closed door which seemed at once so suggestive and secretive.
      I had somehow taken it for granted that the house was abandoned, yet as I approached it I was not so sure; for though the walks were indeed overgrown with weeds, they seemed to retain their nature a little too well to argue complete desertion. Therefore instead of trying the door I knocked, feeling as I did so a trepidation I could scarcely explain. As I waited on the rough, mossy rock which served as a doorstep, I glanced at the neighbouring windows and the panes of the transom above me, and noticed that although old, rattling, and almost opaque with dirt, they were not broken. The building, then, must still be inhabited, despite its isolation and general neglect. However, my rapping evoked no response, so after repeating the summons I tried the rusty latch and found the door unfastened. Inside was a little vestibule with walls from which the plaster was falling, and through the doorway came a faint but peculiarly hateful odour. I entered, carrying my bicycle, and closed the door behind me. Ahead rose a narrow staircase, flanked by a small door probably leading to the cellar, while to the left and right were closed doors leading to rooms on the ground floor.
      Leaning my cycle against the wall I opened the door at the left, and crossed into a small low-ceiled chamber but dimly lighted by its two dusty windows and furnished in the barest and most primitive possible way. It appeared to be a kind of sitting-room, for it had a table and several chairs, and an immense fireplace above which ticked an antique clock on a mantel. Books and papers were very few, and in the prevailing gloom I could not readily discern the titles. What interested me was the uniform air of archaism as displayed in every visible detail. Most of the houses in this region I had found rich in relics of the past, but here the antiquity was curiously complete; for in all the room I could not discover a single article of definitely post-revolutionary date. Had the furnishings been less humble, the place would have been a collector’s paradise.
      As I surveyed this quaint apartment, I felt an increase in that aversion first excited by the bleak exterior of the house. Just what it was that I feared or loathed, I could by no means define; but something in the whole atmosphere seemed redolent of unhallowed age, of unpleasant crudeness, and of secrets which should be forgotten. I felt disinclined to sit down, and wandered about examining the various articles which I had noticed. The first object of my curiosity was a book of medium size lying upon the table and presenting such an antediluvian aspect that I marvelled at beholding it outside a museum or library. It was bound in leather with metal fittings, and was in an excellent state of preservation; being altogether an unusual sort of volume to encounter in an abode so lowly. When I opened it to the title page my wonder grew even greater, for it proved to be nothing less rare than Pigafetta’s account of the Congo region, written in Latin from the notes of the sailor Lopez and printed at Frankfort in 1598. I had often heard of this work, with its curious illustrations by the brothers De Bry, hence for a moment forgot my uneasiness in my desire to turn the pages before me. The engravings were indeed interesting, drawn wholly from imagination and careless descriptions, and represented negroes with white skins and Caucasian features; nor would I soon have closed the book had not an exceedingly trivial circumstance upset my tired nerves and revived my sensation of disquiet. What annoyed me was merely the persistent way in which the volume tended to fall open of itself at Plate XII, which represented in gruesome detail a butcher’s shop of the cannibal Anziques. I experienced some shame at my susceptibility to so slight a thing, but the drawing nevertheless disturbed me, especially in connexion with some adjacent passages descriptive of Anzique gastronomy.
      I had turned to a neighbouring shelf and was examining its meagre literary contents—an eighteenth-century Bible, a Pilgrim’s Progress of like period, illustrated with grotesque woodcuts and printed by the almanack-maker Isaiah Thomas, the rotting bulk of Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana, and a few other books of evidently equal age—when my attention was aroused by the unmistakable sound of walking in the room overhead. At first astonished and startled, considering the lack of response to my recent knocking at the door, I immediately afterward concluded that the walker had just awakened from a sound sleep; and listened with less surprise as the footsteps sounded on the creaking stairs. The tread was heavy, yet seemed to contain a curious quality of cautiousness; a quality which I disliked the more because the tread was heavy. When I had entered the room I had shut the door behind me. Now, after a moment of silence during which the walker may have been inspecting my bicycle in the hall, I heard a fumbling at the latch and saw the panelled portal swing open again.
      In the doorway stood a person of such singular appearance that I should have exclaimed aloud but for the restraints of good breeding. Old, white-bearded, and ragged, my host possessed a countenance and physique which inspired equal wonder and respect. His height could not have been less than six feet, and despite a general air of age and poverty he was stout and powerful in proportion. His face, almost hidden by a long beard which grew high on the cheeks, seemed abnormally ruddy and less wrinkled than one might expect; while over a high forehead fell a shock of white hair little thinned by the years. His blue eyes, though a trifle bloodshot, seemed inexplicably keen and burning. But for his horrible unkemptness the man would have been as distinguished-looking as he was impressive. This unkemptness, however, made him offensive despite his face and figure. Of what his clothing consisted I could hardly tell, for it seemed to me no more than a mass of tatters surmounting a pair of high, heavy boots; and his lack of cleanliness surpassed description.
      The appearance of this man, and the instinctive fear he inspired, prepared me for something like enmity; so that I almost shuddered through surprise and a sense of uncanny incongruity when he motioned me to a chair and addressed me in a thin, weak voice full of fawning respect and ingratiating hospitality. His speech was very curious, an extreme form of Yankee dialect I had thought long extinct; and I studied it closely as he sat down opposite me for conversation.
      “Ketched in the rain, be ye?” he greeted. “Glad ye was nigh the haouse en’ hed the sense ta come right in. I calc’late I was asleep, else I’d a heerd ye—I ain’t as young as I uster be, an’ I need a paowerful sight o’ naps naowadays. Trav’lin’ fur? I hain’t seed many folks ’long this rud sence they tuk off the Arkham stage.”
      I replied that I was going to Arkham, and apologised for my rude entry into his domicile, whereupon he continued.
      “Glad ta see ye, young Sir—new faces is scurce arount here, an’ I hain’t got much ta cheer me up these days. Guess yew hail from Bosting, don’t ye? I never ben thar, but I kin tell a taown man when I see ’im—we hed one fer deestrick schoolmaster in ’eighty-four, but he quit suddent an’ no one never heerd on ’im sence—” Here the old man lapsed into a kind of chuckle, and made no explanation when I questioned him. He seemed to be in an aboundingly good humour, yet to possess those eccentricities which one might guess from his grooming. For some time he rambled on with an almost feverish geniality, when it struck me to ask him how he came by so rare a book as Pigafetta’s Regnum Congo. The effect of this volume had not left me, and I felt a certain hesitancy in speaking of it; but curiosity overmastered all the vague fears which had steadily accumulated since my first glimpse of the house. To my relief, the question did not seem an awkward one; for the old man answered freely and volubly.
      “Oh, thet Afriky book? Cap’n Ebenezer Holt traded me thet in ’sixty-eight—him as was kilt in the war.” Something about the name of Ebenezer Holt caused me to look up sharply. I had encountered it in my genealogical work, but not in any record since the Revolution. I wondered if my host could help me in the task at which I was labouring, and resolved to ask him about it later on. He continued.
      “Ebenezer was on a Salem merchantman for years, an’ picked up a sight o’ queer stuff in every port. He got this in London, I guess—he uster like ter buy things at the shops. I was up ta his haouse onct, on the hill, tradin’ hosses, when I see this book. I relished the picters, so he give it in on a swap. ’Tis a queer book—here, leave me git on my spectacles—” The old man fumbled among his rags, producing a pair of dirty and amazingly antique glasses with small octagonal lenses and steel bows. Donning these, he reached for the volume on the table and turned the pages lovingly.
      “Ebenezer cud read a leetle o’ this—’tis Latin—but I can’t. I hed two er three schoolmasters read me a bit, and Passon Clark, him they say got draownded in the pond—kin yew make anything outen it?” I told him that I could, and translated for his benefit a paragraph near the beginning. If I erred, he was not scholar enough to correct me; for he seemed childishly pleased at my English version. His proximity was becoming rather obnoxious, yet I saw no way to escape without offending him. I was amused at the childish fondness of this ignorant old man for the pictures in a book he could not read, and wondered how much better he could read the few books in English which adorned the room. This revelation of simplicity removed much of the ill-defined apprehension I had felt, and I smiled as my host rambled on:
      “Queer haow picters kin set a body thinkin’. Take this un here near the front. Hev yew ever seed trees like thet, with big leaves a-floppin’ over an’ daown? And them men—them can’t be niggers—they dew beat all. Kinder like Injuns, I guess, even ef they be in Afriky. Some o’ these here critters looks like monkeys, or half monkeys an’ half men, but I never heerd o’ nothing like this un.” Here he pointed to a fabulous creature of the artist, which one might describe as a sort of dragon with the head of an alligator.
      “But naow I’ll shew ye the best un—over here nigh the middle—” The old man’s speech grew a trifle thicker and his eyes assumed a brighter glow; but his fumbling hands, though seemingly clumsier than before, were entirely adequate to their mission. The book fell open, almost of its own accord and as if from frequent consultation at this place, to the repellent twelfth plate shewing a butcher’s shop amongst the Anzique cannibals. My sense of restlessness returned, though I did not exhibit it. The especially bizarre thing was that the artist had made his Africans look like white men—the limbs and quarters hanging about the walls of the shop were ghastly, while the butcher with his axe was hideously incongruous. But my host seemed to relish the view as much as I disliked it.
      “What d’ye think o’ this—ain’t never see the like hereabouts, eh? When I see this I telled Eb Holt, ‘That’s suthin’ ta stir ye up an’ make yer blood tickle!’ When I read in Scripter about slayin’—like them Midianites was slew—I kinder think things, but I ain’t got no picter of it. Here a body kin see all they is to it—I s’pose ’tis sinful, but ain’t we all born an’ livin’ in sin?—Thet feller bein’ chopped up gives me a tickle every time I look at ’im—I hev ta keep lookin’ at ’im—see whar the butcher cut off his feet? Thar’s his head on thet bench, with one arm side of it, an’ t’other arm’s on the graound side o’ the meat block.”
      As the man mumbled on in his shocking ecstasy the expression on his hairy, spectacled face became indescribable, but his voice sank rather than mounted. My own sensations can scarcely be recorded. All the terror I had dimly felt before rushed upon me actively and vividly, and I knew that I loathed the ancient and abhorrent creature so near me with an infinite intensity. His madness, or at least his partial perversion, seemed beyond dispute. He was almost whispering now, with a huskiness more terrible than a scream, and I trembled as I listened.
      “As I says, ’tis queer haow picters sets ye thinkin’. D’ye know, young Sir, I’m right sot on this un here. Arter I got the book off Eb I uster look at it a lot, especial when I’d heerd Passon Clark rant o’ Sundays in his big wig. Onct I tried suthin’ funny—here, young Sir, don’t git skeert—all I done was ter look at the picter afore I kilt the sheep for market—killin’ sheep was kinder more fun arter lookin’ at it—” The tone of the old man now sank very low, sometimes becoming so faint that his words were hardly audible. I listened to the rain, and to the rattling of the bleared, small-paned windows, and marked a rumbling of approaching thunder quite unusual for the season. Once a terrific flash and peal shook the frail house to its foundations, but the whisperer seemed not to notice it.
      “Killin’ sheep was kinder more fun—but d’ye know, ’twan’t quite satisfyin’. Queer haow a cravin’ gits a holt on ye— As ye love the Almighty, young man, don’t tell nobody, but I swar ter Gawd thet picter begun ta make me hungry fer victuals I couldn’t raise nor buy—here, set still, what’s ailin’ ye?—I didn’t do nothin’, only I wondered haow ’twud be ef I did— They say meat makes blood an’ flesh, an’ gives ye new life, so I wondered ef ’twudn’t make a man live longer an’ longer ef ’twas more the same—” But the whisperer never continued. The interruption was not produced by my fright, nor by the rapidly increasing storm amidst whose fury I was presently to open my eyes on a smoky solitude of blackened ruins. It was produced by a very simple though somewhat unusual happening.
      The open book lay flat between us, with the picture staring repulsively upward. As the old man whispered the words “more the same” a tiny spattering impact was heard, and something shewed on the yellowed paper of the upturned volume. I thought of the rain and of a leaky roof, but rain is not red. On the butcher’s shop of the Anzique cannibals a small red spattering glistened picturesquely, lending vividness to the horror of the engraving. The old man saw it, and stopped whispering even before my expression of horror made it necessary; saw it and glanced quickly toward the floor of the room he had left an hour before. I followed his glance, and beheld just above us on the loose plaster of the ancient ceiling a large irregular spot of wet crimson which seemed to spread even as I viewed it. I did not shriek or move, but merely shut my eyes. A moment later came the titanic thunderbolt of thunderbolts; blasting that accursed house of unutterable secrets and bringing the oblivion which alone saved my mind.",True
"Memories of Leng
Disclaimer: I do not own anything. All (or most) of the material contained herein belongs to either Howard Philip Lovecraft or August Derleth. Delta Green (such as it is) belongs to Pagan Publishing. And for concepts that come later in the story... well, creatures of legend that can totally freeze a person's brain have always had their place in the public domain, but Peter S. Beagle deserves credit for his take on the kind that inspire beatific rapture instead of gibbering terror.
Summary: Joseph Clayton always suspected that Marie Trinh was hiding something about her family, but never knew what it was. When he finally finds out what... well, the first step on the road to enlightenment is often quite a doozy. Then, the question becomes what to do with that enlightened knowledge.
Authors Note: There will be Lovecraftian horror in this story, after a fashion. However, there will also be humour and wonder and quite some affection. There will also be aspects more apropos to a Howardian barbarian story or a Burroughs Englishman than to the academics that Lovecraft sometimes wrote about: bravery, sacrifice (in more ways than one) and familiarity even in the most unlikely of places.
Glaston, upper Worcester Co., Massachusetts (roughly analogous to Gardner)
October 27, 2007.
An autumnal chill descended upon the streets of Glaston as the young man walked upon the concrete sidewalk, passing redbrick storefronts and shop windows, every surface still wet with the morning rain. Leaves, red and orange and each vibrant in their hue, were shaken loose from the trees lining the street by the wind, landing wherever they fell. For an instant in time, the spectacle of the leaves drew the attention of the man, in fact little more than a teenage boy, as he made his way toward the corner. However, Joseph Clayton, clad in bluejeans and jacket with a backpack slung from his shoulders, had far more important things to focus on than a show of falling leaves. An important test for this semester was arriving in a week or so and he needed to study.
Also, he was getting quite hungry this close to lunch.
As Joseph rounded the corner and continued toward his favorite eatery, he wondered if he would get swamped in the usual lunch crowd. However, as he saw the front of the Leng Trinh Restaurant, his thoughts turned to quiet dejection.
""Damnit!"" muttered Joseph as he approached the eatery. The reason for this turn in mood was the carpet of tempered glass fragments on the sidewalk below the picture window at the front of the establishment, which was now covered by plastic sheeting. Thuch Van Trinh, one half of the husband-and-wife ownership, was wearing a plaid jacket over his apron and usual cooking clothes and was shoveling the broken glass into a bucket. ""Hey, Mr. Trinh, how's it going?"". Joseph asked with a smile. This was more false cheer than anything, as Joseph could guess how Thuch must be feeling: anger was always a popular choice, followed closely by worry about the reason why.
Despite what he must have been feeling, Thuch Van Trinh grinned back, the black lines of his facial tattooing creasing as the muscles moved under his cheeks. ""Not so good, Mr. Clayton. If this keeps up, I may have to put in Plexiglas so that the window won't break."" The Trinhs accents, as his parents and the other adults of the town told it, had been rather strong (even unusually so) when they had immigrated to Glaston from their first home in Boston. This had usually been waved off by their purported origins in the remote hills on the Vietnam-Laos border, seemingly collaborated by how their teeth had been dyed black. On the other hand, given their rural roots, their speed in adapting local speech patterns so that they now sounded more like second generation Americans (and especially their daughter's complete lack of any accent except the local standard) did make for a puzzling situation. However, for their ease of assimilation and the food they served, they had become well-liked in the community.
So why were things like this happening to them recently? ""How many times does this make this month; two, three?"" Joseph had to ask this, wondering if things were worse than he thought.
""It's happened three times already, this time not more than an hour ago. Thanh wants to install security cameras to watch the place and with how small and cheap they are now, I think we just might."" An hour ago? They'd smashed a picture window in broad daylight? Who in town could be that stupid or that angry? Josephs train of thought was broken then, when Thuch said something of much more interest to the younger man. ""By the way, if you're looking for Marie, she's helping her mother in the kitchen. Even without a window we seem to be doing good business."" Thuch went back to his work and Joseph, not wanting to delay any longer, entered the restaurant.
Just as Thuch had said, Leng Trinh still had it's usual busy lunchtime crowd, albeit one that was concentrated near the back wall. Picking his way around tables packed with diners, Joseph finally arrived at a table set for two, a 'reserved' sign upon it. Removing his backpack and laying it beside a chair, he sat down, shuffled off his coat and went to bury his nose in the menu.
It always felt a bit odd to Joseph, eating in an ethnic restaurant where none of the diners were the same ethnicity as the cooks, or even from the same part of the world. However, none of it mattered when the food was as good as it was here.
""Now then, what would a fine, upstanding New England boy like yourself want in a place like this?"" The voice that asked this was soft, amused, female and had an almost mocking tone. It also had the accent of the New England uplands. To Joseph, it could only be one person.
""The same thing I always get here."" He answered dryly before looking up from the menu. There, holding a pad of paper and a pen, was teenage girl with almond-shaped eyes, shoulder length black hair with green streaks, a cooking apron and an amused grin. ""Hi Marie... you sure your mom's alright with you waitressing this crowd?""
""We've got enough help in the kitchen already and Dad's coming in after all the glass is cleaned up."" She glanced up at the window, plastic sheet and all, after she wrote his order down. ""I just wish we knew who was doing this. If we don't get someone else to cough up some money, our insurance company might go sour on us."" Marie went back to the kitchen to get the food for both of them.
Ten minutes later, she was laying out two place settings of food that had been prepared ahead of time. ""Alright, that's two plates of grilled pork on beds of Leng-style rice, your dish of steamed green beans with soy sauce for dipping, my bowl of soup and two cans of soda."" They'd eat lunch before studying, with Joseph paying the tab for both of them.
If anyone asked, it wasn't a date. Not in the strictest sense, anyway.
""What, no bak bon dzhow?"" Asked Joseph, decidedly disappointed at the apparent lack of the special ingredient.
To this, Marie moved a small earthen bowl from the serving tray onto the table and lifted the lid to reveal a thick gray sauce containing mushrooms and cracked black pepper. ""Would I be one to deny you the gravy of the gods?"" She asked (rhetorically) with a soft smile; Joseph couldn't help but smile back as he cracked the tab on his soda and began on his green beans.
A bit later, when his beans were gone and Marie had almost finished her soup, Joesph began formulating a question that related to a curious thought that had sprung up earlier. ""Not to sound like a nag or anything, but I'm just curious but what was all that 'upstanding' stuff about?"" The only time he had ever heard anyone talk like that was...
Oh God...
Marie swallowed the last bits of her soup. ""Oh, I don't know. Maybe It's that I had no idea that the son of insurance brokers had such deep and aristocratic roots? Maybe it's that I was surprised to find out that the Clayton's had come not from hardy New England farming stock as I had assumed, but from the urbane, wealthy ranks of those grand Brahmins of Boston? I'm sure Granny Cora could tell some fascinating stories about the old days; she sure seemed interested in mine."" If anything, Marie took the entire thing in stride, treating both the memory of the experience and the experience itself with a a great deal of interested amusement. Certainly, mocking the type of language she had encountered was almost cracking her up.
Joseph, on the other hand, had first felt bemusement at the scene in which the Clayton family reunion of the past summer had found itself, quickly turning into outright embarrassment. ""Look, I'm sorry that I didn't tell you about her, but everybody thought that she wouldn't be able to come due to health concerns. It's not my fault that a half-senile, 97 year old woman worked up enough stubbornness to drag her nurse halfway across the state!"".
""I never said anything about anyone being at fault. I just thought it was an interesting revelation about your family."" She had meant her cajoling in good humour, but Josephs defensiveness and embarrassment were never good emotions to bring out. ""Anyway, most people would be proud to have the Boston gentry in their family history: industrialists, merchants, art, culture, philanthropy, charity..."" With every word, Marie spooned a bit of ban boc dzhow onto her grilled pork.
""As well as whaling, slave trading, opium smuggling, snobbery and having your entire life guided by the expectations of your peers; exactly the sorts of things my parents taught me to loathe. The thing is, my great-great-grandmother came from a very select, very privileged and lily-white background; I was worried that she'd... well, react oddly to you."" Joseph retorted as he began spooning (or rather, pouring) the sauce onto his meat after Marie had finished with it and passed it to him. In the case of Cora Clayton (nee Coffin), Josephs fear hadn't primarily been that she would find Marie objectionable on account of her race since that prejudice had been more ingrained in her parents generation than hers. His fear had instead been that his great great grandmother, as self-proclaimed guardian of the old, aristocratic traditions, might object to their relationship because the Trinhs were restaurateurs with no history of pedigree, education or money behind them.
In Cora's world (the 1920s, where her mind was half the time), heirs had married heiresses, families had coordinated their fortunes and everyone had kept an eye on everyone else; these were rules of decorum that had lasted for her long after the Claytons had gone bust in the great Crash of '29. The fact that she had taken Joseph aside and explained her concerns to him had done nothing to soothe his embarrassment, although he had finally convinced her that, being naturalized citizens with a successful restaurant, the Trinhs were firmly in the middling classes. She had also estimated that said restaurant, with no other inheritors besides Marie, would most likely pass into Clayton hands in the fullness of time.
No one had dared explain to her the differences between modern teenage dating and the genteel courtships of her youth.
""I don't think she reacted that oddly. Sure, she was so out of date that you had to explain that I meant 'French Indochina' when I said that my parents came from Vietnam and she did seem a bit too fascinated with my families origins and, alright, it was weird hearing someone actually use the word 'courting' without trying to be funny. However, it was kind of nice to speak French with someone in this town after all the time my parents invested in me learning it."" Marie knew that while it had been terrifying for Joseph, having to put up with his relatives dissection of his relationship and fearing disapproval, she herself had enjoyed a chance to see if the old stereotypes were true. When it had become clear to Marie that the elderly woman was not about to spew racial epitaphs at her but was, indeed, fascinated as to her families background, Marie had made it a point to 'ham it up' in telling their story.
To an entranced Cora Clayton, Marie had described her parents lives before emigration as a subsistence existence in a village high up in the fog-choked mountain passes. She had woven scenes of her people worshiping strange, heathen gods far from the civilized lands of the Buddha and partaking in ghastly rituals to ensure harvests of rice from narrow mountainside terraces. She told the old woman that her parents had tired of such a life and had dreamed of something more, something in the wider world glimpsed in third-hand magazines and radio broadcasts.
After receiving a dispensation from their village shaman to leave (but promising to sent back remittances), they had made their way to Hanoi and then to Boston and finally to Glaston where, having never truly given up the more religious and symbolic aspects of their heathenish past, they nevertheless had made good names for themselves in the community. Marie had made sure that her prose had been both lurid and exotic so as to fully entrance a child of the Age of Empire as well as making proper use of tone, whether enraptured, casual or deathly serious, to emphasize mood. The end result was to make it sound as if her culture wasn't just some rural outlet of modern Vietnam or Laos, but as if it was truly unlike any other in the world.
That was an opinion that Joseph was also rapidly adopting.
They ate in relative silence for a while, the bustle of the lunch crowd beginning to die down as people left, many of them stopping to talk to Mr. Trinh at the till, expressing their concern over what had happened with the window. They were just about half done when Joseph began another conversation. ""So, did you know that there's a 'Heritage Day' coming up at school in a few weeks?""
""Yeah, and?"" Deep down in her gut, Marie was beginning to get a slightly worried feeling from the direction this conversation was going. This pretty much happened whenever the subject of her parent's past came up but, like so many times before, she could probably bluff her way through it.
""I thought that, maybe, we could do something for it. I was thinking about dredging up something from Normandy because I didn't want to clog up the schedule with another variation of British regional culture."" It sounded perfectly innocent, but Marie knew that this was a potentially tricky situation that might require misdirection, a convincing excuse and possible outright lying.
She hated lying to Joseph.
""Alright then. You can do that, I'll do the Vietnamese thing and we'll knock 'em all dead."" She answered with an enthusiasm that she hoped had betrayed nothing of her growing unease with the conversation. This seemed to provoke nothing but a non-committal murmur of agreement and thus, thinking that that was over with, she began eating again.
However, that was not the end of it.
""By Vietnamese, do you mean the standard culture from around Hanoi... or the culture from your parent's home village?"" Joseph asked, seemingly as if only for the purpose of clarification. There was much more behind it though, and whether it was just ingrained paranoia or any real danger of exposure, Marie knew that this was entering onto some very tenuous and potentially very dangerous ground. Still, the subject had to be breached.
""Aren't they pretty much the same? I mean, sure, it was pretty rural back there, but whether village or city, we were all Viet: same language, same culture, same blood, same... pretty much everything, when you think about it."" As denials went, this one wasn't half bad: sincere enough to be taken seriously and with enough internal logic that it wouldn't fall apart immediately in the face of the mildly educated mind.
On this subject, however, Joseph had become rather more than merely mildly educated. He had observed things for a long time: a lot of little things and one or two big things for the most part. And he, after long deliberation and study, had discovered that some of those things just didn't match up.
""You know, there was a time when I could believe that. But... there are just too many deviations to discount."" Joesph stopped eating all together, putting down his fork and looking his girlfriend straight in the eyes before closing and opening them again, as if to rally his thoughts. ""The food, for one thing, isn't like any kind of Vietnamese food I've read about. Yes, you have the side dishes but that's about it for similarity. Second, your parent's tattoos. Again, unlike any other group in Southeast Asia; the closest matches I could find were incised lines on bronze figurines from over two thousand years ago.""
He stopped again. ""And then there's the language you guys speak. I'm fairly sure it's in the Mon-Khmer group, but I've been doing some research and... honestly, I've seen words on this menu that I've never been able to find in any other source. And I'm not the only one who's noticed these things."" Joesph saw panic flash across Marie's eyes, though she tried to hide it. ""Most people don't pay attention and honestly don't care, and the ones who do notice just assume that you guys are either Hmong or some little minority that no-one's ever heard of... but even that doesn't match very well either. It's like you said, you're Viet... but what about all this other stuff?""
It was then that Marie could have ended it all: the doubts, the questions, the lingering curiosity... as well as twenty one centuries of secrecy, tradition and very likely her relationship with this young man. In the end, she decided to dodge again. ""What can I say? We were very rural."" When Joesph just got this frustrated look on his face, Marie sighed, reached across the table and enveloped one of his hands with hers. ""Look, I'll try and dredge something up if I can, but I can't promise anything, okay?""
Joseph mulled on this lack of answers, but as the moment dragged on, his resistance wore down. ""Alright. If you don't want to talk about your culture, that's alright; lots of people come to America to get away from stuff. But I still am sorta curious."" Then he changed the subject. ""Anyway, after we eat, we should begin studying for our tests. Do you want to go over the English or the Algebra first?""
""We should do the Math first, then we can cool off with the Shakespeare. But we better not let the food get cold, what with how the sauce gets if allowed to sit for too long."" Marie began eating again and, after a few beats, Joseph resumed as well.
They stayed at that table for many hours, going over and revising their knowledge of maths and literature. However, already Marie wondered if there was something she could reveal, something that she could show about her parent's culture that would not threaten expose them and, as the old saying went among her tribe, 'get them cut in half and buried in two graves'.
Later that night, The Trinh's upstairs apartment
To Marie's relief, her parents reaction to her plan wasn't anger. On the other hand, fear and worry could be almost as painful.
""I know how you feel about the Clayton boy. He's well-liked, intelligent and his parents are our insurance agents."" Thanh Thi Trinh began, speaking in her families particular dialect of Viet as she, Marie and Thuch Van sat around their dining room table. ""But I ask this of you: is Joesph and his interest in this celebration worth the risk of exposure and, may I add, possible death when this town realizes who we are, when they realize what we are?"" Thanh Thi had always been the more reserved, more cautious and, frankly, more paranoid spouse in this family when it came to their safety. Where her husband was the face of the restaurant, she ran the kitchen with an eye on the back door and all of their cooks. While Thuch made friendly at social gatherings, Thanh kept track of all possible escape routes and who was and wasn't looking at them. She kept track of any news about gangs and hate-group activity in the area, and about any other strange things.
The sort of things that might lure out the kind of people who hunted their people.
But Marie had prepared for this. ""Mother, I know the risks that revealing the secrets of our people would bring. However, I am counting on two circumstances to make sure that only the most benign and harmless information is portrayed."" She rallied herself, knowing that the way she handled this could make the difference on how she presented herself to nearly everyone, especially Joseph . ""First, I must inform both of you that there are some people in this town, including my boyfriend, that realize that we are not quite from the mainstream culture of modern Vietnam."" At this, both Thanh and Thuch got even more worried but they weren't shocked, seeing as any bumpkin with an Internet connection could find that tribal tattooing wasn't really the rage in downtown Hanoi. ""The good news is that while these people realize that we belong to a distinct subgroup, they often deduce that we are either rural Hmong or some other obscure ethnic group. In other words, they know nothing about who our people are and, like the rest of the town, they honestly do not care.""
""What about the nature of our traditons, Marie? What would you do, what rite of our people would be performed on that stage that would not end up with half the town vomiting and the other half trying to hang us?"" Her father had been relatively quiet in this conversation, but he knew that the rituals of his village had, during various times in history, left such a bad impression upon outsiders that they had responded in force to try to stamp them out.
Here, Marie began grasping the thick, heavy and old scrapbook that lay closed upon the table before her. It had been entrusted to them by their village and, by the blessings of the Gods and their Instrument, they had kept it safe and hidden for more than twenty years. ""Father, it is not as if I wish to set up an alter on the stage, recite the incantations of the harvest rites and slice something open; frankly, I would have no idea how. However, I believe that there is a ritual that is benign, unusual and, even according to the author of this book, beautiful enough to make people forget it's oddity."" She opened the book, filled with sepia photographs and notes written in French on yellowed paper, to the page she had bookmarked. ""I want to do the Stork Dance.""
Her parents were quiet for a minute. Admittedly, this was probably the least unusual rite of their people and it did seem to have a calming effect on its audiences. However, it took weeks of intensive training in order to do it right, the costuming and specific actions depended on whether the dancer was a man or woman and the phonograph with the instrumental music and vocals, only having been recorded once before, was on the other side of the planet. It was a tall order to pull off for anyone. ""You do realize that practicing for the dance requires grueling routine, so much so that it might effect your school work?"" Asked her mother, wondering if her daughter was truly sincere.
""I know that. I'll just have to sacrifice my time with Joesph, a sacrifice that I'm sure he'd understand."" Marie responded in English this time, the plans for her act becoming clearer. ""However, I'll need some help in creating the proper costuming and... I know that shipping items from the Old Country is like trying to smuggle Plutonium but if you could convince the shamans to release that phonograph for a month or two, I would be eternally grateful to all of them, and to you.""
Her parents wondered, not for the first time, if Marie truly comprehended what could be asked of that gratitude in the years to come. She had the opportunity to live a life completely detached from the paranoia, the fear and the constant danger that followed her people. Would she give that chance away simply for the sake of a boy?
Whatever choice she made, however, was hers to make.
In the end, they acquiesced... but not without informing their daughter of what their home village could ask of her in exchange for the items she wished. It might be years until it was asked but one day, a representative of their village would approach her and request a repayment, be it in money, information or something else.
It was that ""something else"" that truly worried Thuch and Thanh.
","(Found Among the Papers of the Late
Francis Wayland Thurston, of Boston)
“Of such great powers or beings there may be conceivably a survival . . . a survival of a hugely remote period when . . . consciousness was manifested, perhaps, in shapes and forms long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity . . . forms of which poetry and legend alone have caught a flying memory and called them gods, monsters, mythical beings of all sorts and kinds. . . .”
—Algernon Blackwood.

I.
The Horror in Clay.

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

II.
The Tale of Inspector Legrasse.

The older matters which had made the sculptor’s dream and bas-relief so significant to my uncle formed the subject of the second half of his long manuscript. Once before, it appears, Professor Angell had seen the hellish outlines of the nameless monstrosity, puzzled over the unknown hieroglyphics, and heard the ominous syllables which can be rendered only as “Cthulhu”; and all this in so stirring and horrible a connexion that it is small wonder he pursued young Wilcox with queries and demands for data.
      The earlier experience had come in 1908, seventeen years before, when the American Archaeological Society held its annual meeting in St. Louis. Professor Angell, as befitted one of his authority and attainments, had had a prominent part in all the deliberations; and was one of the first to be approached by the several outsiders who took advantage of the convocation to offer questions for correct answering and problems for expert solution.
      The chief of these outsiders, and in a short time the focus of interest for the entire meeting, was a commonplace-looking middle-aged man who had travelled all the way from New Orleans for certain special information unobtainable from any local source. His name was John Raymond Legrasse, and he was by profession an Inspector of Police. With him he bore the subject of his visit, a grotesque, repulsive, and apparently very ancient stone statuette whose origin he was at a loss to determine. It must not be fancied that Inspector Legrasse had the least interest in archaeology. On the contrary, his wish for enlightenment was prompted by purely professional considerations. The statuette, idol, fetish, or whatever it was, had been captured some months before in the wooded swamps south of New Orleans during a raid on a supposed voodoo meeting; and so singular and hideous were the rites connected with it, that the police could not but realise that they had stumbled on a dark cult totally unknown to them, and infinitely more diabolic than even the blackest of the African voodoo circles. Of its origin, apart from the erratic and unbelievable tales extorted from the captured members, absolutely nothing was to be discovered; hence the anxiety of the police for any antiquarian lore which might help them to place the frightful symbol, and through it track down the cult to its fountain-head.
      Inspector Legrasse was scarcely prepared for the sensation which his offering created. One sight of the thing had been enough to throw the assembled men of science into a state of tense excitement, and they lost no time in crowding around him to gaze at the diminutive figure whose utter strangeness and air of genuinely abysmal antiquity hinted so potently at unopened and archaic vistas. No recognised school of sculpture had animated this terrible object, yet centuries and even thousands of years seemed recorded in its dim and greenish surface of unplaceable stone.
      The figure, which was finally passed slowly from man to man for close and careful study, was between seven and eight inches in height, and of exquisitely artistic workmanship. It represented a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind. This thing, which seemed instinct with a fearsome and unnatural malignancy, was of a somewhat bloated corpulence, and squatted evilly on a rectangular block or pedestal covered with undecipherable characters. The tips of the wings touched the back edge of the block, the seat occupied the centre, whilst the long, curved claws of the doubled-up, crouching hind legs gripped the front edge and extended a quarter of the way down toward the bottom of the pedestal. The cephalopod head was bent forward, so that the ends of the facial feelers brushed the backs of huge fore paws which clasped the croucher’s elevated knees. The aspect of the whole was abnormally life-like, and the more subtly fearful because its source was so totally unknown. Its vast, awesome, and incalculable age was unmistakable; yet not one link did it shew with any known type of art belonging to civilisation’s youth—or indeed to any other time. Totally separate and apart, its very material was a mystery; for the soapy, greenish-black stone with its golden or iridescent flecks and striations resembled nothing familiar to geology or mineralogy. The characters along the base were equally baffling; and no member present, despite a representation of half the world’s expert learning in this field, could form the least notion of even their remotest linguistic kinship. They, like the subject and material, belonged to something horribly remote and distinct from mankind as we know it; something frightfully suggestive of old and unhallowed cycles of life in which our world and our conceptions have no part.
      And yet, as the members severally shook their heads and confessed defeat at the Inspector’s problem, there was one man in that gathering who suspected a touch of bizarre familiarity in the monstrous shape and writing, and who presently told with some diffidence of the odd trifle he knew. This person was the late William Channing Webb, Professor of Anthropology in Princeton University, and an explorer of no slight note. Professor Webb had been engaged, forty-eight years before, in a tour of Greenland and Iceland in search of some Runic inscriptions which he failed to unearth; and whilst high up on the West Greenland coast had encountered a singular tribe or cult of degenerate Esquimaux whose religion, a curious form of devil-worship, chilled him with its deliberate bloodthirstiness and repulsiveness. It was a faith of which other Esquimaux knew little, and which they mentioned only with shudders, saying that it had come down from horribly ancient aeons before ever the world was made. Besides nameless rites and human sacrifices there were certain queer hereditary rituals addressed to a supreme elder devil or tornasuk; and of this Professor Webb had taken a careful phonetic copy from an aged angekok or wizard-priest, expressing the sounds in Roman letters as best he knew how. But just now of prime significance was the fetish which this cult had cherished, and around which they danced when the aurora leaped high over the ice cliffs. It was, the professor stated, a very crude bas-relief of stone, comprising a hideous picture and some cryptic writing. And so far as he could tell, it was a rough parallel in all essential features of the bestial thing now lying before the meeting.
      This data, received with suspense and astonishment by the assembled members, proved doubly exciting to Inspector Legrasse; and he began at once to ply his informant with questions. Having noted and copied an oral ritual among the swamp cult-worshippers his men had arrested, he besought the professor to remember as best he might the syllables taken down amongst the diabolist Esquimaux. There then followed an exhaustive comparison of details, and a moment of really awed silence when both detective and scientist agreed on the virtual identity of the phrase common to two hellish rituals so many worlds of distance apart. What, in substance, both the Esquimau wizards and the Louisiana swamp-priests had chanted to their kindred idols was something very like this—the word-divisions being guessed at from traditional breaks in the phrase as chanted aloud:
      “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.”
      Legrasse had one point in advance of Professor Webb, for several among his mongrel prisoners had repeated to him what older celebrants had told them the words meant. This text, as given, ran something like this:
      “In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”
      And now, in response to a general and urgent demand, Inspector Legrasse related as fully as possible his experience with the swamp worshippers; telling a story to which I could see my uncle attached profound significance. It savoured of the wildest dreams of myth-maker and theosophist, and disclosed an astonishing degree of cosmic imagination among such half-castes and pariahs as might be least expected to possess it.
      On November 1st, 1907, there had come to the New Orleans police a frantic summons from the swamp and lagoon country to the south. The squatters there, mostly primitive but good-natured descendants of Lafitte’s men, were in the grip of stark terror from an unknown thing which had stolen upon them in the night. It was voodoo, apparently, but voodoo of a more terrible sort than they had ever known; and some of their women and children had disappeared since the malevolent tom-tom had begun its incessant beating far within the black haunted woods where no dweller ventured. There were insane shouts and harrowing screams, soul-chilling chants and dancing devil-flames; and, the frightened messenger added, the people could stand it no more.
      So a body of twenty police, filling two carriages and an automobile, had set out in the late afternoon with the shivering squatter as a guide. At the end of the passable road they alighted, and for miles splashed on in silence through the terrible cypress woods where day never came. Ugly roots and malignant hanging nooses of Spanish moss beset them, and now and then a pile of dank stones or fragment of a rotting wall intensified by its hint of morbid habitation a depression which every malformed tree and every fungous islet combined to create. At length the squatter settlement, a miserable huddle of huts, hove in sight; and hysterical dwellers ran out to cluster around the group of bobbing lanterns. The muffled beat of tom-toms was now faintly audible far, far ahead; and a curdling shriek came at infrequent intervals when the wind shifted. A reddish glare, too, seemed to filter through the pale undergrowth beyond endless avenues of forest night. Reluctant even to be left alone again, each one of the cowed squatters refused point-blank to advance another inch toward the scene of unholy worship, so Inspector Legrasse and his nineteen colleagues plunged on unguided into black arcades of horror that none of them had ever trod before.
      The region now entered by the police was one of traditionally evil repute, substantially unknown and untraversed by white men. There were legends of a hidden lake unglimpsed by mortal sight, in which dwelt a huge, formless white polypous thing with luminous eyes; and squatters whispered that bat-winged devils flew up out of caverns in inner earth to worship it at midnight. They said it had been there before D’Iberville, before La Salle, before the Indians, and before even the wholesome beasts and birds of the woods. It was nightmare itself, and to see it was to die. But it made men dream, and so they knew enough to keep away. The present voodoo orgy was, indeed, on the merest fringe of this abhorred area, but that location was bad enough; hence perhaps the very place of the worship had terrified the squatters more than the shocking sounds and incidents.
      Only poetry or madness could do justice to the noises heard by Legrasse’s men as they ploughed on through the black morass toward the red glare and the muffled tom-toms. There are vocal qualities peculiar to men, and vocal qualities peculiar to beasts; and it is terrible to hear the one when the source should yield the other. Animal fury and orgiastic licence here whipped themselves to daemoniac heights by howls and squawking ecstasies that tore and reverberated through those nighted woods like pestilential tempests from the gulfs of hell. Now and then the less organised ululation would cease, and from what seemed a well-drilled chorus of hoarse voices would rise in sing-song chant that hideous phrase or ritual:
      “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.”
Then the men, having reached a spot where the trees were thinner, came suddenly in sight of the spectacle itself. Four of them reeled, one fainted, and two were shaken into a frantic cry which the mad cacophony of the orgy fortunately deadened. Legrasse dashed swamp water on the face of the fainting man, and all stood trembling and nearly hypnotised with horror.
      In a natural glade of the swamp stood a grassy island of perhaps an acre’s extent, clear of trees and tolerably dry. On this now leaped and twisted a more indescribable horde of human abnormality than any but a Sime or an Angarola could paint. Void of clothing, this hybrid spawn were braying, bellowing, and writhing about a monstrous ring-shaped bonfire; in the centre of which, revealed by occasional rifts in the curtain of flame, stood a great granite monolith some eight feet in height; on top of which, incongruous with its diminutiveness, rested the noxious carven statuette. From a wide circle of ten scaffolds set up at regular intervals with the flame-girt monolith as a centre hung, head downward, the oddly marred bodies of the helpless squatters who had disappeared. It was inside this circle that the ring of worshippers jumped and roared, the general direction of the mass motion being from left to right in endless Bacchanal between the ring of bodies and the ring of fire.
      It may have been only imagination and it may have been only echoes which induced one of the men, an excitable Spaniard, to fancy he heard antiphonal responses to the ritual from some far and unillumined spot deeper within the wood of ancient legendry and horror. This man, Joseph D. Galvez, I later met and questioned; and he proved distractingly imaginative. He indeed went so far as to hint of the faint beating of great wings, and of a glimpse of shining eyes and a mountainous white bulk beyond the remotest trees—but I suppose he had been hearing too much native superstition.
      Actually, the horrified pause of the men was of comparatively brief duration. Duty came first; and although there must have been nearly a hundred mongrel celebrants in the throng, the police relied on their firearms and plunged determinedly into the nauseous rout. For five minutes the resultant din and chaos were beyond description. Wild blows were struck, shots were fired, and escapes were made; but in the end Legrasse was able to count some forty-seven sullen prisoners, whom he forced to dress in haste and fall into line between two rows of policemen. Five of the worshippers lay dead, and two severely wounded ones were carried away on improvised stretchers by their fellow-prisoners. The image on the monolith, of course, was carefully removed and carried back by Legrasse.
      Examined at headquarters after a trip of intense strain and weariness, the prisoners all proved to be men of a very low, mixed-blooded, and mentally aberrant type. Most were seamen, and a sprinkling of negroes and mulattoes, largely West Indians or Brava Portuguese from the Cape Verde Islands, gave a colouring of voodooism to the heterogeneous cult. But before many questions were asked, it became manifest that something far deeper and older than negro fetichism was involved. Degraded and ignorant as they were, the creatures held with surprising consistency to the central idea of their loathsome faith.
      They worshipped, so they said, the Great Old Ones who lived ages before there were any men, and who came to the young world out of the sky. Those Old Ones were gone now, inside the earth and under the sea; but their dead bodies had told their secrets in dreams to the first men, who formed a cult which had never died. This was that cult, and the prisoners said it had always existed and always would exist, hidden in distant wastes and dark places all over the world until the time when the great priest Cthulhu, from his dark house in the mighty city of R’lyeh under the waters, should rise and bring the earth again beneath his sway. Some day he would call, when the stars were ready, and the secret cult would always be waiting to liberate him.
      Meanwhile no more must be told. There was a secret which even torture could not extract. Mankind was not absolutely alone among the conscious things of earth, for shapes came out of the dark to visit the faithful few. But these were not the Great Old Ones. No man had ever seen the Old Ones. The carven idol was great Cthulhu, but none might say whether or not the others were precisely like him. No one could read the old writing now, but things were told by word of mouth. The chanted ritual was not the secret—that was never spoken aloud, only whispered. The chant meant only this: “In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”
      Only two of the prisoners were found sane enough to be hanged, and the rest were committed to various institutions. All denied a part in the ritual murders, and averred that the killing had been done by Black Winged Ones which had come to them from their immemorial meeting-place in the haunted wood. But of those mysterious allies no coherent account could ever be gained. What the police did extract, came mainly from an immensely aged mestizo named Castro, who claimed to have sailed to strange ports and talked with undying leaders of the cult in the mountains of China.
      Old Castro remembered bits of hideous legend that paled the speculations of theosophists and made man and the world seem recent and transient indeed. There had been aeons when other Things ruled on the earth, and They had had great cities. Remains of Them, he said the deathless Chinamen had told him, were still to be found as Cyclopean stones on islands in the Pacific. They all died vast epochs of time before men came, but there were arts which could revive Them when the stars had come round again to the right positions in the cycle of eternity. They had, indeed, come themselves from the stars, and brought Their images with Them.
      These Great Old Ones, Castro continued, were not composed altogether of flesh and blood. They had shape—for did not this star-fashioned image prove it?—but that shape was not made of matter. When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world through the sky; but when the stars were wrong, They could not live. But although They no longer lived, They would never really die. They all lay in stone houses in Their great city of R’lyeh, preserved by the spells of mighty Cthulhu for a glorious resurrection when the stars and the earth might once more be ready for Them. But at that time some force from outside must serve to liberate Their bodies. The spells that preserved Them intact likewise prevented Them from making an initial move, and They could only lie awake in the dark and think whilst uncounted millions of years rolled by. They knew all that was occurring in the universe, but Their mode of speech was transmitted thought. Even now They talked in Their tombs. When, after infinities of chaos, the first men came, the Great Old Ones spoke to the sensitive among them by moulding their dreams; for only thus could Their language reach the fleshly minds of mammals.
      Then, whispered Castro, those first men formed the cult around small idols which the Great Ones shewed them; idols brought in dim aeras from dark stars. That cult would never die till the stars came right again, and the secret priests would take great Cthulhu from His tomb to revive His subjects and resume His rule of earth. The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom. Meanwhile the cult, by appropriate rites, must keep alive the memory of those ancient ways and shadow forth the prophecy of their return.
      In the elder time chosen men had talked with the entombed Old Ones in dreams, but then something had happened. The great stone city R’lyeh, with its monoliths and sepulchres, had sunk beneath the waves; and the deep waters, full of the one primal mystery through which not even thought can pass, had cut off the spectral intercourse. But memory never died, and high-priests said that the city would rise again when the stars were right. Then came out of the earth the black spirits of earth, mouldy and shadowy, and full of dim rumours picked up in caverns beneath forgotten sea-bottoms. But of them old Castro dared not speak much. He cut himself off hurriedly, and no amount of persuasion or subtlety could elicit more in this direction. The size of the Old Ones, too, he curiously declined to mention. Of the cult, he said that he thought the centre lay amid the pathless deserts of Arabia, where Irem, the City of Pillars, dreams hidden and untouched. It was not allied to the European witch-cult, and was virtually unknown beyond its members. No book had ever really hinted of it, though the deathless Chinamen said that there were double meanings in the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred which the initiated might read as they chose, especially the much-discussed couplet:
 
“That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.”

      Legrasse, deeply impressed and not a little bewildered, had inquired in vain concerning the historic affiliations of the cult. Castro, apparently, had told the truth when he said that it was wholly secret. The authorities at Tulane University could shed no light upon either cult or image, and now the detective had come to the highest authorities in the country and met with no more than the Greenland tale of Professor Webb.
      The feverish interest aroused at the meeting by Legrasse’s tale, corroborated as it was by the statuette, is echoed in the subsequent correspondence of those who attended; although scant mention occurs in the formal publications of the society. Caution is the first care of those accustomed to face occasional charlatanry and imposture. Legrasse for some time lent the image to Professor Webb, but at the latter’s death it was returned to him and remains in his possession, where I viewed it not long ago. It is truly a terrible thing, and unmistakably akin to the dream-sculpture of young Wilcox.
      That my uncle was excited by the tale of the sculptor I did not wonder, for what thoughts must arise upon hearing, after a knowledge of what Legrasse had learned of the cult, of a sensitive young man who had dreamed not only the figure and exact hieroglyphics of the swamp-found image and the Greenland devil tablet, but had come in his dreams upon at least three of the precise words of the formula uttered alike by Esquimau diabolists and mongrel Louisianans? Professor Angell’s instant start on an investigation of the utmost thoroughness was eminently natural; though privately I suspected young Wilcox of having heard of the cult in some indirect way, and of having invented a series of dreams to heighten and continue the mystery at my uncle’s expense. The dream-narratives and cuttings collected by the professor were, of course, strong corroboration; but the rationalism of my mind and the extravagance of the whole subject led me to adopt what I thought the most sensible conclusions. So, after thoroughly studying the manuscript again and correlating the theosophical and anthropological notes with the cult narrative of Legrasse, I made a trip to Providence to see the sculptor and give him the rebuke I thought proper for so boldly imposing upon a learned and aged man.
      Wilcox still lived alone in the Fleur-de-Lys Building in Thomas Street, a hideous Victorian imitation of seventeenth-century Breton architecture which flaunts its stuccoed front amidst the lovely colonial houses on the ancient hill, and under the very shadow of the finest Georgian steeple in America. I found him at work in his rooms, and at once conceded from the specimens scattered about that his genius is indeed profound and authentic. He will, I believe, some time be heard from as one of the great decadents; for he has crystallised in clay and will one day mirror in marble those nightmares and phantasies which Arthur Machen evokes in prose, and Clark Ashton Smith makes visible in verse and in painting.
      Dark, frail, and somewhat unkempt in aspect, he turned languidly at my knock and asked me my business without rising. When I told him who I was, he displayed some interest; for my uncle had excited his curiosity in probing his strange dreams, yet had never explained the reason for the study. I did not enlarge his knowledge in this regard, but sought with some subtlety to draw him out. In a short time I became convinced of his absolute sincerity, for he spoke of the dreams in a manner none could mistake. They and their subconscious residuum had influenced his art profoundly, and he shewed me a morbid statue whose contours almost made me shake with the potency of its black suggestion. He could not recall having seen the original of this thing except in his own dream bas-relief, but the outlines had formed themselves insensibly under his hands. It was, no doubt, the giant shape he had raved of in delirium. That he really knew nothing of the hidden cult, save from what my uncle’s relentless catechism had let fall, he soon made clear; and again I strove to think of some way in which he could possibly have received the weird impressions.
      He talked of his dreams in a strangely poetic fashion; making me see with terrible vividness the damp Cyclopean city of slimy green stone—whose geometry, he oddly said, was all wrong—and hear with frightened expectancy the ceaseless, half-mental calling from underground: “Cthulhu fhtagn”, “Cthulhu fhtagn”. These words had formed part of that dread ritual which told of dead Cthulhu’s dream-vigil in his stone vault at R’lyeh, and I felt deeply moved despite my rational beliefs. Wilcox, I was sure, had heard of the cult in some casual way, and had soon forgotten it amidst the mass of his equally weird reading and imagining. Later, by virtue of its sheer impressiveness, it had found subconscious expression in dreams, in the bas-relief, and in the terrible statue I now beheld; so that his imposture upon my uncle had been a very innocent one. The youth was of a type, at once slightly affected and slightly ill-mannered, which I could never like; but I was willing enough now to admit both his genius and his honesty. I took leave of him amicably, and wish him all the success his talent promises.
      The matter of the cult still remained to fascinate me, and at times I had visions of personal fame from researches into its origin and connexions. I visited New Orleans, talked with Legrasse and others of that old-time raiding-party, saw the frightful image, and even questioned such of the mongrel prisoners as still survived. Old Castro, unfortunately, had been dead for some years. What I now heard so graphically at first-hand, though it was really no more than a detailed confirmation of what my uncle had written, excited me afresh; for I felt sure that I was on the track of a very real, very secret, and very ancient religion whose discovery would make me an anthropologist of note. My attitude was still one of absolute materialism, as I wish it still were, and I discounted with almost inexplicable perversity the coincidence of the dream notes and odd cuttings collected by Professor Angell.
      One thing I began to suspect, and which I now fear I know, is that my uncle’s death was far from natural. He fell on a narrow hill street leading up from an ancient waterfront swarming with foreign mongrels, after a careless push from a negro sailor. I did not forget the mixed blood and marine pursuits of the cult-members in Louisiana, and would not be surprised to learn of secret methods and poison needles as ruthless and as anciently known as the cryptic rites and beliefs. Legrasse and his men, it is true, have been let alone; but in Norway a certain seaman who saw things is dead. Might not the deeper inquiries of my uncle after encountering the sculptor’s data have come to sinister ears? I think Professor Angell died because he knew too much, or because he was likely to learn too much. Whether I shall go as he did remains to be seen, for I have learned much now.

III.
The Madness from the Sea.

If heaven ever wishes to grant me a boon, it will be a total effacing of the results of a mere chance which fixed my eye on a certain stray piece of shelf-paper. It was nothing on which I would naturally have stumbled in the course of my daily round, for it was an old number of an Australian journal, the Sydney Bulletin for April 18, 1925. It had escaped even the cutting bureau which had at the time of its issuance been avidly collecting material for my uncle’s research.
      I had largely given over my inquiries into what Professor Angell called the “Cthulhu Cult”, and was visiting a learned friend in Paterson, New Jersey; the curator of a local museum and a mineralogist of note. Examining one day the reserve specimens roughly set on the storage shelves in a rear room of the museum, my eye was caught by an odd picture in one of the old papers spread beneath the stones. It was the Sydney Bulletin I have mentioned, for my friend has wide affiliations in all conceivable foreign parts; and the picture was a half-tone cut of a hideous stone image almost identical with that which Legrasse had found in the swamp.
      Eagerly clearing the sheet of its precious contents, I scanned the item in detail; and was disappointed to find it of only moderate length. What it suggested, however, was of portentous significance to my flagging quest; and I carefully tore it out for immediate action. It read as follows:
MYSTERY DERELICT FOUND AT SEA
Vigilant Arrives With Helpless Armed New Zealand Yacht in Tow.
One Survivor and Dead Man Found Aboard. Tale of
Desperate Battle and Deaths at Sea.
Rescued Seaman Refuses
Particulars of Strange Experience.
Odd Idol Found in His Possession. Inquiry
to Follow.

The Morrison Co.’s freighter Vigilant, bound from Valparaiso, arrived this morning at its wharf in Darling Harbour, having in tow the battled and disabled but heavily armed steam yacht Alert of Dunedin, N. Z., which was sighted April 12th in S. Latitude 34° 21', W. Longitude 152° 17' with one living and one dead man aboard.
      The Vigilant left Valparaiso March 25th, and on April 2nd was driven considerably south of her course by exceptionally heavy storms and monster waves. On April 12th the derelict was sighted; and though apparently deserted, was found upon boarding to contain one survivor in a half-delirious condition and one man who had evidently been dead for more than a week. The living man was clutching a horrible stone idol of unknown origin, about a foot in height, regarding whose nature authorities at Sydney University, the Royal Society, and the Museum in College Street all profess complete bafflement, and which the survivor says he found in the cabin of the yacht, in a small carved shrine of common pattern.
      This man, after recovering his senses, told an exceedingly strange story of piracy and slaughter. He is Gustaf Johansen, a Norwegian of some intelligence, and had been second mate of the two-masted schooner Emma of Auckland, which sailed for Callao February 20th with a complement of eleven men. The Emma, he says, was delayed and thrown widely south of her course by the great storm of March 1st, and on March 22nd, in S. Latitude 49° 51', W. Longitude 128° 34', encountered the Alert, manned by a queer and evil-looking crew of Kanakas and half-castes. Being ordered peremptorily to turn back, Capt. Collins refused; whereupon the strange crew began to fire savagely and without warning upon the schooner with a peculiarly heavy battery of brass cannon forming part of the yacht’s equipment. The Emma’s men shewed fight, says the survivor, and though the schooner began to sink from shots beneath the waterline they managed to heave alongside their enemy and board her, grappling with the savage crew on the yacht’s deck, and being forced to kill them all, the number being slightly superior, because of their particularly abhorrent and desperate though rather clumsy mode of fighting.
      Three of the Emma’s men, including Capt. Collins and First Mate Green, were killed; and the remaining eight under Second Mate Johansen proceeded to navigate the captured yacht, going ahead in their original direction to see if any reason for their ordering back had existed. The next day, it appears, they raised and landed on a small island, although none is known to exist in that part of the ocean; and six of the men somehow died ashore, though Johansen is queerly reticent about this part of his story, and speaks only of their falling into a rock chasm. Later, it seems, he and one companion boarded the yacht and tried to manage her, but were beaten about by the storm of April 2nd. From that time till his rescue on the 12th the man remembers little, and he does not even recall when William Briden, his companion, died. Briden’s death reveals no apparent cause, and was probably due to excitement or exposure. Cable advices from Dunedin report that the Alert was well known there as an island trader, and bore an evil reputation along the waterfront. It was owned by a curious group of half-castes whose frequent meetings and night trips to the woods attracted no little curiosity; and it had set sail in great haste just after the storm and earth tremors of March 1st. Our Auckland correspondent gives the Emma and her crew an excellent reputation, and Johansen is described as a sober and worthy man. The admiralty will institute an inquiry on the whole matter beginning tomorrow, at which every effort will be made to induce Johansen to speak more freely than he has done hitherto.
      This was all, together with the picture of the hellish image; but what a train of ideas it started in my mind! Here were new treasuries of data on the Cthulhu Cult, and evidence that it had strange interests at sea as well as on land. What motive prompted the hybrid crew to order back the Emma as they sailed about with their hideous idol? What was the unknown island on which six of the Emma’s crew had died, and about which the mate Johansen was so secretive? What had the vice-admiralty’s investigation brought out, and what was known of the noxious cult in Dunedin? And most marvellous of all, what deep and more than natural linkage of dates was this which gave a malign and now undeniable significance to the various turns of events so carefully noted by my uncle?
      March 1st—our February 28th according to the International Date Line—the earthquake and storm had come. From Dunedin the Alert and her noisome crew had darted eagerly forth as if imperiously summoned, and on the other side of the earth poets and artists had begun to dream of a strange, dank Cyclopean city whilst a young sculptor had moulded in his sleep the form of the dreaded Cthulhu. March 23d the crew of the Emma landed on an unknown island and left six men dead; and on that date the dreams of sensitive men assumed a heightened vividness and darkened with dread of a giant monster’s malign pursuit, whilst an architect had gone mad and a sculptor had lapsed suddenly into delirium! And what of this storm of April 2nd—the date on which all dreams of the dank city ceased, and Wilcox emerged unharmed from the bondage of strange fever? What of all this—and of those hints of old Castro about the sunken, star-born Old Ones and their coming reign; their faithful cult and their mastery of dreams? Was I tottering on the brink of cosmic horrors beyond man’s power to bear? If so, they must be horrors of the mind alone, for in some way the second of April had put a stop to whatever monstrous menace had begun its siege of mankind’s soul.
      That evening, after a day of hurried cabling and arranging, I bade my host adieu and took a train for San Francisco. In less than a month I was in Dunedin; where, however, I found that little was known of the strange cult-members who had lingered in the old sea-taverns. Waterfront scum was far too common for special mention; though there was vague talk about one inland trip these mongrels had made, during which faint drumming and red flame were noted on the distant hills. In Auckland I learned that Johansen had returned with yellow hair turned white after a perfunctory and inconclusive questioning at Sydney, and had thereafter sold his cottage in West Street and sailed with his wife to his old home in Oslo. Of his stirring experience he would tell his friends no more than he had told the admiralty officials, and all they could do was to give me his Oslo address.
      After that I went to Sydney and talked profitlessly with seamen and members of the vice-admiralty court. I saw the Alert, now sold and in commercial use, at Circular Quay in Sydney Cove, but gained nothing from its non-committal bulk. The crouching image with its cuttlefish head, dragon body, scaly wings, and hieroglyphed pedestal, was preserved in the Museum at Hyde Park; and I studied it long and well, finding it a thing of balefully exquisite workmanship, and with the same utter mystery, terrible antiquity, and unearthly strangeness of material which I had noted in Legrasse’s smaller specimen. Geologists, the curator told me, had found it a monstrous puzzle; for they vowed that the world held no rock like it. Then I thought with a shudder of what old Castro had told Legrasse about the primal Great Ones: “They had come from the stars, and had brought Their images with Them.”
      Shaken with such a mental revolution as I had never before known, I now resolved to visit Mate Johansen in Oslo. Sailing for London, I reëmbarked at once for the Norwegian capital; and one autumn day landed at the trim wharves in the shadow of the Egeberg. Johansen’s address, I discovered, lay in the Old Town of King Harold Haardrada, which kept alive the name of Oslo during all the centuries that the greater city masqueraded as “Christiana”. I made the brief trip by taxicab, and knocked with palpitant heart at the door of a neat and ancient building with plastered front. A sad-faced woman in black answered my summons, and I was stung with disappointment when she told me in halting English that Gustaf Johansen was no more.
      He had not survived his return, said his wife, for the doings at sea in 1925 had broken him. He had told her no more than he had told the public, but had left a long manuscript—of “technical matters” as he said—written in English, evidently in order to safeguard her from the peril of casual perusal. During a walk through a narrow lane near the Gothenburg dock, a bundle of papers falling from an attic window had knocked him down. Two Lascar sailors at once helped him to his feet, but before the ambulance could reach him he was dead. Physicians found no adequate cause for the end, and laid it to heart trouble and a weakened constitution.
      I now felt gnawing at my vitals that dark terror which will never leave me till I, too, am at rest; “accidentally” or otherwise. Persuading the widow that my connexion with her husband’s “technical matters” was sufficient to entitle me to his manuscript, I bore the document away and began to read it on the London boat. It was a simple, rambling thing—a naive sailor’s effort at a post-facto diary—and strove to recall day by day that last awful voyage. I cannot attempt to transcribe it verbatim in all its cloudiness and redundance, but I will tell its gist enough to shew why the sound of the water against the vessel’s sides became so unendurable to me that I stopped my ears with cotton.
      Johansen, thank God, did not know quite all, even though he saw the city and the Thing, but I shall never sleep calmly again when I think of the horrors that lurk ceaselessly behind life in time and in space, and of those unhallowed blasphemies from elder stars which dream beneath the sea, known and favoured by a nightmare cult ready and eager to loose them on the world whenever another earthquake shall heave their monstrous stone city again to the sun and air.
      Johansen’s voyage had begun just as he told it to the vice-admiralty. The Emma, in ballast, had cleared Auckland on February 20th, and had felt the full force of that earthquake-born tempest which must have heaved up from the sea-bottom the horrors that filled men’s dreams. Once more under control, the ship was making good progress when held up by the Alert on March 22nd, and I could feel the mate’s regret as he wrote of her bombardment and sinking. Of the swarthy cult-fiends on the Alert he speaks with significant horror. There was some peculiarly abominable quality about them which made their destruction seem almost a duty, and Johansen shews ingenuous wonder at the charge of ruthlessness brought against his party during the proceedings of the court of inquiry. Then, driven ahead by curiosity in their captured yacht under Johansen’s command, the men sight a great stone pillar sticking out of the sea, and in S. Latitude 47° 9', W. Longitude 126° 43' come upon a coast-line of mingled mud, ooze, and weedy Cyclopean masonry which can be nothing less than the tangible substance of earth’s supreme terror—the nightmare corpse-city of R’lyeh, that was built in measureless aeons behind history by the vast, loathsome shapes that seeped down from the dark stars. There lay great Cthulhu and his hordes, hidden in green slimy vaults and sending out at last, after cycles incalculable, the thoughts that spread fear to the dreams of the sensitive and called imperiously to the faithful to come on a pilgrimage of liberation and restoration. All this Johansen did not suspect, but God knows he soon saw enough!
      I suppose that only a single mountain-top, the hideous monolith-crowned citadel whereon great Cthulhu was buried, actually emerged from the waters. When I think of the extent of all that may be brooding down there I almost wish to kill myself forthwith. Johansen and his men were awed by the cosmic majesty of this dripping Babylon of elder daemons, and must have guessed without guidance that it was nothing of this or of any sane planet. Awe at the unbelievable size of the greenish stone blocks, at the dizzying height of the great carven monolith, and at the stupefying identity of the colossal statues and bas-reliefs with the queer image found in the shrine on the Alert, is poignantly visible in every line of the mate’s frightened description.
      Without knowing what futurism is like, Johansen achieved something very close to it when he spoke of the city; for instead of describing any definite structure or building, he dwells only on broad impressions of vast angles and stone surfaces—surfaces too great to belong to any thing right or proper for this earth, and impious with horrible images and hieroglyphs. I mention his talk about angles because it suggests something Wilcox had told me of his awful dreams. He had said that the geometry of the dream-place he saw was abnormal, non-Euclidean, and loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from ours. Now an unlettered seaman felt the same thing whilst gazing at the terrible reality.
      Johansen and his men landed at a sloping mud-bank on this monstrous Acropolis, and clambered slipperily up over titan oozy blocks which could have been no mortal staircase. The very sun of heaven seemed distorted when viewed through the polarising miasma welling out from this sea-soaked perversion, and twisted menace and suspense lurked leeringly in those crazily elusive angles of carven rock where a second glance shewed concavity after the first shewed convexity.
      Something very like fright had come over all the explorers before anything more definite than rock and ooze and weed was seen. Each would have fled had he not feared the scorn of the others, and it was only half-heartedly that they searched—vainly, as it proved—for some portable souvenir to bear away.
      It was Rodriguez the Portuguese who climbed up the foot of the monolith and shouted of what he had found. The rest followed him, and looked curiously at the immense carved door with the now familiar squid-dragon bas-relief. It was, Johansen said, like a great barn-door; and they all felt that it was a door because of the ornate lintel, threshold, and jambs around it, though they could not decide whether it lay flat like a trap-door or slantwise like an outside cellar-door. As Wilcox would have said, the geometry of the place was all wrong. One could not be sure that the sea and the ground were horizontal, hence the relative position of everything else seemed phantasmally variable.
      Briden pushed at the stone in several places without result. Then Donovan felt over it delicately around the edge, pressing each point separately as he went. He climbed interminably along the grotesque stone moulding—that is, one would call it climbing if the thing was not after all horizontal—and the men wondered how any door in the universe could be so vast. Then, very softly and slowly, the acre-great panel began to give inward at the top; and they saw that it was balanced. Donovan slid or somehow propelled himself down or along the jamb and rejoined his fellows, and everyone watched the queer recession of the monstrously carven portal. In this phantasy of prismatic distortion it moved anomalously in a diagonal way, so that all the rules of matter and perspective seemed upset.
      The aperture was black with a darkness almost material. That tenebrousness was indeed a positive quality; for it obscured such parts of the inner walls as ought to have been revealed, and actually burst forth like smoke from its aeon-long imprisonment, visibly darkening the sun as it slunk away into the shrunken and gibbous sky on flapping membraneous wings. The odour arising from the newly opened depths was intolerable, and at length the quick-eared Hawkins thought he heard a nasty, slopping sound down there. Everyone listened, and everyone was listening still when It lumbered slobberingly into sight and gropingly squeezed Its gelatinous green immensity through the black doorway into the tainted outside air of that poison city of madness.
      Poor Johansen’s handwriting almost gave out when he wrote of this. Of the six men who never reached the ship, he thinks two perished of pure fright in that accursed instant. The Thing cannot be described—there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order. A mountain walked or stumbled. God! What wonder that across the earth a great architect went mad, and poor Wilcox raved with fever in that telepathic instant? The Thing of the idols, the green, sticky spawn of the stars, had awaked to claim his own. The stars were right again, and what an age-old cult had failed to do by design, a band of innocent sailors had done by accident. After vigintillions of years great Cthulhu was loose again, and ravening for delight.
      Three men were swept up by the flabby claws before anybody turned. God rest them, if there be any rest in the universe. They were Donovan, Guerrera, and Ångstrom. Parker slipped as the other three were plunging frenziedly over endless vistas of green-crusted rock to the boat, and Johansen swears he was swallowed up by an angle of masonry which shouldn’t have been there; an angle which was acute, but behaved as if it were obtuse. So only Briden and Johansen reached the boat, and pulled desperately for the Alert as the mountainous monstrosity flopped down the slimy stones and hesitated floundering at the edge of the water.
      Steam had not been suffered to go down entirely, despite the departure of all hands for the shore; and it was the work of only a few moments of feverish rushing up and down between wheel and engines to get the Alert under way. Slowly, amidst the distorted horrors of that indescribable scene, she began to churn the lethal waters; whilst on the masonry of that charnel shore that was not of earth the titan Thing from the stars slavered and gibbered like Polypheme cursing the fleeing ship of Odysseus. Then, bolder than the storied Cyclops, great Cthulhu slid greasily into the water and began to pursue with vast wave-raising strokes of cosmic potency. Briden looked back and went mad, laughing shrilly as he kept on laughing at intervals till death found him one night in the cabin whilst Johansen was wandering deliriously.
      But Johansen had not given out yet. Knowing that the Thing could surely overtake the Alert until steam was fully up, he resolved on a desperate chance; and, setting the engine for full speed, ran lightning-like on deck and reversed the wheel. There was a mighty eddying and foaming in the noisome brine, and as the steam mounted higher and higher the brave Norwegian drove his vessel head on against the pursuing jelly which rose above the unclean froth like the stern of a daemon galleon. The awful squid-head with writhing feelers came nearly up to the bowsprit of the sturdy yacht, but Johansen drove on relentlessly. There was a bursting as of an exploding bladder, a slushy nastiness as of a cloven sunfish, a stench as of a thousand opened graves, and a sound that the chronicler would not put on paper. For an instant the ship was befouled by an acrid and blinding green cloud, and then there was only a venomous seething astern; where—God in heaven!—the scattered plasticity of that nameless sky-spawn was nebulously recombining in its hateful original form, whilst its distance widened every second as the Alert gained impetus from its mounting steam.
      That was all. After that Johansen only brooded over the idol in the cabin and attended to a few matters of food for himself and the laughing maniac by his side. He did not try to navigate after the first bold flight, for the reaction had taken something out of his soul. Then came the storm of April 2nd, and a gathering of the clouds about his consciousness. There is a sense of spectral whirling through liquid gulfs of infinity, of dizzying rides through reeling universes on a comet’s tail, and of hysterical plunges from the pit to the moon and from the moon back again to the pit, all livened by a cachinnating chorus of the distorted, hilarious elder gods and the green, bat-winged mocking imps of Tartarus.
      Out of that dream came rescue—the Vigilant, the vice-admiralty court, the streets of Dunedin, and the long voyage back home to the old house by the Egeberg. He could not tell—they would think him mad. He would write of what he knew before death came, but his wife must not guess. Death would be a boon if only it could blot out the memories.
      That was the document I read, and now I have placed it in the tin box beside the bas-relief and the papers of Professor Angell. With it shall go this record of mine—this test of my own sanity, wherein is pieced together that which I hope may never be pieced together again. I have looked upon all that the universe has to hold of horror, and even the skies of spring and the flowers of summer must ever afterward be poison to me. But I do not think my life will be long. As my uncle went, as poor Johansen went, so I shall go. I know too much, and the cult still lives.
      Cthulhu still lives, too, I suppose, again in that chasm of stone which has shielded him since the sun was young. His accursed city is sunken once more, for the Vigilant sailed over the spot after the April storm; but his ministers on earth still bellow and prance and slay around idol-capped monoliths in lonely places. He must have been trapped by the sinking whilst within his black abyss, or else the world would by now be screaming with fright and frenzy. Who knows the end? What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise. Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men. A time will come—but I must not and cannot think! Let me pray that, if I do not survive this manuscript, my executors may put caution before audacity and see that it meets no other eye.
 ",False
"""Once, mankind accepted a simple truth: that they were not alone in this universe.""
-Anthony Hopkins as Odin, Thor (2011).

Hanoi, Socialist Republic of Vietnam
June 24, 2011.
""Hey, we're here. Get up if you don't want to wake up in Hue!""
Joseph Clayton was shaken awake by the hand of one of his classmates on his shoulder. He was sitting in the back of a taxi van... the only one left sitting, actually, as the others had already disembarked to enter the government office they were parked in front of.
Which probably meant that he was left to pay the fare.
After he payed (as seemed to be his lot on this trip), he followed his classmates and his professor into the government office where they hoped to finally receive their travel permits. He hadn't gotten much of sleep on the plane; a mixture of excitement in the face of overseas travel and sheer jet-lag had conspired to leave him weary and light headed until he got a few hours sleep, which the taxi ride had partially afforded him.
And in that sleep...
The dream had come as a stark, clear memory. When Marie had said that she wasn't going to join him at the Miskatonic campus in Arkham for what would be their first year of university, he had been devastated. His first questions, rushed and frantic, had been about the cause of such a change. She certainly had the SAT score to qualify and student debt could be handled with relative ease. Had she decided to forgo post-secondary to concentrate on her stake in the restaurant? Had financial problems struck and prevented admissions from being paid?
Was it something about him?
Her answers, far more controlled than his frenzied speculation, had all been in the negative. Her SAT scores were good, student loans were still open and she still intended to go for a degree in Biology at Miskatonic. It was just... after she'd gotten that phonograph from her parents' home village, the repayment had been a promise to come and spend a year back in the ""Old Country"" as soon as she could. It would only be for a year and then she would return, ready for university and all accompaniments.
That had been very nearly one year before. She had promised him that she would be coming back in the summer of 2011... but after she had arrived in Vietnam, all contact had stopped cold. Her parents, when asked about her condition, always responded with affirmations that she would return and that she was fine... but as winter wore onto spring, subtle hints of doubt and worry had crept into their voices. Had they even been receiving any news from their daughter and if not, then why not? Had something gone terribly wrong?
As it happened, more baffling events awaited inside.
""What do you mean, restricted?"" Joseph asked the Communist Party bureaucrat sitting across the desk from him. Of course, due to the facts that first, said bureaucrat was a government employee and second, they were not alone in the room, Joseph had been careful not to sound too brunt in his tone. A trung sior Sergeant, wearing the forest green uniform of the Vietnam Border Defence Force (VPA), stood by the door of the office, both watching and guarding.
Relieved at being able to shed his stilted English after Joseph exhibited a decent grasp of the Vietnamese language, the bureaucrat put forth what he knew of the situation. ""Civilian access is almost completely denied inside the area you requested. To be honest, that section of the border has been troublesome ever since the war. We get reports of smugglers, poachers, bandits, H'mong insurgents... every type of violent counter-revolutionary you can think of, this region seems to have it. The local Bru farmers aren't much help, but they generally don't bother others and seem to accept the military presence we keep there."" The bureaucrat shifted his gaze from Joseph to Professor Neville Andover, the leader of this particular expedition. ""I'm sorry, but there's nothing that can be done without high level authorization.""
As a response to this, Neville Andover did not get upset. He did not resign himself to failure. He did not even try to ask if there was any other avenue of entry or way to access the information he needed. He just donned an odd, amused smile, the corners of his eyes crinkling behind his wire rim glasses. ""I assume that General Vo is still the Secretary for the Border Forces?"" He asked, almost distractedly. When the official answered yes, Professor Andover reached into the inside of his light cotton jacket and pulled out a small, metal case. From this case, he removed a single paper card of purest black, embossed with an emerald green ""Delta"" symbol and a capital ""Y"" of gold in the center of that hollow triangle. ""I have been in contact with Comrade Vo for the last six months, planning this expedition as an act of cooperation between our two governments and as a boon for my University. He knows that card; show it or describe it to him... you maywant to run it by General Tran as well. Either way, they will give you the answer you need.""
As the bureaucrat took the card and then as the Border Defense sergeant took it from him and headed out of the room, Joesph wondered about his professor and the oddities that surrounded him. The first time he had ever seen the Professor, it had been in his High School Auditorium as Marie had performed the Stork Dance... and Joseph had noticed strange things. In their senior year of High School, both he and Marie had received reference letters to Miskatonic University in Arkham, a town in Essex county. When he had arrived at Miskatonic (without Marie), he had been shocked that the professor for his Cultural Anthropology class was not only the one who had given him his reference but was also the man who had he had seen three years before.
And then there were his classmates, three of whom had also come on this expedition. Many of them had received similar letters from Prof. Andover and most of those, though not relaying specifics, had said that they had found the circumstances equally strange. Two who had gotten references were on this very trip with them. The first was Tracy Williams from the farm country of Northwest Virginia, a girl with blond hair quite a few shades lighter than Josephs own brassy brown and the class Nippon-Nut, being both obsessed with Anime and Manga as well as being Japanese-proficient. The second was Albert Noyes, a young man who has part white, part black and a little Algonquin-Indian from a small hamlet in southern Vermont. His specialties were technology, math and Mandarin Chinese. The third member of retinue was a young man named Malone who... frankly, was a mystery to the entire class. However, he had volunteered for this trip and his grades had been excellent so his place on the roster had been assured.
But there was still a nagging question at the back of his mind: why? Why had they received offers to go to an obscure if admittedly exceptional regional university when the big names had all passed them over? Why had they been gathered from all across the United States by a single professor? And why, it seemed, did it feel like there was such a big connection between the missing member of Dr. Andovers ""collection"" and the reason behind this expedition?
Why did it feel as if Marie was somehow connected to this?
Eventually, the sergeant came back and informed the bureaucrat of General Vo's express permission for the Professor and his students to enter the exclusion zone as well as General Tran's confirmation, before handing the card back to Neville Andover. Joseph knew that academics could sometimes have friends in high and unusual places, but counting on ... no, expecting the approval of not just one, but two ranking Generals in a non-allied nation? This seemed crazy, certifiably insane even.
But then, so did spectral storks and spoonbills.
Northernmost Quang Binh Province, Socialist Republic of Vietnam
June 29, 2011
Despite the calm look on the professors face, something about the current situation made Joseph Clayton distinctly ill at ease.
They had spent the last two days trudging up into the Annamite mountains after leaving the fertile coastal plain. At the last village with road access, they had ditched their vehicles and backpacked up the ridges and trails, counting on a guide from the local Bru people to lead them to... whatever Prof. Andover was looking for. The fact that the guide was now legging it quite quickly back down the misty path told Joseph that something had either gone incredibly wrong or incredibly right.
Now, Neville Andover was chanting, seemingly trying to communicate with something deep in the thick underbrush on either side of the worn, overgrown gully that had been called a trail. The language was almost intellig ible to Joseph, being a form of Mon-Khmer linked to the classical Vietnamese he had studied, perhaps with a few hints of Muong intermixed. However, the syntax and grammer were archaic to say the least. From some of the words used it even seemed to be achingly familiar, almost as if...
With a sudden realization of shock and the smell of grilled pork and Bac Bon Dzhow a memory in his nostrils, Joseph realized where he had encountered this form of Vietic before.
But the shocks were not over.
Spun around by Albert Noyes to see something, Joseph gazed upward to see a human figure standing upon the high bank, glancing down at them with hard, measuring eyes. Undoubtedly masculine, the figure was of a man of slightly darker skin than the farmers of the coast (though the features were similar) and of greater height than either them or the native Bru. Clothed only in a white cotton kilt with geometric designs in black and a leather girdle, this man carried a white flatbow decorated with bands of green, blue and red while a bronze dagger rested at his hip. His head was shaved of all hair, and black designs were tattooed from the crown of the scalp to the jawline, with more tattoos covering his arms, chest and lower legs.
The fact that an arrow was nocked in the string of his bow put the four young people on edge, with Malone and Joesph himself tightening the grips on the hilts of their machetes in anticipation of a hopeless fight. More men in similar dress and tattoos, some with bronze slashing swords, some with bronze-headed spears and others with flatbows, appeared out of the forest on either side of them. Now that Joseph could get a better look at them in the dim light filtering down through the forest canopy and the mist, their arm tattoos began looking very similar to those borne by Marie's parents while those on their faces, while different in design, were still similar in form.
All the while, Prof. Andover kept up the low chanting, of which Joseph could pick out individual words: ""friend"", ""gods"", ""village"", ""priest"", ""comrade"" and at least one invocation of Ho Chi Minh among them. To this, these strange men seemed to confer with each other though glances and nods before took one took a short, bamboo tube from his girdle, put one end to his mouth, took a deep breath and blew.
As the silvery-blue powder erupted from the tube, settled on the heads of the trekking academics and they each lost consciousness in turn, Joseph wondered if this could get any worse.
Meanwhile, Spoonbill Village
Tsan Pho Dao had been the Chief Priest of this village for many years, ever since the death of his father in the closing days of the American War. In that span of years, he had seen many futures and advised his people based on those futures. He had called down both ruin and plenty by invoking the power of the gods of his people. He alone, in a feat outside even the power of the hereditary village chiefs, had communicated with the Instrument of their gods, a being possessed of both boundless knowledge and an absolutely rotten temper. He also, most importantly, had an absolutely perfect memory of his entire life... and that of his father, and his father before him.
To be perfectly honest, he held a tremendous amount of power within this village. The ancestor shrines belonged to families while the hunters had their own little shrines up the mountain where midnight rituals were performed to gather poison for the tips of arrows and darts. But those rituals needed to be performed by the minor priests under his command. This temple was the spiritual center of his people for most of the year and the temple with it's darkened wood walls lit only by feeble braziers whose light was twisted by the smoke of rare and powerful incenses, with it's figurines of gods and demons carved from nephrite and jadeite brought from deep below the earth... was his domain. His and no one else'. He divined the future when possible, he performed the rites and as a result, it was he who had taken countless lives in sacrifice over the course of his adulthood: chickens, pigs, goats, buffalo... people.
As he sat at a low table in his private sanctuary, trying to divine some course for a question that had faced him for most of a year, he noticed something. One of the golden discs he used for divination, a coin looted from a Chinese caravan many centuries ago, stood up on its rim and began to roll. Following the curve of failing momentum, the coin finally came to rest at a specific point on the table, a place that held indication of the future.
Visitors... and not the ""ketchup"" kind of visitors.
Several Hours Later, Close to the Laos Border
The answer to Joseph Clayton's earlier question was a definite yes. When he had awoken, he had found his wrists and ankles bound, the bindings looped over a pole carried by two men with him and the other students suspended like deer carcasses. The Professor, on the other hand, had not been bound, but had found transport by sitting in a large basket suspended from one of the poles by a cord, carried by a pair of men. They had been going downhill from the crest of a ridge and were now leaving the forest, coming onto a road. First, they passed under a wooden gate where roosting spoonbills had been carved into the posts and a sun flanked by two dragons had been carved into the beams above the road.
Then Joseph saw where they were headed. A village of perhaps thirty houses was visible in the valley bottom while narrow terraces had been cut into the hills above, green with growing rice. The view quickly vanished as the men began heading into the village itself but sight was soon replaced with sound. The quiet of the forest was supplanted by the cacophony of a hundred sounds: chickens and pigs grunted and clucked as the animals rooted below the houses and around the garbage heaps while odd-looking reddish dogs, lazing in the sun on the porches of the outermost houses, whined in surprise at the new arrivals. The sounds of tools and primitive machinery clunked melodiously. The sounds of people also were audible: talking, laughing, shouting and even a few low notes of women's work songs were possible for Joseph to pick out of the general buzz... a buzz which also included Albert trying to reason with their captors and Tracy displaying an unusually foul mouth toward same.
Soon, people began to notice the men bringing in captives and a few even began to gather along the path as they entered the village, joining their dogs (or Dholes, as they were now identifiable as) who had come to sniff. It was mostly men, older boys and children who came out to watch while the women and the elderly usually went no further than windows and the porches of the stilt-houses that lined the road. Here, even hanging upside down, Joseph could notice a few things about the dress and appearance of the people
Frankly... it was a bit odd.
From what he knew, the Vietnamese national costume (in it's modern form) placed a heavy emphasis on trousers, an item of clothing that he noticed was rather conspicuously absent here. Everyone here seemed to be wearing variations on one basic outfit in either brown or black: knee-length cotton kilts, short-sleeved cotton jackets (mostly with their front fastenings closed) and either rough-woven conical hats or simple cloths tied over their heads. The men's hair appeared to be cut short to the point where one could vaguely make out the tattoos on their scalp while children varied between the same shortness for boys and a single, long braid for the girls.
Eventually they arrived in a great or square before what appeared to be the temple: a ponderous structure of wood and brick perched upon massive stone foundations, it's sloping roofs flaring outward as if to shroud the surrounding houses from the scrutiny of the heavens. Around them, a crowd had gathered on all sides, an air of excitement buzzing in the air. Men exited the house across the square from the temple entrance and despite the calm demeanour of Professor Andover, words began filtering through to Joseph that began sounding more and more disturbing; words like ""kill"", ""sacrifice"" and ""ritual"". But another word came, one that sent darker imaginings and images rambling through his sensation-saturated mind.
The word ""eat"".
""WAIT! STOP!""
Joseph knew those words as well... as well as that voice!
Out of the crowd rushed a figure dressed much like the others: brown kilt and jacket, the latter partially open to reveal a yem undergarment and with a straw hat on her head. As Joseph finally began taking in other details, he noticed the tattooed lines and whimsical designs on her lower legs and arms and on her face, lines and vaguely triangular patterns that almost resembled the features of an orangutan.
Her face... behind all the tattooing, the face of this woman was still as unmistakable to Joseph as the first day they had met in Kindergarten. To this sudden recognition, the young man could only exclaim his surprise as a soothingly familiar name.
""Marie?""
","
There are things in this world that are better left unknown and areas of knowledge better left unexplored. With my background as an anthropologist and folklorist, trained to think as a scientist, I should reject such conclusions out of hand. Pursuit of knowledge, wherever it might lead, whatever unpalatable facts might surface, has ever been my highest aspiration. Nevertheless, the things I have experienced, the abominations I have seen with my own eyes, have led me to this conclusion. How comforting it would be if the experiences I am about to relate only reflected a psychotic episode!
The events surrounding my stay in Mexico and subsequent hospitalization have already become a fertile source of gossip, rumor, and innuendo among my academic colleagues. What a pity that men and women, supposedly dedicated to science and learning, would stoop to such pastimes, stereotypically associated with the ignorant and unintelligent; nevertheless, such is the sorry case.
I feel that I must clarify the facts of my experience, set the record straight so to speak. For this reason I am writing down the present account, which many readers will no doubt dismiss as the ravings of a lunatic, or the product of some drug induced hallucination. Nevertheless, I will describe the events that transpired as I experienced them. Most of what I now write is taken from notes I recorded carefully as the events occurred. I fortunately had the intuitive foresight to mail these notes to a trusted friend and colleague at the university prior to the horrible night in June of last year, concerning which I shall presently elaborate. The reader is, of course, free to draw his or her conclusions. As for myself, I fear that I may not have much time left, and I do not want to go to whatever fate awaits me in silence.
Had I not chosen to accept the invitation, proffered by an old acquaintance of my days as a graduate student, to explore a strange legend in Mexico, I would be a saner man now. I would still be comfortably ensconced in a tenured position with a prestigious eastern university, still secure in a rational world governed by the well-understood laws and principles of physics. Lamentably, any such concept of reality is now irrevocably lost for me. I know that things exist in this world, in this universe, that all sane and rational laws decree cannot exist. I have gazed upon an abomination barely hinted at in even the darkest and most fabulous corners of myth and legend. How I envy the multitude of humanity that continues to dwell in the smug illusion of an orderly, mechanistic cosmos!
My insane odyssey began almost one year ago. I had been invited to present a paper at an international symposium on religion, mythology, and folklore being held in San Antonio, Texas. At the end of the three day session I had received a call from Carl Rousseau, a former classmate of mine at Columbia whom I had not seen in a number of years.
To my surprise, Rousseau suggested that we meet for dinner. In reality, we had never been close friends. Nevertheless, my old classmate insisted that he had a story to share with me, one that I might find very interesting, considering my recently published research. In summary, I had uncovered and documented evidence pointing to a single very ancient tradition that seems to underlie most of the world's magical and mythological systems.
We met early that same evening at a small restaurant on the famous San Antonio River walk.
""Dr. Shapiro, good to see you again."" Rousseau's greeting sounded cheery enough, though his formality surprised me somewhat. ""Go ahead and order,"" he added, ""I'm only going to have coffee.""
As I perused the menu Rousseau fumbled a bit with his napkin. ""I'll try to explain this the best I can; . . . hope you won't think I'm too crazy, but what you're about to hear is the God honest truth. I swear it.""
""Really? Go ahead,"" I replied. Rousseau's manner disquieted me a little.
""I know you must be wondering why I decided to contact you after all this time; I mean, I know we weren't ever especially close . . . ""
""No matter. How can I help you?""
""Dr. Shapiro . . . ""
""Reuben,"" I interjected.
""O.K., Reuben . . . I don't know if you'd heard, but I've been living in Mexico, also some in Central America, for the last ten years or so.""
""Yes, I knew that your area of interest lay in the pre-conquest folk traditions of that region.""
""But Doc . . . uh . . . Reuben, my interests went beyond mere anthropological studies of folklore . . . more into the esoteric and occult aspects of those traditions. I am convinced that much knowledge from the pre-Columbian civilizations survived the Conquest and the Inquisition and is still preserved in secret by groups or individuals who carefully pass the knowledge on from one generation to the next. As you probably remember, I never pursued my academic studies as far as you did. Actually, I never even finished writing my master's thesis.""
""Pity,"" I sighed, ""you have the brains to become an outstanding teacher and researcher.""
Rousseau frowned slightly. ""Yes, but that's not where my interests lie. Publish or perish, I think they call it. Anyway, I was lucky; I inherited enough money that earning a living isn't a major concern for me.""
""We should all be so fortunate . . .,"" I replied, then added, ""What can I do for you Carl?""
""I was just getting to that,"" he answered, quickly adding, ""I've recently spent some time . . . several months in fact, living in northern Mexico, a little town called San Facundo, only a couple of hours south of Brownsville, Texas. I was originally attracted to the town by some old writings I came across . . . stuff by early Spanish friars bent on christianizing the local Indians, but some really weird stuff.""
""Most likely propaganda to justify some of the atrocities they planned once the benefits of the Inquisition were made available to the natives,"" I replied, wondering where our conversation was leading.
""That was the first thing that occurred to me also, but there were other things . . . I mean twelve priests were locked away in a monastery by order of the Archbishop of Mexico City. It was stated that those priests had been blinded and their tongues cut out at the Church's behest. The Superior of the Augustinian Order operating in the province asked the Church authorities for permission to burn hundreds of Indians at the stake, a request that was granted after he explained the circumstances to a secret tribunal of the Holy Office.
""After that,"" he continued, ""any person, Spaniard or Indian, suspected of engaging in certain practices, things that were known to the investigators, but which the writers of the chronicles were explicitly forbidden to describe, was to be put to death instantly and the corpse burned to ashes.""
""Horrible,"" I grimaced, ""but not too unusual for the times. I know. Some of my own ancestors suffered at the hands of the Inquisition.""
""Yes, Reuben, but it gets stranger. A large section of landscape, several leagues in length and breadth, was declared forbidden ground. No Christian could set a foot in that area under pain of excommunication. To this very day it's known in the region as la zona maldita, 'the Cursed Zone'.""
I rolled Rousseau's account over in my mind for a moment. It did seem to have the makings of an interesting piece of folklore. I told him as much.
""But why call it to my attention specifically?"" I queried. ""I'm a specialist in mythology and folklore, that's true, but is there something special in this odd bit of history you've uncovered that you think I should take any special note of?""
""Absolutely."" Rousseau's voice seemed calmer now. ""After reading all I could find out about this . . . this strangeness, for want of a better term, I decided to actually spend some time in the area and find out what I could first hand. The town of San Facundo, founded in the early seventeen hundreds, sits right at the edge of it . . . I mean the 'Cursed Zone'.""
""Yes, go on."" I couldn't help it. My interest was growing.
""Well, the locals are a strange lot, to say the least,"" he continued. ""You know how it goes, you have an isolated rural community, for many generations, and a lot of genetic fermentation occurs.""
""Often that can be the case,"" I replied.
""Anyway,"" continued Rousseau, ""they tend to be very clannish, tightlipped with any outsiders, and with me, an Americano, well, you can imagine. But after a while I did gain the trust of a few, and what they told me really piqued my interest.""
Rousseau paused for a moment, sipped his coffee, by now almost cold, and wiped the corners of his mouth with his napkin.
""A little south of San Facundo,"" he went on, ""not too far off the main highway, there's a singular hill. It's known locally as El Tinieblo, the place of darkness . . . juts straight up some five hundred feet above the surrounding landscape. The friars regarded it as an especially evil place. It lay right in the middle of the Cursed Zone, and the locals fear it to this day, at least those who aren't part of it."" Rousseau's emphasis on the word ""part"" caused me to feel an odd sensation in the back of my neck.
""It seems,"" he continued, ""that a couple of years back some federales, federal police from the Attorney General's office, went up there to investigate reports of night time activity, you know, lights, strange noises and such. They suspected drug traffickers at work. Anyway, of fifteen federales that went up that hill, only two came back down, both of them traumatized and completely incoherent. As far as anyone knows, no bodies were ever recovered. You've got to remember, those men were all equipped with automatic weapons and were trained to deal with almost any contingency. At any rate, the Mexican government clamped a tight security lid on the whole thing.""
I thought about this for a moment, then replied, ""So you think something strange happened to them, like violent cult activity maybe?""
""I thought that at first."" he responded quickly. ""I thought, perhaps, they had stumbled onto some secret ceremony or something, and just bit off more than they could chew. People can be quite dangerous when someone threatens or interferes with their religious practices.""
He paused again, staring briefly at his lap.
""But I know now that it was something else. I truly wish that it was only a matter of some weird cult or violent religious sect.""
""So, what leads you to believe it wasn't?"" I insisted.
""The two survivors . . . they both died within a few weeks of causes that were undetermined, as best as I could find out, even after bribing a couple of government officials for information. I talked to a doctor in the state capital who had been involved in their treatment. He told me that one of them only sat, you know, drawn up into a fetal position and making meaningless whining sounds; but the other, he would stare vacantly into space most of the time, then suddenly start shrieking at the top of his lungs . . . something about 'los demonios que no tienen forma . . . que te comen el cuerpo y el alma'.""
Though my Spanish was probably not as fluent as Rousseau's, I understood the meaning of his words . . . devils without shape that feed on body and soul . . .
Rousseau continued his account, providing further details about the history of the region and the nature of its inhabitants. Especially intriguing was his mention of certain physical peculiarities, apparently genetic in nature, that characterize some elements of the local population.
""Some of the locals actually seem almost frog like, I mean, like their eyes are round and bulging, they have almost no necks or chins, and their skin . . . well, it seems oddly rough, I might even say scaly.""
""You mean something like ichthyosis,"" I suggested. ""That's a hereditary condition you know . . . ""
""Yes,"" he answered. ""I've seen examples of that in my travels, but this . . . this is well . . . different. It does seem to run in the same families though.""
I thought for a moment, then suggested, ""Probably some unusual mutation due to doubling up defective recessive genes. That sometimes happens with too much inbreeding. I've seen some real oddities in our own southern Appalachian mountains. Even back in Massachusetts, I've heard stories of a decaying fishing town on the coast just south of Newburysport, as well as certain backwaters in the central part of the state where a very high incidence of genetic anomalies seems to occur.""
""I fear there's more to it than that,"" Rousseau replied. ""The other local people, the normal ones, avoid the . . . the strange ones like the plague. They seem to actually be terrified of them.""
""Sounds like a simple case of superstitious fear to me,"" I offered, adding, ""Ignorant people often react that way to anyone who's different or strange.""
""What if the fear were justified?"" he retorted. ""There was a case I looked into personally. It seems that a rural family, . . . lived out from town a little distance . . . Anyway, they had a child who wandered onto some property owned by one of the strange families. The child disappeared. Of course, the family was frantic. Then the child turned up . . . what was left of it, only a few gnawed bones with some shreds of flesh attached. The local police said it was coyotes, but I swear that the tooth marks I saw on the bones were not those of coyotes, or any other predator found in that region. They were not exactly human teeth, but were set in a human-like jaw, judging from the spacing.""
""Hmmm . . .,"" I pondered. ""Might bear looking into, but . . . ""
""Why don't you take some time and come see for yourself?"" demanded my companion. ""There are direct flights from here to Brownsville or Harlingen. After that it's only a couple of hours driving time to San Facundo. I have a house rented there. Nothing luxurious, to be sure, but comfortable enough for a few days. You can stay there with me.""
Our meeting ended at this point, aside from the usual leave-taking remarks and exchange of business cards and hotel telephone numbers. I headed straight to my hotel and presumed that Rousseau had done the same. Arriving at my room, I proceeded almost directly to the shower (the night being very warm). Inadvertently, I left the bathroom door open, a habit born of many years of living alone. As I brushed my teeth, I caught sight in the mirror of a slight movement at the base of the hallway door. I called out, but received no answer. Quick to investigate, I discovered a sheet of paper, folded in half, inserted beneath the door.
Curious, and a little annoyed, I picked up the paper, and saw scribbled thereon, in common black ballpoint, the references Rev. 13; Rev. 13: 13, and Koran 25:29. These cryptic citations, taken from the Christian New Testament and the Muslim Qûran, puzzled me. What could such a thing mean, and why would anyone slip such a note under my door? In that instant I remembered that most hotel rooms in the United States contain copies of the New Testament, distributed by some Christian evangelical organization.
A brief search in the drawers of the end table produced the book I was looking for. I fumbled through the limp pages of the cheap copy until I found the passage in question.
The thirteenth chapter of the Book of Revelations did nothing to resolve the mystery for me, as I read, ""And I stood still upon the sand of the sea. And I saw a beast ascending out of the sea. . . ."" Reading along to the thirteenth verse, I found, ""And I saw three unclean spirits like unto frogs come out of the mouth of the dragon and out of the mouth of the beast and out of the mouth of the false prophet.""
I was perplexed by these strange passages, and even more puzzled as to the purpose of the note. Those verses meant nothing to me. How could this antique eschatological imagery possibly relate to a person such as myself, a tenured professor of anthropology and folklore at a world-renowned Ivy League university? I would have liked to dismiss the whole affair as the misplaced zeal of some ""born-again"" bellhop, just another hawker of Christian fundamentalism of the type so common these days. But a zealous Christian would hardly cite a reference from the Islamic holy book. I did recall that Rousseau had mentioned the frog-like appearance of some San Facundo natives, but failed to see any relationship between that assertion and the material I had just read.
Still curious about the Qûranic reference, I fumbled in my wallet for the card of a certain Monsignor Zacchardi, a Jesuit scholar and professor of Comparative Religion at a local Catholic university. I had met Zacchardi at the conference earlier that week.
The priest answered after several rings.
""Good evening, Doctor Zacchardi,"" I offered. ""Sorry to disturb you so late, but I have a question. Do you have a copy of the Qûran at hand?""
Answering in the affirmative, Zacchardi assured me that my inquiry was no trouble at all. He asked me to wait a minute while he brought the copy from his study. A few moments later he returned.
""What, in particular, did you want to know from the Qûran?""
""The twenty-fifth Surah, twenty-ninth verse, what does it say?""
I could hear him leafing through the book. Presently, he answered, ""This is strange. It reads 'Beware mankind, for Shaitan is Khadhulu.' I had never noticed that particular passage before. I'd have to look into it more deeply before I could give you a possible interpretation.""
""No, that's quite all right,"" I answered. ""I just saw that Surah and verse mentioned in a novel I am reading and it stirred my curiosity.""
""Yes, I understand the feeling perfectly,"" replied the priest. ""Is there anything else?""
""No. Thank you for your help, I truly appreciate it. Good night.""
This brief conversation left me even more mystified than before. Many weeks later, I would come to realize the deeper, and very sinister implications of those cryptic passages, taken from the holy writ of two major religions.
Rousseau's story had undeniably captivated my interest, even overwhelming my native skepticism. I had some vacation time coming up; why not join Rousseau on a little junket down to Mexico? I might uncover some interesting material for further research. Even if I didn't, I might continue south and spend a few days relaxing on the beaches in Veracruz. Never did I imagine how I would come to regret my acceptance of Rousseau's invitation!


II

The hour long flight to Brownsville was boringly uneventful. Rousseau was strangely quiet and seemed rather apprehensive during the brief trip. The drive across the border and into Mexico was another story. After Rousseau picked up his vehicle, a four-wheel-drive Nissan, at the airport in Brownsville, we proceeded to the new international bridge, one of three bridges linking Brownsville, Texas with its sister city of Matamoros, Mexico. Mexican customs and immigration caused us remarkably little delay. Afterwards, we wound our way through the traffic of Matamoros, perhaps chaotic to an unaccustomed American, but rather orderly by the standards of most ""third world"" cities I had experienced. Eventually, we found ourselves on the main southbound highway, passing through open countryside. Rousseau kept up a steady conversation, explaining in great detail the history and folk traditions of the region through which we were passing. He was obviously very knowledgeable about those matters.
The landscape itself was not particularly remarkable at first, consisting of flat coastal plane covered, where it had not been cleared for cultivation, with stunted, thorny vegetation of the sort typically found in semiarid regions. At irregular intervals this was relieved by meandering ribbons of lush greenery marking the course of some narrow stream. Gradually, as we traveled south, the landscape became more rolling and elevated. The dim blue outlines of mountains grew visible on the southwestern horizon.
Villages, such as they were, amounted to clusters of cinder block and adobe structures, usually with a small store or two and a school building. The inhabitants, mostly women and children it seemed, invariably appeared to be occupied outside the houses or congregating around the community bus stop. We passed through any number of such totally forgettable places until, we crested the top of a hill and the town of San Facundo, with its white Spanish colonial church tower, came into view.
San Facundo was laid out in typical Mexican fashion with the whole town extending out from a central plaza, but it was not exactly the dusty little adobe place I had imagined. The business district boasted a number of modern looking establishments, and the principal streets were paved, though often in disrepair. The people I observed on the streets were mostly of Spanish-Indian mestizo stock, with the European strain predominating somewhat, as is often the case in northern Mexico. They seemed normal enough.
""Where,"" I asked, ""are the odd ones? I see nothing abnormal about the people hereabouts.""
""They generally hang together,"" was Rousseau's answer. ""Usually, you don't see them around until late in the afternoon, about the time the sun starts to set. They seem to be more nocturnal.""
""Which doubtless adds to the suspicion and fear of the local people,"" I suggested.
Rousseau paused for a moment, then recommended that we get ourselves settled in our lodgings. ""There'll be plenty of time for taking in the local atmosphere over the next few days,"" he added. ""I am certain that you'll see even more than you bargained for, but right now let's get a shower and something to eat."" The suggestion was more than welcome, as the day was very hot and we had not eaten anything since leaving Brownsville.
The house in which we would be staying was a two-story cinder block affair, plastered over and painted a rather gaudy shade of blue-green. Rousseau had taken it on lease from a local attorney who currently held a government position in another part of the country. There were three bedrooms, one of which would be mine during my stay, and a bath on the upper floor. Rousseau would be sleeping downstairs in the family room, which he had converted into a sort of study. I noticed that he had moved most of the owner's furnishings to the two unoccupied bedrooms, which he was using for storage.
After my shower, which had been difficult due to the extremely low water pressure, I joined Rousseau in the study.
""I've called my cook and she will have us something to eat shortly,"" he said.
""Good,"" I replied, ""but what have we here . . . ?"" What attracted my attention was a large book, bound in crumbling black leather with heavy brass corners and a brass hasp so that the volume could be locked shut. Obviously, it was very old.
""May I see it?"" I asked.
""I thought you would find it interesting,"" replied Rousseau. ""Can you read it?""
I studied the strange calligraphic script for a few minutes, presently recognizing it as Hebrew, a language in which I am fluent. The writing appeared to be on parchment in an archaic Sephardic dialect, but containing a scattering of Arabic words. On the title page I deciphered the words Sepher al Azif, followed by the legend: As written by Abd el Azrada the poet of Sanaa, may Adonai grant him mercy, in the city of Dimasq three centuries past. Rendered by my hand in the tongue of the Holy Covenant of Abraham in the four thousand nine hundred and sixteenth year of the Creation of the World, invoking the protection of Adonai in His Most Holy Name, which no man may utter. Beseeching hereof, His Great and Boundless Mercy, I am Isaac bar Z'evi, scribe to the Synagogue in the city of Cordoba.
The names ""Al Azif"" and ""Abd el Azrada"" stirred up memories in the back of my mind. During the early decades of this century a New England writer of horror fiction named Howard Phillips Lovecraft had based a whole series of stories around such a tome, more frequently referred to by its Greek title, Necronomicon. According to Lovecraft, Al Azif had been written or compiled in Damascus during the eighth century of our common era by one ""Abdul Alhazred,"" apparently an Arab or Syrian magus who flourished at the time of the Umayyad Caliphs, and who was often referred to simply as the ""Mad Arab."" Though almost all serious scholars agree that such a volume had never existed outside of Lovecraft's imagination, much popular speculation had grown up around it, creating a sort of modern folklore, which was precisely the reason I was aware of it.
I also knew that several books had been published during the 1970's and '80's purporting to be the Necronomicon. I had read two of them myself, one merely a mishmash of Sumerian and Akkadian incantations and conjurations for summoning or exorcising various and sundry gods, angels, and demons, and the other a rather odd collection drawn from Elizabethan era grimoires. The latter also may have originally been derived from Mesopotamian magical texts. Nevertheless, here I had before me an apparently ancient volume that seemed to be the real thing . . . and in a hot, dusty provincial town in northern Mexico!
""Where did you get this?"" My question was unavoidable.
""The attorney from whom I rented this house,"" was Rousseau's reply. ""He, in turn, obtained it from an incredibly old gentleman who lived on a ranch near here. He gave it to my lawyer friend before he died. Said it had been in his family for many generations. God only knows where it originally came from or how it got here.""
""It seems to have been written in Muslim Spain some time during the eleventh century,"" I replied. ""But the author, or I should say translator, appears to have been a Jew."" I paused for a moment to organize my thoughts before continuing.
""The original, if this is what I think it is, was written in Arabic some centuries earlier. Supposedly, there were later Greek and Latin translations, as well as an English version attributed to John Dee, court physician and astrologer to Elizabeth I, but no mention was ever made of a Hebrew rendering."" Once again I paused. ""Good God man! Do you have any idea how rare this volume must be?""
Rousseau remained silent for a moment.
""You have just confirmed what I already suspected."" The tone of his reply was edged with fear and resignation, as one might hear from a man who has just received confirmation of a dreaded diagnosis.
""But I've always assumed that the Necronomicon was an entirely fictional work,"" I protested, ""merely a literary invention used by Lovecraft and his circle as the basis for some early twentieth century works of science fiction or whatever . . . ""
Rousseau smiled, rather sadly it seemed. ""Obviously, that was, or is, not the case. You hold the evidence right there in your hands.""
I stared at the leather bound volume I held before me. Suddenly, I felt an unexpected wave of revulsion, bordering on nausea, at the thought that such a horrible book could actually exist . . . and I had it in my own hands. Abruptly, I put the volume on the desk, exercising a fete of will not to drop it like the repulsive thing it was.
Rousseau grimaced a bit, then explained, ""Lovecraft certainly had access to information that is beyond the reach of most researchers. Either he was an initiate into certain secret societies himself, or more likely, discovered documents in his grandfather's library that provided him with information normally available only to a very limited circle of high degree initiates."" Pausing for a moment, he added, ""Lovecraft's father and grandfather were both associated with a highly esoteric Masonic rite, one not generally recognized, or even known of, by most Freemasons. At any rate, he almost certainly had access to their private papers after their deaths.""
The implications of Rousseau's words astounded me. If the dreaded Necronomicon did indeed exist, then the terrible secret cults described by Lovecraft in his series of tales probably existed too. Of course, I was not ready to accept the reality of such abominable entities as Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, or Shub-Niggurath, or places such as the sunken city of R'lyeh, that Lovecraft so often referred to in his fictional, or perhaps fictionalized stories.
""Do you really think what you've told me about this town could somehow be related to this book, or to the things described in Lovecraft's stories?"" I asked incredulously.
""I'm hoping that you'll be able to determine if that's the case,"" Rousseau replied in a voice that was little more than a whisper.
",False
"It must have been some imp of the perverse--or some sardonic pull from dark, hidden sources--which made me change my plans as I did. I had long before resolved to limit my observations to architecture alone, and I was even then hurrying toward the Square in an effort to get quick transportation out of this festering city of death and decay; but the sight of old Zadok Allen set up new currents in my mind and made me slacken my pace uncertainly.
I had been assured that the old man could do nothing but hint at wild, disjointed, and incredible legends, and I had been warned that the natives made it unsafe to be seen talking with him; yet the thought of this aged witness to the town's decay, with memories going back to the early days of ships and factories, was a lure that no amount of reason could make me resist. After all, the strangest and maddest of myths are often merely symbols or allegories based upon truth--and old Zadok must have seen everything which went on around Innsmouth for the last ninety years. Curiosity flared up beyond sense and caution, and in my youthful egotism I fancied I might be able to sift a nucleus of real history from the confused, extravagant outpouring I would probably extract with the aid of raw whiskey.
I knew that I could not accost him then and there, for the firemen would surely notice and object. Instead, I reflected, I would prepare by getting some bootleg liquor at a place where the grocery boy had told me it was plentiful. Then I would loaf near the fire station in apparent casualness, and fall in with old Zadok after he had started on one of his frequent rambles. The youth had said that he was very restless, seldom sitting around the station for more than an hour or two at a time.
A quart bottle of whiskey was easily, though not cheaply, obtained in the rear of a dingy variety-store just off the Square in Eliot Street. The dirty-looking fellow who waited on me had a touch of the staring ""Innsmouth look"", but was quite civil in his way; being perhaps used to the custom of such convivial strangers--truckmen, gold-buyers, and the like--as were occasionally in town.
Reentering the Square I saw that luck was with me; for--shuffling out of Paine Street around the corner of the Gilman House--I glimpsed nothing less than the tall, lean, tattered form of old Zadok Allen himself. In accordance with my plan, I attracted his attention by brandishing my newly-purchased bottle: and soon realised that he had begun to shuffle wistfully after me as I turned into Waite Street on my way to the most deserted region I could think of.
I was steering my course by the map the grocery boy had prepared, and was aiming for the wholly abandoned stretch of southern waterfront which I had previously visited. The only people in sight there had been the fishermen on the distant breakwater; and by going a few squares south I could get beyond the range of these, finding a pair of seats on some abandoned wharf and being free to question old Zadok unobserved for an indefinite time. Before I reached Main Street I could hear a faint and wheezy ""Hey, Mister!"" behind me and I presently allowed the old man to catch up and take copious pulls from the quart bottle.
I began putting out feelers as we walked amidst the omnipresent desolation and crazily tilted ruins, but found that the aged tongue did not loosen as quickly as I had expected. At length I saw a grass-grown opening toward the sea between crumbling brick walls, with the weedy length of an earth-and-masonry wharf projecting beyond. Piles of moss-covered stones near the water promised tolerable seats, and the scene was sheltered from all possible view by a ruined warehouse on the north. Here, I thought was the ideal place for a long secret colloquy; so I guided my companion down the lane and picked out spots to sit in among the mossy stones. The air of death and desertion was ghoulish, and the smell of fish almost insufferable; but I was resolved to let nothing deter me.
About four hours remained for conversation if I were to catch the eight o'clock coach for Arkham, and I began to dole out more liquor to the ancient tippler; meanwhile eating my own frugal lunch. In my donations I was careful not to overshoot the mark, for I did not wish Zadok's vinous garrulousness to pass into a stupor. After an hour his furtive taciturnity shewed signs of disappearing, but much to my disappointment he still sidetracked my questions about Innsmouth and its shadow-haunted past. He would babble of current topics, revealing a wide acquaintance with newspapers and a great tendency to philosophise in a sententious village fashion.
Toward the end of the second hour I feared my quart of whiskey would not be enough to produce results, and was wondering whether I had better leave old Zadok and go back for more. Just then, however, chance made the opening which my questions had been unable to make; and the wheezing ancient's rambling took a turn that caused me to lean forward and listen alertly. My back was toward the fishy-smelling sea, but he was facing it and something or other had caused his wandering gaze to light on the low, distant line of Devil Reef, then showing plainly and almost fascinatingly above the waves. The sight seemed to displease him, for he began a series of weak curses which ended in a confidential whisper and a knowing leer. He bent toward me, took hold of my coat lapel, and hissed out some hints that could not be mistaken,
""Thar's whar it all begun--that cursed place of all wickedness whar the deep water starts. Gate o' hell--sheer drop daown to a bottom no saoundin'-line kin tech. Ol' Cap'n Obed done it--him that faound aout more'n was good fer him in the Saouth Sea islands.
""Everybody was in a bad way them days. Trade fallin' off, mills losin' business--even the new ones--an' the best of our menfolks kilt aprivateerin' in the War of 1812 or lost with the Elizy brig an' the Ranger scow--both on 'em Gilman venters. Obed Marsh he had three ships afloat--brigantine Columby, brig Hefty, an' barque Sumatry Queen. He was the only one as kep' on with the East-Injy an' Pacific trade, though Esdras Martin's barkentine Malay Bride made a venter as late as twenty-eight.
""Never was nobody like Cap'n Obed--old limb o' Satan! Heh, heh! I kin mind him a-tellin' abaout furren parts, an' callin' all the folks stupid for goin' to Christian meetin' an' bearin' their burdens meek an' lowly. Says they'd orter git better gods like some o' the folks in the Injies--gods as ud bring 'em good fishin' in return for their sacrifices, an' ud reely answer folks's prayers.
""Matt Eliot, his fust mate, talked a lot too, only he was again' folks's doin' any heathen things. Told abaout an island east of Othaheite whar they was a lot o' stone ruins older'n anybody knew anything abaout, kind o' like them on Ponape, in the Carolines, but with carven's of faces that looked like the big statues on Easter Island. Thar was a little volcanic island near thar, too, whar they was other ruins with diff'rent carvin'--ruins all wore away like they'd ben under the sea onct, an' with picters of awful monsters all over 'em.
""Wal, Sir, Matt he says the natives araound thar had all the fish they cud ketch, an' sported bracelets an' armlets an' head rigs made aout o' a queer kind o' gold an' covered with picters o' monsters jest like the ones carved over the ruins on the little island--sorter fish-like frogs or froglike fishes that was drawed in all kinds o' positions likes they was human bein's. Nobody cud get aout o' them whar they got all the stuff, an' all the other natives wondered haow they managed to find fish in plenty even when the very next island had lean pickin's. Matt he got to wonderon' too an' so did Cap'n Obed. Obed he notices, besides, that lots of the hn'some young folks ud drop aout o' sight fer good from year to year, an' that they wan't many old folks around. Also, he thinks some of the folks looked durned queer even for Kanakys.
""It took Obed to git the truth aout o' them heathen. I dun't know haow he done it, but he begun by tradin' fer the gold-like things they wore. Ast 'em whar they come from, an' ef they cud git more, an' finally wormed the story aout o' the old chief--Walakea, they called him. Nobody but Obed ud ever a believed the old yeller devil, but the Cap'n cud read folks like they was books. Heh, heh! Nobody never believes me naow when I tell 'em, an' I dun't s'pose you will, young feller--though come to look at ye, ye hev kind o' got them sharp-readin' eyes like Obed had.""
The old man's whisper grew fainter, and I found myself shuddering at the terrible and sincere portentousness of his intonation, even though I knew his tale could be nothing but drunken phantasy.
""Wal, Sir, Obed he larnt that they's things on this arth as most folks never heerd about--an' wouldn't believe ef they did hear. It seems these Kanakys was sacrificin' heaps o' their young men an' maidens to some kind o' god-things that lived under the sea, an' gittin' all kinds o' favour in return. They met the things on the little islet with the queer ruins, an' it seems them awful picters o' frog-fish monsters was supposed to be picters o' these things. Mebbe they was the kind o' critters as got all the mermaid stories an' sech started.
""They had all kinds a' cities on the sea-bottom, an' this island was heaved up from thar. Seem they was some of the things alive in the stone buildin's when the island come up sudden to the surface, That's how the Kanakys got wind they was daown thar. Made sign-talk as soon as they got over bein' skeert, an' pieced up a bargain afore long.
""Them things liked human sacrifices. Had had 'em ages afore, but lost track o' the upper world after a time. What they done to the victims it ain't fer me to say, an' I guess Obed wa'n't none too sharp abaout askin'. But it was all right with the heathens, because they'd ben havin' a hard time an' was desp'rate abaout everything. They give a sarten number o' young folks to the sea-things twice every year--May-Eve an' Hallawe'en--reg'lar as cud be. Also give some a' the carved knick-knacks they made. What the things agreed to give in return was plenty a' fish--they druv 'em in from all over the sea--an' a few gold-like things naow an' then.
""Wal, as I says, the natives met the things on the little volcanic islet--goin' thar in canoes with the sacrifices et cet'ry, and bringin' back any of the gold-like jools as was comin' to 'em. At fust the things didn't never go onto the main island, but arter a time they come to want to. Seems they hankered arter mixin' with the folks, an' havin' j'int ceremonies on the big days--May-Eve an' Hallowe'en. Ye see, they was able to live both in ant aout o' water--what they call amphibians, I guess. The Kanakys told 'em as haow folks from the other islands might wanta wipe 'an out if they got wind o' their bein' thar, but they says they dun't keer much, because they cud wipe aout the hull brood o' humans ef they was willin' to bother--that is, any as didn't be, sarten signs sech as was used onct by the lost Old Ones, whoever they was. But not wantin' to bother, they'd lay low when anybody visited the island.
""When it come to matin' with them toad-lookin' fishes, the Kanakys kind o' balked, but finally they larnt something as put a new face on the matter. Seems that human folks has got a kind a' relation to sech water-beasts--that everything alive come aout o' the water onct an' only needs a little change to go back agin. Them things told the Kanakys that ef they mixed bloods there'd be children as ud look human at fust, but later turn more'n more like the things, till finally they'd take to the water an' jine the main lot o' things daown har. An' this is the important part, young feller--them as turned into fish things an' went into the water wouldn't never die. Them things never died excep' they was kilt violent.
""Wal, Sir, it seems by the time Obed knowed them islanders they was all full o' fish blood from them deep-water things. When they got old an' begun to shew it, they was kep' hid until they felt like takin' to the water an' quittin' the place. Some was more teched than others, an' some never did change quite enough to take to the water; but mosily they turned out jest the way them things said. Them as was born more like the things changed arly, but them as was nearly human sometimes stayed on the island till they was past seventy, though they'd usually go daown under for trial trips afore that. Folks as had took to the water gen'rally come back a good deal to visit, so's a man ud often be a'talkin' to his own five-times-great-grandfather who'd left the dry land a couple o' hundred years or so afore.
""Everybody got aout o' the idee o' dyin'--excep' in canoe wars with the other islanders, or as sacrifices to the sea-gods daown below, or from snakebite or plague or sharp gallopin' ailments or somethin' afore they cud take to the water--but simply looked forrad to a kind o' change that wa'n't a bit horrible arter a while. They thought what they'd got was well wuth all they'd had to give up--an' I guess Obed kind o' come to think the same hisself when he'd chewed over old Walakea's story a bit. Walakea, though, was one of the few as hadn't got none of the fish blood--bein' of a royal line that intermarried with royal lines on other islands.
""Walakea he shewed Obed a lot o' rites an' incantations as had to do with the sea things, an' let him see some o' the folks in the village as had changed a lot from human shape. Somehaow or other, though, he never would let him see one of the reg'lar things from right aout o' the water. In the end he give him a funny kind o' thingumajig made aout o' lead or something, that he said ud bring up the fish things from any place in the water whar they might be a nest o' 'em. The idee was to drop it daown with the right kind o' prayers an' sech. Walakea allowed as the things was scattered all over the world, so's anybody that looked abaout cud find a nest an' bring 'em up ef they was wanted.
""Matt he didn't like this business at all, an' wanted Obed shud keep away from the island; but the Cap'n was sharp fer gain, an' faound he cud get them gold-like things so cheap it ud pay him to make a specialty of them. Things went on that way for years an' Obed got enough o' that gold-like stuff to make him start the refinery in Waite's old run-daown fullin' mill. He didn't dass sell the pieces like they was, for folks ud be all the time askin' questions. All the same his crews ud get a piece an' dispose of it naow and then, even though they was swore to keep quiet; an' he let his women-folks wear some o' the pieces as was more human-like than most.
""Well, come abaout thutty-eight--when I was seven year' old--Obed he faound the island people all wiped aout between v'yages. Seems the other islanders had got wind o' what was goin' on, and had took matters into their own hands. S'pose they must a had, after all, them old magic signs as the sea things says was the only things they was afeard of. No tellin' what any o' them Kanakys will chance to git a holt of when the sea-bottom throws up some island with ruins older'n the deluge. Pious cusses, these was--they didn't leave nothin' standin' on either the main island or the little volcanic islet excep' what parts of the ruins was too big to knock daown. In some places they was little stones strewed abaout--like charms--with somethin' on 'em like what ye call a swastika naowadays. Prob'ly them was the Old Ones' signs. Folks all wiped aout no trace o' no gold-like things an' none the nearby Kanakys ud breathe a word abaout the matter. Wouldn't even admit they'd ever ben any people on that island.
""That naturally hit Obed pretty hard, seein' as his normal trade was doin' very poor. It hit the whole of Innsmouth, too, because in seafarint days what profited the master of a ship gen'lly profited the crew proportionate. Most of the folks araound the taown took the hard times kind o' sheep-like an' resigned, but they was in bad shape because the fishin' was peterin' aout an' the mills wan't doin' none too well.
""Then's the time Obed he begun a-cursin' at the folks fer bein' dull sheep an' prayin' to a Christian heaven as didn't help 'em none. He told 'em he'd knowed o' folks as prayed to gods that give somethin' ye reely need, an' says ef a good bunch o' men ud stand by him, he cud mebbe get a holt o' sarten paowers as ud bring plenty o' fish an' quite a bit of gold. O' course them as sarved on the Sumatry Queen, an' seed the island knowed what he meant, an' wa'n't none too anxious to get clost to sea-things like they'd heard tell on, but them as didn't know what 'twas all abaout got kind o' swayed by what Obed had to say, and begun to ast him what he cud do to sit 'em on the way to the faith as ud bring 'em results.""
Here the old man faltered, mumbled, and lapsed into a moody and apprehensive silence; glancing nervously over his shoulder and then turning back to stare fascinatedly at the distant black reef. When I spoke to him he did not answer, so I knew I would have to let him finish the bottle. The insane yarn I was hearing interested me profoundly, for I fancied there was contained within it a sort of crude allegory based upon the strangeness of Innsmouth and elaborated by an imagination at once creative and full of scraps of exotic legend. Not for a moment did I believe that the tale had any really substantial foundation; but none the less the account held a hint of genuine terror if only because it brought in references to strange jewels clearly akin to the malign tiara I had seen at Newburyport. Perhaps the ornaments had, after all, come from some strange island; and possibly the wild stories were lies of the bygone Obed himself rather than of this antique toper.
I handed Zadok the bottle, and he drained it to the last drop. It was curious how he could stand so much whiskey, for not even a trace of thickness had come into his high, wheezy voice. He licked the nose of the bottle and slipped it into his pocket, then beginning to nod and whisper softly to himself. I bent close to catch any articulate words he might utter, and thought I saw a sardonic smile behind the stained bushy whiskers. Yes--he was really forming words, and I could grasp a fair proportion of them.
""Poor Matt--Matt he allus was agin it--tried to line up the folks on his side, an' had long talks with the preachers--no use--they run the Congregational parson aout o' taown, an' the Methodist feller quit--never did see Resolved Babcock, the Baptist parson, agin--Wrath o' Jehovy--I was a mightly little critter, but I heerd what I heerd an, seen what I seen--Dagon an' Ashtoreth--Belial an' Beelzebub--Golden Caff an' the idols o' Canaan an' the Philistines--Babylonish abominations--Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin--.""
He stopped again, and from the look in his watery blue eyes I feared he was close to a stupor after all. But when I gently shook his shoulder he turned on me with astonishing alertness and snapped out some more obscure phrases.
""Dun't believe me, hey? Hey, heh, heh--then jest tell me, young feller, why Cap'n Obed an' twenty odd other folks used to row aout to Devil Reef in the dead o' night an' chant things so laoud ye cud hear 'em all over taown when the wind was right? Tell me that, hey? An' tell me why Obed was allus droppin' heavy things daown into the deep water t'other side o' the reef whar the bottom shoots daown like a cliff lower'n ye kin saound? Tell me what he done with that funny-shaped lead thingumajig as Walakea give him? Hey, boy? An' what did they all haowl on May-Eve, an, agin the next Hallowe'en? An' why'd the new church parsons--fellers as used to be sailors--wear them queer robes an' cover their-selves with them gold-like things Obed brung? Hey?""
The watery blue eyes were almost savage and maniacal now, and the dirty white beard bristled electrically. Old Zadok probably saw me shrink back, for he began to cackle evilly.
""Heh, heh, heh, heh! Beginnin' to see, hey? Mebbe ye'd like to a ben me in them days, when I seed things at night aout to sea from the cupalo top o' my haouse. Oh, I kin tell ye' little pitchers hev big ears, an' I wa'n't missin' nothin' o' what was gossiped abaout Cap'n Obed an' the folks aout to the reef! Heh, heh, heh! Haow abaout the night I took my pa's ship's glass up to the cupalo an' seed the reef a-bristlin' thick with shapes that dove off quick soon's the moon riz?
""Obed an' the folks was in a dory, but them shapes dove off the far side into the deep water an' never come up...
""Haow'd ye like to be a little shaver alone up in a cupola a-watchin' shapes as wa'n't human shapes?...Heh?...Heh, heh, heh ...""
The old man was getting hysterical, and I began to shiver with a nameless alarm. He laid a gnarled claw on my shoulder, and it seemed to me that its shaking was not altogether that of mirth.
""S'pose one night ye seed somethin' heavy heaved offen Obed's dory beyond the reef' and then learned next day a young feller was missin' from home. Hey! Did anybody ever see hide or hair o' Hiram Gilman agin. Did they? An' Nick Pierce, an' Luelly Waite, an' Adoniram Saouthwick, an' Henry Garrison. Hey? Heh, heh, heh, heh...Shapes talkin' sign language with their hands...them as had reel hands ...
""Wal, Sir, that was the time Obed begun to git on his feet agin. Folks see his three darters a-wearin' gold-like things as nobody'd never see on 'em afore, an' smoke stared comin' aout o' the refin'ry chimbly. Other folks was prosp'rin, too--fish begun to swarm into the harbour fit to kill an' heaven knows what sized cargoes we begun to ship aout to Newb'ryport, Arkham, an' Boston. 'Twas then Obed got the ol' branch railrud put through. Some Kingsport fishermen heerd abaout the ketch an' come up in sloops, but they was all lost. Nobody never see 'em agin. An' jest then our folk organised the Esoteric Order 0' Dagon, an' bought Masonic Hall offen Calvary Commandery for it...heh, heh, heh! Matt Eliot was a Mason an' agin the sellin', but he dropped aout o' sight jest then.
""Remember, I ain't sayin' Obed was set on hevin' things jest like they was on that Kanaky isle. I dun't think he aimed at fust to do no mixin', nor raise no younguns to take to the water an' turn into fishes with eternal life. He wanted them gold things, an' was willin' to pay heavy, an' I guess the others was satisfied fer a while ...
""Come in' forty-six the taown done some lookin' an' thinkin' fer itself. Too many folks missin'--too much wild preachin' at meetin' of a Sunday--too much talk abaout that reef. I guess I done a bit by tellin' Selectman Mowry what I see from the cupalo. They was a party one night as follered Obed's craowd aout to the reef, an' I heerd shots betwixt the dories. Nex' day Obed and thutty-two others was in gaol, with everybody a-wonderin' jest what was afoot and jest what charge agin 'em cud he got to holt. God, ef anybody'd look'd ahead...a couple o' weeks later, when nothin' had ben throwed into the sea fer thet long...""
Zadok was shewing sings of fright and exhaustion, and I let him keep silence for a while, though glancing apprehensively at my watch. The tide had turned and was coming in now, and the sound of the waves seemed to arouse him. I was glad of that tide, for at high water the fishy smell might not be so bad. Again I strained to catch his whispers.
""That awful night...I seed 'em. I was up in the cupalo...hordes of 'em...swarms of 'em...all over the reef an' swimmin' up the harbour into the Manuxet...God, what happened in the streets of Innsmouth that night...they rattled our door, but pa wouldn't open...then he clumb aout the kitchen winder with his musket to find Selecman Mowry an' see what he cud do...Maounds o' the dead an' the dyin'...shots and screams...shaoutin' in Ol Squar an' Taown Squar an' New Church Green--gaol throwed open...--proclamation...treason...called it the plague when folks come in an' faoud haff our people missin'...nobody left but them as ud jine in with Obed an' them things or else keep quiet...never heard o' my pa no more...""
The old man was panting and perspiring profusely. His grip on my shoulder tightened.
""Everything cleaned up in the mornin'--but they was traces...Obed he kinder takes charge an' says things is goin' to be changed... others'll worship with us at meetin'-time, an' sarten haouses hez got to entertin guests...they wanted to mix like they done with the Kanakys, an' he for one didn't feel baound to stop 'em. Far gone, was Obed...jest like a crazy man on the subjeck. He says they brung us fish an' treasure, an' shud hev what they hankered after...""
""Nothin' was to be diff'runt on the aoutside; only we was to keep shy o' strangers ef we knowed what was good fer us.
""We all hed to take the Oath o' Dagon, an' later on they was secon' an' third oaths that some o' us took. Them as ud help special, ud git special rewards--gold an' sech--No use balkin', fer they was millions of 'em daown thar. They'd ruther not start risin' an' wipin' aout human-kind, but ef they was gave away an' forced to, they cud do a lot toward jest that. We didn't hev them old charms to cut 'em off like folks in the Saouth Sea did, an' them Kanakys wudn't never give away their secrets.
""Yield up enough sacrifices an' savage knick-knacks an' harbourage in the taown when they wanted it, an' they'd let well enough alone. Wudn't bother no strangers as might bear tales aoutside--that is, withaout they got pryin'. All in the band of the faithful--Order 0' Dagon--an' the children shud never die, but go back to the Mother Hydra an' Father Dagon what we all come from onct...Ia! Ia! Cthulhu fhtagn! Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah-nagl fhtaga--""
Old Zadok was fast lapsing into stark raving, and I held my breath. Poor old soul--to what pitiful depths of hallucination had his liquor, plus his hatred of the decay, alienage, and disease around him, brought that fertile, imaginative brain? He began to moan now, and tears were coursing down his channelled checks into the depths of his beard.
""God, what I seen senct I was fifteen year' old--Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin!--the folks as was missin', and them as kilt theirselves--them as told things in Arkham or Ipswich or sech places was all called crazy, like you're callin' me right naow--but God, what I seen--They'd a kilt me long ago fer' what I know, only I'd took the fust an' secon' Oaths o' Dago offen Obed, so was pertected unlessen a jury of 'em proved I told things knowin' an' delib'rit...but I wudn't take the third Oath--I'd a died ruther'n take that--
""It got wuss araound Civil War time, when children born senct 'forty-six begun to grow up--some 'em, that is. I was afeared--never did no pryin' arter that awful night, an' never see one o'--them--clost to in all my life. That is, never no full-blooded one. I went to the war, an' ef I'd a had any guts or sense I'd a never come back, but settled away from here. But folks wrote me things wa'n't so bad. That, I s'pose, was because gov'munt draft men was in taown arter 'sixty-three. Arter the war it was jest as bad agin. People begun to fall off--mills an' shops shet daown--shippin' stopped an' the harbour choked up--railrud give up--but they...they never stopped swimmin' in an' aout o' the river from that cursed reef o' Satan--an' more an' more attic winders got a-boarded up, an' more an' more noises was heerd in haouses as wa'n't s'posed to hev nobody in 'em...
""Folks aoutside hev their stories abaout us--s'pose you've heerd a plenty on 'em, seein' what questions ye ast--stories abaout things they've seed naow an' then, an' abaout that queer joolry as still comes in from somewhars an' ain't quite all melted up--but nothin' never gits def'nite. Nobody'll believe nothin'. They call them gold-like things pirate loot, an' allaow the Innsmouth folks hez furren blood or is dis-tempered or somethin'. Beside, them that lives here shoo off as many strangers as they kin, an' encourage the rest not to git very cur'ous, specially raound night time. Beasts balk at the critters--hosses wuss'n mules--but when they got autos that was all right.
""In 'forty-six Cap'n Obed took a second wife that nobody in the taown never see--some says he didn't want to, but was made to by them as he'd called in--had three children by her--two as disappeared young, but one gal as looked like anybody else an' was eddicated in Europe. Obed finally got her married off by a trick to an Arkham feller as didn't suspect nothin'. But nobody aoutside'll hav nothin' to do with Innsmouth folks naow. Barnabas Marsh that runs the refin'ry now is Obed's grandson by his fust wife--son of Onesiphorus, his eldest son, but his mother was another o' them as wa'n't never seen aoutdoors.
""Right naow Barnabas is abaout changed. Can't shet his eyes no more, an' is all aout o' shape. They say he still wears clothes, but he'll take to the water soon. Mebbe he's tried it already--they do sometimes go daown for little spells afore they go daown for good. Ain't ben seed abaout in public fer nigh on ten year'. Dun't know haow his poor wife kin feel--she come from Ipiwich, an' they nigh lynched Barnabas when he courted her fifty odd year' ago. Obed he died in 'seventy-eight an' all the next gen'ration is gone naow--the fust wife's children dead, and the rest...God knows...""
The sound of the incoming tide was now very insistent, and little by little it seemed to change the old man's mood from maudlin tearfulness to watchful fear. He would pause now and then to renew those nervous glances over his shoulder or out toward the reef, and despite the wild absurdity of his tale, I could not help beginning to share his apprehensiveness. Zadok now grew shriller, seemed to be trying to whip up his courage with louder speech.
""Hey, yew, why dun't ye say somethin'? Haow'd ye like to be livin' in a taown like this, with everything a-rottin' an' dyin', an' boarded-up monsters crawlin' an' bleatin' an' barkin' an' hoppin' araoun' black cellars an' attics every way ye turn? Hey? Haow'd ye like to hear the haowlin' night arter night from the churches an' Order o' Dagon Hall, an' know what's doin' part o' the haowlin'? Haow'd ye like to hear what comes from that awful reef every May-Eve an' Hallowmass? Hey? Think the old man's crazy, eh? Wal, Sir, let me tell ye that ain't the wust!""
Zadok was really screaming now, and the mad frenzy of his voice disturbed me more than I care to own.
""Curse ye, dun't set thar a'starin' at me with them eyes--I tell Obed Marsh he's in hell, an, hez got to stay thar! Heh, heh...in hell, I says! Can't git me--I hain't done nothin' nor told nobody nothin'--
""Oh, you, young feller? Wal, even ef I hain't told nobody nothin' yet, I'm a'goin' to naow! Yew jest set still an' listen to me, boy--this is what I ain't never told nobody...I says I didn't get to do pryin' arter that night--but I faound things about jest the same!""
""Yew want to know what the reel horror is, hey? Wal, it's this--it ain't what them fish devils hez done, but what they're a-goin' to do! They're a-bringin' things up aout o' whar they come from into the taown--been doin' it fer years, an' slackenin' up lately. Them haouses north o' the river be-twixt Water an' Main Streets is full of 'em--them devils an' what they brung--an' when they git ready...I say, when they git...ever hear tell of a shoggoth?
""Hey, d'ye hear me? I tell ye I know what them things be--I seen 'em one night when...eh-ahhh-ah! e'yahhh...""
The hideous suddenness and inhuman frightfulness of the old man's shriek almost made me faint. His eyes, looking past me toward the malodorous sea, were positively starting from his head; while his face was a mask of fear worthy of Greek tragedy. His bony claw dug monstrously into my shoulder, and he made no motion as I turned my head to look at whatever he had glimpsed.
There was nothing that I could see. Only the incoming tide, with perhaps one set of ripples more local than the long-flung line of breakers. But now Zadok was shaking me, and I turned back to watch the melting of that fear-frozen face into a chaos of twitching eyelids and mumbling gums. Presently his voice came back--albeit as a trembling whisper.
""Git aout o' here! Get aout o' here! They seen us--git aout fer your life! Dun't wait fer nothin'--they know naow--Run fer it--quick--aout o' this taown--""
Another heavy wave dashed against the loosing masonry of the bygone wharf, and changed the mad ancient's whisper to another inhuman and blood-curdling scream. ""E-yaahhhh!...Yheaaaaaa!...""
Before I could recover my scattered wits he had relaxed his clutch on my shoulder and dashed wildly inland toward the street, reeling northward around the ruined warehouse wall.
I glanced back at the sea, but there was nothing there. And when I reached Water Street and looked along it toward the north there was no remaining trace of Zadok Allen.
","Whether the dreams brought on the fever or the fever brought on the dreams Walter Gilman did not know. Behind everything crouched the brooding, festering horror of the ancient town, and of the mouldy, unhallowed garret gable where he wrote and studied and wrestled with figures and formulae when he was not tossing on the meagre iron bed. His ears were growing sensitive to a preternatural and intolerable degree, and he had long ago stopped the cheap mantel clock whose ticking had come to seem like a thunder of artillery. At night the subtle stirring of the black city outside, the sinister scurrying of rats in the wormy partitions, and the creaking of hidden timbers in the centuried house, were enough to give him a sense of strident pandemonium. The darkness always teemed with unexplained sound—and yet he sometimes shook with fear lest the noises he heard should subside and allow him to hear certain other, fainter, noises which he suspected were lurking behind them.
      He was in the changeless, legend-haunted city of Arkham, with its clustering gambrel roofs that sway and sag over attics where witches hid from the King’s men in the dark, olden days of the Province. Nor was any spot in that city more steeped in macabre memory than the gable room which harboured him—for it was this house and this room which had likewise harboured old Keziah Mason, whose flight from Salem Gaol at the last no one was ever able to explain. That was in 1692—the gaoler had gone mad and babbled of a small, white-fanged furry thing which scuttled out of Keziah’s cell, and not even Cotton Mather could explain the curves and angles smeared on the grey stone walls with some red, sticky fluid.
      Possibly Gilman ought not to have studied so hard. Non-Euclidean calculus and quantum physics are enough to stretch any brain; and when one mixes them with folklore, and tries to trace a strange background of multi-dimensional reality behind the ghoulish hints of the Gothic tales and the wild whispers of the chimney-corner, one can hardly expect to be wholly free from mental tension. Gilman came from Haverhill, but it was only after he had entered college in Arkham that he began to connect his mathematics with the fantastic legends of elder magic. Something in the air of the hoary town worked obscurely on his imagination. The professors at Miskatonic had urged him to slacken up, and had voluntarily cut down his course at several points. Moreover, they had stopped him from consulting the dubious old books on forbidden secrets that were kept under lock and key in a vault at the university library. But all these precautions came late in the day, so that Gilman had some terrible hints from the dreaded Necronomicon of Abdul Alhazred, the fragmentary Book of Eibon, and the suppressed Unaussprechlichen Kulten of von Junzt to correlate with his abstract formulae on the properties of space and the linkage of dimensions known and unknown.
      He knew his room was in the old Witch House—that, indeed, was why he had taken it. There was much in the Essex County records about Keziah Mason’s trial, and what she had admitted under pressure to the Court of Oyer and Terminer had fascinated Gilman beyond all reason. She had told Judge Hathorne of lines and curves that could be made to point out directions leading through the walls of space to other spaces beyond, and had implied that such lines and curves were frequently used at certain midnight meetings in the dark valley of the white stone beyond Meadow Hill and on the unpeopled island in the river. She had spoken also of the Black Man, of her oath, and of her new secret name of Nahab. Then she had drawn those devices on the walls of her cell and vanished.
      Gilman believed strange things about Keziah, and had felt a queer thrill on learning that her dwelling was still standing after more than 235 years. When he heard the hushed Arkham whispers about Keziah’s persistent presence in the old house and the narrow streets, about the irregular human tooth-marks left on certain sleepers in that and other houses, about the childish cries heard near May-Eve, and Hallowmass, about the stench often noted in the old house’s attic just after those dreaded seasons, and about the small, furry, sharp-toothed thing which haunted the mouldering structure and the town and nuzzled people curiously in the black hours before dawn, he resolved to live in the place at any cost. A room was easy to secure; for the house was unpopular, hard to rent, and long given over to cheap lodgings. Gilman could not have told what he expected to find there, but he knew he wanted to be in the building where some circumstance had more or less suddenly given a mediocre old woman of the seventeenth century an insight into mathematical depths perhaps beyond the utmost modern delvings of Planck, Heisenberg, Einstein, and de Sitter.
      He studied the timber and plaster walls for traces of cryptic designs at every accessible spot where the paper had peeled, and within a week managed to get the eastern attic room where Keziah was held to have practiced her spells. It had been vacant from the first—for no one had ever been willing to stay there long—but the Polish landlord had grown wary about renting it. Yet nothing whatever happened to Gilman till about the time of the fever. No ghostly Keziah flitted through the sombre halls and chambers, no small furry thing crept into his dismal eyrie to nuzzle him, and no record of the witch’s incantations rewarded his constant search. Sometimes he would take walks through shadowy tangles of unpaved musty-smelling lanes where eldritch brown houses of unknown age leaned and tottered and leered mockingly through narrow, small-paned windows. Here he knew strange things had happened once, and there was a faint suggestion behind the surface that everything of that monstrous past might not—at least in the darkest, narrowest, and most intricately crooked alleys—have utterly perished. He also rowed out twice to the ill-regarded island in the river, and made a sketch of the singular angles described by the moss-grown rows of grey standing stones whose origin was so obscure and immemorial.
      Gilman’s room was of good size but queerly irregular shape; the north wall slanting perceptibly inward from the outer to the inner end, while the low ceiling slanted gently downward in the same direction. Aside from an obvious rat-hole and the signs of other stopped-up ones, there was no access—nor any appearance of a former avenue of access—to the space which must have existed between the slanting wall and the straight outer wall on the house’s north side, though a view from the exterior shewed where a window had been boarded up at a very remote date. The loft above the ceiling—which must have had a slanting floor—was likewise inaccessible. When Gilman climbed up a ladder to the cobwebbed level loft above the rest of the attic he found vestiges of a bygone aperture tightly and heavily covered with ancient planking and secured by the stout wooden pegs common in colonial carpentry. No amount of persuasion, however, could induce the stolid landlord to let him investigate either of these two closed spaces.
      As time wore along, his absorption in the irregular wall and ceiling of his room increased; for he began to read into the odd angles a mathematical significance which seemed to offer vague clues regarding their purpose. Old Keziah, he reflected, might have had excellent reasons for living in a room with peculiar angles; for was it not through certain angles that she claimed to have gone outside the boundaries of the world of space we know? His interest gradually veered away from the unplumbed voids beyond the slanting surfaces, since it now appeared that the purpose of those surfaces concerned the side he was already on.
      The touch of brain-fever and the dreams began early in February. For some time, apparently, the curious angles of Gilman’s room had been having a strange, almost hypnotic effect on him; and as the bleak winter advanced he had found himself staring more and more intently at the corner where the down-slanting ceiling met the inward-slanting wall. About this period his inability to concentrate on his formal studies worried him considerably, his apprehensions about the mid-year examinations being very acute. But the exaggerated sense of hearing was scarcely less annoying. Life had become an insistent and almost unendurable cacophony, and there was that constant, terrifying impression of other sounds—perhaps from regions beyond life—trembling on the very brink of audibility. So far as concrete noises went, the rats in the ancient partitions were the worst. Sometimes their scratching seemed not only furtive but deliberate. When it came from beyond the slanting north wall it was mixed with a sort of dry rattling—and when it came from the century-closed loft above the slanting ceiling Gilman always braced himself as if expecting some horror which only bided its time before descending to engulf him utterly.
      The dreams were wholly beyond the pale of sanity, and Gilman felt that they must be a result, jointly, of his studies in mathematics and in folklore. He had been thinking too much about the vague regions which his formulae told him must lie beyond the three dimensions we know, and about the possibility that old Keziah Mason—guided by some influence past all conjecture—had actually found the gate to those regions. The yellowed county records containing her testimony and that of her accusers were so damnably suggestive of things beyond human experience—and the descriptions of the darting little furry object which served as her familiar were so painfully realistic despite their incredible details.
      That object—no larger than a good-sized rat and quaintly called by the townspeople “Brown Jenkin”—seemed to have been the fruit of a remarkable case of sympathetic herd-delusion, for in 1692 no less than eleven persons had testified to glimpsing it. There were recent rumours, too, with a baffling and disconcerting amount of agreement. Witnesses said it had long hair and the shape of a rat, but that its sharp-toothed, bearded face was evilly human while its paws were like tiny human hands. It took messages betwixt old Keziah and the devil, and was nursed on the witch’s blood—which it sucked like a vampire. Its voice was a kind of loathsome titter, and it could speak all languages. Of all the bizarre monstrosities in Gilman’s dreams, nothing filled him with greater panic and nausea than this blasphemous and diminutive hybrid, whose image flitted across his vision in a form a thousandfold more hateful than anything his waking mind had deduced from the ancient records and the modern whispers.
      Gilman’s dreams consisted largely in plunges through limitless abysses of inexplicably coloured twilight and bafflingly disordered sound; abysses whose material and gravitational properties, and whose relation to his own entity, he could not even begin to explain. He did not walk or climb, fly or swim, crawl or wriggle; yet always experienced a mode of motion partly voluntary and partly involuntary. Of his own condition he could not well judge, for sight of his arms, legs, and torso seemed always cut off by some odd disarrangement of perspective; but he felt that his physical organisation and faculties were somehow marvellously transmuted and obliquely projected—though not without a certain grotesque relationship to his normal proportions and properties.
      The abysses were by no means vacant, being crowded with indescribably angled masses of alien-hued substance, some of which appeared to be organic while others seemed inorganic. A few of the organic objects tended to awake vague memories in the back of his mind, though he could form no conscious idea of what they mockingly resembled or suggested. In the later dreams he began to distinguish separate categories into which the organic objects appeared to be divided, and which seemed to involve in each case a radically different species of conduct-pattern and basic motivation. Of these categories one seemed to him to include objects slightly less illogical and irrelevant in their motions than the members of the other categories.
      All the objects—organic and inorganic alike—were totally beyond description or even comprehension. Gilman sometimes compared the inorganic masses to prisms, labyrinths, clusters of cubes and planes, and Cyclopean buildings; and the organic things struck him variously as groups of bubbles, octopi, centipedes, living Hindoo idols, and intricate Arabesques roused into a kind of ophidian animation. Everything he saw was unspeakably menacing and horrible; and whenever one of the organic entities appeared by its motions to be noticing him, he felt a stark, hideous fright which generally jolted him awake. Of how the organic entities moved, he could tell no more than of how he moved himself. In time he observed a further mystery—the tendency of certain entities to appear suddenly out of empty space, or to disappear totally with equal suddenness. The shrieking, roaring confusion of sound which permeated the abysses was past all analysis as to pitch, timbre, or rhythm; but seemed to be synchronous with vague visual changes in all the indefinite objects, organic and inorganic alike. Gilman had a constant sense of dread that it might rise to some unbearable degree of intensity during one or another of its obscure, relentlessly inevitable fluctuations.
      But it was not in these vortices of complete alienage that he saw Brown Jenkin. That shocking little horror was reserved for certain lighter, sharper dreams which assailed him just before he dropped into the fullest depths of sleep. He would be lying in the dark fighting to keep awake when a faint lambent glow would seem to shimmer around the centuried room, shewing in a violet mist the convergence of angled planes which had seized his brain so insidiously. The horror would appear to pop out of the rat-hole in the corner and patter toward him over the sagging, wide-planked floor with evil expectancy in its tiny, bearded human face—but mercifully, this dream always melted away before the object got close enough to nuzzle him. It had hellishly long, sharp, canine teeth. Gilman tried to stop up the rat-hole every day, but each night the real tenants of the partitions would gnaw away the obstruction, whatever it might be. Once he had the landlord nail tin over it, but the next night the rats gnawed a fresh hole—in making which they pushed or dragged out into the room a curious little fragment of bone.
      Gilman did not report his fever to the doctor, for he knew he could not pass the examinations if ordered to the college infirmary when every moment was needed for cramming. As it was, he failed in Calculus D and Advanced General Psychology, though not without hope of making up lost ground before the end of the term. It was in March when the fresh element entered his lighter preliminary dreaming, and the nightmare shape of Brown Jenkin began to be companioned by the nebulous blur which grew more and more to resemble a bent old woman. This addition disturbed him more than he could account for, but finally he decided that it was like an ancient crone whom he had twice actually encountered in the dark tangle of lanes near the abandoned wharves. On those occasions the evil, sardonic, and seemingly unmotivated stare of the beldame had set him almost shivering—especially the first time, when an overgrown rat darting across the shadowed mouth of a neighbouring alley had made him think irrationally of Brown Jenkin. Now, he reflected, those nervous fears were being mirrored in his disordered dreams.
      That the influence of the old house was unwholesome, he could not deny; but traces of his early morbid interest still held him there. He argued that the fever alone was responsible for his nightly phantasies, and that when the touch abated he would be free from the monstrous visions. Those visions, however, were of abhorrent vividness and convincingness, and whenever he awaked he retained a vague sense of having undergone much more than he remembered. He was hideously sure that in unrecalled dreams he had talked with both Brown Jenkin and the old woman, and that they had been urging him to go somewhere with them and to meet a third being of greater potency.
      Toward the end of March he began to pick up in his mathematics, though other studies bothered him increasingly. He was getting an intuitive knack for solving Riemannian equations, and astonished Professor Upham by his comprehension of fourth-dimensional and other problems which had floored all the rest of the class. One afternoon there was a discussion of possible freakish curvatures in space, and of theoretical points of approach or even contact between our part of the cosmos and various other regions as distant as the farthest stars or the trans-galactic gulfs themselves—or even as fabulously remote as the tentatively conceivable cosmic units beyond the whole Einsteinian space-time continuum. Gilman’s handling of this theme filled everyone with admiration, even though some of his hypothetical illustrations caused an increase in the always plentiful gossip about his nervous and solitary eccentricity. What made the students shake their heads was his sober theory that a man might—given mathematical knowledge admittedly beyond all likelihood of human acquirement—step deliberately from the earth to any other celestial body which might lie at one of an infinity of specific points in the cosmic pattern.
      Such a step, he said, would require only two stages; first, a passage out of the three-dimensional sphere we know, and second, a passage back to the three-dimensional sphere at another point, perhaps one of infinite remoteness. That this could be accomplished without loss of life was in many cases conceivable. Any being from any part of three-dimensional space could probably survive in the fourth dimension; and its survival of the second stage would depend upon what alien part of three-dimensional space it might select for its re-entry. Denizens of some planets might be able to live on certain others—even planets belonging to other galaxies, or to similar-dimensional phases of other space-time continua—though of course there must be vast numbers of mutually uninhabitable even though mathematically juxtaposed bodies or zones of space.
      It was also possible that the inhabitants of a given dimensional realm could survive entry to many unknown and incomprehensible realms of additional or indefinitely multiplied dimensions—be they within or outside the given space-time continuum—and that the converse would be likewise true. This was a matter for speculation, though one could be fairly certain that the type of mutation involved in a passage from any given dimensional plane to the next higher plane would not be destructive of biological integrity as we understand it. Gilman could not be very clear about his reasons for this last assumption, but his haziness here was more than overbalanced by his clearness on other complex points. Professor Upham especially liked his demonstration of the kinship of higher mathematics to certain phases of magical lore transmitted down the ages from an ineffable antiquity—human or pre-human—whose knowledge of the cosmos and its laws was greater than ours.
      Around the first of April Gilman worried considerably because his slow fever did not abate. He was also troubled by what some of his fellow-lodgers said about his sleep-walking. It seemed that he was often absent from his bed, and that the creaking of his floor at certain hours of the night was remarked by the man in the room below. This fellow also spoke of hearing the tread of shod feet in the night; but Gilman was sure he must have been mistaken in this, since shoes as well as other apparel were always precisely in place in the morning. One could develop all sorts of aural delusions in this morbid old house—for did not Gilman himself, even in daylight, now feel certain that noises other than rat-scratchings came from the black voids beyond the slanting wall and above the slanting ceiling? His pathologically sensitive ears began to listen for faint footfalls in the immemorially sealed loft overhead, and sometimes the illusion of such things was agonisingly realistic.
      However, he knew that he had actually become a somnambulist; for twice at night his room had been found vacant, though with all his clothing in place. Of this he had been assured by Frank Elwood, the one fellow-student whose poverty forced him to room in this squalid and unpopular house. Elwood had been studying in the small hours and had come up for help on a differential equation, only to find Gilman absent. It had been rather presumptuous of him to open the unlocked door after knocking had failed to rouse a response, but he had needed the help very badly and thought that his host would not mind a gentle prodding awake. On neither occasion, though, had Gilman been there—and when told of the matter he wondered where he could have been wandering, barefoot and with only his night-clothes on. He resolved to investigate the matter if reports of his sleep-walking continued, and thought of sprinkling flour on the floor of the corridor to see where his footsteps might lead. The door was the only conceivable egress, for there was no possible foothold outside the narrow window.
      As April advanced Gilman’s fever-sharpened ears were disturbed by the whining prayers of a superstitious loomfixer named Joe Mazurewicz, who had a room on the ground floor. Mazurewicz had told long, rambling stories about the ghost of old Keziah and the furry, sharp-fanged, nuzzling thing, and had said he was so badly haunted at times that only his silver crucifix—given him for the purpose by Father Iwanicki of St. Stanislaus’ Church—could bring him relief. Now he was praying because the Witches’ Sabbath was drawing near. May-Eve was Walpurgis-Night, when hell’s blackest evil roamed the earth and all the slaves of Satan gathered for nameless rites and deeds. It was always a very bad time in Arkham, even though the fine folks up in Miskatonic Avenue and High and Saltonstall Streets pretended to know nothing about it. There would be bad doings—and a child or two would probably be missing. Joe knew about such things, for his grandmother in the old country had heard tales from her grandmother. It was wise to pray and count one’s beads at this season. For three months Keziah and Brown Jenkin had not been near Joe’s room, nor near Paul Choynski’s room, nor anywhere else—and it meant no good when they held off like that. They must be up to something.
      Gilman dropped in at a doctor’s office on the 16th of the month, and was surprised to find his temperature was not as high as he had feared. The physician questioned him sharply, and advised him to see a nerve specialist. On reflection, he was glad he had not consulted the still more inquisitive college doctor. Old Waldron, who had curtailed his activities before, would have made him take a rest—an impossible thing now that he was so close to great results in his equations. He was certainly near the boundary between the known universe and the fourth dimension, and who could say how much farther he might go?
      But even as these thoughts came to him he wondered at the source of his strange confidence. Did all of this perilous sense of imminence come from the formulae on the sheets he covered day by day? The soft, stealthy, imaginary footsteps in the sealed loft above were unnerving. And now, too, there was a growing feeling that somebody was constantly persuading him to do something terrible which he could not do. How about the somnambulism? Where did he go sometimes in the night? And what was that faint suggestion of sound which once in a while seemed to trickle through the maddening confusion of identifiable sounds even in broad daylight and full wakefulness? Its rhythm did not correspond to anything on earth, unless perhaps to the cadence of one or two unmentionable Sabbat-chants, and sometimes he feared it corresponded to certain attributes of the vague shrieking or roaring in those wholly alien abysses of dream.
      The dreams were meanwhile getting to be atrocious. In the lighter preliminary phase the evil old woman was now of fiendish distinctness, and Gilman knew she was the one who had frightened him in the slums. Her bent back, long nose, and shrivelled chin were unmistakable, and her shapeless brown garments were like those he remembered. The expression on her face was one of hideous malevolence and exultation, and when he awaked he could recall a croaking voice that persuaded and threatened. He must meet the Black Man, and go with them all to the throne of Azathoth at the centre of ultimate Chaos. That was what she said. He must sign in his own blood the book of Azathoth and take a new secret name now that his independent delvings had gone so far. What kept him from going with her and Brown Jenkin and the other to the throne of Chaos where the thin flutes pipe mindlessly was the fact that he had seen the name “Azathoth” in the Necronomicon, and knew it stood for a primal evil too horrible for description.
      The old woman always appeared out of thin air near the corner where the downward slant met the inward slant. She seemed to crystallise at a point closer to the ceiling than to the floor, and every night she was a little nearer and more distinct before the dream shifted. Brown Jenkin, too, was always a little nearer at the last, and its yellowish-white fangs glistened shockingly in that unearthly violet phosphorescence. Its shrill loathsome tittering stuck more and more in Gilman’s head, and he could remember in the morning how it had pronounced the words “Azathoth” and “Nyarlathotep”.
      In the deeper dreams everything was likewise more distinct, and Gilman felt that the twilight abysses around him were those of the fourth dimension. Those organic entities whose motions seemed least flagrantly irrelevant and unmotivated were probably projections of life-forms from our own planet, including human beings. What the others were in their own dimensional sphere or spheres he dared not try to think. Two of the less irrelevantly moving things—a rather large congeries of iridescent, prolately spheroidal bubbles and a very much smaller polyhedron of unknown colours and rapidly shifting surface angles—seemed to take notice of him and follow him about or float ahead as he changed position among the titan prisms, labyrinths, cube-and-plane clusters, and quasi-buildings; and all the while the vague shrieking and roaring waxed louder and louder, as if approaching some monstrous climax of utterly unendurable intensity.
      During the night of April 19–20 the new development occurred. Gilman was half-involuntarily moving about in the twilight abysses with the bubble-mass and the small polyhedron floating ahead, when he noticed the peculiarly regular angles formed by the edges of some gigantic neighbouring prism-clusters. In another second he was out of the abyss and standing tremulously on a rocky hillside bathed in intense, diffused green light. He was barefooted and in his night-clothes, and when he tried to walk discovered that he could scarcely lift his feet. A swirling vapour hid everything but the immediate sloping terrain from sight, and he shrank from the thought of the sounds that might surge out of that vapour.
      Then he saw the two shapes laboriously crawling toward him—the old woman and the little furry thing. The crone strained up to her knees and managed to cross her arms in a singular fashion, while Brown Jenkin pointed in a certain direction with a horribly anthropoid fore paw which it raised with evident difficulty. Spurred by an impulse he did not originate, Gilman dragged himself forward along a course determined by the angle of the old woman’s arms and the direction of the small monstrosity’s paw, and before he had shuffled three steps he was back in the twilight abysses. Geometrical shapes seethed around him, and he fell dizzily and interminably. At last he woke in his bed in the crazily angled garret of the eldritch old house.
      He was good for nothing that morning, and stayed away from all his classes. Some unknown attraction was pulling his eyes in a seemingly irrelevant direction, for he could not help staring at a certain vacant spot on the floor. As the day advanced the focus of his unseeing eyes changed position, and by noon he had conquered the impulse to stare at vacancy. About two o’clock he went out for lunch, and as he threaded the narrow lanes of the city he found himself turning always to the southeast. Only an effort halted him at a cafeteria in Church Street, and after the meal he felt the unknown pull still more strongly.
      He would have to consult a nerve specialist after all—perhaps there was a connexion with his somnambulism—but meanwhile he might at least try to break the morbid spell himself. Undoubtedly he could still manage to walk away from the pull; so with great resolution he headed against it and dragged himself deliberately north along Garrison Street. By the time he had reached the bridge over the Miskatonic he was in a cold perspiration, and he clutched at the iron railing as he gazed upstream at the ill-regarded island whose regular lines of ancient standing stones brooded sullenly in the afternoon sunlight.
      Then he gave a start. For there was a clearly visible living figure on that desolate island, and a second glance told him it was certainly the strange old woman whose sinister aspect had worked itself so disastrously into his dreams. The tall grass near her was moving, too, as if some other living thing were crawling close to the ground. When the old woman began to turn toward him he fled precipitately off the bridge and into the shelter of the town’s labyrinthine waterfront alleys. Distant though the island was, he felt that a monstrous and invincible evil could flow from the sardonic stare of that bent, ancient figure in brown.
      The southeastward pull still held, and only with tremendous resolution could Gilman drag himself into the old house and up the rickety stairs. For hours he sat silent and aimless, with his eyes shifting gradually westward. About six o’clock his sharpened ears caught the whining prayers of Joe Mazurewicz two floors below, and in desperation he seized his hat and walked out into the sunset-golden streets, letting the now directly southward pull carry him where it might. An hour later darkness found him in the open fields beyond Hangman’s Brook, with the glimmering spring stars shining ahead. The urge to walk was gradually changing to an urge to leap mystically into space, and suddenly he realised just where the source of the pull lay.
      It was in the sky. A definite point among the stars had a claim on him and was calling him. Apparently it was a point somewhere between Hydra and Argo Navis, and he knew that he had been urged toward it ever since he had awaked soon after dawn. In the morning it had been underfoot; afternoon found it rising in the southeast, and now it was roughly south but wheeling toward the west. What was the meaning of this new thing? Was he going mad? How long would it last? Again mustering his resolution, Gilman turned and dragged himself back to the sinister old house.
      Mazurewicz was waiting for him at the door, and seemed both anxious and reluctant to whisper some fresh bit of superstition. It was about the witch light. Joe had been out celebrating the night before—it was Patriots’ Day in Massachusetts—and had come home after midnight. Looking up at the house from outside, he had thought at first that Gilman’s window was dark; but then he had seen the faint violet glow within. He wanted to warn the gentleman about that glow, for everybody in Arkham knew it was Keziah’s witch light which played near Brown Jenkin and the ghost of the old crone herself. He had not mentioned this before, but now he must tell about it because it meant that Keziah and her long-toothed familiar were haunting the young gentleman. Sometimes he and Paul Choynski and Landlord Dombrowski thought they saw that light seeping out of cracks in the sealed loft above the young gentleman’s room, but they had all agreed not to talk about that. However, it would be better for the gentleman to take another room and get a crucifix from some good priest like Father Iwanicki.
      As the man rambled on Gilman felt a nameless panic clutch at his throat. He knew that Joe must have been half drunk when he came home the night before, yet this mention of a violet light in the garret window was of frightful import. It was a lambent glow of this sort which always played about the old woman and the small furry thing in those lighter, sharper dreams which prefaced his plunge into unknown abysses, and the thought that a wakeful second person could see the dream-luminance was utterly beyond sane harbourage. Yet where had the fellow got such an odd notion? Had he himself talked as well as walked around the house in his sleep? No, Joe said, he had not—but he must check up on this. Perhaps Frank Elwood could tell him something, though he hated to ask.
      Fever—wild dreams—somnambulism—illusions of sounds—a pull toward a point in the sky—and now a suspicion of insane sleep-talking! He must stop studying, see a nerve specialist, and take himself in hand. When he climbed to the second story he paused at Elwood’s door but saw that the other youth was out. Reluctantly he continued up to his garret room and sat down in the dark. His gaze was still pulled to the southwest, but he also found himself listening intently for some sound in the closed loft above, and half imagining that an evil violet light seeped down through an infinitesimal crack in the low, slanting ceiling.
      That night as Gilman slept the violet light broke upon him with heightened intensity, and the old witch and small furry thing—getting closer than ever before—mocked him with inhuman squeals and devilish gestures. He was glad to sink into the vaguely roaring twilight abysses, though the pursuit of that iridescent bubble-congeries and that kaleidoscopic little polyhedron was menacing and irritating. Then came the shift as vast converging planes of a slippery-looking substance loomed above and below him—a shift which ended in a flash of delirium and a blaze of unknown, alien light in which yellow, carmine, and indigo were madly and inextricably blended.
      He was half lying on a high, fantastically balustraded terrace above a boundless jungle of outlandish, incredible peaks, balanced planes, domes, minarets, horizontal discs poised on pinnacles, and numberless forms of still greater wildness—some of stone and some of metal—which glittered gorgeously in the mixed, almost blistering glare from a polychromatic sky. Looking upward he saw three stupendous discs of flame, each of a different hue, and at a different height above an infinitely distant curving horizon of low mountains. Behind him tiers of higher terraces towered aloft as far as he could see. The city below stretched away to the limits of vision, and he hoped that no sound would well up from it.
      The pavement from which he easily raised himself was of a veined, polished stone beyond his power to identify, and the tiles were cut in bizarre-angled shapes which struck him as less asymmetrical than based on some unearthly symmetry whose laws he could not comprehend. The balustrade was chest-high, delicate, and fantastically wrought, while along the rail were ranged at short intervals little figures of grotesque design and exquisite workmanship. They, like the whole balustrade, seemed to be made of some sort of shining metal whose colour could not be guessed in this chaos of mixed effulgences; and their nature utterly defied conjecture. They represented some ridged, barrel-shaped object with thin horizontal arms radiating spoke-like from a central ring, and with vertical knobs or bulbs projecting from the head and base of the barrel. Each of these knobs was the hub of a system of five long, flat, triangularly tapering arms arranged around it like the arms of a starfish—nearly horizontal, but curving slightly away from the central barrel. The base of the bottom knob was fused to the long railing with so delicate a point of contact that several figures had been broken off and were missing. The figures were about four and a half inches in height, while the spiky arms gave them a maximum diameter of about two and a half inches.
      When Gilman stood up the tiles felt hot to his bare feet. He was wholly alone, and his first act was to walk to the balustrade and look dizzily down at the endless, Cyclopean city almost two thousand feet below. As he listened he thought a rhythmic confusion of faint musical pipings covering a wide tonal range welled up from the narrow streets beneath, and he wished he might discern the denizens of the place. The sight turned him giddy after a while, so that he would have fallen to the pavement had he not clutched instinctively at the lustrous balustrade. His right hand fell on one of the projecting figures, the touch seeming to steady him slightly. It was too much, however, for the exotic delicacy of the metal-work, and the spiky figure snapped off under his grasp. Still half-dazed, he continued to clutch it as his other hand seized a vacant space on the smooth railing.
      But now his oversensitive ears caught something behind him, and he looked back across the level terrace. Approaching him softly though without apparent furtiveness were five figures, two of which were the sinister old woman and the fanged, furry little animal. The other three were what sent him unconscious—for they were living entities about eight feet high, shaped precisely like the spiky images on the balustrade, and propelling themselves by a spider-like wriggling of their lower set of starfish-arms.
      Gilman awakened in his bed, drenched by a cold perspiration and with a smarting sensation in his face, hands, and feet. Springing to the floor, he washed and dressed in frantic haste, as if it were necessary for him to get out of the house as quickly as possible. He did not know where he wished to go, but felt that once more he would have to sacrifice his classes. The odd pull toward that spot in the sky between Hydra and Argo had abated, but another of even greater strength had taken its place. Now he felt that he must go north—infinitely north. He dreaded to cross the bridge that gave a view of the desolate island in the Miskatonic, so went over the Peabody Avenue bridge. Very often he stumbled, for his eyes and ears were chained to an extremely lofty point in the blank blue sky.
      After about an hour he got himself under better control, and saw that he was far from the city. All around him stretched the bleak emptiness of salt marshes, while the narrow road ahead led to Innsmouth—that ancient, half-deserted town which Arkham people were so curiously unwilling to visit. Though the northward pull had not diminished, he resisted it as he had resisted the other pull, and finally found that he could almost balance the one against the other. Plodding back to town and getting some coffee at a soda fountain, he dragged himself into the public library and browsed aimlessly among the lighter magazines. Once he met some friends who remarked how oddly sunburned he looked, but he did not tell them of his walk. At three o’clock he took some lunch at a restaurant, noting meanwhile that the pull had either lessened or divided itself. After that he killed the time at a cheap cinema show, seeing the inane performance over and over again without paying any attention to it.
      About nine at night he drifted homeward and stumbled into the ancient house. Joe Mazurewicz was whining unintelligible prayers, and Gilman hastened up to his own garret chamber without pausing to see if Elwood was in. It was when he turned on the feeble electric light that the shock came. At once he saw there was something on the table which did not belong there, and a second look left no room for doubt. Lying on its side—for it could not stand up alone—was the exotic spiky figure which in his monstrous dream he had broken off the fantastic balustrade. No detail was missing. The ridged, barrel-shaped centre, the thin, radiating arms, the knobs at each end, and the flat, slightly outward-curving starfish-arms spreading from those knobs—all were there. In the electric light the colour seemed to be a kind of iridescent grey veined with green, and Gilman could see amidst his horror and bewilderment that one of the knobs ended in a jagged break corresponding to its former point of attachment to the dream-railing.
      Only his tendency toward a dazed stupor prevented him from screaming aloud. This fusion of dream and reality was too much to bear. Still dazed, he clutched at the spiky thing and staggered downstairs to Landlord Dombrowski’s quarters. The whining prayers of the superstitious loomfixer were still sounding through the mouldy halls, but Gilman did not mind them now. The landlord was in, and greeted him pleasantly. No, he had not seen that thing before and did not know anything about it. But his wife had said she found a funny tin thing in one of the beds when she fixed the rooms at noon, and maybe that was it. Dombrowski called her, and she waddled in. Yes, that was the thing. She had found it in the young gentleman’s bed—on the side next the wall. It had looked very queer to her, but of course the young gentleman had lots of queer things in his room—books and curios and pictures and markings on paper. She certainly knew nothing about it.
      So Gilman climbed upstairs again in a mental turmoil, convinced that he was either still dreaming or that his somnambulism had run to incredible extremes and led him to depredations in unknown places. Where had he got this outré thing? He did not recall seeing it in any museum in Arkham. It must have been somewhere, though; and the sight of it as he snatched it in his sleep must have caused the odd dream-picture of the balustraded terrace. Next day he would make some very guarded inquiries—and perhaps see the nerve specialist.
      Meanwhile he would try to keep track of his somnambulism. As he went upstairs and across the garret hall he sprinkled about some flour which he had borrowed—with a frank admission as to its purpose—from the landlord. He had stopped at Elwood’s door on the way, but had found all dark within. Entering his room, he placed the spiky thing on the table, and lay down in complete mental and physical exhaustion without pausing to undress. From the closed loft above the slanting ceiling he thought he heard a faint scratching and padding, but he was too disorganised even to mind it. That cryptical pull from the north was getting very strong again, though it seemed now to come from a lower place in the sky.
      In the dazzling violet light of dream the old woman and the fanged, furry thing came again and with a greater distinctness than on any former occasion. This time they actually reached him, and he felt the crone’s withered claws clutching at him. He was pulled out of bed and into empty space, and for a moment he heard a rhythmic roaring and saw the twilight amorphousness of the vague abysses seething around him. But that moment was very brief, for presently he was in a crude, windowless little space with rough beams and planks rising to a peak just above his head, and with a curious slanting floor underfoot. Propped level on that floor were low cases full of books of every degree of antiquity and disintegration, and in the centre were a table and bench, both apparently fastened in place. Small objects of unknown shape and nature were ranged on the tops of the cases, and in the flaming violet light Gilman thought he saw a counterpart of the spiky image which had puzzled him so horribly. On the left the floor fell abruptly away, leaving a black triangular gulf out of which, after a second’s dry rattling, there presently climbed the hateful little furry thing with the yellow fangs and bearded human face.
      The evilly grinning beldame still clutched him, and beyond the table stood a figure he had never seen before—a tall, lean man of dead black colouration but without the slightest sign of negroid features; wholly devoid of either hair or beard, and wearing as his only garment a shapeless robe of some heavy black fabric. His feet were indistinguishable because of the table and bench, but he must have been shod, since there was a clicking whenever he changed position. The man did not speak, and bore no trace of expression on his small, regular features. He merely pointed to a book of prodigious size which lay open on the table, while the beldame thrust a huge grey quill into Gilman’s right hand. Over everything was a pall of intensely maddening fear, and the climax was reached when the furry thing ran up the dreamer’s clothing to his shoulders and then down his left arm, finally biting him sharply in the wrist just below his cuff. As the blood spurted from this wound Gilman lapsed into a faint.
      He awaked on the morning of the 22nd with a pain in his left wrist, and saw that his cuff was brown with dried blood. His recollections were very confused, but the scene with the black man in the unknown space stood out vividly. The rats must have bitten him as he slept, giving rise to the climax of that frightful dream. Opening the door, he saw that the flour on the corridor floor was undisturbed except for the huge prints of the loutish fellow who roomed at the other end of the garret. So he had not been sleep-walking this time. But something would have to be done about those rats. He would speak to the landlord about them. Again he tried to stop up the hole at the base of the slanting wall, wedging in a candlestick which seemed of about the right size. His ears were ringing horribly, as if with the residual echoes of some horrible noise heard in dreams.
      As he bathed and changed clothes he tried to recall what he had dreamed after the scene in the violet-litten space, but nothing definite would crystallise in his mind. That scene itself must have corresponded to the sealed loft overhead, which had begun to attack his imagination so violently, but later impressions were faint and hazy. There were suggestions of the vague, twilight abysses, and of still vaster, blacker abysses beyond them—abysses in which all fixed suggestions of form were absent. He had been taken there by the bubble-congeries and the little polyhedron which always dogged him; but they, like himself, had changed to wisps of milky, barely luminous mist in this farther void of ultimate blackness. Something else had gone on ahead—a larger wisp which now and then condensed into nameless approximations of form—and he thought that their progress had not been in a straight line, but rather along the alien curves and spirals of some ethereal vortex which obeyed laws unknown to the physics and mathematics of any conceivable cosmos. Eventually there had been a hint of vast, leaping shadows, of a monstrous, half-acoustic pulsing, and of the thin, monotonous piping of an unseen flute—but that was all. Gilman decided he had picked up that last conception from what he had read in the Necronomicon about the mindless entity Azathoth, which rules all time and space from a curiously environed black throne at the centre of Chaos.
      When the blood was washed away the wrist wound proved very slight, and Gilman puzzled over the location of the two tiny punctures. It occurred to him that there was no blood on the bedspread where he had lain—which was very curious in view of the amount on his skin and cuff. Had he been sleep-walking within his room, and had the rat bitten him as he sat in some chair or paused in some less rational position? He looked in every corner for brownish drops or stains, but did not find any. He had better, he thought, sprinkle flour within the room as well as outside the door—though after all no further proof of his sleep-walking was needed. He knew he did walk—and the thing to do now was to stop it. He must ask Frank Elwood for help. This morning the strange pulls from space seemed lessened, though they were replaced by another sensation even more inexplicable. It was a vague, insistent impulse to fly away from his present situation, but held not a hint of the specific direction in which he wished to fly. As he picked up the strange spiky image on the table he thought the older northward pull grew a trifle stronger; but even so, it was wholly overruled by the newer and more bewildering urge.
      He took the spiky image down to Elwood’s room, steeling himself against the whines of the loomfixer which welled up from the ground floor. Elwood was in, thank heaven, and appeared to be stirring about. There was time for a little conversation before leaving for breakfast and college, so Gilman hurriedly poured forth an account of his recent dreams and fears. His host was very sympathetic, and agreed that something ought to be done. He was shocked by his guest’s drawn, haggard aspect, and noticed the queer, abnormal-looking sunburn which others had remarked during the past week. There was not much, though, that he could say. He had not seen Gilman on any sleep-walking expedition, and had no idea what the curious image could be. He had, though, heard the French-Canadian who lodged just under Gilman talking to Mazurewicz one evening. They were telling each other how badly they dreaded the coming of Walpurgis-Night, now only a few days off; and were exchanging pitying comments about the poor, doomed young gentleman. Desrochers, the fellow under Gilman’s room, had spoken of nocturnal footsteps both shod and unshod, and of the violet light he saw one night when he had stolen fearfully up to peer through Gilman’s keyhole. He had not dared to peer, he told Mazurewicz, after he had glimpsed that light through the cracks around the door. There had been soft talking, too—and as he began to describe it his voice had sunk to an inaudible whisper.
      Elwood could not imagine what had set these superstitious creatures gossiping, but supposed their imaginations had been roused by Gilman’s late hours and somnolent walking and talking on the one hand, and by the nearness of traditionally feared May-Eve on the other hand. That Gilman talked in his sleep was plain, and it was obviously from Desrochers’ keyhole-listenings that the delusive notion of the violet dream-light had got abroad. These simple people were quick to imagine they had seen any odd thing they had heard about. As for a plan of action—Gilman had better move down to Elwood’s room and avoid sleeping alone. Elwood would, if awake, rouse him whenever he began to talk or rise in his sleep. Very soon, too, he must see the specialist. Meanwhile they would take the spiky image around to the various museums and to certain professors; seeking identification and stating that it had been found in a public rubbish-can. Also, Dombrowski must attend to the poisoning of those rats in the walls.
      Braced up by Elwood’s companionship, Gilman attended classes that day. Strange urges still tugged at him, but he could sidetrack them with considerable success. During a free period he shewed the queer image to several professors, all of whom were intensely interested, though none of them could shed any light upon its nature or origin. That night he slept on a couch which Elwood had had the landlord bring to the second-story room, and for the first time in weeks was wholly free from disquieting dreams. But the feverishness still hung on, and the whines of the loomfixer were an unnerving influence.
      During the next few days Gilman enjoyed an almost perfect immunity from morbid manifestations. He had, Elwood said, shewed no tendency to talk or rise in his sleep; and meanwhile the landlord was putting rat-poison everywhere. The only disturbing element was the talk among the superstitious foreigners, whose imaginations had become highly excited. Mazurewicz was always trying to make him get a crucifix, and finally forced one upon him which he said had been blessed by the good Father Iwanicki. Desrochers, too, had something to say—in fact, he insisted that cautious steps had sounded in the now vacant room above him on the first and second nights of Gilman’s absence from it. Paul Choynski thought he heard sounds in the halls and on the stairs at night, and claimed that his door had been softly tried, while Mrs. Dombrowski vowed she had seen Brown Jenkin for the first time since All-Hallows. But such naive reports could mean very little, and Gilman let the cheap metal crucifix hang idly from a knob on his host’s dresser.
      For three days Gilman and Elwood canvassed the local museums in an effort to identify the strange spiky image, but always without success. In every quarter, however, interest was intense; for the utter alienage of the thing was a tremendous challenge to scientific curiosity. One of the small radiating arms was broken off and subjected to chemical analysis, and the result is still talked about in college circles. Professor Ellery found platinum, iron, and tellurium in the strange alloy; but mixed with these were at least three other apparent elements of high atomic weight which chemistry was absolutely powerless to classify. Not only did they fail to correspond with any known element, but they did not even fit the vacant places reserved for probable elements in the periodic system. The mystery remains unsolved to this day, though the image is on exhibition at the museum of Miskatonic University.
      On the morning of April 27 a fresh rat-hole appeared in the room where Gilman was a guest, but Dombrowski tinned it up during the day. The poison was not having much effect, for scratchings and scurryings in the walls were virtually undiminished. Elwood was out late that night, and Gilman waited up for him. He did not wish to go to sleep in a room alone—especially since he thought he had glimpsed in the evening twilight the repellent old woman whose image had become so horribly transferred to his dreams. He wondered who she was, and what had been near her rattling the tin can in a rubbish-heap at the mouth of a squalid courtyard. The crone had seemed to notice him and leer evilly at him—though perhaps this was merely his imagination.
      The next day both youths felt very tired, and knew they would sleep like logs when night came. In the evening they drowsily discussed the mathematical studies which had so completely and perhaps harmfully engrossed Gilman, and speculated about the linkage with ancient magic and folklore which seemed so darkly probable. They spoke of old Keziah Mason, and Elwood agreed that Gilman had good scientific grounds for thinking she might have stumbled on strange and significant information. The hidden cults to which these witches belonged often guarded and handed down surprising secrets from elder, forgotten aeons; and it was by no means impossible that Keziah had actually mastered the art of passing through dimensional gates. Tradition emphasises the uselessness of material barriers in halting a witch’s motions; and who can say what underlies the old tales of broomstick rides through the night?
      Whether a modern student could ever gain similar powers from mathematical research alone, was still to be seen. Success, Gilman added, might lead to dangerous and unthinkable situations; for who could foretell the conditions pervading an adjacent but normally inaccessible dimension? On the other hand, the picturesque possibilities were enormous. Time could not exist in certain belts of space, and by entering and remaining in such a belt one might preserve one’s life and age indefinitely; never suffering organic metabolism or deterioration except for slight amounts incurred during visits to one’s own or similar planes. One might, for example, pass into a timeless dimension and emerge at some remote period of the earth’s history as young as before.
      Whether anybody had ever managed to do this, one could hardly conjecture with any degree of authority. Old legends are hazy and ambiguous, and in historic times all attempts at crossing forbidden gaps seem complicated by strange and terrible alliances with beings and messengers from outside. There was the immemorial figure of the deputy or messenger of hidden and terrible powers—the “Black Man” of the witch-cult, and the “Nyarlathotep” of the Necronomicon. There was, too, the baffling problem of the lesser messengers or intermediaries—the quasi-animals and queer hybrids which legend depicts as witches’ familiars. As Gilman and Elwood retired, too sleepy to argue further, they heard Joe Mazurewicz reel into the house half-drunk, and shuddered at the desperate wildness of his whining prayers.
      That night Gilman saw the violet light again. In his dream he had heard a scratching and gnawing in the partitions, and thought that someone fumbled clumsily at the latch. Then he saw the old woman and the small furry thing advancing toward him over the carpeted floor. The beldame’s face was alight with inhuman exultation, and the little yellow-toothed morbidity tittered mockingly as it pointed at the heavily sleeping form of Elwood on the other couch across the room. A paralysis of fear stifled all attempts to cry out. As once before, the hideous crone seized Gilman by the shoulders, yanking him out of bed and into empty space. Again the infinitude of the shrieking twilight abysses flashed past him, but in another second he thought he was in a dark, muddy, unknown alley of foetid odours, with the rotting walls of ancient houses towering up on every hand.
      Ahead was the robed black man he had seen in the peaked space in the other dream, while from a lesser distance the old woman was beckoning and grimacing imperiously. Brown Jenkin was rubbing itself with a kind of affectionate playfulness around the ankles of the black man, which the deep mud largely concealed. There was a dark open doorway on the right, to which the black man silently pointed. Into this the grimacing crone started, dragging Gilman after her by his pajama sleeve. There were evil-smelling staircases which creaked ominously, and on which the old woman seemed to radiate a faint violet light; and finally a door leading off a landing. The crone fumbled with the latch and pushed the door open, motioning to Gilman to wait and disappearing inside the black aperture.
      The youth’s oversensitive ears caught a hideous strangled cry, and presently the beldame came out of the room bearing a small, senseless form which she thrust at the dreamer as if ordering him to carry it. The sight of this form, and the expression on its face, broke the spell. Still too dazed to cry out, he plunged recklessly down the noisome staircase and into the mud outside; halting only when seized and choked by the waiting black man. As consciousness departed he heard the faint, shrill tittering of the fanged, rat-like abnormality.
      On the morning of the 29th Gilman awaked into a maelstrom of horror. The instant he opened his eyes he knew something was terribly wrong, for he was back in his old garret room with the slanting wall and ceiling, sprawled on the now unmade bed. His throat was aching inexplicably, and as he struggled to a sitting posture he saw with growing fright that his feet and pajama-bottoms were brown with caked mud. For the moment his recollections were hopelessly hazy, but he knew at least that he must have been sleep-walking. Elwood had been lost too deeply in slumber to hear and stop him. On the floor were confused muddy prints, but oddly enough they did not extend all the way to the door. The more Gilman looked at them, the more peculiar they seemed; for in addition to those he could recognise as his there were some smaller, almost round markings—such as the legs of a large chair or table might make, except that most of them tended to be divided into halves. There were also some curious muddy rat-tracks leading out of a fresh hole and back into it again. Utter bewilderment and the fear of madness racked Gilman as he staggered to the door and saw that there were no muddy prints outside. The more he remembered of his hideous dream the more terrified he felt, and it added to his desperation to hear Joe Mazurewicz chanting mournfully two floors below.
      Descending to Elwood’s room he roused his still-sleeping host and began telling of how he had found himself, but Elwood could form no idea of what might really have happened. Where Gilman could have been, how he got back to his room without making tracks in the hall, and how the muddy, furniture-like prints came to be mixed with his in the garret chamber, were wholly beyond conjecture. Then there were those dark, livid marks on his throat, as if he had tried to strangle himself. He put his hands up to them, but found that they did not even approximately fit. While they were talking Desrochers dropped in to say that he had heard a terrific clattering overhead in the dark small hours. No, there had been no one on the stairs after midnight—though just before midnight he had heard faint footfalls in the garret, and cautiously descending steps he did not like. It was, he added, a very bad time of year for Arkham. The young gentleman had better be sure to wear the crucifix Joe Mazurewicz had given him. Even the daytime was not safe, for after dawn there had been strange sounds in the house—especially a thin, childish wail hastily choked off.
      Gilman mechanically attended classes that morning, but was wholly unable to fix his mind on his studies. A mood of hideous apprehension and expectancy had seized him, and he seemed to be awaiting the fall of some annihilating blow. At noon he lunched at the University Spa, picking up a paper from the next seat as he waited for dessert. But he never ate that dessert; for an item on the paper’s first page left him limp, wild-eyed, and able only to pay his check and stagger back to Elwood’s room.
      There had been a strange kidnapping the night before in Orne’s Gangway, and the two-year-old child of a clod-like laundry worker named Anastasia Wolejko had completely vanished from sight. The mother, it appeared, had feared the event for some time; but the reasons she assigned for her fear were so grotesque that no one took them seriously. She had, she said, seen Brown Jenkin about the place now and then ever since early in March, and knew from its grimaces and titterings that little Ladislas must be marked for sacrifice at the awful Sabbat on Walpurgis-Night. She had asked her neighbour Mary Czanek to sleep in the room and try to protect the child, but Mary had not dared. She could not tell the police, for they never believed such things. Children had been taken that way every year ever since she could remember. And her friend Pete Stowacki would not help because he wanted the child out of the way anyhow.
      But what threw Gilman into a cold perspiration was the report of a pair of revellers who had been walking past the mouth of the gangway just after midnight. They admitted they had been drunk, but both vowed they had seen a crazily dressed trio furtively entering the dark passageway. There had, they said, been a huge robed negro, a little old woman in rags, and a young white man in his night-clothes. The old woman had been dragging the youth, while around the feet of the negro a tame rat was rubbing and weaving in the brown mud.
      Gilman sat in a daze all the afternoon, and Elwood—who had meanwhile seen the papers and formed terrible conjectures from them—found him thus when he came home. This time neither could doubt but that something hideously serious was closing in around them. Between the phantasms of nightmare and the realities of the objective world a monstrous and unthinkable relationship was crystallising, and only stupendous vigilance could avert still more direful developments. Gilman must see a specialist sooner or later, but not just now, when all the papers were full of this kidnapping business.
      Just what had really happened was maddeningly obscure, and for a moment both Gilman and Elwood exchanged whispered theories of the wildest kind. Had Gilman unconsciously succeeded better than he knew in his studies of space and its dimensions? Had he actually slipped outside our sphere to points unguessed and unimaginable? Where—if anywhere—had he been on those nights of daemoniac alienage? The roaring twilight abysses—the green hillside—the blistering terrace—the pulls from the stars—the ultimate black vortex—the black man—the muddy alley and the stairs—the old witch and the fanged, furry horror—the bubble-congeries and the little polyhedron—the strange sunburn—the wrist wound—the unexplained image—the muddy feet—the throat-marks—the tales and fears of the superstitious foreigners—what did all this mean? To what extent could the laws of sanity apply to such a case?
      There was no sleep for either of them that night, but next day they both cut classes and drowsed. This was April 30th, and with the dusk would come the hellish Sabbat-time which all the foreigners and the superstitious old folk feared. Mazurewicz came home at six o’clock and said people at the mill were whispering that the Walpurgis-revels would be held in the dark ravine beyond Meadow Hill where the old white stone stands in a place queerly void of all plant-life. Some of them had even told the police and advised them to look there for the missing Wolejko child, but they did not believe anything would be done. Joe insisted that the poor young gentleman wear his nickel-chained crucifix, and Gilman put it on and dropped it inside his shirt to humour the fellow.
      Late at night the two youths sat drowsing in their chairs, lulled by the rhythmical praying of the loomfixer on the floor below. Gilman listened as he nodded, his preternaturally sharpened hearing seeming to strain for some subtle, dreaded murmur beyond the noises in the ancient house. Unwholesome recollections of things in the Necronomicon and the Black Book welled up, and he found himself swaying to infandous rhythms said to pertain to the blackest ceremonies of the Sabbat and to have an origin outside the time and space we comprehend.
      Presently he realised what he was listening for—the hellish chant of the celebrants in the distant black valley. How did he know so much about what they expected? How did he know the time when Nahab and her acolyte were due to bear the brimming bowl which would follow the black cock and the black goat? He saw that Elwood had dropped asleep, and tried to call out and waken him. Something, however, closed his throat. He was not his own master. Had he signed the black man’s book after all?
      Then his fevered, abnormal hearing caught the distant, windborne notes. Over miles of hill and field and alley they came, but he recognised them none the less. The fires must be lit, and the dancers must be starting in. How could he keep himself from going? What was it that had enmeshed him? Mathematics—folklore—the house—old Keziah—Brown Jenkin . . . and now he saw that there was a fresh rat-hole in the wall near his couch. Above the distant chanting and the nearer praying of Joe Mazurewicz came another sound—a stealthy, determined scratching in the partitions. He hoped the electric lights would not go out. Then he saw the fanged, bearded little face in the rat-hole—the accursed little face which he at last realised bore such a shocking, mocking resemblance to old Keziah’s—and heard the faint fumbling at the door.
      The screaming twilight abysses flashed before him, and he felt himself helpless in the formless grasp of the iridescent bubble-congeries. Ahead raced the small, kaleidoscopic polyhedron, and all through the churning void there was a heightening and acceleration of the vague tonal pattern which seemed to foreshadow some unutterable and unendurable climax. He seemed to know what was coming—the monstrous burst of Walpurgis-rhythm in whose cosmic timbre would be concentrated all the primal, ultimate space-time seethings which lie behind the massed spheres of matter and sometimes break forth in measured reverberations that penetrate faintly to every layer of entity and give hideous significance throughout the worlds to certain dreaded periods.
      But all this vanished in a second. He was again in the cramped, violet-litten peaked space with the slanting floor, the low cases of ancient books, the bench and table, the queer objects, and the triangular gulf at one side. On the table lay a small white figure—an infant boy, unclothed and unconscious—while on the other side stood the monstrous, leering old woman with a gleaming, grotesque-hafted knife in her right hand, and a queerly proportioned pale metal bowl covered with curiously chased designs and having delicate lateral handles in her left. She was intoning some croaking ritual in a language which Gilman could not understand, but which seemed like something guardedly quoted in the Necronomicon.
      As the scene grew clear he saw the ancient crone bend forward and extend the empty bowl across the table—and unable to control his own motions, he reached far forward and took it in both hands, noticing as he did so its comparative lightness. At the same moment the disgusting form of Brown Jenkin scrambled up over the brink of the triangular black gulf on his left. The crone now motioned him to hold the bowl in a certain position while she raised the huge, grotesque knife above the small white victim as high as her right hand could reach. The fanged, furry thing began tittering a continuation of the unknown ritual, while the witch croaked loathsome responses. Gilman felt a gnawing, poignant abhorrence shoot through his mental and emotional paralysis, and the light metal bowl shook in his grasp. A second later the downward motion of the knife broke the spell completely, and he dropped the bowl with a resounding bell-like clangour while his hands darted out frantically to stop the monstrous deed.
      In an instant he had edged up the slanting floor around the end of the table and wrenched the knife from the old woman’s claws; sending it clattering over the brink of the narrow triangular gulf. In another instant, however, matters were reversed; for those murderous claws had locked themselves tightly around his own throat, while the wrinkled face was twisted with insane fury. He felt the chain of the cheap crucifix grinding into his neck, and in his peril wondered how the sight of the object itself would affect the evil creature. Her strength was altogether superhuman, but as she continued her choking he reached feebly in his shirt and drew out the metal symbol, snapping the chain and pulling it free.
      At sight of the device the witch seemed struck with panic, and her grip relaxed long enough to give Gilman a chance to break it entirely. He pulled the steel-like claws from his neck, and would have dragged the beldame over the edge of the gulf had not the claws received a fresh access of strength and closed in again. This time he resolved to reply in kind, and his own hands reached out for the creature’s throat. Before she saw what he was doing he had the chain of the crucifix twisted about her neck, and a moment later he had tightened it enough to cut off her breath. During her last struggle he felt something bite at his ankle, and saw that Brown Jenkin had come to her aid. With one savage kick he sent the morbidity over the edge of the gulf and heard it whimper on some level far below.
      Whether he had killed the ancient crone he did not know, but he let her rest on the floor where she had fallen. Then, as he turned away, he saw on the table a sight which nearly snapped the last thread of his reason. Brown Jenkin, tough of sinew and with four tiny hands of daemoniac dexterity, had been busy while the witch was throttling him, and his efforts had been in vain. What he had prevented the knife from doing to the victim’s chest, the yellow fangs of the furry blasphemy had done to a wrist—and the bowl so lately on the floor stood full beside the small lifeless body.
      In his dream-delirium Gilman heard the hellish, alien-rhythmed chant of the Sabbat coming from an infinite distance, and knew the black man must be there. Confused memories mixed themselves with his mathematics, and he believed his subconscious mind held the angles which he needed to guide him back to the normal world—alone and unaided for the first time. He felt sure he was in the immemorially sealed loft above his own room, but whether he could ever escape through the slanting floor or the long-stopped egress he doubted greatly. Besides, would not an escape from a dream-loft bring him merely into a dream-house—an abnormal projection of the actual place he sought? He was wholly bewildered as to the relation betwixt dream and reality in all his experiences.
      The passage through the vague abysses would be frightful, for the Walpurgis-rhythm would be vibrating, and at last he would have to hear that hitherto veiled cosmic pulsing which he so mortally dreaded. Even now he could detect a low, monstrous shaking whose tempo he suspected all too well. At Sabbat-time it always mounted and reached through to the worlds to summon the initiate to nameless rites. Half the chants of the Sabbat were patterned on this faintly overheard pulsing which no earthly ear could endure in its unveiled spatial fulness. Gilman wondered, too, whether he could trust his instinct to take him back to the right part of space. How could he be sure he would not land on that green-litten hillside of a far planet, on the tessellated terrace above the city of tentacled monsters somewhere beyond the galaxy, or in the spiral black vortices of that ultimate void of Chaos wherein reigns the mindless daemon-sultan Azathoth?
      Just before he made the plunge the violet light went out and left him in utter blackness. The witch—old Keziah—Nahab—that must have meant her death. And mixed with the distant chant of the Sabbat and the whimpers of Brown Jenkin in the gulf below he thought he heard another and wilder whine from unknown depths. Joe Mazurewicz—the prayers against the Crawling Chaos now turning to an inexplicably triumphant shriek—worlds of sardonic actuality impinging on vortices of febrile dream—Iä! Shub-Niggurath! The Goat with a Thousand Young. . . .
      They found Gilman on the floor of his queerly angled old garret room long before dawn, for the terrible cry had brought Desrochers and Choynski and Dombrowski and Mazurewicz at once, and had even wakened the soundly sleeping Elwood in his chair. He was alive, and with open, staring eyes, but seemed largely unconscious. On his throat were the marks of murderous hands, and on his left ankle was a distressing rat-bite. His clothing was badly rumpled, and Joe’s crucifix was missing. Elwood trembled, afraid even to speculate on what new form his friend’s sleep-walking had taken. Mazurewicz seemed half-dazed because of a “sign” he said he had had in response to his prayers, and he crossed himself frantically when the squealing and whimpering of a rat sounded from beyond the slanting partition.
      When the dreamer was settled on his couch in Elwood’s room they sent for Dr. Malkowski—a local practitioner who would repeat no tales where they might prove embarrassing—and he gave Gilman two hypodermic injections which caused him to relax in something like natural drowsiness. During the day the patient regained consciousness at times and whispered his newest dream disjointedly to Elwood. It was a painful process, and at its very start brought out a fresh and disconcerting fact.
      Gilman—whose ears had so lately possessed an abnormal sensitiveness—was now stone deaf. Dr. Malkowski, summoned again in haste, told Elwood that both ear-drums were ruptured, as if by the impact of some stupendous sound intense beyond all human conception or endurance. How such a sound could have been heard in the last few hours without arousing all the Miskatonic Valley was more than the honest physician could say.
      Elwood wrote his part of the colloquy on paper, so that a fairly easy communication was maintained. Neither knew what to make of the whole chaotic business, and decided it would be better if they thought as little as possible about it. Both, though, agreed that they must leave this ancient and accursed house as soon as it could be arranged. Evening papers spoke of a police raid on some curious revellers in a ravine beyond Meadow Hill just before dawn, and mentioned that the white stone there was an object of age-long superstitious regard. Nobody had been caught, but among the scattering fugitives had been glimpsed a huge negro. In another column it was stated that no trace of the missing child Ladislas Wolejko had been found.
      The crowning horror came that very night. Elwood will never forget it, and was forced to stay out of college the rest of the term because of the resulting nervous breakdown. He had thought he heard rats in the partitions all the evening, but paid little attention to them. Then, long after both he and Gilman had retired, the atrocious shrieking began. Elwood jumped up, turned on the lights, and rushed over to his guest’s couch. The occupant was emitting sounds of veritably inhuman nature, as if racked by some torment beyond description. He was writhing under the bedclothes, and a great red stain was beginning to appear on the blankets.
      Elwood scarcely dared to touch him, but gradually the screaming and writhing subsided. By this time Dombrowski, Choynski, Desrochers, Mazurewicz, and the top-floor lodger were all crowding into the doorway, and the landlord had sent his wife back to telephone for Dr. Malkowski. Everybody shrieked when a large rat-like form suddenly jumped out from beneath the ensanguined bedclothes and scuttled across the floor to a fresh, open hole close by. When the doctor arrived and began to pull down those frightful covers Walter Gilman was dead.
      It would be barbarous to do more than suggest what had killed Gilman. There had been virtually a tunnel through his body—something had eaten his heart out. Dombrowski, frantic at the failure of his constant rat-poisoning efforts, cast aside all thought of his lease and within a week had moved with all his older lodgers to a dingy but less ancient house in Walnut Street. The worst thing for a while was keeping Joe Mazurewicz quiet; for the brooding loomfixer would never stay sober, and was constantly whining and muttering about spectral and terrible things.
      It seems that on that last hideous night Joe had stooped to look at the crimson rat-tracks which led from Gilman’s couch to the nearby hole. On the carpet they were very indistinct, but a piece of open flooring intervened between the carpet’s edge and the base-board. There Mazurewicz had found something monstrous—or thought he had, for no one else could quite agree with him despite the undeniable queerness of the prints. The tracks on the flooring were certainly vastly unlike the average prints of a rat, but even Choynski and Desrochers would not admit that they were like the prints of four tiny human hands.
      The house was never rented again. As soon as Dombrowski left it the pall of its final desolation began to descend, for people shunned it both on account of its old reputation and because of the new foetid odour. Perhaps the ex-landlord’s rat-poison had worked after all, for not long after his departure the place became a neighbourhood nuisance. Health officials traced the smell to the closed spaces above and beside the eastern garret room, and agreed that the number of dead rats must be enormous. They decided, however, that it was not worth their while to hew open and disinfect the long-sealed spaces; for the foetor would soon be over, and the locality was not one which encouraged fastidious standards. Indeed, there were always vague local tales of unexplained stenches upstairs in the Witch House just after May-Eve and Hallowmass. The neighbours grumblingly acquiesced in the inertia—but the foetor none the less formed an additional count against the place. Toward the last the house was condemned as an habitation by the building inspector.
      Gilman’s dreams and their attendant circumstances have never been explained. Elwood, whose thoughts on the entire episode are sometimes almost maddening, came back to college the next autumn and graduated in the following June. He found the spectral gossip of the town much diminished, and it is indeed a fact that—notwithstanding certain reports of a ghostly tittering in the deserted house which lasted almost as long as that edifice itself—no fresh appearances either of old Keziah or of Brown Jenkin have been muttered of since Gilman’s death. It is rather fortunate that Elwood was not in Arkham in that later year when certain events abruptly renewed the local whispers about elder horrors. Of course he heard about the matter afterward and suffered untold torments of black and bewildered speculation; but even that was not as bad as actual nearness and several possible sights would have been.
      In March, 1931, a gale wrecked the roof and great chimney of the vacant Witch House, so that a chaos of crumbling bricks, blackened, moss-grown shingles, and rotting planks and timbers crashed down into the loft and broke through the floor beneath. The whole attic story was choked with debris from above, but no one took the trouble to touch the mess before the inevitable razing of the decrepit structure. That ultimate step came in the following December, and it was when Gilman’s old room was cleared out by reluctant, apprehensive workmen that the gossip began.
      Among the rubbish which had crashed through the ancient slanting ceiling were several things which made the workmen pause and call in the police. Later the police in turn called in the coroner and several professors from the university. There were bones—badly crushed and splintered, but clearly recognisable as human—whose manifestly modern date conflicted puzzlingly with the remote period at which their only possible lurking-place, the low, slant-floored loft overhead, had supposedly been sealed from all human access. The coroner’s physician decided that some belonged to a small child, while certain others—found mixed with shreds of rotten brownish cloth—belonged to a rather undersized, bent female of advanced years. Careful sifting of debris also disclosed many tiny bones of rats caught in the collapse, as well as older rat-bones gnawed by small fangs in a fashion now and then highly productive of controversy and reflection.
      Other objects found included the mingled fragments of many books and papers, together with a yellowish dust left from the total disintegration of still older books and papers. All, without exception, appeared to deal with black magic in its most advanced and horrible forms; and the evidently recent date of certain items is still a mystery as unsolved as that of the modern human bones. An even greater mystery is the absolute homogeneity of the crabbed, archaic writing found on a wide range of papers whose conditions and watermarks suggest age differences of at least 150 to 200 years. To some, though, the greatest mystery of all is the variety of utterly inexplicable objects—objects whose shapes, materials, types of workmanship, and purposes baffle all conjecture—found scattered amidst the wreckage in evidently diverse states of injury. One of these things—which excited several Miskatonic professors profoundly—is a badly damaged monstrosity plainly resembling the strange image which Gilman gave to the college museum, save that it is larger, wrought of some peculiar bluish stone instead of metal, and possessed of a singularly angled pedestal with undecipherable hieroglyphics.
      Archaeologists and anthropologists are still trying to explain the bizarre designs chased on a crushed bowl of light metal whose inner side bore ominous brownish stains when found. Foreigners and credulous grandmothers are equally garrulous about the modern nickel crucifix with broken chain mixed in the rubbish and shiveringly identified by Joe Mazurewicz as that which he had given poor Gilman many years before. Some believe this crucifix was dragged up to the sealed loft by rats, while others think it must have been on the floor in some corner of Gilman’s old room all the time. Still others, including Joe himself, have theories too wild and fantastic for sober credence.
      When the slanting wall of Gilman’s room was torn out, the once sealed triangular space between that partition and the house’s north wall was found to contain much less structural debris, even in proportion to its size, than the room itself; though it had a ghastly layer of older materials which paralysed the wreckers with horror. In brief, the floor was a veritable ossuary of the bones of small children—some fairly modern, but others extending back in infinite gradations to a period so remote that crumbling was almost complete. On this deep bony layer rested a knife of great size, obvious antiquity, and grotesque, ornate, and exotic design—above which the debris was piled.
      In the midst of this debris, wedged between a fallen plank and a cluster of cemented bricks from the ruined chimney, was an object destined to cause more bafflement, veiled fright, and openly superstitious talk in Arkham than anything else discovered in the haunted and accursed building. This object was the partly crushed skeleton of a huge, diseased rat, whose abnormalities of form are still a topic of debate and source of singular reticence among the members of Miskatonic’s department of comparative anatomy. Very little concerning this skeleton has leaked out, but the workmen who found it whisper in shocked tones about the long, brownish hairs with which it was associated.
      The bones of the tiny paws, it is rumoured, imply prehensile characteristics more typical of a diminutive monkey than of a rat; while the small skull with its savage yellow fangs is of the utmost anomalousness, appearing from certain angles like a miniature, monstrously degraded parody of a human skull. The workmen crossed themselves in fright when they came upon this blasphemy, but later burned candles of gratitude in St. Stanislaus’ Church because of the shrill, ghostly tittering they felt they would never hear again.",True
"Spoonbill Village, Northernmost Quang Binh Province, SRV.
June 30, 2011.
Considering their first encounter, this meeting was going rather well.
""No, no, I assure you that I have had quite enough… well, if you insist…"" In the course of explaining his task to the household he would be staying in, Joseph Clayton had been offered tea at the behest of the mistress of the household and all three times, he had acquiesced. She was attending her husband in fine cotton clothes of white and black, the cut more resembling something out of Javanese dancing than anything worn in Indochina during the past thousand years. Their son, called from his lessons for the presentation, was sitting at the far end of the room, listening to what was going on. While he had repeated much the same spiel that Professor Andover to the house's three inhabitants, he had sipped at his bowl almost automatically as one would with water, clear onto what was now his fourth helping. Although not unpleasant, the drink had considerably more kick to it than even the strong brews typical of Vietnamese green tea.
What perplexed Joseph was that he couldn't identify the extra ingredient. It wasn't peppers, having no discernible remains or even the raw chemical heat of capsaicin. It could be ginger, but the heat was of an utterly different kind than any ginger he had ever experienced.
Then again, the additive could just as well be Tarantula venom given the figure he was giving his introduction to.
His name, as he had given it, was Noc. He was the most experience hunter, archer and scout of the village, was of an incredibly ancient lineage and, incidentally, was the first person of this strange, isolated village that he had seen. His tattoos all featured arachnid themes of legs, webbing and fangs and his eyes…
Marie had mentioned that some of the warriors practiced sorcery with mutative effects. If that was what caused Nocs eyes to become all black, seemingly all pupils and tempting Joseph to mentally refer to the man as ""Spider Eye"", then maybe those three weirdoes they caught in the biology labs back in February were onto something after all.
Sitting in the main reception area of the home, replete with decorations of strange latticed designs and black lacquer, Joseph watched carefully as Noc finished examining one of his bowstrings before his eyes darted around the room. On the wall, several bows hung in their unstrung state: the white and banded flatbow he had first witnessed, several simple bows of light colored cane and even one recurve bow made of dark red hardwood.
""So that is your request: to hear the stories of our history, to observe the operation of a household of status and to… take part in our activities?"" Throughout the introduction of this man and the repetition he had given of the Professors offer, Noc had examined all aspects of him closely… and had not been impressed. He had some muscle tone, but everything else about him absolutely screamed that he was some sort of priest or urban scribe in training. Besides, the combination of the girl's cues toward him and his reaction to his tea made it clear: if the boy had been a virgin, steam would have been pouring out of his ears. That made things difficult (and potentially dangerous) for everyone.
Besides, very few people in this village held any affection at all for someone with Joseph's skin tone.
After receiving affirmation of Joseph's duties, Noc laid out the rules. ""Know this: you will record the histories when they are told to you. You shall ask questions when you are allowed and you shall observe what you shall participate in what you are allowed to participate in. No pestering me with questions, no sneaking around trying to observe the women and children and no and I mean no trying to wheedle out information through trickery. We had quite enough trouble with that sort of thing the last time around.""
Joseph was immediately insulted, even though he did not how it as he automatically agreed. Still, two things bothered him. First, underneath the gold and bronze bangles that decorated the forearms and ankles of Nocs wife, Joseph had noticed strange scars, akin in shape to the marks that sperm whales bore from their battles with giant squid.
Second… what did Noc mean by the last time around?
That Night…
As he lay awake, Joseph realized how exhausting the day had been. As it turned out, he was probably doing to spend most of his time in this house as a sort of a servant: documenting and participating in cooking and chores, handling domestic duties and picking little things up only as Noc's wife deemed appropriate. No real questions answered, no interesting discoveries or scandals or surprises… just ordinary ethnographic work.
It wasn't made any better that his libido was getting annoyed at the 'busy' signals it kept receiving. However, there had been no real opportunity to talk with Marie after last night, with all the revelations of cannibalism and sorcery and other things that probably should have made his stomach turn.
/Maybe it would be better if they had made your stomach turn./ Came a wheedling little multi-voiced dialogue from inside his head… from inside his head, but not originating from him.
Oh no. Joseph thought with a mental groan. Not you idiots again! I thought you gave it up after the last time.
/The last time? You mean when you were in the thrall of carnal lusts, disgracing your heritage?/ The dominant voice changed from one of the old WASP lords to that of an aristocratic dowager that had been ancient even when Granny Clara had been a girl. /Maybe now that you know what her kind get up to, you will listen to reason and find a girl more suitable to a young man of your station./
Her parents are just as middle class as mine are, thank you all very much. Joseph snarked back mentally, fully knowing how these… wraiths felt about his relationship with Marie and savoring the thought of causing them anguish.
/You know full well what is meant. What is not understood is why the other girl did not so arouse your… passions./
Oh please, her family is just as drenched in sorcery as these guys, it's just that they're more polite about who they slice open. Besides, I don't really think you'd have acted any differently if it had been Tracy I'd been with that night instead of Marie, inbred and rural as she apparently is. He remembered clearly that night: how these voices (who he was fairly sure were not the products of schizophrenia despite superficially similar symptomatology), had come to him in the midst of what should have been unimaginable passion and communion with his girlfriend (though with was much more awkward, rushed and possibly painful than desired). Even as the passion mounted, their insults became worse: the taunts, the archaic, hateful rhetoric, the most vicious slurs directed against Marie and him. And yet he had forged on, continuing despite the rising chorus of insane voices inside his head… or even because of them, for as they blasphemed against all that Marie was, all the little things that made Joseph love her all the more, he could tell that his defiance was causing them actual pain and torment… and even through the pleasures of the flesh, he took small, sadistic delights in causing pain and anguish to these assholes who claimed authority as his forbearers.
Now Joseph was getting annoyed… and cranky. Look, I don't have to listen to you idiots, even if you do claim to be my ancestors. You came from a completely different world whose rules do not apply to me. Also, the instruments of your authority are gone: no money, no status, no companies or contacts or friends in high places. All that's left are a bunch of ugly little voices in the wind. Why don't you all just blow away? He was tired of his, of having to listen to these inane snobs that he had learned to loath in the abstract and now hated in the concrete. He hated their hate-filled dismissals of all other peoples and cultures, their smug superiority and the generalized arrogance that seemed to drip from the voices.
When they didn't respond, Joseph took it as a sign. ""Good."" He said aloud, as softly as his sense of satisfaction allowed.
","It is said that in Ulthar, which lies beyond the river Skai, no man may kill a cat; and this I can verily believe as I gaze upon him who sitteth purring before the fire. For the cat is cryptic, and close to strange things which men cannot see. He is the soul of antique Aegyptus, and bearer of tales from forgotten cities in Meroë and Ophir. He is the kin of the jungle’s lords, and heir to the secrets of hoary and sinister Africa. The Sphinx is his cousin, and he speaks her language; but he is more ancient than the Sphinx, and remembers that which she hath forgotten.
      In Ulthar, before ever the burgesses forbade the killing of cats, there dwelt an old cotter and his wife who delighted to trap and slay the cats of their neighbours. Why they did this I know not; save that many hate the voice of the cat in the night, and take it ill that cats should run stealthily about yards and gardens at twilight. But whatever the reason, this old man and woman took pleasure in trapping and slaying every cat which came near to their hovel; and from some of the sounds heard after dark, many villagers fancied that the manner of slaying was exceedingly peculiar. But the villagers did not discuss such things with the old man and his wife; because of the habitual expression on the withered faces of the two, and because their cottage was so small and so darkly hidden under spreading oaks at the back of a neglected yard. In truth, much as the owners of cats hated these odd folk, they feared them more; and instead of berating them as brutal assassins, merely took care that no cherished pet or mouser should stray toward the remote hovel under the dark trees. When through some unavoidable oversight a cat was missed, and sounds heard after dark, the loser would lament impotently; or console himself by thanking Fate that it was not one of his children who had thus vanished. For the people of Ulthar were simple, and knew not whence it is all cats first came.
      One day a caravan of strange wanderers from the South entered the narrow cobbled streets of Ulthar. Dark wanderers they were, and unlike the other roving folk who passed through the village twice every year. In the market-place they told fortunes for silver, and bought gay beads from the merchants. What was the land of these wanderers none could tell; but it was seen that they were given to strange prayers, and that they had painted on the sides of their wagons strange figures with human bodies and the heads of cats, hawks, rams, and lions. And the leader of the caravan wore a head-dress with two horns and a curious disc betwixt the horns.
      There was in this singular caravan a little boy with no father or mother, but only a tiny black kitten to cherish. The plague had not been kind to him, yet had left him this small furry thing to mitigate his sorrow; and when one is very young, one can find great relief in the lively antics of a black kitten. So the boy whom the dark people called Menes smiled more often than he wept as he sate playing with his graceful kitten on the steps of an oddly painted wagon.
      On the third morning of the wanderers’ stay in Ulthar, Menes could not find his kitten; and as he sobbed aloud in the market-place certain villagers told him of the old man and his wife, and of sounds heard in the night. And when he heard these things his sobbing gave place to meditation, and finally to prayer. He stretched out his arms toward the sun and prayed in a tongue no villager could understand; though indeed the villagers did not try very hard to understand, since their attention was mostly taken up by the sky and the odd shapes the clouds were assuming. It was very peculiar, but as the little boy uttered his petition there seemed to form overhead the shadowy, nebulous figures of exotic things; of hybrid creatures crowned with horn-flanked discs. Nature is full of such illusions to impress the imaginative.
      That night the wanderers left Ulthar, and were never seen again. And the householders were troubled when they noticed that in all the village there was not a cat to be found. From each hearth the familiar cat had vanished; cats large and small, black, grey, striped, yellow, and white. Old Kranon, the burgomaster, swore that the dark folk had taken the cats away in revenge for the killing of Menes’ kitten; and cursed the caravan and the little boy. But Nith, the lean notary, declared that the old cotter and his wife were more likely persons to suspect; for their hatred of cats was notorious and increasingly bold. Still, no one durst complain to the sinister couple; even when little Atal, the innkeeper’s son, vowed that he had at twilight seen all the cats of Ulthar in that accursed yard under the trees, pacing very slowly and solemnly in a circle around the cottage, two abreast, as if in performance of some unheard-of rite of beasts. The villagers did not know how much to believe from so small a boy; and though they feared that the evil pair had charmed the cats to their death, they preferred not to chide the old cotter till they met him outside his dark and repellent yard.
      So Ulthar went to sleep in vain anger; and when the people awaked at dawn—behold! every cat was back at his accustomed hearth! Large and small, black, grey, striped, yellow, and white, none was missing. Very sleek and fat did the cats appear, and sonorous with purring content. The citizens talked with one another of the affair, and marvelled not a little. Old Kranon again insisted that it was the dark folk who had taken them, since cats did not return alive from the cottage of the ancient man and his wife. But all agreed on one thing: that the refusal of all the cats to eat their portions of meat or drink their saucers of milk was exceedingly curious. And for two whole days the sleek, lazy cats of Ulthar would touch no food, but only doze by the fire or in the sun.
      It was fully a week before the villagers noticed that no lights were appearing at dusk in the windows of the cottage under the trees. Then the lean Nith remarked that no one had seen the old man or his wife since the night the cats were away. In another week the burgomaster decided to overcome his fears and call at the strangely silent dwelling as a matter of duty, though in so doing he was careful to take with him Shang the blacksmith and Thul the cutter of stone as witnesses. And when they had broken down the frail door they found only this: two cleanly picked human skeletons on the earthen floor, and a number of singular beetles crawling in the shadowy corners.
      There was subsequently much talk among the burgesses of Ulthar. Zath, the coroner, disputed at length with Nith, the lean notary; and Kranon and Shang and Thul were overwhelmed with questions. Even little Atal, the innkeeper’s son, was closely questioned and given a sweetmeat as reward. They talked of the old cotter and his wife, of the caravan of dark wanderers, of small Menes and his black kitten, of the prayer of Menes and of the sky during that prayer, of the doings of the cats on the night the caravan left, and of what was later found in the cottage under the dark trees in the repellent yard.
      And in the end the burgesses passed that remarkable law which is told of by traders in Hatheg and discussed by travellers in Nir; namely, that in Ulthar no man may kill a cat.",False
"It must have been some imp of the perverse--or some sardonic pull from dark, hidden sources--which made me change my plans as I did. I had long before resolved to limit my observations to architecture alone, and I was even then hurrying toward the Square in an effort to get quick transportation out of this festering city of death and decay; but the sight of old Zadok Allen set up new currents in my mind and made me slacken my pace uncertainly.
I had been assured that the old man could do nothing but hint at wild, disjointed, and incredible legends, and I had been warned that the natives made it unsafe to be seen talking with him; yet the thought of this aged witness to the town's decay, with memories going back to the early days of ships and factories, was a lure that no amount of reason could make me resist. After all, the strangest and maddest of myths are often merely symbols or allegories based upon truth--and old Zadok must have seen everything which went on around Innsmouth for the last ninety years. Curiosity flared up beyond sense and caution, and in my youthful egotism I fancied I might be able to sift a nucleus of real history from the confused, extravagant outpouring I would probably extract with the aid of raw whiskey.
I knew that I could not accost him then and there, for the firemen would surely notice and object. Instead, I reflected, I would prepare by getting some bootleg liquor at a place where the grocery boy had told me it was plentiful. Then I would loaf near the fire station in apparent casualness, and fall in with old Zadok after he had started on one of his frequent rambles. The youth had said that he was very restless, seldom sitting around the station for more than an hour or two at a time.
A quart bottle of whiskey was easily, though not cheaply, obtained in the rear of a dingy variety-store just off the Square in Eliot Street. The dirty-looking fellow who waited on me had a touch of the staring ""Innsmouth look"", but was quite civil in his way; being perhaps used to the custom of such convivial strangers--truckmen, gold-buyers, and the like--as were occasionally in town.
Reentering the Square I saw that luck was with me; for--shuffling out of Paine Street around the corner of the Gilman House--I glimpsed nothing less than the tall, lean, tattered form of old Zadok Allen himself. In accordance with my plan, I attracted his attention by brandishing my newly-purchased bottle: and soon realised that he had begun to shuffle wistfully after me as I turned into Waite Street on my way to the most deserted region I could think of.
I was steering my course by the map the grocery boy had prepared, and was aiming for the wholly abandoned stretch of southern waterfront which I had previously visited. The only people in sight there had been the fishermen on the distant breakwater; and by going a few squares south I could get beyond the range of these, finding a pair of seats on some abandoned wharf and being free to question old Zadok unobserved for an indefinite time. Before I reached Main Street I could hear a faint and wheezy ""Hey, Mister!"" behind me and I presently allowed the old man to catch up and take copious pulls from the quart bottle.
I began putting out feelers as we walked amidst the omnipresent desolation and crazily tilted ruins, but found that the aged tongue did not loosen as quickly as I had expected. At length I saw a grass-grown opening toward the sea between crumbling brick walls, with the weedy length of an earth-and-masonry wharf projecting beyond. Piles of moss-covered stones near the water promised tolerable seats, and the scene was sheltered from all possible view by a ruined warehouse on the north. Here, I thought was the ideal place for a long secret colloquy; so I guided my companion down the lane and picked out spots to sit in among the mossy stones. The air of death and desertion was ghoulish, and the smell of fish almost insufferable; but I was resolved to let nothing deter me.
About four hours remained for conversation if I were to catch the eight o'clock coach for Arkham, and I began to dole out more liquor to the ancient tippler; meanwhile eating my own frugal lunch. In my donations I was careful not to overshoot the mark, for I did not wish Zadok's vinous garrulousness to pass into a stupor. After an hour his furtive taciturnity shewed signs of disappearing, but much to my disappointment he still sidetracked my questions about Innsmouth and its shadow-haunted past. He would babble of current topics, revealing a wide acquaintance with newspapers and a great tendency to philosophise in a sententious village fashion.
Toward the end of the second hour I feared my quart of whiskey would not be enough to produce results, and was wondering whether I had better leave old Zadok and go back for more. Just then, however, chance made the opening which my questions had been unable to make; and the wheezing ancient's rambling took a turn that caused me to lean forward and listen alertly. My back was toward the fishy-smelling sea, but he was facing it and something or other had caused his wandering gaze to light on the low, distant line of Devil Reef, then showing plainly and almost fascinatingly above the waves. The sight seemed to displease him, for he began a series of weak curses which ended in a confidential whisper and a knowing leer. He bent toward me, took hold of my coat lapel, and hissed out some hints that could not be mistaken,
""Thar's whar it all begun--that cursed place of all wickedness whar the deep water starts. Gate o' hell--sheer drop daown to a bottom no saoundin'-line kin tech. Ol' Cap'n Obed done it--him that faound aout more'n was good fer him in the Saouth Sea islands.
""Everybody was in a bad way them days. Trade fallin' off, mills losin' business--even the new ones--an' the best of our menfolks kilt aprivateerin' in the War of 1812 or lost with the Elizy brig an' the Ranger scow--both on 'em Gilman venters. Obed Marsh he had three ships afloat--brigantine Columby, brig Hefty, an' barque Sumatry Queen. He was the only one as kep' on with the East-Injy an' Pacific trade, though Esdras Martin's barkentine Malay Bride made a venter as late as twenty-eight.
""Never was nobody like Cap'n Obed--old limb o' Satan! Heh, heh! I kin mind him a-tellin' abaout furren parts, an' callin' all the folks stupid for goin' to Christian meetin' an' bearin' their burdens meek an' lowly. Says they'd orter git better gods like some o' the folks in the Injies--gods as ud bring 'em good fishin' in return for their sacrifices, an' ud reely answer folks's prayers.
""Matt Eliot, his fust mate, talked a lot too, only he was again' folks's doin' any heathen things. Told abaout an island east of Othaheite whar they was a lot o' stone ruins older'n anybody knew anything abaout, kind o' like them on Ponape, in the Carolines, but with carven's of faces that looked like the big statues on Easter Island. Thar was a little volcanic island near thar, too, whar they was other ruins with diff'rent carvin'--ruins all wore away like they'd ben under the sea onct, an' with picters of awful monsters all over 'em.
""Wal, Sir, Matt he says the natives araound thar had all the fish they cud ketch, an' sported bracelets an' armlets an' head rigs made aout o' a queer kind o' gold an' covered with picters o' monsters jest like the ones carved over the ruins on the little island--sorter fish-like frogs or froglike fishes that was drawed in all kinds o' positions likes they was human bein's. Nobody cud get aout o' them whar they got all the stuff, an' all the other natives wondered haow they managed to find fish in plenty even when the very next island had lean pickin's. Matt he got to wonderon' too an' so did Cap'n Obed. Obed he notices, besides, that lots of the hn'some young folks ud drop aout o' sight fer good from year to year, an' that they wan't many old folks around. Also, he thinks some of the folks looked durned queer even for Kanakys.
""It took Obed to git the truth aout o' them heathen. I dun't know haow he done it, but he begun by tradin' fer the gold-like things they wore. Ast 'em whar they come from, an' ef they cud git more, an' finally wormed the story aout o' the old chief--Walakea, they called him. Nobody but Obed ud ever a believed the old yeller devil, but the Cap'n cud read folks like they was books. Heh, heh! Nobody never believes me naow when I tell 'em, an' I dun't s'pose you will, young feller--though come to look at ye, ye hev kind o' got them sharp-readin' eyes like Obed had.""
The old man's whisper grew fainter, and I found myself shuddering at the terrible and sincere portentousness of his intonation, even though I knew his tale could be nothing but drunken phantasy.
""Wal, Sir, Obed he larnt that they's things on this arth as most folks never heerd about--an' wouldn't believe ef they did hear. It seems these Kanakys was sacrificin' heaps o' their young men an' maidens to some kind o' god-things that lived under the sea, an' gittin' all kinds o' favour in return. They met the things on the little islet with the queer ruins, an' it seems them awful picters o' frog-fish monsters was supposed to be picters o' these things. Mebbe they was the kind o' critters as got all the mermaid stories an' sech started.
""They had all kinds a' cities on the sea-bottom, an' this island was heaved up from thar. Seem they was some of the things alive in the stone buildin's when the island come up sudden to the surface, That's how the Kanakys got wind they was daown thar. Made sign-talk as soon as they got over bein' skeert, an' pieced up a bargain afore long.
""Them things liked human sacrifices. Had had 'em ages afore, but lost track o' the upper world after a time. What they done to the victims it ain't fer me to say, an' I guess Obed wa'n't none too sharp abaout askin'. But it was all right with the heathens, because they'd ben havin' a hard time an' was desp'rate abaout everything. They give a sarten number o' young folks to the sea-things twice every year--May-Eve an' Hallawe'en--reg'lar as cud be. Also give some a' the carved knick-knacks they made. What the things agreed to give in return was plenty a' fish--they druv 'em in from all over the sea--an' a few gold-like things naow an' then.
""Wal, as I says, the natives met the things on the little volcanic islet--goin' thar in canoes with the sacrifices et cet'ry, and bringin' back any of the gold-like jools as was comin' to 'em. At fust the things didn't never go onto the main island, but arter a time they come to want to. Seems they hankered arter mixin' with the folks, an' havin' j'int ceremonies on the big days--May-Eve an' Hallowe'en. Ye see, they was able to live both in ant aout o' water--what they call amphibians, I guess. The Kanakys told 'em as haow folks from the other islands might wanta wipe 'an out if they got wind o' their bein' thar, but they says they dun't keer much, because they cud wipe aout the hull brood o' humans ef they was willin' to bother--that is, any as didn't be, sarten signs sech as was used onct by the lost Old Ones, whoever they was. But not wantin' to bother, they'd lay low when anybody visited the island.
""When it come to matin' with them toad-lookin' fishes, the Kanakys kind o' balked, but finally they larnt something as put a new face on the matter. Seems that human folks has got a kind a' relation to sech water-beasts--that everything alive come aout o' the water onct an' only needs a little change to go back agin. Them things told the Kanakys that ef they mixed bloods there'd be children as ud look human at fust, but later turn more'n more like the things, till finally they'd take to the water an' jine the main lot o' things daown har. An' this is the important part, young feller--them as turned into fish things an' went into the water wouldn't never die. Them things never died excep' they was kilt violent.
""Wal, Sir, it seems by the time Obed knowed them islanders they was all full o' fish blood from them deep-water things. When they got old an' begun to shew it, they was kep' hid until they felt like takin' to the water an' quittin' the place. Some was more teched than others, an' some never did change quite enough to take to the water; but mosily they turned out jest the way them things said. Them as was born more like the things changed arly, but them as was nearly human sometimes stayed on the island till they was past seventy, though they'd usually go daown under for trial trips afore that. Folks as had took to the water gen'rally come back a good deal to visit, so's a man ud often be a'talkin' to his own five-times-great-grandfather who'd left the dry land a couple o' hundred years or so afore.
""Everybody got aout o' the idee o' dyin'--excep' in canoe wars with the other islanders, or as sacrifices to the sea-gods daown below, or from snakebite or plague or sharp gallopin' ailments or somethin' afore they cud take to the water--but simply looked forrad to a kind o' change that wa'n't a bit horrible arter a while. They thought what they'd got was well wuth all they'd had to give up--an' I guess Obed kind o' come to think the same hisself when he'd chewed over old Walakea's story a bit. Walakea, though, was one of the few as hadn't got none of the fish blood--bein' of a royal line that intermarried with royal lines on other islands.
""Walakea he shewed Obed a lot o' rites an' incantations as had to do with the sea things, an' let him see some o' the folks in the village as had changed a lot from human shape. Somehaow or other, though, he never would let him see one of the reg'lar things from right aout o' the water. In the end he give him a funny kind o' thingumajig made aout o' lead or something, that he said ud bring up the fish things from any place in the water whar they might be a nest o' 'em. The idee was to drop it daown with the right kind o' prayers an' sech. Walakea allowed as the things was scattered all over the world, so's anybody that looked abaout cud find a nest an' bring 'em up ef they was wanted.
""Matt he didn't like this business at all, an' wanted Obed shud keep away from the island; but the Cap'n was sharp fer gain, an' faound he cud get them gold-like things so cheap it ud pay him to make a specialty of them. Things went on that way for years an' Obed got enough o' that gold-like stuff to make him start the refinery in Waite's old run-daown fullin' mill. He didn't dass sell the pieces like they was, for folks ud be all the time askin' questions. All the same his crews ud get a piece an' dispose of it naow and then, even though they was swore to keep quiet; an' he let his women-folks wear some o' the pieces as was more human-like than most.
""Well, come abaout thutty-eight--when I was seven year' old--Obed he faound the island people all wiped aout between v'yages. Seems the other islanders had got wind o' what was goin' on, and had took matters into their own hands. S'pose they must a had, after all, them old magic signs as the sea things says was the only things they was afeard of. No tellin' what any o' them Kanakys will chance to git a holt of when the sea-bottom throws up some island with ruins older'n the deluge. Pious cusses, these was--they didn't leave nothin' standin' on either the main island or the little volcanic islet excep' what parts of the ruins was too big to knock daown. In some places they was little stones strewed abaout--like charms--with somethin' on 'em like what ye call a swastika naowadays. Prob'ly them was the Old Ones' signs. Folks all wiped aout no trace o' no gold-like things an' none the nearby Kanakys ud breathe a word abaout the matter. Wouldn't even admit they'd ever ben any people on that island.
""That naturally hit Obed pretty hard, seein' as his normal trade was doin' very poor. It hit the whole of Innsmouth, too, because in seafarint days what profited the master of a ship gen'lly profited the crew proportionate. Most of the folks araound the taown took the hard times kind o' sheep-like an' resigned, but they was in bad shape because the fishin' was peterin' aout an' the mills wan't doin' none too well.
""Then's the time Obed he begun a-cursin' at the folks fer bein' dull sheep an' prayin' to a Christian heaven as didn't help 'em none. He told 'em he'd knowed o' folks as prayed to gods that give somethin' ye reely need, an' says ef a good bunch o' men ud stand by him, he cud mebbe get a holt o' sarten paowers as ud bring plenty o' fish an' quite a bit of gold. O' course them as sarved on the Sumatry Queen, an' seed the island knowed what he meant, an' wa'n't none too anxious to get clost to sea-things like they'd heard tell on, but them as didn't know what 'twas all abaout got kind o' swayed by what Obed had to say, and begun to ast him what he cud do to sit 'em on the way to the faith as ud bring 'em results.""
Here the old man faltered, mumbled, and lapsed into a moody and apprehensive silence; glancing nervously over his shoulder and then turning back to stare fascinatedly at the distant black reef. When I spoke to him he did not answer, so I knew I would have to let him finish the bottle. The insane yarn I was hearing interested me profoundly, for I fancied there was contained within it a sort of crude allegory based upon the strangeness of Innsmouth and elaborated by an imagination at once creative and full of scraps of exotic legend. Not for a moment did I believe that the tale had any really substantial foundation; but none the less the account held a hint of genuine terror if only because it brought in references to strange jewels clearly akin to the malign tiara I had seen at Newburyport. Perhaps the ornaments had, after all, come from some strange island; and possibly the wild stories were lies of the bygone Obed himself rather than of this antique toper.
I handed Zadok the bottle, and he drained it to the last drop. It was curious how he could stand so much whiskey, for not even a trace of thickness had come into his high, wheezy voice. He licked the nose of the bottle and slipped it into his pocket, then beginning to nod and whisper softly to himself. I bent close to catch any articulate words he might utter, and thought I saw a sardonic smile behind the stained bushy whiskers. Yes--he was really forming words, and I could grasp a fair proportion of them.
""Poor Matt--Matt he allus was agin it--tried to line up the folks on his side, an' had long talks with the preachers--no use--they run the Congregational parson aout o' taown, an' the Methodist feller quit--never did see Resolved Babcock, the Baptist parson, agin--Wrath o' Jehovy--I was a mightly little critter, but I heerd what I heerd an, seen what I seen--Dagon an' Ashtoreth--Belial an' Beelzebub--Golden Caff an' the idols o' Canaan an' the Philistines--Babylonish abominations--Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin--.""
He stopped again, and from the look in his watery blue eyes I feared he was close to a stupor after all. But when I gently shook his shoulder he turned on me with astonishing alertness and snapped out some more obscure phrases.
""Dun't believe me, hey? Hey, heh, heh--then jest tell me, young feller, why Cap'n Obed an' twenty odd other folks used to row aout to Devil Reef in the dead o' night an' chant things so laoud ye cud hear 'em all over taown when the wind was right? Tell me that, hey? An' tell me why Obed was allus droppin' heavy things daown into the deep water t'other side o' the reef whar the bottom shoots daown like a cliff lower'n ye kin saound? Tell me what he done with that funny-shaped lead thingumajig as Walakea give him? Hey, boy? An' what did they all haowl on May-Eve, an, agin the next Hallowe'en? An' why'd the new church parsons--fellers as used to be sailors--wear them queer robes an' cover their-selves with them gold-like things Obed brung? Hey?""
The watery blue eyes were almost savage and maniacal now, and the dirty white beard bristled electrically. Old Zadok probably saw me shrink back, for he began to cackle evilly.
""Heh, heh, heh, heh! Beginnin' to see, hey? Mebbe ye'd like to a ben me in them days, when I seed things at night aout to sea from the cupalo top o' my haouse. Oh, I kin tell ye' little pitchers hev big ears, an' I wa'n't missin' nothin' o' what was gossiped abaout Cap'n Obed an' the folks aout to the reef! Heh, heh, heh! Haow abaout the night I took my pa's ship's glass up to the cupalo an' seed the reef a-bristlin' thick with shapes that dove off quick soon's the moon riz?
""Obed an' the folks was in a dory, but them shapes dove off the far side into the deep water an' never come up...
""Haow'd ye like to be a little shaver alone up in a cupola a-watchin' shapes as wa'n't human shapes?...Heh?...Heh, heh, heh ...""
The old man was getting hysterical, and I began to shiver with a nameless alarm. He laid a gnarled claw on my shoulder, and it seemed to me that its shaking was not altogether that of mirth.
""S'pose one night ye seed somethin' heavy heaved offen Obed's dory beyond the reef' and then learned next day a young feller was missin' from home. Hey! Did anybody ever see hide or hair o' Hiram Gilman agin. Did they? An' Nick Pierce, an' Luelly Waite, an' Adoniram Saouthwick, an' Henry Garrison. Hey? Heh, heh, heh, heh...Shapes talkin' sign language with their hands...them as had reel hands ...
""Wal, Sir, that was the time Obed begun to git on his feet agin. Folks see his three darters a-wearin' gold-like things as nobody'd never see on 'em afore, an' smoke stared comin' aout o' the refin'ry chimbly. Other folks was prosp'rin, too--fish begun to swarm into the harbour fit to kill an' heaven knows what sized cargoes we begun to ship aout to Newb'ryport, Arkham, an' Boston. 'Twas then Obed got the ol' branch railrud put through. Some Kingsport fishermen heerd abaout the ketch an' come up in sloops, but they was all lost. Nobody never see 'em agin. An' jest then our folk organised the Esoteric Order 0' Dagon, an' bought Masonic Hall offen Calvary Commandery for it...heh, heh, heh! Matt Eliot was a Mason an' agin the sellin', but he dropped aout o' sight jest then.
""Remember, I ain't sayin' Obed was set on hevin' things jest like they was on that Kanaky isle. I dun't think he aimed at fust to do no mixin', nor raise no younguns to take to the water an' turn into fishes with eternal life. He wanted them gold things, an' was willin' to pay heavy, an' I guess the others was satisfied fer a while ...
""Come in' forty-six the taown done some lookin' an' thinkin' fer itself. Too many folks missin'--too much wild preachin' at meetin' of a Sunday--too much talk abaout that reef. I guess I done a bit by tellin' Selectman Mowry what I see from the cupalo. They was a party one night as follered Obed's craowd aout to the reef, an' I heerd shots betwixt the dories. Nex' day Obed and thutty-two others was in gaol, with everybody a-wonderin' jest what was afoot and jest what charge agin 'em cud he got to holt. God, ef anybody'd look'd ahead...a couple o' weeks later, when nothin' had ben throwed into the sea fer thet long...""
Zadok was shewing sings of fright and exhaustion, and I let him keep silence for a while, though glancing apprehensively at my watch. The tide had turned and was coming in now, and the sound of the waves seemed to arouse him. I was glad of that tide, for at high water the fishy smell might not be so bad. Again I strained to catch his whispers.
""That awful night...I seed 'em. I was up in the cupalo...hordes of 'em...swarms of 'em...all over the reef an' swimmin' up the harbour into the Manuxet...God, what happened in the streets of Innsmouth that night...they rattled our door, but pa wouldn't open...then he clumb aout the kitchen winder with his musket to find Selecman Mowry an' see what he cud do...Maounds o' the dead an' the dyin'...shots and screams...shaoutin' in Ol Squar an' Taown Squar an' New Church Green--gaol throwed open...--proclamation...treason...called it the plague when folks come in an' faoud haff our people missin'...nobody left but them as ud jine in with Obed an' them things or else keep quiet...never heard o' my pa no more...""
The old man was panting and perspiring profusely. His grip on my shoulder tightened.
""Everything cleaned up in the mornin'--but they was traces...Obed he kinder takes charge an' says things is goin' to be changed... others'll worship with us at meetin'-time, an' sarten haouses hez got to entertin guests...they wanted to mix like they done with the Kanakys, an' he for one didn't feel baound to stop 'em. Far gone, was Obed...jest like a crazy man on the subjeck. He says they brung us fish an' treasure, an' shud hev what they hankered after...""
""Nothin' was to be diff'runt on the aoutside; only we was to keep shy o' strangers ef we knowed what was good fer us.
""We all hed to take the Oath o' Dagon, an' later on they was secon' an' third oaths that some o' us took. Them as ud help special, ud git special rewards--gold an' sech--No use balkin', fer they was millions of 'em daown thar. They'd ruther not start risin' an' wipin' aout human-kind, but ef they was gave away an' forced to, they cud do a lot toward jest that. We didn't hev them old charms to cut 'em off like folks in the Saouth Sea did, an' them Kanakys wudn't never give away their secrets.
""Yield up enough sacrifices an' savage knick-knacks an' harbourage in the taown when they wanted it, an' they'd let well enough alone. Wudn't bother no strangers as might bear tales aoutside--that is, withaout they got pryin'. All in the band of the faithful--Order 0' Dagon--an' the children shud never die, but go back to the Mother Hydra an' Father Dagon what we all come from onct...Ia! Ia! Cthulhu fhtagn! Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah-nagl fhtaga--""
Old Zadok was fast lapsing into stark raving, and I held my breath. Poor old soul--to what pitiful depths of hallucination had his liquor, plus his hatred of the decay, alienage, and disease around him, brought that fertile, imaginative brain? He began to moan now, and tears were coursing down his channelled checks into the depths of his beard.
""God, what I seen senct I was fifteen year' old--Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin!--the folks as was missin', and them as kilt theirselves--them as told things in Arkham or Ipswich or sech places was all called crazy, like you're callin' me right naow--but God, what I seen--They'd a kilt me long ago fer' what I know, only I'd took the fust an' secon' Oaths o' Dago offen Obed, so was pertected unlessen a jury of 'em proved I told things knowin' an' delib'rit...but I wudn't take the third Oath--I'd a died ruther'n take that--
""It got wuss araound Civil War time, when children born senct 'forty-six begun to grow up--some 'em, that is. I was afeared--never did no pryin' arter that awful night, an' never see one o'--them--clost to in all my life. That is, never no full-blooded one. I went to the war, an' ef I'd a had any guts or sense I'd a never come back, but settled away from here. But folks wrote me things wa'n't so bad. That, I s'pose, was because gov'munt draft men was in taown arter 'sixty-three. Arter the war it was jest as bad agin. People begun to fall off--mills an' shops shet daown--shippin' stopped an' the harbour choked up--railrud give up--but they...they never stopped swimmin' in an' aout o' the river from that cursed reef o' Satan--an' more an' more attic winders got a-boarded up, an' more an' more noises was heerd in haouses as wa'n't s'posed to hev nobody in 'em...
""Folks aoutside hev their stories abaout us--s'pose you've heerd a plenty on 'em, seein' what questions ye ast--stories abaout things they've seed naow an' then, an' abaout that queer joolry as still comes in from somewhars an' ain't quite all melted up--but nothin' never gits def'nite. Nobody'll believe nothin'. They call them gold-like things pirate loot, an' allaow the Innsmouth folks hez furren blood or is dis-tempered or somethin'. Beside, them that lives here shoo off as many strangers as they kin, an' encourage the rest not to git very cur'ous, specially raound night time. Beasts balk at the critters--hosses wuss'n mules--but when they got autos that was all right.
""In 'forty-six Cap'n Obed took a second wife that nobody in the taown never see--some says he didn't want to, but was made to by them as he'd called in--had three children by her--two as disappeared young, but one gal as looked like anybody else an' was eddicated in Europe. Obed finally got her married off by a trick to an Arkham feller as didn't suspect nothin'. But nobody aoutside'll hav nothin' to do with Innsmouth folks naow. Barnabas Marsh that runs the refin'ry now is Obed's grandson by his fust wife--son of Onesiphorus, his eldest son, but his mother was another o' them as wa'n't never seen aoutdoors.
""Right naow Barnabas is abaout changed. Can't shet his eyes no more, an' is all aout o' shape. They say he still wears clothes, but he'll take to the water soon. Mebbe he's tried it already--they do sometimes go daown for little spells afore they go daown for good. Ain't ben seed abaout in public fer nigh on ten year'. Dun't know haow his poor wife kin feel--she come from Ipiwich, an' they nigh lynched Barnabas when he courted her fifty odd year' ago. Obed he died in 'seventy-eight an' all the next gen'ration is gone naow--the fust wife's children dead, and the rest...God knows...""
The sound of the incoming tide was now very insistent, and little by little it seemed to change the old man's mood from maudlin tearfulness to watchful fear. He would pause now and then to renew those nervous glances over his shoulder or out toward the reef, and despite the wild absurdity of his tale, I could not help beginning to share his apprehensiveness. Zadok now grew shriller, seemed to be trying to whip up his courage with louder speech.
""Hey, yew, why dun't ye say somethin'? Haow'd ye like to be livin' in a taown like this, with everything a-rottin' an' dyin', an' boarded-up monsters crawlin' an' bleatin' an' barkin' an' hoppin' araoun' black cellars an' attics every way ye turn? Hey? Haow'd ye like to hear the haowlin' night arter night from the churches an' Order o' Dagon Hall, an' know what's doin' part o' the haowlin'? Haow'd ye like to hear what comes from that awful reef every May-Eve an' Hallowmass? Hey? Think the old man's crazy, eh? Wal, Sir, let me tell ye that ain't the wust!""
Zadok was really screaming now, and the mad frenzy of his voice disturbed me more than I care to own.
""Curse ye, dun't set thar a'starin' at me with them eyes--I tell Obed Marsh he's in hell, an, hez got to stay thar! Heh, heh...in hell, I says! Can't git me--I hain't done nothin' nor told nobody nothin'--
""Oh, you, young feller? Wal, even ef I hain't told nobody nothin' yet, I'm a'goin' to naow! Yew jest set still an' listen to me, boy--this is what I ain't never told nobody...I says I didn't get to do pryin' arter that night--but I faound things about jest the same!""
""Yew want to know what the reel horror is, hey? Wal, it's this--it ain't what them fish devils hez done, but what they're a-goin' to do! They're a-bringin' things up aout o' whar they come from into the taown--been doin' it fer years, an' slackenin' up lately. Them haouses north o' the river be-twixt Water an' Main Streets is full of 'em--them devils an' what they brung--an' when they git ready...I say, when they git...ever hear tell of a shoggoth?
""Hey, d'ye hear me? I tell ye I know what them things be--I seen 'em one night when...eh-ahhh-ah! e'yahhh...""
The hideous suddenness and inhuman frightfulness of the old man's shriek almost made me faint. His eyes, looking past me toward the malodorous sea, were positively starting from his head; while his face was a mask of fear worthy of Greek tragedy. His bony claw dug monstrously into my shoulder, and he made no motion as I turned my head to look at whatever he had glimpsed.
There was nothing that I could see. Only the incoming tide, with perhaps one set of ripples more local than the long-flung line of breakers. But now Zadok was shaking me, and I turned back to watch the melting of that fear-frozen face into a chaos of twitching eyelids and mumbling gums. Presently his voice came back--albeit as a trembling whisper.
""Git aout o' here! Get aout o' here! They seen us--git aout fer your life! Dun't wait fer nothin'--they know naow--Run fer it--quick--aout o' this taown--""
Another heavy wave dashed against the loosing masonry of the bygone wharf, and changed the mad ancient's whisper to another inhuman and blood-curdling scream. ""E-yaahhhh!...Yheaaaaaa!...""
Before I could recover my scattered wits he had relaxed his clutch on my shoulder and dashed wildly inland toward the street, reeling northward around the ruined warehouse wall.
I glanced back at the sea, but there was nothing there. And when I reached Water Street and looked along it toward the north there was no remaining trace of Zadok Allen.
","
I.

It is true that I have sent six bullets through the head of my best friend, and yet I hope to shew by this statement that I am not his murderer. At first I shall be called a madman—madder than the man I shot in his cell at the Arkham Sanitarium. Later some of my readers will weigh each statement, correlate it with the known facts, and ask themselves how I could have believed otherwise than as I did after facing the evidence of that horror—that thing on the doorstep.
      Until then I also saw nothing but madness in the wild tales I have acted on. Even now I ask myself whether I was misled—or whether I am not mad after all. I do not know—but others have strange things to tell of Edward and Asenath Derby, and even the stolid police are at their wits’ ends to account for that last terrible visit. They have tried weakly to concoct a theory of a ghastly jest or warning by discharged servants, yet they know in their hearts that the truth is something infinitely more terrible and incredible.
      So I say that I have not murdered Edward Derby. Rather have I avenged him, and in so doing purged the earth of a horror whose survival might have loosed untold terrors on all mankind. There are black zones of shadow close to our daily paths, and now and then some evil soul breaks a passage through. When that happens, the man who knows must strike before reckoning the consequences.
      I have known Edward Pickman Derby all his life. Eight years my junior, he was so precocious that we had much in common from the time he was eight and I sixteen. He was the most phenomenal child scholar I have ever known, and at seven was writing verse of a sombre, fantastic, almost morbid cast which astonished the tutors surrounding him. Perhaps his private education and coddled seclusion had something to do with his premature flowering. An only child, he had organic weaknesses which startled his doting parents and caused them to keep him closely chained to their side. He was never allowed out without his nurse, and seldom had a chance to play unconstrainedly with other children. All this doubtless fostered a strange, secretive inner life in the boy, with imagination as his one avenue of freedom. 
      At any rate, his juvenile learning was prodigious and bizarre; and his facile writings such as to captivate me despite my greater age. About that time I had leanings toward art of a somewhat grotesque cast, and I found in this younger child a rare kindred spirit. What lay behind our joint love of shadows and marvels was, no doubt, the ancient, mouldering, and subtly fearsome town in which we lived—witch-cursed, legend-haunted Arkham, whose huddled, sagging gambrel roofs and crumbling Georgian balustrades brood out the centuries beside the darkly muttering Miskatonic.
      As time went by I turned to architecture and gave up my design of illustrating a book of Edward’s daemoniac poems, yet our comradeship suffered no lessening. Young Derby’s odd genius developed remarkably, and in his eighteenth year his collected nightmare-lyrics made a real sensation when issued under the title Azathoth and Other Horrors. He was a close correspondent of the notorious Baudelairean poet Justin Geoffrey, who wrote The People of the Monolith and died screaming in a madhouse in 1926 after a visit to a sinister, ill-regarded village in Hungary. 
      In self-reliance and practical affairs, however, Derby was greatly retarded because of his coddled existence. His health had improved, but his habits of childish dependence were fostered by overcareful parents; so that he never travelled alone, made independent decisions, or assumed responsibilities. It was early seen that he would not be equal to a struggle in the business or professional arena, but the family fortune was so ample that this formed no tragedy. As he grew to years of manhood he retained a deceptive aspect of boyishness. Blond and blue-eyed, he had the fresh complexion of a child; and his attempts to raise a moustache were discernible only with difficulty. His voice was soft and light, and his pampered, unexercised life gave him a juvenile chubbiness rather than the paunchiness of premature middle age. He was of good height, and his handsome face would have made him a notable gallant had not his shyness held him to seclusion and bookishness.
      Derby’s parents took him abroad every summer, and he was quick to seize on the surface aspects of European thought and expression. His Poe-like talents turned more and more toward the decadent, and other artistic sensitivenesses and yearnings were half-aroused in him. We had great discussions in those days. I had been through Harvard, had studied in a Boston architect’s office, had married, and had finally returned to Arkham to practice my profession—settling in the family homestead in Saltonstall St. since my father had moved to Florida for his health. Edward used to call almost every evening, till I came to regard him as one of the household. He had a characteristic way of ringing the doorbell or sounding the knocker that grew to be a veritable code signal, so that after dinner I always listened for the familiar three brisk strokes followed by two more after a pause. Less frequently I would visit at his house and note with envy the obscure volumes in his constantly growing library.
      Derby went through Miskatonic University in Arkham, since his parents would not let him board away from them. He entered at sixteen and completed his course in three years, majoring in English and French literature and receiving high marks in everything but mathematics and the sciences. He mingled very little with the other students, though looking enviously at the “daring” or “Bohemian” set—whose superficially “smart” language and meaninglessly ironic pose he aped, and whose dubious conduct he wished he dared adopt.
      What he did do was to become an almost fanatical devotee of subterranean magical lore, for which Miskatonic’s library was and is famous. Always a dweller on the surface of phantasy and strangeness, he now delved deep into the actual runes and riddles left by a fabulous past for the guidance or puzzlement of posterity. He read things like the frightful Book of Eibon, the Unaussprechlichen Kulten of von Junzt, and the forbidden Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, though he did not tell his parents he had seen them. Edward was twenty when my son and only child was born, and seemed pleased when I named the newcomer Edward Derby Upton, after him.
      By the time he was twenty-five Edward Derby was a prodigiously learned man and a fairly well-known poet and fantaisiste, though his lack of contacts and responsibilities had slowed down his literary growth by making his products derivative and overbookish. I was perhaps his closest friend—finding him an inexhaustible mine of vital theoretical topics, while he relied on me for advice in whatever matters he did not wish to refer to his parents. He remained single—more through shyness, inertia, and parental protectiveness than through inclination—and moved in society only to the slightest and most perfunctory extent. When the war came both health and ingrained timidity kept him at home. I went to Plattsburg for a commission, but never got overseas.
      So the years wore on. Edward’s mother died when he was thirty-four, and for months he was incapacitated by some odd psychological malady. His father took him to Europe, however, and he managed to pull out of his trouble without visible effects. Afterward he seemed to feel a sort of grotesque exhilaration, as if of partial escape from some unseen bondage. He began to mingle in the more “advanced” college set despite his middle age, and was present at some extremely wild doings—on one occasion paying heavy blackmail (which he borrowed of me) to keep his presence at a certain affair from his father’s notice. Some of the whispered rumours about the wild Miskatonic set were extremely singular. There was even talk of black magic and of happenings utterly beyond credibility.

II.

Edward was thirty-eight when he met Asenath Waite. She was, I judge, about twenty-three at the time; and was taking a special course in mediaeval metaphysics at Miskatonic. The daughter of a friend of mine had met her before—in the Hall School at Kingsport—and had been inclined to shun her because of her odd reputation. She was dark, smallish, and very good-looking except for overprotuberant eyes; but something in her expression alienated extremely sensitive people. It was, however, largely her origin and conversation which caused average folk to avoid her. She was one of the Innsmouth Waites, and dark legends have clustered for generations about crumbling, half-deserted Innsmouth and its people. There are tales of horrible bargains about the year 1850, and of a strange element “not quite human” in the ancient families of the run-down fishing port—tales such as only old-time Yankees can devise and repeat with proper awesomeness.
      Asenath’s case was aggravated by the fact that she was Ephraim Waite’s daughter—the child of his old age by an unknown wife who always went veiled. Ephraim lived in a half-decayed mansion in Washington Street, Innsmouth, and those who had seen the place (Arkham folk avoid going to Innsmouth whenever they can) declared that the attic windows were always boarded, and that strange sounds sometimes floated from within as evening drew on. The old man was known to have been a prodigious magical student in his day, and legend averred that he could raise or quell storms at sea according to his whim. I had seen him once or twice in my youth as he came to Arkham to consult forbidden tomes at the college library, and had hated his wolfish, saturnine face with its tangle of iron-grey beard. He had died insane—under rather queer circumstances—just before his daughter (by his will made a nominal ward of the principal) entered the Hall School, but she had been his morbidly avid pupil and looked fiendishly like him at times.
      The friend whose daughter had gone to school with Asenath Waite repeated many curious things when the news of Edward’s acquaintance with her began to spread about. Asenath, it seemed, had posed as a kind of magician at school; and had really seemed able to accomplish some highly baffling marvels. She professed to be able to raise thunderstorms, though her seeming success was generally laid to some uncanny knack at prediction. All animals markedly disliked her, and she could make any dog howl by certain motions of her right hand. There were times when she displayed snatches of knowledge and language very singular—and very shocking—for a young girl; when she would frighten her schoolmates with leers and winks of an inexplicable kind, and would seem to extract an obscene and zestful irony from her present situation.
      Most unusual, though, were the well-attested cases of her influence over other persons. She was, beyond question, a genuine hypnotist. By gazing peculiarly at a fellow-student she would often give the latter a distinct feeling of exchanged personality—as if the subject were placed momentarily in the magician’s body and able to stare half across the room at her real body, whose eyes blazed and protruded with an alien expression. Asenath often made wild claims about the nature of consciousness and about its independence of the physical frame—or at least from the life-processes of the physical frame. Her crowning rage, however, was that she was not a man; since she believed a male brain had certain unique and far-reaching cosmic powers. Given a man’s brain, she declared, she could not only equal but surpass her father in mastery of unknown forces. 
      Edward met Asenath at a gathering of “intelligentsia” held in one of the students’ rooms, and could talk of nothing else when he came to see me the next day. He had found her full of the interests and erudition which engrossed him most, and was in addition wildly taken with her appearance. I had never seen the young woman, and recalled casual references only faintly, but I knew who she was. It seemed rather regrettable that Derby should become so upheaved about her; but I said nothing to discourage him, since infatuation thrives on opposition. He was not, he said, mentioning her to his father.
      In the next few weeks I heard of very little but Asenath from young Derby. Others now remarked Edward’s autumnal gallantry, though they agreed that he did not look even nearly his actual age, or seem at all inappropriate as an escort for his bizarre divinity. He was only a trifle paunchy despite his indolence and self-indulgence, and his face was absolutely without lines. Asenath, on the other hand, had the premature crow’s feet which come from the exercise of an intense will.
      About this time Edward brought the girl to call on me, and I at once saw that his interest was by no means one-sided. She eyed him continually with an almost predatory air, and I perceived that their intimacy was beyond untangling. Soon afterward I had a visit from old Mr. Derby, whom I had always admired and respected. He had heard the tales of his son’s new friendship, and had wormed the whole truth out of “the boy”. Edward meant to marry Asenath, and had even been looking at houses in the suburbs. Knowing my usually great influence with his son, the father wondered if I could help to break the ill-advised affair off; but I regretfully expressed my doubts. This time it was not a question of Edward’s weak will but of the woman’s strong will. The perennial child had transferred his dependence from the parental image to a new and stronger image, and nothing could be done about it.
      The wedding was performed a month later—by a justice of the peace, according to the bride’s request. Mr. Derby, at my advice, offered no opposition; and he, my wife, my son, and I attended the brief ceremony—the other guests being wild young people from the college. Asenath had bought the old Crowninshield place in the country at the end of High Street, and they proposed to settle there after a short trip to Innsmouth, whence three servants and some books and household goods were to be brought. It was probably not so much consideration for Edward and his father as a personal wish to be near the college, its library, and its crowd of “sophisticates”, that made Asenath settle in Arkham instead of returning permanently home.
      When Edward called on me after the honeymoon I thought he looked slightly changed. Asenath had made him get rid of the undeveloped moustache, but there was more than that. He looked soberer and more thoughtful, his habitual pout of childish rebelliousness being exchanged for a look almost of genuine sadness. I was puzzled to decide whether I liked or disliked the change. Certainly, he seemed for the moment more normally adult than ever before. Perhaps the marriage was a good thing—might not the change of dependence form a start toward actual neutralisation, leading ultimately to responsible independence? He came alone, for Asenath was very busy. She had brought a vast store of books and apparatus from Innsmouth (Derby shuddered as he spoke the name), and was finishing the restoration of the Crowninshield house and grounds.
      Her home in—that town—was a rather disquieting place, but certain objects in it had taught him some surprising things. He was progressing fast in esoteric lore now that he had Asenath’s guidance. Some of the experiments she proposed were very daring and radical—he did not feel at liberty to describe them—but he had confidence in her powers and intentions. The three servants were very queer—an incredibly aged couple who had been with old Ephraim and referred occasionally to him and to Asenath’s dead mother in a cryptic way, and a swarthy young wench who had marked anomalies of feature and seemed to exude a perpetual odour of fish.

III.

For the next two years I saw less and less of Derby. A fortnight would sometimes slip by without the familiar three-and-two strokes at the front door; and when he did call—or when, as happened with increasing infrequency, I called on him—he was very little disposed to converse on vital topics. He had become secretive about those occult studies which he used to describe and discuss so minutely, and preferred not to talk of his wife. She had aged tremendously since her marriage, till now—oddly enough—she seemed the elder of the two. Her face held the most concentratedly determined expression I had ever seen, and her whole aspect seemed to gain a vague, unplaceable repulsiveness. My wife and son noticed it as much as I, and we all ceased gradually to call on her—for which, Edward admitted in one of his boyishly tactless moments, she was unmitigatedly grateful. Occasionally the Derbys would go on long trips—ostensibly to Europe, though Edward sometimes hinted at obscurer destinations. 
      It was after the first year that people began talking about the change in Edward Derby. It was very casual talk, for the change was purely psychological; but it brought up some interesting points. Now and then, it seemed, Edward was observed to wear an expression and to do things wholly incompatible with his usual flabby nature. For example—although in the old days he could not drive a car, he was now seen occasionally to dash into or out of the old Crowninshield driveway with Asenath’s powerful Packard, handling it like a master, and meeting traffic entanglements with a skill and determination utterly alien to his accustomed nature. In such cases he seemed always to be just back from some trip or just starting on one—what sort of trip, no one could guess, although he mostly favoured the Innsmouth road.
      Oddly, the metamorphosis did not seem altogether pleasing. People said he looked too much like his wife, or like old Ephraim Waite himself, in these moments—or perhaps these moments seemed unnatural because they were so rare. Sometimes, hours after starting out in this way, he would return listlessly sprawled on the rear seat of the car while an obviously hired chauffeur or mechanic drove. Also, his preponderant aspect on the streets during his decreasing round of social contacts (including, I may say, his calls on me) was the old-time indecisive one—its irresponsible childishness even more marked than in the past. While Asenath’s face aged, Edward’s—aside from those exceptional occasions—actually relaxed into a kind of exaggerated immaturity, save when a trace of the new sadness or understanding would flash across it. It was really very puzzling. Meanwhile the Derbys almost dropped out of the gay college circle—not through their own disgust, we heard, but because something about their present studies shocked even the most callous of the other decadents. 
      It was in the third year of the marriage that Edward began to hint openly to me of a certain fear and dissatisfaction. He would let fall remarks about things ‘going too far’, and would talk darkly about the need of ‘saving his identity’. At first I ignored such references, but in time I began to question him guardedly, remembering what my friend’s daughter had said about Asenath’s hypnotic influence over the other girls at school—the cases where students had thought they were in her body looking across the room at themselves. This questioning seemed to make him at once alarmed and grateful, and once he mumbled something about having a serious talk with me later.
      About this time old Mr. Derby died, for which I was afterward very thankful. Edward was badly upset, though by no means disorganised. He had seen astonishingly little of his parent since his marriage, for Asenath had concentrated in herself all his vital sense of family linkage. Some called him callous in his loss—especially since those jaunty and confident moods in the car began to increase. He now wished to move back into the old Derby mansion, but Asenath insisted on staying in the Crowninshield house, to which she had become well adjusted.
      Not long afterward my wife heard a curious thing from a friend—one of the few who had not dropped the Derbys. She had been out to the end of High St. to call on the couple, and had seen a car shoot briskly out of the drive with Edward’s oddly confident and almost sneering face above the wheel. Ringing the bell, she had been told by the repulsive wench that Asenath was also out; but had chanced to look up at the house in leaving. There, at one of Edward’s library windows, she had glimpsed a hastily withdrawn face—a face whose expression of pain, defeat, and wistful hopelessness was poignant beyond description. It was—incredibly enough in view of its usual domineering cast—Asenath’s; yet the caller had vowed that in that instant the sad, muddled eyes of poor Edward were gazing out from it. 
      Edward’s calls now grew a trifle more frequent, and his hints occasionally became concrete. What he said was not to be believed, even in centuried and legend-haunted Arkham; but he threw out his dark lore with a sincerity and convincingness which made one fear for his sanity. He talked about terrible meetings in lonely places, of Cyclopean ruins in the heart of the Maine woods beneath which vast staircases lead down to abysses of nighted secrets, of complex angles that lead through invisible walls to other regions of space and time, and of hideous exchanges of personality that permitted explorations in remote and forbidden places, on other worlds, and in different space-time continua.
      He would now and then back up certain crazy hints by exhibiting objects which utterly nonplussed me—elusively coloured and bafflingly textured objects like nothing ever heard of on earth, whose insane curves and surfaces answered no conceivable purpose and followed no conceivable geometry. These things, he said, came ‘from outside’; and his wife knew how to get them. Sometimes—but always in frightened and ambiguous whispers—he would suggest things about old Ephraim Waite, whom he had seen occasionally at the college library in the old days. These adumbrations were never specific, but seemed to revolve around some especially horrible doubt as to whether the old wizard were really dead—in a spiritual as well as corporeal sense.
      At times Derby would halt abruptly in his revelations, and I wondered whether Asenath could possibly have divined his speech at a distance and cut him off through some unknown sort of telepathic mesmerism—some power of the kind she had displayed at school. Certainly, she suspected that he told me things, for as the weeks passed she tried to stop his visits with words and glances of a most inexplicable potency. Only with difficulty could he get to see me, for although he would pretend to be going somewhere else, some invisible force would generally clog his motions or make him forget his destination for the time being. His visits usually came when Asenath was away—‘away in her own body’, as he once oddly put it. She always found out later—the servants watched his goings and comings—but evidently she thought it inexpedient to do anything drastic.

IV.

Derby had been married more than three years on that August day when I got the telegram from Maine. I had not seen him for two months, but had heard he was away “on business”. Asenath was supposed to be with him, though watchful gossips declared there was someone upstairs in the house behind the doubly curtained windows. They had watched the purchases made by the servants. And now the town marshal of Chesuncook had wired of the draggled madman who stumbled out of the woods with delirious ravings and screamed to me for protection. It was Edward—and he had been just able to recall his own name and my name and address.
      Chesuncook is close to the wildest, deepest, and least explored forest belt in Maine, and it took a whole day of feverish jolting through fantastic and forbidding scenery to get there in a car. I found Derby in a cell at the town farm, vacillating between frenzy and apathy. He knew me at once, and began pouring out a meaningless, half-incoherent torrent of words in my direction.
      “Dan—for God’s sake! The pit of the shoggoths! Down the six thousand steps . . . the abomination of abominations . . . I never would let her take me, and then I found myself there. . . . Iä! Shub-Niggurath! . . . The shape rose up from the altar, and there were 500 that howled. . . . The Hooded Thing bleated ‘Kamog! Kamog!’—that was old Ephraim’s secret name in the coven. . . . I was there, where she promised she wouldn’t take me. . . . A minute before I was locked in the library, and then I was there where she had gone with my body—in the place of utter blasphemy, the unholy pit where the black realm begins and the watcher guards the gate. . . . I saw a shoggoth—it changed shape. . . . I can’t stand it. . . . I won’t stand it. . . . I’ll kill her if she ever sends me there again. . . . I’ll kill that entity . . . her, him, it . . . I’ll kill it! I’ll kill it with my own hands!”
      It took me an hour to quiet him, but he subsided at last. The next day I got him decent clothes in the village, and set out with him for Arkham. His fury of hysteria was spent, and he was inclined to be silent; though he began muttering darkly to himself when the car passed through Augusta—as if the sight of a city aroused unpleasant memories. It was clear that he did not wish to go home; and considering the fantastic delusions he seemed to have about his wife—delusions undoubtedly springing from some actual hypnotic ordeal to which he had been subjected—I thought it would be better if he did not. I would, I resolved, put him up myself for a time; no matter what unpleasantness it would make with Asenath. Later I would help him get a divorce, for most assuredly there were mental factors which made this marriage suicidal for him. When we struck open country again Derby’s muttering faded away, and I let him nod and drowse on the seat beside me as I drove.
      During our sunset dash through Portland the muttering commenced again, more distinctly than before, and as I listened I caught a stream of utterly insane drivel about Asenath. The extent to which she had preyed on Edward’s nerves was plain, for he had woven a whole set of hallucinations around her. His present predicament, he mumbled furtively, was only one of a long series. She was getting hold of him, and he knew that some day she would never let go. Even now she probably let him go only when she had to, because she couldn’t hold on long at a time. She constantly took his body and went to nameless places for nameless rites, leaving him in her body and locking him upstairs—but sometimes she couldn’t hold on, and he would find himself suddenly in his own body again in some far-off, horrible, and perhaps unknown place. Sometimes she’d get hold of him again and sometimes she couldn’t. Often he was left stranded somewhere as I had found him . . . time and again he had to find his way home from frightful distances, getting somebody to drive the car after he found it.
      The worst thing was that she was holding on to him longer and longer at a time. She wanted to be a man—to be fully human—that was why she got hold of him. She had sensed the mixture of fine-wrought brain and weak will in him. Some day she would crowd him out and disappear with his body—disappear to become a great magician like her father and leave him marooned in that female shell that wasn’t even quite human. Yes, he knew about the Innsmouth blood now. There had been traffick with things from the sea—it was horrible. . . . And old Ephraim—he had known the secret, and when he grew old did a hideous thing to keep alive . . . he wanted to live forever . . . Asenath would succeed—one successful demonstration had taken place already.
      As Derby muttered on I turned to look at him closely, verifying the impression of change which an earlier scrutiny had given me. Paradoxically, he seemed in better shape than usual—harder, more normally developed, and without the trace of sickly flabbiness caused by his indolent habits. It was as if he had been really active and properly exercised for the first time in his coddled life, and I judged that Asenath’s force must have pushed him into unwonted channels of motion and alertness. But just now his mind was in a pitiable state; for he was mumbling wild extravagances about his wife, about black magic, about old Ephraim, and about some revelation which would convince even me. He repeated names which I recognised from bygone browsings in forbidden volumes, and at times made me shudder with a certain thread of mythological consistency—of convincing coherence—which ran through his maundering. Again and again he would pause, as if to gather courage for some final and terrible disclosure.
      “Dan, Dan, don’t you remember him—the wild eyes and the unkempt beard that never turned white? He glared at me once, and I never forgot it. Now she glares that way. And I know why! He found it in the Necronomicon—the formula. I don’t dare tell you the page yet, but when I do you can read and understand. Then you will know what has engulfed me. On, on, on, on—body to body to body—he means never to die. The life-glow—he knows how to break the link . . . it can flicker on a while even when the body is dead. I’ll give you hints, and maybe you’ll guess. Listen, Dan—do you know why my wife always takes such pains with that silly backhand writing? Have you ever seen a manuscript of old Ephraim’s? Do you want to know why I shivered when I saw some hasty notes Asenath had jotted down? 
      “Asenath . . . is there such a person? Why did they half think there was poison in old Ephraim’s stomach? Why do the Gilmans whisper about the way he shrieked—like a frightened child—when he went mad and Asenath locked him up in the padded attic room where—the other—had been? Was it old Ephraim’s soul that was locked in? Who locked in whom? Why had he been looking for months for someone with a fine mind and a weak will? Why did he curse that his daughter wasn’t a son? Tell me, Daniel Upton—what devilish exchange was perpetrated in the house of horror where that blasphemous monster had his trusting, weak-willed, half-human child at his mercy? Didn’t he make it permanent—as she’ll do in the end with me? Tell me why that thing that calls itself Asenath writes differently when off guard, so that you can’t tell its script from . . .”
      Then the thing happened. Derby’s voice was rising to a thin treble scream as he raved, when suddenly it was shut off with an almost mechanical click. I thought of those other occasions at my home when his confidences had abruptly ceased—when I had half fancied that some obscure telepathic wave of Asenath’s mental force was intervening to keep him silent. This, though, was something altogether different—and, I felt, infinitely more horrible. The face beside me was twisted almost unrecognisably for a moment, while through the whole body there passed a shivering motion—as if all the bones, organs, muscles, nerves, and glands were readjusting themselves to a radically different posture, set of stresses, and general personality.
      Just where the supreme horror lay, I could not for my life tell; yet there swept over me such a swamping wave of sickness and repulsion—such a freezing, petrifying sense of utter alienage and abnormality—that my grasp of the wheel grew feeble and uncertain. The figure beside me seemed less like a lifelong friend than like some monstrous intrusion from outer space—some damnable, utterly accursed focus of unknown and malign cosmic forces.
      I had faltered only a moment, but before another moment was over my companion had seized the wheel and forced me to change places with him. The dusk was now very thick, and the lights of Portland far behind, so I could not see much of his face. The blaze of his eyes, though, was phenomenal; and I knew that he must now be in that queerly energised state—so unlike his usual self—which so many people had noticed. It seemed odd and incredible that listless Edward Derby—he who could never assert himself, and who had never learned to drive—should be ordering me about and taking the wheel of my own car, yet that was precisely what had happened. He did not speak for some time, and in my inexplicable horror I was glad he did not.
      In the lights of Biddeford and Saco I saw his firmly set mouth, and shivered at the blaze of his eyes. The people were right—he did look damnably like his wife and like old Ephraim when in these moods. I did not wonder that the moods were disliked—there was certainly something unnatural and diabolic in them, and I felt the sinister element all the more because of the wild ravings I had been hearing. This man, for all my lifelong knowledge of Edward Pickman Derby, was a stranger—an intrusion of some sort from the black abyss.
      He did not speak until we were on a dark stretch of road, and when he did his voice seemed utterly unfamiliar. It was deeper, firmer, and more decisive than I had ever known it to be; while its accent and pronunciation were altogether changed—though vaguely, remotely, and rather disturbingly recalling something I could not quite place. There was, I thought, a trace of very profound and very genuine irony in the timbre—not the flashy, meaninglessly jaunty pseudo-irony of the callow “sophisticate”, which Derby had habitually affected, but something grim, basic, pervasive, and potentially evil. I marvelled at the self-possession so soon following the spell of panic-struck muttering.
      “I hope you’ll forget my attack back there, Upton,” he was saying. “You know what my nerves are, and I guess you can excuse such things. I’m enormously grateful, of course, for this lift home.
      “And you must forget, too, any crazy things I may have been saying about my wife—and about things in general. That’s what comes from overstudy in a field like mine. My philosophy is full of bizarre concepts, and when the mind gets worn out it cooks up all sorts of imaginary concrete applications. I shall take a rest from now on—you probably won’t see me for some time, and you needn’t blame Asenath for it.
      “This trip was a bit queer, but it’s really very simple. There are certain Indian relics in the north woods—standing stones, and all that—which mean a good deal in folklore, and Asenath and I are following that stuff up. It was a hard search, so I seem to have gone off my head. I must send somebody for the car when I get home. A month’s relaxation will put me back on my feet.”
      I do not recall just what my own part of the conversation was, for the baffling alienage of my seatmate filled all my consciousness. With every moment my feeling of elusive cosmic horror increased, till at length I was in a virtual delirium of longing for the end of the drive. Derby did not offer to relinquish the wheel, and I was glad of the speed with which Portsmouth and Newburyport flashed by. 
      At the junction where the main highway runs inland and avoids Innsmouth I was half afraid my driver would take the bleak shore road that goes through that damnable place. He did not, however, but darted rapidly past Rowley and Ipswich toward our destination. We reached Arkham before midnight, and found the lights still on at the old Crowninshield house. Derby left the car with a hasty repetition of his thanks, and I drove home alone with a curious feeling of relief. It had been a terrible drive—all the more terrible because I could not quite tell why—and I did not regret Derby’s forecast of a long absence from my company.

V.

The next two months were full of rumours. People spoke of seeing Derby more and more in his new energised state, and Asenath was scarcely ever in to her few callers. I had only one visit from Edward, when he called briefly in Asenath’s car—duly reclaimed from wherever he had left it in Maine—to get some books he had lent me. He was in his new state, and paused only long enough for some evasively polite remarks. It was plain that he had nothing to discuss with me when in this condition—and I noticed that he did not even trouble to give the old three-and-two signal when ringing the doorbell. As on that evening in the car, I felt a faint, infinitely deep horror which I could not explain; so that his swift departure was a prodigious relief.
      In mid-September Derby was away for a week, and some of the decadent college set talked knowingly of the matter—hinting at a meeting with a notorious cult-leader, lately expelled from England, who had established headquarters in New York. For my part I could not get that strange ride from Maine out of my head. The transformation I had witnessed had affected me profoundly, and I caught myself again and again trying to account for the thing—and for the extreme horror it had inspired in me.
      But the oddest rumours were those about the sobbing in the old Crowninshield house. The voice seemed to be a woman’s, and some of the younger people thought it sounded like Asenath’s. It was heard only at rare intervals, and would sometimes be choked off as if by force. There was talk of an investigation, but this was dispelled one day when Asenath appeared in the streets and chatted in a sprightly way with a large number of acquaintances—apologising for her recent absences and speaking incidentally about the nervous breakdown and hysteria of a guest from Boston. The guest was never seen, but Asenath’s appearance left nothing to be said. And then someone complicated matters by whispering that the sobs had once or twice been in a man’s voice.
      One evening in mid-October I heard the familiar three-and-two ring at the front door. Answering it myself, I found Edward on the steps, and saw in a moment that his personality was the old one which I had not encountered since the day of his ravings on that terrible ride from Chesuncook. His face was twitching with a mixture of odd emotions in which fear and triumph seemed to share dominion, and he looked furtively over his shoulder as I closed the door behind him.
      Following me clumsily to the study, he asked for some whiskey to steady his nerves. I forbore to question him, but waited till he felt like beginning whatever he wanted to say. At length he ventured some information in a choking voice.
      “Asenath has gone, Dan. We had a long talk last night while the servants were out, and I made her promise to stop preying on me. Of course I had certain—certain occult defences I never told you about. She had to give in, but got frightfully angry. Just packed up and started for New York—walked right out to catch the 8:20 in to Boston. I suppose people will talk, but I can’t help that. You needn’t mention that there was any trouble—just say she’s gone on a long research trip.
      “She’s probably going to stay with one of her horrible groups of devotees. I hope she’ll go west and get a divorce—anyhow, I’ve made her promise to keep away and let me alone. It was horrible, Dan—she was stealing my body—crowding me out—making a prisoner of me. I laid low and pretended to let her do it, but I had to be on the watch. I could plan if I was careful, for she can’t read my mind literally, or in detail. All she could read of my planning was a sort of general mood of rebellion—and she always thought I was helpless. Never thought I could get the best of her . . . but I had a spell or two that worked.”
      Derby looked over his shoulder and took some more whiskey.
      “I paid off those damned servants this morning when they got back. They were ugly about it, and asked questions, but they went. They’re her kind—Innsmouth people—and were hand and glove with her. I hope they’ll let me alone—I didn’t like the way they laughed when they walked away. I must get as many of Dad’s old servants again as I can. I’ll move back home now.
      “I suppose you think I’m crazy, Dan—but Arkham history ought to hint at things that back up what I’ve told you—and what I’m going to tell you. You’ve seen one of the changes, too—in your car after I told you about Asenath that day coming home from Maine. That was when she got me—drove me out of my body. The last thing of the ride I remember was when I was all worked up trying to tell you what that she-devil is. Then she got me, and in a flash I was back at the house—in the library where those damned servants had me locked up—and in that cursed fiend’s body . . . that isn’t even human. . . . You know, it was she you must have ridden home with . . . that preying wolf in my body. . . . You ought to have known the difference!”
      I shuddered as Derby paused. Surely, I had known the difference—yet could I accept an explanation as insane as this? But my distracted caller was growing even wilder.
      “I had to save myself—I had to, Dan! She’d have got me for good at Hallowmass—they hold a Sabbat up there beyond Chesuncook, and the sacrifice would have clinched things. She’d have got me for good . . . she’d have been I, and I’d have been she . . . forever . . . too late. . . . My body’d have been hers for good. . . . She’d have been a man, and fully human, just as she wanted to be. . . . I suppose she’d have put me out of the way—killed her own ex-body with me in it, damn her, just as she did before—just as she, he, or it did before. . . .”
      Edward’s face was now atrociously distorted, and he bent it uncomfortably close to mine as his voice fell to a whisper.
      “You must know what I hinted in the car—that she isn’t Asenath at all, but really old Ephraim himself. I suspected it a year and a half ago, but I know it now. Her handwriting shews it when she’s off guard—sometimes she jots down a note in writing that’s just like her father’s manuscripts, stroke for stroke—and sometimes she says things that nobody but an old man like Ephraim could say. He changed forms with her when he felt death coming—she was the only one he could find with the right kind of brain and a weak enough will—he got her body permanently, just as she almost got mine, and then poisoned the old body he’d put her into. Haven’t you seen old Ephraim’s soul glaring out of that she-devil’s eyes dozens of times . . . and out of mine when she had control of my body?”
      The whisperer was panting, and paused for breath. I said nothing, and when he resumed his voice was nearer normal. This, I reflected, was a case for the asylum, but I would not be the one to send him there. Perhaps time and freedom from Asenath would do its work. I could see that he would never wish to dabble in morbid occultism again.
      “I’ll tell you more later—I must have a long rest now. I’ll tell you something of the forbidden horrors she led me into—something of the age-old horrors that even now are festering in out-of-the-way corners with a few monstrous priests to keep them alive. Some people know things about the universe that nobody ought to know, and can do things that nobody ought to be able to do. I’ve been in it up to my neck, but that’s the end. Today I’d burn that damned Necronomicon and all the rest if I were librarian at Miskatonic.
      “But she can’t get me now. I must get out of that accursed house as soon as I can, and settle down at home. You’ll help me, I know, if I need help. Those devilish servants, you know . . . and if people should get too inquisitive about Asenath. You see, I can’t give them her address. . . . Then there are certain groups of searchers—certain cults, you know—that might misunderstand our breaking up . . . some of them have damnably curious ideas and methods. I know you’ll stand by me if anything happens—even if I have to tell you a lot that will shock you. . . .”
      I had Edward stay and sleep in one of the guest-chambers that night, and in the morning he seemed calmer. We discussed certain possible arrangements for his moving back into the Derby mansion, and I hoped he would lose no time in making the change. He did not call the next evening, but I saw him frequently during the ensuing weeks. We talked as little as possible about strange and unpleasant things, but discussed the renovation of the old Derby house, and the travels which Edward promised to take with my son and me the following summer.
      Of Asenath we said almost nothing, for I saw that the subject was a peculiarly disturbing one. Gossip, of course, was rife; but that was no novelty in connexion with the strange ménage at the old Crowninshield house. One thing I did not like was what Derby’s banker let fall in an overexpansive mood at the Miskatonic Club—about the cheques Edward was sending regularly to a Moses and Abigail Sargent and a Eunice Babson in Innsmouth. That looked as if those evil-faced servants were extorting some kind of tribute from him—yet he had not mentioned the matter to me.
      I wished that the summer—and my son’s Harvard vacation—would come, so that we could get Edward to Europe. He was not, I soon saw, mending as rapidly as I had hoped he would; for there was something a bit hysterical in his occasional exhilaration, while his moods of fright and depression were altogether too frequent. The old Derby house was ready by December, yet Edward constantly put off moving. Though he hated and seemed to fear the Crowninshield place, he was at the same time queerly enslaved by it. He could not seem to begin dismantling things, and invented every kind of excuse to postpone action. When I pointed this out to him he appeared unaccountably frightened. His father’s old butler—who was there with other reacquired family servants—told me one day that Edward’s occasional prowlings about the house, and especially down cellar, looked odd and unwholesome to him. I wondered if Asenath had been writing disturbing letters, but the butler said there was no mail which could have come from her.

VI.

It was about Christmas that Derby broke down one evening while calling on me. I was steering the conversation toward next summer’s travels when he suddenly shrieked and leaped up from his chair with a look of shocking, uncontrollable fright—a cosmic panic and loathing such as only the nether gulfs of nightmare could bring to any sane mind.
      “My brain! My brain! God, Dan—it’s tugging—from beyond—knocking—clawing—that she-devil—even now—Ephraim—Kamog! Kamog!—The pit of the shoggoths—Iä! Shub-Niggurath! The Goat with a Thousand Young! . . . 
      “The flame—the flame . . . beyond body, beyond life . . . in the earth . . . oh, God! . . .”
      I pulled him back to his chair and poured some wine down his throat as his frenzy sank to a dull apathy. He did not resist, but kept his lips moving as if talking to himself. Presently I realised that he was trying to talk to me, and bent my ear to his mouth to catch the feeble words.
      “ . . . again, again . . . she’s trying . . . I might have known . . . nothing can stop that force; not distance, nor magic, nor death . . . it comes and comes, mostly in the night . . . I can’t leave . . . it’s horrible . . . oh, God, Dan, if you only knew as I do just how horrible it is. . . .”
      When he had slumped down into a stupor I propped him with pillows and let normal sleep overtake him. I did not call a doctor, for I knew what would be said of his sanity, and wished to give nature a chance if I possibly could. He waked at midnight, and I put him to bed upstairs, but he was gone by morning. He had let himself quietly out of the house—and his butler, when called on the wire, said he was at home pacing restlessly about the library.
      Edward went to pieces rapidly after that. He did not call again, but I went daily to see him. He would always be sitting in his library, staring at nothing and having an air of abnormal listening. Sometimes he talked rationally, but always on trivial topics. Any mention of his trouble, of future plans, or of Asenath would send him into a frenzy. His butler said he had frightful seizures at night, during which he might eventually do himself harm.
      I had a long talk with his doctor, banker, and lawyer, and finally took the physician with two specialist colleagues to visit him. The spasms that resulted from the first questions were violent and pitiable—and that evening a closed car took his poor struggling body to the Arkham Sanitarium. I was made his guardian and called on him twice weekly—almost weeping to hear his wild shrieks, awesome whispers, and dreadful, droning repetitions of such phrases as “I had to do it—I had to do it . . . it’ll get me . . . it’ll get me . . . down there . . . down there in the dark. . . . Mother, mother! Dan! Save me . . . save me. . . .”
      How much hope of recovery there was, no one could say; but I tried my best to be optimistic. Edward must have a home if he emerged, so I transferred his servants to the Derby mansion, which would surely be his sane choice. What to do about the Crowninshield place with its complex arrangements and collections of utterly inexplicable objects I could not decide, so left it momentarily untouched—telling the Derby housemaid to go over and dust the chief rooms once a week, and ordering the furnace man to have a fire on those days.
      The final nightmare came before Candlemas—heralded, in cruel irony, by a false gleam of hope. One morning late in January the sanitarium telephoned to report that Edward’s reason had suddenly come back. His continuous memory, they said, was badly impaired; but sanity itself was certain. Of course he must remain some time for observation, but there could be little doubt of the outcome. All going well, he would surely be free in a week.
      I hastened over in a flood of delight, but stood bewildered when a nurse took me to Edward’s room. The patient rose to greet me, extending his hand with a polite smile; but I saw in an instant that he bore the strangely energised personality which had seemed so foreign to his own nature—the competent personality I had found so vaguely horrible, and which Edward himself had once vowed was the intruding soul of his wife. There was the same blazing vision—so like Asenath’s and old Ephraim’s—and the same firm mouth; and when he spoke I could sense the same grim, pervasive irony in his voice—the deep irony so redolent of potential evil. This was the person who had driven my car through the night five months before—the person I had not seen since that brief call when he had forgotten the old-time doorbell signal and stirred such nebulous fears in me—and now he filled me with the same dim feeling of blasphemous alienage and ineffable cosmic hideousness.
      He spoke affably of arrangements for release—and there was nothing for me to do but assent, despite some remarkable gaps in his recent memories. Yet I felt that something was terribly, inexplicably wrong and abnormal. There were horrors in this thing that I could not reach. This was a sane person—but was it indeed the Edward Derby I had known? If not, who or what was it—and where was Edward? Ought it to be free or confined . . . or ought it to be extirpated from the face of the earth? There was a hint of the abysmally sardonic in everything the creature said—the Asenath-like eyes lent a special and baffling mockery to certain words about the ‘early liberty earned by an especially close confinement’. I must have behaved very awkwardly, and was glad to beat a retreat.
      All that day and the next I racked my brain over the problem. What had happened? What sort of mind looked out through those alien eyes in Edward’s face? I could think of nothing but this dimly terrible enigma, and gave up all efforts to perform my usual work. The second morning the hospital called up to say that the recovered patient was unchanged, and by evening I was close to a nervous collapse—a state I admit, though others will vow it coloured my subsequent vision. I have nothing to say on this point except that no madness of mine could account for all the evidence.

VII.

It was in the night—after that second evening—that stark, utter horror burst over me and weighted my spirit with a black, clutching panic from which it can never shake free. It began with a telephone call just before midnight. I was the only one up, and sleepily took down the receiver in the library. No one seemed to be on the wire, and I was about to hang up and go to bed when my ear caught a very faint suspicion of sound at the other end. Was someone trying under great difficulties to talk? As I listened I thought I heard a sort of half-liquid bubbling noise—“glub . . . glub . . . glub”—which had an odd suggestion of inarticulate, unintelligible word and syllable divisions. I called, “Who is it?” But the only answer was “glub-glub . . . glub-glub.” I could only assume that the noise was mechanical; but fancying that it might be a case of a broken instrument able to receive but not to send, I added, “I can’t hear you. Better hang up and try Information.” Immediately I heard the receiver go on the hook at the other end.
      This, I say, was just before midnight. When that call was traced afterward it was found to come from the old Crowninshield house, though it was fully half a week from the housemaid’s day to be there. I shall only hint what was found at that house—the upheaval in a remote cellar storeroom, the tracks, the dirt, the hastily rifled wardrobe, the baffling marks on the telephone, the clumsily used stationery, and the detestable stench lingering over everything. The police, poor fools, have their smug little theories, and are still searching for those sinister discharged servants—who have dropped out of sight amidst the present furore. They speak of a ghoulish revenge for things that were done, and say I was included because I was Edward’s best friend and adviser.
      Idiots!—do they fancy those brutish clowns could have forged that handwriting? Do they fancy they could have brought what later came? Are they blind to the changes in that body that was Edward’s? As for me, I now believe all that Edward Derby ever told me. There are horrors beyond life’s edge that we do not suspect, and once in a while man’s evil prying calls them just within our range. Ephraim—Asenath—that devil called them in, and they engulfed Edward as they are engulfing me.
      Can I be sure that I am safe? Those powers survive the life of the physical form. The next day—in the afternoon, when I pulled out of my prostration and was able to walk and talk coherently—I went to the madhouse and shot him dead for Edward’s and the world’s sake, but can I be sure till he is cremated? They are keeping the body for some silly autopsies by different doctors—but I say he must be cremated. He must be cremated—he who was not Edward Derby when I shot him. I shall go mad if he is not, for I may be the next. But my will is not weak—and I shall not let it be undermined by the terrors I know are seething around it. One life—Ephraim, Asenath, and Edward—who now? I will not be driven out of my body . . . I will not change souls with that bullet-ridden lich in the madhouse!
      But let me try to tell coherently of that final horror. I will not speak of what the police persistently ignored—the tales of that dwarfed, grotesque, malodorous thing met by at least three wayfarers in High St. just before two o’clock, and the nature of the single footprints in certain places. I will say only that just about two the doorbell and knocker waked me—doorbell and knocker both, plied alternately and uncertainly in a kind of weak desperation, and each trying to keep to Edward’s old signal of three-and-two strokes.
      Roused from sound sleep, my mind leaped into a turmoil. Derby at the door—and remembering the old code! That new personality had not remembered it . . . was Edward suddenly back in his rightful state? Why was he here in such evident stress and haste? Had he been released ahead of time, or had he escaped? Perhaps, I thought as I flung on a robe and bounded downstairs, his return to his own self had brought raving and violence, revoking his discharge and driving him to a desperate dash for freedom. Whatever had happened, he was good old Edward again, and I would help him!
      When I opened the door into the elm-arched blackness a gust of insufferably foetid wind almost flung me prostrate. I choked in nausea, and for a second scarcely saw the dwarfed, humped figure on the steps. The summons had been Edward’s, but who was this foul, stunted parody? Where had Edward had time to go? His ring had sounded only a second before the door opened.
      The caller had on one of Edward’s overcoats—its bottom almost touching the ground, and its sleeves rolled back yet still covering the hands. On the head was a slouch hat pulled low, while a black silk muffler concealed the face. As I stepped unsteadily forward, the figure made a semi-liquid sound like that I had heard over the telephone—“glub . . . glub . . .”—and thrust at me a large, closely written paper impaled on the end of a long pencil. Still reeling from the morbid and unaccountable foetor, I seized this paper and tried to read it in the light from the doorway.
      Beyond question, it was in Edward’s script. But why had he written when he was close enough to ring—and why was the script so awkward, coarse, and shaky? I could make out nothing in the dim half light, so edged back into the hall, the dwarf figure clumping mechanically after but pausing on the inner door’s threshold. The odour of this singular messenger was really appalling, and I hoped (not in vain, thank God!) that my wife would not wake and confront it.
      Then, as I read the paper, I felt my knees give under me and my vision go black. I was lying on the floor when I came to, that accursed sheet still clutched in my fear-rigid hand. This is what it said.
      “Dan—go to the sanitarium and kill it. Exterminate it. It isn’t Edward Derby any more. She got me—it’s Asenath—and she has been dead three months and a half. I lied when I said she had gone away. I killed her. I had to. It was sudden, but we were alone and I was in my right body. I saw a candlestick and smashed her head in. She would have got me for good at Hallowmass.
      “I buried her in the farther cellar storeroom under some old boxes and cleaned up all the traces. The servants suspected next morning, but they have such secrets that they dare not tell the police. I sent them off, but God knows what they—and others of the cult—will do.
      “I thought for a while I was all right, and then I felt the tugging at my brain. I knew what it was—I ought to have remembered. A soul like hers—or Ephraim’s—is half detached, and keeps right on after death as long as the body lasts. She was getting me—making me change bodies with her—seizing my body and putting me in that corpse of hers buried in the cellar.
      “I knew what was coming—that’s why I snapped and had to go to the asylum. Then it came—I found myself choked in the dark—in Asenath’s rotting carcass down there in the cellar under the boxes where I put it. And I knew she must be in my body at the sanitarium—permanently, for it was after Hallowmass, and the sacrifice would work even without her being there—sane, and ready for release as a menace to the world. I was desperate, and in spite of everything I clawed my way out.
      “I’m too far gone to talk—I couldn’t manage to telephone—but I can still write. I’ll get fixed up somehow and bring you this last word and warning. Kill that fiend if you value the peace and comfort of the world. See that it is cremated. If you don’t, it will live on and on, body to body forever, and I can’t tell you what it will do. Keep clear of black magic, Dan, it’s the devil’s business. Goodbye—you’ve been a great friend. Tell the police whatever they’ll believe—and I’m damnably sorry to drag all this on you. I’ll be at peace before long—this thing won’t hold together much more. Hope you can read this. And kill that thing—kill it.
Yours—Ed.”

      It was only afterward that I read the last half of this paper, for I had fainted at the end of the third paragraph. I fainted again when I saw and smelled what cluttered up the threshold where the warm air had struck it. The messenger would not move or have consciousness any more.
      The butler, tougher-fibred than I, did not faint at what met him in the hall in the morning. Instead, he telephoned the police. When they came I had been taken upstairs to bed, but the—other mass—lay where it had collapsed in the night. The men put handkerchiefs to their noses.
      What they finally found inside Edward’s oddly assorted clothes was mostly liquescent horror. There were bones, too—and a crushed-in skull. Some dental work positively identified the skull as Asenath’s.",True
"THEY were the brawlers and braggarts, the loud boasters and hard drinkers, of Faring town, John Kulrek and his crony Lie-lip Canool. Many a time have I, a tousle-haired lad, stolen to the tavern door to listen to their curses, their profane arguments and wild sea songs; half fearful and half in admiration of these wild rovers. Aye, all the people of Faring town gazed on them with fear and admiration, for they were not like the rest of the Faring men; they were not content to ply their trade along the coasts and among the shark-teeth shoals. No yawls, no skiffs for them! They fared far, farther than any other man in the village, for they shipped on the great sailing-ships that went out on the white tides to brave the restless grey ocean and make ports in strange lands.

Ah, I mind it was swift times in the little sea-coast village of Faring when John Kulrek came home, with the furtive Lie-lip at his side, swaggering down the gang-plank, in his tarry sea-clothes, and the broad leather belt that held his ever-ready dagger; shouting condescending greeting to some favored acquaintance, kissing some maiden who ventured too near; then up the street, roaring some scarcely decent song of the sea. How the cringers and the idlers, the hangers-on, would swarm about the two desperate heroes, flattering and smirking, guffawing hilariously at each nasty jest. For to the tavern loafers and to some of the weaker among the straightforward villagers, these men with their wild talk and their brutal deeds, their tales of the Seven Seas and the far countries, these men, I say, were valiant knights, nature's noblemen who dared to be men of blood and brawn.

And all feared them, so that when a man was beaten or a woman insulted, the villagers muttered—and did nothing. And so when Moll Farrell's niece was put to shame by John Kulrek, none dared even to put into words what all thought. Moll had never married, and she and the girl lived alone in a little hut down close to the beach, so close that in high tide the waves came almost to the door.

The people of the village accounted old Moll something of a witch, and she was a grim, gaunt old dame who had little to say to anyone. But she minded her own business, and eked out a slim living by gathering clams, and picking up bits of driftwood.

The girl was a pretty, foolish little thing, vain and easily befooled, else she had never yielded to the shark-like blandishments of John Kulrek.

I mind the day was a cold winter day with a sharp breeze out of the east when the old dame came into the village street shrieking that the girl had vanished. All scattered over the beach and back among the bleak inland hills to search for her—all save John Kulrek and his cronies who sat in the tavern dicing and toping. All the while beyond the shoals, we heard the never- ceasing droning of the heaving, restless grey monster, and in the dim light of the ghostly dawn Moll Farrell's girl came home.

The tides bore her gently across the wet sands and laid her almost at her own door. Virgin-white she was, and her arms were folded across her still bosom; calm was her face, and the grey tides sighed about her slender limbs. Moll Farrell's eyes were stones, yet she stood above her dead girl and spoke no word till John Kulrek and his crony came reeling down from the tavern, their drinking-jacks still in their hands. Drunk was John Kulrek, and the people gave back for him, murder in their souls; so he came and laughed at Moll Farrell across the body of her girl.

""Zounds!"" swore John Kulrek; ""the wench has drowned herself, Lie-lip!""

Lie-lip laughed, with the twist of his thin mouth. He always hated Moll Farrell, for it was she that had given him the name of Lie-lip.

Then John Kulrek lifted his drinking-jack, swaying on his uncertain legs. ""A health to the wench's ghost!"" he bellowed, while all stood aghast.

Then Moll Farrell spoke, and the words broke from her in a scream which sent ripples of cold up and down the spines of the throng.

""The curse of the Foul Fiend upon you, John Kulrek!"" she screamed. ""The curse of God rest upon your vile soul throughout eternity! May you gaze on sights that shall sear the eyes of you and scorch the soul of you! May you die a bloody death and writhe in hell's flames for a million and a million and yet a million years! I curse you by sea and by land, by earth and by air, by the demons of the swamplands, the fiends of the forest and the goblins of the hills! And you""—her lean finger stabbed at Lie-lip Canool and he started backward, his face paling—""you shall be the death of John Kulrek and he shall be the death of you! You shall bring John Kulrek to the doors of hell and John Kulrek shall bring you to the gallows-tree! I set the seal of death upon your brow, John Kulrek! You shall live in terror and die in horror far out upon the cold grey sea! But the sea that took the soul of innocence to her bosom shall not take you, but shall fling forth your vile carcass to the sands! Aye, John Kulrek""—and she spoke with such a terrible intensity that the drunken mockery on the man's face changed to one of swinish stupidity—""the sea roars for the victim it will not keep! There is snow upon the hills, John Kulrek, and ere it melts your corpse will lie at my feet. And I shall spit upon it and be content.""

Kulrek and his crony sailed at dawn for a long voyage, and Moll went back to her hut and her clam-gathering. She seemed to grow leaner and more grim than ever and her eyes smoldered with a light not sane. The days glided by and people whispered among themselves that Moll's days were numbered, for she faded to a ghost of a woman; but she went her way, refusing all aid.

That was a short, cold summer and the snow on the barren inland hills never melted; a thing very unusual, which caused much comment among the villagers. At dusk and at dawn Moll would come up on the beach, gaze up at the snow which glittered on the hills, then out to sea with a fierce intensity in her gaze.

Then the days grew shorter, the nights longer and darker, and the cold grey tides came sweeping along the bleak strands, bearing the rain and sleet of the sharp east breezes.

And upon a bleak day a trading-vessel sailed into the bay and anchored. And all the idlers and the wastrels flocked to the wharfs, for that was the ship upon which John Kulrek and Lie-lip Canool had sailed. Down the gang-plank came Lie-lip, more furtive than ever, but John Kulrek was not there.

To shouted queries, Canool shook his head. ""Kulrek deserted ship at a port of Sumatra,"" said he. ""He had a row with the skipper, lads; wanted me to desert, too, but no! I had to see you fine lads again, eh boys?""

Almost cringing was Lie-lip Canool, and suddenly he recoiled as Moll Farrell came through the throng. A moment they stood eyeing each other; then Moll's grim lips bent in a terrible smile.

""There's blood on your hand, Canool!"" she lashed out suddenly—so suddenly that Lie-lip started and rubbed his right hand across his left sleeve.

""Stand aside, witch!"" he snarled in sudden anger, striding through the crowd which gave back for him. His admirers followed him to the tavern.

Now, I mind that the next day was even colder; grey fogs came drifting out of the east and veiled the sea and the beaches. There would be no sailing that day, and so all the villagers were in their snug houses or matching tales at the tavern. So it came that Joe, my friend, a lad of my own age, and I, were the ones who saw the first of the strange things that happened.

Being harum-scarum lads of no wisdom, we were sitting in a small rowboat, floating at the end of the wharfs, each shivering and wishing the other would suggest leaving, there being no reason whatever for our being there, save that it was a good place to build air-castles undisturbed.

Suddenly Joe raised his hand. ""Say,"" he said, ""d'ye hear? Who can be out on the bay upon a day like this?""

""Nobody. What d'ye hear?""

""Oars. Or I'm a lubber. Listen.""

There was no seeing anything in that fog, and I heard nothing. Yet Joe swore he did, and suddenly his face assumed a strange look.

""Somebody rowing out there, I tell you! The bay is alive with oars from the sound! A score of boats at the least! Ye dolt, can ye not hear?""

Then, as I shook my head, he leaped and began to undo the painter.

""I'm off to see. Name me liar if the bay is not full of boats, all together like a close fleet. Are you with me?""

Yes, I was with him, though I heard nothing. Then out in the greyness we went, and the fog closed behind and before so that we drifted in a vague world of smoke, seeing naught and hearing naught. We were lost in no time, and I cursed Joe for leading us upon a wild goose chase that was like to end with our being swept out to sea. I thought of Moll Farrell's girl and shuddered.

How long we drifted I know not. Minutes faded into hours, hours into centuries. Still Joe swore he heard the oars, now close at hand, now far away, and for hours we followed them, steering our course toward the sound, as the noise grew or receded. This I later thought of, and could not understand.

Then, when my hands were so numb that I could no longer hold the oar, and the forerunning drowsiness of cold and exhaustion was stealing over me, Weak white stars broke through the fog which glided suddenly away, fading like a ghost of smoke, and we found ourselves afloat just outside the mouth of the bay. The waters lay smooth as a pond, all dark green and silver in the starlight, and the cold came crisper than ever. I was swinging the boat about, to put back into the bay, when Joe gave a shout, and for the first time I heard the clack of oar-locks. I glanced over my shoulder and my blood went cold.

A great beaked prow loomed above us, a weird, unfamiliar shape against the stars, and as I caught my breath, sheered sharply and swept by us, with a curious swishing I never heard any other craft make. Joe screamed and backed oars frantically, and the boat walled out of the way just in time; for though the prow missed us, still otherwise we had died. For from the sides of the ship stood long oars, bank upon bank which swept her along. Though I had never seen such a craft, I knew her for a galley. But what was she doing upon our coasts? They said, the far-farers, that such ships were still in use among the heathens of Barbary; but it was many a long, heaving mile to Barbary, and even so she did not resemble the ships described by those who had sailed far.

We started in pursuit, and this was strange, for though the waters broke about her prow, and she seemed fairly to fly through the waves, yet she was making little speed, and it was no time before we caught up with her. Making our painter fast to a chain far back beyond the reach of the swishing oars, we hailed those on deck. But there came no answer, and at last, conquering our fears, we clambered up the chain and found ourselves upon the strangest deck man has trod for many a long, roaring century.

Joe muttered fearsomely. ""Look, how old it seems! Almost ready to fall to pieces. Why, 'tis fairly rotten!""

There was no one on deck, no one at the long sweep with which the craft was steered. We stole to the hold and looked down the stair. Then and there, if ever men were on the verge of insanity, it was we. For there were rowers there, it is true; they sat upon the rowers' benches and drove the creaking oars through the grey waters. And they that rowed were skeletons!

Shrieking, we plunged across the deck, to fling ourselves into the sea. But at the rail I tripped upon something and fell headlong, and as I lay, I saw a thing which vanquished my fear of the horrors below for an instant. The thing upon which I had tripped was a human body, and in the dim grey light that was beginning to steal across the eastern waves I saw a dagger hilt standing up between his shoulders. Joe was at the rail, urging me to haste, and together we slid down the chain and cut the painter.

Then we stood off into the bay. Straight on kept the grim galley, and we followed, slowly, wondering. She seemed to be heading straight for the beach beside the wharfs, and as we approached, we saw the wharfs thronged with people. They had missed us, no doubt, and now they stood, there in the early dawn light, struck dumb by the apparition which had come up out of the night and the grim ocean.

Straight on swept the galley, her oars a-swish; then ere she reached the shallow water—crash!—a terrific reverberation shook the bay. Before our eyes the grim craft seemed to melt away; then she vanished, and the green waters seethed where she had ridden, but there floated no driftwood there, nor did there ever float any ashore. Aye, something floated ashore, but it was grim driftwood!

We made the landing amid a hum of excited conversation that stopped suddenly. Moll Farrell stood before her hut, limned gauntly against the ghostly dawn, her lean hand pointing sea-ward. And across the sighing wet sands, borne by the grey tide, something came floating; something that the waves dropped at Moll Farrell's feet. And there looked up at us, as we crowded about, a pair of unseeing eyes set in a still, white face. John Kulrek had come home.

Still and grim he lay, rocked by the tide, and as he lurched sideways, all saw the dagger hilt that stood from his back—the dagger all of us had seen a thousand times at the belt of Lie-lip Canool.

""Aye, I killed him!"" came Canool's shriek, as he writhed and groveled before our gaze. ""At sea on a still night in a drunken brawl I slew him and hurled him overboard! And from the far seas he has followed me""—his voice sank to a hideous whisper—""because—of—the—curse—the—sea— would—not—keep—his—body!""

And the wretch sank down, trembling, the shadow of the gallows already in his eyes.

""Aye!"" Strong, deep and exultant was Moll Farrell's voice. ""From the hell of lost craft Satan sent a ship of bygone ages! A ship red with gore and stained with the memory of horrid crimes! None other would bear such a vile carcass! The sea has taken vengeance and has given me mine. See now, how I spit upon the face of John Kulrek.""

And with a ghastly laugh, she pitched forward, the blood starting to her lips. And the sun came up across the restless sea.","

THERE WERE, I remember, six of us in Conrad's bizarrely fashioned study, with its queer relics from all over the world and its long rows of books which ranged from the Mandrake Press edition of Boccaccio to aMissale Romanum, bound in clasped oak boards and printed in Venice, 1740. Clemants and Professor Kirowan had just engaged in a somewhat testy anthropological argument: Clemants upholding the theory of a separate, distinct Alpine race, while the professor maintained that this so-called race was merely a deviation from an original Aryan stock—possibly the result of an admixture between the southern or Mediterranean races and the Nordic people.
""And how,"" asked Clemants, ""do you account for their brachycephalicism? The Mediterraneans were as long-headed as the Aryans: would admixture between these dolichocephalic peoples produce a broad-headed intermediate type?""
""Special conditions might bring about a change in an originally long- headed race,"" snapped Kirowan. ""Boaz has demonstrated, for instance, that in the case of immigrants to America, skull formations often change in one generation. And Flinders Petrie has shown that the Lombards changed from a long- headed to a round-headed race in a few centuries.""
""But what caused these changes?""
""Much is yet unknown to science,"" answered Kirowan, ""and we need not be dogmatic. No one knows, as yet, why people of British and Irish ancestry tend to grow unusually tall in the Darling district of Australia—Cornstalks, as they are called—or why people of such descent generally have thinner jaw-structures after a few generations in New England. The universe is full of the unexplainable.""
""And therefore the uninteresting, according to Machen,"" laughed Taverel.
Conrad shook his head. ""I must disagree. To me, the unknowable is most tantalizingly fascinating.""
""Which accounts, no doubt, for all the works on witchcraft and demonology I see on your shelves,"" said Ketrick, with a wave of his hand toward the rows of books.
And let me speak of Ketrick. Each of the six of us was of the same breed —that is to say, a Briton or an American of British descent. By British, I include all natural inhabitants of the British Isles. We represented various strains of English and Celtic blood, but basically, these strains are the same after all. But Ketrick: to me the man always seemed strangely alien. It was in his eyes that this difference showed externally. They were a sort of amber, almost yellow, and slightly oblique. At times, when one looked at his face from certain angles, they seemed to slant like a Chinaman's.
Others than I had noticed this feature, so unusual in a man of pure Anglo- Saxon descent. The usual myths ascribing his slanted eyes to some pre-natal influence had been mooted about, and I remember Professor Hendrik Brooler once remarked that Ketrick was undoubtedly an atavism, representing a reversion of type to some dim and distant ancestor of Mongolian blood—a sort of freak reversion, since none of his family showed such traces.
But Ketrick comes of the Welsh branch of the Cetrics of Sussex, and his lineage is set down in the Book of Peers. There you may read the line of his ancestry, which extends unbroken to the days of Canute. No slightest trace of Mongoloid intermixture appears in the genealogy, and how could there have been such intermixture in old Saxon England? For Ketrick is the modern form of Cedric, and though that branch fled into Wales before the invasion of the Danes, its male heirs consistently married with English families on the border marches, and it remains a pure line of the powerful Sussex Cedrics—almost pure Saxon. As for the man himself, this defect of his eyes, if it can be called a defect, is his only abnormality, except for a slight and occasional lisping of speech. He is highly intellectual and a good companion except for a slight aloofness and a rather callous indifference which may serve to mask an extremely sensitive nature.
Referring to his remark, I said with a laugh: ""Conrad pursues the obscure and mystic as some men pursue romance; his shelves throng with delightful nightmares of every variety.""
Our host nodded. ""You'll find there a number of delectable dishes—Machen, Poe, Blackwood, Maturin—look, there's a rare feast—Horrid Mysteries, by the Marquis of Grosse—the real Eighteenth Century edition.""
Taverel scanned the shelves. ""Weird fiction seems to vie with works on witchcraft, voodoo and dark magic.""
True; historians and chronicles are often dull; tale-weavers never —the masters, I mean. A voodoo sacrifice can be described in such a dull manner as to take all the real fantasy out of it, and leave it merely a sordid murder. I will admit that few writers of fiction touch the true heights of horror—most of their stuff is too concrete, given too much earthly shape and dimensions. But in such tales as Poe's Fall of the House of Usher, Machen's Black Seal and Lovecraft's Call of Cthulhu —the three master horror-tales, to my mind—the reader is borne into dark and outer realms of imagination.
""But look there,"" he continued, ""there, sandwiched between that nightmare of Huysmans', and Walpole's Castle of Otranto—Von Junzt'sNameless Cults. There's a book to keep you awake at night!""
""I've read it,"" said Taverel, ""and I'm convinced the man is mad. His work is like the conversation of a maniac—it runs with startling clarity for awhile, then suddenly merges into vagueness and disconnected ramblings.""
Conrad shook his head. ""Have you ever thought that perhaps it is his very sanity that causes him to write in that fashion? What if he dares not put on paper all he knows? What if his vague suppositions are dark and mysterious hints, keys to the puzzle, to those who know?""
""Bosh!"" This from Kirowan. ""Are you intimating that any of the nightmare cults referred to by Von Junzt survive to this day—if they ever existed save in the hag-ridden brain of a lunatic poet and philosopher?""
""Not he alone used hidden meanings,"" answered Conrad. ""If you will scan various works of certain great poets you may find double meanings. Men have stumbled onto cosmic secrets in the past and given a hint of them to the world in cryptic words. Do you remember Von Junzt's hints of 'a city in the waste'? What do you think of Flecker's line:""
'Pass not beneath! Men say there blows in stony deserts still a rose
But with no scarlet to her leaf—and from whose heart no perfume flows.'
""Men may stumble upon secret things, but Von Junzt dipped deep into forbidden mysteries. He was one of the few men, for instance, who could read the Necronomicon in the original Greek translation.""
Taverel shrugged his shoulders, and Professor Kirowan, though he snorted and puffed viciously at his pipe, made no direct reply; for he, as well as Conrad, had delved into the Latin version of the book, and had found there things not even a cold-blooded scientist could answer or refute.
""Well,"" he said presently, ""suppose we admit the former existence of cults revolving about such nameless and ghastly gods and entities as Cthulhu, Yog Sothoth, Tsathoggua, Gol-goroth, and the like, I can not find it in my mind to believe that survivals of such cults lurk in the dark corners of the world today.""
To our surprise Clemants answered. He was a tall, lean man, silent almost to the point of taciturnity, and his fierce struggles with poverty in his youth had lined his face beyond his years. Like many another artist, he lived a distinctly dual literary life, his swashbuckling novels furnishing him a generous income, and his editorial position on The Cloven Hoofaffording him full artistic expression. The Cloven Hoof was a poetry magazine whose bizarre contents had often aroused the shocked interest of the conservative critics.
""You remember Von Junzt makes mention of a so-called Bran cult,"" said Clemants, stuffing his pipe-bowl with a peculiarly villainous brand of shag tobacco. ""I think I heard you and Taverel discussing it once.""
""As I gather from his hints,"" snapped Kirowan, ""Von Junzt includes this particular cult among those still in existence. Absurd.""
Again Clemants shook his head. ""When I was a boy working my way through a certain university, I had for roommate a lad as poor and ambitious as I. If I told you his name, it would startle you. Though he came of an old Scotch line of Galloway, he was obviously of a non-Aryan type.
""This is in strictest confidence, you understand. But my roommate talked in his sleep. I began to listen and put his disjointed mumbling together. And in his mutterings I first heard of the ancient cult hinted at by Von Junzt; of the king who rules the Dark Empire, which was a revival of an older, darker empire dating back into the Stone Age; and of the great, nameless cavern where stands the Dark Man—the image of Bran Mak Morn, carved in his likeness by a master-hand while the great king yet lived, and to which each worshipper of Bran makes a pilgrimage once in his or her lifetime. Yes, that cult lives today in the descendants of Bran's people—a silent, unknown current it flows on in the great ocean of life, waiting for the stone image of the great Bran to breathe and move with sudden life, and come from the great cavern to rebuild their lost empire.""
""And who were the people of that empire?"" asked Ketrick.
""Picts,"" answered Taverel, ""doubtless the people known later as the wild Picts of Galloway were predominantly Celtic—a mixture of Gaelic, Cymric, aboriginal and possibly Teutonic elements. Whether they took their name from the older race or lent their own name to that race, is a matter yet to be decided. But when Von Junzt speaks of Picts, he refers specifically to the small, dark, garlic-eating peoples of Mediterranean blood who brought the Neolithic culture into Britain. The first settlers of that country, in fact, who gave rise to the tales of earth spirits and goblins.""
""I can not agree to that last statement,"" said Conrad. ""These legends ascribe a deformity and inhumanness of appearances to the characters. There was nothing about the Picts to excite such horror and repulsion in the Aryan peoples. I believe that the Mediterraneans were preceded by a Mongoloid type, very low in the scale of development, whence these tales—""
""Quite true,"" broke in Kirowan, ""but I hardly think they preceded the Picts, as you call them, into Britain. We find troll and dwarf legends all over the Continent, and I am inclined to think that both the Mediterranean and Aryan people brought these tales with them from the Continent. They must have been of extremely inhuman aspect, those early Mongoloids.""
""At least,"" said Conrad, ""here is a flint mallet a miner found in the Welsh hills and gave to me, which has never been fully explained. It is obviously of no ordinary Neolithic make. See how small it is, compared to most implements of that age; almost like a child's toy; yet it is surprisingly heavy and no doubt a deadly blow could be dealt with it. I fitted the handle to it, myself, and you would be surprised to know how difficult it was to carve it into a shape and balance corresponding with the head.""
We looked at the thing. It was well made, polished somewhat like the other remnants of the Neolithic I had seen, yet as Conrad said, it was strangely different. Its small size was oddly disquieting, for it had no appearance of a toy, otherwise. It was as sinister in suggestion as an Aztec sacrificial dagger. Conrad had fashioned the oaken handle with rare skill, and in carving it to fit the head, had managed to give it the same unnatural appearance as the mallet itself had. He had even copied the workmanship of primal times, fixing the head into the cleft of the haft with rawhide.
""My word!"" Taverel made a clumsy pass at an imaginary antagonist and nearly shattered a costly Shang vase. ""The balance of the thing is all off- center; I'd have to readjust all my mechanics of poise and equilibrium to handle it.""
""Let me see it,"" Ketrick took the thing and fumbled with it, trying to strike the secret of its proper handling. At length, somewhat irritated, he swung it up and struck a heavy blow at a shield which hung on the wall nearby. I was standing near it; I saw the hellish mallet twist in his hand like a live serpent, and his arm wrenched out of line; I heard a shout of alarmed warning —then darkness came with the impact of the mallet against my head.
Slowly I drifted back to consciousness. First there was dull sensation with blindness and total lack of knowledge as to where I was or what I was; then vague realization of life and being, and a hard something pressing into my ribs. Then the mists cleared and I came to myself completely.
I lay on my back half-beneath some underbrush and my head throbbed fiercely. Also my hair was caked and clotted with blood, for the scalp had been laid open. But my eyes traveled down my body and limbs, naked but for a deerskin loincloth and sandals of the same material, and found no other wound. That which pressed so uncomfortably into my ribs was my ax, on which I had fallen.
Now an abhorrent babble reached my ears and stung me into clear consciousness. The noise was faintly like language, but not such language as men are accustomed to. It sounded much like the repeated hissing of many great snakes.
I stared. I lay in a great, gloomy forest. The glade was overshadowed, so that even in the daytime it was very dark. Aye—that forest was dark, cold, silent, gigantic and utterly grisly. And I looked into the glade.
I saw a shambles. Five men lay there—at least, what had been five men. Now as I marked the abhorrent mutilations my soul sickened. And about clustered the—Things. Humans they were, of a sort, though I did not consider them so. They were short and stocky, with broad heads too large for their scrawny bodies. Their hair was snaky and stringy, their faces broad and square, with flat noses, hideously slanted eyes, a thin gash for a mouth, and pointed ears. They wore the skins of beasts, as did I, but these hides were but crudely dressed. They bore small bows and flint-tipped arrows, flint knives and cudgels. And they conversed in a speech as hideous as themselves, a hissing, reptilian speech that filled me with dread and loathing.
Oh, I hated them as I lay there; my brain flamed with white-hot fury. And now I remembered. We had hunted, we six youths of the Sword People, and wandered far into the grim forest which our people generally shunned. Weary of the chase, we had paused to rest; to me had been given the first watch, for in those days, no sleep was safe without a sentry. Now shame and revulsion shook my whole being. I had slept—I had betrayed my comrades. And now they lay gashed and mangled—butchered while they slept, by vermin who had never dared to stand before them on equal terms. I, Aryara, had betrayed my trust.
Aye—I remembered. I had slept and in the midst of a dream of the hunt, fire and sparks had exploded in my head and I had plunged into a deeper darkness where there were no dreams. And now the penalty. They who had stolen through the dense forest and smitten me senseless, had not paused to mutilate me. Thinking me dead they had hastened swiftly to their grisly work. Now perhaps they had forgotten me for a time. I had sat somewhat apart from the others, and when struck, had fallen half-under some bushes. But soon they would remember me. I would hunt no more, dance no more in the dances of hunt and love and war, see no more the wattle huts of the Sword People.
But I had no wish to escape back to my people. Should I slink back with my tale of infamy and disgrace? Should I hear the words of scorn my tribe would fling at me, see the girls point their contemptuous fingers at the youth who slept and betrayed his comrades to the knives of vermin?
Tears stung my eyes, and slow hate heaved up in my bosom, and my brain. I would never bear the sword that marked the warrior. I would never triumph over worthy foes and die gloriously beneath the arrows of the Picts or the axes of the Wolf People or the River People. I would go down to death beneath a nauseous rabble, whom the Picts had long ago driven into forest dens like rats.
And mad rage gripped me and dried my tears, giving in their stead a berserk blaze of wrath. If such reptiles were to bring about my downfall, I would make it a fall long remembered—if such beasts had memories.
Moving cautiously, I shifted until my hand was on the haft of my ax; then I called on Il-marinen and bounded up as a tiger springs. And as a tiger springs I was among my enemies and mashed a flat skull as a man crushes the head of a snake. A sudden wild clamor of fear broke from my victims and for an instant they closed round me, hacking and stabbing. A knife gashed my chest but I gave no heed. A red mist waved before my eyes, and my body and limbs moved in perfect accord with my fighting brain. Snarling, hacking and smiting, I was a tiger among reptiles. In an instant they gave way and fled, leaving me bestriding half a dozen stunted bodies. But I was not satiated.
I was close on the heels of the tallest one, whose head would perhaps come to my shoulder, and who seemed to be their chief. He fled down a sort of runway, squealing like a monstrous lizard, and when I was close at his shoulder, he dived, snake-like, into the bushes. But I was too swift for him, and I dragged him forth and butchered him in a most gory fashion.
And through the bushes I saw the trail he was striving to reach—a path winding in and out among the trees, almost too narrow to allow the traversing of it by a man of normal size. I hacked off my victim's hideous head, and carrying it in my left hand, went up the serpent-path, with my red ax in my right.
Now as I strode swiftly along the path and blood splashed beside my feet at every step from the severed jugular of my foe, I thought of those I hunted. Aye—we held them in so little esteem, we hunted by day in the forest they haunted. What they called themselves, we never knew; for none of our tribe ever learned the accursed hissing sibilances they used as speech; but we called them Children of the Night. And night-things they were indeed, for they slunk in the depths of the dark forests, and in subterraneous dwellings, venturing forth into the hills only when their conquerors slept. It was at night that they did their foul deeds—the quick flight of a flint-tipped arrow to slay cattle, or perhaps a loitering human, the snatching of a child that had wandered from the village.
But it was for more than this we gave them their name; they were, in truth, people of night and darkness and the ancient horror-ridden shadows of bygone ages. For these creatures were very old, and they represented an outworn age. They had once overrun and possessed this land, and they had been driven into hiding and obscurity by the dark, fierce little Picts with whom we contested now, and who hated and loathed them as savagely as did we.
The Picts were different from us in general appearance, being shorter of stature and dark of hair, eyes and skin, whereas we were tall and powerful, with yellow hair and light eyes. But they were cast in the same mold, for all of that. These Children of the Night seemed not human to us, with their deformed dwarfish bodies, yellow skin and hideous faces. Aye—they were reptiles—vermin.
And my brain was like to burst with fury when I thought that it was these vermin on whom I was to glut my ax and perish. Bah! There is no glory slaying snakes or dying from their bites. All this rage and fierce disappointment turned on the objects of my hatred, and with the old red mist waving in front of me I swore by all the gods I knew, to wreak such red havoc before I died as to leave a dread memory in the minds of the survivors.
My people would not honor me, in such contempt they held the Children. But those Children that I left alive would remember me and shudder. So I swore, gripping savagely my ax, which was of bronze, set in a cleft of the oaken haft and fastened securely with rawhide.
Now I heard ahead a sibilant, abhorrent murmur, and a vile stench filtered to me through the trees, human, yet less than human. A few moments more and I emerged from the deep shadows into a wide open space. I had never before seen a village of the Children. There was a cluster of earthen domes, with low doorways sunk into the ground; squalid dwelling-places, half-above and half-below the earth. And I knew from the talk of the old warriors that these dwelling-places were connected by underground corridors, so the whole village was like an ant-bed, or a system of snake holes. And I wondered if other tunnels did not run off under the ground and emerge long distances from the villages.
Before the domes clustered a vast group of the creatures, hissing and jabbering at a great rate.
I had quickened my pace, and now as I burst from cover, I was running with the fleetness of my race. A wild clamor went up from the rabble as they saw the avenger, tall, bloodstained and blazing-eyed leap from the forest, and I cried out fiercely, flung the dripping head among them and bounded like a wounded tiger into the thick of them.
Oh, there was no escape for them now! They might have taken to their tunnels but I would have followed, even to the guts of Hell. They knew they must slay me, and they closed around, a hundred strong, to do it.
There was no wild blaze of glory in my brain as there had been against worthy foes. But the old berserk madness of my race was in my blood and the smell of blood and destruction in my nostrils.
I know not how many I slew. I only know that they thronged about me in a writhing, slashing mass, like serpents about a wolf, and I smote until the ax- edge turned and bent and the ax became no more than a bludgeon; and I smashed skulls, split heads, splintered bones, scattered blood and brains in one red sacrifice to Il-marinen, god of the Sword People.
Bleeding from half a hundred wounds, blinded by a slash across the eyes, I felt a flint knife sink deep into my groin and at the same instant a cudgel laid my scalp open. I went to my knees but reeled up again, and saw in a thick red fog a ring of leering, slant-eyed faces. I lashed out as a dying tiger strikes, and the faces broke in red ruin.
And as I sagged, overbalanced by the fury of my stroke, a taloned hand clutched my throat and a flint blade was driven into my ribs and twisted venomously. Beneath a shower of blows I went down again, but the man with the knife was beneath me, and with my left hand I found him and broke his neck before he could writhe away.
Life was waning swiftly; through the hissing and howling of the Children I could hear the voice of Il-marinen. Yet once again I rose stubbornly, through a very whirlwind of cudgels and spears. I could no longer see my foes, even in a red mist. But I could feel their blows and knew they surged about me. I braced my feet, gripped my slippery ax-haft with both hands, and calling once more on Il-marinen I heaved up the ax and struck one last terrific blow. And I must have died on my feet, for there was no sensation of falling; even as I knew, with a last thrill of savagery, that slew, even as I felt the splintering of skulls beneath my ax, darkness came with oblivion.
I came suddenly to myself. I was half-reclining in a big armchair and Conrad was pouring water on me. My head ached and a trickle of blood had half- dried on my face. Kirowan, Taverel and Clemants were hovering about, anxiously, while Ketrick stood just in front of me, still holding the mallet, his face schooled to a polite perturbation which his eyes did not show. And at the sight of those cursed eyes a red madness surged up in me.
""There,"" Conrad was saying, ""I told you he'd come out of it in a moment; just a light crack. He's taken harder than that. All right now, aren't you, O'Donnel?""
At that I swept them aside, and with a single low snarl of hatred launched myself at Ketrick. Taken utterly by surprise he had no opportunity to defend himself. My hands locked on his throat and we crashed together on the ruins of a divan. The others cried out in amazement and horror and sprang to separate us—or rather, to tear me from my victim, for already Ketrick's slant eyes were beginning to start from their sockets.
""For God's sake, O'Donnel,"" exclaimed Conrad, seeking to break my grip, ""what's come over you? Ketrick didn't mean to hit you—let go, you idiot!""
A fierce wrath almost overcame me at these men who were my friends, men of my own tribe, and I swore at them and their blindness, as they finally managed to tear my strangling fingers from Ketrick's throat. He sat up and choked and explored the blue marks my fingers had left, while I raged and cursed, nearly defeating the combined efforts of the four to hold me.
""You fools!"" I screamed. ""Let me go! Let me do my duty as a tribesman! You blind fools! I care nothing for the paltry blow he dealt me—he and his dealt stronger blows than that against me, in bygone ages. You fools, he is marked with the brand of the beast—the reptile—the vermin we exterminated centuries ago! I must crush him, stamp him out, rid the clean earth of his accursed pollution!""
So I raved and struggled and Conrad gasped to Ketrick over his shoulder: ""Get out, quick! He's out of his head! His mind is unhinged! Get away from him.""
Now I look out over the ancient dreaming downs and the hills and deep forests beyond and I ponder. Somehow, that blow from that ancient accursed mallet knocked me back into another age and another life. While I was Aryara I had no cognizance of any other life. It was no dream; it was a stray bit of reality wherein I, John O'Donnel, once lived and died, and back into which I was snatched across the voids of time and space by a chance blow. Time and times are but cogwheels, unmatched, grinding on oblivious to one another. Occasionally—oh, very rarely!—the cogs fit; the pieces of the plot snap together momentarily and give men faint glimpses beyond the veil of this everyday blindness we call reality.
I am John O'Donnel and I was Aryara, who dreamed dreams of war-glory and hunt-glory and feast-glory and who died on a red heap of his victims in some lost age. But in what age and where?
The last I can answer for you. Mountains and rivers change their contours; the landscapes alter; but the downs least of all. I look out upon them now and I remember them, not only with John O'Donnel's eyes, but with the eyes of Aryara. They are but little changed. Only the great forest has shrunk and dwindled and in many, many places vanished utterly. But here on these very downs Aryara lived and fought and loved and in yonder forest he died. Kirowan was wrong. The little, fierce, dark Picts were not the first men in the Isles. There were beings before them—aye, the Children of the Night. Legends —why, the Children were not unknown to us when we came into what is now the isle of Britain. We had encountered them before, ages before. Already we had our myths of them. But we found them in Britain. Nor had the Picts totally exterminated them.
Nor had the Picts, as so many believe, preceded us by many centuries. We drove them before us as we came, in that long drift from the East. I, Aryara, knew old men who had marched on that century-long trek; who had been borne in the arms of yellow-haired women over countless miles of forest and plain, and who as youths had walked in the vanguard of the invaders.
As to the age—that I cannot say. But I, Aryara, was surely an Aryan and my people were Aryans—members of one of the thousand unknown and unrecorded drifts that scattered yellow-haired blue-eyed tribes all over the world. The Celts were not the first to come into western Europe. I, Aryara, was of the same blood and appearance as the men who sacked Rome, but mine was a much older strain. Of the language spoke, no echo remains in the waking mind of John O'Donnel, but I knew that Aryara's tongue was to ancient Celtic what ancient Celtic is to modern Gaelic.
Il-marinen! I remember the god I called upon, the ancient, ancient god who worked in metals—in bronze then. For Il-marinen was one of the base gods of the Aryans from whom many gods grew; and he was Wieland and Vulcan in the ages of iron. But to Aryara he was Il-marinen.
And Aryara—he was one of many tribes and many drifts. Not alone did the Sword People come or dwell in Britain. The River People were before us and the Wolf People came later. But they were Aryans like us, light-eyed and tall and blond. We fought them, for the reason that the various drifts of Aryans have always fought each other, just as the Achaeans fought the Dorians, just as the Celts and Germans cut each other's throats; aye, just as the Hellenes and the Persians, who were once one people and of the same drift, split in two different ways on the long trek and centuries later met and flooded Greece and Asia Minor with blood.
Now understand, all this I did not know as Aryara. I, Aryara, knew nothing of all these world-wide drifts of my race. I knew only that my people were conquerors, that a century ago my ancestors had dwelt in the great plains far to the east, plains populous with fierce, yellow-haired, light-eyed people like myself; that my ancestors had come westward in a great drift; and that in that drift, when my tribesmen met tribes of other races, they trampled and destroyed them, and when they met other yellow-haired, light-eyed people, of older or newer drifts, they fought savagely and mercilessly, according to the old, illogical custom of the Aryan people. This Aryara knew, and I, John O'Donnel, who know much more and much less than I, Aryara, knew, have combined the knowledge of these separate selves and have come to conclusions that would startle many noted scientists and historians.
Yet this fact is well known: Aryans deteriorate swiftly in sedentary and peaceful lives. Their proper existence is a nomadic one; when they settle down to an agricultural existence, they pave the way for their downfall; and when they pen themselves with city walls, they seal their doom. Why, I, Aryara, remember the tales of the old men—how the Sons of the Sword, on that long drift, found villages of white-skinned yellow-haired people who had drifted into the west centuries before and had quit the wandering life to dwell among the dark, garlic-eating people and gain their sustenance from the soil. And the old men told how soft and weak they were, and how easily they fell before the bronze blades of the Sword People.
Look—is not the whole history of the Sons of Aryan laid on those lines? Look—how swiftly has Persian followed Mede; Greek, Persian; Roman, Greek; and German, Roman. Aye, and the Norseman followed the Germanic tribes when they had grown flabby from a century or so of peace and idleness, and despoiled the spoils they had taken in the southland.
But let me speak of Ketrick. Ha—the short hairs at the back of my neck bristle at the very mention of his name. A reversion to type—but not to the type of some cleanly Chinaman or Mongol of recent times. The Danes drove his ancestors into the hills of Wales; and there, in what medieval century, and in what foul way did that cursed aboriginal taint creep into the clean Saxon blood of the Celtic line, there to lie dormant so long? The Celtic Welsh never mated with the Children any more than the Picts did. But there must have been survivals—vermin lurking in those grim hills, that had outlasted their time and age. In Aryara's day they were scarcely human. What must a thousand years of retrogression have done to the breed?
What foul shape stole into the Ketrick castle on some forgotten night, or rose out of the dusk to grip some woman of the line, straying in the hills?
The mind shrinks from such an image. But this I know: there must have been survivals of that foul, reptilian epoch when the Ketricks went into Wales. There still may be. But this changeling, this waif of darkness, this horror who bears the noble name of Ketrick, the brand of the serpent is upon him, and until he is destroyed there is no rest for me. Now that I know him for what he is, he pollutes the clean air and leaves the slime of the snake on the green earth. The sound of his lisping, hissing voice fills me with crawling horror and the sight of his slanted eyes inspires me with madness.
For I come of a royal race, and such as he is a continual insult and a threat, like a serpent underfoot. Mine is a regal race, though now it is become degraded and falls into decay by continual admixture with conquered races. The waves of alien blood have washed my hair black and my skin dark, but I still have the lordly stature and the blue eyes of a royal Aryan.
And as my ancestors—as I, Aryara, destroyed the scum that writhed beneath our heels, so shall I, John O'Donnel, exterminate the reptilian thing, the monster bred of the snaky taint that slumbered so long unguessed in clean Saxon veins, the vestigial serpent-things left to taunt the Sons of Aryan. They say the blow I received affected my mind; I know it but opened my eyes. Mine ancient enemy walks often on the moors alone, attracted, though he may not know it, by ancestral urgings. And on one of these lonely walks I shall meet him, and when I meet him, I will break his foul neck with my hands, as I, Aryara, broke the necks of foul night-things in the long, long ago.
Then they may take me and break my neck at the end of a rope if they will. I am not blind, if my friends are. And in the sight of the old Aryan god, if not in the blinded eyes of men, I will have kept faith with my tribe.
",True
"""Once, mankind accepted a simple truth: that they were not alone in this universe.""
-Anthony Hopkins as Odin, Thor (2011).

Hanoi, Socialist Republic of Vietnam
June 24, 2011.
""Hey, we're here. Get up if you don't want to wake up in Hue!""
Joseph Clayton was shaken awake by the hand of one of his classmates on his shoulder. He was sitting in the back of a taxi van... the only one left sitting, actually, as the others had already disembarked to enter the government office they were parked in front of.
Which probably meant that he was left to pay the fare.
After he payed (as seemed to be his lot on this trip), he followed his classmates and his professor into the government office where they hoped to finally receive their travel permits. He hadn't gotten much of sleep on the plane; a mixture of excitement in the face of overseas travel and sheer jet-lag had conspired to leave him weary and light headed until he got a few hours sleep, which the taxi ride had partially afforded him.
And in that sleep...
The dream had come as a stark, clear memory. When Marie had said that she wasn't going to join him at the Miskatonic campus in Arkham for what would be their first year of university, he had been devastated. His first questions, rushed and frantic, had been about the cause of such a change. She certainly had the SAT score to qualify and student debt could be handled with relative ease. Had she decided to forgo post-secondary to concentrate on her stake in the restaurant? Had financial problems struck and prevented admissions from being paid?
Was it something about him?
Her answers, far more controlled than his frenzied speculation, had all been in the negative. Her SAT scores were good, student loans were still open and she still intended to go for a degree in Biology at Miskatonic. It was just... after she'd gotten that phonograph from her parents' home village, the repayment had been a promise to come and spend a year back in the ""Old Country"" as soon as she could. It would only be for a year and then she would return, ready for university and all accompaniments.
That had been very nearly one year before. She had promised him that she would be coming back in the summer of 2011... but after she had arrived in Vietnam, all contact had stopped cold. Her parents, when asked about her condition, always responded with affirmations that she would return and that she was fine... but as winter wore onto spring, subtle hints of doubt and worry had crept into their voices. Had they even been receiving any news from their daughter and if not, then why not? Had something gone terribly wrong?
As it happened, more baffling events awaited inside.
""What do you mean, restricted?"" Joseph asked the Communist Party bureaucrat sitting across the desk from him. Of course, due to the facts that first, said bureaucrat was a government employee and second, they were not alone in the room, Joseph had been careful not to sound too brunt in his tone. A trung sior Sergeant, wearing the forest green uniform of the Vietnam Border Defence Force (VPA), stood by the door of the office, both watching and guarding.
Relieved at being able to shed his stilted English after Joseph exhibited a decent grasp of the Vietnamese language, the bureaucrat put forth what he knew of the situation. ""Civilian access is almost completely denied inside the area you requested. To be honest, that section of the border has been troublesome ever since the war. We get reports of smugglers, poachers, bandits, H'mong insurgents... every type of violent counter-revolutionary you can think of, this region seems to have it. The local Bru farmers aren't much help, but they generally don't bother others and seem to accept the military presence we keep there."" The bureaucrat shifted his gaze from Joseph to Professor Neville Andover, the leader of this particular expedition. ""I'm sorry, but there's nothing that can be done without high level authorization.""
As a response to this, Neville Andover did not get upset. He did not resign himself to failure. He did not even try to ask if there was any other avenue of entry or way to access the information he needed. He just donned an odd, amused smile, the corners of his eyes crinkling behind his wire rim glasses. ""I assume that General Vo is still the Secretary for the Border Forces?"" He asked, almost distractedly. When the official answered yes, Professor Andover reached into the inside of his light cotton jacket and pulled out a small, metal case. From this case, he removed a single paper card of purest black, embossed with an emerald green ""Delta"" symbol and a capital ""Y"" of gold in the center of that hollow triangle. ""I have been in contact with Comrade Vo for the last six months, planning this expedition as an act of cooperation between our two governments and as a boon for my University. He knows that card; show it or describe it to him... you maywant to run it by General Tran as well. Either way, they will give you the answer you need.""
As the bureaucrat took the card and then as the Border Defense sergeant took it from him and headed out of the room, Joesph wondered about his professor and the oddities that surrounded him. The first time he had ever seen the Professor, it had been in his High School Auditorium as Marie had performed the Stork Dance... and Joseph had noticed strange things. In their senior year of High School, both he and Marie had received reference letters to Miskatonic University in Arkham, a town in Essex county. When he had arrived at Miskatonic (without Marie), he had been shocked that the professor for his Cultural Anthropology class was not only the one who had given him his reference but was also the man who had he had seen three years before.
And then there were his classmates, three of whom had also come on this expedition. Many of them had received similar letters from Prof. Andover and most of those, though not relaying specifics, had said that they had found the circumstances equally strange. Two who had gotten references were on this very trip with them. The first was Tracy Williams from the farm country of Northwest Virginia, a girl with blond hair quite a few shades lighter than Josephs own brassy brown and the class Nippon-Nut, being both obsessed with Anime and Manga as well as being Japanese-proficient. The second was Albert Noyes, a young man who has part white, part black and a little Algonquin-Indian from a small hamlet in southern Vermont. His specialties were technology, math and Mandarin Chinese. The third member of retinue was a young man named Malone who... frankly, was a mystery to the entire class. However, he had volunteered for this trip and his grades had been excellent so his place on the roster had been assured.
But there was still a nagging question at the back of his mind: why? Why had they received offers to go to an obscure if admittedly exceptional regional university when the big names had all passed them over? Why had they been gathered from all across the United States by a single professor? And why, it seemed, did it feel like there was such a big connection between the missing member of Dr. Andovers ""collection"" and the reason behind this expedition?
Why did it feel as if Marie was somehow connected to this?
Eventually, the sergeant came back and informed the bureaucrat of General Vo's express permission for the Professor and his students to enter the exclusion zone as well as General Tran's confirmation, before handing the card back to Neville Andover. Joseph knew that academics could sometimes have friends in high and unusual places, but counting on ... no, expecting the approval of not just one, but two ranking Generals in a non-allied nation? This seemed crazy, certifiably insane even.
But then, so did spectral storks and spoonbills.
Northernmost Quang Binh Province, Socialist Republic of Vietnam
June 29, 2011
Despite the calm look on the professors face, something about the current situation made Joseph Clayton distinctly ill at ease.
They had spent the last two days trudging up into the Annamite mountains after leaving the fertile coastal plain. At the last village with road access, they had ditched their vehicles and backpacked up the ridges and trails, counting on a guide from the local Bru people to lead them to... whatever Prof. Andover was looking for. The fact that the guide was now legging it quite quickly back down the misty path told Joseph that something had either gone incredibly wrong or incredibly right.
Now, Neville Andover was chanting, seemingly trying to communicate with something deep in the thick underbrush on either side of the worn, overgrown gully that had been called a trail. The language was almost intellig ible to Joseph, being a form of Mon-Khmer linked to the classical Vietnamese he had studied, perhaps with a few hints of Muong intermixed. However, the syntax and grammer were archaic to say the least. From some of the words used it even seemed to be achingly familiar, almost as if...
With a sudden realization of shock and the smell of grilled pork and Bac Bon Dzhow a memory in his nostrils, Joseph realized where he had encountered this form of Vietic before.
But the shocks were not over.
Spun around by Albert Noyes to see something, Joseph gazed upward to see a human figure standing upon the high bank, glancing down at them with hard, measuring eyes. Undoubtedly masculine, the figure was of a man of slightly darker skin than the farmers of the coast (though the features were similar) and of greater height than either them or the native Bru. Clothed only in a white cotton kilt with geometric designs in black and a leather girdle, this man carried a white flatbow decorated with bands of green, blue and red while a bronze dagger rested at his hip. His head was shaved of all hair, and black designs were tattooed from the crown of the scalp to the jawline, with more tattoos covering his arms, chest and lower legs.
The fact that an arrow was nocked in the string of his bow put the four young people on edge, with Malone and Joesph himself tightening the grips on the hilts of their machetes in anticipation of a hopeless fight. More men in similar dress and tattoos, some with bronze slashing swords, some with bronze-headed spears and others with flatbows, appeared out of the forest on either side of them. Now that Joseph could get a better look at them in the dim light filtering down through the forest canopy and the mist, their arm tattoos began looking very similar to those borne by Marie's parents while those on their faces, while different in design, were still similar in form.
All the while, Prof. Andover kept up the low chanting, of which Joseph could pick out individual words: ""friend"", ""gods"", ""village"", ""priest"", ""comrade"" and at least one invocation of Ho Chi Minh among them. To this, these strange men seemed to confer with each other though glances and nods before took one took a short, bamboo tube from his girdle, put one end to his mouth, took a deep breath and blew.
As the silvery-blue powder erupted from the tube, settled on the heads of the trekking academics and they each lost consciousness in turn, Joseph wondered if this could get any worse.
Meanwhile, Spoonbill Village
Tsan Pho Dao had been the Chief Priest of this village for many years, ever since the death of his father in the closing days of the American War. In that span of years, he had seen many futures and advised his people based on those futures. He had called down both ruin and plenty by invoking the power of the gods of his people. He alone, in a feat outside even the power of the hereditary village chiefs, had communicated with the Instrument of their gods, a being possessed of both boundless knowledge and an absolutely rotten temper. He also, most importantly, had an absolutely perfect memory of his entire life... and that of his father, and his father before him.
To be perfectly honest, he held a tremendous amount of power within this village. The ancestor shrines belonged to families while the hunters had their own little shrines up the mountain where midnight rituals were performed to gather poison for the tips of arrows and darts. But those rituals needed to be performed by the minor priests under his command. This temple was the spiritual center of his people for most of the year and the temple with it's darkened wood walls lit only by feeble braziers whose light was twisted by the smoke of rare and powerful incenses, with it's figurines of gods and demons carved from nephrite and jadeite brought from deep below the earth... was his domain. His and no one else'. He divined the future when possible, he performed the rites and as a result, it was he who had taken countless lives in sacrifice over the course of his adulthood: chickens, pigs, goats, buffalo... people.
As he sat at a low table in his private sanctuary, trying to divine some course for a question that had faced him for most of a year, he noticed something. One of the golden discs he used for divination, a coin looted from a Chinese caravan many centuries ago, stood up on its rim and began to roll. Following the curve of failing momentum, the coin finally came to rest at a specific point on the table, a place that held indication of the future.
Visitors... and not the ""ketchup"" kind of visitors.
Several Hours Later, Close to the Laos Border
The answer to Joseph Clayton's earlier question was a definite yes. When he had awoken, he had found his wrists and ankles bound, the bindings looped over a pole carried by two men with him and the other students suspended like deer carcasses. The Professor, on the other hand, had not been bound, but had found transport by sitting in a large basket suspended from one of the poles by a cord, carried by a pair of men. They had been going downhill from the crest of a ridge and were now leaving the forest, coming onto a road. First, they passed under a wooden gate where roosting spoonbills had been carved into the posts and a sun flanked by two dragons had been carved into the beams above the road.
Then Joseph saw where they were headed. A village of perhaps thirty houses was visible in the valley bottom while narrow terraces had been cut into the hills above, green with growing rice. The view quickly vanished as the men began heading into the village itself but sight was soon replaced with sound. The quiet of the forest was supplanted by the cacophony of a hundred sounds: chickens and pigs grunted and clucked as the animals rooted below the houses and around the garbage heaps while odd-looking reddish dogs, lazing in the sun on the porches of the outermost houses, whined in surprise at the new arrivals. The sounds of tools and primitive machinery clunked melodiously. The sounds of people also were audible: talking, laughing, shouting and even a few low notes of women's work songs were possible for Joseph to pick out of the general buzz... a buzz which also included Albert trying to reason with their captors and Tracy displaying an unusually foul mouth toward same.
Soon, people began to notice the men bringing in captives and a few even began to gather along the path as they entered the village, joining their dogs (or Dholes, as they were now identifiable as) who had come to sniff. It was mostly men, older boys and children who came out to watch while the women and the elderly usually went no further than windows and the porches of the stilt-houses that lined the road. Here, even hanging upside down, Joseph could notice a few things about the dress and appearance of the people
Frankly... it was a bit odd.
From what he knew, the Vietnamese national costume (in it's modern form) placed a heavy emphasis on trousers, an item of clothing that he noticed was rather conspicuously absent here. Everyone here seemed to be wearing variations on one basic outfit in either brown or black: knee-length cotton kilts, short-sleeved cotton jackets (mostly with their front fastenings closed) and either rough-woven conical hats or simple cloths tied over their heads. The men's hair appeared to be cut short to the point where one could vaguely make out the tattoos on their scalp while children varied between the same shortness for boys and a single, long braid for the girls.
Eventually they arrived in a great or square before what appeared to be the temple: a ponderous structure of wood and brick perched upon massive stone foundations, it's sloping roofs flaring outward as if to shroud the surrounding houses from the scrutiny of the heavens. Around them, a crowd had gathered on all sides, an air of excitement buzzing in the air. Men exited the house across the square from the temple entrance and despite the calm demeanour of Professor Andover, words began filtering through to Joseph that began sounding more and more disturbing; words like ""kill"", ""sacrifice"" and ""ritual"". But another word came, one that sent darker imaginings and images rambling through his sensation-saturated mind.
The word ""eat"".
""WAIT! STOP!""
Joseph knew those words as well... as well as that voice!
Out of the crowd rushed a figure dressed much like the others: brown kilt and jacket, the latter partially open to reveal a yem undergarment and with a straw hat on her head. As Joseph finally began taking in other details, he noticed the tattooed lines and whimsical designs on her lower legs and arms and on her face, lines and vaguely triangular patterns that almost resembled the features of an orangutan.
Her face... behind all the tattooing, the face of this woman was still as unmistakable to Joseph as the first day they had met in Kindergarten. To this sudden recognition, the young man could only exclaim his surprise as a soothingly familiar name.
""Marie?""
","Over the United States stretched an unseen network of secret intrigue woven tirelessly night and day by the busy enemies of civilisation—Reds, parlour-socialists, enemy-aliens, terrorists, Bolsheviki, pseudo-intellectuals, I. W. W.'s, social faddists, and amateur meddlers of every nuance—all the various varieties of the vicious, witless, and mentally unhinged—brought together through the ""cohesive power of plunder"" and the degeneration of cranial tissue.

All over the United States the various departmental divisions of the Secret Service were busily following up these threads of intrigue leading everywhere through the obscurity of this vast and secret maze.

To meet the constantly increasing danger of physical violence and to uncover secret plots threatening sabotage and revolution, there were capable agents in every branch of the Secret Service, both Federal and State.

But in the first months of 1919 something more terrifying than physical violence suddenly threatened civilised America,—a wild, grotesque, incredible threat of a war on human minds!

And, little by little, the United States Government became convinced that this ghastly menace was no dream of a disordered imagination, but that it was real: that among the enemies of civilisation there actually existed a few powerful but perverted minds capable of wielding psychic forces as terrific weapons: that by the sinister use of psychic knowledge controlling these mighty forces the very minds of mankind could be stealthily approached, seized, controlled and turned upon civilisation to aid in the world's destruction.

In terrible alarm the Government turned to England for advice. But Sir William Crookes was dead.

However, in England, Sir Conan Doyle immediately took up the matter, and in America Professor Hyslop was called into consultation.

And then, when the Government was beginning to realise what this awful menace meant, and that there were actually in the United States possibly half a dozen people who already had begun to carry on a diabolical warfare by means of psychic power, for the purpose of enslaving and controlling the very minds of men,—then, in the terrible moment of discovery, a young girl landed in America after fourteen years' absence in Asia.

And this was the amazing girl that Victor Cleves had just married, at Recklow's suggestion, and in the line of professional duty,—and moral duty, perhaps.

It had been a brief, matter-of-fact ceremony. John Recklow, of the Secret Service, was there; also Benton and Selden of the same service.

The bride's lips were unresponsive; cold as the touch of the groom's unsteady hand.

She looked down at her new ring in a blank sort of way, gave her hand listlessly to Recklow and to the others in turn, whispered a timidly comprehensive ""Thank you,"" and walked away beside Cleves as though dazed.

There was a taxicab waiting. Tressa entered. Recklow came out and spoke to Cleves in a low voice.

""Don't worry,"" replied Cleves dryly. ""That's why I married her.""

""Where are you going now?"" inquired Recklow.

""Back to my apartment.""

""Why don't you take her away for a month?""

Cleves flushed with annoyance: ""This is no occasion for a wedding trip. You understand that, Recklow.""

""I understand. But we ought to give her a breathing space. She's had nothing but trouble. She's worn out.""

Cleves hesitated: ""I can guard her better in the apartment. Isn't it safer to go back there, where your people are always watching the street and house day and night?""

""In a way it might be safer, perhaps. But that girl is nearly exhausted. And her value to us is unlimited. She may be the vital factor in this fight with anarchy. Her weapon is her mind. And it's got to have a chance to rest.""

Cleves, with one hand on the cab door, looked around impatiently.

""Do you, also, conclude that the psychic factor is actually part of this damned problem of Bolshevism?""

Recklow's cool eyes measured him: ""Do you?""

""My God, Recklow, I don't know—after what my own eyes have seen.""

""I don't know either,"" said the other calmly, ""but I am taking no chances. I don't attempt to explain certain things that have occurred. But if it be true that a misuse of psychic ability by foreigners—Asiatics—among the anarchists is responsible for some of the devilish things being done in the United States, then your wife's unparalleled knowledge of the occult East is absolutely vital to us. And so I say, better take her away somewhere and give her mind a chance to recover from the incessant strain of these tragic years.""

The two men stood silent for a moment, then Recklow went to the window of the taxicab.

""I have been suggesting a trip into the country, Mrs. Cleves,"" he said pleasantly, ""—into the real country, somewhere,—a month's quiet in the woods, perhaps. Wouldn't it appeal to you?""

Cleves turned to catch her low-voiced answer.

""I should like it very much,"" she said in that odd, hushed way of speaking, which seemed to have altered her own voice and manner since the ceremony a little while before.

Driving back to his apartment beside her, he strove to realise that this girl was his wife.

One of her gloves lay across her lap, and on it rested a slender hand. And on one finger was his ring.

But Victor Cleves could not bring himself to believe that this brand-new ring really signified anything to him,—that it had altered his own life in any way. But always his incredulous eyes returned to that slim finger resting there, unstirring, banded with a narrow circlet of virgin gold.

In the apartment they did not seem to know exactly what to do or say—what attitude to assume—what effort to make.

Tressa went into her own room, removed her hat and furs, and came slowly back into the living-room, where Cleves still stood gazing absently out of the window.

A fine rain was falling.

They seated themselves. There seemed nothing better to do.

He said, politely: ""In regard to going away for a rest, you wouldn't care for the North Woods, I fancy, unless you like winter sports. Do you?""

""I like sunlight and green leaves,"" she said in that odd, still voice.

""Then, if it would please you to go South for a few weeks' rest——""

""Would it inconvenience you?""

Her manner touched him.

""My dear Miss Norne,"" he began, and checked himself, flushing painfully. The girl blushed, too; then, when he began to laugh, her lovely, bashful smile glimmered for the first time.

""I really can't bring myself to realise that you and I are married,"" he explained, still embarrassed, though smiling.

Her smile became an endeavour. ""I can't believe it either, Mr. Cleves,"" she said. ""I feel rather stunned.""

""Hadn't you better call me Victor—under the circumstances?"" he suggested, striving to speak lightly.

""Yes.... It will not be very easy to say it—not for some time, I think.""

""Tressa?""

""Yes.""

""Yes—what?""

""Yes—Victor.""

""That's the idea,"" he insisted with forced gaiety.

""The thing to do is to face this rather funny situation and take it amiably and with good humour. You'll have your freedom some day, you know.""

""Yes—I—know.""

""And we're already on very good terms. We find each other interesting, don't we?""

""Yes.""

""It even seems to me,"" he ventured, ""it certainly seems to me, at times, as though we are approaching a common basis of—of mutual—er—esteem.""

""Yes. I—I do esteem you, Mr. Cleves.""

""In point of fact,"" he concluded, surprised, ""we are friends—in a way. Wouldn't you call it—friendship?""

""I think so, I think I'd call it that,"" she admitted.

""I think so, too. And that is lucky for us. That makes this crazy situation more comfortable—less—well, perhaps less ponderous.""

The girl assented with a vague smile, but her eyes remained lowered.

""You see,"" he went on, ""when two people are as oddly situated as we are, they're likely to be afraid of being in each other's way. But they ought to get on without being unhappy as long as they are quite confident of each other's friendly consideration. Don't you think so, Tressa?""

Her lowered eyes rested steadily on her ring-finger. ""Yes,"" she said. ""And I am not—unhappy, or—afraid.""

She lifted her blue gaze to his; and, somehow, he thought of her barbaric name, Keuke,—and its Yezidee significance, ""heavenly—azure.""

""Are we really going away together?"" she asked timidly.

""Certainly, if you wish.""

""If you, also, wish it, Mr. Cleves.""

He found himself saying with emphasis that he always wished to do what she desired. And he added, more gently:

""You are tired, Tressa—tired and lonely and unhappy.""

""Tired, but not the—others.""

""Not unhappy?""

""No.""

""Aren't you lonely?""

""Not with you.""

The answer came so naturally, so calmly, that the slight sensation of pleasure it gave him arrived only as an agreeable afterglow.

""We'll go South,"" he said.... ""I'm so glad that you don't feel lonely with me.""

""Will it be warmer where we are going, Mr. Cleves?""

""Yes—you poor child! You need warmth and sunshine, don't you? Was it warm in Yian, where you lived so many years?""

""It was always June in Yian,"" she said under her breath.

She seemed to have fallen into a revery; he watched the sensitive face. Almost imperceptibly it changed; became altered, younger, strangely lovely.

Presently she looked up—and it seemed to him that it was not Tressa Norne at all he saw, but little Keuke—Heavenly Azure—of the Yezidee temple, as she dropped one slim knee over the other and crossed her hands above it.

""It was very beautiful in Yian,"" she said, ""—Yian of the thousand bridges and scented gardens so full of lilies. Even after they took me to the temple, and I thought the world was ending, God's skies still remained soft overhead, and His weather fair and golden.... And when, in the month of the Snake, the Eight Sheiks-el-Djebel came to the temple to spread their shrouds on the rose-marble steps, then, after they had departed, chanting the Prayers for the Dead, each to his Tower of Silence, we temple girls were free for a week.... And once I went with Tchagane—a girl—and with Yulun—another girl—and we took our keutch, which is our luggage, and we went to the yaïlak, or summer pavilion on the Lake of the Ghost. Oh, wonderful,—a silvery world of pale-gilt suns and of moons so frail that the cloud-fleece at high-noon has more substance!""

Her voice died out; she sat gazing down at her spread fingers, on one of which gleamed her wedding-ring.

After a little, she went on dreamily:

""On that week, each three months, we were free.... If a young man should please us....""

""Free?"" he repeated.

""To love,"" she explained coolly.

""Oh."" He nodded, but his face became rather grim.

""There came to me at the yaïlak,"" she went on carelessly, ""one Khassar Noïane—Noïane means Prince—all in a surcoat of gold tissue with green vines embroidered, and wearing a green cap trimmed with dormouse, and green boots inlaid with stiff gold....

""He was so young ... a boy. I laughed. I said: 'Is this a Yaçaoul? An Urdu-envoy of Prince Erlik?'—mocking him as young and thoughtless girls mock—not in unfriendly manner—though I would not endure the touch of any man at all.

""And when I laughed at him, this Eighur boy flew into such a rage! Kai! I was amazed.

""'Sou-sou! Squirrel!' he cried angrily at me. 'Learn the Yacaz, little chatterer! Little mocker of men, it is ten blows with a stick you require, not kisses!'

""At that I whistled my two dogs, Bars and Alaga, for I did not think what he said was funny.

""I said to him: 'You had better go home, Khassar Noïane, for if no man has ever pleased me where I am at liberty to please myself, here on the Lake of the Ghost, then be very certain that no boy can please Keuke-Mongol here or anywhere!'

""And at that—kai! What did he say—that monkey?"" She looked at her husband, her splendid eyes ablaze with wrathful laughter, and made a gesture full of angry grace:

""'Squirrel!' he cries—'little malignant sorceress of Yian! May everything high about you become a sandstorm, and everything long a serpent, and everything broad a toad, and everything——'

""But I had had enough, Victor,"" she added excitedly, ""and I made a wild bee bite him on the lip! What do you think of such a courtship?"" she cried, laughing. But Cleves's face was a study in emotions.

And then, suddenly, the laughing mask seemed to slip from the bewitching features of Keuke Mongol; and there was Tressa Norne—Tressa Cleves—disconcerted, paling a little as the memory of her impulsive confidence in this man beside her began to dawn on her more clearly.

""I—I'm sorry——"" she faltered.... ""You'll think me silly—think evil of me, perhaps——""

She looked into his troubled eyes, then suddenly she took her face into both hands and covered it, sitting very still.

""We'll go South together,"" he said in an uncertain voice.... ""I hope you will try to think of me as a friend.... I'm just troubled because I am so anxious to understand you. That is all.... I'm—I'm troubled, too, because I am anxious that you should think well of me. Will you try, always?""

She nodded.

""I want to be your friend, always,"" he said.

""Thank you, Mr. Cleves.""

It was a strange spot he chose for Tressa—strange but lovely in its own unreal and rather spectral fashion—where a pearl-tinted mist veiled the St. Johns, and made exquisite ghosts of the palmettos, and softened the sun to a silver-gilt wafer pasted on a nacre sky.

It was a still country, where giant water-oaks towered, fantastic under their misty camouflage of moss, and swarming with small birds.

Among the trees the wood-ibis stole; without on the placid glass of the stream the eared grebe floated. There was no wind, no stirring of leaves, no sound save the muffled splash of silver mullet, the breathless whirr of a humming-bird, or the hushed rustle of lizards in the woods.

For Tressa this was the blessed balm that heals,—the balm of silence. And, for the first week, she slept most of the time, or lay in her hammock watching the swarms of small birds creeping and flitting amid the moss-draped labyrinths of the live-oaks at her very door.

It had been a little club house before the war, this bungalow on the St. Johns at Orchid Hammock. Its members had been few and wealthy; but some were dead in France and Flanders, and some still remained overseas, and others continued busy in the North.

And these two young people were quite alone there, save for a negro cook and a maid, and an aged negro kennel-master who wore a scarlet waistcoat and cords too large for his shrunken body, and who pottered, pottered through the fields all day, with his whip clasped behind his bent back and the pointers ranging wide, or plodding in at heel with red tongues lolling.

Twice Cleves went a little way for quail, using Benton's dogs; but even here in this remote spot he dared not move out of view of the little house where Tressa lay asleep.

So he picked up only a few brace of birds, and confined his sport to impaling too-familiar scorpions on the blade of his knife.

And all the while life remained unreal for him; his marriage seemed utterly unbelievable; he could not realise it, could not reconcile himself to conditions so incomprehensible.

Also, ever latent in his mind, was knowledge that made him restless—the knowledge that the young girl he had married had been in love with another man: Sanang.

And there were other thoughts—thoughts which had scarcely even taken the shape of questions.

One morning he came from his room and found Tressa on the veranda in her hammock. She had her moon-lute in her lap.

""You feel better—much better!"" he said gaily, saluting her extended hand.

""Yes. Isn't this heavenly? I begin to believe it is life to me, this pearl-tinted world, and the scent of orange bloom and the stillness of paradise itself.""

She gazed out over the ghostly river. Not a wing stirred its glassy surface.

""Is this dull for you?"" she asked in a low voice.

""Not if you are contented, Tressa.""

""You're so nice about it. Don't you think you might venture a day's real shooting?""

""No, I think I won't,"" he replied.

""On my account?""

""Well—yes.""

""I'm so sorry.""

""It's all right as long as you're getting rested. What is that instrument?""

""My moon-lute.""

""Oh, is that what it's called?""

She nodded, touched the strings. He watched her exquisite hands.

""Shall I?"" she inquired a little shyly.

""Go ahead. I'd like to hear it!""

""I haven't touched it in months—not since I was on the steamer."" She sat up in her hammock and began to swing there; and played and sang while swinging in the flecked shadow of the orange bloom:

""Little Isle of Cispangou,
Isle of iris, isle of cherry,
Tell your tiny maidens merry
Clouds are looming over you!
La-ē-la!
La-ē-la!
All your ocean's but a ferry;
Ships are bringing death to you!
La-ē-lou!
La-ē-lou!
""Little Isle of Cispangou,
Half a thousand ships are sailing;
Captain Death commands each crew;
Lo! the ruddy moon is paling!
La-ē-la!
La-ē-la!
Clouds the dying moon are veiling,
Every cloud a shroud for you!
La-ē-lou!
La-ē-lou!""
""Cispangou,"" she explained, ""is the very, very ancient name, among the Mongols, for Japan.""

""It's not exactly a gay song,"" he said. ""What's it about?""

""Oh, it's a very ancient song about the Mongol invasion of Japan. I know scores and scores of such songs.""

She sang some other songs. Afterward she descended from the hammock and came and sat down beside him on the veranda steps.

""I wish I could amuse you,"" she said wistfully.

""Why do you think I'm bored, Tressa? I'm not at all.""

But she only sighed, lightly, and gathered her knees in both arms.

""I don't know how young men in the Western world are entertained,"" she remarked presently.

""You don't have to entertain me,"" he said, smiling.

""I should be happy to, if I knew how.""

""How are young men entertained in the Orient?""

""Oh, they like songs and stories. But I don't think you do.""

He laughed in spite of himself.

""Do you really wish to entertain me?""

""I do,"" she said seriously.

""Then please perform some of those tricks of magic which you can do so amazingly well.""

Her dawning smile faded a trifle. ""I don't—I haven't——"" She hesitated.

""You haven't your professional paraphernalia with you,"" he suggested.

""Oh—as for that——""

""Don't you need it?""

""For some things—some kinds of things.... I could do—other things——""

He waited. She seemed disconcerted. ""Don't do anything you don't wish to do, Tressa,"" he said.

""I was only—only afraid—that if I should do some little things to amuse you, I might stir—stir up—interfere—encounter some sinister current—and betray myself—betray my whereabouts——""

""Well, for heaven's sake don't venture then!"" he said with emphasis. ""Don't do anything to stir up any other wireless—any Yezidee——""

""I am wondering,"" she reflected, ""just what I dare venture to do to amuse you.""

""Don't bother about me. I wouldn't have you try any psychic stunt down here, and run the chance of stirring up some Asiatic devil somewhere!""

She nodded absently, occupied with her own thoughts, sitting there, chin on hand, her musing eyes intensely blue.

""I think I can amuse you,"" she concluded, ""without bringing any harm to myself.""

""Don't try it, Tressa!—--""

""I'll be very careful. Now, sit quite still—closer to me, please.""

He edged closer; and became conscious of an indefinable freshness in the air that enveloped him, like the scent of something young and growing. But it was no magic odour,—merely the virginal scent of her hair and skin that even clung to her summer gown.

He heard her singing under her breath to herself:

""La-ē-la!
La-ē-la!""
and murmuring caressingly in an unknown tongue.

Then, suddenly in the pale sunshine, scores of little birds came hovering around them, alighting all over them. And he saw them swarming out of the mossy festoons of the water-oaks—scores and scores of tiny birds—Parula warblers, mostly—all flitting fearlessly down to alight upon his shoulders and knees, all keeping up their sweet, dreamy little twittering sound.

""This is wonderful,"" he whispered.

The girl laughed, took several birds on her forefinger.

""This is nothing,"" she said. ""If I only dared—wait a moment!—--"" And, to the Parula warblers:

""Go home, little friends of God!""

The air was filled with the musical whisper of wings. She passed her right arm around her husband's neck.

""Look at the river,"" she said.

""Good God!"" he blurted out. And sat dumb.

For, over the St. John's misty surface, there was the span of a bridge—a strange, marble bridge humped up high in the centre.

And over it were passing thousands of people—he could make them out vaguely—see them passing in two never-ending streams—tinted shapes on the marble bridge.

And now, on the farther shore of the river, he was aware of a city—a vast one, with spectral pagoda shapes against the sky——

Her arm tightened around his neck.

He saw boats on the river—like the grotesque shapes that decorate ancient lacquer.

She rested her face lightly against his cheek.

In his ears was a far confusion of voices—the stir and movement of multitudes—noises on ships, boatmen's cries, the creak of oars.

Then, far and sonorous, quavering across the water from the city, the din of a temple gong.

There were bells, too—very sweet and silvery—camel bells, bells from the Buddhist temples.

He strained his eyes, and thought, amid the pagodas, that there were minarets, also.

Suddenly, clear and ringing came the distant muezzin's cry: ""There is no other god but God!... It is noon. Mussulmans, pray!""

The girl's arm slipped from his neck and she shuddered and pushed him from her.

There was nothing, now, on the river or beyond it but the curtain of hanging mist; no sound except the cry of a gull, sharp and querulous in the vapours overhead.

""Have—have you been amused?"" she asked.

""What did you do to me!"" he demanded harshly.

She smiled and drew a light breath like a sigh.

""God knows what we living do to one another,—or to ourselves,"" she said. ""I only tried to amuse you—after taking counsel with the birds.""

""What was that bridge I saw!""

""The Bridge of Ten Thousand Felicities.""

""And the city?""

""Yian.""

""You lived there?""

""Yes.""

He moistened his dry lips and stole another glance at this very commonplace Florida river. Sky and water were blank and still, and the ghostly trees stood tall, reflected palely in the translucent tide.

""You merely made me visualise what you were thinking about,"" he concluded in a voice which still remained unsteady.

""Did you hear nothing?""

He was silent, remembering the bells and the enormous murmur of a living multitude.

""And—there were the birds, too."" She added, with an uncertain smile: ""I do not mean to worry you.... And you did ask me to amuse you.""

""I don't know how you did it,"" he said harshly. ""And the details—those thousands and thousands of people on the bridge!... And there was one, quite near this end of the bridge, who looked back.... A young girl who turned and laughed at us—""

""That was Yulun.""

""Who?""

""Yulun. I taught her English.""

""A temple girl?""

""Yes. From Black China.""

""How could you make me see her!"" he demanded.

""Why do you ask such things? I do not know how to tell you how I do it.""

""It's a dangerous, uncanny knowledge!"" he blurted out; and suddenly checked himself, for the girl's face went white.

""I don't mean uncanny,"" he hastened to add. ""Because it seems to me that what you did by juggling with invisible currents to which, when attuned, our five senses respond, is on the same lines as the wireless telegraph and telephone.""

She said nothing, but her colour slowly returned.

""You mustn't be so sensitive,"" he added. ""I've no doubt that it's all quite normal—quite explicable on a perfectly scientific basis. Probably it's no more mysterious than a man in an airplane over midocean conversing with people ashore on two continents.""

For the remainder of the day and evening Tressa seemed subdued—not restless, not nervous, but so quiet that, sometimes, glancing at her askance, Cleves involuntarily was reminded of some lithe young creature of the wilds, intensely alert and still, immersed in fixed and dangerous meditation.

About five in the afternoon they took their golf sticks, went down to the river, and embarked in the canoe.

The water was glassy and still. There was not a ripple ahead, save when a sleeping gull awoke and leisurely steered out of their way.

Tressa's arms and throat were bare and she wore no hat. She sat forward, wielding the bow paddle and singing to herself in a low voice.

""You feel all right, don't you?"" he asked.

""Oh, I am so well, physically, now! It's really wonderful, Victor—like being a child again,"" she replied happily.

""You're not much more,"" he muttered.

She heard him: ""Not very much more—in years,"" she said.... ""Does Scripture tell us how old Our Lord was when He descended into Hell?""

""I don't know,"" he replied, startled.

After a little while Tressa tranquilly resumed her paddling and singing:

""—And eight tall towers
Guard the route
Of human life,
Where at all hours
Death looks out,
Holding a knife
Rolled in a shroud.
For every man,
Humble or proud,
Mighty or bowed,
Death has a shroud;—for every man,—
Even for Tchingniz Khan!
Behold them pass!—lancer.
Baroulass,
Temple dancer
In tissue gold,
Khiounnou,
Karlik bold,
Christian, Jew,—
Nations swarm to the great Urdu.
Yaçaoul, with your kettledrum,
Warn your Khan that his hour is come!
Shroud and knife at his spurred feet throw,
And bid him stretch his neck for the blow!—""
""You know,"" remarked Cleves, ""that some of those songs you sing are devilish creepy.""

Tressa looked around at him over her shoulder, saw he was smiling, smiled faintly in return.

They were off Orchid Cove now. The hotel and cottages loomed dimly in the silver mist. Voices came distinctly across the water. There were people on the golf course paralleling the river; laughter sounded from the club-house veranda.

They went ashore.",False
"It was a gentle daylight rain that awaked me front my stupor in the brush-grown railway cut, and when I staggered out to the roadway ahead I saw no trace of any prints in the fresh mud. The fishy odour, too, was gone, Innsmouth's ruined roofs and toppling steeples loomed up greyly toward the southeast, but not a living creature did I spy in all the desolate salt marshes around. My watch was still going, and told me that the hour was past noon.
The reality of what I had been through was highly uncertain in my mind, but I felt that something hideous lay in the background. I must get away from evil-shadowed Innsmouth--and accordingly I began to test my cramped, wearied powers of locomotion. Despite weakness hunger, horror, and bewilderment I found myself after a time able to walk; so started slowly along the muddy road to Rowley. Before evening I was in village, getting a meal and providing myself with presentable clothes. I caught the night train to Arkham, and the next day talked long and earnestly with government officials there; a process I later repeated in Boston. With the main result of these colloquies the public is now familiar--and I wish, for normality's sake, there were nothing more to tell. Perhaps it is madness that is overtaking me--yet perhaps a greater horror--or a greater marvel--is reaching out.
As may well be imagined, I gave up most of the foreplanned features of the rest of my tour--the scenic, architectural, and antiquarian diversions on which I had counted so heavily. Nor did I dare look for that piece of strange jewelry said to be in the Miskatonic University Museum. I did, however, improve my stay in Arkham by collecting some genealogical notes I had long wished to possess; very rough and hasty data, it is true, but capable of good use later on when I might have time to collate and codify them. The curator of the historical society there--Mr. B. Lapham Peabody--was very courteous about assisting me, and expressed unusual interest when I told him I was a grandson of Eliza Orne of Arkham, who was born in 1867 and had married James Williamson of Ohio at the age of seventeen.
It seemed that a maternal uncle of mine had been there many years before on a quest much like my own; and that my grandmother's family was a topic of some local curiosity. There had, Mr. Peabody said, been considerable discussion about the marriage of her father, Benjamin Orne, just after the Civil War; since the ancestry of the bride was peculiarly puzzling. That bride was understood to have been an orphaned Marsh of New Hampshire--a cousin of the Essex County Marshes--but her education had been in France and she knew very little of her family. A guardian had deposited funds in a Boston bank to maintain her and her French governess; but that guardian's name was unfamiliar to Arkham people, and in time he dropped out of sight, so that the governess assumed the role by court appointment. The Frenchwoman--now long dead--was very taciturn, and there were those who said she could have told more than she did.
But the most baffling thing was the inability of anyone to place the recorded parents of the young woman--Enoch and Lydia (Meserve) Marsh--among the known families of New Hampshire. Possibly, many suggested, she was the natural daughter of some Marsh of prominence--she certainly had the true Marsh eyes. Most of the puzzling was done after her early death, which took place at the birth of my grandmother--her only child. Having formed some disagreeable impressions connected with the name of Marsh, I did not welcome the news that it belonged on my own ancestral tree; nor was I pleased by Mr. Peabody's suggestion that I had the true Marsh eyes myself. However, I was grateful for data which I knew would prove valuable; and took copious notes and lists of book references regarding the well-documented Orne family.
I went directly home to Toledo from Boston, and later spent a month at Maumee recuperating from my ordeal. In September I entered Oberlin for my final year, and from then till the next June was busy with studies and other wholesome activities--reminded of the bygone terror only by occasional official visits from government men in connexion with the campaign which my pleas and evidence had started. Around the middle of July--just a year after the Innsmouth experience--I spent a week with my late mother's family in Cleveland; checking some of my new genealogical data with the various notes, traditions, and bits of heirloom material in existence there, and seeing what kind of a connected chart I could construct.
I did not exactly relish this task, for the atmosphere of the Williamson home had always depressed me. There was a strain of morbidity there, and my mother had never encouraged my visiting her parents as a child, although she always welcomed her father when he came to Toledo. My Arkham-born grandmother had seemed strange and almost terrifying to me, and I do not think I grieved when she disappeared. I was eight years old then, and it was said that she had wandered off in grief after the suicide of my Uncle Douglas, her eldest son. He had shot himself after a trip to New England--the same trip, no doubt, which had caused him to be recalled at the Arkham Historical Society.
This uncle had resembled her, and I had never liked him either. Something about the staring, unwinking expression of both of them had given me a vague, unaccountable uneasiness. My mother and Uncle Walter had not looked like that. They were like their father, though poor little cousin Lawrence--Walter's son--had been almost perfect duplicate of his grandmother before his condition took him to the permanent seclusion of a sanitarium at Canton. I had not seen him in four years, but my uncle once implied that his state, both mental and physical, was very bad. This worry had probably been a major cause of his mother's death two years before.
My grandfather and his widowed son Walter now comprised the Cleveland household, but the memory of older times hung thickly over it. I still disliked the place, and tried to get my researches done as quickly as possible. Williamson records and traditions were supplied in abundance by my grandfather; though for Orne material I had to depend on my uncle Walter, who put at my disposal the contents of all his files, including notes, letters, cuttings, heirlooms, photographs, and miniatures.
It was in going over the letters and pictures on the Orne side that I began to acquire a kind of terror of my own ancestry. As I have said, my grandmother and Uncle Douglas had always disturbed me. Now, years after their passing, I gazed at their pictured faces with a measurably heightened feeling of repulsion and alienation. I could not at first understand the change, but gradually a horrible sort of comparison began to obtrude itself on my unconscious mind despite the steady refusal of my consciousness to admit even the least suspicion of it. It was clear that the typical expression of these faces now suggested something it had not suggested before--something which would bring stark panic if too openly thought of.
But the worst shock came when my uncle shewed me the Orne jewellery in a downtown safe deposit vault. Some of the items were delicate and inspiring enough, but there was one box of strange old pieces descended from my mysterious great-grandmother which my uncle was almost reluctant to produce. They were, he said, of very grotesque and almost repulsive design, and had never to his knowledge been publicly worn; though my grandmother used to enjoy looking at them. Vague legends of bad luck clustered around them, and my great-grandmother's French governess had said they ought not to be worn in New England, though it would be quite safe to wear them in Europe.
As my uncle began slowly and grudgingly to unwrap the things he urged me not to be shocked by the strangeness and frequent hideousness of the designs. Artists and archaeologists who had seen them pronounced their workmanship superlatively and exotically exquisite, though no one seemed able to define their exact material or assign them to any specific art tradition. There were two armlets, a tiara, and a kind of pectoral; the latter having in high relief certain figures of almost unbearable extravagance.
During this description I had kept a tight rein on my emotions, but my face must have betrayed my mounting fears. My uncle looked concerned, and paused in his unwrapping to study my countenance. I motioned to him to continue, which he did with renewed signs of reluctance. He seemed to expect some demonstration when the first piece--the tiara--became visible, but I doubt if he expected quite what actually happened. I did not expect it, either, for I thought I was thoroughly forewarned regarding what the jewellery would turn out to be. What I did was to faint silently away, just as I had done in that brier-choked railway cut a year before.
From that day on my life has been a nightmare of brooding and apprehension nor do I know how much is hideous truth and how much madness. My great-grandmother had been a Marsh of unknown source whose husband lived in Arkham--and did not old Zadok say that the daughter of Obed Marsh by a monstrous mother was married to an Arkham man through trick? What was it the ancient toper had muttered about the line of my eyes to Captain Obed's? In Arkham, too, the curator had told me I had the true Marsh eyes. Was Obed Marsh my own great-great-grandfather? Who--or what--then, was my great-great-grandmother? But perhaps this was all madness. Those whitish-gold ornaments might easily have been bought from some Innsmouth sailor by the father of my great-grandmother, whoever he was. And that look in the staring-eyed faces of my grandmother and self-slain uncle might be sheer fancy on my part--sheer fancy, bolstered up by the Innsmouth shadow which had so darkly coloured my imagination. But why had my uncle killed himself after an ancestral quest in New England?
For more than two years I fought off these reflections with partial success. My father secured me a place in an insurance office, and I buried myself in routine as deeply as possible. In the winter of 1930-31, however, the dreams began. They were very sparse and insidious at first, but increased in frequency and vividness as the weeks went by. Great watery spaces opened out before me, and I seemed to wander through titanic sunken porticos and labyrinths of weedy cyclopean walls with grotesque fishes as my companions. Then the other shapes began to appear, filling me with nameless horror the moment I awoke. But during the dreams they did not horrify me at all--I was one with them; wearing their unhuman trappings, treading their aqueous ways, and praying monstrously at their evil sea-bottom temples.
There was much more than I could remember, but even what I did remember each morning would be enough to stamp me as a madman or a genius if ever I dared write it down. Some frightful influence, I felt, was seeking gradually to drag me out of the sane world of wholesome life into unnamable abysses of blackness and alienage; and the process told heavily on me. My health and appearance grew steadily worse, till finally I was forced to give up my position and adopt the static, secluded life of an invalid. Some odd nervous affliction had me in its grip, and I found myself at times almost unable to shut my eyes.
It was then that I began to study the mirror with mounting alarm. The slow ravages of disease are not pleasant to watch, but in my case there was something subtler and more puzzling in the background. My father seemed to notice it, too, for he began looking at me curiously and almost affrightedly. What was taking place in me? Could it be that I was coming to resemble my grandmother and uncle Douglas?
One night I had a frightful dream in which I met my grandmother under the sea. She lived in a phosphorescent palace of many terraces, with gardens of strange leprous corals and grotesque brachiate efflorescences, and welcomed me with a warmth that may have been sardonic. She had changed--as those who take to the water change--and told me she had never died. Instead, she had gone to a spot her dead son had learned about, and had leaped to a realm whose wonders-- destined for him as well--he had spurned with a smoking pistol. This was to be my realm, too--I could not escape it. I would never die, but would live with those who had lived since before man ever walked the earth.
I met also that which had been her grandmother. For eighty thousand years Pth'thya-l'yi had lived in Y'ha-nthlei, and thither she had gone back after Obed Marsh was dead. Y'ha-nthlei was not destroyed when the upper-earth men shot death into the sea. It was hurt, but not destroyed. The Deep Ones could never be destroyed, even though the palaeogean magic of the forgotten Old Ones might sometimes check them. For the present they would rest; but some day, if they remembered, they would rise again for the tribute Great Cthulhu craved. It would be a city greater than Innsmouth next time. They had planned to spread, and had brought up that which would help them, but now they must wait once more. For bringing the upper-earth men's death I must do a penance, but that would not be heavy. This was the dream in which I saw a shoggoth for the first time, and the sight set me awake in a frenzy of screaming. That morning the mirror definitely told me I had acquired the Innsmouth look.
So far I have not shot myself as my uncle Douglas did. I bought an automatic and almost took the step, but certain dreams deterred me. The tense extremes of horror are lessening, and I feel queerly drawn toward the unknown sea-deeps instead of fearing them. I hear and do strange things in sleep, and awake with a kind of exaltation instead of terror. I do not believe I need to wait for the full change as most have waited. If I did, my father would probably shut me up in a sanitarium as my poor little cousin is shut up. Stupendous and unheard-of splendors await me below, and I shall seek them soon. Ia-R'lyehl Cihuiha flgagnl id Ia! No, I shall not shoot myself--I cannot be made to shoot myself!
I shall plan my cousin's escape from that Canton mad-house, and together we shall go to marvel-shadowed Innsmouth. We shall swim out to that brooding reef in the sea and dive down through black abysses to Cyclopean and many-columned Y'ha-nthlei, and in that lair of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory for ever.
","To Victor Cleves came the following telegram in code:

""Washington
""April 14th, 1919.""
""Investigation ordered by the State Department as the result of frequent mention in despatches of Chinese troops operating with the Russian Bolsheviki forces has disclosed that the Bolsheviki are actually raising a Chinese division of 30,000 men recruited in Central Asia. This division has been guilty of the greatest cruelties. A strange rumour prevails among the Allied forces at Archangel that this Chinese division is led by Yezidee and Hassani officers belonging to the sect of devil-worshipers and that they employ black arts and magic in battle.

""From information so far gathered by the several branches of the United States Secret Service operating throughout the world, it appears possible that the various revolutionary forces of disorder, in Europe and Asia, which now are violently threatening the peace and security, of all established civilisation on earth, may have had a common origin. This origin, it is now suspected, may date back to a very remote epoch; the wide-spread forces of violence and merciless destruction may have had their beginning among some ancient and predatory race whose existence was maintained solely by robbery and murder.

""Anarchists, terrorists, Bolshevists, Reds of all shades and degrees, are now believed to represent in modern times what perhaps once was a tribe of Assassins—a sect whose religion was founded upon a common predilection for crimes of violence.

""On this theory then, for the present, the United States Government will proceed with this investigation of Bolshevism; and the Secret Service will continue to pay particular attention to all Orientals in the United States and other countries. You personally are formally instructed to keep in touch with XLY-371 (Alek Selden) and ZB-303 (James Benton), and to employ every possible means to become friendly with the girl Tressa Norne, win her confidence, and, if possible, enlist her actively in the Government Service as your particular aid and comrade.

""It is equally important that the movements of the Oriental, called Sanang, be carefully observed in order to discover the identity and whereabouts of his companions. However, until further instructions he is not to be taken into custody. M. H. 2479.

""(Signed)
""(John Recklow.)""
The long despatch from John Recklow made Cleves's duty plain enough.

For months, now, Selden and Benton had been watching Tressa Norne. And they had learned practically nothing about her.

And now the girl had come within Cleves's sphere of operation. She had been in New York for two weeks. Telegrams from Benton in Chicago, and from Selden in Buffalo, had prepared him for her arrival.

He had his men watching her boarding-house on West Twenty-eighth Street, men to follow her, men to keep their eyes on her at the theatre, where every evening, at 10:45, her entr' acte was staged. He knew where to get her. But he, himself, had been on the watch for the man Sanang; and had failed to find the slightest trace of him in New York, although warned that he had arrived.

So, for that evening, he left the hunt for Sanang to others, put on his evening clothes, and dined with fashionable friends at the Patroons' Club, who never for an instant suspected that young Victor Cleves was in the Service of the United States Government. About half-past nine he strolled around to the theatre, desiring to miss as much as possible of the popular show without being too late to see the curious little entr' acte in which this girl, Tressa Norne, appeared alone.

He had secured an aisle seat near the stage at an outrageous price; the main show was still thundering and fizzing and glittering as he entered the theatre; so he stood in the rear behind the orchestra until the descending curtain extinguished the outrageous glare and din.

Then he went down the aisle, and as he seated himself Tressa Norne stepped from the wings and stood before the lowered curtain facing an expectant but oddly undemonstrative audience.

The girl worked rapidly, seriously, and in silence. She seemed a mere child there behind the footlights, not more than sixteen anyway—her winsome eyes and wistful lips unspoiled by the world's wisdom.

Yet once or twice the mouth drooped for a second and the winning eyes darkened to a remoter blue—the brooding iris hue of far horizons.

She wore the characteristic tabard of stiff golden tissue and the gold pagoda-shaped headpiece of a Yezidee temple girl. Her flat, slipper-shaped foot-gear was of stiff gold, too, and curled upward at the toes.

All this accentuated her apparent youth. For in face and throat no firmer contours had as yet modified the soft fullness of immaturity; her limbs were boyish and frail, and her bosom more undecided still, so that the embroidered breadth of gold fell flat and straight from her chest to a few inches above the ankles.

She seemed to have no stock of paraphernalia with which to aid the performance; no assistant, no orchestral diversion, nor did she serve herself with any magician's patter. She did her work close to the footlights.

Behind her loomed a black curtain; the strip of stage in front was bare even of carpet; the orchestra remained mute.

But when she needed anything—a little table, for example—well, it was suddenly there where she required it—a tripod, for instance, evidently fitted to hold the big iridescent bubble of glass in which swarmed little tropical fishes—and which arrived neatly from nowhere. She merely placed her hands before her as though ready to support something weighty which she expected and—suddenly, the huge crystal bubble was visible, resting between her hands. And when she tired of holding it, she set it upon the empty air and let go of it; and instead of crashing to the stage with its finny rainbow swarm of swimmers, out of thin air appeared a tripod to support it.

Applause followed, not very enthusiastic, for the sort of audience which sustains the shows of which her performance was merely an entr' acte is an audience responsive only to the obvious.

Nobody ever before had seen that sort of magic in America. People scarcely knew whether or not they quite liked it. The lightning of innovation stupefies the dull; ignorance is always suspicious of innovation—always afraid to put itself on record until its mind is made up by somebody else.

So in this typical New York audience approbation was cautious, but every fascinated eye remained focused on this young girl who continued to do incredible things, which seemed to resemble ""putting something over"" on them; a thing which no uneducated American conglomeration ever quite forgives.

The girl's silence, too, perplexed them; they were accustomed to gabble, to noise, to jazz, vocal and instrumental, to that incessant metropolitan clamour which fills every second with sound in a city whose only distinction is its din. Stage, press, art, letters, social existence unless noisy mean nothing in Gotham; reticence, leisure, repose are the three lost arts. The megaphone is the city's symbol; its chiefest crime, silence.

The girl having finished with the big glass bubble full of tiny fish, picked it up and tossed it aside. For a moment it apparently floated there in space like a soap-bubble. Changing rainbow tints waxed and waned on the surface, growing deeper and more gorgeous until the floating globe glowed scarlet, then suddenly burst into flame and vanished. And only a strange, sweet perfume lingered in the air.

But she gave her perplexed audience no time to wonder; she had seated herself on the stage and was already swiftly busy unfolding a white veil with which she presently covered herself, draping it over her like a tent.

The veil seemed to be translucent; she was apparently visible seated beneath it. But the veil turned into smoke, rising into the air in a thin white cloud; and there, where she had been seated, was a statue of white stone the image of herself!—in all the frail springtide of early adolescence—a white statue, cold, opaque, exquisite in its sculptured immobility.

There came, the next moment, a sound of distant thunder; flashes lighted the blank curtain; and suddenly a vein of lightning and a sharper peal shattered the statue to fragments.

There they lay, broken bits of her own sculptured body, glistening in a heap behind the footlights. Then each fragment began to shimmer with a rosy internal light of its own, until the pile of broken marble glowed like living coals under thickening and reddening vapours. And, presently, dimly perceptible, there she was in the flesh again, seated in the fiery centre of the conflagration, stretching her arms luxuriously, yawning, seemingly awakening from refreshing slumber, her eyes unclosing to rest with a sort of confused apology upon her astounded audience.

As she rose to her feet nothing except herself remained on the stage—no débris, not a shred of smoke, not a spark.

She came down, then, across an inclined plank into the orchestra among the audience.

In the aisle seat nearest her sat Victor Cleves. His business was to be there that evening. But she didn't know that, knew nothing about him—had never before set eyes on him.

At her gesture of invitation he made a cup of both his hands. Into these she poured a double handful of unset diamonds—or what appeared to be diamonds—pressed her own hands above his for a second—and the diamonds in his palms had become pearls.

These were passed around to people in the vicinity, and finally returned to Mr. Cleves, who, at her request, covered the heap of pearls with both his hands, hiding them entirely from view.

At her nod he uncovered them. The pearls had become emeralds. Again, while he held them, and without even touching him, she changed them into rubies. Then she turned away from him, apparently forgetting that he still held the gems, and he sat very still, one cupped hand over the other, while she poured silver coins into a woman's gloved hands, turned them into gold coins, then flung each coin into the air, where it changed to a living, fragrant rose and fell among the audience.

Presently she seemed to remember Cleve, came back down the aisle, and under his close and intent gaze drew from his cupped hands, one by one, a score of brilliant little living birds, which continually flew about her and finally perched, twittering, on her golden headdress—a rainbow-crest of living jewels.

As she drew the last warm, breathing little feathered miracle from Cleves's hands and released it, he said rapidly under his breath: ""I want a word with you later. Where?""

She let her clear eyes rest on him for a moment, then with a shrug so slight that it was perceptible, perhaps, only to him, she moved on along the inclined way, stepped daintily over the footlights, caught fire, apparently, nodded to a badly rattled audience, and sauntered off, burning from head to foot.

What applause there was became merged in a dissonant instrumental outburst from the orchestra; the great god Jazz resumed direction, the mindless audience breathed freely again as the curtain rose upon a familiar, yelling turbulence, including all that Gotham really understands and cares for—legs and noise.

Victor Cleves glanced up at the stage, then continued to study the name of the girl on the programme. It was featured in rather pathetic solitude under ""Entr' acte."" And he read further: ""During the entr' acte Miss Tressa Norne will entertain you with several phases of Black Magic. This strange knowledge was acquired by Miss Norne from the Yezidees, among which almost unknown people still remain descendants of that notorious and formidable historic personage known in the twelfth century as The Old Man of the Mountain—or The Old Man of Mount Alamout.

""The pleasant profession of this historic individual was assassination; and some historians now believe that genuine occult power played a part in his dreadful record—a record which terminated only when the infantry of Genghis Khan took Mount Alamout by storm and hanged the Old Man of the Mountain and burned his body under a boulder of You-Stone.

""For Miss Norne's performance there appears to be no plausible, practical or scientific explanation.

""During her performance the curtain will remain lowered for fifteen minutes and will then rise on the last act of 'You Betcha Life.'""

The noisy show continued while Cleves, paying it scant attention, brooded over the programme. And ever his keen, grey eyes reverted to her name, Tressa Norne.

Then, for a little while, he settled back and let his absent gaze wander over the galloping battalions of painted girls and the slapstick principals whose perpetual motion evoked screams of approbation from the audience amid the din of the great god Jazz.

He had an aisle seat; he disturbed nobody when he went out and around to the stage door.

The aged man on duty took his card, called a boy and sent it off. The boy returned with the card, saying that Miss Norne had already dressed and departed.

Cleves tipped him and then tipped the doorman heavily.

""Where does she live?"" he asked.

""Say,"" said the old man, ""I dunno, and that's straight. But them ladies mostly goes up to the roof for a look in at the 'Moonlight Masque' and a dance afterward. Was you ever up there?""

""Yes.""

""Seen the new show?""

""No.""

""Well, g'wan up while you can get a table. And I bet the little girl will be somewheres around.""

""The little girl"" was ""somewheres around."" He secured a table, turned and looked about at the vast cabaret into which only a few people had yet filtered, and saw her at a distance in the carpeted corridor buying violets from one of the flower-girls.

A waiter placed a reserve card on his table; he continued on around the outer edge of the auditorium.

Miss Norne had already seated herself at a small table in the rear, and a waiter was serving her with iced orange juice and little French cakes.

When the waiter returned Cleves went up and took off his hat.

""May I talk with you for a moment, Miss Norne?"" he said.

The girl looked up, the wheat-straw still between her scarlet lips. Then, apparently recognising in him the young man in the audience who had spoken to her, she resumed her business of imbibing orange juice.

The girl seemed even frailer and younger in her hat and street gown. A silver-fox stole hung from her shoulders; a gold bag lay on the table under the bunch of violets.

She paid no attention whatever to him. Presently her wheat-straw buckled, and she selected a better one.

He said: ""There's something rather serious I'd like to speak to you about if you'll let me. I'm not the sort you evidently suppose. I'm not trying to annoy you.""

At that she looked around and upward once more.

Very, very young, but already spoiled, he thought, for the dark-blue eyes were coolly appraising him, and the droop of the mouth had become almost sullen. Besides, traces of paint still remained to incarnadine lip and cheek and there was a hint of hardness in the youthful plumpness of the features.

""Are you a professional?"" she asked without curiosity.

""A theatrical man? No.""

""Then if you haven't anything to offer me, what is it you wish?""

""I have a job to offer if you care for it and if you are up to it,"" he said.

Her eyes became slightly hostile:

""What kind of job do you mean?""

""I want to learn something about you first. Will you come over to my table and talk it over?""

""No.""

""What sort do you suppose me to be?"" he inquired, amused.

""The usual sort, I suppose.""

""You mean a Johnny?""

""Yes—of sorts.""

She let her insolent eyes sweep him once more, from head to foot.

He was a well-built young man and in his evening dress he had that something about him which placed him very definitely where he really belonged.

""Would you mind looking at my card?"" he asked.

He drew it out and laid it beside her, and without stirring she scanned it sideways.

""That's my name and address,"" he continued. ""I'm not contemplating mischief. I've enough excitement in life without seeking adventure. Besides, I'm not the sort who goes about annoying women.""

She glanced up at him again:

""You are annoying me!""

""I'm sorry. I was quite honest. Good-night.""

He took his congé with unhurried amiability; had already turned away when she said:

""Please ... what do you desire to say to me?"" He came back to her table:

""I couldn't tell you until I know a little more about you.""

""What—do you wish to know?""

""Several things. I could scarcely ask you—go over such matters with you—standing here.""

There was a pause; the girl juggled with the straw on the table for a few moments, then, partly turning, she summoned a waiter, paid him, adjusted her stole, picked up her gold bag and her violets and stood up. Then she turned to Cleves and gave him a direct look, which had in it the impersonal and searching gaze of a child.

When they were seated at the table reserved for him the place already was filling rapidly—backwash from the theatres slopped through every aisle—people not yet surfeited with noise, not yet sufficiently sodden by their worship of the great god Jazz.

""Jazz,"" said Cleves, glancing across his dinner-card at Tressa Norne—""what's the meaning of the word? Do you happen to know?""

""Doesn't it come from the French 'jaser'?""

He smiled. ""Possibly. I'm rather hungry. Are you?""

""Yes.""

""Will you indicate your preferences?""

She studied her card, and presently he gave the order.

""I'd like some champagne,"" she said, ""unless you think it's too expensive.""

He smiled at that, too, and gave the order.

""I didn't suggest any wine because you seem so young,"" he said.

""How old do I seem?""

""Sixteen perhaps.""

""I am twenty-one.""

""Then you've had no troubles.""

""I don't know what you call trouble,"" she remarked, indifferently, watching the arriving throngs.

The orchestra, too, had taken its place.

""Well,"" she said, ""now that you've picked me up, what do you really want of me?"" There was no mitigating smile to soften what she said. She dropped her elbows on the table, rested her chin between her palms and looked at him with the same searching, undisturbed expression that is so disconcerting in children. As he made no reply: ""May I have a cocktail?"" she inquired.

He gave the order. And his mind registered pessimism. ""There is nothing doing with this girl,"" he thought. ""She's already on the toboggan."" But he said aloud: ""That was beautiful work you did down in the theatre, Miss Norne.""

""Did you think so?""

""Of course. It was astounding work.""

""Thank you. But managers and audiences differ with you.""

""Then they are very stupid,"" he said.

""Possibly. But that does not help me pay my board.""

""Do you mean you have trouble in securing theatrical engagements?""

""Yes, I am through here to-night, and there's nothing else in view, so far.""

""That's incredible!"" he exclaimed.

She lifted her glass, slowly drained it.

For a few moments she caressed the stem of the empty glass, her gaze remote.

""Yes, it's that way,"" she said. ""From the beginning I felt that my audiences were not in sympathy with me. Sometimes it even amounts to hostility. Americans do not like what I do, even if it holds their attention. I don't quite understand why they don't like it, but I'm always conscious they don't. And of course that settles it—to-night has settled the whole thing, once and for all.""

""What are you going to do?""

""What others do, I presume.""

""What do others do?"" he inquired, watching the lovely sullen eyes.

""Oh, they do what I'm doing now, don't they?—let some man pick them up and feed them."" She lifted her indifferent eyes. ""I'm not criticising you. I meant to do it some day—when I had courage. That's why I just asked you if I might have some champagne—finding myself a little scared at my first step.... But you did say you might have a job for me. Didn't you?""

""Suppose I haven't. What are you going to do?""

The curtain was rising. She nodded toward the bespangled chorus. ""Probably that sort of thing. They've asked me.""

Supper was served. They both were hungry and thirsty; the music made conversation difficult, so they supped in silence and watched the imbecile show conceived by vulgarians, produced by vulgarians and served up to mental degenerates of the same species—the average metropolitan audience.

For ten minutes a pair of comedians fell up and down a flight of steps, and the audience shrieked approval.

""Miss Norne?""

The girl who had been watching the show turned in her chair and looked back at him.

""Your magic is by far the most wonderful I have ever seen or heard of. Even in India such things are not done.""

""No, not in India,"" she said, indifferently.

""Where then?""

""In China.""

""You learned to do such things there?""

""Yes.""

""Where, in China, did you learn such amazing magic?""

""In Yian.""

""I never heard of it. Is it a province?""

""A city.""

""And you lived there?""

""Fourteen years.""

""When?""

""From 1904 to 1918.""

""During the great war,"" he remarked, ""you were in China?""

""Yes.""

""Then you arrived here very recently.""

""In November, from the Coast.""

""I see. You played the theatres from the Coast eastward.""

""And went to pieces in New York,"" she added calmly, finishing her glass of champagne.

""Have you any family?"" he asked.

""No.""

""Do you care to say anything further?"" he inquired, pleasantly.

""About my family? Yes, if you wish. My father was in the spice trade in Yian. The Yezidees took Yian in 1910, threw him into a well in his own compound and filled it up with dead imperial troops. I was thirteen years old.... The Hassani did that. They held Yian nearly eight years, and I lived with my mother, in a garden pagoda, until 1914. In January of that year Germans got through from Kiaou-Chou. They had been six months on the way. I think they were Hassanis. Anyway, they persuaded the Hassanis to massacre every English-speaking prisoner. And so—my mother died in the garden pagoda of Yian.... I was not told for four years.""

""Why did they spare you?"" he asked, astonished at her story so quietly told, so utterly destitute of emotion.

""I was seventeen. A certain person had placed me among the temple girls in the temple of Erlik. It pleased this person to make of me a Mongol temple girl as a mockery at Christ. They gave me the name Keuke Mongol. I asked to serve the shrine of Kwann-an—she being like to our Madonna. But this person gave me the choice between the halberds of the Tchortchas and the sorcery of Erlik.""

She lifted her sombre eyes. ""So I learned how to do the things you saw. But—what I did there on the stage is not—respectable.""

An odd shiver passed over him. For a second he took her literally, suddenly convinced that her magic was not white but black as the demon at whose shrine she had learned it. Then he smiled and asked her pleasantly, whether indeed she employed hypnosis in her miraculous exhibitions.

But her eyes became more sombre still, and, ""I don't care to talk about it,"" she said. ""I have already said too much.""

""I'm sorry. I didn't mean to pry into professional secrets——""

""I can't talk about it,"" she repeated. ""... Please—my glass is quite empty.""

When he had refilled it:

""How did you get away from Yian?"" he asked.

""The Japanese.""

""What luck!""

""Yes. One battle was fought at Buldak. The Hassanis and Blue Flags were terribly cut up. Then, outside the walls of Yian, Prince Sanang's Tchortcha infantry made a stand. He was there with his Yezidee horsemen, all in leather and silk armour with casques and corselets of black Indian steel.

""I could see them from the temple—saw the Japanese gunners open fire. The Tchortchas were blown to shreds in the blast of the Japanese guns.... Sanang got away with some of his Yezidee horsemen.""

""Where was that battle?""

""I told you, outside the walls of Yian.""

""The newspapers never mentioned any such trouble in China,"" he said, suspiciously.

""Nobody knows about it except the Germans and the Japanese.""

""Who is this Sanang?"" he demanded.

""A Yezidee-Mongol. He is one of the Sheiks-el-Djebel—a servant of The Old Man of Mount Alamout.""

""What is he?""

""A sorcerer—assassin.""

""What!"" exclaimed Cleves incredulously.

""Why, yes,"" she said, calmly. ""Have you never heard of The Old Man of Mount Alamout?""

""Well, yes——""

""The succession has been unbroken since 1090 B.C.A Hassan Sabbah is still the present Old Man of the Mountain. His Yezidees worship Erlik. They are sorcerers. But you would not believe that.""

Cleves said with a smile, ""Who is Erlik?""

""The Mongols' Satan.""

""Oh! So these Yezidees are devil-worshipers!""

""They are more. They are actually devils.""

""You don't really believe that even in unexplored China there exists such a creature as a real sorcerer, do you?"" he inquired, smilingly.

""I don't wish to talk of it.""

To his surprise her face had flushed, and he thought her sensitive mouth quivered a little.

He watched her in silence for a moment; then, leaning a little way across the table:

""Where are you going when the show here closes?""

""To my boarding-house.""

""And then?""

""To bed,"" she said, sullenly.

""And to-morrow what do you mean to do?""

""Go out to the agencies and ask for work.""

""And if there is none?""

""The chorus,"" she said, indifferently.

""What salary have you been getting?""

She told him.

""Will you take three times that amount and work with me?""

",False
"
The next few days passed almost without incident. I say ""almost"" because I still had that odd sense of being watched and followed. Occasionally, I caught a brief glimpse of ""fish faces,"" usually alone or in twos, lurking in the shadows or dodging furtively around corners, but as long as they kept their distance I was quite willing to adopt an attitude of ""live and let live.""
Don Ramiro had apparently left on a business trip to Mexico City, at least that's what his wife told me when I attempted to contact him. As for Rousseau, he was gone on some errand to Brownsville, so I was quite alone. The circumstances seemed conducive to renewing my acquaintance with Doña Tencha.
I found the curandera leaving a downtown yerbería, a shop specializing in herbs, candles, potions, and other tools of the sorcerer's trade. When she saw me, she greeted me cheerily.
""Buenas tardes, have they caused you any more problems?""
""No, Doña Tencha, they haven't. They haven't bothered me since that night, thanks to you perhaps.""
""As I said, they know better than to mess with me,"" she laughed, ""so, how can I help you now?""
""As you may have heard,"" I replied, ""I am in San Facundo to study your legends and folk traditions. That's my profession. I am an anthropologist.""
""An anthropophagist? Ha! Then you should get along fine with the frog-faces!""
I was almost as surprised by her darkly humorous word play as by her use of the epithet ""frog-faces,"" so close to the pejorative that I had invented. Her association of anthropophagy with those repulsive people sent a shiver down my spine.
""Believe me, I have nothing to do with eating human flesh,"" I volunteered. ""I was hoping you might be able to enlighten me some about local beliefs, you know, concerning magical and mystical practices."" She eyed me slyly.
""What you really want, güerito, is to know what the frog-faces do up on El Tinieblo when they and their relatives from the sea call up their devil gods, is that not so?""
Her bluntness, and her insight, surprised me even more than previously.
I responded, ""Do you know what happens there? Have you seen?""
""I have seen what I have seen,"" was her reply. ""But,"" she continued, ""to know and to understand, one must see for oneself.""
I remained silent for a few seconds, trying to analyze her meaning. Was she suggesting that I attempt to spy on the rituals, no doubt hideous in nature, on my own, or was she inviting me to join her in such a dubious enterprise?
Presently, I spoke, ""How do you suggest that I accomplish that?""
Once again, Tencha smiled slyly. ""First, one must know when and how.""
""That's logical,"" I responded, ""but when and how can we get started?""
""We?"" Her eyebrows rose in mock surprise.
""Why, yes. I am supposing you intend to show me the way. Otherwise I'll doubtless blunder into some trap they've set up to catch unwelcome intruders. You know, just as happened with the federales.""
She emitted a low chuckle, ""So then, you heard about the federales. No matter, eran una bola de pendejos.""
""Which is exactly the reason I need your help if I am to learn what is going on up there. I don't want to end up a fool, much less a dead fool like them.""
""Well,"" she laughed wryly, ""you are going to need Tencha's help then.""
Doña Tencha explained to me that the strange ones conducted their principal ceremonies at the time of the solar solstices and equinoxes, and lesser ceremonies at each dark-of-the-moon and full moon. She pointed out to me that the eve of the summer solstice, la noche de San Juan, was less than a fortnight away, and this should provide an excellent opportunity to observe the ritual in all its repulsive fullness. She also warned me that the ""frog faces"" and their sea-dwelling cousins would be especially on guard against intruders, as any profanation of the ceremony would incur the wrath of the Ancient Ones, and result in terrible punishments being meted out to the worshipers for their lack of vigilance.
""Take care that you say nothing,"" she warned, ""not to your friend the gringuito, and especially not to Don Ramiro, for he is not entirely worthy of your confidence.""
""Tell me about Ramiro,"" I prodded. ""Is he in any way connected to the strange ones or the sea beings? The reason I ask is that he seems to have profound knowledge concerning their past and their origins. He also speaks almost reverently when he mentions 'Great Kutulli'.""
She quickly traced a sign, not of the cross, with her hand then responded in an uncharacteristically somber tone, ""Ramirito is not of those demons. His blood is free of that stain. Did you know that he is partly descended from the judíos? Nevertheless, his lineage was not of those who followed the book. They were only a few of the many judíos who came here to get away from the priests. The same was true of my people. Only a few agreed to mate with the sea demons, and give birth to monsters. It is from those matings, and later with the judíos that followed the book, that the frog faces come.""
""Then, why not trust Ramiro?"" I asked.
""Because, even though he is not of the demon line himself, he did have close friends among them in his youth. Even worse, he took one of their women as his lover and she bore him a son."" She paused. ""Today he professes shame for what he did as a young man, but his son still lives and runs with the other frog faces. As you know, blood is thicker than water.""
Tencha's words left me with a reeling sensation in the pit of my stomach. I had come to both like and respect Don Ramiro, but the thought of this intelligent and fairly well educated man, whom I had considered a gentleman, taking one of those repulsive creatures as a lover filled me with disgust and loathing. I wondered how he could still face other human beings, knowing that his blood ran in the veins of one of those blasphemous abnormalities.
Tencha seemed to sense my reaction. ""They have a way of messing with one's mind."" Wrinkling her nose, she continued, ""They can get inside your head when it serves them to do so. They can make real fools out of some people; probably that is what happened to Ramirito."" After a pause she added, ""Be careful they don't do it to you!""
Actually, I was far more concerned for the safety of my body than for what the strange beings might do to my mind. I have always prided myself on having a strong will capable of imposing a great deal of mental discipline. Poor Ramiro! He must have been a gullible youth, like so many, seeking new thrills and forbidden pleasures with no thought as to the outcome or consequences.
Tencha and I agreed to meet at the house of her nephew, who lived on a nearby ejido, shortly before sundown on the eve of the summer solstice. She instructed me to wear dark clothing and rubber-soled boots so as to minimize our risks of being seen or heard. In the meantime, she advised, it would be better if we had no contact so as not to arouse suspicion concerning our plans. Later that same day a small boy knocked at my door and presented me with a folded sheet of paper on which was drawn a map showing the way to the ejido and the house of Tencha's nephew. Now there was little to do but wait for the appointed day and hour.


VII

In fact, I made good use of the intervening days and evenings delving into the many books that Rousseau had accumulated in his personal library. Most of these dealt with either the history and folklore of northeastern Mexico or themes related to magic, primitive religion, and demonology. In addition to the foregoing, and the previously mentioned volume of Al Azif, which for some reason I could not bring myself to read, the collection contained several loose leaf binders. One of these was filled with Xeroxed pages, made hastily, judging from the poor alignment, listed as the original 1839 Dusseldorf edition of Friedrich von Junzt's infamous Die Unaussprechlichen Kulten. Another contained several sheets of lined notebook paper covered with handwritten scribbling in Latin and drawings of strange hieroglyphs or sigils, with the legend ""Excerpts from the Liber Ivonis"" noted in English at the top of each page. There were also numerous other pages of notes written in some cryptic script with which I was not familiar. I wondered if those pieces were authentic or merely the spurious work of some crank. In view of the horrible revelations I found in their pages, I sincerely hoped the latter was true.
Presently, I found myself leafing through a crumbling volume titled Relación verdadera de las cosas de la Real Provincia del Nuevo Santander, published in 1783 by a Padre Vicente de Santa Maria, a priest of the Order of St. Francis, who had been allowed access to records of the earlier attempts at christianizing the native Indians of the province.
Father Santa Maria's chronicle covered more than two hundred years of regional history beginning with the earliest European exploration of the province shortly after Cortés' Conquest, and continuing up to the 1770's. The first part of the volume told a repeated story of frustrated attempts at conquest and settlement, failed missionary efforts, unrelenting resistance by fierce and warlike tribes, massacres and retaliations. As I leafed through the heavy volume I came upon a passage that caught my attention. The following is my own translation of the curiously archaic eighteenth century Spanish:


In the year of Our Lord 1627, Don Martín de Zavala, acting as governor of the province by authority of His Excellency Don Rodrigo Pacheco y Osorio, Marquis of Cerralvo and Viceroy of New Spain, dispatched sixteen friars of the Order of St. Augustine, headed by Father Andrés Echevarría y Olmos to the country of the Tahualilos with the object of establishing missions to spread the gospel of Our Lord among those people, who up to then had remained ignorant of it. This group founded four missions on both sides of the San Facundo River and another between there and the Rio de las Palmas, now called the Soto la Marina. After two years had passed, no more word was received from those missions and it was feared that they had been destroyed and the friars killed at the hands of the Indians.
With this present in his mind, and desiring to save the priests if possible, and if not, to avenge them, Don Martin sent a detachment of two hundred men, commanded by Captain Luís Santiesteban y Rojas, to the region of the San Facundo River, where he found the missions abandoned and the priests, with the exception of two who had died, partaking of the brutal and barbarous rituals of the heathens, which included the eating of human flesh in a way that was cruel and worse than inhuman. Seeing what was happening, the valiant captain seized twelve of the apostate friars forthwith, two others escaping in spite of his best efforts to prevent it, and after fighting off the barbarians in a hard battle, carried those priests in chains to San Juan Bautista de Jaumave. From there they were taken to San Luís Potosí and on to the City of México and there processed before the tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, whereby they were made to suffer for their abominable crimes against God and humanity.
As for the heathens, D. Felipe Rocafuerte y Nava, Superior of the Order of St. Augustine for the province, traveled personally to the country of the Tahualilos, accompanied by a strong detachment of soldiers. There he found the Indians to truly be worshippers of Satan the Devil and to frequently summon Satan and other demons to their ceremonies by means of foul incantations and conjurations. Furthermore, he discovered that they often gave of their daughters into carnal union with devils by whom they bore children, also devils. It was also learned that certain Jews, having accepted Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior, had settled in the region and lived peacefully among the Indians without the prior knowledge of provincial or vice regal authorities, but as they professed to be Christians and caused no problems to the Church or government, were left alone. The heathens, on the other hand, had to be dealt with in the severest way for their alliance with the minions of hell. After securing permission from the highest ecclesiastical authority in New Spain, Monsignor Rocafuerte ordered that four hundred Indians and sixty of their priests and caciques be passed through the flames of purification to God's Holy Tribunal.


I felt a singular chill as I read these words written more than two centuries earlier. Here was clear documentation of the things Don Ramiro had told me.
The hot, dry, and windy days of June wore on inexorably. Rousseau returned around the middle of the month. He had been absent about twenty days, and I was beginning to feel concern lest some mishap had befallen him.
""So, what's new Carl?"" I inquired. ""I hadn't expected you to be away so long.""
""I hadn't planned to be,"" he explained. ""I had merely intended to make a quick trip to Brownsville to pick up some books I had ordered. While there, I received word that Doctor Giulio Tarentino from Milan would be speaking at a conference at the University of Texas in Austin.""
""Tarentino?"" The name of a respected colleague immediately aroused my interest. ""I haven't seen him in more than three years. How is he?""
Rousseau paused for a moment; he then replied softly, ""He's dead.""
""But . . . but how?"" I stammered, deeply shocked.
""I traveled to Austin,"" Rousseau explained, "" . . . drove instead of flying. The conference was still several days away, so I planned to spend some time at a resort nearby in the hill country. It's very pleasant there this time of year you know. There was a friend, a young woman, involved, but that's neither here nor there. At any rate, Tarentino wasn't scheduled to present his paper until the third day of the conference. As I suppose you know, he's been doing some very deep research into ancient cults and belief systems that parallels your own . . . ""
""I would prefer to say 'complements',"" I interjected.
""Okay, complements . . . , anyway, he was supposed to present a paper on some research he carried out recently in Brazil.""
""Yes,"" I interrupted, ""he was looking into a certain obscure cult of African origin rumored to still be practiced there.""
""Obscure, but horrible,"" continued Rousseau. ""Certainly not regular Candomblé or Makumba. As I was best able to gather, the cult in question practices some form of demonolatry complete with human sacrifice and God knows what else.""
""From what other colleagues told me,"" I volunteered, ""Tarentino believed the cult to be part of an extremely ancient pattern of beliefs and practices that date back to ancient Mesopotamia and beyond, to the very origins of humanity. In historical times the cult manifested itself in many guises, and in many parts of the world. We find it in the worship of Moloch, mentioned with such abhorrence in the Old Testament, and reflected in the unspeakable practices of the Carthaginians, whose sacrificial rituals dedicated to Baal Hammon caused such revulsion among the Greeks that they would not refer to them directly in their writings. The Roman destruction of Carthage was carried out, in part, to obliterate the very memory of that abominable cult from the face of the earth. Centuries later, we find the same pattern repeated in the mass ritual slaughters carried out by the Aztec priesthood.""
""Tarentino was killed, you know."" Rousseau's words abruptly shook me out of my lecture mode.
""Killed? How . . . ?""
""In Puerto Rico, while on his way to Austin,"" Rousseau stated somberly, adding, ""He had returned to Brazil to attend the funeral of one of his research assistants there, who was also killed under strange circumstances. Ironic, isn't it?""
""How was he killed?"" I asked, dreading the answer.
""In a very strange and horrible way,"" was my friend's reply. ""He apparently was attacked by some animal while walking on the beach near his hotel. Whatever it was, it dragged him bodily into an adjacent wooded area and literally stripped the flesh from his bones. Strangely, there were no identifiable tracks, although there were some odd markings on the beach nearby . . . possibly large sea turtles the police said.""
""I never heard of sea turtles coming out of the water to attack human beings,"" I responded.
""Nor I,"" agreed Rousseau. ""The more superstitious among the locals were talking about the chupacabras, or so I was told.""
My friend's description of Tarentino's death caused me to feel a deep, hollow sensation in the pit of my stomach. It sounded too much like the sacrificial practices of Kutulli's followers. The fact that Tarentino was killed while walking on the beach added another dimension of horror.


VIII

The morning of June 24th dawned hot, muggy, and overcast. I went out early to take my morning coffee and pan dulce, the delicious Mexican sweet bread that I had come to enjoy, at a small cafe near the plaza. Later, I took a casual stroll along the high banks of the San Facundo River. I did not return to the house until almost noon. The only person I found there was Alma, the middle-aged woman whom Rousseau had hired to cook for us. She also came in three times a week to tidy up the house.
""Have you seen Carlos?"" I inquired.
""No,"" she answered. ""The patrón was not here when I came, and I haven't seen him all morning.""
His absence caused me no special concern. Rousseau often came and went without advising anyone. Personally, I knew that he was involved with a local peasant girl, though I had never met her, or even seen the two together.
Actually, I hoped that Rousseau would stay away for a few hours. That would facilitate my preparations for that night's planned adventure. I had no desire to give him any accounting concerning what Tencha and I planned to do. He would want to come along, and I strongly felt that more than three people would be very unwise. Besides, if Tencha found out that Rousseau was becoming too nosy she might want to cancel the whole expedition.
I carefully assembled the items I would be taking along: a mini-video camera and recorder with low light, high speed cassettes, good hiking boots, and a black combat knife. This last item amused me somewhat. Certainly, I have no skill in hand-to-hand combat. Nevertheless, I did not want to go into a situation of unknown danger completely unprepared to defend myself.
I slept restfully for part of the afternoon, a fact that surprised me considering my natural excitement over that night's planned adventure. About two hours before sundown I set out for my meeting with Tencha and her nephew, carrying my gear as inconspicuously as possible in a large all-purpose bag of plastic mesh, of a type frequently used by the ""popular"" classes in Mexico for groceries, clothing, or most anything else. I rode part of the way in a pesera, one of the small passenger vans that serve as public transportation in many Mexican towns and cities, then walked the remaining mile or so to the ejido where I was to meet my companions.
Checking my map, I soon located the house of Tencha's nephew. No one thereabouts seemed to notice me very much, though I am sure that the presence of any stranger, especially a foreigner, in such an isolated place immediately sets the grapevine in motion. Arriving at the house, a small oblong adobe structure with a thatched roof, I hailed the people inside. Immediately, a lean, swarthy man who seemed to be in his mid-twenties appeared in the doorway.
""A quién buscas?, Who are you looking for?"" he demanded brusquely. I asked if he were, indeed Doña Tencha's nephew.
""Sí, lo soy,"" he replied. ""You then, are the Americano she said was coming? Jijos! You do not know what you are getting yourself into, but sit down,"" he motioned to a log that served as a bench. ""Mi tía Tencha will be coming ahorita.""
""Ahorita,"" or soon, turned out to be nearly an hour. An elderly woman, perhaps the young man's mother in law, brought me a clay cup of manzanilla tea while his wife and two small children peered nervously out from inside the doorway. Tencha arrived just as the sun was dipping behind the low hills to the west.
""Have you been waiting very long?"" she asked in a cheerful voice.
""Not too long,"" I lied. ""When do we get started?""
""Not until the moon comes up,"" she replied. ""But we don't want to get there until, maybe, an hour before midnight.""
""You mean to El Tinieblo? I inquired.
""Sí,"" she replied. ""In the meantime Juan Antonio and I have something to do, so try to make yourself comfortable.""
She called out to her nephew, who emerged from the shack carrying a canvass bag slung over his shoulder, and some tools, or perhaps weapons, wrapped in burlap under his arm. I noticed that the bag was moving, as if something were squirming inside. My suspicion was confirmed when a bleating cry, almost like that of a little child, issued from the bag.
The two disappeared around the house, though I could still hear their voices chattering merrily in the distance. Soon, the voices faded in the darkness, and I was left alone, sitting on my lonely log. The old woman brought me more tea as I sat, listening to the sounds of the ejido settling in for the night, and the sounds of the night itself. The sky was still overcast, but I could imagine the stars shining brightly here on a clear night. How we city dwellers lose touch with the simple, yet profound beauties of nature!
Tencha and her nephew did not return until after nine o'clock. By now the overcast had lifted somewhat and a dull moon, nearly full, could be seen just above the eastern horizon.
""Is it time yet?"" I asked impatiently.
""Sí,"" was Tencha's only reply, as she motioned with her hand toward an old Chevrolet pickup with faded light blue paint parked nearby. I sat in the bed of the pickup as we bumped and jolted along the unpaved ranch roads. Tencha and her nephew, who was driving, rode in the cab but, as the rear window had no glass, we were able to converse freely.
""How much further?"" I asked.
""Just a little further to the highway,"" responded Tencha, ""and then several kilometers to the road we take to El Tinieblo.""
After a trip that seemed endless, perhaps because of my extreme discomfort, we arrived at the end of a narrow track that seemed to just stop in the middle of an extensive clump of mesquite.
""We walk from here,"" whispered Tencha, then muttered something to her nephew that I did not understand.
The nephew, Juan Antonio, turned to me and said, ""You still have time to back out if you wish. This is going to be very dangerous.""
""I've come this far,"" I replied. ""I have no desire to back out now.""
I knew that I was not being totally honest in this last statement, but my curiosity now exceeded the undeniable terror I felt at what lay before us.
Juan Antonio produced a small jar containing ground charcoal mixed with lard.
""Smear your face with this,"" he ordered.
I did as was instructed, as did both of my companions. This homemade camouflage paint, together with our dark clothing, made us nearly invisible as we made our way along a narrow path through the night-cloaked brush. Tencha and her nephew followed the path as though they were perfectly familiar with every rock, every abrupt turn. Not so myself. I frequently stumbled or became entangled in the thick chaparral as we made our way with no light other than what was provided by the pale gibbous moon.
Presently, I realized that we were climbing. As we broke into a slight clearing in the chaparral I saw the black bulk of El Tinieblo rising up just before us. More ominously, I saw a dull reddish glow about the top, and seemed to hear a low, steady, but indistinct chanting carried on the wind. Tencha motioned for us to halt.
""It is starting now,"" she whispered very low. ""The ritual will soon begin.""
We continued our slow ascent. Nearly crawling now, we made our way around the side of the hill, gradually, very cautiously, moving closer to the summit. At length, we came to an outcropping of rocks which afforded us a view across the long, flattish top of El Tinieblo.
From this vantage point I could see seven bonfires burning in a more or less circular pattern with a much larger bonfire blazing in the center. Between the outer ring of fires and the central blaze I could see two concentric circles of shadowy figures, apparently squatting on their heels and chanting something in a low, rhythmic murmur as they swayed from side to side in time with their chanting. I started to whisper a question to Tencha, but she placed her hand over my mouth, making a sign with two fingers meaning to wait, then placed one finger to her lips in the universal sign of silence.
Time seemed suspended as we lay there on our bellies, peering out between the rocks and tangled undergrowth that concealed our position from whatever guards might be present. Hours seemed to pass before a howling, a drawn out ululation suddenly sundered the night air, faded, and rose twice again to a nerve shattering pitch. Tencha and her nephew both traced signs across their chests that were not of the cross.
Scarcely had the howling died away that another sound began to reverberate over the hill top, echoing across the dark planes and into the empty night sky beyond, the slow, steady, and deep throbbing of a huge, though unseen drum. The drumming seemed to be steadily increasing in decibels, rising gradually to a deafening crescendo, and was now accompanied by the whining, monotonous piping of unseen flutes.
Slowly, deliberately, the squatting figures rose, swaying, rising, and dipping horribly, in time with the drumming and piping. I could not make out many details of the dancers, though I could tell from their peculiar postures and movements that all but one of them were of the ""strange ones."" There, now dancing, now pausing, but always keeping close to two other figures, I made out the unmistakable form of Ramiro. A business trip to Mexico City? Most likely, his human wife actually believed it!
Presently, I became aware of other figures forming a third circle beyond the outer ring of bonfires. The latter participants in the strange ceremony had apparently come up silently after the drumming had started, filing in from the eastern slope of the hill, the slope that faced in the direction of the sea. I could barely repress a scream when I saw how those shadowy figures danced: they hopped, floundered, undulated in clumsy, hideous time to the music. I gave thanks to whatever gods might be for the night and shadows that partly concealed those horrors from my view.
The frenzy of the dancers increased as the drumming and piping grew in volume and intensity. Howls and other animal noises pierced the night air, and slowly transformed into a more organized sound . . . chanting, unintelligible at first, but gradually taking on a definite pattern of sounds:
""Ph-nglui mglw'nafh Kutulli R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.""
The smoke from the blazing bonfires rose in swirling black billows, forming into a huge cloud that covered the whole portion of sky over El Tinieblo. I could see that the hellish oily black cloud seemed to be writhing and swirling as though driven by some hideous internal will of its own. It actually seemed to be trying to form itself into a shape. In the sky above us, highlighted by the reddish glow from the bonfires, I saw something like a face gradually taking shape, coagulating would be a more accurate description. From the black, bulbous head two burning red eyes glared at the scene below. Tendrils of smoke congealed into writhing tentacles that covered the lower portion of the diabolical face. Other, vaster tentacular shapes reached out into the night sky, completely overarching the hill and surrounding countryside.
The chanting grew louder and the dancing wilder, more frenzied.
Iwwaiy! Iwwaiiy! Ia! Ia! El! Elyon! Aduad! Adua- dua- duado! Ia! Ia! Kutulli fhtagn! Iwwaaaiiiiiiyyy! Ia! Ia!
I lay there, transfixed with horror and fascination, no longer cognizant of my two companions, only of that hellish shape that brooded above us.
My trance was suddenly broken by another sound, a scream, unmistakably human, that seemed to embody the very sum of all anguish and terror. I shifted my vision to seek out the source of that nightmare scream and saw a pale figure, completely naked, being dragged into the circle of celebrants next to the central bonfire. Straining my eyes to discern the unfortunate fellow's features, I was stricken with a sudden sensation of horror beyond my ability to describe. The naked man who was being dragged into the place of sacrifice was my friend Carl Rousseau!
I wanted to call out, to do something, anything, to help my friend. Impossible! I was paralyzed, perhaps with terror, or perhaps simply overwhelmed by the enormity, the utter indescribable horror of what was happening. Rousseau was roughly thrown into the circle before the fire. Immediately, I saw a slimy, glistening black tentacle envelop him and snatch him up before the thing hovering in the sky far above us. The tentacle held the tiny white figure before the red eyes for a moment, as though the hellish entity were examining it. Seconds later, the writhing anemone-like appendages extending in a mass below the eyes seized the pitiable flailing body and thrust it into the gaping black maw that served as a mouth. A scream that was no longer human, of utter horror, pain, and madness, rent the night from far above. I stared, absolutely fixated with horror, as the thing's eyes, two searing red coals suspended in an amorphous blob of bulbous blackness, seemed to survey the scene below, fixing its gaze first on one place, then on another.
The towering black monstrosity seemed to swell in size, taking on more substance and density, as other shadowy entities, impossible to describe, filled the air, flitting and undulating about the enormous black mass of tentacles that I knew must be Kutulli. Without warning the slimy growth of appendages around the mouth spread apart, revealing again the hellish gaping maw that had consumed poor Rousseau. From that dripping hole issued a sound such as I pray no human being will ever again have to hear. I totally lost control of my senses.
I remember nothing of what happened after that, nor do I know what happened to Tencha or Juan Antonio. Even such techniques as hypnotic regression and memory enhancement drugs have failed to make me recall the aftermath of that abominable night. The records show that I wandered onto an ejido many miles from El Tinieblo on the morning of June 30th, nearly a week after the Feast of St. John. The peasants immediately summoned the state judicial police to come pick up the crazy Americano, who babbled incoherently about the ""Ultimate Blackness beyond all time and space,"" and the abominations that dwell there. The Mexican authorities only took time to verify my identity from papers they found on my person and quickly turned me over to American consular personnel in Matamoros. From there I was transported to a psychiatric hospital in Houston where I remained for several months, being discharged when I was deemed stable enough to not pose a danger to myself or others.
In spite of my continued insistence, all efforts to trace Rousseau, or at least verify his fate, have led to dead ends, providing no meaningful answers. Mexican government records indicate that my unfortunate friend renewed a permit to enter the country over one year ago, but no further records of his presence in Mexico exist. State Department officials also confirm that a number of persons were interviewed in San Facundo, but that none admitted to any recollection or knowledge of either Rousseau or myself. Apparently, those officials are dismissing the whole affair as the delusion of a severely disturbed mind.
The administration at the university has been very understanding, placing me on extended leave of absence with pay until I feel fit to resume my teaching and research. My learned colleague Levinson, Dean of the Graduate School of Social Sciences, has even suggested that I take a long vacation to the New England coast, where, he assures me, in such a beautiful and restful setting I would experience a speedy convalescence. Personally, I would not go near the seashore for any inducement.
More than anything else I would like to put the experience, with all its hideous memories and implications, behind me, but I fear I will not be allowed even that solace. The strange sense of being watched and followed, which I felt so acutely in San Facundo, has returned. More ominously, I have several times noticed shadowy hunched figures, figures that walk with an odd shuffling gait. They often lurk near my residence as nightfall approaches. What are they watching and waiting for? I strongly fear that my escape from the horror of El Tinieblo was only temporary.
I sleep with difficulty now, and always with an element of dread, for with sleep come dreams of that horrible other night and what I saw, especially of that last dreadful image that seared itself into my brain at the very moment I lost consciousness. After the hellish black abomination, the Thing called Kutulli, devoured Rousseau, after It trumpeted its hideous screech of triumph to the cosmos, It once again directed its gaze downward, fixing on the very spot where I lay hidden. What I saw reflected in those hideous red orbs, clearly, in spite of the intervening distance and the swirling black smoke, was my own face, twisted and mad with horror.
","

For there be divers sorts of death--some wherein the body remaineth;
and in some it vanisheth quite away with the spirit.  This commonly
occurreth only in solitude (such is God's will) and, none seeing the
end, we say the man is lost, or gone on a long journey--which indeed
he hath; but sometimes it hath happened in sight of many, as abundant
testimony showeth.  In one kind of death the spirit also dieth, and
this it hath been known to do while yet the body was in vigor for
many years.  Sometimes, as is veritably attested, it dieth with the
body, but after a season is raised up again in that place where the
body did decay.

Pondering these words of Hali (whom God rest) and questioning their
full meaning, as one who, having an intimation, yet doubts if there
be not something behind, other than that which he has discerned, I
noted not whither I had strayed until a sudden chill wind striking my
face revived in me a sense of my surroundings.  I observed with
astonishment that everything seemed unfamiliar.  On every side of me
stretched a bleak and desolate expanse of plain, covered with a tall
overgrowth of sere grass, which rustled and whistled in the autumn
wind with heaven knows what mysterious and disquieting suggestion.
Protruded at long intervals above it, stood strangely shaped and
somber-colored rocks, which seemed to have an understanding with one
another and to exchange looks of uncomfortable significance, as if
they had reared their heads to watch the issue of some foreseen
event.  A few blasted trees here and there appeared as leaders in
this malevolent conspiracy of silent expectation.

The day, I thought, must be far advanced, though the sun was
invisible; and although sensible that the air was raw and chill my
consciousness of that fact was rather mental than physical--I had no
feeling of discomfort.  Over all the dismal landscape a canopy of
low, lead-colored clouds hung like a visible curse.  In all this
there were a menace and a portent--a hint of evil, an intimation of
doom.  Bird, beast, or insect there was none.  The wind sighed in the
bare branches of the dead trees and the gray grass bent to whisper
its dread secret to the earth; but no other sound nor motion broke
the awful repose of that dismal place.

I observed in the herbage a number of weather-worn stones, evidently
shaped with tools.  They were broken, covered with moss and half
sunken in the earth.  Some lay prostrate, some leaned at various
angles, none was vertical.  They were obviously headstones of graves,
though the graves themselves no longer existed as either mounds or
depressions; the years had leveled all.  Scattered here and there,
more massive blocks showed where some pompous tomb or ambitious
monument had once flung its feeble defiance at oblivion.  So old
seemed these relics, these vestiges of vanity and memorials of
affection and piety, so battered and worn and stained--so neglected,
deserted, forgotten the place, that I could not help thinking myself
the discoverer of the burial-ground of a prehistoric race of men
whose very name was long extinct.

Filled with these reflections, I was for some time heedless of the
sequence of my own experiences, but soon I thought, ""How came I
hither?""  A moment's reflection seemed to make this all clear and
explain at the same time, though in a disquieting way, the singular
character with which my fancy had invested all that I saw or heard.
I was ill.  I remembered now that I had been prostrated by a sudden
fever, and that my family had told me that in my periods of delirium
I had constantly cried out for liberty and air, and had been held in
bed to prevent my escape out-of-doors.  Now I had eluded the
vigilance of my attendants and had wandered hither to--to where?  I
could not conjecture.  Clearly I was at a considerable distance from
the city where I dwelt--the ancient and famous city of Carcosa.

No signs of human life were anywhere visible nor audible; no rising
smoke, no watch-dog's bark, no lowing of cattle, no shouts of
children at play--nothing but that dismal burial-place, with its air
of mystery and dread, due to my own disordered brain.  Was I not
becoming again delirious, there beyond human aid?  Was it not indeed
ALL an illusion of my madness?  I called aloud the names of my wives
and sons, reached out my hands in search of theirs, even as I walked
among the crumbling stones and in the withered grass.

A noise behind me caused me to turn about.  A wild animal--a lynx--
was approaching.  The thought came to me:  If I break down here in
the desert--if the fever return and I fail, this beast will be at my
throat.  I sprang toward it, shouting.  It trotted tranquilly by
within a hand's breadth of me and disappeared behind a rock.

A moment later a man's head appeared to rise out of the ground a
short distance away.  He was ascending the farther slope of a low
hill whose crest was hardly to be distinguished from the general
level.  His whole figure soon came into view against the background
of gray cloud.  He was half naked, half clad in skins.  His hair was
unkempt, his beard long and ragged.  In one hand he carried a bow and
arrow; the other held a blazing torch with a long trail of black
smoke.  He walked slowly and with caution, as if he feared falling
into some open grave concealed by the tall grass.  This strange
apparition surprised but did not alarm, and taking such a course as
to intercept him I met him almost face to face, accosting him with
the familiar salutation, ""God keep you.""

He gave no heed, nor did he arrest his pace.

""Good stranger,"" I continued, ""I am ill and lost.  Direct me, I
beseech you, to Carcosa.""

The man broke into a barbarous chant in an unknown tongue, passing on
and away.

An owl on the branch of a decayed tree hooted dismally and was
answered by another in the distance.  Looking upward, I saw through a
sudden rift in the clouds Aldebaran and the Hyades!  In all this
there was a hint of night--the lynx, the man with the torch, the owl.
Yet I saw--I saw even the stars in absence of the darkness.  I saw,
but was apparently not seen nor heard.  Under what awful spell did I
exist?

I seated myself at the root of a great tree, seriously to consider
what it were best to do.  That I was mad I could no longer doubt, yet
recognized a ground of doubt in the conviction.  Of fever I had no
trace.  I had, withal, a sense of exhilaration and vigor altogether
unknown to me--a feeling of mental and physical exaltation.  My
senses seemed all alert; I could feel the air as a ponderous
substance; I could hear the silence.

A great root of the giant tree against whose trunk I leaned as I sat
held inclosed in its grasp a slab of stone, a part of which protruded
into a recess formed by another root.  The stone was thus partly
protected from the weather, though greatly decomposed.  Its edges
were worn round, its corners eaten away, its surface deeply furrowed
and scaled.  Glittering particles of mica were visible in the earth
about it--vestiges of its decomposition.  This stone had apparently
marked the grave out of which the tree had sprung ages ago.  The
tree's exacting roots had robbed the grave and made the stone a
prisoner.

A sudden wind pushed some dry leaves and twigs from the uppermost
face of the stone; I saw the low-relief letters of an inscription and
bent to read it.  God in Heaven! MY name in full!--the date of MY
birth!--the date of MY death!

A level shaft of light illuminated the whole side of the tree as I
sprang to my feet in terror.  The sun was rising in the rosy east.  I
stood between the tree and his broad red disk--no shadow darkened the
trunk!

A chorus of howling wolves saluted the dawn.  I saw them sitting on
their haunches, singly and in groups, on the summits of irregular
mounds and tumuli filling a half of my desert prospect and extending
to the horizon.  And then I knew that these were ruins of the ancient
and famous city of Carcosa.


Such are the facts imparted to the medium Bayrolles by the spirit
Hoseib Alar Robardin.

",False
"Memories of Leng
Disclaimer: I do not own anything. All (or most) of the material contained herein belongs to either Howard Philip Lovecraft or August Derleth. Delta Green (such as it is) belongs to Pagan Publishing. And for concepts that come later in the story... well, creatures of legend that can totally freeze a person's brain have always had their place in the public domain, but Peter S. Beagle deserves credit for his take on the kind that inspire beatific rapture instead of gibbering terror.
Summary: Joseph Clayton always suspected that Marie Trinh was hiding something about her family, but never knew what it was. When he finally finds out what... well, the first step on the road to enlightenment is often quite a doozy. Then, the question becomes what to do with that enlightened knowledge.
Authors Note: There will be Lovecraftian horror in this story, after a fashion. However, there will also be humour and wonder and quite some affection. There will also be aspects more apropos to a Howardian barbarian story or a Burroughs Englishman than to the academics that Lovecraft sometimes wrote about: bravery, sacrifice (in more ways than one) and familiarity even in the most unlikely of places.
Glaston, upper Worcester Co., Massachusetts (roughly analogous to Gardner)
October 27, 2007.
An autumnal chill descended upon the streets of Glaston as the young man walked upon the concrete sidewalk, passing redbrick storefronts and shop windows, every surface still wet with the morning rain. Leaves, red and orange and each vibrant in their hue, were shaken loose from the trees lining the street by the wind, landing wherever they fell. For an instant in time, the spectacle of the leaves drew the attention of the man, in fact little more than a teenage boy, as he made his way toward the corner. However, Joseph Clayton, clad in bluejeans and jacket with a backpack slung from his shoulders, had far more important things to focus on than a show of falling leaves. An important test for this semester was arriving in a week or so and he needed to study.
Also, he was getting quite hungry this close to lunch.
As Joseph rounded the corner and continued toward his favorite eatery, he wondered if he would get swamped in the usual lunch crowd. However, as he saw the front of the Leng Trinh Restaurant, his thoughts turned to quiet dejection.
""Damnit!"" muttered Joseph as he approached the eatery. The reason for this turn in mood was the carpet of tempered glass fragments on the sidewalk below the picture window at the front of the establishment, which was now covered by plastic sheeting. Thuch Van Trinh, one half of the husband-and-wife ownership, was wearing a plaid jacket over his apron and usual cooking clothes and was shoveling the broken glass into a bucket. ""Hey, Mr. Trinh, how's it going?"". Joseph asked with a smile. This was more false cheer than anything, as Joseph could guess how Thuch must be feeling: anger was always a popular choice, followed closely by worry about the reason why.
Despite what he must have been feeling, Thuch Van Trinh grinned back, the black lines of his facial tattooing creasing as the muscles moved under his cheeks. ""Not so good, Mr. Clayton. If this keeps up, I may have to put in Plexiglas so that the window won't break."" The Trinhs accents, as his parents and the other adults of the town told it, had been rather strong (even unusually so) when they had immigrated to Glaston from their first home in Boston. This had usually been waved off by their purported origins in the remote hills on the Vietnam-Laos border, seemingly collaborated by how their teeth had been dyed black. On the other hand, given their rural roots, their speed in adapting local speech patterns so that they now sounded more like second generation Americans (and especially their daughter's complete lack of any accent except the local standard) did make for a puzzling situation. However, for their ease of assimilation and the food they served, they had become well-liked in the community.
So why were things like this happening to them recently? ""How many times does this make this month; two, three?"" Joseph had to ask this, wondering if things were worse than he thought.
""It's happened three times already, this time not more than an hour ago. Thanh wants to install security cameras to watch the place and with how small and cheap they are now, I think we just might."" An hour ago? They'd smashed a picture window in broad daylight? Who in town could be that stupid or that angry? Josephs train of thought was broken then, when Thuch said something of much more interest to the younger man. ""By the way, if you're looking for Marie, she's helping her mother in the kitchen. Even without a window we seem to be doing good business."" Thuch went back to his work and Joseph, not wanting to delay any longer, entered the restaurant.
Just as Thuch had said, Leng Trinh still had it's usual busy lunchtime crowd, albeit one that was concentrated near the back wall. Picking his way around tables packed with diners, Joseph finally arrived at a table set for two, a 'reserved' sign upon it. Removing his backpack and laying it beside a chair, he sat down, shuffled off his coat and went to bury his nose in the menu.
It always felt a bit odd to Joseph, eating in an ethnic restaurant where none of the diners were the same ethnicity as the cooks, or even from the same part of the world. However, none of it mattered when the food was as good as it was here.
""Now then, what would a fine, upstanding New England boy like yourself want in a place like this?"" The voice that asked this was soft, amused, female and had an almost mocking tone. It also had the accent of the New England uplands. To Joseph, it could only be one person.
""The same thing I always get here."" He answered dryly before looking up from the menu. There, holding a pad of paper and a pen, was teenage girl with almond-shaped eyes, shoulder length black hair with green streaks, a cooking apron and an amused grin. ""Hi Marie... you sure your mom's alright with you waitressing this crowd?""
""We've got enough help in the kitchen already and Dad's coming in after all the glass is cleaned up."" She glanced up at the window, plastic sheet and all, after she wrote his order down. ""I just wish we knew who was doing this. If we don't get someone else to cough up some money, our insurance company might go sour on us."" Marie went back to the kitchen to get the food for both of them.
Ten minutes later, she was laying out two place settings of food that had been prepared ahead of time. ""Alright, that's two plates of grilled pork on beds of Leng-style rice, your dish of steamed green beans with soy sauce for dipping, my bowl of soup and two cans of soda."" They'd eat lunch before studying, with Joseph paying the tab for both of them.
If anyone asked, it wasn't a date. Not in the strictest sense, anyway.
""What, no bak bon dzhow?"" Asked Joseph, decidedly disappointed at the apparent lack of the special ingredient.
To this, Marie moved a small earthen bowl from the serving tray onto the table and lifted the lid to reveal a thick gray sauce containing mushrooms and cracked black pepper. ""Would I be one to deny you the gravy of the gods?"" She asked (rhetorically) with a soft smile; Joseph couldn't help but smile back as he cracked the tab on his soda and began on his green beans.
A bit later, when his beans were gone and Marie had almost finished her soup, Joesph began formulating a question that related to a curious thought that had sprung up earlier. ""Not to sound like a nag or anything, but I'm just curious but what was all that 'upstanding' stuff about?"" The only time he had ever heard anyone talk like that was...
Oh God...
Marie swallowed the last bits of her soup. ""Oh, I don't know. Maybe It's that I had no idea that the son of insurance brokers had such deep and aristocratic roots? Maybe it's that I was surprised to find out that the Clayton's had come not from hardy New England farming stock as I had assumed, but from the urbane, wealthy ranks of those grand Brahmins of Boston? I'm sure Granny Cora could tell some fascinating stories about the old days; she sure seemed interested in mine."" If anything, Marie took the entire thing in stride, treating both the memory of the experience and the experience itself with a a great deal of interested amusement. Certainly, mocking the type of language she had encountered was almost cracking her up.
Joseph, on the other hand, had first felt bemusement at the scene in which the Clayton family reunion of the past summer had found itself, quickly turning into outright embarrassment. ""Look, I'm sorry that I didn't tell you about her, but everybody thought that she wouldn't be able to come due to health concerns. It's not my fault that a half-senile, 97 year old woman worked up enough stubbornness to drag her nurse halfway across the state!"".
""I never said anything about anyone being at fault. I just thought it was an interesting revelation about your family."" She had meant her cajoling in good humour, but Josephs defensiveness and embarrassment were never good emotions to bring out. ""Anyway, most people would be proud to have the Boston gentry in their family history: industrialists, merchants, art, culture, philanthropy, charity..."" With every word, Marie spooned a bit of ban boc dzhow onto her grilled pork.
""As well as whaling, slave trading, opium smuggling, snobbery and having your entire life guided by the expectations of your peers; exactly the sorts of things my parents taught me to loathe. The thing is, my great-great-grandmother came from a very select, very privileged and lily-white background; I was worried that she'd... well, react oddly to you."" Joseph retorted as he began spooning (or rather, pouring) the sauce onto his meat after Marie had finished with it and passed it to him. In the case of Cora Clayton (nee Coffin), Josephs fear hadn't primarily been that she would find Marie objectionable on account of her race since that prejudice had been more ingrained in her parents generation than hers. His fear had instead been that his great great grandmother, as self-proclaimed guardian of the old, aristocratic traditions, might object to their relationship because the Trinhs were restaurateurs with no history of pedigree, education or money behind them.
In Cora's world (the 1920s, where her mind was half the time), heirs had married heiresses, families had coordinated their fortunes and everyone had kept an eye on everyone else; these were rules of decorum that had lasted for her long after the Claytons had gone bust in the great Crash of '29. The fact that she had taken Joseph aside and explained her concerns to him had done nothing to soothe his embarrassment, although he had finally convinced her that, being naturalized citizens with a successful restaurant, the Trinhs were firmly in the middling classes. She had also estimated that said restaurant, with no other inheritors besides Marie, would most likely pass into Clayton hands in the fullness of time.
No one had dared explain to her the differences between modern teenage dating and the genteel courtships of her youth.
""I don't think she reacted that oddly. Sure, she was so out of date that you had to explain that I meant 'French Indochina' when I said that my parents came from Vietnam and she did seem a bit too fascinated with my families origins and, alright, it was weird hearing someone actually use the word 'courting' without trying to be funny. However, it was kind of nice to speak French with someone in this town after all the time my parents invested in me learning it."" Marie knew that while it had been terrifying for Joseph, having to put up with his relatives dissection of his relationship and fearing disapproval, she herself had enjoyed a chance to see if the old stereotypes were true. When it had become clear to Marie that the elderly woman was not about to spew racial epitaphs at her but was, indeed, fascinated as to her families background, Marie had made it a point to 'ham it up' in telling their story.
To an entranced Cora Clayton, Marie had described her parents lives before emigration as a subsistence existence in a village high up in the fog-choked mountain passes. She had woven scenes of her people worshiping strange, heathen gods far from the civilized lands of the Buddha and partaking in ghastly rituals to ensure harvests of rice from narrow mountainside terraces. She told the old woman that her parents had tired of such a life and had dreamed of something more, something in the wider world glimpsed in third-hand magazines and radio broadcasts.
After receiving a dispensation from their village shaman to leave (but promising to sent back remittances), they had made their way to Hanoi and then to Boston and finally to Glaston where, having never truly given up the more religious and symbolic aspects of their heathenish past, they nevertheless had made good names for themselves in the community. Marie had made sure that her prose had been both lurid and exotic so as to fully entrance a child of the Age of Empire as well as making proper use of tone, whether enraptured, casual or deathly serious, to emphasize mood. The end result was to make it sound as if her culture wasn't just some rural outlet of modern Vietnam or Laos, but as if it was truly unlike any other in the world.
That was an opinion that Joseph was also rapidly adopting.
They ate in relative silence for a while, the bustle of the lunch crowd beginning to die down as people left, many of them stopping to talk to Mr. Trinh at the till, expressing their concern over what had happened with the window. They were just about half done when Joseph began another conversation. ""So, did you know that there's a 'Heritage Day' coming up at school in a few weeks?""
""Yeah, and?"" Deep down in her gut, Marie was beginning to get a slightly worried feeling from the direction this conversation was going. This pretty much happened whenever the subject of her parent's past came up but, like so many times before, she could probably bluff her way through it.
""I thought that, maybe, we could do something for it. I was thinking about dredging up something from Normandy because I didn't want to clog up the schedule with another variation of British regional culture."" It sounded perfectly innocent, but Marie knew that this was a potentially tricky situation that might require misdirection, a convincing excuse and possible outright lying.
She hated lying to Joseph.
""Alright then. You can do that, I'll do the Vietnamese thing and we'll knock 'em all dead."" She answered with an enthusiasm that she hoped had betrayed nothing of her growing unease with the conversation. This seemed to provoke nothing but a non-committal murmur of agreement and thus, thinking that that was over with, she began eating again.
However, that was not the end of it.
""By Vietnamese, do you mean the standard culture from around Hanoi... or the culture from your parent's home village?"" Joseph asked, seemingly as if only for the purpose of clarification. There was much more behind it though, and whether it was just ingrained paranoia or any real danger of exposure, Marie knew that this was entering onto some very tenuous and potentially very dangerous ground. Still, the subject had to be breached.
""Aren't they pretty much the same? I mean, sure, it was pretty rural back there, but whether village or city, we were all Viet: same language, same culture, same blood, same... pretty much everything, when you think about it."" As denials went, this one wasn't half bad: sincere enough to be taken seriously and with enough internal logic that it wouldn't fall apart immediately in the face of the mildly educated mind.
On this subject, however, Joseph had become rather more than merely mildly educated. He had observed things for a long time: a lot of little things and one or two big things for the most part. And he, after long deliberation and study, had discovered that some of those things just didn't match up.
""You know, there was a time when I could believe that. But... there are just too many deviations to discount."" Joesph stopped eating all together, putting down his fork and looking his girlfriend straight in the eyes before closing and opening them again, as if to rally his thoughts. ""The food, for one thing, isn't like any kind of Vietnamese food I've read about. Yes, you have the side dishes but that's about it for similarity. Second, your parent's tattoos. Again, unlike any other group in Southeast Asia; the closest matches I could find were incised lines on bronze figurines from over two thousand years ago.""
He stopped again. ""And then there's the language you guys speak. I'm fairly sure it's in the Mon-Khmer group, but I've been doing some research and... honestly, I've seen words on this menu that I've never been able to find in any other source. And I'm not the only one who's noticed these things."" Joesph saw panic flash across Marie's eyes, though she tried to hide it. ""Most people don't pay attention and honestly don't care, and the ones who do notice just assume that you guys are either Hmong or some little minority that no-one's ever heard of... but even that doesn't match very well either. It's like you said, you're Viet... but what about all this other stuff?""
It was then that Marie could have ended it all: the doubts, the questions, the lingering curiosity... as well as twenty one centuries of secrecy, tradition and very likely her relationship with this young man. In the end, she decided to dodge again. ""What can I say? We were very rural."" When Joesph just got this frustrated look on his face, Marie sighed, reached across the table and enveloped one of his hands with hers. ""Look, I'll try and dredge something up if I can, but I can't promise anything, okay?""
Joseph mulled on this lack of answers, but as the moment dragged on, his resistance wore down. ""Alright. If you don't want to talk about your culture, that's alright; lots of people come to America to get away from stuff. But I still am sorta curious."" Then he changed the subject. ""Anyway, after we eat, we should begin studying for our tests. Do you want to go over the English or the Algebra first?""
""We should do the Math first, then we can cool off with the Shakespeare. But we better not let the food get cold, what with how the sauce gets if allowed to sit for too long."" Marie began eating again and, after a few beats, Joseph resumed as well.
They stayed at that table for many hours, going over and revising their knowledge of maths and literature. However, already Marie wondered if there was something she could reveal, something that she could show about her parent's culture that would not threaten expose them and, as the old saying went among her tribe, 'get them cut in half and buried in two graves'.
Later that night, The Trinh's upstairs apartment
To Marie's relief, her parents reaction to her plan wasn't anger. On the other hand, fear and worry could be almost as painful.
""I know how you feel about the Clayton boy. He's well-liked, intelligent and his parents are our insurance agents."" Thanh Thi Trinh began, speaking in her families particular dialect of Viet as she, Marie and Thuch Van sat around their dining room table. ""But I ask this of you: is Joesph and his interest in this celebration worth the risk of exposure and, may I add, possible death when this town realizes who we are, when they realize what we are?"" Thanh Thi had always been the more reserved, more cautious and, frankly, more paranoid spouse in this family when it came to their safety. Where her husband was the face of the restaurant, she ran the kitchen with an eye on the back door and all of their cooks. While Thuch made friendly at social gatherings, Thanh kept track of all possible escape routes and who was and wasn't looking at them. She kept track of any news about gangs and hate-group activity in the area, and about any other strange things.
The sort of things that might lure out the kind of people who hunted their people.
But Marie had prepared for this. ""Mother, I know the risks that revealing the secrets of our people would bring. However, I am counting on two circumstances to make sure that only the most benign and harmless information is portrayed."" She rallied herself, knowing that the way she handled this could make the difference on how she presented herself to nearly everyone, especially Joseph . ""First, I must inform both of you that there are some people in this town, including my boyfriend, that realize that we are not quite from the mainstream culture of modern Vietnam."" At this, both Thanh and Thuch got even more worried but they weren't shocked, seeing as any bumpkin with an Internet connection could find that tribal tattooing wasn't really the rage in downtown Hanoi. ""The good news is that while these people realize that we belong to a distinct subgroup, they often deduce that we are either rural Hmong or some other obscure ethnic group. In other words, they know nothing about who our people are and, like the rest of the town, they honestly do not care.""
""What about the nature of our traditons, Marie? What would you do, what rite of our people would be performed on that stage that would not end up with half the town vomiting and the other half trying to hang us?"" Her father had been relatively quiet in this conversation, but he knew that the rituals of his village had, during various times in history, left such a bad impression upon outsiders that they had responded in force to try to stamp them out.
Here, Marie began grasping the thick, heavy and old scrapbook that lay closed upon the table before her. It had been entrusted to them by their village and, by the blessings of the Gods and their Instrument, they had kept it safe and hidden for more than twenty years. ""Father, it is not as if I wish to set up an alter on the stage, recite the incantations of the harvest rites and slice something open; frankly, I would have no idea how. However, I believe that there is a ritual that is benign, unusual and, even according to the author of this book, beautiful enough to make people forget it's oddity."" She opened the book, filled with sepia photographs and notes written in French on yellowed paper, to the page she had bookmarked. ""I want to do the Stork Dance.""
Her parents were quiet for a minute. Admittedly, this was probably the least unusual rite of their people and it did seem to have a calming effect on its audiences. However, it took weeks of intensive training in order to do it right, the costuming and specific actions depended on whether the dancer was a man or woman and the phonograph with the instrumental music and vocals, only having been recorded once before, was on the other side of the planet. It was a tall order to pull off for anyone. ""You do realize that practicing for the dance requires grueling routine, so much so that it might effect your school work?"" Asked her mother, wondering if her daughter was truly sincere.
""I know that. I'll just have to sacrifice my time with Joesph, a sacrifice that I'm sure he'd understand."" Marie responded in English this time, the plans for her act becoming clearer. ""However, I'll need some help in creating the proper costuming and... I know that shipping items from the Old Country is like trying to smuggle Plutonium but if you could convince the shamans to release that phonograph for a month or two, I would be eternally grateful to all of them, and to you.""
Her parents wondered, not for the first time, if Marie truly comprehended what could be asked of that gratitude in the years to come. She had the opportunity to live a life completely detached from the paranoia, the fear and the constant danger that followed her people. Would she give that chance away simply for the sake of a boy?
Whatever choice she made, however, was hers to make.
In the end, they acquiesced... but not without informing their daughter of what their home village could ask of her in exchange for the items she wished. It might be years until it was asked but one day, a representative of their village would approach her and request a repayment, be it in money, information or something else.
It was that ""something else"" that truly worried Thuch and Thanh.
","Only when the Nan-yang Maru sailed from Yuen-San did her terrible sense of foreboding begin to subside.

For four years, waking or sleeping, the awful subconsciousness of supreme evil had never left her.

But now, as the Korean shore, receding into darkness, grew dimmer and dimmer, fear subsided and grew vague as the half-forgotten memory of horror in a dream.

She stood near the steamer's stern apart from other passengers, a slender, lonely figure in her silver-fox furs, her ulster and smart little hat, watching the lights of Yuen-San grow paler and smaller along the horizon until they looked like a level row of stars.

Under her haunted eyes Asia was slowly dissolving to a streak of vapour in the misty lustre of the moon.

Suddenly the ancient continent disappeared, washed out by a wave against the sky; and with it vanished the last shreds of that accursed nightmare which had possessed her for four endless years. But whether during those unreal years her soul had only been held in bondage, or whether, as she had been taught, it had been irrevocably destroyed, she still remained uncertain, knowing nothing about the death of souls or how it was accomplished.

As she stood there, her sad eyes fixed on the misty East, a passenger passing—an Englishwoman—paused to say something kind to the young American; and added, ""if there is anything my husband and I can do it would give us much pleasure."" The girl had turned her head as though not comprehending. The other woman hesitated.

""This is Doctor Norne's daughter, is it not?"" she inquired in a pleasant voice.

""Yes, I am Tressa Norne.... I ask your pardon.... Thank you, madam:—I am—I seem to be—a trifle dazed——""

""What wonder, you poor child! Come to us if you feel need of companionship.""

""You are very kind.... I seem to wish to be alone, somehow.""

""I understand.... Good-night, my dear.""

Late the next morning Tressa Norne awoke, conscious for the first time in four years that it was at last her own familiar self stretched out there on the pillows where sunshine streamed through the porthole. All that day she lay in her bamboo steamer chair on deck. Sun and wind conspired to dry every tear that wet her closed lashes. Her dark, glossy hair blew about her face; scarlet tinted her full lips again; the tense hands relaxed. Peace came at sundown.

That evening she took her Yu-kin from her cabin and found a chair on the deserted hurricane deck.

And here, in the brilliant moonlight of the China Sea, she curled up cross-legged on the deck, all alone, and sounded the four futile strings of her moon-lute, and hummed to herself, in a still voice, old songs she had sung in Yian before the tragedy. She sang the tent-song called Tchinguiz. She sang Camel Bells and The Blue Bazaar,—children's songs of the Yiort. She sang the ancient Khiounnou song called ""The Saghalien"":

I
In the month of Saffar
Among the river-reeds
I saw two horsemen
Sitting on their steeds.
Tulugum!
Heitulum!
By the river-reeds
II
In the month of Saffar
A demon guards the ford.
Tokhta, my Lover!
Draw your shining sword!
Tulugum!
Heitulum!
Slay him with your sword!
III
In the month of Saffar
Among the water-weeds
I saw two horsemen
Fighting on their steeds.
Tulugum!
Heitulum!
How my lover bleeds!
IV
In the month of Saffar,
The Year I should have wed—
The Year of The Panther—
My lover lay dead,—
Tulugum!
Heitulum!
Dead without a head.
And songs like these—the one called ""Keuke Mongol,"" and an ancient air of the Tchortchas called ""The Thirty Thousand Calamities,"" and some Chinese boatmen's songs which she had heard in Yian before the tragedy; these she hummed to herself there in the moonlight playing on her round-faced, short-necked lute of four strings.

Terror indeed seemed ended for her, and in her heart a great overwhelming joy was welling up which seemed to overflow across the entire moonlit world.

She had no longer any fear; no premonition of further evil. Among the few Americans and English aboard, something of her story was already known. People were kind; and they were also considerate enough to subdue their sympathetic curiosity when they discovered that this young American girl shrank from any mention of what had happened to her during the last four years of the Great World War.

It was evident, also, that she preferred to remain aloof; and this inclination, when finally understood, was respected by her fellow passengers. The clever, efficient and polite Japanese officers and crew of the Nan-yang Maru were invariably considerate and courteous to her, and they remained nicely reticent, although they also knew the main outline of her story and very much desired to know more. And so, surrounded now by the friendly security of civilised humanity, Tressa Norne, reborn to light out of hell's own shadows, awoke from four years of nightmare which, after all, perhaps, never had seemed entirely actual.

And now God's real sun warmed her by day; His real moon bathed her in creamy coolness by night; sky and wind and wave thrilled her with their blessed assurance that this was once more the real world which stretched illimitably on every side from horizon to horizon; and the fair faces and pleasant voices of her own countrymen made the past seem only a ghastly dream that never again could enmesh her soul with its web of sorcery.

And now the days at sea fled very swiftly; and when at last the Golden Gate was not far away she had finally managed to persuade herself that nothing really can harm the human soul; that the monstrous devil-years were ended, never again to return; that in this vast, clean Western Continent there could be no occult threat to dread, no gigantic menace to destroy her body, no secret power that could consign her soul to the dreadful abysm of spiritual annihilation.

Very early that morning she came on deck. The November day was delightfully warm, the air clear save for a belt of mist low on the water to the southward.

She had been told that land would not be sighted for twenty-four hours, but she went forward and stood beside the starboard rail, searching the horizon with the enchanted eyes of hope.

As she stood there a Japanese ship's officer crossing the deck, forward, halted abruptly and stood staring at something to the southward.

At the same moment, above the belt of mist on the water, and perfectly clear against the blue sky above, the girl saw a fountain of gold fire rise from the fog, drift upward in the daylight, slowly assume the incandescent outline of a serpentine creature which leisurely uncoiled and hung there floating, its lizard-tail undulating, its feet with their five stumpy claws closing, relaxing, like those of a living reptile. For a full minute this amazing shape of fire floated there in the sky, brilliant in the morning light, then the reptilian form faded, died out, and the last spark vanished in the sunshine.

When the Japanese officer at last turned to resume his promenade, he noticed a white-faced girl gripping a stanchion behind him as though she were on the point of swooning. He crossed the deck quickly. Tressa Norne's eyes opened.

""Are you ill, Miss Norne?"" he asked.

""The—the Dragon,"" she whispered.

The officer laughed. ""Why, that was nothing but Chinese day-fireworks,"" he explained. ""The crew of some fishing boat yonder in the fog is amusing itself."" He looked at her narrowly, then with a nice little bow and smile he offered his arm: ""If you are indisposed, perhaps you might wish to go below to your stateroom, Miss Norne?""

She thanked him, managed to pull herself together and force a ghost of a smile.

He lingered a moment, said something cheerful about being nearly home, then made her a punctilious salute and went his way.

Tressa Norne leaned back against the stanchion and closed her eyes. Her pallor became deathly. She bent over and laid her white face in her folded arms.

After a while she lifted her head, and, turning very slowly, stared at the fog-belt out of frightened eyes.

And saw, rising out of the fog, a pearl-tinted sphere which gradually mounted into the clear daylight above like the full moon's phantom in the sky.

Higher, higher rose the spectral moon until at last it swam in the very zenith. Then it slowly evaporated in the blue vault above.

A great wave of despair swept her; she clung to the stanchion, staring with half-blinded eyes at the flat fog-bank in the south.

But no more ""Chinese day-fireworks"" rose out of it. And at length she summoned sufficient strength to go below to her cabin and lie there, half senseless, huddled on her bed.

When land was sighted, the following morning, Tressa Norne had lived a century in twenty-four hours. And in that space of time her agonised soul had touched all depths.

But now as the Golden Gate loomed up in the morning light, rage, terror, despair had burned themselves out. From their ashes within her mind arose the cool wrath of desperation armed for anything, wary, alert, passionately determined to survive at whatever cost, recklessly ready to fight for bodily existence.

That was her sole instinct now, to go on living, to survive, no matter at what price. And if it were indeed true that her soul had been slain, she defied its murderers to slay her body also.

That night, at her hotel in San Francisco, she double-locked her door and lay down without undressing, leaving all lights burning and an automatic pistol underneath her pillow.

Toward morning she fell asleep, slept for an hour, started up in awful fear. And saw the double-locked door opposite the foot of her bed slowly opening of its own accord.

Into the brightly illuminated room stepped a graceful young man in full evening dress carrying over his left arm an overcoat, and in his other hand a top hat and silver tipped walking-stick.

With one bound the girl swung herself from the bed to the carpet and clutched at the pistol under her pillow.

""Sanang!"" she cried in a terrible voice.

""Keuke Mongol!"" he said, smilingly.

For a moment they confronted each other in the brightly lighted bedroom, then, partly turning, he cast a calm glance at the open door behind him; and, as though moved by a wind, the door slowly closed. And she heard the key turn of itself in the lock, and saw the bolt slide smoothly into place again.

Her power of speech came back to her presently—only a broken whisper at first: ""Do you think I am afraid of your accursed magic?"" she managed to gasp. ""Do you think I am afraid of you, Sanang?""

""You are afraid,"" he said serenely.

""You lie!""

""No, I do not lie. To one another the Yezidees never lie.""

""You lie again, assassin! I am no Yezidee!""

He smiled gently. His features were pleasing, smooth, and regular; his cheek-bones high, his skin fine and of a pale and delicate ivory colour. Once his black, beautifully shaped eyes wandered to the levelled pistol which she now held clutched desperately close to her right hip, and a slightly ironical expression veiled his gaze for an instant.

""Bullets?"" he murmured. ""But you and I are of the Hassanis.""

""The third lie, Sanang!"" Her voice had regained its strength. Tense, alert, blue eyes ablaze, every faculty concentrated on the terrible business before her, the girl now seemed like some supple leopardess poised on the swift verge of murder.

""Tokhta!""[1] She spat the word. ""Any movement toward a hidden weapon, any gesture suggesting recourse to magic—and I kill you, Sanang, exactly where you stand!""

""With a pistol?"" He laughed. Then his smooth features altered subtly. He said: ""Keuke Mongol, who call yourself Tressa Norne,—Keuke—heavenly azure-blue,—named so in the temple because of the colour of your eyes—listen attentively, for this is the Yarlig which I bring to you by word of mouth from Yian, as from Yezidee to Yezidee:

""Here, in this land called the United States of America, the Temple girl, Keuke Mongol, who has witnessed the mysteries of Erlik and who understands the magic of the Sheiks-el-Djebel, and who has seen Mount Alamout and the eight castles and the fifty thousand Hassanis in white turbans and in robes of white;—you—Azure-blue eyes—heed the Yarlig!—or may thirty thousand calamities overtake you!""

There was a dead silence; then he went on seriously: ""It is decreed: You shall cease to remember that you are a Yezidee, that you are of the Hassanis, that you ever have laid eyes on Yian the Beautiful, that you ever set naked foot upon Mount Alamout. It is decreed that you remember nothing of what you have seen and heard, of what has been told and taught during the last four years reckoned as the Christians reckon from our Year of the Bull. Otherwise—my Master sends you this for your—convenience.""

Leisurely, from under his folded overcoat, the young man produced a roll of white cloth and dropped it at her feet and the girl shrank aside, shuddering, knowing that the roll of white cloth was meant for her winding-sheet.

Then the colour came back to lip and cheek; and, glancing up from the soft white shroud, she smiled at the young man: ""Have you ended your Oriental mummery?"" she asked calmly. ""Listen very seriously in your turn, Sanang, Sheik-el-Djebel, Prince of the Hassanis who, God knows when and how, have come out into the sunshine of this clean and decent country, out of a filthy darkness where devils and sorcerers make earth a hell.

""If you, or yours, threaten me, annoy me, interfere with me, I shall go to our civilised police and tell all I know concerning the Yezidees. I mean to live. Do you understand? You know what you have done to me and mine. I come back to my own country alone, without any living kin, poor, homeless, friendless,—and, perhaps, damned. I intend, nevertheless, to survive. I shall not relax my clutch on bodily existence whatever the Yezidees may pretend to have done to my soul. I am determined to live in the body, anyway.""

He nodded gravely.

She said: ""Out at sea, over the fog, I saw the sign of Yu-lao in fire floating in the day-sky. I saw his spectral moon rise and vanish in mid-heaven. I understood. But——"" And here she suddenly showed an edge of teeth under the full scarlet upper lip: ""Keep your signs and your shrouds to yourself, dog of a Yezidee!—toad!—tortoise-egg!—he-goat with three legs! Keep your threats and your messages to yourself! Keep your accursed magic to yourself! Do you think to frighten me with your sorcery by showing me the Moons of Yu-lao?—by opening a bolted door? I know more of such magic than do you, Sanang—Death Adder of Alamout!""

Suddenly she laughed aloud at him—laughed insultingly in his expressionless face:

""I saw you and Gutchlug Khan and your cowardly Tchortchas in red-lacquered jackets slink out of the Temple of Erlik where the bronze gong thundered and a cloud settled down raining little yellow snakes all over the marble steps—all over you, Prince Sanang! You were afraid, my Tougtchi!—you and Gutchlug and your red Tchortchas with their halberds all dripping with human entrails! And I saw you mount and gallop off into the woods while in the depths of the magic cloud which rained little yellow snakes all around you, we temple girls laughed and mocked at you—at you and your cowardly Tchortcha horsemen.""

A slight tinge of pink came into the young man's pale face. Tressa Norne stepped nearer, her levelled pistol resting on her hip.

""Why did you not complain of us to your Master, the Old Man of the Mountain?"" she asked jeeringly. ""And where, also, was your Yezidee magic when it rained little snakes?—What frightened you away—who had boldly come to seize a temple girl—you who had screwed up your courage sufficiently to defy Erlik in his very shrine and snatch from his temple a young thing whose naked body wrapped in gold was worth the chance of death to you?""

The young man's top-hat dropped to the floor. He bent over to pick it up. His face was quite expressionless, quite colourless, now.

""I went on no such errand,"" he said with an effort. ""I went with a thousand prayers on scarlet paper made in——""

""A lie, Yezidee! You came to seize me!""

He turned still paler. ""By Abu, Omar, Otman, and Ali, it is not true!""

""You lie!—by the Lion of God, Hassini!""

She stepped closer. ""And I'll tell you another thing you fear—you Yezidee of Alamout—you robber of Yian—you sorcerer of Sabbah Khan, and chief of his sect of Assassins! You fear this native land of mine, America; and its laws and customs, and its clear, clean sunshine; and its cities and people; and its police! Take that message back. We Americans fear nobody save the true God!—nobody—neither Yezidee nor Hassani nor Russ nor German nor that sexless monster born of hell and called the Bolshevik!""

""Tokhta!"" he cried sharply.

""Damn you!"" retorted the girl; ""get out of my room! Get out of my sight! Get out of my path! Get out of my life! Take that to your Master of Mount Alamout! I do what I please; I go where I please; I live as I please. And if I please, I turn against him!""

""In that event,"" he said hoarsely, ""there lies your winding-sheet on the floor at your feet! Take up your shroud; and make Erlik seize you!""

""Sanang,"" she said very seriously.

""I hear you, Keuke-Mongol.""

""Listen attentively. I wish to live. I have had enough of death in life. I desire to remain a living, breathing thing—even if it be true—as you Yezidees tell me, that you have caught my soul in a net and that your sorcerers really control its destiny.

""But damned or not, I passionately desire to live. And I am coward enough to hold my peace for the sake of living. So—I remain silent. I have no stomach to defy the Yezidees; because, if I do, sooner or later I shall be killed. I know it. I have no desire to die for others—to perish for the sake of the common good. I am young. I have suffered too much; I am determined to live—and let my soul take its chances between God and Erlik.""

She came close to him, looked curiously into his pale face.

""I laughed at you out of the temple cloud,"" she said. ""I know how to open bolted doors as well as you do. And I know other things. And if you ever again come to me in this life I shall first torture you, then slay you. Then I shall tell all!... and unroll my shroud.""

""I keep your word of promise until you break it,"" he interrupted hastily. ""Yarlig! It is decreed!"" And then he slowly turned as though to glance over his shoulder at the locked and bolted door.

""Permit me to open it for you, Prince Sanang,"" said the girl scornfully. And she gazed steadily at the door.

Presently, all by itself, the key turned in the lock, the bolt slid back, the door gently opened.

Toward it, white as a corpse, his overcoat on his left arm, his stick and top-hat in the other hand, crept the young man in his faultless evening garb.

Then, as he reached the threshold, he suddenly sprang aside. A small yellow snake lay coiled there on the door sill. For a full throbbing minute the young man stared at the yellow reptile in unfeigned horror. Then, very cautiously, he moved his fascinated eyes sideways and gazed in silence at Tressa Norne.

The girl laughed.

""Sorceress!"" he burst out hoarsely. ""Take that accursed thing from my path!""

""What thing, Sanang?"" At that his dark, frightened eyes stole toward the threshold again, seeking the little snake. But there was no snake there. And when he was certain of this he went, twitching and trembling all over.

Behind him the door closed softly, locking and bolting itself.

And behind the bolted door in the brightly lighted bedroom Tressa Norne fell on both knees, her pistol still clutched in her right hand, calling passionately upon Christ to forgive her for the dreadful ability she had dared to use, and begging Him to save her body from death and her soul from the snare of the Yezidee.

",False
"When I drew nigh the nameless city I knew it was accursed. I was traveling in a parched and terrible valley under the moon, and afar I saw it protruding uncannily above the sands as parts of a corpse may protrude from an ill-made grave. Fear spoke from the age-worn stones of this hoary survivor of the deluge, this great-grandfather of the eldest pyramid; and a viewless aura repelled me and bade me retreat from antique and sinister secrets that no man should see, and no man else had dared to see..
Remote in the desert of Araby lies the nameless city, crumbling and inarticulate, its low walls nearly hidden by the sands of uncounted ages. It must have been thus before the first stones of Memphis were laid, and while the bricks of Babylon were yet unbaked. There is no legend so old as to give it a name, or to recall that it was ever alive; but it is told of in whispers around campfires and muttered about by grandams in the tents of sheiks so that all the tribes shun it without wholly knowing why. It was of this place that Abdul Alhazred the mad poet dreamed of the night before he sang his unexplained couplet:
That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons death may die.
I should have known that the Arabs had good reason for shunning the nameless city, the city told of in strange tales but seen by no living man, yet I defied them and went into the untrodden waste with my camel. I alone have seen it, and that is why no other face bears such hideous lines of fear as mine; why no other man shivers so horribly when the night wind rattles the windows. When I came upon it in the ghastly stillness of unending sleep it looked at me, chilly from the rays of a cold moon amidst the desert's heat. And as I returned its look I forgot my triumph at finding it, and stopped still with my camel to wait for the dawn.
For hours I waited, till the east grew grey and the stars faded, and the grey turned to roseate light edged with gold. I heard a moaning and saw a storm of sand stirring among the antique stones though the sky was clear and the vast reaches of desert still. Then suddenly above the desert's far rim came the blazing edge of the sun, seen through the tiny sandstorm which was passing away, and in my fevered state I fancied that from some remote depth there came a crash of musical metal to hail the fiery disc as Memnon hails it from the banks of the Nile. My ears rang and my imagination seethed as I led my camel slowly across the sand to that unvocal place; that place which I alone of living men had seen.
In and out amongst the shapeless foundations of houses and places I wandered, finding never a carving or inscription to tell of these men, if men they were, who built this city and dwelt therein so long ago. The antiquity of the spot was unwholesome, and I longed to encounter some sign or device to prove that the city was indeed fashioned by mankind. There were certain proportions and dimensions in the ruins which I did not like. I had with me many tools, and dug much within the walls of the obliterated edifices; but progress was slow, and nothing significant was revealed. When night and the moon returned I felt a chill wind which brought new fear, so that I did not dare to remain in the city. And as I went outside the antique walls to sleep, a small sighing sandstorm gathered behind me, blowing over the grey stones though the moon was bright and most of the desert still.
I awakened just at dawn from a pageant of horrible dreams, my ears ringing as from some metallic peal. I saw the sun peering redly through the last gusts of a little sandstorm that hovered over the nameless city, and marked the quietness of the rest of the landscape. Once more I ventured within those brooding ruins that swelled beneath the sand like an ogre under a coverlet, and again dug vainly for relics of the forgotten race. At noon I rested, and in the afternoon I spent much time tracing the walls and bygone streets, and the outlines of the nearly vanished buildings. I saw that the city had been mighty indeed, and wondered at the sources of its greatness. To myself I pictured all the spendours of an age so distant that Chaldaea could not recall it, and thought of Sarnath the Doomed, that stood in the land of Mnar when mankind was young, and of Ib, that was carven of grey stone before mankind existed.
All at once I came upon a place where the bed rock rose stark through the sand and formed a low cliff; and here I saw with joy what seemed to promise further traces of the antediluvian people. Hewn rudely on the face of the cliff were the unmistakable facades of several small, squat rock houses or temples; whose interiors might preserve many secrets of ages too remote for calculation, though sandstorms had long effaced any carvings which may have been outside.
Very low and sand-choked were all the dark apertures near me, but I cleared on with my spade and crawled through it, carrying a torch to reveal whatever mysteries it might hold. When I was inside I saw that the cavern was indeed a temple, and beheld plain signs of the race that had lived and worshipped before the desert was a desert. Primitive altars, pillars, and niches, all curiously low, were not absent; and though I saw no sculptures or frescoes, there were many singular stones clearly shaped into symbols by artificial means. The lowness of the chiselled chamber was very strange, for I could hardly kneel upright; but the area was so great that my torch showed only part of it at a time. I shuddered oddly in some of the far corners; for certain altars and stones suggested forgotten rites of terrible, revolting and inexplicable nature and made me wonder what manner of men could have made and frequented such a temple. When I had seen all that the place contained, I crawled out again, avid to find what the temples might yield.
Night had now approached, yet the tangible things I had seen made curiosity stronger than fear, so that I did not flee from the long mooncast shadows that had daunted me when first I saw the nameless city. In the twilight I cleared another aperture and with a new torch crawled into it, finding more vague stones and symbols, though nothing more definite than the other temple had contained the room was just as low, but much less broad, ending in a very narrow passage crowded with obscure and cryptical shrines. About these shrines I was prying when the noise of a wind and my camel outside broke through the stillness and drew me forth to see what could have frightened the beast.
The moon was gleaming vividly over the primitive ruins, lighting a dense cloud of sand that seemed blown by a strong but decreasing wind from some point along the cliff ahead of me. I knew it was this chilly, sandy wind which had disturbed the camel and was about to lead him to a place of better shelter when I chanced to glance up and saw that there was no wind atop the cliff. This astonished me and made me fearful again, but I immediately recalled the sudden local winds that I had seen and heard before at sunrise and sunset, and judged it was a normal thing. I decided it came from some rock fissure leading to a cave, and watched the troubled sand to trace it to its source; soon perceiving that it came from the black orifice of a temple a long distance south of me, almost out of sight. Against the choking sand-cloud I plodded toward this temple, which as I neared it loomed larger than the rest, and shewed a doorway far less clogged with caked sand. I would have entered had not the terrific force of the icy wind almost quenched my torch. It poured madly out of the dark door, sighing uncannily as it ruffled the sand and spread among the weird ruins. Soon it grew fainter and the sand grew more and more still, till finally all was at rest again; but a presence seemed stalking among the spectral stones of the city, and when I glanced at the moon it seemed to quiver as though mirrored in unquiet waters. I was more afraid than I could explain, but not enough to dull my thirst for wonder; so as soon as the wind was quite gone I crossed into the dark chamber from which it had come.
This temple, as I had fancied from the outside, was larger than either of those I had visited before; and was presumably a natural cavern since it bore winds from some region beyond. Here I could stand quite upright, but saw that the stones and altars were as low as those in the other temples. On the walls and roof I beheld for the first time some traces of the pictorial art of the ancient race, curious curling streaks of paint that had almost faded or crumbled away; and on two of the altars I saw with rising excitement a maze of well-fashioned curvilinear carvings. As I held my torch aloft it seemed to me that the shape of the roof was too regular to be natural, and I wondered what the prehistoric cutters of stone had first worked upon. Their engineering skill must have been vast.
Then a brighter flare of the fantastic flame showed that form which I had been seeking, the opening to those remoter abysses whence the sudden wind had blown; and I grew faint when I saw that it was a small and plainly artificial door chiselled in the solid rock. I thrust my torch within, beholding a black tunnel with the roof arching low over a rough flight of very small, numerous and steeply descending steps. I shall always see those steps in my dreams, for I came to learn what they meant. At the time I hardly knew whether to call them steps or mere footholds in a precipitous descent. My mind was whirling with mad thoughts, and the words and warning of Arab prophets seemed to float across the desert from the land that men know to the nameless city that men dare not know. Yet I hesitated only for a moment before advancing through the portal and commencing to climb cautiously down the steep passage, feet first, as though on a ladder.
It is only in the terrible phantasms of drugs or delirium that any other man can have such a descent as mine. The narrow passage led infinitely down like some hideous haunted well, and the torch I held above my head could not light the unknown depths toward which I was crawling. I lost track of the hours and forgot to consult my watch, though I was frightened when I thought of the distance I must have be traversing. There were changes of direction and of steepness; and once I came to a long, low, level passage where I had to wriggle my feet first along the rocky floor, holding torch at arm's length beyond my head. The place was not high enough for kneeling. After that were more of the steep steps, and I was still scrambling down interminably when my failing torch died out. I do not think I noticed it at the time, for when I did notice it I was still holding it above me as if it were ablaze. I was quite unbalanced with that instinct for the strange and the unknown which had made me a wanderer upon earth and a haunter of far, ancient, and forbidden places.
In the darkness there flashed before my mind fragments of my cherished treasury of daemonic lore; sentences from Alhazred the mad Arab, paragraphs from the apocryphal nightmares of Damascius, and infamous lines from the delirious Image du Monde of Gauthier de Metz. I repeated queer extracts, and muttered of Afrasiab and the daemons that floated with him down the Oxus; later chanting over and over again a phrase from one of Lord Dunsany's tales--""The unreveberate blackness of the abyss."" Once when the descent grew amazingly steep I recited something in sing-song from Thomas Moore until I feared to recite more:
A reservoir of darkness, black
As witches' cauldrons are, when fill'd
With moon-drugs in th' eclipse distill'd
Leaning to look if foot might pass
Down thro' that chasm, I saw, beneath,
As far as vision could explore,
The jetty sides as smooth as glass,
Looking as if just varnish'd o'er
With that dark pitch the Seat of Death
Throws out upon its slimy shore.
Time had quite ceased to exist when my feet again felt a level floor, and I found myself in a place slightly higher than the rooms in the two smaller temples now so incalculably far above my head. I could not quite stand, but could kneel upright, and in the dark I shuffled and crept hither and thither at random. I soon knew that I was in a narrow passage whose walls were lined with cases of wood having glass fronts. As in that Palaeozoic and abysmal place I felt of such things as polished wood and glass I shuddered at the possible implications. The cases were apparently ranged along each side of the passage at regular intervals, and were oblong and horizontal, hideously like coffins in shape and size. When I tried to move two or three for further examination, I found that they were firmly fastened.
I saw that the passage was a long one, so floundered ahead rapidly in a creeping run that would have seemed horrible had any eye watched me in the blackness; crossing from side to side occasionally to feel of my surroundings and be sure the walls and rows of cases still stretched on. Man is so used to thinking visually that I almost forgot the darkness and pictured the endless corridor of wood and glass in its low-studded monotony as though I saw it. And then in a moment of indescribable emotion I did see it.
Just when my fancy merged into real sight I cannot tell; but there came a gradual glow ahead, and all at once I knew that I saw the dim outlines of a corridor and the cases, revealed by some unknown subterranean phosphorescence. For a little while all was exactly as I had imagined it, since the glow was very faint; but as I mechanically kept stumbling ahead into the stronger light I realised that my fancy had been but feeble. This hall was no relic of crudity like the temples in the city above, but a monument of the most magnificent and exotic art. Rich, vivid, and daringly fantastic designs and pictures formed a continuous scheme of mural paintings whose lines and colours were beyond description. The cases were of a strange golden wood, with fronts of exquisite glass, and containing the mummified forms of creatures outreaching in grotesqueness the most chaotic dreams of man.
To convey any idea of these monstrosities is impossible. They were of the reptile kind, with body lines suggestion sometimes the crocodile, sometimes the seal, but more often nothing of which either the naturalist or the palaeontologist ever heard. In size they approximated a small man, and their fore-legs bore delicate and evident feet curiously like human hands and fingers. But strangest of all were their heads, which presented a contour violating all known biological principles. To nothing can such things be well compared--in one flash I thought of comparisons as varied as the cat, the bullfrog, the mythic Satyr, and the human being. Not Jove himself had had so colossal and protuberant a forehead, yet the horns and the noselessness and the alligator-like jaw placed things outside all established categories. I debated for a time on the reality of the mummies, half suspecting they were artificial idols; but soon decided they were indeed some palaeogean species which had lived when the nameless city was alive. To crown their grotesqueness, most of them were gorgeously enrobed in the costliest of fabrics, and lavishly laden with ornaments of gold, jewels, and unknown shining metals.
The importance of these crawling creatures must have been vast, for they held first place among the wild designs on the frescoed walls and ceiling. With matchless skill had the artist drawn them in a world of their own, wherein they had cities and gardens fashioned to suit their dimensions; and I could not help but think that their pictured history was allegorical, perhaps showing the progress of the race that worshipped them. These creatures, I said to myself, were to men of the nameless city what the she-wolf was to Rome, or some totem-beast is to a tribe of Indians.
Holding this view, I could trace roughly a wonderful epic of the nameless city; the tale of a mighty seacoast metropolis that ruled the world before Africa rose out of the waves, and of its struggles as the sea shrank away, and the desert crept into the fertile valley that held it. I saw its wars and triumphs, its troubles and defeats, and afterwards its terrible fight against the desert when thousands of its people--here represented in allegory by the grotesque reptiles--were driven to chisel their way down through the rocks in some marvellous manner to another world whereof their prophets had told them. It was all vividly weird and realistic, and its connection with the awesome descent I had made was unmistakable. I even recognized the passages.
As I crept along the corridor toward the brighter light I saw later stages of the painted epic--the leave-taking of the race that had dwelt in the nameless city and the valley around for ten million years; the race whose souls shrank from quitting scenes their bodies had known so long where they had settled as nomads in the earth's youth, hewing in the virgin rock those primal shrines at which they had never ceased to worship. Now that the light was better I studied the pictures more closely and, remembering that the strange reptiles must represent the unknown men, pondered upon the customs of the nameless city. Many things were peculiar and inexplicable. The civilization, which included a written alphabet, had seemingly risen to a higher order than those immeasurably later civilizations of Egypt and Chaldaea, yet there were curious omissions. I could, for example, find no pictures to represent deaths or funeral customs, save such as were related to wars, violence, and plagues; and I wondered at the reticence shown concerning natural death. It was as though an ideal of immortality had been fostered as a cheering illusion.
Still nearer the end of the passage was painted scenes of the utmost picturesqueness and extravagance: contrasted views of the nameless city in its desertion and growing ruin, and of the strange new realm of paradise to which the race had hewed its way through the stone. In these views the city and the desert valley were shewn always by moonlight, golden nimbus hovering over the fallen walls, and half-revealing the splendid perfection of former times, shown spectrally and elusively by the artist. The paradisal scenes were almost too extravagant to be believed, portraying a hidden world of eternal day filled with glorious cities and ethereal hills and valleys. At the very last I thought I saw signs of an artistic anticlimax. The paintings were less skillful, and much more bizarre than even the wildest of the earlier scenes. They seemed to record a slow decadence of the ancient stock, coupled with a growing ferocity toward the outside world from which it was driven by the desert. The forms of the people--always represented by the sacred reptiles--appeared to be gradually wasting away, through their spirit as shewn hovering above the ruins by moonlight gained in proportion. Emaciated priests, displayed as reptiles in ornate robes, cursed the upper air and all who breathed it; and one terrible final scene shewed a primitive-looking man, perhaps a pioneer of ancient Irem, the City of Pillars, torn to pieces by members of the elder race. I remember how the Arabs fear the nameless city, and was glad that beyond this place the grey walls and ceiling were bare.
As I viewed the pageant of mural history I had approached very closely to the end of the low-ceiled hall, and was aware of a gate through which came all of the illuminating phosphorescence. Creeping up to it, I cried aloud in transcendent amazement at what lay beyond; for instead of other and brighter chambers there was only an illimitable void of uniform radiance, such one might fancy when gazing down from the peak of Mount Everest upon a sea of sunlit mist. Behind me was a passage so cramped that I could not stand upright in it; before me was an infinity of subterranean effulgence.
Reaching down from the passage into the abyss was the head of a steep flight of steps--small numerous steps like those of black passages I had traversed--but after a few feet the glowing vapours concealed everything. Swung back open against the left-hand wall of the passage was a massive door of brass, incredibly thick and decorated with fantastic bas-reliefs, which could if closed shut the whole inner world of light away from the vaults and passages of rock. I looked at the step, and for the nonce dared not try them. I touched the open brass door, and could not move it. Then I sank prone to the stone floor, my mind aflame with prodigious reflections which not even a death-like exhaustion could banish.
As I lay still with closed eyes, free to ponder, many things I had lightly noted in the frescoes came back to me with new and terrible significance--scenes representing the nameless city in its heyday--the vegetations of the valley around it, and the distant lands with which its merchants traded. The allegory of the crawling creatures puzzled me by its universal prominence, and I wondered that it would be so closely followed in a pictured history of such importance. In the frescoes the nameless city had been shewn in proportions fitted to the reptiles. I wondered what its real proportions and magnificence had been, and reflected a moment on certain oddities I had noticed in the ruins. I thought curiously of the lowness of the primal temples and of the underground corridor, which were doubtless hewn thus out of deference to the reptile deities there honoured; though it perforce reduced the worshippers to crawling. Perhaps the very rites here involved crawling in imitation of the creatures. No religious theory, however, could easily explain why the level passages in that awesome descent should be as low as the temples--or lower, since one could not even kneel in it. As I thought of the crawling creatures, whose hideous mummified forms were so close to me, I felt a new throb of fear. Mental associations are curious, and I shrank from the idea that except for the poor primitive man torn to pieces in the last painting, mine was the only human form amidst the many relics and symbols of the primordial life.
But as always in my strange and roving existence, wonder soon drove out fear; for the luminous abyss and what it might contain presented a problem worthy of the greatest explorer that a weird world of mystery lay far down that flight of peculiarly small steps I could not doubt, and I hoped to find there those human memorials which the painted corridor had failed to give. The frescoes had pictured unbelievable cities, and valleys in this lower realm, and my fancy dwelt on the rich and colossal ruins that awaited me.
My fears, indeed, concerned the past rather than the future. Not even the physical horror of my position in that cramped corridor of dead reptiles and antediluvian frescoes, miles below the world I knew and faced by another world of eery light and mist, could match the lethal dread I felt at the abysmal antiquity of the scene and its soul. An ancientness so vast that measurement is feeble seemed to leer down from the primal stones and rock-hewn temples of the nameless city, while the very latest of the astounding maps in the frescoes shewed oceans and continents that man has forgotten, with only here and there some vaguely familiar outlines. Of what could have happened in the geological ages since the paintings ceased and the death-hating race resentfully succumbed to decay, no man might say. Life had once teemed in these caverns and in the luminous realm beyond; now I was alone with vivid relics, and I trembled to think of the countless ages through which these relics had kept a silent deserted vigil.
Suddenly there came another burst of that acute fear which had intermittently seized me ever since I first saw the terrible valley and the nameless city under a cold moon, and despite my exhaustion I found myself starting frantically to a sitting posture and gazing back along the black corridor toward the tunnels that rose to the outer world. My sensations were like those which had made me shun the nameless city at night, and were as inexplicable as they were poignant. In another moment, however, I received a still greater shock in the form of a definite sound--the first which had broken the utter silence of these tomb-like depths. It was a deep, low moaning, as of a distant throng of condemned spirits, and came from the direction in which I was staring. Its volume rapidly grew, till it soon reverberated rightfully through the low passage, and at the same time I became conscious of an increasing draught of old air, likewise flowing from the tunnels and the city above. The touch of this air seemed to restore my balance, for I instantly recalled the sudden gusts which had risen around the mouth of the abyss each sunset and sunrise, one of which had indeed revealed the hidden tunnels to me. I looked at my watch and saw that sunrise was near, so bracing myself to resist the gale that was sweeping down to its cavern home as it had swept forth at evening. My fear again waned low, since a natural phenomenon tends to dispel broodings over the unknown.
More and more madly poured the shrieking, moaning night wind into the gulf of the inner earth. I dropped prone again and clutched vainly at the floor for fear of being swept bodily through the open gate into the phosphorescent abyss. Such fury I had not expected, and as I grew aware of an actual slipping of my form toward the abyss I was beset by a thousand new terrors of apprehension and imagination. The malignancy of the blast awakened incredible fancies; once more I compared myself shudderingly to the only human image in that frightful corridor, the man who was torn to pieces by the nameless race, for in the fiendish clawing of the swirling currents there seemed to abide a vindictive rage all the stronger because it was largely impotent. I think I screamed frantically near the last--I was almost mad--of the howling wind-wraiths. I tried to crawl against the murderous invisible torrent, but I could not even hold my own as I was pushed slowly and inexorably toward the unknown world. Finally reason must have wholly snapped; for I fell babbling over and over that unexplainable couplet of the mad Arab Alhazred, who dreamed of the nameless city:
That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die.
Only the grim brooding desert gods know what really took place--what indescribable struggles and scrambles in the dark I endured or what Abaddon guided me back to life, where I must always remember and shiver in the night wind till oblivion--or worse--claims me. Monstrous, unnatural, colossal, was the thing--too far beyond all the ideas of man to be believed except in the silent damnable small hours of the morning when one cannot sleep.
I have said that the fury of the rushing blast was infernal-- cacodaemoniacal--and that its voices were hideous with the pent-up viciousness of desolate eternities. Presently these voices, while still chaotic before me, seemed to my beating brain to take articulate form behind me; and down there in the grave of unnumbered aeon-dead antiquities, leagues below the dawn-lit world of men, I heard the ghastly cursing and snarling of strange-tongued fiends. Turning, I saw outlined against the luminous aether of the abyss that could not be seen against the dusk of the corridor--a nightmare horde of rushing devils; hate distorted, grotesquely panoplied, half transparent devils of a race no man might mistake--the crawling reptiles of the nameless city.
And as the wind died away I was plunged into the ghoul-pooled darkness of earth's bowels; for behind the last of the creatures the great brazen door clanged shut with a deafening peal of metallic music whose reverberations swelled out to the distant world to hail the rising sun as Memnon hails it from the banks of the Nile.
","
I spent the next few days becoming acquainted with the town and its people. Personally, I did not find most of the locals as reticent as my companion had led me to believe. Actually, many of the people I met during my casual rambles about the town and its immediate environs seemed willing, even eager to converse about their community and its history, in spite, or maybe because of, my rather labored Spanish.
Especially interesting to me, as it turned out, was the fact that many of the local people were descended, in part, from Sephardic Jews who had settled in this once remote region to avoid, as far as possible, direct contact with Church authorities. They had maintained a façade of Catholic Christianity while secretly retaining their Jewish identity. Gradually, they had assimilated with both Mexican settlers and the native Indians, remaining, nevertheless, quietly proud of their Sephardic roots.
Rousseau had apparently overlooked this bit of history, or perhaps considered it of trivial importance. Nevertheless, I viewed this as the most obvious explanation for the presence of the Hebrew Necronomicon in San Facundo. Indeed, if some of those eighteenth-century crypto-Jews had been involved in dark magical practices, as the presence of the book might indicate, then rumors of similar activities among the Indian natives of this region could have attracted them to settle here in the first place.
This informal reconnoitering also brought me my first glimpse of the ""strange"" ones, which I call them for lack of a better name. Truly, Rousseau did not exaggerate concerning their physical oddity; indeed, his descriptions left me unprepared for the actual appearance of those people. They tended to be of medium height, on the average, but this was difficult to ascertain due to their characteristically stooped posture and odd gaits, which seemed to be a sort of shambling shuffle, as if a regular human bipedal locomotion were alien to their normal means of ambulation. Their physiognomies were, however, the items of greatest strangeness. The heads tended to be elongated and the faces very narrow. Eyes were large, roundish, and bulging, giving the impression of being nearly, or totally lidless. Their mouths tended to be extremely wide, reaching well around to the sides of the face, with thin lips drawn back somewhat to reveal gums and teeth. The teeth themselves were of utmost oddity, being uniformly pointed, even back into the molar area. My impression was of the saw-like teeth found in certain species of carnivorous fish or reptiles. The skin of these creatures was of a brownish-grey color, quite unlike that of a typical Mexican or Indian. Its texture, as best I could tell, was rough, almost horny in fact, and there was a disquieting suggestion of squamousness.
My first face-to-face encounter with these beings occurred late in the afternoon of my third day in San Facundo. I was strolling along a side street near the main plaza. The afternoon was hot and I was thirsty. Presently, I came to a small store, little more than a hole in the wall, set in a venerable but dilapidated building of heavy yellowish brick, probably dating from the middle of the nineteenth century. I entered and requested a cold soft drink from the proprietor, a short, pudgy man of late middle age. Scarcely had he handed me the bottled drink when two other men entered. I first noticed the frozen expression on the owner's face, then turned to see two of the ""strange"" ones, only a few feet away. One of them muttered, or almost hissed, something in unintelligible Spanish which sent the fat little proprietor scurrying behind a curtain in the rear of the store. Both men eyed me in a curiously sinister way but said nothing. A moment later the owner emerged, carrying something in a paper sack folded over at the top, which he handed to the nearer of the two men. One of the creatures extended a gloved hand, placed some bills on the counter, and left with his companion as silently as they had come.
I turned to the proprietor, whom I knew slightly, with whose brother I had already conversed at some length the previous day, and inquired, ""Quiénes eran? Who were they?""
""No quieres saber. You don't want to know,"" was his reply.
""But why do you say that?"" I persisted. ""I find your town fascinating and would like to know something about its more, shall we say, unusual side. Obviously, certain of your local citizens have characteristics that set them apart from the average person one meets on the street. What can you tell about them?""
""Yo no sé nada,"" was his curt reply, ""and it would be much better if you did not keep asking. There are things better not known.""
Puzzled, I left the store and continued along the street to the plaza. I noticed that the sun was sinking low and the first rays of what promised to be a glorious sunset were already painting the western sky in a riot of luminous color. I tarried about the plaza for perhaps another hour, until the last tints of purple, orange, and gold had faded into the gathering dusk. A sudden impulse caused me to turn my gaze toward the south, where the streets gradually sloped downward towards the narrow San Facundo River. There, beyond the low roofs of the town, beyond the tree-lined bluffs above the river, and across the rolling, dusk-shrouded plain rose the dusky shape of a distant outcropping. Starkly outlined against the darkling sky, I beheld El Tinieblo. Far more sinister, in view of the incident with the federales, a dark red glow seemed to emanate from its low, flat summit.


IV

The following days proved extremely interesting. Quickly, I found that gaining the friendship and trust of certain people in San Facundo opened doors to many other acquaintances. My own Portuguese-Jewish heritage and knowledge of the Cabbalah would turn out to be advantageous in this respect. I soon discovered that some Sanfacundinos were quite familiar with Cabalistic teachings and concepts, and were eager to participate in discussions with outsiders who were learned in these matters, apparently hoping to enrich their own store of knowledge. Nevertheless, my attempts to learn more concerning the ""strange ones"" were invariably met with evasion or rebuff. In a more disquieting vane, I was starting to develop a sense of being watched and followed.
Among my newly found friends was one Don Ramiro De Leon-Espinoza, a local land owner and businessman whose family had been among the original settlers in the region. One morning, well into my second week in San Facundo, Don Ramiro and myself met for coffee and conversation in a cafe near the plaza.
""You, who are erudite in so many things, what really brings you to San Facundo?"" he queried.
""Really,"" I replied, ""I came on an invitation from an old acquaintance. He told me that, let's say, interesting things have happened here in the past, and some influence from those occurrences may linger on into the present.""
Don Ramiro narrowed his eyes thoughtfully. ""And, of course, that acquaintance of yours is the gringo living in the house of Licenciado Santos Garza, is that not true?""
""Yes, as a matter of fact it is,"" I replied, sensing a certain suspicion in his tone. ""But I am here for purely academic reasons. As I've already told you, I am an anthropologist and the study of folklore is my specialty.""
My companion took a deep sip from his cup, eyeing me over the rim as he continued, ""I understand that, and it's a good thing. Otherwise, we wouldn't be having this conversation. You know, we don't appreciate that nosy bolillo, or Frenchman or whatever he is, prying into things that are none of his business. It is only because of our courtesy that we have not run him off.""
I knew then why Rousseau had found the local people so inaccessible. I also understood Don Ramiro's words as a message intended for Rousseau.
""Now, let us talk of things we both find interesting,"" Don Ramiro suggested enthusiastically, his mood seeming to shift abruptly.
""I know of a site near here that I am sure you will find fascinating. It dates back to pre-Conquest times; it may even be thousands of years old. Our legends have it that the place was already old before the Aztecs, or even the Toltecs. Anyway, it is located on land that I own.""
The prospect of visiting a largely unexplored pre-Columbian ruin truly excited me. ""How soon can we go?"" I responded with almost child like anticipation.
We drove out of town on a paved road for several miles, then turned onto another one of limestone gravel, known locally as caliche, which wound past alternating areas of cleared land and thick, spiny vegetation. We passed several ejidos, communally owned farms, and continued on into rolling uplands that manifested fewer and fewer signs of human habitation. Presently, the road degenerated into a mere track, little more than two parallel ruts running through thickly overgrown and rocky country. Fortunately, Don Ramiro's truck, a Ford utility-type vehicle with four-wheel drive, was adequate to the task.
""Is this area part of la zona maldita?"" I casually inquired.
""You know of la zona maldita?"" Don Ramiro answered with some surprise; then, anticipating my answer, continued, ""Ah sí, your friend Rousseau must have told you.""
""Rousseau,"" I corrected.
""Sí, whatever,"" was his curt reply. After a brief silence he volunteered, ""We are very much into the zona. The ruins that I am about to show you are one of its focal points.""
Abruptly, the trail ascended, topping the crest of a steep rise, then dipped slightly into a broad, almost level expanse. As my companion halted the truck briefly at the top of the rise, I viewed the scene extending out before us. There, jutting up from the thorny chaparral, I saw several low, truncated pyramids, along with what appeared to be a large conical structure and the jagged, broken tops of a number of walls. The structures appeared to be composed of a black basaltic stone, in rather striking contrast to the brownish-grey sandstone or pale limestone shale so abundant in that region.
""This is fascinating, Don Ramiro, but why hasn't this site been opened to archaeological study?"" My academic orientation made the question inevitable.
""I have a very valid reason for not wanting that to happen,"" he replied quickly. ""If the government knew of this place,"" he explained, ""they would declare it, and the surrounding area, a national archaeological zone.""
""But,"" I protested, ""wouldn't that allow for organized research into the true origins and age of the site, the identification of the ancient culture to which it belonged? You, yourself say that it may be older than the Toltec civilization. Why, this might cause archaeologists to rethink some of their present beliefs concerning ancient civilization in Mexico!""
""It would only give government bureaucrats an opportunity to loot the patrimony of our ancestors!"" he snapped. ""They would take the best for themselves, or sell it to foreigners, and put whatever was left in museum store rooms to be forgotten and eventually thrown out with the rubbish.""
I accepted his reasoning, which sounded sincere enough, though privately I suspected his real motive was fear of government confiscation of his property.
We left the truck and proceeded into the brush on foot.
""Be careful of snakes,"" warned my host. ""We have several very poisonous varieties around here.""
We made our way to the largest of the pyramids, scratching ourselves considerably on the thorny vegetation. I also noticed that my clothing suffered tears in several places. The pyramid, actually more of a rectangular structure with steeply sloping sides, rose some fifty feet from its base to a long platform. The platform itself was reached by means of a crumbling masonry stairway on the eastern face of the pyramid. Stunted mesquite and prickly pear grew from cracks in the basaltic blocks, and a tough wiry grass covered most of the platform surfaces, growing from centuries of accumulated soil and disintegrated masonry. Altogether, it was difficult to ascertain if the pyramid had ever served as the base for a masonry temple, as was usually the case with other ancient Mexican and Mesoamerican sites.
The top of the pyramid measured, in approximate terms, thirty feet in width by forty feet in length, and commanded an excellent view of the whole complex of structures. This large pyramid seemed to be situated near the western end of the city, for such the complex appeared to be. The crumbling remains of other buildings, including at least three smaller pyramids, stretched out for nearly three quarters of a mile to the south and east, though the tops of the structures were often barely visible above the thick, stunted vegetation. Obviously, the construction of such a center in this desolate and inaccessible site, with the primitive tools and technology probably available to the builders, had been no mean undertaking.
Of singular peculiarity among the crumbling stone edifices was the truncated conical structure mentioned earlier. As best as I could tell, its diameter was about one hundred feet at the base and it rose to an average height of some seventy feet, though the jagged outline of its rim suggested it had originally been much higher. Exploring entirely around the base, I could find no sign of a stairway or portal, or any other means of ingress or egress. Strangely, I noticed, the tower was devoid of any vegetation, with the exception of a sickly lichenous or fungous growth of a putrid grayish-green hue that spread in irregular patches up the sides of the structure. Also, notably absent were birds and bird droppings, nor were any of the swift striped-back skinks that abound in the area to be seen darting about the sloping sides of that mysterious black tower.
I abruptly noticed that Don Ramiro was nowhere about. Concerned that he had fallen, or otherwise injured himself in the crumbling stonework, I called out to him. After a few moments I heard his voice some distance away.
""Aquí estoy, aquí donde el ídolo.""
I was taken by surprise as I had not seen any idol in the place. After a few minutes of searching I found my host, standing with an awed expression before a large carven figure of black stone.
The figure itself was about fifteen feet tall, and at first glance appeared to be a representation of some deity fashioned in the typical, highly stylized Mesoamerican mode. Closer examination, however, sent me reeling with revulsion. The ""god,"" or whatever it was intended to represent, was actually some sort of fantastic sea creature, incorporating in its tentacled visage a grotesque parody of a face. Worst of all, the monstrosity was depicted employing its facial tentacles to force a human figure into its gaping, toothy mouth.
""What is it?"" I asked.
""The Great Kutulli,"" he replied, in a voice that sounded almost reverent.
The day was becoming late. Noticing this, Ramiro motioned in the direction of the truck.
""Time to go,"" he said without further comment. I felt fully in agreement. The prospect of remaining in this place after dark filled me with an overpowering dread . . . a dread I could scarcely explain at the moment.
The long, bumpy trip back to San Facundo was made in silence. My companion seemed unusually pensive and answered my few inquiries in grunted monosyllables. As for myself, I simply felt too overwhelmed, too overloaded with unanswered questions to give voice to my thoughts.
We reached town just after nightfall. My host dropped me off near Rousseau's place, though I still had to walk a long block up a steep, dark street to reach the house. In the gathering gloom I discerned several shadowy figures approaching me. For some inexplicable reason, call it primal instinct, I realized that these figures meant extreme danger, for me, now! I broke for the house, running as fast as my unaccustomed legs would carry me. Though I did not look back, I fully sensed the close pursuit of my assailants, could almost feel their searing breath on my neck. The dim light from Rousseau's study still seemed infinitely far away, and I caught a brief glimpse of something running, or loping just to my right side, almost close enough to grab me. I cried out, an incoherent scream of desperation and terror.
""Ay basta! Lárguense a la chingada pinches demonios encartados! Vámonos! Asquerosos chingados!""
I didn't see who was yelling, threatening, and cursing in a coarse female voice, and at the top of her lungs. I merely fell, exhausted, on my hands and knees. Presently, I felt a strong, thick arm help me back to my feet.
""Ay, pobre güerito. Por tantito te llevan a la chingada esos pendejos!""
I stared into the face of a copper-skinned woman of uncertain age, not unusually tall, but powerfully built, with a stocky, heavy-boned body. Her rugged Indian features and small bright eyes somehow inspired confidence.
""Who were they?"" I panted.
""They were nobody that you ever want to meet,"" she replied, adding, ""They know better than to mess with me; I know ways to make them curse their mothers for bringing them into this world. Ha!""
""But señora, who are you?"" I asked, beginning to catch my breath.
""Everyone calls me Doña Tencha. They say that I'm a bruja, a witch.""
""Are you?"" I asked, wondering.
""What do you think?"" she responded, half laughing. ""Ha, ha! Take care."" With that, she disappeared into a dark cluster of shacks situated just off the street.
I arrived at the house and fumbled for my key. Before I could insert it in the lock, Rousseau unexpectedly opened the door.
""My God, Shapiro! What happened? You look like you've seen the devil himself!""
""Maybe I have, or a close enough facsimile,"" I answered.
""But . . . but, how . . . what happened?""
Obviously he was taken aback by my state at that moment. I proceeded to give him as complete an account as possible of my recent peril.
Rousseau pondered for a moment, as if trying to make some sense out of what I was saying, then offered, ""I don't think it was a matter of common street ruffians. You say that they seemed to be terrified of the woman . . . what's her name? Tencha, did you say?""
""Yes, she said that's what people call her.""
""Funny,"" he replied. ""I had heard something about some kind of witch or sorceress living near here. I don't know why I never looked her up. She might be a good source of information.""
""She probably saved my life,"" I responded, rubbing my forehead.
My companion seemed to reflect for a moment. ""Do you think it was the freaks?""
""I'm sure it was several of them!"" I shot back, somewhat annoyed at his seeming failure to grasp the significance of the matter.
""And you say they were terrified of her?""
""That's what I said; but wait, you know, I heard her call them 'demonios encartados'.""
""Hybrid devils? Maybe just an epithet, but . . . ""
I cut off Rousseau's reply in mid-sentence. ""Did you ever read any of Lovecraft's works Carl?""
He shook his head.
""In several of his stories referring to the 'Cthulhu Mythos',"" I continued, ""Lovecraft described hybrid beings resulting from unions between certain strange sea creatures, apparently some sort of survival from an earlier, pre-human age, and renegade humans. Those hybrid beings were dedicated to the restoration to power of the extra-dimensional entity Cthulhu and his kind, called the 'Ancient Ones,' on our own earthly plane of existence. At least that's how the stories went.""
Rousseau's face manifested a mixture of revulsion and astonishment.
""So . . . you believe these freakish-looking people we see around here are some kind of alien hybrid? Good God, Shapiro . . . do you realize the implications of what you're suggesting?""
""Unfortunately, I do,"" I replied.
Now I knew, beyond any doubt, that my strange sense of being watched and followed reflected a very real danger. Quite in violation of my normal adherence to Ivy League conventions of ""political correctness,"" I was now applying the label of ""fish faces"" to the repellent beings that lurked about in the late afternoon shadows and darkness of night. After all, those creatures definitely had it in for us, or at least for me. Strangely, Rousseau had never been accosted, or even approached by any of the oddities, which seemed difficult to explain considering the length of his stay in San Facundo.


V

The following afternoon I met with Don Ramiro at a quiet local tavern. After providing him with an account of the previous night's events I queried, ""What do you think it means Don Ramiro?""
""Pues, I think it means you had better be careful,"" he replied, lifting his eyebrows in a kind of facial shrug.
""But, why do you think they jumped me while they've left my friend Rousseau alone all this time? Also, Don Ramiro, what can you tell me about those people, and who is Doña Tencha?""
""Please Profe, one question at a time. Now you ask why they attacked you and not Rou . . . whatever his name is; well, maybe it is because you have come too close to certain things that are better left alone. As for Tencha, she is a curandera, a folk healer who, maybe, practices a little black magic now and then.""
Unsatisfied, I continued to prod him.
""And the creatures themselves, who, or what are they?""
He paused for a long moment, as if uncertain how to answer my question. ""They go back a long time,"" he half whispered, then continued, ""The indios here, they practiced strange rituals, things that so horrified the priests that they killed hundreds, burned them alive, to cleanse the land of the abomination. That is how they saw it.""
""But the strange ones . . . ,"" I interrupted, scarcely able to contain my curiosity.
""Have patience, my friend; I am coming to that.""
He glanced quickly over his shoulder and leaned forward, obviously not wishing to be overheard. In a low voice he continued, ""This will sound incredible to you, with your scientific training, but the indios were in contact with very ancient beings, monstrous things from the sea."" My companion stopped momentarily, seeming to gage my reaction, then resumed his story. ""Those things, animals or devils, or whatever they were, demanded constant sacrifices, human sacrifices. They taught the Indians to do horrible things, to devour the sacrificial victims the same way that they liked to do it . . . alive and conscious!""
I recoiled at this. The very idea of a living, conscious human being torn apart and devoured by savages and the abominations they worshipped, while the poor wretch was aware of the hideous thing being done to him, seemed horrible beyond all imagining.
""They showed them how to tear the flesh away without damaging the main blood vessels or nerves. The victim would live on for hours while the flesh was being ripped from his bones. They did it with their teeth you know. That is how the sea demons taught them to do it. The pain suffered by the victim, along with his gradually ebbing life force, served as a kind of food for the others.""
Though gagging from my companion's horrible account, I still needed to learn more. I sensed that I was very close to receiving an important revelation. I urged Don Ramiro to continue.
""It only gets worse,"" he assured me, ""but if you wish, I will tell you what I know.""
He poured himself a double shot of brandy, took a deep sip, and continued, ""After a long time, maybe a century, the sea-things suggested to the Indians that they give their young women up to them, that they have their children. The beings assured them that these children would be as gods.""
""But, why didn't they just take the young women?"" I interjected. ""I mean, with the power those things held over the Indians . . . ""
""Perhaps they had to come willingly or it would not work."" This was my companion's answer. ""The reality is that I do not know. At any rate, the things from the sea served the others.""
""Others . . . but, what kind of others?"" I prodded.
""Things from . . . from outside.""
He took another sip.
""There are beings . . . or entities that we cannot see, cannot be aware of with our normal five senses, at least not unless they want, or allow, us to be. They exist in other dimensions from those we know . . . or between dimensions. Anyway, they are not subject to the laws of space and time as we know them. The greatest among them on this planet is called Kutulli.""
""That horrible idol we saw at the ruined city . . . you said it was the Great Kutulli.""
""Sí. The city was built by the ancient ancestors of the Indians the Spanish found here. It had fallen into ruins many centuries before those Europeans arrived here with their absurd worship of a crucified and dying god. The people degenerated; they lost their civilization but their beliefs continued. They carried out their sacred rituals of blood sacrifice for many centuries, always certain of the proximate advent of their god . . . Great Kutulli. Are you wondering from where came their cult? They brought it from the place of their origin . . . their legends told of a great continent in the place where the sun rises, the land that now sleeps beneath the sea.""
Ramiro's face took on a strange, distant cast.
""Their god, or his servitors, eventually took notice of this devotion. As you know, the coast is only about forty kilometers east of here. The people often went there to fish, even as they do now. At a spot on the coast known as Naniché, 'Place Where We Meet' in the language of the native Indians, the tribal priests summoned the beings from the sea. This contact confirmed their faith. They now could speak directly with the servants of Kutulli, even as their long ago ancestors had done, according to legend.""
""So, that was the beginning of the cannibal cult?"" I interrupted.
""Sí. Of course, the Indians had performed human sacrifice for countless centuries before, but never in so horrible a way as I described earlier. The sea beings taught the Indians many things, many rituals and magical chants said to be powerful in hastening the return of Great Kutulli and the Ancient Ones."" With this, Don Ramiro became unexpectedly silent.
I took advantage of my companion's prolonged pause to reflect on his words. Obviously, there was a philological relationship between ""Kutulli"" and the ""Cthulhu"" of Lovecraft's tales. Many other similarities were also apparent, too many for my comfort.
At length I inquired, ""Is it not true that the first Spaniards to permanently establish themselves in this region were friars of the Augustinian Order?""
""Yes . . . and no,"" he answered. ""Before the priests came there were others; they came here because they wanted to get away from the Church's lackeys, to a place where they could practice their beliefs without interference. They were all originally judíos, but among them were some who called themselves Cafanes. They were worshipers of a god called El Asuado. Their cult was taken from the writings of the Sepher al Azif. I think your friend has a copy. Several were made locally from the original, which is . . . where no one can lay hands on it. A few specially chosen ones from each new generation of Cafanes were taught to read the ancient writing, a tradition passed along to this day among their descendants, who are known as the Rabana.
""These people, the Cafanes, worshipped the same way the Indians did. They shared in the rituals and sacrifices, and taught the Indians new ones from their book. Everything went well for them until the priests came. They came to convert the Indians, but . . . ,"" he chuckled, ""the first to be sent here were converted themselves . . . when they saw the power of the conjurations from the book . . . and what the sea gods could actually do, something they could behold with their own eyes, not just accept by faith, they believed, and participated in the rituals of sacrifice. For this, they were punished by the Church.""
Now I understood the import of Rousseau's statement concerning the twelve priests who were blinded, mutilated, and imprisoned by the ecclesiastical authorities. A clearer, albeit terrible picture of San Facundo's secret past was taking shape in my mind. Here dwelt a tribe of Indians, probably believing themselves descended from ancient Atlanteans or some such. They had achieved a fairly high level of early civilization, then regressed to a primitive state, maintaining, through it all, a cult dedicated to the Ancient Ones, hoary and abominable entities from beyond all time and space as we humans understand those concepts.
At some later time, still long before their initial encounter with European civilization, the Indians had established contact with ancient and dreadful beings from the sea, beings that were dedicated, or bound, to the service of the Ancient Ones, especially to Kutulli. Much later, some of those same Indians had submitted to sexual congress with the sea creatures, and thus created a race of hybrids better able to function freely in the world of men. Eventually, this strange mixture had come to include certain apostate Jews, who, through their possession of the unspeakable Necronomicon, had come to share beliefs and practices almost identical to those of the Indians.
This ""Kutulli"" must certainly be the same as Cthulhu, who ""In his house in R'lyeh lies not dead but dreaming,"" according to Lovecraft's mythos. Incredible as it all seemed, that mythos seemed to be based, at least partly, on actual belief systems, and far more hideously, on actual occurrences. The implications filled me with a sense of primal horror and dread.
""You look pale, my friend. Perhaps the things I have told you are a little too much for your sensitivities."" Thus said Ramiro.
""The things you have told me,"" I answered, ""even if partially true, speak to man's worst and most primal fears. Merciful God, Ramiro! If this is true, then what implications does this have for the rest of us… for the very concept of humanity?""
That night I dreamed . . . dreamed horribly. I found myself standing before the strange black tower in the ruined city, though now it was not in ruins. The tower jutted up before me into the night sky. A great, gibbous moon gleamed overhead, casting its pallid light on the scene, which was also illuminated by the red glow of massive bonfires. I was aware of motion and the incessant throbbing of some huge drum. Presently, I saw that the tower was completely encircled by three concentric rings of celebrants, squat men and women with broad faces and prominent cheek bones, their straight hair matted and their naked bodies painted hideously from head to foot in red and black. Around and around the base of that menacing black truncated cone they leaped and whirled in their frenzied dance, to the obscene rhythm of that great unseen drum and to the high, monotonous whine of flutes. Some distance away, in the shadow of a hideous black idol, squatted others, hungrily gnawing the last shreds of bloody flesh from bones that I knew belonged to no four-footed beast. At that point I noticed the outermost ring of dancers, the one formed by other celebrants, those that hopped, flopped, and floundered about grotesquely, keeping time with the horrible thunderous beating of the drum and the maddening whine of flutes.
Suddenly, all was silent. An interval of time passed, impossible to measure in a dream state, and the drumming and piping began anew, this time accompanied by a strange low chanting that gradually rose to an almost deafening crescendo. The words, scarcely intelligible in themselves, seemed to reverberate in the very core of my brain: ""Ph-nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn."" Something compelled me to look high up, toward the rim of the tower. In the uncertain light and moving shadows I could make out that the rim was fashioned of a stone different from the rest of the edifice, something shiny and black, like onyx. It seemed to be covered with carvings. As the chanting reached an almost unbearable pitch, I saw several huge black snakelike objects rise out of the tower. Presently, these stretched out far in all directions, writhing in the night sky high above our heads. Then, something of singular horror took place: above the waving tentacles a sort of face seemed to be forming, or materializing. The head, in its upper part, suggested some grotesque parody of the human face, but below the eyes all similarity ceased. The lower part of this obscene visage consisted of a writhing mass of tentacle-like appendages surrounding a black gaping maw, I won't call it a mouth, from which drooled a nauseating yellowish ichor. As I stared paralyzed with horror at the blasphemous obscenity forming above the tower, I saw the hideous eyes look downward, focusing on me!
I awoke screaming in the predawn hours, bathed in cold, clammy sweat. My heart was pounding like the terrible drum which I had heard in my dream.

",False
"Spoonbill Village,
Northernmost Quang Binh Province, Socialist Republic of Vietnam
July 2, 2011
Two young adults walked up the path beside the bronze-casters shop to the barren hillside and the forest edge beyond. ""So, how do you like things so far?"" Marie asked as she and Joseph made their way up the rough-hewn stone steps. Their destination was the house of the village woodcutter and charcoal-burner, a place that also doubled as a furniture workshop and, importantly for this journey, the villages' firearms armory.
""Not that bad. I've been doing domestic work for the past few days but neither Noc nor his wife seems to really be a slave driver. Actually, they feel more like people who understand that they're training a new servant."" Joseph thought on something. ""I'm actually surprised that he and the other hunters allowing me to accompany them. They neither seem to respect me or anyone who would stoop to use a gun, so I wonder why they changed their attitude.""
It was here that Marie began ruminating on something, an old thought that had given her more than her share of bad dreams. ""There are some things worth surrendering pride for, Joseph. Tell me, have you seen those weird scars on the ankles and arms of Nocs wife?""
""You mean those marks that look like Giant Squid wounds? Yes, but what about them?"" Joseph suddenly stopped. ""What are they, anyway?""
Having stopped also, Marie sighed, a sense of foreboding covering her features. ""When I asked that myself, they didn't tell me much more than the stories I'd already heard when I was a kid: legends about ghosts, devils from the mist, 'shadows that drink blood' is what they called them sometimes. But what I got here is that those Shugoran priests that saved my people weren't just going to somewhere. They were running ifrom/i somewhere, someone or something, something that no one is willing to talk any further about."" Marie started forward again at such a pace that her boyfriend had to hurry to catch up.
Getting the feeling that nothing more was going to be answered on that subject for a good while, Joseph changed track. ""How are the others getting on? I've been stuck in the house most of the day and I haven't really had a chance to talk to either the Prof or my classmates.""
Happy to shift from thoughts of chilling horror, Marie chuckled with increasing mirth as she began going back up the trail. ""From what I've heard, Albert's been filming every step in the bronze making process that he can, not to mention all the casting processes and various uses of equipment. The only reason that he hasn't been thrown out yet is because the family's elder patriarch has taken a liking to… well, not just him, but all of you guys, just from the descriptions alone. Your Professor and his assistant have basically locked themselves in the temple: no word out yet, but I assume that they're observing normal operations. As for Tracy…"" Here, Marie began acting a little odd. ""She talks in her sleep, if you didn't know.""
""Really?"" Joseph responded interestedly. Not reacting the way that she had feared, Marie relaxed a little from the paranoia she had been wrangling with.
""Yeah, and the strange thing is that it's in… well, tree-ish. And then there's the tattooing on her back as well."" Marie went on talking, relieved that her fear seemed to have been senseless.
Before he could answer his girlfriends increasingly chatty descriptions, a thought crossed Josephs mind on exactly why such a thing might be mentioned. ""Why would you ask me if I knew…"" Then the realization hit him and he stopped cold. ""Were you thinking that… Tracy and I?""
Marie stopped as well. ""It's not unknown to happen, you know."" Marie answered the implied question almost defensively, as if trying to justify her momentary paranoia. ""Sweethearts get separated and sometimes… one finds companionship elsewhere. Especially with, you know."" Marie tapped the side of her head, indicating the ""visitors"" that had first cursed Joseph Claytons existence during High School.
Joseph snorted in an amused, disparaging way. ""Please don't give them that much credit. I've ignored, rebuked and insulted those jerks so many times that I've made a virtual bloodsport out of it. Besides, if I'd made any moves towards Tracy, Albert would have killed me.""
""Wait, those two… they're together?"" Marie asked, wondering how she'd missed that.
""Intimately so, yes."" This was all Joseph was willing to say, himself not wishing to examine too closely the memory of walking in on his dorm-mate and his girl when they had neglected to put a sock on the doorknob. ""Anyway, as to these voices, I went to the psychology department to see if I could discover just what was causing it.""
Marie waited a heartbeat before plunging into the vital question. ""And what did they say?"" If her boyfriend did indeed have Schizophrenia, then he needed help: drugs to control the symptoms and perhaps therapy to help him conquer whatever dark corners of his psyche were feeding these voices.
If it was something else… then perhaps the local sorcerers might need to be consulted before long.
Joseph sighed. 'Whatever is going on inside my head, the geeks with the scanning equipment are pretty sure that this isn't a case of medical Schizophrenia. They say that the symptoms are all wrong, the voices aren't persuasive enough… and that I don't have any of the telltale injuries on the brain that would suggest medical reasons. And then there was the time they hooked me up to the EEG during one of my 'episodes'."" He paused, wondering just how to proceed but, since he was already experiencing strange things, he decided just to press on. ""The guys swore that, before the equipment shorted out, at least two additional wavelengths were being read beside mine."" With a shrug, Joseph summed up his thoughts. ""Ever since I came here and heard all of the seemingly crazy stories from you and the others… I don't know, but what I've gone through just makes sense now, at least in knowing that it actually can happen.""
Marie smiled. Yes, we definitely need to consult the priests. ""Come on, we've talked enough and you need to get that rifle before you head out.""
And rifles there were, all secured inside a triple locked room in the back corner of the woodcutter's house. They looked like Berthier carbines, French bolt-action repeaters from the First World War… but they were not the only guns present. ""Is that a Hotchkiss?"" Joseph asked in a voice combining bemusement and astonishment. Among the rifles and a few, scattered revolvers sat a machine-gun still on its tripod and looking impossibly well-maintained for being kept in the back room of a house located in a tropical moist forest.
""An M1914 by the looks of it, if the pictures I've seen are at all accurate. There's a story behind it, but I only know that only the oldest elders know it."" Marie replied, having picked up of the Berthier Carbines and handing it to Joseph. The ammunition was kept in a chest under a trapdoor in the main part of the house as a safety measure so they'd have to go back to pick it up. But then she asked the question that she probably should have asked before they left the village proper. ""Speaking of guns, since when did you shoot?""
""There's a gun range in Arkham; Tracy and Albert invited me along for a few lessons before Thanksgiving. She's the one with actual hunting experience and I think he only came along to check out the engineering on the pieces. It wasn't that much fun, but I think what I learned in getting my license will help on this."" Joseph began inspecting the carbine he had been given, finding it oiled and well-maintained as any other firearm in the room. There was a question that had to be asked, however?
Where did they get all these guns?
b15 minutes Later/b
Marie walked up the stairs to her grandparent's house. She was supposed to act as a translator and informant for the expedition, having prior contacts inside the community and being a member first by blood and more recently by initiation. Truth be told, she had a feeling that old Tsan was really acting as gatekeeper in his interactions with Professor Andover while she was playing the part of a more convenient and mobile ambassador, Tsan having never left the temple save by palanquin in almost forty years.
Walking in the door, Marie was unprepared for another surprise. She saw Tracy sitting before the camera as her Grandmother and Aunt watched, waiting to begin filming the day's questions and activities, even making a short introductory statement... but not in English.
""And as soon as the translator gets here, we'll begin the second day of... Hey Marie, you almost scared me there."" Here was an audible note of guilt as Tracy hastily switched from the strange language that she had been using to the carefully modulated, Patsy Cline-accented English she had used since Marie had met her. Marie had heard it, and Tracy knew that she had heard... and Marie knew that Tracy knew.
""Yeah, I've gotten that reaction a few times since I got here."" Marie joked, knowing that humor had the power to break tension. ""So... what language were you speaking in anyway? I'm afraid I didn't recognize anything about it."" Her female elders watched closely, knowing that something had happened but being ignorant of other languages, were unsure of exactly what.
Tracy grinned bitterly. ""I'd be more surprised if you did recognize it. It's... well, it's not really a language per se, but a patois of a couple languages, with Early Modern English, Ohio Valley Shawnee, Coastal Algonquian, some Iroquoian loanwords having to do with ritual and bits of Eastern Siouan."" Tracy let out the deep breath she had been using to list all those languages. She was getting more comfortable now. ""I guess it won't do any harm if I told you, seeing as we're almost in the same boat.""
Tracy beckoned Marie to sit, turning off the camera as she did. ""The kids in my town learn it... well, sort of as a first language; English is really more of a first-and-a-half language for us. We got exposed to it through TV and then when we went to school, but most of our formative years were spent listening to and absorbing the patois around the house. Most of us never really let go of it as a language for our own private conversations.""
Marie reflected on this... but was also noting some of the features on Tracy's face: the high, rounded cheeks, her high-bridged nose, the way that her eyes were less the bright crystal blue of stereotype and more of a dark, cloudy blue resembling ultramarine. ""I hope you don't mind me saying this, Tracy but does your family have any Native American ancestry? I don't mean to pry, but you do kind of have the look.""
Tracy considered this for a moment before giving an affirmative nod. ""My father's paternal grandmother was from the Oklahoma Kiowa. My mother, as far as can be traced, is also about an eighth, this time one-eighth Shawnee, which seems to be the median for Longhouse."" She got an odd, contemplative look on my face. ""That's another one of those things that we try not to mention to outsiders, even though they tend to notice it anyway. Back in the old days, admitting it would have been a quick ticket to using a segregated washroom or worse. And now?"" Tracy shrugged. ""Now it's considered cool, while the inbreeding still makes us look like freaks.""
Marie decided to test something, just for her own sake. ""Albert doesn't seem to think you're a freak."" The more she thought about it, she had more in common with Tracy than first realized. Both of them had lived life right on the edge of themselves and their kin being recognized as something other, something foreign to the perceived natural order of the world. Both of them could sense the threat of possible revelation... and knew what it was to try to trust someone with these secrets.
""Hey, you're talking about a guy whose family has worked for alien mushroom bugs for the last hundred years. A bit of mild inbreeding is probably the most normal thing Al's ever experienced."" Here there was definitely affection to her voice, a cue that no matter what other strangeness they were involved in, there was a loving relationship between the two.
At this thought Marie smiled, thanking the ancestors for a little bit of normalcy in this year-long cavalcade of oddities that she had flung herself into. Then another question sprang forth. ""Did you know about the whole alien thing when you guys were at Miskatonic?""
Tracy shook her head. ""No, but then again, he was always kinda spacey."" Marie couldn't help but giggle at this bad pun. Tracy went on, the affection still in her voice. ""Seriously, the thing about Miskatonic is that, after awhile, you begin getting the feeling that almost everyone else is holding something close to their chest, thinking each word over before saying it. It's then that you realize that... you're not alone, that almost everyone else is as paranoid as you are, having something to hide."" She looked towards Marie. ""Everyone except for your Joseph, that is. The only thing strange about him that I noticed was that romance was nowhere on his radar at all.""
""You'd be surprised, actually."" Marie answered cryptically. Before Tracy could ask, she turned back the camera back on, signaling the beginning of the interview session.
That evening
Sweaty, hot, dirty and exhausted, Joseph Clayton exited the forest with Noc and the other hunters. Between all of them, the hunters had brought down a Sambar stag and three small muntjacs. Joseph, for his part, had escaped being gored by a wild boar only by dodging its charge, rolling into a hollow under a log and then shooting it in the head at point-blank range when it tried to go after him. For this feat, the hunters designated him ""master of the pit"" when they roasted it at tonight's feast. It had sounded like an honorable title, but Joseph could guess that they were making him little more than a cook, a traditionally female position.
Still, it was an in and it would probably be research gold.
He was entirely less enthusiastic about what else was coming back with them.
When he and the group of hunters came into the village proper, he saw Marie and the taller, paler form of Tracy coming towards him, having been up on the family terrace transplanting rice seedlings. Due to her fair skin, Tracy was wearing the largest hat she could while her arms and shins had been slathered with sunblock. Marie had already taken hers off.
As they neared him, Marie slowed to a stop, seeing the grim look on Josephs face. Tracy looked at her in confusion, then at Joseph and from his stony face understood that something was wrong. ""What is it?"" Marie asked her boyfriend.
Joseph sighed. ""When the hunters brought us in, were we supposed to be for any kind of important sacrifice?""
""Well, the Rhinoceros Festival is supposed to happen any day now. It's when we recharge the mist that surrounds the village to keep us hidden."" Marie looked around Joseph to where one of the hunters was leading a group of people into the village. They looked like quite a bedraggled bunch, many of them thin and in questionable health. There were also two women who may have been considered beautiful if not for the look in their eyes that they had been through several levels of hell before coming here.
But for all these conditions, they did not look frightened of their tattooed guides.
Noticing where Marie was looking, Joseph offered explanation. ""We met up with them about a mile down the trail. Apparently the government sent up street people as some fresh blood for you guys. And that's not all. Apparently..."" Here, he lowered his voice ""One of the families that were living incognito in Vinh got killed a few nights ago: Father, mother, twelve year old boy... from what I heard it sounded like some sort of animal tore them up inside their apartment... and no blood was spilled.""
Tracy looked like she was going to vomit at the news, while a look of dread overcame Marie, as old legends came forth out of the terrifying mist of childhood nightmare to become shadows in the waking world. ""Is there anything else?"" Marie asked quietly.
Now it was Joseph's turn to look back at the party coming out of the forest, which were now carrying a man by his hands and feet on a pole, his mouth gagged and his eyes blindfolded. ""Only that they also sent you a sacrifice. From what they said, he's a drug-runner, sexual slaver and a general bad example of low-level underworld scum.""
Marie, still in shock over the news of the murders, was perhaps not picking and choosing the words coming out of her mouth. ""Which mean he's gonna taste worse than the fish sauce.""
At these words, both gruesome and almost ridiculous, both her lover and her friend goggled at her.
","YAR AM squinted carefully down the blue barrel of his Lee-Enfield, called devoutly on Allah and sent a bullet through the brain of a flying rider.
""Allaho akbar!""
The big Afghan shouted in glee, waving his weapon above his head, ""God is great! By Allah, sahib, I have sent another one of the dogs to Hell!""
His companion peered cautiously over the rim of the sand-pit they had scooped with their hands. He was a lean and wiry American, Steve Clarney by name.
""Good work, old horse,"" said this person. ""Four left. Look—they're drawing off.""
The white-robed horsemen were indeed reining away, clustering together just out of accurate rifle-range, as if in council. There had been seven when they had first swooped down on the comrades, but the fire from the two rifles in the sand-pit had been deadly.
""Look, sahib—they abandon the fray!""
Yar Ali stood up boldly and shouted taunts at the departing riders, one of whom whirled and sent a bullet that kicked up sand thirty feet in front of the pit.
""They shoot like the sons of dogs,"" said Yar Ali in complacent self- esteem. ""By Allah, did you see that rogue plunge from his saddle as my lead went home? Up, sahib; let us run after them and cut them down!""
Paying no attention to this outrageous proposal—for he knew it was but one of the gestures Afghan nature continually demands—Steve rose, dusted off his breeches and gazing after the riders, now white specks far out on the desert, said musingly: ""Those fellows ride as if they had some set purpose in mind—not a bit like men running from a licking.""
""Aye,"" agreed Yar Ali promptly and seeing nothing inconsistent with his present attitude and recent bloodthirsty suggestion, ""they ride after more of their kind—they are hawks who give up their prey not quickly. We had best move our position quickly, Steve sahib. They will come back—maybe in a few hours, maybe in a few days—it all depends on how far away lies the oasis of their tribe. But they will be back. We have guns and lives—they want both. And behold.""
The Afghan levered out the empty shell and slipped a single cartridge into the breech of his rifle.
""My last bullet, sahib.""
Steve nodded. ""I've got three left.""
The raiders whom their bullets had knocked from the saddle had been looted by their own comrades. No use searching the bodies which lay in the sand for ammunition. Steve lifted his canteen and shook it. Not much water remained. He knew that Yar Ali had only a little more than he, though the big Afridi, bred in a barren land, had used and needed less water than did the American; although the latter, judged from a white man's standards, was hard and tough as a wolf. As Steve unscrewed the canteen cap and drank very sparingly, he mentally reviewed the chain of events that had led them to their present position.
Wanderers, soldiers of fortune, thrown together by chance and attracted to each other by mutual admiration, he and Yar Ali had wandered from India up through Turkistan and down through Persia, an oddly assorted but highly capable pair. Driven by the restless urge of inherent wanderlust, their avowed purpose —which they swore to and sometimes believed themselves—was the accumulation of some vague and undiscovered treasure, some pot of gold at the foot of some yet unborn rainbow.
Then in ancient Shiraz they had heard of the Fire of Asshurbanipal. From the lips of an ancient Persian trader, who only half believed what he repeated to them, they heard the tale that he in turn had heard from the babbling lips of delirium, in his distant youth. He had been a member of a caravan, fifty years before, which, wandering far on the southern shore of the Persian Gulf trading for pearls, had followed the tale of a rare pearl far into the desert.
The pearl, rumored found by a diver and stolen by a shaykh of the interior, they did not find, but they did pick up a Turk who was dying of starvation, thirst and a bullet wound in the thigh. As, he died in delirium, he babbled a wild tale of a silent dead city of black stone set in the drifting sands of the desert far to the westward, and of a flaming gem clutched in the bony fingers of a skeleton on an ancient throne.
He had not dared bring it away with him, because of an overpowering brooding horror that haunted the place, and thirst had driven him into the desert again, where Bedouins had pursued and wounded him. Yet he had escaped, riding hard until his horse fell under him. He died without telling how he had reached the mythical city in the first place, but the old trader thought he must have come from the northwest—a deserter from the Turkish army, making a desperate attempt to reach the Gulf.
The men of the caravan had made no attempt to plunge still further into the desert in search of the city; for, said the old trader, they believed it to be the ancient, ancient City of Evil spoken of in the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Alhazred—the city of the dead on which an ancient curse rested. Legends named it vaguely: the Arabs called it Beled-el-Djinn, the City of Devils, and the Turks, Karashehr, the Black City. And the gem was that ancient and accursed jewel belonging to a king of long ago, whom the Grecians called Sardanapalus and the Semitic peoples Asshurbanipal.
Steve had been fascinated by the tale. Admitting to himself that it was doubtless one of the ten thousand cock-and-bull myths booted about the East, still there was a possibility that he and Yar Ali had stumbled onto a trace of that pot, of rainbow gold for which they searched. And Yar Ali had heard hints before of a silent city of the sands; tales had followed the eastbound caravans over the high Persian uplands and across the sands of Turkistan, into the mountain country and beyond—vague tales; whispers of a black city of the djinn, deep in the hazes of a haunted desert.
So, following the trail of the legend, the companions had tome from Shiraz to a village on the Arabian shore of the Persian Gulf, and there had heard more from an old man who had been a pearl-driver in his youth. The loquacity of age was on him and he told tales repeated to him by wandering tribesmen who had them in turn from the wild nomads of the deep interior; and again Steve and Yar Ah heard of the still black city with giant beasts carved of stone, and the skeleton sultan who held the blazing gem.
And so, mentally swearing at himself for a fool, Steve had made the plunge, and Yar Ali, secure in the knowledge that all things lay on the lap of Allah, had come with him. Their scanty supply of money had been just sufficient to provide riding-camels and provisions for a bold flying invasion of the unknown. Their only chart had been the vague rumors that placed the supposed location of Kara-Shehr.
There had been days of hard travel, pushing the beasts and conserving water and food. Then, deep in the desert they invaded, they had encountered a blinding sand-wind in which they had lost the camels. After that came long miles of staggering through the sands, battered by a flaming sun, subsisting on rapidly dwindling water from their canteens, and food Yar Ali had in a pouch. No thought of finding the mythical city now. They pushed on blindly, in hope of stumbling upon a spring; they knew that behind them no oases lay within a distance they could hope to cover on foot. It was a desperate chance, but their only one.
Then white-clad hawks had swooped down on them, out of the haze of the skyline, and from a shallow and hastily scooped trench the adventurers had exchanged shots with the wild riders who circled them at top speed. The bullets of the Bedouins had skipped through their makeshift fortifications, knocking dust into their eyes and flicking bits of cloth from their garments, but by good chance neither had been hit.
Their one bit of luck, reflected Clarney, as he cursed himself for a fool. What a mad venture it had been, anyway! To think that two men could so dare the desert and live, much less wrest from its abvsmal bosom the secrets of the ages! And that crazy tale of a skeleton hand gripping a flaming jewel in a dead city-bosh! What utter rot! He must have been crazy himself to credit it, the American decided with the clarity of view that suffering and danger bring.
""Well, old horse,"" said Steve, lifting his rifle, ""let's get going. It's a toss-up if we die of thirst or get sniped off by the desert-brothers. Anyway, we're doin' no good here.""
""God gives,"" agreed Yar Ali cheerfully. ""The sun sinks westward. Soon the coolness of night will be upon us. Perhaps we shall find water yet, sabib. Look, the terrain changes to the south.""
Clarney shaded his eyes against the dying sun. Beyond a level, barren expanse of several miles width, the land did indeed become more broken; aborted hills were in evidence. The American slung his rifle over his arm and sighed.
""Heave ahead; we're food for the buzzards anyhow.""
The sun sank and the moon rose, flooding the desert with weird silver light. Drifted sand glimmered in long ripples, as if a sea had suddenly been frozen into immobility. Steve, parched fiercely by a thirst he dared not fully quench, cursed beneath his breath. The desert was beautiful beneath the moon, with the beauty of a cold marble lorelei to lure men to destruction. What a mad quest! his weary brain reiterated; the Fire of Asshurbanipal retreated into the mazes of unreality with each dragging step. The desert became not merely a material wasteland, but the gray mists of the lost eons, in whose depths dreamed sunken things.
Clarney stumbled and swore; was he failing already? Yar Ali swung along with the easy, tireless stride of the mountain man, and Steve set his teeth, nerving himself to greater effort. They were entering the broken country at last, and the going became harder. Shallow gullies and narrow ravines knifed 'the earth with wavering patterns. Most of them were nearly filled with sand, and there was no trace of water.
""This country was once oasis country,"" commented Yar Ali. ""Allah knows how many centuries ago the sand took it, as the sand has taken so many cities in TurkiStan.""
They swung on like dead men in a gray land of death.
The moon grew red and sinister as she sank, and shadowy darkness settled over the desert before they had reached a point where they could see what lay beyond the broken belt. Even the big Afghan's feet began to drag, and Steve kept himself erect only by a savage effort of will. At last they toiled up a sort of ridge, on the southern side of which the land sloped downward.
""We rest,"" declared Steve. ""There's no water in this hellish country. No use in goin' on for ever. My legs are stiff as gun-barrels. I couldn't take another step to save my neck. Here's a kind of stunted cliff, about as high as a man's shoulder, facing south. We'll sleep in the lee of it.
""And shall we not keep watch, Steve sahib?""
""We don't,"" answered Steve. ""If the Arabs cut our throats while we're asleep, so much the better. We're goners anyhow.""
With which optimistic observation Clarney lay down stiffly in the deep sand. But Yar Ali stood, leaning forward, straining his eyes into the elusive darkness that turned the star-flecked horizons to murky wells of shadow.
""Something lies on the skyline to the south,"" he muttered uneasily. ""A hill? I cannot tell, or even be sure that I see anything at all.""
""You're seeing mirages already,"" said Steve irritably. ""Lie down and sleep.""
And so saying Steve slumbered.
The sun in his eves awoke him. He sat up, yawning, and his first sensation was that of thirst. He lifted his canteen and wet his lips. One drink left. Yar Ali still slept. Steve's eves wandered over the southern horizon and he started. He kicked the recumbent Afghan.
""Hey, wake up, Ali. I reckon you weren't seeing things after all. There's your hill—and a queer-lookin' one, too.""
The Afridi woke as a wild thing wakes, instantly and completely, his hand leaping to his long knife as he glared about for enemies. His gaze followed Steve's pointing fingers and his eves widened.
""By Allah and by Allah!"" he swore. ""We have come into a land of djinn! That is no hill—it is a city of stone in the midst of the sands!""
Steve bounded to his feet like a steel spring released. As he gazed with bated breath, a fierce shout escaped his lips. At his feet the slope of the ridge ran down into a wide and level expanse of sand that stretched away southward. And far away, across those sands, to his straining sight the 'hill' slowly took shape, like a mirage growing from the drifting sands.
He saw great uneven walls, massive battlements; all about crawled the sands like a living, sensate thing, drifted high about the walls, softening the rugged outlines. No wonder that at first glance the whole had appeared like a hill.
""Kara-Shehr!"" Clarney exclaimed fiercely. ""Beled-el-Djinn! The city of the dead! It wasn't a pipe-dream after all! We've found it—by Heaven, we've found it! Come on! Let's go!""
Yar Ali shook his head uncertainly and muttered something about evil djinn under his breath, but he followed. The sight of the ruins had swept from Steve his thirst and hunger, and the fatigue that a few hours' sleep had not fully overcome. He trudged on swiftly, oblivious to the rising heat, his eyes gleaming with the lust of the explorer. It was not altogether greed for the fabled gem that had prompted Steve Clarney to risk his life in that grim wilderness; deep in his soul lurked the age-old heritage of the white man, the urge to seek out the hidden places of the world, and that urge had been stirred to the depths by the ancient tales.
Now as they crossed the level wastes that separated the broken land from the city, they saw—the shattered walls take clearer form and shape, as if they grew out of the morning sky. The city seemed built of huge blocks of black stone, but how high the walls had been there was no telling because of the sand that drifted high about their base; in many places they had fallen away and the sand hid the fragments entirely.
The sun reached her zenith and thirst intruded itself in spite of zeal and enthusiasm, but Steve fiercely mastered his suffering. His lips were parched and swollen, but fie would not take that last drink until he had reached the ruined city. Yar Ali wet his lips from his own canteen and tried to share the remainder with his friend. Steve shook his head and plodded on.
In the ferocious heat of the desert afternoon they reached the ruin, and passing through a wide breach in the crumbling wall, gazed on the dead city. Sand choked the ancient streets and lent fantastic form to huge, fallen and half-hidden columns. So crumbled into decay and so covered with sand was the whole that the explorers could make out little of the original plan of the city; now it was but a waste of drifted sand and crumbling stone over which brooded, like an invisible cloud, an aura of unspeakable antiquity.
But directly in front of them ran a broad avenue, the outline of which not even the ravaging sands and winds of time had been able to efface. On either side of the wide way were ranged huge columns, not unusually tall, even allowing for the sand that hid their bases, but incredibly massive. On the top of each column stood a figure carved from solid stone—great, somber images, half human, half bestial, partaking of the brooding brutishness of the whole city. Steve cried out in amazement.
""The winged bulls of Nineveh. The bulls with men's heads! By the saints, AH, the old tales are true! The Assyrians did build this city! The whole tale's true! They must have come here when the Babylonians destroved Assyriawhy, this scene's a dead ringer for pictures I've seen—reconstructed scenes of old Nineveh! And look!""
He pointed down the broad street to the great building which reared at the other end, a colossal, brooding edifice whose columns and walls of solid black stone blocks defied the winds and sands of time. The drifting, obliterating sea washed about its foundations, overflowing into its doorways, but it would require a thousand years to inundate the whole structure.
""An abode of devils!"" muttered Yar Ali, uneasily.
""The temple of Baal!"" exclaimed Steve. ""Come on!—I was afraid we'd find all the palaces and temples hidden by the sand and have to dig for the gem.""
""Little good it will do us,"" muttered Yar Ali. ""Here we die.""
""I reckon so."" Steve unscrewed the cap of his canteen. ""Let's take our last drink. Anyway, we're safe from the Arabs. Thev'd never dare come here, with their superstitions. We'll drink and then we'll die, I reckon, but first we'll find the jewel. When I pass out, I want to have it in my hand. Mavbe a few centuries later some lucky son-of-a-gun will find our skeletons—and the gem. Here's to him, whoever he is!""
With which grim jest Clarney drained his canteen and Yar Ali followed suit. They had played their last ace; the rest lay on the lap of Allah.
They strode up the broad way, and Yar Ali, utterly fearless in the face of human foci, glanced nervously to tight and left, half expecting to see a horned and fantastic face leering at him from behind a column. Steve him felt the somber antiquity of the place, and almost found himself fearing a rush of bronze war chariots down the forgotten streets, or to hear the sudden menacing flare of bronze trumpets. The silence in dead cities was' so much more intense, he reflected, than that on the open desert.
They came to the portals of the great temple. Rows of immense columns flanked the wide doorway, which was ankledeep in sand, and from which sagged massive bronze frameworks that had once braced mighty doors, whose polished woodwork had rotted away centuries ago. They passed into a mighty hall of misty twilight whose shadowy stone roof was upheld by columns like the trunks of forest trees. The whole effect of the architecture was one of awesome magnitude and sullen, breathtaking splendor, like a temple built by somber giants for the abode of dark gods.
Yar-Ali walked fearfully, as if he expected to awake sleeping gods, and Steve, without the Afridi's superstitions, yet felt the gloomy majesty of the place lay somber hands on his soul.
No trace of a footprint showed in the deep dust on the floor; half a century had passed since the affrighted and devilridden Turk had fled these silent halls. As for the Bedouins, it was easy to see why those superstitious sons of the desert shunned this haunted city—and haunted it was, not by actual ghosts, perhaps, but by the shadows of lost splendors.
As they trod the sands of the hall, which seemed endless, Steve pondered many questions: How did these fugitives from the wrath of frenzied rebels build this city? How did they pass through the country of their foes—for Babylonia lay between Assyria and the Arabian desert. Yet there had been no other place for them to go; westward lay Syria and the sea, and north and east swarmed the 'dangerous Medes', those fierce Aryans whose aid had stiffened the arm of Babylon to smite her foe to the dust.
Possibly, thought Steve, Kara-Shehr—whatever its name had been in those dim days—had been built as an outpost border city before the fall of the Assyrian empire, whither survivals of that overthrow fled. At any rate it was possible that Kara-Shehr had outlasted Nineveh by some centuries—a strange, hermit city, no doubt, cut off from the rest of the world.
Surely, as Yar Ali had said, this was once fertile country, watered by oases; and doubtless in the broken country they had passed over the night before, there had been quarries that furnished the stone for the building of the city.
Then what caused its downfall? Did the encroachment of the sands and the filling up of the springs cause the people to abandon it, or was Kara-Shehr a city of silence before the sands crept over the walls? Did the downfall come from within or without? Did civil war blot out the inhabitants, or were they slaughtered by some powerful foe from the desert? Clarney shook his head in baffled chagrin. The answers to those questions were lost in—the maze of forgotten ages.
""Allaho akbar!"" They had traversed the great shadowy hall and at its further end they came upon a hideous black stone altar, behind which loomed an ancient god, bestial and horrific. Steve shrugged his shoulders as he recognized the monstrous aspect of the image—aye, that teas Baal, on which black altar in other ages many a screaming, writhing, naked victim had offered up its naked soul. The idol embodied in its utter, abysmal and sullen bestiality the whole soul of this demoniac city. Surely, thought Steve, the builders of Nineveh and Kara-Shehr were cast in another mold from the people of today. Their art and culture were too ponderous, too grimly Barren of the lighter aspects of humanity, to be wholly human, as modern man understands humanity.
Their architecture was repellent; of high skill, yet so massive, sullen and brutish in effect as to be almost beyond the comprehension of moderns.
The adventurers passed through a narrow door which opened in the end of the hall close to the idol, and came into a series of wide, dim, dusty chambers connected by column-flanked corridors. Along these they strode in the gray ghostly light, and came at last to a wide stair, whose massive stone steps led upward and vanished in the gloom. Here Yar Ali halted.
""We have dared much, sahib,"" he muttered. ""Is it wise to dare more?""
Steve, aquiver with eagerness, yet understood the Afghan's mind. ""You mean we shouldn't, go up those stairs?""
""They have an evil look. To what chambers of silence and horror may they lead? When djinn haunt deserted buildings, they lurk in the upper chambers. At any moment a demon may bite off our heads.""
""We're dead men anyhow,"" grunted Steve. ""But I tell you—you go on back through the hall and watch for the Arabs while I go upstairs.""
""Watch for a wind on the horizon,"" responded the Afghan gloomily, shifting his rifle and loosening his long knife in its scabbard. ""No Bedouin comes here. Lead on, sahib. Thou'rt mad after the manner of all Franks,—but I would not leave thee to face the djinn alone.""
So the companions mounted the massive stairs, their feet sinking deep into the accumulated dust of centuries at each step. Up and up they went, to an incredible height until the depths below merged into a vague gloom.
""We walk blind to our doom, sahib,"" muttered Yar Ali. ""Allah il allah —and Muhammad is his Prophet! Nevertheless, I feel the presence of slumbering Evil and never again shall I hear the wind blowing up the Khyber Pass.""
Steve made no reply. He did not like the breathless silence that brooded over the ancient temple, nor the grisly gray light that filtered from some hidden source.
Now above them the gloom lightened somewhat and they emerged into a vast circular chamber, grayly illumined by light that filtered in through the high, pierced ceiling. But another radiance lent itself to the illumination. A cry burst from Steve's lips, echoed by Yar Ali.
Standing on the top step of the broad stone stair, they looked directly across the broad chamber, with its dustcovered heavy tile floor and bare black stone walls. From about the center of the chamber, massive steps led up to a stone dais, and on this dais stood a marble throne. About this throne glowed and shimmered an uncanny light, and the awestruck adventurers gasped as they saw its source. On the throne slumped a human skeleton, an almost shapeless mass of moldering bones. A fleshless hand sagged outstretched upon the broad marble throne-arm, and in its grisly clasp there pulsed and throbbed like a living thing, a great crimson stone.
The Fire of Asshurbanipal! Even after they had found the lost city Steve had not really allowed himself to believe that they would find the gem, or that it even existed in reality. Yet he could not doubt the evidence of his eyes, dazzled by that evil, incredible glow. With a fierce shout he sprang across the chamber and up the steps. Yar All was at his heels, but when Steve would have seized the gem, the Afghan laid a hand on his arm.
""Wait!"" exclaimed the big Muhammadan. ""Touch it not yet, sahib! A curse lies on ancient things—and surely this is a thing triply accursed! Else why has it lain here untouched in a country of thieves for so many centuries? It is not well to disturb the possessions of the dead.""
""Bosh!"" snorted the American. ""Superstitions! The Bedouins were scared by the tales that have come down to 'em from their ancestors. Being desert- dwellers they mistrust cities anyway, and no doubt this one had an evil reputation in its lifetime. And nobody except Bedouins have seen this place before, except that Turk, who was probably half demented with suffering.
""These bones may be those of the king mentioned in the legend—the dry desert air preserves such things indefinitelybut I doubt it. May be Assyrian—most likely Arab—some beggar that got the gem and then died on that throne for some reason or other.""
The Afghan scarcely heard him. He was gazing in fearful fascination at the great stone, as a hypnotized bird stares into a serpent's eye.
""Look at it, sahib!"" he whispered. ""What is it? No such gem as this was ever cut by. mortal hands! Look how it throbs and pulses like the heart of a cobra!""
Steve was looking, and he was aware of a strange undefined feeling of uneasiness. Well versed in the knowledge of precious stones, he had never seen a stone like this. At first glance he had supposed it to be a monster ruby, as told in the legends. Now he was not sure, and he had a nervous feeling that Yar Ali was right, that this was no natural, normal gem: He could not classify the style in which it was cut, and such was the power of its lurid radiance that he found it difficult to gaze at it closely for any length of time. The whole setting was not one calculated to soothe restless nerves. The deep dust on the floor suggested an unwholesome antiquity; the gray light evoked a sense of unreality, and the heavy black walls towered grimly, hinting at hidden things.
""Let's take the stone, and go!"" muttered Steve, an unaccustomed panicky dread rising in his bosom.
""Wait!"" Yar Ali's eyes were blazing, and he gazed, not at the gem, but at the sullen stone walls. ""We are flies in the lair of the spider! Sahib, as Allah lives, it is more than the ghosts of old fears that lurk over this city of horror! I feel the presence of peril, as I have felt it before—as I felt it in a jungle cavern where a python lurked unseen in—the darkness —as I felt it in the temple of Thuggee where the hidden stranglers of Siva crouched to spring upon us—as I feel it now, tenfold!""
Steve's hair prickled. He knew that Yar All was a grim veteran, not to be stampeded by silly fear or senseless panic; he well remembered the incidents referred to by the Afghan, as he remembered other occasions upon which Yar Ali's Oriental telepathic instinct had warned him of danger before that danger was seen or heard.
""What is it, Yar Ali?"" he whispered.
The Afghan shook his head, his eyes filled with a weird mysterious light as he listened to the dim occult promptings of his subconsciousness.
""I know not; I know it is close to us, and that it is very ancient and very evil. I think—"" Suddenly he halted and wheeled, the eery light vanishing from his eyes to be replaced by a glare of wolf-like fear and suspicion.
""Hark, sahib!"" he snapped. ""Ghosts or dead men mount the stair!""
Steve stiffened as the stealthy pad of soft sandals on stone reached his ear.
""By Judas, Ali!"" he rapped; ""something's out there—""
The ancient walls re-echoed to a chorus of wild yells as a horde of savage figures flooded the chamber. For one dazed insane instant Steve believed wildly that they were being attacked by re-embodied warriors of a vanished age; then the spiteful crack of a bullet past his ear and the acrid smell of powder told him that their foes were material enough. Clarney cursed; in their fancied security—they had been caught like rats in a trap by the pursuing Arabs.
Even as the American threw up his rifle, Yar Ali fired point-blank from the hip with deadly effect, hurled his empty rifle into the horde and went down the steps like a hurricane, his three-foot Khyber knife shimmering in his hairv hand. Into his gusto for battle went real relief that his foes were human. A bullet ripped the turban from his head, but an Arab went down with a split skull beneath the hillman's first, shearing stroke.
A tall Bedouin clapped his gun-muzzle to the Afghan's side, but before he could pull the trigger, Clarney's bullet scattered his brains. The very number of the attackers hindered their onslaught on the big Afridi, whose tigerish quickness made shooting as dangerous to themselves as to him. The bulk of them swarmed about him, striking with scimitar and rifle-stock while others charged up the steps after Steve. At that range there was no missing; the American simply thrust his rifle muzzle into a bearded face and blasted it into a ghastly ruin. The others came on, screaming like panthers.
And now as he prepared to expend his last cartridge, Clarney saw two things in one flashing instant—a wild warrior who, with froth on his beard and a heavy simitar uplifted, was almost upon him, and another who knelt on the floor drawing a careful bead on the plunging Yar Ali. Steve made an instant choice and fired over the shoulder of the charging swordsman, killing the rifleman—and voluntarily offering his own life for his friend's; for the scimitar was swinging at his own head. But even as the Arab swung, grunting with the force of the blow, his sandaled foot slipped on the marble steps and the curved blade, veering erratically from its arc, clashed on Steve's rifle-barrel. In an instant the American clubbed his rifle, and as the Bedouin recovered his balance and again heaved up the scimitar, Clarnev struck with all his rangy power, and stock and skull shattered together.
Then a heavy ball smacked into his shoulder, sickening him with the shock.
As he staggered dizzily, a Bedouin whipped a turbancloth about his feet and jerked viciously. Clarney pitched headlong down the steps, to strike with stunning force. A gun-stock in a brown hand went up to dash out his brains, but an imperious command halted the blow.
""Slay him not, but bind him hand and foot.""
As Steve struggled dazedly against many gripping hands, it seemed to him that somewhere he had heard that imperious voice before.
The American's downfall had occurred in a matter of seconds. Even as Steve's second shot had cracked, Yar Ali had half severed a raider's arm and himself received a numbing blow from a rifle-stock on his left shoulder. His sheepskin coat, worn despite the desert heat, saved his hide from half a dozen slashing knives. A rifle was discharged so close to his face that the powder burnt him fiercely, bringing a bloodthirsty yell from the maddened Afghan. As Yar Ali swung up his dripping blade the rifleman, ashy-faced, lifted his rifle above his head in both hands to parry the downward blow, whereat the Afridi, with a yelp of ferocious exultation, shifted as a junglecat strikes and plunged his long knife into the Arab's belly. But at that instant a rifle-stock, swung with all the hearty ill-will its wielder could evoke, crashed against the giant's head, laying open the scalp and dashing him to his knees.
With the dogged and silent ferocity of his breed, Yar Ali staggered blindly up again, slashing at foes he could scarcely see, but a storm of blows battered him down again, nor did his attackers cease beating him until he lay still. They would have finished him in short order then, but for another peremptory order from their chief; whereupon they bound the senseless knife-man and flung him down alongside Steve, who was fully conscious and aware of the savage hurt of the bullet in his shoulder.
He glared up at the tall Arab who stood looking down at him.
""Well, sabib,"" said this one—and Steve saw he was no Bedouin —""do you not remember me?""
Steve scowled; a bullet-wound is no aid to concentration.
""You look familiar—by Judas!—you are! Nureddin El Mekru!""
""I am honored! The sahib remembers!"" Nureddin salaamed mockingly. ""And you remember, no doubt, the occasion on which you made me a present of—this!""
The dark eyes shadowed with bitter menace and the shaykh indicated a thin white scar on the angle of his jaw...
""I remember,"" snarled Clarney, whom pain and anger did not tend to make docile. ""It was in Somaliland, years ago. You were in the slave-trade then. A wretch of a nigger escaped from you and took refuge with me. You walked into my camp one night in your high-handed way, started a row and in the ensuing scrap you got a butcher-knife across your face. I wish I'd cut your lousy throat.""
""You had your chance,"" answered the Arab. ""Now the tables are turned.""
""I thought your stamping-ground lay west,"" growled Clarney; ""Yemen and the Somali country.""
""I quit the slave-trade long ago,"" answered the shaykh. ""It is an outworn game. I led a band of thieves in Yemen for a time; then again I was forced to change my location. I came here with a few faithful followers, and by Allah, those wild men nearly slit my throat at first. But I overcame their suspicions, and now I lead more men than have followed me in years.
""They whom you fought off yesterday were my men—scouts I had sent out ahead. My oasis lies far to the west. We have ridden for many days, for I was on my way to this very city. When my scouts rode in and told me of two wanderers, I did not alter my course, for I had business first in Beled-el- Djinn. We rode into the city from the west and saw your tracks in the sand. We followed there, and you were blind buffalo who heard not our coming.""
Steve snarled. ""You wouldn't have caught us so easy, only we thought no Bedouin would dare come into Kara-Shehr.""
Nureddin nodded. ""But I am no Bedouin. I have traveled far and seen many lands and many races, and I have read many books. I know that fear is smoke, that the dead are dead, and that djinn and ghosts and curses are mists that the wind blows away. It was because of the tales of the red stone that I came into this forsaken desert. But it has taken months to persuade my men to ride with me here.
""But—I am here! And your presence is a delightful surprise. Doubtless you have guessed why I had you taken alive; I have more elaborate entertainment planned for you and that Pathan swine. Now—I take the Fire of Asshurbanipal and we will go.""
He turned toward the dais, and one of his men, a bearded one-eyed giant, exclaimed, ""Hold, my lord! Ancient evil reigned here before. the days of Muhammad! The djinn howl through these halls when the winds blow, and men have seen ghosts dancing on the walls beneath the moon. No man of mortals has dared this black city for a thousand years—save one, half a century ago, who fled shrieking.
""You have come here from Yemen; you do not know the ancient curse on this foul city, and this evil stone, which pulses like the red heart of Satan! We have followed you here against our judgment, because you have proven yourself a strong man, and have said you hold a charm against all evil beings. You said you but wished to look on this mysterious gem, but now we see it is your intention to take it for yourself. Do not offend the djinn!""
""Nay, Nureddin, do not offend the djinn!"" chorused the other Bedouins. The shaykh's own hard-bitten ruffians, standing in a compact group somewhat apart from the Bedouins, said nothing; hardened to crimes and deeds of impiety, they were less affected by the superstitions of the desert men, to whom the dread tale of the accursed city had been repeated for centuries. Steve, even while hating Nureddin with concentrated venom, realized the magnetic power of the man, the innate leadership that had enabled him to overcome thus far the fears and traditions of ages.
""The curse is laid on infidels who invade the city,"" answered Nureddin, ""not on the Faithful. See, in this chamber have we overcome our kafar foes!""
A white-bearded desert hawk shook his head.
""The curse is more ancient than Muhammad, and recks not of race or creed. Evil men reared this black city in the dawn of the Beginnings of Days. They oppressed our ancestors of the black tents, and warred among themselves; aye, the black walls of this foul city were stained with blood, and echoed to the shouts of unholy revel and the whispers of dark intrigues.
""Thus came the stone to the city: there dwelt a magician at the court of Asshurbanipal, and the black wisdom of ages was not denied to him. To gain honor and power for himself, he dared the horrors of a nameless vast cavern in a dark, untraveled land, and from those fiendhaunted depths he brought that blazing gem, which is carved of the frozen flames of Hell! By reason of his fearful power in black magic, he put a spell on the demon which guarded the ancient gem, and so stole away the stone. And the demon slept in the cavern unknowing.
""So this magician—Xuthltan by name—dwelt in the court of the sultan Asshurbanipal and did magic and forecast events by scanning the lurid deeps of the stone, into which no eyes but his could look unblinded. And men called the stone the Fire of Asshurbanipal, in honor of the king.
""But evil came upon the kingdom and men cried out that it was the curse of the djinn, and the sultan in great fear bade Xuthltan take the gem and cast it into the cavern from which he had taken it, lest worse ill befall them.
""Yet it was not the magician's will to give up the gem wherein he read strange secrets of pre-Adamite days, and he fled to the rebel city of Kara- Shehr, where soon civil war broke out and men strove with one another to possess the gem. Then the king who ruled the city, coveting the stone, seized the magician and put him to death by torture, and in this very room he watched him die; with the gem in his hand the king sat upon the throne—even as he has sat upon the throne—even as he has sat throughout the centuries —even as now he sits!""
The Arab's finger stabbed at the moldering bones on the marble throne, and the wild desert men blenched; even Nureddin's own scoundrels recoiled, catching their breath, but the shaykh showed no sign of perturbation.
""As Xuthltan died,"" continued the old Bedouin, ""he cursed the stone whose magic had not saved him, and he shrieked aloud the fearful words which undid the spell he had put upon the demon in the cavern, and set the monster free. And crying out on the forgotten gods, Cthulhu and Koth and Yog-Sothoth, and all the pre-Adamite Dwellers in the black cities under the sea and the caverns of the earth, he called upon them—to take back that which was theirs, and with his dying breath pronounced doom on the false king, and that doom was that the king should sit on his throne holding in his hand the Fire of Asshurbanipal until the thunder of judgment Day.
""Thereat the great stone cried out as a live thing cries, and the king and his soldiers saw a black cloud spinning up from the floor, and out of the cloud blew a fetid wind, and out of the wind came a grisly shape which stretched forth fearsome paws and laid them on the king, who shriveled and died at their touch. And the soldiers fled screaming, and all the people of the city ran forth wailing into the desert, where they perished or gained through the wastes to the far oasis towns. Kara-Shehr lay silent and deserted, the haunt of the lizard and the jackal. And when some of the desertpeople ventured into the city they found the king dead on his throne, clutching the blazing gem, but they dared not lay hand upon it, for they knew the demon lurked near to guard it through all the ages—as he lurks near even as we stand here.""
The warriors shuddered involuntarily and glanced about, and Nureddin said, ""Why did he not come forth when the Franks entered the chamber? Is he deaf, that the sound of the combat has not awakened him?""
""We have not touched the gem,"" answered the old Bedouin, ""nor had the Franks molested it. Men have looked on it and lived; but no mortal may touch it and survive.""
Nureddin started to speak, gazed at the stubborn, uneasy faces and realized the futility of argument. His attitude changed abruptly.
""I am master here,"" he snapped, dropping a hand to his holster. ""I have not sweat and bled for this gem to be balked at the last by groundless fears! Stand back, all! Let any man cross me at the peril of his head!""
He faced them, his eyes blazing, and they fell back, cowed by the force of his ruthless personality. He strode boldly up the marble steps, and the Arabs caught their breath, recoiling toward the door; Yar Ali, conscious at last, groaned dismally. God! thought Steve, what a barbaric scene!—bound captives on the dust-heaped floor, wild warriors clustered about, gripping their weapons, the raw acrid scent of blood and burnt powder still fouling the air, corpses strewn in a horrid welter of blood, brains and entrails—and on the dais, the hawk-faced shaykh, oblivious to all except the evil crimson glow in the skeleton fingers that rested on the marble throne.
A tense silence gripped all as Nureddin stretched forth his hand slowly, as if hypnotized by the throbbing crimson light. And in Steve's subconsciousness there shuddered a dim echo, as of something vast and loathsome waking suddenly from an age-long slumber. The American's eyes moved instinctively toward the grim cyclopean walls. The jewel's glow had altered strangely; it burned a deeper, darker red, angry and menacing.
""Heart of all evil,"" murmured the shaykh, ""how many princes died for thee in the Beginnings of Happenings? Surely the blood of kings throbs in thee. The sultans and the princesses and the generals who wore thee, they are dust and are forgotten, but thou blazest with majesty undimmed, fire of the world—""
Nureddin seized the stone. A shuddery wail broke from the Arabs, cut through by a sharp inhuman cry. To Steve it seemed, horribly, that the great jewel had cried out like a living thing! The stone slipped from the shaykh's hand. Nureddin might have dropped it; to Steve it looked as though it leaped convulsively, as a live thing might leap. It rolled from the dais, bounding from step to step, with Nureddin springing after it, cursing as his clutching hand missed it. It struck the floor, veered sharply, and despite the deep dust, rolled like a revolving ball of fire toward the back wall. Nureddin was close upon it—it struck the wall—the shaykh's hand reached for it.
A scream of mortal fear ripped the tense silence. Without warning the solid wall had opened. Out of the black wall that gaped there, a tentacle shot and gripped the shaykh's body as a python girdles its victim, and jerked him headlong into the darkness. And then the wall showed blank and solid once more; only from within sounded a hideous, high-pitched, muffled screaming that chilled the blood of the listeners. Howling wordlessly, the Arabs stampeded, jammed in a battling, screeching mass in the doorway, tore through and raced madly down the wide stairs.
Steve and Yar Ali, lying helplessly, heard the frenzied clamor of their flight fade away into the distance, and gazed in dumb horror at the grim wall. The shrieks had faded into a more horrific silence. Holding their breath, they heard suddenly a sound that froze the blood in their veins—the soft sliding of metal or stone in a groove. At the same time the hidden door began to open, and Steve caught a glimmer in the blackness that might have been the glitter of monstrous eyes. He closed his own eyes; he dared not look upon whatever horror slunk from that hideous black well. He knew that there are strains the human brain cannot stand, and every primitive instinct in his soul cried out to him that this thing was nightmare and lunacy. He sensed that Yar Ali likewise closed his eyes, and the two lay like dead men.
Clarney heard no sound, but he sensed the presence of a horrific evil too grisly for human comprehension—of an Invader from Outer Gulfs and far black reaches of cosmic being. A deadly cold pervaded the chamber, and Steve felt the glare of inhuman eyes sear through his closed lids and freeze his consciousness. If he looked, if he opened his eyes, he knew stark black madness would be his instant lot.
He felt a soul-shakingly foul breath against his face and knew that the monster was bending close above him, but he lay like a man frozen in a nightmare. He clung to one thought: neither he nor Yar Ali had touched the jewel this horror guarded.
Then he no longer smelled the foul odor, the coldness in the air grew appreciably less, and he heard again the secret door slide in its groove. The fiend was returning to its hiding-place. Not all the legions of Hell could have prevented Steve's eyes, from opening a trifle. He had only a glimpse as the hidden door slid to—and that one glimpse was enough to drive all consciousness from his brain. Steve Clarney, iron-nerved adventurer, fainted for the only time in his checkered life.
How long he lay there Steve never knew, but it could not have been long, for he was roused by Yar Ali's whisper, ""Lie still, sahib, a little shifting of my body and I can reach thy cords with my teeth.""
Steve felt the Afghan's powerful teeth at work on his bonds, and as he lay with his face jammed into the thick dust, and his wounded shoulder began to throb agonizingly—he had forgotten it until now—he began to gather the wandering threads of his consciousness, and it all came back to him. How much, he wondered dazedly, had been the nightmares of delirium, born from suffering and the thirst that caked his throat? The fight with, the Arabs had been real—the bonds and the wounds showed that—but the grisly doom of the shaykh—the thing that had crept out of the black entrance in the wall—surely that had been a figment of delirium. Nureddin had fallen into a well or pit of some sort—Stave felt his hands were free and he rose to a sitting posture, fumbling for a pocket-knife the Arabs had overlooked. He did not look up or about the chamber as he slashed, the cords that bound his I ankles, and then freed Yar Ali, working awkwardly because his left arm was stiff and useless.
""Where are the Bedouins?"" he asked, as the Afghan rose, lifting him to his feet.
""Allah, sahib,"" whispered Yar Ali, ""are you mad? Have you forgotten? Let us go quickly before the djinn returns!""
""It was a nightmare,"" muttered Steve. ""Look—the jewel is back on the throne—"" His voice died out. Again that red glow throbbed about the ancient throne, reflecting from the moldering skull; again in the outstretched finger-bones pulsed the Fire of Asshurbanipal. But at the foot of the throne lay another object that had not been there before—the severed head of Nureddin el Mekru stared sightlessly up at the gray light filtering through the stone ceiling. The bloodless lips were drawn back from the teeth in a ghastly grin, the staring eyes mirrored an intolerable horror. In the thick dust of the floor three spoors showed—one of the shaykh's where he had followed the red jewel as it rolled to the wall, and above it two other sets of tracks, coming to the throne and returning to the wall—vast, shapeless tracks, as of splayed feet, taloned and gigantic, neither human nor animal.
""My God!"" choked Steve. ""It was true—and the Thing—the Thing I saw—""
Steve remembered the flight from that chamber as a rushing nightmare, in which he and his companion hurtled headlong down an endless stair that was a gray well of fear, raced blindly through dusty silent chambers, past the glowering idol in the mighty hall and into the blazing light of the desert sun, where they fell slavering, fighting for breath.
Again Steve was roused by the Afridi's voice: ""Sahib, sahib, in the Name of Allah the Compassionate, our luck has turned!""
Steve looked at his companion as a man might look in a trance: The big Afghan's garments were in tatters, and blood-soaked. He was stained with dust and caked with blood, and his voice was a croak. But his eyes were alight with hope and he pointed with a trembling finger.
""In the shade of yon ruined wall!"" he croaked, striving to moisten his blackened lips. ""Allah it allah! The horses of the men we killed! With canteens and food-pouches at the saddle-horns! Those dogs fled without halting for the steeds of their comrades!""
New life surged up into Steve's bosom and he rose, staggering.
""Out of here,"" he mumbled. ""Out of here, quick!""
Like dying men they stumbled to the horses, tore them loose and climbed fumblingly into the saddles.
""We'll lead the spare mounts,"" croaked Steve, and Yar Ali nodded emphatic agreement.
""Belike we shall need them ere we sight the coast.""
Though their tortured nerves screamed for the water that swung in canteens at the saddle-horns, they turned the mounts aside and, swaying in the saddle, rode like flying corpses down the long sandy street of Kara-Shehr, between the ruined palaces and the crumbling columns, crossed the fallen wall and swept out into the desert. Not once did either glance back toward that black pile of ancient horror, nor did either speak until the ruins faded into the hazy distance. Then and only then did they draw rein and ease their thirst.
""Allah il allah!"" said Yar Ali piously. ""Those dogs have beaten me until it is as though every bone in my body were broken. Dismount, I beg thee, sahib, and let me probe for that accursed bullet, and dress thy shoulder to the best of my meager ability.""
While this was going on, Yar Ali spoke, avoiding his friend's eye, ""You said, sahib, you said something about—about seeing? What saw ye, in Allah's name?""
A strong shudder shook the American's steely fray ""You didn't look when —when the—the Thing put back the jewel in the skeleton's hand and left Nureddin's head on the dais?""
""By Allah, not I!"" swore Yar Ali. ""My eyes were as closed as if they had been welded together by the molten irons of Satan!""
Steve made no reply until the comrades had once more swung into the saddle and started on their long trek for the coast, which, with spare horses, food, water and weapons, they had a good chance to reach.
""I looked,"" the American said somberly. ""I wish I had not; I know I'll dream about it for the rest of my life. I had only a glance; I couldn't describe it as a man describes an earthly thing. God help me, it wasn't earthly or sane either. Mankind isn't the first owner of the earth; there were Beings here before his coming—and now, survivals of hideously ancient epochs. Maybe spheres of alien dimensions press unseen on this material universe today. Sorcerers have called up sleeping devils before now and controlled them with magic. It is not unreasonable to suppose an Assyrian magician could invoke an elemental demon out of the earth to avenge him and guard something that must have come out of Hell in the first place.""
""I'll try to tell you what I glimpsed; then we'll never speak of it again. It was gigantic and black and shadowy; it was a hulking monstrosity that walked upright like a man, but it was like a toad, too, and it was winged and tentacled. I saw only its back; if I'd seen the front of it—its face —I'd have undoubtedly lost my mind. The old Arab was right; God help us, it was the monster that Xuthltan called up out of the dark blind caverns of the earth to guard the Fire of Asshurbanipal!""


",False
"

  ""Oh, thou who burn'st in heart for those who burn
  In Hell, whose fires thyself shall feed in turn;
  How long be crying--'Mercy on them.' God!
  Why, who art thou to teach and He to learn?""

In the Church of St. Barnabé vespers were over; the clergy left the
altar; the little choir-boys flocked across the chancel and settled in
the stalls. A Suisse in rich uniform marched down the south aisle,
sounding his staff at every fourth step on the stone pavement; behind him
came that eloquent preacher and good man, Monseigneur C----.

My chair was near the chancel rail, I now turned toward the west end of
the church. The other people between the altar and the pulpit turned too.
There was a little scraping and rustling while the congregation seated
itself again; the preacher mounted the pulpit stairs, and the organ
voluntary ceased.

I had always found the organ-playing at St. Barnabé highly interesting.
Learned and scientific it was, too much so for my small knowledge, but
expressing a vivid if cold intelligence. Moreover, it possessed the
French quality of taste: taste reigned supreme, self-controlled,
dignified and reticent.

To-day, however, from the first chord I had felt a change for the worse,
a sinister change. During vespers it had been chiefly the chancel organ
which supported the beautiful choir, but now and again, quite wantonly as
it seemed, from the west gallery where the great organ stands, a heavy
hand had struck across the church at the serene peace of those clear
voices. It was something more than harsh and dissonant, and it betrayed
no lack of skill. As it recurred again and again, it set me thinking of
what my architect's books say about the custom in early times to
consecrate the choir as soon as it was built, and that the nave, being
finished sometimes half a century later, often did not get any blessing
at all: I wondered idly if that had been the case at St. Barnabé, and
whether something not usually supposed to be at home in a Christian
church might have entered undetected and taken possession of the west
gallery. I had read of such things happening, too, but not in works on
architecture.

Then I remembered that St. Barnabé was not much more than a hundred years
old, and smiled at the incongruous association of mediaeval superstitions
with that cheerful little piece of eighteenth-century rococo.

But now vespers were over, and there should have followed a few quiet
chords, fit to accompany meditation, while we waited for the sermon.
Instead of that, the discord at the lower end of the church broke out
with the departure of the clergy, as if now nothing could control it.

I belong to those children of an older and simpler generation who do not
love to seek for psychological subtleties in art; and I have ever refused
to find in music anything more than melody and harmony, but I felt that
in the labyrinth of sounds now issuing from that instrument there was
something being hunted. Up and down the pedals chased him, while the
manuals blared approval. Poor devil! whoever he was, there seemed small
hope of escape!

My nervous annoyance changed to anger. Who was doing this? How dare he
play like that in the midst of divine service? I glanced at the people
near me: not one appeared to be in the least disturbed. The placid brows
of the kneeling nuns, still turned towards the altar, lost none of their
devout abstraction under the pale shadow of their white head-dress. The
fashionable lady beside me was looking expectantly at Monseigneur C----.
For all her face betrayed, the organ might have been singing an Ave
Maria.

But now, at last, the preacher had made the sign of the cross, and
commanded silence. I turned to him gladly. Thus far I had not found the
rest I had counted on when I entered St. Barnabé that afternoon.

I was worn out by three nights of physical suffering and mental trouble:
the last had been the worst, and it was an exhausted body, and a mind
benumbed and yet acutely sensitive, which I had brought to my favourite
church for healing. For I had been reading _The King in Yellow_.

""The sun ariseth; they gather themselves together and lay them down in
their dens."" Monseigneur C---- delivered his text in a calm voice,
glancing quietly over the congregation. My eyes turned, I knew not why,
toward the lower end of the church. The organist was coming from behind
his pipes, and passing along the gallery on his way out, I saw him
disappear by a small door that leads to some stairs which descend
directly to the street. He was a slender man, and his face was as white
as his coat was black. ""Good riddance!"" I thought, ""with your wicked
music! I hope your assistant will play the closing voluntary.""

With a feeling of relief--with a deep, calm feeling of relief, I turned
back to the mild face in the pulpit and settled myself to listen. Here,
at last, was the ease of mind I longed for.

""My children,"" said the preacher, ""one truth the human soul finds hardest
of all to learn: that it has nothing to fear. It can never be made to see
that nothing can really harm it.""

""Curious doctrine!"" I thought, ""for a Catholic priest. Let us see how he
will reconcile that with the Fathers.""

""Nothing can really harm the soul,"" he went on, in, his coolest, clearest
tones, ""because----""

But I never heard the rest; my eye left his face, I knew not for what
reason, and sought the lower end of the church. The same man was coming
out from behind the organ, and was passing along the gallery _the same
way_. But there had not been time for him to return, and if he had
returned, I must have seen him. I felt a faint chill, and my heart sank;
and yet, his going and coming were no affair of mine. I looked at him: I
could not look away from his black figure and his white face. When he was
exactly opposite to me, he turned and sent across the church straight
into my eyes, a look of hate, intense and deadly: I have never seen any
other like it; would to God I might never see it again! Then he
disappeared by the same door through which I had watched him depart less
than sixty seconds before.

I sat and tried to collect my thoughts. My first sensation was like that
of a very young child badly hurt, when it catches its breath before
crying out.

To suddenly find myself the object of such hatred was exquisitely
painful: and this man was an utter stranger. Why should he hate me
so?--me, whom he had never seen before? For the moment all other
sensation was merged in this one pang: even fear was subordinate to
grief, and for that moment I never doubted; but in the next I began to
reason, and a sense of the incongruous came to my aid.

As I have said, St. Barnabé is a modern church. It is small and well
lighted; one sees all over it almost at a glance. The organ gallery gets
a strong white light from a row of long windows in the clerestory, which
have not even coloured glass.

The pulpit being in the middle of the church, it followed that, when I
was turned toward it, whatever moved at the west end could not fail to
attract my eye. When the organist passed it was no wonder that I saw him:
I had simply miscalculated the interval between his first and his second
passing. He had come in that last time by the other side-door. As for the
look which had so upset me, there had been no such thing, and I was a
nervous fool.

I looked about. This was a likely place to harbour supernatural horrors!
That clear-cut, reasonable face of Monseigneur C----, his collected
manner and easy, graceful gestures, were they not just a little
discouraging to the notion of a gruesome mystery? I glanced above his
head, and almost laughed. That flyaway lady supporting one corner of the
pulpit canopy, which looked like a fringed damask table-cloth in a high
wind, at the first attempt of a basilisk to pose up there in the organ
loft, she would point her gold trumpet at him, and puff him out of
existence! I laughed to myself over this conceit, which, at the time, I
thought very amusing, and sat and chaffed myself and everything else,
from the old harpy outside the railing, who had made me pay ten centimes
for my chair, before she would let me in (she was more like a basilisk, I
told myself, than was my organist with the anaemic complexion): from that
grim old dame, to, yes, alas! Monseigneur C---- himself. For all
devoutness had fled. I had never yet done such a thing in my life, but
now I felt a desire to mock.

As for the sermon, I could not hear a word of it for the jingle in my
ears of

 ""The skirts of St. Paul has reached.
  Having preached us those six Lent lectures,
  More unctuous than ever he preached,""

keeping time to the most fantastic and irreverent thoughts.

It was no use to sit there any longer: I must get out of doors and shake
myself free from this hateful mood. I knew the rudeness I was committing,
but still I rose and left the church.

A spring sun was shining on the Rue St. Honoré, as I ran down the church
steps. On one corner stood a barrow full of yellow jonquils, pale violets
from the Riviera, dark Russian violets, and white Roman hyacinths in a
golden cloud of mimosa. The street was full of Sunday pleasure-seekers. I
swung my cane and laughed with the rest. Some one overtook and passed me.
He never turned, but there was the same deadly malignity in his white
profile that there had been in his eyes. I watched him as long as I could
see him. His lithe back expressed the same menace; every step that
carried him away from me seemed to bear him on some errand connected with
my destruction.

I was creeping along, my feet almost refusing to move. There began to
dawn in me a sense of responsibility for something long forgotten. It
began to seem as if I deserved that which he threatened: it reached a
long way back--a long, long way back. It had lain dormant all these
years: it was there, though, and presently it would rise and confront me.
But I would try to escape; and I stumbled as best I could into the Rue de
Rivoli, across the Place de la Concorde and on to the Quai. I looked with
sick eyes upon the sun, shining through the white foam of the fountain,
pouring over the backs of the dusky bronze river-gods, on the far-away
Arc, a structure of amethyst mist, on the countless vistas of grey stems
and bare branches faintly green. Then I saw him again coming down one of
the chestnut alleys of the Cours la Reine.

I left the river-side, plunged blindly across to the Champs Elysées and
turned toward the Arc. The setting sun was sending its rays along the
green sward of the Rond-point: in the full glow he sat on a bench,
children and young mothers all about him. He was nothing but a Sunday
lounger, like the others, like myself. I said the words almost aloud, and
all the while I gazed on the malignant hatred of his face. But he was not
looking at me. I crept past and dragged my leaden feet up the Avenue. I
knew that every time I met him brought him nearer to the accomplishment
of his purpose and my fate. And still I tried to save myself.

The last rays of sunset were pouring through the great Arc. I passed
under it, and met him face to face. I had left him far down the Champs
Elysées, and yet he came in with a stream of people who were returning
from the Bois de Boulogne. He came so close that he brushed me. His
slender frame felt like iron inside its loose black covering. He showed
no signs of haste, nor of fatigue, nor of any human feeling. His whole
being expressed one thing: the will, and the power to work me evil.

In anguish I watched him where he went down the broad crowded Avenue,
that was all flashing with wheels and the trappings of horses and the
helmets of the Garde Republicaine.

He was soon lost to sight; then I turned and fled. Into the Bois, and far
out beyond it--I know not where I went, but after a long while as it
seemed to me, night had fallen, and I found myself sitting at a table
before a small café. I had wandered back into the Bois. It was hours now
since I had seen him. Physical fatigue and mental suffering had left me
no power to think or feel. I was tired, so tired! I longed to hide away
in my own den. I resolved to go home. But that was a long way off.

I live in the Court of the Dragon, a narrow passage that leads from the
Rue de Rennes to the Rue du Dragon.

It is an ""impasse""; traversable only for foot passengers. Over the
entrance on the Rue de Rennes is a balcony, supported by an iron dragon.
Within the court tall old houses rise on either side, and close the ends
that give on the two streets. Huge gates, swung back during the day into
the walls of the deep archways, close this court, after midnight, and one
must enter then by ringing at certain small doors on the side. The sunken
pavement collects unsavoury pools. Steep stairways pitch down to doors
that open on the court. The ground floors are occupied by shops of
second-hand dealers, and by iron workers. All day long the place rings
with the clink of hammers and the clang of metal bars.

Unsavoury as it is below, there is cheerfulness, and comfort, and hard,
honest work above.

Five flights up are the ateliers of architects and painters, and the
hiding-places of middle-aged students like myself who want to live alone.
When I first came here to live I was young, and not alone.

I had to walk a while before any conveyance appeared, but at last, when I
had almost reached the Arc de Triomphe again, an empty cab came along and
I took it.

From the Arc to the Rue de Rennes is a drive of more than half an hour,
especially when one is conveyed by a tired cab horse that has been at the
mercy of Sunday fete-makers.

There had been time before I passed under the Dragon's wings to meet my
enemy over and over again, but I never saw him once, and now refuge was
close at hand.

Before the wide gateway a small mob of children were playing. Our
concierge and his wife walked among them, with their black poodle,
keeping order; some couples were waltzing on the side-walk. I returned
their greetings and hurried in.

All the inhabitants of the court had trooped out into the street. The
place was quite deserted, lighted by a few lanterns hung high up, in
which the gas burned dimly.

My apartment was at the top of a house, halfway down the court, reached
by a staircase that descended almost into the street, with only a bit of
passage-way intervening, I set my foot on the threshold of the open door,
the friendly old ruinous stairs rose before me, leading up to rest and
shelter. Looking back over my right shoulder, I saw _him,_ ten paces
off. He must have entered the court with me.

He was coming straight on, neither slowly, nor swiftly, but straight on
to me. And now he was looking at me. For the first time since our eyes
encountered across the church they met now again, and I knew that the
time had come.

Retreating backward, down the court, I faced him. I meant to escape by
the entrance on the Rue du Dragon. His eyes told me that I never should
escape.

It seemed ages while we were going, I retreating, he advancing, down the
court in perfect silence; but at last I felt the shadow of the archway,
and the next step brought me within it. I had meant to turn here and
spring through into the street. But the shadow was not that of an
archway; it was that of a vault. The great doors on the Rue du Dragon
were closed. I felt this by the blackness which surrounded me, and at the
same instant I read it in his face. How his face gleamed in the darkness,
drawing swiftly nearer! The deep vaults, the huge closed doors, their
cold iron clamps were all on his side. The thing which he had threatened
had arrived: it gathered and bore down on me from the fathomless shadows;
the point from which it would strike was his infernal eyes. Hopeless, I
set my back against the barred doors and defied him.


There was a scraping of chairs on the stone floor, and a rustling as the
congregation rose. I could hear the Suisse's staff in the south aisle,
preceding Monseigneur C---- to the sacristy.

The kneeling nuns, roused from their devout abstraction, made their
reverence and went away. The fashionable lady, my neighbour, rose also,
with graceful reserve. As she departed her glance just flitted over my
face in disapproval.

Half dead, or so it seemed to me, yet intensely alive to every trifle, I
sat among the leisurely moving crowd, then rose too and went toward the
door.

I had slept through the sermon. Had I slept through the sermon? I looked
up and saw him passing along the gallery to his place. Only his side I
saw; the thin bent arm in its black covering looked like one of those
devilish, nameless instruments which lie in the disused torture-chambers
of mediaeval castles.

But I had escaped him, though his eyes had said I should not. _Had_
I escaped him? That which gave him the power over me came back out of
oblivion, where I had hoped to keep it. For I knew him now. Death and the
awful abode of lost souls, whither my weakness long ago had sent
him--they had changed him for every other eye, but not for mine. I had
recognized him almost from the first; I had never doubted what he was
come to do; and now I knew while my body sat safe in the cheerful little
church, he had been hunting my soul in the Court of the Dragon.

I crept to the door: the organ broke out overhead with a blare. A
dazzling light filled the church, blotting the altar from my eyes. The
people faded away, the arches, the vaulted roof vanished. I raised my
seared eyes to the fathomless glare, and I saw the black stars hanging in
the heavens: and the wet winds from the lake of Hali chilled my face.

And now, far away, over leagues of tossing cloud-waves, I saw the moon
dripping with spray; and beyond, the towers of Carcosa rose behind the
moon.

Death and the awful abode of lost souls, whither my weakness long ago had
sent him, had changed him for every other eye but mine. And now I heard
_his voice_, rising, swelling, thundering through the flaring light,
and as I fell, the radiance increasing, increasing, poured over me in
waves of flame. Then I sank into the depths, and I heard the King in
Yellow whispering to my soul: ""It is a fearful thing to fall into the
hands of the living God!""


","Cleves opened his eyes. He was lying on his left side. In the pink glow of the night-lamp he saw his wife in her night-dress, seated sideways on the farther edge of the bed, talking to a young girl.

The strange girl wore what appeared to be a chamber-robe of frail gold tissue that clung to her body and glittered as she moved. He had never before seen such a dress; but he had seen the girl; he recognised her instantly as the girl he had seen turn to look back at Tressa as she crossed the phantom bridge over that misty Florida river. And Cleves comprehended that he was looking at Yulun.

But this charming young thing was no ghost, no astral projection. This girl was warm, living, breathing flesh. The delicate scent of her strange garments and of her hair, her very breath, was in the air of the room. Her half-hushed but laughing voice was deliciously human; her delicate little hands, caressing Tressa's, were too eagerly real to doubt.

Both talked at the same time, their animated voices mingling in the breathless delight of the reunion. Their exclamations, enchanting laughter, bubbling chatter, filled his ears. But not one word of what they were saying to each other could he understand.

Suddenly Tressa looked over her shoulder and met his astonished eyes.

""Tokhta!"" she exclaimed. ""Yulun! My lord is awake!""

Yulun swung around swiftly on the edge of the bed and looked laughingly at Cleves. But when her red lips unclosed she spoke to Tressa: and, ""Darling,"" she said in English, ""I think your dear lord remembers that he saw me on the Bridge of Dreams. And heard the bells of Yian across the mist.""

Tressa said, laughing at her husband: ""This is Yulun, flame-slender, very white, loveliest in Yian. On the rose-marble steps of the Yezidee Temple she flung a stemless rose upon Djamouk's shroud, where he had spread it like a patch of snow in the sun.

""And at the Lake of the Ghosts, where there is freedom to love, for those who desire love, came Yaddin, Tougtchi to Djamouk the Fox, in search of love—and Yulun, flame-slim, and flower-white.... Tell my dear lord, Yulun!""

Yulun laughed at Cleves out of her dark eyes that slanted charmingly at the corners.

""Kai!"" she cried softly, clapping her palms. ""I took his roses and tore them with my hands till their petals rained on him and their golden hearts were a powdery cloud floating across the water.

""I said: 'Even the damned do not mate with demons, my Tougtchi! So go to the devil, my Banneret, and may Erlik seize you!'""

Cleves, his ears ringing with the sweet confusion of their girlish laughter, rose from his pillow, supporting himself on one arm.

""You are Yulun. You are alive and real——"" He looked at Tressa: ""She is real, isn't she?"" And, to Yulun: ""Where do you come from?""

The girl replied seriously: ""I come from Yian."" She turned to Tressa with a dazzling smile: ""Thou knowest, my heart's gold, how it was I came. Tell thy dear lord in thine own way, so that it shall be simple for his understanding.... And now—because my visit is ending—I think thy dear lord should sleep. Bid him sleep, my heart's gold!""

At that calm suggestion Cleves sat upright on the bed,—or attempted to. But sank back gently on his pillow and met there a dark, delicious rush of drowsiness.

He made an effort—or tried to: the smooth, sweet tide of sleep swept over him to the eyelids, leaving him still and breathing evenly on his pillow.

The two girls leaned over and looked down at him.

""Thy dear lord,"" murmured Yulun. ""Does he love thee, rose-bud of Yian?""

""No,"" said Tressa, under her breath.

""Does he know thou art damned, heart of gold?""

""He says no soul is ever really harmed,"" whispered Tressa.

""Kai! Has he never heard of the Slayer of Souls?"" exclaimed Yulun incredulously.

""My lord maintains that neither the Assassin of Khorassan nor the Sheiks-el-Djebel of the Eight Towers, nor their dark prince Erlik, can have power over God to slay the human soul.""

""Tokhta, Rose of Yian! Our souls were slain there in the Yezidee temple.""

Tressa looked down at Cleves:

""My dear lord says no,"" she said under her breath.

""And—Sanang?""

Tressa paled: ""His mind and mine did battle. I tore my heart from his grasp. I have laid it, bleeding, at my dear lord's feet. Let God judge between us, Yulun.""

""There was a day,"" whispered Yulun, ""when Prince Sanang went to the Lake of the Ghosts.""

Tressa, very pallid, looked down at her sleeping husband. She said:

""Prince Sanang came to the Lake of the Ghosts. The snow of the cherry-trees covered the young world.

""The water was clear as sunlight; and the lake was afire with scarlet carp.... Yulun—beloved—the nightingale sang all night long—all night long.... Then I saw Sanang shining, all gold, in the moonlight.... May God remember him in hell!""

""May God remember him.""

""Sanang Noïane. May he be accursed in the Namaz Ga!""

""May he be tormented in Jehaunum!—Sanang, Slayer of Souls.""

Tressa leaned forward on the bed, stretched herself out, and laid her face gently across her husband's feet, touching them with her lips.

Then she straightened herself and sat up, supported by one hand, and looking silently down at the sleeping man.

""No soul shall die,"" she said. ""Niaz!""

""Is it written?"" asked Yulun, surprised.

""My lord has said it.""

""Allahou Ekber,"" murmured Yulun; ""thy lord is only a man.""

Tressa said: ""Neither the Tekbir nor the fatha, nor the warning of Khidr, nor the Yacaz of the Khagan, nor even the prayers of the Ten Imaums are of any value to me unless my dear lord confirms the truth of them with his own lips.""

""And Erlik? Is he nothing, then?""

""Erlik!"" repeated Tressa insolently. ""Who is Erlik but the servant of Satan who was stoned?""

Her beautiful, angry lips were suddenly distorted; her blue eyes blazed. Then she spat, her mouth still tremulous with hatred. She said in a voice shaking with rage:

""Yulun, beloved! Listen attentively. I have slain two of the Slayers of the Eight Towers. With God's help I shall slay them all—all!—Djamouk, Yaddin, Arrak Sou-Sou—all!—every one!—Tiyang Khan, Togrul,—all shall I slay, even to the last one among them!""

""Sanang, also?""

""I leave him to God. It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God!""

Yulun calmly paraphrased the cant phrase of the Assassins: ""For it is written that we belong to God and we return to Him. Heart of gold, I shall execute my duty!""

Then Yulun slipped from the edge of the bed to the floor, and stood there looking oddly at Tressa, her eyes rain-bright as though choking back tears—or laughter.

""Heart of a rose,"" she said in a suppressed voice, ""my time is nearly ended.... So.... I go to the chamber of this strange young man who holds my soul like a pearl afire between his hands.... I think it it written that I shall love him.""

Tressa rose also and placed her lips close to Yulun's ear: ""His name, beloved, is Benton. His room is on this floor. Shall we make the effort together?""

""Yes,"" said Yulun. ""Lay your body down upon the bed beside your lord who sleeps so deeply.... And now stretch out.... And fold both hands.... And now put off thy body like a silken garment.... So! And leave it there beside thy lord, asleep.""

They stood together for a moment, shining like dewy shapes of tall flowers, whispering and laughing together in the soft glow of the night lamp.

Cleves slept on, unstirring. There was the white and sleeping figure of his wife lying on the bed beside him.

But Tressa and Yulun were already melting away between the wall and the confused rosy radiance of the lamp.

Benton, in night attire and chamber-robe belted in, fresh from his bath and still drying his curly hair on a rough towel, wandered back into his bedroom.

When his short, bright hair was dry, he lighted a cigarette, took the automatic from his dresser, examined the clip, and shoved it under his pillow.

Then he picked up the little leather-bound Testament, seated himself, and opened it. And read tranquilly while his cigarette burned.

When he was ready he turned out the ceiling light, leaving only the night lamp lighted. Then he knelt beside his bed,—a custom surviving the nursery period,—and rested his forehead against his folded hands.

Then, as he prayed, something snapped the thread of prayer as though somebody had spoken aloud in the still room; and, like one who has been suddenly interrupted, he opened his eyes and looked around and upward.

The silent shock of her presence passed presently. He got up from his knees, looking at her all the while.

""You are Yulun,"" he said very calmly.

The girl flushed brightly and rested one hand on the foot of the bed.

""Do you remember in the moonlight where you walked along the hedge of white hibiscus and oleander—that night you said good-bye to Tressa in the South?""

""Yes.""

""Twice,"" she said, laughing, ""you stopped to peer at the blossoms in the moonlight.""

""I thought I saw a face among them.""

""You were not sure whether it was flowers or a girl's face looking at you from the blossoming hedge of white hibiscus,"" said Yulun.

""I know now,"" he said in an odd, still voice, unlike his own.

""Yes, it was I,"" she murmured. And of a sudden the girl dropped to her knees without a sound and laid her head on the velvet carpet at his feet.

So swiftly, noiselessly was it done that he had not comprehended—had not moved—when she sat upright, resting on her knees, and grasped the collar of her tunic with both gemmed hands.

""Have pity on me, lord of my lost soul!"" she cried softly.

Benton stooped in a dazed way to lift the girl; but found himself knee deep in a snowy drift of white hibiscus blossoms—touched nothing but silken petals—waded in them as he stepped forward. And saw her standing before him still grasping the collar of her golden tunic.

A great white drift of bloom lay almost waist deep between them; the fragrance of oleander, too, was heavy in the room.

""There are years of life before the flaming gates of Jehaunum open. And I am very young,"" said Yulun wistfully.

Somebody else laughed in the room. Turning his head, he saw Tressa standing by the empty fireplace.

""What you see and hear need not disturb you,"" she said, looking at Benton out of brilliant eyes. ""There is no god but God; and His prophet has been called by many names."" And to Yulun: ""Have I not told you that nothing can harm our souls?""

Yulun's expression altered and she turned to Benton: ""Say it to me!"" she pleaded.

As in a dream he heard his own words: ""Nothing can ever really harm the soul.""

Yulun's hands fell from her tunic collar. Very slowly she lifted her head, looking at him out of lovely, proud young eyes.

She said, evenly, her still gaze on him: ""I am Yulun of the Temple. My heart is like a blazing pearl which you hold between your hands. May the four Blessed Companions witness the truth of what I say.""

Then a delicate veil of colour wrapped her white skin from throat to temple; she looked at Benton with sudden and exquisite distress, frightened and ashamed at his silence.

In the intense stillness Benton moved toward her. Into his outstretched hands her two hands fell; but, bending above them, his lips touched only two white hibiscus flowers that lay fresh and dewy in his palms.

Bewildered, he straightened up; and saw the girl standing by the mantel beside Tressa, who had caught her by the left hand.

""Tokhta! Look out!"" she said distinctly.

Suddenly he saw two men in the room, close to him—their broad faces, slanting eyes, and sparse beards thrust almost against his shoulder.

""Djamouk! Yaddin-ed-Din!"" cried Tressa in a terrible voice. But quick as a flash Yulun tore a white sheet from the bed, flung it on the floor, and, whipping a tiny, jewelled knife from her sleeve, threw it glittering upon the sheet at the feet of the two men.

""One shroud for two souls!"" she said breathlessly, ""—and a knife like that to sever them from their bodies!""

The two men sprang backward as the sheet touched their feet, and now they stood there as though confounded.

""Djamouk, Kahn of the Fifth Tower!"" cried Tressa in a clear voice, ""you have put off your body like a threadbare cloak, and your form that stands there is only your mind! And it is only the evil will of Yaddin in the shape of his body that confronts us in this room of a man you have doomed!""

Yulun, intent as a young leopardess on her prey, moved soundlessly toward Yaddin.

""Tougtchi!"" she said coldly, ""you did murder this day, my Banneret, and the Toug of Djamouk has been greased. Now look out for yourself!""

""Don't stir!"" came Tressa's warning voice, as Benton snatched his pistol from the pillow. ""Don't fire! Those men have no real substance! For God's sake don't fire! I tell you they have no bodies!""

Suddenly something—some force—flung Benton on the bed. The two men did not seem to touch him at all, but he lay there struggling, crushed, held by something that was strangling him.

Through his swimming eyes he saw Yaddin trying to drive a long nail into his skull with a hammer,—felt the piercing agony of the first crashing blow,—struggled upright, drenched in blood, his ears ringing with the screaming of Yaddin.

Then, there in the little rococo bedroom of the Ritz-Carlton, began a strange and horrible struggle—the more dreadful because the struggle was not physical and the combatants never touched each other—scarcely moved at all.

Yaddin, still screaming, confronted Yulun. The girl's eyes were ablaze, her lips parted with the violence of her breathing. And Yaddin writhed and screamed under the terrible concentration of her gaze, his inferior but ferocious mind locked with her mind in deadly battle.

The girl said slowly, showing a glimmer of white teeth: ""Your will to do evil to my young lord is breaking, Yaddin-ed-Din.... I am breaking it. The nail and hammer were but symbols. It was your brain that brooded murder—that willed he should die as though shattered by lightning when that blood-vessel burst in his brain!""

""Sorceress!"" shrieked Yaddin, ""what are you doing to my heart, where my body lies asleep in a berth on the Montreal Express!""

""Your heart is weak, Yaddin. Soon the valves shall fail. A negro porter shall discover you dead in your berth, my Banneret!""

The man's swarthy face became livid with the terrific mental battle.

""Let me go back to my body!"" he panted. ""What are you doing to me that I can not go back? I will go back! I wish it!—I——""

""Let us go back and rejoin our bodies!"" cried Djamouk in an agonised voice. ""There are teeth in my throat, deep in my throat, biting and tearing out the cords.""

""Cancer,"" said Tressa calmly. ""Your body shall die of it while your soul stumbles on through darkness.""

""My Tougtchi!"" shouted Djamouk, ""I hear my soul bidding my body farewell! I must go before my mind expires in the terrible gaze of this young sorceress!""

He turned, drifted like something misty to the solid wall.

""My soul be ransom for yours!"" cried Yulun to Tressa. ""Bar that man's path to life!""

Tressa flung out her right hand and, with her forefinger, drew a barrier through space, bar above bar.

And Benton, half swooning on his bed, saw a cage of terrible and living light penning in Djamouk, who beat upon the incandescent bars and grasped them and clawed his way about, squealing like a tortured rat in a red-hot cage.

Through the deafening tumult Yulun's voice cut like a sword:

""Their bodies are dying, Heart of a Rose!... Listen! I hear their souls bidding their minds farewell!""

And, after a dreadful silence: ""The train speeding north carries two dead men! God is God. Niaz!""

The bars of living fire faded. Two cinder-like and shapeless shadows floated and eddied like whitened ashes stirred by a wind on the hearth; then drifted through the lamp-light, fading, dissolving, lost gradually in thin air.

Tressa, leaning back against the mantel, covered her face with both hands.

Yulun crept to the bed where Benton lay, breathing evenly in deepest sleep.

With the sheer sleeve of her tunic she wiped the blood from his face. And, at her touch, the wound in the temple closed and the short, bright hair dried and curled over a forehead as clean and fresh as a boy's.

Then Yulun laid her lips against his, rested so a moment.

""Seek me, dear lord,"" she whispered. ""Or send me a sign and I shall come.""

And, after a pause, she said, her lips scarcely stirring: ""Love me. My heart is a flaming pearl burning between your hands.""

Then she lifted her head.

But Tressa had rejoined her body, where it lay asleep beside her deeply sleeping husband.

So Yulun stood a moment, her eyes remote. Then, after a while, the little rococo bedroom in the Ritz-Carlton was empty save for a young man asleep on the bed, holding in his clenched hand a white hibiscus blossom.

",True
"I can hardly describe the mood in which I was left by this harrowing episode--an episode at once mad and pitiful, grotesque and terrifying. The grocery boy had prepared me for it, yet the reality left me none the less bewildered and disturbed. Puerile though the story was, old Zadok's insane earnestness and horror had communicated to me a mounting unrest which joined with my earlier sense of loathing for the town and its blight of intangible shadow.

Later I might sift the tale and extract some nucleus of historic allegory; just now I wished to put it out of my head. The hour grown perilously late--my watch said 7:15, and the Arkham bus left Town Square at eight--so I tried to give my thoughts as neutral and practical a cast as possible, meanwhile walking rapidly through the deserted streets of gaping roofs and leaning houses toward the hotel where I had checked my valise and would find my bus.

Though the golden light of late afternoon gave the ancient roofs and decrepit chimneys an air of mystic loveliness and peace, I could not help glancing over my shoulder now and then. I would surely be very glad to get out of malodorous and fear-shadowed Innsmouth, and wished there were some other vehicle than the bus driven by that sinister-looking fellow Sargent. Yet I did not hurry too precipitately, for there were architectural details worth viewing at every silent corner; and I could easily, I calculated, cover the necessary distance in a half-hour.

Studying the grocery youth's map and seeking a route I had not traversed before, I chose Marsh Street instead of State for my approach to Town Square. Near the corner of Fall Street I began to see scattered groups of furtive whisperers, and when I finally reached the Square I saw that almost all the loiterers were congregated around the door of the Gilman House. It seemed as if many bulging, watery, unwinking eyes looked oddly at me as I claimed my valise in the lobby, and I hoped that none of these unpleasant creatures would be my fellow-passengers on the coach.

The bus, rather early, rattled in with three passengers somewhat before eight, and an evil-looking fellow on the sidewalk muttered a few indistinguishable words to the driver. Sargent threw out a mail-bag and a roll of newspapers, and entered the hotel; while the passengers--the same men whom I had seen arriving in Newburyport that morning--shambled to the sidewalk and exchanged some faint guttural words with a loafer in a language I could have sworn was not English. I boarded the empty coach and took the seat I had taken before, but was hardly settled before Sargent re-appeared and began mumbling in a throaty voice of peculiar repulsiveness.

I was, it appeared, in very bad luck. There had been something wrong with the engine, despite the excellent time made from Newburyport, and the bus could not complete the journey to Arkham. No, it could not possibly be repaired that night, nor was there any other way of getting transportation out of Innsmouth either to Arkham or elsewhere. Sargent was sorry, but I would have to stop over at the Gilman. Probably the clerk would make the price easy for me, but there was nothing else to do. Almost dazed by this sudden obstacle, and violently dreading the fall of night in this decaying and half-unlighted town, I left the bus and reentered the hotel lobby; where the sullen queer-looking night clerk told me I could have Room 428 on next the top floor--large, but without running water--for a dollar.

Despite what I had heard of this hotel in Newburyport, I signed the register, paid my dollar, let the clerk take my valise, and followed that sour, solitary attendant up three creaking flights of stairs past dusty corridors which seemed wholly devoid of life. My room was a dismal rear one with two windows and bare, cheap furnishings, overlooked a dingy court-yard otherwise hemmed in by low, deserted brick blocks, and commanded a view of decrepit westward-stretching roofs with a marshy countryside beyond. At the end of the corridor was a bathroom--a discouraging relique with ancient marble bowl, tin tub, faint electric light, and musty wooded paneling around all the plumbing fixtures.

It being still daylight, I descended to the Square and looked around for a dinner of some sort; noticing as I did so the strange glances I received from the unwholesome loafers. Since the grocery was closed, I was forced to patronise the restaurant I had shunned before; a stooped, narrow-headed man with staring, unwinking eyes, and a flat-nosed wench with unbelievably thick, clumsy hands being in attendance. The service was all of the counter type, and it relieved me to find that much was evidently served from cans and packages. A bowl of vegetable soup with crackers was enough for me, and I soon headed back for my cheerless room at the Gilman; getting a evening paper and a fly-specked magazine from the evil-visaged clerk at the rickety stand beside his desk.

As twilight deepened I turned on the one feeble electric bulb over the cheap, iron-framed bed, and tried as best I could to continue the reading I had begun. I felt it advisable to keep my mind wholesomely occupied, for it would not do to brood over the abnormalities of this ancient, blight-shadowed town while I was still within its borders. The insane yarn I had heard from the aged drunkard did not promise very pleasant dreams, and I felt I must keep the image of his wild, watery eyes as far as possible from my imagination.

Also, I must not dwell on what that factory inspector had told the Newburyport ticket-agent about the Gilman House and the voices of its nocturnal tenants--not on that, nor on the face beneath the tiara in the black church doorway; the face for whose horror my conscious mind could not account. It would perhaps have been easier to keep my thoughts from disturbing topics had the room not been so gruesomely musty. As it was, the lethal mustiness blended hideously with the town's general fishy odour and persistently focussed one's fancy on death and decay.

Another thing that disturbed me was the absence of a bolt on the door of my room. One had been there, as marks clearly shewed, but there were signs of recent removal. No doubt it had been out of order, like so many other things in this decrepit edifice. In my nervousness I looked around and discovered a bolt on the clothes press which seemed to be of the same size, judging from the marks, as the one formerly on the door. To gain a partial relief from the general tension I busied myself by transferring this hardware to the vacant place with the aid of a handy three-in-one device including a screwdriver which I kept on my key-ring. The bolt fitted perfectly, and I was somewhat relieved when I knew that I could shoot it firmly upon retiring. Not that I had any real apprehension of its need, but that any symbol of security was welcome in an environment of this kind. There were adequate bolts on the two lateral doors to connecting rooms, and these I proceeded to fasten.

I did not undress, but decided to read till I was sleepy and then lie down with only my coat, collar, and shoes off. Taking a pocket flash light from my valise, I placed it in my trousers, so that I could read my watch if I woke up later in the dark. Drowsiness, however, did not come; and when I stopped to analyse my thoughts I found to my disquiet that I was really unconsciously listening for something--listening for something which I dreaded but could not name. That inspector's story must have worked on my imagination more deeply than I had suspected. Again I tried to read, but found that I made no progress.

After a time I seemed to hear the stairs and corridors creak at intervals as if with footsteps, and wondered if the other rooms were beginning to fill up. There were no voices, however, and it struck me that there was something subtly furtive about the creaking. I did not like it, and debated whether I had better try to sleep at all. This town had some queer people, and there had undoubtedly been several disappearances. Was this one of those inns where travelers were slain for their money? Surely I had no look of excessive prosperity. Or were the towns folk really so resentful about curious visitors? Had my obvious sightseeing, with its frequent map-consultations, aroused unfavorable notice. It occurred to me that I must be in a highly nervous state to let a few random creakings set me off speculating in this fashion--but I regretted none the less that I was unarmed.

At length, feeling a fatigue which had nothing of drowsiness in it, I bolted the newly outfitted hall door, turned off the light, and threw myself down on the hard, uneven bed--coat, collar, shoes, and all. In the darkness every faint noise of the night seemed magnified, and a flood of doubly unpleasant thoughts swept over me. I was sorry I had put out the light, yet was too tired to rise and turn it on again. Then, after a long, dreary interval, and prefaced by a fresh creaking of stairs and corridor, there came that soft, damnably unmistakable sound which seemed like a malign fulfillment of all my apprehensions. Without the least shadow of a doubt, the lock of my door was being tried--cautiously, furtively, tentatively--with a key.

My sensations upon recognising this sign of actual peril were perhaps less rather than more tumultuous because of my previous vague fears. I had been, albeit without definite reason, instinctively on my guard--and that was to my advantage in the new and real crisis, whatever it might turn out to be. Nevertheless the change in the menace from vague premonition to immediate reality was a profound shock, and fell upon me with the force of a genuine blow. It never once occurred to me that the fumbling might be a mere mistake. Malign purpose was all I could think of, and I kept deathly quiet, awaiting the would-be intruder's next move.

After a time the cautious rattling ceased, and I heard the room to the north entered with a pass-key. Then the lock of the connecting door to my room was softly tried. The bolt held, of course, and I heard the floor creak as the prowler left the room. After a moment there came another soft rattling, and I knew that the room to the south of me was being entered. Again a furtive trying of a bolted connecting door, and again a receding creaking. This time the creaking went along the hall and down the stairs, so I knew that the prowler had realised the bolted condition of my doors and was giving up his attempt for a greater or lesser time, as the future would shew.

The readiness with which I fell into a plan of action proves that I must have been subconsciously fearing some menace and considering possible avenues of escape for hours. From the first I felt that the unseen fumbler meant a danger not to be met or dealt with, but only to be fled from as precipitately as possible. The one thing to do was to get out of that hotel alive as quickly as I could, and through some channel other than the front stairs and lobby.

Rising softly and throwing my flashlight on the switch, I sought to light the bulb over my bed in order to choose and pocket some belongings for a swift, valiseless flight. Nothing, however, happened; and I saw that the power had been cut off. Clearly, some cryptic, evil movement was afoot on a large scale--just what, I could not say. As I stood pondering with my hand on the now useless switch I heard a muffled creaking on the floor below, and thought I could barely distinguish voices in conversation. A moment later I felt less sure that the deeper sounds were voices, since the apparent hoarse barkings and loose-syllabled croakings bore so little resemblance to recognized human speech. Then I thought with renewed force of what the factory inspector had heard in the night in this mouldering and pestilential building.

Having filled my pockets with the flashlight's aid, I put on my hat and tiptoed to the windows to consider chances of descent. Despite the state's safety regulations there was no fire escape on this side of the hotel, and I saw that my windows commanded only a sheer three story drop to the cobbled courtyard. On the right and left, however, some ancient brick business blocks abutted on the hotel; their slant roofs coming up to a reasonable jumping distance from my fourth-story level. To reach either of these lines of buildings I would have to be in a room two from my own--in one case on the north and in the other case on the south--and my mind instantly set to work what chances I had of making the transfer.

I could not, I decided, risk an emergence into the corridor; where my footsteps would surely be heard, and where the difficulties of entering the desired room would be insuperable. My progress, if it was to be made at all, would have to be through the less solidly-built connecting doors of the rooms; the locks and bolts of which I would have to force violently, using my shoulder as a battering-ram whenever they were set against me. This, I thought, would be possible owing to the rickety nature of the house and its fixtures; but I realised I could not do it noiselessly. I would have to count on sheer speed, and the chance of getting to a window before any hostile forces became coordinated enough to open the right door toward me with a pass-key. My own outer door I reinforced by pushing the bureau against it--little by little, in order to make a minimum of sound.

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

Gathering from the grocery boy's map that the best route out of town was southward, I glanced first at the connecting door on the south side of the room. It was designed to open in my direction, hence I saw--after drawing the bolt and finding other fastening in place--it was not a favorable one for forcing. Accordingly abandoning it as a route, I cautiously moved the bedstead against it to hamper any attack which might be made on it later from the next room. The door on the north was hung to open away from me, and this--though a test proved it to be locked or bolted from the other side--I knew must be my route. If I could gain the roofs of the buildings in Paine Street and descend successfully to the ground level, I might perhaps dart through the courtyard and the adjacent or opposite building to Washington or Bates--or else emerge in Paine and edge around southward into Washington. In any case, I would aim to strike Washington somehow and get quickly out of the Town Square region. My preference would be to avoid Paine, since the fire station there might be open all night.

As I thought of these things I looked out over the squalid sea of decaying roofs below me, now brightened by the beams of a moon not much past full. On the right the black gash of the river-gorge clove the panorama; abandoned factories and railway station clinging barnacle-like to its sides. Beyond it the rusted railway and the Rowley road led off through a flat marshy terrain dotted with islets of higher and dryer scrub-grown land. On the left the creek-threaded country-side was nearer, the narrow road to Ipswich gleaming white in the moonlight. I could not see from my side of the hotel the southward route toward Arkham which I had determined to take.

I was irresolutely speculating on when I had better attack the northward door, and on how I could least audibly manage it, when I noticed that the vague noises underfoot had given place to a fresh and heavier creaking of the stairs. A wavering flicker of light shewed through my transom, and the boards of the corridor began to groan with a ponderous load. Muffled sounds of possible vocal origin approached, and at length a firm knock came at my outer door.

For a moment I simply held my breath and waited. Eternities seemed to elapse, and the nauseous fishy odour of my environment seemed to mount suddenly and spectacularly. Then the knocking was repeated--continuously, and with growing insistence. I knew that the time for action had come, and forthwith drew the bolt of the northward connecting door, bracing myself for the task of battering it open. The knocking waxed louder, and I hoped that its volume would cover the sound of my efforts. At last beginning my attempt, I lunged again and again at the thin paneling with my left shoulder, heedless of shock or pain. The door resisted even more than I expected, but I did not give in. And all the while the clamour at the outer door increased.

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

For an instant I felt absolute despair, since my trapping in a chamber with no window egress seemed complete. A wave of almost abnormal horror swept over me, and invested with a terrible but unexplainable singularity the flashlight-glimpsed dust prints made by the intruder who had lately tried my door from this room. Then, with a dazed automatism which persisted despite hopelessness, I made for the next connecting door and performed the blind motion of pushing at it in an effort to get through and--granting that fastenings might be as providentially intact as in this second room--bolt the hall door beyond before the lock could be turned from outside.

Sheer fortunate chance gave me my reprieve--for the connecting door before me was not only unlocked but actually ajar. In a second I was though, and had my right knee and shoulder against a hall door which was visibly opening inward. My pressure took the opener off guard, for the thing shut as I pushed, so that I could slip the well-conditioned bolt as I had done with the other door. As I gained this respite I heard the battering at the two other doors abate, while a confused clatter came from the connecting door I had shielded with the bedstead. Evidently the bulk of my assailants had entered the southerly room and were massing in a lateral attack. But at the same moment a pass-key sounded in the next door to the north, and I knew that a nearer peril was at hand.

The northward connecting door was wide open, but there was no time to think about checking the already turning lock in the hall. All I could do was to shut and bolt the open connecting door, as well as its mate on the opposite side--pushing a bedstead against the one and a bureau against the other, and moving a washstand in front of the hall door. I must, I saw, trust to such makeshift barriers to shield me till I could get out the window and on the roof of the Paine Street block. But even in this acute moment my chief horror was something apart from the immediate weakness of my defenses. I was shuddering because not one of my pursuers, despite some hideous panting, grunting, and subdued barkings at odd intervals, was uttering an unmuffled or intelligible vocal sound.

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

Surveying the conditions, I chose the more southerly of the two windows as my avenue of escape; planning to land on the inner slope of the roof and make for the nearest sky-light. Once inside one of the decrepit brick structures I would have to reckon with pursuit; but I hoped to descend and dodge in and out of yawning doorways along the shadowed courtyard, eventually getting to Washington Street and slipping out of town toward the south.

The clatter at the northerly connecting door was now terrific, and I saw that the weak panelling was beginning to splinter. Obviously, the besiegers had brought some ponderous object into play as a battering-ram. The bedstead, however, still held firm; so that I had at least a faint chance of making good my escape. As I opened the window I noticed that it was flanked by heavy velour draperies suspended from a pole by brass rings, and also that there was a large projecting catch for the shutters on the exterior. Seeing a possible means of avoiding the dangerous jump, I yanked at the hangings and brought them down, pole and all; then quickly hooking two of the rings in the shutter catch and flinging the drapery outside. The heavy folds reached fully to the abutting roof, and I saw that the rings and catch would be likely to bear my weight. So, climbing out of the window and down the improvised rope ladder, I left behind me forever the morbid and horror-infested fabric of the Gilman House.

I landed safely on the loose slates of the steep roof, and succeeded in gaining the gaping black skylight without a slip. Glancing up at the window I had left, I observed it was still dark, though far across the crumbling chimneys to the north I could see lights ominously blazing in the Order of Dagon Hall, the Baptist church, and the Congregational church which I recalled so shiveringly. There had seemed to be no one in the courtyard below, and I hoped there would be a chance to get away before the spreading of a general alarm. Flashing my pocket lamp into the skylight, I saw that there were no steps down. The distance was slight, however, so I clambered over the brink and dropped; striking a dusty floor littered with crumbling boxes and barrels.

The place was ghoulish-looking, but I was past minding such impressions and made at once for the staircase revealed by my flashlight--after a hasty glance at my watch, which shewed the hour to be 2 a.m. The steps creaked, but seemed tolerably sound; and I raced down past a barnlike second storey to the ground floor. The desolation was complete, and only echoes answered my footfalls. At length I reached the lower hall at the end of which I saw a faint luminous rectangle marking the ruined Paine Street doorway. Heading the other way, I found the back door also open; and darted out and down five stone steps to the grass-grown cobblestones of the courtyard.

The moonbeams did not reach down here, but I could just see my way about without using the flashlight. Some of the windows on the Gilman House side were faintly glowing, and I thought I heard confused sounds within. Walking softly over to the Washington Street side I perceived several open doorways, and chose the nearest as my route out. The hallway inside was black, and when I reached the opposite end I saw that the street door was wedged immovably shut. Resolved to try another building, I groped my way back toward the courtyard, but stopped short when close to the doorway.

For out of an opened door in the Gilman House a large crowd of doubtful shapes was pouring--lanterns bobbing in the darkness, and horrible croaking voices exchanging low cries in what was certainly not English. The figures moved uncertainly, and I realized to my relief that they did not know where I had gone; but for all that they sent a shiver of horror through my frame. Their features were indistinguishable, but their crouching, shambling gait was abominably repellent. And worst of all, I perceived that one figure was strangely robed, and unmistakably surmounted by a tall tiara of a design altogether too familiar. As the figures spread throughout the courtyard, I felt my fears increase. Suppose I could find no egress from this building on the street side? The fishy odour was detestable, and I wondered I could stand it without fainting. Again groping toward the street, I opened a door off the hall and came upon an empty room with closely shuttered but sashless windows. Fumbling in the rays of my flashlight, I found I could open the shutters; and in another moment had climbed outside and was fully closing the aperture in its original manner.

I was now in Washington Street, and for the moment saw no living thing nor any light save that of the moon. From several directions in the distance, however, I could hear the sound of hoarse voices, of footsteps, and of a curious kind of pattering which did not sound quite like footsteps. Plainly I had no time to lose. The points of the compass were clear to me, and I was glad that all the street lights were turned off, as is often the custom on strongly moonlit nights in prosperous rural regions. Some of the sounds came from the south, yet I retained my design of escaping in that direction. There would, I knew, be plenty of deserted doorways to shelter me in case I met any person or group who looked like pursuers.

I walked rapidly, softly, and close to the ruined houses. While hatless and dishevelled after my arduous climb, I did not look especially noticeable; and stood a good chance of passing unheeded if forced to encounter any casual wayfarer.

At Bates Street I drew into a yawning vestibule while two shambling figures crossed in front of me, but was soon on my way again and approaching the open space where Eliot Street obliquely crosses Washington at the intersection of South. Though I had never seen this space, it had looked dangerous to me on the grocery youth's map; since the moonlight would have free play there. There was no use trying to evade it, for any alternative course would involve detours of possibly disastrous visibility and delaying effect. The only thing to do was to cross it boldly and openly; imitating the typical shamble of the Innsmouth folk as best I could, and trusting that no one--or at least no pursuer of mine--would be there.

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

The open space was, as I had expected, strongly moonlit; and I saw the remains of a parklike, iron-railed green in its center. Fortunately no one was about though a curious sort of buzz or roar seemed to be increasing in the direction of Town Square. South Street was very wide, leading directly down a slight declivity to the waterfront and commanding a long view out to sea; and I hoped that no one would be glancing up it from afar as I crossed in the bright moonlight.

My progress was unimpeded, and no fresh sound arose to hint that I had been spied. Glancing about me, I involuntarily let my pace slacken for a second to take in the sight of the sea, gorgeous in the burning moonlight at the street's end. Far out beyond the breakwater was the dim, dark line of Devil Reef, and as I glimpsed it I could not help thinking of all the hideous legends I had heard in the last twenty-four hours--legends which portrayed this ragged rock as a veritable gateway to realms of unfathomed horror and inconceivable abnormality.

Then, without warning, I saw the intermittent flashes of light on the distant reef. They were definite and unmistakable, and awaked in my mind a blind horror beyond all rational proportion. My muscles tightened for panic flight, held in only by a certain unconscious caution and half-hypnotic fascination. And to make matters worse, there now flashed forth from the lofty cupola of the Gilman House, which loomed up to the northeast behind me, a series of analogous though differently spaced gleams which could be nothing less than an answering signal.

Controlling my muscles, and realising afresh--how plainly visible I was, I resumed my brisker and feignedly shambling pace; though keeping my eyes on that hellish and ominous reef as long as the opening of South Street gave me a seaward view. What the whole proceeding meant, I could not imagine; unless it involved some strange rite connected with Devil Reef, or unless some party had landed from a ship on that sinister rock. I now bent to the left around the ruinous green; still gazing toward the ocean as it blazed in the spectral summer moonlight, and watching the cryptical flashing of those nameless, unexplainable beacons.

It was then that the most horrible impression of all was borne in upon me--the impression which destroyed my last vestige of self-control and sent me running frantically southward past the yawning black doorways and fishily staring windows of that deserted nightmare street. For at a closer glance I saw that the moonlit waters between the reef and the shore were far from empty. They were alive with a teeming horde of shapes swimming inward toward the town; and even at my vast distance and in my single moment of perception I could tell that the bobbing heads and flailing arms were alien and aberrant in a way scarcely to be expressed or consciously formulated.

My frantic running ceased before I had covered a block, for at my left I began to hear something like the hue and cry of organised pursuit. There were footsteps and guttural sounds, and a rattling motor wheezed south along Federal Street. In a second all my plans were utterly changed--for if the southward highway were blocked ahead of me, I must clearly find another egress from Innsmouth. I paused and drew into a gaping doorway, reflecting how lucky I was to have left the moonlit open space before these pursuers came down the parallel street.

A second reflection was less comforting. Since the pursuit was down another street, it was plain that the party was not following me directly. It had not seen me, but was simply obeying a general plan of cutting off my escape. This, however, implied that all roads leading out of Innsmouth were similarly patrolled; for the people could not have known what route I intended to take. If this were so, I would have to make my retreat across country away from any road; but how could I do that in view of the marshy and creek-riddled nature of all the surrounding region? For a moment my brain reeled--both from sheer hopelessness and from a rapid increase in the omnipresent fishy odour.

Then I thought of the abandoned railway to Rowley, whose solid line of ballasted, weed-grown earth still stretched off to the northwest from the crumbling station on the edge at the river-gorge. There was just a chance that the townsfolk would not think of that; since its briar-choked desertion made it half-impassable, and the unlikeliest of all avenues for a fugitive to choose. I had seen it clearly from my hotel window and knew about how it lay. Most of its earlier length was uncomfortably visible from the Rowley road, and from high places in the town itself; but one could perhaps crawl inconspicuously through the undergrowth. At any rate, it would form my only chance of deliverance, and there was nothing to do but try it.

Drawing inside the hall of my deserted shelter, I once more consulted the grocery boy's map with the aid of the flashlight. The immediate problem was how to reach the ancient railway; and I now saw that the safest course was ahead to Babson Street; then west to Lafayette--there edging around but not crossing an open space homologous to the one I had traversed--and subsequently back northward and westward in a zigzagging line through Lafayette, Bates, Adam, and Bank streets--the latter skirting the river gorge--to the abandoned and dilapidated station I had seen from my window. My reason for going ahead to Babson was that I wished neither to recross the earlier open space nor to begin my westward course along a cross street as broad as South.

Starting once more, I crossed the street to the right-hand side in order to edge around into Babson as inconspicuously as possible. Noises still continued in Federal Street, and as I glanced behind me I thought I saw a gleam of light near the building through which I had escaped. Anxious to leave Washington Street, I broke into a quiet dogtrot, trusting to luck not to encounter any observing eye. Next the corner of Babson Street I saw to my alarm that one of the houses was still inhabited, as attested by curtains at the window; but there were no lights within, and I passed it without disaster.

In Babson Street, which crossed Federal and might thus reveal me to the searchers, I clung as closely as possible to the sagging, uneven buildings; twice pausing in a doorway as the noises behind me momentarily increased. The open space ahead shone wide and desolate under the moon, but my route would not force me to cross it. During my second pause I began to detect a fresh distribution of vague sounds; and upon looking cautiously out from cover beheld a motor car darting across the open space, bound outward along Eliot Street, which there intersects both Babson and Lafayette.

As I watched--choked by a sudden rise in the fishy odour after a short abatement--I saw a band of uncouth, crouching shapes loping and shambling in the same direction; and knew that this must be the party guarding the Ipswich road, since that highway forms an extension of Eliot Street. Two of the figures I glimpsed were in voluminous robes, and one wore a peaked diadem which glistened whitely in the moonlight. The gait of this figure was so odd that it sent a chill through me--for it seemed to me the creature was almost hopping.

When the last of the band was out of sight I resumed my progress; darting around the corner into Lafayette Street, and crossing Eliot very hurriedly lest stragglers of the party be still advancing along that thoroughfare. I did hear some croaking and clattering sounds far off toward Town Square, but accomplished the passage without disaster. My greatest dread was in re-crossing broad and moonlit South Street--with its seaward view--and I had to nerve myself for the ordeal. Someone might easily be looking, and possible Eliot Street stragglers could not fail to glimpse me from either of two points. At the last moment I decided I had better slacken my trot and make the crossing as before in the shambling gait of an average Innsmouth native.

When the view of the water again opened out--this time on my right--I was half-determined not to look at it at all. I could not however, resist; but cast a sidelong glance as I carefully and imitatively shambled toward the protecting shadows ahead. There was no ship visible, as I had half-expected there would be. Instead, the first thing which caught my eye was a small rowboat pulling in toward the abandoned wharves and laden with some bulky, tarpaulin-covered object. Its rowers, though distantly and indistinctly seen, were of an especially repellent aspect. Several swimmers were still discernible; while on the far black reef I could see a faint, steady glow unlike the winking beacon visible before, and of a curious colour which I could not precisely identify. Above the slant roofs ahead and to the right there loomed the tall cupola of the Gilman House, but it was completely dark. The fishy odour, dispelled for a moment by some merciful breeze, now closed in again with maddening intensity.

I had not quite crossed the street when I heard a muttering band advancing along Washington from the north. As they reached the broad open space where I had had my first disquieting glimpse of the moonlit water I could see them plainly only a block away--and was horrified by the bestial abnormality of their faces and the doglike sub-humanness of their crouching gait. One man moved in a positively simian way, with long arms frequently touching the ground; while another figure--robed and tiaraed--seemed to progress in an almost hopping fashion. I judged this party to be the one I had seen in the Gilman's courtyard--the one, therefore, most closely on my trail. As some of the figures turned to look in my direction I was transfixed with fright, yet managed to preserve the casual, shambling gait I had assumed. To this day I do not know whether they saw me or not. If they did, my stratagem must have deceived them, for they passed on across the moonlit space without varying their course--meanwhile croaking and jabbering in some hateful guttural patois I could not identify.

Once more in shadow, I resumed my former dog-trot past the leaning and decrepit houses that stared blankly into the night. Having crossed to the western sidewalk I rounded the nearest corner into Bates Street where I kept close to the buildings on the southern side. I passed two houses shewing signs of habitation, one of which had faint lights in upper rooms, yet met with no obstacle. As I turned into Adams Street I felt measurably safer, but received a shook when a man reeled out of a black doorway directly in front of me. He proved, however, too hopelessly drunk to be a menace; so that I reached the dismal ruins of the Bank Street warehouses in safety.

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

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

The vast, barnlike length of the old bridge gleamed spectrally in the moonlight, and I saw that the ties were safe for at least a few feet within. Entering, I began to use my flashlight, and was almost knocked down by the cloud of bats that flapped past me. About half-way across there was a perilous gap in the ties which I feared for a moment would halt me; but in the end I risked a desperate jump which fortunately succeeded.

I was glad to see the moonlight again when I emerged from that macabre tunnel. The old tracks crossed River Street at grade, and at once veered off into a region increasingly rural and with less and less of Innsmouth's abhorrent fishy odour. Here the dense growth of weeds and briers hindered me and cruelly tore at my clothes, but I was none the less glad that they were there to give me concealment in case of peril. I knew that much of my route must be visible from the Rowley road.

The marshy region began very abruptly, with the single track on a low, grassy embankment where the weedy growth was somewhat thinner. Then came a sort of island of higher ground, where the line passed through a shallow open cut choked with bushes and brambles. I was very glad of this partial shelter, since at this point the Rowley road was uncomfortably near according to my window view. At the end of the cut it would cross the track and swerve off to a safer distance; but meanwhile I must be exceedingly careful. I was by this time thankfully certain that the railway itself was not patrolled.

Just before entering the cut I glanced behind me, but saw no pursuer. The ancient spires and roofs of decaying Innsmouth gleamed lovely and ethereal in the magic yellow moonlight, and I thought of how they must have looked in the old days before the shadow fell. Then, as my gaze circled inland from the town, something less tranquil arrested my notice and held me immobile for a second.

What I saw--or fancied I saw--was a disturbing suggestion of undulant motion far to the south; a suggestion which made me conclude that a very large horde must be pouring out of the city along the level Ipswich road. The distance was great and I could distinguish nothing in detail; but I did not at all like the look of that moving column. It undulated too much, and glistened too brightly in the rays of the now westering moon. There was a suggestion of sound, too, though the wind was blowing the other way--a suggestion of bestial scraping and bellowing even worse than the muttering of the parties I had lately overheard.

All sorts of unpleasant conjectures crossed my mind. I thought of those very extreme Innsmouth types said to be hidden in crumbling, centuried warrens near the waterfront; I thought, too, of those nameless swimmers I had seen. Counting the parties so far glimpsed, as well as those presumably covering other roads, the number of my pursuers must be strangely large for a town as depopulated as Innsmouth.

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

I had entered the brush-grown cut and was struggling along at a very slow pace when that damnable fishy odour again waxed dominant. Had the wind suddenly changed eastward, so that it blew in from the sea and over the town? It must have, I concluded, since I now began to hear shocking guttural murmurs from that hitherto silent direction. There was another sound, too--a kind of wholesale, colossal flopping or pattering which somehow called up images of the most detestable sort. It made me think illogically of that unpleasantly undulating column on the far-off Ipswich road.

And then both stench and sounds grew stronger, so that I paused shivering and grateful for the cut's protection. It was here, I recalled, that the Rowley road drew so close to the old railway before crossing westward and diverging. Something was coming along that road, and I must lie low till its passage and vanishment in the distance. Thank heaven these creatures employed no dogs for tracking--though perhaps that would have been impossible amidst the omnipresent regional odour. Crouched in the bushes of that sandy cleft I felt reasonably safe, even though I knew the searchers would have to cross the track in front of me not much more than a hundred yards away. I would be able to see them, but they could not, except by a malign miracle, see me.

All at once I began dreading to look at them as they passed. I saw the close moonlit space where they would surge by, and had curious thoughts about the irredeemable pollution of that space. They would perhaps be the worst of all Innsmouth types--something one would not care to remember.

The stench waxed overpowering, and the noises swelled to a bestial babel of croaking, baying and barking without the least suggestion of human speech. Were these indeed the voices of my pursuers? Did they have dogs after all? So far I had seen none of the lower animals in Innsmouth. That flopping or pattering was monstrous--I could not look upon the degenerate creatures responsible for it. I would keep my eyes shut till the sound receded toward the west. The horde was very close now--air foul with their hoarse snarlings, and the ground almost shaking with their alien-rhythmed footfalls. My breath nearly ceased to come, and I put every ounce of will-power into the task of holding my eyelids down.

I am not even yet willing to say whether what followed was a hideous actuality or only a nightmare hallucination. The later action of the government, after my frantic appeals, would tend to confirm it as a monstrous truth; but could not an hallucination have been repeated under the quasi-hypnotic spell of that ancient, haunted, and shadowed town? Such places have strange properties, and the legacy of insane legend might well have acted on more than one human imagination amidst those dead, stench-cursed streets and huddles of rotting roofs and crumbling steeples. Is it not possible that the germ of an actual contagious madness lurks in the depths of that shadow over Innsmouth? Who can be sure of reality after hearing things like the tale of old Zadok Allen? The government men never found poor Zadok, and have no conjectures to make as to what became of him. Where does madness leave off and reality begin? Is it possible that even my latest fear is sheer delusion?

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

I thought I was prepared for the worst, and I really ought to have been prepared considering what I had seen before.

My other pursuers had been accursedly abnormal--so should I not have been ready to face a strengthening of the abnormal element; to look upon forms in which there was no mixture of the normal at all? I did not open my eyes until the raucous clamour came loudly from a point obviously straight ahead. Then I knew that a long section of them must be plainly in sight where the sides of the cut flattened out and the road crossed the track--and I could no longer keep myself from sampling whatever horror that leering yellow moon might have to shew.

It was the end, for whatever remains to me of life on the surface of this earth, of every vestige of mental peace and confidence in the integrity of nature and of the human mind. Nothing that I could have imagined--nothing, even, that I could have gathered had I credited old Zadok's crazy tale in the most literal way--would be in any way comparable to the demoniac, blasphemous reality that I saw--or believe I saw. I have tried to hint what it was in order to postpone the horror of writing it down baldly. Can it be possible that this planet has actually spawned such things; that human eyes have truly seen, as objective flesh, what man has hitherto known only in febrile phantasy and tenuous legend?

And yet I saw them in a limitless stream--flopping, hopping, croaking, bleating--urging inhumanly through the spectral moonlight in a grotesque, malignant saraband of fantastic nightmare. And some of them had tall tiaras of that nameless whitish-gold metal...and some were strangely robed...and one, who led the way, was clad in a ghoulishly humped black coat and striped trousers, and had a man's felt hat perched on the shapeless thing that answered for a head.

I think their predominant colour was a greyish-green, though they had white bellies. They were mostly shiny and slippery, but the ridges of their backs were scaly. Their forms vaguely suggested the anthropoid, while their heads were the heads of fish, with prodigious bulging eyes that never closed. At the sides of their necks were palpitating gills, and their long paws were webbed. They hopped irregularly, sometimes on two legs and sometimes on four. I was somehow glad that they had no more than four limbs. Their croaking, baying voices, clearly used for articulate speech, held all the dark shades of expression which their staring faces lacked.

But for all of their monstrousness they were not unfamiliar to me. I knew too well what they must be--for was not the memory of the evil tiara at Newburyport still fresh? They were the blasphemous fish-frogs of the nameless design--living and horrible--and as I saw them I knew also of what that humped, tiaraed priest in the black church basement had fearsomely reminded me. Their number was past guessing. It seemed to me that there were limitless swarms of them and certainly my momentary glimpse could have shewn only the least fraction. In another instant everything was blotted out by a merciful fit of fainting; the first I had ever had.","On the wall hung a map of Mongolia, that indefinite region a million and a half square miles in area, vast sections of which have never been explored.

Turkestan and China border it on the south, and Tibet almost touches it, not quite.

Even in the twelfth century, when the wild Mongols broke loose and nearly overran the world, the Tibet infantry under Genghis, the Tchortcha horsemen drafted out of Black China, and a great cloud of Mongol cavalry under the Prince of the Vanguard commanding half a hundred Hezars, never penetrated that grisly and unknown waste. The ""Eight Towers of the Assassins"" guarded it—still guard it, possibly.

The vice-regent of Erlik, Prince of Darkness, dwelt within this unknown land. And dwells there still, perhaps.

In front of this wall-map stood Tressa Norne.

Behind her, facing the map, four men were seated—three of them under thirty.

These three were volunteers in the service of the United States Government—men of independent means, of position, who had volunteered for military duty at the outbreak of the great war. However, they had been assigned by the Government to a very different sort of duty no less exciting than service on the fighting line, but far less conspicuous, for they had been drafted into the United States Department of Justice.

The names of these three were Victor Cleves, a professor of ornithology at Harvard University before the war; Alexander Selden, junior partner in the banking firm of Milwyn, Selden, and Co., and James Benton, a New York architect.

The fourth man's name was John Recklow. He might have been over fifty, or under. He was well-built, in a square, athletic way, clear-skinned and ruddy, grey-eyed, quiet in voice and manner. His hair and moustache had turned silvery. He had been employed by the Government for many years. He seemed to be enormously interested in what Miss Norne was saying.

Also he was the only man who interrupted her narrative to ask questions. And his questions revealed a knowledge which was making the girl more sensitive and uneasy every moment.

Finally, when she spoke of the Scarlet Desert, he asked if the Scarlet Lake were there and if the Xin was still supposed to inhabit its vermilion depths. And at that she turned and looked at him, her forefinger still resting on the map.

""Where have you ever heard of the Scarlet Lake and the Xin?"" she asked as though frightened.

Recklow said quietly that as a boy he had served under Gordon and Sir Robert.

""If, as a boy, you served under Chinese Gordon, you already know much of what I have told you, Mr. Recklow. Is it not true?"" she demanded nervously.

""That makes no difference,"" he replied with a smile. ""It is all very new to these three young gentlemen. And as for myself, I am checking up what you say and comparing it with what I heard many, many years ago when my comrade Barres and I were in Yian.""

""Did you really know Sir Robert Hart?""

""Yes.""

""Then why do you not explain to these gentlemen?""

""Dear child,"" he interrupted gently, ""what did Chinese Gordon or Sir Robert Hart, or even my comrade Barres, or I myself know about occult Asia in comparison to what you know?—a girl who has actually served the mysteries of Erlik for four amazing years!""

She paled a trifle, came slowly across the room to where Recklow was seated, laid a timid hand on his sleeve.

""Do you believe there are sorcerers in Asia?"" she asked with that child-like directness which her wonderful blue eyes corroborated.

Recklow remained silent.

""Because,"" she went on, ""if, in your heart, you do not believe this to be an accursed fact, then what I have to say will mean nothing to any of you.""

Recklow touched his short, silvery moustache, hesitating. Then:

""The worship of Erlik is devil worship,"" he said. ""Also I am entirely prepared to believe that there are, among the Yezidees, adepts who employ scientific weapons against civilisation—who have probably obtained a rather terrifying knowledge of psychic laws which they use scientifically, and which to ordinary, God-fearing folk appear to be the black magic of sorcerers.""

Cleves said: ""The employment by the huns of poison gases and long-range cannon is a parallel case. Before the war we could not believe in the possibility of a cannon that threw shells a distance of seventy miles.""

The girl still addressed herself to Recklow: ""Then you do not believe there are real sorcerers in Asia, Mr. Recklow?""

""Not sorcerers with supernatural powers for evil. Only degenerate human beings who, somehow, have managed to tap invisible psychic currents, and have learned how to use terrific forces about which, so far, we know practically nothing.""

She spoke again in the same uneasy voice: ""Then you do not believe that either God or Satan is involved?""

""No,"" he replied smilingly, ""and you must not so believe.""

""Nor the—the destruction of human souls,"" she persisted; ""you do not believe it is being accomplished to-day?""

""Not in the slightest, dear young lady,"" he said cheerfully.

""Do you not believe that to have been instructed in such unlawful knowledge is damning? Do you not believe that ability to employ unknown forces is forbidden of God, and that to disobey His law means death to the soul?""

""No!""

""That it is the price one pays to Satan for occult power over people's minds?"" she insisted.

""Hypnotic suggestion is not one of the cardinal sins,"" explained Recklow, still smiling—""unless wickedly employed. The Yezidee priesthood is a band of so-called sorcerers only because of their wicked employment of whatever hypnotic and psychic knowledge they may have obtained.

""There was nothing intrinsically wicked in the huns' discovery of phosgene. But the use they made of it made devils out of them. My ability to manufacture phosgene gas is no crime. But if I manufacture it and use it to poison innocent human beings, then, in that sense, I am, perhaps, a sort of modern sorcerer.""

Tressa Norne turned paler:

""I had better tell you that I have used—forbidden knowledge—which the Yezidees taught me in the temple of Erlik.""

""Used it how?"" demanded Cleves.

""To—to earn a living.... And once or twice to defend myself.""

There was the slightest scepticism in Recklow's bland smile. ""You did quite right, Miss Norne.""

She had become very white now. She stood beside Recklow, her back toward the suspended map, and looked in a scared sort of way from one to the other of the men seated before her, turning finally to Cleves, and coming toward him.

""I—I once killed a man,"" she said with a catch in her breath.

Cleves reddened with astonishment. ""Why did you do that?"" he asked.

""He was already on his way to kill me in bed.""

""You were perfectly right,"" remarked Recklow coolly.

""I don't know ... I was in bed.... And then, on the edge of sleep, I felt his mind groping to get hold of mine—feeling about in the darkness to get hold of my brain and seize it and paralyse it.""

All colour had left her face. Cleves gripped the arm of his chair and watched her intently.

""I—I had only a moment's mental freedom,"" she went on in a ghost of a voice. ""I was just able to rouse myself, fight off those murderous brain-fingers—let loose a clear mental ray.... And then, O God! I saw him in his room with his Kalmuck knife—saw him already on his way to murder me—Gutchlug Khan, the Yezidee—looking about in his bedroom for a shroud.... And when—when he reached for the bed to draw forth a fine, white sheet for the shroud without which no Yezidee dares journey deathward—then—then I became frightened.... And I killed him—I slew him there in his hotel bedroom on the floor above mine!""

Selden moistened his lips: ""That Oriental, Gutchlug, died from heart-failure in a San Francisco hotel,"" he said. ""I was there at the time.""

""He died by the fangs of a little yellow snake,"" whispered the girl.

""There was no snake in his room,"" retorted Cleves.

""And no wound on his body,"" added Selden. ""I attended the autopsy.""

She said, faintly: ""There was no snake, and no wound, as you say.... Yet Gutchlug died of both there in his bedroom.... And before he died he heard his soul bidding him farewell; and he saw the death-adder coiled in the sheet he clutched—saw the thing strike him again and again—saw and felt the tiny wounds on his left hand; felt the fangs pricking deep, deep into the veins; died of it there within the minute—died of the swiftest poison known. And yet——""

She turned her dead-white face to Cleves—""And yet there was no snake there!... And never had been.... And so I—I ask you, gentlemen, if souls do not die when minds learn to fight death with death—and deal it so swiftly, so silently, while one's body lies, unstirring on a bed—in a locked room on the floor below——""

She swayed a little, put out one hand rather blindly.

Recklow rose and passed a muscular arm around her; Cleves, beside her, held her left hand, crushing it, without intention, until she opened her eyes with a cry of pain.

""Are you all right?"" asked Recklow bluntly.

""Yes."" She turned and looked at Cleves and he caressed her bruised hand as though dazed.

""Tell me,"" she said to Cleves—""you who know—know more about my mind than anybody living——"" a painful colour surged into her face—but she went on steadily, forcing herself to meet his gaze: ""tell me, Mr. Cleves—do you still believe that nothing can really destroy my soul? And that it shall yet win through to safety?""

He said: ""Your soul is in God's keeping, and always shall be.... And if the Yezidees have made you believe otherwise, they lie.""

Recklow added in a slow, perplexed way: ""I have no personal knowledge of psychic power. I am not psychic, not susceptible. But if you actually possess such ability, Miss Norne, and if you have employed such knowledge to defend your life, then you have done absolutely right.""

""No guilt touches you,"" added Selden with an involuntary shiver, ""if by hypnosis or psychic ability you really did put an end to that would-be murderer, Gutchlug.""

Selden said: ""If Gutchlug died by the fangs of a yellow death-adder which existed only in his own mind, and if you actually had anything to do with it you acted purely in self-defence.""

""You did your full duty,"" added Benton—""but—good God!—it seems incredible to me, that such power can actually be available in the world!""

Recklow spoke again in his pleasant, undisturbed voice: ""Go back to the map, Miss Norne, and tell us a little more about this rather terrifying thing which you believe menaces the civilised world with destruction.""

Tressa Norne laid a slim finger on the map. Her voice had become steady. She said:

""The devil-worship, of which one of the modern developments is Bolshevism, and another the terrorism of the hun, began in Asia long before Christ's advent: At least so it was taught us in the temple of Erlik.

""It has always existed, its aim always has been the annihilation of good and the elevation of evil; the subjection of right by might, and the worldwide triumph of wrong.

""Perhaps it is as old as the first battle between God and Satan. I have wondered about it, sometimes. There in the dusk of the temple when the Eight Assassins came—the eight Sheiks-el-Djebel, all in white—chanting the Yakase of Sabbah—always that dirge when they came and spread their eight white shrouds on the temple steps——""

Her voice caught; she waited to recover her composure. Then went on:

""The ambition of Genghis was to conquer the world by force of arms. It was merely of physical subjection that he dreamed. But the Slayer of Souls——""

""Who?"" asked Recklow sharply.

""The Slayer of Souls—Erlik's vice-regent on earth—Hassan Sabbah. The Old Man of the Mountain. It is of him I am speaking,"" exclaimed Tressa Norne—with quiet resolution. ""Genghis sought only physical conquest of man; the Yezidee's ambition is more awful, for he is attempting to surprise and seize the very minds of men!""

There was a dead silence. Tressa looked palely upon the four.

""The Yezidees—who you tell me are not sorcerers—are using power—which you tell me is not magic accursed by God—to waylay, capture, enslave, and destroy the minds and souls of mankind.

""It may be that what they employ is hypnotic ability and psychic power and can be, some day, explained on a scientific basis when we learn more about the occult laws which govern these phenomena.

""But could anything render the threat less awful? For there have existed for centuries—perhaps always—a sect of Satanists determined upon the destruction of everything that is pure and holy and good on earth; and they are resolved to substitute for righteousness the dreadful reign of hell.

""In the beginning there were comparatively few of these human demons. Gradually, through the eras, they have increased. In the twelfth century there were fifty thousand of the Sect of Assassins.

""Beside the castle of the Slayer of Souls on Mount Alamout——"" she laid her finger on the map—""eight other towers were erected for the Eight Chief Assassins, called Sheiks-el-Djebel.

""In the temple we were taught where these eight towers stood."" She picked up a pencil, and on eight blank spaces of unexplored and unmapped Mongolia she made eight crosses. Then she turned to the men behind her.

""It was taught to us in the temple that from these eight foci of infection the disease of evil has been spreading throughout the world; from these eight towers have gone forth every year the emissaries of evil—perverted missionaries—to spread the poisonous propaganda, to teach it, to tamper stealthily with the minds of men, dominate them, pervert them, instruct them in the creed of the Assassin of Souls.

""All over the world are people, already contaminated, whose minds are already enslaved and poisoned, and who are infecting the still healthy brains of others—stealthily possessing themselves of the minds of mankind—teaching them evil, inviting them to mock the precepts of Christ.

""Of such lost minds are the degraded brains of the Germans—the pastors and philosophers who teach that might is right.

""Of such crippled minds are the Bolsheviki, poisoned long, long ago by close contact with Asia which, before that, had infected and enslaved the minds of the ruling classes with ferocious philosophy.

""Of such minds are all anarchists of every shade and stripe—all terrorists, all disciples of violence,—the murderously envious, the slothful slinking brotherhood which prowls through the world taking every opportunity to set it afire; those mentally dulled by reason of excesses; those weak intellects become unsound through futile gabble,—parlour socialists, amateur revolutionists, theoretical incapables excited by discussion fit only for healthy minds.""

She left the map and came over to where the four men were seated terribly intent upon her every word.

""In the temple of Erlik, where my girlhood was passed after the murder of my parents, I learned what I am repeating to you,"" she said.

""I learned this, also, that the Eight Towers still exist—still stand to-day,—at least theoretically—and that from the Eight Towers pours forth across the world a stream of poison.

""I was told that, to every country, eight Yezidees were allotted—eight sorcerers—or adepts in scientific psychology if you prefer it—whose mission is to teach the gospel of hell and gradually but surely to win the minds of men to the service of the Slayer of Souls.

""That is what was taught us in the temple. We were educated in the development of occult powers—for it seems all human beings possess this psychic power latent within them—only few, even when instructed, acquire any ability to control and use this force....

""I—I learned—rapidly. I even thought, sometimes, that the Yezidees were beginning to be a little afraid of me,—even the Hassani priests.... And the Sheiks-el-Djebel, spreading their shrouds on the temple steps, looked at me with unquiet eyes, where I stood like a corpse amid the incense clouds——""

She passed her fingers over her eyelids, then framed her face between both hands for a moment's thought lost in tragic retrospection.

""Kai!"" she whispered dreamily as though to herself—""what Erlik awoke within my body that was asleep, God knows, but it was as though a twin comrade arose within me and looked out through my eyes upon a world which never before had been visible.""

Utter silence reigned in the room: Cleves's breathing seemed almost painful to him so intently was he listening and watching this girl; Benton's hands whitened with his grip on the chair-arms; Selden, tense, absorbed, kept his keen gaze of a business man fastened on her face. Recklow slowly caressed the cold bowl of his pipe with both thumbs.

Tressa Norne's strange and remote eyes subtly altered, and she lifted her head and looked calmly at the men before her.

""I think that there is nothing more for me to add,"" she said. ""The Red Spectre of Anarchy, called Bolshevism at present, threatens our country. Our Government is now awake to this menace and the Secret Service is moving everywhere.

""Great damage already has been done to the minds of many people in this Republic; poison has spread; is spreading. The Eight Towers still stand. The Eight Assassins are in America.

""But these eight Assassins know me to be their enemy.... They will surely attempt to kill me.... I don't believe I can avoid—death—very long.... But I want to serve my country and—and mankind.""

""They'll have to get me first,"" said Cleves, bluntly. ""I shall not permit you out of my sight.""

Recklow said in a musing voice: ""And these eight gentlemen, who are very likely to hurt us, also, are the first people we ought to hunt.""

""To get them,"" added Selden, ""we ought to choke the stream at its source.""

""To find out who they are is what is going to worry us,"" added Benton. Cleves had stood holding a chair for Tressa Norne. Finally she noticed it and seated herself as though tired.

""Is Sanang one of these eight?"" he asked her. The girl turned and looked up at him, and he saw the flush mounting in her face.

""Sometimes,"" she said steadily, ""I have almost believed he was Erlik's own vice-regent on earth—the Slayer of Souls himself.""

Benton and Selden had gone. Recklow left a little later. Cleves accompanied him out to the landing.

""Are you going to keep Miss Norne here with you for the present?"" inquired the older man.

""Yes. I dare not let her out of my sight, Recklow. What else can I do?""

""I don't know. Is she prepared for the consequences?""

""Gossip? Slander?""

""Of course.""

""I can get a housekeeper.""

""That only makes it look worse.""

Cleves reddened. ""Well, do you want to find her in some hotel or apartment with her throat cut?""

""No,"" replied Recklow, gently, ""I do not.""

""Then what else is there to do but keep her here in my own apartment and never let her out of my sight until we can find and lock up the eight gentlemen who are undoubtedly bent on murdering her?""

""Isn't there some woman in the Service who could help out? I could mention several.""

""I tell you I can't trust Tressa Norne to anybody except myself,"" insisted Cleves. ""I got her into this; I am responsible if she is murdered; I dare not entrust her safety to anybody else. And, Recklow, it's a ghastly responsibility for a man to induce a young girl to face death, even in the service of her country.""

""If she remains here alone with you she'll face social destruction,"" remarked Recklow.

Cleves was silent for a moment, then he burst out: ""Well, what am I to do? What is there left for me to do except to watch over her and see her through this devilish business? What other way have I to protect her, Recklow?""

""You could offer her the protection of your name,"" suggested the other, carelessly.

""What? You mean—marry her?""

""Well, nobody else would be inclined to, Cleves, if it ever becomes known she has lived here quite alone with you.""

Cleves stared at the elder man.

""This is nonsense,"" he said in a harsh voice. ""That young girl doesn't want to marry anybody. Neither do I. She doesn't wish to have her throat cut, that's all. And I'm determined she shan't.""

""There are stealthier assassins, Cleves,—the slayers of reputations. It goes badly with their victim. It does indeed.""

""Well, hang it, what do you think I ought to do?""

""I think you ought to marry her if you're going to keep her here.""

""Suppose she doesn't mind the unconventionality of it?""

""All women mind. No woman, at heart, is unconventional, Cleves.""

""She—she seems to agree with me that she ought to stay here.... Besides, she has no money, no relatives, no friends in America——""

""All the more tragic. If you really believe it to be your duty to keep her here where you can look after her bodily safety, then the other obligation is still heavier. And there may come a day when Miss Norne will wish that you had been less conscientious concerning the safety of her pretty throat.... For the knife of the Yezidee is swifter and less cruel than the tongue that slays with a smile.... And this young girl has many years to live, after this business of Bolshevism is dead and forgotten in our Republic.""

""Recklow!""

""Yes?""

""You think I might dare try to find a room somewhere else for her and let her take her chances? Do you?""

""It's your affair.""

""I know—hang it! I know it's my affair. I've unintentionally made it so. But can't you tell me what I ought to do?""

""I can't.""

""What would you do?""

""Don't ask me,"" returned Recklow, sharply. ""If you're not man enough to come to a decision you may turn her over to me.""

Cleves flushed brightly. ""Do you think you are old enough to take my job and avoid scandal?""

Recklow's cold eyes rested on him: ""If you like,"" he said, ""I'll assume your various kinds of personal responsibility toward Miss Norne.""

Cleve's visage burned. ""I'll shoulder my own burdens,"" he retorted.

""Sure. I knew you would."" And Recklow smiled and held out his hand. Cleves took it without cordiality. Standing so, Recklow, still smiling, said: ""What a rotten deal that child has had—is having. Her father and mother were fine people. Did you ever hear of Dr. Norne?""

""She mentioned him once.""

""They were up-State people of most excellent antecedents and no money.

""Dr. Norne was our Vice-Consul at Yarkand in the province of Sin Kiang. All he had was his salary, and he lost that and his post when the administration changed. Then he went into the spice trade.

""Some Jew syndicate here sent him up the Yarkand River to see what could be done about jade and gold concessions. He was on that business when the tragedy happened. The Kalmuks and Khirghiz were responsible, under Yezidee instigation. And there you are:—and here is his child, Cleves—back, by some miracle, from that flowering hell called Yian, believing in her heart that she really lost her soul there in the temple. And now, here in her own native land, she is exposed to actual and hourly danger of assassination.... Poor kid!... Did you ever hear of a rottener deal, Cleves?""

Their hands had remained clasped while Recklow was speaking. He spoke again, clearly, amiably:

""To lay down one's life for a friend is fine. I'm not sure that it's finer to offer one's honour in behalf of a girl whose honour is at stake.""

After a moment Cleves's grip tightened.

""All right,"" he said.

Recklow went downstairs.

",False
"Shortly before ten the next morning I stood with one small valise in front of Hammond's Drug Store in old Market Square waiting for the Innsmouth bus. As the hour for its arrival drew near I noticed a general drift of the loungers to other places up the street, or to the Ideal Lunch across the square. Evidently the ticket-agent had not exaggerated the dislike which local People bore toward Innsmouth and its denizens. In a few moments a small motor-coach of extreme decrepitude and dirty grey colour rattled down State Street, made a turn, and drew up at the curb beside me. I felt immediately that it was the right one; a guess which the half-illegible sign on the windshield--Arkham-Innsmouth-Newburyport--soon verified.
There were only three passengers--dark, unkempt men of sullen visage and somewhat youthful cast--and when the vehicle stopped they clumsily shambled out and began walking up State Street in a silent, almost furtive fashion. The driver also alighted, and I watched him as he went into the drug store to make some purchase. This, I reflected, must be the Joe Sargent mentioned by the ticket-agent; and even before I noticed any details there spread over me a wave of spontaneous aversion which could be neither checked nor explained. It suddenly struck me as very natural that the local people should not wish to ride on a bus owned and driven by this man, or to visit any oftener than possible the habitat of such a man and his kinsfolk.
When the driver came out of the store I looked at him more carefully and tried to determine the source of my evil impression. He was a thin, stoop-shouldered man not much under six feet tall, dressed in shabby blue civilian clothes and wearing a frayed golf cap. His age was perhaps thirty-five, but the odd, deep creases in the sides of his neck made him seem older when one did not study his dull, expressionless face. He had a narrow head, bulging, watery-blue eyes that seemed never to wink, a flat nose, a receding forehead and chin, and singularly undeveloped ears. His long thick lip and coarse-pored, greyish cheeks seemed almost beardless except for some sparse yellow hairs that straggled and curled in irregular patches; and in places the surface seemed queerly irregular, as if peeling from some cutaneous disease. His hands were large and heavily veined, and had a very unusual greyish-blue tinge. The fingers were strikingly short in proportion to the rest of the structure, and seemed to have a tendency to curl closely into the huge palm. As he walked toward the bus I observed his peculiarly shambling gait and saw that his feet were inordinately immense. The more I studied them the more I wondered how he could buy any shoes to fit them.
A certain greasiness about the fellow increased my dislike. He was evidently given to working or lounging around the fish docks, and carried with him much of their characteristic smell. Just what foreign blood was in him I could not even guess. His oddities certainly did not look Asiatic, Polynesian, Levantine or negroid, yet I could see why the people found him alien. I myself would have thought of biological degeneration rather than alienage.
I was sorry when I saw there would be no other passengers on the bus. Somehow I did not like the idea of riding alone with this driver. But as leaving time obviously approached I conquered my qualms and followed the man aboard, extending him a dollar bill and murmuring the single word ""Innsmouth."" He looked curiously at me for a second as he returned forty cents change without speaking. I took a seat far behind him, but on the same side of the bus, since I wished to watch the shore during the journey.
At length the decrepit vehicle stared with a jerk, and rattled noisily past the old brick buildings of State Street amidst a cloud of vapour from the exhaust. Glancing at the people on the sidewalks, I thought I detected in them a curious wish to avoid looking at the bus--or at least a wish to avoid seeming to look at it. Then we turned to the left into High Street, where the going was smoother; flying by stately old mansions of the early republic and still older colonial farmhouses, passing the Lower Green and Parker River, and finally emerging into a long, monotonous stretch of open shore country.
The day was warm and sunny, but the landscape of sand and sedge-grass, and stunted shrubbery became more and desolate as we proceeded. Out the window I could see the blue water and the sandy line of Plum Island, and we presently drew very near the beach as our narrow road veered off from the main highway to Rowley and Ipswich. There were no visible houses, and I could tell by the state of the road that traffic was very light hereabouts. The weather-worn telephone poles carried only two wires. Now and then we crossed crude wooden bridges over tidal creeks that wound far inland and promoted the general isolation of the region.
Once in a while I noticed dead stumps and crumbling foundation-walls above the drifting sand, and recalled the old tradition quoted in one of the histories I had read, that this was once a fertile and thickly-settled countryside. The change, it was said, came simultaneously with the Innsmouth epidemic of l846, and was thought by simple folk to have a dark connection with hidden forces of evil. Actually, it was caused by the unwise cutting of woodlands near the shore, which robbed the soil of the best protection and opened the way for waves of wind-blown sand.
At last we lost sight of Plum Island and saw the vast expanse of the open Atlantic on our left. Our narrow course began to climb steeply, and I felt a singular sense of disquiet in looking at the lonely crest ahead where the rutted road-way met the sky. It was as if the bus were about to keep on in its ascent, leaving the sane earth altogether and merging with the unknown arcana of upper air and cryptical sky. The smell of the sea took on ominous implications, and the silent driver's bent, rigid back and narrow head became more and more hateful. As I looked at him I saw that the back of his head was almost as hairless as his face, having only a few straggling yellow strands upon a grey scabrous surface.
Then we reached the crest and beheld the outspread valley beyond, where the Manuxet joins the sea just north of the long line of cliffs that culminate in Kingsport Head and veer off toward Cape Ann. On the far misty horizon I could just make out the dizzy profile of the Head, topped by the queer ancient house of which so many legends are told; but for the moment all my attention was captured by the nearer panorama just below me. I had, I realized, come face to face with rumour-shadowed Innsmouth.
It was a town of wide extent and dense construction, yet one with a portentous dearth of visible life. From the tangle of chimney-pots scarcely a wisp of smoke came, and the three tall steeples loomed stark and unpainted against the seaward horizon. One of them was crumbling down at the top, and in that and another there were only black gaping holes where clock-dials should have been. The vast huddle of sagging gambrel roofs and peaked gables conveyed with offensive clearness the idea of wormy decay, and as we approached along the now descending road I could see that many roofs had wholly caved in. There were some large square Georgian houses, too, with hipped roofs, cupolas, and railed ""widow's walks."" These were mostly well back from the water, and one or two seemed to be in moderately sound condition. Stretching inland from among them I saw the rusted, grass-grown line of the abandoned railway, with leaning telegraph-poles now devoid of wires, and the half-obscured lines of the old carriage roads to Rowley and Ipswich.
The decay was worst close to the waterfront, though in its very midst I could spy the white belfry of a fairly well preserved brick structure which looked like a small factory. The harbour, long clogged with sand, was enclosed by an ancient stone breakwater; on which I could begin to discern the minute forms of a few seated fishermen, and at whose end were what looked like the foundations of a bygone lighthouse. A sandy tongue had formed inside this barrier and upon it I saw a few decrepit cabins, moored dories, and scattered lobster-pots. The only deep water seemed to be where the river poured out past the belfried structure and turned southward to join the ocean at the breakwater's end.
Here and there the ruins of wharves jutted out from the shore to end in indeterminate rottenness, those farthest south seeming the most decayed. And far out at sea, despite a high tide, I glimpsed a long, black line scarcely rising above the water yet carrying a suggestion of odd latent malignancy. This, I knew, must be Devil Reef. As I looked, a subtle, curious sense of beckoning seemed superadded to the grim repulsion; and oddly enough, I found this overtone more disturbing than the primary impression.
We met no one on the road, but presently began to pass deserted farms in varying stages of ruin. Then I noticed a few inhabited houses with rags stuffed in the broken windows and shells and dead fish lying about the littered yards. Once or twice I saw listless-looking people working in barren gardens or digging clams on the fishy-smelling beach below, and groups of dirty, simian-visaged children playing around weed-grown doorsteps. Somehow these people seemed more disquieting than the dismal buildings, for almost every one had certain peculiarities of face and motions which I instinctively disliked without being able to define or comprehend them. For a second I thought this typical physique suggested some picture I had seen, perhaps in a book, under circumstances of particular horror or melancholy; but this pseudo-recollection passed very quickly.
As the bus reached a lower level I began to catch the steady note of a waterfall through the unnatural stillness, The leaning, unpainted houses grew thicker, lined both sides of the road, and displayed more urban tendencies than did those we were leaving behind, The panorama ahead had contracted to a street scene, and in spots I could see where a cobblestone pavement and stretches of brick sidewalk had formerly existed. All the houses were apparently deserted, and there were occasional gaps where tumbledown chimneys and cellar walls told of buildings that had collapsed. Pervading everything was the most nauseous fishy odour imaginable.
Soon cross streets and junctions began to appear; those on the left leading to shoreward realms of unpaved squalor and decay, while those on the right shewed vistas of departed grandeur. So far I had seen no people in the town, but there now came signs of a sparse habitation--curtained windows here and there, and an occasional battered motorcar at the curb. Pavement and sidewalks were increasingly well-defined, and though most of the houses were quite old--wood and brick structures of the early 19th century--they were obviously kept fit for habitation. As an amateur antiquarian I almost lost my olfactory disgust and my feeling of menace and repulsion amidst this rich, unaltered survival from the past.
But I was not to reach my destination without one very strong impression of poignantly disagreeable quality. The bus had come to a sort of open concourse or radial point with churches on two sides and the bedraggled remains of a circular green in the centre, and I was looking at a large pillared hall on the right-hand junction ahead. The structure's once white paint was now gray and peeling and the black and gold sign on the pediment was so faded that I could only with difficulty make out the words ""Esoteric Order of Dagon."" This, then was the former Masonic Hall now given over to a degraded cult. As I strained to decipher this inscription my notice was distracted by the raucous tones of a cracked bell across the street, and I quickly turned to look out the window on my side of the coach.
The sound came from a squat stone church of manifestly later date than most of the houses, built in a clumsy Gothic fashion and having a disproportionately high basement with shuttered windows. Though the hands of its clock were missing on the side I glimpsed, I knew that those hoarse strokes were tolling the hour of eleven. Then suddenly all thoughts of time were blotted out by an onrushing image of sharp intensity and unaccountable horror which had seized me before I knew what it really was. The door of the church basement was open, revealing a rectangle of blackness inside. And as I looked, a certain object crossed or seemed to cross that dark rectangle; burning into my brain a momentary conception of nightmare which was all the more maddening because analysis could not shew a single nightmarish quality in it.
It was a living object--the first except the driver that I had seen since entering the compact part of the town--and had I been in a steadier mood I would have found nothing whatever of terror in it. Clearly, as I realised a moment later, it was the pastor; clad in some peculiar vestments doubtless introduced since the Order of Dagon had modified the ritual of the local churches. The thing which had probably caught my first subconscious glance and supplied the touch of bizarre horror was the tall tiara he wore; an almost exact duplicate of the one Miss Tilton had shown me the previous evening. This, acting on my imagination, had supplied namelessly sinister qualities to the indeterminate face and robed, shambling form beneath it. There was not, I soon decided, any reason why I should have felt that shuddering touch of evil pseudo-memory. Was it not natural that a local mystery cult should adopt among its regimentals an unique type of head-dress made familiar to the community in some strange way--perhaps as treasure-trove?
A very thin sprinkling of repellent-looking youngish people now became visible on the sidewalks--lone individuals, and silent knots of two or three. The lower floors of the crumbling houses sometimes harboured small shops with dingy signs, and I noticed a parked truck or two as we rattled along. The sound of waterfalls became more and more distinct, and presently I saw a fairly deep river-gorge ahead, spanned by a wide, iron-railed highway bridge beyond which a large square opened out. As we clanked over the bridge I looked out on both sides and observed some factory buildings on the edge of the grassy bluff or part way down. The water far below was very abundant, and I could see two vigorous sets of falls upstream on my right and at least one downstream on my left. From this point the noise was quite deafening. Then we rolled into the large semicircular square across the river and drew up on the right-hand side in front of a tall, cupola crowned building with remnants of yellow paint and with a half-effaced sign proclaiming it to be the Gilman House.
I was glad to get out of that bus, and at once proceeded to check my valise in the shabby hotel lobby. There was only one person in sight--an elderly man without what I had come to call the ""Innsmouth look""--and I decided not to ask him any of the questions which bothered me; remembering that odd things had been noticed in this hotel. Instead, I strolled out on the square, from which the bus had already gone, and studied the scene minutely and appraisingly.
One side of the cobblestoned open space was the straight line of the river; the other was a semicircle of slant-roofed brick buildings of about the 1800 period, from which several streets radiated away to the southeast, south, and southwest. Lamps were depressingly few and small--all low-powered incandescents--and I was glad that my plans called for departure before dark, even though I knew the moon would be bright. The buildings were all in fair condition, and included perhaps a dozen shops in current operation; of which one was a grocery of the First National chain, others a dismal restaurant, a drug store, and a wholesale fish-dealer's office, and still another, at the eastward extremity of the square near the river an office of the town's only industry--the Marsh Refining Company. There were perhaps ten people visible, and four or five automobiles and motor trucks stood scattered about. I did not need to be told that this was the civic centre of Innsmouth. Eastward I could catch blue glimpses of the harbour, against which rose the decaying remains of three once beautiful Georgian steeples. And toward the shore on the opposite bank of the river I saw the white belfry surmounting what I took to be the Marsh refinery.
For some reason or other I chose to make my first inquiries at the chain grocery, whose personnel was not likely to be native to Innsmouth. I found a solitary boy of about seventeen in charge, and was pleased to note the brightness and affability which promised cheerful information. He seemed exceptionally eager to talk, and I soon gathered that he did not like the place, its fishy smell, or its furtive people. A word with any outsider was a relief to him. He hailed from Arkham, boarded with a family who came from Ipswich, and went back whenever he got a moment off. His family did not like him to work in Innsmouth, but the chain had transferred him there and he did not wish to give up his job.
There was, he said, no public library or chamber of commerce in Innsmouth, but I could probably find my way about. The street I had come down was Federal. West of that were the fine old residence streets--Broad, Washington, Lafayette, and Adams--and east of it were the shoreward slums. It was in these slums--along Main Street--that I would find the old Georgian churches, but they were all long abandoned. It would be well not to make oneself too conspicuous in such neighbourhoods--especially north of the river since the people were sullen and hostile. Some strangers had even disappeared.
Certain spots were almost forbidden territory, as he had learned at considerable cost. One must not, for example, linger much around the Marsh refinery, or around any of the still used churches, or around the pillared Order of Dagon Hall at New Church Green. Those churches were very odd--all violently disavowed by their respective denominations elsewhere, and apparently using the queerest kind of ceremonials and clerical vestments. Their creeds were heterodox and mysterious, involving hints of certain marvelous transformations leading to bodily immorality--of a sort--on this earth. The youth's own pastor--Dr. Wallace of Asbury M. E. Church in Arkham--had gravely urged him not to join any church in Innsmouth.
As for the Innsmouth people--the youth hardly knew what to make of them. They were as furtive and seldom seen as animals that live in burrows, and one could hardly imagine how they passed the time apart from their desultory fishing. Perhaps--judging from the quantities of bootleg liquor they consumed--they lay for most of the daylight hours in an alcoholic stupor. They seemed sullenly banded together in some sort of fellowship and understanding--despising the world as if they had access to other and preferable spheres of entity. Their appearance--especially those staring, unwinking eyes which one never saw shut--was certainly shocking enough; and their voices were disgusting. It was awful to hear them chanting in their churches at night, and especially during their main festivals or revivals, which fell twice a year on April 30th and October 31st.
They were very fond of the water, and swam a great deal in both river and harbour. Swimming races out to Devil Reef were very common, and everyone in sight seemed well able to share in this arduous sport. When one came to think of it, it was generally only rather young people who were seen about in public, and of these the oldest were apt to be the most tainted-looking. When exceptions did occur, they were mostly persons with no trace of aberrancy, like the old clerk at the hotel. One wondered what became of the bulk of the older folk, and whether the ""Innsmouth look"" were not a strange and insidious disease-phenomenon which increased its hold as years advanced.
Only a very rare affliction, of course, could bring about such vast and radical anatomical changes in a single individual after maturity--changes invoking osseous factors as basic as the shape of the skull--but then, even this aspect was no more baffling and unheard-of than the visible features of the malady as a whole. It would be hard, the youth implied, to form any real conclusions regarding such a matter; since one never came to know the natives personally no matter how long one might live in Innsmouth.
The youth was certain that many specimens even worse than the worst visible ones were kept locked indoors in some places. People sometimes heard the queerest kind of sounds. The tottering waterfront hovels north of the river were reputedly connected by hidden tunnels, being thus a veritable warren of unseen abnormalities. What kind of foreign blood--if any--these beings had, it was impossible to tell. They sometimes kept certain especially repulsive characters out of sight when government and others from the outside world came to town.
It would be of no use, my informant said, to ask the natives anything about the place. The only one who would talk was a very aged but normal looking man who lived at the poorhouse on the north rim of the town and spent his time walking about or lounging around the fire station. This hoary character, Zadok Allen, was 96 years old and somewhat touched in the head, besides being the town drunkard. He was a strange, furtive creature who constantly looked over his shoulder as if afraid of something, and when sober could not be persuaded to talk at all with strangers. He was, however, unable to resist any offer of his favorite poison; and once drunk would furnish the most astonishing fragments of whispered reminiscence.
After all, though, little useful data could be gained from him; since his stories were all insane, incomplete hints of impossible marvels and horrors which could have no source save in his own disordered fancy. Nobody ever believed him, but the natives did not like him to drink and talk with strangers; and it was not always safe to be seen questioning him. It was probably from him that some of the wildest popular whispers and delusions were derived.
Several non-native residents had reported monstrous glimpses from time to time, but between old Zadok's tales and the malformed inhabitants it was no wonder such illusions were current. None of the non-natives ever stayed out late at night, there being a widespread impression that it was not wise to do so. Besides, the streets were loathsomely dark.
As for business--the abundance of fish was certainly almost uncanny, but the natives were taking less and less advantage of it. Moreover, prices were falling and competition was growing. Of course the town's real business was the refinery, whose commercial office was on the square only a few doors east of where we stood. Old Man Marsh was never seen, but sometimes went to the works in a closed, curtained car.
There were all sorts of rumors about how Marsh had come to look. He had once been a great dandy; and people said he still wore the frock-coated finery of the Edwardian age curiously adapted to certain deformities. His son had formerly conducted the office in the square, but latterly they had been keeping out of sight a good deal and leaving the brunt of affairs to the younger generation. The sons and their sisters had come to look very queer, especially the elder ones; and it was said that their health was failing.
One of the Marsh daughters was a repellent, reptilian-looking woman who wore an excess of weird jewellery clearly of the same exotic tradition as that to which the strange tiara belonged. My informant had noticed it many times, and had heard it spoken of as coming from some secret hoard, either of pirates or of demons. The clergymen--or priests, or whatever they were called nowadays--also wore this kind of ornament as a headdress; but one seldom caught glimpses of them. Other specimens the youth had not seen, though many were rumoured to exist around Innsmouth.
The Marshes, together with the other three gently bred families of the town--the Waites, the Gilmans, and the Eliots--were all very retiring. They lived in immense houses along Washington Street, and several were reputed to harbour in concealment certain living kinsfolk whose personal aspect forbade public view, and whose deaths had been reported and recorded.
Warning me that many of the street signs were down, the youth drew for my benefit a rough but ample and painstaking sketch map of the town's salient features. After a moment's study I felt sure that it would be of great help, and pocketed it with profuse thanks. Disliking the dinginess of the single restaurant I had seen, I bought a fair supply of cheese crackers and ginger wafers to serve as a lunch later on. My program, I decided, would be to thread the principal streets, talk with any non-natives I might encounter, and catch the eight o'clock coach for Arkham. The town, I could see, formed a significant and exaggerated example of communal decay; but being no sociologist I would limit my serious observations to the field of architecture.
Thus I began my systematic though half-bewildered tour of Innsmouth's narrow, shadow-blighted ways. Crossing the bridge and turning toward the roar of the lower falls, I passed close to the Marsh refinery, which seemed to be oddly free from the noise of industry. The building stood on the steep river bluff near a bridge and an open confluence of streets which I took to be the earliest civic center, displaced after the Revolution by the present Town Square.
Re-crossing the gorge on the Main Street bridge, I struck a region of utter desertion which somehow made me shudder. Collapsing huddles of gambrel roofs formed a jagged and fantastic skyline, above which rose the ghoulish, decapitated steeple of an ancient church. Some houses along Main Street were tenanted, but most were tightly boarded up. Down unpaved side streets I saw the black, gaping windows of deserted hovels, many of which leaned at perilous and incredible angles through the sinking of part of the foundations. Those windows stared so spectrally that it took courage to turn eastward toward the waterfront. Certainly, the terror of a deserted house swells in geometrical rather than arithmetical progression as houses multiply to form a city of stark desolation. The sight of such endless avenues of fishy-eyed vacancy and death, and the thought of such linked infinities of black, brooding compartments given over to cob-webs and memories and the conqueror worm, start up vestigial fears and aversions that not even the stoutest philosophy can disperse.
Fish Street was as deserted as Main, though it differed in having many brick and stone warehouses still in excellent shape. Water Street was almost its duplicate, save that there were great seaward gaps where wharves had been. Not a living thing did I see except for the scattered fishermen on the distant break-water, and not a sound did I hear save the lapping of the harbour tides and the roar of the falls in the Manuxet. The town was getting more and more on my nerves, and I looked behind me furtively as I picked my way back over the tottering Water Street bridge. The Fish Street bridge, according to the sketch, was in ruins.
North of the river there were traces of squalid life--active fish-packing houses in Water Street, smoking chimneys and patched roofs here and there, occasional sounds from indeterminate sources, and infrequent shambling forms in the dismal streets and unpaved lanes--but I seemed to find this even more oppressive than the southerly desertion. For one thing, the people were more hideous and abnormal than those near the centre of the town; so that I was several times evilly reminded of something utterly fantastic which I could not quite place. Undoubtedly the alien strain in the Innsmouth folk was stronger here than farther inland--unless, indeed, the ""Innsmouth look"" were a disease rather than a blood stain, in which case this district might be held to harbour the more advanced cases.
One detail that annoyed me was the distribution of the few faint sounds I heard. They ought naturally to have come wholly from the visibly inhabited houses, yet in reality were often strongest inside the most rigidly boarded-up facades. There were creakings, scurryings, and hoarse doubtful noises; and I thought uncomfortably about the hidden tunnels suggested by the grocery boy. Suddenly I found myself wondering what the voices of those denizens would be like. I had heard no speech so far in this quarter, and was unaccountably anxious not to do so.
Pausing only long enough to look at two fine but ruinous old churches at Main and Church Streets, I hastened out of that vile waterfront slum. My next logical goal was New Church Green, but somehow or other I could not bear to repass the church in whose basement I had glimpsed the inexplicably frightening form of that strangely diademmed priest or pastor. Besides, the grocery youth had told me that churches, as well as the Order of Dagon Hall, were not advisable neighbourhoods for strangers.
Accordingly I kept north along Main to Martin, then turning inland, crossing Federal Street safely north of the Green, and entering the decayed patrician neighbourhood of northern Broad, Washington, Lafayette, and Adams Streets. Though these stately old avenues were ill-surfaced and unkempt, their elm-shaded dignity had not entirely departed. Mansion after mansion claimed my gaze, most of them decrepit and boarded up amidst neglected grounds, but one or two in each street shewing signs of occupancy. In Washington Street there was a row of four or five in excellent repair and with finely-tended lawns and gardens. The most sumptuous of these--with wide terraced parterres extending back the whole way to Lafayette Street--I took to be the home of Old Man Marsh, the afflicted refinery owner.
In all these streets no living thing was visible, and I wondered at the complete absence of cats and dogs from Innsmouth. Another thing which puzzled and disturbed me, even in some of the best-preserved mansions, was the tightly shuttered condition of many third-story and attic windows. Furtiveness and secretiveness seemed universal in this hushed city of alienage and death, and I could not escape the sensation of being watched from ambush on every hand by sly, staring eyes that never shut.
I shivered as the cracked stroke of three sounded from a belfry on my left. Too well did I recall the squat church from which those notes came. Following Washington Street toward the river, I now faced a new zone of former industry and commerce; noting the ruins of a factory ahead, and seeing others, with the traces of an old railway station and covered railway bridge beyond, up the gorge on my right.
The uncertain bridge now before me was posted with a warning sign, but I took the risk and crossed again to the south bank where traces of life reappeared. Furtive, shambling creatures stared cryptically in my direction, and more normal faces eyed me coldly and curiously. Innsmouth was rapidly becoming intolerable, and I turned down Paine Street toward the Square in the hope of getting some vehicle to take me to Arkham before the still-distant starting-time of that sinister bus.
It was then that I saw the tumbledown fire station on my left, and noticed the red faced, bushy-bearded, watery eyed old man in nondescript rags who sat on a bench in front of it talking with a pair of unkempt but not abnormal looking firemen. This, of course, must be Zadok Allen, the half-crazed, liquorish nonagenarian whose tales of old Innsmouth and its shadow were so hideous and incredible.
","
Sllytha's eyes snapped open. Outside the strange vehicle, the breath of Huitloxopetl drew lightning through those terrible, alien skies. Sllytha shuddered as she stared at the nightmarish landscape beyond the glass and fought to control the strange vocal functions of this borrowed mouth. Her soul prayed to the Elder Gods, but the lights in the sky, the pain in her mind, told her that it was too late. His power was reaching out, his bonds were cracking; this nightmarish world, her distant, beloved Yaar-Kyth, all worlds in the ocean of stars were drawing their final breath. She looked at the creature --the man-- that sought to gain her attention. He spoke, but the gentle, tormented mind that had drawn her to this body was not with her anymore, and her knowledge of this world's tongues and customs had vanished with her. His strangeness revolted her, but she remembered him; the woman had loved him. But Sllytha had mourned for them both, for she had sensed the taint of the Haunter of Dreams at the root of that love. 
Sllytha felt her eyes water; another new sensation, whose meaning she knew not. The man tried to touch her face, but she recoiled. 
""Snnakh'gha!"", she told him, signaling the horrid skies with a wave of her limbs. ""Snnakh'gha, Huitloxopetl orr'ep Sygroth naflfhtagn!"" 
Of course, he understood her tongue as little as she, his. But he grew tense upon hearing the Ancient One's name. The Elder Rune... deep inside, she knew it was not strong enough anymore, but it was all she had. Again she turned toward the darkened landscape outside, and spoke the familiar, once conforting syllables: 
""Laina caldulech, n'n'ghai'ghai; Nodens wegha'ymnko, n'n'ghai'ghai; Glyuh'uho w'gn-yah, n'n'ghai'ghai; Stell'gho dalmalech, n'n'ghai'ghai..."" 
Not enough. As the sorcerers had said, it was not strong enough to hold Huitloxopetl in check. 
Panic rose within her. That hellish Being would soon cross the Gate, and this world would be but the first of thousands to be crushed by its wrath. She would die, not in her world, not even in her own body. 
With an odd, barely audible squeal, she eluded the man's arms and climbed from the back seat of the vehicle where she had lain and out the open window on the driver's side. 
The man called after her, unheeded, as Sllytha crawled away in panic, ripping the suffocating drapings that clung to her body, seeking only to get away from those horrible open skies. She must find some place deep and dark, with no empty abysses above, some place cold and black and conforting, like her beautiful, lost Yaar-Kyth...

*     *     *

In the hills, they gathered. 
some drifted aimlessly, following a call which led nowhere; others gained the faintest insight and, being unprepared, gave in to fear or delivering insanity. Yet others, those in whom the call was stronger, grasped knives and guns and answered it in their own way. 
But here, in Mount Chignautla, which could be seen in the hazy distance from Montecruz-- where Miguel Quocha had enjoyed the benefits of an art scholarship way back when-- the confused, the afraid, and the insane gathered alike, waiting for Old Artemio. 
Thin, hunched, his limbs and skin dried and darkened by seventy years of sunlight, Old Artemio was a great Huichol shaman and healer of whom it was whispered that he became an owl by night and flew to the skies, where he talked to the moon and her faceless brother; none of it was true, but sometimes he did speak to the gods. Such a time was now. He had been sitting on a deerskin for three days while those who sought his guidance came. 
At last, his eyes opened. He tasted the sour mixture of peyote and bile in his throat, coughed, and pain shot through his body as he raised his arms, drawing two hundred pairs of eyes to him. 
A god had spoken to him; he knew what he must do in order to serve Him. Without speaking, Old Artemio took a knife from his waist and, as all those who  had come to place their lives in his hands watched in horror, slit his own throat. 
First, there was mute shock; then there were screams, and a god reaped fear.

*     *     *

""Sally!"", Michael shouted hoarsely, jumping out of the car. ""Sally!"" 
But she was already getting away. He watched in horror as she crawled away at an uncanny speed, without lifting any part of her body an inch from the ground. Her body snaked through the tall grass of the hillside, her naked limbs whiplashing to and fro in a way that seemed insanely familiar to Michael: it was so much like the convulsive crawl of the garden lizards he used to watch, as a child, in the backyard of his Westchester home. In a way, this was worse than all the horrors he had witnessed before: the Quocha paintings, the thing that has impersonated Daniel Pickman... Nothing was as rawly unnatural as watching the woman he loved behave like... like... 
He had started after her, but stopped and ran back to the car. He would accomplish nothing going after her and getting lost; it was time to cut to the root of it all.
Michael opened the trunk of the car and pulled out the paintings, one by one.

*     *     *

Mexico City. The thin, ragged pauper stumbled across Tlatelolco Plaza, shouting at the clouds as they made electric winces back at him. 
""They're thirsty!"", he croaked, then coughed out a clot of blood --a remnant of his last clobbering from the police, half an hour ago-- and went on, his breath stinking of marihuana: ""Huitzilo-puch-tlee an'is brrrothers're hungry! Tlatelolco was their dish for food in the ol' days, an' it's gettin' ready to be used again! Th' gods want hearts, an' they want blood, an' they want 'em fresh an' yoongh! They're gonna feed soon!"" 
From a window in the luxurious Spanish building across the plaza, President Diaz Ordaz looked at the bum with undisguised revulsion. To think that one so young could end up like that... 
Two policemen converged on the bum, clubs raised, and the President turned away, dismissing the whole thing altogether. He resumed his brooding over the strange, haunting dreams which had invaded his night-time of late; so somber, yet so inspiring...

*     *     *

""It's Freeman!"", snapped Lt. August. They looked back at the coalescing darkness downhill, trying to pinpoint any further sounds. ""Let's go!"", muttered August, leading the way back to the car and drawing his gun. Jude Davenport went after him, and they both stumbled their way down.

Miguel Quocha watched them through his thick glasses. The flashlight streaked the grass and tress as Jude tried to see where they were stepping on. He had no flashlight, but darkness was no hindrance for him anymore. He turned toward the Temple of Aype, and crossed the entrance. If something bad was happening down there, it would have to wait; all the more reasons to get on with what he had to do. 
The warm blackness of the temple embraced him, the way a devious snake would. Back in 1941, his teacher Ramiro Aguirre had waited at the foot of the hill while he came here on his own; he had slept the night through beside the altar, for his test had been to fight off the madness that pervaded the temple-cave. The sculpted walls pressed on him, covered with intrincate bas-reliefs of Olmec priests, leering jaguars with forked tongues, and less identifiable creatures. And everywhere, in a thousand different forms, the dreaded, unmistakable glyph that was the sigil of Atzotol, the idiotic ruler of the Huehuetecuhtli, those Most Ancient Lords who once dwelt in the darkness before the young gods created the First Sun. Atzotol, a local name for Azathoth... 
Fourteen years had passed since his previous visit to the Temple of Aype... to the world; to him, it had been so much longer. His childhood in Huaracho seemed so remote... as were the days when he was first haunted by dream-visions of Sygroth, which had shaken his sanity even though they were but pale shadows of the horrors yet to come. 
It all started when he was twenty-one. He was a promising artist and had earned a scholarship at Valencia University, a small college in Montecruz, a town about thirty miles south-west from Huaracho; but his choice of subjects was taking a turn for the morbid, and his teachers were dismayed at what they saw as a loss of his aestethical values. There was a growing breach betwen Quocha and his local peers, so he started corresponding with other artists of similar tastes the world over. Thus did he get acquainted with someone with a similar penchant for strangeness, and with an entrancing talent, Clark Ashton Smith; and it was Smith who sent him photos and reviews of the works of one Richard Pickman, who, Quocha realized, had achieved depths of blackness in the human soul that he had barely glimpsed himself. He begged Smith to introduce him to this amazing artist, and Smith contacted him to a closer friend of Pickman's, a writer of weird tales named Randolph Carter. 
Carter kindly agreed to Quocha's request, and wrote to Pickman about his young admiter --they both lived in Boston, but Carter had been staying in his birthplace of Arkham for the last few months--, and Quocha was overjoyed when Pickman agreed to meet him. Quocha would travel to Boston within three months, meet with Carter, and they would visit Pickman together. 
The time cama, and Quocha was greeted at the station by a solemn but cordial Randolph Carter. As they dined at a nearby restaurant, Carter told him that he had been at Pickman's Newbury Street home and found that he was not there. In his last letter, Pickman had instructed him to take Quocha to his North End studio if this happened, since he was staying there most of the time lately, so they took the subway and they walked into a veritable maze of twisting, decaying streets; Quocha nervously eyed the locals as Carter explained that it was very unusual of Pickman to allow any but his closest friends to even know about his North End studio, but he must be too obsessed with his current work to get away from it for long, and would allow Quocha to go there for practicality's sake. He would most certainly refuse to show him the paintings he kept there, though. 
Carter knocked, but there was no answer. 
""He must be working in his studio in the basement, where he cannot hear us"", said Carter, drawing out a keyring, and proceeded to open the door. They went in, and Quocha's inquiry about the sense of having a studio in a basement died in mid-speech as he looked at the masterful paintings that hung all over the living room: those terrible, life-like scenes of horror, so graphic and yet so subtle, mostly in greys and browns... Carter asked him to wait as he looked for Pickman, and he obeyed happily, feasting his eyes on the pictures. 
Later, Carter came back. Quocha noted with disappointimen that he was alone; then he saw the  way he swayed, supporting himself along the wall... and his face -- the thin, trembling lips, the shock in his eyes... He has seen hell, thought Quocha suddenly; then he went to his aid, stammering garbled questions as he helped Carter to a seat. 
""He's gone..."", muttered Carter, sinking in the couch. ""I-I had not wanted to believe it, but I guess I saw it coming... He's gone for good, I think... those damned things... but what is that... place? How does it fit? How could even he paint that?"" 
Quocha gave him some water, then went down the hallway. He had to look. He heard Carter's shout, urging him back, but he was already descending the brick stairway to the basement. Just a quick look and-- 
Quocha had half-expected to find a dead body. But there was no body, no blood, nothimg. Only that one thing which he had known thatCarter had seen: 
Hell. 
The walls were lined with the most masterful and abhorrent works ever created by Richard Pickman; there was also a cicular well door that Carter had  covered with its wooden lid before going back up. But Quocha saw nothing but the canvas that held a landscape bathed with sickly, greenish light... 
He barely heard Carter's approaching footsteps before dropping into blackness, feeling that something stabbed into his mind. 
Quocha woke up in Carter's guest room, where Carter had taken care of him with the medical knowledge he had obtained during the Great War. Quocha told him of the dreams that had plagued him the last nine hours, and Carter listened intently, demanding every detail he could recall. Quocha had trouble to recall and pronounce that strange name, Huitloxopetl; and when he did, Carter paled. He then asked if Quocha had any knowledge of certain rare occult traditions, threw out a few names that baffled him. Carter sighed, left the room, and came back with a massive, centuries-old tome in his hands. 
""This"", he said, ""is perhaps the only surviving copy of the Greek translation of the Necronomicon. It belonged to Pickman, and I am certain that he was studying it right before he... left"". 
Just as that had been but his first taste of eldritch nightmares, so was his night-long talk with Randolph Carter his first acquaintance with the insane lore of the Ancient Ones... 
The following weeks were to Quocha an endless descent into madness. The dreams plagued him each night,and Carter tried to help him, acting as if he knew what they meant, but refusing to tell him. Quocha started to read the Necronomicon whenever Carter was not around, and his mind reeled at what he could gather from it. Yet it said nothing of Huitloxopetl. 
And then that man came... 
He must have climbed along the branches of a tree in order to break in through the attic's window; in any case, the broken glass suggested as much. He must have been a common burglar, looking for whatever valuable items Carter's home might hold. Paintings are sometimes expensive, so he must have decided to take a look at the canvas that lay facing the wall right beside the window. It was Quocha who found him, the very night he had decided to confront the painting once and for all. He went to the attic, the Necronomicon under his arm, half hoping to find some use for the protective formulae it contained... 
But he had found the painting in plain sight, blasting him with his noxious influence with such force that he almost tumbled back down; then he saw the body, twisted at the foot of the painting, and his heart grew cold. Quocha knelt by its side... 
...and almost ran off when the dead man's face shifted. He should have; but he stayed, thinking him alive after all. What he saw, though, was not life, but proof that the power of Huitloxopetl was not restricted to the realms of dream. 
The man's face shifted, yes, but not as living features do: it stirred like a cloud formation, like clay under invisible hands. The jaw elongated, the nose grew straighter... and the dead man grinned obscenely with Randolph Carter's face. 
Quocha could barely remember running out of the house and hailing a cab frantically, later to board a train  back to Mexico, all the while absently hugging the Necronomicon.

Now Miguel Quocha knew what he had seen: the Haunter of Dreams had used its power to mold the flesh of the dead and create a servant with no life of its own, the same way it did when he tricked Sally and Michael into thinking that her father had returned.

He had been afraid to even answer Carter's letters for months, but he finally told him about what had driven him away, and Carter later visited him in Montecruz, easing his fears somewhat; but he never asked about the Necronomicon. 
It was then that Quocha began his occult studies, in search of a way to exorcise the Thing which haunted his mind. He besieged antiquarians, bombarded libraries all over the country with bizarre requests. His scholarship was cancelled; his father almost threw him out; his artistic mentor, Gerardo Murillo, rejected his darker, tasteless works. 
Until Ramiro Aguirre approached him at the Montecruz library. This eccentric, cynical man with brown skin and black, thick sideburns, somehow broke through his wariness; they left the library together, talked through dinner, and they became not only teacher and pupil, but also friends. 
Together they sought things hidden in the darkest corners of reality, plumbed sources of knowledge older than human life. They pursued the lore of the ancient Mayan wizards, learning the Songs and the dances which were fueled by their Wills, started to awaken dormant parts of their brains through the rite of Panchebe... 
But Quocha was overconfident; they both were. They actually thought that such secrets would prove the undoing of the Ancient Ones' cosmic games, yet all the while unseen players led their every thought. Quocha thought himself free of dreams and curses, but truth finally laughed in his face in the form of heavily-drugged pulque that an old servant of ancient gods sold them that evening, at Sausalito. Quocha gulped it down, and blackness flooded his mind as it had not done in years, even as the old man laughed and shouted that terrible name, ""Huitloxopetl"". Then delirium embraced him, and he saw the Cyclopean Sygroth once more, the flailing form of Ramiro sinking into the gaping crypt even as the myriad wings of its dweller racked the noxious air within, flapping in triumph. 
Quocha recovered  his consciousness several days later; days he had spent with no food or sleep, only painting, painting the most abhorrent pictures ever created by --or rather, through-- a human hand. Ramiro lay lifeless in a corner of the room, and the old man who drugged them giggled insanely by his side, his mind destroyed. 
Despairing, Quocha ran away for a second time, barely resisting the pull of the paintings; his mind, he knew, was the key it needed to break forth, so there was only one thing he could do, for the sake of all. He reached a sacred place in the caves of Chihuahua, and there used the Necronomicon to escape Huitloxopetl the only way he could --by leaving this world altogether. He broke the Seal of Power, opened a Gate, and went beyond the Haunter's reach. 
He had lived far more than the six years gone by to the rest of the world since his faked demise; he had sojourned the places Between, had learned much, had --changed. He was now what he and Ramiro always strove for: a Halach Uinic, a Wielder of the Power. 
For all the good that could do, right now.

Standing in front of the altar, Quocha gazed into the great obsidian mirror above it. ""Tezcatlipoca"", had said Ramiro so very long ago, ""The Smoking Mirror of Nahualtotec --Nyarlathotep to you. The priests of Atzotol used them as gates into the Throne of Chaos, where they could partake of the madness of Atzotol himself. Whatever they learned there, they had no sanity left to take advantage of it"". 
And in Azathoth lay the key to stop the Haunter of Dreams from breaking through, that much had his delvings revealed. But how? He certainly could not call upon the Daemon Sultan! Huitloxopetl's hate for his father notwithstanding, Azathoth had imprisoned him before the Elder Gods took away his intelligence! If summoned, he would wreak senseless devastation, undirected, uncontained; he would never think of punishing his rebellious son --he had no mind left to think! But Quocha believed he had solved the riddle. The pictures were the Haunter's link to this world, so he had to throw them through a gateway into Chaos itself, where no natural laws applied, and the gate to Sygroth would be nullified. It was simple indeed. 
Too bad Quocha did not know that the paintings were meaningless, for they had already fulfilled their purpose; that they had created a conduit between a human mind and a mind from Yaar-Kyth, and Huitloxopetl's link to Earth was not a canvas, but a woman...

*     *     *

From time to time, thoughts started to form in Sally's shredded mind. Then, awareness of her surroundings would batter her, and she would try to scream, emitting only wet burping sounds which terrified her even more; but madness soon settled in again, relieving her. The pain was always there, streaking her every fiber as she slithered on the sand; her skin began to wither as the three suns showered her with green death. Her mind still carried recollections of swimming through dark waters, of surfacing on a shore and crawling away from the sea. She had dragged herself for hours over the burning sand, unaware that this alien, bloated body would never make it to her destination under the scorching suns. Yet she kept moving, even as some internal organs burst, her snaking limbs growing brittle and their skin peeling off. Pangs of madness still shook her, but she could not stop. Not even when the vast, sculpted crags of Sygroth rose around her. 
Her eyes, fit for the depths of Yaar-Kyth's oceans, had long since shrunk into charred crusts within their sockets, but she needed them no longer, the Call was enough. It was far more than a mere sound or thought: it was a wave of rushing, all-consuming Will, filling her mind with pictures of the twisted constructions her path winded through, and of the beckoning central monolith, something shining with reflercted light within an opening in its base. 
As Sally crept on, pieces of her water-starved body were scrapped off and left behind, unheeded. A thick, sweet fluid caked her mouth, dribbling off a ruptured organ. Unknowingly, she climbed a sand-encrusted stone ramp, passing over the bas-reliefs of ancient scripture which spelled the Elder Rune. She felt nothing when cranial fluids flooded the empty eye-sockets, even as she reached the edge of the great slab. She only longed for her own body, in which she had a voice to scream with... 
Blackness gaped, and something shifted within its depths, the greenish light flashing off its surface. Sally gurgled a final cry as the Call released her. The pain receded, even madness seemed to take pity on her. She was aware of falling and, for just a moment, she finally knew. She realized that the alien body which housed her was plunging into the depths of Sygroth, and that her psychic linking with Sllytha had been no accident, but part of the decades-spanning gambit of Huitloxopetl. Richard Pickman, Miguel Quocha, the U-Boat, the O'Khymer librarian --there were no failures for the Haunter, no misfires; only subtle new twists in its plan. And she had now fulfilled it. 
She tried to think of Michael as blackness engulfed her and was puzzled at the dull feelings his image evoked. She died not in fear or pain, but sadness; sadness because she knew that her love for Michael was but a hollow lie, inspired by Huitloxopetl. 
The Thing in the depths caught the withered body, impaling it with an appendage; the psychic conduit was now within the limits of its prison, unobstructed. It flapped its myriad wings in satisfaction as it waited for the other end of the Gateway to open.

*     *     *

""Michael! What happened? Where is Sally?"" Michael Freeman seemed oblivious to his questions, so Lt. August pulled him around. 
""She is... gone. She... something's gotten into her. We've got to burn these damned paintings! We should have done it long ago!"" 
""What do you mean, something?"", pressed August. ""Where is she?"" 
""She is not herself..."" Michael was obviously on the verge of shock. She spoke in some strange tongue, then she crawled away! God, her eyes!"" 
Her eyes. Jude could not help a shiver. La Pulzella Gaia... 
""Got to burn them...!"", Michael squealed, and Lt. August slapped him, hard. 
""We're going to need them, according to Quocha"". Lt. August gazed at the electrified night sky. ""I hate to say this, but we'd better look for your wife later"". 
Jude sympathized with Michael. He looked so distressed... almost like... 
...like himself in Venice, five months ago. 
""Not now"", Jude muttered. The memories flooded his mind, unheeding. Laura, her beautiful eyes, her laughter... 
""Let's take the paintings back to Quocha!"", said Lt. August. Jude leaned down to pick some of them up from the grass. 
Laura had been sitting on the fence along the channel that night, laughing at some silly joke. Jude never knew what made her slip over it. Shouting her name, he plunged after her, splashing blindly into the lightless waters. He was sure that his hand had brushed her at least once. God, he almost had her... 
The cold blackness of the channel's waters was still so raw, so vivid in his memory, devouring every thought, rekindling the pain... 
Then the blackness parted, and a beautiful, smiling face came into his memory, startling him. Laura came through the waters, arms outstretched. 
""Laura..."", Jud moaned softly, holding her close within his mind. This is wrong, an alarmed part of him exclaimed; it didn't happen this way, I never found her... But Jude hushed this voice, tears welling in his eyes. Laura kissed him playfully and then pulled back, with an impish smile. Jude looked into her eyes and grew suddenly cold, as the pale harlequin's face whispered teasingly: 
""Poor things. Chasing ghosts for the Haunter's amusement. And the actual gate has escaped you"". 
Distant and unheeded, Michael and Lt. August were calling Jude's name. The harlequin drew back, and jude reached after her. A glass-like surface stopped him, as if she now were a reflection in a mirror; on both sides, though, there was only darkness. 
Laura smiled again; so lovely, her dress flapping in the tide. ""The gate is beyond your reach; her life is the only lock, and it is about to be opened"". She raised her arms toward him in a blur of her colorful harlequin's garb. ""I require such a gate, and you must be unlocked"". 
The harlequin with Laura's eyes erupted, becoming a bright pillar of golden flame. Jude screamed, trying to back away, but he was trapped. The mirror; it was him who was encased within the glassy surface. The pillar of fire grew, towering vastly into the black void. The mirror broke into a thousand pieces, swept and consumed by the fire, and Jude, and Jude's mind was blown away into nothingness.

*     *     *

When Jude fell to the floor, convulsing, Michael went into hysterics until Lt. Freeman shook him back into his senses. Then, shaking, he obediently lifted Jude's legs and they both started up the hill. 
All the while, Jude muttered deliriously again and again: ""S'teheli... S'teheli...""

*     *     *

Quocha felt it, that strange mixture of warmth and coldness within his mind, even as the obsidian mirror above the altar cracked loudly, black splinters falling off in a dusty rain. 
He shivered, and turned around, his inhumanly keen senses already perceiving the approaching voices. He walked toward the entrance of the cave, fearing the worst. 
There: that golden flame pulsating beyond the trees, rapidly approaching. Lt. August and Michael were unwittingly bringing its source to the Temple of Aype: the limp, shining body of Jude Davenport. Of course, theirs were normal, human eyes; they could not possibly perceive the terrible Elder Fire emanating from their unconscious friend. Unseen to most creatures, yet powerful enough to crack the Mirror-Gate. 
Breathless, Quocha looked up at Betelgeuse, now brighter than the rest of the stars. He had read stories, vague mentions of an emissary of the Elder Gods, who went from world to world, charged with obstructing the efforts of the Ancient Ones to break the seals of their prisons... But he had never believed them... 
But if the stories were true... if S'teheli was now truly manifesting itself, then they had less time than he had thought. 
The Gate would soon be fully open. 
 ",False
"""They say foul things of Old Times still lurk
In dark forgotten corners of the world.
And Gates still gape to loose, on certain nights.
Shapes pent in Hell.""

--Justin Geoffrey


I read of it first in the strange book of Von Junzt, the German
eccentric who lived so curiously and died in such grisly and mysterious
fashion. It was my fortune to have access to his _Nameless Cults_ in the
original edition, the so-called Black Book, published in Dusseldorf in
1839, shortly before a hounding doom overtook the author. Collectors of
rare literature were familiar with _Nameless Cults_ mainly through the
cheap and faulty translation which was pirated in London by Bridewall in
1845, and the carefully expurgated edition put out by the Golden Goblin
Press of New York, 1909. But the volume I stumbled upon was one of the
unexpurgated German copies, with heavy black leather covers and rusty
iron hasps. I doubt if there are more than half a dozen such volumes in
the entire world today, for the quantity issued was not great, and when
the manner of the author's demise was bruited about, many possessors of
the book burned their volumes in panic.

Von Junzt spent his entire life (1795-1840) delving into forbidden
subjects; he traveled in all parts of the world, gained entrance into
innumerable secret societies, and read countless little-known and
esoteric books and manuscripts in the original; and in the chapters of
the Black Book, which range from startling clarity of exposition to
murky ambiguity, there are statements and hints to freeze the blood of a
thinking man. Reading what Von Junzt _dared_ put in print arouses uneasy
speculations as to what it was that he dared _not_ tell. What dark
matters, for instance, were contained in those closely written pages
that formed the unpublished manuscript on which he worked unceasingly
for months before his death, and which lay torn and scattered all over
the floor of the locked and bolted chamber in which Von Junzt was found
dead with the marks of taloned fingers on his throat? It will never be
known, for the author's closest friend, the Frenchman Alexis Ladeau,
after having spent a whole night piecing the fragments together and
reading what was written, burnt them to ashes and cut his own throat
with a razor.

But the contents of the published matter are shuddersome enough, even if
one accepts the general view that they but represent the ravings of a
madman. There among many strange things I found mention of the Black
Stone, that curious, sinister monolith that broods among the mountains
of Hungary, and about which so many dark legends cluster. Van Junzt did
not devote much space to it--the bulk of his grim work concerns cults
and objects of dark worship which he maintained existed in his day, and
it would seem that the Black Stone represents some order or being lost
and forgotten centuries ago. But he spoke of it as one of the _keys_--a
phrase used many times by him, in various relations, and constituting
one of the obscurities of his work. And he hinted briefly at curious
sights to be seen about the monolith on Midsummer's Night. He mentioned
Otto Dostmann's theory that this monolith was a remnant of the Hunnish
invasion and had been erected to commemorate a victory of Attila over
the Goths. Von Junzt contradicted this assertion without giving any
refutory facts, merely remarking that to attribute the origin of the
Black Stone to the Huns was as logical as assuming that William the
Conqueror reared Stonehenge.

This implication of enormous antiquity piqued my interest immensely and
after some difficulty I succeeded in locating a rat-eaten and moldering
copy of Dostmann's _Remnants of Lost Empires_ (Berlin, 1809, ""Der
Drachenhaus"" Press). I was disappointed to find that Dostmann referred
to the Black Stone even more briefly than had Von Junzt, dismissing it
with a few lines as an artifact comparatively modern in contrast with
the Greco-Roman ruins of Asia Minor which were his pet theme. He
admitted his inability to make out the defaced characters on the
monolith but pronounced them unmistakably Mongoloid. However, little as
I learned from Dostmann, he did mention the name of the village adjacent
to the Black Stone--Stregoicavar--an ominous name, meaning something
like Witch-Town.

A close scrutiny of guidebooks and travel articles gave me no further
information--Stregoicavar, not on any map that I could find, lay in a
wild, little-frequented region, out of the path of casual tourists. But
I did find subject for thought in Dornly's _Magyar Folklore_. In his
chapter on _Dream Myths_ he mentions the Black Stone and tells of some
curious superstitions regarding it--especially the belief that if anyone
sleeps in the vicinity of the monolith, that person will be haunted by
monstrous nightmares forever after; and he cited tales of the peasants
regarding too-curious people who ventured to visit the Stone on
Midsummer Night and who died raving mad because of _something_ they saw
there.

That was all I could gleam from Dornly, but my interest was even more
intensely roused as I sensed a distinctly sinister aura about the Stone.
The suggestion of dark antiquity, the recurrent hint of unnatural events
on Midsummer Night, touched some slumbering instinct in my being, as one
senses, rather than hears, the flowing of some dark subterraneous river
in the night.

And I suddenly saw a connection between this Stone and a certain weird
and fantastic poem written by the mad poet, Justin Geoffrey: _The People
of the Monolith_. Inquiries led to the information that Geoffrey had
indeed written that poem while traveling in Hungary, and I could not
doubt that the Black Stone was the very monolith to which he referred in
his strange verse. Reading his stanzas again, I felt once more the
strange dim stirrings of subconscious promptings that I had noticed when
first reading of the Stone.

I had been casting about for a place to spend a short vacation and I
made up my mind. I went to Stregoicavar. A train of obsolete style
carried me from Temesvar to within striking distance, at least, of my
objective, and a three days' ride in a jouncing coach brought me to the
little village which lay in a fertile valley high up in the fir-clad
mountains. The journey itself was uneventful, but during the first day
we passed the old battlefield of Schomvaal where the brave
Polish-Hungarian knight, Count Boris Vladinoff, made his gallant and
futile stand against the victorious hosts of Suleiman the Magnificent,
when the Grand Turk swept over eastern Europe in 1526.

The driver of the coach pointed out to me a great heap of crumbling
stones on a hill nearby, under which, he said, the bones of the brave
Count lay. I remembered a passage from Larson's _Turkish Wars_. ""After
the skirmish"" (in which the Count with his small army had beaten back
the Turkish advance-guard) ""the Count was standing beneath the
half-ruined walls of the old castle on the hill, giving orders as to the
disposition of his forces, when an aide brought to him a small lacquered
case which had been taken from the body of the famous Turkish scribe and
historian, Selim Bahadur, who had fallen in the fight. The Count took
therefrom a roll of parchment and began to read, but he had not read far
before he turned very pale and, without saying a word, replaced the
parchment in the case and thrust the case into his cloak. At that very
instant a hidden Turkish battery suddenly opened fire, and the balls
striking the old castle, the Hungarians were horrified to see the walls
crash down in ruin, completely covering the brave Count. Without a
leader the gallant little army was cut to pieces, and in the war-swept
years which followed, the bones of the noblemen were never recovered.
Today the natives point out a huge and moldering pile of ruins near
Schomvaal beneath which, they say, still rests all that the centuries
have left of Count Boris Vladinoff.""

I found the village of Stregoicavar a dreamy, drowsy little village that
apparently belied its sinister cognomen--a forgotten back-eddy that
Progress had passed by. The quaint houses and the quainter dress and
manners of the people were those of an earlier century. They were
friendly, mildly curious but not inquisitive, though visitors from the
outside world were extremely rare.

""Ten years ago another American came here and stayed a few days in the
village,"" said the owner of the tavern where I had put up, ""a young
fellow and queer-acting--mumbled to himself--a poet, I think.""

I knew he must mean Justin Geoffrey.

""Yes, he was a poet,"" I answered, ""and he wrote a poem about a bit of
scenery near this very village.""

""Indeed?"" Mine host's interest was aroused. ""Then, since all great poets
are strange in their speech and actions, he must have achieved great
fame, for his actions and conversations were the strangest of any man I
ever I knew.""

""As is usual with artists,"" I answered, ""most of his recognition has
come since his death.""

""He is dead, then?""

""He died screaming in a madhouse five years ago.""

""Too bad, too bad,"" sighed mine host sympathetically. ""Poor lad--he
looked too long at the Black Stone.""

My heart gave a leap, but I masked my keen interest and said casually.
""I have heard something of this Black Stone; somewhere near this
village, is it not?""

""Nearer than Christian folk wish,"" he responded. ""Look!"" He drew me to a
latticed window and pointed up at the fir-clad slopes of the brooding
blue mountains. ""There beyond where you see the bare face of that
jutting cliff stands that accursed Stone. Would that it were ground to
powder and the powder flung into the Danube to be carried to the deepest
ocean! Once men tried to destroy the thing, but each man who laid hammer
or maul against it came to an evil end. So now the people shun it.""

""What is there so evil about it?"" I asked curiously.

""It is a demon-haunted thing,"" he answered uneasily and with the
suggestion of a shudder. ""In my childhood I knew a young man who came up
from below and laughed at our traditions--in his foolhardiness he went
to the Stone one Midsummer Night and at dawn stumbled into the village
again, stricken dumb and mad. Something had shattered his brain and
sealed his lips, for until the day of his death, which came soon after,
he spoke only to utter terrible blasphemies or to slaver gibberish.

""My own nephew when very small was lost in the mountains and slept in
the woods near the Stone, and now in his manhood he is tortured by foul
dreams, so that at times he makes the night hideous with his screams and
wakes with cold sweat upon him.

""But let us talk of something else, _Herr_; it is not good to dwell upon
such things.""

I remarked on the evident age of the tavern and he answered with pride.
""The foundations are more than four hundred years old; the original
house was the only one in the village which was not burned to the ground
when Suleiman's devil swept through the mountains. Here, in the house
that then stood on these same foundations, it is said, the scribe Selim
Bahadur had his headquarters while ravaging the country hereabouts.""

I learned then that the present inhabitants of Stregoicavar are not
descendants of the people who dwelt there before the Turkish raid of
1526. The victorious Moslems left no living human in the village or the
vicinity thereabouts when they passed over. Men, women and children they
wiped out in one red holocaust of murder, leaving a vast stretch of
country silent and utterly deserted. The present people of Stregoicavar
are descended from hardy settlers from the lower valleys who came into
the ruined village after the Turk was thrust back.

Mine host did not speak of the extermination of the original inhabitants
with any great resentment and I learned that his ancestors in the lower
levels had looked on the mountaineers with even more hatred and aversion
than they regarded the Turks. He was rather vague regarding the causes
of this feud, but said that the original inhabitants of Stregoicavar had
been in the habit of making stealthy raids on the lowlands and stealing
girls and children. Moreover, he said that they were not exactly of the
same blood as his own people; the sturdy, original Magyar-Slavic stock
had mixed and intermarried with a degraded aboriginal race until the
breeds had blended, producing an unsavory amalgamation. Who these
aborigines were, he had not the slightest idea, but maintained that they
were ""pagans"" and had dwelt in the mountains since time immemorial,
before the coming of the conquering peoples.

I attached little importance to this tale; seeing in it merely a
parallel to the amalgamation of Celtic tribes with Mediterranean
aborigines in the Galloway hills, with the resultant mixed race which,
as Picts, has such an extensive part in Scotch legendary. Time has a
curious foreshortening effect on folklore, and just as tales of the
Picts became intertwined with legends of an older Mongoloid race, so
that eventually the Picts were ascribed the repulsive appearance of the
squat primitives, whose individuality merged, in the telling, into
Pictish tales, and was forgotten; so, I felt, the supposed inhuman
attributes of the first villagers of Stregoicavar could be traced to
older, outworn myths with invading Huns and Mongols.

The morning after my arrival I received directions from mine host, who
gave them worriedly, and set out to find the Black Stone. A few hours'
tramp up the fir-covered slopes brought me to the face of the rugged,
solid stone cliff which jutted boldly from the mountainside. A narrow
trail wound up it, and mounting this, I looked out over the peaceful
valley of Stregoicavar, which seemed to drowse, guarded on either hand
by the great blue mountains. No huts or any sign of human tenancy showed
between the cliff whereon I stood and the village. I saw numbers of
scattering farms in the valley but all lay on the other side of
Stregoicavar, which itself seemed to shrink from the brooding slopes
which masked the Black Stone.

The summit of the cliffs proved to be a sort of thickly wooded plateau.
I made my way through the dense growth for a short distance and came
into a wide glade; and in the center of the glade reared a gaunt figure
of black stone.

It was octagonal in shape, some sixteen feet in height and about a foot
and a half thick. It had once evidently been highly polished, but now
the surface was thickly dinted as if savage efforts had been made to
demolish it; but the hammers had done little more than to flake off
small bits of stone and mutilate the characters which once had evidently
marched up in a spiraling line round and round the shaft to the top. Up
to ten feet from the base these characters were almost completely
blotted out, so that it was very difficult to trace their direction.
Higher up they were plainer, and I managed to squirm part of the way up
the shaft and scan them at close range. All were more or less defaced,
but I was positive that they symbolized no language now remembered on
the face of the earth. I am fairly familiar with all hieroglyphics known
to researchers and philologists and I can say, with certainty that those
characters were like nothing of which I have ever read or heard. The
nearest approach to them that I ever saw were some crude scratches on a
gigantic and strangely symmetrical rock in a lost valley of Yucatan. I
remember that when I pointed out these marks to the archeologist who was
my companion, he maintained that they either represented natural
weathering or the idle scratching of some Indian. To my theory that the
rock was really the base of a long-vanished column, he merely laughed,
calling my attention to the dimensions of it, which suggested, if it
were built with any natural rules of architectural symmetry, a column a
thousand feet high. But I was not convinced.

I will not say that the characters on the Black Stone were similar to
those on that colossal rock in Yucatan; but one suggested the other. As
to the substance of the monolith, again I was baffled. The stone of
which it was composed was a dully gleaming black, whose surface, where
it was not dinted and roughened, created a curious illusion of
semi-transparency.

I spent most of the morning there and came away baffled. No connection
of the Stone with any other artifact in the world suggested itself to
me. It was as if the monolith had been reared by alien hands, in an age
distant and apart from human ken.

I returned to the village with my interest in no way abated. Now that I
had seen the curious thing, my desire was still more keenly whetted to
investigate the matter further and seek to learn by what strange hands
and for what strange purpose the Black Stone had been reared in the long
ago.

I sought out the tavern-keeper's nephew and questioned him in regard to
his dreams, but he was vague, though willing to oblige. He did not mind
discussing them, but was unable to describe them with any clarity.
Though he dreamed the same dreams repeatedly, and though they were
hideously vivid at the time, they left no distinct impression on his
waking mind. He remembered them only as chaotic nightmares through which
huge whirling fires shot lurid tongues of flame and a black drum
bellowed incessantly. One thing only he remembered clearly--in one dream
he had seen the Black Stone, not on a mountain slope but set like a
spire on a colossal black castle.

As for the rest of the villagers I found them not inclined to talk about
the Stone, with the exception of the schoolmaster, a man of surprizing
education, who spent much more of his time out in the world than any of
the rest.

He was much interested in what I told him of Von Junzt's remarks about
the Stone, and warmly agreed with the German author in the alleged age
of the monolith. He believed that a coven had once existed in the
vicinity and that possibly all of the original villagers had been
members of that fertility cult which once threatened to undermine
European civilization and gave rise to the tales of witchcraft. He cited
the very name of the village to prove his point; it had not been
originally named Stregoicavar, he said; according to legends the
builders had called it Xuthltan, which was the aboriginal name of the
site on which the village had been built many centuries ago.

This fact roused again an indescribable feeling of uneasiness. The
barbarous name did not suggest connection with any Scythic, Slavic or
Mongolian race to which an aboriginal people of these mountains would,
under natural circumstances, have belonged.

That the Magyars and Slavs of the lower valleys believed the original
inhabitants of the village to be members of the witchcraft cult was
evident, the schoolmaster said, by the name they gave it, which name
continued to be used even after the older settlers had been massacred by
the Turks, and the village rebuilt by a cleaner and more wholesome
breed.

He did not believe that the members of the cult erected the monolith but
he did believe that they used it as a center of their activities, and
repeating vague legends which had been handed down since before the
Turkish invasion, he advanced the theory that the degenerate villagers
had used it as a sort of altar on which they offered human sacrifices,
using as victims the girls and babies stolen from his own ancestors in
the lower valleys.

He discounted the myths of weird events on Midsummer Night, as well as a
curious legend of a strange deity which the witch-people of Xuthltan
were said to have invoked with chants and wild rituals of flagellation
and slaughter.

He had never visited the Stone on Midsummer Night, he said, but he would
not fear to do so; whatever _had_ existed or taken place there in the
past, had been long engulfed in the mists of time and oblivion. The
Black Stone had lost its meaning save as a link to a dead and dusty
past.

It was while returning from a visit with this schoolmaster one night
about a week after my arrival at Stregoicavar that a sudden recollection
struck me--it was Midsummer Night! The very time that the legends linked
with grisly implications to the Black Stone. I turned away from the
tavern and strode swiftly through the village. Stregoicavar lay silent;
the villagers retired early. I saw no one as I passed rapidly out of the
village and up into the firs which masked the mountain's slopes with
whispering darkness. A broad silver moon hung above the valley, flooding
the crags and slopes in a weird light and etching the shadows blackly.
No wind blew through the firs, but a mysterious, intangible rustling and
whispering was abroad. Surely on such nights in past centuries, my
whimsical imagination told me, naked witches astride magic broomsticks
had flown across the valley, pursued by jeering demoniac familiars.

I came to the cliffs and was somewhat disquieted to note that the
illusive moonlight lent them a subtle appearance I had not noticed
before--in the weird light they appeared less like natural cliffs and
more like the ruins of cyclopean and Titan-reared battlements jutting
from the mountain-slope.

Shaking off this hallucination with difficulty I came upon the plateau
and hesitated a moment before I plunged into the brooding darkness of
the woods. A sort of breathless tenseness hung over the shadows, like an
unseen monster holding its breath lest it scare away its prey.

I shook off the sensation--a natural one, considering the eeriness of
the place and its evil reputation--and made my way through the wood,
experiencing a most unpleasant sensation that I was being followed, and
halting once, sure that something clammy and unstable had brushed
against my face in the darkness.

I came out into the glade and saw the tall monolith rearing its gaunt
height above the sward. At the edge of the woods on the side toward the
cliffs was a stone which formed a sort of natural seat. I sat down,
reflecting that it was probably while there that the mad poet, Justin
Geoffrey, had written his fantastic _People of the Monolith_. Mine host
thought that it was the Stone which had caused Geoffrey's insanity, but
the seeds of madness had been sown in the poet's brain long before he
ever came to Stregoicavar.

A glance at my watch showed that the hour of midnight was close at hand.
I leaned back, waiting whatever ghostly demonstration might appear. A
thin night wind started up among the branches of the firs, with an
uncanny suggestion of faint, unseen pipes whispering an eerie and evil
tune. The monotony of the sound and my steady gazing at the monolith
produced a sort of self-hypnosis upon me; I grew drowsy. I fought this
feeling, but sleep stole on me in spite of myself; the monolith seemed
to sway and dance, strangely distorted to my gaze, and then I slept.

I opened my eyes and sought to rise, but lay still, as if an icy hand
gripped me helpless. Cold terror stole over me. The glade was no longer
deserted. It was thronged by a silent crowd of strange people, and my
distended eyes took in strange barbaric details of costume which my
reason told me were archaic and forgotten even in this backward land.
Surely, I thought, these are villagers who have come here to hold some
fantastic conclave--but another glance told me that these people were
not the folk of Stregoicavar. They were a shorter, more squat race,
whose brows were lower, whose faces were broader and duller. Some had
Slavic and Magyar features, but those features were degraded as from a
mixture of some baser, alien strain I could not classify. Many wore the
hides of wild beasts, and their whole appearance, both men and women,
was one of sensual brutishness. They terrified and repelled me, but they
gave me no heed. They formed in a vast half-circle in front of the
monolith and began a sort of chant, flinging their arms in unison and
weaving their bodies rhythmically from the waist upward. All eyes were
fixed on the top of the Stone which they seemed to be invoking. But the
strangest of all was the dimness of their voices; not fifty yards from
me hundreds of men and women were unmistakably lifting their voices in a
wild chant, yet those voices came to me as a faint indistinguishable
murmur as if from across vast leagues of Space--or _time_.

Before the monolith stood a sort of brazier from which a vile, nauseous
yellow smoke billowed upward, curling curiously in a swaying spiral
around the black shaft, like a vast unstable snake.

On one side of this brazier lay two figures--a young girl, stark naked
and bound hand and foot, and an infant, apparently only a few months
old. On the other side of the brazier squatted a hideous old hag with a
queer sort of black drum on her lap; this drum she beat with slow light
blows of her open palms, but I could not hear the sound.

The rhythm of the swaying bodies grew faster and into the space between
the people and the monolith sprang a naked young woman, her eyes
blazing, her long black hair flying loose. Spinning dizzily on her toes,
she whirled across the open space and fell prostrate before the Stone,
where she lay motionless. The next instant a fantastic figure followed
her--a man from whose waist hung a goatskin, and whose features were
entirely hidden by a sort of mask made from a huge wolf's head, so that
he looked like a monstrous, nightmare being, horribly compounded of
elements both human and bestial. In his hand he held a bunch of long fir
switches bound together at the larger ends, and the moonlight glinted on
a chain of heavy gold looped about his neck. A smaller chain depending
from it suggested a pendant of some sort, but this was missing.

The people tossed their arms violently and seemed to redouble their
shouts as this grotesque creature loped across the open space with many
a fantastic leap and caper. Coming to the woman who lay before the
monolith, he began to lash her with the switches he bore, and she leaped
up and spun into the wild mazes of the most incredible dance I have ever
seen. And her tormentor danced with her, keeping the wild rhythm,
matching her every whirl and bound, while incessantly raining cruel
blows on her naked body. And at every blow he shouted a single word,
over and over, and all the people shouted it back. I could see the
working of their lips, and now the faint far-off murmur of their voices
merged and blended into one distant shout, repeated over and over with
slobbering ecstasy. But what the one word was, I could not make out.

In dizzy whirls spun the wild dancers, while the lookers-on, standing
still in their tracks, followed the rhythm of their dance with swaying
bodies and weaving arms. Madness grew in the eyes of the capering
votaress and was reflected in the eyes of the watchers. Wilder and more
extravagant grew the whirling frenzy of that mad dance--it became a
bestial and obscene thing, while the old hag howled and battered the
drum like a crazy woman, and the switches cracked out a devil's tune.

Blood trickled down the dancer's limbs but she seemed not to feel the
lashing save as a stimulus for further enormities of outrageous motion;
bounding into the midst of the yellow smoke which now spread out tenuous
tentacles to embrace both flying figures, she seemed to merge with that
foul fog and veil herself with it. Then emerging into plain view,
closely followed by the beast-thing that flogged her, she shot into an
indescribable, explosive burst of dynamic mad motion, and on the very
crest of that mad wave, she dropped suddenly to the sward, quivering and
panting as if completely overcome by her frenzied exertions. The lashing
continued with unabated violence and intensity and she began to wriggle
toward the monolith on her belly. The priest--or such I will call
him--followed, lashing her unprotected body with all the power of his
arm as she writhed along, leaving a heavy track of blood on the trampled
earth. She reached the monolith, and gasping and panting, flung both
arms about it and covered the cold stone with fierce hot kisses, as in
frenzied and unholy adoration.

The fantastic priest bounded high in the air, flinging away the
red-dabbled switches, and the worshippers, howling and foaming at the
mouths, turned on each other with tooth and nail, rending one another's
garments and flesh in a blind passion of bestiality. The priest swept up
the infant with a long arm, and shouting again that Name, whirled the
wailing babe high in the air and dashed its brains out against the
monolith, leaving a ghastly stain on the black surface. Cold with horror
I saw him rip the tiny body open with his bare brutish fingers and fling
handfuls of blood on the shaft, then toss the red and torn shape into
the brazier, extinguishing flame and smoke in a crimson rain, while the
maddened brutes behind him howled over and over the Name. Then suddenly
they all fell prostrate, writhing like snakes, while the priest flung
wide his gory hands as in triumph. I opened my mouth to scream my horror
and loathing, but only a dry rattle sounded; a huge monstrous toad-like
thing squatted on the top of the monolith!

I saw its bloated, repulsive and unstable outline against the moonlight
and set in what would have been the face of a natural creature, its
huge, blinking eyes which reflected all the lust, abysmal greed, obscene
cruelty and monstrous evil that has stalked the sons of men since their
ancestors moved blind and hairless in the treetops. In those grisly eyes
were mirrored all the unholy things and vile secrets that sleep in the
cities under the sea, and that skulk from the light of day in the
blackness of primordial caverns. And so that ghastly thing that the
unhallowed ritual of cruelty and sadism and blood had evoked from the
silence of the hills, leered and blinked down on its bestial
worshippers, who groveled in abhorrent abasement before it.

Now the beast-masked priest lifted the bound and weakly writhing girl in
his brutish hands and held her up toward that horror on the monolith.
And as that monstrosity sucked in its breath, lustfully and
slobberingly, something snapped in my brain and I fell into a merciful
faint.

I opened my eyes on a still white dawn. All the events of the night
rushed back on me and I sprang up, then stared about me in amazement.
The monolith brooded gaunt and silent above the sward which waved, green
and untrampled, in the morning breeze. A few quick strides took me
across the glade; here had the dancers leaped and bounded until the
ground should have been trampled bare, and here had the votaress
wriggled her painful way to the Stone, streaming blood on the earth. But
no drop of crimson showed on the uncrushed sward. I looked,
shudderingly, at the side of the monolith against which the bestial
priest had brained the stolen baby--but no dark stain nor grisly clot
showed there.

A dream! It had been a wild nightmare--or else--I shrugged my shoulders.
What vivid clarity for a dream!

I returned quietly to the village and entered the inn without being
seen. And there I sat meditating over the strange events of the night.
More and more was I prone to discard the dream-theory. That what I had
seen was illusion and without material substance, was evident. But I
believed that I had looked on the mirrored shadow of a deed perpetrated
in ghastly actuality in bygone days. But how was I to know? What proof
to show that my vision had been a gathering of foul specters rather than
a nightmare originating in my brain?

As if for answer a name flashed into my mind--Selim Bahadur! According
to legend this man, who had been a soldier as well as a scribe, had
commanded that part of Suleiman's army which had devastated
Stregoicavar; it seemed logical enough; and if so, he had gone straight
from the blotted-out countryside to the bloody field of Schomvaal, and
his doom. I sprang up with a sudden shout--that manuscript which was
taken from the Turk's body, and which Count Boris shuddered over--might
it not contain some narration of what the conquering Turks found in
Stregoicavar? What else could have shaken the iron nerves of the Polish
adventurer? And since the bones of the Count had never been recovered,
what more certain than that the lacquered case, with its mysterious
contents, still lay hidden beneath the ruins that covered Boris
Vladinoff? I began packing my bag with fierce haste.

Three days later found me ensconced in a little village a few miles from
the old battlefield, and when the moon rose I was working with savage
intensity on the great pile of crumbling stone that crowned the hill. It
was back-breaking toil--looking back now I can not see how I
accomplished it, though I labored without a pause from moonrise to dawn.
Just as the sun was coming up I tore aside the last tangle of stones and
looked on all that was mortal of Count Boris Vladinoff--only a few
pitiful fragments of crumbling bone--and among them, crushed out of all
original shape, lay a case whose lacquered surface had kept it from
complete decay through the centuries.

I seized it with frenzied eagerness, and piling back some of the stones
on the bones I hurried away; for I did not care to be discovered by the
suspicious peasants in an act of apparent desecration.

Back in my tavern chamber I opened the case and found the parchment
comparatively intact; and there was something else in the case--a small
squat object wrapped in silk. I was wild to plumb the secrets of those
yellowed pages, but weariness forbade me. Since leaving Stregoicavar I
had hardly slept at all, and the terrific exertions of the previous
night combined to overcome me. In spite of myself I was forced to
stretch myself on my bed, nor did I awake until sundown.

I snatched a hasty supper, and then in the light of a flickering candle,
I set myself to read the neat Turkish characters that covered the
parchment. It was difficult work, for I am not deeply versed in the
language and the archaic style of the narrative baffled me. But as I
toiled through it a word or a phrase here and there leaped at me and a
dimly growing horror shook me in its grip. I bent my energies fiercely
to the task, and as the tale grew clearer and took more tangible form my
blood chilled in my veins, my hair stood up and my tongue clove to my
mouth. All external things partook of the grisly madness of that
infernal manuscript until the night sounds of insects and creatures in
the woods took the form of ghastly murmurings and stealthy treadings of
ghoulish horrors and the sighing of the night wind changed to tittering
obscene gloating of evil over the souls of men.

At last when gray dawn was stealing through the latticed window, I laid
down the manuscript and took up and unwrapped the thing in the bit of
silk. Staring at it with haggard eyes I knew the truth of the matter was
clinched, even had it been possible to doubt the veracity of that
terrible manuscript.

And I replaced both obscene things in the case, nor did I rest nor sleep
nor eat until that case containing them had been weighted with stones
and flung into the deepest current of the Danube which, God grant,
carried them back into the Hell from which they came.

It was no dream I dreamed on Midsummer Midnight in the hills above
Stregoicavar. Well for Justin Geoffrey that he tarried there only in the
sunlight and went his way, for had he gazed upon that ghastly conclave,
his mad brain would have snapped before it did. How my own reason held,
I do not know.

No--it was no dream--I gazed upon a foul rout of votaries long dead,
come up from Hell to worship as of old; ghosts that bowed before a
ghost. For Hell has long claimed their hideous god. Long, long he dwelt
among the hills, a brain-shattering vestige of an outworn age, but no
longer his obscene talons clutch for the souls of living men, and his
kingdom is a dead kingdom, peopled only by the ghosts of those who
served him in his lifetime and theirs.

By what foul alchemy or godless sorcery the Gates of Hell are opened on
that one eerie night I do not know, but mine own eyes have seen. And I
know I looked on no living thing that night, for the manuscript written
in the careful hand of Selim Bahadur narrated at length what he and his
raiders found in the valley of Stregoicavar; and I read, set down in
detail, the blasphemous obscenities that torture wrung from the lips of
screaming worshippers; and I read, too, of the lost, grim black cavern
high in the hills where the horrified Turks hemmed a monstrous, bloated,
wallowing toad-like being and slew it with flame and ancient steel
blessed in old times by Muhammad, and with incantations that were old
when Arabia was young. And even staunch old Selim's hand shook as he
recorded the cataclysmic, earth-shaking death-howls of the monstrosity,
which died not alone; for half-score of his slayers perished with him,
in ways that Selim would not or could not describe.

And that squat idol carved of gold and wrapped in silk was an image of
_himself_, and Selim tore it from the golden chain that looped the neck
of the slain high priest of the mask.

Well that the Turks swept out that foul valley with torch and cleanly
steel! Such sights as those brooding mountains have looked on belong to
the darkness and abysses of lost eons. No--it is not fear of the
toad-thing that makes me shudder in the night. He is made fast in Hell
with his nauseous horde, freed only for an hour on the most weird night
of the year, as I have seen. And of his worshippers, none remains.

But it is the realization that such things once crouched beast-like
above the souls of men which brings cold sweat to my brow; and I fear to
peer again into the leaves of Von Junzt's abomination. For now I
understand his repeated phrase of _keys_!--aye! Keys to Outer
Doors--links with an abhorrent past and--who knows?--of abhorrent
spheres of the _present_. And I understand why the cliffs look like
battlements in the moonlight and why the tavern-keeper's
nightmare-haunted nephew saw in his dream, the Black Stone like a spire
on a cyclopean black castle. If men ever excavate among those mountains
they may find incredible things below those masking slopes. For the cave
wherein the Turks trapped the--_thing_--was not truly a cavern, and I
shudder to contemplate the gigantic gulf of eons which must stretch
between this age and the time when the earth shook herself and reared
up, like a wave, those blue mountains that, rising, enveloped
unthinkable things. May no man ever seek to uproot that ghastly spire
men call the Black Stone!

A Key! Aye, it is a Key, symbol of a forgotten horror. That horror has
faded into the limbo from which it crawled, loathsomely, in the black
dawn of the earth. But what of the other fiendish possibilities hinted
at by Von Junzt--what of the monstrous hand which strangled out his
life? Since reading what Selim Bahadur wrote, I can no longer doubt
anything in the Black Book. Man was not always master of the earth--_and
is he now?_

And the thought recurs to me--if such a monstrous entity as the Master
of the Monolith somehow survived its own unspeakably distant epoch so
long--_what nameless shapes may even now lurk in the dark places of the
world?_
","Only when the Nan-yang Maru sailed from Yuen-San did her terrible sense of foreboding begin to subside.

For four years, waking or sleeping, the awful subconsciousness of supreme evil had never left her.

But now, as the Korean shore, receding into darkness, grew dimmer and dimmer, fear subsided and grew vague as the half-forgotten memory of horror in a dream.

She stood near the steamer's stern apart from other passengers, a slender, lonely figure in her silver-fox furs, her ulster and smart little hat, watching the lights of Yuen-San grow paler and smaller along the horizon until they looked like a level row of stars.

Under her haunted eyes Asia was slowly dissolving to a streak of vapour in the misty lustre of the moon.

Suddenly the ancient continent disappeared, washed out by a wave against the sky; and with it vanished the last shreds of that accursed nightmare which had possessed her for four endless years. But whether during those unreal years her soul had only been held in bondage, or whether, as she had been taught, it had been irrevocably destroyed, she still remained uncertain, knowing nothing about the death of souls or how it was accomplished.

As she stood there, her sad eyes fixed on the misty East, a passenger passing—an Englishwoman—paused to say something kind to the young American; and added, ""if there is anything my husband and I can do it would give us much pleasure."" The girl had turned her head as though not comprehending. The other woman hesitated.

""This is Doctor Norne's daughter, is it not?"" she inquired in a pleasant voice.

""Yes, I am Tressa Norne.... I ask your pardon.... Thank you, madam:—I am—I seem to be—a trifle dazed——""

""What wonder, you poor child! Come to us if you feel need of companionship.""

""You are very kind.... I seem to wish to be alone, somehow.""

""I understand.... Good-night, my dear.""

Late the next morning Tressa Norne awoke, conscious for the first time in four years that it was at last her own familiar self stretched out there on the pillows where sunshine streamed through the porthole. All that day she lay in her bamboo steamer chair on deck. Sun and wind conspired to dry every tear that wet her closed lashes. Her dark, glossy hair blew about her face; scarlet tinted her full lips again; the tense hands relaxed. Peace came at sundown.

That evening she took her Yu-kin from her cabin and found a chair on the deserted hurricane deck.

And here, in the brilliant moonlight of the China Sea, she curled up cross-legged on the deck, all alone, and sounded the four futile strings of her moon-lute, and hummed to herself, in a still voice, old songs she had sung in Yian before the tragedy. She sang the tent-song called Tchinguiz. She sang Camel Bells and The Blue Bazaar,—children's songs of the Yiort. She sang the ancient Khiounnou song called ""The Saghalien"":

I
In the month of Saffar
Among the river-reeds
I saw two horsemen
Sitting on their steeds.
Tulugum!
Heitulum!
By the river-reeds
II
In the month of Saffar
A demon guards the ford.
Tokhta, my Lover!
Draw your shining sword!
Tulugum!
Heitulum!
Slay him with your sword!
III
In the month of Saffar
Among the water-weeds
I saw two horsemen
Fighting on their steeds.
Tulugum!
Heitulum!
How my lover bleeds!
IV
In the month of Saffar,
The Year I should have wed—
The Year of The Panther—
My lover lay dead,—
Tulugum!
Heitulum!
Dead without a head.
And songs like these—the one called ""Keuke Mongol,"" and an ancient air of the Tchortchas called ""The Thirty Thousand Calamities,"" and some Chinese boatmen's songs which she had heard in Yian before the tragedy; these she hummed to herself there in the moonlight playing on her round-faced, short-necked lute of four strings.

Terror indeed seemed ended for her, and in her heart a great overwhelming joy was welling up which seemed to overflow across the entire moonlit world.

She had no longer any fear; no premonition of further evil. Among the few Americans and English aboard, something of her story was already known. People were kind; and they were also considerate enough to subdue their sympathetic curiosity when they discovered that this young American girl shrank from any mention of what had happened to her during the last four years of the Great World War.

It was evident, also, that she preferred to remain aloof; and this inclination, when finally understood, was respected by her fellow passengers. The clever, efficient and polite Japanese officers and crew of the Nan-yang Maru were invariably considerate and courteous to her, and they remained nicely reticent, although they also knew the main outline of her story and very much desired to know more. And so, surrounded now by the friendly security of civilised humanity, Tressa Norne, reborn to light out of hell's own shadows, awoke from four years of nightmare which, after all, perhaps, never had seemed entirely actual.

And now God's real sun warmed her by day; His real moon bathed her in creamy coolness by night; sky and wind and wave thrilled her with their blessed assurance that this was once more the real world which stretched illimitably on every side from horizon to horizon; and the fair faces and pleasant voices of her own countrymen made the past seem only a ghastly dream that never again could enmesh her soul with its web of sorcery.

And now the days at sea fled very swiftly; and when at last the Golden Gate was not far away she had finally managed to persuade herself that nothing really can harm the human soul; that the monstrous devil-years were ended, never again to return; that in this vast, clean Western Continent there could be no occult threat to dread, no gigantic menace to destroy her body, no secret power that could consign her soul to the dreadful abysm of spiritual annihilation.

Very early that morning she came on deck. The November day was delightfully warm, the air clear save for a belt of mist low on the water to the southward.

She had been told that land would not be sighted for twenty-four hours, but she went forward and stood beside the starboard rail, searching the horizon with the enchanted eyes of hope.

As she stood there a Japanese ship's officer crossing the deck, forward, halted abruptly and stood staring at something to the southward.

At the same moment, above the belt of mist on the water, and perfectly clear against the blue sky above, the girl saw a fountain of gold fire rise from the fog, drift upward in the daylight, slowly assume the incandescent outline of a serpentine creature which leisurely uncoiled and hung there floating, its lizard-tail undulating, its feet with their five stumpy claws closing, relaxing, like those of a living reptile. For a full minute this amazing shape of fire floated there in the sky, brilliant in the morning light, then the reptilian form faded, died out, and the last spark vanished in the sunshine.

When the Japanese officer at last turned to resume his promenade, he noticed a white-faced girl gripping a stanchion behind him as though she were on the point of swooning. He crossed the deck quickly. Tressa Norne's eyes opened.

""Are you ill, Miss Norne?"" he asked.

""The—the Dragon,"" she whispered.

The officer laughed. ""Why, that was nothing but Chinese day-fireworks,"" he explained. ""The crew of some fishing boat yonder in the fog is amusing itself."" He looked at her narrowly, then with a nice little bow and smile he offered his arm: ""If you are indisposed, perhaps you might wish to go below to your stateroom, Miss Norne?""

She thanked him, managed to pull herself together and force a ghost of a smile.

He lingered a moment, said something cheerful about being nearly home, then made her a punctilious salute and went his way.

Tressa Norne leaned back against the stanchion and closed her eyes. Her pallor became deathly. She bent over and laid her white face in her folded arms.

After a while she lifted her head, and, turning very slowly, stared at the fog-belt out of frightened eyes.

And saw, rising out of the fog, a pearl-tinted sphere which gradually mounted into the clear daylight above like the full moon's phantom in the sky.

Higher, higher rose the spectral moon until at last it swam in the very zenith. Then it slowly evaporated in the blue vault above.

A great wave of despair swept her; she clung to the stanchion, staring with half-blinded eyes at the flat fog-bank in the south.

But no more ""Chinese day-fireworks"" rose out of it. And at length she summoned sufficient strength to go below to her cabin and lie there, half senseless, huddled on her bed.

When land was sighted, the following morning, Tressa Norne had lived a century in twenty-four hours. And in that space of time her agonised soul had touched all depths.

But now as the Golden Gate loomed up in the morning light, rage, terror, despair had burned themselves out. From their ashes within her mind arose the cool wrath of desperation armed for anything, wary, alert, passionately determined to survive at whatever cost, recklessly ready to fight for bodily existence.

That was her sole instinct now, to go on living, to survive, no matter at what price. And if it were indeed true that her soul had been slain, she defied its murderers to slay her body also.

That night, at her hotel in San Francisco, she double-locked her door and lay down without undressing, leaving all lights burning and an automatic pistol underneath her pillow.

Toward morning she fell asleep, slept for an hour, started up in awful fear. And saw the double-locked door opposite the foot of her bed slowly opening of its own accord.

Into the brightly illuminated room stepped a graceful young man in full evening dress carrying over his left arm an overcoat, and in his other hand a top hat and silver tipped walking-stick.

With one bound the girl swung herself from the bed to the carpet and clutched at the pistol under her pillow.

""Sanang!"" she cried in a terrible voice.

""Keuke Mongol!"" he said, smilingly.

For a moment they confronted each other in the brightly lighted bedroom, then, partly turning, he cast a calm glance at the open door behind him; and, as though moved by a wind, the door slowly closed. And she heard the key turn of itself in the lock, and saw the bolt slide smoothly into place again.

Her power of speech came back to her presently—only a broken whisper at first: ""Do you think I am afraid of your accursed magic?"" she managed to gasp. ""Do you think I am afraid of you, Sanang?""

""You are afraid,"" he said serenely.

""You lie!""

""No, I do not lie. To one another the Yezidees never lie.""

""You lie again, assassin! I am no Yezidee!""

He smiled gently. His features were pleasing, smooth, and regular; his cheek-bones high, his skin fine and of a pale and delicate ivory colour. Once his black, beautifully shaped eyes wandered to the levelled pistol which she now held clutched desperately close to her right hip, and a slightly ironical expression veiled his gaze for an instant.

""Bullets?"" he murmured. ""But you and I are of the Hassanis.""

""The third lie, Sanang!"" Her voice had regained its strength. Tense, alert, blue eyes ablaze, every faculty concentrated on the terrible business before her, the girl now seemed like some supple leopardess poised on the swift verge of murder.

""Tokhta!""[1] She spat the word. ""Any movement toward a hidden weapon, any gesture suggesting recourse to magic—and I kill you, Sanang, exactly where you stand!""

""With a pistol?"" He laughed. Then his smooth features altered subtly. He said: ""Keuke Mongol, who call yourself Tressa Norne,—Keuke—heavenly azure-blue,—named so in the temple because of the colour of your eyes—listen attentively, for this is the Yarlig which I bring to you by word of mouth from Yian, as from Yezidee to Yezidee:

""Here, in this land called the United States of America, the Temple girl, Keuke Mongol, who has witnessed the mysteries of Erlik and who understands the magic of the Sheiks-el-Djebel, and who has seen Mount Alamout and the eight castles and the fifty thousand Hassanis in white turbans and in robes of white;—you—Azure-blue eyes—heed the Yarlig!—or may thirty thousand calamities overtake you!""

There was a dead silence; then he went on seriously: ""It is decreed: You shall cease to remember that you are a Yezidee, that you are of the Hassanis, that you ever have laid eyes on Yian the Beautiful, that you ever set naked foot upon Mount Alamout. It is decreed that you remember nothing of what you have seen and heard, of what has been told and taught during the last four years reckoned as the Christians reckon from our Year of the Bull. Otherwise—my Master sends you this for your—convenience.""

Leisurely, from under his folded overcoat, the young man produced a roll of white cloth and dropped it at her feet and the girl shrank aside, shuddering, knowing that the roll of white cloth was meant for her winding-sheet.

Then the colour came back to lip and cheek; and, glancing up from the soft white shroud, she smiled at the young man: ""Have you ended your Oriental mummery?"" she asked calmly. ""Listen very seriously in your turn, Sanang, Sheik-el-Djebel, Prince of the Hassanis who, God knows when and how, have come out into the sunshine of this clean and decent country, out of a filthy darkness where devils and sorcerers make earth a hell.

""If you, or yours, threaten me, annoy me, interfere with me, I shall go to our civilised police and tell all I know concerning the Yezidees. I mean to live. Do you understand? You know what you have done to me and mine. I come back to my own country alone, without any living kin, poor, homeless, friendless,—and, perhaps, damned. I intend, nevertheless, to survive. I shall not relax my clutch on bodily existence whatever the Yezidees may pretend to have done to my soul. I am determined to live in the body, anyway.""

He nodded gravely.

She said: ""Out at sea, over the fog, I saw the sign of Yu-lao in fire floating in the day-sky. I saw his spectral moon rise and vanish in mid-heaven. I understood. But——"" And here she suddenly showed an edge of teeth under the full scarlet upper lip: ""Keep your signs and your shrouds to yourself, dog of a Yezidee!—toad!—tortoise-egg!—he-goat with three legs! Keep your threats and your messages to yourself! Keep your accursed magic to yourself! Do you think to frighten me with your sorcery by showing me the Moons of Yu-lao?—by opening a bolted door? I know more of such magic than do you, Sanang—Death Adder of Alamout!""

Suddenly she laughed aloud at him—laughed insultingly in his expressionless face:

""I saw you and Gutchlug Khan and your cowardly Tchortchas in red-lacquered jackets slink out of the Temple of Erlik where the bronze gong thundered and a cloud settled down raining little yellow snakes all over the marble steps—all over you, Prince Sanang! You were afraid, my Tougtchi!—you and Gutchlug and your red Tchortchas with their halberds all dripping with human entrails! And I saw you mount and gallop off into the woods while in the depths of the magic cloud which rained little yellow snakes all around you, we temple girls laughed and mocked at you—at you and your cowardly Tchortcha horsemen.""

A slight tinge of pink came into the young man's pale face. Tressa Norne stepped nearer, her levelled pistol resting on her hip.

""Why did you not complain of us to your Master, the Old Man of the Mountain?"" she asked jeeringly. ""And where, also, was your Yezidee magic when it rained little snakes?—What frightened you away—who had boldly come to seize a temple girl—you who had screwed up your courage sufficiently to defy Erlik in his very shrine and snatch from his temple a young thing whose naked body wrapped in gold was worth the chance of death to you?""

The young man's top-hat dropped to the floor. He bent over to pick it up. His face was quite expressionless, quite colourless, now.

""I went on no such errand,"" he said with an effort. ""I went with a thousand prayers on scarlet paper made in——""

""A lie, Yezidee! You came to seize me!""

He turned still paler. ""By Abu, Omar, Otman, and Ali, it is not true!""

""You lie!—by the Lion of God, Hassini!""

She stepped closer. ""And I'll tell you another thing you fear—you Yezidee of Alamout—you robber of Yian—you sorcerer of Sabbah Khan, and chief of his sect of Assassins! You fear this native land of mine, America; and its laws and customs, and its clear, clean sunshine; and its cities and people; and its police! Take that message back. We Americans fear nobody save the true God!—nobody—neither Yezidee nor Hassani nor Russ nor German nor that sexless monster born of hell and called the Bolshevik!""

""Tokhta!"" he cried sharply.

""Damn you!"" retorted the girl; ""get out of my room! Get out of my sight! Get out of my path! Get out of my life! Take that to your Master of Mount Alamout! I do what I please; I go where I please; I live as I please. And if I please, I turn against him!""

""In that event,"" he said hoarsely, ""there lies your winding-sheet on the floor at your feet! Take up your shroud; and make Erlik seize you!""

""Sanang,"" she said very seriously.

""I hear you, Keuke-Mongol.""

""Listen attentively. I wish to live. I have had enough of death in life. I desire to remain a living, breathing thing—even if it be true—as you Yezidees tell me, that you have caught my soul in a net and that your sorcerers really control its destiny.

""But damned or not, I passionately desire to live. And I am coward enough to hold my peace for the sake of living. So—I remain silent. I have no stomach to defy the Yezidees; because, if I do, sooner or later I shall be killed. I know it. I have no desire to die for others—to perish for the sake of the common good. I am young. I have suffered too much; I am determined to live—and let my soul take its chances between God and Erlik.""

She came close to him, looked curiously into his pale face.

""I laughed at you out of the temple cloud,"" she said. ""I know how to open bolted doors as well as you do. And I know other things. And if you ever again come to me in this life I shall first torture you, then slay you. Then I shall tell all!... and unroll my shroud.""

""I keep your word of promise until you break it,"" he interrupted hastily. ""Yarlig! It is decreed!"" And then he slowly turned as though to glance over his shoulder at the locked and bolted door.

""Permit me to open it for you, Prince Sanang,"" said the girl scornfully. And she gazed steadily at the door.

Presently, all by itself, the key turned in the lock, the bolt slid back, the door gently opened.

Toward it, white as a corpse, his overcoat on his left arm, his stick and top-hat in the other hand, crept the young man in his faultless evening garb.

Then, as he reached the threshold, he suddenly sprang aside. A small yellow snake lay coiled there on the door sill. For a full throbbing minute the young man stared at the yellow reptile in unfeigned horror. Then, very cautiously, he moved his fascinated eyes sideways and gazed in silence at Tressa Norne.

The girl laughed.

""Sorceress!"" he burst out hoarsely. ""Take that accursed thing from my path!""

""What thing, Sanang?"" At that his dark, frightened eyes stole toward the threshold again, seeking the little snake. But there was no snake there. And when he was certain of this he went, twitching and trembling all over.

Behind him the door closed softly, locking and bolting itself.

And behind the bolted door in the brightly lighted bedroom Tressa Norne fell on both knees, her pistol still clutched in her right hand, calling passionately upon Christ to forgive her for the dreadful ability she had dared to use, and begging Him to save her body from death and her soul from the snare of the Yezidee.

",False
"Shortly before ten the next morning I stood with one small valise in front of Hammond's Drug Store in old Market Square waiting for the Innsmouth bus. As the hour for its arrival drew near I noticed a general drift of the loungers to other places up the street, or to the Ideal Lunch across the square. Evidently the ticket-agent had not exaggerated the dislike which local People bore toward Innsmouth and its denizens. In a few moments a small motor-coach of extreme decrepitude and dirty grey colour rattled down State Street, made a turn, and drew up at the curb beside me. I felt immediately that it was the right one; a guess which the half-illegible sign on the windshield--Arkham-Innsmouth-Newburyport--soon verified.
There were only three passengers--dark, unkempt men of sullen visage and somewhat youthful cast--and when the vehicle stopped they clumsily shambled out and began walking up State Street in a silent, almost furtive fashion. The driver also alighted, and I watched him as he went into the drug store to make some purchase. This, I reflected, must be the Joe Sargent mentioned by the ticket-agent; and even before I noticed any details there spread over me a wave of spontaneous aversion which could be neither checked nor explained. It suddenly struck me as very natural that the local people should not wish to ride on a bus owned and driven by this man, or to visit any oftener than possible the habitat of such a man and his kinsfolk.
When the driver came out of the store I looked at him more carefully and tried to determine the source of my evil impression. He was a thin, stoop-shouldered man not much under six feet tall, dressed in shabby blue civilian clothes and wearing a frayed golf cap. His age was perhaps thirty-five, but the odd, deep creases in the sides of his neck made him seem older when one did not study his dull, expressionless face. He had a narrow head, bulging, watery-blue eyes that seemed never to wink, a flat nose, a receding forehead and chin, and singularly undeveloped ears. His long thick lip and coarse-pored, greyish cheeks seemed almost beardless except for some sparse yellow hairs that straggled and curled in irregular patches; and in places the surface seemed queerly irregular, as if peeling from some cutaneous disease. His hands were large and heavily veined, and had a very unusual greyish-blue tinge. The fingers were strikingly short in proportion to the rest of the structure, and seemed to have a tendency to curl closely into the huge palm. As he walked toward the bus I observed his peculiarly shambling gait and saw that his feet were inordinately immense. The more I studied them the more I wondered how he could buy any shoes to fit them.
A certain greasiness about the fellow increased my dislike. He was evidently given to working or lounging around the fish docks, and carried with him much of their characteristic smell. Just what foreign blood was in him I could not even guess. His oddities certainly did not look Asiatic, Polynesian, Levantine or negroid, yet I could see why the people found him alien. I myself would have thought of biological degeneration rather than alienage.
I was sorry when I saw there would be no other passengers on the bus. Somehow I did not like the idea of riding alone with this driver. But as leaving time obviously approached I conquered my qualms and followed the man aboard, extending him a dollar bill and murmuring the single word ""Innsmouth."" He looked curiously at me for a second as he returned forty cents change without speaking. I took a seat far behind him, but on the same side of the bus, since I wished to watch the shore during the journey.
At length the decrepit vehicle stared with a jerk, and rattled noisily past the old brick buildings of State Street amidst a cloud of vapour from the exhaust. Glancing at the people on the sidewalks, I thought I detected in them a curious wish to avoid looking at the bus--or at least a wish to avoid seeming to look at it. Then we turned to the left into High Street, where the going was smoother; flying by stately old mansions of the early republic and still older colonial farmhouses, passing the Lower Green and Parker River, and finally emerging into a long, monotonous stretch of open shore country.
The day was warm and sunny, but the landscape of sand and sedge-grass, and stunted shrubbery became more and desolate as we proceeded. Out the window I could see the blue water and the sandy line of Plum Island, and we presently drew very near the beach as our narrow road veered off from the main highway to Rowley and Ipswich. There were no visible houses, and I could tell by the state of the road that traffic was very light hereabouts. The weather-worn telephone poles carried only two wires. Now and then we crossed crude wooden bridges over tidal creeks that wound far inland and promoted the general isolation of the region.
Once in a while I noticed dead stumps and crumbling foundation-walls above the drifting sand, and recalled the old tradition quoted in one of the histories I had read, that this was once a fertile and thickly-settled countryside. The change, it was said, came simultaneously with the Innsmouth epidemic of l846, and was thought by simple folk to have a dark connection with hidden forces of evil. Actually, it was caused by the unwise cutting of woodlands near the shore, which robbed the soil of the best protection and opened the way for waves of wind-blown sand.
At last we lost sight of Plum Island and saw the vast expanse of the open Atlantic on our left. Our narrow course began to climb steeply, and I felt a singular sense of disquiet in looking at the lonely crest ahead where the rutted road-way met the sky. It was as if the bus were about to keep on in its ascent, leaving the sane earth altogether and merging with the unknown arcana of upper air and cryptical sky. The smell of the sea took on ominous implications, and the silent driver's bent, rigid back and narrow head became more and more hateful. As I looked at him I saw that the back of his head was almost as hairless as his face, having only a few straggling yellow strands upon a grey scabrous surface.
Then we reached the crest and beheld the outspread valley beyond, where the Manuxet joins the sea just north of the long line of cliffs that culminate in Kingsport Head and veer off toward Cape Ann. On the far misty horizon I could just make out the dizzy profile of the Head, topped by the queer ancient house of which so many legends are told; but for the moment all my attention was captured by the nearer panorama just below me. I had, I realized, come face to face with rumour-shadowed Innsmouth.
It was a town of wide extent and dense construction, yet one with a portentous dearth of visible life. From the tangle of chimney-pots scarcely a wisp of smoke came, and the three tall steeples loomed stark and unpainted against the seaward horizon. One of them was crumbling down at the top, and in that and another there were only black gaping holes where clock-dials should have been. The vast huddle of sagging gambrel roofs and peaked gables conveyed with offensive clearness the idea of wormy decay, and as we approached along the now descending road I could see that many roofs had wholly caved in. There were some large square Georgian houses, too, with hipped roofs, cupolas, and railed ""widow's walks."" These were mostly well back from the water, and one or two seemed to be in moderately sound condition. Stretching inland from among them I saw the rusted, grass-grown line of the abandoned railway, with leaning telegraph-poles now devoid of wires, and the half-obscured lines of the old carriage roads to Rowley and Ipswich.
The decay was worst close to the waterfront, though in its very midst I could spy the white belfry of a fairly well preserved brick structure which looked like a small factory. The harbour, long clogged with sand, was enclosed by an ancient stone breakwater; on which I could begin to discern the minute forms of a few seated fishermen, and at whose end were what looked like the foundations of a bygone lighthouse. A sandy tongue had formed inside this barrier and upon it I saw a few decrepit cabins, moored dories, and scattered lobster-pots. The only deep water seemed to be where the river poured out past the belfried structure and turned southward to join the ocean at the breakwater's end.
Here and there the ruins of wharves jutted out from the shore to end in indeterminate rottenness, those farthest south seeming the most decayed. And far out at sea, despite a high tide, I glimpsed a long, black line scarcely rising above the water yet carrying a suggestion of odd latent malignancy. This, I knew, must be Devil Reef. As I looked, a subtle, curious sense of beckoning seemed superadded to the grim repulsion; and oddly enough, I found this overtone more disturbing than the primary impression.
We met no one on the road, but presently began to pass deserted farms in varying stages of ruin. Then I noticed a few inhabited houses with rags stuffed in the broken windows and shells and dead fish lying about the littered yards. Once or twice I saw listless-looking people working in barren gardens or digging clams on the fishy-smelling beach below, and groups of dirty, simian-visaged children playing around weed-grown doorsteps. Somehow these people seemed more disquieting than the dismal buildings, for almost every one had certain peculiarities of face and motions which I instinctively disliked without being able to define or comprehend them. For a second I thought this typical physique suggested some picture I had seen, perhaps in a book, under circumstances of particular horror or melancholy; but this pseudo-recollection passed very quickly.
As the bus reached a lower level I began to catch the steady note of a waterfall through the unnatural stillness, The leaning, unpainted houses grew thicker, lined both sides of the road, and displayed more urban tendencies than did those we were leaving behind, The panorama ahead had contracted to a street scene, and in spots I could see where a cobblestone pavement and stretches of brick sidewalk had formerly existed. All the houses were apparently deserted, and there were occasional gaps where tumbledown chimneys and cellar walls told of buildings that had collapsed. Pervading everything was the most nauseous fishy odour imaginable.
Soon cross streets and junctions began to appear; those on the left leading to shoreward realms of unpaved squalor and decay, while those on the right shewed vistas of departed grandeur. So far I had seen no people in the town, but there now came signs of a sparse habitation--curtained windows here and there, and an occasional battered motorcar at the curb. Pavement and sidewalks were increasingly well-defined, and though most of the houses were quite old--wood and brick structures of the early 19th century--they were obviously kept fit for habitation. As an amateur antiquarian I almost lost my olfactory disgust and my feeling of menace and repulsion amidst this rich, unaltered survival from the past.
But I was not to reach my destination without one very strong impression of poignantly disagreeable quality. The bus had come to a sort of open concourse or radial point with churches on two sides and the bedraggled remains of a circular green in the centre, and I was looking at a large pillared hall on the right-hand junction ahead. The structure's once white paint was now gray and peeling and the black and gold sign on the pediment was so faded that I could only with difficulty make out the words ""Esoteric Order of Dagon."" This, then was the former Masonic Hall now given over to a degraded cult. As I strained to decipher this inscription my notice was distracted by the raucous tones of a cracked bell across the street, and I quickly turned to look out the window on my side of the coach.
The sound came from a squat stone church of manifestly later date than most of the houses, built in a clumsy Gothic fashion and having a disproportionately high basement with shuttered windows. Though the hands of its clock were missing on the side I glimpsed, I knew that those hoarse strokes were tolling the hour of eleven. Then suddenly all thoughts of time were blotted out by an onrushing image of sharp intensity and unaccountable horror which had seized me before I knew what it really was. The door of the church basement was open, revealing a rectangle of blackness inside. And as I looked, a certain object crossed or seemed to cross that dark rectangle; burning into my brain a momentary conception of nightmare which was all the more maddening because analysis could not shew a single nightmarish quality in it.
It was a living object--the first except the driver that I had seen since entering the compact part of the town--and had I been in a steadier mood I would have found nothing whatever of terror in it. Clearly, as I realised a moment later, it was the pastor; clad in some peculiar vestments doubtless introduced since the Order of Dagon had modified the ritual of the local churches. The thing which had probably caught my first subconscious glance and supplied the touch of bizarre horror was the tall tiara he wore; an almost exact duplicate of the one Miss Tilton had shown me the previous evening. This, acting on my imagination, had supplied namelessly sinister qualities to the indeterminate face and robed, shambling form beneath it. There was not, I soon decided, any reason why I should have felt that shuddering touch of evil pseudo-memory. Was it not natural that a local mystery cult should adopt among its regimentals an unique type of head-dress made familiar to the community in some strange way--perhaps as treasure-trove?
A very thin sprinkling of repellent-looking youngish people now became visible on the sidewalks--lone individuals, and silent knots of two or three. The lower floors of the crumbling houses sometimes harboured small shops with dingy signs, and I noticed a parked truck or two as we rattled along. The sound of waterfalls became more and more distinct, and presently I saw a fairly deep river-gorge ahead, spanned by a wide, iron-railed highway bridge beyond which a large square opened out. As we clanked over the bridge I looked out on both sides and observed some factory buildings on the edge of the grassy bluff or part way down. The water far below was very abundant, and I could see two vigorous sets of falls upstream on my right and at least one downstream on my left. From this point the noise was quite deafening. Then we rolled into the large semicircular square across the river and drew up on the right-hand side in front of a tall, cupola crowned building with remnants of yellow paint and with a half-effaced sign proclaiming it to be the Gilman House.
I was glad to get out of that bus, and at once proceeded to check my valise in the shabby hotel lobby. There was only one person in sight--an elderly man without what I had come to call the ""Innsmouth look""--and I decided not to ask him any of the questions which bothered me; remembering that odd things had been noticed in this hotel. Instead, I strolled out on the square, from which the bus had already gone, and studied the scene minutely and appraisingly.
One side of the cobblestoned open space was the straight line of the river; the other was a semicircle of slant-roofed brick buildings of about the 1800 period, from which several streets radiated away to the southeast, south, and southwest. Lamps were depressingly few and small--all low-powered incandescents--and I was glad that my plans called for departure before dark, even though I knew the moon would be bright. The buildings were all in fair condition, and included perhaps a dozen shops in current operation; of which one was a grocery of the First National chain, others a dismal restaurant, a drug store, and a wholesale fish-dealer's office, and still another, at the eastward extremity of the square near the river an office of the town's only industry--the Marsh Refining Company. There were perhaps ten people visible, and four or five automobiles and motor trucks stood scattered about. I did not need to be told that this was the civic centre of Innsmouth. Eastward I could catch blue glimpses of the harbour, against which rose the decaying remains of three once beautiful Georgian steeples. And toward the shore on the opposite bank of the river I saw the white belfry surmounting what I took to be the Marsh refinery.
For some reason or other I chose to make my first inquiries at the chain grocery, whose personnel was not likely to be native to Innsmouth. I found a solitary boy of about seventeen in charge, and was pleased to note the brightness and affability which promised cheerful information. He seemed exceptionally eager to talk, and I soon gathered that he did not like the place, its fishy smell, or its furtive people. A word with any outsider was a relief to him. He hailed from Arkham, boarded with a family who came from Ipswich, and went back whenever he got a moment off. His family did not like him to work in Innsmouth, but the chain had transferred him there and he did not wish to give up his job.
There was, he said, no public library or chamber of commerce in Innsmouth, but I could probably find my way about. The street I had come down was Federal. West of that were the fine old residence streets--Broad, Washington, Lafayette, and Adams--and east of it were the shoreward slums. It was in these slums--along Main Street--that I would find the old Georgian churches, but they were all long abandoned. It would be well not to make oneself too conspicuous in such neighbourhoods--especially north of the river since the people were sullen and hostile. Some strangers had even disappeared.
Certain spots were almost forbidden territory, as he had learned at considerable cost. One must not, for example, linger much around the Marsh refinery, or around any of the still used churches, or around the pillared Order of Dagon Hall at New Church Green. Those churches were very odd--all violently disavowed by their respective denominations elsewhere, and apparently using the queerest kind of ceremonials and clerical vestments. Their creeds were heterodox and mysterious, involving hints of certain marvelous transformations leading to bodily immorality--of a sort--on this earth. The youth's own pastor--Dr. Wallace of Asbury M. E. Church in Arkham--had gravely urged him not to join any church in Innsmouth.
As for the Innsmouth people--the youth hardly knew what to make of them. They were as furtive and seldom seen as animals that live in burrows, and one could hardly imagine how they passed the time apart from their desultory fishing. Perhaps--judging from the quantities of bootleg liquor they consumed--they lay for most of the daylight hours in an alcoholic stupor. They seemed sullenly banded together in some sort of fellowship and understanding--despising the world as if they had access to other and preferable spheres of entity. Their appearance--especially those staring, unwinking eyes which one never saw shut--was certainly shocking enough; and their voices were disgusting. It was awful to hear them chanting in their churches at night, and especially during their main festivals or revivals, which fell twice a year on April 30th and October 31st.
They were very fond of the water, and swam a great deal in both river and harbour. Swimming races out to Devil Reef were very common, and everyone in sight seemed well able to share in this arduous sport. When one came to think of it, it was generally only rather young people who were seen about in public, and of these the oldest were apt to be the most tainted-looking. When exceptions did occur, they were mostly persons with no trace of aberrancy, like the old clerk at the hotel. One wondered what became of the bulk of the older folk, and whether the ""Innsmouth look"" were not a strange and insidious disease-phenomenon which increased its hold as years advanced.
Only a very rare affliction, of course, could bring about such vast and radical anatomical changes in a single individual after maturity--changes invoking osseous factors as basic as the shape of the skull--but then, even this aspect was no more baffling and unheard-of than the visible features of the malady as a whole. It would be hard, the youth implied, to form any real conclusions regarding such a matter; since one never came to know the natives personally no matter how long one might live in Innsmouth.
The youth was certain that many specimens even worse than the worst visible ones were kept locked indoors in some places. People sometimes heard the queerest kind of sounds. The tottering waterfront hovels north of the river were reputedly connected by hidden tunnels, being thus a veritable warren of unseen abnormalities. What kind of foreign blood--if any--these beings had, it was impossible to tell. They sometimes kept certain especially repulsive characters out of sight when government and others from the outside world came to town.
It would be of no use, my informant said, to ask the natives anything about the place. The only one who would talk was a very aged but normal looking man who lived at the poorhouse on the north rim of the town and spent his time walking about or lounging around the fire station. This hoary character, Zadok Allen, was 96 years old and somewhat touched in the head, besides being the town drunkard. He was a strange, furtive creature who constantly looked over his shoulder as if afraid of something, and when sober could not be persuaded to talk at all with strangers. He was, however, unable to resist any offer of his favorite poison; and once drunk would furnish the most astonishing fragments of whispered reminiscence.
After all, though, little useful data could be gained from him; since his stories were all insane, incomplete hints of impossible marvels and horrors which could have no source save in his own disordered fancy. Nobody ever believed him, but the natives did not like him to drink and talk with strangers; and it was not always safe to be seen questioning him. It was probably from him that some of the wildest popular whispers and delusions were derived.
Several non-native residents had reported monstrous glimpses from time to time, but between old Zadok's tales and the malformed inhabitants it was no wonder such illusions were current. None of the non-natives ever stayed out late at night, there being a widespread impression that it was not wise to do so. Besides, the streets were loathsomely dark.
As for business--the abundance of fish was certainly almost uncanny, but the natives were taking less and less advantage of it. Moreover, prices were falling and competition was growing. Of course the town's real business was the refinery, whose commercial office was on the square only a few doors east of where we stood. Old Man Marsh was never seen, but sometimes went to the works in a closed, curtained car.
There were all sorts of rumors about how Marsh had come to look. He had once been a great dandy; and people said he still wore the frock-coated finery of the Edwardian age curiously adapted to certain deformities. His son had formerly conducted the office in the square, but latterly they had been keeping out of sight a good deal and leaving the brunt of affairs to the younger generation. The sons and their sisters had come to look very queer, especially the elder ones; and it was said that their health was failing.
One of the Marsh daughters was a repellent, reptilian-looking woman who wore an excess of weird jewellery clearly of the same exotic tradition as that to which the strange tiara belonged. My informant had noticed it many times, and had heard it spoken of as coming from some secret hoard, either of pirates or of demons. The clergymen--or priests, or whatever they were called nowadays--also wore this kind of ornament as a headdress; but one seldom caught glimpses of them. Other specimens the youth had not seen, though many were rumoured to exist around Innsmouth.
The Marshes, together with the other three gently bred families of the town--the Waites, the Gilmans, and the Eliots--were all very retiring. They lived in immense houses along Washington Street, and several were reputed to harbour in concealment certain living kinsfolk whose personal aspect forbade public view, and whose deaths had been reported and recorded.
Warning me that many of the street signs were down, the youth drew for my benefit a rough but ample and painstaking sketch map of the town's salient features. After a moment's study I felt sure that it would be of great help, and pocketed it with profuse thanks. Disliking the dinginess of the single restaurant I had seen, I bought a fair supply of cheese crackers and ginger wafers to serve as a lunch later on. My program, I decided, would be to thread the principal streets, talk with any non-natives I might encounter, and catch the eight o'clock coach for Arkham. The town, I could see, formed a significant and exaggerated example of communal decay; but being no sociologist I would limit my serious observations to the field of architecture.
Thus I began my systematic though half-bewildered tour of Innsmouth's narrow, shadow-blighted ways. Crossing the bridge and turning toward the roar of the lower falls, I passed close to the Marsh refinery, which seemed to be oddly free from the noise of industry. The building stood on the steep river bluff near a bridge and an open confluence of streets which I took to be the earliest civic center, displaced after the Revolution by the present Town Square.
Re-crossing the gorge on the Main Street bridge, I struck a region of utter desertion which somehow made me shudder. Collapsing huddles of gambrel roofs formed a jagged and fantastic skyline, above which rose the ghoulish, decapitated steeple of an ancient church. Some houses along Main Street were tenanted, but most were tightly boarded up. Down unpaved side streets I saw the black, gaping windows of deserted hovels, many of which leaned at perilous and incredible angles through the sinking of part of the foundations. Those windows stared so spectrally that it took courage to turn eastward toward the waterfront. Certainly, the terror of a deserted house swells in geometrical rather than arithmetical progression as houses multiply to form a city of stark desolation. The sight of such endless avenues of fishy-eyed vacancy and death, and the thought of such linked infinities of black, brooding compartments given over to cob-webs and memories and the conqueror worm, start up vestigial fears and aversions that not even the stoutest philosophy can disperse.
Fish Street was as deserted as Main, though it differed in having many brick and stone warehouses still in excellent shape. Water Street was almost its duplicate, save that there were great seaward gaps where wharves had been. Not a living thing did I see except for the scattered fishermen on the distant break-water, and not a sound did I hear save the lapping of the harbour tides and the roar of the falls in the Manuxet. The town was getting more and more on my nerves, and I looked behind me furtively as I picked my way back over the tottering Water Street bridge. The Fish Street bridge, according to the sketch, was in ruins.
North of the river there were traces of squalid life--active fish-packing houses in Water Street, smoking chimneys and patched roofs here and there, occasional sounds from indeterminate sources, and infrequent shambling forms in the dismal streets and unpaved lanes--but I seemed to find this even more oppressive than the southerly desertion. For one thing, the people were more hideous and abnormal than those near the centre of the town; so that I was several times evilly reminded of something utterly fantastic which I could not quite place. Undoubtedly the alien strain in the Innsmouth folk was stronger here than farther inland--unless, indeed, the ""Innsmouth look"" were a disease rather than a blood stain, in which case this district might be held to harbour the more advanced cases.
One detail that annoyed me was the distribution of the few faint sounds I heard. They ought naturally to have come wholly from the visibly inhabited houses, yet in reality were often strongest inside the most rigidly boarded-up facades. There were creakings, scurryings, and hoarse doubtful noises; and I thought uncomfortably about the hidden tunnels suggested by the grocery boy. Suddenly I found myself wondering what the voices of those denizens would be like. I had heard no speech so far in this quarter, and was unaccountably anxious not to do so.
Pausing only long enough to look at two fine but ruinous old churches at Main and Church Streets, I hastened out of that vile waterfront slum. My next logical goal was New Church Green, but somehow or other I could not bear to repass the church in whose basement I had glimpsed the inexplicably frightening form of that strangely diademmed priest or pastor. Besides, the grocery youth had told me that churches, as well as the Order of Dagon Hall, were not advisable neighbourhoods for strangers.
Accordingly I kept north along Main to Martin, then turning inland, crossing Federal Street safely north of the Green, and entering the decayed patrician neighbourhood of northern Broad, Washington, Lafayette, and Adams Streets. Though these stately old avenues were ill-surfaced and unkempt, their elm-shaded dignity had not entirely departed. Mansion after mansion claimed my gaze, most of them decrepit and boarded up amidst neglected grounds, but one or two in each street shewing signs of occupancy. In Washington Street there was a row of four or five in excellent repair and with finely-tended lawns and gardens. The most sumptuous of these--with wide terraced parterres extending back the whole way to Lafayette Street--I took to be the home of Old Man Marsh, the afflicted refinery owner.
In all these streets no living thing was visible, and I wondered at the complete absence of cats and dogs from Innsmouth. Another thing which puzzled and disturbed me, even in some of the best-preserved mansions, was the tightly shuttered condition of many third-story and attic windows. Furtiveness and secretiveness seemed universal in this hushed city of alienage and death, and I could not escape the sensation of being watched from ambush on every hand by sly, staring eyes that never shut.
I shivered as the cracked stroke of three sounded from a belfry on my left. Too well did I recall the squat church from which those notes came. Following Washington Street toward the river, I now faced a new zone of former industry and commerce; noting the ruins of a factory ahead, and seeing others, with the traces of an old railway station and covered railway bridge beyond, up the gorge on my right.
The uncertain bridge now before me was posted with a warning sign, but I took the risk and crossed again to the south bank where traces of life reappeared. Furtive, shambling creatures stared cryptically in my direction, and more normal faces eyed me coldly and curiously. Innsmouth was rapidly becoming intolerable, and I turned down Paine Street toward the Square in the hope of getting some vehicle to take me to Arkham before the still-distant starting-time of that sinister bus.
It was then that I saw the tumbledown fire station on my left, and noticed the red faced, bushy-bearded, watery eyed old man in nondescript rags who sat on a bench in front of it talking with a pair of unkempt but not abnormal looking firemen. This, of course, must be Zadok Allen, the half-crazed, liquorish nonagenarian whose tales of old Innsmouth and its shadow were so hideous and incredible.
","
I.

It is true that I have sent six bullets through the head of my best friend, and yet I hope to shew by this statement that I am not his murderer. At first I shall be called a madman—madder than the man I shot in his cell at the Arkham Sanitarium. Later some of my readers will weigh each statement, correlate it with the known facts, and ask themselves how I could have believed otherwise than as I did after facing the evidence of that horror—that thing on the doorstep.
      Until then I also saw nothing but madness in the wild tales I have acted on. Even now I ask myself whether I was misled—or whether I am not mad after all. I do not know—but others have strange things to tell of Edward and Asenath Derby, and even the stolid police are at their wits’ ends to account for that last terrible visit. They have tried weakly to concoct a theory of a ghastly jest or warning by discharged servants, yet they know in their hearts that the truth is something infinitely more terrible and incredible.
      So I say that I have not murdered Edward Derby. Rather have I avenged him, and in so doing purged the earth of a horror whose survival might have loosed untold terrors on all mankind. There are black zones of shadow close to our daily paths, and now and then some evil soul breaks a passage through. When that happens, the man who knows must strike before reckoning the consequences.
      I have known Edward Pickman Derby all his life. Eight years my junior, he was so precocious that we had much in common from the time he was eight and I sixteen. He was the most phenomenal child scholar I have ever known, and at seven was writing verse of a sombre, fantastic, almost morbid cast which astonished the tutors surrounding him. Perhaps his private education and coddled seclusion had something to do with his premature flowering. An only child, he had organic weaknesses which startled his doting parents and caused them to keep him closely chained to their side. He was never allowed out without his nurse, and seldom had a chance to play unconstrainedly with other children. All this doubtless fostered a strange, secretive inner life in the boy, with imagination as his one avenue of freedom. 
      At any rate, his juvenile learning was prodigious and bizarre; and his facile writings such as to captivate me despite my greater age. About that time I had leanings toward art of a somewhat grotesque cast, and I found in this younger child a rare kindred spirit. What lay behind our joint love of shadows and marvels was, no doubt, the ancient, mouldering, and subtly fearsome town in which we lived—witch-cursed, legend-haunted Arkham, whose huddled, sagging gambrel roofs and crumbling Georgian balustrades brood out the centuries beside the darkly muttering Miskatonic.
      As time went by I turned to architecture and gave up my design of illustrating a book of Edward’s daemoniac poems, yet our comradeship suffered no lessening. Young Derby’s odd genius developed remarkably, and in his eighteenth year his collected nightmare-lyrics made a real sensation when issued under the title Azathoth and Other Horrors. He was a close correspondent of the notorious Baudelairean poet Justin Geoffrey, who wrote The People of the Monolith and died screaming in a madhouse in 1926 after a visit to a sinister, ill-regarded village in Hungary. 
      In self-reliance and practical affairs, however, Derby was greatly retarded because of his coddled existence. His health had improved, but his habits of childish dependence were fostered by overcareful parents; so that he never travelled alone, made independent decisions, or assumed responsibilities. It was early seen that he would not be equal to a struggle in the business or professional arena, but the family fortune was so ample that this formed no tragedy. As he grew to years of manhood he retained a deceptive aspect of boyishness. Blond and blue-eyed, he had the fresh complexion of a child; and his attempts to raise a moustache were discernible only with difficulty. His voice was soft and light, and his pampered, unexercised life gave him a juvenile chubbiness rather than the paunchiness of premature middle age. He was of good height, and his handsome face would have made him a notable gallant had not his shyness held him to seclusion and bookishness.
      Derby’s parents took him abroad every summer, and he was quick to seize on the surface aspects of European thought and expression. His Poe-like talents turned more and more toward the decadent, and other artistic sensitivenesses and yearnings were half-aroused in him. We had great discussions in those days. I had been through Harvard, had studied in a Boston architect’s office, had married, and had finally returned to Arkham to practice my profession—settling in the family homestead in Saltonstall St. since my father had moved to Florida for his health. Edward used to call almost every evening, till I came to regard him as one of the household. He had a characteristic way of ringing the doorbell or sounding the knocker that grew to be a veritable code signal, so that after dinner I always listened for the familiar three brisk strokes followed by two more after a pause. Less frequently I would visit at his house and note with envy the obscure volumes in his constantly growing library.
      Derby went through Miskatonic University in Arkham, since his parents would not let him board away from them. He entered at sixteen and completed his course in three years, majoring in English and French literature and receiving high marks in everything but mathematics and the sciences. He mingled very little with the other students, though looking enviously at the “daring” or “Bohemian” set—whose superficially “smart” language and meaninglessly ironic pose he aped, and whose dubious conduct he wished he dared adopt.
      What he did do was to become an almost fanatical devotee of subterranean magical lore, for which Miskatonic’s library was and is famous. Always a dweller on the surface of phantasy and strangeness, he now delved deep into the actual runes and riddles left by a fabulous past for the guidance or puzzlement of posterity. He read things like the frightful Book of Eibon, the Unaussprechlichen Kulten of von Junzt, and the forbidden Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, though he did not tell his parents he had seen them. Edward was twenty when my son and only child was born, and seemed pleased when I named the newcomer Edward Derby Upton, after him.
      By the time he was twenty-five Edward Derby was a prodigiously learned man and a fairly well-known poet and fantaisiste, though his lack of contacts and responsibilities had slowed down his literary growth by making his products derivative and overbookish. I was perhaps his closest friend—finding him an inexhaustible mine of vital theoretical topics, while he relied on me for advice in whatever matters he did not wish to refer to his parents. He remained single—more through shyness, inertia, and parental protectiveness than through inclination—and moved in society only to the slightest and most perfunctory extent. When the war came both health and ingrained timidity kept him at home. I went to Plattsburg for a commission, but never got overseas.
      So the years wore on. Edward’s mother died when he was thirty-four, and for months he was incapacitated by some odd psychological malady. His father took him to Europe, however, and he managed to pull out of his trouble without visible effects. Afterward he seemed to feel a sort of grotesque exhilaration, as if of partial escape from some unseen bondage. He began to mingle in the more “advanced” college set despite his middle age, and was present at some extremely wild doings—on one occasion paying heavy blackmail (which he borrowed of me) to keep his presence at a certain affair from his father’s notice. Some of the whispered rumours about the wild Miskatonic set were extremely singular. There was even talk of black magic and of happenings utterly beyond credibility.

II.

Edward was thirty-eight when he met Asenath Waite. She was, I judge, about twenty-three at the time; and was taking a special course in mediaeval metaphysics at Miskatonic. The daughter of a friend of mine had met her before—in the Hall School at Kingsport—and had been inclined to shun her because of her odd reputation. She was dark, smallish, and very good-looking except for overprotuberant eyes; but something in her expression alienated extremely sensitive people. It was, however, largely her origin and conversation which caused average folk to avoid her. She was one of the Innsmouth Waites, and dark legends have clustered for generations about crumbling, half-deserted Innsmouth and its people. There are tales of horrible bargains about the year 1850, and of a strange element “not quite human” in the ancient families of the run-down fishing port—tales such as only old-time Yankees can devise and repeat with proper awesomeness.
      Asenath’s case was aggravated by the fact that she was Ephraim Waite’s daughter—the child of his old age by an unknown wife who always went veiled. Ephraim lived in a half-decayed mansion in Washington Street, Innsmouth, and those who had seen the place (Arkham folk avoid going to Innsmouth whenever they can) declared that the attic windows were always boarded, and that strange sounds sometimes floated from within as evening drew on. The old man was known to have been a prodigious magical student in his day, and legend averred that he could raise or quell storms at sea according to his whim. I had seen him once or twice in my youth as he came to Arkham to consult forbidden tomes at the college library, and had hated his wolfish, saturnine face with its tangle of iron-grey beard. He had died insane—under rather queer circumstances—just before his daughter (by his will made a nominal ward of the principal) entered the Hall School, but she had been his morbidly avid pupil and looked fiendishly like him at times.
      The friend whose daughter had gone to school with Asenath Waite repeated many curious things when the news of Edward’s acquaintance with her began to spread about. Asenath, it seemed, had posed as a kind of magician at school; and had really seemed able to accomplish some highly baffling marvels. She professed to be able to raise thunderstorms, though her seeming success was generally laid to some uncanny knack at prediction. All animals markedly disliked her, and she could make any dog howl by certain motions of her right hand. There were times when she displayed snatches of knowledge and language very singular—and very shocking—for a young girl; when she would frighten her schoolmates with leers and winks of an inexplicable kind, and would seem to extract an obscene and zestful irony from her present situation.
      Most unusual, though, were the well-attested cases of her influence over other persons. She was, beyond question, a genuine hypnotist. By gazing peculiarly at a fellow-student she would often give the latter a distinct feeling of exchanged personality—as if the subject were placed momentarily in the magician’s body and able to stare half across the room at her real body, whose eyes blazed and protruded with an alien expression. Asenath often made wild claims about the nature of consciousness and about its independence of the physical frame—or at least from the life-processes of the physical frame. Her crowning rage, however, was that she was not a man; since she believed a male brain had certain unique and far-reaching cosmic powers. Given a man’s brain, she declared, she could not only equal but surpass her father in mastery of unknown forces. 
      Edward met Asenath at a gathering of “intelligentsia” held in one of the students’ rooms, and could talk of nothing else when he came to see me the next day. He had found her full of the interests and erudition which engrossed him most, and was in addition wildly taken with her appearance. I had never seen the young woman, and recalled casual references only faintly, but I knew who she was. It seemed rather regrettable that Derby should become so upheaved about her; but I said nothing to discourage him, since infatuation thrives on opposition. He was not, he said, mentioning her to his father.
      In the next few weeks I heard of very little but Asenath from young Derby. Others now remarked Edward’s autumnal gallantry, though they agreed that he did not look even nearly his actual age, or seem at all inappropriate as an escort for his bizarre divinity. He was only a trifle paunchy despite his indolence and self-indulgence, and his face was absolutely without lines. Asenath, on the other hand, had the premature crow’s feet which come from the exercise of an intense will.
      About this time Edward brought the girl to call on me, and I at once saw that his interest was by no means one-sided. She eyed him continually with an almost predatory air, and I perceived that their intimacy was beyond untangling. Soon afterward I had a visit from old Mr. Derby, whom I had always admired and respected. He had heard the tales of his son’s new friendship, and had wormed the whole truth out of “the boy”. Edward meant to marry Asenath, and had even been looking at houses in the suburbs. Knowing my usually great influence with his son, the father wondered if I could help to break the ill-advised affair off; but I regretfully expressed my doubts. This time it was not a question of Edward’s weak will but of the woman’s strong will. The perennial child had transferred his dependence from the parental image to a new and stronger image, and nothing could be done about it.
      The wedding was performed a month later—by a justice of the peace, according to the bride’s request. Mr. Derby, at my advice, offered no opposition; and he, my wife, my son, and I attended the brief ceremony—the other guests being wild young people from the college. Asenath had bought the old Crowninshield place in the country at the end of High Street, and they proposed to settle there after a short trip to Innsmouth, whence three servants and some books and household goods were to be brought. It was probably not so much consideration for Edward and his father as a personal wish to be near the college, its library, and its crowd of “sophisticates”, that made Asenath settle in Arkham instead of returning permanently home.
      When Edward called on me after the honeymoon I thought he looked slightly changed. Asenath had made him get rid of the undeveloped moustache, but there was more than that. He looked soberer and more thoughtful, his habitual pout of childish rebelliousness being exchanged for a look almost of genuine sadness. I was puzzled to decide whether I liked or disliked the change. Certainly, he seemed for the moment more normally adult than ever before. Perhaps the marriage was a good thing—might not the change of dependence form a start toward actual neutralisation, leading ultimately to responsible independence? He came alone, for Asenath was very busy. She had brought a vast store of books and apparatus from Innsmouth (Derby shuddered as he spoke the name), and was finishing the restoration of the Crowninshield house and grounds.
      Her home in—that town—was a rather disquieting place, but certain objects in it had taught him some surprising things. He was progressing fast in esoteric lore now that he had Asenath’s guidance. Some of the experiments she proposed were very daring and radical—he did not feel at liberty to describe them—but he had confidence in her powers and intentions. The three servants were very queer—an incredibly aged couple who had been with old Ephraim and referred occasionally to him and to Asenath’s dead mother in a cryptic way, and a swarthy young wench who had marked anomalies of feature and seemed to exude a perpetual odour of fish.

III.

For the next two years I saw less and less of Derby. A fortnight would sometimes slip by without the familiar three-and-two strokes at the front door; and when he did call—or when, as happened with increasing infrequency, I called on him—he was very little disposed to converse on vital topics. He had become secretive about those occult studies which he used to describe and discuss so minutely, and preferred not to talk of his wife. She had aged tremendously since her marriage, till now—oddly enough—she seemed the elder of the two. Her face held the most concentratedly determined expression I had ever seen, and her whole aspect seemed to gain a vague, unplaceable repulsiveness. My wife and son noticed it as much as I, and we all ceased gradually to call on her—for which, Edward admitted in one of his boyishly tactless moments, she was unmitigatedly grateful. Occasionally the Derbys would go on long trips—ostensibly to Europe, though Edward sometimes hinted at obscurer destinations. 
      It was after the first year that people began talking about the change in Edward Derby. It was very casual talk, for the change was purely psychological; but it brought up some interesting points. Now and then, it seemed, Edward was observed to wear an expression and to do things wholly incompatible with his usual flabby nature. For example—although in the old days he could not drive a car, he was now seen occasionally to dash into or out of the old Crowninshield driveway with Asenath’s powerful Packard, handling it like a master, and meeting traffic entanglements with a skill and determination utterly alien to his accustomed nature. In such cases he seemed always to be just back from some trip or just starting on one—what sort of trip, no one could guess, although he mostly favoured the Innsmouth road.
      Oddly, the metamorphosis did not seem altogether pleasing. People said he looked too much like his wife, or like old Ephraim Waite himself, in these moments—or perhaps these moments seemed unnatural because they were so rare. Sometimes, hours after starting out in this way, he would return listlessly sprawled on the rear seat of the car while an obviously hired chauffeur or mechanic drove. Also, his preponderant aspect on the streets during his decreasing round of social contacts (including, I may say, his calls on me) was the old-time indecisive one—its irresponsible childishness even more marked than in the past. While Asenath’s face aged, Edward’s—aside from those exceptional occasions—actually relaxed into a kind of exaggerated immaturity, save when a trace of the new sadness or understanding would flash across it. It was really very puzzling. Meanwhile the Derbys almost dropped out of the gay college circle—not through their own disgust, we heard, but because something about their present studies shocked even the most callous of the other decadents. 
      It was in the third year of the marriage that Edward began to hint openly to me of a certain fear and dissatisfaction. He would let fall remarks about things ‘going too far’, and would talk darkly about the need of ‘saving his identity’. At first I ignored such references, but in time I began to question him guardedly, remembering what my friend’s daughter had said about Asenath’s hypnotic influence over the other girls at school—the cases where students had thought they were in her body looking across the room at themselves. This questioning seemed to make him at once alarmed and grateful, and once he mumbled something about having a serious talk with me later.
      About this time old Mr. Derby died, for which I was afterward very thankful. Edward was badly upset, though by no means disorganised. He had seen astonishingly little of his parent since his marriage, for Asenath had concentrated in herself all his vital sense of family linkage. Some called him callous in his loss—especially since those jaunty and confident moods in the car began to increase. He now wished to move back into the old Derby mansion, but Asenath insisted on staying in the Crowninshield house, to which she had become well adjusted.
      Not long afterward my wife heard a curious thing from a friend—one of the few who had not dropped the Derbys. She had been out to the end of High St. to call on the couple, and had seen a car shoot briskly out of the drive with Edward’s oddly confident and almost sneering face above the wheel. Ringing the bell, she had been told by the repulsive wench that Asenath was also out; but had chanced to look up at the house in leaving. There, at one of Edward’s library windows, she had glimpsed a hastily withdrawn face—a face whose expression of pain, defeat, and wistful hopelessness was poignant beyond description. It was—incredibly enough in view of its usual domineering cast—Asenath’s; yet the caller had vowed that in that instant the sad, muddled eyes of poor Edward were gazing out from it. 
      Edward’s calls now grew a trifle more frequent, and his hints occasionally became concrete. What he said was not to be believed, even in centuried and legend-haunted Arkham; but he threw out his dark lore with a sincerity and convincingness which made one fear for his sanity. He talked about terrible meetings in lonely places, of Cyclopean ruins in the heart of the Maine woods beneath which vast staircases lead down to abysses of nighted secrets, of complex angles that lead through invisible walls to other regions of space and time, and of hideous exchanges of personality that permitted explorations in remote and forbidden places, on other worlds, and in different space-time continua.
      He would now and then back up certain crazy hints by exhibiting objects which utterly nonplussed me—elusively coloured and bafflingly textured objects like nothing ever heard of on earth, whose insane curves and surfaces answered no conceivable purpose and followed no conceivable geometry. These things, he said, came ‘from outside’; and his wife knew how to get them. Sometimes—but always in frightened and ambiguous whispers—he would suggest things about old Ephraim Waite, whom he had seen occasionally at the college library in the old days. These adumbrations were never specific, but seemed to revolve around some especially horrible doubt as to whether the old wizard were really dead—in a spiritual as well as corporeal sense.
      At times Derby would halt abruptly in his revelations, and I wondered whether Asenath could possibly have divined his speech at a distance and cut him off through some unknown sort of telepathic mesmerism—some power of the kind she had displayed at school. Certainly, she suspected that he told me things, for as the weeks passed she tried to stop his visits with words and glances of a most inexplicable potency. Only with difficulty could he get to see me, for although he would pretend to be going somewhere else, some invisible force would generally clog his motions or make him forget his destination for the time being. His visits usually came when Asenath was away—‘away in her own body’, as he once oddly put it. She always found out later—the servants watched his goings and comings—but evidently she thought it inexpedient to do anything drastic.

IV.

Derby had been married more than three years on that August day when I got the telegram from Maine. I had not seen him for two months, but had heard he was away “on business”. Asenath was supposed to be with him, though watchful gossips declared there was someone upstairs in the house behind the doubly curtained windows. They had watched the purchases made by the servants. And now the town marshal of Chesuncook had wired of the draggled madman who stumbled out of the woods with delirious ravings and screamed to me for protection. It was Edward—and he had been just able to recall his own name and my name and address.
      Chesuncook is close to the wildest, deepest, and least explored forest belt in Maine, and it took a whole day of feverish jolting through fantastic and forbidding scenery to get there in a car. I found Derby in a cell at the town farm, vacillating between frenzy and apathy. He knew me at once, and began pouring out a meaningless, half-incoherent torrent of words in my direction.
      “Dan—for God’s sake! The pit of the shoggoths! Down the six thousand steps . . . the abomination of abominations . . . I never would let her take me, and then I found myself there. . . . Iä! Shub-Niggurath! . . . The shape rose up from the altar, and there were 500 that howled. . . . The Hooded Thing bleated ‘Kamog! Kamog!’—that was old Ephraim’s secret name in the coven. . . . I was there, where she promised she wouldn’t take me. . . . A minute before I was locked in the library, and then I was there where she had gone with my body—in the place of utter blasphemy, the unholy pit where the black realm begins and the watcher guards the gate. . . . I saw a shoggoth—it changed shape. . . . I can’t stand it. . . . I won’t stand it. . . . I’ll kill her if she ever sends me there again. . . . I’ll kill that entity . . . her, him, it . . . I’ll kill it! I’ll kill it with my own hands!”
      It took me an hour to quiet him, but he subsided at last. The next day I got him decent clothes in the village, and set out with him for Arkham. His fury of hysteria was spent, and he was inclined to be silent; though he began muttering darkly to himself when the car passed through Augusta—as if the sight of a city aroused unpleasant memories. It was clear that he did not wish to go home; and considering the fantastic delusions he seemed to have about his wife—delusions undoubtedly springing from some actual hypnotic ordeal to which he had been subjected—I thought it would be better if he did not. I would, I resolved, put him up myself for a time; no matter what unpleasantness it would make with Asenath. Later I would help him get a divorce, for most assuredly there were mental factors which made this marriage suicidal for him. When we struck open country again Derby’s muttering faded away, and I let him nod and drowse on the seat beside me as I drove.
      During our sunset dash through Portland the muttering commenced again, more distinctly than before, and as I listened I caught a stream of utterly insane drivel about Asenath. The extent to which she had preyed on Edward’s nerves was plain, for he had woven a whole set of hallucinations around her. His present predicament, he mumbled furtively, was only one of a long series. She was getting hold of him, and he knew that some day she would never let go. Even now she probably let him go only when she had to, because she couldn’t hold on long at a time. She constantly took his body and went to nameless places for nameless rites, leaving him in her body and locking him upstairs—but sometimes she couldn’t hold on, and he would find himself suddenly in his own body again in some far-off, horrible, and perhaps unknown place. Sometimes she’d get hold of him again and sometimes she couldn’t. Often he was left stranded somewhere as I had found him . . . time and again he had to find his way home from frightful distances, getting somebody to drive the car after he found it.
      The worst thing was that she was holding on to him longer and longer at a time. She wanted to be a man—to be fully human—that was why she got hold of him. She had sensed the mixture of fine-wrought brain and weak will in him. Some day she would crowd him out and disappear with his body—disappear to become a great magician like her father and leave him marooned in that female shell that wasn’t even quite human. Yes, he knew about the Innsmouth blood now. There had been traffick with things from the sea—it was horrible. . . . And old Ephraim—he had known the secret, and when he grew old did a hideous thing to keep alive . . . he wanted to live forever . . . Asenath would succeed—one successful demonstration had taken place already.
      As Derby muttered on I turned to look at him closely, verifying the impression of change which an earlier scrutiny had given me. Paradoxically, he seemed in better shape than usual—harder, more normally developed, and without the trace of sickly flabbiness caused by his indolent habits. It was as if he had been really active and properly exercised for the first time in his coddled life, and I judged that Asenath’s force must have pushed him into unwonted channels of motion and alertness. But just now his mind was in a pitiable state; for he was mumbling wild extravagances about his wife, about black magic, about old Ephraim, and about some revelation which would convince even me. He repeated names which I recognised from bygone browsings in forbidden volumes, and at times made me shudder with a certain thread of mythological consistency—of convincing coherence—which ran through his maundering. Again and again he would pause, as if to gather courage for some final and terrible disclosure.
      “Dan, Dan, don’t you remember him—the wild eyes and the unkempt beard that never turned white? He glared at me once, and I never forgot it. Now she glares that way. And I know why! He found it in the Necronomicon—the formula. I don’t dare tell you the page yet, but when I do you can read and understand. Then you will know what has engulfed me. On, on, on, on—body to body to body—he means never to die. The life-glow—he knows how to break the link . . . it can flicker on a while even when the body is dead. I’ll give you hints, and maybe you’ll guess. Listen, Dan—do you know why my wife always takes such pains with that silly backhand writing? Have you ever seen a manuscript of old Ephraim’s? Do you want to know why I shivered when I saw some hasty notes Asenath had jotted down? 
      “Asenath . . . is there such a person? Why did they half think there was poison in old Ephraim’s stomach? Why do the Gilmans whisper about the way he shrieked—like a frightened child—when he went mad and Asenath locked him up in the padded attic room where—the other—had been? Was it old Ephraim’s soul that was locked in? Who locked in whom? Why had he been looking for months for someone with a fine mind and a weak will? Why did he curse that his daughter wasn’t a son? Tell me, Daniel Upton—what devilish exchange was perpetrated in the house of horror where that blasphemous monster had his trusting, weak-willed, half-human child at his mercy? Didn’t he make it permanent—as she’ll do in the end with me? Tell me why that thing that calls itself Asenath writes differently when off guard, so that you can’t tell its script from . . .”
      Then the thing happened. Derby’s voice was rising to a thin treble scream as he raved, when suddenly it was shut off with an almost mechanical click. I thought of those other occasions at my home when his confidences had abruptly ceased—when I had half fancied that some obscure telepathic wave of Asenath’s mental force was intervening to keep him silent. This, though, was something altogether different—and, I felt, infinitely more horrible. The face beside me was twisted almost unrecognisably for a moment, while through the whole body there passed a shivering motion—as if all the bones, organs, muscles, nerves, and glands were readjusting themselves to a radically different posture, set of stresses, and general personality.
      Just where the supreme horror lay, I could not for my life tell; yet there swept over me such a swamping wave of sickness and repulsion—such a freezing, petrifying sense of utter alienage and abnormality—that my grasp of the wheel grew feeble and uncertain. The figure beside me seemed less like a lifelong friend than like some monstrous intrusion from outer space—some damnable, utterly accursed focus of unknown and malign cosmic forces.
      I had faltered only a moment, but before another moment was over my companion had seized the wheel and forced me to change places with him. The dusk was now very thick, and the lights of Portland far behind, so I could not see much of his face. The blaze of his eyes, though, was phenomenal; and I knew that he must now be in that queerly energised state—so unlike his usual self—which so many people had noticed. It seemed odd and incredible that listless Edward Derby—he who could never assert himself, and who had never learned to drive—should be ordering me about and taking the wheel of my own car, yet that was precisely what had happened. He did not speak for some time, and in my inexplicable horror I was glad he did not.
      In the lights of Biddeford and Saco I saw his firmly set mouth, and shivered at the blaze of his eyes. The people were right—he did look damnably like his wife and like old Ephraim when in these moods. I did not wonder that the moods were disliked—there was certainly something unnatural and diabolic in them, and I felt the sinister element all the more because of the wild ravings I had been hearing. This man, for all my lifelong knowledge of Edward Pickman Derby, was a stranger—an intrusion of some sort from the black abyss.
      He did not speak until we were on a dark stretch of road, and when he did his voice seemed utterly unfamiliar. It was deeper, firmer, and more decisive than I had ever known it to be; while its accent and pronunciation were altogether changed—though vaguely, remotely, and rather disturbingly recalling something I could not quite place. There was, I thought, a trace of very profound and very genuine irony in the timbre—not the flashy, meaninglessly jaunty pseudo-irony of the callow “sophisticate”, which Derby had habitually affected, but something grim, basic, pervasive, and potentially evil. I marvelled at the self-possession so soon following the spell of panic-struck muttering.
      “I hope you’ll forget my attack back there, Upton,” he was saying. “You know what my nerves are, and I guess you can excuse such things. I’m enormously grateful, of course, for this lift home.
      “And you must forget, too, any crazy things I may have been saying about my wife—and about things in general. That’s what comes from overstudy in a field like mine. My philosophy is full of bizarre concepts, and when the mind gets worn out it cooks up all sorts of imaginary concrete applications. I shall take a rest from now on—you probably won’t see me for some time, and you needn’t blame Asenath for it.
      “This trip was a bit queer, but it’s really very simple. There are certain Indian relics in the north woods—standing stones, and all that—which mean a good deal in folklore, and Asenath and I are following that stuff up. It was a hard search, so I seem to have gone off my head. I must send somebody for the car when I get home. A month’s relaxation will put me back on my feet.”
      I do not recall just what my own part of the conversation was, for the baffling alienage of my seatmate filled all my consciousness. With every moment my feeling of elusive cosmic horror increased, till at length I was in a virtual delirium of longing for the end of the drive. Derby did not offer to relinquish the wheel, and I was glad of the speed with which Portsmouth and Newburyport flashed by. 
      At the junction where the main highway runs inland and avoids Innsmouth I was half afraid my driver would take the bleak shore road that goes through that damnable place. He did not, however, but darted rapidly past Rowley and Ipswich toward our destination. We reached Arkham before midnight, and found the lights still on at the old Crowninshield house. Derby left the car with a hasty repetition of his thanks, and I drove home alone with a curious feeling of relief. It had been a terrible drive—all the more terrible because I could not quite tell why—and I did not regret Derby’s forecast of a long absence from my company.

V.

The next two months were full of rumours. People spoke of seeing Derby more and more in his new energised state, and Asenath was scarcely ever in to her few callers. I had only one visit from Edward, when he called briefly in Asenath’s car—duly reclaimed from wherever he had left it in Maine—to get some books he had lent me. He was in his new state, and paused only long enough for some evasively polite remarks. It was plain that he had nothing to discuss with me when in this condition—and I noticed that he did not even trouble to give the old three-and-two signal when ringing the doorbell. As on that evening in the car, I felt a faint, infinitely deep horror which I could not explain; so that his swift departure was a prodigious relief.
      In mid-September Derby was away for a week, and some of the decadent college set talked knowingly of the matter—hinting at a meeting with a notorious cult-leader, lately expelled from England, who had established headquarters in New York. For my part I could not get that strange ride from Maine out of my head. The transformation I had witnessed had affected me profoundly, and I caught myself again and again trying to account for the thing—and for the extreme horror it had inspired in me.
      But the oddest rumours were those about the sobbing in the old Crowninshield house. The voice seemed to be a woman’s, and some of the younger people thought it sounded like Asenath’s. It was heard only at rare intervals, and would sometimes be choked off as if by force. There was talk of an investigation, but this was dispelled one day when Asenath appeared in the streets and chatted in a sprightly way with a large number of acquaintances—apologising for her recent absences and speaking incidentally about the nervous breakdown and hysteria of a guest from Boston. The guest was never seen, but Asenath’s appearance left nothing to be said. And then someone complicated matters by whispering that the sobs had once or twice been in a man’s voice.
      One evening in mid-October I heard the familiar three-and-two ring at the front door. Answering it myself, I found Edward on the steps, and saw in a moment that his personality was the old one which I had not encountered since the day of his ravings on that terrible ride from Chesuncook. His face was twitching with a mixture of odd emotions in which fear and triumph seemed to share dominion, and he looked furtively over his shoulder as I closed the door behind him.
      Following me clumsily to the study, he asked for some whiskey to steady his nerves. I forbore to question him, but waited till he felt like beginning whatever he wanted to say. At length he ventured some information in a choking voice.
      “Asenath has gone, Dan. We had a long talk last night while the servants were out, and I made her promise to stop preying on me. Of course I had certain—certain occult defences I never told you about. She had to give in, but got frightfully angry. Just packed up and started for New York—walked right out to catch the 8:20 in to Boston. I suppose people will talk, but I can’t help that. You needn’t mention that there was any trouble—just say she’s gone on a long research trip.
      “She’s probably going to stay with one of her horrible groups of devotees. I hope she’ll go west and get a divorce—anyhow, I’ve made her promise to keep away and let me alone. It was horrible, Dan—she was stealing my body—crowding me out—making a prisoner of me. I laid low and pretended to let her do it, but I had to be on the watch. I could plan if I was careful, for she can’t read my mind literally, or in detail. All she could read of my planning was a sort of general mood of rebellion—and she always thought I was helpless. Never thought I could get the best of her . . . but I had a spell or two that worked.”
      Derby looked over his shoulder and took some more whiskey.
      “I paid off those damned servants this morning when they got back. They were ugly about it, and asked questions, but they went. They’re her kind—Innsmouth people—and were hand and glove with her. I hope they’ll let me alone—I didn’t like the way they laughed when they walked away. I must get as many of Dad’s old servants again as I can. I’ll move back home now.
      “I suppose you think I’m crazy, Dan—but Arkham history ought to hint at things that back up what I’ve told you—and what I’m going to tell you. You’ve seen one of the changes, too—in your car after I told you about Asenath that day coming home from Maine. That was when she got me—drove me out of my body. The last thing of the ride I remember was when I was all worked up trying to tell you what that she-devil is. Then she got me, and in a flash I was back at the house—in the library where those damned servants had me locked up—and in that cursed fiend’s body . . . that isn’t even human. . . . You know, it was she you must have ridden home with . . . that preying wolf in my body. . . . You ought to have known the difference!”
      I shuddered as Derby paused. Surely, I had known the difference—yet could I accept an explanation as insane as this? But my distracted caller was growing even wilder.
      “I had to save myself—I had to, Dan! She’d have got me for good at Hallowmass—they hold a Sabbat up there beyond Chesuncook, and the sacrifice would have clinched things. She’d have got me for good . . . she’d have been I, and I’d have been she . . . forever . . . too late. . . . My body’d have been hers for good. . . . She’d have been a man, and fully human, just as she wanted to be. . . . I suppose she’d have put me out of the way—killed her own ex-body with me in it, damn her, just as she did before—just as she, he, or it did before. . . .”
      Edward’s face was now atrociously distorted, and he bent it uncomfortably close to mine as his voice fell to a whisper.
      “You must know what I hinted in the car—that she isn’t Asenath at all, but really old Ephraim himself. I suspected it a year and a half ago, but I know it now. Her handwriting shews it when she’s off guard—sometimes she jots down a note in writing that’s just like her father’s manuscripts, stroke for stroke—and sometimes she says things that nobody but an old man like Ephraim could say. He changed forms with her when he felt death coming—she was the only one he could find with the right kind of brain and a weak enough will—he got her body permanently, just as she almost got mine, and then poisoned the old body he’d put her into. Haven’t you seen old Ephraim’s soul glaring out of that she-devil’s eyes dozens of times . . . and out of mine when she had control of my body?”
      The whisperer was panting, and paused for breath. I said nothing, and when he resumed his voice was nearer normal. This, I reflected, was a case for the asylum, but I would not be the one to send him there. Perhaps time and freedom from Asenath would do its work. I could see that he would never wish to dabble in morbid occultism again.
      “I’ll tell you more later—I must have a long rest now. I’ll tell you something of the forbidden horrors she led me into—something of the age-old horrors that even now are festering in out-of-the-way corners with a few monstrous priests to keep them alive. Some people know things about the universe that nobody ought to know, and can do things that nobody ought to be able to do. I’ve been in it up to my neck, but that’s the end. Today I’d burn that damned Necronomicon and all the rest if I were librarian at Miskatonic.
      “But she can’t get me now. I must get out of that accursed house as soon as I can, and settle down at home. You’ll help me, I know, if I need help. Those devilish servants, you know . . . and if people should get too inquisitive about Asenath. You see, I can’t give them her address. . . . Then there are certain groups of searchers—certain cults, you know—that might misunderstand our breaking up . . . some of them have damnably curious ideas and methods. I know you’ll stand by me if anything happens—even if I have to tell you a lot that will shock you. . . .”
      I had Edward stay and sleep in one of the guest-chambers that night, and in the morning he seemed calmer. We discussed certain possible arrangements for his moving back into the Derby mansion, and I hoped he would lose no time in making the change. He did not call the next evening, but I saw him frequently during the ensuing weeks. We talked as little as possible about strange and unpleasant things, but discussed the renovation of the old Derby house, and the travels which Edward promised to take with my son and me the following summer.
      Of Asenath we said almost nothing, for I saw that the subject was a peculiarly disturbing one. Gossip, of course, was rife; but that was no novelty in connexion with the strange ménage at the old Crowninshield house. One thing I did not like was what Derby’s banker let fall in an overexpansive mood at the Miskatonic Club—about the cheques Edward was sending regularly to a Moses and Abigail Sargent and a Eunice Babson in Innsmouth. That looked as if those evil-faced servants were extorting some kind of tribute from him—yet he had not mentioned the matter to me.
      I wished that the summer—and my son’s Harvard vacation—would come, so that we could get Edward to Europe. He was not, I soon saw, mending as rapidly as I had hoped he would; for there was something a bit hysterical in his occasional exhilaration, while his moods of fright and depression were altogether too frequent. The old Derby house was ready by December, yet Edward constantly put off moving. Though he hated and seemed to fear the Crowninshield place, he was at the same time queerly enslaved by it. He could not seem to begin dismantling things, and invented every kind of excuse to postpone action. When I pointed this out to him he appeared unaccountably frightened. His father’s old butler—who was there with other reacquired family servants—told me one day that Edward’s occasional prowlings about the house, and especially down cellar, looked odd and unwholesome to him. I wondered if Asenath had been writing disturbing letters, but the butler said there was no mail which could have come from her.

VI.

It was about Christmas that Derby broke down one evening while calling on me. I was steering the conversation toward next summer’s travels when he suddenly shrieked and leaped up from his chair with a look of shocking, uncontrollable fright—a cosmic panic and loathing such as only the nether gulfs of nightmare could bring to any sane mind.
      “My brain! My brain! God, Dan—it’s tugging—from beyond—knocking—clawing—that she-devil—even now—Ephraim—Kamog! Kamog!—The pit of the shoggoths—Iä! Shub-Niggurath! The Goat with a Thousand Young! . . . 
      “The flame—the flame . . . beyond body, beyond life . . . in the earth . . . oh, God! . . .”
      I pulled him back to his chair and poured some wine down his throat as his frenzy sank to a dull apathy. He did not resist, but kept his lips moving as if talking to himself. Presently I realised that he was trying to talk to me, and bent my ear to his mouth to catch the feeble words.
      “ . . . again, again . . . she’s trying . . . I might have known . . . nothing can stop that force; not distance, nor magic, nor death . . . it comes and comes, mostly in the night . . . I can’t leave . . . it’s horrible . . . oh, God, Dan, if you only knew as I do just how horrible it is. . . .”
      When he had slumped down into a stupor I propped him with pillows and let normal sleep overtake him. I did not call a doctor, for I knew what would be said of his sanity, and wished to give nature a chance if I possibly could. He waked at midnight, and I put him to bed upstairs, but he was gone by morning. He had let himself quietly out of the house—and his butler, when called on the wire, said he was at home pacing restlessly about the library.
      Edward went to pieces rapidly after that. He did not call again, but I went daily to see him. He would always be sitting in his library, staring at nothing and having an air of abnormal listening. Sometimes he talked rationally, but always on trivial topics. Any mention of his trouble, of future plans, or of Asenath would send him into a frenzy. His butler said he had frightful seizures at night, during which he might eventually do himself harm.
      I had a long talk with his doctor, banker, and lawyer, and finally took the physician with two specialist colleagues to visit him. The spasms that resulted from the first questions were violent and pitiable—and that evening a closed car took his poor struggling body to the Arkham Sanitarium. I was made his guardian and called on him twice weekly—almost weeping to hear his wild shrieks, awesome whispers, and dreadful, droning repetitions of such phrases as “I had to do it—I had to do it . . . it’ll get me . . . it’ll get me . . . down there . . . down there in the dark. . . . Mother, mother! Dan! Save me . . . save me. . . .”
      How much hope of recovery there was, no one could say; but I tried my best to be optimistic. Edward must have a home if he emerged, so I transferred his servants to the Derby mansion, which would surely be his sane choice. What to do about the Crowninshield place with its complex arrangements and collections of utterly inexplicable objects I could not decide, so left it momentarily untouched—telling the Derby housemaid to go over and dust the chief rooms once a week, and ordering the furnace man to have a fire on those days.
      The final nightmare came before Candlemas—heralded, in cruel irony, by a false gleam of hope. One morning late in January the sanitarium telephoned to report that Edward’s reason had suddenly come back. His continuous memory, they said, was badly impaired; but sanity itself was certain. Of course he must remain some time for observation, but there could be little doubt of the outcome. All going well, he would surely be free in a week.
      I hastened over in a flood of delight, but stood bewildered when a nurse took me to Edward’s room. The patient rose to greet me, extending his hand with a polite smile; but I saw in an instant that he bore the strangely energised personality which had seemed so foreign to his own nature—the competent personality I had found so vaguely horrible, and which Edward himself had once vowed was the intruding soul of his wife. There was the same blazing vision—so like Asenath’s and old Ephraim’s—and the same firm mouth; and when he spoke I could sense the same grim, pervasive irony in his voice—the deep irony so redolent of potential evil. This was the person who had driven my car through the night five months before—the person I had not seen since that brief call when he had forgotten the old-time doorbell signal and stirred such nebulous fears in me—and now he filled me with the same dim feeling of blasphemous alienage and ineffable cosmic hideousness.
      He spoke affably of arrangements for release—and there was nothing for me to do but assent, despite some remarkable gaps in his recent memories. Yet I felt that something was terribly, inexplicably wrong and abnormal. There were horrors in this thing that I could not reach. This was a sane person—but was it indeed the Edward Derby I had known? If not, who or what was it—and where was Edward? Ought it to be free or confined . . . or ought it to be extirpated from the face of the earth? There was a hint of the abysmally sardonic in everything the creature said—the Asenath-like eyes lent a special and baffling mockery to certain words about the ‘early liberty earned by an especially close confinement’. I must have behaved very awkwardly, and was glad to beat a retreat.
      All that day and the next I racked my brain over the problem. What had happened? What sort of mind looked out through those alien eyes in Edward’s face? I could think of nothing but this dimly terrible enigma, and gave up all efforts to perform my usual work. The second morning the hospital called up to say that the recovered patient was unchanged, and by evening I was close to a nervous collapse—a state I admit, though others will vow it coloured my subsequent vision. I have nothing to say on this point except that no madness of mine could account for all the evidence.

VII.

It was in the night—after that second evening—that stark, utter horror burst over me and weighted my spirit with a black, clutching panic from which it can never shake free. It began with a telephone call just before midnight. I was the only one up, and sleepily took down the receiver in the library. No one seemed to be on the wire, and I was about to hang up and go to bed when my ear caught a very faint suspicion of sound at the other end. Was someone trying under great difficulties to talk? As I listened I thought I heard a sort of half-liquid bubbling noise—“glub . . . glub . . . glub”—which had an odd suggestion of inarticulate, unintelligible word and syllable divisions. I called, “Who is it?” But the only answer was “glub-glub . . . glub-glub.” I could only assume that the noise was mechanical; but fancying that it might be a case of a broken instrument able to receive but not to send, I added, “I can’t hear you. Better hang up and try Information.” Immediately I heard the receiver go on the hook at the other end.
      This, I say, was just before midnight. When that call was traced afterward it was found to come from the old Crowninshield house, though it was fully half a week from the housemaid’s day to be there. I shall only hint what was found at that house—the upheaval in a remote cellar storeroom, the tracks, the dirt, the hastily rifled wardrobe, the baffling marks on the telephone, the clumsily used stationery, and the detestable stench lingering over everything. The police, poor fools, have their smug little theories, and are still searching for those sinister discharged servants—who have dropped out of sight amidst the present furore. They speak of a ghoulish revenge for things that were done, and say I was included because I was Edward’s best friend and adviser.
      Idiots!—do they fancy those brutish clowns could have forged that handwriting? Do they fancy they could have brought what later came? Are they blind to the changes in that body that was Edward’s? As for me, I now believe all that Edward Derby ever told me. There are horrors beyond life’s edge that we do not suspect, and once in a while man’s evil prying calls them just within our range. Ephraim—Asenath—that devil called them in, and they engulfed Edward as they are engulfing me.
      Can I be sure that I am safe? Those powers survive the life of the physical form. The next day—in the afternoon, when I pulled out of my prostration and was able to walk and talk coherently—I went to the madhouse and shot him dead for Edward’s and the world’s sake, but can I be sure till he is cremated? They are keeping the body for some silly autopsies by different doctors—but I say he must be cremated. He must be cremated—he who was not Edward Derby when I shot him. I shall go mad if he is not, for I may be the next. But my will is not weak—and I shall not let it be undermined by the terrors I know are seething around it. One life—Ephraim, Asenath, and Edward—who now? I will not be driven out of my body . . . I will not change souls with that bullet-ridden lich in the madhouse!
      But let me try to tell coherently of that final horror. I will not speak of what the police persistently ignored—the tales of that dwarfed, grotesque, malodorous thing met by at least three wayfarers in High St. just before two o’clock, and the nature of the single footprints in certain places. I will say only that just about two the doorbell and knocker waked me—doorbell and knocker both, plied alternately and uncertainly in a kind of weak desperation, and each trying to keep to Edward’s old signal of three-and-two strokes.
      Roused from sound sleep, my mind leaped into a turmoil. Derby at the door—and remembering the old code! That new personality had not remembered it . . . was Edward suddenly back in his rightful state? Why was he here in such evident stress and haste? Had he been released ahead of time, or had he escaped? Perhaps, I thought as I flung on a robe and bounded downstairs, his return to his own self had brought raving and violence, revoking his discharge and driving him to a desperate dash for freedom. Whatever had happened, he was good old Edward again, and I would help him!
      When I opened the door into the elm-arched blackness a gust of insufferably foetid wind almost flung me prostrate. I choked in nausea, and for a second scarcely saw the dwarfed, humped figure on the steps. The summons had been Edward’s, but who was this foul, stunted parody? Where had Edward had time to go? His ring had sounded only a second before the door opened.
      The caller had on one of Edward’s overcoats—its bottom almost touching the ground, and its sleeves rolled back yet still covering the hands. On the head was a slouch hat pulled low, while a black silk muffler concealed the face. As I stepped unsteadily forward, the figure made a semi-liquid sound like that I had heard over the telephone—“glub . . . glub . . .”—and thrust at me a large, closely written paper impaled on the end of a long pencil. Still reeling from the morbid and unaccountable foetor, I seized this paper and tried to read it in the light from the doorway.
      Beyond question, it was in Edward’s script. But why had he written when he was close enough to ring—and why was the script so awkward, coarse, and shaky? I could make out nothing in the dim half light, so edged back into the hall, the dwarf figure clumping mechanically after but pausing on the inner door’s threshold. The odour of this singular messenger was really appalling, and I hoped (not in vain, thank God!) that my wife would not wake and confront it.
      Then, as I read the paper, I felt my knees give under me and my vision go black. I was lying on the floor when I came to, that accursed sheet still clutched in my fear-rigid hand. This is what it said.
      “Dan—go to the sanitarium and kill it. Exterminate it. It isn’t Edward Derby any more. She got me—it’s Asenath—and she has been dead three months and a half. I lied when I said she had gone away. I killed her. I had to. It was sudden, but we were alone and I was in my right body. I saw a candlestick and smashed her head in. She would have got me for good at Hallowmass.
      “I buried her in the farther cellar storeroom under some old boxes and cleaned up all the traces. The servants suspected next morning, but they have such secrets that they dare not tell the police. I sent them off, but God knows what they—and others of the cult—will do.
      “I thought for a while I was all right, and then I felt the tugging at my brain. I knew what it was—I ought to have remembered. A soul like hers—or Ephraim’s—is half detached, and keeps right on after death as long as the body lasts. She was getting me—making me change bodies with her—seizing my body and putting me in that corpse of hers buried in the cellar.
      “I knew what was coming—that’s why I snapped and had to go to the asylum. Then it came—I found myself choked in the dark—in Asenath’s rotting carcass down there in the cellar under the boxes where I put it. And I knew she must be in my body at the sanitarium—permanently, for it was after Hallowmass, and the sacrifice would work even without her being there—sane, and ready for release as a menace to the world. I was desperate, and in spite of everything I clawed my way out.
      “I’m too far gone to talk—I couldn’t manage to telephone—but I can still write. I’ll get fixed up somehow and bring you this last word and warning. Kill that fiend if you value the peace and comfort of the world. See that it is cremated. If you don’t, it will live on and on, body to body forever, and I can’t tell you what it will do. Keep clear of black magic, Dan, it’s the devil’s business. Goodbye—you’ve been a great friend. Tell the police whatever they’ll believe—and I’m damnably sorry to drag all this on you. I’ll be at peace before long—this thing won’t hold together much more. Hope you can read this. And kill that thing—kill it.
Yours—Ed.”

      It was only afterward that I read the last half of this paper, for I had fainted at the end of the third paragraph. I fainted again when I saw and smelled what cluttered up the threshold where the warm air had struck it. The messenger would not move or have consciousness any more.
      The butler, tougher-fibred than I, did not faint at what met him in the hall in the morning. Instead, he telephoned the police. When they came I had been taken upstairs to bed, but the—other mass—lay where it had collapsed in the night. The men put handkerchiefs to their noses.
      What they finally found inside Edward’s oddly assorted clothes was mostly liquescent horror. There were bones, too—and a crushed-in skull. Some dental work positively identified the skull as Asenath’s.",True
"THEY were the brawlers and braggarts, the loud boasters and hard drinkers, of Faring town, John Kulrek and his crony Lie-lip Canool. Many a time have I, a tousle-haired lad, stolen to the tavern door to listen to their curses, their profane arguments and wild sea songs; half fearful and half in admiration of these wild rovers. Aye, all the people of Faring town gazed on them with fear and admiration, for they were not like the rest of the Faring men; they were not content to ply their trade along the coasts and among the shark-teeth shoals. No yawls, no skiffs for them! They fared far, farther than any other man in the village, for they shipped on the great sailing-ships that went out on the white tides to brave the restless grey ocean and make ports in strange lands.

Ah, I mind it was swift times in the little sea-coast village of Faring when John Kulrek came home, with the furtive Lie-lip at his side, swaggering down the gang-plank, in his tarry sea-clothes, and the broad leather belt that held his ever-ready dagger; shouting condescending greeting to some favored acquaintance, kissing some maiden who ventured too near; then up the street, roaring some scarcely decent song of the sea. How the cringers and the idlers, the hangers-on, would swarm about the two desperate heroes, flattering and smirking, guffawing hilariously at each nasty jest. For to the tavern loafers and to some of the weaker among the straightforward villagers, these men with their wild talk and their brutal deeds, their tales of the Seven Seas and the far countries, these men, I say, were valiant knights, nature's noblemen who dared to be men of blood and brawn.

And all feared them, so that when a man was beaten or a woman insulted, the villagers muttered—and did nothing. And so when Moll Farrell's niece was put to shame by John Kulrek, none dared even to put into words what all thought. Moll had never married, and she and the girl lived alone in a little hut down close to the beach, so close that in high tide the waves came almost to the door.

The people of the village accounted old Moll something of a witch, and she was a grim, gaunt old dame who had little to say to anyone. But she minded her own business, and eked out a slim living by gathering clams, and picking up bits of driftwood.

The girl was a pretty, foolish little thing, vain and easily befooled, else she had never yielded to the shark-like blandishments of John Kulrek.

I mind the day was a cold winter day with a sharp breeze out of the east when the old dame came into the village street shrieking that the girl had vanished. All scattered over the beach and back among the bleak inland hills to search for her—all save John Kulrek and his cronies who sat in the tavern dicing and toping. All the while beyond the shoals, we heard the never- ceasing droning of the heaving, restless grey monster, and in the dim light of the ghostly dawn Moll Farrell's girl came home.

The tides bore her gently across the wet sands and laid her almost at her own door. Virgin-white she was, and her arms were folded across her still bosom; calm was her face, and the grey tides sighed about her slender limbs. Moll Farrell's eyes were stones, yet she stood above her dead girl and spoke no word till John Kulrek and his crony came reeling down from the tavern, their drinking-jacks still in their hands. Drunk was John Kulrek, and the people gave back for him, murder in their souls; so he came and laughed at Moll Farrell across the body of her girl.

""Zounds!"" swore John Kulrek; ""the wench has drowned herself, Lie-lip!""

Lie-lip laughed, with the twist of his thin mouth. He always hated Moll Farrell, for it was she that had given him the name of Lie-lip.

Then John Kulrek lifted his drinking-jack, swaying on his uncertain legs. ""A health to the wench's ghost!"" he bellowed, while all stood aghast.

Then Moll Farrell spoke, and the words broke from her in a scream which sent ripples of cold up and down the spines of the throng.

""The curse of the Foul Fiend upon you, John Kulrek!"" she screamed. ""The curse of God rest upon your vile soul throughout eternity! May you gaze on sights that shall sear the eyes of you and scorch the soul of you! May you die a bloody death and writhe in hell's flames for a million and a million and yet a million years! I curse you by sea and by land, by earth and by air, by the demons of the swamplands, the fiends of the forest and the goblins of the hills! And you""—her lean finger stabbed at Lie-lip Canool and he started backward, his face paling—""you shall be the death of John Kulrek and he shall be the death of you! You shall bring John Kulrek to the doors of hell and John Kulrek shall bring you to the gallows-tree! I set the seal of death upon your brow, John Kulrek! You shall live in terror and die in horror far out upon the cold grey sea! But the sea that took the soul of innocence to her bosom shall not take you, but shall fling forth your vile carcass to the sands! Aye, John Kulrek""—and she spoke with such a terrible intensity that the drunken mockery on the man's face changed to one of swinish stupidity—""the sea roars for the victim it will not keep! There is snow upon the hills, John Kulrek, and ere it melts your corpse will lie at my feet. And I shall spit upon it and be content.""

Kulrek and his crony sailed at dawn for a long voyage, and Moll went back to her hut and her clam-gathering. She seemed to grow leaner and more grim than ever and her eyes smoldered with a light not sane. The days glided by and people whispered among themselves that Moll's days were numbered, for she faded to a ghost of a woman; but she went her way, refusing all aid.

That was a short, cold summer and the snow on the barren inland hills never melted; a thing very unusual, which caused much comment among the villagers. At dusk and at dawn Moll would come up on the beach, gaze up at the snow which glittered on the hills, then out to sea with a fierce intensity in her gaze.

Then the days grew shorter, the nights longer and darker, and the cold grey tides came sweeping along the bleak strands, bearing the rain and sleet of the sharp east breezes.

And upon a bleak day a trading-vessel sailed into the bay and anchored. And all the idlers and the wastrels flocked to the wharfs, for that was the ship upon which John Kulrek and Lie-lip Canool had sailed. Down the gang-plank came Lie-lip, more furtive than ever, but John Kulrek was not there.

To shouted queries, Canool shook his head. ""Kulrek deserted ship at a port of Sumatra,"" said he. ""He had a row with the skipper, lads; wanted me to desert, too, but no! I had to see you fine lads again, eh boys?""

Almost cringing was Lie-lip Canool, and suddenly he recoiled as Moll Farrell came through the throng. A moment they stood eyeing each other; then Moll's grim lips bent in a terrible smile.

""There's blood on your hand, Canool!"" she lashed out suddenly—so suddenly that Lie-lip started and rubbed his right hand across his left sleeve.

""Stand aside, witch!"" he snarled in sudden anger, striding through the crowd which gave back for him. His admirers followed him to the tavern.

Now, I mind that the next day was even colder; grey fogs came drifting out of the east and veiled the sea and the beaches. There would be no sailing that day, and so all the villagers were in their snug houses or matching tales at the tavern. So it came that Joe, my friend, a lad of my own age, and I, were the ones who saw the first of the strange things that happened.

Being harum-scarum lads of no wisdom, we were sitting in a small rowboat, floating at the end of the wharfs, each shivering and wishing the other would suggest leaving, there being no reason whatever for our being there, save that it was a good place to build air-castles undisturbed.

Suddenly Joe raised his hand. ""Say,"" he said, ""d'ye hear? Who can be out on the bay upon a day like this?""

""Nobody. What d'ye hear?""

""Oars. Or I'm a lubber. Listen.""

There was no seeing anything in that fog, and I heard nothing. Yet Joe swore he did, and suddenly his face assumed a strange look.

""Somebody rowing out there, I tell you! The bay is alive with oars from the sound! A score of boats at the least! Ye dolt, can ye not hear?""

Then, as I shook my head, he leaped and began to undo the painter.

""I'm off to see. Name me liar if the bay is not full of boats, all together like a close fleet. Are you with me?""

Yes, I was with him, though I heard nothing. Then out in the greyness we went, and the fog closed behind and before so that we drifted in a vague world of smoke, seeing naught and hearing naught. We were lost in no time, and I cursed Joe for leading us upon a wild goose chase that was like to end with our being swept out to sea. I thought of Moll Farrell's girl and shuddered.

How long we drifted I know not. Minutes faded into hours, hours into centuries. Still Joe swore he heard the oars, now close at hand, now far away, and for hours we followed them, steering our course toward the sound, as the noise grew or receded. This I later thought of, and could not understand.

Then, when my hands were so numb that I could no longer hold the oar, and the forerunning drowsiness of cold and exhaustion was stealing over me, Weak white stars broke through the fog which glided suddenly away, fading like a ghost of smoke, and we found ourselves afloat just outside the mouth of the bay. The waters lay smooth as a pond, all dark green and silver in the starlight, and the cold came crisper than ever. I was swinging the boat about, to put back into the bay, when Joe gave a shout, and for the first time I heard the clack of oar-locks. I glanced over my shoulder and my blood went cold.

A great beaked prow loomed above us, a weird, unfamiliar shape against the stars, and as I caught my breath, sheered sharply and swept by us, with a curious swishing I never heard any other craft make. Joe screamed and backed oars frantically, and the boat walled out of the way just in time; for though the prow missed us, still otherwise we had died. For from the sides of the ship stood long oars, bank upon bank which swept her along. Though I had never seen such a craft, I knew her for a galley. But what was she doing upon our coasts? They said, the far-farers, that such ships were still in use among the heathens of Barbary; but it was many a long, heaving mile to Barbary, and even so she did not resemble the ships described by those who had sailed far.

We started in pursuit, and this was strange, for though the waters broke about her prow, and she seemed fairly to fly through the waves, yet she was making little speed, and it was no time before we caught up with her. Making our painter fast to a chain far back beyond the reach of the swishing oars, we hailed those on deck. But there came no answer, and at last, conquering our fears, we clambered up the chain and found ourselves upon the strangest deck man has trod for many a long, roaring century.

Joe muttered fearsomely. ""Look, how old it seems! Almost ready to fall to pieces. Why, 'tis fairly rotten!""

There was no one on deck, no one at the long sweep with which the craft was steered. We stole to the hold and looked down the stair. Then and there, if ever men were on the verge of insanity, it was we. For there were rowers there, it is true; they sat upon the rowers' benches and drove the creaking oars through the grey waters. And they that rowed were skeletons!

Shrieking, we plunged across the deck, to fling ourselves into the sea. But at the rail I tripped upon something and fell headlong, and as I lay, I saw a thing which vanquished my fear of the horrors below for an instant. The thing upon which I had tripped was a human body, and in the dim grey light that was beginning to steal across the eastern waves I saw a dagger hilt standing up between his shoulders. Joe was at the rail, urging me to haste, and together we slid down the chain and cut the painter.

Then we stood off into the bay. Straight on kept the grim galley, and we followed, slowly, wondering. She seemed to be heading straight for the beach beside the wharfs, and as we approached, we saw the wharfs thronged with people. They had missed us, no doubt, and now they stood, there in the early dawn light, struck dumb by the apparition which had come up out of the night and the grim ocean.

Straight on swept the galley, her oars a-swish; then ere she reached the shallow water—crash!—a terrific reverberation shook the bay. Before our eyes the grim craft seemed to melt away; then she vanished, and the green waters seethed where she had ridden, but there floated no driftwood there, nor did there ever float any ashore. Aye, something floated ashore, but it was grim driftwood!

We made the landing amid a hum of excited conversation that stopped suddenly. Moll Farrell stood before her hut, limned gauntly against the ghostly dawn, her lean hand pointing sea-ward. And across the sighing wet sands, borne by the grey tide, something came floating; something that the waves dropped at Moll Farrell's feet. And there looked up at us, as we crowded about, a pair of unseeing eyes set in a still, white face. John Kulrek had come home.

Still and grim he lay, rocked by the tide, and as he lurched sideways, all saw the dagger hilt that stood from his back—the dagger all of us had seen a thousand times at the belt of Lie-lip Canool.

""Aye, I killed him!"" came Canool's shriek, as he writhed and groveled before our gaze. ""At sea on a still night in a drunken brawl I slew him and hurled him overboard! And from the far seas he has followed me""—his voice sank to a hideous whisper—""because—of—the—curse—the—sea— would—not—keep—his—body!""

And the wretch sank down, trembling, the shadow of the gallows already in his eyes.

""Aye!"" Strong, deep and exultant was Moll Farrell's voice. ""From the hell of lost craft Satan sent a ship of bygone ages! A ship red with gore and stained with the memory of horrid crimes! None other would bear such a vile carcass! The sea has taken vengeance and has given me mine. See now, how I spit upon the face of John Kulrek.""

And with a ghastly laugh, she pitched forward, the blood starting to her lips. And the sun came up across the restless sea.","
I spent the next few days becoming acquainted with the town and its people. Personally, I did not find most of the locals as reticent as my companion had led me to believe. Actually, many of the people I met during my casual rambles about the town and its immediate environs seemed willing, even eager to converse about their community and its history, in spite, or maybe because of, my rather labored Spanish.
Especially interesting to me, as it turned out, was the fact that many of the local people were descended, in part, from Sephardic Jews who had settled in this once remote region to avoid, as far as possible, direct contact with Church authorities. They had maintained a façade of Catholic Christianity while secretly retaining their Jewish identity. Gradually, they had assimilated with both Mexican settlers and the native Indians, remaining, nevertheless, quietly proud of their Sephardic roots.
Rousseau had apparently overlooked this bit of history, or perhaps considered it of trivial importance. Nevertheless, I viewed this as the most obvious explanation for the presence of the Hebrew Necronomicon in San Facundo. Indeed, if some of those eighteenth-century crypto-Jews had been involved in dark magical practices, as the presence of the book might indicate, then rumors of similar activities among the Indian natives of this region could have attracted them to settle here in the first place.
This informal reconnoitering also brought me my first glimpse of the ""strange"" ones, which I call them for lack of a better name. Truly, Rousseau did not exaggerate concerning their physical oddity; indeed, his descriptions left me unprepared for the actual appearance of those people. They tended to be of medium height, on the average, but this was difficult to ascertain due to their characteristically stooped posture and odd gaits, which seemed to be a sort of shambling shuffle, as if a regular human bipedal locomotion were alien to their normal means of ambulation. Their physiognomies were, however, the items of greatest strangeness. The heads tended to be elongated and the faces very narrow. Eyes were large, roundish, and bulging, giving the impression of being nearly, or totally lidless. Their mouths tended to be extremely wide, reaching well around to the sides of the face, with thin lips drawn back somewhat to reveal gums and teeth. The teeth themselves were of utmost oddity, being uniformly pointed, even back into the molar area. My impression was of the saw-like teeth found in certain species of carnivorous fish or reptiles. The skin of these creatures was of a brownish-grey color, quite unlike that of a typical Mexican or Indian. Its texture, as best I could tell, was rough, almost horny in fact, and there was a disquieting suggestion of squamousness.
My first face-to-face encounter with these beings occurred late in the afternoon of my third day in San Facundo. I was strolling along a side street near the main plaza. The afternoon was hot and I was thirsty. Presently, I came to a small store, little more than a hole in the wall, set in a venerable but dilapidated building of heavy yellowish brick, probably dating from the middle of the nineteenth century. I entered and requested a cold soft drink from the proprietor, a short, pudgy man of late middle age. Scarcely had he handed me the bottled drink when two other men entered. I first noticed the frozen expression on the owner's face, then turned to see two of the ""strange"" ones, only a few feet away. One of them muttered, or almost hissed, something in unintelligible Spanish which sent the fat little proprietor scurrying behind a curtain in the rear of the store. Both men eyed me in a curiously sinister way but said nothing. A moment later the owner emerged, carrying something in a paper sack folded over at the top, which he handed to the nearer of the two men. One of the creatures extended a gloved hand, placed some bills on the counter, and left with his companion as silently as they had come.
I turned to the proprietor, whom I knew slightly, with whose brother I had already conversed at some length the previous day, and inquired, ""Quiénes eran? Who were they?""
""No quieres saber. You don't want to know,"" was his reply.
""But why do you say that?"" I persisted. ""I find your town fascinating and would like to know something about its more, shall we say, unusual side. Obviously, certain of your local citizens have characteristics that set them apart from the average person one meets on the street. What can you tell about them?""
""Yo no sé nada,"" was his curt reply, ""and it would be much better if you did not keep asking. There are things better not known.""
Puzzled, I left the store and continued along the street to the plaza. I noticed that the sun was sinking low and the first rays of what promised to be a glorious sunset were already painting the western sky in a riot of luminous color. I tarried about the plaza for perhaps another hour, until the last tints of purple, orange, and gold had faded into the gathering dusk. A sudden impulse caused me to turn my gaze toward the south, where the streets gradually sloped downward towards the narrow San Facundo River. There, beyond the low roofs of the town, beyond the tree-lined bluffs above the river, and across the rolling, dusk-shrouded plain rose the dusky shape of a distant outcropping. Starkly outlined against the darkling sky, I beheld El Tinieblo. Far more sinister, in view of the incident with the federales, a dark red glow seemed to emanate from its low, flat summit.


IV

The following days proved extremely interesting. Quickly, I found that gaining the friendship and trust of certain people in San Facundo opened doors to many other acquaintances. My own Portuguese-Jewish heritage and knowledge of the Cabbalah would turn out to be advantageous in this respect. I soon discovered that some Sanfacundinos were quite familiar with Cabalistic teachings and concepts, and were eager to participate in discussions with outsiders who were learned in these matters, apparently hoping to enrich their own store of knowledge. Nevertheless, my attempts to learn more concerning the ""strange ones"" were invariably met with evasion or rebuff. In a more disquieting vane, I was starting to develop a sense of being watched and followed.
Among my newly found friends was one Don Ramiro De Leon-Espinoza, a local land owner and businessman whose family had been among the original settlers in the region. One morning, well into my second week in San Facundo, Don Ramiro and myself met for coffee and conversation in a cafe near the plaza.
""You, who are erudite in so many things, what really brings you to San Facundo?"" he queried.
""Really,"" I replied, ""I came on an invitation from an old acquaintance. He told me that, let's say, interesting things have happened here in the past, and some influence from those occurrences may linger on into the present.""
Don Ramiro narrowed his eyes thoughtfully. ""And, of course, that acquaintance of yours is the gringo living in the house of Licenciado Santos Garza, is that not true?""
""Yes, as a matter of fact it is,"" I replied, sensing a certain suspicion in his tone. ""But I am here for purely academic reasons. As I've already told you, I am an anthropologist and the study of folklore is my specialty.""
My companion took a deep sip from his cup, eyeing me over the rim as he continued, ""I understand that, and it's a good thing. Otherwise, we wouldn't be having this conversation. You know, we don't appreciate that nosy bolillo, or Frenchman or whatever he is, prying into things that are none of his business. It is only because of our courtesy that we have not run him off.""
I knew then why Rousseau had found the local people so inaccessible. I also understood Don Ramiro's words as a message intended for Rousseau.
""Now, let us talk of things we both find interesting,"" Don Ramiro suggested enthusiastically, his mood seeming to shift abruptly.
""I know of a site near here that I am sure you will find fascinating. It dates back to pre-Conquest times; it may even be thousands of years old. Our legends have it that the place was already old before the Aztecs, or even the Toltecs. Anyway, it is located on land that I own.""
The prospect of visiting a largely unexplored pre-Columbian ruin truly excited me. ""How soon can we go?"" I responded with almost child like anticipation.
We drove out of town on a paved road for several miles, then turned onto another one of limestone gravel, known locally as caliche, which wound past alternating areas of cleared land and thick, spiny vegetation. We passed several ejidos, communally owned farms, and continued on into rolling uplands that manifested fewer and fewer signs of human habitation. Presently, the road degenerated into a mere track, little more than two parallel ruts running through thickly overgrown and rocky country. Fortunately, Don Ramiro's truck, a Ford utility-type vehicle with four-wheel drive, was adequate to the task.
""Is this area part of la zona maldita?"" I casually inquired.
""You know of la zona maldita?"" Don Ramiro answered with some surprise; then, anticipating my answer, continued, ""Ah sí, your friend Rousseau must have told you.""
""Rousseau,"" I corrected.
""Sí, whatever,"" was his curt reply. After a brief silence he volunteered, ""We are very much into the zona. The ruins that I am about to show you are one of its focal points.""
Abruptly, the trail ascended, topping the crest of a steep rise, then dipped slightly into a broad, almost level expanse. As my companion halted the truck briefly at the top of the rise, I viewed the scene extending out before us. There, jutting up from the thorny chaparral, I saw several low, truncated pyramids, along with what appeared to be a large conical structure and the jagged, broken tops of a number of walls. The structures appeared to be composed of a black basaltic stone, in rather striking contrast to the brownish-grey sandstone or pale limestone shale so abundant in that region.
""This is fascinating, Don Ramiro, but why hasn't this site been opened to archaeological study?"" My academic orientation made the question inevitable.
""I have a very valid reason for not wanting that to happen,"" he replied quickly. ""If the government knew of this place,"" he explained, ""they would declare it, and the surrounding area, a national archaeological zone.""
""But,"" I protested, ""wouldn't that allow for organized research into the true origins and age of the site, the identification of the ancient culture to which it belonged? You, yourself say that it may be older than the Toltec civilization. Why, this might cause archaeologists to rethink some of their present beliefs concerning ancient civilization in Mexico!""
""It would only give government bureaucrats an opportunity to loot the patrimony of our ancestors!"" he snapped. ""They would take the best for themselves, or sell it to foreigners, and put whatever was left in museum store rooms to be forgotten and eventually thrown out with the rubbish.""
I accepted his reasoning, which sounded sincere enough, though privately I suspected his real motive was fear of government confiscation of his property.
We left the truck and proceeded into the brush on foot.
""Be careful of snakes,"" warned my host. ""We have several very poisonous varieties around here.""
We made our way to the largest of the pyramids, scratching ourselves considerably on the thorny vegetation. I also noticed that my clothing suffered tears in several places. The pyramid, actually more of a rectangular structure with steeply sloping sides, rose some fifty feet from its base to a long platform. The platform itself was reached by means of a crumbling masonry stairway on the eastern face of the pyramid. Stunted mesquite and prickly pear grew from cracks in the basaltic blocks, and a tough wiry grass covered most of the platform surfaces, growing from centuries of accumulated soil and disintegrated masonry. Altogether, it was difficult to ascertain if the pyramid had ever served as the base for a masonry temple, as was usually the case with other ancient Mexican and Mesoamerican sites.
The top of the pyramid measured, in approximate terms, thirty feet in width by forty feet in length, and commanded an excellent view of the whole complex of structures. This large pyramid seemed to be situated near the western end of the city, for such the complex appeared to be. The crumbling remains of other buildings, including at least three smaller pyramids, stretched out for nearly three quarters of a mile to the south and east, though the tops of the structures were often barely visible above the thick, stunted vegetation. Obviously, the construction of such a center in this desolate and inaccessible site, with the primitive tools and technology probably available to the builders, had been no mean undertaking.
Of singular peculiarity among the crumbling stone edifices was the truncated conical structure mentioned earlier. As best as I could tell, its diameter was about one hundred feet at the base and it rose to an average height of some seventy feet, though the jagged outline of its rim suggested it had originally been much higher. Exploring entirely around the base, I could find no sign of a stairway or portal, or any other means of ingress or egress. Strangely, I noticed, the tower was devoid of any vegetation, with the exception of a sickly lichenous or fungous growth of a putrid grayish-green hue that spread in irregular patches up the sides of the structure. Also, notably absent were birds and bird droppings, nor were any of the swift striped-back skinks that abound in the area to be seen darting about the sloping sides of that mysterious black tower.
I abruptly noticed that Don Ramiro was nowhere about. Concerned that he had fallen, or otherwise injured himself in the crumbling stonework, I called out to him. After a few moments I heard his voice some distance away.
""Aquí estoy, aquí donde el ídolo.""
I was taken by surprise as I had not seen any idol in the place. After a few minutes of searching I found my host, standing with an awed expression before a large carven figure of black stone.
The figure itself was about fifteen feet tall, and at first glance appeared to be a representation of some deity fashioned in the typical, highly stylized Mesoamerican mode. Closer examination, however, sent me reeling with revulsion. The ""god,"" or whatever it was intended to represent, was actually some sort of fantastic sea creature, incorporating in its tentacled visage a grotesque parody of a face. Worst of all, the monstrosity was depicted employing its facial tentacles to force a human figure into its gaping, toothy mouth.
""What is it?"" I asked.
""The Great Kutulli,"" he replied, in a voice that sounded almost reverent.
The day was becoming late. Noticing this, Ramiro motioned in the direction of the truck.
""Time to go,"" he said without further comment. I felt fully in agreement. The prospect of remaining in this place after dark filled me with an overpowering dread . . . a dread I could scarcely explain at the moment.
The long, bumpy trip back to San Facundo was made in silence. My companion seemed unusually pensive and answered my few inquiries in grunted monosyllables. As for myself, I simply felt too overwhelmed, too overloaded with unanswered questions to give voice to my thoughts.
We reached town just after nightfall. My host dropped me off near Rousseau's place, though I still had to walk a long block up a steep, dark street to reach the house. In the gathering gloom I discerned several shadowy figures approaching me. For some inexplicable reason, call it primal instinct, I realized that these figures meant extreme danger, for me, now! I broke for the house, running as fast as my unaccustomed legs would carry me. Though I did not look back, I fully sensed the close pursuit of my assailants, could almost feel their searing breath on my neck. The dim light from Rousseau's study still seemed infinitely far away, and I caught a brief glimpse of something running, or loping just to my right side, almost close enough to grab me. I cried out, an incoherent scream of desperation and terror.
""Ay basta! Lárguense a la chingada pinches demonios encartados! Vámonos! Asquerosos chingados!""
I didn't see who was yelling, threatening, and cursing in a coarse female voice, and at the top of her lungs. I merely fell, exhausted, on my hands and knees. Presently, I felt a strong, thick arm help me back to my feet.
""Ay, pobre güerito. Por tantito te llevan a la chingada esos pendejos!""
I stared into the face of a copper-skinned woman of uncertain age, not unusually tall, but powerfully built, with a stocky, heavy-boned body. Her rugged Indian features and small bright eyes somehow inspired confidence.
""Who were they?"" I panted.
""They were nobody that you ever want to meet,"" she replied, adding, ""They know better than to mess with me; I know ways to make them curse their mothers for bringing them into this world. Ha!""
""But señora, who are you?"" I asked, beginning to catch my breath.
""Everyone calls me Doña Tencha. They say that I'm a bruja, a witch.""
""Are you?"" I asked, wondering.
""What do you think?"" she responded, half laughing. ""Ha, ha! Take care."" With that, she disappeared into a dark cluster of shacks situated just off the street.
I arrived at the house and fumbled for my key. Before I could insert it in the lock, Rousseau unexpectedly opened the door.
""My God, Shapiro! What happened? You look like you've seen the devil himself!""
""Maybe I have, or a close enough facsimile,"" I answered.
""But . . . but, how . . . what happened?""
Obviously he was taken aback by my state at that moment. I proceeded to give him as complete an account as possible of my recent peril.
Rousseau pondered for a moment, as if trying to make some sense out of what I was saying, then offered, ""I don't think it was a matter of common street ruffians. You say that they seemed to be terrified of the woman . . . what's her name? Tencha, did you say?""
""Yes, she said that's what people call her.""
""Funny,"" he replied. ""I had heard something about some kind of witch or sorceress living near here. I don't know why I never looked her up. She might be a good source of information.""
""She probably saved my life,"" I responded, rubbing my forehead.
My companion seemed to reflect for a moment. ""Do you think it was the freaks?""
""I'm sure it was several of them!"" I shot back, somewhat annoyed at his seeming failure to grasp the significance of the matter.
""And you say they were terrified of her?""
""That's what I said; but wait, you know, I heard her call them 'demonios encartados'.""
""Hybrid devils? Maybe just an epithet, but . . . ""
I cut off Rousseau's reply in mid-sentence. ""Did you ever read any of Lovecraft's works Carl?""
He shook his head.
""In several of his stories referring to the 'Cthulhu Mythos',"" I continued, ""Lovecraft described hybrid beings resulting from unions between certain strange sea creatures, apparently some sort of survival from an earlier, pre-human age, and renegade humans. Those hybrid beings were dedicated to the restoration to power of the extra-dimensional entity Cthulhu and his kind, called the 'Ancient Ones,' on our own earthly plane of existence. At least that's how the stories went.""
Rousseau's face manifested a mixture of revulsion and astonishment.
""So . . . you believe these freakish-looking people we see around here are some kind of alien hybrid? Good God, Shapiro . . . do you realize the implications of what you're suggesting?""
""Unfortunately, I do,"" I replied.
Now I knew, beyond any doubt, that my strange sense of being watched and followed reflected a very real danger. Quite in violation of my normal adherence to Ivy League conventions of ""political correctness,"" I was now applying the label of ""fish faces"" to the repellent beings that lurked about in the late afternoon shadows and darkness of night. After all, those creatures definitely had it in for us, or at least for me. Strangely, Rousseau had never been accosted, or even approached by any of the oddities, which seemed difficult to explain considering the length of his stay in San Facundo.


V

The following afternoon I met with Don Ramiro at a quiet local tavern. After providing him with an account of the previous night's events I queried, ""What do you think it means Don Ramiro?""
""Pues, I think it means you had better be careful,"" he replied, lifting his eyebrows in a kind of facial shrug.
""But, why do you think they jumped me while they've left my friend Rousseau alone all this time? Also, Don Ramiro, what can you tell me about those people, and who is Doña Tencha?""
""Please Profe, one question at a time. Now you ask why they attacked you and not Rou . . . whatever his name is; well, maybe it is because you have come too close to certain things that are better left alone. As for Tencha, she is a curandera, a folk healer who, maybe, practices a little black magic now and then.""
Unsatisfied, I continued to prod him.
""And the creatures themselves, who, or what are they?""
He paused for a long moment, as if uncertain how to answer my question. ""They go back a long time,"" he half whispered, then continued, ""The indios here, they practiced strange rituals, things that so horrified the priests that they killed hundreds, burned them alive, to cleanse the land of the abomination. That is how they saw it.""
""But the strange ones . . . ,"" I interrupted, scarcely able to contain my curiosity.
""Have patience, my friend; I am coming to that.""
He glanced quickly over his shoulder and leaned forward, obviously not wishing to be overheard. In a low voice he continued, ""This will sound incredible to you, with your scientific training, but the indios were in contact with very ancient beings, monstrous things from the sea."" My companion stopped momentarily, seeming to gage my reaction, then resumed his story. ""Those things, animals or devils, or whatever they were, demanded constant sacrifices, human sacrifices. They taught the Indians to do horrible things, to devour the sacrificial victims the same way that they liked to do it . . . alive and conscious!""
I recoiled at this. The very idea of a living, conscious human being torn apart and devoured by savages and the abominations they worshipped, while the poor wretch was aware of the hideous thing being done to him, seemed horrible beyond all imagining.
""They showed them how to tear the flesh away without damaging the main blood vessels or nerves. The victim would live on for hours while the flesh was being ripped from his bones. They did it with their teeth you know. That is how the sea demons taught them to do it. The pain suffered by the victim, along with his gradually ebbing life force, served as a kind of food for the others.""
Though gagging from my companion's horrible account, I still needed to learn more. I sensed that I was very close to receiving an important revelation. I urged Don Ramiro to continue.
""It only gets worse,"" he assured me, ""but if you wish, I will tell you what I know.""
He poured himself a double shot of brandy, took a deep sip, and continued, ""After a long time, maybe a century, the sea-things suggested to the Indians that they give their young women up to them, that they have their children. The beings assured them that these children would be as gods.""
""But, why didn't they just take the young women?"" I interjected. ""I mean, with the power those things held over the Indians . . . ""
""Perhaps they had to come willingly or it would not work."" This was my companion's answer. ""The reality is that I do not know. At any rate, the things from the sea served the others.""
""Others . . . but, what kind of others?"" I prodded.
""Things from . . . from outside.""
He took another sip.
""There are beings . . . or entities that we cannot see, cannot be aware of with our normal five senses, at least not unless they want, or allow, us to be. They exist in other dimensions from those we know . . . or between dimensions. Anyway, they are not subject to the laws of space and time as we know them. The greatest among them on this planet is called Kutulli.""
""That horrible idol we saw at the ruined city . . . you said it was the Great Kutulli.""
""Sí. The city was built by the ancient ancestors of the Indians the Spanish found here. It had fallen into ruins many centuries before those Europeans arrived here with their absurd worship of a crucified and dying god. The people degenerated; they lost their civilization but their beliefs continued. They carried out their sacred rituals of blood sacrifice for many centuries, always certain of the proximate advent of their god . . . Great Kutulli. Are you wondering from where came their cult? They brought it from the place of their origin . . . their legends told of a great continent in the place where the sun rises, the land that now sleeps beneath the sea.""
Ramiro's face took on a strange, distant cast.
""Their god, or his servitors, eventually took notice of this devotion. As you know, the coast is only about forty kilometers east of here. The people often went there to fish, even as they do now. At a spot on the coast known as Naniché, 'Place Where We Meet' in the language of the native Indians, the tribal priests summoned the beings from the sea. This contact confirmed their faith. They now could speak directly with the servants of Kutulli, even as their long ago ancestors had done, according to legend.""
""So, that was the beginning of the cannibal cult?"" I interrupted.
""Sí. Of course, the Indians had performed human sacrifice for countless centuries before, but never in so horrible a way as I described earlier. The sea beings taught the Indians many things, many rituals and magical chants said to be powerful in hastening the return of Great Kutulli and the Ancient Ones."" With this, Don Ramiro became unexpectedly silent.
I took advantage of my companion's prolonged pause to reflect on his words. Obviously, there was a philological relationship between ""Kutulli"" and the ""Cthulhu"" of Lovecraft's tales. Many other similarities were also apparent, too many for my comfort.
At length I inquired, ""Is it not true that the first Spaniards to permanently establish themselves in this region were friars of the Augustinian Order?""
""Yes . . . and no,"" he answered. ""Before the priests came there were others; they came here because they wanted to get away from the Church's lackeys, to a place where they could practice their beliefs without interference. They were all originally judíos, but among them were some who called themselves Cafanes. They were worshipers of a god called El Asuado. Their cult was taken from the writings of the Sepher al Azif. I think your friend has a copy. Several were made locally from the original, which is . . . where no one can lay hands on it. A few specially chosen ones from each new generation of Cafanes were taught to read the ancient writing, a tradition passed along to this day among their descendants, who are known as the Rabana.
""These people, the Cafanes, worshipped the same way the Indians did. They shared in the rituals and sacrifices, and taught the Indians new ones from their book. Everything went well for them until the priests came. They came to convert the Indians, but . . . ,"" he chuckled, ""the first to be sent here were converted themselves . . . when they saw the power of the conjurations from the book . . . and what the sea gods could actually do, something they could behold with their own eyes, not just accept by faith, they believed, and participated in the rituals of sacrifice. For this, they were punished by the Church.""
Now I understood the import of Rousseau's statement concerning the twelve priests who were blinded, mutilated, and imprisoned by the ecclesiastical authorities. A clearer, albeit terrible picture of San Facundo's secret past was taking shape in my mind. Here dwelt a tribe of Indians, probably believing themselves descended from ancient Atlanteans or some such. They had achieved a fairly high level of early civilization, then regressed to a primitive state, maintaining, through it all, a cult dedicated to the Ancient Ones, hoary and abominable entities from beyond all time and space as we humans understand those concepts.
At some later time, still long before their initial encounter with European civilization, the Indians had established contact with ancient and dreadful beings from the sea, beings that were dedicated, or bound, to the service of the Ancient Ones, especially to Kutulli. Much later, some of those same Indians had submitted to sexual congress with the sea creatures, and thus created a race of hybrids better able to function freely in the world of men. Eventually, this strange mixture had come to include certain apostate Jews, who, through their possession of the unspeakable Necronomicon, had come to share beliefs and practices almost identical to those of the Indians.
This ""Kutulli"" must certainly be the same as Cthulhu, who ""In his house in R'lyeh lies not dead but dreaming,"" according to Lovecraft's mythos. Incredible as it all seemed, that mythos seemed to be based, at least partly, on actual belief systems, and far more hideously, on actual occurrences. The implications filled me with a sense of primal horror and dread.
""You look pale, my friend. Perhaps the things I have told you are a little too much for your sensitivities."" Thus said Ramiro.
""The things you have told me,"" I answered, ""even if partially true, speak to man's worst and most primal fears. Merciful God, Ramiro! If this is true, then what implications does this have for the rest of us… for the very concept of humanity?""
That night I dreamed . . . dreamed horribly. I found myself standing before the strange black tower in the ruined city, though now it was not in ruins. The tower jutted up before me into the night sky. A great, gibbous moon gleamed overhead, casting its pallid light on the scene, which was also illuminated by the red glow of massive bonfires. I was aware of motion and the incessant throbbing of some huge drum. Presently, I saw that the tower was completely encircled by three concentric rings of celebrants, squat men and women with broad faces and prominent cheek bones, their straight hair matted and their naked bodies painted hideously from head to foot in red and black. Around and around the base of that menacing black truncated cone they leaped and whirled in their frenzied dance, to the obscene rhythm of that great unseen drum and to the high, monotonous whine of flutes. Some distance away, in the shadow of a hideous black idol, squatted others, hungrily gnawing the last shreds of bloody flesh from bones that I knew belonged to no four-footed beast. At that point I noticed the outermost ring of dancers, the one formed by other celebrants, those that hopped, flopped, and floundered about grotesquely, keeping time with the horrible thunderous beating of the drum and the maddening whine of flutes.
Suddenly, all was silent. An interval of time passed, impossible to measure in a dream state, and the drumming and piping began anew, this time accompanied by a strange low chanting that gradually rose to an almost deafening crescendo. The words, scarcely intelligible in themselves, seemed to reverberate in the very core of my brain: ""Ph-nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn."" Something compelled me to look high up, toward the rim of the tower. In the uncertain light and moving shadows I could make out that the rim was fashioned of a stone different from the rest of the edifice, something shiny and black, like onyx. It seemed to be covered with carvings. As the chanting reached an almost unbearable pitch, I saw several huge black snakelike objects rise out of the tower. Presently, these stretched out far in all directions, writhing in the night sky high above our heads. Then, something of singular horror took place: above the waving tentacles a sort of face seemed to be forming, or materializing. The head, in its upper part, suggested some grotesque parody of the human face, but below the eyes all similarity ceased. The lower part of this obscene visage consisted of a writhing mass of tentacle-like appendages surrounding a black gaping maw, I won't call it a mouth, from which drooled a nauseating yellowish ichor. As I stared paralyzed with horror at the blasphemous obscenity forming above the tower, I saw the hideous eyes look downward, focusing on me!
I awoke screaming in the predawn hours, bathed in cold, clammy sweat. My heart was pounding like the terrible drum which I had heard in my dream.

",False
"THEY were the brawlers and braggarts, the loud boasters and hard drinkers, of Faring town, John Kulrek and his crony Lie-lip Canool. Many a time have I, a tousle-haired lad, stolen to the tavern door to listen to their curses, their profane arguments and wild sea songs; half fearful and half in admiration of these wild rovers. Aye, all the people of Faring town gazed on them with fear and admiration, for they were not like the rest of the Faring men; they were not content to ply their trade along the coasts and among the shark-teeth shoals. No yawls, no skiffs for them! They fared far, farther than any other man in the village, for they shipped on the great sailing-ships that went out on the white tides to brave the restless grey ocean and make ports in strange lands.

Ah, I mind it was swift times in the little sea-coast village of Faring when John Kulrek came home, with the furtive Lie-lip at his side, swaggering down the gang-plank, in his tarry sea-clothes, and the broad leather belt that held his ever-ready dagger; shouting condescending greeting to some favored acquaintance, kissing some maiden who ventured too near; then up the street, roaring some scarcely decent song of the sea. How the cringers and the idlers, the hangers-on, would swarm about the two desperate heroes, flattering and smirking, guffawing hilariously at each nasty jest. For to the tavern loafers and to some of the weaker among the straightforward villagers, these men with their wild talk and their brutal deeds, their tales of the Seven Seas and the far countries, these men, I say, were valiant knights, nature's noblemen who dared to be men of blood and brawn.

And all feared them, so that when a man was beaten or a woman insulted, the villagers muttered—and did nothing. And so when Moll Farrell's niece was put to shame by John Kulrek, none dared even to put into words what all thought. Moll had never married, and she and the girl lived alone in a little hut down close to the beach, so close that in high tide the waves came almost to the door.

The people of the village accounted old Moll something of a witch, and she was a grim, gaunt old dame who had little to say to anyone. But she minded her own business, and eked out a slim living by gathering clams, and picking up bits of driftwood.

The girl was a pretty, foolish little thing, vain and easily befooled, else she had never yielded to the shark-like blandishments of John Kulrek.

I mind the day was a cold winter day with a sharp breeze out of the east when the old dame came into the village street shrieking that the girl had vanished. All scattered over the beach and back among the bleak inland hills to search for her—all save John Kulrek and his cronies who sat in the tavern dicing and toping. All the while beyond the shoals, we heard the never- ceasing droning of the heaving, restless grey monster, and in the dim light of the ghostly dawn Moll Farrell's girl came home.

The tides bore her gently across the wet sands and laid her almost at her own door. Virgin-white she was, and her arms were folded across her still bosom; calm was her face, and the grey tides sighed about her slender limbs. Moll Farrell's eyes were stones, yet she stood above her dead girl and spoke no word till John Kulrek and his crony came reeling down from the tavern, their drinking-jacks still in their hands. Drunk was John Kulrek, and the people gave back for him, murder in their souls; so he came and laughed at Moll Farrell across the body of her girl.

""Zounds!"" swore John Kulrek; ""the wench has drowned herself, Lie-lip!""

Lie-lip laughed, with the twist of his thin mouth. He always hated Moll Farrell, for it was she that had given him the name of Lie-lip.

Then John Kulrek lifted his drinking-jack, swaying on his uncertain legs. ""A health to the wench's ghost!"" he bellowed, while all stood aghast.

Then Moll Farrell spoke, and the words broke from her in a scream which sent ripples of cold up and down the spines of the throng.

""The curse of the Foul Fiend upon you, John Kulrek!"" she screamed. ""The curse of God rest upon your vile soul throughout eternity! May you gaze on sights that shall sear the eyes of you and scorch the soul of you! May you die a bloody death and writhe in hell's flames for a million and a million and yet a million years! I curse you by sea and by land, by earth and by air, by the demons of the swamplands, the fiends of the forest and the goblins of the hills! And you""—her lean finger stabbed at Lie-lip Canool and he started backward, his face paling—""you shall be the death of John Kulrek and he shall be the death of you! You shall bring John Kulrek to the doors of hell and John Kulrek shall bring you to the gallows-tree! I set the seal of death upon your brow, John Kulrek! You shall live in terror and die in horror far out upon the cold grey sea! But the sea that took the soul of innocence to her bosom shall not take you, but shall fling forth your vile carcass to the sands! Aye, John Kulrek""—and she spoke with such a terrible intensity that the drunken mockery on the man's face changed to one of swinish stupidity—""the sea roars for the victim it will not keep! There is snow upon the hills, John Kulrek, and ere it melts your corpse will lie at my feet. And I shall spit upon it and be content.""

Kulrek and his crony sailed at dawn for a long voyage, and Moll went back to her hut and her clam-gathering. She seemed to grow leaner and more grim than ever and her eyes smoldered with a light not sane. The days glided by and people whispered among themselves that Moll's days were numbered, for she faded to a ghost of a woman; but she went her way, refusing all aid.

That was a short, cold summer and the snow on the barren inland hills never melted; a thing very unusual, which caused much comment among the villagers. At dusk and at dawn Moll would come up on the beach, gaze up at the snow which glittered on the hills, then out to sea with a fierce intensity in her gaze.

Then the days grew shorter, the nights longer and darker, and the cold grey tides came sweeping along the bleak strands, bearing the rain and sleet of the sharp east breezes.

And upon a bleak day a trading-vessel sailed into the bay and anchored. And all the idlers and the wastrels flocked to the wharfs, for that was the ship upon which John Kulrek and Lie-lip Canool had sailed. Down the gang-plank came Lie-lip, more furtive than ever, but John Kulrek was not there.

To shouted queries, Canool shook his head. ""Kulrek deserted ship at a port of Sumatra,"" said he. ""He had a row with the skipper, lads; wanted me to desert, too, but no! I had to see you fine lads again, eh boys?""

Almost cringing was Lie-lip Canool, and suddenly he recoiled as Moll Farrell came through the throng. A moment they stood eyeing each other; then Moll's grim lips bent in a terrible smile.

""There's blood on your hand, Canool!"" she lashed out suddenly—so suddenly that Lie-lip started and rubbed his right hand across his left sleeve.

""Stand aside, witch!"" he snarled in sudden anger, striding through the crowd which gave back for him. His admirers followed him to the tavern.

Now, I mind that the next day was even colder; grey fogs came drifting out of the east and veiled the sea and the beaches. There would be no sailing that day, and so all the villagers were in their snug houses or matching tales at the tavern. So it came that Joe, my friend, a lad of my own age, and I, were the ones who saw the first of the strange things that happened.

Being harum-scarum lads of no wisdom, we were sitting in a small rowboat, floating at the end of the wharfs, each shivering and wishing the other would suggest leaving, there being no reason whatever for our being there, save that it was a good place to build air-castles undisturbed.

Suddenly Joe raised his hand. ""Say,"" he said, ""d'ye hear? Who can be out on the bay upon a day like this?""

""Nobody. What d'ye hear?""

""Oars. Or I'm a lubber. Listen.""

There was no seeing anything in that fog, and I heard nothing. Yet Joe swore he did, and suddenly his face assumed a strange look.

""Somebody rowing out there, I tell you! The bay is alive with oars from the sound! A score of boats at the least! Ye dolt, can ye not hear?""

Then, as I shook my head, he leaped and began to undo the painter.

""I'm off to see. Name me liar if the bay is not full of boats, all together like a close fleet. Are you with me?""

Yes, I was with him, though I heard nothing. Then out in the greyness we went, and the fog closed behind and before so that we drifted in a vague world of smoke, seeing naught and hearing naught. We were lost in no time, and I cursed Joe for leading us upon a wild goose chase that was like to end with our being swept out to sea. I thought of Moll Farrell's girl and shuddered.

How long we drifted I know not. Minutes faded into hours, hours into centuries. Still Joe swore he heard the oars, now close at hand, now far away, and for hours we followed them, steering our course toward the sound, as the noise grew or receded. This I later thought of, and could not understand.

Then, when my hands were so numb that I could no longer hold the oar, and the forerunning drowsiness of cold and exhaustion was stealing over me, Weak white stars broke through the fog which glided suddenly away, fading like a ghost of smoke, and we found ourselves afloat just outside the mouth of the bay. The waters lay smooth as a pond, all dark green and silver in the starlight, and the cold came crisper than ever. I was swinging the boat about, to put back into the bay, when Joe gave a shout, and for the first time I heard the clack of oar-locks. I glanced over my shoulder and my blood went cold.

A great beaked prow loomed above us, a weird, unfamiliar shape against the stars, and as I caught my breath, sheered sharply and swept by us, with a curious swishing I never heard any other craft make. Joe screamed and backed oars frantically, and the boat walled out of the way just in time; for though the prow missed us, still otherwise we had died. For from the sides of the ship stood long oars, bank upon bank which swept her along. Though I had never seen such a craft, I knew her for a galley. But what was she doing upon our coasts? They said, the far-farers, that such ships were still in use among the heathens of Barbary; but it was many a long, heaving mile to Barbary, and even so she did not resemble the ships described by those who had sailed far.

We started in pursuit, and this was strange, for though the waters broke about her prow, and she seemed fairly to fly through the waves, yet she was making little speed, and it was no time before we caught up with her. Making our painter fast to a chain far back beyond the reach of the swishing oars, we hailed those on deck. But there came no answer, and at last, conquering our fears, we clambered up the chain and found ourselves upon the strangest deck man has trod for many a long, roaring century.

Joe muttered fearsomely. ""Look, how old it seems! Almost ready to fall to pieces. Why, 'tis fairly rotten!""

There was no one on deck, no one at the long sweep with which the craft was steered. We stole to the hold and looked down the stair. Then and there, if ever men were on the verge of insanity, it was we. For there were rowers there, it is true; they sat upon the rowers' benches and drove the creaking oars through the grey waters. And they that rowed were skeletons!

Shrieking, we plunged across the deck, to fling ourselves into the sea. But at the rail I tripped upon something and fell headlong, and as I lay, I saw a thing which vanquished my fear of the horrors below for an instant. The thing upon which I had tripped was a human body, and in the dim grey light that was beginning to steal across the eastern waves I saw a dagger hilt standing up between his shoulders. Joe was at the rail, urging me to haste, and together we slid down the chain and cut the painter.

Then we stood off into the bay. Straight on kept the grim galley, and we followed, slowly, wondering. She seemed to be heading straight for the beach beside the wharfs, and as we approached, we saw the wharfs thronged with people. They had missed us, no doubt, and now they stood, there in the early dawn light, struck dumb by the apparition which had come up out of the night and the grim ocean.

Straight on swept the galley, her oars a-swish; then ere she reached the shallow water—crash!—a terrific reverberation shook the bay. Before our eyes the grim craft seemed to melt away; then she vanished, and the green waters seethed where she had ridden, but there floated no driftwood there, nor did there ever float any ashore. Aye, something floated ashore, but it was grim driftwood!

We made the landing amid a hum of excited conversation that stopped suddenly. Moll Farrell stood before her hut, limned gauntly against the ghostly dawn, her lean hand pointing sea-ward. And across the sighing wet sands, borne by the grey tide, something came floating; something that the waves dropped at Moll Farrell's feet. And there looked up at us, as we crowded about, a pair of unseeing eyes set in a still, white face. John Kulrek had come home.

Still and grim he lay, rocked by the tide, and as he lurched sideways, all saw the dagger hilt that stood from his back—the dagger all of us had seen a thousand times at the belt of Lie-lip Canool.

""Aye, I killed him!"" came Canool's shriek, as he writhed and groveled before our gaze. ""At sea on a still night in a drunken brawl I slew him and hurled him overboard! And from the far seas he has followed me""—his voice sank to a hideous whisper—""because—of—the—curse—the—sea— would—not—keep—his—body!""

And the wretch sank down, trembling, the shadow of the gallows already in his eyes.

""Aye!"" Strong, deep and exultant was Moll Farrell's voice. ""From the hell of lost craft Satan sent a ship of bygone ages! A ship red with gore and stained with the memory of horrid crimes! None other would bear such a vile carcass! The sea has taken vengeance and has given me mine. See now, how I spit upon the face of John Kulrek.""

And with a ghastly laugh, she pitched forward, the blood starting to her lips. And the sun came up across the restless sea.","LET ME BEGIN by saying that I was surprised when Tussmann called on me. We had never been close friends; the man's mercenary instincts repelled me; and since our bitter controversy of three years before, when he attempted to discredit my Evidences of Nahua Culture in Yucatan, which was the result of years of careful research, our relations had been anything but cordial. However, I received him and found his manner hasty and abrupt, but rather abstracted, as if his dislike for me had been thrust aside in some driving passion that had hold of him.
His errand was quickly stated. He wished my aid in obtaining a volume in the first edition of Von Junzt's Nameless Cults—the edition known as the Black Book, not from its color, but because of its dark contents. He might almost as well have asked me for the original Greek translation of theNecronomicon. Though since my return from Yucatan I had devoted practically all my time to my avocation of book collecting, I had not stumbled onto any hint that the book in the Dusseldorf edition was still in existence.
A word as to this rare work. Its extreme ambiguity in spots, coupled with its incredible subject matter, has caused it long to be regarded as the ravings of a maniac and the author was damned with the brand of insanity. But the fact remains that much of his assertions are unanswerable, and that he spent the full forty-five years of his life prying into strange places and discovering secret and abysmal things. Not a great many volumes were printed in the first edition and many of these were burned by their frightened owners when Von Junzt was found strangled in a mysterious manner, in his barred and bolted chamber one night in 1840, six months after he had returned from a mysterious journey to Mongolia.
Five years later a London printer, one Bridewall, pirated the work, and issued a cheap translation for sensational effect, full of grotesque woodcuts, and riddled with misspellings, faulty translations and the usual errors of a cheap and unscholarly printing. This still further discredited the original work, and publishers and public forgot about the book until 1909 when the Golden Goblin Press of New York brought out an edition.
Their production was so carefully expurgated that fully a fourth of the original matter was cut out; the book was handsomely bound and decorated with the exquisite and weirdly imaginative illustrations of Diego Vasquez. The edition was intended for popular consumption but the artistic instinct of the publishers defeated that end, since the cost of issuing the book was so great that they were forced to cite it at a prohibitive price.
I was explaining all this to Tussmann when he interrupted brusquely to say that he was not utterly ignorant in such matters. One of the Golden Goblin books ornamented his library, he said, and it was in it that he found a certain line which aroused his interest. If I could procure him a copy of the original 1839 edition, he would make it worth my while; knowing, he added, that it would be useless to offer me money, he would, instead, in return for my trouble on his behalf, make a full retraction of his former accusations in regard to my Yucatan researches, and offer a complete apology in The Scientific News.
I will admit that I was astounded at this, and realized that if the matter meant so much to Tussmann that he was willing to make such concessions, it must indeed be of the utmost importance. I answered that I considered that I had sufficiently refuted his charges in the eyes of the world and had no desire to put him in a humiliating position, but that I would make the utmost efforts to procure him what he wanted.
He thanked me abruptly and took his leave, saying rather vaguely that he hoped to find a complete exposition of something in the Black Book which had evidently been slighted in the later edition.
I set to work, writing letters to friends, colleagues and book dealers all over the world, and soon discovered that I had assumed a task of no small magnitude. Three months elapsed before my efforts were crowned with success, but at last, through the aid of Professor James Clement of Richmond, Virginia, I was able to obtain what I wished.
I notified Tussmann and he came to London by the next train. His eyes burned avidly as he gazed at the thick, dusty volume with its heavy leather covers and rusty iron hasps, and his fingers quivered with eagerness as he thumbed the time-yellowed pages.
And when he cried out fiercely and smashed his clenched fist down on the table I knew that he had found what he hunted.
""Listen!"" he commanded, and he read to me a passage that spoke of an old, old temple in a Honduras jungle where a strange god was worshipped by an ancient tribe which became extinct before the coming of the Spaniards. And Tussmann read aloud of the mummy that had been, in life, the last high priest of that vanished people, and which now lay in a chamber hewn in the solid rock of the cliff against which the temple was built. About that mummy's withered neck was a copper chain, and on that chain a great red jewel carved in the form of a toad. This jewel was a key, Von Junzt went on to say, to the treasure of the temple which lay hidden in a subterranean crypt far below the temple's altar.
Tussmann's eyes blazed.
""I have seen that temple! I have stood before the altar. I have seen the sealed-up entrance of the chamber in which, the natives say, lies the mummy of the priest. It is a very curious temple, no more like the ruins of the prehistoric Indians than it is like the buildings of the modern Latin- Americans. The Indians in the vicinity disclaim any former connection with the place; they say that the people who built that temple were a different race from themselves, and were there when their own ancestors came into the country. I believe it to be a remnant of some long-vanished civilization which began to decay thousands of years before the Spaniards came.
""I would have liked to have broken into the sealed-up chamber, but I had neither the time nor the tools for the task. I was hurrying to the coast, having been wounded by an accidental gunshot in the foot, and I stumbled onto the place purely by chance.
""I have been planning to have another look at it, but circumstances have prevented—now I intend to let nothing stand in my way! By chance I came upon a passage in the Golden Goblin edition of this book, describing the temple. But that was all; the mummy was only briefly mentioned. Interested, I obtained one of Bridewall's translations but ran up against a blank wall of baffling blunders. By some irritating mischance the translator had even mistaken the location of the Temple of the Toad, as Von Junzt calls it, and has it in Guatemala instead of Honduras. The general description is faulty, the jewel is mentioned and the fact that it is a 'key'. But a key to what, Bridewall's book does not state. I now felt that I was on the track of a real discovery, unless Von Junzt was, as many maintain, a madman. But that the man was actually in Honduras at one time is well attested, and no one could so vividly describe the temple—as he does in the Black Book—unless he had seen it himself. How he learned of the jewel is more than I can say. The Indians who told me of the mummy said nothing of any jewel. I can only believe that Von Junzt found his way into the sealed crypt somehow—the man had uncanny ways of learning hidden things.
""To the best of my knowledge only one other white man has seen the Temple of the Toad besides Von Junzt and myself—the Spanish traveler Juan Gonzales, who made a partial exploration of that country in 1793. He mentioned, briefly, a curious fane that differed from most Indian ruins, and spoke skeptically of a legend current among the natives that there was 'something unusual' hidden under the temple. I feel certain that he was referring to the Temple of the Toad.
""Tomorrow I sail for Central America. Keep the book; I have no more use for it. This time I am going fully prepared and I intend to find what is hidden in that temple, if I have to demolish it. It can be nothing less than a great store of gold! The Spaniards missed it, somehow; when they arrived in Central America, the Temple of the Toad was deserted; they were searching for living Indians from whom torture could wring gold; not for mummies of lost peoples. But I mean to have that treasure.""
So saying Tussman took his departure. I sat down and opened the book at the place where he had left off reading, and I sat until midnight, wrapt in Von Junzt's curious, wild and at times utterly vague expoundings. And I found pertaining to the Temple of the Toad certain things which disquieted me so much that the next morning I attempted to get in touch with Tussmann, only to find that he had already sailed.
Several months passed and then I received a letter from Tussmann, asking me to come and spend a few days with him at his estate in Sussex; he also requested me to bring the Black Book with me.
I arrived at Tussmann's rather isolated estate just after nightfall. He lived in almost feudal state, his great ivy-grown house and broad lawns surrounded by high stone walls. As I went up the hedge-bordered way from the gate to the house, I noted that the place had not been well kept in its master's absence. Weeds grew rank among the trees, almost choking out the grass. Among some unkempt bushes over against the outer wall, I heard what appeared to be a horse or an ox blundering and lumbering about. I distinctly heard the clink of its hoof on a stone.
A servant who eyed me suspiciously admitted me and I found Tussmann pacing to and fro in his study like a caged lion. His giant frame was leaner, harder than when I had last seen him; his face was bronzed by a tropic sun. There were more and harsher lines in his strong face and his eyes burned more intensely than ever. A smoldering, baffled anger seemed to underlie his manner.
""Well, Tussmann,"" I greeted him, ""what success? Did you find the gold?""
""I found not an ounce of gold,"" he growled. ""The whole thing was a hoax —well, not all of it. I broke into the sealed chamber and found the mummy—""
""And the jewel?"" I exclaimed.
He drew something from his pocket and handed it to me.
I gazed curiously at the thing I held. It was a great jewel, clear and transparent as crystal, but of a sinister crimson, carved, as Von Junzt had declared, in the shape of a toad. I shuddered involuntarily; the image was peculiarly repulsive. I turned my attention to the heavy and curiously wrought copper chain which supported it.
""What are these characters carved on the chain?"" I asked curiously.
""I can not say,"" Tussmann replied. ""I had thought perhaps you might know. I find a faint resemblance between them and certain partly defaced hieroglyphics on a monolith known as the Black Stone in the mountains of Hungary. I have been unable to decipher them.""
""Tell me of your trip,"" I urged, and over our whiskey-and-sodas he began, as if with a strange reluctance.
""I found the temple again with no great difficulty, though it lies in a lonely and little-frequented region. The temple is built against a sheer stone cliff in a deserted valley unknown to maps and explorers. I would not endeavor to make an estimate of its antiquity, but it is built of a sort of unusually hard basalt, such as I have never seen anywhere else, and its extreme weathering suggests incredible age.
""Most of the columns which form its facade are in ruins, thrusting up shattered stumps from worn bases, like the scattered and broken teeth of some grinning hag. The outer walls are crumbling, but the inner walls and the columns which support such of the roof as remains intact, seem good for another thousand years, as well as the walls of the inner chamber.
""The main chamber is a large circular affair with a floor composed of great squares of stone. In the center stands the altar, merely a huge, round, curiously carved block of the same material. Directly behind the altar, in the solid stone cliff which forms the rear wall of the chamber, is the sealed and hewn-out chamber wherein lay the mummy of the temple's last priest.
""I broke into the crypt with not too much difficulty and found the mummy exactly as is stated in the Black Book. Though it was in a remarkable state of preservation, I was unable to classify it. The withered features and general contour of the skull suggested certain degraded and mongrel peoples of Lower Egypt, and I feel certain that the priest was a member of a race more akin to the Caucasian than the Indian. Beyond this, I can not make any positive statement.
""But the jewel was there, the chain looped about the dried-up neck.""
From this point Tussmann's narrative became so vague that I had some difficulty in following him and wondered if the tropic sun had affected his mind. He had opened a hidden door in the altar somehow with the jewel—just how, he did not plainly say, and it struck me that he did not clearly understand himself the action of the jewel-key. But the opening of the secret door had had a bad effect on the hardy rogues in his employ. They had refused point-blank to follow him through that gaping black opening which had appeared so mysteriously when the gem was touched to the altar.
Tussmann entered alone with his pistol and electric torch, finding a narrow stone stair that wound down into the bowels of the earth, apparently. He followed this and presently came into a broad corridor, in the blackness of which his tiny beam of light was almost engulfed. As he told this he spoke with strange annoyance of a toad which hopped ahead of him, just beyond the circle of light, all the time he was below ground.
Making his way along dank tunnels and stairways that were wells of solid blackness, he at last came to a heavy door fantastically carved, which he felt must be the crypt wherein was secreted the gold of the ancient worshippers. He pressed the toad-jewel against it at several places and finally the door gaped wide.
""And the treasure?"" I broke in eagerly.
He laughed in savage self-mockery.
""There was no gold there, no precious gems—nothing""—he hesitated—""nothing that I could bring away.""
Again his tale lapsed into vagueness. I gathered that he had left the temple rather hurriedly without searching any further for the supposed treasure. He had intended bringing the mummy away with him, he said, to present to some museum, but when he came up out of the pits, it could not be found and he believed that his men, in superstitious aversion to having such a companion on their road to the coast, had thrown it into some well or cavern.
""And so,"" he concluded, ""I am in England again no richer than when I left.""
""You have the jewel,"" I reminded him. ""Surely it is valuable.""
He eyed it without favor, but with a sort of fierce avidness almost obsessional.
""Would you say that it is a ruby?"" he asked.
I shook my head. ""I am unable to classify it.""
""And I. But let me see the book.""
He slowly turned the heavy pages, his lips moving as he read. Sometimes he shook his head as if puzzled, and I noticed him dwell long over a certain line.
""This man dipped so deeply into forbidden things,"" said he, ""I can not wonder that his fate was so strange and mysterious. He must have had some foreboding of his end—here he warns men not to disturb sleeping things.""
Tussmann seemed lost in thought for some moments.
""Aye, sleeping things,"" he muttered, ""that seem dead, but only lie waiting for some blind fool to awake them—I should have read further in the Black Book—and I should have shut the door when I left the crypt —but I have the key and I'll keep it in spite of Hell.""
He roused himself from his reveries and was about to speak when he stopped short. From somewhere upstairs had come a peculiar sound.
""What was that?"" he glared at me. I shook my head and he ran to the door and shouted for a servant. The man entered a few moments later and he was rather pale.
""You were upstairs?"" growled Tussmann.
""Yes, sir.""
""Did you hear anything?"" asked Tussmann harshly and in a manner almost threatening and accusing.
""I did, sir,"" the man answered with a puzzled look on his face.
""What did you hear?"" The question was fairly snarled.
""Well, sir,"" the man laughed apologetically, ""you'll say I'm a bit off, I fear, but to tell you the truth, sir, it sounded like a horse stamping around on the roof!""
A blaze of absolute madness leaped into Tussmann's eyes.
""You fool!"" he screamed. ""Get out of here!"" The man shrank back in amazement and Tussmann snatched up the gleaming toad-carved jewel.
""I've been a fool!"" he raved. ""I didn't read far enough—and I should have shut the door—but by heaven, the key is mine and I'll keep it in spite of man or devil.""
And with these strange words he turned and fled upstairs. A moment later his door slammed heavily and a servant, knocking timidly, brought forth only a blasphemous order to retire and a luridly worded threat to shoot anyone who tried to obtain entrance into the room.
Had it not been so late I would have left the house, for I was certain that Tussmann was stark mad. As it was, I retired to the room a frightened servant showed me, but I did not go to bed. I opened the pages of the Black Book at the place where Tussmann had been reading.
This much was evident, unless the man was utterly insane: he had stumbled upon something unexpected in the Temple of the Toad. Something unnatural about the opening of the altar door had frightened his men, and in the subterraneous crypt Tussmann had found somethingthat he had not thought to find. And I believed that he had been followed from Central America, and that the reason for his persecution was the jewel he called the Key.
Seeking some clue in Von Junzt's volume, I read again of the Temple of the Toad, of the strange pre-Indian people who worshipped there, and of the huge, tittering, tentacled, hoofed monstrosity that they worshipped.
Tussmann had said that he had not read far enough when he had first seen the book. Puzzling over this cryptic phrase I came upon the line he had pored over—marked by his thumb nail. It seemed to me to be another of Von Junzt's many ambiguities, for it merely stated that a temple's god was the temple's treasure. Then the dark implication of the hint struck me and cold sweat beaded my forehead.
The Key to the Treasure! And the temple's treasure was the temple's god! And sleeping Things might awaken on the opening of their prison door! I sprang up, unnerved by the intolerable suggestion, and at that moment something crashed in the stillness and the death-scream of a human being burst upon my ears.
In an instant I was out of the room, and as I dashed up the stairs I heard sounds that have made me doubt my sanity ever since. At Tussmann's door I halted, essaying with shaking hand to turn the knob. The door was locked, and as I hesitated I heard from within a hideous high-pitched tittering and then the disgusting squashy sound as if a great, jelly-like bulk was being forced through the window. The sound ceased and I could have sworn I heard a faint swish of gigantic wings. Then silence.
Gathering my shattered nerves, I broke down the door. A foul and overpowering stench billowed out like a yellow mist. Gasping in nausea I entered. The room was in ruins, but nothing was missing except that crimson toad-carved jewel Tussmann called the Key, and that was never found. A foul, unspeakable slime smeared the windowsill, and in the center of the room lay Tussmann, his head crushed and flattened; and on the red ruin of skull and face, the plain print of an enormous hoof.

",True
"It must have been some imp of the perverse--or some sardonic pull from dark, hidden sources--which made me change my plans as I did. I had long before resolved to limit my observations to architecture alone, and I was even then hurrying toward the Square in an effort to get quick transportation out of this festering city of death and decay; but the sight of old Zadok Allen set up new currents in my mind and made me slacken my pace uncertainly.
I had been assured that the old man could do nothing but hint at wild, disjointed, and incredible legends, and I had been warned that the natives made it unsafe to be seen talking with him; yet the thought of this aged witness to the town's decay, with memories going back to the early days of ships and factories, was a lure that no amount of reason could make me resist. After all, the strangest and maddest of myths are often merely symbols or allegories based upon truth--and old Zadok must have seen everything which went on around Innsmouth for the last ninety years. Curiosity flared up beyond sense and caution, and in my youthful egotism I fancied I might be able to sift a nucleus of real history from the confused, extravagant outpouring I would probably extract with the aid of raw whiskey.
I knew that I could not accost him then and there, for the firemen would surely notice and object. Instead, I reflected, I would prepare by getting some bootleg liquor at a place where the grocery boy had told me it was plentiful. Then I would loaf near the fire station in apparent casualness, and fall in with old Zadok after he had started on one of his frequent rambles. The youth had said that he was very restless, seldom sitting around the station for more than an hour or two at a time.
A quart bottle of whiskey was easily, though not cheaply, obtained in the rear of a dingy variety-store just off the Square in Eliot Street. The dirty-looking fellow who waited on me had a touch of the staring ""Innsmouth look"", but was quite civil in his way; being perhaps used to the custom of such convivial strangers--truckmen, gold-buyers, and the like--as were occasionally in town.
Reentering the Square I saw that luck was with me; for--shuffling out of Paine Street around the corner of the Gilman House--I glimpsed nothing less than the tall, lean, tattered form of old Zadok Allen himself. In accordance with my plan, I attracted his attention by brandishing my newly-purchased bottle: and soon realised that he had begun to shuffle wistfully after me as I turned into Waite Street on my way to the most deserted region I could think of.
I was steering my course by the map the grocery boy had prepared, and was aiming for the wholly abandoned stretch of southern waterfront which I had previously visited. The only people in sight there had been the fishermen on the distant breakwater; and by going a few squares south I could get beyond the range of these, finding a pair of seats on some abandoned wharf and being free to question old Zadok unobserved for an indefinite time. Before I reached Main Street I could hear a faint and wheezy ""Hey, Mister!"" behind me and I presently allowed the old man to catch up and take copious pulls from the quart bottle.
I began putting out feelers as we walked amidst the omnipresent desolation and crazily tilted ruins, but found that the aged tongue did not loosen as quickly as I had expected. At length I saw a grass-grown opening toward the sea between crumbling brick walls, with the weedy length of an earth-and-masonry wharf projecting beyond. Piles of moss-covered stones near the water promised tolerable seats, and the scene was sheltered from all possible view by a ruined warehouse on the north. Here, I thought was the ideal place for a long secret colloquy; so I guided my companion down the lane and picked out spots to sit in among the mossy stones. The air of death and desertion was ghoulish, and the smell of fish almost insufferable; but I was resolved to let nothing deter me.
About four hours remained for conversation if I were to catch the eight o'clock coach for Arkham, and I began to dole out more liquor to the ancient tippler; meanwhile eating my own frugal lunch. In my donations I was careful not to overshoot the mark, for I did not wish Zadok's vinous garrulousness to pass into a stupor. After an hour his furtive taciturnity shewed signs of disappearing, but much to my disappointment he still sidetracked my questions about Innsmouth and its shadow-haunted past. He would babble of current topics, revealing a wide acquaintance with newspapers and a great tendency to philosophise in a sententious village fashion.
Toward the end of the second hour I feared my quart of whiskey would not be enough to produce results, and was wondering whether I had better leave old Zadok and go back for more. Just then, however, chance made the opening which my questions had been unable to make; and the wheezing ancient's rambling took a turn that caused me to lean forward and listen alertly. My back was toward the fishy-smelling sea, but he was facing it and something or other had caused his wandering gaze to light on the low, distant line of Devil Reef, then showing plainly and almost fascinatingly above the waves. The sight seemed to displease him, for he began a series of weak curses which ended in a confidential whisper and a knowing leer. He bent toward me, took hold of my coat lapel, and hissed out some hints that could not be mistaken,
""Thar's whar it all begun--that cursed place of all wickedness whar the deep water starts. Gate o' hell--sheer drop daown to a bottom no saoundin'-line kin tech. Ol' Cap'n Obed done it--him that faound aout more'n was good fer him in the Saouth Sea islands.
""Everybody was in a bad way them days. Trade fallin' off, mills losin' business--even the new ones--an' the best of our menfolks kilt aprivateerin' in the War of 1812 or lost with the Elizy brig an' the Ranger scow--both on 'em Gilman venters. Obed Marsh he had three ships afloat--brigantine Columby, brig Hefty, an' barque Sumatry Queen. He was the only one as kep' on with the East-Injy an' Pacific trade, though Esdras Martin's barkentine Malay Bride made a venter as late as twenty-eight.
""Never was nobody like Cap'n Obed--old limb o' Satan! Heh, heh! I kin mind him a-tellin' abaout furren parts, an' callin' all the folks stupid for goin' to Christian meetin' an' bearin' their burdens meek an' lowly. Says they'd orter git better gods like some o' the folks in the Injies--gods as ud bring 'em good fishin' in return for their sacrifices, an' ud reely answer folks's prayers.
""Matt Eliot, his fust mate, talked a lot too, only he was again' folks's doin' any heathen things. Told abaout an island east of Othaheite whar they was a lot o' stone ruins older'n anybody knew anything abaout, kind o' like them on Ponape, in the Carolines, but with carven's of faces that looked like the big statues on Easter Island. Thar was a little volcanic island near thar, too, whar they was other ruins with diff'rent carvin'--ruins all wore away like they'd ben under the sea onct, an' with picters of awful monsters all over 'em.
""Wal, Sir, Matt he says the natives araound thar had all the fish they cud ketch, an' sported bracelets an' armlets an' head rigs made aout o' a queer kind o' gold an' covered with picters o' monsters jest like the ones carved over the ruins on the little island--sorter fish-like frogs or froglike fishes that was drawed in all kinds o' positions likes they was human bein's. Nobody cud get aout o' them whar they got all the stuff, an' all the other natives wondered haow they managed to find fish in plenty even when the very next island had lean pickin's. Matt he got to wonderon' too an' so did Cap'n Obed. Obed he notices, besides, that lots of the hn'some young folks ud drop aout o' sight fer good from year to year, an' that they wan't many old folks around. Also, he thinks some of the folks looked durned queer even for Kanakys.
""It took Obed to git the truth aout o' them heathen. I dun't know haow he done it, but he begun by tradin' fer the gold-like things they wore. Ast 'em whar they come from, an' ef they cud git more, an' finally wormed the story aout o' the old chief--Walakea, they called him. Nobody but Obed ud ever a believed the old yeller devil, but the Cap'n cud read folks like they was books. Heh, heh! Nobody never believes me naow when I tell 'em, an' I dun't s'pose you will, young feller--though come to look at ye, ye hev kind o' got them sharp-readin' eyes like Obed had.""
The old man's whisper grew fainter, and I found myself shuddering at the terrible and sincere portentousness of his intonation, even though I knew his tale could be nothing but drunken phantasy.
""Wal, Sir, Obed he larnt that they's things on this arth as most folks never heerd about--an' wouldn't believe ef they did hear. It seems these Kanakys was sacrificin' heaps o' their young men an' maidens to some kind o' god-things that lived under the sea, an' gittin' all kinds o' favour in return. They met the things on the little islet with the queer ruins, an' it seems them awful picters o' frog-fish monsters was supposed to be picters o' these things. Mebbe they was the kind o' critters as got all the mermaid stories an' sech started.
""They had all kinds a' cities on the sea-bottom, an' this island was heaved up from thar. Seem they was some of the things alive in the stone buildin's when the island come up sudden to the surface, That's how the Kanakys got wind they was daown thar. Made sign-talk as soon as they got over bein' skeert, an' pieced up a bargain afore long.
""Them things liked human sacrifices. Had had 'em ages afore, but lost track o' the upper world after a time. What they done to the victims it ain't fer me to say, an' I guess Obed wa'n't none too sharp abaout askin'. But it was all right with the heathens, because they'd ben havin' a hard time an' was desp'rate abaout everything. They give a sarten number o' young folks to the sea-things twice every year--May-Eve an' Hallawe'en--reg'lar as cud be. Also give some a' the carved knick-knacks they made. What the things agreed to give in return was plenty a' fish--they druv 'em in from all over the sea--an' a few gold-like things naow an' then.
""Wal, as I says, the natives met the things on the little volcanic islet--goin' thar in canoes with the sacrifices et cet'ry, and bringin' back any of the gold-like jools as was comin' to 'em. At fust the things didn't never go onto the main island, but arter a time they come to want to. Seems they hankered arter mixin' with the folks, an' havin' j'int ceremonies on the big days--May-Eve an' Hallowe'en. Ye see, they was able to live both in ant aout o' water--what they call amphibians, I guess. The Kanakys told 'em as haow folks from the other islands might wanta wipe 'an out if they got wind o' their bein' thar, but they says they dun't keer much, because they cud wipe aout the hull brood o' humans ef they was willin' to bother--that is, any as didn't be, sarten signs sech as was used onct by the lost Old Ones, whoever they was. But not wantin' to bother, they'd lay low when anybody visited the island.
""When it come to matin' with them toad-lookin' fishes, the Kanakys kind o' balked, but finally they larnt something as put a new face on the matter. Seems that human folks has got a kind a' relation to sech water-beasts--that everything alive come aout o' the water onct an' only needs a little change to go back agin. Them things told the Kanakys that ef they mixed bloods there'd be children as ud look human at fust, but later turn more'n more like the things, till finally they'd take to the water an' jine the main lot o' things daown har. An' this is the important part, young feller--them as turned into fish things an' went into the water wouldn't never die. Them things never died excep' they was kilt violent.
""Wal, Sir, it seems by the time Obed knowed them islanders they was all full o' fish blood from them deep-water things. When they got old an' begun to shew it, they was kep' hid until they felt like takin' to the water an' quittin' the place. Some was more teched than others, an' some never did change quite enough to take to the water; but mosily they turned out jest the way them things said. Them as was born more like the things changed arly, but them as was nearly human sometimes stayed on the island till they was past seventy, though they'd usually go daown under for trial trips afore that. Folks as had took to the water gen'rally come back a good deal to visit, so's a man ud often be a'talkin' to his own five-times-great-grandfather who'd left the dry land a couple o' hundred years or so afore.
""Everybody got aout o' the idee o' dyin'--excep' in canoe wars with the other islanders, or as sacrifices to the sea-gods daown below, or from snakebite or plague or sharp gallopin' ailments or somethin' afore they cud take to the water--but simply looked forrad to a kind o' change that wa'n't a bit horrible arter a while. They thought what they'd got was well wuth all they'd had to give up--an' I guess Obed kind o' come to think the same hisself when he'd chewed over old Walakea's story a bit. Walakea, though, was one of the few as hadn't got none of the fish blood--bein' of a royal line that intermarried with royal lines on other islands.
""Walakea he shewed Obed a lot o' rites an' incantations as had to do with the sea things, an' let him see some o' the folks in the village as had changed a lot from human shape. Somehaow or other, though, he never would let him see one of the reg'lar things from right aout o' the water. In the end he give him a funny kind o' thingumajig made aout o' lead or something, that he said ud bring up the fish things from any place in the water whar they might be a nest o' 'em. The idee was to drop it daown with the right kind o' prayers an' sech. Walakea allowed as the things was scattered all over the world, so's anybody that looked abaout cud find a nest an' bring 'em up ef they was wanted.
""Matt he didn't like this business at all, an' wanted Obed shud keep away from the island; but the Cap'n was sharp fer gain, an' faound he cud get them gold-like things so cheap it ud pay him to make a specialty of them. Things went on that way for years an' Obed got enough o' that gold-like stuff to make him start the refinery in Waite's old run-daown fullin' mill. He didn't dass sell the pieces like they was, for folks ud be all the time askin' questions. All the same his crews ud get a piece an' dispose of it naow and then, even though they was swore to keep quiet; an' he let his women-folks wear some o' the pieces as was more human-like than most.
""Well, come abaout thutty-eight--when I was seven year' old--Obed he faound the island people all wiped aout between v'yages. Seems the other islanders had got wind o' what was goin' on, and had took matters into their own hands. S'pose they must a had, after all, them old magic signs as the sea things says was the only things they was afeard of. No tellin' what any o' them Kanakys will chance to git a holt of when the sea-bottom throws up some island with ruins older'n the deluge. Pious cusses, these was--they didn't leave nothin' standin' on either the main island or the little volcanic islet excep' what parts of the ruins was too big to knock daown. In some places they was little stones strewed abaout--like charms--with somethin' on 'em like what ye call a swastika naowadays. Prob'ly them was the Old Ones' signs. Folks all wiped aout no trace o' no gold-like things an' none the nearby Kanakys ud breathe a word abaout the matter. Wouldn't even admit they'd ever ben any people on that island.
""That naturally hit Obed pretty hard, seein' as his normal trade was doin' very poor. It hit the whole of Innsmouth, too, because in seafarint days what profited the master of a ship gen'lly profited the crew proportionate. Most of the folks araound the taown took the hard times kind o' sheep-like an' resigned, but they was in bad shape because the fishin' was peterin' aout an' the mills wan't doin' none too well.
""Then's the time Obed he begun a-cursin' at the folks fer bein' dull sheep an' prayin' to a Christian heaven as didn't help 'em none. He told 'em he'd knowed o' folks as prayed to gods that give somethin' ye reely need, an' says ef a good bunch o' men ud stand by him, he cud mebbe get a holt o' sarten paowers as ud bring plenty o' fish an' quite a bit of gold. O' course them as sarved on the Sumatry Queen, an' seed the island knowed what he meant, an' wa'n't none too anxious to get clost to sea-things like they'd heard tell on, but them as didn't know what 'twas all abaout got kind o' swayed by what Obed had to say, and begun to ast him what he cud do to sit 'em on the way to the faith as ud bring 'em results.""
Here the old man faltered, mumbled, and lapsed into a moody and apprehensive silence; glancing nervously over his shoulder and then turning back to stare fascinatedly at the distant black reef. When I spoke to him he did not answer, so I knew I would have to let him finish the bottle. The insane yarn I was hearing interested me profoundly, for I fancied there was contained within it a sort of crude allegory based upon the strangeness of Innsmouth and elaborated by an imagination at once creative and full of scraps of exotic legend. Not for a moment did I believe that the tale had any really substantial foundation; but none the less the account held a hint of genuine terror if only because it brought in references to strange jewels clearly akin to the malign tiara I had seen at Newburyport. Perhaps the ornaments had, after all, come from some strange island; and possibly the wild stories were lies of the bygone Obed himself rather than of this antique toper.
I handed Zadok the bottle, and he drained it to the last drop. It was curious how he could stand so much whiskey, for not even a trace of thickness had come into his high, wheezy voice. He licked the nose of the bottle and slipped it into his pocket, then beginning to nod and whisper softly to himself. I bent close to catch any articulate words he might utter, and thought I saw a sardonic smile behind the stained bushy whiskers. Yes--he was really forming words, and I could grasp a fair proportion of them.
""Poor Matt--Matt he allus was agin it--tried to line up the folks on his side, an' had long talks with the preachers--no use--they run the Congregational parson aout o' taown, an' the Methodist feller quit--never did see Resolved Babcock, the Baptist parson, agin--Wrath o' Jehovy--I was a mightly little critter, but I heerd what I heerd an, seen what I seen--Dagon an' Ashtoreth--Belial an' Beelzebub--Golden Caff an' the idols o' Canaan an' the Philistines--Babylonish abominations--Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin--.""
He stopped again, and from the look in his watery blue eyes I feared he was close to a stupor after all. But when I gently shook his shoulder he turned on me with astonishing alertness and snapped out some more obscure phrases.
""Dun't believe me, hey? Hey, heh, heh--then jest tell me, young feller, why Cap'n Obed an' twenty odd other folks used to row aout to Devil Reef in the dead o' night an' chant things so laoud ye cud hear 'em all over taown when the wind was right? Tell me that, hey? An' tell me why Obed was allus droppin' heavy things daown into the deep water t'other side o' the reef whar the bottom shoots daown like a cliff lower'n ye kin saound? Tell me what he done with that funny-shaped lead thingumajig as Walakea give him? Hey, boy? An' what did they all haowl on May-Eve, an, agin the next Hallowe'en? An' why'd the new church parsons--fellers as used to be sailors--wear them queer robes an' cover their-selves with them gold-like things Obed brung? Hey?""
The watery blue eyes were almost savage and maniacal now, and the dirty white beard bristled electrically. Old Zadok probably saw me shrink back, for he began to cackle evilly.
""Heh, heh, heh, heh! Beginnin' to see, hey? Mebbe ye'd like to a ben me in them days, when I seed things at night aout to sea from the cupalo top o' my haouse. Oh, I kin tell ye' little pitchers hev big ears, an' I wa'n't missin' nothin' o' what was gossiped abaout Cap'n Obed an' the folks aout to the reef! Heh, heh, heh! Haow abaout the night I took my pa's ship's glass up to the cupalo an' seed the reef a-bristlin' thick with shapes that dove off quick soon's the moon riz?
""Obed an' the folks was in a dory, but them shapes dove off the far side into the deep water an' never come up...
""Haow'd ye like to be a little shaver alone up in a cupola a-watchin' shapes as wa'n't human shapes?...Heh?...Heh, heh, heh ...""
The old man was getting hysterical, and I began to shiver with a nameless alarm. He laid a gnarled claw on my shoulder, and it seemed to me that its shaking was not altogether that of mirth.
""S'pose one night ye seed somethin' heavy heaved offen Obed's dory beyond the reef' and then learned next day a young feller was missin' from home. Hey! Did anybody ever see hide or hair o' Hiram Gilman agin. Did they? An' Nick Pierce, an' Luelly Waite, an' Adoniram Saouthwick, an' Henry Garrison. Hey? Heh, heh, heh, heh...Shapes talkin' sign language with their hands...them as had reel hands ...
""Wal, Sir, that was the time Obed begun to git on his feet agin. Folks see his three darters a-wearin' gold-like things as nobody'd never see on 'em afore, an' smoke stared comin' aout o' the refin'ry chimbly. Other folks was prosp'rin, too--fish begun to swarm into the harbour fit to kill an' heaven knows what sized cargoes we begun to ship aout to Newb'ryport, Arkham, an' Boston. 'Twas then Obed got the ol' branch railrud put through. Some Kingsport fishermen heerd abaout the ketch an' come up in sloops, but they was all lost. Nobody never see 'em agin. An' jest then our folk organised the Esoteric Order 0' Dagon, an' bought Masonic Hall offen Calvary Commandery for it...heh, heh, heh! Matt Eliot was a Mason an' agin the sellin', but he dropped aout o' sight jest then.
""Remember, I ain't sayin' Obed was set on hevin' things jest like they was on that Kanaky isle. I dun't think he aimed at fust to do no mixin', nor raise no younguns to take to the water an' turn into fishes with eternal life. He wanted them gold things, an' was willin' to pay heavy, an' I guess the others was satisfied fer a while ...
""Come in' forty-six the taown done some lookin' an' thinkin' fer itself. Too many folks missin'--too much wild preachin' at meetin' of a Sunday--too much talk abaout that reef. I guess I done a bit by tellin' Selectman Mowry what I see from the cupalo. They was a party one night as follered Obed's craowd aout to the reef, an' I heerd shots betwixt the dories. Nex' day Obed and thutty-two others was in gaol, with everybody a-wonderin' jest what was afoot and jest what charge agin 'em cud he got to holt. God, ef anybody'd look'd ahead...a couple o' weeks later, when nothin' had ben throwed into the sea fer thet long...""
Zadok was shewing sings of fright and exhaustion, and I let him keep silence for a while, though glancing apprehensively at my watch. The tide had turned and was coming in now, and the sound of the waves seemed to arouse him. I was glad of that tide, for at high water the fishy smell might not be so bad. Again I strained to catch his whispers.
""That awful night...I seed 'em. I was up in the cupalo...hordes of 'em...swarms of 'em...all over the reef an' swimmin' up the harbour into the Manuxet...God, what happened in the streets of Innsmouth that night...they rattled our door, but pa wouldn't open...then he clumb aout the kitchen winder with his musket to find Selecman Mowry an' see what he cud do...Maounds o' the dead an' the dyin'...shots and screams...shaoutin' in Ol Squar an' Taown Squar an' New Church Green--gaol throwed open...--proclamation...treason...called it the plague when folks come in an' faoud haff our people missin'...nobody left but them as ud jine in with Obed an' them things or else keep quiet...never heard o' my pa no more...""
The old man was panting and perspiring profusely. His grip on my shoulder tightened.
""Everything cleaned up in the mornin'--but they was traces...Obed he kinder takes charge an' says things is goin' to be changed... others'll worship with us at meetin'-time, an' sarten haouses hez got to entertin guests...they wanted to mix like they done with the Kanakys, an' he for one didn't feel baound to stop 'em. Far gone, was Obed...jest like a crazy man on the subjeck. He says they brung us fish an' treasure, an' shud hev what they hankered after...""
""Nothin' was to be diff'runt on the aoutside; only we was to keep shy o' strangers ef we knowed what was good fer us.
""We all hed to take the Oath o' Dagon, an' later on they was secon' an' third oaths that some o' us took. Them as ud help special, ud git special rewards--gold an' sech--No use balkin', fer they was millions of 'em daown thar. They'd ruther not start risin' an' wipin' aout human-kind, but ef they was gave away an' forced to, they cud do a lot toward jest that. We didn't hev them old charms to cut 'em off like folks in the Saouth Sea did, an' them Kanakys wudn't never give away their secrets.
""Yield up enough sacrifices an' savage knick-knacks an' harbourage in the taown when they wanted it, an' they'd let well enough alone. Wudn't bother no strangers as might bear tales aoutside--that is, withaout they got pryin'. All in the band of the faithful--Order 0' Dagon--an' the children shud never die, but go back to the Mother Hydra an' Father Dagon what we all come from onct...Ia! Ia! Cthulhu fhtagn! Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah-nagl fhtaga--""
Old Zadok was fast lapsing into stark raving, and I held my breath. Poor old soul--to what pitiful depths of hallucination had his liquor, plus his hatred of the decay, alienage, and disease around him, brought that fertile, imaginative brain? He began to moan now, and tears were coursing down his channelled checks into the depths of his beard.
""God, what I seen senct I was fifteen year' old--Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin!--the folks as was missin', and them as kilt theirselves--them as told things in Arkham or Ipswich or sech places was all called crazy, like you're callin' me right naow--but God, what I seen--They'd a kilt me long ago fer' what I know, only I'd took the fust an' secon' Oaths o' Dago offen Obed, so was pertected unlessen a jury of 'em proved I told things knowin' an' delib'rit...but I wudn't take the third Oath--I'd a died ruther'n take that--
""It got wuss araound Civil War time, when children born senct 'forty-six begun to grow up--some 'em, that is. I was afeared--never did no pryin' arter that awful night, an' never see one o'--them--clost to in all my life. That is, never no full-blooded one. I went to the war, an' ef I'd a had any guts or sense I'd a never come back, but settled away from here. But folks wrote me things wa'n't so bad. That, I s'pose, was because gov'munt draft men was in taown arter 'sixty-three. Arter the war it was jest as bad agin. People begun to fall off--mills an' shops shet daown--shippin' stopped an' the harbour choked up--railrud give up--but they...they never stopped swimmin' in an' aout o' the river from that cursed reef o' Satan--an' more an' more attic winders got a-boarded up, an' more an' more noises was heerd in haouses as wa'n't s'posed to hev nobody in 'em...
""Folks aoutside hev their stories abaout us--s'pose you've heerd a plenty on 'em, seein' what questions ye ast--stories abaout things they've seed naow an' then, an' abaout that queer joolry as still comes in from somewhars an' ain't quite all melted up--but nothin' never gits def'nite. Nobody'll believe nothin'. They call them gold-like things pirate loot, an' allaow the Innsmouth folks hez furren blood or is dis-tempered or somethin'. Beside, them that lives here shoo off as many strangers as they kin, an' encourage the rest not to git very cur'ous, specially raound night time. Beasts balk at the critters--hosses wuss'n mules--but when they got autos that was all right.
""In 'forty-six Cap'n Obed took a second wife that nobody in the taown never see--some says he didn't want to, but was made to by them as he'd called in--had three children by her--two as disappeared young, but one gal as looked like anybody else an' was eddicated in Europe. Obed finally got her married off by a trick to an Arkham feller as didn't suspect nothin'. But nobody aoutside'll hav nothin' to do with Innsmouth folks naow. Barnabas Marsh that runs the refin'ry now is Obed's grandson by his fust wife--son of Onesiphorus, his eldest son, but his mother was another o' them as wa'n't never seen aoutdoors.
""Right naow Barnabas is abaout changed. Can't shet his eyes no more, an' is all aout o' shape. They say he still wears clothes, but he'll take to the water soon. Mebbe he's tried it already--they do sometimes go daown for little spells afore they go daown for good. Ain't ben seed abaout in public fer nigh on ten year'. Dun't know haow his poor wife kin feel--she come from Ipiwich, an' they nigh lynched Barnabas when he courted her fifty odd year' ago. Obed he died in 'seventy-eight an' all the next gen'ration is gone naow--the fust wife's children dead, and the rest...God knows...""
The sound of the incoming tide was now very insistent, and little by little it seemed to change the old man's mood from maudlin tearfulness to watchful fear. He would pause now and then to renew those nervous glances over his shoulder or out toward the reef, and despite the wild absurdity of his tale, I could not help beginning to share his apprehensiveness. Zadok now grew shriller, seemed to be trying to whip up his courage with louder speech.
""Hey, yew, why dun't ye say somethin'? Haow'd ye like to be livin' in a taown like this, with everything a-rottin' an' dyin', an' boarded-up monsters crawlin' an' bleatin' an' barkin' an' hoppin' araoun' black cellars an' attics every way ye turn? Hey? Haow'd ye like to hear the haowlin' night arter night from the churches an' Order o' Dagon Hall, an' know what's doin' part o' the haowlin'? Haow'd ye like to hear what comes from that awful reef every May-Eve an' Hallowmass? Hey? Think the old man's crazy, eh? Wal, Sir, let me tell ye that ain't the wust!""
Zadok was really screaming now, and the mad frenzy of his voice disturbed me more than I care to own.
""Curse ye, dun't set thar a'starin' at me with them eyes--I tell Obed Marsh he's in hell, an, hez got to stay thar! Heh, heh...in hell, I says! Can't git me--I hain't done nothin' nor told nobody nothin'--
""Oh, you, young feller? Wal, even ef I hain't told nobody nothin' yet, I'm a'goin' to naow! Yew jest set still an' listen to me, boy--this is what I ain't never told nobody...I says I didn't get to do pryin' arter that night--but I faound things about jest the same!""
""Yew want to know what the reel horror is, hey? Wal, it's this--it ain't what them fish devils hez done, but what they're a-goin' to do! They're a-bringin' things up aout o' whar they come from into the taown--been doin' it fer years, an' slackenin' up lately. Them haouses north o' the river be-twixt Water an' Main Streets is full of 'em--them devils an' what they brung--an' when they git ready...I say, when they git...ever hear tell of a shoggoth?
""Hey, d'ye hear me? I tell ye I know what them things be--I seen 'em one night when...eh-ahhh-ah! e'yahhh...""
The hideous suddenness and inhuman frightfulness of the old man's shriek almost made me faint. His eyes, looking past me toward the malodorous sea, were positively starting from his head; while his face was a mask of fear worthy of Greek tragedy. His bony claw dug monstrously into my shoulder, and he made no motion as I turned my head to look at whatever he had glimpsed.
There was nothing that I could see. Only the incoming tide, with perhaps one set of ripples more local than the long-flung line of breakers. But now Zadok was shaking me, and I turned back to watch the melting of that fear-frozen face into a chaos of twitching eyelids and mumbling gums. Presently his voice came back--albeit as a trembling whisper.
""Git aout o' here! Get aout o' here! They seen us--git aout fer your life! Dun't wait fer nothin'--they know naow--Run fer it--quick--aout o' this taown--""
Another heavy wave dashed against the loosing masonry of the bygone wharf, and changed the mad ancient's whisper to another inhuman and blood-curdling scream. ""E-yaahhhh!...Yheaaaaaa!...""
Before I could recover my scattered wits he had relaxed his clutch on my shoulder and dashed wildly inland toward the street, reeling northward around the ruined warehouse wall.
I glanced back at the sea, but there was nothing there. And when I reached Water Street and looked along it toward the north there was no remaining trace of Zadok Allen.
","It is said that in Ulthar, which lies beyond the river Skai, no man may kill a cat; and this I can verily believe as I gaze upon him who sitteth purring before the fire. For the cat is cryptic, and close to strange things which men cannot see. He is the soul of antique Aegyptus, and bearer of tales from forgotten cities in Meroë and Ophir. He is the kin of the jungle’s lords, and heir to the secrets of hoary and sinister Africa. The Sphinx is his cousin, and he speaks her language; but he is more ancient than the Sphinx, and remembers that which she hath forgotten.
      In Ulthar, before ever the burgesses forbade the killing of cats, there dwelt an old cotter and his wife who delighted to trap and slay the cats of their neighbours. Why they did this I know not; save that many hate the voice of the cat in the night, and take it ill that cats should run stealthily about yards and gardens at twilight. But whatever the reason, this old man and woman took pleasure in trapping and slaying every cat which came near to their hovel; and from some of the sounds heard after dark, many villagers fancied that the manner of slaying was exceedingly peculiar. But the villagers did not discuss such things with the old man and his wife; because of the habitual expression on the withered faces of the two, and because their cottage was so small and so darkly hidden under spreading oaks at the back of a neglected yard. In truth, much as the owners of cats hated these odd folk, they feared them more; and instead of berating them as brutal assassins, merely took care that no cherished pet or mouser should stray toward the remote hovel under the dark trees. When through some unavoidable oversight a cat was missed, and sounds heard after dark, the loser would lament impotently; or console himself by thanking Fate that it was not one of his children who had thus vanished. For the people of Ulthar were simple, and knew not whence it is all cats first came.
      One day a caravan of strange wanderers from the South entered the narrow cobbled streets of Ulthar. Dark wanderers they were, and unlike the other roving folk who passed through the village twice every year. In the market-place they told fortunes for silver, and bought gay beads from the merchants. What was the land of these wanderers none could tell; but it was seen that they were given to strange prayers, and that they had painted on the sides of their wagons strange figures with human bodies and the heads of cats, hawks, rams, and lions. And the leader of the caravan wore a head-dress with two horns and a curious disc betwixt the horns.
      There was in this singular caravan a little boy with no father or mother, but only a tiny black kitten to cherish. The plague had not been kind to him, yet had left him this small furry thing to mitigate his sorrow; and when one is very young, one can find great relief in the lively antics of a black kitten. So the boy whom the dark people called Menes smiled more often than he wept as he sate playing with his graceful kitten on the steps of an oddly painted wagon.
      On the third morning of the wanderers’ stay in Ulthar, Menes could not find his kitten; and as he sobbed aloud in the market-place certain villagers told him of the old man and his wife, and of sounds heard in the night. And when he heard these things his sobbing gave place to meditation, and finally to prayer. He stretched out his arms toward the sun and prayed in a tongue no villager could understand; though indeed the villagers did not try very hard to understand, since their attention was mostly taken up by the sky and the odd shapes the clouds were assuming. It was very peculiar, but as the little boy uttered his petition there seemed to form overhead the shadowy, nebulous figures of exotic things; of hybrid creatures crowned with horn-flanked discs. Nature is full of such illusions to impress the imaginative.
      That night the wanderers left Ulthar, and were never seen again. And the householders were troubled when they noticed that in all the village there was not a cat to be found. From each hearth the familiar cat had vanished; cats large and small, black, grey, striped, yellow, and white. Old Kranon, the burgomaster, swore that the dark folk had taken the cats away in revenge for the killing of Menes’ kitten; and cursed the caravan and the little boy. But Nith, the lean notary, declared that the old cotter and his wife were more likely persons to suspect; for their hatred of cats was notorious and increasingly bold. Still, no one durst complain to the sinister couple; even when little Atal, the innkeeper’s son, vowed that he had at twilight seen all the cats of Ulthar in that accursed yard under the trees, pacing very slowly and solemnly in a circle around the cottage, two abreast, as if in performance of some unheard-of rite of beasts. The villagers did not know how much to believe from so small a boy; and though they feared that the evil pair had charmed the cats to their death, they preferred not to chide the old cotter till they met him outside his dark and repellent yard.
      So Ulthar went to sleep in vain anger; and when the people awaked at dawn—behold! every cat was back at his accustomed hearth! Large and small, black, grey, striped, yellow, and white, none was missing. Very sleek and fat did the cats appear, and sonorous with purring content. The citizens talked with one another of the affair, and marvelled not a little. Old Kranon again insisted that it was the dark folk who had taken them, since cats did not return alive from the cottage of the ancient man and his wife. But all agreed on one thing: that the refusal of all the cats to eat their portions of meat or drink their saucers of milk was exceedingly curious. And for two whole days the sleek, lazy cats of Ulthar would touch no food, but only doze by the fire or in the sun.
      It was fully a week before the villagers noticed that no lights were appearing at dusk in the windows of the cottage under the trees. Then the lean Nith remarked that no one had seen the old man or his wife since the night the cats were away. In another week the burgomaster decided to overcome his fears and call at the strangely silent dwelling as a matter of duty, though in so doing he was careful to take with him Shang the blacksmith and Thul the cutter of stone as witnesses. And when they had broken down the frail door they found only this: two cleanly picked human skeletons on the earthen floor, and a number of singular beetles crawling in the shadowy corners.
      There was subsequently much talk among the burgesses of Ulthar. Zath, the coroner, disputed at length with Nith, the lean notary; and Kranon and Shang and Thul were overwhelmed with questions. Even little Atal, the innkeeper’s son, was closely questioned and given a sweetmeat as reward. They talked of the old cotter and his wife, of the caravan of dark wanderers, of small Menes and his black kitten, of the prayer of Menes and of the sky during that prayer, of the doings of the cats on the night the caravan left, and of what was later found in the cottage under the dark trees in the repellent yard.
      And in the end the burgesses passed that remarkable law which is told of by traders in Hatheg and discussed by travellers in Nir; namely, that in Ulthar no man may kill a cat.",True
"
The next few days passed almost without incident. I say ""almost"" because I still had that odd sense of being watched and followed. Occasionally, I caught a brief glimpse of ""fish faces,"" usually alone or in twos, lurking in the shadows or dodging furtively around corners, but as long as they kept their distance I was quite willing to adopt an attitude of ""live and let live.""
Don Ramiro had apparently left on a business trip to Mexico City, at least that's what his wife told me when I attempted to contact him. As for Rousseau, he was gone on some errand to Brownsville, so I was quite alone. The circumstances seemed conducive to renewing my acquaintance with Doña Tencha.
I found the curandera leaving a downtown yerbería, a shop specializing in herbs, candles, potions, and other tools of the sorcerer's trade. When she saw me, she greeted me cheerily.
""Buenas tardes, have they caused you any more problems?""
""No, Doña Tencha, they haven't. They haven't bothered me since that night, thanks to you perhaps.""
""As I said, they know better than to mess with me,"" she laughed, ""so, how can I help you now?""
""As you may have heard,"" I replied, ""I am in San Facundo to study your legends and folk traditions. That's my profession. I am an anthropologist.""
""An anthropophagist? Ha! Then you should get along fine with the frog-faces!""
I was almost as surprised by her darkly humorous word play as by her use of the epithet ""frog-faces,"" so close to the pejorative that I had invented. Her association of anthropophagy with those repulsive people sent a shiver down my spine.
""Believe me, I have nothing to do with eating human flesh,"" I volunteered. ""I was hoping you might be able to enlighten me some about local beliefs, you know, concerning magical and mystical practices."" She eyed me slyly.
""What you really want, güerito, is to know what the frog-faces do up on El Tinieblo when they and their relatives from the sea call up their devil gods, is that not so?""
Her bluntness, and her insight, surprised me even more than previously.
I responded, ""Do you know what happens there? Have you seen?""
""I have seen what I have seen,"" was her reply. ""But,"" she continued, ""to know and to understand, one must see for oneself.""
I remained silent for a few seconds, trying to analyze her meaning. Was she suggesting that I attempt to spy on the rituals, no doubt hideous in nature, on my own, or was she inviting me to join her in such a dubious enterprise?
Presently, I spoke, ""How do you suggest that I accomplish that?""
Once again, Tencha smiled slyly. ""First, one must know when and how.""
""That's logical,"" I responded, ""but when and how can we get started?""
""We?"" Her eyebrows rose in mock surprise.
""Why, yes. I am supposing you intend to show me the way. Otherwise I'll doubtless blunder into some trap they've set up to catch unwelcome intruders. You know, just as happened with the federales.""
She emitted a low chuckle, ""So then, you heard about the federales. No matter, eran una bola de pendejos.""
""Which is exactly the reason I need your help if I am to learn what is going on up there. I don't want to end up a fool, much less a dead fool like them.""
""Well,"" she laughed wryly, ""you are going to need Tencha's help then.""
Doña Tencha explained to me that the strange ones conducted their principal ceremonies at the time of the solar solstices and equinoxes, and lesser ceremonies at each dark-of-the-moon and full moon. She pointed out to me that the eve of the summer solstice, la noche de San Juan, was less than a fortnight away, and this should provide an excellent opportunity to observe the ritual in all its repulsive fullness. She also warned me that the ""frog faces"" and their sea-dwelling cousins would be especially on guard against intruders, as any profanation of the ceremony would incur the wrath of the Ancient Ones, and result in terrible punishments being meted out to the worshipers for their lack of vigilance.
""Take care that you say nothing,"" she warned, ""not to your friend the gringuito, and especially not to Don Ramiro, for he is not entirely worthy of your confidence.""
""Tell me about Ramiro,"" I prodded. ""Is he in any way connected to the strange ones or the sea beings? The reason I ask is that he seems to have profound knowledge concerning their past and their origins. He also speaks almost reverently when he mentions 'Great Kutulli'.""
She quickly traced a sign, not of the cross, with her hand then responded in an uncharacteristically somber tone, ""Ramirito is not of those demons. His blood is free of that stain. Did you know that he is partly descended from the judíos? Nevertheless, his lineage was not of those who followed the book. They were only a few of the many judíos who came here to get away from the priests. The same was true of my people. Only a few agreed to mate with the sea demons, and give birth to monsters. It is from those matings, and later with the judíos that followed the book, that the frog faces come.""
""Then, why not trust Ramiro?"" I asked.
""Because, even though he is not of the demon line himself, he did have close friends among them in his youth. Even worse, he took one of their women as his lover and she bore him a son."" She paused. ""Today he professes shame for what he did as a young man, but his son still lives and runs with the other frog faces. As you know, blood is thicker than water.""
Tencha's words left me with a reeling sensation in the pit of my stomach. I had come to both like and respect Don Ramiro, but the thought of this intelligent and fairly well educated man, whom I had considered a gentleman, taking one of those repulsive creatures as a lover filled me with disgust and loathing. I wondered how he could still face other human beings, knowing that his blood ran in the veins of one of those blasphemous abnormalities.
Tencha seemed to sense my reaction. ""They have a way of messing with one's mind."" Wrinkling her nose, she continued, ""They can get inside your head when it serves them to do so. They can make real fools out of some people; probably that is what happened to Ramirito."" After a pause she added, ""Be careful they don't do it to you!""
Actually, I was far more concerned for the safety of my body than for what the strange beings might do to my mind. I have always prided myself on having a strong will capable of imposing a great deal of mental discipline. Poor Ramiro! He must have been a gullible youth, like so many, seeking new thrills and forbidden pleasures with no thought as to the outcome or consequences.
Tencha and I agreed to meet at the house of her nephew, who lived on a nearby ejido, shortly before sundown on the eve of the summer solstice. She instructed me to wear dark clothing and rubber-soled boots so as to minimize our risks of being seen or heard. In the meantime, she advised, it would be better if we had no contact so as not to arouse suspicion concerning our plans. Later that same day a small boy knocked at my door and presented me with a folded sheet of paper on which was drawn a map showing the way to the ejido and the house of Tencha's nephew. Now there was little to do but wait for the appointed day and hour.


VII

In fact, I made good use of the intervening days and evenings delving into the many books that Rousseau had accumulated in his personal library. Most of these dealt with either the history and folklore of northeastern Mexico or themes related to magic, primitive religion, and demonology. In addition to the foregoing, and the previously mentioned volume of Al Azif, which for some reason I could not bring myself to read, the collection contained several loose leaf binders. One of these was filled with Xeroxed pages, made hastily, judging from the poor alignment, listed as the original 1839 Dusseldorf edition of Friedrich von Junzt's infamous Die Unaussprechlichen Kulten. Another contained several sheets of lined notebook paper covered with handwritten scribbling in Latin and drawings of strange hieroglyphs or sigils, with the legend ""Excerpts from the Liber Ivonis"" noted in English at the top of each page. There were also numerous other pages of notes written in some cryptic script with which I was not familiar. I wondered if those pieces were authentic or merely the spurious work of some crank. In view of the horrible revelations I found in their pages, I sincerely hoped the latter was true.
Presently, I found myself leafing through a crumbling volume titled Relación verdadera de las cosas de la Real Provincia del Nuevo Santander, published in 1783 by a Padre Vicente de Santa Maria, a priest of the Order of St. Francis, who had been allowed access to records of the earlier attempts at christianizing the native Indians of the province.
Father Santa Maria's chronicle covered more than two hundred years of regional history beginning with the earliest European exploration of the province shortly after Cortés' Conquest, and continuing up to the 1770's. The first part of the volume told a repeated story of frustrated attempts at conquest and settlement, failed missionary efforts, unrelenting resistance by fierce and warlike tribes, massacres and retaliations. As I leafed through the heavy volume I came upon a passage that caught my attention. The following is my own translation of the curiously archaic eighteenth century Spanish:


In the year of Our Lord 1627, Don Martín de Zavala, acting as governor of the province by authority of His Excellency Don Rodrigo Pacheco y Osorio, Marquis of Cerralvo and Viceroy of New Spain, dispatched sixteen friars of the Order of St. Augustine, headed by Father Andrés Echevarría y Olmos to the country of the Tahualilos with the object of establishing missions to spread the gospel of Our Lord among those people, who up to then had remained ignorant of it. This group founded four missions on both sides of the San Facundo River and another between there and the Rio de las Palmas, now called the Soto la Marina. After two years had passed, no more word was received from those missions and it was feared that they had been destroyed and the friars killed at the hands of the Indians.
With this present in his mind, and desiring to save the priests if possible, and if not, to avenge them, Don Martin sent a detachment of two hundred men, commanded by Captain Luís Santiesteban y Rojas, to the region of the San Facundo River, where he found the missions abandoned and the priests, with the exception of two who had died, partaking of the brutal and barbarous rituals of the heathens, which included the eating of human flesh in a way that was cruel and worse than inhuman. Seeing what was happening, the valiant captain seized twelve of the apostate friars forthwith, two others escaping in spite of his best efforts to prevent it, and after fighting off the barbarians in a hard battle, carried those priests in chains to San Juan Bautista de Jaumave. From there they were taken to San Luís Potosí and on to the City of México and there processed before the tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, whereby they were made to suffer for their abominable crimes against God and humanity.
As for the heathens, D. Felipe Rocafuerte y Nava, Superior of the Order of St. Augustine for the province, traveled personally to the country of the Tahualilos, accompanied by a strong detachment of soldiers. There he found the Indians to truly be worshippers of Satan the Devil and to frequently summon Satan and other demons to their ceremonies by means of foul incantations and conjurations. Furthermore, he discovered that they often gave of their daughters into carnal union with devils by whom they bore children, also devils. It was also learned that certain Jews, having accepted Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior, had settled in the region and lived peacefully among the Indians without the prior knowledge of provincial or vice regal authorities, but as they professed to be Christians and caused no problems to the Church or government, were left alone. The heathens, on the other hand, had to be dealt with in the severest way for their alliance with the minions of hell. After securing permission from the highest ecclesiastical authority in New Spain, Monsignor Rocafuerte ordered that four hundred Indians and sixty of their priests and caciques be passed through the flames of purification to God's Holy Tribunal.


I felt a singular chill as I read these words written more than two centuries earlier. Here was clear documentation of the things Don Ramiro had told me.
The hot, dry, and windy days of June wore on inexorably. Rousseau returned around the middle of the month. He had been absent about twenty days, and I was beginning to feel concern lest some mishap had befallen him.
""So, what's new Carl?"" I inquired. ""I hadn't expected you to be away so long.""
""I hadn't planned to be,"" he explained. ""I had merely intended to make a quick trip to Brownsville to pick up some books I had ordered. While there, I received word that Doctor Giulio Tarentino from Milan would be speaking at a conference at the University of Texas in Austin.""
""Tarentino?"" The name of a respected colleague immediately aroused my interest. ""I haven't seen him in more than three years. How is he?""
Rousseau paused for a moment; he then replied softly, ""He's dead.""
""But . . . but how?"" I stammered, deeply shocked.
""I traveled to Austin,"" Rousseau explained, "" . . . drove instead of flying. The conference was still several days away, so I planned to spend some time at a resort nearby in the hill country. It's very pleasant there this time of year you know. There was a friend, a young woman, involved, but that's neither here nor there. At any rate, Tarentino wasn't scheduled to present his paper until the third day of the conference. As I suppose you know, he's been doing some very deep research into ancient cults and belief systems that parallels your own . . . ""
""I would prefer to say 'complements',"" I interjected.
""Okay, complements . . . , anyway, he was supposed to present a paper on some research he carried out recently in Brazil.""
""Yes,"" I interrupted, ""he was looking into a certain obscure cult of African origin rumored to still be practiced there.""
""Obscure, but horrible,"" continued Rousseau. ""Certainly not regular Candomblé or Makumba. As I was best able to gather, the cult in question practices some form of demonolatry complete with human sacrifice and God knows what else.""
""From what other colleagues told me,"" I volunteered, ""Tarentino believed the cult to be part of an extremely ancient pattern of beliefs and practices that date back to ancient Mesopotamia and beyond, to the very origins of humanity. In historical times the cult manifested itself in many guises, and in many parts of the world. We find it in the worship of Moloch, mentioned with such abhorrence in the Old Testament, and reflected in the unspeakable practices of the Carthaginians, whose sacrificial rituals dedicated to Baal Hammon caused such revulsion among the Greeks that they would not refer to them directly in their writings. The Roman destruction of Carthage was carried out, in part, to obliterate the very memory of that abominable cult from the face of the earth. Centuries later, we find the same pattern repeated in the mass ritual slaughters carried out by the Aztec priesthood.""
""Tarentino was killed, you know."" Rousseau's words abruptly shook me out of my lecture mode.
""Killed? How . . . ?""
""In Puerto Rico, while on his way to Austin,"" Rousseau stated somberly, adding, ""He had returned to Brazil to attend the funeral of one of his research assistants there, who was also killed under strange circumstances. Ironic, isn't it?""
""How was he killed?"" I asked, dreading the answer.
""In a very strange and horrible way,"" was my friend's reply. ""He apparently was attacked by some animal while walking on the beach near his hotel. Whatever it was, it dragged him bodily into an adjacent wooded area and literally stripped the flesh from his bones. Strangely, there were no identifiable tracks, although there were some odd markings on the beach nearby . . . possibly large sea turtles the police said.""
""I never heard of sea turtles coming out of the water to attack human beings,"" I responded.
""Nor I,"" agreed Rousseau. ""The more superstitious among the locals were talking about the chupacabras, or so I was told.""
My friend's description of Tarentino's death caused me to feel a deep, hollow sensation in the pit of my stomach. It sounded too much like the sacrificial practices of Kutulli's followers. The fact that Tarentino was killed while walking on the beach added another dimension of horror.


VIII

The morning of June 24th dawned hot, muggy, and overcast. I went out early to take my morning coffee and pan dulce, the delicious Mexican sweet bread that I had come to enjoy, at a small cafe near the plaza. Later, I took a casual stroll along the high banks of the San Facundo River. I did not return to the house until almost noon. The only person I found there was Alma, the middle-aged woman whom Rousseau had hired to cook for us. She also came in three times a week to tidy up the house.
""Have you seen Carlos?"" I inquired.
""No,"" she answered. ""The patrón was not here when I came, and I haven't seen him all morning.""
His absence caused me no special concern. Rousseau often came and went without advising anyone. Personally, I knew that he was involved with a local peasant girl, though I had never met her, or even seen the two together.
Actually, I hoped that Rousseau would stay away for a few hours. That would facilitate my preparations for that night's planned adventure. I had no desire to give him any accounting concerning what Tencha and I planned to do. He would want to come along, and I strongly felt that more than three people would be very unwise. Besides, if Tencha found out that Rousseau was becoming too nosy she might want to cancel the whole expedition.
I carefully assembled the items I would be taking along: a mini-video camera and recorder with low light, high speed cassettes, good hiking boots, and a black combat knife. This last item amused me somewhat. Certainly, I have no skill in hand-to-hand combat. Nevertheless, I did not want to go into a situation of unknown danger completely unprepared to defend myself.
I slept restfully for part of the afternoon, a fact that surprised me considering my natural excitement over that night's planned adventure. About two hours before sundown I set out for my meeting with Tencha and her nephew, carrying my gear as inconspicuously as possible in a large all-purpose bag of plastic mesh, of a type frequently used by the ""popular"" classes in Mexico for groceries, clothing, or most anything else. I rode part of the way in a pesera, one of the small passenger vans that serve as public transportation in many Mexican towns and cities, then walked the remaining mile or so to the ejido where I was to meet my companions.
Checking my map, I soon located the house of Tencha's nephew. No one thereabouts seemed to notice me very much, though I am sure that the presence of any stranger, especially a foreigner, in such an isolated place immediately sets the grapevine in motion. Arriving at the house, a small oblong adobe structure with a thatched roof, I hailed the people inside. Immediately, a lean, swarthy man who seemed to be in his mid-twenties appeared in the doorway.
""A quién buscas?, Who are you looking for?"" he demanded brusquely. I asked if he were, indeed Doña Tencha's nephew.
""Sí, lo soy,"" he replied. ""You then, are the Americano she said was coming? Jijos! You do not know what you are getting yourself into, but sit down,"" he motioned to a log that served as a bench. ""Mi tía Tencha will be coming ahorita.""
""Ahorita,"" or soon, turned out to be nearly an hour. An elderly woman, perhaps the young man's mother in law, brought me a clay cup of manzanilla tea while his wife and two small children peered nervously out from inside the doorway. Tencha arrived just as the sun was dipping behind the low hills to the west.
""Have you been waiting very long?"" she asked in a cheerful voice.
""Not too long,"" I lied. ""When do we get started?""
""Not until the moon comes up,"" she replied. ""But we don't want to get there until, maybe, an hour before midnight.""
""You mean to El Tinieblo? I inquired.
""Sí,"" she replied. ""In the meantime Juan Antonio and I have something to do, so try to make yourself comfortable.""
She called out to her nephew, who emerged from the shack carrying a canvass bag slung over his shoulder, and some tools, or perhaps weapons, wrapped in burlap under his arm. I noticed that the bag was moving, as if something were squirming inside. My suspicion was confirmed when a bleating cry, almost like that of a little child, issued from the bag.
The two disappeared around the house, though I could still hear their voices chattering merrily in the distance. Soon, the voices faded in the darkness, and I was left alone, sitting on my lonely log. The old woman brought me more tea as I sat, listening to the sounds of the ejido settling in for the night, and the sounds of the night itself. The sky was still overcast, but I could imagine the stars shining brightly here on a clear night. How we city dwellers lose touch with the simple, yet profound beauties of nature!
Tencha and her nephew did not return until after nine o'clock. By now the overcast had lifted somewhat and a dull moon, nearly full, could be seen just above the eastern horizon.
""Is it time yet?"" I asked impatiently.
""Sí,"" was Tencha's only reply, as she motioned with her hand toward an old Chevrolet pickup with faded light blue paint parked nearby. I sat in the bed of the pickup as we bumped and jolted along the unpaved ranch roads. Tencha and her nephew, who was driving, rode in the cab but, as the rear window had no glass, we were able to converse freely.
""How much further?"" I asked.
""Just a little further to the highway,"" responded Tencha, ""and then several kilometers to the road we take to El Tinieblo.""
After a trip that seemed endless, perhaps because of my extreme discomfort, we arrived at the end of a narrow track that seemed to just stop in the middle of an extensive clump of mesquite.
""We walk from here,"" whispered Tencha, then muttered something to her nephew that I did not understand.
The nephew, Juan Antonio, turned to me and said, ""You still have time to back out if you wish. This is going to be very dangerous.""
""I've come this far,"" I replied. ""I have no desire to back out now.""
I knew that I was not being totally honest in this last statement, but my curiosity now exceeded the undeniable terror I felt at what lay before us.
Juan Antonio produced a small jar containing ground charcoal mixed with lard.
""Smear your face with this,"" he ordered.
I did as was instructed, as did both of my companions. This homemade camouflage paint, together with our dark clothing, made us nearly invisible as we made our way along a narrow path through the night-cloaked brush. Tencha and her nephew followed the path as though they were perfectly familiar with every rock, every abrupt turn. Not so myself. I frequently stumbled or became entangled in the thick chaparral as we made our way with no light other than what was provided by the pale gibbous moon.
Presently, I realized that we were climbing. As we broke into a slight clearing in the chaparral I saw the black bulk of El Tinieblo rising up just before us. More ominously, I saw a dull reddish glow about the top, and seemed to hear a low, steady, but indistinct chanting carried on the wind. Tencha motioned for us to halt.
""It is starting now,"" she whispered very low. ""The ritual will soon begin.""
We continued our slow ascent. Nearly crawling now, we made our way around the side of the hill, gradually, very cautiously, moving closer to the summit. At length, we came to an outcropping of rocks which afforded us a view across the long, flattish top of El Tinieblo.
From this vantage point I could see seven bonfires burning in a more or less circular pattern with a much larger bonfire blazing in the center. Between the outer ring of fires and the central blaze I could see two concentric circles of shadowy figures, apparently squatting on their heels and chanting something in a low, rhythmic murmur as they swayed from side to side in time with their chanting. I started to whisper a question to Tencha, but she placed her hand over my mouth, making a sign with two fingers meaning to wait, then placed one finger to her lips in the universal sign of silence.
Time seemed suspended as we lay there on our bellies, peering out between the rocks and tangled undergrowth that concealed our position from whatever guards might be present. Hours seemed to pass before a howling, a drawn out ululation suddenly sundered the night air, faded, and rose twice again to a nerve shattering pitch. Tencha and her nephew both traced signs across their chests that were not of the cross.
Scarcely had the howling died away that another sound began to reverberate over the hill top, echoing across the dark planes and into the empty night sky beyond, the slow, steady, and deep throbbing of a huge, though unseen drum. The drumming seemed to be steadily increasing in decibels, rising gradually to a deafening crescendo, and was now accompanied by the whining, monotonous piping of unseen flutes.
Slowly, deliberately, the squatting figures rose, swaying, rising, and dipping horribly, in time with the drumming and piping. I could not make out many details of the dancers, though I could tell from their peculiar postures and movements that all but one of them were of the ""strange ones."" There, now dancing, now pausing, but always keeping close to two other figures, I made out the unmistakable form of Ramiro. A business trip to Mexico City? Most likely, his human wife actually believed it!
Presently, I became aware of other figures forming a third circle beyond the outer ring of bonfires. The latter participants in the strange ceremony had apparently come up silently after the drumming had started, filing in from the eastern slope of the hill, the slope that faced in the direction of the sea. I could barely repress a scream when I saw how those shadowy figures danced: they hopped, floundered, undulated in clumsy, hideous time to the music. I gave thanks to whatever gods might be for the night and shadows that partly concealed those horrors from my view.
The frenzy of the dancers increased as the drumming and piping grew in volume and intensity. Howls and other animal noises pierced the night air, and slowly transformed into a more organized sound . . . chanting, unintelligible at first, but gradually taking on a definite pattern of sounds:
""Ph-nglui mglw'nafh Kutulli R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.""
The smoke from the blazing bonfires rose in swirling black billows, forming into a huge cloud that covered the whole portion of sky over El Tinieblo. I could see that the hellish oily black cloud seemed to be writhing and swirling as though driven by some hideous internal will of its own. It actually seemed to be trying to form itself into a shape. In the sky above us, highlighted by the reddish glow from the bonfires, I saw something like a face gradually taking shape, coagulating would be a more accurate description. From the black, bulbous head two burning red eyes glared at the scene below. Tendrils of smoke congealed into writhing tentacles that covered the lower portion of the diabolical face. Other, vaster tentacular shapes reached out into the night sky, completely overarching the hill and surrounding countryside.
The chanting grew louder and the dancing wilder, more frenzied.
Iwwaiy! Iwwaiiy! Ia! Ia! El! Elyon! Aduad! Adua- dua- duado! Ia! Ia! Kutulli fhtagn! Iwwaaaiiiiiiyyy! Ia! Ia!
I lay there, transfixed with horror and fascination, no longer cognizant of my two companions, only of that hellish shape that brooded above us.
My trance was suddenly broken by another sound, a scream, unmistakably human, that seemed to embody the very sum of all anguish and terror. I shifted my vision to seek out the source of that nightmare scream and saw a pale figure, completely naked, being dragged into the circle of celebrants next to the central bonfire. Straining my eyes to discern the unfortunate fellow's features, I was stricken with a sudden sensation of horror beyond my ability to describe. The naked man who was being dragged into the place of sacrifice was my friend Carl Rousseau!
I wanted to call out, to do something, anything, to help my friend. Impossible! I was paralyzed, perhaps with terror, or perhaps simply overwhelmed by the enormity, the utter indescribable horror of what was happening. Rousseau was roughly thrown into the circle before the fire. Immediately, I saw a slimy, glistening black tentacle envelop him and snatch him up before the thing hovering in the sky far above us. The tentacle held the tiny white figure before the red eyes for a moment, as though the hellish entity were examining it. Seconds later, the writhing anemone-like appendages extending in a mass below the eyes seized the pitiable flailing body and thrust it into the gaping black maw that served as a mouth. A scream that was no longer human, of utter horror, pain, and madness, rent the night from far above. I stared, absolutely fixated with horror, as the thing's eyes, two searing red coals suspended in an amorphous blob of bulbous blackness, seemed to survey the scene below, fixing its gaze first on one place, then on another.
The towering black monstrosity seemed to swell in size, taking on more substance and density, as other shadowy entities, impossible to describe, filled the air, flitting and undulating about the enormous black mass of tentacles that I knew must be Kutulli. Without warning the slimy growth of appendages around the mouth spread apart, revealing again the hellish gaping maw that had consumed poor Rousseau. From that dripping hole issued a sound such as I pray no human being will ever again have to hear. I totally lost control of my senses.
I remember nothing of what happened after that, nor do I know what happened to Tencha or Juan Antonio. Even such techniques as hypnotic regression and memory enhancement drugs have failed to make me recall the aftermath of that abominable night. The records show that I wandered onto an ejido many miles from El Tinieblo on the morning of June 30th, nearly a week after the Feast of St. John. The peasants immediately summoned the state judicial police to come pick up the crazy Americano, who babbled incoherently about the ""Ultimate Blackness beyond all time and space,"" and the abominations that dwell there. The Mexican authorities only took time to verify my identity from papers they found on my person and quickly turned me over to American consular personnel in Matamoros. From there I was transported to a psychiatric hospital in Houston where I remained for several months, being discharged when I was deemed stable enough to not pose a danger to myself or others.
In spite of my continued insistence, all efforts to trace Rousseau, or at least verify his fate, have led to dead ends, providing no meaningful answers. Mexican government records indicate that my unfortunate friend renewed a permit to enter the country over one year ago, but no further records of his presence in Mexico exist. State Department officials also confirm that a number of persons were interviewed in San Facundo, but that none admitted to any recollection or knowledge of either Rousseau or myself. Apparently, those officials are dismissing the whole affair as the delusion of a severely disturbed mind.
The administration at the university has been very understanding, placing me on extended leave of absence with pay until I feel fit to resume my teaching and research. My learned colleague Levinson, Dean of the Graduate School of Social Sciences, has even suggested that I take a long vacation to the New England coast, where, he assures me, in such a beautiful and restful setting I would experience a speedy convalescence. Personally, I would not go near the seashore for any inducement.
More than anything else I would like to put the experience, with all its hideous memories and implications, behind me, but I fear I will not be allowed even that solace. The strange sense of being watched and followed, which I felt so acutely in San Facundo, has returned. More ominously, I have several times noticed shadowy hunched figures, figures that walk with an odd shuffling gait. They often lurk near my residence as nightfall approaches. What are they watching and waiting for? I strongly fear that my escape from the horror of El Tinieblo was only temporary.
I sleep with difficulty now, and always with an element of dread, for with sleep come dreams of that horrible other night and what I saw, especially of that last dreadful image that seared itself into my brain at the very moment I lost consciousness. After the hellish black abomination, the Thing called Kutulli, devoured Rousseau, after It trumpeted its hideous screech of triumph to the cosmos, It once again directed its gaze downward, fixing on the very spot where I lay hidden. What I saw reflected in those hideous red orbs, clearly, in spite of the intervening distance and the swirling black smoke, was my own face, twisted and mad with horror.
","
I spent the next few days becoming acquainted with the town and its people. Personally, I did not find most of the locals as reticent as my companion had led me to believe. Actually, many of the people I met during my casual rambles about the town and its immediate environs seemed willing, even eager to converse about their community and its history, in spite, or maybe because of, my rather labored Spanish.
Especially interesting to me, as it turned out, was the fact that many of the local people were descended, in part, from Sephardic Jews who had settled in this once remote region to avoid, as far as possible, direct contact with Church authorities. They had maintained a façade of Catholic Christianity while secretly retaining their Jewish identity. Gradually, they had assimilated with both Mexican settlers and the native Indians, remaining, nevertheless, quietly proud of their Sephardic roots.
Rousseau had apparently overlooked this bit of history, or perhaps considered it of trivial importance. Nevertheless, I viewed this as the most obvious explanation for the presence of the Hebrew Necronomicon in San Facundo. Indeed, if some of those eighteenth-century crypto-Jews had been involved in dark magical practices, as the presence of the book might indicate, then rumors of similar activities among the Indian natives of this region could have attracted them to settle here in the first place.
This informal reconnoitering also brought me my first glimpse of the ""strange"" ones, which I call them for lack of a better name. Truly, Rousseau did not exaggerate concerning their physical oddity; indeed, his descriptions left me unprepared for the actual appearance of those people. They tended to be of medium height, on the average, but this was difficult to ascertain due to their characteristically stooped posture and odd gaits, which seemed to be a sort of shambling shuffle, as if a regular human bipedal locomotion were alien to their normal means of ambulation. Their physiognomies were, however, the items of greatest strangeness. The heads tended to be elongated and the faces very narrow. Eyes were large, roundish, and bulging, giving the impression of being nearly, or totally lidless. Their mouths tended to be extremely wide, reaching well around to the sides of the face, with thin lips drawn back somewhat to reveal gums and teeth. The teeth themselves were of utmost oddity, being uniformly pointed, even back into the molar area. My impression was of the saw-like teeth found in certain species of carnivorous fish or reptiles. The skin of these creatures was of a brownish-grey color, quite unlike that of a typical Mexican or Indian. Its texture, as best I could tell, was rough, almost horny in fact, and there was a disquieting suggestion of squamousness.
My first face-to-face encounter with these beings occurred late in the afternoon of my third day in San Facundo. I was strolling along a side street near the main plaza. The afternoon was hot and I was thirsty. Presently, I came to a small store, little more than a hole in the wall, set in a venerable but dilapidated building of heavy yellowish brick, probably dating from the middle of the nineteenth century. I entered and requested a cold soft drink from the proprietor, a short, pudgy man of late middle age. Scarcely had he handed me the bottled drink when two other men entered. I first noticed the frozen expression on the owner's face, then turned to see two of the ""strange"" ones, only a few feet away. One of them muttered, or almost hissed, something in unintelligible Spanish which sent the fat little proprietor scurrying behind a curtain in the rear of the store. Both men eyed me in a curiously sinister way but said nothing. A moment later the owner emerged, carrying something in a paper sack folded over at the top, which he handed to the nearer of the two men. One of the creatures extended a gloved hand, placed some bills on the counter, and left with his companion as silently as they had come.
I turned to the proprietor, whom I knew slightly, with whose brother I had already conversed at some length the previous day, and inquired, ""Quiénes eran? Who were they?""
""No quieres saber. You don't want to know,"" was his reply.
""But why do you say that?"" I persisted. ""I find your town fascinating and would like to know something about its more, shall we say, unusual side. Obviously, certain of your local citizens have characteristics that set them apart from the average person one meets on the street. What can you tell about them?""
""Yo no sé nada,"" was his curt reply, ""and it would be much better if you did not keep asking. There are things better not known.""
Puzzled, I left the store and continued along the street to the plaza. I noticed that the sun was sinking low and the first rays of what promised to be a glorious sunset were already painting the western sky in a riot of luminous color. I tarried about the plaza for perhaps another hour, until the last tints of purple, orange, and gold had faded into the gathering dusk. A sudden impulse caused me to turn my gaze toward the south, where the streets gradually sloped downward towards the narrow San Facundo River. There, beyond the low roofs of the town, beyond the tree-lined bluffs above the river, and across the rolling, dusk-shrouded plain rose the dusky shape of a distant outcropping. Starkly outlined against the darkling sky, I beheld El Tinieblo. Far more sinister, in view of the incident with the federales, a dark red glow seemed to emanate from its low, flat summit.


IV

The following days proved extremely interesting. Quickly, I found that gaining the friendship and trust of certain people in San Facundo opened doors to many other acquaintances. My own Portuguese-Jewish heritage and knowledge of the Cabbalah would turn out to be advantageous in this respect. I soon discovered that some Sanfacundinos were quite familiar with Cabalistic teachings and concepts, and were eager to participate in discussions with outsiders who were learned in these matters, apparently hoping to enrich their own store of knowledge. Nevertheless, my attempts to learn more concerning the ""strange ones"" were invariably met with evasion or rebuff. In a more disquieting vane, I was starting to develop a sense of being watched and followed.
Among my newly found friends was one Don Ramiro De Leon-Espinoza, a local land owner and businessman whose family had been among the original settlers in the region. One morning, well into my second week in San Facundo, Don Ramiro and myself met for coffee and conversation in a cafe near the plaza.
""You, who are erudite in so many things, what really brings you to San Facundo?"" he queried.
""Really,"" I replied, ""I came on an invitation from an old acquaintance. He told me that, let's say, interesting things have happened here in the past, and some influence from those occurrences may linger on into the present.""
Don Ramiro narrowed his eyes thoughtfully. ""And, of course, that acquaintance of yours is the gringo living in the house of Licenciado Santos Garza, is that not true?""
""Yes, as a matter of fact it is,"" I replied, sensing a certain suspicion in his tone. ""But I am here for purely academic reasons. As I've already told you, I am an anthropologist and the study of folklore is my specialty.""
My companion took a deep sip from his cup, eyeing me over the rim as he continued, ""I understand that, and it's a good thing. Otherwise, we wouldn't be having this conversation. You know, we don't appreciate that nosy bolillo, or Frenchman or whatever he is, prying into things that are none of his business. It is only because of our courtesy that we have not run him off.""
I knew then why Rousseau had found the local people so inaccessible. I also understood Don Ramiro's words as a message intended for Rousseau.
""Now, let us talk of things we both find interesting,"" Don Ramiro suggested enthusiastically, his mood seeming to shift abruptly.
""I know of a site near here that I am sure you will find fascinating. It dates back to pre-Conquest times; it may even be thousands of years old. Our legends have it that the place was already old before the Aztecs, or even the Toltecs. Anyway, it is located on land that I own.""
The prospect of visiting a largely unexplored pre-Columbian ruin truly excited me. ""How soon can we go?"" I responded with almost child like anticipation.
We drove out of town on a paved road for several miles, then turned onto another one of limestone gravel, known locally as caliche, which wound past alternating areas of cleared land and thick, spiny vegetation. We passed several ejidos, communally owned farms, and continued on into rolling uplands that manifested fewer and fewer signs of human habitation. Presently, the road degenerated into a mere track, little more than two parallel ruts running through thickly overgrown and rocky country. Fortunately, Don Ramiro's truck, a Ford utility-type vehicle with four-wheel drive, was adequate to the task.
""Is this area part of la zona maldita?"" I casually inquired.
""You know of la zona maldita?"" Don Ramiro answered with some surprise; then, anticipating my answer, continued, ""Ah sí, your friend Rousseau must have told you.""
""Rousseau,"" I corrected.
""Sí, whatever,"" was his curt reply. After a brief silence he volunteered, ""We are very much into the zona. The ruins that I am about to show you are one of its focal points.""
Abruptly, the trail ascended, topping the crest of a steep rise, then dipped slightly into a broad, almost level expanse. As my companion halted the truck briefly at the top of the rise, I viewed the scene extending out before us. There, jutting up from the thorny chaparral, I saw several low, truncated pyramids, along with what appeared to be a large conical structure and the jagged, broken tops of a number of walls. The structures appeared to be composed of a black basaltic stone, in rather striking contrast to the brownish-grey sandstone or pale limestone shale so abundant in that region.
""This is fascinating, Don Ramiro, but why hasn't this site been opened to archaeological study?"" My academic orientation made the question inevitable.
""I have a very valid reason for not wanting that to happen,"" he replied quickly. ""If the government knew of this place,"" he explained, ""they would declare it, and the surrounding area, a national archaeological zone.""
""But,"" I protested, ""wouldn't that allow for organized research into the true origins and age of the site, the identification of the ancient culture to which it belonged? You, yourself say that it may be older than the Toltec civilization. Why, this might cause archaeologists to rethink some of their present beliefs concerning ancient civilization in Mexico!""
""It would only give government bureaucrats an opportunity to loot the patrimony of our ancestors!"" he snapped. ""They would take the best for themselves, or sell it to foreigners, and put whatever was left in museum store rooms to be forgotten and eventually thrown out with the rubbish.""
I accepted his reasoning, which sounded sincere enough, though privately I suspected his real motive was fear of government confiscation of his property.
We left the truck and proceeded into the brush on foot.
""Be careful of snakes,"" warned my host. ""We have several very poisonous varieties around here.""
We made our way to the largest of the pyramids, scratching ourselves considerably on the thorny vegetation. I also noticed that my clothing suffered tears in several places. The pyramid, actually more of a rectangular structure with steeply sloping sides, rose some fifty feet from its base to a long platform. The platform itself was reached by means of a crumbling masonry stairway on the eastern face of the pyramid. Stunted mesquite and prickly pear grew from cracks in the basaltic blocks, and a tough wiry grass covered most of the platform surfaces, growing from centuries of accumulated soil and disintegrated masonry. Altogether, it was difficult to ascertain if the pyramid had ever served as the base for a masonry temple, as was usually the case with other ancient Mexican and Mesoamerican sites.
The top of the pyramid measured, in approximate terms, thirty feet in width by forty feet in length, and commanded an excellent view of the whole complex of structures. This large pyramid seemed to be situated near the western end of the city, for such the complex appeared to be. The crumbling remains of other buildings, including at least three smaller pyramids, stretched out for nearly three quarters of a mile to the south and east, though the tops of the structures were often barely visible above the thick, stunted vegetation. Obviously, the construction of such a center in this desolate and inaccessible site, with the primitive tools and technology probably available to the builders, had been no mean undertaking.
Of singular peculiarity among the crumbling stone edifices was the truncated conical structure mentioned earlier. As best as I could tell, its diameter was about one hundred feet at the base and it rose to an average height of some seventy feet, though the jagged outline of its rim suggested it had originally been much higher. Exploring entirely around the base, I could find no sign of a stairway or portal, or any other means of ingress or egress. Strangely, I noticed, the tower was devoid of any vegetation, with the exception of a sickly lichenous or fungous growth of a putrid grayish-green hue that spread in irregular patches up the sides of the structure. Also, notably absent were birds and bird droppings, nor were any of the swift striped-back skinks that abound in the area to be seen darting about the sloping sides of that mysterious black tower.
I abruptly noticed that Don Ramiro was nowhere about. Concerned that he had fallen, or otherwise injured himself in the crumbling stonework, I called out to him. After a few moments I heard his voice some distance away.
""Aquí estoy, aquí donde el ídolo.""
I was taken by surprise as I had not seen any idol in the place. After a few minutes of searching I found my host, standing with an awed expression before a large carven figure of black stone.
The figure itself was about fifteen feet tall, and at first glance appeared to be a representation of some deity fashioned in the typical, highly stylized Mesoamerican mode. Closer examination, however, sent me reeling with revulsion. The ""god,"" or whatever it was intended to represent, was actually some sort of fantastic sea creature, incorporating in its tentacled visage a grotesque parody of a face. Worst of all, the monstrosity was depicted employing its facial tentacles to force a human figure into its gaping, toothy mouth.
""What is it?"" I asked.
""The Great Kutulli,"" he replied, in a voice that sounded almost reverent.
The day was becoming late. Noticing this, Ramiro motioned in the direction of the truck.
""Time to go,"" he said without further comment. I felt fully in agreement. The prospect of remaining in this place after dark filled me with an overpowering dread . . . a dread I could scarcely explain at the moment.
The long, bumpy trip back to San Facundo was made in silence. My companion seemed unusually pensive and answered my few inquiries in grunted monosyllables. As for myself, I simply felt too overwhelmed, too overloaded with unanswered questions to give voice to my thoughts.
We reached town just after nightfall. My host dropped me off near Rousseau's place, though I still had to walk a long block up a steep, dark street to reach the house. In the gathering gloom I discerned several shadowy figures approaching me. For some inexplicable reason, call it primal instinct, I realized that these figures meant extreme danger, for me, now! I broke for the house, running as fast as my unaccustomed legs would carry me. Though I did not look back, I fully sensed the close pursuit of my assailants, could almost feel their searing breath on my neck. The dim light from Rousseau's study still seemed infinitely far away, and I caught a brief glimpse of something running, or loping just to my right side, almost close enough to grab me. I cried out, an incoherent scream of desperation and terror.
""Ay basta! Lárguense a la chingada pinches demonios encartados! Vámonos! Asquerosos chingados!""
I didn't see who was yelling, threatening, and cursing in a coarse female voice, and at the top of her lungs. I merely fell, exhausted, on my hands and knees. Presently, I felt a strong, thick arm help me back to my feet.
""Ay, pobre güerito. Por tantito te llevan a la chingada esos pendejos!""
I stared into the face of a copper-skinned woman of uncertain age, not unusually tall, but powerfully built, with a stocky, heavy-boned body. Her rugged Indian features and small bright eyes somehow inspired confidence.
""Who were they?"" I panted.
""They were nobody that you ever want to meet,"" she replied, adding, ""They know better than to mess with me; I know ways to make them curse their mothers for bringing them into this world. Ha!""
""But señora, who are you?"" I asked, beginning to catch my breath.
""Everyone calls me Doña Tencha. They say that I'm a bruja, a witch.""
""Are you?"" I asked, wondering.
""What do you think?"" she responded, half laughing. ""Ha, ha! Take care."" With that, she disappeared into a dark cluster of shacks situated just off the street.
I arrived at the house and fumbled for my key. Before I could insert it in the lock, Rousseau unexpectedly opened the door.
""My God, Shapiro! What happened? You look like you've seen the devil himself!""
""Maybe I have, or a close enough facsimile,"" I answered.
""But . . . but, how . . . what happened?""
Obviously he was taken aback by my state at that moment. I proceeded to give him as complete an account as possible of my recent peril.
Rousseau pondered for a moment, as if trying to make some sense out of what I was saying, then offered, ""I don't think it was a matter of common street ruffians. You say that they seemed to be terrified of the woman . . . what's her name? Tencha, did you say?""
""Yes, she said that's what people call her.""
""Funny,"" he replied. ""I had heard something about some kind of witch or sorceress living near here. I don't know why I never looked her up. She might be a good source of information.""
""She probably saved my life,"" I responded, rubbing my forehead.
My companion seemed to reflect for a moment. ""Do you think it was the freaks?""
""I'm sure it was several of them!"" I shot back, somewhat annoyed at his seeming failure to grasp the significance of the matter.
""And you say they were terrified of her?""
""That's what I said; but wait, you know, I heard her call them 'demonios encartados'.""
""Hybrid devils? Maybe just an epithet, but . . . ""
I cut off Rousseau's reply in mid-sentence. ""Did you ever read any of Lovecraft's works Carl?""
He shook his head.
""In several of his stories referring to the 'Cthulhu Mythos',"" I continued, ""Lovecraft described hybrid beings resulting from unions between certain strange sea creatures, apparently some sort of survival from an earlier, pre-human age, and renegade humans. Those hybrid beings were dedicated to the restoration to power of the extra-dimensional entity Cthulhu and his kind, called the 'Ancient Ones,' on our own earthly plane of existence. At least that's how the stories went.""
Rousseau's face manifested a mixture of revulsion and astonishment.
""So . . . you believe these freakish-looking people we see around here are some kind of alien hybrid? Good God, Shapiro . . . do you realize the implications of what you're suggesting?""
""Unfortunately, I do,"" I replied.
Now I knew, beyond any doubt, that my strange sense of being watched and followed reflected a very real danger. Quite in violation of my normal adherence to Ivy League conventions of ""political correctness,"" I was now applying the label of ""fish faces"" to the repellent beings that lurked about in the late afternoon shadows and darkness of night. After all, those creatures definitely had it in for us, or at least for me. Strangely, Rousseau had never been accosted, or even approached by any of the oddities, which seemed difficult to explain considering the length of his stay in San Facundo.


V

The following afternoon I met with Don Ramiro at a quiet local tavern. After providing him with an account of the previous night's events I queried, ""What do you think it means Don Ramiro?""
""Pues, I think it means you had better be careful,"" he replied, lifting his eyebrows in a kind of facial shrug.
""But, why do you think they jumped me while they've left my friend Rousseau alone all this time? Also, Don Ramiro, what can you tell me about those people, and who is Doña Tencha?""
""Please Profe, one question at a time. Now you ask why they attacked you and not Rou . . . whatever his name is; well, maybe it is because you have come too close to certain things that are better left alone. As for Tencha, she is a curandera, a folk healer who, maybe, practices a little black magic now and then.""
Unsatisfied, I continued to prod him.
""And the creatures themselves, who, or what are they?""
He paused for a long moment, as if uncertain how to answer my question. ""They go back a long time,"" he half whispered, then continued, ""The indios here, they practiced strange rituals, things that so horrified the priests that they killed hundreds, burned them alive, to cleanse the land of the abomination. That is how they saw it.""
""But the strange ones . . . ,"" I interrupted, scarcely able to contain my curiosity.
""Have patience, my friend; I am coming to that.""
He glanced quickly over his shoulder and leaned forward, obviously not wishing to be overheard. In a low voice he continued, ""This will sound incredible to you, with your scientific training, but the indios were in contact with very ancient beings, monstrous things from the sea."" My companion stopped momentarily, seeming to gage my reaction, then resumed his story. ""Those things, animals or devils, or whatever they were, demanded constant sacrifices, human sacrifices. They taught the Indians to do horrible things, to devour the sacrificial victims the same way that they liked to do it . . . alive and conscious!""
I recoiled at this. The very idea of a living, conscious human being torn apart and devoured by savages and the abominations they worshipped, while the poor wretch was aware of the hideous thing being done to him, seemed horrible beyond all imagining.
""They showed them how to tear the flesh away without damaging the main blood vessels or nerves. The victim would live on for hours while the flesh was being ripped from his bones. They did it with their teeth you know. That is how the sea demons taught them to do it. The pain suffered by the victim, along with his gradually ebbing life force, served as a kind of food for the others.""
Though gagging from my companion's horrible account, I still needed to learn more. I sensed that I was very close to receiving an important revelation. I urged Don Ramiro to continue.
""It only gets worse,"" he assured me, ""but if you wish, I will tell you what I know.""
He poured himself a double shot of brandy, took a deep sip, and continued, ""After a long time, maybe a century, the sea-things suggested to the Indians that they give their young women up to them, that they have their children. The beings assured them that these children would be as gods.""
""But, why didn't they just take the young women?"" I interjected. ""I mean, with the power those things held over the Indians . . . ""
""Perhaps they had to come willingly or it would not work."" This was my companion's answer. ""The reality is that I do not know. At any rate, the things from the sea served the others.""
""Others . . . but, what kind of others?"" I prodded.
""Things from . . . from outside.""
He took another sip.
""There are beings . . . or entities that we cannot see, cannot be aware of with our normal five senses, at least not unless they want, or allow, us to be. They exist in other dimensions from those we know . . . or between dimensions. Anyway, they are not subject to the laws of space and time as we know them. The greatest among them on this planet is called Kutulli.""
""That horrible idol we saw at the ruined city . . . you said it was the Great Kutulli.""
""Sí. The city was built by the ancient ancestors of the Indians the Spanish found here. It had fallen into ruins many centuries before those Europeans arrived here with their absurd worship of a crucified and dying god. The people degenerated; they lost their civilization but their beliefs continued. They carried out their sacred rituals of blood sacrifice for many centuries, always certain of the proximate advent of their god . . . Great Kutulli. Are you wondering from where came their cult? They brought it from the place of their origin . . . their legends told of a great continent in the place where the sun rises, the land that now sleeps beneath the sea.""
Ramiro's face took on a strange, distant cast.
""Their god, or his servitors, eventually took notice of this devotion. As you know, the coast is only about forty kilometers east of here. The people often went there to fish, even as they do now. At a spot on the coast known as Naniché, 'Place Where We Meet' in the language of the native Indians, the tribal priests summoned the beings from the sea. This contact confirmed their faith. They now could speak directly with the servants of Kutulli, even as their long ago ancestors had done, according to legend.""
""So, that was the beginning of the cannibal cult?"" I interrupted.
""Sí. Of course, the Indians had performed human sacrifice for countless centuries before, but never in so horrible a way as I described earlier. The sea beings taught the Indians many things, many rituals and magical chants said to be powerful in hastening the return of Great Kutulli and the Ancient Ones."" With this, Don Ramiro became unexpectedly silent.
I took advantage of my companion's prolonged pause to reflect on his words. Obviously, there was a philological relationship between ""Kutulli"" and the ""Cthulhu"" of Lovecraft's tales. Many other similarities were also apparent, too many for my comfort.
At length I inquired, ""Is it not true that the first Spaniards to permanently establish themselves in this region were friars of the Augustinian Order?""
""Yes . . . and no,"" he answered. ""Before the priests came there were others; they came here because they wanted to get away from the Church's lackeys, to a place where they could practice their beliefs without interference. They were all originally judíos, but among them were some who called themselves Cafanes. They were worshipers of a god called El Asuado. Their cult was taken from the writings of the Sepher al Azif. I think your friend has a copy. Several were made locally from the original, which is . . . where no one can lay hands on it. A few specially chosen ones from each new generation of Cafanes were taught to read the ancient writing, a tradition passed along to this day among their descendants, who are known as the Rabana.
""These people, the Cafanes, worshipped the same way the Indians did. They shared in the rituals and sacrifices, and taught the Indians new ones from their book. Everything went well for them until the priests came. They came to convert the Indians, but . . . ,"" he chuckled, ""the first to be sent here were converted themselves . . . when they saw the power of the conjurations from the book . . . and what the sea gods could actually do, something they could behold with their own eyes, not just accept by faith, they believed, and participated in the rituals of sacrifice. For this, they were punished by the Church.""
Now I understood the import of Rousseau's statement concerning the twelve priests who were blinded, mutilated, and imprisoned by the ecclesiastical authorities. A clearer, albeit terrible picture of San Facundo's secret past was taking shape in my mind. Here dwelt a tribe of Indians, probably believing themselves descended from ancient Atlanteans or some such. They had achieved a fairly high level of early civilization, then regressed to a primitive state, maintaining, through it all, a cult dedicated to the Ancient Ones, hoary and abominable entities from beyond all time and space as we humans understand those concepts.
At some later time, still long before their initial encounter with European civilization, the Indians had established contact with ancient and dreadful beings from the sea, beings that were dedicated, or bound, to the service of the Ancient Ones, especially to Kutulli. Much later, some of those same Indians had submitted to sexual congress with the sea creatures, and thus created a race of hybrids better able to function freely in the world of men. Eventually, this strange mixture had come to include certain apostate Jews, who, through their possession of the unspeakable Necronomicon, had come to share beliefs and practices almost identical to those of the Indians.
This ""Kutulli"" must certainly be the same as Cthulhu, who ""In his house in R'lyeh lies not dead but dreaming,"" according to Lovecraft's mythos. Incredible as it all seemed, that mythos seemed to be based, at least partly, on actual belief systems, and far more hideously, on actual occurrences. The implications filled me with a sense of primal horror and dread.
""You look pale, my friend. Perhaps the things I have told you are a little too much for your sensitivities."" Thus said Ramiro.
""The things you have told me,"" I answered, ""even if partially true, speak to man's worst and most primal fears. Merciful God, Ramiro! If this is true, then what implications does this have for the rest of us… for the very concept of humanity?""
That night I dreamed . . . dreamed horribly. I found myself standing before the strange black tower in the ruined city, though now it was not in ruins. The tower jutted up before me into the night sky. A great, gibbous moon gleamed overhead, casting its pallid light on the scene, which was also illuminated by the red glow of massive bonfires. I was aware of motion and the incessant throbbing of some huge drum. Presently, I saw that the tower was completely encircled by three concentric rings of celebrants, squat men and women with broad faces and prominent cheek bones, their straight hair matted and their naked bodies painted hideously from head to foot in red and black. Around and around the base of that menacing black truncated cone they leaped and whirled in their frenzied dance, to the obscene rhythm of that great unseen drum and to the high, monotonous whine of flutes. Some distance away, in the shadow of a hideous black idol, squatted others, hungrily gnawing the last shreds of bloody flesh from bones that I knew belonged to no four-footed beast. At that point I noticed the outermost ring of dancers, the one formed by other celebrants, those that hopped, flopped, and floundered about grotesquely, keeping time with the horrible thunderous beating of the drum and the maddening whine of flutes.
Suddenly, all was silent. An interval of time passed, impossible to measure in a dream state, and the drumming and piping began anew, this time accompanied by a strange low chanting that gradually rose to an almost deafening crescendo. The words, scarcely intelligible in themselves, seemed to reverberate in the very core of my brain: ""Ph-nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn."" Something compelled me to look high up, toward the rim of the tower. In the uncertain light and moving shadows I could make out that the rim was fashioned of a stone different from the rest of the edifice, something shiny and black, like onyx. It seemed to be covered with carvings. As the chanting reached an almost unbearable pitch, I saw several huge black snakelike objects rise out of the tower. Presently, these stretched out far in all directions, writhing in the night sky high above our heads. Then, something of singular horror took place: above the waving tentacles a sort of face seemed to be forming, or materializing. The head, in its upper part, suggested some grotesque parody of the human face, but below the eyes all similarity ceased. The lower part of this obscene visage consisted of a writhing mass of tentacle-like appendages surrounding a black gaping maw, I won't call it a mouth, from which drooled a nauseating yellowish ichor. As I stared paralyzed with horror at the blasphemous obscenity forming above the tower, I saw the hideous eyes look downward, focusing on me!
I awoke screaming in the predawn hours, bathed in cold, clammy sweat. My heart was pounding like the terrible drum which I had heard in my dream.

",True
"Shortly before ten the next morning I stood with one small valise in front of Hammond's Drug Store in old Market Square waiting for the Innsmouth bus. As the hour for its arrival drew near I noticed a general drift of the loungers to other places up the street, or to the Ideal Lunch across the square. Evidently the ticket-agent had not exaggerated the dislike which local People bore toward Innsmouth and its denizens. In a few moments a small motor-coach of extreme decrepitude and dirty grey colour rattled down State Street, made a turn, and drew up at the curb beside me. I felt immediately that it was the right one; a guess which the half-illegible sign on the windshield--Arkham-Innsmouth-Newburyport--soon verified.
There were only three passengers--dark, unkempt men of sullen visage and somewhat youthful cast--and when the vehicle stopped they clumsily shambled out and began walking up State Street in a silent, almost furtive fashion. The driver also alighted, and I watched him as he went into the drug store to make some purchase. This, I reflected, must be the Joe Sargent mentioned by the ticket-agent; and even before I noticed any details there spread over me a wave of spontaneous aversion which could be neither checked nor explained. It suddenly struck me as very natural that the local people should not wish to ride on a bus owned and driven by this man, or to visit any oftener than possible the habitat of such a man and his kinsfolk.
When the driver came out of the store I looked at him more carefully and tried to determine the source of my evil impression. He was a thin, stoop-shouldered man not much under six feet tall, dressed in shabby blue civilian clothes and wearing a frayed golf cap. His age was perhaps thirty-five, but the odd, deep creases in the sides of his neck made him seem older when one did not study his dull, expressionless face. He had a narrow head, bulging, watery-blue eyes that seemed never to wink, a flat nose, a receding forehead and chin, and singularly undeveloped ears. His long thick lip and coarse-pored, greyish cheeks seemed almost beardless except for some sparse yellow hairs that straggled and curled in irregular patches; and in places the surface seemed queerly irregular, as if peeling from some cutaneous disease. His hands were large and heavily veined, and had a very unusual greyish-blue tinge. The fingers were strikingly short in proportion to the rest of the structure, and seemed to have a tendency to curl closely into the huge palm. As he walked toward the bus I observed his peculiarly shambling gait and saw that his feet were inordinately immense. The more I studied them the more I wondered how he could buy any shoes to fit them.
A certain greasiness about the fellow increased my dislike. He was evidently given to working or lounging around the fish docks, and carried with him much of their characteristic smell. Just what foreign blood was in him I could not even guess. His oddities certainly did not look Asiatic, Polynesian, Levantine or negroid, yet I could see why the people found him alien. I myself would have thought of biological degeneration rather than alienage.
I was sorry when I saw there would be no other passengers on the bus. Somehow I did not like the idea of riding alone with this driver. But as leaving time obviously approached I conquered my qualms and followed the man aboard, extending him a dollar bill and murmuring the single word ""Innsmouth."" He looked curiously at me for a second as he returned forty cents change without speaking. I took a seat far behind him, but on the same side of the bus, since I wished to watch the shore during the journey.
At length the decrepit vehicle stared with a jerk, and rattled noisily past the old brick buildings of State Street amidst a cloud of vapour from the exhaust. Glancing at the people on the sidewalks, I thought I detected in them a curious wish to avoid looking at the bus--or at least a wish to avoid seeming to look at it. Then we turned to the left into High Street, where the going was smoother; flying by stately old mansions of the early republic and still older colonial farmhouses, passing the Lower Green and Parker River, and finally emerging into a long, monotonous stretch of open shore country.
The day was warm and sunny, but the landscape of sand and sedge-grass, and stunted shrubbery became more and desolate as we proceeded. Out the window I could see the blue water and the sandy line of Plum Island, and we presently drew very near the beach as our narrow road veered off from the main highway to Rowley and Ipswich. There were no visible houses, and I could tell by the state of the road that traffic was very light hereabouts. The weather-worn telephone poles carried only two wires. Now and then we crossed crude wooden bridges over tidal creeks that wound far inland and promoted the general isolation of the region.
Once in a while I noticed dead stumps and crumbling foundation-walls above the drifting sand, and recalled the old tradition quoted in one of the histories I had read, that this was once a fertile and thickly-settled countryside. The change, it was said, came simultaneously with the Innsmouth epidemic of l846, and was thought by simple folk to have a dark connection with hidden forces of evil. Actually, it was caused by the unwise cutting of woodlands near the shore, which robbed the soil of the best protection and opened the way for waves of wind-blown sand.
At last we lost sight of Plum Island and saw the vast expanse of the open Atlantic on our left. Our narrow course began to climb steeply, and I felt a singular sense of disquiet in looking at the lonely crest ahead where the rutted road-way met the sky. It was as if the bus were about to keep on in its ascent, leaving the sane earth altogether and merging with the unknown arcana of upper air and cryptical sky. The smell of the sea took on ominous implications, and the silent driver's bent, rigid back and narrow head became more and more hateful. As I looked at him I saw that the back of his head was almost as hairless as his face, having only a few straggling yellow strands upon a grey scabrous surface.
Then we reached the crest and beheld the outspread valley beyond, where the Manuxet joins the sea just north of the long line of cliffs that culminate in Kingsport Head and veer off toward Cape Ann. On the far misty horizon I could just make out the dizzy profile of the Head, topped by the queer ancient house of which so many legends are told; but for the moment all my attention was captured by the nearer panorama just below me. I had, I realized, come face to face with rumour-shadowed Innsmouth.
It was a town of wide extent and dense construction, yet one with a portentous dearth of visible life. From the tangle of chimney-pots scarcely a wisp of smoke came, and the three tall steeples loomed stark and unpainted against the seaward horizon. One of them was crumbling down at the top, and in that and another there were only black gaping holes where clock-dials should have been. The vast huddle of sagging gambrel roofs and peaked gables conveyed with offensive clearness the idea of wormy decay, and as we approached along the now descending road I could see that many roofs had wholly caved in. There were some large square Georgian houses, too, with hipped roofs, cupolas, and railed ""widow's walks."" These were mostly well back from the water, and one or two seemed to be in moderately sound condition. Stretching inland from among them I saw the rusted, grass-grown line of the abandoned railway, with leaning telegraph-poles now devoid of wires, and the half-obscured lines of the old carriage roads to Rowley and Ipswich.
The decay was worst close to the waterfront, though in its very midst I could spy the white belfry of a fairly well preserved brick structure which looked like a small factory. The harbour, long clogged with sand, was enclosed by an ancient stone breakwater; on which I could begin to discern the minute forms of a few seated fishermen, and at whose end were what looked like the foundations of a bygone lighthouse. A sandy tongue had formed inside this barrier and upon it I saw a few decrepit cabins, moored dories, and scattered lobster-pots. The only deep water seemed to be where the river poured out past the belfried structure and turned southward to join the ocean at the breakwater's end.
Here and there the ruins of wharves jutted out from the shore to end in indeterminate rottenness, those farthest south seeming the most decayed. And far out at sea, despite a high tide, I glimpsed a long, black line scarcely rising above the water yet carrying a suggestion of odd latent malignancy. This, I knew, must be Devil Reef. As I looked, a subtle, curious sense of beckoning seemed superadded to the grim repulsion; and oddly enough, I found this overtone more disturbing than the primary impression.
We met no one on the road, but presently began to pass deserted farms in varying stages of ruin. Then I noticed a few inhabited houses with rags stuffed in the broken windows and shells and dead fish lying about the littered yards. Once or twice I saw listless-looking people working in barren gardens or digging clams on the fishy-smelling beach below, and groups of dirty, simian-visaged children playing around weed-grown doorsteps. Somehow these people seemed more disquieting than the dismal buildings, for almost every one had certain peculiarities of face and motions which I instinctively disliked without being able to define or comprehend them. For a second I thought this typical physique suggested some picture I had seen, perhaps in a book, under circumstances of particular horror or melancholy; but this pseudo-recollection passed very quickly.
As the bus reached a lower level I began to catch the steady note of a waterfall through the unnatural stillness, The leaning, unpainted houses grew thicker, lined both sides of the road, and displayed more urban tendencies than did those we were leaving behind, The panorama ahead had contracted to a street scene, and in spots I could see where a cobblestone pavement and stretches of brick sidewalk had formerly existed. All the houses were apparently deserted, and there were occasional gaps where tumbledown chimneys and cellar walls told of buildings that had collapsed. Pervading everything was the most nauseous fishy odour imaginable.
Soon cross streets and junctions began to appear; those on the left leading to shoreward realms of unpaved squalor and decay, while those on the right shewed vistas of departed grandeur. So far I had seen no people in the town, but there now came signs of a sparse habitation--curtained windows here and there, and an occasional battered motorcar at the curb. Pavement and sidewalks were increasingly well-defined, and though most of the houses were quite old--wood and brick structures of the early 19th century--they were obviously kept fit for habitation. As an amateur antiquarian I almost lost my olfactory disgust and my feeling of menace and repulsion amidst this rich, unaltered survival from the past.
But I was not to reach my destination without one very strong impression of poignantly disagreeable quality. The bus had come to a sort of open concourse or radial point with churches on two sides and the bedraggled remains of a circular green in the centre, and I was looking at a large pillared hall on the right-hand junction ahead. The structure's once white paint was now gray and peeling and the black and gold sign on the pediment was so faded that I could only with difficulty make out the words ""Esoteric Order of Dagon."" This, then was the former Masonic Hall now given over to a degraded cult. As I strained to decipher this inscription my notice was distracted by the raucous tones of a cracked bell across the street, and I quickly turned to look out the window on my side of the coach.
The sound came from a squat stone church of manifestly later date than most of the houses, built in a clumsy Gothic fashion and having a disproportionately high basement with shuttered windows. Though the hands of its clock were missing on the side I glimpsed, I knew that those hoarse strokes were tolling the hour of eleven. Then suddenly all thoughts of time were blotted out by an onrushing image of sharp intensity and unaccountable horror which had seized me before I knew what it really was. The door of the church basement was open, revealing a rectangle of blackness inside. And as I looked, a certain object crossed or seemed to cross that dark rectangle; burning into my brain a momentary conception of nightmare which was all the more maddening because analysis could not shew a single nightmarish quality in it.
It was a living object--the first except the driver that I had seen since entering the compact part of the town--and had I been in a steadier mood I would have found nothing whatever of terror in it. Clearly, as I realised a moment later, it was the pastor; clad in some peculiar vestments doubtless introduced since the Order of Dagon had modified the ritual of the local churches. The thing which had probably caught my first subconscious glance and supplied the touch of bizarre horror was the tall tiara he wore; an almost exact duplicate of the one Miss Tilton had shown me the previous evening. This, acting on my imagination, had supplied namelessly sinister qualities to the indeterminate face and robed, shambling form beneath it. There was not, I soon decided, any reason why I should have felt that shuddering touch of evil pseudo-memory. Was it not natural that a local mystery cult should adopt among its regimentals an unique type of head-dress made familiar to the community in some strange way--perhaps as treasure-trove?
A very thin sprinkling of repellent-looking youngish people now became visible on the sidewalks--lone individuals, and silent knots of two or three. The lower floors of the crumbling houses sometimes harboured small shops with dingy signs, and I noticed a parked truck or two as we rattled along. The sound of waterfalls became more and more distinct, and presently I saw a fairly deep river-gorge ahead, spanned by a wide, iron-railed highway bridge beyond which a large square opened out. As we clanked over the bridge I looked out on both sides and observed some factory buildings on the edge of the grassy bluff or part way down. The water far below was very abundant, and I could see two vigorous sets of falls upstream on my right and at least one downstream on my left. From this point the noise was quite deafening. Then we rolled into the large semicircular square across the river and drew up on the right-hand side in front of a tall, cupola crowned building with remnants of yellow paint and with a half-effaced sign proclaiming it to be the Gilman House.
I was glad to get out of that bus, and at once proceeded to check my valise in the shabby hotel lobby. There was only one person in sight--an elderly man without what I had come to call the ""Innsmouth look""--and I decided not to ask him any of the questions which bothered me; remembering that odd things had been noticed in this hotel. Instead, I strolled out on the square, from which the bus had already gone, and studied the scene minutely and appraisingly.
One side of the cobblestoned open space was the straight line of the river; the other was a semicircle of slant-roofed brick buildings of about the 1800 period, from which several streets radiated away to the southeast, south, and southwest. Lamps were depressingly few and small--all low-powered incandescents--and I was glad that my plans called for departure before dark, even though I knew the moon would be bright. The buildings were all in fair condition, and included perhaps a dozen shops in current operation; of which one was a grocery of the First National chain, others a dismal restaurant, a drug store, and a wholesale fish-dealer's office, and still another, at the eastward extremity of the square near the river an office of the town's only industry--the Marsh Refining Company. There were perhaps ten people visible, and four or five automobiles and motor trucks stood scattered about. I did not need to be told that this was the civic centre of Innsmouth. Eastward I could catch blue glimpses of the harbour, against which rose the decaying remains of three once beautiful Georgian steeples. And toward the shore on the opposite bank of the river I saw the white belfry surmounting what I took to be the Marsh refinery.
For some reason or other I chose to make my first inquiries at the chain grocery, whose personnel was not likely to be native to Innsmouth. I found a solitary boy of about seventeen in charge, and was pleased to note the brightness and affability which promised cheerful information. He seemed exceptionally eager to talk, and I soon gathered that he did not like the place, its fishy smell, or its furtive people. A word with any outsider was a relief to him. He hailed from Arkham, boarded with a family who came from Ipswich, and went back whenever he got a moment off. His family did not like him to work in Innsmouth, but the chain had transferred him there and he did not wish to give up his job.
There was, he said, no public library or chamber of commerce in Innsmouth, but I could probably find my way about. The street I had come down was Federal. West of that were the fine old residence streets--Broad, Washington, Lafayette, and Adams--and east of it were the shoreward slums. It was in these slums--along Main Street--that I would find the old Georgian churches, but they were all long abandoned. It would be well not to make oneself too conspicuous in such neighbourhoods--especially north of the river since the people were sullen and hostile. Some strangers had even disappeared.
Certain spots were almost forbidden territory, as he had learned at considerable cost. One must not, for example, linger much around the Marsh refinery, or around any of the still used churches, or around the pillared Order of Dagon Hall at New Church Green. Those churches were very odd--all violently disavowed by their respective denominations elsewhere, and apparently using the queerest kind of ceremonials and clerical vestments. Their creeds were heterodox and mysterious, involving hints of certain marvelous transformations leading to bodily immorality--of a sort--on this earth. The youth's own pastor--Dr. Wallace of Asbury M. E. Church in Arkham--had gravely urged him not to join any church in Innsmouth.
As for the Innsmouth people--the youth hardly knew what to make of them. They were as furtive and seldom seen as animals that live in burrows, and one could hardly imagine how they passed the time apart from their desultory fishing. Perhaps--judging from the quantities of bootleg liquor they consumed--they lay for most of the daylight hours in an alcoholic stupor. They seemed sullenly banded together in some sort of fellowship and understanding--despising the world as if they had access to other and preferable spheres of entity. Their appearance--especially those staring, unwinking eyes which one never saw shut--was certainly shocking enough; and their voices were disgusting. It was awful to hear them chanting in their churches at night, and especially during their main festivals or revivals, which fell twice a year on April 30th and October 31st.
They were very fond of the water, and swam a great deal in both river and harbour. Swimming races out to Devil Reef were very common, and everyone in sight seemed well able to share in this arduous sport. When one came to think of it, it was generally only rather young people who were seen about in public, and of these the oldest were apt to be the most tainted-looking. When exceptions did occur, they were mostly persons with no trace of aberrancy, like the old clerk at the hotel. One wondered what became of the bulk of the older folk, and whether the ""Innsmouth look"" were not a strange and insidious disease-phenomenon which increased its hold as years advanced.
Only a very rare affliction, of course, could bring about such vast and radical anatomical changes in a single individual after maturity--changes invoking osseous factors as basic as the shape of the skull--but then, even this aspect was no more baffling and unheard-of than the visible features of the malady as a whole. It would be hard, the youth implied, to form any real conclusions regarding such a matter; since one never came to know the natives personally no matter how long one might live in Innsmouth.
The youth was certain that many specimens even worse than the worst visible ones were kept locked indoors in some places. People sometimes heard the queerest kind of sounds. The tottering waterfront hovels north of the river were reputedly connected by hidden tunnels, being thus a veritable warren of unseen abnormalities. What kind of foreign blood--if any--these beings had, it was impossible to tell. They sometimes kept certain especially repulsive characters out of sight when government and others from the outside world came to town.
It would be of no use, my informant said, to ask the natives anything about the place. The only one who would talk was a very aged but normal looking man who lived at the poorhouse on the north rim of the town and spent his time walking about or lounging around the fire station. This hoary character, Zadok Allen, was 96 years old and somewhat touched in the head, besides being the town drunkard. He was a strange, furtive creature who constantly looked over his shoulder as if afraid of something, and when sober could not be persuaded to talk at all with strangers. He was, however, unable to resist any offer of his favorite poison; and once drunk would furnish the most astonishing fragments of whispered reminiscence.
After all, though, little useful data could be gained from him; since his stories were all insane, incomplete hints of impossible marvels and horrors which could have no source save in his own disordered fancy. Nobody ever believed him, but the natives did not like him to drink and talk with strangers; and it was not always safe to be seen questioning him. It was probably from him that some of the wildest popular whispers and delusions were derived.
Several non-native residents had reported monstrous glimpses from time to time, but between old Zadok's tales and the malformed inhabitants it was no wonder such illusions were current. None of the non-natives ever stayed out late at night, there being a widespread impression that it was not wise to do so. Besides, the streets were loathsomely dark.
As for business--the abundance of fish was certainly almost uncanny, but the natives were taking less and less advantage of it. Moreover, prices were falling and competition was growing. Of course the town's real business was the refinery, whose commercial office was on the square only a few doors east of where we stood. Old Man Marsh was never seen, but sometimes went to the works in a closed, curtained car.
There were all sorts of rumors about how Marsh had come to look. He had once been a great dandy; and people said he still wore the frock-coated finery of the Edwardian age curiously adapted to certain deformities. His son had formerly conducted the office in the square, but latterly they had been keeping out of sight a good deal and leaving the brunt of affairs to the younger generation. The sons and their sisters had come to look very queer, especially the elder ones; and it was said that their health was failing.
One of the Marsh daughters was a repellent, reptilian-looking woman who wore an excess of weird jewellery clearly of the same exotic tradition as that to which the strange tiara belonged. My informant had noticed it many times, and had heard it spoken of as coming from some secret hoard, either of pirates or of demons. The clergymen--or priests, or whatever they were called nowadays--also wore this kind of ornament as a headdress; but one seldom caught glimpses of them. Other specimens the youth had not seen, though many were rumoured to exist around Innsmouth.
The Marshes, together with the other three gently bred families of the town--the Waites, the Gilmans, and the Eliots--were all very retiring. They lived in immense houses along Washington Street, and several were reputed to harbour in concealment certain living kinsfolk whose personal aspect forbade public view, and whose deaths had been reported and recorded.
Warning me that many of the street signs were down, the youth drew for my benefit a rough but ample and painstaking sketch map of the town's salient features. After a moment's study I felt sure that it would be of great help, and pocketed it with profuse thanks. Disliking the dinginess of the single restaurant I had seen, I bought a fair supply of cheese crackers and ginger wafers to serve as a lunch later on. My program, I decided, would be to thread the principal streets, talk with any non-natives I might encounter, and catch the eight o'clock coach for Arkham. The town, I could see, formed a significant and exaggerated example of communal decay; but being no sociologist I would limit my serious observations to the field of architecture.
Thus I began my systematic though half-bewildered tour of Innsmouth's narrow, shadow-blighted ways. Crossing the bridge and turning toward the roar of the lower falls, I passed close to the Marsh refinery, which seemed to be oddly free from the noise of industry. The building stood on the steep river bluff near a bridge and an open confluence of streets which I took to be the earliest civic center, displaced after the Revolution by the present Town Square.
Re-crossing the gorge on the Main Street bridge, I struck a region of utter desertion which somehow made me shudder. Collapsing huddles of gambrel roofs formed a jagged and fantastic skyline, above which rose the ghoulish, decapitated steeple of an ancient church. Some houses along Main Street were tenanted, but most were tightly boarded up. Down unpaved side streets I saw the black, gaping windows of deserted hovels, many of which leaned at perilous and incredible angles through the sinking of part of the foundations. Those windows stared so spectrally that it took courage to turn eastward toward the waterfront. Certainly, the terror of a deserted house swells in geometrical rather than arithmetical progression as houses multiply to form a city of stark desolation. The sight of such endless avenues of fishy-eyed vacancy and death, and the thought of such linked infinities of black, brooding compartments given over to cob-webs and memories and the conqueror worm, start up vestigial fears and aversions that not even the stoutest philosophy can disperse.
Fish Street was as deserted as Main, though it differed in having many brick and stone warehouses still in excellent shape. Water Street was almost its duplicate, save that there were great seaward gaps where wharves had been. Not a living thing did I see except for the scattered fishermen on the distant break-water, and not a sound did I hear save the lapping of the harbour tides and the roar of the falls in the Manuxet. The town was getting more and more on my nerves, and I looked behind me furtively as I picked my way back over the tottering Water Street bridge. The Fish Street bridge, according to the sketch, was in ruins.
North of the river there were traces of squalid life--active fish-packing houses in Water Street, smoking chimneys and patched roofs here and there, occasional sounds from indeterminate sources, and infrequent shambling forms in the dismal streets and unpaved lanes--but I seemed to find this even more oppressive than the southerly desertion. For one thing, the people were more hideous and abnormal than those near the centre of the town; so that I was several times evilly reminded of something utterly fantastic which I could not quite place. Undoubtedly the alien strain in the Innsmouth folk was stronger here than farther inland--unless, indeed, the ""Innsmouth look"" were a disease rather than a blood stain, in which case this district might be held to harbour the more advanced cases.
One detail that annoyed me was the distribution of the few faint sounds I heard. They ought naturally to have come wholly from the visibly inhabited houses, yet in reality were often strongest inside the most rigidly boarded-up facades. There were creakings, scurryings, and hoarse doubtful noises; and I thought uncomfortably about the hidden tunnels suggested by the grocery boy. Suddenly I found myself wondering what the voices of those denizens would be like. I had heard no speech so far in this quarter, and was unaccountably anxious not to do so.
Pausing only long enough to look at two fine but ruinous old churches at Main and Church Streets, I hastened out of that vile waterfront slum. My next logical goal was New Church Green, but somehow or other I could not bear to repass the church in whose basement I had glimpsed the inexplicably frightening form of that strangely diademmed priest or pastor. Besides, the grocery youth had told me that churches, as well as the Order of Dagon Hall, were not advisable neighbourhoods for strangers.
Accordingly I kept north along Main to Martin, then turning inland, crossing Federal Street safely north of the Green, and entering the decayed patrician neighbourhood of northern Broad, Washington, Lafayette, and Adams Streets. Though these stately old avenues were ill-surfaced and unkempt, their elm-shaded dignity had not entirely departed. Mansion after mansion claimed my gaze, most of them decrepit and boarded up amidst neglected grounds, but one or two in each street shewing signs of occupancy. In Washington Street there was a row of four or five in excellent repair and with finely-tended lawns and gardens. The most sumptuous of these--with wide terraced parterres extending back the whole way to Lafayette Street--I took to be the home of Old Man Marsh, the afflicted refinery owner.
In all these streets no living thing was visible, and I wondered at the complete absence of cats and dogs from Innsmouth. Another thing which puzzled and disturbed me, even in some of the best-preserved mansions, was the tightly shuttered condition of many third-story and attic windows. Furtiveness and secretiveness seemed universal in this hushed city of alienage and death, and I could not escape the sensation of being watched from ambush on every hand by sly, staring eyes that never shut.
I shivered as the cracked stroke of three sounded from a belfry on my left. Too well did I recall the squat church from which those notes came. Following Washington Street toward the river, I now faced a new zone of former industry and commerce; noting the ruins of a factory ahead, and seeing others, with the traces of an old railway station and covered railway bridge beyond, up the gorge on my right.
The uncertain bridge now before me was posted with a warning sign, but I took the risk and crossed again to the south bank where traces of life reappeared. Furtive, shambling creatures stared cryptically in my direction, and more normal faces eyed me coldly and curiously. Innsmouth was rapidly becoming intolerable, and I turned down Paine Street toward the Square in the hope of getting some vehicle to take me to Arkham before the still-distant starting-time of that sinister bus.
It was then that I saw the tumbledown fire station on my left, and noticed the red faced, bushy-bearded, watery eyed old man in nondescript rags who sat on a bench in front of it talking with a pair of unkempt but not abnormal looking firemen. This, of course, must be Zadok Allen, the half-crazed, liquorish nonagenarian whose tales of old Innsmouth and its shadow were so hideous and incredible.
","I.

After twenty-two years of nightmare and terror, saved only by a desperate conviction of the mythical source of certain impressions, I am unwilling to vouch for the truth of that which I think I found in Western Australia on the night of July 17–18, 1935. There is reason to hope that my experience was wholly or partly an hallucination—for which, indeed, abundant causes existed. And yet, its realism was so hideous that I sometimes find hope impossible. If the thing did happen, then man must be prepared to accept notions of the cosmos, and of his own place in the seething vortex of time, whose merest mention is paralysing. He must, too, be placed on guard against a specific lurking peril which, though it will never engulf the whole race, may impose monstrous and unguessable horrors upon certain venturesome members of it. It is for this latter reason that I urge, with all the force of my being, a final abandonment of all attempts at unearthing those fragments of unknown, primordial masonry which my expedition set out to investigate.
      Assuming that I was sane and awake, my experience on that night was such as has befallen no man before. It was, moreover, a frightful confirmation of all I had sought to dismiss as myth and dream. Mercifully there is no proof, for in my fright I lost the awesome object which would—if real and brought out of that noxious abyss—have formed irrefutable evidence. When I came upon the horror I was alone—and I have up to now told no one about it. I could not stop the others from digging in its direction, but chance and the shifting sand have so far saved them from finding it. Now I must formulate some definitive statement—not only for the sake of my own mental balance, but to warn such others as may read it seriously.
      These pages—much in whose earlier parts will be familiar to close readers of the general and scientific press—are written in the cabin of the ship that is bringing me home. I shall give them to my son, Prof. Wingate Peaslee of Miskatonic University—the only member of my family who stuck to me after my queer amnesia of long ago, and the man best informed on the inner facts of my case. Of all living persons, he is least likely to ridicule what I shall tell of that fateful night. I did not enlighten him orally before sailing, because I think he had better have the revelation in written form. Reading and re-reading at leisure will leave with him a more convincing picture than my confused tongue could hope to convey. He can do as he thinks best with this account—shewing it, with suitable comment, to any quarters where it will be likely to accomplish good. It is for the sake of such readers as are unfamiliar with the earlier phases of my case that I am prefacing the revelation itself with a fairly ample summary of its background.
      My name is Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee, and those who recall the newspaper tales of a generation back—or the letters and articles in psychological journals six or seven years ago—will know who and what I am. The press was filled with the details of my strange amnesia in 1908–13, and much was made of the traditions of horror, madness, and witchcraft which lurk behind the ancient Massachusetts town then and now forming my place of residence. Yet I would have it known that there is nothing whatever of the mad or sinister in my heredity and early life. This is a highly important fact in view of the shadow which fell so suddenly upon me from outside sources. It may be that centuries of dark brooding had given to crumbling, whisper-haunted Arkham a peculiar vulnerability as regards such shadows—though even this seems doubtful in the light of those other cases which I later came to study. But the chief point is that my own ancestry and background are altogether normal. What came, came from somewhere else—where, I even now hesitate to assert in plain words.
      I am the son of Jonathan and Hannah (Wingate) Peaslee, both of wholesome old Haverhill stock. I was born and reared in Haverhill—at the old homestead in Boardman Street near Golden Hill—and did not go to Arkham till I entered Miskatonic University at the age of eighteen. That was in 1889. After my graduation I studied economics at Harvard, and came back to Miskatonic as Instructor of Political Economy in 1895. For thirteen years more my life ran smoothly and happily. I married Alice Keezar of Haverhill in 1896, and my three children, Robert K., Wingate, and Hannah, were born in 1898, 1900, and 1903, respectively. In 1898 I became an associate professor, and in 1902 a full professor. At no time had I the least interest in either occultism or abnormal psychology.
      It was on Thursday, May 14, 1908, that the queer amnesia came. The thing was quite sudden, though later I realised that certain brief, glimmering visions of several hours previous—chaotic visions which disturbed me greatly because they were so unprecedented—must have formed premonitory symptoms. My head was aching, and I had a singular feeling—altogether new to me—that someone else was trying to get possession of my thoughts. 
      The collapse occurred about 10:20 a.m., while I was conducting a class in Political Economy VI—history and present tendencies of economics—for juniors and a few sophomores. I began to see strange shapes before my eyes, and to feel that I was in a grotesque room other than the classroom. My thoughts and speech wandered from my subject, and the students saw that something was gravely amiss. Then I slumped down, unconscious in my chair, in a stupor from which no one could arouse me. Nor did my rightful faculties again look out upon the daylight of our normal world for five years, four months, and thirteen days.
      It is, of course, from others that I have learned what followed. I shewed no sign of consciousness for sixteen and a half hours, though removed to my home at 27 Crane St. and given the best of medical attention. At 3 a.m. May 15 my eyes opened and I began to speak, but before long the doctors and my family were thoroughly frightened by the trend of my expression and language. It was clear that I had no remembrance of my identity or of my past, though for some reason I seemed anxious to conceal this lack of knowledge. My eyes gazed strangely at the persons around me, and the flexions of my facial muscles were altogether unfamiliar.
      Even my speech seemed awkward and foreign. I used my vocal organs clumsily and gropingly, and my diction had a curiously stilted quality, as if I had laboriously learned the English language from books. The pronunciation was barbarously alien, whilst the idiom seemed to include both scraps of curious archaism and expressions of a wholly incomprehensible cast. Of the latter one in particular was very potently—even terrifiedly—recalled by the youngest of the physicians twenty years afterward. For at that late period such a phrase began to have an actual currency—first in England and then in the United States—and though of much complexity and indisputable newness, it reproduced in every least particular the mystifying words of the strange Arkham patient of 1908.
      Physical strength returned at once, although I required an odd amount of re-education in the use of my hands, legs, and bodily apparatus in general. Because of this and other handicaps inherent in the mnemonic lapse, I was for some time kept under strict medical care. When I saw that my attempts to conceal the lapse had failed, I admitted it openly, and became eager for information of all sorts. Indeed, it seemed to the doctors that I had lost interest in my proper personality as soon as I found the case of amnesia accepted as a natural thing. They noticed that my chief efforts were to master certain points in history, science, art, language, and folklore—some of them tremendously abstruse, and some childishly simple—which remained, very oddly in many cases, outside my consciousness.
      At the same time they noticed that I had an inexplicable command of many almost unknown sorts of knowledge—a command which I seemed to wish to hide rather than display. I would inadvertently refer, with casual assurance, to specific events in dim ages outside the range of accepted history—passing off such references as a jest when I saw the surprise they created. And I had a way of speaking of the future which two or three times caused actual fright. These uncanny flashes soon ceased to appear, though some observers laid their vanishment more to a certain furtive caution on my part than to any waning of the strange knowledge behind them. Indeed, I seemed anomalously avid to absorb the speech, customs, and perspectives of the age around me; as if I were a studious traveller from a far, foreign land.
      As soon as permitted, I haunted the college library at all hours; and shortly began to arrange for those odd travels, and special courses at American and European universities, which evoked so much comment during the next few years. I did not at any time suffer from a lack of learned contacts, for my case had a mild celebrity among the psychologists of the period. I was lectured upon as a typical example of secondary personality—even though I seemed to puzzle the lecturers now and then with some bizarre symptom or some queer trace of carefully veiled mockery.
      Of real friendliness, however, I encountered little. Something in my aspect and speech seemed to excite vague fears and aversions in everyone I met, as if I were a being infinitely removed from all that is normal and healthful. This idea of a black, hidden horror connected with incalculable gulfs of some sort of distance was oddly widespread and persistent. My own family formed no exception. From the moment of my strange waking my wife had regarded me with extreme horror and loathing, vowing that I was some utter alien usurping the body of her husband. In 1910 she obtained a legal divorce, nor would she ever consent to see me even after my return to normalcy in 1913. These feelings were shared by my elder son and my small daughter, neither of whom I have ever seen since.
      Only my second son Wingate seemed able to conquer the terror and repulsion which my change aroused. He indeed felt that I was a stranger, but though only eight years old held fast to a faith that my proper self would return. When it did return he sought me out, and the courts gave me his custody. In succeeding years he helped me with the studies to which I was driven, and today at thirty-five he is a professor of psychology at Miskatonic. But I do not wonder at the horror I caused—for certainly, the mind, voice, and facial expression of the being that awaked on May 15, 1908 were not those of Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee.
      I will not attempt to tell much of my life from 1908 to 1913, since readers may glean all the outward essentials—as I largely had to do—from files of old newspapers and scientific journals. I was given charge of my funds, and spent them slowly and on the whole wisely, in travel and in study at various centres of learning. My travels, however, were singular in the extreme; involving long visits to remote and desolate places. In 1909 I spent a month in the Himalayas, and in 1911 aroused much attention through a camel trip into the unknown deserts of Arabia. What happened on those journeys I have never been able to learn. During the summer of 1912 I chartered a ship and sailed in the Arctic north of Spitzbergen, afterward shewing signs of disappointment. Later in that year I spent weeks alone beyond the limits of previous or subsequent exploration in the vast limestone cavern systems of western Virginia—black labyrinths so complex that no retracing of my steps could even be considered.
      My sojourns at the universities were marked by abnormally rapid assimilation, as if the secondary personality had an intelligence enormously superior to my own. I have found, also, that my rate of reading and solitary study was phenomenal. I could master every detail of a book merely by glancing over it as fast as I could turn the leaves; while my skill at interpreting complex figures in an instant was veritably awesome. At times there appeared almost ugly reports of my power to influence the thoughts and acts of others, though I seemed to have taken care to minimise displays of this faculty.
      Other ugly reports concerned my intimacy with leaders of occultist groups, and scholars suspected of connexion with nameless bands of abhorrent elder-world hierophants. These rumours, though never proved at the time, were doubtless stimulated by the known tenor of some of my reading—for the consultation of rare books at libraries cannot be effected secretly. There is tangible proof—in the form of marginal notes—that I went minutely through such things as the Comte d’Erlette’s Cultes des Goules, Ludvig Prinn’s De Vermis Mysteriis, the Unaussprechlichen Kulten of von Junzt, the surviving fragments of the puzzling Book of Eibon, and the dreaded Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred. Then, too, it is undeniable that a fresh and evil wave of underground cult activity set in about the time of my odd mutation.
      In the summer of 1913 I began to display signs of ennui and flagging interest, and to hint to various associates that a change might soon be expected in me. I spoke of returning memories of my earlier life—though most auditors judged me insincere, since all the recollections I gave were casual, and such as might have been learned from my old private papers. About the middle of August I returned to Arkham and reopened my long-closed house in Crane St. Here I installed a mechanism of the most curious aspect, constructed piecemeal by different makers of scientific apparatus in Europe and America, and guarded carefully from the sight of anyone intelligent enough to analyse it. Those who did see it—a workman, a servant, and the new housekeeper—say that it was a queer mixture of rods, wheels, and mirrors, though only about two feet tall, one foot wide, and one foot thick. The central mirror was circular and convex. All this is borne out by such makers of parts as can be located.
      On the evening of Friday, Sept. 26, I dismissed the housekeeper and the maid till noon of the next day. Lights burned in the house till late, and a lean, dark, curiously foreign-looking man called in an automobile. It was about 1 a.m. that the lights were last seen. At 2:15 a.m. a policeman observed the place in darkness, but with the stranger’s motor still at the curb. By four o’clock the motor was certainly gone. It was at six that a hesitant, foreign voice on the telephone asked Dr. Wilson to call at my house and bring me out of a peculiar faint. This call—a long-distance one—was later traced to a public booth in the North Station in Boston, but no sign of the lean foreigner was ever unearthed.
      When the doctor reached my house he found me unconscious in the sitting-room—in an easy-chair with a table drawn up before it. On the polished table-top were scratches shewing where some heavy object had rested. The queer machine was gone, nor was anything afterward heard of it. Undoubtedly the dark, lean foreigner had taken it away. In the library grate were abundant ashes evidently left from the burning of every remaining scrap of paper on which I had written since the advent of the amnesia. Dr. Wilson found my breathing very peculiar, but after an hypodermic injection it became more regular.
      At 11:15 a.m., Sept. 27, I stirred vigorously, and my hitherto mask-like face began to shew signs of expression. Dr. Wilson remarked that the expression was not that of my secondary personality, but seemed much like that of my normal self. About 11:30 I muttered some very curious syllables—syllables which seemed unrelated to any human speech. I appeared, too, to struggle against something. Then, just after noon—the housekeeper and the maid having meanwhile returned—I began to mutter in English.
      “. . . of the orthodox economists of that period, Jevons typifies the prevailing trend toward scientific correlation. His attempt to link the commercial cycle of prosperity and depression with the physical cycle of the solar spots forms perhaps the apex of . . .”
      Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee had come back—a spirit in whose time-scale it was still that Thursday morning in 1908, with the economics class gazing up at the battered desk on the platform.

II.

My reabsorption into normal life was a painful and difficult process. The loss of over five years creates more complications than can be imagined, and in my case there were countless matters to be adjusted. What I heard of my actions since 1908 astonished and disturbed me, but I tried to view the matter as philosophically as I could. At last regaining custody of my second son Wingate, I settled down with him in the Crane Street house and endeavoured to resume teaching—my old professorship having been kindly offered me by the college.
      I began work with the February, 1914, term, and kept at it just a year. By that time I realised how badly my experience had shaken me. Though perfectly sane—I hoped—and with no flaw in my original personality, I had not the nervous energy of the old days. Vague dreams and queer ideas continually haunted me, and when the outbreak of the world war turned my mind to history I found myself thinking of periods and events in the oddest possible fashion. My conception of time—my ability to distinguish between consecutiveness and simultaneousness—seemed subtly disordered; so that I formed chimerical notions about living in one age and casting one’s mind all over eternity for knowledge of past and future ages.
      The war gave me strange impressions of remembering some of its far-off consequences—as if I knew how it was coming out and could look back upon it in the light of future information. All such quasi-memories were attended with much pain, and with a feeling that some artificial psychological barrier was set against them. When I diffidently hinted to others about my impressions I met with varied responses. Some persons looked uncomfortably at me, but men in the mathematics department spoke of new developments in those theories of relativity—then discussed only in learned circles—which were later to become so famous. Dr. Albert Einstein, they said, was rapidly reducing time to the status of a mere dimension.
      But the dreams and disturbed feelings gained on me, so that I had to drop my regular work in 1915. Certain of the impressions were taking an annoying shape—giving me the persistent notion that my amnesia had formed some unholy sort of exchange; that the secondary personality had indeed been an intruding force from unknown regions, and that my own personality had suffered displacement. Thus I was driven to vague and frightful speculations concerning the whereabouts of my true self during the years that another had held my body. The curious knowledge and strange conduct of my body’s late tenant troubled me more and more as I learned further details from persons, papers, and magazines. Queernesses that had baffled others seemed to harmonise terribly with some background of black knowledge which festered in the chasms of my subconscious. I began to search feverishly for every scrap of information bearing on the studies and travels of that other one during the dark years.
      Not all of my troubles were as semi-abstract as this. There were the dreams—and these seemed to grow in vividness and concreteness. Knowing how most would regard them, I seldom mentioned them to anyone but my son or certain trusted psychologists, but eventually I commenced a scientific study of other cases in order to see how typical or non-typical such visions might be among amnesia victims. My results, aided by psychologists, historians, anthropologists, and mental specialists of wide experience, and by a study that included all records of split personalities from the days of daemoniac-possession legends to the medically realistic present, at first bothered me more than they consoled me.
      I soon found that my dreams had indeed no counterpart in the overwhelming bulk of true amnesia cases. There remained, however, a tiny residue of accounts which for years baffled and shocked me with their parallelism to my own experience. Some of them were bits of ancient folklore; others were case-histories in the annals of medicine; one or two were anecdotes obscurely buried in standard histories. It thus appeared that, while my special kind of affliction was prodigiously rare, instances of it had occurred at long intervals ever since the beginning of man’s annals. Some centuries might contain one, two, or three cases; others none—or at least none whose record survived.
      The essence was always the same—a person of keen thoughtfulness seized with a strange secondary life and leading for a greater or lesser period an utterly alien existence typified at first by vocal and bodily awkwardness, and later by a wholesale acquisition of scientific, historic, artistic, and anthropological knowledge; an acquisition carried on with feverish zest and with a wholly abnormal absorptive power. Then a sudden return of the rightful consciousness, intermittently plagued ever after with vague unplaceable dreams suggesting fragments of some hideous memory elaborately blotted out. And the close resemblance of those nightmares to my own—even in some of the smallest particulars—left no doubt in my mind of their significantly typical nature. One or two of the cases had an added ring of faint, blasphemous familiarity, as if I had heard of them before through some cosmic channel too morbid and frightful to contemplate. In three instances there was specific mention of such an unknown machine as had been in my house before the second change.
      Another thing that cloudily worried me during my investigation was the somewhat greater frequency of cases where a brief, elusive glimpse of the typical nightmares was afforded to persons not visited with well-defined amnesia. These persons were largely of mediocre mind or less—some so primitive that they could scarcely be thought of as vehicles for abnormal scholarship and preternatural mental acquisitions. For a second they would be fired with alien force—then a backward lapse and a thin, swift-fading memory of un-human horrors.
      There had been at least three such cases during the past half century—one only fifteen years before. Had something been groping blindly through time from some unsuspected abyss in Nature? Were these faint cases monstrous, sinister experiments of a kind and authorship utterly beyond sane belief? Such were a few of the formless speculations of my weaker hours—fancies abetted by myths which my studies uncovered. For I could not doubt but that certain persistent legends of immemorial antiquity, apparently unknown to the victims and physicians connected with recent amnesia cases, formed a striking and awesome elaboration of memory lapses such as mine.
      Of the nature of the dreams and impressions which were growing so clamorous I still almost fear to speak. They seemed to savour of madness, and at times I believed I was indeed going mad. Was there a special type of delusion afflicting those who had suffered lapses of memory? Conceivably, the efforts of the subconscious mind to fill up a perplexing blank with pseudo-memories might give rise to strange imaginative vagaries. This, indeed (though an alternative folklore theory finally seemed to me more plausible), was the belief of many of the alienists who helped me in my search for parallel cases, and who shared my puzzlement at the exact resemblances sometimes discovered. They did not call the condition true insanity, but classed it rather among neurotic disorders. My course in trying to track it down and analyse it, instead of vainly seeking to dismiss or forget it, they heartily endorsed as correct according to the best psychological principles. I especially valued the advice of such physicians as had studied me during my possession by the other personality.
      My first disturbances were not visual at all, but concerned the more abstract matters which I have mentioned. There was, too, a feeling of profound and inexplicable horror concerning myself. I developed a queer fear of seeing my own form, as if my eyes would find it something utterly alien and inconceivably abhorrent. When I did glance down and behold the familiar human shape in quiet grey or blue clothing I always felt a curious relief, though in order to gain this relief I had to conquer an infinite dread. I shunned mirrors as much as possible, and was always shaved at the barber’s.
      It was a long time before I correlated any of these disappointed feelings with the fleeting visual impressions which began to develop. The first such correlation had to do with the odd sensation of an external, artificial restraint on my memory. I felt that the snatches of sight I experienced had a profound and terrible meaning, and a frightful connexion with myself, but that some purposeful influence held me from grasping that meaning and that connexion. Then came that queerness about the element of time, and with it desperate efforts to place the fragmentary dream-glimpses in the chronological and spatial pattern.
      The glimpses themselves were at first merely strange rather than horrible. I would seem to be in an enormous vaulted chamber whose lofty stone groinings were well-nigh lost in the shadows overhead. In whatever time or place the scene might be, the principle of the arch was known as fully and used as extensively as by the Romans. There were colossal round windows and high arched doors, and pedestals or tables each as tall as the height of an ordinary room. Vast shelves of dark wood lined the walls, holding what seemed to be volumes of immense size with strange hieroglyphs on their backs. The exposed stonework held curious carvings, always in curvilinear mathematical designs, and there were chiselled inscriptions in the same characters that the huge books bore. The dark granite masonry was of a monstrous megalithic type, with lines of convex-topped blocks fitting the concave-bottomed courses which rested upon them. There were no chairs, but the tops of the vast pedestals were littered with books, papers, and what seemed to be writing materials—oddly figured jars of a purplish metal, and rods with stained tips. Tall as the pedestals were, I seemed at times able to view them from above. On some of them were great globes of luminous crystal serving as lamps, and inexplicable machines formed of vitreous tubes and metal rods. The windows were glazed, and latticed with stout-looking bars. Though I dared not approach and peer out them, I could see from where I was the waving tops of singular fern-like growths. The floor was of massive octagonal flagstones, while rugs and hangings were entirely lacking.
      Later I had visions of sweeping through Cyclopean corridors of stone, and up and down gigantic inclined planes of the same monstrous masonry. There were no stairs anywhere, nor was any passageway less than thirty feet wide. Some of the structures through which I floated must have towered into the sky for thousands of feet. There were multiple levels of black vaults below, and never-opened trap-doors, sealed down with metal bands and holding dim suggestions of some special peril. I seemed to be a prisoner, and horror hung broodingly over everything I saw. I felt that the mocking curvilinear hieroglyphs on the walls would blast my soul with their message were I not guarded by a merciful ignorance.
      Still later my dreams included vistas from the great round windows, and from the titanic flat roof, with its curious gardens, wide barren area, and high, scalloped parapet of stone, to which the topmost of the inclined planes led. There were almost endless leagues of giant buildings, each in its garden, and ranged along paved roads fully two hundred feet wide. They differed greatly in aspect, but few were less than five hundred feet square or a thousand feet high. Many seemed so limitless that they must have had a frontage of several thousand feet, while some shot up to mountainous altitudes in the grey, steamy heavens. They seemed to be mainly of stone or concrete, and most of them embodied the oddly curvilinear type of masonry noticeable in the building that held me. Roofs were flat and garden-covered, and tended to have scalloped parapets. Sometimes there were terraces and higher levels, and wide cleared spaces amidst the gardens. The great roads held hints of motion, but in the earlier visions I could not resolve this impression into details.
      In certain places I beheld enormous dark cylindrical towers which climbed far above any of the other structures. These appeared to be of a totally unique nature, and shewed signs of prodigious age and dilapidation. They were built of a bizarre type of square-cut basalt masonry, and tapered slightly toward their rounded tops. Nowhere in any of them could the least traces of windows or other apertures save huge doors be found. I noticed also some lower buildings—all crumbling with the weathering of aeons—which resembled these dark cylindrical towers in basic architecture. Around all these aberrant piles of square-cut masonry there hovered an inexplicable aura of menace and concentrated fear, like that bred by the sealed trap-doors.
      The omnipresent gardens were almost terrifying in their strangeness, with bizarre and unfamiliar forms of vegetation nodding over broad paths lined with curiously carven monoliths. Abnormally vast fern-like growths predominated; some green, and some of a ghastly, fungoid pallor. Among them rose great spectral things resembling calamites, whose bamboo-like trunks towered to fabulous heights. Then there were tufted forms like fabulous cycads, and grotesque dark-green shrubs and trees of coniferous aspect. Flowers were small, colourless, and unrecognisable, blooming in geometrical beds and at large among the greenery. In a few of the terrace and roof-top gardens were larger and more vivid blossoms of almost offensive contours and seeming to suggest artificial breeding. Fungi of inconceivable size, outlines, and colours speckled the scene in patterns bespeaking some unknown but well-established horticultural tradition. In the larger gardens on the ground there seemed to be some attempt to preserve the irregularities of Nature, but on the roofs there was more selectiveness, and more evidences of the topiary art.
      The skies were almost always moist and cloudy, and sometimes I would seem to witness tremendous rains. Once in a while, though, there would be glimpses of the sun—which looked abnormally large—and of the moon, whose markings held a touch of difference from the normal that I could never quite fathom. When—very rarely—the night sky was clear to any extent, I beheld constellations which were nearly beyond recognition. Known outlines were sometimes approximated, but seldom duplicated; and from the position of the few groups I could recognise, I felt I must be in the earth’s southern hemisphere, near the Tropic of Capricorn. The far horizon was always steamy and indistinct, but I could see that great jungles of unknown tree-ferns, calamites, lepidodendra, and sigillaria lay outside the city, their fantastic frondage waving mockingly in the shifting vapours. Now and then there would be suggestions of motion in the sky, but these my early visions never resolved.
      By the autumn of 1914 I began to have infrequent dreams of strange floatings over the city and through the regions around it. I saw interminable roads through forests of fearsome growths with mottled, fluted, and banded trunks, and past other cities as strange as the one which persistently haunted me. I saw monstrous constructions of black or iridescent stone in glades and clearings where perpetual twilight reigned, and traversed long causeways over swamps so dark that I could tell but little of their moist, towering vegetation. Once I saw an area of countless miles strown with age-blasted basaltic ruins whose architecture had been like that of the few windowless, round-topped towers in the haunting city. And once I saw the sea—a boundless steamy expanse beyond the colossal stone piers of an enormous town of domes and arches. Great shapeless suggestions of shadow moved over it, and here and there its surface was vexed with anomalous spoutings.

III.

As I have said, it was not immediately that these wild visions began to hold their terrifying quality. Certainly, many persons have dreamed intrinsically stranger things—things compounded of unrelated scraps of daily life, pictures, and reading, and arranged in fantastically novel forms by the unchecked caprices of sleep. For some time I accepted the visions as natural, even though I had never before been an extravagant dreamer. Many of the vague anomalies, I argued, must have come from trivial sources too numerous to track down; while others seemed to reflect a common text-book knowledge of the plants and other conditions of the primitive world of a hundred and fifty million years ago—the world of the Permian or Triassic age. In the course of some months, however, the element of terror did figure with accumulating force. This was when the dreams began so unfailingly to have the aspect of memories, and when my mind began to link them with my growing abstract disturbances—the feeling of mnemonic restraint, the curious impressions regarding time, the sense of a loathsome exchange with my secondary personality of 1908–13, and, considerably later, the inexplicable loathing of my own person.
      As certain definite details began to enter the dreams, their horror increased a thousandfold—until by October, 1915, I felt I must do something. It was then that I began an intensive study of other cases of amnesia and visions, feeling that I might thereby objectivise my trouble and shake clear of its emotional grip. However, as before mentioned, the result was at first almost exactly opposite. It disturbed me vastly to find that my dreams had been so closely duplicated; especially since some of the accounts were too early to admit of any geological knowledge—and therefore of any idea of primitive landscapes—on the subjects’ part. What is more, many of these accounts supplied very horrible details and explanations in connexion with the visions of great buildings and jungle gardens—and other things. The actual sights and vague impressions were bad enough, but what was hinted or asserted by some of the other dreamers savoured of madness and blasphemy. Worst of all, my own pseudo-memory was aroused to wilder dreams and hints of coming revelations. And yet most doctors deemed my course, on the whole, an advisable one.
      I studied psychology systematically, and under the prevailing stimulus my son Wingate did the same—his studies leading eventually to his present professorship. In 1917 and 1918 I took special courses at Miskatonic. Meanwhile my examination of medical, historical, and anthropological records became indefatigable; involving travels to distant libraries, and finally including even a reading of the hideous books of forbidden elder lore in which my secondary personality had been so disturbingly interested. Some of the latter were the actual copies I had consulted in my altered state, and I was greatly disturbed by certain marginal notations and ostensible corrections of the hideous text in a script and idiom which somehow seemed oddly un-human.
      These markings were mostly in the respective languages of the various books, all of which the writer seemed to know with equal though obviously academic facility. One note appended to von Junzt’s Unaussprechlichen Kulten, however, was alarmingly otherwise. It consisted of certain curvilinear hieroglyphs in the same ink as that of the German corrections, but following no recognised human pattern. And these hieroglyphs were closely and unmistakably akin to the characters constantly met with in my dreams—characters whose meaning I would sometimes momentarily fancy I knew or was just on the brink of recalling. To complete my black confusion, my librarians assured me that, in view of previous examinations and records of consultation of the volumes in question, all of these notations must have been made by myself in my secondary state. This despite the fact that I was and still am ignorant of three of the languages involved.
      Piecing together the scattered records, ancient and modern, anthropological and medical, I found a fairly consistent mixture of myth and hallucination whose scope and wildness left me utterly dazed. Only one thing consoled me—the fact that the myths were of such early existence. What lost knowledge could have brought pictures of the Palaeozoic or Mesozoic landscape into these primitive fables, I could not even guess, but the pictures had been there. Thus, a basis existed for the formation of a fixed type of delusion. Cases of amnesia no doubt created the general myth-pattern—but afterward the fanciful accretions of the myths must have reacted on amnesia sufferers and coloured their pseudo-memories. I myself had read and heard all the early tales during my memory lapse—my quest had amply proved that. Was it not natural, then, for my subsequent dreams and emotional impressions to become coloured and moulded by what my memory subtly held over from my secondary state? A few of the myths had significant connexions with other cloudy legends of the pre-human world, especially those Hindoo tales involving stupefying gulfs of time and forming part of the lore of modern theosophists.
      Primal myth and modern delusion joined in their assumption that mankind is only one—perhaps the least—of the highly evolved and dominant races of this planet’s long and largely unknown career. Things of inconceivable shape, they implied, had reared towers to the sky and delved into every secret of Nature before the first amphibian forbear of man had crawled out of the hot sea three hundred million years ago. Some had come down from the stars; a few were as old as the cosmos itself; others had arisen swiftly from terrene germs as far behind the first germs of our life-cycle as those germs are behind ourselves. Spans of thousands of millions of years, and linkages with other galaxies and universes, were freely spoken of. Indeed, there was no such thing as time in its humanly accepted sense.
      But most of the tales and impressions concerned a relatively late race, of a queer and intricate shape resembling no life-form known to science, which had lived till only fifty million years before the advent of man. This, they indicated, was the greatest race of all; because it alone had conquered the secret of time. It had learned all things that ever were known or ever would be known on the earth, through the power of its keener minds to project themselves into the past and future, even through gulfs of millions of years, and study the lore of every age. From the accomplishments of this race arose all legends of prophets, including those in human mythology.
      In its vast libraries were volumes of texts and pictures holding the whole of earth’s annals—histories and descriptions of every species that had ever been or that ever would be, with full records of their arts, their achievements, their languages, and their psychologies. With this aeon-embracing knowledge, the Great Race chose from every era and life-form such thoughts, arts, and processes as might suit its own nature and situation. Knowledge of the past, secured through a kind of mind-casting outside the recognised senses, was harder to glean than knowledge of the future.
      In the latter case the course was easier and more material. With suitable mechanical aid a mind would project itself forward in time, feeling its dim, extra-sensory way till it approached the desired period. Then, after preliminary trials, it would seize on the best discoverable representative of the highest of that period’s life-forms; entering the organism’s brain and setting up therein its own vibrations while the displaced mind would strike back to the period of the displacer, remaining in the latter’s body till a reverse process was set up. The projected mind, in the body of the organism of the future, would then pose as a member of the race whose outward form it wore; learning as quickly as possible all that could be learned of the chosen age and its massed information and techniques.
      Meanwhile the displaced mind, thrown back to the displacer’s age and body, would be carefully guarded. It would be kept from harming the body it occupied, and would be drained of all its knowledge by trained questioners. Often it could be questioned in its own language, when previous quests into the future had brought back records of that language. If the mind came from a body whose language the Great Race could not physically reproduce, clever machines would be made, on which the alien speech could be played as on a musical instrument. The Great Race’s members were immense rugose cones ten feet high, and with head and other organs attached to foot-thick, distensible limbs spreading from the apexes. They spoke by the clicking or scraping of huge paws or claws attached to the end of two of their four limbs, and walked by the expansion and contraction of a viscous layer attached to their vast ten-foot bases.
      When the captive mind’s amazement and resentment had worn off, and when (assuming that it came from a body vastly different from the Great Race’s) it had lost its horror at its unfamiliar temporary form, it was permitted to study its new environment and experience a wonder and wisdom approximating that of its displacer. With suitable precautions, and in exchange for suitable services, it was allowed to rove all over the habitable world in titan airships or on the huge boat-like atomic-engined vehicles which traversed the great roads, and to delve freely into the libraries containing the records of the planet’s past and future. This reconciled many captive minds to their lot; since none were other than keen, and to such minds the unveiling of hidden mysteries of earth—closed chapters of inconceivable pasts and dizzying vortices of future time which include the years ahead of their own natural ages—forms always, despite the abysmal horrors often unveiled, the supreme experience of life.
      Now and then certain captives were permitted to meet other captive minds seized from the future—to exchange thoughts with consciousnesses living a hundred or a thousand or a million years before or after their own ages. And all were urged to write copiously in their own languages of themselves and their respective periods; such documents to be filed in the great central archives.
      It may be added that there was one sad special type of captive whose privileges were far greater than those of the majority. These were the dying permanent exiles, whose bodies in the future had been seized by keen-minded members of the Great Race who, faced with death, sought to escape mental extinction. Such melancholy exiles were not as common as might be expected, since the longevity of the Great Race lessened its love of life—especially among those superior minds capable of projection. From cases of the permanent projection of elder minds arose many of those lasting changes of personality noticed in later history—including mankind’s.
      As for the ordinary cases of exploration—when the displacing mind had learned what it wished in the future, it would build an apparatus like that which had started its flight and reverse the process of projection. Once more it would be in its own body in its own age, while the lately captive mind would return to that body of the future to which it properly belonged. Only when one or the other of the bodies had died during the exchange was this restoration impossible. In such cases, of course, the exploring mind had—like those of the death-escapers—to live out an alien-bodied life in the future; or else the captive mind—like the dying permanent exiles—had to end its days in the form and past age of the Great Race.
      This fate was least horrible when the captive mind was also of the Great Race—a not infrequent occurrence, since in all its periods that race was intensely concerned with its own future. The number of dying permanent exiles of the Great Race was very slight—largely because of the tremendous penalties attached to displacements of future Great Race minds by the moribund. Through projection, arrangements were made to inflict these penalties on the offending minds in their new future bodies—and sometimes forced re-exchanges were effected. Complex cases of the displacement of exploring or already captive minds by minds in various regions of the past had been known and carefully rectified. In every age since the discovery of mind-projection, a minute but well-recognised element of the population consisted of Great Race minds from past ages, sojourning for a longer or shorter while.
      When a captive mind of alien origin was returned to its own body in the future, it was purged by an intricate mechanical hypnosis of all it had learned in the Great Race’s age—this because of certain troublesome consequences inherent in the general carrying forward of knowledge in large quantities. The few existing instances of clear transmission had caused, and would cause at known future times, great disasters. And it was largely in consequence of two cases of the kind (said the old myths) that mankind had learned what it had concerning the Great Race. Of all things surviving physically and directly from that aeon-distant world, there remained only certain ruins of great stones in far places and under the sea, and parts of the text of the frightful Pnakotic Manuscripts.
      Thus the returning mind reached its own age with only the faintest and most fragmentary visions of what it had undergone since its seizure. All memories that could be eradicated were eradicated, so that in most cases only a dream-shadowed blank stretched back to the time of the first exchange. Some minds recalled more than others, and the chance joining of memories had at rare times brought hints of the forbidden past to future ages. There probably never was a time when groups or cults did not secretly cherish certain of these hints. In the Necronomicon the presence of such a cult among human beings was suggested—a cult that sometimes gave aid to minds voyaging down the aeons from the days of the Great Race.
      And meanwhile the Great Race itself waxed well-nigh omniscient, and turned to the task of setting up exchanges with the minds of other planets, and of exploring their pasts and futures. It sought likewise to fathom the past years and origin of that black, aeon-dead orb in far space whence its own mental heritage had come—for the mind of the Great Race was older than its bodily form. The beings of a dying elder world, wise with the ultimate secrets, had looked ahead for a new world and species wherein they might have long life; and had sent their minds en masse into that future race best adapted to house them—the cone-shaped things that peopled our earth a billion years ago. Thus the Great Race came to be, while the myriad minds sent backward were left to die in the horror of strange shapes. Later the race would again face death, yet would live through another forward migration of its best minds into the bodies of others who had a longer physical span ahead of them.
      Such was the background of intertwined legend and hallucination. When, around 1920, I had my researches in coherent shape, I felt a slight lessening of the tension which their earlier stages had increased. After all, and in spite of the fancies prompted by blind emotions, were not most of my phenomena readily explainable? Any chance might have turned my mind to dark studies during the amnesia—and then I read the forbidden legends and met the members of ancient and ill-regarded cults. That, plainly, supplied the material for the dreams and disturbed feelings which came after the return of memory. As for the marginal notes in dream-hieroglyphs and languages unknown to me, but laid at my door by librarians—I might easily have picked up a smattering of the tongues during my secondary state, while the hieroglyphs were doubtless coined by my fancy from descriptions in old legends, and afterward woven into my dreams. I tried to verify certain points through conversation with known cult-leaders, but never succeeded in establishing the right connexions.
      At times the parallelism of so many cases in so many distant ages continued to worry me as it had at first, but on the other hand I reflected that the excitant folklore was undoubtedly more universal in the past than in the present. Probably all the other victims whose cases were like mine had had a long and familiar knowledge of the tales I had learned only when in my secondary state. When these victims had lost their memory, they had associated themselves with the creatures of their household myths—the fabulous invaders supposed to displace men’s minds—and had thus embarked upon quests for knowledge which they thought they could take back to a fancied, non-human past. Then when their memory returned, they reversed the associative process and thought of themselves as the former captive minds instead of as the displacers. Hence the dreams and pseudo-memories following the conventional myth-pattern.
      Despite the seeming cumbrousness of these explanations, they came finally to supersede all others in my mind—largely because of the greater weakness of any rival theory. And a substantial number of eminent psychologists and anthropologists gradually agreed with me. The more I reflected, the more convincing did my reasoning seem; till in the end I had a really effective bulwark against the visions and impressions which still assailed me. Suppose I did see strange things at night? These were only what I had heard and read of. Suppose I did have odd loathings and perspectives and pseudo-memories? These, too, were only echoes of myths absorbed in my secondary state. Nothing that I might dream, nothing that I might feel, could be of any actual significance.
      Fortified by this philosophy, I greatly improved in nervous equilibrium, even though the visions (rather than the abstract impressions) steadily became more frequent and more disturbingly detailed. In 1922 I felt able to undertake regular work again, and put my newly gained knowledge to practical use by accepting an instructorship in psychology at the university. My old chair of political economy had long been adequately filled—besides which, methods of teaching economics had changed greatly since my heyday. My son was at this time just entering on the post-graduate studies leading to his present professorship, and we worked together a great deal.

IV.

I continued, however, to keep a careful record of the outré dreams which crowded upon me so thickly and vividly. Such a record, I argued, was of genuine value as a psychological document. The glimpses still seemed damnably like memories, though I fought off this impression with a goodly measure of success. In writing, I treated the phantasmata as things seen; but at all other times I brushed them aside like any gossamer illusions of the night. I had never mentioned such matters in common conversation; though reports of them, filtering out as such things will, had aroused sundry rumours regarding my mental health. It is amusing to reflect that these rumours were confined wholly to laymen, without a single champion among physicians or psychologists.
      Of my visions after 1914 I will here mention only a few, since fuller accounts and records are at the disposal of the serious student. It is evident that with time the curious inhibitions somewhat waned, for the scope of my visions vastly increased. They have never, though, become other than disjointed fragments seemingly without clear motivation. Within the dreams I seemed gradually to acquire a greater and greater freedom of wandering. I floated through many strange buildings of stone, going from one to the other along mammoth underground passages which seemed to form the common avenues of transit. Sometimes I encountered those gigantic sealed trap-doors in the lowest level, around which such an aura of fear and forbiddenness clung. I saw tremendous tessellated pools, and rooms of curious and inexplicable utensils of myriad sorts. Then there were colossal caverns of intricate machinery whose outlines and purpose were wholly strange to me, and whose sound manifested itself only after many years of dreaming. I may here remark that sight and sound are the only senses I have ever exercised in the visionary world.
      The real horror began in May, 1915, when I first saw the living things. This was before my studies had taught me what, in view of the myths and case histories, to expect. As mental barriers wore down, I beheld great masses of thin vapour in various parts of the building and in the streets below. These steadily grew more solid and distinct, till at last I could trace their monstrous outlines with uncomfortable ease. They seemed to be enormous iridescent cones, about ten feet high and ten feet wide at the base, and made up of some ridgy, scaly, semi-elastic matter. From their apexes projected four flexible, cylindrical members, each a foot thick, and of a ridgy substance like that of the cones themselves. These members were sometimes contracted almost to nothing, and sometimes extended to any distance up to about ten feet. Terminating two of them were enormous claws or nippers. At the end of a third were four red, trumpet-like appendages. The fourth terminated in an irregular yellowish globe some two feet in diameter and having three great dark eyes ranged along its central circumference. Surmounting this head were four slender grey stalks bearing flower-like appendages, whilst from its nether side dangled eight greenish antennae or tentacles. The great base of the central cone was fringed with a rubbery, grey substance which moved the whole entity through expansion and contraction.
      Their actions, though harmless, horrified me even more than their appearance—for it is not wholesome to watch monstrous objects doing what one has known only human beings to do. These objects moved intelligently around the great rooms, getting books from the shelves and taking them to the great tables, or vice versa, and sometimes writing diligently with a peculiar rod gripped in the greenish head-tentacles. The huge nippers were used in carrying books and in conversation—speech consisting of a kind of clicking and scraping. The objects had no clothing, but wore satchels or knapsacks suspended from the top of the conical trunk. They commonly carried their head and its supporting member at the level of the cone top, although it was frequently raised or lowered. The other three great members tended to rest downward on the sides of the cone, contracted to about five feet each, when not in use. From their rate of reading, writing, and operating their machines (those on the tables seemed somehow connected with thought) I concluded that their intelligence was enormously greater than man’s.
      Afterward I saw them everywhere; swarming in all the great chambers and corridors, tending monstrous machines in vaulted crypts, and racing along the vast roads in gigantic boat-shaped cars. I ceased to be afraid of them, for they seemed to form supremely natural parts of their environment. Individual differences amongst them began to be manifest, and a few appeared to be under some kind of restraint. These latter, though shewing no physical variation, had a diversity of gestures and habits which marked them off not only from the majority, but very largely from one another. They wrote a great deal in what seemed to my cloudy vision a vast variety of characters—never the typical curvilinear hieroglyphs of the majority. A few, I fancied, used our own familiar alphabet. Most of them worked much more slowly than the general mass of the entities.
      All this time my own part in the dreams seemed to be that of a disembodied consciousness with a range of vision wider than the normal; floating freely about, yet confined to the ordinary avenues and speeds of travel. Not until August, 1915, did any suggestions of bodily existence begin to harass me. I say harass, because the first phase was a purely abstract though infinitely terrible association of my previously noted body-loathing with the scenes of my visions. For a while my chief concern during dreams was to avoid looking down at myself, and I recall how grateful I was for the total absence of large mirrors in the strange rooms. I was mightily troubled by the fact that I always saw the great tables—whose height could not be under ten feet—from a level not below that of their surfaces.
      And then the morbid temptation to look down at myself became greater and greater, till one night I could not resist it. At first my downward glance revealed nothing whatever. A moment later I perceived that this was because my head lay at the end of a flexible neck of enormous length. Retracting this neck and gazing down very sharply, I saw the scaly, rugose, iridescent bulk of a vast cone ten feet tall and ten feet wide at the base. That was when I waked half of Arkham with my screaming as I plunged madly up from the abyss of sleep.
      Only after weeks of hideous repetition did I grow half-reconciled to these visions of myself in monstrous form. In the dreams I now moved bodily among the other unknown entities, reading terrible books from the endless shelves and writing for hours at the great tables with a stylus managed by the green tentacles that hung down from my head. Snatches of what I read and wrote would linger in my memory. There were horrible annals of other worlds and other universes, and of stirrings of formless life outside of all universes. There were records of strange orders of beings which had peopled the world in forgotten pasts, and frightful chronicles of grotesque-bodied intelligences which would people it millions of years after the death of the last human being. And I learned of chapters in human history whose existence no scholar of today has ever suspected. Most of these writings were in the language of the hieroglyphs; which I studied in a queer way with the aid of droning machines, and which was evidently an agglutinative speech with root systems utterly unlike any found in human languages. Other volumes were in other unknown tongues learned in the same queer way. A very few were in languages I knew. Extremely clever pictures, both inserted in the records and forming separate collections, aided me immensely. And all the time I seemed to be setting down a history of my own age in English. On waking, I could recall only minute and meaningless scraps of the unknown tongues which my dream-self had mastered, though whole phrases of the history stayed with me.
      I learned—even before my waking self had studied the parallel cases or the old myths from which the dreams doubtless sprang—that the entities around me were of the world’s greatest race, which had conquered time and had sent exploring minds into every age. I knew, too, that I had been snatched from my age while another used my body in that age, and that a few of the other strange forms housed similarly captured minds. I seemed to talk, in some odd language of claw-clickings, with exiled intellects from every corner of the solar system.
      There was a mind from the planet we know as Venus, which would live incalculable epochs to come, and one from an outer moon of Jupiter six million years in the past. Of earthly minds there were some from the winged, star-headed, half-vegetable race of palaeogean Antarctica; one from the reptile people of fabled Valusia; three from the furry pre-human Hyperborean worshippers of Tsathoggua; one from the wholly abominable Tcho-Tchos; two from the arachnid denizens of earth’s last age; five from the hardy coleopterous species immediately following mankind, to which the Great Race was some day to transfer its keenest minds en masse in the face of horrible peril; and several from different branches of humanity.
      I talked with the mind of Yiang-Li, a philosopher from the cruel empire of Tsan-Chan, which is to come in A.D. 5000; with that of a general of the great-headed brown people who held South Africa in B.C. 50,000; with that of a twelfth-century Florentine monk named Bartolomeo Corsi; with that of a king of Lomar who had ruled that terrible polar land 100,000 years before the squat, yellow Inutos came from the west to engulf it; with that of Nug-Soth, a magician of the dark conquerors of A.D. 16,000; with that of a Roman named Titus Sempronius Blaesus, who had been a quaestor in Sulla’s time; with that of Khephnes, an Egyptian of the 14th Dynasty who told me the hideous secret of Nyarlathotep; with that of a priest of Atlantis’ middle kingdom; with that of a Suffolk gentleman of Cromwell’s day, James Woodville; with that of a court astronomer of pre-Inca Peru; with that of the Australian physicist Nevil Kingston-Brown, who will die in A.D. 2518; with that of an archimage of vanished Yhe in the Pacific; with that of Theodotides, a Graeco-Bactrian official of B.C. 200; with that of an aged Frenchman of Louis XIII’s time named Pierre-Louis Montmagny; with that of Crom-Ya, a Cimmerian chieftain of B.C. 15,000; and with so many others that my brain cannot hold the shocking secrets and dizzying marvels I learned from them.
      I awaked each morning in a fever, sometimes frantically trying to verify or discredit such information as fell within the range of modern human knowledge. Traditional facts took on new and doubtful aspects, and I marvelled at the dream-fancy which could invent such surprising addenda to history and science. I shivered at the mysteries the past may conceal, and trembled at the menaces the future may bring forth. What was hinted in the speech of post-human entities of the fate of mankind produced such an effect on me that I will not set it down here. After man there would be the mighty beetle civilisation, the bodies of whose members the cream of the Great Race would seize when the monstrous doom overtook the elder world. Later, as the earth’s span closed, the transferred minds would again migrate through time and space—to another stopping-place in the bodies of the bulbous vegetable entities of Mercury. But there would be races after them, clinging pathetically to the cold planet and burrowing to its horror-filled core, before the utter end.
      Meanwhile, in my dreams, I wrote endlessly in that history of my own age which I was preparing—half voluntarily and half through promises of increased library and travel opportunities—for the Great Race’s central archives. The archives were in a colossal subterranean structure near the city’s centre, which I came to know well through frequent labours and consultations. Meant to last as long as the race, and to withstand the fiercest of earth’s convulsions, this titan repository surpassed all other buildings in the massive, mountain-like firmness of its construction.
      The records, written or printed on great sheets of a curiously tenacious cellulose fabric, were bound into books that opened from the top, and were kept in individual cases of a strange, extremely light rustless metal of greyish hue, decorated with mathematical designs and bearing the title in the Great Race’s curvilinear hieroglyphs. These cases were stored in tiers of rectangular vaults—like closed, locked shelves—wrought of the same rustless metal and fastened by knobs with intricate turnings. My own history was assigned a specific place in the vaults of the lowest or vertebrate level—the section devoted to the culture of mankind and of the furry and reptilian races immediately preceding it in terrestrial dominance.
      But none of the dreams ever gave me a full picture of daily life. All were the merest misty, disconnected fragments, and it is certain that these fragments were not unfolded in their rightful sequence. I have, for example, a very imperfect idea of my own living arrangements in the dream-world; though I seem to have possessed a great stone room of my own. My restrictions as a prisoner gradually disappeared, so that some of the visions included vivid travels over the mighty jungle roads, sojourns in strange cities, and explorations of some of the vast dark windowless ruins from which the Great Race shrank in curious fear. There were also long sea-voyages in enormous, many-decked boats of incredible swiftness, and trips over wild regions in closed, projectile-like airships lifted and moved by electrical repulsion. Beyond the wide, warm ocean were other cities of the Great Race, and on one far continent I saw the crude villages of the black-snouted, winged creatures who would evolve as a dominant stock after the Great Race had sent its foremost minds into the future to escape the creeping horror. Flatness and exuberant green life were always the keynote of the scene. Hills were low and sparse, and usually displayed signs of volcanic forces.
      Of the animals I saw, I could write volumes. All were wild; for the Great Race’s mechanised culture had long since done away with domestic beasts, while food was wholly vegetable or synthetic. Clumsy reptiles of great bulk floundered in steaming morasses, fluttered in the heavy air, or spouted in the seas and lakes; and among these I fancied I could vaguely recognise lesser, archaic prototypes of many forms—dinosaurs, pterodactyls, ichthyosaurs, labyrinthodonts, rhamphorhynci, plesiosaurs, and the like—made familiar through palaeontology. Of birds or mammals there were none that I could discern.
      The ground and swamps were constantly alive with snakes, lizards, and crocodiles, while insects buzzed incessantly amidst the lush vegetation. And far out at sea unspied and unknown monsters spouted mountainous columns of foam into the vaporous sky. Once I was taken under the ocean in a gigantic submarine vessel with searchlights, and glimpsed some living horrors of awesome magnitude. I saw also the ruins of incredible sunken cities, and the wealth of crinoid, brachiopod, coral, and ichthyic life which everywhere abounded.
      Of the physiology, psychology, folkways, and detailed history of the Great Race my visions preserved but little information, and many of the scattered points I here set down were gleaned from my study of old legends and other cases rather than from my own dreaming. For in time, of course, my reading and research caught up with and passed the dreams in many phases; so that certain dream-fragments were explained in advance, and formed verifications of what I had learned. This consolingly established my belief that similar reading and research, accomplished by my secondary self, had formed the source of the whole terrible fabric of pseudo-memories.
      The period of my dreams, apparently, was one somewhat less than 150,000,000 years ago, when the Palaeozoic age was giving place to the Mesozoic. The bodies occupied by the Great Race represented no surviving—or even scientifically known—line of terrestrial evolution, but were of a peculiar, closely homogeneous, and highly specialised organic type inclining as much to the vegetable as to the animal state. Cell-action was of an unique sort almost precluding fatigue, and wholly eliminating the need of sleep. Nourishment, assimilated through the red trumpet-like appendages on one of the great flexible limbs, was always semi-fluid and in many aspects wholly unlike the food of existing animals. The beings had but two of the senses which we recognise—sight and hearing, the latter accomplished through the flower-like appendages on the grey stalks above their heads—but of other and incomprehensible senses (not, however, well utilisable by alien captive minds inhabiting their bodies) they possessed many. Their three eyes were so situated as to give them a range of vision wider than the normal. Their blood was a sort of deep-greenish ichor of great thickness. They had no sex, but reproduced through seeds or spores which clustered on their bases and could be developed only under water. Great, shallow tanks were used for the growth of their young—which were, however, reared only in small numbers on account of the longevity of individuals; four or five thousand years being the common life span.
      Markedly defective individuals were quietly disposed of as soon as their defects were noticed. Disease and the approach of death were, in the absence of a sense of touch or of physical pain, recognised by purely visual symptoms. The dead were incinerated with dignified ceremonies. Once in a while, as before mentioned, a keen mind would escape death by forward projection in time; but such cases were not numerous. When one did occur, the exiled mind from the future was treated with the utmost kindness till the dissolution of its unfamiliar tenement.
      The Great Race seemed to form a single loosely knit nation or league, with major institutions in common, though there were four definite divisions. The political and economic system of each unit was a sort of fascistic socialism, with major resources rationally distributed, and power delegated to a small governing board elected by the votes of all able to pass certain educational and psychological tests. Family organisation was not overstressed, though ties among persons of common descent were recognised, and the young were generally reared by their parents.
      Resemblances to human attitudes and institutions were, of course, most marked in those fields where on the one hand highly abstract elements were concerned, or where on the other hand there was a dominance of the basic, unspecialised urges common to all organic life. A few added likenesses came through conscious adoption as the Great Race probed the future and copied what it liked. Industry, highly mechanised, demanded but little time from each citizen; and the abundant leisure was filled with intellectual and aesthetic activities of various sorts. The sciences were carried to an unbelievable height of development, and art was a vital part of life, though at the period of my dreams it had passed its crest and meridian. Technology was enormously stimulated through the constant struggle to survive, and to keep in existence the physical fabric of great cities, imposed by the prodigious geologic upheavals of those primal days.
      Crime was surprisingly scanty, and was dealt with through highly efficient policing. Punishments ranged from privilege-deprivation and imprisonment to death or major emotion-wrenching, and were never administered without a careful study of the criminal’s motivations. Warfare, largely civil for the last few millennia though sometimes waged against reptilian and octopodic invaders, or against the winged, star-headed Old Ones who centred in the Antarctic, was infrequent though infinitely devastating. An enormous army, using camera-like weapons which produced tremendous electrical effects, was kept on hand for purposes seldom mentioned, but obviously connected with the ceaseless fear of the dark, windowless elder ruins and of the great sealed trap-doors in the lowest subterrene levels.
      This fear of the basalt ruins and trap-doors was largely a matter of unspoken suggestion—or, at most, of furtive quasi-whispers. Everything specific which bore on it was significantly absent from such books as were on the common shelves. It was the one subject lying altogether under a taboo among the Great Race, and seemed to be connected alike with horrible bygone struggles, and with that future peril which would some day force the race to send its keener minds ahead en masse in time. Imperfect and fragmentary as were the other things presented by dreams and legends, this matter was still more bafflingly shrouded. The vague old myths avoided it—or perhaps all allusions had for some reason been excised. And in the dreams of myself and others, the hints were peculiarly few. Members of the Great Race never intentionally referred to the matter, and what could be gleaned came only from some of the more sharply observant captive minds.
      According to these scraps of information, the basis of the fear was a horrible elder race of half-polypous, utterly alien entities which had come through space from immeasurably distant universes and had dominated the earth and three other solar planets about six hundred million years ago. They were only partly material—as we understand matter—and their type of consciousness and media of perception differed wholly from those of terrestrial organisms. For example, their senses did not include that of sight; their mental world being a strange, non-visual pattern of impressions. They were, however, sufficiently material to use implements of normal matter when in cosmic areas containing it; and they required housing—albeit of a peculiar kind. Though their senses could penetrate all material barriers, their substance could not; and certain forms of electrical energy could wholly destroy them. They had the power of aërial motion despite the absence of wings or any other visible means of levitation. Their minds were of such texture that no exchange with them could be effected by the Great Race.
      When these things had come to the earth they had built mighty basalt cities of windowless towers, and had preyed horribly upon the beings they found. Thus it was when the minds of the Great Race sped across the void from that obscure trans-galactic world known in the disturbing and debatable Eltdown Shards as Yith. The newcomers, with the instruments they created, had found it easy to subdue the predatory entities and drive them down to those caverns of inner earth which they had already joined to their abodes and begun to inhabit. Then they had sealed the entrances and left them to their fate, afterward occupying most of their great cities and preserving certain important buildings for reasons connected more with superstition than with indifference, boldness, or scientific and historical zeal.
      But as the aeons passed, there came vague, evil signs that the Elder Things were growing strong and numerous in the inner world. There were sporadic irruptions of a particularly hideous character in certain small and remote cities of the Great Race, and in some of the deserted elder cities which the Great Race had not peopled—places where the paths to the gulfs below had not been properly sealed or guarded. After that greater precautions were taken, and many of the paths were closed for ever—though a few were left with sealed trap-doors for strategic use in fighting the Elder Things if ever they broke forth in unexpected places; fresh rifts caused by that selfsame geologic change which had choked some of the paths and had slowly lessened the number of outer-world structures and ruins surviving from the conquered entities.
      The irruptions of the Elder Things must have been shocking beyond all description, since they had permanently coloured the psychology of the Great Race. Such was the fixed mood of horror that the very aspect of the creatures was left unmentioned—at no time was I able to gain a clear hint of what they looked like. There were veiled suggestions of a monstrous plasticity, and of temporary lapses of visibility, while other fragmentary whispers referred to their control and military use of great winds. Singular whistling noises, and colossal footprints made up of five circular toe-marks, seemed also to be associated with them.
      It was evident that the coming doom so desperately feared by the Great Race—the doom that was one day to send millions of keen minds across the chasm of time to strange bodies in the safer future—had to do with a final successful irruption of the Elder Beings. Mental projections down the ages had clearly foretold such a horror, and the Great Race had resolved that none who could escape should face it. That the foray would be a matter of vengeance, rather than an attempt to reoccupy the outer world, they knew from the planet’s later history—for their projections shewed the coming and going of subsequent races untroubled by the monstrous entities. Perhaps these entities had come to prefer earth’s inner abysses to the variable, storm-ravaged surface, since light meant nothing to them. Perhaps, too, they were slowly weakening with the aeons. Indeed, it was known that they would be quite dead in the time of the post-human beetle race which the fleeing minds would tenant. Meanwhile the Great Race maintained its cautious vigilance, with potent weapons ceaselessly ready despite the horrified banishing of the subject from common speech and visible records. And always the shadow of nameless fear hung about the sealed trap-doors and the dark, windowless elder towers.

V.

That is the world of which my dreams brought me dim, scattered echoes every night. I cannot hope to give any true idea of the horror and dread contained in such echoes, for it was upon a wholly intangible quality—the sharp sense of pseudo-memory—that such feelings mainly depended. As I have said, my studies gradually gave me a defence against these feelings, in the form of rational psychological explanations; and this saving influence was augmented by the subtle touch of accustomedness which comes with the passage of time. Yet in spite of everything the vague, creeping terror would return momentarily now and then. It did not, however, engulf me as it had before; and after 1922 I lived a very normal life of work and recreation.
      In the course of years I began to feel that my experience—together with the kindred cases and the related folklore—ought to be definitely summarised and published for the benefit of serious students; hence I prepared a series of articles briefly covering the whole ground and illustrated with crude sketches of some of the shapes, scenes, decorative motifs, and hieroglyphs remembered from the dreams. These appeared at various times during 1928 and 1929 in the Journal of the American Psychological Society, but did not attract much attention. Meanwhile I continued to record my dreams with the minutest care, even though the growing stack of reports attained troublesomely vast proportions.
      On July 10, 1934, there was forwarded to me by the Psychological Society the letter which opened the culminating and most horrible phase of the whole mad ordeal. It was postmarked Pilbarra, Western Australia, and bore the signature of one whom I found, upon inquiry, to be a mining engineer of considerable prominence. Enclosed were some very curious snapshots. I will reproduce the text in its entirety, and no reader can fail to understand how tremendous an effect it and the photographs had upon me.
      I was, for a time, almost stunned and incredulous; for although I had often thought that some basis of fact must underlie certain phases of the legends which had coloured my dreams, I was none the less unprepared for anything like a tangible survival from a lost world remote beyond all imagination. Most devastating of all were the photographs—for here, in cold, incontrovertible realism, there stood out against a background of sand certain worn-down, water-ridged, storm-weathered blocks of stone whose slightly convex tops and slightly concave bottoms told their own story. And when I studied them with a magnifying glass I could see all too plainly, amidst the batterings and pittings, the traces of those vast curvilinear designs and occasional hieroglyphs whose significance had become so hideous to me. But here is the letter, which speaks for itself:
49, Dampier Str.,
      Pilbarra, W. Australia,
            18 May, 1934.
Prof. N. W. Peaslee,
c/o Am. Psychological Society,
30, E. 41st Str.,
N. Y. City, U.S.A.

My dear Sir:—
      A recent conversation with Dr. E. M. Boyle of Perth, and some papers with your articles which he has just sent me, make it advisable for me to tell you about certain things I have seen in the Great Sandy Desert east of our gold field here. It would seem, in view of the peculiar legends about old cities with huge stonework and strange designs and hieroglyphs which you describe, that I have come upon something very important.
      The blackfellows have always been full of talk about “great stones with marks on them”, and seem to have a terrible fear of such things. They connect them in some way with their common racial legends about Buddai, the gigantic old man who lies asleep for ages underground with his head on his arm, and who will some day awake and eat up the world. There are some very old and half-forgotten tales of enormous underground huts of great stones, where passages lead down and down, and where horrible things have happened. The blackfellows claim that once some warriors, fleeing in battle, went down into one and never came back, but that frightful winds began to blow from the place soon after they went down. However, there usually isn’t much in what these natives say.
      But what I have to tell is more than this. Two years ago, when I was prospecting about 500 miles east in the desert, I came on a lot of queer pieces of dressed stone perhaps 3 × 2 × 2 feet in size, and weathered and pitted to the very limit. At first I couldn’t find any of the marks the blackfellows told about, but when I looked close enough I could make out some deeply carved lines in spite of the weathering. They were peculiar curves, just like what the blacks had tried to describe. I imagine there must have been 30 or 40 blocks, some nearly buried in the sand, and all within a circle perhaps a quarter of a mile’s diameter.
      When I saw some, I looked around closely for more, and made a careful reckoning of the place with my instruments. I also took pictures of 10 or 12 of the most typical blocks, and will enclose the prints for you to see. I turned my information and pictures over to the government at Perth, but they have done nothing with them. Then I met Dr. Boyle, who had read your articles in the Journal of the American Psychological Society, and in time happened to mention the stones. He was enormously interested, and became quite excited when I shewed him my snapshots, saying that the stones and markings were just like those of the masonry you had dreamed about and seen described in legends. He meant to write you, but was delayed. Meanwhile he sent me most of the magazines with your articles, and I saw at once from your drawings and descriptions that my stones are certainly the kind you mean. You can appreciate this from the enclosed prints. Later on you will hear directly from Dr. Boyle.
      Now I can understand how important all this will be to you. Without question we are faced with the remains of an unknown civilisation older than any dreamed of before, and forming a basis for your legends. As a mining engineer, I have some knowledge of geology, and can tell you that these blocks are so ancient they frighten me. They are mostly sandstone and granite, though one is almost certainly made of a queer sort of cement or concrete. They bear evidence of water action, as if this part of the world had been submerged and come up again after long ages—all since these blocks were made and used. It is a matter of hundreds of thousands of years—or heaven knows how much more. I don’t like to think about it.
      In view of your previous diligent work in tracking down the legends and everything connected with them, I cannot doubt but that you will want to lead an expedition to the desert and make some archaeological excavations. Both Dr. Boyle and I are prepared to coöperate in such work if you—or organisations known to you—can furnish the funds. I can get together a dozen miners for the heavy digging—the blacks would be of no use, for I’ve found that they have an almost maniacal fear of this particular spot. Boyle and I are saying nothing to others, for you very obviously ought to have precedence in any discoveries or credit.
      The place can be reached from Pilbarra in about 4 days by motor tractor—which we’d need for our apparatus. It is somewhat west and south of Warburton’s path of 1873, and 100 miles southeast of Joanna Spring. We could float things up the De Grey River instead of starting from Pilbarra—but all that can be talked over later. Roughly, the stones lie at a point about 22° 3' 14"" South Latitude, 125° 0' 39"" East Longitude. The climate is tropical, and the desert conditions are trying. Any expedition had better be made in winter—June or July or August. I shall welcome further correspondence upon this subject, and am keenly eager to assist in any plan you may devise. After studying your articles I am deeply impressed with the profound significance of the whole matter. Dr. Boyle will write later. When rapid communication is needed, a cable to Perth can be relayed by wireless.
      Hoping profoundly for an early message,

Believe me,
      Most faithfully yours,
            Robert B. F. Mackenzie.
      Of the immediate aftermath of this letter, much can be learned from the press. My good fortune in securing the backing of Miskatonic University was great, and both Mr. Mackenzie and Dr. Boyle proved invaluable in arranging matters at the Australian end. We were not too specific with the public about our objects, since the whole matter would have lent itself unpleasantly to sensational and jocose treatment by the cheaper newspapers. As a result, printed reports were sparing; but enough appeared to tell of our quest for reported Australian ruins and to chronicle our various preparatory steps.
      Professors William Dyer of the college’s geology department (leader of the Miskatonic Antarctic Expedition of 1930–31), Ferdinand C. Ashley of the department of ancient history, and Tyler M. Freeborn of the department of anthropology—together with my son Wingate—accompanied me. My correspondent Mackenzie came to Arkham early in 1935 and assisted in our final preparations. He proved to be a tremendously competent and affable man of about fifty, admirably well-read, and deeply familiar with all the conditions of Australian travel. He had tractors waiting at Pilbarra, and we chartered a tramp steamer of sufficiently light draught to get up the river to that point. We were prepared to excavate in the most careful and scientific fashion, sifting every particle of sand, and disturbing nothing which might seem to be in or near its original situation.
      Sailing from Boston aboard the wheezy Lexington on March 28, 1935, we had a leisurely trip across the Atlantic and Mediterranean, through the Suez Canal, down the Red Sea, and across the Indian Ocean to our goal. I need not tell how the sight of the low, sandy West Australian coast depressed me, and how I detested the crude mining town and dreary gold fields where the tractors were given their last loads. Dr. Boyle, who met us, proved to be elderly, pleasant, and intelligent—and his knowledge of psychology led him into many long discussions with my son and me.
      Discomfort and expectancy were oddly mingled in most of us when at length our party of eighteen rattled forth over the arid leagues of sand and rock. On Friday, May 31st, we forded a branch of the De Grey and entered the realm of utter desolation. A certain positive terror grew on me as we advanced to this actual site of the elder world behind the legends—a terror of course abetted by the fact that my disturbing dreams and pseudo-memories still beset me with unabated force.
      It was on Monday, June 3, that we saw the first of the half-buried blocks. I cannot describe the emotions with which I actually touched—in objective reality—a fragment of Cyclopean masonry in every respect like the blocks in the walls of my dream-buildings. There was a distinct trace of carving—and my hands trembled as I recognised part of a curvilinear decorative scheme made hellish to me through years of tormenting nightmare and baffling research.
      A month of digging brought a total of some 1250 blocks in varying stages of wear and disintegration. Most of these were carven megaliths with curved tops and bottoms. A minority were smaller, flatter, plain-surfaced, and square or octagonally cut—like those of the floors and pavements in my dreams—while a few were singularly massive and curved or slanted in such a manner as to suggest use in vaulting or groining, or as parts of arches or round window casings. The deeper—and the farther north and east—we dug, the more blocks we found; though we still failed to discover any trace of arrangement among them. Professor Dyer was appalled at the measureless age of the fragments, and Freeborn found traces of symbols which fitted darkly into certain Papuan and Polynesian legends of infinite antiquity. The condition and scattering of the blocks told mutely of vertiginous cycles of time and geologic upheavals of cosmic savagery.
      We had an aëroplane with us, and my son Wingate would often go up to different heights and scan the sand-and-rock waste for signs of dim, large-scale outlines—either differences of level or trails of scattered blocks. His results were virtually negative; for whenever he would one day think he had glimpsed some significant trend, he would on his next trip find the impression replaced by another equally insubstantial—a result of the shifting, wind-blown sand. One or two of these ephemeral suggestions, though, affected me queerly and disagreeably. They seemed, after a fashion, to dovetail horribly with something which I had dreamed or read, but which I could no longer remember. There was a terrible pseudo-familiarity about them—which somehow made me look furtively and apprehensively over the abominable, sterile terrain toward the north and northeast.
      Around the first week in July I developed an unaccountable set of mixed emotions about that general northeasterly region. There was horror, and there was curiosity—but more than that, there was a persistent and perplexing illusion of memory. I tried all sorts of psychological expedients to get these notions out of my head, but met with no success. Sleeplessness also gained upon me, but I almost welcomed this because of the resultant shortening of my dream-periods. I acquired the habit of taking long, lone walks in the desert late at night—usually to the north or northeast, whither the sum of my strange new impulses seemed subtly to pull me.
      Sometimes, on these walks, I would stumble over nearly buried fragments of the ancient masonry. Though there were fewer visible blocks here than where we had started, I felt sure that there must be a vast abundance beneath the surface. The ground was less level than at our camp, and the prevailing high winds now and then piled the sand into fantastic temporary hillocks—exposing some traces of the elder stones while it covered other traces. I was queerly anxious to have the excavations extend to this territory, yet at the same time dreaded what might be revealed. Obviously, I was getting into a rather bad state—all the worse because I could not account for it.
      An indication of my poor nervous health can be gained from my response to an odd discovery which I made on one of my nocturnal rambles. It was on the evening of July 11th, when a gibbous moon flooded the mysterious hillocks with a curious pallor. Wandering somewhat beyond my usual limits, I came upon a great stone which seemed to differ markedly from any we had yet encountered. It was almost wholly covered, but I stooped and cleared away the sand with my hands, later studying the object carefully and supplementing the moonlight with my electric torch. Unlike the other very large rocks, this one was perfectly square-cut, with no convex or concave surface. It seemed, too, to be of a dark basaltic substance wholly dissimilar to the granite and sandstone and occasional concrete of the now familiar fragments.
      Suddenly I rose, turned, and ran for the camp at top speed. It was a wholly unconscious and irrational flight, and only when I was close to my tent did I fully realise why I had run. Then it came to me. The queer dark stone was something which I had dreamed and read about, and which was linked with the uttermost horrors of the aeon-old legendry. It was one of the blocks of that basaltic elder masonry which the fabled Great Race held in such fear—the tall, windowless ruins left by those brooding, half-material, alien Things that festered in earth’s nether abysses and against whose wind-like, invisible forces the trap-doors were sealed and the sleepless sentinels posted.
      I remained awake all that night, but by dawn realised how silly I had been to let the shadow of a myth upset me. Instead of being frightened, I should have had a discoverer’s enthusiasm. The next forenoon I told the others about my find, and Dyer, Freeborn, Boyle, my son, and I set out to view the anomalous block. Failure, however, confronted us. I had formed no clear idea of the stone’s location, and a late wind had wholly altered the hillocks of shifting sand.

VI.

I come now to the crucial and most difficult part of my narrative—all the more difficult because I cannot be quite certain of its reality. At times I feel uncomfortably sure that I was not dreaming or deluded; and it is this feeling—in view of the stupendous implications which the objective truth of my experience would raise—which impels me to make this record. My son—a trained psychologist with the fullest and most sympathetic knowledge of my whole case—shall be the primary judge of what I have to tell.
      First let me outline the externals of the matter, as those at the camp know them. On the night of July 17–18, after a windy day, I retired early but could not sleep. Rising shortly before eleven, and afflicted as usual with that strange feeling regarding the northeastward terrain, I set out on one of my typical nocturnal walks; seeing and greeting only one person—an Australian miner named Tupper—as I left our precincts. The moon, slightly past full, shone from a clear sky and drenched the ancient sands with a white, leprous radiance which seemed to me somehow infinitely evil. There was no longer any wind, nor did any return for nearly five hours, as amply attested by Tupper and others who did not sleep through the night. The Australian last saw me walking rapidly across the pallid, secret-guarding hillocks toward the northeast.
      About 3:30 a.m. a violent wind blew up, waking everyone in camp and felling three of the tents. The sky was unclouded, and the desert still blazed with that leprous moonlight. As the party saw to the tents my absence was noted, but in view of my previous walks this circumstance gave no one alarm. And yet as many as three men—all Australians—seemed to feel something sinister in the air. Mackenzie explained to Prof. Freeborn that this was a fear picked up from blackfellow folklore—the natives having woven a curious fabric of malignant myth about the high winds which at long intervals sweep across the sands under a clear sky. Such winds, it is whispered, blow out of the great stone huts under the ground where terrible things have happened—and are never felt except near places where the big marked stones are scattered. Close to four the gale subsided as suddenly as it had begun, leaving the sand hills in new and unfamiliar shapes.
      It was just past five, with the bloated, fungoid moon sinking in the west, when I staggered into camp—hatless, tattered, features scratched and ensanguined, and without my electric torch. Most of the men had returned to bed, but Prof. Dyer was smoking a pipe in front of his tent. Seeing my winded and almost frenzied state, he called Dr. Boyle, and the two of them got me on my cot and made me comfortable. My son, roused by the stir, soon joined them, and they all tried to force me to lie still and attempt sleep.
      But there was no sleep for me. My psychological state was very extraordinary—different from anything I had previously suffered. After a time I insisted upon talking—nervously and elaborately explaining my condition. I told them I had become fatigued, and had lain down in the sand for a nap. There had, I said, been dreams even more frightful than usual—and when I was awaked by the sudden high wind my overwrought nerves had snapped. I had fled in panic, frequently falling over half-buried stones and thus gaining my tattered and bedraggled aspect. I must have slept long—hence the hours of my absence.
      Of anything strange either seen or experienced I hinted absolutely nothing—exercising the greatest self-control in that respect. But I spoke of a change of mind regarding the whole work of the expedition, and earnestly urged a halt in all digging toward the northeast. My reasoning was patently weak—for I mentioned a dearth of blocks, a wish not to offend the superstitious miners, a possible shortage of funds from the college, and other things either untrue or irrelevant. Naturally, no one paid the least attention to my new wishes—not even my son, whose concern for my health was very obvious.
      The next day I was up and around the camp, but took no part in the excavations. Seeing that I could not stop the work, I decided to return home as soon as possible for the sake of my nerves, and made my son promise to fly me in the plane to Perth—a thousand miles to the southwest—as soon as he had surveyed the region I wished let alone. If, I reflected, the thing I had seen was still visible, I might decide to attempt a specific warning even at the cost of ridicule. It was just conceivable that the miners who knew the local folklore might back me up. Humouring me, my son made the survey that very afternoon; flying over all the terrain my walk could possibly have covered. Yet nothing of what I had found remained in sight. It was the case of the anomalous basalt block all over again—the shifting sand had wiped out every trace. For an instant I half regretted having lost a certain awesome object in my stark fright—but now I know that the loss was merciful. I can still believe my whole experience an illusion—especially if, as I devoutly hope, that hellish abyss is never found.
      Wingate took me to Perth July 20, though declining to abandon the expedition and return home. He stayed with me until the 25th, when the steamer for Liverpool sailed. Now, in the cabin of the Empress, I am pondering long and frantically on the entire matter, and have decided that my son at least must be informed. It shall rest with him whether to diffuse the matter more widely. In order to meet any eventuality I have prepared this summary of my background—as already known in a scattered way to others—and will now tell as briefly as possible what seemed to happen during my absence from the camp that hideous night.
      Nerves on edge, and whipped into a kind of perverse eagerness by that inexplicable, dread-mingled, pseudo-mnemonic urge toward the northeast, I plodded on beneath the evil, burning moon. Here and there I saw, half-shrouded by the sand, those primal Cyclopean blocks left from nameless and forgotten aeons. The incalculable age and brooding horror of this monstrous waste began to oppress me as never before, and I could not keep from thinking of my maddening dreams, of the frightful legends which lay behind them, and of the present fears of natives and miners concerning the desert and its carven stones.
      And yet I plodded on as if to some eldritch rendezvous—more and more assailed by bewildering fancies, compulsions, and pseudo-memories. I thought of some of the possible contours of the lines of stones as seen by my son from the air, and wondered why they seemed at once so ominous and so familiar. Something was fumbling and rattling at the latch of my recollection, while another unknown force sought to keep the portal barred.
      The night was windless, and the pallid sand curved upward and downward like frozen waves of the sea. I had no goal, but somehow ploughed along as if with fate-bound assurance. My dreams welled up into the waking world, so that each sand-embedded megalith seemed part of endless rooms and corridors of pre-human masonry, carved and hieroglyphed with symbols that I knew too well from years of custom as a captive mind of the Great Race. At moments I fancied I saw those omniscient conical horrors moving about at their accustomed tasks, and I feared to look down lest I find myself one with them in aspect. Yet all the while I saw the sand-covered blocks as well as the rooms and corridors; the evil, burning moon as well as the lamps of luminous crystal; the endless desert as well as the waving ferns and cycads beyond the windows. I was awake and dreaming at the same time.
      I do not know how long or how far—or indeed, in just what direction—I had walked when I first spied the heap of blocks bared by the day’s wind. It was the largest group in one place that I had so far seen, and so sharply did it impress me that the visions of fabulous aeons faded suddenly away. Again there were only the desert and the evil moon and the shards of an unguessed past. I drew close and paused, and cast the added light of my electric torch over the tumbled pile. A hillock had blown away, leaving a low, irregularly round mass of megaliths and smaller fragments some forty feet across and from two to eight feet high.
      From the very outset I realised that there was some utterly unprecedented quality about these stones. Not only was the mere number of them quite without parallel, but something in the sand-worn traces of design arrested me as I scanned them under the mingled beams of the moon and my torch. Not that any one differed essentially from the earlier specimens we had found. It was something subtler than that. The impression did not come when I looked at one block alone, but only when I ran my eye over several almost simultaneously. Then, at last, the truth dawned upon me. The curvilinear patterns on many of these blocks were closely related—parts of one vast decorative conception. For the first time in this aeon-shaken waste I had come upon a mass of masonry in its old position—tumbled and fragmentary, it is true, but none the less existing in a very definite sense.
      Mounting at a low place, I clambered laboriously over the heap; here and there clearing away the sand with my fingers, and constantly striving to interpret varieties of size, shape, and style, and relationships of design. After a while I could vaguely guess at the nature of the bygone structure, and at the designs which had once stretched over the vast surfaces of the primal masonry. The perfect identity of the whole with some of my dream-glimpses appalled and unnerved me. This was once a Cyclopean corridor thirty feet tall, paved with octagonal blocks and solidly vaulted overhead. There would have been rooms opening off on the right, and at the farther end one of those strange inclined planes would have wound down to still lower depths.
      I started violently as these conceptions occurred to me, for there was more in them than the blocks themselves had supplied. How did I know that this level should have been far underground? How did I know that the plane leading upward should have been behind me? How did I know that the long subterrene passage to the Square of Pillars ought to lie on the left one level above me? How did I know that the room of machines, and the rightward-leading tunnel to the central archives, ought to lie two levels below? How did I know that there would be one of those horrible, metal-banded trap-doors at the very bottom, four levels down? Bewildered by this intrusion from the dream-world, I found myself shaking and bathed in a cold perspiration.
      Then, as a last, intolerable touch, I felt that faint, insidious stream of cool air trickling upward from a depressed place near the centre of the huge heap. Instantly, as once before, my visions faded, and I saw again only the evil moonlight, the brooding desert, and the spreading tumulus of palaeogean masonry. Something real and tangible, yet fraught with infinite suggestions of nighted mystery, now confronted me. For that stream of air could argue but one thing—a hidden gulf of great size beneath the disordered blocks on the surface.
      My first thought was of the sinister blackfellow legends of vast underground huts among the megaliths where horrors happen and great winds are born. Then thoughts of my own dreams came back, and I felt dim pseudo-memories tugging at my mind. What manner of place lay below me? What primal, inconceivable source of age-old myth-cycles and haunting nightmares might I be on the brink of uncovering? It was only for a moment that I hesitated, for more than curiosity and scientific zeal was driving me on and working against my growing fear.
      I seemed to move almost automatically, as if in the clutch of some compelling fate. Pocketing my torch, and struggling with a strength that I had not thought I possessed, I wrenched aside first one titan fragment of stone and then another, till there welled up a strong draught whose dampness contrasted oddly with the desert’s dry air. A black rift began to yawn, and at length—when I had pushed away every fragment small enough to budge—the leprous moonlight blazed on an aperture of ample width to admit me.
      I drew out my torch and cast a brilliant beam into the opening. Below me was a chaos of tumbled masonry, sloping roughly down toward the north at an angle of about forty-five degrees, and evidently the result of some bygone collapse from above. Between its surface and the ground level was a gulf of impenetrable blackness at whose upper edge were signs of gigantic, stress-heaved vaulting. At this point, it appeared, the desert’s sands lay directly upon a floor of some titan structure of earth’s youth—how preserved through aeons of geologic convulsion I could not then and cannot now even attempt to guess.
      In retrospect, the barest idea of a sudden, lone descent into such a doubtful abyss—and at a time when one’s whereabouts were unknown to any living soul—seems like the utter apex of insanity. Perhaps it was—yet that night I embarked without hesitancy upon such a descent. Again there was manifest that lure and driving of fatality which had all along seemed to direct my course. With torch flashing intermittently to save the battery, I commenced a mad scramble down the sinister, Cyclopean incline below the opening—sometimes facing forward as I found good hand and foot holds, and at other times turning to face the heap of megaliths as I clung and fumbled more precariously. In two directions beside me, distant walls of carven, crumbling masonry loomed dimly under the direct beams of my torch. Ahead, however, was only unbroken blackness.
      I kept no track of time during my downward scramble. So seething with baffling hints and images was my mind, that all objective matters seemed withdrawn into incalculable distances. Physical sensation was dead, and even fear remained as a wraith-like, inactive gargoyle leering impotently at me. Eventually I reached a level floor strown with fallen blocks, shapeless fragments of stone, and sand and detritus of every kind. On either side—perhaps thirty feet apart—rose massive walls culminating in huge groinings. That they were carved I could just discern, but the nature of the carvings was beyond my perception. What held me the most was the vaulting overhead. The beam from my torch could not reach the roof, but the lower parts of the monstrous arches stood out distinctly. And so perfect was their identity with what I had seen in countless dreams of the elder world, that I trembled actively for the first time.
      Behind and high above, a faint luminous blur told of the distant moonlit world outside. Some vague shred of caution warned me that I should not let it out of my sight, lest I have no guide for my return. I now advanced toward the wall on my left, where the traces of carving were plainest. The littered floor was nearly as hard to traverse as the downward heap had been, but I managed to pick my difficult way. At one place I heaved aside some blocks and kicked away the detritus to see what the pavement was like, and shuddered at the utter, fateful familiarity of the great octagonal stones whose buckled surface still held roughly together.
      Reaching a convenient distance from the wall, I cast the torchlight slowly and carefully over its worn remnants of carving. Some bygone influx of water seemed to have acted on the sandstone surface, while there were curious incrustations which I could not explain. In places the masonry was very loose and distorted, and I wondered how many aeons more this primal, hidden edifice could keep its remaining traces of form amidst earth’s heavings.
      But it was the carvings themselves that excited me most. Despite their time-crumbled state, they were relatively easy to trace at close range; and the complete, intimate familiarity of every detail almost stunned my imagination. That the major attributes of this hoary masonry should be familiar, was not beyond normal credibility. Powerfully impressing the weavers of certain myths, they had become embodied in a stream of cryptic lore which, somehow coming to my notice during the amnesic period, had evoked vivid images in my subconscious mind. But how could I explain the exact and minute fashion in which each line and spiral of these strange designs tallied with what I had dreamt for more than a score of years? What obscure, forgotten iconography could have reproduced each subtle shading and nuance which so persistently, exactly, and unvaryingly besieged my sleeping vision night after night?
      For this was no chance or remote resemblance. Definitely and absolutely, the millennially ancient, aeon-hidden corridor in which I stood was the original of something I knew in sleep as intimately as I knew my own house in Crane Street, Arkham. True, my dreams shewed the place in its undecayed prime; but the identity was no less real on that account. I was wholly and horribly oriented. The particular structure I was in was known to me. Known, too, was its place in that terrible elder city of dreams. That I could visit unerringly any point in that structure or in that city which had escaped the changes and devastations of uncounted ages, I realised with hideous and instinctive certainty. What in God’s name could all this mean? How had I come to know what I knew? And what awful reality could lie behind those antique tales of the beings who had dwelt in this labyrinth of primordial stone?
      Words can convey only fractionally the welter of dread and bewilderment which ate at my spirit. I knew this place. I knew what lay before me, and what had lain overhead before the myriad towering stories had fallen to dust and debris and the desert. No need now, I thought with a shudder, to keep that faint blur of moonlight in view. I was torn betwixt a longing to flee and a feverish mixture of burning curiosity and driving fatality. What had happened to this monstrous megalopolis of eld in the millions of years since the time of my dreams? Of the subterrene mazes which had underlain the city and linked all its titan towers, how much had still survived the writhings of earth’s crust?
      Had I come upon a whole buried world of unholy archaism? Could I still find the house of the writing-master, and the tower where S’gg’ha, a captive mind from the star-headed vegetable carnivores of Antarctica, had chiselled certain pictures on the blank spaces of the walls? Would the passage at the second level down, to the hall of the alien minds, be still unchoked and traversable? In that hall the captive mind of an incredible entity—a half-plastic denizen of the hollow interior of an unknown trans-Plutonian planet eighteen million years in the future—had kept a certain thing which it had modelled from clay.
      I shut my eyes and put my hand to my head in a vain, pitiful effort to drive these insane dream-fragments from my consciousness. Then, for the first time, I felt acutely the coolness, motion, and dampness of the surrounding air. Shuddering, I realised that a vast chain of aeon-dead black gulfs must indeed be yawning somewhere beyond and below me. I thought of the frightful chambers and corridors and inclines as I recalled them from my dreams. Would the way to the central archives still be open? Again that driving fatality tugged insistently at my brain as I recalled the awesome records that once lay cased in those rectangular vaults of rustless metal.
      There, said the dreams and legends, had reposed the whole history, past and future, of the cosmic space-time continuum—written by captive minds from every orb and every age in the solar system. Madness, of course—but had I not now stumbled into a nighted world as mad as I? I thought of the locked metal shelves, and of the curious knob-twistings needed to open each one. My own came vividly into my consciousness. How often had I gone through that intricate routine of varied turns and pressures in the terrestrial vertebrate section on the lowest level! Every detail was fresh and familiar. If there were such a vault as I had dreamed of, I could open it in a moment. It was then that madness took me utterly. An instant later, and I was leaping and stumbling over the rocky debris toward the well-remembered incline to the depths below.

VII.

From that point forward my impressions are scarcely to be relied on—indeed, I still possess a final, desperate hope that they all form parts of some daemoniac dream—or illusion born of delirium. A fever raged in my brain, and everything came to me through a kind of haze—sometimes only intermittently. The rays of my torch shot feebly into the engulfing blackness, bringing phantasmal flashes of hideously familiar walls and carvings, all blighted with the decay of ages. In one place a tremendous mass of vaulting had fallen, so that I had to clamber over a mighty mound of stones reaching almost to the ragged, grotesquely stalactited roof. It was all the ultimate apex of nightmare, made worse by the blasphemous tug of pseudo-memory. One thing only was unfamiliar, and that was my own size in relation to the monstrous masonry. I felt oppressed by a sense of unwonted smallness, as if the sight of these towering walls from a mere human body was something wholly new and abnormal. Again and again I looked nervously down at myself, vaguely disturbed by the human form I possessed.
      Onward through the blackness of the abyss I leaped, plunged, and staggered—often falling and bruising myself, and once nearly shattering my torch. Every stone and corner of that daemoniac gulf was known to me, and at many points I stopped to cast beams of light through choked and crumbling yet familiar archways. Some rooms had totally collapsed; others were bare or debris-filled. In a few I saw masses of metal—some fairly intact, some broken, and some crushed or battered—which I recognised as the colossal pedestals or tables of my dreams. What they could in truth have been, I dared not guess.
      I found the downward incline and began its descent—though after a time halted by a gaping, ragged chasm whose narrowest point could not be much less than four feet across. Here the stonework had fallen through, revealing incalculable inky depths beneath. I knew there were two more cellar levels in this titan edifice, and trembled with fresh panic as I recalled the metal-clamped trap-door on the lowest one. There could be no guards now—for what had lurked beneath had long since done its hideous work and sunk into its long decline. By the time of the post-human beetle race it would be quite dead. And yet, as I thought of the native legends, I trembled anew.
      It cost me a terrible effort to vault that yawning chasm, since the littered floor prevented a running start—but madness drove me on. I chose a place close to the left-hand wall—where the rift was least wide and the landing-spot reasonably clear of dangerous debris—and after one frantic moment reached the other side in safety. At last gaining the lower level, I stumbled on past the archway of the room of machines, within which were fantastic ruins of metal half-buried beneath fallen vaulting. Everything was where I knew it would be, and I climbed confidently over the heaps which barred the entrance of a vast transverse corridor. This, I realised, would take me under the city to the central archives.
      Endless ages seemed to unroll as I stumbled, leaped, and crawled along that debris-cluttered corridor. Now and then I could make out carvings on the age-stained walls—some familiar, others seemingly added since the period of my dreams. Since this was a subterrene house-connecting highway, there were no archways save when the route led through the lower levels of various buildings. At some of these intersections I turned aside long enough to look down well-remembered corridors and into well-remembered rooms. Twice only did I find any radical changes from what I had dreamed of—and in one of these cases I could trace the sealed-up outlines of the archway I remembered.
      I shook violently, and felt a curious surge of retarding weakness, as I steered a hurried and reluctant course through the crypt of one of those great windowless ruined towers whose alien basalt masonry bespoke a whispered and horrible origin. This primal vault was round and fully two hundred feet across, with nothing carved upon the dark-hued stonework. The floor was here free from anything save dust and sand, and I could see the apertures leading upward and downward. There were no stairs or inclines—indeed, my dreams had pictured those elder towers as wholly untouched by the fabulous Great Race. Those who had built them had not needed stairs or inclines. In the dreams, the downward aperture had been tightly sealed and nervously guarded. Now it lay open—black and yawning, and giving forth a current of cool, damp air. Of what limitless caverns of eternal night might brood below, I would not permit myself to think.
      Later, clawing my way along a badly heaped section of the corridor, I reached a place where the roof had wholly caved in. The debris rose like a mountain, and I climbed up over it, passing through a vast empty space where my torchlight could reveal neither walls nor vaulting. This, I reflected, must be the cellar of the house of the metal-purveyors, fronting on the third square not far from the archives. What had happened to it I could not conjecture.
      I found the corridor again beyond the mountain of detritus and stones, but after a short distance encountered a wholly choked place where the fallen vaulting almost touched the perilously sagging ceiling. How I managed to wrench and tear aside enough blocks to afford a passage, and how I dared disturb the tightly packed fragments when the least shift of equilibrium might have brought down all the tons of superincumbent masonry to crush me to nothingness, I do not know. It was sheer madness that impelled and guided me—if, indeed, my whole underground adventure was not—as I hope—a hellish delusion or phase of dreaming. But I did make—or dream that I made—a passage that I could squirm through. As I wriggled over the mound of debris—my torch, switched continuously on, thrust deeply within my mouth—I felt myself torn by the fantastic stalactites of the jagged floor above me.
      I was now close to the great underground archival structure which seemed to form my goal. Sliding and clambering down the farther side of the barrier, and picking my way along the remaining stretch of corridor with hand-held, intermittently flashing torch, I came at last to a low, circular crypt with arches—still in a marvellous state of preservation—opening off on every side. The walls, or such parts of them as lay within reach of my torchlight, were densely hieroglyphed and chiselled with typical curvilinear symbols—some added since the period of my dreams.
      This, I realised, was my fated destination, and I turned at once through a familiar archway on my left. That I could find a clear passage up and down the incline to all the surviving levels, I had oddly little doubt. This vast, earth-protected pile, housing the annals of all the solar system, had been built with supernal skill and strength to last as long as that system itself. Blocks of stupendous size, poised with mathematical genius and bound with cements of incredible toughness, had combined to form a mass as firm as the planet’s rocky core. Here, after ages more prodigious than I could sanely grasp, its buried bulk stood in all its essential contours; the vast, dust-drifted floors scarce sprinkled with the litter elsewhere so dominant.
      The relatively easy walking from this point onward went curiously to my head. All the frantic eagerness hitherto frustrated by obstacles now took itself out in a kind of febrile speed, and I literally raced along the low-roofed, monstrously well-remembered aisles beyond the archway. I was past being astonished by the familiarity of what I saw. On every hand the great hieroglyphed metal shelf-doors loomed monstrously; some yet in place, others sprung open, and still others bent and buckled under bygone geological stresses not quite strong enough to shatter the titan masonry. Here and there a dust-covered heap below a gaping empty shelf seemed to indicate where cases had been shaken down by earth-tremors. On occasional pillars were great symbols or letters proclaiming classes and sub-classes of volumes.
      Once I paused before an open vault where I saw some of the accustomed metal cases still in position amidst the omnipresent gritty dust. Reaching up, I dislodged one of the thinner specimens with some difficulty, and rested it on the floor for inspection. It was titled in the prevailing curvilinear hieroglyphs, though something in the arrangement of the characters seemed subtly unusual. The odd mechanism of the hooked fastener was perfectly well known to me, and I snapped up the still rustless and workable lid and drew out the book within. The latter, as expected, was some twenty by fifteen inches in area, and two inches thick; the thin metal covers opening at the top. Its tough cellulose pages seemed unaffected by the myriad cycles of time they had lived through, and I studied the queerly pigmented, brush-drawn letters of the text—symbols utterly unlike either the usual curved hieroglyphs or any alphabet known to human scholarship—with a haunting, half-aroused memory. It came to me that this was the language used by a captive mind I had known slightly in my dreams—a mind from a large asteroid on which had survived much of the archaic life and lore of the primal planet whereof it formed a fragment. At the same time I recalled that this level of the archives was devoted to volumes dealing with the non-terrestrial planets.
      As I ceased poring over this incredible document I saw that the light of my torch was beginning to fail, hence quickly inserted the extra battery I always had with me. Then, armed with the stronger radiance, I resumed my feverish racing through unending tangles of aisles and corridors—recognising now and then some familiar shelf, and vaguely annoyed by the acoustic conditions which made my footfalls echo incongruously in these catacombs of aeon-long death and silence. The very prints of my shoes behind me in the millennially untrodden dust made me shudder. Never before, if my mad dreams held anything of truth, had human feet pressed upon those immemorial pavements. Of the particular goal of my insane racing, my conscious mind held no hint. There was, however, some force of evil potency pulling at my dazed will and buried recollections, so that I vaguely felt I was not running at random.
      I came to a downward incline and followed it to profounder depths. Floors flashed by me as I raced, but I did not pause to explore them. In my whirling brain there had begun to beat a certain rhythm which set my right hand twitching in unison. I wanted to unlock something, and felt that I knew all the intricate twists and pressures needed to do it. It would be like a modern safe with a combination lock. Dream or not, I had once known and still knew. How any dream—or scrap of unconsciously absorbed legend—could have taught me a detail so minute, so intricate, and so complex, I did not attempt to explain to myself. I was beyond all coherent thought. For was not this whole experience—this shocking familiarity with a set of unknown ruins, and this monstrously exact identity of everything before me with what only dreams and scraps of myth could have suggested—a horror beyond all reason? Probably it was my basic conviction then—as it is now during my saner moments—that I was not awake at all, and that the entire buried city was a fragment of febrile hallucination.
      Eventually I reached the lowest level and struck off to the right of the incline. For some shadowy reason I tried to soften my steps, even though I lost speed thereby. There was a space I was afraid to cross on this last, deeply buried floor, and as I drew near it I recalled what thing in that space I feared. It was merely one of the metal-barred and closely guarded trap-doors. There would be no guards now, and on that account I trembled and tiptoed as I had done in passing through that black basalt vault where a similar trap-door had yawned. I felt a current of cool, damp air, as I had felt there, and wished that my course led in another direction. Why I had to take the particular course I was taking, I did not know.
      When I came to the space I saw that the trap-door yawned widely open. Ahead the shelves began again, and I glimpsed on the floor before one of them a heap very thinly covered with dust, where a number of cases had recently fallen. At the same moment a fresh wave of panic clutched me, though for some time I could not discover why. Heaps of fallen cases were not uncommon, for all through the aeons this lightless labyrinth had been racked by the heavings of earth and had echoed at intervals to the deafening clatter of toppling objects. It was only when I was nearly across the space that I realised why I shook so violently.
      Not the heap, but something about the dust of the level floor was troubling me. In the light of my torch it seemed as if that dust were not as even as it ought to be—there were places where it looked thinner, as if it had been disturbed not many months before. I could not be sure, for even the apparently thinner places were dusty enough; yet a certain suspicion of regularity in the fancied unevenness was highly disquieting. When I brought the torchlight close to one of the queer places I did not like what I saw—for the illusion of regularity became very great. It was as if there were regular lines of composite impressions—impressions that went in threes, each slightly over a foot square, and consisting of five nearly circular three-inch prints, one in advance of the other four.
      These possible lines of foot-square impressions appeared to lead in two directions, as if something had gone somewhere and returned. They were of course very faint, and may have been illusions or accidents; but there was an element of dim, fumbling terror about the way I thought they ran. For at one end of them was the heap of cases which must have clattered down not long before, while at the other end was the ominous trap-door with the cool, damp wind, yawning unguarded down to abysses past imagination.

VIII.

That my strange sense of compulsion was deep and overwhelming is shewn by its conquest of my fear. No rational motive could have drawn me on after that hideous suspicion of prints and the creeping dream-memories it excited. Yet my right hand, even as it shook with fright, still twitched rhythmically in its eagerness to turn a lock it hoped to find. Before I knew it I was past the heap of lately fallen cases and running on tiptoe through aisles of utterly unbroken dust toward a point which I seemed to know morbidly, horribly well. My mind was asking itself questions whose origin and relevancy I was only beginning to guess. Would the shelf be reachable by a human body? Could my human hand master all the aeon-remembered motions of the lock? Would the lock be undamaged and workable? And what would I do—what dare I do—with what (as I now commenced to realise) I both hoped and feared to find? Would it prove the awesome, brain-shattering truth of something past normal conception, or shew only that I was dreaming?
      The next I knew I had ceased my tiptoe racing and was standing still, staring at a row of maddeningly familiar hieroglyphed shelves. They were in a state of almost perfect preservation, and only three of the doors in this vicinity had sprung open. My feelings toward these shelves cannot be described—so utter and insistent was the sense of old acquaintance. I was looking high up, at a row near the top and wholly out of my reach, and wondering how I could climb to best advantage. An open door four rows from the bottom would help, and the locks of the closed doors formed possible holds for hands and feet. I would grip the torch between my teeth as I had in other places where both hands were needed. Above all, I must make no noise. How to get down what I wished to remove would be difficult, but I could probably hook its movable fastener in my coat collar and carry it like a knapsack. Again I wondered whether the lock would be undamaged. That I could repeat each familiar motion I had not the least doubt. But I hoped the thing would not scrape or creak—and that my hand could work it properly.
      Even as I thought these things I had taken the torch in my mouth and begun to climb. The projecting locks were poor supports; but as I had expected, the opened shelf helped greatly. I used both the difficultly swinging door and the edge of the aperture itself in my ascent, and managed to avoid any loud creaking. Balanced on the upper edge of the door, and leaning far to my right, I could just reach the lock I sought. My fingers, half-numb from climbing, were very clumsy at first; but I soon saw that they were anatomically adequate. And the memory-rhythm was strong in them. Out of unknown gulfs of time the intricate secret motions had somehow reached my brain correctly in every detail—for after less than five minutes of trying there came a click whose familiarity was all the more startling because I had not consciously anticipated it. In another instant the metal door was slowly swinging open with only the faintest grating sound.
      Dazedly I looked over the row of greyish case-ends thus exposed, and felt a tremendous surge of some wholly inexplicable emotion. Just within reach of my right hand was a case whose curving hieroglyphs made me shake with a pang infinitely more complex than one of mere fright. Still shaking, I managed to dislodge it amidst a shower of gritty flakes, and ease it over toward myself without any violent noise. Like the other case I had handled, it was slightly more than twenty by fifteen inches in size, with curved mathematical designs in low relief. In thickness it just exceeded three inches. Crudely wedging it between myself and the surface I was climbing, I fumbled with the fastener and finally got the hook free. Lifting the cover, I shifted the heavy object to my back, and let the hook catch hold of my collar. Hands now free, I awkwardly clambered down to the dusty floor, and prepared to inspect my prize.
      Kneeling in the gritty dust, I swung the case around and rested it in front of me. My hands shook, and I dreaded to draw out the book within almost as much as I longed—and felt compelled—to do so. It had very gradually become clear to me what I ought to find, and this realisation nearly paralysed my faculties. If the thing were there—and if I were not dreaming—the implications would be quite beyond the power of the human spirit to bear. What tormented me most was my momentary inability to feel that my surroundings were a dream. The sense of reality was hideous—and again becomes so as I recall the scene.
      At length I tremblingly pulled the book from its container and stared fascinatedly at the well-known hieroglyphs on the cover. It seemed to be in prime condition, and the curvilinear letters of the title held me in almost as hypnotised a state as if I could read them. Indeed, I cannot swear that I did not actually read them in some transient and terrible access of abnormal memory. I do not know how long it was before I dared to lift that thin metal cover. I temporised and made excuses to myself. I took the torch from my mouth and shut it off to save the battery. Then, in the dark, I screwed up my courage—finally lifting the cover without turning on the light. Last of all I did indeed flash the torch upon the exposed page—steeling myself in advance to suppress any sound no matter what I should find.
      I looked for an instant, then almost collapsed. Clenching my teeth, however, I kept silence. I sank wholly to the floor and put a hand to my forehead amidst the engulfing blackness. What I dreaded and expected was there. Either I was dreaming, or time and space had become a mockery. I must be dreaming—but I would test the horror by carrying this thing back and shewing it to my son if it were indeed a reality. My head swam frightfully, even though there were no visible objects in the unbroken gloom to swirl around me. Ideas and images of the starkest terror—excited by vistas which my glimpse had opened up—began to throng in upon me and cloud my senses.
      I thought of those possible prints in the dust, and trembled at the sound of my own breathing as I did so. Once again I flashed on the light and looked at the page as a serpent’s victim may look at his destroyer’s eyes and fangs. Then, with clumsy fingers in the dark, I closed the book, put it in its container, and snapped the lid and the curious hooked fastener. This was what I must carry back to the outer world if it truly existed—if the whole abyss truly existed—if I, and the world itself, truly existed.
      Just when I tottered to my feet and commenced my return I cannot be certain. It comes to me oddly—as a measure of my sense of separation from the normal world—that I did not even once look at my watch during those hideous hours underground. Torch in hand, and with the ominous case under one arm, I eventually found myself tiptoeing in a kind of silent panic past the draught-giving abyss and those lurking suggestions of prints. I lessened my precautions as I climbed up the endless inclines, but could not shake off a shadow of apprehension which I had not felt on the downward journey.
      I dreaded having to re-pass through that black basalt crypt that was older than the city itself, where cold draughts welled up from unguarded depths. I thought of that which the Great Race had feared, and of what might still be lurking—be it ever so weak and dying—down there. I thought of those possible five-circle prints and of what my dreams had told me of such prints—and of strange winds and whistling noises associated with them. And I thought of the tales of the modern blacks, wherein the horror of great winds and nameless subterrene ruins was dwelt upon.
      I knew from a carven wall symbol the right floor to enter, and came at last—after passing that other book I had examined—to the great circular space with the branching archways. On my right, and at once recognisable, was the arch through which I had arrived. This I now entered, conscious that the rest of my course would be harder because of the tumbled state of the masonry outside the archive building. My new metal-cased burden weighed upon me, and I found it harder and harder to be quiet as I stumbled among debris and fragments of every sort.
      Then I came to the ceiling-high mound of debris through which I had wrenched a scanty passage. My dread at wriggling through again was infinite; for my first passage had made some noise, and I now—after seeing those possible prints—dreaded sound above all things. The case, too, doubled the problem of traversing the narrow crevice. But I clambered up the barrier as best I could, and pushed the case through the aperture ahead of me. Then, torch in mouth, I scrambled through myself—my back torn as before by stalactites. As I tried to grasp the case again, it fell some distance ahead of me down the slope of the debris, making a disturbing clatter and arousing echoes which sent me into a cold perspiration. I lunged for it at once, and regained it without further noise—but a moment afterward the slipping of blocks under my feet raised a sudden and unprecedented din.
      The din was my undoing. For, falsely or not, I thought I heard it answered in a terrible way from spaces far behind me. I thought I heard a shrill, whistling sound, like nothing else on earth, and beyond any adequate verbal description. It may have been only my imagination. If so, what followed has a grim irony—since, save for the panic of this thing, the second thing might never have happened.
      As it was, my frenzy was absolute and unrelieved. Taking my torch in my hand and clutching feebly at the case, I leaped and bounded wildly ahead with no idea in my brain beyond a mad desire to race out of these nightmare ruins to the waking world of desert and moonlight which lay so far above. I hardly knew it when I reached the mountain of debris which towered into the vast blackness beyond the caved-in roof, and bruised and cut myself repeatedly in scrambling up its steep slope of jagged blocks and fragments. Then came the great disaster. Just as I blindly crossed the summit, unprepared for the sudden dip ahead, my feet slipped utterly and I found myself involved in a mangling avalanche of sliding masonry whose cannon-loud uproar split the black cavern air in a deafening series of earth-shaking reverberations.
      I have no recollection of emerging from this chaos, but a momentary fragment of consciousness shews me as plunging and tripping and scrambling along the corridor amidst the clangour—case and torch still with me. Then, just as I approached that primal basalt crypt I had so dreaded, utter madness came. For as the echoes of the avalanche died down, there became audible a repetition of that frightful, alien whistling I thought I had heard before. This time there was no doubt about it—and what was worse, it came from a point not behind but ahead of me.
      Probably I shrieked aloud then. I have a dim picture of myself as flying through the hellish basalt vault of the Elder Things, and hearing that damnable alien sound piping up from the open, unguarded door of limitless nether blacknesses. There was a wind, too—not merely a cool, damp draught, but a violent, purposeful blast belching savagely and frigidly from that abominable gulf whence the obscene whistling came.
      There are memories of leaping and lurching over obstacles of every sort, with that torrent of wind and shrieking sound growing moment by moment, and seeming to curl and twist purposefully around me as it struck out wickedly from the spaces behind and beneath. Though in my rear, that wind had the odd effect of hindering instead of aiding my progress; as if it acted like a noose or lasso thrown around me. Heedless of the noise I made, I clattered over a great barrier of blocks and was again in the structure that led to the surface. I recall glimpsing the archway to the room of machines and almost crying out as I saw the incline leading down to where one of those blasphemous trap-doors must be yawning two levels below. But instead of crying out I muttered over and over to myself that this was all a dream from which I must soon awake. Perhaps I was in camp—perhaps I was at home in Arkham. As these hopes bolstered up my sanity I began to mount the incline to the higher level.
      I knew, of course, that I had the four-foot cleft to re-cross, yet was too racked by other fears to realise the full horror until I came almost upon it. On my descent, the leap across had been easy—but could I clear the gap as readily when going uphill, and hampered by fright, exhaustion, the weight of the metal case, and the anomalous backward tug of that daemon wind? I thought of these things at the last moment, and thought also of the nameless entities which might be lurking in the black abysses below the chasm.
      My wavering torch was growing feeble, but I could tell by some obscure memory when I neared the cleft. The chill blasts of wind and the nauseous whistling shrieks behind me were for the moment like a merciful opiate, dulling my imagination to the horror of the yawning gulf ahead. And then I became aware of the added blasts and whistling in front of me—tides of abomination surging up through the cleft itself from depths unimagined and unimaginable.
      Now, indeed, the essence of pure nightmare was upon me. Sanity departed—and ignoring everything except the animal impulse of flight, I merely struggled and plunged upward over the incline’s debris as if no gulf had existed. Then I saw the chasm’s edge, leaped frenziedly with every ounce of strength I possessed, and was instantly engulfed in a pandaemoniac vortex of loathsome sound and utter, materially tangible blackness.
      This is the end of my experience, so far as I can recall. Any further impressions belong wholly to the domain of phantasmagoric delirium. Dream, madness, and memory merged wildly together in a series of fantastic, fragmentary delusions which can have no relation to anything real. There was a hideous fall through incalculable leagues of viscous, sentient darkness, and a babel of noises utterly alien to all that we know of the earth and its organic life. Dormant, rudimentary senses seemed to start into vitality within me, telling of pits and voids peopled by floating horrors and leading to sunless crags and oceans and teeming cities of windowless basalt towers upon which no light ever shone.
      Secrets of the primal planet and its immemorial aeons flashed through my brain without the aid of sight or sound, and there were known to me things which not even the wildest of my former dreams had ever suggested. And all the while cold fingers of damp vapour clutched and picked at me, and that eldritch, damnable whistling shrieked fiendishly above all the alternations of babel and silence in the whirlpools of darkness around.
      Afterward there were visions of the Cyclopean city of my dreams—not in ruins, but just as I had dreamed of it. I was in my conical, non-human body again, and mingled with crowds of the Great Race and the captive minds who carried books up and down the lofty corridors and vast inclines. Then, superimposed upon these pictures, were frightful momentary flashes of a non-visual consciousness involving desperate struggles, a writhing free from clutching tentacles of whistling wind, an insane, bat-like flight through half-solid air, a feverish burrowing through the cyclone-whipped dark, and a wild stumbling and scrambling over fallen masonry.
      Once there was a curious, intrusive flash of half-sight—a faint, diffuse suspicion of bluish radiance far overhead. Then there came a dream of wind-pursued climbing and crawling—of wriggling into a blaze of sardonic moonlight through a jumble of debris which slid and collapsed after me amidst a morbid hurricane. It was the evil, monotonous beating of that maddening moonlight which at last told me of the return of what I had once known as the objective, waking world.
      I was clawing prone through the sands of the Australian desert, and around me shrieked such a tumult of wind as I had never before known on our planet’s surface. My clothing was in rags, and my whole body was a mass of bruises and scratches. Full consciousness returned very slowly, and at no time could I tell just where true memory left off and delirious dream began. There had seemed to be a mound of titan blocks, an abyss beneath it, a monstrous revelation from the past, and a nightmare horror at the end—but how much of this was real? My flashlight was gone, and likewise any metal case I may have discovered. Had there been such a case—or any abyss—or any mound? Raising my head, I looked behind me, and saw only the sterile, undulant sands of the waste.
      The daemon wind died down, and the bloated, fungoid moon sank reddeningly in the west. I lurched to my feet and began to stagger southwestward toward the camp. What in truth had happened to me? Had I merely collapsed in the desert and dragged a dream-racked body over miles of sand and buried blocks? If not, how could I bear to live any longer? For in this new doubt all my faith in the myth-born unreality of my visions dissolved once more into the hellish older doubting. If that abyss was real, then the Great Race was real—and its blasphemous reachings and seizures in the cosmos-wide vortex of time were no myths or nightmares, but a terrible, soul-shattering actuality.
      Had I, in full hideous fact, been drawn back to a pre-human world of a hundred and fifty million years ago in those dark, baffling days of the amnesia? Had my present body been the vehicle of a frightful alien consciousness from palaeogean gulfs of time? Had I, as the captive mind of those shambling horrors, indeed known that accursed city of stone in its primordial heyday, and wriggled down those familiar corridors in the loathsome shape of my captor? Were those tormenting dreams of more than twenty years the offspring of stark, monstrous memories? Had I once veritably talked with minds from reachless corners of time and space, learned the universe’s secrets past and to come, and written the annals of my own world for the metal cases of those titan archives? And were those others—those shocking Elder Things of the mad winds and daemon pipings—in truth a lingering, lurking menace, waiting and slowly weakening in black abysses while varied shapes of life drag out their multimillennial courses on the planet’s age-racked surface?
      I do not know. If that abyss and what it held were real, there is no hope. Then, all too truly, there lies upon this world of man a mocking and incredible shadow out of time. But mercifully, there is no proof that these things are other than fresh phases of my myth-born dreams. I did not bring back the metal case that would have been a proof, and so far those subterrene corridors have not been found. If the laws of the universe are kind, they will never be found. But I must tell my son what I saw or thought I saw, and let him use his judgment as a psychologist in gauging the reality of my experience, and communicating this account to others.
      I have said that the awful truth behind my tortured years of dreaming hinges absolutely upon the actuality of what I thought I saw in those Cyclopean buried ruins. It has been hard for me literally to set down the crucial revelation, though no reader can have failed to guess it. Of course it lay in that book within the metal case—the case which I pried out of its forgotten lair amidst the undisturbed dust of a million centuries. No eye had seen, no hand had touched that book since the advent of man to this planet. And yet, when I flashed my torch upon it in that frightful megalithic abyss, I saw that the queerly pigmented letters on the brittle, aeon-browned cellulose pages were not indeed any nameless hieroglyphs of earth’s youth. They were, instead, the letters of our familiar alphabet, spelling out the words of the English language in my own handwriting.
",True
"
I

Although I knew nothing of chemistry, I listened fascinated. He picked up
an Easter lily which Geneviève had brought that morning from Notre Dame,
and dropped it into the basin. Instantly the liquid lost its crystalline
clearness. For a second the lily was enveloped in a milk-white foam,
which disappeared, leaving the fluid opalescent. Changing tints of orange
and crimson played over the surface, and then what seemed to be a ray of
pure sunlight struck through from the bottom where the lily was resting.
At the same instant he plunged his hand into the basin and drew out the
flower. ""There is no danger,"" he explained, ""if you choose the right
moment. That golden ray is the signal.""

He held the lily toward me, and I took it in my hand. It had turned to
stone, to the purest marble.

""You see,"" he said, ""it is without a flaw. What sculptor could reproduce
it?""

The marble was white as snow, but in its depths the veins of the lily
were tinged with palest azure, and a faint flush lingered deep in its
heart.

""Don't ask me the reason of that,"" he smiled, noticing my wonder. ""I have
no idea why the veins and heart are tinted, but they always are.
Yesterday I tried one of Geneviève's gold-fish,--there it is.""

The fish looked as if sculptured in marble. But if you held it to the
light the stone was beautifully veined with a faint blue, and from
somewhere within came a rosy light like the tint which slumbers in an
opal. I looked into the basin. Once more it seemed filled with clearest
crystal.

""If I should touch it now?"" I demanded.

""I don't know,"" he replied, ""but you had better not try.""

""There is one thing I'm curious about,"" I said, ""and that is where the
ray of sunlight came from.""

""It looked like a sunbeam true enough,"" he said. ""I don't know, it always
comes when I immerse any living thing. Perhaps,"" he continued, smiling,
""perhaps it is the vital spark of the creature escaping to the source
from whence it came.""

I saw he was mocking, and threatened him with a mahl-stick, but he only
laughed and changed the subject.

""Stay to lunch. Geneviève will be here directly.""

""I saw her going to early mass,"" I said, ""and she looked as fresh and
sweet as that lily--before you destroyed it.""

""Do you think I destroyed it?"" said Boris gravely.

""Destroyed, preserved, how can we tell?""

We sat in the corner of a studio near his unfinished group of the
""Fates."" He leaned back on the sofa, twirling a sculptor's chisel and
squinting at his work.

""By the way,"" he said, ""I have finished pointing up that old academic
Ariadne, and I suppose it will have to go to the Salon. It's all I have
ready this year, but after the success the 'Madonna' brought me I feel
ashamed to send a thing like that.""

The ""Madonna,"" an exquisite marble for which Geneviève had sat, had been
the sensation of last year's Salon. I looked at the Ariadne. It was a
magnificent piece of technical work, but I agreed with Boris that the
world would expect something better of him than that. Still, it was
impossible now to think of finishing in time for the Salon that splendid
terrible group half shrouded in the marble behind me. The ""Fates"" would
have to wait.

We were proud of Boris Yvain. We claimed him and he claimed us on the
strength of his having been born in America, although his father was
French and his mother was a Russian. Every one in the Beaux Arts called
him Boris. And yet there were only two of us whom he addressed in the
same familiar way--Jack Scott and myself.

Perhaps my being in love with Geneviève had something to do with his
affection for me. Not that it had ever been acknowledged between us. But
after all was settled, and she had told me with tears in her eyes that it
was Boris whom she loved, I went over to his house and congratulated him.
The perfect cordiality of that interview did not deceive either of us, I
always believed, although to one at least it was a great comfort. I do
not think he and Geneviève ever spoke of the matter together, but Boris
knew.

Geneviève was lovely. The Madonna-like purity of her face might have been
inspired by the Sanctus in Gounod's Mass. But I was always glad when she
changed that mood for what we called her ""April Manoeuvres."" She was
often as variable as an April day. In the morning grave, dignified and
sweet, at noon laughing, capricious, at evening whatever one least
expected. I preferred her so rather than in that Madonna-like
tranquillity which stirred the depths of my heart. I was dreaming of
Geneviève when he spoke again.

""What do you think of my discovery, Alec?""

""I think it wonderful.""

""I shall make no use of it, you know, beyond satisfying my own curiosity
so far as may be, and the secret will die with me.""

""It would be rather a blow to sculpture, would it not? We painters lose
more than we ever gain by photography.""

Boris nodded, playing with the edge of the chisel.

""This new vicious discovery would corrupt the world of art. No, I shall
never confide the secret to any one,"" he said slowly.

It would be hard to find any one less informed about such phenomena than
myself; but of course I had heard of mineral springs so saturated with
silica that the leaves and twigs which fell into them were turned to
stone after a time. I dimly comprehended the process, how the silica
replaced the vegetable matter, atom by atom, and the result was a
duplicate of the object in stone. This, I confess, had never interested
me greatly, and as for the ancient fossils thus produced, they disgusted
me. Boris, it appeared, feeling curiosity instead of repugnance, had
investigated the subject, and had accidentally stumbled on a solution
which, attacking the immersed object with a ferocity unheard of, in a
second did the work of years. This was all I could make out of the
strange story he had just been telling me. He spoke again after a long
silence.

""I am almost frightened when I think what I have found. Scientists would
go mad over the discovery. It was so simple too; it discovered itself.
When I think of that formula, and that new element precipitated in
metallic scales--""

""What new element?""

""Oh, I haven't thought of naming it, and I don't believe I ever shall.
There are enough precious metals now in the world to cut throats over.""

I pricked up my ears. ""Have you struck gold, Boris?""

""No, better;--but see here, Alec!"" he laughed, starting up. ""You and I
have all we need in this world. Ah! how sinister and covetous you look
already!"" I laughed too, and told him I was devoured by the desire for
gold, and we had better talk of something else; so when Geneviève came in
shortly after, we had turned our backs on alchemy.

Geneviève was dressed in silvery grey from head to foot. The light
glinted along the soft curves of her fair hair as she turned her cheek to
Boris; then she saw me and returned my greeting. She had never before
failed to blow me a kiss from the tips of her white fingers, and I
promptly complained of the omission. She smiled and held out her hand,
which dropped almost before it had touched mine; then she said, looking
at Boris--

""You must ask Alec to stay for luncheon."" This also was something new.
She had always asked me herself until to-day.

""I did,"" said Boris shortly.

""And you said yes, I hope?"" She turned to me with a charming conventional
smile. I might have been an acquaintance of the day before yesterday. I
made her a low bow. ""J'avais bien l'honneur, madame,"" but refusing to
take up our usual bantering tone, she murmured a hospitable commonplace
and disappeared. Boris and I looked at one another.

""I had better go home, don't you think?"" I asked.

""Hanged if I know,"" he replied frankly.

While we were discussing the advisability of my departure Geneviève
reappeared in the doorway without her bonnet. She was wonderfully
beautiful, but her colour was too deep and her lovely eyes were too
bright. She came straight up to me and took my arm.

""Luncheon is ready. Was I cross, Alec? I thought I had a headache, but I
haven't. Come here, Boris;"" and she slipped her other arm through his.
""Alec knows that after you there is no one in the world whom I like as
well as I like him, so if he sometimes feels snubbed it won't hurt him.""

""À la bonheur!"" I cried, ""who says there are no thunderstorms in April?""

""Are you ready?"" chanted Boris. ""Aye ready;"" and arm-in-arm we raced into
the dining-room, scandalizing the servants. After all we were not so much
to blame; Geneviève was eighteen, Boris was twenty-three, and I not quite
twenty-one.




II

Some work that I was doing about this time on the decorations for
Geneviève's boudoir kept me constantly at the quaint little hotel in the
Rue Sainte-Cécile. Boris and I in those days laboured hard but as we
pleased, which was fitfully, and we all three, with Jack Scott, idled a
great deal together.

One quiet afternoon I had been wandering alone over the house examining
curios, prying into odd corners, bringing out sweetmeats and cigars from
strange hiding-places, and at last I stopped in the bathing-room. Boris,
all over clay, stood there washing his hands.

The room was built of rose-coloured marble excepting the floor, which was
tessellated in rose and grey. In the centre was a square pool sunken
below the surface of the floor; steps led down into it, sculptured
pillars supported a frescoed ceiling. A delicious marble Cupid appeared
to have just alighted on his pedestal at the upper end of the room. The
whole interior was Boris' work and mine. Boris, in his working-clothes of
white canvas, scraped the traces of clay and red modelling wax from his
handsome hands, and coquetted over his shoulder with the Cupid.

""I see you,"" he insisted, ""don't try to look the other way and pretend
not to see me. You know who made you, little humbug!""

It was always my rôle to interpret Cupid's sentiments in these
conversations, and when my turn came I responded in such a manner, that
Boris seized my arm and dragged me toward the pool, declaring he would
duck me. Next instant he dropped my arm and turned pale. ""Good God!"" he
said, ""I forgot the pool is full of the solution!""

I shivered a little, and dryly advised him to remember better where he
had stored the precious liquid.

""In Heaven's name, why do you keep a small lake of that gruesome stuff
here of all places?"" I asked.

""I want to experiment on something large,"" he replied.

""On me, for instance?""

""Ah! that came too close for jesting; but I do want to watch the action
of that solution on a more highly organized living body; there is that
big white rabbit,"" he said, following me into the studio.

Jack Scott, wearing a paint-stained jacket, came wandering in,
appropriated all the Oriental sweetmeats he could lay his hands on,
looted the cigarette case, and finally he and Boris disappeared together
to visit the Luxembourg Gallery, where a new silver bronze by Rodin and a
landscape of Monet's were claiming the exclusive attention of artistic
France. I went back to the studio, and resumed my work. It was a
Renaissance screen, which Boris wanted me to paint for Geneviève's
boudoir. But the small boy who was unwillingly dawdling through a series
of poses for it, to-day refused all bribes to be good. He never rested an
instant in the same position, and inside of five minutes I had as many
different outlines of the little beggar.

""Are you posing, or are you executing a song and dance, my friend?"" I
inquired.

""Whichever monsieur pleases,"" he replied, with an angelic smile.

Of course I dismissed him for the day, and of course I paid him for the
full time, that being the way we spoil our models.

After the young imp had gone, I made a few perfunctory daubs at my work,
but was so thoroughly out of humour, that it took me the rest of the
afternoon to undo the damage I had done, so at last I scraped my palette,
stuck my brushes in a bowl of black soap, and strolled into the
smoking-room. I really believe that, excepting Geneviève's apartments, no
room in the house was so free from the perfume of tobacco as this one. It
was a queer chaos of odds and ends, hung with threadbare tapestry. A
sweet-toned old spinet in good repair stood by the window. There were
stands of weapons, some old and dull, others bright and modern, festoons
of Indian and Turkish armour over the mantel, two or three good pictures,
and a pipe-rack. It was here that we used to come for new sensations in
smoking. I doubt if any type of pipe ever existed which was not
represented in that rack. When we had selected one, we immediately
carried it somewhere else and smoked it; for the place was, on the whole,
more gloomy and less inviting than any in the house. But this afternoon,
the twilight was very soothing, the rugs and skins on the floor looked
brown and soft and drowsy; the big couch was piled with cushions--I found
my pipe and curled up there for an unaccustomed smoke in the
smoking-room. I had chosen one with a long flexible stem, and lighting it
fell to dreaming. After a while it went out, but I did not stir. I
dreamed on and presently fell asleep.

I awoke to the saddest music I had ever heard. The room was quite dark, I
had no idea what time it was. A ray of moonlight silvered one edge of the
old spinet, and the polished wood seemed to exhale the sounds as perfume
floats above a box of sandalwood. Some one rose in the darkness, and came
away weeping quietly, and I was fool enough to cry out ""Geneviève!""

She dropped at my voice, and, I had time to curse myself while I made a
light and tried to raise her from the floor. She shrank away with a
murmur of pain. She was very quiet, and asked for Boris. I carried her to
the divan, and went to look for him, but he was not in the house, and the
servants were gone to bed. Perplexed and anxious, I hurried back to
Geneviève. She lay where I had left her, looking very white.

""I can't find Boris nor any of the servants,"" I said.

""I know,"" she answered faintly, ""Boris has gone to Ept with Mr. Scott. I
did not remember when I sent you for him just now.""

""But he can't get back in that case before to-morrow afternoon, and--are
you hurt? Did I frighten you into falling? What an awful fool I am, but I
was only half awake.""

""Boris thought you had gone home before dinner. Do please excuse us for
letting you stay here all this time.""

""I have had a long nap,"" I laughed, ""so sound that I did not know whether
I was still asleep or not when I found myself staring at a figure that
was moving toward me, and called out your name. Have you been trying the
old spinet? You must have played very softly.""

I would tell a thousand more lies worse than that one to see the look of
relief that came into her face. She smiled adorably, and said in her
natural voice: ""Alec, I tripped on that wolf's head, and I think my ankle
is sprained. Please call Marie, and then go home.""

I did as she bade me, and left her there when the maid came in.




III

At noon next day when I called, I found Boris walking restlessly about
his studio.

""Geneviève is asleep just now,"" he told me, ""the sprain is nothing, but
why should she have such a high fever? The doctor can't account for it;
or else he will not,"" he muttered.

""Geneviève has a fever?"" I asked.

""I should say so, and has actually been a little light-headed at
intervals all night. The idea! gay little Geneviève, without a care in
the world,--and she keeps saying her heart's broken, and she wants to
die!""

My own heart stood still.

Boris leaned against the door of his studio, looking down, his hands in
his pockets, his kind, keen eyes clouded, a new line of trouble drawn
""over the mouth's good mark, that made the smile."" The maid had orders to
summon him the instant Geneviève opened her eyes. We waited and waited,
and Boris, growing restless, wandered about, fussing with modelling wax
and red clay. Suddenly he started for the next room. ""Come and see my
rose-coloured bath full of death!"" he cried.

""Is it death?"" I asked, to humour his mood.

""You are not prepared to call it life, I suppose,"" he answered. As he
spoke he plucked a solitary goldfish squirming and twisting out of its
globe. ""We'll send this one after the other--wherever that is,"" he said.
There was feverish excitement in his voice. A dull weight of fever lay on
my limbs and on my brain as I followed him to the fair crystal pool with
its pink-tinted sides; and he dropped the creature in. Falling, its
scales flashed with a hot orange gleam in its angry twistings and
contortions; the moment it struck the liquid it became rigid and sank
heavily to the bottom. Then came the milky foam, the splendid hues
radiating on the surface and then the shaft of pure serene light broke
through from seemingly infinite depths. Boris plunged in his hand and
drew out an exquisite marble thing, blue-veined, rose-tinted, and
glistening with opalescent drops.

""Child's play,"" he muttered, and looked wearily, longingly at me,--as if
I could answer such questions! But Jack Scott came in and entered into
the ""game,"" as he called it, with ardour. Nothing would do but to try the
experiment on the white rabbit then and there. I was willing that Boris
should find distraction from his cares, but I hated to see the life go
out of a warm, living creature and I declined to be present. Picking up a
book at random, I sat down in the studio to read. Alas! I had found
_The King in Yellow_. After a few moments, which seemed ages, I was
putting it away with a nervous shudder, when Boris and Jack came in
bringing their marble rabbit. At the same time the bell rang above, and a
cry came from the sick-room. Boris was gone like a flash, and the next
moment he called, ""Jack, run for the doctor; bring him back with you.
Alec, come here.""

I went and stood at her door. A frightened maid came out in haste and ran
away to fetch some remedy. Geneviève, sitting bolt upright, with crimson
cheeks and glittering eyes, babbled incessantly and resisted Boris'
gentle restraint. He called me to help. At my first touch she sighed and
sank back, closing her eyes, and then--then--as we still bent above her,
she opened them again, looked straight into Boris' face--poor
fever-crazed girl!--and told her secret. At the same instant our three
lives turned into new channels; the bond that held us so long together
snapped for ever and a new bond was forged in its place, for she had
spoken my name, and as the fever tortured her, her heart poured out its
load of hidden sorrow. Amazed and dumb I bowed my head, while my face
burned like a live coal, and the blood surged in my ears, stupefying me
with its clamour. Incapable of movement, incapable of speech, I listened
to her feverish words in an agony of shame and sorrow. I could not
silence her, I could not look at Boris. Then I felt an arm upon my
shoulder, and Boris turned a bloodless face to mine.

""It is not your fault, Alec; don't grieve so if she loves you--"" but he
could not finish; and as the doctor stepped swiftly into the room,
saying--""Ah, the fever!"" I seized Jack Scott and hurried him to the
street, saying, ""Boris would rather be alone."" We crossed the street to
our own apartments, and that night, seeing I was going to be ill too, he
went for the doctor again. The last thing I recollect with any
distinctness was hearing Jack say, ""For Heaven's sake, doctor, what ails
him, to wear a face like that?"" and I thought of _The King in
Yellow_ and the Pallid Mask.

I was very ill, for the strain of two years which I had endured since
that fatal May morning when Geneviève murmured, ""I love you, but I think
I love Boris best,"" told on me at last. I had never imagined that it
could become more than I could endure. Outwardly tranquil, I had deceived
myself. Although the inward battle raged night after night, and I, lying
alone in my room, cursed myself for rebellious thoughts unloyal to Boris
and unworthy of Geneviève, the morning always brought relief, and I
returned to Geneviève and to my dear Boris with a heart washed clean by
the tempests of the night.

Never in word or deed or thought while with them had I betrayed my sorrow
even to myself.

The mask of self-deception was no longer a mask for me, it was a part of
me. Night lifted it, laying bare the stifled truth below; but there was
no one to see except myself, and when the day broke the mask fell back
again of its own accord. These thoughts passed through my troubled mind
as I lay sick, but they were hopelessly entangled with visions of white
creatures, heavy as stone, crawling about in Boris' basin,--of the wolf's
head on the rug, foaming and snapping at Geneviève, who lay smiling
beside it. I thought, too, of the King in Yellow wrapped in the fantastic
colours of his tattered mantle, and that bitter cry of Cassilda, ""Not
upon us, oh King, not upon us!"" Feverishly I struggled to put it from me,
but I saw the lake of Hali, thin and blank, without a ripple or wind to
stir it, and I saw the towers of Carcosa behind the moon. Aldebaran, the
Hyades, Alar, Hastur, glided through the cloud-rifts which fluttered and
flapped as they passed like the scolloped tatters of the King in Yellow.
Among all these, one sane thought persisted. It never wavered, no matter
what else was going on in my disordered mind, that my chief reason for
existing was to meet some requirement of Boris and Geneviève. What this
obligation was, its nature, was never clear; sometimes it seemed to be
protection, sometimes support, through a great crisis. Whatever it seemed
to be for the time, its weight rested only on me, and I was never so ill
or so weak that I did not respond with my whole soul. There were always
crowds of faces about me, mostly strange, but a few I recognized, Boris
among them. Afterward they told me that this could not have been, but I
know that once at least he bent over me. It was only a touch, a faint
echo of his voice, then the clouds settled back on my senses, and I lost
him, but he _did_ stand there and bend over me _once_ at least.

At last, one morning I awoke to find the sunlight falling across my bed,
and Jack Scott reading beside me. I had not strength enough to speak
aloud, neither could I think, much less remember, but I could smile
feebly, as Jack's eye met mine, and when he jumped up and asked eagerly
if I wanted anything, I could whisper, ""Yes--Boris."" Jack moved to the
head of my bed, and leaned down to arrange my pillow: I did not see his
face, but he answered heartily, ""You must wait, Alec; you are too weak to
see even Boris.""

I waited and I grew strong; in a few days I was able to see whom I would,
but meanwhile I had thought and remembered. From the moment when all the
past grew clear again in my mind, I never doubted what I should do when
the time came, and I felt sure that Boris would have resolved upon the
same course so far as he was concerned; as for what pertained to me
alone, I knew he would see that also as I did. I no longer asked for any
one. I never inquired why no message came from them; why during the week
I lay there, waiting and growing stronger, I never heard their name
spoken. Preoccupied with my own searchings for the right way, and with my
feeble but determined fight against despair, I simply acquiesced in
Jack's reticence, taking for granted that he was afraid to speak of them,
lest I should turn unruly and insist on seeing them. Meanwhile I said
over and over to myself, how would it be when life began again for us
all? We would take up our relations exactly as they were before Geneviève
fell ill. Boris and I would look into each other's eyes, and there would
be neither rancour nor cowardice nor mistrust in that glance. I would be
with them again for a little while in the dear intimacy of their home,
and then, without pretext or explanation, I would disappear from their
lives for ever. Boris would know; Geneviève--the only comfort was that
she would never know. It seemed, as I thought it over, that I had found
the meaning of that sense of obligation which had persisted all through
my delirium, and the only possible answer to it. So, when I was quite
ready, I beckoned Jack to me one day, and said--

""Jack, I want Boris at once; and take my dearest greeting to
Geneviève....""

When at last he made me understand that they were both dead, I fell into
a wild rage that tore all my little convalescent strength to atoms. I
raved and cursed myself into a relapse, from which I crawled forth some
weeks afterward a boy of twenty-one who believed that his youth was gone
for ever. I seemed to be past the capability of further suffering, and
one day when Jack handed me a letter and the keys to Boris' house, I took
them without a tremor and asked him to tell me all. It was cruel of me to
ask him, but there was no help for it, and he leaned wearily on his thin
hands, to reopen the wound which could never entirely heal. He began very
quietly--

""Alec, unless you have a clue that I know nothing about, you will not be
able to explain any more than I what has happened. I suspect that you
would rather not hear these details, but you must learn them, else I
would spare you the relation. God knows I wish I could be spared the
telling. I shall use few words.

""That day when I left you in the doctor's care and came back to Boris, I
found him working on the 'Fates.' Geneviève, he said, was sleeping under
the influence of drugs. She had been quite out of her mind, he said. He
kept on working, not talking any more, and I watched him. Before long, I
saw that the third figure of the group--the one looking straight ahead,
out over the world--bore his face; not as you ever saw it, but as it
looked then and to the end. This is one thing for which I should like to
find an explanation, but I never shall.

""Well, he worked and I watched him in silence, and we went on that way
until nearly midnight. Then we heard the door open and shut sharply, and
a swift rush in the next room. Boris sprang through the doorway and I
followed; but we were too late. She lay at the bottom of the pool, her
hands across her breast. Then Boris shot himself through the heart."" Jack
stopped speaking, drops of sweat stood under his eyes, and his thin
cheeks twitched. ""I carried Boris to his room. Then I went back and let
that hellish fluid out of the pool, and turning on all the water, washed
the marble clean of every drop. When at length I dared descend the steps,
I found her lying there as white as snow. At last, when I had decided
what was best to do, I went into the laboratory, and first emptied the
solution in the basin into the waste-pipe; then I poured the contents of
every jar and bottle after it. There was wood in the fire-place, so I
built a fire, and breaking the locks of Boris' cabinet I burnt every
paper, notebook and letter that I found there. With a mallet from the
studio I smashed to pieces all the empty bottles, then loading them into
a coal-scuttle, I carried them to the cellar and threw them over the
red-hot bed of the furnace. Six times I made the journey, and at last,
not a vestige remained of anything which might again aid in seeking for
the formula which Boris had found. Then at last I dared call the doctor.
He is a good man, and together we struggled to keep it from the public.
Without him I never could have succeeded. At last we got the servants
paid and sent away into the country, where old Rosier keeps them quiet
with stones of Boris' and Geneviève's travels in distant lands, from
whence they will not return for years. We buried Boris in the little
cemetery of Sèvres. The doctor is a good creature, and knows when to pity
a man who can bear no more. He gave his certificate of heart disease and
asked no questions of me.""

Then, lifting his head from his hands, he said, ""Open the letter, Alec;
it is for us both.""

I tore it open. It was Boris' will dated a year before. He left
everything to Geneviève, and in case of her dying childless, I was to
take control of the house in the Rue Sainte-Cécile, and Jack Scott the
management at Ept. On our deaths the property reverted to his mother's
family in Russia, with the exception of the sculptured marbles executed
by himself. These he left to me.

The page blurred under our eyes, and Jack got up and walked to the
window. Presently he returned and sat down again. I dreaded to hear what
he was going to say, but he spoke with the same simplicity and
gentleness.

""Geneviève lies before the Madonna in the marble room. The Madonna bends
tenderly above her, and Geneviève smiles back into that calm face that
never would have been except for her.""

His voice broke, but he grasped my hand, saying, ""Courage, Alec."" Next
morning he left for Ept to fulfil his trust.




IV

The same evening I took the keys and went into the house I had known so
well. Everything was in order, but the silence was terrible. Though I
went twice to the door of the marble room, I could not force myself to
enter. It was beyond my strength. I went into the smoking-room and sat
down before the spinet. A small lace handkerchief lay on the keys, and I
turned away, choking. It was plain I could not stay, so I locked every
door, every window, and the three front and back gates, and went away.
Next morning Alcide packed my valise, and leaving him in charge of my
apartments I took the Orient express for Constantinople. During the two
years that I wandered through the East, at first, in our letters, we
never mentioned Geneviève and Boris, but gradually their names crept in.
I recollect particularly a passage in one of Jack's letters replying to
one of mine--

""What you tell me of seeing Boris bending over you while you lay ill, and
feeling his touch on your face, and hearing his voice, of course troubles
me. This that you describe must have happened a fortnight after he died.
I say to myself that you were dreaming, that it was part of your
delirium, but the explanation does not satisfy me, nor would it you.""

Toward the end of the second year a letter came from Jack to me in India
so unlike anything that I had ever known of him that I decided to return
at once to Paris. He wrote: ""I am well, and sell all my pictures as
artists do who have no need of money. I have not a care of my own, but I
am more restless than if I had. I am unable to shake off a strange
anxiety about you. It is not apprehension, it is rather a breathless
expectancy--of what, God knows! I can only say it is wearing me out.
Nights I dream always of you and Boris. I can never recall anything
afterward, but I wake in the morning with my heart beating, and all day
the excitement increases until I fall asleep at night to recall the same
experience. I am quite exhausted by it, and have determined to break up
this morbid condition. I must see you. Shall I go to Bombay, or will you
come to Paris?""

I telegraphed him to expect me by the next steamer.

When we met I thought he had changed very little; I, he insisted, looked
in splendid health. It was good to hear his voice again, and as we sat
and chatted about what life still held for us, we felt that it was
pleasant to be alive in the bright spring weather.

We stayed in Paris together a week, and then I went for a week to Ept
with him, but first of all we went to the cemetery at Sèvres, where Boris
lay.

""Shall we place the 'Fates' in the little grove above him?"" Jack asked,
and I answered--

""I think only the 'Madonna' should watch over Boris' grave."" But Jack was
none the better for my home-coming. The dreams of which he could not
retain even the least definite outline continued, and he said that at
times the sense of breathless expectancy was suffocating.

""You see I do you harm and not good,"" I said. ""Try a change without me.""
So he started alone for a ramble among the Channel Islands, and I went
back to Paris. I had not yet entered Boris' house, now mine, since my
return, but I knew it must be done. It had been kept in order by Jack;
there were servants there, so I gave up my own apartment and went there
to live. Instead of the agitation I had feared, I found myself able to
paint there tranquilly. I visited all the rooms--all but one. I could not
bring myself to enter the marble room where Geneviève lay, and yet I felt
the longing growing daily to look upon her face, to kneel beside her.

One April afternoon, I lay dreaming in the smoking-room, just as I had
lain two years before, and mechanically I looked among the tawny Eastern
rugs for the wolf-skin. At last I distinguished the pointed ears and flat
cruel head, and I thought of my dream where I saw Geneviève lying beside
it. The helmets still hung against the threadbare tapestry, among them
the old Spanish morion which I remembered Geneviève had once put on when
we were amusing ourselves with the ancient bits of mail. I turned my eyes
to the spinet; every yellow key seemed eloquent of her caressing hand,
and I rose, drawn by the strength of my life's passion to the sealed door
of the marble room. The heavy doors swung inward under my trembling
hands. Sunlight poured through the window, tipping with gold the wings of
Cupid, and lingered like a nimbus over the brows of the Madonna. Her
tender face bent in compassion over a marble form so exquisitely pure
that I knelt and signed myself. Geneviève lay in the shadow under the
Madonna, and yet, through her white arms, I saw the pale azure vein, and
beneath her softly clasped hands the folds of her dress were tinged with
rose, as if from some faint warm light within her breast.

Bending, with a breaking heart, I touched the marble drapery with my
lips, then crept back into the silent house.

A maid came and brought me a letter, and I sat down in the little
conservatory to read it; but as I was about to break the seal, seeing the
girl lingering, I asked her what she wanted.

She stammered something about a white rabbit that had been caught in the
house, and asked what should be done with it I told her to let it loose
in the walled garden behind the house, and opened my letter. It was from
Jack, but so incoherent that I thought he must have lost his reason. It
was nothing but a series of prayers to me not to leave the house until he
could get back; he could not tell me why, there were the dreams, he
said--he could explain nothing, but he was sure that I must not leave the
house in the Rue Sainte-Cécile.

As I finished reading I raised my eyes and saw the same maid-servant
standing in the doorway holding a glass dish in which two gold-fish were
swimming: ""Put them back into the tank and tell me what you mean by
interrupting me,"" I said.

With a half-suppressed whimper she emptied water and fish into an
aquarium at the end of the conservatory, and turning to me asked my
permission to leave my service. She said people were playing tricks on
her, evidently with a design of getting her into trouble; the marble
rabbit had been stolen and a live one had been brought into the house;
the two beautiful marble fish were gone, and she had just found those
common live things flopping on the dining-room floor. I reassured her and
sent her away, saying I would look about myself. I went into the studio;
there was nothing there but my canvases and some casts, except the marble
of the Easter lily. I saw it on a table across the room. Then I strode
angrily over to it. But the flower I lifted from the table was fresh and
fragile and filled the air with perfume.

Then suddenly I comprehended, and sprang through the hall-way to the
marble room. The doors flew open, the sunlight streamed into my face, and
through it, in a heavenly glory, the Madonna smiled, as Geneviève lifted
her flushed face from her marble couch and opened her sleepy eyes.

","Cleves opened his eyes. He was lying on his left side. In the pink glow of the night-lamp he saw his wife in her night-dress, seated sideways on the farther edge of the bed, talking to a young girl.

The strange girl wore what appeared to be a chamber-robe of frail gold tissue that clung to her body and glittered as she moved. He had never before seen such a dress; but he had seen the girl; he recognised her instantly as the girl he had seen turn to look back at Tressa as she crossed the phantom bridge over that misty Florida river. And Cleves comprehended that he was looking at Yulun.

But this charming young thing was no ghost, no astral projection. This girl was warm, living, breathing flesh. The delicate scent of her strange garments and of her hair, her very breath, was in the air of the room. Her half-hushed but laughing voice was deliciously human; her delicate little hands, caressing Tressa's, were too eagerly real to doubt.

Both talked at the same time, their animated voices mingling in the breathless delight of the reunion. Their exclamations, enchanting laughter, bubbling chatter, filled his ears. But not one word of what they were saying to each other could he understand.

Suddenly Tressa looked over her shoulder and met his astonished eyes.

""Tokhta!"" she exclaimed. ""Yulun! My lord is awake!""

Yulun swung around swiftly on the edge of the bed and looked laughingly at Cleves. But when her red lips unclosed she spoke to Tressa: and, ""Darling,"" she said in English, ""I think your dear lord remembers that he saw me on the Bridge of Dreams. And heard the bells of Yian across the mist.""

Tressa said, laughing at her husband: ""This is Yulun, flame-slender, very white, loveliest in Yian. On the rose-marble steps of the Yezidee Temple she flung a stemless rose upon Djamouk's shroud, where he had spread it like a patch of snow in the sun.

""And at the Lake of the Ghosts, where there is freedom to love, for those who desire love, came Yaddin, Tougtchi to Djamouk the Fox, in search of love—and Yulun, flame-slim, and flower-white.... Tell my dear lord, Yulun!""

Yulun laughed at Cleves out of her dark eyes that slanted charmingly at the corners.

""Kai!"" she cried softly, clapping her palms. ""I took his roses and tore them with my hands till their petals rained on him and their golden hearts were a powdery cloud floating across the water.

""I said: 'Even the damned do not mate with demons, my Tougtchi! So go to the devil, my Banneret, and may Erlik seize you!'""

Cleves, his ears ringing with the sweet confusion of their girlish laughter, rose from his pillow, supporting himself on one arm.

""You are Yulun. You are alive and real——"" He looked at Tressa: ""She is real, isn't she?"" And, to Yulun: ""Where do you come from?""

The girl replied seriously: ""I come from Yian."" She turned to Tressa with a dazzling smile: ""Thou knowest, my heart's gold, how it was I came. Tell thy dear lord in thine own way, so that it shall be simple for his understanding.... And now—because my visit is ending—I think thy dear lord should sleep. Bid him sleep, my heart's gold!""

At that calm suggestion Cleves sat upright on the bed,—or attempted to. But sank back gently on his pillow and met there a dark, delicious rush of drowsiness.

He made an effort—or tried to: the smooth, sweet tide of sleep swept over him to the eyelids, leaving him still and breathing evenly on his pillow.

The two girls leaned over and looked down at him.

""Thy dear lord,"" murmured Yulun. ""Does he love thee, rose-bud of Yian?""

""No,"" said Tressa, under her breath.

""Does he know thou art damned, heart of gold?""

""He says no soul is ever really harmed,"" whispered Tressa.

""Kai! Has he never heard of the Slayer of Souls?"" exclaimed Yulun incredulously.

""My lord maintains that neither the Assassin of Khorassan nor the Sheiks-el-Djebel of the Eight Towers, nor their dark prince Erlik, can have power over God to slay the human soul.""

""Tokhta, Rose of Yian! Our souls were slain there in the Yezidee temple.""

Tressa looked down at Cleves:

""My dear lord says no,"" she said under her breath.

""And—Sanang?""

Tressa paled: ""His mind and mine did battle. I tore my heart from his grasp. I have laid it, bleeding, at my dear lord's feet. Let God judge between us, Yulun.""

""There was a day,"" whispered Yulun, ""when Prince Sanang went to the Lake of the Ghosts.""

Tressa, very pallid, looked down at her sleeping husband. She said:

""Prince Sanang came to the Lake of the Ghosts. The snow of the cherry-trees covered the young world.

""The water was clear as sunlight; and the lake was afire with scarlet carp.... Yulun—beloved—the nightingale sang all night long—all night long.... Then I saw Sanang shining, all gold, in the moonlight.... May God remember him in hell!""

""May God remember him.""

""Sanang Noïane. May he be accursed in the Namaz Ga!""

""May he be tormented in Jehaunum!—Sanang, Slayer of Souls.""

Tressa leaned forward on the bed, stretched herself out, and laid her face gently across her husband's feet, touching them with her lips.

Then she straightened herself and sat up, supported by one hand, and looking silently down at the sleeping man.

""No soul shall die,"" she said. ""Niaz!""

""Is it written?"" asked Yulun, surprised.

""My lord has said it.""

""Allahou Ekber,"" murmured Yulun; ""thy lord is only a man.""

Tressa said: ""Neither the Tekbir nor the fatha, nor the warning of Khidr, nor the Yacaz of the Khagan, nor even the prayers of the Ten Imaums are of any value to me unless my dear lord confirms the truth of them with his own lips.""

""And Erlik? Is he nothing, then?""

""Erlik!"" repeated Tressa insolently. ""Who is Erlik but the servant of Satan who was stoned?""

Her beautiful, angry lips were suddenly distorted; her blue eyes blazed. Then she spat, her mouth still tremulous with hatred. She said in a voice shaking with rage:

""Yulun, beloved! Listen attentively. I have slain two of the Slayers of the Eight Towers. With God's help I shall slay them all—all!—Djamouk, Yaddin, Arrak Sou-Sou—all!—every one!—Tiyang Khan, Togrul,—all shall I slay, even to the last one among them!""

""Sanang, also?""

""I leave him to God. It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God!""

Yulun calmly paraphrased the cant phrase of the Assassins: ""For it is written that we belong to God and we return to Him. Heart of gold, I shall execute my duty!""

Then Yulun slipped from the edge of the bed to the floor, and stood there looking oddly at Tressa, her eyes rain-bright as though choking back tears—or laughter.

""Heart of a rose,"" she said in a suppressed voice, ""my time is nearly ended.... So.... I go to the chamber of this strange young man who holds my soul like a pearl afire between his hands.... I think it it written that I shall love him.""

Tressa rose also and placed her lips close to Yulun's ear: ""His name, beloved, is Benton. His room is on this floor. Shall we make the effort together?""

""Yes,"" said Yulun. ""Lay your body down upon the bed beside your lord who sleeps so deeply.... And now stretch out.... And fold both hands.... And now put off thy body like a silken garment.... So! And leave it there beside thy lord, asleep.""

They stood together for a moment, shining like dewy shapes of tall flowers, whispering and laughing together in the soft glow of the night lamp.

Cleves slept on, unstirring. There was the white and sleeping figure of his wife lying on the bed beside him.

But Tressa and Yulun were already melting away between the wall and the confused rosy radiance of the lamp.

Benton, in night attire and chamber-robe belted in, fresh from his bath and still drying his curly hair on a rough towel, wandered back into his bedroom.

When his short, bright hair was dry, he lighted a cigarette, took the automatic from his dresser, examined the clip, and shoved it under his pillow.

Then he picked up the little leather-bound Testament, seated himself, and opened it. And read tranquilly while his cigarette burned.

When he was ready he turned out the ceiling light, leaving only the night lamp lighted. Then he knelt beside his bed,—a custom surviving the nursery period,—and rested his forehead against his folded hands.

Then, as he prayed, something snapped the thread of prayer as though somebody had spoken aloud in the still room; and, like one who has been suddenly interrupted, he opened his eyes and looked around and upward.

The silent shock of her presence passed presently. He got up from his knees, looking at her all the while.

""You are Yulun,"" he said very calmly.

The girl flushed brightly and rested one hand on the foot of the bed.

""Do you remember in the moonlight where you walked along the hedge of white hibiscus and oleander—that night you said good-bye to Tressa in the South?""

""Yes.""

""Twice,"" she said, laughing, ""you stopped to peer at the blossoms in the moonlight.""

""I thought I saw a face among them.""

""You were not sure whether it was flowers or a girl's face looking at you from the blossoming hedge of white hibiscus,"" said Yulun.

""I know now,"" he said in an odd, still voice, unlike his own.

""Yes, it was I,"" she murmured. And of a sudden the girl dropped to her knees without a sound and laid her head on the velvet carpet at his feet.

So swiftly, noiselessly was it done that he had not comprehended—had not moved—when she sat upright, resting on her knees, and grasped the collar of her tunic with both gemmed hands.

""Have pity on me, lord of my lost soul!"" she cried softly.

Benton stooped in a dazed way to lift the girl; but found himself knee deep in a snowy drift of white hibiscus blossoms—touched nothing but silken petals—waded in them as he stepped forward. And saw her standing before him still grasping the collar of her golden tunic.

A great white drift of bloom lay almost waist deep between them; the fragrance of oleander, too, was heavy in the room.

""There are years of life before the flaming gates of Jehaunum open. And I am very young,"" said Yulun wistfully.

Somebody else laughed in the room. Turning his head, he saw Tressa standing by the empty fireplace.

""What you see and hear need not disturb you,"" she said, looking at Benton out of brilliant eyes. ""There is no god but God; and His prophet has been called by many names."" And to Yulun: ""Have I not told you that nothing can harm our souls?""

Yulun's expression altered and she turned to Benton: ""Say it to me!"" she pleaded.

As in a dream he heard his own words: ""Nothing can ever really harm the soul.""

Yulun's hands fell from her tunic collar. Very slowly she lifted her head, looking at him out of lovely, proud young eyes.

She said, evenly, her still gaze on him: ""I am Yulun of the Temple. My heart is like a blazing pearl which you hold between your hands. May the four Blessed Companions witness the truth of what I say.""

Then a delicate veil of colour wrapped her white skin from throat to temple; she looked at Benton with sudden and exquisite distress, frightened and ashamed at his silence.

In the intense stillness Benton moved toward her. Into his outstretched hands her two hands fell; but, bending above them, his lips touched only two white hibiscus flowers that lay fresh and dewy in his palms.

Bewildered, he straightened up; and saw the girl standing by the mantel beside Tressa, who had caught her by the left hand.

""Tokhta! Look out!"" she said distinctly.

Suddenly he saw two men in the room, close to him—their broad faces, slanting eyes, and sparse beards thrust almost against his shoulder.

""Djamouk! Yaddin-ed-Din!"" cried Tressa in a terrible voice. But quick as a flash Yulun tore a white sheet from the bed, flung it on the floor, and, whipping a tiny, jewelled knife from her sleeve, threw it glittering upon the sheet at the feet of the two men.

""One shroud for two souls!"" she said breathlessly, ""—and a knife like that to sever them from their bodies!""

The two men sprang backward as the sheet touched their feet, and now they stood there as though confounded.

""Djamouk, Kahn of the Fifth Tower!"" cried Tressa in a clear voice, ""you have put off your body like a threadbare cloak, and your form that stands there is only your mind! And it is only the evil will of Yaddin in the shape of his body that confronts us in this room of a man you have doomed!""

Yulun, intent as a young leopardess on her prey, moved soundlessly toward Yaddin.

""Tougtchi!"" she said coldly, ""you did murder this day, my Banneret, and the Toug of Djamouk has been greased. Now look out for yourself!""

""Don't stir!"" came Tressa's warning voice, as Benton snatched his pistol from the pillow. ""Don't fire! Those men have no real substance! For God's sake don't fire! I tell you they have no bodies!""

Suddenly something—some force—flung Benton on the bed. The two men did not seem to touch him at all, but he lay there struggling, crushed, held by something that was strangling him.

Through his swimming eyes he saw Yaddin trying to drive a long nail into his skull with a hammer,—felt the piercing agony of the first crashing blow,—struggled upright, drenched in blood, his ears ringing with the screaming of Yaddin.

Then, there in the little rococo bedroom of the Ritz-Carlton, began a strange and horrible struggle—the more dreadful because the struggle was not physical and the combatants never touched each other—scarcely moved at all.

Yaddin, still screaming, confronted Yulun. The girl's eyes were ablaze, her lips parted with the violence of her breathing. And Yaddin writhed and screamed under the terrible concentration of her gaze, his inferior but ferocious mind locked with her mind in deadly battle.

The girl said slowly, showing a glimmer of white teeth: ""Your will to do evil to my young lord is breaking, Yaddin-ed-Din.... I am breaking it. The nail and hammer were but symbols. It was your brain that brooded murder—that willed he should die as though shattered by lightning when that blood-vessel burst in his brain!""

""Sorceress!"" shrieked Yaddin, ""what are you doing to my heart, where my body lies asleep in a berth on the Montreal Express!""

""Your heart is weak, Yaddin. Soon the valves shall fail. A negro porter shall discover you dead in your berth, my Banneret!""

The man's swarthy face became livid with the terrific mental battle.

""Let me go back to my body!"" he panted. ""What are you doing to me that I can not go back? I will go back! I wish it!—I——""

""Let us go back and rejoin our bodies!"" cried Djamouk in an agonised voice. ""There are teeth in my throat, deep in my throat, biting and tearing out the cords.""

""Cancer,"" said Tressa calmly. ""Your body shall die of it while your soul stumbles on through darkness.""

""My Tougtchi!"" shouted Djamouk, ""I hear my soul bidding my body farewell! I must go before my mind expires in the terrible gaze of this young sorceress!""

He turned, drifted like something misty to the solid wall.

""My soul be ransom for yours!"" cried Yulun to Tressa. ""Bar that man's path to life!""

Tressa flung out her right hand and, with her forefinger, drew a barrier through space, bar above bar.

And Benton, half swooning on his bed, saw a cage of terrible and living light penning in Djamouk, who beat upon the incandescent bars and grasped them and clawed his way about, squealing like a tortured rat in a red-hot cage.

Through the deafening tumult Yulun's voice cut like a sword:

""Their bodies are dying, Heart of a Rose!... Listen! I hear their souls bidding their minds farewell!""

And, after a dreadful silence: ""The train speeding north carries two dead men! God is God. Niaz!""

The bars of living fire faded. Two cinder-like and shapeless shadows floated and eddied like whitened ashes stirred by a wind on the hearth; then drifted through the lamp-light, fading, dissolving, lost gradually in thin air.

Tressa, leaning back against the mantel, covered her face with both hands.

Yulun crept to the bed where Benton lay, breathing evenly in deepest sleep.

With the sheer sleeve of her tunic she wiped the blood from his face. And, at her touch, the wound in the temple closed and the short, bright hair dried and curled over a forehead as clean and fresh as a boy's.

Then Yulun laid her lips against his, rested so a moment.

""Seek me, dear lord,"" she whispered. ""Or send me a sign and I shall come.""

And, after a pause, she said, her lips scarcely stirring: ""Love me. My heart is a flaming pearl burning between your hands.""

Then she lifted her head.

But Tressa had rejoined her body, where it lay asleep beside her deeply sleeping husband.

So Yulun stood a moment, her eyes remote. Then, after a while, the little rococo bedroom in the Ritz-Carlton was empty save for a young man asleep on the bed, holding in his clenched hand a white hibiscus blossom.

",True
"

I

""Ne raillons pas les fous; leur folie dure plus longtemps que
la nôtre.... Voila toute la différence.""

Toward the end of the year 1920 the Government of the United States had
practically completed the programme, adopted during the last months of
President Winthrop's administration. The country was apparently tranquil.
Everybody knows how the Tariff and Labour questions were settled. The war
with Germany, incident on that country's seizure of the Samoan Islands,
had left no visible scars upon the republic, and the temporary occupation
of Norfolk by the invading army had been forgotten in the joy over
repeated naval victories, and the subsequent ridiculous plight of General
Von Gartenlaube's forces in the State of New Jersey. The Cuban and
Hawaiian investments had paid one hundred per cent and the territory of
Samoa was well worth its cost as a coaling station. The country was in a
superb state of defence. Every coast city had been well supplied with land
fortifications; the army under the parental eye of the General Staff,
organized according to the Prussian system, had been increased to 300,000
men, with a territorial reserve of a million; and six magnificent
squadrons of cruisers and battle-ships patrolled the six stations of the
navigable seas, leaving a steam reserve amply fitted to control home
waters. The gentlemen from the West had at last been constrained to
acknowledge that a college for the training of diplomats was as necessary
as law schools are for the training of barristers; consequently we were no
longer represented abroad by incompetent patriots. The nation was
prosperous; Chicago, for a moment paralyzed after a second great fire, had
risen from its ruins, white and imperial, and more beautiful than the white
city which had been built for its plaything in 1893. Everywhere good
architecture was replacing bad, and even in New York, a sudden craving for
decency had swept away a great portion of the existing horrors. Streets
had been widened, properly paved and lighted, trees had been planted,
squares laid out, elevated structures demolished and underground roads
built to replace them. The new government buildings and barracks were fine
bits of architecture, and the long system of stone quays which completely
surrounded the island had been turned into parks which proved a god-send
to the population. The subsidizing of the state theatre and state opera
brought its own reward. The United States National Academy of Design was
much like European institutions of the same kind. Nobody envied the
Secretary of Fine Arts, either his cabinet position or his portfolio. The
Secretary of Forestry and Game Preservation had a much easier time, thanks
to the new system of National Mounted Police. We had profited well by the
latest treaties with France and England; the exclusion of foreign-born
Jews as a measure of self-preservation, the settlement of the new
independent negro state of Suanee, the checking of immigration, the new
laws concerning naturalization, and the gradual centralization of power in
the executive all contributed to national calm and prosperity. When the
Government solved the Indian problem and squadrons of Indian cavalry
scouts in native costume were substituted for the pitiable organizations
tacked on to the tail of skeletonized regiments by a former Secretary of
War, the nation drew a long sigh of relief. When, after the colossal
Congress of Religions, bigotry and intolerance were laid in their graves
and kindness and charity began to draw warring sects together, many
thought the millennium had arrived, at least in the new world which after
all is a world by itself.

But self-preservation is the first law, and the United States had to look
on in helpless sorrow as Germany, Italy, Spain and Belgium writhed in the
throes of Anarchy, while Russia, watching from the Caucasus, stooped and
bound them one by one.

In the city of New York the summer of 1899 was signalized by the
dismantling of the Elevated Railroads. The summer of 1900 will live in
the memories of New York people for many a cycle; the Dodge Statue was
removed in that year. In the following winter began that agitation for
the repeal of the laws prohibiting suicide which bore its final fruit in
the month of April, 1920, when the first Government Lethal Chamber was
opened on Washington Square.

I had walked down that day from Dr. Archer's house on Madison Avenue,
where I had been as a mere formality. Ever since that fall from my horse,
four years before, I had been troubled at times with pains in the back of
my head and neck, but now for months they had been absent, and the doctor
sent me away that day saying there was nothing more to be cured in me. It
was hardly worth his fee to be told that; I knew it myself. Still I did
not grudge him the money. What I minded was the mistake which he made at
first. When they picked me up from the pavement where I lay unconscious,
and somebody had mercifully sent a bullet through my horse's head, I was
carried to Dr. Archer, and he, pronouncing my brain affected, placed me
in his private asylum where I was obliged to endure treatment for
insanity. At last he decided that I was well, and I, knowing that my mind
had always been as sound as his, if not sounder, ""paid my tuition"" as he
jokingly called it, and left. I told him, smiling, that I would get even
with him for his mistake, and he laughed heartily, and asked me to call
once in a while. I did so, hoping for a chance to even up accounts, but
he gave me none, and I told him I would wait.

The fall from my horse had fortunately left no evil results; on the
contrary it had changed my whole character for the better. From a lazy
young man about town, I had become active, energetic, temperate, and
above all--oh, above all else--ambitious. There was only one thing which
troubled me, I laughed at my own uneasiness, and yet it troubled me.

During my convalescence I had bought and read for the first time, _The
King in Yellow_. I remember after finishing the first act that it
occurred to me that I had better stop. I started up and flung the book
into the fireplace; the volume struck the barred grate and fell open on
the hearth in the firelight. If I had not caught a glimpse of the opening
words in the second act I should never have finished it, but as I stooped
to pick it up, my eyes became riveted to the open page, and with a cry of
terror, or perhaps it was of joy so poignant that I suffered in every
nerve, I snatched the thing out of the coals and crept shaking to my
bedroom, where I read it and reread it, and wept and laughed and trembled
with a horror which at times assails me yet. This is the thing that
troubles me, for I cannot forget Carcosa where black stars hang in the
heavens; where the shadows of men's thoughts lengthen in the afternoon,
when the twin suns sink into the lake of Hali; and my mind will bear for
ever the memory of the Pallid Mask. I pray God will curse the writer, as
the writer has cursed the world with this beautiful, stupendous creation,
terrible in its simplicity, irresistible in its truth--a world which now
trembles before the King in Yellow. When the French Government seized the
translated copies which had just arrived in Paris, London, of course,
became eager to read it. It is well known how the book spread like an
infectious disease, from city to city, from continent to continent,
barred out here, confiscated there, denounced by Press and pulpit,
censured even by the most advanced of literary anarchists. No definite
principles had been violated in those wicked pages, no doctrine
promulgated, no convictions outraged. It could not be judged by any known
standard, yet, although it was acknowledged that the supreme note of art
had been struck in _The King in Yellow_, all felt that human nature
could not bear the strain, nor thrive on words in which the essence of
purest poison lurked. The very banality and innocence of the first act
only allowed the blow to fall afterward with more awful effect.

It was, I remember, the 13th day of April, 1920, that the first
Government Lethal Chamber was established on the south side of Washington
Square, between Wooster Street and South Fifth Avenue. The block which
had formerly consisted of a lot of shabby old buildings, used as cafés
and restaurants for foreigners, had been acquired by the Government in
the winter of 1898. The French and Italian cafés and restaurants were
torn down; the whole block was enclosed by a gilded iron railing, and
converted into a lovely garden with lawns, flowers and fountains. In the
centre of the garden stood a small, white building, severely classical in
architecture, and surrounded by thickets of flowers. Six Ionic columns
supported the roof, and the single door was of bronze. A splendid marble
group of the ""Fates"" stood before the door, the work of a young American
sculptor, Boris Yvain, who had died in Paris when only twenty-three years
old.

The inauguration ceremonies were in progress as I crossed University
Place and entered the square. I threaded my way through the silent throng
of spectators, but was stopped at Fourth Street by a cordon of police. A
regiment of United States lancers were drawn up in a hollow square round
the Lethal Chamber. On a raised tribune facing Washington Park stood the
Governor of New York, and behind him were grouped the Mayor of New
York and Brooklyn, the Inspector-General of Police, the Commandant of
the state troops, Colonel Livingston, military aid to the President of the
United States, General Blount, commanding at Governor's Island,
Major-General Hamilton, commanding the garrison of New York and Brooklyn,
Admiral Buffby of the fleet in the North River, Surgeon-General
Lanceford, the staff of the National Free Hospital, Senators Wyse and
Franklin of New York, and the Commissioner of Public Works. The tribune
was surrounded by a squadron of hussars of the National Guard.

The Governor was finishing his reply to the short speech of the
Surgeon-General. I heard him say: ""The laws prohibiting suicide and
providing punishment for any attempt at self-destruction have been
repealed. The Government has seen fit to acknowledge the right of man to
end an existence which may have become intolerable to him, through
physical suffering or mental despair. It is believed that the community
will be benefited by the removal of such people from their midst. Since
the passage of this law, the number of suicides in the United States has
not increased. Now the Government has determined to establish a Lethal
Chamber in every city, town and village in the country, it remains to be
seen whether or not that class of human creatures from whose desponding
ranks new victims of self-destruction fall daily will accept the relief
thus provided."" He paused, and turned to the white Lethal Chamber. The
silence in the street was absolute. ""There a painless death awaits him
who can no longer bear the sorrows of this life. If death is welcome let
him seek it there."" Then quickly turning to the military aid of the
President's household, he said, ""I declare the Lethal Chamber open,"" and
again facing the vast crowd he cried in a clear voice: ""Citizens of New
York and of the United States of America, through me the Government
declares the Lethal Chamber to be open.""

The solemn hush was broken by a sharp cry of command, the squadron of
hussars filed after the Governor's carriage, the lancers wheeled and
formed along Fifth Avenue to wait for the commandant of the garrison, and
the mounted police followed them. I left the crowd to gape and stare at
the white marble Death Chamber, and, crossing South Fifth Avenue, walked
along the western side of that thoroughfare to Bleecker Street. Then I
turned to the right and stopped before a dingy shop which bore the sign:

HAWBERK, ARMOURER.

I glanced in at the doorway and saw Hawberk busy in his little shop at
the end of the hall. He looked up, and catching sight of me cried in his
deep, hearty voice, ""Come in, Mr. Castaigne!"" Constance, his daughter,
rose to meet me as I crossed the threshold, and held out her pretty
hand, but I saw the blush of disappointment on her cheeks, and knew
that it was another Castaigne she had expected, my cousin Louis. I
smiled at her confusion and complimented her on the banner she was
embroidering from a coloured plate. Old Hawberk sat riveting the worn
greaves of some ancient suit of armour, and the ting! ting! ting! of his
little hammer sounded pleasantly in the quaint shop. Presently he
dropped his hammer, and fussed about for a moment with a tiny wrench.
The soft clash of the mail sent a thrill of pleasure through me. I
loved to hear the music of steel brushing against steel, the mellow
shock of the mallet on thigh pieces, and the jingle of chain armour.
That was the only reason I went to see Hawberk. He had never interested
me personally, nor did Constance, except for the fact of her being in
love with Louis. This did occupy my attention, and sometimes even kept
me awake at night. But I knew in my heart that all would come right,
and that I should arrange their future as I expected to arrange that of
my kind doctor, John Archer. However, I should never have troubled
myself about visiting them just then, had it not been, as I say, that
the music of the tinkling hammer had for me this strong fascination. I
would sit for hours, listening and listening, and when a stray sunbeam
struck the inlaid steel, the sensation it gave me was almost too keen
to endure. My eyes would become fixed, dilating with a pleasure that
stretched every nerve almost to breaking, until some movement of the
old armourer cut off the ray of sunlight, then, still thrilling
secretly, I leaned back and listened again to the sound of the
polishing rag, swish! swish! rubbing rust from the rivets.

Constance worked with the embroidery over her knees, now and then pausing
to examine more closely the pattern in the coloured plate from the
Metropolitan Museum.

""Who is this for?"" I asked.

Hawberk explained, that in addition to the treasures of armour in the
Metropolitan Museum of which he had been appointed armourer, he also
had charge of several collections belonging to rich amateurs. This was the
missing greave of a famous suit which a client of his had traced to a
little shop in Paris on the Quai d'Orsay. He, Hawberk, had negotiated for
and secured the greave, and now the suit was complete. He laid down his
hammer and read me the history of the suit, traced since 1450 from owner
to owner until it was acquired by Thomas Stainbridge. When his superb
collection was sold, this client of Hawberk's bought the suit, and since
then the search for the missing greave had been pushed until it was,
almost by accident, located in Paris.

""Did you continue the search so persistently without any certainty of the
greave being still in existence?"" I demanded.

""Of course,"" he replied coolly.

Then for the first time I took a personal interest in Hawberk.

""It was worth something to you,"" I ventured.

""No,"" he replied, laughing, ""my pleasure in finding it was my reward.""

""Have you no ambition to be rich?"" I asked, smiling.

""My one ambition is to be the best armourer in the world,"" he answered
gravely.

Constance asked me if I had seen the ceremonies at the Lethal Chamber.
She herself had noticed cavalry passing up Broadway that morning, and had
wished to see the inauguration, but her father wanted the banner
finished, and she had stayed at his request.

""Did you see your cousin, Mr. Castaigne, there?"" she asked, with the
slightest tremor of her soft eyelashes.

""No,"" I replied carelessly. ""Louis' regiment is manoeuvring out in
Westchester County."" I rose and picked up my hat and cane.

""Are you going upstairs to see the lunatic again?"" laughed old Hawberk.
If Hawberk knew how I loathe that word ""lunatic,"" he would never use it
in my presence. It rouses certain feelings within me which I do not care
to explain. However, I answered him quietly: ""I think I shall drop in and
see Mr. Wilde for a moment or two.""

""Poor fellow,"" said Constance, with a shake of the head, ""it must be hard
to live alone year after year poor, crippled and almost demented. It is
very good of you, Mr. Castaigne, to visit him as often as you do.""

""I think he is vicious,"" observed Hawberk, beginning again with his
hammer. I listened to the golden tinkle on the greave plates; when he had
finished I replied:

""No, he is not vicious, nor is he in the least demented. His mind is a
wonder chamber, from which he can extract treasures that you and I would
give years of our life to acquire.""'

Hawberk laughed.

I continued a little impatiently: ""He knows history as no one else could
know it. Nothing, however trivial, escapes his search, and his memory is
so absolute, so precise in details, that were it known in New York that
such a man existed, the people could not honour him enough.""

""Nonsense,"" muttered Hawberk, searching on the floor for a fallen rivet.

""Is it nonsense,"" I asked, managing to suppress what I felt, ""is it
nonsense when he says that the tassets and cuissards of the enamelled
suit of armour commonly known as the 'Prince's Emblazoned' can be found
among a mass of rusty theatrical properties, broken stoves and
ragpicker's refuse in a garret in Pell Street?""

Hawberk's hammer fell to the ground, but he picked it up and asked, with
a great deal of calm, how I knew that the tassets and left cuissard were
missing from the ""Prince's Emblazoned.""

""I did not know until Mr. Wilde mentioned it to me the other day. He said
they were in the garret of 998 Pell Street.""

""Nonsense,"" he cried, but I noticed his hand trembling under his leathern
apron.

""Is this nonsense too?"" I asked pleasantly, ""is it nonsense when Mr.
Wilde continually speaks of you as the Marquis of Avonshire and of Miss
Constance--""

I did not finish, for Constance had started to her feet with terror
written on every feature. Hawberk looked at me and slowly smoothed his
leathern apron.

""That is impossible,"" he observed, ""Mr. Wilde may know a great many
things--""

""About armour, for instance, and the 'Prince's Emblazoned,'"" I
interposed, smiling.

""Yes,"" he continued, slowly, ""about armour also--may be--but he is wrong
in regard to the Marquis of Avonshire, who, as you know, killed his
wife's traducer years ago, and went to Australia where he did not long
survive his wife.""

""Mr. Wilde is wrong,"" murmured Constance. Her lips were blanched, but her
voice was sweet and calm.

""Let us agree, if you please, that in this one circumstance Mr. Wilde is
wrong,"" I said.




II

I climbed the three dilapidated flights of stairs, which I had so often
climbed before, and knocked at a small door at the end of the corridor.
Mr. Wilde opened the door and I walked in.

When he had double-locked the door and pushed a heavy chest against it,
he came and sat down beside me, peering up into my face with his little
light-coloured eyes. Half a dozen new scratches covered his nose and
cheeks, and the silver wires which supported his artificial ears had
become displaced. I thought I had never seen him so hideously
fascinating. He had no ears. The artificial ones, which now stood out at
an angle from the fine wire, were his one weakness. They were made of wax
and painted a shell pink, but the rest of his face was yellow. He might
better have revelled in the luxury of some artificial fingers for his
left hand, which was absolutely fingerless, but it seemed to cause him no
inconvenience, and he was satisfied with his wax ears. He was very small,
scarcely higher than a child of ten, but his arms were magnificently
developed, and his thighs as thick as any athlete's. Still, the most
remarkable thing about Mr. Wilde was that a man of his marvellous
intelligence and knowledge should have such a head. It was flat and
pointed, like the heads of many of those unfortunates whom people
imprison in asylums for the weak-minded. Many called him insane, but I
knew him to be as sane as I was.

I do not deny that he was eccentric; the mania he had for keeping that
cat and teasing her until she flew at his face like a demon, was
certainly eccentric. I never could understand why he kept the creature,
nor what pleasure he found in shutting himself up in his room with this
surly, vicious beast. I remember once, glancing up from the manuscript I
was studying by the light of some tallow dips, and seeing Mr. Wilde
squatting motionless on his high chair, his eyes fairly blazing with
excitement, while the cat, which had risen from her place before the
stove, came creeping across the floor right at him. Before I could move
she flattened her belly to the ground, crouched, trembled, and sprang
into his face. Howling and foaming they rolled over and over on the
floor, scratching and clawing, until the cat screamed and fled under the
cabinet, and Mr. Wilde turned over on his back, his limbs contracting and
curling up like the legs of a dying spider. He _was_ eccentric.

Mr. Wilde had climbed into his high chair, and, after studying my face,
picked up a dog's-eared ledger and opened it.

""Henry B. Matthews,"" he read, ""book-keeper with Whysot Whysot and
Company, dealers in church ornaments. Called April 3rd. Reputation
damaged on the race-track. Known as a welcher. Reputation to be repaired
by August 1st. Retainer Five Dollars."" He turned the page and ran his
fingerless knuckles down the closely-written columns.

""P. Greene Dusenberry, Minister of the Gospel, Fairbeach, New Jersey.
Reputation damaged in the Bowery. To be repaired as soon as possible.
Retainer $100.""

He coughed and added, ""Called, April 6th.""

""Then you are not in need of money, Mr. Wilde,"" I inquired.

""Listen,"" he coughed again.

""Mrs. C. Hamilton Chester, of Chester Park, New York City. Called April
7th. Reputation damaged at Dieppe, France. To be repaired by October 1st
Retainer $500.

""Note.--C. Hamilton Chester, Captain U.S.S. 'Avalanche', ordered home
from South Sea Squadron October 1st.""

""Well,"" I said, ""the profession of a Repairer of Reputations is
lucrative.""

His colourless eyes sought mine, ""I only wanted to demonstrate that I
was correct. You said it was impossible to succeed as a Repairer of
Reputations; that even if I did succeed in certain cases it would cost
me more than I would gain by it. To-day I have five hundred men in my
employ, who are poorly paid, but who pursue the work with an enthusiasm
which possibly may be born of fear. These men enter every shade and grade
of society; some even are pillars of the most exclusive social temples;
others are the prop and pride of the financial world; still others, hold
undisputed sway among the 'Fancy and the Talent.' I choose them at my
leisure from those who reply to my advertisements. It is easy enough,
they are all cowards. I could treble the number in twenty days if I
wished. So you see, those who have in their keeping the reputations of
their fellow-citizens, I have in my pay.""

""They may turn on you,"" I suggested.

He rubbed his thumb over his cropped ears, and adjusted the wax
substitutes. ""I think not,"" he murmured thoughtfully, ""I seldom have to
apply the whip, and then only once. Besides they like their wages.""

""How do you apply the whip?"" I demanded.

His face for a moment was awful to look upon. His eyes dwindled to a pair
of green sparks.

""I invite them to come and have a little chat with me,"" he said in a soft
voice.

A knock at the door interrupted him, and his face resumed its amiable
expression.

""Who is it?"" he inquired.

""Mr. Steylette,"" was the answer.

""Come to-morrow,"" replied Mr. Wilde.

""Impossible,"" began the other, but was silenced by a sort of bark from
Mr. Wilde.

""Come to-morrow,"" he repeated.

We heard somebody move away from the door and turn the corner by the
stairway.

""Who is that?"" I asked.

""Arnold Steylette, Owner and Editor in Chief of the great New York
daily.""

He drummed on the ledger with his fingerless hand adding: ""I pay him very
badly, but he thinks it a good bargain.""

""Arnold Steylette!"" I repeated amazed.

""Yes,"" said Mr. Wilde, with a self-satisfied cough.

The cat, which had entered the room as he spoke, hesitated, looked up at
him and snarled. He climbed down from the chair and squatting on the
floor, took the creature into his arms and caressed her. The cat ceased
snarling and presently began a loud purring which seemed to increase in
timbre as he stroked her. ""Where are the notes?"" I asked. He pointed to
the table, and for the hundredth time I picked up the bundle of
manuscript entitled--

""THE IMPERIAL DYNASTY OF AMERICA.""

One by one I studied the well-worn pages, worn only by my own handling,
and although I knew all by heart, from the beginning, ""When from Carcosa,
the Hyades, Hastur, and Aldebaran,"" to ""Castaigne, Louis de Calvados,
born December 19th, 1877,"" I read it with an eager, rapt attention,
pausing to repeat parts of it aloud, and dwelling especially on ""Hildred
de Calvados, only son of Hildred Castaigne and Edythe Landes Castaigne,
first in succession,"" etc., etc.

When I finished, Mr. Wilde nodded and coughed.

""Speaking of your legitimate ambition,"" he said, ""how do Constance and
Louis get along?""

""She loves him,"" I replied simply.

The cat on his knee suddenly turned and struck at his eyes, and he flung
her off and climbed on to the chair opposite me.

""And Dr. Archer! But that's a matter you can settle any time you wish,""
he added.

""Yes,"" I replied, ""Dr. Archer can wait, but it is time I saw my cousin
Louis.""

""It is time,"" he repeated. Then he took another ledger from the table and
ran over the leaves rapidly. ""We are now in communication with ten
thousand men,"" he muttered. ""We can count on one hundred thousand within
the first twenty-eight hours, and in forty-eight hours the state will
rise _en masse_. The country follows the state, and the portion that
will not, I mean California and the Northwest, might better never have
been inhabited. I shall not send them the Yellow Sign.""

The blood rushed to my head, but I only answered, ""A new broom sweeps
clean.""

""The ambition of Caesar and of Napoleon pales before that which could not
rest until it had seized the minds of men and controlled even their
unborn thoughts,"" said Mr. Wilde.

""You are speaking of the King in Yellow,"" I groaned, with a shudder.

""He is a king whom emperors have served.""

""I am content to serve him,"" I replied.

Mr. Wilde sat rubbing his ears with his crippled hand. ""Perhaps Constance
does not love him,"" he suggested.

I started to reply, but a sudden burst of military music from the street
below drowned my voice. The twentieth dragoon regiment, formerly in
garrison at Mount St. Vincent, was returning from the manoeuvres in
Westchester County, to its new barracks on East Washington Square. It was
my cousin's regiment. They were a fine lot of fellows, in their pale
blue, tight-fitting jackets, jaunty busbys and white riding breeches with
the double yellow stripe, into which their limbs seemed moulded. Every
other squadron was armed with lances, from the metal points of which
fluttered yellow and white pennons. The band passed, playing the
regimental march, then came the colonel and staff, the horses crowding
and trampling, while their heads bobbed in unison, and the pennons
fluttered from their lance points. The troopers, who rode with the
beautiful English seat, looked brown as berries from their bloodless
campaign among the farms of Westchester, and the music of their sabres
against the stirrups, and the jingle of spurs and carbines was delightful
to me. I saw Louis riding with his squadron. He was as handsome an
officer as I have ever seen. Mr. Wilde, who had mounted a chair by the
window, saw him too, but said nothing. Louis turned and looked straight
at Hawberk's shop as he passed, and I could see the flush on his brown
cheeks. I think Constance must have been at the window. When the last
troopers had clattered by, and the last pennons vanished into South Fifth
Avenue, Mr. Wilde clambered out of his chair and dragged the chest away
from the door.

""Yes,"" he said, ""it is time that you saw your cousin Louis.""

He unlocked the door and I picked up my hat and stick and stepped into
the corridor. The stairs were dark. Groping about, I set my foot on
something soft, which snarled and spit, and I aimed a murderous blow at
the cat, but my cane shivered to splinters against the balustrade, and
the beast scurried back into Mr. Wilde's room.

Passing Hawberk's door again I saw him still at work on the armour, but
I did not stop, and stepping out into Bleecker Street, I followed it to
Wooster, skirted the grounds of the Lethal Chamber, and crossing
Washington Park went straight to my rooms in the Benedick. Here I lunched
comfortably, read the _Herald_ and the _Meteor_, and finally went
to the steel safe in my bedroom and set the time combination. The
three and three-quarter minutes which it is necessary to wait, while the
time lock is opening, are to me golden moments. From the instant I set
the combination to the moment when I grasp the knobs and swing back
the solid steel doors, I live in an ecstasy of expectation. Those moments
must be like moments passed in Paradise. I know what I am to find at
the end of the time limit. I know what the massive safe holds secure for
me, for me alone, and the exquisite pleasure of waiting is hardly enhanced
when the safe opens and I lift, from its velvet crown, a diadem of purest
gold, blazing with diamonds. I do this every day, and yet the joy of
waiting and at last touching again the diadem, only seems to increase as
the days pass. It is a diadem fit for a King among kings, an Emperor
among emperors. The King in Yellow might scorn it, but it shall be worn
by his royal servant.

I held it in my arms until the alarm in the safe rang harshly, and then
tenderly, proudly, I replaced it and shut the steel doors. I walked
slowly back into my study, which faces Washington Square, and leaned on
the window sill. The afternoon sun poured into my windows, and a gentle
breeze stirred the branches of the elms and maples in the park, now
covered with buds and tender foliage. A flock of pigeons circled about
the tower of the Memorial Church; sometimes alighting on the purple tiled
roof, sometimes wheeling downward to the lotos fountain in front of the
marble arch. The gardeners were busy with the flower beds around the
fountain, and the freshly turned earth smelled sweet and spicy. A lawn
mower, drawn by a fat white horse, clinked across the green sward, and
watering-carts poured showers of spray over the asphalt drives. Around
the statue of Peter Stuyvesant, which in 1897 had replaced the
monstrosity supposed to represent Garibaldi, children played in the
spring sunshine, and nurse girls wheeled elaborate baby carriages with a
reckless disregard for the pasty-faced occupants, which could probably be
explained by the presence of half a dozen trim dragoon troopers languidly
lolling on the benches. Through the trees, the Washington Memorial Arch
glistened like silver in the sunshine, and beyond, on the eastern
extremity of the square the grey stone barracks of the dragoons, and the
white granite artillery stables were alive with colour and motion.

I looked at the Lethal Chamber on the corner of the square opposite. A
few curious people still lingered about the gilded iron railing, but
inside the grounds the paths were deserted. I watched the fountains
ripple and sparkle; the sparrows had already found this new bathing nook,
and the basins were covered with the dusty-feathered little things. Two
or three white peacocks picked their way across the lawns, and a drab
coloured pigeon sat so motionless on the arm of one of the ""Fates,"" that
it seemed to be a part of the sculptured stone.

As I was turning carelessly away, a slight commotion in the group of
curious loiterers around the gates attracted my attention. A young man
had entered, and was advancing with nervous strides along the gravel path
which leads to the bronze doors of the Lethal Chamber. He paused a moment
before the ""Fates,"" and as he raised his head to those three mysterious
faces, the pigeon rose from its sculptured perch, circled about for a
moment and wheeled to the east. The young man pressed his hand to his
face, and then with an undefinable gesture sprang up the marble steps,
the bronze doors closed behind him, and half an hour later the loiterers
slouched away, and the frightened pigeon returned to its perch in the
arms of Fate.

I put on my hat and went out into the park for a little walk before
dinner. As I crossed the central driveway a group of officers passed, and
one of them called out, ""Hello, Hildred,"" and came back to shake hands
with me. It was my cousin Louis, who stood smiling and tapping his
spurred heels with his riding-whip.

""Just back from Westchester,"" he said; ""been doing the bucolic; milk and
curds, you know, dairy-maids in sunbonnets, who say 'haeow' and 'I don't
think' when you tell them they are pretty. I'm nearly dead for a square
meal at Delmonico's. What's the news?""

""There is none,"" I replied pleasantly. ""I saw your regiment coming in this
morning.""

""Did you? I didn't see you. Where were you?""

""In Mr. Wilde's window.""

""Oh, hell!"" he began impatiently, ""that man is stark mad! I don't
understand why you--""

He saw how annoyed I felt by this outburst, and begged my pardon.

""Really, old chap,"" he said, ""I don't mean to run down a man you like,
but for the life of me I can't see what the deuce you find in common with
Mr. Wilde. He's not well bred, to put it generously; he is hideously
deformed; his head is the head of a criminally insane person. You know
yourself he's been in an asylum--""

""So have I,"" I interrupted calmly.

Louis looked startled and confused for a moment, but recovered and
slapped me heartily on the shoulder. ""You were completely cured,"" he
began; but I stopped him again.

""I suppose you mean that I was simply acknowledged never to have been
insane.""

""Of course that--that's what I meant,"" he laughed.

I disliked his laugh because I knew it was forced, but I nodded gaily and
asked him where he was going. Louis looked after his brother officers who
had now almost reached Broadway.

""We had intended to sample a Brunswick cocktail, but to tell you the
truth I was anxious for an excuse to go and see Hawberk instead. Come
along, I'll make you my excuse.""

We found old Hawberk, neatly attired in a fresh spring suit, standing at
the door of his shop and sniffing the air.

""I had just decided to take Constance for a little stroll before dinner,""
he replied to the impetuous volley of questions from Louis. ""We thought
of walking on the park terrace along the North River.""

At that moment Constance appeared and grew pale and rosy by turns as
Louis bent over her small gloved fingers. I tried to excuse myself,
alleging an engagement uptown, but Louis and Constance would not listen,
and I saw I was expected to remain and engage old Hawberk's attention.
After all it would be just as well if I kept my eye on Louis, I thought,
and when they hailed a Spring Street horse-car, I got in after them and
took my seat beside the armourer.

The beautiful line of parks and granite terraces overlooking the wharves
along the North River, which were built in 1910 and finished in the
autumn of 1917, had become one of the most popular promenades in the
metropolis. They extended from the battery to 190th Street, overlooking
the noble river and affording a fine view of the Jersey shore and the
Highlands opposite. Cafés and restaurants were scattered here and there
among the trees, and twice a week military bands from the garrison played
in the kiosques on the parapets.

We sat down in the sunshine on the bench at the foot of the equestrian
statue of General Sheridan. Constance tipped her sunshade to shield her
eyes, and she and Louis began a murmuring conversation which was
impossible to catch. Old Hawberk, leaning on his ivory headed cane,
lighted an excellent cigar, the mate to which I politely refused, and
smiled at vacancy. The sun hung low above the Staten Island woods, and
the bay was dyed with golden hues reflected from the sun-warmed sails of
the shipping in the harbour.

Brigs, schooners, yachts, clumsy ferry-boats, their decks swarming with
people, railroad transports carrying lines of brown, blue and white
freight cars, stately sound steamers, déclassé tramp steamers, coasters,
dredgers, scows, and everywhere pervading the entire bay impudent little
tugs puffing and whistling officiously;--these were the craft which
churned the sunlight waters as far as the eye could reach. In calm
contrast to the hurry of sailing vessel and steamer a silent fleet of
white warships lay motionless in midstream.

Constance's merry laugh aroused me from my reverie.

""What _are_ you staring at?"" she inquired.

""Nothing--the fleet,"" I smiled.

Then Louis told us what the vessels were, pointing out each by its
relative position to the old Red Fort on Governor's Island.

""That little cigar shaped thing is a torpedo boat,"" he explained; ""there
are four more lying close together. They are the _Tarpon_, the _Falcon_,
the _Sea Fox_, and the _Octopus_. The gun-boats just above are the
_Princeton_, the _Champlain_, the _Still Water_ and the _Erie_. Next to
them lie the cruisers _Faragut_ and _Los Angeles_, and above them the
battle ships _California_, and _Dakota_, and the _Washington_ which is
the flag ship. Those two squatty looking chunks of metal which are
anchored there off Castle William are the double turreted monitors
_Terrible_ and _Magnificent_; behind them lies the ram, _Osceola_.""

Constance looked at him with deep approval in her beautiful eyes. ""What
loads of things you know for a soldier,"" she said, and we all joined in
the laugh which followed.

Presently Louis rose with a nod to us and offered his arm to Constance,
and they strolled away along the river wall. Hawberk watched them for a
moment and then turned to me.

""Mr. Wilde was right,"" he said. ""I have found the missing tassets and
left cuissard of the 'Prince's Emblazoned,' in a vile old junk garret in
Pell Street.""

""998?"" I inquired, with a smile.

""Yes.""

""Mr. Wilde is a very intelligent man,"" I observed.

""I want to give him the credit of this most important discovery,""
continued Hawberk. ""And I intend it shall be known that he is entitled
to the fame of it.""

""He won't thank you for that,"" I answered sharply; ""please say nothing
about it.""

""Do you know what it is worth?"" said Hawberk.

""No, fifty dollars, perhaps.""

""It is valued at five hundred, but the owner of the 'Prince's Emblazoned'
will give two thousand dollars to the person who completes his suit; that
reward also belongs to Mr. Wilde.""

""He doesn't want it! He refuses it!"" I answered angrily. ""What do you
know about Mr. Wilde? He doesn't need the money. He is rich--or will
be--richer than any living man except myself. What will we care for money
then--what will we care, he and I, when--when--""

""When what?"" demanded Hawberk, astonished.

""You will see,"" I replied, on my guard again.

He looked at me narrowly, much as Doctor Archer used to, and I knew he
thought I was mentally unsound. Perhaps it was fortunate for him that he
did not use the word lunatic just then.

""No,"" I replied to his unspoken thought, ""I am not mentally weak; my mind
is as healthy as Mr. Wilde's. I do not care to explain just yet what I
have on hand, but it is an investment which will pay more than mere gold,
silver and precious stones. It will secure the happiness and prosperity
of a continent--yes, a hemisphere!""

""Oh,"" said Hawberk.

""And eventually,"" I continued more quietly, ""it will secure the happiness
of the whole world.""

""And incidentally your own happiness and prosperity as well as Mr.
Wilde's?""

""Exactly,"" I smiled. But I could have throttled him for taking that tone.

He looked at me in silence for a while and then said very gently, ""Why
don't you give up your books and studies, Mr. Castaigne, and take a tramp
among the mountains somewhere or other? You used to be fond of fishing.
Take a cast or two at the trout in the Rangelys.""

""I don't care for fishing any more,"" I answered, without a shade of
annoyance in my voice.

""You used to be fond of everything,"" he continued; ""athletics, yachting,
shooting, riding--""

""I have never cared to ride since my fall,"" I said quietly.

""Ah, yes, your fall,"" he repeated, looking away from me.

I thought this nonsense had gone far enough, so I brought the
conversation back to Mr. Wilde; but he was scanning my face again in a
manner highly offensive to me.

""Mr. Wilde,"" he repeated, ""do you know what he did this afternoon? He
came downstairs and nailed a sign over the hall door next to mine; it
read:

""MR. WILDE,
REPAIRER OF REPUTATIONS.
Third Bell.

""Do you know what a Repairer of Reputations can be?""

""I do,"" I replied, suppressing the rage within.

""Oh,"" he said again.

Louis and Constance came strolling by and stopped to ask if we would join
them. Hawberk looked at his watch. At the same moment a puff of smoke
shot from the casemates of Castle William, and the boom of the sunset gun
rolled across the water and was re-echoed from the Highlands opposite.
The flag came running down from the flag-pole, the bugles sounded on the
white decks of the warships, and the first electric light sparkled out
from the Jersey shore.

As I turned into the city with Hawberk I heard Constance murmur something
to Louis which I did not understand; but Louis whispered ""My darling,"" in
reply; and again, walking ahead with Hawberk through the square I heard a
murmur of ""sweetheart,"" and ""my own Constance,"" and I knew the time had
nearly arrived when I should speak of important matters with my cousin
Louis.




III

One morning early in May I stood before the steel safe in my bedroom,
trying on the golden jewelled crown. The diamonds flashed fire as I
turned to the mirror, and the heavy beaten gold burned like a halo about
my head. I remembered Camilla's agonized scream and the awful words
echoing through the dim streets of Carcosa. They were the last lines in
the first act, and I dared not think of what followed--dared not, even
in the spring sunshine, there in my own room, surrounded with familiar
objects, reassured by the bustle from the street and the voices of the
servants in the hallway outside. For those poisoned words had dropped
slowly into my heart, as death-sweat drops upon a bed-sheet and is
absorbed. Trembling, I put the diadem from my head and wiped my forehead,
but I thought of Hastur and of my own rightful ambition, and I remembered
Mr. Wilde as I had last left him, his face all torn and bloody from the
claws of that devil's creature, and what he said--ah, what he said. The
alarm bell in the safe began to whirr harshly, and I knew my time was up;
but I would not heed it, and replacing the flashing circlet upon my head
I turned defiantly to the mirror. I stood for a long time absorbed in the
changing expression of my own eyes. The mirror reflected a face which was
like my own, but whiter, and so thin that I hardly recognized it And all
the time I kept repeating between my clenched teeth, ""The day has come!
the day has come!"" while the alarm in the safe whirred and clamoured, and
the diamonds sparkled and flamed above my brow. I heard a door open but
did not heed it. It was only when I saw two faces in the mirror:--it was
only when another face rose over my shoulder, and two other eyes met
mine. I wheeled like a flash and seized a long knife from my
dressing-table, and my cousin sprang back very pale, crying: ""Hildred!
for God's sake!"" then as my hand fell, he said: ""It is I, Louis, don't
you know me?"" I stood silent. I could not have spoken for my life. He
walked up to me and took the knife from my hand.

""What is all this?"" he inquired, in a gentle voice. ""Are you ill?""

""No,"" I replied. But I doubt if he heard me.

""Come, come, old fellow,"" he cried, ""take off that brass crown and toddle
into the study. Are you going to a masquerade? What's all this theatrical
tinsel anyway?""

I was glad he thought the crown was made of brass and paste, yet I didn't
like him any the better for thinking so. I let him take it from my hand,
knowing it was best to humour him. He tossed the splendid diadem in the
air, and catching it, turned to me smiling.

""It's dear at fifty cents,"" he said. ""What's it for?""

I did not answer, but took the circlet from his hands, and placing it in
the safe shut the massive steel door. The alarm ceased its infernal din
at once. He watched me curiously, but did not seem to notice the sudden
ceasing of the alarm. He did, however, speak of the safe as a biscuit
box. Fearing lest he might examine the combination I led the way into my
study. Louis threw himself on the sofa and flicked at flies with his
eternal riding-whip. He wore his fatigue uniform with the braided jacket
and jaunty cap, and I noticed that his riding-boots were all splashed
with red mud.

""Where have you been?"" I inquired.

""Jumping mud creeks in Jersey,"" he said. ""I haven't had time to change
yet; I was rather in a hurry to see you. Haven't you got a glass of
something? I'm dead tired; been in the saddle twenty-four hours.""

I gave him some brandy from my medicinal store, which he drank with a
grimace.

""Damned bad stuff,"" he observed. ""I'll give you an address where they
sell brandy that is brandy.""

""It's good enough for my needs,"" I said indifferently. ""I use it to rub
my chest with."" He stared and flicked at another fly.

""See here, old fellow,"" he began, ""I've got something to suggest to you.
It's four years now that you've shut yourself up here like an owl, never
going anywhere, never taking any healthy exercise, never doing a damn
thing but poring over those books up there on the mantelpiece.""

He glanced along the row of shelves. ""Napoleon, Napoleon, Napoleon!"" he
read. ""For heaven's sake, have you nothing but Napoleons there?""

""I wish they were bound in gold,"" I said. ""But wait, yes, there is
another book, _The King in Yellow_."" I looked him steadily in the
eye.

""Have you never read it?"" I asked.

""I? No, thank God! I don't want to be driven crazy.""

I saw he regretted his speech as soon as he had uttered it. There is only
one word which I loathe more than I do lunatic and that word is crazy.
But I controlled myself and asked him why he thought _The King in
Yellow_ dangerous.

""Oh, I don't know,"" he said, hastily. ""I only remember the excitement it
created and the denunciations from pulpit and Press. I believe the author
shot himself after bringing forth this monstrosity, didn't he?""

""I understand he is still alive,"" I answered.

""That's probably true,"" he muttered; ""bullets couldn't kill a fiend like
that.""

""It is a book of great truths,"" I said.

""Yes,"" he replied, ""of 'truths' which send men frantic and blast their
lives. I don't care if the thing is, as they say, the very supreme
essence of art. It's a crime to have written it, and I for one shall
never open its pages.""

""Is that what you have come to tell me?"" I asked.

""No,"" he said, ""I came to tell you that I am going to be married.""

I believe for a moment my heart ceased to beat, but I kept my eyes on his
face.

""Yes,"" he continued, smiling happily, ""married to the sweetest girl on
earth.""

""Constance Hawberk,"" I said mechanically.

""How did you know?"" he cried, astonished. ""I didn't know it myself until
that evening last April, when we strolled down to the embankment before
dinner.""

""When is it to be?"" I asked.

""It was to have been next September, but an hour ago a despatch came
ordering our regiment to the Presidio, San Francisco. We leave at noon
to-morrow. To-morrow,"" he repeated. ""Just think, Hildred, to-morrow I
shall be the happiest fellow that ever drew breath in this jolly world,
for Constance will go with me.""

I offered him my hand in congratulation, and he seized and shook it like
the good-natured fool he was--or pretended to be.

""I am going to get my squadron as a wedding present,"" he rattled on.
""Captain and Mrs. Louis Castaigne, eh, Hildred?""

Then he told me where it was to be and who were to be there, and made me
promise to come and be best man. I set my teeth and listened to his
boyish chatter without showing what I felt, but--

I was getting to the limit of my endurance, and when he jumped up, and,
switching his spurs till they jingled, said he must go, I did not detain
him.

""There's one thing I want to ask of you,"" I said quietly.

""Out with it, it's promised,"" he laughed.

""I want you to meet me for a quarter of an hour's talk to-night.""

""Of course, if you wish,"" he said, somewhat puzzled. ""Where?""

""Anywhere, in the park there.""

""What time, Hildred?""

""Midnight.""

""What in the name of--"" he began, but checked himself and laughingly
assented. I watched him go down the stairs and hurry away, his sabre
banging at every stride. He turned into Bleecker Street, and I knew he
was going to see Constance. I gave him ten minutes to disappear and then
followed in his footsteps, taking with me the jewelled crown and the
silken robe embroidered with the Yellow Sign. When I turned into Bleecker
Street, and entered the doorway which bore the sign--

MR. WILDE,
REPAIRER OF REPUTATIONS.
Third Bell.

I saw old Hawberk moving about in his shop, and imagined I heard
Constance's voice in the parlour; but I avoided them both and hurried up
the trembling stairways to Mr. Wilde's apartment. I knocked and entered
without ceremony. Mr. Wilde lay groaning on the floor, his face covered
with blood, his clothes torn to shreds. Drops of blood were scattered
about over the carpet, which had also been ripped and frayed in the
evidently recent struggle.

""It's that cursed cat,"" he said, ceasing his groans, and turning his
colourless eyes to me; ""she attacked me while I was asleep. I believe she
will kill me yet.""

This was too much, so I went into the kitchen, and, seizing a hatchet
from the pantry, started to find the infernal beast and settle her then
and there. My search was fruitless, and after a while I gave it up and
came back to find Mr. Wilde squatting on his high chair by the table. He
had washed his face and changed his clothes. The great furrows which the
cat's claws had ploughed up in his face he had filled with collodion, and
a rag hid the wound in his throat. I told him I should kill the cat when
I came across her, but he only shook his head and turned to the open
ledger before him. He read name after name of the people who had come to
him in regard to their reputation, and the sums he had amassed were
startling.

""I put on the screws now and then,"" he explained.

""One day or other some of these people will assassinate you,"" I insisted.

""Do you think so?"" he said, rubbing his mutilated ears.

It was useless to argue with him, so I took down the manuscript entitled
Imperial Dynasty of America, for the last time I should ever take it down
in Mr. Wilde's study. I read it through, thrilling and trembling with
pleasure. When I had finished Mr. Wilde took the manuscript and, turning
to the dark passage which leads from his study to his bed-chamber,
called out in a loud voice, ""Vance."" Then for the first time, I noticed a
man crouching there in the shadow. How I had overlooked him during my
search for the cat, I cannot imagine.

""Vance, come in,"" cried Mr. Wilde.

The figure rose and crept towards us, and I shall never forget the face
that he raised to mine, as the light from the window illuminated it.

""Vance, this is Mr. Castaigne,"" said Mr. Wilde. Before he had finished
speaking, the man threw himself on the ground before the table, crying
and grasping, ""Oh, God! Oh, my God! Help me! Forgive me! Oh, Mr.
Castaigne, keep that man away. You cannot, you cannot mean it! You are
different--save me! I am broken down--I was in a madhouse and now--when
all was coming right--when I had forgotten the King--the King in Yellow
and--but I shall go mad again--I shall go mad--""

His voice died into a choking rattle, for Mr. Wilde had leapt on him and
his right hand encircled the man's throat. When Vance fell in a heap on
the floor, Mr. Wilde clambered nimbly into his chair again, and rubbing
his mangled ears with the stump of his hand, turned to me and asked me
for the ledger. I reached it down from the shelf and he opened it. After
a moment's searching among the beautifully written pages, he coughed
complacently, and pointed to the name Vance.

""Vance,"" he read aloud, ""Osgood Oswald Vance."" At the sound of his name,
the man on the floor raised his head and turned a convulsed face to Mr.
Wilde. His eyes were injected with blood, his lips tumefied. ""Called
April 28th,"" continued Mr. Wilde. ""Occupation, cashier in the Seaforth
National Bank; has served a term of forgery at Sing Sing, from whence he
was transferred to the Asylum for the Criminal Insane. Pardoned by the
Governor of New York, and discharged from the Asylum, January 19, 1918.
Reputation damaged at Sheepshead Bay. Rumours that he lives beyond his
income. Reputation to be repaired at once. Retainer $1,500.

""Note.--Has embezzled sums amounting to $30,000 since March 20, 1919,
excellent family, and secured present position through uncle's influence.
Father, President of Seaforth Bank.""

I looked at the man on the floor.

""Get up, Vance,"" said Mr. Wilde in a gentle voice. Vance rose as if
hypnotized. ""He will do as we suggest now,"" observed Mr. Wilde, and
opening the manuscript, he read the entire history of the Imperial
Dynasty of America. Then in a kind and soothing murmur he ran over the
important points with Vance, who stood like one stunned. His eyes were so
blank and vacant that I imagined he had become half-witted, and remarked
it to Mr. Wilde who replied that it was of no consequence anyway. Very
patiently we pointed out to Vance what his share in the affair would be,
and he seemed to understand after a while. Mr. Wilde explained the
manuscript, using several volumes on Heraldry, to substantiate the result
of his researches. He mentioned the establishment of the Dynasty in
Carcosa, the lakes which connected Hastur, Aldebaran and the mystery of
the Hyades. He spoke of Cassilda and Camilla, and sounded the cloudy
depths of Demhe, and the Lake of Hali. ""The scolloped tatters of the King
in Yellow must hide Yhtill forever,"" he muttered, but I do not believe
Vance heard him. Then by degrees he led Vance along the ramifications of
the Imperial family, to Uoht and Thale, from Naotalba and Phantom of
Truth, to Aldones, and then tossing aside his manuscript and notes, he
began the wonderful story of the Last King. Fascinated and thrilled I
watched him. He threw up his head, his long arms were stretched out in a
magnificent gesture of pride and power, and his eyes blazed deep in their
sockets like two emeralds. Vance listened stupefied. As for me, when at
last Mr. Wilde had finished, and pointing to me, cried, ""The cousin of
the King!"" my head swam with excitement.

Controlling myself with a superhuman effort, I explained to Vance why I
alone was worthy of the crown and why my cousin must be exiled or die.
I made him understand that my cousin must never marry, even after
renouncing all his claims, and how that least of all he should marry the
daughter of the Marquis of Avonshire and bring England into the question.
I showed him a list of thousands of names which Mr. Wilde had drawn up;
every man whose name was there had received the Yellow Sign which no
living human being dared disregard. The city, the state, the whole land,
were ready to rise and tremble before the Pallid Mask.

The time had come, the people should know the son of Hastur, and the
whole world bow to the black stars which hang in the sky over Carcosa.

Vance leaned on the table, his head buried in his hands. Mr. Wilde drew
a rough sketch on the margin of yesterday's _Herald_ with a bit of
lead pencil. It was a plan of Hawberk's rooms. Then he wrote out the
order and affixed the seal, and shaking like a palsied man I signed my
first writ of execution with my name Hildred-Rex.

Mr. Wilde clambered to the floor and unlocking the cabinet, took a long
square box from the first shelf. This he brought to the table and opened.
A new knife lay in the tissue paper inside and I picked it up and handed
it to Vance, along with the order and the plan of Hawberk's apartment.
Then Mr. Wilde told Vance he could go; and he went, shambling like an
outcast of the slums.

I sat for a while watching the daylight fade behind the square tower of
the Judson Memorial Church, and finally, gathering up the manuscript and
notes, took my hat and started for the door.

Mr. Wilde watched me in silence. When I had stepped into the hall I
looked back. Mr. Wilde's small eyes were still fixed on me. Behind him,
the shadows gathered in the fading light. Then I closed the door behind
me and went out into the darkening streets.

I had eaten nothing since breakfast, but I was not hungry. A wretched,
half-starved creature, who stood looking across the street at the Lethal
Chamber, noticed me and came up to tell me a tale of misery. I gave him
money, I don't know why, and he went away without thanking me. An
hour later another outcast approached and whined his story. I had a blank
bit of paper in my pocket, on which was traced the Yellow Sign, and I
handed it to him. He looked at it stupidly for a moment, and then with an
uncertain glance at me, folded it with what seemed to me exaggerated care
and placed it in his bosom.

The electric lights were sparkling among the trees, and the new moon
shone in the sky above the Lethal Chamber. It was tiresome waiting in the
square; I wandered from the Marble Arch to the artillery stables and back
again to the lotos fountain. The flowers and grass exhaled a fragrance
which troubled me. The jet of the fountain played in the moonlight, and
the musical splash of falling drops reminded me of the tinkle of chained
mail in Hawberk's shop. But it was not so fascinating, and the dull
sparkle of the moonlight on the water brought no such sensations of
exquisite pleasure, as when the sunshine played over the polished steel
of a corselet on Hawberk's knee. I watched the bats darting and turning
above the water plants in the fountain basin, but their rapid, jerky
flight set my nerves on edge, and I went away again to walk aimlessly to
and fro among the trees.

The artillery stables were dark, but in the cavalry barracks the
officers' windows were brilliantly lighted, and the sallyport was
constantly filled with troopers in fatigue, carrying straw and harness
and baskets filled with tin dishes.

Twice the mounted sentry at the gates was changed while I wandered up and
down the asphalt walk. I looked at my watch. It was nearly time. The
lights in the barracks went out one by one, the barred gate was closed,
and every minute or two an officer passed in through the side wicket,
leaving a rattle of accoutrements and a jingle of spurs on the night air.
The square had become very silent. The last homeless loiterer had been
driven away by the grey-coated park policeman, the car tracks along
Wooster Street were deserted, and the only sound which broke the
stillness was the stamping of the sentry's horse and the ring of his
sabre against the saddle pommel. In the barracks, the officers' quarters
were still lighted, and military servants passed and repassed before the
bay windows. Twelve o'clock sounded from the new spire of St. Francis
Xavier, and at the last stroke of the sad-toned bell a figure passed
through the wicket beside the portcullis, returned the salute of the
sentry, and crossing the street entered the square and advanced toward
the Benedick apartment house.

""Louis,"" I called.

The man pivoted on his spurred heels and came straight toward me.

""Is that you, Hildred?""

""Yes, you are on time.""

I took his offered hand, and we strolled toward the Lethal Chamber.

He rattled on about his wedding and the graces of Constance, and their
future prospects, calling my attention to his captain's shoulder-straps,
and the triple gold arabesque on his sleeve and fatigue cap. I believe I
listened as much to the music of his spurs and sabre as I did to his
boyish babble, and at last we stood under the elms on the Fourth Street
corner of the square opposite the Lethal Chamber. Then he laughed and
asked me what I wanted with him. I motioned him to a seat on a bench
under the electric light, and sat down beside him. He looked at me
curiously, with that same searching glance which I hate and fear so in
doctors. I felt the insult of his look, but he did not know it, and I
carefully concealed my feelings.

""Well, old chap,"" he inquired, ""what can I do for you?""

I drew from my pocket the manuscript and notes of the Imperial Dynasty
of America, and looking him in the eye said:

""I will tell you. On your word as a soldier, promise me to read this
manuscript from beginning to end, without asking me a question. Promise
me to read these notes in the same way, and promise me to listen to what
I have to tell later.""

""I promise, if you wish it,"" he said pleasantly. ""Give me the paper,
Hildred.""

He began to read, raising his eyebrows with a puzzled, whimsical air,
which made me tremble with suppressed anger. As he advanced his, eyebrows
contracted, and his lips seemed to form the word ""rubbish.""

Then he looked slightly bored, but apparently for my sake read, with an
attempt at interest, which presently ceased to be an effort He started
when in the closely written pages he came to his own name, and when he
came to mine he lowered the paper, and looked sharply at me for a moment
But he kept his word, and resumed his reading, and I let the half-formed
question die on his lips unanswered. When he came to the end and read the
signature of Mr. Wilde, he folded the paper carefully and returned it to
me. I handed him the notes, and he settled back, pushing his fatigue cap
up to his forehead, with a boyish gesture, which I remembered so well in
school. I watched his face as he read, and when he finished I took the
notes with the manuscript, and placed them in my pocket. Then I unfolded
a scroll marked with the Yellow Sign. He saw the sign, but he did not
seem to recognize it, and I called his attention to it somewhat sharply.

""Well,"" he said, ""I see it. What is it?""

""It is the Yellow Sign,"" I said angrily.

""Oh, that's it, is it?"" said Louis, in that flattering voice, which
Doctor Archer used to employ with me, and would probably have employed
again, had I not settled his affair for him.

I kept my rage down and answered as steadily as possible, ""Listen, you
have engaged your word?""

""I am listening, old chap,"" he replied soothingly.

I began to speak very calmly.

""Dr. Archer, having by some means become possessed of the secret of the
Imperial Succession, attempted to deprive me of my right, alleging that
because of a fall from my horse four years ago, I had become mentally
deficient. He presumed to place me under restraint in his own house in
hopes of either driving me insane or poisoning me. I have not forgotten
it. I visited him last night and the interview was final.""

Louis turned quite pale, but did not move. I resumed triumphantly, ""There
are yet three people to be interviewed in the interests of Mr. Wilde and
myself. They are my cousin Louis, Mr. Hawberk, and his daughter
Constance.""

Louis sprang to his feet and I arose also, and flung the paper marked
with the Yellow Sign to the ground.

""Oh, I don't need that to tell you what I have to say,"" I cried, with a
laugh of triumph. ""You must renounce the crown to me, do you hear, to
_me_.""

Louis looked at me with a startled air, but recovering himself said
kindly, ""Of course I renounce the--what is it I must renounce?""

""The crown,"" I said angrily.

""Of course,"" he answered, ""I renounce it. Come, old chap, I'll walk back
to your rooms with you.""

""Don't try any of your doctor's tricks on me,"" I cried, trembling with
fury. ""Don't act as if you think I am insane.""

""What nonsense,"" he replied. ""Come, it's getting late, Hildred.""

""No,"" I shouted, ""you must listen. You cannot marry, I forbid it. Do you
hear? I forbid it. You shall renounce the crown, and in reward I grant
you exile, but if you refuse you shall die.""

He tried to calm me, but I was roused at last, and drawing my long knife
barred his way.

Then I told him how they would find Dr. Archer in the cellar with his
throat open, and I laughed in his face when I thought of Vance and his
knife, and the order signed by me.

""Ah, you are the King,"" I cried, ""but I shall be King. Who are you to
keep me from Empire over all the habitable earth! I was born the cousin
of a king, but I shall be King!""

Louis stood white and rigid before me. Suddenly a man came running up
Fourth Street, entered the gate of the Lethal Temple, traversed the path
to the bronze doors at full speed, and plunged into the death chamber
with the cry of one demented, and I laughed until I wept tears, for I had
recognized Vance, and knew that Hawberk and his daughter were no longer
in my way.

""Go,"" I cried to Louis, ""you have ceased to be a menace. You will never
marry Constance now, and if you marry any one else in your exile, I will
visit you as I did my doctor last night. Mr. Wilde takes charge of you
to-morrow."" Then I turned and darted into South Fifth Avenue, and with a
cry of terror Louis dropped his belt and sabre and followed me like the
wind. I heard him close behind me at the corner of Bleecker Street, and I
dashed into the doorway under Hawberk's sign. He cried, ""Halt, or I
fire!"" but when he saw that I flew up the stairs leaving Hawberk's shop
below, he left me, and I heard him hammering and shouting at their door
as though it were possible to arouse the dead.

Mr. Wilde's door was open, and I entered crying, ""It is done, it is done!
Let the nations rise and look upon their King!"" but I could not find Mr.
Wilde, so I went to the cabinet and took the splendid diadem from its
case. Then I drew on the white silk robe, embroidered with the Yellow
Sign, and placed the crown upon my head. At last I was King, King by my
right in Hastur, King because I knew the mystery of the Hyades, and my
mind had sounded the depths of the Lake of Hali. I was King! The first
grey pencillings of dawn would raise a tempest which would shake two
hemispheres. Then as I stood, my every nerve pitched to the highest
tension, faint with the joy and splendour of my thought, without, in the
dark passage, a man groaned.

I seized the tallow dip and sprang to the door. The cat passed me like a
demon, and the tallow dip went out, but my long knife flew swifter than
she, and I heard her screech, and I knew that my knife had found her. For
a moment I listened to her tumbling and thumping about in the darkness,
and then when her frenzy ceased, I lighted a lamp and raised it over my
head. Mr. Wilde lay on the floor with his throat torn open. At first I
thought he was dead, but as I looked, a green sparkle came into his
sunken eyes, his mutilated hand trembled, and then a spasm stretched his
mouth from ear to ear. For a moment my terror and despair gave place to
hope, but as I bent over him his eyeballs rolled clean around in his
head, and he died. Then while I stood, transfixed with rage and despair,
seeing my crown, my empire, every hope and every ambition, my very life,
lying prostrate there with the dead master, _they_ came, seized me
from behind, and bound me until my veins stood out like cords, and my
voice failed with the paroxysms of my frenzied screams. But I still
raged, bleeding and infuriated among them, and more than one policeman
felt my sharp teeth. Then when I could no longer move they came nearer; I
saw old Hawberk, and behind him my cousin Louis' ghastly face, and
farther away, in the corner, a woman, Constance, weeping softly.

""Ah! I see it now!"" I shrieked. ""You have seized the throne and the
empire. Woe! woe to you who are crowned with the crown of the King in
Yellow!""


[EDITOR'S NOTE.--Mr. Castaigne died yesterday in the Asylum for Criminal
Insane.]


","It is said that in Ulthar, which lies beyond the river Skai, no man may kill a cat; and this I can verily believe as I gaze upon him who sitteth purring before the fire. For the cat is cryptic, and close to strange things which men cannot see. He is the soul of antique Aegyptus, and bearer of tales from forgotten cities in Meroë and Ophir. He is the kin of the jungle’s lords, and heir to the secrets of hoary and sinister Africa. The Sphinx is his cousin, and he speaks her language; but he is more ancient than the Sphinx, and remembers that which she hath forgotten.
      In Ulthar, before ever the burgesses forbade the killing of cats, there dwelt an old cotter and his wife who delighted to trap and slay the cats of their neighbours. Why they did this I know not; save that many hate the voice of the cat in the night, and take it ill that cats should run stealthily about yards and gardens at twilight. But whatever the reason, this old man and woman took pleasure in trapping and slaying every cat which came near to their hovel; and from some of the sounds heard after dark, many villagers fancied that the manner of slaying was exceedingly peculiar. But the villagers did not discuss such things with the old man and his wife; because of the habitual expression on the withered faces of the two, and because their cottage was so small and so darkly hidden under spreading oaks at the back of a neglected yard. In truth, much as the owners of cats hated these odd folk, they feared them more; and instead of berating them as brutal assassins, merely took care that no cherished pet or mouser should stray toward the remote hovel under the dark trees. When through some unavoidable oversight a cat was missed, and sounds heard after dark, the loser would lament impotently; or console himself by thanking Fate that it was not one of his children who had thus vanished. For the people of Ulthar were simple, and knew not whence it is all cats first came.
      One day a caravan of strange wanderers from the South entered the narrow cobbled streets of Ulthar. Dark wanderers they were, and unlike the other roving folk who passed through the village twice every year. In the market-place they told fortunes for silver, and bought gay beads from the merchants. What was the land of these wanderers none could tell; but it was seen that they were given to strange prayers, and that they had painted on the sides of their wagons strange figures with human bodies and the heads of cats, hawks, rams, and lions. And the leader of the caravan wore a head-dress with two horns and a curious disc betwixt the horns.
      There was in this singular caravan a little boy with no father or mother, but only a tiny black kitten to cherish. The plague had not been kind to him, yet had left him this small furry thing to mitigate his sorrow; and when one is very young, one can find great relief in the lively antics of a black kitten. So the boy whom the dark people called Menes smiled more often than he wept as he sate playing with his graceful kitten on the steps of an oddly painted wagon.
      On the third morning of the wanderers’ stay in Ulthar, Menes could not find his kitten; and as he sobbed aloud in the market-place certain villagers told him of the old man and his wife, and of sounds heard in the night. And when he heard these things his sobbing gave place to meditation, and finally to prayer. He stretched out his arms toward the sun and prayed in a tongue no villager could understand; though indeed the villagers did not try very hard to understand, since their attention was mostly taken up by the sky and the odd shapes the clouds were assuming. It was very peculiar, but as the little boy uttered his petition there seemed to form overhead the shadowy, nebulous figures of exotic things; of hybrid creatures crowned with horn-flanked discs. Nature is full of such illusions to impress the imaginative.
      That night the wanderers left Ulthar, and were never seen again. And the householders were troubled when they noticed that in all the village there was not a cat to be found. From each hearth the familiar cat had vanished; cats large and small, black, grey, striped, yellow, and white. Old Kranon, the burgomaster, swore that the dark folk had taken the cats away in revenge for the killing of Menes’ kitten; and cursed the caravan and the little boy. But Nith, the lean notary, declared that the old cotter and his wife were more likely persons to suspect; for their hatred of cats was notorious and increasingly bold. Still, no one durst complain to the sinister couple; even when little Atal, the innkeeper’s son, vowed that he had at twilight seen all the cats of Ulthar in that accursed yard under the trees, pacing very slowly and solemnly in a circle around the cottage, two abreast, as if in performance of some unheard-of rite of beasts. The villagers did not know how much to believe from so small a boy; and though they feared that the evil pair had charmed the cats to their death, they preferred not to chide the old cotter till they met him outside his dark and repellent yard.
      So Ulthar went to sleep in vain anger; and when the people awaked at dawn—behold! every cat was back at his accustomed hearth! Large and small, black, grey, striped, yellow, and white, none was missing. Very sleek and fat did the cats appear, and sonorous with purring content. The citizens talked with one another of the affair, and marvelled not a little. Old Kranon again insisted that it was the dark folk who had taken them, since cats did not return alive from the cottage of the ancient man and his wife. But all agreed on one thing: that the refusal of all the cats to eat their portions of meat or drink their saucers of milk was exceedingly curious. And for two whole days the sleek, lazy cats of Ulthar would touch no food, but only doze by the fire or in the sun.
      It was fully a week before the villagers noticed that no lights were appearing at dusk in the windows of the cottage under the trees. Then the lean Nith remarked that no one had seen the old man or his wife since the night the cats were away. In another week the burgomaster decided to overcome his fears and call at the strangely silent dwelling as a matter of duty, though in so doing he was careful to take with him Shang the blacksmith and Thul the cutter of stone as witnesses. And when they had broken down the frail door they found only this: two cleanly picked human skeletons on the earthen floor, and a number of singular beetles crawling in the shadowy corners.
      There was subsequently much talk among the burgesses of Ulthar. Zath, the coroner, disputed at length with Nith, the lean notary; and Kranon and Shang and Thul were overwhelmed with questions. Even little Atal, the innkeeper’s son, was closely questioned and given a sweetmeat as reward. They talked of the old cotter and his wife, of the caravan of dark wanderers, of small Menes and his black kitten, of the prayer of Menes and of the sky during that prayer, of the doings of the cats on the night the caravan left, and of what was later found in the cottage under the dark trees in the repellent yard.
      And in the end the burgesses passed that remarkable law which is told of by traders in Hatheg and discussed by travellers in Nir; namely, that in Ulthar no man may kill a cat.",False
"
I

There are so many things which are impossible to explain! Why should
certain chords in music make me think of the brown and golden tints of
autumn foliage? Why should the Mass of Sainte Cécile bend my thoughts
wandering among caverns whose walls blaze with ragged masses of virgin
silver? What was it in the roar and turmoil of Broadway at six o'clock
that flashed before my eyes the picture of a still Breton forest where
sunlight filtered through spring foliage and Sylvia bent, half curiously,
half tenderly, over a small green lizard, murmuring: ""To think that this
also is a little ward of God!""

When I first saw the watchman his back was toward me. I looked at him
indifferently until he went into the church. I paid no more attention to
him than I had to any other man who lounged through Washington Square
that morning, and when I shut my window and turned back into my studio I
had forgotten him. Late in the afternoon, the day being warm, I raised
the window again and leaned out to get a sniff of air. A man was standing
in the courtyard of the church, and I noticed him again with as little
interest as I had that morning. I looked across the square to where the
fountain was playing and then, with my mind filled with vague impressions
of trees, asphalt drives, and the moving groups of nursemaids and
holiday-makers, I started to walk back to my easel. As I turned, my
listless glance included the man below in the churchyard. His face was
toward me now, and with a perfectly involuntary movement I bent to see
it. At the same moment he raised his head and looked at me. Instantly I
thought of a coffin-worm. Whatever it was about the man that repelled me
I did not know, but the impression of a plump white grave-worm was so
intense and nauseating that I must have shown it in my expression, for he
turned his puffy face away with a movement which made me think of a
disturbed grub in a chestnut.

I went back to my easel and motioned the model to resume her pose. After
working a while I was satisfied that I was spoiling what I had done as
rapidly as possible, and I took up a palette knife and scraped the colour
out again. The flesh tones were sallow and unhealthy, and I did not
understand how I could have painted such sickly colour into a study which
before that had glowed with healthy tones.

I looked at Tessie. She had not changed, and the clear flush of health
dyed her neck and cheeks as I frowned.

""Is it something I've done?"" she said.

""No,--I've made a mess of this arm, and for the life of me I can't see
how I came to paint such mud as that into the canvas,"" I replied.

""Don't I pose well?"" she insisted.

""Of course, perfectly.""

""Then it's not my fault?""

""No. It's my own.""

""I am very sorry,"" she said.

I told her she could rest while I applied rag and turpentine to the
plague spot on my canvas, and she went off to smoke a cigarette and look
over the illustrations in the _Courrier Français_.

I did not know whether it was something in the turpentine or a defect in
the canvas, but the more I scrubbed the more that gangrene seemed to
spread. I worked like a beaver to get it out, and yet the disease
appeared to creep from limb to limb of the study before me. Alarmed, I
strove to arrest it, but now the colour on the breast changed and the
whole figure seemed to absorb the infection as a sponge soaks up water.
Vigorously I plied palette-knife, turpentine, and scraper, thinking all
the time what a _séance_ I should hold with Duval who had sold me
the canvas; but soon I noticed that it was not the canvas which was
defective nor yet the colours of Edward. ""It must be the turpentine,"" I
thought angrily, ""or else my eyes have become so blurred and confused by
the afternoon light that I can't see straight."" I called Tessie, the
model. She came and leaned over my chair blowing rings of smoke into the
air.

""What _have_ you been doing to it?"" she exclaimed

""Nothing,"" I growled, ""it must be this turpentine!""

""What a horrible colour it is now,"" she continued. ""Do you think my flesh
resembles green cheese?""

""No, I don't,"" I said angrily; ""did you ever know me to paint like that
before?""

""No, indeed!""

""Well, then!""

""It must be the turpentine, or something,"" she admitted.

She slipped on a Japanese robe and walked to the window. I scraped and
rubbed until I was tired, and finally picked up my brushes and hurled
them through the canvas with a forcible expression, the tone alone of
which reached Tessie's ears.

Nevertheless she promptly began: ""That's it! Swear and act silly and ruin
your brushes! You have been three weeks on that study, and now look!
What's the good of ripping the canvas? What creatures artists are!""

I felt about as much ashamed as I usually did after such an outbreak, and
I turned the ruined canvas to the wall. Tessie helped me clean my
brushes, and then danced away to dress. From the screen she regaled me
with bits of advice concerning whole or partial loss of temper, until,
thinking, perhaps, I had been tormented sufficiently, she came out to
implore me to button her waist where she could not reach it on the
shoulder.

""Everything went wrong from the time you came back from the window and
talked about that horrid-looking man you saw in the churchyard,"" she
announced.

""Yes, he probably bewitched the picture,"" I said, yawning. I looked at my
watch.

""It's after six, I know,"" said Tessie, adjusting her hat before the
mirror.

""Yes,"" I replied, ""I didn't mean to keep you so long."" I leaned out of
the window but recoiled with disgust, for the young man with the pasty
face stood below in the churchyard. Tessie saw my gesture of disapproval
and leaned from the window.

""Is that the man you don't like?"" she whispered.

I nodded.

""I can't see his face, but he does look fat and soft. Someway or other,""
she continued, turning to look at me, ""he reminds me of a dream,--an
awful dream I once had. Or,"" she mused, looking down at her shapely
shoes, ""was it a dream after all?""

""How should I know?"" I smiled.

Tessie smiled in reply.

""You were in it,"" she said, ""so perhaps you might know something about
it.""

""Tessie! Tessie!"" I protested, ""don't you dare flatter by saying that you
dream about me!""

""But I did,"" she insisted; ""shall I tell you about it?""

""Go ahead,"" I replied, lighting a cigarette.

Tessie leaned back on the open window-sill and began very seriously.

""One night last winter I was lying in bed thinking about nothing at all
in particular. I had been posing for you and I was tired out, yet it
seemed impossible for me to sleep. I heard the bells in the city ring
ten, eleven, and midnight. I must have fallen asleep about midnight
because I don't remember hearing the bells after that. It seemed to me
that I had scarcely closed my eyes when I dreamed that something impelled
me to go to the window. I rose, and raising the sash leaned out.
Twenty-fifth Street was deserted as far as I could see. I began to be
afraid; everything outside seemed so--so black and uncomfortable. Then
the sound of wheels in the distance came to my ears, and it seemed to me
as though that was what I must wait for. Very slowly the wheels
approached, and, finally, I could make out a vehicle moving along the
street. It came nearer and nearer, and when it passed beneath my window I
saw it was a hearse. Then, as I trembled with fear, the driver turned and
looked straight at me. When I awoke I was standing by the open window
shivering with cold, but the black-plumed hearse and the driver were
gone. I dreamed this dream again in March last, and again awoke beside
the open window. Last night the dream came again. You remember how it was
raining; when I awoke, standing at the open window, my night-dress was
soaked.""

""But where did I come into the dream?"" I asked.

""You--you were in the coffin; but you were not dead.""

""In the coffin?""

""Yes.""

""How did you know? Could you see me?""

""No; I only knew you were there.""

""Had you been eating Welsh rarebits, or lobster salad?"" I began,
laughing, but the girl interrupted me with a frightened cry.

""Hello! What's up?"" I said, as she shrank into the embrasure by the
window.

""The--the man below in the churchyard;--he drove the hearse.""

""Nonsense,"" I said, but Tessie's eyes were wide with terror. I went to
the window and looked out. The man was gone. ""Come, Tessie,"" I urged,
""don't be foolish. You have posed too long; you are nervous.""

""Do you think I could forget that face?"" she murmured. ""Three times I saw
the hearse pass below my window, and every time the driver turned and
looked up at me. Oh, his face was so white and--and soft? It looked
dead--it looked as if it had been dead a long time.""

I induced the girl to sit down and swallow a glass of Marsala. Then I sat
down beside her, and tried to give her some advice.

""Look here, Tessie,"" I said, ""you go to the country for a week or two,
and you'll have no more dreams about hearses. You pose all day, and when
night comes your nerves are upset. You can't keep this up. Then again,
instead of going to bed when your day's work is done, you run off to
picnics at Sulzer's Park, or go to the Eldorado or Coney Island, and when
you come down here next morning you are fagged out. There was no real
hearse. There was a soft-shell crab dream.""

She smiled faintly.

""What about the man in the churchyard?""

""Oh, he's only an ordinary unhealthy, everyday creature.""

""As true as my name is Tessie Reardon, I swear to you, Mr. Scott, that
the face of the man below in the churchyard is the face of the man who
drove the hearse!""

""What of it?"" I said. ""It's an honest trade.""

""Then you think I _did_ see the hearse?""

""Oh,"" I said diplomatically, ""if you really did, it might not be unlikely
that the man below drove it. There is nothing in that.""

Tessie rose, unrolled her scented handkerchief, and taking a bit of gum
from a knot in the hem, placed it in her mouth. Then drawing on her
gloves she offered me her hand, with a frank, ""Good-night, Mr. Scott,""
and walked out.




II

The next morning, Thomas, the bell-boy, brought me the _Herald_ and
a bit of news. The church next door had been sold. I thanked Heaven for
it, not that being a Catholic I had any repugnance for the congregation
next door, but because my nerves were shattered by a blatant exhorter,
whose every word echoed through the aisle of the church as if it had been
my own rooms, and who insisted on his r's with a nasal persistence which
revolted my every instinct. Then, too, there was a fiend in human shape,
an organist, who reeled off some of the grand old hymns with an
interpretation of his own, and I longed for the blood of a creature who
could play the doxology with an amendment of minor chords which one hears
only in a quartet of very young undergraduates. I believe the minister
was a good man, but when he bellowed: ""And the Lorrrrd said unto Moses,
the Lorrrd is a man of war; the Lorrrd is his name. My wrath shall wax
hot and I will kill you with the sworrrrd!"" I wondered how many centuries
of purgatory it would take to atone for such a sin.

""Who bought the property?"" I asked Thomas.

""Nobody that I knows, sir. They do say the gent wot owns this 'ere
'Amilton flats was lookin' at it. 'E might be a bildin' more studios.""

I walked to the window. The young man with the unhealthy face stood by
the churchyard gate, and at the mere sight of him the same overwhelming
repugnance took possession of me.

""By the way, Thomas,"" I said, ""who is that fellow down there?""

Thomas sniffed. ""That there worm, sir? 'Es night-watchman of the church,
sir. 'E maikes me tired a-sittin' out all night on them steps and lookin'
at you insultin' like. I'd a punched 'is 'ed, sir--beg pardon, sir--""

""Go on, Thomas.""

""One night a comin' 'ome with Arry, the other English boy, I sees 'im a
sittin' there on them steps. We 'ad Molly and Jen with us, sir, the two
girls on the tray service, an' 'e looks so insultin' at us that I up and
sez: 'Wat you looking hat, you fat slug?'--beg pardon, sir, but that's
'ow I sez, sir. Then 'e don't say nothin' and I sez: 'Come out and I'll
punch that puddin' 'ed.' Then I hopens the gate an' goes in, but 'e don't
say nothin', only looks insultin' like. Then I 'its 'im one, but, ugh!
'is 'ed was that cold and mushy it ud sicken you to touch 'im.""

""What did he do then?"" I asked curiously.

""'Im? Nawthin'.""

""And you, Thomas?""

The young fellow flushed with embarrassment and smiled uneasily.

""Mr. Scott, sir, I ain't no coward, an' I can't make it out at all why I
run. I was in the 5th Lawncers, sir, bugler at Tel-el-Kebir, an' was shot
by the wells.""

""You don't mean to say you ran away?""

""Yes, sir; I run.""

""Why?""

""That's just what I want to know, sir. I grabbed Molly an' run, an' the
rest was as frightened as I.""

""But what were they frightened at?""

Thomas refused to answer for a while, but now my curiosity was aroused
about the repulsive young man below and I pressed him. Three years'
sojourn in America had not only modified Thomas' cockney dialect but had
given him the American's fear of ridicule.

""You won't believe me, Mr. Scott, sir?""

""Yes, I will.""

""You will lawf at me, sir?""

""Nonsense!""

He hesitated. ""Well, sir, it's Gawd's truth that when I 'it 'im 'e
grabbed me wrists, sir, and when I twisted 'is soft, mushy fist one of
'is fingers come off in me 'and.""

The utter loathing and horror of Thomas' face must have been reflected in
my own, for he added:

""It's orful, an' now when I see 'im I just go away. 'E maikes me hill.""

When Thomas had gone I went to the window. The man stood beside the
church-railing with both hands on the gate, but I hastily retreated to my
easel again, sickened and horrified, for I saw that the middle finger of
his right hand was missing.

At nine o'clock Tessie appeared and vanished behind the screen with a
merry ""Good morning, Mr. Scott."" When she had reappeared and taken her
pose upon the model-stand I started a new canvas, much to her delight.
She remained silent as long as I was on the drawing, but as soon as the
scrape of the charcoal ceased and I took up my fixative she began to
chatter.

""Oh, I had such a lovely time last night. We went to Tony Pastor's.""

""Who are 'we'?"" I demanded.

""Oh, Maggie, you know, Mr. Whyte's model, and Pinkie McCormick--we call
her Pinkie because she's got that beautiful red hair you artists like so
much--and Lizzie Burke.""

I sent a shower of spray from the fixative over the canvas, and said:
""Well, go on.""

""We saw Kelly and Baby Barnes the skirt-dancer and--and all the rest. I
made a mash.""

""Then you have gone back on me, Tessie?""

She laughed and shook her head.

""He's Lizzie Burke's brother, Ed. He's a perfect gen'l'man.""

I felt constrained to give her some parental advice concerning mashing,
which she took with a bright smile.

""Oh, I can take care of a strange mash,"" she said, examining her chewing
gum, ""but Ed is different. Lizzie is my best friend.""

Then she related how Ed had come back from the stocking mill in Lowell,
Massachusetts, to find her and Lizzie grown up, and what an accomplished
young man he was, and how he thought nothing of squandering half-a-dollar
for ice-cream and oysters to celebrate his entry as clerk into the
woollen department of Macy's. Before she finished I began to paint, and
she resumed the pose, smiling and chattering like a sparrow. By noon I
had the study fairly well rubbed in and Tessie came to look at it.

""That's better,"" she said.

I thought so too, and ate my lunch with a satisfied feeling that all was
going well. Tessie spread her lunch on a drawing table opposite me and we
drank our claret from the same bottle and lighted our cigarettes from the
same match. I was very much attached to Tessie. I had watched her shoot
up into a slender but exquisitely formed woman from a frail, awkward
child. She had posed for me during the last three years, and among all my
models she was my favourite. It would have troubled me very much indeed
had she become ""tough"" or ""fly,"" as the phrase goes, but I never noticed
any deterioration of her manner, and felt at heart that she was all
right. She and I never discussed morals at all, and I had no intention of
doing so, partly because I had none myself, and partly because I knew she
would do what she liked in spite of me. Still I did hope she would steer
clear of complications, because I wished her well, and then also I had a
selfish desire to retain the best model I had. I knew that mashing, as
she termed it, had no significance with girls like Tessie, and that such
things in America did not resemble in the least the same things in Paris.
Yet, having lived with my eyes open, I also knew that somebody would take
Tessie away some day, in one manner or another, and though I professed to
myself that marriage was nonsense, I sincerely hoped that, in this case,
there would be a priest at the end of the vista. I am a Catholic. When I
listen to high mass, when I sign myself, I feel that everything,
including myself, is more cheerful, and when I confess, it does me good.
A man who lives as much alone as I do, must confess to somebody. Then,
again, Sylvia was Catholic, and it was reason enough for me. But I was
speaking of Tessie, which is very different. Tessie also was Catholic and
much more devout than I, so, taking it all in all, I had little fear for
my pretty model until she should fall in love. But _then_ I knew
that fate alone would decide her future for her, and I prayed inwardly
that fate would keep her away from men like me and throw into her path
nothing but Ed Burkes and Jimmy McCormicks, bless her sweet face!

Tessie sat blowing rings of smoke up to the ceiling and tinkling the ice
in her tumbler.

""Do you know that I also had a dream last night?"" I observed.

""Not about that man,"" she laughed.

""Exactly. A dream similar to yours, only much worse.""

It was foolish and thoughtless of me to say this, but you know how little
tact the average painter has. ""I must have fallen asleep about ten
o'clock,"" I continued, ""and after a while I dreamt that I awoke. So
plainly did I hear the midnight bells, the wind in the tree-branches, and
the whistle of steamers from the bay, that even now I can scarcely
believe I was not awake. I seemed to be lying in a box which had a glass
cover. Dimly I saw the street lamps as I passed, for I must tell you,
Tessie, the box in which I reclined appeared to lie in a cushioned wagon
which jolted me over a stony pavement. After a while I became impatient
and tried to move, but the box was too narrow. My hands were crossed on
my breast, so I could not raise them to help myself. I listened and then
tried to call. My voice was gone. I could hear the trample of the horses
attached to the wagon, and even the breathing of the driver. Then another
sound broke upon my ears like the raising of a window sash. I managed to
turn my head a little, and found I could look, not only through the glass
cover of my box, but also through the glass panes in the side of the
covered vehicle. I saw houses, empty and silent, with neither light nor
life about any of them excepting one. In that house a window was open on
the first floor, and a figure all in white stood looking down into the
street. It was you.""

Tessie had turned her face away from me and leaned on the table with her
elbow.

""I could see your face,"" I resumed, ""and it seemed to me to be very
sorrowful. Then we passed on and turned into a narrow black lane.
Presently the horses stopped. I waited and waited, closing my eyes with
ear and impatience, but all was silent as the grave. After what seemed to
me hours, I began to feel uncomfortable. A sense that somebody was close
to me made me unclose my eyes. Then I saw the white face of the
hearse-driver looking at me through the coffin-lid----""

A sob from Tessie interrupted me. She was trembling like a leaf. I saw I
had made an ass of myself and attempted to repair the damage.

""Why, Tess,"" I said, ""I only told you this to show you what influence
your story might have on another person's dreams. You don't suppose I
really lay in a coffin, do you? What are you trembling for? Don't you see
that your dream and my unreasonable dislike for that inoffensive watchman
of the church simply set my brain working as soon as I fell asleep?""

She laid her head between her arms, and sobbed as if her heart would
break. What a precious triple donkey I had made of myself! But I was
about to break my record. I went over and put my arm about her.

""Tessie dear, forgive me,"" I said; ""I had no business to frighten you
with such nonsense. You are too sensible a girl, too good a Catholic to
believe in dreams.""

Her hand tightened on mine and her head fell back upon my shoulder, but
she still trembled and I petted her and comforted her.

""Come, Tess, open your eyes and smile.""

Her eyes opened with a slow languid movement and met mine, but their
expression was so queer that I hastened to reassure her again.

""It's all humbug, Tessie; you surely are not afraid that any harm will
come to you because of that.""

""No,"" she said, but her scarlet lips quivered.

""Then, what's the matter? Are you afraid?""

""Yes. Not for myself.""

""For me, then?"" I demanded gaily.

""For you,"" she murmured in a voice almost inaudible. ""I--I care for you.""

At first I started to laugh, but when I understood her, a shock passed
through me, and I sat like one turned to stone. This was the crowning bit
of idiocy I had committed. During the moment which elapsed between her
reply and my answer I thought of a thousand responses to that innocent
confession. I could pass it by with a laugh, I could misunderstand her
and assure her as to my health, I could simply point out that it was
impossible she could love me. But my reply was quicker than my thoughts,
and I might think and think now when it was too late, for I had kissed
her on the mouth.

That evening I took my usual walk in Washington Park, pondering over the
occurrences of the day. I was thoroughly committed. There was no back out
now, and I stared the future straight in the face. I was not good, not
even scrupulous, but I had no idea of deceiving either myself or Tessie.
The one passion of my life lay buried in the sunlit forests of Brittany.
Was it buried for ever? Hope cried ""No!"" For three years I had been
listening to the voice of Hope, and for three years I had waited for a
footstep on my threshold. Had Sylvia forgotten? ""No!"" cried Hope.

I said that I was no good. That is true, but still I was not exactly a
comic opera villain. I had led an easy-going reckless life, taking what
invited me of pleasure, deploring and sometimes bitterly regretting
consequences. In one thing alone, except my painting, was I serious, and
that was something which lay hidden if not lost in the Breton forests.

It was too late for me to regret what had occurred during the day.
Whatever it had been, pity, a sudden tenderness for sorrow, or the more
brutal instinct of gratified vanity, it was all the same now, and unless
I wished to bruise an innocent heart, my path lay marked before me. The
fire and strength, the depth of passion of a love which I had never even
suspected, with all my imagined experience in the world, left me no
alternative but to respond or send her away. Whether because I am so
cowardly about giving pain to others, or whether it was that I have
little of the gloomy Puritan in me, I do not know, but I shrank from
disclaiming responsibility for that thoughtless kiss, and in fact had no
time to do so before the gates of her heart opened and the flood poured
forth. Others who habitually do their duty and find a sullen satisfaction
in making themselves and everybody else unhappy, might have withstood it.
I did not. I dared not. After the storm had abated I did tell her that
she might better have loved Ed Burke and worn a plain gold ring, but she
would not hear of it, and I thought perhaps as long as she had decided to
love somebody she could not marry, it had better be me. I, at least,
could treat her with an intelligent affection, and whenever she became
tired of her infatuation she could go none the worse for it. For I was
decided on that point although I knew how hard it would be. I remembered
the usual termination of Platonic liaisons, and thought how disgusted I
had been whenever I heard of one. I knew I was undertaking a great deal
for so unscrupulous a man as I was, and I dreamed the future, but never
for one moment did I doubt that she was safe with me. Had it been anybody
but Tessie I should not have bothered my head about scruples. For it did
not occur to me to sacrifice Tessie as I would have sacrificed a woman of
the world. I looked the future squarely in the face and saw the several
probable endings to the affair. She would either tire of the whole thing,
or become so unhappy that I should have either to marry her or go away.
If I married her we would be unhappy. I with a wife unsuited to me, and
she with a husband unsuitable for any woman. For my past life could
scarcely entitle me to marry. If I went away she might either fall ill,
recover, and marry some Eddie Burke, or she might recklessly or
deliberately go and do something foolish. On the other hand, if she tired
of me, then her whole life would be before her with beautiful vistas of
Eddie Burkes and marriage rings and twins and Harlem flats and Heaven
knows what. As I strolled along through the trees by the Washington Arch,
I decided that she should find a substantial friend in me, anyway, and
the future could take care of itself. Then I went into the house and put
on my evening dress, for the little faintly-perfumed note on my dresser
said, ""Have a cab at the stage door at eleven,"" and the note was signed
""Edith Carmichel, Metropolitan Theatre.""

I took supper that night, or rather we took supper, Miss Carmichel and I,
at Solari's, and the dawn was just beginning to gild the cross on the
Memorial Church as I entered Washington Square after leaving Edith at the
Brunswick. There was not a soul in the park as I passed along the trees
and took the walk which leads from the Garibaldi statue to the Hamilton
Apartment House, but as I passed the churchyard I saw a figure sitting on
the stone steps. In spite of myself a chill crept over me at the sight of
the white puffy face, and I hastened to pass. Then he said something
which might have been addressed to me or might merely have been a mutter
to himself, but a sudden furious anger flamed up within me that such a
creature should address me. For an instant I felt like wheeling about and
smashing my stick over his head, but I walked on, and entering the
Hamilton went to my apartment. For some time I tossed about the bed
trying to get the sound of his voice out of my ears, but could not. It
filled my head, that muttering sound, like thick oily smoke from a
fat-rendering vat or an odour of noisome decay. And as I lay and tossed
about, the voice in my ears seemed more distinct, and I began to
understand the words he had muttered. They came to me slowly as if I had
forgotten them, and at last I could make some sense out of the sounds. It
was this:

""Have you found the Yellow Sign?""

""Have you found the Yellow Sign?""

""Have you found the Yellow Sign?""

I was furious. What did he mean by that? Then with a curse upon him and
his I rolled over and went to sleep, but when I awoke later I looked pale
and haggard, for I had dreamed the dream of the night before, and it
troubled me more than I cared to think.

I dressed and went down into my studio. Tessie sat by the window, but as
I came in she rose and put both arms around my neck for an innocent kiss.
She looked so sweet and dainty that I kissed her again and then sat down
before the easel.

""Hello! Where's the study I began yesterday?"" I asked.

Tessie looked conscious, but did not answer. I began to hunt among the
piles of canvases, saying, ""Hurry up, Tess, and get ready; we must take
advantage of the morning light.""

When at last I gave up the search among the other canvases and turned to
look around the room for the missing study I noticed Tessie standing by
the screen with her clothes still on.

""What's the matter,"" I asked, ""don't you feel well?""

""Yes.""

""Then hurry.""

""Do you want me to pose as--as I have always posed?""

Then I understood. Here was a new complication. I had lost, of course,
the best nude model I had ever seen. I looked at Tessie. Her face was
scarlet. Alas! Alas! We had eaten of the tree of knowledge, and Eden and
native innocence were dreams of the past--I mean for her.

I suppose she noticed the disappointment on my face, for she said: ""I
will pose if you wish. The study is behind the screen here where I put
it.""

""No,"" I said, ""we will begin something new;"" and I went into my wardrobe
and picked out a Moorish costume which fairly blazed with tinsel. It was
a genuine costume, and Tessie retired to the screen with it enchanted.
When she came forth again I was astonished. Her long black hair was bound
above her forehead with a circlet of turquoises, and the ends, curled
about her glittering girdle. Her feet were encased in the embroidered
pointed slippers and the skirt of her costume, curiously wrought with
arabesques in silver, fell to her ankles. The deep metallic blue vest
embroidered with silver and the short Mauresque jacket spangled and sewn
with turquoises became her wonderfully. She came up to me and held up her
face smiling. I slipped my hand into my pocket, and drawing out a gold
chain with a cross attached, dropped it over her head.

""It's yours, Tessie.""

""Mine?"" she faltered.

""Yours. Now go and pose,"" Then with a radiant smile she ran behind the
screen and presently reappeared with a little box on which was written my
name.

""I had intended to give it to you when I went home to-night,"" she said,
""but I can't wait now.""

I opened the box. On the pink cotton inside lay a clasp of black onyx, on
which was inlaid a curious symbol or letter in gold. It was neither
Arabic nor Chinese, nor, as I found afterwards, did it belong to any
human script.

""It's all I had to give you for a keepsake,"" she said timidly.

I was annoyed, but I told her how much I should prize it, and promised to
wear it always. She fastened it on my coat beneath the lapel.

""How foolish, Tess, to go and buy me such a beautiful thing as this,"" I
said.

""I did not buy it,"" she laughed.

""Where did you get it?""

Then she told me how she had found it one day while coming from the
Aquarium in the Battery, how she had advertised it and watched the
papers, but at last gave up all hopes of finding the owner.

""That was last winter,"" she said, ""the very day I had the first horrid
dream about the hearse.""

I remembered my dream of the previous night but said nothing, and
presently my charcoal was flying over a new canvas, and Tessie stood
motionless on the model-stand.




III

The day following was a disastrous one for me. While moving a framed
canvas from one easel to another my foot slipped on the polished floor,
and I fell heavily on both wrists. They were so badly sprained that it
was useless to attempt to hold a brush, and I was obliged to wander about
the studio, glaring at unfinished drawings and sketches, until despair
seized me and I sat down to smoke and twiddle my thumbs with rage. The
rain blew against the windows and rattled on the roof of the church,
driving me into a nervous fit with its interminable patter. Tessie sat
sewing by the window, and every now and then raised her head and looked
at me with such innocent compassion that I began to feel ashamed of my
irritation and looked about for something to occupy me. I had read all
the papers and all the books in the library, but for the sake of
something to do I went to the bookcases and shoved them open with my
elbow. I knew every volume by its colour and examined them all, passing
slowly around the library and whistling to keep up my spirits. I was
turning to go into the dining-room when my eye fell upon a book bound in
serpent skin, standing in a corner of the top shelf of the last bookcase.
I did not remember it, and from the floor could not decipher the pale
lettering on the back, so I went to the smoking-room and called Tessie.
She came in from the studio and climbed up to reach the book.

""What is it?"" I asked.

""_The King in Yellow._""

I was dumfounded. Who had placed it there? How came it in my rooms? I had
long ago decided that I should never open that book, and nothing on earth
could have persuaded me to buy it. Fearful lest curiosity might tempt me
to open it, I had never even looked at it in book-stores. If I ever had
had any curiosity to read it, the awful tragedy of young Castaigne, whom
I knew, prevented me from exploring its wicked pages. I had always
refused to listen to any description of it, and indeed, nobody ever
ventured to discuss the second part aloud, so I had absolutely no
knowledge of what those leaves might reveal. I stared at the poisonous
mottled binding as I would at a snake.

""Don't touch it, Tessie,"" I said; ""come down.""

Of course my admonition was enough to arouse her curiosity, and before I
could prevent it she took the book and, laughing, danced off into the
studio with it. I called to her, but she slipped away with a tormenting
smile at my helpless hands, and I followed her with some impatience.

""Tessie!"" I cried, entering the library, ""listen, I am serious. Put that
book away. I do not wish you to open it!"" The library was empty. I went
into both drawing-rooms, then into the bedrooms, laundry, kitchen, and
finally returned to the library and began a systematic search. She had
hidden herself so well that it was half-an-hour later when I discovered
her crouching white and silent by the latticed window in the store-room
above. At the first glance I saw she had been punished for her
foolishness. _The King in Yellow_ lay at her feet, but the book was
open at the second part. I looked at Tessie and saw it was too late. She
had opened _The King in Yellow_. Then I took her by the hand and led
her into the studio. She seemed dazed, and when I told her to lie down on
the sofa she obeyed me without a word. After a while she closed her eyes
and her breathing became regular and deep, but I could not determine
whether or not she slept. For a long while I sat silently beside her, but
she neither stirred nor spoke, and at last I rose, and, entering the
unused store-room, took the book in my least injured hand. It seemed
heavy as lead, but I carried it into the studio again, and sitting down
on the rug beside the sofa, opened it and read it through from beginning
to end.

When, faint with excess of my emotions, I dropped the volume and leaned
wearily back against the sofa, Tessie opened her eyes and looked at
me....

We had been speaking for some time in a dull monotonous strain before I
realized that we were discussing _The King in Yellow_. Oh the sin of
writing such words,--words which are clear as crystal, limpid and musical
as bubbling springs, words which sparkle and glow like the poisoned
diamonds of the Medicis! Oh the wickedness, the hopeless damnation of a
soul who could fascinate and paralyze human creatures with such
words,--words understood by the ignorant and wise alike, words which are
more precious than jewels, more soothing than music, more awful than
death!

We talked on, unmindful of the gathering shadows, and she was begging me
to throw away the clasp of black onyx quaintly inlaid with what we now
knew to be the Yellow Sign. I never shall know why I refused, though even
at this hour, here in my bedroom as I write this confession, I should be
glad to know _what_ it was that prevented me from tearing the Yellow
Sign from my breast and casting it into the fire. I am sure I wished to
do so, and yet Tessie pleaded with me in vain. Night fell and the hours
dragged on, but still we murmured to each other of the King and the
Pallid Mask, and midnight sounded from the misty spires in the
fog-wrapped city. We spoke of Hastur and of Cassilda, while outside the
fog rolled against the blank window-panes as the cloud waves roll and
break on the shores of Hali.

The house was very silent now, and not a sound came up from the misty
streets. Tessie lay among the cushions, her face a grey blot in the
gloom, but her hands were clasped in mine, and I knew that she knew and
read my thoughts as I read hers, for we had understood the mystery of the
Hyades and the Phantom of Truth was laid. Then as we answered each other,
swiftly, silently, thought on thought, the shadows stirred in the gloom
about us, and far in the distant streets we heard a sound. Nearer and
nearer it came, the dull crunching of wheels, nearer and yet nearer, and
now, outside before the door it ceased, and I dragged myself to the
window and saw a black-plumed hearse. The gate below opened and shut, and
I crept shaking to my door and bolted it, but I knew no bolts, no locks,
could keep that creature out who was coming for the Yellow Sign. And now
I heard him moving very softly along the hall. Now he was at the door,
and the bolts rotted at his touch. Now he had entered. With eyes starting
from my head I peered into the darkness, but when he came into the room I
did not see him. It was only when I felt him envelope me in his cold soft
grasp that I cried out and struggled with deadly fury, but my hands were
useless and he tore the onyx clasp from my coat and struck me full in the
face. Then, as I fell, I heard Tessie's soft cry and her spirit fled: and
even while falling I longed to follow her, for I knew that the King in
Yellow had opened his tattered mantle and there was only God to cry to
now.

I could tell more, but I cannot see what help it will be to the world. As
for me, I am past human help or hope. As I lie here, writing, careless
even whether or not I die before I finish, I can see the doctor gathering
up his powders and phials with a vague gesture to the good priest beside
me, which I understand.

They will be very curious to know the tragedy--they of the outside world
who write books and print millions of newspapers, but I shall write no
more, and the father confessor will seal my last words with the seal of
sanctity when his holy office is done. They of the outside world may send
their creatures into wrecked homes and death-smitten firesides, and their
newspapers will batten on blood and tears, but with me their spies must
halt before the confessional. They know that Tessie is dead and that I am
dying. They know how the people in the house, aroused by an infernal
scream, rushed into my room and found one living and two dead, but they
do not know what I shall tell them now; they do not know that the doctor
said as he pointed to a horrible decomposed heap on the floor--the livid
corpse of the watchman from the church: ""I have no theory, no explanation.
That man must have been dead for months!""


I think I am dying. I wish the priest would--


","

THERE WERE, I remember, six of us in Conrad's bizarrely fashioned study, with its queer relics from all over the world and its long rows of books which ranged from the Mandrake Press edition of Boccaccio to aMissale Romanum, bound in clasped oak boards and printed in Venice, 1740. Clemants and Professor Kirowan had just engaged in a somewhat testy anthropological argument: Clemants upholding the theory of a separate, distinct Alpine race, while the professor maintained that this so-called race was merely a deviation from an original Aryan stock—possibly the result of an admixture between the southern or Mediterranean races and the Nordic people.
""And how,"" asked Clemants, ""do you account for their brachycephalicism? The Mediterraneans were as long-headed as the Aryans: would admixture between these dolichocephalic peoples produce a broad-headed intermediate type?""
""Special conditions might bring about a change in an originally long- headed race,"" snapped Kirowan. ""Boaz has demonstrated, for instance, that in the case of immigrants to America, skull formations often change in one generation. And Flinders Petrie has shown that the Lombards changed from a long- headed to a round-headed race in a few centuries.""
""But what caused these changes?""
""Much is yet unknown to science,"" answered Kirowan, ""and we need not be dogmatic. No one knows, as yet, why people of British and Irish ancestry tend to grow unusually tall in the Darling district of Australia—Cornstalks, as they are called—or why people of such descent generally have thinner jaw-structures after a few generations in New England. The universe is full of the unexplainable.""
""And therefore the uninteresting, according to Machen,"" laughed Taverel.
Conrad shook his head. ""I must disagree. To me, the unknowable is most tantalizingly fascinating.""
""Which accounts, no doubt, for all the works on witchcraft and demonology I see on your shelves,"" said Ketrick, with a wave of his hand toward the rows of books.
And let me speak of Ketrick. Each of the six of us was of the same breed —that is to say, a Briton or an American of British descent. By British, I include all natural inhabitants of the British Isles. We represented various strains of English and Celtic blood, but basically, these strains are the same after all. But Ketrick: to me the man always seemed strangely alien. It was in his eyes that this difference showed externally. They were a sort of amber, almost yellow, and slightly oblique. At times, when one looked at his face from certain angles, they seemed to slant like a Chinaman's.
Others than I had noticed this feature, so unusual in a man of pure Anglo- Saxon descent. The usual myths ascribing his slanted eyes to some pre-natal influence had been mooted about, and I remember Professor Hendrik Brooler once remarked that Ketrick was undoubtedly an atavism, representing a reversion of type to some dim and distant ancestor of Mongolian blood—a sort of freak reversion, since none of his family showed such traces.
But Ketrick comes of the Welsh branch of the Cetrics of Sussex, and his lineage is set down in the Book of Peers. There you may read the line of his ancestry, which extends unbroken to the days of Canute. No slightest trace of Mongoloid intermixture appears in the genealogy, and how could there have been such intermixture in old Saxon England? For Ketrick is the modern form of Cedric, and though that branch fled into Wales before the invasion of the Danes, its male heirs consistently married with English families on the border marches, and it remains a pure line of the powerful Sussex Cedrics—almost pure Saxon. As for the man himself, this defect of his eyes, if it can be called a defect, is his only abnormality, except for a slight and occasional lisping of speech. He is highly intellectual and a good companion except for a slight aloofness and a rather callous indifference which may serve to mask an extremely sensitive nature.
Referring to his remark, I said with a laugh: ""Conrad pursues the obscure and mystic as some men pursue romance; his shelves throng with delightful nightmares of every variety.""
Our host nodded. ""You'll find there a number of delectable dishes—Machen, Poe, Blackwood, Maturin—look, there's a rare feast—Horrid Mysteries, by the Marquis of Grosse—the real Eighteenth Century edition.""
Taverel scanned the shelves. ""Weird fiction seems to vie with works on witchcraft, voodoo and dark magic.""
True; historians and chronicles are often dull; tale-weavers never —the masters, I mean. A voodoo sacrifice can be described in such a dull manner as to take all the real fantasy out of it, and leave it merely a sordid murder. I will admit that few writers of fiction touch the true heights of horror—most of their stuff is too concrete, given too much earthly shape and dimensions. But in such tales as Poe's Fall of the House of Usher, Machen's Black Seal and Lovecraft's Call of Cthulhu —the three master horror-tales, to my mind—the reader is borne into dark and outer realms of imagination.
""But look there,"" he continued, ""there, sandwiched between that nightmare of Huysmans', and Walpole's Castle of Otranto—Von Junzt'sNameless Cults. There's a book to keep you awake at night!""
""I've read it,"" said Taverel, ""and I'm convinced the man is mad. His work is like the conversation of a maniac—it runs with startling clarity for awhile, then suddenly merges into vagueness and disconnected ramblings.""
Conrad shook his head. ""Have you ever thought that perhaps it is his very sanity that causes him to write in that fashion? What if he dares not put on paper all he knows? What if his vague suppositions are dark and mysterious hints, keys to the puzzle, to those who know?""
""Bosh!"" This from Kirowan. ""Are you intimating that any of the nightmare cults referred to by Von Junzt survive to this day—if they ever existed save in the hag-ridden brain of a lunatic poet and philosopher?""
""Not he alone used hidden meanings,"" answered Conrad. ""If you will scan various works of certain great poets you may find double meanings. Men have stumbled onto cosmic secrets in the past and given a hint of them to the world in cryptic words. Do you remember Von Junzt's hints of 'a city in the waste'? What do you think of Flecker's line:""
'Pass not beneath! Men say there blows in stony deserts still a rose
But with no scarlet to her leaf—and from whose heart no perfume flows.'
""Men may stumble upon secret things, but Von Junzt dipped deep into forbidden mysteries. He was one of the few men, for instance, who could read the Necronomicon in the original Greek translation.""
Taverel shrugged his shoulders, and Professor Kirowan, though he snorted and puffed viciously at his pipe, made no direct reply; for he, as well as Conrad, had delved into the Latin version of the book, and had found there things not even a cold-blooded scientist could answer or refute.
""Well,"" he said presently, ""suppose we admit the former existence of cults revolving about such nameless and ghastly gods and entities as Cthulhu, Yog Sothoth, Tsathoggua, Gol-goroth, and the like, I can not find it in my mind to believe that survivals of such cults lurk in the dark corners of the world today.""
To our surprise Clemants answered. He was a tall, lean man, silent almost to the point of taciturnity, and his fierce struggles with poverty in his youth had lined his face beyond his years. Like many another artist, he lived a distinctly dual literary life, his swashbuckling novels furnishing him a generous income, and his editorial position on The Cloven Hoofaffording him full artistic expression. The Cloven Hoof was a poetry magazine whose bizarre contents had often aroused the shocked interest of the conservative critics.
""You remember Von Junzt makes mention of a so-called Bran cult,"" said Clemants, stuffing his pipe-bowl with a peculiarly villainous brand of shag tobacco. ""I think I heard you and Taverel discussing it once.""
""As I gather from his hints,"" snapped Kirowan, ""Von Junzt includes this particular cult among those still in existence. Absurd.""
Again Clemants shook his head. ""When I was a boy working my way through a certain university, I had for roommate a lad as poor and ambitious as I. If I told you his name, it would startle you. Though he came of an old Scotch line of Galloway, he was obviously of a non-Aryan type.
""This is in strictest confidence, you understand. But my roommate talked in his sleep. I began to listen and put his disjointed mumbling together. And in his mutterings I first heard of the ancient cult hinted at by Von Junzt; of the king who rules the Dark Empire, which was a revival of an older, darker empire dating back into the Stone Age; and of the great, nameless cavern where stands the Dark Man—the image of Bran Mak Morn, carved in his likeness by a master-hand while the great king yet lived, and to which each worshipper of Bran makes a pilgrimage once in his or her lifetime. Yes, that cult lives today in the descendants of Bran's people—a silent, unknown current it flows on in the great ocean of life, waiting for the stone image of the great Bran to breathe and move with sudden life, and come from the great cavern to rebuild their lost empire.""
""And who were the people of that empire?"" asked Ketrick.
""Picts,"" answered Taverel, ""doubtless the people known later as the wild Picts of Galloway were predominantly Celtic—a mixture of Gaelic, Cymric, aboriginal and possibly Teutonic elements. Whether they took their name from the older race or lent their own name to that race, is a matter yet to be decided. But when Von Junzt speaks of Picts, he refers specifically to the small, dark, garlic-eating peoples of Mediterranean blood who brought the Neolithic culture into Britain. The first settlers of that country, in fact, who gave rise to the tales of earth spirits and goblins.""
""I can not agree to that last statement,"" said Conrad. ""These legends ascribe a deformity and inhumanness of appearances to the characters. There was nothing about the Picts to excite such horror and repulsion in the Aryan peoples. I believe that the Mediterraneans were preceded by a Mongoloid type, very low in the scale of development, whence these tales—""
""Quite true,"" broke in Kirowan, ""but I hardly think they preceded the Picts, as you call them, into Britain. We find troll and dwarf legends all over the Continent, and I am inclined to think that both the Mediterranean and Aryan people brought these tales with them from the Continent. They must have been of extremely inhuman aspect, those early Mongoloids.""
""At least,"" said Conrad, ""here is a flint mallet a miner found in the Welsh hills and gave to me, which has never been fully explained. It is obviously of no ordinary Neolithic make. See how small it is, compared to most implements of that age; almost like a child's toy; yet it is surprisingly heavy and no doubt a deadly blow could be dealt with it. I fitted the handle to it, myself, and you would be surprised to know how difficult it was to carve it into a shape and balance corresponding with the head.""
We looked at the thing. It was well made, polished somewhat like the other remnants of the Neolithic I had seen, yet as Conrad said, it was strangely different. Its small size was oddly disquieting, for it had no appearance of a toy, otherwise. It was as sinister in suggestion as an Aztec sacrificial dagger. Conrad had fashioned the oaken handle with rare skill, and in carving it to fit the head, had managed to give it the same unnatural appearance as the mallet itself had. He had even copied the workmanship of primal times, fixing the head into the cleft of the haft with rawhide.
""My word!"" Taverel made a clumsy pass at an imaginary antagonist and nearly shattered a costly Shang vase. ""The balance of the thing is all off- center; I'd have to readjust all my mechanics of poise and equilibrium to handle it.""
""Let me see it,"" Ketrick took the thing and fumbled with it, trying to strike the secret of its proper handling. At length, somewhat irritated, he swung it up and struck a heavy blow at a shield which hung on the wall nearby. I was standing near it; I saw the hellish mallet twist in his hand like a live serpent, and his arm wrenched out of line; I heard a shout of alarmed warning —then darkness came with the impact of the mallet against my head.
Slowly I drifted back to consciousness. First there was dull sensation with blindness and total lack of knowledge as to where I was or what I was; then vague realization of life and being, and a hard something pressing into my ribs. Then the mists cleared and I came to myself completely.
I lay on my back half-beneath some underbrush and my head throbbed fiercely. Also my hair was caked and clotted with blood, for the scalp had been laid open. But my eyes traveled down my body and limbs, naked but for a deerskin loincloth and sandals of the same material, and found no other wound. That which pressed so uncomfortably into my ribs was my ax, on which I had fallen.
Now an abhorrent babble reached my ears and stung me into clear consciousness. The noise was faintly like language, but not such language as men are accustomed to. It sounded much like the repeated hissing of many great snakes.
I stared. I lay in a great, gloomy forest. The glade was overshadowed, so that even in the daytime it was very dark. Aye—that forest was dark, cold, silent, gigantic and utterly grisly. And I looked into the glade.
I saw a shambles. Five men lay there—at least, what had been five men. Now as I marked the abhorrent mutilations my soul sickened. And about clustered the—Things. Humans they were, of a sort, though I did not consider them so. They were short and stocky, with broad heads too large for their scrawny bodies. Their hair was snaky and stringy, their faces broad and square, with flat noses, hideously slanted eyes, a thin gash for a mouth, and pointed ears. They wore the skins of beasts, as did I, but these hides were but crudely dressed. They bore small bows and flint-tipped arrows, flint knives and cudgels. And they conversed in a speech as hideous as themselves, a hissing, reptilian speech that filled me with dread and loathing.
Oh, I hated them as I lay there; my brain flamed with white-hot fury. And now I remembered. We had hunted, we six youths of the Sword People, and wandered far into the grim forest which our people generally shunned. Weary of the chase, we had paused to rest; to me had been given the first watch, for in those days, no sleep was safe without a sentry. Now shame and revulsion shook my whole being. I had slept—I had betrayed my comrades. And now they lay gashed and mangled—butchered while they slept, by vermin who had never dared to stand before them on equal terms. I, Aryara, had betrayed my trust.
Aye—I remembered. I had slept and in the midst of a dream of the hunt, fire and sparks had exploded in my head and I had plunged into a deeper darkness where there were no dreams. And now the penalty. They who had stolen through the dense forest and smitten me senseless, had not paused to mutilate me. Thinking me dead they had hastened swiftly to their grisly work. Now perhaps they had forgotten me for a time. I had sat somewhat apart from the others, and when struck, had fallen half-under some bushes. But soon they would remember me. I would hunt no more, dance no more in the dances of hunt and love and war, see no more the wattle huts of the Sword People.
But I had no wish to escape back to my people. Should I slink back with my tale of infamy and disgrace? Should I hear the words of scorn my tribe would fling at me, see the girls point their contemptuous fingers at the youth who slept and betrayed his comrades to the knives of vermin?
Tears stung my eyes, and slow hate heaved up in my bosom, and my brain. I would never bear the sword that marked the warrior. I would never triumph over worthy foes and die gloriously beneath the arrows of the Picts or the axes of the Wolf People or the River People. I would go down to death beneath a nauseous rabble, whom the Picts had long ago driven into forest dens like rats.
And mad rage gripped me and dried my tears, giving in their stead a berserk blaze of wrath. If such reptiles were to bring about my downfall, I would make it a fall long remembered—if such beasts had memories.
Moving cautiously, I shifted until my hand was on the haft of my ax; then I called on Il-marinen and bounded up as a tiger springs. And as a tiger springs I was among my enemies and mashed a flat skull as a man crushes the head of a snake. A sudden wild clamor of fear broke from my victims and for an instant they closed round me, hacking and stabbing. A knife gashed my chest but I gave no heed. A red mist waved before my eyes, and my body and limbs moved in perfect accord with my fighting brain. Snarling, hacking and smiting, I was a tiger among reptiles. In an instant they gave way and fled, leaving me bestriding half a dozen stunted bodies. But I was not satiated.
I was close on the heels of the tallest one, whose head would perhaps come to my shoulder, and who seemed to be their chief. He fled down a sort of runway, squealing like a monstrous lizard, and when I was close at his shoulder, he dived, snake-like, into the bushes. But I was too swift for him, and I dragged him forth and butchered him in a most gory fashion.
And through the bushes I saw the trail he was striving to reach—a path winding in and out among the trees, almost too narrow to allow the traversing of it by a man of normal size. I hacked off my victim's hideous head, and carrying it in my left hand, went up the serpent-path, with my red ax in my right.
Now as I strode swiftly along the path and blood splashed beside my feet at every step from the severed jugular of my foe, I thought of those I hunted. Aye—we held them in so little esteem, we hunted by day in the forest they haunted. What they called themselves, we never knew; for none of our tribe ever learned the accursed hissing sibilances they used as speech; but we called them Children of the Night. And night-things they were indeed, for they slunk in the depths of the dark forests, and in subterraneous dwellings, venturing forth into the hills only when their conquerors slept. It was at night that they did their foul deeds—the quick flight of a flint-tipped arrow to slay cattle, or perhaps a loitering human, the snatching of a child that had wandered from the village.
But it was for more than this we gave them their name; they were, in truth, people of night and darkness and the ancient horror-ridden shadows of bygone ages. For these creatures were very old, and they represented an outworn age. They had once overrun and possessed this land, and they had been driven into hiding and obscurity by the dark, fierce little Picts with whom we contested now, and who hated and loathed them as savagely as did we.
The Picts were different from us in general appearance, being shorter of stature and dark of hair, eyes and skin, whereas we were tall and powerful, with yellow hair and light eyes. But they were cast in the same mold, for all of that. These Children of the Night seemed not human to us, with their deformed dwarfish bodies, yellow skin and hideous faces. Aye—they were reptiles—vermin.
And my brain was like to burst with fury when I thought that it was these vermin on whom I was to glut my ax and perish. Bah! There is no glory slaying snakes or dying from their bites. All this rage and fierce disappointment turned on the objects of my hatred, and with the old red mist waving in front of me I swore by all the gods I knew, to wreak such red havoc before I died as to leave a dread memory in the minds of the survivors.
My people would not honor me, in such contempt they held the Children. But those Children that I left alive would remember me and shudder. So I swore, gripping savagely my ax, which was of bronze, set in a cleft of the oaken haft and fastened securely with rawhide.
Now I heard ahead a sibilant, abhorrent murmur, and a vile stench filtered to me through the trees, human, yet less than human. A few moments more and I emerged from the deep shadows into a wide open space. I had never before seen a village of the Children. There was a cluster of earthen domes, with low doorways sunk into the ground; squalid dwelling-places, half-above and half-below the earth. And I knew from the talk of the old warriors that these dwelling-places were connected by underground corridors, so the whole village was like an ant-bed, or a system of snake holes. And I wondered if other tunnels did not run off under the ground and emerge long distances from the villages.
Before the domes clustered a vast group of the creatures, hissing and jabbering at a great rate.
I had quickened my pace, and now as I burst from cover, I was running with the fleetness of my race. A wild clamor went up from the rabble as they saw the avenger, tall, bloodstained and blazing-eyed leap from the forest, and I cried out fiercely, flung the dripping head among them and bounded like a wounded tiger into the thick of them.
Oh, there was no escape for them now! They might have taken to their tunnels but I would have followed, even to the guts of Hell. They knew they must slay me, and they closed around, a hundred strong, to do it.
There was no wild blaze of glory in my brain as there had been against worthy foes. But the old berserk madness of my race was in my blood and the smell of blood and destruction in my nostrils.
I know not how many I slew. I only know that they thronged about me in a writhing, slashing mass, like serpents about a wolf, and I smote until the ax- edge turned and bent and the ax became no more than a bludgeon; and I smashed skulls, split heads, splintered bones, scattered blood and brains in one red sacrifice to Il-marinen, god of the Sword People.
Bleeding from half a hundred wounds, blinded by a slash across the eyes, I felt a flint knife sink deep into my groin and at the same instant a cudgel laid my scalp open. I went to my knees but reeled up again, and saw in a thick red fog a ring of leering, slant-eyed faces. I lashed out as a dying tiger strikes, and the faces broke in red ruin.
And as I sagged, overbalanced by the fury of my stroke, a taloned hand clutched my throat and a flint blade was driven into my ribs and twisted venomously. Beneath a shower of blows I went down again, but the man with the knife was beneath me, and with my left hand I found him and broke his neck before he could writhe away.
Life was waning swiftly; through the hissing and howling of the Children I could hear the voice of Il-marinen. Yet once again I rose stubbornly, through a very whirlwind of cudgels and spears. I could no longer see my foes, even in a red mist. But I could feel their blows and knew they surged about me. I braced my feet, gripped my slippery ax-haft with both hands, and calling once more on Il-marinen I heaved up the ax and struck one last terrific blow. And I must have died on my feet, for there was no sensation of falling; even as I knew, with a last thrill of savagery, that slew, even as I felt the splintering of skulls beneath my ax, darkness came with oblivion.
I came suddenly to myself. I was half-reclining in a big armchair and Conrad was pouring water on me. My head ached and a trickle of blood had half- dried on my face. Kirowan, Taverel and Clemants were hovering about, anxiously, while Ketrick stood just in front of me, still holding the mallet, his face schooled to a polite perturbation which his eyes did not show. And at the sight of those cursed eyes a red madness surged up in me.
""There,"" Conrad was saying, ""I told you he'd come out of it in a moment; just a light crack. He's taken harder than that. All right now, aren't you, O'Donnel?""
At that I swept them aside, and with a single low snarl of hatred launched myself at Ketrick. Taken utterly by surprise he had no opportunity to defend himself. My hands locked on his throat and we crashed together on the ruins of a divan. The others cried out in amazement and horror and sprang to separate us—or rather, to tear me from my victim, for already Ketrick's slant eyes were beginning to start from their sockets.
""For God's sake, O'Donnel,"" exclaimed Conrad, seeking to break my grip, ""what's come over you? Ketrick didn't mean to hit you—let go, you idiot!""
A fierce wrath almost overcame me at these men who were my friends, men of my own tribe, and I swore at them and their blindness, as they finally managed to tear my strangling fingers from Ketrick's throat. He sat up and choked and explored the blue marks my fingers had left, while I raged and cursed, nearly defeating the combined efforts of the four to hold me.
""You fools!"" I screamed. ""Let me go! Let me do my duty as a tribesman! You blind fools! I care nothing for the paltry blow he dealt me—he and his dealt stronger blows than that against me, in bygone ages. You fools, he is marked with the brand of the beast—the reptile—the vermin we exterminated centuries ago! I must crush him, stamp him out, rid the clean earth of his accursed pollution!""
So I raved and struggled and Conrad gasped to Ketrick over his shoulder: ""Get out, quick! He's out of his head! His mind is unhinged! Get away from him.""
Now I look out over the ancient dreaming downs and the hills and deep forests beyond and I ponder. Somehow, that blow from that ancient accursed mallet knocked me back into another age and another life. While I was Aryara I had no cognizance of any other life. It was no dream; it was a stray bit of reality wherein I, John O'Donnel, once lived and died, and back into which I was snatched across the voids of time and space by a chance blow. Time and times are but cogwheels, unmatched, grinding on oblivious to one another. Occasionally—oh, very rarely!—the cogs fit; the pieces of the plot snap together momentarily and give men faint glimpses beyond the veil of this everyday blindness we call reality.
I am John O'Donnel and I was Aryara, who dreamed dreams of war-glory and hunt-glory and feast-glory and who died on a red heap of his victims in some lost age. But in what age and where?
The last I can answer for you. Mountains and rivers change their contours; the landscapes alter; but the downs least of all. I look out upon them now and I remember them, not only with John O'Donnel's eyes, but with the eyes of Aryara. They are but little changed. Only the great forest has shrunk and dwindled and in many, many places vanished utterly. But here on these very downs Aryara lived and fought and loved and in yonder forest he died. Kirowan was wrong. The little, fierce, dark Picts were not the first men in the Isles. There were beings before them—aye, the Children of the Night. Legends —why, the Children were not unknown to us when we came into what is now the isle of Britain. We had encountered them before, ages before. Already we had our myths of them. But we found them in Britain. Nor had the Picts totally exterminated them.
Nor had the Picts, as so many believe, preceded us by many centuries. We drove them before us as we came, in that long drift from the East. I, Aryara, knew old men who had marched on that century-long trek; who had been borne in the arms of yellow-haired women over countless miles of forest and plain, and who as youths had walked in the vanguard of the invaders.
As to the age—that I cannot say. But I, Aryara, was surely an Aryan and my people were Aryans—members of one of the thousand unknown and unrecorded drifts that scattered yellow-haired blue-eyed tribes all over the world. The Celts were not the first to come into western Europe. I, Aryara, was of the same blood and appearance as the men who sacked Rome, but mine was a much older strain. Of the language spoke, no echo remains in the waking mind of John O'Donnel, but I knew that Aryara's tongue was to ancient Celtic what ancient Celtic is to modern Gaelic.
Il-marinen! I remember the god I called upon, the ancient, ancient god who worked in metals—in bronze then. For Il-marinen was one of the base gods of the Aryans from whom many gods grew; and he was Wieland and Vulcan in the ages of iron. But to Aryara he was Il-marinen.
And Aryara—he was one of many tribes and many drifts. Not alone did the Sword People come or dwell in Britain. The River People were before us and the Wolf People came later. But they were Aryans like us, light-eyed and tall and blond. We fought them, for the reason that the various drifts of Aryans have always fought each other, just as the Achaeans fought the Dorians, just as the Celts and Germans cut each other's throats; aye, just as the Hellenes and the Persians, who were once one people and of the same drift, split in two different ways on the long trek and centuries later met and flooded Greece and Asia Minor with blood.
Now understand, all this I did not know as Aryara. I, Aryara, knew nothing of all these world-wide drifts of my race. I knew only that my people were conquerors, that a century ago my ancestors had dwelt in the great plains far to the east, plains populous with fierce, yellow-haired, light-eyed people like myself; that my ancestors had come westward in a great drift; and that in that drift, when my tribesmen met tribes of other races, they trampled and destroyed them, and when they met other yellow-haired, light-eyed people, of older or newer drifts, they fought savagely and mercilessly, according to the old, illogical custom of the Aryan people. This Aryara knew, and I, John O'Donnel, who know much more and much less than I, Aryara, knew, have combined the knowledge of these separate selves and have come to conclusions that would startle many noted scientists and historians.
Yet this fact is well known: Aryans deteriorate swiftly in sedentary and peaceful lives. Their proper existence is a nomadic one; when they settle down to an agricultural existence, they pave the way for their downfall; and when they pen themselves with city walls, they seal their doom. Why, I, Aryara, remember the tales of the old men—how the Sons of the Sword, on that long drift, found villages of white-skinned yellow-haired people who had drifted into the west centuries before and had quit the wandering life to dwell among the dark, garlic-eating people and gain their sustenance from the soil. And the old men told how soft and weak they were, and how easily they fell before the bronze blades of the Sword People.
Look—is not the whole history of the Sons of Aryan laid on those lines? Look—how swiftly has Persian followed Mede; Greek, Persian; Roman, Greek; and German, Roman. Aye, and the Norseman followed the Germanic tribes when they had grown flabby from a century or so of peace and idleness, and despoiled the spoils they had taken in the southland.
But let me speak of Ketrick. Ha—the short hairs at the back of my neck bristle at the very mention of his name. A reversion to type—but not to the type of some cleanly Chinaman or Mongol of recent times. The Danes drove his ancestors into the hills of Wales; and there, in what medieval century, and in what foul way did that cursed aboriginal taint creep into the clean Saxon blood of the Celtic line, there to lie dormant so long? The Celtic Welsh never mated with the Children any more than the Picts did. But there must have been survivals—vermin lurking in those grim hills, that had outlasted their time and age. In Aryara's day they were scarcely human. What must a thousand years of retrogression have done to the breed?
What foul shape stole into the Ketrick castle on some forgotten night, or rose out of the dusk to grip some woman of the line, straying in the hills?
The mind shrinks from such an image. But this I know: there must have been survivals of that foul, reptilian epoch when the Ketricks went into Wales. There still may be. But this changeling, this waif of darkness, this horror who bears the noble name of Ketrick, the brand of the serpent is upon him, and until he is destroyed there is no rest for me. Now that I know him for what he is, he pollutes the clean air and leaves the slime of the snake on the green earth. The sound of his lisping, hissing voice fills me with crawling horror and the sight of his slanted eyes inspires me with madness.
For I come of a royal race, and such as he is a continual insult and a threat, like a serpent underfoot. Mine is a regal race, though now it is become degraded and falls into decay by continual admixture with conquered races. The waves of alien blood have washed my hair black and my skin dark, but I still have the lordly stature and the blue eyes of a royal Aryan.
And as my ancestors—as I, Aryara, destroyed the scum that writhed beneath our heels, so shall I, John O'Donnel, exterminate the reptilian thing, the monster bred of the snaky taint that slumbered so long unguessed in clean Saxon veins, the vestigial serpent-things left to taunt the Sons of Aryan. They say the blow I received affected my mind; I know it but opened my eyes. Mine ancient enemy walks often on the moors alone, attracted, though he may not know it, by ancestral urgings. And on one of these lonely walks I shall meet him, and when I meet him, I will break his foul neck with my hands, as I, Aryara, broke the necks of foul night-things in the long, long ago.
Then they may take me and break my neck at the end of a rope if they will. I am not blind, if my friends are. And in the sight of the old Aryan god, if not in the blinded eyes of men, I will have kept faith with my tribe.
",False
"
I

There are so many things which are impossible to explain! Why should
certain chords in music make me think of the brown and golden tints of
autumn foliage? Why should the Mass of Sainte Cécile bend my thoughts
wandering among caverns whose walls blaze with ragged masses of virgin
silver? What was it in the roar and turmoil of Broadway at six o'clock
that flashed before my eyes the picture of a still Breton forest where
sunlight filtered through spring foliage and Sylvia bent, half curiously,
half tenderly, over a small green lizard, murmuring: ""To think that this
also is a little ward of God!""

When I first saw the watchman his back was toward me. I looked at him
indifferently until he went into the church. I paid no more attention to
him than I had to any other man who lounged through Washington Square
that morning, and when I shut my window and turned back into my studio I
had forgotten him. Late in the afternoon, the day being warm, I raised
the window again and leaned out to get a sniff of air. A man was standing
in the courtyard of the church, and I noticed him again with as little
interest as I had that morning. I looked across the square to where the
fountain was playing and then, with my mind filled with vague impressions
of trees, asphalt drives, and the moving groups of nursemaids and
holiday-makers, I started to walk back to my easel. As I turned, my
listless glance included the man below in the churchyard. His face was
toward me now, and with a perfectly involuntary movement I bent to see
it. At the same moment he raised his head and looked at me. Instantly I
thought of a coffin-worm. Whatever it was about the man that repelled me
I did not know, but the impression of a plump white grave-worm was so
intense and nauseating that I must have shown it in my expression, for he
turned his puffy face away with a movement which made me think of a
disturbed grub in a chestnut.

I went back to my easel and motioned the model to resume her pose. After
working a while I was satisfied that I was spoiling what I had done as
rapidly as possible, and I took up a palette knife and scraped the colour
out again. The flesh tones were sallow and unhealthy, and I did not
understand how I could have painted such sickly colour into a study which
before that had glowed with healthy tones.

I looked at Tessie. She had not changed, and the clear flush of health
dyed her neck and cheeks as I frowned.

""Is it something I've done?"" she said.

""No,--I've made a mess of this arm, and for the life of me I can't see
how I came to paint such mud as that into the canvas,"" I replied.

""Don't I pose well?"" she insisted.

""Of course, perfectly.""

""Then it's not my fault?""

""No. It's my own.""

""I am very sorry,"" she said.

I told her she could rest while I applied rag and turpentine to the
plague spot on my canvas, and she went off to smoke a cigarette and look
over the illustrations in the _Courrier Français_.

I did not know whether it was something in the turpentine or a defect in
the canvas, but the more I scrubbed the more that gangrene seemed to
spread. I worked like a beaver to get it out, and yet the disease
appeared to creep from limb to limb of the study before me. Alarmed, I
strove to arrest it, but now the colour on the breast changed and the
whole figure seemed to absorb the infection as a sponge soaks up water.
Vigorously I plied palette-knife, turpentine, and scraper, thinking all
the time what a _séance_ I should hold with Duval who had sold me
the canvas; but soon I noticed that it was not the canvas which was
defective nor yet the colours of Edward. ""It must be the turpentine,"" I
thought angrily, ""or else my eyes have become so blurred and confused by
the afternoon light that I can't see straight."" I called Tessie, the
model. She came and leaned over my chair blowing rings of smoke into the
air.

""What _have_ you been doing to it?"" she exclaimed

""Nothing,"" I growled, ""it must be this turpentine!""

""What a horrible colour it is now,"" she continued. ""Do you think my flesh
resembles green cheese?""

""No, I don't,"" I said angrily; ""did you ever know me to paint like that
before?""

""No, indeed!""

""Well, then!""

""It must be the turpentine, or something,"" she admitted.

She slipped on a Japanese robe and walked to the window. I scraped and
rubbed until I was tired, and finally picked up my brushes and hurled
them through the canvas with a forcible expression, the tone alone of
which reached Tessie's ears.

Nevertheless she promptly began: ""That's it! Swear and act silly and ruin
your brushes! You have been three weeks on that study, and now look!
What's the good of ripping the canvas? What creatures artists are!""

I felt about as much ashamed as I usually did after such an outbreak, and
I turned the ruined canvas to the wall. Tessie helped me clean my
brushes, and then danced away to dress. From the screen she regaled me
with bits of advice concerning whole or partial loss of temper, until,
thinking, perhaps, I had been tormented sufficiently, she came out to
implore me to button her waist where she could not reach it on the
shoulder.

""Everything went wrong from the time you came back from the window and
talked about that horrid-looking man you saw in the churchyard,"" she
announced.

""Yes, he probably bewitched the picture,"" I said, yawning. I looked at my
watch.

""It's after six, I know,"" said Tessie, adjusting her hat before the
mirror.

""Yes,"" I replied, ""I didn't mean to keep you so long."" I leaned out of
the window but recoiled with disgust, for the young man with the pasty
face stood below in the churchyard. Tessie saw my gesture of disapproval
and leaned from the window.

""Is that the man you don't like?"" she whispered.

I nodded.

""I can't see his face, but he does look fat and soft. Someway or other,""
she continued, turning to look at me, ""he reminds me of a dream,--an
awful dream I once had. Or,"" she mused, looking down at her shapely
shoes, ""was it a dream after all?""

""How should I know?"" I smiled.

Tessie smiled in reply.

""You were in it,"" she said, ""so perhaps you might know something about
it.""

""Tessie! Tessie!"" I protested, ""don't you dare flatter by saying that you
dream about me!""

""But I did,"" she insisted; ""shall I tell you about it?""

""Go ahead,"" I replied, lighting a cigarette.

Tessie leaned back on the open window-sill and began very seriously.

""One night last winter I was lying in bed thinking about nothing at all
in particular. I had been posing for you and I was tired out, yet it
seemed impossible for me to sleep. I heard the bells in the city ring
ten, eleven, and midnight. I must have fallen asleep about midnight
because I don't remember hearing the bells after that. It seemed to me
that I had scarcely closed my eyes when I dreamed that something impelled
me to go to the window. I rose, and raising the sash leaned out.
Twenty-fifth Street was deserted as far as I could see. I began to be
afraid; everything outside seemed so--so black and uncomfortable. Then
the sound of wheels in the distance came to my ears, and it seemed to me
as though that was what I must wait for. Very slowly the wheels
approached, and, finally, I could make out a vehicle moving along the
street. It came nearer and nearer, and when it passed beneath my window I
saw it was a hearse. Then, as I trembled with fear, the driver turned and
looked straight at me. When I awoke I was standing by the open window
shivering with cold, but the black-plumed hearse and the driver were
gone. I dreamed this dream again in March last, and again awoke beside
the open window. Last night the dream came again. You remember how it was
raining; when I awoke, standing at the open window, my night-dress was
soaked.""

""But where did I come into the dream?"" I asked.

""You--you were in the coffin; but you were not dead.""

""In the coffin?""

""Yes.""

""How did you know? Could you see me?""

""No; I only knew you were there.""

""Had you been eating Welsh rarebits, or lobster salad?"" I began,
laughing, but the girl interrupted me with a frightened cry.

""Hello! What's up?"" I said, as she shrank into the embrasure by the
window.

""The--the man below in the churchyard;--he drove the hearse.""

""Nonsense,"" I said, but Tessie's eyes were wide with terror. I went to
the window and looked out. The man was gone. ""Come, Tessie,"" I urged,
""don't be foolish. You have posed too long; you are nervous.""

""Do you think I could forget that face?"" she murmured. ""Three times I saw
the hearse pass below my window, and every time the driver turned and
looked up at me. Oh, his face was so white and--and soft? It looked
dead--it looked as if it had been dead a long time.""

I induced the girl to sit down and swallow a glass of Marsala. Then I sat
down beside her, and tried to give her some advice.

""Look here, Tessie,"" I said, ""you go to the country for a week or two,
and you'll have no more dreams about hearses. You pose all day, and when
night comes your nerves are upset. You can't keep this up. Then again,
instead of going to bed when your day's work is done, you run off to
picnics at Sulzer's Park, or go to the Eldorado or Coney Island, and when
you come down here next morning you are fagged out. There was no real
hearse. There was a soft-shell crab dream.""

She smiled faintly.

""What about the man in the churchyard?""

""Oh, he's only an ordinary unhealthy, everyday creature.""

""As true as my name is Tessie Reardon, I swear to you, Mr. Scott, that
the face of the man below in the churchyard is the face of the man who
drove the hearse!""

""What of it?"" I said. ""It's an honest trade.""

""Then you think I _did_ see the hearse?""

""Oh,"" I said diplomatically, ""if you really did, it might not be unlikely
that the man below drove it. There is nothing in that.""

Tessie rose, unrolled her scented handkerchief, and taking a bit of gum
from a knot in the hem, placed it in her mouth. Then drawing on her
gloves she offered me her hand, with a frank, ""Good-night, Mr. Scott,""
and walked out.




II

The next morning, Thomas, the bell-boy, brought me the _Herald_ and
a bit of news. The church next door had been sold. I thanked Heaven for
it, not that being a Catholic I had any repugnance for the congregation
next door, but because my nerves were shattered by a blatant exhorter,
whose every word echoed through the aisle of the church as if it had been
my own rooms, and who insisted on his r's with a nasal persistence which
revolted my every instinct. Then, too, there was a fiend in human shape,
an organist, who reeled off some of the grand old hymns with an
interpretation of his own, and I longed for the blood of a creature who
could play the doxology with an amendment of minor chords which one hears
only in a quartet of very young undergraduates. I believe the minister
was a good man, but when he bellowed: ""And the Lorrrrd said unto Moses,
the Lorrrd is a man of war; the Lorrrd is his name. My wrath shall wax
hot and I will kill you with the sworrrrd!"" I wondered how many centuries
of purgatory it would take to atone for such a sin.

""Who bought the property?"" I asked Thomas.

""Nobody that I knows, sir. They do say the gent wot owns this 'ere
'Amilton flats was lookin' at it. 'E might be a bildin' more studios.""

I walked to the window. The young man with the unhealthy face stood by
the churchyard gate, and at the mere sight of him the same overwhelming
repugnance took possession of me.

""By the way, Thomas,"" I said, ""who is that fellow down there?""

Thomas sniffed. ""That there worm, sir? 'Es night-watchman of the church,
sir. 'E maikes me tired a-sittin' out all night on them steps and lookin'
at you insultin' like. I'd a punched 'is 'ed, sir--beg pardon, sir--""

""Go on, Thomas.""

""One night a comin' 'ome with Arry, the other English boy, I sees 'im a
sittin' there on them steps. We 'ad Molly and Jen with us, sir, the two
girls on the tray service, an' 'e looks so insultin' at us that I up and
sez: 'Wat you looking hat, you fat slug?'--beg pardon, sir, but that's
'ow I sez, sir. Then 'e don't say nothin' and I sez: 'Come out and I'll
punch that puddin' 'ed.' Then I hopens the gate an' goes in, but 'e don't
say nothin', only looks insultin' like. Then I 'its 'im one, but, ugh!
'is 'ed was that cold and mushy it ud sicken you to touch 'im.""

""What did he do then?"" I asked curiously.

""'Im? Nawthin'.""

""And you, Thomas?""

The young fellow flushed with embarrassment and smiled uneasily.

""Mr. Scott, sir, I ain't no coward, an' I can't make it out at all why I
run. I was in the 5th Lawncers, sir, bugler at Tel-el-Kebir, an' was shot
by the wells.""

""You don't mean to say you ran away?""

""Yes, sir; I run.""

""Why?""

""That's just what I want to know, sir. I grabbed Molly an' run, an' the
rest was as frightened as I.""

""But what were they frightened at?""

Thomas refused to answer for a while, but now my curiosity was aroused
about the repulsive young man below and I pressed him. Three years'
sojourn in America had not only modified Thomas' cockney dialect but had
given him the American's fear of ridicule.

""You won't believe me, Mr. Scott, sir?""

""Yes, I will.""

""You will lawf at me, sir?""

""Nonsense!""

He hesitated. ""Well, sir, it's Gawd's truth that when I 'it 'im 'e
grabbed me wrists, sir, and when I twisted 'is soft, mushy fist one of
'is fingers come off in me 'and.""

The utter loathing and horror of Thomas' face must have been reflected in
my own, for he added:

""It's orful, an' now when I see 'im I just go away. 'E maikes me hill.""

When Thomas had gone I went to the window. The man stood beside the
church-railing with both hands on the gate, but I hastily retreated to my
easel again, sickened and horrified, for I saw that the middle finger of
his right hand was missing.

At nine o'clock Tessie appeared and vanished behind the screen with a
merry ""Good morning, Mr. Scott."" When she had reappeared and taken her
pose upon the model-stand I started a new canvas, much to her delight.
She remained silent as long as I was on the drawing, but as soon as the
scrape of the charcoal ceased and I took up my fixative she began to
chatter.

""Oh, I had such a lovely time last night. We went to Tony Pastor's.""

""Who are 'we'?"" I demanded.

""Oh, Maggie, you know, Mr. Whyte's model, and Pinkie McCormick--we call
her Pinkie because she's got that beautiful red hair you artists like so
much--and Lizzie Burke.""

I sent a shower of spray from the fixative over the canvas, and said:
""Well, go on.""

""We saw Kelly and Baby Barnes the skirt-dancer and--and all the rest. I
made a mash.""

""Then you have gone back on me, Tessie?""

She laughed and shook her head.

""He's Lizzie Burke's brother, Ed. He's a perfect gen'l'man.""

I felt constrained to give her some parental advice concerning mashing,
which she took with a bright smile.

""Oh, I can take care of a strange mash,"" she said, examining her chewing
gum, ""but Ed is different. Lizzie is my best friend.""

Then she related how Ed had come back from the stocking mill in Lowell,
Massachusetts, to find her and Lizzie grown up, and what an accomplished
young man he was, and how he thought nothing of squandering half-a-dollar
for ice-cream and oysters to celebrate his entry as clerk into the
woollen department of Macy's. Before she finished I began to paint, and
she resumed the pose, smiling and chattering like a sparrow. By noon I
had the study fairly well rubbed in and Tessie came to look at it.

""That's better,"" she said.

I thought so too, and ate my lunch with a satisfied feeling that all was
going well. Tessie spread her lunch on a drawing table opposite me and we
drank our claret from the same bottle and lighted our cigarettes from the
same match. I was very much attached to Tessie. I had watched her shoot
up into a slender but exquisitely formed woman from a frail, awkward
child. She had posed for me during the last three years, and among all my
models she was my favourite. It would have troubled me very much indeed
had she become ""tough"" or ""fly,"" as the phrase goes, but I never noticed
any deterioration of her manner, and felt at heart that she was all
right. She and I never discussed morals at all, and I had no intention of
doing so, partly because I had none myself, and partly because I knew she
would do what she liked in spite of me. Still I did hope she would steer
clear of complications, because I wished her well, and then also I had a
selfish desire to retain the best model I had. I knew that mashing, as
she termed it, had no significance with girls like Tessie, and that such
things in America did not resemble in the least the same things in Paris.
Yet, having lived with my eyes open, I also knew that somebody would take
Tessie away some day, in one manner or another, and though I professed to
myself that marriage was nonsense, I sincerely hoped that, in this case,
there would be a priest at the end of the vista. I am a Catholic. When I
listen to high mass, when I sign myself, I feel that everything,
including myself, is more cheerful, and when I confess, it does me good.
A man who lives as much alone as I do, must confess to somebody. Then,
again, Sylvia was Catholic, and it was reason enough for me. But I was
speaking of Tessie, which is very different. Tessie also was Catholic and
much more devout than I, so, taking it all in all, I had little fear for
my pretty model until she should fall in love. But _then_ I knew
that fate alone would decide her future for her, and I prayed inwardly
that fate would keep her away from men like me and throw into her path
nothing but Ed Burkes and Jimmy McCormicks, bless her sweet face!

Tessie sat blowing rings of smoke up to the ceiling and tinkling the ice
in her tumbler.

""Do you know that I also had a dream last night?"" I observed.

""Not about that man,"" she laughed.

""Exactly. A dream similar to yours, only much worse.""

It was foolish and thoughtless of me to say this, but you know how little
tact the average painter has. ""I must have fallen asleep about ten
o'clock,"" I continued, ""and after a while I dreamt that I awoke. So
plainly did I hear the midnight bells, the wind in the tree-branches, and
the whistle of steamers from the bay, that even now I can scarcely
believe I was not awake. I seemed to be lying in a box which had a glass
cover. Dimly I saw the street lamps as I passed, for I must tell you,
Tessie, the box in which I reclined appeared to lie in a cushioned wagon
which jolted me over a stony pavement. After a while I became impatient
and tried to move, but the box was too narrow. My hands were crossed on
my breast, so I could not raise them to help myself. I listened and then
tried to call. My voice was gone. I could hear the trample of the horses
attached to the wagon, and even the breathing of the driver. Then another
sound broke upon my ears like the raising of a window sash. I managed to
turn my head a little, and found I could look, not only through the glass
cover of my box, but also through the glass panes in the side of the
covered vehicle. I saw houses, empty and silent, with neither light nor
life about any of them excepting one. In that house a window was open on
the first floor, and a figure all in white stood looking down into the
street. It was you.""

Tessie had turned her face away from me and leaned on the table with her
elbow.

""I could see your face,"" I resumed, ""and it seemed to me to be very
sorrowful. Then we passed on and turned into a narrow black lane.
Presently the horses stopped. I waited and waited, closing my eyes with
ear and impatience, but all was silent as the grave. After what seemed to
me hours, I began to feel uncomfortable. A sense that somebody was close
to me made me unclose my eyes. Then I saw the white face of the
hearse-driver looking at me through the coffin-lid----""

A sob from Tessie interrupted me. She was trembling like a leaf. I saw I
had made an ass of myself and attempted to repair the damage.

""Why, Tess,"" I said, ""I only told you this to show you what influence
your story might have on another person's dreams. You don't suppose I
really lay in a coffin, do you? What are you trembling for? Don't you see
that your dream and my unreasonable dislike for that inoffensive watchman
of the church simply set my brain working as soon as I fell asleep?""

She laid her head between her arms, and sobbed as if her heart would
break. What a precious triple donkey I had made of myself! But I was
about to break my record. I went over and put my arm about her.

""Tessie dear, forgive me,"" I said; ""I had no business to frighten you
with such nonsense. You are too sensible a girl, too good a Catholic to
believe in dreams.""

Her hand tightened on mine and her head fell back upon my shoulder, but
she still trembled and I petted her and comforted her.

""Come, Tess, open your eyes and smile.""

Her eyes opened with a slow languid movement and met mine, but their
expression was so queer that I hastened to reassure her again.

""It's all humbug, Tessie; you surely are not afraid that any harm will
come to you because of that.""

""No,"" she said, but her scarlet lips quivered.

""Then, what's the matter? Are you afraid?""

""Yes. Not for myself.""

""For me, then?"" I demanded gaily.

""For you,"" she murmured in a voice almost inaudible. ""I--I care for you.""

At first I started to laugh, but when I understood her, a shock passed
through me, and I sat like one turned to stone. This was the crowning bit
of idiocy I had committed. During the moment which elapsed between her
reply and my answer I thought of a thousand responses to that innocent
confession. I could pass it by with a laugh, I could misunderstand her
and assure her as to my health, I could simply point out that it was
impossible she could love me. But my reply was quicker than my thoughts,
and I might think and think now when it was too late, for I had kissed
her on the mouth.

That evening I took my usual walk in Washington Park, pondering over the
occurrences of the day. I was thoroughly committed. There was no back out
now, and I stared the future straight in the face. I was not good, not
even scrupulous, but I had no idea of deceiving either myself or Tessie.
The one passion of my life lay buried in the sunlit forests of Brittany.
Was it buried for ever? Hope cried ""No!"" For three years I had been
listening to the voice of Hope, and for three years I had waited for a
footstep on my threshold. Had Sylvia forgotten? ""No!"" cried Hope.

I said that I was no good. That is true, but still I was not exactly a
comic opera villain. I had led an easy-going reckless life, taking what
invited me of pleasure, deploring and sometimes bitterly regretting
consequences. In one thing alone, except my painting, was I serious, and
that was something which lay hidden if not lost in the Breton forests.

It was too late for me to regret what had occurred during the day.
Whatever it had been, pity, a sudden tenderness for sorrow, or the more
brutal instinct of gratified vanity, it was all the same now, and unless
I wished to bruise an innocent heart, my path lay marked before me. The
fire and strength, the depth of passion of a love which I had never even
suspected, with all my imagined experience in the world, left me no
alternative but to respond or send her away. Whether because I am so
cowardly about giving pain to others, or whether it was that I have
little of the gloomy Puritan in me, I do not know, but I shrank from
disclaiming responsibility for that thoughtless kiss, and in fact had no
time to do so before the gates of her heart opened and the flood poured
forth. Others who habitually do their duty and find a sullen satisfaction
in making themselves and everybody else unhappy, might have withstood it.
I did not. I dared not. After the storm had abated I did tell her that
she might better have loved Ed Burke and worn a plain gold ring, but she
would not hear of it, and I thought perhaps as long as she had decided to
love somebody she could not marry, it had better be me. I, at least,
could treat her with an intelligent affection, and whenever she became
tired of her infatuation she could go none the worse for it. For I was
decided on that point although I knew how hard it would be. I remembered
the usual termination of Platonic liaisons, and thought how disgusted I
had been whenever I heard of one. I knew I was undertaking a great deal
for so unscrupulous a man as I was, and I dreamed the future, but never
for one moment did I doubt that she was safe with me. Had it been anybody
but Tessie I should not have bothered my head about scruples. For it did
not occur to me to sacrifice Tessie as I would have sacrificed a woman of
the world. I looked the future squarely in the face and saw the several
probable endings to the affair. She would either tire of the whole thing,
or become so unhappy that I should have either to marry her or go away.
If I married her we would be unhappy. I with a wife unsuited to me, and
she with a husband unsuitable for any woman. For my past life could
scarcely entitle me to marry. If I went away she might either fall ill,
recover, and marry some Eddie Burke, or she might recklessly or
deliberately go and do something foolish. On the other hand, if she tired
of me, then her whole life would be before her with beautiful vistas of
Eddie Burkes and marriage rings and twins and Harlem flats and Heaven
knows what. As I strolled along through the trees by the Washington Arch,
I decided that she should find a substantial friend in me, anyway, and
the future could take care of itself. Then I went into the house and put
on my evening dress, for the little faintly-perfumed note on my dresser
said, ""Have a cab at the stage door at eleven,"" and the note was signed
""Edith Carmichel, Metropolitan Theatre.""

I took supper that night, or rather we took supper, Miss Carmichel and I,
at Solari's, and the dawn was just beginning to gild the cross on the
Memorial Church as I entered Washington Square after leaving Edith at the
Brunswick. There was not a soul in the park as I passed along the trees
and took the walk which leads from the Garibaldi statue to the Hamilton
Apartment House, but as I passed the churchyard I saw a figure sitting on
the stone steps. In spite of myself a chill crept over me at the sight of
the white puffy face, and I hastened to pass. Then he said something
which might have been addressed to me or might merely have been a mutter
to himself, but a sudden furious anger flamed up within me that such a
creature should address me. For an instant I felt like wheeling about and
smashing my stick over his head, but I walked on, and entering the
Hamilton went to my apartment. For some time I tossed about the bed
trying to get the sound of his voice out of my ears, but could not. It
filled my head, that muttering sound, like thick oily smoke from a
fat-rendering vat or an odour of noisome decay. And as I lay and tossed
about, the voice in my ears seemed more distinct, and I began to
understand the words he had muttered. They came to me slowly as if I had
forgotten them, and at last I could make some sense out of the sounds. It
was this:

""Have you found the Yellow Sign?""

""Have you found the Yellow Sign?""

""Have you found the Yellow Sign?""

I was furious. What did he mean by that? Then with a curse upon him and
his I rolled over and went to sleep, but when I awoke later I looked pale
and haggard, for I had dreamed the dream of the night before, and it
troubled me more than I cared to think.

I dressed and went down into my studio. Tessie sat by the window, but as
I came in she rose and put both arms around my neck for an innocent kiss.
She looked so sweet and dainty that I kissed her again and then sat down
before the easel.

""Hello! Where's the study I began yesterday?"" I asked.

Tessie looked conscious, but did not answer. I began to hunt among the
piles of canvases, saying, ""Hurry up, Tess, and get ready; we must take
advantage of the morning light.""

When at last I gave up the search among the other canvases and turned to
look around the room for the missing study I noticed Tessie standing by
the screen with her clothes still on.

""What's the matter,"" I asked, ""don't you feel well?""

""Yes.""

""Then hurry.""

""Do you want me to pose as--as I have always posed?""

Then I understood. Here was a new complication. I had lost, of course,
the best nude model I had ever seen. I looked at Tessie. Her face was
scarlet. Alas! Alas! We had eaten of the tree of knowledge, and Eden and
native innocence were dreams of the past--I mean for her.

I suppose she noticed the disappointment on my face, for she said: ""I
will pose if you wish. The study is behind the screen here where I put
it.""

""No,"" I said, ""we will begin something new;"" and I went into my wardrobe
and picked out a Moorish costume which fairly blazed with tinsel. It was
a genuine costume, and Tessie retired to the screen with it enchanted.
When she came forth again I was astonished. Her long black hair was bound
above her forehead with a circlet of turquoises, and the ends, curled
about her glittering girdle. Her feet were encased in the embroidered
pointed slippers and the skirt of her costume, curiously wrought with
arabesques in silver, fell to her ankles. The deep metallic blue vest
embroidered with silver and the short Mauresque jacket spangled and sewn
with turquoises became her wonderfully. She came up to me and held up her
face smiling. I slipped my hand into my pocket, and drawing out a gold
chain with a cross attached, dropped it over her head.

""It's yours, Tessie.""

""Mine?"" she faltered.

""Yours. Now go and pose,"" Then with a radiant smile she ran behind the
screen and presently reappeared with a little box on which was written my
name.

""I had intended to give it to you when I went home to-night,"" she said,
""but I can't wait now.""

I opened the box. On the pink cotton inside lay a clasp of black onyx, on
which was inlaid a curious symbol or letter in gold. It was neither
Arabic nor Chinese, nor, as I found afterwards, did it belong to any
human script.

""It's all I had to give you for a keepsake,"" she said timidly.

I was annoyed, but I told her how much I should prize it, and promised to
wear it always. She fastened it on my coat beneath the lapel.

""How foolish, Tess, to go and buy me such a beautiful thing as this,"" I
said.

""I did not buy it,"" she laughed.

""Where did you get it?""

Then she told me how she had found it one day while coming from the
Aquarium in the Battery, how she had advertised it and watched the
papers, but at last gave up all hopes of finding the owner.

""That was last winter,"" she said, ""the very day I had the first horrid
dream about the hearse.""

I remembered my dream of the previous night but said nothing, and
presently my charcoal was flying over a new canvas, and Tessie stood
motionless on the model-stand.




III

The day following was a disastrous one for me. While moving a framed
canvas from one easel to another my foot slipped on the polished floor,
and I fell heavily on both wrists. They were so badly sprained that it
was useless to attempt to hold a brush, and I was obliged to wander about
the studio, glaring at unfinished drawings and sketches, until despair
seized me and I sat down to smoke and twiddle my thumbs with rage. The
rain blew against the windows and rattled on the roof of the church,
driving me into a nervous fit with its interminable patter. Tessie sat
sewing by the window, and every now and then raised her head and looked
at me with such innocent compassion that I began to feel ashamed of my
irritation and looked about for something to occupy me. I had read all
the papers and all the books in the library, but for the sake of
something to do I went to the bookcases and shoved them open with my
elbow. I knew every volume by its colour and examined them all, passing
slowly around the library and whistling to keep up my spirits. I was
turning to go into the dining-room when my eye fell upon a book bound in
serpent skin, standing in a corner of the top shelf of the last bookcase.
I did not remember it, and from the floor could not decipher the pale
lettering on the back, so I went to the smoking-room and called Tessie.
She came in from the studio and climbed up to reach the book.

""What is it?"" I asked.

""_The King in Yellow._""

I was dumfounded. Who had placed it there? How came it in my rooms? I had
long ago decided that I should never open that book, and nothing on earth
could have persuaded me to buy it. Fearful lest curiosity might tempt me
to open it, I had never even looked at it in book-stores. If I ever had
had any curiosity to read it, the awful tragedy of young Castaigne, whom
I knew, prevented me from exploring its wicked pages. I had always
refused to listen to any description of it, and indeed, nobody ever
ventured to discuss the second part aloud, so I had absolutely no
knowledge of what those leaves might reveal. I stared at the poisonous
mottled binding as I would at a snake.

""Don't touch it, Tessie,"" I said; ""come down.""

Of course my admonition was enough to arouse her curiosity, and before I
could prevent it she took the book and, laughing, danced off into the
studio with it. I called to her, but she slipped away with a tormenting
smile at my helpless hands, and I followed her with some impatience.

""Tessie!"" I cried, entering the library, ""listen, I am serious. Put that
book away. I do not wish you to open it!"" The library was empty. I went
into both drawing-rooms, then into the bedrooms, laundry, kitchen, and
finally returned to the library and began a systematic search. She had
hidden herself so well that it was half-an-hour later when I discovered
her crouching white and silent by the latticed window in the store-room
above. At the first glance I saw she had been punished for her
foolishness. _The King in Yellow_ lay at her feet, but the book was
open at the second part. I looked at Tessie and saw it was too late. She
had opened _The King in Yellow_. Then I took her by the hand and led
her into the studio. She seemed dazed, and when I told her to lie down on
the sofa she obeyed me without a word. After a while she closed her eyes
and her breathing became regular and deep, but I could not determine
whether or not she slept. For a long while I sat silently beside her, but
she neither stirred nor spoke, and at last I rose, and, entering the
unused store-room, took the book in my least injured hand. It seemed
heavy as lead, but I carried it into the studio again, and sitting down
on the rug beside the sofa, opened it and read it through from beginning
to end.

When, faint with excess of my emotions, I dropped the volume and leaned
wearily back against the sofa, Tessie opened her eyes and looked at
me....

We had been speaking for some time in a dull monotonous strain before I
realized that we were discussing _The King in Yellow_. Oh the sin of
writing such words,--words which are clear as crystal, limpid and musical
as bubbling springs, words which sparkle and glow like the poisoned
diamonds of the Medicis! Oh the wickedness, the hopeless damnation of a
soul who could fascinate and paralyze human creatures with such
words,--words understood by the ignorant and wise alike, words which are
more precious than jewels, more soothing than music, more awful than
death!

We talked on, unmindful of the gathering shadows, and she was begging me
to throw away the clasp of black onyx quaintly inlaid with what we now
knew to be the Yellow Sign. I never shall know why I refused, though even
at this hour, here in my bedroom as I write this confession, I should be
glad to know _what_ it was that prevented me from tearing the Yellow
Sign from my breast and casting it into the fire. I am sure I wished to
do so, and yet Tessie pleaded with me in vain. Night fell and the hours
dragged on, but still we murmured to each other of the King and the
Pallid Mask, and midnight sounded from the misty spires in the
fog-wrapped city. We spoke of Hastur and of Cassilda, while outside the
fog rolled against the blank window-panes as the cloud waves roll and
break on the shores of Hali.

The house was very silent now, and not a sound came up from the misty
streets. Tessie lay among the cushions, her face a grey blot in the
gloom, but her hands were clasped in mine, and I knew that she knew and
read my thoughts as I read hers, for we had understood the mystery of the
Hyades and the Phantom of Truth was laid. Then as we answered each other,
swiftly, silently, thought on thought, the shadows stirred in the gloom
about us, and far in the distant streets we heard a sound. Nearer and
nearer it came, the dull crunching of wheels, nearer and yet nearer, and
now, outside before the door it ceased, and I dragged myself to the
window and saw a black-plumed hearse. The gate below opened and shut, and
I crept shaking to my door and bolted it, but I knew no bolts, no locks,
could keep that creature out who was coming for the Yellow Sign. And now
I heard him moving very softly along the hall. Now he was at the door,
and the bolts rotted at his touch. Now he had entered. With eyes starting
from my head I peered into the darkness, but when he came into the room I
did not see him. It was only when I felt him envelope me in his cold soft
grasp that I cried out and struggled with deadly fury, but my hands were
useless and he tore the onyx clasp from my coat and struck me full in the
face. Then, as I fell, I heard Tessie's soft cry and her spirit fled: and
even while falling I longed to follow her, for I knew that the King in
Yellow had opened his tattered mantle and there was only God to cry to
now.

I could tell more, but I cannot see what help it will be to the world. As
for me, I am past human help or hope. As I lie here, writing, careless
even whether or not I die before I finish, I can see the doctor gathering
up his powders and phials with a vague gesture to the good priest beside
me, which I understand.

They will be very curious to know the tragedy--they of the outside world
who write books and print millions of newspapers, but I shall write no
more, and the father confessor will seal my last words with the seal of
sanctity when his holy office is done. They of the outside world may send
their creatures into wrecked homes and death-smitten firesides, and their
newspapers will batten on blood and tears, but with me their spies must
halt before the confessional. They know that Tessie is dead and that I am
dying. They know how the people in the house, aroused by an infernal
scream, rushed into my room and found one living and two dead, but they
do not know what I shall tell them now; they do not know that the doctor
said as he pointed to a horrible decomposed heap on the floor--the livid
corpse of the watchman from the church: ""I have no theory, no explanation.
That man must have been dead for months!""


I think I am dying. I wish the priest would--


","
By Their smell can men sometimes know Them near, but of Their semblance can no man know, saving only in the features of those They have begotten on mankind; and of those there are many sorts, differing in likeness from man's truest eidolon to that shape without sight or substance which is Them. They walk unseen and foul in lonely places where the Words have been spoken and the Rites howled through at their Seasons. The wind gibbers with Their voices, and the earth mutters with Their consciousness.
-- The Necronomicon

The lighthouse was a steal. Sure, it needed a little fixing up. ""Handyman's Special"" was how the realty company had listed the quaint brick cylinder. Howard knew ""Handyman's Special"" was realty-speak for ""Sucker's Money-Pit."" This was his fifth lighthouse in the last two years and he had come to understand realty-speak, and realtors quite well. He had purchased what lighthouses he could, the first in Northern California, three in Washington state, and now this one, in the small town of Timber Bay on Oregon's South coast.
He still hadn't found what he had been looking for.
Howard Flips had been many things in his forty years, nothing serious mind you, manual labor of course was below someone like Howard, but then again, when waiting for an inheritance, one can't be too picky about how one earns a living in the meantime. He'd been a librarian's assistant in Massachusetts in the 80's, a ship's cook on board a South Seas cruise ship for most of the 90's, and then it had happened. After overcoming colon cancer, prostate cancer, three strokes, a triple bypass, and the loss of most of his sight and all of his hearing, Howard's father had finally passed away.
He had choked on a chicken bone.
Then the glorious day had arrived. Howard sat in the law offices of Leach, Kling, Hammar and Kleever as Hubris Leach, his father's attorney of sixty years, informed Howard that he had inherited a sum of money somewhere in the vicinity of ten or twelve million dollars, presented him with a check in the amount of eight million dollars, and said the rest would follow pending the liquidation of all assets as per his father's specific instructions.
Eight million dollars.
Howard had plans. They had been forming since he had been helping out in the library at Miskatonic University in Arkham, Massachusetts in the 80's. Howard had read in an obscure text in an even more obscure manuscript written sometime during World War II known as the Book of Hidden Numbers, (a weighty tome which Howard had discovered alongside such dreaded volumes as the Necronomicon, the Cultes des Goules, the Revelations of Glaaki, and the Book of Eibon, all of which were kept under lock and key at the university library) of a chamber deep in the bowels of a lighthouse somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. A chamber with a tide pool, which led into an underwater cavern filled with creatures that would bestow immortality upon any and all who would agree to feed them. These creatures could not venture out of their underground dwellings to gather the unnamed food they needed to flourish. Yet, if they did not receive this food, they would go dormant, and that is what the manuscript said had happened in the early twentieth century.
According to the text, the lighthouse keeper had accidentally discovered the cavern at an unusually low tide cycle, had encountered the creatures, which the text did not describe other than to call them ""horrific"" and ""ghastly,"" and there they offered him their deal. Regular feedings for immortality. The keeper agreed, and was able to continue feeding them until his disappearance in 1928. Howard didn't know if they had acquired a new servant, the lighthouse keeper was never seen again, and the book had no copyright date, only that it had been printed in Berlin in the 30's. There was no further mention of the lighthouses or the creatures in the book.
The fact that the lighthouse keeper had disappeared made Howard wonder if the lure of immortality offered by the creatures was genuine or just a dangling carrot. It didn't matter, Howard meant to find out either way. He was drawn to the idea. He was obsessed with it. He had even dreamed about it numerous times. Strange dreams of underwater cities of alien origin, and whispering voices speaking unheard languages, chanting unknown incantations designed to foster an atmosphere conducive to the bringing forth of some great and dreadful being. He actually considered the search for the chamber beneath the lighthouse a Higher Calling. And so upon receiving his inheritance, he made a decision to tour all of the lighthouses in the Pacific Northwest, buying any and all of them that he could, and searching for the underground chamber. But until that particular autumn afternoon his search had turned up nothing but moss-covered brick towers which the Coast Guard had made obsolete with their newfangled aids to navigation, or forgotten lighthouses that had been replaced by newer, more modern structures.
But no hidden chamber.
And no creatures.
Howard slid the old-fashioned skeleton key into the rusty lock which made a low grating sound, and found to his surprise that it turned quite easily. He pushed open the old wooden door a little harder than he probably should have and the door swung open and crashed against the stone wall inside with a loud bang. There was suddenly what sounded like a fluttering of feathers overhead and Howard assumed that there was probably a whole community of bats or pigeons, or both, living in the long-abandoned lighthouse. No matter, he had no plans to move in.
Not yet anyway.
In comparison to the other lighthouses that Howard had visited in the previous months, this one was actually well lit. Long horizontal windows spiraled upward, following the narrow stairway as it wound its way around the inner walls of the old building, allowing the sun to penetrate the damp air that lingered inside. But it wasn't the lighting that struck Howard as strange; for indeed, as soon as he had stepped inside the lighthouse he could actually feel a difference from all of the other lighthouses that he had seen; but it was the absence of something so common in old buildings that one could easily overlook it, if one were not observant.
But Howard was an observant fellow.
He stamped his feet on the ground a few times and looked up at the windows, waiting. But what he was looking for was not there. There were no dust motes flitting in the rays of sunshine that spilled in through the narrow windows. No dust motes. None. Every old building he had searched had millions of dust motes swirling into the beams of sunshine that streamed through their ancient panes of glass. But not here. The place was mildewed and damp and wet and slippery and just plain cold. The chill seemed to permeate everything. Outside the temperature was a wondrous 65 degrees, but within the walls of that ancient tower of light it could easily have been half that. He started to walk further inside to get a look around and slipped. If anyone had been watching he probably would have looked like a beginning ice skater trying to keep his balance. He steadied himself by putting one hand against the wall and his hand sank into a slick, sticky substance. He quickly yanked it away. He brought the open palm to his face and sniffed.
That was the first time he threw up that day.
He tried his handkerchief, but the only thing that came off of the palm of his left hand and into the handkerchief was that horrible odor. He walked carefully over to a nearby table and tried scraping his hand clean on its edge. That helped a little. As a kid he used to smear rubber cement all over the palms of his hands and then peel it off after it had dried, making little sticky rubber balls. This stuff reminded Howard of that rubber cement, only this substance was a lot more mucilaginous. He pulled his pocket knife out of . . . his pocket and tried scraping the stuff off that way. That worked much better, and in a few minutes he had succeeded in getting most of the gummy substance off of his hand. But it was now all over the blade of his knife and so he simply left the knife on the table.
After all, the place was his. And he could afford a new knife.
A feeling of . . . separateness . . . suddenly came over Howard. This lighthouse felt more like . . . a holy place than an ancient warning beacon. Not ""holy"" in the Judeo-Christian sense of the word, but more in its meaning of sacredness. The ancient Greek and Hebrew words for ""Holy"" actually meant ""set aside; separate."" That's what this place felt like . . . holy . . . yet . . . not a good holy, more like a bad holy; a malevolent sinister evil lingered in every particle of non-dust-moted air, a diabolic ambiance that saturated every atom, every cell. Could it be possible?
Could this be the place?
A shiver ran up Howard's back and he tried not to get his hopes up. After buying five lighthouses and exploring three times as many, he had almost started to feel as if the Book of Hidden Numbers was just a hoax. A so-called sacred text created to part the proverbial fool and his proverbial money. But he just couldn't shake that feeling of . . .
Destiny.
If any place he had visited had ever exuded a wisp of anticipation and the apprehension of the object of Howard's quest, this one did. This one seemed to say, Come Howard! Come inside and find your . . .

Destiny . . . ?
Yes. Destiny. For the first time since stepping inside, Howard took a good look around. He stuffed his hands inside the pockets of his London Fog and sniffed, curls of steam spiraled out of his nostrils as he exhaled. The round room was bare save the desk which held Howard's now defiled blade. The floor was covered with a dark green algae of some sort, no doubt the cause of Howard's slip; the walls were bare, except in spots here and there was the sticky essence that had befouled Howard's palm. Upon closer inspection he noticed that the sticky stuff on the walls seemed to be a series of blotches the size of a human head. Furthermore they seemed to be evenly spaced apart, almost like . . . footprints, or hand prints, or . . .
Howard blinked. On the far side of the room he spotted a rusted iron ring laying on the concrete floor. He went over to it and saw the outline of some type of trap door surrounding the ring.
""Howard,"" a voice whispered over his shoulder.
Howard spun around. ""What's that? Who's there?"" The open door that he had entered stood out like a bright green rectangle, as Howard saw the bushes outside the lighthouse reflecting the afternoon sun standing, in stark contrast to the grey walls surrounding it. But there was no reply to his inquiry.
He continued to stare at the open door, but there was nothing there, only the overgrown blackberry vines that wound their way up the litter of pines that surrounded the lighthouse. He bent over and grabbed hold of the iron ring and gave it a slow steady pull. At first he thought that it was not going to budge, but when he had heard a slippery sucking noise, like the sound a foot makes when pulled out of deep mud, he went at it with a gusto that was actually surprising to him, and the door opened.
It was a heavy door, no question about that, but Howard had not even so much as found a basement in any of the lighthouses he had inspected previously, and like the petite mothers who lifted cars off of their newborn infants, Howard threw the door open without so much as a grunt. The black aperture gaped at him, beckoning.
Adrenaline coursed.
Destiny called.
""Howard."" The whispering voice seemed to beckon from deep within the darkened tunnel.
Howard pulled out his flashlight and turned it on, shining the beam of light down into an abyss of moss-covered stone steps and various fungi clinging to water-soaked walls. Without hesitation Howard began carefully descending the steps. His heart began beating faster, he could actually feel it increase in its palpitations. His blood pulsed loud in his ears. His mouth went dry. Could this be it? Could this really be the place? Howard tried desperately to fight off the instinct to cry, Eureka! I've found it! But he would not allow himself to be disappointed so bitterly, he had searched too long, come too far, drank too many espresso's with over-the-hill real estate saleswomen with their dyed and sprayed hair, fake fingernails and pancake make-up, spent too much money in search of this . . . this . . . what was he searching for, anyway? He had almost forgotten, the purpose lingering on the fringes of his consciousness . . . Ah yes! Servanthood for immortality, that was it! He had certainly come too far to let emotions lead him now. He must remain calm, cool-headed, reserved. After all, if it was all true, he would need to make a good impression.
Wouldn't he?
Of course. So he stopped on the steps and closed his eyes. He breathed in and out, practicing the relaxation techniques he had learned from the tapes he had in his glove compartment. In and out. Slowly, deliberately. In . . . hold for five seconds. Out . . . exhale for ten. In . . . out . . . in . . . out. There, that was better, he felt ready to continue.
Get a grip man. Do you think they'll take an emotionally unstable applicant seriously?
They didn't have to know he had been on antidepressants for months. Howard opened his eyes and peered down the beam of his flashlight into the bowels of the lighthouse. In the orifice there was only blackness, and the occasional ears of rippling fungus that grew out of the old bricks like warts. Something was different here. The air was actually getting warmer, yet at the same time that musty, nauseating odor that had filled his nostrils upstairs earlier was increasing. It was almost as if . . .
As if something actually lived down there.
By his own count Howard had descended two dozen steps when the trap door above him slammed shut. His ears popped, like when he would slam the door in his Volkswagen Beetle, and he winced at the pain.
No turning back now Howard.
Panic raced from his head to his chest and dropped into his knees like a jolt of high voltage. Howard's first instinct was to race back up the stairs, to somehow muster the strength to throw that massive trap door open and flee. Just run. It didn't matter where, just as long as it was far away from this place. Forget the money and the years he had spent in search of. . .
Just forget it.
But though he actually tried, he couldn't move. He was literally, and for the first time in all of his life, . . . paralyzed . . . incapacitated. If the Hordes of Hell had come bounding up those lichen-covered stairs he would be fortunate to even be able to let out a scream, much less try to defend himself, or attempt escape. And so Howard Flips stood there in the dank darkness. Unable to move, unable to speak, unable to do anything except perhaps let his bladder flow freely, against his will, of course. But that didn't happen. Instead, the wave of fear passed, the panic subsided like a receding tide in a time-lapsed film. And Howard was again . . . Howard. Out of habit, and an unconscious attempt at self-comfort, he adjusted his glasses on the bridge of his nose, sniffed, and stretched.
That was better. He was ready to continue.
Who locked you in here Howard?
Howard pushed the thought away. It didn't matter. He was certain that he had found what he had been looking for. He continued his descent, calmly. When he had counted seventy-five steps, he found that he had reached the bottom, or a bottom. In the distance he could hear water drip-dripping, as from a ceiling into a pool beneath. His light beam pierced the darkness, and he saw that there was a passageway. Not a natural formation, but a tunnel that had actually been dug. By human hands.
Well, Howard assumed that the hands that created this tunnel were human.
He proceeded down the narrow passageway; the fungi was thick along the walls, the stone floor was slick, and deep green. He rounded a turn and thought he saw a dim glow further down the tunnel. He stopped for a moment, switching off his flashlight and taking in his claustrophobic surroundings. There was indeed a greenish-yellow radiance off in the distance, and the sound of dripping water grew louder. He thought he heard something shuffling down the steps behind him. And then a thought struck. . . .
How can you be so sure that whatever shut that trapdoor isn't locked in here with you?
The time-lapsed film ran again and the tide of fear rose. Howard turned on his flashlight and shined its beam behind him, in the direction of the alleged noise. But there was nothing there. At least nothing he could see. He turned back around and walked toward the glow. Seconds later he found himself entering a large cavern. Splinters of sunlight sliced through the darkness at various points along one high wall, as if cracks and crevices in the cliffs that lined the ocean had purposely allowed air and light into this abysmal asylum, to nurture, or at the very least, allow to exist, some type of life forms.
The sunlight splashed on the algae-covered walls of the cavern like vandal's paint. Water dripped from overhead and landed in what Howard now saw was a small pool. A tide pool no doubt, being this close to the ocean. Howard knelt and scooped up some water, tasting his fingers. Yes. It was salt water.
This has to be it! This has to be the cave! he thought. He shut off his flashlight and let his eyes adjust to the light. As he stood there in the semi-darkness, he tried to remember what he had done with that transcript from the Book of Hidden Numbers that explained this place. He felt around in his pockets and finally found the crumpled piece of notebook paper that he had been carrying around for years. He couldn't remember the last time he had actually read the passage, and so was glad that he had found the transcript. He opened it up, switched his flashlight back on, and read:


Should they not receive their food on a regular basis, they will lapse into a dormant sleep, until the Time. This would be devastating to the cause of the Great Old Ones, and cannot be accepted in any way. There are two who are responsible for their safety and flourishing. The first is the human servant, the lighthouse keeper, whoever that may be. He must be recruited and ordained into service, his pay is the promise of immortality. The second one is the Thing from Between. He is the recruiter. He cannot venture out for the food, yet he cannot join the cavern dwellers, because of his nature. He is more foul and terrible than the cavern dwellers, and cannot be trusted to insure the lighthouse keeper's safety. Therefore, a fail-safe has been put into place. Should the servant lighthouse keeper ever be found missing, and the dwellers begin their lapse into dormancy, then the call will go out into the subconscious mind of a chosen recruit. And he shall find them, and he shall revive them.

The Thing from Between? Be recruited? The call? . . . he couldn't remember reading that part before. Howard became confused. He was certain he had never read that passage before. He only remembered that the text told of the hidden cavern and the needed lighthouse keeper. There was no mention of a ""Thing from Between"" . . . that he could remember. It was as if . . . 
A noise came from down the passageway from which he had emerged. Was there really someone, or some-thing between him and the trap door? Howard furrowed his brow. His ears began to ring and the air suddenly seemed charged with electricity. He backed away from the entrance to the tunnel and pressed himself against a wet wall. He could feel the water soaking through his trench coat, through his shirt, and finally into his skin, and a chill ran through his body.
There was no doubt in his mind now, there was something coming down the passageway. But it was not footsteps that he heard, but rather a slithering, sucking sound, as if a dwarf with a limp was slowly dragging a drenched quilt across a rough surface. The sound was getting closer, and it was all Howard could do to keep from screaming maniacally and diving into the dark tide pool at his feet. He bit down on his clenched fist, and raised his darkened flashlight above his head, as if that might protect him from . . . that . . . thing.
His eyes were fully adjusted to the dimly lit cavern and locked on the doorway to the tunnel. The noise grew louder, and then stopped.
Nothing came out of the portal.
Howard held his breath and watched. But nothing happened. Minutes passed. Still nothing. Soon, Howard's arm began to cramp from holding his flashlight above his head and so he lowered his arm. But he dared not switch on the light, or move. Maybe whatever it was stopped its pursuit of Howard because it could no longer hear him, or see his flashlight beam. Maybe it turned around and left. Maybe . . . 
It's still there, Howard.
This time Howard didn't push the thoughts away, instead, he decided to just let them flow. Perhaps they could actually help him, perhaps they would be his only salvation. He thought that whatever it was in the tunnel might possibly be waiting for him to present himself as a recruit. Yes! Maybe that it was it! Maybe it wasn't going to hurt him at all, but was just simply waiting for him to come forward and say ""Here I am!"" After all, didn't the text talk about a recruiter?
The water in the tide pool splashed.
Howard jerked in a spasm of fear, and let out a scream that no matter how hard he tried he could not contain. The water went still as the ripples lapped the dark rocky shore at Howard's feet. Then with a great splashing and sloshing of water something jumped from the tide pool to the floor next to Howard. It was like a man, yet unlike any man that he had ever seen. It raised itself up on two feet and was taller than Howard by a good yard. It was humanoid in shape, with two legs, two long and lanky arms that ended in webbed, spindly, claw-tipped fingers, a long slim torso, and sitting atop a bull-like neck was an elongated head, with two large round orbs where eyes should be, two tiny slits for a nose, and a long, ear-to-ear slice for a mouth. Its rubbery skin glistened in the little light that the cracks in the cliffs allowed through. It had webbed feet, not unlike those of a frog or a toad. But the most striking thing to Howard was the smell. Mists of the foul effluvium drifted off the top of its head. And for the second time that day, Howard vomited, all over the feet of the creature that stood before him.
When he looked up, Howard saw the creature looking over at the entrance to the tunnel, and it barked. The sound was like a cross between a lion's roar, and a lap dog's yap. Howard heard the slithering sucking noise in the tunnel again, this time growing fainter, as whatever it was in that dark hallway was retreating. The tall creature swung its head around and stooped down, putting its reptilian face mere inches from Howard's. Howard tried breathing through his mouth only, to avoid the smell, but it was no use, and he bent over and threw up again. When he looked up the creature was still there, still stooped, still in his face. Its tiny nostril slits expanded and contracted as it moved its head over the top of Howard's scalp, it was smelling him. Howard was in such a state of shock, fear, and panic, that once again, he found himself paralyzed.
Is this really happening to me? he thought.
Then, another voice spoke in his head, like his own thoughts, yet it was not his voice. ""Yes, Howard, it is happening. Did you not present yourself here for consideration of service?""
Howard let out a yelp and fell to his knees.
This time the creature spoke out of its mouth. ""Would you prefer,"" it croaked, ""that I speak to you in this manner?"" Howard saw rows and rows of nail-like teeth lining the creature's jaws. And he nodded rapidly, actually meaning to shake his head, he did not want to see those teeth or smell that putrid breath again. ""Very well then."" It grunted and continued. ""You obviously believe, Howard, or you would not be here.""
""How do you know my name?"" Howard stammered.
""Because we have been calling you, Howard. You were chosen.""
""I didn't hear anyone calling me.""
""Come now, Howard, stop with all of this foolishness. Do you wish to serve us, or not?""
Howard was silent for a moment, and in the distance, he thought he heard the slithering noise. ""Yes.""
""Very well then,"" it croaked, and reached one of its long hands down and wrapped itself around the top of Howard's skull. Sparks floated into Howard's peripheral vision, and then he blacked out.
* * *

When he awoke, Howard was in a room at the top of the lighthouse. It was still daylight, of course, but Howard wasn't sure if still was the proper term to use, for he had no idea how many days he had been unconscious or how he had gotten up to the top of the lighthouse. He ran his hand across his chin and noticed that he had grown a full beard. His clothes were tattered and torn.
He looked at his hands and they were filthy. His fingernails were long and caked with a dark substance. He was abruptly becoming aware that a considerable length of time had actually passed.
""How long have, Iâ!,"" Howard started, but was stopped in mid-sentence. There was a small wooden trap door in the floor, no doubt the access to the stairs, and Howard's attention was drawn to it because it was creaking open.
""Don't worry, Howard,"" he heard a whispering voice say. ""You have served well, and this won't hurt a bit."" Howard watched the trap door open, and saw a long tentacle, like that of a giant octopus come slithering rapidly from the crack toward his face.
It wrapped itself around Howard's neck and squeezed. His spectacles fell to the floor.
And Howard slipped into the promised immortality.
",False
"""Once, mankind accepted a simple truth: that they were not alone in this universe.""
-Anthony Hopkins as Odin, Thor (2011).

Hanoi, Socialist Republic of Vietnam
June 24, 2011.
""Hey, we're here. Get up if you don't want to wake up in Hue!""
Joseph Clayton was shaken awake by the hand of one of his classmates on his shoulder. He was sitting in the back of a taxi van... the only one left sitting, actually, as the others had already disembarked to enter the government office they were parked in front of.
Which probably meant that he was left to pay the fare.
After he payed (as seemed to be his lot on this trip), he followed his classmates and his professor into the government office where they hoped to finally receive their travel permits. He hadn't gotten much of sleep on the plane; a mixture of excitement in the face of overseas travel and sheer jet-lag had conspired to leave him weary and light headed until he got a few hours sleep, which the taxi ride had partially afforded him.
And in that sleep...
The dream had come as a stark, clear memory. When Marie had said that she wasn't going to join him at the Miskatonic campus in Arkham for what would be their first year of university, he had been devastated. His first questions, rushed and frantic, had been about the cause of such a change. She certainly had the SAT score to qualify and student debt could be handled with relative ease. Had she decided to forgo post-secondary to concentrate on her stake in the restaurant? Had financial problems struck and prevented admissions from being paid?
Was it something about him?
Her answers, far more controlled than his frenzied speculation, had all been in the negative. Her SAT scores were good, student loans were still open and she still intended to go for a degree in Biology at Miskatonic. It was just... after she'd gotten that phonograph from her parents' home village, the repayment had been a promise to come and spend a year back in the ""Old Country"" as soon as she could. It would only be for a year and then she would return, ready for university and all accompaniments.
That had been very nearly one year before. She had promised him that she would be coming back in the summer of 2011... but after she had arrived in Vietnam, all contact had stopped cold. Her parents, when asked about her condition, always responded with affirmations that she would return and that she was fine... but as winter wore onto spring, subtle hints of doubt and worry had crept into their voices. Had they even been receiving any news from their daughter and if not, then why not? Had something gone terribly wrong?
As it happened, more baffling events awaited inside.
""What do you mean, restricted?"" Joseph asked the Communist Party bureaucrat sitting across the desk from him. Of course, due to the facts that first, said bureaucrat was a government employee and second, they were not alone in the room, Joseph had been careful not to sound too brunt in his tone. A trung sior Sergeant, wearing the forest green uniform of the Vietnam Border Defence Force (VPA), stood by the door of the office, both watching and guarding.
Relieved at being able to shed his stilted English after Joseph exhibited a decent grasp of the Vietnamese language, the bureaucrat put forth what he knew of the situation. ""Civilian access is almost completely denied inside the area you requested. To be honest, that section of the border has been troublesome ever since the war. We get reports of smugglers, poachers, bandits, H'mong insurgents... every type of violent counter-revolutionary you can think of, this region seems to have it. The local Bru farmers aren't much help, but they generally don't bother others and seem to accept the military presence we keep there."" The bureaucrat shifted his gaze from Joseph to Professor Neville Andover, the leader of this particular expedition. ""I'm sorry, but there's nothing that can be done without high level authorization.""
As a response to this, Neville Andover did not get upset. He did not resign himself to failure. He did not even try to ask if there was any other avenue of entry or way to access the information he needed. He just donned an odd, amused smile, the corners of his eyes crinkling behind his wire rim glasses. ""I assume that General Vo is still the Secretary for the Border Forces?"" He asked, almost distractedly. When the official answered yes, Professor Andover reached into the inside of his light cotton jacket and pulled out a small, metal case. From this case, he removed a single paper card of purest black, embossed with an emerald green ""Delta"" symbol and a capital ""Y"" of gold in the center of that hollow triangle. ""I have been in contact with Comrade Vo for the last six months, planning this expedition as an act of cooperation between our two governments and as a boon for my University. He knows that card; show it or describe it to him... you maywant to run it by General Tran as well. Either way, they will give you the answer you need.""
As the bureaucrat took the card and then as the Border Defense sergeant took it from him and headed out of the room, Joesph wondered about his professor and the oddities that surrounded him. The first time he had ever seen the Professor, it had been in his High School Auditorium as Marie had performed the Stork Dance... and Joseph had noticed strange things. In their senior year of High School, both he and Marie had received reference letters to Miskatonic University in Arkham, a town in Essex county. When he had arrived at Miskatonic (without Marie), he had been shocked that the professor for his Cultural Anthropology class was not only the one who had given him his reference but was also the man who had he had seen three years before.
And then there were his classmates, three of whom had also come on this expedition. Many of them had received similar letters from Prof. Andover and most of those, though not relaying specifics, had said that they had found the circumstances equally strange. Two who had gotten references were on this very trip with them. The first was Tracy Williams from the farm country of Northwest Virginia, a girl with blond hair quite a few shades lighter than Josephs own brassy brown and the class Nippon-Nut, being both obsessed with Anime and Manga as well as being Japanese-proficient. The second was Albert Noyes, a young man who has part white, part black and a little Algonquin-Indian from a small hamlet in southern Vermont. His specialties were technology, math and Mandarin Chinese. The third member of retinue was a young man named Malone who... frankly, was a mystery to the entire class. However, he had volunteered for this trip and his grades had been excellent so his place on the roster had been assured.
But there was still a nagging question at the back of his mind: why? Why had they received offers to go to an obscure if admittedly exceptional regional university when the big names had all passed them over? Why had they been gathered from all across the United States by a single professor? And why, it seemed, did it feel like there was such a big connection between the missing member of Dr. Andovers ""collection"" and the reason behind this expedition?
Why did it feel as if Marie was somehow connected to this?
Eventually, the sergeant came back and informed the bureaucrat of General Vo's express permission for the Professor and his students to enter the exclusion zone as well as General Tran's confirmation, before handing the card back to Neville Andover. Joseph knew that academics could sometimes have friends in high and unusual places, but counting on ... no, expecting the approval of not just one, but two ranking Generals in a non-allied nation? This seemed crazy, certifiably insane even.
But then, so did spectral storks and spoonbills.
Northernmost Quang Binh Province, Socialist Republic of Vietnam
June 29, 2011
Despite the calm look on the professors face, something about the current situation made Joseph Clayton distinctly ill at ease.
They had spent the last two days trudging up into the Annamite mountains after leaving the fertile coastal plain. At the last village with road access, they had ditched their vehicles and backpacked up the ridges and trails, counting on a guide from the local Bru people to lead them to... whatever Prof. Andover was looking for. The fact that the guide was now legging it quite quickly back down the misty path told Joseph that something had either gone incredibly wrong or incredibly right.
Now, Neville Andover was chanting, seemingly trying to communicate with something deep in the thick underbrush on either side of the worn, overgrown gully that had been called a trail. The language was almost intellig ible to Joseph, being a form of Mon-Khmer linked to the classical Vietnamese he had studied, perhaps with a few hints of Muong intermixed. However, the syntax and grammer were archaic to say the least. From some of the words used it even seemed to be achingly familiar, almost as if...
With a sudden realization of shock and the smell of grilled pork and Bac Bon Dzhow a memory in his nostrils, Joseph realized where he had encountered this form of Vietic before.
But the shocks were not over.
Spun around by Albert Noyes to see something, Joseph gazed upward to see a human figure standing upon the high bank, glancing down at them with hard, measuring eyes. Undoubtedly masculine, the figure was of a man of slightly darker skin than the farmers of the coast (though the features were similar) and of greater height than either them or the native Bru. Clothed only in a white cotton kilt with geometric designs in black and a leather girdle, this man carried a white flatbow decorated with bands of green, blue and red while a bronze dagger rested at his hip. His head was shaved of all hair, and black designs were tattooed from the crown of the scalp to the jawline, with more tattoos covering his arms, chest and lower legs.
The fact that an arrow was nocked in the string of his bow put the four young people on edge, with Malone and Joesph himself tightening the grips on the hilts of their machetes in anticipation of a hopeless fight. More men in similar dress and tattoos, some with bronze slashing swords, some with bronze-headed spears and others with flatbows, appeared out of the forest on either side of them. Now that Joseph could get a better look at them in the dim light filtering down through the forest canopy and the mist, their arm tattoos began looking very similar to those borne by Marie's parents while those on their faces, while different in design, were still similar in form.
All the while, Prof. Andover kept up the low chanting, of which Joseph could pick out individual words: ""friend"", ""gods"", ""village"", ""priest"", ""comrade"" and at least one invocation of Ho Chi Minh among them. To this, these strange men seemed to confer with each other though glances and nods before took one took a short, bamboo tube from his girdle, put one end to his mouth, took a deep breath and blew.
As the silvery-blue powder erupted from the tube, settled on the heads of the trekking academics and they each lost consciousness in turn, Joseph wondered if this could get any worse.
Meanwhile, Spoonbill Village
Tsan Pho Dao had been the Chief Priest of this village for many years, ever since the death of his father in the closing days of the American War. In that span of years, he had seen many futures and advised his people based on those futures. He had called down both ruin and plenty by invoking the power of the gods of his people. He alone, in a feat outside even the power of the hereditary village chiefs, had communicated with the Instrument of their gods, a being possessed of both boundless knowledge and an absolutely rotten temper. He also, most importantly, had an absolutely perfect memory of his entire life... and that of his father, and his father before him.
To be perfectly honest, he held a tremendous amount of power within this village. The ancestor shrines belonged to families while the hunters had their own little shrines up the mountain where midnight rituals were performed to gather poison for the tips of arrows and darts. But those rituals needed to be performed by the minor priests under his command. This temple was the spiritual center of his people for most of the year and the temple with it's darkened wood walls lit only by feeble braziers whose light was twisted by the smoke of rare and powerful incenses, with it's figurines of gods and demons carved from nephrite and jadeite brought from deep below the earth... was his domain. His and no one else'. He divined the future when possible, he performed the rites and as a result, it was he who had taken countless lives in sacrifice over the course of his adulthood: chickens, pigs, goats, buffalo... people.
As he sat at a low table in his private sanctuary, trying to divine some course for a question that had faced him for most of a year, he noticed something. One of the golden discs he used for divination, a coin looted from a Chinese caravan many centuries ago, stood up on its rim and began to roll. Following the curve of failing momentum, the coin finally came to rest at a specific point on the table, a place that held indication of the future.
Visitors... and not the ""ketchup"" kind of visitors.
Several Hours Later, Close to the Laos Border
The answer to Joseph Clayton's earlier question was a definite yes. When he had awoken, he had found his wrists and ankles bound, the bindings looped over a pole carried by two men with him and the other students suspended like deer carcasses. The Professor, on the other hand, had not been bound, but had found transport by sitting in a large basket suspended from one of the poles by a cord, carried by a pair of men. They had been going downhill from the crest of a ridge and were now leaving the forest, coming onto a road. First, they passed under a wooden gate where roosting spoonbills had been carved into the posts and a sun flanked by two dragons had been carved into the beams above the road.
Then Joseph saw where they were headed. A village of perhaps thirty houses was visible in the valley bottom while narrow terraces had been cut into the hills above, green with growing rice. The view quickly vanished as the men began heading into the village itself but sight was soon replaced with sound. The quiet of the forest was supplanted by the cacophony of a hundred sounds: chickens and pigs grunted and clucked as the animals rooted below the houses and around the garbage heaps while odd-looking reddish dogs, lazing in the sun on the porches of the outermost houses, whined in surprise at the new arrivals. The sounds of tools and primitive machinery clunked melodiously. The sounds of people also were audible: talking, laughing, shouting and even a few low notes of women's work songs were possible for Joseph to pick out of the general buzz... a buzz which also included Albert trying to reason with their captors and Tracy displaying an unusually foul mouth toward same.
Soon, people began to notice the men bringing in captives and a few even began to gather along the path as they entered the village, joining their dogs (or Dholes, as they were now identifiable as) who had come to sniff. It was mostly men, older boys and children who came out to watch while the women and the elderly usually went no further than windows and the porches of the stilt-houses that lined the road. Here, even hanging upside down, Joseph could notice a few things about the dress and appearance of the people
Frankly... it was a bit odd.
From what he knew, the Vietnamese national costume (in it's modern form) placed a heavy emphasis on trousers, an item of clothing that he noticed was rather conspicuously absent here. Everyone here seemed to be wearing variations on one basic outfit in either brown or black: knee-length cotton kilts, short-sleeved cotton jackets (mostly with their front fastenings closed) and either rough-woven conical hats or simple cloths tied over their heads. The men's hair appeared to be cut short to the point where one could vaguely make out the tattoos on their scalp while children varied between the same shortness for boys and a single, long braid for the girls.
Eventually they arrived in a great or square before what appeared to be the temple: a ponderous structure of wood and brick perched upon massive stone foundations, it's sloping roofs flaring outward as if to shroud the surrounding houses from the scrutiny of the heavens. Around them, a crowd had gathered on all sides, an air of excitement buzzing in the air. Men exited the house across the square from the temple entrance and despite the calm demeanour of Professor Andover, words began filtering through to Joseph that began sounding more and more disturbing; words like ""kill"", ""sacrifice"" and ""ritual"". But another word came, one that sent darker imaginings and images rambling through his sensation-saturated mind.
The word ""eat"".
""WAIT! STOP!""
Joseph knew those words as well... as well as that voice!
Out of the crowd rushed a figure dressed much like the others: brown kilt and jacket, the latter partially open to reveal a yem undergarment and with a straw hat on her head. As Joseph finally began taking in other details, he noticed the tattooed lines and whimsical designs on her lower legs and arms and on her face, lines and vaguely triangular patterns that almost resembled the features of an orangutan.
Her face... behind all the tattooing, the face of this woman was still as unmistakable to Joseph as the first day they had met in Kindergarten. To this sudden recognition, the young man could only exclaim his surprise as a soothingly familiar name.
""Marie?""
","(Found Among the Papers of the Late
Francis Wayland Thurston, of Boston)
“Of such great powers or beings there may be conceivably a survival . . . a survival of a hugely remote period when . . . consciousness was manifested, perhaps, in shapes and forms long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity . . . forms of which poetry and legend alone have caught a flying memory and called them gods, monsters, mythical beings of all sorts and kinds. . . .”
—Algernon Blackwood.

I.
The Horror in Clay.

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

II.
The Tale of Inspector Legrasse.

The older matters which had made the sculptor’s dream and bas-relief so significant to my uncle formed the subject of the second half of his long manuscript. Once before, it appears, Professor Angell had seen the hellish outlines of the nameless monstrosity, puzzled over the unknown hieroglyphics, and heard the ominous syllables which can be rendered only as “Cthulhu”; and all this in so stirring and horrible a connexion that it is small wonder he pursued young Wilcox with queries and demands for data.
      The earlier experience had come in 1908, seventeen years before, when the American Archaeological Society held its annual meeting in St. Louis. Professor Angell, as befitted one of his authority and attainments, had had a prominent part in all the deliberations; and was one of the first to be approached by the several outsiders who took advantage of the convocation to offer questions for correct answering and problems for expert solution.
      The chief of these outsiders, and in a short time the focus of interest for the entire meeting, was a commonplace-looking middle-aged man who had travelled all the way from New Orleans for certain special information unobtainable from any local source. His name was John Raymond Legrasse, and he was by profession an Inspector of Police. With him he bore the subject of his visit, a grotesque, repulsive, and apparently very ancient stone statuette whose origin he was at a loss to determine. It must not be fancied that Inspector Legrasse had the least interest in archaeology. On the contrary, his wish for enlightenment was prompted by purely professional considerations. The statuette, idol, fetish, or whatever it was, had been captured some months before in the wooded swamps south of New Orleans during a raid on a supposed voodoo meeting; and so singular and hideous were the rites connected with it, that the police could not but realise that they had stumbled on a dark cult totally unknown to them, and infinitely more diabolic than even the blackest of the African voodoo circles. Of its origin, apart from the erratic and unbelievable tales extorted from the captured members, absolutely nothing was to be discovered; hence the anxiety of the police for any antiquarian lore which might help them to place the frightful symbol, and through it track down the cult to its fountain-head.
      Inspector Legrasse was scarcely prepared for the sensation which his offering created. One sight of the thing had been enough to throw the assembled men of science into a state of tense excitement, and they lost no time in crowding around him to gaze at the diminutive figure whose utter strangeness and air of genuinely abysmal antiquity hinted so potently at unopened and archaic vistas. No recognised school of sculpture had animated this terrible object, yet centuries and even thousands of years seemed recorded in its dim and greenish surface of unplaceable stone.
      The figure, which was finally passed slowly from man to man for close and careful study, was between seven and eight inches in height, and of exquisitely artistic workmanship. It represented a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind. This thing, which seemed instinct with a fearsome and unnatural malignancy, was of a somewhat bloated corpulence, and squatted evilly on a rectangular block or pedestal covered with undecipherable characters. The tips of the wings touched the back edge of the block, the seat occupied the centre, whilst the long, curved claws of the doubled-up, crouching hind legs gripped the front edge and extended a quarter of the way down toward the bottom of the pedestal. The cephalopod head was bent forward, so that the ends of the facial feelers brushed the backs of huge fore paws which clasped the croucher’s elevated knees. The aspect of the whole was abnormally life-like, and the more subtly fearful because its source was so totally unknown. Its vast, awesome, and incalculable age was unmistakable; yet not one link did it shew with any known type of art belonging to civilisation’s youth—or indeed to any other time. Totally separate and apart, its very material was a mystery; for the soapy, greenish-black stone with its golden or iridescent flecks and striations resembled nothing familiar to geology or mineralogy. The characters along the base were equally baffling; and no member present, despite a representation of half the world’s expert learning in this field, could form the least notion of even their remotest linguistic kinship. They, like the subject and material, belonged to something horribly remote and distinct from mankind as we know it; something frightfully suggestive of old and unhallowed cycles of life in which our world and our conceptions have no part.
      And yet, as the members severally shook their heads and confessed defeat at the Inspector’s problem, there was one man in that gathering who suspected a touch of bizarre familiarity in the monstrous shape and writing, and who presently told with some diffidence of the odd trifle he knew. This person was the late William Channing Webb, Professor of Anthropology in Princeton University, and an explorer of no slight note. Professor Webb had been engaged, forty-eight years before, in a tour of Greenland and Iceland in search of some Runic inscriptions which he failed to unearth; and whilst high up on the West Greenland coast had encountered a singular tribe or cult of degenerate Esquimaux whose religion, a curious form of devil-worship, chilled him with its deliberate bloodthirstiness and repulsiveness. It was a faith of which other Esquimaux knew little, and which they mentioned only with shudders, saying that it had come down from horribly ancient aeons before ever the world was made. Besides nameless rites and human sacrifices there were certain queer hereditary rituals addressed to a supreme elder devil or tornasuk; and of this Professor Webb had taken a careful phonetic copy from an aged angekok or wizard-priest, expressing the sounds in Roman letters as best he knew how. But just now of prime significance was the fetish which this cult had cherished, and around which they danced when the aurora leaped high over the ice cliffs. It was, the professor stated, a very crude bas-relief of stone, comprising a hideous picture and some cryptic writing. And so far as he could tell, it was a rough parallel in all essential features of the bestial thing now lying before the meeting.
      This data, received with suspense and astonishment by the assembled members, proved doubly exciting to Inspector Legrasse; and he began at once to ply his informant with questions. Having noted and copied an oral ritual among the swamp cult-worshippers his men had arrested, he besought the professor to remember as best he might the syllables taken down amongst the diabolist Esquimaux. There then followed an exhaustive comparison of details, and a moment of really awed silence when both detective and scientist agreed on the virtual identity of the phrase common to two hellish rituals so many worlds of distance apart. What, in substance, both the Esquimau wizards and the Louisiana swamp-priests had chanted to their kindred idols was something very like this—the word-divisions being guessed at from traditional breaks in the phrase as chanted aloud:
      “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.”
      Legrasse had one point in advance of Professor Webb, for several among his mongrel prisoners had repeated to him what older celebrants had told them the words meant. This text, as given, ran something like this:
      “In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”
      And now, in response to a general and urgent demand, Inspector Legrasse related as fully as possible his experience with the swamp worshippers; telling a story to which I could see my uncle attached profound significance. It savoured of the wildest dreams of myth-maker and theosophist, and disclosed an astonishing degree of cosmic imagination among such half-castes and pariahs as might be least expected to possess it.
      On November 1st, 1907, there had come to the New Orleans police a frantic summons from the swamp and lagoon country to the south. The squatters there, mostly primitive but good-natured descendants of Lafitte’s men, were in the grip of stark terror from an unknown thing which had stolen upon them in the night. It was voodoo, apparently, but voodoo of a more terrible sort than they had ever known; and some of their women and children had disappeared since the malevolent tom-tom had begun its incessant beating far within the black haunted woods where no dweller ventured. There were insane shouts and harrowing screams, soul-chilling chants and dancing devil-flames; and, the frightened messenger added, the people could stand it no more.
      So a body of twenty police, filling two carriages and an automobile, had set out in the late afternoon with the shivering squatter as a guide. At the end of the passable road they alighted, and for miles splashed on in silence through the terrible cypress woods where day never came. Ugly roots and malignant hanging nooses of Spanish moss beset them, and now and then a pile of dank stones or fragment of a rotting wall intensified by its hint of morbid habitation a depression which every malformed tree and every fungous islet combined to create. At length the squatter settlement, a miserable huddle of huts, hove in sight; and hysterical dwellers ran out to cluster around the group of bobbing lanterns. The muffled beat of tom-toms was now faintly audible far, far ahead; and a curdling shriek came at infrequent intervals when the wind shifted. A reddish glare, too, seemed to filter through the pale undergrowth beyond endless avenues of forest night. Reluctant even to be left alone again, each one of the cowed squatters refused point-blank to advance another inch toward the scene of unholy worship, so Inspector Legrasse and his nineteen colleagues plunged on unguided into black arcades of horror that none of them had ever trod before.
      The region now entered by the police was one of traditionally evil repute, substantially unknown and untraversed by white men. There were legends of a hidden lake unglimpsed by mortal sight, in which dwelt a huge, formless white polypous thing with luminous eyes; and squatters whispered that bat-winged devils flew up out of caverns in inner earth to worship it at midnight. They said it had been there before D’Iberville, before La Salle, before the Indians, and before even the wholesome beasts and birds of the woods. It was nightmare itself, and to see it was to die. But it made men dream, and so they knew enough to keep away. The present voodoo orgy was, indeed, on the merest fringe of this abhorred area, but that location was bad enough; hence perhaps the very place of the worship had terrified the squatters more than the shocking sounds and incidents.
      Only poetry or madness could do justice to the noises heard by Legrasse’s men as they ploughed on through the black morass toward the red glare and the muffled tom-toms. There are vocal qualities peculiar to men, and vocal qualities peculiar to beasts; and it is terrible to hear the one when the source should yield the other. Animal fury and orgiastic licence here whipped themselves to daemoniac heights by howls and squawking ecstasies that tore and reverberated through those nighted woods like pestilential tempests from the gulfs of hell. Now and then the less organised ululation would cease, and from what seemed a well-drilled chorus of hoarse voices would rise in sing-song chant that hideous phrase or ritual:
      “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.”
Then the men, having reached a spot where the trees were thinner, came suddenly in sight of the spectacle itself. Four of them reeled, one fainted, and two were shaken into a frantic cry which the mad cacophony of the orgy fortunately deadened. Legrasse dashed swamp water on the face of the fainting man, and all stood trembling and nearly hypnotised with horror.
      In a natural glade of the swamp stood a grassy island of perhaps an acre’s extent, clear of trees and tolerably dry. On this now leaped and twisted a more indescribable horde of human abnormality than any but a Sime or an Angarola could paint. Void of clothing, this hybrid spawn were braying, bellowing, and writhing about a monstrous ring-shaped bonfire; in the centre of which, revealed by occasional rifts in the curtain of flame, stood a great granite monolith some eight feet in height; on top of which, incongruous with its diminutiveness, rested the noxious carven statuette. From a wide circle of ten scaffolds set up at regular intervals with the flame-girt monolith as a centre hung, head downward, the oddly marred bodies of the helpless squatters who had disappeared. It was inside this circle that the ring of worshippers jumped and roared, the general direction of the mass motion being from left to right in endless Bacchanal between the ring of bodies and the ring of fire.
      It may have been only imagination and it may have been only echoes which induced one of the men, an excitable Spaniard, to fancy he heard antiphonal responses to the ritual from some far and unillumined spot deeper within the wood of ancient legendry and horror. This man, Joseph D. Galvez, I later met and questioned; and he proved distractingly imaginative. He indeed went so far as to hint of the faint beating of great wings, and of a glimpse of shining eyes and a mountainous white bulk beyond the remotest trees—but I suppose he had been hearing too much native superstition.
      Actually, the horrified pause of the men was of comparatively brief duration. Duty came first; and although there must have been nearly a hundred mongrel celebrants in the throng, the police relied on their firearms and plunged determinedly into the nauseous rout. For five minutes the resultant din and chaos were beyond description. Wild blows were struck, shots were fired, and escapes were made; but in the end Legrasse was able to count some forty-seven sullen prisoners, whom he forced to dress in haste and fall into line between two rows of policemen. Five of the worshippers lay dead, and two severely wounded ones were carried away on improvised stretchers by their fellow-prisoners. The image on the monolith, of course, was carefully removed and carried back by Legrasse.
      Examined at headquarters after a trip of intense strain and weariness, the prisoners all proved to be men of a very low, mixed-blooded, and mentally aberrant type. Most were seamen, and a sprinkling of negroes and mulattoes, largely West Indians or Brava Portuguese from the Cape Verde Islands, gave a colouring of voodooism to the heterogeneous cult. But before many questions were asked, it became manifest that something far deeper and older than negro fetichism was involved. Degraded and ignorant as they were, the creatures held with surprising consistency to the central idea of their loathsome faith.
      They worshipped, so they said, the Great Old Ones who lived ages before there were any men, and who came to the young world out of the sky. Those Old Ones were gone now, inside the earth and under the sea; but their dead bodies had told their secrets in dreams to the first men, who formed a cult which had never died. This was that cult, and the prisoners said it had always existed and always would exist, hidden in distant wastes and dark places all over the world until the time when the great priest Cthulhu, from his dark house in the mighty city of R’lyeh under the waters, should rise and bring the earth again beneath his sway. Some day he would call, when the stars were ready, and the secret cult would always be waiting to liberate him.
      Meanwhile no more must be told. There was a secret which even torture could not extract. Mankind was not absolutely alone among the conscious things of earth, for shapes came out of the dark to visit the faithful few. But these were not the Great Old Ones. No man had ever seen the Old Ones. The carven idol was great Cthulhu, but none might say whether or not the others were precisely like him. No one could read the old writing now, but things were told by word of mouth. The chanted ritual was not the secret—that was never spoken aloud, only whispered. The chant meant only this: “In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”
      Only two of the prisoners were found sane enough to be hanged, and the rest were committed to various institutions. All denied a part in the ritual murders, and averred that the killing had been done by Black Winged Ones which had come to them from their immemorial meeting-place in the haunted wood. But of those mysterious allies no coherent account could ever be gained. What the police did extract, came mainly from an immensely aged mestizo named Castro, who claimed to have sailed to strange ports and talked with undying leaders of the cult in the mountains of China.
      Old Castro remembered bits of hideous legend that paled the speculations of theosophists and made man and the world seem recent and transient indeed. There had been aeons when other Things ruled on the earth, and They had had great cities. Remains of Them, he said the deathless Chinamen had told him, were still to be found as Cyclopean stones on islands in the Pacific. They all died vast epochs of time before men came, but there were arts which could revive Them when the stars had come round again to the right positions in the cycle of eternity. They had, indeed, come themselves from the stars, and brought Their images with Them.
      These Great Old Ones, Castro continued, were not composed altogether of flesh and blood. They had shape—for did not this star-fashioned image prove it?—but that shape was not made of matter. When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world through the sky; but when the stars were wrong, They could not live. But although They no longer lived, They would never really die. They all lay in stone houses in Their great city of R’lyeh, preserved by the spells of mighty Cthulhu for a glorious resurrection when the stars and the earth might once more be ready for Them. But at that time some force from outside must serve to liberate Their bodies. The spells that preserved Them intact likewise prevented Them from making an initial move, and They could only lie awake in the dark and think whilst uncounted millions of years rolled by. They knew all that was occurring in the universe, but Their mode of speech was transmitted thought. Even now They talked in Their tombs. When, after infinities of chaos, the first men came, the Great Old Ones spoke to the sensitive among them by moulding their dreams; for only thus could Their language reach the fleshly minds of mammals.
      Then, whispered Castro, those first men formed the cult around small idols which the Great Ones shewed them; idols brought in dim aeras from dark stars. That cult would never die till the stars came right again, and the secret priests would take great Cthulhu from His tomb to revive His subjects and resume His rule of earth. The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom. Meanwhile the cult, by appropriate rites, must keep alive the memory of those ancient ways and shadow forth the prophecy of their return.
      In the elder time chosen men had talked with the entombed Old Ones in dreams, but then something had happened. The great stone city R’lyeh, with its monoliths and sepulchres, had sunk beneath the waves; and the deep waters, full of the one primal mystery through which not even thought can pass, had cut off the spectral intercourse. But memory never died, and high-priests said that the city would rise again when the stars were right. Then came out of the earth the black spirits of earth, mouldy and shadowy, and full of dim rumours picked up in caverns beneath forgotten sea-bottoms. But of them old Castro dared not speak much. He cut himself off hurriedly, and no amount of persuasion or subtlety could elicit more in this direction. The size of the Old Ones, too, he curiously declined to mention. Of the cult, he said that he thought the centre lay amid the pathless deserts of Arabia, where Irem, the City of Pillars, dreams hidden and untouched. It was not allied to the European witch-cult, and was virtually unknown beyond its members. No book had ever really hinted of it, though the deathless Chinamen said that there were double meanings in the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred which the initiated might read as they chose, especially the much-discussed couplet:
 
“That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.”

      Legrasse, deeply impressed and not a little bewildered, had inquired in vain concerning the historic affiliations of the cult. Castro, apparently, had told the truth when he said that it was wholly secret. The authorities at Tulane University could shed no light upon either cult or image, and now the detective had come to the highest authorities in the country and met with no more than the Greenland tale of Professor Webb.
      The feverish interest aroused at the meeting by Legrasse’s tale, corroborated as it was by the statuette, is echoed in the subsequent correspondence of those who attended; although scant mention occurs in the formal publications of the society. Caution is the first care of those accustomed to face occasional charlatanry and imposture. Legrasse for some time lent the image to Professor Webb, but at the latter’s death it was returned to him and remains in his possession, where I viewed it not long ago. It is truly a terrible thing, and unmistakably akin to the dream-sculpture of young Wilcox.
      That my uncle was excited by the tale of the sculptor I did not wonder, for what thoughts must arise upon hearing, after a knowledge of what Legrasse had learned of the cult, of a sensitive young man who had dreamed not only the figure and exact hieroglyphics of the swamp-found image and the Greenland devil tablet, but had come in his dreams upon at least three of the precise words of the formula uttered alike by Esquimau diabolists and mongrel Louisianans? Professor Angell’s instant start on an investigation of the utmost thoroughness was eminently natural; though privately I suspected young Wilcox of having heard of the cult in some indirect way, and of having invented a series of dreams to heighten and continue the mystery at my uncle’s expense. The dream-narratives and cuttings collected by the professor were, of course, strong corroboration; but the rationalism of my mind and the extravagance of the whole subject led me to adopt what I thought the most sensible conclusions. So, after thoroughly studying the manuscript again and correlating the theosophical and anthropological notes with the cult narrative of Legrasse, I made a trip to Providence to see the sculptor and give him the rebuke I thought proper for so boldly imposing upon a learned and aged man.
      Wilcox still lived alone in the Fleur-de-Lys Building in Thomas Street, a hideous Victorian imitation of seventeenth-century Breton architecture which flaunts its stuccoed front amidst the lovely colonial houses on the ancient hill, and under the very shadow of the finest Georgian steeple in America. I found him at work in his rooms, and at once conceded from the specimens scattered about that his genius is indeed profound and authentic. He will, I believe, some time be heard from as one of the great decadents; for he has crystallised in clay and will one day mirror in marble those nightmares and phantasies which Arthur Machen evokes in prose, and Clark Ashton Smith makes visible in verse and in painting.
      Dark, frail, and somewhat unkempt in aspect, he turned languidly at my knock and asked me my business without rising. When I told him who I was, he displayed some interest; for my uncle had excited his curiosity in probing his strange dreams, yet had never explained the reason for the study. I did not enlarge his knowledge in this regard, but sought with some subtlety to draw him out. In a short time I became convinced of his absolute sincerity, for he spoke of the dreams in a manner none could mistake. They and their subconscious residuum had influenced his art profoundly, and he shewed me a morbid statue whose contours almost made me shake with the potency of its black suggestion. He could not recall having seen the original of this thing except in his own dream bas-relief, but the outlines had formed themselves insensibly under his hands. It was, no doubt, the giant shape he had raved of in delirium. That he really knew nothing of the hidden cult, save from what my uncle’s relentless catechism had let fall, he soon made clear; and again I strove to think of some way in which he could possibly have received the weird impressions.
      He talked of his dreams in a strangely poetic fashion; making me see with terrible vividness the damp Cyclopean city of slimy green stone—whose geometry, he oddly said, was all wrong—and hear with frightened expectancy the ceaseless, half-mental calling from underground: “Cthulhu fhtagn”, “Cthulhu fhtagn”. These words had formed part of that dread ritual which told of dead Cthulhu’s dream-vigil in his stone vault at R’lyeh, and I felt deeply moved despite my rational beliefs. Wilcox, I was sure, had heard of the cult in some casual way, and had soon forgotten it amidst the mass of his equally weird reading and imagining. Later, by virtue of its sheer impressiveness, it had found subconscious expression in dreams, in the bas-relief, and in the terrible statue I now beheld; so that his imposture upon my uncle had been a very innocent one. The youth was of a type, at once slightly affected and slightly ill-mannered, which I could never like; but I was willing enough now to admit both his genius and his honesty. I took leave of him amicably, and wish him all the success his talent promises.
      The matter of the cult still remained to fascinate me, and at times I had visions of personal fame from researches into its origin and connexions. I visited New Orleans, talked with Legrasse and others of that old-time raiding-party, saw the frightful image, and even questioned such of the mongrel prisoners as still survived. Old Castro, unfortunately, had been dead for some years. What I now heard so graphically at first-hand, though it was really no more than a detailed confirmation of what my uncle had written, excited me afresh; for I felt sure that I was on the track of a very real, very secret, and very ancient religion whose discovery would make me an anthropologist of note. My attitude was still one of absolute materialism, as I wish it still were, and I discounted with almost inexplicable perversity the coincidence of the dream notes and odd cuttings collected by Professor Angell.
      One thing I began to suspect, and which I now fear I know, is that my uncle’s death was far from natural. He fell on a narrow hill street leading up from an ancient waterfront swarming with foreign mongrels, after a careless push from a negro sailor. I did not forget the mixed blood and marine pursuits of the cult-members in Louisiana, and would not be surprised to learn of secret methods and poison needles as ruthless and as anciently known as the cryptic rites and beliefs. Legrasse and his men, it is true, have been let alone; but in Norway a certain seaman who saw things is dead. Might not the deeper inquiries of my uncle after encountering the sculptor’s data have come to sinister ears? I think Professor Angell died because he knew too much, or because he was likely to learn too much. Whether I shall go as he did remains to be seen, for I have learned much now.

III.
The Madness from the Sea.

If heaven ever wishes to grant me a boon, it will be a total effacing of the results of a mere chance which fixed my eye on a certain stray piece of shelf-paper. It was nothing on which I would naturally have stumbled in the course of my daily round, for it was an old number of an Australian journal, the Sydney Bulletin for April 18, 1925. It had escaped even the cutting bureau which had at the time of its issuance been avidly collecting material for my uncle’s research.
      I had largely given over my inquiries into what Professor Angell called the “Cthulhu Cult”, and was visiting a learned friend in Paterson, New Jersey; the curator of a local museum and a mineralogist of note. Examining one day the reserve specimens roughly set on the storage shelves in a rear room of the museum, my eye was caught by an odd picture in one of the old papers spread beneath the stones. It was the Sydney Bulletin I have mentioned, for my friend has wide affiliations in all conceivable foreign parts; and the picture was a half-tone cut of a hideous stone image almost identical with that which Legrasse had found in the swamp.
      Eagerly clearing the sheet of its precious contents, I scanned the item in detail; and was disappointed to find it of only moderate length. What it suggested, however, was of portentous significance to my flagging quest; and I carefully tore it out for immediate action. It read as follows:
MYSTERY DERELICT FOUND AT SEA
Vigilant Arrives With Helpless Armed New Zealand Yacht in Tow.
One Survivor and Dead Man Found Aboard. Tale of
Desperate Battle and Deaths at Sea.
Rescued Seaman Refuses
Particulars of Strange Experience.
Odd Idol Found in His Possession. Inquiry
to Follow.

The Morrison Co.’s freighter Vigilant, bound from Valparaiso, arrived this morning at its wharf in Darling Harbour, having in tow the battled and disabled but heavily armed steam yacht Alert of Dunedin, N. Z., which was sighted April 12th in S. Latitude 34° 21', W. Longitude 152° 17' with one living and one dead man aboard.
      The Vigilant left Valparaiso March 25th, and on April 2nd was driven considerably south of her course by exceptionally heavy storms and monster waves. On April 12th the derelict was sighted; and though apparently deserted, was found upon boarding to contain one survivor in a half-delirious condition and one man who had evidently been dead for more than a week. The living man was clutching a horrible stone idol of unknown origin, about a foot in height, regarding whose nature authorities at Sydney University, the Royal Society, and the Museum in College Street all profess complete bafflement, and which the survivor says he found in the cabin of the yacht, in a small carved shrine of common pattern.
      This man, after recovering his senses, told an exceedingly strange story of piracy and slaughter. He is Gustaf Johansen, a Norwegian of some intelligence, and had been second mate of the two-masted schooner Emma of Auckland, which sailed for Callao February 20th with a complement of eleven men. The Emma, he says, was delayed and thrown widely south of her course by the great storm of March 1st, and on March 22nd, in S. Latitude 49° 51', W. Longitude 128° 34', encountered the Alert, manned by a queer and evil-looking crew of Kanakas and half-castes. Being ordered peremptorily to turn back, Capt. Collins refused; whereupon the strange crew began to fire savagely and without warning upon the schooner with a peculiarly heavy battery of brass cannon forming part of the yacht’s equipment. The Emma’s men shewed fight, says the survivor, and though the schooner began to sink from shots beneath the waterline they managed to heave alongside their enemy and board her, grappling with the savage crew on the yacht’s deck, and being forced to kill them all, the number being slightly superior, because of their particularly abhorrent and desperate though rather clumsy mode of fighting.
      Three of the Emma’s men, including Capt. Collins and First Mate Green, were killed; and the remaining eight under Second Mate Johansen proceeded to navigate the captured yacht, going ahead in their original direction to see if any reason for their ordering back had existed. The next day, it appears, they raised and landed on a small island, although none is known to exist in that part of the ocean; and six of the men somehow died ashore, though Johansen is queerly reticent about this part of his story, and speaks only of their falling into a rock chasm. Later, it seems, he and one companion boarded the yacht and tried to manage her, but were beaten about by the storm of April 2nd. From that time till his rescue on the 12th the man remembers little, and he does not even recall when William Briden, his companion, died. Briden’s death reveals no apparent cause, and was probably due to excitement or exposure. Cable advices from Dunedin report that the Alert was well known there as an island trader, and bore an evil reputation along the waterfront. It was owned by a curious group of half-castes whose frequent meetings and night trips to the woods attracted no little curiosity; and it had set sail in great haste just after the storm and earth tremors of March 1st. Our Auckland correspondent gives the Emma and her crew an excellent reputation, and Johansen is described as a sober and worthy man. The admiralty will institute an inquiry on the whole matter beginning tomorrow, at which every effort will be made to induce Johansen to speak more freely than he has done hitherto.
      This was all, together with the picture of the hellish image; but what a train of ideas it started in my mind! Here were new treasuries of data on the Cthulhu Cult, and evidence that it had strange interests at sea as well as on land. What motive prompted the hybrid crew to order back the Emma as they sailed about with their hideous idol? What was the unknown island on which six of the Emma’s crew had died, and about which the mate Johansen was so secretive? What had the vice-admiralty’s investigation brought out, and what was known of the noxious cult in Dunedin? And most marvellous of all, what deep and more than natural linkage of dates was this which gave a malign and now undeniable significance to the various turns of events so carefully noted by my uncle?
      March 1st—our February 28th according to the International Date Line—the earthquake and storm had come. From Dunedin the Alert and her noisome crew had darted eagerly forth as if imperiously summoned, and on the other side of the earth poets and artists had begun to dream of a strange, dank Cyclopean city whilst a young sculptor had moulded in his sleep the form of the dreaded Cthulhu. March 23d the crew of the Emma landed on an unknown island and left six men dead; and on that date the dreams of sensitive men assumed a heightened vividness and darkened with dread of a giant monster’s malign pursuit, whilst an architect had gone mad and a sculptor had lapsed suddenly into delirium! And what of this storm of April 2nd—the date on which all dreams of the dank city ceased, and Wilcox emerged unharmed from the bondage of strange fever? What of all this—and of those hints of old Castro about the sunken, star-born Old Ones and their coming reign; their faithful cult and their mastery of dreams? Was I tottering on the brink of cosmic horrors beyond man’s power to bear? If so, they must be horrors of the mind alone, for in some way the second of April had put a stop to whatever monstrous menace had begun its siege of mankind’s soul.
      That evening, after a day of hurried cabling and arranging, I bade my host adieu and took a train for San Francisco. In less than a month I was in Dunedin; where, however, I found that little was known of the strange cult-members who had lingered in the old sea-taverns. Waterfront scum was far too common for special mention; though there was vague talk about one inland trip these mongrels had made, during which faint drumming and red flame were noted on the distant hills. In Auckland I learned that Johansen had returned with yellow hair turned white after a perfunctory and inconclusive questioning at Sydney, and had thereafter sold his cottage in West Street and sailed with his wife to his old home in Oslo. Of his stirring experience he would tell his friends no more than he had told the admiralty officials, and all they could do was to give me his Oslo address.
      After that I went to Sydney and talked profitlessly with seamen and members of the vice-admiralty court. I saw the Alert, now sold and in commercial use, at Circular Quay in Sydney Cove, but gained nothing from its non-committal bulk. The crouching image with its cuttlefish head, dragon body, scaly wings, and hieroglyphed pedestal, was preserved in the Museum at Hyde Park; and I studied it long and well, finding it a thing of balefully exquisite workmanship, and with the same utter mystery, terrible antiquity, and unearthly strangeness of material which I had noted in Legrasse’s smaller specimen. Geologists, the curator told me, had found it a monstrous puzzle; for they vowed that the world held no rock like it. Then I thought with a shudder of what old Castro had told Legrasse about the primal Great Ones: “They had come from the stars, and had brought Their images with Them.”
      Shaken with such a mental revolution as I had never before known, I now resolved to visit Mate Johansen in Oslo. Sailing for London, I reëmbarked at once for the Norwegian capital; and one autumn day landed at the trim wharves in the shadow of the Egeberg. Johansen’s address, I discovered, lay in the Old Town of King Harold Haardrada, which kept alive the name of Oslo during all the centuries that the greater city masqueraded as “Christiana”. I made the brief trip by taxicab, and knocked with palpitant heart at the door of a neat and ancient building with plastered front. A sad-faced woman in black answered my summons, and I was stung with disappointment when she told me in halting English that Gustaf Johansen was no more.
      He had not survived his return, said his wife, for the doings at sea in 1925 had broken him. He had told her no more than he had told the public, but had left a long manuscript—of “technical matters” as he said—written in English, evidently in order to safeguard her from the peril of casual perusal. During a walk through a narrow lane near the Gothenburg dock, a bundle of papers falling from an attic window had knocked him down. Two Lascar sailors at once helped him to his feet, but before the ambulance could reach him he was dead. Physicians found no adequate cause for the end, and laid it to heart trouble and a weakened constitution.
      I now felt gnawing at my vitals that dark terror which will never leave me till I, too, am at rest; “accidentally” or otherwise. Persuading the widow that my connexion with her husband’s “technical matters” was sufficient to entitle me to his manuscript, I bore the document away and began to read it on the London boat. It was a simple, rambling thing—a naive sailor’s effort at a post-facto diary—and strove to recall day by day that last awful voyage. I cannot attempt to transcribe it verbatim in all its cloudiness and redundance, but I will tell its gist enough to shew why the sound of the water against the vessel’s sides became so unendurable to me that I stopped my ears with cotton.
      Johansen, thank God, did not know quite all, even though he saw the city and the Thing, but I shall never sleep calmly again when I think of the horrors that lurk ceaselessly behind life in time and in space, and of those unhallowed blasphemies from elder stars which dream beneath the sea, known and favoured by a nightmare cult ready and eager to loose them on the world whenever another earthquake shall heave their monstrous stone city again to the sun and air.
      Johansen’s voyage had begun just as he told it to the vice-admiralty. The Emma, in ballast, had cleared Auckland on February 20th, and had felt the full force of that earthquake-born tempest which must have heaved up from the sea-bottom the horrors that filled men’s dreams. Once more under control, the ship was making good progress when held up by the Alert on March 22nd, and I could feel the mate’s regret as he wrote of her bombardment and sinking. Of the swarthy cult-fiends on the Alert he speaks with significant horror. There was some peculiarly abominable quality about them which made their destruction seem almost a duty, and Johansen shews ingenuous wonder at the charge of ruthlessness brought against his party during the proceedings of the court of inquiry. Then, driven ahead by curiosity in their captured yacht under Johansen’s command, the men sight a great stone pillar sticking out of the sea, and in S. Latitude 47° 9', W. Longitude 126° 43' come upon a coast-line of mingled mud, ooze, and weedy Cyclopean masonry which can be nothing less than the tangible substance of earth’s supreme terror—the nightmare corpse-city of R’lyeh, that was built in measureless aeons behind history by the vast, loathsome shapes that seeped down from the dark stars. There lay great Cthulhu and his hordes, hidden in green slimy vaults and sending out at last, after cycles incalculable, the thoughts that spread fear to the dreams of the sensitive and called imperiously to the faithful to come on a pilgrimage of liberation and restoration. All this Johansen did not suspect, but God knows he soon saw enough!
      I suppose that only a single mountain-top, the hideous monolith-crowned citadel whereon great Cthulhu was buried, actually emerged from the waters. When I think of the extent of all that may be brooding down there I almost wish to kill myself forthwith. Johansen and his men were awed by the cosmic majesty of this dripping Babylon of elder daemons, and must have guessed without guidance that it was nothing of this or of any sane planet. Awe at the unbelievable size of the greenish stone blocks, at the dizzying height of the great carven monolith, and at the stupefying identity of the colossal statues and bas-reliefs with the queer image found in the shrine on the Alert, is poignantly visible in every line of the mate’s frightened description.
      Without knowing what futurism is like, Johansen achieved something very close to it when he spoke of the city; for instead of describing any definite structure or building, he dwells only on broad impressions of vast angles and stone surfaces—surfaces too great to belong to any thing right or proper for this earth, and impious with horrible images and hieroglyphs. I mention his talk about angles because it suggests something Wilcox had told me of his awful dreams. He had said that the geometry of the dream-place he saw was abnormal, non-Euclidean, and loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from ours. Now an unlettered seaman felt the same thing whilst gazing at the terrible reality.
      Johansen and his men landed at a sloping mud-bank on this monstrous Acropolis, and clambered slipperily up over titan oozy blocks which could have been no mortal staircase. The very sun of heaven seemed distorted when viewed through the polarising miasma welling out from this sea-soaked perversion, and twisted menace and suspense lurked leeringly in those crazily elusive angles of carven rock where a second glance shewed concavity after the first shewed convexity.
      Something very like fright had come over all the explorers before anything more definite than rock and ooze and weed was seen. Each would have fled had he not feared the scorn of the others, and it was only half-heartedly that they searched—vainly, as it proved—for some portable souvenir to bear away.
      It was Rodriguez the Portuguese who climbed up the foot of the monolith and shouted of what he had found. The rest followed him, and looked curiously at the immense carved door with the now familiar squid-dragon bas-relief. It was, Johansen said, like a great barn-door; and they all felt that it was a door because of the ornate lintel, threshold, and jambs around it, though they could not decide whether it lay flat like a trap-door or slantwise like an outside cellar-door. As Wilcox would have said, the geometry of the place was all wrong. One could not be sure that the sea and the ground were horizontal, hence the relative position of everything else seemed phantasmally variable.
      Briden pushed at the stone in several places without result. Then Donovan felt over it delicately around the edge, pressing each point separately as he went. He climbed interminably along the grotesque stone moulding—that is, one would call it climbing if the thing was not after all horizontal—and the men wondered how any door in the universe could be so vast. Then, very softly and slowly, the acre-great panel began to give inward at the top; and they saw that it was balanced. Donovan slid or somehow propelled himself down or along the jamb and rejoined his fellows, and everyone watched the queer recession of the monstrously carven portal. In this phantasy of prismatic distortion it moved anomalously in a diagonal way, so that all the rules of matter and perspective seemed upset.
      The aperture was black with a darkness almost material. That tenebrousness was indeed a positive quality; for it obscured such parts of the inner walls as ought to have been revealed, and actually burst forth like smoke from its aeon-long imprisonment, visibly darkening the sun as it slunk away into the shrunken and gibbous sky on flapping membraneous wings. The odour arising from the newly opened depths was intolerable, and at length the quick-eared Hawkins thought he heard a nasty, slopping sound down there. Everyone listened, and everyone was listening still when It lumbered slobberingly into sight and gropingly squeezed Its gelatinous green immensity through the black doorway into the tainted outside air of that poison city of madness.
      Poor Johansen’s handwriting almost gave out when he wrote of this. Of the six men who never reached the ship, he thinks two perished of pure fright in that accursed instant. The Thing cannot be described—there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order. A mountain walked or stumbled. God! What wonder that across the earth a great architect went mad, and poor Wilcox raved with fever in that telepathic instant? The Thing of the idols, the green, sticky spawn of the stars, had awaked to claim his own. The stars were right again, and what an age-old cult had failed to do by design, a band of innocent sailors had done by accident. After vigintillions of years great Cthulhu was loose again, and ravening for delight.
      Three men were swept up by the flabby claws before anybody turned. God rest them, if there be any rest in the universe. They were Donovan, Guerrera, and Ångstrom. Parker slipped as the other three were plunging frenziedly over endless vistas of green-crusted rock to the boat, and Johansen swears he was swallowed up by an angle of masonry which shouldn’t have been there; an angle which was acute, but behaved as if it were obtuse. So only Briden and Johansen reached the boat, and pulled desperately for the Alert as the mountainous monstrosity flopped down the slimy stones and hesitated floundering at the edge of the water.
      Steam had not been suffered to go down entirely, despite the departure of all hands for the shore; and it was the work of only a few moments of feverish rushing up and down between wheel and engines to get the Alert under way. Slowly, amidst the distorted horrors of that indescribable scene, she began to churn the lethal waters; whilst on the masonry of that charnel shore that was not of earth the titan Thing from the stars slavered and gibbered like Polypheme cursing the fleeing ship of Odysseus. Then, bolder than the storied Cyclops, great Cthulhu slid greasily into the water and began to pursue with vast wave-raising strokes of cosmic potency. Briden looked back and went mad, laughing shrilly as he kept on laughing at intervals till death found him one night in the cabin whilst Johansen was wandering deliriously.
      But Johansen had not given out yet. Knowing that the Thing could surely overtake the Alert until steam was fully up, he resolved on a desperate chance; and, setting the engine for full speed, ran lightning-like on deck and reversed the wheel. There was a mighty eddying and foaming in the noisome brine, and as the steam mounted higher and higher the brave Norwegian drove his vessel head on against the pursuing jelly which rose above the unclean froth like the stern of a daemon galleon. The awful squid-head with writhing feelers came nearly up to the bowsprit of the sturdy yacht, but Johansen drove on relentlessly. There was a bursting as of an exploding bladder, a slushy nastiness as of a cloven sunfish, a stench as of a thousand opened graves, and a sound that the chronicler would not put on paper. For an instant the ship was befouled by an acrid and blinding green cloud, and then there was only a venomous seething astern; where—God in heaven!—the scattered plasticity of that nameless sky-spawn was nebulously recombining in its hateful original form, whilst its distance widened every second as the Alert gained impetus from its mounting steam.
      That was all. After that Johansen only brooded over the idol in the cabin and attended to a few matters of food for himself and the laughing maniac by his side. He did not try to navigate after the first bold flight, for the reaction had taken something out of his soul. Then came the storm of April 2nd, and a gathering of the clouds about his consciousness. There is a sense of spectral whirling through liquid gulfs of infinity, of dizzying rides through reeling universes on a comet’s tail, and of hysterical plunges from the pit to the moon and from the moon back again to the pit, all livened by a cachinnating chorus of the distorted, hilarious elder gods and the green, bat-winged mocking imps of Tartarus.
      Out of that dream came rescue—the Vigilant, the vice-admiralty court, the streets of Dunedin, and the long voyage back home to the old house by the Egeberg. He could not tell—they would think him mad. He would write of what he knew before death came, but his wife must not guess. Death would be a boon if only it could blot out the memories.
      That was the document I read, and now I have placed it in the tin box beside the bas-relief and the papers of Professor Angell. With it shall go this record of mine—this test of my own sanity, wherein is pieced together that which I hope may never be pieced together again. I have looked upon all that the universe has to hold of horror, and even the skies of spring and the flowers of summer must ever afterward be poison to me. But I do not think my life will be long. As my uncle went, as poor Johansen went, so I shall go. I know too much, and the cult still lives.
      Cthulhu still lives, too, I suppose, again in that chasm of stone which has shielded him since the sun was young. His accursed city is sunken once more, for the Vigilant sailed over the spot after the April storm; but his ministers on earth still bellow and prance and slay around idol-capped monoliths in lonely places. He must have been trapped by the sinking whilst within his black abyss, or else the world would by now be screaming with fright and frenzy. Who knows the end? What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise. Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men. A time will come—but I must not and cannot think! Let me pray that, if I do not survive this manuscript, my executors may put caution before audacity and see that it meets no other eye.
 ",False
"I WAS SITTING on the porch when my grandfather hobbled out and sank down on his favorite chair with the cushioned seat, and began to stuff tobacco in his old corncob-pipe.

""I thought you'd be goin' to the dance,"" he said.

""I'm waiting for Doc Blaine,"" I answered. ""I'm going over to old man Garfield's with him.""

My grandfather sucked at his pipe awhile before he spoke again.

""Old Jim purty bad off?""

""Doc says he hasn't a chance.""

""Who's takin' care of him?""

""Joe Braxton—­against Garfield's wishes. But somebody had to stay with him.""

My grandfather sucked his pipe noisily, and watched the heat lightning playing away off up in the hills; then he said: ""You think old Jim's the biggest liar in this county, don't you?""

""He tells some pretty tall tales,"" I admitted. ""Some of the things he claimed he took part in, must have happened before he was born.""

""I came from Tennesee to Texas in 1870,"" my grandfather said abruptly. ""I saw this town of Lost Knob grow up from nothin'. There wasn't even a log-hut store here when I came. But old Jim Garfield was here, livin' in the same place he lives now, only then it was a log cabin. He don't look a day older now than he did the first time I saw him.""

""You never mentioned that before,"" I said in some surprise.

""I knew you'd put it down to an old man's maunderin's,"" he answered. ""Old Jim was the first white man to settle in this country. He built his cabin a good fifty miles west of the frontier. God knows how he done it, for these hills swarmed with Comanches then.

""I remember the first time I ever saw him. Even then everybody called him 'old Jim.'

""I remember him tellin' me the same tales he's told you—­how he was at the battle of San Jacinto when he was a youngster, and how he'd rode with Ewen Cameron and Jack Hayes. Only I believe him, and you don't.""

""That was so long ago—­"" I protested.

""The last Indian raid through this country was in 1874,"" said my grandfather, engrossed in his own reminiscences. ""I was in on that fight, and so was old Jim. I saw him knock old Yellow Tail off his mustang at seven hundred yards with a buffalo rifle.

""But before that I was with him in a fight up near the head of Locust Creek. A band of Comanches came down Mesquital, lootin' and burnin', rode through the hills and started back up Locust Creek, and a scout of us were hot on their heels. We ran on to them just at sundown in a mesquite flat. We killed seven of them, and the rest skinned out through the brush on foot. But three of our boys were killed, and Jim Garfield got a thrust in the breast with a lance.

""It was an awful wound. He lay like a dead man, and it seemed sure nobody could live after a wound like that. But an old Indian came out of the brush, and when we aimed our guns at him, he made the peace sign and spoke to us in Spanish. I don't know why the boys didn't shoot him in his tracks, because our blood was heated with the fightin' and killin', but somethin' about him made us hold our fire. He said he wasn't a Comanche, but was an old friend of Garfield's, and wanted to help him. He asked us to carry Jim into a clump of mesquite, and leave him alone with him, and to this day I don't know why we did, but we did. It was an awful time—­the wounded moanin' and callin' for water, the starin' corpses strewn about the camp, night comin' on, and no way of knowin' that the Indians wouldn't return when dark fell.

""We made camp right there, because the horses were fagged out, and we watched all night, but the Comanches didn't come back. I don't know what went on out in the mesquite where Jim Garfield's body lay, because I never saw that strange Indian again; but durin' the night I kept hearin' a weird moanin' that wasn't made by the dyin' men, and an owl hooted from midnight till dawn.

""And at sunrise Jim Garfield came walkin' out of the mesquite, pale and haggard, but alive, and already the wound in his breast had closed and begun to heal. And since then he's never mentioned that wound, nor that fight, nor the strange Indian who came and went so mysteriously. And he hasn't aged a bit; he looks now just like he did then—­a man of about fifty.""

In the silence that followed, a car began to purr down the road, and twin shafts of light cut through the dusk.

""That's Doc Blaine,"" I said. ""When I come back I'll tell you how Garfield is.""

Doc Blaine was prompt with his predictions as we drove the three miles of post-oak covered hills that lay between Lost Knob and the Garfield farm.

""I'll be surprised to find him alive,"" he said, ""smashed up like he is. A man his age ought to have more sense than to try to break a young horse.""

""He doesn't look so old,"" I remarked.

""I'll be fifty, my next birthday,"" answered Doc Blaine. ""I've known him all my life, and he must have been at least fifty the first time I ever saw him. His looks are deceiving.""

Old Garfield's dwelling-place was reminiscent of the past. The boards of the low squat house had never known paint. Orchard fence and corrals were built of rails.

Old Jim lay on his rude bed, tended crudely but efficiently by the man Doc Blaine had hired over the old man's protests. As I looked at him, I was impressed anew by his evident vitality. His frame was stooped but unwithered, his limbs rounded out with springy muscles. In his corded neck and in his face, drawn though it was with suffering, was apparent an innate virility. His eyes, though partly glazed with pain, burned with the same unquenchable element.

""He's been ravin',"" said Joe Braxton stolidly.

""First white man in this country,"" muttered old Jim, becoming intelligible. ""Hills no white man ever set foot in before. Gettin' too old. Have to settle down. Can't move on like I used to. Settle down here. Good country before it filled up with cow-men and squatters. Wish Ewen Cameron could see this country. The Mexicans shot him. Damn 'em!""

Doc Blaine shook his head. ""He's all smashed up inside. He won't live till daylight.""

Garfield unexpectedly lifted his head and looked at us with clear eyes.

""Wrong, Doc,"" he wheezed, his breath whistling with pain. ""I'll live. What's broken bones and twisted guts? Nothin'! It's the heart that counts. Long as the heart keeps pumpin', a man can't die. My heart's sound. Listen to it! Feel of it!""

He groped painfully for Doc Blaine's wrist, dragged his hand to his bosom and held it there, staring up into the doctor's face with avid intensity.

""Regular dynamo, ain't it?"" he gasped. ""Stronger'n a gasoline engine!""

Blaine beckoned me. ""Lay your hand here,"" he said, placing my hand on the old man's bare breast. ""He does have a remarkable heart action.""

I noted, in the light of the coal-oil lamp, a great livid scar in the gaunt arching breast—­such a scar as might be made by a flint-headed spear. I laid my hand directly on this scar, and an exclamation escaped my lips.

Under my hand old Jim Garfield's heart pulsed, but its throb was like no other heart action I have ever observed. Its power was astounding; his ribs vibrated to its steady throb. It felt more like the vibrating of a dynamo than the action of a human organ. I could feel its amazing vitality radiating from his breast, stealing up into my hand and up my arm, until my own heart seemed to speed up in response.

""I can't die,"" old Jim gasped. ""Not so long as my heart's in my breast. Only a bullet through the brain can kill me. And even then I wouldn't be rightly dead, as long as my heart beats in my breast. Yet it ain't rightly mine, either. It belongs to Ghost Man, the Lipan chief. It was the heart of a god the Lipans worshipped before the Comanches drove 'em out of their native hills.

""I knew Ghost Man down on the Rio Grande, when I was with Ewen Cameron. I saved his life from the Mexicans once. He tied the string of ghost wampum between him and me—­the wampum no man but me and him can see or feel. He came when he knowed I needed him, in that fight up on the headwaters of Locust Creek, when I got this scar.

""I was dead as a man can be. My heart was sliced in two, like the heart of a butchered beef steer.

""All night Ghost Man did magic, callin' my ghost back from spirit-land. I remember that flight, a little. It was dark, and gray-like, and I drifted through gray mists and heard the dead wailin' past me in the mist. But Ghost Man brought me back.

""He took out what was left of my mortal heart, and put the heart of the god in my bosom. But it's his, and when I'm through with it, he'll come for it. It's kept me alive and strong for the lifetime of a man. Age can't touch me. What do I care if these fools around here call me an old liar? What I know, I know. But hark'ee!""

His fingers became claws, clamping fiercely on Doc Blaine's wrist. His old eyes, old yet strangely young, burned fierce as those of an eagle under his bushy brows.

""If by some mischance I should die, now or later, promise me this! Cut into my bosom and take out the heart Ghost Man lent me so long ago! It's his. And as long as it beats in my body, my spirit'll be tied to that body, though my head be crushed like an egg underfoot! A livin' thing in a rottin' body! Promise!""

""All right, I promise,"" replied Doc Blaine, to humor him, and old Jim Garfield sank back with a whistling sigh of relief.

He did not die that night, nor the next, nor the next. I well remember the next day, because it was that day that I had the fight with Jack Kirby.

People will take a good deal from a bully, rather than to spill blood. Because nobody had gone to the trouble of killing him, Kirby thought the whole countryside was afraid of him.

He had bought a steer from my father, and when my father went to collect for it, Kirby told him that he had paid the money to me—­which was a lie. I went looking for Kirby, and came upon him in a bootleg joint, boasting of his toughness, and telling the crowd that he was going to beat me up and make me say that he had paid me the money, and that I had stuck it into my own pocket. When I heard him say that, I saw red, and ran in on him with a stockman's knife, and cut him across the face, and in the neck, side, breast and belly, and the only thing that saved his life was the fact that the crowd pulled me off.

There was a preliminary hearing, and I was indicted on a charge of assault, and my trial was set for the following term of court. Kirby was as tough-fibered as a post-oak country bully ought to be, and he recovered, swearing vengeance, for he was vain of his looks, though God knows why, and I had permanently impaired them.

And while Jack Kirby was recovering, old man Garfield recovered too, to the amazement of everybody, especially Doc Blaine.

I well remember the night Doc Blaine took me again out to old Jim Garfield's farm. I was in Shifty Corlan's joint, trying to drink enough of the slop he called beer to get a kick out of it, when Doc Blaine came in and persuaded me to go with him.

As we drove along the winding old road in Doc's car, I asked: ""Why are you insistent that I go with you this particular night? This isn't a professional call, is it?""

""No,"" he said. ""You couldn't kill old Jim with a post-oak maul. He's completely recovered from injuries that ought to have killed an ox. To tell the truth, Jack Kirby is in Lost Knob, swearing he'll shoot you on sight.""

""Well, for God's sake!"" I exclaimed angrily. ""Now everybody'll think I left town because I was afraid of him. Turn around and take me back, damn it!""

""Be reasonable,"" said Doc. ""Everybody knows you're not afraid of Kirby. Nobody's afraid of him now. His bluff's broken, and that's why he's so wild against you. But you can't afford to have any more trouble with him now, and your trial only a short time off.""

I laughed and said: ""Well, if he's looking for me hard enough, he can find me as easily at old Garfield's as in town, because Shifty Corlan heard you say where we were going. And Shifty's hated me ever since I skinned him in that horse-swap last fall. He'll tell Kirby where I went.""

""I never thought of that,"" said Doc Blaine, worried.

""Hell, forget it,"" I advised. ""Kirby hasn't got guts enough to do anything but blow.""

But I was mistaken. Puncture a bully's vanity and you touch his one vital spot.

Old Jim had not gone to bed when we got there. He was sitting in the room opening on to his sagging porch, the room which was at once living-room and bedroom, smoking his old cob pipe and trying to read a newspaper by the light of his coal-oil lamp. All the windows and doors were wide open for the coolness, and the insects which swarmed in and fluttered around the lamp didn't seem to bother him.

We sat down and discussed the weather—­which isn't so inane as one might suppose, in a country where men's livelihood depends on sun and rain, and is at the mercy of wind and drouth. The talk drifted into other kindred channels, and after some time, Doc Blaine bluntly spoke of something that hung in his mind.

""Jim,"" he said, ""that night I thought you were dying, you babbled a lot of stuff about your heart, and an Indian who lent you his. How much of that was delirium?""

""None, Doc,"" said Garfield, pulling at his pipe. ""It was gospel truth. Ghost Man, the Lipan priest of the Gods of Night, replaced my dead, torn heart with one from somethin' he worshipped. I ain't sure myself just what that somethin' is—­somethin' from away back and a long way off, he said. But bein' a god, it can do without its heart for awhile. But when I die—­if I ever get my head smashed so my consciousness is destroyed—­the heart must be given back to Ghost Man.""

""You mean you were in earnest about cutting out your heart?"" demanded Doc Blaine.

""It has to be,"" answered old Garfield. ""A livin' thing in a dead thing is opposed to nat'er. That's what Ghost Man said.""

""Who the devil was Ghost Man?""

""I told you. A witch-doctor of the Lipans, who dwelt in this country before the Comanches came down from the Staked Plains and drove 'em south across the Rio Grande. I was a friend to 'em. I reckon Ghost Man is the only one left alive.""

""Alive? Now?""

""I dunno,"" confessed old Jim. ""I dunno whether he's alive or dead. I dunno whether he was alive when he came to me after the fight on Locust Creek, or even if he was alive when I knowed him in the southern country. Alive as we understand life, I mean.""

""What balderdash is this?"" demanded Doc Blaine uneasily, and I felt a slight stirring in my hair. Outside was stillness, and the stars, and the black shadows of the post-oak woods. The lamp cast old Garfield's shadow grotesquely on the wall, so that it did not at all resemble that of a human, and his words were strange as words heard in a nightmare.

""I knowed you wouldn't understand,"" said old Jim. ""I don't understand myself, and I ain't got the words to explain them things I feel and know without understandin'. The Lipans were kin to the Apaches, and the Apaches learnt curious things from the Pueblos. Ghost Man was—­that's all I can say—­alive or dead, I don't know, but he was. What's more, he is.""

""Is it you or me that's crazy?"" asked Doc Blaine.

""Well,"" said old Jim, ""I'll tell you this much—­Ghost Man knew Coronado.""

""Crazy as a loon!"" murmured Doc Blaine. Then he lifted his head. ""What's that?""

""Horse turning in from the road,"" I said. ""Sounds like it stopped.""

I stepped to the door, like a fool, and stood etched in the light behind me. I got a glimpse of a shadowy bulk I knew to be a man on a horse; then Doc Blaine yelled: ""Look out!"" and threw himself against me, knocking us both sprawling. At the same instant I heard the smashing report of a rifle, and old Garfield grunted and fell heavily.

""Jack Kirby!"" screamed Doc Blaine. ""He's killed Jim!""

I scrambled up, hearing the clatter of retreating hoofs, snatched old Jim's shotgun from the wall, rushed recklessly out on to the sagging porch and let go both barrels at the fleeing shape, dim in the starlight. The charge was too light to kill at that range, but the bird-shot stung the horse and maddened him. He swerved, crashed headlong through a rail fence and charged across the orchard, and a peach tree limb knocked his rider out of the saddle. He never moved after he hit the ground. I ran out there and looked down at him. It was Jack Kirby, right enough, and his neck was broken like a rotten branch.

I let him lie, and ran back to the house. Doc Blaine had stretched old Garfield out on a bench he'd dragged in from the porch, and Doc's face was whiter than I'd ever seen it. Old Jim was a ghastly sight; he had been shot with an old-fashioned .45-70, and at that range the heavy ball had literally torn off the top of his head. His features were masked with blood and brains. He had been directly behind me, poor old devil, and he had stopped the slug meant for me.

Doc Blaine was trembling, though he was anything but a stranger to such sights.

""Would you pronounce him dead?"" he asked.

""That's for you to say."" I answered. ""But even a fool could tell that he's dead.

""He is dead,"" said Doc Blaine in a strained unnatural voice. ""Rigor mortis is already setting in. But feel his heart!""

I did, and cried out. The flesh was already cold and clammy; but beneath it that mysterious heart still hammered steadily away, like a dynamo in a deserted house. No blood coursed through those veins; yet the heart pounded, pounded, pounded, like the pulse of Eternity.

""A living thing in a dead thing,"" whispered Doc Blaine, cold sweat on his face. ""This is opposed to nature. I am going to keep the promise I made him. I'll assume full responsibility. This is too monstrous to ignore.""

Our implements were a butcher-knife and a hack-saw. Outside only the still stars looked down on the black post-oak shadows and the dead man that lay in the orchard. Inside, the old lamp flickered, making strange shadows move and shiver and cringe in the corners, and glistened on the blood on the floor, and the red-dabbled figure on the bench. The only sound inside was the crunch of the saw-edge in bone; outside an owl began to hoot weirdly.

Doc Blaine thrust a red-stained hand into the aperture he had made, and drew out a red, pulsing object that caught the lamplight. With a choked cry he recoiled, and the thing slipped from his fingers and fell on the table. And I too cried out involuntarily. For it did not fall with a soft meaty thud, as a piece of flesh should fall. It thumped hard on the table.

Impelled by an irresistible urge, I bent and gingerly picked up old Garfield's heart. The feel of it was brittle, unyielding, like steel or stone, but smoother than either. In size and shape it was the duplicate of a human heart, but it was slick and smooth, and its crimson surface reflected the lamplight like a jewel more lambent than any ruby; and in my hand it still throbbed mightily, sending vibratory radiations of energy up my arm until my own heart seemed swelling and bursting in response. It was cosmic power, beyond my comprehension, concentrated into the likeness of a human heart.

The thought came to me that here was a dynamo of life, the nearest approach to immortality that is possible for the destructible human body, the materialization of a cosmic secret more wonderful than the fabulous fountain sought for by Ponce de Leon. My soul was drawn into that unterrestrial gleam, and I suddenly wished passionately that it hammered and thundered in my own bosom in place of my paltry heart of tissue and muscle.

Doc Blaine ejaculated incoherently. I wheeled.

The noise of his coming had been no greater than the whispering of a night wind through the corn. There in the doorway he stood, tall, dark, inscrutable—­an Indian warrior, in the paint, war bonnet, breech-clout and moccasins of an elder age. His dark eyes burned like fires gleaming deep under fathomless black lakes. Silently he extended his hand, and I dropped Jim Garfield's heart into it. Then without a word he turned and stalked into the night. But when Doc Blaine and I rushed out into the yard an instant later, there was no sign of any human being. He had vanished like a phantom of the night, and only something that looked like an owl was flying, dwindling from sight, into the rising moon.","
There are things in this world that are better left unknown and areas of knowledge better left unexplored. With my background as an anthropologist and folklorist, trained to think as a scientist, I should reject such conclusions out of hand. Pursuit of knowledge, wherever it might lead, whatever unpalatable facts might surface, has ever been my highest aspiration. Nevertheless, the things I have experienced, the abominations I have seen with my own eyes, have led me to this conclusion. How comforting it would be if the experiences I am about to relate only reflected a psychotic episode!
The events surrounding my stay in Mexico and subsequent hospitalization have already become a fertile source of gossip, rumor, and innuendo among my academic colleagues. What a pity that men and women, supposedly dedicated to science and learning, would stoop to such pastimes, stereotypically associated with the ignorant and unintelligent; nevertheless, such is the sorry case.
I feel that I must clarify the facts of my experience, set the record straight so to speak. For this reason I am writing down the present account, which many readers will no doubt dismiss as the ravings of a lunatic, or the product of some drug induced hallucination. Nevertheless, I will describe the events that transpired as I experienced them. Most of what I now write is taken from notes I recorded carefully as the events occurred. I fortunately had the intuitive foresight to mail these notes to a trusted friend and colleague at the university prior to the horrible night in June of last year, concerning which I shall presently elaborate. The reader is, of course, free to draw his or her conclusions. As for myself, I fear that I may not have much time left, and I do not want to go to whatever fate awaits me in silence.
Had I not chosen to accept the invitation, proffered by an old acquaintance of my days as a graduate student, to explore a strange legend in Mexico, I would be a saner man now. I would still be comfortably ensconced in a tenured position with a prestigious eastern university, still secure in a rational world governed by the well-understood laws and principles of physics. Lamentably, any such concept of reality is now irrevocably lost for me. I know that things exist in this world, in this universe, that all sane and rational laws decree cannot exist. I have gazed upon an abomination barely hinted at in even the darkest and most fabulous corners of myth and legend. How I envy the multitude of humanity that continues to dwell in the smug illusion of an orderly, mechanistic cosmos!
My insane odyssey began almost one year ago. I had been invited to present a paper at an international symposium on religion, mythology, and folklore being held in San Antonio, Texas. At the end of the three day session I had received a call from Carl Rousseau, a former classmate of mine at Columbia whom I had not seen in a number of years.
To my surprise, Rousseau suggested that we meet for dinner. In reality, we had never been close friends. Nevertheless, my old classmate insisted that he had a story to share with me, one that I might find very interesting, considering my recently published research. In summary, I had uncovered and documented evidence pointing to a single very ancient tradition that seems to underlie most of the world's magical and mythological systems.
We met early that same evening at a small restaurant on the famous San Antonio River walk.
""Dr. Shapiro, good to see you again."" Rousseau's greeting sounded cheery enough, though his formality surprised me somewhat. ""Go ahead and order,"" he added, ""I'm only going to have coffee.""
As I perused the menu Rousseau fumbled a bit with his napkin. ""I'll try to explain this the best I can; . . . hope you won't think I'm too crazy, but what you're about to hear is the God honest truth. I swear it.""
""Really? Go ahead,"" I replied. Rousseau's manner disquieted me a little.
""I know you must be wondering why I decided to contact you after all this time; I mean, I know we weren't ever especially close . . . ""
""No matter. How can I help you?""
""Dr. Shapiro . . . ""
""Reuben,"" I interjected.
""O.K., Reuben . . . I don't know if you'd heard, but I've been living in Mexico, also some in Central America, for the last ten years or so.""
""Yes, I knew that your area of interest lay in the pre-conquest folk traditions of that region.""
""But Doc . . . uh . . . Reuben, my interests went beyond mere anthropological studies of folklore . . . more into the esoteric and occult aspects of those traditions. I am convinced that much knowledge from the pre-Columbian civilizations survived the Conquest and the Inquisition and is still preserved in secret by groups or individuals who carefully pass the knowledge on from one generation to the next. As you probably remember, I never pursued my academic studies as far as you did. Actually, I never even finished writing my master's thesis.""
""Pity,"" I sighed, ""you have the brains to become an outstanding teacher and researcher.""
Rousseau frowned slightly. ""Yes, but that's not where my interests lie. Publish or perish, I think they call it. Anyway, I was lucky; I inherited enough money that earning a living isn't a major concern for me.""
""We should all be so fortunate . . .,"" I replied, then added, ""What can I do for you Carl?""
""I was just getting to that,"" he answered, quickly adding, ""I've recently spent some time . . . several months in fact, living in northern Mexico, a little town called San Facundo, only a couple of hours south of Brownsville, Texas. I was originally attracted to the town by some old writings I came across . . . stuff by early Spanish friars bent on christianizing the local Indians, but some really weird stuff.""
""Most likely propaganda to justify some of the atrocities they planned once the benefits of the Inquisition were made available to the natives,"" I replied, wondering where our conversation was leading.
""That was the first thing that occurred to me also, but there were other things . . . I mean twelve priests were locked away in a monastery by order of the Archbishop of Mexico City. It was stated that those priests had been blinded and their tongues cut out at the Church's behest. The Superior of the Augustinian Order operating in the province asked the Church authorities for permission to burn hundreds of Indians at the stake, a request that was granted after he explained the circumstances to a secret tribunal of the Holy Office.
""After that,"" he continued, ""any person, Spaniard or Indian, suspected of engaging in certain practices, things that were known to the investigators, but which the writers of the chronicles were explicitly forbidden to describe, was to be put to death instantly and the corpse burned to ashes.""
""Horrible,"" I grimaced, ""but not too unusual for the times. I know. Some of my own ancestors suffered at the hands of the Inquisition.""
""Yes, Reuben, but it gets stranger. A large section of landscape, several leagues in length and breadth, was declared forbidden ground. No Christian could set a foot in that area under pain of excommunication. To this very day it's known in the region as la zona maldita, 'the Cursed Zone'.""
I rolled Rousseau's account over in my mind for a moment. It did seem to have the makings of an interesting piece of folklore. I told him as much.
""But why call it to my attention specifically?"" I queried. ""I'm a specialist in mythology and folklore, that's true, but is there something special in this odd bit of history you've uncovered that you think I should take any special note of?""
""Absolutely."" Rousseau's voice seemed calmer now. ""After reading all I could find out about this . . . this strangeness, for want of a better term, I decided to actually spend some time in the area and find out what I could first hand. The town of San Facundo, founded in the early seventeen hundreds, sits right at the edge of it . . . I mean the 'Cursed Zone'.""
""Yes, go on."" I couldn't help it. My interest was growing.
""Well, the locals are a strange lot, to say the least,"" he continued. ""You know how it goes, you have an isolated rural community, for many generations, and a lot of genetic fermentation occurs.""
""Often that can be the case,"" I replied.
""Anyway,"" continued Rousseau, ""they tend to be very clannish, tightlipped with any outsiders, and with me, an Americano, well, you can imagine. But after a while I did gain the trust of a few, and what they told me really piqued my interest.""
Rousseau paused for a moment, sipped his coffee, by now almost cold, and wiped the corners of his mouth with his napkin.
""A little south of San Facundo,"" he went on, ""not too far off the main highway, there's a singular hill. It's known locally as El Tinieblo, the place of darkness . . . juts straight up some five hundred feet above the surrounding landscape. The friars regarded it as an especially evil place. It lay right in the middle of the Cursed Zone, and the locals fear it to this day, at least those who aren't part of it."" Rousseau's emphasis on the word ""part"" caused me to feel an odd sensation in the back of my neck.
""It seems,"" he continued, ""that a couple of years back some federales, federal police from the Attorney General's office, went up there to investigate reports of night time activity, you know, lights, strange noises and such. They suspected drug traffickers at work. Anyway, of fifteen federales that went up that hill, only two came back down, both of them traumatized and completely incoherent. As far as anyone knows, no bodies were ever recovered. You've got to remember, those men were all equipped with automatic weapons and were trained to deal with almost any contingency. At any rate, the Mexican government clamped a tight security lid on the whole thing.""
I thought about this for a moment, then replied, ""So you think something strange happened to them, like violent cult activity maybe?""
""I thought that at first."" he responded quickly. ""I thought, perhaps, they had stumbled onto some secret ceremony or something, and just bit off more than they could chew. People can be quite dangerous when someone threatens or interferes with their religious practices.""
He paused again, staring briefly at his lap.
""But I know now that it was something else. I truly wish that it was only a matter of some weird cult or violent religious sect.""
""So, what leads you to believe it wasn't?"" I insisted.
""The two survivors . . . they both died within a few weeks of causes that were undetermined, as best as I could find out, even after bribing a couple of government officials for information. I talked to a doctor in the state capital who had been involved in their treatment. He told me that one of them only sat, you know, drawn up into a fetal position and making meaningless whining sounds; but the other, he would stare vacantly into space most of the time, then suddenly start shrieking at the top of his lungs . . . something about 'los demonios que no tienen forma . . . que te comen el cuerpo y el alma'.""
Though my Spanish was probably not as fluent as Rousseau's, I understood the meaning of his words . . . devils without shape that feed on body and soul . . .
Rousseau continued his account, providing further details about the history of the region and the nature of its inhabitants. Especially intriguing was his mention of certain physical peculiarities, apparently genetic in nature, that characterize some elements of the local population.
""Some of the locals actually seem almost frog like, I mean, like their eyes are round and bulging, they have almost no necks or chins, and their skin . . . well, it seems oddly rough, I might even say scaly.""
""You mean something like ichthyosis,"" I suggested. ""That's a hereditary condition you know . . . ""
""Yes,"" he answered. ""I've seen examples of that in my travels, but this . . . this is well . . . different. It does seem to run in the same families though.""
I thought for a moment, then suggested, ""Probably some unusual mutation due to doubling up defective recessive genes. That sometimes happens with too much inbreeding. I've seen some real oddities in our own southern Appalachian mountains. Even back in Massachusetts, I've heard stories of a decaying fishing town on the coast just south of Newburysport, as well as certain backwaters in the central part of the state where a very high incidence of genetic anomalies seems to occur.""
""I fear there's more to it than that,"" Rousseau replied. ""The other local people, the normal ones, avoid the . . . the strange ones like the plague. They seem to actually be terrified of them.""
""Sounds like a simple case of superstitious fear to me,"" I offered, adding, ""Ignorant people often react that way to anyone who's different or strange.""
""What if the fear were justified?"" he retorted. ""There was a case I looked into personally. It seems that a rural family, . . . lived out from town a little distance . . . Anyway, they had a child who wandered onto some property owned by one of the strange families. The child disappeared. Of course, the family was frantic. Then the child turned up . . . what was left of it, only a few gnawed bones with some shreds of flesh attached. The local police said it was coyotes, but I swear that the tooth marks I saw on the bones were not those of coyotes, or any other predator found in that region. They were not exactly human teeth, but were set in a human-like jaw, judging from the spacing.""
""Hmmm . . .,"" I pondered. ""Might bear looking into, but . . . ""
""Why don't you take some time and come see for yourself?"" demanded my companion. ""There are direct flights from here to Brownsville or Harlingen. After that it's only a couple of hours driving time to San Facundo. I have a house rented there. Nothing luxurious, to be sure, but comfortable enough for a few days. You can stay there with me.""
Our meeting ended at this point, aside from the usual leave-taking remarks and exchange of business cards and hotel telephone numbers. I headed straight to my hotel and presumed that Rousseau had done the same. Arriving at my room, I proceeded almost directly to the shower (the night being very warm). Inadvertently, I left the bathroom door open, a habit born of many years of living alone. As I brushed my teeth, I caught sight in the mirror of a slight movement at the base of the hallway door. I called out, but received no answer. Quick to investigate, I discovered a sheet of paper, folded in half, inserted beneath the door.
Curious, and a little annoyed, I picked up the paper, and saw scribbled thereon, in common black ballpoint, the references Rev. 13; Rev. 13: 13, and Koran 25:29. These cryptic citations, taken from the Christian New Testament and the Muslim Qûran, puzzled me. What could such a thing mean, and why would anyone slip such a note under my door? In that instant I remembered that most hotel rooms in the United States contain copies of the New Testament, distributed by some Christian evangelical organization.
A brief search in the drawers of the end table produced the book I was looking for. I fumbled through the limp pages of the cheap copy until I found the passage in question.
The thirteenth chapter of the Book of Revelations did nothing to resolve the mystery for me, as I read, ""And I stood still upon the sand of the sea. And I saw a beast ascending out of the sea. . . ."" Reading along to the thirteenth verse, I found, ""And I saw three unclean spirits like unto frogs come out of the mouth of the dragon and out of the mouth of the beast and out of the mouth of the false prophet.""
I was perplexed by these strange passages, and even more puzzled as to the purpose of the note. Those verses meant nothing to me. How could this antique eschatological imagery possibly relate to a person such as myself, a tenured professor of anthropology and folklore at a world-renowned Ivy League university? I would have liked to dismiss the whole affair as the misplaced zeal of some ""born-again"" bellhop, just another hawker of Christian fundamentalism of the type so common these days. But a zealous Christian would hardly cite a reference from the Islamic holy book. I did recall that Rousseau had mentioned the frog-like appearance of some San Facundo natives, but failed to see any relationship between that assertion and the material I had just read.
Still curious about the Qûranic reference, I fumbled in my wallet for the card of a certain Monsignor Zacchardi, a Jesuit scholar and professor of Comparative Religion at a local Catholic university. I had met Zacchardi at the conference earlier that week.
The priest answered after several rings.
""Good evening, Doctor Zacchardi,"" I offered. ""Sorry to disturb you so late, but I have a question. Do you have a copy of the Qûran at hand?""
Answering in the affirmative, Zacchardi assured me that my inquiry was no trouble at all. He asked me to wait a minute while he brought the copy from his study. A few moments later he returned.
""What, in particular, did you want to know from the Qûran?""
""The twenty-fifth Surah, twenty-ninth verse, what does it say?""
I could hear him leafing through the book. Presently, he answered, ""This is strange. It reads 'Beware mankind, for Shaitan is Khadhulu.' I had never noticed that particular passage before. I'd have to look into it more deeply before I could give you a possible interpretation.""
""No, that's quite all right,"" I answered. ""I just saw that Surah and verse mentioned in a novel I am reading and it stirred my curiosity.""
""Yes, I understand the feeling perfectly,"" replied the priest. ""Is there anything else?""
""No. Thank you for your help, I truly appreciate it. Good night.""
This brief conversation left me even more mystified than before. Many weeks later, I would come to realize the deeper, and very sinister implications of those cryptic passages, taken from the holy writ of two major religions.
Rousseau's story had undeniably captivated my interest, even overwhelming my native skepticism. I had some vacation time coming up; why not join Rousseau on a little junket down to Mexico? I might uncover some interesting material for further research. Even if I didn't, I might continue south and spend a few days relaxing on the beaches in Veracruz. Never did I imagine how I would come to regret my acceptance of Rousseau's invitation!


II

The hour long flight to Brownsville was boringly uneventful. Rousseau was strangely quiet and seemed rather apprehensive during the brief trip. The drive across the border and into Mexico was another story. After Rousseau picked up his vehicle, a four-wheel-drive Nissan, at the airport in Brownsville, we proceeded to the new international bridge, one of three bridges linking Brownsville, Texas with its sister city of Matamoros, Mexico. Mexican customs and immigration caused us remarkably little delay. Afterwards, we wound our way through the traffic of Matamoros, perhaps chaotic to an unaccustomed American, but rather orderly by the standards of most ""third world"" cities I had experienced. Eventually, we found ourselves on the main southbound highway, passing through open countryside. Rousseau kept up a steady conversation, explaining in great detail the history and folk traditions of the region through which we were passing. He was obviously very knowledgeable about those matters.
The landscape itself was not particularly remarkable at first, consisting of flat coastal plane covered, where it had not been cleared for cultivation, with stunted, thorny vegetation of the sort typically found in semiarid regions. At irregular intervals this was relieved by meandering ribbons of lush greenery marking the course of some narrow stream. Gradually, as we traveled south, the landscape became more rolling and elevated. The dim blue outlines of mountains grew visible on the southwestern horizon.
Villages, such as they were, amounted to clusters of cinder block and adobe structures, usually with a small store or two and a school building. The inhabitants, mostly women and children it seemed, invariably appeared to be occupied outside the houses or congregating around the community bus stop. We passed through any number of such totally forgettable places until, we crested the top of a hill and the town of San Facundo, with its white Spanish colonial church tower, came into view.
San Facundo was laid out in typical Mexican fashion with the whole town extending out from a central plaza, but it was not exactly the dusty little adobe place I had imagined. The business district boasted a number of modern looking establishments, and the principal streets were paved, though often in disrepair. The people I observed on the streets were mostly of Spanish-Indian mestizo stock, with the European strain predominating somewhat, as is often the case in northern Mexico. They seemed normal enough.
""Where,"" I asked, ""are the odd ones? I see nothing abnormal about the people hereabouts.""
""They generally hang together,"" was Rousseau's answer. ""Usually, you don't see them around until late in the afternoon, about the time the sun starts to set. They seem to be more nocturnal.""
""Which doubtless adds to the suspicion and fear of the local people,"" I suggested.
Rousseau paused for a moment, then recommended that we get ourselves settled in our lodgings. ""There'll be plenty of time for taking in the local atmosphere over the next few days,"" he added. ""I am certain that you'll see even more than you bargained for, but right now let's get a shower and something to eat."" The suggestion was more than welcome, as the day was very hot and we had not eaten anything since leaving Brownsville.
The house in which we would be staying was a two-story cinder block affair, plastered over and painted a rather gaudy shade of blue-green. Rousseau had taken it on lease from a local attorney who currently held a government position in another part of the country. There were three bedrooms, one of which would be mine during my stay, and a bath on the upper floor. Rousseau would be sleeping downstairs in the family room, which he had converted into a sort of study. I noticed that he had moved most of the owner's furnishings to the two unoccupied bedrooms, which he was using for storage.
After my shower, which had been difficult due to the extremely low water pressure, I joined Rousseau in the study.
""I've called my cook and she will have us something to eat shortly,"" he said.
""Good,"" I replied, ""but what have we here . . . ?"" What attracted my attention was a large book, bound in crumbling black leather with heavy brass corners and a brass hasp so that the volume could be locked shut. Obviously, it was very old.
""May I see it?"" I asked.
""I thought you would find it interesting,"" replied Rousseau. ""Can you read it?""
I studied the strange calligraphic script for a few minutes, presently recognizing it as Hebrew, a language in which I am fluent. The writing appeared to be on parchment in an archaic Sephardic dialect, but containing a scattering of Arabic words. On the title page I deciphered the words Sepher al Azif, followed by the legend: As written by Abd el Azrada the poet of Sanaa, may Adonai grant him mercy, in the city of Dimasq three centuries past. Rendered by my hand in the tongue of the Holy Covenant of Abraham in the four thousand nine hundred and sixteenth year of the Creation of the World, invoking the protection of Adonai in His Most Holy Name, which no man may utter. Beseeching hereof, His Great and Boundless Mercy, I am Isaac bar Z'evi, scribe to the Synagogue in the city of Cordoba.
The names ""Al Azif"" and ""Abd el Azrada"" stirred up memories in the back of my mind. During the early decades of this century a New England writer of horror fiction named Howard Phillips Lovecraft had based a whole series of stories around such a tome, more frequently referred to by its Greek title, Necronomicon. According to Lovecraft, Al Azif had been written or compiled in Damascus during the eighth century of our common era by one ""Abdul Alhazred,"" apparently an Arab or Syrian magus who flourished at the time of the Umayyad Caliphs, and who was often referred to simply as the ""Mad Arab."" Though almost all serious scholars agree that such a volume had never existed outside of Lovecraft's imagination, much popular speculation had grown up around it, creating a sort of modern folklore, which was precisely the reason I was aware of it.
I also knew that several books had been published during the 1970's and '80's purporting to be the Necronomicon. I had read two of them myself, one merely a mishmash of Sumerian and Akkadian incantations and conjurations for summoning or exorcising various and sundry gods, angels, and demons, and the other a rather odd collection drawn from Elizabethan era grimoires. The latter also may have originally been derived from Mesopotamian magical texts. Nevertheless, here I had before me an apparently ancient volume that seemed to be the real thing . . . and in a hot, dusty provincial town in northern Mexico!
""Where did you get this?"" My question was unavoidable.
""The attorney from whom I rented this house,"" was Rousseau's reply. ""He, in turn, obtained it from an incredibly old gentleman who lived on a ranch near here. He gave it to my lawyer friend before he died. Said it had been in his family for many generations. God only knows where it originally came from or how it got here.""
""It seems to have been written in Muslim Spain some time during the eleventh century,"" I replied. ""But the author, or I should say translator, appears to have been a Jew."" I paused for a moment to organize my thoughts before continuing.
""The original, if this is what I think it is, was written in Arabic some centuries earlier. Supposedly, there were later Greek and Latin translations, as well as an English version attributed to John Dee, court physician and astrologer to Elizabeth I, but no mention was ever made of a Hebrew rendering."" Once again I paused. ""Good God man! Do you have any idea how rare this volume must be?""
Rousseau remained silent for a moment.
""You have just confirmed what I already suspected."" The tone of his reply was edged with fear and resignation, as one might hear from a man who has just received confirmation of a dreaded diagnosis.
""But I've always assumed that the Necronomicon was an entirely fictional work,"" I protested, ""merely a literary invention used by Lovecraft and his circle as the basis for some early twentieth century works of science fiction or whatever . . . ""
Rousseau smiled, rather sadly it seemed. ""Obviously, that was, or is, not the case. You hold the evidence right there in your hands.""
I stared at the leather bound volume I held before me. Suddenly, I felt an unexpected wave of revulsion, bordering on nausea, at the thought that such a horrible book could actually exist . . . and I had it in my own hands. Abruptly, I put the volume on the desk, exercising a fete of will not to drop it like the repulsive thing it was.
Rousseau grimaced a bit, then explained, ""Lovecraft certainly had access to information that is beyond the reach of most researchers. Either he was an initiate into certain secret societies himself, or more likely, discovered documents in his grandfather's library that provided him with information normally available only to a very limited circle of high degree initiates."" Pausing for a moment, he added, ""Lovecraft's father and grandfather were both associated with a highly esoteric Masonic rite, one not generally recognized, or even known of, by most Freemasons. At any rate, he almost certainly had access to their private papers after their deaths.""
The implications of Rousseau's words astounded me. If the dreaded Necronomicon did indeed exist, then the terrible secret cults described by Lovecraft in his series of tales probably existed too. Of course, I was not ready to accept the reality of such abominable entities as Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, or Shub-Niggurath, or places such as the sunken city of R'lyeh, that Lovecraft so often referred to in his fictional, or perhaps fictionalized stories.
""Do you really think what you've told me about this town could somehow be related to this book, or to the things described in Lovecraft's stories?"" I asked incredulously.
""I'm hoping that you'll be able to determine if that's the case,"" Rousseau replied in a voice that was little more than a whisper.
",False
"Memories of Leng
Disclaimer: I do not own anything. All (or most) of the material contained herein belongs to either Howard Philip Lovecraft or August Derleth. Delta Green (such as it is) belongs to Pagan Publishing. And for concepts that come later in the story... well, creatures of legend that can totally freeze a person's brain have always had their place in the public domain, but Peter S. Beagle deserves credit for his take on the kind that inspire beatific rapture instead of gibbering terror.
Summary: Joseph Clayton always suspected that Marie Trinh was hiding something about her family, but never knew what it was. When he finally finds out what... well, the first step on the road to enlightenment is often quite a doozy. Then, the question becomes what to do with that enlightened knowledge.
Authors Note: There will be Lovecraftian horror in this story, after a fashion. However, there will also be humour and wonder and quite some affection. There will also be aspects more apropos to a Howardian barbarian story or a Burroughs Englishman than to the academics that Lovecraft sometimes wrote about: bravery, sacrifice (in more ways than one) and familiarity even in the most unlikely of places.
Glaston, upper Worcester Co., Massachusetts (roughly analogous to Gardner)
October 27, 2007.
An autumnal chill descended upon the streets of Glaston as the young man walked upon the concrete sidewalk, passing redbrick storefronts and shop windows, every surface still wet with the morning rain. Leaves, red and orange and each vibrant in their hue, were shaken loose from the trees lining the street by the wind, landing wherever they fell. For an instant in time, the spectacle of the leaves drew the attention of the man, in fact little more than a teenage boy, as he made his way toward the corner. However, Joseph Clayton, clad in bluejeans and jacket with a backpack slung from his shoulders, had far more important things to focus on than a show of falling leaves. An important test for this semester was arriving in a week or so and he needed to study.
Also, he was getting quite hungry this close to lunch.
As Joseph rounded the corner and continued toward his favorite eatery, he wondered if he would get swamped in the usual lunch crowd. However, as he saw the front of the Leng Trinh Restaurant, his thoughts turned to quiet dejection.
""Damnit!"" muttered Joseph as he approached the eatery. The reason for this turn in mood was the carpet of tempered glass fragments on the sidewalk below the picture window at the front of the establishment, which was now covered by plastic sheeting. Thuch Van Trinh, one half of the husband-and-wife ownership, was wearing a plaid jacket over his apron and usual cooking clothes and was shoveling the broken glass into a bucket. ""Hey, Mr. Trinh, how's it going?"". Joseph asked with a smile. This was more false cheer than anything, as Joseph could guess how Thuch must be feeling: anger was always a popular choice, followed closely by worry about the reason why.
Despite what he must have been feeling, Thuch Van Trinh grinned back, the black lines of his facial tattooing creasing as the muscles moved under his cheeks. ""Not so good, Mr. Clayton. If this keeps up, I may have to put in Plexiglas so that the window won't break."" The Trinhs accents, as his parents and the other adults of the town told it, had been rather strong (even unusually so) when they had immigrated to Glaston from their first home in Boston. This had usually been waved off by their purported origins in the remote hills on the Vietnam-Laos border, seemingly collaborated by how their teeth had been dyed black. On the other hand, given their rural roots, their speed in adapting local speech patterns so that they now sounded more like second generation Americans (and especially their daughter's complete lack of any accent except the local standard) did make for a puzzling situation. However, for their ease of assimilation and the food they served, they had become well-liked in the community.
So why were things like this happening to them recently? ""How many times does this make this month; two, three?"" Joseph had to ask this, wondering if things were worse than he thought.
""It's happened three times already, this time not more than an hour ago. Thanh wants to install security cameras to watch the place and with how small and cheap they are now, I think we just might."" An hour ago? They'd smashed a picture window in broad daylight? Who in town could be that stupid or that angry? Josephs train of thought was broken then, when Thuch said something of much more interest to the younger man. ""By the way, if you're looking for Marie, she's helping her mother in the kitchen. Even without a window we seem to be doing good business."" Thuch went back to his work and Joseph, not wanting to delay any longer, entered the restaurant.
Just as Thuch had said, Leng Trinh still had it's usual busy lunchtime crowd, albeit one that was concentrated near the back wall. Picking his way around tables packed with diners, Joseph finally arrived at a table set for two, a 'reserved' sign upon it. Removing his backpack and laying it beside a chair, he sat down, shuffled off his coat and went to bury his nose in the menu.
It always felt a bit odd to Joseph, eating in an ethnic restaurant where none of the diners were the same ethnicity as the cooks, or even from the same part of the world. However, none of it mattered when the food was as good as it was here.
""Now then, what would a fine, upstanding New England boy like yourself want in a place like this?"" The voice that asked this was soft, amused, female and had an almost mocking tone. It also had the accent of the New England uplands. To Joseph, it could only be one person.
""The same thing I always get here."" He answered dryly before looking up from the menu. There, holding a pad of paper and a pen, was teenage girl with almond-shaped eyes, shoulder length black hair with green streaks, a cooking apron and an amused grin. ""Hi Marie... you sure your mom's alright with you waitressing this crowd?""
""We've got enough help in the kitchen already and Dad's coming in after all the glass is cleaned up."" She glanced up at the window, plastic sheet and all, after she wrote his order down. ""I just wish we knew who was doing this. If we don't get someone else to cough up some money, our insurance company might go sour on us."" Marie went back to the kitchen to get the food for both of them.
Ten minutes later, she was laying out two place settings of food that had been prepared ahead of time. ""Alright, that's two plates of grilled pork on beds of Leng-style rice, your dish of steamed green beans with soy sauce for dipping, my bowl of soup and two cans of soda."" They'd eat lunch before studying, with Joseph paying the tab for both of them.
If anyone asked, it wasn't a date. Not in the strictest sense, anyway.
""What, no bak bon dzhow?"" Asked Joseph, decidedly disappointed at the apparent lack of the special ingredient.
To this, Marie moved a small earthen bowl from the serving tray onto the table and lifted the lid to reveal a thick gray sauce containing mushrooms and cracked black pepper. ""Would I be one to deny you the gravy of the gods?"" She asked (rhetorically) with a soft smile; Joseph couldn't help but smile back as he cracked the tab on his soda and began on his green beans.
A bit later, when his beans were gone and Marie had almost finished her soup, Joesph began formulating a question that related to a curious thought that had sprung up earlier. ""Not to sound like a nag or anything, but I'm just curious but what was all that 'upstanding' stuff about?"" The only time he had ever heard anyone talk like that was...
Oh God...
Marie swallowed the last bits of her soup. ""Oh, I don't know. Maybe It's that I had no idea that the son of insurance brokers had such deep and aristocratic roots? Maybe it's that I was surprised to find out that the Clayton's had come not from hardy New England farming stock as I had assumed, but from the urbane, wealthy ranks of those grand Brahmins of Boston? I'm sure Granny Cora could tell some fascinating stories about the old days; she sure seemed interested in mine."" If anything, Marie took the entire thing in stride, treating both the memory of the experience and the experience itself with a a great deal of interested amusement. Certainly, mocking the type of language she had encountered was almost cracking her up.
Joseph, on the other hand, had first felt bemusement at the scene in which the Clayton family reunion of the past summer had found itself, quickly turning into outright embarrassment. ""Look, I'm sorry that I didn't tell you about her, but everybody thought that she wouldn't be able to come due to health concerns. It's not my fault that a half-senile, 97 year old woman worked up enough stubbornness to drag her nurse halfway across the state!"".
""I never said anything about anyone being at fault. I just thought it was an interesting revelation about your family."" She had meant her cajoling in good humour, but Josephs defensiveness and embarrassment were never good emotions to bring out. ""Anyway, most people would be proud to have the Boston gentry in their family history: industrialists, merchants, art, culture, philanthropy, charity..."" With every word, Marie spooned a bit of ban boc dzhow onto her grilled pork.
""As well as whaling, slave trading, opium smuggling, snobbery and having your entire life guided by the expectations of your peers; exactly the sorts of things my parents taught me to loathe. The thing is, my great-great-grandmother came from a very select, very privileged and lily-white background; I was worried that she'd... well, react oddly to you."" Joseph retorted as he began spooning (or rather, pouring) the sauce onto his meat after Marie had finished with it and passed it to him. In the case of Cora Clayton (nee Coffin), Josephs fear hadn't primarily been that she would find Marie objectionable on account of her race since that prejudice had been more ingrained in her parents generation than hers. His fear had instead been that his great great grandmother, as self-proclaimed guardian of the old, aristocratic traditions, might object to their relationship because the Trinhs were restaurateurs with no history of pedigree, education or money behind them.
In Cora's world (the 1920s, where her mind was half the time), heirs had married heiresses, families had coordinated their fortunes and everyone had kept an eye on everyone else; these were rules of decorum that had lasted for her long after the Claytons had gone bust in the great Crash of '29. The fact that she had taken Joseph aside and explained her concerns to him had done nothing to soothe his embarrassment, although he had finally convinced her that, being naturalized citizens with a successful restaurant, the Trinhs were firmly in the middling classes. She had also estimated that said restaurant, with no other inheritors besides Marie, would most likely pass into Clayton hands in the fullness of time.
No one had dared explain to her the differences between modern teenage dating and the genteel courtships of her youth.
""I don't think she reacted that oddly. Sure, she was so out of date that you had to explain that I meant 'French Indochina' when I said that my parents came from Vietnam and she did seem a bit too fascinated with my families origins and, alright, it was weird hearing someone actually use the word 'courting' without trying to be funny. However, it was kind of nice to speak French with someone in this town after all the time my parents invested in me learning it."" Marie knew that while it had been terrifying for Joseph, having to put up with his relatives dissection of his relationship and fearing disapproval, she herself had enjoyed a chance to see if the old stereotypes were true. When it had become clear to Marie that the elderly woman was not about to spew racial epitaphs at her but was, indeed, fascinated as to her families background, Marie had made it a point to 'ham it up' in telling their story.
To an entranced Cora Clayton, Marie had described her parents lives before emigration as a subsistence existence in a village high up in the fog-choked mountain passes. She had woven scenes of her people worshiping strange, heathen gods far from the civilized lands of the Buddha and partaking in ghastly rituals to ensure harvests of rice from narrow mountainside terraces. She told the old woman that her parents had tired of such a life and had dreamed of something more, something in the wider world glimpsed in third-hand magazines and radio broadcasts.
After receiving a dispensation from their village shaman to leave (but promising to sent back remittances), they had made their way to Hanoi and then to Boston and finally to Glaston where, having never truly given up the more religious and symbolic aspects of their heathenish past, they nevertheless had made good names for themselves in the community. Marie had made sure that her prose had been both lurid and exotic so as to fully entrance a child of the Age of Empire as well as making proper use of tone, whether enraptured, casual or deathly serious, to emphasize mood. The end result was to make it sound as if her culture wasn't just some rural outlet of modern Vietnam or Laos, but as if it was truly unlike any other in the world.
That was an opinion that Joseph was also rapidly adopting.
They ate in relative silence for a while, the bustle of the lunch crowd beginning to die down as people left, many of them stopping to talk to Mr. Trinh at the till, expressing their concern over what had happened with the window. They were just about half done when Joseph began another conversation. ""So, did you know that there's a 'Heritage Day' coming up at school in a few weeks?""
""Yeah, and?"" Deep down in her gut, Marie was beginning to get a slightly worried feeling from the direction this conversation was going. This pretty much happened whenever the subject of her parent's past came up but, like so many times before, she could probably bluff her way through it.
""I thought that, maybe, we could do something for it. I was thinking about dredging up something from Normandy because I didn't want to clog up the schedule with another variation of British regional culture."" It sounded perfectly innocent, but Marie knew that this was a potentially tricky situation that might require misdirection, a convincing excuse and possible outright lying.
She hated lying to Joseph.
""Alright then. You can do that, I'll do the Vietnamese thing and we'll knock 'em all dead."" She answered with an enthusiasm that she hoped had betrayed nothing of her growing unease with the conversation. This seemed to provoke nothing but a non-committal murmur of agreement and thus, thinking that that was over with, she began eating again.
However, that was not the end of it.
""By Vietnamese, do you mean the standard culture from around Hanoi... or the culture from your parent's home village?"" Joseph asked, seemingly as if only for the purpose of clarification. There was much more behind it though, and whether it was just ingrained paranoia or any real danger of exposure, Marie knew that this was entering onto some very tenuous and potentially very dangerous ground. Still, the subject had to be breached.
""Aren't they pretty much the same? I mean, sure, it was pretty rural back there, but whether village or city, we were all Viet: same language, same culture, same blood, same... pretty much everything, when you think about it."" As denials went, this one wasn't half bad: sincere enough to be taken seriously and with enough internal logic that it wouldn't fall apart immediately in the face of the mildly educated mind.
On this subject, however, Joseph had become rather more than merely mildly educated. He had observed things for a long time: a lot of little things and one or two big things for the most part. And he, after long deliberation and study, had discovered that some of those things just didn't match up.
""You know, there was a time when I could believe that. But... there are just too many deviations to discount."" Joesph stopped eating all together, putting down his fork and looking his girlfriend straight in the eyes before closing and opening them again, as if to rally his thoughts. ""The food, for one thing, isn't like any kind of Vietnamese food I've read about. Yes, you have the side dishes but that's about it for similarity. Second, your parent's tattoos. Again, unlike any other group in Southeast Asia; the closest matches I could find were incised lines on bronze figurines from over two thousand years ago.""
He stopped again. ""And then there's the language you guys speak. I'm fairly sure it's in the Mon-Khmer group, but I've been doing some research and... honestly, I've seen words on this menu that I've never been able to find in any other source. And I'm not the only one who's noticed these things."" Joesph saw panic flash across Marie's eyes, though she tried to hide it. ""Most people don't pay attention and honestly don't care, and the ones who do notice just assume that you guys are either Hmong or some little minority that no-one's ever heard of... but even that doesn't match very well either. It's like you said, you're Viet... but what about all this other stuff?""
It was then that Marie could have ended it all: the doubts, the questions, the lingering curiosity... as well as twenty one centuries of secrecy, tradition and very likely her relationship with this young man. In the end, she decided to dodge again. ""What can I say? We were very rural."" When Joesph just got this frustrated look on his face, Marie sighed, reached across the table and enveloped one of his hands with hers. ""Look, I'll try and dredge something up if I can, but I can't promise anything, okay?""
Joseph mulled on this lack of answers, but as the moment dragged on, his resistance wore down. ""Alright. If you don't want to talk about your culture, that's alright; lots of people come to America to get away from stuff. But I still am sorta curious."" Then he changed the subject. ""Anyway, after we eat, we should begin studying for our tests. Do you want to go over the English or the Algebra first?""
""We should do the Math first, then we can cool off with the Shakespeare. But we better not let the food get cold, what with how the sauce gets if allowed to sit for too long."" Marie began eating again and, after a few beats, Joseph resumed as well.
They stayed at that table for many hours, going over and revising their knowledge of maths and literature. However, already Marie wondered if there was something she could reveal, something that she could show about her parent's culture that would not threaten expose them and, as the old saying went among her tribe, 'get them cut in half and buried in two graves'.
Later that night, The Trinh's upstairs apartment
To Marie's relief, her parents reaction to her plan wasn't anger. On the other hand, fear and worry could be almost as painful.
""I know how you feel about the Clayton boy. He's well-liked, intelligent and his parents are our insurance agents."" Thanh Thi Trinh began, speaking in her families particular dialect of Viet as she, Marie and Thuch Van sat around their dining room table. ""But I ask this of you: is Joesph and his interest in this celebration worth the risk of exposure and, may I add, possible death when this town realizes who we are, when they realize what we are?"" Thanh Thi had always been the more reserved, more cautious and, frankly, more paranoid spouse in this family when it came to their safety. Where her husband was the face of the restaurant, she ran the kitchen with an eye on the back door and all of their cooks. While Thuch made friendly at social gatherings, Thanh kept track of all possible escape routes and who was and wasn't looking at them. She kept track of any news about gangs and hate-group activity in the area, and about any other strange things.
The sort of things that might lure out the kind of people who hunted their people.
But Marie had prepared for this. ""Mother, I know the risks that revealing the secrets of our people would bring. However, I am counting on two circumstances to make sure that only the most benign and harmless information is portrayed."" She rallied herself, knowing that the way she handled this could make the difference on how she presented herself to nearly everyone, especially Joseph . ""First, I must inform both of you that there are some people in this town, including my boyfriend, that realize that we are not quite from the mainstream culture of modern Vietnam."" At this, both Thanh and Thuch got even more worried but they weren't shocked, seeing as any bumpkin with an Internet connection could find that tribal tattooing wasn't really the rage in downtown Hanoi. ""The good news is that while these people realize that we belong to a distinct subgroup, they often deduce that we are either rural Hmong or some other obscure ethnic group. In other words, they know nothing about who our people are and, like the rest of the town, they honestly do not care.""
""What about the nature of our traditons, Marie? What would you do, what rite of our people would be performed on that stage that would not end up with half the town vomiting and the other half trying to hang us?"" Her father had been relatively quiet in this conversation, but he knew that the rituals of his village had, during various times in history, left such a bad impression upon outsiders that they had responded in force to try to stamp them out.
Here, Marie began grasping the thick, heavy and old scrapbook that lay closed upon the table before her. It had been entrusted to them by their village and, by the blessings of the Gods and their Instrument, they had kept it safe and hidden for more than twenty years. ""Father, it is not as if I wish to set up an alter on the stage, recite the incantations of the harvest rites and slice something open; frankly, I would have no idea how. However, I believe that there is a ritual that is benign, unusual and, even according to the author of this book, beautiful enough to make people forget it's oddity."" She opened the book, filled with sepia photographs and notes written in French on yellowed paper, to the page she had bookmarked. ""I want to do the Stork Dance.""
Her parents were quiet for a minute. Admittedly, this was probably the least unusual rite of their people and it did seem to have a calming effect on its audiences. However, it took weeks of intensive training in order to do it right, the costuming and specific actions depended on whether the dancer was a man or woman and the phonograph with the instrumental music and vocals, only having been recorded once before, was on the other side of the planet. It was a tall order to pull off for anyone. ""You do realize that practicing for the dance requires grueling routine, so much so that it might effect your school work?"" Asked her mother, wondering if her daughter was truly sincere.
""I know that. I'll just have to sacrifice my time with Joesph, a sacrifice that I'm sure he'd understand."" Marie responded in English this time, the plans for her act becoming clearer. ""However, I'll need some help in creating the proper costuming and... I know that shipping items from the Old Country is like trying to smuggle Plutonium but if you could convince the shamans to release that phonograph for a month or two, I would be eternally grateful to all of them, and to you.""
Her parents wondered, not for the first time, if Marie truly comprehended what could be asked of that gratitude in the years to come. She had the opportunity to live a life completely detached from the paranoia, the fear and the constant danger that followed her people. Would she give that chance away simply for the sake of a boy?
Whatever choice she made, however, was hers to make.
In the end, they acquiesced... but not without informing their daughter of what their home village could ask of her in exchange for the items she wished. It might be years until it was asked but one day, a representative of their village would approach her and request a repayment, be it in money, information or something else.
It was that ""something else"" that truly worried Thuch and Thanh.
","Whether the dreams brought on the fever or the fever brought on the dreams Walter Gilman did not know. Behind everything crouched the brooding, festering horror of the ancient town, and of the mouldy, unhallowed garret gable where he wrote and studied and wrestled with figures and formulae when he was not tossing on the meagre iron bed. His ears were growing sensitive to a preternatural and intolerable degree, and he had long ago stopped the cheap mantel clock whose ticking had come to seem like a thunder of artillery. At night the subtle stirring of the black city outside, the sinister scurrying of rats in the wormy partitions, and the creaking of hidden timbers in the centuried house, were enough to give him a sense of strident pandemonium. The darkness always teemed with unexplained sound—and yet he sometimes shook with fear lest the noises he heard should subside and allow him to hear certain other, fainter, noises which he suspected were lurking behind them.
      He was in the changeless, legend-haunted city of Arkham, with its clustering gambrel roofs that sway and sag over attics where witches hid from the King’s men in the dark, olden days of the Province. Nor was any spot in that city more steeped in macabre memory than the gable room which harboured him—for it was this house and this room which had likewise harboured old Keziah Mason, whose flight from Salem Gaol at the last no one was ever able to explain. That was in 1692—the gaoler had gone mad and babbled of a small, white-fanged furry thing which scuttled out of Keziah’s cell, and not even Cotton Mather could explain the curves and angles smeared on the grey stone walls with some red, sticky fluid.
      Possibly Gilman ought not to have studied so hard. Non-Euclidean calculus and quantum physics are enough to stretch any brain; and when one mixes them with folklore, and tries to trace a strange background of multi-dimensional reality behind the ghoulish hints of the Gothic tales and the wild whispers of the chimney-corner, one can hardly expect to be wholly free from mental tension. Gilman came from Haverhill, but it was only after he had entered college in Arkham that he began to connect his mathematics with the fantastic legends of elder magic. Something in the air of the hoary town worked obscurely on his imagination. The professors at Miskatonic had urged him to slacken up, and had voluntarily cut down his course at several points. Moreover, they had stopped him from consulting the dubious old books on forbidden secrets that were kept under lock and key in a vault at the university library. But all these precautions came late in the day, so that Gilman had some terrible hints from the dreaded Necronomicon of Abdul Alhazred, the fragmentary Book of Eibon, and the suppressed Unaussprechlichen Kulten of von Junzt to correlate with his abstract formulae on the properties of space and the linkage of dimensions known and unknown.
      He knew his room was in the old Witch House—that, indeed, was why he had taken it. There was much in the Essex County records about Keziah Mason’s trial, and what she had admitted under pressure to the Court of Oyer and Terminer had fascinated Gilman beyond all reason. She had told Judge Hathorne of lines and curves that could be made to point out directions leading through the walls of space to other spaces beyond, and had implied that such lines and curves were frequently used at certain midnight meetings in the dark valley of the white stone beyond Meadow Hill and on the unpeopled island in the river. She had spoken also of the Black Man, of her oath, and of her new secret name of Nahab. Then she had drawn those devices on the walls of her cell and vanished.
      Gilman believed strange things about Keziah, and had felt a queer thrill on learning that her dwelling was still standing after more than 235 years. When he heard the hushed Arkham whispers about Keziah’s persistent presence in the old house and the narrow streets, about the irregular human tooth-marks left on certain sleepers in that and other houses, about the childish cries heard near May-Eve, and Hallowmass, about the stench often noted in the old house’s attic just after those dreaded seasons, and about the small, furry, sharp-toothed thing which haunted the mouldering structure and the town and nuzzled people curiously in the black hours before dawn, he resolved to live in the place at any cost. A room was easy to secure; for the house was unpopular, hard to rent, and long given over to cheap lodgings. Gilman could not have told what he expected to find there, but he knew he wanted to be in the building where some circumstance had more or less suddenly given a mediocre old woman of the seventeenth century an insight into mathematical depths perhaps beyond the utmost modern delvings of Planck, Heisenberg, Einstein, and de Sitter.
      He studied the timber and plaster walls for traces of cryptic designs at every accessible spot where the paper had peeled, and within a week managed to get the eastern attic room where Keziah was held to have practiced her spells. It had been vacant from the first—for no one had ever been willing to stay there long—but the Polish landlord had grown wary about renting it. Yet nothing whatever happened to Gilman till about the time of the fever. No ghostly Keziah flitted through the sombre halls and chambers, no small furry thing crept into his dismal eyrie to nuzzle him, and no record of the witch’s incantations rewarded his constant search. Sometimes he would take walks through shadowy tangles of unpaved musty-smelling lanes where eldritch brown houses of unknown age leaned and tottered and leered mockingly through narrow, small-paned windows. Here he knew strange things had happened once, and there was a faint suggestion behind the surface that everything of that monstrous past might not—at least in the darkest, narrowest, and most intricately crooked alleys—have utterly perished. He also rowed out twice to the ill-regarded island in the river, and made a sketch of the singular angles described by the moss-grown rows of grey standing stones whose origin was so obscure and immemorial.
      Gilman’s room was of good size but queerly irregular shape; the north wall slanting perceptibly inward from the outer to the inner end, while the low ceiling slanted gently downward in the same direction. Aside from an obvious rat-hole and the signs of other stopped-up ones, there was no access—nor any appearance of a former avenue of access—to the space which must have existed between the slanting wall and the straight outer wall on the house’s north side, though a view from the exterior shewed where a window had been boarded up at a very remote date. The loft above the ceiling—which must have had a slanting floor—was likewise inaccessible. When Gilman climbed up a ladder to the cobwebbed level loft above the rest of the attic he found vestiges of a bygone aperture tightly and heavily covered with ancient planking and secured by the stout wooden pegs common in colonial carpentry. No amount of persuasion, however, could induce the stolid landlord to let him investigate either of these two closed spaces.
      As time wore along, his absorption in the irregular wall and ceiling of his room increased; for he began to read into the odd angles a mathematical significance which seemed to offer vague clues regarding their purpose. Old Keziah, he reflected, might have had excellent reasons for living in a room with peculiar angles; for was it not through certain angles that she claimed to have gone outside the boundaries of the world of space we know? His interest gradually veered away from the unplumbed voids beyond the slanting surfaces, since it now appeared that the purpose of those surfaces concerned the side he was already on.
      The touch of brain-fever and the dreams began early in February. For some time, apparently, the curious angles of Gilman’s room had been having a strange, almost hypnotic effect on him; and as the bleak winter advanced he had found himself staring more and more intently at the corner where the down-slanting ceiling met the inward-slanting wall. About this period his inability to concentrate on his formal studies worried him considerably, his apprehensions about the mid-year examinations being very acute. But the exaggerated sense of hearing was scarcely less annoying. Life had become an insistent and almost unendurable cacophony, and there was that constant, terrifying impression of other sounds—perhaps from regions beyond life—trembling on the very brink of audibility. So far as concrete noises went, the rats in the ancient partitions were the worst. Sometimes their scratching seemed not only furtive but deliberate. When it came from beyond the slanting north wall it was mixed with a sort of dry rattling—and when it came from the century-closed loft above the slanting ceiling Gilman always braced himself as if expecting some horror which only bided its time before descending to engulf him utterly.
      The dreams were wholly beyond the pale of sanity, and Gilman felt that they must be a result, jointly, of his studies in mathematics and in folklore. He had been thinking too much about the vague regions which his formulae told him must lie beyond the three dimensions we know, and about the possibility that old Keziah Mason—guided by some influence past all conjecture—had actually found the gate to those regions. The yellowed county records containing her testimony and that of her accusers were so damnably suggestive of things beyond human experience—and the descriptions of the darting little furry object which served as her familiar were so painfully realistic despite their incredible details.
      That object—no larger than a good-sized rat and quaintly called by the townspeople “Brown Jenkin”—seemed to have been the fruit of a remarkable case of sympathetic herd-delusion, for in 1692 no less than eleven persons had testified to glimpsing it. There were recent rumours, too, with a baffling and disconcerting amount of agreement. Witnesses said it had long hair and the shape of a rat, but that its sharp-toothed, bearded face was evilly human while its paws were like tiny human hands. It took messages betwixt old Keziah and the devil, and was nursed on the witch’s blood—which it sucked like a vampire. Its voice was a kind of loathsome titter, and it could speak all languages. Of all the bizarre monstrosities in Gilman’s dreams, nothing filled him with greater panic and nausea than this blasphemous and diminutive hybrid, whose image flitted across his vision in a form a thousandfold more hateful than anything his waking mind had deduced from the ancient records and the modern whispers.
      Gilman’s dreams consisted largely in plunges through limitless abysses of inexplicably coloured twilight and bafflingly disordered sound; abysses whose material and gravitational properties, and whose relation to his own entity, he could not even begin to explain. He did not walk or climb, fly or swim, crawl or wriggle; yet always experienced a mode of motion partly voluntary and partly involuntary. Of his own condition he could not well judge, for sight of his arms, legs, and torso seemed always cut off by some odd disarrangement of perspective; but he felt that his physical organisation and faculties were somehow marvellously transmuted and obliquely projected—though not without a certain grotesque relationship to his normal proportions and properties.
      The abysses were by no means vacant, being crowded with indescribably angled masses of alien-hued substance, some of which appeared to be organic while others seemed inorganic. A few of the organic objects tended to awake vague memories in the back of his mind, though he could form no conscious idea of what they mockingly resembled or suggested. In the later dreams he began to distinguish separate categories into which the organic objects appeared to be divided, and which seemed to involve in each case a radically different species of conduct-pattern and basic motivation. Of these categories one seemed to him to include objects slightly less illogical and irrelevant in their motions than the members of the other categories.
      All the objects—organic and inorganic alike—were totally beyond description or even comprehension. Gilman sometimes compared the inorganic masses to prisms, labyrinths, clusters of cubes and planes, and Cyclopean buildings; and the organic things struck him variously as groups of bubbles, octopi, centipedes, living Hindoo idols, and intricate Arabesques roused into a kind of ophidian animation. Everything he saw was unspeakably menacing and horrible; and whenever one of the organic entities appeared by its motions to be noticing him, he felt a stark, hideous fright which generally jolted him awake. Of how the organic entities moved, he could tell no more than of how he moved himself. In time he observed a further mystery—the tendency of certain entities to appear suddenly out of empty space, or to disappear totally with equal suddenness. The shrieking, roaring confusion of sound which permeated the abysses was past all analysis as to pitch, timbre, or rhythm; but seemed to be synchronous with vague visual changes in all the indefinite objects, organic and inorganic alike. Gilman had a constant sense of dread that it might rise to some unbearable degree of intensity during one or another of its obscure, relentlessly inevitable fluctuations.
      But it was not in these vortices of complete alienage that he saw Brown Jenkin. That shocking little horror was reserved for certain lighter, sharper dreams which assailed him just before he dropped into the fullest depths of sleep. He would be lying in the dark fighting to keep awake when a faint lambent glow would seem to shimmer around the centuried room, shewing in a violet mist the convergence of angled planes which had seized his brain so insidiously. The horror would appear to pop out of the rat-hole in the corner and patter toward him over the sagging, wide-planked floor with evil expectancy in its tiny, bearded human face—but mercifully, this dream always melted away before the object got close enough to nuzzle him. It had hellishly long, sharp, canine teeth. Gilman tried to stop up the rat-hole every day, but each night the real tenants of the partitions would gnaw away the obstruction, whatever it might be. Once he had the landlord nail tin over it, but the next night the rats gnawed a fresh hole—in making which they pushed or dragged out into the room a curious little fragment of bone.
      Gilman did not report his fever to the doctor, for he knew he could not pass the examinations if ordered to the college infirmary when every moment was needed for cramming. As it was, he failed in Calculus D and Advanced General Psychology, though not without hope of making up lost ground before the end of the term. It was in March when the fresh element entered his lighter preliminary dreaming, and the nightmare shape of Brown Jenkin began to be companioned by the nebulous blur which grew more and more to resemble a bent old woman. This addition disturbed him more than he could account for, but finally he decided that it was like an ancient crone whom he had twice actually encountered in the dark tangle of lanes near the abandoned wharves. On those occasions the evil, sardonic, and seemingly unmotivated stare of the beldame had set him almost shivering—especially the first time, when an overgrown rat darting across the shadowed mouth of a neighbouring alley had made him think irrationally of Brown Jenkin. Now, he reflected, those nervous fears were being mirrored in his disordered dreams.
      That the influence of the old house was unwholesome, he could not deny; but traces of his early morbid interest still held him there. He argued that the fever alone was responsible for his nightly phantasies, and that when the touch abated he would be free from the monstrous visions. Those visions, however, were of abhorrent vividness and convincingness, and whenever he awaked he retained a vague sense of having undergone much more than he remembered. He was hideously sure that in unrecalled dreams he had talked with both Brown Jenkin and the old woman, and that they had been urging him to go somewhere with them and to meet a third being of greater potency.
      Toward the end of March he began to pick up in his mathematics, though other studies bothered him increasingly. He was getting an intuitive knack for solving Riemannian equations, and astonished Professor Upham by his comprehension of fourth-dimensional and other problems which had floored all the rest of the class. One afternoon there was a discussion of possible freakish curvatures in space, and of theoretical points of approach or even contact between our part of the cosmos and various other regions as distant as the farthest stars or the trans-galactic gulfs themselves—or even as fabulously remote as the tentatively conceivable cosmic units beyond the whole Einsteinian space-time continuum. Gilman’s handling of this theme filled everyone with admiration, even though some of his hypothetical illustrations caused an increase in the always plentiful gossip about his nervous and solitary eccentricity. What made the students shake their heads was his sober theory that a man might—given mathematical knowledge admittedly beyond all likelihood of human acquirement—step deliberately from the earth to any other celestial body which might lie at one of an infinity of specific points in the cosmic pattern.
      Such a step, he said, would require only two stages; first, a passage out of the three-dimensional sphere we know, and second, a passage back to the three-dimensional sphere at another point, perhaps one of infinite remoteness. That this could be accomplished without loss of life was in many cases conceivable. Any being from any part of three-dimensional space could probably survive in the fourth dimension; and its survival of the second stage would depend upon what alien part of three-dimensional space it might select for its re-entry. Denizens of some planets might be able to live on certain others—even planets belonging to other galaxies, or to similar-dimensional phases of other space-time continua—though of course there must be vast numbers of mutually uninhabitable even though mathematically juxtaposed bodies or zones of space.
      It was also possible that the inhabitants of a given dimensional realm could survive entry to many unknown and incomprehensible realms of additional or indefinitely multiplied dimensions—be they within or outside the given space-time continuum—and that the converse would be likewise true. This was a matter for speculation, though one could be fairly certain that the type of mutation involved in a passage from any given dimensional plane to the next higher plane would not be destructive of biological integrity as we understand it. Gilman could not be very clear about his reasons for this last assumption, but his haziness here was more than overbalanced by his clearness on other complex points. Professor Upham especially liked his demonstration of the kinship of higher mathematics to certain phases of magical lore transmitted down the ages from an ineffable antiquity—human or pre-human—whose knowledge of the cosmos and its laws was greater than ours.
      Around the first of April Gilman worried considerably because his slow fever did not abate. He was also troubled by what some of his fellow-lodgers said about his sleep-walking. It seemed that he was often absent from his bed, and that the creaking of his floor at certain hours of the night was remarked by the man in the room below. This fellow also spoke of hearing the tread of shod feet in the night; but Gilman was sure he must have been mistaken in this, since shoes as well as other apparel were always precisely in place in the morning. One could develop all sorts of aural delusions in this morbid old house—for did not Gilman himself, even in daylight, now feel certain that noises other than rat-scratchings came from the black voids beyond the slanting wall and above the slanting ceiling? His pathologically sensitive ears began to listen for faint footfalls in the immemorially sealed loft overhead, and sometimes the illusion of such things was agonisingly realistic.
      However, he knew that he had actually become a somnambulist; for twice at night his room had been found vacant, though with all his clothing in place. Of this he had been assured by Frank Elwood, the one fellow-student whose poverty forced him to room in this squalid and unpopular house. Elwood had been studying in the small hours and had come up for help on a differential equation, only to find Gilman absent. It had been rather presumptuous of him to open the unlocked door after knocking had failed to rouse a response, but he had needed the help very badly and thought that his host would not mind a gentle prodding awake. On neither occasion, though, had Gilman been there—and when told of the matter he wondered where he could have been wandering, barefoot and with only his night-clothes on. He resolved to investigate the matter if reports of his sleep-walking continued, and thought of sprinkling flour on the floor of the corridor to see where his footsteps might lead. The door was the only conceivable egress, for there was no possible foothold outside the narrow window.
      As April advanced Gilman’s fever-sharpened ears were disturbed by the whining prayers of a superstitious loomfixer named Joe Mazurewicz, who had a room on the ground floor. Mazurewicz had told long, rambling stories about the ghost of old Keziah and the furry, sharp-fanged, nuzzling thing, and had said he was so badly haunted at times that only his silver crucifix—given him for the purpose by Father Iwanicki of St. Stanislaus’ Church—could bring him relief. Now he was praying because the Witches’ Sabbath was drawing near. May-Eve was Walpurgis-Night, when hell’s blackest evil roamed the earth and all the slaves of Satan gathered for nameless rites and deeds. It was always a very bad time in Arkham, even though the fine folks up in Miskatonic Avenue and High and Saltonstall Streets pretended to know nothing about it. There would be bad doings—and a child or two would probably be missing. Joe knew about such things, for his grandmother in the old country had heard tales from her grandmother. It was wise to pray and count one’s beads at this season. For three months Keziah and Brown Jenkin had not been near Joe’s room, nor near Paul Choynski’s room, nor anywhere else—and it meant no good when they held off like that. They must be up to something.
      Gilman dropped in at a doctor’s office on the 16th of the month, and was surprised to find his temperature was not as high as he had feared. The physician questioned him sharply, and advised him to see a nerve specialist. On reflection, he was glad he had not consulted the still more inquisitive college doctor. Old Waldron, who had curtailed his activities before, would have made him take a rest—an impossible thing now that he was so close to great results in his equations. He was certainly near the boundary between the known universe and the fourth dimension, and who could say how much farther he might go?
      But even as these thoughts came to him he wondered at the source of his strange confidence. Did all of this perilous sense of imminence come from the formulae on the sheets he covered day by day? The soft, stealthy, imaginary footsteps in the sealed loft above were unnerving. And now, too, there was a growing feeling that somebody was constantly persuading him to do something terrible which he could not do. How about the somnambulism? Where did he go sometimes in the night? And what was that faint suggestion of sound which once in a while seemed to trickle through the maddening confusion of identifiable sounds even in broad daylight and full wakefulness? Its rhythm did not correspond to anything on earth, unless perhaps to the cadence of one or two unmentionable Sabbat-chants, and sometimes he feared it corresponded to certain attributes of the vague shrieking or roaring in those wholly alien abysses of dream.
      The dreams were meanwhile getting to be atrocious. In the lighter preliminary phase the evil old woman was now of fiendish distinctness, and Gilman knew she was the one who had frightened him in the slums. Her bent back, long nose, and shrivelled chin were unmistakable, and her shapeless brown garments were like those he remembered. The expression on her face was one of hideous malevolence and exultation, and when he awaked he could recall a croaking voice that persuaded and threatened. He must meet the Black Man, and go with them all to the throne of Azathoth at the centre of ultimate Chaos. That was what she said. He must sign in his own blood the book of Azathoth and take a new secret name now that his independent delvings had gone so far. What kept him from going with her and Brown Jenkin and the other to the throne of Chaos where the thin flutes pipe mindlessly was the fact that he had seen the name “Azathoth” in the Necronomicon, and knew it stood for a primal evil too horrible for description.
      The old woman always appeared out of thin air near the corner where the downward slant met the inward slant. She seemed to crystallise at a point closer to the ceiling than to the floor, and every night she was a little nearer and more distinct before the dream shifted. Brown Jenkin, too, was always a little nearer at the last, and its yellowish-white fangs glistened shockingly in that unearthly violet phosphorescence. Its shrill loathsome tittering stuck more and more in Gilman’s head, and he could remember in the morning how it had pronounced the words “Azathoth” and “Nyarlathotep”.
      In the deeper dreams everything was likewise more distinct, and Gilman felt that the twilight abysses around him were those of the fourth dimension. Those organic entities whose motions seemed least flagrantly irrelevant and unmotivated were probably projections of life-forms from our own planet, including human beings. What the others were in their own dimensional sphere or spheres he dared not try to think. Two of the less irrelevantly moving things—a rather large congeries of iridescent, prolately spheroidal bubbles and a very much smaller polyhedron of unknown colours and rapidly shifting surface angles—seemed to take notice of him and follow him about or float ahead as he changed position among the titan prisms, labyrinths, cube-and-plane clusters, and quasi-buildings; and all the while the vague shrieking and roaring waxed louder and louder, as if approaching some monstrous climax of utterly unendurable intensity.
      During the night of April 19–20 the new development occurred. Gilman was half-involuntarily moving about in the twilight abysses with the bubble-mass and the small polyhedron floating ahead, when he noticed the peculiarly regular angles formed by the edges of some gigantic neighbouring prism-clusters. In another second he was out of the abyss and standing tremulously on a rocky hillside bathed in intense, diffused green light. He was barefooted and in his night-clothes, and when he tried to walk discovered that he could scarcely lift his feet. A swirling vapour hid everything but the immediate sloping terrain from sight, and he shrank from the thought of the sounds that might surge out of that vapour.
      Then he saw the two shapes laboriously crawling toward him—the old woman and the little furry thing. The crone strained up to her knees and managed to cross her arms in a singular fashion, while Brown Jenkin pointed in a certain direction with a horribly anthropoid fore paw which it raised with evident difficulty. Spurred by an impulse he did not originate, Gilman dragged himself forward along a course determined by the angle of the old woman’s arms and the direction of the small monstrosity’s paw, and before he had shuffled three steps he was back in the twilight abysses. Geometrical shapes seethed around him, and he fell dizzily and interminably. At last he woke in his bed in the crazily angled garret of the eldritch old house.
      He was good for nothing that morning, and stayed away from all his classes. Some unknown attraction was pulling his eyes in a seemingly irrelevant direction, for he could not help staring at a certain vacant spot on the floor. As the day advanced the focus of his unseeing eyes changed position, and by noon he had conquered the impulse to stare at vacancy. About two o’clock he went out for lunch, and as he threaded the narrow lanes of the city he found himself turning always to the southeast. Only an effort halted him at a cafeteria in Church Street, and after the meal he felt the unknown pull still more strongly.
      He would have to consult a nerve specialist after all—perhaps there was a connexion with his somnambulism—but meanwhile he might at least try to break the morbid spell himself. Undoubtedly he could still manage to walk away from the pull; so with great resolution he headed against it and dragged himself deliberately north along Garrison Street. By the time he had reached the bridge over the Miskatonic he was in a cold perspiration, and he clutched at the iron railing as he gazed upstream at the ill-regarded island whose regular lines of ancient standing stones brooded sullenly in the afternoon sunlight.
      Then he gave a start. For there was a clearly visible living figure on that desolate island, and a second glance told him it was certainly the strange old woman whose sinister aspect had worked itself so disastrously into his dreams. The tall grass near her was moving, too, as if some other living thing were crawling close to the ground. When the old woman began to turn toward him he fled precipitately off the bridge and into the shelter of the town’s labyrinthine waterfront alleys. Distant though the island was, he felt that a monstrous and invincible evil could flow from the sardonic stare of that bent, ancient figure in brown.
      The southeastward pull still held, and only with tremendous resolution could Gilman drag himself into the old house and up the rickety stairs. For hours he sat silent and aimless, with his eyes shifting gradually westward. About six o’clock his sharpened ears caught the whining prayers of Joe Mazurewicz two floors below, and in desperation he seized his hat and walked out into the sunset-golden streets, letting the now directly southward pull carry him where it might. An hour later darkness found him in the open fields beyond Hangman’s Brook, with the glimmering spring stars shining ahead. The urge to walk was gradually changing to an urge to leap mystically into space, and suddenly he realised just where the source of the pull lay.
      It was in the sky. A definite point among the stars had a claim on him and was calling him. Apparently it was a point somewhere between Hydra and Argo Navis, and he knew that he had been urged toward it ever since he had awaked soon after dawn. In the morning it had been underfoot; afternoon found it rising in the southeast, and now it was roughly south but wheeling toward the west. What was the meaning of this new thing? Was he going mad? How long would it last? Again mustering his resolution, Gilman turned and dragged himself back to the sinister old house.
      Mazurewicz was waiting for him at the door, and seemed both anxious and reluctant to whisper some fresh bit of superstition. It was about the witch light. Joe had been out celebrating the night before—it was Patriots’ Day in Massachusetts—and had come home after midnight. Looking up at the house from outside, he had thought at first that Gilman’s window was dark; but then he had seen the faint violet glow within. He wanted to warn the gentleman about that glow, for everybody in Arkham knew it was Keziah’s witch light which played near Brown Jenkin and the ghost of the old crone herself. He had not mentioned this before, but now he must tell about it because it meant that Keziah and her long-toothed familiar were haunting the young gentleman. Sometimes he and Paul Choynski and Landlord Dombrowski thought they saw that light seeping out of cracks in the sealed loft above the young gentleman’s room, but they had all agreed not to talk about that. However, it would be better for the gentleman to take another room and get a crucifix from some good priest like Father Iwanicki.
      As the man rambled on Gilman felt a nameless panic clutch at his throat. He knew that Joe must have been half drunk when he came home the night before, yet this mention of a violet light in the garret window was of frightful import. It was a lambent glow of this sort which always played about the old woman and the small furry thing in those lighter, sharper dreams which prefaced his plunge into unknown abysses, and the thought that a wakeful second person could see the dream-luminance was utterly beyond sane harbourage. Yet where had the fellow got such an odd notion? Had he himself talked as well as walked around the house in his sleep? No, Joe said, he had not—but he must check up on this. Perhaps Frank Elwood could tell him something, though he hated to ask.
      Fever—wild dreams—somnambulism—illusions of sounds—a pull toward a point in the sky—and now a suspicion of insane sleep-talking! He must stop studying, see a nerve specialist, and take himself in hand. When he climbed to the second story he paused at Elwood’s door but saw that the other youth was out. Reluctantly he continued up to his garret room and sat down in the dark. His gaze was still pulled to the southwest, but he also found himself listening intently for some sound in the closed loft above, and half imagining that an evil violet light seeped down through an infinitesimal crack in the low, slanting ceiling.
      That night as Gilman slept the violet light broke upon him with heightened intensity, and the old witch and small furry thing—getting closer than ever before—mocked him with inhuman squeals and devilish gestures. He was glad to sink into the vaguely roaring twilight abysses, though the pursuit of that iridescent bubble-congeries and that kaleidoscopic little polyhedron was menacing and irritating. Then came the shift as vast converging planes of a slippery-looking substance loomed above and below him—a shift which ended in a flash of delirium and a blaze of unknown, alien light in which yellow, carmine, and indigo were madly and inextricably blended.
      He was half lying on a high, fantastically balustraded terrace above a boundless jungle of outlandish, incredible peaks, balanced planes, domes, minarets, horizontal discs poised on pinnacles, and numberless forms of still greater wildness—some of stone and some of metal—which glittered gorgeously in the mixed, almost blistering glare from a polychromatic sky. Looking upward he saw three stupendous discs of flame, each of a different hue, and at a different height above an infinitely distant curving horizon of low mountains. Behind him tiers of higher terraces towered aloft as far as he could see. The city below stretched away to the limits of vision, and he hoped that no sound would well up from it.
      The pavement from which he easily raised himself was of a veined, polished stone beyond his power to identify, and the tiles were cut in bizarre-angled shapes which struck him as less asymmetrical than based on some unearthly symmetry whose laws he could not comprehend. The balustrade was chest-high, delicate, and fantastically wrought, while along the rail were ranged at short intervals little figures of grotesque design and exquisite workmanship. They, like the whole balustrade, seemed to be made of some sort of shining metal whose colour could not be guessed in this chaos of mixed effulgences; and their nature utterly defied conjecture. They represented some ridged, barrel-shaped object with thin horizontal arms radiating spoke-like from a central ring, and with vertical knobs or bulbs projecting from the head and base of the barrel. Each of these knobs was the hub of a system of five long, flat, triangularly tapering arms arranged around it like the arms of a starfish—nearly horizontal, but curving slightly away from the central barrel. The base of the bottom knob was fused to the long railing with so delicate a point of contact that several figures had been broken off and were missing. The figures were about four and a half inches in height, while the spiky arms gave them a maximum diameter of about two and a half inches.
      When Gilman stood up the tiles felt hot to his bare feet. He was wholly alone, and his first act was to walk to the balustrade and look dizzily down at the endless, Cyclopean city almost two thousand feet below. As he listened he thought a rhythmic confusion of faint musical pipings covering a wide tonal range welled up from the narrow streets beneath, and he wished he might discern the denizens of the place. The sight turned him giddy after a while, so that he would have fallen to the pavement had he not clutched instinctively at the lustrous balustrade. His right hand fell on one of the projecting figures, the touch seeming to steady him slightly. It was too much, however, for the exotic delicacy of the metal-work, and the spiky figure snapped off under his grasp. Still half-dazed, he continued to clutch it as his other hand seized a vacant space on the smooth railing.
      But now his oversensitive ears caught something behind him, and he looked back across the level terrace. Approaching him softly though without apparent furtiveness were five figures, two of which were the sinister old woman and the fanged, furry little animal. The other three were what sent him unconscious—for they were living entities about eight feet high, shaped precisely like the spiky images on the balustrade, and propelling themselves by a spider-like wriggling of their lower set of starfish-arms.
      Gilman awakened in his bed, drenched by a cold perspiration and with a smarting sensation in his face, hands, and feet. Springing to the floor, he washed and dressed in frantic haste, as if it were necessary for him to get out of the house as quickly as possible. He did not know where he wished to go, but felt that once more he would have to sacrifice his classes. The odd pull toward that spot in the sky between Hydra and Argo had abated, but another of even greater strength had taken its place. Now he felt that he must go north—infinitely north. He dreaded to cross the bridge that gave a view of the desolate island in the Miskatonic, so went over the Peabody Avenue bridge. Very often he stumbled, for his eyes and ears were chained to an extremely lofty point in the blank blue sky.
      After about an hour he got himself under better control, and saw that he was far from the city. All around him stretched the bleak emptiness of salt marshes, while the narrow road ahead led to Innsmouth—that ancient, half-deserted town which Arkham people were so curiously unwilling to visit. Though the northward pull had not diminished, he resisted it as he had resisted the other pull, and finally found that he could almost balance the one against the other. Plodding back to town and getting some coffee at a soda fountain, he dragged himself into the public library and browsed aimlessly among the lighter magazines. Once he met some friends who remarked how oddly sunburned he looked, but he did not tell them of his walk. At three o’clock he took some lunch at a restaurant, noting meanwhile that the pull had either lessened or divided itself. After that he killed the time at a cheap cinema show, seeing the inane performance over and over again without paying any attention to it.
      About nine at night he drifted homeward and stumbled into the ancient house. Joe Mazurewicz was whining unintelligible prayers, and Gilman hastened up to his own garret chamber without pausing to see if Elwood was in. It was when he turned on the feeble electric light that the shock came. At once he saw there was something on the table which did not belong there, and a second look left no room for doubt. Lying on its side—for it could not stand up alone—was the exotic spiky figure which in his monstrous dream he had broken off the fantastic balustrade. No detail was missing. The ridged, barrel-shaped centre, the thin, radiating arms, the knobs at each end, and the flat, slightly outward-curving starfish-arms spreading from those knobs—all were there. In the electric light the colour seemed to be a kind of iridescent grey veined with green, and Gilman could see amidst his horror and bewilderment that one of the knobs ended in a jagged break corresponding to its former point of attachment to the dream-railing.
      Only his tendency toward a dazed stupor prevented him from screaming aloud. This fusion of dream and reality was too much to bear. Still dazed, he clutched at the spiky thing and staggered downstairs to Landlord Dombrowski’s quarters. The whining prayers of the superstitious loomfixer were still sounding through the mouldy halls, but Gilman did not mind them now. The landlord was in, and greeted him pleasantly. No, he had not seen that thing before and did not know anything about it. But his wife had said she found a funny tin thing in one of the beds when she fixed the rooms at noon, and maybe that was it. Dombrowski called her, and she waddled in. Yes, that was the thing. She had found it in the young gentleman’s bed—on the side next the wall. It had looked very queer to her, but of course the young gentleman had lots of queer things in his room—books and curios and pictures and markings on paper. She certainly knew nothing about it.
      So Gilman climbed upstairs again in a mental turmoil, convinced that he was either still dreaming or that his somnambulism had run to incredible extremes and led him to depredations in unknown places. Where had he got this outré thing? He did not recall seeing it in any museum in Arkham. It must have been somewhere, though; and the sight of it as he snatched it in his sleep must have caused the odd dream-picture of the balustraded terrace. Next day he would make some very guarded inquiries—and perhaps see the nerve specialist.
      Meanwhile he would try to keep track of his somnambulism. As he went upstairs and across the garret hall he sprinkled about some flour which he had borrowed—with a frank admission as to its purpose—from the landlord. He had stopped at Elwood’s door on the way, but had found all dark within. Entering his room, he placed the spiky thing on the table, and lay down in complete mental and physical exhaustion without pausing to undress. From the closed loft above the slanting ceiling he thought he heard a faint scratching and padding, but he was too disorganised even to mind it. That cryptical pull from the north was getting very strong again, though it seemed now to come from a lower place in the sky.
      In the dazzling violet light of dream the old woman and the fanged, furry thing came again and with a greater distinctness than on any former occasion. This time they actually reached him, and he felt the crone’s withered claws clutching at him. He was pulled out of bed and into empty space, and for a moment he heard a rhythmic roaring and saw the twilight amorphousness of the vague abysses seething around him. But that moment was very brief, for presently he was in a crude, windowless little space with rough beams and planks rising to a peak just above his head, and with a curious slanting floor underfoot. Propped level on that floor were low cases full of books of every degree of antiquity and disintegration, and in the centre were a table and bench, both apparently fastened in place. Small objects of unknown shape and nature were ranged on the tops of the cases, and in the flaming violet light Gilman thought he saw a counterpart of the spiky image which had puzzled him so horribly. On the left the floor fell abruptly away, leaving a black triangular gulf out of which, after a second’s dry rattling, there presently climbed the hateful little furry thing with the yellow fangs and bearded human face.
      The evilly grinning beldame still clutched him, and beyond the table stood a figure he had never seen before—a tall, lean man of dead black colouration but without the slightest sign of negroid features; wholly devoid of either hair or beard, and wearing as his only garment a shapeless robe of some heavy black fabric. His feet were indistinguishable because of the table and bench, but he must have been shod, since there was a clicking whenever he changed position. The man did not speak, and bore no trace of expression on his small, regular features. He merely pointed to a book of prodigious size which lay open on the table, while the beldame thrust a huge grey quill into Gilman’s right hand. Over everything was a pall of intensely maddening fear, and the climax was reached when the furry thing ran up the dreamer’s clothing to his shoulders and then down his left arm, finally biting him sharply in the wrist just below his cuff. As the blood spurted from this wound Gilman lapsed into a faint.
      He awaked on the morning of the 22nd with a pain in his left wrist, and saw that his cuff was brown with dried blood. His recollections were very confused, but the scene with the black man in the unknown space stood out vividly. The rats must have bitten him as he slept, giving rise to the climax of that frightful dream. Opening the door, he saw that the flour on the corridor floor was undisturbed except for the huge prints of the loutish fellow who roomed at the other end of the garret. So he had not been sleep-walking this time. But something would have to be done about those rats. He would speak to the landlord about them. Again he tried to stop up the hole at the base of the slanting wall, wedging in a candlestick which seemed of about the right size. His ears were ringing horribly, as if with the residual echoes of some horrible noise heard in dreams.
      As he bathed and changed clothes he tried to recall what he had dreamed after the scene in the violet-litten space, but nothing definite would crystallise in his mind. That scene itself must have corresponded to the sealed loft overhead, which had begun to attack his imagination so violently, but later impressions were faint and hazy. There were suggestions of the vague, twilight abysses, and of still vaster, blacker abysses beyond them—abysses in which all fixed suggestions of form were absent. He had been taken there by the bubble-congeries and the little polyhedron which always dogged him; but they, like himself, had changed to wisps of milky, barely luminous mist in this farther void of ultimate blackness. Something else had gone on ahead—a larger wisp which now and then condensed into nameless approximations of form—and he thought that their progress had not been in a straight line, but rather along the alien curves and spirals of some ethereal vortex which obeyed laws unknown to the physics and mathematics of any conceivable cosmos. Eventually there had been a hint of vast, leaping shadows, of a monstrous, half-acoustic pulsing, and of the thin, monotonous piping of an unseen flute—but that was all. Gilman decided he had picked up that last conception from what he had read in the Necronomicon about the mindless entity Azathoth, which rules all time and space from a curiously environed black throne at the centre of Chaos.
      When the blood was washed away the wrist wound proved very slight, and Gilman puzzled over the location of the two tiny punctures. It occurred to him that there was no blood on the bedspread where he had lain—which was very curious in view of the amount on his skin and cuff. Had he been sleep-walking within his room, and had the rat bitten him as he sat in some chair or paused in some less rational position? He looked in every corner for brownish drops or stains, but did not find any. He had better, he thought, sprinkle flour within the room as well as outside the door—though after all no further proof of his sleep-walking was needed. He knew he did walk—and the thing to do now was to stop it. He must ask Frank Elwood for help. This morning the strange pulls from space seemed lessened, though they were replaced by another sensation even more inexplicable. It was a vague, insistent impulse to fly away from his present situation, but held not a hint of the specific direction in which he wished to fly. As he picked up the strange spiky image on the table he thought the older northward pull grew a trifle stronger; but even so, it was wholly overruled by the newer and more bewildering urge.
      He took the spiky image down to Elwood’s room, steeling himself against the whines of the loomfixer which welled up from the ground floor. Elwood was in, thank heaven, and appeared to be stirring about. There was time for a little conversation before leaving for breakfast and college, so Gilman hurriedly poured forth an account of his recent dreams and fears. His host was very sympathetic, and agreed that something ought to be done. He was shocked by his guest’s drawn, haggard aspect, and noticed the queer, abnormal-looking sunburn which others had remarked during the past week. There was not much, though, that he could say. He had not seen Gilman on any sleep-walking expedition, and had no idea what the curious image could be. He had, though, heard the French-Canadian who lodged just under Gilman talking to Mazurewicz one evening. They were telling each other how badly they dreaded the coming of Walpurgis-Night, now only a few days off; and were exchanging pitying comments about the poor, doomed young gentleman. Desrochers, the fellow under Gilman’s room, had spoken of nocturnal footsteps both shod and unshod, and of the violet light he saw one night when he had stolen fearfully up to peer through Gilman’s keyhole. He had not dared to peer, he told Mazurewicz, after he had glimpsed that light through the cracks around the door. There had been soft talking, too—and as he began to describe it his voice had sunk to an inaudible whisper.
      Elwood could not imagine what had set these superstitious creatures gossiping, but supposed their imaginations had been roused by Gilman’s late hours and somnolent walking and talking on the one hand, and by the nearness of traditionally feared May-Eve on the other hand. That Gilman talked in his sleep was plain, and it was obviously from Desrochers’ keyhole-listenings that the delusive notion of the violet dream-light had got abroad. These simple people were quick to imagine they had seen any odd thing they had heard about. As for a plan of action—Gilman had better move down to Elwood’s room and avoid sleeping alone. Elwood would, if awake, rouse him whenever he began to talk or rise in his sleep. Very soon, too, he must see the specialist. Meanwhile they would take the spiky image around to the various museums and to certain professors; seeking identification and stating that it had been found in a public rubbish-can. Also, Dombrowski must attend to the poisoning of those rats in the walls.
      Braced up by Elwood’s companionship, Gilman attended classes that day. Strange urges still tugged at him, but he could sidetrack them with considerable success. During a free period he shewed the queer image to several professors, all of whom were intensely interested, though none of them could shed any light upon its nature or origin. That night he slept on a couch which Elwood had had the landlord bring to the second-story room, and for the first time in weeks was wholly free from disquieting dreams. But the feverishness still hung on, and the whines of the loomfixer were an unnerving influence.
      During the next few days Gilman enjoyed an almost perfect immunity from morbid manifestations. He had, Elwood said, shewed no tendency to talk or rise in his sleep; and meanwhile the landlord was putting rat-poison everywhere. The only disturbing element was the talk among the superstitious foreigners, whose imaginations had become highly excited. Mazurewicz was always trying to make him get a crucifix, and finally forced one upon him which he said had been blessed by the good Father Iwanicki. Desrochers, too, had something to say—in fact, he insisted that cautious steps had sounded in the now vacant room above him on the first and second nights of Gilman’s absence from it. Paul Choynski thought he heard sounds in the halls and on the stairs at night, and claimed that his door had been softly tried, while Mrs. Dombrowski vowed she had seen Brown Jenkin for the first time since All-Hallows. But such naive reports could mean very little, and Gilman let the cheap metal crucifix hang idly from a knob on his host’s dresser.
      For three days Gilman and Elwood canvassed the local museums in an effort to identify the strange spiky image, but always without success. In every quarter, however, interest was intense; for the utter alienage of the thing was a tremendous challenge to scientific curiosity. One of the small radiating arms was broken off and subjected to chemical analysis, and the result is still talked about in college circles. Professor Ellery found platinum, iron, and tellurium in the strange alloy; but mixed with these were at least three other apparent elements of high atomic weight which chemistry was absolutely powerless to classify. Not only did they fail to correspond with any known element, but they did not even fit the vacant places reserved for probable elements in the periodic system. The mystery remains unsolved to this day, though the image is on exhibition at the museum of Miskatonic University.
      On the morning of April 27 a fresh rat-hole appeared in the room where Gilman was a guest, but Dombrowski tinned it up during the day. The poison was not having much effect, for scratchings and scurryings in the walls were virtually undiminished. Elwood was out late that night, and Gilman waited up for him. He did not wish to go to sleep in a room alone—especially since he thought he had glimpsed in the evening twilight the repellent old woman whose image had become so horribly transferred to his dreams. He wondered who she was, and what had been near her rattling the tin can in a rubbish-heap at the mouth of a squalid courtyard. The crone had seemed to notice him and leer evilly at him—though perhaps this was merely his imagination.
      The next day both youths felt very tired, and knew they would sleep like logs when night came. In the evening they drowsily discussed the mathematical studies which had so completely and perhaps harmfully engrossed Gilman, and speculated about the linkage with ancient magic and folklore which seemed so darkly probable. They spoke of old Keziah Mason, and Elwood agreed that Gilman had good scientific grounds for thinking she might have stumbled on strange and significant information. The hidden cults to which these witches belonged often guarded and handed down surprising secrets from elder, forgotten aeons; and it was by no means impossible that Keziah had actually mastered the art of passing through dimensional gates. Tradition emphasises the uselessness of material barriers in halting a witch’s motions; and who can say what underlies the old tales of broomstick rides through the night?
      Whether a modern student could ever gain similar powers from mathematical research alone, was still to be seen. Success, Gilman added, might lead to dangerous and unthinkable situations; for who could foretell the conditions pervading an adjacent but normally inaccessible dimension? On the other hand, the picturesque possibilities were enormous. Time could not exist in certain belts of space, and by entering and remaining in such a belt one might preserve one’s life and age indefinitely; never suffering organic metabolism or deterioration except for slight amounts incurred during visits to one’s own or similar planes. One might, for example, pass into a timeless dimension and emerge at some remote period of the earth’s history as young as before.
      Whether anybody had ever managed to do this, one could hardly conjecture with any degree of authority. Old legends are hazy and ambiguous, and in historic times all attempts at crossing forbidden gaps seem complicated by strange and terrible alliances with beings and messengers from outside. There was the immemorial figure of the deputy or messenger of hidden and terrible powers—the “Black Man” of the witch-cult, and the “Nyarlathotep” of the Necronomicon. There was, too, the baffling problem of the lesser messengers or intermediaries—the quasi-animals and queer hybrids which legend depicts as witches’ familiars. As Gilman and Elwood retired, too sleepy to argue further, they heard Joe Mazurewicz reel into the house half-drunk, and shuddered at the desperate wildness of his whining prayers.
      That night Gilman saw the violet light again. In his dream he had heard a scratching and gnawing in the partitions, and thought that someone fumbled clumsily at the latch. Then he saw the old woman and the small furry thing advancing toward him over the carpeted floor. The beldame’s face was alight with inhuman exultation, and the little yellow-toothed morbidity tittered mockingly as it pointed at the heavily sleeping form of Elwood on the other couch across the room. A paralysis of fear stifled all attempts to cry out. As once before, the hideous crone seized Gilman by the shoulders, yanking him out of bed and into empty space. Again the infinitude of the shrieking twilight abysses flashed past him, but in another second he thought he was in a dark, muddy, unknown alley of foetid odours, with the rotting walls of ancient houses towering up on every hand.
      Ahead was the robed black man he had seen in the peaked space in the other dream, while from a lesser distance the old woman was beckoning and grimacing imperiously. Brown Jenkin was rubbing itself with a kind of affectionate playfulness around the ankles of the black man, which the deep mud largely concealed. There was a dark open doorway on the right, to which the black man silently pointed. Into this the grimacing crone started, dragging Gilman after her by his pajama sleeve. There were evil-smelling staircases which creaked ominously, and on which the old woman seemed to radiate a faint violet light; and finally a door leading off a landing. The crone fumbled with the latch and pushed the door open, motioning to Gilman to wait and disappearing inside the black aperture.
      The youth’s oversensitive ears caught a hideous strangled cry, and presently the beldame came out of the room bearing a small, senseless form which she thrust at the dreamer as if ordering him to carry it. The sight of this form, and the expression on its face, broke the spell. Still too dazed to cry out, he plunged recklessly down the noisome staircase and into the mud outside; halting only when seized and choked by the waiting black man. As consciousness departed he heard the faint, shrill tittering of the fanged, rat-like abnormality.
      On the morning of the 29th Gilman awaked into a maelstrom of horror. The instant he opened his eyes he knew something was terribly wrong, for he was back in his old garret room with the slanting wall and ceiling, sprawled on the now unmade bed. His throat was aching inexplicably, and as he struggled to a sitting posture he saw with growing fright that his feet and pajama-bottoms were brown with caked mud. For the moment his recollections were hopelessly hazy, but he knew at least that he must have been sleep-walking. Elwood had been lost too deeply in slumber to hear and stop him. On the floor were confused muddy prints, but oddly enough they did not extend all the way to the door. The more Gilman looked at them, the more peculiar they seemed; for in addition to those he could recognise as his there were some smaller, almost round markings—such as the legs of a large chair or table might make, except that most of them tended to be divided into halves. There were also some curious muddy rat-tracks leading out of a fresh hole and back into it again. Utter bewilderment and the fear of madness racked Gilman as he staggered to the door and saw that there were no muddy prints outside. The more he remembered of his hideous dream the more terrified he felt, and it added to his desperation to hear Joe Mazurewicz chanting mournfully two floors below.
      Descending to Elwood’s room he roused his still-sleeping host and began telling of how he had found himself, but Elwood could form no idea of what might really have happened. Where Gilman could have been, how he got back to his room without making tracks in the hall, and how the muddy, furniture-like prints came to be mixed with his in the garret chamber, were wholly beyond conjecture. Then there were those dark, livid marks on his throat, as if he had tried to strangle himself. He put his hands up to them, but found that they did not even approximately fit. While they were talking Desrochers dropped in to say that he had heard a terrific clattering overhead in the dark small hours. No, there had been no one on the stairs after midnight—though just before midnight he had heard faint footfalls in the garret, and cautiously descending steps he did not like. It was, he added, a very bad time of year for Arkham. The young gentleman had better be sure to wear the crucifix Joe Mazurewicz had given him. Even the daytime was not safe, for after dawn there had been strange sounds in the house—especially a thin, childish wail hastily choked off.
      Gilman mechanically attended classes that morning, but was wholly unable to fix his mind on his studies. A mood of hideous apprehension and expectancy had seized him, and he seemed to be awaiting the fall of some annihilating blow. At noon he lunched at the University Spa, picking up a paper from the next seat as he waited for dessert. But he never ate that dessert; for an item on the paper’s first page left him limp, wild-eyed, and able only to pay his check and stagger back to Elwood’s room.
      There had been a strange kidnapping the night before in Orne’s Gangway, and the two-year-old child of a clod-like laundry worker named Anastasia Wolejko had completely vanished from sight. The mother, it appeared, had feared the event for some time; but the reasons she assigned for her fear were so grotesque that no one took them seriously. She had, she said, seen Brown Jenkin about the place now and then ever since early in March, and knew from its grimaces and titterings that little Ladislas must be marked for sacrifice at the awful Sabbat on Walpurgis-Night. She had asked her neighbour Mary Czanek to sleep in the room and try to protect the child, but Mary had not dared. She could not tell the police, for they never believed such things. Children had been taken that way every year ever since she could remember. And her friend Pete Stowacki would not help because he wanted the child out of the way anyhow.
      But what threw Gilman into a cold perspiration was the report of a pair of revellers who had been walking past the mouth of the gangway just after midnight. They admitted they had been drunk, but both vowed they had seen a crazily dressed trio furtively entering the dark passageway. There had, they said, been a huge robed negro, a little old woman in rags, and a young white man in his night-clothes. The old woman had been dragging the youth, while around the feet of the negro a tame rat was rubbing and weaving in the brown mud.
      Gilman sat in a daze all the afternoon, and Elwood—who had meanwhile seen the papers and formed terrible conjectures from them—found him thus when he came home. This time neither could doubt but that something hideously serious was closing in around them. Between the phantasms of nightmare and the realities of the objective world a monstrous and unthinkable relationship was crystallising, and only stupendous vigilance could avert still more direful developments. Gilman must see a specialist sooner or later, but not just now, when all the papers were full of this kidnapping business.
      Just what had really happened was maddeningly obscure, and for a moment both Gilman and Elwood exchanged whispered theories of the wildest kind. Had Gilman unconsciously succeeded better than he knew in his studies of space and its dimensions? Had he actually slipped outside our sphere to points unguessed and unimaginable? Where—if anywhere—had he been on those nights of daemoniac alienage? The roaring twilight abysses—the green hillside—the blistering terrace—the pulls from the stars—the ultimate black vortex—the black man—the muddy alley and the stairs—the old witch and the fanged, furry horror—the bubble-congeries and the little polyhedron—the strange sunburn—the wrist wound—the unexplained image—the muddy feet—the throat-marks—the tales and fears of the superstitious foreigners—what did all this mean? To what extent could the laws of sanity apply to such a case?
      There was no sleep for either of them that night, but next day they both cut classes and drowsed. This was April 30th, and with the dusk would come the hellish Sabbat-time which all the foreigners and the superstitious old folk feared. Mazurewicz came home at six o’clock and said people at the mill were whispering that the Walpurgis-revels would be held in the dark ravine beyond Meadow Hill where the old white stone stands in a place queerly void of all plant-life. Some of them had even told the police and advised them to look there for the missing Wolejko child, but they did not believe anything would be done. Joe insisted that the poor young gentleman wear his nickel-chained crucifix, and Gilman put it on and dropped it inside his shirt to humour the fellow.
      Late at night the two youths sat drowsing in their chairs, lulled by the rhythmical praying of the loomfixer on the floor below. Gilman listened as he nodded, his preternaturally sharpened hearing seeming to strain for some subtle, dreaded murmur beyond the noises in the ancient house. Unwholesome recollections of things in the Necronomicon and the Black Book welled up, and he found himself swaying to infandous rhythms said to pertain to the blackest ceremonies of the Sabbat and to have an origin outside the time and space we comprehend.
      Presently he realised what he was listening for—the hellish chant of the celebrants in the distant black valley. How did he know so much about what they expected? How did he know the time when Nahab and her acolyte were due to bear the brimming bowl which would follow the black cock and the black goat? He saw that Elwood had dropped asleep, and tried to call out and waken him. Something, however, closed his throat. He was not his own master. Had he signed the black man’s book after all?
      Then his fevered, abnormal hearing caught the distant, windborne notes. Over miles of hill and field and alley they came, but he recognised them none the less. The fires must be lit, and the dancers must be starting in. How could he keep himself from going? What was it that had enmeshed him? Mathematics—folklore—the house—old Keziah—Brown Jenkin . . . and now he saw that there was a fresh rat-hole in the wall near his couch. Above the distant chanting and the nearer praying of Joe Mazurewicz came another sound—a stealthy, determined scratching in the partitions. He hoped the electric lights would not go out. Then he saw the fanged, bearded little face in the rat-hole—the accursed little face which he at last realised bore such a shocking, mocking resemblance to old Keziah’s—and heard the faint fumbling at the door.
      The screaming twilight abysses flashed before him, and he felt himself helpless in the formless grasp of the iridescent bubble-congeries. Ahead raced the small, kaleidoscopic polyhedron, and all through the churning void there was a heightening and acceleration of the vague tonal pattern which seemed to foreshadow some unutterable and unendurable climax. He seemed to know what was coming—the monstrous burst of Walpurgis-rhythm in whose cosmic timbre would be concentrated all the primal, ultimate space-time seethings which lie behind the massed spheres of matter and sometimes break forth in measured reverberations that penetrate faintly to every layer of entity and give hideous significance throughout the worlds to certain dreaded periods.
      But all this vanished in a second. He was again in the cramped, violet-litten peaked space with the slanting floor, the low cases of ancient books, the bench and table, the queer objects, and the triangular gulf at one side. On the table lay a small white figure—an infant boy, unclothed and unconscious—while on the other side stood the monstrous, leering old woman with a gleaming, grotesque-hafted knife in her right hand, and a queerly proportioned pale metal bowl covered with curiously chased designs and having delicate lateral handles in her left. She was intoning some croaking ritual in a language which Gilman could not understand, but which seemed like something guardedly quoted in the Necronomicon.
      As the scene grew clear he saw the ancient crone bend forward and extend the empty bowl across the table—and unable to control his own motions, he reached far forward and took it in both hands, noticing as he did so its comparative lightness. At the same moment the disgusting form of Brown Jenkin scrambled up over the brink of the triangular black gulf on his left. The crone now motioned him to hold the bowl in a certain position while she raised the huge, grotesque knife above the small white victim as high as her right hand could reach. The fanged, furry thing began tittering a continuation of the unknown ritual, while the witch croaked loathsome responses. Gilman felt a gnawing, poignant abhorrence shoot through his mental and emotional paralysis, and the light metal bowl shook in his grasp. A second later the downward motion of the knife broke the spell completely, and he dropped the bowl with a resounding bell-like clangour while his hands darted out frantically to stop the monstrous deed.
      In an instant he had edged up the slanting floor around the end of the table and wrenched the knife from the old woman’s claws; sending it clattering over the brink of the narrow triangular gulf. In another instant, however, matters were reversed; for those murderous claws had locked themselves tightly around his own throat, while the wrinkled face was twisted with insane fury. He felt the chain of the cheap crucifix grinding into his neck, and in his peril wondered how the sight of the object itself would affect the evil creature. Her strength was altogether superhuman, but as she continued her choking he reached feebly in his shirt and drew out the metal symbol, snapping the chain and pulling it free.
      At sight of the device the witch seemed struck with panic, and her grip relaxed long enough to give Gilman a chance to break it entirely. He pulled the steel-like claws from his neck, and would have dragged the beldame over the edge of the gulf had not the claws received a fresh access of strength and closed in again. This time he resolved to reply in kind, and his own hands reached out for the creature’s throat. Before she saw what he was doing he had the chain of the crucifix twisted about her neck, and a moment later he had tightened it enough to cut off her breath. During her last struggle he felt something bite at his ankle, and saw that Brown Jenkin had come to her aid. With one savage kick he sent the morbidity over the edge of the gulf and heard it whimper on some level far below.
      Whether he had killed the ancient crone he did not know, but he let her rest on the floor where she had fallen. Then, as he turned away, he saw on the table a sight which nearly snapped the last thread of his reason. Brown Jenkin, tough of sinew and with four tiny hands of daemoniac dexterity, had been busy while the witch was throttling him, and his efforts had been in vain. What he had prevented the knife from doing to the victim’s chest, the yellow fangs of the furry blasphemy had done to a wrist—and the bowl so lately on the floor stood full beside the small lifeless body.
      In his dream-delirium Gilman heard the hellish, alien-rhythmed chant of the Sabbat coming from an infinite distance, and knew the black man must be there. Confused memories mixed themselves with his mathematics, and he believed his subconscious mind held the angles which he needed to guide him back to the normal world—alone and unaided for the first time. He felt sure he was in the immemorially sealed loft above his own room, but whether he could ever escape through the slanting floor or the long-stopped egress he doubted greatly. Besides, would not an escape from a dream-loft bring him merely into a dream-house—an abnormal projection of the actual place he sought? He was wholly bewildered as to the relation betwixt dream and reality in all his experiences.
      The passage through the vague abysses would be frightful, for the Walpurgis-rhythm would be vibrating, and at last he would have to hear that hitherto veiled cosmic pulsing which he so mortally dreaded. Even now he could detect a low, monstrous shaking whose tempo he suspected all too well. At Sabbat-time it always mounted and reached through to the worlds to summon the initiate to nameless rites. Half the chants of the Sabbat were patterned on this faintly overheard pulsing which no earthly ear could endure in its unveiled spatial fulness. Gilman wondered, too, whether he could trust his instinct to take him back to the right part of space. How could he be sure he would not land on that green-litten hillside of a far planet, on the tessellated terrace above the city of tentacled monsters somewhere beyond the galaxy, or in the spiral black vortices of that ultimate void of Chaos wherein reigns the mindless daemon-sultan Azathoth?
      Just before he made the plunge the violet light went out and left him in utter blackness. The witch—old Keziah—Nahab—that must have meant her death. And mixed with the distant chant of the Sabbat and the whimpers of Brown Jenkin in the gulf below he thought he heard another and wilder whine from unknown depths. Joe Mazurewicz—the prayers against the Crawling Chaos now turning to an inexplicably triumphant shriek—worlds of sardonic actuality impinging on vortices of febrile dream—Iä! Shub-Niggurath! The Goat with a Thousand Young. . . .
      They found Gilman on the floor of his queerly angled old garret room long before dawn, for the terrible cry had brought Desrochers and Choynski and Dombrowski and Mazurewicz at once, and had even wakened the soundly sleeping Elwood in his chair. He was alive, and with open, staring eyes, but seemed largely unconscious. On his throat were the marks of murderous hands, and on his left ankle was a distressing rat-bite. His clothing was badly rumpled, and Joe’s crucifix was missing. Elwood trembled, afraid even to speculate on what new form his friend’s sleep-walking had taken. Mazurewicz seemed half-dazed because of a “sign” he said he had had in response to his prayers, and he crossed himself frantically when the squealing and whimpering of a rat sounded from beyond the slanting partition.
      When the dreamer was settled on his couch in Elwood’s room they sent for Dr. Malkowski—a local practitioner who would repeat no tales where they might prove embarrassing—and he gave Gilman two hypodermic injections which caused him to relax in something like natural drowsiness. During the day the patient regained consciousness at times and whispered his newest dream disjointedly to Elwood. It was a painful process, and at its very start brought out a fresh and disconcerting fact.
      Gilman—whose ears had so lately possessed an abnormal sensitiveness—was now stone deaf. Dr. Malkowski, summoned again in haste, told Elwood that both ear-drums were ruptured, as if by the impact of some stupendous sound intense beyond all human conception or endurance. How such a sound could have been heard in the last few hours without arousing all the Miskatonic Valley was more than the honest physician could say.
      Elwood wrote his part of the colloquy on paper, so that a fairly easy communication was maintained. Neither knew what to make of the whole chaotic business, and decided it would be better if they thought as little as possible about it. Both, though, agreed that they must leave this ancient and accursed house as soon as it could be arranged. Evening papers spoke of a police raid on some curious revellers in a ravine beyond Meadow Hill just before dawn, and mentioned that the white stone there was an object of age-long superstitious regard. Nobody had been caught, but among the scattering fugitives had been glimpsed a huge negro. In another column it was stated that no trace of the missing child Ladislas Wolejko had been found.
      The crowning horror came that very night. Elwood will never forget it, and was forced to stay out of college the rest of the term because of the resulting nervous breakdown. He had thought he heard rats in the partitions all the evening, but paid little attention to them. Then, long after both he and Gilman had retired, the atrocious shrieking began. Elwood jumped up, turned on the lights, and rushed over to his guest’s couch. The occupant was emitting sounds of veritably inhuman nature, as if racked by some torment beyond description. He was writhing under the bedclothes, and a great red stain was beginning to appear on the blankets.
      Elwood scarcely dared to touch him, but gradually the screaming and writhing subsided. By this time Dombrowski, Choynski, Desrochers, Mazurewicz, and the top-floor lodger were all crowding into the doorway, and the landlord had sent his wife back to telephone for Dr. Malkowski. Everybody shrieked when a large rat-like form suddenly jumped out from beneath the ensanguined bedclothes and scuttled across the floor to a fresh, open hole close by. When the doctor arrived and began to pull down those frightful covers Walter Gilman was dead.
      It would be barbarous to do more than suggest what had killed Gilman. There had been virtually a tunnel through his body—something had eaten his heart out. Dombrowski, frantic at the failure of his constant rat-poisoning efforts, cast aside all thought of his lease and within a week had moved with all his older lodgers to a dingy but less ancient house in Walnut Street. The worst thing for a while was keeping Joe Mazurewicz quiet; for the brooding loomfixer would never stay sober, and was constantly whining and muttering about spectral and terrible things.
      It seems that on that last hideous night Joe had stooped to look at the crimson rat-tracks which led from Gilman’s couch to the nearby hole. On the carpet they were very indistinct, but a piece of open flooring intervened between the carpet’s edge and the base-board. There Mazurewicz had found something monstrous—or thought he had, for no one else could quite agree with him despite the undeniable queerness of the prints. The tracks on the flooring were certainly vastly unlike the average prints of a rat, but even Choynski and Desrochers would not admit that they were like the prints of four tiny human hands.
      The house was never rented again. As soon as Dombrowski left it the pall of its final desolation began to descend, for people shunned it both on account of its old reputation and because of the new foetid odour. Perhaps the ex-landlord’s rat-poison had worked after all, for not long after his departure the place became a neighbourhood nuisance. Health officials traced the smell to the closed spaces above and beside the eastern garret room, and agreed that the number of dead rats must be enormous. They decided, however, that it was not worth their while to hew open and disinfect the long-sealed spaces; for the foetor would soon be over, and the locality was not one which encouraged fastidious standards. Indeed, there were always vague local tales of unexplained stenches upstairs in the Witch House just after May-Eve and Hallowmass. The neighbours grumblingly acquiesced in the inertia—but the foetor none the less formed an additional count against the place. Toward the last the house was condemned as an habitation by the building inspector.
      Gilman’s dreams and their attendant circumstances have never been explained. Elwood, whose thoughts on the entire episode are sometimes almost maddening, came back to college the next autumn and graduated in the following June. He found the spectral gossip of the town much diminished, and it is indeed a fact that—notwithstanding certain reports of a ghostly tittering in the deserted house which lasted almost as long as that edifice itself—no fresh appearances either of old Keziah or of Brown Jenkin have been muttered of since Gilman’s death. It is rather fortunate that Elwood was not in Arkham in that later year when certain events abruptly renewed the local whispers about elder horrors. Of course he heard about the matter afterward and suffered untold torments of black and bewildered speculation; but even that was not as bad as actual nearness and several possible sights would have been.
      In March, 1931, a gale wrecked the roof and great chimney of the vacant Witch House, so that a chaos of crumbling bricks, blackened, moss-grown shingles, and rotting planks and timbers crashed down into the loft and broke through the floor beneath. The whole attic story was choked with debris from above, but no one took the trouble to touch the mess before the inevitable razing of the decrepit structure. That ultimate step came in the following December, and it was when Gilman’s old room was cleared out by reluctant, apprehensive workmen that the gossip began.
      Among the rubbish which had crashed through the ancient slanting ceiling were several things which made the workmen pause and call in the police. Later the police in turn called in the coroner and several professors from the university. There were bones—badly crushed and splintered, but clearly recognisable as human—whose manifestly modern date conflicted puzzlingly with the remote period at which their only possible lurking-place, the low, slant-floored loft overhead, had supposedly been sealed from all human access. The coroner’s physician decided that some belonged to a small child, while certain others—found mixed with shreds of rotten brownish cloth—belonged to a rather undersized, bent female of advanced years. Careful sifting of debris also disclosed many tiny bones of rats caught in the collapse, as well as older rat-bones gnawed by small fangs in a fashion now and then highly productive of controversy and reflection.
      Other objects found included the mingled fragments of many books and papers, together with a yellowish dust left from the total disintegration of still older books and papers. All, without exception, appeared to deal with black magic in its most advanced and horrible forms; and the evidently recent date of certain items is still a mystery as unsolved as that of the modern human bones. An even greater mystery is the absolute homogeneity of the crabbed, archaic writing found on a wide range of papers whose conditions and watermarks suggest age differences of at least 150 to 200 years. To some, though, the greatest mystery of all is the variety of utterly inexplicable objects—objects whose shapes, materials, types of workmanship, and purposes baffle all conjecture—found scattered amidst the wreckage in evidently diverse states of injury. One of these things—which excited several Miskatonic professors profoundly—is a badly damaged monstrosity plainly resembling the strange image which Gilman gave to the college museum, save that it is larger, wrought of some peculiar bluish stone instead of metal, and possessed of a singularly angled pedestal with undecipherable hieroglyphics.
      Archaeologists and anthropologists are still trying to explain the bizarre designs chased on a crushed bowl of light metal whose inner side bore ominous brownish stains when found. Foreigners and credulous grandmothers are equally garrulous about the modern nickel crucifix with broken chain mixed in the rubbish and shiveringly identified by Joe Mazurewicz as that which he had given poor Gilman many years before. Some believe this crucifix was dragged up to the sealed loft by rats, while others think it must have been on the floor in some corner of Gilman’s old room all the time. Still others, including Joe himself, have theories too wild and fantastic for sober credence.
      When the slanting wall of Gilman’s room was torn out, the once sealed triangular space between that partition and the house’s north wall was found to contain much less structural debris, even in proportion to its size, than the room itself; though it had a ghastly layer of older materials which paralysed the wreckers with horror. In brief, the floor was a veritable ossuary of the bones of small children—some fairly modern, but others extending back in infinite gradations to a period so remote that crumbling was almost complete. On this deep bony layer rested a knife of great size, obvious antiquity, and grotesque, ornate, and exotic design—above which the debris was piled.
      In the midst of this debris, wedged between a fallen plank and a cluster of cemented bricks from the ruined chimney, was an object destined to cause more bafflement, veiled fright, and openly superstitious talk in Arkham than anything else discovered in the haunted and accursed building. This object was the partly crushed skeleton of a huge, diseased rat, whose abnormalities of form are still a topic of debate and source of singular reticence among the members of Miskatonic’s department of comparative anatomy. Very little concerning this skeleton has leaked out, but the workmen who found it whisper in shocked tones about the long, brownish hairs with which it was associated.
      The bones of the tiny paws, it is rumoured, imply prehensile characteristics more typical of a diminutive monkey than of a rat; while the small skull with its savage yellow fangs is of the utmost anomalousness, appearing from certain angles like a miniature, monstrously degraded parody of a human skull. The workmen crossed themselves in fright when they came upon this blasphemy, but later burned candles of gratitude in St. Stanislaus’ Church because of the shrill, ghostly tittering they felt they would never hear again.",False
"It was a gentle daylight rain that awaked me front my stupor in the brush-grown railway cut, and when I staggered out to the roadway ahead I saw no trace of any prints in the fresh mud. The fishy odour, too, was gone, Innsmouth's ruined roofs and toppling steeples loomed up greyly toward the southeast, but not a living creature did I spy in all the desolate salt marshes around. My watch was still going, and told me that the hour was past noon.
The reality of what I had been through was highly uncertain in my mind, but I felt that something hideous lay in the background. I must get away from evil-shadowed Innsmouth--and accordingly I began to test my cramped, wearied powers of locomotion. Despite weakness hunger, horror, and bewilderment I found myself after a time able to walk; so started slowly along the muddy road to Rowley. Before evening I was in village, getting a meal and providing myself with presentable clothes. I caught the night train to Arkham, and the next day talked long and earnestly with government officials there; a process I later repeated in Boston. With the main result of these colloquies the public is now familiar--and I wish, for normality's sake, there were nothing more to tell. Perhaps it is madness that is overtaking me--yet perhaps a greater horror--or a greater marvel--is reaching out.
As may well be imagined, I gave up most of the foreplanned features of the rest of my tour--the scenic, architectural, and antiquarian diversions on which I had counted so heavily. Nor did I dare look for that piece of strange jewelry said to be in the Miskatonic University Museum. I did, however, improve my stay in Arkham by collecting some genealogical notes I had long wished to possess; very rough and hasty data, it is true, but capable of good use later on when I might have time to collate and codify them. The curator of the historical society there--Mr. B. Lapham Peabody--was very courteous about assisting me, and expressed unusual interest when I told him I was a grandson of Eliza Orne of Arkham, who was born in 1867 and had married James Williamson of Ohio at the age of seventeen.
It seemed that a maternal uncle of mine had been there many years before on a quest much like my own; and that my grandmother's family was a topic of some local curiosity. There had, Mr. Peabody said, been considerable discussion about the marriage of her father, Benjamin Orne, just after the Civil War; since the ancestry of the bride was peculiarly puzzling. That bride was understood to have been an orphaned Marsh of New Hampshire--a cousin of the Essex County Marshes--but her education had been in France and she knew very little of her family. A guardian had deposited funds in a Boston bank to maintain her and her French governess; but that guardian's name was unfamiliar to Arkham people, and in time he dropped out of sight, so that the governess assumed the role by court appointment. The Frenchwoman--now long dead--was very taciturn, and there were those who said she could have told more than she did.
But the most baffling thing was the inability of anyone to place the recorded parents of the young woman--Enoch and Lydia (Meserve) Marsh--among the known families of New Hampshire. Possibly, many suggested, she was the natural daughter of some Marsh of prominence--she certainly had the true Marsh eyes. Most of the puzzling was done after her early death, which took place at the birth of my grandmother--her only child. Having formed some disagreeable impressions connected with the name of Marsh, I did not welcome the news that it belonged on my own ancestral tree; nor was I pleased by Mr. Peabody's suggestion that I had the true Marsh eyes myself. However, I was grateful for data which I knew would prove valuable; and took copious notes and lists of book references regarding the well-documented Orne family.
I went directly home to Toledo from Boston, and later spent a month at Maumee recuperating from my ordeal. In September I entered Oberlin for my final year, and from then till the next June was busy with studies and other wholesome activities--reminded of the bygone terror only by occasional official visits from government men in connexion with the campaign which my pleas and evidence had started. Around the middle of July--just a year after the Innsmouth experience--I spent a week with my late mother's family in Cleveland; checking some of my new genealogical data with the various notes, traditions, and bits of heirloom material in existence there, and seeing what kind of a connected chart I could construct.
I did not exactly relish this task, for the atmosphere of the Williamson home had always depressed me. There was a strain of morbidity there, and my mother had never encouraged my visiting her parents as a child, although she always welcomed her father when he came to Toledo. My Arkham-born grandmother had seemed strange and almost terrifying to me, and I do not think I grieved when she disappeared. I was eight years old then, and it was said that she had wandered off in grief after the suicide of my Uncle Douglas, her eldest son. He had shot himself after a trip to New England--the same trip, no doubt, which had caused him to be recalled at the Arkham Historical Society.
This uncle had resembled her, and I had never liked him either. Something about the staring, unwinking expression of both of them had given me a vague, unaccountable uneasiness. My mother and Uncle Walter had not looked like that. They were like their father, though poor little cousin Lawrence--Walter's son--had been almost perfect duplicate of his grandmother before his condition took him to the permanent seclusion of a sanitarium at Canton. I had not seen him in four years, but my uncle once implied that his state, both mental and physical, was very bad. This worry had probably been a major cause of his mother's death two years before.
My grandfather and his widowed son Walter now comprised the Cleveland household, but the memory of older times hung thickly over it. I still disliked the place, and tried to get my researches done as quickly as possible. Williamson records and traditions were supplied in abundance by my grandfather; though for Orne material I had to depend on my uncle Walter, who put at my disposal the contents of all his files, including notes, letters, cuttings, heirlooms, photographs, and miniatures.
It was in going over the letters and pictures on the Orne side that I began to acquire a kind of terror of my own ancestry. As I have said, my grandmother and Uncle Douglas had always disturbed me. Now, years after their passing, I gazed at their pictured faces with a measurably heightened feeling of repulsion and alienation. I could not at first understand the change, but gradually a horrible sort of comparison began to obtrude itself on my unconscious mind despite the steady refusal of my consciousness to admit even the least suspicion of it. It was clear that the typical expression of these faces now suggested something it had not suggested before--something which would bring stark panic if too openly thought of.
But the worst shock came when my uncle shewed me the Orne jewellery in a downtown safe deposit vault. Some of the items were delicate and inspiring enough, but there was one box of strange old pieces descended from my mysterious great-grandmother which my uncle was almost reluctant to produce. They were, he said, of very grotesque and almost repulsive design, and had never to his knowledge been publicly worn; though my grandmother used to enjoy looking at them. Vague legends of bad luck clustered around them, and my great-grandmother's French governess had said they ought not to be worn in New England, though it would be quite safe to wear them in Europe.
As my uncle began slowly and grudgingly to unwrap the things he urged me not to be shocked by the strangeness and frequent hideousness of the designs. Artists and archaeologists who had seen them pronounced their workmanship superlatively and exotically exquisite, though no one seemed able to define their exact material or assign them to any specific art tradition. There were two armlets, a tiara, and a kind of pectoral; the latter having in high relief certain figures of almost unbearable extravagance.
During this description I had kept a tight rein on my emotions, but my face must have betrayed my mounting fears. My uncle looked concerned, and paused in his unwrapping to study my countenance. I motioned to him to continue, which he did with renewed signs of reluctance. He seemed to expect some demonstration when the first piece--the tiara--became visible, but I doubt if he expected quite what actually happened. I did not expect it, either, for I thought I was thoroughly forewarned regarding what the jewellery would turn out to be. What I did was to faint silently away, just as I had done in that brier-choked railway cut a year before.
From that day on my life has been a nightmare of brooding and apprehension nor do I know how much is hideous truth and how much madness. My great-grandmother had been a Marsh of unknown source whose husband lived in Arkham--and did not old Zadok say that the daughter of Obed Marsh by a monstrous mother was married to an Arkham man through trick? What was it the ancient toper had muttered about the line of my eyes to Captain Obed's? In Arkham, too, the curator had told me I had the true Marsh eyes. Was Obed Marsh my own great-great-grandfather? Who--or what--then, was my great-great-grandmother? But perhaps this was all madness. Those whitish-gold ornaments might easily have been bought from some Innsmouth sailor by the father of my great-grandmother, whoever he was. And that look in the staring-eyed faces of my grandmother and self-slain uncle might be sheer fancy on my part--sheer fancy, bolstered up by the Innsmouth shadow which had so darkly coloured my imagination. But why had my uncle killed himself after an ancestral quest in New England?
For more than two years I fought off these reflections with partial success. My father secured me a place in an insurance office, and I buried myself in routine as deeply as possible. In the winter of 1930-31, however, the dreams began. They were very sparse and insidious at first, but increased in frequency and vividness as the weeks went by. Great watery spaces opened out before me, and I seemed to wander through titanic sunken porticos and labyrinths of weedy cyclopean walls with grotesque fishes as my companions. Then the other shapes began to appear, filling me with nameless horror the moment I awoke. But during the dreams they did not horrify me at all--I was one with them; wearing their unhuman trappings, treading their aqueous ways, and praying monstrously at their evil sea-bottom temples.
There was much more than I could remember, but even what I did remember each morning would be enough to stamp me as a madman or a genius if ever I dared write it down. Some frightful influence, I felt, was seeking gradually to drag me out of the sane world of wholesome life into unnamable abysses of blackness and alienage; and the process told heavily on me. My health and appearance grew steadily worse, till finally I was forced to give up my position and adopt the static, secluded life of an invalid. Some odd nervous affliction had me in its grip, and I found myself at times almost unable to shut my eyes.
It was then that I began to study the mirror with mounting alarm. The slow ravages of disease are not pleasant to watch, but in my case there was something subtler and more puzzling in the background. My father seemed to notice it, too, for he began looking at me curiously and almost affrightedly. What was taking place in me? Could it be that I was coming to resemble my grandmother and uncle Douglas?
One night I had a frightful dream in which I met my grandmother under the sea. She lived in a phosphorescent palace of many terraces, with gardens of strange leprous corals and grotesque brachiate efflorescences, and welcomed me with a warmth that may have been sardonic. She had changed--as those who take to the water change--and told me she had never died. Instead, she had gone to a spot her dead son had learned about, and had leaped to a realm whose wonders-- destined for him as well--he had spurned with a smoking pistol. This was to be my realm, too--I could not escape it. I would never die, but would live with those who had lived since before man ever walked the earth.
I met also that which had been her grandmother. For eighty thousand years Pth'thya-l'yi had lived in Y'ha-nthlei, and thither she had gone back after Obed Marsh was dead. Y'ha-nthlei was not destroyed when the upper-earth men shot death into the sea. It was hurt, but not destroyed. The Deep Ones could never be destroyed, even though the palaeogean magic of the forgotten Old Ones might sometimes check them. For the present they would rest; but some day, if they remembered, they would rise again for the tribute Great Cthulhu craved. It would be a city greater than Innsmouth next time. They had planned to spread, and had brought up that which would help them, but now they must wait once more. For bringing the upper-earth men's death I must do a penance, but that would not be heavy. This was the dream in which I saw a shoggoth for the first time, and the sight set me awake in a frenzy of screaming. That morning the mirror definitely told me I had acquired the Innsmouth look.
So far I have not shot myself as my uncle Douglas did. I bought an automatic and almost took the step, but certain dreams deterred me. The tense extremes of horror are lessening, and I feel queerly drawn toward the unknown sea-deeps instead of fearing them. I hear and do strange things in sleep, and awake with a kind of exaltation instead of terror. I do not believe I need to wait for the full change as most have waited. If I did, my father would probably shut me up in a sanitarium as my poor little cousin is shut up. Stupendous and unheard-of splendors await me below, and I shall seek them soon. Ia-R'lyehl Cihuiha flgagnl id Ia! No, I shall not shoot myself--I cannot be made to shoot myself!
I shall plan my cousin's escape from that Canton mad-house, and together we shall go to marvel-shadowed Innsmouth. We shall swim out to that brooding reef in the sea and dive down through black abysses to Cyclopean and many-columned Y'ha-nthlei, and in that lair of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory for ever.
","It is said that in Ulthar, which lies beyond the river Skai, no man may kill a cat; and this I can verily believe as I gaze upon him who sitteth purring before the fire. For the cat is cryptic, and close to strange things which men cannot see. He is the soul of antique Aegyptus, and bearer of tales from forgotten cities in Meroë and Ophir. He is the kin of the jungle’s lords, and heir to the secrets of hoary and sinister Africa. The Sphinx is his cousin, and he speaks her language; but he is more ancient than the Sphinx, and remembers that which she hath forgotten.
      In Ulthar, before ever the burgesses forbade the killing of cats, there dwelt an old cotter and his wife who delighted to trap and slay the cats of their neighbours. Why they did this I know not; save that many hate the voice of the cat in the night, and take it ill that cats should run stealthily about yards and gardens at twilight. But whatever the reason, this old man and woman took pleasure in trapping and slaying every cat which came near to their hovel; and from some of the sounds heard after dark, many villagers fancied that the manner of slaying was exceedingly peculiar. But the villagers did not discuss such things with the old man and his wife; because of the habitual expression on the withered faces of the two, and because their cottage was so small and so darkly hidden under spreading oaks at the back of a neglected yard. In truth, much as the owners of cats hated these odd folk, they feared them more; and instead of berating them as brutal assassins, merely took care that no cherished pet or mouser should stray toward the remote hovel under the dark trees. When through some unavoidable oversight a cat was missed, and sounds heard after dark, the loser would lament impotently; or console himself by thanking Fate that it was not one of his children who had thus vanished. For the people of Ulthar were simple, and knew not whence it is all cats first came.
      One day a caravan of strange wanderers from the South entered the narrow cobbled streets of Ulthar. Dark wanderers they were, and unlike the other roving folk who passed through the village twice every year. In the market-place they told fortunes for silver, and bought gay beads from the merchants. What was the land of these wanderers none could tell; but it was seen that they were given to strange prayers, and that they had painted on the sides of their wagons strange figures with human bodies and the heads of cats, hawks, rams, and lions. And the leader of the caravan wore a head-dress with two horns and a curious disc betwixt the horns.
      There was in this singular caravan a little boy with no father or mother, but only a tiny black kitten to cherish. The plague had not been kind to him, yet had left him this small furry thing to mitigate his sorrow; and when one is very young, one can find great relief in the lively antics of a black kitten. So the boy whom the dark people called Menes smiled more often than he wept as he sate playing with his graceful kitten on the steps of an oddly painted wagon.
      On the third morning of the wanderers’ stay in Ulthar, Menes could not find his kitten; and as he sobbed aloud in the market-place certain villagers told him of the old man and his wife, and of sounds heard in the night. And when he heard these things his sobbing gave place to meditation, and finally to prayer. He stretched out his arms toward the sun and prayed in a tongue no villager could understand; though indeed the villagers did not try very hard to understand, since their attention was mostly taken up by the sky and the odd shapes the clouds were assuming. It was very peculiar, but as the little boy uttered his petition there seemed to form overhead the shadowy, nebulous figures of exotic things; of hybrid creatures crowned with horn-flanked discs. Nature is full of such illusions to impress the imaginative.
      That night the wanderers left Ulthar, and were never seen again. And the householders were troubled when they noticed that in all the village there was not a cat to be found. From each hearth the familiar cat had vanished; cats large and small, black, grey, striped, yellow, and white. Old Kranon, the burgomaster, swore that the dark folk had taken the cats away in revenge for the killing of Menes’ kitten; and cursed the caravan and the little boy. But Nith, the lean notary, declared that the old cotter and his wife were more likely persons to suspect; for their hatred of cats was notorious and increasingly bold. Still, no one durst complain to the sinister couple; even when little Atal, the innkeeper’s son, vowed that he had at twilight seen all the cats of Ulthar in that accursed yard under the trees, pacing very slowly and solemnly in a circle around the cottage, two abreast, as if in performance of some unheard-of rite of beasts. The villagers did not know how much to believe from so small a boy; and though they feared that the evil pair had charmed the cats to their death, they preferred not to chide the old cotter till they met him outside his dark and repellent yard.
      So Ulthar went to sleep in vain anger; and when the people awaked at dawn—behold! every cat was back at his accustomed hearth! Large and small, black, grey, striped, yellow, and white, none was missing. Very sleek and fat did the cats appear, and sonorous with purring content. The citizens talked with one another of the affair, and marvelled not a little. Old Kranon again insisted that it was the dark folk who had taken them, since cats did not return alive from the cottage of the ancient man and his wife. But all agreed on one thing: that the refusal of all the cats to eat their portions of meat or drink their saucers of milk was exceedingly curious. And for two whole days the sleek, lazy cats of Ulthar would touch no food, but only doze by the fire or in the sun.
      It was fully a week before the villagers noticed that no lights were appearing at dusk in the windows of the cottage under the trees. Then the lean Nith remarked that no one had seen the old man or his wife since the night the cats were away. In another week the burgomaster decided to overcome his fears and call at the strangely silent dwelling as a matter of duty, though in so doing he was careful to take with him Shang the blacksmith and Thul the cutter of stone as witnesses. And when they had broken down the frail door they found only this: two cleanly picked human skeletons on the earthen floor, and a number of singular beetles crawling in the shadowy corners.
      There was subsequently much talk among the burgesses of Ulthar. Zath, the coroner, disputed at length with Nith, the lean notary; and Kranon and Shang and Thul were overwhelmed with questions. Even little Atal, the innkeeper’s son, was closely questioned and given a sweetmeat as reward. They talked of the old cotter and his wife, of the caravan of dark wanderers, of small Menes and his black kitten, of the prayer of Menes and of the sky during that prayer, of the doings of the cats on the night the caravan left, and of what was later found in the cottage under the dark trees in the repellent yard.
      And in the end the burgesses passed that remarkable law which is told of by traders in Hatheg and discussed by travellers in Nir; namely, that in Ulthar no man may kill a cat.",True
"Shortly before ten the next morning I stood with one small valise in front of Hammond's Drug Store in old Market Square waiting for the Innsmouth bus. As the hour for its arrival drew near I noticed a general drift of the loungers to other places up the street, or to the Ideal Lunch across the square. Evidently the ticket-agent had not exaggerated the dislike which local People bore toward Innsmouth and its denizens. In a few moments a small motor-coach of extreme decrepitude and dirty grey colour rattled down State Street, made a turn, and drew up at the curb beside me. I felt immediately that it was the right one; a guess which the half-illegible sign on the windshield--Arkham-Innsmouth-Newburyport--soon verified.
There were only three passengers--dark, unkempt men of sullen visage and somewhat youthful cast--and when the vehicle stopped they clumsily shambled out and began walking up State Street in a silent, almost furtive fashion. The driver also alighted, and I watched him as he went into the drug store to make some purchase. This, I reflected, must be the Joe Sargent mentioned by the ticket-agent; and even before I noticed any details there spread over me a wave of spontaneous aversion which could be neither checked nor explained. It suddenly struck me as very natural that the local people should not wish to ride on a bus owned and driven by this man, or to visit any oftener than possible the habitat of such a man and his kinsfolk.
When the driver came out of the store I looked at him more carefully and tried to determine the source of my evil impression. He was a thin, stoop-shouldered man not much under six feet tall, dressed in shabby blue civilian clothes and wearing a frayed golf cap. His age was perhaps thirty-five, but the odd, deep creases in the sides of his neck made him seem older when one did not study his dull, expressionless face. He had a narrow head, bulging, watery-blue eyes that seemed never to wink, a flat nose, a receding forehead and chin, and singularly undeveloped ears. His long thick lip and coarse-pored, greyish cheeks seemed almost beardless except for some sparse yellow hairs that straggled and curled in irregular patches; and in places the surface seemed queerly irregular, as if peeling from some cutaneous disease. His hands were large and heavily veined, and had a very unusual greyish-blue tinge. The fingers were strikingly short in proportion to the rest of the structure, and seemed to have a tendency to curl closely into the huge palm. As he walked toward the bus I observed his peculiarly shambling gait and saw that his feet were inordinately immense. The more I studied them the more I wondered how he could buy any shoes to fit them.
A certain greasiness about the fellow increased my dislike. He was evidently given to working or lounging around the fish docks, and carried with him much of their characteristic smell. Just what foreign blood was in him I could not even guess. His oddities certainly did not look Asiatic, Polynesian, Levantine or negroid, yet I could see why the people found him alien. I myself would have thought of biological degeneration rather than alienage.
I was sorry when I saw there would be no other passengers on the bus. Somehow I did not like the idea of riding alone with this driver. But as leaving time obviously approached I conquered my qualms and followed the man aboard, extending him a dollar bill and murmuring the single word ""Innsmouth."" He looked curiously at me for a second as he returned forty cents change without speaking. I took a seat far behind him, but on the same side of the bus, since I wished to watch the shore during the journey.
At length the decrepit vehicle stared with a jerk, and rattled noisily past the old brick buildings of State Street amidst a cloud of vapour from the exhaust. Glancing at the people on the sidewalks, I thought I detected in them a curious wish to avoid looking at the bus--or at least a wish to avoid seeming to look at it. Then we turned to the left into High Street, where the going was smoother; flying by stately old mansions of the early republic and still older colonial farmhouses, passing the Lower Green and Parker River, and finally emerging into a long, monotonous stretch of open shore country.
The day was warm and sunny, but the landscape of sand and sedge-grass, and stunted shrubbery became more and desolate as we proceeded. Out the window I could see the blue water and the sandy line of Plum Island, and we presently drew very near the beach as our narrow road veered off from the main highway to Rowley and Ipswich. There were no visible houses, and I could tell by the state of the road that traffic was very light hereabouts. The weather-worn telephone poles carried only two wires. Now and then we crossed crude wooden bridges over tidal creeks that wound far inland and promoted the general isolation of the region.
Once in a while I noticed dead stumps and crumbling foundation-walls above the drifting sand, and recalled the old tradition quoted in one of the histories I had read, that this was once a fertile and thickly-settled countryside. The change, it was said, came simultaneously with the Innsmouth epidemic of l846, and was thought by simple folk to have a dark connection with hidden forces of evil. Actually, it was caused by the unwise cutting of woodlands near the shore, which robbed the soil of the best protection and opened the way for waves of wind-blown sand.
At last we lost sight of Plum Island and saw the vast expanse of the open Atlantic on our left. Our narrow course began to climb steeply, and I felt a singular sense of disquiet in looking at the lonely crest ahead where the rutted road-way met the sky. It was as if the bus were about to keep on in its ascent, leaving the sane earth altogether and merging with the unknown arcana of upper air and cryptical sky. The smell of the sea took on ominous implications, and the silent driver's bent, rigid back and narrow head became more and more hateful. As I looked at him I saw that the back of his head was almost as hairless as his face, having only a few straggling yellow strands upon a grey scabrous surface.
Then we reached the crest and beheld the outspread valley beyond, where the Manuxet joins the sea just north of the long line of cliffs that culminate in Kingsport Head and veer off toward Cape Ann. On the far misty horizon I could just make out the dizzy profile of the Head, topped by the queer ancient house of which so many legends are told; but for the moment all my attention was captured by the nearer panorama just below me. I had, I realized, come face to face with rumour-shadowed Innsmouth.
It was a town of wide extent and dense construction, yet one with a portentous dearth of visible life. From the tangle of chimney-pots scarcely a wisp of smoke came, and the three tall steeples loomed stark and unpainted against the seaward horizon. One of them was crumbling down at the top, and in that and another there were only black gaping holes where clock-dials should have been. The vast huddle of sagging gambrel roofs and peaked gables conveyed with offensive clearness the idea of wormy decay, and as we approached along the now descending road I could see that many roofs had wholly caved in. There were some large square Georgian houses, too, with hipped roofs, cupolas, and railed ""widow's walks."" These were mostly well back from the water, and one or two seemed to be in moderately sound condition. Stretching inland from among them I saw the rusted, grass-grown line of the abandoned railway, with leaning telegraph-poles now devoid of wires, and the half-obscured lines of the old carriage roads to Rowley and Ipswich.
The decay was worst close to the waterfront, though in its very midst I could spy the white belfry of a fairly well preserved brick structure which looked like a small factory. The harbour, long clogged with sand, was enclosed by an ancient stone breakwater; on which I could begin to discern the minute forms of a few seated fishermen, and at whose end were what looked like the foundations of a bygone lighthouse. A sandy tongue had formed inside this barrier and upon it I saw a few decrepit cabins, moored dories, and scattered lobster-pots. The only deep water seemed to be where the river poured out past the belfried structure and turned southward to join the ocean at the breakwater's end.
Here and there the ruins of wharves jutted out from the shore to end in indeterminate rottenness, those farthest south seeming the most decayed. And far out at sea, despite a high tide, I glimpsed a long, black line scarcely rising above the water yet carrying a suggestion of odd latent malignancy. This, I knew, must be Devil Reef. As I looked, a subtle, curious sense of beckoning seemed superadded to the grim repulsion; and oddly enough, I found this overtone more disturbing than the primary impression.
We met no one on the road, but presently began to pass deserted farms in varying stages of ruin. Then I noticed a few inhabited houses with rags stuffed in the broken windows and shells and dead fish lying about the littered yards. Once or twice I saw listless-looking people working in barren gardens or digging clams on the fishy-smelling beach below, and groups of dirty, simian-visaged children playing around weed-grown doorsteps. Somehow these people seemed more disquieting than the dismal buildings, for almost every one had certain peculiarities of face and motions which I instinctively disliked without being able to define or comprehend them. For a second I thought this typical physique suggested some picture I had seen, perhaps in a book, under circumstances of particular horror or melancholy; but this pseudo-recollection passed very quickly.
As the bus reached a lower level I began to catch the steady note of a waterfall through the unnatural stillness, The leaning, unpainted houses grew thicker, lined both sides of the road, and displayed more urban tendencies than did those we were leaving behind, The panorama ahead had contracted to a street scene, and in spots I could see where a cobblestone pavement and stretches of brick sidewalk had formerly existed. All the houses were apparently deserted, and there were occasional gaps where tumbledown chimneys and cellar walls told of buildings that had collapsed. Pervading everything was the most nauseous fishy odour imaginable.
Soon cross streets and junctions began to appear; those on the left leading to shoreward realms of unpaved squalor and decay, while those on the right shewed vistas of departed grandeur. So far I had seen no people in the town, but there now came signs of a sparse habitation--curtained windows here and there, and an occasional battered motorcar at the curb. Pavement and sidewalks were increasingly well-defined, and though most of the houses were quite old--wood and brick structures of the early 19th century--they were obviously kept fit for habitation. As an amateur antiquarian I almost lost my olfactory disgust and my feeling of menace and repulsion amidst this rich, unaltered survival from the past.
But I was not to reach my destination without one very strong impression of poignantly disagreeable quality. The bus had come to a sort of open concourse or radial point with churches on two sides and the bedraggled remains of a circular green in the centre, and I was looking at a large pillared hall on the right-hand junction ahead. The structure's once white paint was now gray and peeling and the black and gold sign on the pediment was so faded that I could only with difficulty make out the words ""Esoteric Order of Dagon."" This, then was the former Masonic Hall now given over to a degraded cult. As I strained to decipher this inscription my notice was distracted by the raucous tones of a cracked bell across the street, and I quickly turned to look out the window on my side of the coach.
The sound came from a squat stone church of manifestly later date than most of the houses, built in a clumsy Gothic fashion and having a disproportionately high basement with shuttered windows. Though the hands of its clock were missing on the side I glimpsed, I knew that those hoarse strokes were tolling the hour of eleven. Then suddenly all thoughts of time were blotted out by an onrushing image of sharp intensity and unaccountable horror which had seized me before I knew what it really was. The door of the church basement was open, revealing a rectangle of blackness inside. And as I looked, a certain object crossed or seemed to cross that dark rectangle; burning into my brain a momentary conception of nightmare which was all the more maddening because analysis could not shew a single nightmarish quality in it.
It was a living object--the first except the driver that I had seen since entering the compact part of the town--and had I been in a steadier mood I would have found nothing whatever of terror in it. Clearly, as I realised a moment later, it was the pastor; clad in some peculiar vestments doubtless introduced since the Order of Dagon had modified the ritual of the local churches. The thing which had probably caught my first subconscious glance and supplied the touch of bizarre horror was the tall tiara he wore; an almost exact duplicate of the one Miss Tilton had shown me the previous evening. This, acting on my imagination, had supplied namelessly sinister qualities to the indeterminate face and robed, shambling form beneath it. There was not, I soon decided, any reason why I should have felt that shuddering touch of evil pseudo-memory. Was it not natural that a local mystery cult should adopt among its regimentals an unique type of head-dress made familiar to the community in some strange way--perhaps as treasure-trove?
A very thin sprinkling of repellent-looking youngish people now became visible on the sidewalks--lone individuals, and silent knots of two or three. The lower floors of the crumbling houses sometimes harboured small shops with dingy signs, and I noticed a parked truck or two as we rattled along. The sound of waterfalls became more and more distinct, and presently I saw a fairly deep river-gorge ahead, spanned by a wide, iron-railed highway bridge beyond which a large square opened out. As we clanked over the bridge I looked out on both sides and observed some factory buildings on the edge of the grassy bluff or part way down. The water far below was very abundant, and I could see two vigorous sets of falls upstream on my right and at least one downstream on my left. From this point the noise was quite deafening. Then we rolled into the large semicircular square across the river and drew up on the right-hand side in front of a tall, cupola crowned building with remnants of yellow paint and with a half-effaced sign proclaiming it to be the Gilman House.
I was glad to get out of that bus, and at once proceeded to check my valise in the shabby hotel lobby. There was only one person in sight--an elderly man without what I had come to call the ""Innsmouth look""--and I decided not to ask him any of the questions which bothered me; remembering that odd things had been noticed in this hotel. Instead, I strolled out on the square, from which the bus had already gone, and studied the scene minutely and appraisingly.
One side of the cobblestoned open space was the straight line of the river; the other was a semicircle of slant-roofed brick buildings of about the 1800 period, from which several streets radiated away to the southeast, south, and southwest. Lamps were depressingly few and small--all low-powered incandescents--and I was glad that my plans called for departure before dark, even though I knew the moon would be bright. The buildings were all in fair condition, and included perhaps a dozen shops in current operation; of which one was a grocery of the First National chain, others a dismal restaurant, a drug store, and a wholesale fish-dealer's office, and still another, at the eastward extremity of the square near the river an office of the town's only industry--the Marsh Refining Company. There were perhaps ten people visible, and four or five automobiles and motor trucks stood scattered about. I did not need to be told that this was the civic centre of Innsmouth. Eastward I could catch blue glimpses of the harbour, against which rose the decaying remains of three once beautiful Georgian steeples. And toward the shore on the opposite bank of the river I saw the white belfry surmounting what I took to be the Marsh refinery.
For some reason or other I chose to make my first inquiries at the chain grocery, whose personnel was not likely to be native to Innsmouth. I found a solitary boy of about seventeen in charge, and was pleased to note the brightness and affability which promised cheerful information. He seemed exceptionally eager to talk, and I soon gathered that he did not like the place, its fishy smell, or its furtive people. A word with any outsider was a relief to him. He hailed from Arkham, boarded with a family who came from Ipswich, and went back whenever he got a moment off. His family did not like him to work in Innsmouth, but the chain had transferred him there and he did not wish to give up his job.
There was, he said, no public library or chamber of commerce in Innsmouth, but I could probably find my way about. The street I had come down was Federal. West of that were the fine old residence streets--Broad, Washington, Lafayette, and Adams--and east of it were the shoreward slums. It was in these slums--along Main Street--that I would find the old Georgian churches, but they were all long abandoned. It would be well not to make oneself too conspicuous in such neighbourhoods--especially north of the river since the people were sullen and hostile. Some strangers had even disappeared.
Certain spots were almost forbidden territory, as he had learned at considerable cost. One must not, for example, linger much around the Marsh refinery, or around any of the still used churches, or around the pillared Order of Dagon Hall at New Church Green. Those churches were very odd--all violently disavowed by their respective denominations elsewhere, and apparently using the queerest kind of ceremonials and clerical vestments. Their creeds were heterodox and mysterious, involving hints of certain marvelous transformations leading to bodily immorality--of a sort--on this earth. The youth's own pastor--Dr. Wallace of Asbury M. E. Church in Arkham--had gravely urged him not to join any church in Innsmouth.
As for the Innsmouth people--the youth hardly knew what to make of them. They were as furtive and seldom seen as animals that live in burrows, and one could hardly imagine how they passed the time apart from their desultory fishing. Perhaps--judging from the quantities of bootleg liquor they consumed--they lay for most of the daylight hours in an alcoholic stupor. They seemed sullenly banded together in some sort of fellowship and understanding--despising the world as if they had access to other and preferable spheres of entity. Their appearance--especially those staring, unwinking eyes which one never saw shut--was certainly shocking enough; and their voices were disgusting. It was awful to hear them chanting in their churches at night, and especially during their main festivals or revivals, which fell twice a year on April 30th and October 31st.
They were very fond of the water, and swam a great deal in both river and harbour. Swimming races out to Devil Reef were very common, and everyone in sight seemed well able to share in this arduous sport. When one came to think of it, it was generally only rather young people who were seen about in public, and of these the oldest were apt to be the most tainted-looking. When exceptions did occur, they were mostly persons with no trace of aberrancy, like the old clerk at the hotel. One wondered what became of the bulk of the older folk, and whether the ""Innsmouth look"" were not a strange and insidious disease-phenomenon which increased its hold as years advanced.
Only a very rare affliction, of course, could bring about such vast and radical anatomical changes in a single individual after maturity--changes invoking osseous factors as basic as the shape of the skull--but then, even this aspect was no more baffling and unheard-of than the visible features of the malady as a whole. It would be hard, the youth implied, to form any real conclusions regarding such a matter; since one never came to know the natives personally no matter how long one might live in Innsmouth.
The youth was certain that many specimens even worse than the worst visible ones were kept locked indoors in some places. People sometimes heard the queerest kind of sounds. The tottering waterfront hovels north of the river were reputedly connected by hidden tunnels, being thus a veritable warren of unseen abnormalities. What kind of foreign blood--if any--these beings had, it was impossible to tell. They sometimes kept certain especially repulsive characters out of sight when government and others from the outside world came to town.
It would be of no use, my informant said, to ask the natives anything about the place. The only one who would talk was a very aged but normal looking man who lived at the poorhouse on the north rim of the town and spent his time walking about or lounging around the fire station. This hoary character, Zadok Allen, was 96 years old and somewhat touched in the head, besides being the town drunkard. He was a strange, furtive creature who constantly looked over his shoulder as if afraid of something, and when sober could not be persuaded to talk at all with strangers. He was, however, unable to resist any offer of his favorite poison; and once drunk would furnish the most astonishing fragments of whispered reminiscence.
After all, though, little useful data could be gained from him; since his stories were all insane, incomplete hints of impossible marvels and horrors which could have no source save in his own disordered fancy. Nobody ever believed him, but the natives did not like him to drink and talk with strangers; and it was not always safe to be seen questioning him. It was probably from him that some of the wildest popular whispers and delusions were derived.
Several non-native residents had reported monstrous glimpses from time to time, but between old Zadok's tales and the malformed inhabitants it was no wonder such illusions were current. None of the non-natives ever stayed out late at night, there being a widespread impression that it was not wise to do so. Besides, the streets were loathsomely dark.
As for business--the abundance of fish was certainly almost uncanny, but the natives were taking less and less advantage of it. Moreover, prices were falling and competition was growing. Of course the town's real business was the refinery, whose commercial office was on the square only a few doors east of where we stood. Old Man Marsh was never seen, but sometimes went to the works in a closed, curtained car.
There were all sorts of rumors about how Marsh had come to look. He had once been a great dandy; and people said he still wore the frock-coated finery of the Edwardian age curiously adapted to certain deformities. His son had formerly conducted the office in the square, but latterly they had been keeping out of sight a good deal and leaving the brunt of affairs to the younger generation. The sons and their sisters had come to look very queer, especially the elder ones; and it was said that their health was failing.
One of the Marsh daughters was a repellent, reptilian-looking woman who wore an excess of weird jewellery clearly of the same exotic tradition as that to which the strange tiara belonged. My informant had noticed it many times, and had heard it spoken of as coming from some secret hoard, either of pirates or of demons. The clergymen--or priests, or whatever they were called nowadays--also wore this kind of ornament as a headdress; but one seldom caught glimpses of them. Other specimens the youth had not seen, though many were rumoured to exist around Innsmouth.
The Marshes, together with the other three gently bred families of the town--the Waites, the Gilmans, and the Eliots--were all very retiring. They lived in immense houses along Washington Street, and several were reputed to harbour in concealment certain living kinsfolk whose personal aspect forbade public view, and whose deaths had been reported and recorded.
Warning me that many of the street signs were down, the youth drew for my benefit a rough but ample and painstaking sketch map of the town's salient features. After a moment's study I felt sure that it would be of great help, and pocketed it with profuse thanks. Disliking the dinginess of the single restaurant I had seen, I bought a fair supply of cheese crackers and ginger wafers to serve as a lunch later on. My program, I decided, would be to thread the principal streets, talk with any non-natives I might encounter, and catch the eight o'clock coach for Arkham. The town, I could see, formed a significant and exaggerated example of communal decay; but being no sociologist I would limit my serious observations to the field of architecture.
Thus I began my systematic though half-bewildered tour of Innsmouth's narrow, shadow-blighted ways. Crossing the bridge and turning toward the roar of the lower falls, I passed close to the Marsh refinery, which seemed to be oddly free from the noise of industry. The building stood on the steep river bluff near a bridge and an open confluence of streets which I took to be the earliest civic center, displaced after the Revolution by the present Town Square.
Re-crossing the gorge on the Main Street bridge, I struck a region of utter desertion which somehow made me shudder. Collapsing huddles of gambrel roofs formed a jagged and fantastic skyline, above which rose the ghoulish, decapitated steeple of an ancient church. Some houses along Main Street were tenanted, but most were tightly boarded up. Down unpaved side streets I saw the black, gaping windows of deserted hovels, many of which leaned at perilous and incredible angles through the sinking of part of the foundations. Those windows stared so spectrally that it took courage to turn eastward toward the waterfront. Certainly, the terror of a deserted house swells in geometrical rather than arithmetical progression as houses multiply to form a city of stark desolation. The sight of such endless avenues of fishy-eyed vacancy and death, and the thought of such linked infinities of black, brooding compartments given over to cob-webs and memories and the conqueror worm, start up vestigial fears and aversions that not even the stoutest philosophy can disperse.
Fish Street was as deserted as Main, though it differed in having many brick and stone warehouses still in excellent shape. Water Street was almost its duplicate, save that there were great seaward gaps where wharves had been. Not a living thing did I see except for the scattered fishermen on the distant break-water, and not a sound did I hear save the lapping of the harbour tides and the roar of the falls in the Manuxet. The town was getting more and more on my nerves, and I looked behind me furtively as I picked my way back over the tottering Water Street bridge. The Fish Street bridge, according to the sketch, was in ruins.
North of the river there were traces of squalid life--active fish-packing houses in Water Street, smoking chimneys and patched roofs here and there, occasional sounds from indeterminate sources, and infrequent shambling forms in the dismal streets and unpaved lanes--but I seemed to find this even more oppressive than the southerly desertion. For one thing, the people were more hideous and abnormal than those near the centre of the town; so that I was several times evilly reminded of something utterly fantastic which I could not quite place. Undoubtedly the alien strain in the Innsmouth folk was stronger here than farther inland--unless, indeed, the ""Innsmouth look"" were a disease rather than a blood stain, in which case this district might be held to harbour the more advanced cases.
One detail that annoyed me was the distribution of the few faint sounds I heard. They ought naturally to have come wholly from the visibly inhabited houses, yet in reality were often strongest inside the most rigidly boarded-up facades. There were creakings, scurryings, and hoarse doubtful noises; and I thought uncomfortably about the hidden tunnels suggested by the grocery boy. Suddenly I found myself wondering what the voices of those denizens would be like. I had heard no speech so far in this quarter, and was unaccountably anxious not to do so.
Pausing only long enough to look at two fine but ruinous old churches at Main and Church Streets, I hastened out of that vile waterfront slum. My next logical goal was New Church Green, but somehow or other I could not bear to repass the church in whose basement I had glimpsed the inexplicably frightening form of that strangely diademmed priest or pastor. Besides, the grocery youth had told me that churches, as well as the Order of Dagon Hall, were not advisable neighbourhoods for strangers.
Accordingly I kept north along Main to Martin, then turning inland, crossing Federal Street safely north of the Green, and entering the decayed patrician neighbourhood of northern Broad, Washington, Lafayette, and Adams Streets. Though these stately old avenues were ill-surfaced and unkempt, their elm-shaded dignity had not entirely departed. Mansion after mansion claimed my gaze, most of them decrepit and boarded up amidst neglected grounds, but one or two in each street shewing signs of occupancy. In Washington Street there was a row of four or five in excellent repair and with finely-tended lawns and gardens. The most sumptuous of these--with wide terraced parterres extending back the whole way to Lafayette Street--I took to be the home of Old Man Marsh, the afflicted refinery owner.
In all these streets no living thing was visible, and I wondered at the complete absence of cats and dogs from Innsmouth. Another thing which puzzled and disturbed me, even in some of the best-preserved mansions, was the tightly shuttered condition of many third-story and attic windows. Furtiveness and secretiveness seemed universal in this hushed city of alienage and death, and I could not escape the sensation of being watched from ambush on every hand by sly, staring eyes that never shut.
I shivered as the cracked stroke of three sounded from a belfry on my left. Too well did I recall the squat church from which those notes came. Following Washington Street toward the river, I now faced a new zone of former industry and commerce; noting the ruins of a factory ahead, and seeing others, with the traces of an old railway station and covered railway bridge beyond, up the gorge on my right.
The uncertain bridge now before me was posted with a warning sign, but I took the risk and crossed again to the south bank where traces of life reappeared. Furtive, shambling creatures stared cryptically in my direction, and more normal faces eyed me coldly and curiously. Innsmouth was rapidly becoming intolerable, and I turned down Paine Street toward the Square in the hope of getting some vehicle to take me to Arkham before the still-distant starting-time of that sinister bus.
It was then that I saw the tumbledown fire station on my left, and noticed the red faced, bushy-bearded, watery eyed old man in nondescript rags who sat on a bench in front of it talking with a pair of unkempt but not abnormal looking firemen. This, of course, must be Zadok Allen, the half-crazed, liquorish nonagenarian whose tales of old Innsmouth and its shadow were so hideous and incredible.
","West of Arkham the hills rise wild, and there are valleys with deep woods that no axe has ever cut. There are dark narrow glens where the trees slope fantastically, and where thin brooklets trickle without ever having caught the glint of sunlight. On the gentle slopes there are farms, ancient and rocky, with squat, moss-coated cottages brooding eternally over old New England secrets in the lee of great ledges; but these are all vacant now, the wide chimneys crumbling and the shingled sides bulging perilously beneath low gambrel roofs.
The old folk have gone away, and foreigners do not like to live there. French-Canadians have tried it, Italians have tried it, and the Poles have come and departed. It is not because of anything that can be seen or heard or handled, but because of something that is imagined. The place is not good for imagination, and does not bring restful dreams at night. It must be this which keeps the foreigners away, for old Ammi Pierce has never told them of anything he recalls from the strange days. Ammi, whose head has been a little queer for years, is the only one who still remains, or who ever talks of the strange days; and he dares to do this because his house is so near the open fields and the travelled roads around Arkham.
There was once a road over the hills and through the valleys, that ran straight where the blasted heath is now; but people ceased to use it and a new road was laid curving far toward the south. Traces of the old one can still be found amidst the weeds of a returning wilderness, and some of them will doubtless linger even when half the hollows are flooded for the new reservoir. Then the dark woods will be cut down and the blasted heath will slumber far below blue waters whose surface will mirror the sky and ripple in the sun. And the secrets of the strange days will be one with the deep's secrets; one with the hidden lore of old ocean, and all the mystery of primal earth.
When I went into the hills and vales to survey for the new reservoir they told me the place was evil. They told me this in Arkham, and because that is a very old town full of witch legends I thought the evil must be something which grandams had whispered to children through centuries. The name ""blasted heath"" seemed to me very odd and theatrical, and I wondered how it had come into the folklore of a Puritan people. Then I saw that dark westward tangle of glens and slopes for myself, and ceased to wonder at anything beside its own elder mystery. It was morning when I saw it, but shadow lurked always there. The trees grew too thickly, and their trunks were too big for any healthy New England wood. There was too much silence in the dim alleys between them, and the floor was too soft with the dank moss and mattings of infinite years of decay.
In the open spaces, mostly along the line of the old road, there were little hillside farms; sometimes with all the buildings standing, sometimes with only one or two, and sometimes with only a lone chimney or fast-filling cellar. Weeds and briers reigned, and furtive wild things rustled in the undergrowth. Upon everything was a haze of restlessness and oppression; a touch of the unreal and the grotesque, as if some vital element of perspective or chiaroscuro were awry. I did not wonder that the foreigners would not stay, for this was no region to sleep in. It was too much like a landscape of Salvator Rosa; too much like some forbidden woodcut in a tale of terror.
But even all this was not so bad as the blasted heath. I knew it the moment I came upon it at the bottom of a spacious valley; for no other name could fit such a thing, or any other thing fit such a name. It was as if the poet had coined the phrase from having seen this one particular region. It must, I thought as I viewed it, be the outcome of a fire; but why had nothing new ever grown over these five acres of grey desolation that sprawled open to the sky like a great spot eaten by acid in the woods and fields? It lay largely to the north of the ancient road line, but encroached a little on the other side. I felt an odd reluctance about approaching, and did so at last only because my business took me through and past it. There was no vegetation of any kind on that broad expanse, but only a fine grey dust or ash which no wind seemed ever to blow about. The trees near it were sickly and stunted, and many dead trunks stood or lay rotting at the rim. As I walked hurriedly by I saw the tumbled bricks and stones of an old chimney and cellar on my right, and the yawning black maw of an abandoned well whose stagnant vapours played strange tricks with the hues of the sunlight. Even the long, dark woodland climb beyond seemed welcome in contrast, and I marvelled no more at the frightened whispers of Arkham people. There had been no house or ruin near; even in the old days the place must have been lonely and remote. And at twilight, dreading to repass that ominous spot, I walked circuitously back to the town by the curious road on the south. I vaguely wished some clouds would gather, for an odd timidity about the deep skyey voids above had crept into my soul.
In the evening I asked old people in Arkham about the blasted heath, and what was meant by that phrase ""strange days"" which so many evasively muttered. I could not, however, get any good answers except that all the mystery was much more recent than I had dreamed. It was not a matter of old legendry at all, but something within the lifetime of those who spoke. It had happened in the 'eighties, and a family had disappeared or was killed. Speakers would not be exact; and because they all told me to pay no attention to old Ammi Pierce's crazy tales, I sought him out the next morning, having heard that he lived alone in the ancient tottering cottage where the trees first begin to get very thick. It was a fearsomely ancient place, and had begun to exude the faint miasmal odour which clings about houses that have stood too long. Only with persistent knocking could I rouse the aged man, and when he shuffled timidly to the door I could tell he was not glad to see me. He was not so feeble as I had expected; but his eyes drooped in a curious way, and his unkempt clothing and white beard made him seem very worn and dismal.
Not knowing just how he could best be launched on his tales, I feigned a matter of business; told him of my surveying, and asked vague questions about the district. He was far brighter and more educated than I had been led to think, and before I knew it had grasped quite as much of the subject as any man I had talked with in Arkham. He was not like other rustics I had known in the sections where reservoirs were to be. From him there were no protests at the miles of old wood and farmland to be blotted out, though perhaps there would have been had not his home lain outside the bounds of the future lake. Relief was all that he showed; relief at the doom of the dark ancient valleys through which he had roamed all his life. They were better under water now--better under water since the strange days. And with this opening his husky voice sank low, while his body leaned forward and his right forefinger began to point shakily and impressively.
It was then that I heard the story, and as the rambling voice scraped and whispered on I shivered again and again spite the summer day. Often I had to recall the speaker from ramblings, piece out scientific points which he knew only by a fading parrot memory of professors' talk, or bridge over gaps, where his sense of logic and continuity broke down. When he was done I did not wonder that his mind had snapped a trifle, or that the folk of Arkham would not speak much of the blasted heath. I hurried back before sunset to my hotel, unwilling to have the stars come out above me in the open; and the next day returned to Boston to give up my position. I could not go into that dim chaos of old forest and slope again, or face another time that grey blasted heath where the black well yawned deep beside the tumbled bricks and stones. The reservoir will soon be built now, and all those elder secrets will be safe forever under watery fathoms. But even then I do not believe I would like to visit that country by night--at least not when the sinister stars are out; and nothing could bribe me to drink the new city water of Arkham.
It all began, old Ammi said, with the meteorite. Before that time there had been no wild legends at all since the witch trials, and even then these western woods were not feared half so much as the small island in the Miskatonic where the devil held court beside a curious lone altar older than the Indians. These were not haunted woods, and their fantastic dusk was never terrible till the strange days. Then there had come that white noontide cloud, that string of explosions in the air, and that pillar of smoke from the valley far in the wood. And by night all Arkham had heard of the great rock that fell out of the sky and bedded itself in the ground beside the well at the Nahum Gardner place. That was the house which had stood where the blasted heath was to come--the trim white Nahum Gardner house amidst its fertile gardens and orchards.
Nahum had come to town to tell people about the stone, and dropped in at Ammi Pierce's on the way. Ammi was forty then, and all the queer things were fixed very strongly in his mind. He and his wife had gone with the three professors from Miskatonic University who hastened out the next morning to see the weird visitor from unknown stellar space, and had wondered why Nahum had called it so large the day before. It had shrunk, Nahum said as he pointed out the big brownish mound above the ripped earth and charred grass near the archaic well-sweep in his front yard; but the wise men answered that stones do not shrink. Its heat lingered persistently, and Nahum declared it had glowed faintly in the night. The professors tried it with a geologist's hammer and found it was oddly soft. It was, in truth, so soft as to be almost plastic; and they gouged rather than chipped a specimen to take back to the college for testing. They took it in an old pail borrowed from Nahum's kitchen, for even the small piece refused to grow cool. On the trip back they stopped at Ammi's to rest, and seemed thoughtful when Mrs. Pierce remarked that the fragment was growing smaller and burning the bottom of the pail. Truly, it was not large, but perhaps they had taken less than they thought.
The day after that--all this was in June of '82--the professors had trooped out again in a great excitement. As they passed Ammi's they told him what queer things the specimen had done, and how it had faded wholly away when they put it in a glass beaker. The beaker had gone, too, and the wise men talked of the strange stone's affinity for silicon. It had acted quite unbelievably in that well-ordered laboratory; doing nothing at all and showing no occluded gases when heated on charcoal, being wholly negative in the borax bead, and soon proving itself absolutely non-volatile at any producible temperature, including that of the oxy-hydrogen blowpipe. On an anvil it appeared highly malleable, and in the dark its luminosity was very marked. Stubbornly refusing to grow cool, it soon had the college in a state of real excitement; and when upon heating before the spectroscope it displayed shining bands unlike any known colours of the normal spectrum there was much breathless talk of new elements, bizarre optical properties, and other things which puzzled men of science are wont to say when faced by the unknown.
Hot as it was, they tested it in a crucible with all the proper reagents. Water did nothing. Hydrochloric acid was the same. Nitric acid and even aqua regia merely hissed and spattered against its torrid invulnerability. Ammi had difficulty in recalling all these things, but recognized some solvents as I mentioned them in the usual order of use. There were ammonia and caustic soda, alcohol and ether, nauseous carbon disulphide and a dozen others; but although the weight grew steadily less as time passed, and the fragment seemed to be slightly cooling, there was no change in the solvents to show that they had attacked the substance at all. It was a metal, though, beyond a doubt. It was magnetic, for one thing; and after its immersion in the acid solvents there seemed to be faint traces of the Widmanstatten figures found on meteoric iron. When the cooling had grown very considerable, the testing was carried on in glass; and it was in a glass beaker that they left all the chips made of the original fragment during the work. The next morning both chips and beaker were gone without trace, and only a charred spot marked the place on the wooden shelf where they had been.
All this the professors told Ammi as they paused at his door, and once more he went with them to see the stony messenger from the stars, though this time his wife did not accompany him. It had now most certainly shrunk, and even the sober professors could not doubt the truth of what they saw. All around the dwindling brown lump near the well was a vacant space, except where the earth had caved in; and whereas it had been a good seven feet across the day before, it was now scarcely five. It was still hot, and the sages studied its surface curiously as they detached another and larger piece with hammer and chisel. They gouged deeply this time, and as they pried away the smaller mass they saw that the core of the thing was not quite homogeneous.
They had uncovered what seemed to be the side of a large coloured globule embedded in the substance. The colour, which resembled some of the bands in the meteor's strange spectrum, was almost impossible to describe; and it was only by analogy that they called it colour at all. Its texture was glossy, and upon tapping it appeared to promise both brittleness and hollowness. One of the professors gave it a smart blow with a hammer, and it burst with a nervous little pop. Nothing was emitted, and all trace of the thing vanished with the puncturing. It left behind a hollow spherical space about three inches across, and all thought it probable that others would be discovered as the enclosing substance wasted away.
Conjecture was vain; so after a futile attempt to find additional globules by drilling, the seekers left again with their new specimen which proved, however, as baffling in the laboratory as its predecessor. Aside from being almost plastic, having heat, magnetism, and slight luminosity, cooling slightly in powerful acids, possessing an unknown spectrum, wasting away in air, and attacking silicon compounds with mutual destruction as a result, it presented no identifying features whatsoever; and at the end of the tests the college scientists were forced to own that they could not place it. It was nothing of this earth, but a piece of the great outside; and as such dowered with outside properties and obedient to outside laws.
That night there was a thunderstorm, and when the professors went out to Nahum's the next day they met with a bitter disappointment. The stone, magnetic as it had been, must have had some peculiar electrical property; for it had ""drawn the lightning,"" as Nahum said, with a singular persistence. Six times within an hour the farmer saw the lightning strike the furrow in the front yard, and when the storm was over nothing remained but a ragged pit by the ancient well-sweep, half-choked with a caved-in earth. Digging had borne no fruit, and the scientists verified the fact of the utter vanishment. The failure was total; so that nothing was left to do but go back to the laboratory and test again the disappearing fragment left carefully cased in lead. That fragment lasted a week, at the end of which nothing of value had been learned of it. When it had gone, no residue was left behind, and in time the professors felt scarcely sure they had indeed seen with waking eyes that cryptic vestige of the fathomless gulfs outside; that lone, weird message from other universes and other realms of matter, force, and entity.
As was natural, the Arkham papers made much of the incident with its collegiate sponsoring, and sent reporters to talk with Nahum Gardner and his family. At least one Boston daily also sent a scribe, and Nahum quickly became a kind of local celebrity. He was a lean, genial person of about fifty, living with his wife and three sons on the pleasant farmstead in the valley. He and Ammi exchanged visits frequently, as did their wives; and Ammi had nothing but praise for him after all these years. He seemed slightly proud of the notice his place had attracted, and talked often of the meteorite in the succeeding weeks. That July and August were hot; and Nahum worked hard at his haying in the ten-acre pasture across Chapman's Brook; his rattling wain wearing deep ruts in the shadowy lanes between. The labour tired him more than it had in other years, and he felt that age was beginning to tell on him.
Then fell the time of fruit and harvest. The pears and apples slowly ripened, and Nahum vowed that his orchards were prospering as never before. The fruit was growing to phenomenal size and unwonted gloss, and in such abundance that extra barrels were ordered to handle the future crop. But with the ripening came sore disappointment, for of all that gorgeous array of specious lusciousness not one single jot was fit to eat. Into the fine flavour of the pears and apples had crept a stealthy bitterness and sickishness, so that even the smallest bites induced a lasting disgust. It was the same with the melons and tomatoes, and Nahum sadly saw that his entire crop was lost. Quick to connect events, he declared that the meteorite had poisoned the soil, and thanked Heaven that most of the other crops were in the upland lot along the road.
Winter came early, and was very cold. Ammi saw Nahum less often than usual, and observed that he had begun to look worried. The rest of his family too, seemed to have grown taciturn; and were far from steady in their church-going or their attendance at the various social events of the countryside. For this reserve or melancholy no cause could be found, though all the household confessed now and then to poorer health and a feeling of vague disquiet. Nahum himself gave the most definite statement of anyone when he said he was disturbed about certain footprints in the snow. They were the usual winter prints of red squirrels, white rabbits, and foxes, but the brooding farmer professed to see something not quite right about their nature and arrangement. He was never specific, but appeared to think that they were not as characteristic of the anatomy and habits of squirrels and rabbits and foxes as they ought to be. Ammi listened without interest to this talk until one night when he drove past Nahum's house in his sleigh on the way back from Clark's Comer. There had been a moon, and a rabbit had run across the road, and the leaps of that rabbit were longer than either Ammi or his horse liked. The latter, indeed, had almost run away when brought up by a firm rein. Thereafter Ammi gave Nahum's tales more respect, and wondered why the Gardner dogs seemed so cowed and quivering every morning. They had, it developed, nearly lost the spirit to bark.
In February the McGregor boys from Meadow Hill were out shooting woodchucks, and not far from the Gardner place bagged a very peculiar specimen. The proportions of its body seemed slightly altered in a queer way impossible to describe, while its face had taken on an expression which no one ever saw in a woodchuck before. The boys were genuinely frightened, and threw the thing away at once, so that only their grotesque tales of it ever reached the people of the countryside. But the shying of horses near Nahum's house had now become an acknowledged thing, and all the basis for a cycle of whispered legend was fast taking form.
People vowed that the snow melted faster around Nahum's than it did anywhere else, and early in March there was an awed discussion in Potter's general store at Clark's Corners. Stephen Rice had driven past Gardner's in the morning, and had noticed the skunk-cabbages coming up through the mud by the woods across the road. Never were things of such size seen before, and they held strange colours that could not be put into any words. Their shapes were monstrous, and the horse had snorted at an odour which struck Stephen as wholly unprecedented. That afternoon several persons drove past to see the abnormal growth, and all agreed that plants of that kind ought never to sprout in a healthy world. The bad fruit of the fall before was freely mentioned, and it went from mouth to mouth that there was poison in Nahum's ground. Of course it was the meteorite; and remembering how strange the men from the college had found that stone to be, several farmers spoke about the matter to them.
One day they paid Nahum a visit; but having no love of wild tales and folklore were very conservative in what they inferred. The plants were certainly odd, but all skunk-cabbages are more or less odd in shape and hue. Perhaps some mineral element from the stone had entered the soil, but it would soon be washed away. And as for the footprints and frightened horses--of course this was mere country talk which such a phenomenon as the aerolite would be certain to start. There was really nothing for serious men to do in cases of wild gossip, for superstitious rustics will say and believe anything. And so all through the strange days the professors stayed away in contempt. Only one of them, when given two phials of dust for analysis in a police job over a year and half later, recalled that the queer colour of that skunk-cabbage had been very like one of the anomalous bands of light shown by the meteor fragment in the college spectroscope, and like the brittle globule found imbedded in the stone from the abyss. The samples in this analysis case gave the same odd bands at first, though later they lost the property.
The trees budded prematurely around Nahum's, and at night they swayed ominously in the wind. Nahum's second son Thaddeus, a lad of fifteen, swore that they swayed also when there was no wind; but even the gossips would not credit this. Certainly, however, restlessness was in the air. The entire Gardner family developed the habit of stealthy listening, though not for any sound which they could consciously name. The listening was, indeed, rather a product of moments when consciousness seemed half to slip away. Unfortunately such moments increased week by week, till it became common speech that ""something was wrong with all Nahum's folks."" When the early saxifrage came out it had another strange colour; not quite like that of the skunk-cabbage, but plainly related and equally unknown to anyone who saw it. Nahum took some blossoms to Arkham and showed them to the editor of the Gazette, but that dignitary did no more than write a humorous article about them, in which the dark fears of rustics were held up to polite ridicule. It was a mistake of Nahum's to tell a stolid city man about the way the great, overgrown mourning-cloak butterflies behaved in connection with these saxifrages.
April brought a kind of madness to the country folk, and began that disuse of the road past Nahum's which led to its ultimate abandonment. It was the vegetation. All the orchard trees blossomed forth in strange colours, and through the stony soil of the yard and adjacent pasturage there sprang up a bizarre growth which only a botanist could connect with the proper flora of the region. No sane wholesome colours were anywhere to be seen except in the green grass and leafage; but everywhere were those hectic and prismatic variants of some diseased, underlying primary tone without a place among the known tints of earth. The ""Dutchman's breeches"" became a thing of sinister menace, and the bloodroots grew insolent in their chromatic perversion. Ammi and the Gardners thought that most of the colours had a sort of haunting familiarity, and decided that they reminded one of the brittle globule in the meteor. Nahum ploughed and sowed the ten-acre pasture and the upland lot, but did nothing with the land around the house. He knew it would be of no use, and hoped that the summer's strange growths would draw all the poison from the soil. He was prepared for almost anything now, and had grown used to the sense of something near him waiting to be heard. The shunning of his house by neighbors told on him, of course; but it told on his wife more. The boys were better off, being at school each day; but they could not help being frightened by the gossip. Thaddeus, an especially sensitive youth, suffered the most.
In May the insects came, and Nahum's place became a nightmare of buzzing and crawling. Most of the creatures seemed not quite usual in their aspects and motions, and their nocturnal habits contradicted all former experience. The Gardners took to watching at night--watching in all directions at random for something--they could not tell what. It was then that they owned that Thaddeus had been right about the trees. Mrs. Gardner was the next to see it from the window as she watched the swollen boughs of a maple against a moonlit sky. The boughs surely moved, and there was no wind. It must be the sap. Strangeness had come into everything growing now. Yet it was none of Nahum's family at all who made the next discovery. Familiarity had dulled them, and what they could not see was glimpsed by a timid windmill salesman from Bolton who drove by one night in ignorance of the country legends. What he told in Arkham was given a short paragraph in the Gazette; and it was there that all the farmers, Nahum included, saw it first. The night had been dark and the buggy-lamps faint, but around a farm in the valley which everyone knew from the account must be Nahum's, the darkness had been less thick. A dim though distinct luminosity seemed to inhere in all the vegetation, grass, leaves, and blossoms alike, while at one moment a detached piece of the phosphorescence appeared to stir furtively in the yard near the barn.
The grass had so far seemed untouched, and the cows were freely pastured in the lot near the house, but toward the end of May the milk began to be bad. Then Nahum had the cows driven to the uplands, after which this trouble ceased. Not long after this the change in grass and leaves became apparent to the eye. All the verdure was going grey, and was developing a highly singular quality of brittleness. Ammi was now the only person who ever visited the place, and his visits were becoming fewer and fewer. When school closed the Gardners were virtually cut off from the world, and sometimes let Ammi do their errands in town. They were failing curiously both physically and mentally, and no one was surprised when the news of Mrs. Gardner's madness stole around.
It happened in June, about the anniversary of the meteor's fall, and the poor woman screamed about things in the air which she could not describe. In her raving there was not a single specific noun, but only verbs and pronouns. Things moved and changed and fluttered, and ears tingled to impulses which were not wholly sounds. Something was taken away--she was being drained of something--something was fastening itself on her that ought not to be--someone must make it keep off--nothing was ever still in the night--the walls and windows shifted. Nahum did not send her to the county asylum, but let her wander about the house as long as she was harmless to herself and others. Even when her expression changed he did nothing. But when the boys grew afraid of her, and Thaddeus nearly fainted at the way she made faces at him, he decided to keep her locked in the attic. By July she had ceased to speak and crawled on all fours, and before that month was over Nahum got the mad notion that she was slightly luminous in the dark, as he now clearly saw was the case with the nearby vegetation.
It was a little before this that the horses had stampeded. Something had aroused them in the night, and their neighing and kicking in their stalls had been terrible. There seemed virtually nothing to do to calm them, and when Nahum opened the stable door they all bolted out like frightened woodland deer. It took a week to track all four, and when found they were seen to be quite useless and unmanageable. Something had snapped in their brains, and each one had to be shot for its own good. Nahum borrowed a horse from Ammi for his haying, but found it would not approach the barn. It shied, balked, and whinnied, and in the end he could do nothing but drive it into the yard while the men used their own strength to get the heavy wagon near enough the hayloft for convenient pitching. And all the while the vegetation was turning grey and brittle. Even the flowers whose hues had been so strange were greying now, and the fruit was coming out grey and dwarfed and tasteless. The asters and golden-rod bloomed grey and distorted, and the roses and zinneas and hollyhocks in the front yard were such blasphemous-looking things that Nahum's oldest boy Zenas cut them down. The strangely puffed insects died about that time, even the bees that had left their hives and taken to the woods.
By September all the vegetation was fast crumbling to a greyish powder, and Nahum feared that the trees would die before the poison was out of the soil. His wife now had spells of terrific screaming, and he and the boys were in a constant state of nervous tension. They shunned people now, and when school opened the boys did not go. But it was Ammi, on one of his rare visits, who first realised that the well water was no longer good. It had an evil taste that was not exactly fetid nor exactly salty, and Ammi advised his friend to dig another well on higher ground to use till the soil was good again. Nahum, however, ignored the warning, for he had by that time become calloused to strange and unpleasant things. He and the boys continued to use the tainted supply, drinking it as listlessly and mechanically as they ate their meagre and ill-cooked meals and did their thankless and monotonous chores through the aimless days. There was something of stolid resignation about them all, as if they walked half in another world between lines of nameless guards to a certain and familiar doom.
Thaddeus went mad in September after a visit to the well. He had gone with a pail and had come back empty-handed, shrieking and waving his arms, and sometimes lapsing into an inane titter or a whisper about ""the moving colours down there."" Two in one family was pretty bad, but Nahum was very brave about it. He let the boy run about for a week until he began stumbling and hurting himself, and then he shut him in an attic room across the hall from his mother's. The way they screamed at each other from behind their locked doors was very terrible, especially to little Merwin, who fancied they talked in some terrible language that was not of earth. Merwin was getting frightfully imaginative, and his restlessness was worse after the shutting away of the brother who had been his greatest playmate.
Almost at the same time the mortality among the livestock commenced. Poultry turned greyish and died very quickly, their meat being found dry and noisome upon cutting. Hogs grew inordinately fat, then suddenly began to undergo loathsome changes which no one could explain. Their meat was of course useless, and Nahum was at his wit's end. No rural veterinary would approach his place, and the city veterinary from Arkham was openly baffled. The swine began growing grey and brittle and falling to pieces before they died, and their eyes and muzzles developed singular alterations. It was very inexplicable, for they had never been fed from the tainted vegetation. Then something struck the cows. Certain areas or sometimes the whole body would be uncannily shrivelled or compressed, and atrocious collapses or disintegrations were common. In the last stages--and death was always the result--there would be a greying and turning brittle like that which beset the hogs. There could be no question of poison, for all the cases occurred in a locked and undisturbed barn. No bites of prowling things could have brought the virus, for what live beast of earth can pass through solid obstacles? It must be only natural disease--yet what disease could wreak such results was beyond any mind's guessing. When the harvest came there was not an animal surviving on the place, for the stock and poultry were dead and the dogs had run away. These dogs, three in number, had all vanished one night and were never heard of again. The five cats had left some time before, but their going was scarcely noticed since there now seemed to be no mice, and only Mrs. Gardner had made pets of the graceful felines.
On the nineteenth of October Nahum staggered into Ammi's house with hideous news. The death had come to poor Thaddeus in his attic room, and it had come in a way which could not be told. Nahum had dug a grave in the railed family plot behind the farm, and had put therein what he found. There could have been nothing from outside, for the small barred window and locked door were intact; but it was much as it had been in the barn. Ammi and his wife consoled the stricken man as best they could, but shuddered as they did so. Stark terror seemed to cling round the Gardners and all they touched, and the very presence of one in the house was a breath from regions unnamed and unnamable. Ammi accompanied Nahum home with the greatest reluctance, and did what he might to calm the hysterical sobbing of little Merwin. Zenas needed no calming. He had come of late to do nothing but stare into space and obey what his father told him; and Ammi thought that his fate was very merciful. Now and then Merwin's screams were answered faintly from the attic, and in response to an inquiring look Nahum said that his wife was getting very feeble. When night approached, Ammi managed to get away; for not even friendship could make him stay in that spot when the faint glow of the vegetation began and the trees may or may not have swayed without wind. It was really lucky for Ammi that he was not more imaginative. Even as things were, his mind was bent ever so slightly; but had he been able to connect and reflect upon all the portents around him he must inevitably have turned a total maniac. In the twilight he hastened home, the screams of the mad woman and the nervous child ringing horribly in his ears.
Three days later Nahum burst into Ammi's kitchen in the early morning, and in the absence of his host stammered out a desperate tale once more, while Mrs. Pierce listened in a clutching fright. It was little Merwin this time. He was gone. He had gone out late at night with a lantern and pail for water, and had never come back. He'd been going to pieces for days, and hardly knew what he was about. Screamed at everything. There had been a frantic shriek from the yard then, but before the father could get to the door the boy was gone. There was no glow from the lantern he had taken, and of the child himself no trace. At the time Nahum thought the lantern and pail were gone too; but when dawn came, and the man had plodded back from his all-night search of the woods and fields, he had found some very curious things near the well. There was a crushed and apparently somewhat melted mass of iron which had certainly been the lantern; while a bent handle and twisted iron hoops beside it, both half-fused, seemed to hint at the remnants of the pail. That was all. Nahum was past imagining, Mrs. Pierce was blank, and Ammi, when he had reached home and heard the tale, could give no guess. Merwin was gone, and there would be no use in telling the people around, who shunned all Gardners now. No use, either, in telling the city people at Arkham who laughed at everything. Thad was gone, and now Merwin was gone. Something was creeping and creeping and waiting to be seen and heard. Nahum would go soon, and he wanted Ammi to look after his wife and Zenas if they survived him. It must all be a judgment of some sort; though he could not fancy what for, since he had always walked uprightly in the Lord's ways so far as he knew.
For over two weeks Ammi saw nothing of Nahum; and then, worried about what might have happened, he overcame his fears and paid the Gardner place a visit. There was no smoke from the great chimney, and for a moment the visitor was apprehensive of the worst. The aspect of the whole farm was shocking--greyish withered grass and leaves on the ground, vines falling in brittle wreckage from archaic walls and gables, and great bare trees clawing up at the grey November sky with a studied malevolence which Ammi could not but feel had come from some subtle change in the tilt of the branches. But Nahum was alive, after all. He was weak, and lying on a couch in the low-ceiled kitchen, but perfectly conscious and able to give simple orders to Zenas. The room was deadly cold; and as Ammi visibly shivered, the host shouted huskily to Zenas for more wood. Wood, indeed, was sorely needed; since the cavernous fireplace was unlit and empty, with a cloud of soot blowing about in the chill wind that came down the chimney. Presently Nahum asked him if the extra wood had made him any more comfortable, and then Ammi saw what had happened. The stoutest cord had broken at last, and the hapless farmer's mind was proof against more sorrow.
Questioning tactfully, Ammi could get no clear data at all about the missing Zenas. ""In the well--he lives in the well--"" was all that the clouded father would say. Then there flashed across the visitor's mind a sudden thought of the mad wife, and he changed his line of inquiry. ""Nabby? Why, here she is!"" was the surprised response of poor Nahum, and Ammi soon saw that he must search for himself. Leaving the harmless babbler on the couch, he took the keys from their nail beside the door and climbed the creaking stairs to the attic. It was very close and noisome up there, and no sound could be heard from any direction. Of the four doors in sight, only one was locked, and on this he tried various keys of the ring he had taken. The third key proved the right one, and after some fumbling Ammi threw open the low white door.
It was quite dark inside, for the window was small and half-obscured by the crude wooden bars; and Ammi could see nothing at all on the wide-planked floor. The stench was beyond enduring, and before proceeding further he had to retreat to another room and return with his lungs filled with breathable air. When he did enter he saw something dark in the corner, and upon seeing it more clearly he screamed outright. While he screamed he thought a momentary cloud eclipsed the window, and a second later he felt himself brushed as if by some hateful current of vapour. Strange colours danced before his eyes; and had not a present horror numbed him he would have thought of the globule in the meteor that the geologist's hammer had shattered, and of the morbid vegetation that had sprouted in the spring. As it was he thought only of the blasphemous monstrosity which confronted him, and which all too clearly had shared the nameless fate of young Thaddeus and the livestock. But the terrible thing about the horror was that it very slowly and perceptibly moved as it continued to crumble.
Ammi would give me no added particulars of this scene, but the shape in the comer does not reappear in his tale as a moving object. There are things which cannot be mentioned, and what is done in common humanity is sometimes cruelly judged by the law. I gathered that no moving thing was left in that attic room, and that to leave anything capable of motion there would have been a deed so monstrous as to damn any accountable being to eternal torment. Anyone but a stolid farmer would have fainted or gone mad, but Ammi walked conscious through that low doorway and locked the accursed secret behind him. There would be Nahum to deal with now; he must be fed and tended, and removed to some place where he could be cared for.
Commencing his descent of the dark stairs. Ammi heard a thud below him. He even thought a scream had been suddenly choked off, and recalled nervously the clammy vapour which had brushed by him in that frightful room above. What presence had his cry and entry started up? Halted by some vague fear, he heard still further sounds below. Indubitably there was a sort of heavy dragging, and a most detestably sticky noise as of some fiendish and unclean species of suction. With an associative sense goaded to feverish heights, he thought unaccountably of what he had seen upstairs. Good God! What eldritch dream-world was this into which he had blundered? He dared move neither backward nor forward, but stood there trembling at the black curve of the boxed-in staircase. Every trifle of the scene burned itself into his brain. The sounds, the sense of dread expectancy, the darkness, the steepness of the narrow step--and merciful Heaven!--the faint but unmistakable luminosity of all the woodwork in sight; steps, sides, exposed laths, and beams alike.
Then there burst forth a frantic whinny from Ammi's horse outside, followed at once by a clatter which told of a frenzied runaway. In another moment horse and buggy had gone beyond earshot, leaving the frightened man on the dark stairs to guess what had sent them. But that was not all. There had been another sound out there. A sort of liquid splash--water--it must have been the well. He had left Hero untied near it, and a buggy wheel must have brushed the coping and knocked in a stone. And still the pale phosphorescence glowed in that detestably ancient woodwork. God! how old the house was! Most of it built before 1670, and the gambrel roof no later than 1730.
A feeble scratching on the floor downstairs now sounded distinctly, and Ammi's grip tightened on a heavy stick he had picked up in the attic for some purpose. Slowly nerving himself, he finished his descent and walked boldly toward the kitchen. But he did not complete the walk, because what he sought was no longer there. It had come to meet him, and it was still alive after a fashion. Whether it had crawled or whether it had been dragged by any external forces, Ammi could not say; but the death had been at it. Everything had happened in the last half-hour, but collapse, greying, and disintegration were already far advanced. There was a horrible brittleness, and dry fragments were scaling off. Ammi could not touch it, but looked horrifiedly into the distorted parody that had been a face. ""What was it, Nahum--what was it?"" He whispered, and the cleft, bulging lips were just able to crackle out a final answer.
""Nothin'...nothin'...the colour...it burns...cold an' wet, but it burns...it lived in the well...I seen it...a kind of smoke...jest like the flowers last spring...the well shone at night...Thad an' Merwin an' Zenas...everything alive...suckin' the life out of everything...in that stone...it must a' come in that stone pizened the whole place...dun't know what it wants...that round thing them men from the college dug outen the stone...they smashed it...it was the same colour...jest the same, like the flowers an' plants...must a' ben more of 'em...seeds...seeds...they growed...I seen it the fust time this week...must a' got strong on Zenas...he was a big boy, full o' life...it beats down your mind an' then gets ye...burns ye up...in the well water...you was right about that...evil water...Zenas never come back from the well...can't git away...draws ye...ye know summ'at's comin' but tain't no use...I seen it time an' agin senct Zenas was took...whar's Nabby, Ammi?...my head's no good...dun't know how long sense I fed her...it'll git her ef we ain't keerful...jest a colour...her face is gittin' to hev that colour sometimes towards night...an' it burns an' sucks...it come from some place whar things ain't as they is here...one o' them professors said so...he was right...look out, Ammi, it'll do suthin' more...sucks the life out...""
But that was all. That which spoke could speak no more because it had completely caved in. Ammi laid a red checked tablecloth over what was left and reeled out the back door into the fields. He climbed the slope to the ten-acre pasture and stumbled home by the north road and the woods. He could not pass that well from which his horses had run away. He had looked at it through the window, and had seen that no stone was missing from the rim. Then the lurching buggy had not dislodged anything after all--the splash had been something else--something which went into the well after it had done with poor Nahum.
When Ammi reached his house the horses and buggy had arrived before him and thrown his wife into fits of anxiety. Reassuring her without explanations, he set out at once for Arkham and notified the authorities that the Gardner family was no more. He indulged in no details, but merely told of the deaths of Nahum and Nabby, that of Thaddeus being already known, and mentioned that the cause seemed to be the same strange ailment which had killed the live-stock. He also stated that Merwin and Zenas had disappeared. There was considerable questioning at the police station, and in the end Ammi was compelled to take three officers to the Gardner farm, together with the coroner, the medical examiner, and the veterinary who had treated the diseased animals. He went much against his will, for the afternoon was advancing and he feared the fall of night over that accursed place, but it was some comfort to have so many people with him.
The six men drove out in a democrat-wagon, following Ammi's buggy, and arrived at the pest-ridden farmhouse about four o'clock. Used as the officers were to gruesome experiences, not one remained unmoved at what was found in the attic and under the red checked tablecloth on the floor below. The whole aspect of the farm with its grey desolation was terrible enough, but those two crumbling objects were beyond all bounds. No one could look long at them, and even the medical examiner admitted that there was very little to examine. Specimens could be analysed, of course, so he busied himself in obtaining them--and here it develops that a very puzzling aftermath occurred at the college laboratory where the two phials of dust were finally taken. Under the spectroscope both samples gave off an unknown spectrum, in which many of the baffling bands were precisely like those which the strange meteor had yielded in the previous year. The property of emitting this spectrum vanished in a month, the dust thereafter consisting mainly of alkaline phosphates and carbonates.
Ammi would not have told the men about the well if he had thought they meant to do anything then and there. It was getting toward sunset, and he was anxious to be away. But he could not help glancing nervously at the stony curb by the great sweep, and when a detective questioned him he admitted that Nahum had feared something down there so much so that he had never even thought of searching it for Merwin or Zenas. After that nothing would do but that they empty and explore the well immediately, so Ammi had to wait trembling while pail after pail of rank water was hauled up and splashed on the soaking ground outside. The men sniffed in disgust at the fluid, and toward the last held their noses against the foetor they were uncovering. It was not so long a job as they had feared it would be, since the water was phenomenally low. There is no need to speak too exactly of what they found. Merwin and Zenas were both there, in part, though the vestiges were mainly skeletal. There were also a small deer and a large dog in about the same state, and a number of bones of small animals. The ooze and slime at the bottom seemed inexplicably porous and bubbling, and a man who descended on hand-holds with a long pole found that he could sink the wooden shaft to any depth in the mud of the floor without meeting any solid obstruction.
Twilight had now fallen, and lanterns were brought from the house. Then, when it was seen that nothing further could be gained from the well, everyone went indoors and conferred in the ancient sitting-room while the intermittent light of a spectral half-moon played wanly on the grey desolation outside. The men were frankly nonplussed by the entire case, and could find no convincing common element to link the strange vegetable conditions, the unknown disease of live-stock and humans, and the unaccountable deaths of Merwin and Zenas in the tainted well. They had heard the common country talk, it is true; but could not believe that anything contrary to natural law had occurred. No doubt the meteor had poisoned the soil, but the illness of persons and animals who had eaten nothing grown in that soil was another matter. Was it the well water? Very possibly. It might be a good idea to analyze it. But what peculiar madness could have made both boys jump into the well? Their deeds were so similar-and the fragments showed that they had both suffered from the grey brittle death. Why was everything so grey and brittle?
It was the coroner, seated near a window overlooking the yard, who first noticed the glow about the well. Night had fully set in, and all the abhorrent grounds seemed faintly luminous with more than the fitful moonbeams; but this new glow was something definite and distinct, and appeared to shoot up from the black pit like a softened ray from a searchlight, giving dull reflections in the little ground pools where the water had been emptied. It had a very queer colour, and as all the men clustered round the window Ammi gave a violent start. For this strange beam of ghastly miasma was to him of no unfamiliar hue. He had seen that colour before, and feared to think what it might mean. He had seen it in the nasty brittle globule in that aerolite two summers ago, had seen it in the crazy vegetation of the springtime, and had thought he had seen it for an instant that very morning against the small barred window of that terrible attic room where nameless things had happened. It had flashed there a second, and a clammy and hateful current of vapour had brushed past him--and then poor Nahum had been taken by something of that colour. He had said so at the last--said it was like the globule and the plants. After that had come the runaway in the yard and the splash in the well and now that well was belching forth to the night a pale insidious beam of the same demoniac tint.
It does credit to the alertness of Ammi's mind that he puzzled even at that tense moment over a point which was essentially scientific. He could not but wonder at his gleaning of the same impression from a vapour glimpsed in the daytime, against a window opening on the morning sky, and from a nocturnal exhalation seen as a phosphorescent mist against the black and blasted landscape. It wasn't right--it was against Nature--and he thought of those terrible last words of his stricken friend, ""It come from some place whar things ain't as they is here...one o' them professors said so...""
All three horses outside, tied to a pair of shrivelled saplings by the road, were now neighing and pawing frantically. The wagon driver started for the door to do something, but Ammi laid a shaky hand on his shoulder. ""Dun't go out thar,"" he whispered. ""They's more to this nor what we know. Nahum said somethin' lived in the well that sucks your life out. He said it must be some'at growed from a round ball like one we all seen in the meteor stone that fell a year ago June. Sucks an' burns, he said, an' is jest a cloud of colour like that light out thar now, that ye can hardly see an' can't tell what it is. Nahum thought it feeds on everything livin' an' gits stronger all the time. He said he seen it this last week. It must be somethin' from away off in the sky like the men from the college last year says the meteor stone was. The way it's made an' the way it works ain't like no way o' God's world. It's some'at from beyond.""
So the men paused indecisively as the light from the well grew stronger and the hitched horses pawed and whinnied in increasing frenzy. It was truly an awful moment; with terror in that ancient and accursed house itself, four monstrous sets of fragments--two from the house and two from the well--in the woodshed behind, and that shaft of unknown and unholy iridescence from the slimy depths in front. Ammi had restrained the driver on impulse, forgetting how uninjured he himself was after the clammy brushing of that coloured vapour in the attic room, but perhaps it is just as well that he acted as he did. No one will ever know what was abroad that night; and though the blasphemy from beyond had not so far hurt any human of unweakened mind, there is no telling what it might not have done at that last moment, and with its seemingly increased strength and the special signs of purpose it was soon to display beneath the half-clouded moonlit sky.
All at once one of the detectives at the window gave a short, sharp gasp. The others looked at him, and then quickly followed his own gaze upward to the point at which its idle straying had been suddenly arrested. There was no need for words. What had been disputed in country gossip was disputable no longer, and it is because of the thing which every man of that party agreed in whispering later on, that the strange days are never talked about in Arkham. It is necessary to premise that there was no wind at that hour of the evening. One did arise not long afterward, but there was absolutely none then. Even the dry tips of the lingering hedge-mustard, grey and blighted, and the fringe on the roof of the standing democrat-wagon were unstirred. And yet amid that tense godless calm the high bare boughs of all the trees in the yard were moving. They were twitching morbidly and spasmodically, clawing in convulsive and epileptic madness at the moonlit clouds; scratching impotently in the noxious air as if jerked by some allied and bodiless line of linkage with subterrene horrors writhing and struggling below the black roots.
Not a man breathed for several seconds. Then a cloud of darker depth passed over the moon, and the silhouette of clutching branches faded out momentarily. At this there was a general cry; muffled with awe, but husky and almost identical from every throat. For the terror had not faded with the silhouette, and in a fearsome instant of deeper darkness the watchers saw wriggling at that tree top height a thousand tiny points of faint and unhallowed radiance, tipping each bough like the fire of St. Elmo or the flames that come down on the apostles' heads at Pentecost. It was a monstrous constellation of unnatural light, like a glutted swarm of corpse-fed fireflies dancing hellish sarabands over an accursed marsh, and its colour was that same nameless intrusion which Ammi had come to recognize and dread. All the while the shaft of phosphorescence from the well was getting brighter and brighter, bringing to the minds of the huddled men, a sense of doom and abnormality which far outraced any image their conscious minds could form. It was no longer shining out; it was pouring out; and as the shapeless stream of unplaceable colour left the well it seemed to flow directly into the sky.
The veterinary shivered, and walked to the front door to drop the heavy extra bar across it. Ammi shook no less, and had to tug and point for lack of controllable voice when he wished to draw notice to the growing luminosity of the trees. The neighing and stamping of the horses had become utterly frightful, but not a soul of that group in the old house would have ventured forth for any earthly reward. With the moments the shining of the trees increased, while their restless branches seemed to strain more and more toward verticality. The wood of the well-sweep was shining now, and presently a policeman dumbly pointed to some wooden sheds and bee-hives near the stone wall on the west. They were commencing to shine, too, though the tethered vehicles of the visitors seemed so far unaffected. Then there was a wild commotion and clopping in the road, and as Ammi quenched the lamp for better seeing they realized that the span of frantic greys had broken their sapling and run off with the democrat-wagon.
The shock served to loosen several tongues, and embarrassed whispers were exchanged. ""It spreads on everything organic that's been around here,"" muttered the medical examiner. No one replied, but the man who had been in the well gave a hint that his long pole must have stirred up something intangible. ""It was awful,"" he added. ""There was no bottom at all. Just ooze and bubbles and the feeling of something lurking under there."" Ammi's horse still pawed and screamed deafeningly in the road outside, and nearly drowned its owner's faint quaver as he mumbled his formless reflections. ""It come from that stone--it growed down thar--it got everything livin'--it fed itself on 'em, mind and body--Thad an' Merwin, Zenas an' Nabby--Nahum was the last--they all drunk the water--it got strong on 'em--it come from beyond, whar things ain't like they be here--now it's goin' home--""
At this point, as the column of unknown colour flared suddenly stronger and began to weave itself into fantastic suggestions of shape which each spectator described differently, there came from poor tethered Hero such a sound as no man before or since ever heard from a horse. Every person in that low-pitched sitting room stopped his ears, and Ammi turned away from the window in horror and nausea. Words could not convey it--when Ammi looked out again the hapless beast lay huddled inert on the moonlit ground between the splintered shafts of the buggy. That was the last of Hero till they buried him next day. But the present was no time to mourn, for almost at this instant a detective silently called attention to something terrible in the very room with them. In the absence of the lamplight it was clear that a faint phosphorescence had begun to pervade the entire apartment. It glowed on the broad-planked floor and the fragment of rag carpet, and shimmered over the sashes of the small-paned windows. It ran up and down the exposed corner-posts, coruscated about the shelf and mantel, and infected the very doors and furniture. Each minute saw it strengthen, and at last it was very plain that healthy living things must leave that house.
Ammi showed them the back door and the path up through the fields to the ten-acre pasture. They walked and stumbled as in a dream, and did not dare look back till they were far away on the high ground. They were glad of the path, for they could not have gone the front way, by that well. It was bad enough passing the glowing barn and sheds, and those shining orchard trees with their gnarled, fiendish contours; but thank Heaven the branches did their worst twisting high up. The moon went under some very black clouds as they crossed the rustic bridge over Chapman's Brook, and it was blind groping from there to the open meadows.
When they looked back toward the valley and the distant Gardner place at the bottom they saw a fearsome sight. At the farm was shining with the hideous unknown blend of colour; trees, buildings, and even such grass and herbage as had not been wholly changed to lethal grey brittleness. The boughs were all straining skyward, tipped with tongues of foul flame, and lambent tricklings of the same monstrous fire were creeping about the ridgepoles of the house, barn and sheds. It was a scene from a vision of Fuseli, and over all the rest reigned that riot of luminous amorphousness, that alien and undimensioned rainbow of cryptic poison from the well--seething, feeling, lapping, reaching, scintillating, straining, and malignly bubbling in its cosmic and unrecognizable chromaticism.
Then without warning the hideous thing shot vertically up toward the sky like a rocket or meteor, leaving behind no trail and disappearing through a round and curiously regular hole in the clouds before any man could gasp or cry out. No watcher can ever forget that sight, and Ammi stared blankly at the stars of Cygnus, Deneb twinkling above the others, where the unknown colour had melted into the Milky Way. But his gaze was the next moment called swiftly to earth by the crackling in the valley. It was just that. Only a wooden ripping and crackling, and not an explosion, as so many others of the party vowed. Yet the outcome was the same, for in one feverish kaleidoscopic instant there burst up from that doomed and accursed farm a gleamingly eruptive cataclysm of unnatural sparks and substance; blurring the glance of the few who saw it, and sending forth to the zenith a bombarding cloudburst of such coloured and fantastic fragments as our universe must needs disown. Through quickly reclosing vapours they followed the great morbidity that had vanished, and in another second they had vanished too. Behind and below was only a darkness to which the men dared not return, and all about was a mounting wind which seemed to sweep down in black, frore gusts from interstellar space. It shrieked and howled, and lashed the fields and distorted woods in a mad cosmic frenzy, till soon the trembling party realized it would be no use waiting for the moon to show what was left down there at Nahum's.
Too awed even to hint theories, the seven shaking men trudged back toward Arkham by the north road. Ammi was worse than his fellows, and begged them to see him inside his own kitchen, instead of keeping straight on to town. He did not wish to cross the blighted, wind-whipped woods alone to his home on the main road. For he had had an added shock that the others were spared, and was crushed forever with a brooding fear he dared not even mention for many years to come. As the rest of the watchers on that tempestuous hill had stolidly set their faces toward the road, Ammi had looked back an instant at the shadowed valley of desolation so lately sheltering his ill-starred friend. And from that stricken, far-away spot he had seen something feebly rise, only to sink down again upon the place from which the great shapeless horror had shot into the sky. It was just a colour--but not any colour of our earth or heavens. And because Ammi recognized that colour, and knew that this last faint remnant must still lurk down there in the well, he has never been quite right since.
Ammi would never go near the place again. It is forty-four years now since the horror happened, but he has never been there, and will be glad when the new reservoir blots it out. I shall be glad, too, for I do not like the way the sunlight changed colour around the mouth of that abandoned well I passed. I hope the water will always be very deep--but even so, I shall never drink it. I do not think I shall visit the Arkham country hereafter. Three of the men who had been with Ammi returned the next morning to see the ruins by daylight, but there were not any real ruins. Only the bricks of the chimney, the stones of the cellar, some mineral and metallic litter here and there, and the rim of that nefandous well. Save for Ammi's dead horse, which they towed away and buried, and the buggy which they shortly returned to him, everything that had ever been living had gone. Five eldritch acres of dusty grey desert remained, nor has anything ever grown there since. To this day it sprawls open to the sky like a great spot eaten by acid in the woods and fields, and the few who have ever dared glimpse it in spite of the rural tales have named it ""the blasted heath.""
The rural tales are queer. They might be even queerer if city men and college chemists could be interested enough to analyze the water from that disused well, or the grey dust that no wind seems to disperse. Botanists, too, ought to study the stunted flora on the borders of that spot, for they might shed light on the country notion that the blight is spreading--little by little, perhaps an inch a year. People say the colour of the neighboring herbage is not quite right in the spring, and that wild things leave queer prints in the light winter snow. Snow never seems quite so heavy on the blasted heath as it is elsewhere. Horses--the few that are left in this motor age--grow skittish in the silent valley; and hunters cannot depend on their dogs too near the splotch of greyish dust.
They say the mental influences are very bad, too; numbers went queer in the years after Nahum's taking, and always they lacked the power to get away. Then the stronger-minded folk all left the region, and only the foreigners tried to live in the crumbling old homesteads. They could not stay, though; and one sometimes wonders what insight beyond ours their wild, weird stories of whispered magic have given them. Their dreams at night, they protest, are very horrible in that grotesque country; and surely the very look of the dark realm is enough to stir a morbid fancy. No traveler has ever escaped a sense of strangeness in those deep ravines, and artists shiver as they paint thick woods whose mystery is as much of the spirits as of the eye. I myself am curious about the sensation I derived from my one lone walk before Ammi told me his tale. When twilight came I had vaguely wished some clouds would gather, for an odd timidity about the deep skyey voids above had crept into my soul.
Do not ask me for my opinion. I do not know--that is all. There was no one but Ammi to question; for Arkham people will not talk about the strange days, and all three professors who saw the aerolite and its coloured globule are dead. There were other globules--depend upon that. One must have fed itself and escaped, and probably there was another which was too late. No doubt it is still down the well--I know there was something wrong with the sunlight I saw above the miasmal brink. The rustics say the blight creeps an inch a year, so perhaps there is a kind of growth or nourishment even now. But whatever demon hatchling is there, it must be tethered to something or else it would quickly spread. Is it fastened to the roots of those trees that claw the air? One of the current Arkham tales is about fat oaks that shine and move as they ought not to do at night.
What it is, only God knows. In terms of matter I suppose the thing Ammi described would be called a gas, but this gas obeyed the laws that are not of our cosmos. This was no fruit of such worlds and suns as shine on the telescopes and photographic plates of our observatories. This was no breath from the skies whose motions and dimensions our astronomers measure or deem too vast to measure. It was just a colour out of space--a frightful messenger from unformed realms of infinity beyond all Nature as we know it; from realms whose mere existence stuns the brain and numbs us with the black cosmic gulfs it throws open before our frenzied eyes.
I doubt very much if Ammi consciously lied to me, and I do not think his tale was all a freak of madness as the townsfolk had forewarned. Something terrible came to the hills and valleys on that meteor, and something terrible--though I know not in what proportion--still remains. I shall be glad to see the water come. Meanwhile I hope nothing will happen to Ammi. He saw so much of the thing--and its influence was so insidious. Why has he never been able to move away? How clearly he recalled those dying words of Nahum's--""Can't git away--draws ye--ye know summ'at's comin' but tain't no use--"". Ammi is such a good old man--when the reservoir gang gets to work I must write the chief engineer to keep a sharp watch on him. I would hate to think of him as the grey, twisted, brittle monstrosity which persists more and more in troubling my sleep.
",True
"
I

Although I knew nothing of chemistry, I listened fascinated. He picked up
an Easter lily which Geneviève had brought that morning from Notre Dame,
and dropped it into the basin. Instantly the liquid lost its crystalline
clearness. For a second the lily was enveloped in a milk-white foam,
which disappeared, leaving the fluid opalescent. Changing tints of orange
and crimson played over the surface, and then what seemed to be a ray of
pure sunlight struck through from the bottom where the lily was resting.
At the same instant he plunged his hand into the basin and drew out the
flower. ""There is no danger,"" he explained, ""if you choose the right
moment. That golden ray is the signal.""

He held the lily toward me, and I took it in my hand. It had turned to
stone, to the purest marble.

""You see,"" he said, ""it is without a flaw. What sculptor could reproduce
it?""

The marble was white as snow, but in its depths the veins of the lily
were tinged with palest azure, and a faint flush lingered deep in its
heart.

""Don't ask me the reason of that,"" he smiled, noticing my wonder. ""I have
no idea why the veins and heart are tinted, but they always are.
Yesterday I tried one of Geneviève's gold-fish,--there it is.""

The fish looked as if sculptured in marble. But if you held it to the
light the stone was beautifully veined with a faint blue, and from
somewhere within came a rosy light like the tint which slumbers in an
opal. I looked into the basin. Once more it seemed filled with clearest
crystal.

""If I should touch it now?"" I demanded.

""I don't know,"" he replied, ""but you had better not try.""

""There is one thing I'm curious about,"" I said, ""and that is where the
ray of sunlight came from.""

""It looked like a sunbeam true enough,"" he said. ""I don't know, it always
comes when I immerse any living thing. Perhaps,"" he continued, smiling,
""perhaps it is the vital spark of the creature escaping to the source
from whence it came.""

I saw he was mocking, and threatened him with a mahl-stick, but he only
laughed and changed the subject.

""Stay to lunch. Geneviève will be here directly.""

""I saw her going to early mass,"" I said, ""and she looked as fresh and
sweet as that lily--before you destroyed it.""

""Do you think I destroyed it?"" said Boris gravely.

""Destroyed, preserved, how can we tell?""

We sat in the corner of a studio near his unfinished group of the
""Fates."" He leaned back on the sofa, twirling a sculptor's chisel and
squinting at his work.

""By the way,"" he said, ""I have finished pointing up that old academic
Ariadne, and I suppose it will have to go to the Salon. It's all I have
ready this year, but after the success the 'Madonna' brought me I feel
ashamed to send a thing like that.""

The ""Madonna,"" an exquisite marble for which Geneviève had sat, had been
the sensation of last year's Salon. I looked at the Ariadne. It was a
magnificent piece of technical work, but I agreed with Boris that the
world would expect something better of him than that. Still, it was
impossible now to think of finishing in time for the Salon that splendid
terrible group half shrouded in the marble behind me. The ""Fates"" would
have to wait.

We were proud of Boris Yvain. We claimed him and he claimed us on the
strength of his having been born in America, although his father was
French and his mother was a Russian. Every one in the Beaux Arts called
him Boris. And yet there were only two of us whom he addressed in the
same familiar way--Jack Scott and myself.

Perhaps my being in love with Geneviève had something to do with his
affection for me. Not that it had ever been acknowledged between us. But
after all was settled, and she had told me with tears in her eyes that it
was Boris whom she loved, I went over to his house and congratulated him.
The perfect cordiality of that interview did not deceive either of us, I
always believed, although to one at least it was a great comfort. I do
not think he and Geneviève ever spoke of the matter together, but Boris
knew.

Geneviève was lovely. The Madonna-like purity of her face might have been
inspired by the Sanctus in Gounod's Mass. But I was always glad when she
changed that mood for what we called her ""April Manoeuvres."" She was
often as variable as an April day. In the morning grave, dignified and
sweet, at noon laughing, capricious, at evening whatever one least
expected. I preferred her so rather than in that Madonna-like
tranquillity which stirred the depths of my heart. I was dreaming of
Geneviève when he spoke again.

""What do you think of my discovery, Alec?""

""I think it wonderful.""

""I shall make no use of it, you know, beyond satisfying my own curiosity
so far as may be, and the secret will die with me.""

""It would be rather a blow to sculpture, would it not? We painters lose
more than we ever gain by photography.""

Boris nodded, playing with the edge of the chisel.

""This new vicious discovery would corrupt the world of art. No, I shall
never confide the secret to any one,"" he said slowly.

It would be hard to find any one less informed about such phenomena than
myself; but of course I had heard of mineral springs so saturated with
silica that the leaves and twigs which fell into them were turned to
stone after a time. I dimly comprehended the process, how the silica
replaced the vegetable matter, atom by atom, and the result was a
duplicate of the object in stone. This, I confess, had never interested
me greatly, and as for the ancient fossils thus produced, they disgusted
me. Boris, it appeared, feeling curiosity instead of repugnance, had
investigated the subject, and had accidentally stumbled on a solution
which, attacking the immersed object with a ferocity unheard of, in a
second did the work of years. This was all I could make out of the
strange story he had just been telling me. He spoke again after a long
silence.

""I am almost frightened when I think what I have found. Scientists would
go mad over the discovery. It was so simple too; it discovered itself.
When I think of that formula, and that new element precipitated in
metallic scales--""

""What new element?""

""Oh, I haven't thought of naming it, and I don't believe I ever shall.
There are enough precious metals now in the world to cut throats over.""

I pricked up my ears. ""Have you struck gold, Boris?""

""No, better;--but see here, Alec!"" he laughed, starting up. ""You and I
have all we need in this world. Ah! how sinister and covetous you look
already!"" I laughed too, and told him I was devoured by the desire for
gold, and we had better talk of something else; so when Geneviève came in
shortly after, we had turned our backs on alchemy.

Geneviève was dressed in silvery grey from head to foot. The light
glinted along the soft curves of her fair hair as she turned her cheek to
Boris; then she saw me and returned my greeting. She had never before
failed to blow me a kiss from the tips of her white fingers, and I
promptly complained of the omission. She smiled and held out her hand,
which dropped almost before it had touched mine; then she said, looking
at Boris--

""You must ask Alec to stay for luncheon."" This also was something new.
She had always asked me herself until to-day.

""I did,"" said Boris shortly.

""And you said yes, I hope?"" She turned to me with a charming conventional
smile. I might have been an acquaintance of the day before yesterday. I
made her a low bow. ""J'avais bien l'honneur, madame,"" but refusing to
take up our usual bantering tone, she murmured a hospitable commonplace
and disappeared. Boris and I looked at one another.

""I had better go home, don't you think?"" I asked.

""Hanged if I know,"" he replied frankly.

While we were discussing the advisability of my departure Geneviève
reappeared in the doorway without her bonnet. She was wonderfully
beautiful, but her colour was too deep and her lovely eyes were too
bright. She came straight up to me and took my arm.

""Luncheon is ready. Was I cross, Alec? I thought I had a headache, but I
haven't. Come here, Boris;"" and she slipped her other arm through his.
""Alec knows that after you there is no one in the world whom I like as
well as I like him, so if he sometimes feels snubbed it won't hurt him.""

""À la bonheur!"" I cried, ""who says there are no thunderstorms in April?""

""Are you ready?"" chanted Boris. ""Aye ready;"" and arm-in-arm we raced into
the dining-room, scandalizing the servants. After all we were not so much
to blame; Geneviève was eighteen, Boris was twenty-three, and I not quite
twenty-one.




II

Some work that I was doing about this time on the decorations for
Geneviève's boudoir kept me constantly at the quaint little hotel in the
Rue Sainte-Cécile. Boris and I in those days laboured hard but as we
pleased, which was fitfully, and we all three, with Jack Scott, idled a
great deal together.

One quiet afternoon I had been wandering alone over the house examining
curios, prying into odd corners, bringing out sweetmeats and cigars from
strange hiding-places, and at last I stopped in the bathing-room. Boris,
all over clay, stood there washing his hands.

The room was built of rose-coloured marble excepting the floor, which was
tessellated in rose and grey. In the centre was a square pool sunken
below the surface of the floor; steps led down into it, sculptured
pillars supported a frescoed ceiling. A delicious marble Cupid appeared
to have just alighted on his pedestal at the upper end of the room. The
whole interior was Boris' work and mine. Boris, in his working-clothes of
white canvas, scraped the traces of clay and red modelling wax from his
handsome hands, and coquetted over his shoulder with the Cupid.

""I see you,"" he insisted, ""don't try to look the other way and pretend
not to see me. You know who made you, little humbug!""

It was always my rôle to interpret Cupid's sentiments in these
conversations, and when my turn came I responded in such a manner, that
Boris seized my arm and dragged me toward the pool, declaring he would
duck me. Next instant he dropped my arm and turned pale. ""Good God!"" he
said, ""I forgot the pool is full of the solution!""

I shivered a little, and dryly advised him to remember better where he
had stored the precious liquid.

""In Heaven's name, why do you keep a small lake of that gruesome stuff
here of all places?"" I asked.

""I want to experiment on something large,"" he replied.

""On me, for instance?""

""Ah! that came too close for jesting; but I do want to watch the action
of that solution on a more highly organized living body; there is that
big white rabbit,"" he said, following me into the studio.

Jack Scott, wearing a paint-stained jacket, came wandering in,
appropriated all the Oriental sweetmeats he could lay his hands on,
looted the cigarette case, and finally he and Boris disappeared together
to visit the Luxembourg Gallery, where a new silver bronze by Rodin and a
landscape of Monet's were claiming the exclusive attention of artistic
France. I went back to the studio, and resumed my work. It was a
Renaissance screen, which Boris wanted me to paint for Geneviève's
boudoir. But the small boy who was unwillingly dawdling through a series
of poses for it, to-day refused all bribes to be good. He never rested an
instant in the same position, and inside of five minutes I had as many
different outlines of the little beggar.

""Are you posing, or are you executing a song and dance, my friend?"" I
inquired.

""Whichever monsieur pleases,"" he replied, with an angelic smile.

Of course I dismissed him for the day, and of course I paid him for the
full time, that being the way we spoil our models.

After the young imp had gone, I made a few perfunctory daubs at my work,
but was so thoroughly out of humour, that it took me the rest of the
afternoon to undo the damage I had done, so at last I scraped my palette,
stuck my brushes in a bowl of black soap, and strolled into the
smoking-room. I really believe that, excepting Geneviève's apartments, no
room in the house was so free from the perfume of tobacco as this one. It
was a queer chaos of odds and ends, hung with threadbare tapestry. A
sweet-toned old spinet in good repair stood by the window. There were
stands of weapons, some old and dull, others bright and modern, festoons
of Indian and Turkish armour over the mantel, two or three good pictures,
and a pipe-rack. It was here that we used to come for new sensations in
smoking. I doubt if any type of pipe ever existed which was not
represented in that rack. When we had selected one, we immediately
carried it somewhere else and smoked it; for the place was, on the whole,
more gloomy and less inviting than any in the house. But this afternoon,
the twilight was very soothing, the rugs and skins on the floor looked
brown and soft and drowsy; the big couch was piled with cushions--I found
my pipe and curled up there for an unaccustomed smoke in the
smoking-room. I had chosen one with a long flexible stem, and lighting it
fell to dreaming. After a while it went out, but I did not stir. I
dreamed on and presently fell asleep.

I awoke to the saddest music I had ever heard. The room was quite dark, I
had no idea what time it was. A ray of moonlight silvered one edge of the
old spinet, and the polished wood seemed to exhale the sounds as perfume
floats above a box of sandalwood. Some one rose in the darkness, and came
away weeping quietly, and I was fool enough to cry out ""Geneviève!""

She dropped at my voice, and, I had time to curse myself while I made a
light and tried to raise her from the floor. She shrank away with a
murmur of pain. She was very quiet, and asked for Boris. I carried her to
the divan, and went to look for him, but he was not in the house, and the
servants were gone to bed. Perplexed and anxious, I hurried back to
Geneviève. She lay where I had left her, looking very white.

""I can't find Boris nor any of the servants,"" I said.

""I know,"" she answered faintly, ""Boris has gone to Ept with Mr. Scott. I
did not remember when I sent you for him just now.""

""But he can't get back in that case before to-morrow afternoon, and--are
you hurt? Did I frighten you into falling? What an awful fool I am, but I
was only half awake.""

""Boris thought you had gone home before dinner. Do please excuse us for
letting you stay here all this time.""

""I have had a long nap,"" I laughed, ""so sound that I did not know whether
I was still asleep or not when I found myself staring at a figure that
was moving toward me, and called out your name. Have you been trying the
old spinet? You must have played very softly.""

I would tell a thousand more lies worse than that one to see the look of
relief that came into her face. She smiled adorably, and said in her
natural voice: ""Alec, I tripped on that wolf's head, and I think my ankle
is sprained. Please call Marie, and then go home.""

I did as she bade me, and left her there when the maid came in.




III

At noon next day when I called, I found Boris walking restlessly about
his studio.

""Geneviève is asleep just now,"" he told me, ""the sprain is nothing, but
why should she have such a high fever? The doctor can't account for it;
or else he will not,"" he muttered.

""Geneviève has a fever?"" I asked.

""I should say so, and has actually been a little light-headed at
intervals all night. The idea! gay little Geneviève, without a care in
the world,--and she keeps saying her heart's broken, and she wants to
die!""

My own heart stood still.

Boris leaned against the door of his studio, looking down, his hands in
his pockets, his kind, keen eyes clouded, a new line of trouble drawn
""over the mouth's good mark, that made the smile."" The maid had orders to
summon him the instant Geneviève opened her eyes. We waited and waited,
and Boris, growing restless, wandered about, fussing with modelling wax
and red clay. Suddenly he started for the next room. ""Come and see my
rose-coloured bath full of death!"" he cried.

""Is it death?"" I asked, to humour his mood.

""You are not prepared to call it life, I suppose,"" he answered. As he
spoke he plucked a solitary goldfish squirming and twisting out of its
globe. ""We'll send this one after the other--wherever that is,"" he said.
There was feverish excitement in his voice. A dull weight of fever lay on
my limbs and on my brain as I followed him to the fair crystal pool with
its pink-tinted sides; and he dropped the creature in. Falling, its
scales flashed with a hot orange gleam in its angry twistings and
contortions; the moment it struck the liquid it became rigid and sank
heavily to the bottom. Then came the milky foam, the splendid hues
radiating on the surface and then the shaft of pure serene light broke
through from seemingly infinite depths. Boris plunged in his hand and
drew out an exquisite marble thing, blue-veined, rose-tinted, and
glistening with opalescent drops.

""Child's play,"" he muttered, and looked wearily, longingly at me,--as if
I could answer such questions! But Jack Scott came in and entered into
the ""game,"" as he called it, with ardour. Nothing would do but to try the
experiment on the white rabbit then and there. I was willing that Boris
should find distraction from his cares, but I hated to see the life go
out of a warm, living creature and I declined to be present. Picking up a
book at random, I sat down in the studio to read. Alas! I had found
_The King in Yellow_. After a few moments, which seemed ages, I was
putting it away with a nervous shudder, when Boris and Jack came in
bringing their marble rabbit. At the same time the bell rang above, and a
cry came from the sick-room. Boris was gone like a flash, and the next
moment he called, ""Jack, run for the doctor; bring him back with you.
Alec, come here.""

I went and stood at her door. A frightened maid came out in haste and ran
away to fetch some remedy. Geneviève, sitting bolt upright, with crimson
cheeks and glittering eyes, babbled incessantly and resisted Boris'
gentle restraint. He called me to help. At my first touch she sighed and
sank back, closing her eyes, and then--then--as we still bent above her,
she opened them again, looked straight into Boris' face--poor
fever-crazed girl!--and told her secret. At the same instant our three
lives turned into new channels; the bond that held us so long together
snapped for ever and a new bond was forged in its place, for she had
spoken my name, and as the fever tortured her, her heart poured out its
load of hidden sorrow. Amazed and dumb I bowed my head, while my face
burned like a live coal, and the blood surged in my ears, stupefying me
with its clamour. Incapable of movement, incapable of speech, I listened
to her feverish words in an agony of shame and sorrow. I could not
silence her, I could not look at Boris. Then I felt an arm upon my
shoulder, and Boris turned a bloodless face to mine.

""It is not your fault, Alec; don't grieve so if she loves you--"" but he
could not finish; and as the doctor stepped swiftly into the room,
saying--""Ah, the fever!"" I seized Jack Scott and hurried him to the
street, saying, ""Boris would rather be alone."" We crossed the street to
our own apartments, and that night, seeing I was going to be ill too, he
went for the doctor again. The last thing I recollect with any
distinctness was hearing Jack say, ""For Heaven's sake, doctor, what ails
him, to wear a face like that?"" and I thought of _The King in
Yellow_ and the Pallid Mask.

I was very ill, for the strain of two years which I had endured since
that fatal May morning when Geneviève murmured, ""I love you, but I think
I love Boris best,"" told on me at last. I had never imagined that it
could become more than I could endure. Outwardly tranquil, I had deceived
myself. Although the inward battle raged night after night, and I, lying
alone in my room, cursed myself for rebellious thoughts unloyal to Boris
and unworthy of Geneviève, the morning always brought relief, and I
returned to Geneviève and to my dear Boris with a heart washed clean by
the tempests of the night.

Never in word or deed or thought while with them had I betrayed my sorrow
even to myself.

The mask of self-deception was no longer a mask for me, it was a part of
me. Night lifted it, laying bare the stifled truth below; but there was
no one to see except myself, and when the day broke the mask fell back
again of its own accord. These thoughts passed through my troubled mind
as I lay sick, but they were hopelessly entangled with visions of white
creatures, heavy as stone, crawling about in Boris' basin,--of the wolf's
head on the rug, foaming and snapping at Geneviève, who lay smiling
beside it. I thought, too, of the King in Yellow wrapped in the fantastic
colours of his tattered mantle, and that bitter cry of Cassilda, ""Not
upon us, oh King, not upon us!"" Feverishly I struggled to put it from me,
but I saw the lake of Hali, thin and blank, without a ripple or wind to
stir it, and I saw the towers of Carcosa behind the moon. Aldebaran, the
Hyades, Alar, Hastur, glided through the cloud-rifts which fluttered and
flapped as they passed like the scolloped tatters of the King in Yellow.
Among all these, one sane thought persisted. It never wavered, no matter
what else was going on in my disordered mind, that my chief reason for
existing was to meet some requirement of Boris and Geneviève. What this
obligation was, its nature, was never clear; sometimes it seemed to be
protection, sometimes support, through a great crisis. Whatever it seemed
to be for the time, its weight rested only on me, and I was never so ill
or so weak that I did not respond with my whole soul. There were always
crowds of faces about me, mostly strange, but a few I recognized, Boris
among them. Afterward they told me that this could not have been, but I
know that once at least he bent over me. It was only a touch, a faint
echo of his voice, then the clouds settled back on my senses, and I lost
him, but he _did_ stand there and bend over me _once_ at least.

At last, one morning I awoke to find the sunlight falling across my bed,
and Jack Scott reading beside me. I had not strength enough to speak
aloud, neither could I think, much less remember, but I could smile
feebly, as Jack's eye met mine, and when he jumped up and asked eagerly
if I wanted anything, I could whisper, ""Yes--Boris."" Jack moved to the
head of my bed, and leaned down to arrange my pillow: I did not see his
face, but he answered heartily, ""You must wait, Alec; you are too weak to
see even Boris.""

I waited and I grew strong; in a few days I was able to see whom I would,
but meanwhile I had thought and remembered. From the moment when all the
past grew clear again in my mind, I never doubted what I should do when
the time came, and I felt sure that Boris would have resolved upon the
same course so far as he was concerned; as for what pertained to me
alone, I knew he would see that also as I did. I no longer asked for any
one. I never inquired why no message came from them; why during the week
I lay there, waiting and growing stronger, I never heard their name
spoken. Preoccupied with my own searchings for the right way, and with my
feeble but determined fight against despair, I simply acquiesced in
Jack's reticence, taking for granted that he was afraid to speak of them,
lest I should turn unruly and insist on seeing them. Meanwhile I said
over and over to myself, how would it be when life began again for us
all? We would take up our relations exactly as they were before Geneviève
fell ill. Boris and I would look into each other's eyes, and there would
be neither rancour nor cowardice nor mistrust in that glance. I would be
with them again for a little while in the dear intimacy of their home,
and then, without pretext or explanation, I would disappear from their
lives for ever. Boris would know; Geneviève--the only comfort was that
she would never know. It seemed, as I thought it over, that I had found
the meaning of that sense of obligation which had persisted all through
my delirium, and the only possible answer to it. So, when I was quite
ready, I beckoned Jack to me one day, and said--

""Jack, I want Boris at once; and take my dearest greeting to
Geneviève....""

When at last he made me understand that they were both dead, I fell into
a wild rage that tore all my little convalescent strength to atoms. I
raved and cursed myself into a relapse, from which I crawled forth some
weeks afterward a boy of twenty-one who believed that his youth was gone
for ever. I seemed to be past the capability of further suffering, and
one day when Jack handed me a letter and the keys to Boris' house, I took
them without a tremor and asked him to tell me all. It was cruel of me to
ask him, but there was no help for it, and he leaned wearily on his thin
hands, to reopen the wound which could never entirely heal. He began very
quietly--

""Alec, unless you have a clue that I know nothing about, you will not be
able to explain any more than I what has happened. I suspect that you
would rather not hear these details, but you must learn them, else I
would spare you the relation. God knows I wish I could be spared the
telling. I shall use few words.

""That day when I left you in the doctor's care and came back to Boris, I
found him working on the 'Fates.' Geneviève, he said, was sleeping under
the influence of drugs. She had been quite out of her mind, he said. He
kept on working, not talking any more, and I watched him. Before long, I
saw that the third figure of the group--the one looking straight ahead,
out over the world--bore his face; not as you ever saw it, but as it
looked then and to the end. This is one thing for which I should like to
find an explanation, but I never shall.

""Well, he worked and I watched him in silence, and we went on that way
until nearly midnight. Then we heard the door open and shut sharply, and
a swift rush in the next room. Boris sprang through the doorway and I
followed; but we were too late. She lay at the bottom of the pool, her
hands across her breast. Then Boris shot himself through the heart."" Jack
stopped speaking, drops of sweat stood under his eyes, and his thin
cheeks twitched. ""I carried Boris to his room. Then I went back and let
that hellish fluid out of the pool, and turning on all the water, washed
the marble clean of every drop. When at length I dared descend the steps,
I found her lying there as white as snow. At last, when I had decided
what was best to do, I went into the laboratory, and first emptied the
solution in the basin into the waste-pipe; then I poured the contents of
every jar and bottle after it. There was wood in the fire-place, so I
built a fire, and breaking the locks of Boris' cabinet I burnt every
paper, notebook and letter that I found there. With a mallet from the
studio I smashed to pieces all the empty bottles, then loading them into
a coal-scuttle, I carried them to the cellar and threw them over the
red-hot bed of the furnace. Six times I made the journey, and at last,
not a vestige remained of anything which might again aid in seeking for
the formula which Boris had found. Then at last I dared call the doctor.
He is a good man, and together we struggled to keep it from the public.
Without him I never could have succeeded. At last we got the servants
paid and sent away into the country, where old Rosier keeps them quiet
with stones of Boris' and Geneviève's travels in distant lands, from
whence they will not return for years. We buried Boris in the little
cemetery of Sèvres. The doctor is a good creature, and knows when to pity
a man who can bear no more. He gave his certificate of heart disease and
asked no questions of me.""

Then, lifting his head from his hands, he said, ""Open the letter, Alec;
it is for us both.""

I tore it open. It was Boris' will dated a year before. He left
everything to Geneviève, and in case of her dying childless, I was to
take control of the house in the Rue Sainte-Cécile, and Jack Scott the
management at Ept. On our deaths the property reverted to his mother's
family in Russia, with the exception of the sculptured marbles executed
by himself. These he left to me.

The page blurred under our eyes, and Jack got up and walked to the
window. Presently he returned and sat down again. I dreaded to hear what
he was going to say, but he spoke with the same simplicity and
gentleness.

""Geneviève lies before the Madonna in the marble room. The Madonna bends
tenderly above her, and Geneviève smiles back into that calm face that
never would have been except for her.""

His voice broke, but he grasped my hand, saying, ""Courage, Alec."" Next
morning he left for Ept to fulfil his trust.




IV

The same evening I took the keys and went into the house I had known so
well. Everything was in order, but the silence was terrible. Though I
went twice to the door of the marble room, I could not force myself to
enter. It was beyond my strength. I went into the smoking-room and sat
down before the spinet. A small lace handkerchief lay on the keys, and I
turned away, choking. It was plain I could not stay, so I locked every
door, every window, and the three front and back gates, and went away.
Next morning Alcide packed my valise, and leaving him in charge of my
apartments I took the Orient express for Constantinople. During the two
years that I wandered through the East, at first, in our letters, we
never mentioned Geneviève and Boris, but gradually their names crept in.
I recollect particularly a passage in one of Jack's letters replying to
one of mine--

""What you tell me of seeing Boris bending over you while you lay ill, and
feeling his touch on your face, and hearing his voice, of course troubles
me. This that you describe must have happened a fortnight after he died.
I say to myself that you were dreaming, that it was part of your
delirium, but the explanation does not satisfy me, nor would it you.""

Toward the end of the second year a letter came from Jack to me in India
so unlike anything that I had ever known of him that I decided to return
at once to Paris. He wrote: ""I am well, and sell all my pictures as
artists do who have no need of money. I have not a care of my own, but I
am more restless than if I had. I am unable to shake off a strange
anxiety about you. It is not apprehension, it is rather a breathless
expectancy--of what, God knows! I can only say it is wearing me out.
Nights I dream always of you and Boris. I can never recall anything
afterward, but I wake in the morning with my heart beating, and all day
the excitement increases until I fall asleep at night to recall the same
experience. I am quite exhausted by it, and have determined to break up
this morbid condition. I must see you. Shall I go to Bombay, or will you
come to Paris?""

I telegraphed him to expect me by the next steamer.

When we met I thought he had changed very little; I, he insisted, looked
in splendid health. It was good to hear his voice again, and as we sat
and chatted about what life still held for us, we felt that it was
pleasant to be alive in the bright spring weather.

We stayed in Paris together a week, and then I went for a week to Ept
with him, but first of all we went to the cemetery at Sèvres, where Boris
lay.

""Shall we place the 'Fates' in the little grove above him?"" Jack asked,
and I answered--

""I think only the 'Madonna' should watch over Boris' grave."" But Jack was
none the better for my home-coming. The dreams of which he could not
retain even the least definite outline continued, and he said that at
times the sense of breathless expectancy was suffocating.

""You see I do you harm and not good,"" I said. ""Try a change without me.""
So he started alone for a ramble among the Channel Islands, and I went
back to Paris. I had not yet entered Boris' house, now mine, since my
return, but I knew it must be done. It had been kept in order by Jack;
there were servants there, so I gave up my own apartment and went there
to live. Instead of the agitation I had feared, I found myself able to
paint there tranquilly. I visited all the rooms--all but one. I could not
bring myself to enter the marble room where Geneviève lay, and yet I felt
the longing growing daily to look upon her face, to kneel beside her.

One April afternoon, I lay dreaming in the smoking-room, just as I had
lain two years before, and mechanically I looked among the tawny Eastern
rugs for the wolf-skin. At last I distinguished the pointed ears and flat
cruel head, and I thought of my dream where I saw Geneviève lying beside
it. The helmets still hung against the threadbare tapestry, among them
the old Spanish morion which I remembered Geneviève had once put on when
we were amusing ourselves with the ancient bits of mail. I turned my eyes
to the spinet; every yellow key seemed eloquent of her caressing hand,
and I rose, drawn by the strength of my life's passion to the sealed door
of the marble room. The heavy doors swung inward under my trembling
hands. Sunlight poured through the window, tipping with gold the wings of
Cupid, and lingered like a nimbus over the brows of the Madonna. Her
tender face bent in compassion over a marble form so exquisitely pure
that I knelt and signed myself. Geneviève lay in the shadow under the
Madonna, and yet, through her white arms, I saw the pale azure vein, and
beneath her softly clasped hands the folds of her dress were tinged with
rose, as if from some faint warm light within her breast.

Bending, with a breaking heart, I touched the marble drapery with my
lips, then crept back into the silent house.

A maid came and brought me a letter, and I sat down in the little
conservatory to read it; but as I was about to break the seal, seeing the
girl lingering, I asked her what she wanted.

She stammered something about a white rabbit that had been caught in the
house, and asked what should be done with it I told her to let it loose
in the walled garden behind the house, and opened my letter. It was from
Jack, but so incoherent that I thought he must have lost his reason. It
was nothing but a series of prayers to me not to leave the house until he
could get back; he could not tell me why, there were the dreams, he
said--he could explain nothing, but he was sure that I must not leave the
house in the Rue Sainte-Cécile.

As I finished reading I raised my eyes and saw the same maid-servant
standing in the doorway holding a glass dish in which two gold-fish were
swimming: ""Put them back into the tank and tell me what you mean by
interrupting me,"" I said.

With a half-suppressed whimper she emptied water and fish into an
aquarium at the end of the conservatory, and turning to me asked my
permission to leave my service. She said people were playing tricks on
her, evidently with a design of getting her into trouble; the marble
rabbit had been stolen and a live one had been brought into the house;
the two beautiful marble fish were gone, and she had just found those
common live things flopping on the dining-room floor. I reassured her and
sent her away, saying I would look about myself. I went into the studio;
there was nothing there but my canvases and some casts, except the marble
of the Easter lily. I saw it on a table across the room. Then I strode
angrily over to it. But the flower I lifted from the table was fresh and
fragile and filled the air with perfume.

Then suddenly I comprehended, and sprang through the hall-way to the
marble room. The doors flew open, the sunlight streamed into my face, and
through it, in a heavenly glory, the Madonna smiled, as Geneviève lifted
her flushed face from her marble couch and opened her sleepy eyes.

","Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places. For them are the catacombs of Ptolemais, and the carven mausolea of the nightmare countries. They climb to the moonlit towers of ruined Rhine castles, and falter down black cobwebbed steps beneath the scattered stones of forgotten cities in Asia. The haunted wood and the desolate mountain are their shrines, and they linger around the sinister monoliths on uninhabited islands. But the true epicure in the terrible, to whom a new thrill of unutterable ghastliness is the chief end and justification of existence, esteems most of all the ancient, lonely farmhouses of backwoods New England; for there the dark elements of strength, solitude, grotesqueness, and ignorance combine to form the perfection of the hideous.
      Most horrible of all sights are the little unpainted wooden houses remote from travelled ways, usually squatted upon some damp, grassy slope or leaning against some gigantic outcropping of rock. Two hundred years and more they have leaned or squatted there, while the vines have crawled and the trees have swelled and spread. They are almost hidden now in lawless luxuriances of green and guardian shrouds of shadow; but the small-paned windows still stare shockingly, as if blinking through a lethal stupor which wards off madness by dulling the memory of unutterable things.
      In such houses have dwelt generations of strange people, whose like the world has never seen. Seized with a gloomy and fanatical belief which exiled them from their kind, their ancestors sought the wilderness for freedom. There the scions of a conquering race indeed flourished free from the restrictions of their fellows, but cowered in an appalling slavery to the dismal phantasms of their own minds. Divorced from the enlightenment of civilisation, the strength of these Puritans turned into singular channels; and in their isolation, morbid self-repression, and struggle for life with relentless Nature, there came to them dark furtive traits from the prehistoric depths of their cold Northern heritage. By necessity practical and by philosophy stern, these folk were not beautiful in their sins. Erring as all mortals must, they were forced by their rigid code to seek concealment above all else; so that they came to use less and less taste in what they concealed. Only the silent, sleepy, staring houses in the backwoods can tell all that has lain hidden since the early days; and they are not communicative, being loath to shake off the drowsiness which helps them forget. Sometimes one feels that it would be merciful to tear down these houses, for they must often dream.
      It was to a time-battered edifice of this description that I was driven one afternoon in November, 1896, by a rain of such chilling copiousness that any shelter was preferable to exposure. I had been travelling for some time amongst the people of the Miskatonic Valley in quest of certain genealogical data; and from the remote, devious, and problematical nature of my course, had deemed it convenient to employ a bicycle despite the lateness of the season. Now I found myself upon an apparently abandoned road which I had chosen as the shortest cut to Arkham; overtaken by the storm at a point far from any town, and confronted with no refuge save the antique and repellent wooden building which blinked with bleared windows from between two huge leafless elms near the foot of a rocky hill. Distant though it was from the remnant of a road, the house none the less impressed me unfavourably the very moment I espied it. Honest, wholesome structures do not stare at travellers so slyly and hauntingly, and in my genealogical researches I had encountered legends of a century before which biassed me against places of this kind. Yet the force of the elements was such as to overcome my scruples, and I did not hesitate to wheel my machine up the weedy rise to the closed door which seemed at once so suggestive and secretive.
      I had somehow taken it for granted that the house was abandoned, yet as I approached it I was not so sure; for though the walks were indeed overgrown with weeds, they seemed to retain their nature a little too well to argue complete desertion. Therefore instead of trying the door I knocked, feeling as I did so a trepidation I could scarcely explain. As I waited on the rough, mossy rock which served as a doorstep, I glanced at the neighbouring windows and the panes of the transom above me, and noticed that although old, rattling, and almost opaque with dirt, they were not broken. The building, then, must still be inhabited, despite its isolation and general neglect. However, my rapping evoked no response, so after repeating the summons I tried the rusty latch and found the door unfastened. Inside was a little vestibule with walls from which the plaster was falling, and through the doorway came a faint but peculiarly hateful odour. I entered, carrying my bicycle, and closed the door behind me. Ahead rose a narrow staircase, flanked by a small door probably leading to the cellar, while to the left and right were closed doors leading to rooms on the ground floor.
      Leaning my cycle against the wall I opened the door at the left, and crossed into a small low-ceiled chamber but dimly lighted by its two dusty windows and furnished in the barest and most primitive possible way. It appeared to be a kind of sitting-room, for it had a table and several chairs, and an immense fireplace above which ticked an antique clock on a mantel. Books and papers were very few, and in the prevailing gloom I could not readily discern the titles. What interested me was the uniform air of archaism as displayed in every visible detail. Most of the houses in this region I had found rich in relics of the past, but here the antiquity was curiously complete; for in all the room I could not discover a single article of definitely post-revolutionary date. Had the furnishings been less humble, the place would have been a collector’s paradise.
      As I surveyed this quaint apartment, I felt an increase in that aversion first excited by the bleak exterior of the house. Just what it was that I feared or loathed, I could by no means define; but something in the whole atmosphere seemed redolent of unhallowed age, of unpleasant crudeness, and of secrets which should be forgotten. I felt disinclined to sit down, and wandered about examining the various articles which I had noticed. The first object of my curiosity was a book of medium size lying upon the table and presenting such an antediluvian aspect that I marvelled at beholding it outside a museum or library. It was bound in leather with metal fittings, and was in an excellent state of preservation; being altogether an unusual sort of volume to encounter in an abode so lowly. When I opened it to the title page my wonder grew even greater, for it proved to be nothing less rare than Pigafetta’s account of the Congo region, written in Latin from the notes of the sailor Lopez and printed at Frankfort in 1598. I had often heard of this work, with its curious illustrations by the brothers De Bry, hence for a moment forgot my uneasiness in my desire to turn the pages before me. The engravings were indeed interesting, drawn wholly from imagination and careless descriptions, and represented negroes with white skins and Caucasian features; nor would I soon have closed the book had not an exceedingly trivial circumstance upset my tired nerves and revived my sensation of disquiet. What annoyed me was merely the persistent way in which the volume tended to fall open of itself at Plate XII, which represented in gruesome detail a butcher’s shop of the cannibal Anziques. I experienced some shame at my susceptibility to so slight a thing, but the drawing nevertheless disturbed me, especially in connexion with some adjacent passages descriptive of Anzique gastronomy.
      I had turned to a neighbouring shelf and was examining its meagre literary contents—an eighteenth-century Bible, a Pilgrim’s Progress of like period, illustrated with grotesque woodcuts and printed by the almanack-maker Isaiah Thomas, the rotting bulk of Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana, and a few other books of evidently equal age—when my attention was aroused by the unmistakable sound of walking in the room overhead. At first astonished and startled, considering the lack of response to my recent knocking at the door, I immediately afterward concluded that the walker had just awakened from a sound sleep; and listened with less surprise as the footsteps sounded on the creaking stairs. The tread was heavy, yet seemed to contain a curious quality of cautiousness; a quality which I disliked the more because the tread was heavy. When I had entered the room I had shut the door behind me. Now, after a moment of silence during which the walker may have been inspecting my bicycle in the hall, I heard a fumbling at the latch and saw the panelled portal swing open again.
      In the doorway stood a person of such singular appearance that I should have exclaimed aloud but for the restraints of good breeding. Old, white-bearded, and ragged, my host possessed a countenance and physique which inspired equal wonder and respect. His height could not have been less than six feet, and despite a general air of age and poverty he was stout and powerful in proportion. His face, almost hidden by a long beard which grew high on the cheeks, seemed abnormally ruddy and less wrinkled than one might expect; while over a high forehead fell a shock of white hair little thinned by the years. His blue eyes, though a trifle bloodshot, seemed inexplicably keen and burning. But for his horrible unkemptness the man would have been as distinguished-looking as he was impressive. This unkemptness, however, made him offensive despite his face and figure. Of what his clothing consisted I could hardly tell, for it seemed to me no more than a mass of tatters surmounting a pair of high, heavy boots; and his lack of cleanliness surpassed description.
      The appearance of this man, and the instinctive fear he inspired, prepared me for something like enmity; so that I almost shuddered through surprise and a sense of uncanny incongruity when he motioned me to a chair and addressed me in a thin, weak voice full of fawning respect and ingratiating hospitality. His speech was very curious, an extreme form of Yankee dialect I had thought long extinct; and I studied it closely as he sat down opposite me for conversation.
      “Ketched in the rain, be ye?” he greeted. “Glad ye was nigh the haouse en’ hed the sense ta come right in. I calc’late I was asleep, else I’d a heerd ye—I ain’t as young as I uster be, an’ I need a paowerful sight o’ naps naowadays. Trav’lin’ fur? I hain’t seed many folks ’long this rud sence they tuk off the Arkham stage.”
      I replied that I was going to Arkham, and apologised for my rude entry into his domicile, whereupon he continued.
      “Glad ta see ye, young Sir—new faces is scurce arount here, an’ I hain’t got much ta cheer me up these days. Guess yew hail from Bosting, don’t ye? I never ben thar, but I kin tell a taown man when I see ’im—we hed one fer deestrick schoolmaster in ’eighty-four, but he quit suddent an’ no one never heerd on ’im sence—” Here the old man lapsed into a kind of chuckle, and made no explanation when I questioned him. He seemed to be in an aboundingly good humour, yet to possess those eccentricities which one might guess from his grooming. For some time he rambled on with an almost feverish geniality, when it struck me to ask him how he came by so rare a book as Pigafetta’s Regnum Congo. The effect of this volume had not left me, and I felt a certain hesitancy in speaking of it; but curiosity overmastered all the vague fears which had steadily accumulated since my first glimpse of the house. To my relief, the question did not seem an awkward one; for the old man answered freely and volubly.
      “Oh, thet Afriky book? Cap’n Ebenezer Holt traded me thet in ’sixty-eight—him as was kilt in the war.” Something about the name of Ebenezer Holt caused me to look up sharply. I had encountered it in my genealogical work, but not in any record since the Revolution. I wondered if my host could help me in the task at which I was labouring, and resolved to ask him about it later on. He continued.
      “Ebenezer was on a Salem merchantman for years, an’ picked up a sight o’ queer stuff in every port. He got this in London, I guess—he uster like ter buy things at the shops. I was up ta his haouse onct, on the hill, tradin’ hosses, when I see this book. I relished the picters, so he give it in on a swap. ’Tis a queer book—here, leave me git on my spectacles—” The old man fumbled among his rags, producing a pair of dirty and amazingly antique glasses with small octagonal lenses and steel bows. Donning these, he reached for the volume on the table and turned the pages lovingly.
      “Ebenezer cud read a leetle o’ this—’tis Latin—but I can’t. I hed two er three schoolmasters read me a bit, and Passon Clark, him they say got draownded in the pond—kin yew make anything outen it?” I told him that I could, and translated for his benefit a paragraph near the beginning. If I erred, he was not scholar enough to correct me; for he seemed childishly pleased at my English version. His proximity was becoming rather obnoxious, yet I saw no way to escape without offending him. I was amused at the childish fondness of this ignorant old man for the pictures in a book he could not read, and wondered how much better he could read the few books in English which adorned the room. This revelation of simplicity removed much of the ill-defined apprehension I had felt, and I smiled as my host rambled on:
      “Queer haow picters kin set a body thinkin’. Take this un here near the front. Hev yew ever seed trees like thet, with big leaves a-floppin’ over an’ daown? And them men—them can’t be niggers—they dew beat all. Kinder like Injuns, I guess, even ef they be in Afriky. Some o’ these here critters looks like monkeys, or half monkeys an’ half men, but I never heerd o’ nothing like this un.” Here he pointed to a fabulous creature of the artist, which one might describe as a sort of dragon with the head of an alligator.
      “But naow I’ll shew ye the best un—over here nigh the middle—” The old man’s speech grew a trifle thicker and his eyes assumed a brighter glow; but his fumbling hands, though seemingly clumsier than before, were entirely adequate to their mission. The book fell open, almost of its own accord and as if from frequent consultation at this place, to the repellent twelfth plate shewing a butcher’s shop amongst the Anzique cannibals. My sense of restlessness returned, though I did not exhibit it. The especially bizarre thing was that the artist had made his Africans look like white men—the limbs and quarters hanging about the walls of the shop were ghastly, while the butcher with his axe was hideously incongruous. But my host seemed to relish the view as much as I disliked it.
      “What d’ye think o’ this—ain’t never see the like hereabouts, eh? When I see this I telled Eb Holt, ‘That’s suthin’ ta stir ye up an’ make yer blood tickle!’ When I read in Scripter about slayin’—like them Midianites was slew—I kinder think things, but I ain’t got no picter of it. Here a body kin see all they is to it—I s’pose ’tis sinful, but ain’t we all born an’ livin’ in sin?—Thet feller bein’ chopped up gives me a tickle every time I look at ’im—I hev ta keep lookin’ at ’im—see whar the butcher cut off his feet? Thar’s his head on thet bench, with one arm side of it, an’ t’other arm’s on the graound side o’ the meat block.”
      As the man mumbled on in his shocking ecstasy the expression on his hairy, spectacled face became indescribable, but his voice sank rather than mounted. My own sensations can scarcely be recorded. All the terror I had dimly felt before rushed upon me actively and vividly, and I knew that I loathed the ancient and abhorrent creature so near me with an infinite intensity. His madness, or at least his partial perversion, seemed beyond dispute. He was almost whispering now, with a huskiness more terrible than a scream, and I trembled as I listened.
      “As I says, ’tis queer haow picters sets ye thinkin’. D’ye know, young Sir, I’m right sot on this un here. Arter I got the book off Eb I uster look at it a lot, especial when I’d heerd Passon Clark rant o’ Sundays in his big wig. Onct I tried suthin’ funny—here, young Sir, don’t git skeert—all I done was ter look at the picter afore I kilt the sheep for market—killin’ sheep was kinder more fun arter lookin’ at it—” The tone of the old man now sank very low, sometimes becoming so faint that his words were hardly audible. I listened to the rain, and to the rattling of the bleared, small-paned windows, and marked a rumbling of approaching thunder quite unusual for the season. Once a terrific flash and peal shook the frail house to its foundations, but the whisperer seemed not to notice it.
      “Killin’ sheep was kinder more fun—but d’ye know, ’twan’t quite satisfyin’. Queer haow a cravin’ gits a holt on ye— As ye love the Almighty, young man, don’t tell nobody, but I swar ter Gawd thet picter begun ta make me hungry fer victuals I couldn’t raise nor buy—here, set still, what’s ailin’ ye?—I didn’t do nothin’, only I wondered haow ’twud be ef I did— They say meat makes blood an’ flesh, an’ gives ye new life, so I wondered ef ’twudn’t make a man live longer an’ longer ef ’twas more the same—” But the whisperer never continued. The interruption was not produced by my fright, nor by the rapidly increasing storm amidst whose fury I was presently to open my eyes on a smoky solitude of blackened ruins. It was produced by a very simple though somewhat unusual happening.
      The open book lay flat between us, with the picture staring repulsively upward. As the old man whispered the words “more the same” a tiny spattering impact was heard, and something shewed on the yellowed paper of the upturned volume. I thought of the rain and of a leaky roof, but rain is not red. On the butcher’s shop of the Anzique cannibals a small red spattering glistened picturesquely, lending vividness to the horror of the engraving. The old man saw it, and stopped whispering even before my expression of horror made it necessary; saw it and glanced quickly toward the floor of the room he had left an hour before. I followed his glance, and beheld just above us on the loose plaster of the ancient ceiling a large irregular spot of wet crimson which seemed to spread even as I viewed it. I did not shriek or move, but merely shut my eyes. A moment later came the titanic thunderbolt of thunderbolts; blasting that accursed house of unutterable secrets and bringing the oblivion which alone saved my mind.",False
"I can hardly describe the mood in which I was left by this harrowing episode--an episode at once mad and pitiful, grotesque and terrifying. The grocery boy had prepared me for it, yet the reality left me none the less bewildered and disturbed. Puerile though the story was, old Zadok's insane earnestness and horror had communicated to me a mounting unrest which joined with my earlier sense of loathing for the town and its blight of intangible shadow.

Later I might sift the tale and extract some nucleus of historic allegory; just now I wished to put it out of my head. The hour grown perilously late--my watch said 7:15, and the Arkham bus left Town Square at eight--so I tried to give my thoughts as neutral and practical a cast as possible, meanwhile walking rapidly through the deserted streets of gaping roofs and leaning houses toward the hotel where I had checked my valise and would find my bus.

Though the golden light of late afternoon gave the ancient roofs and decrepit chimneys an air of mystic loveliness and peace, I could not help glancing over my shoulder now and then. I would surely be very glad to get out of malodorous and fear-shadowed Innsmouth, and wished there were some other vehicle than the bus driven by that sinister-looking fellow Sargent. Yet I did not hurry too precipitately, for there were architectural details worth viewing at every silent corner; and I could easily, I calculated, cover the necessary distance in a half-hour.

Studying the grocery youth's map and seeking a route I had not traversed before, I chose Marsh Street instead of State for my approach to Town Square. Near the corner of Fall Street I began to see scattered groups of furtive whisperers, and when I finally reached the Square I saw that almost all the loiterers were congregated around the door of the Gilman House. It seemed as if many bulging, watery, unwinking eyes looked oddly at me as I claimed my valise in the lobby, and I hoped that none of these unpleasant creatures would be my fellow-passengers on the coach.

The bus, rather early, rattled in with three passengers somewhat before eight, and an evil-looking fellow on the sidewalk muttered a few indistinguishable words to the driver. Sargent threw out a mail-bag and a roll of newspapers, and entered the hotel; while the passengers--the same men whom I had seen arriving in Newburyport that morning--shambled to the sidewalk and exchanged some faint guttural words with a loafer in a language I could have sworn was not English. I boarded the empty coach and took the seat I had taken before, but was hardly settled before Sargent re-appeared and began mumbling in a throaty voice of peculiar repulsiveness.

I was, it appeared, in very bad luck. There had been something wrong with the engine, despite the excellent time made from Newburyport, and the bus could not complete the journey to Arkham. No, it could not possibly be repaired that night, nor was there any other way of getting transportation out of Innsmouth either to Arkham or elsewhere. Sargent was sorry, but I would have to stop over at the Gilman. Probably the clerk would make the price easy for me, but there was nothing else to do. Almost dazed by this sudden obstacle, and violently dreading the fall of night in this decaying and half-unlighted town, I left the bus and reentered the hotel lobby; where the sullen queer-looking night clerk told me I could have Room 428 on next the top floor--large, but without running water--for a dollar.

Despite what I had heard of this hotel in Newburyport, I signed the register, paid my dollar, let the clerk take my valise, and followed that sour, solitary attendant up three creaking flights of stairs past dusty corridors which seemed wholly devoid of life. My room was a dismal rear one with two windows and bare, cheap furnishings, overlooked a dingy court-yard otherwise hemmed in by low, deserted brick blocks, and commanded a view of decrepit westward-stretching roofs with a marshy countryside beyond. At the end of the corridor was a bathroom--a discouraging relique with ancient marble bowl, tin tub, faint electric light, and musty wooded paneling around all the plumbing fixtures.

It being still daylight, I descended to the Square and looked around for a dinner of some sort; noticing as I did so the strange glances I received from the unwholesome loafers. Since the grocery was closed, I was forced to patronise the restaurant I had shunned before; a stooped, narrow-headed man with staring, unwinking eyes, and a flat-nosed wench with unbelievably thick, clumsy hands being in attendance. The service was all of the counter type, and it relieved me to find that much was evidently served from cans and packages. A bowl of vegetable soup with crackers was enough for me, and I soon headed back for my cheerless room at the Gilman; getting a evening paper and a fly-specked magazine from the evil-visaged clerk at the rickety stand beside his desk.

As twilight deepened I turned on the one feeble electric bulb over the cheap, iron-framed bed, and tried as best I could to continue the reading I had begun. I felt it advisable to keep my mind wholesomely occupied, for it would not do to brood over the abnormalities of this ancient, blight-shadowed town while I was still within its borders. The insane yarn I had heard from the aged drunkard did not promise very pleasant dreams, and I felt I must keep the image of his wild, watery eyes as far as possible from my imagination.

Also, I must not dwell on what that factory inspector had told the Newburyport ticket-agent about the Gilman House and the voices of its nocturnal tenants--not on that, nor on the face beneath the tiara in the black church doorway; the face for whose horror my conscious mind could not account. It would perhaps have been easier to keep my thoughts from disturbing topics had the room not been so gruesomely musty. As it was, the lethal mustiness blended hideously with the town's general fishy odour and persistently focussed one's fancy on death and decay.

Another thing that disturbed me was the absence of a bolt on the door of my room. One had been there, as marks clearly shewed, but there were signs of recent removal. No doubt it had been out of order, like so many other things in this decrepit edifice. In my nervousness I looked around and discovered a bolt on the clothes press which seemed to be of the same size, judging from the marks, as the one formerly on the door. To gain a partial relief from the general tension I busied myself by transferring this hardware to the vacant place with the aid of a handy three-in-one device including a screwdriver which I kept on my key-ring. The bolt fitted perfectly, and I was somewhat relieved when I knew that I could shoot it firmly upon retiring. Not that I had any real apprehension of its need, but that any symbol of security was welcome in an environment of this kind. There were adequate bolts on the two lateral doors to connecting rooms, and these I proceeded to fasten.

I did not undress, but decided to read till I was sleepy and then lie down with only my coat, collar, and shoes off. Taking a pocket flash light from my valise, I placed it in my trousers, so that I could read my watch if I woke up later in the dark. Drowsiness, however, did not come; and when I stopped to analyse my thoughts I found to my disquiet that I was really unconsciously listening for something--listening for something which I dreaded but could not name. That inspector's story must have worked on my imagination more deeply than I had suspected. Again I tried to read, but found that I made no progress.

After a time I seemed to hear the stairs and corridors creak at intervals as if with footsteps, and wondered if the other rooms were beginning to fill up. There were no voices, however, and it struck me that there was something subtly furtive about the creaking. I did not like it, and debated whether I had better try to sleep at all. This town had some queer people, and there had undoubtedly been several disappearances. Was this one of those inns where travelers were slain for their money? Surely I had no look of excessive prosperity. Or were the towns folk really so resentful about curious visitors? Had my obvious sightseeing, with its frequent map-consultations, aroused unfavorable notice. It occurred to me that I must be in a highly nervous state to let a few random creakings set me off speculating in this fashion--but I regretted none the less that I was unarmed.

At length, feeling a fatigue which had nothing of drowsiness in it, I bolted the newly outfitted hall door, turned off the light, and threw myself down on the hard, uneven bed--coat, collar, shoes, and all. In the darkness every faint noise of the night seemed magnified, and a flood of doubly unpleasant thoughts swept over me. I was sorry I had put out the light, yet was too tired to rise and turn it on again. Then, after a long, dreary interval, and prefaced by a fresh creaking of stairs and corridor, there came that soft, damnably unmistakable sound which seemed like a malign fulfillment of all my apprehensions. Without the least shadow of a doubt, the lock of my door was being tried--cautiously, furtively, tentatively--with a key.

My sensations upon recognising this sign of actual peril were perhaps less rather than more tumultuous because of my previous vague fears. I had been, albeit without definite reason, instinctively on my guard--and that was to my advantage in the new and real crisis, whatever it might turn out to be. Nevertheless the change in the menace from vague premonition to immediate reality was a profound shock, and fell upon me with the force of a genuine blow. It never once occurred to me that the fumbling might be a mere mistake. Malign purpose was all I could think of, and I kept deathly quiet, awaiting the would-be intruder's next move.

After a time the cautious rattling ceased, and I heard the room to the north entered with a pass-key. Then the lock of the connecting door to my room was softly tried. The bolt held, of course, and I heard the floor creak as the prowler left the room. After a moment there came another soft rattling, and I knew that the room to the south of me was being entered. Again a furtive trying of a bolted connecting door, and again a receding creaking. This time the creaking went along the hall and down the stairs, so I knew that the prowler had realised the bolted condition of my doors and was giving up his attempt for a greater or lesser time, as the future would shew.

The readiness with which I fell into a plan of action proves that I must have been subconsciously fearing some menace and considering possible avenues of escape for hours. From the first I felt that the unseen fumbler meant a danger not to be met or dealt with, but only to be fled from as precipitately as possible. The one thing to do was to get out of that hotel alive as quickly as I could, and through some channel other than the front stairs and lobby.

Rising softly and throwing my flashlight on the switch, I sought to light the bulb over my bed in order to choose and pocket some belongings for a swift, valiseless flight. Nothing, however, happened; and I saw that the power had been cut off. Clearly, some cryptic, evil movement was afoot on a large scale--just what, I could not say. As I stood pondering with my hand on the now useless switch I heard a muffled creaking on the floor below, and thought I could barely distinguish voices in conversation. A moment later I felt less sure that the deeper sounds were voices, since the apparent hoarse barkings and loose-syllabled croakings bore so little resemblance to recognized human speech. Then I thought with renewed force of what the factory inspector had heard in the night in this mouldering and pestilential building.

Having filled my pockets with the flashlight's aid, I put on my hat and tiptoed to the windows to consider chances of descent. Despite the state's safety regulations there was no fire escape on this side of the hotel, and I saw that my windows commanded only a sheer three story drop to the cobbled courtyard. On the right and left, however, some ancient brick business blocks abutted on the hotel; their slant roofs coming up to a reasonable jumping distance from my fourth-story level. To reach either of these lines of buildings I would have to be in a room two from my own--in one case on the north and in the other case on the south--and my mind instantly set to work what chances I had of making the transfer.

I could not, I decided, risk an emergence into the corridor; where my footsteps would surely be heard, and where the difficulties of entering the desired room would be insuperable. My progress, if it was to be made at all, would have to be through the less solidly-built connecting doors of the rooms; the locks and bolts of which I would have to force violently, using my shoulder as a battering-ram whenever they were set against me. This, I thought, would be possible owing to the rickety nature of the house and its fixtures; but I realised I could not do it noiselessly. I would have to count on sheer speed, and the chance of getting to a window before any hostile forces became coordinated enough to open the right door toward me with a pass-key. My own outer door I reinforced by pushing the bureau against it--little by little, in order to make a minimum of sound.

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

Gathering from the grocery boy's map that the best route out of town was southward, I glanced first at the connecting door on the south side of the room. It was designed to open in my direction, hence I saw--after drawing the bolt and finding other fastening in place--it was not a favorable one for forcing. Accordingly abandoning it as a route, I cautiously moved the bedstead against it to hamper any attack which might be made on it later from the next room. The door on the north was hung to open away from me, and this--though a test proved it to be locked or bolted from the other side--I knew must be my route. If I could gain the roofs of the buildings in Paine Street and descend successfully to the ground level, I might perhaps dart through the courtyard and the adjacent or opposite building to Washington or Bates--or else emerge in Paine and edge around southward into Washington. In any case, I would aim to strike Washington somehow and get quickly out of the Town Square region. My preference would be to avoid Paine, since the fire station there might be open all night.

As I thought of these things I looked out over the squalid sea of decaying roofs below me, now brightened by the beams of a moon not much past full. On the right the black gash of the river-gorge clove the panorama; abandoned factories and railway station clinging barnacle-like to its sides. Beyond it the rusted railway and the Rowley road led off through a flat marshy terrain dotted with islets of higher and dryer scrub-grown land. On the left the creek-threaded country-side was nearer, the narrow road to Ipswich gleaming white in the moonlight. I could not see from my side of the hotel the southward route toward Arkham which I had determined to take.

I was irresolutely speculating on when I had better attack the northward door, and on how I could least audibly manage it, when I noticed that the vague noises underfoot had given place to a fresh and heavier creaking of the stairs. A wavering flicker of light shewed through my transom, and the boards of the corridor began to groan with a ponderous load. Muffled sounds of possible vocal origin approached, and at length a firm knock came at my outer door.

For a moment I simply held my breath and waited. Eternities seemed to elapse, and the nauseous fishy odour of my environment seemed to mount suddenly and spectacularly. Then the knocking was repeated--continuously, and with growing insistence. I knew that the time for action had come, and forthwith drew the bolt of the northward connecting door, bracing myself for the task of battering it open. The knocking waxed louder, and I hoped that its volume would cover the sound of my efforts. At last beginning my attempt, I lunged again and again at the thin paneling with my left shoulder, heedless of shock or pain. The door resisted even more than I expected, but I did not give in. And all the while the clamour at the outer door increased.

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

For an instant I felt absolute despair, since my trapping in a chamber with no window egress seemed complete. A wave of almost abnormal horror swept over me, and invested with a terrible but unexplainable singularity the flashlight-glimpsed dust prints made by the intruder who had lately tried my door from this room. Then, with a dazed automatism which persisted despite hopelessness, I made for the next connecting door and performed the blind motion of pushing at it in an effort to get through and--granting that fastenings might be as providentially intact as in this second room--bolt the hall door beyond before the lock could be turned from outside.

Sheer fortunate chance gave me my reprieve--for the connecting door before me was not only unlocked but actually ajar. In a second I was though, and had my right knee and shoulder against a hall door which was visibly opening inward. My pressure took the opener off guard, for the thing shut as I pushed, so that I could slip the well-conditioned bolt as I had done with the other door. As I gained this respite I heard the battering at the two other doors abate, while a confused clatter came from the connecting door I had shielded with the bedstead. Evidently the bulk of my assailants had entered the southerly room and were massing in a lateral attack. But at the same moment a pass-key sounded in the next door to the north, and I knew that a nearer peril was at hand.

The northward connecting door was wide open, but there was no time to think about checking the already turning lock in the hall. All I could do was to shut and bolt the open connecting door, as well as its mate on the opposite side--pushing a bedstead against the one and a bureau against the other, and moving a washstand in front of the hall door. I must, I saw, trust to such makeshift barriers to shield me till I could get out the window and on the roof of the Paine Street block. But even in this acute moment my chief horror was something apart from the immediate weakness of my defenses. I was shuddering because not one of my pursuers, despite some hideous panting, grunting, and subdued barkings at odd intervals, was uttering an unmuffled or intelligible vocal sound.

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

Surveying the conditions, I chose the more southerly of the two windows as my avenue of escape; planning to land on the inner slope of the roof and make for the nearest sky-light. Once inside one of the decrepit brick structures I would have to reckon with pursuit; but I hoped to descend and dodge in and out of yawning doorways along the shadowed courtyard, eventually getting to Washington Street and slipping out of town toward the south.

The clatter at the northerly connecting door was now terrific, and I saw that the weak panelling was beginning to splinter. Obviously, the besiegers had brought some ponderous object into play as a battering-ram. The bedstead, however, still held firm; so that I had at least a faint chance of making good my escape. As I opened the window I noticed that it was flanked by heavy velour draperies suspended from a pole by brass rings, and also that there was a large projecting catch for the shutters on the exterior. Seeing a possible means of avoiding the dangerous jump, I yanked at the hangings and brought them down, pole and all; then quickly hooking two of the rings in the shutter catch and flinging the drapery outside. The heavy folds reached fully to the abutting roof, and I saw that the rings and catch would be likely to bear my weight. So, climbing out of the window and down the improvised rope ladder, I left behind me forever the morbid and horror-infested fabric of the Gilman House.

I landed safely on the loose slates of the steep roof, and succeeded in gaining the gaping black skylight without a slip. Glancing up at the window I had left, I observed it was still dark, though far across the crumbling chimneys to the north I could see lights ominously blazing in the Order of Dagon Hall, the Baptist church, and the Congregational church which I recalled so shiveringly. There had seemed to be no one in the courtyard below, and I hoped there would be a chance to get away before the spreading of a general alarm. Flashing my pocket lamp into the skylight, I saw that there were no steps down. The distance was slight, however, so I clambered over the brink and dropped; striking a dusty floor littered with crumbling boxes and barrels.

The place was ghoulish-looking, but I was past minding such impressions and made at once for the staircase revealed by my flashlight--after a hasty glance at my watch, which shewed the hour to be 2 a.m. The steps creaked, but seemed tolerably sound; and I raced down past a barnlike second storey to the ground floor. The desolation was complete, and only echoes answered my footfalls. At length I reached the lower hall at the end of which I saw a faint luminous rectangle marking the ruined Paine Street doorway. Heading the other way, I found the back door also open; and darted out and down five stone steps to the grass-grown cobblestones of the courtyard.

The moonbeams did not reach down here, but I could just see my way about without using the flashlight. Some of the windows on the Gilman House side were faintly glowing, and I thought I heard confused sounds within. Walking softly over to the Washington Street side I perceived several open doorways, and chose the nearest as my route out. The hallway inside was black, and when I reached the opposite end I saw that the street door was wedged immovably shut. Resolved to try another building, I groped my way back toward the courtyard, but stopped short when close to the doorway.

For out of an opened door in the Gilman House a large crowd of doubtful shapes was pouring--lanterns bobbing in the darkness, and horrible croaking voices exchanging low cries in what was certainly not English. The figures moved uncertainly, and I realized to my relief that they did not know where I had gone; but for all that they sent a shiver of horror through my frame. Their features were indistinguishable, but their crouching, shambling gait was abominably repellent. And worst of all, I perceived that one figure was strangely robed, and unmistakably surmounted by a tall tiara of a design altogether too familiar. As the figures spread throughout the courtyard, I felt my fears increase. Suppose I could find no egress from this building on the street side? The fishy odour was detestable, and I wondered I could stand it without fainting. Again groping toward the street, I opened a door off the hall and came upon an empty room with closely shuttered but sashless windows. Fumbling in the rays of my flashlight, I found I could open the shutters; and in another moment had climbed outside and was fully closing the aperture in its original manner.

I was now in Washington Street, and for the moment saw no living thing nor any light save that of the moon. From several directions in the distance, however, I could hear the sound of hoarse voices, of footsteps, and of a curious kind of pattering which did not sound quite like footsteps. Plainly I had no time to lose. The points of the compass were clear to me, and I was glad that all the street lights were turned off, as is often the custom on strongly moonlit nights in prosperous rural regions. Some of the sounds came from the south, yet I retained my design of escaping in that direction. There would, I knew, be plenty of deserted doorways to shelter me in case I met any person or group who looked like pursuers.

I walked rapidly, softly, and close to the ruined houses. While hatless and dishevelled after my arduous climb, I did not look especially noticeable; and stood a good chance of passing unheeded if forced to encounter any casual wayfarer.

At Bates Street I drew into a yawning vestibule while two shambling figures crossed in front of me, but was soon on my way again and approaching the open space where Eliot Street obliquely crosses Washington at the intersection of South. Though I had never seen this space, it had looked dangerous to me on the grocery youth's map; since the moonlight would have free play there. There was no use trying to evade it, for any alternative course would involve detours of possibly disastrous visibility and delaying effect. The only thing to do was to cross it boldly and openly; imitating the typical shamble of the Innsmouth folk as best I could, and trusting that no one--or at least no pursuer of mine--would be there.

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

The open space was, as I had expected, strongly moonlit; and I saw the remains of a parklike, iron-railed green in its center. Fortunately no one was about though a curious sort of buzz or roar seemed to be increasing in the direction of Town Square. South Street was very wide, leading directly down a slight declivity to the waterfront and commanding a long view out to sea; and I hoped that no one would be glancing up it from afar as I crossed in the bright moonlight.

My progress was unimpeded, and no fresh sound arose to hint that I had been spied. Glancing about me, I involuntarily let my pace slacken for a second to take in the sight of the sea, gorgeous in the burning moonlight at the street's end. Far out beyond the breakwater was the dim, dark line of Devil Reef, and as I glimpsed it I could not help thinking of all the hideous legends I had heard in the last twenty-four hours--legends which portrayed this ragged rock as a veritable gateway to realms of unfathomed horror and inconceivable abnormality.

Then, without warning, I saw the intermittent flashes of light on the distant reef. They were definite and unmistakable, and awaked in my mind a blind horror beyond all rational proportion. My muscles tightened for panic flight, held in only by a certain unconscious caution and half-hypnotic fascination. And to make matters worse, there now flashed forth from the lofty cupola of the Gilman House, which loomed up to the northeast behind me, a series of analogous though differently spaced gleams which could be nothing less than an answering signal.

Controlling my muscles, and realising afresh--how plainly visible I was, I resumed my brisker and feignedly shambling pace; though keeping my eyes on that hellish and ominous reef as long as the opening of South Street gave me a seaward view. What the whole proceeding meant, I could not imagine; unless it involved some strange rite connected with Devil Reef, or unless some party had landed from a ship on that sinister rock. I now bent to the left around the ruinous green; still gazing toward the ocean as it blazed in the spectral summer moonlight, and watching the cryptical flashing of those nameless, unexplainable beacons.

It was then that the most horrible impression of all was borne in upon me--the impression which destroyed my last vestige of self-control and sent me running frantically southward past the yawning black doorways and fishily staring windows of that deserted nightmare street. For at a closer glance I saw that the moonlit waters between the reef and the shore were far from empty. They were alive with a teeming horde of shapes swimming inward toward the town; and even at my vast distance and in my single moment of perception I could tell that the bobbing heads and flailing arms were alien and aberrant in a way scarcely to be expressed or consciously formulated.

My frantic running ceased before I had covered a block, for at my left I began to hear something like the hue and cry of organised pursuit. There were footsteps and guttural sounds, and a rattling motor wheezed south along Federal Street. In a second all my plans were utterly changed--for if the southward highway were blocked ahead of me, I must clearly find another egress from Innsmouth. I paused and drew into a gaping doorway, reflecting how lucky I was to have left the moonlit open space before these pursuers came down the parallel street.

A second reflection was less comforting. Since the pursuit was down another street, it was plain that the party was not following me directly. It had not seen me, but was simply obeying a general plan of cutting off my escape. This, however, implied that all roads leading out of Innsmouth were similarly patrolled; for the people could not have known what route I intended to take. If this were so, I would have to make my retreat across country away from any road; but how could I do that in view of the marshy and creek-riddled nature of all the surrounding region? For a moment my brain reeled--both from sheer hopelessness and from a rapid increase in the omnipresent fishy odour.

Then I thought of the abandoned railway to Rowley, whose solid line of ballasted, weed-grown earth still stretched off to the northwest from the crumbling station on the edge at the river-gorge. There was just a chance that the townsfolk would not think of that; since its briar-choked desertion made it half-impassable, and the unlikeliest of all avenues for a fugitive to choose. I had seen it clearly from my hotel window and knew about how it lay. Most of its earlier length was uncomfortably visible from the Rowley road, and from high places in the town itself; but one could perhaps crawl inconspicuously through the undergrowth. At any rate, it would form my only chance of deliverance, and there was nothing to do but try it.

Drawing inside the hall of my deserted shelter, I once more consulted the grocery boy's map with the aid of the flashlight. The immediate problem was how to reach the ancient railway; and I now saw that the safest course was ahead to Babson Street; then west to Lafayette--there edging around but not crossing an open space homologous to the one I had traversed--and subsequently back northward and westward in a zigzagging line through Lafayette, Bates, Adam, and Bank streets--the latter skirting the river gorge--to the abandoned and dilapidated station I had seen from my window. My reason for going ahead to Babson was that I wished neither to recross the earlier open space nor to begin my westward course along a cross street as broad as South.

Starting once more, I crossed the street to the right-hand side in order to edge around into Babson as inconspicuously as possible. Noises still continued in Federal Street, and as I glanced behind me I thought I saw a gleam of light near the building through which I had escaped. Anxious to leave Washington Street, I broke into a quiet dogtrot, trusting to luck not to encounter any observing eye. Next the corner of Babson Street I saw to my alarm that one of the houses was still inhabited, as attested by curtains at the window; but there were no lights within, and I passed it without disaster.

In Babson Street, which crossed Federal and might thus reveal me to the searchers, I clung as closely as possible to the sagging, uneven buildings; twice pausing in a doorway as the noises behind me momentarily increased. The open space ahead shone wide and desolate under the moon, but my route would not force me to cross it. During my second pause I began to detect a fresh distribution of vague sounds; and upon looking cautiously out from cover beheld a motor car darting across the open space, bound outward along Eliot Street, which there intersects both Babson and Lafayette.

As I watched--choked by a sudden rise in the fishy odour after a short abatement--I saw a band of uncouth, crouching shapes loping and shambling in the same direction; and knew that this must be the party guarding the Ipswich road, since that highway forms an extension of Eliot Street. Two of the figures I glimpsed were in voluminous robes, and one wore a peaked diadem which glistened whitely in the moonlight. The gait of this figure was so odd that it sent a chill through me--for it seemed to me the creature was almost hopping.

When the last of the band was out of sight I resumed my progress; darting around the corner into Lafayette Street, and crossing Eliot very hurriedly lest stragglers of the party be still advancing along that thoroughfare. I did hear some croaking and clattering sounds far off toward Town Square, but accomplished the passage without disaster. My greatest dread was in re-crossing broad and moonlit South Street--with its seaward view--and I had to nerve myself for the ordeal. Someone might easily be looking, and possible Eliot Street stragglers could not fail to glimpse me from either of two points. At the last moment I decided I had better slacken my trot and make the crossing as before in the shambling gait of an average Innsmouth native.

When the view of the water again opened out--this time on my right--I was half-determined not to look at it at all. I could not however, resist; but cast a sidelong glance as I carefully and imitatively shambled toward the protecting shadows ahead. There was no ship visible, as I had half-expected there would be. Instead, the first thing which caught my eye was a small rowboat pulling in toward the abandoned wharves and laden with some bulky, tarpaulin-covered object. Its rowers, though distantly and indistinctly seen, were of an especially repellent aspect. Several swimmers were still discernible; while on the far black reef I could see a faint, steady glow unlike the winking beacon visible before, and of a curious colour which I could not precisely identify. Above the slant roofs ahead and to the right there loomed the tall cupola of the Gilman House, but it was completely dark. The fishy odour, dispelled for a moment by some merciful breeze, now closed in again with maddening intensity.

I had not quite crossed the street when I heard a muttering band advancing along Washington from the north. As they reached the broad open space where I had had my first disquieting glimpse of the moonlit water I could see them plainly only a block away--and was horrified by the bestial abnormality of their faces and the doglike sub-humanness of their crouching gait. One man moved in a positively simian way, with long arms frequently touching the ground; while another figure--robed and tiaraed--seemed to progress in an almost hopping fashion. I judged this party to be the one I had seen in the Gilman's courtyard--the one, therefore, most closely on my trail. As some of the figures turned to look in my direction I was transfixed with fright, yet managed to preserve the casual, shambling gait I had assumed. To this day I do not know whether they saw me or not. If they did, my stratagem must have deceived them, for they passed on across the moonlit space without varying their course--meanwhile croaking and jabbering in some hateful guttural patois I could not identify.

Once more in shadow, I resumed my former dog-trot past the leaning and decrepit houses that stared blankly into the night. Having crossed to the western sidewalk I rounded the nearest corner into Bates Street where I kept close to the buildings on the southern side. I passed two houses shewing signs of habitation, one of which had faint lights in upper rooms, yet met with no obstacle. As I turned into Adams Street I felt measurably safer, but received a shook when a man reeled out of a black doorway directly in front of me. He proved, however, too hopelessly drunk to be a menace; so that I reached the dismal ruins of the Bank Street warehouses in safety.

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

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

The vast, barnlike length of the old bridge gleamed spectrally in the moonlight, and I saw that the ties were safe for at least a few feet within. Entering, I began to use my flashlight, and was almost knocked down by the cloud of bats that flapped past me. About half-way across there was a perilous gap in the ties which I feared for a moment would halt me; but in the end I risked a desperate jump which fortunately succeeded.

I was glad to see the moonlight again when I emerged from that macabre tunnel. The old tracks crossed River Street at grade, and at once veered off into a region increasingly rural and with less and less of Innsmouth's abhorrent fishy odour. Here the dense growth of weeds and briers hindered me and cruelly tore at my clothes, but I was none the less glad that they were there to give me concealment in case of peril. I knew that much of my route must be visible from the Rowley road.

The marshy region began very abruptly, with the single track on a low, grassy embankment where the weedy growth was somewhat thinner. Then came a sort of island of higher ground, where the line passed through a shallow open cut choked with bushes and brambles. I was very glad of this partial shelter, since at this point the Rowley road was uncomfortably near according to my window view. At the end of the cut it would cross the track and swerve off to a safer distance; but meanwhile I must be exceedingly careful. I was by this time thankfully certain that the railway itself was not patrolled.

Just before entering the cut I glanced behind me, but saw no pursuer. The ancient spires and roofs of decaying Innsmouth gleamed lovely and ethereal in the magic yellow moonlight, and I thought of how they must have looked in the old days before the shadow fell. Then, as my gaze circled inland from the town, something less tranquil arrested my notice and held me immobile for a second.

What I saw--or fancied I saw--was a disturbing suggestion of undulant motion far to the south; a suggestion which made me conclude that a very large horde must be pouring out of the city along the level Ipswich road. The distance was great and I could distinguish nothing in detail; but I did not at all like the look of that moving column. It undulated too much, and glistened too brightly in the rays of the now westering moon. There was a suggestion of sound, too, though the wind was blowing the other way--a suggestion of bestial scraping and bellowing even worse than the muttering of the parties I had lately overheard.

All sorts of unpleasant conjectures crossed my mind. I thought of those very extreme Innsmouth types said to be hidden in crumbling, centuried warrens near the waterfront; I thought, too, of those nameless swimmers I had seen. Counting the parties so far glimpsed, as well as those presumably covering other roads, the number of my pursuers must be strangely large for a town as depopulated as Innsmouth.

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

I had entered the brush-grown cut and was struggling along at a very slow pace when that damnable fishy odour again waxed dominant. Had the wind suddenly changed eastward, so that it blew in from the sea and over the town? It must have, I concluded, since I now began to hear shocking guttural murmurs from that hitherto silent direction. There was another sound, too--a kind of wholesale, colossal flopping or pattering which somehow called up images of the most detestable sort. It made me think illogically of that unpleasantly undulating column on the far-off Ipswich road.

And then both stench and sounds grew stronger, so that I paused shivering and grateful for the cut's protection. It was here, I recalled, that the Rowley road drew so close to the old railway before crossing westward and diverging. Something was coming along that road, and I must lie low till its passage and vanishment in the distance. Thank heaven these creatures employed no dogs for tracking--though perhaps that would have been impossible amidst the omnipresent regional odour. Crouched in the bushes of that sandy cleft I felt reasonably safe, even though I knew the searchers would have to cross the track in front of me not much more than a hundred yards away. I would be able to see them, but they could not, except by a malign miracle, see me.

All at once I began dreading to look at them as they passed. I saw the close moonlit space where they would surge by, and had curious thoughts about the irredeemable pollution of that space. They would perhaps be the worst of all Innsmouth types--something one would not care to remember.

The stench waxed overpowering, and the noises swelled to a bestial babel of croaking, baying and barking without the least suggestion of human speech. Were these indeed the voices of my pursuers? Did they have dogs after all? So far I had seen none of the lower animals in Innsmouth. That flopping or pattering was monstrous--I could not look upon the degenerate creatures responsible for it. I would keep my eyes shut till the sound receded toward the west. The horde was very close now--air foul with their hoarse snarlings, and the ground almost shaking with their alien-rhythmed footfalls. My breath nearly ceased to come, and I put every ounce of will-power into the task of holding my eyelids down.

I am not even yet willing to say whether what followed was a hideous actuality or only a nightmare hallucination. The later action of the government, after my frantic appeals, would tend to confirm it as a monstrous truth; but could not an hallucination have been repeated under the quasi-hypnotic spell of that ancient, haunted, and shadowed town? Such places have strange properties, and the legacy of insane legend might well have acted on more than one human imagination amidst those dead, stench-cursed streets and huddles of rotting roofs and crumbling steeples. Is it not possible that the germ of an actual contagious madness lurks in the depths of that shadow over Innsmouth? Who can be sure of reality after hearing things like the tale of old Zadok Allen? The government men never found poor Zadok, and have no conjectures to make as to what became of him. Where does madness leave off and reality begin? Is it possible that even my latest fear is sheer delusion?

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

I thought I was prepared for the worst, and I really ought to have been prepared considering what I had seen before.

My other pursuers had been accursedly abnormal--so should I not have been ready to face a strengthening of the abnormal element; to look upon forms in which there was no mixture of the normal at all? I did not open my eyes until the raucous clamour came loudly from a point obviously straight ahead. Then I knew that a long section of them must be plainly in sight where the sides of the cut flattened out and the road crossed the track--and I could no longer keep myself from sampling whatever horror that leering yellow moon might have to shew.

It was the end, for whatever remains to me of life on the surface of this earth, of every vestige of mental peace and confidence in the integrity of nature and of the human mind. Nothing that I could have imagined--nothing, even, that I could have gathered had I credited old Zadok's crazy tale in the most literal way--would be in any way comparable to the demoniac, blasphemous reality that I saw--or believe I saw. I have tried to hint what it was in order to postpone the horror of writing it down baldly. Can it be possible that this planet has actually spawned such things; that human eyes have truly seen, as objective flesh, what man has hitherto known only in febrile phantasy and tenuous legend?

And yet I saw them in a limitless stream--flopping, hopping, croaking, bleating--urging inhumanly through the spectral moonlight in a grotesque, malignant saraband of fantastic nightmare. And some of them had tall tiaras of that nameless whitish-gold metal...and some were strangely robed...and one, who led the way, was clad in a ghoulishly humped black coat and striped trousers, and had a man's felt hat perched on the shapeless thing that answered for a head.

I think their predominant colour was a greyish-green, though they had white bellies. They were mostly shiny and slippery, but the ridges of their backs were scaly. Their forms vaguely suggested the anthropoid, while their heads were the heads of fish, with prodigious bulging eyes that never closed. At the sides of their necks were palpitating gills, and their long paws were webbed. They hopped irregularly, sometimes on two legs and sometimes on four. I was somehow glad that they had no more than four limbs. Their croaking, baying voices, clearly used for articulate speech, held all the dark shades of expression which their staring faces lacked.

But for all of their monstrousness they were not unfamiliar to me. I knew too well what they must be--for was not the memory of the evil tiara at Newburyport still fresh? They were the blasphemous fish-frogs of the nameless design--living and horrible--and as I saw them I knew also of what that humped, tiaraed priest in the black church basement had fearsomely reminded me. Their number was past guessing. It seemed to me that there were limitless swarms of them and certainly my momentary glimpse could have shewn only the least fraction. In another instant everything was blotted out by a merciful fit of fainting; the first I had ever had.","Whether the dreams brought on the fever or the fever brought on the dreams Walter Gilman did not know. Behind everything crouched the brooding, festering horror of the ancient town, and of the mouldy, unhallowed garret gable where he wrote and studied and wrestled with figures and formulae when he was not tossing on the meagre iron bed. His ears were growing sensitive to a preternatural and intolerable degree, and he had long ago stopped the cheap mantel clock whose ticking had come to seem like a thunder of artillery. At night the subtle stirring of the black city outside, the sinister scurrying of rats in the wormy partitions, and the creaking of hidden timbers in the centuried house, were enough to give him a sense of strident pandemonium. The darkness always teemed with unexplained sound—and yet he sometimes shook with fear lest the noises he heard should subside and allow him to hear certain other, fainter, noises which he suspected were lurking behind them.
      He was in the changeless, legend-haunted city of Arkham, with its clustering gambrel roofs that sway and sag over attics where witches hid from the King’s men in the dark, olden days of the Province. Nor was any spot in that city more steeped in macabre memory than the gable room which harboured him—for it was this house and this room which had likewise harboured old Keziah Mason, whose flight from Salem Gaol at the last no one was ever able to explain. That was in 1692—the gaoler had gone mad and babbled of a small, white-fanged furry thing which scuttled out of Keziah’s cell, and not even Cotton Mather could explain the curves and angles smeared on the grey stone walls with some red, sticky fluid.
      Possibly Gilman ought not to have studied so hard. Non-Euclidean calculus and quantum physics are enough to stretch any brain; and when one mixes them with folklore, and tries to trace a strange background of multi-dimensional reality behind the ghoulish hints of the Gothic tales and the wild whispers of the chimney-corner, one can hardly expect to be wholly free from mental tension. Gilman came from Haverhill, but it was only after he had entered college in Arkham that he began to connect his mathematics with the fantastic legends of elder magic. Something in the air of the hoary town worked obscurely on his imagination. The professors at Miskatonic had urged him to slacken up, and had voluntarily cut down his course at several points. Moreover, they had stopped him from consulting the dubious old books on forbidden secrets that were kept under lock and key in a vault at the university library. But all these precautions came late in the day, so that Gilman had some terrible hints from the dreaded Necronomicon of Abdul Alhazred, the fragmentary Book of Eibon, and the suppressed Unaussprechlichen Kulten of von Junzt to correlate with his abstract formulae on the properties of space and the linkage of dimensions known and unknown.
      He knew his room was in the old Witch House—that, indeed, was why he had taken it. There was much in the Essex County records about Keziah Mason’s trial, and what she had admitted under pressure to the Court of Oyer and Terminer had fascinated Gilman beyond all reason. She had told Judge Hathorne of lines and curves that could be made to point out directions leading through the walls of space to other spaces beyond, and had implied that such lines and curves were frequently used at certain midnight meetings in the dark valley of the white stone beyond Meadow Hill and on the unpeopled island in the river. She had spoken also of the Black Man, of her oath, and of her new secret name of Nahab. Then she had drawn those devices on the walls of her cell and vanished.
      Gilman believed strange things about Keziah, and had felt a queer thrill on learning that her dwelling was still standing after more than 235 years. When he heard the hushed Arkham whispers about Keziah’s persistent presence in the old house and the narrow streets, about the irregular human tooth-marks left on certain sleepers in that and other houses, about the childish cries heard near May-Eve, and Hallowmass, about the stench often noted in the old house’s attic just after those dreaded seasons, and about the small, furry, sharp-toothed thing which haunted the mouldering structure and the town and nuzzled people curiously in the black hours before dawn, he resolved to live in the place at any cost. A room was easy to secure; for the house was unpopular, hard to rent, and long given over to cheap lodgings. Gilman could not have told what he expected to find there, but he knew he wanted to be in the building where some circumstance had more or less suddenly given a mediocre old woman of the seventeenth century an insight into mathematical depths perhaps beyond the utmost modern delvings of Planck, Heisenberg, Einstein, and de Sitter.
      He studied the timber and plaster walls for traces of cryptic designs at every accessible spot where the paper had peeled, and within a week managed to get the eastern attic room where Keziah was held to have practiced her spells. It had been vacant from the first—for no one had ever been willing to stay there long—but the Polish landlord had grown wary about renting it. Yet nothing whatever happened to Gilman till about the time of the fever. No ghostly Keziah flitted through the sombre halls and chambers, no small furry thing crept into his dismal eyrie to nuzzle him, and no record of the witch’s incantations rewarded his constant search. Sometimes he would take walks through shadowy tangles of unpaved musty-smelling lanes where eldritch brown houses of unknown age leaned and tottered and leered mockingly through narrow, small-paned windows. Here he knew strange things had happened once, and there was a faint suggestion behind the surface that everything of that monstrous past might not—at least in the darkest, narrowest, and most intricately crooked alleys—have utterly perished. He also rowed out twice to the ill-regarded island in the river, and made a sketch of the singular angles described by the moss-grown rows of grey standing stones whose origin was so obscure and immemorial.
      Gilman’s room was of good size but queerly irregular shape; the north wall slanting perceptibly inward from the outer to the inner end, while the low ceiling slanted gently downward in the same direction. Aside from an obvious rat-hole and the signs of other stopped-up ones, there was no access—nor any appearance of a former avenue of access—to the space which must have existed between the slanting wall and the straight outer wall on the house’s north side, though a view from the exterior shewed where a window had been boarded up at a very remote date. The loft above the ceiling—which must have had a slanting floor—was likewise inaccessible. When Gilman climbed up a ladder to the cobwebbed level loft above the rest of the attic he found vestiges of a bygone aperture tightly and heavily covered with ancient planking and secured by the stout wooden pegs common in colonial carpentry. No amount of persuasion, however, could induce the stolid landlord to let him investigate either of these two closed spaces.
      As time wore along, his absorption in the irregular wall and ceiling of his room increased; for he began to read into the odd angles a mathematical significance which seemed to offer vague clues regarding their purpose. Old Keziah, he reflected, might have had excellent reasons for living in a room with peculiar angles; for was it not through certain angles that she claimed to have gone outside the boundaries of the world of space we know? His interest gradually veered away from the unplumbed voids beyond the slanting surfaces, since it now appeared that the purpose of those surfaces concerned the side he was already on.
      The touch of brain-fever and the dreams began early in February. For some time, apparently, the curious angles of Gilman’s room had been having a strange, almost hypnotic effect on him; and as the bleak winter advanced he had found himself staring more and more intently at the corner where the down-slanting ceiling met the inward-slanting wall. About this period his inability to concentrate on his formal studies worried him considerably, his apprehensions about the mid-year examinations being very acute. But the exaggerated sense of hearing was scarcely less annoying. Life had become an insistent and almost unendurable cacophony, and there was that constant, terrifying impression of other sounds—perhaps from regions beyond life—trembling on the very brink of audibility. So far as concrete noises went, the rats in the ancient partitions were the worst. Sometimes their scratching seemed not only furtive but deliberate. When it came from beyond the slanting north wall it was mixed with a sort of dry rattling—and when it came from the century-closed loft above the slanting ceiling Gilman always braced himself as if expecting some horror which only bided its time before descending to engulf him utterly.
      The dreams were wholly beyond the pale of sanity, and Gilman felt that they must be a result, jointly, of his studies in mathematics and in folklore. He had been thinking too much about the vague regions which his formulae told him must lie beyond the three dimensions we know, and about the possibility that old Keziah Mason—guided by some influence past all conjecture—had actually found the gate to those regions. The yellowed county records containing her testimony and that of her accusers were so damnably suggestive of things beyond human experience—and the descriptions of the darting little furry object which served as her familiar were so painfully realistic despite their incredible details.
      That object—no larger than a good-sized rat and quaintly called by the townspeople “Brown Jenkin”—seemed to have been the fruit of a remarkable case of sympathetic herd-delusion, for in 1692 no less than eleven persons had testified to glimpsing it. There were recent rumours, too, with a baffling and disconcerting amount of agreement. Witnesses said it had long hair and the shape of a rat, but that its sharp-toothed, bearded face was evilly human while its paws were like tiny human hands. It took messages betwixt old Keziah and the devil, and was nursed on the witch’s blood—which it sucked like a vampire. Its voice was a kind of loathsome titter, and it could speak all languages. Of all the bizarre monstrosities in Gilman’s dreams, nothing filled him with greater panic and nausea than this blasphemous and diminutive hybrid, whose image flitted across his vision in a form a thousandfold more hateful than anything his waking mind had deduced from the ancient records and the modern whispers.
      Gilman’s dreams consisted largely in plunges through limitless abysses of inexplicably coloured twilight and bafflingly disordered sound; abysses whose material and gravitational properties, and whose relation to his own entity, he could not even begin to explain. He did not walk or climb, fly or swim, crawl or wriggle; yet always experienced a mode of motion partly voluntary and partly involuntary. Of his own condition he could not well judge, for sight of his arms, legs, and torso seemed always cut off by some odd disarrangement of perspective; but he felt that his physical organisation and faculties were somehow marvellously transmuted and obliquely projected—though not without a certain grotesque relationship to his normal proportions and properties.
      The abysses were by no means vacant, being crowded with indescribably angled masses of alien-hued substance, some of which appeared to be organic while others seemed inorganic. A few of the organic objects tended to awake vague memories in the back of his mind, though he could form no conscious idea of what they mockingly resembled or suggested. In the later dreams he began to distinguish separate categories into which the organic objects appeared to be divided, and which seemed to involve in each case a radically different species of conduct-pattern and basic motivation. Of these categories one seemed to him to include objects slightly less illogical and irrelevant in their motions than the members of the other categories.
      All the objects—organic and inorganic alike—were totally beyond description or even comprehension. Gilman sometimes compared the inorganic masses to prisms, labyrinths, clusters of cubes and planes, and Cyclopean buildings; and the organic things struck him variously as groups of bubbles, octopi, centipedes, living Hindoo idols, and intricate Arabesques roused into a kind of ophidian animation. Everything he saw was unspeakably menacing and horrible; and whenever one of the organic entities appeared by its motions to be noticing him, he felt a stark, hideous fright which generally jolted him awake. Of how the organic entities moved, he could tell no more than of how he moved himself. In time he observed a further mystery—the tendency of certain entities to appear suddenly out of empty space, or to disappear totally with equal suddenness. The shrieking, roaring confusion of sound which permeated the abysses was past all analysis as to pitch, timbre, or rhythm; but seemed to be synchronous with vague visual changes in all the indefinite objects, organic and inorganic alike. Gilman had a constant sense of dread that it might rise to some unbearable degree of intensity during one or another of its obscure, relentlessly inevitable fluctuations.
      But it was not in these vortices of complete alienage that he saw Brown Jenkin. That shocking little horror was reserved for certain lighter, sharper dreams which assailed him just before he dropped into the fullest depths of sleep. He would be lying in the dark fighting to keep awake when a faint lambent glow would seem to shimmer around the centuried room, shewing in a violet mist the convergence of angled planes which had seized his brain so insidiously. The horror would appear to pop out of the rat-hole in the corner and patter toward him over the sagging, wide-planked floor with evil expectancy in its tiny, bearded human face—but mercifully, this dream always melted away before the object got close enough to nuzzle him. It had hellishly long, sharp, canine teeth. Gilman tried to stop up the rat-hole every day, but each night the real tenants of the partitions would gnaw away the obstruction, whatever it might be. Once he had the landlord nail tin over it, but the next night the rats gnawed a fresh hole—in making which they pushed or dragged out into the room a curious little fragment of bone.
      Gilman did not report his fever to the doctor, for he knew he could not pass the examinations if ordered to the college infirmary when every moment was needed for cramming. As it was, he failed in Calculus D and Advanced General Psychology, though not without hope of making up lost ground before the end of the term. It was in March when the fresh element entered his lighter preliminary dreaming, and the nightmare shape of Brown Jenkin began to be companioned by the nebulous blur which grew more and more to resemble a bent old woman. This addition disturbed him more than he could account for, but finally he decided that it was like an ancient crone whom he had twice actually encountered in the dark tangle of lanes near the abandoned wharves. On those occasions the evil, sardonic, and seemingly unmotivated stare of the beldame had set him almost shivering—especially the first time, when an overgrown rat darting across the shadowed mouth of a neighbouring alley had made him think irrationally of Brown Jenkin. Now, he reflected, those nervous fears were being mirrored in his disordered dreams.
      That the influence of the old house was unwholesome, he could not deny; but traces of his early morbid interest still held him there. He argued that the fever alone was responsible for his nightly phantasies, and that when the touch abated he would be free from the monstrous visions. Those visions, however, were of abhorrent vividness and convincingness, and whenever he awaked he retained a vague sense of having undergone much more than he remembered. He was hideously sure that in unrecalled dreams he had talked with both Brown Jenkin and the old woman, and that they had been urging him to go somewhere with them and to meet a third being of greater potency.
      Toward the end of March he began to pick up in his mathematics, though other studies bothered him increasingly. He was getting an intuitive knack for solving Riemannian equations, and astonished Professor Upham by his comprehension of fourth-dimensional and other problems which had floored all the rest of the class. One afternoon there was a discussion of possible freakish curvatures in space, and of theoretical points of approach or even contact between our part of the cosmos and various other regions as distant as the farthest stars or the trans-galactic gulfs themselves—or even as fabulously remote as the tentatively conceivable cosmic units beyond the whole Einsteinian space-time continuum. Gilman’s handling of this theme filled everyone with admiration, even though some of his hypothetical illustrations caused an increase in the always plentiful gossip about his nervous and solitary eccentricity. What made the students shake their heads was his sober theory that a man might—given mathematical knowledge admittedly beyond all likelihood of human acquirement—step deliberately from the earth to any other celestial body which might lie at one of an infinity of specific points in the cosmic pattern.
      Such a step, he said, would require only two stages; first, a passage out of the three-dimensional sphere we know, and second, a passage back to the three-dimensional sphere at another point, perhaps one of infinite remoteness. That this could be accomplished without loss of life was in many cases conceivable. Any being from any part of three-dimensional space could probably survive in the fourth dimension; and its survival of the second stage would depend upon what alien part of three-dimensional space it might select for its re-entry. Denizens of some planets might be able to live on certain others—even planets belonging to other galaxies, or to similar-dimensional phases of other space-time continua—though of course there must be vast numbers of mutually uninhabitable even though mathematically juxtaposed bodies or zones of space.
      It was also possible that the inhabitants of a given dimensional realm could survive entry to many unknown and incomprehensible realms of additional or indefinitely multiplied dimensions—be they within or outside the given space-time continuum—and that the converse would be likewise true. This was a matter for speculation, though one could be fairly certain that the type of mutation involved in a passage from any given dimensional plane to the next higher plane would not be destructive of biological integrity as we understand it. Gilman could not be very clear about his reasons for this last assumption, but his haziness here was more than overbalanced by his clearness on other complex points. Professor Upham especially liked his demonstration of the kinship of higher mathematics to certain phases of magical lore transmitted down the ages from an ineffable antiquity—human or pre-human—whose knowledge of the cosmos and its laws was greater than ours.
      Around the first of April Gilman worried considerably because his slow fever did not abate. He was also troubled by what some of his fellow-lodgers said about his sleep-walking. It seemed that he was often absent from his bed, and that the creaking of his floor at certain hours of the night was remarked by the man in the room below. This fellow also spoke of hearing the tread of shod feet in the night; but Gilman was sure he must have been mistaken in this, since shoes as well as other apparel were always precisely in place in the morning. One could develop all sorts of aural delusions in this morbid old house—for did not Gilman himself, even in daylight, now feel certain that noises other than rat-scratchings came from the black voids beyond the slanting wall and above the slanting ceiling? His pathologically sensitive ears began to listen for faint footfalls in the immemorially sealed loft overhead, and sometimes the illusion of such things was agonisingly realistic.
      However, he knew that he had actually become a somnambulist; for twice at night his room had been found vacant, though with all his clothing in place. Of this he had been assured by Frank Elwood, the one fellow-student whose poverty forced him to room in this squalid and unpopular house. Elwood had been studying in the small hours and had come up for help on a differential equation, only to find Gilman absent. It had been rather presumptuous of him to open the unlocked door after knocking had failed to rouse a response, but he had needed the help very badly and thought that his host would not mind a gentle prodding awake. On neither occasion, though, had Gilman been there—and when told of the matter he wondered where he could have been wandering, barefoot and with only his night-clothes on. He resolved to investigate the matter if reports of his sleep-walking continued, and thought of sprinkling flour on the floor of the corridor to see where his footsteps might lead. The door was the only conceivable egress, for there was no possible foothold outside the narrow window.
      As April advanced Gilman’s fever-sharpened ears were disturbed by the whining prayers of a superstitious loomfixer named Joe Mazurewicz, who had a room on the ground floor. Mazurewicz had told long, rambling stories about the ghost of old Keziah and the furry, sharp-fanged, nuzzling thing, and had said he was so badly haunted at times that only his silver crucifix—given him for the purpose by Father Iwanicki of St. Stanislaus’ Church—could bring him relief. Now he was praying because the Witches’ Sabbath was drawing near. May-Eve was Walpurgis-Night, when hell’s blackest evil roamed the earth and all the slaves of Satan gathered for nameless rites and deeds. It was always a very bad time in Arkham, even though the fine folks up in Miskatonic Avenue and High and Saltonstall Streets pretended to know nothing about it. There would be bad doings—and a child or two would probably be missing. Joe knew about such things, for his grandmother in the old country had heard tales from her grandmother. It was wise to pray and count one’s beads at this season. For three months Keziah and Brown Jenkin had not been near Joe’s room, nor near Paul Choynski’s room, nor anywhere else—and it meant no good when they held off like that. They must be up to something.
      Gilman dropped in at a doctor’s office on the 16th of the month, and was surprised to find his temperature was not as high as he had feared. The physician questioned him sharply, and advised him to see a nerve specialist. On reflection, he was glad he had not consulted the still more inquisitive college doctor. Old Waldron, who had curtailed his activities before, would have made him take a rest—an impossible thing now that he was so close to great results in his equations. He was certainly near the boundary between the known universe and the fourth dimension, and who could say how much farther he might go?
      But even as these thoughts came to him he wondered at the source of his strange confidence. Did all of this perilous sense of imminence come from the formulae on the sheets he covered day by day? The soft, stealthy, imaginary footsteps in the sealed loft above were unnerving. And now, too, there was a growing feeling that somebody was constantly persuading him to do something terrible which he could not do. How about the somnambulism? Where did he go sometimes in the night? And what was that faint suggestion of sound which once in a while seemed to trickle through the maddening confusion of identifiable sounds even in broad daylight and full wakefulness? Its rhythm did not correspond to anything on earth, unless perhaps to the cadence of one or two unmentionable Sabbat-chants, and sometimes he feared it corresponded to certain attributes of the vague shrieking or roaring in those wholly alien abysses of dream.
      The dreams were meanwhile getting to be atrocious. In the lighter preliminary phase the evil old woman was now of fiendish distinctness, and Gilman knew she was the one who had frightened him in the slums. Her bent back, long nose, and shrivelled chin were unmistakable, and her shapeless brown garments were like those he remembered. The expression on her face was one of hideous malevolence and exultation, and when he awaked he could recall a croaking voice that persuaded and threatened. He must meet the Black Man, and go with them all to the throne of Azathoth at the centre of ultimate Chaos. That was what she said. He must sign in his own blood the book of Azathoth and take a new secret name now that his independent delvings had gone so far. What kept him from going with her and Brown Jenkin and the other to the throne of Chaos where the thin flutes pipe mindlessly was the fact that he had seen the name “Azathoth” in the Necronomicon, and knew it stood for a primal evil too horrible for description.
      The old woman always appeared out of thin air near the corner where the downward slant met the inward slant. She seemed to crystallise at a point closer to the ceiling than to the floor, and every night she was a little nearer and more distinct before the dream shifted. Brown Jenkin, too, was always a little nearer at the last, and its yellowish-white fangs glistened shockingly in that unearthly violet phosphorescence. Its shrill loathsome tittering stuck more and more in Gilman’s head, and he could remember in the morning how it had pronounced the words “Azathoth” and “Nyarlathotep”.
      In the deeper dreams everything was likewise more distinct, and Gilman felt that the twilight abysses around him were those of the fourth dimension. Those organic entities whose motions seemed least flagrantly irrelevant and unmotivated were probably projections of life-forms from our own planet, including human beings. What the others were in their own dimensional sphere or spheres he dared not try to think. Two of the less irrelevantly moving things—a rather large congeries of iridescent, prolately spheroidal bubbles and a very much smaller polyhedron of unknown colours and rapidly shifting surface angles—seemed to take notice of him and follow him about or float ahead as he changed position among the titan prisms, labyrinths, cube-and-plane clusters, and quasi-buildings; and all the while the vague shrieking and roaring waxed louder and louder, as if approaching some monstrous climax of utterly unendurable intensity.
      During the night of April 19–20 the new development occurred. Gilman was half-involuntarily moving about in the twilight abysses with the bubble-mass and the small polyhedron floating ahead, when he noticed the peculiarly regular angles formed by the edges of some gigantic neighbouring prism-clusters. In another second he was out of the abyss and standing tremulously on a rocky hillside bathed in intense, diffused green light. He was barefooted and in his night-clothes, and when he tried to walk discovered that he could scarcely lift his feet. A swirling vapour hid everything but the immediate sloping terrain from sight, and he shrank from the thought of the sounds that might surge out of that vapour.
      Then he saw the two shapes laboriously crawling toward him—the old woman and the little furry thing. The crone strained up to her knees and managed to cross her arms in a singular fashion, while Brown Jenkin pointed in a certain direction with a horribly anthropoid fore paw which it raised with evident difficulty. Spurred by an impulse he did not originate, Gilman dragged himself forward along a course determined by the angle of the old woman’s arms and the direction of the small monstrosity’s paw, and before he had shuffled three steps he was back in the twilight abysses. Geometrical shapes seethed around him, and he fell dizzily and interminably. At last he woke in his bed in the crazily angled garret of the eldritch old house.
      He was good for nothing that morning, and stayed away from all his classes. Some unknown attraction was pulling his eyes in a seemingly irrelevant direction, for he could not help staring at a certain vacant spot on the floor. As the day advanced the focus of his unseeing eyes changed position, and by noon he had conquered the impulse to stare at vacancy. About two o’clock he went out for lunch, and as he threaded the narrow lanes of the city he found himself turning always to the southeast. Only an effort halted him at a cafeteria in Church Street, and after the meal he felt the unknown pull still more strongly.
      He would have to consult a nerve specialist after all—perhaps there was a connexion with his somnambulism—but meanwhile he might at least try to break the morbid spell himself. Undoubtedly he could still manage to walk away from the pull; so with great resolution he headed against it and dragged himself deliberately north along Garrison Street. By the time he had reached the bridge over the Miskatonic he was in a cold perspiration, and he clutched at the iron railing as he gazed upstream at the ill-regarded island whose regular lines of ancient standing stones brooded sullenly in the afternoon sunlight.
      Then he gave a start. For there was a clearly visible living figure on that desolate island, and a second glance told him it was certainly the strange old woman whose sinister aspect had worked itself so disastrously into his dreams. The tall grass near her was moving, too, as if some other living thing were crawling close to the ground. When the old woman began to turn toward him he fled precipitately off the bridge and into the shelter of the town’s labyrinthine waterfront alleys. Distant though the island was, he felt that a monstrous and invincible evil could flow from the sardonic stare of that bent, ancient figure in brown.
      The southeastward pull still held, and only with tremendous resolution could Gilman drag himself into the old house and up the rickety stairs. For hours he sat silent and aimless, with his eyes shifting gradually westward. About six o’clock his sharpened ears caught the whining prayers of Joe Mazurewicz two floors below, and in desperation he seized his hat and walked out into the sunset-golden streets, letting the now directly southward pull carry him where it might. An hour later darkness found him in the open fields beyond Hangman’s Brook, with the glimmering spring stars shining ahead. The urge to walk was gradually changing to an urge to leap mystically into space, and suddenly he realised just where the source of the pull lay.
      It was in the sky. A definite point among the stars had a claim on him and was calling him. Apparently it was a point somewhere between Hydra and Argo Navis, and he knew that he had been urged toward it ever since he had awaked soon after dawn. In the morning it had been underfoot; afternoon found it rising in the southeast, and now it was roughly south but wheeling toward the west. What was the meaning of this new thing? Was he going mad? How long would it last? Again mustering his resolution, Gilman turned and dragged himself back to the sinister old house.
      Mazurewicz was waiting for him at the door, and seemed both anxious and reluctant to whisper some fresh bit of superstition. It was about the witch light. Joe had been out celebrating the night before—it was Patriots’ Day in Massachusetts—and had come home after midnight. Looking up at the house from outside, he had thought at first that Gilman’s window was dark; but then he had seen the faint violet glow within. He wanted to warn the gentleman about that glow, for everybody in Arkham knew it was Keziah’s witch light which played near Brown Jenkin and the ghost of the old crone herself. He had not mentioned this before, but now he must tell about it because it meant that Keziah and her long-toothed familiar were haunting the young gentleman. Sometimes he and Paul Choynski and Landlord Dombrowski thought they saw that light seeping out of cracks in the sealed loft above the young gentleman’s room, but they had all agreed not to talk about that. However, it would be better for the gentleman to take another room and get a crucifix from some good priest like Father Iwanicki.
      As the man rambled on Gilman felt a nameless panic clutch at his throat. He knew that Joe must have been half drunk when he came home the night before, yet this mention of a violet light in the garret window was of frightful import. It was a lambent glow of this sort which always played about the old woman and the small furry thing in those lighter, sharper dreams which prefaced his plunge into unknown abysses, and the thought that a wakeful second person could see the dream-luminance was utterly beyond sane harbourage. Yet where had the fellow got such an odd notion? Had he himself talked as well as walked around the house in his sleep? No, Joe said, he had not—but he must check up on this. Perhaps Frank Elwood could tell him something, though he hated to ask.
      Fever—wild dreams—somnambulism—illusions of sounds—a pull toward a point in the sky—and now a suspicion of insane sleep-talking! He must stop studying, see a nerve specialist, and take himself in hand. When he climbed to the second story he paused at Elwood’s door but saw that the other youth was out. Reluctantly he continued up to his garret room and sat down in the dark. His gaze was still pulled to the southwest, but he also found himself listening intently for some sound in the closed loft above, and half imagining that an evil violet light seeped down through an infinitesimal crack in the low, slanting ceiling.
      That night as Gilman slept the violet light broke upon him with heightened intensity, and the old witch and small furry thing—getting closer than ever before—mocked him with inhuman squeals and devilish gestures. He was glad to sink into the vaguely roaring twilight abysses, though the pursuit of that iridescent bubble-congeries and that kaleidoscopic little polyhedron was menacing and irritating. Then came the shift as vast converging planes of a slippery-looking substance loomed above and below him—a shift which ended in a flash of delirium and a blaze of unknown, alien light in which yellow, carmine, and indigo were madly and inextricably blended.
      He was half lying on a high, fantastically balustraded terrace above a boundless jungle of outlandish, incredible peaks, balanced planes, domes, minarets, horizontal discs poised on pinnacles, and numberless forms of still greater wildness—some of stone and some of metal—which glittered gorgeously in the mixed, almost blistering glare from a polychromatic sky. Looking upward he saw three stupendous discs of flame, each of a different hue, and at a different height above an infinitely distant curving horizon of low mountains. Behind him tiers of higher terraces towered aloft as far as he could see. The city below stretched away to the limits of vision, and he hoped that no sound would well up from it.
      The pavement from which he easily raised himself was of a veined, polished stone beyond his power to identify, and the tiles were cut in bizarre-angled shapes which struck him as less asymmetrical than based on some unearthly symmetry whose laws he could not comprehend. The balustrade was chest-high, delicate, and fantastically wrought, while along the rail were ranged at short intervals little figures of grotesque design and exquisite workmanship. They, like the whole balustrade, seemed to be made of some sort of shining metal whose colour could not be guessed in this chaos of mixed effulgences; and their nature utterly defied conjecture. They represented some ridged, barrel-shaped object with thin horizontal arms radiating spoke-like from a central ring, and with vertical knobs or bulbs projecting from the head and base of the barrel. Each of these knobs was the hub of a system of five long, flat, triangularly tapering arms arranged around it like the arms of a starfish—nearly horizontal, but curving slightly away from the central barrel. The base of the bottom knob was fused to the long railing with so delicate a point of contact that several figures had been broken off and were missing. The figures were about four and a half inches in height, while the spiky arms gave them a maximum diameter of about two and a half inches.
      When Gilman stood up the tiles felt hot to his bare feet. He was wholly alone, and his first act was to walk to the balustrade and look dizzily down at the endless, Cyclopean city almost two thousand feet below. As he listened he thought a rhythmic confusion of faint musical pipings covering a wide tonal range welled up from the narrow streets beneath, and he wished he might discern the denizens of the place. The sight turned him giddy after a while, so that he would have fallen to the pavement had he not clutched instinctively at the lustrous balustrade. His right hand fell on one of the projecting figures, the touch seeming to steady him slightly. It was too much, however, for the exotic delicacy of the metal-work, and the spiky figure snapped off under his grasp. Still half-dazed, he continued to clutch it as his other hand seized a vacant space on the smooth railing.
      But now his oversensitive ears caught something behind him, and he looked back across the level terrace. Approaching him softly though without apparent furtiveness were five figures, two of which were the sinister old woman and the fanged, furry little animal. The other three were what sent him unconscious—for they were living entities about eight feet high, shaped precisely like the spiky images on the balustrade, and propelling themselves by a spider-like wriggling of their lower set of starfish-arms.
      Gilman awakened in his bed, drenched by a cold perspiration and with a smarting sensation in his face, hands, and feet. Springing to the floor, he washed and dressed in frantic haste, as if it were necessary for him to get out of the house as quickly as possible. He did not know where he wished to go, but felt that once more he would have to sacrifice his classes. The odd pull toward that spot in the sky between Hydra and Argo had abated, but another of even greater strength had taken its place. Now he felt that he must go north—infinitely north. He dreaded to cross the bridge that gave a view of the desolate island in the Miskatonic, so went over the Peabody Avenue bridge. Very often he stumbled, for his eyes and ears were chained to an extremely lofty point in the blank blue sky.
      After about an hour he got himself under better control, and saw that he was far from the city. All around him stretched the bleak emptiness of salt marshes, while the narrow road ahead led to Innsmouth—that ancient, half-deserted town which Arkham people were so curiously unwilling to visit. Though the northward pull had not diminished, he resisted it as he had resisted the other pull, and finally found that he could almost balance the one against the other. Plodding back to town and getting some coffee at a soda fountain, he dragged himself into the public library and browsed aimlessly among the lighter magazines. Once he met some friends who remarked how oddly sunburned he looked, but he did not tell them of his walk. At three o’clock he took some lunch at a restaurant, noting meanwhile that the pull had either lessened or divided itself. After that he killed the time at a cheap cinema show, seeing the inane performance over and over again without paying any attention to it.
      About nine at night he drifted homeward and stumbled into the ancient house. Joe Mazurewicz was whining unintelligible prayers, and Gilman hastened up to his own garret chamber without pausing to see if Elwood was in. It was when he turned on the feeble electric light that the shock came. At once he saw there was something on the table which did not belong there, and a second look left no room for doubt. Lying on its side—for it could not stand up alone—was the exotic spiky figure which in his monstrous dream he had broken off the fantastic balustrade. No detail was missing. The ridged, barrel-shaped centre, the thin, radiating arms, the knobs at each end, and the flat, slightly outward-curving starfish-arms spreading from those knobs—all were there. In the electric light the colour seemed to be a kind of iridescent grey veined with green, and Gilman could see amidst his horror and bewilderment that one of the knobs ended in a jagged break corresponding to its former point of attachment to the dream-railing.
      Only his tendency toward a dazed stupor prevented him from screaming aloud. This fusion of dream and reality was too much to bear. Still dazed, he clutched at the spiky thing and staggered downstairs to Landlord Dombrowski’s quarters. The whining prayers of the superstitious loomfixer were still sounding through the mouldy halls, but Gilman did not mind them now. The landlord was in, and greeted him pleasantly. No, he had not seen that thing before and did not know anything about it. But his wife had said she found a funny tin thing in one of the beds when she fixed the rooms at noon, and maybe that was it. Dombrowski called her, and she waddled in. Yes, that was the thing. She had found it in the young gentleman’s bed—on the side next the wall. It had looked very queer to her, but of course the young gentleman had lots of queer things in his room—books and curios and pictures and markings on paper. She certainly knew nothing about it.
      So Gilman climbed upstairs again in a mental turmoil, convinced that he was either still dreaming or that his somnambulism had run to incredible extremes and led him to depredations in unknown places. Where had he got this outré thing? He did not recall seeing it in any museum in Arkham. It must have been somewhere, though; and the sight of it as he snatched it in his sleep must have caused the odd dream-picture of the balustraded terrace. Next day he would make some very guarded inquiries—and perhaps see the nerve specialist.
      Meanwhile he would try to keep track of his somnambulism. As he went upstairs and across the garret hall he sprinkled about some flour which he had borrowed—with a frank admission as to its purpose—from the landlord. He had stopped at Elwood’s door on the way, but had found all dark within. Entering his room, he placed the spiky thing on the table, and lay down in complete mental and physical exhaustion without pausing to undress. From the closed loft above the slanting ceiling he thought he heard a faint scratching and padding, but he was too disorganised even to mind it. That cryptical pull from the north was getting very strong again, though it seemed now to come from a lower place in the sky.
      In the dazzling violet light of dream the old woman and the fanged, furry thing came again and with a greater distinctness than on any former occasion. This time they actually reached him, and he felt the crone’s withered claws clutching at him. He was pulled out of bed and into empty space, and for a moment he heard a rhythmic roaring and saw the twilight amorphousness of the vague abysses seething around him. But that moment was very brief, for presently he was in a crude, windowless little space with rough beams and planks rising to a peak just above his head, and with a curious slanting floor underfoot. Propped level on that floor were low cases full of books of every degree of antiquity and disintegration, and in the centre were a table and bench, both apparently fastened in place. Small objects of unknown shape and nature were ranged on the tops of the cases, and in the flaming violet light Gilman thought he saw a counterpart of the spiky image which had puzzled him so horribly. On the left the floor fell abruptly away, leaving a black triangular gulf out of which, after a second’s dry rattling, there presently climbed the hateful little furry thing with the yellow fangs and bearded human face.
      The evilly grinning beldame still clutched him, and beyond the table stood a figure he had never seen before—a tall, lean man of dead black colouration but without the slightest sign of negroid features; wholly devoid of either hair or beard, and wearing as his only garment a shapeless robe of some heavy black fabric. His feet were indistinguishable because of the table and bench, but he must have been shod, since there was a clicking whenever he changed position. The man did not speak, and bore no trace of expression on his small, regular features. He merely pointed to a book of prodigious size which lay open on the table, while the beldame thrust a huge grey quill into Gilman’s right hand. Over everything was a pall of intensely maddening fear, and the climax was reached when the furry thing ran up the dreamer’s clothing to his shoulders and then down his left arm, finally biting him sharply in the wrist just below his cuff. As the blood spurted from this wound Gilman lapsed into a faint.
      He awaked on the morning of the 22nd with a pain in his left wrist, and saw that his cuff was brown with dried blood. His recollections were very confused, but the scene with the black man in the unknown space stood out vividly. The rats must have bitten him as he slept, giving rise to the climax of that frightful dream. Opening the door, he saw that the flour on the corridor floor was undisturbed except for the huge prints of the loutish fellow who roomed at the other end of the garret. So he had not been sleep-walking this time. But something would have to be done about those rats. He would speak to the landlord about them. Again he tried to stop up the hole at the base of the slanting wall, wedging in a candlestick which seemed of about the right size. His ears were ringing horribly, as if with the residual echoes of some horrible noise heard in dreams.
      As he bathed and changed clothes he tried to recall what he had dreamed after the scene in the violet-litten space, but nothing definite would crystallise in his mind. That scene itself must have corresponded to the sealed loft overhead, which had begun to attack his imagination so violently, but later impressions were faint and hazy. There were suggestions of the vague, twilight abysses, and of still vaster, blacker abysses beyond them—abysses in which all fixed suggestions of form were absent. He had been taken there by the bubble-congeries and the little polyhedron which always dogged him; but they, like himself, had changed to wisps of milky, barely luminous mist in this farther void of ultimate blackness. Something else had gone on ahead—a larger wisp which now and then condensed into nameless approximations of form—and he thought that their progress had not been in a straight line, but rather along the alien curves and spirals of some ethereal vortex which obeyed laws unknown to the physics and mathematics of any conceivable cosmos. Eventually there had been a hint of vast, leaping shadows, of a monstrous, half-acoustic pulsing, and of the thin, monotonous piping of an unseen flute—but that was all. Gilman decided he had picked up that last conception from what he had read in the Necronomicon about the mindless entity Azathoth, which rules all time and space from a curiously environed black throne at the centre of Chaos.
      When the blood was washed away the wrist wound proved very slight, and Gilman puzzled over the location of the two tiny punctures. It occurred to him that there was no blood on the bedspread where he had lain—which was very curious in view of the amount on his skin and cuff. Had he been sleep-walking within his room, and had the rat bitten him as he sat in some chair or paused in some less rational position? He looked in every corner for brownish drops or stains, but did not find any. He had better, he thought, sprinkle flour within the room as well as outside the door—though after all no further proof of his sleep-walking was needed. He knew he did walk—and the thing to do now was to stop it. He must ask Frank Elwood for help. This morning the strange pulls from space seemed lessened, though they were replaced by another sensation even more inexplicable. It was a vague, insistent impulse to fly away from his present situation, but held not a hint of the specific direction in which he wished to fly. As he picked up the strange spiky image on the table he thought the older northward pull grew a trifle stronger; but even so, it was wholly overruled by the newer and more bewildering urge.
      He took the spiky image down to Elwood’s room, steeling himself against the whines of the loomfixer which welled up from the ground floor. Elwood was in, thank heaven, and appeared to be stirring about. There was time for a little conversation before leaving for breakfast and college, so Gilman hurriedly poured forth an account of his recent dreams and fears. His host was very sympathetic, and agreed that something ought to be done. He was shocked by his guest’s drawn, haggard aspect, and noticed the queer, abnormal-looking sunburn which others had remarked during the past week. There was not much, though, that he could say. He had not seen Gilman on any sleep-walking expedition, and had no idea what the curious image could be. He had, though, heard the French-Canadian who lodged just under Gilman talking to Mazurewicz one evening. They were telling each other how badly they dreaded the coming of Walpurgis-Night, now only a few days off; and were exchanging pitying comments about the poor, doomed young gentleman. Desrochers, the fellow under Gilman’s room, had spoken of nocturnal footsteps both shod and unshod, and of the violet light he saw one night when he had stolen fearfully up to peer through Gilman’s keyhole. He had not dared to peer, he told Mazurewicz, after he had glimpsed that light through the cracks around the door. There had been soft talking, too—and as he began to describe it his voice had sunk to an inaudible whisper.
      Elwood could not imagine what had set these superstitious creatures gossiping, but supposed their imaginations had been roused by Gilman’s late hours and somnolent walking and talking on the one hand, and by the nearness of traditionally feared May-Eve on the other hand. That Gilman talked in his sleep was plain, and it was obviously from Desrochers’ keyhole-listenings that the delusive notion of the violet dream-light had got abroad. These simple people were quick to imagine they had seen any odd thing they had heard about. As for a plan of action—Gilman had better move down to Elwood’s room and avoid sleeping alone. Elwood would, if awake, rouse him whenever he began to talk or rise in his sleep. Very soon, too, he must see the specialist. Meanwhile they would take the spiky image around to the various museums and to certain professors; seeking identification and stating that it had been found in a public rubbish-can. Also, Dombrowski must attend to the poisoning of those rats in the walls.
      Braced up by Elwood’s companionship, Gilman attended classes that day. Strange urges still tugged at him, but he could sidetrack them with considerable success. During a free period he shewed the queer image to several professors, all of whom were intensely interested, though none of them could shed any light upon its nature or origin. That night he slept on a couch which Elwood had had the landlord bring to the second-story room, and for the first time in weeks was wholly free from disquieting dreams. But the feverishness still hung on, and the whines of the loomfixer were an unnerving influence.
      During the next few days Gilman enjoyed an almost perfect immunity from morbid manifestations. He had, Elwood said, shewed no tendency to talk or rise in his sleep; and meanwhile the landlord was putting rat-poison everywhere. The only disturbing element was the talk among the superstitious foreigners, whose imaginations had become highly excited. Mazurewicz was always trying to make him get a crucifix, and finally forced one upon him which he said had been blessed by the good Father Iwanicki. Desrochers, too, had something to say—in fact, he insisted that cautious steps had sounded in the now vacant room above him on the first and second nights of Gilman’s absence from it. Paul Choynski thought he heard sounds in the halls and on the stairs at night, and claimed that his door had been softly tried, while Mrs. Dombrowski vowed she had seen Brown Jenkin for the first time since All-Hallows. But such naive reports could mean very little, and Gilman let the cheap metal crucifix hang idly from a knob on his host’s dresser.
      For three days Gilman and Elwood canvassed the local museums in an effort to identify the strange spiky image, but always without success. In every quarter, however, interest was intense; for the utter alienage of the thing was a tremendous challenge to scientific curiosity. One of the small radiating arms was broken off and subjected to chemical analysis, and the result is still talked about in college circles. Professor Ellery found platinum, iron, and tellurium in the strange alloy; but mixed with these were at least three other apparent elements of high atomic weight which chemistry was absolutely powerless to classify. Not only did they fail to correspond with any known element, but they did not even fit the vacant places reserved for probable elements in the periodic system. The mystery remains unsolved to this day, though the image is on exhibition at the museum of Miskatonic University.
      On the morning of April 27 a fresh rat-hole appeared in the room where Gilman was a guest, but Dombrowski tinned it up during the day. The poison was not having much effect, for scratchings and scurryings in the walls were virtually undiminished. Elwood was out late that night, and Gilman waited up for him. He did not wish to go to sleep in a room alone—especially since he thought he had glimpsed in the evening twilight the repellent old woman whose image had become so horribly transferred to his dreams. He wondered who she was, and what had been near her rattling the tin can in a rubbish-heap at the mouth of a squalid courtyard. The crone had seemed to notice him and leer evilly at him—though perhaps this was merely his imagination.
      The next day both youths felt very tired, and knew they would sleep like logs when night came. In the evening they drowsily discussed the mathematical studies which had so completely and perhaps harmfully engrossed Gilman, and speculated about the linkage with ancient magic and folklore which seemed so darkly probable. They spoke of old Keziah Mason, and Elwood agreed that Gilman had good scientific grounds for thinking she might have stumbled on strange and significant information. The hidden cults to which these witches belonged often guarded and handed down surprising secrets from elder, forgotten aeons; and it was by no means impossible that Keziah had actually mastered the art of passing through dimensional gates. Tradition emphasises the uselessness of material barriers in halting a witch’s motions; and who can say what underlies the old tales of broomstick rides through the night?
      Whether a modern student could ever gain similar powers from mathematical research alone, was still to be seen. Success, Gilman added, might lead to dangerous and unthinkable situations; for who could foretell the conditions pervading an adjacent but normally inaccessible dimension? On the other hand, the picturesque possibilities were enormous. Time could not exist in certain belts of space, and by entering and remaining in such a belt one might preserve one’s life and age indefinitely; never suffering organic metabolism or deterioration except for slight amounts incurred during visits to one’s own or similar planes. One might, for example, pass into a timeless dimension and emerge at some remote period of the earth’s history as young as before.
      Whether anybody had ever managed to do this, one could hardly conjecture with any degree of authority. Old legends are hazy and ambiguous, and in historic times all attempts at crossing forbidden gaps seem complicated by strange and terrible alliances with beings and messengers from outside. There was the immemorial figure of the deputy or messenger of hidden and terrible powers—the “Black Man” of the witch-cult, and the “Nyarlathotep” of the Necronomicon. There was, too, the baffling problem of the lesser messengers or intermediaries—the quasi-animals and queer hybrids which legend depicts as witches’ familiars. As Gilman and Elwood retired, too sleepy to argue further, they heard Joe Mazurewicz reel into the house half-drunk, and shuddered at the desperate wildness of his whining prayers.
      That night Gilman saw the violet light again. In his dream he had heard a scratching and gnawing in the partitions, and thought that someone fumbled clumsily at the latch. Then he saw the old woman and the small furry thing advancing toward him over the carpeted floor. The beldame’s face was alight with inhuman exultation, and the little yellow-toothed morbidity tittered mockingly as it pointed at the heavily sleeping form of Elwood on the other couch across the room. A paralysis of fear stifled all attempts to cry out. As once before, the hideous crone seized Gilman by the shoulders, yanking him out of bed and into empty space. Again the infinitude of the shrieking twilight abysses flashed past him, but in another second he thought he was in a dark, muddy, unknown alley of foetid odours, with the rotting walls of ancient houses towering up on every hand.
      Ahead was the robed black man he had seen in the peaked space in the other dream, while from a lesser distance the old woman was beckoning and grimacing imperiously. Brown Jenkin was rubbing itself with a kind of affectionate playfulness around the ankles of the black man, which the deep mud largely concealed. There was a dark open doorway on the right, to which the black man silently pointed. Into this the grimacing crone started, dragging Gilman after her by his pajama sleeve. There were evil-smelling staircases which creaked ominously, and on which the old woman seemed to radiate a faint violet light; and finally a door leading off a landing. The crone fumbled with the latch and pushed the door open, motioning to Gilman to wait and disappearing inside the black aperture.
      The youth’s oversensitive ears caught a hideous strangled cry, and presently the beldame came out of the room bearing a small, senseless form which she thrust at the dreamer as if ordering him to carry it. The sight of this form, and the expression on its face, broke the spell. Still too dazed to cry out, he plunged recklessly down the noisome staircase and into the mud outside; halting only when seized and choked by the waiting black man. As consciousness departed he heard the faint, shrill tittering of the fanged, rat-like abnormality.
      On the morning of the 29th Gilman awaked into a maelstrom of horror. The instant he opened his eyes he knew something was terribly wrong, for he was back in his old garret room with the slanting wall and ceiling, sprawled on the now unmade bed. His throat was aching inexplicably, and as he struggled to a sitting posture he saw with growing fright that his feet and pajama-bottoms were brown with caked mud. For the moment his recollections were hopelessly hazy, but he knew at least that he must have been sleep-walking. Elwood had been lost too deeply in slumber to hear and stop him. On the floor were confused muddy prints, but oddly enough they did not extend all the way to the door. The more Gilman looked at them, the more peculiar they seemed; for in addition to those he could recognise as his there were some smaller, almost round markings—such as the legs of a large chair or table might make, except that most of them tended to be divided into halves. There were also some curious muddy rat-tracks leading out of a fresh hole and back into it again. Utter bewilderment and the fear of madness racked Gilman as he staggered to the door and saw that there were no muddy prints outside. The more he remembered of his hideous dream the more terrified he felt, and it added to his desperation to hear Joe Mazurewicz chanting mournfully two floors below.
      Descending to Elwood’s room he roused his still-sleeping host and began telling of how he had found himself, but Elwood could form no idea of what might really have happened. Where Gilman could have been, how he got back to his room without making tracks in the hall, and how the muddy, furniture-like prints came to be mixed with his in the garret chamber, were wholly beyond conjecture. Then there were those dark, livid marks on his throat, as if he had tried to strangle himself. He put his hands up to them, but found that they did not even approximately fit. While they were talking Desrochers dropped in to say that he had heard a terrific clattering overhead in the dark small hours. No, there had been no one on the stairs after midnight—though just before midnight he had heard faint footfalls in the garret, and cautiously descending steps he did not like. It was, he added, a very bad time of year for Arkham. The young gentleman had better be sure to wear the crucifix Joe Mazurewicz had given him. Even the daytime was not safe, for after dawn there had been strange sounds in the house—especially a thin, childish wail hastily choked off.
      Gilman mechanically attended classes that morning, but was wholly unable to fix his mind on his studies. A mood of hideous apprehension and expectancy had seized him, and he seemed to be awaiting the fall of some annihilating blow. At noon he lunched at the University Spa, picking up a paper from the next seat as he waited for dessert. But he never ate that dessert; for an item on the paper’s first page left him limp, wild-eyed, and able only to pay his check and stagger back to Elwood’s room.
      There had been a strange kidnapping the night before in Orne’s Gangway, and the two-year-old child of a clod-like laundry worker named Anastasia Wolejko had completely vanished from sight. The mother, it appeared, had feared the event for some time; but the reasons she assigned for her fear were so grotesque that no one took them seriously. She had, she said, seen Brown Jenkin about the place now and then ever since early in March, and knew from its grimaces and titterings that little Ladislas must be marked for sacrifice at the awful Sabbat on Walpurgis-Night. She had asked her neighbour Mary Czanek to sleep in the room and try to protect the child, but Mary had not dared. She could not tell the police, for they never believed such things. Children had been taken that way every year ever since she could remember. And her friend Pete Stowacki would not help because he wanted the child out of the way anyhow.
      But what threw Gilman into a cold perspiration was the report of a pair of revellers who had been walking past the mouth of the gangway just after midnight. They admitted they had been drunk, but both vowed they had seen a crazily dressed trio furtively entering the dark passageway. There had, they said, been a huge robed negro, a little old woman in rags, and a young white man in his night-clothes. The old woman had been dragging the youth, while around the feet of the negro a tame rat was rubbing and weaving in the brown mud.
      Gilman sat in a daze all the afternoon, and Elwood—who had meanwhile seen the papers and formed terrible conjectures from them—found him thus when he came home. This time neither could doubt but that something hideously serious was closing in around them. Between the phantasms of nightmare and the realities of the objective world a monstrous and unthinkable relationship was crystallising, and only stupendous vigilance could avert still more direful developments. Gilman must see a specialist sooner or later, but not just now, when all the papers were full of this kidnapping business.
      Just what had really happened was maddeningly obscure, and for a moment both Gilman and Elwood exchanged whispered theories of the wildest kind. Had Gilman unconsciously succeeded better than he knew in his studies of space and its dimensions? Had he actually slipped outside our sphere to points unguessed and unimaginable? Where—if anywhere—had he been on those nights of daemoniac alienage? The roaring twilight abysses—the green hillside—the blistering terrace—the pulls from the stars—the ultimate black vortex—the black man—the muddy alley and the stairs—the old witch and the fanged, furry horror—the bubble-congeries and the little polyhedron—the strange sunburn—the wrist wound—the unexplained image—the muddy feet—the throat-marks—the tales and fears of the superstitious foreigners—what did all this mean? To what extent could the laws of sanity apply to such a case?
      There was no sleep for either of them that night, but next day they both cut classes and drowsed. This was April 30th, and with the dusk would come the hellish Sabbat-time which all the foreigners and the superstitious old folk feared. Mazurewicz came home at six o’clock and said people at the mill were whispering that the Walpurgis-revels would be held in the dark ravine beyond Meadow Hill where the old white stone stands in a place queerly void of all plant-life. Some of them had even told the police and advised them to look there for the missing Wolejko child, but they did not believe anything would be done. Joe insisted that the poor young gentleman wear his nickel-chained crucifix, and Gilman put it on and dropped it inside his shirt to humour the fellow.
      Late at night the two youths sat drowsing in their chairs, lulled by the rhythmical praying of the loomfixer on the floor below. Gilman listened as he nodded, his preternaturally sharpened hearing seeming to strain for some subtle, dreaded murmur beyond the noises in the ancient house. Unwholesome recollections of things in the Necronomicon and the Black Book welled up, and he found himself swaying to infandous rhythms said to pertain to the blackest ceremonies of the Sabbat and to have an origin outside the time and space we comprehend.
      Presently he realised what he was listening for—the hellish chant of the celebrants in the distant black valley. How did he know so much about what they expected? How did he know the time when Nahab and her acolyte were due to bear the brimming bowl which would follow the black cock and the black goat? He saw that Elwood had dropped asleep, and tried to call out and waken him. Something, however, closed his throat. He was not his own master. Had he signed the black man’s book after all?
      Then his fevered, abnormal hearing caught the distant, windborne notes. Over miles of hill and field and alley they came, but he recognised them none the less. The fires must be lit, and the dancers must be starting in. How could he keep himself from going? What was it that had enmeshed him? Mathematics—folklore—the house—old Keziah—Brown Jenkin . . . and now he saw that there was a fresh rat-hole in the wall near his couch. Above the distant chanting and the nearer praying of Joe Mazurewicz came another sound—a stealthy, determined scratching in the partitions. He hoped the electric lights would not go out. Then he saw the fanged, bearded little face in the rat-hole—the accursed little face which he at last realised bore such a shocking, mocking resemblance to old Keziah’s—and heard the faint fumbling at the door.
      The screaming twilight abysses flashed before him, and he felt himself helpless in the formless grasp of the iridescent bubble-congeries. Ahead raced the small, kaleidoscopic polyhedron, and all through the churning void there was a heightening and acceleration of the vague tonal pattern which seemed to foreshadow some unutterable and unendurable climax. He seemed to know what was coming—the monstrous burst of Walpurgis-rhythm in whose cosmic timbre would be concentrated all the primal, ultimate space-time seethings which lie behind the massed spheres of matter and sometimes break forth in measured reverberations that penetrate faintly to every layer of entity and give hideous significance throughout the worlds to certain dreaded periods.
      But all this vanished in a second. He was again in the cramped, violet-litten peaked space with the slanting floor, the low cases of ancient books, the bench and table, the queer objects, and the triangular gulf at one side. On the table lay a small white figure—an infant boy, unclothed and unconscious—while on the other side stood the monstrous, leering old woman with a gleaming, grotesque-hafted knife in her right hand, and a queerly proportioned pale metal bowl covered with curiously chased designs and having delicate lateral handles in her left. She was intoning some croaking ritual in a language which Gilman could not understand, but which seemed like something guardedly quoted in the Necronomicon.
      As the scene grew clear he saw the ancient crone bend forward and extend the empty bowl across the table—and unable to control his own motions, he reached far forward and took it in both hands, noticing as he did so its comparative lightness. At the same moment the disgusting form of Brown Jenkin scrambled up over the brink of the triangular black gulf on his left. The crone now motioned him to hold the bowl in a certain position while she raised the huge, grotesque knife above the small white victim as high as her right hand could reach. The fanged, furry thing began tittering a continuation of the unknown ritual, while the witch croaked loathsome responses. Gilman felt a gnawing, poignant abhorrence shoot through his mental and emotional paralysis, and the light metal bowl shook in his grasp. A second later the downward motion of the knife broke the spell completely, and he dropped the bowl with a resounding bell-like clangour while his hands darted out frantically to stop the monstrous deed.
      In an instant he had edged up the slanting floor around the end of the table and wrenched the knife from the old woman’s claws; sending it clattering over the brink of the narrow triangular gulf. In another instant, however, matters were reversed; for those murderous claws had locked themselves tightly around his own throat, while the wrinkled face was twisted with insane fury. He felt the chain of the cheap crucifix grinding into his neck, and in his peril wondered how the sight of the object itself would affect the evil creature. Her strength was altogether superhuman, but as she continued her choking he reached feebly in his shirt and drew out the metal symbol, snapping the chain and pulling it free.
      At sight of the device the witch seemed struck with panic, and her grip relaxed long enough to give Gilman a chance to break it entirely. He pulled the steel-like claws from his neck, and would have dragged the beldame over the edge of the gulf had not the claws received a fresh access of strength and closed in again. This time he resolved to reply in kind, and his own hands reached out for the creature’s throat. Before she saw what he was doing he had the chain of the crucifix twisted about her neck, and a moment later he had tightened it enough to cut off her breath. During her last struggle he felt something bite at his ankle, and saw that Brown Jenkin had come to her aid. With one savage kick he sent the morbidity over the edge of the gulf and heard it whimper on some level far below.
      Whether he had killed the ancient crone he did not know, but he let her rest on the floor where she had fallen. Then, as he turned away, he saw on the table a sight which nearly snapped the last thread of his reason. Brown Jenkin, tough of sinew and with four tiny hands of daemoniac dexterity, had been busy while the witch was throttling him, and his efforts had been in vain. What he had prevented the knife from doing to the victim’s chest, the yellow fangs of the furry blasphemy had done to a wrist—and the bowl so lately on the floor stood full beside the small lifeless body.
      In his dream-delirium Gilman heard the hellish, alien-rhythmed chant of the Sabbat coming from an infinite distance, and knew the black man must be there. Confused memories mixed themselves with his mathematics, and he believed his subconscious mind held the angles which he needed to guide him back to the normal world—alone and unaided for the first time. He felt sure he was in the immemorially sealed loft above his own room, but whether he could ever escape through the slanting floor or the long-stopped egress he doubted greatly. Besides, would not an escape from a dream-loft bring him merely into a dream-house—an abnormal projection of the actual place he sought? He was wholly bewildered as to the relation betwixt dream and reality in all his experiences.
      The passage through the vague abysses would be frightful, for the Walpurgis-rhythm would be vibrating, and at last he would have to hear that hitherto veiled cosmic pulsing which he so mortally dreaded. Even now he could detect a low, monstrous shaking whose tempo he suspected all too well. At Sabbat-time it always mounted and reached through to the worlds to summon the initiate to nameless rites. Half the chants of the Sabbat were patterned on this faintly overheard pulsing which no earthly ear could endure in its unveiled spatial fulness. Gilman wondered, too, whether he could trust his instinct to take him back to the right part of space. How could he be sure he would not land on that green-litten hillside of a far planet, on the tessellated terrace above the city of tentacled monsters somewhere beyond the galaxy, or in the spiral black vortices of that ultimate void of Chaos wherein reigns the mindless daemon-sultan Azathoth?
      Just before he made the plunge the violet light went out and left him in utter blackness. The witch—old Keziah—Nahab—that must have meant her death. And mixed with the distant chant of the Sabbat and the whimpers of Brown Jenkin in the gulf below he thought he heard another and wilder whine from unknown depths. Joe Mazurewicz—the prayers against the Crawling Chaos now turning to an inexplicably triumphant shriek—worlds of sardonic actuality impinging on vortices of febrile dream—Iä! Shub-Niggurath! The Goat with a Thousand Young. . . .
      They found Gilman on the floor of his queerly angled old garret room long before dawn, for the terrible cry had brought Desrochers and Choynski and Dombrowski and Mazurewicz at once, and had even wakened the soundly sleeping Elwood in his chair. He was alive, and with open, staring eyes, but seemed largely unconscious. On his throat were the marks of murderous hands, and on his left ankle was a distressing rat-bite. His clothing was badly rumpled, and Joe’s crucifix was missing. Elwood trembled, afraid even to speculate on what new form his friend’s sleep-walking had taken. Mazurewicz seemed half-dazed because of a “sign” he said he had had in response to his prayers, and he crossed himself frantically when the squealing and whimpering of a rat sounded from beyond the slanting partition.
      When the dreamer was settled on his couch in Elwood’s room they sent for Dr. Malkowski—a local practitioner who would repeat no tales where they might prove embarrassing—and he gave Gilman two hypodermic injections which caused him to relax in something like natural drowsiness. During the day the patient regained consciousness at times and whispered his newest dream disjointedly to Elwood. It was a painful process, and at its very start brought out a fresh and disconcerting fact.
      Gilman—whose ears had so lately possessed an abnormal sensitiveness—was now stone deaf. Dr. Malkowski, summoned again in haste, told Elwood that both ear-drums were ruptured, as if by the impact of some stupendous sound intense beyond all human conception or endurance. How such a sound could have been heard in the last few hours without arousing all the Miskatonic Valley was more than the honest physician could say.
      Elwood wrote his part of the colloquy on paper, so that a fairly easy communication was maintained. Neither knew what to make of the whole chaotic business, and decided it would be better if they thought as little as possible about it. Both, though, agreed that they must leave this ancient and accursed house as soon as it could be arranged. Evening papers spoke of a police raid on some curious revellers in a ravine beyond Meadow Hill just before dawn, and mentioned that the white stone there was an object of age-long superstitious regard. Nobody had been caught, but among the scattering fugitives had been glimpsed a huge negro. In another column it was stated that no trace of the missing child Ladislas Wolejko had been found.
      The crowning horror came that very night. Elwood will never forget it, and was forced to stay out of college the rest of the term because of the resulting nervous breakdown. He had thought he heard rats in the partitions all the evening, but paid little attention to them. Then, long after both he and Gilman had retired, the atrocious shrieking began. Elwood jumped up, turned on the lights, and rushed over to his guest’s couch. The occupant was emitting sounds of veritably inhuman nature, as if racked by some torment beyond description. He was writhing under the bedclothes, and a great red stain was beginning to appear on the blankets.
      Elwood scarcely dared to touch him, but gradually the screaming and writhing subsided. By this time Dombrowski, Choynski, Desrochers, Mazurewicz, and the top-floor lodger were all crowding into the doorway, and the landlord had sent his wife back to telephone for Dr. Malkowski. Everybody shrieked when a large rat-like form suddenly jumped out from beneath the ensanguined bedclothes and scuttled across the floor to a fresh, open hole close by. When the doctor arrived and began to pull down those frightful covers Walter Gilman was dead.
      It would be barbarous to do more than suggest what had killed Gilman. There had been virtually a tunnel through his body—something had eaten his heart out. Dombrowski, frantic at the failure of his constant rat-poisoning efforts, cast aside all thought of his lease and within a week had moved with all his older lodgers to a dingy but less ancient house in Walnut Street. The worst thing for a while was keeping Joe Mazurewicz quiet; for the brooding loomfixer would never stay sober, and was constantly whining and muttering about spectral and terrible things.
      It seems that on that last hideous night Joe had stooped to look at the crimson rat-tracks which led from Gilman’s couch to the nearby hole. On the carpet they were very indistinct, but a piece of open flooring intervened between the carpet’s edge and the base-board. There Mazurewicz had found something monstrous—or thought he had, for no one else could quite agree with him despite the undeniable queerness of the prints. The tracks on the flooring were certainly vastly unlike the average prints of a rat, but even Choynski and Desrochers would not admit that they were like the prints of four tiny human hands.
      The house was never rented again. As soon as Dombrowski left it the pall of its final desolation began to descend, for people shunned it both on account of its old reputation and because of the new foetid odour. Perhaps the ex-landlord’s rat-poison had worked after all, for not long after his departure the place became a neighbourhood nuisance. Health officials traced the smell to the closed spaces above and beside the eastern garret room, and agreed that the number of dead rats must be enormous. They decided, however, that it was not worth their while to hew open and disinfect the long-sealed spaces; for the foetor would soon be over, and the locality was not one which encouraged fastidious standards. Indeed, there were always vague local tales of unexplained stenches upstairs in the Witch House just after May-Eve and Hallowmass. The neighbours grumblingly acquiesced in the inertia—but the foetor none the less formed an additional count against the place. Toward the last the house was condemned as an habitation by the building inspector.
      Gilman’s dreams and their attendant circumstances have never been explained. Elwood, whose thoughts on the entire episode are sometimes almost maddening, came back to college the next autumn and graduated in the following June. He found the spectral gossip of the town much diminished, and it is indeed a fact that—notwithstanding certain reports of a ghostly tittering in the deserted house which lasted almost as long as that edifice itself—no fresh appearances either of old Keziah or of Brown Jenkin have been muttered of since Gilman’s death. It is rather fortunate that Elwood was not in Arkham in that later year when certain events abruptly renewed the local whispers about elder horrors. Of course he heard about the matter afterward and suffered untold torments of black and bewildered speculation; but even that was not as bad as actual nearness and several possible sights would have been.
      In March, 1931, a gale wrecked the roof and great chimney of the vacant Witch House, so that a chaos of crumbling bricks, blackened, moss-grown shingles, and rotting planks and timbers crashed down into the loft and broke through the floor beneath. The whole attic story was choked with debris from above, but no one took the trouble to touch the mess before the inevitable razing of the decrepit structure. That ultimate step came in the following December, and it was when Gilman’s old room was cleared out by reluctant, apprehensive workmen that the gossip began.
      Among the rubbish which had crashed through the ancient slanting ceiling were several things which made the workmen pause and call in the police. Later the police in turn called in the coroner and several professors from the university. There were bones—badly crushed and splintered, but clearly recognisable as human—whose manifestly modern date conflicted puzzlingly with the remote period at which their only possible lurking-place, the low, slant-floored loft overhead, had supposedly been sealed from all human access. The coroner’s physician decided that some belonged to a small child, while certain others—found mixed with shreds of rotten brownish cloth—belonged to a rather undersized, bent female of advanced years. Careful sifting of debris also disclosed many tiny bones of rats caught in the collapse, as well as older rat-bones gnawed by small fangs in a fashion now and then highly productive of controversy and reflection.
      Other objects found included the mingled fragments of many books and papers, together with a yellowish dust left from the total disintegration of still older books and papers. All, without exception, appeared to deal with black magic in its most advanced and horrible forms; and the evidently recent date of certain items is still a mystery as unsolved as that of the modern human bones. An even greater mystery is the absolute homogeneity of the crabbed, archaic writing found on a wide range of papers whose conditions and watermarks suggest age differences of at least 150 to 200 years. To some, though, the greatest mystery of all is the variety of utterly inexplicable objects—objects whose shapes, materials, types of workmanship, and purposes baffle all conjecture—found scattered amidst the wreckage in evidently diverse states of injury. One of these things—which excited several Miskatonic professors profoundly—is a badly damaged monstrosity plainly resembling the strange image which Gilman gave to the college museum, save that it is larger, wrought of some peculiar bluish stone instead of metal, and possessed of a singularly angled pedestal with undecipherable hieroglyphics.
      Archaeologists and anthropologists are still trying to explain the bizarre designs chased on a crushed bowl of light metal whose inner side bore ominous brownish stains when found. Foreigners and credulous grandmothers are equally garrulous about the modern nickel crucifix with broken chain mixed in the rubbish and shiveringly identified by Joe Mazurewicz as that which he had given poor Gilman many years before. Some believe this crucifix was dragged up to the sealed loft by rats, while others think it must have been on the floor in some corner of Gilman’s old room all the time. Still others, including Joe himself, have theories too wild and fantastic for sober credence.
      When the slanting wall of Gilman’s room was torn out, the once sealed triangular space between that partition and the house’s north wall was found to contain much less structural debris, even in proportion to its size, than the room itself; though it had a ghastly layer of older materials which paralysed the wreckers with horror. In brief, the floor was a veritable ossuary of the bones of small children—some fairly modern, but others extending back in infinite gradations to a period so remote that crumbling was almost complete. On this deep bony layer rested a knife of great size, obvious antiquity, and grotesque, ornate, and exotic design—above which the debris was piled.
      In the midst of this debris, wedged between a fallen plank and a cluster of cemented bricks from the ruined chimney, was an object destined to cause more bafflement, veiled fright, and openly superstitious talk in Arkham than anything else discovered in the haunted and accursed building. This object was the partly crushed skeleton of a huge, diseased rat, whose abnormalities of form are still a topic of debate and source of singular reticence among the members of Miskatonic’s department of comparative anatomy. Very little concerning this skeleton has leaked out, but the workmen who found it whisper in shocked tones about the long, brownish hairs with which it was associated.
      The bones of the tiny paws, it is rumoured, imply prehensile characteristics more typical of a diminutive monkey than of a rat; while the small skull with its savage yellow fangs is of the utmost anomalousness, appearing from certain angles like a miniature, monstrously degraded parody of a human skull. The workmen crossed themselves in fright when they came upon this blasphemy, but later burned candles of gratitude in St. Stanislaus’ Church because of the shrill, ghostly tittering they felt they would never hear again.",True
"During the winter of 1927-28 officials of the Federal government made a strange and secret investigation of certain conditions in the ancient Massachusetts seaport of Innsmouth. The public first learned of it in February, when a vast series of raids and arrests occurred, followed by the deliberate burning and dynamiting--under suitable precautions--of an enormous number of crumbling, worm-eaten, and supposedly empty houses along the abandoned waterfront. Uninquiring souls let this occurrence pass as one of the major clashes in a spasmodic war on liquor.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References to decline were few, though the significance of the later record was unmistakable. After the Civil War all industrial life was confined to the Marsh Refining Company, and the marketing of gold ingots formed the only remaining bit of major commerce aside from the eternal fishing. That fishing paid less and less as the price of the commodity fell and large-scale corporations offered competition, but there was never a dearth of fish around Innsmouth Harbour. Foreigners seldom settled there, and there was some discreetly veiled evidence that a number of Poles and Portuguese who had tried it had been scattered in a peculiarly drastic fashion.

Most interesting of all was a glancing reference to the strange jewelry vaguely associated with Innsmouth. It had evidently impressed the whole countryside more than a little, for mention was made of specimens in the museum of Miskatonic University at Arkham, and in the display room of the Newburyport Historical Society. The fragmentary descriptions of these things were bald and prosaic, but they hinted to me an undercurrent of persistent strangeness. Something about them seemed so odd and provocative that I could not put them out of my mind, and despite the relative lateness of the hour I resolved to see the local sample--said to be a large, queerly-proportioned thing evidently meant for a tiara--if it could possibly be arranged.

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

It took no excessive sensitiveness to beauty to make me literally gasp at the strange, unearthly splendour of the alien, opulent phantasy that rested there on a purple velvet cushion. Even now I can hardly describe what I saw, though it was clearly enough a sort of tiara, as the description had said. It was tall in front, and with a very large and curiously irregular periphery, as if designed for a head of almost freakishly elliptical outline. The material seemed to be predominantly gold, though a weird lighter lustrousness hinted at some strange alloy with an equally beautiful and scarcely identifiable metal. Its condition was almost perfect, and one could have spent hours in studying the striking and puzzlingly untraditional designs--some simply geometrical, and some plainly marine--chased or moulded in high relief on its surface with a craftsmanship of incredible skill and grace.

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

However, I soon saw that my uneasiness had a second and perhaps equally potent source residing in the pictorial and mathematical suggestion of the strange designs. The patterns all hinted of remote secrets and unimaginable abysses in time and space, and the monotonously aquatic nature of the reliefs became almost sinister. Among these reliefs were fabulous monsters of abhorrent grotesqueness and malignity--half ichthyic and half batrachian in suggestion--which one could not dissociate from a certain haunting and uncomfortable sense of pseudomemory, as if they called up some image from deep cells and tissues whose retentive functions are wholly primal and awesomely ancestral. At times I fancied that every contour of these blasphemous fish-frogs was over-flowing with the ultimate quintessence of unknown and inhuman evil.

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

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

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

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

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

","
I.

It is true that I have sent six bullets through the head of my best friend, and yet I hope to shew by this statement that I am not his murderer. At first I shall be called a madman—madder than the man I shot in his cell at the Arkham Sanitarium. Later some of my readers will weigh each statement, correlate it with the known facts, and ask themselves how I could have believed otherwise than as I did after facing the evidence of that horror—that thing on the doorstep.
      Until then I also saw nothing but madness in the wild tales I have acted on. Even now I ask myself whether I was misled—or whether I am not mad after all. I do not know—but others have strange things to tell of Edward and Asenath Derby, and even the stolid police are at their wits’ ends to account for that last terrible visit. They have tried weakly to concoct a theory of a ghastly jest or warning by discharged servants, yet they know in their hearts that the truth is something infinitely more terrible and incredible.
      So I say that I have not murdered Edward Derby. Rather have I avenged him, and in so doing purged the earth of a horror whose survival might have loosed untold terrors on all mankind. There are black zones of shadow close to our daily paths, and now and then some evil soul breaks a passage through. When that happens, the man who knows must strike before reckoning the consequences.
      I have known Edward Pickman Derby all his life. Eight years my junior, he was so precocious that we had much in common from the time he was eight and I sixteen. He was the most phenomenal child scholar I have ever known, and at seven was writing verse of a sombre, fantastic, almost morbid cast which astonished the tutors surrounding him. Perhaps his private education and coddled seclusion had something to do with his premature flowering. An only child, he had organic weaknesses which startled his doting parents and caused them to keep him closely chained to their side. He was never allowed out without his nurse, and seldom had a chance to play unconstrainedly with other children. All this doubtless fostered a strange, secretive inner life in the boy, with imagination as his one avenue of freedom. 
      At any rate, his juvenile learning was prodigious and bizarre; and his facile writings such as to captivate me despite my greater age. About that time I had leanings toward art of a somewhat grotesque cast, and I found in this younger child a rare kindred spirit. What lay behind our joint love of shadows and marvels was, no doubt, the ancient, mouldering, and subtly fearsome town in which we lived—witch-cursed, legend-haunted Arkham, whose huddled, sagging gambrel roofs and crumbling Georgian balustrades brood out the centuries beside the darkly muttering Miskatonic.
      As time went by I turned to architecture and gave up my design of illustrating a book of Edward’s daemoniac poems, yet our comradeship suffered no lessening. Young Derby’s odd genius developed remarkably, and in his eighteenth year his collected nightmare-lyrics made a real sensation when issued under the title Azathoth and Other Horrors. He was a close correspondent of the notorious Baudelairean poet Justin Geoffrey, who wrote The People of the Monolith and died screaming in a madhouse in 1926 after a visit to a sinister, ill-regarded village in Hungary. 
      In self-reliance and practical affairs, however, Derby was greatly retarded because of his coddled existence. His health had improved, but his habits of childish dependence were fostered by overcareful parents; so that he never travelled alone, made independent decisions, or assumed responsibilities. It was early seen that he would not be equal to a struggle in the business or professional arena, but the family fortune was so ample that this formed no tragedy. As he grew to years of manhood he retained a deceptive aspect of boyishness. Blond and blue-eyed, he had the fresh complexion of a child; and his attempts to raise a moustache were discernible only with difficulty. His voice was soft and light, and his pampered, unexercised life gave him a juvenile chubbiness rather than the paunchiness of premature middle age. He was of good height, and his handsome face would have made him a notable gallant had not his shyness held him to seclusion and bookishness.
      Derby’s parents took him abroad every summer, and he was quick to seize on the surface aspects of European thought and expression. His Poe-like talents turned more and more toward the decadent, and other artistic sensitivenesses and yearnings were half-aroused in him. We had great discussions in those days. I had been through Harvard, had studied in a Boston architect’s office, had married, and had finally returned to Arkham to practice my profession—settling in the family homestead in Saltonstall St. since my father had moved to Florida for his health. Edward used to call almost every evening, till I came to regard him as one of the household. He had a characteristic way of ringing the doorbell or sounding the knocker that grew to be a veritable code signal, so that after dinner I always listened for the familiar three brisk strokes followed by two more after a pause. Less frequently I would visit at his house and note with envy the obscure volumes in his constantly growing library.
      Derby went through Miskatonic University in Arkham, since his parents would not let him board away from them. He entered at sixteen and completed his course in three years, majoring in English and French literature and receiving high marks in everything but mathematics and the sciences. He mingled very little with the other students, though looking enviously at the “daring” or “Bohemian” set—whose superficially “smart” language and meaninglessly ironic pose he aped, and whose dubious conduct he wished he dared adopt.
      What he did do was to become an almost fanatical devotee of subterranean magical lore, for which Miskatonic’s library was and is famous. Always a dweller on the surface of phantasy and strangeness, he now delved deep into the actual runes and riddles left by a fabulous past for the guidance or puzzlement of posterity. He read things like the frightful Book of Eibon, the Unaussprechlichen Kulten of von Junzt, and the forbidden Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, though he did not tell his parents he had seen them. Edward was twenty when my son and only child was born, and seemed pleased when I named the newcomer Edward Derby Upton, after him.
      By the time he was twenty-five Edward Derby was a prodigiously learned man and a fairly well-known poet and fantaisiste, though his lack of contacts and responsibilities had slowed down his literary growth by making his products derivative and overbookish. I was perhaps his closest friend—finding him an inexhaustible mine of vital theoretical topics, while he relied on me for advice in whatever matters he did not wish to refer to his parents. He remained single—more through shyness, inertia, and parental protectiveness than through inclination—and moved in society only to the slightest and most perfunctory extent. When the war came both health and ingrained timidity kept him at home. I went to Plattsburg for a commission, but never got overseas.
      So the years wore on. Edward’s mother died when he was thirty-four, and for months he was incapacitated by some odd psychological malady. His father took him to Europe, however, and he managed to pull out of his trouble without visible effects. Afterward he seemed to feel a sort of grotesque exhilaration, as if of partial escape from some unseen bondage. He began to mingle in the more “advanced” college set despite his middle age, and was present at some extremely wild doings—on one occasion paying heavy blackmail (which he borrowed of me) to keep his presence at a certain affair from his father’s notice. Some of the whispered rumours about the wild Miskatonic set were extremely singular. There was even talk of black magic and of happenings utterly beyond credibility.

II.

Edward was thirty-eight when he met Asenath Waite. She was, I judge, about twenty-three at the time; and was taking a special course in mediaeval metaphysics at Miskatonic. The daughter of a friend of mine had met her before—in the Hall School at Kingsport—and had been inclined to shun her because of her odd reputation. She was dark, smallish, and very good-looking except for overprotuberant eyes; but something in her expression alienated extremely sensitive people. It was, however, largely her origin and conversation which caused average folk to avoid her. She was one of the Innsmouth Waites, and dark legends have clustered for generations about crumbling, half-deserted Innsmouth and its people. There are tales of horrible bargains about the year 1850, and of a strange element “not quite human” in the ancient families of the run-down fishing port—tales such as only old-time Yankees can devise and repeat with proper awesomeness.
      Asenath’s case was aggravated by the fact that she was Ephraim Waite’s daughter—the child of his old age by an unknown wife who always went veiled. Ephraim lived in a half-decayed mansion in Washington Street, Innsmouth, and those who had seen the place (Arkham folk avoid going to Innsmouth whenever they can) declared that the attic windows were always boarded, and that strange sounds sometimes floated from within as evening drew on. The old man was known to have been a prodigious magical student in his day, and legend averred that he could raise or quell storms at sea according to his whim. I had seen him once or twice in my youth as he came to Arkham to consult forbidden tomes at the college library, and had hated his wolfish, saturnine face with its tangle of iron-grey beard. He had died insane—under rather queer circumstances—just before his daughter (by his will made a nominal ward of the principal) entered the Hall School, but she had been his morbidly avid pupil and looked fiendishly like him at times.
      The friend whose daughter had gone to school with Asenath Waite repeated many curious things when the news of Edward’s acquaintance with her began to spread about. Asenath, it seemed, had posed as a kind of magician at school; and had really seemed able to accomplish some highly baffling marvels. She professed to be able to raise thunderstorms, though her seeming success was generally laid to some uncanny knack at prediction. All animals markedly disliked her, and she could make any dog howl by certain motions of her right hand. There were times when she displayed snatches of knowledge and language very singular—and very shocking—for a young girl; when she would frighten her schoolmates with leers and winks of an inexplicable kind, and would seem to extract an obscene and zestful irony from her present situation.
      Most unusual, though, were the well-attested cases of her influence over other persons. She was, beyond question, a genuine hypnotist. By gazing peculiarly at a fellow-student she would often give the latter a distinct feeling of exchanged personality—as if the subject were placed momentarily in the magician’s body and able to stare half across the room at her real body, whose eyes blazed and protruded with an alien expression. Asenath often made wild claims about the nature of consciousness and about its independence of the physical frame—or at least from the life-processes of the physical frame. Her crowning rage, however, was that she was not a man; since she believed a male brain had certain unique and far-reaching cosmic powers. Given a man’s brain, she declared, she could not only equal but surpass her father in mastery of unknown forces. 
      Edward met Asenath at a gathering of “intelligentsia” held in one of the students’ rooms, and could talk of nothing else when he came to see me the next day. He had found her full of the interests and erudition which engrossed him most, and was in addition wildly taken with her appearance. I had never seen the young woman, and recalled casual references only faintly, but I knew who she was. It seemed rather regrettable that Derby should become so upheaved about her; but I said nothing to discourage him, since infatuation thrives on opposition. He was not, he said, mentioning her to his father.
      In the next few weeks I heard of very little but Asenath from young Derby. Others now remarked Edward’s autumnal gallantry, though they agreed that he did not look even nearly his actual age, or seem at all inappropriate as an escort for his bizarre divinity. He was only a trifle paunchy despite his indolence and self-indulgence, and his face was absolutely without lines. Asenath, on the other hand, had the premature crow’s feet which come from the exercise of an intense will.
      About this time Edward brought the girl to call on me, and I at once saw that his interest was by no means one-sided. She eyed him continually with an almost predatory air, and I perceived that their intimacy was beyond untangling. Soon afterward I had a visit from old Mr. Derby, whom I had always admired and respected. He had heard the tales of his son’s new friendship, and had wormed the whole truth out of “the boy”. Edward meant to marry Asenath, and had even been looking at houses in the suburbs. Knowing my usually great influence with his son, the father wondered if I could help to break the ill-advised affair off; but I regretfully expressed my doubts. This time it was not a question of Edward’s weak will but of the woman’s strong will. The perennial child had transferred his dependence from the parental image to a new and stronger image, and nothing could be done about it.
      The wedding was performed a month later—by a justice of the peace, according to the bride’s request. Mr. Derby, at my advice, offered no opposition; and he, my wife, my son, and I attended the brief ceremony—the other guests being wild young people from the college. Asenath had bought the old Crowninshield place in the country at the end of High Street, and they proposed to settle there after a short trip to Innsmouth, whence three servants and some books and household goods were to be brought. It was probably not so much consideration for Edward and his father as a personal wish to be near the college, its library, and its crowd of “sophisticates”, that made Asenath settle in Arkham instead of returning permanently home.
      When Edward called on me after the honeymoon I thought he looked slightly changed. Asenath had made him get rid of the undeveloped moustache, but there was more than that. He looked soberer and more thoughtful, his habitual pout of childish rebelliousness being exchanged for a look almost of genuine sadness. I was puzzled to decide whether I liked or disliked the change. Certainly, he seemed for the moment more normally adult than ever before. Perhaps the marriage was a good thing—might not the change of dependence form a start toward actual neutralisation, leading ultimately to responsible independence? He came alone, for Asenath was very busy. She had brought a vast store of books and apparatus from Innsmouth (Derby shuddered as he spoke the name), and was finishing the restoration of the Crowninshield house and grounds.
      Her home in—that town—was a rather disquieting place, but certain objects in it had taught him some surprising things. He was progressing fast in esoteric lore now that he had Asenath’s guidance. Some of the experiments she proposed were very daring and radical—he did not feel at liberty to describe them—but he had confidence in her powers and intentions. The three servants were very queer—an incredibly aged couple who had been with old Ephraim and referred occasionally to him and to Asenath’s dead mother in a cryptic way, and a swarthy young wench who had marked anomalies of feature and seemed to exude a perpetual odour of fish.

III.

For the next two years I saw less and less of Derby. A fortnight would sometimes slip by without the familiar three-and-two strokes at the front door; and when he did call—or when, as happened with increasing infrequency, I called on him—he was very little disposed to converse on vital topics. He had become secretive about those occult studies which he used to describe and discuss so minutely, and preferred not to talk of his wife. She had aged tremendously since her marriage, till now—oddly enough—she seemed the elder of the two. Her face held the most concentratedly determined expression I had ever seen, and her whole aspect seemed to gain a vague, unplaceable repulsiveness. My wife and son noticed it as much as I, and we all ceased gradually to call on her—for which, Edward admitted in one of his boyishly tactless moments, she was unmitigatedly grateful. Occasionally the Derbys would go on long trips—ostensibly to Europe, though Edward sometimes hinted at obscurer destinations. 
      It was after the first year that people began talking about the change in Edward Derby. It was very casual talk, for the change was purely psychological; but it brought up some interesting points. Now and then, it seemed, Edward was observed to wear an expression and to do things wholly incompatible with his usual flabby nature. For example—although in the old days he could not drive a car, he was now seen occasionally to dash into or out of the old Crowninshield driveway with Asenath’s powerful Packard, handling it like a master, and meeting traffic entanglements with a skill and determination utterly alien to his accustomed nature. In such cases he seemed always to be just back from some trip or just starting on one—what sort of trip, no one could guess, although he mostly favoured the Innsmouth road.
      Oddly, the metamorphosis did not seem altogether pleasing. People said he looked too much like his wife, or like old Ephraim Waite himself, in these moments—or perhaps these moments seemed unnatural because they were so rare. Sometimes, hours after starting out in this way, he would return listlessly sprawled on the rear seat of the car while an obviously hired chauffeur or mechanic drove. Also, his preponderant aspect on the streets during his decreasing round of social contacts (including, I may say, his calls on me) was the old-time indecisive one—its irresponsible childishness even more marked than in the past. While Asenath’s face aged, Edward’s—aside from those exceptional occasions—actually relaxed into a kind of exaggerated immaturity, save when a trace of the new sadness or understanding would flash across it. It was really very puzzling. Meanwhile the Derbys almost dropped out of the gay college circle—not through their own disgust, we heard, but because something about their present studies shocked even the most callous of the other decadents. 
      It was in the third year of the marriage that Edward began to hint openly to me of a certain fear and dissatisfaction. He would let fall remarks about things ‘going too far’, and would talk darkly about the need of ‘saving his identity’. At first I ignored such references, but in time I began to question him guardedly, remembering what my friend’s daughter had said about Asenath’s hypnotic influence over the other girls at school—the cases where students had thought they were in her body looking across the room at themselves. This questioning seemed to make him at once alarmed and grateful, and once he mumbled something about having a serious talk with me later.
      About this time old Mr. Derby died, for which I was afterward very thankful. Edward was badly upset, though by no means disorganised. He had seen astonishingly little of his parent since his marriage, for Asenath had concentrated in herself all his vital sense of family linkage. Some called him callous in his loss—especially since those jaunty and confident moods in the car began to increase. He now wished to move back into the old Derby mansion, but Asenath insisted on staying in the Crowninshield house, to which she had become well adjusted.
      Not long afterward my wife heard a curious thing from a friend—one of the few who had not dropped the Derbys. She had been out to the end of High St. to call on the couple, and had seen a car shoot briskly out of the drive with Edward’s oddly confident and almost sneering face above the wheel. Ringing the bell, she had been told by the repulsive wench that Asenath was also out; but had chanced to look up at the house in leaving. There, at one of Edward’s library windows, she had glimpsed a hastily withdrawn face—a face whose expression of pain, defeat, and wistful hopelessness was poignant beyond description. It was—incredibly enough in view of its usual domineering cast—Asenath’s; yet the caller had vowed that in that instant the sad, muddled eyes of poor Edward were gazing out from it. 
      Edward’s calls now grew a trifle more frequent, and his hints occasionally became concrete. What he said was not to be believed, even in centuried and legend-haunted Arkham; but he threw out his dark lore with a sincerity and convincingness which made one fear for his sanity. He talked about terrible meetings in lonely places, of Cyclopean ruins in the heart of the Maine woods beneath which vast staircases lead down to abysses of nighted secrets, of complex angles that lead through invisible walls to other regions of space and time, and of hideous exchanges of personality that permitted explorations in remote and forbidden places, on other worlds, and in different space-time continua.
      He would now and then back up certain crazy hints by exhibiting objects which utterly nonplussed me—elusively coloured and bafflingly textured objects like nothing ever heard of on earth, whose insane curves and surfaces answered no conceivable purpose and followed no conceivable geometry. These things, he said, came ‘from outside’; and his wife knew how to get them. Sometimes—but always in frightened and ambiguous whispers—he would suggest things about old Ephraim Waite, whom he had seen occasionally at the college library in the old days. These adumbrations were never specific, but seemed to revolve around some especially horrible doubt as to whether the old wizard were really dead—in a spiritual as well as corporeal sense.
      At times Derby would halt abruptly in his revelations, and I wondered whether Asenath could possibly have divined his speech at a distance and cut him off through some unknown sort of telepathic mesmerism—some power of the kind she had displayed at school. Certainly, she suspected that he told me things, for as the weeks passed she tried to stop his visits with words and glances of a most inexplicable potency. Only with difficulty could he get to see me, for although he would pretend to be going somewhere else, some invisible force would generally clog his motions or make him forget his destination for the time being. His visits usually came when Asenath was away—‘away in her own body’, as he once oddly put it. She always found out later—the servants watched his goings and comings—but evidently she thought it inexpedient to do anything drastic.

IV.

Derby had been married more than three years on that August day when I got the telegram from Maine. I had not seen him for two months, but had heard he was away “on business”. Asenath was supposed to be with him, though watchful gossips declared there was someone upstairs in the house behind the doubly curtained windows. They had watched the purchases made by the servants. And now the town marshal of Chesuncook had wired of the draggled madman who stumbled out of the woods with delirious ravings and screamed to me for protection. It was Edward—and he had been just able to recall his own name and my name and address.
      Chesuncook is close to the wildest, deepest, and least explored forest belt in Maine, and it took a whole day of feverish jolting through fantastic and forbidding scenery to get there in a car. I found Derby in a cell at the town farm, vacillating between frenzy and apathy. He knew me at once, and began pouring out a meaningless, half-incoherent torrent of words in my direction.
      “Dan—for God’s sake! The pit of the shoggoths! Down the six thousand steps . . . the abomination of abominations . . . I never would let her take me, and then I found myself there. . . . Iä! Shub-Niggurath! . . . The shape rose up from the altar, and there were 500 that howled. . . . The Hooded Thing bleated ‘Kamog! Kamog!’—that was old Ephraim’s secret name in the coven. . . . I was there, where she promised she wouldn’t take me. . . . A minute before I was locked in the library, and then I was there where she had gone with my body—in the place of utter blasphemy, the unholy pit where the black realm begins and the watcher guards the gate. . . . I saw a shoggoth—it changed shape. . . . I can’t stand it. . . . I won’t stand it. . . . I’ll kill her if she ever sends me there again. . . . I’ll kill that entity . . . her, him, it . . . I’ll kill it! I’ll kill it with my own hands!”
      It took me an hour to quiet him, but he subsided at last. The next day I got him decent clothes in the village, and set out with him for Arkham. His fury of hysteria was spent, and he was inclined to be silent; though he began muttering darkly to himself when the car passed through Augusta—as if the sight of a city aroused unpleasant memories. It was clear that he did not wish to go home; and considering the fantastic delusions he seemed to have about his wife—delusions undoubtedly springing from some actual hypnotic ordeal to which he had been subjected—I thought it would be better if he did not. I would, I resolved, put him up myself for a time; no matter what unpleasantness it would make with Asenath. Later I would help him get a divorce, for most assuredly there were mental factors which made this marriage suicidal for him. When we struck open country again Derby’s muttering faded away, and I let him nod and drowse on the seat beside me as I drove.
      During our sunset dash through Portland the muttering commenced again, more distinctly than before, and as I listened I caught a stream of utterly insane drivel about Asenath. The extent to which she had preyed on Edward’s nerves was plain, for he had woven a whole set of hallucinations around her. His present predicament, he mumbled furtively, was only one of a long series. She was getting hold of him, and he knew that some day she would never let go. Even now she probably let him go only when she had to, because she couldn’t hold on long at a time. She constantly took his body and went to nameless places for nameless rites, leaving him in her body and locking him upstairs—but sometimes she couldn’t hold on, and he would find himself suddenly in his own body again in some far-off, horrible, and perhaps unknown place. Sometimes she’d get hold of him again and sometimes she couldn’t. Often he was left stranded somewhere as I had found him . . . time and again he had to find his way home from frightful distances, getting somebody to drive the car after he found it.
      The worst thing was that she was holding on to him longer and longer at a time. She wanted to be a man—to be fully human—that was why she got hold of him. She had sensed the mixture of fine-wrought brain and weak will in him. Some day she would crowd him out and disappear with his body—disappear to become a great magician like her father and leave him marooned in that female shell that wasn’t even quite human. Yes, he knew about the Innsmouth blood now. There had been traffick with things from the sea—it was horrible. . . . And old Ephraim—he had known the secret, and when he grew old did a hideous thing to keep alive . . . he wanted to live forever . . . Asenath would succeed—one successful demonstration had taken place already.
      As Derby muttered on I turned to look at him closely, verifying the impression of change which an earlier scrutiny had given me. Paradoxically, he seemed in better shape than usual—harder, more normally developed, and without the trace of sickly flabbiness caused by his indolent habits. It was as if he had been really active and properly exercised for the first time in his coddled life, and I judged that Asenath’s force must have pushed him into unwonted channels of motion and alertness. But just now his mind was in a pitiable state; for he was mumbling wild extravagances about his wife, about black magic, about old Ephraim, and about some revelation which would convince even me. He repeated names which I recognised from bygone browsings in forbidden volumes, and at times made me shudder with a certain thread of mythological consistency—of convincing coherence—which ran through his maundering. Again and again he would pause, as if to gather courage for some final and terrible disclosure.
      “Dan, Dan, don’t you remember him—the wild eyes and the unkempt beard that never turned white? He glared at me once, and I never forgot it. Now she glares that way. And I know why! He found it in the Necronomicon—the formula. I don’t dare tell you the page yet, but when I do you can read and understand. Then you will know what has engulfed me. On, on, on, on—body to body to body—he means never to die. The life-glow—he knows how to break the link . . . it can flicker on a while even when the body is dead. I’ll give you hints, and maybe you’ll guess. Listen, Dan—do you know why my wife always takes such pains with that silly backhand writing? Have you ever seen a manuscript of old Ephraim’s? Do you want to know why I shivered when I saw some hasty notes Asenath had jotted down? 
      “Asenath . . . is there such a person? Why did they half think there was poison in old Ephraim’s stomach? Why do the Gilmans whisper about the way he shrieked—like a frightened child—when he went mad and Asenath locked him up in the padded attic room where—the other—had been? Was it old Ephraim’s soul that was locked in? Who locked in whom? Why had he been looking for months for someone with a fine mind and a weak will? Why did he curse that his daughter wasn’t a son? Tell me, Daniel Upton—what devilish exchange was perpetrated in the house of horror where that blasphemous monster had his trusting, weak-willed, half-human child at his mercy? Didn’t he make it permanent—as she’ll do in the end with me? Tell me why that thing that calls itself Asenath writes differently when off guard, so that you can’t tell its script from . . .”
      Then the thing happened. Derby’s voice was rising to a thin treble scream as he raved, when suddenly it was shut off with an almost mechanical click. I thought of those other occasions at my home when his confidences had abruptly ceased—when I had half fancied that some obscure telepathic wave of Asenath’s mental force was intervening to keep him silent. This, though, was something altogether different—and, I felt, infinitely more horrible. The face beside me was twisted almost unrecognisably for a moment, while through the whole body there passed a shivering motion—as if all the bones, organs, muscles, nerves, and glands were readjusting themselves to a radically different posture, set of stresses, and general personality.
      Just where the supreme horror lay, I could not for my life tell; yet there swept over me such a swamping wave of sickness and repulsion—such a freezing, petrifying sense of utter alienage and abnormality—that my grasp of the wheel grew feeble and uncertain. The figure beside me seemed less like a lifelong friend than like some monstrous intrusion from outer space—some damnable, utterly accursed focus of unknown and malign cosmic forces.
      I had faltered only a moment, but before another moment was over my companion had seized the wheel and forced me to change places with him. The dusk was now very thick, and the lights of Portland far behind, so I could not see much of his face. The blaze of his eyes, though, was phenomenal; and I knew that he must now be in that queerly energised state—so unlike his usual self—which so many people had noticed. It seemed odd and incredible that listless Edward Derby—he who could never assert himself, and who had never learned to drive—should be ordering me about and taking the wheel of my own car, yet that was precisely what had happened. He did not speak for some time, and in my inexplicable horror I was glad he did not.
      In the lights of Biddeford and Saco I saw his firmly set mouth, and shivered at the blaze of his eyes. The people were right—he did look damnably like his wife and like old Ephraim when in these moods. I did not wonder that the moods were disliked—there was certainly something unnatural and diabolic in them, and I felt the sinister element all the more because of the wild ravings I had been hearing. This man, for all my lifelong knowledge of Edward Pickman Derby, was a stranger—an intrusion of some sort from the black abyss.
      He did not speak until we were on a dark stretch of road, and when he did his voice seemed utterly unfamiliar. It was deeper, firmer, and more decisive than I had ever known it to be; while its accent and pronunciation were altogether changed—though vaguely, remotely, and rather disturbingly recalling something I could not quite place. There was, I thought, a trace of very profound and very genuine irony in the timbre—not the flashy, meaninglessly jaunty pseudo-irony of the callow “sophisticate”, which Derby had habitually affected, but something grim, basic, pervasive, and potentially evil. I marvelled at the self-possession so soon following the spell of panic-struck muttering.
      “I hope you’ll forget my attack back there, Upton,” he was saying. “You know what my nerves are, and I guess you can excuse such things. I’m enormously grateful, of course, for this lift home.
      “And you must forget, too, any crazy things I may have been saying about my wife—and about things in general. That’s what comes from overstudy in a field like mine. My philosophy is full of bizarre concepts, and when the mind gets worn out it cooks up all sorts of imaginary concrete applications. I shall take a rest from now on—you probably won’t see me for some time, and you needn’t blame Asenath for it.
      “This trip was a bit queer, but it’s really very simple. There are certain Indian relics in the north woods—standing stones, and all that—which mean a good deal in folklore, and Asenath and I are following that stuff up. It was a hard search, so I seem to have gone off my head. I must send somebody for the car when I get home. A month’s relaxation will put me back on my feet.”
      I do not recall just what my own part of the conversation was, for the baffling alienage of my seatmate filled all my consciousness. With every moment my feeling of elusive cosmic horror increased, till at length I was in a virtual delirium of longing for the end of the drive. Derby did not offer to relinquish the wheel, and I was glad of the speed with which Portsmouth and Newburyport flashed by. 
      At the junction where the main highway runs inland and avoids Innsmouth I was half afraid my driver would take the bleak shore road that goes through that damnable place. He did not, however, but darted rapidly past Rowley and Ipswich toward our destination. We reached Arkham before midnight, and found the lights still on at the old Crowninshield house. Derby left the car with a hasty repetition of his thanks, and I drove home alone with a curious feeling of relief. It had been a terrible drive—all the more terrible because I could not quite tell why—and I did not regret Derby’s forecast of a long absence from my company.

V.

The next two months were full of rumours. People spoke of seeing Derby more and more in his new energised state, and Asenath was scarcely ever in to her few callers. I had only one visit from Edward, when he called briefly in Asenath’s car—duly reclaimed from wherever he had left it in Maine—to get some books he had lent me. He was in his new state, and paused only long enough for some evasively polite remarks. It was plain that he had nothing to discuss with me when in this condition—and I noticed that he did not even trouble to give the old three-and-two signal when ringing the doorbell. As on that evening in the car, I felt a faint, infinitely deep horror which I could not explain; so that his swift departure was a prodigious relief.
      In mid-September Derby was away for a week, and some of the decadent college set talked knowingly of the matter—hinting at a meeting with a notorious cult-leader, lately expelled from England, who had established headquarters in New York. For my part I could not get that strange ride from Maine out of my head. The transformation I had witnessed had affected me profoundly, and I caught myself again and again trying to account for the thing—and for the extreme horror it had inspired in me.
      But the oddest rumours were those about the sobbing in the old Crowninshield house. The voice seemed to be a woman’s, and some of the younger people thought it sounded like Asenath’s. It was heard only at rare intervals, and would sometimes be choked off as if by force. There was talk of an investigation, but this was dispelled one day when Asenath appeared in the streets and chatted in a sprightly way with a large number of acquaintances—apologising for her recent absences and speaking incidentally about the nervous breakdown and hysteria of a guest from Boston. The guest was never seen, but Asenath’s appearance left nothing to be said. And then someone complicated matters by whispering that the sobs had once or twice been in a man’s voice.
      One evening in mid-October I heard the familiar three-and-two ring at the front door. Answering it myself, I found Edward on the steps, and saw in a moment that his personality was the old one which I had not encountered since the day of his ravings on that terrible ride from Chesuncook. His face was twitching with a mixture of odd emotions in which fear and triumph seemed to share dominion, and he looked furtively over his shoulder as I closed the door behind him.
      Following me clumsily to the study, he asked for some whiskey to steady his nerves. I forbore to question him, but waited till he felt like beginning whatever he wanted to say. At length he ventured some information in a choking voice.
      “Asenath has gone, Dan. We had a long talk last night while the servants were out, and I made her promise to stop preying on me. Of course I had certain—certain occult defences I never told you about. She had to give in, but got frightfully angry. Just packed up and started for New York—walked right out to catch the 8:20 in to Boston. I suppose people will talk, but I can’t help that. You needn’t mention that there was any trouble—just say she’s gone on a long research trip.
      “She’s probably going to stay with one of her horrible groups of devotees. I hope she’ll go west and get a divorce—anyhow, I’ve made her promise to keep away and let me alone. It was horrible, Dan—she was stealing my body—crowding me out—making a prisoner of me. I laid low and pretended to let her do it, but I had to be on the watch. I could plan if I was careful, for she can’t read my mind literally, or in detail. All she could read of my planning was a sort of general mood of rebellion—and she always thought I was helpless. Never thought I could get the best of her . . . but I had a spell or two that worked.”
      Derby looked over his shoulder and took some more whiskey.
      “I paid off those damned servants this morning when they got back. They were ugly about it, and asked questions, but they went. They’re her kind—Innsmouth people—and were hand and glove with her. I hope they’ll let me alone—I didn’t like the way they laughed when they walked away. I must get as many of Dad’s old servants again as I can. I’ll move back home now.
      “I suppose you think I’m crazy, Dan—but Arkham history ought to hint at things that back up what I’ve told you—and what I’m going to tell you. You’ve seen one of the changes, too—in your car after I told you about Asenath that day coming home from Maine. That was when she got me—drove me out of my body. The last thing of the ride I remember was when I was all worked up trying to tell you what that she-devil is. Then she got me, and in a flash I was back at the house—in the library where those damned servants had me locked up—and in that cursed fiend’s body . . . that isn’t even human. . . . You know, it was she you must have ridden home with . . . that preying wolf in my body. . . . You ought to have known the difference!”
      I shuddered as Derby paused. Surely, I had known the difference—yet could I accept an explanation as insane as this? But my distracted caller was growing even wilder.
      “I had to save myself—I had to, Dan! She’d have got me for good at Hallowmass—they hold a Sabbat up there beyond Chesuncook, and the sacrifice would have clinched things. She’d have got me for good . . . she’d have been I, and I’d have been she . . . forever . . . too late. . . . My body’d have been hers for good. . . . She’d have been a man, and fully human, just as she wanted to be. . . . I suppose she’d have put me out of the way—killed her own ex-body with me in it, damn her, just as she did before—just as she, he, or it did before. . . .”
      Edward’s face was now atrociously distorted, and he bent it uncomfortably close to mine as his voice fell to a whisper.
      “You must know what I hinted in the car—that she isn’t Asenath at all, but really old Ephraim himself. I suspected it a year and a half ago, but I know it now. Her handwriting shews it when she’s off guard—sometimes she jots down a note in writing that’s just like her father’s manuscripts, stroke for stroke—and sometimes she says things that nobody but an old man like Ephraim could say. He changed forms with her when he felt death coming—she was the only one he could find with the right kind of brain and a weak enough will—he got her body permanently, just as she almost got mine, and then poisoned the old body he’d put her into. Haven’t you seen old Ephraim’s soul glaring out of that she-devil’s eyes dozens of times . . . and out of mine when she had control of my body?”
      The whisperer was panting, and paused for breath. I said nothing, and when he resumed his voice was nearer normal. This, I reflected, was a case for the asylum, but I would not be the one to send him there. Perhaps time and freedom from Asenath would do its work. I could see that he would never wish to dabble in morbid occultism again.
      “I’ll tell you more later—I must have a long rest now. I’ll tell you something of the forbidden horrors she led me into—something of the age-old horrors that even now are festering in out-of-the-way corners with a few monstrous priests to keep them alive. Some people know things about the universe that nobody ought to know, and can do things that nobody ought to be able to do. I’ve been in it up to my neck, but that’s the end. Today I’d burn that damned Necronomicon and all the rest if I were librarian at Miskatonic.
      “But she can’t get me now. I must get out of that accursed house as soon as I can, and settle down at home. You’ll help me, I know, if I need help. Those devilish servants, you know . . . and if people should get too inquisitive about Asenath. You see, I can’t give them her address. . . . Then there are certain groups of searchers—certain cults, you know—that might misunderstand our breaking up . . . some of them have damnably curious ideas and methods. I know you’ll stand by me if anything happens—even if I have to tell you a lot that will shock you. . . .”
      I had Edward stay and sleep in one of the guest-chambers that night, and in the morning he seemed calmer. We discussed certain possible arrangements for his moving back into the Derby mansion, and I hoped he would lose no time in making the change. He did not call the next evening, but I saw him frequently during the ensuing weeks. We talked as little as possible about strange and unpleasant things, but discussed the renovation of the old Derby house, and the travels which Edward promised to take with my son and me the following summer.
      Of Asenath we said almost nothing, for I saw that the subject was a peculiarly disturbing one. Gossip, of course, was rife; but that was no novelty in connexion with the strange ménage at the old Crowninshield house. One thing I did not like was what Derby’s banker let fall in an overexpansive mood at the Miskatonic Club—about the cheques Edward was sending regularly to a Moses and Abigail Sargent and a Eunice Babson in Innsmouth. That looked as if those evil-faced servants were extorting some kind of tribute from him—yet he had not mentioned the matter to me.
      I wished that the summer—and my son’s Harvard vacation—would come, so that we could get Edward to Europe. He was not, I soon saw, mending as rapidly as I had hoped he would; for there was something a bit hysterical in his occasional exhilaration, while his moods of fright and depression were altogether too frequent. The old Derby house was ready by December, yet Edward constantly put off moving. Though he hated and seemed to fear the Crowninshield place, he was at the same time queerly enslaved by it. He could not seem to begin dismantling things, and invented every kind of excuse to postpone action. When I pointed this out to him he appeared unaccountably frightened. His father’s old butler—who was there with other reacquired family servants—told me one day that Edward’s occasional prowlings about the house, and especially down cellar, looked odd and unwholesome to him. I wondered if Asenath had been writing disturbing letters, but the butler said there was no mail which could have come from her.

VI.

It was about Christmas that Derby broke down one evening while calling on me. I was steering the conversation toward next summer’s travels when he suddenly shrieked and leaped up from his chair with a look of shocking, uncontrollable fright—a cosmic panic and loathing such as only the nether gulfs of nightmare could bring to any sane mind.
      “My brain! My brain! God, Dan—it’s tugging—from beyond—knocking—clawing—that she-devil—even now—Ephraim—Kamog! Kamog!—The pit of the shoggoths—Iä! Shub-Niggurath! The Goat with a Thousand Young! . . . 
      “The flame—the flame . . . beyond body, beyond life . . . in the earth . . . oh, God! . . .”
      I pulled him back to his chair and poured some wine down his throat as his frenzy sank to a dull apathy. He did not resist, but kept his lips moving as if talking to himself. Presently I realised that he was trying to talk to me, and bent my ear to his mouth to catch the feeble words.
      “ . . . again, again . . . she’s trying . . . I might have known . . . nothing can stop that force; not distance, nor magic, nor death . . . it comes and comes, mostly in the night . . . I can’t leave . . . it’s horrible . . . oh, God, Dan, if you only knew as I do just how horrible it is. . . .”
      When he had slumped down into a stupor I propped him with pillows and let normal sleep overtake him. I did not call a doctor, for I knew what would be said of his sanity, and wished to give nature a chance if I possibly could. He waked at midnight, and I put him to bed upstairs, but he was gone by morning. He had let himself quietly out of the house—and his butler, when called on the wire, said he was at home pacing restlessly about the library.
      Edward went to pieces rapidly after that. He did not call again, but I went daily to see him. He would always be sitting in his library, staring at nothing and having an air of abnormal listening. Sometimes he talked rationally, but always on trivial topics. Any mention of his trouble, of future plans, or of Asenath would send him into a frenzy. His butler said he had frightful seizures at night, during which he might eventually do himself harm.
      I had a long talk with his doctor, banker, and lawyer, and finally took the physician with two specialist colleagues to visit him. The spasms that resulted from the first questions were violent and pitiable—and that evening a closed car took his poor struggling body to the Arkham Sanitarium. I was made his guardian and called on him twice weekly—almost weeping to hear his wild shrieks, awesome whispers, and dreadful, droning repetitions of such phrases as “I had to do it—I had to do it . . . it’ll get me . . . it’ll get me . . . down there . . . down there in the dark. . . . Mother, mother! Dan! Save me . . . save me. . . .”
      How much hope of recovery there was, no one could say; but I tried my best to be optimistic. Edward must have a home if he emerged, so I transferred his servants to the Derby mansion, which would surely be his sane choice. What to do about the Crowninshield place with its complex arrangements and collections of utterly inexplicable objects I could not decide, so left it momentarily untouched—telling the Derby housemaid to go over and dust the chief rooms once a week, and ordering the furnace man to have a fire on those days.
      The final nightmare came before Candlemas—heralded, in cruel irony, by a false gleam of hope. One morning late in January the sanitarium telephoned to report that Edward’s reason had suddenly come back. His continuous memory, they said, was badly impaired; but sanity itself was certain. Of course he must remain some time for observation, but there could be little doubt of the outcome. All going well, he would surely be free in a week.
      I hastened over in a flood of delight, but stood bewildered when a nurse took me to Edward’s room. The patient rose to greet me, extending his hand with a polite smile; but I saw in an instant that he bore the strangely energised personality which had seemed so foreign to his own nature—the competent personality I had found so vaguely horrible, and which Edward himself had once vowed was the intruding soul of his wife. There was the same blazing vision—so like Asenath’s and old Ephraim’s—and the same firm mouth; and when he spoke I could sense the same grim, pervasive irony in his voice—the deep irony so redolent of potential evil. This was the person who had driven my car through the night five months before—the person I had not seen since that brief call when he had forgotten the old-time doorbell signal and stirred such nebulous fears in me—and now he filled me with the same dim feeling of blasphemous alienage and ineffable cosmic hideousness.
      He spoke affably of arrangements for release—and there was nothing for me to do but assent, despite some remarkable gaps in his recent memories. Yet I felt that something was terribly, inexplicably wrong and abnormal. There were horrors in this thing that I could not reach. This was a sane person—but was it indeed the Edward Derby I had known? If not, who or what was it—and where was Edward? Ought it to be free or confined . . . or ought it to be extirpated from the face of the earth? There was a hint of the abysmally sardonic in everything the creature said—the Asenath-like eyes lent a special and baffling mockery to certain words about the ‘early liberty earned by an especially close confinement’. I must have behaved very awkwardly, and was glad to beat a retreat.
      All that day and the next I racked my brain over the problem. What had happened? What sort of mind looked out through those alien eyes in Edward’s face? I could think of nothing but this dimly terrible enigma, and gave up all efforts to perform my usual work. The second morning the hospital called up to say that the recovered patient was unchanged, and by evening I was close to a nervous collapse—a state I admit, though others will vow it coloured my subsequent vision. I have nothing to say on this point except that no madness of mine could account for all the evidence.

VII.

It was in the night—after that second evening—that stark, utter horror burst over me and weighted my spirit with a black, clutching panic from which it can never shake free. It began with a telephone call just before midnight. I was the only one up, and sleepily took down the receiver in the library. No one seemed to be on the wire, and I was about to hang up and go to bed when my ear caught a very faint suspicion of sound at the other end. Was someone trying under great difficulties to talk? As I listened I thought I heard a sort of half-liquid bubbling noise—“glub . . . glub . . . glub”—which had an odd suggestion of inarticulate, unintelligible word and syllable divisions. I called, “Who is it?” But the only answer was “glub-glub . . . glub-glub.” I could only assume that the noise was mechanical; but fancying that it might be a case of a broken instrument able to receive but not to send, I added, “I can’t hear you. Better hang up and try Information.” Immediately I heard the receiver go on the hook at the other end.
      This, I say, was just before midnight. When that call was traced afterward it was found to come from the old Crowninshield house, though it was fully half a week from the housemaid’s day to be there. I shall only hint what was found at that house—the upheaval in a remote cellar storeroom, the tracks, the dirt, the hastily rifled wardrobe, the baffling marks on the telephone, the clumsily used stationery, and the detestable stench lingering over everything. The police, poor fools, have their smug little theories, and are still searching for those sinister discharged servants—who have dropped out of sight amidst the present furore. They speak of a ghoulish revenge for things that were done, and say I was included because I was Edward’s best friend and adviser.
      Idiots!—do they fancy those brutish clowns could have forged that handwriting? Do they fancy they could have brought what later came? Are they blind to the changes in that body that was Edward’s? As for me, I now believe all that Edward Derby ever told me. There are horrors beyond life’s edge that we do not suspect, and once in a while man’s evil prying calls them just within our range. Ephraim—Asenath—that devil called them in, and they engulfed Edward as they are engulfing me.
      Can I be sure that I am safe? Those powers survive the life of the physical form. The next day—in the afternoon, when I pulled out of my prostration and was able to walk and talk coherently—I went to the madhouse and shot him dead for Edward’s and the world’s sake, but can I be sure till he is cremated? They are keeping the body for some silly autopsies by different doctors—but I say he must be cremated. He must be cremated—he who was not Edward Derby when I shot him. I shall go mad if he is not, for I may be the next. But my will is not weak—and I shall not let it be undermined by the terrors I know are seething around it. One life—Ephraim, Asenath, and Edward—who now? I will not be driven out of my body . . . I will not change souls with that bullet-ridden lich in the madhouse!
      But let me try to tell coherently of that final horror. I will not speak of what the police persistently ignored—the tales of that dwarfed, grotesque, malodorous thing met by at least three wayfarers in High St. just before two o’clock, and the nature of the single footprints in certain places. I will say only that just about two the doorbell and knocker waked me—doorbell and knocker both, plied alternately and uncertainly in a kind of weak desperation, and each trying to keep to Edward’s old signal of three-and-two strokes.
      Roused from sound sleep, my mind leaped into a turmoil. Derby at the door—and remembering the old code! That new personality had not remembered it . . . was Edward suddenly back in his rightful state? Why was he here in such evident stress and haste? Had he been released ahead of time, or had he escaped? Perhaps, I thought as I flung on a robe and bounded downstairs, his return to his own self had brought raving and violence, revoking his discharge and driving him to a desperate dash for freedom. Whatever had happened, he was good old Edward again, and I would help him!
      When I opened the door into the elm-arched blackness a gust of insufferably foetid wind almost flung me prostrate. I choked in nausea, and for a second scarcely saw the dwarfed, humped figure on the steps. The summons had been Edward’s, but who was this foul, stunted parody? Where had Edward had time to go? His ring had sounded only a second before the door opened.
      The caller had on one of Edward’s overcoats—its bottom almost touching the ground, and its sleeves rolled back yet still covering the hands. On the head was a slouch hat pulled low, while a black silk muffler concealed the face. As I stepped unsteadily forward, the figure made a semi-liquid sound like that I had heard over the telephone—“glub . . . glub . . .”—and thrust at me a large, closely written paper impaled on the end of a long pencil. Still reeling from the morbid and unaccountable foetor, I seized this paper and tried to read it in the light from the doorway.
      Beyond question, it was in Edward’s script. But why had he written when he was close enough to ring—and why was the script so awkward, coarse, and shaky? I could make out nothing in the dim half light, so edged back into the hall, the dwarf figure clumping mechanically after but pausing on the inner door’s threshold. The odour of this singular messenger was really appalling, and I hoped (not in vain, thank God!) that my wife would not wake and confront it.
      Then, as I read the paper, I felt my knees give under me and my vision go black. I was lying on the floor when I came to, that accursed sheet still clutched in my fear-rigid hand. This is what it said.
      “Dan—go to the sanitarium and kill it. Exterminate it. It isn’t Edward Derby any more. She got me—it’s Asenath—and she has been dead three months and a half. I lied when I said she had gone away. I killed her. I had to. It was sudden, but we were alone and I was in my right body. I saw a candlestick and smashed her head in. She would have got me for good at Hallowmass.
      “I buried her in the farther cellar storeroom under some old boxes and cleaned up all the traces. The servants suspected next morning, but they have such secrets that they dare not tell the police. I sent them off, but God knows what they—and others of the cult—will do.
      “I thought for a while I was all right, and then I felt the tugging at my brain. I knew what it was—I ought to have remembered. A soul like hers—or Ephraim’s—is half detached, and keeps right on after death as long as the body lasts. She was getting me—making me change bodies with her—seizing my body and putting me in that corpse of hers buried in the cellar.
      “I knew what was coming—that’s why I snapped and had to go to the asylum. Then it came—I found myself choked in the dark—in Asenath’s rotting carcass down there in the cellar under the boxes where I put it. And I knew she must be in my body at the sanitarium—permanently, for it was after Hallowmass, and the sacrifice would work even without her being there—sane, and ready for release as a menace to the world. I was desperate, and in spite of everything I clawed my way out.
      “I’m too far gone to talk—I couldn’t manage to telephone—but I can still write. I’ll get fixed up somehow and bring you this last word and warning. Kill that fiend if you value the peace and comfort of the world. See that it is cremated. If you don’t, it will live on and on, body to body forever, and I can’t tell you what it will do. Keep clear of black magic, Dan, it’s the devil’s business. Goodbye—you’ve been a great friend. Tell the police whatever they’ll believe—and I’m damnably sorry to drag all this on you. I’ll be at peace before long—this thing won’t hold together much more. Hope you can read this. And kill that thing—kill it.
Yours—Ed.”

      It was only afterward that I read the last half of this paper, for I had fainted at the end of the third paragraph. I fainted again when I saw and smelled what cluttered up the threshold where the warm air had struck it. The messenger would not move or have consciousness any more.
      The butler, tougher-fibred than I, did not faint at what met him in the hall in the morning. Instead, he telephoned the police. When they came I had been taken upstairs to bed, but the—other mass—lay where it had collapsed in the night. The men put handkerchiefs to their noses.
      What they finally found inside Edward’s oddly assorted clothes was mostly liquescent horror. There were bones, too—and a crushed-in skull. Some dental work positively identified the skull as Asenath’s.",True
"I can hardly describe the mood in which I was left by this harrowing episode--an episode at once mad and pitiful, grotesque and terrifying. The grocery boy had prepared me for it, yet the reality left me none the less bewildered and disturbed. Puerile though the story was, old Zadok's insane earnestness and horror had communicated to me a mounting unrest which joined with my earlier sense of loathing for the town and its blight of intangible shadow.

Later I might sift the tale and extract some nucleus of historic allegory; just now I wished to put it out of my head. The hour grown perilously late--my watch said 7:15, and the Arkham bus left Town Square at eight--so I tried to give my thoughts as neutral and practical a cast as possible, meanwhile walking rapidly through the deserted streets of gaping roofs and leaning houses toward the hotel where I had checked my valise and would find my bus.

Though the golden light of late afternoon gave the ancient roofs and decrepit chimneys an air of mystic loveliness and peace, I could not help glancing over my shoulder now and then. I would surely be very glad to get out of malodorous and fear-shadowed Innsmouth, and wished there were some other vehicle than the bus driven by that sinister-looking fellow Sargent. Yet I did not hurry too precipitately, for there were architectural details worth viewing at every silent corner; and I could easily, I calculated, cover the necessary distance in a half-hour.

Studying the grocery youth's map and seeking a route I had not traversed before, I chose Marsh Street instead of State for my approach to Town Square. Near the corner of Fall Street I began to see scattered groups of furtive whisperers, and when I finally reached the Square I saw that almost all the loiterers were congregated around the door of the Gilman House. It seemed as if many bulging, watery, unwinking eyes looked oddly at me as I claimed my valise in the lobby, and I hoped that none of these unpleasant creatures would be my fellow-passengers on the coach.

The bus, rather early, rattled in with three passengers somewhat before eight, and an evil-looking fellow on the sidewalk muttered a few indistinguishable words to the driver. Sargent threw out a mail-bag and a roll of newspapers, and entered the hotel; while the passengers--the same men whom I had seen arriving in Newburyport that morning--shambled to the sidewalk and exchanged some faint guttural words with a loafer in a language I could have sworn was not English. I boarded the empty coach and took the seat I had taken before, but was hardly settled before Sargent re-appeared and began mumbling in a throaty voice of peculiar repulsiveness.

I was, it appeared, in very bad luck. There had been something wrong with the engine, despite the excellent time made from Newburyport, and the bus could not complete the journey to Arkham. No, it could not possibly be repaired that night, nor was there any other way of getting transportation out of Innsmouth either to Arkham or elsewhere. Sargent was sorry, but I would have to stop over at the Gilman. Probably the clerk would make the price easy for me, but there was nothing else to do. Almost dazed by this sudden obstacle, and violently dreading the fall of night in this decaying and half-unlighted town, I left the bus and reentered the hotel lobby; where the sullen queer-looking night clerk told me I could have Room 428 on next the top floor--large, but without running water--for a dollar.

Despite what I had heard of this hotel in Newburyport, I signed the register, paid my dollar, let the clerk take my valise, and followed that sour, solitary attendant up three creaking flights of stairs past dusty corridors which seemed wholly devoid of life. My room was a dismal rear one with two windows and bare, cheap furnishings, overlooked a dingy court-yard otherwise hemmed in by low, deserted brick blocks, and commanded a view of decrepit westward-stretching roofs with a marshy countryside beyond. At the end of the corridor was a bathroom--a discouraging relique with ancient marble bowl, tin tub, faint electric light, and musty wooded paneling around all the plumbing fixtures.

It being still daylight, I descended to the Square and looked around for a dinner of some sort; noticing as I did so the strange glances I received from the unwholesome loafers. Since the grocery was closed, I was forced to patronise the restaurant I had shunned before; a stooped, narrow-headed man with staring, unwinking eyes, and a flat-nosed wench with unbelievably thick, clumsy hands being in attendance. The service was all of the counter type, and it relieved me to find that much was evidently served from cans and packages. A bowl of vegetable soup with crackers was enough for me, and I soon headed back for my cheerless room at the Gilman; getting a evening paper and a fly-specked magazine from the evil-visaged clerk at the rickety stand beside his desk.

As twilight deepened I turned on the one feeble electric bulb over the cheap, iron-framed bed, and tried as best I could to continue the reading I had begun. I felt it advisable to keep my mind wholesomely occupied, for it would not do to brood over the abnormalities of this ancient, blight-shadowed town while I was still within its borders. The insane yarn I had heard from the aged drunkard did not promise very pleasant dreams, and I felt I must keep the image of his wild, watery eyes as far as possible from my imagination.

Also, I must not dwell on what that factory inspector had told the Newburyport ticket-agent about the Gilman House and the voices of its nocturnal tenants--not on that, nor on the face beneath the tiara in the black church doorway; the face for whose horror my conscious mind could not account. It would perhaps have been easier to keep my thoughts from disturbing topics had the room not been so gruesomely musty. As it was, the lethal mustiness blended hideously with the town's general fishy odour and persistently focussed one's fancy on death and decay.

Another thing that disturbed me was the absence of a bolt on the door of my room. One had been there, as marks clearly shewed, but there were signs of recent removal. No doubt it had been out of order, like so many other things in this decrepit edifice. In my nervousness I looked around and discovered a bolt on the clothes press which seemed to be of the same size, judging from the marks, as the one formerly on the door. To gain a partial relief from the general tension I busied myself by transferring this hardware to the vacant place with the aid of a handy three-in-one device including a screwdriver which I kept on my key-ring. The bolt fitted perfectly, and I was somewhat relieved when I knew that I could shoot it firmly upon retiring. Not that I had any real apprehension of its need, but that any symbol of security was welcome in an environment of this kind. There were adequate bolts on the two lateral doors to connecting rooms, and these I proceeded to fasten.

I did not undress, but decided to read till I was sleepy and then lie down with only my coat, collar, and shoes off. Taking a pocket flash light from my valise, I placed it in my trousers, so that I could read my watch if I woke up later in the dark. Drowsiness, however, did not come; and when I stopped to analyse my thoughts I found to my disquiet that I was really unconsciously listening for something--listening for something which I dreaded but could not name. That inspector's story must have worked on my imagination more deeply than I had suspected. Again I tried to read, but found that I made no progress.

After a time I seemed to hear the stairs and corridors creak at intervals as if with footsteps, and wondered if the other rooms were beginning to fill up. There were no voices, however, and it struck me that there was something subtly furtive about the creaking. I did not like it, and debated whether I had better try to sleep at all. This town had some queer people, and there had undoubtedly been several disappearances. Was this one of those inns where travelers were slain for their money? Surely I had no look of excessive prosperity. Or were the towns folk really so resentful about curious visitors? Had my obvious sightseeing, with its frequent map-consultations, aroused unfavorable notice. It occurred to me that I must be in a highly nervous state to let a few random creakings set me off speculating in this fashion--but I regretted none the less that I was unarmed.

At length, feeling a fatigue which had nothing of drowsiness in it, I bolted the newly outfitted hall door, turned off the light, and threw myself down on the hard, uneven bed--coat, collar, shoes, and all. In the darkness every faint noise of the night seemed magnified, and a flood of doubly unpleasant thoughts swept over me. I was sorry I had put out the light, yet was too tired to rise and turn it on again. Then, after a long, dreary interval, and prefaced by a fresh creaking of stairs and corridor, there came that soft, damnably unmistakable sound which seemed like a malign fulfillment of all my apprehensions. Without the least shadow of a doubt, the lock of my door was being tried--cautiously, furtively, tentatively--with a key.

My sensations upon recognising this sign of actual peril were perhaps less rather than more tumultuous because of my previous vague fears. I had been, albeit without definite reason, instinctively on my guard--and that was to my advantage in the new and real crisis, whatever it might turn out to be. Nevertheless the change in the menace from vague premonition to immediate reality was a profound shock, and fell upon me with the force of a genuine blow. It never once occurred to me that the fumbling might be a mere mistake. Malign purpose was all I could think of, and I kept deathly quiet, awaiting the would-be intruder's next move.

After a time the cautious rattling ceased, and I heard the room to the north entered with a pass-key. Then the lock of the connecting door to my room was softly tried. The bolt held, of course, and I heard the floor creak as the prowler left the room. After a moment there came another soft rattling, and I knew that the room to the south of me was being entered. Again a furtive trying of a bolted connecting door, and again a receding creaking. This time the creaking went along the hall and down the stairs, so I knew that the prowler had realised the bolted condition of my doors and was giving up his attempt for a greater or lesser time, as the future would shew.

The readiness with which I fell into a plan of action proves that I must have been subconsciously fearing some menace and considering possible avenues of escape for hours. From the first I felt that the unseen fumbler meant a danger not to be met or dealt with, but only to be fled from as precipitately as possible. The one thing to do was to get out of that hotel alive as quickly as I could, and through some channel other than the front stairs and lobby.

Rising softly and throwing my flashlight on the switch, I sought to light the bulb over my bed in order to choose and pocket some belongings for a swift, valiseless flight. Nothing, however, happened; and I saw that the power had been cut off. Clearly, some cryptic, evil movement was afoot on a large scale--just what, I could not say. As I stood pondering with my hand on the now useless switch I heard a muffled creaking on the floor below, and thought I could barely distinguish voices in conversation. A moment later I felt less sure that the deeper sounds were voices, since the apparent hoarse barkings and loose-syllabled croakings bore so little resemblance to recognized human speech. Then I thought with renewed force of what the factory inspector had heard in the night in this mouldering and pestilential building.

Having filled my pockets with the flashlight's aid, I put on my hat and tiptoed to the windows to consider chances of descent. Despite the state's safety regulations there was no fire escape on this side of the hotel, and I saw that my windows commanded only a sheer three story drop to the cobbled courtyard. On the right and left, however, some ancient brick business blocks abutted on the hotel; their slant roofs coming up to a reasonable jumping distance from my fourth-story level. To reach either of these lines of buildings I would have to be in a room two from my own--in one case on the north and in the other case on the south--and my mind instantly set to work what chances I had of making the transfer.

I could not, I decided, risk an emergence into the corridor; where my footsteps would surely be heard, and where the difficulties of entering the desired room would be insuperable. My progress, if it was to be made at all, would have to be through the less solidly-built connecting doors of the rooms; the locks and bolts of which I would have to force violently, using my shoulder as a battering-ram whenever they were set against me. This, I thought, would be possible owing to the rickety nature of the house and its fixtures; but I realised I could not do it noiselessly. I would have to count on sheer speed, and the chance of getting to a window before any hostile forces became coordinated enough to open the right door toward me with a pass-key. My own outer door I reinforced by pushing the bureau against it--little by little, in order to make a minimum of sound.

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

Gathering from the grocery boy's map that the best route out of town was southward, I glanced first at the connecting door on the south side of the room. It was designed to open in my direction, hence I saw--after drawing the bolt and finding other fastening in place--it was not a favorable one for forcing. Accordingly abandoning it as a route, I cautiously moved the bedstead against it to hamper any attack which might be made on it later from the next room. The door on the north was hung to open away from me, and this--though a test proved it to be locked or bolted from the other side--I knew must be my route. If I could gain the roofs of the buildings in Paine Street and descend successfully to the ground level, I might perhaps dart through the courtyard and the adjacent or opposite building to Washington or Bates--or else emerge in Paine and edge around southward into Washington. In any case, I would aim to strike Washington somehow and get quickly out of the Town Square region. My preference would be to avoid Paine, since the fire station there might be open all night.

As I thought of these things I looked out over the squalid sea of decaying roofs below me, now brightened by the beams of a moon not much past full. On the right the black gash of the river-gorge clove the panorama; abandoned factories and railway station clinging barnacle-like to its sides. Beyond it the rusted railway and the Rowley road led off through a flat marshy terrain dotted with islets of higher and dryer scrub-grown land. On the left the creek-threaded country-side was nearer, the narrow road to Ipswich gleaming white in the moonlight. I could not see from my side of the hotel the southward route toward Arkham which I had determined to take.

I was irresolutely speculating on when I had better attack the northward door, and on how I could least audibly manage it, when I noticed that the vague noises underfoot had given place to a fresh and heavier creaking of the stairs. A wavering flicker of light shewed through my transom, and the boards of the corridor began to groan with a ponderous load. Muffled sounds of possible vocal origin approached, and at length a firm knock came at my outer door.

For a moment I simply held my breath and waited. Eternities seemed to elapse, and the nauseous fishy odour of my environment seemed to mount suddenly and spectacularly. Then the knocking was repeated--continuously, and with growing insistence. I knew that the time for action had come, and forthwith drew the bolt of the northward connecting door, bracing myself for the task of battering it open. The knocking waxed louder, and I hoped that its volume would cover the sound of my efforts. At last beginning my attempt, I lunged again and again at the thin paneling with my left shoulder, heedless of shock or pain. The door resisted even more than I expected, but I did not give in. And all the while the clamour at the outer door increased.

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

For an instant I felt absolute despair, since my trapping in a chamber with no window egress seemed complete. A wave of almost abnormal horror swept over me, and invested with a terrible but unexplainable singularity the flashlight-glimpsed dust prints made by the intruder who had lately tried my door from this room. Then, with a dazed automatism which persisted despite hopelessness, I made for the next connecting door and performed the blind motion of pushing at it in an effort to get through and--granting that fastenings might be as providentially intact as in this second room--bolt the hall door beyond before the lock could be turned from outside.

Sheer fortunate chance gave me my reprieve--for the connecting door before me was not only unlocked but actually ajar. In a second I was though, and had my right knee and shoulder against a hall door which was visibly opening inward. My pressure took the opener off guard, for the thing shut as I pushed, so that I could slip the well-conditioned bolt as I had done with the other door. As I gained this respite I heard the battering at the two other doors abate, while a confused clatter came from the connecting door I had shielded with the bedstead. Evidently the bulk of my assailants had entered the southerly room and were massing in a lateral attack. But at the same moment a pass-key sounded in the next door to the north, and I knew that a nearer peril was at hand.

The northward connecting door was wide open, but there was no time to think about checking the already turning lock in the hall. All I could do was to shut and bolt the open connecting door, as well as its mate on the opposite side--pushing a bedstead against the one and a bureau against the other, and moving a washstand in front of the hall door. I must, I saw, trust to such makeshift barriers to shield me till I could get out the window and on the roof of the Paine Street block. But even in this acute moment my chief horror was something apart from the immediate weakness of my defenses. I was shuddering because not one of my pursuers, despite some hideous panting, grunting, and subdued barkings at odd intervals, was uttering an unmuffled or intelligible vocal sound.

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

Surveying the conditions, I chose the more southerly of the two windows as my avenue of escape; planning to land on the inner slope of the roof and make for the nearest sky-light. Once inside one of the decrepit brick structures I would have to reckon with pursuit; but I hoped to descend and dodge in and out of yawning doorways along the shadowed courtyard, eventually getting to Washington Street and slipping out of town toward the south.

The clatter at the northerly connecting door was now terrific, and I saw that the weak panelling was beginning to splinter. Obviously, the besiegers had brought some ponderous object into play as a battering-ram. The bedstead, however, still held firm; so that I had at least a faint chance of making good my escape. As I opened the window I noticed that it was flanked by heavy velour draperies suspended from a pole by brass rings, and also that there was a large projecting catch for the shutters on the exterior. Seeing a possible means of avoiding the dangerous jump, I yanked at the hangings and brought them down, pole and all; then quickly hooking two of the rings in the shutter catch and flinging the drapery outside. The heavy folds reached fully to the abutting roof, and I saw that the rings and catch would be likely to bear my weight. So, climbing out of the window and down the improvised rope ladder, I left behind me forever the morbid and horror-infested fabric of the Gilman House.

I landed safely on the loose slates of the steep roof, and succeeded in gaining the gaping black skylight without a slip. Glancing up at the window I had left, I observed it was still dark, though far across the crumbling chimneys to the north I could see lights ominously blazing in the Order of Dagon Hall, the Baptist church, and the Congregational church which I recalled so shiveringly. There had seemed to be no one in the courtyard below, and I hoped there would be a chance to get away before the spreading of a general alarm. Flashing my pocket lamp into the skylight, I saw that there were no steps down. The distance was slight, however, so I clambered over the brink and dropped; striking a dusty floor littered with crumbling boxes and barrels.

The place was ghoulish-looking, but I was past minding such impressions and made at once for the staircase revealed by my flashlight--after a hasty glance at my watch, which shewed the hour to be 2 a.m. The steps creaked, but seemed tolerably sound; and I raced down past a barnlike second storey to the ground floor. The desolation was complete, and only echoes answered my footfalls. At length I reached the lower hall at the end of which I saw a faint luminous rectangle marking the ruined Paine Street doorway. Heading the other way, I found the back door also open; and darted out and down five stone steps to the grass-grown cobblestones of the courtyard.

The moonbeams did not reach down here, but I could just see my way about without using the flashlight. Some of the windows on the Gilman House side were faintly glowing, and I thought I heard confused sounds within. Walking softly over to the Washington Street side I perceived several open doorways, and chose the nearest as my route out. The hallway inside was black, and when I reached the opposite end I saw that the street door was wedged immovably shut. Resolved to try another building, I groped my way back toward the courtyard, but stopped short when close to the doorway.

For out of an opened door in the Gilman House a large crowd of doubtful shapes was pouring--lanterns bobbing in the darkness, and horrible croaking voices exchanging low cries in what was certainly not English. The figures moved uncertainly, and I realized to my relief that they did not know where I had gone; but for all that they sent a shiver of horror through my frame. Their features were indistinguishable, but their crouching, shambling gait was abominably repellent. And worst of all, I perceived that one figure was strangely robed, and unmistakably surmounted by a tall tiara of a design altogether too familiar. As the figures spread throughout the courtyard, I felt my fears increase. Suppose I could find no egress from this building on the street side? The fishy odour was detestable, and I wondered I could stand it without fainting. Again groping toward the street, I opened a door off the hall and came upon an empty room with closely shuttered but sashless windows. Fumbling in the rays of my flashlight, I found I could open the shutters; and in another moment had climbed outside and was fully closing the aperture in its original manner.

I was now in Washington Street, and for the moment saw no living thing nor any light save that of the moon. From several directions in the distance, however, I could hear the sound of hoarse voices, of footsteps, and of a curious kind of pattering which did not sound quite like footsteps. Plainly I had no time to lose. The points of the compass were clear to me, and I was glad that all the street lights were turned off, as is often the custom on strongly moonlit nights in prosperous rural regions. Some of the sounds came from the south, yet I retained my design of escaping in that direction. There would, I knew, be plenty of deserted doorways to shelter me in case I met any person or group who looked like pursuers.

I walked rapidly, softly, and close to the ruined houses. While hatless and dishevelled after my arduous climb, I did not look especially noticeable; and stood a good chance of passing unheeded if forced to encounter any casual wayfarer.

At Bates Street I drew into a yawning vestibule while two shambling figures crossed in front of me, but was soon on my way again and approaching the open space where Eliot Street obliquely crosses Washington at the intersection of South. Though I had never seen this space, it had looked dangerous to me on the grocery youth's map; since the moonlight would have free play there. There was no use trying to evade it, for any alternative course would involve detours of possibly disastrous visibility and delaying effect. The only thing to do was to cross it boldly and openly; imitating the typical shamble of the Innsmouth folk as best I could, and trusting that no one--or at least no pursuer of mine--would be there.

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

The open space was, as I had expected, strongly moonlit; and I saw the remains of a parklike, iron-railed green in its center. Fortunately no one was about though a curious sort of buzz or roar seemed to be increasing in the direction of Town Square. South Street was very wide, leading directly down a slight declivity to the waterfront and commanding a long view out to sea; and I hoped that no one would be glancing up it from afar as I crossed in the bright moonlight.

My progress was unimpeded, and no fresh sound arose to hint that I had been spied. Glancing about me, I involuntarily let my pace slacken for a second to take in the sight of the sea, gorgeous in the burning moonlight at the street's end. Far out beyond the breakwater was the dim, dark line of Devil Reef, and as I glimpsed it I could not help thinking of all the hideous legends I had heard in the last twenty-four hours--legends which portrayed this ragged rock as a veritable gateway to realms of unfathomed horror and inconceivable abnormality.

Then, without warning, I saw the intermittent flashes of light on the distant reef. They were definite and unmistakable, and awaked in my mind a blind horror beyond all rational proportion. My muscles tightened for panic flight, held in only by a certain unconscious caution and half-hypnotic fascination. And to make matters worse, there now flashed forth from the lofty cupola of the Gilman House, which loomed up to the northeast behind me, a series of analogous though differently spaced gleams which could be nothing less than an answering signal.

Controlling my muscles, and realising afresh--how plainly visible I was, I resumed my brisker and feignedly shambling pace; though keeping my eyes on that hellish and ominous reef as long as the opening of South Street gave me a seaward view. What the whole proceeding meant, I could not imagine; unless it involved some strange rite connected with Devil Reef, or unless some party had landed from a ship on that sinister rock. I now bent to the left around the ruinous green; still gazing toward the ocean as it blazed in the spectral summer moonlight, and watching the cryptical flashing of those nameless, unexplainable beacons.

It was then that the most horrible impression of all was borne in upon me--the impression which destroyed my last vestige of self-control and sent me running frantically southward past the yawning black doorways and fishily staring windows of that deserted nightmare street. For at a closer glance I saw that the moonlit waters between the reef and the shore were far from empty. They were alive with a teeming horde of shapes swimming inward toward the town; and even at my vast distance and in my single moment of perception I could tell that the bobbing heads and flailing arms were alien and aberrant in a way scarcely to be expressed or consciously formulated.

My frantic running ceased before I had covered a block, for at my left I began to hear something like the hue and cry of organised pursuit. There were footsteps and guttural sounds, and a rattling motor wheezed south along Federal Street. In a second all my plans were utterly changed--for if the southward highway were blocked ahead of me, I must clearly find another egress from Innsmouth. I paused and drew into a gaping doorway, reflecting how lucky I was to have left the moonlit open space before these pursuers came down the parallel street.

A second reflection was less comforting. Since the pursuit was down another street, it was plain that the party was not following me directly. It had not seen me, but was simply obeying a general plan of cutting off my escape. This, however, implied that all roads leading out of Innsmouth were similarly patrolled; for the people could not have known what route I intended to take. If this were so, I would have to make my retreat across country away from any road; but how could I do that in view of the marshy and creek-riddled nature of all the surrounding region? For a moment my brain reeled--both from sheer hopelessness and from a rapid increase in the omnipresent fishy odour.

Then I thought of the abandoned railway to Rowley, whose solid line of ballasted, weed-grown earth still stretched off to the northwest from the crumbling station on the edge at the river-gorge. There was just a chance that the townsfolk would not think of that; since its briar-choked desertion made it half-impassable, and the unlikeliest of all avenues for a fugitive to choose. I had seen it clearly from my hotel window and knew about how it lay. Most of its earlier length was uncomfortably visible from the Rowley road, and from high places in the town itself; but one could perhaps crawl inconspicuously through the undergrowth. At any rate, it would form my only chance of deliverance, and there was nothing to do but try it.

Drawing inside the hall of my deserted shelter, I once more consulted the grocery boy's map with the aid of the flashlight. The immediate problem was how to reach the ancient railway; and I now saw that the safest course was ahead to Babson Street; then west to Lafayette--there edging around but not crossing an open space homologous to the one I had traversed--and subsequently back northward and westward in a zigzagging line through Lafayette, Bates, Adam, and Bank streets--the latter skirting the river gorge--to the abandoned and dilapidated station I had seen from my window. My reason for going ahead to Babson was that I wished neither to recross the earlier open space nor to begin my westward course along a cross street as broad as South.

Starting once more, I crossed the street to the right-hand side in order to edge around into Babson as inconspicuously as possible. Noises still continued in Federal Street, and as I glanced behind me I thought I saw a gleam of light near the building through which I had escaped. Anxious to leave Washington Street, I broke into a quiet dogtrot, trusting to luck not to encounter any observing eye. Next the corner of Babson Street I saw to my alarm that one of the houses was still inhabited, as attested by curtains at the window; but there were no lights within, and I passed it without disaster.

In Babson Street, which crossed Federal and might thus reveal me to the searchers, I clung as closely as possible to the sagging, uneven buildings; twice pausing in a doorway as the noises behind me momentarily increased. The open space ahead shone wide and desolate under the moon, but my route would not force me to cross it. During my second pause I began to detect a fresh distribution of vague sounds; and upon looking cautiously out from cover beheld a motor car darting across the open space, bound outward along Eliot Street, which there intersects both Babson and Lafayette.

As I watched--choked by a sudden rise in the fishy odour after a short abatement--I saw a band of uncouth, crouching shapes loping and shambling in the same direction; and knew that this must be the party guarding the Ipswich road, since that highway forms an extension of Eliot Street. Two of the figures I glimpsed were in voluminous robes, and one wore a peaked diadem which glistened whitely in the moonlight. The gait of this figure was so odd that it sent a chill through me--for it seemed to me the creature was almost hopping.

When the last of the band was out of sight I resumed my progress; darting around the corner into Lafayette Street, and crossing Eliot very hurriedly lest stragglers of the party be still advancing along that thoroughfare. I did hear some croaking and clattering sounds far off toward Town Square, but accomplished the passage without disaster. My greatest dread was in re-crossing broad and moonlit South Street--with its seaward view--and I had to nerve myself for the ordeal. Someone might easily be looking, and possible Eliot Street stragglers could not fail to glimpse me from either of two points. At the last moment I decided I had better slacken my trot and make the crossing as before in the shambling gait of an average Innsmouth native.

When the view of the water again opened out--this time on my right--I was half-determined not to look at it at all. I could not however, resist; but cast a sidelong glance as I carefully and imitatively shambled toward the protecting shadows ahead. There was no ship visible, as I had half-expected there would be. Instead, the first thing which caught my eye was a small rowboat pulling in toward the abandoned wharves and laden with some bulky, tarpaulin-covered object. Its rowers, though distantly and indistinctly seen, were of an especially repellent aspect. Several swimmers were still discernible; while on the far black reef I could see a faint, steady glow unlike the winking beacon visible before, and of a curious colour which I could not precisely identify. Above the slant roofs ahead and to the right there loomed the tall cupola of the Gilman House, but it was completely dark. The fishy odour, dispelled for a moment by some merciful breeze, now closed in again with maddening intensity.

I had not quite crossed the street when I heard a muttering band advancing along Washington from the north. As they reached the broad open space where I had had my first disquieting glimpse of the moonlit water I could see them plainly only a block away--and was horrified by the bestial abnormality of their faces and the doglike sub-humanness of their crouching gait. One man moved in a positively simian way, with long arms frequently touching the ground; while another figure--robed and tiaraed--seemed to progress in an almost hopping fashion. I judged this party to be the one I had seen in the Gilman's courtyard--the one, therefore, most closely on my trail. As some of the figures turned to look in my direction I was transfixed with fright, yet managed to preserve the casual, shambling gait I had assumed. To this day I do not know whether they saw me or not. If they did, my stratagem must have deceived them, for they passed on across the moonlit space without varying their course--meanwhile croaking and jabbering in some hateful guttural patois I could not identify.

Once more in shadow, I resumed my former dog-trot past the leaning and decrepit houses that stared blankly into the night. Having crossed to the western sidewalk I rounded the nearest corner into Bates Street where I kept close to the buildings on the southern side. I passed two houses shewing signs of habitation, one of which had faint lights in upper rooms, yet met with no obstacle. As I turned into Adams Street I felt measurably safer, but received a shook when a man reeled out of a black doorway directly in front of me. He proved, however, too hopelessly drunk to be a menace; so that I reached the dismal ruins of the Bank Street warehouses in safety.

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

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

The vast, barnlike length of the old bridge gleamed spectrally in the moonlight, and I saw that the ties were safe for at least a few feet within. Entering, I began to use my flashlight, and was almost knocked down by the cloud of bats that flapped past me. About half-way across there was a perilous gap in the ties which I feared for a moment would halt me; but in the end I risked a desperate jump which fortunately succeeded.

I was glad to see the moonlight again when I emerged from that macabre tunnel. The old tracks crossed River Street at grade, and at once veered off into a region increasingly rural and with less and less of Innsmouth's abhorrent fishy odour. Here the dense growth of weeds and briers hindered me and cruelly tore at my clothes, but I was none the less glad that they were there to give me concealment in case of peril. I knew that much of my route must be visible from the Rowley road.

The marshy region began very abruptly, with the single track on a low, grassy embankment where the weedy growth was somewhat thinner. Then came a sort of island of higher ground, where the line passed through a shallow open cut choked with bushes and brambles. I was very glad of this partial shelter, since at this point the Rowley road was uncomfortably near according to my window view. At the end of the cut it would cross the track and swerve off to a safer distance; but meanwhile I must be exceedingly careful. I was by this time thankfully certain that the railway itself was not patrolled.

Just before entering the cut I glanced behind me, but saw no pursuer. The ancient spires and roofs of decaying Innsmouth gleamed lovely and ethereal in the magic yellow moonlight, and I thought of how they must have looked in the old days before the shadow fell. Then, as my gaze circled inland from the town, something less tranquil arrested my notice and held me immobile for a second.

What I saw--or fancied I saw--was a disturbing suggestion of undulant motion far to the south; a suggestion which made me conclude that a very large horde must be pouring out of the city along the level Ipswich road. The distance was great and I could distinguish nothing in detail; but I did not at all like the look of that moving column. It undulated too much, and glistened too brightly in the rays of the now westering moon. There was a suggestion of sound, too, though the wind was blowing the other way--a suggestion of bestial scraping and bellowing even worse than the muttering of the parties I had lately overheard.

All sorts of unpleasant conjectures crossed my mind. I thought of those very extreme Innsmouth types said to be hidden in crumbling, centuried warrens near the waterfront; I thought, too, of those nameless swimmers I had seen. Counting the parties so far glimpsed, as well as those presumably covering other roads, the number of my pursuers must be strangely large for a town as depopulated as Innsmouth.

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

I had entered the brush-grown cut and was struggling along at a very slow pace when that damnable fishy odour again waxed dominant. Had the wind suddenly changed eastward, so that it blew in from the sea and over the town? It must have, I concluded, since I now began to hear shocking guttural murmurs from that hitherto silent direction. There was another sound, too--a kind of wholesale, colossal flopping or pattering which somehow called up images of the most detestable sort. It made me think illogically of that unpleasantly undulating column on the far-off Ipswich road.

And then both stench and sounds grew stronger, so that I paused shivering and grateful for the cut's protection. It was here, I recalled, that the Rowley road drew so close to the old railway before crossing westward and diverging. Something was coming along that road, and I must lie low till its passage and vanishment in the distance. Thank heaven these creatures employed no dogs for tracking--though perhaps that would have been impossible amidst the omnipresent regional odour. Crouched in the bushes of that sandy cleft I felt reasonably safe, even though I knew the searchers would have to cross the track in front of me not much more than a hundred yards away. I would be able to see them, but they could not, except by a malign miracle, see me.

All at once I began dreading to look at them as they passed. I saw the close moonlit space where they would surge by, and had curious thoughts about the irredeemable pollution of that space. They would perhaps be the worst of all Innsmouth types--something one would not care to remember.

The stench waxed overpowering, and the noises swelled to a bestial babel of croaking, baying and barking without the least suggestion of human speech. Were these indeed the voices of my pursuers? Did they have dogs after all? So far I had seen none of the lower animals in Innsmouth. That flopping or pattering was monstrous--I could not look upon the degenerate creatures responsible for it. I would keep my eyes shut till the sound receded toward the west. The horde was very close now--air foul with their hoarse snarlings, and the ground almost shaking with their alien-rhythmed footfalls. My breath nearly ceased to come, and I put every ounce of will-power into the task of holding my eyelids down.

I am not even yet willing to say whether what followed was a hideous actuality or only a nightmare hallucination. The later action of the government, after my frantic appeals, would tend to confirm it as a monstrous truth; but could not an hallucination have been repeated under the quasi-hypnotic spell of that ancient, haunted, and shadowed town? Such places have strange properties, and the legacy of insane legend might well have acted on more than one human imagination amidst those dead, stench-cursed streets and huddles of rotting roofs and crumbling steeples. Is it not possible that the germ of an actual contagious madness lurks in the depths of that shadow over Innsmouth? Who can be sure of reality after hearing things like the tale of old Zadok Allen? The government men never found poor Zadok, and have no conjectures to make as to what became of him. Where does madness leave off and reality begin? Is it possible that even my latest fear is sheer delusion?

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

I thought I was prepared for the worst, and I really ought to have been prepared considering what I had seen before.

My other pursuers had been accursedly abnormal--so should I not have been ready to face a strengthening of the abnormal element; to look upon forms in which there was no mixture of the normal at all? I did not open my eyes until the raucous clamour came loudly from a point obviously straight ahead. Then I knew that a long section of them must be plainly in sight where the sides of the cut flattened out and the road crossed the track--and I could no longer keep myself from sampling whatever horror that leering yellow moon might have to shew.

It was the end, for whatever remains to me of life on the surface of this earth, of every vestige of mental peace and confidence in the integrity of nature and of the human mind. Nothing that I could have imagined--nothing, even, that I could have gathered had I credited old Zadok's crazy tale in the most literal way--would be in any way comparable to the demoniac, blasphemous reality that I saw--or believe I saw. I have tried to hint what it was in order to postpone the horror of writing it down baldly. Can it be possible that this planet has actually spawned such things; that human eyes have truly seen, as objective flesh, what man has hitherto known only in febrile phantasy and tenuous legend?

And yet I saw them in a limitless stream--flopping, hopping, croaking, bleating--urging inhumanly through the spectral moonlight in a grotesque, malignant saraband of fantastic nightmare. And some of them had tall tiaras of that nameless whitish-gold metal...and some were strangely robed...and one, who led the way, was clad in a ghoulishly humped black coat and striped trousers, and had a man's felt hat perched on the shapeless thing that answered for a head.

I think their predominant colour was a greyish-green, though they had white bellies. They were mostly shiny and slippery, but the ridges of their backs were scaly. Their forms vaguely suggested the anthropoid, while their heads were the heads of fish, with prodigious bulging eyes that never closed. At the sides of their necks were palpitating gills, and their long paws were webbed. They hopped irregularly, sometimes on two legs and sometimes on four. I was somehow glad that they had no more than four limbs. Their croaking, baying voices, clearly used for articulate speech, held all the dark shades of expression which their staring faces lacked.

But for all of their monstrousness they were not unfamiliar to me. I knew too well what they must be--for was not the memory of the evil tiara at Newburyport still fresh? They were the blasphemous fish-frogs of the nameless design--living and horrible--and as I saw them I knew also of what that humped, tiaraed priest in the black church basement had fearsomely reminded me. Their number was past guessing. It seemed to me that there were limitless swarms of them and certainly my momentary glimpse could have shewn only the least fraction. In another instant everything was blotted out by a merciful fit of fainting; the first I had ever had.","
I.

It is true that I have sent six bullets through the head of my best friend, and yet I hope to shew by this statement that I am not his murderer. At first I shall be called a madman—madder than the man I shot in his cell at the Arkham Sanitarium. Later some of my readers will weigh each statement, correlate it with the known facts, and ask themselves how I could have believed otherwise than as I did after facing the evidence of that horror—that thing on the doorstep.
      Until then I also saw nothing but madness in the wild tales I have acted on. Even now I ask myself whether I was misled—or whether I am not mad after all. I do not know—but others have strange things to tell of Edward and Asenath Derby, and even the stolid police are at their wits’ ends to account for that last terrible visit. They have tried weakly to concoct a theory of a ghastly jest or warning by discharged servants, yet they know in their hearts that the truth is something infinitely more terrible and incredible.
      So I say that I have not murdered Edward Derby. Rather have I avenged him, and in so doing purged the earth of a horror whose survival might have loosed untold terrors on all mankind. There are black zones of shadow close to our daily paths, and now and then some evil soul breaks a passage through. When that happens, the man who knows must strike before reckoning the consequences.
      I have known Edward Pickman Derby all his life. Eight years my junior, he was so precocious that we had much in common from the time he was eight and I sixteen. He was the most phenomenal child scholar I have ever known, and at seven was writing verse of a sombre, fantastic, almost morbid cast which astonished the tutors surrounding him. Perhaps his private education and coddled seclusion had something to do with his premature flowering. An only child, he had organic weaknesses which startled his doting parents and caused them to keep him closely chained to their side. He was never allowed out without his nurse, and seldom had a chance to play unconstrainedly with other children. All this doubtless fostered a strange, secretive inner life in the boy, with imagination as his one avenue of freedom. 
      At any rate, his juvenile learning was prodigious and bizarre; and his facile writings such as to captivate me despite my greater age. About that time I had leanings toward art of a somewhat grotesque cast, and I found in this younger child a rare kindred spirit. What lay behind our joint love of shadows and marvels was, no doubt, the ancient, mouldering, and subtly fearsome town in which we lived—witch-cursed, legend-haunted Arkham, whose huddled, sagging gambrel roofs and crumbling Georgian balustrades brood out the centuries beside the darkly muttering Miskatonic.
      As time went by I turned to architecture and gave up my design of illustrating a book of Edward’s daemoniac poems, yet our comradeship suffered no lessening. Young Derby’s odd genius developed remarkably, and in his eighteenth year his collected nightmare-lyrics made a real sensation when issued under the title Azathoth and Other Horrors. He was a close correspondent of the notorious Baudelairean poet Justin Geoffrey, who wrote The People of the Monolith and died screaming in a madhouse in 1926 after a visit to a sinister, ill-regarded village in Hungary. 
      In self-reliance and practical affairs, however, Derby was greatly retarded because of his coddled existence. His health had improved, but his habits of childish dependence were fostered by overcareful parents; so that he never travelled alone, made independent decisions, or assumed responsibilities. It was early seen that he would not be equal to a struggle in the business or professional arena, but the family fortune was so ample that this formed no tragedy. As he grew to years of manhood he retained a deceptive aspect of boyishness. Blond and blue-eyed, he had the fresh complexion of a child; and his attempts to raise a moustache were discernible only with difficulty. His voice was soft and light, and his pampered, unexercised life gave him a juvenile chubbiness rather than the paunchiness of premature middle age. He was of good height, and his handsome face would have made him a notable gallant had not his shyness held him to seclusion and bookishness.
      Derby’s parents took him abroad every summer, and he was quick to seize on the surface aspects of European thought and expression. His Poe-like talents turned more and more toward the decadent, and other artistic sensitivenesses and yearnings were half-aroused in him. We had great discussions in those days. I had been through Harvard, had studied in a Boston architect’s office, had married, and had finally returned to Arkham to practice my profession—settling in the family homestead in Saltonstall St. since my father had moved to Florida for his health. Edward used to call almost every evening, till I came to regard him as one of the household. He had a characteristic way of ringing the doorbell or sounding the knocker that grew to be a veritable code signal, so that after dinner I always listened for the familiar three brisk strokes followed by two more after a pause. Less frequently I would visit at his house and note with envy the obscure volumes in his constantly growing library.
      Derby went through Miskatonic University in Arkham, since his parents would not let him board away from them. He entered at sixteen and completed his course in three years, majoring in English and French literature and receiving high marks in everything but mathematics and the sciences. He mingled very little with the other students, though looking enviously at the “daring” or “Bohemian” set—whose superficially “smart” language and meaninglessly ironic pose he aped, and whose dubious conduct he wished he dared adopt.
      What he did do was to become an almost fanatical devotee of subterranean magical lore, for which Miskatonic’s library was and is famous. Always a dweller on the surface of phantasy and strangeness, he now delved deep into the actual runes and riddles left by a fabulous past for the guidance or puzzlement of posterity. He read things like the frightful Book of Eibon, the Unaussprechlichen Kulten of von Junzt, and the forbidden Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, though he did not tell his parents he had seen them. Edward was twenty when my son and only child was born, and seemed pleased when I named the newcomer Edward Derby Upton, after him.
      By the time he was twenty-five Edward Derby was a prodigiously learned man and a fairly well-known poet and fantaisiste, though his lack of contacts and responsibilities had slowed down his literary growth by making his products derivative and overbookish. I was perhaps his closest friend—finding him an inexhaustible mine of vital theoretical topics, while he relied on me for advice in whatever matters he did not wish to refer to his parents. He remained single—more through shyness, inertia, and parental protectiveness than through inclination—and moved in society only to the slightest and most perfunctory extent. When the war came both health and ingrained timidity kept him at home. I went to Plattsburg for a commission, but never got overseas.
      So the years wore on. Edward’s mother died when he was thirty-four, and for months he was incapacitated by some odd psychological malady. His father took him to Europe, however, and he managed to pull out of his trouble without visible effects. Afterward he seemed to feel a sort of grotesque exhilaration, as if of partial escape from some unseen bondage. He began to mingle in the more “advanced” college set despite his middle age, and was present at some extremely wild doings—on one occasion paying heavy blackmail (which he borrowed of me) to keep his presence at a certain affair from his father’s notice. Some of the whispered rumours about the wild Miskatonic set were extremely singular. There was even talk of black magic and of happenings utterly beyond credibility.

II.

Edward was thirty-eight when he met Asenath Waite. She was, I judge, about twenty-three at the time; and was taking a special course in mediaeval metaphysics at Miskatonic. The daughter of a friend of mine had met her before—in the Hall School at Kingsport—and had been inclined to shun her because of her odd reputation. She was dark, smallish, and very good-looking except for overprotuberant eyes; but something in her expression alienated extremely sensitive people. It was, however, largely her origin and conversation which caused average folk to avoid her. She was one of the Innsmouth Waites, and dark legends have clustered for generations about crumbling, half-deserted Innsmouth and its people. There are tales of horrible bargains about the year 1850, and of a strange element “not quite human” in the ancient families of the run-down fishing port—tales such as only old-time Yankees can devise and repeat with proper awesomeness.
      Asenath’s case was aggravated by the fact that she was Ephraim Waite’s daughter—the child of his old age by an unknown wife who always went veiled. Ephraim lived in a half-decayed mansion in Washington Street, Innsmouth, and those who had seen the place (Arkham folk avoid going to Innsmouth whenever they can) declared that the attic windows were always boarded, and that strange sounds sometimes floated from within as evening drew on. The old man was known to have been a prodigious magical student in his day, and legend averred that he could raise or quell storms at sea according to his whim. I had seen him once or twice in my youth as he came to Arkham to consult forbidden tomes at the college library, and had hated his wolfish, saturnine face with its tangle of iron-grey beard. He had died insane—under rather queer circumstances—just before his daughter (by his will made a nominal ward of the principal) entered the Hall School, but she had been his morbidly avid pupil and looked fiendishly like him at times.
      The friend whose daughter had gone to school with Asenath Waite repeated many curious things when the news of Edward’s acquaintance with her began to spread about. Asenath, it seemed, had posed as a kind of magician at school; and had really seemed able to accomplish some highly baffling marvels. She professed to be able to raise thunderstorms, though her seeming success was generally laid to some uncanny knack at prediction. All animals markedly disliked her, and she could make any dog howl by certain motions of her right hand. There were times when she displayed snatches of knowledge and language very singular—and very shocking—for a young girl; when she would frighten her schoolmates with leers and winks of an inexplicable kind, and would seem to extract an obscene and zestful irony from her present situation.
      Most unusual, though, were the well-attested cases of her influence over other persons. She was, beyond question, a genuine hypnotist. By gazing peculiarly at a fellow-student she would often give the latter a distinct feeling of exchanged personality—as if the subject were placed momentarily in the magician’s body and able to stare half across the room at her real body, whose eyes blazed and protruded with an alien expression. Asenath often made wild claims about the nature of consciousness and about its independence of the physical frame—or at least from the life-processes of the physical frame. Her crowning rage, however, was that she was not a man; since she believed a male brain had certain unique and far-reaching cosmic powers. Given a man’s brain, she declared, she could not only equal but surpass her father in mastery of unknown forces. 
      Edward met Asenath at a gathering of “intelligentsia” held in one of the students’ rooms, and could talk of nothing else when he came to see me the next day. He had found her full of the interests and erudition which engrossed him most, and was in addition wildly taken with her appearance. I had never seen the young woman, and recalled casual references only faintly, but I knew who she was. It seemed rather regrettable that Derby should become so upheaved about her; but I said nothing to discourage him, since infatuation thrives on opposition. He was not, he said, mentioning her to his father.
      In the next few weeks I heard of very little but Asenath from young Derby. Others now remarked Edward’s autumnal gallantry, though they agreed that he did not look even nearly his actual age, or seem at all inappropriate as an escort for his bizarre divinity. He was only a trifle paunchy despite his indolence and self-indulgence, and his face was absolutely without lines. Asenath, on the other hand, had the premature crow’s feet which come from the exercise of an intense will.
      About this time Edward brought the girl to call on me, and I at once saw that his interest was by no means one-sided. She eyed him continually with an almost predatory air, and I perceived that their intimacy was beyond untangling. Soon afterward I had a visit from old Mr. Derby, whom I had always admired and respected. He had heard the tales of his son’s new friendship, and had wormed the whole truth out of “the boy”. Edward meant to marry Asenath, and had even been looking at houses in the suburbs. Knowing my usually great influence with his son, the father wondered if I could help to break the ill-advised affair off; but I regretfully expressed my doubts. This time it was not a question of Edward’s weak will but of the woman’s strong will. The perennial child had transferred his dependence from the parental image to a new and stronger image, and nothing could be done about it.
      The wedding was performed a month later—by a justice of the peace, according to the bride’s request. Mr. Derby, at my advice, offered no opposition; and he, my wife, my son, and I attended the brief ceremony—the other guests being wild young people from the college. Asenath had bought the old Crowninshield place in the country at the end of High Street, and they proposed to settle there after a short trip to Innsmouth, whence three servants and some books and household goods were to be brought. It was probably not so much consideration for Edward and his father as a personal wish to be near the college, its library, and its crowd of “sophisticates”, that made Asenath settle in Arkham instead of returning permanently home.
      When Edward called on me after the honeymoon I thought he looked slightly changed. Asenath had made him get rid of the undeveloped moustache, but there was more than that. He looked soberer and more thoughtful, his habitual pout of childish rebelliousness being exchanged for a look almost of genuine sadness. I was puzzled to decide whether I liked or disliked the change. Certainly, he seemed for the moment more normally adult than ever before. Perhaps the marriage was a good thing—might not the change of dependence form a start toward actual neutralisation, leading ultimately to responsible independence? He came alone, for Asenath was very busy. She had brought a vast store of books and apparatus from Innsmouth (Derby shuddered as he spoke the name), and was finishing the restoration of the Crowninshield house and grounds.
      Her home in—that town—was a rather disquieting place, but certain objects in it had taught him some surprising things. He was progressing fast in esoteric lore now that he had Asenath’s guidance. Some of the experiments she proposed were very daring and radical—he did not feel at liberty to describe them—but he had confidence in her powers and intentions. The three servants were very queer—an incredibly aged couple who had been with old Ephraim and referred occasionally to him and to Asenath’s dead mother in a cryptic way, and a swarthy young wench who had marked anomalies of feature and seemed to exude a perpetual odour of fish.

III.

For the next two years I saw less and less of Derby. A fortnight would sometimes slip by without the familiar three-and-two strokes at the front door; and when he did call—or when, as happened with increasing infrequency, I called on him—he was very little disposed to converse on vital topics. He had become secretive about those occult studies which he used to describe and discuss so minutely, and preferred not to talk of his wife. She had aged tremendously since her marriage, till now—oddly enough—she seemed the elder of the two. Her face held the most concentratedly determined expression I had ever seen, and her whole aspect seemed to gain a vague, unplaceable repulsiveness. My wife and son noticed it as much as I, and we all ceased gradually to call on her—for which, Edward admitted in one of his boyishly tactless moments, she was unmitigatedly grateful. Occasionally the Derbys would go on long trips—ostensibly to Europe, though Edward sometimes hinted at obscurer destinations. 
      It was after the first year that people began talking about the change in Edward Derby. It was very casual talk, for the change was purely psychological; but it brought up some interesting points. Now and then, it seemed, Edward was observed to wear an expression and to do things wholly incompatible with his usual flabby nature. For example—although in the old days he could not drive a car, he was now seen occasionally to dash into or out of the old Crowninshield driveway with Asenath’s powerful Packard, handling it like a master, and meeting traffic entanglements with a skill and determination utterly alien to his accustomed nature. In such cases he seemed always to be just back from some trip or just starting on one—what sort of trip, no one could guess, although he mostly favoured the Innsmouth road.
      Oddly, the metamorphosis did not seem altogether pleasing. People said he looked too much like his wife, or like old Ephraim Waite himself, in these moments—or perhaps these moments seemed unnatural because they were so rare. Sometimes, hours after starting out in this way, he would return listlessly sprawled on the rear seat of the car while an obviously hired chauffeur or mechanic drove. Also, his preponderant aspect on the streets during his decreasing round of social contacts (including, I may say, his calls on me) was the old-time indecisive one—its irresponsible childishness even more marked than in the past. While Asenath’s face aged, Edward’s—aside from those exceptional occasions—actually relaxed into a kind of exaggerated immaturity, save when a trace of the new sadness or understanding would flash across it. It was really very puzzling. Meanwhile the Derbys almost dropped out of the gay college circle—not through their own disgust, we heard, but because something about their present studies shocked even the most callous of the other decadents. 
      It was in the third year of the marriage that Edward began to hint openly to me of a certain fear and dissatisfaction. He would let fall remarks about things ‘going too far’, and would talk darkly about the need of ‘saving his identity’. At first I ignored such references, but in time I began to question him guardedly, remembering what my friend’s daughter had said about Asenath’s hypnotic influence over the other girls at school—the cases where students had thought they were in her body looking across the room at themselves. This questioning seemed to make him at once alarmed and grateful, and once he mumbled something about having a serious talk with me later.
      About this time old Mr. Derby died, for which I was afterward very thankful. Edward was badly upset, though by no means disorganised. He had seen astonishingly little of his parent since his marriage, for Asenath had concentrated in herself all his vital sense of family linkage. Some called him callous in his loss—especially since those jaunty and confident moods in the car began to increase. He now wished to move back into the old Derby mansion, but Asenath insisted on staying in the Crowninshield house, to which she had become well adjusted.
      Not long afterward my wife heard a curious thing from a friend—one of the few who had not dropped the Derbys. She had been out to the end of High St. to call on the couple, and had seen a car shoot briskly out of the drive with Edward’s oddly confident and almost sneering face above the wheel. Ringing the bell, she had been told by the repulsive wench that Asenath was also out; but had chanced to look up at the house in leaving. There, at one of Edward’s library windows, she had glimpsed a hastily withdrawn face—a face whose expression of pain, defeat, and wistful hopelessness was poignant beyond description. It was—incredibly enough in view of its usual domineering cast—Asenath’s; yet the caller had vowed that in that instant the sad, muddled eyes of poor Edward were gazing out from it. 
      Edward’s calls now grew a trifle more frequent, and his hints occasionally became concrete. What he said was not to be believed, even in centuried and legend-haunted Arkham; but he threw out his dark lore with a sincerity and convincingness which made one fear for his sanity. He talked about terrible meetings in lonely places, of Cyclopean ruins in the heart of the Maine woods beneath which vast staircases lead down to abysses of nighted secrets, of complex angles that lead through invisible walls to other regions of space and time, and of hideous exchanges of personality that permitted explorations in remote and forbidden places, on other worlds, and in different space-time continua.
      He would now and then back up certain crazy hints by exhibiting objects which utterly nonplussed me—elusively coloured and bafflingly textured objects like nothing ever heard of on earth, whose insane curves and surfaces answered no conceivable purpose and followed no conceivable geometry. These things, he said, came ‘from outside’; and his wife knew how to get them. Sometimes—but always in frightened and ambiguous whispers—he would suggest things about old Ephraim Waite, whom he had seen occasionally at the college library in the old days. These adumbrations were never specific, but seemed to revolve around some especially horrible doubt as to whether the old wizard were really dead—in a spiritual as well as corporeal sense.
      At times Derby would halt abruptly in his revelations, and I wondered whether Asenath could possibly have divined his speech at a distance and cut him off through some unknown sort of telepathic mesmerism—some power of the kind she had displayed at school. Certainly, she suspected that he told me things, for as the weeks passed she tried to stop his visits with words and glances of a most inexplicable potency. Only with difficulty could he get to see me, for although he would pretend to be going somewhere else, some invisible force would generally clog his motions or make him forget his destination for the time being. His visits usually came when Asenath was away—‘away in her own body’, as he once oddly put it. She always found out later—the servants watched his goings and comings—but evidently she thought it inexpedient to do anything drastic.

IV.

Derby had been married more than three years on that August day when I got the telegram from Maine. I had not seen him for two months, but had heard he was away “on business”. Asenath was supposed to be with him, though watchful gossips declared there was someone upstairs in the house behind the doubly curtained windows. They had watched the purchases made by the servants. And now the town marshal of Chesuncook had wired of the draggled madman who stumbled out of the woods with delirious ravings and screamed to me for protection. It was Edward—and he had been just able to recall his own name and my name and address.
      Chesuncook is close to the wildest, deepest, and least explored forest belt in Maine, and it took a whole day of feverish jolting through fantastic and forbidding scenery to get there in a car. I found Derby in a cell at the town farm, vacillating between frenzy and apathy. He knew me at once, and began pouring out a meaningless, half-incoherent torrent of words in my direction.
      “Dan—for God’s sake! The pit of the shoggoths! Down the six thousand steps . . . the abomination of abominations . . . I never would let her take me, and then I found myself there. . . . Iä! Shub-Niggurath! . . . The shape rose up from the altar, and there were 500 that howled. . . . The Hooded Thing bleated ‘Kamog! Kamog!’—that was old Ephraim’s secret name in the coven. . . . I was there, where she promised she wouldn’t take me. . . . A minute before I was locked in the library, and then I was there where she had gone with my body—in the place of utter blasphemy, the unholy pit where the black realm begins and the watcher guards the gate. . . . I saw a shoggoth—it changed shape. . . . I can’t stand it. . . . I won’t stand it. . . . I’ll kill her if she ever sends me there again. . . . I’ll kill that entity . . . her, him, it . . . I’ll kill it! I’ll kill it with my own hands!”
      It took me an hour to quiet him, but he subsided at last. The next day I got him decent clothes in the village, and set out with him for Arkham. His fury of hysteria was spent, and he was inclined to be silent; though he began muttering darkly to himself when the car passed through Augusta—as if the sight of a city aroused unpleasant memories. It was clear that he did not wish to go home; and considering the fantastic delusions he seemed to have about his wife—delusions undoubtedly springing from some actual hypnotic ordeal to which he had been subjected—I thought it would be better if he did not. I would, I resolved, put him up myself for a time; no matter what unpleasantness it would make with Asenath. Later I would help him get a divorce, for most assuredly there were mental factors which made this marriage suicidal for him. When we struck open country again Derby’s muttering faded away, and I let him nod and drowse on the seat beside me as I drove.
      During our sunset dash through Portland the muttering commenced again, more distinctly than before, and as I listened I caught a stream of utterly insane drivel about Asenath. The extent to which she had preyed on Edward’s nerves was plain, for he had woven a whole set of hallucinations around her. His present predicament, he mumbled furtively, was only one of a long series. She was getting hold of him, and he knew that some day she would never let go. Even now she probably let him go only when she had to, because she couldn’t hold on long at a time. She constantly took his body and went to nameless places for nameless rites, leaving him in her body and locking him upstairs—but sometimes she couldn’t hold on, and he would find himself suddenly in his own body again in some far-off, horrible, and perhaps unknown place. Sometimes she’d get hold of him again and sometimes she couldn’t. Often he was left stranded somewhere as I had found him . . . time and again he had to find his way home from frightful distances, getting somebody to drive the car after he found it.
      The worst thing was that she was holding on to him longer and longer at a time. She wanted to be a man—to be fully human—that was why she got hold of him. She had sensed the mixture of fine-wrought brain and weak will in him. Some day she would crowd him out and disappear with his body—disappear to become a great magician like her father and leave him marooned in that female shell that wasn’t even quite human. Yes, he knew about the Innsmouth blood now. There had been traffick with things from the sea—it was horrible. . . . And old Ephraim—he had known the secret, and when he grew old did a hideous thing to keep alive . . . he wanted to live forever . . . Asenath would succeed—one successful demonstration had taken place already.
      As Derby muttered on I turned to look at him closely, verifying the impression of change which an earlier scrutiny had given me. Paradoxically, he seemed in better shape than usual—harder, more normally developed, and without the trace of sickly flabbiness caused by his indolent habits. It was as if he had been really active and properly exercised for the first time in his coddled life, and I judged that Asenath’s force must have pushed him into unwonted channels of motion and alertness. But just now his mind was in a pitiable state; for he was mumbling wild extravagances about his wife, about black magic, about old Ephraim, and about some revelation which would convince even me. He repeated names which I recognised from bygone browsings in forbidden volumes, and at times made me shudder with a certain thread of mythological consistency—of convincing coherence—which ran through his maundering. Again and again he would pause, as if to gather courage for some final and terrible disclosure.
      “Dan, Dan, don’t you remember him—the wild eyes and the unkempt beard that never turned white? He glared at me once, and I never forgot it. Now she glares that way. And I know why! He found it in the Necronomicon—the formula. I don’t dare tell you the page yet, but when I do you can read and understand. Then you will know what has engulfed me. On, on, on, on—body to body to body—he means never to die. The life-glow—he knows how to break the link . . . it can flicker on a while even when the body is dead. I’ll give you hints, and maybe you’ll guess. Listen, Dan—do you know why my wife always takes such pains with that silly backhand writing? Have you ever seen a manuscript of old Ephraim’s? Do you want to know why I shivered when I saw some hasty notes Asenath had jotted down? 
      “Asenath . . . is there such a person? Why did they half think there was poison in old Ephraim’s stomach? Why do the Gilmans whisper about the way he shrieked—like a frightened child—when he went mad and Asenath locked him up in the padded attic room where—the other—had been? Was it old Ephraim’s soul that was locked in? Who locked in whom? Why had he been looking for months for someone with a fine mind and a weak will? Why did he curse that his daughter wasn’t a son? Tell me, Daniel Upton—what devilish exchange was perpetrated in the house of horror where that blasphemous monster had his trusting, weak-willed, half-human child at his mercy? Didn’t he make it permanent—as she’ll do in the end with me? Tell me why that thing that calls itself Asenath writes differently when off guard, so that you can’t tell its script from . . .”
      Then the thing happened. Derby’s voice was rising to a thin treble scream as he raved, when suddenly it was shut off with an almost mechanical click. I thought of those other occasions at my home when his confidences had abruptly ceased—when I had half fancied that some obscure telepathic wave of Asenath’s mental force was intervening to keep him silent. This, though, was something altogether different—and, I felt, infinitely more horrible. The face beside me was twisted almost unrecognisably for a moment, while through the whole body there passed a shivering motion—as if all the bones, organs, muscles, nerves, and glands were readjusting themselves to a radically different posture, set of stresses, and general personality.
      Just where the supreme horror lay, I could not for my life tell; yet there swept over me such a swamping wave of sickness and repulsion—such a freezing, petrifying sense of utter alienage and abnormality—that my grasp of the wheel grew feeble and uncertain. The figure beside me seemed less like a lifelong friend than like some monstrous intrusion from outer space—some damnable, utterly accursed focus of unknown and malign cosmic forces.
      I had faltered only a moment, but before another moment was over my companion had seized the wheel and forced me to change places with him. The dusk was now very thick, and the lights of Portland far behind, so I could not see much of his face. The blaze of his eyes, though, was phenomenal; and I knew that he must now be in that queerly energised state—so unlike his usual self—which so many people had noticed. It seemed odd and incredible that listless Edward Derby—he who could never assert himself, and who had never learned to drive—should be ordering me about and taking the wheel of my own car, yet that was precisely what had happened. He did not speak for some time, and in my inexplicable horror I was glad he did not.
      In the lights of Biddeford and Saco I saw his firmly set mouth, and shivered at the blaze of his eyes. The people were right—he did look damnably like his wife and like old Ephraim when in these moods. I did not wonder that the moods were disliked—there was certainly something unnatural and diabolic in them, and I felt the sinister element all the more because of the wild ravings I had been hearing. This man, for all my lifelong knowledge of Edward Pickman Derby, was a stranger—an intrusion of some sort from the black abyss.
      He did not speak until we were on a dark stretch of road, and when he did his voice seemed utterly unfamiliar. It was deeper, firmer, and more decisive than I had ever known it to be; while its accent and pronunciation were altogether changed—though vaguely, remotely, and rather disturbingly recalling something I could not quite place. There was, I thought, a trace of very profound and very genuine irony in the timbre—not the flashy, meaninglessly jaunty pseudo-irony of the callow “sophisticate”, which Derby had habitually affected, but something grim, basic, pervasive, and potentially evil. I marvelled at the self-possession so soon following the spell of panic-struck muttering.
      “I hope you’ll forget my attack back there, Upton,” he was saying. “You know what my nerves are, and I guess you can excuse such things. I’m enormously grateful, of course, for this lift home.
      “And you must forget, too, any crazy things I may have been saying about my wife—and about things in general. That’s what comes from overstudy in a field like mine. My philosophy is full of bizarre concepts, and when the mind gets worn out it cooks up all sorts of imaginary concrete applications. I shall take a rest from now on—you probably won’t see me for some time, and you needn’t blame Asenath for it.
      “This trip was a bit queer, but it’s really very simple. There are certain Indian relics in the north woods—standing stones, and all that—which mean a good deal in folklore, and Asenath and I are following that stuff up. It was a hard search, so I seem to have gone off my head. I must send somebody for the car when I get home. A month’s relaxation will put me back on my feet.”
      I do not recall just what my own part of the conversation was, for the baffling alienage of my seatmate filled all my consciousness. With every moment my feeling of elusive cosmic horror increased, till at length I was in a virtual delirium of longing for the end of the drive. Derby did not offer to relinquish the wheel, and I was glad of the speed with which Portsmouth and Newburyport flashed by. 
      At the junction where the main highway runs inland and avoids Innsmouth I was half afraid my driver would take the bleak shore road that goes through that damnable place. He did not, however, but darted rapidly past Rowley and Ipswich toward our destination. We reached Arkham before midnight, and found the lights still on at the old Crowninshield house. Derby left the car with a hasty repetition of his thanks, and I drove home alone with a curious feeling of relief. It had been a terrible drive—all the more terrible because I could not quite tell why—and I did not regret Derby’s forecast of a long absence from my company.

V.

The next two months were full of rumours. People spoke of seeing Derby more and more in his new energised state, and Asenath was scarcely ever in to her few callers. I had only one visit from Edward, when he called briefly in Asenath’s car—duly reclaimed from wherever he had left it in Maine—to get some books he had lent me. He was in his new state, and paused only long enough for some evasively polite remarks. It was plain that he had nothing to discuss with me when in this condition—and I noticed that he did not even trouble to give the old three-and-two signal when ringing the doorbell. As on that evening in the car, I felt a faint, infinitely deep horror which I could not explain; so that his swift departure was a prodigious relief.
      In mid-September Derby was away for a week, and some of the decadent college set talked knowingly of the matter—hinting at a meeting with a notorious cult-leader, lately expelled from England, who had established headquarters in New York. For my part I could not get that strange ride from Maine out of my head. The transformation I had witnessed had affected me profoundly, and I caught myself again and again trying to account for the thing—and for the extreme horror it had inspired in me.
      But the oddest rumours were those about the sobbing in the old Crowninshield house. The voice seemed to be a woman’s, and some of the younger people thought it sounded like Asenath’s. It was heard only at rare intervals, and would sometimes be choked off as if by force. There was talk of an investigation, but this was dispelled one day when Asenath appeared in the streets and chatted in a sprightly way with a large number of acquaintances—apologising for her recent absences and speaking incidentally about the nervous breakdown and hysteria of a guest from Boston. The guest was never seen, but Asenath’s appearance left nothing to be said. And then someone complicated matters by whispering that the sobs had once or twice been in a man’s voice.
      One evening in mid-October I heard the familiar three-and-two ring at the front door. Answering it myself, I found Edward on the steps, and saw in a moment that his personality was the old one which I had not encountered since the day of his ravings on that terrible ride from Chesuncook. His face was twitching with a mixture of odd emotions in which fear and triumph seemed to share dominion, and he looked furtively over his shoulder as I closed the door behind him.
      Following me clumsily to the study, he asked for some whiskey to steady his nerves. I forbore to question him, but waited till he felt like beginning whatever he wanted to say. At length he ventured some information in a choking voice.
      “Asenath has gone, Dan. We had a long talk last night while the servants were out, and I made her promise to stop preying on me. Of course I had certain—certain occult defences I never told you about. She had to give in, but got frightfully angry. Just packed up and started for New York—walked right out to catch the 8:20 in to Boston. I suppose people will talk, but I can’t help that. You needn’t mention that there was any trouble—just say she’s gone on a long research trip.
      “She’s probably going to stay with one of her horrible groups of devotees. I hope she’ll go west and get a divorce—anyhow, I’ve made her promise to keep away and let me alone. It was horrible, Dan—she was stealing my body—crowding me out—making a prisoner of me. I laid low and pretended to let her do it, but I had to be on the watch. I could plan if I was careful, for she can’t read my mind literally, or in detail. All she could read of my planning was a sort of general mood of rebellion—and she always thought I was helpless. Never thought I could get the best of her . . . but I had a spell or two that worked.”
      Derby looked over his shoulder and took some more whiskey.
      “I paid off those damned servants this morning when they got back. They were ugly about it, and asked questions, but they went. They’re her kind—Innsmouth people—and were hand and glove with her. I hope they’ll let me alone—I didn’t like the way they laughed when they walked away. I must get as many of Dad’s old servants again as I can. I’ll move back home now.
      “I suppose you think I’m crazy, Dan—but Arkham history ought to hint at things that back up what I’ve told you—and what I’m going to tell you. You’ve seen one of the changes, too—in your car after I told you about Asenath that day coming home from Maine. That was when she got me—drove me out of my body. The last thing of the ride I remember was when I was all worked up trying to tell you what that she-devil is. Then she got me, and in a flash I was back at the house—in the library where those damned servants had me locked up—and in that cursed fiend’s body . . . that isn’t even human. . . . You know, it was she you must have ridden home with . . . that preying wolf in my body. . . . You ought to have known the difference!”
      I shuddered as Derby paused. Surely, I had known the difference—yet could I accept an explanation as insane as this? But my distracted caller was growing even wilder.
      “I had to save myself—I had to, Dan! She’d have got me for good at Hallowmass—they hold a Sabbat up there beyond Chesuncook, and the sacrifice would have clinched things. She’d have got me for good . . . she’d have been I, and I’d have been she . . . forever . . . too late. . . . My body’d have been hers for good. . . . She’d have been a man, and fully human, just as she wanted to be. . . . I suppose she’d have put me out of the way—killed her own ex-body with me in it, damn her, just as she did before—just as she, he, or it did before. . . .”
      Edward’s face was now atrociously distorted, and he bent it uncomfortably close to mine as his voice fell to a whisper.
      “You must know what I hinted in the car—that she isn’t Asenath at all, but really old Ephraim himself. I suspected it a year and a half ago, but I know it now. Her handwriting shews it when she’s off guard—sometimes she jots down a note in writing that’s just like her father’s manuscripts, stroke for stroke—and sometimes she says things that nobody but an old man like Ephraim could say. He changed forms with her when he felt death coming—she was the only one he could find with the right kind of brain and a weak enough will—he got her body permanently, just as she almost got mine, and then poisoned the old body he’d put her into. Haven’t you seen old Ephraim’s soul glaring out of that she-devil’s eyes dozens of times . . . and out of mine when she had control of my body?”
      The whisperer was panting, and paused for breath. I said nothing, and when he resumed his voice was nearer normal. This, I reflected, was a case for the asylum, but I would not be the one to send him there. Perhaps time and freedom from Asenath would do its work. I could see that he would never wish to dabble in morbid occultism again.
      “I’ll tell you more later—I must have a long rest now. I’ll tell you something of the forbidden horrors she led me into—something of the age-old horrors that even now are festering in out-of-the-way corners with a few monstrous priests to keep them alive. Some people know things about the universe that nobody ought to know, and can do things that nobody ought to be able to do. I’ve been in it up to my neck, but that’s the end. Today I’d burn that damned Necronomicon and all the rest if I were librarian at Miskatonic.
      “But she can’t get me now. I must get out of that accursed house as soon as I can, and settle down at home. You’ll help me, I know, if I need help. Those devilish servants, you know . . . and if people should get too inquisitive about Asenath. You see, I can’t give them her address. . . . Then there are certain groups of searchers—certain cults, you know—that might misunderstand our breaking up . . . some of them have damnably curious ideas and methods. I know you’ll stand by me if anything happens—even if I have to tell you a lot that will shock you. . . .”
      I had Edward stay and sleep in one of the guest-chambers that night, and in the morning he seemed calmer. We discussed certain possible arrangements for his moving back into the Derby mansion, and I hoped he would lose no time in making the change. He did not call the next evening, but I saw him frequently during the ensuing weeks. We talked as little as possible about strange and unpleasant things, but discussed the renovation of the old Derby house, and the travels which Edward promised to take with my son and me the following summer.
      Of Asenath we said almost nothing, for I saw that the subject was a peculiarly disturbing one. Gossip, of course, was rife; but that was no novelty in connexion with the strange ménage at the old Crowninshield house. One thing I did not like was what Derby’s banker let fall in an overexpansive mood at the Miskatonic Club—about the cheques Edward was sending regularly to a Moses and Abigail Sargent and a Eunice Babson in Innsmouth. That looked as if those evil-faced servants were extorting some kind of tribute from him—yet he had not mentioned the matter to me.
      I wished that the summer—and my son’s Harvard vacation—would come, so that we could get Edward to Europe. He was not, I soon saw, mending as rapidly as I had hoped he would; for there was something a bit hysterical in his occasional exhilaration, while his moods of fright and depression were altogether too frequent. The old Derby house was ready by December, yet Edward constantly put off moving. Though he hated and seemed to fear the Crowninshield place, he was at the same time queerly enslaved by it. He could not seem to begin dismantling things, and invented every kind of excuse to postpone action. When I pointed this out to him he appeared unaccountably frightened. His father’s old butler—who was there with other reacquired family servants—told me one day that Edward’s occasional prowlings about the house, and especially down cellar, looked odd and unwholesome to him. I wondered if Asenath had been writing disturbing letters, but the butler said there was no mail which could have come from her.

VI.

It was about Christmas that Derby broke down one evening while calling on me. I was steering the conversation toward next summer’s travels when he suddenly shrieked and leaped up from his chair with a look of shocking, uncontrollable fright—a cosmic panic and loathing such as only the nether gulfs of nightmare could bring to any sane mind.
      “My brain! My brain! God, Dan—it’s tugging—from beyond—knocking—clawing—that she-devil—even now—Ephraim—Kamog! Kamog!—The pit of the shoggoths—Iä! Shub-Niggurath! The Goat with a Thousand Young! . . . 
      “The flame—the flame . . . beyond body, beyond life . . . in the earth . . . oh, God! . . .”
      I pulled him back to his chair and poured some wine down his throat as his frenzy sank to a dull apathy. He did not resist, but kept his lips moving as if talking to himself. Presently I realised that he was trying to talk to me, and bent my ear to his mouth to catch the feeble words.
      “ . . . again, again . . . she’s trying . . . I might have known . . . nothing can stop that force; not distance, nor magic, nor death . . . it comes and comes, mostly in the night . . . I can’t leave . . . it’s horrible . . . oh, God, Dan, if you only knew as I do just how horrible it is. . . .”
      When he had slumped down into a stupor I propped him with pillows and let normal sleep overtake him. I did not call a doctor, for I knew what would be said of his sanity, and wished to give nature a chance if I possibly could. He waked at midnight, and I put him to bed upstairs, but he was gone by morning. He had let himself quietly out of the house—and his butler, when called on the wire, said he was at home pacing restlessly about the library.
      Edward went to pieces rapidly after that. He did not call again, but I went daily to see him. He would always be sitting in his library, staring at nothing and having an air of abnormal listening. Sometimes he talked rationally, but always on trivial topics. Any mention of his trouble, of future plans, or of Asenath would send him into a frenzy. His butler said he had frightful seizures at night, during which he might eventually do himself harm.
      I had a long talk with his doctor, banker, and lawyer, and finally took the physician with two specialist colleagues to visit him. The spasms that resulted from the first questions were violent and pitiable—and that evening a closed car took his poor struggling body to the Arkham Sanitarium. I was made his guardian and called on him twice weekly—almost weeping to hear his wild shrieks, awesome whispers, and dreadful, droning repetitions of such phrases as “I had to do it—I had to do it . . . it’ll get me . . . it’ll get me . . . down there . . . down there in the dark. . . . Mother, mother! Dan! Save me . . . save me. . . .”
      How much hope of recovery there was, no one could say; but I tried my best to be optimistic. Edward must have a home if he emerged, so I transferred his servants to the Derby mansion, which would surely be his sane choice. What to do about the Crowninshield place with its complex arrangements and collections of utterly inexplicable objects I could not decide, so left it momentarily untouched—telling the Derby housemaid to go over and dust the chief rooms once a week, and ordering the furnace man to have a fire on those days.
      The final nightmare came before Candlemas—heralded, in cruel irony, by a false gleam of hope. One morning late in January the sanitarium telephoned to report that Edward’s reason had suddenly come back. His continuous memory, they said, was badly impaired; but sanity itself was certain. Of course he must remain some time for observation, but there could be little doubt of the outcome. All going well, he would surely be free in a week.
      I hastened over in a flood of delight, but stood bewildered when a nurse took me to Edward’s room. The patient rose to greet me, extending his hand with a polite smile; but I saw in an instant that he bore the strangely energised personality which had seemed so foreign to his own nature—the competent personality I had found so vaguely horrible, and which Edward himself had once vowed was the intruding soul of his wife. There was the same blazing vision—so like Asenath’s and old Ephraim’s—and the same firm mouth; and when he spoke I could sense the same grim, pervasive irony in his voice—the deep irony so redolent of potential evil. This was the person who had driven my car through the night five months before—the person I had not seen since that brief call when he had forgotten the old-time doorbell signal and stirred such nebulous fears in me—and now he filled me with the same dim feeling of blasphemous alienage and ineffable cosmic hideousness.
      He spoke affably of arrangements for release—and there was nothing for me to do but assent, despite some remarkable gaps in his recent memories. Yet I felt that something was terribly, inexplicably wrong and abnormal. There were horrors in this thing that I could not reach. This was a sane person—but was it indeed the Edward Derby I had known? If not, who or what was it—and where was Edward? Ought it to be free or confined . . . or ought it to be extirpated from the face of the earth? There was a hint of the abysmally sardonic in everything the creature said—the Asenath-like eyes lent a special and baffling mockery to certain words about the ‘early liberty earned by an especially close confinement’. I must have behaved very awkwardly, and was glad to beat a retreat.
      All that day and the next I racked my brain over the problem. What had happened? What sort of mind looked out through those alien eyes in Edward’s face? I could think of nothing but this dimly terrible enigma, and gave up all efforts to perform my usual work. The second morning the hospital called up to say that the recovered patient was unchanged, and by evening I was close to a nervous collapse—a state I admit, though others will vow it coloured my subsequent vision. I have nothing to say on this point except that no madness of mine could account for all the evidence.

VII.

It was in the night—after that second evening—that stark, utter horror burst over me and weighted my spirit with a black, clutching panic from which it can never shake free. It began with a telephone call just before midnight. I was the only one up, and sleepily took down the receiver in the library. No one seemed to be on the wire, and I was about to hang up and go to bed when my ear caught a very faint suspicion of sound at the other end. Was someone trying under great difficulties to talk? As I listened I thought I heard a sort of half-liquid bubbling noise—“glub . . . glub . . . glub”—which had an odd suggestion of inarticulate, unintelligible word and syllable divisions. I called, “Who is it?” But the only answer was “glub-glub . . . glub-glub.” I could only assume that the noise was mechanical; but fancying that it might be a case of a broken instrument able to receive but not to send, I added, “I can’t hear you. Better hang up and try Information.” Immediately I heard the receiver go on the hook at the other end.
      This, I say, was just before midnight. When that call was traced afterward it was found to come from the old Crowninshield house, though it was fully half a week from the housemaid’s day to be there. I shall only hint what was found at that house—the upheaval in a remote cellar storeroom, the tracks, the dirt, the hastily rifled wardrobe, the baffling marks on the telephone, the clumsily used stationery, and the detestable stench lingering over everything. The police, poor fools, have their smug little theories, and are still searching for those sinister discharged servants—who have dropped out of sight amidst the present furore. They speak of a ghoulish revenge for things that were done, and say I was included because I was Edward’s best friend and adviser.
      Idiots!—do they fancy those brutish clowns could have forged that handwriting? Do they fancy they could have brought what later came? Are they blind to the changes in that body that was Edward’s? As for me, I now believe all that Edward Derby ever told me. There are horrors beyond life’s edge that we do not suspect, and once in a while man’s evil prying calls them just within our range. Ephraim—Asenath—that devil called them in, and they engulfed Edward as they are engulfing me.
      Can I be sure that I am safe? Those powers survive the life of the physical form. The next day—in the afternoon, when I pulled out of my prostration and was able to walk and talk coherently—I went to the madhouse and shot him dead for Edward’s and the world’s sake, but can I be sure till he is cremated? They are keeping the body for some silly autopsies by different doctors—but I say he must be cremated. He must be cremated—he who was not Edward Derby when I shot him. I shall go mad if he is not, for I may be the next. But my will is not weak—and I shall not let it be undermined by the terrors I know are seething around it. One life—Ephraim, Asenath, and Edward—who now? I will not be driven out of my body . . . I will not change souls with that bullet-ridden lich in the madhouse!
      But let me try to tell coherently of that final horror. I will not speak of what the police persistently ignored—the tales of that dwarfed, grotesque, malodorous thing met by at least three wayfarers in High St. just before two o’clock, and the nature of the single footprints in certain places. I will say only that just about two the doorbell and knocker waked me—doorbell and knocker both, plied alternately and uncertainly in a kind of weak desperation, and each trying to keep to Edward’s old signal of three-and-two strokes.
      Roused from sound sleep, my mind leaped into a turmoil. Derby at the door—and remembering the old code! That new personality had not remembered it . . . was Edward suddenly back in his rightful state? Why was he here in such evident stress and haste? Had he been released ahead of time, or had he escaped? Perhaps, I thought as I flung on a robe and bounded downstairs, his return to his own self had brought raving and violence, revoking his discharge and driving him to a desperate dash for freedom. Whatever had happened, he was good old Edward again, and I would help him!
      When I opened the door into the elm-arched blackness a gust of insufferably foetid wind almost flung me prostrate. I choked in nausea, and for a second scarcely saw the dwarfed, humped figure on the steps. The summons had been Edward’s, but who was this foul, stunted parody? Where had Edward had time to go? His ring had sounded only a second before the door opened.
      The caller had on one of Edward’s overcoats—its bottom almost touching the ground, and its sleeves rolled back yet still covering the hands. On the head was a slouch hat pulled low, while a black silk muffler concealed the face. As I stepped unsteadily forward, the figure made a semi-liquid sound like that I had heard over the telephone—“glub . . . glub . . .”—and thrust at me a large, closely written paper impaled on the end of a long pencil. Still reeling from the morbid and unaccountable foetor, I seized this paper and tried to read it in the light from the doorway.
      Beyond question, it was in Edward’s script. But why had he written when he was close enough to ring—and why was the script so awkward, coarse, and shaky? I could make out nothing in the dim half light, so edged back into the hall, the dwarf figure clumping mechanically after but pausing on the inner door’s threshold. The odour of this singular messenger was really appalling, and I hoped (not in vain, thank God!) that my wife would not wake and confront it.
      Then, as I read the paper, I felt my knees give under me and my vision go black. I was lying on the floor when I came to, that accursed sheet still clutched in my fear-rigid hand. This is what it said.
      “Dan—go to the sanitarium and kill it. Exterminate it. It isn’t Edward Derby any more. She got me—it’s Asenath—and she has been dead three months and a half. I lied when I said she had gone away. I killed her. I had to. It was sudden, but we were alone and I was in my right body. I saw a candlestick and smashed her head in. She would have got me for good at Hallowmass.
      “I buried her in the farther cellar storeroom under some old boxes and cleaned up all the traces. The servants suspected next morning, but they have such secrets that they dare not tell the police. I sent them off, but God knows what they—and others of the cult—will do.
      “I thought for a while I was all right, and then I felt the tugging at my brain. I knew what it was—I ought to have remembered. A soul like hers—or Ephraim’s—is half detached, and keeps right on after death as long as the body lasts. She was getting me—making me change bodies with her—seizing my body and putting me in that corpse of hers buried in the cellar.
      “I knew what was coming—that’s why I snapped and had to go to the asylum. Then it came—I found myself choked in the dark—in Asenath’s rotting carcass down there in the cellar under the boxes where I put it. And I knew she must be in my body at the sanitarium—permanently, for it was after Hallowmass, and the sacrifice would work even without her being there—sane, and ready for release as a menace to the world. I was desperate, and in spite of everything I clawed my way out.
      “I’m too far gone to talk—I couldn’t manage to telephone—but I can still write. I’ll get fixed up somehow and bring you this last word and warning. Kill that fiend if you value the peace and comfort of the world. See that it is cremated. If you don’t, it will live on and on, body to body forever, and I can’t tell you what it will do. Keep clear of black magic, Dan, it’s the devil’s business. Goodbye—you’ve been a great friend. Tell the police whatever they’ll believe—and I’m damnably sorry to drag all this on you. I’ll be at peace before long—this thing won’t hold together much more. Hope you can read this. And kill that thing—kill it.
Yours—Ed.”

      It was only afterward that I read the last half of this paper, for I had fainted at the end of the third paragraph. I fainted again when I saw and smelled what cluttered up the threshold where the warm air had struck it. The messenger would not move or have consciousness any more.
      The butler, tougher-fibred than I, did not faint at what met him in the hall in the morning. Instead, he telephoned the police. When they came I had been taken upstairs to bed, but the—other mass—lay where it had collapsed in the night. The men put handkerchiefs to their noses.
      What they finally found inside Edward’s oddly assorted clothes was mostly liquescent horror. There were bones, too—and a crushed-in skull. Some dental work positively identified the skull as Asenath’s.",True
"

  ""Oh, thou who burn'st in heart for those who burn
  In Hell, whose fires thyself shall feed in turn;
  How long be crying--'Mercy on them.' God!
  Why, who art thou to teach and He to learn?""

In the Church of St. Barnabé vespers were over; the clergy left the
altar; the little choir-boys flocked across the chancel and settled in
the stalls. A Suisse in rich uniform marched down the south aisle,
sounding his staff at every fourth step on the stone pavement; behind him
came that eloquent preacher and good man, Monseigneur C----.

My chair was near the chancel rail, I now turned toward the west end of
the church. The other people between the altar and the pulpit turned too.
There was a little scraping and rustling while the congregation seated
itself again; the preacher mounted the pulpit stairs, and the organ
voluntary ceased.

I had always found the organ-playing at St. Barnabé highly interesting.
Learned and scientific it was, too much so for my small knowledge, but
expressing a vivid if cold intelligence. Moreover, it possessed the
French quality of taste: taste reigned supreme, self-controlled,
dignified and reticent.

To-day, however, from the first chord I had felt a change for the worse,
a sinister change. During vespers it had been chiefly the chancel organ
which supported the beautiful choir, but now and again, quite wantonly as
it seemed, from the west gallery where the great organ stands, a heavy
hand had struck across the church at the serene peace of those clear
voices. It was something more than harsh and dissonant, and it betrayed
no lack of skill. As it recurred again and again, it set me thinking of
what my architect's books say about the custom in early times to
consecrate the choir as soon as it was built, and that the nave, being
finished sometimes half a century later, often did not get any blessing
at all: I wondered idly if that had been the case at St. Barnabé, and
whether something not usually supposed to be at home in a Christian
church might have entered undetected and taken possession of the west
gallery. I had read of such things happening, too, but not in works on
architecture.

Then I remembered that St. Barnabé was not much more than a hundred years
old, and smiled at the incongruous association of mediaeval superstitions
with that cheerful little piece of eighteenth-century rococo.

But now vespers were over, and there should have followed a few quiet
chords, fit to accompany meditation, while we waited for the sermon.
Instead of that, the discord at the lower end of the church broke out
with the departure of the clergy, as if now nothing could control it.

I belong to those children of an older and simpler generation who do not
love to seek for psychological subtleties in art; and I have ever refused
to find in music anything more than melody and harmony, but I felt that
in the labyrinth of sounds now issuing from that instrument there was
something being hunted. Up and down the pedals chased him, while the
manuals blared approval. Poor devil! whoever he was, there seemed small
hope of escape!

My nervous annoyance changed to anger. Who was doing this? How dare he
play like that in the midst of divine service? I glanced at the people
near me: not one appeared to be in the least disturbed. The placid brows
of the kneeling nuns, still turned towards the altar, lost none of their
devout abstraction under the pale shadow of their white head-dress. The
fashionable lady beside me was looking expectantly at Monseigneur C----.
For all her face betrayed, the organ might have been singing an Ave
Maria.

But now, at last, the preacher had made the sign of the cross, and
commanded silence. I turned to him gladly. Thus far I had not found the
rest I had counted on when I entered St. Barnabé that afternoon.

I was worn out by three nights of physical suffering and mental trouble:
the last had been the worst, and it was an exhausted body, and a mind
benumbed and yet acutely sensitive, which I had brought to my favourite
church for healing. For I had been reading _The King in Yellow_.

""The sun ariseth; they gather themselves together and lay them down in
their dens."" Monseigneur C---- delivered his text in a calm voice,
glancing quietly over the congregation. My eyes turned, I knew not why,
toward the lower end of the church. The organist was coming from behind
his pipes, and passing along the gallery on his way out, I saw him
disappear by a small door that leads to some stairs which descend
directly to the street. He was a slender man, and his face was as white
as his coat was black. ""Good riddance!"" I thought, ""with your wicked
music! I hope your assistant will play the closing voluntary.""

With a feeling of relief--with a deep, calm feeling of relief, I turned
back to the mild face in the pulpit and settled myself to listen. Here,
at last, was the ease of mind I longed for.

""My children,"" said the preacher, ""one truth the human soul finds hardest
of all to learn: that it has nothing to fear. It can never be made to see
that nothing can really harm it.""

""Curious doctrine!"" I thought, ""for a Catholic priest. Let us see how he
will reconcile that with the Fathers.""

""Nothing can really harm the soul,"" he went on, in, his coolest, clearest
tones, ""because----""

But I never heard the rest; my eye left his face, I knew not for what
reason, and sought the lower end of the church. The same man was coming
out from behind the organ, and was passing along the gallery _the same
way_. But there had not been time for him to return, and if he had
returned, I must have seen him. I felt a faint chill, and my heart sank;
and yet, his going and coming were no affair of mine. I looked at him: I
could not look away from his black figure and his white face. When he was
exactly opposite to me, he turned and sent across the church straight
into my eyes, a look of hate, intense and deadly: I have never seen any
other like it; would to God I might never see it again! Then he
disappeared by the same door through which I had watched him depart less
than sixty seconds before.

I sat and tried to collect my thoughts. My first sensation was like that
of a very young child badly hurt, when it catches its breath before
crying out.

To suddenly find myself the object of such hatred was exquisitely
painful: and this man was an utter stranger. Why should he hate me
so?--me, whom he had never seen before? For the moment all other
sensation was merged in this one pang: even fear was subordinate to
grief, and for that moment I never doubted; but in the next I began to
reason, and a sense of the incongruous came to my aid.

As I have said, St. Barnabé is a modern church. It is small and well
lighted; one sees all over it almost at a glance. The organ gallery gets
a strong white light from a row of long windows in the clerestory, which
have not even coloured glass.

The pulpit being in the middle of the church, it followed that, when I
was turned toward it, whatever moved at the west end could not fail to
attract my eye. When the organist passed it was no wonder that I saw him:
I had simply miscalculated the interval between his first and his second
passing. He had come in that last time by the other side-door. As for the
look which had so upset me, there had been no such thing, and I was a
nervous fool.

I looked about. This was a likely place to harbour supernatural horrors!
That clear-cut, reasonable face of Monseigneur C----, his collected
manner and easy, graceful gestures, were they not just a little
discouraging to the notion of a gruesome mystery? I glanced above his
head, and almost laughed. That flyaway lady supporting one corner of the
pulpit canopy, which looked like a fringed damask table-cloth in a high
wind, at the first attempt of a basilisk to pose up there in the organ
loft, she would point her gold trumpet at him, and puff him out of
existence! I laughed to myself over this conceit, which, at the time, I
thought very amusing, and sat and chaffed myself and everything else,
from the old harpy outside the railing, who had made me pay ten centimes
for my chair, before she would let me in (she was more like a basilisk, I
told myself, than was my organist with the anaemic complexion): from that
grim old dame, to, yes, alas! Monseigneur C---- himself. For all
devoutness had fled. I had never yet done such a thing in my life, but
now I felt a desire to mock.

As for the sermon, I could not hear a word of it for the jingle in my
ears of

 ""The skirts of St. Paul has reached.
  Having preached us those six Lent lectures,
  More unctuous than ever he preached,""

keeping time to the most fantastic and irreverent thoughts.

It was no use to sit there any longer: I must get out of doors and shake
myself free from this hateful mood. I knew the rudeness I was committing,
but still I rose and left the church.

A spring sun was shining on the Rue St. Honoré, as I ran down the church
steps. On one corner stood a barrow full of yellow jonquils, pale violets
from the Riviera, dark Russian violets, and white Roman hyacinths in a
golden cloud of mimosa. The street was full of Sunday pleasure-seekers. I
swung my cane and laughed with the rest. Some one overtook and passed me.
He never turned, but there was the same deadly malignity in his white
profile that there had been in his eyes. I watched him as long as I could
see him. His lithe back expressed the same menace; every step that
carried him away from me seemed to bear him on some errand connected with
my destruction.

I was creeping along, my feet almost refusing to move. There began to
dawn in me a sense of responsibility for something long forgotten. It
began to seem as if I deserved that which he threatened: it reached a
long way back--a long, long way back. It had lain dormant all these
years: it was there, though, and presently it would rise and confront me.
But I would try to escape; and I stumbled as best I could into the Rue de
Rivoli, across the Place de la Concorde and on to the Quai. I looked with
sick eyes upon the sun, shining through the white foam of the fountain,
pouring over the backs of the dusky bronze river-gods, on the far-away
Arc, a structure of amethyst mist, on the countless vistas of grey stems
and bare branches faintly green. Then I saw him again coming down one of
the chestnut alleys of the Cours la Reine.

I left the river-side, plunged blindly across to the Champs Elysées and
turned toward the Arc. The setting sun was sending its rays along the
green sward of the Rond-point: in the full glow he sat on a bench,
children and young mothers all about him. He was nothing but a Sunday
lounger, like the others, like myself. I said the words almost aloud, and
all the while I gazed on the malignant hatred of his face. But he was not
looking at me. I crept past and dragged my leaden feet up the Avenue. I
knew that every time I met him brought him nearer to the accomplishment
of his purpose and my fate. And still I tried to save myself.

The last rays of sunset were pouring through the great Arc. I passed
under it, and met him face to face. I had left him far down the Champs
Elysées, and yet he came in with a stream of people who were returning
from the Bois de Boulogne. He came so close that he brushed me. His
slender frame felt like iron inside its loose black covering. He showed
no signs of haste, nor of fatigue, nor of any human feeling. His whole
being expressed one thing: the will, and the power to work me evil.

In anguish I watched him where he went down the broad crowded Avenue,
that was all flashing with wheels and the trappings of horses and the
helmets of the Garde Republicaine.

He was soon lost to sight; then I turned and fled. Into the Bois, and far
out beyond it--I know not where I went, but after a long while as it
seemed to me, night had fallen, and I found myself sitting at a table
before a small café. I had wandered back into the Bois. It was hours now
since I had seen him. Physical fatigue and mental suffering had left me
no power to think or feel. I was tired, so tired! I longed to hide away
in my own den. I resolved to go home. But that was a long way off.

I live in the Court of the Dragon, a narrow passage that leads from the
Rue de Rennes to the Rue du Dragon.

It is an ""impasse""; traversable only for foot passengers. Over the
entrance on the Rue de Rennes is a balcony, supported by an iron dragon.
Within the court tall old houses rise on either side, and close the ends
that give on the two streets. Huge gates, swung back during the day into
the walls of the deep archways, close this court, after midnight, and one
must enter then by ringing at certain small doors on the side. The sunken
pavement collects unsavoury pools. Steep stairways pitch down to doors
that open on the court. The ground floors are occupied by shops of
second-hand dealers, and by iron workers. All day long the place rings
with the clink of hammers and the clang of metal bars.

Unsavoury as it is below, there is cheerfulness, and comfort, and hard,
honest work above.

Five flights up are the ateliers of architects and painters, and the
hiding-places of middle-aged students like myself who want to live alone.
When I first came here to live I was young, and not alone.

I had to walk a while before any conveyance appeared, but at last, when I
had almost reached the Arc de Triomphe again, an empty cab came along and
I took it.

From the Arc to the Rue de Rennes is a drive of more than half an hour,
especially when one is conveyed by a tired cab horse that has been at the
mercy of Sunday fete-makers.

There had been time before I passed under the Dragon's wings to meet my
enemy over and over again, but I never saw him once, and now refuge was
close at hand.

Before the wide gateway a small mob of children were playing. Our
concierge and his wife walked among them, with their black poodle,
keeping order; some couples were waltzing on the side-walk. I returned
their greetings and hurried in.

All the inhabitants of the court had trooped out into the street. The
place was quite deserted, lighted by a few lanterns hung high up, in
which the gas burned dimly.

My apartment was at the top of a house, halfway down the court, reached
by a staircase that descended almost into the street, with only a bit of
passage-way intervening, I set my foot on the threshold of the open door,
the friendly old ruinous stairs rose before me, leading up to rest and
shelter. Looking back over my right shoulder, I saw _him,_ ten paces
off. He must have entered the court with me.

He was coming straight on, neither slowly, nor swiftly, but straight on
to me. And now he was looking at me. For the first time since our eyes
encountered across the church they met now again, and I knew that the
time had come.

Retreating backward, down the court, I faced him. I meant to escape by
the entrance on the Rue du Dragon. His eyes told me that I never should
escape.

It seemed ages while we were going, I retreating, he advancing, down the
court in perfect silence; but at last I felt the shadow of the archway,
and the next step brought me within it. I had meant to turn here and
spring through into the street. But the shadow was not that of an
archway; it was that of a vault. The great doors on the Rue du Dragon
were closed. I felt this by the blackness which surrounded me, and at the
same instant I read it in his face. How his face gleamed in the darkness,
drawing swiftly nearer! The deep vaults, the huge closed doors, their
cold iron clamps were all on his side. The thing which he had threatened
had arrived: it gathered and bore down on me from the fathomless shadows;
the point from which it would strike was his infernal eyes. Hopeless, I
set my back against the barred doors and defied him.


There was a scraping of chairs on the stone floor, and a rustling as the
congregation rose. I could hear the Suisse's staff in the south aisle,
preceding Monseigneur C---- to the sacristy.

The kneeling nuns, roused from their devout abstraction, made their
reverence and went away. The fashionable lady, my neighbour, rose also,
with graceful reserve. As she departed her glance just flitted over my
face in disapproval.

Half dead, or so it seemed to me, yet intensely alive to every trifle, I
sat among the leisurely moving crowd, then rose too and went toward the
door.

I had slept through the sermon. Had I slept through the sermon? I looked
up and saw him passing along the gallery to his place. Only his side I
saw; the thin bent arm in its black covering looked like one of those
devilish, nameless instruments which lie in the disused torture-chambers
of mediaeval castles.

But I had escaped him, though his eyes had said I should not. _Had_
I escaped him? That which gave him the power over me came back out of
oblivion, where I had hoped to keep it. For I knew him now. Death and the
awful abode of lost souls, whither my weakness long ago had sent
him--they had changed him for every other eye, but not for mine. I had
recognized him almost from the first; I had never doubted what he was
come to do; and now I knew while my body sat safe in the cheerful little
church, he had been hunting my soul in the Court of the Dragon.

I crept to the door: the organ broke out overhead with a blare. A
dazzling light filled the church, blotting the altar from my eyes. The
people faded away, the arches, the vaulted roof vanished. I raised my
seared eyes to the fathomless glare, and I saw the black stars hanging in
the heavens: and the wet winds from the lake of Hali chilled my face.

And now, far away, over leagues of tossing cloud-waves, I saw the moon
dripping with spray; and beyond, the towers of Carcosa rose behind the
moon.

Death and the awful abode of lost souls, whither my weakness long ago had
sent him, had changed him for every other eye but mine. And now I heard
_his voice_, rising, swelling, thundering through the flaring light,
and as I fell, the radiance increasing, increasing, poured over me in
waves of flame. Then I sank into the depths, and I heard the King in
Yellow whispering to my soul: ""It is a fearful thing to fall into the
hands of the living God!""


","When the young man named Sanang left the bed-chamber of Tressa Norne he turned to the right in the carpeted corridor outside and hurried toward the hotel elevator. But he did not ring for the lift; instead he took the spiral iron stairway which circled it, and mounted hastily to the floor above.

Here was his own apartment and he entered it with a key bearing the hotel tag. A dusky-skinned powerful old man wearing a grizzled beard and a greasy broadcloth coat of old-fashioned cut known to provincials as a ""Prince Albert"" looked up from where he was seated cross-legged upon the sofa, sharpening a curved knife on a whetstone.

""Gutchlug,"" stammered Sanang, ""I am afraid of her! What happened two years ago at the temple happened again a moment since, there in her very bedroom! She made a yellow death-adder out of nothing and placed it upon the threshold, and mocked me with laughter. May Thirty Thousand Calamities overtake her! May Erlik seize her! May her eyes rot out and her limbs fester! May the seven score and three principal devils——""

""You chatter like a temple ape,"" said Gutchlug tranquilly. ""Does Keuke Mongol die or live? That alone interests me.""

""Gutchlug,"" faltered the young man, ""thou knowest that m-my heart is inclined to mercy toward this young Yezidee——""

""I know that it is inclined to lust,"" said the other bluntly.

Sanang's pale face flamed.

""Listen,"" he said. ""If I had not loved her better than life had I dared go that day to the temple to take her for my own?""

""You loved life better,"" said Gutchlug. ""You fled when it rained snakes on the temple steps—you and your Tchortcha horsemen! Kai! I also ran. But I gave every soldier thirty blows with a stick before I slept that night. And you should have had your thirty, also, conforming to the Yarlig, my Tougtchi.""

Sanang, still holding his hat and cane and carrying his overcoat over his left arm, looked down at the heavy, brutal features of Gutchlug Khan—at the cruel mouth with its crooked smile under the grizzled beard; at the huge hands—the powerful hands of a murderer—now deftly honing to a razor-edge the Kalmuck knife held so firmly yet lightly in his great blunt fingers.

""Listen attentively, Prince Sanang,"" growled Gutchlug, pausing in his monotonous task to test the blade's edge on his thumb—""Does the Yezidee Keuke Mongol live? Yes or no?""

Sanang hesitated, moistened his pallid lips. ""She dares not betray us.""

""By what pledge?""

""Fear.""

""That is no pledge. You also were afraid, yet you went to the temple!""

""She has listened to the Yarlig. She has looked upon her shroud. She has admitted that she desires to live. Therein lies her pledge to us.""

""And she placed a yellow snake at your feet!"" sneered Gutchlug. ""Prince Sanang, tell me, what man or what devil in all the chronicles of the past has ever tamed a Snow-Leopard?"" And he continued to hone his yataghan.

""Gutchlug——""

""No, she dies,"" said the other tranquilly.

""Not yet!""

""When, then?""

""Gutchlug, thou knowest me. Hear my pledge! At her first gesture toward treachery—her first thought of betrayal—I myself will end it all.""

""You promise to slay this young snow-leopardess?""

""By the four companions, I swear to kill her with my own hands!""

Gutchlug sneered. ""Kill her—yes—with the kiss that has burned thy lips to ashes for all these months. I know thee, Sanang. Leave her to me. Dead she will no longer trouble thee.""

""Gutchlug!""

""I hear, Prince Sanang.""

""Strike when I nod. Not until then.""

""I hear, Tougtchi. I understand thee, my Banneret. I whet my knife. Kai!""

Sanang looked at him, put on his top-hat and overcoat, pulled on a pair of white evening gloves.

""I go forth,"" he said more pleasantly.

""I remain here to talk to my seven ancestors and sharpen my knife,"" remarked Gutchlug.

""When the white world and the yellow world and the brown world and the black world finally fall before the Hassanis,"" said Sanang with a quick smile, ""I shall bring thee to her. Gutchlug—once—before she is veiled, thou shalt behold what is lovelier than Eve.""

The other stolidly whetted his knife.

Sanang pulled out a gold cigarette case, lighted a cigarette with an air.

""I go among Germans,"" he volunteered amiably. ""The huns swam across two oceans, but, like the unclean swine, it is their own throats they cut when they swim! Well, there is only one God. And not very many angels. Erlik is greater. And there are many million devils to do his bidding. Adieu. There is rice and there is koumiss in the frozen closet. When I return you shall have been asleep for hours.""

When Sanang left the hotel one of two young men seated in the hotel lobby got up and strolled out after him.

A few minutes later the other man went to the elevator, ascended to the fourth floor, and entered an apartment next to the one occupied by Sanang.

There was another man there, lying on the lounge and smoking a cigar. Without a word, they both went leisurely about the matter of disrobing for the night.

When the shorter man who had been in the apartment when the other entered, and who was dark and curly-headed, had attired himself in pyjamas, he sat down on one of the twin beds to enjoy his cigar to the bitter end.

""Has Sanang gone out?"" he inquired in a low voice.

""Yes. Benton went after him.""

The other man nodded. ""Cleves,"" he said, ""I guess it looks as though this Norne girl is in it, too.""

""What happened?""

""As soon as she arrived, Sanang made straight for her apartment. He remained inside for half an hour. Then he came out in a hurry and went to his own rooms, where that surly servant of his squats all day, shining up his arsenal, and drinking koumiss.""

""Did you get their conversation?""

""I've got a record of the gibberish. It requires an interpreter, of course.""

""I suppose so. I'll take the records east with me to-morrow, and by the same token I'd better notify New York that I'm leaving.""

He went, half-undressed, to the telephone, got the telegraph office, and sent the following message:

""Recklow, New York:

""Leaving to-morrow for N. Y. with samples. Retain expert in Oriental fabrics.

""Victor Cleves.""

""Report for me, too,"" said the dark young man, who was still enjoying his cigar on his pillows.

So Cleves sent another telegram, directed also to

""Recklow, New York:

""Benton and I are watching the market. Chinese importations fluctuate. Recent consignment per Nan-yang Maru will be carefully inspected and details forwarded.

""Alek Selden.""

In the next room Gutchlug could hear the voice of Cleves at the telephone, but he merely shrugged his heavy shoulders in contempt. For he had other things to do beside eavesdropping.

Also, for the last hour—in fact, ever since Sanang's departure—something had been happening to him—something that happens to a Hassani only once in a lifetime. And now this unique thing had happened to him—to him, Gutchlug Khan—to him before whose Khiounnou ancestors eighty-one thousand nations had bowed the knee.

It had come to him at last, this dread thing, unheralded, totally unexpected, a few minutes after Sanang had departed.

And he suddenly knew he was going to die.

And, when, presently, he comprehended it, he bent his grizzled head and listened seriously. And, after a little silence, he heard his soul bidding him farewell.

So the chatter of white men at a telephone in the next apartment had no longer any significance for him. Whether or not they had been spying on him; whether they were plotting, made no difference to him now.

He tested his knife's edge with his thumb and listened gravely to his soul bidding him farewell.

But, for a Yezidee, there was still a little detail to attend to before his soul departed;—two matters to regulate. One was to select his shroud. The other was to cut the white throat of this young snow-leopardess called Keuke Mongol, the Yezidee temple girl.

And he could steal down to her bedroom and finish that matter in five minutes.

But first he must choose his shroud, as is the custom of the Yezidee.

That office, however, was quickly accomplished in a country where fine white sheets of linen are to be found on every hotel bed.

So, on his way to the door, his naked knife in his right hand, he paused to fumble under the bed-covers and draw out a white linen sheet.

Something hurt his hand like a needle. He moved it, felt the thing squirm under his fingers and pierce his palm again and again. With a shriek, he tore the bedclothes from the bed.

A little yellow snake lay coiled there.

He got as far as the telephone, but could not use it. And there he fell heavily, shaking the room and dragging the instrument down with him.

There was some excitement. Cleves and Selden in their bathrobes went in to look at the body. The hotel physician diagnosed it as heart-trouble. Or, possibly, poison. Some gazed significantly at the naked knife still clutched in the dead man's hands.

Around the wrist of the other hand was twisted a pliable gold bracelet representing a little snake. It had real emeralds for eyes.

It had not been there when Gutchlug died.

But nobody except Sanang could know that. And later when Sanang came back and found Gutchlug very dead on the bed and a policeman sitting outside, he offered no information concerning the new bracelet shaped like a snake with real emeralds for eyes, which adorned the dead man's left wrist.

Toward evening, however, after an autopsy had confirmed the house physician's diagnosis that heart-disease had finished Gutchlug, Sanang mustered enough courage to go to the desk in the lobby and send up his card to Miss Norne.

It appeared, however, that Miss Norne had left for Chicago about noon.

",True
"Spoonbill Village, Northernmost Quang Binh Province, SRV.
June 30, 2011.
Considering their first encounter, this meeting was going rather well.
""No, no, I assure you that I have had quite enough… well, if you insist…"" In the course of explaining his task to the household he would be staying in, Joseph Clayton had been offered tea at the behest of the mistress of the household and all three times, he had acquiesced. She was attending her husband in fine cotton clothes of white and black, the cut more resembling something out of Javanese dancing than anything worn in Indochina during the past thousand years. Their son, called from his lessons for the presentation, was sitting at the far end of the room, listening to what was going on. While he had repeated much the same spiel that Professor Andover to the house's three inhabitants, he had sipped at his bowl almost automatically as one would with water, clear onto what was now his fourth helping. Although not unpleasant, the drink had considerably more kick to it than even the strong brews typical of Vietnamese green tea.
What perplexed Joseph was that he couldn't identify the extra ingredient. It wasn't peppers, having no discernible remains or even the raw chemical heat of capsaicin. It could be ginger, but the heat was of an utterly different kind than any ginger he had ever experienced.
Then again, the additive could just as well be Tarantula venom given the figure he was giving his introduction to.
His name, as he had given it, was Noc. He was the most experience hunter, archer and scout of the village, was of an incredibly ancient lineage and, incidentally, was the first person of this strange, isolated village that he had seen. His tattoos all featured arachnid themes of legs, webbing and fangs and his eyes…
Marie had mentioned that some of the warriors practiced sorcery with mutative effects. If that was what caused Nocs eyes to become all black, seemingly all pupils and tempting Joseph to mentally refer to the man as ""Spider Eye"", then maybe those three weirdoes they caught in the biology labs back in February were onto something after all.
Sitting in the main reception area of the home, replete with decorations of strange latticed designs and black lacquer, Joseph watched carefully as Noc finished examining one of his bowstrings before his eyes darted around the room. On the wall, several bows hung in their unstrung state: the white and banded flatbow he had first witnessed, several simple bows of light colored cane and even one recurve bow made of dark red hardwood.
""So that is your request: to hear the stories of our history, to observe the operation of a household of status and to… take part in our activities?"" Throughout the introduction of this man and the repetition he had given of the Professors offer, Noc had examined all aspects of him closely… and had not been impressed. He had some muscle tone, but everything else about him absolutely screamed that he was some sort of priest or urban scribe in training. Besides, the combination of the girl's cues toward him and his reaction to his tea made it clear: if the boy had been a virgin, steam would have been pouring out of his ears. That made things difficult (and potentially dangerous) for everyone.
Besides, very few people in this village held any affection at all for someone with Joseph's skin tone.
After receiving affirmation of Joseph's duties, Noc laid out the rules. ""Know this: you will record the histories when they are told to you. You shall ask questions when you are allowed and you shall observe what you shall participate in what you are allowed to participate in. No pestering me with questions, no sneaking around trying to observe the women and children and no and I mean no trying to wheedle out information through trickery. We had quite enough trouble with that sort of thing the last time around.""
Joseph was immediately insulted, even though he did not how it as he automatically agreed. Still, two things bothered him. First, underneath the gold and bronze bangles that decorated the forearms and ankles of Nocs wife, Joseph had noticed strange scars, akin in shape to the marks that sperm whales bore from their battles with giant squid.
Second… what did Noc mean by the last time around?
That Night…
As he lay awake, Joseph realized how exhausting the day had been. As it turned out, he was probably doing to spend most of his time in this house as a sort of a servant: documenting and participating in cooking and chores, handling domestic duties and picking little things up only as Noc's wife deemed appropriate. No real questions answered, no interesting discoveries or scandals or surprises… just ordinary ethnographic work.
It wasn't made any better that his libido was getting annoyed at the 'busy' signals it kept receiving. However, there had been no real opportunity to talk with Marie after last night, with all the revelations of cannibalism and sorcery and other things that probably should have made his stomach turn.
/Maybe it would be better if they had made your stomach turn./ Came a wheedling little multi-voiced dialogue from inside his head… from inside his head, but not originating from him.
Oh no. Joseph thought with a mental groan. Not you idiots again! I thought you gave it up after the last time.
/The last time? You mean when you were in the thrall of carnal lusts, disgracing your heritage?/ The dominant voice changed from one of the old WASP lords to that of an aristocratic dowager that had been ancient even when Granny Clara had been a girl. /Maybe now that you know what her kind get up to, you will listen to reason and find a girl more suitable to a young man of your station./
Her parents are just as middle class as mine are, thank you all very much. Joseph snarked back mentally, fully knowing how these… wraiths felt about his relationship with Marie and savoring the thought of causing them anguish.
/You know full well what is meant. What is not understood is why the other girl did not so arouse your… passions./
Oh please, her family is just as drenched in sorcery as these guys, it's just that they're more polite about who they slice open. Besides, I don't really think you'd have acted any differently if it had been Tracy I'd been with that night instead of Marie, inbred and rural as she apparently is. He remembered clearly that night: how these voices (who he was fairly sure were not the products of schizophrenia despite superficially similar symptomatology), had come to him in the midst of what should have been unimaginable passion and communion with his girlfriend (though with was much more awkward, rushed and possibly painful than desired). Even as the passion mounted, their insults became worse: the taunts, the archaic, hateful rhetoric, the most vicious slurs directed against Marie and him. And yet he had forged on, continuing despite the rising chorus of insane voices inside his head… or even because of them, for as they blasphemed against all that Marie was, all the little things that made Joseph love her all the more, he could tell that his defiance was causing them actual pain and torment… and even through the pleasures of the flesh, he took small, sadistic delights in causing pain and anguish to these assholes who claimed authority as his forbearers.
Now Joseph was getting annoyed… and cranky. Look, I don't have to listen to you idiots, even if you do claim to be my ancestors. You came from a completely different world whose rules do not apply to me. Also, the instruments of your authority are gone: no money, no status, no companies or contacts or friends in high places. All that's left are a bunch of ugly little voices in the wind. Why don't you all just blow away? He was tired of his, of having to listen to these inane snobs that he had learned to loath in the abstract and now hated in the concrete. He hated their hate-filled dismissals of all other peoples and cultures, their smug superiority and the generalized arrogance that seemed to drip from the voices.
When they didn't respond, Joseph took it as a sign. ""Good."" He said aloud, as softly as his sense of satisfaction allowed.
","In that great blizzard which, on the 4th of February, struck the eastern coast of the United States from Georgia to Maine, John Recklow and his men hunted Sanang, the last of the Yezidees.

And Sanang clung like a demon to the country which he had doomed to destruction, imbedding each claw again as it was torn loose, battling for the supremacy of evil with all his dreadful psychic power, striving still to seize, cripple, and slay the bodies and souls of a hundred million Americans.

Again he scattered the uncounted myriads of germs of the Black Plague which he and his Yezidees had brought out of Mongolia a year before; and once more the plague swept over the country, and thousands on thousands died.

But now the National, State and City governments were fighting, with physicians, nurses, and police, this gruesome epidemic which had come into the world from they knew not where. And National, State and City governments, aroused at last, were fighting the more terrible plague of anarchy.

Nation-wide raids were made from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from the Gulf to the Lakes. Thousands of terrorists of all shades and stripes whose minds had been seized and poisoned by the Yezidees were being arrested. Deportations had begun; government agents were everywhere swarming to clean out the foulness that had struck deeper into the body of the Republic than any one had supposed.

And it seemed, at last, as though the Red Plague, too, was about to be stamped out along with the Black Death called Influenza.

But only a small group of Secret Service men knew that a resurgence of these horrors was inevitable unless Sanang, the Slayer of Souls, was destroyed. And they knew, too, that only one person in America could hope to destroy Sanang, the last of the Yezidees, and that was Tressa Cleves.

Only by the sudden onset of the plague in various cities of the land had Recklow any clew concerning the whereabouts of Sanang.

In Boston, then Washington, then Kansas City, and then New York the epidemic suddenly blazed up. And in these places of death the Secret Service men always found a clew, and there they hunted Sanang, the Yezidee, to kill him without mercy where they might find him.

But they never found Sanang Noïane; only the ghastly marks of his poisoned claws on the body of the sickened nation—only minds diseased by the Red Plague and bodies dying of the Black Death—civil and social centres disorganized, disrupted, depraved, dying.

When the blizzard burst upon New York, struggling in the throes of the plague, and paralysed the metropolis for a week, John Recklow sent out a special alarm, and New York swarmed with Secret Service men searching the snow-buried city for a graceful, slender, dark young man whose eyes slanted a trifle in his amber-tinted face; who dressed fashionably, lived fastidiously, and spoke English perfectly in a delightfully modulated voice.

And to New York, thrice stricken by anarchy, by plague, and now by God, hurried, from all parts of the nation, thousands of secret agents who had been hunting Sanang in distant cities or who had been raiding the traitorous and secret gatherings of his mental dupes.

Agent ZB-303, who was volunteer agent James Benton, came from Boston with his new bride who had just arrived by way of England—a young girl named Yulun who landed swathed in sables, and stretched out both lovely little hands to Benton the instant she caught sight of him on the pier. Whereupon he took the slim figure in furs into his arms, which was interesting because they had never before met in the flesh.

So,—their honeymoon scarce begun, Benton and Yulun came from Boston in answer to Recklow's emergency call.

And all the way across from San Francisco came volunteer agent XLY-371, otherwise Alek Selden, bringing with him a girl named Sansa whom he had gone to the coast to meet, and whom he had immediately married after she had landed from the Japanese steamer Nan-yang Maru. Which, also, was remarkable, because, although they recognised each other instantly, and their hands and lips clung as they met, neither had ever before beheld the living body of the other.

The third man who came to New York at Recklow's summons was volunteer agent 53-6-26, otherwise Victor Cleves.

His young wife, suffering from nervous shock after the deaths of Togrul Khan and of the Baroulass girl, Aoula, had been convalescing in a private sanitarium in Westchester.

Until the summons came to her husband from Recklow, she had seen him only for a few moments every day. But the call to duty seemed to have effected a miraculous cure in the slender, blue-eyed girl who had lain all day long, day after day, in her still, sunny room scarcely unclosing her eyes at all save only when her husband was permitted to enter for the few minutes allowed them every day.

The physician had just left, after admitting that Mrs. Cleves seemed to be well enough to travel if she insisted; and she and her maid had already begun to pack when her husband came into her room.

She looked around over her shoulder, then rose from her knees, flung an armful of clothing into the trunk before which she had been kneeling, and came across the room to him. Then she dismissed her maid from the room. And when the girl had gone:

""I am well, Victor,"" she said in a low voice. ""Why are you troubled?""

""I can't bear to have you drawn into this horrible affair once more.""

""Who else is there to discover and overcome Sanang?"" she asked calmly.

He remained silent.

So, for a few moments they stood confronting each other there in the still, sunny chamber—husband and wife who had never even exchanged the first kiss—two young creatures more vitally and intimately bound together than any two on earth—yet utterly separated body and soul from each other—two solitary spirits which had never merged; two bodies virginal and inviolate.

Tressa spoke first: ""I must go. That was our bargain.""

The word made him wince as though it had been a sudden blow. Then his face flushed red.

""Bargain or no bargain,"" he said, ""I don't want you to go because I'm afraid you can not endure another shock like the last one.... And every time you have thrown your own mind and body between this Nation and destruction you have nearly died of it.""

""And if I die?"" she said in a low voice.

What answer she awaited—perhaps hoped for—was not the one he made. He said: ""If you die in what you believe to be your line of duty, then it will be I who have killed you.""

""That would not be true. It is you who have saved me.""

""I have not. I have done nothing except to lead you into danger of death since I first met you. If you mean spiritually, that also is untrue. You have saved yourself—if that indeed were necessary. You have redeemed yourself—if it is true you needed redemption—which I never believed——""

""Oh,"" she sighed swiftly, ""Sanang surprised my soul when it was free of my body—followed my soul into the Wood of the White Moth—caught it there all alone—and—slew it!""

His lips and throat had gone dry as he watched the pallid terror grow in her face.

Presently he recovered his voice: ""You call that Yezidee the Slayer of Souls,"" he said, ""but I tell you there is no such creature, no such power!

""I suppose I—I know what you mean—having seen what we call souls dissociated from their physical bodies—but that this Yezidee could do you any spiritual damage I do not for one instant believe. The idea is monstrous, I tell you——""

""I—I fought him—soul battling against soul——"" she stammered, breathing faster and irregularly. ""I struggled with Sanang there in the Wood of the White Moth. I called on God! I called on my two great dogs, Bars and Alaga! I recited the Fatha with all my strength—fighting convulsively whenever his soul seized mine; I cried out the name of Khidr, begging for wisdom! I called on the Ten Imaums, on Ali the Lion, on the Blessed Companions. Then I tore my spirit out of the grasp of his soul—but there was no escape!—no escape,"" she wailed. ""For on every side I saw the cloud-topped rampart of Gog and Magog, and the woods rang with Erlik's laughter—the dissonant mirth of hell——""

She began to shudder and sway a little, then with an effort she controlled herself in a measure.

""There never has been,"" she began again with lips that quivered in spite of her—""there never has been one moment in our married lives when my soul dared forget the Wood of the White Moth—dared seek yours.... God lives. But so does Erlik. There are angels; but there are as many demons.... My soul is ashamed.... And very lonely ... very lonely ... but no fit companion—for yours——""

Her hands dropped listlessly beside her and her chin sank.

""So you believe that Yezidee devil caught your soul when it was wandering somewhere out of your body, and destroyed it,"" he said.

She did not answer, did not even lift her eyes until he had stepped close to her—closer than he had ever come. Then she looked up at him, but closed her eyes as he swept her into his arms and crushed her face and body against his own.

Now her red lips were on his; now her face and heart and limbs and breast melted into his—her breath, her pulse, her strength flowed into his and became part of their single being and single pulse and breath. And she felt their two souls flame and fuse together, and burn together in one heavenly blaze—felt the swift conflagration mount, overwhelm, and sweep her clean of the last lingering taint; felt her soul, unafraid, clasp her husband's spirit in its white embrace—clung to him, uplifted out of hell, rising into the blinding light of Paradise.

Far—far away she heard her own voice in singing whispers—heard her lips pronounce The Name—""Ata—Ata! Allahou——""

Her blue eyes unclosed; through a mist, in which she saw her husband's face, grew a vast metallic clamour in her ears.

Her husband kissed her, long, silently; then, retaining her hand, he turned and lifted the receiver from the clamouring telephone.

""Yes! Yes, this is 53-6-26. Yes, V-69 is with me.... When?... To-day?... Very well.... Yes, we'll come at once.... Yes, we can get a train in a few minutes.... All right. Good-bye.""

He took his wife into his arms again.

""Dearest of all in the world,"" he said, ""Sanang is cornered in a row of houses near the East River, and Recklow has flung a cordon around the entire block. Good God! I can't take you there!""

Then Tressa smiled, drew his head down, looked into his face till the clear blue splendour of her gaze stilled the tumult in his brain.

""I alone know how to deal with Prince Sanang,"" she said quietly. ""And if John Recklow, or you, or Mr. Benton or Mr. Selden should kill him with your pistols, it would be only his body you slay, not the evil thing that would escape you and return to Erlik.""

""Must you do this thing, Tressa?""

""Yes, I must do it.""

""But—if our pistols cannot kill this sorcerer, how are you going to deal with him?""

""I know how.""

""Have you the strength?""

""Yes—the bodily and the spiritual. Don't you know that I am already part of you?""

""We shall be nearer still,"" he murmured.

She flushed but met his gaze.

""Yes.... We shall be but one being.... Utterly.... For already our hearts and souls are one. And we shall become of one mind and one body.

""I am no longer afraid of Sanang Noïane!""

""No longer afraid to slay him?"" he asked quietly.

A blue light flashed in her eyes and her face grew still and white and terrible.

""Death to the body? That is nothing, my lord!"" she said, in a hard, sweet voice. ""It is written that we belong to God and that we return to Him. All living things must die, Heart of the World! It is only the death of souls that matters. And it has arrived at a time in the history of mankind, I think, when the Slayer of Souls shall slay no more.""

She looked at him, flushed, withdrew her hand and went slowly across the room to the big bay window where potted flowers were in bloom.

From a window-box she took a pinch of dry soil and dropped it into the bosom of her gown.

Then, facing the East, with lowered arms and palms turned outward:

""There is no god but God,"" she whispered—""the merciful, the long-suffering, the compassionate, the just.

""For it is written that when the heavens are rolled together like a scroll, every soul shall know what it hath wrought.

""And those souls that are dead in Jehannum shall arise from the dead, and shall have their day in court. Nor shall Erlik stay them till all has been said.

""And on that day the soul of a girl that hath been put to death shall ask for what reason it was slain.

""Thus it has been written.""

Then Tressa dropped to her knees, touched the carpet with her forehead, straightened her lithe body and, looking over her shoulder, clapped her hands together sharply.

Her maid opened the door. ""Hasten with my lord's luggage!"" she cried happily; and, still kneeling, lifted her head to her husband and laughed up into his eyes.

""You should call the porter for we are nearly ready. Shall we go to the station in a sleigh? Oh, wonderful!""

She leaped to her feet, extended her hand and caught his.

""Horses for the lord of the Yiort!"" she cried, laughingly. ""Kosh! Take me out into this new white world that has been born to-day of the ten purities and the ten thousand felicities! It has been made anew for you and me who also have been born this day!""

He scarcely knew this sparkling, laughing girl with her quick grace and her thousand swift little moods and gaieties.

Porters came to take his luggage from his own room; and then her trunk and bags were ready, and were taken away.

The baggage sleigh drove off. Their own jingling sleigh followed; and Tressa, buried in furs, looked out upon a dazzling, unblemished world, lying silvery white under a sky as azure as her eyes.

""Keuke Mongol—Heavenly Azure,"" he whispered close to her crimsoned cheek, ""do you know how I have loved you—always—always?""

""No, I did not know that,"" she said.

""Nor I, in the beginning. Yet it happened, also, from the beginning when I first saw you.""

""That is a delicious thing to be told. Within me a most heavenly glow is spreading.... Unglove your hand.""

She slipped the glove from her own white fingers and felt for his under the furs.

""Aie,"" she sighed, ""you are more beautiful than Ali; more wonderful than the Flaming Pearl. Out of ice and fire a new world has been made for us.""

""Heavenly Azure—my darling!""

""Oh-h,"" she sighed, ""your words are sweeter than the breeze in Yian! I shall be a bride to you such as there never has been since the days of the Blessed Companions—may their names be perfumed and sweet-scented!... Shall I truly be one with you, my lord?""

""Mind, soul, and body, one being, you and I, little Heavenly Azure.""

""Between your two hands you hold me like a burning rose, my lord.""

""Your sweetness and fire penetrate my soul.""

""We shall burn together then till the sky-carpet be rolled up. Kosh! We shall be one, and on that day I shall not be afraid.""

The sleigh came to a clashing, jingling halt; the train plowed into the depot buried in vast clouds of snowy steam.

But when they had taken the places reserved for them, and the train was moving swifter and more swiftly toward New York, fear suddenly overwhelmed Victor Cleves, and his face grew grey with the menacing tumult of his thoughts.

The girl seemed to comprehend him, too, and her own features became still and serious as she leaned forward in her chair.

""It is in God's hands, Heart of the World,"" she said in a low voice. ""We are one, thou and I,—or nearly so. Nothing can harm my soul.""

""No.... But the danger—to your life——""

""I fear no Yezidee.""

""The beast will surely try to kill you. And what can I do? You say my pistol is useless.""

""Yes.... But I want you near me.""

""Do you imagine I'd leave you for a second? Good God,"" he added in a strangled voice, ""isn't there any way I can kill this wild beast? With my naked hands——?""

""You must leave him to me, Victor.""

""And you believe you can slay him? Do you?""

She remained silent for a long while, bent forward in her armchair, and her hands clasped tightly on her knees.

""My husband,"" she said at last, ""what your astronomers have but just begun to suspect is true, and has long, long been known to the Sheiks-el-Djebel.

""For, near to this world we live in, are other worlds—planets that do not reflect light. And there is a dark world called Yrimid, close to the earth—a planet wrapped in darkness—a black star.... And upon it Erlik dwells.... And it is peopled by demons.... And from it comes sickness and evil——""

She moistened her lips; sat for a while gazing vaguely straight before her.

""From this black planet comes all evil upon earth,"" she resumed in a hushed voice. ""For it is very near to the earth. It is not a hundred miles away. All strange phenomena for which our scientists can not account are due to this invisible planet,—all new and sudden pestilences; all convulsions of nature; the newly noticed radio disturbances; the new, so-called inter-planetary signals—all—all have their hidden causes within that black and demon-haunted planet long known to the Yezidees, and by them called Yrimid, or Erlik's World. And—it is to this black planet that I shall send Sanang, Slayer of Souls. I shall tear him from this earth, though he cling to it with every claw; and I shall fling his soul into darkness—out across the gulf—drive his soul forth—hurl it toward Erlik like a swift rocket charred and falling from the sky into endless night.

""So shall I strive to deal with Prince Sanang, Sorcerer of Mount Alamout, the last of the Assassins, Sheik-el-Djebel, and Slayer of Souls.... May God remember him in hell.""

Already their train was rolling into the great terminal.

Recklow was awaiting them. He took Tressa's hands in his and gazed earnestly into her face.

""Have you come to show us how to conclude this murderous business?"" he asked grimly.

""I shall try,"" she said calmly. ""Where have you cornered Sanang?""

""Could you and Victor come at once?""

""Yes."" She turned and looked at her husband, who had become quite pale.

Recklow saw the look they exchanged. There could be no misunderstanding what had happened to these two. Their tragedy had ended. They were united at last. He understood it instantly,—realised how terrible was this new and tragic situation for them both.

Yet, he knew also that the salvation of civilisation itself now depended upon this girl. She must face Sanang. There was nothing else possible.

""The streets are choked with snow,"" he said, ""but I have a coupé and two strong horses waiting.""

He nodded to one of his men standing near. Cleves gave him the hand luggage and checks.

""All right,"" he said in a low voice to Recklow; and passed one arm through Tressa's.

The coupé was waiting on Forty-second Street, guarded by a policeman. When they had entered and were seated, two mounted policemen rode ahead of the lurching vehicle, picking a way amid the monstrous snow-drifts, and headed for the East River.

""We've got him somewhere in a wretched row of empty houses not far from East River Park. I'm taking you there. I've drawn a cordon of my men around the entire block. He can't get away. But I dared take no chances with this Yezidee sorcerer—dared not let one of my men go in to look for him—go anywhere near him,—until I could lay the situation before you, Mrs. Cleves.""

""Yes,"" she said calmly, ""it was the only way, Mr. Recklow. There would have been no use shooting him—no use taking him prisoner. A prisoner, he remains as deadly as ever; dead, his mind still lives and breeds evil. You are quite right; it is for me to deal with Sanang.""

Recklow shuddered in spite of himself. ""Can you tear his claws from the vitals of the world, and free the sick brains of a million people from the slavery of this monster's mind?""

The girl said seriously:

""Even Satan was stoned. It is so written. And was cast out. And dwells forever and ever in Abaddon. No star lights that Pit. None lights the Black Planet, Yrimid. It is where evil dwells. And there Sanang Noïane belongs.""

And now, beyond the dirty edges of the snow-smothered city, under an icy mist they caught sight of the river where ships lay blockaded by frozen floes.

Gulls circled over it; ghostly factory chimneys on the further shore loomed up gigantic, ranged like minarettes.

The coupé, jolting along behind the mounted policemen, struggled up toward the sidewalk and stopped. The two horses stood steaming, knee deep in snow. Recklow sprang out; Tressa gave him one hand and stepped lithely to the sidewalk. Then Cleves got out and came and took hold of his wife's arm again.

""Well,"" he said harshly to Recklow, ""where is this damned Yezidee hidden?""

Recklow pointed in silence, but he and Tressa had already lifted their gaze to the stark, shabby row of abandoned three-story houses where every dirty blind was closed.

""They're to be demolished and model tenements built,"" he said briefly.

A man muffled in a fur overcoat came up and took Tressa's hand and kissed it.

She smiled palely at Benton, spoke of Yulun, wished him happiness. While she was yet speaking Selden approached and bent over her gloved hand. She spoke to him very sweetly of Sansa, expressing pleasure at the prospect of seeing her again in the body.

""The Seldens and ourselves have adjoining apartments at the Ritz,"" said Benton. ""We have reserved a third suite for you and Victor.""

She inclined her lovely head, gravely, then turned to Recklow, saying that she was ready.

""It makes no difference which front door I unlock,"" he said. ""All these tenements are connected by human rat-holes and hidden runways leading from one house to another.... How many men do you want?""

""I want you four men,—nobody else.""

Recklow led the way up a snow-covered stoop, drew a key from his pocket, fitted it, and pulled open the door.

A musty chill struck their faces as they entered the darkened and empty hallway. Involuntarily every man drew his pistol.

""I must ask you to do exactly what I tell you to do,"" she said calmly.

""Certainly,"" said Recklow, caressing his white moustache and striving to pierce the gloom with his keen eyes.

Then Tressa took her husband's hand. ""Come,"" she said. They mounted the stairway together; and the three others followed with pistols lifted.

There was a vague grey light on the second floor; the broken rear shutters let it in.

As though she seemed to know her way, the girl led them forward, opened a door in the wall, and disclosed a bare, dusty room in the next house.

Through this she stepped; the others crept after her with weapons ready. She opened a second door, turned to the four men.

""Wait here for me. Come only when I call,"" she whispered.

""For God's sake take me with you,"" burst out Cleves.

""In God's name stay where you are till you hear me call your name!"" she said almost breathlessly.

Then, suddenly she turned, swiftly retracing her steps; and they saw her pass through the first door and disappear into the first house they had entered.

A terrible silence fell among them. The sound of her steps on the bare boards had died away. There was not a sound in the chilly dusk.

Minute after minute dragged by. One by one the men peered fearfully at Cleves. His visage was ghastly and they could see his pistol-hand trembling.

Twice Recklow looked at his wrist watch. The third time he said, unsteadily: ""She has been gone three-quarters of an hour.""

Then, far away, they heard a heavy tread on the stairs. Nearer and nearer came the footsteps. Every pistol was levelled at the first door as a man's bulky form darkened it.

""It's one of my men,"" said Recklow in a voice like a low groan. ""Where on earth is Mrs. Cleves?""

""I came to tell you,"" said the agent, ""Mrs. Cleves came out of the first house nearly an hour ago. She got into the coupé and told the driver to go to the Ritz.""

""What!"" gasped Recklow.

""She's gone to the Ritz,"" repeated the agent. ""No one else has come out. And I began to worry—hearing nothing of you, Mr. Recklow. So I stepped in to see——""

""You say that Mrs. Cleves went out of the house we entered, got into the coupé, and told the driver to go to the Ritz?"" demanded Cleves, astounded.

""Yes, sir.""

""Where is that coupé? Did it return?""

""It had not returned when I came in here.""

""Go back and look for it. Look in the other street,"" said Recklow sharply.

The agent hurried away over the creaking boards. The four men gazed at one another.

""The thing to do is to obey her and stay where we are,"" said Recklow grimly. ""Who knows what peril we may cause her if we move from——""

His words froze on his lips as Tressa's voice rang out from the darkness beyond the door they were guarding:

""Victor I I—I need you! Come to me, my husband!""

As Cleves sprang through the door into the darkness beyond, Benton smashed a window sash with all the force of his shoulder, and, reaching out through the shattered glass, tore the rotting blinds from their hinges, letting in a flood of sickly light.

Against the bare wall stood Tressa, both arms extended, her hands flat against the plaster, and each hand transfixed and pinned to the wall by a knife.

A white sheet lay at her feet. On it rested a third knife. And, bending on one knee to pick it up, they caught a glimpse of a slender young man in fashionable afternoon attire, who, as they entered with the crash of the shattered window in their ears, sprang to his nimble feet and stood confronting them, knife in hand.

Instantly every man fired at him and the bullets whipped the plaster to a smoke behind him, but the slender, dark skinned young man stood motionless, looking at them out of brilliant eyes that slanted a trifle.

Again the racket of the fusillade swept him and filled the room with plaster dust.

Cleves, frantic with horror, laid hold of the knives that pinned his wife's hands to the wall, and dragged them out.

But there was no blood, no wound to be seen on her soft palms. She took the murderous looking blades from him, threw one terrible look at Sanang, kicked the shroud across the floor toward him, and flung both knives upon it.

The place was still dim with plaster dust and pistol fumes as she stepped forward through the acrid mist, motioning the four men aside.

""Sanang!"" she cried in a clear voice, ""may God remember you in hell, for my feet have spurned your shroud, and your knives, which could not scar my palms, shall never pierce my heart! Look out for yourself, Prince Sanang!""

""Tokhta!"" he said, calmly. ""My soul be ransom for yours!""

""That is a lie! My soul is already ransomed! My mind is the more powerful. It has already halted yours. It is conquering yours. It is seizing your mind and enslaving it. It is mastering your will, Sanang! Your mind bends before mine. You know it! You know it is bending. You feel it is breaking down!""

Sanang's eyes began to glitter but his pale brown face had grown almost white.

""I slew you once—in the Wood of the White Moth,"" he said huskily. ""There is no resurrection from such a death, little Heavenly Azure. Look upon me! My soul and yours are one!""

""You are looking upon my soul,"" she said.

""A lie! You are in your body!""

The girl laughed. ""My body lies asleep in the Ritz upon my husband's bed,"" she said. ""My body is his, my mind belongs to him, my soul is already one with his. Do you not know it, dog of a Yezidee? Look upon me, Sanang Noïane! Look upon my unwounded hands! My shroud lies at your feet. And there lie the knives that could not pierce my heart! I am thrice clean! Listen to my words, Sanang! There is no other god but God!""

The young man's visage grew pasty and loose and horrible; his lips became flaccid like dewlaps; but out of these sagging folds of livid skin his voice burst whistling, screaming, as though wrenched from his very belly:

""May Erlik strangle you! May you rot where you stand! May your face become a writhing mass of maggots and your body a corruption of living worms!

""For what you are doing to me this day may every demon in hell torment you!

""Have a care what you are about!"" he screeched. ""You are slaying my mind, you sorceress! You have seized my mind and are crushing it! You are putting out its light, you Yezidee witch!—you are quenching the last spark—of reason—in—me——""

""Sanang!""

His knife fell clattering to the floor. But he stood stock still, his hands clutching his head—stood motionless, while scream on scream tore through the loose and gaping lips, blowing them into ghastly, distorted folds.

""Sanang Noïane!"" she cried in her clear voice, ""the Eight Towers are darkened! The Rampart of Gog and Magog is fallen! On Mount Alamout nothing is living. The minds of mankind are free again!""

She stepped forward, slowly, and stood near him chanting in a low voice the Prayers for the Dead She bent down and unrolled the shroud, laid it on his shoulders and drew it up and across his face, covering his dying eyes, and swathed him so, slowly, from head to foot.

Then she gathered up the three knives, cast them upward into the air. They did not fall again. They disappeared. And all the while, under her breath, the girl was chanting the Prayers for the Dead as she moved silently about her business.

Shrouded to the forehead in its white cerements, the muffled figure of Sanang stood upright, motionless as a swathed and frozen corpse.

Outside, the daylight had become greyer. It had begun to snow again, and a few flakes blew in through the shattered windows and clung to the winding sheet of Sanang.

And now Tressa drew close to the shrouded shape and stood before it, gazing intently upon the outlined features of the last of the Yezidees.

""Sanang,"" she said very softly, ""I hear your soul bidding your body farewell. Tokhta!""

Then, under the strained gaze of the four men gathered there, the shroud fell to the floor in a loose heap of white folds. There was nobody under it; no trace of Sanang. The human shape of the Yezidee had disappeared; but a greyish mist had filled the room, wavering up like smoke from the shroud, and, like smoke, blowing in a long streamer toward the window where the draught drew it out through the falling snow and scattered the last shred of it against the greying sky.

In the room the mist thinned swiftly; the four men could now see one another. But Tressa was no longer in the room. And in place of the white shroud a piece of filthy tattered carpet lay on the floor. And a dead rat, flattened out, dry and dusty, lay upon it.

""For God's sake,"" whispered Recklow hoarsely, ""let us get out of this!""

Cleves, his pistol clutched convulsively, stared at him in terror. But Recklow took him by the arm and drew him away, muttering that Tressa was waiting for him, and might be ill, and that there was nothing further to expect in this ghastly spot.

They went with Cleves to the Ritz. At the desk the clerk said that Mrs. Cleves had the keys and was in her apartment.

The three men entered the corridor with him; watched him try the door; saw him open it; lingered a moment after it had closed; heard the key turn.

At the sound of the door closing the maid came.

""Madame is asleep in her room,"" she whispered.

""When did she come in?""

""More than two hours ago, sir. I have drawn her bath, but when I opened the door a few moments ago, Madame was still asleep.""

He nodded; he was trembling when he put off his overcoat and dropped hat and gloves on the carpet.

From the little rose and ivory reception room he could see the closed door of his wife's chamber. And for a while he stood staring at it.

Then, slowly, he crossed this room, opened the door; entered.

In her bedroom the tinted twilight was like ashes of roses. He went to the bed and looked down at her shadowy face; gazed intently; listened; then, in sudden terror, bent and laid his hand on her heart. It was beating as tranquilly as a child's; but as she stirred, turned her head, and unclosed her eyes, under his hand her heart leaped like a wild thing caught unawares and the snowy skin glowed with an exquisite and deepening tint as she lifted her arms and clasped them around her husband's, neck, drawing his quivering face against her own.",False
"It was a gentle daylight rain that awaked me front my stupor in the brush-grown railway cut, and when I staggered out to the roadway ahead I saw no trace of any prints in the fresh mud. The fishy odour, too, was gone, Innsmouth's ruined roofs and toppling steeples loomed up greyly toward the southeast, but not a living creature did I spy in all the desolate salt marshes around. My watch was still going, and told me that the hour was past noon.
The reality of what I had been through was highly uncertain in my mind, but I felt that something hideous lay in the background. I must get away from evil-shadowed Innsmouth--and accordingly I began to test my cramped, wearied powers of locomotion. Despite weakness hunger, horror, and bewilderment I found myself after a time able to walk; so started slowly along the muddy road to Rowley. Before evening I was in village, getting a meal and providing myself with presentable clothes. I caught the night train to Arkham, and the next day talked long and earnestly with government officials there; a process I later repeated in Boston. With the main result of these colloquies the public is now familiar--and I wish, for normality's sake, there were nothing more to tell. Perhaps it is madness that is overtaking me--yet perhaps a greater horror--or a greater marvel--is reaching out.
As may well be imagined, I gave up most of the foreplanned features of the rest of my tour--the scenic, architectural, and antiquarian diversions on which I had counted so heavily. Nor did I dare look for that piece of strange jewelry said to be in the Miskatonic University Museum. I did, however, improve my stay in Arkham by collecting some genealogical notes I had long wished to possess; very rough and hasty data, it is true, but capable of good use later on when I might have time to collate and codify them. The curator of the historical society there--Mr. B. Lapham Peabody--was very courteous about assisting me, and expressed unusual interest when I told him I was a grandson of Eliza Orne of Arkham, who was born in 1867 and had married James Williamson of Ohio at the age of seventeen.
It seemed that a maternal uncle of mine had been there many years before on a quest much like my own; and that my grandmother's family was a topic of some local curiosity. There had, Mr. Peabody said, been considerable discussion about the marriage of her father, Benjamin Orne, just after the Civil War; since the ancestry of the bride was peculiarly puzzling. That bride was understood to have been an orphaned Marsh of New Hampshire--a cousin of the Essex County Marshes--but her education had been in France and she knew very little of her family. A guardian had deposited funds in a Boston bank to maintain her and her French governess; but that guardian's name was unfamiliar to Arkham people, and in time he dropped out of sight, so that the governess assumed the role by court appointment. The Frenchwoman--now long dead--was very taciturn, and there were those who said she could have told more than she did.
But the most baffling thing was the inability of anyone to place the recorded parents of the young woman--Enoch and Lydia (Meserve) Marsh--among the known families of New Hampshire. Possibly, many suggested, she was the natural daughter of some Marsh of prominence--she certainly had the true Marsh eyes. Most of the puzzling was done after her early death, which took place at the birth of my grandmother--her only child. Having formed some disagreeable impressions connected with the name of Marsh, I did not welcome the news that it belonged on my own ancestral tree; nor was I pleased by Mr. Peabody's suggestion that I had the true Marsh eyes myself. However, I was grateful for data which I knew would prove valuable; and took copious notes and lists of book references regarding the well-documented Orne family.
I went directly home to Toledo from Boston, and later spent a month at Maumee recuperating from my ordeal. In September I entered Oberlin for my final year, and from then till the next June was busy with studies and other wholesome activities--reminded of the bygone terror only by occasional official visits from government men in connexion with the campaign which my pleas and evidence had started. Around the middle of July--just a year after the Innsmouth experience--I spent a week with my late mother's family in Cleveland; checking some of my new genealogical data with the various notes, traditions, and bits of heirloom material in existence there, and seeing what kind of a connected chart I could construct.
I did not exactly relish this task, for the atmosphere of the Williamson home had always depressed me. There was a strain of morbidity there, and my mother had never encouraged my visiting her parents as a child, although she always welcomed her father when he came to Toledo. My Arkham-born grandmother had seemed strange and almost terrifying to me, and I do not think I grieved when she disappeared. I was eight years old then, and it was said that she had wandered off in grief after the suicide of my Uncle Douglas, her eldest son. He had shot himself after a trip to New England--the same trip, no doubt, which had caused him to be recalled at the Arkham Historical Society.
This uncle had resembled her, and I had never liked him either. Something about the staring, unwinking expression of both of them had given me a vague, unaccountable uneasiness. My mother and Uncle Walter had not looked like that. They were like their father, though poor little cousin Lawrence--Walter's son--had been almost perfect duplicate of his grandmother before his condition took him to the permanent seclusion of a sanitarium at Canton. I had not seen him in four years, but my uncle once implied that his state, both mental and physical, was very bad. This worry had probably been a major cause of his mother's death two years before.
My grandfather and his widowed son Walter now comprised the Cleveland household, but the memory of older times hung thickly over it. I still disliked the place, and tried to get my researches done as quickly as possible. Williamson records and traditions were supplied in abundance by my grandfather; though for Orne material I had to depend on my uncle Walter, who put at my disposal the contents of all his files, including notes, letters, cuttings, heirlooms, photographs, and miniatures.
It was in going over the letters and pictures on the Orne side that I began to acquire a kind of terror of my own ancestry. As I have said, my grandmother and Uncle Douglas had always disturbed me. Now, years after their passing, I gazed at their pictured faces with a measurably heightened feeling of repulsion and alienation. I could not at first understand the change, but gradually a horrible sort of comparison began to obtrude itself on my unconscious mind despite the steady refusal of my consciousness to admit even the least suspicion of it. It was clear that the typical expression of these faces now suggested something it had not suggested before--something which would bring stark panic if too openly thought of.
But the worst shock came when my uncle shewed me the Orne jewellery in a downtown safe deposit vault. Some of the items were delicate and inspiring enough, but there was one box of strange old pieces descended from my mysterious great-grandmother which my uncle was almost reluctant to produce. They were, he said, of very grotesque and almost repulsive design, and had never to his knowledge been publicly worn; though my grandmother used to enjoy looking at them. Vague legends of bad luck clustered around them, and my great-grandmother's French governess had said they ought not to be worn in New England, though it would be quite safe to wear them in Europe.
As my uncle began slowly and grudgingly to unwrap the things he urged me not to be shocked by the strangeness and frequent hideousness of the designs. Artists and archaeologists who had seen them pronounced their workmanship superlatively and exotically exquisite, though no one seemed able to define their exact material or assign them to any specific art tradition. There were two armlets, a tiara, and a kind of pectoral; the latter having in high relief certain figures of almost unbearable extravagance.
During this description I had kept a tight rein on my emotions, but my face must have betrayed my mounting fears. My uncle looked concerned, and paused in his unwrapping to study my countenance. I motioned to him to continue, which he did with renewed signs of reluctance. He seemed to expect some demonstration when the first piece--the tiara--became visible, but I doubt if he expected quite what actually happened. I did not expect it, either, for I thought I was thoroughly forewarned regarding what the jewellery would turn out to be. What I did was to faint silently away, just as I had done in that brier-choked railway cut a year before.
From that day on my life has been a nightmare of brooding and apprehension nor do I know how much is hideous truth and how much madness. My great-grandmother had been a Marsh of unknown source whose husband lived in Arkham--and did not old Zadok say that the daughter of Obed Marsh by a monstrous mother was married to an Arkham man through trick? What was it the ancient toper had muttered about the line of my eyes to Captain Obed's? In Arkham, too, the curator had told me I had the true Marsh eyes. Was Obed Marsh my own great-great-grandfather? Who--or what--then, was my great-great-grandmother? But perhaps this was all madness. Those whitish-gold ornaments might easily have been bought from some Innsmouth sailor by the father of my great-grandmother, whoever he was. And that look in the staring-eyed faces of my grandmother and self-slain uncle might be sheer fancy on my part--sheer fancy, bolstered up by the Innsmouth shadow which had so darkly coloured my imagination. But why had my uncle killed himself after an ancestral quest in New England?
For more than two years I fought off these reflections with partial success. My father secured me a place in an insurance office, and I buried myself in routine as deeply as possible. In the winter of 1930-31, however, the dreams began. They were very sparse and insidious at first, but increased in frequency and vividness as the weeks went by. Great watery spaces opened out before me, and I seemed to wander through titanic sunken porticos and labyrinths of weedy cyclopean walls with grotesque fishes as my companions. Then the other shapes began to appear, filling me with nameless horror the moment I awoke. But during the dreams they did not horrify me at all--I was one with them; wearing their unhuman trappings, treading their aqueous ways, and praying monstrously at their evil sea-bottom temples.
There was much more than I could remember, but even what I did remember each morning would be enough to stamp me as a madman or a genius if ever I dared write it down. Some frightful influence, I felt, was seeking gradually to drag me out of the sane world of wholesome life into unnamable abysses of blackness and alienage; and the process told heavily on me. My health and appearance grew steadily worse, till finally I was forced to give up my position and adopt the static, secluded life of an invalid. Some odd nervous affliction had me in its grip, and I found myself at times almost unable to shut my eyes.
It was then that I began to study the mirror with mounting alarm. The slow ravages of disease are not pleasant to watch, but in my case there was something subtler and more puzzling in the background. My father seemed to notice it, too, for he began looking at me curiously and almost affrightedly. What was taking place in me? Could it be that I was coming to resemble my grandmother and uncle Douglas?
One night I had a frightful dream in which I met my grandmother under the sea. She lived in a phosphorescent palace of many terraces, with gardens of strange leprous corals and grotesque brachiate efflorescences, and welcomed me with a warmth that may have been sardonic. She had changed--as those who take to the water change--and told me she had never died. Instead, she had gone to a spot her dead son had learned about, and had leaped to a realm whose wonders-- destined for him as well--he had spurned with a smoking pistol. This was to be my realm, too--I could not escape it. I would never die, but would live with those who had lived since before man ever walked the earth.
I met also that which had been her grandmother. For eighty thousand years Pth'thya-l'yi had lived in Y'ha-nthlei, and thither she had gone back after Obed Marsh was dead. Y'ha-nthlei was not destroyed when the upper-earth men shot death into the sea. It was hurt, but not destroyed. The Deep Ones could never be destroyed, even though the palaeogean magic of the forgotten Old Ones might sometimes check them. For the present they would rest; but some day, if they remembered, they would rise again for the tribute Great Cthulhu craved. It would be a city greater than Innsmouth next time. They had planned to spread, and had brought up that which would help them, but now they must wait once more. For bringing the upper-earth men's death I must do a penance, but that would not be heavy. This was the dream in which I saw a shoggoth for the first time, and the sight set me awake in a frenzy of screaming. That morning the mirror definitely told me I had acquired the Innsmouth look.
So far I have not shot myself as my uncle Douglas did. I bought an automatic and almost took the step, but certain dreams deterred me. The tense extremes of horror are lessening, and I feel queerly drawn toward the unknown sea-deeps instead of fearing them. I hear and do strange things in sleep, and awake with a kind of exaltation instead of terror. I do not believe I need to wait for the full change as most have waited. If I did, my father would probably shut me up in a sanitarium as my poor little cousin is shut up. Stupendous and unheard-of splendors await me below, and I shall seek them soon. Ia-R'lyehl Cihuiha flgagnl id Ia! No, I shall not shoot myself--I cannot be made to shoot myself!
I shall plan my cousin's escape from that Canton mad-house, and together we shall go to marvel-shadowed Innsmouth. We shall swim out to that brooding reef in the sea and dive down through black abysses to Cyclopean and many-columned Y'ha-nthlei, and in that lair of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory for ever.
","West of Arkham the hills rise wild, and there are valleys with deep woods that no axe has ever cut. There are dark narrow glens where the trees slope fantastically, and where thin brooklets trickle without ever having caught the glint of sunlight. On the gentle slopes there are farms, ancient and rocky, with squat, moss-coated cottages brooding eternally over old New England secrets in the lee of great ledges; but these are all vacant now, the wide chimneys crumbling and the shingled sides bulging perilously beneath low gambrel roofs.
The old folk have gone away, and foreigners do not like to live there. French-Canadians have tried it, Italians have tried it, and the Poles have come and departed. It is not because of anything that can be seen or heard or handled, but because of something that is imagined. The place is not good for imagination, and does not bring restful dreams at night. It must be this which keeps the foreigners away, for old Ammi Pierce has never told them of anything he recalls from the strange days. Ammi, whose head has been a little queer for years, is the only one who still remains, or who ever talks of the strange days; and he dares to do this because his house is so near the open fields and the travelled roads around Arkham.
There was once a road over the hills and through the valleys, that ran straight where the blasted heath is now; but people ceased to use it and a new road was laid curving far toward the south. Traces of the old one can still be found amidst the weeds of a returning wilderness, and some of them will doubtless linger even when half the hollows are flooded for the new reservoir. Then the dark woods will be cut down and the blasted heath will slumber far below blue waters whose surface will mirror the sky and ripple in the sun. And the secrets of the strange days will be one with the deep's secrets; one with the hidden lore of old ocean, and all the mystery of primal earth.
When I went into the hills and vales to survey for the new reservoir they told me the place was evil. They told me this in Arkham, and because that is a very old town full of witch legends I thought the evil must be something which grandams had whispered to children through centuries. The name ""blasted heath"" seemed to me very odd and theatrical, and I wondered how it had come into the folklore of a Puritan people. Then I saw that dark westward tangle of glens and slopes for myself, and ceased to wonder at anything beside its own elder mystery. It was morning when I saw it, but shadow lurked always there. The trees grew too thickly, and their trunks were too big for any healthy New England wood. There was too much silence in the dim alleys between them, and the floor was too soft with the dank moss and mattings of infinite years of decay.
In the open spaces, mostly along the line of the old road, there were little hillside farms; sometimes with all the buildings standing, sometimes with only one or two, and sometimes with only a lone chimney or fast-filling cellar. Weeds and briers reigned, and furtive wild things rustled in the undergrowth. Upon everything was a haze of restlessness and oppression; a touch of the unreal and the grotesque, as if some vital element of perspective or chiaroscuro were awry. I did not wonder that the foreigners would not stay, for this was no region to sleep in. It was too much like a landscape of Salvator Rosa; too much like some forbidden woodcut in a tale of terror.
But even all this was not so bad as the blasted heath. I knew it the moment I came upon it at the bottom of a spacious valley; for no other name could fit such a thing, or any other thing fit such a name. It was as if the poet had coined the phrase from having seen this one particular region. It must, I thought as I viewed it, be the outcome of a fire; but why had nothing new ever grown over these five acres of grey desolation that sprawled open to the sky like a great spot eaten by acid in the woods and fields? It lay largely to the north of the ancient road line, but encroached a little on the other side. I felt an odd reluctance about approaching, and did so at last only because my business took me through and past it. There was no vegetation of any kind on that broad expanse, but only a fine grey dust or ash which no wind seemed ever to blow about. The trees near it were sickly and stunted, and many dead trunks stood or lay rotting at the rim. As I walked hurriedly by I saw the tumbled bricks and stones of an old chimney and cellar on my right, and the yawning black maw of an abandoned well whose stagnant vapours played strange tricks with the hues of the sunlight. Even the long, dark woodland climb beyond seemed welcome in contrast, and I marvelled no more at the frightened whispers of Arkham people. There had been no house or ruin near; even in the old days the place must have been lonely and remote. And at twilight, dreading to repass that ominous spot, I walked circuitously back to the town by the curious road on the south. I vaguely wished some clouds would gather, for an odd timidity about the deep skyey voids above had crept into my soul.
In the evening I asked old people in Arkham about the blasted heath, and what was meant by that phrase ""strange days"" which so many evasively muttered. I could not, however, get any good answers except that all the mystery was much more recent than I had dreamed. It was not a matter of old legendry at all, but something within the lifetime of those who spoke. It had happened in the 'eighties, and a family had disappeared or was killed. Speakers would not be exact; and because they all told me to pay no attention to old Ammi Pierce's crazy tales, I sought him out the next morning, having heard that he lived alone in the ancient tottering cottage where the trees first begin to get very thick. It was a fearsomely ancient place, and had begun to exude the faint miasmal odour which clings about houses that have stood too long. Only with persistent knocking could I rouse the aged man, and when he shuffled timidly to the door I could tell he was not glad to see me. He was not so feeble as I had expected; but his eyes drooped in a curious way, and his unkempt clothing and white beard made him seem very worn and dismal.
Not knowing just how he could best be launched on his tales, I feigned a matter of business; told him of my surveying, and asked vague questions about the district. He was far brighter and more educated than I had been led to think, and before I knew it had grasped quite as much of the subject as any man I had talked with in Arkham. He was not like other rustics I had known in the sections where reservoirs were to be. From him there were no protests at the miles of old wood and farmland to be blotted out, though perhaps there would have been had not his home lain outside the bounds of the future lake. Relief was all that he showed; relief at the doom of the dark ancient valleys through which he had roamed all his life. They were better under water now--better under water since the strange days. And with this opening his husky voice sank low, while his body leaned forward and his right forefinger began to point shakily and impressively.
It was then that I heard the story, and as the rambling voice scraped and whispered on I shivered again and again spite the summer day. Often I had to recall the speaker from ramblings, piece out scientific points which he knew only by a fading parrot memory of professors' talk, or bridge over gaps, where his sense of logic and continuity broke down. When he was done I did not wonder that his mind had snapped a trifle, or that the folk of Arkham would not speak much of the blasted heath. I hurried back before sunset to my hotel, unwilling to have the stars come out above me in the open; and the next day returned to Boston to give up my position. I could not go into that dim chaos of old forest and slope again, or face another time that grey blasted heath where the black well yawned deep beside the tumbled bricks and stones. The reservoir will soon be built now, and all those elder secrets will be safe forever under watery fathoms. But even then I do not believe I would like to visit that country by night--at least not when the sinister stars are out; and nothing could bribe me to drink the new city water of Arkham.
It all began, old Ammi said, with the meteorite. Before that time there had been no wild legends at all since the witch trials, and even then these western woods were not feared half so much as the small island in the Miskatonic where the devil held court beside a curious lone altar older than the Indians. These were not haunted woods, and their fantastic dusk was never terrible till the strange days. Then there had come that white noontide cloud, that string of explosions in the air, and that pillar of smoke from the valley far in the wood. And by night all Arkham had heard of the great rock that fell out of the sky and bedded itself in the ground beside the well at the Nahum Gardner place. That was the house which had stood where the blasted heath was to come--the trim white Nahum Gardner house amidst its fertile gardens and orchards.
Nahum had come to town to tell people about the stone, and dropped in at Ammi Pierce's on the way. Ammi was forty then, and all the queer things were fixed very strongly in his mind. He and his wife had gone with the three professors from Miskatonic University who hastened out the next morning to see the weird visitor from unknown stellar space, and had wondered why Nahum had called it so large the day before. It had shrunk, Nahum said as he pointed out the big brownish mound above the ripped earth and charred grass near the archaic well-sweep in his front yard; but the wise men answered that stones do not shrink. Its heat lingered persistently, and Nahum declared it had glowed faintly in the night. The professors tried it with a geologist's hammer and found it was oddly soft. It was, in truth, so soft as to be almost plastic; and they gouged rather than chipped a specimen to take back to the college for testing. They took it in an old pail borrowed from Nahum's kitchen, for even the small piece refused to grow cool. On the trip back they stopped at Ammi's to rest, and seemed thoughtful when Mrs. Pierce remarked that the fragment was growing smaller and burning the bottom of the pail. Truly, it was not large, but perhaps they had taken less than they thought.
The day after that--all this was in June of '82--the professors had trooped out again in a great excitement. As they passed Ammi's they told him what queer things the specimen had done, and how it had faded wholly away when they put it in a glass beaker. The beaker had gone, too, and the wise men talked of the strange stone's affinity for silicon. It had acted quite unbelievably in that well-ordered laboratory; doing nothing at all and showing no occluded gases when heated on charcoal, being wholly negative in the borax bead, and soon proving itself absolutely non-volatile at any producible temperature, including that of the oxy-hydrogen blowpipe. On an anvil it appeared highly malleable, and in the dark its luminosity was very marked. Stubbornly refusing to grow cool, it soon had the college in a state of real excitement; and when upon heating before the spectroscope it displayed shining bands unlike any known colours of the normal spectrum there was much breathless talk of new elements, bizarre optical properties, and other things which puzzled men of science are wont to say when faced by the unknown.
Hot as it was, they tested it in a crucible with all the proper reagents. Water did nothing. Hydrochloric acid was the same. Nitric acid and even aqua regia merely hissed and spattered against its torrid invulnerability. Ammi had difficulty in recalling all these things, but recognized some solvents as I mentioned them in the usual order of use. There were ammonia and caustic soda, alcohol and ether, nauseous carbon disulphide and a dozen others; but although the weight grew steadily less as time passed, and the fragment seemed to be slightly cooling, there was no change in the solvents to show that they had attacked the substance at all. It was a metal, though, beyond a doubt. It was magnetic, for one thing; and after its immersion in the acid solvents there seemed to be faint traces of the Widmanstatten figures found on meteoric iron. When the cooling had grown very considerable, the testing was carried on in glass; and it was in a glass beaker that they left all the chips made of the original fragment during the work. The next morning both chips and beaker were gone without trace, and only a charred spot marked the place on the wooden shelf where they had been.
All this the professors told Ammi as they paused at his door, and once more he went with them to see the stony messenger from the stars, though this time his wife did not accompany him. It had now most certainly shrunk, and even the sober professors could not doubt the truth of what they saw. All around the dwindling brown lump near the well was a vacant space, except where the earth had caved in; and whereas it had been a good seven feet across the day before, it was now scarcely five. It was still hot, and the sages studied its surface curiously as they detached another and larger piece with hammer and chisel. They gouged deeply this time, and as they pried away the smaller mass they saw that the core of the thing was not quite homogeneous.
They had uncovered what seemed to be the side of a large coloured globule embedded in the substance. The colour, which resembled some of the bands in the meteor's strange spectrum, was almost impossible to describe; and it was only by analogy that they called it colour at all. Its texture was glossy, and upon tapping it appeared to promise both brittleness and hollowness. One of the professors gave it a smart blow with a hammer, and it burst with a nervous little pop. Nothing was emitted, and all trace of the thing vanished with the puncturing. It left behind a hollow spherical space about three inches across, and all thought it probable that others would be discovered as the enclosing substance wasted away.
Conjecture was vain; so after a futile attempt to find additional globules by drilling, the seekers left again with their new specimen which proved, however, as baffling in the laboratory as its predecessor. Aside from being almost plastic, having heat, magnetism, and slight luminosity, cooling slightly in powerful acids, possessing an unknown spectrum, wasting away in air, and attacking silicon compounds with mutual destruction as a result, it presented no identifying features whatsoever; and at the end of the tests the college scientists were forced to own that they could not place it. It was nothing of this earth, but a piece of the great outside; and as such dowered with outside properties and obedient to outside laws.
That night there was a thunderstorm, and when the professors went out to Nahum's the next day they met with a bitter disappointment. The stone, magnetic as it had been, must have had some peculiar electrical property; for it had ""drawn the lightning,"" as Nahum said, with a singular persistence. Six times within an hour the farmer saw the lightning strike the furrow in the front yard, and when the storm was over nothing remained but a ragged pit by the ancient well-sweep, half-choked with a caved-in earth. Digging had borne no fruit, and the scientists verified the fact of the utter vanishment. The failure was total; so that nothing was left to do but go back to the laboratory and test again the disappearing fragment left carefully cased in lead. That fragment lasted a week, at the end of which nothing of value had been learned of it. When it had gone, no residue was left behind, and in time the professors felt scarcely sure they had indeed seen with waking eyes that cryptic vestige of the fathomless gulfs outside; that lone, weird message from other universes and other realms of matter, force, and entity.
As was natural, the Arkham papers made much of the incident with its collegiate sponsoring, and sent reporters to talk with Nahum Gardner and his family. At least one Boston daily also sent a scribe, and Nahum quickly became a kind of local celebrity. He was a lean, genial person of about fifty, living with his wife and three sons on the pleasant farmstead in the valley. He and Ammi exchanged visits frequently, as did their wives; and Ammi had nothing but praise for him after all these years. He seemed slightly proud of the notice his place had attracted, and talked often of the meteorite in the succeeding weeks. That July and August were hot; and Nahum worked hard at his haying in the ten-acre pasture across Chapman's Brook; his rattling wain wearing deep ruts in the shadowy lanes between. The labour tired him more than it had in other years, and he felt that age was beginning to tell on him.
Then fell the time of fruit and harvest. The pears and apples slowly ripened, and Nahum vowed that his orchards were prospering as never before. The fruit was growing to phenomenal size and unwonted gloss, and in such abundance that extra barrels were ordered to handle the future crop. But with the ripening came sore disappointment, for of all that gorgeous array of specious lusciousness not one single jot was fit to eat. Into the fine flavour of the pears and apples had crept a stealthy bitterness and sickishness, so that even the smallest bites induced a lasting disgust. It was the same with the melons and tomatoes, and Nahum sadly saw that his entire crop was lost. Quick to connect events, he declared that the meteorite had poisoned the soil, and thanked Heaven that most of the other crops were in the upland lot along the road.
Winter came early, and was very cold. Ammi saw Nahum less often than usual, and observed that he had begun to look worried. The rest of his family too, seemed to have grown taciturn; and were far from steady in their church-going or their attendance at the various social events of the countryside. For this reserve or melancholy no cause could be found, though all the household confessed now and then to poorer health and a feeling of vague disquiet. Nahum himself gave the most definite statement of anyone when he said he was disturbed about certain footprints in the snow. They were the usual winter prints of red squirrels, white rabbits, and foxes, but the brooding farmer professed to see something not quite right about their nature and arrangement. He was never specific, but appeared to think that they were not as characteristic of the anatomy and habits of squirrels and rabbits and foxes as they ought to be. Ammi listened without interest to this talk until one night when he drove past Nahum's house in his sleigh on the way back from Clark's Comer. There had been a moon, and a rabbit had run across the road, and the leaps of that rabbit were longer than either Ammi or his horse liked. The latter, indeed, had almost run away when brought up by a firm rein. Thereafter Ammi gave Nahum's tales more respect, and wondered why the Gardner dogs seemed so cowed and quivering every morning. They had, it developed, nearly lost the spirit to bark.
In February the McGregor boys from Meadow Hill were out shooting woodchucks, and not far from the Gardner place bagged a very peculiar specimen. The proportions of its body seemed slightly altered in a queer way impossible to describe, while its face had taken on an expression which no one ever saw in a woodchuck before. The boys were genuinely frightened, and threw the thing away at once, so that only their grotesque tales of it ever reached the people of the countryside. But the shying of horses near Nahum's house had now become an acknowledged thing, and all the basis for a cycle of whispered legend was fast taking form.
People vowed that the snow melted faster around Nahum's than it did anywhere else, and early in March there was an awed discussion in Potter's general store at Clark's Corners. Stephen Rice had driven past Gardner's in the morning, and had noticed the skunk-cabbages coming up through the mud by the woods across the road. Never were things of such size seen before, and they held strange colours that could not be put into any words. Their shapes were monstrous, and the horse had snorted at an odour which struck Stephen as wholly unprecedented. That afternoon several persons drove past to see the abnormal growth, and all agreed that plants of that kind ought never to sprout in a healthy world. The bad fruit of the fall before was freely mentioned, and it went from mouth to mouth that there was poison in Nahum's ground. Of course it was the meteorite; and remembering how strange the men from the college had found that stone to be, several farmers spoke about the matter to them.
One day they paid Nahum a visit; but having no love of wild tales and folklore were very conservative in what they inferred. The plants were certainly odd, but all skunk-cabbages are more or less odd in shape and hue. Perhaps some mineral element from the stone had entered the soil, but it would soon be washed away. And as for the footprints and frightened horses--of course this was mere country talk which such a phenomenon as the aerolite would be certain to start. There was really nothing for serious men to do in cases of wild gossip, for superstitious rustics will say and believe anything. And so all through the strange days the professors stayed away in contempt. Only one of them, when given two phials of dust for analysis in a police job over a year and half later, recalled that the queer colour of that skunk-cabbage had been very like one of the anomalous bands of light shown by the meteor fragment in the college spectroscope, and like the brittle globule found imbedded in the stone from the abyss. The samples in this analysis case gave the same odd bands at first, though later they lost the property.
The trees budded prematurely around Nahum's, and at night they swayed ominously in the wind. Nahum's second son Thaddeus, a lad of fifteen, swore that they swayed also when there was no wind; but even the gossips would not credit this. Certainly, however, restlessness was in the air. The entire Gardner family developed the habit of stealthy listening, though not for any sound which they could consciously name. The listening was, indeed, rather a product of moments when consciousness seemed half to slip away. Unfortunately such moments increased week by week, till it became common speech that ""something was wrong with all Nahum's folks."" When the early saxifrage came out it had another strange colour; not quite like that of the skunk-cabbage, but plainly related and equally unknown to anyone who saw it. Nahum took some blossoms to Arkham and showed them to the editor of the Gazette, but that dignitary did no more than write a humorous article about them, in which the dark fears of rustics were held up to polite ridicule. It was a mistake of Nahum's to tell a stolid city man about the way the great, overgrown mourning-cloak butterflies behaved in connection with these saxifrages.
April brought a kind of madness to the country folk, and began that disuse of the road past Nahum's which led to its ultimate abandonment. It was the vegetation. All the orchard trees blossomed forth in strange colours, and through the stony soil of the yard and adjacent pasturage there sprang up a bizarre growth which only a botanist could connect with the proper flora of the region. No sane wholesome colours were anywhere to be seen except in the green grass and leafage; but everywhere were those hectic and prismatic variants of some diseased, underlying primary tone without a place among the known tints of earth. The ""Dutchman's breeches"" became a thing of sinister menace, and the bloodroots grew insolent in their chromatic perversion. Ammi and the Gardners thought that most of the colours had a sort of haunting familiarity, and decided that they reminded one of the brittle globule in the meteor. Nahum ploughed and sowed the ten-acre pasture and the upland lot, but did nothing with the land around the house. He knew it would be of no use, and hoped that the summer's strange growths would draw all the poison from the soil. He was prepared for almost anything now, and had grown used to the sense of something near him waiting to be heard. The shunning of his house by neighbors told on him, of course; but it told on his wife more. The boys were better off, being at school each day; but they could not help being frightened by the gossip. Thaddeus, an especially sensitive youth, suffered the most.
In May the insects came, and Nahum's place became a nightmare of buzzing and crawling. Most of the creatures seemed not quite usual in their aspects and motions, and their nocturnal habits contradicted all former experience. The Gardners took to watching at night--watching in all directions at random for something--they could not tell what. It was then that they owned that Thaddeus had been right about the trees. Mrs. Gardner was the next to see it from the window as she watched the swollen boughs of a maple against a moonlit sky. The boughs surely moved, and there was no wind. It must be the sap. Strangeness had come into everything growing now. Yet it was none of Nahum's family at all who made the next discovery. Familiarity had dulled them, and what they could not see was glimpsed by a timid windmill salesman from Bolton who drove by one night in ignorance of the country legends. What he told in Arkham was given a short paragraph in the Gazette; and it was there that all the farmers, Nahum included, saw it first. The night had been dark and the buggy-lamps faint, but around a farm in the valley which everyone knew from the account must be Nahum's, the darkness had been less thick. A dim though distinct luminosity seemed to inhere in all the vegetation, grass, leaves, and blossoms alike, while at one moment a detached piece of the phosphorescence appeared to stir furtively in the yard near the barn.
The grass had so far seemed untouched, and the cows were freely pastured in the lot near the house, but toward the end of May the milk began to be bad. Then Nahum had the cows driven to the uplands, after which this trouble ceased. Not long after this the change in grass and leaves became apparent to the eye. All the verdure was going grey, and was developing a highly singular quality of brittleness. Ammi was now the only person who ever visited the place, and his visits were becoming fewer and fewer. When school closed the Gardners were virtually cut off from the world, and sometimes let Ammi do their errands in town. They were failing curiously both physically and mentally, and no one was surprised when the news of Mrs. Gardner's madness stole around.
It happened in June, about the anniversary of the meteor's fall, and the poor woman screamed about things in the air which she could not describe. In her raving there was not a single specific noun, but only verbs and pronouns. Things moved and changed and fluttered, and ears tingled to impulses which were not wholly sounds. Something was taken away--she was being drained of something--something was fastening itself on her that ought not to be--someone must make it keep off--nothing was ever still in the night--the walls and windows shifted. Nahum did not send her to the county asylum, but let her wander about the house as long as she was harmless to herself and others. Even when her expression changed he did nothing. But when the boys grew afraid of her, and Thaddeus nearly fainted at the way she made faces at him, he decided to keep her locked in the attic. By July she had ceased to speak and crawled on all fours, and before that month was over Nahum got the mad notion that she was slightly luminous in the dark, as he now clearly saw was the case with the nearby vegetation.
It was a little before this that the horses had stampeded. Something had aroused them in the night, and their neighing and kicking in their stalls had been terrible. There seemed virtually nothing to do to calm them, and when Nahum opened the stable door they all bolted out like frightened woodland deer. It took a week to track all four, and when found they were seen to be quite useless and unmanageable. Something had snapped in their brains, and each one had to be shot for its own good. Nahum borrowed a horse from Ammi for his haying, but found it would not approach the barn. It shied, balked, and whinnied, and in the end he could do nothing but drive it into the yard while the men used their own strength to get the heavy wagon near enough the hayloft for convenient pitching. And all the while the vegetation was turning grey and brittle. Even the flowers whose hues had been so strange were greying now, and the fruit was coming out grey and dwarfed and tasteless. The asters and golden-rod bloomed grey and distorted, and the roses and zinneas and hollyhocks in the front yard were such blasphemous-looking things that Nahum's oldest boy Zenas cut them down. The strangely puffed insects died about that time, even the bees that had left their hives and taken to the woods.
By September all the vegetation was fast crumbling to a greyish powder, and Nahum feared that the trees would die before the poison was out of the soil. His wife now had spells of terrific screaming, and he and the boys were in a constant state of nervous tension. They shunned people now, and when school opened the boys did not go. But it was Ammi, on one of his rare visits, who first realised that the well water was no longer good. It had an evil taste that was not exactly fetid nor exactly salty, and Ammi advised his friend to dig another well on higher ground to use till the soil was good again. Nahum, however, ignored the warning, for he had by that time become calloused to strange and unpleasant things. He and the boys continued to use the tainted supply, drinking it as listlessly and mechanically as they ate their meagre and ill-cooked meals and did their thankless and monotonous chores through the aimless days. There was something of stolid resignation about them all, as if they walked half in another world between lines of nameless guards to a certain and familiar doom.
Thaddeus went mad in September after a visit to the well. He had gone with a pail and had come back empty-handed, shrieking and waving his arms, and sometimes lapsing into an inane titter or a whisper about ""the moving colours down there."" Two in one family was pretty bad, but Nahum was very brave about it. He let the boy run about for a week until he began stumbling and hurting himself, and then he shut him in an attic room across the hall from his mother's. The way they screamed at each other from behind their locked doors was very terrible, especially to little Merwin, who fancied they talked in some terrible language that was not of earth. Merwin was getting frightfully imaginative, and his restlessness was worse after the shutting away of the brother who had been his greatest playmate.
Almost at the same time the mortality among the livestock commenced. Poultry turned greyish and died very quickly, their meat being found dry and noisome upon cutting. Hogs grew inordinately fat, then suddenly began to undergo loathsome changes which no one could explain. Their meat was of course useless, and Nahum was at his wit's end. No rural veterinary would approach his place, and the city veterinary from Arkham was openly baffled. The swine began growing grey and brittle and falling to pieces before they died, and their eyes and muzzles developed singular alterations. It was very inexplicable, for they had never been fed from the tainted vegetation. Then something struck the cows. Certain areas or sometimes the whole body would be uncannily shrivelled or compressed, and atrocious collapses or disintegrations were common. In the last stages--and death was always the result--there would be a greying and turning brittle like that which beset the hogs. There could be no question of poison, for all the cases occurred in a locked and undisturbed barn. No bites of prowling things could have brought the virus, for what live beast of earth can pass through solid obstacles? It must be only natural disease--yet what disease could wreak such results was beyond any mind's guessing. When the harvest came there was not an animal surviving on the place, for the stock and poultry were dead and the dogs had run away. These dogs, three in number, had all vanished one night and were never heard of again. The five cats had left some time before, but their going was scarcely noticed since there now seemed to be no mice, and only Mrs. Gardner had made pets of the graceful felines.
On the nineteenth of October Nahum staggered into Ammi's house with hideous news. The death had come to poor Thaddeus in his attic room, and it had come in a way which could not be told. Nahum had dug a grave in the railed family plot behind the farm, and had put therein what he found. There could have been nothing from outside, for the small barred window and locked door were intact; but it was much as it had been in the barn. Ammi and his wife consoled the stricken man as best they could, but shuddered as they did so. Stark terror seemed to cling round the Gardners and all they touched, and the very presence of one in the house was a breath from regions unnamed and unnamable. Ammi accompanied Nahum home with the greatest reluctance, and did what he might to calm the hysterical sobbing of little Merwin. Zenas needed no calming. He had come of late to do nothing but stare into space and obey what his father told him; and Ammi thought that his fate was very merciful. Now and then Merwin's screams were answered faintly from the attic, and in response to an inquiring look Nahum said that his wife was getting very feeble. When night approached, Ammi managed to get away; for not even friendship could make him stay in that spot when the faint glow of the vegetation began and the trees may or may not have swayed without wind. It was really lucky for Ammi that he was not more imaginative. Even as things were, his mind was bent ever so slightly; but had he been able to connect and reflect upon all the portents around him he must inevitably have turned a total maniac. In the twilight he hastened home, the screams of the mad woman and the nervous child ringing horribly in his ears.
Three days later Nahum burst into Ammi's kitchen in the early morning, and in the absence of his host stammered out a desperate tale once more, while Mrs. Pierce listened in a clutching fright. It was little Merwin this time. He was gone. He had gone out late at night with a lantern and pail for water, and had never come back. He'd been going to pieces for days, and hardly knew what he was about. Screamed at everything. There had been a frantic shriek from the yard then, but before the father could get to the door the boy was gone. There was no glow from the lantern he had taken, and of the child himself no trace. At the time Nahum thought the lantern and pail were gone too; but when dawn came, and the man had plodded back from his all-night search of the woods and fields, he had found some very curious things near the well. There was a crushed and apparently somewhat melted mass of iron which had certainly been the lantern; while a bent handle and twisted iron hoops beside it, both half-fused, seemed to hint at the remnants of the pail. That was all. Nahum was past imagining, Mrs. Pierce was blank, and Ammi, when he had reached home and heard the tale, could give no guess. Merwin was gone, and there would be no use in telling the people around, who shunned all Gardners now. No use, either, in telling the city people at Arkham who laughed at everything. Thad was gone, and now Merwin was gone. Something was creeping and creeping and waiting to be seen and heard. Nahum would go soon, and he wanted Ammi to look after his wife and Zenas if they survived him. It must all be a judgment of some sort; though he could not fancy what for, since he had always walked uprightly in the Lord's ways so far as he knew.
For over two weeks Ammi saw nothing of Nahum; and then, worried about what might have happened, he overcame his fears and paid the Gardner place a visit. There was no smoke from the great chimney, and for a moment the visitor was apprehensive of the worst. The aspect of the whole farm was shocking--greyish withered grass and leaves on the ground, vines falling in brittle wreckage from archaic walls and gables, and great bare trees clawing up at the grey November sky with a studied malevolence which Ammi could not but feel had come from some subtle change in the tilt of the branches. But Nahum was alive, after all. He was weak, and lying on a couch in the low-ceiled kitchen, but perfectly conscious and able to give simple orders to Zenas. The room was deadly cold; and as Ammi visibly shivered, the host shouted huskily to Zenas for more wood. Wood, indeed, was sorely needed; since the cavernous fireplace was unlit and empty, with a cloud of soot blowing about in the chill wind that came down the chimney. Presently Nahum asked him if the extra wood had made him any more comfortable, and then Ammi saw what had happened. The stoutest cord had broken at last, and the hapless farmer's mind was proof against more sorrow.
Questioning tactfully, Ammi could get no clear data at all about the missing Zenas. ""In the well--he lives in the well--"" was all that the clouded father would say. Then there flashed across the visitor's mind a sudden thought of the mad wife, and he changed his line of inquiry. ""Nabby? Why, here she is!"" was the surprised response of poor Nahum, and Ammi soon saw that he must search for himself. Leaving the harmless babbler on the couch, he took the keys from their nail beside the door and climbed the creaking stairs to the attic. It was very close and noisome up there, and no sound could be heard from any direction. Of the four doors in sight, only one was locked, and on this he tried various keys of the ring he had taken. The third key proved the right one, and after some fumbling Ammi threw open the low white door.
It was quite dark inside, for the window was small and half-obscured by the crude wooden bars; and Ammi could see nothing at all on the wide-planked floor. The stench was beyond enduring, and before proceeding further he had to retreat to another room and return with his lungs filled with breathable air. When he did enter he saw something dark in the corner, and upon seeing it more clearly he screamed outright. While he screamed he thought a momentary cloud eclipsed the window, and a second later he felt himself brushed as if by some hateful current of vapour. Strange colours danced before his eyes; and had not a present horror numbed him he would have thought of the globule in the meteor that the geologist's hammer had shattered, and of the morbid vegetation that had sprouted in the spring. As it was he thought only of the blasphemous monstrosity which confronted him, and which all too clearly had shared the nameless fate of young Thaddeus and the livestock. But the terrible thing about the horror was that it very slowly and perceptibly moved as it continued to crumble.
Ammi would give me no added particulars of this scene, but the shape in the comer does not reappear in his tale as a moving object. There are things which cannot be mentioned, and what is done in common humanity is sometimes cruelly judged by the law. I gathered that no moving thing was left in that attic room, and that to leave anything capable of motion there would have been a deed so monstrous as to damn any accountable being to eternal torment. Anyone but a stolid farmer would have fainted or gone mad, but Ammi walked conscious through that low doorway and locked the accursed secret behind him. There would be Nahum to deal with now; he must be fed and tended, and removed to some place where he could be cared for.
Commencing his descent of the dark stairs. Ammi heard a thud below him. He even thought a scream had been suddenly choked off, and recalled nervously the clammy vapour which had brushed by him in that frightful room above. What presence had his cry and entry started up? Halted by some vague fear, he heard still further sounds below. Indubitably there was a sort of heavy dragging, and a most detestably sticky noise as of some fiendish and unclean species of suction. With an associative sense goaded to feverish heights, he thought unaccountably of what he had seen upstairs. Good God! What eldritch dream-world was this into which he had blundered? He dared move neither backward nor forward, but stood there trembling at the black curve of the boxed-in staircase. Every trifle of the scene burned itself into his brain. The sounds, the sense of dread expectancy, the darkness, the steepness of the narrow step--and merciful Heaven!--the faint but unmistakable luminosity of all the woodwork in sight; steps, sides, exposed laths, and beams alike.
Then there burst forth a frantic whinny from Ammi's horse outside, followed at once by a clatter which told of a frenzied runaway. In another moment horse and buggy had gone beyond earshot, leaving the frightened man on the dark stairs to guess what had sent them. But that was not all. There had been another sound out there. A sort of liquid splash--water--it must have been the well. He had left Hero untied near it, and a buggy wheel must have brushed the coping and knocked in a stone. And still the pale phosphorescence glowed in that detestably ancient woodwork. God! how old the house was! Most of it built before 1670, and the gambrel roof no later than 1730.
A feeble scratching on the floor downstairs now sounded distinctly, and Ammi's grip tightened on a heavy stick he had picked up in the attic for some purpose. Slowly nerving himself, he finished his descent and walked boldly toward the kitchen. But he did not complete the walk, because what he sought was no longer there. It had come to meet him, and it was still alive after a fashion. Whether it had crawled or whether it had been dragged by any external forces, Ammi could not say; but the death had been at it. Everything had happened in the last half-hour, but collapse, greying, and disintegration were already far advanced. There was a horrible brittleness, and dry fragments were scaling off. Ammi could not touch it, but looked horrifiedly into the distorted parody that had been a face. ""What was it, Nahum--what was it?"" He whispered, and the cleft, bulging lips were just able to crackle out a final answer.
""Nothin'...nothin'...the colour...it burns...cold an' wet, but it burns...it lived in the well...I seen it...a kind of smoke...jest like the flowers last spring...the well shone at night...Thad an' Merwin an' Zenas...everything alive...suckin' the life out of everything...in that stone...it must a' come in that stone pizened the whole place...dun't know what it wants...that round thing them men from the college dug outen the stone...they smashed it...it was the same colour...jest the same, like the flowers an' plants...must a' ben more of 'em...seeds...seeds...they growed...I seen it the fust time this week...must a' got strong on Zenas...he was a big boy, full o' life...it beats down your mind an' then gets ye...burns ye up...in the well water...you was right about that...evil water...Zenas never come back from the well...can't git away...draws ye...ye know summ'at's comin' but tain't no use...I seen it time an' agin senct Zenas was took...whar's Nabby, Ammi?...my head's no good...dun't know how long sense I fed her...it'll git her ef we ain't keerful...jest a colour...her face is gittin' to hev that colour sometimes towards night...an' it burns an' sucks...it come from some place whar things ain't as they is here...one o' them professors said so...he was right...look out, Ammi, it'll do suthin' more...sucks the life out...""
But that was all. That which spoke could speak no more because it had completely caved in. Ammi laid a red checked tablecloth over what was left and reeled out the back door into the fields. He climbed the slope to the ten-acre pasture and stumbled home by the north road and the woods. He could not pass that well from which his horses had run away. He had looked at it through the window, and had seen that no stone was missing from the rim. Then the lurching buggy had not dislodged anything after all--the splash had been something else--something which went into the well after it had done with poor Nahum.
When Ammi reached his house the horses and buggy had arrived before him and thrown his wife into fits of anxiety. Reassuring her without explanations, he set out at once for Arkham and notified the authorities that the Gardner family was no more. He indulged in no details, but merely told of the deaths of Nahum and Nabby, that of Thaddeus being already known, and mentioned that the cause seemed to be the same strange ailment which had killed the live-stock. He also stated that Merwin and Zenas had disappeared. There was considerable questioning at the police station, and in the end Ammi was compelled to take three officers to the Gardner farm, together with the coroner, the medical examiner, and the veterinary who had treated the diseased animals. He went much against his will, for the afternoon was advancing and he feared the fall of night over that accursed place, but it was some comfort to have so many people with him.
The six men drove out in a democrat-wagon, following Ammi's buggy, and arrived at the pest-ridden farmhouse about four o'clock. Used as the officers were to gruesome experiences, not one remained unmoved at what was found in the attic and under the red checked tablecloth on the floor below. The whole aspect of the farm with its grey desolation was terrible enough, but those two crumbling objects were beyond all bounds. No one could look long at them, and even the medical examiner admitted that there was very little to examine. Specimens could be analysed, of course, so he busied himself in obtaining them--and here it develops that a very puzzling aftermath occurred at the college laboratory where the two phials of dust were finally taken. Under the spectroscope both samples gave off an unknown spectrum, in which many of the baffling bands were precisely like those which the strange meteor had yielded in the previous year. The property of emitting this spectrum vanished in a month, the dust thereafter consisting mainly of alkaline phosphates and carbonates.
Ammi would not have told the men about the well if he had thought they meant to do anything then and there. It was getting toward sunset, and he was anxious to be away. But he could not help glancing nervously at the stony curb by the great sweep, and when a detective questioned him he admitted that Nahum had feared something down there so much so that he had never even thought of searching it for Merwin or Zenas. After that nothing would do but that they empty and explore the well immediately, so Ammi had to wait trembling while pail after pail of rank water was hauled up and splashed on the soaking ground outside. The men sniffed in disgust at the fluid, and toward the last held their noses against the foetor they were uncovering. It was not so long a job as they had feared it would be, since the water was phenomenally low. There is no need to speak too exactly of what they found. Merwin and Zenas were both there, in part, though the vestiges were mainly skeletal. There were also a small deer and a large dog in about the same state, and a number of bones of small animals. The ooze and slime at the bottom seemed inexplicably porous and bubbling, and a man who descended on hand-holds with a long pole found that he could sink the wooden shaft to any depth in the mud of the floor without meeting any solid obstruction.
Twilight had now fallen, and lanterns were brought from the house. Then, when it was seen that nothing further could be gained from the well, everyone went indoors and conferred in the ancient sitting-room while the intermittent light of a spectral half-moon played wanly on the grey desolation outside. The men were frankly nonplussed by the entire case, and could find no convincing common element to link the strange vegetable conditions, the unknown disease of live-stock and humans, and the unaccountable deaths of Merwin and Zenas in the tainted well. They had heard the common country talk, it is true; but could not believe that anything contrary to natural law had occurred. No doubt the meteor had poisoned the soil, but the illness of persons and animals who had eaten nothing grown in that soil was another matter. Was it the well water? Very possibly. It might be a good idea to analyze it. But what peculiar madness could have made both boys jump into the well? Their deeds were so similar-and the fragments showed that they had both suffered from the grey brittle death. Why was everything so grey and brittle?
It was the coroner, seated near a window overlooking the yard, who first noticed the glow about the well. Night had fully set in, and all the abhorrent grounds seemed faintly luminous with more than the fitful moonbeams; but this new glow was something definite and distinct, and appeared to shoot up from the black pit like a softened ray from a searchlight, giving dull reflections in the little ground pools where the water had been emptied. It had a very queer colour, and as all the men clustered round the window Ammi gave a violent start. For this strange beam of ghastly miasma was to him of no unfamiliar hue. He had seen that colour before, and feared to think what it might mean. He had seen it in the nasty brittle globule in that aerolite two summers ago, had seen it in the crazy vegetation of the springtime, and had thought he had seen it for an instant that very morning against the small barred window of that terrible attic room where nameless things had happened. It had flashed there a second, and a clammy and hateful current of vapour had brushed past him--and then poor Nahum had been taken by something of that colour. He had said so at the last--said it was like the globule and the plants. After that had come the runaway in the yard and the splash in the well and now that well was belching forth to the night a pale insidious beam of the same demoniac tint.
It does credit to the alertness of Ammi's mind that he puzzled even at that tense moment over a point which was essentially scientific. He could not but wonder at his gleaning of the same impression from a vapour glimpsed in the daytime, against a window opening on the morning sky, and from a nocturnal exhalation seen as a phosphorescent mist against the black and blasted landscape. It wasn't right--it was against Nature--and he thought of those terrible last words of his stricken friend, ""It come from some place whar things ain't as they is here...one o' them professors said so...""
All three horses outside, tied to a pair of shrivelled saplings by the road, were now neighing and pawing frantically. The wagon driver started for the door to do something, but Ammi laid a shaky hand on his shoulder. ""Dun't go out thar,"" he whispered. ""They's more to this nor what we know. Nahum said somethin' lived in the well that sucks your life out. He said it must be some'at growed from a round ball like one we all seen in the meteor stone that fell a year ago June. Sucks an' burns, he said, an' is jest a cloud of colour like that light out thar now, that ye can hardly see an' can't tell what it is. Nahum thought it feeds on everything livin' an' gits stronger all the time. He said he seen it this last week. It must be somethin' from away off in the sky like the men from the college last year says the meteor stone was. The way it's made an' the way it works ain't like no way o' God's world. It's some'at from beyond.""
So the men paused indecisively as the light from the well grew stronger and the hitched horses pawed and whinnied in increasing frenzy. It was truly an awful moment; with terror in that ancient and accursed house itself, four monstrous sets of fragments--two from the house and two from the well--in the woodshed behind, and that shaft of unknown and unholy iridescence from the slimy depths in front. Ammi had restrained the driver on impulse, forgetting how uninjured he himself was after the clammy brushing of that coloured vapour in the attic room, but perhaps it is just as well that he acted as he did. No one will ever know what was abroad that night; and though the blasphemy from beyond had not so far hurt any human of unweakened mind, there is no telling what it might not have done at that last moment, and with its seemingly increased strength and the special signs of purpose it was soon to display beneath the half-clouded moonlit sky.
All at once one of the detectives at the window gave a short, sharp gasp. The others looked at him, and then quickly followed his own gaze upward to the point at which its idle straying had been suddenly arrested. There was no need for words. What had been disputed in country gossip was disputable no longer, and it is because of the thing which every man of that party agreed in whispering later on, that the strange days are never talked about in Arkham. It is necessary to premise that there was no wind at that hour of the evening. One did arise not long afterward, but there was absolutely none then. Even the dry tips of the lingering hedge-mustard, grey and blighted, and the fringe on the roof of the standing democrat-wagon were unstirred. And yet amid that tense godless calm the high bare boughs of all the trees in the yard were moving. They were twitching morbidly and spasmodically, clawing in convulsive and epileptic madness at the moonlit clouds; scratching impotently in the noxious air as if jerked by some allied and bodiless line of linkage with subterrene horrors writhing and struggling below the black roots.
Not a man breathed for several seconds. Then a cloud of darker depth passed over the moon, and the silhouette of clutching branches faded out momentarily. At this there was a general cry; muffled with awe, but husky and almost identical from every throat. For the terror had not faded with the silhouette, and in a fearsome instant of deeper darkness the watchers saw wriggling at that tree top height a thousand tiny points of faint and unhallowed radiance, tipping each bough like the fire of St. Elmo or the flames that come down on the apostles' heads at Pentecost. It was a monstrous constellation of unnatural light, like a glutted swarm of corpse-fed fireflies dancing hellish sarabands over an accursed marsh, and its colour was that same nameless intrusion which Ammi had come to recognize and dread. All the while the shaft of phosphorescence from the well was getting brighter and brighter, bringing to the minds of the huddled men, a sense of doom and abnormality which far outraced any image their conscious minds could form. It was no longer shining out; it was pouring out; and as the shapeless stream of unplaceable colour left the well it seemed to flow directly into the sky.
The veterinary shivered, and walked to the front door to drop the heavy extra bar across it. Ammi shook no less, and had to tug and point for lack of controllable voice when he wished to draw notice to the growing luminosity of the trees. The neighing and stamping of the horses had become utterly frightful, but not a soul of that group in the old house would have ventured forth for any earthly reward. With the moments the shining of the trees increased, while their restless branches seemed to strain more and more toward verticality. The wood of the well-sweep was shining now, and presently a policeman dumbly pointed to some wooden sheds and bee-hives near the stone wall on the west. They were commencing to shine, too, though the tethered vehicles of the visitors seemed so far unaffected. Then there was a wild commotion and clopping in the road, and as Ammi quenched the lamp for better seeing they realized that the span of frantic greys had broken their sapling and run off with the democrat-wagon.
The shock served to loosen several tongues, and embarrassed whispers were exchanged. ""It spreads on everything organic that's been around here,"" muttered the medical examiner. No one replied, but the man who had been in the well gave a hint that his long pole must have stirred up something intangible. ""It was awful,"" he added. ""There was no bottom at all. Just ooze and bubbles and the feeling of something lurking under there."" Ammi's horse still pawed and screamed deafeningly in the road outside, and nearly drowned its owner's faint quaver as he mumbled his formless reflections. ""It come from that stone--it growed down thar--it got everything livin'--it fed itself on 'em, mind and body--Thad an' Merwin, Zenas an' Nabby--Nahum was the last--they all drunk the water--it got strong on 'em--it come from beyond, whar things ain't like they be here--now it's goin' home--""
At this point, as the column of unknown colour flared suddenly stronger and began to weave itself into fantastic suggestions of shape which each spectator described differently, there came from poor tethered Hero such a sound as no man before or since ever heard from a horse. Every person in that low-pitched sitting room stopped his ears, and Ammi turned away from the window in horror and nausea. Words could not convey it--when Ammi looked out again the hapless beast lay huddled inert on the moonlit ground between the splintered shafts of the buggy. That was the last of Hero till they buried him next day. But the present was no time to mourn, for almost at this instant a detective silently called attention to something terrible in the very room with them. In the absence of the lamplight it was clear that a faint phosphorescence had begun to pervade the entire apartment. It glowed on the broad-planked floor and the fragment of rag carpet, and shimmered over the sashes of the small-paned windows. It ran up and down the exposed corner-posts, coruscated about the shelf and mantel, and infected the very doors and furniture. Each minute saw it strengthen, and at last it was very plain that healthy living things must leave that house.
Ammi showed them the back door and the path up through the fields to the ten-acre pasture. They walked and stumbled as in a dream, and did not dare look back till they were far away on the high ground. They were glad of the path, for they could not have gone the front way, by that well. It was bad enough passing the glowing barn and sheds, and those shining orchard trees with their gnarled, fiendish contours; but thank Heaven the branches did their worst twisting high up. The moon went under some very black clouds as they crossed the rustic bridge over Chapman's Brook, and it was blind groping from there to the open meadows.
When they looked back toward the valley and the distant Gardner place at the bottom they saw a fearsome sight. At the farm was shining with the hideous unknown blend of colour; trees, buildings, and even such grass and herbage as had not been wholly changed to lethal grey brittleness. The boughs were all straining skyward, tipped with tongues of foul flame, and lambent tricklings of the same monstrous fire were creeping about the ridgepoles of the house, barn and sheds. It was a scene from a vision of Fuseli, and over all the rest reigned that riot of luminous amorphousness, that alien and undimensioned rainbow of cryptic poison from the well--seething, feeling, lapping, reaching, scintillating, straining, and malignly bubbling in its cosmic and unrecognizable chromaticism.
Then without warning the hideous thing shot vertically up toward the sky like a rocket or meteor, leaving behind no trail and disappearing through a round and curiously regular hole in the clouds before any man could gasp or cry out. No watcher can ever forget that sight, and Ammi stared blankly at the stars of Cygnus, Deneb twinkling above the others, where the unknown colour had melted into the Milky Way. But his gaze was the next moment called swiftly to earth by the crackling in the valley. It was just that. Only a wooden ripping and crackling, and not an explosion, as so many others of the party vowed. Yet the outcome was the same, for in one feverish kaleidoscopic instant there burst up from that doomed and accursed farm a gleamingly eruptive cataclysm of unnatural sparks and substance; blurring the glance of the few who saw it, and sending forth to the zenith a bombarding cloudburst of such coloured and fantastic fragments as our universe must needs disown. Through quickly reclosing vapours they followed the great morbidity that had vanished, and in another second they had vanished too. Behind and below was only a darkness to which the men dared not return, and all about was a mounting wind which seemed to sweep down in black, frore gusts from interstellar space. It shrieked and howled, and lashed the fields and distorted woods in a mad cosmic frenzy, till soon the trembling party realized it would be no use waiting for the moon to show what was left down there at Nahum's.
Too awed even to hint theories, the seven shaking men trudged back toward Arkham by the north road. Ammi was worse than his fellows, and begged them to see him inside his own kitchen, instead of keeping straight on to town. He did not wish to cross the blighted, wind-whipped woods alone to his home on the main road. For he had had an added shock that the others were spared, and was crushed forever with a brooding fear he dared not even mention for many years to come. As the rest of the watchers on that tempestuous hill had stolidly set their faces toward the road, Ammi had looked back an instant at the shadowed valley of desolation so lately sheltering his ill-starred friend. And from that stricken, far-away spot he had seen something feebly rise, only to sink down again upon the place from which the great shapeless horror had shot into the sky. It was just a colour--but not any colour of our earth or heavens. And because Ammi recognized that colour, and knew that this last faint remnant must still lurk down there in the well, he has never been quite right since.
Ammi would never go near the place again. It is forty-four years now since the horror happened, but he has never been there, and will be glad when the new reservoir blots it out. I shall be glad, too, for I do not like the way the sunlight changed colour around the mouth of that abandoned well I passed. I hope the water will always be very deep--but even so, I shall never drink it. I do not think I shall visit the Arkham country hereafter. Three of the men who had been with Ammi returned the next morning to see the ruins by daylight, but there were not any real ruins. Only the bricks of the chimney, the stones of the cellar, some mineral and metallic litter here and there, and the rim of that nefandous well. Save for Ammi's dead horse, which they towed away and buried, and the buggy which they shortly returned to him, everything that had ever been living had gone. Five eldritch acres of dusty grey desert remained, nor has anything ever grown there since. To this day it sprawls open to the sky like a great spot eaten by acid in the woods and fields, and the few who have ever dared glimpse it in spite of the rural tales have named it ""the blasted heath.""
The rural tales are queer. They might be even queerer if city men and college chemists could be interested enough to analyze the water from that disused well, or the grey dust that no wind seems to disperse. Botanists, too, ought to study the stunted flora on the borders of that spot, for they might shed light on the country notion that the blight is spreading--little by little, perhaps an inch a year. People say the colour of the neighboring herbage is not quite right in the spring, and that wild things leave queer prints in the light winter snow. Snow never seems quite so heavy on the blasted heath as it is elsewhere. Horses--the few that are left in this motor age--grow skittish in the silent valley; and hunters cannot depend on their dogs too near the splotch of greyish dust.
They say the mental influences are very bad, too; numbers went queer in the years after Nahum's taking, and always they lacked the power to get away. Then the stronger-minded folk all left the region, and only the foreigners tried to live in the crumbling old homesteads. They could not stay, though; and one sometimes wonders what insight beyond ours their wild, weird stories of whispered magic have given them. Their dreams at night, they protest, are very horrible in that grotesque country; and surely the very look of the dark realm is enough to stir a morbid fancy. No traveler has ever escaped a sense of strangeness in those deep ravines, and artists shiver as they paint thick woods whose mystery is as much of the spirits as of the eye. I myself am curious about the sensation I derived from my one lone walk before Ammi told me his tale. When twilight came I had vaguely wished some clouds would gather, for an odd timidity about the deep skyey voids above had crept into my soul.
Do not ask me for my opinion. I do not know--that is all. There was no one but Ammi to question; for Arkham people will not talk about the strange days, and all three professors who saw the aerolite and its coloured globule are dead. There were other globules--depend upon that. One must have fed itself and escaped, and probably there was another which was too late. No doubt it is still down the well--I know there was something wrong with the sunlight I saw above the miasmal brink. The rustics say the blight creeps an inch a year, so perhaps there is a kind of growth or nourishment even now. But whatever demon hatchling is there, it must be tethered to something or else it would quickly spread. Is it fastened to the roots of those trees that claw the air? One of the current Arkham tales is about fat oaks that shine and move as they ought not to do at night.
What it is, only God knows. In terms of matter I suppose the thing Ammi described would be called a gas, but this gas obeyed the laws that are not of our cosmos. This was no fruit of such worlds and suns as shine on the telescopes and photographic plates of our observatories. This was no breath from the skies whose motions and dimensions our astronomers measure or deem too vast to measure. It was just a colour out of space--a frightful messenger from unformed realms of infinity beyond all Nature as we know it; from realms whose mere existence stuns the brain and numbs us with the black cosmic gulfs it throws open before our frenzied eyes.
I doubt very much if Ammi consciously lied to me, and I do not think his tale was all a freak of madness as the townsfolk had forewarned. Something terrible came to the hills and valleys on that meteor, and something terrible--though I know not in what proportion--still remains. I shall be glad to see the water come. Meanwhile I hope nothing will happen to Ammi. He saw so much of the thing--and its influence was so insidious. Why has he never been able to move away? How clearly he recalled those dying words of Nahum's--""Can't git away--draws ye--ye know summ'at's comin' but tain't no use--"". Ammi is such a good old man--when the reservoir gang gets to work I must write the chief engineer to keep a sharp watch on him. I would hate to think of him as the grey, twisted, brittle monstrosity which persists more and more in troubling my sleep.
",True
"I
The animal paused on the threshold, interrogative alert, ready for flight if necessary. Severn laid down his palette, and held out a hand of welcome. The cat remained motionless, her yellow eyes fastened upon Severn.
""Puss,"" he said, in his low, pleasant voice, ""come in.""
The tip of her thin tail twitched uncertainly.
""Come in,"" he said again.
Apparently she found his voice reassuring, for she slowly settled upon all fours, her eyes still fastened upon him, her tail tucked under her gaunt flanks.
He rose from his easel smiling. She eyed him quietly, and when he walked toward her she watched him bend above her without a wince; her eyes followed his hand until it touched her head. Then she uttered a ragged mew.
It had long been Severn's custom to converse with animals, probably because he lived so much alone; and now he said, ""What's the matter, puss?""
Her timid eyes sought his.
""I understand,"" he said gently, ""you shall have it at once.""
Then moving quietly about he busied himself with the duties of a host, rinsed a saucer, filled it with the rest of the milk from the bottle on the window-sill, and kneeling down, crumbled a roll into the hollow of his hand.
The creature rose and crept toward the saucer.
With the handle of a palette-knife he stirred the crumbs and milk together and stepped back as she thrust her nose into the mess. He watched her in silence. From time to time the saucer clinked upon the tiled floor as she reached for a morsel on the rim; and at last the bread was all gone, and her purple tongue travelled over every unlicked spot until the saucer shone like polished marble. Then she sat up, and coolly turning her back to him, began her ablutions.
""Keep it up,"" said Severn, much interested, ""you need it.""
She flattened one ear, but neither turned nor interrupted her toilet. As the grime was slowly removed Severn observed that nature had intended her for a white cat. Her fur had disappeared in patches, from disease or the chances of war, her tail was bony and her spine sharp. But what charms she had were becoming apparent under vigorous licking, and he waited until she had finished before re-opening the conversation. When at last she closed her eyes and folded her forepaws under her breast, he began again very gently: ""Puss, tell me your troubles.""
At the sound of his voice she broke into a harsh rumbling which he recognized as an attempt to purr. He bent over to rub her cheek and she mewed again, an amiable inquiring little mew, to which he replied, ""Certainly, you are greatly improved, and when you recover your plumage you will be a gorgeous bird."" Much flattered, she stood up and marched around and around his legs, pushing her head between them and making pleased remarks, to which he responded with grave politeness.
""Now, what sent you here,"" he said—""here into the Street of the Four Winds, and up five flights to the very door where you would be welcome? What was it that prevented your meditated flight when I turned from my canvas to encounter your yellow eyes? Are you a Latin Quarter cat as I am a Latin Quarter man? And why do you wear a rose-coloured flowered garter buckled about your neck?"" The cat had climbed into his lap, and now sat purring as he passed his hand over her thin coat.
""Excuse me,"" he continued in lazy soothing tones, harmonizing with her purring, ""if I seem indelicate, but I cannot help musing on this rose-coloured garter, flowered so quaintly and fastened with a silver clasp. For the clasp is silver; I can see the mint mark on the edge, as is prescribed by the law of the French Republic. Now, why is this garter woven of rose silk and delicately embroidered,—why is this silken garter with its silver clasp about your famished throat? Am I indiscreet when I inquire if its owner is your owner? Is she some aged dame living in memory of youthful vanities, fond, doting on you, decorating you with her intimate personal attire? The circumference of the garter would suggest this, for your neck is thin, and the garter fits you. But then again I notice—I notice most things—that the garter is capable of being much enlarged. These small silver-rimmed eyelets, of which I count five, are proof of that. And now I observe that the fifth eyelet is worn out, as though the tongue of the clasp were accustomed to lie there. That seems to argue a well-rounded form.""
The cat curled her toes in contentment. The street was very still outside.
He murmured on: ""Why should your mistress decorate you with an article most necessary to her at all times? Anyway, at most times. How did she come to slip this bit of silk and silver about your neck? Was it the caprice of a moment,—when you, before you had lost your pristine plumpness, marched singing into her bedroom to bid her good-morning? Of course, and she sat up among the pillows, her coiled hair tumbling to her shoulders, as you sprang upon the bed purring: 'Good-day, my lady.' Oh, it is very easy to understand,"" he yawned, resting his head on the back of the chair. The cat still purred, tightening and relaxing her padded claws over his knee.
""Shall I tell you all about her, cat? She is very beautiful—your mistress,"" he murmured drowsily, ""and her hair is heavy as burnished gold. I could paint her,—not on canvas—for I should need shades and tones and hues and dyes more splendid than the iris of a splendid rainbow. I could only paint her with closed eyes, for in dreams alone can such colours as I need be found. For her eyes, I must have azure from skies untroubled by a cloud—the skies of dreamland. For her lips, roses from the palaces of slumberland, and for her brow, snow-drifts from mountains which tower in fantastic pinnacles to the moons;—oh, much higher than our moon here,—the crystal moons of dreamland. She is—very—beautiful, your mistress.""
The words died on his lips and his eyelids drooped.
The cat, too, was asleep, her cheek turned up upon her wasted flank, her paws relaxed and limp.
II
""It is fortunate,"" said Severn, sitting up and stretching, ""that we have tided over the dinner hour, for I have nothing to offer you for supper but what may be purchased with one silver franc.""
The cat on his knee rose, arched her back, yawned, and looked up at him.
""What shall it be? A roast chicken with salad? No? Possibly you prefer beef? Of course,—and I shall try an egg and some white bread. Now for the wines. Milk for you? Good. I shall take a little water, fresh from the wood,"" with a motion toward the bucket in the sink.
He put on his hat and left the room. The cat followed to the door, and after he had closed it behind him, she settled down, smelling at the cracks, and cocking one ear at every creak from the crazy old building.
The door below opened and shut. The cat looked serious, for a moment doubtful, and her ears flattened in nervous expectation. Presently she rose with a jerk of her tail and started on a noiseless tour of the studio. She sneezed at a pot of turpentine, hastily retreating to the table, which she presently mounted, and having satisfied her curiosity concerning a roll of red modelling wax, returned to the door and sat down with her eyes on the crack over the threshold. Then she lifted her voice in a thin plaint.
When Severn returned he looked grave, but the cat, joyous and demonstrative, marched around him, rubbing her gaunt body against his legs, driving her head enthusiastically into his hand, and purring until her voice mounted to a squeal.
He placed a bit of meat, wrapped in brown paper, upon the table, and with a penknife cut it into shreds. The milk he took from a bottle which had served for medicine, and poured it into the saucer on the hearth.
The cat crouched before it, purring and lapping at the same time.
He cooked his egg and ate it with a slice of bread, watching her busy with the shredded meat, and when he had finished, and had filled and emptied a cup of water from the bucket in the sink, he sat down, taking her into his lap, where she at once curled up and began her toilet. He began to speak again, touching her caressingly at times by way of emphasis.
""Cat, I have found out where your mistress lives. It is not very far away;—it is here, under this same leaky roof, but in the north wing which I had supposed was uninhabited. My janitor tells me this. By chance, he is almost sober this evening. The butcher on the rue de Seine, where I bought your meat, knows you, and old Cabane the baker identified you with needless sarcasm. They tell me hard tales of your mistress which I shall not believe. They say she is idle and vain and pleasure-loving; they say she is hare-brained and reckless. The little sculptor on the ground floor, who was buying rolls from old Cabane, spoke to me to-night for the first time, although we have always bowed to each other. He said she was very good and very beautiful. He has only seen her once, and does not know her name. I thanked him;—I don't know why I thanked him so warmly. Cabane said, 'Into this cursed Street of the Four Winds, the four winds blow all things evil.' The sculptor looked confused, but when he went out with his rolls, he said to me, 'I am sure, Monsieur, that she is as good as she is beautiful.'""
The cat had finished her toilet, and now, springing softly to the floor, went to the door and sniffed. He knelt beside her, and unclasping the garter held it for a moment in his hands. After a while he said: ""There is a name engraved upon the silver clasp beneath the buckle. It is a pretty name, Sylvia Elven. Sylvia is a woman's name, Elven is the name of a town. In Paris, in this quarter, above all, in this Street of the Four Winds, names are worn and put away as the fashions change with the seasons. I know the little town of Elven, for there I met Fate face to face and Fate was unkind. But do you know that in Elven Fate had another name, and that name was Sylvia?""
He replaced the garter and stood up looking down at the cat crouched before the closed door.
""The name of Elven has a charm for me. It tells me of meadows and clear rivers. The name of Sylvia troubles me like perfume from dead flowers.""
The cat mewed.
""Yes, yes,"" he said soothingly, ""I will take you back. Your Sylvia is not my Sylvia; the world is wide and Elven is not unknown. Yet in the darkness and filth of poorer Paris, in the sad shadows of this ancient house, these names are very pleasant to me.""
He lifted her in his arms and strode through the silent corridors to the stairs. Down five flights and into the moonlit court, past the little sculptor's den, and then again in at the gate of the north wing and up the worm-eaten stairs he passed, until he came to a closed door. When he had stood knocking for a long time, something moved behind the door; it opened and he went in. The room was dark. As he crossed the threshold, the cat sprang from his arms into the shadows. He listened but heard nothing. The silence was oppressive and he struck a match. At his elbow stood a table and on the table a candle in a gilded candlestick. This he lighted, then looked around. The chamber was vast, the hangings heavy with embroidery. Over the fireplace towered a carved mantel, grey with the ashes of dead fires. In a recess by the deep-set windows stood a bed, from which the bedclothes, soft and fine as lace, trailed to the polished floor. He lifted the candle above his head. A handkerchief lay at his feet. It was faintly perfumed. He turned toward the windows. In front of them was acanapé and over it were flung, pell-mell, a gown of silk, a heap of lace-like garments, white and delicate as spiders' meshes, long, crumpled gloves, and, on the floor beneath, the stockings, the little pointed shoes, and one garter of rosy silk, quaintly flowered and fitted with a silver clasp. Wondering, he stepped forward and drew the heavy curtains from the bed. For a moment the candle flared in his hand; then his eyes met two other eyes, wide open, smiling, and the candle-flame flashed over hair heavy as gold.
She was pale, but not as white as he; her eyes were untroubled as a child's; but he stared, trembling from head to foot, while the candle flickered in his hand.
At last he whispered: ""Sylvia, it is I.""
Again he said, ""It is I.""
Then, knowing that she was dead, he kissed her on the mouth. And through the long watches of the night the cat purred on his knee, tightening and relaxing her padded claws, until the sky paled above the Street of the Four Winds.
","

THERE WERE, I remember, six of us in Conrad's bizarrely fashioned study, with its queer relics from all over the world and its long rows of books which ranged from the Mandrake Press edition of Boccaccio to aMissale Romanum, bound in clasped oak boards and printed in Venice, 1740. Clemants and Professor Kirowan had just engaged in a somewhat testy anthropological argument: Clemants upholding the theory of a separate, distinct Alpine race, while the professor maintained that this so-called race was merely a deviation from an original Aryan stock—possibly the result of an admixture between the southern or Mediterranean races and the Nordic people.
""And how,"" asked Clemants, ""do you account for their brachycephalicism? The Mediterraneans were as long-headed as the Aryans: would admixture between these dolichocephalic peoples produce a broad-headed intermediate type?""
""Special conditions might bring about a change in an originally long- headed race,"" snapped Kirowan. ""Boaz has demonstrated, for instance, that in the case of immigrants to America, skull formations often change in one generation. And Flinders Petrie has shown that the Lombards changed from a long- headed to a round-headed race in a few centuries.""
""But what caused these changes?""
""Much is yet unknown to science,"" answered Kirowan, ""and we need not be dogmatic. No one knows, as yet, why people of British and Irish ancestry tend to grow unusually tall in the Darling district of Australia—Cornstalks, as they are called—or why people of such descent generally have thinner jaw-structures after a few generations in New England. The universe is full of the unexplainable.""
""And therefore the uninteresting, according to Machen,"" laughed Taverel.
Conrad shook his head. ""I must disagree. To me, the unknowable is most tantalizingly fascinating.""
""Which accounts, no doubt, for all the works on witchcraft and demonology I see on your shelves,"" said Ketrick, with a wave of his hand toward the rows of books.
And let me speak of Ketrick. Each of the six of us was of the same breed —that is to say, a Briton or an American of British descent. By British, I include all natural inhabitants of the British Isles. We represented various strains of English and Celtic blood, but basically, these strains are the same after all. But Ketrick: to me the man always seemed strangely alien. It was in his eyes that this difference showed externally. They were a sort of amber, almost yellow, and slightly oblique. At times, when one looked at his face from certain angles, they seemed to slant like a Chinaman's.
Others than I had noticed this feature, so unusual in a man of pure Anglo- Saxon descent. The usual myths ascribing his slanted eyes to some pre-natal influence had been mooted about, and I remember Professor Hendrik Brooler once remarked that Ketrick was undoubtedly an atavism, representing a reversion of type to some dim and distant ancestor of Mongolian blood—a sort of freak reversion, since none of his family showed such traces.
But Ketrick comes of the Welsh branch of the Cetrics of Sussex, and his lineage is set down in the Book of Peers. There you may read the line of his ancestry, which extends unbroken to the days of Canute. No slightest trace of Mongoloid intermixture appears in the genealogy, and how could there have been such intermixture in old Saxon England? For Ketrick is the modern form of Cedric, and though that branch fled into Wales before the invasion of the Danes, its male heirs consistently married with English families on the border marches, and it remains a pure line of the powerful Sussex Cedrics—almost pure Saxon. As for the man himself, this defect of his eyes, if it can be called a defect, is his only abnormality, except for a slight and occasional lisping of speech. He is highly intellectual and a good companion except for a slight aloofness and a rather callous indifference which may serve to mask an extremely sensitive nature.
Referring to his remark, I said with a laugh: ""Conrad pursues the obscure and mystic as some men pursue romance; his shelves throng with delightful nightmares of every variety.""
Our host nodded. ""You'll find there a number of delectable dishes—Machen, Poe, Blackwood, Maturin—look, there's a rare feast—Horrid Mysteries, by the Marquis of Grosse—the real Eighteenth Century edition.""
Taverel scanned the shelves. ""Weird fiction seems to vie with works on witchcraft, voodoo and dark magic.""
True; historians and chronicles are often dull; tale-weavers never —the masters, I mean. A voodoo sacrifice can be described in such a dull manner as to take all the real fantasy out of it, and leave it merely a sordid murder. I will admit that few writers of fiction touch the true heights of horror—most of their stuff is too concrete, given too much earthly shape and dimensions. But in such tales as Poe's Fall of the House of Usher, Machen's Black Seal and Lovecraft's Call of Cthulhu —the three master horror-tales, to my mind—the reader is borne into dark and outer realms of imagination.
""But look there,"" he continued, ""there, sandwiched between that nightmare of Huysmans', and Walpole's Castle of Otranto—Von Junzt'sNameless Cults. There's a book to keep you awake at night!""
""I've read it,"" said Taverel, ""and I'm convinced the man is mad. His work is like the conversation of a maniac—it runs with startling clarity for awhile, then suddenly merges into vagueness and disconnected ramblings.""
Conrad shook his head. ""Have you ever thought that perhaps it is his very sanity that causes him to write in that fashion? What if he dares not put on paper all he knows? What if his vague suppositions are dark and mysterious hints, keys to the puzzle, to those who know?""
""Bosh!"" This from Kirowan. ""Are you intimating that any of the nightmare cults referred to by Von Junzt survive to this day—if they ever existed save in the hag-ridden brain of a lunatic poet and philosopher?""
""Not he alone used hidden meanings,"" answered Conrad. ""If you will scan various works of certain great poets you may find double meanings. Men have stumbled onto cosmic secrets in the past and given a hint of them to the world in cryptic words. Do you remember Von Junzt's hints of 'a city in the waste'? What do you think of Flecker's line:""
'Pass not beneath! Men say there blows in stony deserts still a rose
But with no scarlet to her leaf—and from whose heart no perfume flows.'
""Men may stumble upon secret things, but Von Junzt dipped deep into forbidden mysteries. He was one of the few men, for instance, who could read the Necronomicon in the original Greek translation.""
Taverel shrugged his shoulders, and Professor Kirowan, though he snorted and puffed viciously at his pipe, made no direct reply; for he, as well as Conrad, had delved into the Latin version of the book, and had found there things not even a cold-blooded scientist could answer or refute.
""Well,"" he said presently, ""suppose we admit the former existence of cults revolving about such nameless and ghastly gods and entities as Cthulhu, Yog Sothoth, Tsathoggua, Gol-goroth, and the like, I can not find it in my mind to believe that survivals of such cults lurk in the dark corners of the world today.""
To our surprise Clemants answered. He was a tall, lean man, silent almost to the point of taciturnity, and his fierce struggles with poverty in his youth had lined his face beyond his years. Like many another artist, he lived a distinctly dual literary life, his swashbuckling novels furnishing him a generous income, and his editorial position on The Cloven Hoofaffording him full artistic expression. The Cloven Hoof was a poetry magazine whose bizarre contents had often aroused the shocked interest of the conservative critics.
""You remember Von Junzt makes mention of a so-called Bran cult,"" said Clemants, stuffing his pipe-bowl with a peculiarly villainous brand of shag tobacco. ""I think I heard you and Taverel discussing it once.""
""As I gather from his hints,"" snapped Kirowan, ""Von Junzt includes this particular cult among those still in existence. Absurd.""
Again Clemants shook his head. ""When I was a boy working my way through a certain university, I had for roommate a lad as poor and ambitious as I. If I told you his name, it would startle you. Though he came of an old Scotch line of Galloway, he was obviously of a non-Aryan type.
""This is in strictest confidence, you understand. But my roommate talked in his sleep. I began to listen and put his disjointed mumbling together. And in his mutterings I first heard of the ancient cult hinted at by Von Junzt; of the king who rules the Dark Empire, which was a revival of an older, darker empire dating back into the Stone Age; and of the great, nameless cavern where stands the Dark Man—the image of Bran Mak Morn, carved in his likeness by a master-hand while the great king yet lived, and to which each worshipper of Bran makes a pilgrimage once in his or her lifetime. Yes, that cult lives today in the descendants of Bran's people—a silent, unknown current it flows on in the great ocean of life, waiting for the stone image of the great Bran to breathe and move with sudden life, and come from the great cavern to rebuild their lost empire.""
""And who were the people of that empire?"" asked Ketrick.
""Picts,"" answered Taverel, ""doubtless the people known later as the wild Picts of Galloway were predominantly Celtic—a mixture of Gaelic, Cymric, aboriginal and possibly Teutonic elements. Whether they took their name from the older race or lent their own name to that race, is a matter yet to be decided. But when Von Junzt speaks of Picts, he refers specifically to the small, dark, garlic-eating peoples of Mediterranean blood who brought the Neolithic culture into Britain. The first settlers of that country, in fact, who gave rise to the tales of earth spirits and goblins.""
""I can not agree to that last statement,"" said Conrad. ""These legends ascribe a deformity and inhumanness of appearances to the characters. There was nothing about the Picts to excite such horror and repulsion in the Aryan peoples. I believe that the Mediterraneans were preceded by a Mongoloid type, very low in the scale of development, whence these tales—""
""Quite true,"" broke in Kirowan, ""but I hardly think they preceded the Picts, as you call them, into Britain. We find troll and dwarf legends all over the Continent, and I am inclined to think that both the Mediterranean and Aryan people brought these tales with them from the Continent. They must have been of extremely inhuman aspect, those early Mongoloids.""
""At least,"" said Conrad, ""here is a flint mallet a miner found in the Welsh hills and gave to me, which has never been fully explained. It is obviously of no ordinary Neolithic make. See how small it is, compared to most implements of that age; almost like a child's toy; yet it is surprisingly heavy and no doubt a deadly blow could be dealt with it. I fitted the handle to it, myself, and you would be surprised to know how difficult it was to carve it into a shape and balance corresponding with the head.""
We looked at the thing. It was well made, polished somewhat like the other remnants of the Neolithic I had seen, yet as Conrad said, it was strangely different. Its small size was oddly disquieting, for it had no appearance of a toy, otherwise. It was as sinister in suggestion as an Aztec sacrificial dagger. Conrad had fashioned the oaken handle with rare skill, and in carving it to fit the head, had managed to give it the same unnatural appearance as the mallet itself had. He had even copied the workmanship of primal times, fixing the head into the cleft of the haft with rawhide.
""My word!"" Taverel made a clumsy pass at an imaginary antagonist and nearly shattered a costly Shang vase. ""The balance of the thing is all off- center; I'd have to readjust all my mechanics of poise and equilibrium to handle it.""
""Let me see it,"" Ketrick took the thing and fumbled with it, trying to strike the secret of its proper handling. At length, somewhat irritated, he swung it up and struck a heavy blow at a shield which hung on the wall nearby. I was standing near it; I saw the hellish mallet twist in his hand like a live serpent, and his arm wrenched out of line; I heard a shout of alarmed warning —then darkness came with the impact of the mallet against my head.
Slowly I drifted back to consciousness. First there was dull sensation with blindness and total lack of knowledge as to where I was or what I was; then vague realization of life and being, and a hard something pressing into my ribs. Then the mists cleared and I came to myself completely.
I lay on my back half-beneath some underbrush and my head throbbed fiercely. Also my hair was caked and clotted with blood, for the scalp had been laid open. But my eyes traveled down my body and limbs, naked but for a deerskin loincloth and sandals of the same material, and found no other wound. That which pressed so uncomfortably into my ribs was my ax, on which I had fallen.
Now an abhorrent babble reached my ears and stung me into clear consciousness. The noise was faintly like language, but not such language as men are accustomed to. It sounded much like the repeated hissing of many great snakes.
I stared. I lay in a great, gloomy forest. The glade was overshadowed, so that even in the daytime it was very dark. Aye—that forest was dark, cold, silent, gigantic and utterly grisly. And I looked into the glade.
I saw a shambles. Five men lay there—at least, what had been five men. Now as I marked the abhorrent mutilations my soul sickened. And about clustered the—Things. Humans they were, of a sort, though I did not consider them so. They were short and stocky, with broad heads too large for their scrawny bodies. Their hair was snaky and stringy, their faces broad and square, with flat noses, hideously slanted eyes, a thin gash for a mouth, and pointed ears. They wore the skins of beasts, as did I, but these hides were but crudely dressed. They bore small bows and flint-tipped arrows, flint knives and cudgels. And they conversed in a speech as hideous as themselves, a hissing, reptilian speech that filled me with dread and loathing.
Oh, I hated them as I lay there; my brain flamed with white-hot fury. And now I remembered. We had hunted, we six youths of the Sword People, and wandered far into the grim forest which our people generally shunned. Weary of the chase, we had paused to rest; to me had been given the first watch, for in those days, no sleep was safe without a sentry. Now shame and revulsion shook my whole being. I had slept—I had betrayed my comrades. And now they lay gashed and mangled—butchered while they slept, by vermin who had never dared to stand before them on equal terms. I, Aryara, had betrayed my trust.
Aye—I remembered. I had slept and in the midst of a dream of the hunt, fire and sparks had exploded in my head and I had plunged into a deeper darkness where there were no dreams. And now the penalty. They who had stolen through the dense forest and smitten me senseless, had not paused to mutilate me. Thinking me dead they had hastened swiftly to their grisly work. Now perhaps they had forgotten me for a time. I had sat somewhat apart from the others, and when struck, had fallen half-under some bushes. But soon they would remember me. I would hunt no more, dance no more in the dances of hunt and love and war, see no more the wattle huts of the Sword People.
But I had no wish to escape back to my people. Should I slink back with my tale of infamy and disgrace? Should I hear the words of scorn my tribe would fling at me, see the girls point their contemptuous fingers at the youth who slept and betrayed his comrades to the knives of vermin?
Tears stung my eyes, and slow hate heaved up in my bosom, and my brain. I would never bear the sword that marked the warrior. I would never triumph over worthy foes and die gloriously beneath the arrows of the Picts or the axes of the Wolf People or the River People. I would go down to death beneath a nauseous rabble, whom the Picts had long ago driven into forest dens like rats.
And mad rage gripped me and dried my tears, giving in their stead a berserk blaze of wrath. If such reptiles were to bring about my downfall, I would make it a fall long remembered—if such beasts had memories.
Moving cautiously, I shifted until my hand was on the haft of my ax; then I called on Il-marinen and bounded up as a tiger springs. And as a tiger springs I was among my enemies and mashed a flat skull as a man crushes the head of a snake. A sudden wild clamor of fear broke from my victims and for an instant they closed round me, hacking and stabbing. A knife gashed my chest but I gave no heed. A red mist waved before my eyes, and my body and limbs moved in perfect accord with my fighting brain. Snarling, hacking and smiting, I was a tiger among reptiles. In an instant they gave way and fled, leaving me bestriding half a dozen stunted bodies. But I was not satiated.
I was close on the heels of the tallest one, whose head would perhaps come to my shoulder, and who seemed to be their chief. He fled down a sort of runway, squealing like a monstrous lizard, and when I was close at his shoulder, he dived, snake-like, into the bushes. But I was too swift for him, and I dragged him forth and butchered him in a most gory fashion.
And through the bushes I saw the trail he was striving to reach—a path winding in and out among the trees, almost too narrow to allow the traversing of it by a man of normal size. I hacked off my victim's hideous head, and carrying it in my left hand, went up the serpent-path, with my red ax in my right.
Now as I strode swiftly along the path and blood splashed beside my feet at every step from the severed jugular of my foe, I thought of those I hunted. Aye—we held them in so little esteem, we hunted by day in the forest they haunted. What they called themselves, we never knew; for none of our tribe ever learned the accursed hissing sibilances they used as speech; but we called them Children of the Night. And night-things they were indeed, for they slunk in the depths of the dark forests, and in subterraneous dwellings, venturing forth into the hills only when their conquerors slept. It was at night that they did their foul deeds—the quick flight of a flint-tipped arrow to slay cattle, or perhaps a loitering human, the snatching of a child that had wandered from the village.
But it was for more than this we gave them their name; they were, in truth, people of night and darkness and the ancient horror-ridden shadows of bygone ages. For these creatures were very old, and they represented an outworn age. They had once overrun and possessed this land, and they had been driven into hiding and obscurity by the dark, fierce little Picts with whom we contested now, and who hated and loathed them as savagely as did we.
The Picts were different from us in general appearance, being shorter of stature and dark of hair, eyes and skin, whereas we were tall and powerful, with yellow hair and light eyes. But they were cast in the same mold, for all of that. These Children of the Night seemed not human to us, with their deformed dwarfish bodies, yellow skin and hideous faces. Aye—they were reptiles—vermin.
And my brain was like to burst with fury when I thought that it was these vermin on whom I was to glut my ax and perish. Bah! There is no glory slaying snakes or dying from their bites. All this rage and fierce disappointment turned on the objects of my hatred, and with the old red mist waving in front of me I swore by all the gods I knew, to wreak such red havoc before I died as to leave a dread memory in the minds of the survivors.
My people would not honor me, in such contempt they held the Children. But those Children that I left alive would remember me and shudder. So I swore, gripping savagely my ax, which was of bronze, set in a cleft of the oaken haft and fastened securely with rawhide.
Now I heard ahead a sibilant, abhorrent murmur, and a vile stench filtered to me through the trees, human, yet less than human. A few moments more and I emerged from the deep shadows into a wide open space. I had never before seen a village of the Children. There was a cluster of earthen domes, with low doorways sunk into the ground; squalid dwelling-places, half-above and half-below the earth. And I knew from the talk of the old warriors that these dwelling-places were connected by underground corridors, so the whole village was like an ant-bed, or a system of snake holes. And I wondered if other tunnels did not run off under the ground and emerge long distances from the villages.
Before the domes clustered a vast group of the creatures, hissing and jabbering at a great rate.
I had quickened my pace, and now as I burst from cover, I was running with the fleetness of my race. A wild clamor went up from the rabble as they saw the avenger, tall, bloodstained and blazing-eyed leap from the forest, and I cried out fiercely, flung the dripping head among them and bounded like a wounded tiger into the thick of them.
Oh, there was no escape for them now! They might have taken to their tunnels but I would have followed, even to the guts of Hell. They knew they must slay me, and they closed around, a hundred strong, to do it.
There was no wild blaze of glory in my brain as there had been against worthy foes. But the old berserk madness of my race was in my blood and the smell of blood and destruction in my nostrils.
I know not how many I slew. I only know that they thronged about me in a writhing, slashing mass, like serpents about a wolf, and I smote until the ax- edge turned and bent and the ax became no more than a bludgeon; and I smashed skulls, split heads, splintered bones, scattered blood and brains in one red sacrifice to Il-marinen, god of the Sword People.
Bleeding from half a hundred wounds, blinded by a slash across the eyes, I felt a flint knife sink deep into my groin and at the same instant a cudgel laid my scalp open. I went to my knees but reeled up again, and saw in a thick red fog a ring of leering, slant-eyed faces. I lashed out as a dying tiger strikes, and the faces broke in red ruin.
And as I sagged, overbalanced by the fury of my stroke, a taloned hand clutched my throat and a flint blade was driven into my ribs and twisted venomously. Beneath a shower of blows I went down again, but the man with the knife was beneath me, and with my left hand I found him and broke his neck before he could writhe away.
Life was waning swiftly; through the hissing and howling of the Children I could hear the voice of Il-marinen. Yet once again I rose stubbornly, through a very whirlwind of cudgels and spears. I could no longer see my foes, even in a red mist. But I could feel their blows and knew they surged about me. I braced my feet, gripped my slippery ax-haft with both hands, and calling once more on Il-marinen I heaved up the ax and struck one last terrific blow. And I must have died on my feet, for there was no sensation of falling; even as I knew, with a last thrill of savagery, that slew, even as I felt the splintering of skulls beneath my ax, darkness came with oblivion.
I came suddenly to myself. I was half-reclining in a big armchair and Conrad was pouring water on me. My head ached and a trickle of blood had half- dried on my face. Kirowan, Taverel and Clemants were hovering about, anxiously, while Ketrick stood just in front of me, still holding the mallet, his face schooled to a polite perturbation which his eyes did not show. And at the sight of those cursed eyes a red madness surged up in me.
""There,"" Conrad was saying, ""I told you he'd come out of it in a moment; just a light crack. He's taken harder than that. All right now, aren't you, O'Donnel?""
At that I swept them aside, and with a single low snarl of hatred launched myself at Ketrick. Taken utterly by surprise he had no opportunity to defend himself. My hands locked on his throat and we crashed together on the ruins of a divan. The others cried out in amazement and horror and sprang to separate us—or rather, to tear me from my victim, for already Ketrick's slant eyes were beginning to start from their sockets.
""For God's sake, O'Donnel,"" exclaimed Conrad, seeking to break my grip, ""what's come over you? Ketrick didn't mean to hit you—let go, you idiot!""
A fierce wrath almost overcame me at these men who were my friends, men of my own tribe, and I swore at them and their blindness, as they finally managed to tear my strangling fingers from Ketrick's throat. He sat up and choked and explored the blue marks my fingers had left, while I raged and cursed, nearly defeating the combined efforts of the four to hold me.
""You fools!"" I screamed. ""Let me go! Let me do my duty as a tribesman! You blind fools! I care nothing for the paltry blow he dealt me—he and his dealt stronger blows than that against me, in bygone ages. You fools, he is marked with the brand of the beast—the reptile—the vermin we exterminated centuries ago! I must crush him, stamp him out, rid the clean earth of his accursed pollution!""
So I raved and struggled and Conrad gasped to Ketrick over his shoulder: ""Get out, quick! He's out of his head! His mind is unhinged! Get away from him.""
Now I look out over the ancient dreaming downs and the hills and deep forests beyond and I ponder. Somehow, that blow from that ancient accursed mallet knocked me back into another age and another life. While I was Aryara I had no cognizance of any other life. It was no dream; it was a stray bit of reality wherein I, John O'Donnel, once lived and died, and back into which I was snatched across the voids of time and space by a chance blow. Time and times are but cogwheels, unmatched, grinding on oblivious to one another. Occasionally—oh, very rarely!—the cogs fit; the pieces of the plot snap together momentarily and give men faint glimpses beyond the veil of this everyday blindness we call reality.
I am John O'Donnel and I was Aryara, who dreamed dreams of war-glory and hunt-glory and feast-glory and who died on a red heap of his victims in some lost age. But in what age and where?
The last I can answer for you. Mountains and rivers change their contours; the landscapes alter; but the downs least of all. I look out upon them now and I remember them, not only with John O'Donnel's eyes, but with the eyes of Aryara. They are but little changed. Only the great forest has shrunk and dwindled and in many, many places vanished utterly. But here on these very downs Aryara lived and fought and loved and in yonder forest he died. Kirowan was wrong. The little, fierce, dark Picts were not the first men in the Isles. There were beings before them—aye, the Children of the Night. Legends —why, the Children were not unknown to us when we came into what is now the isle of Britain. We had encountered them before, ages before. Already we had our myths of them. But we found them in Britain. Nor had the Picts totally exterminated them.
Nor had the Picts, as so many believe, preceded us by many centuries. We drove them before us as we came, in that long drift from the East. I, Aryara, knew old men who had marched on that century-long trek; who had been borne in the arms of yellow-haired women over countless miles of forest and plain, and who as youths had walked in the vanguard of the invaders.
As to the age—that I cannot say. But I, Aryara, was surely an Aryan and my people were Aryans—members of one of the thousand unknown and unrecorded drifts that scattered yellow-haired blue-eyed tribes all over the world. The Celts were not the first to come into western Europe. I, Aryara, was of the same blood and appearance as the men who sacked Rome, but mine was a much older strain. Of the language spoke, no echo remains in the waking mind of John O'Donnel, but I knew that Aryara's tongue was to ancient Celtic what ancient Celtic is to modern Gaelic.
Il-marinen! I remember the god I called upon, the ancient, ancient god who worked in metals—in bronze then. For Il-marinen was one of the base gods of the Aryans from whom many gods grew; and he was Wieland and Vulcan in the ages of iron. But to Aryara he was Il-marinen.
And Aryara—he was one of many tribes and many drifts. Not alone did the Sword People come or dwell in Britain. The River People were before us and the Wolf People came later. But they were Aryans like us, light-eyed and tall and blond. We fought them, for the reason that the various drifts of Aryans have always fought each other, just as the Achaeans fought the Dorians, just as the Celts and Germans cut each other's throats; aye, just as the Hellenes and the Persians, who were once one people and of the same drift, split in two different ways on the long trek and centuries later met and flooded Greece and Asia Minor with blood.
Now understand, all this I did not know as Aryara. I, Aryara, knew nothing of all these world-wide drifts of my race. I knew only that my people were conquerors, that a century ago my ancestors had dwelt in the great plains far to the east, plains populous with fierce, yellow-haired, light-eyed people like myself; that my ancestors had come westward in a great drift; and that in that drift, when my tribesmen met tribes of other races, they trampled and destroyed them, and when they met other yellow-haired, light-eyed people, of older or newer drifts, they fought savagely and mercilessly, according to the old, illogical custom of the Aryan people. This Aryara knew, and I, John O'Donnel, who know much more and much less than I, Aryara, knew, have combined the knowledge of these separate selves and have come to conclusions that would startle many noted scientists and historians.
Yet this fact is well known: Aryans deteriorate swiftly in sedentary and peaceful lives. Their proper existence is a nomadic one; when they settle down to an agricultural existence, they pave the way for their downfall; and when they pen themselves with city walls, they seal their doom. Why, I, Aryara, remember the tales of the old men—how the Sons of the Sword, on that long drift, found villages of white-skinned yellow-haired people who had drifted into the west centuries before and had quit the wandering life to dwell among the dark, garlic-eating people and gain their sustenance from the soil. And the old men told how soft and weak they were, and how easily they fell before the bronze blades of the Sword People.
Look—is not the whole history of the Sons of Aryan laid on those lines? Look—how swiftly has Persian followed Mede; Greek, Persian; Roman, Greek; and German, Roman. Aye, and the Norseman followed the Germanic tribes when they had grown flabby from a century or so of peace and idleness, and despoiled the spoils they had taken in the southland.
But let me speak of Ketrick. Ha—the short hairs at the back of my neck bristle at the very mention of his name. A reversion to type—but not to the type of some cleanly Chinaman or Mongol of recent times. The Danes drove his ancestors into the hills of Wales; and there, in what medieval century, and in what foul way did that cursed aboriginal taint creep into the clean Saxon blood of the Celtic line, there to lie dormant so long? The Celtic Welsh never mated with the Children any more than the Picts did. But there must have been survivals—vermin lurking in those grim hills, that had outlasted their time and age. In Aryara's day they were scarcely human. What must a thousand years of retrogression have done to the breed?
What foul shape stole into the Ketrick castle on some forgotten night, or rose out of the dusk to grip some woman of the line, straying in the hills?
The mind shrinks from such an image. But this I know: there must have been survivals of that foul, reptilian epoch when the Ketricks went into Wales. There still may be. But this changeling, this waif of darkness, this horror who bears the noble name of Ketrick, the brand of the serpent is upon him, and until he is destroyed there is no rest for me. Now that I know him for what he is, he pollutes the clean air and leaves the slime of the snake on the green earth. The sound of his lisping, hissing voice fills me with crawling horror and the sight of his slanted eyes inspires me with madness.
For I come of a royal race, and such as he is a continual insult and a threat, like a serpent underfoot. Mine is a regal race, though now it is become degraded and falls into decay by continual admixture with conquered races. The waves of alien blood have washed my hair black and my skin dark, but I still have the lordly stature and the blue eyes of a royal Aryan.
And as my ancestors—as I, Aryara, destroyed the scum that writhed beneath our heels, so shall I, John O'Donnel, exterminate the reptilian thing, the monster bred of the snaky taint that slumbered so long unguessed in clean Saxon veins, the vestigial serpent-things left to taunt the Sons of Aryan. They say the blow I received affected my mind; I know it but opened my eyes. Mine ancient enemy walks often on the moors alone, attracted, though he may not know it, by ancestral urgings. And on one of these lonely walks I shall meet him, and when I meet him, I will break his foul neck with my hands, as I, Aryara, broke the necks of foul night-things in the long, long ago.
Then they may take me and break my neck at the end of a rope if they will. I am not blind, if my friends are. And in the sight of the old Aryan god, if not in the blinded eyes of men, I will have kept faith with my tribe.
",False
"I
The animal paused on the threshold, interrogative alert, ready for flight if necessary. Severn laid down his palette, and held out a hand of welcome. The cat remained motionless, her yellow eyes fastened upon Severn.
""Puss,"" he said, in his low, pleasant voice, ""come in.""
The tip of her thin tail twitched uncertainly.
""Come in,"" he said again.
Apparently she found his voice reassuring, for she slowly settled upon all fours, her eyes still fastened upon him, her tail tucked under her gaunt flanks.
He rose from his easel smiling. She eyed him quietly, and when he walked toward her she watched him bend above her without a wince; her eyes followed his hand until it touched her head. Then she uttered a ragged mew.
It had long been Severn's custom to converse with animals, probably because he lived so much alone; and now he said, ""What's the matter, puss?""
Her timid eyes sought his.
""I understand,"" he said gently, ""you shall have it at once.""
Then moving quietly about he busied himself with the duties of a host, rinsed a saucer, filled it with the rest of the milk from the bottle on the window-sill, and kneeling down, crumbled a roll into the hollow of his hand.
The creature rose and crept toward the saucer.
With the handle of a palette-knife he stirred the crumbs and milk together and stepped back as she thrust her nose into the mess. He watched her in silence. From time to time the saucer clinked upon the tiled floor as she reached for a morsel on the rim; and at last the bread was all gone, and her purple tongue travelled over every unlicked spot until the saucer shone like polished marble. Then she sat up, and coolly turning her back to him, began her ablutions.
""Keep it up,"" said Severn, much interested, ""you need it.""
She flattened one ear, but neither turned nor interrupted her toilet. As the grime was slowly removed Severn observed that nature had intended her for a white cat. Her fur had disappeared in patches, from disease or the chances of war, her tail was bony and her spine sharp. But what charms she had were becoming apparent under vigorous licking, and he waited until she had finished before re-opening the conversation. When at last she closed her eyes and folded her forepaws under her breast, he began again very gently: ""Puss, tell me your troubles.""
At the sound of his voice she broke into a harsh rumbling which he recognized as an attempt to purr. He bent over to rub her cheek and she mewed again, an amiable inquiring little mew, to which he replied, ""Certainly, you are greatly improved, and when you recover your plumage you will be a gorgeous bird."" Much flattered, she stood up and marched around and around his legs, pushing her head between them and making pleased remarks, to which he responded with grave politeness.
""Now, what sent you here,"" he said—""here into the Street of the Four Winds, and up five flights to the very door where you would be welcome? What was it that prevented your meditated flight when I turned from my canvas to encounter your yellow eyes? Are you a Latin Quarter cat as I am a Latin Quarter man? And why do you wear a rose-coloured flowered garter buckled about your neck?"" The cat had climbed into his lap, and now sat purring as he passed his hand over her thin coat.
""Excuse me,"" he continued in lazy soothing tones, harmonizing with her purring, ""if I seem indelicate, but I cannot help musing on this rose-coloured garter, flowered so quaintly and fastened with a silver clasp. For the clasp is silver; I can see the mint mark on the edge, as is prescribed by the law of the French Republic. Now, why is this garter woven of rose silk and delicately embroidered,—why is this silken garter with its silver clasp about your famished throat? Am I indiscreet when I inquire if its owner is your owner? Is she some aged dame living in memory of youthful vanities, fond, doting on you, decorating you with her intimate personal attire? The circumference of the garter would suggest this, for your neck is thin, and the garter fits you. But then again I notice—I notice most things—that the garter is capable of being much enlarged. These small silver-rimmed eyelets, of which I count five, are proof of that. And now I observe that the fifth eyelet is worn out, as though the tongue of the clasp were accustomed to lie there. That seems to argue a well-rounded form.""
The cat curled her toes in contentment. The street was very still outside.
He murmured on: ""Why should your mistress decorate you with an article most necessary to her at all times? Anyway, at most times. How did she come to slip this bit of silk and silver about your neck? Was it the caprice of a moment,—when you, before you had lost your pristine plumpness, marched singing into her bedroom to bid her good-morning? Of course, and she sat up among the pillows, her coiled hair tumbling to her shoulders, as you sprang upon the bed purring: 'Good-day, my lady.' Oh, it is very easy to understand,"" he yawned, resting his head on the back of the chair. The cat still purred, tightening and relaxing her padded claws over his knee.
""Shall I tell you all about her, cat? She is very beautiful—your mistress,"" he murmured drowsily, ""and her hair is heavy as burnished gold. I could paint her,—not on canvas—for I should need shades and tones and hues and dyes more splendid than the iris of a splendid rainbow. I could only paint her with closed eyes, for in dreams alone can such colours as I need be found. For her eyes, I must have azure from skies untroubled by a cloud—the skies of dreamland. For her lips, roses from the palaces of slumberland, and for her brow, snow-drifts from mountains which tower in fantastic pinnacles to the moons;—oh, much higher than our moon here,—the crystal moons of dreamland. She is—very—beautiful, your mistress.""
The words died on his lips and his eyelids drooped.
The cat, too, was asleep, her cheek turned up upon her wasted flank, her paws relaxed and limp.
II
""It is fortunate,"" said Severn, sitting up and stretching, ""that we have tided over the dinner hour, for I have nothing to offer you for supper but what may be purchased with one silver franc.""
The cat on his knee rose, arched her back, yawned, and looked up at him.
""What shall it be? A roast chicken with salad? No? Possibly you prefer beef? Of course,—and I shall try an egg and some white bread. Now for the wines. Milk for you? Good. I shall take a little water, fresh from the wood,"" with a motion toward the bucket in the sink.
He put on his hat and left the room. The cat followed to the door, and after he had closed it behind him, she settled down, smelling at the cracks, and cocking one ear at every creak from the crazy old building.
The door below opened and shut. The cat looked serious, for a moment doubtful, and her ears flattened in nervous expectation. Presently she rose with a jerk of her tail and started on a noiseless tour of the studio. She sneezed at a pot of turpentine, hastily retreating to the table, which she presently mounted, and having satisfied her curiosity concerning a roll of red modelling wax, returned to the door and sat down with her eyes on the crack over the threshold. Then she lifted her voice in a thin plaint.
When Severn returned he looked grave, but the cat, joyous and demonstrative, marched around him, rubbing her gaunt body against his legs, driving her head enthusiastically into his hand, and purring until her voice mounted to a squeal.
He placed a bit of meat, wrapped in brown paper, upon the table, and with a penknife cut it into shreds. The milk he took from a bottle which had served for medicine, and poured it into the saucer on the hearth.
The cat crouched before it, purring and lapping at the same time.
He cooked his egg and ate it with a slice of bread, watching her busy with the shredded meat, and when he had finished, and had filled and emptied a cup of water from the bucket in the sink, he sat down, taking her into his lap, where she at once curled up and began her toilet. He began to speak again, touching her caressingly at times by way of emphasis.
""Cat, I have found out where your mistress lives. It is not very far away;—it is here, under this same leaky roof, but in the north wing which I had supposed was uninhabited. My janitor tells me this. By chance, he is almost sober this evening. The butcher on the rue de Seine, where I bought your meat, knows you, and old Cabane the baker identified you with needless sarcasm. They tell me hard tales of your mistress which I shall not believe. They say she is idle and vain and pleasure-loving; they say she is hare-brained and reckless. The little sculptor on the ground floor, who was buying rolls from old Cabane, spoke to me to-night for the first time, although we have always bowed to each other. He said she was very good and very beautiful. He has only seen her once, and does not know her name. I thanked him;—I don't know why I thanked him so warmly. Cabane said, 'Into this cursed Street of the Four Winds, the four winds blow all things evil.' The sculptor looked confused, but when he went out with his rolls, he said to me, 'I am sure, Monsieur, that she is as good as she is beautiful.'""
The cat had finished her toilet, and now, springing softly to the floor, went to the door and sniffed. He knelt beside her, and unclasping the garter held it for a moment in his hands. After a while he said: ""There is a name engraved upon the silver clasp beneath the buckle. It is a pretty name, Sylvia Elven. Sylvia is a woman's name, Elven is the name of a town. In Paris, in this quarter, above all, in this Street of the Four Winds, names are worn and put away as the fashions change with the seasons. I know the little town of Elven, for there I met Fate face to face and Fate was unkind. But do you know that in Elven Fate had another name, and that name was Sylvia?""
He replaced the garter and stood up looking down at the cat crouched before the closed door.
""The name of Elven has a charm for me. It tells me of meadows and clear rivers. The name of Sylvia troubles me like perfume from dead flowers.""
The cat mewed.
""Yes, yes,"" he said soothingly, ""I will take you back. Your Sylvia is not my Sylvia; the world is wide and Elven is not unknown. Yet in the darkness and filth of poorer Paris, in the sad shadows of this ancient house, these names are very pleasant to me.""
He lifted her in his arms and strode through the silent corridors to the stairs. Down five flights and into the moonlit court, past the little sculptor's den, and then again in at the gate of the north wing and up the worm-eaten stairs he passed, until he came to a closed door. When he had stood knocking for a long time, something moved behind the door; it opened and he went in. The room was dark. As he crossed the threshold, the cat sprang from his arms into the shadows. He listened but heard nothing. The silence was oppressive and he struck a match. At his elbow stood a table and on the table a candle in a gilded candlestick. This he lighted, then looked around. The chamber was vast, the hangings heavy with embroidery. Over the fireplace towered a carved mantel, grey with the ashes of dead fires. In a recess by the deep-set windows stood a bed, from which the bedclothes, soft and fine as lace, trailed to the polished floor. He lifted the candle above his head. A handkerchief lay at his feet. It was faintly perfumed. He turned toward the windows. In front of them was acanapé and over it were flung, pell-mell, a gown of silk, a heap of lace-like garments, white and delicate as spiders' meshes, long, crumpled gloves, and, on the floor beneath, the stockings, the little pointed shoes, and one garter of rosy silk, quaintly flowered and fitted with a silver clasp. Wondering, he stepped forward and drew the heavy curtains from the bed. For a moment the candle flared in his hand; then his eyes met two other eyes, wide open, smiling, and the candle-flame flashed over hair heavy as gold.
She was pale, but not as white as he; her eyes were untroubled as a child's; but he stared, trembling from head to foot, while the candle flickered in his hand.
At last he whispered: ""Sylvia, it is I.""
Again he said, ""It is I.""
Then, knowing that she was dead, he kissed her on the mouth. And through the long watches of the night the cat purred on his knee, tightening and relaxing her padded claws, until the sky paled above the Street of the Four Winds.
","In that great blizzard which, on the 4th of February, struck the eastern coast of the United States from Georgia to Maine, John Recklow and his men hunted Sanang, the last of the Yezidees.

And Sanang clung like a demon to the country which he had doomed to destruction, imbedding each claw again as it was torn loose, battling for the supremacy of evil with all his dreadful psychic power, striving still to seize, cripple, and slay the bodies and souls of a hundred million Americans.

Again he scattered the uncounted myriads of germs of the Black Plague which he and his Yezidees had brought out of Mongolia a year before; and once more the plague swept over the country, and thousands on thousands died.

But now the National, State and City governments were fighting, with physicians, nurses, and police, this gruesome epidemic which had come into the world from they knew not where. And National, State and City governments, aroused at last, were fighting the more terrible plague of anarchy.

Nation-wide raids were made from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from the Gulf to the Lakes. Thousands of terrorists of all shades and stripes whose minds had been seized and poisoned by the Yezidees were being arrested. Deportations had begun; government agents were everywhere swarming to clean out the foulness that had struck deeper into the body of the Republic than any one had supposed.

And it seemed, at last, as though the Red Plague, too, was about to be stamped out along with the Black Death called Influenza.

But only a small group of Secret Service men knew that a resurgence of these horrors was inevitable unless Sanang, the Slayer of Souls, was destroyed. And they knew, too, that only one person in America could hope to destroy Sanang, the last of the Yezidees, and that was Tressa Cleves.

Only by the sudden onset of the plague in various cities of the land had Recklow any clew concerning the whereabouts of Sanang.

In Boston, then Washington, then Kansas City, and then New York the epidemic suddenly blazed up. And in these places of death the Secret Service men always found a clew, and there they hunted Sanang, the Yezidee, to kill him without mercy where they might find him.

But they never found Sanang Noïane; only the ghastly marks of his poisoned claws on the body of the sickened nation—only minds diseased by the Red Plague and bodies dying of the Black Death—civil and social centres disorganized, disrupted, depraved, dying.

When the blizzard burst upon New York, struggling in the throes of the plague, and paralysed the metropolis for a week, John Recklow sent out a special alarm, and New York swarmed with Secret Service men searching the snow-buried city for a graceful, slender, dark young man whose eyes slanted a trifle in his amber-tinted face; who dressed fashionably, lived fastidiously, and spoke English perfectly in a delightfully modulated voice.

And to New York, thrice stricken by anarchy, by plague, and now by God, hurried, from all parts of the nation, thousands of secret agents who had been hunting Sanang in distant cities or who had been raiding the traitorous and secret gatherings of his mental dupes.

Agent ZB-303, who was volunteer agent James Benton, came from Boston with his new bride who had just arrived by way of England—a young girl named Yulun who landed swathed in sables, and stretched out both lovely little hands to Benton the instant she caught sight of him on the pier. Whereupon he took the slim figure in furs into his arms, which was interesting because they had never before met in the flesh.

So,—their honeymoon scarce begun, Benton and Yulun came from Boston in answer to Recklow's emergency call.

And all the way across from San Francisco came volunteer agent XLY-371, otherwise Alek Selden, bringing with him a girl named Sansa whom he had gone to the coast to meet, and whom he had immediately married after she had landed from the Japanese steamer Nan-yang Maru. Which, also, was remarkable, because, although they recognised each other instantly, and their hands and lips clung as they met, neither had ever before beheld the living body of the other.

The third man who came to New York at Recklow's summons was volunteer agent 53-6-26, otherwise Victor Cleves.

His young wife, suffering from nervous shock after the deaths of Togrul Khan and of the Baroulass girl, Aoula, had been convalescing in a private sanitarium in Westchester.

Until the summons came to her husband from Recklow, she had seen him only for a few moments every day. But the call to duty seemed to have effected a miraculous cure in the slender, blue-eyed girl who had lain all day long, day after day, in her still, sunny room scarcely unclosing her eyes at all save only when her husband was permitted to enter for the few minutes allowed them every day.

The physician had just left, after admitting that Mrs. Cleves seemed to be well enough to travel if she insisted; and she and her maid had already begun to pack when her husband came into her room.

She looked around over her shoulder, then rose from her knees, flung an armful of clothing into the trunk before which she had been kneeling, and came across the room to him. Then she dismissed her maid from the room. And when the girl had gone:

""I am well, Victor,"" she said in a low voice. ""Why are you troubled?""

""I can't bear to have you drawn into this horrible affair once more.""

""Who else is there to discover and overcome Sanang?"" she asked calmly.

He remained silent.

So, for a few moments they stood confronting each other there in the still, sunny chamber—husband and wife who had never even exchanged the first kiss—two young creatures more vitally and intimately bound together than any two on earth—yet utterly separated body and soul from each other—two solitary spirits which had never merged; two bodies virginal and inviolate.

Tressa spoke first: ""I must go. That was our bargain.""

The word made him wince as though it had been a sudden blow. Then his face flushed red.

""Bargain or no bargain,"" he said, ""I don't want you to go because I'm afraid you can not endure another shock like the last one.... And every time you have thrown your own mind and body between this Nation and destruction you have nearly died of it.""

""And if I die?"" she said in a low voice.

What answer she awaited—perhaps hoped for—was not the one he made. He said: ""If you die in what you believe to be your line of duty, then it will be I who have killed you.""

""That would not be true. It is you who have saved me.""

""I have not. I have done nothing except to lead you into danger of death since I first met you. If you mean spiritually, that also is untrue. You have saved yourself—if that indeed were necessary. You have redeemed yourself—if it is true you needed redemption—which I never believed——""

""Oh,"" she sighed swiftly, ""Sanang surprised my soul when it was free of my body—followed my soul into the Wood of the White Moth—caught it there all alone—and—slew it!""

His lips and throat had gone dry as he watched the pallid terror grow in her face.

Presently he recovered his voice: ""You call that Yezidee the Slayer of Souls,"" he said, ""but I tell you there is no such creature, no such power!

""I suppose I—I know what you mean—having seen what we call souls dissociated from their physical bodies—but that this Yezidee could do you any spiritual damage I do not for one instant believe. The idea is monstrous, I tell you——""

""I—I fought him—soul battling against soul——"" she stammered, breathing faster and irregularly. ""I struggled with Sanang there in the Wood of the White Moth. I called on God! I called on my two great dogs, Bars and Alaga! I recited the Fatha with all my strength—fighting convulsively whenever his soul seized mine; I cried out the name of Khidr, begging for wisdom! I called on the Ten Imaums, on Ali the Lion, on the Blessed Companions. Then I tore my spirit out of the grasp of his soul—but there was no escape!—no escape,"" she wailed. ""For on every side I saw the cloud-topped rampart of Gog and Magog, and the woods rang with Erlik's laughter—the dissonant mirth of hell——""

She began to shudder and sway a little, then with an effort she controlled herself in a measure.

""There never has been,"" she began again with lips that quivered in spite of her—""there never has been one moment in our married lives when my soul dared forget the Wood of the White Moth—dared seek yours.... God lives. But so does Erlik. There are angels; but there are as many demons.... My soul is ashamed.... And very lonely ... very lonely ... but no fit companion—for yours——""

Her hands dropped listlessly beside her and her chin sank.

""So you believe that Yezidee devil caught your soul when it was wandering somewhere out of your body, and destroyed it,"" he said.

She did not answer, did not even lift her eyes until he had stepped close to her—closer than he had ever come. Then she looked up at him, but closed her eyes as he swept her into his arms and crushed her face and body against his own.

Now her red lips were on his; now her face and heart and limbs and breast melted into his—her breath, her pulse, her strength flowed into his and became part of their single being and single pulse and breath. And she felt their two souls flame and fuse together, and burn together in one heavenly blaze—felt the swift conflagration mount, overwhelm, and sweep her clean of the last lingering taint; felt her soul, unafraid, clasp her husband's spirit in its white embrace—clung to him, uplifted out of hell, rising into the blinding light of Paradise.

Far—far away she heard her own voice in singing whispers—heard her lips pronounce The Name—""Ata—Ata! Allahou——""

Her blue eyes unclosed; through a mist, in which she saw her husband's face, grew a vast metallic clamour in her ears.

Her husband kissed her, long, silently; then, retaining her hand, he turned and lifted the receiver from the clamouring telephone.

""Yes! Yes, this is 53-6-26. Yes, V-69 is with me.... When?... To-day?... Very well.... Yes, we'll come at once.... Yes, we can get a train in a few minutes.... All right. Good-bye.""

He took his wife into his arms again.

""Dearest of all in the world,"" he said, ""Sanang is cornered in a row of houses near the East River, and Recklow has flung a cordon around the entire block. Good God! I can't take you there!""

Then Tressa smiled, drew his head down, looked into his face till the clear blue splendour of her gaze stilled the tumult in his brain.

""I alone know how to deal with Prince Sanang,"" she said quietly. ""And if John Recklow, or you, or Mr. Benton or Mr. Selden should kill him with your pistols, it would be only his body you slay, not the evil thing that would escape you and return to Erlik.""

""Must you do this thing, Tressa?""

""Yes, I must do it.""

""But—if our pistols cannot kill this sorcerer, how are you going to deal with him?""

""I know how.""

""Have you the strength?""

""Yes—the bodily and the spiritual. Don't you know that I am already part of you?""

""We shall be nearer still,"" he murmured.

She flushed but met his gaze.

""Yes.... We shall be but one being.... Utterly.... For already our hearts and souls are one. And we shall become of one mind and one body.

""I am no longer afraid of Sanang Noïane!""

""No longer afraid to slay him?"" he asked quietly.

A blue light flashed in her eyes and her face grew still and white and terrible.

""Death to the body? That is nothing, my lord!"" she said, in a hard, sweet voice. ""It is written that we belong to God and that we return to Him. All living things must die, Heart of the World! It is only the death of souls that matters. And it has arrived at a time in the history of mankind, I think, when the Slayer of Souls shall slay no more.""

She looked at him, flushed, withdrew her hand and went slowly across the room to the big bay window where potted flowers were in bloom.

From a window-box she took a pinch of dry soil and dropped it into the bosom of her gown.

Then, facing the East, with lowered arms and palms turned outward:

""There is no god but God,"" she whispered—""the merciful, the long-suffering, the compassionate, the just.

""For it is written that when the heavens are rolled together like a scroll, every soul shall know what it hath wrought.

""And those souls that are dead in Jehannum shall arise from the dead, and shall have their day in court. Nor shall Erlik stay them till all has been said.

""And on that day the soul of a girl that hath been put to death shall ask for what reason it was slain.

""Thus it has been written.""

Then Tressa dropped to her knees, touched the carpet with her forehead, straightened her lithe body and, looking over her shoulder, clapped her hands together sharply.

Her maid opened the door. ""Hasten with my lord's luggage!"" she cried happily; and, still kneeling, lifted her head to her husband and laughed up into his eyes.

""You should call the porter for we are nearly ready. Shall we go to the station in a sleigh? Oh, wonderful!""

She leaped to her feet, extended her hand and caught his.

""Horses for the lord of the Yiort!"" she cried, laughingly. ""Kosh! Take me out into this new white world that has been born to-day of the ten purities and the ten thousand felicities! It has been made anew for you and me who also have been born this day!""

He scarcely knew this sparkling, laughing girl with her quick grace and her thousand swift little moods and gaieties.

Porters came to take his luggage from his own room; and then her trunk and bags were ready, and were taken away.

The baggage sleigh drove off. Their own jingling sleigh followed; and Tressa, buried in furs, looked out upon a dazzling, unblemished world, lying silvery white under a sky as azure as her eyes.

""Keuke Mongol—Heavenly Azure,"" he whispered close to her crimsoned cheek, ""do you know how I have loved you—always—always?""

""No, I did not know that,"" she said.

""Nor I, in the beginning. Yet it happened, also, from the beginning when I first saw you.""

""That is a delicious thing to be told. Within me a most heavenly glow is spreading.... Unglove your hand.""

She slipped the glove from her own white fingers and felt for his under the furs.

""Aie,"" she sighed, ""you are more beautiful than Ali; more wonderful than the Flaming Pearl. Out of ice and fire a new world has been made for us.""

""Heavenly Azure—my darling!""

""Oh-h,"" she sighed, ""your words are sweeter than the breeze in Yian! I shall be a bride to you such as there never has been since the days of the Blessed Companions—may their names be perfumed and sweet-scented!... Shall I truly be one with you, my lord?""

""Mind, soul, and body, one being, you and I, little Heavenly Azure.""

""Between your two hands you hold me like a burning rose, my lord.""

""Your sweetness and fire penetrate my soul.""

""We shall burn together then till the sky-carpet be rolled up. Kosh! We shall be one, and on that day I shall not be afraid.""

The sleigh came to a clashing, jingling halt; the train plowed into the depot buried in vast clouds of snowy steam.

But when they had taken the places reserved for them, and the train was moving swifter and more swiftly toward New York, fear suddenly overwhelmed Victor Cleves, and his face grew grey with the menacing tumult of his thoughts.

The girl seemed to comprehend him, too, and her own features became still and serious as she leaned forward in her chair.

""It is in God's hands, Heart of the World,"" she said in a low voice. ""We are one, thou and I,—or nearly so. Nothing can harm my soul.""

""No.... But the danger—to your life——""

""I fear no Yezidee.""

""The beast will surely try to kill you. And what can I do? You say my pistol is useless.""

""Yes.... But I want you near me.""

""Do you imagine I'd leave you for a second? Good God,"" he added in a strangled voice, ""isn't there any way I can kill this wild beast? With my naked hands——?""

""You must leave him to me, Victor.""

""And you believe you can slay him? Do you?""

She remained silent for a long while, bent forward in her armchair, and her hands clasped tightly on her knees.

""My husband,"" she said at last, ""what your astronomers have but just begun to suspect is true, and has long, long been known to the Sheiks-el-Djebel.

""For, near to this world we live in, are other worlds—planets that do not reflect light. And there is a dark world called Yrimid, close to the earth—a planet wrapped in darkness—a black star.... And upon it Erlik dwells.... And it is peopled by demons.... And from it comes sickness and evil——""

She moistened her lips; sat for a while gazing vaguely straight before her.

""From this black planet comes all evil upon earth,"" she resumed in a hushed voice. ""For it is very near to the earth. It is not a hundred miles away. All strange phenomena for which our scientists can not account are due to this invisible planet,—all new and sudden pestilences; all convulsions of nature; the newly noticed radio disturbances; the new, so-called inter-planetary signals—all—all have their hidden causes within that black and demon-haunted planet long known to the Yezidees, and by them called Yrimid, or Erlik's World. And—it is to this black planet that I shall send Sanang, Slayer of Souls. I shall tear him from this earth, though he cling to it with every claw; and I shall fling his soul into darkness—out across the gulf—drive his soul forth—hurl it toward Erlik like a swift rocket charred and falling from the sky into endless night.

""So shall I strive to deal with Prince Sanang, Sorcerer of Mount Alamout, the last of the Assassins, Sheik-el-Djebel, and Slayer of Souls.... May God remember him in hell.""

Already their train was rolling into the great terminal.

Recklow was awaiting them. He took Tressa's hands in his and gazed earnestly into her face.

""Have you come to show us how to conclude this murderous business?"" he asked grimly.

""I shall try,"" she said calmly. ""Where have you cornered Sanang?""

""Could you and Victor come at once?""

""Yes."" She turned and looked at her husband, who had become quite pale.

Recklow saw the look they exchanged. There could be no misunderstanding what had happened to these two. Their tragedy had ended. They were united at last. He understood it instantly,—realised how terrible was this new and tragic situation for them both.

Yet, he knew also that the salvation of civilisation itself now depended upon this girl. She must face Sanang. There was nothing else possible.

""The streets are choked with snow,"" he said, ""but I have a coupé and two strong horses waiting.""

He nodded to one of his men standing near. Cleves gave him the hand luggage and checks.

""All right,"" he said in a low voice to Recklow; and passed one arm through Tressa's.

The coupé was waiting on Forty-second Street, guarded by a policeman. When they had entered and were seated, two mounted policemen rode ahead of the lurching vehicle, picking a way amid the monstrous snow-drifts, and headed for the East River.

""We've got him somewhere in a wretched row of empty houses not far from East River Park. I'm taking you there. I've drawn a cordon of my men around the entire block. He can't get away. But I dared take no chances with this Yezidee sorcerer—dared not let one of my men go in to look for him—go anywhere near him,—until I could lay the situation before you, Mrs. Cleves.""

""Yes,"" she said calmly, ""it was the only way, Mr. Recklow. There would have been no use shooting him—no use taking him prisoner. A prisoner, he remains as deadly as ever; dead, his mind still lives and breeds evil. You are quite right; it is for me to deal with Sanang.""

Recklow shuddered in spite of himself. ""Can you tear his claws from the vitals of the world, and free the sick brains of a million people from the slavery of this monster's mind?""

The girl said seriously:

""Even Satan was stoned. It is so written. And was cast out. And dwells forever and ever in Abaddon. No star lights that Pit. None lights the Black Planet, Yrimid. It is where evil dwells. And there Sanang Noïane belongs.""

And now, beyond the dirty edges of the snow-smothered city, under an icy mist they caught sight of the river where ships lay blockaded by frozen floes.

Gulls circled over it; ghostly factory chimneys on the further shore loomed up gigantic, ranged like minarettes.

The coupé, jolting along behind the mounted policemen, struggled up toward the sidewalk and stopped. The two horses stood steaming, knee deep in snow. Recklow sprang out; Tressa gave him one hand and stepped lithely to the sidewalk. Then Cleves got out and came and took hold of his wife's arm again.

""Well,"" he said harshly to Recklow, ""where is this damned Yezidee hidden?""

Recklow pointed in silence, but he and Tressa had already lifted their gaze to the stark, shabby row of abandoned three-story houses where every dirty blind was closed.

""They're to be demolished and model tenements built,"" he said briefly.

A man muffled in a fur overcoat came up and took Tressa's hand and kissed it.

She smiled palely at Benton, spoke of Yulun, wished him happiness. While she was yet speaking Selden approached and bent over her gloved hand. She spoke to him very sweetly of Sansa, expressing pleasure at the prospect of seeing her again in the body.

""The Seldens and ourselves have adjoining apartments at the Ritz,"" said Benton. ""We have reserved a third suite for you and Victor.""

She inclined her lovely head, gravely, then turned to Recklow, saying that she was ready.

""It makes no difference which front door I unlock,"" he said. ""All these tenements are connected by human rat-holes and hidden runways leading from one house to another.... How many men do you want?""

""I want you four men,—nobody else.""

Recklow led the way up a snow-covered stoop, drew a key from his pocket, fitted it, and pulled open the door.

A musty chill struck their faces as they entered the darkened and empty hallway. Involuntarily every man drew his pistol.

""I must ask you to do exactly what I tell you to do,"" she said calmly.

""Certainly,"" said Recklow, caressing his white moustache and striving to pierce the gloom with his keen eyes.

Then Tressa took her husband's hand. ""Come,"" she said. They mounted the stairway together; and the three others followed with pistols lifted.

There was a vague grey light on the second floor; the broken rear shutters let it in.

As though she seemed to know her way, the girl led them forward, opened a door in the wall, and disclosed a bare, dusty room in the next house.

Through this she stepped; the others crept after her with weapons ready. She opened a second door, turned to the four men.

""Wait here for me. Come only when I call,"" she whispered.

""For God's sake take me with you,"" burst out Cleves.

""In God's name stay where you are till you hear me call your name!"" she said almost breathlessly.

Then, suddenly she turned, swiftly retracing her steps; and they saw her pass through the first door and disappear into the first house they had entered.

A terrible silence fell among them. The sound of her steps on the bare boards had died away. There was not a sound in the chilly dusk.

Minute after minute dragged by. One by one the men peered fearfully at Cleves. His visage was ghastly and they could see his pistol-hand trembling.

Twice Recklow looked at his wrist watch. The third time he said, unsteadily: ""She has been gone three-quarters of an hour.""

Then, far away, they heard a heavy tread on the stairs. Nearer and nearer came the footsteps. Every pistol was levelled at the first door as a man's bulky form darkened it.

""It's one of my men,"" said Recklow in a voice like a low groan. ""Where on earth is Mrs. Cleves?""

""I came to tell you,"" said the agent, ""Mrs. Cleves came out of the first house nearly an hour ago. She got into the coupé and told the driver to go to the Ritz.""

""What!"" gasped Recklow.

""She's gone to the Ritz,"" repeated the agent. ""No one else has come out. And I began to worry—hearing nothing of you, Mr. Recklow. So I stepped in to see——""

""You say that Mrs. Cleves went out of the house we entered, got into the coupé, and told the driver to go to the Ritz?"" demanded Cleves, astounded.

""Yes, sir.""

""Where is that coupé? Did it return?""

""It had not returned when I came in here.""

""Go back and look for it. Look in the other street,"" said Recklow sharply.

The agent hurried away over the creaking boards. The four men gazed at one another.

""The thing to do is to obey her and stay where we are,"" said Recklow grimly. ""Who knows what peril we may cause her if we move from——""

His words froze on his lips as Tressa's voice rang out from the darkness beyond the door they were guarding:

""Victor I I—I need you! Come to me, my husband!""

As Cleves sprang through the door into the darkness beyond, Benton smashed a window sash with all the force of his shoulder, and, reaching out through the shattered glass, tore the rotting blinds from their hinges, letting in a flood of sickly light.

Against the bare wall stood Tressa, both arms extended, her hands flat against the plaster, and each hand transfixed and pinned to the wall by a knife.

A white sheet lay at her feet. On it rested a third knife. And, bending on one knee to pick it up, they caught a glimpse of a slender young man in fashionable afternoon attire, who, as they entered with the crash of the shattered window in their ears, sprang to his nimble feet and stood confronting them, knife in hand.

Instantly every man fired at him and the bullets whipped the plaster to a smoke behind him, but the slender, dark skinned young man stood motionless, looking at them out of brilliant eyes that slanted a trifle.

Again the racket of the fusillade swept him and filled the room with plaster dust.

Cleves, frantic with horror, laid hold of the knives that pinned his wife's hands to the wall, and dragged them out.

But there was no blood, no wound to be seen on her soft palms. She took the murderous looking blades from him, threw one terrible look at Sanang, kicked the shroud across the floor toward him, and flung both knives upon it.

The place was still dim with plaster dust and pistol fumes as she stepped forward through the acrid mist, motioning the four men aside.

""Sanang!"" she cried in a clear voice, ""may God remember you in hell, for my feet have spurned your shroud, and your knives, which could not scar my palms, shall never pierce my heart! Look out for yourself, Prince Sanang!""

""Tokhta!"" he said, calmly. ""My soul be ransom for yours!""

""That is a lie! My soul is already ransomed! My mind is the more powerful. It has already halted yours. It is conquering yours. It is seizing your mind and enslaving it. It is mastering your will, Sanang! Your mind bends before mine. You know it! You know it is bending. You feel it is breaking down!""

Sanang's eyes began to glitter but his pale brown face had grown almost white.

""I slew you once—in the Wood of the White Moth,"" he said huskily. ""There is no resurrection from such a death, little Heavenly Azure. Look upon me! My soul and yours are one!""

""You are looking upon my soul,"" she said.

""A lie! You are in your body!""

The girl laughed. ""My body lies asleep in the Ritz upon my husband's bed,"" she said. ""My body is his, my mind belongs to him, my soul is already one with his. Do you not know it, dog of a Yezidee? Look upon me, Sanang Noïane! Look upon my unwounded hands! My shroud lies at your feet. And there lie the knives that could not pierce my heart! I am thrice clean! Listen to my words, Sanang! There is no other god but God!""

The young man's visage grew pasty and loose and horrible; his lips became flaccid like dewlaps; but out of these sagging folds of livid skin his voice burst whistling, screaming, as though wrenched from his very belly:

""May Erlik strangle you! May you rot where you stand! May your face become a writhing mass of maggots and your body a corruption of living worms!

""For what you are doing to me this day may every demon in hell torment you!

""Have a care what you are about!"" he screeched. ""You are slaying my mind, you sorceress! You have seized my mind and are crushing it! You are putting out its light, you Yezidee witch!—you are quenching the last spark—of reason—in—me——""

""Sanang!""

His knife fell clattering to the floor. But he stood stock still, his hands clutching his head—stood motionless, while scream on scream tore through the loose and gaping lips, blowing them into ghastly, distorted folds.

""Sanang Noïane!"" she cried in her clear voice, ""the Eight Towers are darkened! The Rampart of Gog and Magog is fallen! On Mount Alamout nothing is living. The minds of mankind are free again!""

She stepped forward, slowly, and stood near him chanting in a low voice the Prayers for the Dead She bent down and unrolled the shroud, laid it on his shoulders and drew it up and across his face, covering his dying eyes, and swathed him so, slowly, from head to foot.

Then she gathered up the three knives, cast them upward into the air. They did not fall again. They disappeared. And all the while, under her breath, the girl was chanting the Prayers for the Dead as she moved silently about her business.

Shrouded to the forehead in its white cerements, the muffled figure of Sanang stood upright, motionless as a swathed and frozen corpse.

Outside, the daylight had become greyer. It had begun to snow again, and a few flakes blew in through the shattered windows and clung to the winding sheet of Sanang.

And now Tressa drew close to the shrouded shape and stood before it, gazing intently upon the outlined features of the last of the Yezidees.

""Sanang,"" she said very softly, ""I hear your soul bidding your body farewell. Tokhta!""

Then, under the strained gaze of the four men gathered there, the shroud fell to the floor in a loose heap of white folds. There was nobody under it; no trace of Sanang. The human shape of the Yezidee had disappeared; but a greyish mist had filled the room, wavering up like smoke from the shroud, and, like smoke, blowing in a long streamer toward the window where the draught drew it out through the falling snow and scattered the last shred of it against the greying sky.

In the room the mist thinned swiftly; the four men could now see one another. But Tressa was no longer in the room. And in place of the white shroud a piece of filthy tattered carpet lay on the floor. And a dead rat, flattened out, dry and dusty, lay upon it.

""For God's sake,"" whispered Recklow hoarsely, ""let us get out of this!""

Cleves, his pistol clutched convulsively, stared at him in terror. But Recklow took him by the arm and drew him away, muttering that Tressa was waiting for him, and might be ill, and that there was nothing further to expect in this ghastly spot.

They went with Cleves to the Ritz. At the desk the clerk said that Mrs. Cleves had the keys and was in her apartment.

The three men entered the corridor with him; watched him try the door; saw him open it; lingered a moment after it had closed; heard the key turn.

At the sound of the door closing the maid came.

""Madame is asleep in her room,"" she whispered.

""When did she come in?""

""More than two hours ago, sir. I have drawn her bath, but when I opened the door a few moments ago, Madame was still asleep.""

He nodded; he was trembling when he put off his overcoat and dropped hat and gloves on the carpet.

From the little rose and ivory reception room he could see the closed door of his wife's chamber. And for a while he stood staring at it.

Then, slowly, he crossed this room, opened the door; entered.

In her bedroom the tinted twilight was like ashes of roses. He went to the bed and looked down at her shadowy face; gazed intently; listened; then, in sudden terror, bent and laid his hand on her heart. It was beating as tranquilly as a child's; but as she stirred, turned her head, and unclosed her eyes, under his hand her heart leaped like a wild thing caught unawares and the snowy skin glowed with an exquisite and deepening tint as she lifted her arms and clasped them around her husband's, neck, drawing his quivering face against her own.",True
"""They say foul things of Old Times still lurk
In dark forgotten corners of the world.
And Gates still gape to loose, on certain nights.
Shapes pent in Hell.""

--Justin Geoffrey


I read of it first in the strange book of Von Junzt, the German
eccentric who lived so curiously and died in such grisly and mysterious
fashion. It was my fortune to have access to his _Nameless Cults_ in the
original edition, the so-called Black Book, published in Dusseldorf in
1839, shortly before a hounding doom overtook the author. Collectors of
rare literature were familiar with _Nameless Cults_ mainly through the
cheap and faulty translation which was pirated in London by Bridewall in
1845, and the carefully expurgated edition put out by the Golden Goblin
Press of New York, 1909. But the volume I stumbled upon was one of the
unexpurgated German copies, with heavy black leather covers and rusty
iron hasps. I doubt if there are more than half a dozen such volumes in
the entire world today, for the quantity issued was not great, and when
the manner of the author's demise was bruited about, many possessors of
the book burned their volumes in panic.

Von Junzt spent his entire life (1795-1840) delving into forbidden
subjects; he traveled in all parts of the world, gained entrance into
innumerable secret societies, and read countless little-known and
esoteric books and manuscripts in the original; and in the chapters of
the Black Book, which range from startling clarity of exposition to
murky ambiguity, there are statements and hints to freeze the blood of a
thinking man. Reading what Von Junzt _dared_ put in print arouses uneasy
speculations as to what it was that he dared _not_ tell. What dark
matters, for instance, were contained in those closely written pages
that formed the unpublished manuscript on which he worked unceasingly
for months before his death, and which lay torn and scattered all over
the floor of the locked and bolted chamber in which Von Junzt was found
dead with the marks of taloned fingers on his throat? It will never be
known, for the author's closest friend, the Frenchman Alexis Ladeau,
after having spent a whole night piecing the fragments together and
reading what was written, burnt them to ashes and cut his own throat
with a razor.

But the contents of the published matter are shuddersome enough, even if
one accepts the general view that they but represent the ravings of a
madman. There among many strange things I found mention of the Black
Stone, that curious, sinister monolith that broods among the mountains
of Hungary, and about which so many dark legends cluster. Van Junzt did
not devote much space to it--the bulk of his grim work concerns cults
and objects of dark worship which he maintained existed in his day, and
it would seem that the Black Stone represents some order or being lost
and forgotten centuries ago. But he spoke of it as one of the _keys_--a
phrase used many times by him, in various relations, and constituting
one of the obscurities of his work. And he hinted briefly at curious
sights to be seen about the monolith on Midsummer's Night. He mentioned
Otto Dostmann's theory that this monolith was a remnant of the Hunnish
invasion and had been erected to commemorate a victory of Attila over
the Goths. Von Junzt contradicted this assertion without giving any
refutory facts, merely remarking that to attribute the origin of the
Black Stone to the Huns was as logical as assuming that William the
Conqueror reared Stonehenge.

This implication of enormous antiquity piqued my interest immensely and
after some difficulty I succeeded in locating a rat-eaten and moldering
copy of Dostmann's _Remnants of Lost Empires_ (Berlin, 1809, ""Der
Drachenhaus"" Press). I was disappointed to find that Dostmann referred
to the Black Stone even more briefly than had Von Junzt, dismissing it
with a few lines as an artifact comparatively modern in contrast with
the Greco-Roman ruins of Asia Minor which were his pet theme. He
admitted his inability to make out the defaced characters on the
monolith but pronounced them unmistakably Mongoloid. However, little as
I learned from Dostmann, he did mention the name of the village adjacent
to the Black Stone--Stregoicavar--an ominous name, meaning something
like Witch-Town.

A close scrutiny of guidebooks and travel articles gave me no further
information--Stregoicavar, not on any map that I could find, lay in a
wild, little-frequented region, out of the path of casual tourists. But
I did find subject for thought in Dornly's _Magyar Folklore_. In his
chapter on _Dream Myths_ he mentions the Black Stone and tells of some
curious superstitions regarding it--especially the belief that if anyone
sleeps in the vicinity of the monolith, that person will be haunted by
monstrous nightmares forever after; and he cited tales of the peasants
regarding too-curious people who ventured to visit the Stone on
Midsummer Night and who died raving mad because of _something_ they saw
there.

That was all I could gleam from Dornly, but my interest was even more
intensely roused as I sensed a distinctly sinister aura about the Stone.
The suggestion of dark antiquity, the recurrent hint of unnatural events
on Midsummer Night, touched some slumbering instinct in my being, as one
senses, rather than hears, the flowing of some dark subterraneous river
in the night.

And I suddenly saw a connection between this Stone and a certain weird
and fantastic poem written by the mad poet, Justin Geoffrey: _The People
of the Monolith_. Inquiries led to the information that Geoffrey had
indeed written that poem while traveling in Hungary, and I could not
doubt that the Black Stone was the very monolith to which he referred in
his strange verse. Reading his stanzas again, I felt once more the
strange dim stirrings of subconscious promptings that I had noticed when
first reading of the Stone.

I had been casting about for a place to spend a short vacation and I
made up my mind. I went to Stregoicavar. A train of obsolete style
carried me from Temesvar to within striking distance, at least, of my
objective, and a three days' ride in a jouncing coach brought me to the
little village which lay in a fertile valley high up in the fir-clad
mountains. The journey itself was uneventful, but during the first day
we passed the old battlefield of Schomvaal where the brave
Polish-Hungarian knight, Count Boris Vladinoff, made his gallant and
futile stand against the victorious hosts of Suleiman the Magnificent,
when the Grand Turk swept over eastern Europe in 1526.

The driver of the coach pointed out to me a great heap of crumbling
stones on a hill nearby, under which, he said, the bones of the brave
Count lay. I remembered a passage from Larson's _Turkish Wars_. ""After
the skirmish"" (in which the Count with his small army had beaten back
the Turkish advance-guard) ""the Count was standing beneath the
half-ruined walls of the old castle on the hill, giving orders as to the
disposition of his forces, when an aide brought to him a small lacquered
case which had been taken from the body of the famous Turkish scribe and
historian, Selim Bahadur, who had fallen in the fight. The Count took
therefrom a roll of parchment and began to read, but he had not read far
before he turned very pale and, without saying a word, replaced the
parchment in the case and thrust the case into his cloak. At that very
instant a hidden Turkish battery suddenly opened fire, and the balls
striking the old castle, the Hungarians were horrified to see the walls
crash down in ruin, completely covering the brave Count. Without a
leader the gallant little army was cut to pieces, and in the war-swept
years which followed, the bones of the noblemen were never recovered.
Today the natives point out a huge and moldering pile of ruins near
Schomvaal beneath which, they say, still rests all that the centuries
have left of Count Boris Vladinoff.""

I found the village of Stregoicavar a dreamy, drowsy little village that
apparently belied its sinister cognomen--a forgotten back-eddy that
Progress had passed by. The quaint houses and the quainter dress and
manners of the people were those of an earlier century. They were
friendly, mildly curious but not inquisitive, though visitors from the
outside world were extremely rare.

""Ten years ago another American came here and stayed a few days in the
village,"" said the owner of the tavern where I had put up, ""a young
fellow and queer-acting--mumbled to himself--a poet, I think.""

I knew he must mean Justin Geoffrey.

""Yes, he was a poet,"" I answered, ""and he wrote a poem about a bit of
scenery near this very village.""

""Indeed?"" Mine host's interest was aroused. ""Then, since all great poets
are strange in their speech and actions, he must have achieved great
fame, for his actions and conversations were the strangest of any man I
ever I knew.""

""As is usual with artists,"" I answered, ""most of his recognition has
come since his death.""

""He is dead, then?""

""He died screaming in a madhouse five years ago.""

""Too bad, too bad,"" sighed mine host sympathetically. ""Poor lad--he
looked too long at the Black Stone.""

My heart gave a leap, but I masked my keen interest and said casually.
""I have heard something of this Black Stone; somewhere near this
village, is it not?""

""Nearer than Christian folk wish,"" he responded. ""Look!"" He drew me to a
latticed window and pointed up at the fir-clad slopes of the brooding
blue mountains. ""There beyond where you see the bare face of that
jutting cliff stands that accursed Stone. Would that it were ground to
powder and the powder flung into the Danube to be carried to the deepest
ocean! Once men tried to destroy the thing, but each man who laid hammer
or maul against it came to an evil end. So now the people shun it.""

""What is there so evil about it?"" I asked curiously.

""It is a demon-haunted thing,"" he answered uneasily and with the
suggestion of a shudder. ""In my childhood I knew a young man who came up
from below and laughed at our traditions--in his foolhardiness he went
to the Stone one Midsummer Night and at dawn stumbled into the village
again, stricken dumb and mad. Something had shattered his brain and
sealed his lips, for until the day of his death, which came soon after,
he spoke only to utter terrible blasphemies or to slaver gibberish.

""My own nephew when very small was lost in the mountains and slept in
the woods near the Stone, and now in his manhood he is tortured by foul
dreams, so that at times he makes the night hideous with his screams and
wakes with cold sweat upon him.

""But let us talk of something else, _Herr_; it is not good to dwell upon
such things.""

I remarked on the evident age of the tavern and he answered with pride.
""The foundations are more than four hundred years old; the original
house was the only one in the village which was not burned to the ground
when Suleiman's devil swept through the mountains. Here, in the house
that then stood on these same foundations, it is said, the scribe Selim
Bahadur had his headquarters while ravaging the country hereabouts.""

I learned then that the present inhabitants of Stregoicavar are not
descendants of the people who dwelt there before the Turkish raid of
1526. The victorious Moslems left no living human in the village or the
vicinity thereabouts when they passed over. Men, women and children they
wiped out in one red holocaust of murder, leaving a vast stretch of
country silent and utterly deserted. The present people of Stregoicavar
are descended from hardy settlers from the lower valleys who came into
the ruined village after the Turk was thrust back.

Mine host did not speak of the extermination of the original inhabitants
with any great resentment and I learned that his ancestors in the lower
levels had looked on the mountaineers with even more hatred and aversion
than they regarded the Turks. He was rather vague regarding the causes
of this feud, but said that the original inhabitants of Stregoicavar had
been in the habit of making stealthy raids on the lowlands and stealing
girls and children. Moreover, he said that they were not exactly of the
same blood as his own people; the sturdy, original Magyar-Slavic stock
had mixed and intermarried with a degraded aboriginal race until the
breeds had blended, producing an unsavory amalgamation. Who these
aborigines were, he had not the slightest idea, but maintained that they
were ""pagans"" and had dwelt in the mountains since time immemorial,
before the coming of the conquering peoples.

I attached little importance to this tale; seeing in it merely a
parallel to the amalgamation of Celtic tribes with Mediterranean
aborigines in the Galloway hills, with the resultant mixed race which,
as Picts, has such an extensive part in Scotch legendary. Time has a
curious foreshortening effect on folklore, and just as tales of the
Picts became intertwined with legends of an older Mongoloid race, so
that eventually the Picts were ascribed the repulsive appearance of the
squat primitives, whose individuality merged, in the telling, into
Pictish tales, and was forgotten; so, I felt, the supposed inhuman
attributes of the first villagers of Stregoicavar could be traced to
older, outworn myths with invading Huns and Mongols.

The morning after my arrival I received directions from mine host, who
gave them worriedly, and set out to find the Black Stone. A few hours'
tramp up the fir-covered slopes brought me to the face of the rugged,
solid stone cliff which jutted boldly from the mountainside. A narrow
trail wound up it, and mounting this, I looked out over the peaceful
valley of Stregoicavar, which seemed to drowse, guarded on either hand
by the great blue mountains. No huts or any sign of human tenancy showed
between the cliff whereon I stood and the village. I saw numbers of
scattering farms in the valley but all lay on the other side of
Stregoicavar, which itself seemed to shrink from the brooding slopes
which masked the Black Stone.

The summit of the cliffs proved to be a sort of thickly wooded plateau.
I made my way through the dense growth for a short distance and came
into a wide glade; and in the center of the glade reared a gaunt figure
of black stone.

It was octagonal in shape, some sixteen feet in height and about a foot
and a half thick. It had once evidently been highly polished, but now
the surface was thickly dinted as if savage efforts had been made to
demolish it; but the hammers had done little more than to flake off
small bits of stone and mutilate the characters which once had evidently
marched up in a spiraling line round and round the shaft to the top. Up
to ten feet from the base these characters were almost completely
blotted out, so that it was very difficult to trace their direction.
Higher up they were plainer, and I managed to squirm part of the way up
the shaft and scan them at close range. All were more or less defaced,
but I was positive that they symbolized no language now remembered on
the face of the earth. I am fairly familiar with all hieroglyphics known
to researchers and philologists and I can say, with certainty that those
characters were like nothing of which I have ever read or heard. The
nearest approach to them that I ever saw were some crude scratches on a
gigantic and strangely symmetrical rock in a lost valley of Yucatan. I
remember that when I pointed out these marks to the archeologist who was
my companion, he maintained that they either represented natural
weathering or the idle scratching of some Indian. To my theory that the
rock was really the base of a long-vanished column, he merely laughed,
calling my attention to the dimensions of it, which suggested, if it
were built with any natural rules of architectural symmetry, a column a
thousand feet high. But I was not convinced.

I will not say that the characters on the Black Stone were similar to
those on that colossal rock in Yucatan; but one suggested the other. As
to the substance of the monolith, again I was baffled. The stone of
which it was composed was a dully gleaming black, whose surface, where
it was not dinted and roughened, created a curious illusion of
semi-transparency.

I spent most of the morning there and came away baffled. No connection
of the Stone with any other artifact in the world suggested itself to
me. It was as if the monolith had been reared by alien hands, in an age
distant and apart from human ken.

I returned to the village with my interest in no way abated. Now that I
had seen the curious thing, my desire was still more keenly whetted to
investigate the matter further and seek to learn by what strange hands
and for what strange purpose the Black Stone had been reared in the long
ago.

I sought out the tavern-keeper's nephew and questioned him in regard to
his dreams, but he was vague, though willing to oblige. He did not mind
discussing them, but was unable to describe them with any clarity.
Though he dreamed the same dreams repeatedly, and though they were
hideously vivid at the time, they left no distinct impression on his
waking mind. He remembered them only as chaotic nightmares through which
huge whirling fires shot lurid tongues of flame and a black drum
bellowed incessantly. One thing only he remembered clearly--in one dream
he had seen the Black Stone, not on a mountain slope but set like a
spire on a colossal black castle.

As for the rest of the villagers I found them not inclined to talk about
the Stone, with the exception of the schoolmaster, a man of surprizing
education, who spent much more of his time out in the world than any of
the rest.

He was much interested in what I told him of Von Junzt's remarks about
the Stone, and warmly agreed with the German author in the alleged age
of the monolith. He believed that a coven had once existed in the
vicinity and that possibly all of the original villagers had been
members of that fertility cult which once threatened to undermine
European civilization and gave rise to the tales of witchcraft. He cited
the very name of the village to prove his point; it had not been
originally named Stregoicavar, he said; according to legends the
builders had called it Xuthltan, which was the aboriginal name of the
site on which the village had been built many centuries ago.

This fact roused again an indescribable feeling of uneasiness. The
barbarous name did not suggest connection with any Scythic, Slavic or
Mongolian race to which an aboriginal people of these mountains would,
under natural circumstances, have belonged.

That the Magyars and Slavs of the lower valleys believed the original
inhabitants of the village to be members of the witchcraft cult was
evident, the schoolmaster said, by the name they gave it, which name
continued to be used even after the older settlers had been massacred by
the Turks, and the village rebuilt by a cleaner and more wholesome
breed.

He did not believe that the members of the cult erected the monolith but
he did believe that they used it as a center of their activities, and
repeating vague legends which had been handed down since before the
Turkish invasion, he advanced the theory that the degenerate villagers
had used it as a sort of altar on which they offered human sacrifices,
using as victims the girls and babies stolen from his own ancestors in
the lower valleys.

He discounted the myths of weird events on Midsummer Night, as well as a
curious legend of a strange deity which the witch-people of Xuthltan
were said to have invoked with chants and wild rituals of flagellation
and slaughter.

He had never visited the Stone on Midsummer Night, he said, but he would
not fear to do so; whatever _had_ existed or taken place there in the
past, had been long engulfed in the mists of time and oblivion. The
Black Stone had lost its meaning save as a link to a dead and dusty
past.

It was while returning from a visit with this schoolmaster one night
about a week after my arrival at Stregoicavar that a sudden recollection
struck me--it was Midsummer Night! The very time that the legends linked
with grisly implications to the Black Stone. I turned away from the
tavern and strode swiftly through the village. Stregoicavar lay silent;
the villagers retired early. I saw no one as I passed rapidly out of the
village and up into the firs which masked the mountain's slopes with
whispering darkness. A broad silver moon hung above the valley, flooding
the crags and slopes in a weird light and etching the shadows blackly.
No wind blew through the firs, but a mysterious, intangible rustling and
whispering was abroad. Surely on such nights in past centuries, my
whimsical imagination told me, naked witches astride magic broomsticks
had flown across the valley, pursued by jeering demoniac familiars.

I came to the cliffs and was somewhat disquieted to note that the
illusive moonlight lent them a subtle appearance I had not noticed
before--in the weird light they appeared less like natural cliffs and
more like the ruins of cyclopean and Titan-reared battlements jutting
from the mountain-slope.

Shaking off this hallucination with difficulty I came upon the plateau
and hesitated a moment before I plunged into the brooding darkness of
the woods. A sort of breathless tenseness hung over the shadows, like an
unseen monster holding its breath lest it scare away its prey.

I shook off the sensation--a natural one, considering the eeriness of
the place and its evil reputation--and made my way through the wood,
experiencing a most unpleasant sensation that I was being followed, and
halting once, sure that something clammy and unstable had brushed
against my face in the darkness.

I came out into the glade and saw the tall monolith rearing its gaunt
height above the sward. At the edge of the woods on the side toward the
cliffs was a stone which formed a sort of natural seat. I sat down,
reflecting that it was probably while there that the mad poet, Justin
Geoffrey, had written his fantastic _People of the Monolith_. Mine host
thought that it was the Stone which had caused Geoffrey's insanity, but
the seeds of madness had been sown in the poet's brain long before he
ever came to Stregoicavar.

A glance at my watch showed that the hour of midnight was close at hand.
I leaned back, waiting whatever ghostly demonstration might appear. A
thin night wind started up among the branches of the firs, with an
uncanny suggestion of faint, unseen pipes whispering an eerie and evil
tune. The monotony of the sound and my steady gazing at the monolith
produced a sort of self-hypnosis upon me; I grew drowsy. I fought this
feeling, but sleep stole on me in spite of myself; the monolith seemed
to sway and dance, strangely distorted to my gaze, and then I slept.

I opened my eyes and sought to rise, but lay still, as if an icy hand
gripped me helpless. Cold terror stole over me. The glade was no longer
deserted. It was thronged by a silent crowd of strange people, and my
distended eyes took in strange barbaric details of costume which my
reason told me were archaic and forgotten even in this backward land.
Surely, I thought, these are villagers who have come here to hold some
fantastic conclave--but another glance told me that these people were
not the folk of Stregoicavar. They were a shorter, more squat race,
whose brows were lower, whose faces were broader and duller. Some had
Slavic and Magyar features, but those features were degraded as from a
mixture of some baser, alien strain I could not classify. Many wore the
hides of wild beasts, and their whole appearance, both men and women,
was one of sensual brutishness. They terrified and repelled me, but they
gave me no heed. They formed in a vast half-circle in front of the
monolith and began a sort of chant, flinging their arms in unison and
weaving their bodies rhythmically from the waist upward. All eyes were
fixed on the top of the Stone which they seemed to be invoking. But the
strangest of all was the dimness of their voices; not fifty yards from
me hundreds of men and women were unmistakably lifting their voices in a
wild chant, yet those voices came to me as a faint indistinguishable
murmur as if from across vast leagues of Space--or _time_.

Before the monolith stood a sort of brazier from which a vile, nauseous
yellow smoke billowed upward, curling curiously in a swaying spiral
around the black shaft, like a vast unstable snake.

On one side of this brazier lay two figures--a young girl, stark naked
and bound hand and foot, and an infant, apparently only a few months
old. On the other side of the brazier squatted a hideous old hag with a
queer sort of black drum on her lap; this drum she beat with slow light
blows of her open palms, but I could not hear the sound.

The rhythm of the swaying bodies grew faster and into the space between
the people and the monolith sprang a naked young woman, her eyes
blazing, her long black hair flying loose. Spinning dizzily on her toes,
she whirled across the open space and fell prostrate before the Stone,
where she lay motionless. The next instant a fantastic figure followed
her--a man from whose waist hung a goatskin, and whose features were
entirely hidden by a sort of mask made from a huge wolf's head, so that
he looked like a monstrous, nightmare being, horribly compounded of
elements both human and bestial. In his hand he held a bunch of long fir
switches bound together at the larger ends, and the moonlight glinted on
a chain of heavy gold looped about his neck. A smaller chain depending
from it suggested a pendant of some sort, but this was missing.

The people tossed their arms violently and seemed to redouble their
shouts as this grotesque creature loped across the open space with many
a fantastic leap and caper. Coming to the woman who lay before the
monolith, he began to lash her with the switches he bore, and she leaped
up and spun into the wild mazes of the most incredible dance I have ever
seen. And her tormentor danced with her, keeping the wild rhythm,
matching her every whirl and bound, while incessantly raining cruel
blows on her naked body. And at every blow he shouted a single word,
over and over, and all the people shouted it back. I could see the
working of their lips, and now the faint far-off murmur of their voices
merged and blended into one distant shout, repeated over and over with
slobbering ecstasy. But what the one word was, I could not make out.

In dizzy whirls spun the wild dancers, while the lookers-on, standing
still in their tracks, followed the rhythm of their dance with swaying
bodies and weaving arms. Madness grew in the eyes of the capering
votaress and was reflected in the eyes of the watchers. Wilder and more
extravagant grew the whirling frenzy of that mad dance--it became a
bestial and obscene thing, while the old hag howled and battered the
drum like a crazy woman, and the switches cracked out a devil's tune.

Blood trickled down the dancer's limbs but she seemed not to feel the
lashing save as a stimulus for further enormities of outrageous motion;
bounding into the midst of the yellow smoke which now spread out tenuous
tentacles to embrace both flying figures, she seemed to merge with that
foul fog and veil herself with it. Then emerging into plain view,
closely followed by the beast-thing that flogged her, she shot into an
indescribable, explosive burst of dynamic mad motion, and on the very
crest of that mad wave, she dropped suddenly to the sward, quivering and
panting as if completely overcome by her frenzied exertions. The lashing
continued with unabated violence and intensity and she began to wriggle
toward the monolith on her belly. The priest--or such I will call
him--followed, lashing her unprotected body with all the power of his
arm as she writhed along, leaving a heavy track of blood on the trampled
earth. She reached the monolith, and gasping and panting, flung both
arms about it and covered the cold stone with fierce hot kisses, as in
frenzied and unholy adoration.

The fantastic priest bounded high in the air, flinging away the
red-dabbled switches, and the worshippers, howling and foaming at the
mouths, turned on each other with tooth and nail, rending one another's
garments and flesh in a blind passion of bestiality. The priest swept up
the infant with a long arm, and shouting again that Name, whirled the
wailing babe high in the air and dashed its brains out against the
monolith, leaving a ghastly stain on the black surface. Cold with horror
I saw him rip the tiny body open with his bare brutish fingers and fling
handfuls of blood on the shaft, then toss the red and torn shape into
the brazier, extinguishing flame and smoke in a crimson rain, while the
maddened brutes behind him howled over and over the Name. Then suddenly
they all fell prostrate, writhing like snakes, while the priest flung
wide his gory hands as in triumph. I opened my mouth to scream my horror
and loathing, but only a dry rattle sounded; a huge monstrous toad-like
thing squatted on the top of the monolith!

I saw its bloated, repulsive and unstable outline against the moonlight
and set in what would have been the face of a natural creature, its
huge, blinking eyes which reflected all the lust, abysmal greed, obscene
cruelty and monstrous evil that has stalked the sons of men since their
ancestors moved blind and hairless in the treetops. In those grisly eyes
were mirrored all the unholy things and vile secrets that sleep in the
cities under the sea, and that skulk from the light of day in the
blackness of primordial caverns. And so that ghastly thing that the
unhallowed ritual of cruelty and sadism and blood had evoked from the
silence of the hills, leered and blinked down on its bestial
worshippers, who groveled in abhorrent abasement before it.

Now the beast-masked priest lifted the bound and weakly writhing girl in
his brutish hands and held her up toward that horror on the monolith.
And as that monstrosity sucked in its breath, lustfully and
slobberingly, something snapped in my brain and I fell into a merciful
faint.

I opened my eyes on a still white dawn. All the events of the night
rushed back on me and I sprang up, then stared about me in amazement.
The monolith brooded gaunt and silent above the sward which waved, green
and untrampled, in the morning breeze. A few quick strides took me
across the glade; here had the dancers leaped and bounded until the
ground should have been trampled bare, and here had the votaress
wriggled her painful way to the Stone, streaming blood on the earth. But
no drop of crimson showed on the uncrushed sward. I looked,
shudderingly, at the side of the monolith against which the bestial
priest had brained the stolen baby--but no dark stain nor grisly clot
showed there.

A dream! It had been a wild nightmare--or else--I shrugged my shoulders.
What vivid clarity for a dream!

I returned quietly to the village and entered the inn without being
seen. And there I sat meditating over the strange events of the night.
More and more was I prone to discard the dream-theory. That what I had
seen was illusion and without material substance, was evident. But I
believed that I had looked on the mirrored shadow of a deed perpetrated
in ghastly actuality in bygone days. But how was I to know? What proof
to show that my vision had been a gathering of foul specters rather than
a nightmare originating in my brain?

As if for answer a name flashed into my mind--Selim Bahadur! According
to legend this man, who had been a soldier as well as a scribe, had
commanded that part of Suleiman's army which had devastated
Stregoicavar; it seemed logical enough; and if so, he had gone straight
from the blotted-out countryside to the bloody field of Schomvaal, and
his doom. I sprang up with a sudden shout--that manuscript which was
taken from the Turk's body, and which Count Boris shuddered over--might
it not contain some narration of what the conquering Turks found in
Stregoicavar? What else could have shaken the iron nerves of the Polish
adventurer? And since the bones of the Count had never been recovered,
what more certain than that the lacquered case, with its mysterious
contents, still lay hidden beneath the ruins that covered Boris
Vladinoff? I began packing my bag with fierce haste.

Three days later found me ensconced in a little village a few miles from
the old battlefield, and when the moon rose I was working with savage
intensity on the great pile of crumbling stone that crowned the hill. It
was back-breaking toil--looking back now I can not see how I
accomplished it, though I labored without a pause from moonrise to dawn.
Just as the sun was coming up I tore aside the last tangle of stones and
looked on all that was mortal of Count Boris Vladinoff--only a few
pitiful fragments of crumbling bone--and among them, crushed out of all
original shape, lay a case whose lacquered surface had kept it from
complete decay through the centuries.

I seized it with frenzied eagerness, and piling back some of the stones
on the bones I hurried away; for I did not care to be discovered by the
suspicious peasants in an act of apparent desecration.

Back in my tavern chamber I opened the case and found the parchment
comparatively intact; and there was something else in the case--a small
squat object wrapped in silk. I was wild to plumb the secrets of those
yellowed pages, but weariness forbade me. Since leaving Stregoicavar I
had hardly slept at all, and the terrific exertions of the previous
night combined to overcome me. In spite of myself I was forced to
stretch myself on my bed, nor did I awake until sundown.

I snatched a hasty supper, and then in the light of a flickering candle,
I set myself to read the neat Turkish characters that covered the
parchment. It was difficult work, for I am not deeply versed in the
language and the archaic style of the narrative baffled me. But as I
toiled through it a word or a phrase here and there leaped at me and a
dimly growing horror shook me in its grip. I bent my energies fiercely
to the task, and as the tale grew clearer and took more tangible form my
blood chilled in my veins, my hair stood up and my tongue clove to my
mouth. All external things partook of the grisly madness of that
infernal manuscript until the night sounds of insects and creatures in
the woods took the form of ghastly murmurings and stealthy treadings of
ghoulish horrors and the sighing of the night wind changed to tittering
obscene gloating of evil over the souls of men.

At last when gray dawn was stealing through the latticed window, I laid
down the manuscript and took up and unwrapped the thing in the bit of
silk. Staring at it with haggard eyes I knew the truth of the matter was
clinched, even had it been possible to doubt the veracity of that
terrible manuscript.

And I replaced both obscene things in the case, nor did I rest nor sleep
nor eat until that case containing them had been weighted with stones
and flung into the deepest current of the Danube which, God grant,
carried them back into the Hell from which they came.

It was no dream I dreamed on Midsummer Midnight in the hills above
Stregoicavar. Well for Justin Geoffrey that he tarried there only in the
sunlight and went his way, for had he gazed upon that ghastly conclave,
his mad brain would have snapped before it did. How my own reason held,
I do not know.

No--it was no dream--I gazed upon a foul rout of votaries long dead,
come up from Hell to worship as of old; ghosts that bowed before a
ghost. For Hell has long claimed their hideous god. Long, long he dwelt
among the hills, a brain-shattering vestige of an outworn age, but no
longer his obscene talons clutch for the souls of living men, and his
kingdom is a dead kingdom, peopled only by the ghosts of those who
served him in his lifetime and theirs.

By what foul alchemy or godless sorcery the Gates of Hell are opened on
that one eerie night I do not know, but mine own eyes have seen. And I
know I looked on no living thing that night, for the manuscript written
in the careful hand of Selim Bahadur narrated at length what he and his
raiders found in the valley of Stregoicavar; and I read, set down in
detail, the blasphemous obscenities that torture wrung from the lips of
screaming worshippers; and I read, too, of the lost, grim black cavern
high in the hills where the horrified Turks hemmed a monstrous, bloated,
wallowing toad-like being and slew it with flame and ancient steel
blessed in old times by Muhammad, and with incantations that were old
when Arabia was young. And even staunch old Selim's hand shook as he
recorded the cataclysmic, earth-shaking death-howls of the monstrosity,
which died not alone; for half-score of his slayers perished with him,
in ways that Selim would not or could not describe.

And that squat idol carved of gold and wrapped in silk was an image of
_himself_, and Selim tore it from the golden chain that looped the neck
of the slain high priest of the mask.

Well that the Turks swept out that foul valley with torch and cleanly
steel! Such sights as those brooding mountains have looked on belong to
the darkness and abysses of lost eons. No--it is not fear of the
toad-thing that makes me shudder in the night. He is made fast in Hell
with his nauseous horde, freed only for an hour on the most weird night
of the year, as I have seen. And of his worshippers, none remains.

But it is the realization that such things once crouched beast-like
above the souls of men which brings cold sweat to my brow; and I fear to
peer again into the leaves of Von Junzt's abomination. For now I
understand his repeated phrase of _keys_!--aye! Keys to Outer
Doors--links with an abhorrent past and--who knows?--of abhorrent
spheres of the _present_. And I understand why the cliffs look like
battlements in the moonlight and why the tavern-keeper's
nightmare-haunted nephew saw in his dream, the Black Stone like a spire
on a cyclopean black castle. If men ever excavate among those mountains
they may find incredible things below those masking slopes. For the cave
wherein the Turks trapped the--_thing_--was not truly a cavern, and I
shudder to contemplate the gigantic gulf of eons which must stretch
between this age and the time when the earth shook herself and reared
up, like a wave, those blue mountains that, rising, enveloped
unthinkable things. May no man ever seek to uproot that ghastly spire
men call the Black Stone!

A Key! Aye, it is a Key, symbol of a forgotten horror. That horror has
faded into the limbo from which it crawled, loathsomely, in the black
dawn of the earth. But what of the other fiendish possibilities hinted
at by Von Junzt--what of the monstrous hand which strangled out his
life? Since reading what Selim Bahadur wrote, I can no longer doubt
anything in the Black Book. Man was not always master of the earth--_and
is he now?_

And the thought recurs to me--if such a monstrous entity as the Master
of the Monolith somehow survived its own unspeakably distant epoch so
long--_what nameless shapes may even now lurk in the dark places of the
world?_
","
I spent the next few days becoming acquainted with the town and its people. Personally, I did not find most of the locals as reticent as my companion had led me to believe. Actually, many of the people I met during my casual rambles about the town and its immediate environs seemed willing, even eager to converse about their community and its history, in spite, or maybe because of, my rather labored Spanish.
Especially interesting to me, as it turned out, was the fact that many of the local people were descended, in part, from Sephardic Jews who had settled in this once remote region to avoid, as far as possible, direct contact with Church authorities. They had maintained a façade of Catholic Christianity while secretly retaining their Jewish identity. Gradually, they had assimilated with both Mexican settlers and the native Indians, remaining, nevertheless, quietly proud of their Sephardic roots.
Rousseau had apparently overlooked this bit of history, or perhaps considered it of trivial importance. Nevertheless, I viewed this as the most obvious explanation for the presence of the Hebrew Necronomicon in San Facundo. Indeed, if some of those eighteenth-century crypto-Jews had been involved in dark magical practices, as the presence of the book might indicate, then rumors of similar activities among the Indian natives of this region could have attracted them to settle here in the first place.
This informal reconnoitering also brought me my first glimpse of the ""strange"" ones, which I call them for lack of a better name. Truly, Rousseau did not exaggerate concerning their physical oddity; indeed, his descriptions left me unprepared for the actual appearance of those people. They tended to be of medium height, on the average, but this was difficult to ascertain due to their characteristically stooped posture and odd gaits, which seemed to be a sort of shambling shuffle, as if a regular human bipedal locomotion were alien to their normal means of ambulation. Their physiognomies were, however, the items of greatest strangeness. The heads tended to be elongated and the faces very narrow. Eyes were large, roundish, and bulging, giving the impression of being nearly, or totally lidless. Their mouths tended to be extremely wide, reaching well around to the sides of the face, with thin lips drawn back somewhat to reveal gums and teeth. The teeth themselves were of utmost oddity, being uniformly pointed, even back into the molar area. My impression was of the saw-like teeth found in certain species of carnivorous fish or reptiles. The skin of these creatures was of a brownish-grey color, quite unlike that of a typical Mexican or Indian. Its texture, as best I could tell, was rough, almost horny in fact, and there was a disquieting suggestion of squamousness.
My first face-to-face encounter with these beings occurred late in the afternoon of my third day in San Facundo. I was strolling along a side street near the main plaza. The afternoon was hot and I was thirsty. Presently, I came to a small store, little more than a hole in the wall, set in a venerable but dilapidated building of heavy yellowish brick, probably dating from the middle of the nineteenth century. I entered and requested a cold soft drink from the proprietor, a short, pudgy man of late middle age. Scarcely had he handed me the bottled drink when two other men entered. I first noticed the frozen expression on the owner's face, then turned to see two of the ""strange"" ones, only a few feet away. One of them muttered, or almost hissed, something in unintelligible Spanish which sent the fat little proprietor scurrying behind a curtain in the rear of the store. Both men eyed me in a curiously sinister way but said nothing. A moment later the owner emerged, carrying something in a paper sack folded over at the top, which he handed to the nearer of the two men. One of the creatures extended a gloved hand, placed some bills on the counter, and left with his companion as silently as they had come.
I turned to the proprietor, whom I knew slightly, with whose brother I had already conversed at some length the previous day, and inquired, ""Quiénes eran? Who were they?""
""No quieres saber. You don't want to know,"" was his reply.
""But why do you say that?"" I persisted. ""I find your town fascinating and would like to know something about its more, shall we say, unusual side. Obviously, certain of your local citizens have characteristics that set them apart from the average person one meets on the street. What can you tell about them?""
""Yo no sé nada,"" was his curt reply, ""and it would be much better if you did not keep asking. There are things better not known.""
Puzzled, I left the store and continued along the street to the plaza. I noticed that the sun was sinking low and the first rays of what promised to be a glorious sunset were already painting the western sky in a riot of luminous color. I tarried about the plaza for perhaps another hour, until the last tints of purple, orange, and gold had faded into the gathering dusk. A sudden impulse caused me to turn my gaze toward the south, where the streets gradually sloped downward towards the narrow San Facundo River. There, beyond the low roofs of the town, beyond the tree-lined bluffs above the river, and across the rolling, dusk-shrouded plain rose the dusky shape of a distant outcropping. Starkly outlined against the darkling sky, I beheld El Tinieblo. Far more sinister, in view of the incident with the federales, a dark red glow seemed to emanate from its low, flat summit.


IV

The following days proved extremely interesting. Quickly, I found that gaining the friendship and trust of certain people in San Facundo opened doors to many other acquaintances. My own Portuguese-Jewish heritage and knowledge of the Cabbalah would turn out to be advantageous in this respect. I soon discovered that some Sanfacundinos were quite familiar with Cabalistic teachings and concepts, and were eager to participate in discussions with outsiders who were learned in these matters, apparently hoping to enrich their own store of knowledge. Nevertheless, my attempts to learn more concerning the ""strange ones"" were invariably met with evasion or rebuff. In a more disquieting vane, I was starting to develop a sense of being watched and followed.
Among my newly found friends was one Don Ramiro De Leon-Espinoza, a local land owner and businessman whose family had been among the original settlers in the region. One morning, well into my second week in San Facundo, Don Ramiro and myself met for coffee and conversation in a cafe near the plaza.
""You, who are erudite in so many things, what really brings you to San Facundo?"" he queried.
""Really,"" I replied, ""I came on an invitation from an old acquaintance. He told me that, let's say, interesting things have happened here in the past, and some influence from those occurrences may linger on into the present.""
Don Ramiro narrowed his eyes thoughtfully. ""And, of course, that acquaintance of yours is the gringo living in the house of Licenciado Santos Garza, is that not true?""
""Yes, as a matter of fact it is,"" I replied, sensing a certain suspicion in his tone. ""But I am here for purely academic reasons. As I've already told you, I am an anthropologist and the study of folklore is my specialty.""
My companion took a deep sip from his cup, eyeing me over the rim as he continued, ""I understand that, and it's a good thing. Otherwise, we wouldn't be having this conversation. You know, we don't appreciate that nosy bolillo, or Frenchman or whatever he is, prying into things that are none of his business. It is only because of our courtesy that we have not run him off.""
I knew then why Rousseau had found the local people so inaccessible. I also understood Don Ramiro's words as a message intended for Rousseau.
""Now, let us talk of things we both find interesting,"" Don Ramiro suggested enthusiastically, his mood seeming to shift abruptly.
""I know of a site near here that I am sure you will find fascinating. It dates back to pre-Conquest times; it may even be thousands of years old. Our legends have it that the place was already old before the Aztecs, or even the Toltecs. Anyway, it is located on land that I own.""
The prospect of visiting a largely unexplored pre-Columbian ruin truly excited me. ""How soon can we go?"" I responded with almost child like anticipation.
We drove out of town on a paved road for several miles, then turned onto another one of limestone gravel, known locally as caliche, which wound past alternating areas of cleared land and thick, spiny vegetation. We passed several ejidos, communally owned farms, and continued on into rolling uplands that manifested fewer and fewer signs of human habitation. Presently, the road degenerated into a mere track, little more than two parallel ruts running through thickly overgrown and rocky country. Fortunately, Don Ramiro's truck, a Ford utility-type vehicle with four-wheel drive, was adequate to the task.
""Is this area part of la zona maldita?"" I casually inquired.
""You know of la zona maldita?"" Don Ramiro answered with some surprise; then, anticipating my answer, continued, ""Ah sí, your friend Rousseau must have told you.""
""Rousseau,"" I corrected.
""Sí, whatever,"" was his curt reply. After a brief silence he volunteered, ""We are very much into the zona. The ruins that I am about to show you are one of its focal points.""
Abruptly, the trail ascended, topping the crest of a steep rise, then dipped slightly into a broad, almost level expanse. As my companion halted the truck briefly at the top of the rise, I viewed the scene extending out before us. There, jutting up from the thorny chaparral, I saw several low, truncated pyramids, along with what appeared to be a large conical structure and the jagged, broken tops of a number of walls. The structures appeared to be composed of a black basaltic stone, in rather striking contrast to the brownish-grey sandstone or pale limestone shale so abundant in that region.
""This is fascinating, Don Ramiro, but why hasn't this site been opened to archaeological study?"" My academic orientation made the question inevitable.
""I have a very valid reason for not wanting that to happen,"" he replied quickly. ""If the government knew of this place,"" he explained, ""they would declare it, and the surrounding area, a national archaeological zone.""
""But,"" I protested, ""wouldn't that allow for organized research into the true origins and age of the site, the identification of the ancient culture to which it belonged? You, yourself say that it may be older than the Toltec civilization. Why, this might cause archaeologists to rethink some of their present beliefs concerning ancient civilization in Mexico!""
""It would only give government bureaucrats an opportunity to loot the patrimony of our ancestors!"" he snapped. ""They would take the best for themselves, or sell it to foreigners, and put whatever was left in museum store rooms to be forgotten and eventually thrown out with the rubbish.""
I accepted his reasoning, which sounded sincere enough, though privately I suspected his real motive was fear of government confiscation of his property.
We left the truck and proceeded into the brush on foot.
""Be careful of snakes,"" warned my host. ""We have several very poisonous varieties around here.""
We made our way to the largest of the pyramids, scratching ourselves considerably on the thorny vegetation. I also noticed that my clothing suffered tears in several places. The pyramid, actually more of a rectangular structure with steeply sloping sides, rose some fifty feet from its base to a long platform. The platform itself was reached by means of a crumbling masonry stairway on the eastern face of the pyramid. Stunted mesquite and prickly pear grew from cracks in the basaltic blocks, and a tough wiry grass covered most of the platform surfaces, growing from centuries of accumulated soil and disintegrated masonry. Altogether, it was difficult to ascertain if the pyramid had ever served as the base for a masonry temple, as was usually the case with other ancient Mexican and Mesoamerican sites.
The top of the pyramid measured, in approximate terms, thirty feet in width by forty feet in length, and commanded an excellent view of the whole complex of structures. This large pyramid seemed to be situated near the western end of the city, for such the complex appeared to be. The crumbling remains of other buildings, including at least three smaller pyramids, stretched out for nearly three quarters of a mile to the south and east, though the tops of the structures were often barely visible above the thick, stunted vegetation. Obviously, the construction of such a center in this desolate and inaccessible site, with the primitive tools and technology probably available to the builders, had been no mean undertaking.
Of singular peculiarity among the crumbling stone edifices was the truncated conical structure mentioned earlier. As best as I could tell, its diameter was about one hundred feet at the base and it rose to an average height of some seventy feet, though the jagged outline of its rim suggested it had originally been much higher. Exploring entirely around the base, I could find no sign of a stairway or portal, or any other means of ingress or egress. Strangely, I noticed, the tower was devoid of any vegetation, with the exception of a sickly lichenous or fungous growth of a putrid grayish-green hue that spread in irregular patches up the sides of the structure. Also, notably absent were birds and bird droppings, nor were any of the swift striped-back skinks that abound in the area to be seen darting about the sloping sides of that mysterious black tower.
I abruptly noticed that Don Ramiro was nowhere about. Concerned that he had fallen, or otherwise injured himself in the crumbling stonework, I called out to him. After a few moments I heard his voice some distance away.
""Aquí estoy, aquí donde el ídolo.""
I was taken by surprise as I had not seen any idol in the place. After a few minutes of searching I found my host, standing with an awed expression before a large carven figure of black stone.
The figure itself was about fifteen feet tall, and at first glance appeared to be a representation of some deity fashioned in the typical, highly stylized Mesoamerican mode. Closer examination, however, sent me reeling with revulsion. The ""god,"" or whatever it was intended to represent, was actually some sort of fantastic sea creature, incorporating in its tentacled visage a grotesque parody of a face. Worst of all, the monstrosity was depicted employing its facial tentacles to force a human figure into its gaping, toothy mouth.
""What is it?"" I asked.
""The Great Kutulli,"" he replied, in a voice that sounded almost reverent.
The day was becoming late. Noticing this, Ramiro motioned in the direction of the truck.
""Time to go,"" he said without further comment. I felt fully in agreement. The prospect of remaining in this place after dark filled me with an overpowering dread . . . a dread I could scarcely explain at the moment.
The long, bumpy trip back to San Facundo was made in silence. My companion seemed unusually pensive and answered my few inquiries in grunted monosyllables. As for myself, I simply felt too overwhelmed, too overloaded with unanswered questions to give voice to my thoughts.
We reached town just after nightfall. My host dropped me off near Rousseau's place, though I still had to walk a long block up a steep, dark street to reach the house. In the gathering gloom I discerned several shadowy figures approaching me. For some inexplicable reason, call it primal instinct, I realized that these figures meant extreme danger, for me, now! I broke for the house, running as fast as my unaccustomed legs would carry me. Though I did not look back, I fully sensed the close pursuit of my assailants, could almost feel their searing breath on my neck. The dim light from Rousseau's study still seemed infinitely far away, and I caught a brief glimpse of something running, or loping just to my right side, almost close enough to grab me. I cried out, an incoherent scream of desperation and terror.
""Ay basta! Lárguense a la chingada pinches demonios encartados! Vámonos! Asquerosos chingados!""
I didn't see who was yelling, threatening, and cursing in a coarse female voice, and at the top of her lungs. I merely fell, exhausted, on my hands and knees. Presently, I felt a strong, thick arm help me back to my feet.
""Ay, pobre güerito. Por tantito te llevan a la chingada esos pendejos!""
I stared into the face of a copper-skinned woman of uncertain age, not unusually tall, but powerfully built, with a stocky, heavy-boned body. Her rugged Indian features and small bright eyes somehow inspired confidence.
""Who were they?"" I panted.
""They were nobody that you ever want to meet,"" she replied, adding, ""They know better than to mess with me; I know ways to make them curse their mothers for bringing them into this world. Ha!""
""But señora, who are you?"" I asked, beginning to catch my breath.
""Everyone calls me Doña Tencha. They say that I'm a bruja, a witch.""
""Are you?"" I asked, wondering.
""What do you think?"" she responded, half laughing. ""Ha, ha! Take care."" With that, she disappeared into a dark cluster of shacks situated just off the street.
I arrived at the house and fumbled for my key. Before I could insert it in the lock, Rousseau unexpectedly opened the door.
""My God, Shapiro! What happened? You look like you've seen the devil himself!""
""Maybe I have, or a close enough facsimile,"" I answered.
""But . . . but, how . . . what happened?""
Obviously he was taken aback by my state at that moment. I proceeded to give him as complete an account as possible of my recent peril.
Rousseau pondered for a moment, as if trying to make some sense out of what I was saying, then offered, ""I don't think it was a matter of common street ruffians. You say that they seemed to be terrified of the woman . . . what's her name? Tencha, did you say?""
""Yes, she said that's what people call her.""
""Funny,"" he replied. ""I had heard something about some kind of witch or sorceress living near here. I don't know why I never looked her up. She might be a good source of information.""
""She probably saved my life,"" I responded, rubbing my forehead.
My companion seemed to reflect for a moment. ""Do you think it was the freaks?""
""I'm sure it was several of them!"" I shot back, somewhat annoyed at his seeming failure to grasp the significance of the matter.
""And you say they were terrified of her?""
""That's what I said; but wait, you know, I heard her call them 'demonios encartados'.""
""Hybrid devils? Maybe just an epithet, but . . . ""
I cut off Rousseau's reply in mid-sentence. ""Did you ever read any of Lovecraft's works Carl?""
He shook his head.
""In several of his stories referring to the 'Cthulhu Mythos',"" I continued, ""Lovecraft described hybrid beings resulting from unions between certain strange sea creatures, apparently some sort of survival from an earlier, pre-human age, and renegade humans. Those hybrid beings were dedicated to the restoration to power of the extra-dimensional entity Cthulhu and his kind, called the 'Ancient Ones,' on our own earthly plane of existence. At least that's how the stories went.""
Rousseau's face manifested a mixture of revulsion and astonishment.
""So . . . you believe these freakish-looking people we see around here are some kind of alien hybrid? Good God, Shapiro . . . do you realize the implications of what you're suggesting?""
""Unfortunately, I do,"" I replied.
Now I knew, beyond any doubt, that my strange sense of being watched and followed reflected a very real danger. Quite in violation of my normal adherence to Ivy League conventions of ""political correctness,"" I was now applying the label of ""fish faces"" to the repellent beings that lurked about in the late afternoon shadows and darkness of night. After all, those creatures definitely had it in for us, or at least for me. Strangely, Rousseau had never been accosted, or even approached by any of the oddities, which seemed difficult to explain considering the length of his stay in San Facundo.


V

The following afternoon I met with Don Ramiro at a quiet local tavern. After providing him with an account of the previous night's events I queried, ""What do you think it means Don Ramiro?""
""Pues, I think it means you had better be careful,"" he replied, lifting his eyebrows in a kind of facial shrug.
""But, why do you think they jumped me while they've left my friend Rousseau alone all this time? Also, Don Ramiro, what can you tell me about those people, and who is Doña Tencha?""
""Please Profe, one question at a time. Now you ask why they attacked you and not Rou . . . whatever his name is; well, maybe it is because you have come too close to certain things that are better left alone. As for Tencha, she is a curandera, a folk healer who, maybe, practices a little black magic now and then.""
Unsatisfied, I continued to prod him.
""And the creatures themselves, who, or what are they?""
He paused for a long moment, as if uncertain how to answer my question. ""They go back a long time,"" he half whispered, then continued, ""The indios here, they practiced strange rituals, things that so horrified the priests that they killed hundreds, burned them alive, to cleanse the land of the abomination. That is how they saw it.""
""But the strange ones . . . ,"" I interrupted, scarcely able to contain my curiosity.
""Have patience, my friend; I am coming to that.""
He glanced quickly over his shoulder and leaned forward, obviously not wishing to be overheard. In a low voice he continued, ""This will sound incredible to you, with your scientific training, but the indios were in contact with very ancient beings, monstrous things from the sea."" My companion stopped momentarily, seeming to gage my reaction, then resumed his story. ""Those things, animals or devils, or whatever they were, demanded constant sacrifices, human sacrifices. They taught the Indians to do horrible things, to devour the sacrificial victims the same way that they liked to do it . . . alive and conscious!""
I recoiled at this. The very idea of a living, conscious human being torn apart and devoured by savages and the abominations they worshipped, while the poor wretch was aware of the hideous thing being done to him, seemed horrible beyond all imagining.
""They showed them how to tear the flesh away without damaging the main blood vessels or nerves. The victim would live on for hours while the flesh was being ripped from his bones. They did it with their teeth you know. That is how the sea demons taught them to do it. The pain suffered by the victim, along with his gradually ebbing life force, served as a kind of food for the others.""
Though gagging from my companion's horrible account, I still needed to learn more. I sensed that I was very close to receiving an important revelation. I urged Don Ramiro to continue.
""It only gets worse,"" he assured me, ""but if you wish, I will tell you what I know.""
He poured himself a double shot of brandy, took a deep sip, and continued, ""After a long time, maybe a century, the sea-things suggested to the Indians that they give their young women up to them, that they have their children. The beings assured them that these children would be as gods.""
""But, why didn't they just take the young women?"" I interjected. ""I mean, with the power those things held over the Indians . . . ""
""Perhaps they had to come willingly or it would not work."" This was my companion's answer. ""The reality is that I do not know. At any rate, the things from the sea served the others.""
""Others . . . but, what kind of others?"" I prodded.
""Things from . . . from outside.""
He took another sip.
""There are beings . . . or entities that we cannot see, cannot be aware of with our normal five senses, at least not unless they want, or allow, us to be. They exist in other dimensions from those we know . . . or between dimensions. Anyway, they are not subject to the laws of space and time as we know them. The greatest among them on this planet is called Kutulli.""
""That horrible idol we saw at the ruined city . . . you said it was the Great Kutulli.""
""Sí. The city was built by the ancient ancestors of the Indians the Spanish found here. It had fallen into ruins many centuries before those Europeans arrived here with their absurd worship of a crucified and dying god. The people degenerated; they lost their civilization but their beliefs continued. They carried out their sacred rituals of blood sacrifice for many centuries, always certain of the proximate advent of their god . . . Great Kutulli. Are you wondering from where came their cult? They brought it from the place of their origin . . . their legends told of a great continent in the place where the sun rises, the land that now sleeps beneath the sea.""
Ramiro's face took on a strange, distant cast.
""Their god, or his servitors, eventually took notice of this devotion. As you know, the coast is only about forty kilometers east of here. The people often went there to fish, even as they do now. At a spot on the coast known as Naniché, 'Place Where We Meet' in the language of the native Indians, the tribal priests summoned the beings from the sea. This contact confirmed their faith. They now could speak directly with the servants of Kutulli, even as their long ago ancestors had done, according to legend.""
""So, that was the beginning of the cannibal cult?"" I interrupted.
""Sí. Of course, the Indians had performed human sacrifice for countless centuries before, but never in so horrible a way as I described earlier. The sea beings taught the Indians many things, many rituals and magical chants said to be powerful in hastening the return of Great Kutulli and the Ancient Ones."" With this, Don Ramiro became unexpectedly silent.
I took advantage of my companion's prolonged pause to reflect on his words. Obviously, there was a philological relationship between ""Kutulli"" and the ""Cthulhu"" of Lovecraft's tales. Many other similarities were also apparent, too many for my comfort.
At length I inquired, ""Is it not true that the first Spaniards to permanently establish themselves in this region were friars of the Augustinian Order?""
""Yes . . . and no,"" he answered. ""Before the priests came there were others; they came here because they wanted to get away from the Church's lackeys, to a place where they could practice their beliefs without interference. They were all originally judíos, but among them were some who called themselves Cafanes. They were worshipers of a god called El Asuado. Their cult was taken from the writings of the Sepher al Azif. I think your friend has a copy. Several were made locally from the original, which is . . . where no one can lay hands on it. A few specially chosen ones from each new generation of Cafanes were taught to read the ancient writing, a tradition passed along to this day among their descendants, who are known as the Rabana.
""These people, the Cafanes, worshipped the same way the Indians did. They shared in the rituals and sacrifices, and taught the Indians new ones from their book. Everything went well for them until the priests came. They came to convert the Indians, but . . . ,"" he chuckled, ""the first to be sent here were converted themselves . . . when they saw the power of the conjurations from the book . . . and what the sea gods could actually do, something they could behold with their own eyes, not just accept by faith, they believed, and participated in the rituals of sacrifice. For this, they were punished by the Church.""
Now I understood the import of Rousseau's statement concerning the twelve priests who were blinded, mutilated, and imprisoned by the ecclesiastical authorities. A clearer, albeit terrible picture of San Facundo's secret past was taking shape in my mind. Here dwelt a tribe of Indians, probably believing themselves descended from ancient Atlanteans or some such. They had achieved a fairly high level of early civilization, then regressed to a primitive state, maintaining, through it all, a cult dedicated to the Ancient Ones, hoary and abominable entities from beyond all time and space as we humans understand those concepts.
At some later time, still long before their initial encounter with European civilization, the Indians had established contact with ancient and dreadful beings from the sea, beings that were dedicated, or bound, to the service of the Ancient Ones, especially to Kutulli. Much later, some of those same Indians had submitted to sexual congress with the sea creatures, and thus created a race of hybrids better able to function freely in the world of men. Eventually, this strange mixture had come to include certain apostate Jews, who, through their possession of the unspeakable Necronomicon, had come to share beliefs and practices almost identical to those of the Indians.
This ""Kutulli"" must certainly be the same as Cthulhu, who ""In his house in R'lyeh lies not dead but dreaming,"" according to Lovecraft's mythos. Incredible as it all seemed, that mythos seemed to be based, at least partly, on actual belief systems, and far more hideously, on actual occurrences. The implications filled me with a sense of primal horror and dread.
""You look pale, my friend. Perhaps the things I have told you are a little too much for your sensitivities."" Thus said Ramiro.
""The things you have told me,"" I answered, ""even if partially true, speak to man's worst and most primal fears. Merciful God, Ramiro! If this is true, then what implications does this have for the rest of us… for the very concept of humanity?""
That night I dreamed . . . dreamed horribly. I found myself standing before the strange black tower in the ruined city, though now it was not in ruins. The tower jutted up before me into the night sky. A great, gibbous moon gleamed overhead, casting its pallid light on the scene, which was also illuminated by the red glow of massive bonfires. I was aware of motion and the incessant throbbing of some huge drum. Presently, I saw that the tower was completely encircled by three concentric rings of celebrants, squat men and women with broad faces and prominent cheek bones, their straight hair matted and their naked bodies painted hideously from head to foot in red and black. Around and around the base of that menacing black truncated cone they leaped and whirled in their frenzied dance, to the obscene rhythm of that great unseen drum and to the high, monotonous whine of flutes. Some distance away, in the shadow of a hideous black idol, squatted others, hungrily gnawing the last shreds of bloody flesh from bones that I knew belonged to no four-footed beast. At that point I noticed the outermost ring of dancers, the one formed by other celebrants, those that hopped, flopped, and floundered about grotesquely, keeping time with the horrible thunderous beating of the drum and the maddening whine of flutes.
Suddenly, all was silent. An interval of time passed, impossible to measure in a dream state, and the drumming and piping began anew, this time accompanied by a strange low chanting that gradually rose to an almost deafening crescendo. The words, scarcely intelligible in themselves, seemed to reverberate in the very core of my brain: ""Ph-nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn."" Something compelled me to look high up, toward the rim of the tower. In the uncertain light and moving shadows I could make out that the rim was fashioned of a stone different from the rest of the edifice, something shiny and black, like onyx. It seemed to be covered with carvings. As the chanting reached an almost unbearable pitch, I saw several huge black snakelike objects rise out of the tower. Presently, these stretched out far in all directions, writhing in the night sky high above our heads. Then, something of singular horror took place: above the waving tentacles a sort of face seemed to be forming, or materializing. The head, in its upper part, suggested some grotesque parody of the human face, but below the eyes all similarity ceased. The lower part of this obscene visage consisted of a writhing mass of tentacle-like appendages surrounding a black gaping maw, I won't call it a mouth, from which drooled a nauseating yellowish ichor. As I stared paralyzed with horror at the blasphemous obscenity forming above the tower, I saw the hideous eyes look downward, focusing on me!
I awoke screaming in the predawn hours, bathed in cold, clammy sweat. My heart was pounding like the terrible drum which I had heard in my dream.

",False
"It must have been some imp of the perverse--or some sardonic pull from dark, hidden sources--which made me change my plans as I did. I had long before resolved to limit my observations to architecture alone, and I was even then hurrying toward the Square in an effort to get quick transportation out of this festering city of death and decay; but the sight of old Zadok Allen set up new currents in my mind and made me slacken my pace uncertainly.
I had been assured that the old man could do nothing but hint at wild, disjointed, and incredible legends, and I had been warned that the natives made it unsafe to be seen talking with him; yet the thought of this aged witness to the town's decay, with memories going back to the early days of ships and factories, was a lure that no amount of reason could make me resist. After all, the strangest and maddest of myths are often merely symbols or allegories based upon truth--and old Zadok must have seen everything which went on around Innsmouth for the last ninety years. Curiosity flared up beyond sense and caution, and in my youthful egotism I fancied I might be able to sift a nucleus of real history from the confused, extravagant outpouring I would probably extract with the aid of raw whiskey.
I knew that I could not accost him then and there, for the firemen would surely notice and object. Instead, I reflected, I would prepare by getting some bootleg liquor at a place where the grocery boy had told me it was plentiful. Then I would loaf near the fire station in apparent casualness, and fall in with old Zadok after he had started on one of his frequent rambles. The youth had said that he was very restless, seldom sitting around the station for more than an hour or two at a time.
A quart bottle of whiskey was easily, though not cheaply, obtained in the rear of a dingy variety-store just off the Square in Eliot Street. The dirty-looking fellow who waited on me had a touch of the staring ""Innsmouth look"", but was quite civil in his way; being perhaps used to the custom of such convivial strangers--truckmen, gold-buyers, and the like--as were occasionally in town.
Reentering the Square I saw that luck was with me; for--shuffling out of Paine Street around the corner of the Gilman House--I glimpsed nothing less than the tall, lean, tattered form of old Zadok Allen himself. In accordance with my plan, I attracted his attention by brandishing my newly-purchased bottle: and soon realised that he had begun to shuffle wistfully after me as I turned into Waite Street on my way to the most deserted region I could think of.
I was steering my course by the map the grocery boy had prepared, and was aiming for the wholly abandoned stretch of southern waterfront which I had previously visited. The only people in sight there had been the fishermen on the distant breakwater; and by going a few squares south I could get beyond the range of these, finding a pair of seats on some abandoned wharf and being free to question old Zadok unobserved for an indefinite time. Before I reached Main Street I could hear a faint and wheezy ""Hey, Mister!"" behind me and I presently allowed the old man to catch up and take copious pulls from the quart bottle.
I began putting out feelers as we walked amidst the omnipresent desolation and crazily tilted ruins, but found that the aged tongue did not loosen as quickly as I had expected. At length I saw a grass-grown opening toward the sea between crumbling brick walls, with the weedy length of an earth-and-masonry wharf projecting beyond. Piles of moss-covered stones near the water promised tolerable seats, and the scene was sheltered from all possible view by a ruined warehouse on the north. Here, I thought was the ideal place for a long secret colloquy; so I guided my companion down the lane and picked out spots to sit in among the mossy stones. The air of death and desertion was ghoulish, and the smell of fish almost insufferable; but I was resolved to let nothing deter me.
About four hours remained for conversation if I were to catch the eight o'clock coach for Arkham, and I began to dole out more liquor to the ancient tippler; meanwhile eating my own frugal lunch. In my donations I was careful not to overshoot the mark, for I did not wish Zadok's vinous garrulousness to pass into a stupor. After an hour his furtive taciturnity shewed signs of disappearing, but much to my disappointment he still sidetracked my questions about Innsmouth and its shadow-haunted past. He would babble of current topics, revealing a wide acquaintance with newspapers and a great tendency to philosophise in a sententious village fashion.
Toward the end of the second hour I feared my quart of whiskey would not be enough to produce results, and was wondering whether I had better leave old Zadok and go back for more. Just then, however, chance made the opening which my questions had been unable to make; and the wheezing ancient's rambling took a turn that caused me to lean forward and listen alertly. My back was toward the fishy-smelling sea, but he was facing it and something or other had caused his wandering gaze to light on the low, distant line of Devil Reef, then showing plainly and almost fascinatingly above the waves. The sight seemed to displease him, for he began a series of weak curses which ended in a confidential whisper and a knowing leer. He bent toward me, took hold of my coat lapel, and hissed out some hints that could not be mistaken,
""Thar's whar it all begun--that cursed place of all wickedness whar the deep water starts. Gate o' hell--sheer drop daown to a bottom no saoundin'-line kin tech. Ol' Cap'n Obed done it--him that faound aout more'n was good fer him in the Saouth Sea islands.
""Everybody was in a bad way them days. Trade fallin' off, mills losin' business--even the new ones--an' the best of our menfolks kilt aprivateerin' in the War of 1812 or lost with the Elizy brig an' the Ranger scow--both on 'em Gilman venters. Obed Marsh he had three ships afloat--brigantine Columby, brig Hefty, an' barque Sumatry Queen. He was the only one as kep' on with the East-Injy an' Pacific trade, though Esdras Martin's barkentine Malay Bride made a venter as late as twenty-eight.
""Never was nobody like Cap'n Obed--old limb o' Satan! Heh, heh! I kin mind him a-tellin' abaout furren parts, an' callin' all the folks stupid for goin' to Christian meetin' an' bearin' their burdens meek an' lowly. Says they'd orter git better gods like some o' the folks in the Injies--gods as ud bring 'em good fishin' in return for their sacrifices, an' ud reely answer folks's prayers.
""Matt Eliot, his fust mate, talked a lot too, only he was again' folks's doin' any heathen things. Told abaout an island east of Othaheite whar they was a lot o' stone ruins older'n anybody knew anything abaout, kind o' like them on Ponape, in the Carolines, but with carven's of faces that looked like the big statues on Easter Island. Thar was a little volcanic island near thar, too, whar they was other ruins with diff'rent carvin'--ruins all wore away like they'd ben under the sea onct, an' with picters of awful monsters all over 'em.
""Wal, Sir, Matt he says the natives araound thar had all the fish they cud ketch, an' sported bracelets an' armlets an' head rigs made aout o' a queer kind o' gold an' covered with picters o' monsters jest like the ones carved over the ruins on the little island--sorter fish-like frogs or froglike fishes that was drawed in all kinds o' positions likes they was human bein's. Nobody cud get aout o' them whar they got all the stuff, an' all the other natives wondered haow they managed to find fish in plenty even when the very next island had lean pickin's. Matt he got to wonderon' too an' so did Cap'n Obed. Obed he notices, besides, that lots of the hn'some young folks ud drop aout o' sight fer good from year to year, an' that they wan't many old folks around. Also, he thinks some of the folks looked durned queer even for Kanakys.
""It took Obed to git the truth aout o' them heathen. I dun't know haow he done it, but he begun by tradin' fer the gold-like things they wore. Ast 'em whar they come from, an' ef they cud git more, an' finally wormed the story aout o' the old chief--Walakea, they called him. Nobody but Obed ud ever a believed the old yeller devil, but the Cap'n cud read folks like they was books. Heh, heh! Nobody never believes me naow when I tell 'em, an' I dun't s'pose you will, young feller--though come to look at ye, ye hev kind o' got them sharp-readin' eyes like Obed had.""
The old man's whisper grew fainter, and I found myself shuddering at the terrible and sincere portentousness of his intonation, even though I knew his tale could be nothing but drunken phantasy.
""Wal, Sir, Obed he larnt that they's things on this arth as most folks never heerd about--an' wouldn't believe ef they did hear. It seems these Kanakys was sacrificin' heaps o' their young men an' maidens to some kind o' god-things that lived under the sea, an' gittin' all kinds o' favour in return. They met the things on the little islet with the queer ruins, an' it seems them awful picters o' frog-fish monsters was supposed to be picters o' these things. Mebbe they was the kind o' critters as got all the mermaid stories an' sech started.
""They had all kinds a' cities on the sea-bottom, an' this island was heaved up from thar. Seem they was some of the things alive in the stone buildin's when the island come up sudden to the surface, That's how the Kanakys got wind they was daown thar. Made sign-talk as soon as they got over bein' skeert, an' pieced up a bargain afore long.
""Them things liked human sacrifices. Had had 'em ages afore, but lost track o' the upper world after a time. What they done to the victims it ain't fer me to say, an' I guess Obed wa'n't none too sharp abaout askin'. But it was all right with the heathens, because they'd ben havin' a hard time an' was desp'rate abaout everything. They give a sarten number o' young folks to the sea-things twice every year--May-Eve an' Hallawe'en--reg'lar as cud be. Also give some a' the carved knick-knacks they made. What the things agreed to give in return was plenty a' fish--they druv 'em in from all over the sea--an' a few gold-like things naow an' then.
""Wal, as I says, the natives met the things on the little volcanic islet--goin' thar in canoes with the sacrifices et cet'ry, and bringin' back any of the gold-like jools as was comin' to 'em. At fust the things didn't never go onto the main island, but arter a time they come to want to. Seems they hankered arter mixin' with the folks, an' havin' j'int ceremonies on the big days--May-Eve an' Hallowe'en. Ye see, they was able to live both in ant aout o' water--what they call amphibians, I guess. The Kanakys told 'em as haow folks from the other islands might wanta wipe 'an out if they got wind o' their bein' thar, but they says they dun't keer much, because they cud wipe aout the hull brood o' humans ef they was willin' to bother--that is, any as didn't be, sarten signs sech as was used onct by the lost Old Ones, whoever they was. But not wantin' to bother, they'd lay low when anybody visited the island.
""When it come to matin' with them toad-lookin' fishes, the Kanakys kind o' balked, but finally they larnt something as put a new face on the matter. Seems that human folks has got a kind a' relation to sech water-beasts--that everything alive come aout o' the water onct an' only needs a little change to go back agin. Them things told the Kanakys that ef they mixed bloods there'd be children as ud look human at fust, but later turn more'n more like the things, till finally they'd take to the water an' jine the main lot o' things daown har. An' this is the important part, young feller--them as turned into fish things an' went into the water wouldn't never die. Them things never died excep' they was kilt violent.
""Wal, Sir, it seems by the time Obed knowed them islanders they was all full o' fish blood from them deep-water things. When they got old an' begun to shew it, they was kep' hid until they felt like takin' to the water an' quittin' the place. Some was more teched than others, an' some never did change quite enough to take to the water; but mosily they turned out jest the way them things said. Them as was born more like the things changed arly, but them as was nearly human sometimes stayed on the island till they was past seventy, though they'd usually go daown under for trial trips afore that. Folks as had took to the water gen'rally come back a good deal to visit, so's a man ud often be a'talkin' to his own five-times-great-grandfather who'd left the dry land a couple o' hundred years or so afore.
""Everybody got aout o' the idee o' dyin'--excep' in canoe wars with the other islanders, or as sacrifices to the sea-gods daown below, or from snakebite or plague or sharp gallopin' ailments or somethin' afore they cud take to the water--but simply looked forrad to a kind o' change that wa'n't a bit horrible arter a while. They thought what they'd got was well wuth all they'd had to give up--an' I guess Obed kind o' come to think the same hisself when he'd chewed over old Walakea's story a bit. Walakea, though, was one of the few as hadn't got none of the fish blood--bein' of a royal line that intermarried with royal lines on other islands.
""Walakea he shewed Obed a lot o' rites an' incantations as had to do with the sea things, an' let him see some o' the folks in the village as had changed a lot from human shape. Somehaow or other, though, he never would let him see one of the reg'lar things from right aout o' the water. In the end he give him a funny kind o' thingumajig made aout o' lead or something, that he said ud bring up the fish things from any place in the water whar they might be a nest o' 'em. The idee was to drop it daown with the right kind o' prayers an' sech. Walakea allowed as the things was scattered all over the world, so's anybody that looked abaout cud find a nest an' bring 'em up ef they was wanted.
""Matt he didn't like this business at all, an' wanted Obed shud keep away from the island; but the Cap'n was sharp fer gain, an' faound he cud get them gold-like things so cheap it ud pay him to make a specialty of them. Things went on that way for years an' Obed got enough o' that gold-like stuff to make him start the refinery in Waite's old run-daown fullin' mill. He didn't dass sell the pieces like they was, for folks ud be all the time askin' questions. All the same his crews ud get a piece an' dispose of it naow and then, even though they was swore to keep quiet; an' he let his women-folks wear some o' the pieces as was more human-like than most.
""Well, come abaout thutty-eight--when I was seven year' old--Obed he faound the island people all wiped aout between v'yages. Seems the other islanders had got wind o' what was goin' on, and had took matters into their own hands. S'pose they must a had, after all, them old magic signs as the sea things says was the only things they was afeard of. No tellin' what any o' them Kanakys will chance to git a holt of when the sea-bottom throws up some island with ruins older'n the deluge. Pious cusses, these was--they didn't leave nothin' standin' on either the main island or the little volcanic islet excep' what parts of the ruins was too big to knock daown. In some places they was little stones strewed abaout--like charms--with somethin' on 'em like what ye call a swastika naowadays. Prob'ly them was the Old Ones' signs. Folks all wiped aout no trace o' no gold-like things an' none the nearby Kanakys ud breathe a word abaout the matter. Wouldn't even admit they'd ever ben any people on that island.
""That naturally hit Obed pretty hard, seein' as his normal trade was doin' very poor. It hit the whole of Innsmouth, too, because in seafarint days what profited the master of a ship gen'lly profited the crew proportionate. Most of the folks araound the taown took the hard times kind o' sheep-like an' resigned, but they was in bad shape because the fishin' was peterin' aout an' the mills wan't doin' none too well.
""Then's the time Obed he begun a-cursin' at the folks fer bein' dull sheep an' prayin' to a Christian heaven as didn't help 'em none. He told 'em he'd knowed o' folks as prayed to gods that give somethin' ye reely need, an' says ef a good bunch o' men ud stand by him, he cud mebbe get a holt o' sarten paowers as ud bring plenty o' fish an' quite a bit of gold. O' course them as sarved on the Sumatry Queen, an' seed the island knowed what he meant, an' wa'n't none too anxious to get clost to sea-things like they'd heard tell on, but them as didn't know what 'twas all abaout got kind o' swayed by what Obed had to say, and begun to ast him what he cud do to sit 'em on the way to the faith as ud bring 'em results.""
Here the old man faltered, mumbled, and lapsed into a moody and apprehensive silence; glancing nervously over his shoulder and then turning back to stare fascinatedly at the distant black reef. When I spoke to him he did not answer, so I knew I would have to let him finish the bottle. The insane yarn I was hearing interested me profoundly, for I fancied there was contained within it a sort of crude allegory based upon the strangeness of Innsmouth and elaborated by an imagination at once creative and full of scraps of exotic legend. Not for a moment did I believe that the tale had any really substantial foundation; but none the less the account held a hint of genuine terror if only because it brought in references to strange jewels clearly akin to the malign tiara I had seen at Newburyport. Perhaps the ornaments had, after all, come from some strange island; and possibly the wild stories were lies of the bygone Obed himself rather than of this antique toper.
I handed Zadok the bottle, and he drained it to the last drop. It was curious how he could stand so much whiskey, for not even a trace of thickness had come into his high, wheezy voice. He licked the nose of the bottle and slipped it into his pocket, then beginning to nod and whisper softly to himself. I bent close to catch any articulate words he might utter, and thought I saw a sardonic smile behind the stained bushy whiskers. Yes--he was really forming words, and I could grasp a fair proportion of them.
""Poor Matt--Matt he allus was agin it--tried to line up the folks on his side, an' had long talks with the preachers--no use--they run the Congregational parson aout o' taown, an' the Methodist feller quit--never did see Resolved Babcock, the Baptist parson, agin--Wrath o' Jehovy--I was a mightly little critter, but I heerd what I heerd an, seen what I seen--Dagon an' Ashtoreth--Belial an' Beelzebub--Golden Caff an' the idols o' Canaan an' the Philistines--Babylonish abominations--Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin--.""
He stopped again, and from the look in his watery blue eyes I feared he was close to a stupor after all. But when I gently shook his shoulder he turned on me with astonishing alertness and snapped out some more obscure phrases.
""Dun't believe me, hey? Hey, heh, heh--then jest tell me, young feller, why Cap'n Obed an' twenty odd other folks used to row aout to Devil Reef in the dead o' night an' chant things so laoud ye cud hear 'em all over taown when the wind was right? Tell me that, hey? An' tell me why Obed was allus droppin' heavy things daown into the deep water t'other side o' the reef whar the bottom shoots daown like a cliff lower'n ye kin saound? Tell me what he done with that funny-shaped lead thingumajig as Walakea give him? Hey, boy? An' what did they all haowl on May-Eve, an, agin the next Hallowe'en? An' why'd the new church parsons--fellers as used to be sailors--wear them queer robes an' cover their-selves with them gold-like things Obed brung? Hey?""
The watery blue eyes were almost savage and maniacal now, and the dirty white beard bristled electrically. Old Zadok probably saw me shrink back, for he began to cackle evilly.
""Heh, heh, heh, heh! Beginnin' to see, hey? Mebbe ye'd like to a ben me in them days, when I seed things at night aout to sea from the cupalo top o' my haouse. Oh, I kin tell ye' little pitchers hev big ears, an' I wa'n't missin' nothin' o' what was gossiped abaout Cap'n Obed an' the folks aout to the reef! Heh, heh, heh! Haow abaout the night I took my pa's ship's glass up to the cupalo an' seed the reef a-bristlin' thick with shapes that dove off quick soon's the moon riz?
""Obed an' the folks was in a dory, but them shapes dove off the far side into the deep water an' never come up...
""Haow'd ye like to be a little shaver alone up in a cupola a-watchin' shapes as wa'n't human shapes?...Heh?...Heh, heh, heh ...""
The old man was getting hysterical, and I began to shiver with a nameless alarm. He laid a gnarled claw on my shoulder, and it seemed to me that its shaking was not altogether that of mirth.
""S'pose one night ye seed somethin' heavy heaved offen Obed's dory beyond the reef' and then learned next day a young feller was missin' from home. Hey! Did anybody ever see hide or hair o' Hiram Gilman agin. Did they? An' Nick Pierce, an' Luelly Waite, an' Adoniram Saouthwick, an' Henry Garrison. Hey? Heh, heh, heh, heh...Shapes talkin' sign language with their hands...them as had reel hands ...
""Wal, Sir, that was the time Obed begun to git on his feet agin. Folks see his three darters a-wearin' gold-like things as nobody'd never see on 'em afore, an' smoke stared comin' aout o' the refin'ry chimbly. Other folks was prosp'rin, too--fish begun to swarm into the harbour fit to kill an' heaven knows what sized cargoes we begun to ship aout to Newb'ryport, Arkham, an' Boston. 'Twas then Obed got the ol' branch railrud put through. Some Kingsport fishermen heerd abaout the ketch an' come up in sloops, but they was all lost. Nobody never see 'em agin. An' jest then our folk organised the Esoteric Order 0' Dagon, an' bought Masonic Hall offen Calvary Commandery for it...heh, heh, heh! Matt Eliot was a Mason an' agin the sellin', but he dropped aout o' sight jest then.
""Remember, I ain't sayin' Obed was set on hevin' things jest like they was on that Kanaky isle. I dun't think he aimed at fust to do no mixin', nor raise no younguns to take to the water an' turn into fishes with eternal life. He wanted them gold things, an' was willin' to pay heavy, an' I guess the others was satisfied fer a while ...
""Come in' forty-six the taown done some lookin' an' thinkin' fer itself. Too many folks missin'--too much wild preachin' at meetin' of a Sunday--too much talk abaout that reef. I guess I done a bit by tellin' Selectman Mowry what I see from the cupalo. They was a party one night as follered Obed's craowd aout to the reef, an' I heerd shots betwixt the dories. Nex' day Obed and thutty-two others was in gaol, with everybody a-wonderin' jest what was afoot and jest what charge agin 'em cud he got to holt. God, ef anybody'd look'd ahead...a couple o' weeks later, when nothin' had ben throwed into the sea fer thet long...""
Zadok was shewing sings of fright and exhaustion, and I let him keep silence for a while, though glancing apprehensively at my watch. The tide had turned and was coming in now, and the sound of the waves seemed to arouse him. I was glad of that tide, for at high water the fishy smell might not be so bad. Again I strained to catch his whispers.
""That awful night...I seed 'em. I was up in the cupalo...hordes of 'em...swarms of 'em...all over the reef an' swimmin' up the harbour into the Manuxet...God, what happened in the streets of Innsmouth that night...they rattled our door, but pa wouldn't open...then he clumb aout the kitchen winder with his musket to find Selecman Mowry an' see what he cud do...Maounds o' the dead an' the dyin'...shots and screams...shaoutin' in Ol Squar an' Taown Squar an' New Church Green--gaol throwed open...--proclamation...treason...called it the plague when folks come in an' faoud haff our people missin'...nobody left but them as ud jine in with Obed an' them things or else keep quiet...never heard o' my pa no more...""
The old man was panting and perspiring profusely. His grip on my shoulder tightened.
""Everything cleaned up in the mornin'--but they was traces...Obed he kinder takes charge an' says things is goin' to be changed... others'll worship with us at meetin'-time, an' sarten haouses hez got to entertin guests...they wanted to mix like they done with the Kanakys, an' he for one didn't feel baound to stop 'em. Far gone, was Obed...jest like a crazy man on the subjeck. He says they brung us fish an' treasure, an' shud hev what they hankered after...""
""Nothin' was to be diff'runt on the aoutside; only we was to keep shy o' strangers ef we knowed what was good fer us.
""We all hed to take the Oath o' Dagon, an' later on they was secon' an' third oaths that some o' us took. Them as ud help special, ud git special rewards--gold an' sech--No use balkin', fer they was millions of 'em daown thar. They'd ruther not start risin' an' wipin' aout human-kind, but ef they was gave away an' forced to, they cud do a lot toward jest that. We didn't hev them old charms to cut 'em off like folks in the Saouth Sea did, an' them Kanakys wudn't never give away their secrets.
""Yield up enough sacrifices an' savage knick-knacks an' harbourage in the taown when they wanted it, an' they'd let well enough alone. Wudn't bother no strangers as might bear tales aoutside--that is, withaout they got pryin'. All in the band of the faithful--Order 0' Dagon--an' the children shud never die, but go back to the Mother Hydra an' Father Dagon what we all come from onct...Ia! Ia! Cthulhu fhtagn! Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah-nagl fhtaga--""
Old Zadok was fast lapsing into stark raving, and I held my breath. Poor old soul--to what pitiful depths of hallucination had his liquor, plus his hatred of the decay, alienage, and disease around him, brought that fertile, imaginative brain? He began to moan now, and tears were coursing down his channelled checks into the depths of his beard.
""God, what I seen senct I was fifteen year' old--Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin!--the folks as was missin', and them as kilt theirselves--them as told things in Arkham or Ipswich or sech places was all called crazy, like you're callin' me right naow--but God, what I seen--They'd a kilt me long ago fer' what I know, only I'd took the fust an' secon' Oaths o' Dago offen Obed, so was pertected unlessen a jury of 'em proved I told things knowin' an' delib'rit...but I wudn't take the third Oath--I'd a died ruther'n take that--
""It got wuss araound Civil War time, when children born senct 'forty-six begun to grow up--some 'em, that is. I was afeared--never did no pryin' arter that awful night, an' never see one o'--them--clost to in all my life. That is, never no full-blooded one. I went to the war, an' ef I'd a had any guts or sense I'd a never come back, but settled away from here. But folks wrote me things wa'n't so bad. That, I s'pose, was because gov'munt draft men was in taown arter 'sixty-three. Arter the war it was jest as bad agin. People begun to fall off--mills an' shops shet daown--shippin' stopped an' the harbour choked up--railrud give up--but they...they never stopped swimmin' in an' aout o' the river from that cursed reef o' Satan--an' more an' more attic winders got a-boarded up, an' more an' more noises was heerd in haouses as wa'n't s'posed to hev nobody in 'em...
""Folks aoutside hev their stories abaout us--s'pose you've heerd a plenty on 'em, seein' what questions ye ast--stories abaout things they've seed naow an' then, an' abaout that queer joolry as still comes in from somewhars an' ain't quite all melted up--but nothin' never gits def'nite. Nobody'll believe nothin'. They call them gold-like things pirate loot, an' allaow the Innsmouth folks hez furren blood or is dis-tempered or somethin'. Beside, them that lives here shoo off as many strangers as they kin, an' encourage the rest not to git very cur'ous, specially raound night time. Beasts balk at the critters--hosses wuss'n mules--but when they got autos that was all right.
""In 'forty-six Cap'n Obed took a second wife that nobody in the taown never see--some says he didn't want to, but was made to by them as he'd called in--had three children by her--two as disappeared young, but one gal as looked like anybody else an' was eddicated in Europe. Obed finally got her married off by a trick to an Arkham feller as didn't suspect nothin'. But nobody aoutside'll hav nothin' to do with Innsmouth folks naow. Barnabas Marsh that runs the refin'ry now is Obed's grandson by his fust wife--son of Onesiphorus, his eldest son, but his mother was another o' them as wa'n't never seen aoutdoors.
""Right naow Barnabas is abaout changed. Can't shet his eyes no more, an' is all aout o' shape. They say he still wears clothes, but he'll take to the water soon. Mebbe he's tried it already--they do sometimes go daown for little spells afore they go daown for good. Ain't ben seed abaout in public fer nigh on ten year'. Dun't know haow his poor wife kin feel--she come from Ipiwich, an' they nigh lynched Barnabas when he courted her fifty odd year' ago. Obed he died in 'seventy-eight an' all the next gen'ration is gone naow--the fust wife's children dead, and the rest...God knows...""
The sound of the incoming tide was now very insistent, and little by little it seemed to change the old man's mood from maudlin tearfulness to watchful fear. He would pause now and then to renew those nervous glances over his shoulder or out toward the reef, and despite the wild absurdity of his tale, I could not help beginning to share his apprehensiveness. Zadok now grew shriller, seemed to be trying to whip up his courage with louder speech.
""Hey, yew, why dun't ye say somethin'? Haow'd ye like to be livin' in a taown like this, with everything a-rottin' an' dyin', an' boarded-up monsters crawlin' an' bleatin' an' barkin' an' hoppin' araoun' black cellars an' attics every way ye turn? Hey? Haow'd ye like to hear the haowlin' night arter night from the churches an' Order o' Dagon Hall, an' know what's doin' part o' the haowlin'? Haow'd ye like to hear what comes from that awful reef every May-Eve an' Hallowmass? Hey? Think the old man's crazy, eh? Wal, Sir, let me tell ye that ain't the wust!""
Zadok was really screaming now, and the mad frenzy of his voice disturbed me more than I care to own.
""Curse ye, dun't set thar a'starin' at me with them eyes--I tell Obed Marsh he's in hell, an, hez got to stay thar! Heh, heh...in hell, I says! Can't git me--I hain't done nothin' nor told nobody nothin'--
""Oh, you, young feller? Wal, even ef I hain't told nobody nothin' yet, I'm a'goin' to naow! Yew jest set still an' listen to me, boy--this is what I ain't never told nobody...I says I didn't get to do pryin' arter that night--but I faound things about jest the same!""
""Yew want to know what the reel horror is, hey? Wal, it's this--it ain't what them fish devils hez done, but what they're a-goin' to do! They're a-bringin' things up aout o' whar they come from into the taown--been doin' it fer years, an' slackenin' up lately. Them haouses north o' the river be-twixt Water an' Main Streets is full of 'em--them devils an' what they brung--an' when they git ready...I say, when they git...ever hear tell of a shoggoth?
""Hey, d'ye hear me? I tell ye I know what them things be--I seen 'em one night when...eh-ahhh-ah! e'yahhh...""
The hideous suddenness and inhuman frightfulness of the old man's shriek almost made me faint. His eyes, looking past me toward the malodorous sea, were positively starting from his head; while his face was a mask of fear worthy of Greek tragedy. His bony claw dug monstrously into my shoulder, and he made no motion as I turned my head to look at whatever he had glimpsed.
There was nothing that I could see. Only the incoming tide, with perhaps one set of ripples more local than the long-flung line of breakers. But now Zadok was shaking me, and I turned back to watch the melting of that fear-frozen face into a chaos of twitching eyelids and mumbling gums. Presently his voice came back--albeit as a trembling whisper.
""Git aout o' here! Get aout o' here! They seen us--git aout fer your life! Dun't wait fer nothin'--they know naow--Run fer it--quick--aout o' this taown--""
Another heavy wave dashed against the loosing masonry of the bygone wharf, and changed the mad ancient's whisper to another inhuman and blood-curdling scream. ""E-yaahhhh!...Yheaaaaaa!...""
Before I could recover my scattered wits he had relaxed his clutch on my shoulder and dashed wildly inland toward the street, reeling northward around the ruined warehouse wall.
I glanced back at the sea, but there was nothing there. And when I reached Water Street and looked along it toward the north there was no remaining trace of Zadok Allen.
","West of Arkham the hills rise wild, and there are valleys with deep woods that no axe has ever cut. There are dark narrow glens where the trees slope fantastically, and where thin brooklets trickle without ever having caught the glint of sunlight. On the gentle slopes there are farms, ancient and rocky, with squat, moss-coated cottages brooding eternally over old New England secrets in the lee of great ledges; but these are all vacant now, the wide chimneys crumbling and the shingled sides bulging perilously beneath low gambrel roofs.
The old folk have gone away, and foreigners do not like to live there. French-Canadians have tried it, Italians have tried it, and the Poles have come and departed. It is not because of anything that can be seen or heard or handled, but because of something that is imagined. The place is not good for imagination, and does not bring restful dreams at night. It must be this which keeps the foreigners away, for old Ammi Pierce has never told them of anything he recalls from the strange days. Ammi, whose head has been a little queer for years, is the only one who still remains, or who ever talks of the strange days; and he dares to do this because his house is so near the open fields and the travelled roads around Arkham.
There was once a road over the hills and through the valleys, that ran straight where the blasted heath is now; but people ceased to use it and a new road was laid curving far toward the south. Traces of the old one can still be found amidst the weeds of a returning wilderness, and some of them will doubtless linger even when half the hollows are flooded for the new reservoir. Then the dark woods will be cut down and the blasted heath will slumber far below blue waters whose surface will mirror the sky and ripple in the sun. And the secrets of the strange days will be one with the deep's secrets; one with the hidden lore of old ocean, and all the mystery of primal earth.
When I went into the hills and vales to survey for the new reservoir they told me the place was evil. They told me this in Arkham, and because that is a very old town full of witch legends I thought the evil must be something which grandams had whispered to children through centuries. The name ""blasted heath"" seemed to me very odd and theatrical, and I wondered how it had come into the folklore of a Puritan people. Then I saw that dark westward tangle of glens and slopes for myself, and ceased to wonder at anything beside its own elder mystery. It was morning when I saw it, but shadow lurked always there. The trees grew too thickly, and their trunks were too big for any healthy New England wood. There was too much silence in the dim alleys between them, and the floor was too soft with the dank moss and mattings of infinite years of decay.
In the open spaces, mostly along the line of the old road, there were little hillside farms; sometimes with all the buildings standing, sometimes with only one or two, and sometimes with only a lone chimney or fast-filling cellar. Weeds and briers reigned, and furtive wild things rustled in the undergrowth. Upon everything was a haze of restlessness and oppression; a touch of the unreal and the grotesque, as if some vital element of perspective or chiaroscuro were awry. I did not wonder that the foreigners would not stay, for this was no region to sleep in. It was too much like a landscape of Salvator Rosa; too much like some forbidden woodcut in a tale of terror.
But even all this was not so bad as the blasted heath. I knew it the moment I came upon it at the bottom of a spacious valley; for no other name could fit such a thing, or any other thing fit such a name. It was as if the poet had coined the phrase from having seen this one particular region. It must, I thought as I viewed it, be the outcome of a fire; but why had nothing new ever grown over these five acres of grey desolation that sprawled open to the sky like a great spot eaten by acid in the woods and fields? It lay largely to the north of the ancient road line, but encroached a little on the other side. I felt an odd reluctance about approaching, and did so at last only because my business took me through and past it. There was no vegetation of any kind on that broad expanse, but only a fine grey dust or ash which no wind seemed ever to blow about. The trees near it were sickly and stunted, and many dead trunks stood or lay rotting at the rim. As I walked hurriedly by I saw the tumbled bricks and stones of an old chimney and cellar on my right, and the yawning black maw of an abandoned well whose stagnant vapours played strange tricks with the hues of the sunlight. Even the long, dark woodland climb beyond seemed welcome in contrast, and I marvelled no more at the frightened whispers of Arkham people. There had been no house or ruin near; even in the old days the place must have been lonely and remote. And at twilight, dreading to repass that ominous spot, I walked circuitously back to the town by the curious road on the south. I vaguely wished some clouds would gather, for an odd timidity about the deep skyey voids above had crept into my soul.
In the evening I asked old people in Arkham about the blasted heath, and what was meant by that phrase ""strange days"" which so many evasively muttered. I could not, however, get any good answers except that all the mystery was much more recent than I had dreamed. It was not a matter of old legendry at all, but something within the lifetime of those who spoke. It had happened in the 'eighties, and a family had disappeared or was killed. Speakers would not be exact; and because they all told me to pay no attention to old Ammi Pierce's crazy tales, I sought him out the next morning, having heard that he lived alone in the ancient tottering cottage where the trees first begin to get very thick. It was a fearsomely ancient place, and had begun to exude the faint miasmal odour which clings about houses that have stood too long. Only with persistent knocking could I rouse the aged man, and when he shuffled timidly to the door I could tell he was not glad to see me. He was not so feeble as I had expected; but his eyes drooped in a curious way, and his unkempt clothing and white beard made him seem very worn and dismal.
Not knowing just how he could best be launched on his tales, I feigned a matter of business; told him of my surveying, and asked vague questions about the district. He was far brighter and more educated than I had been led to think, and before I knew it had grasped quite as much of the subject as any man I had talked with in Arkham. He was not like other rustics I had known in the sections where reservoirs were to be. From him there were no protests at the miles of old wood and farmland to be blotted out, though perhaps there would have been had not his home lain outside the bounds of the future lake. Relief was all that he showed; relief at the doom of the dark ancient valleys through which he had roamed all his life. They were better under water now--better under water since the strange days. And with this opening his husky voice sank low, while his body leaned forward and his right forefinger began to point shakily and impressively.
It was then that I heard the story, and as the rambling voice scraped and whispered on I shivered again and again spite the summer day. Often I had to recall the speaker from ramblings, piece out scientific points which he knew only by a fading parrot memory of professors' talk, or bridge over gaps, where his sense of logic and continuity broke down. When he was done I did not wonder that his mind had snapped a trifle, or that the folk of Arkham would not speak much of the blasted heath. I hurried back before sunset to my hotel, unwilling to have the stars come out above me in the open; and the next day returned to Boston to give up my position. I could not go into that dim chaos of old forest and slope again, or face another time that grey blasted heath where the black well yawned deep beside the tumbled bricks and stones. The reservoir will soon be built now, and all those elder secrets will be safe forever under watery fathoms. But even then I do not believe I would like to visit that country by night--at least not when the sinister stars are out; and nothing could bribe me to drink the new city water of Arkham.
It all began, old Ammi said, with the meteorite. Before that time there had been no wild legends at all since the witch trials, and even then these western woods were not feared half so much as the small island in the Miskatonic where the devil held court beside a curious lone altar older than the Indians. These were not haunted woods, and their fantastic dusk was never terrible till the strange days. Then there had come that white noontide cloud, that string of explosions in the air, and that pillar of smoke from the valley far in the wood. And by night all Arkham had heard of the great rock that fell out of the sky and bedded itself in the ground beside the well at the Nahum Gardner place. That was the house which had stood where the blasted heath was to come--the trim white Nahum Gardner house amidst its fertile gardens and orchards.
Nahum had come to town to tell people about the stone, and dropped in at Ammi Pierce's on the way. Ammi was forty then, and all the queer things were fixed very strongly in his mind. He and his wife had gone with the three professors from Miskatonic University who hastened out the next morning to see the weird visitor from unknown stellar space, and had wondered why Nahum had called it so large the day before. It had shrunk, Nahum said as he pointed out the big brownish mound above the ripped earth and charred grass near the archaic well-sweep in his front yard; but the wise men answered that stones do not shrink. Its heat lingered persistently, and Nahum declared it had glowed faintly in the night. The professors tried it with a geologist's hammer and found it was oddly soft. It was, in truth, so soft as to be almost plastic; and they gouged rather than chipped a specimen to take back to the college for testing. They took it in an old pail borrowed from Nahum's kitchen, for even the small piece refused to grow cool. On the trip back they stopped at Ammi's to rest, and seemed thoughtful when Mrs. Pierce remarked that the fragment was growing smaller and burning the bottom of the pail. Truly, it was not large, but perhaps they had taken less than they thought.
The day after that--all this was in June of '82--the professors had trooped out again in a great excitement. As they passed Ammi's they told him what queer things the specimen had done, and how it had faded wholly away when they put it in a glass beaker. The beaker had gone, too, and the wise men talked of the strange stone's affinity for silicon. It had acted quite unbelievably in that well-ordered laboratory; doing nothing at all and showing no occluded gases when heated on charcoal, being wholly negative in the borax bead, and soon proving itself absolutely non-volatile at any producible temperature, including that of the oxy-hydrogen blowpipe. On an anvil it appeared highly malleable, and in the dark its luminosity was very marked. Stubbornly refusing to grow cool, it soon had the college in a state of real excitement; and when upon heating before the spectroscope it displayed shining bands unlike any known colours of the normal spectrum there was much breathless talk of new elements, bizarre optical properties, and other things which puzzled men of science are wont to say when faced by the unknown.
Hot as it was, they tested it in a crucible with all the proper reagents. Water did nothing. Hydrochloric acid was the same. Nitric acid and even aqua regia merely hissed and spattered against its torrid invulnerability. Ammi had difficulty in recalling all these things, but recognized some solvents as I mentioned them in the usual order of use. There were ammonia and caustic soda, alcohol and ether, nauseous carbon disulphide and a dozen others; but although the weight grew steadily less as time passed, and the fragment seemed to be slightly cooling, there was no change in the solvents to show that they had attacked the substance at all. It was a metal, though, beyond a doubt. It was magnetic, for one thing; and after its immersion in the acid solvents there seemed to be faint traces of the Widmanstatten figures found on meteoric iron. When the cooling had grown very considerable, the testing was carried on in glass; and it was in a glass beaker that they left all the chips made of the original fragment during the work. The next morning both chips and beaker were gone without trace, and only a charred spot marked the place on the wooden shelf where they had been.
All this the professors told Ammi as they paused at his door, and once more he went with them to see the stony messenger from the stars, though this time his wife did not accompany him. It had now most certainly shrunk, and even the sober professors could not doubt the truth of what they saw. All around the dwindling brown lump near the well was a vacant space, except where the earth had caved in; and whereas it had been a good seven feet across the day before, it was now scarcely five. It was still hot, and the sages studied its surface curiously as they detached another and larger piece with hammer and chisel. They gouged deeply this time, and as they pried away the smaller mass they saw that the core of the thing was not quite homogeneous.
They had uncovered what seemed to be the side of a large coloured globule embedded in the substance. The colour, which resembled some of the bands in the meteor's strange spectrum, was almost impossible to describe; and it was only by analogy that they called it colour at all. Its texture was glossy, and upon tapping it appeared to promise both brittleness and hollowness. One of the professors gave it a smart blow with a hammer, and it burst with a nervous little pop. Nothing was emitted, and all trace of the thing vanished with the puncturing. It left behind a hollow spherical space about three inches across, and all thought it probable that others would be discovered as the enclosing substance wasted away.
Conjecture was vain; so after a futile attempt to find additional globules by drilling, the seekers left again with their new specimen which proved, however, as baffling in the laboratory as its predecessor. Aside from being almost plastic, having heat, magnetism, and slight luminosity, cooling slightly in powerful acids, possessing an unknown spectrum, wasting away in air, and attacking silicon compounds with mutual destruction as a result, it presented no identifying features whatsoever; and at the end of the tests the college scientists were forced to own that they could not place it. It was nothing of this earth, but a piece of the great outside; and as such dowered with outside properties and obedient to outside laws.
That night there was a thunderstorm, and when the professors went out to Nahum's the next day they met with a bitter disappointment. The stone, magnetic as it had been, must have had some peculiar electrical property; for it had ""drawn the lightning,"" as Nahum said, with a singular persistence. Six times within an hour the farmer saw the lightning strike the furrow in the front yard, and when the storm was over nothing remained but a ragged pit by the ancient well-sweep, half-choked with a caved-in earth. Digging had borne no fruit, and the scientists verified the fact of the utter vanishment. The failure was total; so that nothing was left to do but go back to the laboratory and test again the disappearing fragment left carefully cased in lead. That fragment lasted a week, at the end of which nothing of value had been learned of it. When it had gone, no residue was left behind, and in time the professors felt scarcely sure they had indeed seen with waking eyes that cryptic vestige of the fathomless gulfs outside; that lone, weird message from other universes and other realms of matter, force, and entity.
As was natural, the Arkham papers made much of the incident with its collegiate sponsoring, and sent reporters to talk with Nahum Gardner and his family. At least one Boston daily also sent a scribe, and Nahum quickly became a kind of local celebrity. He was a lean, genial person of about fifty, living with his wife and three sons on the pleasant farmstead in the valley. He and Ammi exchanged visits frequently, as did their wives; and Ammi had nothing but praise for him after all these years. He seemed slightly proud of the notice his place had attracted, and talked often of the meteorite in the succeeding weeks. That July and August were hot; and Nahum worked hard at his haying in the ten-acre pasture across Chapman's Brook; his rattling wain wearing deep ruts in the shadowy lanes between. The labour tired him more than it had in other years, and he felt that age was beginning to tell on him.
Then fell the time of fruit and harvest. The pears and apples slowly ripened, and Nahum vowed that his orchards were prospering as never before. The fruit was growing to phenomenal size and unwonted gloss, and in such abundance that extra barrels were ordered to handle the future crop. But with the ripening came sore disappointment, for of all that gorgeous array of specious lusciousness not one single jot was fit to eat. Into the fine flavour of the pears and apples had crept a stealthy bitterness and sickishness, so that even the smallest bites induced a lasting disgust. It was the same with the melons and tomatoes, and Nahum sadly saw that his entire crop was lost. Quick to connect events, he declared that the meteorite had poisoned the soil, and thanked Heaven that most of the other crops were in the upland lot along the road.
Winter came early, and was very cold. Ammi saw Nahum less often than usual, and observed that he had begun to look worried. The rest of his family too, seemed to have grown taciturn; and were far from steady in their church-going or their attendance at the various social events of the countryside. For this reserve or melancholy no cause could be found, though all the household confessed now and then to poorer health and a feeling of vague disquiet. Nahum himself gave the most definite statement of anyone when he said he was disturbed about certain footprints in the snow. They were the usual winter prints of red squirrels, white rabbits, and foxes, but the brooding farmer professed to see something not quite right about their nature and arrangement. He was never specific, but appeared to think that they were not as characteristic of the anatomy and habits of squirrels and rabbits and foxes as they ought to be. Ammi listened without interest to this talk until one night when he drove past Nahum's house in his sleigh on the way back from Clark's Comer. There had been a moon, and a rabbit had run across the road, and the leaps of that rabbit were longer than either Ammi or his horse liked. The latter, indeed, had almost run away when brought up by a firm rein. Thereafter Ammi gave Nahum's tales more respect, and wondered why the Gardner dogs seemed so cowed and quivering every morning. They had, it developed, nearly lost the spirit to bark.
In February the McGregor boys from Meadow Hill were out shooting woodchucks, and not far from the Gardner place bagged a very peculiar specimen. The proportions of its body seemed slightly altered in a queer way impossible to describe, while its face had taken on an expression which no one ever saw in a woodchuck before. The boys were genuinely frightened, and threw the thing away at once, so that only their grotesque tales of it ever reached the people of the countryside. But the shying of horses near Nahum's house had now become an acknowledged thing, and all the basis for a cycle of whispered legend was fast taking form.
People vowed that the snow melted faster around Nahum's than it did anywhere else, and early in March there was an awed discussion in Potter's general store at Clark's Corners. Stephen Rice had driven past Gardner's in the morning, and had noticed the skunk-cabbages coming up through the mud by the woods across the road. Never were things of such size seen before, and they held strange colours that could not be put into any words. Their shapes were monstrous, and the horse had snorted at an odour which struck Stephen as wholly unprecedented. That afternoon several persons drove past to see the abnormal growth, and all agreed that plants of that kind ought never to sprout in a healthy world. The bad fruit of the fall before was freely mentioned, and it went from mouth to mouth that there was poison in Nahum's ground. Of course it was the meteorite; and remembering how strange the men from the college had found that stone to be, several farmers spoke about the matter to them.
One day they paid Nahum a visit; but having no love of wild tales and folklore were very conservative in what they inferred. The plants were certainly odd, but all skunk-cabbages are more or less odd in shape and hue. Perhaps some mineral element from the stone had entered the soil, but it would soon be washed away. And as for the footprints and frightened horses--of course this was mere country talk which such a phenomenon as the aerolite would be certain to start. There was really nothing for serious men to do in cases of wild gossip, for superstitious rustics will say and believe anything. And so all through the strange days the professors stayed away in contempt. Only one of them, when given two phials of dust for analysis in a police job over a year and half later, recalled that the queer colour of that skunk-cabbage had been very like one of the anomalous bands of light shown by the meteor fragment in the college spectroscope, and like the brittle globule found imbedded in the stone from the abyss. The samples in this analysis case gave the same odd bands at first, though later they lost the property.
The trees budded prematurely around Nahum's, and at night they swayed ominously in the wind. Nahum's second son Thaddeus, a lad of fifteen, swore that they swayed also when there was no wind; but even the gossips would not credit this. Certainly, however, restlessness was in the air. The entire Gardner family developed the habit of stealthy listening, though not for any sound which they could consciously name. The listening was, indeed, rather a product of moments when consciousness seemed half to slip away. Unfortunately such moments increased week by week, till it became common speech that ""something was wrong with all Nahum's folks."" When the early saxifrage came out it had another strange colour; not quite like that of the skunk-cabbage, but plainly related and equally unknown to anyone who saw it. Nahum took some blossoms to Arkham and showed them to the editor of the Gazette, but that dignitary did no more than write a humorous article about them, in which the dark fears of rustics were held up to polite ridicule. It was a mistake of Nahum's to tell a stolid city man about the way the great, overgrown mourning-cloak butterflies behaved in connection with these saxifrages.
April brought a kind of madness to the country folk, and began that disuse of the road past Nahum's which led to its ultimate abandonment. It was the vegetation. All the orchard trees blossomed forth in strange colours, and through the stony soil of the yard and adjacent pasturage there sprang up a bizarre growth which only a botanist could connect with the proper flora of the region. No sane wholesome colours were anywhere to be seen except in the green grass and leafage; but everywhere were those hectic and prismatic variants of some diseased, underlying primary tone without a place among the known tints of earth. The ""Dutchman's breeches"" became a thing of sinister menace, and the bloodroots grew insolent in their chromatic perversion. Ammi and the Gardners thought that most of the colours had a sort of haunting familiarity, and decided that they reminded one of the brittle globule in the meteor. Nahum ploughed and sowed the ten-acre pasture and the upland lot, but did nothing with the land around the house. He knew it would be of no use, and hoped that the summer's strange growths would draw all the poison from the soil. He was prepared for almost anything now, and had grown used to the sense of something near him waiting to be heard. The shunning of his house by neighbors told on him, of course; but it told on his wife more. The boys were better off, being at school each day; but they could not help being frightened by the gossip. Thaddeus, an especially sensitive youth, suffered the most.
In May the insects came, and Nahum's place became a nightmare of buzzing and crawling. Most of the creatures seemed not quite usual in their aspects and motions, and their nocturnal habits contradicted all former experience. The Gardners took to watching at night--watching in all directions at random for something--they could not tell what. It was then that they owned that Thaddeus had been right about the trees. Mrs. Gardner was the next to see it from the window as she watched the swollen boughs of a maple against a moonlit sky. The boughs surely moved, and there was no wind. It must be the sap. Strangeness had come into everything growing now. Yet it was none of Nahum's family at all who made the next discovery. Familiarity had dulled them, and what they could not see was glimpsed by a timid windmill salesman from Bolton who drove by one night in ignorance of the country legends. What he told in Arkham was given a short paragraph in the Gazette; and it was there that all the farmers, Nahum included, saw it first. The night had been dark and the buggy-lamps faint, but around a farm in the valley which everyone knew from the account must be Nahum's, the darkness had been less thick. A dim though distinct luminosity seemed to inhere in all the vegetation, grass, leaves, and blossoms alike, while at one moment a detached piece of the phosphorescence appeared to stir furtively in the yard near the barn.
The grass had so far seemed untouched, and the cows were freely pastured in the lot near the house, but toward the end of May the milk began to be bad. Then Nahum had the cows driven to the uplands, after which this trouble ceased. Not long after this the change in grass and leaves became apparent to the eye. All the verdure was going grey, and was developing a highly singular quality of brittleness. Ammi was now the only person who ever visited the place, and his visits were becoming fewer and fewer. When school closed the Gardners were virtually cut off from the world, and sometimes let Ammi do their errands in town. They were failing curiously both physically and mentally, and no one was surprised when the news of Mrs. Gardner's madness stole around.
It happened in June, about the anniversary of the meteor's fall, and the poor woman screamed about things in the air which she could not describe. In her raving there was not a single specific noun, but only verbs and pronouns. Things moved and changed and fluttered, and ears tingled to impulses which were not wholly sounds. Something was taken away--she was being drained of something--something was fastening itself on her that ought not to be--someone must make it keep off--nothing was ever still in the night--the walls and windows shifted. Nahum did not send her to the county asylum, but let her wander about the house as long as she was harmless to herself and others. Even when her expression changed he did nothing. But when the boys grew afraid of her, and Thaddeus nearly fainted at the way she made faces at him, he decided to keep her locked in the attic. By July she had ceased to speak and crawled on all fours, and before that month was over Nahum got the mad notion that she was slightly luminous in the dark, as he now clearly saw was the case with the nearby vegetation.
It was a little before this that the horses had stampeded. Something had aroused them in the night, and their neighing and kicking in their stalls had been terrible. There seemed virtually nothing to do to calm them, and when Nahum opened the stable door they all bolted out like frightened woodland deer. It took a week to track all four, and when found they were seen to be quite useless and unmanageable. Something had snapped in their brains, and each one had to be shot for its own good. Nahum borrowed a horse from Ammi for his haying, but found it would not approach the barn. It shied, balked, and whinnied, and in the end he could do nothing but drive it into the yard while the men used their own strength to get the heavy wagon near enough the hayloft for convenient pitching. And all the while the vegetation was turning grey and brittle. Even the flowers whose hues had been so strange were greying now, and the fruit was coming out grey and dwarfed and tasteless. The asters and golden-rod bloomed grey and distorted, and the roses and zinneas and hollyhocks in the front yard were such blasphemous-looking things that Nahum's oldest boy Zenas cut them down. The strangely puffed insects died about that time, even the bees that had left their hives and taken to the woods.
By September all the vegetation was fast crumbling to a greyish powder, and Nahum feared that the trees would die before the poison was out of the soil. His wife now had spells of terrific screaming, and he and the boys were in a constant state of nervous tension. They shunned people now, and when school opened the boys did not go. But it was Ammi, on one of his rare visits, who first realised that the well water was no longer good. It had an evil taste that was not exactly fetid nor exactly salty, and Ammi advised his friend to dig another well on higher ground to use till the soil was good again. Nahum, however, ignored the warning, for he had by that time become calloused to strange and unpleasant things. He and the boys continued to use the tainted supply, drinking it as listlessly and mechanically as they ate their meagre and ill-cooked meals and did their thankless and monotonous chores through the aimless days. There was something of stolid resignation about them all, as if they walked half in another world between lines of nameless guards to a certain and familiar doom.
Thaddeus went mad in September after a visit to the well. He had gone with a pail and had come back empty-handed, shrieking and waving his arms, and sometimes lapsing into an inane titter or a whisper about ""the moving colours down there."" Two in one family was pretty bad, but Nahum was very brave about it. He let the boy run about for a week until he began stumbling and hurting himself, and then he shut him in an attic room across the hall from his mother's. The way they screamed at each other from behind their locked doors was very terrible, especially to little Merwin, who fancied they talked in some terrible language that was not of earth. Merwin was getting frightfully imaginative, and his restlessness was worse after the shutting away of the brother who had been his greatest playmate.
Almost at the same time the mortality among the livestock commenced. Poultry turned greyish and died very quickly, their meat being found dry and noisome upon cutting. Hogs grew inordinately fat, then suddenly began to undergo loathsome changes which no one could explain. Their meat was of course useless, and Nahum was at his wit's end. No rural veterinary would approach his place, and the city veterinary from Arkham was openly baffled. The swine began growing grey and brittle and falling to pieces before they died, and their eyes and muzzles developed singular alterations. It was very inexplicable, for they had never been fed from the tainted vegetation. Then something struck the cows. Certain areas or sometimes the whole body would be uncannily shrivelled or compressed, and atrocious collapses or disintegrations were common. In the last stages--and death was always the result--there would be a greying and turning brittle like that which beset the hogs. There could be no question of poison, for all the cases occurred in a locked and undisturbed barn. No bites of prowling things could have brought the virus, for what live beast of earth can pass through solid obstacles? It must be only natural disease--yet what disease could wreak such results was beyond any mind's guessing. When the harvest came there was not an animal surviving on the place, for the stock and poultry were dead and the dogs had run away. These dogs, three in number, had all vanished one night and were never heard of again. The five cats had left some time before, but their going was scarcely noticed since there now seemed to be no mice, and only Mrs. Gardner had made pets of the graceful felines.
On the nineteenth of October Nahum staggered into Ammi's house with hideous news. The death had come to poor Thaddeus in his attic room, and it had come in a way which could not be told. Nahum had dug a grave in the railed family plot behind the farm, and had put therein what he found. There could have been nothing from outside, for the small barred window and locked door were intact; but it was much as it had been in the barn. Ammi and his wife consoled the stricken man as best they could, but shuddered as they did so. Stark terror seemed to cling round the Gardners and all they touched, and the very presence of one in the house was a breath from regions unnamed and unnamable. Ammi accompanied Nahum home with the greatest reluctance, and did what he might to calm the hysterical sobbing of little Merwin. Zenas needed no calming. He had come of late to do nothing but stare into space and obey what his father told him; and Ammi thought that his fate was very merciful. Now and then Merwin's screams were answered faintly from the attic, and in response to an inquiring look Nahum said that his wife was getting very feeble. When night approached, Ammi managed to get away; for not even friendship could make him stay in that spot when the faint glow of the vegetation began and the trees may or may not have swayed without wind. It was really lucky for Ammi that he was not more imaginative. Even as things were, his mind was bent ever so slightly; but had he been able to connect and reflect upon all the portents around him he must inevitably have turned a total maniac. In the twilight he hastened home, the screams of the mad woman and the nervous child ringing horribly in his ears.
Three days later Nahum burst into Ammi's kitchen in the early morning, and in the absence of his host stammered out a desperate tale once more, while Mrs. Pierce listened in a clutching fright. It was little Merwin this time. He was gone. He had gone out late at night with a lantern and pail for water, and had never come back. He'd been going to pieces for days, and hardly knew what he was about. Screamed at everything. There had been a frantic shriek from the yard then, but before the father could get to the door the boy was gone. There was no glow from the lantern he had taken, and of the child himself no trace. At the time Nahum thought the lantern and pail were gone too; but when dawn came, and the man had plodded back from his all-night search of the woods and fields, he had found some very curious things near the well. There was a crushed and apparently somewhat melted mass of iron which had certainly been the lantern; while a bent handle and twisted iron hoops beside it, both half-fused, seemed to hint at the remnants of the pail. That was all. Nahum was past imagining, Mrs. Pierce was blank, and Ammi, when he had reached home and heard the tale, could give no guess. Merwin was gone, and there would be no use in telling the people around, who shunned all Gardners now. No use, either, in telling the city people at Arkham who laughed at everything. Thad was gone, and now Merwin was gone. Something was creeping and creeping and waiting to be seen and heard. Nahum would go soon, and he wanted Ammi to look after his wife and Zenas if they survived him. It must all be a judgment of some sort; though he could not fancy what for, since he had always walked uprightly in the Lord's ways so far as he knew.
For over two weeks Ammi saw nothing of Nahum; and then, worried about what might have happened, he overcame his fears and paid the Gardner place a visit. There was no smoke from the great chimney, and for a moment the visitor was apprehensive of the worst. The aspect of the whole farm was shocking--greyish withered grass and leaves on the ground, vines falling in brittle wreckage from archaic walls and gables, and great bare trees clawing up at the grey November sky with a studied malevolence which Ammi could not but feel had come from some subtle change in the tilt of the branches. But Nahum was alive, after all. He was weak, and lying on a couch in the low-ceiled kitchen, but perfectly conscious and able to give simple orders to Zenas. The room was deadly cold; and as Ammi visibly shivered, the host shouted huskily to Zenas for more wood. Wood, indeed, was sorely needed; since the cavernous fireplace was unlit and empty, with a cloud of soot blowing about in the chill wind that came down the chimney. Presently Nahum asked him if the extra wood had made him any more comfortable, and then Ammi saw what had happened. The stoutest cord had broken at last, and the hapless farmer's mind was proof against more sorrow.
Questioning tactfully, Ammi could get no clear data at all about the missing Zenas. ""In the well--he lives in the well--"" was all that the clouded father would say. Then there flashed across the visitor's mind a sudden thought of the mad wife, and he changed his line of inquiry. ""Nabby? Why, here she is!"" was the surprised response of poor Nahum, and Ammi soon saw that he must search for himself. Leaving the harmless babbler on the couch, he took the keys from their nail beside the door and climbed the creaking stairs to the attic. It was very close and noisome up there, and no sound could be heard from any direction. Of the four doors in sight, only one was locked, and on this he tried various keys of the ring he had taken. The third key proved the right one, and after some fumbling Ammi threw open the low white door.
It was quite dark inside, for the window was small and half-obscured by the crude wooden bars; and Ammi could see nothing at all on the wide-planked floor. The stench was beyond enduring, and before proceeding further he had to retreat to another room and return with his lungs filled with breathable air. When he did enter he saw something dark in the corner, and upon seeing it more clearly he screamed outright. While he screamed he thought a momentary cloud eclipsed the window, and a second later he felt himself brushed as if by some hateful current of vapour. Strange colours danced before his eyes; and had not a present horror numbed him he would have thought of the globule in the meteor that the geologist's hammer had shattered, and of the morbid vegetation that had sprouted in the spring. As it was he thought only of the blasphemous monstrosity which confronted him, and which all too clearly had shared the nameless fate of young Thaddeus and the livestock. But the terrible thing about the horror was that it very slowly and perceptibly moved as it continued to crumble.
Ammi would give me no added particulars of this scene, but the shape in the comer does not reappear in his tale as a moving object. There are things which cannot be mentioned, and what is done in common humanity is sometimes cruelly judged by the law. I gathered that no moving thing was left in that attic room, and that to leave anything capable of motion there would have been a deed so monstrous as to damn any accountable being to eternal torment. Anyone but a stolid farmer would have fainted or gone mad, but Ammi walked conscious through that low doorway and locked the accursed secret behind him. There would be Nahum to deal with now; he must be fed and tended, and removed to some place where he could be cared for.
Commencing his descent of the dark stairs. Ammi heard a thud below him. He even thought a scream had been suddenly choked off, and recalled nervously the clammy vapour which had brushed by him in that frightful room above. What presence had his cry and entry started up? Halted by some vague fear, he heard still further sounds below. Indubitably there was a sort of heavy dragging, and a most detestably sticky noise as of some fiendish and unclean species of suction. With an associative sense goaded to feverish heights, he thought unaccountably of what he had seen upstairs. Good God! What eldritch dream-world was this into which he had blundered? He dared move neither backward nor forward, but stood there trembling at the black curve of the boxed-in staircase. Every trifle of the scene burned itself into his brain. The sounds, the sense of dread expectancy, the darkness, the steepness of the narrow step--and merciful Heaven!--the faint but unmistakable luminosity of all the woodwork in sight; steps, sides, exposed laths, and beams alike.
Then there burst forth a frantic whinny from Ammi's horse outside, followed at once by a clatter which told of a frenzied runaway. In another moment horse and buggy had gone beyond earshot, leaving the frightened man on the dark stairs to guess what had sent them. But that was not all. There had been another sound out there. A sort of liquid splash--water--it must have been the well. He had left Hero untied near it, and a buggy wheel must have brushed the coping and knocked in a stone. And still the pale phosphorescence glowed in that detestably ancient woodwork. God! how old the house was! Most of it built before 1670, and the gambrel roof no later than 1730.
A feeble scratching on the floor downstairs now sounded distinctly, and Ammi's grip tightened on a heavy stick he had picked up in the attic for some purpose. Slowly nerving himself, he finished his descent and walked boldly toward the kitchen. But he did not complete the walk, because what he sought was no longer there. It had come to meet him, and it was still alive after a fashion. Whether it had crawled or whether it had been dragged by any external forces, Ammi could not say; but the death had been at it. Everything had happened in the last half-hour, but collapse, greying, and disintegration were already far advanced. There was a horrible brittleness, and dry fragments were scaling off. Ammi could not touch it, but looked horrifiedly into the distorted parody that had been a face. ""What was it, Nahum--what was it?"" He whispered, and the cleft, bulging lips were just able to crackle out a final answer.
""Nothin'...nothin'...the colour...it burns...cold an' wet, but it burns...it lived in the well...I seen it...a kind of smoke...jest like the flowers last spring...the well shone at night...Thad an' Merwin an' Zenas...everything alive...suckin' the life out of everything...in that stone...it must a' come in that stone pizened the whole place...dun't know what it wants...that round thing them men from the college dug outen the stone...they smashed it...it was the same colour...jest the same, like the flowers an' plants...must a' ben more of 'em...seeds...seeds...they growed...I seen it the fust time this week...must a' got strong on Zenas...he was a big boy, full o' life...it beats down your mind an' then gets ye...burns ye up...in the well water...you was right about that...evil water...Zenas never come back from the well...can't git away...draws ye...ye know summ'at's comin' but tain't no use...I seen it time an' agin senct Zenas was took...whar's Nabby, Ammi?...my head's no good...dun't know how long sense I fed her...it'll git her ef we ain't keerful...jest a colour...her face is gittin' to hev that colour sometimes towards night...an' it burns an' sucks...it come from some place whar things ain't as they is here...one o' them professors said so...he was right...look out, Ammi, it'll do suthin' more...sucks the life out...""
But that was all. That which spoke could speak no more because it had completely caved in. Ammi laid a red checked tablecloth over what was left and reeled out the back door into the fields. He climbed the slope to the ten-acre pasture and stumbled home by the north road and the woods. He could not pass that well from which his horses had run away. He had looked at it through the window, and had seen that no stone was missing from the rim. Then the lurching buggy had not dislodged anything after all--the splash had been something else--something which went into the well after it had done with poor Nahum.
When Ammi reached his house the horses and buggy had arrived before him and thrown his wife into fits of anxiety. Reassuring her without explanations, he set out at once for Arkham and notified the authorities that the Gardner family was no more. He indulged in no details, but merely told of the deaths of Nahum and Nabby, that of Thaddeus being already known, and mentioned that the cause seemed to be the same strange ailment which had killed the live-stock. He also stated that Merwin and Zenas had disappeared. There was considerable questioning at the police station, and in the end Ammi was compelled to take three officers to the Gardner farm, together with the coroner, the medical examiner, and the veterinary who had treated the diseased animals. He went much against his will, for the afternoon was advancing and he feared the fall of night over that accursed place, but it was some comfort to have so many people with him.
The six men drove out in a democrat-wagon, following Ammi's buggy, and arrived at the pest-ridden farmhouse about four o'clock. Used as the officers were to gruesome experiences, not one remained unmoved at what was found in the attic and under the red checked tablecloth on the floor below. The whole aspect of the farm with its grey desolation was terrible enough, but those two crumbling objects were beyond all bounds. No one could look long at them, and even the medical examiner admitted that there was very little to examine. Specimens could be analysed, of course, so he busied himself in obtaining them--and here it develops that a very puzzling aftermath occurred at the college laboratory where the two phials of dust were finally taken. Under the spectroscope both samples gave off an unknown spectrum, in which many of the baffling bands were precisely like those which the strange meteor had yielded in the previous year. The property of emitting this spectrum vanished in a month, the dust thereafter consisting mainly of alkaline phosphates and carbonates.
Ammi would not have told the men about the well if he had thought they meant to do anything then and there. It was getting toward sunset, and he was anxious to be away. But he could not help glancing nervously at the stony curb by the great sweep, and when a detective questioned him he admitted that Nahum had feared something down there so much so that he had never even thought of searching it for Merwin or Zenas. After that nothing would do but that they empty and explore the well immediately, so Ammi had to wait trembling while pail after pail of rank water was hauled up and splashed on the soaking ground outside. The men sniffed in disgust at the fluid, and toward the last held their noses against the foetor they were uncovering. It was not so long a job as they had feared it would be, since the water was phenomenally low. There is no need to speak too exactly of what they found. Merwin and Zenas were both there, in part, though the vestiges were mainly skeletal. There were also a small deer and a large dog in about the same state, and a number of bones of small animals. The ooze and slime at the bottom seemed inexplicably porous and bubbling, and a man who descended on hand-holds with a long pole found that he could sink the wooden shaft to any depth in the mud of the floor without meeting any solid obstruction.
Twilight had now fallen, and lanterns were brought from the house. Then, when it was seen that nothing further could be gained from the well, everyone went indoors and conferred in the ancient sitting-room while the intermittent light of a spectral half-moon played wanly on the grey desolation outside. The men were frankly nonplussed by the entire case, and could find no convincing common element to link the strange vegetable conditions, the unknown disease of live-stock and humans, and the unaccountable deaths of Merwin and Zenas in the tainted well. They had heard the common country talk, it is true; but could not believe that anything contrary to natural law had occurred. No doubt the meteor had poisoned the soil, but the illness of persons and animals who had eaten nothing grown in that soil was another matter. Was it the well water? Very possibly. It might be a good idea to analyze it. But what peculiar madness could have made both boys jump into the well? Their deeds were so similar-and the fragments showed that they had both suffered from the grey brittle death. Why was everything so grey and brittle?
It was the coroner, seated near a window overlooking the yard, who first noticed the glow about the well. Night had fully set in, and all the abhorrent grounds seemed faintly luminous with more than the fitful moonbeams; but this new glow was something definite and distinct, and appeared to shoot up from the black pit like a softened ray from a searchlight, giving dull reflections in the little ground pools where the water had been emptied. It had a very queer colour, and as all the men clustered round the window Ammi gave a violent start. For this strange beam of ghastly miasma was to him of no unfamiliar hue. He had seen that colour before, and feared to think what it might mean. He had seen it in the nasty brittle globule in that aerolite two summers ago, had seen it in the crazy vegetation of the springtime, and had thought he had seen it for an instant that very morning against the small barred window of that terrible attic room where nameless things had happened. It had flashed there a second, and a clammy and hateful current of vapour had brushed past him--and then poor Nahum had been taken by something of that colour. He had said so at the last--said it was like the globule and the plants. After that had come the runaway in the yard and the splash in the well and now that well was belching forth to the night a pale insidious beam of the same demoniac tint.
It does credit to the alertness of Ammi's mind that he puzzled even at that tense moment over a point which was essentially scientific. He could not but wonder at his gleaning of the same impression from a vapour glimpsed in the daytime, against a window opening on the morning sky, and from a nocturnal exhalation seen as a phosphorescent mist against the black and blasted landscape. It wasn't right--it was against Nature--and he thought of those terrible last words of his stricken friend, ""It come from some place whar things ain't as they is here...one o' them professors said so...""
All three horses outside, tied to a pair of shrivelled saplings by the road, were now neighing and pawing frantically. The wagon driver started for the door to do something, but Ammi laid a shaky hand on his shoulder. ""Dun't go out thar,"" he whispered. ""They's more to this nor what we know. Nahum said somethin' lived in the well that sucks your life out. He said it must be some'at growed from a round ball like one we all seen in the meteor stone that fell a year ago June. Sucks an' burns, he said, an' is jest a cloud of colour like that light out thar now, that ye can hardly see an' can't tell what it is. Nahum thought it feeds on everything livin' an' gits stronger all the time. He said he seen it this last week. It must be somethin' from away off in the sky like the men from the college last year says the meteor stone was. The way it's made an' the way it works ain't like no way o' God's world. It's some'at from beyond.""
So the men paused indecisively as the light from the well grew stronger and the hitched horses pawed and whinnied in increasing frenzy. It was truly an awful moment; with terror in that ancient and accursed house itself, four monstrous sets of fragments--two from the house and two from the well--in the woodshed behind, and that shaft of unknown and unholy iridescence from the slimy depths in front. Ammi had restrained the driver on impulse, forgetting how uninjured he himself was after the clammy brushing of that coloured vapour in the attic room, but perhaps it is just as well that he acted as he did. No one will ever know what was abroad that night; and though the blasphemy from beyond had not so far hurt any human of unweakened mind, there is no telling what it might not have done at that last moment, and with its seemingly increased strength and the special signs of purpose it was soon to display beneath the half-clouded moonlit sky.
All at once one of the detectives at the window gave a short, sharp gasp. The others looked at him, and then quickly followed his own gaze upward to the point at which its idle straying had been suddenly arrested. There was no need for words. What had been disputed in country gossip was disputable no longer, and it is because of the thing which every man of that party agreed in whispering later on, that the strange days are never talked about in Arkham. It is necessary to premise that there was no wind at that hour of the evening. One did arise not long afterward, but there was absolutely none then. Even the dry tips of the lingering hedge-mustard, grey and blighted, and the fringe on the roof of the standing democrat-wagon were unstirred. And yet amid that tense godless calm the high bare boughs of all the trees in the yard were moving. They were twitching morbidly and spasmodically, clawing in convulsive and epileptic madness at the moonlit clouds; scratching impotently in the noxious air as if jerked by some allied and bodiless line of linkage with subterrene horrors writhing and struggling below the black roots.
Not a man breathed for several seconds. Then a cloud of darker depth passed over the moon, and the silhouette of clutching branches faded out momentarily. At this there was a general cry; muffled with awe, but husky and almost identical from every throat. For the terror had not faded with the silhouette, and in a fearsome instant of deeper darkness the watchers saw wriggling at that tree top height a thousand tiny points of faint and unhallowed radiance, tipping each bough like the fire of St. Elmo or the flames that come down on the apostles' heads at Pentecost. It was a monstrous constellation of unnatural light, like a glutted swarm of corpse-fed fireflies dancing hellish sarabands over an accursed marsh, and its colour was that same nameless intrusion which Ammi had come to recognize and dread. All the while the shaft of phosphorescence from the well was getting brighter and brighter, bringing to the minds of the huddled men, a sense of doom and abnormality which far outraced any image their conscious minds could form. It was no longer shining out; it was pouring out; and as the shapeless stream of unplaceable colour left the well it seemed to flow directly into the sky.
The veterinary shivered, and walked to the front door to drop the heavy extra bar across it. Ammi shook no less, and had to tug and point for lack of controllable voice when he wished to draw notice to the growing luminosity of the trees. The neighing and stamping of the horses had become utterly frightful, but not a soul of that group in the old house would have ventured forth for any earthly reward. With the moments the shining of the trees increased, while their restless branches seemed to strain more and more toward verticality. The wood of the well-sweep was shining now, and presently a policeman dumbly pointed to some wooden sheds and bee-hives near the stone wall on the west. They were commencing to shine, too, though the tethered vehicles of the visitors seemed so far unaffected. Then there was a wild commotion and clopping in the road, and as Ammi quenched the lamp for better seeing they realized that the span of frantic greys had broken their sapling and run off with the democrat-wagon.
The shock served to loosen several tongues, and embarrassed whispers were exchanged. ""It spreads on everything organic that's been around here,"" muttered the medical examiner. No one replied, but the man who had been in the well gave a hint that his long pole must have stirred up something intangible. ""It was awful,"" he added. ""There was no bottom at all. Just ooze and bubbles and the feeling of something lurking under there."" Ammi's horse still pawed and screamed deafeningly in the road outside, and nearly drowned its owner's faint quaver as he mumbled his formless reflections. ""It come from that stone--it growed down thar--it got everything livin'--it fed itself on 'em, mind and body--Thad an' Merwin, Zenas an' Nabby--Nahum was the last--they all drunk the water--it got strong on 'em--it come from beyond, whar things ain't like they be here--now it's goin' home--""
At this point, as the column of unknown colour flared suddenly stronger and began to weave itself into fantastic suggestions of shape which each spectator described differently, there came from poor tethered Hero such a sound as no man before or since ever heard from a horse. Every person in that low-pitched sitting room stopped his ears, and Ammi turned away from the window in horror and nausea. Words could not convey it--when Ammi looked out again the hapless beast lay huddled inert on the moonlit ground between the splintered shafts of the buggy. That was the last of Hero till they buried him next day. But the present was no time to mourn, for almost at this instant a detective silently called attention to something terrible in the very room with them. In the absence of the lamplight it was clear that a faint phosphorescence had begun to pervade the entire apartment. It glowed on the broad-planked floor and the fragment of rag carpet, and shimmered over the sashes of the small-paned windows. It ran up and down the exposed corner-posts, coruscated about the shelf and mantel, and infected the very doors and furniture. Each minute saw it strengthen, and at last it was very plain that healthy living things must leave that house.
Ammi showed them the back door and the path up through the fields to the ten-acre pasture. They walked and stumbled as in a dream, and did not dare look back till they were far away on the high ground. They were glad of the path, for they could not have gone the front way, by that well. It was bad enough passing the glowing barn and sheds, and those shining orchard trees with their gnarled, fiendish contours; but thank Heaven the branches did their worst twisting high up. The moon went under some very black clouds as they crossed the rustic bridge over Chapman's Brook, and it was blind groping from there to the open meadows.
When they looked back toward the valley and the distant Gardner place at the bottom they saw a fearsome sight. At the farm was shining with the hideous unknown blend of colour; trees, buildings, and even such grass and herbage as had not been wholly changed to lethal grey brittleness. The boughs were all straining skyward, tipped with tongues of foul flame, and lambent tricklings of the same monstrous fire were creeping about the ridgepoles of the house, barn and sheds. It was a scene from a vision of Fuseli, and over all the rest reigned that riot of luminous amorphousness, that alien and undimensioned rainbow of cryptic poison from the well--seething, feeling, lapping, reaching, scintillating, straining, and malignly bubbling in its cosmic and unrecognizable chromaticism.
Then without warning the hideous thing shot vertically up toward the sky like a rocket or meteor, leaving behind no trail and disappearing through a round and curiously regular hole in the clouds before any man could gasp or cry out. No watcher can ever forget that sight, and Ammi stared blankly at the stars of Cygnus, Deneb twinkling above the others, where the unknown colour had melted into the Milky Way. But his gaze was the next moment called swiftly to earth by the crackling in the valley. It was just that. Only a wooden ripping and crackling, and not an explosion, as so many others of the party vowed. Yet the outcome was the same, for in one feverish kaleidoscopic instant there burst up from that doomed and accursed farm a gleamingly eruptive cataclysm of unnatural sparks and substance; blurring the glance of the few who saw it, and sending forth to the zenith a bombarding cloudburst of such coloured and fantastic fragments as our universe must needs disown. Through quickly reclosing vapours they followed the great morbidity that had vanished, and in another second they had vanished too. Behind and below was only a darkness to which the men dared not return, and all about was a mounting wind which seemed to sweep down in black, frore gusts from interstellar space. It shrieked and howled, and lashed the fields and distorted woods in a mad cosmic frenzy, till soon the trembling party realized it would be no use waiting for the moon to show what was left down there at Nahum's.
Too awed even to hint theories, the seven shaking men trudged back toward Arkham by the north road. Ammi was worse than his fellows, and begged them to see him inside his own kitchen, instead of keeping straight on to town. He did not wish to cross the blighted, wind-whipped woods alone to his home on the main road. For he had had an added shock that the others were spared, and was crushed forever with a brooding fear he dared not even mention for many years to come. As the rest of the watchers on that tempestuous hill had stolidly set their faces toward the road, Ammi had looked back an instant at the shadowed valley of desolation so lately sheltering his ill-starred friend. And from that stricken, far-away spot he had seen something feebly rise, only to sink down again upon the place from which the great shapeless horror had shot into the sky. It was just a colour--but not any colour of our earth or heavens. And because Ammi recognized that colour, and knew that this last faint remnant must still lurk down there in the well, he has never been quite right since.
Ammi would never go near the place again. It is forty-four years now since the horror happened, but he has never been there, and will be glad when the new reservoir blots it out. I shall be glad, too, for I do not like the way the sunlight changed colour around the mouth of that abandoned well I passed. I hope the water will always be very deep--but even so, I shall never drink it. I do not think I shall visit the Arkham country hereafter. Three of the men who had been with Ammi returned the next morning to see the ruins by daylight, but there were not any real ruins. Only the bricks of the chimney, the stones of the cellar, some mineral and metallic litter here and there, and the rim of that nefandous well. Save for Ammi's dead horse, which they towed away and buried, and the buggy which they shortly returned to him, everything that had ever been living had gone. Five eldritch acres of dusty grey desert remained, nor has anything ever grown there since. To this day it sprawls open to the sky like a great spot eaten by acid in the woods and fields, and the few who have ever dared glimpse it in spite of the rural tales have named it ""the blasted heath.""
The rural tales are queer. They might be even queerer if city men and college chemists could be interested enough to analyze the water from that disused well, or the grey dust that no wind seems to disperse. Botanists, too, ought to study the stunted flora on the borders of that spot, for they might shed light on the country notion that the blight is spreading--little by little, perhaps an inch a year. People say the colour of the neighboring herbage is not quite right in the spring, and that wild things leave queer prints in the light winter snow. Snow never seems quite so heavy on the blasted heath as it is elsewhere. Horses--the few that are left in this motor age--grow skittish in the silent valley; and hunters cannot depend on their dogs too near the splotch of greyish dust.
They say the mental influences are very bad, too; numbers went queer in the years after Nahum's taking, and always they lacked the power to get away. Then the stronger-minded folk all left the region, and only the foreigners tried to live in the crumbling old homesteads. They could not stay, though; and one sometimes wonders what insight beyond ours their wild, weird stories of whispered magic have given them. Their dreams at night, they protest, are very horrible in that grotesque country; and surely the very look of the dark realm is enough to stir a morbid fancy. No traveler has ever escaped a sense of strangeness in those deep ravines, and artists shiver as they paint thick woods whose mystery is as much of the spirits as of the eye. I myself am curious about the sensation I derived from my one lone walk before Ammi told me his tale. When twilight came I had vaguely wished some clouds would gather, for an odd timidity about the deep skyey voids above had crept into my soul.
Do not ask me for my opinion. I do not know--that is all. There was no one but Ammi to question; for Arkham people will not talk about the strange days, and all three professors who saw the aerolite and its coloured globule are dead. There were other globules--depend upon that. One must have fed itself and escaped, and probably there was another which was too late. No doubt it is still down the well--I know there was something wrong with the sunlight I saw above the miasmal brink. The rustics say the blight creeps an inch a year, so perhaps there is a kind of growth or nourishment even now. But whatever demon hatchling is there, it must be tethered to something or else it would quickly spread. Is it fastened to the roots of those trees that claw the air? One of the current Arkham tales is about fat oaks that shine and move as they ought not to do at night.
What it is, only God knows. In terms of matter I suppose the thing Ammi described would be called a gas, but this gas obeyed the laws that are not of our cosmos. This was no fruit of such worlds and suns as shine on the telescopes and photographic plates of our observatories. This was no breath from the skies whose motions and dimensions our astronomers measure or deem too vast to measure. It was just a colour out of space--a frightful messenger from unformed realms of infinity beyond all Nature as we know it; from realms whose mere existence stuns the brain and numbs us with the black cosmic gulfs it throws open before our frenzied eyes.
I doubt very much if Ammi consciously lied to me, and I do not think his tale was all a freak of madness as the townsfolk had forewarned. Something terrible came to the hills and valleys on that meteor, and something terrible--though I know not in what proportion--still remains. I shall be glad to see the water come. Meanwhile I hope nothing will happen to Ammi. He saw so much of the thing--and its influence was so insidious. Why has he never been able to move away? How clearly he recalled those dying words of Nahum's--""Can't git away--draws ye--ye know summ'at's comin' but tain't no use--"". Ammi is such a good old man--when the reservoir gang gets to work I must write the chief engineer to keep a sharp watch on him. I would hate to think of him as the grey, twisted, brittle monstrosity which persists more and more in troubling my sleep.
",True
"
I

Although I knew nothing of chemistry, I listened fascinated. He picked up
an Easter lily which Geneviève had brought that morning from Notre Dame,
and dropped it into the basin. Instantly the liquid lost its crystalline
clearness. For a second the lily was enveloped in a milk-white foam,
which disappeared, leaving the fluid opalescent. Changing tints of orange
and crimson played over the surface, and then what seemed to be a ray of
pure sunlight struck through from the bottom where the lily was resting.
At the same instant he plunged his hand into the basin and drew out the
flower. ""There is no danger,"" he explained, ""if you choose the right
moment. That golden ray is the signal.""

He held the lily toward me, and I took it in my hand. It had turned to
stone, to the purest marble.

""You see,"" he said, ""it is without a flaw. What sculptor could reproduce
it?""

The marble was white as snow, but in its depths the veins of the lily
were tinged with palest azure, and a faint flush lingered deep in its
heart.

""Don't ask me the reason of that,"" he smiled, noticing my wonder. ""I have
no idea why the veins and heart are tinted, but they always are.
Yesterday I tried one of Geneviève's gold-fish,--there it is.""

The fish looked as if sculptured in marble. But if you held it to the
light the stone was beautifully veined with a faint blue, and from
somewhere within came a rosy light like the tint which slumbers in an
opal. I looked into the basin. Once more it seemed filled with clearest
crystal.

""If I should touch it now?"" I demanded.

""I don't know,"" he replied, ""but you had better not try.""

""There is one thing I'm curious about,"" I said, ""and that is where the
ray of sunlight came from.""

""It looked like a sunbeam true enough,"" he said. ""I don't know, it always
comes when I immerse any living thing. Perhaps,"" he continued, smiling,
""perhaps it is the vital spark of the creature escaping to the source
from whence it came.""

I saw he was mocking, and threatened him with a mahl-stick, but he only
laughed and changed the subject.

""Stay to lunch. Geneviève will be here directly.""

""I saw her going to early mass,"" I said, ""and she looked as fresh and
sweet as that lily--before you destroyed it.""

""Do you think I destroyed it?"" said Boris gravely.

""Destroyed, preserved, how can we tell?""

We sat in the corner of a studio near his unfinished group of the
""Fates."" He leaned back on the sofa, twirling a sculptor's chisel and
squinting at his work.

""By the way,"" he said, ""I have finished pointing up that old academic
Ariadne, and I suppose it will have to go to the Salon. It's all I have
ready this year, but after the success the 'Madonna' brought me I feel
ashamed to send a thing like that.""

The ""Madonna,"" an exquisite marble for which Geneviève had sat, had been
the sensation of last year's Salon. I looked at the Ariadne. It was a
magnificent piece of technical work, but I agreed with Boris that the
world would expect something better of him than that. Still, it was
impossible now to think of finishing in time for the Salon that splendid
terrible group half shrouded in the marble behind me. The ""Fates"" would
have to wait.

We were proud of Boris Yvain. We claimed him and he claimed us on the
strength of his having been born in America, although his father was
French and his mother was a Russian. Every one in the Beaux Arts called
him Boris. And yet there were only two of us whom he addressed in the
same familiar way--Jack Scott and myself.

Perhaps my being in love with Geneviève had something to do with his
affection for me. Not that it had ever been acknowledged between us. But
after all was settled, and she had told me with tears in her eyes that it
was Boris whom she loved, I went over to his house and congratulated him.
The perfect cordiality of that interview did not deceive either of us, I
always believed, although to one at least it was a great comfort. I do
not think he and Geneviève ever spoke of the matter together, but Boris
knew.

Geneviève was lovely. The Madonna-like purity of her face might have been
inspired by the Sanctus in Gounod's Mass. But I was always glad when she
changed that mood for what we called her ""April Manoeuvres."" She was
often as variable as an April day. In the morning grave, dignified and
sweet, at noon laughing, capricious, at evening whatever one least
expected. I preferred her so rather than in that Madonna-like
tranquillity which stirred the depths of my heart. I was dreaming of
Geneviève when he spoke again.

""What do you think of my discovery, Alec?""

""I think it wonderful.""

""I shall make no use of it, you know, beyond satisfying my own curiosity
so far as may be, and the secret will die with me.""

""It would be rather a blow to sculpture, would it not? We painters lose
more than we ever gain by photography.""

Boris nodded, playing with the edge of the chisel.

""This new vicious discovery would corrupt the world of art. No, I shall
never confide the secret to any one,"" he said slowly.

It would be hard to find any one less informed about such phenomena than
myself; but of course I had heard of mineral springs so saturated with
silica that the leaves and twigs which fell into them were turned to
stone after a time. I dimly comprehended the process, how the silica
replaced the vegetable matter, atom by atom, and the result was a
duplicate of the object in stone. This, I confess, had never interested
me greatly, and as for the ancient fossils thus produced, they disgusted
me. Boris, it appeared, feeling curiosity instead of repugnance, had
investigated the subject, and had accidentally stumbled on a solution
which, attacking the immersed object with a ferocity unheard of, in a
second did the work of years. This was all I could make out of the
strange story he had just been telling me. He spoke again after a long
silence.

""I am almost frightened when I think what I have found. Scientists would
go mad over the discovery. It was so simple too; it discovered itself.
When I think of that formula, and that new element precipitated in
metallic scales--""

""What new element?""

""Oh, I haven't thought of naming it, and I don't believe I ever shall.
There are enough precious metals now in the world to cut throats over.""

I pricked up my ears. ""Have you struck gold, Boris?""

""No, better;--but see here, Alec!"" he laughed, starting up. ""You and I
have all we need in this world. Ah! how sinister and covetous you look
already!"" I laughed too, and told him I was devoured by the desire for
gold, and we had better talk of something else; so when Geneviève came in
shortly after, we had turned our backs on alchemy.

Geneviève was dressed in silvery grey from head to foot. The light
glinted along the soft curves of her fair hair as she turned her cheek to
Boris; then she saw me and returned my greeting. She had never before
failed to blow me a kiss from the tips of her white fingers, and I
promptly complained of the omission. She smiled and held out her hand,
which dropped almost before it had touched mine; then she said, looking
at Boris--

""You must ask Alec to stay for luncheon."" This also was something new.
She had always asked me herself until to-day.

""I did,"" said Boris shortly.

""And you said yes, I hope?"" She turned to me with a charming conventional
smile. I might have been an acquaintance of the day before yesterday. I
made her a low bow. ""J'avais bien l'honneur, madame,"" but refusing to
take up our usual bantering tone, she murmured a hospitable commonplace
and disappeared. Boris and I looked at one another.

""I had better go home, don't you think?"" I asked.

""Hanged if I know,"" he replied frankly.

While we were discussing the advisability of my departure Geneviève
reappeared in the doorway without her bonnet. She was wonderfully
beautiful, but her colour was too deep and her lovely eyes were too
bright. She came straight up to me and took my arm.

""Luncheon is ready. Was I cross, Alec? I thought I had a headache, but I
haven't. Come here, Boris;"" and she slipped her other arm through his.
""Alec knows that after you there is no one in the world whom I like as
well as I like him, so if he sometimes feels snubbed it won't hurt him.""

""À la bonheur!"" I cried, ""who says there are no thunderstorms in April?""

""Are you ready?"" chanted Boris. ""Aye ready;"" and arm-in-arm we raced into
the dining-room, scandalizing the servants. After all we were not so much
to blame; Geneviève was eighteen, Boris was twenty-three, and I not quite
twenty-one.




II

Some work that I was doing about this time on the decorations for
Geneviève's boudoir kept me constantly at the quaint little hotel in the
Rue Sainte-Cécile. Boris and I in those days laboured hard but as we
pleased, which was fitfully, and we all three, with Jack Scott, idled a
great deal together.

One quiet afternoon I had been wandering alone over the house examining
curios, prying into odd corners, bringing out sweetmeats and cigars from
strange hiding-places, and at last I stopped in the bathing-room. Boris,
all over clay, stood there washing his hands.

The room was built of rose-coloured marble excepting the floor, which was
tessellated in rose and grey. In the centre was a square pool sunken
below the surface of the floor; steps led down into it, sculptured
pillars supported a frescoed ceiling. A delicious marble Cupid appeared
to have just alighted on his pedestal at the upper end of the room. The
whole interior was Boris' work and mine. Boris, in his working-clothes of
white canvas, scraped the traces of clay and red modelling wax from his
handsome hands, and coquetted over his shoulder with the Cupid.

""I see you,"" he insisted, ""don't try to look the other way and pretend
not to see me. You know who made you, little humbug!""

It was always my rôle to interpret Cupid's sentiments in these
conversations, and when my turn came I responded in such a manner, that
Boris seized my arm and dragged me toward the pool, declaring he would
duck me. Next instant he dropped my arm and turned pale. ""Good God!"" he
said, ""I forgot the pool is full of the solution!""

I shivered a little, and dryly advised him to remember better where he
had stored the precious liquid.

""In Heaven's name, why do you keep a small lake of that gruesome stuff
here of all places?"" I asked.

""I want to experiment on something large,"" he replied.

""On me, for instance?""

""Ah! that came too close for jesting; but I do want to watch the action
of that solution on a more highly organized living body; there is that
big white rabbit,"" he said, following me into the studio.

Jack Scott, wearing a paint-stained jacket, came wandering in,
appropriated all the Oriental sweetmeats he could lay his hands on,
looted the cigarette case, and finally he and Boris disappeared together
to visit the Luxembourg Gallery, where a new silver bronze by Rodin and a
landscape of Monet's were claiming the exclusive attention of artistic
France. I went back to the studio, and resumed my work. It was a
Renaissance screen, which Boris wanted me to paint for Geneviève's
boudoir. But the small boy who was unwillingly dawdling through a series
of poses for it, to-day refused all bribes to be good. He never rested an
instant in the same position, and inside of five minutes I had as many
different outlines of the little beggar.

""Are you posing, or are you executing a song and dance, my friend?"" I
inquired.

""Whichever monsieur pleases,"" he replied, with an angelic smile.

Of course I dismissed him for the day, and of course I paid him for the
full time, that being the way we spoil our models.

After the young imp had gone, I made a few perfunctory daubs at my work,
but was so thoroughly out of humour, that it took me the rest of the
afternoon to undo the damage I had done, so at last I scraped my palette,
stuck my brushes in a bowl of black soap, and strolled into the
smoking-room. I really believe that, excepting Geneviève's apartments, no
room in the house was so free from the perfume of tobacco as this one. It
was a queer chaos of odds and ends, hung with threadbare tapestry. A
sweet-toned old spinet in good repair stood by the window. There were
stands of weapons, some old and dull, others bright and modern, festoons
of Indian and Turkish armour over the mantel, two or three good pictures,
and a pipe-rack. It was here that we used to come for new sensations in
smoking. I doubt if any type of pipe ever existed which was not
represented in that rack. When we had selected one, we immediately
carried it somewhere else and smoked it; for the place was, on the whole,
more gloomy and less inviting than any in the house. But this afternoon,
the twilight was very soothing, the rugs and skins on the floor looked
brown and soft and drowsy; the big couch was piled with cushions--I found
my pipe and curled up there for an unaccustomed smoke in the
smoking-room. I had chosen one with a long flexible stem, and lighting it
fell to dreaming. After a while it went out, but I did not stir. I
dreamed on and presently fell asleep.

I awoke to the saddest music I had ever heard. The room was quite dark, I
had no idea what time it was. A ray of moonlight silvered one edge of the
old spinet, and the polished wood seemed to exhale the sounds as perfume
floats above a box of sandalwood. Some one rose in the darkness, and came
away weeping quietly, and I was fool enough to cry out ""Geneviève!""

She dropped at my voice, and, I had time to curse myself while I made a
light and tried to raise her from the floor. She shrank away with a
murmur of pain. She was very quiet, and asked for Boris. I carried her to
the divan, and went to look for him, but he was not in the house, and the
servants were gone to bed. Perplexed and anxious, I hurried back to
Geneviève. She lay where I had left her, looking very white.

""I can't find Boris nor any of the servants,"" I said.

""I know,"" she answered faintly, ""Boris has gone to Ept with Mr. Scott. I
did not remember when I sent you for him just now.""

""But he can't get back in that case before to-morrow afternoon, and--are
you hurt? Did I frighten you into falling? What an awful fool I am, but I
was only half awake.""

""Boris thought you had gone home before dinner. Do please excuse us for
letting you stay here all this time.""

""I have had a long nap,"" I laughed, ""so sound that I did not know whether
I was still asleep or not when I found myself staring at a figure that
was moving toward me, and called out your name. Have you been trying the
old spinet? You must have played very softly.""

I would tell a thousand more lies worse than that one to see the look of
relief that came into her face. She smiled adorably, and said in her
natural voice: ""Alec, I tripped on that wolf's head, and I think my ankle
is sprained. Please call Marie, and then go home.""

I did as she bade me, and left her there when the maid came in.




III

At noon next day when I called, I found Boris walking restlessly about
his studio.

""Geneviève is asleep just now,"" he told me, ""the sprain is nothing, but
why should she have such a high fever? The doctor can't account for it;
or else he will not,"" he muttered.

""Geneviève has a fever?"" I asked.

""I should say so, and has actually been a little light-headed at
intervals all night. The idea! gay little Geneviève, without a care in
the world,--and she keeps saying her heart's broken, and she wants to
die!""

My own heart stood still.

Boris leaned against the door of his studio, looking down, his hands in
his pockets, his kind, keen eyes clouded, a new line of trouble drawn
""over the mouth's good mark, that made the smile."" The maid had orders to
summon him the instant Geneviève opened her eyes. We waited and waited,
and Boris, growing restless, wandered about, fussing with modelling wax
and red clay. Suddenly he started for the next room. ""Come and see my
rose-coloured bath full of death!"" he cried.

""Is it death?"" I asked, to humour his mood.

""You are not prepared to call it life, I suppose,"" he answered. As he
spoke he plucked a solitary goldfish squirming and twisting out of its
globe. ""We'll send this one after the other--wherever that is,"" he said.
There was feverish excitement in his voice. A dull weight of fever lay on
my limbs and on my brain as I followed him to the fair crystal pool with
its pink-tinted sides; and he dropped the creature in. Falling, its
scales flashed with a hot orange gleam in its angry twistings and
contortions; the moment it struck the liquid it became rigid and sank
heavily to the bottom. Then came the milky foam, the splendid hues
radiating on the surface and then the shaft of pure serene light broke
through from seemingly infinite depths. Boris plunged in his hand and
drew out an exquisite marble thing, blue-veined, rose-tinted, and
glistening with opalescent drops.

""Child's play,"" he muttered, and looked wearily, longingly at me,--as if
I could answer such questions! But Jack Scott came in and entered into
the ""game,"" as he called it, with ardour. Nothing would do but to try the
experiment on the white rabbit then and there. I was willing that Boris
should find distraction from his cares, but I hated to see the life go
out of a warm, living creature and I declined to be present. Picking up a
book at random, I sat down in the studio to read. Alas! I had found
_The King in Yellow_. After a few moments, which seemed ages, I was
putting it away with a nervous shudder, when Boris and Jack came in
bringing their marble rabbit. At the same time the bell rang above, and a
cry came from the sick-room. Boris was gone like a flash, and the next
moment he called, ""Jack, run for the doctor; bring him back with you.
Alec, come here.""

I went and stood at her door. A frightened maid came out in haste and ran
away to fetch some remedy. Geneviève, sitting bolt upright, with crimson
cheeks and glittering eyes, babbled incessantly and resisted Boris'
gentle restraint. He called me to help. At my first touch she sighed and
sank back, closing her eyes, and then--then--as we still bent above her,
she opened them again, looked straight into Boris' face--poor
fever-crazed girl!--and told her secret. At the same instant our three
lives turned into new channels; the bond that held us so long together
snapped for ever and a new bond was forged in its place, for she had
spoken my name, and as the fever tortured her, her heart poured out its
load of hidden sorrow. Amazed and dumb I bowed my head, while my face
burned like a live coal, and the blood surged in my ears, stupefying me
with its clamour. Incapable of movement, incapable of speech, I listened
to her feverish words in an agony of shame and sorrow. I could not
silence her, I could not look at Boris. Then I felt an arm upon my
shoulder, and Boris turned a bloodless face to mine.

""It is not your fault, Alec; don't grieve so if she loves you--"" but he
could not finish; and as the doctor stepped swiftly into the room,
saying--""Ah, the fever!"" I seized Jack Scott and hurried him to the
street, saying, ""Boris would rather be alone."" We crossed the street to
our own apartments, and that night, seeing I was going to be ill too, he
went for the doctor again. The last thing I recollect with any
distinctness was hearing Jack say, ""For Heaven's sake, doctor, what ails
him, to wear a face like that?"" and I thought of _The King in
Yellow_ and the Pallid Mask.

I was very ill, for the strain of two years which I had endured since
that fatal May morning when Geneviève murmured, ""I love you, but I think
I love Boris best,"" told on me at last. I had never imagined that it
could become more than I could endure. Outwardly tranquil, I had deceived
myself. Although the inward battle raged night after night, and I, lying
alone in my room, cursed myself for rebellious thoughts unloyal to Boris
and unworthy of Geneviève, the morning always brought relief, and I
returned to Geneviève and to my dear Boris with a heart washed clean by
the tempests of the night.

Never in word or deed or thought while with them had I betrayed my sorrow
even to myself.

The mask of self-deception was no longer a mask for me, it was a part of
me. Night lifted it, laying bare the stifled truth below; but there was
no one to see except myself, and when the day broke the mask fell back
again of its own accord. These thoughts passed through my troubled mind
as I lay sick, but they were hopelessly entangled with visions of white
creatures, heavy as stone, crawling about in Boris' basin,--of the wolf's
head on the rug, foaming and snapping at Geneviève, who lay smiling
beside it. I thought, too, of the King in Yellow wrapped in the fantastic
colours of his tattered mantle, and that bitter cry of Cassilda, ""Not
upon us, oh King, not upon us!"" Feverishly I struggled to put it from me,
but I saw the lake of Hali, thin and blank, without a ripple or wind to
stir it, and I saw the towers of Carcosa behind the moon. Aldebaran, the
Hyades, Alar, Hastur, glided through the cloud-rifts which fluttered and
flapped as they passed like the scolloped tatters of the King in Yellow.
Among all these, one sane thought persisted. It never wavered, no matter
what else was going on in my disordered mind, that my chief reason for
existing was to meet some requirement of Boris and Geneviève. What this
obligation was, its nature, was never clear; sometimes it seemed to be
protection, sometimes support, through a great crisis. Whatever it seemed
to be for the time, its weight rested only on me, and I was never so ill
or so weak that I did not respond with my whole soul. There were always
crowds of faces about me, mostly strange, but a few I recognized, Boris
among them. Afterward they told me that this could not have been, but I
know that once at least he bent over me. It was only a touch, a faint
echo of his voice, then the clouds settled back on my senses, and I lost
him, but he _did_ stand there and bend over me _once_ at least.

At last, one morning I awoke to find the sunlight falling across my bed,
and Jack Scott reading beside me. I had not strength enough to speak
aloud, neither could I think, much less remember, but I could smile
feebly, as Jack's eye met mine, and when he jumped up and asked eagerly
if I wanted anything, I could whisper, ""Yes--Boris."" Jack moved to the
head of my bed, and leaned down to arrange my pillow: I did not see his
face, but he answered heartily, ""You must wait, Alec; you are too weak to
see even Boris.""

I waited and I grew strong; in a few days I was able to see whom I would,
but meanwhile I had thought and remembered. From the moment when all the
past grew clear again in my mind, I never doubted what I should do when
the time came, and I felt sure that Boris would have resolved upon the
same course so far as he was concerned; as for what pertained to me
alone, I knew he would see that also as I did. I no longer asked for any
one. I never inquired why no message came from them; why during the week
I lay there, waiting and growing stronger, I never heard their name
spoken. Preoccupied with my own searchings for the right way, and with my
feeble but determined fight against despair, I simply acquiesced in
Jack's reticence, taking for granted that he was afraid to speak of them,
lest I should turn unruly and insist on seeing them. Meanwhile I said
over and over to myself, how would it be when life began again for us
all? We would take up our relations exactly as they were before Geneviève
fell ill. Boris and I would look into each other's eyes, and there would
be neither rancour nor cowardice nor mistrust in that glance. I would be
with them again for a little while in the dear intimacy of their home,
and then, without pretext or explanation, I would disappear from their
lives for ever. Boris would know; Geneviève--the only comfort was that
she would never know. It seemed, as I thought it over, that I had found
the meaning of that sense of obligation which had persisted all through
my delirium, and the only possible answer to it. So, when I was quite
ready, I beckoned Jack to me one day, and said--

""Jack, I want Boris at once; and take my dearest greeting to
Geneviève....""

When at last he made me understand that they were both dead, I fell into
a wild rage that tore all my little convalescent strength to atoms. I
raved and cursed myself into a relapse, from which I crawled forth some
weeks afterward a boy of twenty-one who believed that his youth was gone
for ever. I seemed to be past the capability of further suffering, and
one day when Jack handed me a letter and the keys to Boris' house, I took
them without a tremor and asked him to tell me all. It was cruel of me to
ask him, but there was no help for it, and he leaned wearily on his thin
hands, to reopen the wound which could never entirely heal. He began very
quietly--

""Alec, unless you have a clue that I know nothing about, you will not be
able to explain any more than I what has happened. I suspect that you
would rather not hear these details, but you must learn them, else I
would spare you the relation. God knows I wish I could be spared the
telling. I shall use few words.

""That day when I left you in the doctor's care and came back to Boris, I
found him working on the 'Fates.' Geneviève, he said, was sleeping under
the influence of drugs. She had been quite out of her mind, he said. He
kept on working, not talking any more, and I watched him. Before long, I
saw that the third figure of the group--the one looking straight ahead,
out over the world--bore his face; not as you ever saw it, but as it
looked then and to the end. This is one thing for which I should like to
find an explanation, but I never shall.

""Well, he worked and I watched him in silence, and we went on that way
until nearly midnight. Then we heard the door open and shut sharply, and
a swift rush in the next room. Boris sprang through the doorway and I
followed; but we were too late. She lay at the bottom of the pool, her
hands across her breast. Then Boris shot himself through the heart."" Jack
stopped speaking, drops of sweat stood under his eyes, and his thin
cheeks twitched. ""I carried Boris to his room. Then I went back and let
that hellish fluid out of the pool, and turning on all the water, washed
the marble clean of every drop. When at length I dared descend the steps,
I found her lying there as white as snow. At last, when I had decided
what was best to do, I went into the laboratory, and first emptied the
solution in the basin into the waste-pipe; then I poured the contents of
every jar and bottle after it. There was wood in the fire-place, so I
built a fire, and breaking the locks of Boris' cabinet I burnt every
paper, notebook and letter that I found there. With a mallet from the
studio I smashed to pieces all the empty bottles, then loading them into
a coal-scuttle, I carried them to the cellar and threw them over the
red-hot bed of the furnace. Six times I made the journey, and at last,
not a vestige remained of anything which might again aid in seeking for
the formula which Boris had found. Then at last I dared call the doctor.
He is a good man, and together we struggled to keep it from the public.
Without him I never could have succeeded. At last we got the servants
paid and sent away into the country, where old Rosier keeps them quiet
with stones of Boris' and Geneviève's travels in distant lands, from
whence they will not return for years. We buried Boris in the little
cemetery of Sèvres. The doctor is a good creature, and knows when to pity
a man who can bear no more. He gave his certificate of heart disease and
asked no questions of me.""

Then, lifting his head from his hands, he said, ""Open the letter, Alec;
it is for us both.""

I tore it open. It was Boris' will dated a year before. He left
everything to Geneviève, and in case of her dying childless, I was to
take control of the house in the Rue Sainte-Cécile, and Jack Scott the
management at Ept. On our deaths the property reverted to his mother's
family in Russia, with the exception of the sculptured marbles executed
by himself. These he left to me.

The page blurred under our eyes, and Jack got up and walked to the
window. Presently he returned and sat down again. I dreaded to hear what
he was going to say, but he spoke with the same simplicity and
gentleness.

""Geneviève lies before the Madonna in the marble room. The Madonna bends
tenderly above her, and Geneviève smiles back into that calm face that
never would have been except for her.""

His voice broke, but he grasped my hand, saying, ""Courage, Alec."" Next
morning he left for Ept to fulfil his trust.




IV

The same evening I took the keys and went into the house I had known so
well. Everything was in order, but the silence was terrible. Though I
went twice to the door of the marble room, I could not force myself to
enter. It was beyond my strength. I went into the smoking-room and sat
down before the spinet. A small lace handkerchief lay on the keys, and I
turned away, choking. It was plain I could not stay, so I locked every
door, every window, and the three front and back gates, and went away.
Next morning Alcide packed my valise, and leaving him in charge of my
apartments I took the Orient express for Constantinople. During the two
years that I wandered through the East, at first, in our letters, we
never mentioned Geneviève and Boris, but gradually their names crept in.
I recollect particularly a passage in one of Jack's letters replying to
one of mine--

""What you tell me of seeing Boris bending over you while you lay ill, and
feeling his touch on your face, and hearing his voice, of course troubles
me. This that you describe must have happened a fortnight after he died.
I say to myself that you were dreaming, that it was part of your
delirium, but the explanation does not satisfy me, nor would it you.""

Toward the end of the second year a letter came from Jack to me in India
so unlike anything that I had ever known of him that I decided to return
at once to Paris. He wrote: ""I am well, and sell all my pictures as
artists do who have no need of money. I have not a care of my own, but I
am more restless than if I had. I am unable to shake off a strange
anxiety about you. It is not apprehension, it is rather a breathless
expectancy--of what, God knows! I can only say it is wearing me out.
Nights I dream always of you and Boris. I can never recall anything
afterward, but I wake in the morning with my heart beating, and all day
the excitement increases until I fall asleep at night to recall the same
experience. I am quite exhausted by it, and have determined to break up
this morbid condition. I must see you. Shall I go to Bombay, or will you
come to Paris?""

I telegraphed him to expect me by the next steamer.

When we met I thought he had changed very little; I, he insisted, looked
in splendid health. It was good to hear his voice again, and as we sat
and chatted about what life still held for us, we felt that it was
pleasant to be alive in the bright spring weather.

We stayed in Paris together a week, and then I went for a week to Ept
with him, but first of all we went to the cemetery at Sèvres, where Boris
lay.

""Shall we place the 'Fates' in the little grove above him?"" Jack asked,
and I answered--

""I think only the 'Madonna' should watch over Boris' grave."" But Jack was
none the better for my home-coming. The dreams of which he could not
retain even the least definite outline continued, and he said that at
times the sense of breathless expectancy was suffocating.

""You see I do you harm and not good,"" I said. ""Try a change without me.""
So he started alone for a ramble among the Channel Islands, and I went
back to Paris. I had not yet entered Boris' house, now mine, since my
return, but I knew it must be done. It had been kept in order by Jack;
there were servants there, so I gave up my own apartment and went there
to live. Instead of the agitation I had feared, I found myself able to
paint there tranquilly. I visited all the rooms--all but one. I could not
bring myself to enter the marble room where Geneviève lay, and yet I felt
the longing growing daily to look upon her face, to kneel beside her.

One April afternoon, I lay dreaming in the smoking-room, just as I had
lain two years before, and mechanically I looked among the tawny Eastern
rugs for the wolf-skin. At last I distinguished the pointed ears and flat
cruel head, and I thought of my dream where I saw Geneviève lying beside
it. The helmets still hung against the threadbare tapestry, among them
the old Spanish morion which I remembered Geneviève had once put on when
we were amusing ourselves with the ancient bits of mail. I turned my eyes
to the spinet; every yellow key seemed eloquent of her caressing hand,
and I rose, drawn by the strength of my life's passion to the sealed door
of the marble room. The heavy doors swung inward under my trembling
hands. Sunlight poured through the window, tipping with gold the wings of
Cupid, and lingered like a nimbus over the brows of the Madonna. Her
tender face bent in compassion over a marble form so exquisitely pure
that I knelt and signed myself. Geneviève lay in the shadow under the
Madonna, and yet, through her white arms, I saw the pale azure vein, and
beneath her softly clasped hands the folds of her dress were tinged with
rose, as if from some faint warm light within her breast.

Bending, with a breaking heart, I touched the marble drapery with my
lips, then crept back into the silent house.

A maid came and brought me a letter, and I sat down in the little
conservatory to read it; but as I was about to break the seal, seeing the
girl lingering, I asked her what she wanted.

She stammered something about a white rabbit that had been caught in the
house, and asked what should be done with it I told her to let it loose
in the walled garden behind the house, and opened my letter. It was from
Jack, but so incoherent that I thought he must have lost his reason. It
was nothing but a series of prayers to me not to leave the house until he
could get back; he could not tell me why, there were the dreams, he
said--he could explain nothing, but he was sure that I must not leave the
house in the Rue Sainte-Cécile.

As I finished reading I raised my eyes and saw the same maid-servant
standing in the doorway holding a glass dish in which two gold-fish were
swimming: ""Put them back into the tank and tell me what you mean by
interrupting me,"" I said.

With a half-suppressed whimper she emptied water and fish into an
aquarium at the end of the conservatory, and turning to me asked my
permission to leave my service. She said people were playing tricks on
her, evidently with a design of getting her into trouble; the marble
rabbit had been stolen and a live one had been brought into the house;
the two beautiful marble fish were gone, and she had just found those
common live things flopping on the dining-room floor. I reassured her and
sent her away, saying I would look about myself. I went into the studio;
there was nothing there but my canvases and some casts, except the marble
of the Easter lily. I saw it on a table across the room. Then I strode
angrily over to it. But the flower I lifted from the table was fresh and
fragile and filled the air with perfume.

Then suddenly I comprehended, and sprang through the hall-way to the
marble room. The doors flew open, the sunlight streamed into my face, and
through it, in a heavenly glory, the Madonna smiled, as Geneviève lifted
her flushed face from her marble couch and opened her sleepy eyes.

","To Victor Cleves came the following telegram in code:

""Washington
""April 14th, 1919.""
""Investigation ordered by the State Department as the result of frequent mention in despatches of Chinese troops operating with the Russian Bolsheviki forces has disclosed that the Bolsheviki are actually raising a Chinese division of 30,000 men recruited in Central Asia. This division has been guilty of the greatest cruelties. A strange rumour prevails among the Allied forces at Archangel that this Chinese division is led by Yezidee and Hassani officers belonging to the sect of devil-worshipers and that they employ black arts and magic in battle.

""From information so far gathered by the several branches of the United States Secret Service operating throughout the world, it appears possible that the various revolutionary forces of disorder, in Europe and Asia, which now are violently threatening the peace and security, of all established civilisation on earth, may have had a common origin. This origin, it is now suspected, may date back to a very remote epoch; the wide-spread forces of violence and merciless destruction may have had their beginning among some ancient and predatory race whose existence was maintained solely by robbery and murder.

""Anarchists, terrorists, Bolshevists, Reds of all shades and degrees, are now believed to represent in modern times what perhaps once was a tribe of Assassins—a sect whose religion was founded upon a common predilection for crimes of violence.

""On this theory then, for the present, the United States Government will proceed with this investigation of Bolshevism; and the Secret Service will continue to pay particular attention to all Orientals in the United States and other countries. You personally are formally instructed to keep in touch with XLY-371 (Alek Selden) and ZB-303 (James Benton), and to employ every possible means to become friendly with the girl Tressa Norne, win her confidence, and, if possible, enlist her actively in the Government Service as your particular aid and comrade.

""It is equally important that the movements of the Oriental, called Sanang, be carefully observed in order to discover the identity and whereabouts of his companions. However, until further instructions he is not to be taken into custody. M. H. 2479.

""(Signed)
""(John Recklow.)""
The long despatch from John Recklow made Cleves's duty plain enough.

For months, now, Selden and Benton had been watching Tressa Norne. And they had learned practically nothing about her.

And now the girl had come within Cleves's sphere of operation. She had been in New York for two weeks. Telegrams from Benton in Chicago, and from Selden in Buffalo, had prepared him for her arrival.

He had his men watching her boarding-house on West Twenty-eighth Street, men to follow her, men to keep their eyes on her at the theatre, where every evening, at 10:45, her entr' acte was staged. He knew where to get her. But he, himself, had been on the watch for the man Sanang; and had failed to find the slightest trace of him in New York, although warned that he had arrived.

So, for that evening, he left the hunt for Sanang to others, put on his evening clothes, and dined with fashionable friends at the Patroons' Club, who never for an instant suspected that young Victor Cleves was in the Service of the United States Government. About half-past nine he strolled around to the theatre, desiring to miss as much as possible of the popular show without being too late to see the curious little entr' acte in which this girl, Tressa Norne, appeared alone.

He had secured an aisle seat near the stage at an outrageous price; the main show was still thundering and fizzing and glittering as he entered the theatre; so he stood in the rear behind the orchestra until the descending curtain extinguished the outrageous glare and din.

Then he went down the aisle, and as he seated himself Tressa Norne stepped from the wings and stood before the lowered curtain facing an expectant but oddly undemonstrative audience.

The girl worked rapidly, seriously, and in silence. She seemed a mere child there behind the footlights, not more than sixteen anyway—her winsome eyes and wistful lips unspoiled by the world's wisdom.

Yet once or twice the mouth drooped for a second and the winning eyes darkened to a remoter blue—the brooding iris hue of far horizons.

She wore the characteristic tabard of stiff golden tissue and the gold pagoda-shaped headpiece of a Yezidee temple girl. Her flat, slipper-shaped foot-gear was of stiff gold, too, and curled upward at the toes.

All this accentuated her apparent youth. For in face and throat no firmer contours had as yet modified the soft fullness of immaturity; her limbs were boyish and frail, and her bosom more undecided still, so that the embroidered breadth of gold fell flat and straight from her chest to a few inches above the ankles.

She seemed to have no stock of paraphernalia with which to aid the performance; no assistant, no orchestral diversion, nor did she serve herself with any magician's patter. She did her work close to the footlights.

Behind her loomed a black curtain; the strip of stage in front was bare even of carpet; the orchestra remained mute.

But when she needed anything—a little table, for example—well, it was suddenly there where she required it—a tripod, for instance, evidently fitted to hold the big iridescent bubble of glass in which swarmed little tropical fishes—and which arrived neatly from nowhere. She merely placed her hands before her as though ready to support something weighty which she expected and—suddenly, the huge crystal bubble was visible, resting between her hands. And when she tired of holding it, she set it upon the empty air and let go of it; and instead of crashing to the stage with its finny rainbow swarm of swimmers, out of thin air appeared a tripod to support it.

Applause followed, not very enthusiastic, for the sort of audience which sustains the shows of which her performance was merely an entr' acte is an audience responsive only to the obvious.

Nobody ever before had seen that sort of magic in America. People scarcely knew whether or not they quite liked it. The lightning of innovation stupefies the dull; ignorance is always suspicious of innovation—always afraid to put itself on record until its mind is made up by somebody else.

So in this typical New York audience approbation was cautious, but every fascinated eye remained focused on this young girl who continued to do incredible things, which seemed to resemble ""putting something over"" on them; a thing which no uneducated American conglomeration ever quite forgives.

The girl's silence, too, perplexed them; they were accustomed to gabble, to noise, to jazz, vocal and instrumental, to that incessant metropolitan clamour which fills every second with sound in a city whose only distinction is its din. Stage, press, art, letters, social existence unless noisy mean nothing in Gotham; reticence, leisure, repose are the three lost arts. The megaphone is the city's symbol; its chiefest crime, silence.

The girl having finished with the big glass bubble full of tiny fish, picked it up and tossed it aside. For a moment it apparently floated there in space like a soap-bubble. Changing rainbow tints waxed and waned on the surface, growing deeper and more gorgeous until the floating globe glowed scarlet, then suddenly burst into flame and vanished. And only a strange, sweet perfume lingered in the air.

But she gave her perplexed audience no time to wonder; she had seated herself on the stage and was already swiftly busy unfolding a white veil with which she presently covered herself, draping it over her like a tent.

The veil seemed to be translucent; she was apparently visible seated beneath it. But the veil turned into smoke, rising into the air in a thin white cloud; and there, where she had been seated, was a statue of white stone the image of herself!—in all the frail springtide of early adolescence—a white statue, cold, opaque, exquisite in its sculptured immobility.

There came, the next moment, a sound of distant thunder; flashes lighted the blank curtain; and suddenly a vein of lightning and a sharper peal shattered the statue to fragments.

There they lay, broken bits of her own sculptured body, glistening in a heap behind the footlights. Then each fragment began to shimmer with a rosy internal light of its own, until the pile of broken marble glowed like living coals under thickening and reddening vapours. And, presently, dimly perceptible, there she was in the flesh again, seated in the fiery centre of the conflagration, stretching her arms luxuriously, yawning, seemingly awakening from refreshing slumber, her eyes unclosing to rest with a sort of confused apology upon her astounded audience.

As she rose to her feet nothing except herself remained on the stage—no débris, not a shred of smoke, not a spark.

She came down, then, across an inclined plank into the orchestra among the audience.

In the aisle seat nearest her sat Victor Cleves. His business was to be there that evening. But she didn't know that, knew nothing about him—had never before set eyes on him.

At her gesture of invitation he made a cup of both his hands. Into these she poured a double handful of unset diamonds—or what appeared to be diamonds—pressed her own hands above his for a second—and the diamonds in his palms had become pearls.

These were passed around to people in the vicinity, and finally returned to Mr. Cleves, who, at her request, covered the heap of pearls with both his hands, hiding them entirely from view.

At her nod he uncovered them. The pearls had become emeralds. Again, while he held them, and without even touching him, she changed them into rubies. Then she turned away from him, apparently forgetting that he still held the gems, and he sat very still, one cupped hand over the other, while she poured silver coins into a woman's gloved hands, turned them into gold coins, then flung each coin into the air, where it changed to a living, fragrant rose and fell among the audience.

Presently she seemed to remember Cleve, came back down the aisle, and under his close and intent gaze drew from his cupped hands, one by one, a score of brilliant little living birds, which continually flew about her and finally perched, twittering, on her golden headdress—a rainbow-crest of living jewels.

As she drew the last warm, breathing little feathered miracle from Cleves's hands and released it, he said rapidly under his breath: ""I want a word with you later. Where?""

She let her clear eyes rest on him for a moment, then with a shrug so slight that it was perceptible, perhaps, only to him, she moved on along the inclined way, stepped daintily over the footlights, caught fire, apparently, nodded to a badly rattled audience, and sauntered off, burning from head to foot.

What applause there was became merged in a dissonant instrumental outburst from the orchestra; the great god Jazz resumed direction, the mindless audience breathed freely again as the curtain rose upon a familiar, yelling turbulence, including all that Gotham really understands and cares for—legs and noise.

Victor Cleves glanced up at the stage, then continued to study the name of the girl on the programme. It was featured in rather pathetic solitude under ""Entr' acte."" And he read further: ""During the entr' acte Miss Tressa Norne will entertain you with several phases of Black Magic. This strange knowledge was acquired by Miss Norne from the Yezidees, among which almost unknown people still remain descendants of that notorious and formidable historic personage known in the twelfth century as The Old Man of the Mountain—or The Old Man of Mount Alamout.

""The pleasant profession of this historic individual was assassination; and some historians now believe that genuine occult power played a part in his dreadful record—a record which terminated only when the infantry of Genghis Khan took Mount Alamout by storm and hanged the Old Man of the Mountain and burned his body under a boulder of You-Stone.

""For Miss Norne's performance there appears to be no plausible, practical or scientific explanation.

""During her performance the curtain will remain lowered for fifteen minutes and will then rise on the last act of 'You Betcha Life.'""

The noisy show continued while Cleves, paying it scant attention, brooded over the programme. And ever his keen, grey eyes reverted to her name, Tressa Norne.

Then, for a little while, he settled back and let his absent gaze wander over the galloping battalions of painted girls and the slapstick principals whose perpetual motion evoked screams of approbation from the audience amid the din of the great god Jazz.

He had an aisle seat; he disturbed nobody when he went out and around to the stage door.

The aged man on duty took his card, called a boy and sent it off. The boy returned with the card, saying that Miss Norne had already dressed and departed.

Cleves tipped him and then tipped the doorman heavily.

""Where does she live?"" he asked.

""Say,"" said the old man, ""I dunno, and that's straight. But them ladies mostly goes up to the roof for a look in at the 'Moonlight Masque' and a dance afterward. Was you ever up there?""

""Yes.""

""Seen the new show?""

""No.""

""Well, g'wan up while you can get a table. And I bet the little girl will be somewheres around.""

""The little girl"" was ""somewheres around."" He secured a table, turned and looked about at the vast cabaret into which only a few people had yet filtered, and saw her at a distance in the carpeted corridor buying violets from one of the flower-girls.

A waiter placed a reserve card on his table; he continued on around the outer edge of the auditorium.

Miss Norne had already seated herself at a small table in the rear, and a waiter was serving her with iced orange juice and little French cakes.

When the waiter returned Cleves went up and took off his hat.

""May I talk with you for a moment, Miss Norne?"" he said.

The girl looked up, the wheat-straw still between her scarlet lips. Then, apparently recognising in him the young man in the audience who had spoken to her, she resumed her business of imbibing orange juice.

The girl seemed even frailer and younger in her hat and street gown. A silver-fox stole hung from her shoulders; a gold bag lay on the table under the bunch of violets.

She paid no attention whatever to him. Presently her wheat-straw buckled, and she selected a better one.

He said: ""There's something rather serious I'd like to speak to you about if you'll let me. I'm not the sort you evidently suppose. I'm not trying to annoy you.""

At that she looked around and upward once more.

Very, very young, but already spoiled, he thought, for the dark-blue eyes were coolly appraising him, and the droop of the mouth had become almost sullen. Besides, traces of paint still remained to incarnadine lip and cheek and there was a hint of hardness in the youthful plumpness of the features.

""Are you a professional?"" she asked without curiosity.

""A theatrical man? No.""

""Then if you haven't anything to offer me, what is it you wish?""

""I have a job to offer if you care for it and if you are up to it,"" he said.

Her eyes became slightly hostile:

""What kind of job do you mean?""

""I want to learn something about you first. Will you come over to my table and talk it over?""

""No.""

""What sort do you suppose me to be?"" he inquired, amused.

""The usual sort, I suppose.""

""You mean a Johnny?""

""Yes—of sorts.""

She let her insolent eyes sweep him once more, from head to foot.

He was a well-built young man and in his evening dress he had that something about him which placed him very definitely where he really belonged.

""Would you mind looking at my card?"" he asked.

He drew it out and laid it beside her, and without stirring she scanned it sideways.

""That's my name and address,"" he continued. ""I'm not contemplating mischief. I've enough excitement in life without seeking adventure. Besides, I'm not the sort who goes about annoying women.""

She glanced up at him again:

""You are annoying me!""

""I'm sorry. I was quite honest. Good-night.""

He took his congé with unhurried amiability; had already turned away when she said:

""Please ... what do you desire to say to me?"" He came back to her table:

""I couldn't tell you until I know a little more about you.""

""What—do you wish to know?""

""Several things. I could scarcely ask you—go over such matters with you—standing here.""

There was a pause; the girl juggled with the straw on the table for a few moments, then, partly turning, she summoned a waiter, paid him, adjusted her stole, picked up her gold bag and her violets and stood up. Then she turned to Cleves and gave him a direct look, which had in it the impersonal and searching gaze of a child.

When they were seated at the table reserved for him the place already was filling rapidly—backwash from the theatres slopped through every aisle—people not yet surfeited with noise, not yet sufficiently sodden by their worship of the great god Jazz.

""Jazz,"" said Cleves, glancing across his dinner-card at Tressa Norne—""what's the meaning of the word? Do you happen to know?""

""Doesn't it come from the French 'jaser'?""

He smiled. ""Possibly. I'm rather hungry. Are you?""

""Yes.""

""Will you indicate your preferences?""

She studied her card, and presently he gave the order.

""I'd like some champagne,"" she said, ""unless you think it's too expensive.""

He smiled at that, too, and gave the order.

""I didn't suggest any wine because you seem so young,"" he said.

""How old do I seem?""

""Sixteen perhaps.""

""I am twenty-one.""

""Then you've had no troubles.""

""I don't know what you call trouble,"" she remarked, indifferently, watching the arriving throngs.

The orchestra, too, had taken its place.

""Well,"" she said, ""now that you've picked me up, what do you really want of me?"" There was no mitigating smile to soften what she said. She dropped her elbows on the table, rested her chin between her palms and looked at him with the same searching, undisturbed expression that is so disconcerting in children. As he made no reply: ""May I have a cocktail?"" she inquired.

He gave the order. And his mind registered pessimism. ""There is nothing doing with this girl,"" he thought. ""She's already on the toboggan."" But he said aloud: ""That was beautiful work you did down in the theatre, Miss Norne.""

""Did you think so?""

""Of course. It was astounding work.""

""Thank you. But managers and audiences differ with you.""

""Then they are very stupid,"" he said.

""Possibly. But that does not help me pay my board.""

""Do you mean you have trouble in securing theatrical engagements?""

""Yes, I am through here to-night, and there's nothing else in view, so far.""

""That's incredible!"" he exclaimed.

She lifted her glass, slowly drained it.

For a few moments she caressed the stem of the empty glass, her gaze remote.

""Yes, it's that way,"" she said. ""From the beginning I felt that my audiences were not in sympathy with me. Sometimes it even amounts to hostility. Americans do not like what I do, even if it holds their attention. I don't quite understand why they don't like it, but I'm always conscious they don't. And of course that settles it—to-night has settled the whole thing, once and for all.""

""What are you going to do?""

""What others do, I presume.""

""What do others do?"" he inquired, watching the lovely sullen eyes.

""Oh, they do what I'm doing now, don't they?—let some man pick them up and feed them."" She lifted her indifferent eyes. ""I'm not criticising you. I meant to do it some day—when I had courage. That's why I just asked you if I might have some champagne—finding myself a little scared at my first step.... But you did say you might have a job for me. Didn't you?""

""Suppose I haven't. What are you going to do?""

The curtain was rising. She nodded toward the bespangled chorus. ""Probably that sort of thing. They've asked me.""

Supper was served. They both were hungry and thirsty; the music made conversation difficult, so they supped in silence and watched the imbecile show conceived by vulgarians, produced by vulgarians and served up to mental degenerates of the same species—the average metropolitan audience.

For ten minutes a pair of comedians fell up and down a flight of steps, and the audience shrieked approval.

""Miss Norne?""

The girl who had been watching the show turned in her chair and looked back at him.

""Your magic is by far the most wonderful I have ever seen or heard of. Even in India such things are not done.""

""No, not in India,"" she said, indifferently.

""Where then?""

""In China.""

""You learned to do such things there?""

""Yes.""

""Where, in China, did you learn such amazing magic?""

""In Yian.""

""I never heard of it. Is it a province?""

""A city.""

""And you lived there?""

""Fourteen years.""

""When?""

""From 1904 to 1918.""

""During the great war,"" he remarked, ""you were in China?""

""Yes.""

""Then you arrived here very recently.""

""In November, from the Coast.""

""I see. You played the theatres from the Coast eastward.""

""And went to pieces in New York,"" she added calmly, finishing her glass of champagne.

""Have you any family?"" he asked.

""No.""

""Do you care to say anything further?"" he inquired, pleasantly.

""About my family? Yes, if you wish. My father was in the spice trade in Yian. The Yezidees took Yian in 1910, threw him into a well in his own compound and filled it up with dead imperial troops. I was thirteen years old.... The Hassani did that. They held Yian nearly eight years, and I lived with my mother, in a garden pagoda, until 1914. In January of that year Germans got through from Kiaou-Chou. They had been six months on the way. I think they were Hassanis. Anyway, they persuaded the Hassanis to massacre every English-speaking prisoner. And so—my mother died in the garden pagoda of Yian.... I was not told for four years.""

""Why did they spare you?"" he asked, astonished at her story so quietly told, so utterly destitute of emotion.

""I was seventeen. A certain person had placed me among the temple girls in the temple of Erlik. It pleased this person to make of me a Mongol temple girl as a mockery at Christ. They gave me the name Keuke Mongol. I asked to serve the shrine of Kwann-an—she being like to our Madonna. But this person gave me the choice between the halberds of the Tchortchas and the sorcery of Erlik.""

She lifted her sombre eyes. ""So I learned how to do the things you saw. But—what I did there on the stage is not—respectable.""

An odd shiver passed over him. For a second he took her literally, suddenly convinced that her magic was not white but black as the demon at whose shrine she had learned it. Then he smiled and asked her pleasantly, whether indeed she employed hypnosis in her miraculous exhibitions.

But her eyes became more sombre still, and, ""I don't care to talk about it,"" she said. ""I have already said too much.""

""I'm sorry. I didn't mean to pry into professional secrets——""

""I can't talk about it,"" she repeated. ""... Please—my glass is quite empty.""

When he had refilled it:

""How did you get away from Yian?"" he asked.

""The Japanese.""

""What luck!""

""Yes. One battle was fought at Buldak. The Hassanis and Blue Flags were terribly cut up. Then, outside the walls of Yian, Prince Sanang's Tchortcha infantry made a stand. He was there with his Yezidee horsemen, all in leather and silk armour with casques and corselets of black Indian steel.

""I could see them from the temple—saw the Japanese gunners open fire. The Tchortchas were blown to shreds in the blast of the Japanese guns.... Sanang got away with some of his Yezidee horsemen.""

""Where was that battle?""

""I told you, outside the walls of Yian.""

""The newspapers never mentioned any such trouble in China,"" he said, suspiciously.

""Nobody knows about it except the Germans and the Japanese.""

""Who is this Sanang?"" he demanded.

""A Yezidee-Mongol. He is one of the Sheiks-el-Djebel—a servant of The Old Man of Mount Alamout.""

""What is he?""

""A sorcerer—assassin.""

""What!"" exclaimed Cleves incredulously.

""Why, yes,"" she said, calmly. ""Have you never heard of The Old Man of Mount Alamout?""

""Well, yes——""

""The succession has been unbroken since 1090 B.C.A Hassan Sabbah is still the present Old Man of the Mountain. His Yezidees worship Erlik. They are sorcerers. But you would not believe that.""

Cleves said with a smile, ""Who is Erlik?""

""The Mongols' Satan.""

""Oh! So these Yezidees are devil-worshipers!""

""They are more. They are actually devils.""

""You don't really believe that even in unexplored China there exists such a creature as a real sorcerer, do you?"" he inquired, smilingly.

""I don't wish to talk of it.""

To his surprise her face had flushed, and he thought her sensitive mouth quivered a little.

He watched her in silence for a moment; then, leaning a little way across the table:

""Where are you going when the show here closes?""

""To my boarding-house.""

""And then?""

""To bed,"" she said, sullenly.

""And to-morrow what do you mean to do?""

""Go out to the agencies and ask for work.""

""And if there is none?""

""The chorus,"" she said, indifferently.

""What salary have you been getting?""

She told him.

""Will you take three times that amount and work with me?""

",True
"THEY were the brawlers and braggarts, the loud boasters and hard drinkers, of Faring town, John Kulrek and his crony Lie-lip Canool. Many a time have I, a tousle-haired lad, stolen to the tavern door to listen to their curses, their profane arguments and wild sea songs; half fearful and half in admiration of these wild rovers. Aye, all the people of Faring town gazed on them with fear and admiration, for they were not like the rest of the Faring men; they were not content to ply their trade along the coasts and among the shark-teeth shoals. No yawls, no skiffs for them! They fared far, farther than any other man in the village, for they shipped on the great sailing-ships that went out on the white tides to brave the restless grey ocean and make ports in strange lands.

Ah, I mind it was swift times in the little sea-coast village of Faring when John Kulrek came home, with the furtive Lie-lip at his side, swaggering down the gang-plank, in his tarry sea-clothes, and the broad leather belt that held his ever-ready dagger; shouting condescending greeting to some favored acquaintance, kissing some maiden who ventured too near; then up the street, roaring some scarcely decent song of the sea. How the cringers and the idlers, the hangers-on, would swarm about the two desperate heroes, flattering and smirking, guffawing hilariously at each nasty jest. For to the tavern loafers and to some of the weaker among the straightforward villagers, these men with their wild talk and their brutal deeds, their tales of the Seven Seas and the far countries, these men, I say, were valiant knights, nature's noblemen who dared to be men of blood and brawn.

And all feared them, so that when a man was beaten or a woman insulted, the villagers muttered—and did nothing. And so when Moll Farrell's niece was put to shame by John Kulrek, none dared even to put into words what all thought. Moll had never married, and she and the girl lived alone in a little hut down close to the beach, so close that in high tide the waves came almost to the door.

The people of the village accounted old Moll something of a witch, and she was a grim, gaunt old dame who had little to say to anyone. But she minded her own business, and eked out a slim living by gathering clams, and picking up bits of driftwood.

The girl was a pretty, foolish little thing, vain and easily befooled, else she had never yielded to the shark-like blandishments of John Kulrek.

I mind the day was a cold winter day with a sharp breeze out of the east when the old dame came into the village street shrieking that the girl had vanished. All scattered over the beach and back among the bleak inland hills to search for her—all save John Kulrek and his cronies who sat in the tavern dicing and toping. All the while beyond the shoals, we heard the never- ceasing droning of the heaving, restless grey monster, and in the dim light of the ghostly dawn Moll Farrell's girl came home.

The tides bore her gently across the wet sands and laid her almost at her own door. Virgin-white she was, and her arms were folded across her still bosom; calm was her face, and the grey tides sighed about her slender limbs. Moll Farrell's eyes were stones, yet she stood above her dead girl and spoke no word till John Kulrek and his crony came reeling down from the tavern, their drinking-jacks still in their hands. Drunk was John Kulrek, and the people gave back for him, murder in their souls; so he came and laughed at Moll Farrell across the body of her girl.

""Zounds!"" swore John Kulrek; ""the wench has drowned herself, Lie-lip!""

Lie-lip laughed, with the twist of his thin mouth. He always hated Moll Farrell, for it was she that had given him the name of Lie-lip.

Then John Kulrek lifted his drinking-jack, swaying on his uncertain legs. ""A health to the wench's ghost!"" he bellowed, while all stood aghast.

Then Moll Farrell spoke, and the words broke from her in a scream which sent ripples of cold up and down the spines of the throng.

""The curse of the Foul Fiend upon you, John Kulrek!"" she screamed. ""The curse of God rest upon your vile soul throughout eternity! May you gaze on sights that shall sear the eyes of you and scorch the soul of you! May you die a bloody death and writhe in hell's flames for a million and a million and yet a million years! I curse you by sea and by land, by earth and by air, by the demons of the swamplands, the fiends of the forest and the goblins of the hills! And you""—her lean finger stabbed at Lie-lip Canool and he started backward, his face paling—""you shall be the death of John Kulrek and he shall be the death of you! You shall bring John Kulrek to the doors of hell and John Kulrek shall bring you to the gallows-tree! I set the seal of death upon your brow, John Kulrek! You shall live in terror and die in horror far out upon the cold grey sea! But the sea that took the soul of innocence to her bosom shall not take you, but shall fling forth your vile carcass to the sands! Aye, John Kulrek""—and she spoke with such a terrible intensity that the drunken mockery on the man's face changed to one of swinish stupidity—""the sea roars for the victim it will not keep! There is snow upon the hills, John Kulrek, and ere it melts your corpse will lie at my feet. And I shall spit upon it and be content.""

Kulrek and his crony sailed at dawn for a long voyage, and Moll went back to her hut and her clam-gathering. She seemed to grow leaner and more grim than ever and her eyes smoldered with a light not sane. The days glided by and people whispered among themselves that Moll's days were numbered, for she faded to a ghost of a woman; but she went her way, refusing all aid.

That was a short, cold summer and the snow on the barren inland hills never melted; a thing very unusual, which caused much comment among the villagers. At dusk and at dawn Moll would come up on the beach, gaze up at the snow which glittered on the hills, then out to sea with a fierce intensity in her gaze.

Then the days grew shorter, the nights longer and darker, and the cold grey tides came sweeping along the bleak strands, bearing the rain and sleet of the sharp east breezes.

And upon a bleak day a trading-vessel sailed into the bay and anchored. And all the idlers and the wastrels flocked to the wharfs, for that was the ship upon which John Kulrek and Lie-lip Canool had sailed. Down the gang-plank came Lie-lip, more furtive than ever, but John Kulrek was not there.

To shouted queries, Canool shook his head. ""Kulrek deserted ship at a port of Sumatra,"" said he. ""He had a row with the skipper, lads; wanted me to desert, too, but no! I had to see you fine lads again, eh boys?""

Almost cringing was Lie-lip Canool, and suddenly he recoiled as Moll Farrell came through the throng. A moment they stood eyeing each other; then Moll's grim lips bent in a terrible smile.

""There's blood on your hand, Canool!"" she lashed out suddenly—so suddenly that Lie-lip started and rubbed his right hand across his left sleeve.

""Stand aside, witch!"" he snarled in sudden anger, striding through the crowd which gave back for him. His admirers followed him to the tavern.

Now, I mind that the next day was even colder; grey fogs came drifting out of the east and veiled the sea and the beaches. There would be no sailing that day, and so all the villagers were in their snug houses or matching tales at the tavern. So it came that Joe, my friend, a lad of my own age, and I, were the ones who saw the first of the strange things that happened.

Being harum-scarum lads of no wisdom, we were sitting in a small rowboat, floating at the end of the wharfs, each shivering and wishing the other would suggest leaving, there being no reason whatever for our being there, save that it was a good place to build air-castles undisturbed.

Suddenly Joe raised his hand. ""Say,"" he said, ""d'ye hear? Who can be out on the bay upon a day like this?""

""Nobody. What d'ye hear?""

""Oars. Or I'm a lubber. Listen.""

There was no seeing anything in that fog, and I heard nothing. Yet Joe swore he did, and suddenly his face assumed a strange look.

""Somebody rowing out there, I tell you! The bay is alive with oars from the sound! A score of boats at the least! Ye dolt, can ye not hear?""

Then, as I shook my head, he leaped and began to undo the painter.

""I'm off to see. Name me liar if the bay is not full of boats, all together like a close fleet. Are you with me?""

Yes, I was with him, though I heard nothing. Then out in the greyness we went, and the fog closed behind and before so that we drifted in a vague world of smoke, seeing naught and hearing naught. We were lost in no time, and I cursed Joe for leading us upon a wild goose chase that was like to end with our being swept out to sea. I thought of Moll Farrell's girl and shuddered.

How long we drifted I know not. Minutes faded into hours, hours into centuries. Still Joe swore he heard the oars, now close at hand, now far away, and for hours we followed them, steering our course toward the sound, as the noise grew or receded. This I later thought of, and could not understand.

Then, when my hands were so numb that I could no longer hold the oar, and the forerunning drowsiness of cold and exhaustion was stealing over me, Weak white stars broke through the fog which glided suddenly away, fading like a ghost of smoke, and we found ourselves afloat just outside the mouth of the bay. The waters lay smooth as a pond, all dark green and silver in the starlight, and the cold came crisper than ever. I was swinging the boat about, to put back into the bay, when Joe gave a shout, and for the first time I heard the clack of oar-locks. I glanced over my shoulder and my blood went cold.

A great beaked prow loomed above us, a weird, unfamiliar shape against the stars, and as I caught my breath, sheered sharply and swept by us, with a curious swishing I never heard any other craft make. Joe screamed and backed oars frantically, and the boat walled out of the way just in time; for though the prow missed us, still otherwise we had died. For from the sides of the ship stood long oars, bank upon bank which swept her along. Though I had never seen such a craft, I knew her for a galley. But what was she doing upon our coasts? They said, the far-farers, that such ships were still in use among the heathens of Barbary; but it was many a long, heaving mile to Barbary, and even so she did not resemble the ships described by those who had sailed far.

We started in pursuit, and this was strange, for though the waters broke about her prow, and she seemed fairly to fly through the waves, yet she was making little speed, and it was no time before we caught up with her. Making our painter fast to a chain far back beyond the reach of the swishing oars, we hailed those on deck. But there came no answer, and at last, conquering our fears, we clambered up the chain and found ourselves upon the strangest deck man has trod for many a long, roaring century.

Joe muttered fearsomely. ""Look, how old it seems! Almost ready to fall to pieces. Why, 'tis fairly rotten!""

There was no one on deck, no one at the long sweep with which the craft was steered. We stole to the hold and looked down the stair. Then and there, if ever men were on the verge of insanity, it was we. For there were rowers there, it is true; they sat upon the rowers' benches and drove the creaking oars through the grey waters. And they that rowed were skeletons!

Shrieking, we plunged across the deck, to fling ourselves into the sea. But at the rail I tripped upon something and fell headlong, and as I lay, I saw a thing which vanquished my fear of the horrors below for an instant. The thing upon which I had tripped was a human body, and in the dim grey light that was beginning to steal across the eastern waves I saw a dagger hilt standing up between his shoulders. Joe was at the rail, urging me to haste, and together we slid down the chain and cut the painter.

Then we stood off into the bay. Straight on kept the grim galley, and we followed, slowly, wondering. She seemed to be heading straight for the beach beside the wharfs, and as we approached, we saw the wharfs thronged with people. They had missed us, no doubt, and now they stood, there in the early dawn light, struck dumb by the apparition which had come up out of the night and the grim ocean.

Straight on swept the galley, her oars a-swish; then ere she reached the shallow water—crash!—a terrific reverberation shook the bay. Before our eyes the grim craft seemed to melt away; then she vanished, and the green waters seethed where she had ridden, but there floated no driftwood there, nor did there ever float any ashore. Aye, something floated ashore, but it was grim driftwood!

We made the landing amid a hum of excited conversation that stopped suddenly. Moll Farrell stood before her hut, limned gauntly against the ghostly dawn, her lean hand pointing sea-ward. And across the sighing wet sands, borne by the grey tide, something came floating; something that the waves dropped at Moll Farrell's feet. And there looked up at us, as we crowded about, a pair of unseeing eyes set in a still, white face. John Kulrek had come home.

Still and grim he lay, rocked by the tide, and as he lurched sideways, all saw the dagger hilt that stood from his back—the dagger all of us had seen a thousand times at the belt of Lie-lip Canool.

""Aye, I killed him!"" came Canool's shriek, as he writhed and groveled before our gaze. ""At sea on a still night in a drunken brawl I slew him and hurled him overboard! And from the far seas he has followed me""—his voice sank to a hideous whisper—""because—of—the—curse—the—sea— would—not—keep—his—body!""

And the wretch sank down, trembling, the shadow of the gallows already in his eyes.

""Aye!"" Strong, deep and exultant was Moll Farrell's voice. ""From the hell of lost craft Satan sent a ship of bygone ages! A ship red with gore and stained with the memory of horrid crimes! None other would bear such a vile carcass! The sea has taken vengeance and has given me mine. See now, how I spit upon the face of John Kulrek.""

And with a ghastly laugh, she pitched forward, the blood starting to her lips. And the sun came up across the restless sea.","

For there be divers sorts of death--some wherein the body remaineth;
and in some it vanisheth quite away with the spirit.  This commonly
occurreth only in solitude (such is God's will) and, none seeing the
end, we say the man is lost, or gone on a long journey--which indeed
he hath; but sometimes it hath happened in sight of many, as abundant
testimony showeth.  In one kind of death the spirit also dieth, and
this it hath been known to do while yet the body was in vigor for
many years.  Sometimes, as is veritably attested, it dieth with the
body, but after a season is raised up again in that place where the
body did decay.

Pondering these words of Hali (whom God rest) and questioning their
full meaning, as one who, having an intimation, yet doubts if there
be not something behind, other than that which he has discerned, I
noted not whither I had strayed until a sudden chill wind striking my
face revived in me a sense of my surroundings.  I observed with
astonishment that everything seemed unfamiliar.  On every side of me
stretched a bleak and desolate expanse of plain, covered with a tall
overgrowth of sere grass, which rustled and whistled in the autumn
wind with heaven knows what mysterious and disquieting suggestion.
Protruded at long intervals above it, stood strangely shaped and
somber-colored rocks, which seemed to have an understanding with one
another and to exchange looks of uncomfortable significance, as if
they had reared their heads to watch the issue of some foreseen
event.  A few blasted trees here and there appeared as leaders in
this malevolent conspiracy of silent expectation.

The day, I thought, must be far advanced, though the sun was
invisible; and although sensible that the air was raw and chill my
consciousness of that fact was rather mental than physical--I had no
feeling of discomfort.  Over all the dismal landscape a canopy of
low, lead-colored clouds hung like a visible curse.  In all this
there were a menace and a portent--a hint of evil, an intimation of
doom.  Bird, beast, or insect there was none.  The wind sighed in the
bare branches of the dead trees and the gray grass bent to whisper
its dread secret to the earth; but no other sound nor motion broke
the awful repose of that dismal place.

I observed in the herbage a number of weather-worn stones, evidently
shaped with tools.  They were broken, covered with moss and half
sunken in the earth.  Some lay prostrate, some leaned at various
angles, none was vertical.  They were obviously headstones of graves,
though the graves themselves no longer existed as either mounds or
depressions; the years had leveled all.  Scattered here and there,
more massive blocks showed where some pompous tomb or ambitious
monument had once flung its feeble defiance at oblivion.  So old
seemed these relics, these vestiges of vanity and memorials of
affection and piety, so battered and worn and stained--so neglected,
deserted, forgotten the place, that I could not help thinking myself
the discoverer of the burial-ground of a prehistoric race of men
whose very name was long extinct.

Filled with these reflections, I was for some time heedless of the
sequence of my own experiences, but soon I thought, ""How came I
hither?""  A moment's reflection seemed to make this all clear and
explain at the same time, though in a disquieting way, the singular
character with which my fancy had invested all that I saw or heard.
I was ill.  I remembered now that I had been prostrated by a sudden
fever, and that my family had told me that in my periods of delirium
I had constantly cried out for liberty and air, and had been held in
bed to prevent my escape out-of-doors.  Now I had eluded the
vigilance of my attendants and had wandered hither to--to where?  I
could not conjecture.  Clearly I was at a considerable distance from
the city where I dwelt--the ancient and famous city of Carcosa.

No signs of human life were anywhere visible nor audible; no rising
smoke, no watch-dog's bark, no lowing of cattle, no shouts of
children at play--nothing but that dismal burial-place, with its air
of mystery and dread, due to my own disordered brain.  Was I not
becoming again delirious, there beyond human aid?  Was it not indeed
ALL an illusion of my madness?  I called aloud the names of my wives
and sons, reached out my hands in search of theirs, even as I walked
among the crumbling stones and in the withered grass.

A noise behind me caused me to turn about.  A wild animal--a lynx--
was approaching.  The thought came to me:  If I break down here in
the desert--if the fever return and I fail, this beast will be at my
throat.  I sprang toward it, shouting.  It trotted tranquilly by
within a hand's breadth of me and disappeared behind a rock.

A moment later a man's head appeared to rise out of the ground a
short distance away.  He was ascending the farther slope of a low
hill whose crest was hardly to be distinguished from the general
level.  His whole figure soon came into view against the background
of gray cloud.  He was half naked, half clad in skins.  His hair was
unkempt, his beard long and ragged.  In one hand he carried a bow and
arrow; the other held a blazing torch with a long trail of black
smoke.  He walked slowly and with caution, as if he feared falling
into some open grave concealed by the tall grass.  This strange
apparition surprised but did not alarm, and taking such a course as
to intercept him I met him almost face to face, accosting him with
the familiar salutation, ""God keep you.""

He gave no heed, nor did he arrest his pace.

""Good stranger,"" I continued, ""I am ill and lost.  Direct me, I
beseech you, to Carcosa.""

The man broke into a barbarous chant in an unknown tongue, passing on
and away.

An owl on the branch of a decayed tree hooted dismally and was
answered by another in the distance.  Looking upward, I saw through a
sudden rift in the clouds Aldebaran and the Hyades!  In all this
there was a hint of night--the lynx, the man with the torch, the owl.
Yet I saw--I saw even the stars in absence of the darkness.  I saw,
but was apparently not seen nor heard.  Under what awful spell did I
exist?

I seated myself at the root of a great tree, seriously to consider
what it were best to do.  That I was mad I could no longer doubt, yet
recognized a ground of doubt in the conviction.  Of fever I had no
trace.  I had, withal, a sense of exhilaration and vigor altogether
unknown to me--a feeling of mental and physical exaltation.  My
senses seemed all alert; I could feel the air as a ponderous
substance; I could hear the silence.

A great root of the giant tree against whose trunk I leaned as I sat
held inclosed in its grasp a slab of stone, a part of which protruded
into a recess formed by another root.  The stone was thus partly
protected from the weather, though greatly decomposed.  Its edges
were worn round, its corners eaten away, its surface deeply furrowed
and scaled.  Glittering particles of mica were visible in the earth
about it--vestiges of its decomposition.  This stone had apparently
marked the grave out of which the tree had sprung ages ago.  The
tree's exacting roots had robbed the grave and made the stone a
prisoner.

A sudden wind pushed some dry leaves and twigs from the uppermost
face of the stone; I saw the low-relief letters of an inscription and
bent to read it.  God in Heaven! MY name in full!--the date of MY
birth!--the date of MY death!

A level shaft of light illuminated the whole side of the tree as I
sprang to my feet in terror.  The sun was rising in the rosy east.  I
stood between the tree and his broad red disk--no shadow darkened the
trunk!

A chorus of howling wolves saluted the dawn.  I saw them sitting on
their haunches, singly and in groups, on the summits of irregular
mounds and tumuli filling a half of my desert prospect and extending
to the horizon.  And then I knew that these were ruins of the ancient
and famous city of Carcosa.


Such are the facts imparted to the medium Bayrolles by the spirit
Hoseib Alar Robardin.

",False
"""Once, mankind accepted a simple truth: that they were not alone in this universe.""
-Anthony Hopkins as Odin, Thor (2011).

Hanoi, Socialist Republic of Vietnam
June 24, 2011.
""Hey, we're here. Get up if you don't want to wake up in Hue!""
Joseph Clayton was shaken awake by the hand of one of his classmates on his shoulder. He was sitting in the back of a taxi van... the only one left sitting, actually, as the others had already disembarked to enter the government office they were parked in front of.
Which probably meant that he was left to pay the fare.
After he payed (as seemed to be his lot on this trip), he followed his classmates and his professor into the government office where they hoped to finally receive their travel permits. He hadn't gotten much of sleep on the plane; a mixture of excitement in the face of overseas travel and sheer jet-lag had conspired to leave him weary and light headed until he got a few hours sleep, which the taxi ride had partially afforded him.
And in that sleep...
The dream had come as a stark, clear memory. When Marie had said that she wasn't going to join him at the Miskatonic campus in Arkham for what would be their first year of university, he had been devastated. His first questions, rushed and frantic, had been about the cause of such a change. She certainly had the SAT score to qualify and student debt could be handled with relative ease. Had she decided to forgo post-secondary to concentrate on her stake in the restaurant? Had financial problems struck and prevented admissions from being paid?
Was it something about him?
Her answers, far more controlled than his frenzied speculation, had all been in the negative. Her SAT scores were good, student loans were still open and she still intended to go for a degree in Biology at Miskatonic. It was just... after she'd gotten that phonograph from her parents' home village, the repayment had been a promise to come and spend a year back in the ""Old Country"" as soon as she could. It would only be for a year and then she would return, ready for university and all accompaniments.
That had been very nearly one year before. She had promised him that she would be coming back in the summer of 2011... but after she had arrived in Vietnam, all contact had stopped cold. Her parents, when asked about her condition, always responded with affirmations that she would return and that she was fine... but as winter wore onto spring, subtle hints of doubt and worry had crept into their voices. Had they even been receiving any news from their daughter and if not, then why not? Had something gone terribly wrong?
As it happened, more baffling events awaited inside.
""What do you mean, restricted?"" Joseph asked the Communist Party bureaucrat sitting across the desk from him. Of course, due to the facts that first, said bureaucrat was a government employee and second, they were not alone in the room, Joseph had been careful not to sound too brunt in his tone. A trung sior Sergeant, wearing the forest green uniform of the Vietnam Border Defence Force (VPA), stood by the door of the office, both watching and guarding.
Relieved at being able to shed his stilted English after Joseph exhibited a decent grasp of the Vietnamese language, the bureaucrat put forth what he knew of the situation. ""Civilian access is almost completely denied inside the area you requested. To be honest, that section of the border has been troublesome ever since the war. We get reports of smugglers, poachers, bandits, H'mong insurgents... every type of violent counter-revolutionary you can think of, this region seems to have it. The local Bru farmers aren't much help, but they generally don't bother others and seem to accept the military presence we keep there."" The bureaucrat shifted his gaze from Joseph to Professor Neville Andover, the leader of this particular expedition. ""I'm sorry, but there's nothing that can be done without high level authorization.""
As a response to this, Neville Andover did not get upset. He did not resign himself to failure. He did not even try to ask if there was any other avenue of entry or way to access the information he needed. He just donned an odd, amused smile, the corners of his eyes crinkling behind his wire rim glasses. ""I assume that General Vo is still the Secretary for the Border Forces?"" He asked, almost distractedly. When the official answered yes, Professor Andover reached into the inside of his light cotton jacket and pulled out a small, metal case. From this case, he removed a single paper card of purest black, embossed with an emerald green ""Delta"" symbol and a capital ""Y"" of gold in the center of that hollow triangle. ""I have been in contact with Comrade Vo for the last six months, planning this expedition as an act of cooperation between our two governments and as a boon for my University. He knows that card; show it or describe it to him... you maywant to run it by General Tran as well. Either way, they will give you the answer you need.""
As the bureaucrat took the card and then as the Border Defense sergeant took it from him and headed out of the room, Joesph wondered about his professor and the oddities that surrounded him. The first time he had ever seen the Professor, it had been in his High School Auditorium as Marie had performed the Stork Dance... and Joseph had noticed strange things. In their senior year of High School, both he and Marie had received reference letters to Miskatonic University in Arkham, a town in Essex county. When he had arrived at Miskatonic (without Marie), he had been shocked that the professor for his Cultural Anthropology class was not only the one who had given him his reference but was also the man who had he had seen three years before.
And then there were his classmates, three of whom had also come on this expedition. Many of them had received similar letters from Prof. Andover and most of those, though not relaying specifics, had said that they had found the circumstances equally strange. Two who had gotten references were on this very trip with them. The first was Tracy Williams from the farm country of Northwest Virginia, a girl with blond hair quite a few shades lighter than Josephs own brassy brown and the class Nippon-Nut, being both obsessed with Anime and Manga as well as being Japanese-proficient. The second was Albert Noyes, a young man who has part white, part black and a little Algonquin-Indian from a small hamlet in southern Vermont. His specialties were technology, math and Mandarin Chinese. The third member of retinue was a young man named Malone who... frankly, was a mystery to the entire class. However, he had volunteered for this trip and his grades had been excellent so his place on the roster had been assured.
But there was still a nagging question at the back of his mind: why? Why had they received offers to go to an obscure if admittedly exceptional regional university when the big names had all passed them over? Why had they been gathered from all across the United States by a single professor? And why, it seemed, did it feel like there was such a big connection between the missing member of Dr. Andovers ""collection"" and the reason behind this expedition?
Why did it feel as if Marie was somehow connected to this?
Eventually, the sergeant came back and informed the bureaucrat of General Vo's express permission for the Professor and his students to enter the exclusion zone as well as General Tran's confirmation, before handing the card back to Neville Andover. Joseph knew that academics could sometimes have friends in high and unusual places, but counting on ... no, expecting the approval of not just one, but two ranking Generals in a non-allied nation? This seemed crazy, certifiably insane even.
But then, so did spectral storks and spoonbills.
Northernmost Quang Binh Province, Socialist Republic of Vietnam
June 29, 2011
Despite the calm look on the professors face, something about the current situation made Joseph Clayton distinctly ill at ease.
They had spent the last two days trudging up into the Annamite mountains after leaving the fertile coastal plain. At the last village with road access, they had ditched their vehicles and backpacked up the ridges and trails, counting on a guide from the local Bru people to lead them to... whatever Prof. Andover was looking for. The fact that the guide was now legging it quite quickly back down the misty path told Joseph that something had either gone incredibly wrong or incredibly right.
Now, Neville Andover was chanting, seemingly trying to communicate with something deep in the thick underbrush on either side of the worn, overgrown gully that had been called a trail. The language was almost intellig ible to Joseph, being a form of Mon-Khmer linked to the classical Vietnamese he had studied, perhaps with a few hints of Muong intermixed. However, the syntax and grammer were archaic to say the least. From some of the words used it even seemed to be achingly familiar, almost as if...
With a sudden realization of shock and the smell of grilled pork and Bac Bon Dzhow a memory in his nostrils, Joseph realized where he had encountered this form of Vietic before.
But the shocks were not over.
Spun around by Albert Noyes to see something, Joseph gazed upward to see a human figure standing upon the high bank, glancing down at them with hard, measuring eyes. Undoubtedly masculine, the figure was of a man of slightly darker skin than the farmers of the coast (though the features were similar) and of greater height than either them or the native Bru. Clothed only in a white cotton kilt with geometric designs in black and a leather girdle, this man carried a white flatbow decorated with bands of green, blue and red while a bronze dagger rested at his hip. His head was shaved of all hair, and black designs were tattooed from the crown of the scalp to the jawline, with more tattoos covering his arms, chest and lower legs.
The fact that an arrow was nocked in the string of his bow put the four young people on edge, with Malone and Joesph himself tightening the grips on the hilts of their machetes in anticipation of a hopeless fight. More men in similar dress and tattoos, some with bronze slashing swords, some with bronze-headed spears and others with flatbows, appeared out of the forest on either side of them. Now that Joseph could get a better look at them in the dim light filtering down through the forest canopy and the mist, their arm tattoos began looking very similar to those borne by Marie's parents while those on their faces, while different in design, were still similar in form.
All the while, Prof. Andover kept up the low chanting, of which Joseph could pick out individual words: ""friend"", ""gods"", ""village"", ""priest"", ""comrade"" and at least one invocation of Ho Chi Minh among them. To this, these strange men seemed to confer with each other though glances and nods before took one took a short, bamboo tube from his girdle, put one end to his mouth, took a deep breath and blew.
As the silvery-blue powder erupted from the tube, settled on the heads of the trekking academics and they each lost consciousness in turn, Joseph wondered if this could get any worse.
Meanwhile, Spoonbill Village
Tsan Pho Dao had been the Chief Priest of this village for many years, ever since the death of his father in the closing days of the American War. In that span of years, he had seen many futures and advised his people based on those futures. He had called down both ruin and plenty by invoking the power of the gods of his people. He alone, in a feat outside even the power of the hereditary village chiefs, had communicated with the Instrument of their gods, a being possessed of both boundless knowledge and an absolutely rotten temper. He also, most importantly, had an absolutely perfect memory of his entire life... and that of his father, and his father before him.
To be perfectly honest, he held a tremendous amount of power within this village. The ancestor shrines belonged to families while the hunters had their own little shrines up the mountain where midnight rituals were performed to gather poison for the tips of arrows and darts. But those rituals needed to be performed by the minor priests under his command. This temple was the spiritual center of his people for most of the year and the temple with it's darkened wood walls lit only by feeble braziers whose light was twisted by the smoke of rare and powerful incenses, with it's figurines of gods and demons carved from nephrite and jadeite brought from deep below the earth... was his domain. His and no one else'. He divined the future when possible, he performed the rites and as a result, it was he who had taken countless lives in sacrifice over the course of his adulthood: chickens, pigs, goats, buffalo... people.
As he sat at a low table in his private sanctuary, trying to divine some course for a question that had faced him for most of a year, he noticed something. One of the golden discs he used for divination, a coin looted from a Chinese caravan many centuries ago, stood up on its rim and began to roll. Following the curve of failing momentum, the coin finally came to rest at a specific point on the table, a place that held indication of the future.
Visitors... and not the ""ketchup"" kind of visitors.
Several Hours Later, Close to the Laos Border
The answer to Joseph Clayton's earlier question was a definite yes. When he had awoken, he had found his wrists and ankles bound, the bindings looped over a pole carried by two men with him and the other students suspended like deer carcasses. The Professor, on the other hand, had not been bound, but had found transport by sitting in a large basket suspended from one of the poles by a cord, carried by a pair of men. They had been going downhill from the crest of a ridge and were now leaving the forest, coming onto a road. First, they passed under a wooden gate where roosting spoonbills had been carved into the posts and a sun flanked by two dragons had been carved into the beams above the road.
Then Joseph saw where they were headed. A village of perhaps thirty houses was visible in the valley bottom while narrow terraces had been cut into the hills above, green with growing rice. The view quickly vanished as the men began heading into the village itself but sight was soon replaced with sound. The quiet of the forest was supplanted by the cacophony of a hundred sounds: chickens and pigs grunted and clucked as the animals rooted below the houses and around the garbage heaps while odd-looking reddish dogs, lazing in the sun on the porches of the outermost houses, whined in surprise at the new arrivals. The sounds of tools and primitive machinery clunked melodiously. The sounds of people also were audible: talking, laughing, shouting and even a few low notes of women's work songs were possible for Joseph to pick out of the general buzz... a buzz which also included Albert trying to reason with their captors and Tracy displaying an unusually foul mouth toward same.
Soon, people began to notice the men bringing in captives and a few even began to gather along the path as they entered the village, joining their dogs (or Dholes, as they were now identifiable as) who had come to sniff. It was mostly men, older boys and children who came out to watch while the women and the elderly usually went no further than windows and the porches of the stilt-houses that lined the road. Here, even hanging upside down, Joseph could notice a few things about the dress and appearance of the people
Frankly... it was a bit odd.
From what he knew, the Vietnamese national costume (in it's modern form) placed a heavy emphasis on trousers, an item of clothing that he noticed was rather conspicuously absent here. Everyone here seemed to be wearing variations on one basic outfit in either brown or black: knee-length cotton kilts, short-sleeved cotton jackets (mostly with their front fastenings closed) and either rough-woven conical hats or simple cloths tied over their heads. The men's hair appeared to be cut short to the point where one could vaguely make out the tattoos on their scalp while children varied between the same shortness for boys and a single, long braid for the girls.
Eventually they arrived in a great or square before what appeared to be the temple: a ponderous structure of wood and brick perched upon massive stone foundations, it's sloping roofs flaring outward as if to shroud the surrounding houses from the scrutiny of the heavens. Around them, a crowd had gathered on all sides, an air of excitement buzzing in the air. Men exited the house across the square from the temple entrance and despite the calm demeanour of Professor Andover, words began filtering through to Joseph that began sounding more and more disturbing; words like ""kill"", ""sacrifice"" and ""ritual"". But another word came, one that sent darker imaginings and images rambling through his sensation-saturated mind.
The word ""eat"".
""WAIT! STOP!""
Joseph knew those words as well... as well as that voice!
Out of the crowd rushed a figure dressed much like the others: brown kilt and jacket, the latter partially open to reveal a yem undergarment and with a straw hat on her head. As Joseph finally began taking in other details, he noticed the tattooed lines and whimsical designs on her lower legs and arms and on her face, lines and vaguely triangular patterns that almost resembled the features of an orangutan.
Her face... behind all the tattooing, the face of this woman was still as unmistakable to Joseph as the first day they had met in Kindergarten. To this sudden recognition, the young man could only exclaim his surprise as a soothingly familiar name.
""Marie?""
","It is said that in Ulthar, which lies beyond the river Skai, no man may kill a cat; and this I can verily believe as I gaze upon him who sitteth purring before the fire. For the cat is cryptic, and close to strange things which men cannot see. He is the soul of antique Aegyptus, and bearer of tales from forgotten cities in Meroë and Ophir. He is the kin of the jungle’s lords, and heir to the secrets of hoary and sinister Africa. The Sphinx is his cousin, and he speaks her language; but he is more ancient than the Sphinx, and remembers that which she hath forgotten.
      In Ulthar, before ever the burgesses forbade the killing of cats, there dwelt an old cotter and his wife who delighted to trap and slay the cats of their neighbours. Why they did this I know not; save that many hate the voice of the cat in the night, and take it ill that cats should run stealthily about yards and gardens at twilight. But whatever the reason, this old man and woman took pleasure in trapping and slaying every cat which came near to their hovel; and from some of the sounds heard after dark, many villagers fancied that the manner of slaying was exceedingly peculiar. But the villagers did not discuss such things with the old man and his wife; because of the habitual expression on the withered faces of the two, and because their cottage was so small and so darkly hidden under spreading oaks at the back of a neglected yard. In truth, much as the owners of cats hated these odd folk, they feared them more; and instead of berating them as brutal assassins, merely took care that no cherished pet or mouser should stray toward the remote hovel under the dark trees. When through some unavoidable oversight a cat was missed, and sounds heard after dark, the loser would lament impotently; or console himself by thanking Fate that it was not one of his children who had thus vanished. For the people of Ulthar were simple, and knew not whence it is all cats first came.
      One day a caravan of strange wanderers from the South entered the narrow cobbled streets of Ulthar. Dark wanderers they were, and unlike the other roving folk who passed through the village twice every year. In the market-place they told fortunes for silver, and bought gay beads from the merchants. What was the land of these wanderers none could tell; but it was seen that they were given to strange prayers, and that they had painted on the sides of their wagons strange figures with human bodies and the heads of cats, hawks, rams, and lions. And the leader of the caravan wore a head-dress with two horns and a curious disc betwixt the horns.
      There was in this singular caravan a little boy with no father or mother, but only a tiny black kitten to cherish. The plague had not been kind to him, yet had left him this small furry thing to mitigate his sorrow; and when one is very young, one can find great relief in the lively antics of a black kitten. So the boy whom the dark people called Menes smiled more often than he wept as he sate playing with his graceful kitten on the steps of an oddly painted wagon.
      On the third morning of the wanderers’ stay in Ulthar, Menes could not find his kitten; and as he sobbed aloud in the market-place certain villagers told him of the old man and his wife, and of sounds heard in the night. And when he heard these things his sobbing gave place to meditation, and finally to prayer. He stretched out his arms toward the sun and prayed in a tongue no villager could understand; though indeed the villagers did not try very hard to understand, since their attention was mostly taken up by the sky and the odd shapes the clouds were assuming. It was very peculiar, but as the little boy uttered his petition there seemed to form overhead the shadowy, nebulous figures of exotic things; of hybrid creatures crowned with horn-flanked discs. Nature is full of such illusions to impress the imaginative.
      That night the wanderers left Ulthar, and were never seen again. And the householders were troubled when they noticed that in all the village there was not a cat to be found. From each hearth the familiar cat had vanished; cats large and small, black, grey, striped, yellow, and white. Old Kranon, the burgomaster, swore that the dark folk had taken the cats away in revenge for the killing of Menes’ kitten; and cursed the caravan and the little boy. But Nith, the lean notary, declared that the old cotter and his wife were more likely persons to suspect; for their hatred of cats was notorious and increasingly bold. Still, no one durst complain to the sinister couple; even when little Atal, the innkeeper’s son, vowed that he had at twilight seen all the cats of Ulthar in that accursed yard under the trees, pacing very slowly and solemnly in a circle around the cottage, two abreast, as if in performance of some unheard-of rite of beasts. The villagers did not know how much to believe from so small a boy; and though they feared that the evil pair had charmed the cats to their death, they preferred not to chide the old cotter till they met him outside his dark and repellent yard.
      So Ulthar went to sleep in vain anger; and when the people awaked at dawn—behold! every cat was back at his accustomed hearth! Large and small, black, grey, striped, yellow, and white, none was missing. Very sleek and fat did the cats appear, and sonorous with purring content. The citizens talked with one another of the affair, and marvelled not a little. Old Kranon again insisted that it was the dark folk who had taken them, since cats did not return alive from the cottage of the ancient man and his wife. But all agreed on one thing: that the refusal of all the cats to eat their portions of meat or drink their saucers of milk was exceedingly curious. And for two whole days the sleek, lazy cats of Ulthar would touch no food, but only doze by the fire or in the sun.
      It was fully a week before the villagers noticed that no lights were appearing at dusk in the windows of the cottage under the trees. Then the lean Nith remarked that no one had seen the old man or his wife since the night the cats were away. In another week the burgomaster decided to overcome his fears and call at the strangely silent dwelling as a matter of duty, though in so doing he was careful to take with him Shang the blacksmith and Thul the cutter of stone as witnesses. And when they had broken down the frail door they found only this: two cleanly picked human skeletons on the earthen floor, and a number of singular beetles crawling in the shadowy corners.
      There was subsequently much talk among the burgesses of Ulthar. Zath, the coroner, disputed at length with Nith, the lean notary; and Kranon and Shang and Thul were overwhelmed with questions. Even little Atal, the innkeeper’s son, was closely questioned and given a sweetmeat as reward. They talked of the old cotter and his wife, of the caravan of dark wanderers, of small Menes and his black kitten, of the prayer of Menes and of the sky during that prayer, of the doings of the cats on the night the caravan left, and of what was later found in the cottage under the dark trees in the repellent yard.
      And in the end the burgesses passed that remarkable law which is told of by traders in Hatheg and discussed by travellers in Nir; namely, that in Ulthar no man may kill a cat.",False
"During the winter of 1927-28 officials of the Federal government made a strange and secret investigation of certain conditions in the ancient Massachusetts seaport of Innsmouth. The public first learned of it in February, when a vast series of raids and arrests occurred, followed by the deliberate burning and dynamiting--under suitable precautions--of an enormous number of crumbling, worm-eaten, and supposedly empty houses along the abandoned waterfront. Uninquiring souls let this occurrence pass as one of the major clashes in a spasmodic war on liquor.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References to decline were few, though the significance of the later record was unmistakable. After the Civil War all industrial life was confined to the Marsh Refining Company, and the marketing of gold ingots formed the only remaining bit of major commerce aside from the eternal fishing. That fishing paid less and less as the price of the commodity fell and large-scale corporations offered competition, but there was never a dearth of fish around Innsmouth Harbour. Foreigners seldom settled there, and there was some discreetly veiled evidence that a number of Poles and Portuguese who had tried it had been scattered in a peculiarly drastic fashion.

Most interesting of all was a glancing reference to the strange jewelry vaguely associated with Innsmouth. It had evidently impressed the whole countryside more than a little, for mention was made of specimens in the museum of Miskatonic University at Arkham, and in the display room of the Newburyport Historical Society. The fragmentary descriptions of these things were bald and prosaic, but they hinted to me an undercurrent of persistent strangeness. Something about them seemed so odd and provocative that I could not put them out of my mind, and despite the relative lateness of the hour I resolved to see the local sample--said to be a large, queerly-proportioned thing evidently meant for a tiara--if it could possibly be arranged.

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

It took no excessive sensitiveness to beauty to make me literally gasp at the strange, unearthly splendour of the alien, opulent phantasy that rested there on a purple velvet cushion. Even now I can hardly describe what I saw, though it was clearly enough a sort of tiara, as the description had said. It was tall in front, and with a very large and curiously irregular periphery, as if designed for a head of almost freakishly elliptical outline. The material seemed to be predominantly gold, though a weird lighter lustrousness hinted at some strange alloy with an equally beautiful and scarcely identifiable metal. Its condition was almost perfect, and one could have spent hours in studying the striking and puzzlingly untraditional designs--some simply geometrical, and some plainly marine--chased or moulded in high relief on its surface with a craftsmanship of incredible skill and grace.

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

However, I soon saw that my uneasiness had a second and perhaps equally potent source residing in the pictorial and mathematical suggestion of the strange designs. The patterns all hinted of remote secrets and unimaginable abysses in time and space, and the monotonously aquatic nature of the reliefs became almost sinister. Among these reliefs were fabulous monsters of abhorrent grotesqueness and malignity--half ichthyic and half batrachian in suggestion--which one could not dissociate from a certain haunting and uncomfortable sense of pseudomemory, as if they called up some image from deep cells and tissues whose retentive functions are wholly primal and awesomely ancestral. At times I fancied that every contour of these blasphemous fish-frogs was over-flowing with the ultimate quintessence of unknown and inhuman evil.

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

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

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

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

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

","It is said that in Ulthar, which lies beyond the river Skai, no man may kill a cat; and this I can verily believe as I gaze upon him who sitteth purring before the fire. For the cat is cryptic, and close to strange things which men cannot see. He is the soul of antique Aegyptus, and bearer of tales from forgotten cities in Meroë and Ophir. He is the kin of the jungle’s lords, and heir to the secrets of hoary and sinister Africa. The Sphinx is his cousin, and he speaks her language; but he is more ancient than the Sphinx, and remembers that which she hath forgotten.
      In Ulthar, before ever the burgesses forbade the killing of cats, there dwelt an old cotter and his wife who delighted to trap and slay the cats of their neighbours. Why they did this I know not; save that many hate the voice of the cat in the night, and take it ill that cats should run stealthily about yards and gardens at twilight. But whatever the reason, this old man and woman took pleasure in trapping and slaying every cat which came near to their hovel; and from some of the sounds heard after dark, many villagers fancied that the manner of slaying was exceedingly peculiar. But the villagers did not discuss such things with the old man and his wife; because of the habitual expression on the withered faces of the two, and because their cottage was so small and so darkly hidden under spreading oaks at the back of a neglected yard. In truth, much as the owners of cats hated these odd folk, they feared them more; and instead of berating them as brutal assassins, merely took care that no cherished pet or mouser should stray toward the remote hovel under the dark trees. When through some unavoidable oversight a cat was missed, and sounds heard after dark, the loser would lament impotently; or console himself by thanking Fate that it was not one of his children who had thus vanished. For the people of Ulthar were simple, and knew not whence it is all cats first came.
      One day a caravan of strange wanderers from the South entered the narrow cobbled streets of Ulthar. Dark wanderers they were, and unlike the other roving folk who passed through the village twice every year. In the market-place they told fortunes for silver, and bought gay beads from the merchants. What was the land of these wanderers none could tell; but it was seen that they were given to strange prayers, and that they had painted on the sides of their wagons strange figures with human bodies and the heads of cats, hawks, rams, and lions. And the leader of the caravan wore a head-dress with two horns and a curious disc betwixt the horns.
      There was in this singular caravan a little boy with no father or mother, but only a tiny black kitten to cherish. The plague had not been kind to him, yet had left him this small furry thing to mitigate his sorrow; and when one is very young, one can find great relief in the lively antics of a black kitten. So the boy whom the dark people called Menes smiled more often than he wept as he sate playing with his graceful kitten on the steps of an oddly painted wagon.
      On the third morning of the wanderers’ stay in Ulthar, Menes could not find his kitten; and as he sobbed aloud in the market-place certain villagers told him of the old man and his wife, and of sounds heard in the night. And when he heard these things his sobbing gave place to meditation, and finally to prayer. He stretched out his arms toward the sun and prayed in a tongue no villager could understand; though indeed the villagers did not try very hard to understand, since their attention was mostly taken up by the sky and the odd shapes the clouds were assuming. It was very peculiar, but as the little boy uttered his petition there seemed to form overhead the shadowy, nebulous figures of exotic things; of hybrid creatures crowned with horn-flanked discs. Nature is full of such illusions to impress the imaginative.
      That night the wanderers left Ulthar, and were never seen again. And the householders were troubled when they noticed that in all the village there was not a cat to be found. From each hearth the familiar cat had vanished; cats large and small, black, grey, striped, yellow, and white. Old Kranon, the burgomaster, swore that the dark folk had taken the cats away in revenge for the killing of Menes’ kitten; and cursed the caravan and the little boy. But Nith, the lean notary, declared that the old cotter and his wife were more likely persons to suspect; for their hatred of cats was notorious and increasingly bold. Still, no one durst complain to the sinister couple; even when little Atal, the innkeeper’s son, vowed that he had at twilight seen all the cats of Ulthar in that accursed yard under the trees, pacing very slowly and solemnly in a circle around the cottage, two abreast, as if in performance of some unheard-of rite of beasts. The villagers did not know how much to believe from so small a boy; and though they feared that the evil pair had charmed the cats to their death, they preferred not to chide the old cotter till they met him outside his dark and repellent yard.
      So Ulthar went to sleep in vain anger; and when the people awaked at dawn—behold! every cat was back at his accustomed hearth! Large and small, black, grey, striped, yellow, and white, none was missing. Very sleek and fat did the cats appear, and sonorous with purring content. The citizens talked with one another of the affair, and marvelled not a little. Old Kranon again insisted that it was the dark folk who had taken them, since cats did not return alive from the cottage of the ancient man and his wife. But all agreed on one thing: that the refusal of all the cats to eat their portions of meat or drink their saucers of milk was exceedingly curious. And for two whole days the sleek, lazy cats of Ulthar would touch no food, but only doze by the fire or in the sun.
      It was fully a week before the villagers noticed that no lights were appearing at dusk in the windows of the cottage under the trees. Then the lean Nith remarked that no one had seen the old man or his wife since the night the cats were away. In another week the burgomaster decided to overcome his fears and call at the strangely silent dwelling as a matter of duty, though in so doing he was careful to take with him Shang the blacksmith and Thul the cutter of stone as witnesses. And when they had broken down the frail door they found only this: two cleanly picked human skeletons on the earthen floor, and a number of singular beetles crawling in the shadowy corners.
      There was subsequently much talk among the burgesses of Ulthar. Zath, the coroner, disputed at length with Nith, the lean notary; and Kranon and Shang and Thul were overwhelmed with questions. Even little Atal, the innkeeper’s son, was closely questioned and given a sweetmeat as reward. They talked of the old cotter and his wife, of the caravan of dark wanderers, of small Menes and his black kitten, of the prayer of Menes and of the sky during that prayer, of the doings of the cats on the night the caravan left, and of what was later found in the cottage under the dark trees in the repellent yard.
      And in the end the burgesses passed that remarkable law which is told of by traders in Hatheg and discussed by travellers in Nir; namely, that in Ulthar no man may kill a cat.",True
"It must have been some imp of the perverse--or some sardonic pull from dark, hidden sources--which made me change my plans as I did. I had long before resolved to limit my observations to architecture alone, and I was even then hurrying toward the Square in an effort to get quick transportation out of this festering city of death and decay; but the sight of old Zadok Allen set up new currents in my mind and made me slacken my pace uncertainly.
I had been assured that the old man could do nothing but hint at wild, disjointed, and incredible legends, and I had been warned that the natives made it unsafe to be seen talking with him; yet the thought of this aged witness to the town's decay, with memories going back to the early days of ships and factories, was a lure that no amount of reason could make me resist. After all, the strangest and maddest of myths are often merely symbols or allegories based upon truth--and old Zadok must have seen everything which went on around Innsmouth for the last ninety years. Curiosity flared up beyond sense and caution, and in my youthful egotism I fancied I might be able to sift a nucleus of real history from the confused, extravagant outpouring I would probably extract with the aid of raw whiskey.
I knew that I could not accost him then and there, for the firemen would surely notice and object. Instead, I reflected, I would prepare by getting some bootleg liquor at a place where the grocery boy had told me it was plentiful. Then I would loaf near the fire station in apparent casualness, and fall in with old Zadok after he had started on one of his frequent rambles. The youth had said that he was very restless, seldom sitting around the station for more than an hour or two at a time.
A quart bottle of whiskey was easily, though not cheaply, obtained in the rear of a dingy variety-store just off the Square in Eliot Street. The dirty-looking fellow who waited on me had a touch of the staring ""Innsmouth look"", but was quite civil in his way; being perhaps used to the custom of such convivial strangers--truckmen, gold-buyers, and the like--as were occasionally in town.
Reentering the Square I saw that luck was with me; for--shuffling out of Paine Street around the corner of the Gilman House--I glimpsed nothing less than the tall, lean, tattered form of old Zadok Allen himself. In accordance with my plan, I attracted his attention by brandishing my newly-purchased bottle: and soon realised that he had begun to shuffle wistfully after me as I turned into Waite Street on my way to the most deserted region I could think of.
I was steering my course by the map the grocery boy had prepared, and was aiming for the wholly abandoned stretch of southern waterfront which I had previously visited. The only people in sight there had been the fishermen on the distant breakwater; and by going a few squares south I could get beyond the range of these, finding a pair of seats on some abandoned wharf and being free to question old Zadok unobserved for an indefinite time. Before I reached Main Street I could hear a faint and wheezy ""Hey, Mister!"" behind me and I presently allowed the old man to catch up and take copious pulls from the quart bottle.
I began putting out feelers as we walked amidst the omnipresent desolation and crazily tilted ruins, but found that the aged tongue did not loosen as quickly as I had expected. At length I saw a grass-grown opening toward the sea between crumbling brick walls, with the weedy length of an earth-and-masonry wharf projecting beyond. Piles of moss-covered stones near the water promised tolerable seats, and the scene was sheltered from all possible view by a ruined warehouse on the north. Here, I thought was the ideal place for a long secret colloquy; so I guided my companion down the lane and picked out spots to sit in among the mossy stones. The air of death and desertion was ghoulish, and the smell of fish almost insufferable; but I was resolved to let nothing deter me.
About four hours remained for conversation if I were to catch the eight o'clock coach for Arkham, and I began to dole out more liquor to the ancient tippler; meanwhile eating my own frugal lunch. In my donations I was careful not to overshoot the mark, for I did not wish Zadok's vinous garrulousness to pass into a stupor. After an hour his furtive taciturnity shewed signs of disappearing, but much to my disappointment he still sidetracked my questions about Innsmouth and its shadow-haunted past. He would babble of current topics, revealing a wide acquaintance with newspapers and a great tendency to philosophise in a sententious village fashion.
Toward the end of the second hour I feared my quart of whiskey would not be enough to produce results, and was wondering whether I had better leave old Zadok and go back for more. Just then, however, chance made the opening which my questions had been unable to make; and the wheezing ancient's rambling took a turn that caused me to lean forward and listen alertly. My back was toward the fishy-smelling sea, but he was facing it and something or other had caused his wandering gaze to light on the low, distant line of Devil Reef, then showing plainly and almost fascinatingly above the waves. The sight seemed to displease him, for he began a series of weak curses which ended in a confidential whisper and a knowing leer. He bent toward me, took hold of my coat lapel, and hissed out some hints that could not be mistaken,
""Thar's whar it all begun--that cursed place of all wickedness whar the deep water starts. Gate o' hell--sheer drop daown to a bottom no saoundin'-line kin tech. Ol' Cap'n Obed done it--him that faound aout more'n was good fer him in the Saouth Sea islands.
""Everybody was in a bad way them days. Trade fallin' off, mills losin' business--even the new ones--an' the best of our menfolks kilt aprivateerin' in the War of 1812 or lost with the Elizy brig an' the Ranger scow--both on 'em Gilman venters. Obed Marsh he had three ships afloat--brigantine Columby, brig Hefty, an' barque Sumatry Queen. He was the only one as kep' on with the East-Injy an' Pacific trade, though Esdras Martin's barkentine Malay Bride made a venter as late as twenty-eight.
""Never was nobody like Cap'n Obed--old limb o' Satan! Heh, heh! I kin mind him a-tellin' abaout furren parts, an' callin' all the folks stupid for goin' to Christian meetin' an' bearin' their burdens meek an' lowly. Says they'd orter git better gods like some o' the folks in the Injies--gods as ud bring 'em good fishin' in return for their sacrifices, an' ud reely answer folks's prayers.
""Matt Eliot, his fust mate, talked a lot too, only he was again' folks's doin' any heathen things. Told abaout an island east of Othaheite whar they was a lot o' stone ruins older'n anybody knew anything abaout, kind o' like them on Ponape, in the Carolines, but with carven's of faces that looked like the big statues on Easter Island. Thar was a little volcanic island near thar, too, whar they was other ruins with diff'rent carvin'--ruins all wore away like they'd ben under the sea onct, an' with picters of awful monsters all over 'em.
""Wal, Sir, Matt he says the natives araound thar had all the fish they cud ketch, an' sported bracelets an' armlets an' head rigs made aout o' a queer kind o' gold an' covered with picters o' monsters jest like the ones carved over the ruins on the little island--sorter fish-like frogs or froglike fishes that was drawed in all kinds o' positions likes they was human bein's. Nobody cud get aout o' them whar they got all the stuff, an' all the other natives wondered haow they managed to find fish in plenty even when the very next island had lean pickin's. Matt he got to wonderon' too an' so did Cap'n Obed. Obed he notices, besides, that lots of the hn'some young folks ud drop aout o' sight fer good from year to year, an' that they wan't many old folks around. Also, he thinks some of the folks looked durned queer even for Kanakys.
""It took Obed to git the truth aout o' them heathen. I dun't know haow he done it, but he begun by tradin' fer the gold-like things they wore. Ast 'em whar they come from, an' ef they cud git more, an' finally wormed the story aout o' the old chief--Walakea, they called him. Nobody but Obed ud ever a believed the old yeller devil, but the Cap'n cud read folks like they was books. Heh, heh! Nobody never believes me naow when I tell 'em, an' I dun't s'pose you will, young feller--though come to look at ye, ye hev kind o' got them sharp-readin' eyes like Obed had.""
The old man's whisper grew fainter, and I found myself shuddering at the terrible and sincere portentousness of his intonation, even though I knew his tale could be nothing but drunken phantasy.
""Wal, Sir, Obed he larnt that they's things on this arth as most folks never heerd about--an' wouldn't believe ef they did hear. It seems these Kanakys was sacrificin' heaps o' their young men an' maidens to some kind o' god-things that lived under the sea, an' gittin' all kinds o' favour in return. They met the things on the little islet with the queer ruins, an' it seems them awful picters o' frog-fish monsters was supposed to be picters o' these things. Mebbe they was the kind o' critters as got all the mermaid stories an' sech started.
""They had all kinds a' cities on the sea-bottom, an' this island was heaved up from thar. Seem they was some of the things alive in the stone buildin's when the island come up sudden to the surface, That's how the Kanakys got wind they was daown thar. Made sign-talk as soon as they got over bein' skeert, an' pieced up a bargain afore long.
""Them things liked human sacrifices. Had had 'em ages afore, but lost track o' the upper world after a time. What they done to the victims it ain't fer me to say, an' I guess Obed wa'n't none too sharp abaout askin'. But it was all right with the heathens, because they'd ben havin' a hard time an' was desp'rate abaout everything. They give a sarten number o' young folks to the sea-things twice every year--May-Eve an' Hallawe'en--reg'lar as cud be. Also give some a' the carved knick-knacks they made. What the things agreed to give in return was plenty a' fish--they druv 'em in from all over the sea--an' a few gold-like things naow an' then.
""Wal, as I says, the natives met the things on the little volcanic islet--goin' thar in canoes with the sacrifices et cet'ry, and bringin' back any of the gold-like jools as was comin' to 'em. At fust the things didn't never go onto the main island, but arter a time they come to want to. Seems they hankered arter mixin' with the folks, an' havin' j'int ceremonies on the big days--May-Eve an' Hallowe'en. Ye see, they was able to live both in ant aout o' water--what they call amphibians, I guess. The Kanakys told 'em as haow folks from the other islands might wanta wipe 'an out if they got wind o' their bein' thar, but they says they dun't keer much, because they cud wipe aout the hull brood o' humans ef they was willin' to bother--that is, any as didn't be, sarten signs sech as was used onct by the lost Old Ones, whoever they was. But not wantin' to bother, they'd lay low when anybody visited the island.
""When it come to matin' with them toad-lookin' fishes, the Kanakys kind o' balked, but finally they larnt something as put a new face on the matter. Seems that human folks has got a kind a' relation to sech water-beasts--that everything alive come aout o' the water onct an' only needs a little change to go back agin. Them things told the Kanakys that ef they mixed bloods there'd be children as ud look human at fust, but later turn more'n more like the things, till finally they'd take to the water an' jine the main lot o' things daown har. An' this is the important part, young feller--them as turned into fish things an' went into the water wouldn't never die. Them things never died excep' they was kilt violent.
""Wal, Sir, it seems by the time Obed knowed them islanders they was all full o' fish blood from them deep-water things. When they got old an' begun to shew it, they was kep' hid until they felt like takin' to the water an' quittin' the place. Some was more teched than others, an' some never did change quite enough to take to the water; but mosily they turned out jest the way them things said. Them as was born more like the things changed arly, but them as was nearly human sometimes stayed on the island till they was past seventy, though they'd usually go daown under for trial trips afore that. Folks as had took to the water gen'rally come back a good deal to visit, so's a man ud often be a'talkin' to his own five-times-great-grandfather who'd left the dry land a couple o' hundred years or so afore.
""Everybody got aout o' the idee o' dyin'--excep' in canoe wars with the other islanders, or as sacrifices to the sea-gods daown below, or from snakebite or plague or sharp gallopin' ailments or somethin' afore they cud take to the water--but simply looked forrad to a kind o' change that wa'n't a bit horrible arter a while. They thought what they'd got was well wuth all they'd had to give up--an' I guess Obed kind o' come to think the same hisself when he'd chewed over old Walakea's story a bit. Walakea, though, was one of the few as hadn't got none of the fish blood--bein' of a royal line that intermarried with royal lines on other islands.
""Walakea he shewed Obed a lot o' rites an' incantations as had to do with the sea things, an' let him see some o' the folks in the village as had changed a lot from human shape. Somehaow or other, though, he never would let him see one of the reg'lar things from right aout o' the water. In the end he give him a funny kind o' thingumajig made aout o' lead or something, that he said ud bring up the fish things from any place in the water whar they might be a nest o' 'em. The idee was to drop it daown with the right kind o' prayers an' sech. Walakea allowed as the things was scattered all over the world, so's anybody that looked abaout cud find a nest an' bring 'em up ef they was wanted.
""Matt he didn't like this business at all, an' wanted Obed shud keep away from the island; but the Cap'n was sharp fer gain, an' faound he cud get them gold-like things so cheap it ud pay him to make a specialty of them. Things went on that way for years an' Obed got enough o' that gold-like stuff to make him start the refinery in Waite's old run-daown fullin' mill. He didn't dass sell the pieces like they was, for folks ud be all the time askin' questions. All the same his crews ud get a piece an' dispose of it naow and then, even though they was swore to keep quiet; an' he let his women-folks wear some o' the pieces as was more human-like than most.
""Well, come abaout thutty-eight--when I was seven year' old--Obed he faound the island people all wiped aout between v'yages. Seems the other islanders had got wind o' what was goin' on, and had took matters into their own hands. S'pose they must a had, after all, them old magic signs as the sea things says was the only things they was afeard of. No tellin' what any o' them Kanakys will chance to git a holt of when the sea-bottom throws up some island with ruins older'n the deluge. Pious cusses, these was--they didn't leave nothin' standin' on either the main island or the little volcanic islet excep' what parts of the ruins was too big to knock daown. In some places they was little stones strewed abaout--like charms--with somethin' on 'em like what ye call a swastika naowadays. Prob'ly them was the Old Ones' signs. Folks all wiped aout no trace o' no gold-like things an' none the nearby Kanakys ud breathe a word abaout the matter. Wouldn't even admit they'd ever ben any people on that island.
""That naturally hit Obed pretty hard, seein' as his normal trade was doin' very poor. It hit the whole of Innsmouth, too, because in seafarint days what profited the master of a ship gen'lly profited the crew proportionate. Most of the folks araound the taown took the hard times kind o' sheep-like an' resigned, but they was in bad shape because the fishin' was peterin' aout an' the mills wan't doin' none too well.
""Then's the time Obed he begun a-cursin' at the folks fer bein' dull sheep an' prayin' to a Christian heaven as didn't help 'em none. He told 'em he'd knowed o' folks as prayed to gods that give somethin' ye reely need, an' says ef a good bunch o' men ud stand by him, he cud mebbe get a holt o' sarten paowers as ud bring plenty o' fish an' quite a bit of gold. O' course them as sarved on the Sumatry Queen, an' seed the island knowed what he meant, an' wa'n't none too anxious to get clost to sea-things like they'd heard tell on, but them as didn't know what 'twas all abaout got kind o' swayed by what Obed had to say, and begun to ast him what he cud do to sit 'em on the way to the faith as ud bring 'em results.""
Here the old man faltered, mumbled, and lapsed into a moody and apprehensive silence; glancing nervously over his shoulder and then turning back to stare fascinatedly at the distant black reef. When I spoke to him he did not answer, so I knew I would have to let him finish the bottle. The insane yarn I was hearing interested me profoundly, for I fancied there was contained within it a sort of crude allegory based upon the strangeness of Innsmouth and elaborated by an imagination at once creative and full of scraps of exotic legend. Not for a moment did I believe that the tale had any really substantial foundation; but none the less the account held a hint of genuine terror if only because it brought in references to strange jewels clearly akin to the malign tiara I had seen at Newburyport. Perhaps the ornaments had, after all, come from some strange island; and possibly the wild stories were lies of the bygone Obed himself rather than of this antique toper.
I handed Zadok the bottle, and he drained it to the last drop. It was curious how he could stand so much whiskey, for not even a trace of thickness had come into his high, wheezy voice. He licked the nose of the bottle and slipped it into his pocket, then beginning to nod and whisper softly to himself. I bent close to catch any articulate words he might utter, and thought I saw a sardonic smile behind the stained bushy whiskers. Yes--he was really forming words, and I could grasp a fair proportion of them.
""Poor Matt--Matt he allus was agin it--tried to line up the folks on his side, an' had long talks with the preachers--no use--they run the Congregational parson aout o' taown, an' the Methodist feller quit--never did see Resolved Babcock, the Baptist parson, agin--Wrath o' Jehovy--I was a mightly little critter, but I heerd what I heerd an, seen what I seen--Dagon an' Ashtoreth--Belial an' Beelzebub--Golden Caff an' the idols o' Canaan an' the Philistines--Babylonish abominations--Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin--.""
He stopped again, and from the look in his watery blue eyes I feared he was close to a stupor after all. But when I gently shook his shoulder he turned on me with astonishing alertness and snapped out some more obscure phrases.
""Dun't believe me, hey? Hey, heh, heh--then jest tell me, young feller, why Cap'n Obed an' twenty odd other folks used to row aout to Devil Reef in the dead o' night an' chant things so laoud ye cud hear 'em all over taown when the wind was right? Tell me that, hey? An' tell me why Obed was allus droppin' heavy things daown into the deep water t'other side o' the reef whar the bottom shoots daown like a cliff lower'n ye kin saound? Tell me what he done with that funny-shaped lead thingumajig as Walakea give him? Hey, boy? An' what did they all haowl on May-Eve, an, agin the next Hallowe'en? An' why'd the new church parsons--fellers as used to be sailors--wear them queer robes an' cover their-selves with them gold-like things Obed brung? Hey?""
The watery blue eyes were almost savage and maniacal now, and the dirty white beard bristled electrically. Old Zadok probably saw me shrink back, for he began to cackle evilly.
""Heh, heh, heh, heh! Beginnin' to see, hey? Mebbe ye'd like to a ben me in them days, when I seed things at night aout to sea from the cupalo top o' my haouse. Oh, I kin tell ye' little pitchers hev big ears, an' I wa'n't missin' nothin' o' what was gossiped abaout Cap'n Obed an' the folks aout to the reef! Heh, heh, heh! Haow abaout the night I took my pa's ship's glass up to the cupalo an' seed the reef a-bristlin' thick with shapes that dove off quick soon's the moon riz?
""Obed an' the folks was in a dory, but them shapes dove off the far side into the deep water an' never come up...
""Haow'd ye like to be a little shaver alone up in a cupola a-watchin' shapes as wa'n't human shapes?...Heh?...Heh, heh, heh ...""
The old man was getting hysterical, and I began to shiver with a nameless alarm. He laid a gnarled claw on my shoulder, and it seemed to me that its shaking was not altogether that of mirth.
""S'pose one night ye seed somethin' heavy heaved offen Obed's dory beyond the reef' and then learned next day a young feller was missin' from home. Hey! Did anybody ever see hide or hair o' Hiram Gilman agin. Did they? An' Nick Pierce, an' Luelly Waite, an' Adoniram Saouthwick, an' Henry Garrison. Hey? Heh, heh, heh, heh...Shapes talkin' sign language with their hands...them as had reel hands ...
""Wal, Sir, that was the time Obed begun to git on his feet agin. Folks see his three darters a-wearin' gold-like things as nobody'd never see on 'em afore, an' smoke stared comin' aout o' the refin'ry chimbly. Other folks was prosp'rin, too--fish begun to swarm into the harbour fit to kill an' heaven knows what sized cargoes we begun to ship aout to Newb'ryport, Arkham, an' Boston. 'Twas then Obed got the ol' branch railrud put through. Some Kingsport fishermen heerd abaout the ketch an' come up in sloops, but they was all lost. Nobody never see 'em agin. An' jest then our folk organised the Esoteric Order 0' Dagon, an' bought Masonic Hall offen Calvary Commandery for it...heh, heh, heh! Matt Eliot was a Mason an' agin the sellin', but he dropped aout o' sight jest then.
""Remember, I ain't sayin' Obed was set on hevin' things jest like they was on that Kanaky isle. I dun't think he aimed at fust to do no mixin', nor raise no younguns to take to the water an' turn into fishes with eternal life. He wanted them gold things, an' was willin' to pay heavy, an' I guess the others was satisfied fer a while ...
""Come in' forty-six the taown done some lookin' an' thinkin' fer itself. Too many folks missin'--too much wild preachin' at meetin' of a Sunday--too much talk abaout that reef. I guess I done a bit by tellin' Selectman Mowry what I see from the cupalo. They was a party one night as follered Obed's craowd aout to the reef, an' I heerd shots betwixt the dories. Nex' day Obed and thutty-two others was in gaol, with everybody a-wonderin' jest what was afoot and jest what charge agin 'em cud he got to holt. God, ef anybody'd look'd ahead...a couple o' weeks later, when nothin' had ben throwed into the sea fer thet long...""
Zadok was shewing sings of fright and exhaustion, and I let him keep silence for a while, though glancing apprehensively at my watch. The tide had turned and was coming in now, and the sound of the waves seemed to arouse him. I was glad of that tide, for at high water the fishy smell might not be so bad. Again I strained to catch his whispers.
""That awful night...I seed 'em. I was up in the cupalo...hordes of 'em...swarms of 'em...all over the reef an' swimmin' up the harbour into the Manuxet...God, what happened in the streets of Innsmouth that night...they rattled our door, but pa wouldn't open...then he clumb aout the kitchen winder with his musket to find Selecman Mowry an' see what he cud do...Maounds o' the dead an' the dyin'...shots and screams...shaoutin' in Ol Squar an' Taown Squar an' New Church Green--gaol throwed open...--proclamation...treason...called it the plague when folks come in an' faoud haff our people missin'...nobody left but them as ud jine in with Obed an' them things or else keep quiet...never heard o' my pa no more...""
The old man was panting and perspiring profusely. His grip on my shoulder tightened.
""Everything cleaned up in the mornin'--but they was traces...Obed he kinder takes charge an' says things is goin' to be changed... others'll worship with us at meetin'-time, an' sarten haouses hez got to entertin guests...they wanted to mix like they done with the Kanakys, an' he for one didn't feel baound to stop 'em. Far gone, was Obed...jest like a crazy man on the subjeck. He says they brung us fish an' treasure, an' shud hev what they hankered after...""
""Nothin' was to be diff'runt on the aoutside; only we was to keep shy o' strangers ef we knowed what was good fer us.
""We all hed to take the Oath o' Dagon, an' later on they was secon' an' third oaths that some o' us took. Them as ud help special, ud git special rewards--gold an' sech--No use balkin', fer they was millions of 'em daown thar. They'd ruther not start risin' an' wipin' aout human-kind, but ef they was gave away an' forced to, they cud do a lot toward jest that. We didn't hev them old charms to cut 'em off like folks in the Saouth Sea did, an' them Kanakys wudn't never give away their secrets.
""Yield up enough sacrifices an' savage knick-knacks an' harbourage in the taown when they wanted it, an' they'd let well enough alone. Wudn't bother no strangers as might bear tales aoutside--that is, withaout they got pryin'. All in the band of the faithful--Order 0' Dagon--an' the children shud never die, but go back to the Mother Hydra an' Father Dagon what we all come from onct...Ia! Ia! Cthulhu fhtagn! Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah-nagl fhtaga--""
Old Zadok was fast lapsing into stark raving, and I held my breath. Poor old soul--to what pitiful depths of hallucination had his liquor, plus his hatred of the decay, alienage, and disease around him, brought that fertile, imaginative brain? He began to moan now, and tears were coursing down his channelled checks into the depths of his beard.
""God, what I seen senct I was fifteen year' old--Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin!--the folks as was missin', and them as kilt theirselves--them as told things in Arkham or Ipswich or sech places was all called crazy, like you're callin' me right naow--but God, what I seen--They'd a kilt me long ago fer' what I know, only I'd took the fust an' secon' Oaths o' Dago offen Obed, so was pertected unlessen a jury of 'em proved I told things knowin' an' delib'rit...but I wudn't take the third Oath--I'd a died ruther'n take that--
""It got wuss araound Civil War time, when children born senct 'forty-six begun to grow up--some 'em, that is. I was afeared--never did no pryin' arter that awful night, an' never see one o'--them--clost to in all my life. That is, never no full-blooded one. I went to the war, an' ef I'd a had any guts or sense I'd a never come back, but settled away from here. But folks wrote me things wa'n't so bad. That, I s'pose, was because gov'munt draft men was in taown arter 'sixty-three. Arter the war it was jest as bad agin. People begun to fall off--mills an' shops shet daown--shippin' stopped an' the harbour choked up--railrud give up--but they...they never stopped swimmin' in an' aout o' the river from that cursed reef o' Satan--an' more an' more attic winders got a-boarded up, an' more an' more noises was heerd in haouses as wa'n't s'posed to hev nobody in 'em...
""Folks aoutside hev their stories abaout us--s'pose you've heerd a plenty on 'em, seein' what questions ye ast--stories abaout things they've seed naow an' then, an' abaout that queer joolry as still comes in from somewhars an' ain't quite all melted up--but nothin' never gits def'nite. Nobody'll believe nothin'. They call them gold-like things pirate loot, an' allaow the Innsmouth folks hez furren blood or is dis-tempered or somethin'. Beside, them that lives here shoo off as many strangers as they kin, an' encourage the rest not to git very cur'ous, specially raound night time. Beasts balk at the critters--hosses wuss'n mules--but when they got autos that was all right.
""In 'forty-six Cap'n Obed took a second wife that nobody in the taown never see--some says he didn't want to, but was made to by them as he'd called in--had three children by her--two as disappeared young, but one gal as looked like anybody else an' was eddicated in Europe. Obed finally got her married off by a trick to an Arkham feller as didn't suspect nothin'. But nobody aoutside'll hav nothin' to do with Innsmouth folks naow. Barnabas Marsh that runs the refin'ry now is Obed's grandson by his fust wife--son of Onesiphorus, his eldest son, but his mother was another o' them as wa'n't never seen aoutdoors.
""Right naow Barnabas is abaout changed. Can't shet his eyes no more, an' is all aout o' shape. They say he still wears clothes, but he'll take to the water soon. Mebbe he's tried it already--they do sometimes go daown for little spells afore they go daown for good. Ain't ben seed abaout in public fer nigh on ten year'. Dun't know haow his poor wife kin feel--she come from Ipiwich, an' they nigh lynched Barnabas when he courted her fifty odd year' ago. Obed he died in 'seventy-eight an' all the next gen'ration is gone naow--the fust wife's children dead, and the rest...God knows...""
The sound of the incoming tide was now very insistent, and little by little it seemed to change the old man's mood from maudlin tearfulness to watchful fear. He would pause now and then to renew those nervous glances over his shoulder or out toward the reef, and despite the wild absurdity of his tale, I could not help beginning to share his apprehensiveness. Zadok now grew shriller, seemed to be trying to whip up his courage with louder speech.
""Hey, yew, why dun't ye say somethin'? Haow'd ye like to be livin' in a taown like this, with everything a-rottin' an' dyin', an' boarded-up monsters crawlin' an' bleatin' an' barkin' an' hoppin' araoun' black cellars an' attics every way ye turn? Hey? Haow'd ye like to hear the haowlin' night arter night from the churches an' Order o' Dagon Hall, an' know what's doin' part o' the haowlin'? Haow'd ye like to hear what comes from that awful reef every May-Eve an' Hallowmass? Hey? Think the old man's crazy, eh? Wal, Sir, let me tell ye that ain't the wust!""
Zadok was really screaming now, and the mad frenzy of his voice disturbed me more than I care to own.
""Curse ye, dun't set thar a'starin' at me with them eyes--I tell Obed Marsh he's in hell, an, hez got to stay thar! Heh, heh...in hell, I says! Can't git me--I hain't done nothin' nor told nobody nothin'--
""Oh, you, young feller? Wal, even ef I hain't told nobody nothin' yet, I'm a'goin' to naow! Yew jest set still an' listen to me, boy--this is what I ain't never told nobody...I says I didn't get to do pryin' arter that night--but I faound things about jest the same!""
""Yew want to know what the reel horror is, hey? Wal, it's this--it ain't what them fish devils hez done, but what they're a-goin' to do! They're a-bringin' things up aout o' whar they come from into the taown--been doin' it fer years, an' slackenin' up lately. Them haouses north o' the river be-twixt Water an' Main Streets is full of 'em--them devils an' what they brung--an' when they git ready...I say, when they git...ever hear tell of a shoggoth?
""Hey, d'ye hear me? I tell ye I know what them things be--I seen 'em one night when...eh-ahhh-ah! e'yahhh...""
The hideous suddenness and inhuman frightfulness of the old man's shriek almost made me faint. His eyes, looking past me toward the malodorous sea, were positively starting from his head; while his face was a mask of fear worthy of Greek tragedy. His bony claw dug monstrously into my shoulder, and he made no motion as I turned my head to look at whatever he had glimpsed.
There was nothing that I could see. Only the incoming tide, with perhaps one set of ripples more local than the long-flung line of breakers. But now Zadok was shaking me, and I turned back to watch the melting of that fear-frozen face into a chaos of twitching eyelids and mumbling gums. Presently his voice came back--albeit as a trembling whisper.
""Git aout o' here! Get aout o' here! They seen us--git aout fer your life! Dun't wait fer nothin'--they know naow--Run fer it--quick--aout o' this taown--""
Another heavy wave dashed against the loosing masonry of the bygone wharf, and changed the mad ancient's whisper to another inhuman and blood-curdling scream. ""E-yaahhhh!...Yheaaaaaa!...""
Before I could recover my scattered wits he had relaxed his clutch on my shoulder and dashed wildly inland toward the street, reeling northward around the ruined warehouse wall.
I glanced back at the sea, but there was nothing there. And when I reached Water Street and looked along it toward the north there was no remaining trace of Zadok Allen.
","Cleves opened his eyes. He was lying on his left side. In the pink glow of the night-lamp he saw his wife in her night-dress, seated sideways on the farther edge of the bed, talking to a young girl.

The strange girl wore what appeared to be a chamber-robe of frail gold tissue that clung to her body and glittered as she moved. He had never before seen such a dress; but he had seen the girl; he recognised her instantly as the girl he had seen turn to look back at Tressa as she crossed the phantom bridge over that misty Florida river. And Cleves comprehended that he was looking at Yulun.

But this charming young thing was no ghost, no astral projection. This girl was warm, living, breathing flesh. The delicate scent of her strange garments and of her hair, her very breath, was in the air of the room. Her half-hushed but laughing voice was deliciously human; her delicate little hands, caressing Tressa's, were too eagerly real to doubt.

Both talked at the same time, their animated voices mingling in the breathless delight of the reunion. Their exclamations, enchanting laughter, bubbling chatter, filled his ears. But not one word of what they were saying to each other could he understand.

Suddenly Tressa looked over her shoulder and met his astonished eyes.

""Tokhta!"" she exclaimed. ""Yulun! My lord is awake!""

Yulun swung around swiftly on the edge of the bed and looked laughingly at Cleves. But when her red lips unclosed she spoke to Tressa: and, ""Darling,"" she said in English, ""I think your dear lord remembers that he saw me on the Bridge of Dreams. And heard the bells of Yian across the mist.""

Tressa said, laughing at her husband: ""This is Yulun, flame-slender, very white, loveliest in Yian. On the rose-marble steps of the Yezidee Temple she flung a stemless rose upon Djamouk's shroud, where he had spread it like a patch of snow in the sun.

""And at the Lake of the Ghosts, where there is freedom to love, for those who desire love, came Yaddin, Tougtchi to Djamouk the Fox, in search of love—and Yulun, flame-slim, and flower-white.... Tell my dear lord, Yulun!""

Yulun laughed at Cleves out of her dark eyes that slanted charmingly at the corners.

""Kai!"" she cried softly, clapping her palms. ""I took his roses and tore them with my hands till their petals rained on him and their golden hearts were a powdery cloud floating across the water.

""I said: 'Even the damned do not mate with demons, my Tougtchi! So go to the devil, my Banneret, and may Erlik seize you!'""

Cleves, his ears ringing with the sweet confusion of their girlish laughter, rose from his pillow, supporting himself on one arm.

""You are Yulun. You are alive and real——"" He looked at Tressa: ""She is real, isn't she?"" And, to Yulun: ""Where do you come from?""

The girl replied seriously: ""I come from Yian."" She turned to Tressa with a dazzling smile: ""Thou knowest, my heart's gold, how it was I came. Tell thy dear lord in thine own way, so that it shall be simple for his understanding.... And now—because my visit is ending—I think thy dear lord should sleep. Bid him sleep, my heart's gold!""

At that calm suggestion Cleves sat upright on the bed,—or attempted to. But sank back gently on his pillow and met there a dark, delicious rush of drowsiness.

He made an effort—or tried to: the smooth, sweet tide of sleep swept over him to the eyelids, leaving him still and breathing evenly on his pillow.

The two girls leaned over and looked down at him.

""Thy dear lord,"" murmured Yulun. ""Does he love thee, rose-bud of Yian?""

""No,"" said Tressa, under her breath.

""Does he know thou art damned, heart of gold?""

""He says no soul is ever really harmed,"" whispered Tressa.

""Kai! Has he never heard of the Slayer of Souls?"" exclaimed Yulun incredulously.

""My lord maintains that neither the Assassin of Khorassan nor the Sheiks-el-Djebel of the Eight Towers, nor their dark prince Erlik, can have power over God to slay the human soul.""

""Tokhta, Rose of Yian! Our souls were slain there in the Yezidee temple.""

Tressa looked down at Cleves:

""My dear lord says no,"" she said under her breath.

""And—Sanang?""

Tressa paled: ""His mind and mine did battle. I tore my heart from his grasp. I have laid it, bleeding, at my dear lord's feet. Let God judge between us, Yulun.""

""There was a day,"" whispered Yulun, ""when Prince Sanang went to the Lake of the Ghosts.""

Tressa, very pallid, looked down at her sleeping husband. She said:

""Prince Sanang came to the Lake of the Ghosts. The snow of the cherry-trees covered the young world.

""The water was clear as sunlight; and the lake was afire with scarlet carp.... Yulun—beloved—the nightingale sang all night long—all night long.... Then I saw Sanang shining, all gold, in the moonlight.... May God remember him in hell!""

""May God remember him.""

""Sanang Noïane. May he be accursed in the Namaz Ga!""

""May he be tormented in Jehaunum!—Sanang, Slayer of Souls.""

Tressa leaned forward on the bed, stretched herself out, and laid her face gently across her husband's feet, touching them with her lips.

Then she straightened herself and sat up, supported by one hand, and looking silently down at the sleeping man.

""No soul shall die,"" she said. ""Niaz!""

""Is it written?"" asked Yulun, surprised.

""My lord has said it.""

""Allahou Ekber,"" murmured Yulun; ""thy lord is only a man.""

Tressa said: ""Neither the Tekbir nor the fatha, nor the warning of Khidr, nor the Yacaz of the Khagan, nor even the prayers of the Ten Imaums are of any value to me unless my dear lord confirms the truth of them with his own lips.""

""And Erlik? Is he nothing, then?""

""Erlik!"" repeated Tressa insolently. ""Who is Erlik but the servant of Satan who was stoned?""

Her beautiful, angry lips were suddenly distorted; her blue eyes blazed. Then she spat, her mouth still tremulous with hatred. She said in a voice shaking with rage:

""Yulun, beloved! Listen attentively. I have slain two of the Slayers of the Eight Towers. With God's help I shall slay them all—all!—Djamouk, Yaddin, Arrak Sou-Sou—all!—every one!—Tiyang Khan, Togrul,—all shall I slay, even to the last one among them!""

""Sanang, also?""

""I leave him to God. It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God!""

Yulun calmly paraphrased the cant phrase of the Assassins: ""For it is written that we belong to God and we return to Him. Heart of gold, I shall execute my duty!""

Then Yulun slipped from the edge of the bed to the floor, and stood there looking oddly at Tressa, her eyes rain-bright as though choking back tears—or laughter.

""Heart of a rose,"" she said in a suppressed voice, ""my time is nearly ended.... So.... I go to the chamber of this strange young man who holds my soul like a pearl afire between his hands.... I think it it written that I shall love him.""

Tressa rose also and placed her lips close to Yulun's ear: ""His name, beloved, is Benton. His room is on this floor. Shall we make the effort together?""

""Yes,"" said Yulun. ""Lay your body down upon the bed beside your lord who sleeps so deeply.... And now stretch out.... And fold both hands.... And now put off thy body like a silken garment.... So! And leave it there beside thy lord, asleep.""

They stood together for a moment, shining like dewy shapes of tall flowers, whispering and laughing together in the soft glow of the night lamp.

Cleves slept on, unstirring. There was the white and sleeping figure of his wife lying on the bed beside him.

But Tressa and Yulun were already melting away between the wall and the confused rosy radiance of the lamp.

Benton, in night attire and chamber-robe belted in, fresh from his bath and still drying his curly hair on a rough towel, wandered back into his bedroom.

When his short, bright hair was dry, he lighted a cigarette, took the automatic from his dresser, examined the clip, and shoved it under his pillow.

Then he picked up the little leather-bound Testament, seated himself, and opened it. And read tranquilly while his cigarette burned.

When he was ready he turned out the ceiling light, leaving only the night lamp lighted. Then he knelt beside his bed,—a custom surviving the nursery period,—and rested his forehead against his folded hands.

Then, as he prayed, something snapped the thread of prayer as though somebody had spoken aloud in the still room; and, like one who has been suddenly interrupted, he opened his eyes and looked around and upward.

The silent shock of her presence passed presently. He got up from his knees, looking at her all the while.

""You are Yulun,"" he said very calmly.

The girl flushed brightly and rested one hand on the foot of the bed.

""Do you remember in the moonlight where you walked along the hedge of white hibiscus and oleander—that night you said good-bye to Tressa in the South?""

""Yes.""

""Twice,"" she said, laughing, ""you stopped to peer at the blossoms in the moonlight.""

""I thought I saw a face among them.""

""You were not sure whether it was flowers or a girl's face looking at you from the blossoming hedge of white hibiscus,"" said Yulun.

""I know now,"" he said in an odd, still voice, unlike his own.

""Yes, it was I,"" she murmured. And of a sudden the girl dropped to her knees without a sound and laid her head on the velvet carpet at his feet.

So swiftly, noiselessly was it done that he had not comprehended—had not moved—when she sat upright, resting on her knees, and grasped the collar of her tunic with both gemmed hands.

""Have pity on me, lord of my lost soul!"" she cried softly.

Benton stooped in a dazed way to lift the girl; but found himself knee deep in a snowy drift of white hibiscus blossoms—touched nothing but silken petals—waded in them as he stepped forward. And saw her standing before him still grasping the collar of her golden tunic.

A great white drift of bloom lay almost waist deep between them; the fragrance of oleander, too, was heavy in the room.

""There are years of life before the flaming gates of Jehaunum open. And I am very young,"" said Yulun wistfully.

Somebody else laughed in the room. Turning his head, he saw Tressa standing by the empty fireplace.

""What you see and hear need not disturb you,"" she said, looking at Benton out of brilliant eyes. ""There is no god but God; and His prophet has been called by many names."" And to Yulun: ""Have I not told you that nothing can harm our souls?""

Yulun's expression altered and she turned to Benton: ""Say it to me!"" she pleaded.

As in a dream he heard his own words: ""Nothing can ever really harm the soul.""

Yulun's hands fell from her tunic collar. Very slowly she lifted her head, looking at him out of lovely, proud young eyes.

She said, evenly, her still gaze on him: ""I am Yulun of the Temple. My heart is like a blazing pearl which you hold between your hands. May the four Blessed Companions witness the truth of what I say.""

Then a delicate veil of colour wrapped her white skin from throat to temple; she looked at Benton with sudden and exquisite distress, frightened and ashamed at his silence.

In the intense stillness Benton moved toward her. Into his outstretched hands her two hands fell; but, bending above them, his lips touched only two white hibiscus flowers that lay fresh and dewy in his palms.

Bewildered, he straightened up; and saw the girl standing by the mantel beside Tressa, who had caught her by the left hand.

""Tokhta! Look out!"" she said distinctly.

Suddenly he saw two men in the room, close to him—their broad faces, slanting eyes, and sparse beards thrust almost against his shoulder.

""Djamouk! Yaddin-ed-Din!"" cried Tressa in a terrible voice. But quick as a flash Yulun tore a white sheet from the bed, flung it on the floor, and, whipping a tiny, jewelled knife from her sleeve, threw it glittering upon the sheet at the feet of the two men.

""One shroud for two souls!"" she said breathlessly, ""—and a knife like that to sever them from their bodies!""

The two men sprang backward as the sheet touched their feet, and now they stood there as though confounded.

""Djamouk, Kahn of the Fifth Tower!"" cried Tressa in a clear voice, ""you have put off your body like a threadbare cloak, and your form that stands there is only your mind! And it is only the evil will of Yaddin in the shape of his body that confronts us in this room of a man you have doomed!""

Yulun, intent as a young leopardess on her prey, moved soundlessly toward Yaddin.

""Tougtchi!"" she said coldly, ""you did murder this day, my Banneret, and the Toug of Djamouk has been greased. Now look out for yourself!""

""Don't stir!"" came Tressa's warning voice, as Benton snatched his pistol from the pillow. ""Don't fire! Those men have no real substance! For God's sake don't fire! I tell you they have no bodies!""

Suddenly something—some force—flung Benton on the bed. The two men did not seem to touch him at all, but he lay there struggling, crushed, held by something that was strangling him.

Through his swimming eyes he saw Yaddin trying to drive a long nail into his skull with a hammer,—felt the piercing agony of the first crashing blow,—struggled upright, drenched in blood, his ears ringing with the screaming of Yaddin.

Then, there in the little rococo bedroom of the Ritz-Carlton, began a strange and horrible struggle—the more dreadful because the struggle was not physical and the combatants never touched each other—scarcely moved at all.

Yaddin, still screaming, confronted Yulun. The girl's eyes were ablaze, her lips parted with the violence of her breathing. And Yaddin writhed and screamed under the terrible concentration of her gaze, his inferior but ferocious mind locked with her mind in deadly battle.

The girl said slowly, showing a glimmer of white teeth: ""Your will to do evil to my young lord is breaking, Yaddin-ed-Din.... I am breaking it. The nail and hammer were but symbols. It was your brain that brooded murder—that willed he should die as though shattered by lightning when that blood-vessel burst in his brain!""

""Sorceress!"" shrieked Yaddin, ""what are you doing to my heart, where my body lies asleep in a berth on the Montreal Express!""

""Your heart is weak, Yaddin. Soon the valves shall fail. A negro porter shall discover you dead in your berth, my Banneret!""

The man's swarthy face became livid with the terrific mental battle.

""Let me go back to my body!"" he panted. ""What are you doing to me that I can not go back? I will go back! I wish it!—I——""

""Let us go back and rejoin our bodies!"" cried Djamouk in an agonised voice. ""There are teeth in my throat, deep in my throat, biting and tearing out the cords.""

""Cancer,"" said Tressa calmly. ""Your body shall die of it while your soul stumbles on through darkness.""

""My Tougtchi!"" shouted Djamouk, ""I hear my soul bidding my body farewell! I must go before my mind expires in the terrible gaze of this young sorceress!""

He turned, drifted like something misty to the solid wall.

""My soul be ransom for yours!"" cried Yulun to Tressa. ""Bar that man's path to life!""

Tressa flung out her right hand and, with her forefinger, drew a barrier through space, bar above bar.

And Benton, half swooning on his bed, saw a cage of terrible and living light penning in Djamouk, who beat upon the incandescent bars and grasped them and clawed his way about, squealing like a tortured rat in a red-hot cage.

Through the deafening tumult Yulun's voice cut like a sword:

""Their bodies are dying, Heart of a Rose!... Listen! I hear their souls bidding their minds farewell!""

And, after a dreadful silence: ""The train speeding north carries two dead men! God is God. Niaz!""

The bars of living fire faded. Two cinder-like and shapeless shadows floated and eddied like whitened ashes stirred by a wind on the hearth; then drifted through the lamp-light, fading, dissolving, lost gradually in thin air.

Tressa, leaning back against the mantel, covered her face with both hands.

Yulun crept to the bed where Benton lay, breathing evenly in deepest sleep.

With the sheer sleeve of her tunic she wiped the blood from his face. And, at her touch, the wound in the temple closed and the short, bright hair dried and curled over a forehead as clean and fresh as a boy's.

Then Yulun laid her lips against his, rested so a moment.

""Seek me, dear lord,"" she whispered. ""Or send me a sign and I shall come.""

And, after a pause, she said, her lips scarcely stirring: ""Love me. My heart is a flaming pearl burning between your hands.""

Then she lifted her head.

But Tressa had rejoined her body, where it lay asleep beside her deeply sleeping husband.

So Yulun stood a moment, her eyes remote. Then, after a while, the little rococo bedroom in the Ritz-Carlton was empty save for a young man asleep on the bed, holding in his clenched hand a white hibiscus blossom.

",False
"I can hardly describe the mood in which I was left by this harrowing episode--an episode at once mad and pitiful, grotesque and terrifying. The grocery boy had prepared me for it, yet the reality left me none the less bewildered and disturbed. Puerile though the story was, old Zadok's insane earnestness and horror had communicated to me a mounting unrest which joined with my earlier sense of loathing for the town and its blight of intangible shadow.

Later I might sift the tale and extract some nucleus of historic allegory; just now I wished to put it out of my head. The hour grown perilously late--my watch said 7:15, and the Arkham bus left Town Square at eight--so I tried to give my thoughts as neutral and practical a cast as possible, meanwhile walking rapidly through the deserted streets of gaping roofs and leaning houses toward the hotel where I had checked my valise and would find my bus.

Though the golden light of late afternoon gave the ancient roofs and decrepit chimneys an air of mystic loveliness and peace, I could not help glancing over my shoulder now and then. I would surely be very glad to get out of malodorous and fear-shadowed Innsmouth, and wished there were some other vehicle than the bus driven by that sinister-looking fellow Sargent. Yet I did not hurry too precipitately, for there were architectural details worth viewing at every silent corner; and I could easily, I calculated, cover the necessary distance in a half-hour.

Studying the grocery youth's map and seeking a route I had not traversed before, I chose Marsh Street instead of State for my approach to Town Square. Near the corner of Fall Street I began to see scattered groups of furtive whisperers, and when I finally reached the Square I saw that almost all the loiterers were congregated around the door of the Gilman House. It seemed as if many bulging, watery, unwinking eyes looked oddly at me as I claimed my valise in the lobby, and I hoped that none of these unpleasant creatures would be my fellow-passengers on the coach.

The bus, rather early, rattled in with three passengers somewhat before eight, and an evil-looking fellow on the sidewalk muttered a few indistinguishable words to the driver. Sargent threw out a mail-bag and a roll of newspapers, and entered the hotel; while the passengers--the same men whom I had seen arriving in Newburyport that morning--shambled to the sidewalk and exchanged some faint guttural words with a loafer in a language I could have sworn was not English. I boarded the empty coach and took the seat I had taken before, but was hardly settled before Sargent re-appeared and began mumbling in a throaty voice of peculiar repulsiveness.

I was, it appeared, in very bad luck. There had been something wrong with the engine, despite the excellent time made from Newburyport, and the bus could not complete the journey to Arkham. No, it could not possibly be repaired that night, nor was there any other way of getting transportation out of Innsmouth either to Arkham or elsewhere. Sargent was sorry, but I would have to stop over at the Gilman. Probably the clerk would make the price easy for me, but there was nothing else to do. Almost dazed by this sudden obstacle, and violently dreading the fall of night in this decaying and half-unlighted town, I left the bus and reentered the hotel lobby; where the sullen queer-looking night clerk told me I could have Room 428 on next the top floor--large, but without running water--for a dollar.

Despite what I had heard of this hotel in Newburyport, I signed the register, paid my dollar, let the clerk take my valise, and followed that sour, solitary attendant up three creaking flights of stairs past dusty corridors which seemed wholly devoid of life. My room was a dismal rear one with two windows and bare, cheap furnishings, overlooked a dingy court-yard otherwise hemmed in by low, deserted brick blocks, and commanded a view of decrepit westward-stretching roofs with a marshy countryside beyond. At the end of the corridor was a bathroom--a discouraging relique with ancient marble bowl, tin tub, faint electric light, and musty wooded paneling around all the plumbing fixtures.

It being still daylight, I descended to the Square and looked around for a dinner of some sort; noticing as I did so the strange glances I received from the unwholesome loafers. Since the grocery was closed, I was forced to patronise the restaurant I had shunned before; a stooped, narrow-headed man with staring, unwinking eyes, and a flat-nosed wench with unbelievably thick, clumsy hands being in attendance. The service was all of the counter type, and it relieved me to find that much was evidently served from cans and packages. A bowl of vegetable soup with crackers was enough for me, and I soon headed back for my cheerless room at the Gilman; getting a evening paper and a fly-specked magazine from the evil-visaged clerk at the rickety stand beside his desk.

As twilight deepened I turned on the one feeble electric bulb over the cheap, iron-framed bed, and tried as best I could to continue the reading I had begun. I felt it advisable to keep my mind wholesomely occupied, for it would not do to brood over the abnormalities of this ancient, blight-shadowed town while I was still within its borders. The insane yarn I had heard from the aged drunkard did not promise very pleasant dreams, and I felt I must keep the image of his wild, watery eyes as far as possible from my imagination.

Also, I must not dwell on what that factory inspector had told the Newburyport ticket-agent about the Gilman House and the voices of its nocturnal tenants--not on that, nor on the face beneath the tiara in the black church doorway; the face for whose horror my conscious mind could not account. It would perhaps have been easier to keep my thoughts from disturbing topics had the room not been so gruesomely musty. As it was, the lethal mustiness blended hideously with the town's general fishy odour and persistently focussed one's fancy on death and decay.

Another thing that disturbed me was the absence of a bolt on the door of my room. One had been there, as marks clearly shewed, but there were signs of recent removal. No doubt it had been out of order, like so many other things in this decrepit edifice. In my nervousness I looked around and discovered a bolt on the clothes press which seemed to be of the same size, judging from the marks, as the one formerly on the door. To gain a partial relief from the general tension I busied myself by transferring this hardware to the vacant place with the aid of a handy three-in-one device including a screwdriver which I kept on my key-ring. The bolt fitted perfectly, and I was somewhat relieved when I knew that I could shoot it firmly upon retiring. Not that I had any real apprehension of its need, but that any symbol of security was welcome in an environment of this kind. There were adequate bolts on the two lateral doors to connecting rooms, and these I proceeded to fasten.

I did not undress, but decided to read till I was sleepy and then lie down with only my coat, collar, and shoes off. Taking a pocket flash light from my valise, I placed it in my trousers, so that I could read my watch if I woke up later in the dark. Drowsiness, however, did not come; and when I stopped to analyse my thoughts I found to my disquiet that I was really unconsciously listening for something--listening for something which I dreaded but could not name. That inspector's story must have worked on my imagination more deeply than I had suspected. Again I tried to read, but found that I made no progress.

After a time I seemed to hear the stairs and corridors creak at intervals as if with footsteps, and wondered if the other rooms were beginning to fill up. There were no voices, however, and it struck me that there was something subtly furtive about the creaking. I did not like it, and debated whether I had better try to sleep at all. This town had some queer people, and there had undoubtedly been several disappearances. Was this one of those inns where travelers were slain for their money? Surely I had no look of excessive prosperity. Or were the towns folk really so resentful about curious visitors? Had my obvious sightseeing, with its frequent map-consultations, aroused unfavorable notice. It occurred to me that I must be in a highly nervous state to let a few random creakings set me off speculating in this fashion--but I regretted none the less that I was unarmed.

At length, feeling a fatigue which had nothing of drowsiness in it, I bolted the newly outfitted hall door, turned off the light, and threw myself down on the hard, uneven bed--coat, collar, shoes, and all. In the darkness every faint noise of the night seemed magnified, and a flood of doubly unpleasant thoughts swept over me. I was sorry I had put out the light, yet was too tired to rise and turn it on again. Then, after a long, dreary interval, and prefaced by a fresh creaking of stairs and corridor, there came that soft, damnably unmistakable sound which seemed like a malign fulfillment of all my apprehensions. Without the least shadow of a doubt, the lock of my door was being tried--cautiously, furtively, tentatively--with a key.

My sensations upon recognising this sign of actual peril were perhaps less rather than more tumultuous because of my previous vague fears. I had been, albeit without definite reason, instinctively on my guard--and that was to my advantage in the new and real crisis, whatever it might turn out to be. Nevertheless the change in the menace from vague premonition to immediate reality was a profound shock, and fell upon me with the force of a genuine blow. It never once occurred to me that the fumbling might be a mere mistake. Malign purpose was all I could think of, and I kept deathly quiet, awaiting the would-be intruder's next move.

After a time the cautious rattling ceased, and I heard the room to the north entered with a pass-key. Then the lock of the connecting door to my room was softly tried. The bolt held, of course, and I heard the floor creak as the prowler left the room. After a moment there came another soft rattling, and I knew that the room to the south of me was being entered. Again a furtive trying of a bolted connecting door, and again a receding creaking. This time the creaking went along the hall and down the stairs, so I knew that the prowler had realised the bolted condition of my doors and was giving up his attempt for a greater or lesser time, as the future would shew.

The readiness with which I fell into a plan of action proves that I must have been subconsciously fearing some menace and considering possible avenues of escape for hours. From the first I felt that the unseen fumbler meant a danger not to be met or dealt with, but only to be fled from as precipitately as possible. The one thing to do was to get out of that hotel alive as quickly as I could, and through some channel other than the front stairs and lobby.

Rising softly and throwing my flashlight on the switch, I sought to light the bulb over my bed in order to choose and pocket some belongings for a swift, valiseless flight. Nothing, however, happened; and I saw that the power had been cut off. Clearly, some cryptic, evil movement was afoot on a large scale--just what, I could not say. As I stood pondering with my hand on the now useless switch I heard a muffled creaking on the floor below, and thought I could barely distinguish voices in conversation. A moment later I felt less sure that the deeper sounds were voices, since the apparent hoarse barkings and loose-syllabled croakings bore so little resemblance to recognized human speech. Then I thought with renewed force of what the factory inspector had heard in the night in this mouldering and pestilential building.

Having filled my pockets with the flashlight's aid, I put on my hat and tiptoed to the windows to consider chances of descent. Despite the state's safety regulations there was no fire escape on this side of the hotel, and I saw that my windows commanded only a sheer three story drop to the cobbled courtyard. On the right and left, however, some ancient brick business blocks abutted on the hotel; their slant roofs coming up to a reasonable jumping distance from my fourth-story level. To reach either of these lines of buildings I would have to be in a room two from my own--in one case on the north and in the other case on the south--and my mind instantly set to work what chances I had of making the transfer.

I could not, I decided, risk an emergence into the corridor; where my footsteps would surely be heard, and where the difficulties of entering the desired room would be insuperable. My progress, if it was to be made at all, would have to be through the less solidly-built connecting doors of the rooms; the locks and bolts of which I would have to force violently, using my shoulder as a battering-ram whenever they were set against me. This, I thought, would be possible owing to the rickety nature of the house and its fixtures; but I realised I could not do it noiselessly. I would have to count on sheer speed, and the chance of getting to a window before any hostile forces became coordinated enough to open the right door toward me with a pass-key. My own outer door I reinforced by pushing the bureau against it--little by little, in order to make a minimum of sound.

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

Gathering from the grocery boy's map that the best route out of town was southward, I glanced first at the connecting door on the south side of the room. It was designed to open in my direction, hence I saw--after drawing the bolt and finding other fastening in place--it was not a favorable one for forcing. Accordingly abandoning it as a route, I cautiously moved the bedstead against it to hamper any attack which might be made on it later from the next room. The door on the north was hung to open away from me, and this--though a test proved it to be locked or bolted from the other side--I knew must be my route. If I could gain the roofs of the buildings in Paine Street and descend successfully to the ground level, I might perhaps dart through the courtyard and the adjacent or opposite building to Washington or Bates--or else emerge in Paine and edge around southward into Washington. In any case, I would aim to strike Washington somehow and get quickly out of the Town Square region. My preference would be to avoid Paine, since the fire station there might be open all night.

As I thought of these things I looked out over the squalid sea of decaying roofs below me, now brightened by the beams of a moon not much past full. On the right the black gash of the river-gorge clove the panorama; abandoned factories and railway station clinging barnacle-like to its sides. Beyond it the rusted railway and the Rowley road led off through a flat marshy terrain dotted with islets of higher and dryer scrub-grown land. On the left the creek-threaded country-side was nearer, the narrow road to Ipswich gleaming white in the moonlight. I could not see from my side of the hotel the southward route toward Arkham which I had determined to take.

I was irresolutely speculating on when I had better attack the northward door, and on how I could least audibly manage it, when I noticed that the vague noises underfoot had given place to a fresh and heavier creaking of the stairs. A wavering flicker of light shewed through my transom, and the boards of the corridor began to groan with a ponderous load. Muffled sounds of possible vocal origin approached, and at length a firm knock came at my outer door.

For a moment I simply held my breath and waited. Eternities seemed to elapse, and the nauseous fishy odour of my environment seemed to mount suddenly and spectacularly. Then the knocking was repeated--continuously, and with growing insistence. I knew that the time for action had come, and forthwith drew the bolt of the northward connecting door, bracing myself for the task of battering it open. The knocking waxed louder, and I hoped that its volume would cover the sound of my efforts. At last beginning my attempt, I lunged again and again at the thin paneling with my left shoulder, heedless of shock or pain. The door resisted even more than I expected, but I did not give in. And all the while the clamour at the outer door increased.

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

For an instant I felt absolute despair, since my trapping in a chamber with no window egress seemed complete. A wave of almost abnormal horror swept over me, and invested with a terrible but unexplainable singularity the flashlight-glimpsed dust prints made by the intruder who had lately tried my door from this room. Then, with a dazed automatism which persisted despite hopelessness, I made for the next connecting door and performed the blind motion of pushing at it in an effort to get through and--granting that fastenings might be as providentially intact as in this second room--bolt the hall door beyond before the lock could be turned from outside.

Sheer fortunate chance gave me my reprieve--for the connecting door before me was not only unlocked but actually ajar. In a second I was though, and had my right knee and shoulder against a hall door which was visibly opening inward. My pressure took the opener off guard, for the thing shut as I pushed, so that I could slip the well-conditioned bolt as I had done with the other door. As I gained this respite I heard the battering at the two other doors abate, while a confused clatter came from the connecting door I had shielded with the bedstead. Evidently the bulk of my assailants had entered the southerly room and were massing in a lateral attack. But at the same moment a pass-key sounded in the next door to the north, and I knew that a nearer peril was at hand.

The northward connecting door was wide open, but there was no time to think about checking the already turning lock in the hall. All I could do was to shut and bolt the open connecting door, as well as its mate on the opposite side--pushing a bedstead against the one and a bureau against the other, and moving a washstand in front of the hall door. I must, I saw, trust to such makeshift barriers to shield me till I could get out the window and on the roof of the Paine Street block. But even in this acute moment my chief horror was something apart from the immediate weakness of my defenses. I was shuddering because not one of my pursuers, despite some hideous panting, grunting, and subdued barkings at odd intervals, was uttering an unmuffled or intelligible vocal sound.

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

Surveying the conditions, I chose the more southerly of the two windows as my avenue of escape; planning to land on the inner slope of the roof and make for the nearest sky-light. Once inside one of the decrepit brick structures I would have to reckon with pursuit; but I hoped to descend and dodge in and out of yawning doorways along the shadowed courtyard, eventually getting to Washington Street and slipping out of town toward the south.

The clatter at the northerly connecting door was now terrific, and I saw that the weak panelling was beginning to splinter. Obviously, the besiegers had brought some ponderous object into play as a battering-ram. The bedstead, however, still held firm; so that I had at least a faint chance of making good my escape. As I opened the window I noticed that it was flanked by heavy velour draperies suspended from a pole by brass rings, and also that there was a large projecting catch for the shutters on the exterior. Seeing a possible means of avoiding the dangerous jump, I yanked at the hangings and brought them down, pole and all; then quickly hooking two of the rings in the shutter catch and flinging the drapery outside. The heavy folds reached fully to the abutting roof, and I saw that the rings and catch would be likely to bear my weight. So, climbing out of the window and down the improvised rope ladder, I left behind me forever the morbid and horror-infested fabric of the Gilman House.

I landed safely on the loose slates of the steep roof, and succeeded in gaining the gaping black skylight without a slip. Glancing up at the window I had left, I observed it was still dark, though far across the crumbling chimneys to the north I could see lights ominously blazing in the Order of Dagon Hall, the Baptist church, and the Congregational church which I recalled so shiveringly. There had seemed to be no one in the courtyard below, and I hoped there would be a chance to get away before the spreading of a general alarm. Flashing my pocket lamp into the skylight, I saw that there were no steps down. The distance was slight, however, so I clambered over the brink and dropped; striking a dusty floor littered with crumbling boxes and barrels.

The place was ghoulish-looking, but I was past minding such impressions and made at once for the staircase revealed by my flashlight--after a hasty glance at my watch, which shewed the hour to be 2 a.m. The steps creaked, but seemed tolerably sound; and I raced down past a barnlike second storey to the ground floor. The desolation was complete, and only echoes answered my footfalls. At length I reached the lower hall at the end of which I saw a faint luminous rectangle marking the ruined Paine Street doorway. Heading the other way, I found the back door also open; and darted out and down five stone steps to the grass-grown cobblestones of the courtyard.

The moonbeams did not reach down here, but I could just see my way about without using the flashlight. Some of the windows on the Gilman House side were faintly glowing, and I thought I heard confused sounds within. Walking softly over to the Washington Street side I perceived several open doorways, and chose the nearest as my route out. The hallway inside was black, and when I reached the opposite end I saw that the street door was wedged immovably shut. Resolved to try another building, I groped my way back toward the courtyard, but stopped short when close to the doorway.

For out of an opened door in the Gilman House a large crowd of doubtful shapes was pouring--lanterns bobbing in the darkness, and horrible croaking voices exchanging low cries in what was certainly not English. The figures moved uncertainly, and I realized to my relief that they did not know where I had gone; but for all that they sent a shiver of horror through my frame. Their features were indistinguishable, but their crouching, shambling gait was abominably repellent. And worst of all, I perceived that one figure was strangely robed, and unmistakably surmounted by a tall tiara of a design altogether too familiar. As the figures spread throughout the courtyard, I felt my fears increase. Suppose I could find no egress from this building on the street side? The fishy odour was detestable, and I wondered I could stand it without fainting. Again groping toward the street, I opened a door off the hall and came upon an empty room with closely shuttered but sashless windows. Fumbling in the rays of my flashlight, I found I could open the shutters; and in another moment had climbed outside and was fully closing the aperture in its original manner.

I was now in Washington Street, and for the moment saw no living thing nor any light save that of the moon. From several directions in the distance, however, I could hear the sound of hoarse voices, of footsteps, and of a curious kind of pattering which did not sound quite like footsteps. Plainly I had no time to lose. The points of the compass were clear to me, and I was glad that all the street lights were turned off, as is often the custom on strongly moonlit nights in prosperous rural regions. Some of the sounds came from the south, yet I retained my design of escaping in that direction. There would, I knew, be plenty of deserted doorways to shelter me in case I met any person or group who looked like pursuers.

I walked rapidly, softly, and close to the ruined houses. While hatless and dishevelled after my arduous climb, I did not look especially noticeable; and stood a good chance of passing unheeded if forced to encounter any casual wayfarer.

At Bates Street I drew into a yawning vestibule while two shambling figures crossed in front of me, but was soon on my way again and approaching the open space where Eliot Street obliquely crosses Washington at the intersection of South. Though I had never seen this space, it had looked dangerous to me on the grocery youth's map; since the moonlight would have free play there. There was no use trying to evade it, for any alternative course would involve detours of possibly disastrous visibility and delaying effect. The only thing to do was to cross it boldly and openly; imitating the typical shamble of the Innsmouth folk as best I could, and trusting that no one--or at least no pursuer of mine--would be there.

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

The open space was, as I had expected, strongly moonlit; and I saw the remains of a parklike, iron-railed green in its center. Fortunately no one was about though a curious sort of buzz or roar seemed to be increasing in the direction of Town Square. South Street was very wide, leading directly down a slight declivity to the waterfront and commanding a long view out to sea; and I hoped that no one would be glancing up it from afar as I crossed in the bright moonlight.

My progress was unimpeded, and no fresh sound arose to hint that I had been spied. Glancing about me, I involuntarily let my pace slacken for a second to take in the sight of the sea, gorgeous in the burning moonlight at the street's end. Far out beyond the breakwater was the dim, dark line of Devil Reef, and as I glimpsed it I could not help thinking of all the hideous legends I had heard in the last twenty-four hours--legends which portrayed this ragged rock as a veritable gateway to realms of unfathomed horror and inconceivable abnormality.

Then, without warning, I saw the intermittent flashes of light on the distant reef. They were definite and unmistakable, and awaked in my mind a blind horror beyond all rational proportion. My muscles tightened for panic flight, held in only by a certain unconscious caution and half-hypnotic fascination. And to make matters worse, there now flashed forth from the lofty cupola of the Gilman House, which loomed up to the northeast behind me, a series of analogous though differently spaced gleams which could be nothing less than an answering signal.

Controlling my muscles, and realising afresh--how plainly visible I was, I resumed my brisker and feignedly shambling pace; though keeping my eyes on that hellish and ominous reef as long as the opening of South Street gave me a seaward view. What the whole proceeding meant, I could not imagine; unless it involved some strange rite connected with Devil Reef, or unless some party had landed from a ship on that sinister rock. I now bent to the left around the ruinous green; still gazing toward the ocean as it blazed in the spectral summer moonlight, and watching the cryptical flashing of those nameless, unexplainable beacons.

It was then that the most horrible impression of all was borne in upon me--the impression which destroyed my last vestige of self-control and sent me running frantically southward past the yawning black doorways and fishily staring windows of that deserted nightmare street. For at a closer glance I saw that the moonlit waters between the reef and the shore were far from empty. They were alive with a teeming horde of shapes swimming inward toward the town; and even at my vast distance and in my single moment of perception I could tell that the bobbing heads and flailing arms were alien and aberrant in a way scarcely to be expressed or consciously formulated.

My frantic running ceased before I had covered a block, for at my left I began to hear something like the hue and cry of organised pursuit. There were footsteps and guttural sounds, and a rattling motor wheezed south along Federal Street. In a second all my plans were utterly changed--for if the southward highway were blocked ahead of me, I must clearly find another egress from Innsmouth. I paused and drew into a gaping doorway, reflecting how lucky I was to have left the moonlit open space before these pursuers came down the parallel street.

A second reflection was less comforting. Since the pursuit was down another street, it was plain that the party was not following me directly. It had not seen me, but was simply obeying a general plan of cutting off my escape. This, however, implied that all roads leading out of Innsmouth were similarly patrolled; for the people could not have known what route I intended to take. If this were so, I would have to make my retreat across country away from any road; but how could I do that in view of the marshy and creek-riddled nature of all the surrounding region? For a moment my brain reeled--both from sheer hopelessness and from a rapid increase in the omnipresent fishy odour.

Then I thought of the abandoned railway to Rowley, whose solid line of ballasted, weed-grown earth still stretched off to the northwest from the crumbling station on the edge at the river-gorge. There was just a chance that the townsfolk would not think of that; since its briar-choked desertion made it half-impassable, and the unlikeliest of all avenues for a fugitive to choose. I had seen it clearly from my hotel window and knew about how it lay. Most of its earlier length was uncomfortably visible from the Rowley road, and from high places in the town itself; but one could perhaps crawl inconspicuously through the undergrowth. At any rate, it would form my only chance of deliverance, and there was nothing to do but try it.

Drawing inside the hall of my deserted shelter, I once more consulted the grocery boy's map with the aid of the flashlight. The immediate problem was how to reach the ancient railway; and I now saw that the safest course was ahead to Babson Street; then west to Lafayette--there edging around but not crossing an open space homologous to the one I had traversed--and subsequently back northward and westward in a zigzagging line through Lafayette, Bates, Adam, and Bank streets--the latter skirting the river gorge--to the abandoned and dilapidated station I had seen from my window. My reason for going ahead to Babson was that I wished neither to recross the earlier open space nor to begin my westward course along a cross street as broad as South.

Starting once more, I crossed the street to the right-hand side in order to edge around into Babson as inconspicuously as possible. Noises still continued in Federal Street, and as I glanced behind me I thought I saw a gleam of light near the building through which I had escaped. Anxious to leave Washington Street, I broke into a quiet dogtrot, trusting to luck not to encounter any observing eye. Next the corner of Babson Street I saw to my alarm that one of the houses was still inhabited, as attested by curtains at the window; but there were no lights within, and I passed it without disaster.

In Babson Street, which crossed Federal and might thus reveal me to the searchers, I clung as closely as possible to the sagging, uneven buildings; twice pausing in a doorway as the noises behind me momentarily increased. The open space ahead shone wide and desolate under the moon, but my route would not force me to cross it. During my second pause I began to detect a fresh distribution of vague sounds; and upon looking cautiously out from cover beheld a motor car darting across the open space, bound outward along Eliot Street, which there intersects both Babson and Lafayette.

As I watched--choked by a sudden rise in the fishy odour after a short abatement--I saw a band of uncouth, crouching shapes loping and shambling in the same direction; and knew that this must be the party guarding the Ipswich road, since that highway forms an extension of Eliot Street. Two of the figures I glimpsed were in voluminous robes, and one wore a peaked diadem which glistened whitely in the moonlight. The gait of this figure was so odd that it sent a chill through me--for it seemed to me the creature was almost hopping.

When the last of the band was out of sight I resumed my progress; darting around the corner into Lafayette Street, and crossing Eliot very hurriedly lest stragglers of the party be still advancing along that thoroughfare. I did hear some croaking and clattering sounds far off toward Town Square, but accomplished the passage without disaster. My greatest dread was in re-crossing broad and moonlit South Street--with its seaward view--and I had to nerve myself for the ordeal. Someone might easily be looking, and possible Eliot Street stragglers could not fail to glimpse me from either of two points. At the last moment I decided I had better slacken my trot and make the crossing as before in the shambling gait of an average Innsmouth native.

When the view of the water again opened out--this time on my right--I was half-determined not to look at it at all. I could not however, resist; but cast a sidelong glance as I carefully and imitatively shambled toward the protecting shadows ahead. There was no ship visible, as I had half-expected there would be. Instead, the first thing which caught my eye was a small rowboat pulling in toward the abandoned wharves and laden with some bulky, tarpaulin-covered object. Its rowers, though distantly and indistinctly seen, were of an especially repellent aspect. Several swimmers were still discernible; while on the far black reef I could see a faint, steady glow unlike the winking beacon visible before, and of a curious colour which I could not precisely identify. Above the slant roofs ahead and to the right there loomed the tall cupola of the Gilman House, but it was completely dark. The fishy odour, dispelled for a moment by some merciful breeze, now closed in again with maddening intensity.

I had not quite crossed the street when I heard a muttering band advancing along Washington from the north. As they reached the broad open space where I had had my first disquieting glimpse of the moonlit water I could see them plainly only a block away--and was horrified by the bestial abnormality of their faces and the doglike sub-humanness of their crouching gait. One man moved in a positively simian way, with long arms frequently touching the ground; while another figure--robed and tiaraed--seemed to progress in an almost hopping fashion. I judged this party to be the one I had seen in the Gilman's courtyard--the one, therefore, most closely on my trail. As some of the figures turned to look in my direction I was transfixed with fright, yet managed to preserve the casual, shambling gait I had assumed. To this day I do not know whether they saw me or not. If they did, my stratagem must have deceived them, for they passed on across the moonlit space without varying their course--meanwhile croaking and jabbering in some hateful guttural patois I could not identify.

Once more in shadow, I resumed my former dog-trot past the leaning and decrepit houses that stared blankly into the night. Having crossed to the western sidewalk I rounded the nearest corner into Bates Street where I kept close to the buildings on the southern side. I passed two houses shewing signs of habitation, one of which had faint lights in upper rooms, yet met with no obstacle. As I turned into Adams Street I felt measurably safer, but received a shook when a man reeled out of a black doorway directly in front of me. He proved, however, too hopelessly drunk to be a menace; so that I reached the dismal ruins of the Bank Street warehouses in safety.

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

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

The vast, barnlike length of the old bridge gleamed spectrally in the moonlight, and I saw that the ties were safe for at least a few feet within. Entering, I began to use my flashlight, and was almost knocked down by the cloud of bats that flapped past me. About half-way across there was a perilous gap in the ties which I feared for a moment would halt me; but in the end I risked a desperate jump which fortunately succeeded.

I was glad to see the moonlight again when I emerged from that macabre tunnel. The old tracks crossed River Street at grade, and at once veered off into a region increasingly rural and with less and less of Innsmouth's abhorrent fishy odour. Here the dense growth of weeds and briers hindered me and cruelly tore at my clothes, but I was none the less glad that they were there to give me concealment in case of peril. I knew that much of my route must be visible from the Rowley road.

The marshy region began very abruptly, with the single track on a low, grassy embankment where the weedy growth was somewhat thinner. Then came a sort of island of higher ground, where the line passed through a shallow open cut choked with bushes and brambles. I was very glad of this partial shelter, since at this point the Rowley road was uncomfortably near according to my window view. At the end of the cut it would cross the track and swerve off to a safer distance; but meanwhile I must be exceedingly careful. I was by this time thankfully certain that the railway itself was not patrolled.

Just before entering the cut I glanced behind me, but saw no pursuer. The ancient spires and roofs of decaying Innsmouth gleamed lovely and ethereal in the magic yellow moonlight, and I thought of how they must have looked in the old days before the shadow fell. Then, as my gaze circled inland from the town, something less tranquil arrested my notice and held me immobile for a second.

What I saw--or fancied I saw--was a disturbing suggestion of undulant motion far to the south; a suggestion which made me conclude that a very large horde must be pouring out of the city along the level Ipswich road. The distance was great and I could distinguish nothing in detail; but I did not at all like the look of that moving column. It undulated too much, and glistened too brightly in the rays of the now westering moon. There was a suggestion of sound, too, though the wind was blowing the other way--a suggestion of bestial scraping and bellowing even worse than the muttering of the parties I had lately overheard.

All sorts of unpleasant conjectures crossed my mind. I thought of those very extreme Innsmouth types said to be hidden in crumbling, centuried warrens near the waterfront; I thought, too, of those nameless swimmers I had seen. Counting the parties so far glimpsed, as well as those presumably covering other roads, the number of my pursuers must be strangely large for a town as depopulated as Innsmouth.

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

I had entered the brush-grown cut and was struggling along at a very slow pace when that damnable fishy odour again waxed dominant. Had the wind suddenly changed eastward, so that it blew in from the sea and over the town? It must have, I concluded, since I now began to hear shocking guttural murmurs from that hitherto silent direction. There was another sound, too--a kind of wholesale, colossal flopping or pattering which somehow called up images of the most detestable sort. It made me think illogically of that unpleasantly undulating column on the far-off Ipswich road.

And then both stench and sounds grew stronger, so that I paused shivering and grateful for the cut's protection. It was here, I recalled, that the Rowley road drew so close to the old railway before crossing westward and diverging. Something was coming along that road, and I must lie low till its passage and vanishment in the distance. Thank heaven these creatures employed no dogs for tracking--though perhaps that would have been impossible amidst the omnipresent regional odour. Crouched in the bushes of that sandy cleft I felt reasonably safe, even though I knew the searchers would have to cross the track in front of me not much more than a hundred yards away. I would be able to see them, but they could not, except by a malign miracle, see me.

All at once I began dreading to look at them as they passed. I saw the close moonlit space where they would surge by, and had curious thoughts about the irredeemable pollution of that space. They would perhaps be the worst of all Innsmouth types--something one would not care to remember.

The stench waxed overpowering, and the noises swelled to a bestial babel of croaking, baying and barking without the least suggestion of human speech. Were these indeed the voices of my pursuers? Did they have dogs after all? So far I had seen none of the lower animals in Innsmouth. That flopping or pattering was monstrous--I could not look upon the degenerate creatures responsible for it. I would keep my eyes shut till the sound receded toward the west. The horde was very close now--air foul with their hoarse snarlings, and the ground almost shaking with their alien-rhythmed footfalls. My breath nearly ceased to come, and I put every ounce of will-power into the task of holding my eyelids down.

I am not even yet willing to say whether what followed was a hideous actuality or only a nightmare hallucination. The later action of the government, after my frantic appeals, would tend to confirm it as a monstrous truth; but could not an hallucination have been repeated under the quasi-hypnotic spell of that ancient, haunted, and shadowed town? Such places have strange properties, and the legacy of insane legend might well have acted on more than one human imagination amidst those dead, stench-cursed streets and huddles of rotting roofs and crumbling steeples. Is it not possible that the germ of an actual contagious madness lurks in the depths of that shadow over Innsmouth? Who can be sure of reality after hearing things like the tale of old Zadok Allen? The government men never found poor Zadok, and have no conjectures to make as to what became of him. Where does madness leave off and reality begin? Is it possible that even my latest fear is sheer delusion?

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

I thought I was prepared for the worst, and I really ought to have been prepared considering what I had seen before.

My other pursuers had been accursedly abnormal--so should I not have been ready to face a strengthening of the abnormal element; to look upon forms in which there was no mixture of the normal at all? I did not open my eyes until the raucous clamour came loudly from a point obviously straight ahead. Then I knew that a long section of them must be plainly in sight where the sides of the cut flattened out and the road crossed the track--and I could no longer keep myself from sampling whatever horror that leering yellow moon might have to shew.

It was the end, for whatever remains to me of life on the surface of this earth, of every vestige of mental peace and confidence in the integrity of nature and of the human mind. Nothing that I could have imagined--nothing, even, that I could have gathered had I credited old Zadok's crazy tale in the most literal way--would be in any way comparable to the demoniac, blasphemous reality that I saw--or believe I saw. I have tried to hint what it was in order to postpone the horror of writing it down baldly. Can it be possible that this planet has actually spawned such things; that human eyes have truly seen, as objective flesh, what man has hitherto known only in febrile phantasy and tenuous legend?

And yet I saw them in a limitless stream--flopping, hopping, croaking, bleating--urging inhumanly through the spectral moonlight in a grotesque, malignant saraband of fantastic nightmare. And some of them had tall tiaras of that nameless whitish-gold metal...and some were strangely robed...and one, who led the way, was clad in a ghoulishly humped black coat and striped trousers, and had a man's felt hat perched on the shapeless thing that answered for a head.

I think their predominant colour was a greyish-green, though they had white bellies. They were mostly shiny and slippery, but the ridges of their backs were scaly. Their forms vaguely suggested the anthropoid, while their heads were the heads of fish, with prodigious bulging eyes that never closed. At the sides of their necks were palpitating gills, and their long paws were webbed. They hopped irregularly, sometimes on two legs and sometimes on four. I was somehow glad that they had no more than four limbs. Their croaking, baying voices, clearly used for articulate speech, held all the dark shades of expression which their staring faces lacked.

But for all of their monstrousness they were not unfamiliar to me. I knew too well what they must be--for was not the memory of the evil tiara at Newburyport still fresh? They were the blasphemous fish-frogs of the nameless design--living and horrible--and as I saw them I knew also of what that humped, tiaraed priest in the black church basement had fearsomely reminded me. Their number was past guessing. It seemed to me that there were limitless swarms of them and certainly my momentary glimpse could have shewn only the least fraction. In another instant everything was blotted out by a merciful fit of fainting; the first I had ever had.","(Found Among the Papers of the Late
Francis Wayland Thurston, of Boston)
“Of such great powers or beings there may be conceivably a survival . . . a survival of a hugely remote period when . . . consciousness was manifested, perhaps, in shapes and forms long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity . . . forms of which poetry and legend alone have caught a flying memory and called them gods, monsters, mythical beings of all sorts and kinds. . . .”
—Algernon Blackwood.

I.
The Horror in Clay.

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

II.
The Tale of Inspector Legrasse.

The older matters which had made the sculptor’s dream and bas-relief so significant to my uncle formed the subject of the second half of his long manuscript. Once before, it appears, Professor Angell had seen the hellish outlines of the nameless monstrosity, puzzled over the unknown hieroglyphics, and heard the ominous syllables which can be rendered only as “Cthulhu”; and all this in so stirring and horrible a connexion that it is small wonder he pursued young Wilcox with queries and demands for data.
      The earlier experience had come in 1908, seventeen years before, when the American Archaeological Society held its annual meeting in St. Louis. Professor Angell, as befitted one of his authority and attainments, had had a prominent part in all the deliberations; and was one of the first to be approached by the several outsiders who took advantage of the convocation to offer questions for correct answering and problems for expert solution.
      The chief of these outsiders, and in a short time the focus of interest for the entire meeting, was a commonplace-looking middle-aged man who had travelled all the way from New Orleans for certain special information unobtainable from any local source. His name was John Raymond Legrasse, and he was by profession an Inspector of Police. With him he bore the subject of his visit, a grotesque, repulsive, and apparently very ancient stone statuette whose origin he was at a loss to determine. It must not be fancied that Inspector Legrasse had the least interest in archaeology. On the contrary, his wish for enlightenment was prompted by purely professional considerations. The statuette, idol, fetish, or whatever it was, had been captured some months before in the wooded swamps south of New Orleans during a raid on a supposed voodoo meeting; and so singular and hideous were the rites connected with it, that the police could not but realise that they had stumbled on a dark cult totally unknown to them, and infinitely more diabolic than even the blackest of the African voodoo circles. Of its origin, apart from the erratic and unbelievable tales extorted from the captured members, absolutely nothing was to be discovered; hence the anxiety of the police for any antiquarian lore which might help them to place the frightful symbol, and through it track down the cult to its fountain-head.
      Inspector Legrasse was scarcely prepared for the sensation which his offering created. One sight of the thing had been enough to throw the assembled men of science into a state of tense excitement, and they lost no time in crowding around him to gaze at the diminutive figure whose utter strangeness and air of genuinely abysmal antiquity hinted so potently at unopened and archaic vistas. No recognised school of sculpture had animated this terrible object, yet centuries and even thousands of years seemed recorded in its dim and greenish surface of unplaceable stone.
      The figure, which was finally passed slowly from man to man for close and careful study, was between seven and eight inches in height, and of exquisitely artistic workmanship. It represented a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind. This thing, which seemed instinct with a fearsome and unnatural malignancy, was of a somewhat bloated corpulence, and squatted evilly on a rectangular block or pedestal covered with undecipherable characters. The tips of the wings touched the back edge of the block, the seat occupied the centre, whilst the long, curved claws of the doubled-up, crouching hind legs gripped the front edge and extended a quarter of the way down toward the bottom of the pedestal. The cephalopod head was bent forward, so that the ends of the facial feelers brushed the backs of huge fore paws which clasped the croucher’s elevated knees. The aspect of the whole was abnormally life-like, and the more subtly fearful because its source was so totally unknown. Its vast, awesome, and incalculable age was unmistakable; yet not one link did it shew with any known type of art belonging to civilisation’s youth—or indeed to any other time. Totally separate and apart, its very material was a mystery; for the soapy, greenish-black stone with its golden or iridescent flecks and striations resembled nothing familiar to geology or mineralogy. The characters along the base were equally baffling; and no member present, despite a representation of half the world’s expert learning in this field, could form the least notion of even their remotest linguistic kinship. They, like the subject and material, belonged to something horribly remote and distinct from mankind as we know it; something frightfully suggestive of old and unhallowed cycles of life in which our world and our conceptions have no part.
      And yet, as the members severally shook their heads and confessed defeat at the Inspector’s problem, there was one man in that gathering who suspected a touch of bizarre familiarity in the monstrous shape and writing, and who presently told with some diffidence of the odd trifle he knew. This person was the late William Channing Webb, Professor of Anthropology in Princeton University, and an explorer of no slight note. Professor Webb had been engaged, forty-eight years before, in a tour of Greenland and Iceland in search of some Runic inscriptions which he failed to unearth; and whilst high up on the West Greenland coast had encountered a singular tribe or cult of degenerate Esquimaux whose religion, a curious form of devil-worship, chilled him with its deliberate bloodthirstiness and repulsiveness. It was a faith of which other Esquimaux knew little, and which they mentioned only with shudders, saying that it had come down from horribly ancient aeons before ever the world was made. Besides nameless rites and human sacrifices there were certain queer hereditary rituals addressed to a supreme elder devil or tornasuk; and of this Professor Webb had taken a careful phonetic copy from an aged angekok or wizard-priest, expressing the sounds in Roman letters as best he knew how. But just now of prime significance was the fetish which this cult had cherished, and around which they danced when the aurora leaped high over the ice cliffs. It was, the professor stated, a very crude bas-relief of stone, comprising a hideous picture and some cryptic writing. And so far as he could tell, it was a rough parallel in all essential features of the bestial thing now lying before the meeting.
      This data, received with suspense and astonishment by the assembled members, proved doubly exciting to Inspector Legrasse; and he began at once to ply his informant with questions. Having noted and copied an oral ritual among the swamp cult-worshippers his men had arrested, he besought the professor to remember as best he might the syllables taken down amongst the diabolist Esquimaux. There then followed an exhaustive comparison of details, and a moment of really awed silence when both detective and scientist agreed on the virtual identity of the phrase common to two hellish rituals so many worlds of distance apart. What, in substance, both the Esquimau wizards and the Louisiana swamp-priests had chanted to their kindred idols was something very like this—the word-divisions being guessed at from traditional breaks in the phrase as chanted aloud:
      “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.”
      Legrasse had one point in advance of Professor Webb, for several among his mongrel prisoners had repeated to him what older celebrants had told them the words meant. This text, as given, ran something like this:
      “In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”
      And now, in response to a general and urgent demand, Inspector Legrasse related as fully as possible his experience with the swamp worshippers; telling a story to which I could see my uncle attached profound significance. It savoured of the wildest dreams of myth-maker and theosophist, and disclosed an astonishing degree of cosmic imagination among such half-castes and pariahs as might be least expected to possess it.
      On November 1st, 1907, there had come to the New Orleans police a frantic summons from the swamp and lagoon country to the south. The squatters there, mostly primitive but good-natured descendants of Lafitte’s men, were in the grip of stark terror from an unknown thing which had stolen upon them in the night. It was voodoo, apparently, but voodoo of a more terrible sort than they had ever known; and some of their women and children had disappeared since the malevolent tom-tom had begun its incessant beating far within the black haunted woods where no dweller ventured. There were insane shouts and harrowing screams, soul-chilling chants and dancing devil-flames; and, the frightened messenger added, the people could stand it no more.
      So a body of twenty police, filling two carriages and an automobile, had set out in the late afternoon with the shivering squatter as a guide. At the end of the passable road they alighted, and for miles splashed on in silence through the terrible cypress woods where day never came. Ugly roots and malignant hanging nooses of Spanish moss beset them, and now and then a pile of dank stones or fragment of a rotting wall intensified by its hint of morbid habitation a depression which every malformed tree and every fungous islet combined to create. At length the squatter settlement, a miserable huddle of huts, hove in sight; and hysterical dwellers ran out to cluster around the group of bobbing lanterns. The muffled beat of tom-toms was now faintly audible far, far ahead; and a curdling shriek came at infrequent intervals when the wind shifted. A reddish glare, too, seemed to filter through the pale undergrowth beyond endless avenues of forest night. Reluctant even to be left alone again, each one of the cowed squatters refused point-blank to advance another inch toward the scene of unholy worship, so Inspector Legrasse and his nineteen colleagues plunged on unguided into black arcades of horror that none of them had ever trod before.
      The region now entered by the police was one of traditionally evil repute, substantially unknown and untraversed by white men. There were legends of a hidden lake unglimpsed by mortal sight, in which dwelt a huge, formless white polypous thing with luminous eyes; and squatters whispered that bat-winged devils flew up out of caverns in inner earth to worship it at midnight. They said it had been there before D’Iberville, before La Salle, before the Indians, and before even the wholesome beasts and birds of the woods. It was nightmare itself, and to see it was to die. But it made men dream, and so they knew enough to keep away. The present voodoo orgy was, indeed, on the merest fringe of this abhorred area, but that location was bad enough; hence perhaps the very place of the worship had terrified the squatters more than the shocking sounds and incidents.
      Only poetry or madness could do justice to the noises heard by Legrasse’s men as they ploughed on through the black morass toward the red glare and the muffled tom-toms. There are vocal qualities peculiar to men, and vocal qualities peculiar to beasts; and it is terrible to hear the one when the source should yield the other. Animal fury and orgiastic licence here whipped themselves to daemoniac heights by howls and squawking ecstasies that tore and reverberated through those nighted woods like pestilential tempests from the gulfs of hell. Now and then the less organised ululation would cease, and from what seemed a well-drilled chorus of hoarse voices would rise in sing-song chant that hideous phrase or ritual:
      “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.”
Then the men, having reached a spot where the trees were thinner, came suddenly in sight of the spectacle itself. Four of them reeled, one fainted, and two were shaken into a frantic cry which the mad cacophony of the orgy fortunately deadened. Legrasse dashed swamp water on the face of the fainting man, and all stood trembling and nearly hypnotised with horror.
      In a natural glade of the swamp stood a grassy island of perhaps an acre’s extent, clear of trees and tolerably dry. On this now leaped and twisted a more indescribable horde of human abnormality than any but a Sime or an Angarola could paint. Void of clothing, this hybrid spawn were braying, bellowing, and writhing about a monstrous ring-shaped bonfire; in the centre of which, revealed by occasional rifts in the curtain of flame, stood a great granite monolith some eight feet in height; on top of which, incongruous with its diminutiveness, rested the noxious carven statuette. From a wide circle of ten scaffolds set up at regular intervals with the flame-girt monolith as a centre hung, head downward, the oddly marred bodies of the helpless squatters who had disappeared. It was inside this circle that the ring of worshippers jumped and roared, the general direction of the mass motion being from left to right in endless Bacchanal between the ring of bodies and the ring of fire.
      It may have been only imagination and it may have been only echoes which induced one of the men, an excitable Spaniard, to fancy he heard antiphonal responses to the ritual from some far and unillumined spot deeper within the wood of ancient legendry and horror. This man, Joseph D. Galvez, I later met and questioned; and he proved distractingly imaginative. He indeed went so far as to hint of the faint beating of great wings, and of a glimpse of shining eyes and a mountainous white bulk beyond the remotest trees—but I suppose he had been hearing too much native superstition.
      Actually, the horrified pause of the men was of comparatively brief duration. Duty came first; and although there must have been nearly a hundred mongrel celebrants in the throng, the police relied on their firearms and plunged determinedly into the nauseous rout. For five minutes the resultant din and chaos were beyond description. Wild blows were struck, shots were fired, and escapes were made; but in the end Legrasse was able to count some forty-seven sullen prisoners, whom he forced to dress in haste and fall into line between two rows of policemen. Five of the worshippers lay dead, and two severely wounded ones were carried away on improvised stretchers by their fellow-prisoners. The image on the monolith, of course, was carefully removed and carried back by Legrasse.
      Examined at headquarters after a trip of intense strain and weariness, the prisoners all proved to be men of a very low, mixed-blooded, and mentally aberrant type. Most were seamen, and a sprinkling of negroes and mulattoes, largely West Indians or Brava Portuguese from the Cape Verde Islands, gave a colouring of voodooism to the heterogeneous cult. But before many questions were asked, it became manifest that something far deeper and older than negro fetichism was involved. Degraded and ignorant as they were, the creatures held with surprising consistency to the central idea of their loathsome faith.
      They worshipped, so they said, the Great Old Ones who lived ages before there were any men, and who came to the young world out of the sky. Those Old Ones were gone now, inside the earth and under the sea; but their dead bodies had told their secrets in dreams to the first men, who formed a cult which had never died. This was that cult, and the prisoners said it had always existed and always would exist, hidden in distant wastes and dark places all over the world until the time when the great priest Cthulhu, from his dark house in the mighty city of R’lyeh under the waters, should rise and bring the earth again beneath his sway. Some day he would call, when the stars were ready, and the secret cult would always be waiting to liberate him.
      Meanwhile no more must be told. There was a secret which even torture could not extract. Mankind was not absolutely alone among the conscious things of earth, for shapes came out of the dark to visit the faithful few. But these were not the Great Old Ones. No man had ever seen the Old Ones. The carven idol was great Cthulhu, but none might say whether or not the others were precisely like him. No one could read the old writing now, but things were told by word of mouth. The chanted ritual was not the secret—that was never spoken aloud, only whispered. The chant meant only this: “In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”
      Only two of the prisoners were found sane enough to be hanged, and the rest were committed to various institutions. All denied a part in the ritual murders, and averred that the killing had been done by Black Winged Ones which had come to them from their immemorial meeting-place in the haunted wood. But of those mysterious allies no coherent account could ever be gained. What the police did extract, came mainly from an immensely aged mestizo named Castro, who claimed to have sailed to strange ports and talked with undying leaders of the cult in the mountains of China.
      Old Castro remembered bits of hideous legend that paled the speculations of theosophists and made man and the world seem recent and transient indeed. There had been aeons when other Things ruled on the earth, and They had had great cities. Remains of Them, he said the deathless Chinamen had told him, were still to be found as Cyclopean stones on islands in the Pacific. They all died vast epochs of time before men came, but there were arts which could revive Them when the stars had come round again to the right positions in the cycle of eternity. They had, indeed, come themselves from the stars, and brought Their images with Them.
      These Great Old Ones, Castro continued, were not composed altogether of flesh and blood. They had shape—for did not this star-fashioned image prove it?—but that shape was not made of matter. When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world through the sky; but when the stars were wrong, They could not live. But although They no longer lived, They would never really die. They all lay in stone houses in Their great city of R’lyeh, preserved by the spells of mighty Cthulhu for a glorious resurrection when the stars and the earth might once more be ready for Them. But at that time some force from outside must serve to liberate Their bodies. The spells that preserved Them intact likewise prevented Them from making an initial move, and They could only lie awake in the dark and think whilst uncounted millions of years rolled by. They knew all that was occurring in the universe, but Their mode of speech was transmitted thought. Even now They talked in Their tombs. When, after infinities of chaos, the first men came, the Great Old Ones spoke to the sensitive among them by moulding their dreams; for only thus could Their language reach the fleshly minds of mammals.
      Then, whispered Castro, those first men formed the cult around small idols which the Great Ones shewed them; idols brought in dim aeras from dark stars. That cult would never die till the stars came right again, and the secret priests would take great Cthulhu from His tomb to revive His subjects and resume His rule of earth. The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom. Meanwhile the cult, by appropriate rites, must keep alive the memory of those ancient ways and shadow forth the prophecy of their return.
      In the elder time chosen men had talked with the entombed Old Ones in dreams, but then something had happened. The great stone city R’lyeh, with its monoliths and sepulchres, had sunk beneath the waves; and the deep waters, full of the one primal mystery through which not even thought can pass, had cut off the spectral intercourse. But memory never died, and high-priests said that the city would rise again when the stars were right. Then came out of the earth the black spirits of earth, mouldy and shadowy, and full of dim rumours picked up in caverns beneath forgotten sea-bottoms. But of them old Castro dared not speak much. He cut himself off hurriedly, and no amount of persuasion or subtlety could elicit more in this direction. The size of the Old Ones, too, he curiously declined to mention. Of the cult, he said that he thought the centre lay amid the pathless deserts of Arabia, where Irem, the City of Pillars, dreams hidden and untouched. It was not allied to the European witch-cult, and was virtually unknown beyond its members. No book had ever really hinted of it, though the deathless Chinamen said that there were double meanings in the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred which the initiated might read as they chose, especially the much-discussed couplet:
 
“That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.”

      Legrasse, deeply impressed and not a little bewildered, had inquired in vain concerning the historic affiliations of the cult. Castro, apparently, had told the truth when he said that it was wholly secret. The authorities at Tulane University could shed no light upon either cult or image, and now the detective had come to the highest authorities in the country and met with no more than the Greenland tale of Professor Webb.
      The feverish interest aroused at the meeting by Legrasse’s tale, corroborated as it was by the statuette, is echoed in the subsequent correspondence of those who attended; although scant mention occurs in the formal publications of the society. Caution is the first care of those accustomed to face occasional charlatanry and imposture. Legrasse for some time lent the image to Professor Webb, but at the latter’s death it was returned to him and remains in his possession, where I viewed it not long ago. It is truly a terrible thing, and unmistakably akin to the dream-sculpture of young Wilcox.
      That my uncle was excited by the tale of the sculptor I did not wonder, for what thoughts must arise upon hearing, after a knowledge of what Legrasse had learned of the cult, of a sensitive young man who had dreamed not only the figure and exact hieroglyphics of the swamp-found image and the Greenland devil tablet, but had come in his dreams upon at least three of the precise words of the formula uttered alike by Esquimau diabolists and mongrel Louisianans? Professor Angell’s instant start on an investigation of the utmost thoroughness was eminently natural; though privately I suspected young Wilcox of having heard of the cult in some indirect way, and of having invented a series of dreams to heighten and continue the mystery at my uncle’s expense. The dream-narratives and cuttings collected by the professor were, of course, strong corroboration; but the rationalism of my mind and the extravagance of the whole subject led me to adopt what I thought the most sensible conclusions. So, after thoroughly studying the manuscript again and correlating the theosophical and anthropological notes with the cult narrative of Legrasse, I made a trip to Providence to see the sculptor and give him the rebuke I thought proper for so boldly imposing upon a learned and aged man.
      Wilcox still lived alone in the Fleur-de-Lys Building in Thomas Street, a hideous Victorian imitation of seventeenth-century Breton architecture which flaunts its stuccoed front amidst the lovely colonial houses on the ancient hill, and under the very shadow of the finest Georgian steeple in America. I found him at work in his rooms, and at once conceded from the specimens scattered about that his genius is indeed profound and authentic. He will, I believe, some time be heard from as one of the great decadents; for he has crystallised in clay and will one day mirror in marble those nightmares and phantasies which Arthur Machen evokes in prose, and Clark Ashton Smith makes visible in verse and in painting.
      Dark, frail, and somewhat unkempt in aspect, he turned languidly at my knock and asked me my business without rising. When I told him who I was, he displayed some interest; for my uncle had excited his curiosity in probing his strange dreams, yet had never explained the reason for the study. I did not enlarge his knowledge in this regard, but sought with some subtlety to draw him out. In a short time I became convinced of his absolute sincerity, for he spoke of the dreams in a manner none could mistake. They and their subconscious residuum had influenced his art profoundly, and he shewed me a morbid statue whose contours almost made me shake with the potency of its black suggestion. He could not recall having seen the original of this thing except in his own dream bas-relief, but the outlines had formed themselves insensibly under his hands. It was, no doubt, the giant shape he had raved of in delirium. That he really knew nothing of the hidden cult, save from what my uncle’s relentless catechism had let fall, he soon made clear; and again I strove to think of some way in which he could possibly have received the weird impressions.
      He talked of his dreams in a strangely poetic fashion; making me see with terrible vividness the damp Cyclopean city of slimy green stone—whose geometry, he oddly said, was all wrong—and hear with frightened expectancy the ceaseless, half-mental calling from underground: “Cthulhu fhtagn”, “Cthulhu fhtagn”. These words had formed part of that dread ritual which told of dead Cthulhu’s dream-vigil in his stone vault at R’lyeh, and I felt deeply moved despite my rational beliefs. Wilcox, I was sure, had heard of the cult in some casual way, and had soon forgotten it amidst the mass of his equally weird reading and imagining. Later, by virtue of its sheer impressiveness, it had found subconscious expression in dreams, in the bas-relief, and in the terrible statue I now beheld; so that his imposture upon my uncle had been a very innocent one. The youth was of a type, at once slightly affected and slightly ill-mannered, which I could never like; but I was willing enough now to admit both his genius and his honesty. I took leave of him amicably, and wish him all the success his talent promises.
      The matter of the cult still remained to fascinate me, and at times I had visions of personal fame from researches into its origin and connexions. I visited New Orleans, talked with Legrasse and others of that old-time raiding-party, saw the frightful image, and even questioned such of the mongrel prisoners as still survived. Old Castro, unfortunately, had been dead for some years. What I now heard so graphically at first-hand, though it was really no more than a detailed confirmation of what my uncle had written, excited me afresh; for I felt sure that I was on the track of a very real, very secret, and very ancient religion whose discovery would make me an anthropologist of note. My attitude was still one of absolute materialism, as I wish it still were, and I discounted with almost inexplicable perversity the coincidence of the dream notes and odd cuttings collected by Professor Angell.
      One thing I began to suspect, and which I now fear I know, is that my uncle’s death was far from natural. He fell on a narrow hill street leading up from an ancient waterfront swarming with foreign mongrels, after a careless push from a negro sailor. I did not forget the mixed blood and marine pursuits of the cult-members in Louisiana, and would not be surprised to learn of secret methods and poison needles as ruthless and as anciently known as the cryptic rites and beliefs. Legrasse and his men, it is true, have been let alone; but in Norway a certain seaman who saw things is dead. Might not the deeper inquiries of my uncle after encountering the sculptor’s data have come to sinister ears? I think Professor Angell died because he knew too much, or because he was likely to learn too much. Whether I shall go as he did remains to be seen, for I have learned much now.

III.
The Madness from the Sea.

If heaven ever wishes to grant me a boon, it will be a total effacing of the results of a mere chance which fixed my eye on a certain stray piece of shelf-paper. It was nothing on which I would naturally have stumbled in the course of my daily round, for it was an old number of an Australian journal, the Sydney Bulletin for April 18, 1925. It had escaped even the cutting bureau which had at the time of its issuance been avidly collecting material for my uncle’s research.
      I had largely given over my inquiries into what Professor Angell called the “Cthulhu Cult”, and was visiting a learned friend in Paterson, New Jersey; the curator of a local museum and a mineralogist of note. Examining one day the reserve specimens roughly set on the storage shelves in a rear room of the museum, my eye was caught by an odd picture in one of the old papers spread beneath the stones. It was the Sydney Bulletin I have mentioned, for my friend has wide affiliations in all conceivable foreign parts; and the picture was a half-tone cut of a hideous stone image almost identical with that which Legrasse had found in the swamp.
      Eagerly clearing the sheet of its precious contents, I scanned the item in detail; and was disappointed to find it of only moderate length. What it suggested, however, was of portentous significance to my flagging quest; and I carefully tore it out for immediate action. It read as follows:
MYSTERY DERELICT FOUND AT SEA
Vigilant Arrives With Helpless Armed New Zealand Yacht in Tow.
One Survivor and Dead Man Found Aboard. Tale of
Desperate Battle and Deaths at Sea.
Rescued Seaman Refuses
Particulars of Strange Experience.
Odd Idol Found in His Possession. Inquiry
to Follow.

The Morrison Co.’s freighter Vigilant, bound from Valparaiso, arrived this morning at its wharf in Darling Harbour, having in tow the battled and disabled but heavily armed steam yacht Alert of Dunedin, N. Z., which was sighted April 12th in S. Latitude 34° 21', W. Longitude 152° 17' with one living and one dead man aboard.
      The Vigilant left Valparaiso March 25th, and on April 2nd was driven considerably south of her course by exceptionally heavy storms and monster waves. On April 12th the derelict was sighted; and though apparently deserted, was found upon boarding to contain one survivor in a half-delirious condition and one man who had evidently been dead for more than a week. The living man was clutching a horrible stone idol of unknown origin, about a foot in height, regarding whose nature authorities at Sydney University, the Royal Society, and the Museum in College Street all profess complete bafflement, and which the survivor says he found in the cabin of the yacht, in a small carved shrine of common pattern.
      This man, after recovering his senses, told an exceedingly strange story of piracy and slaughter. He is Gustaf Johansen, a Norwegian of some intelligence, and had been second mate of the two-masted schooner Emma of Auckland, which sailed for Callao February 20th with a complement of eleven men. The Emma, he says, was delayed and thrown widely south of her course by the great storm of March 1st, and on March 22nd, in S. Latitude 49° 51', W. Longitude 128° 34', encountered the Alert, manned by a queer and evil-looking crew of Kanakas and half-castes. Being ordered peremptorily to turn back, Capt. Collins refused; whereupon the strange crew began to fire savagely and without warning upon the schooner with a peculiarly heavy battery of brass cannon forming part of the yacht’s equipment. The Emma’s men shewed fight, says the survivor, and though the schooner began to sink from shots beneath the waterline they managed to heave alongside their enemy and board her, grappling with the savage crew on the yacht’s deck, and being forced to kill them all, the number being slightly superior, because of their particularly abhorrent and desperate though rather clumsy mode of fighting.
      Three of the Emma’s men, including Capt. Collins and First Mate Green, were killed; and the remaining eight under Second Mate Johansen proceeded to navigate the captured yacht, going ahead in their original direction to see if any reason for their ordering back had existed. The next day, it appears, they raised and landed on a small island, although none is known to exist in that part of the ocean; and six of the men somehow died ashore, though Johansen is queerly reticent about this part of his story, and speaks only of their falling into a rock chasm. Later, it seems, he and one companion boarded the yacht and tried to manage her, but were beaten about by the storm of April 2nd. From that time till his rescue on the 12th the man remembers little, and he does not even recall when William Briden, his companion, died. Briden’s death reveals no apparent cause, and was probably due to excitement or exposure. Cable advices from Dunedin report that the Alert was well known there as an island trader, and bore an evil reputation along the waterfront. It was owned by a curious group of half-castes whose frequent meetings and night trips to the woods attracted no little curiosity; and it had set sail in great haste just after the storm and earth tremors of March 1st. Our Auckland correspondent gives the Emma and her crew an excellent reputation, and Johansen is described as a sober and worthy man. The admiralty will institute an inquiry on the whole matter beginning tomorrow, at which every effort will be made to induce Johansen to speak more freely than he has done hitherto.
      This was all, together with the picture of the hellish image; but what a train of ideas it started in my mind! Here were new treasuries of data on the Cthulhu Cult, and evidence that it had strange interests at sea as well as on land. What motive prompted the hybrid crew to order back the Emma as they sailed about with their hideous idol? What was the unknown island on which six of the Emma’s crew had died, and about which the mate Johansen was so secretive? What had the vice-admiralty’s investigation brought out, and what was known of the noxious cult in Dunedin? And most marvellous of all, what deep and more than natural linkage of dates was this which gave a malign and now undeniable significance to the various turns of events so carefully noted by my uncle?
      March 1st—our February 28th according to the International Date Line—the earthquake and storm had come. From Dunedin the Alert and her noisome crew had darted eagerly forth as if imperiously summoned, and on the other side of the earth poets and artists had begun to dream of a strange, dank Cyclopean city whilst a young sculptor had moulded in his sleep the form of the dreaded Cthulhu. March 23d the crew of the Emma landed on an unknown island and left six men dead; and on that date the dreams of sensitive men assumed a heightened vividness and darkened with dread of a giant monster’s malign pursuit, whilst an architect had gone mad and a sculptor had lapsed suddenly into delirium! And what of this storm of April 2nd—the date on which all dreams of the dank city ceased, and Wilcox emerged unharmed from the bondage of strange fever? What of all this—and of those hints of old Castro about the sunken, star-born Old Ones and their coming reign; their faithful cult and their mastery of dreams? Was I tottering on the brink of cosmic horrors beyond man’s power to bear? If so, they must be horrors of the mind alone, for in some way the second of April had put a stop to whatever monstrous menace had begun its siege of mankind’s soul.
      That evening, after a day of hurried cabling and arranging, I bade my host adieu and took a train for San Francisco. In less than a month I was in Dunedin; where, however, I found that little was known of the strange cult-members who had lingered in the old sea-taverns. Waterfront scum was far too common for special mention; though there was vague talk about one inland trip these mongrels had made, during which faint drumming and red flame were noted on the distant hills. In Auckland I learned that Johansen had returned with yellow hair turned white after a perfunctory and inconclusive questioning at Sydney, and had thereafter sold his cottage in West Street and sailed with his wife to his old home in Oslo. Of his stirring experience he would tell his friends no more than he had told the admiralty officials, and all they could do was to give me his Oslo address.
      After that I went to Sydney and talked profitlessly with seamen and members of the vice-admiralty court. I saw the Alert, now sold and in commercial use, at Circular Quay in Sydney Cove, but gained nothing from its non-committal bulk. The crouching image with its cuttlefish head, dragon body, scaly wings, and hieroglyphed pedestal, was preserved in the Museum at Hyde Park; and I studied it long and well, finding it a thing of balefully exquisite workmanship, and with the same utter mystery, terrible antiquity, and unearthly strangeness of material which I had noted in Legrasse’s smaller specimen. Geologists, the curator told me, had found it a monstrous puzzle; for they vowed that the world held no rock like it. Then I thought with a shudder of what old Castro had told Legrasse about the primal Great Ones: “They had come from the stars, and had brought Their images with Them.”
      Shaken with such a mental revolution as I had never before known, I now resolved to visit Mate Johansen in Oslo. Sailing for London, I reëmbarked at once for the Norwegian capital; and one autumn day landed at the trim wharves in the shadow of the Egeberg. Johansen’s address, I discovered, lay in the Old Town of King Harold Haardrada, which kept alive the name of Oslo during all the centuries that the greater city masqueraded as “Christiana”. I made the brief trip by taxicab, and knocked with palpitant heart at the door of a neat and ancient building with plastered front. A sad-faced woman in black answered my summons, and I was stung with disappointment when she told me in halting English that Gustaf Johansen was no more.
      He had not survived his return, said his wife, for the doings at sea in 1925 had broken him. He had told her no more than he had told the public, but had left a long manuscript—of “technical matters” as he said—written in English, evidently in order to safeguard her from the peril of casual perusal. During a walk through a narrow lane near the Gothenburg dock, a bundle of papers falling from an attic window had knocked him down. Two Lascar sailors at once helped him to his feet, but before the ambulance could reach him he was dead. Physicians found no adequate cause for the end, and laid it to heart trouble and a weakened constitution.
      I now felt gnawing at my vitals that dark terror which will never leave me till I, too, am at rest; “accidentally” or otherwise. Persuading the widow that my connexion with her husband’s “technical matters” was sufficient to entitle me to his manuscript, I bore the document away and began to read it on the London boat. It was a simple, rambling thing—a naive sailor’s effort at a post-facto diary—and strove to recall day by day that last awful voyage. I cannot attempt to transcribe it verbatim in all its cloudiness and redundance, but I will tell its gist enough to shew why the sound of the water against the vessel’s sides became so unendurable to me that I stopped my ears with cotton.
      Johansen, thank God, did not know quite all, even though he saw the city and the Thing, but I shall never sleep calmly again when I think of the horrors that lurk ceaselessly behind life in time and in space, and of those unhallowed blasphemies from elder stars which dream beneath the sea, known and favoured by a nightmare cult ready and eager to loose them on the world whenever another earthquake shall heave their monstrous stone city again to the sun and air.
      Johansen’s voyage had begun just as he told it to the vice-admiralty. The Emma, in ballast, had cleared Auckland on February 20th, and had felt the full force of that earthquake-born tempest which must have heaved up from the sea-bottom the horrors that filled men’s dreams. Once more under control, the ship was making good progress when held up by the Alert on March 22nd, and I could feel the mate’s regret as he wrote of her bombardment and sinking. Of the swarthy cult-fiends on the Alert he speaks with significant horror. There was some peculiarly abominable quality about them which made their destruction seem almost a duty, and Johansen shews ingenuous wonder at the charge of ruthlessness brought against his party during the proceedings of the court of inquiry. Then, driven ahead by curiosity in their captured yacht under Johansen’s command, the men sight a great stone pillar sticking out of the sea, and in S. Latitude 47° 9', W. Longitude 126° 43' come upon a coast-line of mingled mud, ooze, and weedy Cyclopean masonry which can be nothing less than the tangible substance of earth’s supreme terror—the nightmare corpse-city of R’lyeh, that was built in measureless aeons behind history by the vast, loathsome shapes that seeped down from the dark stars. There lay great Cthulhu and his hordes, hidden in green slimy vaults and sending out at last, after cycles incalculable, the thoughts that spread fear to the dreams of the sensitive and called imperiously to the faithful to come on a pilgrimage of liberation and restoration. All this Johansen did not suspect, but God knows he soon saw enough!
      I suppose that only a single mountain-top, the hideous monolith-crowned citadel whereon great Cthulhu was buried, actually emerged from the waters. When I think of the extent of all that may be brooding down there I almost wish to kill myself forthwith. Johansen and his men were awed by the cosmic majesty of this dripping Babylon of elder daemons, and must have guessed without guidance that it was nothing of this or of any sane planet. Awe at the unbelievable size of the greenish stone blocks, at the dizzying height of the great carven monolith, and at the stupefying identity of the colossal statues and bas-reliefs with the queer image found in the shrine on the Alert, is poignantly visible in every line of the mate’s frightened description.
      Without knowing what futurism is like, Johansen achieved something very close to it when he spoke of the city; for instead of describing any definite structure or building, he dwells only on broad impressions of vast angles and stone surfaces—surfaces too great to belong to any thing right or proper for this earth, and impious with horrible images and hieroglyphs. I mention his talk about angles because it suggests something Wilcox had told me of his awful dreams. He had said that the geometry of the dream-place he saw was abnormal, non-Euclidean, and loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from ours. Now an unlettered seaman felt the same thing whilst gazing at the terrible reality.
      Johansen and his men landed at a sloping mud-bank on this monstrous Acropolis, and clambered slipperily up over titan oozy blocks which could have been no mortal staircase. The very sun of heaven seemed distorted when viewed through the polarising miasma welling out from this sea-soaked perversion, and twisted menace and suspense lurked leeringly in those crazily elusive angles of carven rock where a second glance shewed concavity after the first shewed convexity.
      Something very like fright had come over all the explorers before anything more definite than rock and ooze and weed was seen. Each would have fled had he not feared the scorn of the others, and it was only half-heartedly that they searched—vainly, as it proved—for some portable souvenir to bear away.
      It was Rodriguez the Portuguese who climbed up the foot of the monolith and shouted of what he had found. The rest followed him, and looked curiously at the immense carved door with the now familiar squid-dragon bas-relief. It was, Johansen said, like a great barn-door; and they all felt that it was a door because of the ornate lintel, threshold, and jambs around it, though they could not decide whether it lay flat like a trap-door or slantwise like an outside cellar-door. As Wilcox would have said, the geometry of the place was all wrong. One could not be sure that the sea and the ground were horizontal, hence the relative position of everything else seemed phantasmally variable.
      Briden pushed at the stone in several places without result. Then Donovan felt over it delicately around the edge, pressing each point separately as he went. He climbed interminably along the grotesque stone moulding—that is, one would call it climbing if the thing was not after all horizontal—and the men wondered how any door in the universe could be so vast. Then, very softly and slowly, the acre-great panel began to give inward at the top; and they saw that it was balanced. Donovan slid or somehow propelled himself down or along the jamb and rejoined his fellows, and everyone watched the queer recession of the monstrously carven portal. In this phantasy of prismatic distortion it moved anomalously in a diagonal way, so that all the rules of matter and perspective seemed upset.
      The aperture was black with a darkness almost material. That tenebrousness was indeed a positive quality; for it obscured such parts of the inner walls as ought to have been revealed, and actually burst forth like smoke from its aeon-long imprisonment, visibly darkening the sun as it slunk away into the shrunken and gibbous sky on flapping membraneous wings. The odour arising from the newly opened depths was intolerable, and at length the quick-eared Hawkins thought he heard a nasty, slopping sound down there. Everyone listened, and everyone was listening still when It lumbered slobberingly into sight and gropingly squeezed Its gelatinous green immensity through the black doorway into the tainted outside air of that poison city of madness.
      Poor Johansen’s handwriting almost gave out when he wrote of this. Of the six men who never reached the ship, he thinks two perished of pure fright in that accursed instant. The Thing cannot be described—there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order. A mountain walked or stumbled. God! What wonder that across the earth a great architect went mad, and poor Wilcox raved with fever in that telepathic instant? The Thing of the idols, the green, sticky spawn of the stars, had awaked to claim his own. The stars were right again, and what an age-old cult had failed to do by design, a band of innocent sailors had done by accident. After vigintillions of years great Cthulhu was loose again, and ravening for delight.
      Three men were swept up by the flabby claws before anybody turned. God rest them, if there be any rest in the universe. They were Donovan, Guerrera, and Ångstrom. Parker slipped as the other three were plunging frenziedly over endless vistas of green-crusted rock to the boat, and Johansen swears he was swallowed up by an angle of masonry which shouldn’t have been there; an angle which was acute, but behaved as if it were obtuse. So only Briden and Johansen reached the boat, and pulled desperately for the Alert as the mountainous monstrosity flopped down the slimy stones and hesitated floundering at the edge of the water.
      Steam had not been suffered to go down entirely, despite the departure of all hands for the shore; and it was the work of only a few moments of feverish rushing up and down between wheel and engines to get the Alert under way. Slowly, amidst the distorted horrors of that indescribable scene, she began to churn the lethal waters; whilst on the masonry of that charnel shore that was not of earth the titan Thing from the stars slavered and gibbered like Polypheme cursing the fleeing ship of Odysseus. Then, bolder than the storied Cyclops, great Cthulhu slid greasily into the water and began to pursue with vast wave-raising strokes of cosmic potency. Briden looked back and went mad, laughing shrilly as he kept on laughing at intervals till death found him one night in the cabin whilst Johansen was wandering deliriously.
      But Johansen had not given out yet. Knowing that the Thing could surely overtake the Alert until steam was fully up, he resolved on a desperate chance; and, setting the engine for full speed, ran lightning-like on deck and reversed the wheel. There was a mighty eddying and foaming in the noisome brine, and as the steam mounted higher and higher the brave Norwegian drove his vessel head on against the pursuing jelly which rose above the unclean froth like the stern of a daemon galleon. The awful squid-head with writhing feelers came nearly up to the bowsprit of the sturdy yacht, but Johansen drove on relentlessly. There was a bursting as of an exploding bladder, a slushy nastiness as of a cloven sunfish, a stench as of a thousand opened graves, and a sound that the chronicler would not put on paper. For an instant the ship was befouled by an acrid and blinding green cloud, and then there was only a venomous seething astern; where—God in heaven!—the scattered plasticity of that nameless sky-spawn was nebulously recombining in its hateful original form, whilst its distance widened every second as the Alert gained impetus from its mounting steam.
      That was all. After that Johansen only brooded over the idol in the cabin and attended to a few matters of food for himself and the laughing maniac by his side. He did not try to navigate after the first bold flight, for the reaction had taken something out of his soul. Then came the storm of April 2nd, and a gathering of the clouds about his consciousness. There is a sense of spectral whirling through liquid gulfs of infinity, of dizzying rides through reeling universes on a comet’s tail, and of hysterical plunges from the pit to the moon and from the moon back again to the pit, all livened by a cachinnating chorus of the distorted, hilarious elder gods and the green, bat-winged mocking imps of Tartarus.
      Out of that dream came rescue—the Vigilant, the vice-admiralty court, the streets of Dunedin, and the long voyage back home to the old house by the Egeberg. He could not tell—they would think him mad. He would write of what he knew before death came, but his wife must not guess. Death would be a boon if only it could blot out the memories.
      That was the document I read, and now I have placed it in the tin box beside the bas-relief and the papers of Professor Angell. With it shall go this record of mine—this test of my own sanity, wherein is pieced together that which I hope may never be pieced together again. I have looked upon all that the universe has to hold of horror, and even the skies of spring and the flowers of summer must ever afterward be poison to me. But I do not think my life will be long. As my uncle went, as poor Johansen went, so I shall go. I know too much, and the cult still lives.
      Cthulhu still lives, too, I suppose, again in that chasm of stone which has shielded him since the sun was young. His accursed city is sunken once more, for the Vigilant sailed over the spot after the April storm; but his ministers on earth still bellow and prance and slay around idol-capped monoliths in lonely places. He must have been trapped by the sinking whilst within his black abyss, or else the world would by now be screaming with fright and frenzy. Who knows the end? What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise. Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men. A time will come—but I must not and cannot think! Let me pray that, if I do not survive this manuscript, my executors may put caution before audacity and see that it meets no other eye.
 ",True
"
I

Although I knew nothing of chemistry, I listened fascinated. He picked up
an Easter lily which Geneviève had brought that morning from Notre Dame,
and dropped it into the basin. Instantly the liquid lost its crystalline
clearness. For a second the lily was enveloped in a milk-white foam,
which disappeared, leaving the fluid opalescent. Changing tints of orange
and crimson played over the surface, and then what seemed to be a ray of
pure sunlight struck through from the bottom where the lily was resting.
At the same instant he plunged his hand into the basin and drew out the
flower. ""There is no danger,"" he explained, ""if you choose the right
moment. That golden ray is the signal.""

He held the lily toward me, and I took it in my hand. It had turned to
stone, to the purest marble.

""You see,"" he said, ""it is without a flaw. What sculptor could reproduce
it?""

The marble was white as snow, but in its depths the veins of the lily
were tinged with palest azure, and a faint flush lingered deep in its
heart.

""Don't ask me the reason of that,"" he smiled, noticing my wonder. ""I have
no idea why the veins and heart are tinted, but they always are.
Yesterday I tried one of Geneviève's gold-fish,--there it is.""

The fish looked as if sculptured in marble. But if you held it to the
light the stone was beautifully veined with a faint blue, and from
somewhere within came a rosy light like the tint which slumbers in an
opal. I looked into the basin. Once more it seemed filled with clearest
crystal.

""If I should touch it now?"" I demanded.

""I don't know,"" he replied, ""but you had better not try.""

""There is one thing I'm curious about,"" I said, ""and that is where the
ray of sunlight came from.""

""It looked like a sunbeam true enough,"" he said. ""I don't know, it always
comes when I immerse any living thing. Perhaps,"" he continued, smiling,
""perhaps it is the vital spark of the creature escaping to the source
from whence it came.""

I saw he was mocking, and threatened him with a mahl-stick, but he only
laughed and changed the subject.

""Stay to lunch. Geneviève will be here directly.""

""I saw her going to early mass,"" I said, ""and she looked as fresh and
sweet as that lily--before you destroyed it.""

""Do you think I destroyed it?"" said Boris gravely.

""Destroyed, preserved, how can we tell?""

We sat in the corner of a studio near his unfinished group of the
""Fates."" He leaned back on the sofa, twirling a sculptor's chisel and
squinting at his work.

""By the way,"" he said, ""I have finished pointing up that old academic
Ariadne, and I suppose it will have to go to the Salon. It's all I have
ready this year, but after the success the 'Madonna' brought me I feel
ashamed to send a thing like that.""

The ""Madonna,"" an exquisite marble for which Geneviève had sat, had been
the sensation of last year's Salon. I looked at the Ariadne. It was a
magnificent piece of technical work, but I agreed with Boris that the
world would expect something better of him than that. Still, it was
impossible now to think of finishing in time for the Salon that splendid
terrible group half shrouded in the marble behind me. The ""Fates"" would
have to wait.

We were proud of Boris Yvain. We claimed him and he claimed us on the
strength of his having been born in America, although his father was
French and his mother was a Russian. Every one in the Beaux Arts called
him Boris. And yet there were only two of us whom he addressed in the
same familiar way--Jack Scott and myself.

Perhaps my being in love with Geneviève had something to do with his
affection for me. Not that it had ever been acknowledged between us. But
after all was settled, and she had told me with tears in her eyes that it
was Boris whom she loved, I went over to his house and congratulated him.
The perfect cordiality of that interview did not deceive either of us, I
always believed, although to one at least it was a great comfort. I do
not think he and Geneviève ever spoke of the matter together, but Boris
knew.

Geneviève was lovely. The Madonna-like purity of her face might have been
inspired by the Sanctus in Gounod's Mass. But I was always glad when she
changed that mood for what we called her ""April Manoeuvres."" She was
often as variable as an April day. In the morning grave, dignified and
sweet, at noon laughing, capricious, at evening whatever one least
expected. I preferred her so rather than in that Madonna-like
tranquillity which stirred the depths of my heart. I was dreaming of
Geneviève when he spoke again.

""What do you think of my discovery, Alec?""

""I think it wonderful.""

""I shall make no use of it, you know, beyond satisfying my own curiosity
so far as may be, and the secret will die with me.""

""It would be rather a blow to sculpture, would it not? We painters lose
more than we ever gain by photography.""

Boris nodded, playing with the edge of the chisel.

""This new vicious discovery would corrupt the world of art. No, I shall
never confide the secret to any one,"" he said slowly.

It would be hard to find any one less informed about such phenomena than
myself; but of course I had heard of mineral springs so saturated with
silica that the leaves and twigs which fell into them were turned to
stone after a time. I dimly comprehended the process, how the silica
replaced the vegetable matter, atom by atom, and the result was a
duplicate of the object in stone. This, I confess, had never interested
me greatly, and as for the ancient fossils thus produced, they disgusted
me. Boris, it appeared, feeling curiosity instead of repugnance, had
investigated the subject, and had accidentally stumbled on a solution
which, attacking the immersed object with a ferocity unheard of, in a
second did the work of years. This was all I could make out of the
strange story he had just been telling me. He spoke again after a long
silence.

""I am almost frightened when I think what I have found. Scientists would
go mad over the discovery. It was so simple too; it discovered itself.
When I think of that formula, and that new element precipitated in
metallic scales--""

""What new element?""

""Oh, I haven't thought of naming it, and I don't believe I ever shall.
There are enough precious metals now in the world to cut throats over.""

I pricked up my ears. ""Have you struck gold, Boris?""

""No, better;--but see here, Alec!"" he laughed, starting up. ""You and I
have all we need in this world. Ah! how sinister and covetous you look
already!"" I laughed too, and told him I was devoured by the desire for
gold, and we had better talk of something else; so when Geneviève came in
shortly after, we had turned our backs on alchemy.

Geneviève was dressed in silvery grey from head to foot. The light
glinted along the soft curves of her fair hair as she turned her cheek to
Boris; then she saw me and returned my greeting. She had never before
failed to blow me a kiss from the tips of her white fingers, and I
promptly complained of the omission. She smiled and held out her hand,
which dropped almost before it had touched mine; then she said, looking
at Boris--

""You must ask Alec to stay for luncheon."" This also was something new.
She had always asked me herself until to-day.

""I did,"" said Boris shortly.

""And you said yes, I hope?"" She turned to me with a charming conventional
smile. I might have been an acquaintance of the day before yesterday. I
made her a low bow. ""J'avais bien l'honneur, madame,"" but refusing to
take up our usual bantering tone, she murmured a hospitable commonplace
and disappeared. Boris and I looked at one another.

""I had better go home, don't you think?"" I asked.

""Hanged if I know,"" he replied frankly.

While we were discussing the advisability of my departure Geneviève
reappeared in the doorway without her bonnet. She was wonderfully
beautiful, but her colour was too deep and her lovely eyes were too
bright. She came straight up to me and took my arm.

""Luncheon is ready. Was I cross, Alec? I thought I had a headache, but I
haven't. Come here, Boris;"" and she slipped her other arm through his.
""Alec knows that after you there is no one in the world whom I like as
well as I like him, so if he sometimes feels snubbed it won't hurt him.""

""À la bonheur!"" I cried, ""who says there are no thunderstorms in April?""

""Are you ready?"" chanted Boris. ""Aye ready;"" and arm-in-arm we raced into
the dining-room, scandalizing the servants. After all we were not so much
to blame; Geneviève was eighteen, Boris was twenty-three, and I not quite
twenty-one.




II

Some work that I was doing about this time on the decorations for
Geneviève's boudoir kept me constantly at the quaint little hotel in the
Rue Sainte-Cécile. Boris and I in those days laboured hard but as we
pleased, which was fitfully, and we all three, with Jack Scott, idled a
great deal together.

One quiet afternoon I had been wandering alone over the house examining
curios, prying into odd corners, bringing out sweetmeats and cigars from
strange hiding-places, and at last I stopped in the bathing-room. Boris,
all over clay, stood there washing his hands.

The room was built of rose-coloured marble excepting the floor, which was
tessellated in rose and grey. In the centre was a square pool sunken
below the surface of the floor; steps led down into it, sculptured
pillars supported a frescoed ceiling. A delicious marble Cupid appeared
to have just alighted on his pedestal at the upper end of the room. The
whole interior was Boris' work and mine. Boris, in his working-clothes of
white canvas, scraped the traces of clay and red modelling wax from his
handsome hands, and coquetted over his shoulder with the Cupid.

""I see you,"" he insisted, ""don't try to look the other way and pretend
not to see me. You know who made you, little humbug!""

It was always my rôle to interpret Cupid's sentiments in these
conversations, and when my turn came I responded in such a manner, that
Boris seized my arm and dragged me toward the pool, declaring he would
duck me. Next instant he dropped my arm and turned pale. ""Good God!"" he
said, ""I forgot the pool is full of the solution!""

I shivered a little, and dryly advised him to remember better where he
had stored the precious liquid.

""In Heaven's name, why do you keep a small lake of that gruesome stuff
here of all places?"" I asked.

""I want to experiment on something large,"" he replied.

""On me, for instance?""

""Ah! that came too close for jesting; but I do want to watch the action
of that solution on a more highly organized living body; there is that
big white rabbit,"" he said, following me into the studio.

Jack Scott, wearing a paint-stained jacket, came wandering in,
appropriated all the Oriental sweetmeats he could lay his hands on,
looted the cigarette case, and finally he and Boris disappeared together
to visit the Luxembourg Gallery, where a new silver bronze by Rodin and a
landscape of Monet's were claiming the exclusive attention of artistic
France. I went back to the studio, and resumed my work. It was a
Renaissance screen, which Boris wanted me to paint for Geneviève's
boudoir. But the small boy who was unwillingly dawdling through a series
of poses for it, to-day refused all bribes to be good. He never rested an
instant in the same position, and inside of five minutes I had as many
different outlines of the little beggar.

""Are you posing, or are you executing a song and dance, my friend?"" I
inquired.

""Whichever monsieur pleases,"" he replied, with an angelic smile.

Of course I dismissed him for the day, and of course I paid him for the
full time, that being the way we spoil our models.

After the young imp had gone, I made a few perfunctory daubs at my work,
but was so thoroughly out of humour, that it took me the rest of the
afternoon to undo the damage I had done, so at last I scraped my palette,
stuck my brushes in a bowl of black soap, and strolled into the
smoking-room. I really believe that, excepting Geneviève's apartments, no
room in the house was so free from the perfume of tobacco as this one. It
was a queer chaos of odds and ends, hung with threadbare tapestry. A
sweet-toned old spinet in good repair stood by the window. There were
stands of weapons, some old and dull, others bright and modern, festoons
of Indian and Turkish armour over the mantel, two or three good pictures,
and a pipe-rack. It was here that we used to come for new sensations in
smoking. I doubt if any type of pipe ever existed which was not
represented in that rack. When we had selected one, we immediately
carried it somewhere else and smoked it; for the place was, on the whole,
more gloomy and less inviting than any in the house. But this afternoon,
the twilight was very soothing, the rugs and skins on the floor looked
brown and soft and drowsy; the big couch was piled with cushions--I found
my pipe and curled up there for an unaccustomed smoke in the
smoking-room. I had chosen one with a long flexible stem, and lighting it
fell to dreaming. After a while it went out, but I did not stir. I
dreamed on and presently fell asleep.

I awoke to the saddest music I had ever heard. The room was quite dark, I
had no idea what time it was. A ray of moonlight silvered one edge of the
old spinet, and the polished wood seemed to exhale the sounds as perfume
floats above a box of sandalwood. Some one rose in the darkness, and came
away weeping quietly, and I was fool enough to cry out ""Geneviève!""

She dropped at my voice, and, I had time to curse myself while I made a
light and tried to raise her from the floor. She shrank away with a
murmur of pain. She was very quiet, and asked for Boris. I carried her to
the divan, and went to look for him, but he was not in the house, and the
servants were gone to bed. Perplexed and anxious, I hurried back to
Geneviève. She lay where I had left her, looking very white.

""I can't find Boris nor any of the servants,"" I said.

""I know,"" she answered faintly, ""Boris has gone to Ept with Mr. Scott. I
did not remember when I sent you for him just now.""

""But he can't get back in that case before to-morrow afternoon, and--are
you hurt? Did I frighten you into falling? What an awful fool I am, but I
was only half awake.""

""Boris thought you had gone home before dinner. Do please excuse us for
letting you stay here all this time.""

""I have had a long nap,"" I laughed, ""so sound that I did not know whether
I was still asleep or not when I found myself staring at a figure that
was moving toward me, and called out your name. Have you been trying the
old spinet? You must have played very softly.""

I would tell a thousand more lies worse than that one to see the look of
relief that came into her face. She smiled adorably, and said in her
natural voice: ""Alec, I tripped on that wolf's head, and I think my ankle
is sprained. Please call Marie, and then go home.""

I did as she bade me, and left her there when the maid came in.




III

At noon next day when I called, I found Boris walking restlessly about
his studio.

""Geneviève is asleep just now,"" he told me, ""the sprain is nothing, but
why should she have such a high fever? The doctor can't account for it;
or else he will not,"" he muttered.

""Geneviève has a fever?"" I asked.

""I should say so, and has actually been a little light-headed at
intervals all night. The idea! gay little Geneviève, without a care in
the world,--and she keeps saying her heart's broken, and she wants to
die!""

My own heart stood still.

Boris leaned against the door of his studio, looking down, his hands in
his pockets, his kind, keen eyes clouded, a new line of trouble drawn
""over the mouth's good mark, that made the smile."" The maid had orders to
summon him the instant Geneviève opened her eyes. We waited and waited,
and Boris, growing restless, wandered about, fussing with modelling wax
and red clay. Suddenly he started for the next room. ""Come and see my
rose-coloured bath full of death!"" he cried.

""Is it death?"" I asked, to humour his mood.

""You are not prepared to call it life, I suppose,"" he answered. As he
spoke he plucked a solitary goldfish squirming and twisting out of its
globe. ""We'll send this one after the other--wherever that is,"" he said.
There was feverish excitement in his voice. A dull weight of fever lay on
my limbs and on my brain as I followed him to the fair crystal pool with
its pink-tinted sides; and he dropped the creature in. Falling, its
scales flashed with a hot orange gleam in its angry twistings and
contortions; the moment it struck the liquid it became rigid and sank
heavily to the bottom. Then came the milky foam, the splendid hues
radiating on the surface and then the shaft of pure serene light broke
through from seemingly infinite depths. Boris plunged in his hand and
drew out an exquisite marble thing, blue-veined, rose-tinted, and
glistening with opalescent drops.

""Child's play,"" he muttered, and looked wearily, longingly at me,--as if
I could answer such questions! But Jack Scott came in and entered into
the ""game,"" as he called it, with ardour. Nothing would do but to try the
experiment on the white rabbit then and there. I was willing that Boris
should find distraction from his cares, but I hated to see the life go
out of a warm, living creature and I declined to be present. Picking up a
book at random, I sat down in the studio to read. Alas! I had found
_The King in Yellow_. After a few moments, which seemed ages, I was
putting it away with a nervous shudder, when Boris and Jack came in
bringing their marble rabbit. At the same time the bell rang above, and a
cry came from the sick-room. Boris was gone like a flash, and the next
moment he called, ""Jack, run for the doctor; bring him back with you.
Alec, come here.""

I went and stood at her door. A frightened maid came out in haste and ran
away to fetch some remedy. Geneviève, sitting bolt upright, with crimson
cheeks and glittering eyes, babbled incessantly and resisted Boris'
gentle restraint. He called me to help. At my first touch she sighed and
sank back, closing her eyes, and then--then--as we still bent above her,
she opened them again, looked straight into Boris' face--poor
fever-crazed girl!--and told her secret. At the same instant our three
lives turned into new channels; the bond that held us so long together
snapped for ever and a new bond was forged in its place, for she had
spoken my name, and as the fever tortured her, her heart poured out its
load of hidden sorrow. Amazed and dumb I bowed my head, while my face
burned like a live coal, and the blood surged in my ears, stupefying me
with its clamour. Incapable of movement, incapable of speech, I listened
to her feverish words in an agony of shame and sorrow. I could not
silence her, I could not look at Boris. Then I felt an arm upon my
shoulder, and Boris turned a bloodless face to mine.

""It is not your fault, Alec; don't grieve so if she loves you--"" but he
could not finish; and as the doctor stepped swiftly into the room,
saying--""Ah, the fever!"" I seized Jack Scott and hurried him to the
street, saying, ""Boris would rather be alone."" We crossed the street to
our own apartments, and that night, seeing I was going to be ill too, he
went for the doctor again. The last thing I recollect with any
distinctness was hearing Jack say, ""For Heaven's sake, doctor, what ails
him, to wear a face like that?"" and I thought of _The King in
Yellow_ and the Pallid Mask.

I was very ill, for the strain of two years which I had endured since
that fatal May morning when Geneviève murmured, ""I love you, but I think
I love Boris best,"" told on me at last. I had never imagined that it
could become more than I could endure. Outwardly tranquil, I had deceived
myself. Although the inward battle raged night after night, and I, lying
alone in my room, cursed myself for rebellious thoughts unloyal to Boris
and unworthy of Geneviève, the morning always brought relief, and I
returned to Geneviève and to my dear Boris with a heart washed clean by
the tempests of the night.

Never in word or deed or thought while with them had I betrayed my sorrow
even to myself.

The mask of self-deception was no longer a mask for me, it was a part of
me. Night lifted it, laying bare the stifled truth below; but there was
no one to see except myself, and when the day broke the mask fell back
again of its own accord. These thoughts passed through my troubled mind
as I lay sick, but they were hopelessly entangled with visions of white
creatures, heavy as stone, crawling about in Boris' basin,--of the wolf's
head on the rug, foaming and snapping at Geneviève, who lay smiling
beside it. I thought, too, of the King in Yellow wrapped in the fantastic
colours of his tattered mantle, and that bitter cry of Cassilda, ""Not
upon us, oh King, not upon us!"" Feverishly I struggled to put it from me,
but I saw the lake of Hali, thin and blank, without a ripple or wind to
stir it, and I saw the towers of Carcosa behind the moon. Aldebaran, the
Hyades, Alar, Hastur, glided through the cloud-rifts which fluttered and
flapped as they passed like the scolloped tatters of the King in Yellow.
Among all these, one sane thought persisted. It never wavered, no matter
what else was going on in my disordered mind, that my chief reason for
existing was to meet some requirement of Boris and Geneviève. What this
obligation was, its nature, was never clear; sometimes it seemed to be
protection, sometimes support, through a great crisis. Whatever it seemed
to be for the time, its weight rested only on me, and I was never so ill
or so weak that I did not respond with my whole soul. There were always
crowds of faces about me, mostly strange, but a few I recognized, Boris
among them. Afterward they told me that this could not have been, but I
know that once at least he bent over me. It was only a touch, a faint
echo of his voice, then the clouds settled back on my senses, and I lost
him, but he _did_ stand there and bend over me _once_ at least.

At last, one morning I awoke to find the sunlight falling across my bed,
and Jack Scott reading beside me. I had not strength enough to speak
aloud, neither could I think, much less remember, but I could smile
feebly, as Jack's eye met mine, and when he jumped up and asked eagerly
if I wanted anything, I could whisper, ""Yes--Boris."" Jack moved to the
head of my bed, and leaned down to arrange my pillow: I did not see his
face, but he answered heartily, ""You must wait, Alec; you are too weak to
see even Boris.""

I waited and I grew strong; in a few days I was able to see whom I would,
but meanwhile I had thought and remembered. From the moment when all the
past grew clear again in my mind, I never doubted what I should do when
the time came, and I felt sure that Boris would have resolved upon the
same course so far as he was concerned; as for what pertained to me
alone, I knew he would see that also as I did. I no longer asked for any
one. I never inquired why no message came from them; why during the week
I lay there, waiting and growing stronger, I never heard their name
spoken. Preoccupied with my own searchings for the right way, and with my
feeble but determined fight against despair, I simply acquiesced in
Jack's reticence, taking for granted that he was afraid to speak of them,
lest I should turn unruly and insist on seeing them. Meanwhile I said
over and over to myself, how would it be when life began again for us
all? We would take up our relations exactly as they were before Geneviève
fell ill. Boris and I would look into each other's eyes, and there would
be neither rancour nor cowardice nor mistrust in that glance. I would be
with them again for a little while in the dear intimacy of their home,
and then, without pretext or explanation, I would disappear from their
lives for ever. Boris would know; Geneviève--the only comfort was that
she would never know. It seemed, as I thought it over, that I had found
the meaning of that sense of obligation which had persisted all through
my delirium, and the only possible answer to it. So, when I was quite
ready, I beckoned Jack to me one day, and said--

""Jack, I want Boris at once; and take my dearest greeting to
Geneviève....""

When at last he made me understand that they were both dead, I fell into
a wild rage that tore all my little convalescent strength to atoms. I
raved and cursed myself into a relapse, from which I crawled forth some
weeks afterward a boy of twenty-one who believed that his youth was gone
for ever. I seemed to be past the capability of further suffering, and
one day when Jack handed me a letter and the keys to Boris' house, I took
them without a tremor and asked him to tell me all. It was cruel of me to
ask him, but there was no help for it, and he leaned wearily on his thin
hands, to reopen the wound which could never entirely heal. He began very
quietly--

""Alec, unless you have a clue that I know nothing about, you will not be
able to explain any more than I what has happened. I suspect that you
would rather not hear these details, but you must learn them, else I
would spare you the relation. God knows I wish I could be spared the
telling. I shall use few words.

""That day when I left you in the doctor's care and came back to Boris, I
found him working on the 'Fates.' Geneviève, he said, was sleeping under
the influence of drugs. She had been quite out of her mind, he said. He
kept on working, not talking any more, and I watched him. Before long, I
saw that the third figure of the group--the one looking straight ahead,
out over the world--bore his face; not as you ever saw it, but as it
looked then and to the end. This is one thing for which I should like to
find an explanation, but I never shall.

""Well, he worked and I watched him in silence, and we went on that way
until nearly midnight. Then we heard the door open and shut sharply, and
a swift rush in the next room. Boris sprang through the doorway and I
followed; but we were too late. She lay at the bottom of the pool, her
hands across her breast. Then Boris shot himself through the heart."" Jack
stopped speaking, drops of sweat stood under his eyes, and his thin
cheeks twitched. ""I carried Boris to his room. Then I went back and let
that hellish fluid out of the pool, and turning on all the water, washed
the marble clean of every drop. When at length I dared descend the steps,
I found her lying there as white as snow. At last, when I had decided
what was best to do, I went into the laboratory, and first emptied the
solution in the basin into the waste-pipe; then I poured the contents of
every jar and bottle after it. There was wood in the fire-place, so I
built a fire, and breaking the locks of Boris' cabinet I burnt every
paper, notebook and letter that I found there. With a mallet from the
studio I smashed to pieces all the empty bottles, then loading them into
a coal-scuttle, I carried them to the cellar and threw them over the
red-hot bed of the furnace. Six times I made the journey, and at last,
not a vestige remained of anything which might again aid in seeking for
the formula which Boris had found. Then at last I dared call the doctor.
He is a good man, and together we struggled to keep it from the public.
Without him I never could have succeeded. At last we got the servants
paid and sent away into the country, where old Rosier keeps them quiet
with stones of Boris' and Geneviève's travels in distant lands, from
whence they will not return for years. We buried Boris in the little
cemetery of Sèvres. The doctor is a good creature, and knows when to pity
a man who can bear no more. He gave his certificate of heart disease and
asked no questions of me.""

Then, lifting his head from his hands, he said, ""Open the letter, Alec;
it is for us both.""

I tore it open. It was Boris' will dated a year before. He left
everything to Geneviève, and in case of her dying childless, I was to
take control of the house in the Rue Sainte-Cécile, and Jack Scott the
management at Ept. On our deaths the property reverted to his mother's
family in Russia, with the exception of the sculptured marbles executed
by himself. These he left to me.

The page blurred under our eyes, and Jack got up and walked to the
window. Presently he returned and sat down again. I dreaded to hear what
he was going to say, but he spoke with the same simplicity and
gentleness.

""Geneviève lies before the Madonna in the marble room. The Madonna bends
tenderly above her, and Geneviève smiles back into that calm face that
never would have been except for her.""

His voice broke, but he grasped my hand, saying, ""Courage, Alec."" Next
morning he left for Ept to fulfil his trust.




IV

The same evening I took the keys and went into the house I had known so
well. Everything was in order, but the silence was terrible. Though I
went twice to the door of the marble room, I could not force myself to
enter. It was beyond my strength. I went into the smoking-room and sat
down before the spinet. A small lace handkerchief lay on the keys, and I
turned away, choking. It was plain I could not stay, so I locked every
door, every window, and the three front and back gates, and went away.
Next morning Alcide packed my valise, and leaving him in charge of my
apartments I took the Orient express for Constantinople. During the two
years that I wandered through the East, at first, in our letters, we
never mentioned Geneviève and Boris, but gradually their names crept in.
I recollect particularly a passage in one of Jack's letters replying to
one of mine--

""What you tell me of seeing Boris bending over you while you lay ill, and
feeling his touch on your face, and hearing his voice, of course troubles
me. This that you describe must have happened a fortnight after he died.
I say to myself that you were dreaming, that it was part of your
delirium, but the explanation does not satisfy me, nor would it you.""

Toward the end of the second year a letter came from Jack to me in India
so unlike anything that I had ever known of him that I decided to return
at once to Paris. He wrote: ""I am well, and sell all my pictures as
artists do who have no need of money. I have not a care of my own, but I
am more restless than if I had. I am unable to shake off a strange
anxiety about you. It is not apprehension, it is rather a breathless
expectancy--of what, God knows! I can only say it is wearing me out.
Nights I dream always of you and Boris. I can never recall anything
afterward, but I wake in the morning with my heart beating, and all day
the excitement increases until I fall asleep at night to recall the same
experience. I am quite exhausted by it, and have determined to break up
this morbid condition. I must see you. Shall I go to Bombay, or will you
come to Paris?""

I telegraphed him to expect me by the next steamer.

When we met I thought he had changed very little; I, he insisted, looked
in splendid health. It was good to hear his voice again, and as we sat
and chatted about what life still held for us, we felt that it was
pleasant to be alive in the bright spring weather.

We stayed in Paris together a week, and then I went for a week to Ept
with him, but first of all we went to the cemetery at Sèvres, where Boris
lay.

""Shall we place the 'Fates' in the little grove above him?"" Jack asked,
and I answered--

""I think only the 'Madonna' should watch over Boris' grave."" But Jack was
none the better for my home-coming. The dreams of which he could not
retain even the least definite outline continued, and he said that at
times the sense of breathless expectancy was suffocating.

""You see I do you harm and not good,"" I said. ""Try a change without me.""
So he started alone for a ramble among the Channel Islands, and I went
back to Paris. I had not yet entered Boris' house, now mine, since my
return, but I knew it must be done. It had been kept in order by Jack;
there were servants there, so I gave up my own apartment and went there
to live. Instead of the agitation I had feared, I found myself able to
paint there tranquilly. I visited all the rooms--all but one. I could not
bring myself to enter the marble room where Geneviève lay, and yet I felt
the longing growing daily to look upon her face, to kneel beside her.

One April afternoon, I lay dreaming in the smoking-room, just as I had
lain two years before, and mechanically I looked among the tawny Eastern
rugs for the wolf-skin. At last I distinguished the pointed ears and flat
cruel head, and I thought of my dream where I saw Geneviève lying beside
it. The helmets still hung against the threadbare tapestry, among them
the old Spanish morion which I remembered Geneviève had once put on when
we were amusing ourselves with the ancient bits of mail. I turned my eyes
to the spinet; every yellow key seemed eloquent of her caressing hand,
and I rose, drawn by the strength of my life's passion to the sealed door
of the marble room. The heavy doors swung inward under my trembling
hands. Sunlight poured through the window, tipping with gold the wings of
Cupid, and lingered like a nimbus over the brows of the Madonna. Her
tender face bent in compassion over a marble form so exquisitely pure
that I knelt and signed myself. Geneviève lay in the shadow under the
Madonna, and yet, through her white arms, I saw the pale azure vein, and
beneath her softly clasped hands the folds of her dress were tinged with
rose, as if from some faint warm light within her breast.

Bending, with a breaking heart, I touched the marble drapery with my
lips, then crept back into the silent house.

A maid came and brought me a letter, and I sat down in the little
conservatory to read it; but as I was about to break the seal, seeing the
girl lingering, I asked her what she wanted.

She stammered something about a white rabbit that had been caught in the
house, and asked what should be done with it I told her to let it loose
in the walled garden behind the house, and opened my letter. It was from
Jack, but so incoherent that I thought he must have lost his reason. It
was nothing but a series of prayers to me not to leave the house until he
could get back; he could not tell me why, there were the dreams, he
said--he could explain nothing, but he was sure that I must not leave the
house in the Rue Sainte-Cécile.

As I finished reading I raised my eyes and saw the same maid-servant
standing in the doorway holding a glass dish in which two gold-fish were
swimming: ""Put them back into the tank and tell me what you mean by
interrupting me,"" I said.

With a half-suppressed whimper she emptied water and fish into an
aquarium at the end of the conservatory, and turning to me asked my
permission to leave my service. She said people were playing tricks on
her, evidently with a design of getting her into trouble; the marble
rabbit had been stolen and a live one had been brought into the house;
the two beautiful marble fish were gone, and she had just found those
common live things flopping on the dining-room floor. I reassured her and
sent her away, saying I would look about myself. I went into the studio;
there was nothing there but my canvases and some casts, except the marble
of the Easter lily. I saw it on a table across the room. Then I strode
angrily over to it. But the flower I lifted from the table was fresh and
fragile and filled the air with perfume.

Then suddenly I comprehended, and sprang through the hall-way to the
marble room. The doors flew open, the sunlight streamed into my face, and
through it, in a heavenly glory, the Madonna smiled, as Geneviève lifted
her flushed face from her marble couch and opened her sleepy eyes.

","Over the United States stretched an unseen network of secret intrigue woven tirelessly night and day by the busy enemies of civilisation—Reds, parlour-socialists, enemy-aliens, terrorists, Bolsheviki, pseudo-intellectuals, I. W. W.'s, social faddists, and amateur meddlers of every nuance—all the various varieties of the vicious, witless, and mentally unhinged—brought together through the ""cohesive power of plunder"" and the degeneration of cranial tissue.

All over the United States the various departmental divisions of the Secret Service were busily following up these threads of intrigue leading everywhere through the obscurity of this vast and secret maze.

To meet the constantly increasing danger of physical violence and to uncover secret plots threatening sabotage and revolution, there were capable agents in every branch of the Secret Service, both Federal and State.

But in the first months of 1919 something more terrifying than physical violence suddenly threatened civilised America,—a wild, grotesque, incredible threat of a war on human minds!

And, little by little, the United States Government became convinced that this ghastly menace was no dream of a disordered imagination, but that it was real: that among the enemies of civilisation there actually existed a few powerful but perverted minds capable of wielding psychic forces as terrific weapons: that by the sinister use of psychic knowledge controlling these mighty forces the very minds of mankind could be stealthily approached, seized, controlled and turned upon civilisation to aid in the world's destruction.

In terrible alarm the Government turned to England for advice. But Sir William Crookes was dead.

However, in England, Sir Conan Doyle immediately took up the matter, and in America Professor Hyslop was called into consultation.

And then, when the Government was beginning to realise what this awful menace meant, and that there were actually in the United States possibly half a dozen people who already had begun to carry on a diabolical warfare by means of psychic power, for the purpose of enslaving and controlling the very minds of men,—then, in the terrible moment of discovery, a young girl landed in America after fourteen years' absence in Asia.

And this was the amazing girl that Victor Cleves had just married, at Recklow's suggestion, and in the line of professional duty,—and moral duty, perhaps.

It had been a brief, matter-of-fact ceremony. John Recklow, of the Secret Service, was there; also Benton and Selden of the same service.

The bride's lips were unresponsive; cold as the touch of the groom's unsteady hand.

She looked down at her new ring in a blank sort of way, gave her hand listlessly to Recklow and to the others in turn, whispered a timidly comprehensive ""Thank you,"" and walked away beside Cleves as though dazed.

There was a taxicab waiting. Tressa entered. Recklow came out and spoke to Cleves in a low voice.

""Don't worry,"" replied Cleves dryly. ""That's why I married her.""

""Where are you going now?"" inquired Recklow.

""Back to my apartment.""

""Why don't you take her away for a month?""

Cleves flushed with annoyance: ""This is no occasion for a wedding trip. You understand that, Recklow.""

""I understand. But we ought to give her a breathing space. She's had nothing but trouble. She's worn out.""

Cleves hesitated: ""I can guard her better in the apartment. Isn't it safer to go back there, where your people are always watching the street and house day and night?""

""In a way it might be safer, perhaps. But that girl is nearly exhausted. And her value to us is unlimited. She may be the vital factor in this fight with anarchy. Her weapon is her mind. And it's got to have a chance to rest.""

Cleves, with one hand on the cab door, looked around impatiently.

""Do you, also, conclude that the psychic factor is actually part of this damned problem of Bolshevism?""

Recklow's cool eyes measured him: ""Do you?""

""My God, Recklow, I don't know—after what my own eyes have seen.""

""I don't know either,"" said the other calmly, ""but I am taking no chances. I don't attempt to explain certain things that have occurred. But if it be true that a misuse of psychic ability by foreigners—Asiatics—among the anarchists is responsible for some of the devilish things being done in the United States, then your wife's unparalleled knowledge of the occult East is absolutely vital to us. And so I say, better take her away somewhere and give her mind a chance to recover from the incessant strain of these tragic years.""

The two men stood silent for a moment, then Recklow went to the window of the taxicab.

""I have been suggesting a trip into the country, Mrs. Cleves,"" he said pleasantly, ""—into the real country, somewhere,—a month's quiet in the woods, perhaps. Wouldn't it appeal to you?""

Cleves turned to catch her low-voiced answer.

""I should like it very much,"" she said in that odd, hushed way of speaking, which seemed to have altered her own voice and manner since the ceremony a little while before.

Driving back to his apartment beside her, he strove to realise that this girl was his wife.

One of her gloves lay across her lap, and on it rested a slender hand. And on one finger was his ring.

But Victor Cleves could not bring himself to believe that this brand-new ring really signified anything to him,—that it had altered his own life in any way. But always his incredulous eyes returned to that slim finger resting there, unstirring, banded with a narrow circlet of virgin gold.

In the apartment they did not seem to know exactly what to do or say—what attitude to assume—what effort to make.

Tressa went into her own room, removed her hat and furs, and came slowly back into the living-room, where Cleves still stood gazing absently out of the window.

A fine rain was falling.

They seated themselves. There seemed nothing better to do.

He said, politely: ""In regard to going away for a rest, you wouldn't care for the North Woods, I fancy, unless you like winter sports. Do you?""

""I like sunlight and green leaves,"" she said in that odd, still voice.

""Then, if it would please you to go South for a few weeks' rest——""

""Would it inconvenience you?""

Her manner touched him.

""My dear Miss Norne,"" he began, and checked himself, flushing painfully. The girl blushed, too; then, when he began to laugh, her lovely, bashful smile glimmered for the first time.

""I really can't bring myself to realise that you and I are married,"" he explained, still embarrassed, though smiling.

Her smile became an endeavour. ""I can't believe it either, Mr. Cleves,"" she said. ""I feel rather stunned.""

""Hadn't you better call me Victor—under the circumstances?"" he suggested, striving to speak lightly.

""Yes.... It will not be very easy to say it—not for some time, I think.""

""Tressa?""

""Yes.""

""Yes—what?""

""Yes—Victor.""

""That's the idea,"" he insisted with forced gaiety.

""The thing to do is to face this rather funny situation and take it amiably and with good humour. You'll have your freedom some day, you know.""

""Yes—I—know.""

""And we're already on very good terms. We find each other interesting, don't we?""

""Yes.""

""It even seems to me,"" he ventured, ""it certainly seems to me, at times, as though we are approaching a common basis of—of mutual—er—esteem.""

""Yes. I—I do esteem you, Mr. Cleves.""

""In point of fact,"" he concluded, surprised, ""we are friends—in a way. Wouldn't you call it—friendship?""

""I think so, I think I'd call it that,"" she admitted.

""I think so, too. And that is lucky for us. That makes this crazy situation more comfortable—less—well, perhaps less ponderous.""

The girl assented with a vague smile, but her eyes remained lowered.

""You see,"" he went on, ""when two people are as oddly situated as we are, they're likely to be afraid of being in each other's way. But they ought to get on without being unhappy as long as they are quite confident of each other's friendly consideration. Don't you think so, Tressa?""

Her lowered eyes rested steadily on her ring-finger. ""Yes,"" she said. ""And I am not—unhappy, or—afraid.""

She lifted her blue gaze to his; and, somehow, he thought of her barbaric name, Keuke,—and its Yezidee significance, ""heavenly—azure.""

""Are we really going away together?"" she asked timidly.

""Certainly, if you wish.""

""If you, also, wish it, Mr. Cleves.""

He found himself saying with emphasis that he always wished to do what she desired. And he added, more gently:

""You are tired, Tressa—tired and lonely and unhappy.""

""Tired, but not the—others.""

""Not unhappy?""

""No.""

""Aren't you lonely?""

""Not with you.""

The answer came so naturally, so calmly, that the slight sensation of pleasure it gave him arrived only as an agreeable afterglow.

""We'll go South,"" he said.... ""I'm so glad that you don't feel lonely with me.""

""Will it be warmer where we are going, Mr. Cleves?""

""Yes—you poor child! You need warmth and sunshine, don't you? Was it warm in Yian, where you lived so many years?""

""It was always June in Yian,"" she said under her breath.

She seemed to have fallen into a revery; he watched the sensitive face. Almost imperceptibly it changed; became altered, younger, strangely lovely.

Presently she looked up—and it seemed to him that it was not Tressa Norne at all he saw, but little Keuke—Heavenly Azure—of the Yezidee temple, as she dropped one slim knee over the other and crossed her hands above it.

""It was very beautiful in Yian,"" she said, ""—Yian of the thousand bridges and scented gardens so full of lilies. Even after they took me to the temple, and I thought the world was ending, God's skies still remained soft overhead, and His weather fair and golden.... And when, in the month of the Snake, the Eight Sheiks-el-Djebel came to the temple to spread their shrouds on the rose-marble steps, then, after they had departed, chanting the Prayers for the Dead, each to his Tower of Silence, we temple girls were free for a week.... And once I went with Tchagane—a girl—and with Yulun—another girl—and we took our keutch, which is our luggage, and we went to the yaïlak, or summer pavilion on the Lake of the Ghost. Oh, wonderful,—a silvery world of pale-gilt suns and of moons so frail that the cloud-fleece at high-noon has more substance!""

Her voice died out; she sat gazing down at her spread fingers, on one of which gleamed her wedding-ring.

After a little, she went on dreamily:

""On that week, each three months, we were free.... If a young man should please us....""

""Free?"" he repeated.

""To love,"" she explained coolly.

""Oh."" He nodded, but his face became rather grim.

""There came to me at the yaïlak,"" she went on carelessly, ""one Khassar Noïane—Noïane means Prince—all in a surcoat of gold tissue with green vines embroidered, and wearing a green cap trimmed with dormouse, and green boots inlaid with stiff gold....

""He was so young ... a boy. I laughed. I said: 'Is this a Yaçaoul? An Urdu-envoy of Prince Erlik?'—mocking him as young and thoughtless girls mock—not in unfriendly manner—though I would not endure the touch of any man at all.

""And when I laughed at him, this Eighur boy flew into such a rage! Kai! I was amazed.

""'Sou-sou! Squirrel!' he cried angrily at me. 'Learn the Yacaz, little chatterer! Little mocker of men, it is ten blows with a stick you require, not kisses!'

""At that I whistled my two dogs, Bars and Alaga, for I did not think what he said was funny.

""I said to him: 'You had better go home, Khassar Noïane, for if no man has ever pleased me where I am at liberty to please myself, here on the Lake of the Ghost, then be very certain that no boy can please Keuke-Mongol here or anywhere!'

""And at that—kai! What did he say—that monkey?"" She looked at her husband, her splendid eyes ablaze with wrathful laughter, and made a gesture full of angry grace:

""'Squirrel!' he cries—'little malignant sorceress of Yian! May everything high about you become a sandstorm, and everything long a serpent, and everything broad a toad, and everything——'

""But I had had enough, Victor,"" she added excitedly, ""and I made a wild bee bite him on the lip! What do you think of such a courtship?"" she cried, laughing. But Cleves's face was a study in emotions.

And then, suddenly, the laughing mask seemed to slip from the bewitching features of Keuke Mongol; and there was Tressa Norne—Tressa Cleves—disconcerted, paling a little as the memory of her impulsive confidence in this man beside her began to dawn on her more clearly.

""I—I'm sorry——"" she faltered.... ""You'll think me silly—think evil of me, perhaps——""

She looked into his troubled eyes, then suddenly she took her face into both hands and covered it, sitting very still.

""We'll go South together,"" he said in an uncertain voice.... ""I hope you will try to think of me as a friend.... I'm just troubled because I am so anxious to understand you. That is all.... I'm—I'm troubled, too, because I am anxious that you should think well of me. Will you try, always?""

She nodded.

""I want to be your friend, always,"" he said.

""Thank you, Mr. Cleves.""

It was a strange spot he chose for Tressa—strange but lovely in its own unreal and rather spectral fashion—where a pearl-tinted mist veiled the St. Johns, and made exquisite ghosts of the palmettos, and softened the sun to a silver-gilt wafer pasted on a nacre sky.

It was a still country, where giant water-oaks towered, fantastic under their misty camouflage of moss, and swarming with small birds.

Among the trees the wood-ibis stole; without on the placid glass of the stream the eared grebe floated. There was no wind, no stirring of leaves, no sound save the muffled splash of silver mullet, the breathless whirr of a humming-bird, or the hushed rustle of lizards in the woods.

For Tressa this was the blessed balm that heals,—the balm of silence. And, for the first week, she slept most of the time, or lay in her hammock watching the swarms of small birds creeping and flitting amid the moss-draped labyrinths of the live-oaks at her very door.

It had been a little club house before the war, this bungalow on the St. Johns at Orchid Hammock. Its members had been few and wealthy; but some were dead in France and Flanders, and some still remained overseas, and others continued busy in the North.

And these two young people were quite alone there, save for a negro cook and a maid, and an aged negro kennel-master who wore a scarlet waistcoat and cords too large for his shrunken body, and who pottered, pottered through the fields all day, with his whip clasped behind his bent back and the pointers ranging wide, or plodding in at heel with red tongues lolling.

Twice Cleves went a little way for quail, using Benton's dogs; but even here in this remote spot he dared not move out of view of the little house where Tressa lay asleep.

So he picked up only a few brace of birds, and confined his sport to impaling too-familiar scorpions on the blade of his knife.

And all the while life remained unreal for him; his marriage seemed utterly unbelievable; he could not realise it, could not reconcile himself to conditions so incomprehensible.

Also, ever latent in his mind, was knowledge that made him restless—the knowledge that the young girl he had married had been in love with another man: Sanang.

And there were other thoughts—thoughts which had scarcely even taken the shape of questions.

One morning he came from his room and found Tressa on the veranda in her hammock. She had her moon-lute in her lap.

""You feel better—much better!"" he said gaily, saluting her extended hand.

""Yes. Isn't this heavenly? I begin to believe it is life to me, this pearl-tinted world, and the scent of orange bloom and the stillness of paradise itself.""

She gazed out over the ghostly river. Not a wing stirred its glassy surface.

""Is this dull for you?"" she asked in a low voice.

""Not if you are contented, Tressa.""

""You're so nice about it. Don't you think you might venture a day's real shooting?""

""No, I think I won't,"" he replied.

""On my account?""

""Well—yes.""

""I'm so sorry.""

""It's all right as long as you're getting rested. What is that instrument?""

""My moon-lute.""

""Oh, is that what it's called?""

She nodded, touched the strings. He watched her exquisite hands.

""Shall I?"" she inquired a little shyly.

""Go ahead. I'd like to hear it!""

""I haven't touched it in months—not since I was on the steamer."" She sat up in her hammock and began to swing there; and played and sang while swinging in the flecked shadow of the orange bloom:

""Little Isle of Cispangou,
Isle of iris, isle of cherry,
Tell your tiny maidens merry
Clouds are looming over you!
La-ē-la!
La-ē-la!
All your ocean's but a ferry;
Ships are bringing death to you!
La-ē-lou!
La-ē-lou!
""Little Isle of Cispangou,
Half a thousand ships are sailing;
Captain Death commands each crew;
Lo! the ruddy moon is paling!
La-ē-la!
La-ē-la!
Clouds the dying moon are veiling,
Every cloud a shroud for you!
La-ē-lou!
La-ē-lou!""
""Cispangou,"" she explained, ""is the very, very ancient name, among the Mongols, for Japan.""

""It's not exactly a gay song,"" he said. ""What's it about?""

""Oh, it's a very ancient song about the Mongol invasion of Japan. I know scores and scores of such songs.""

She sang some other songs. Afterward she descended from the hammock and came and sat down beside him on the veranda steps.

""I wish I could amuse you,"" she said wistfully.

""Why do you think I'm bored, Tressa? I'm not at all.""

But she only sighed, lightly, and gathered her knees in both arms.

""I don't know how young men in the Western world are entertained,"" she remarked presently.

""You don't have to entertain me,"" he said, smiling.

""I should be happy to, if I knew how.""

""How are young men entertained in the Orient?""

""Oh, they like songs and stories. But I don't think you do.""

He laughed in spite of himself.

""Do you really wish to entertain me?""

""I do,"" she said seriously.

""Then please perform some of those tricks of magic which you can do so amazingly well.""

Her dawning smile faded a trifle. ""I don't—I haven't——"" She hesitated.

""You haven't your professional paraphernalia with you,"" he suggested.

""Oh—as for that——""

""Don't you need it?""

""For some things—some kinds of things.... I could do—other things——""

He waited. She seemed disconcerted. ""Don't do anything you don't wish to do, Tressa,"" he said.

""I was only—only afraid—that if I should do some little things to amuse you, I might stir—stir up—interfere—encounter some sinister current—and betray myself—betray my whereabouts——""

""Well, for heaven's sake don't venture then!"" he said with emphasis. ""Don't do anything to stir up any other wireless—any Yezidee——""

""I am wondering,"" she reflected, ""just what I dare venture to do to amuse you.""

""Don't bother about me. I wouldn't have you try any psychic stunt down here, and run the chance of stirring up some Asiatic devil somewhere!""

She nodded absently, occupied with her own thoughts, sitting there, chin on hand, her musing eyes intensely blue.

""I think I can amuse you,"" she concluded, ""without bringing any harm to myself.""

""Don't try it, Tressa!—--""

""I'll be very careful. Now, sit quite still—closer to me, please.""

He edged closer; and became conscious of an indefinable freshness in the air that enveloped him, like the scent of something young and growing. But it was no magic odour,—merely the virginal scent of her hair and skin that even clung to her summer gown.

He heard her singing under her breath to herself:

""La-ē-la!
La-ē-la!""
and murmuring caressingly in an unknown tongue.

Then, suddenly in the pale sunshine, scores of little birds came hovering around them, alighting all over them. And he saw them swarming out of the mossy festoons of the water-oaks—scores and scores of tiny birds—Parula warblers, mostly—all flitting fearlessly down to alight upon his shoulders and knees, all keeping up their sweet, dreamy little twittering sound.

""This is wonderful,"" he whispered.

The girl laughed, took several birds on her forefinger.

""This is nothing,"" she said. ""If I only dared—wait a moment!—--"" And, to the Parula warblers:

""Go home, little friends of God!""

The air was filled with the musical whisper of wings. She passed her right arm around her husband's neck.

""Look at the river,"" she said.

""Good God!"" he blurted out. And sat dumb.

For, over the St. John's misty surface, there was the span of a bridge—a strange, marble bridge humped up high in the centre.

And over it were passing thousands of people—he could make them out vaguely—see them passing in two never-ending streams—tinted shapes on the marble bridge.

And now, on the farther shore of the river, he was aware of a city—a vast one, with spectral pagoda shapes against the sky——

Her arm tightened around his neck.

He saw boats on the river—like the grotesque shapes that decorate ancient lacquer.

She rested her face lightly against his cheek.

In his ears was a far confusion of voices—the stir and movement of multitudes—noises on ships, boatmen's cries, the creak of oars.

Then, far and sonorous, quavering across the water from the city, the din of a temple gong.

There were bells, too—very sweet and silvery—camel bells, bells from the Buddhist temples.

He strained his eyes, and thought, amid the pagodas, that there were minarets, also.

Suddenly, clear and ringing came the distant muezzin's cry: ""There is no other god but God!... It is noon. Mussulmans, pray!""

The girl's arm slipped from his neck and she shuddered and pushed him from her.

There was nothing, now, on the river or beyond it but the curtain of hanging mist; no sound except the cry of a gull, sharp and querulous in the vapours overhead.

""Have—have you been amused?"" she asked.

""What did you do to me!"" he demanded harshly.

She smiled and drew a light breath like a sigh.

""God knows what we living do to one another,—or to ourselves,"" she said. ""I only tried to amuse you—after taking counsel with the birds.""

""What was that bridge I saw!""

""The Bridge of Ten Thousand Felicities.""

""And the city?""

""Yian.""

""You lived there?""

""Yes.""

He moistened his dry lips and stole another glance at this very commonplace Florida river. Sky and water were blank and still, and the ghostly trees stood tall, reflected palely in the translucent tide.

""You merely made me visualise what you were thinking about,"" he concluded in a voice which still remained unsteady.

""Did you hear nothing?""

He was silent, remembering the bells and the enormous murmur of a living multitude.

""And—there were the birds, too."" She added, with an uncertain smile: ""I do not mean to worry you.... And you did ask me to amuse you.""

""I don't know how you did it,"" he said harshly. ""And the details—those thousands and thousands of people on the bridge!... And there was one, quite near this end of the bridge, who looked back.... A young girl who turned and laughed at us—""

""That was Yulun.""

""Who?""

""Yulun. I taught her English.""

""A temple girl?""

""Yes. From Black China.""

""How could you make me see her!"" he demanded.

""Why do you ask such things? I do not know how to tell you how I do it.""

""It's a dangerous, uncanny knowledge!"" he blurted out; and suddenly checked himself, for the girl's face went white.

""I don't mean uncanny,"" he hastened to add. ""Because it seems to me that what you did by juggling with invisible currents to which, when attuned, our five senses respond, is on the same lines as the wireless telegraph and telephone.""

She said nothing, but her colour slowly returned.

""You mustn't be so sensitive,"" he added. ""I've no doubt that it's all quite normal—quite explicable on a perfectly scientific basis. Probably it's no more mysterious than a man in an airplane over midocean conversing with people ashore on two continents.""

For the remainder of the day and evening Tressa seemed subdued—not restless, not nervous, but so quiet that, sometimes, glancing at her askance, Cleves involuntarily was reminded of some lithe young creature of the wilds, intensely alert and still, immersed in fixed and dangerous meditation.

About five in the afternoon they took their golf sticks, went down to the river, and embarked in the canoe.

The water was glassy and still. There was not a ripple ahead, save when a sleeping gull awoke and leisurely steered out of their way.

Tressa's arms and throat were bare and she wore no hat. She sat forward, wielding the bow paddle and singing to herself in a low voice.

""You feel all right, don't you?"" he asked.

""Oh, I am so well, physically, now! It's really wonderful, Victor—like being a child again,"" she replied happily.

""You're not much more,"" he muttered.

She heard him: ""Not very much more—in years,"" she said.... ""Does Scripture tell us how old Our Lord was when He descended into Hell?""

""I don't know,"" he replied, startled.

After a little while Tressa tranquilly resumed her paddling and singing:

""—And eight tall towers
Guard the route
Of human life,
Where at all hours
Death looks out,
Holding a knife
Rolled in a shroud.
For every man,
Humble or proud,
Mighty or bowed,
Death has a shroud;—for every man,—
Even for Tchingniz Khan!
Behold them pass!—lancer.
Baroulass,
Temple dancer
In tissue gold,
Khiounnou,
Karlik bold,
Christian, Jew,—
Nations swarm to the great Urdu.
Yaçaoul, with your kettledrum,
Warn your Khan that his hour is come!
Shroud and knife at his spurred feet throw,
And bid him stretch his neck for the blow!—""
""You know,"" remarked Cleves, ""that some of those songs you sing are devilish creepy.""

Tressa looked around at him over her shoulder, saw he was smiling, smiled faintly in return.

They were off Orchid Cove now. The hotel and cottages loomed dimly in the silver mist. Voices came distinctly across the water. There were people on the golf course paralleling the river; laughter sounded from the club-house veranda.

They went ashore.",True
"When I drew nigh the nameless city I knew it was accursed. I was traveling in a parched and terrible valley under the moon, and afar I saw it protruding uncannily above the sands as parts of a corpse may protrude from an ill-made grave. Fear spoke from the age-worn stones of this hoary survivor of the deluge, this great-grandfather of the eldest pyramid; and a viewless aura repelled me and bade me retreat from antique and sinister secrets that no man should see, and no man else had dared to see..
Remote in the desert of Araby lies the nameless city, crumbling and inarticulate, its low walls nearly hidden by the sands of uncounted ages. It must have been thus before the first stones of Memphis were laid, and while the bricks of Babylon were yet unbaked. There is no legend so old as to give it a name, or to recall that it was ever alive; but it is told of in whispers around campfires and muttered about by grandams in the tents of sheiks so that all the tribes shun it without wholly knowing why. It was of this place that Abdul Alhazred the mad poet dreamed of the night before he sang his unexplained couplet:
That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons death may die.
I should have known that the Arabs had good reason for shunning the nameless city, the city told of in strange tales but seen by no living man, yet I defied them and went into the untrodden waste with my camel. I alone have seen it, and that is why no other face bears such hideous lines of fear as mine; why no other man shivers so horribly when the night wind rattles the windows. When I came upon it in the ghastly stillness of unending sleep it looked at me, chilly from the rays of a cold moon amidst the desert's heat. And as I returned its look I forgot my triumph at finding it, and stopped still with my camel to wait for the dawn.
For hours I waited, till the east grew grey and the stars faded, and the grey turned to roseate light edged with gold. I heard a moaning and saw a storm of sand stirring among the antique stones though the sky was clear and the vast reaches of desert still. Then suddenly above the desert's far rim came the blazing edge of the sun, seen through the tiny sandstorm which was passing away, and in my fevered state I fancied that from some remote depth there came a crash of musical metal to hail the fiery disc as Memnon hails it from the banks of the Nile. My ears rang and my imagination seethed as I led my camel slowly across the sand to that unvocal place; that place which I alone of living men had seen.
In and out amongst the shapeless foundations of houses and places I wandered, finding never a carving or inscription to tell of these men, if men they were, who built this city and dwelt therein so long ago. The antiquity of the spot was unwholesome, and I longed to encounter some sign or device to prove that the city was indeed fashioned by mankind. There were certain proportions and dimensions in the ruins which I did not like. I had with me many tools, and dug much within the walls of the obliterated edifices; but progress was slow, and nothing significant was revealed. When night and the moon returned I felt a chill wind which brought new fear, so that I did not dare to remain in the city. And as I went outside the antique walls to sleep, a small sighing sandstorm gathered behind me, blowing over the grey stones though the moon was bright and most of the desert still.
I awakened just at dawn from a pageant of horrible dreams, my ears ringing as from some metallic peal. I saw the sun peering redly through the last gusts of a little sandstorm that hovered over the nameless city, and marked the quietness of the rest of the landscape. Once more I ventured within those brooding ruins that swelled beneath the sand like an ogre under a coverlet, and again dug vainly for relics of the forgotten race. At noon I rested, and in the afternoon I spent much time tracing the walls and bygone streets, and the outlines of the nearly vanished buildings. I saw that the city had been mighty indeed, and wondered at the sources of its greatness. To myself I pictured all the spendours of an age so distant that Chaldaea could not recall it, and thought of Sarnath the Doomed, that stood in the land of Mnar when mankind was young, and of Ib, that was carven of grey stone before mankind existed.
All at once I came upon a place where the bed rock rose stark through the sand and formed a low cliff; and here I saw with joy what seemed to promise further traces of the antediluvian people. Hewn rudely on the face of the cliff were the unmistakable facades of several small, squat rock houses or temples; whose interiors might preserve many secrets of ages too remote for calculation, though sandstorms had long effaced any carvings which may have been outside.
Very low and sand-choked were all the dark apertures near me, but I cleared on with my spade and crawled through it, carrying a torch to reveal whatever mysteries it might hold. When I was inside I saw that the cavern was indeed a temple, and beheld plain signs of the race that had lived and worshipped before the desert was a desert. Primitive altars, pillars, and niches, all curiously low, were not absent; and though I saw no sculptures or frescoes, there were many singular stones clearly shaped into symbols by artificial means. The lowness of the chiselled chamber was very strange, for I could hardly kneel upright; but the area was so great that my torch showed only part of it at a time. I shuddered oddly in some of the far corners; for certain altars and stones suggested forgotten rites of terrible, revolting and inexplicable nature and made me wonder what manner of men could have made and frequented such a temple. When I had seen all that the place contained, I crawled out again, avid to find what the temples might yield.
Night had now approached, yet the tangible things I had seen made curiosity stronger than fear, so that I did not flee from the long mooncast shadows that had daunted me when first I saw the nameless city. In the twilight I cleared another aperture and with a new torch crawled into it, finding more vague stones and symbols, though nothing more definite than the other temple had contained the room was just as low, but much less broad, ending in a very narrow passage crowded with obscure and cryptical shrines. About these shrines I was prying when the noise of a wind and my camel outside broke through the stillness and drew me forth to see what could have frightened the beast.
The moon was gleaming vividly over the primitive ruins, lighting a dense cloud of sand that seemed blown by a strong but decreasing wind from some point along the cliff ahead of me. I knew it was this chilly, sandy wind which had disturbed the camel and was about to lead him to a place of better shelter when I chanced to glance up and saw that there was no wind atop the cliff. This astonished me and made me fearful again, but I immediately recalled the sudden local winds that I had seen and heard before at sunrise and sunset, and judged it was a normal thing. I decided it came from some rock fissure leading to a cave, and watched the troubled sand to trace it to its source; soon perceiving that it came from the black orifice of a temple a long distance south of me, almost out of sight. Against the choking sand-cloud I plodded toward this temple, which as I neared it loomed larger than the rest, and shewed a doorway far less clogged with caked sand. I would have entered had not the terrific force of the icy wind almost quenched my torch. It poured madly out of the dark door, sighing uncannily as it ruffled the sand and spread among the weird ruins. Soon it grew fainter and the sand grew more and more still, till finally all was at rest again; but a presence seemed stalking among the spectral stones of the city, and when I glanced at the moon it seemed to quiver as though mirrored in unquiet waters. I was more afraid than I could explain, but not enough to dull my thirst for wonder; so as soon as the wind was quite gone I crossed into the dark chamber from which it had come.
This temple, as I had fancied from the outside, was larger than either of those I had visited before; and was presumably a natural cavern since it bore winds from some region beyond. Here I could stand quite upright, but saw that the stones and altars were as low as those in the other temples. On the walls and roof I beheld for the first time some traces of the pictorial art of the ancient race, curious curling streaks of paint that had almost faded or crumbled away; and on two of the altars I saw with rising excitement a maze of well-fashioned curvilinear carvings. As I held my torch aloft it seemed to me that the shape of the roof was too regular to be natural, and I wondered what the prehistoric cutters of stone had first worked upon. Their engineering skill must have been vast.
Then a brighter flare of the fantastic flame showed that form which I had been seeking, the opening to those remoter abysses whence the sudden wind had blown; and I grew faint when I saw that it was a small and plainly artificial door chiselled in the solid rock. I thrust my torch within, beholding a black tunnel with the roof arching low over a rough flight of very small, numerous and steeply descending steps. I shall always see those steps in my dreams, for I came to learn what they meant. At the time I hardly knew whether to call them steps or mere footholds in a precipitous descent. My mind was whirling with mad thoughts, and the words and warning of Arab prophets seemed to float across the desert from the land that men know to the nameless city that men dare not know. Yet I hesitated only for a moment before advancing through the portal and commencing to climb cautiously down the steep passage, feet first, as though on a ladder.
It is only in the terrible phantasms of drugs or delirium that any other man can have such a descent as mine. The narrow passage led infinitely down like some hideous haunted well, and the torch I held above my head could not light the unknown depths toward which I was crawling. I lost track of the hours and forgot to consult my watch, though I was frightened when I thought of the distance I must have be traversing. There were changes of direction and of steepness; and once I came to a long, low, level passage where I had to wriggle my feet first along the rocky floor, holding torch at arm's length beyond my head. The place was not high enough for kneeling. After that were more of the steep steps, and I was still scrambling down interminably when my failing torch died out. I do not think I noticed it at the time, for when I did notice it I was still holding it above me as if it were ablaze. I was quite unbalanced with that instinct for the strange and the unknown which had made me a wanderer upon earth and a haunter of far, ancient, and forbidden places.
In the darkness there flashed before my mind fragments of my cherished treasury of daemonic lore; sentences from Alhazred the mad Arab, paragraphs from the apocryphal nightmares of Damascius, and infamous lines from the delirious Image du Monde of Gauthier de Metz. I repeated queer extracts, and muttered of Afrasiab and the daemons that floated with him down the Oxus; later chanting over and over again a phrase from one of Lord Dunsany's tales--""The unreveberate blackness of the abyss."" Once when the descent grew amazingly steep I recited something in sing-song from Thomas Moore until I feared to recite more:
A reservoir of darkness, black
As witches' cauldrons are, when fill'd
With moon-drugs in th' eclipse distill'd
Leaning to look if foot might pass
Down thro' that chasm, I saw, beneath,
As far as vision could explore,
The jetty sides as smooth as glass,
Looking as if just varnish'd o'er
With that dark pitch the Seat of Death
Throws out upon its slimy shore.
Time had quite ceased to exist when my feet again felt a level floor, and I found myself in a place slightly higher than the rooms in the two smaller temples now so incalculably far above my head. I could not quite stand, but could kneel upright, and in the dark I shuffled and crept hither and thither at random. I soon knew that I was in a narrow passage whose walls were lined with cases of wood having glass fronts. As in that Palaeozoic and abysmal place I felt of such things as polished wood and glass I shuddered at the possible implications. The cases were apparently ranged along each side of the passage at regular intervals, and were oblong and horizontal, hideously like coffins in shape and size. When I tried to move two or three for further examination, I found that they were firmly fastened.
I saw that the passage was a long one, so floundered ahead rapidly in a creeping run that would have seemed horrible had any eye watched me in the blackness; crossing from side to side occasionally to feel of my surroundings and be sure the walls and rows of cases still stretched on. Man is so used to thinking visually that I almost forgot the darkness and pictured the endless corridor of wood and glass in its low-studded monotony as though I saw it. And then in a moment of indescribable emotion I did see it.
Just when my fancy merged into real sight I cannot tell; but there came a gradual glow ahead, and all at once I knew that I saw the dim outlines of a corridor and the cases, revealed by some unknown subterranean phosphorescence. For a little while all was exactly as I had imagined it, since the glow was very faint; but as I mechanically kept stumbling ahead into the stronger light I realised that my fancy had been but feeble. This hall was no relic of crudity like the temples in the city above, but a monument of the most magnificent and exotic art. Rich, vivid, and daringly fantastic designs and pictures formed a continuous scheme of mural paintings whose lines and colours were beyond description. The cases were of a strange golden wood, with fronts of exquisite glass, and containing the mummified forms of creatures outreaching in grotesqueness the most chaotic dreams of man.
To convey any idea of these monstrosities is impossible. They were of the reptile kind, with body lines suggestion sometimes the crocodile, sometimes the seal, but more often nothing of which either the naturalist or the palaeontologist ever heard. In size they approximated a small man, and their fore-legs bore delicate and evident feet curiously like human hands and fingers. But strangest of all were their heads, which presented a contour violating all known biological principles. To nothing can such things be well compared--in one flash I thought of comparisons as varied as the cat, the bullfrog, the mythic Satyr, and the human being. Not Jove himself had had so colossal and protuberant a forehead, yet the horns and the noselessness and the alligator-like jaw placed things outside all established categories. I debated for a time on the reality of the mummies, half suspecting they were artificial idols; but soon decided they were indeed some palaeogean species which had lived when the nameless city was alive. To crown their grotesqueness, most of them were gorgeously enrobed in the costliest of fabrics, and lavishly laden with ornaments of gold, jewels, and unknown shining metals.
The importance of these crawling creatures must have been vast, for they held first place among the wild designs on the frescoed walls and ceiling. With matchless skill had the artist drawn them in a world of their own, wherein they had cities and gardens fashioned to suit their dimensions; and I could not help but think that their pictured history was allegorical, perhaps showing the progress of the race that worshipped them. These creatures, I said to myself, were to men of the nameless city what the she-wolf was to Rome, or some totem-beast is to a tribe of Indians.
Holding this view, I could trace roughly a wonderful epic of the nameless city; the tale of a mighty seacoast metropolis that ruled the world before Africa rose out of the waves, and of its struggles as the sea shrank away, and the desert crept into the fertile valley that held it. I saw its wars and triumphs, its troubles and defeats, and afterwards its terrible fight against the desert when thousands of its people--here represented in allegory by the grotesque reptiles--were driven to chisel their way down through the rocks in some marvellous manner to another world whereof their prophets had told them. It was all vividly weird and realistic, and its connection with the awesome descent I had made was unmistakable. I even recognized the passages.
As I crept along the corridor toward the brighter light I saw later stages of the painted epic--the leave-taking of the race that had dwelt in the nameless city and the valley around for ten million years; the race whose souls shrank from quitting scenes their bodies had known so long where they had settled as nomads in the earth's youth, hewing in the virgin rock those primal shrines at which they had never ceased to worship. Now that the light was better I studied the pictures more closely and, remembering that the strange reptiles must represent the unknown men, pondered upon the customs of the nameless city. Many things were peculiar and inexplicable. The civilization, which included a written alphabet, had seemingly risen to a higher order than those immeasurably later civilizations of Egypt and Chaldaea, yet there were curious omissions. I could, for example, find no pictures to represent deaths or funeral customs, save such as were related to wars, violence, and plagues; and I wondered at the reticence shown concerning natural death. It was as though an ideal of immortality had been fostered as a cheering illusion.
Still nearer the end of the passage was painted scenes of the utmost picturesqueness and extravagance: contrasted views of the nameless city in its desertion and growing ruin, and of the strange new realm of paradise to which the race had hewed its way through the stone. In these views the city and the desert valley were shewn always by moonlight, golden nimbus hovering over the fallen walls, and half-revealing the splendid perfection of former times, shown spectrally and elusively by the artist. The paradisal scenes were almost too extravagant to be believed, portraying a hidden world of eternal day filled with glorious cities and ethereal hills and valleys. At the very last I thought I saw signs of an artistic anticlimax. The paintings were less skillful, and much more bizarre than even the wildest of the earlier scenes. They seemed to record a slow decadence of the ancient stock, coupled with a growing ferocity toward the outside world from which it was driven by the desert. The forms of the people--always represented by the sacred reptiles--appeared to be gradually wasting away, through their spirit as shewn hovering above the ruins by moonlight gained in proportion. Emaciated priests, displayed as reptiles in ornate robes, cursed the upper air and all who breathed it; and one terrible final scene shewed a primitive-looking man, perhaps a pioneer of ancient Irem, the City of Pillars, torn to pieces by members of the elder race. I remember how the Arabs fear the nameless city, and was glad that beyond this place the grey walls and ceiling were bare.
As I viewed the pageant of mural history I had approached very closely to the end of the low-ceiled hall, and was aware of a gate through which came all of the illuminating phosphorescence. Creeping up to it, I cried aloud in transcendent amazement at what lay beyond; for instead of other and brighter chambers there was only an illimitable void of uniform radiance, such one might fancy when gazing down from the peak of Mount Everest upon a sea of sunlit mist. Behind me was a passage so cramped that I could not stand upright in it; before me was an infinity of subterranean effulgence.
Reaching down from the passage into the abyss was the head of a steep flight of steps--small numerous steps like those of black passages I had traversed--but after a few feet the glowing vapours concealed everything. Swung back open against the left-hand wall of the passage was a massive door of brass, incredibly thick and decorated with fantastic bas-reliefs, which could if closed shut the whole inner world of light away from the vaults and passages of rock. I looked at the step, and for the nonce dared not try them. I touched the open brass door, and could not move it. Then I sank prone to the stone floor, my mind aflame with prodigious reflections which not even a death-like exhaustion could banish.
As I lay still with closed eyes, free to ponder, many things I had lightly noted in the frescoes came back to me with new and terrible significance--scenes representing the nameless city in its heyday--the vegetations of the valley around it, and the distant lands with which its merchants traded. The allegory of the crawling creatures puzzled me by its universal prominence, and I wondered that it would be so closely followed in a pictured history of such importance. In the frescoes the nameless city had been shewn in proportions fitted to the reptiles. I wondered what its real proportions and magnificence had been, and reflected a moment on certain oddities I had noticed in the ruins. I thought curiously of the lowness of the primal temples and of the underground corridor, which were doubtless hewn thus out of deference to the reptile deities there honoured; though it perforce reduced the worshippers to crawling. Perhaps the very rites here involved crawling in imitation of the creatures. No religious theory, however, could easily explain why the level passages in that awesome descent should be as low as the temples--or lower, since one could not even kneel in it. As I thought of the crawling creatures, whose hideous mummified forms were so close to me, I felt a new throb of fear. Mental associations are curious, and I shrank from the idea that except for the poor primitive man torn to pieces in the last painting, mine was the only human form amidst the many relics and symbols of the primordial life.
But as always in my strange and roving existence, wonder soon drove out fear; for the luminous abyss and what it might contain presented a problem worthy of the greatest explorer that a weird world of mystery lay far down that flight of peculiarly small steps I could not doubt, and I hoped to find there those human memorials which the painted corridor had failed to give. The frescoes had pictured unbelievable cities, and valleys in this lower realm, and my fancy dwelt on the rich and colossal ruins that awaited me.
My fears, indeed, concerned the past rather than the future. Not even the physical horror of my position in that cramped corridor of dead reptiles and antediluvian frescoes, miles below the world I knew and faced by another world of eery light and mist, could match the lethal dread I felt at the abysmal antiquity of the scene and its soul. An ancientness so vast that measurement is feeble seemed to leer down from the primal stones and rock-hewn temples of the nameless city, while the very latest of the astounding maps in the frescoes shewed oceans and continents that man has forgotten, with only here and there some vaguely familiar outlines. Of what could have happened in the geological ages since the paintings ceased and the death-hating race resentfully succumbed to decay, no man might say. Life had once teemed in these caverns and in the luminous realm beyond; now I was alone with vivid relics, and I trembled to think of the countless ages through which these relics had kept a silent deserted vigil.
Suddenly there came another burst of that acute fear which had intermittently seized me ever since I first saw the terrible valley and the nameless city under a cold moon, and despite my exhaustion I found myself starting frantically to a sitting posture and gazing back along the black corridor toward the tunnels that rose to the outer world. My sensations were like those which had made me shun the nameless city at night, and were as inexplicable as they were poignant. In another moment, however, I received a still greater shock in the form of a definite sound--the first which had broken the utter silence of these tomb-like depths. It was a deep, low moaning, as of a distant throng of condemned spirits, and came from the direction in which I was staring. Its volume rapidly grew, till it soon reverberated rightfully through the low passage, and at the same time I became conscious of an increasing draught of old air, likewise flowing from the tunnels and the city above. The touch of this air seemed to restore my balance, for I instantly recalled the sudden gusts which had risen around the mouth of the abyss each sunset and sunrise, one of which had indeed revealed the hidden tunnels to me. I looked at my watch and saw that sunrise was near, so bracing myself to resist the gale that was sweeping down to its cavern home as it had swept forth at evening. My fear again waned low, since a natural phenomenon tends to dispel broodings over the unknown.
More and more madly poured the shrieking, moaning night wind into the gulf of the inner earth. I dropped prone again and clutched vainly at the floor for fear of being swept bodily through the open gate into the phosphorescent abyss. Such fury I had not expected, and as I grew aware of an actual slipping of my form toward the abyss I was beset by a thousand new terrors of apprehension and imagination. The malignancy of the blast awakened incredible fancies; once more I compared myself shudderingly to the only human image in that frightful corridor, the man who was torn to pieces by the nameless race, for in the fiendish clawing of the swirling currents there seemed to abide a vindictive rage all the stronger because it was largely impotent. I think I screamed frantically near the last--I was almost mad--of the howling wind-wraiths. I tried to crawl against the murderous invisible torrent, but I could not even hold my own as I was pushed slowly and inexorably toward the unknown world. Finally reason must have wholly snapped; for I fell babbling over and over that unexplainable couplet of the mad Arab Alhazred, who dreamed of the nameless city:
That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die.
Only the grim brooding desert gods know what really took place--what indescribable struggles and scrambles in the dark I endured or what Abaddon guided me back to life, where I must always remember and shiver in the night wind till oblivion--or worse--claims me. Monstrous, unnatural, colossal, was the thing--too far beyond all the ideas of man to be believed except in the silent damnable small hours of the morning when one cannot sleep.
I have said that the fury of the rushing blast was infernal-- cacodaemoniacal--and that its voices were hideous with the pent-up viciousness of desolate eternities. Presently these voices, while still chaotic before me, seemed to my beating brain to take articulate form behind me; and down there in the grave of unnumbered aeon-dead antiquities, leagues below the dawn-lit world of men, I heard the ghastly cursing and snarling of strange-tongued fiends. Turning, I saw outlined against the luminous aether of the abyss that could not be seen against the dusk of the corridor--a nightmare horde of rushing devils; hate distorted, grotesquely panoplied, half transparent devils of a race no man might mistake--the crawling reptiles of the nameless city.
And as the wind died away I was plunged into the ghoul-pooled darkness of earth's bowels; for behind the last of the creatures the great brazen door clanged shut with a deafening peal of metallic music whose reverberations swelled out to the distant world to hail the rising sun as Memnon hails it from the banks of the Nile.
","YAR AM squinted carefully down the blue barrel of his Lee-Enfield, called devoutly on Allah and sent a bullet through the brain of a flying rider.
""Allaho akbar!""
The big Afghan shouted in glee, waving his weapon above his head, ""God is great! By Allah, sahib, I have sent another one of the dogs to Hell!""
His companion peered cautiously over the rim of the sand-pit they had scooped with their hands. He was a lean and wiry American, Steve Clarney by name.
""Good work, old horse,"" said this person. ""Four left. Look—they're drawing off.""
The white-robed horsemen were indeed reining away, clustering together just out of accurate rifle-range, as if in council. There had been seven when they had first swooped down on the comrades, but the fire from the two rifles in the sand-pit had been deadly.
""Look, sahib—they abandon the fray!""
Yar Ali stood up boldly and shouted taunts at the departing riders, one of whom whirled and sent a bullet that kicked up sand thirty feet in front of the pit.
""They shoot like the sons of dogs,"" said Yar Ali in complacent self- esteem. ""By Allah, did you see that rogue plunge from his saddle as my lead went home? Up, sahib; let us run after them and cut them down!""
Paying no attention to this outrageous proposal—for he knew it was but one of the gestures Afghan nature continually demands—Steve rose, dusted off his breeches and gazing after the riders, now white specks far out on the desert, said musingly: ""Those fellows ride as if they had some set purpose in mind—not a bit like men running from a licking.""
""Aye,"" agreed Yar Ali promptly and seeing nothing inconsistent with his present attitude and recent bloodthirsty suggestion, ""they ride after more of their kind—they are hawks who give up their prey not quickly. We had best move our position quickly, Steve sahib. They will come back—maybe in a few hours, maybe in a few days—it all depends on how far away lies the oasis of their tribe. But they will be back. We have guns and lives—they want both. And behold.""
The Afghan levered out the empty shell and slipped a single cartridge into the breech of his rifle.
""My last bullet, sahib.""
Steve nodded. ""I've got three left.""
The raiders whom their bullets had knocked from the saddle had been looted by their own comrades. No use searching the bodies which lay in the sand for ammunition. Steve lifted his canteen and shook it. Not much water remained. He knew that Yar Ali had only a little more than he, though the big Afridi, bred in a barren land, had used and needed less water than did the American; although the latter, judged from a white man's standards, was hard and tough as a wolf. As Steve unscrewed the canteen cap and drank very sparingly, he mentally reviewed the chain of events that had led them to their present position.
Wanderers, soldiers of fortune, thrown together by chance and attracted to each other by mutual admiration, he and Yar Ali had wandered from India up through Turkistan and down through Persia, an oddly assorted but highly capable pair. Driven by the restless urge of inherent wanderlust, their avowed purpose —which they swore to and sometimes believed themselves—was the accumulation of some vague and undiscovered treasure, some pot of gold at the foot of some yet unborn rainbow.
Then in ancient Shiraz they had heard of the Fire of Asshurbanipal. From the lips of an ancient Persian trader, who only half believed what he repeated to them, they heard the tale that he in turn had heard from the babbling lips of delirium, in his distant youth. He had been a member of a caravan, fifty years before, which, wandering far on the southern shore of the Persian Gulf trading for pearls, had followed the tale of a rare pearl far into the desert.
The pearl, rumored found by a diver and stolen by a shaykh of the interior, they did not find, but they did pick up a Turk who was dying of starvation, thirst and a bullet wound in the thigh. As, he died in delirium, he babbled a wild tale of a silent dead city of black stone set in the drifting sands of the desert far to the westward, and of a flaming gem clutched in the bony fingers of a skeleton on an ancient throne.
He had not dared bring it away with him, because of an overpowering brooding horror that haunted the place, and thirst had driven him into the desert again, where Bedouins had pursued and wounded him. Yet he had escaped, riding hard until his horse fell under him. He died without telling how he had reached the mythical city in the first place, but the old trader thought he must have come from the northwest—a deserter from the Turkish army, making a desperate attempt to reach the Gulf.
The men of the caravan had made no attempt to plunge still further into the desert in search of the city; for, said the old trader, they believed it to be the ancient, ancient City of Evil spoken of in the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Alhazred—the city of the dead on which an ancient curse rested. Legends named it vaguely: the Arabs called it Beled-el-Djinn, the City of Devils, and the Turks, Karashehr, the Black City. And the gem was that ancient and accursed jewel belonging to a king of long ago, whom the Grecians called Sardanapalus and the Semitic peoples Asshurbanipal.
Steve had been fascinated by the tale. Admitting to himself that it was doubtless one of the ten thousand cock-and-bull myths booted about the East, still there was a possibility that he and Yar Ali had stumbled onto a trace of that pot, of rainbow gold for which they searched. And Yar Ali had heard hints before of a silent city of the sands; tales had followed the eastbound caravans over the high Persian uplands and across the sands of Turkistan, into the mountain country and beyond—vague tales; whispers of a black city of the djinn, deep in the hazes of a haunted desert.
So, following the trail of the legend, the companions had tome from Shiraz to a village on the Arabian shore of the Persian Gulf, and there had heard more from an old man who had been a pearl-driver in his youth. The loquacity of age was on him and he told tales repeated to him by wandering tribesmen who had them in turn from the wild nomads of the deep interior; and again Steve and Yar Ah heard of the still black city with giant beasts carved of stone, and the skeleton sultan who held the blazing gem.
And so, mentally swearing at himself for a fool, Steve had made the plunge, and Yar Ali, secure in the knowledge that all things lay on the lap of Allah, had come with him. Their scanty supply of money had been just sufficient to provide riding-camels and provisions for a bold flying invasion of the unknown. Their only chart had been the vague rumors that placed the supposed location of Kara-Shehr.
There had been days of hard travel, pushing the beasts and conserving water and food. Then, deep in the desert they invaded, they had encountered a blinding sand-wind in which they had lost the camels. After that came long miles of staggering through the sands, battered by a flaming sun, subsisting on rapidly dwindling water from their canteens, and food Yar Ali had in a pouch. No thought of finding the mythical city now. They pushed on blindly, in hope of stumbling upon a spring; they knew that behind them no oases lay within a distance they could hope to cover on foot. It was a desperate chance, but their only one.
Then white-clad hawks had swooped down on them, out of the haze of the skyline, and from a shallow and hastily scooped trench the adventurers had exchanged shots with the wild riders who circled them at top speed. The bullets of the Bedouins had skipped through their makeshift fortifications, knocking dust into their eyes and flicking bits of cloth from their garments, but by good chance neither had been hit.
Their one bit of luck, reflected Clarney, as he cursed himself for a fool. What a mad venture it had been, anyway! To think that two men could so dare the desert and live, much less wrest from its abvsmal bosom the secrets of the ages! And that crazy tale of a skeleton hand gripping a flaming jewel in a dead city-bosh! What utter rot! He must have been crazy himself to credit it, the American decided with the clarity of view that suffering and danger bring.
""Well, old horse,"" said Steve, lifting his rifle, ""let's get going. It's a toss-up if we die of thirst or get sniped off by the desert-brothers. Anyway, we're doin' no good here.""
""God gives,"" agreed Yar Ali cheerfully. ""The sun sinks westward. Soon the coolness of night will be upon us. Perhaps we shall find water yet, sabib. Look, the terrain changes to the south.""
Clarney shaded his eyes against the dying sun. Beyond a level, barren expanse of several miles width, the land did indeed become more broken; aborted hills were in evidence. The American slung his rifle over his arm and sighed.
""Heave ahead; we're food for the buzzards anyhow.""
The sun sank and the moon rose, flooding the desert with weird silver light. Drifted sand glimmered in long ripples, as if a sea had suddenly been frozen into immobility. Steve, parched fiercely by a thirst he dared not fully quench, cursed beneath his breath. The desert was beautiful beneath the moon, with the beauty of a cold marble lorelei to lure men to destruction. What a mad quest! his weary brain reiterated; the Fire of Asshurbanipal retreated into the mazes of unreality with each dragging step. The desert became not merely a material wasteland, but the gray mists of the lost eons, in whose depths dreamed sunken things.
Clarney stumbled and swore; was he failing already? Yar Ali swung along with the easy, tireless stride of the mountain man, and Steve set his teeth, nerving himself to greater effort. They were entering the broken country at last, and the going became harder. Shallow gullies and narrow ravines knifed 'the earth with wavering patterns. Most of them were nearly filled with sand, and there was no trace of water.
""This country was once oasis country,"" commented Yar Ali. ""Allah knows how many centuries ago the sand took it, as the sand has taken so many cities in TurkiStan.""
They swung on like dead men in a gray land of death.
The moon grew red and sinister as she sank, and shadowy darkness settled over the desert before they had reached a point where they could see what lay beyond the broken belt. Even the big Afghan's feet began to drag, and Steve kept himself erect only by a savage effort of will. At last they toiled up a sort of ridge, on the southern side of which the land sloped downward.
""We rest,"" declared Steve. ""There's no water in this hellish country. No use in goin' on for ever. My legs are stiff as gun-barrels. I couldn't take another step to save my neck. Here's a kind of stunted cliff, about as high as a man's shoulder, facing south. We'll sleep in the lee of it.
""And shall we not keep watch, Steve sahib?""
""We don't,"" answered Steve. ""If the Arabs cut our throats while we're asleep, so much the better. We're goners anyhow.""
With which optimistic observation Clarney lay down stiffly in the deep sand. But Yar Ali stood, leaning forward, straining his eyes into the elusive darkness that turned the star-flecked horizons to murky wells of shadow.
""Something lies on the skyline to the south,"" he muttered uneasily. ""A hill? I cannot tell, or even be sure that I see anything at all.""
""You're seeing mirages already,"" said Steve irritably. ""Lie down and sleep.""
And so saying Steve slumbered.
The sun in his eves awoke him. He sat up, yawning, and his first sensation was that of thirst. He lifted his canteen and wet his lips. One drink left. Yar Ali still slept. Steve's eves wandered over the southern horizon and he started. He kicked the recumbent Afghan.
""Hey, wake up, Ali. I reckon you weren't seeing things after all. There's your hill—and a queer-lookin' one, too.""
The Afridi woke as a wild thing wakes, instantly and completely, his hand leaping to his long knife as he glared about for enemies. His gaze followed Steve's pointing fingers and his eves widened.
""By Allah and by Allah!"" he swore. ""We have come into a land of djinn! That is no hill—it is a city of stone in the midst of the sands!""
Steve bounded to his feet like a steel spring released. As he gazed with bated breath, a fierce shout escaped his lips. At his feet the slope of the ridge ran down into a wide and level expanse of sand that stretched away southward. And far away, across those sands, to his straining sight the 'hill' slowly took shape, like a mirage growing from the drifting sands.
He saw great uneven walls, massive battlements; all about crawled the sands like a living, sensate thing, drifted high about the walls, softening the rugged outlines. No wonder that at first glance the whole had appeared like a hill.
""Kara-Shehr!"" Clarney exclaimed fiercely. ""Beled-el-Djinn! The city of the dead! It wasn't a pipe-dream after all! We've found it—by Heaven, we've found it! Come on! Let's go!""
Yar Ali shook his head uncertainly and muttered something about evil djinn under his breath, but he followed. The sight of the ruins had swept from Steve his thirst and hunger, and the fatigue that a few hours' sleep had not fully overcome. He trudged on swiftly, oblivious to the rising heat, his eyes gleaming with the lust of the explorer. It was not altogether greed for the fabled gem that had prompted Steve Clarney to risk his life in that grim wilderness; deep in his soul lurked the age-old heritage of the white man, the urge to seek out the hidden places of the world, and that urge had been stirred to the depths by the ancient tales.
Now as they crossed the level wastes that separated the broken land from the city, they saw—the shattered walls take clearer form and shape, as if they grew out of the morning sky. The city seemed built of huge blocks of black stone, but how high the walls had been there was no telling because of the sand that drifted high about their base; in many places they had fallen away and the sand hid the fragments entirely.
The sun reached her zenith and thirst intruded itself in spite of zeal and enthusiasm, but Steve fiercely mastered his suffering. His lips were parched and swollen, but fie would not take that last drink until he had reached the ruined city. Yar Ali wet his lips from his own canteen and tried to share the remainder with his friend. Steve shook his head and plodded on.
In the ferocious heat of the desert afternoon they reached the ruin, and passing through a wide breach in the crumbling wall, gazed on the dead city. Sand choked the ancient streets and lent fantastic form to huge, fallen and half-hidden columns. So crumbled into decay and so covered with sand was the whole that the explorers could make out little of the original plan of the city; now it was but a waste of drifted sand and crumbling stone over which brooded, like an invisible cloud, an aura of unspeakable antiquity.
But directly in front of them ran a broad avenue, the outline of which not even the ravaging sands and winds of time had been able to efface. On either side of the wide way were ranged huge columns, not unusually tall, even allowing for the sand that hid their bases, but incredibly massive. On the top of each column stood a figure carved from solid stone—great, somber images, half human, half bestial, partaking of the brooding brutishness of the whole city. Steve cried out in amazement.
""The winged bulls of Nineveh. The bulls with men's heads! By the saints, AH, the old tales are true! The Assyrians did build this city! The whole tale's true! They must have come here when the Babylonians destroved Assyriawhy, this scene's a dead ringer for pictures I've seen—reconstructed scenes of old Nineveh! And look!""
He pointed down the broad street to the great building which reared at the other end, a colossal, brooding edifice whose columns and walls of solid black stone blocks defied the winds and sands of time. The drifting, obliterating sea washed about its foundations, overflowing into its doorways, but it would require a thousand years to inundate the whole structure.
""An abode of devils!"" muttered Yar Ali, uneasily.
""The temple of Baal!"" exclaimed Steve. ""Come on!—I was afraid we'd find all the palaces and temples hidden by the sand and have to dig for the gem.""
""Little good it will do us,"" muttered Yar Ali. ""Here we die.""
""I reckon so."" Steve unscrewed the cap of his canteen. ""Let's take our last drink. Anyway, we're safe from the Arabs. Thev'd never dare come here, with their superstitions. We'll drink and then we'll die, I reckon, but first we'll find the jewel. When I pass out, I want to have it in my hand. Mavbe a few centuries later some lucky son-of-a-gun will find our skeletons—and the gem. Here's to him, whoever he is!""
With which grim jest Clarney drained his canteen and Yar Ali followed suit. They had played their last ace; the rest lay on the lap of Allah.
They strode up the broad way, and Yar Ali, utterly fearless in the face of human foci, glanced nervously to tight and left, half expecting to see a horned and fantastic face leering at him from behind a column. Steve him felt the somber antiquity of the place, and almost found himself fearing a rush of bronze war chariots down the forgotten streets, or to hear the sudden menacing flare of bronze trumpets. The silence in dead cities was' so much more intense, he reflected, than that on the open desert.
They came to the portals of the great temple. Rows of immense columns flanked the wide doorway, which was ankledeep in sand, and from which sagged massive bronze frameworks that had once braced mighty doors, whose polished woodwork had rotted away centuries ago. They passed into a mighty hall of misty twilight whose shadowy stone roof was upheld by columns like the trunks of forest trees. The whole effect of the architecture was one of awesome magnitude and sullen, breathtaking splendor, like a temple built by somber giants for the abode of dark gods.
Yar-Ali walked fearfully, as if he expected to awake sleeping gods, and Steve, without the Afridi's superstitions, yet felt the gloomy majesty of the place lay somber hands on his soul.
No trace of a footprint showed in the deep dust on the floor; half a century had passed since the affrighted and devilridden Turk had fled these silent halls. As for the Bedouins, it was easy to see why those superstitious sons of the desert shunned this haunted city—and haunted it was, not by actual ghosts, perhaps, but by the shadows of lost splendors.
As they trod the sands of the hall, which seemed endless, Steve pondered many questions: How did these fugitives from the wrath of frenzied rebels build this city? How did they pass through the country of their foes—for Babylonia lay between Assyria and the Arabian desert. Yet there had been no other place for them to go; westward lay Syria and the sea, and north and east swarmed the 'dangerous Medes', those fierce Aryans whose aid had stiffened the arm of Babylon to smite her foe to the dust.
Possibly, thought Steve, Kara-Shehr—whatever its name had been in those dim days—had been built as an outpost border city before the fall of the Assyrian empire, whither survivals of that overthrow fled. At any rate it was possible that Kara-Shehr had outlasted Nineveh by some centuries—a strange, hermit city, no doubt, cut off from the rest of the world.
Surely, as Yar Ali had said, this was once fertile country, watered by oases; and doubtless in the broken country they had passed over the night before, there had been quarries that furnished the stone for the building of the city.
Then what caused its downfall? Did the encroachment of the sands and the filling up of the springs cause the people to abandon it, or was Kara-Shehr a city of silence before the sands crept over the walls? Did the downfall come from within or without? Did civil war blot out the inhabitants, or were they slaughtered by some powerful foe from the desert? Clarney shook his head in baffled chagrin. The answers to those questions were lost in—the maze of forgotten ages.
""Allaho akbar!"" They had traversed the great shadowy hall and at its further end they came upon a hideous black stone altar, behind which loomed an ancient god, bestial and horrific. Steve shrugged his shoulders as he recognized the monstrous aspect of the image—aye, that teas Baal, on which black altar in other ages many a screaming, writhing, naked victim had offered up its naked soul. The idol embodied in its utter, abysmal and sullen bestiality the whole soul of this demoniac city. Surely, thought Steve, the builders of Nineveh and Kara-Shehr were cast in another mold from the people of today. Their art and culture were too ponderous, too grimly Barren of the lighter aspects of humanity, to be wholly human, as modern man understands humanity.
Their architecture was repellent; of high skill, yet so massive, sullen and brutish in effect as to be almost beyond the comprehension of moderns.
The adventurers passed through a narrow door which opened in the end of the hall close to the idol, and came into a series of wide, dim, dusty chambers connected by column-flanked corridors. Along these they strode in the gray ghostly light, and came at last to a wide stair, whose massive stone steps led upward and vanished in the gloom. Here Yar Ali halted.
""We have dared much, sahib,"" he muttered. ""Is it wise to dare more?""
Steve, aquiver with eagerness, yet understood the Afghan's mind. ""You mean we shouldn't, go up those stairs?""
""They have an evil look. To what chambers of silence and horror may they lead? When djinn haunt deserted buildings, they lurk in the upper chambers. At any moment a demon may bite off our heads.""
""We're dead men anyhow,"" grunted Steve. ""But I tell you—you go on back through the hall and watch for the Arabs while I go upstairs.""
""Watch for a wind on the horizon,"" responded the Afghan gloomily, shifting his rifle and loosening his long knife in its scabbard. ""No Bedouin comes here. Lead on, sahib. Thou'rt mad after the manner of all Franks,—but I would not leave thee to face the djinn alone.""
So the companions mounted the massive stairs, their feet sinking deep into the accumulated dust of centuries at each step. Up and up they went, to an incredible height until the depths below merged into a vague gloom.
""We walk blind to our doom, sahib,"" muttered Yar Ali. ""Allah il allah —and Muhammad is his Prophet! Nevertheless, I feel the presence of slumbering Evil and never again shall I hear the wind blowing up the Khyber Pass.""
Steve made no reply. He did not like the breathless silence that brooded over the ancient temple, nor the grisly gray light that filtered from some hidden source.
Now above them the gloom lightened somewhat and they emerged into a vast circular chamber, grayly illumined by light that filtered in through the high, pierced ceiling. But another radiance lent itself to the illumination. A cry burst from Steve's lips, echoed by Yar Ali.
Standing on the top step of the broad stone stair, they looked directly across the broad chamber, with its dustcovered heavy tile floor and bare black stone walls. From about the center of the chamber, massive steps led up to a stone dais, and on this dais stood a marble throne. About this throne glowed and shimmered an uncanny light, and the awestruck adventurers gasped as they saw its source. On the throne slumped a human skeleton, an almost shapeless mass of moldering bones. A fleshless hand sagged outstretched upon the broad marble throne-arm, and in its grisly clasp there pulsed and throbbed like a living thing, a great crimson stone.
The Fire of Asshurbanipal! Even after they had found the lost city Steve had not really allowed himself to believe that they would find the gem, or that it even existed in reality. Yet he could not doubt the evidence of his eyes, dazzled by that evil, incredible glow. With a fierce shout he sprang across the chamber and up the steps. Yar All was at his heels, but when Steve would have seized the gem, the Afghan laid a hand on his arm.
""Wait!"" exclaimed the big Muhammadan. ""Touch it not yet, sahib! A curse lies on ancient things—and surely this is a thing triply accursed! Else why has it lain here untouched in a country of thieves for so many centuries? It is not well to disturb the possessions of the dead.""
""Bosh!"" snorted the American. ""Superstitions! The Bedouins were scared by the tales that have come down to 'em from their ancestors. Being desert- dwellers they mistrust cities anyway, and no doubt this one had an evil reputation in its lifetime. And nobody except Bedouins have seen this place before, except that Turk, who was probably half demented with suffering.
""These bones may be those of the king mentioned in the legend—the dry desert air preserves such things indefinitelybut I doubt it. May be Assyrian—most likely Arab—some beggar that got the gem and then died on that throne for some reason or other.""
The Afghan scarcely heard him. He was gazing in fearful fascination at the great stone, as a hypnotized bird stares into a serpent's eye.
""Look at it, sahib!"" he whispered. ""What is it? No such gem as this was ever cut by. mortal hands! Look how it throbs and pulses like the heart of a cobra!""
Steve was looking, and he was aware of a strange undefined feeling of uneasiness. Well versed in the knowledge of precious stones, he had never seen a stone like this. At first glance he had supposed it to be a monster ruby, as told in the legends. Now he was not sure, and he had a nervous feeling that Yar Ali was right, that this was no natural, normal gem: He could not classify the style in which it was cut, and such was the power of its lurid radiance that he found it difficult to gaze at it closely for any length of time. The whole setting was not one calculated to soothe restless nerves. The deep dust on the floor suggested an unwholesome antiquity; the gray light evoked a sense of unreality, and the heavy black walls towered grimly, hinting at hidden things.
""Let's take the stone, and go!"" muttered Steve, an unaccustomed panicky dread rising in his bosom.
""Wait!"" Yar Ali's eyes were blazing, and he gazed, not at the gem, but at the sullen stone walls. ""We are flies in the lair of the spider! Sahib, as Allah lives, it is more than the ghosts of old fears that lurk over this city of horror! I feel the presence of peril, as I have felt it before—as I felt it in a jungle cavern where a python lurked unseen in—the darkness —as I felt it in the temple of Thuggee where the hidden stranglers of Siva crouched to spring upon us—as I feel it now, tenfold!""
Steve's hair prickled. He knew that Yar All was a grim veteran, not to be stampeded by silly fear or senseless panic; he well remembered the incidents referred to by the Afghan, as he remembered other occasions upon which Yar Ali's Oriental telepathic instinct had warned him of danger before that danger was seen or heard.
""What is it, Yar Ali?"" he whispered.
The Afghan shook his head, his eyes filled with a weird mysterious light as he listened to the dim occult promptings of his subconsciousness.
""I know not; I know it is close to us, and that it is very ancient and very evil. I think—"" Suddenly he halted and wheeled, the eery light vanishing from his eyes to be replaced by a glare of wolf-like fear and suspicion.
""Hark, sahib!"" he snapped. ""Ghosts or dead men mount the stair!""
Steve stiffened as the stealthy pad of soft sandals on stone reached his ear.
""By Judas, Ali!"" he rapped; ""something's out there—""
The ancient walls re-echoed to a chorus of wild yells as a horde of savage figures flooded the chamber. For one dazed insane instant Steve believed wildly that they were being attacked by re-embodied warriors of a vanished age; then the spiteful crack of a bullet past his ear and the acrid smell of powder told him that their foes were material enough. Clarney cursed; in their fancied security—they had been caught like rats in a trap by the pursuing Arabs.
Even as the American threw up his rifle, Yar Ali fired point-blank from the hip with deadly effect, hurled his empty rifle into the horde and went down the steps like a hurricane, his three-foot Khyber knife shimmering in his hairv hand. Into his gusto for battle went real relief that his foes were human. A bullet ripped the turban from his head, but an Arab went down with a split skull beneath the hillman's first, shearing stroke.
A tall Bedouin clapped his gun-muzzle to the Afghan's side, but before he could pull the trigger, Clarney's bullet scattered his brains. The very number of the attackers hindered their onslaught on the big Afridi, whose tigerish quickness made shooting as dangerous to themselves as to him. The bulk of them swarmed about him, striking with scimitar and rifle-stock while others charged up the steps after Steve. At that range there was no missing; the American simply thrust his rifle muzzle into a bearded face and blasted it into a ghastly ruin. The others came on, screaming like panthers.
And now as he prepared to expend his last cartridge, Clarney saw two things in one flashing instant—a wild warrior who, with froth on his beard and a heavy simitar uplifted, was almost upon him, and another who knelt on the floor drawing a careful bead on the plunging Yar Ali. Steve made an instant choice and fired over the shoulder of the charging swordsman, killing the rifleman—and voluntarily offering his own life for his friend's; for the scimitar was swinging at his own head. But even as the Arab swung, grunting with the force of the blow, his sandaled foot slipped on the marble steps and the curved blade, veering erratically from its arc, clashed on Steve's rifle-barrel. In an instant the American clubbed his rifle, and as the Bedouin recovered his balance and again heaved up the scimitar, Clarnev struck with all his rangy power, and stock and skull shattered together.
Then a heavy ball smacked into his shoulder, sickening him with the shock.
As he staggered dizzily, a Bedouin whipped a turbancloth about his feet and jerked viciously. Clarney pitched headlong down the steps, to strike with stunning force. A gun-stock in a brown hand went up to dash out his brains, but an imperious command halted the blow.
""Slay him not, but bind him hand and foot.""
As Steve struggled dazedly against many gripping hands, it seemed to him that somewhere he had heard that imperious voice before.
The American's downfall had occurred in a matter of seconds. Even as Steve's second shot had cracked, Yar Ali had half severed a raider's arm and himself received a numbing blow from a rifle-stock on his left shoulder. His sheepskin coat, worn despite the desert heat, saved his hide from half a dozen slashing knives. A rifle was discharged so close to his face that the powder burnt him fiercely, bringing a bloodthirsty yell from the maddened Afghan. As Yar Ali swung up his dripping blade the rifleman, ashy-faced, lifted his rifle above his head in both hands to parry the downward blow, whereat the Afridi, with a yelp of ferocious exultation, shifted as a junglecat strikes and plunged his long knife into the Arab's belly. But at that instant a rifle-stock, swung with all the hearty ill-will its wielder could evoke, crashed against the giant's head, laying open the scalp and dashing him to his knees.
With the dogged and silent ferocity of his breed, Yar Ali staggered blindly up again, slashing at foes he could scarcely see, but a storm of blows battered him down again, nor did his attackers cease beating him until he lay still. They would have finished him in short order then, but for another peremptory order from their chief; whereupon they bound the senseless knife-man and flung him down alongside Steve, who was fully conscious and aware of the savage hurt of the bullet in his shoulder.
He glared up at the tall Arab who stood looking down at him.
""Well, sabib,"" said this one—and Steve saw he was no Bedouin —""do you not remember me?""
Steve scowled; a bullet-wound is no aid to concentration.
""You look familiar—by Judas!—you are! Nureddin El Mekru!""
""I am honored! The sahib remembers!"" Nureddin salaamed mockingly. ""And you remember, no doubt, the occasion on which you made me a present of—this!""
The dark eyes shadowed with bitter menace and the shaykh indicated a thin white scar on the angle of his jaw...
""I remember,"" snarled Clarney, whom pain and anger did not tend to make docile. ""It was in Somaliland, years ago. You were in the slave-trade then. A wretch of a nigger escaped from you and took refuge with me. You walked into my camp one night in your high-handed way, started a row and in the ensuing scrap you got a butcher-knife across your face. I wish I'd cut your lousy throat.""
""You had your chance,"" answered the Arab. ""Now the tables are turned.""
""I thought your stamping-ground lay west,"" growled Clarney; ""Yemen and the Somali country.""
""I quit the slave-trade long ago,"" answered the shaykh. ""It is an outworn game. I led a band of thieves in Yemen for a time; then again I was forced to change my location. I came here with a few faithful followers, and by Allah, those wild men nearly slit my throat at first. But I overcame their suspicions, and now I lead more men than have followed me in years.
""They whom you fought off yesterday were my men—scouts I had sent out ahead. My oasis lies far to the west. We have ridden for many days, for I was on my way to this very city. When my scouts rode in and told me of two wanderers, I did not alter my course, for I had business first in Beled-el- Djinn. We rode into the city from the west and saw your tracks in the sand. We followed there, and you were blind buffalo who heard not our coming.""
Steve snarled. ""You wouldn't have caught us so easy, only we thought no Bedouin would dare come into Kara-Shehr.""
Nureddin nodded. ""But I am no Bedouin. I have traveled far and seen many lands and many races, and I have read many books. I know that fear is smoke, that the dead are dead, and that djinn and ghosts and curses are mists that the wind blows away. It was because of the tales of the red stone that I came into this forsaken desert. But it has taken months to persuade my men to ride with me here.
""But—I am here! And your presence is a delightful surprise. Doubtless you have guessed why I had you taken alive; I have more elaborate entertainment planned for you and that Pathan swine. Now—I take the Fire of Asshurbanipal and we will go.""
He turned toward the dais, and one of his men, a bearded one-eyed giant, exclaimed, ""Hold, my lord! Ancient evil reigned here before. the days of Muhammad! The djinn howl through these halls when the winds blow, and men have seen ghosts dancing on the walls beneath the moon. No man of mortals has dared this black city for a thousand years—save one, half a century ago, who fled shrieking.
""You have come here from Yemen; you do not know the ancient curse on this foul city, and this evil stone, which pulses like the red heart of Satan! We have followed you here against our judgment, because you have proven yourself a strong man, and have said you hold a charm against all evil beings. You said you but wished to look on this mysterious gem, but now we see it is your intention to take it for yourself. Do not offend the djinn!""
""Nay, Nureddin, do not offend the djinn!"" chorused the other Bedouins. The shaykh's own hard-bitten ruffians, standing in a compact group somewhat apart from the Bedouins, said nothing; hardened to crimes and deeds of impiety, they were less affected by the superstitions of the desert men, to whom the dread tale of the accursed city had been repeated for centuries. Steve, even while hating Nureddin with concentrated venom, realized the magnetic power of the man, the innate leadership that had enabled him to overcome thus far the fears and traditions of ages.
""The curse is laid on infidels who invade the city,"" answered Nureddin, ""not on the Faithful. See, in this chamber have we overcome our kafar foes!""
A white-bearded desert hawk shook his head.
""The curse is more ancient than Muhammad, and recks not of race or creed. Evil men reared this black city in the dawn of the Beginnings of Days. They oppressed our ancestors of the black tents, and warred among themselves; aye, the black walls of this foul city were stained with blood, and echoed to the shouts of unholy revel and the whispers of dark intrigues.
""Thus came the stone to the city: there dwelt a magician at the court of Asshurbanipal, and the black wisdom of ages was not denied to him. To gain honor and power for himself, he dared the horrors of a nameless vast cavern in a dark, untraveled land, and from those fiendhaunted depths he brought that blazing gem, which is carved of the frozen flames of Hell! By reason of his fearful power in black magic, he put a spell on the demon which guarded the ancient gem, and so stole away the stone. And the demon slept in the cavern unknowing.
""So this magician—Xuthltan by name—dwelt in the court of the sultan Asshurbanipal and did magic and forecast events by scanning the lurid deeps of the stone, into which no eyes but his could look unblinded. And men called the stone the Fire of Asshurbanipal, in honor of the king.
""But evil came upon the kingdom and men cried out that it was the curse of the djinn, and the sultan in great fear bade Xuthltan take the gem and cast it into the cavern from which he had taken it, lest worse ill befall them.
""Yet it was not the magician's will to give up the gem wherein he read strange secrets of pre-Adamite days, and he fled to the rebel city of Kara- Shehr, where soon civil war broke out and men strove with one another to possess the gem. Then the king who ruled the city, coveting the stone, seized the magician and put him to death by torture, and in this very room he watched him die; with the gem in his hand the king sat upon the throne—even as he has sat upon the throne—even as he has sat throughout the centuries —even as now he sits!""
The Arab's finger stabbed at the moldering bones on the marble throne, and the wild desert men blenched; even Nureddin's own scoundrels recoiled, catching their breath, but the shaykh showed no sign of perturbation.
""As Xuthltan died,"" continued the old Bedouin, ""he cursed the stone whose magic had not saved him, and he shrieked aloud the fearful words which undid the spell he had put upon the demon in the cavern, and set the monster free. And crying out on the forgotten gods, Cthulhu and Koth and Yog-Sothoth, and all the pre-Adamite Dwellers in the black cities under the sea and the caverns of the earth, he called upon them—to take back that which was theirs, and with his dying breath pronounced doom on the false king, and that doom was that the king should sit on his throne holding in his hand the Fire of Asshurbanipal until the thunder of judgment Day.
""Thereat the great stone cried out as a live thing cries, and the king and his soldiers saw a black cloud spinning up from the floor, and out of the cloud blew a fetid wind, and out of the wind came a grisly shape which stretched forth fearsome paws and laid them on the king, who shriveled and died at their touch. And the soldiers fled screaming, and all the people of the city ran forth wailing into the desert, where they perished or gained through the wastes to the far oasis towns. Kara-Shehr lay silent and deserted, the haunt of the lizard and the jackal. And when some of the desertpeople ventured into the city they found the king dead on his throne, clutching the blazing gem, but they dared not lay hand upon it, for they knew the demon lurked near to guard it through all the ages—as he lurks near even as we stand here.""
The warriors shuddered involuntarily and glanced about, and Nureddin said, ""Why did he not come forth when the Franks entered the chamber? Is he deaf, that the sound of the combat has not awakened him?""
""We have not touched the gem,"" answered the old Bedouin, ""nor had the Franks molested it. Men have looked on it and lived; but no mortal may touch it and survive.""
Nureddin started to speak, gazed at the stubborn, uneasy faces and realized the futility of argument. His attitude changed abruptly.
""I am master here,"" he snapped, dropping a hand to his holster. ""I have not sweat and bled for this gem to be balked at the last by groundless fears! Stand back, all! Let any man cross me at the peril of his head!""
He faced them, his eyes blazing, and they fell back, cowed by the force of his ruthless personality. He strode boldly up the marble steps, and the Arabs caught their breath, recoiling toward the door; Yar Ali, conscious at last, groaned dismally. God! thought Steve, what a barbaric scene!—bound captives on the dust-heaped floor, wild warriors clustered about, gripping their weapons, the raw acrid scent of blood and burnt powder still fouling the air, corpses strewn in a horrid welter of blood, brains and entrails—and on the dais, the hawk-faced shaykh, oblivious to all except the evil crimson glow in the skeleton fingers that rested on the marble throne.
A tense silence gripped all as Nureddin stretched forth his hand slowly, as if hypnotized by the throbbing crimson light. And in Steve's subconsciousness there shuddered a dim echo, as of something vast and loathsome waking suddenly from an age-long slumber. The American's eyes moved instinctively toward the grim cyclopean walls. The jewel's glow had altered strangely; it burned a deeper, darker red, angry and menacing.
""Heart of all evil,"" murmured the shaykh, ""how many princes died for thee in the Beginnings of Happenings? Surely the blood of kings throbs in thee. The sultans and the princesses and the generals who wore thee, they are dust and are forgotten, but thou blazest with majesty undimmed, fire of the world—""
Nureddin seized the stone. A shuddery wail broke from the Arabs, cut through by a sharp inhuman cry. To Steve it seemed, horribly, that the great jewel had cried out like a living thing! The stone slipped from the shaykh's hand. Nureddin might have dropped it; to Steve it looked as though it leaped convulsively, as a live thing might leap. It rolled from the dais, bounding from step to step, with Nureddin springing after it, cursing as his clutching hand missed it. It struck the floor, veered sharply, and despite the deep dust, rolled like a revolving ball of fire toward the back wall. Nureddin was close upon it—it struck the wall—the shaykh's hand reached for it.
A scream of mortal fear ripped the tense silence. Without warning the solid wall had opened. Out of the black wall that gaped there, a tentacle shot and gripped the shaykh's body as a python girdles its victim, and jerked him headlong into the darkness. And then the wall showed blank and solid once more; only from within sounded a hideous, high-pitched, muffled screaming that chilled the blood of the listeners. Howling wordlessly, the Arabs stampeded, jammed in a battling, screeching mass in the doorway, tore through and raced madly down the wide stairs.
Steve and Yar Ali, lying helplessly, heard the frenzied clamor of their flight fade away into the distance, and gazed in dumb horror at the grim wall. The shrieks had faded into a more horrific silence. Holding their breath, they heard suddenly a sound that froze the blood in their veins—the soft sliding of metal or stone in a groove. At the same time the hidden door began to open, and Steve caught a glimmer in the blackness that might have been the glitter of monstrous eyes. He closed his own eyes; he dared not look upon whatever horror slunk from that hideous black well. He knew that there are strains the human brain cannot stand, and every primitive instinct in his soul cried out to him that this thing was nightmare and lunacy. He sensed that Yar Ali likewise closed his eyes, and the two lay like dead men.
Clarney heard no sound, but he sensed the presence of a horrific evil too grisly for human comprehension—of an Invader from Outer Gulfs and far black reaches of cosmic being. A deadly cold pervaded the chamber, and Steve felt the glare of inhuman eyes sear through his closed lids and freeze his consciousness. If he looked, if he opened his eyes, he knew stark black madness would be his instant lot.
He felt a soul-shakingly foul breath against his face and knew that the monster was bending close above him, but he lay like a man frozen in a nightmare. He clung to one thought: neither he nor Yar Ali had touched the jewel this horror guarded.
Then he no longer smelled the foul odor, the coldness in the air grew appreciably less, and he heard again the secret door slide in its groove. The fiend was returning to its hiding-place. Not all the legions of Hell could have prevented Steve's eyes, from opening a trifle. He had only a glimpse as the hidden door slid to—and that one glimpse was enough to drive all consciousness from his brain. Steve Clarney, iron-nerved adventurer, fainted for the only time in his checkered life.
How long he lay there Steve never knew, but it could not have been long, for he was roused by Yar Ali's whisper, ""Lie still, sahib, a little shifting of my body and I can reach thy cords with my teeth.""
Steve felt the Afghan's powerful teeth at work on his bonds, and as he lay with his face jammed into the thick dust, and his wounded shoulder began to throb agonizingly—he had forgotten it until now—he began to gather the wandering threads of his consciousness, and it all came back to him. How much, he wondered dazedly, had been the nightmares of delirium, born from suffering and the thirst that caked his throat? The fight with, the Arabs had been real—the bonds and the wounds showed that—but the grisly doom of the shaykh—the thing that had crept out of the black entrance in the wall—surely that had been a figment of delirium. Nureddin had fallen into a well or pit of some sort—Stave felt his hands were free and he rose to a sitting posture, fumbling for a pocket-knife the Arabs had overlooked. He did not look up or about the chamber as he slashed, the cords that bound his I ankles, and then freed Yar Ali, working awkwardly because his left arm was stiff and useless.
""Where are the Bedouins?"" he asked, as the Afghan rose, lifting him to his feet.
""Allah, sahib,"" whispered Yar Ali, ""are you mad? Have you forgotten? Let us go quickly before the djinn returns!""
""It was a nightmare,"" muttered Steve. ""Look—the jewel is back on the throne—"" His voice died out. Again that red glow throbbed about the ancient throne, reflecting from the moldering skull; again in the outstretched finger-bones pulsed the Fire of Asshurbanipal. But at the foot of the throne lay another object that had not been there before—the severed head of Nureddin el Mekru stared sightlessly up at the gray light filtering through the stone ceiling. The bloodless lips were drawn back from the teeth in a ghastly grin, the staring eyes mirrored an intolerable horror. In the thick dust of the floor three spoors showed—one of the shaykh's where he had followed the red jewel as it rolled to the wall, and above it two other sets of tracks, coming to the throne and returning to the wall—vast, shapeless tracks, as of splayed feet, taloned and gigantic, neither human nor animal.
""My God!"" choked Steve. ""It was true—and the Thing—the Thing I saw—""
Steve remembered the flight from that chamber as a rushing nightmare, in which he and his companion hurtled headlong down an endless stair that was a gray well of fear, raced blindly through dusty silent chambers, past the glowering idol in the mighty hall and into the blazing light of the desert sun, where they fell slavering, fighting for breath.
Again Steve was roused by the Afridi's voice: ""Sahib, sahib, in the Name of Allah the Compassionate, our luck has turned!""
Steve looked at his companion as a man might look in a trance: The big Afghan's garments were in tatters, and blood-soaked. He was stained with dust and caked with blood, and his voice was a croak. But his eyes were alight with hope and he pointed with a trembling finger.
""In the shade of yon ruined wall!"" he croaked, striving to moisten his blackened lips. ""Allah it allah! The horses of the men we killed! With canteens and food-pouches at the saddle-horns! Those dogs fled without halting for the steeds of their comrades!""
New life surged up into Steve's bosom and he rose, staggering.
""Out of here,"" he mumbled. ""Out of here, quick!""
Like dying men they stumbled to the horses, tore them loose and climbed fumblingly into the saddles.
""We'll lead the spare mounts,"" croaked Steve, and Yar Ali nodded emphatic agreement.
""Belike we shall need them ere we sight the coast.""
Though their tortured nerves screamed for the water that swung in canteens at the saddle-horns, they turned the mounts aside and, swaying in the saddle, rode like flying corpses down the long sandy street of Kara-Shehr, between the ruined palaces and the crumbling columns, crossed the fallen wall and swept out into the desert. Not once did either glance back toward that black pile of ancient horror, nor did either speak until the ruins faded into the hazy distance. Then and only then did they draw rein and ease their thirst.
""Allah il allah!"" said Yar Ali piously. ""Those dogs have beaten me until it is as though every bone in my body were broken. Dismount, I beg thee, sahib, and let me probe for that accursed bullet, and dress thy shoulder to the best of my meager ability.""
While this was going on, Yar Ali spoke, avoiding his friend's eye, ""You said, sahib, you said something about—about seeing? What saw ye, in Allah's name?""
A strong shudder shook the American's steely fray ""You didn't look when —when the—the Thing put back the jewel in the skeleton's hand and left Nureddin's head on the dais?""
""By Allah, not I!"" swore Yar Ali. ""My eyes were as closed as if they had been welded together by the molten irons of Satan!""
Steve made no reply until the comrades had once more swung into the saddle and started on their long trek for the coast, which, with spare horses, food, water and weapons, they had a good chance to reach.
""I looked,"" the American said somberly. ""I wish I had not; I know I'll dream about it for the rest of my life. I had only a glance; I couldn't describe it as a man describes an earthly thing. God help me, it wasn't earthly or sane either. Mankind isn't the first owner of the earth; there were Beings here before his coming—and now, survivals of hideously ancient epochs. Maybe spheres of alien dimensions press unseen on this material universe today. Sorcerers have called up sleeping devils before now and controlled them with magic. It is not unreasonable to suppose an Assyrian magician could invoke an elemental demon out of the earth to avenge him and guard something that must have come out of Hell in the first place.""
""I'll try to tell you what I glimpsed; then we'll never speak of it again. It was gigantic and black and shadowy; it was a hulking monstrosity that walked upright like a man, but it was like a toad, too, and it was winged and tentacled. I saw only its back; if I'd seen the front of it—its face —I'd have undoubtedly lost my mind. The old Arab was right; God help us, it was the monster that Xuthltan called up out of the dark blind caverns of the earth to guard the Fire of Asshurbanipal!""


",False
"I can hardly describe the mood in which I was left by this harrowing episode--an episode at once mad and pitiful, grotesque and terrifying. The grocery boy had prepared me for it, yet the reality left me none the less bewildered and disturbed. Puerile though the story was, old Zadok's insane earnestness and horror had communicated to me a mounting unrest which joined with my earlier sense of loathing for the town and its blight of intangible shadow.

Later I might sift the tale and extract some nucleus of historic allegory; just now I wished to put it out of my head. The hour grown perilously late--my watch said 7:15, and the Arkham bus left Town Square at eight--so I tried to give my thoughts as neutral and practical a cast as possible, meanwhile walking rapidly through the deserted streets of gaping roofs and leaning houses toward the hotel where I had checked my valise and would find my bus.

Though the golden light of late afternoon gave the ancient roofs and decrepit chimneys an air of mystic loveliness and peace, I could not help glancing over my shoulder now and then. I would surely be very glad to get out of malodorous and fear-shadowed Innsmouth, and wished there were some other vehicle than the bus driven by that sinister-looking fellow Sargent. Yet I did not hurry too precipitately, for there were architectural details worth viewing at every silent corner; and I could easily, I calculated, cover the necessary distance in a half-hour.

Studying the grocery youth's map and seeking a route I had not traversed before, I chose Marsh Street instead of State for my approach to Town Square. Near the corner of Fall Street I began to see scattered groups of furtive whisperers, and when I finally reached the Square I saw that almost all the loiterers were congregated around the door of the Gilman House. It seemed as if many bulging, watery, unwinking eyes looked oddly at me as I claimed my valise in the lobby, and I hoped that none of these unpleasant creatures would be my fellow-passengers on the coach.

The bus, rather early, rattled in with three passengers somewhat before eight, and an evil-looking fellow on the sidewalk muttered a few indistinguishable words to the driver. Sargent threw out a mail-bag and a roll of newspapers, and entered the hotel; while the passengers--the same men whom I had seen arriving in Newburyport that morning--shambled to the sidewalk and exchanged some faint guttural words with a loafer in a language I could have sworn was not English. I boarded the empty coach and took the seat I had taken before, but was hardly settled before Sargent re-appeared and began mumbling in a throaty voice of peculiar repulsiveness.

I was, it appeared, in very bad luck. There had been something wrong with the engine, despite the excellent time made from Newburyport, and the bus could not complete the journey to Arkham. No, it could not possibly be repaired that night, nor was there any other way of getting transportation out of Innsmouth either to Arkham or elsewhere. Sargent was sorry, but I would have to stop over at the Gilman. Probably the clerk would make the price easy for me, but there was nothing else to do. Almost dazed by this sudden obstacle, and violently dreading the fall of night in this decaying and half-unlighted town, I left the bus and reentered the hotel lobby; where the sullen queer-looking night clerk told me I could have Room 428 on next the top floor--large, but without running water--for a dollar.

Despite what I had heard of this hotel in Newburyport, I signed the register, paid my dollar, let the clerk take my valise, and followed that sour, solitary attendant up three creaking flights of stairs past dusty corridors which seemed wholly devoid of life. My room was a dismal rear one with two windows and bare, cheap furnishings, overlooked a dingy court-yard otherwise hemmed in by low, deserted brick blocks, and commanded a view of decrepit westward-stretching roofs with a marshy countryside beyond. At the end of the corridor was a bathroom--a discouraging relique with ancient marble bowl, tin tub, faint electric light, and musty wooded paneling around all the plumbing fixtures.

It being still daylight, I descended to the Square and looked around for a dinner of some sort; noticing as I did so the strange glances I received from the unwholesome loafers. Since the grocery was closed, I was forced to patronise the restaurant I had shunned before; a stooped, narrow-headed man with staring, unwinking eyes, and a flat-nosed wench with unbelievably thick, clumsy hands being in attendance. The service was all of the counter type, and it relieved me to find that much was evidently served from cans and packages. A bowl of vegetable soup with crackers was enough for me, and I soon headed back for my cheerless room at the Gilman; getting a evening paper and a fly-specked magazine from the evil-visaged clerk at the rickety stand beside his desk.

As twilight deepened I turned on the one feeble electric bulb over the cheap, iron-framed bed, and tried as best I could to continue the reading I had begun. I felt it advisable to keep my mind wholesomely occupied, for it would not do to brood over the abnormalities of this ancient, blight-shadowed town while I was still within its borders. The insane yarn I had heard from the aged drunkard did not promise very pleasant dreams, and I felt I must keep the image of his wild, watery eyes as far as possible from my imagination.

Also, I must not dwell on what that factory inspector had told the Newburyport ticket-agent about the Gilman House and the voices of its nocturnal tenants--not on that, nor on the face beneath the tiara in the black church doorway; the face for whose horror my conscious mind could not account. It would perhaps have been easier to keep my thoughts from disturbing topics had the room not been so gruesomely musty. As it was, the lethal mustiness blended hideously with the town's general fishy odour and persistently focussed one's fancy on death and decay.

Another thing that disturbed me was the absence of a bolt on the door of my room. One had been there, as marks clearly shewed, but there were signs of recent removal. No doubt it had been out of order, like so many other things in this decrepit edifice. In my nervousness I looked around and discovered a bolt on the clothes press which seemed to be of the same size, judging from the marks, as the one formerly on the door. To gain a partial relief from the general tension I busied myself by transferring this hardware to the vacant place with the aid of a handy three-in-one device including a screwdriver which I kept on my key-ring. The bolt fitted perfectly, and I was somewhat relieved when I knew that I could shoot it firmly upon retiring. Not that I had any real apprehension of its need, but that any symbol of security was welcome in an environment of this kind. There were adequate bolts on the two lateral doors to connecting rooms, and these I proceeded to fasten.

I did not undress, but decided to read till I was sleepy and then lie down with only my coat, collar, and shoes off. Taking a pocket flash light from my valise, I placed it in my trousers, so that I could read my watch if I woke up later in the dark. Drowsiness, however, did not come; and when I stopped to analyse my thoughts I found to my disquiet that I was really unconsciously listening for something--listening for something which I dreaded but could not name. That inspector's story must have worked on my imagination more deeply than I had suspected. Again I tried to read, but found that I made no progress.

After a time I seemed to hear the stairs and corridors creak at intervals as if with footsteps, and wondered if the other rooms were beginning to fill up. There were no voices, however, and it struck me that there was something subtly furtive about the creaking. I did not like it, and debated whether I had better try to sleep at all. This town had some queer people, and there had undoubtedly been several disappearances. Was this one of those inns where travelers were slain for their money? Surely I had no look of excessive prosperity. Or were the towns folk really so resentful about curious visitors? Had my obvious sightseeing, with its frequent map-consultations, aroused unfavorable notice. It occurred to me that I must be in a highly nervous state to let a few random creakings set me off speculating in this fashion--but I regretted none the less that I was unarmed.

At length, feeling a fatigue which had nothing of drowsiness in it, I bolted the newly outfitted hall door, turned off the light, and threw myself down on the hard, uneven bed--coat, collar, shoes, and all. In the darkness every faint noise of the night seemed magnified, and a flood of doubly unpleasant thoughts swept over me. I was sorry I had put out the light, yet was too tired to rise and turn it on again. Then, after a long, dreary interval, and prefaced by a fresh creaking of stairs and corridor, there came that soft, damnably unmistakable sound which seemed like a malign fulfillment of all my apprehensions. Without the least shadow of a doubt, the lock of my door was being tried--cautiously, furtively, tentatively--with a key.

My sensations upon recognising this sign of actual peril were perhaps less rather than more tumultuous because of my previous vague fears. I had been, albeit without definite reason, instinctively on my guard--and that was to my advantage in the new and real crisis, whatever it might turn out to be. Nevertheless the change in the menace from vague premonition to immediate reality was a profound shock, and fell upon me with the force of a genuine blow. It never once occurred to me that the fumbling might be a mere mistake. Malign purpose was all I could think of, and I kept deathly quiet, awaiting the would-be intruder's next move.

After a time the cautious rattling ceased, and I heard the room to the north entered with a pass-key. Then the lock of the connecting door to my room was softly tried. The bolt held, of course, and I heard the floor creak as the prowler left the room. After a moment there came another soft rattling, and I knew that the room to the south of me was being entered. Again a furtive trying of a bolted connecting door, and again a receding creaking. This time the creaking went along the hall and down the stairs, so I knew that the prowler had realised the bolted condition of my doors and was giving up his attempt for a greater or lesser time, as the future would shew.

The readiness with which I fell into a plan of action proves that I must have been subconsciously fearing some menace and considering possible avenues of escape for hours. From the first I felt that the unseen fumbler meant a danger not to be met or dealt with, but only to be fled from as precipitately as possible. The one thing to do was to get out of that hotel alive as quickly as I could, and through some channel other than the front stairs and lobby.

Rising softly and throwing my flashlight on the switch, I sought to light the bulb over my bed in order to choose and pocket some belongings for a swift, valiseless flight. Nothing, however, happened; and I saw that the power had been cut off. Clearly, some cryptic, evil movement was afoot on a large scale--just what, I could not say. As I stood pondering with my hand on the now useless switch I heard a muffled creaking on the floor below, and thought I could barely distinguish voices in conversation. A moment later I felt less sure that the deeper sounds were voices, since the apparent hoarse barkings and loose-syllabled croakings bore so little resemblance to recognized human speech. Then I thought with renewed force of what the factory inspector had heard in the night in this mouldering and pestilential building.

Having filled my pockets with the flashlight's aid, I put on my hat and tiptoed to the windows to consider chances of descent. Despite the state's safety regulations there was no fire escape on this side of the hotel, and I saw that my windows commanded only a sheer three story drop to the cobbled courtyard. On the right and left, however, some ancient brick business blocks abutted on the hotel; their slant roofs coming up to a reasonable jumping distance from my fourth-story level. To reach either of these lines of buildings I would have to be in a room two from my own--in one case on the north and in the other case on the south--and my mind instantly set to work what chances I had of making the transfer.

I could not, I decided, risk an emergence into the corridor; where my footsteps would surely be heard, and where the difficulties of entering the desired room would be insuperable. My progress, if it was to be made at all, would have to be through the less solidly-built connecting doors of the rooms; the locks and bolts of which I would have to force violently, using my shoulder as a battering-ram whenever they were set against me. This, I thought, would be possible owing to the rickety nature of the house and its fixtures; but I realised I could not do it noiselessly. I would have to count on sheer speed, and the chance of getting to a window before any hostile forces became coordinated enough to open the right door toward me with a pass-key. My own outer door I reinforced by pushing the bureau against it--little by little, in order to make a minimum of sound.

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

Gathering from the grocery boy's map that the best route out of town was southward, I glanced first at the connecting door on the south side of the room. It was designed to open in my direction, hence I saw--after drawing the bolt and finding other fastening in place--it was not a favorable one for forcing. Accordingly abandoning it as a route, I cautiously moved the bedstead against it to hamper any attack which might be made on it later from the next room. The door on the north was hung to open away from me, and this--though a test proved it to be locked or bolted from the other side--I knew must be my route. If I could gain the roofs of the buildings in Paine Street and descend successfully to the ground level, I might perhaps dart through the courtyard and the adjacent or opposite building to Washington or Bates--or else emerge in Paine and edge around southward into Washington. In any case, I would aim to strike Washington somehow and get quickly out of the Town Square region. My preference would be to avoid Paine, since the fire station there might be open all night.

As I thought of these things I looked out over the squalid sea of decaying roofs below me, now brightened by the beams of a moon not much past full. On the right the black gash of the river-gorge clove the panorama; abandoned factories and railway station clinging barnacle-like to its sides. Beyond it the rusted railway and the Rowley road led off through a flat marshy terrain dotted with islets of higher and dryer scrub-grown land. On the left the creek-threaded country-side was nearer, the narrow road to Ipswich gleaming white in the moonlight. I could not see from my side of the hotel the southward route toward Arkham which I had determined to take.

I was irresolutely speculating on when I had better attack the northward door, and on how I could least audibly manage it, when I noticed that the vague noises underfoot had given place to a fresh and heavier creaking of the stairs. A wavering flicker of light shewed through my transom, and the boards of the corridor began to groan with a ponderous load. Muffled sounds of possible vocal origin approached, and at length a firm knock came at my outer door.

For a moment I simply held my breath and waited. Eternities seemed to elapse, and the nauseous fishy odour of my environment seemed to mount suddenly and spectacularly. Then the knocking was repeated--continuously, and with growing insistence. I knew that the time for action had come, and forthwith drew the bolt of the northward connecting door, bracing myself for the task of battering it open. The knocking waxed louder, and I hoped that its volume would cover the sound of my efforts. At last beginning my attempt, I lunged again and again at the thin paneling with my left shoulder, heedless of shock or pain. The door resisted even more than I expected, but I did not give in. And all the while the clamour at the outer door increased.

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

For an instant I felt absolute despair, since my trapping in a chamber with no window egress seemed complete. A wave of almost abnormal horror swept over me, and invested with a terrible but unexplainable singularity the flashlight-glimpsed dust prints made by the intruder who had lately tried my door from this room. Then, with a dazed automatism which persisted despite hopelessness, I made for the next connecting door and performed the blind motion of pushing at it in an effort to get through and--granting that fastenings might be as providentially intact as in this second room--bolt the hall door beyond before the lock could be turned from outside.

Sheer fortunate chance gave me my reprieve--for the connecting door before me was not only unlocked but actually ajar. In a second I was though, and had my right knee and shoulder against a hall door which was visibly opening inward. My pressure took the opener off guard, for the thing shut as I pushed, so that I could slip the well-conditioned bolt as I had done with the other door. As I gained this respite I heard the battering at the two other doors abate, while a confused clatter came from the connecting door I had shielded with the bedstead. Evidently the bulk of my assailants had entered the southerly room and were massing in a lateral attack. But at the same moment a pass-key sounded in the next door to the north, and I knew that a nearer peril was at hand.

The northward connecting door was wide open, but there was no time to think about checking the already turning lock in the hall. All I could do was to shut and bolt the open connecting door, as well as its mate on the opposite side--pushing a bedstead against the one and a bureau against the other, and moving a washstand in front of the hall door. I must, I saw, trust to such makeshift barriers to shield me till I could get out the window and on the roof of the Paine Street block. But even in this acute moment my chief horror was something apart from the immediate weakness of my defenses. I was shuddering because not one of my pursuers, despite some hideous panting, grunting, and subdued barkings at odd intervals, was uttering an unmuffled or intelligible vocal sound.

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

Surveying the conditions, I chose the more southerly of the two windows as my avenue of escape; planning to land on the inner slope of the roof and make for the nearest sky-light. Once inside one of the decrepit brick structures I would have to reckon with pursuit; but I hoped to descend and dodge in and out of yawning doorways along the shadowed courtyard, eventually getting to Washington Street and slipping out of town toward the south.

The clatter at the northerly connecting door was now terrific, and I saw that the weak panelling was beginning to splinter. Obviously, the besiegers had brought some ponderous object into play as a battering-ram. The bedstead, however, still held firm; so that I had at least a faint chance of making good my escape. As I opened the window I noticed that it was flanked by heavy velour draperies suspended from a pole by brass rings, and also that there was a large projecting catch for the shutters on the exterior. Seeing a possible means of avoiding the dangerous jump, I yanked at the hangings and brought them down, pole and all; then quickly hooking two of the rings in the shutter catch and flinging the drapery outside. The heavy folds reached fully to the abutting roof, and I saw that the rings and catch would be likely to bear my weight. So, climbing out of the window and down the improvised rope ladder, I left behind me forever the morbid and horror-infested fabric of the Gilman House.

I landed safely on the loose slates of the steep roof, and succeeded in gaining the gaping black skylight without a slip. Glancing up at the window I had left, I observed it was still dark, though far across the crumbling chimneys to the north I could see lights ominously blazing in the Order of Dagon Hall, the Baptist church, and the Congregational church which I recalled so shiveringly. There had seemed to be no one in the courtyard below, and I hoped there would be a chance to get away before the spreading of a general alarm. Flashing my pocket lamp into the skylight, I saw that there were no steps down. The distance was slight, however, so I clambered over the brink and dropped; striking a dusty floor littered with crumbling boxes and barrels.

The place was ghoulish-looking, but I was past minding such impressions and made at once for the staircase revealed by my flashlight--after a hasty glance at my watch, which shewed the hour to be 2 a.m. The steps creaked, but seemed tolerably sound; and I raced down past a barnlike second storey to the ground floor. The desolation was complete, and only echoes answered my footfalls. At length I reached the lower hall at the end of which I saw a faint luminous rectangle marking the ruined Paine Street doorway. Heading the other way, I found the back door also open; and darted out and down five stone steps to the grass-grown cobblestones of the courtyard.

The moonbeams did not reach down here, but I could just see my way about without using the flashlight. Some of the windows on the Gilman House side were faintly glowing, and I thought I heard confused sounds within. Walking softly over to the Washington Street side I perceived several open doorways, and chose the nearest as my route out. The hallway inside was black, and when I reached the opposite end I saw that the street door was wedged immovably shut. Resolved to try another building, I groped my way back toward the courtyard, but stopped short when close to the doorway.

For out of an opened door in the Gilman House a large crowd of doubtful shapes was pouring--lanterns bobbing in the darkness, and horrible croaking voices exchanging low cries in what was certainly not English. The figures moved uncertainly, and I realized to my relief that they did not know where I had gone; but for all that they sent a shiver of horror through my frame. Their features were indistinguishable, but their crouching, shambling gait was abominably repellent. And worst of all, I perceived that one figure was strangely robed, and unmistakably surmounted by a tall tiara of a design altogether too familiar. As the figures spread throughout the courtyard, I felt my fears increase. Suppose I could find no egress from this building on the street side? The fishy odour was detestable, and I wondered I could stand it without fainting. Again groping toward the street, I opened a door off the hall and came upon an empty room with closely shuttered but sashless windows. Fumbling in the rays of my flashlight, I found I could open the shutters; and in another moment had climbed outside and was fully closing the aperture in its original manner.

I was now in Washington Street, and for the moment saw no living thing nor any light save that of the moon. From several directions in the distance, however, I could hear the sound of hoarse voices, of footsteps, and of a curious kind of pattering which did not sound quite like footsteps. Plainly I had no time to lose. The points of the compass were clear to me, and I was glad that all the street lights were turned off, as is often the custom on strongly moonlit nights in prosperous rural regions. Some of the sounds came from the south, yet I retained my design of escaping in that direction. There would, I knew, be plenty of deserted doorways to shelter me in case I met any person or group who looked like pursuers.

I walked rapidly, softly, and close to the ruined houses. While hatless and dishevelled after my arduous climb, I did not look especially noticeable; and stood a good chance of passing unheeded if forced to encounter any casual wayfarer.

At Bates Street I drew into a yawning vestibule while two shambling figures crossed in front of me, but was soon on my way again and approaching the open space where Eliot Street obliquely crosses Washington at the intersection of South. Though I had never seen this space, it had looked dangerous to me on the grocery youth's map; since the moonlight would have free play there. There was no use trying to evade it, for any alternative course would involve detours of possibly disastrous visibility and delaying effect. The only thing to do was to cross it boldly and openly; imitating the typical shamble of the Innsmouth folk as best I could, and trusting that no one--or at least no pursuer of mine--would be there.

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

The open space was, as I had expected, strongly moonlit; and I saw the remains of a parklike, iron-railed green in its center. Fortunately no one was about though a curious sort of buzz or roar seemed to be increasing in the direction of Town Square. South Street was very wide, leading directly down a slight declivity to the waterfront and commanding a long view out to sea; and I hoped that no one would be glancing up it from afar as I crossed in the bright moonlight.

My progress was unimpeded, and no fresh sound arose to hint that I had been spied. Glancing about me, I involuntarily let my pace slacken for a second to take in the sight of the sea, gorgeous in the burning moonlight at the street's end. Far out beyond the breakwater was the dim, dark line of Devil Reef, and as I glimpsed it I could not help thinking of all the hideous legends I had heard in the last twenty-four hours--legends which portrayed this ragged rock as a veritable gateway to realms of unfathomed horror and inconceivable abnormality.

Then, without warning, I saw the intermittent flashes of light on the distant reef. They were definite and unmistakable, and awaked in my mind a blind horror beyond all rational proportion. My muscles tightened for panic flight, held in only by a certain unconscious caution and half-hypnotic fascination. And to make matters worse, there now flashed forth from the lofty cupola of the Gilman House, which loomed up to the northeast behind me, a series of analogous though differently spaced gleams which could be nothing less than an answering signal.

Controlling my muscles, and realising afresh--how plainly visible I was, I resumed my brisker and feignedly shambling pace; though keeping my eyes on that hellish and ominous reef as long as the opening of South Street gave me a seaward view. What the whole proceeding meant, I could not imagine; unless it involved some strange rite connected with Devil Reef, or unless some party had landed from a ship on that sinister rock. I now bent to the left around the ruinous green; still gazing toward the ocean as it blazed in the spectral summer moonlight, and watching the cryptical flashing of those nameless, unexplainable beacons.

It was then that the most horrible impression of all was borne in upon me--the impression which destroyed my last vestige of self-control and sent me running frantically southward past the yawning black doorways and fishily staring windows of that deserted nightmare street. For at a closer glance I saw that the moonlit waters between the reef and the shore were far from empty. They were alive with a teeming horde of shapes swimming inward toward the town; and even at my vast distance and in my single moment of perception I could tell that the bobbing heads and flailing arms were alien and aberrant in a way scarcely to be expressed or consciously formulated.

My frantic running ceased before I had covered a block, for at my left I began to hear something like the hue and cry of organised pursuit. There were footsteps and guttural sounds, and a rattling motor wheezed south along Federal Street. In a second all my plans were utterly changed--for if the southward highway were blocked ahead of me, I must clearly find another egress from Innsmouth. I paused and drew into a gaping doorway, reflecting how lucky I was to have left the moonlit open space before these pursuers came down the parallel street.

A second reflection was less comforting. Since the pursuit was down another street, it was plain that the party was not following me directly. It had not seen me, but was simply obeying a general plan of cutting off my escape. This, however, implied that all roads leading out of Innsmouth were similarly patrolled; for the people could not have known what route I intended to take. If this were so, I would have to make my retreat across country away from any road; but how could I do that in view of the marshy and creek-riddled nature of all the surrounding region? For a moment my brain reeled--both from sheer hopelessness and from a rapid increase in the omnipresent fishy odour.

Then I thought of the abandoned railway to Rowley, whose solid line of ballasted, weed-grown earth still stretched off to the northwest from the crumbling station on the edge at the river-gorge. There was just a chance that the townsfolk would not think of that; since its briar-choked desertion made it half-impassable, and the unlikeliest of all avenues for a fugitive to choose. I had seen it clearly from my hotel window and knew about how it lay. Most of its earlier length was uncomfortably visible from the Rowley road, and from high places in the town itself; but one could perhaps crawl inconspicuously through the undergrowth. At any rate, it would form my only chance of deliverance, and there was nothing to do but try it.

Drawing inside the hall of my deserted shelter, I once more consulted the grocery boy's map with the aid of the flashlight. The immediate problem was how to reach the ancient railway; and I now saw that the safest course was ahead to Babson Street; then west to Lafayette--there edging around but not crossing an open space homologous to the one I had traversed--and subsequently back northward and westward in a zigzagging line through Lafayette, Bates, Adam, and Bank streets--the latter skirting the river gorge--to the abandoned and dilapidated station I had seen from my window. My reason for going ahead to Babson was that I wished neither to recross the earlier open space nor to begin my westward course along a cross street as broad as South.

Starting once more, I crossed the street to the right-hand side in order to edge around into Babson as inconspicuously as possible. Noises still continued in Federal Street, and as I glanced behind me I thought I saw a gleam of light near the building through which I had escaped. Anxious to leave Washington Street, I broke into a quiet dogtrot, trusting to luck not to encounter any observing eye. Next the corner of Babson Street I saw to my alarm that one of the houses was still inhabited, as attested by curtains at the window; but there were no lights within, and I passed it without disaster.

In Babson Street, which crossed Federal and might thus reveal me to the searchers, I clung as closely as possible to the sagging, uneven buildings; twice pausing in a doorway as the noises behind me momentarily increased. The open space ahead shone wide and desolate under the moon, but my route would not force me to cross it. During my second pause I began to detect a fresh distribution of vague sounds; and upon looking cautiously out from cover beheld a motor car darting across the open space, bound outward along Eliot Street, which there intersects both Babson and Lafayette.

As I watched--choked by a sudden rise in the fishy odour after a short abatement--I saw a band of uncouth, crouching shapes loping and shambling in the same direction; and knew that this must be the party guarding the Ipswich road, since that highway forms an extension of Eliot Street. Two of the figures I glimpsed were in voluminous robes, and one wore a peaked diadem which glistened whitely in the moonlight. The gait of this figure was so odd that it sent a chill through me--for it seemed to me the creature was almost hopping.

When the last of the band was out of sight I resumed my progress; darting around the corner into Lafayette Street, and crossing Eliot very hurriedly lest stragglers of the party be still advancing along that thoroughfare. I did hear some croaking and clattering sounds far off toward Town Square, but accomplished the passage without disaster. My greatest dread was in re-crossing broad and moonlit South Street--with its seaward view--and I had to nerve myself for the ordeal. Someone might easily be looking, and possible Eliot Street stragglers could not fail to glimpse me from either of two points. At the last moment I decided I had better slacken my trot and make the crossing as before in the shambling gait of an average Innsmouth native.

When the view of the water again opened out--this time on my right--I was half-determined not to look at it at all. I could not however, resist; but cast a sidelong glance as I carefully and imitatively shambled toward the protecting shadows ahead. There was no ship visible, as I had half-expected there would be. Instead, the first thing which caught my eye was a small rowboat pulling in toward the abandoned wharves and laden with some bulky, tarpaulin-covered object. Its rowers, though distantly and indistinctly seen, were of an especially repellent aspect. Several swimmers were still discernible; while on the far black reef I could see a faint, steady glow unlike the winking beacon visible before, and of a curious colour which I could not precisely identify. Above the slant roofs ahead and to the right there loomed the tall cupola of the Gilman House, but it was completely dark. The fishy odour, dispelled for a moment by some merciful breeze, now closed in again with maddening intensity.

I had not quite crossed the street when I heard a muttering band advancing along Washington from the north. As they reached the broad open space where I had had my first disquieting glimpse of the moonlit water I could see them plainly only a block away--and was horrified by the bestial abnormality of their faces and the doglike sub-humanness of their crouching gait. One man moved in a positively simian way, with long arms frequently touching the ground; while another figure--robed and tiaraed--seemed to progress in an almost hopping fashion. I judged this party to be the one I had seen in the Gilman's courtyard--the one, therefore, most closely on my trail. As some of the figures turned to look in my direction I was transfixed with fright, yet managed to preserve the casual, shambling gait I had assumed. To this day I do not know whether they saw me or not. If they did, my stratagem must have deceived them, for they passed on across the moonlit space without varying their course--meanwhile croaking and jabbering in some hateful guttural patois I could not identify.

Once more in shadow, I resumed my former dog-trot past the leaning and decrepit houses that stared blankly into the night. Having crossed to the western sidewalk I rounded the nearest corner into Bates Street where I kept close to the buildings on the southern side. I passed two houses shewing signs of habitation, one of which had faint lights in upper rooms, yet met with no obstacle. As I turned into Adams Street I felt measurably safer, but received a shook when a man reeled out of a black doorway directly in front of me. He proved, however, too hopelessly drunk to be a menace; so that I reached the dismal ruins of the Bank Street warehouses in safety.

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

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

The vast, barnlike length of the old bridge gleamed spectrally in the moonlight, and I saw that the ties were safe for at least a few feet within. Entering, I began to use my flashlight, and was almost knocked down by the cloud of bats that flapped past me. About half-way across there was a perilous gap in the ties which I feared for a moment would halt me; but in the end I risked a desperate jump which fortunately succeeded.

I was glad to see the moonlight again when I emerged from that macabre tunnel. The old tracks crossed River Street at grade, and at once veered off into a region increasingly rural and with less and less of Innsmouth's abhorrent fishy odour. Here the dense growth of weeds and briers hindered me and cruelly tore at my clothes, but I was none the less glad that they were there to give me concealment in case of peril. I knew that much of my route must be visible from the Rowley road.

The marshy region began very abruptly, with the single track on a low, grassy embankment where the weedy growth was somewhat thinner. Then came a sort of island of higher ground, where the line passed through a shallow open cut choked with bushes and brambles. I was very glad of this partial shelter, since at this point the Rowley road was uncomfortably near according to my window view. At the end of the cut it would cross the track and swerve off to a safer distance; but meanwhile I must be exceedingly careful. I was by this time thankfully certain that the railway itself was not patrolled.

Just before entering the cut I glanced behind me, but saw no pursuer. The ancient spires and roofs of decaying Innsmouth gleamed lovely and ethereal in the magic yellow moonlight, and I thought of how they must have looked in the old days before the shadow fell. Then, as my gaze circled inland from the town, something less tranquil arrested my notice and held me immobile for a second.

What I saw--or fancied I saw--was a disturbing suggestion of undulant motion far to the south; a suggestion which made me conclude that a very large horde must be pouring out of the city along the level Ipswich road. The distance was great and I could distinguish nothing in detail; but I did not at all like the look of that moving column. It undulated too much, and glistened too brightly in the rays of the now westering moon. There was a suggestion of sound, too, though the wind was blowing the other way--a suggestion of bestial scraping and bellowing even worse than the muttering of the parties I had lately overheard.

All sorts of unpleasant conjectures crossed my mind. I thought of those very extreme Innsmouth types said to be hidden in crumbling, centuried warrens near the waterfront; I thought, too, of those nameless swimmers I had seen. Counting the parties so far glimpsed, as well as those presumably covering other roads, the number of my pursuers must be strangely large for a town as depopulated as Innsmouth.

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

I had entered the brush-grown cut and was struggling along at a very slow pace when that damnable fishy odour again waxed dominant. Had the wind suddenly changed eastward, so that it blew in from the sea and over the town? It must have, I concluded, since I now began to hear shocking guttural murmurs from that hitherto silent direction. There was another sound, too--a kind of wholesale, colossal flopping or pattering which somehow called up images of the most detestable sort. It made me think illogically of that unpleasantly undulating column on the far-off Ipswich road.

And then both stench and sounds grew stronger, so that I paused shivering and grateful for the cut's protection. It was here, I recalled, that the Rowley road drew so close to the old railway before crossing westward and diverging. Something was coming along that road, and I must lie low till its passage and vanishment in the distance. Thank heaven these creatures employed no dogs for tracking--though perhaps that would have been impossible amidst the omnipresent regional odour. Crouched in the bushes of that sandy cleft I felt reasonably safe, even though I knew the searchers would have to cross the track in front of me not much more than a hundred yards away. I would be able to see them, but they could not, except by a malign miracle, see me.

All at once I began dreading to look at them as they passed. I saw the close moonlit space where they would surge by, and had curious thoughts about the irredeemable pollution of that space. They would perhaps be the worst of all Innsmouth types--something one would not care to remember.

The stench waxed overpowering, and the noises swelled to a bestial babel of croaking, baying and barking without the least suggestion of human speech. Were these indeed the voices of my pursuers? Did they have dogs after all? So far I had seen none of the lower animals in Innsmouth. That flopping or pattering was monstrous--I could not look upon the degenerate creatures responsible for it. I would keep my eyes shut till the sound receded toward the west. The horde was very close now--air foul with their hoarse snarlings, and the ground almost shaking with their alien-rhythmed footfalls. My breath nearly ceased to come, and I put every ounce of will-power into the task of holding my eyelids down.

I am not even yet willing to say whether what followed was a hideous actuality or only a nightmare hallucination. The later action of the government, after my frantic appeals, would tend to confirm it as a monstrous truth; but could not an hallucination have been repeated under the quasi-hypnotic spell of that ancient, haunted, and shadowed town? Such places have strange properties, and the legacy of insane legend might well have acted on more than one human imagination amidst those dead, stench-cursed streets and huddles of rotting roofs and crumbling steeples. Is it not possible that the germ of an actual contagious madness lurks in the depths of that shadow over Innsmouth? Who can be sure of reality after hearing things like the tale of old Zadok Allen? The government men never found poor Zadok, and have no conjectures to make as to what became of him. Where does madness leave off and reality begin? Is it possible that even my latest fear is sheer delusion?

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

I thought I was prepared for the worst, and I really ought to have been prepared considering what I had seen before.

My other pursuers had been accursedly abnormal--so should I not have been ready to face a strengthening of the abnormal element; to look upon forms in which there was no mixture of the normal at all? I did not open my eyes until the raucous clamour came loudly from a point obviously straight ahead. Then I knew that a long section of them must be plainly in sight where the sides of the cut flattened out and the road crossed the track--and I could no longer keep myself from sampling whatever horror that leering yellow moon might have to shew.

It was the end, for whatever remains to me of life on the surface of this earth, of every vestige of mental peace and confidence in the integrity of nature and of the human mind. Nothing that I could have imagined--nothing, even, that I could have gathered had I credited old Zadok's crazy tale in the most literal way--would be in any way comparable to the demoniac, blasphemous reality that I saw--or believe I saw. I have tried to hint what it was in order to postpone the horror of writing it down baldly. Can it be possible that this planet has actually spawned such things; that human eyes have truly seen, as objective flesh, what man has hitherto known only in febrile phantasy and tenuous legend?

And yet I saw them in a limitless stream--flopping, hopping, croaking, bleating--urging inhumanly through the spectral moonlight in a grotesque, malignant saraband of fantastic nightmare. And some of them had tall tiaras of that nameless whitish-gold metal...and some were strangely robed...and one, who led the way, was clad in a ghoulishly humped black coat and striped trousers, and had a man's felt hat perched on the shapeless thing that answered for a head.

I think their predominant colour was a greyish-green, though they had white bellies. They were mostly shiny and slippery, but the ridges of their backs were scaly. Their forms vaguely suggested the anthropoid, while their heads were the heads of fish, with prodigious bulging eyes that never closed. At the sides of their necks were palpitating gills, and their long paws were webbed. They hopped irregularly, sometimes on two legs and sometimes on four. I was somehow glad that they had no more than four limbs. Their croaking, baying voices, clearly used for articulate speech, held all the dark shades of expression which their staring faces lacked.

But for all of their monstrousness they were not unfamiliar to me. I knew too well what they must be--for was not the memory of the evil tiara at Newburyport still fresh? They were the blasphemous fish-frogs of the nameless design--living and horrible--and as I saw them I knew also of what that humped, tiaraed priest in the black church basement had fearsomely reminded me. Their number was past guessing. It seemed to me that there were limitless swarms of them and certainly my momentary glimpse could have shewn only the least fraction. In another instant everything was blotted out by a merciful fit of fainting; the first I had ever had.","Whether the dreams brought on the fever or the fever brought on the dreams Walter Gilman did not know. Behind everything crouched the brooding, festering horror of the ancient town, and of the mouldy, unhallowed garret gable where he wrote and studied and wrestled with figures and formulae when he was not tossing on the meagre iron bed. His ears were growing sensitive to a preternatural and intolerable degree, and he had long ago stopped the cheap mantel clock whose ticking had come to seem like a thunder of artillery. At night the subtle stirring of the black city outside, the sinister scurrying of rats in the wormy partitions, and the creaking of hidden timbers in the centuried house, were enough to give him a sense of strident pandemonium. The darkness always teemed with unexplained sound—and yet he sometimes shook with fear lest the noises he heard should subside and allow him to hear certain other, fainter, noises which he suspected were lurking behind them.
      He was in the changeless, legend-haunted city of Arkham, with its clustering gambrel roofs that sway and sag over attics where witches hid from the King’s men in the dark, olden days of the Province. Nor was any spot in that city more steeped in macabre memory than the gable room which harboured him—for it was this house and this room which had likewise harboured old Keziah Mason, whose flight from Salem Gaol at the last no one was ever able to explain. That was in 1692—the gaoler had gone mad and babbled of a small, white-fanged furry thing which scuttled out of Keziah’s cell, and not even Cotton Mather could explain the curves and angles smeared on the grey stone walls with some red, sticky fluid.
      Possibly Gilman ought not to have studied so hard. Non-Euclidean calculus and quantum physics are enough to stretch any brain; and when one mixes them with folklore, and tries to trace a strange background of multi-dimensional reality behind the ghoulish hints of the Gothic tales and the wild whispers of the chimney-corner, one can hardly expect to be wholly free from mental tension. Gilman came from Haverhill, but it was only after he had entered college in Arkham that he began to connect his mathematics with the fantastic legends of elder magic. Something in the air of the hoary town worked obscurely on his imagination. The professors at Miskatonic had urged him to slacken up, and had voluntarily cut down his course at several points. Moreover, they had stopped him from consulting the dubious old books on forbidden secrets that were kept under lock and key in a vault at the university library. But all these precautions came late in the day, so that Gilman had some terrible hints from the dreaded Necronomicon of Abdul Alhazred, the fragmentary Book of Eibon, and the suppressed Unaussprechlichen Kulten of von Junzt to correlate with his abstract formulae on the properties of space and the linkage of dimensions known and unknown.
      He knew his room was in the old Witch House—that, indeed, was why he had taken it. There was much in the Essex County records about Keziah Mason’s trial, and what she had admitted under pressure to the Court of Oyer and Terminer had fascinated Gilman beyond all reason. She had told Judge Hathorne of lines and curves that could be made to point out directions leading through the walls of space to other spaces beyond, and had implied that such lines and curves were frequently used at certain midnight meetings in the dark valley of the white stone beyond Meadow Hill and on the unpeopled island in the river. She had spoken also of the Black Man, of her oath, and of her new secret name of Nahab. Then she had drawn those devices on the walls of her cell and vanished.
      Gilman believed strange things about Keziah, and had felt a queer thrill on learning that her dwelling was still standing after more than 235 years. When he heard the hushed Arkham whispers about Keziah’s persistent presence in the old house and the narrow streets, about the irregular human tooth-marks left on certain sleepers in that and other houses, about the childish cries heard near May-Eve, and Hallowmass, about the stench often noted in the old house’s attic just after those dreaded seasons, and about the small, furry, sharp-toothed thing which haunted the mouldering structure and the town and nuzzled people curiously in the black hours before dawn, he resolved to live in the place at any cost. A room was easy to secure; for the house was unpopular, hard to rent, and long given over to cheap lodgings. Gilman could not have told what he expected to find there, but he knew he wanted to be in the building where some circumstance had more or less suddenly given a mediocre old woman of the seventeenth century an insight into mathematical depths perhaps beyond the utmost modern delvings of Planck, Heisenberg, Einstein, and de Sitter.
      He studied the timber and plaster walls for traces of cryptic designs at every accessible spot where the paper had peeled, and within a week managed to get the eastern attic room where Keziah was held to have practiced her spells. It had been vacant from the first—for no one had ever been willing to stay there long—but the Polish landlord had grown wary about renting it. Yet nothing whatever happened to Gilman till about the time of the fever. No ghostly Keziah flitted through the sombre halls and chambers, no small furry thing crept into his dismal eyrie to nuzzle him, and no record of the witch’s incantations rewarded his constant search. Sometimes he would take walks through shadowy tangles of unpaved musty-smelling lanes where eldritch brown houses of unknown age leaned and tottered and leered mockingly through narrow, small-paned windows. Here he knew strange things had happened once, and there was a faint suggestion behind the surface that everything of that monstrous past might not—at least in the darkest, narrowest, and most intricately crooked alleys—have utterly perished. He also rowed out twice to the ill-regarded island in the river, and made a sketch of the singular angles described by the moss-grown rows of grey standing stones whose origin was so obscure and immemorial.
      Gilman’s room was of good size but queerly irregular shape; the north wall slanting perceptibly inward from the outer to the inner end, while the low ceiling slanted gently downward in the same direction. Aside from an obvious rat-hole and the signs of other stopped-up ones, there was no access—nor any appearance of a former avenue of access—to the space which must have existed between the slanting wall and the straight outer wall on the house’s north side, though a view from the exterior shewed where a window had been boarded up at a very remote date. The loft above the ceiling—which must have had a slanting floor—was likewise inaccessible. When Gilman climbed up a ladder to the cobwebbed level loft above the rest of the attic he found vestiges of a bygone aperture tightly and heavily covered with ancient planking and secured by the stout wooden pegs common in colonial carpentry. No amount of persuasion, however, could induce the stolid landlord to let him investigate either of these two closed spaces.
      As time wore along, his absorption in the irregular wall and ceiling of his room increased; for he began to read into the odd angles a mathematical significance which seemed to offer vague clues regarding their purpose. Old Keziah, he reflected, might have had excellent reasons for living in a room with peculiar angles; for was it not through certain angles that she claimed to have gone outside the boundaries of the world of space we know? His interest gradually veered away from the unplumbed voids beyond the slanting surfaces, since it now appeared that the purpose of those surfaces concerned the side he was already on.
      The touch of brain-fever and the dreams began early in February. For some time, apparently, the curious angles of Gilman’s room had been having a strange, almost hypnotic effect on him; and as the bleak winter advanced he had found himself staring more and more intently at the corner where the down-slanting ceiling met the inward-slanting wall. About this period his inability to concentrate on his formal studies worried him considerably, his apprehensions about the mid-year examinations being very acute. But the exaggerated sense of hearing was scarcely less annoying. Life had become an insistent and almost unendurable cacophony, and there was that constant, terrifying impression of other sounds—perhaps from regions beyond life—trembling on the very brink of audibility. So far as concrete noises went, the rats in the ancient partitions were the worst. Sometimes their scratching seemed not only furtive but deliberate. When it came from beyond the slanting north wall it was mixed with a sort of dry rattling—and when it came from the century-closed loft above the slanting ceiling Gilman always braced himself as if expecting some horror which only bided its time before descending to engulf him utterly.
      The dreams were wholly beyond the pale of sanity, and Gilman felt that they must be a result, jointly, of his studies in mathematics and in folklore. He had been thinking too much about the vague regions which his formulae told him must lie beyond the three dimensions we know, and about the possibility that old Keziah Mason—guided by some influence past all conjecture—had actually found the gate to those regions. The yellowed county records containing her testimony and that of her accusers were so damnably suggestive of things beyond human experience—and the descriptions of the darting little furry object which served as her familiar were so painfully realistic despite their incredible details.
      That object—no larger than a good-sized rat and quaintly called by the townspeople “Brown Jenkin”—seemed to have been the fruit of a remarkable case of sympathetic herd-delusion, for in 1692 no less than eleven persons had testified to glimpsing it. There were recent rumours, too, with a baffling and disconcerting amount of agreement. Witnesses said it had long hair and the shape of a rat, but that its sharp-toothed, bearded face was evilly human while its paws were like tiny human hands. It took messages betwixt old Keziah and the devil, and was nursed on the witch’s blood—which it sucked like a vampire. Its voice was a kind of loathsome titter, and it could speak all languages. Of all the bizarre monstrosities in Gilman’s dreams, nothing filled him with greater panic and nausea than this blasphemous and diminutive hybrid, whose image flitted across his vision in a form a thousandfold more hateful than anything his waking mind had deduced from the ancient records and the modern whispers.
      Gilman’s dreams consisted largely in plunges through limitless abysses of inexplicably coloured twilight and bafflingly disordered sound; abysses whose material and gravitational properties, and whose relation to his own entity, he could not even begin to explain. He did not walk or climb, fly or swim, crawl or wriggle; yet always experienced a mode of motion partly voluntary and partly involuntary. Of his own condition he could not well judge, for sight of his arms, legs, and torso seemed always cut off by some odd disarrangement of perspective; but he felt that his physical organisation and faculties were somehow marvellously transmuted and obliquely projected—though not without a certain grotesque relationship to his normal proportions and properties.
      The abysses were by no means vacant, being crowded with indescribably angled masses of alien-hued substance, some of which appeared to be organic while others seemed inorganic. A few of the organic objects tended to awake vague memories in the back of his mind, though he could form no conscious idea of what they mockingly resembled or suggested. In the later dreams he began to distinguish separate categories into which the organic objects appeared to be divided, and which seemed to involve in each case a radically different species of conduct-pattern and basic motivation. Of these categories one seemed to him to include objects slightly less illogical and irrelevant in their motions than the members of the other categories.
      All the objects—organic and inorganic alike—were totally beyond description or even comprehension. Gilman sometimes compared the inorganic masses to prisms, labyrinths, clusters of cubes and planes, and Cyclopean buildings; and the organic things struck him variously as groups of bubbles, octopi, centipedes, living Hindoo idols, and intricate Arabesques roused into a kind of ophidian animation. Everything he saw was unspeakably menacing and horrible; and whenever one of the organic entities appeared by its motions to be noticing him, he felt a stark, hideous fright which generally jolted him awake. Of how the organic entities moved, he could tell no more than of how he moved himself. In time he observed a further mystery—the tendency of certain entities to appear suddenly out of empty space, or to disappear totally with equal suddenness. The shrieking, roaring confusion of sound which permeated the abysses was past all analysis as to pitch, timbre, or rhythm; but seemed to be synchronous with vague visual changes in all the indefinite objects, organic and inorganic alike. Gilman had a constant sense of dread that it might rise to some unbearable degree of intensity during one or another of its obscure, relentlessly inevitable fluctuations.
      But it was not in these vortices of complete alienage that he saw Brown Jenkin. That shocking little horror was reserved for certain lighter, sharper dreams which assailed him just before he dropped into the fullest depths of sleep. He would be lying in the dark fighting to keep awake when a faint lambent glow would seem to shimmer around the centuried room, shewing in a violet mist the convergence of angled planes which had seized his brain so insidiously. The horror would appear to pop out of the rat-hole in the corner and patter toward him over the sagging, wide-planked floor with evil expectancy in its tiny, bearded human face—but mercifully, this dream always melted away before the object got close enough to nuzzle him. It had hellishly long, sharp, canine teeth. Gilman tried to stop up the rat-hole every day, but each night the real tenants of the partitions would gnaw away the obstruction, whatever it might be. Once he had the landlord nail tin over it, but the next night the rats gnawed a fresh hole—in making which they pushed or dragged out into the room a curious little fragment of bone.
      Gilman did not report his fever to the doctor, for he knew he could not pass the examinations if ordered to the college infirmary when every moment was needed for cramming. As it was, he failed in Calculus D and Advanced General Psychology, though not without hope of making up lost ground before the end of the term. It was in March when the fresh element entered his lighter preliminary dreaming, and the nightmare shape of Brown Jenkin began to be companioned by the nebulous blur which grew more and more to resemble a bent old woman. This addition disturbed him more than he could account for, but finally he decided that it was like an ancient crone whom he had twice actually encountered in the dark tangle of lanes near the abandoned wharves. On those occasions the evil, sardonic, and seemingly unmotivated stare of the beldame had set him almost shivering—especially the first time, when an overgrown rat darting across the shadowed mouth of a neighbouring alley had made him think irrationally of Brown Jenkin. Now, he reflected, those nervous fears were being mirrored in his disordered dreams.
      That the influence of the old house was unwholesome, he could not deny; but traces of his early morbid interest still held him there. He argued that the fever alone was responsible for his nightly phantasies, and that when the touch abated he would be free from the monstrous visions. Those visions, however, were of abhorrent vividness and convincingness, and whenever he awaked he retained a vague sense of having undergone much more than he remembered. He was hideously sure that in unrecalled dreams he had talked with both Brown Jenkin and the old woman, and that they had been urging him to go somewhere with them and to meet a third being of greater potency.
      Toward the end of March he began to pick up in his mathematics, though other studies bothered him increasingly. He was getting an intuitive knack for solving Riemannian equations, and astonished Professor Upham by his comprehension of fourth-dimensional and other problems which had floored all the rest of the class. One afternoon there was a discussion of possible freakish curvatures in space, and of theoretical points of approach or even contact between our part of the cosmos and various other regions as distant as the farthest stars or the trans-galactic gulfs themselves—or even as fabulously remote as the tentatively conceivable cosmic units beyond the whole Einsteinian space-time continuum. Gilman’s handling of this theme filled everyone with admiration, even though some of his hypothetical illustrations caused an increase in the always plentiful gossip about his nervous and solitary eccentricity. What made the students shake their heads was his sober theory that a man might—given mathematical knowledge admittedly beyond all likelihood of human acquirement—step deliberately from the earth to any other celestial body which might lie at one of an infinity of specific points in the cosmic pattern.
      Such a step, he said, would require only two stages; first, a passage out of the three-dimensional sphere we know, and second, a passage back to the three-dimensional sphere at another point, perhaps one of infinite remoteness. That this could be accomplished without loss of life was in many cases conceivable. Any being from any part of three-dimensional space could probably survive in the fourth dimension; and its survival of the second stage would depend upon what alien part of three-dimensional space it might select for its re-entry. Denizens of some planets might be able to live on certain others—even planets belonging to other galaxies, or to similar-dimensional phases of other space-time continua—though of course there must be vast numbers of mutually uninhabitable even though mathematically juxtaposed bodies or zones of space.
      It was also possible that the inhabitants of a given dimensional realm could survive entry to many unknown and incomprehensible realms of additional or indefinitely multiplied dimensions—be they within or outside the given space-time continuum—and that the converse would be likewise true. This was a matter for speculation, though one could be fairly certain that the type of mutation involved in a passage from any given dimensional plane to the next higher plane would not be destructive of biological integrity as we understand it. Gilman could not be very clear about his reasons for this last assumption, but his haziness here was more than overbalanced by his clearness on other complex points. Professor Upham especially liked his demonstration of the kinship of higher mathematics to certain phases of magical lore transmitted down the ages from an ineffable antiquity—human or pre-human—whose knowledge of the cosmos and its laws was greater than ours.
      Around the first of April Gilman worried considerably because his slow fever did not abate. He was also troubled by what some of his fellow-lodgers said about his sleep-walking. It seemed that he was often absent from his bed, and that the creaking of his floor at certain hours of the night was remarked by the man in the room below. This fellow also spoke of hearing the tread of shod feet in the night; but Gilman was sure he must have been mistaken in this, since shoes as well as other apparel were always precisely in place in the morning. One could develop all sorts of aural delusions in this morbid old house—for did not Gilman himself, even in daylight, now feel certain that noises other than rat-scratchings came from the black voids beyond the slanting wall and above the slanting ceiling? His pathologically sensitive ears began to listen for faint footfalls in the immemorially sealed loft overhead, and sometimes the illusion of such things was agonisingly realistic.
      However, he knew that he had actually become a somnambulist; for twice at night his room had been found vacant, though with all his clothing in place. Of this he had been assured by Frank Elwood, the one fellow-student whose poverty forced him to room in this squalid and unpopular house. Elwood had been studying in the small hours and had come up for help on a differential equation, only to find Gilman absent. It had been rather presumptuous of him to open the unlocked door after knocking had failed to rouse a response, but he had needed the help very badly and thought that his host would not mind a gentle prodding awake. On neither occasion, though, had Gilman been there—and when told of the matter he wondered where he could have been wandering, barefoot and with only his night-clothes on. He resolved to investigate the matter if reports of his sleep-walking continued, and thought of sprinkling flour on the floor of the corridor to see where his footsteps might lead. The door was the only conceivable egress, for there was no possible foothold outside the narrow window.
      As April advanced Gilman’s fever-sharpened ears were disturbed by the whining prayers of a superstitious loomfixer named Joe Mazurewicz, who had a room on the ground floor. Mazurewicz had told long, rambling stories about the ghost of old Keziah and the furry, sharp-fanged, nuzzling thing, and had said he was so badly haunted at times that only his silver crucifix—given him for the purpose by Father Iwanicki of St. Stanislaus’ Church—could bring him relief. Now he was praying because the Witches’ Sabbath was drawing near. May-Eve was Walpurgis-Night, when hell’s blackest evil roamed the earth and all the slaves of Satan gathered for nameless rites and deeds. It was always a very bad time in Arkham, even though the fine folks up in Miskatonic Avenue and High and Saltonstall Streets pretended to know nothing about it. There would be bad doings—and a child or two would probably be missing. Joe knew about such things, for his grandmother in the old country had heard tales from her grandmother. It was wise to pray and count one’s beads at this season. For three months Keziah and Brown Jenkin had not been near Joe’s room, nor near Paul Choynski’s room, nor anywhere else—and it meant no good when they held off like that. They must be up to something.
      Gilman dropped in at a doctor’s office on the 16th of the month, and was surprised to find his temperature was not as high as he had feared. The physician questioned him sharply, and advised him to see a nerve specialist. On reflection, he was glad he had not consulted the still more inquisitive college doctor. Old Waldron, who had curtailed his activities before, would have made him take a rest—an impossible thing now that he was so close to great results in his equations. He was certainly near the boundary between the known universe and the fourth dimension, and who could say how much farther he might go?
      But even as these thoughts came to him he wondered at the source of his strange confidence. Did all of this perilous sense of imminence come from the formulae on the sheets he covered day by day? The soft, stealthy, imaginary footsteps in the sealed loft above were unnerving. And now, too, there was a growing feeling that somebody was constantly persuading him to do something terrible which he could not do. How about the somnambulism? Where did he go sometimes in the night? And what was that faint suggestion of sound which once in a while seemed to trickle through the maddening confusion of identifiable sounds even in broad daylight and full wakefulness? Its rhythm did not correspond to anything on earth, unless perhaps to the cadence of one or two unmentionable Sabbat-chants, and sometimes he feared it corresponded to certain attributes of the vague shrieking or roaring in those wholly alien abysses of dream.
      The dreams were meanwhile getting to be atrocious. In the lighter preliminary phase the evil old woman was now of fiendish distinctness, and Gilman knew she was the one who had frightened him in the slums. Her bent back, long nose, and shrivelled chin were unmistakable, and her shapeless brown garments were like those he remembered. The expression on her face was one of hideous malevolence and exultation, and when he awaked he could recall a croaking voice that persuaded and threatened. He must meet the Black Man, and go with them all to the throne of Azathoth at the centre of ultimate Chaos. That was what she said. He must sign in his own blood the book of Azathoth and take a new secret name now that his independent delvings had gone so far. What kept him from going with her and Brown Jenkin and the other to the throne of Chaos where the thin flutes pipe mindlessly was the fact that he had seen the name “Azathoth” in the Necronomicon, and knew it stood for a primal evil too horrible for description.
      The old woman always appeared out of thin air near the corner where the downward slant met the inward slant. She seemed to crystallise at a point closer to the ceiling than to the floor, and every night she was a little nearer and more distinct before the dream shifted. Brown Jenkin, too, was always a little nearer at the last, and its yellowish-white fangs glistened shockingly in that unearthly violet phosphorescence. Its shrill loathsome tittering stuck more and more in Gilman’s head, and he could remember in the morning how it had pronounced the words “Azathoth” and “Nyarlathotep”.
      In the deeper dreams everything was likewise more distinct, and Gilman felt that the twilight abysses around him were those of the fourth dimension. Those organic entities whose motions seemed least flagrantly irrelevant and unmotivated were probably projections of life-forms from our own planet, including human beings. What the others were in their own dimensional sphere or spheres he dared not try to think. Two of the less irrelevantly moving things—a rather large congeries of iridescent, prolately spheroidal bubbles and a very much smaller polyhedron of unknown colours and rapidly shifting surface angles—seemed to take notice of him and follow him about or float ahead as he changed position among the titan prisms, labyrinths, cube-and-plane clusters, and quasi-buildings; and all the while the vague shrieking and roaring waxed louder and louder, as if approaching some monstrous climax of utterly unendurable intensity.
      During the night of April 19–20 the new development occurred. Gilman was half-involuntarily moving about in the twilight abysses with the bubble-mass and the small polyhedron floating ahead, when he noticed the peculiarly regular angles formed by the edges of some gigantic neighbouring prism-clusters. In another second he was out of the abyss and standing tremulously on a rocky hillside bathed in intense, diffused green light. He was barefooted and in his night-clothes, and when he tried to walk discovered that he could scarcely lift his feet. A swirling vapour hid everything but the immediate sloping terrain from sight, and he shrank from the thought of the sounds that might surge out of that vapour.
      Then he saw the two shapes laboriously crawling toward him—the old woman and the little furry thing. The crone strained up to her knees and managed to cross her arms in a singular fashion, while Brown Jenkin pointed in a certain direction with a horribly anthropoid fore paw which it raised with evident difficulty. Spurred by an impulse he did not originate, Gilman dragged himself forward along a course determined by the angle of the old woman’s arms and the direction of the small monstrosity’s paw, and before he had shuffled three steps he was back in the twilight abysses. Geometrical shapes seethed around him, and he fell dizzily and interminably. At last he woke in his bed in the crazily angled garret of the eldritch old house.
      He was good for nothing that morning, and stayed away from all his classes. Some unknown attraction was pulling his eyes in a seemingly irrelevant direction, for he could not help staring at a certain vacant spot on the floor. As the day advanced the focus of his unseeing eyes changed position, and by noon he had conquered the impulse to stare at vacancy. About two o’clock he went out for lunch, and as he threaded the narrow lanes of the city he found himself turning always to the southeast. Only an effort halted him at a cafeteria in Church Street, and after the meal he felt the unknown pull still more strongly.
      He would have to consult a nerve specialist after all—perhaps there was a connexion with his somnambulism—but meanwhile he might at least try to break the morbid spell himself. Undoubtedly he could still manage to walk away from the pull; so with great resolution he headed against it and dragged himself deliberately north along Garrison Street. By the time he had reached the bridge over the Miskatonic he was in a cold perspiration, and he clutched at the iron railing as he gazed upstream at the ill-regarded island whose regular lines of ancient standing stones brooded sullenly in the afternoon sunlight.
      Then he gave a start. For there was a clearly visible living figure on that desolate island, and a second glance told him it was certainly the strange old woman whose sinister aspect had worked itself so disastrously into his dreams. The tall grass near her was moving, too, as if some other living thing were crawling close to the ground. When the old woman began to turn toward him he fled precipitately off the bridge and into the shelter of the town’s labyrinthine waterfront alleys. Distant though the island was, he felt that a monstrous and invincible evil could flow from the sardonic stare of that bent, ancient figure in brown.
      The southeastward pull still held, and only with tremendous resolution could Gilman drag himself into the old house and up the rickety stairs. For hours he sat silent and aimless, with his eyes shifting gradually westward. About six o’clock his sharpened ears caught the whining prayers of Joe Mazurewicz two floors below, and in desperation he seized his hat and walked out into the sunset-golden streets, letting the now directly southward pull carry him where it might. An hour later darkness found him in the open fields beyond Hangman’s Brook, with the glimmering spring stars shining ahead. The urge to walk was gradually changing to an urge to leap mystically into space, and suddenly he realised just where the source of the pull lay.
      It was in the sky. A definite point among the stars had a claim on him and was calling him. Apparently it was a point somewhere between Hydra and Argo Navis, and he knew that he had been urged toward it ever since he had awaked soon after dawn. In the morning it had been underfoot; afternoon found it rising in the southeast, and now it was roughly south but wheeling toward the west. What was the meaning of this new thing? Was he going mad? How long would it last? Again mustering his resolution, Gilman turned and dragged himself back to the sinister old house.
      Mazurewicz was waiting for him at the door, and seemed both anxious and reluctant to whisper some fresh bit of superstition. It was about the witch light. Joe had been out celebrating the night before—it was Patriots’ Day in Massachusetts—and had come home after midnight. Looking up at the house from outside, he had thought at first that Gilman’s window was dark; but then he had seen the faint violet glow within. He wanted to warn the gentleman about that glow, for everybody in Arkham knew it was Keziah’s witch light which played near Brown Jenkin and the ghost of the old crone herself. He had not mentioned this before, but now he must tell about it because it meant that Keziah and her long-toothed familiar were haunting the young gentleman. Sometimes he and Paul Choynski and Landlord Dombrowski thought they saw that light seeping out of cracks in the sealed loft above the young gentleman’s room, but they had all agreed not to talk about that. However, it would be better for the gentleman to take another room and get a crucifix from some good priest like Father Iwanicki.
      As the man rambled on Gilman felt a nameless panic clutch at his throat. He knew that Joe must have been half drunk when he came home the night before, yet this mention of a violet light in the garret window was of frightful import. It was a lambent glow of this sort which always played about the old woman and the small furry thing in those lighter, sharper dreams which prefaced his plunge into unknown abysses, and the thought that a wakeful second person could see the dream-luminance was utterly beyond sane harbourage. Yet where had the fellow got such an odd notion? Had he himself talked as well as walked around the house in his sleep? No, Joe said, he had not—but he must check up on this. Perhaps Frank Elwood could tell him something, though he hated to ask.
      Fever—wild dreams—somnambulism—illusions of sounds—a pull toward a point in the sky—and now a suspicion of insane sleep-talking! He must stop studying, see a nerve specialist, and take himself in hand. When he climbed to the second story he paused at Elwood’s door but saw that the other youth was out. Reluctantly he continued up to his garret room and sat down in the dark. His gaze was still pulled to the southwest, but he also found himself listening intently for some sound in the closed loft above, and half imagining that an evil violet light seeped down through an infinitesimal crack in the low, slanting ceiling.
      That night as Gilman slept the violet light broke upon him with heightened intensity, and the old witch and small furry thing—getting closer than ever before—mocked him with inhuman squeals and devilish gestures. He was glad to sink into the vaguely roaring twilight abysses, though the pursuit of that iridescent bubble-congeries and that kaleidoscopic little polyhedron was menacing and irritating. Then came the shift as vast converging planes of a slippery-looking substance loomed above and below him—a shift which ended in a flash of delirium and a blaze of unknown, alien light in which yellow, carmine, and indigo were madly and inextricably blended.
      He was half lying on a high, fantastically balustraded terrace above a boundless jungle of outlandish, incredible peaks, balanced planes, domes, minarets, horizontal discs poised on pinnacles, and numberless forms of still greater wildness—some of stone and some of metal—which glittered gorgeously in the mixed, almost blistering glare from a polychromatic sky. Looking upward he saw three stupendous discs of flame, each of a different hue, and at a different height above an infinitely distant curving horizon of low mountains. Behind him tiers of higher terraces towered aloft as far as he could see. The city below stretched away to the limits of vision, and he hoped that no sound would well up from it.
      The pavement from which he easily raised himself was of a veined, polished stone beyond his power to identify, and the tiles were cut in bizarre-angled shapes which struck him as less asymmetrical than based on some unearthly symmetry whose laws he could not comprehend. The balustrade was chest-high, delicate, and fantastically wrought, while along the rail were ranged at short intervals little figures of grotesque design and exquisite workmanship. They, like the whole balustrade, seemed to be made of some sort of shining metal whose colour could not be guessed in this chaos of mixed effulgences; and their nature utterly defied conjecture. They represented some ridged, barrel-shaped object with thin horizontal arms radiating spoke-like from a central ring, and with vertical knobs or bulbs projecting from the head and base of the barrel. Each of these knobs was the hub of a system of five long, flat, triangularly tapering arms arranged around it like the arms of a starfish—nearly horizontal, but curving slightly away from the central barrel. The base of the bottom knob was fused to the long railing with so delicate a point of contact that several figures had been broken off and were missing. The figures were about four and a half inches in height, while the spiky arms gave them a maximum diameter of about two and a half inches.
      When Gilman stood up the tiles felt hot to his bare feet. He was wholly alone, and his first act was to walk to the balustrade and look dizzily down at the endless, Cyclopean city almost two thousand feet below. As he listened he thought a rhythmic confusion of faint musical pipings covering a wide tonal range welled up from the narrow streets beneath, and he wished he might discern the denizens of the place. The sight turned him giddy after a while, so that he would have fallen to the pavement had he not clutched instinctively at the lustrous balustrade. His right hand fell on one of the projecting figures, the touch seeming to steady him slightly. It was too much, however, for the exotic delicacy of the metal-work, and the spiky figure snapped off under his grasp. Still half-dazed, he continued to clutch it as his other hand seized a vacant space on the smooth railing.
      But now his oversensitive ears caught something behind him, and he looked back across the level terrace. Approaching him softly though without apparent furtiveness were five figures, two of which were the sinister old woman and the fanged, furry little animal. The other three were what sent him unconscious—for they were living entities about eight feet high, shaped precisely like the spiky images on the balustrade, and propelling themselves by a spider-like wriggling of their lower set of starfish-arms.
      Gilman awakened in his bed, drenched by a cold perspiration and with a smarting sensation in his face, hands, and feet. Springing to the floor, he washed and dressed in frantic haste, as if it were necessary for him to get out of the house as quickly as possible. He did not know where he wished to go, but felt that once more he would have to sacrifice his classes. The odd pull toward that spot in the sky between Hydra and Argo had abated, but another of even greater strength had taken its place. Now he felt that he must go north—infinitely north. He dreaded to cross the bridge that gave a view of the desolate island in the Miskatonic, so went over the Peabody Avenue bridge. Very often he stumbled, for his eyes and ears were chained to an extremely lofty point in the blank blue sky.
      After about an hour he got himself under better control, and saw that he was far from the city. All around him stretched the bleak emptiness of salt marshes, while the narrow road ahead led to Innsmouth—that ancient, half-deserted town which Arkham people were so curiously unwilling to visit. Though the northward pull had not diminished, he resisted it as he had resisted the other pull, and finally found that he could almost balance the one against the other. Plodding back to town and getting some coffee at a soda fountain, he dragged himself into the public library and browsed aimlessly among the lighter magazines. Once he met some friends who remarked how oddly sunburned he looked, but he did not tell them of his walk. At three o’clock he took some lunch at a restaurant, noting meanwhile that the pull had either lessened or divided itself. After that he killed the time at a cheap cinema show, seeing the inane performance over and over again without paying any attention to it.
      About nine at night he drifted homeward and stumbled into the ancient house. Joe Mazurewicz was whining unintelligible prayers, and Gilman hastened up to his own garret chamber without pausing to see if Elwood was in. It was when he turned on the feeble electric light that the shock came. At once he saw there was something on the table which did not belong there, and a second look left no room for doubt. Lying on its side—for it could not stand up alone—was the exotic spiky figure which in his monstrous dream he had broken off the fantastic balustrade. No detail was missing. The ridged, barrel-shaped centre, the thin, radiating arms, the knobs at each end, and the flat, slightly outward-curving starfish-arms spreading from those knobs—all were there. In the electric light the colour seemed to be a kind of iridescent grey veined with green, and Gilman could see amidst his horror and bewilderment that one of the knobs ended in a jagged break corresponding to its former point of attachment to the dream-railing.
      Only his tendency toward a dazed stupor prevented him from screaming aloud. This fusion of dream and reality was too much to bear. Still dazed, he clutched at the spiky thing and staggered downstairs to Landlord Dombrowski’s quarters. The whining prayers of the superstitious loomfixer were still sounding through the mouldy halls, but Gilman did not mind them now. The landlord was in, and greeted him pleasantly. No, he had not seen that thing before and did not know anything about it. But his wife had said she found a funny tin thing in one of the beds when she fixed the rooms at noon, and maybe that was it. Dombrowski called her, and she waddled in. Yes, that was the thing. She had found it in the young gentleman’s bed—on the side next the wall. It had looked very queer to her, but of course the young gentleman had lots of queer things in his room—books and curios and pictures and markings on paper. She certainly knew nothing about it.
      So Gilman climbed upstairs again in a mental turmoil, convinced that he was either still dreaming or that his somnambulism had run to incredible extremes and led him to depredations in unknown places. Where had he got this outré thing? He did not recall seeing it in any museum in Arkham. It must have been somewhere, though; and the sight of it as he snatched it in his sleep must have caused the odd dream-picture of the balustraded terrace. Next day he would make some very guarded inquiries—and perhaps see the nerve specialist.
      Meanwhile he would try to keep track of his somnambulism. As he went upstairs and across the garret hall he sprinkled about some flour which he had borrowed—with a frank admission as to its purpose—from the landlord. He had stopped at Elwood’s door on the way, but had found all dark within. Entering his room, he placed the spiky thing on the table, and lay down in complete mental and physical exhaustion without pausing to undress. From the closed loft above the slanting ceiling he thought he heard a faint scratching and padding, but he was too disorganised even to mind it. That cryptical pull from the north was getting very strong again, though it seemed now to come from a lower place in the sky.
      In the dazzling violet light of dream the old woman and the fanged, furry thing came again and with a greater distinctness than on any former occasion. This time they actually reached him, and he felt the crone’s withered claws clutching at him. He was pulled out of bed and into empty space, and for a moment he heard a rhythmic roaring and saw the twilight amorphousness of the vague abysses seething around him. But that moment was very brief, for presently he was in a crude, windowless little space with rough beams and planks rising to a peak just above his head, and with a curious slanting floor underfoot. Propped level on that floor were low cases full of books of every degree of antiquity and disintegration, and in the centre were a table and bench, both apparently fastened in place. Small objects of unknown shape and nature were ranged on the tops of the cases, and in the flaming violet light Gilman thought he saw a counterpart of the spiky image which had puzzled him so horribly. On the left the floor fell abruptly away, leaving a black triangular gulf out of which, after a second’s dry rattling, there presently climbed the hateful little furry thing with the yellow fangs and bearded human face.
      The evilly grinning beldame still clutched him, and beyond the table stood a figure he had never seen before—a tall, lean man of dead black colouration but without the slightest sign of negroid features; wholly devoid of either hair or beard, and wearing as his only garment a shapeless robe of some heavy black fabric. His feet were indistinguishable because of the table and bench, but he must have been shod, since there was a clicking whenever he changed position. The man did not speak, and bore no trace of expression on his small, regular features. He merely pointed to a book of prodigious size which lay open on the table, while the beldame thrust a huge grey quill into Gilman’s right hand. Over everything was a pall of intensely maddening fear, and the climax was reached when the furry thing ran up the dreamer’s clothing to his shoulders and then down his left arm, finally biting him sharply in the wrist just below his cuff. As the blood spurted from this wound Gilman lapsed into a faint.
      He awaked on the morning of the 22nd with a pain in his left wrist, and saw that his cuff was brown with dried blood. His recollections were very confused, but the scene with the black man in the unknown space stood out vividly. The rats must have bitten him as he slept, giving rise to the climax of that frightful dream. Opening the door, he saw that the flour on the corridor floor was undisturbed except for the huge prints of the loutish fellow who roomed at the other end of the garret. So he had not been sleep-walking this time. But something would have to be done about those rats. He would speak to the landlord about them. Again he tried to stop up the hole at the base of the slanting wall, wedging in a candlestick which seemed of about the right size. His ears were ringing horribly, as if with the residual echoes of some horrible noise heard in dreams.
      As he bathed and changed clothes he tried to recall what he had dreamed after the scene in the violet-litten space, but nothing definite would crystallise in his mind. That scene itself must have corresponded to the sealed loft overhead, which had begun to attack his imagination so violently, but later impressions were faint and hazy. There were suggestions of the vague, twilight abysses, and of still vaster, blacker abysses beyond them—abysses in which all fixed suggestions of form were absent. He had been taken there by the bubble-congeries and the little polyhedron which always dogged him; but they, like himself, had changed to wisps of milky, barely luminous mist in this farther void of ultimate blackness. Something else had gone on ahead—a larger wisp which now and then condensed into nameless approximations of form—and he thought that their progress had not been in a straight line, but rather along the alien curves and spirals of some ethereal vortex which obeyed laws unknown to the physics and mathematics of any conceivable cosmos. Eventually there had been a hint of vast, leaping shadows, of a monstrous, half-acoustic pulsing, and of the thin, monotonous piping of an unseen flute—but that was all. Gilman decided he had picked up that last conception from what he had read in the Necronomicon about the mindless entity Azathoth, which rules all time and space from a curiously environed black throne at the centre of Chaos.
      When the blood was washed away the wrist wound proved very slight, and Gilman puzzled over the location of the two tiny punctures. It occurred to him that there was no blood on the bedspread where he had lain—which was very curious in view of the amount on his skin and cuff. Had he been sleep-walking within his room, and had the rat bitten him as he sat in some chair or paused in some less rational position? He looked in every corner for brownish drops or stains, but did not find any. He had better, he thought, sprinkle flour within the room as well as outside the door—though after all no further proof of his sleep-walking was needed. He knew he did walk—and the thing to do now was to stop it. He must ask Frank Elwood for help. This morning the strange pulls from space seemed lessened, though they were replaced by another sensation even more inexplicable. It was a vague, insistent impulse to fly away from his present situation, but held not a hint of the specific direction in which he wished to fly. As he picked up the strange spiky image on the table he thought the older northward pull grew a trifle stronger; but even so, it was wholly overruled by the newer and more bewildering urge.
      He took the spiky image down to Elwood’s room, steeling himself against the whines of the loomfixer which welled up from the ground floor. Elwood was in, thank heaven, and appeared to be stirring about. There was time for a little conversation before leaving for breakfast and college, so Gilman hurriedly poured forth an account of his recent dreams and fears. His host was very sympathetic, and agreed that something ought to be done. He was shocked by his guest’s drawn, haggard aspect, and noticed the queer, abnormal-looking sunburn which others had remarked during the past week. There was not much, though, that he could say. He had not seen Gilman on any sleep-walking expedition, and had no idea what the curious image could be. He had, though, heard the French-Canadian who lodged just under Gilman talking to Mazurewicz one evening. They were telling each other how badly they dreaded the coming of Walpurgis-Night, now only a few days off; and were exchanging pitying comments about the poor, doomed young gentleman. Desrochers, the fellow under Gilman’s room, had spoken of nocturnal footsteps both shod and unshod, and of the violet light he saw one night when he had stolen fearfully up to peer through Gilman’s keyhole. He had not dared to peer, he told Mazurewicz, after he had glimpsed that light through the cracks around the door. There had been soft talking, too—and as he began to describe it his voice had sunk to an inaudible whisper.
      Elwood could not imagine what had set these superstitious creatures gossiping, but supposed their imaginations had been roused by Gilman’s late hours and somnolent walking and talking on the one hand, and by the nearness of traditionally feared May-Eve on the other hand. That Gilman talked in his sleep was plain, and it was obviously from Desrochers’ keyhole-listenings that the delusive notion of the violet dream-light had got abroad. These simple people were quick to imagine they had seen any odd thing they had heard about. As for a plan of action—Gilman had better move down to Elwood’s room and avoid sleeping alone. Elwood would, if awake, rouse him whenever he began to talk or rise in his sleep. Very soon, too, he must see the specialist. Meanwhile they would take the spiky image around to the various museums and to certain professors; seeking identification and stating that it had been found in a public rubbish-can. Also, Dombrowski must attend to the poisoning of those rats in the walls.
      Braced up by Elwood’s companionship, Gilman attended classes that day. Strange urges still tugged at him, but he could sidetrack them with considerable success. During a free period he shewed the queer image to several professors, all of whom were intensely interested, though none of them could shed any light upon its nature or origin. That night he slept on a couch which Elwood had had the landlord bring to the second-story room, and for the first time in weeks was wholly free from disquieting dreams. But the feverishness still hung on, and the whines of the loomfixer were an unnerving influence.
      During the next few days Gilman enjoyed an almost perfect immunity from morbid manifestations. He had, Elwood said, shewed no tendency to talk or rise in his sleep; and meanwhile the landlord was putting rat-poison everywhere. The only disturbing element was the talk among the superstitious foreigners, whose imaginations had become highly excited. Mazurewicz was always trying to make him get a crucifix, and finally forced one upon him which he said had been blessed by the good Father Iwanicki. Desrochers, too, had something to say—in fact, he insisted that cautious steps had sounded in the now vacant room above him on the first and second nights of Gilman’s absence from it. Paul Choynski thought he heard sounds in the halls and on the stairs at night, and claimed that his door had been softly tried, while Mrs. Dombrowski vowed she had seen Brown Jenkin for the first time since All-Hallows. But such naive reports could mean very little, and Gilman let the cheap metal crucifix hang idly from a knob on his host’s dresser.
      For three days Gilman and Elwood canvassed the local museums in an effort to identify the strange spiky image, but always without success. In every quarter, however, interest was intense; for the utter alienage of the thing was a tremendous challenge to scientific curiosity. One of the small radiating arms was broken off and subjected to chemical analysis, and the result is still talked about in college circles. Professor Ellery found platinum, iron, and tellurium in the strange alloy; but mixed with these were at least three other apparent elements of high atomic weight which chemistry was absolutely powerless to classify. Not only did they fail to correspond with any known element, but they did not even fit the vacant places reserved for probable elements in the periodic system. The mystery remains unsolved to this day, though the image is on exhibition at the museum of Miskatonic University.
      On the morning of April 27 a fresh rat-hole appeared in the room where Gilman was a guest, but Dombrowski tinned it up during the day. The poison was not having much effect, for scratchings and scurryings in the walls were virtually undiminished. Elwood was out late that night, and Gilman waited up for him. He did not wish to go to sleep in a room alone—especially since he thought he had glimpsed in the evening twilight the repellent old woman whose image had become so horribly transferred to his dreams. He wondered who she was, and what had been near her rattling the tin can in a rubbish-heap at the mouth of a squalid courtyard. The crone had seemed to notice him and leer evilly at him—though perhaps this was merely his imagination.
      The next day both youths felt very tired, and knew they would sleep like logs when night came. In the evening they drowsily discussed the mathematical studies which had so completely and perhaps harmfully engrossed Gilman, and speculated about the linkage with ancient magic and folklore which seemed so darkly probable. They spoke of old Keziah Mason, and Elwood agreed that Gilman had good scientific grounds for thinking she might have stumbled on strange and significant information. The hidden cults to which these witches belonged often guarded and handed down surprising secrets from elder, forgotten aeons; and it was by no means impossible that Keziah had actually mastered the art of passing through dimensional gates. Tradition emphasises the uselessness of material barriers in halting a witch’s motions; and who can say what underlies the old tales of broomstick rides through the night?
      Whether a modern student could ever gain similar powers from mathematical research alone, was still to be seen. Success, Gilman added, might lead to dangerous and unthinkable situations; for who could foretell the conditions pervading an adjacent but normally inaccessible dimension? On the other hand, the picturesque possibilities were enormous. Time could not exist in certain belts of space, and by entering and remaining in such a belt one might preserve one’s life and age indefinitely; never suffering organic metabolism or deterioration except for slight amounts incurred during visits to one’s own or similar planes. One might, for example, pass into a timeless dimension and emerge at some remote period of the earth’s history as young as before.
      Whether anybody had ever managed to do this, one could hardly conjecture with any degree of authority. Old legends are hazy and ambiguous, and in historic times all attempts at crossing forbidden gaps seem complicated by strange and terrible alliances with beings and messengers from outside. There was the immemorial figure of the deputy or messenger of hidden and terrible powers—the “Black Man” of the witch-cult, and the “Nyarlathotep” of the Necronomicon. There was, too, the baffling problem of the lesser messengers or intermediaries—the quasi-animals and queer hybrids which legend depicts as witches’ familiars. As Gilman and Elwood retired, too sleepy to argue further, they heard Joe Mazurewicz reel into the house half-drunk, and shuddered at the desperate wildness of his whining prayers.
      That night Gilman saw the violet light again. In his dream he had heard a scratching and gnawing in the partitions, and thought that someone fumbled clumsily at the latch. Then he saw the old woman and the small furry thing advancing toward him over the carpeted floor. The beldame’s face was alight with inhuman exultation, and the little yellow-toothed morbidity tittered mockingly as it pointed at the heavily sleeping form of Elwood on the other couch across the room. A paralysis of fear stifled all attempts to cry out. As once before, the hideous crone seized Gilman by the shoulders, yanking him out of bed and into empty space. Again the infinitude of the shrieking twilight abysses flashed past him, but in another second he thought he was in a dark, muddy, unknown alley of foetid odours, with the rotting walls of ancient houses towering up on every hand.
      Ahead was the robed black man he had seen in the peaked space in the other dream, while from a lesser distance the old woman was beckoning and grimacing imperiously. Brown Jenkin was rubbing itself with a kind of affectionate playfulness around the ankles of the black man, which the deep mud largely concealed. There was a dark open doorway on the right, to which the black man silently pointed. Into this the grimacing crone started, dragging Gilman after her by his pajama sleeve. There were evil-smelling staircases which creaked ominously, and on which the old woman seemed to radiate a faint violet light; and finally a door leading off a landing. The crone fumbled with the latch and pushed the door open, motioning to Gilman to wait and disappearing inside the black aperture.
      The youth’s oversensitive ears caught a hideous strangled cry, and presently the beldame came out of the room bearing a small, senseless form which she thrust at the dreamer as if ordering him to carry it. The sight of this form, and the expression on its face, broke the spell. Still too dazed to cry out, he plunged recklessly down the noisome staircase and into the mud outside; halting only when seized and choked by the waiting black man. As consciousness departed he heard the faint, shrill tittering of the fanged, rat-like abnormality.
      On the morning of the 29th Gilman awaked into a maelstrom of horror. The instant he opened his eyes he knew something was terribly wrong, for he was back in his old garret room with the slanting wall and ceiling, sprawled on the now unmade bed. His throat was aching inexplicably, and as he struggled to a sitting posture he saw with growing fright that his feet and pajama-bottoms were brown with caked mud. For the moment his recollections were hopelessly hazy, but he knew at least that he must have been sleep-walking. Elwood had been lost too deeply in slumber to hear and stop him. On the floor were confused muddy prints, but oddly enough they did not extend all the way to the door. The more Gilman looked at them, the more peculiar they seemed; for in addition to those he could recognise as his there were some smaller, almost round markings—such as the legs of a large chair or table might make, except that most of them tended to be divided into halves. There were also some curious muddy rat-tracks leading out of a fresh hole and back into it again. Utter bewilderment and the fear of madness racked Gilman as he staggered to the door and saw that there were no muddy prints outside. The more he remembered of his hideous dream the more terrified he felt, and it added to his desperation to hear Joe Mazurewicz chanting mournfully two floors below.
      Descending to Elwood’s room he roused his still-sleeping host and began telling of how he had found himself, but Elwood could form no idea of what might really have happened. Where Gilman could have been, how he got back to his room without making tracks in the hall, and how the muddy, furniture-like prints came to be mixed with his in the garret chamber, were wholly beyond conjecture. Then there were those dark, livid marks on his throat, as if he had tried to strangle himself. He put his hands up to them, but found that they did not even approximately fit. While they were talking Desrochers dropped in to say that he had heard a terrific clattering overhead in the dark small hours. No, there had been no one on the stairs after midnight—though just before midnight he had heard faint footfalls in the garret, and cautiously descending steps he did not like. It was, he added, a very bad time of year for Arkham. The young gentleman had better be sure to wear the crucifix Joe Mazurewicz had given him. Even the daytime was not safe, for after dawn there had been strange sounds in the house—especially a thin, childish wail hastily choked off.
      Gilman mechanically attended classes that morning, but was wholly unable to fix his mind on his studies. A mood of hideous apprehension and expectancy had seized him, and he seemed to be awaiting the fall of some annihilating blow. At noon he lunched at the University Spa, picking up a paper from the next seat as he waited for dessert. But he never ate that dessert; for an item on the paper’s first page left him limp, wild-eyed, and able only to pay his check and stagger back to Elwood’s room.
      There had been a strange kidnapping the night before in Orne’s Gangway, and the two-year-old child of a clod-like laundry worker named Anastasia Wolejko had completely vanished from sight. The mother, it appeared, had feared the event for some time; but the reasons she assigned for her fear were so grotesque that no one took them seriously. She had, she said, seen Brown Jenkin about the place now and then ever since early in March, and knew from its grimaces and titterings that little Ladislas must be marked for sacrifice at the awful Sabbat on Walpurgis-Night. She had asked her neighbour Mary Czanek to sleep in the room and try to protect the child, but Mary had not dared. She could not tell the police, for they never believed such things. Children had been taken that way every year ever since she could remember. And her friend Pete Stowacki would not help because he wanted the child out of the way anyhow.
      But what threw Gilman into a cold perspiration was the report of a pair of revellers who had been walking past the mouth of the gangway just after midnight. They admitted they had been drunk, but both vowed they had seen a crazily dressed trio furtively entering the dark passageway. There had, they said, been a huge robed negro, a little old woman in rags, and a young white man in his night-clothes. The old woman had been dragging the youth, while around the feet of the negro a tame rat was rubbing and weaving in the brown mud.
      Gilman sat in a daze all the afternoon, and Elwood—who had meanwhile seen the papers and formed terrible conjectures from them—found him thus when he came home. This time neither could doubt but that something hideously serious was closing in around them. Between the phantasms of nightmare and the realities of the objective world a monstrous and unthinkable relationship was crystallising, and only stupendous vigilance could avert still more direful developments. Gilman must see a specialist sooner or later, but not just now, when all the papers were full of this kidnapping business.
      Just what had really happened was maddeningly obscure, and for a moment both Gilman and Elwood exchanged whispered theories of the wildest kind. Had Gilman unconsciously succeeded better than he knew in his studies of space and its dimensions? Had he actually slipped outside our sphere to points unguessed and unimaginable? Where—if anywhere—had he been on those nights of daemoniac alienage? The roaring twilight abysses—the green hillside—the blistering terrace—the pulls from the stars—the ultimate black vortex—the black man—the muddy alley and the stairs—the old witch and the fanged, furry horror—the bubble-congeries and the little polyhedron—the strange sunburn—the wrist wound—the unexplained image—the muddy feet—the throat-marks—the tales and fears of the superstitious foreigners—what did all this mean? To what extent could the laws of sanity apply to such a case?
      There was no sleep for either of them that night, but next day they both cut classes and drowsed. This was April 30th, and with the dusk would come the hellish Sabbat-time which all the foreigners and the superstitious old folk feared. Mazurewicz came home at six o’clock and said people at the mill were whispering that the Walpurgis-revels would be held in the dark ravine beyond Meadow Hill where the old white stone stands in a place queerly void of all plant-life. Some of them had even told the police and advised them to look there for the missing Wolejko child, but they did not believe anything would be done. Joe insisted that the poor young gentleman wear his nickel-chained crucifix, and Gilman put it on and dropped it inside his shirt to humour the fellow.
      Late at night the two youths sat drowsing in their chairs, lulled by the rhythmical praying of the loomfixer on the floor below. Gilman listened as he nodded, his preternaturally sharpened hearing seeming to strain for some subtle, dreaded murmur beyond the noises in the ancient house. Unwholesome recollections of things in the Necronomicon and the Black Book welled up, and he found himself swaying to infandous rhythms said to pertain to the blackest ceremonies of the Sabbat and to have an origin outside the time and space we comprehend.
      Presently he realised what he was listening for—the hellish chant of the celebrants in the distant black valley. How did he know so much about what they expected? How did he know the time when Nahab and her acolyte were due to bear the brimming bowl which would follow the black cock and the black goat? He saw that Elwood had dropped asleep, and tried to call out and waken him. Something, however, closed his throat. He was not his own master. Had he signed the black man’s book after all?
      Then his fevered, abnormal hearing caught the distant, windborne notes. Over miles of hill and field and alley they came, but he recognised them none the less. The fires must be lit, and the dancers must be starting in. How could he keep himself from going? What was it that had enmeshed him? Mathematics—folklore—the house—old Keziah—Brown Jenkin . . . and now he saw that there was a fresh rat-hole in the wall near his couch. Above the distant chanting and the nearer praying of Joe Mazurewicz came another sound—a stealthy, determined scratching in the partitions. He hoped the electric lights would not go out. Then he saw the fanged, bearded little face in the rat-hole—the accursed little face which he at last realised bore such a shocking, mocking resemblance to old Keziah’s—and heard the faint fumbling at the door.
      The screaming twilight abysses flashed before him, and he felt himself helpless in the formless grasp of the iridescent bubble-congeries. Ahead raced the small, kaleidoscopic polyhedron, and all through the churning void there was a heightening and acceleration of the vague tonal pattern which seemed to foreshadow some unutterable and unendurable climax. He seemed to know what was coming—the monstrous burst of Walpurgis-rhythm in whose cosmic timbre would be concentrated all the primal, ultimate space-time seethings which lie behind the massed spheres of matter and sometimes break forth in measured reverberations that penetrate faintly to every layer of entity and give hideous significance throughout the worlds to certain dreaded periods.
      But all this vanished in a second. He was again in the cramped, violet-litten peaked space with the slanting floor, the low cases of ancient books, the bench and table, the queer objects, and the triangular gulf at one side. On the table lay a small white figure—an infant boy, unclothed and unconscious—while on the other side stood the monstrous, leering old woman with a gleaming, grotesque-hafted knife in her right hand, and a queerly proportioned pale metal bowl covered with curiously chased designs and having delicate lateral handles in her left. She was intoning some croaking ritual in a language which Gilman could not understand, but which seemed like something guardedly quoted in the Necronomicon.
      As the scene grew clear he saw the ancient crone bend forward and extend the empty bowl across the table—and unable to control his own motions, he reached far forward and took it in both hands, noticing as he did so its comparative lightness. At the same moment the disgusting form of Brown Jenkin scrambled up over the brink of the triangular black gulf on his left. The crone now motioned him to hold the bowl in a certain position while she raised the huge, grotesque knife above the small white victim as high as her right hand could reach. The fanged, furry thing began tittering a continuation of the unknown ritual, while the witch croaked loathsome responses. Gilman felt a gnawing, poignant abhorrence shoot through his mental and emotional paralysis, and the light metal bowl shook in his grasp. A second later the downward motion of the knife broke the spell completely, and he dropped the bowl with a resounding bell-like clangour while his hands darted out frantically to stop the monstrous deed.
      In an instant he had edged up the slanting floor around the end of the table and wrenched the knife from the old woman’s claws; sending it clattering over the brink of the narrow triangular gulf. In another instant, however, matters were reversed; for those murderous claws had locked themselves tightly around his own throat, while the wrinkled face was twisted with insane fury. He felt the chain of the cheap crucifix grinding into his neck, and in his peril wondered how the sight of the object itself would affect the evil creature. Her strength was altogether superhuman, but as she continued her choking he reached feebly in his shirt and drew out the metal symbol, snapping the chain and pulling it free.
      At sight of the device the witch seemed struck with panic, and her grip relaxed long enough to give Gilman a chance to break it entirely. He pulled the steel-like claws from his neck, and would have dragged the beldame over the edge of the gulf had not the claws received a fresh access of strength and closed in again. This time he resolved to reply in kind, and his own hands reached out for the creature’s throat. Before she saw what he was doing he had the chain of the crucifix twisted about her neck, and a moment later he had tightened it enough to cut off her breath. During her last struggle he felt something bite at his ankle, and saw that Brown Jenkin had come to her aid. With one savage kick he sent the morbidity over the edge of the gulf and heard it whimper on some level far below.
      Whether he had killed the ancient crone he did not know, but he let her rest on the floor where she had fallen. Then, as he turned away, he saw on the table a sight which nearly snapped the last thread of his reason. Brown Jenkin, tough of sinew and with four tiny hands of daemoniac dexterity, had been busy while the witch was throttling him, and his efforts had been in vain. What he had prevented the knife from doing to the victim’s chest, the yellow fangs of the furry blasphemy had done to a wrist—and the bowl so lately on the floor stood full beside the small lifeless body.
      In his dream-delirium Gilman heard the hellish, alien-rhythmed chant of the Sabbat coming from an infinite distance, and knew the black man must be there. Confused memories mixed themselves with his mathematics, and he believed his subconscious mind held the angles which he needed to guide him back to the normal world—alone and unaided for the first time. He felt sure he was in the immemorially sealed loft above his own room, but whether he could ever escape through the slanting floor or the long-stopped egress he doubted greatly. Besides, would not an escape from a dream-loft bring him merely into a dream-house—an abnormal projection of the actual place he sought? He was wholly bewildered as to the relation betwixt dream and reality in all his experiences.
      The passage through the vague abysses would be frightful, for the Walpurgis-rhythm would be vibrating, and at last he would have to hear that hitherto veiled cosmic pulsing which he so mortally dreaded. Even now he could detect a low, monstrous shaking whose tempo he suspected all too well. At Sabbat-time it always mounted and reached through to the worlds to summon the initiate to nameless rites. Half the chants of the Sabbat were patterned on this faintly overheard pulsing which no earthly ear could endure in its unveiled spatial fulness. Gilman wondered, too, whether he could trust his instinct to take him back to the right part of space. How could he be sure he would not land on that green-litten hillside of a far planet, on the tessellated terrace above the city of tentacled monsters somewhere beyond the galaxy, or in the spiral black vortices of that ultimate void of Chaos wherein reigns the mindless daemon-sultan Azathoth?
      Just before he made the plunge the violet light went out and left him in utter blackness. The witch—old Keziah—Nahab—that must have meant her death. And mixed with the distant chant of the Sabbat and the whimpers of Brown Jenkin in the gulf below he thought he heard another and wilder whine from unknown depths. Joe Mazurewicz—the prayers against the Crawling Chaos now turning to an inexplicably triumphant shriek—worlds of sardonic actuality impinging on vortices of febrile dream—Iä! Shub-Niggurath! The Goat with a Thousand Young. . . .
      They found Gilman on the floor of his queerly angled old garret room long before dawn, for the terrible cry had brought Desrochers and Choynski and Dombrowski and Mazurewicz at once, and had even wakened the soundly sleeping Elwood in his chair. He was alive, and with open, staring eyes, but seemed largely unconscious. On his throat were the marks of murderous hands, and on his left ankle was a distressing rat-bite. His clothing was badly rumpled, and Joe’s crucifix was missing. Elwood trembled, afraid even to speculate on what new form his friend’s sleep-walking had taken. Mazurewicz seemed half-dazed because of a “sign” he said he had had in response to his prayers, and he crossed himself frantically when the squealing and whimpering of a rat sounded from beyond the slanting partition.
      When the dreamer was settled on his couch in Elwood’s room they sent for Dr. Malkowski—a local practitioner who would repeat no tales where they might prove embarrassing—and he gave Gilman two hypodermic injections which caused him to relax in something like natural drowsiness. During the day the patient regained consciousness at times and whispered his newest dream disjointedly to Elwood. It was a painful process, and at its very start brought out a fresh and disconcerting fact.
      Gilman—whose ears had so lately possessed an abnormal sensitiveness—was now stone deaf. Dr. Malkowski, summoned again in haste, told Elwood that both ear-drums were ruptured, as if by the impact of some stupendous sound intense beyond all human conception or endurance. How such a sound could have been heard in the last few hours without arousing all the Miskatonic Valley was more than the honest physician could say.
      Elwood wrote his part of the colloquy on paper, so that a fairly easy communication was maintained. Neither knew what to make of the whole chaotic business, and decided it would be better if they thought as little as possible about it. Both, though, agreed that they must leave this ancient and accursed house as soon as it could be arranged. Evening papers spoke of a police raid on some curious revellers in a ravine beyond Meadow Hill just before dawn, and mentioned that the white stone there was an object of age-long superstitious regard. Nobody had been caught, but among the scattering fugitives had been glimpsed a huge negro. In another column it was stated that no trace of the missing child Ladislas Wolejko had been found.
      The crowning horror came that very night. Elwood will never forget it, and was forced to stay out of college the rest of the term because of the resulting nervous breakdown. He had thought he heard rats in the partitions all the evening, but paid little attention to them. Then, long after both he and Gilman had retired, the atrocious shrieking began. Elwood jumped up, turned on the lights, and rushed over to his guest’s couch. The occupant was emitting sounds of veritably inhuman nature, as if racked by some torment beyond description. He was writhing under the bedclothes, and a great red stain was beginning to appear on the blankets.
      Elwood scarcely dared to touch him, but gradually the screaming and writhing subsided. By this time Dombrowski, Choynski, Desrochers, Mazurewicz, and the top-floor lodger were all crowding into the doorway, and the landlord had sent his wife back to telephone for Dr. Malkowski. Everybody shrieked when a large rat-like form suddenly jumped out from beneath the ensanguined bedclothes and scuttled across the floor to a fresh, open hole close by. When the doctor arrived and began to pull down those frightful covers Walter Gilman was dead.
      It would be barbarous to do more than suggest what had killed Gilman. There had been virtually a tunnel through his body—something had eaten his heart out. Dombrowski, frantic at the failure of his constant rat-poisoning efforts, cast aside all thought of his lease and within a week had moved with all his older lodgers to a dingy but less ancient house in Walnut Street. The worst thing for a while was keeping Joe Mazurewicz quiet; for the brooding loomfixer would never stay sober, and was constantly whining and muttering about spectral and terrible things.
      It seems that on that last hideous night Joe had stooped to look at the crimson rat-tracks which led from Gilman’s couch to the nearby hole. On the carpet they were very indistinct, but a piece of open flooring intervened between the carpet’s edge and the base-board. There Mazurewicz had found something monstrous—or thought he had, for no one else could quite agree with him despite the undeniable queerness of the prints. The tracks on the flooring were certainly vastly unlike the average prints of a rat, but even Choynski and Desrochers would not admit that they were like the prints of four tiny human hands.
      The house was never rented again. As soon as Dombrowski left it the pall of its final desolation began to descend, for people shunned it both on account of its old reputation and because of the new foetid odour. Perhaps the ex-landlord’s rat-poison had worked after all, for not long after his departure the place became a neighbourhood nuisance. Health officials traced the smell to the closed spaces above and beside the eastern garret room, and agreed that the number of dead rats must be enormous. They decided, however, that it was not worth their while to hew open and disinfect the long-sealed spaces; for the foetor would soon be over, and the locality was not one which encouraged fastidious standards. Indeed, there were always vague local tales of unexplained stenches upstairs in the Witch House just after May-Eve and Hallowmass. The neighbours grumblingly acquiesced in the inertia—but the foetor none the less formed an additional count against the place. Toward the last the house was condemned as an habitation by the building inspector.
      Gilman’s dreams and their attendant circumstances have never been explained. Elwood, whose thoughts on the entire episode are sometimes almost maddening, came back to college the next autumn and graduated in the following June. He found the spectral gossip of the town much diminished, and it is indeed a fact that—notwithstanding certain reports of a ghostly tittering in the deserted house which lasted almost as long as that edifice itself—no fresh appearances either of old Keziah or of Brown Jenkin have been muttered of since Gilman’s death. It is rather fortunate that Elwood was not in Arkham in that later year when certain events abruptly renewed the local whispers about elder horrors. Of course he heard about the matter afterward and suffered untold torments of black and bewildered speculation; but even that was not as bad as actual nearness and several possible sights would have been.
      In March, 1931, a gale wrecked the roof and great chimney of the vacant Witch House, so that a chaos of crumbling bricks, blackened, moss-grown shingles, and rotting planks and timbers crashed down into the loft and broke through the floor beneath. The whole attic story was choked with debris from above, but no one took the trouble to touch the mess before the inevitable razing of the decrepit structure. That ultimate step came in the following December, and it was when Gilman’s old room was cleared out by reluctant, apprehensive workmen that the gossip began.
      Among the rubbish which had crashed through the ancient slanting ceiling were several things which made the workmen pause and call in the police. Later the police in turn called in the coroner and several professors from the university. There were bones—badly crushed and splintered, but clearly recognisable as human—whose manifestly modern date conflicted puzzlingly with the remote period at which their only possible lurking-place, the low, slant-floored loft overhead, had supposedly been sealed from all human access. The coroner’s physician decided that some belonged to a small child, while certain others—found mixed with shreds of rotten brownish cloth—belonged to a rather undersized, bent female of advanced years. Careful sifting of debris also disclosed many tiny bones of rats caught in the collapse, as well as older rat-bones gnawed by small fangs in a fashion now and then highly productive of controversy and reflection.
      Other objects found included the mingled fragments of many books and papers, together with a yellowish dust left from the total disintegration of still older books and papers. All, without exception, appeared to deal with black magic in its most advanced and horrible forms; and the evidently recent date of certain items is still a mystery as unsolved as that of the modern human bones. An even greater mystery is the absolute homogeneity of the crabbed, archaic writing found on a wide range of papers whose conditions and watermarks suggest age differences of at least 150 to 200 years. To some, though, the greatest mystery of all is the variety of utterly inexplicable objects—objects whose shapes, materials, types of workmanship, and purposes baffle all conjecture—found scattered amidst the wreckage in evidently diverse states of injury. One of these things—which excited several Miskatonic professors profoundly—is a badly damaged monstrosity plainly resembling the strange image which Gilman gave to the college museum, save that it is larger, wrought of some peculiar bluish stone instead of metal, and possessed of a singularly angled pedestal with undecipherable hieroglyphics.
      Archaeologists and anthropologists are still trying to explain the bizarre designs chased on a crushed bowl of light metal whose inner side bore ominous brownish stains when found. Foreigners and credulous grandmothers are equally garrulous about the modern nickel crucifix with broken chain mixed in the rubbish and shiveringly identified by Joe Mazurewicz as that which he had given poor Gilman many years before. Some believe this crucifix was dragged up to the sealed loft by rats, while others think it must have been on the floor in some corner of Gilman’s old room all the time. Still others, including Joe himself, have theories too wild and fantastic for sober credence.
      When the slanting wall of Gilman’s room was torn out, the once sealed triangular space between that partition and the house’s north wall was found to contain much less structural debris, even in proportion to its size, than the room itself; though it had a ghastly layer of older materials which paralysed the wreckers with horror. In brief, the floor was a veritable ossuary of the bones of small children—some fairly modern, but others extending back in infinite gradations to a period so remote that crumbling was almost complete. On this deep bony layer rested a knife of great size, obvious antiquity, and grotesque, ornate, and exotic design—above which the debris was piled.
      In the midst of this debris, wedged between a fallen plank and a cluster of cemented bricks from the ruined chimney, was an object destined to cause more bafflement, veiled fright, and openly superstitious talk in Arkham than anything else discovered in the haunted and accursed building. This object was the partly crushed skeleton of a huge, diseased rat, whose abnormalities of form are still a topic of debate and source of singular reticence among the members of Miskatonic’s department of comparative anatomy. Very little concerning this skeleton has leaked out, but the workmen who found it whisper in shocked tones about the long, brownish hairs with which it was associated.
      The bones of the tiny paws, it is rumoured, imply prehensile characteristics more typical of a diminutive monkey than of a rat; while the small skull with its savage yellow fangs is of the utmost anomalousness, appearing from certain angles like a miniature, monstrously degraded parody of a human skull. The workmen crossed themselves in fright when they came upon this blasphemy, but later burned candles of gratitude in St. Stanislaus’ Church because of the shrill, ghostly tittering they felt they would never hear again.",True
"I
The animal paused on the threshold, interrogative alert, ready for flight if necessary. Severn laid down his palette, and held out a hand of welcome. The cat remained motionless, her yellow eyes fastened upon Severn.
""Puss,"" he said, in his low, pleasant voice, ""come in.""
The tip of her thin tail twitched uncertainly.
""Come in,"" he said again.
Apparently she found his voice reassuring, for she slowly settled upon all fours, her eyes still fastened upon him, her tail tucked under her gaunt flanks.
He rose from his easel smiling. She eyed him quietly, and when he walked toward her she watched him bend above her without a wince; her eyes followed his hand until it touched her head. Then she uttered a ragged mew.
It had long been Severn's custom to converse with animals, probably because he lived so much alone; and now he said, ""What's the matter, puss?""
Her timid eyes sought his.
""I understand,"" he said gently, ""you shall have it at once.""
Then moving quietly about he busied himself with the duties of a host, rinsed a saucer, filled it with the rest of the milk from the bottle on the window-sill, and kneeling down, crumbled a roll into the hollow of his hand.
The creature rose and crept toward the saucer.
With the handle of a palette-knife he stirred the crumbs and milk together and stepped back as she thrust her nose into the mess. He watched her in silence. From time to time the saucer clinked upon the tiled floor as she reached for a morsel on the rim; and at last the bread was all gone, and her purple tongue travelled over every unlicked spot until the saucer shone like polished marble. Then she sat up, and coolly turning her back to him, began her ablutions.
""Keep it up,"" said Severn, much interested, ""you need it.""
She flattened one ear, but neither turned nor interrupted her toilet. As the grime was slowly removed Severn observed that nature had intended her for a white cat. Her fur had disappeared in patches, from disease or the chances of war, her tail was bony and her spine sharp. But what charms she had were becoming apparent under vigorous licking, and he waited until she had finished before re-opening the conversation. When at last she closed her eyes and folded her forepaws under her breast, he began again very gently: ""Puss, tell me your troubles.""
At the sound of his voice she broke into a harsh rumbling which he recognized as an attempt to purr. He bent over to rub her cheek and she mewed again, an amiable inquiring little mew, to which he replied, ""Certainly, you are greatly improved, and when you recover your plumage you will be a gorgeous bird."" Much flattered, she stood up and marched around and around his legs, pushing her head between them and making pleased remarks, to which he responded with grave politeness.
""Now, what sent you here,"" he said—""here into the Street of the Four Winds, and up five flights to the very door where you would be welcome? What was it that prevented your meditated flight when I turned from my canvas to encounter your yellow eyes? Are you a Latin Quarter cat as I am a Latin Quarter man? And why do you wear a rose-coloured flowered garter buckled about your neck?"" The cat had climbed into his lap, and now sat purring as he passed his hand over her thin coat.
""Excuse me,"" he continued in lazy soothing tones, harmonizing with her purring, ""if I seem indelicate, but I cannot help musing on this rose-coloured garter, flowered so quaintly and fastened with a silver clasp. For the clasp is silver; I can see the mint mark on the edge, as is prescribed by the law of the French Republic. Now, why is this garter woven of rose silk and delicately embroidered,—why is this silken garter with its silver clasp about your famished throat? Am I indiscreet when I inquire if its owner is your owner? Is she some aged dame living in memory of youthful vanities, fond, doting on you, decorating you with her intimate personal attire? The circumference of the garter would suggest this, for your neck is thin, and the garter fits you. But then again I notice—I notice most things—that the garter is capable of being much enlarged. These small silver-rimmed eyelets, of which I count five, are proof of that. And now I observe that the fifth eyelet is worn out, as though the tongue of the clasp were accustomed to lie there. That seems to argue a well-rounded form.""
The cat curled her toes in contentment. The street was very still outside.
He murmured on: ""Why should your mistress decorate you with an article most necessary to her at all times? Anyway, at most times. How did she come to slip this bit of silk and silver about your neck? Was it the caprice of a moment,—when you, before you had lost your pristine plumpness, marched singing into her bedroom to bid her good-morning? Of course, and she sat up among the pillows, her coiled hair tumbling to her shoulders, as you sprang upon the bed purring: 'Good-day, my lady.' Oh, it is very easy to understand,"" he yawned, resting his head on the back of the chair. The cat still purred, tightening and relaxing her padded claws over his knee.
""Shall I tell you all about her, cat? She is very beautiful—your mistress,"" he murmured drowsily, ""and her hair is heavy as burnished gold. I could paint her,—not on canvas—for I should need shades and tones and hues and dyes more splendid than the iris of a splendid rainbow. I could only paint her with closed eyes, for in dreams alone can such colours as I need be found. For her eyes, I must have azure from skies untroubled by a cloud—the skies of dreamland. For her lips, roses from the palaces of slumberland, and for her brow, snow-drifts from mountains which tower in fantastic pinnacles to the moons;—oh, much higher than our moon here,—the crystal moons of dreamland. She is—very—beautiful, your mistress.""
The words died on his lips and his eyelids drooped.
The cat, too, was asleep, her cheek turned up upon her wasted flank, her paws relaxed and limp.
II
""It is fortunate,"" said Severn, sitting up and stretching, ""that we have tided over the dinner hour, for I have nothing to offer you for supper but what may be purchased with one silver franc.""
The cat on his knee rose, arched her back, yawned, and looked up at him.
""What shall it be? A roast chicken with salad? No? Possibly you prefer beef? Of course,—and I shall try an egg and some white bread. Now for the wines. Milk for you? Good. I shall take a little water, fresh from the wood,"" with a motion toward the bucket in the sink.
He put on his hat and left the room. The cat followed to the door, and after he had closed it behind him, she settled down, smelling at the cracks, and cocking one ear at every creak from the crazy old building.
The door below opened and shut. The cat looked serious, for a moment doubtful, and her ears flattened in nervous expectation. Presently she rose with a jerk of her tail and started on a noiseless tour of the studio. She sneezed at a pot of turpentine, hastily retreating to the table, which she presently mounted, and having satisfied her curiosity concerning a roll of red modelling wax, returned to the door and sat down with her eyes on the crack over the threshold. Then she lifted her voice in a thin plaint.
When Severn returned he looked grave, but the cat, joyous and demonstrative, marched around him, rubbing her gaunt body against his legs, driving her head enthusiastically into his hand, and purring until her voice mounted to a squeal.
He placed a bit of meat, wrapped in brown paper, upon the table, and with a penknife cut it into shreds. The milk he took from a bottle which had served for medicine, and poured it into the saucer on the hearth.
The cat crouched before it, purring and lapping at the same time.
He cooked his egg and ate it with a slice of bread, watching her busy with the shredded meat, and when he had finished, and had filled and emptied a cup of water from the bucket in the sink, he sat down, taking her into his lap, where she at once curled up and began her toilet. He began to speak again, touching her caressingly at times by way of emphasis.
""Cat, I have found out where your mistress lives. It is not very far away;—it is here, under this same leaky roof, but in the north wing which I had supposed was uninhabited. My janitor tells me this. By chance, he is almost sober this evening. The butcher on the rue de Seine, where I bought your meat, knows you, and old Cabane the baker identified you with needless sarcasm. They tell me hard tales of your mistress which I shall not believe. They say she is idle and vain and pleasure-loving; they say she is hare-brained and reckless. The little sculptor on the ground floor, who was buying rolls from old Cabane, spoke to me to-night for the first time, although we have always bowed to each other. He said she was very good and very beautiful. He has only seen her once, and does not know her name. I thanked him;—I don't know why I thanked him so warmly. Cabane said, 'Into this cursed Street of the Four Winds, the four winds blow all things evil.' The sculptor looked confused, but when he went out with his rolls, he said to me, 'I am sure, Monsieur, that she is as good as she is beautiful.'""
The cat had finished her toilet, and now, springing softly to the floor, went to the door and sniffed. He knelt beside her, and unclasping the garter held it for a moment in his hands. After a while he said: ""There is a name engraved upon the silver clasp beneath the buckle. It is a pretty name, Sylvia Elven. Sylvia is a woman's name, Elven is the name of a town. In Paris, in this quarter, above all, in this Street of the Four Winds, names are worn and put away as the fashions change with the seasons. I know the little town of Elven, for there I met Fate face to face and Fate was unkind. But do you know that in Elven Fate had another name, and that name was Sylvia?""
He replaced the garter and stood up looking down at the cat crouched before the closed door.
""The name of Elven has a charm for me. It tells me of meadows and clear rivers. The name of Sylvia troubles me like perfume from dead flowers.""
The cat mewed.
""Yes, yes,"" he said soothingly, ""I will take you back. Your Sylvia is not my Sylvia; the world is wide and Elven is not unknown. Yet in the darkness and filth of poorer Paris, in the sad shadows of this ancient house, these names are very pleasant to me.""
He lifted her in his arms and strode through the silent corridors to the stairs. Down five flights and into the moonlit court, past the little sculptor's den, and then again in at the gate of the north wing and up the worm-eaten stairs he passed, until he came to a closed door. When he had stood knocking for a long time, something moved behind the door; it opened and he went in. The room was dark. As he crossed the threshold, the cat sprang from his arms into the shadows. He listened but heard nothing. The silence was oppressive and he struck a match. At his elbow stood a table and on the table a candle in a gilded candlestick. This he lighted, then looked around. The chamber was vast, the hangings heavy with embroidery. Over the fireplace towered a carved mantel, grey with the ashes of dead fires. In a recess by the deep-set windows stood a bed, from which the bedclothes, soft and fine as lace, trailed to the polished floor. He lifted the candle above his head. A handkerchief lay at his feet. It was faintly perfumed. He turned toward the windows. In front of them was acanapé and over it were flung, pell-mell, a gown of silk, a heap of lace-like garments, white and delicate as spiders' meshes, long, crumpled gloves, and, on the floor beneath, the stockings, the little pointed shoes, and one garter of rosy silk, quaintly flowered and fitted with a silver clasp. Wondering, he stepped forward and drew the heavy curtains from the bed. For a moment the candle flared in his hand; then his eyes met two other eyes, wide open, smiling, and the candle-flame flashed over hair heavy as gold.
She was pale, but not as white as he; her eyes were untroubled as a child's; but he stared, trembling from head to foot, while the candle flickered in his hand.
At last he whispered: ""Sylvia, it is I.""
Again he said, ""It is I.""
Then, knowing that she was dead, he kissed her on the mouth. And through the long watches of the night the cat purred on his knee, tightening and relaxing her padded claws, until the sky paled above the Street of the Four Winds.
","It is said that in Ulthar, which lies beyond the river Skai, no man may kill a cat; and this I can verily believe as I gaze upon him who sitteth purring before the fire. For the cat is cryptic, and close to strange things which men cannot see. He is the soul of antique Aegyptus, and bearer of tales from forgotten cities in Meroë and Ophir. He is the kin of the jungle’s lords, and heir to the secrets of hoary and sinister Africa. The Sphinx is his cousin, and he speaks her language; but he is more ancient than the Sphinx, and remembers that which she hath forgotten.
      In Ulthar, before ever the burgesses forbade the killing of cats, there dwelt an old cotter and his wife who delighted to trap and slay the cats of their neighbours. Why they did this I know not; save that many hate the voice of the cat in the night, and take it ill that cats should run stealthily about yards and gardens at twilight. But whatever the reason, this old man and woman took pleasure in trapping and slaying every cat which came near to their hovel; and from some of the sounds heard after dark, many villagers fancied that the manner of slaying was exceedingly peculiar. But the villagers did not discuss such things with the old man and his wife; because of the habitual expression on the withered faces of the two, and because their cottage was so small and so darkly hidden under spreading oaks at the back of a neglected yard. In truth, much as the owners of cats hated these odd folk, they feared them more; and instead of berating them as brutal assassins, merely took care that no cherished pet or mouser should stray toward the remote hovel under the dark trees. When through some unavoidable oversight a cat was missed, and sounds heard after dark, the loser would lament impotently; or console himself by thanking Fate that it was not one of his children who had thus vanished. For the people of Ulthar were simple, and knew not whence it is all cats first came.
      One day a caravan of strange wanderers from the South entered the narrow cobbled streets of Ulthar. Dark wanderers they were, and unlike the other roving folk who passed through the village twice every year. In the market-place they told fortunes for silver, and bought gay beads from the merchants. What was the land of these wanderers none could tell; but it was seen that they were given to strange prayers, and that they had painted on the sides of their wagons strange figures with human bodies and the heads of cats, hawks, rams, and lions. And the leader of the caravan wore a head-dress with two horns and a curious disc betwixt the horns.
      There was in this singular caravan a little boy with no father or mother, but only a tiny black kitten to cherish. The plague had not been kind to him, yet had left him this small furry thing to mitigate his sorrow; and when one is very young, one can find great relief in the lively antics of a black kitten. So the boy whom the dark people called Menes smiled more often than he wept as he sate playing with his graceful kitten on the steps of an oddly painted wagon.
      On the third morning of the wanderers’ stay in Ulthar, Menes could not find his kitten; and as he sobbed aloud in the market-place certain villagers told him of the old man and his wife, and of sounds heard in the night. And when he heard these things his sobbing gave place to meditation, and finally to prayer. He stretched out his arms toward the sun and prayed in a tongue no villager could understand; though indeed the villagers did not try very hard to understand, since their attention was mostly taken up by the sky and the odd shapes the clouds were assuming. It was very peculiar, but as the little boy uttered his petition there seemed to form overhead the shadowy, nebulous figures of exotic things; of hybrid creatures crowned with horn-flanked discs. Nature is full of such illusions to impress the imaginative.
      That night the wanderers left Ulthar, and were never seen again. And the householders were troubled when they noticed that in all the village there was not a cat to be found. From each hearth the familiar cat had vanished; cats large and small, black, grey, striped, yellow, and white. Old Kranon, the burgomaster, swore that the dark folk had taken the cats away in revenge for the killing of Menes’ kitten; and cursed the caravan and the little boy. But Nith, the lean notary, declared that the old cotter and his wife were more likely persons to suspect; for their hatred of cats was notorious and increasingly bold. Still, no one durst complain to the sinister couple; even when little Atal, the innkeeper’s son, vowed that he had at twilight seen all the cats of Ulthar in that accursed yard under the trees, pacing very slowly and solemnly in a circle around the cottage, two abreast, as if in performance of some unheard-of rite of beasts. The villagers did not know how much to believe from so small a boy; and though they feared that the evil pair had charmed the cats to their death, they preferred not to chide the old cotter till they met him outside his dark and repellent yard.
      So Ulthar went to sleep in vain anger; and when the people awaked at dawn—behold! every cat was back at his accustomed hearth! Large and small, black, grey, striped, yellow, and white, none was missing. Very sleek and fat did the cats appear, and sonorous with purring content. The citizens talked with one another of the affair, and marvelled not a little. Old Kranon again insisted that it was the dark folk who had taken them, since cats did not return alive from the cottage of the ancient man and his wife. But all agreed on one thing: that the refusal of all the cats to eat their portions of meat or drink their saucers of milk was exceedingly curious. And for two whole days the sleek, lazy cats of Ulthar would touch no food, but only doze by the fire or in the sun.
      It was fully a week before the villagers noticed that no lights were appearing at dusk in the windows of the cottage under the trees. Then the lean Nith remarked that no one had seen the old man or his wife since the night the cats were away. In another week the burgomaster decided to overcome his fears and call at the strangely silent dwelling as a matter of duty, though in so doing he was careful to take with him Shang the blacksmith and Thul the cutter of stone as witnesses. And when they had broken down the frail door they found only this: two cleanly picked human skeletons on the earthen floor, and a number of singular beetles crawling in the shadowy corners.
      There was subsequently much talk among the burgesses of Ulthar. Zath, the coroner, disputed at length with Nith, the lean notary; and Kranon and Shang and Thul were overwhelmed with questions. Even little Atal, the innkeeper’s son, was closely questioned and given a sweetmeat as reward. They talked of the old cotter and his wife, of the caravan of dark wanderers, of small Menes and his black kitten, of the prayer of Menes and of the sky during that prayer, of the doings of the cats on the night the caravan left, and of what was later found in the cottage under the dark trees in the repellent yard.
      And in the end the burgesses passed that remarkable law which is told of by traders in Hatheg and discussed by travellers in Nir; namely, that in Ulthar no man may kill a cat.",False
"STEVE BRILL did not believe in ghosts or demons. Juan Lopez did. But neither the caution of the one nor the sturdy skepticism of the other was shield against the horror that fell upon them—the horror forgotten by men for more than three hundred years—a screaming fear monstrously resurrected from the black lost ages.

Yet as Steve Brill sat on his sagging stoop that last evening, his thoughts were as far from uncanny menaces as the thoughts of man can be. His ruminations were bitter but materialistic. He surveyed his farmland and he swore. Brill was tall, rangy and tough as boot-leather—true son of the iron-bodied pioneers who wrenched West Texas from the wilderness. He was browned by the sun and strong as a longhorned steer. His lean legs and the boots on them showed his cowboy instincts, and now he cursed himself that he had ever climbed off the hurricane deck of his crankeyed mustang and turned to farming. He was no farmer, the young puncher admitted profanely.

Yet his failure had not all been his fault. Plentiful rain in the winter —so rare in West Texas—had given promise of good crops. But as usual, things had happened. A late blizzard had destroyed all the budding fruit. The grain which had looked so promising was ripped to shreds and battered into the ground by terrific hailstorms just as it was turning yellow. A period of intense dryness, followed by another hailstorm, finished the corn.

Then the cotton, which had somehow struggled through, fell before a swarm of grasshoppers which stripped Brill's field almost overnight. So Brill sat and swore that he would not renew his lease—he gave fervent thanks that he did not own the land on which he had wasted his sweat, and that there were still broad rolling ranges to the West where a strong young man could make his living riding and roping.

Now as Brill sat glumly, he was aware of the approaching form of his nearest neighbor, Juan Lopez, a taciturn old Mexican who lived in a but just out of sight over the hill across the creek, and grubbed for a living. At present he was clearing a strip of land on an adjoining farm, and in returning to his but he crossed a corner of Brill's pasture.

Brill idly watched him climb through the barbed-wire fence and trudge along the path he had worn in the short dry grass. He had been working at his present job for over a month now, chopping down tough gnarly mesquite trees and digging up their incredibly long roots, and Brill knew that he always followed the same path home. And watching, Brill noted him swerving far aside, seemingly to avoid a low rounded hillock which jutted above the level of the pasture. Lopez went far around this knoll and Brill remembered that the old Mexican always circled it at a distance. And another thing came into Brill's idle mind —Lopez always increased his gait when he was passing the knoll, and he always managed to get by it before sundown—yet Mexican laborers generally worked from the first light of dawn to the last glint of twilight, especially at these grubbing jobs, when they were paid by the acre and not by the day. Brill's curiosity was aroused.

He rose, and sauntering down the slight slope on the crown of which his shack sat, hailed the plodding Mexican.

""Hey, Lopez, wait a minute.""

Lopez halted; looked about, and remained motionless but unenthusiastic as the white man approached.

""Lopez,"" said Brill lazily, ""it ain't none of my business, but I just wanted to ask you—how come you always go so far around that old Indian mound?""

""No Babe,"" grunted Lopez shortly.

""You're a liar,"" responded Brill genially. ""You savvy all right; you speak English as good as me. What's the matter—you think that mound's ha'nted or somethin'!""

Brill could speak Spanish himself and read it, too, but like most Anglo- Saxons he much preferred to speak his own language.

Lopez shrugged his shoulders.

""It is not a good place, no bueno,"" he muttered, avoiding Brill's eyes. ""Let hidden things rest.""

""I reckon you're scared of ghosts,"" Brill bantered. ""Shucks, if that is an Indian mound, them Indians been dead so long their ghosts 'ud be plumb wore out by now.""

Brill knew that the illiterate Mexicans looked with superstitious aversion on the mounds that are found here and there through the Southwest —relics of a past and forgotten age, containing the moldering bones of chiefs and warriors of a lost race.

""Best not to disturb what is hidden in the earth,"" grunted Lopez.

""Bosh,"" said Brill. ""Me and some boys busted into one of them mounds over in the Palo Pinto country and dug up pieces of a skeleton with some beads and flint arrowheads and the like. I kept some of the teeth a long time till I lost 'em, and I ain't never been ha'nted.""

""Indians?"" snorted Lopez unexpectedly. ""Who spoke of Indians? There have been more than Indians in this country. In the old times strange things happened here. I have heard the tales of my people, handed down from generation to generation. And my people were here long before yours, Senor Brill.""

""Yeah, you're right,"" admitted Steve. ""First white men in this country was Spaniards, of course. Coronado passed along not very far from here, I hear tell, and Hernando de Estrada's expedition came through here—away back yonder—I dunno how long ago.""

""In 1545,"" said Lopez. ""They pitched camp yonder where your corral stands now.""

Brill turned to glance at his rail-fenced corral, inhabited now by his saddlehorse, a pair of workhorses and a scrawny cow.

""How come you know so much about it?"" he asked curiously.

""One of my ancestors marched with de Estrada,"" answered Lopez. ""A soldier, Porfirio Lopez; he told his son of that expedition, and he told his son, and so down the family line to me, who have no son to whom I can tell the tale.""

""I didn't know you were so well connected,"" said Brill. ""Maybe you know somethin' about the gold de Estrada was supposed to have hid around here, somewhere.""

""There was no gold,"" growled Lopez. ""De Estrada's soldiers bore only their arms, and they fought their way through hostile country—many left their bones along the trail. Later—many years later—a mule train from Santa Fe was attacked not many miles from here by Comanches and they hid their gold and escaped; so the legends got mixed up. But even their gold is not there now, because Gringo buffalo-hunters found it and dug it up.""

Brill nodded abstractedly, hardly heeding. Of all the continent of North America there is no section so haunted by tales of lost or hidden treasure as is the Southwest. Uncounted wealth passed back and forth over the hills and plains of Texas and New Mexico in the old days when Spain owned the gold and silver mines of the New World and controlled the rich fur trade of the West, and echoes of that wealth linger on in tales of golden caches. Some such vagrant dream, born of failure and pressing poverty, rose in Brill's mind.

Aloud he spoke: ""Well, anyway, I got nothin' else to do and I believe I'll dig into that old mound and see what I can find.""

The effect of that simple statement on Lopez was nothing short of shocking. He recoiled and his swarthy brown face went ashy; his black eyes flared and he threw up his arms in a gesture of intense expostulation.

""Dios, no!"" he cried. ""Don't do that, Senor Brill! There is a curse —my grandfather told me—""

""Told you what?"" asked Brill.

Lopez lapsed into sullen silence.

""I cannot speak,"" he muttered. ""I am sworn to silence. Only to an eldest son could I open my heart. But believe me when I say better had you cut your throat than to break into that accursed mound.""

""Well,"" said Brill, impatient of Mexican superstitions, ""if it's so bad why don't you tell me about it? Gimme a logical reason for not bustin' into it.""

""I cannot speak!"" cried the Mexican desperately. ""I know!—but I swore to silence on the Holy Crucifix, just as every man of my family has sworn. It is a thing so dark, it is to risk damnation even to speak of it! Were I to tell you, I would blast the soul from your body. But I have sworn—and I have no son, so my lips are sealed forever.""

""Aw, well,"" said Brill sarcastically, ""why don't you write it out?""

Lopez started, stared, and to Steve's surprise, caught at the suggestion.

""I will! Dios be thanked the good priest taught me to write when I was a child. My oath said nothing of writing. I only swore not to speak. I will write out the whole thing for you, if you will swear not to speak of it afterward, and to destroy the paper as soon as you have read it.

""Sure,"" said Brill, to humor him, and the old Mexican seemed much relieved.

""Bueno! I will go at once and write. Tomorrow as I go to work I will bring you the paper and you will understand why no one must open that accursed mound!""

And Lopez hurried along his homeward path, his stooped shoulders swaying with the effort of his unwonted haste. Steve grinned after him, shrugged his shoulders and turned back toward his own shack. Then he halted, gazing back at the low rounded mound with its grass-grown sides. It must be an Indian tomb, he decided, what with its symmetry and its similarity to other Indian mounds he had seen. He scowled as he tried to figure out the seeming connection between the mysterious knoll and the martial ancestor of Juan Lopez.

Brill gazed after the receding figure of the old Mexican. A shallow valley, cut by a half-dry creek, bordered with trees and underbrush, lay between Brill's pasture and the low sloping hill beyond which lay Lopez's shack. Among the trees along the creek bank the old Mexican was disappearing. And Brill came to a sudden decision.

Hurrying up the slight slope, he took a pick and a shovel from the tool shed built onto the back of his shack. The sun had not yet set and Brill believed he could open the mound deep enough to determine its nature before dark. If not, he could work by lantern light. Steve, like most of his breed, lived mostly by impulse, and his present urge was to tear into that mysterious hillock and find what, if anything, was concealed therein. The thought of treasure came again to his mind, piqued by the evasive attitude of Lopez.

What if, after all, that grassy heap of brown earth hid riches—virgin ore from forgotten mines, or the minted coinage of old Spain? Was it not possible that the musketeers of de Estrada had themselves reared that pile above a treasure they could not bear away, molding it in the likeness of an Indian mound to fool seekers? Did old Lopez know that? It would not be strange if, knowing of treasure there, the old Mexican refrained from disturbing it. Ridden with grisly superstitious fears, he might well live out a life of barren toil rather than risk the wrath of lurking ghosts or devils—for the Mexicans say that hidden gold is always accursed, and surely there was supposed to be some especial doom resting on this mound. Well, Brill meditated, Latin-Indian devils had no terrors for the Anglo-Saxon, tormented by the demons of drouth and storm and crop failure.

Steve set to work with the savage energy characteristic of his breed. The task was no light one; the soil, baked by the fierce sun, was iron-hard, and mixed with rocks and pebbles. Brill sweated profusely and grunted with his efforts, but the fire of the treasure-hunter was on him. He shook the sweat out of his eyes and drove in the pick with mighty strokes that ripped and crumbled the close-packed dirt.

The sun went down, and in the long dreamy summer twilight he worked on, almost oblivious of time or space. He began to be convinced that the mound was a genuine Indian tomb, as he found traces of charcoal in the soil. The ancient people which reared these sepulchers had kept fires burning upon them for days, at some point in the building. All the mounds Steve had ever opened had contained a solid stratum of charcoal a short distance below the surface: But the charcoal traces he found now were scattered about through the soil.

His idea of a Spanish-built treasure trove faded, but he persisted. Who knows? Perhaps that strange folk men now called Mound-Builders had treasure of their own which they laid away with the dead.

Then Steve yelped in exultation as his pick rang on a bit of metal. He snatched it up and held it close to his eyes, straining in the waning, light. It was caked and corroded with rust, worn almost paper-thin, but he knew it for what it was—a spur-rowel, unmistakably Spanish with its long cruel points. And he halted, completely bewildered. No Spaniard ever reared this mound, with its undeniable marks of aboriginal workmanship. Yet how came that relic of Spanish caballeros hidden deep in the packed soil?

Brill shook his head and set to work again. He knew that in the center of the mound, if it were indeed an aboriginal tomb, he would find a narrow chamber built of heavy stones, containing the bones of the chief for whom the mound had been reared and the victims sacrificed above it. And in the gathering darkness he felt his pick strike heavily against something granite-like and unyielding. Examination, by sense of feel as well as by sight, proved it to be a solid block of stone, roughly hewn. Doubtless it formed one of the ends of the deathchamber. Useless to try to shatter it. Brill chipped and pecked about it, scrapping the dirt and pebbles away from the corners until he felt that wrenching it out would be but a matter of sinking the pick-point underneath and levering it out.

But now he was suddenly aware that darkness had come on. In the young moon objects were dim and shadowy. His mustang nickered in the corral whence came the comfortable crunch of tired beasts' jaws on corn. A whippoorwill called eerily from the dark shadows of the narrow winding creek. Brill straightened reluctantly. Better get a lantern and continue his explorations by its light.

He felt in his pocket with some idea of wrenching out the stone and exploring the cavity by the aid of matches. Then he stiffened. Was it. imagination that he heard a faint sinister rustling, which seemed to come from behind the blocking stone? Snakes! Doubtless they had holes somewhere about the base of the mound and there might be a dozen big diamond-backed rattlers coiled up in that cave-like interior waiting for him to put his hand among them. He shivered slightly at the thought and backed away out of the excavation he had made.

It wouldn't do to go poking about blindly into holes. And for the past few minutes, he realized, he had been aware of a faint foul odor exuding from interstices about the blocking stone—though he admitted that the smell suggested reptiles no more than it did any other menacing scent. It had a charnel-house reek about it—gases formed in the chamber of death, no doubt, and dangerous to the living.

Steve laid down his pick and returned to the house, impatient of the necessary delay. Entering the dark building, he struck a. match and located his kerosene lantern hanging on its nail on the wall. Shaking it, he satisfied himself that it was nearly full of coal oil, and lighted it. Then he fared forth again, for his eagerness would not allow him to pause long enough for a bite of food. The mere opening of the mound intrigued him, as it must always intrigue a man of imagination, and the discovery of the Spanish spur had whetted his curiosity.

He hurried from his shack, the swinging lantern casting long distorted shadows ahead of him and behind. He chuckled as he visualized Lopez's thoughts and actions when he learned, on the morrow, that the forbidden mound had been pried into. A good thing he opened it that evening, Brill reflected; Lopez might even have tried to prevent him meddling with it, had he known.

In the dreamy hush of the summer night, Brill reached the mound—lifted his lantern—swore bewilderedly. The lantern revealed his excavations, his tools lying carelessly where he had dropped them—and a black gaping aperture! The great blocking stone lay in the bottom of the excavation he had made, as if thrust carelessly aside. Warily he thrust the lantern forward and peered into the small cave-like chamber, expecting to see he knew not what. Nothing met his eyes except the bare rock sides of a long narrow cell, large enough to receive a man's body, which had apparently been built up of roughly hewn square-cut stones, cunningly and strongly joined together.

""Lopez!"" exclaimed Steve furiously. ""The dirty coyote! He's been watchin' me work—and when I went after the lantern, he snuck up and pried the rock outand grabbed whatever was in there, I reckon. Blast his greasy hide, I'll fix him!""

Savagely he extinguished the lantern and glared across the shallow, brush- grown valley. And as he looked he stiffened. Over the corner of the hill, on the other side of which the shack of Lope z stood, a shadow moved. The slender moon was setting, the light dim and the play of the shadows baffling. But Steve's eyes were sharpened by the sun and winds of the wastelands, and he knew that it was some two-legged creature that was disappearing over the low shoulder of the mesquite-grown hill.

""Beatin' it to his shack,"" snarled Brill. ""He's shore got somethin' or he wouldn't be travelin' at that speed.""

Brill swallowed, wondering why a peculiar trembling had suddenly taken hold of him. What was there unusual about a thieving old greaser running home with his loot? Brill tried to drown the feeling that there was something peculiar about the gait of the dim shadow, which gad seemed to move at a sort of slinking lope. There, must have been need for swiftness when stocky old Juan Lopez elected to travel at such a strange pace.

""Whatever he found is as much mine as his,"" swore Brill, trying to get his mind off the abnormal aspect of the figure's flight, ""I got this land leased and I done all the work diggin'. A curse, heck! No wonder he told me that stuff. Wanted me to leave it alone so he could get it hisself. It's a wonder he ain't dug it up long before this. But you can't never tell about them spigs.""

Brill, as he meditated thus, was striding down the gentle slope of the pasture which led down to the creek bed. He passed into the shadows of the trees and dense underbrush and walked across the dry creek bed, noting absently that neither whippoorwill nor hoot-owl called in the darkness. There was a waiting, listening tenseness in the night that he did not like. The shadows in the creek bed seemed too thick, too breathless. He wished he had not blown out the lantern, which he still carried, and was glad he had brought the pick, gripped like a battle-ax in his right hand. He had an impulse to whistle, just to break the silence, then swore and dismissed the thought. Yet he was glad when he clambered up the low opposite bank and emerged into the starlight.

He walked up the slope and onto the hill, and looked down on the mesquite flat wherein stood Lopezs squalid hut. A light showed at the one window.

""Packin' his things for a getaway, I reckon,"" grunted Steve. ""Oh, what the—""

He staggered as from a physical impact as a frightful scream knifed the stillness. He wanted to clap his hands over his ears to shut out the horror of that cry, which rose unbearably and then broke in an abhorrent gurgle.

""Good God!"" Steve felt the cold sweat spring out upon him. ""Lopez—or somebody—""

Even as he gasped the words he was running down the hill as fast as his long legs could carry him. Some unspeakable horror was taking place in that lonely hut, but he was going to investigate if it meant facing the Devil himself. He tightened his grip on his pick-handle as he ran. Wandering prowlers, murdering old Lopez for the loot he had taken from the mound, Steve thought, and forgot his wrath. It would go hard for anyone he found molesting the old scoundrel, thief though he might be.

He hit the flat, running hard.. And then the light in the but went out and Steve staggeed in full flight, bringing up against a mesquite tree with an impact that jolted a grunt out of him and tore his hands on the thorns. Rebounding with a sobbed curse, he rushed for the shack, nerving himself for what he might see—his hair still standing on end at what he had already seen.

Brill tried the one door of the but and found it bolted. He shouted to Lopez and received no answer. Yet utter silence did not reign. From within came a curious muffled worrying sound that ceased as Brill swung his pick crashing against the door. The flimsy portal splintered and Brill leaped into, the dark hut, eyes blazing, pick swung high for a desperate onslaught. But no, sound ruffled the grisly silence, and in the darkness nothing stirred, though Brill's chaotic imagination peopled the shadowed corners of the but with shapes of horror.

With a hand damp with perspiration he found a match and struck it. Besides himself only Lopez occupied the hut—old Lopez, stark dead on the dirt floor, arms spread wide like a crucifix, mouth sagging open in a semblance of idiocy, eyes wide and staring with a horror Brill found intolerable. The one window gaped open, showing the method of the slayer's exit —possibly his entrance as well. Brill went to that window and gazed out warily. He saw only the sloping hillside on one hand and the mesquite flat on the other. He starred—was that a hint of movement among the stunted shadows of the mesquites and chaparral—or had he but imagined he glimpsed a dim loping figure among the trees?

He turned back, as the match burned down to his fingers. He lit the old coal-oil lamp on the rude table, cursing as he burned his hand. The globe of the lamp was very hot, as if it had been burning for hours.

Reluctantly he turned to the corpse on the floor. Whatever sort of death had come to Lopez, it had been horrible, but Brill, gingerly examining the dead man, found no wound—no mark of knife or bludgeon on him. Wait. There was a thin smear of blood on Brill's questing hand. Searching, he found thesource—three or four tiny punctures in Lopezs throat, from which blood had oozed sluggishly. At first he thought they had been inflicted with a stiletto—a thin round edgeless dagger then he shook his head. He had seen stiletto wounds—he had the scar of one on his own body. These wounds more resembled the bite of some animal—they looked like the marks of pointed fangs.

Yet Brill did not believe they were deep enough to have caused death, nor had much blood flowed from them. A belief, abhorrent with grisly speculations, rose up in the dark corners of his mind—that Lopez had died of fright and that the wounds had been inflicted either simultaneously—with his death, or an instant afterward.

And Steve noticed something else; scrawled about on the floor lay a number of dingy leaves of paper, scrawled in the old Mexican's crude hand —he would write of the curse of the mound, he had said. There were the sheets on which he had written, there was the stump of a pencil on the floor, there was the hot lamp globe, all mute witnesses that the old Mexican had been seated at the roughhewn table writing for hours. Then it was not he who opened the moundchamber and stole the contents—but who was it, in God's name? And who or what was it that Brill had glimpsed loping over the shoulder of the hill?

Well, there was but one thing to do—saddle his mustang and ride the ten miles to Coyote Wells, the nearest town, and inform the sheriff of the murder.

Brill gathered up the papers. The last was crumpled in the old man's clutching hand and Brill secured it with some difficulty. Then as he turned to extinguish the light, he hesitated, and cursed himself for the crawling fear that lurked at the back of his mind—fear of the shadowy thing he had seen cross the window just before the light was extinguished in the hut. The long arm of the murderer, he thought, reaching for the lamp to put it out, no doubt. What had there been abnormal or inhuman about that vision, distorted though it must have been in the dim lamplight and shadow? As a man strives to remember the details of a nightmare dream, Steve tried to define in his mind some clear reason that would explain, why that flying glimpse had unnerved him to the extent of blundering headlong into a tree, and why the mere vague remembrance of it now caused cold sweat to break out on him.

Cursing himself to keep up his courage, he lighted his lantern, blew out the lamp on the rough table, and resolutely set forth, grasping his pick like a weapon. After all, why should certain seemingly abnormal aspects about a sordid murder upset him? Such crimes were abhorrent, but common enough, especially among Mexicans, who cherished unguessed feuds.

Then as he stepped into the silent starflecked night he brought up short. From across the creek sounded the sudden soul-shaking scream of a horse in deadly terror—then a mad drumming of hoofs that receded in the distance. And Brill swore in rage and dismay. Was it a pan lurking in the hills —had a monster cat slain old Lopez? Then why was not the victim marked with the scars of fierce hooked talons? And who extinguished the light in the but?

As he wondered, Brill was running swiftly toward the dark creek. Not lightly does a cowpuncher regard the stampeding of his stock. As he passed into the darkness of the brush along the dry creek, Brill found his tongue strangely dry. He kept swallowing, and he held the lantern high. It made but faint impression in the gloom, but seemed to accentuate the blackness of the crowding shadows. For some strange reason, the thought entered Brill's chaotic mind that though the land was new to the Anglo-Saxon, it was in reality very old. That broken and desecrated tomb was mute evidence that the land was ancient to man, and suddenly the night and the hills and the shadows bore on Brill with a sense of hideous antiquity. Here had long, generations of men lived and died before Brill's ancestors ever heard of the land. In the night, in the shadows of this very creek, men had no doubt given up their ghosts in grisly ways. With these reflections Brill hurried through the shadows of the thick trees.

He breathed deeply in relief when he emerged from the trees on his own side. Hurrying up the gentle slope to the railed corral, he held up his lantern, investigating. The corral was empty; not even the placid cow was in sight. And the bars were down. That pointed to human agency, and the affair took on a newly sinister aspect. Someone did not intend that Brill should ride to Coyote Wells that night. It meant that the murderer intended making his getaway and wanted a good start on the law, or else—Brill grinned wryly. Far away across a mesquite flat he believed he could still catch the faint and faraway noise of running horses. What in God's name had given them such a fright? A cold finger of fear played shudderingly on Brill's spine.

Steve headed for the house. He did not enter boldly. He crept clear around the shack, peering shudderingly into the dark windows, listening with painful intensity for some sound to betray the presence of the lurking killer. At last he ventured to open the door and step in. He threw the door back against the wall to find if anyone were hiding behind it, lifted the lantern high and stepped in, heart pounding, pick gripped fiercely, his feelings a mixture of fear and red rage. But no hidden assassin leaped upon him, and a wary exploration of the shack revealed nothing.

With a sigh of relief Brill locked the doors, made fast the windows and lighted his old coal-oil lamp. The thought of old Lopez lying, a glassy-eyed corpse alone in the but across the creek, made him wince and shiver, but he did not intend to start for town on foot in the night.

He drew from its hiding-place his reliable old Colt .45, spun the blue- steel cylinder, and grinned mirthlessly. Maybe the killer did not intend to leave any witnesses to his crime alive. Well, let him come! He—or they —would find a young cowpuncher with a six-shooter less easy prey than an old unarmed Mexican. And that reminded Brill of the papers he had brought from the hut. Taking care that he was not in line with a window through which a sudden bullet might come, he settled himself to read, with one ear alert for stealthy sounds.

And as he read the crude laborious script, a slow cold horror grew in his soul. It was a tale of fear that the old Mexican had scrawled—a tale handed down from generation—a tale of ancient times.

And Brill read of the wanderings of the caballero Hernando de Estrada and his armored pikemen, who dared the deserts of the Southwest when all was strange and unknown. There were some forty-odd soldiers, servants, and masters, at, the beginning, the manuscript ran. There was the captain, de Estrada, and the priest, and young Juan Zavilla, and Don Santiago de Valdez—a mysterious nobleman who had been taken off a helplessly floating ship in the Caribbean Sea—all the others of the crew and passengers had died of plague, he had said and he had cast their bodies overboard. So de Estrada had taken him aboard the ship that was bearing the expedition from Spain, and de Valdez joined them in their explorations.

Brill read something of their wanderings, told in the crude style of old Lopez, as the old Mexican's ancestors had handed down the tale for over three hundred years. The bare written words dimly reflected the terrific hardships the explorers bad encountered—drouth, thirst, floods, the desert sandstorms, the spears of hostile redskins. But it was of another peril that old Lopez told—a grisly lurking horror that fell upon the lonely caravan wandering through the immensity of the wild. Man by man they fell and no man knew the slayer. Fear and black suspicion ate at the heart of the expedition like a canker, and their leader knew not where to turn. This they all knew: among them was a fiend in human form.

Men began to draw apart from each other, to scatter along the line of march, and this mutual suspicion, that sought security in solitude, made it easier for the fiend. The skeleton of the expedition staggered through the wilderness, lost, dazed and helpless, and still the unseen horror hung on their flanks, dragging down the stragglers, preying on drowsing sentries and sleeping men. And on the throat of each was found the wounds of pointed fangs that bled the victim white; so that the living knew with what manner of evil they had to deal. Men reeled through the wild, calling on the saints, or blaspheming in their terror, fighting frenziedly against sleep, until thev fell with exhaustion and 'sleep stole on them with horror and death.

Suspicion centered on a great black man, a cannibal slave from Calabar. And they put him in chains. But young Juan Zavilla went the way of the rest, and then the priest was taken. But the priest fought off his fiendish assailant and lived long enough to gasp the demon's name to de Estrada. And Brill, shuddering and wide-eyed, read:

""... And now it was evident to de Estrada that the good priest had spoken the truth, and the slayer was Don Santiago de Valdez, who was a vampire, an undead fiend, subsisting on the blood of the living. And de Estrada called to mind a certain foul nobleman who had lurked, in the' mountains of Castile since the days of the Moors, feeding off the blood of helpless victims which lent him a ghastly immortality. This nobleman had been driven forth; none knew where he had fled but it was evident that he and Don Santiago were the same man: He had fled Spain by ship, and de Estrada knew that the people of that ship had died, not by plague as the fiend had represented, but by the fangs of the vampire.""

""De Estrada and the black man and the few soldiers who still lived went searching for him and found him stretched in bestial sleep in a clump of chaparral; fullgorged he was with human blood from his last victim. Now it is well known that a vampire, like a great serpent, when well gorged, falls into a deep sleep and may be taken without peril. But de Estrada was at a loss as to how to dispose of the monster, for how may the dead be slain? For a vampire is a man who has died long ago, yet is quick with a certain foul unlife.""

""The men urged that the Caballero drive a stake through the fiend's heart and cut off his head, uttering the holy words that would crumble the long-dead body into dust, but the priest was dead and de Estrada feared that in the act the monster might waken.

""So—they took Don Santiago, lifting him softly, and bore him to an old Indian mound near by. This they opened, taking forth the bones they found there, and they placed the vampire within and sealed up the mound. Him grant until Judgment Day.""

""It is a place accursed, and I wish I had starved elsewhere before I came into this part of the country seeking work—for I have known of the land and the creek and the mound with its terrible secret, ever since childhood; so you see, Senor Brill, why you must not open the mound and wake the fiend—""

There the manuscript ended with an erratic scratch of the pencil that tore the crumpled leaf.

Brill rose, his heart pounding wildly, his face bloodless, his tongue cleaving to his palate. He gagged and found words.

""That's why the spur was in the mound—one of them Spaniards dropped it while they was diggin'—and I mighta knowed it's been dug into before, the way the charcoal was scattered out—but, good God—""

Aghast he shrank from the black visions—an undead monster stirring in the gloom of his tomb, thrusting from within to push aside the stone loosened by the pick of ignorance—a shadowy shape loping over the hill toward a light that betokened a human prey—a frightful long arm that crossed a dim-lighted window...

""It's madness!"" he gasped. ""Lopez was plumb loco! They ain't no such things as vampires! If they is, why didn't he get me first, instead of Lopez —unless he was scoutin' around, makin' sure of everything before he pounced? Aw, hell! It's all a pipe-dream—""

The words froze in his throat. At the window a face glared and gibbered soundlessly at him. Two icy eyes pierced his very soul. A shriek burst from his throat and that ghastly visage vanished. But the very air was permeated by the foul scent that had hung about the ancient mound. And now the door creaked —bent slowly inward. Brill backed up against the wall, his gun shaking in his hand: It did not occur to him to fire through the door; in his chaotic brain he had but one thought that only that thin portal of wood separated him from some horror born out of the womb of night and gloom and the black past. His eyes were distended as he saw the door give, as he heard the staples of the bolt groan.

The door burst inward. Brill did not scream. His tongue was frozen to the roof of his mouth. His fear-glazed eyes took in the tall, vulture-like form —the icy eyes, the long black fingernails—the moldering garb, hideously ancient—the long spurred boot—the slouch-hat with its crumbling feather—the flowing cloak that was falling to slow shreds. Framed in the black doorway crouched that abhorrent shape out of the past, and Brill's brain reeled. A savage cold radiated from the figure—the scent of moldering clay and charnel-house refuse. And then the undead came at the living like a swooping vulture.

Brill fired point-blank and saw a shred of rotten cloth fly from the Thing's breast. The vampire reeled beneath the impact of the heavy ball, then righted himself and came on with frightful speed. Brill reeled back against the wall with a choking cry, the gun falling from his nerveless hand. The black legends were true then—human weapons were powerless—for may a man kill one already dead for long centuries, as mortals die?

Then the clawlike hands at his throat roused the young cowpuncher to a frenzy of madness. As his pioneer ancestors fought hand to hand against brain-shattering odds, Steve Brill fought the cold dead crawling thing that sought his life and his soul.

Of that ghastly battle Brill never remembered much. It was a blind chaos in which he screamed beast-like, tore and slugged and hammered, where long black nails like the talons of a panther tore at him, and pointed teeth snapped again and again at his throat. Rolling and tumbling about the room, both half enveloped by the musty folds of that ancient rotting cloak, they smote and tore at each other among the ruins of the shattered furniture, and—the fury of the vampire was not more terrible than the fearcrazed desperation of his victim.

They crashed headlong, into the table, knocking it down upon its side, and the coal oil lamp splintered on the floor, spraying the walls with sudden flames. Brill felt the bite of the burning oil that spattered him, but in the red frenzy of the fight he gave no heed. The black talons were tearing at him, the inhuman eyes burning icily into his soul; between his frantic fingers the withered flesh of the monster was hard as dry wood. And wave after wave of blind madness swept over Steve Brill. Like a man battling a nightmare he screamed and smote, while all about them the fire leaped up and caught at the walls and roof.

Through darting jets and licking tongues of flames they reeled and rolled like a demon and a mortal warring on the firelanced floors of hell: And in the growing tumult of the flames, Brill gathered himself for one last volcanic burst of frenzied strength. Breaking away and staggering, up, gasping and bloody, he lunged blindly at the foul shape and caught it in a grip not even the vampire could break. And whirling his fiendish assailant bodily on high, he dashed him down across the uptilted edge of the fallen table as a man might break a stick of wood across his knee. Something cracked like a snapping branch and the vampire fell from Brill's grasp to writhe in a strange broken posture on the burning floor. Yet it was not dead, for its flaming eyes still burned on Brill with a ghastly hunger, and it strove to crawl toward him with its broken spine, as a dying snake crawls.

Brill, reeling and gasping, shook the blood from his eyes, and staggered blindly through the broken door. And as a man runs from the portals of hell, he ran stumblingly through, the mesquite and chaparral until he fell from utter exhaustion. Looking back he saw the flames of the burning house and thanked God that it would burn until the very bones of Don Santiago de Valdez were utterly consumed and destroyed from the knowledge of men.

","It is said that in Ulthar, which lies beyond the river Skai, no man may kill a cat; and this I can verily believe as I gaze upon him who sitteth purring before the fire. For the cat is cryptic, and close to strange things which men cannot see. He is the soul of antique Aegyptus, and bearer of tales from forgotten cities in Meroë and Ophir. He is the kin of the jungle’s lords, and heir to the secrets of hoary and sinister Africa. The Sphinx is his cousin, and he speaks her language; but he is more ancient than the Sphinx, and remembers that which she hath forgotten.
      In Ulthar, before ever the burgesses forbade the killing of cats, there dwelt an old cotter and his wife who delighted to trap and slay the cats of their neighbours. Why they did this I know not; save that many hate the voice of the cat in the night, and take it ill that cats should run stealthily about yards and gardens at twilight. But whatever the reason, this old man and woman took pleasure in trapping and slaying every cat which came near to their hovel; and from some of the sounds heard after dark, many villagers fancied that the manner of slaying was exceedingly peculiar. But the villagers did not discuss such things with the old man and his wife; because of the habitual expression on the withered faces of the two, and because their cottage was so small and so darkly hidden under spreading oaks at the back of a neglected yard. In truth, much as the owners of cats hated these odd folk, they feared them more; and instead of berating them as brutal assassins, merely took care that no cherished pet or mouser should stray toward the remote hovel under the dark trees. When through some unavoidable oversight a cat was missed, and sounds heard after dark, the loser would lament impotently; or console himself by thanking Fate that it was not one of his children who had thus vanished. For the people of Ulthar were simple, and knew not whence it is all cats first came.
      One day a caravan of strange wanderers from the South entered the narrow cobbled streets of Ulthar. Dark wanderers they were, and unlike the other roving folk who passed through the village twice every year. In the market-place they told fortunes for silver, and bought gay beads from the merchants. What was the land of these wanderers none could tell; but it was seen that they were given to strange prayers, and that they had painted on the sides of their wagons strange figures with human bodies and the heads of cats, hawks, rams, and lions. And the leader of the caravan wore a head-dress with two horns and a curious disc betwixt the horns.
      There was in this singular caravan a little boy with no father or mother, but only a tiny black kitten to cherish. The plague had not been kind to him, yet had left him this small furry thing to mitigate his sorrow; and when one is very young, one can find great relief in the lively antics of a black kitten. So the boy whom the dark people called Menes smiled more often than he wept as he sate playing with his graceful kitten on the steps of an oddly painted wagon.
      On the third morning of the wanderers’ stay in Ulthar, Menes could not find his kitten; and as he sobbed aloud in the market-place certain villagers told him of the old man and his wife, and of sounds heard in the night. And when he heard these things his sobbing gave place to meditation, and finally to prayer. He stretched out his arms toward the sun and prayed in a tongue no villager could understand; though indeed the villagers did not try very hard to understand, since their attention was mostly taken up by the sky and the odd shapes the clouds were assuming. It was very peculiar, but as the little boy uttered his petition there seemed to form overhead the shadowy, nebulous figures of exotic things; of hybrid creatures crowned with horn-flanked discs. Nature is full of such illusions to impress the imaginative.
      That night the wanderers left Ulthar, and were never seen again. And the householders were troubled when they noticed that in all the village there was not a cat to be found. From each hearth the familiar cat had vanished; cats large and small, black, grey, striped, yellow, and white. Old Kranon, the burgomaster, swore that the dark folk had taken the cats away in revenge for the killing of Menes’ kitten; and cursed the caravan and the little boy. But Nith, the lean notary, declared that the old cotter and his wife were more likely persons to suspect; for their hatred of cats was notorious and increasingly bold. Still, no one durst complain to the sinister couple; even when little Atal, the innkeeper’s son, vowed that he had at twilight seen all the cats of Ulthar in that accursed yard under the trees, pacing very slowly and solemnly in a circle around the cottage, two abreast, as if in performance of some unheard-of rite of beasts. The villagers did not know how much to believe from so small a boy; and though they feared that the evil pair had charmed the cats to their death, they preferred not to chide the old cotter till they met him outside his dark and repellent yard.
      So Ulthar went to sleep in vain anger; and when the people awaked at dawn—behold! every cat was back at his accustomed hearth! Large and small, black, grey, striped, yellow, and white, none was missing. Very sleek and fat did the cats appear, and sonorous with purring content. The citizens talked with one another of the affair, and marvelled not a little. Old Kranon again insisted that it was the dark folk who had taken them, since cats did not return alive from the cottage of the ancient man and his wife. But all agreed on one thing: that the refusal of all the cats to eat their portions of meat or drink their saucers of milk was exceedingly curious. And for two whole days the sleek, lazy cats of Ulthar would touch no food, but only doze by the fire or in the sun.
      It was fully a week before the villagers noticed that no lights were appearing at dusk in the windows of the cottage under the trees. Then the lean Nith remarked that no one had seen the old man or his wife since the night the cats were away. In another week the burgomaster decided to overcome his fears and call at the strangely silent dwelling as a matter of duty, though in so doing he was careful to take with him Shang the blacksmith and Thul the cutter of stone as witnesses. And when they had broken down the frail door they found only this: two cleanly picked human skeletons on the earthen floor, and a number of singular beetles crawling in the shadowy corners.
      There was subsequently much talk among the burgesses of Ulthar. Zath, the coroner, disputed at length with Nith, the lean notary; and Kranon and Shang and Thul were overwhelmed with questions. Even little Atal, the innkeeper’s son, was closely questioned and given a sweetmeat as reward. They talked of the old cotter and his wife, of the caravan of dark wanderers, of small Menes and his black kitten, of the prayer of Menes and of the sky during that prayer, of the doings of the cats on the night the caravan left, and of what was later found in the cottage under the dark trees in the repellent yard.
      And in the end the burgesses passed that remarkable law which is told of by traders in Hatheg and discussed by travellers in Nir; namely, that in Ulthar no man may kill a cat.",False
"I
The animal paused on the threshold, interrogative alert, ready for flight if necessary. Severn laid down his palette, and held out a hand of welcome. The cat remained motionless, her yellow eyes fastened upon Severn.
""Puss,"" he said, in his low, pleasant voice, ""come in.""
The tip of her thin tail twitched uncertainly.
""Come in,"" he said again.
Apparently she found his voice reassuring, for she slowly settled upon all fours, her eyes still fastened upon him, her tail tucked under her gaunt flanks.
He rose from his easel smiling. She eyed him quietly, and when he walked toward her she watched him bend above her without a wince; her eyes followed his hand until it touched her head. Then she uttered a ragged mew.
It had long been Severn's custom to converse with animals, probably because he lived so much alone; and now he said, ""What's the matter, puss?""
Her timid eyes sought his.
""I understand,"" he said gently, ""you shall have it at once.""
Then moving quietly about he busied himself with the duties of a host, rinsed a saucer, filled it with the rest of the milk from the bottle on the window-sill, and kneeling down, crumbled a roll into the hollow of his hand.
The creature rose and crept toward the saucer.
With the handle of a palette-knife he stirred the crumbs and milk together and stepped back as she thrust her nose into the mess. He watched her in silence. From time to time the saucer clinked upon the tiled floor as she reached for a morsel on the rim; and at last the bread was all gone, and her purple tongue travelled over every unlicked spot until the saucer shone like polished marble. Then she sat up, and coolly turning her back to him, began her ablutions.
""Keep it up,"" said Severn, much interested, ""you need it.""
She flattened one ear, but neither turned nor interrupted her toilet. As the grime was slowly removed Severn observed that nature had intended her for a white cat. Her fur had disappeared in patches, from disease or the chances of war, her tail was bony and her spine sharp. But what charms she had were becoming apparent under vigorous licking, and he waited until she had finished before re-opening the conversation. When at last she closed her eyes and folded her forepaws under her breast, he began again very gently: ""Puss, tell me your troubles.""
At the sound of his voice she broke into a harsh rumbling which he recognized as an attempt to purr. He bent over to rub her cheek and she mewed again, an amiable inquiring little mew, to which he replied, ""Certainly, you are greatly improved, and when you recover your plumage you will be a gorgeous bird."" Much flattered, she stood up and marched around and around his legs, pushing her head between them and making pleased remarks, to which he responded with grave politeness.
""Now, what sent you here,"" he said—""here into the Street of the Four Winds, and up five flights to the very door where you would be welcome? What was it that prevented your meditated flight when I turned from my canvas to encounter your yellow eyes? Are you a Latin Quarter cat as I am a Latin Quarter man? And why do you wear a rose-coloured flowered garter buckled about your neck?"" The cat had climbed into his lap, and now sat purring as he passed his hand over her thin coat.
""Excuse me,"" he continued in lazy soothing tones, harmonizing with her purring, ""if I seem indelicate, but I cannot help musing on this rose-coloured garter, flowered so quaintly and fastened with a silver clasp. For the clasp is silver; I can see the mint mark on the edge, as is prescribed by the law of the French Republic. Now, why is this garter woven of rose silk and delicately embroidered,—why is this silken garter with its silver clasp about your famished throat? Am I indiscreet when I inquire if its owner is your owner? Is she some aged dame living in memory of youthful vanities, fond, doting on you, decorating you with her intimate personal attire? The circumference of the garter would suggest this, for your neck is thin, and the garter fits you. But then again I notice—I notice most things—that the garter is capable of being much enlarged. These small silver-rimmed eyelets, of which I count five, are proof of that. And now I observe that the fifth eyelet is worn out, as though the tongue of the clasp were accustomed to lie there. That seems to argue a well-rounded form.""
The cat curled her toes in contentment. The street was very still outside.
He murmured on: ""Why should your mistress decorate you with an article most necessary to her at all times? Anyway, at most times. How did she come to slip this bit of silk and silver about your neck? Was it the caprice of a moment,—when you, before you had lost your pristine plumpness, marched singing into her bedroom to bid her good-morning? Of course, and she sat up among the pillows, her coiled hair tumbling to her shoulders, as you sprang upon the bed purring: 'Good-day, my lady.' Oh, it is very easy to understand,"" he yawned, resting his head on the back of the chair. The cat still purred, tightening and relaxing her padded claws over his knee.
""Shall I tell you all about her, cat? She is very beautiful—your mistress,"" he murmured drowsily, ""and her hair is heavy as burnished gold. I could paint her,—not on canvas—for I should need shades and tones and hues and dyes more splendid than the iris of a splendid rainbow. I could only paint her with closed eyes, for in dreams alone can such colours as I need be found. For her eyes, I must have azure from skies untroubled by a cloud—the skies of dreamland. For her lips, roses from the palaces of slumberland, and for her brow, snow-drifts from mountains which tower in fantastic pinnacles to the moons;—oh, much higher than our moon here,—the crystal moons of dreamland. She is—very—beautiful, your mistress.""
The words died on his lips and his eyelids drooped.
The cat, too, was asleep, her cheek turned up upon her wasted flank, her paws relaxed and limp.
II
""It is fortunate,"" said Severn, sitting up and stretching, ""that we have tided over the dinner hour, for I have nothing to offer you for supper but what may be purchased with one silver franc.""
The cat on his knee rose, arched her back, yawned, and looked up at him.
""What shall it be? A roast chicken with salad? No? Possibly you prefer beef? Of course,—and I shall try an egg and some white bread. Now for the wines. Milk for you? Good. I shall take a little water, fresh from the wood,"" with a motion toward the bucket in the sink.
He put on his hat and left the room. The cat followed to the door, and after he had closed it behind him, she settled down, smelling at the cracks, and cocking one ear at every creak from the crazy old building.
The door below opened and shut. The cat looked serious, for a moment doubtful, and her ears flattened in nervous expectation. Presently she rose with a jerk of her tail and started on a noiseless tour of the studio. She sneezed at a pot of turpentine, hastily retreating to the table, which she presently mounted, and having satisfied her curiosity concerning a roll of red modelling wax, returned to the door and sat down with her eyes on the crack over the threshold. Then she lifted her voice in a thin plaint.
When Severn returned he looked grave, but the cat, joyous and demonstrative, marched around him, rubbing her gaunt body against his legs, driving her head enthusiastically into his hand, and purring until her voice mounted to a squeal.
He placed a bit of meat, wrapped in brown paper, upon the table, and with a penknife cut it into shreds. The milk he took from a bottle which had served for medicine, and poured it into the saucer on the hearth.
The cat crouched before it, purring and lapping at the same time.
He cooked his egg and ate it with a slice of bread, watching her busy with the shredded meat, and when he had finished, and had filled and emptied a cup of water from the bucket in the sink, he sat down, taking her into his lap, where she at once curled up and began her toilet. He began to speak again, touching her caressingly at times by way of emphasis.
""Cat, I have found out where your mistress lives. It is not very far away;—it is here, under this same leaky roof, but in the north wing which I had supposed was uninhabited. My janitor tells me this. By chance, he is almost sober this evening. The butcher on the rue de Seine, where I bought your meat, knows you, and old Cabane the baker identified you with needless sarcasm. They tell me hard tales of your mistress which I shall not believe. They say she is idle and vain and pleasure-loving; they say she is hare-brained and reckless. The little sculptor on the ground floor, who was buying rolls from old Cabane, spoke to me to-night for the first time, although we have always bowed to each other. He said she was very good and very beautiful. He has only seen her once, and does not know her name. I thanked him;—I don't know why I thanked him so warmly. Cabane said, 'Into this cursed Street of the Four Winds, the four winds blow all things evil.' The sculptor looked confused, but when he went out with his rolls, he said to me, 'I am sure, Monsieur, that she is as good as she is beautiful.'""
The cat had finished her toilet, and now, springing softly to the floor, went to the door and sniffed. He knelt beside her, and unclasping the garter held it for a moment in his hands. After a while he said: ""There is a name engraved upon the silver clasp beneath the buckle. It is a pretty name, Sylvia Elven. Sylvia is a woman's name, Elven is the name of a town. In Paris, in this quarter, above all, in this Street of the Four Winds, names are worn and put away as the fashions change with the seasons. I know the little town of Elven, for there I met Fate face to face and Fate was unkind. But do you know that in Elven Fate had another name, and that name was Sylvia?""
He replaced the garter and stood up looking down at the cat crouched before the closed door.
""The name of Elven has a charm for me. It tells me of meadows and clear rivers. The name of Sylvia troubles me like perfume from dead flowers.""
The cat mewed.
""Yes, yes,"" he said soothingly, ""I will take you back. Your Sylvia is not my Sylvia; the world is wide and Elven is not unknown. Yet in the darkness and filth of poorer Paris, in the sad shadows of this ancient house, these names are very pleasant to me.""
He lifted her in his arms and strode through the silent corridors to the stairs. Down five flights and into the moonlit court, past the little sculptor's den, and then again in at the gate of the north wing and up the worm-eaten stairs he passed, until he came to a closed door. When he had stood knocking for a long time, something moved behind the door; it opened and he went in. The room was dark. As he crossed the threshold, the cat sprang from his arms into the shadows. He listened but heard nothing. The silence was oppressive and he struck a match. At his elbow stood a table and on the table a candle in a gilded candlestick. This he lighted, then looked around. The chamber was vast, the hangings heavy with embroidery. Over the fireplace towered a carved mantel, grey with the ashes of dead fires. In a recess by the deep-set windows stood a bed, from which the bedclothes, soft and fine as lace, trailed to the polished floor. He lifted the candle above his head. A handkerchief lay at his feet. It was faintly perfumed. He turned toward the windows. In front of them was acanapé and over it were flung, pell-mell, a gown of silk, a heap of lace-like garments, white and delicate as spiders' meshes, long, crumpled gloves, and, on the floor beneath, the stockings, the little pointed shoes, and one garter of rosy silk, quaintly flowered and fitted with a silver clasp. Wondering, he stepped forward and drew the heavy curtains from the bed. For a moment the candle flared in his hand; then his eyes met two other eyes, wide open, smiling, and the candle-flame flashed over hair heavy as gold.
She was pale, but not as white as he; her eyes were untroubled as a child's; but he stared, trembling from head to foot, while the candle flickered in his hand.
At last he whispered: ""Sylvia, it is I.""
Again he said, ""It is I.""
Then, knowing that she was dead, he kissed her on the mouth. And through the long watches of the night the cat purred on his knee, tightening and relaxing her padded claws, until the sky paled above the Street of the Four Winds.
","I repeat to you, gentlemen, that your inquisition is fruitless. Detain me here forever if you will; confine or execute me if you must have a victim to propitiate the illusion you call justice; but I can say no more than I have said already. Everything that I can remember, I have told with perfect candour. Nothing has been distorted or concealed, and if anything remains vague, it is only because of the dark cloud which has come over my mind—that cloud and the nebulous nature of the horrors which brought it upon me.
      Again I say, I do not know what has become of Harley Warren; though I think—almost hope—that he is in peaceful oblivion, if there be anywhere so blessed a thing. It is true that I have for five years been his closest friend, and a partial sharer of his terrible researches into the unknown. I will not deny, though my memory is uncertain and indistinct, that this witness of yours may have seen us together as he says, on the Gainesville pike, walking toward Big Cypress Swamp, at half past eleven on that awful night. That we bore electric lanterns, spades, and a curious coil of wire with attached instruments, I will even affirm; for these things all played a part in the single hideous scene which remains burned into my shaken recollection. But of what followed, and of the reason I was found alone and dazed on the edge of the swamp next morning, I must insist that I know nothing save what I have told you over and over again. You say to me that there is nothing in the swamp or near it which could form the setting of that frightful episode. I reply that I know nothing beyond what I saw. Vision or nightmare it may have been—vision or nightmare I fervently hope it was—yet it is all that my mind retains of what took place in those shocking hours after we left the sight of men. And why Harley Warren did not return, he or his shade—or some nameless thing I cannot describe—alone can tell.
      As I have said before, the weird studies of Harley Warren were well known to me, and to some extent shared by me. Of his vast collection of strange, rare books on forbidden subjects I have read all that are written in the languages of which I am master; but these are few as compared with those in languages I cannot understand. Most, I believe, are in Arabic; and the fiend-inspired book which brought on the end—the book which he carried in his pocket out of the world—was written in characters whose like I never saw elsewhere. Warren would never tell me just what was in that book. As to the nature of our studies—must I say again that I no longer retain full comprehension? It seems to me rather merciful that I do not, for they were terrible studies, which I pursued more through reluctant fascination than through actual inclination. Warren always dominated me, and sometimes I feared him. I remember how I shuddered at his facial expression on the night before the awful happening, when he talked so incessantly of his theory, why certain corpses never decay, but rest firm and fat in their tombs for a thousand years. But I do not fear him now, for I suspect that he has known horrors beyond my ken. Now I fear for him.
      Once more I say that I have no clear idea of our object on that night. Certainly, it had much to do with something in the book which Warren carried with him—that ancient book in undecipherable characters which had come to him from India a month before—but I swear I do not know what it was that we expected to find. Your witness says he saw us at half past eleven on the Gainesville pike, headed for Big Cypress Swamp. This is probably true, but I have no distinct memory of it. The picture seared into my soul is of one scene only, and the hour must have been long after midnight; for a waning crescent moon was high in the vaporous heavens.
      The place was an ancient cemetery; so ancient that I trembled at the manifold signs of immemorial years. It was in a deep, damp hollow, overgrown with rank grass, moss, and curious creeping weeds, and filled with a vague stench which my idle fancy associated absurdly with rotting stone. On every hand were the signs of neglect and decrepitude, and I seemed haunted by the notion that Warren and I were the first living creatures to invade a lethal silence of centuries. Over the valley’s rim a wan, waning crescent moon peered through the noisome vapours that seemed to emanate from unheard-of catacombs, and by its feeble, wavering beams I could distinguish a repellent array of antique slabs, urns, cenotaphs, and mausolean facades; all crumbling, moss-grown, and moisture-stained, and partly concealed by the gross luxuriance of the unhealthy vegetation. My first vivid impression of my own presence in this terrible necropolis concerns the act of pausing with Warren before a certain half-obliterated sepulchre, and of throwing down some burdens which we seemed to have been carrying. I now observed that I had with me an electric lantern and two spades, whilst my companion was supplied with a similar lantern and a portable telephone outfit. No word was uttered, for the spot and the task seemed known to us; and without delay we seized our spades and commenced to clear away the grass, weeds, and drifted earth from the flat, archaic mortuary. After uncovering the entire surface, which consisted of three immense granite slabs, we stepped back some distance to survey the charnel scene; and Warren appeared to make some mental calculations. Then he returned to the sepulchre, and using his spade as a lever, sought to pry up the slab lying nearest to a stony ruin which may have been a monument in its day. He did not succeed, and motioned to me to come to his assistance. Finally our combined strength loosened the stone, which we raised and tipped to one side.
      The removal of the slab revealed a black aperture, from which rushed an effluence of miasmal gases so nauseous that we started back in horror. After an interval, however, we approached the pit again, and found the exhalations less unbearable. Our lanterns disclosed the top of a flight of stone steps, dripping with some detestable ichor of the inner earth, and bordered by moist walls encrusted with nitre. And now for the first time my memory records verbal discourse, Warren addressing me at length in his mellow tenor voice; a voice singularly unperturbed by our awesome surroundings.
      “I’m sorry to have to ask you to stay on the surface,” he said, “but it would be a crime to let anyone with your frail nerves go down there. You can’t imagine, even from what you have read and from what I’ve told you, the things I shall have to see and do. It’s fiendish work, Carter, and I doubt if any man without ironclad sensibilities could ever see it through and come up alive and sane. I don’t wish to offend you, and heaven knows I’d be glad enough to have you with me; but the responsibility is in a certain sense mine, and I couldn’t drag a bundle of nerves like you down to probable death or madness. I tell you, you can’t imagine what the thing is really like! But I promise to keep you informed over the telephone of every move—you see I’ve enough wire here to reach to the centre of the earth and back!”
      I can still hear, in memory, those coolly spoken words; and I can still remember my remonstrances. I seemed desperately anxious to accompany my friend into those sepulchral depths, yet he proved inflexibly obdurate. At one time he threatened to abandon the expedition if I remained insistent; a threat which proved effective, since he alone held the key to the thing. All this I can still remember, though I no longer know what manner of thing we sought. After he had secured my reluctant acquiescence in his design, Warren picked up the reel of wire and adjusted the instruments. At his nod I took one of the latter and seated myself upon an aged, discoloured gravestone close by the newly uncovered aperture. Then he shook my hand, shouldered the coil of wire, and disappeared within that indescribable ossuary. For a moment I kept sight of the glow of his lantern, and heard the rustle of the wire as he laid it down after him; but the glow soon disappeared abruptly, as if a turn in the stone staircase had been encountered, and the sound died away almost as quickly. I was alone, yet bound to the unknown depths by those magic strands whose insulated surface lay green beneath the struggling beams of that waning crescent moon.
      In the lone silence of that hoary and deserted city of the dead, my mind conceived the most ghastly phantasies and illusions; and the grotesque shrines and monoliths seemed to assume a hideous personality—a half-sentience. Amorphous shadows seemed to lurk in the darker recesses of the weed-choked hollow and to flit as in some blasphemous ceremonial procession past the portals of the mouldering tombs in the hillside; shadows which could not have been cast by that pallid, peering crescent moon. I constantly consulted my watch by the light of my electric lantern, and listened with feverish anxiety at the receiver of the telephone; but for more than a quarter of an hour heard nothing. Then a faint clicking came from the instrument, and I called down to my friend in a tense voice. Apprehensive as I was, I was nevertheless unprepared for the words which came up from that uncanny vault in accents more alarmed and quivering than any I had heard before from Harley Warren. He who had so calmly left me a little while previously, now called from below in a shaky whisper more portentous than the loudest shriek:
      “God! If you could see what I am seeing!”
      I could not answer. Speechless, I could only wait. Then came the frenzied tones again:
      “Carter, it’s terrible—monstrous—unbelievable!”
      This time my voice did not fail me, and I poured into the transmitter a flood of excited questions. Terrified, I continued to repeat, “Warren, what is it? What is it?”
      Once more came the voice of my friend, still hoarse with fear, and now apparently tinged with despair:
      “I can’t tell you, Carter! It’s too utterly beyond thought—I dare not tell you—no man could know it and live—Great God! I never dreamed of THIS!” Stillness again, save for my now incoherent torrent of shuddering inquiry. Then the voice of Warren in a pitch of wilder consternation:
      “Carter! for the love of God, put back the slab and get out of this if you can! Quick!—leave everything else and make for the outside—it’s your only chance! Do as I say, and don’t ask me to explain!”
      I heard, yet was able only to repeat my frantic questions. Around me were the tombs and the darkness and the shadows; below me, some peril beyond the radius of the human imagination. But my friend was in greater danger than I, and through my fear I felt a vague resentment that he should deem me capable of deserting him under such circumstances. More clicking, and after a pause a piteous cry from Warren:
      “Beat it! For God’s sake, put back the slab and beat it, Carter!”
      Something in the boyish slang of my evidently stricken companion unleashed my faculties. I formed and shouted a resolution, “Warren, brace up! I’m coming down!” But at this offer the tone of my auditor changed to a scream of utter despair:
      “Don’t! You can’t understand! It’s too late—and my own fault. Put back the slab and run—there’s nothing else you or anyone can do now!” The tone changed again, this time acquiring a softer quality, as of hopeless resignation. Yet it remained tense through anxiety for me.
      “Quick—before it’s too late!” I tried not to heed him; tried to break through the paralysis which held me, and to fulfil my vow to rush down to his aid. But his next whisper found me still held inert in the chains of stark horror.
      “Carter—hurry! It’s no use—you must go—better one than two—the slab—” A pause, more clicking, then the faint voice of Warren:
      “Nearly over now—don’t make it harder—cover up those damned steps and run for your life—you’re losing time— So long, Carter—won’t see you again.” Here Warren’s whisper swelled into a cry; a cry that gradually rose to a shriek fraught with all the horror of the ages—
      “Curse these hellish things—legions— My God! Beat it! Beat it! Beat it!”
      After that was silence. I know not how many interminable aeons I sat stupefied; whispering, muttering, calling, screaming into that telephone. Over and over again through those aeons I whispered and muttered, called, shouted, and screamed, “Warren! Warren! Answer me—are you there?”
      And then there came to me the crowning horror of all—the unbelievable, unthinkable, almost unmentionable thing. I have said that aeons seemed to elapse after Warren shrieked forth his last despairing warning, and that only my own cries now broke the hideous silence. But after a while there was a further clicking in the receiver, and I strained my ears to listen. Again I called down, “Warren, are you there?”, and in answer heard the thing which has brought this cloud over my mind. I do not try, gentlemen, to account for that thing—that voice—nor can I venture to describe it in detail, since the first words took away my consciousness and created a mental blank which reaches to the time of my awakening in the hospital. Shall I say that the voice was deep; hollow; gelatinous; remote; unearthly; inhuman; disembodied? What shall I say? It was the end of my experience, and is the end of my story. I heard it, and knew no more. Heard it as I sat petrified in that unknown cemetery in the hollow, amidst the crumbling stones and the falling tombs, the rank vegetation and the miasmal vapours. Heard it well up from the innermost depths of that damnable open sepulchre as I watched amorphous, necrophagous shadows dance beneath an accursed waning moon. And this is what it said:
      “YOU FOOL, WARREN IS DEAD!”",False
"I WAS SITTING on the porch when my grandfather hobbled out and sank down on his favorite chair with the cushioned seat, and began to stuff tobacco in his old corncob-pipe.

""I thought you'd be goin' to the dance,"" he said.

""I'm waiting for Doc Blaine,"" I answered. ""I'm going over to old man Garfield's with him.""

My grandfather sucked at his pipe awhile before he spoke again.

""Old Jim purty bad off?""

""Doc says he hasn't a chance.""

""Who's takin' care of him?""

""Joe Braxton—­against Garfield's wishes. But somebody had to stay with him.""

My grandfather sucked his pipe noisily, and watched the heat lightning playing away off up in the hills; then he said: ""You think old Jim's the biggest liar in this county, don't you?""

""He tells some pretty tall tales,"" I admitted. ""Some of the things he claimed he took part in, must have happened before he was born.""

""I came from Tennesee to Texas in 1870,"" my grandfather said abruptly. ""I saw this town of Lost Knob grow up from nothin'. There wasn't even a log-hut store here when I came. But old Jim Garfield was here, livin' in the same place he lives now, only then it was a log cabin. He don't look a day older now than he did the first time I saw him.""

""You never mentioned that before,"" I said in some surprise.

""I knew you'd put it down to an old man's maunderin's,"" he answered. ""Old Jim was the first white man to settle in this country. He built his cabin a good fifty miles west of the frontier. God knows how he done it, for these hills swarmed with Comanches then.

""I remember the first time I ever saw him. Even then everybody called him 'old Jim.'

""I remember him tellin' me the same tales he's told you—­how he was at the battle of San Jacinto when he was a youngster, and how he'd rode with Ewen Cameron and Jack Hayes. Only I believe him, and you don't.""

""That was so long ago—­"" I protested.

""The last Indian raid through this country was in 1874,"" said my grandfather, engrossed in his own reminiscences. ""I was in on that fight, and so was old Jim. I saw him knock old Yellow Tail off his mustang at seven hundred yards with a buffalo rifle.

""But before that I was with him in a fight up near the head of Locust Creek. A band of Comanches came down Mesquital, lootin' and burnin', rode through the hills and started back up Locust Creek, and a scout of us were hot on their heels. We ran on to them just at sundown in a mesquite flat. We killed seven of them, and the rest skinned out through the brush on foot. But three of our boys were killed, and Jim Garfield got a thrust in the breast with a lance.

""It was an awful wound. He lay like a dead man, and it seemed sure nobody could live after a wound like that. But an old Indian came out of the brush, and when we aimed our guns at him, he made the peace sign and spoke to us in Spanish. I don't know why the boys didn't shoot him in his tracks, because our blood was heated with the fightin' and killin', but somethin' about him made us hold our fire. He said he wasn't a Comanche, but was an old friend of Garfield's, and wanted to help him. He asked us to carry Jim into a clump of mesquite, and leave him alone with him, and to this day I don't know why we did, but we did. It was an awful time—­the wounded moanin' and callin' for water, the starin' corpses strewn about the camp, night comin' on, and no way of knowin' that the Indians wouldn't return when dark fell.

""We made camp right there, because the horses were fagged out, and we watched all night, but the Comanches didn't come back. I don't know what went on out in the mesquite where Jim Garfield's body lay, because I never saw that strange Indian again; but durin' the night I kept hearin' a weird moanin' that wasn't made by the dyin' men, and an owl hooted from midnight till dawn.

""And at sunrise Jim Garfield came walkin' out of the mesquite, pale and haggard, but alive, and already the wound in his breast had closed and begun to heal. And since then he's never mentioned that wound, nor that fight, nor the strange Indian who came and went so mysteriously. And he hasn't aged a bit; he looks now just like he did then—­a man of about fifty.""

In the silence that followed, a car began to purr down the road, and twin shafts of light cut through the dusk.

""That's Doc Blaine,"" I said. ""When I come back I'll tell you how Garfield is.""

Doc Blaine was prompt with his predictions as we drove the three miles of post-oak covered hills that lay between Lost Knob and the Garfield farm.

""I'll be surprised to find him alive,"" he said, ""smashed up like he is. A man his age ought to have more sense than to try to break a young horse.""

""He doesn't look so old,"" I remarked.

""I'll be fifty, my next birthday,"" answered Doc Blaine. ""I've known him all my life, and he must have been at least fifty the first time I ever saw him. His looks are deceiving.""

Old Garfield's dwelling-place was reminiscent of the past. The boards of the low squat house had never known paint. Orchard fence and corrals were built of rails.

Old Jim lay on his rude bed, tended crudely but efficiently by the man Doc Blaine had hired over the old man's protests. As I looked at him, I was impressed anew by his evident vitality. His frame was stooped but unwithered, his limbs rounded out with springy muscles. In his corded neck and in his face, drawn though it was with suffering, was apparent an innate virility. His eyes, though partly glazed with pain, burned with the same unquenchable element.

""He's been ravin',"" said Joe Braxton stolidly.

""First white man in this country,"" muttered old Jim, becoming intelligible. ""Hills no white man ever set foot in before. Gettin' too old. Have to settle down. Can't move on like I used to. Settle down here. Good country before it filled up with cow-men and squatters. Wish Ewen Cameron could see this country. The Mexicans shot him. Damn 'em!""

Doc Blaine shook his head. ""He's all smashed up inside. He won't live till daylight.""

Garfield unexpectedly lifted his head and looked at us with clear eyes.

""Wrong, Doc,"" he wheezed, his breath whistling with pain. ""I'll live. What's broken bones and twisted guts? Nothin'! It's the heart that counts. Long as the heart keeps pumpin', a man can't die. My heart's sound. Listen to it! Feel of it!""

He groped painfully for Doc Blaine's wrist, dragged his hand to his bosom and held it there, staring up into the doctor's face with avid intensity.

""Regular dynamo, ain't it?"" he gasped. ""Stronger'n a gasoline engine!""

Blaine beckoned me. ""Lay your hand here,"" he said, placing my hand on the old man's bare breast. ""He does have a remarkable heart action.""

I noted, in the light of the coal-oil lamp, a great livid scar in the gaunt arching breast—­such a scar as might be made by a flint-headed spear. I laid my hand directly on this scar, and an exclamation escaped my lips.

Under my hand old Jim Garfield's heart pulsed, but its throb was like no other heart action I have ever observed. Its power was astounding; his ribs vibrated to its steady throb. It felt more like the vibrating of a dynamo than the action of a human organ. I could feel its amazing vitality radiating from his breast, stealing up into my hand and up my arm, until my own heart seemed to speed up in response.

""I can't die,"" old Jim gasped. ""Not so long as my heart's in my breast. Only a bullet through the brain can kill me. And even then I wouldn't be rightly dead, as long as my heart beats in my breast. Yet it ain't rightly mine, either. It belongs to Ghost Man, the Lipan chief. It was the heart of a god the Lipans worshipped before the Comanches drove 'em out of their native hills.

""I knew Ghost Man down on the Rio Grande, when I was with Ewen Cameron. I saved his life from the Mexicans once. He tied the string of ghost wampum between him and me—­the wampum no man but me and him can see or feel. He came when he knowed I needed him, in that fight up on the headwaters of Locust Creek, when I got this scar.

""I was dead as a man can be. My heart was sliced in two, like the heart of a butchered beef steer.

""All night Ghost Man did magic, callin' my ghost back from spirit-land. I remember that flight, a little. It was dark, and gray-like, and I drifted through gray mists and heard the dead wailin' past me in the mist. But Ghost Man brought me back.

""He took out what was left of my mortal heart, and put the heart of the god in my bosom. But it's his, and when I'm through with it, he'll come for it. It's kept me alive and strong for the lifetime of a man. Age can't touch me. What do I care if these fools around here call me an old liar? What I know, I know. But hark'ee!""

His fingers became claws, clamping fiercely on Doc Blaine's wrist. His old eyes, old yet strangely young, burned fierce as those of an eagle under his bushy brows.

""If by some mischance I should die, now or later, promise me this! Cut into my bosom and take out the heart Ghost Man lent me so long ago! It's his. And as long as it beats in my body, my spirit'll be tied to that body, though my head be crushed like an egg underfoot! A livin' thing in a rottin' body! Promise!""

""All right, I promise,"" replied Doc Blaine, to humor him, and old Jim Garfield sank back with a whistling sigh of relief.

He did not die that night, nor the next, nor the next. I well remember the next day, because it was that day that I had the fight with Jack Kirby.

People will take a good deal from a bully, rather than to spill blood. Because nobody had gone to the trouble of killing him, Kirby thought the whole countryside was afraid of him.

He had bought a steer from my father, and when my father went to collect for it, Kirby told him that he had paid the money to me—­which was a lie. I went looking for Kirby, and came upon him in a bootleg joint, boasting of his toughness, and telling the crowd that he was going to beat me up and make me say that he had paid me the money, and that I had stuck it into my own pocket. When I heard him say that, I saw red, and ran in on him with a stockman's knife, and cut him across the face, and in the neck, side, breast and belly, and the only thing that saved his life was the fact that the crowd pulled me off.

There was a preliminary hearing, and I was indicted on a charge of assault, and my trial was set for the following term of court. Kirby was as tough-fibered as a post-oak country bully ought to be, and he recovered, swearing vengeance, for he was vain of his looks, though God knows why, and I had permanently impaired them.

And while Jack Kirby was recovering, old man Garfield recovered too, to the amazement of everybody, especially Doc Blaine.

I well remember the night Doc Blaine took me again out to old Jim Garfield's farm. I was in Shifty Corlan's joint, trying to drink enough of the slop he called beer to get a kick out of it, when Doc Blaine came in and persuaded me to go with him.

As we drove along the winding old road in Doc's car, I asked: ""Why are you insistent that I go with you this particular night? This isn't a professional call, is it?""

""No,"" he said. ""You couldn't kill old Jim with a post-oak maul. He's completely recovered from injuries that ought to have killed an ox. To tell the truth, Jack Kirby is in Lost Knob, swearing he'll shoot you on sight.""

""Well, for God's sake!"" I exclaimed angrily. ""Now everybody'll think I left town because I was afraid of him. Turn around and take me back, damn it!""

""Be reasonable,"" said Doc. ""Everybody knows you're not afraid of Kirby. Nobody's afraid of him now. His bluff's broken, and that's why he's so wild against you. But you can't afford to have any more trouble with him now, and your trial only a short time off.""

I laughed and said: ""Well, if he's looking for me hard enough, he can find me as easily at old Garfield's as in town, because Shifty Corlan heard you say where we were going. And Shifty's hated me ever since I skinned him in that horse-swap last fall. He'll tell Kirby where I went.""

""I never thought of that,"" said Doc Blaine, worried.

""Hell, forget it,"" I advised. ""Kirby hasn't got guts enough to do anything but blow.""

But I was mistaken. Puncture a bully's vanity and you touch his one vital spot.

Old Jim had not gone to bed when we got there. He was sitting in the room opening on to his sagging porch, the room which was at once living-room and bedroom, smoking his old cob pipe and trying to read a newspaper by the light of his coal-oil lamp. All the windows and doors were wide open for the coolness, and the insects which swarmed in and fluttered around the lamp didn't seem to bother him.

We sat down and discussed the weather—­which isn't so inane as one might suppose, in a country where men's livelihood depends on sun and rain, and is at the mercy of wind and drouth. The talk drifted into other kindred channels, and after some time, Doc Blaine bluntly spoke of something that hung in his mind.

""Jim,"" he said, ""that night I thought you were dying, you babbled a lot of stuff about your heart, and an Indian who lent you his. How much of that was delirium?""

""None, Doc,"" said Garfield, pulling at his pipe. ""It was gospel truth. Ghost Man, the Lipan priest of the Gods of Night, replaced my dead, torn heart with one from somethin' he worshipped. I ain't sure myself just what that somethin' is—­somethin' from away back and a long way off, he said. But bein' a god, it can do without its heart for awhile. But when I die—­if I ever get my head smashed so my consciousness is destroyed—­the heart must be given back to Ghost Man.""

""You mean you were in earnest about cutting out your heart?"" demanded Doc Blaine.

""It has to be,"" answered old Garfield. ""A livin' thing in a dead thing is opposed to nat'er. That's what Ghost Man said.""

""Who the devil was Ghost Man?""

""I told you. A witch-doctor of the Lipans, who dwelt in this country before the Comanches came down from the Staked Plains and drove 'em south across the Rio Grande. I was a friend to 'em. I reckon Ghost Man is the only one left alive.""

""Alive? Now?""

""I dunno,"" confessed old Jim. ""I dunno whether he's alive or dead. I dunno whether he was alive when he came to me after the fight on Locust Creek, or even if he was alive when I knowed him in the southern country. Alive as we understand life, I mean.""

""What balderdash is this?"" demanded Doc Blaine uneasily, and I felt a slight stirring in my hair. Outside was stillness, and the stars, and the black shadows of the post-oak woods. The lamp cast old Garfield's shadow grotesquely on the wall, so that it did not at all resemble that of a human, and his words were strange as words heard in a nightmare.

""I knowed you wouldn't understand,"" said old Jim. ""I don't understand myself, and I ain't got the words to explain them things I feel and know without understandin'. The Lipans were kin to the Apaches, and the Apaches learnt curious things from the Pueblos. Ghost Man was—­that's all I can say—­alive or dead, I don't know, but he was. What's more, he is.""

""Is it you or me that's crazy?"" asked Doc Blaine.

""Well,"" said old Jim, ""I'll tell you this much—­Ghost Man knew Coronado.""

""Crazy as a loon!"" murmured Doc Blaine. Then he lifted his head. ""What's that?""

""Horse turning in from the road,"" I said. ""Sounds like it stopped.""

I stepped to the door, like a fool, and stood etched in the light behind me. I got a glimpse of a shadowy bulk I knew to be a man on a horse; then Doc Blaine yelled: ""Look out!"" and threw himself against me, knocking us both sprawling. At the same instant I heard the smashing report of a rifle, and old Garfield grunted and fell heavily.

""Jack Kirby!"" screamed Doc Blaine. ""He's killed Jim!""

I scrambled up, hearing the clatter of retreating hoofs, snatched old Jim's shotgun from the wall, rushed recklessly out on to the sagging porch and let go both barrels at the fleeing shape, dim in the starlight. The charge was too light to kill at that range, but the bird-shot stung the horse and maddened him. He swerved, crashed headlong through a rail fence and charged across the orchard, and a peach tree limb knocked his rider out of the saddle. He never moved after he hit the ground. I ran out there and looked down at him. It was Jack Kirby, right enough, and his neck was broken like a rotten branch.

I let him lie, and ran back to the house. Doc Blaine had stretched old Garfield out on a bench he'd dragged in from the porch, and Doc's face was whiter than I'd ever seen it. Old Jim was a ghastly sight; he had been shot with an old-fashioned .45-70, and at that range the heavy ball had literally torn off the top of his head. His features were masked with blood and brains. He had been directly behind me, poor old devil, and he had stopped the slug meant for me.

Doc Blaine was trembling, though he was anything but a stranger to such sights.

""Would you pronounce him dead?"" he asked.

""That's for you to say."" I answered. ""But even a fool could tell that he's dead.

""He is dead,"" said Doc Blaine in a strained unnatural voice. ""Rigor mortis is already setting in. But feel his heart!""

I did, and cried out. The flesh was already cold and clammy; but beneath it that mysterious heart still hammered steadily away, like a dynamo in a deserted house. No blood coursed through those veins; yet the heart pounded, pounded, pounded, like the pulse of Eternity.

""A living thing in a dead thing,"" whispered Doc Blaine, cold sweat on his face. ""This is opposed to nature. I am going to keep the promise I made him. I'll assume full responsibility. This is too monstrous to ignore.""

Our implements were a butcher-knife and a hack-saw. Outside only the still stars looked down on the black post-oak shadows and the dead man that lay in the orchard. Inside, the old lamp flickered, making strange shadows move and shiver and cringe in the corners, and glistened on the blood on the floor, and the red-dabbled figure on the bench. The only sound inside was the crunch of the saw-edge in bone; outside an owl began to hoot weirdly.

Doc Blaine thrust a red-stained hand into the aperture he had made, and drew out a red, pulsing object that caught the lamplight. With a choked cry he recoiled, and the thing slipped from his fingers and fell on the table. And I too cried out involuntarily. For it did not fall with a soft meaty thud, as a piece of flesh should fall. It thumped hard on the table.

Impelled by an irresistible urge, I bent and gingerly picked up old Garfield's heart. The feel of it was brittle, unyielding, like steel or stone, but smoother than either. In size and shape it was the duplicate of a human heart, but it was slick and smooth, and its crimson surface reflected the lamplight like a jewel more lambent than any ruby; and in my hand it still throbbed mightily, sending vibratory radiations of energy up my arm until my own heart seemed swelling and bursting in response. It was cosmic power, beyond my comprehension, concentrated into the likeness of a human heart.

The thought came to me that here was a dynamo of life, the nearest approach to immortality that is possible for the destructible human body, the materialization of a cosmic secret more wonderful than the fabulous fountain sought for by Ponce de Leon. My soul was drawn into that unterrestrial gleam, and I suddenly wished passionately that it hammered and thundered in my own bosom in place of my paltry heart of tissue and muscle.

Doc Blaine ejaculated incoherently. I wheeled.

The noise of his coming had been no greater than the whispering of a night wind through the corn. There in the doorway he stood, tall, dark, inscrutable—­an Indian warrior, in the paint, war bonnet, breech-clout and moccasins of an elder age. His dark eyes burned like fires gleaming deep under fathomless black lakes. Silently he extended his hand, and I dropped Jim Garfield's heart into it. Then without a word he turned and stalked into the night. But when Doc Blaine and I rushed out into the yard an instant later, there was no sign of any human being. He had vanished like a phantom of the night, and only something that looked like an owl was flying, dwindling from sight, into the rising moon.","YAR AM squinted carefully down the blue barrel of his Lee-Enfield, called devoutly on Allah and sent a bullet through the brain of a flying rider.
""Allaho akbar!""
The big Afghan shouted in glee, waving his weapon above his head, ""God is great! By Allah, sahib, I have sent another one of the dogs to Hell!""
His companion peered cautiously over the rim of the sand-pit they had scooped with their hands. He was a lean and wiry American, Steve Clarney by name.
""Good work, old horse,"" said this person. ""Four left. Look—they're drawing off.""
The white-robed horsemen were indeed reining away, clustering together just out of accurate rifle-range, as if in council. There had been seven when they had first swooped down on the comrades, but the fire from the two rifles in the sand-pit had been deadly.
""Look, sahib—they abandon the fray!""
Yar Ali stood up boldly and shouted taunts at the departing riders, one of whom whirled and sent a bullet that kicked up sand thirty feet in front of the pit.
""They shoot like the sons of dogs,"" said Yar Ali in complacent self- esteem. ""By Allah, did you see that rogue plunge from his saddle as my lead went home? Up, sahib; let us run after them and cut them down!""
Paying no attention to this outrageous proposal—for he knew it was but one of the gestures Afghan nature continually demands—Steve rose, dusted off his breeches and gazing after the riders, now white specks far out on the desert, said musingly: ""Those fellows ride as if they had some set purpose in mind—not a bit like men running from a licking.""
""Aye,"" agreed Yar Ali promptly and seeing nothing inconsistent with his present attitude and recent bloodthirsty suggestion, ""they ride after more of their kind—they are hawks who give up their prey not quickly. We had best move our position quickly, Steve sahib. They will come back—maybe in a few hours, maybe in a few days—it all depends on how far away lies the oasis of their tribe. But they will be back. We have guns and lives—they want both. And behold.""
The Afghan levered out the empty shell and slipped a single cartridge into the breech of his rifle.
""My last bullet, sahib.""
Steve nodded. ""I've got three left.""
The raiders whom their bullets had knocked from the saddle had been looted by their own comrades. No use searching the bodies which lay in the sand for ammunition. Steve lifted his canteen and shook it. Not much water remained. He knew that Yar Ali had only a little more than he, though the big Afridi, bred in a barren land, had used and needed less water than did the American; although the latter, judged from a white man's standards, was hard and tough as a wolf. As Steve unscrewed the canteen cap and drank very sparingly, he mentally reviewed the chain of events that had led them to their present position.
Wanderers, soldiers of fortune, thrown together by chance and attracted to each other by mutual admiration, he and Yar Ali had wandered from India up through Turkistan and down through Persia, an oddly assorted but highly capable pair. Driven by the restless urge of inherent wanderlust, their avowed purpose —which they swore to and sometimes believed themselves—was the accumulation of some vague and undiscovered treasure, some pot of gold at the foot of some yet unborn rainbow.
Then in ancient Shiraz they had heard of the Fire of Asshurbanipal. From the lips of an ancient Persian trader, who only half believed what he repeated to them, they heard the tale that he in turn had heard from the babbling lips of delirium, in his distant youth. He had been a member of a caravan, fifty years before, which, wandering far on the southern shore of the Persian Gulf trading for pearls, had followed the tale of a rare pearl far into the desert.
The pearl, rumored found by a diver and stolen by a shaykh of the interior, they did not find, but they did pick up a Turk who was dying of starvation, thirst and a bullet wound in the thigh. As, he died in delirium, he babbled a wild tale of a silent dead city of black stone set in the drifting sands of the desert far to the westward, and of a flaming gem clutched in the bony fingers of a skeleton on an ancient throne.
He had not dared bring it away with him, because of an overpowering brooding horror that haunted the place, and thirst had driven him into the desert again, where Bedouins had pursued and wounded him. Yet he had escaped, riding hard until his horse fell under him. He died without telling how he had reached the mythical city in the first place, but the old trader thought he must have come from the northwest—a deserter from the Turkish army, making a desperate attempt to reach the Gulf.
The men of the caravan had made no attempt to plunge still further into the desert in search of the city; for, said the old trader, they believed it to be the ancient, ancient City of Evil spoken of in the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Alhazred—the city of the dead on which an ancient curse rested. Legends named it vaguely: the Arabs called it Beled-el-Djinn, the City of Devils, and the Turks, Karashehr, the Black City. And the gem was that ancient and accursed jewel belonging to a king of long ago, whom the Grecians called Sardanapalus and the Semitic peoples Asshurbanipal.
Steve had been fascinated by the tale. Admitting to himself that it was doubtless one of the ten thousand cock-and-bull myths booted about the East, still there was a possibility that he and Yar Ali had stumbled onto a trace of that pot, of rainbow gold for which they searched. And Yar Ali had heard hints before of a silent city of the sands; tales had followed the eastbound caravans over the high Persian uplands and across the sands of Turkistan, into the mountain country and beyond—vague tales; whispers of a black city of the djinn, deep in the hazes of a haunted desert.
So, following the trail of the legend, the companions had tome from Shiraz to a village on the Arabian shore of the Persian Gulf, and there had heard more from an old man who had been a pearl-driver in his youth. The loquacity of age was on him and he told tales repeated to him by wandering tribesmen who had them in turn from the wild nomads of the deep interior; and again Steve and Yar Ah heard of the still black city with giant beasts carved of stone, and the skeleton sultan who held the blazing gem.
And so, mentally swearing at himself for a fool, Steve had made the plunge, and Yar Ali, secure in the knowledge that all things lay on the lap of Allah, had come with him. Their scanty supply of money had been just sufficient to provide riding-camels and provisions for a bold flying invasion of the unknown. Their only chart had been the vague rumors that placed the supposed location of Kara-Shehr.
There had been days of hard travel, pushing the beasts and conserving water and food. Then, deep in the desert they invaded, they had encountered a blinding sand-wind in which they had lost the camels. After that came long miles of staggering through the sands, battered by a flaming sun, subsisting on rapidly dwindling water from their canteens, and food Yar Ali had in a pouch. No thought of finding the mythical city now. They pushed on blindly, in hope of stumbling upon a spring; they knew that behind them no oases lay within a distance they could hope to cover on foot. It was a desperate chance, but their only one.
Then white-clad hawks had swooped down on them, out of the haze of the skyline, and from a shallow and hastily scooped trench the adventurers had exchanged shots with the wild riders who circled them at top speed. The bullets of the Bedouins had skipped through their makeshift fortifications, knocking dust into their eyes and flicking bits of cloth from their garments, but by good chance neither had been hit.
Their one bit of luck, reflected Clarney, as he cursed himself for a fool. What a mad venture it had been, anyway! To think that two men could so dare the desert and live, much less wrest from its abvsmal bosom the secrets of the ages! And that crazy tale of a skeleton hand gripping a flaming jewel in a dead city-bosh! What utter rot! He must have been crazy himself to credit it, the American decided with the clarity of view that suffering and danger bring.
""Well, old horse,"" said Steve, lifting his rifle, ""let's get going. It's a toss-up if we die of thirst or get sniped off by the desert-brothers. Anyway, we're doin' no good here.""
""God gives,"" agreed Yar Ali cheerfully. ""The sun sinks westward. Soon the coolness of night will be upon us. Perhaps we shall find water yet, sabib. Look, the terrain changes to the south.""
Clarney shaded his eyes against the dying sun. Beyond a level, barren expanse of several miles width, the land did indeed become more broken; aborted hills were in evidence. The American slung his rifle over his arm and sighed.
""Heave ahead; we're food for the buzzards anyhow.""
The sun sank and the moon rose, flooding the desert with weird silver light. Drifted sand glimmered in long ripples, as if a sea had suddenly been frozen into immobility. Steve, parched fiercely by a thirst he dared not fully quench, cursed beneath his breath. The desert was beautiful beneath the moon, with the beauty of a cold marble lorelei to lure men to destruction. What a mad quest! his weary brain reiterated; the Fire of Asshurbanipal retreated into the mazes of unreality with each dragging step. The desert became not merely a material wasteland, but the gray mists of the lost eons, in whose depths dreamed sunken things.
Clarney stumbled and swore; was he failing already? Yar Ali swung along with the easy, tireless stride of the mountain man, and Steve set his teeth, nerving himself to greater effort. They were entering the broken country at last, and the going became harder. Shallow gullies and narrow ravines knifed 'the earth with wavering patterns. Most of them were nearly filled with sand, and there was no trace of water.
""This country was once oasis country,"" commented Yar Ali. ""Allah knows how many centuries ago the sand took it, as the sand has taken so many cities in TurkiStan.""
They swung on like dead men in a gray land of death.
The moon grew red and sinister as she sank, and shadowy darkness settled over the desert before they had reached a point where they could see what lay beyond the broken belt. Even the big Afghan's feet began to drag, and Steve kept himself erect only by a savage effort of will. At last they toiled up a sort of ridge, on the southern side of which the land sloped downward.
""We rest,"" declared Steve. ""There's no water in this hellish country. No use in goin' on for ever. My legs are stiff as gun-barrels. I couldn't take another step to save my neck. Here's a kind of stunted cliff, about as high as a man's shoulder, facing south. We'll sleep in the lee of it.
""And shall we not keep watch, Steve sahib?""
""We don't,"" answered Steve. ""If the Arabs cut our throats while we're asleep, so much the better. We're goners anyhow.""
With which optimistic observation Clarney lay down stiffly in the deep sand. But Yar Ali stood, leaning forward, straining his eyes into the elusive darkness that turned the star-flecked horizons to murky wells of shadow.
""Something lies on the skyline to the south,"" he muttered uneasily. ""A hill? I cannot tell, or even be sure that I see anything at all.""
""You're seeing mirages already,"" said Steve irritably. ""Lie down and sleep.""
And so saying Steve slumbered.
The sun in his eves awoke him. He sat up, yawning, and his first sensation was that of thirst. He lifted his canteen and wet his lips. One drink left. Yar Ali still slept. Steve's eves wandered over the southern horizon and he started. He kicked the recumbent Afghan.
""Hey, wake up, Ali. I reckon you weren't seeing things after all. There's your hill—and a queer-lookin' one, too.""
The Afridi woke as a wild thing wakes, instantly and completely, his hand leaping to his long knife as he glared about for enemies. His gaze followed Steve's pointing fingers and his eves widened.
""By Allah and by Allah!"" he swore. ""We have come into a land of djinn! That is no hill—it is a city of stone in the midst of the sands!""
Steve bounded to his feet like a steel spring released. As he gazed with bated breath, a fierce shout escaped his lips. At his feet the slope of the ridge ran down into a wide and level expanse of sand that stretched away southward. And far away, across those sands, to his straining sight the 'hill' slowly took shape, like a mirage growing from the drifting sands.
He saw great uneven walls, massive battlements; all about crawled the sands like a living, sensate thing, drifted high about the walls, softening the rugged outlines. No wonder that at first glance the whole had appeared like a hill.
""Kara-Shehr!"" Clarney exclaimed fiercely. ""Beled-el-Djinn! The city of the dead! It wasn't a pipe-dream after all! We've found it—by Heaven, we've found it! Come on! Let's go!""
Yar Ali shook his head uncertainly and muttered something about evil djinn under his breath, but he followed. The sight of the ruins had swept from Steve his thirst and hunger, and the fatigue that a few hours' sleep had not fully overcome. He trudged on swiftly, oblivious to the rising heat, his eyes gleaming with the lust of the explorer. It was not altogether greed for the fabled gem that had prompted Steve Clarney to risk his life in that grim wilderness; deep in his soul lurked the age-old heritage of the white man, the urge to seek out the hidden places of the world, and that urge had been stirred to the depths by the ancient tales.
Now as they crossed the level wastes that separated the broken land from the city, they saw—the shattered walls take clearer form and shape, as if they grew out of the morning sky. The city seemed built of huge blocks of black stone, but how high the walls had been there was no telling because of the sand that drifted high about their base; in many places they had fallen away and the sand hid the fragments entirely.
The sun reached her zenith and thirst intruded itself in spite of zeal and enthusiasm, but Steve fiercely mastered his suffering. His lips were parched and swollen, but fie would not take that last drink until he had reached the ruined city. Yar Ali wet his lips from his own canteen and tried to share the remainder with his friend. Steve shook his head and plodded on.
In the ferocious heat of the desert afternoon they reached the ruin, and passing through a wide breach in the crumbling wall, gazed on the dead city. Sand choked the ancient streets and lent fantastic form to huge, fallen and half-hidden columns. So crumbled into decay and so covered with sand was the whole that the explorers could make out little of the original plan of the city; now it was but a waste of drifted sand and crumbling stone over which brooded, like an invisible cloud, an aura of unspeakable antiquity.
But directly in front of them ran a broad avenue, the outline of which not even the ravaging sands and winds of time had been able to efface. On either side of the wide way were ranged huge columns, not unusually tall, even allowing for the sand that hid their bases, but incredibly massive. On the top of each column stood a figure carved from solid stone—great, somber images, half human, half bestial, partaking of the brooding brutishness of the whole city. Steve cried out in amazement.
""The winged bulls of Nineveh. The bulls with men's heads! By the saints, AH, the old tales are true! The Assyrians did build this city! The whole tale's true! They must have come here when the Babylonians destroved Assyriawhy, this scene's a dead ringer for pictures I've seen—reconstructed scenes of old Nineveh! And look!""
He pointed down the broad street to the great building which reared at the other end, a colossal, brooding edifice whose columns and walls of solid black stone blocks defied the winds and sands of time. The drifting, obliterating sea washed about its foundations, overflowing into its doorways, but it would require a thousand years to inundate the whole structure.
""An abode of devils!"" muttered Yar Ali, uneasily.
""The temple of Baal!"" exclaimed Steve. ""Come on!—I was afraid we'd find all the palaces and temples hidden by the sand and have to dig for the gem.""
""Little good it will do us,"" muttered Yar Ali. ""Here we die.""
""I reckon so."" Steve unscrewed the cap of his canteen. ""Let's take our last drink. Anyway, we're safe from the Arabs. Thev'd never dare come here, with their superstitions. We'll drink and then we'll die, I reckon, but first we'll find the jewel. When I pass out, I want to have it in my hand. Mavbe a few centuries later some lucky son-of-a-gun will find our skeletons—and the gem. Here's to him, whoever he is!""
With which grim jest Clarney drained his canteen and Yar Ali followed suit. They had played their last ace; the rest lay on the lap of Allah.
They strode up the broad way, and Yar Ali, utterly fearless in the face of human foci, glanced nervously to tight and left, half expecting to see a horned and fantastic face leering at him from behind a column. Steve him felt the somber antiquity of the place, and almost found himself fearing a rush of bronze war chariots down the forgotten streets, or to hear the sudden menacing flare of bronze trumpets. The silence in dead cities was' so much more intense, he reflected, than that on the open desert.
They came to the portals of the great temple. Rows of immense columns flanked the wide doorway, which was ankledeep in sand, and from which sagged massive bronze frameworks that had once braced mighty doors, whose polished woodwork had rotted away centuries ago. They passed into a mighty hall of misty twilight whose shadowy stone roof was upheld by columns like the trunks of forest trees. The whole effect of the architecture was one of awesome magnitude and sullen, breathtaking splendor, like a temple built by somber giants for the abode of dark gods.
Yar-Ali walked fearfully, as if he expected to awake sleeping gods, and Steve, without the Afridi's superstitions, yet felt the gloomy majesty of the place lay somber hands on his soul.
No trace of a footprint showed in the deep dust on the floor; half a century had passed since the affrighted and devilridden Turk had fled these silent halls. As for the Bedouins, it was easy to see why those superstitious sons of the desert shunned this haunted city—and haunted it was, not by actual ghosts, perhaps, but by the shadows of lost splendors.
As they trod the sands of the hall, which seemed endless, Steve pondered many questions: How did these fugitives from the wrath of frenzied rebels build this city? How did they pass through the country of their foes—for Babylonia lay between Assyria and the Arabian desert. Yet there had been no other place for them to go; westward lay Syria and the sea, and north and east swarmed the 'dangerous Medes', those fierce Aryans whose aid had stiffened the arm of Babylon to smite her foe to the dust.
Possibly, thought Steve, Kara-Shehr—whatever its name had been in those dim days—had been built as an outpost border city before the fall of the Assyrian empire, whither survivals of that overthrow fled. At any rate it was possible that Kara-Shehr had outlasted Nineveh by some centuries—a strange, hermit city, no doubt, cut off from the rest of the world.
Surely, as Yar Ali had said, this was once fertile country, watered by oases; and doubtless in the broken country they had passed over the night before, there had been quarries that furnished the stone for the building of the city.
Then what caused its downfall? Did the encroachment of the sands and the filling up of the springs cause the people to abandon it, or was Kara-Shehr a city of silence before the sands crept over the walls? Did the downfall come from within or without? Did civil war blot out the inhabitants, or were they slaughtered by some powerful foe from the desert? Clarney shook his head in baffled chagrin. The answers to those questions were lost in—the maze of forgotten ages.
""Allaho akbar!"" They had traversed the great shadowy hall and at its further end they came upon a hideous black stone altar, behind which loomed an ancient god, bestial and horrific. Steve shrugged his shoulders as he recognized the monstrous aspect of the image—aye, that teas Baal, on which black altar in other ages many a screaming, writhing, naked victim had offered up its naked soul. The idol embodied in its utter, abysmal and sullen bestiality the whole soul of this demoniac city. Surely, thought Steve, the builders of Nineveh and Kara-Shehr were cast in another mold from the people of today. Their art and culture were too ponderous, too grimly Barren of the lighter aspects of humanity, to be wholly human, as modern man understands humanity.
Their architecture was repellent; of high skill, yet so massive, sullen and brutish in effect as to be almost beyond the comprehension of moderns.
The adventurers passed through a narrow door which opened in the end of the hall close to the idol, and came into a series of wide, dim, dusty chambers connected by column-flanked corridors. Along these they strode in the gray ghostly light, and came at last to a wide stair, whose massive stone steps led upward and vanished in the gloom. Here Yar Ali halted.
""We have dared much, sahib,"" he muttered. ""Is it wise to dare more?""
Steve, aquiver with eagerness, yet understood the Afghan's mind. ""You mean we shouldn't, go up those stairs?""
""They have an evil look. To what chambers of silence and horror may they lead? When djinn haunt deserted buildings, they lurk in the upper chambers. At any moment a demon may bite off our heads.""
""We're dead men anyhow,"" grunted Steve. ""But I tell you—you go on back through the hall and watch for the Arabs while I go upstairs.""
""Watch for a wind on the horizon,"" responded the Afghan gloomily, shifting his rifle and loosening his long knife in its scabbard. ""No Bedouin comes here. Lead on, sahib. Thou'rt mad after the manner of all Franks,—but I would not leave thee to face the djinn alone.""
So the companions mounted the massive stairs, their feet sinking deep into the accumulated dust of centuries at each step. Up and up they went, to an incredible height until the depths below merged into a vague gloom.
""We walk blind to our doom, sahib,"" muttered Yar Ali. ""Allah il allah —and Muhammad is his Prophet! Nevertheless, I feel the presence of slumbering Evil and never again shall I hear the wind blowing up the Khyber Pass.""
Steve made no reply. He did not like the breathless silence that brooded over the ancient temple, nor the grisly gray light that filtered from some hidden source.
Now above them the gloom lightened somewhat and they emerged into a vast circular chamber, grayly illumined by light that filtered in through the high, pierced ceiling. But another radiance lent itself to the illumination. A cry burst from Steve's lips, echoed by Yar Ali.
Standing on the top step of the broad stone stair, they looked directly across the broad chamber, with its dustcovered heavy tile floor and bare black stone walls. From about the center of the chamber, massive steps led up to a stone dais, and on this dais stood a marble throne. About this throne glowed and shimmered an uncanny light, and the awestruck adventurers gasped as they saw its source. On the throne slumped a human skeleton, an almost shapeless mass of moldering bones. A fleshless hand sagged outstretched upon the broad marble throne-arm, and in its grisly clasp there pulsed and throbbed like a living thing, a great crimson stone.
The Fire of Asshurbanipal! Even after they had found the lost city Steve had not really allowed himself to believe that they would find the gem, or that it even existed in reality. Yet he could not doubt the evidence of his eyes, dazzled by that evil, incredible glow. With a fierce shout he sprang across the chamber and up the steps. Yar All was at his heels, but when Steve would have seized the gem, the Afghan laid a hand on his arm.
""Wait!"" exclaimed the big Muhammadan. ""Touch it not yet, sahib! A curse lies on ancient things—and surely this is a thing triply accursed! Else why has it lain here untouched in a country of thieves for so many centuries? It is not well to disturb the possessions of the dead.""
""Bosh!"" snorted the American. ""Superstitions! The Bedouins were scared by the tales that have come down to 'em from their ancestors. Being desert- dwellers they mistrust cities anyway, and no doubt this one had an evil reputation in its lifetime. And nobody except Bedouins have seen this place before, except that Turk, who was probably half demented with suffering.
""These bones may be those of the king mentioned in the legend—the dry desert air preserves such things indefinitelybut I doubt it. May be Assyrian—most likely Arab—some beggar that got the gem and then died on that throne for some reason or other.""
The Afghan scarcely heard him. He was gazing in fearful fascination at the great stone, as a hypnotized bird stares into a serpent's eye.
""Look at it, sahib!"" he whispered. ""What is it? No such gem as this was ever cut by. mortal hands! Look how it throbs and pulses like the heart of a cobra!""
Steve was looking, and he was aware of a strange undefined feeling of uneasiness. Well versed in the knowledge of precious stones, he had never seen a stone like this. At first glance he had supposed it to be a monster ruby, as told in the legends. Now he was not sure, and he had a nervous feeling that Yar Ali was right, that this was no natural, normal gem: He could not classify the style in which it was cut, and such was the power of its lurid radiance that he found it difficult to gaze at it closely for any length of time. The whole setting was not one calculated to soothe restless nerves. The deep dust on the floor suggested an unwholesome antiquity; the gray light evoked a sense of unreality, and the heavy black walls towered grimly, hinting at hidden things.
""Let's take the stone, and go!"" muttered Steve, an unaccustomed panicky dread rising in his bosom.
""Wait!"" Yar Ali's eyes were blazing, and he gazed, not at the gem, but at the sullen stone walls. ""We are flies in the lair of the spider! Sahib, as Allah lives, it is more than the ghosts of old fears that lurk over this city of horror! I feel the presence of peril, as I have felt it before—as I felt it in a jungle cavern where a python lurked unseen in—the darkness —as I felt it in the temple of Thuggee where the hidden stranglers of Siva crouched to spring upon us—as I feel it now, tenfold!""
Steve's hair prickled. He knew that Yar All was a grim veteran, not to be stampeded by silly fear or senseless panic; he well remembered the incidents referred to by the Afghan, as he remembered other occasions upon which Yar Ali's Oriental telepathic instinct had warned him of danger before that danger was seen or heard.
""What is it, Yar Ali?"" he whispered.
The Afghan shook his head, his eyes filled with a weird mysterious light as he listened to the dim occult promptings of his subconsciousness.
""I know not; I know it is close to us, and that it is very ancient and very evil. I think—"" Suddenly he halted and wheeled, the eery light vanishing from his eyes to be replaced by a glare of wolf-like fear and suspicion.
""Hark, sahib!"" he snapped. ""Ghosts or dead men mount the stair!""
Steve stiffened as the stealthy pad of soft sandals on stone reached his ear.
""By Judas, Ali!"" he rapped; ""something's out there—""
The ancient walls re-echoed to a chorus of wild yells as a horde of savage figures flooded the chamber. For one dazed insane instant Steve believed wildly that they were being attacked by re-embodied warriors of a vanished age; then the spiteful crack of a bullet past his ear and the acrid smell of powder told him that their foes were material enough. Clarney cursed; in their fancied security—they had been caught like rats in a trap by the pursuing Arabs.
Even as the American threw up his rifle, Yar Ali fired point-blank from the hip with deadly effect, hurled his empty rifle into the horde and went down the steps like a hurricane, his three-foot Khyber knife shimmering in his hairv hand. Into his gusto for battle went real relief that his foes were human. A bullet ripped the turban from his head, but an Arab went down with a split skull beneath the hillman's first, shearing stroke.
A tall Bedouin clapped his gun-muzzle to the Afghan's side, but before he could pull the trigger, Clarney's bullet scattered his brains. The very number of the attackers hindered their onslaught on the big Afridi, whose tigerish quickness made shooting as dangerous to themselves as to him. The bulk of them swarmed about him, striking with scimitar and rifle-stock while others charged up the steps after Steve. At that range there was no missing; the American simply thrust his rifle muzzle into a bearded face and blasted it into a ghastly ruin. The others came on, screaming like panthers.
And now as he prepared to expend his last cartridge, Clarney saw two things in one flashing instant—a wild warrior who, with froth on his beard and a heavy simitar uplifted, was almost upon him, and another who knelt on the floor drawing a careful bead on the plunging Yar Ali. Steve made an instant choice and fired over the shoulder of the charging swordsman, killing the rifleman—and voluntarily offering his own life for his friend's; for the scimitar was swinging at his own head. But even as the Arab swung, grunting with the force of the blow, his sandaled foot slipped on the marble steps and the curved blade, veering erratically from its arc, clashed on Steve's rifle-barrel. In an instant the American clubbed his rifle, and as the Bedouin recovered his balance and again heaved up the scimitar, Clarnev struck with all his rangy power, and stock and skull shattered together.
Then a heavy ball smacked into his shoulder, sickening him with the shock.
As he staggered dizzily, a Bedouin whipped a turbancloth about his feet and jerked viciously. Clarney pitched headlong down the steps, to strike with stunning force. A gun-stock in a brown hand went up to dash out his brains, but an imperious command halted the blow.
""Slay him not, but bind him hand and foot.""
As Steve struggled dazedly against many gripping hands, it seemed to him that somewhere he had heard that imperious voice before.
The American's downfall had occurred in a matter of seconds. Even as Steve's second shot had cracked, Yar Ali had half severed a raider's arm and himself received a numbing blow from a rifle-stock on his left shoulder. His sheepskin coat, worn despite the desert heat, saved his hide from half a dozen slashing knives. A rifle was discharged so close to his face that the powder burnt him fiercely, bringing a bloodthirsty yell from the maddened Afghan. As Yar Ali swung up his dripping blade the rifleman, ashy-faced, lifted his rifle above his head in both hands to parry the downward blow, whereat the Afridi, with a yelp of ferocious exultation, shifted as a junglecat strikes and plunged his long knife into the Arab's belly. But at that instant a rifle-stock, swung with all the hearty ill-will its wielder could evoke, crashed against the giant's head, laying open the scalp and dashing him to his knees.
With the dogged and silent ferocity of his breed, Yar Ali staggered blindly up again, slashing at foes he could scarcely see, but a storm of blows battered him down again, nor did his attackers cease beating him until he lay still. They would have finished him in short order then, but for another peremptory order from their chief; whereupon they bound the senseless knife-man and flung him down alongside Steve, who was fully conscious and aware of the savage hurt of the bullet in his shoulder.
He glared up at the tall Arab who stood looking down at him.
""Well, sabib,"" said this one—and Steve saw he was no Bedouin —""do you not remember me?""
Steve scowled; a bullet-wound is no aid to concentration.
""You look familiar—by Judas!—you are! Nureddin El Mekru!""
""I am honored! The sahib remembers!"" Nureddin salaamed mockingly. ""And you remember, no doubt, the occasion on which you made me a present of—this!""
The dark eyes shadowed with bitter menace and the shaykh indicated a thin white scar on the angle of his jaw...
""I remember,"" snarled Clarney, whom pain and anger did not tend to make docile. ""It was in Somaliland, years ago. You were in the slave-trade then. A wretch of a nigger escaped from you and took refuge with me. You walked into my camp one night in your high-handed way, started a row and in the ensuing scrap you got a butcher-knife across your face. I wish I'd cut your lousy throat.""
""You had your chance,"" answered the Arab. ""Now the tables are turned.""
""I thought your stamping-ground lay west,"" growled Clarney; ""Yemen and the Somali country.""
""I quit the slave-trade long ago,"" answered the shaykh. ""It is an outworn game. I led a band of thieves in Yemen for a time; then again I was forced to change my location. I came here with a few faithful followers, and by Allah, those wild men nearly slit my throat at first. But I overcame their suspicions, and now I lead more men than have followed me in years.
""They whom you fought off yesterday were my men—scouts I had sent out ahead. My oasis lies far to the west. We have ridden for many days, for I was on my way to this very city. When my scouts rode in and told me of two wanderers, I did not alter my course, for I had business first in Beled-el- Djinn. We rode into the city from the west and saw your tracks in the sand. We followed there, and you were blind buffalo who heard not our coming.""
Steve snarled. ""You wouldn't have caught us so easy, only we thought no Bedouin would dare come into Kara-Shehr.""
Nureddin nodded. ""But I am no Bedouin. I have traveled far and seen many lands and many races, and I have read many books. I know that fear is smoke, that the dead are dead, and that djinn and ghosts and curses are mists that the wind blows away. It was because of the tales of the red stone that I came into this forsaken desert. But it has taken months to persuade my men to ride with me here.
""But—I am here! And your presence is a delightful surprise. Doubtless you have guessed why I had you taken alive; I have more elaborate entertainment planned for you and that Pathan swine. Now—I take the Fire of Asshurbanipal and we will go.""
He turned toward the dais, and one of his men, a bearded one-eyed giant, exclaimed, ""Hold, my lord! Ancient evil reigned here before. the days of Muhammad! The djinn howl through these halls when the winds blow, and men have seen ghosts dancing on the walls beneath the moon. No man of mortals has dared this black city for a thousand years—save one, half a century ago, who fled shrieking.
""You have come here from Yemen; you do not know the ancient curse on this foul city, and this evil stone, which pulses like the red heart of Satan! We have followed you here against our judgment, because you have proven yourself a strong man, and have said you hold a charm against all evil beings. You said you but wished to look on this mysterious gem, but now we see it is your intention to take it for yourself. Do not offend the djinn!""
""Nay, Nureddin, do not offend the djinn!"" chorused the other Bedouins. The shaykh's own hard-bitten ruffians, standing in a compact group somewhat apart from the Bedouins, said nothing; hardened to crimes and deeds of impiety, they were less affected by the superstitions of the desert men, to whom the dread tale of the accursed city had been repeated for centuries. Steve, even while hating Nureddin with concentrated venom, realized the magnetic power of the man, the innate leadership that had enabled him to overcome thus far the fears and traditions of ages.
""The curse is laid on infidels who invade the city,"" answered Nureddin, ""not on the Faithful. See, in this chamber have we overcome our kafar foes!""
A white-bearded desert hawk shook his head.
""The curse is more ancient than Muhammad, and recks not of race or creed. Evil men reared this black city in the dawn of the Beginnings of Days. They oppressed our ancestors of the black tents, and warred among themselves; aye, the black walls of this foul city were stained with blood, and echoed to the shouts of unholy revel and the whispers of dark intrigues.
""Thus came the stone to the city: there dwelt a magician at the court of Asshurbanipal, and the black wisdom of ages was not denied to him. To gain honor and power for himself, he dared the horrors of a nameless vast cavern in a dark, untraveled land, and from those fiendhaunted depths he brought that blazing gem, which is carved of the frozen flames of Hell! By reason of his fearful power in black magic, he put a spell on the demon which guarded the ancient gem, and so stole away the stone. And the demon slept in the cavern unknowing.
""So this magician—Xuthltan by name—dwelt in the court of the sultan Asshurbanipal and did magic and forecast events by scanning the lurid deeps of the stone, into which no eyes but his could look unblinded. And men called the stone the Fire of Asshurbanipal, in honor of the king.
""But evil came upon the kingdom and men cried out that it was the curse of the djinn, and the sultan in great fear bade Xuthltan take the gem and cast it into the cavern from which he had taken it, lest worse ill befall them.
""Yet it was not the magician's will to give up the gem wherein he read strange secrets of pre-Adamite days, and he fled to the rebel city of Kara- Shehr, where soon civil war broke out and men strove with one another to possess the gem. Then the king who ruled the city, coveting the stone, seized the magician and put him to death by torture, and in this very room he watched him die; with the gem in his hand the king sat upon the throne—even as he has sat upon the throne—even as he has sat throughout the centuries —even as now he sits!""
The Arab's finger stabbed at the moldering bones on the marble throne, and the wild desert men blenched; even Nureddin's own scoundrels recoiled, catching their breath, but the shaykh showed no sign of perturbation.
""As Xuthltan died,"" continued the old Bedouin, ""he cursed the stone whose magic had not saved him, and he shrieked aloud the fearful words which undid the spell he had put upon the demon in the cavern, and set the monster free. And crying out on the forgotten gods, Cthulhu and Koth and Yog-Sothoth, and all the pre-Adamite Dwellers in the black cities under the sea and the caverns of the earth, he called upon them—to take back that which was theirs, and with his dying breath pronounced doom on the false king, and that doom was that the king should sit on his throne holding in his hand the Fire of Asshurbanipal until the thunder of judgment Day.
""Thereat the great stone cried out as a live thing cries, and the king and his soldiers saw a black cloud spinning up from the floor, and out of the cloud blew a fetid wind, and out of the wind came a grisly shape which stretched forth fearsome paws and laid them on the king, who shriveled and died at their touch. And the soldiers fled screaming, and all the people of the city ran forth wailing into the desert, where they perished or gained through the wastes to the far oasis towns. Kara-Shehr lay silent and deserted, the haunt of the lizard and the jackal. And when some of the desertpeople ventured into the city they found the king dead on his throne, clutching the blazing gem, but they dared not lay hand upon it, for they knew the demon lurked near to guard it through all the ages—as he lurks near even as we stand here.""
The warriors shuddered involuntarily and glanced about, and Nureddin said, ""Why did he not come forth when the Franks entered the chamber? Is he deaf, that the sound of the combat has not awakened him?""
""We have not touched the gem,"" answered the old Bedouin, ""nor had the Franks molested it. Men have looked on it and lived; but no mortal may touch it and survive.""
Nureddin started to speak, gazed at the stubborn, uneasy faces and realized the futility of argument. His attitude changed abruptly.
""I am master here,"" he snapped, dropping a hand to his holster. ""I have not sweat and bled for this gem to be balked at the last by groundless fears! Stand back, all! Let any man cross me at the peril of his head!""
He faced them, his eyes blazing, and they fell back, cowed by the force of his ruthless personality. He strode boldly up the marble steps, and the Arabs caught their breath, recoiling toward the door; Yar Ali, conscious at last, groaned dismally. God! thought Steve, what a barbaric scene!—bound captives on the dust-heaped floor, wild warriors clustered about, gripping their weapons, the raw acrid scent of blood and burnt powder still fouling the air, corpses strewn in a horrid welter of blood, brains and entrails—and on the dais, the hawk-faced shaykh, oblivious to all except the evil crimson glow in the skeleton fingers that rested on the marble throne.
A tense silence gripped all as Nureddin stretched forth his hand slowly, as if hypnotized by the throbbing crimson light. And in Steve's subconsciousness there shuddered a dim echo, as of something vast and loathsome waking suddenly from an age-long slumber. The American's eyes moved instinctively toward the grim cyclopean walls. The jewel's glow had altered strangely; it burned a deeper, darker red, angry and menacing.
""Heart of all evil,"" murmured the shaykh, ""how many princes died for thee in the Beginnings of Happenings? Surely the blood of kings throbs in thee. The sultans and the princesses and the generals who wore thee, they are dust and are forgotten, but thou blazest with majesty undimmed, fire of the world—""
Nureddin seized the stone. A shuddery wail broke from the Arabs, cut through by a sharp inhuman cry. To Steve it seemed, horribly, that the great jewel had cried out like a living thing! The stone slipped from the shaykh's hand. Nureddin might have dropped it; to Steve it looked as though it leaped convulsively, as a live thing might leap. It rolled from the dais, bounding from step to step, with Nureddin springing after it, cursing as his clutching hand missed it. It struck the floor, veered sharply, and despite the deep dust, rolled like a revolving ball of fire toward the back wall. Nureddin was close upon it—it struck the wall—the shaykh's hand reached for it.
A scream of mortal fear ripped the tense silence. Without warning the solid wall had opened. Out of the black wall that gaped there, a tentacle shot and gripped the shaykh's body as a python girdles its victim, and jerked him headlong into the darkness. And then the wall showed blank and solid once more; only from within sounded a hideous, high-pitched, muffled screaming that chilled the blood of the listeners. Howling wordlessly, the Arabs stampeded, jammed in a battling, screeching mass in the doorway, tore through and raced madly down the wide stairs.
Steve and Yar Ali, lying helplessly, heard the frenzied clamor of their flight fade away into the distance, and gazed in dumb horror at the grim wall. The shrieks had faded into a more horrific silence. Holding their breath, they heard suddenly a sound that froze the blood in their veins—the soft sliding of metal or stone in a groove. At the same time the hidden door began to open, and Steve caught a glimmer in the blackness that might have been the glitter of monstrous eyes. He closed his own eyes; he dared not look upon whatever horror slunk from that hideous black well. He knew that there are strains the human brain cannot stand, and every primitive instinct in his soul cried out to him that this thing was nightmare and lunacy. He sensed that Yar Ali likewise closed his eyes, and the two lay like dead men.
Clarney heard no sound, but he sensed the presence of a horrific evil too grisly for human comprehension—of an Invader from Outer Gulfs and far black reaches of cosmic being. A deadly cold pervaded the chamber, and Steve felt the glare of inhuman eyes sear through his closed lids and freeze his consciousness. If he looked, if he opened his eyes, he knew stark black madness would be his instant lot.
He felt a soul-shakingly foul breath against his face and knew that the monster was bending close above him, but he lay like a man frozen in a nightmare. He clung to one thought: neither he nor Yar Ali had touched the jewel this horror guarded.
Then he no longer smelled the foul odor, the coldness in the air grew appreciably less, and he heard again the secret door slide in its groove. The fiend was returning to its hiding-place. Not all the legions of Hell could have prevented Steve's eyes, from opening a trifle. He had only a glimpse as the hidden door slid to—and that one glimpse was enough to drive all consciousness from his brain. Steve Clarney, iron-nerved adventurer, fainted for the only time in his checkered life.
How long he lay there Steve never knew, but it could not have been long, for he was roused by Yar Ali's whisper, ""Lie still, sahib, a little shifting of my body and I can reach thy cords with my teeth.""
Steve felt the Afghan's powerful teeth at work on his bonds, and as he lay with his face jammed into the thick dust, and his wounded shoulder began to throb agonizingly—he had forgotten it until now—he began to gather the wandering threads of his consciousness, and it all came back to him. How much, he wondered dazedly, had been the nightmares of delirium, born from suffering and the thirst that caked his throat? The fight with, the Arabs had been real—the bonds and the wounds showed that—but the grisly doom of the shaykh—the thing that had crept out of the black entrance in the wall—surely that had been a figment of delirium. Nureddin had fallen into a well or pit of some sort—Stave felt his hands were free and he rose to a sitting posture, fumbling for a pocket-knife the Arabs had overlooked. He did not look up or about the chamber as he slashed, the cords that bound his I ankles, and then freed Yar Ali, working awkwardly because his left arm was stiff and useless.
""Where are the Bedouins?"" he asked, as the Afghan rose, lifting him to his feet.
""Allah, sahib,"" whispered Yar Ali, ""are you mad? Have you forgotten? Let us go quickly before the djinn returns!""
""It was a nightmare,"" muttered Steve. ""Look—the jewel is back on the throne—"" His voice died out. Again that red glow throbbed about the ancient throne, reflecting from the moldering skull; again in the outstretched finger-bones pulsed the Fire of Asshurbanipal. But at the foot of the throne lay another object that had not been there before—the severed head of Nureddin el Mekru stared sightlessly up at the gray light filtering through the stone ceiling. The bloodless lips were drawn back from the teeth in a ghastly grin, the staring eyes mirrored an intolerable horror. In the thick dust of the floor three spoors showed—one of the shaykh's where he had followed the red jewel as it rolled to the wall, and above it two other sets of tracks, coming to the throne and returning to the wall—vast, shapeless tracks, as of splayed feet, taloned and gigantic, neither human nor animal.
""My God!"" choked Steve. ""It was true—and the Thing—the Thing I saw—""
Steve remembered the flight from that chamber as a rushing nightmare, in which he and his companion hurtled headlong down an endless stair that was a gray well of fear, raced blindly through dusty silent chambers, past the glowering idol in the mighty hall and into the blazing light of the desert sun, where they fell slavering, fighting for breath.
Again Steve was roused by the Afridi's voice: ""Sahib, sahib, in the Name of Allah the Compassionate, our luck has turned!""
Steve looked at his companion as a man might look in a trance: The big Afghan's garments were in tatters, and blood-soaked. He was stained with dust and caked with blood, and his voice was a croak. But his eyes were alight with hope and he pointed with a trembling finger.
""In the shade of yon ruined wall!"" he croaked, striving to moisten his blackened lips. ""Allah it allah! The horses of the men we killed! With canteens and food-pouches at the saddle-horns! Those dogs fled without halting for the steeds of their comrades!""
New life surged up into Steve's bosom and he rose, staggering.
""Out of here,"" he mumbled. ""Out of here, quick!""
Like dying men they stumbled to the horses, tore them loose and climbed fumblingly into the saddles.
""We'll lead the spare mounts,"" croaked Steve, and Yar Ali nodded emphatic agreement.
""Belike we shall need them ere we sight the coast.""
Though their tortured nerves screamed for the water that swung in canteens at the saddle-horns, they turned the mounts aside and, swaying in the saddle, rode like flying corpses down the long sandy street of Kara-Shehr, between the ruined palaces and the crumbling columns, crossed the fallen wall and swept out into the desert. Not once did either glance back toward that black pile of ancient horror, nor did either speak until the ruins faded into the hazy distance. Then and only then did they draw rein and ease their thirst.
""Allah il allah!"" said Yar Ali piously. ""Those dogs have beaten me until it is as though every bone in my body were broken. Dismount, I beg thee, sahib, and let me probe for that accursed bullet, and dress thy shoulder to the best of my meager ability.""
While this was going on, Yar Ali spoke, avoiding his friend's eye, ""You said, sahib, you said something about—about seeing? What saw ye, in Allah's name?""
A strong shudder shook the American's steely fray ""You didn't look when —when the—the Thing put back the jewel in the skeleton's hand and left Nureddin's head on the dais?""
""By Allah, not I!"" swore Yar Ali. ""My eyes were as closed as if they had been welded together by the molten irons of Satan!""
Steve made no reply until the comrades had once more swung into the saddle and started on their long trek for the coast, which, with spare horses, food, water and weapons, they had a good chance to reach.
""I looked,"" the American said somberly. ""I wish I had not; I know I'll dream about it for the rest of my life. I had only a glance; I couldn't describe it as a man describes an earthly thing. God help me, it wasn't earthly or sane either. Mankind isn't the first owner of the earth; there were Beings here before his coming—and now, survivals of hideously ancient epochs. Maybe spheres of alien dimensions press unseen on this material universe today. Sorcerers have called up sleeping devils before now and controlled them with magic. It is not unreasonable to suppose an Assyrian magician could invoke an elemental demon out of the earth to avenge him and guard something that must have come out of Hell in the first place.""
""I'll try to tell you what I glimpsed; then we'll never speak of it again. It was gigantic and black and shadowy; it was a hulking monstrosity that walked upright like a man, but it was like a toad, too, and it was winged and tentacled. I saw only its back; if I'd seen the front of it—its face —I'd have undoubtedly lost my mind. The old Arab was right; God help us, it was the monster that Xuthltan called up out of the dark blind caverns of the earth to guard the Fire of Asshurbanipal!""


",True
"I
The animal paused on the threshold, interrogative alert, ready for flight if necessary. Severn laid down his palette, and held out a hand of welcome. The cat remained motionless, her yellow eyes fastened upon Severn.
""Puss,"" he said, in his low, pleasant voice, ""come in.""
The tip of her thin tail twitched uncertainly.
""Come in,"" he said again.
Apparently she found his voice reassuring, for she slowly settled upon all fours, her eyes still fastened upon him, her tail tucked under her gaunt flanks.
He rose from his easel smiling. She eyed him quietly, and when he walked toward her she watched him bend above her without a wince; her eyes followed his hand until it touched her head. Then she uttered a ragged mew.
It had long been Severn's custom to converse with animals, probably because he lived so much alone; and now he said, ""What's the matter, puss?""
Her timid eyes sought his.
""I understand,"" he said gently, ""you shall have it at once.""
Then moving quietly about he busied himself with the duties of a host, rinsed a saucer, filled it with the rest of the milk from the bottle on the window-sill, and kneeling down, crumbled a roll into the hollow of his hand.
The creature rose and crept toward the saucer.
With the handle of a palette-knife he stirred the crumbs and milk together and stepped back as she thrust her nose into the mess. He watched her in silence. From time to time the saucer clinked upon the tiled floor as she reached for a morsel on the rim; and at last the bread was all gone, and her purple tongue travelled over every unlicked spot until the saucer shone like polished marble. Then she sat up, and coolly turning her back to him, began her ablutions.
""Keep it up,"" said Severn, much interested, ""you need it.""
She flattened one ear, but neither turned nor interrupted her toilet. As the grime was slowly removed Severn observed that nature had intended her for a white cat. Her fur had disappeared in patches, from disease or the chances of war, her tail was bony and her spine sharp. But what charms she had were becoming apparent under vigorous licking, and he waited until she had finished before re-opening the conversation. When at last she closed her eyes and folded her forepaws under her breast, he began again very gently: ""Puss, tell me your troubles.""
At the sound of his voice she broke into a harsh rumbling which he recognized as an attempt to purr. He bent over to rub her cheek and she mewed again, an amiable inquiring little mew, to which he replied, ""Certainly, you are greatly improved, and when you recover your plumage you will be a gorgeous bird."" Much flattered, she stood up and marched around and around his legs, pushing her head between them and making pleased remarks, to which he responded with grave politeness.
""Now, what sent you here,"" he said—""here into the Street of the Four Winds, and up five flights to the very door where you would be welcome? What was it that prevented your meditated flight when I turned from my canvas to encounter your yellow eyes? Are you a Latin Quarter cat as I am a Latin Quarter man? And why do you wear a rose-coloured flowered garter buckled about your neck?"" The cat had climbed into his lap, and now sat purring as he passed his hand over her thin coat.
""Excuse me,"" he continued in lazy soothing tones, harmonizing with her purring, ""if I seem indelicate, but I cannot help musing on this rose-coloured garter, flowered so quaintly and fastened with a silver clasp. For the clasp is silver; I can see the mint mark on the edge, as is prescribed by the law of the French Republic. Now, why is this garter woven of rose silk and delicately embroidered,—why is this silken garter with its silver clasp about your famished throat? Am I indiscreet when I inquire if its owner is your owner? Is she some aged dame living in memory of youthful vanities, fond, doting on you, decorating you with her intimate personal attire? The circumference of the garter would suggest this, for your neck is thin, and the garter fits you. But then again I notice—I notice most things—that the garter is capable of being much enlarged. These small silver-rimmed eyelets, of which I count five, are proof of that. And now I observe that the fifth eyelet is worn out, as though the tongue of the clasp were accustomed to lie there. That seems to argue a well-rounded form.""
The cat curled her toes in contentment. The street was very still outside.
He murmured on: ""Why should your mistress decorate you with an article most necessary to her at all times? Anyway, at most times. How did she come to slip this bit of silk and silver about your neck? Was it the caprice of a moment,—when you, before you had lost your pristine plumpness, marched singing into her bedroom to bid her good-morning? Of course, and she sat up among the pillows, her coiled hair tumbling to her shoulders, as you sprang upon the bed purring: 'Good-day, my lady.' Oh, it is very easy to understand,"" he yawned, resting his head on the back of the chair. The cat still purred, tightening and relaxing her padded claws over his knee.
""Shall I tell you all about her, cat? She is very beautiful—your mistress,"" he murmured drowsily, ""and her hair is heavy as burnished gold. I could paint her,—not on canvas—for I should need shades and tones and hues and dyes more splendid than the iris of a splendid rainbow. I could only paint her with closed eyes, for in dreams alone can such colours as I need be found. For her eyes, I must have azure from skies untroubled by a cloud—the skies of dreamland. For her lips, roses from the palaces of slumberland, and for her brow, snow-drifts from mountains which tower in fantastic pinnacles to the moons;—oh, much higher than our moon here,—the crystal moons of dreamland. She is—very—beautiful, your mistress.""
The words died on his lips and his eyelids drooped.
The cat, too, was asleep, her cheek turned up upon her wasted flank, her paws relaxed and limp.
II
""It is fortunate,"" said Severn, sitting up and stretching, ""that we have tided over the dinner hour, for I have nothing to offer you for supper but what may be purchased with one silver franc.""
The cat on his knee rose, arched her back, yawned, and looked up at him.
""What shall it be? A roast chicken with salad? No? Possibly you prefer beef? Of course,—and I shall try an egg and some white bread. Now for the wines. Milk for you? Good. I shall take a little water, fresh from the wood,"" with a motion toward the bucket in the sink.
He put on his hat and left the room. The cat followed to the door, and after he had closed it behind him, she settled down, smelling at the cracks, and cocking one ear at every creak from the crazy old building.
The door below opened and shut. The cat looked serious, for a moment doubtful, and her ears flattened in nervous expectation. Presently she rose with a jerk of her tail and started on a noiseless tour of the studio. She sneezed at a pot of turpentine, hastily retreating to the table, which she presently mounted, and having satisfied her curiosity concerning a roll of red modelling wax, returned to the door and sat down with her eyes on the crack over the threshold. Then she lifted her voice in a thin plaint.
When Severn returned he looked grave, but the cat, joyous and demonstrative, marched around him, rubbing her gaunt body against his legs, driving her head enthusiastically into his hand, and purring until her voice mounted to a squeal.
He placed a bit of meat, wrapped in brown paper, upon the table, and with a penknife cut it into shreds. The milk he took from a bottle which had served for medicine, and poured it into the saucer on the hearth.
The cat crouched before it, purring and lapping at the same time.
He cooked his egg and ate it with a slice of bread, watching her busy with the shredded meat, and when he had finished, and had filled and emptied a cup of water from the bucket in the sink, he sat down, taking her into his lap, where she at once curled up and began her toilet. He began to speak again, touching her caressingly at times by way of emphasis.
""Cat, I have found out where your mistress lives. It is not very far away;—it is here, under this same leaky roof, but in the north wing which I had supposed was uninhabited. My janitor tells me this. By chance, he is almost sober this evening. The butcher on the rue de Seine, where I bought your meat, knows you, and old Cabane the baker identified you with needless sarcasm. They tell me hard tales of your mistress which I shall not believe. They say she is idle and vain and pleasure-loving; they say she is hare-brained and reckless. The little sculptor on the ground floor, who was buying rolls from old Cabane, spoke to me to-night for the first time, although we have always bowed to each other. He said she was very good and very beautiful. He has only seen her once, and does not know her name. I thanked him;—I don't know why I thanked him so warmly. Cabane said, 'Into this cursed Street of the Four Winds, the four winds blow all things evil.' The sculptor looked confused, but when he went out with his rolls, he said to me, 'I am sure, Monsieur, that she is as good as she is beautiful.'""
The cat had finished her toilet, and now, springing softly to the floor, went to the door and sniffed. He knelt beside her, and unclasping the garter held it for a moment in his hands. After a while he said: ""There is a name engraved upon the silver clasp beneath the buckle. It is a pretty name, Sylvia Elven. Sylvia is a woman's name, Elven is the name of a town. In Paris, in this quarter, above all, in this Street of the Four Winds, names are worn and put away as the fashions change with the seasons. I know the little town of Elven, for there I met Fate face to face and Fate was unkind. But do you know that in Elven Fate had another name, and that name was Sylvia?""
He replaced the garter and stood up looking down at the cat crouched before the closed door.
""The name of Elven has a charm for me. It tells me of meadows and clear rivers. The name of Sylvia troubles me like perfume from dead flowers.""
The cat mewed.
""Yes, yes,"" he said soothingly, ""I will take you back. Your Sylvia is not my Sylvia; the world is wide and Elven is not unknown. Yet in the darkness and filth of poorer Paris, in the sad shadows of this ancient house, these names are very pleasant to me.""
He lifted her in his arms and strode through the silent corridors to the stairs. Down five flights and into the moonlit court, past the little sculptor's den, and then again in at the gate of the north wing and up the worm-eaten stairs he passed, until he came to a closed door. When he had stood knocking for a long time, something moved behind the door; it opened and he went in. The room was dark. As he crossed the threshold, the cat sprang from his arms into the shadows. He listened but heard nothing. The silence was oppressive and he struck a match. At his elbow stood a table and on the table a candle in a gilded candlestick. This he lighted, then looked around. The chamber was vast, the hangings heavy with embroidery. Over the fireplace towered a carved mantel, grey with the ashes of dead fires. In a recess by the deep-set windows stood a bed, from which the bedclothes, soft and fine as lace, trailed to the polished floor. He lifted the candle above his head. A handkerchief lay at his feet. It was faintly perfumed. He turned toward the windows. In front of them was acanapé and over it were flung, pell-mell, a gown of silk, a heap of lace-like garments, white and delicate as spiders' meshes, long, crumpled gloves, and, on the floor beneath, the stockings, the little pointed shoes, and one garter of rosy silk, quaintly flowered and fitted with a silver clasp. Wondering, he stepped forward and drew the heavy curtains from the bed. For a moment the candle flared in his hand; then his eyes met two other eyes, wide open, smiling, and the candle-flame flashed over hair heavy as gold.
She was pale, but not as white as he; her eyes were untroubled as a child's; but he stared, trembling from head to foot, while the candle flickered in his hand.
At last he whispered: ""Sylvia, it is I.""
Again he said, ""It is I.""
Then, knowing that she was dead, he kissed her on the mouth. And through the long watches of the night the cat purred on his knee, tightening and relaxing her padded claws, until the sky paled above the Street of the Four Winds.
","When the young man named Sanang left the bed-chamber of Tressa Norne he turned to the right in the carpeted corridor outside and hurried toward the hotel elevator. But he did not ring for the lift; instead he took the spiral iron stairway which circled it, and mounted hastily to the floor above.

Here was his own apartment and he entered it with a key bearing the hotel tag. A dusky-skinned powerful old man wearing a grizzled beard and a greasy broadcloth coat of old-fashioned cut known to provincials as a ""Prince Albert"" looked up from where he was seated cross-legged upon the sofa, sharpening a curved knife on a whetstone.

""Gutchlug,"" stammered Sanang, ""I am afraid of her! What happened two years ago at the temple happened again a moment since, there in her very bedroom! She made a yellow death-adder out of nothing and placed it upon the threshold, and mocked me with laughter. May Thirty Thousand Calamities overtake her! May Erlik seize her! May her eyes rot out and her limbs fester! May the seven score and three principal devils——""

""You chatter like a temple ape,"" said Gutchlug tranquilly. ""Does Keuke Mongol die or live? That alone interests me.""

""Gutchlug,"" faltered the young man, ""thou knowest that m-my heart is inclined to mercy toward this young Yezidee——""

""I know that it is inclined to lust,"" said the other bluntly.

Sanang's pale face flamed.

""Listen,"" he said. ""If I had not loved her better than life had I dared go that day to the temple to take her for my own?""

""You loved life better,"" said Gutchlug. ""You fled when it rained snakes on the temple steps—you and your Tchortcha horsemen! Kai! I also ran. But I gave every soldier thirty blows with a stick before I slept that night. And you should have had your thirty, also, conforming to the Yarlig, my Tougtchi.""

Sanang, still holding his hat and cane and carrying his overcoat over his left arm, looked down at the heavy, brutal features of Gutchlug Khan—at the cruel mouth with its crooked smile under the grizzled beard; at the huge hands—the powerful hands of a murderer—now deftly honing to a razor-edge the Kalmuck knife held so firmly yet lightly in his great blunt fingers.

""Listen attentively, Prince Sanang,"" growled Gutchlug, pausing in his monotonous task to test the blade's edge on his thumb—""Does the Yezidee Keuke Mongol live? Yes or no?""

Sanang hesitated, moistened his pallid lips. ""She dares not betray us.""

""By what pledge?""

""Fear.""

""That is no pledge. You also were afraid, yet you went to the temple!""

""She has listened to the Yarlig. She has looked upon her shroud. She has admitted that she desires to live. Therein lies her pledge to us.""

""And she placed a yellow snake at your feet!"" sneered Gutchlug. ""Prince Sanang, tell me, what man or what devil in all the chronicles of the past has ever tamed a Snow-Leopard?"" And he continued to hone his yataghan.

""Gutchlug——""

""No, she dies,"" said the other tranquilly.

""Not yet!""

""When, then?""

""Gutchlug, thou knowest me. Hear my pledge! At her first gesture toward treachery—her first thought of betrayal—I myself will end it all.""

""You promise to slay this young snow-leopardess?""

""By the four companions, I swear to kill her with my own hands!""

Gutchlug sneered. ""Kill her—yes—with the kiss that has burned thy lips to ashes for all these months. I know thee, Sanang. Leave her to me. Dead she will no longer trouble thee.""

""Gutchlug!""

""I hear, Prince Sanang.""

""Strike when I nod. Not until then.""

""I hear, Tougtchi. I understand thee, my Banneret. I whet my knife. Kai!""

Sanang looked at him, put on his top-hat and overcoat, pulled on a pair of white evening gloves.

""I go forth,"" he said more pleasantly.

""I remain here to talk to my seven ancestors and sharpen my knife,"" remarked Gutchlug.

""When the white world and the yellow world and the brown world and the black world finally fall before the Hassanis,"" said Sanang with a quick smile, ""I shall bring thee to her. Gutchlug—once—before she is veiled, thou shalt behold what is lovelier than Eve.""

The other stolidly whetted his knife.

Sanang pulled out a gold cigarette case, lighted a cigarette with an air.

""I go among Germans,"" he volunteered amiably. ""The huns swam across two oceans, but, like the unclean swine, it is their own throats they cut when they swim! Well, there is only one God. And not very many angels. Erlik is greater. And there are many million devils to do his bidding. Adieu. There is rice and there is koumiss in the frozen closet. When I return you shall have been asleep for hours.""

When Sanang left the hotel one of two young men seated in the hotel lobby got up and strolled out after him.

A few minutes later the other man went to the elevator, ascended to the fourth floor, and entered an apartment next to the one occupied by Sanang.

There was another man there, lying on the lounge and smoking a cigar. Without a word, they both went leisurely about the matter of disrobing for the night.

When the shorter man who had been in the apartment when the other entered, and who was dark and curly-headed, had attired himself in pyjamas, he sat down on one of the twin beds to enjoy his cigar to the bitter end.

""Has Sanang gone out?"" he inquired in a low voice.

""Yes. Benton went after him.""

The other man nodded. ""Cleves,"" he said, ""I guess it looks as though this Norne girl is in it, too.""

""What happened?""

""As soon as she arrived, Sanang made straight for her apartment. He remained inside for half an hour. Then he came out in a hurry and went to his own rooms, where that surly servant of his squats all day, shining up his arsenal, and drinking koumiss.""

""Did you get their conversation?""

""I've got a record of the gibberish. It requires an interpreter, of course.""

""I suppose so. I'll take the records east with me to-morrow, and by the same token I'd better notify New York that I'm leaving.""

He went, half-undressed, to the telephone, got the telegraph office, and sent the following message:

""Recklow, New York:

""Leaving to-morrow for N. Y. with samples. Retain expert in Oriental fabrics.

""Victor Cleves.""

""Report for me, too,"" said the dark young man, who was still enjoying his cigar on his pillows.

So Cleves sent another telegram, directed also to

""Recklow, New York:

""Benton and I are watching the market. Chinese importations fluctuate. Recent consignment per Nan-yang Maru will be carefully inspected and details forwarded.

""Alek Selden.""

In the next room Gutchlug could hear the voice of Cleves at the telephone, but he merely shrugged his heavy shoulders in contempt. For he had other things to do beside eavesdropping.

Also, for the last hour—in fact, ever since Sanang's departure—something had been happening to him—something that happens to a Hassani only once in a lifetime. And now this unique thing had happened to him—to him, Gutchlug Khan—to him before whose Khiounnou ancestors eighty-one thousand nations had bowed the knee.

It had come to him at last, this dread thing, unheralded, totally unexpected, a few minutes after Sanang had departed.

And he suddenly knew he was going to die.

And, when, presently, he comprehended it, he bent his grizzled head and listened seriously. And, after a little silence, he heard his soul bidding him farewell.

So the chatter of white men at a telephone in the next apartment had no longer any significance for him. Whether or not they had been spying on him; whether they were plotting, made no difference to him now.

He tested his knife's edge with his thumb and listened gravely to his soul bidding him farewell.

But, for a Yezidee, there was still a little detail to attend to before his soul departed;—two matters to regulate. One was to select his shroud. The other was to cut the white throat of this young snow-leopardess called Keuke Mongol, the Yezidee temple girl.

And he could steal down to her bedroom and finish that matter in five minutes.

But first he must choose his shroud, as is the custom of the Yezidee.

That office, however, was quickly accomplished in a country where fine white sheets of linen are to be found on every hotel bed.

So, on his way to the door, his naked knife in his right hand, he paused to fumble under the bed-covers and draw out a white linen sheet.

Something hurt his hand like a needle. He moved it, felt the thing squirm under his fingers and pierce his palm again and again. With a shriek, he tore the bedclothes from the bed.

A little yellow snake lay coiled there.

He got as far as the telephone, but could not use it. And there he fell heavily, shaking the room and dragging the instrument down with him.

There was some excitement. Cleves and Selden in their bathrobes went in to look at the body. The hotel physician diagnosed it as heart-trouble. Or, possibly, poison. Some gazed significantly at the naked knife still clutched in the dead man's hands.

Around the wrist of the other hand was twisted a pliable gold bracelet representing a little snake. It had real emeralds for eyes.

It had not been there when Gutchlug died.

But nobody except Sanang could know that. And later when Sanang came back and found Gutchlug very dead on the bed and a policeman sitting outside, he offered no information concerning the new bracelet shaped like a snake with real emeralds for eyes, which adorned the dead man's left wrist.

Toward evening, however, after an autopsy had confirmed the house physician's diagnosis that heart-disease had finished Gutchlug, Sanang mustered enough courage to go to the desk in the lobby and send up his card to Miss Norne.

It appeared, however, that Miss Norne had left for Chicago about noon.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References to decline were few, though the significance of the later record was unmistakable. After the Civil War all industrial life was confined to the Marsh Refining Company, and the marketing of gold ingots formed the only remaining bit of major commerce aside from the eternal fishing. That fishing paid less and less as the price of the commodity fell and large-scale corporations offered competition, but there was never a dearth of fish around Innsmouth Harbour. Foreigners seldom settled there, and there was some discreetly veiled evidence that a number of Poles and Portuguese who had tried it had been scattered in a peculiarly drastic fashion.

Most interesting of all was a glancing reference to the strange jewelry vaguely associated with Innsmouth. It had evidently impressed the whole countryside more than a little, for mention was made of specimens in the museum of Miskatonic University at Arkham, and in the display room of the Newburyport Historical Society. The fragmentary descriptions of these things were bald and prosaic, but they hinted to me an undercurrent of persistent strangeness. Something about them seemed so odd and provocative that I could not put them out of my mind, and despite the relative lateness of the hour I resolved to see the local sample--said to be a large, queerly-proportioned thing evidently meant for a tiara--if it could possibly be arranged.

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

It took no excessive sensitiveness to beauty to make me literally gasp at the strange, unearthly splendour of the alien, opulent phantasy that rested there on a purple velvet cushion. Even now I can hardly describe what I saw, though it was clearly enough a sort of tiara, as the description had said. It was tall in front, and with a very large and curiously irregular periphery, as if designed for a head of almost freakishly elliptical outline. The material seemed to be predominantly gold, though a weird lighter lustrousness hinted at some strange alloy with an equally beautiful and scarcely identifiable metal. Its condition was almost perfect, and one could have spent hours in studying the striking and puzzlingly untraditional designs--some simply geometrical, and some plainly marine--chased or moulded in high relief on its surface with a craftsmanship of incredible skill and grace.

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

However, I soon saw that my uneasiness had a second and perhaps equally potent source residing in the pictorial and mathematical suggestion of the strange designs. The patterns all hinted of remote secrets and unimaginable abysses in time and space, and the monotonously aquatic nature of the reliefs became almost sinister. Among these reliefs were fabulous monsters of abhorrent grotesqueness and malignity--half ichthyic and half batrachian in suggestion--which one could not dissociate from a certain haunting and uncomfortable sense of pseudomemory, as if they called up some image from deep cells and tissues whose retentive functions are wholly primal and awesomely ancestral. At times I fancied that every contour of these blasphemous fish-frogs was over-flowing with the ultimate quintessence of unknown and inhuman evil.

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

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

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

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

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

","Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places. For them are the catacombs of Ptolemais, and the carven mausolea of the nightmare countries. They climb to the moonlit towers of ruined Rhine castles, and falter down black cobwebbed steps beneath the scattered stones of forgotten cities in Asia. The haunted wood and the desolate mountain are their shrines, and they linger around the sinister monoliths on uninhabited islands. But the true epicure in the terrible, to whom a new thrill of unutterable ghastliness is the chief end and justification of existence, esteems most of all the ancient, lonely farmhouses of backwoods New England; for there the dark elements of strength, solitude, grotesqueness, and ignorance combine to form the perfection of the hideous.
      Most horrible of all sights are the little unpainted wooden houses remote from travelled ways, usually squatted upon some damp, grassy slope or leaning against some gigantic outcropping of rock. Two hundred years and more they have leaned or squatted there, while the vines have crawled and the trees have swelled and spread. They are almost hidden now in lawless luxuriances of green and guardian shrouds of shadow; but the small-paned windows still stare shockingly, as if blinking through a lethal stupor which wards off madness by dulling the memory of unutterable things.
      In such houses have dwelt generations of strange people, whose like the world has never seen. Seized with a gloomy and fanatical belief which exiled them from their kind, their ancestors sought the wilderness for freedom. There the scions of a conquering race indeed flourished free from the restrictions of their fellows, but cowered in an appalling slavery to the dismal phantasms of their own minds. Divorced from the enlightenment of civilisation, the strength of these Puritans turned into singular channels; and in their isolation, morbid self-repression, and struggle for life with relentless Nature, there came to them dark furtive traits from the prehistoric depths of their cold Northern heritage. By necessity practical and by philosophy stern, these folk were not beautiful in their sins. Erring as all mortals must, they were forced by their rigid code to seek concealment above all else; so that they came to use less and less taste in what they concealed. Only the silent, sleepy, staring houses in the backwoods can tell all that has lain hidden since the early days; and they are not communicative, being loath to shake off the drowsiness which helps them forget. Sometimes one feels that it would be merciful to tear down these houses, for they must often dream.
      It was to a time-battered edifice of this description that I was driven one afternoon in November, 1896, by a rain of such chilling copiousness that any shelter was preferable to exposure. I had been travelling for some time amongst the people of the Miskatonic Valley in quest of certain genealogical data; and from the remote, devious, and problematical nature of my course, had deemed it convenient to employ a bicycle despite the lateness of the season. Now I found myself upon an apparently abandoned road which I had chosen as the shortest cut to Arkham; overtaken by the storm at a point far from any town, and confronted with no refuge save the antique and repellent wooden building which blinked with bleared windows from between two huge leafless elms near the foot of a rocky hill. Distant though it was from the remnant of a road, the house none the less impressed me unfavourably the very moment I espied it. Honest, wholesome structures do not stare at travellers so slyly and hauntingly, and in my genealogical researches I had encountered legends of a century before which biassed me against places of this kind. Yet the force of the elements was such as to overcome my scruples, and I did not hesitate to wheel my machine up the weedy rise to the closed door which seemed at once so suggestive and secretive.
      I had somehow taken it for granted that the house was abandoned, yet as I approached it I was not so sure; for though the walks were indeed overgrown with weeds, they seemed to retain their nature a little too well to argue complete desertion. Therefore instead of trying the door I knocked, feeling as I did so a trepidation I could scarcely explain. As I waited on the rough, mossy rock which served as a doorstep, I glanced at the neighbouring windows and the panes of the transom above me, and noticed that although old, rattling, and almost opaque with dirt, they were not broken. The building, then, must still be inhabited, despite its isolation and general neglect. However, my rapping evoked no response, so after repeating the summons I tried the rusty latch and found the door unfastened. Inside was a little vestibule with walls from which the plaster was falling, and through the doorway came a faint but peculiarly hateful odour. I entered, carrying my bicycle, and closed the door behind me. Ahead rose a narrow staircase, flanked by a small door probably leading to the cellar, while to the left and right were closed doors leading to rooms on the ground floor.
      Leaning my cycle against the wall I opened the door at the left, and crossed into a small low-ceiled chamber but dimly lighted by its two dusty windows and furnished in the barest and most primitive possible way. It appeared to be a kind of sitting-room, for it had a table and several chairs, and an immense fireplace above which ticked an antique clock on a mantel. Books and papers were very few, and in the prevailing gloom I could not readily discern the titles. What interested me was the uniform air of archaism as displayed in every visible detail. Most of the houses in this region I had found rich in relics of the past, but here the antiquity was curiously complete; for in all the room I could not discover a single article of definitely post-revolutionary date. Had the furnishings been less humble, the place would have been a collector’s paradise.
      As I surveyed this quaint apartment, I felt an increase in that aversion first excited by the bleak exterior of the house. Just what it was that I feared or loathed, I could by no means define; but something in the whole atmosphere seemed redolent of unhallowed age, of unpleasant crudeness, and of secrets which should be forgotten. I felt disinclined to sit down, and wandered about examining the various articles which I had noticed. The first object of my curiosity was a book of medium size lying upon the table and presenting such an antediluvian aspect that I marvelled at beholding it outside a museum or library. It was bound in leather with metal fittings, and was in an excellent state of preservation; being altogether an unusual sort of volume to encounter in an abode so lowly. When I opened it to the title page my wonder grew even greater, for it proved to be nothing less rare than Pigafetta’s account of the Congo region, written in Latin from the notes of the sailor Lopez and printed at Frankfort in 1598. I had often heard of this work, with its curious illustrations by the brothers De Bry, hence for a moment forgot my uneasiness in my desire to turn the pages before me. The engravings were indeed interesting, drawn wholly from imagination and careless descriptions, and represented negroes with white skins and Caucasian features; nor would I soon have closed the book had not an exceedingly trivial circumstance upset my tired nerves and revived my sensation of disquiet. What annoyed me was merely the persistent way in which the volume tended to fall open of itself at Plate XII, which represented in gruesome detail a butcher’s shop of the cannibal Anziques. I experienced some shame at my susceptibility to so slight a thing, but the drawing nevertheless disturbed me, especially in connexion with some adjacent passages descriptive of Anzique gastronomy.
      I had turned to a neighbouring shelf and was examining its meagre literary contents—an eighteenth-century Bible, a Pilgrim’s Progress of like period, illustrated with grotesque woodcuts and printed by the almanack-maker Isaiah Thomas, the rotting bulk of Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana, and a few other books of evidently equal age—when my attention was aroused by the unmistakable sound of walking in the room overhead. At first astonished and startled, considering the lack of response to my recent knocking at the door, I immediately afterward concluded that the walker had just awakened from a sound sleep; and listened with less surprise as the footsteps sounded on the creaking stairs. The tread was heavy, yet seemed to contain a curious quality of cautiousness; a quality which I disliked the more because the tread was heavy. When I had entered the room I had shut the door behind me. Now, after a moment of silence during which the walker may have been inspecting my bicycle in the hall, I heard a fumbling at the latch and saw the panelled portal swing open again.
      In the doorway stood a person of such singular appearance that I should have exclaimed aloud but for the restraints of good breeding. Old, white-bearded, and ragged, my host possessed a countenance and physique which inspired equal wonder and respect. His height could not have been less than six feet, and despite a general air of age and poverty he was stout and powerful in proportion. His face, almost hidden by a long beard which grew high on the cheeks, seemed abnormally ruddy and less wrinkled than one might expect; while over a high forehead fell a shock of white hair little thinned by the years. His blue eyes, though a trifle bloodshot, seemed inexplicably keen and burning. But for his horrible unkemptness the man would have been as distinguished-looking as he was impressive. This unkemptness, however, made him offensive despite his face and figure. Of what his clothing consisted I could hardly tell, for it seemed to me no more than a mass of tatters surmounting a pair of high, heavy boots; and his lack of cleanliness surpassed description.
      The appearance of this man, and the instinctive fear he inspired, prepared me for something like enmity; so that I almost shuddered through surprise and a sense of uncanny incongruity when he motioned me to a chair and addressed me in a thin, weak voice full of fawning respect and ingratiating hospitality. His speech was very curious, an extreme form of Yankee dialect I had thought long extinct; and I studied it closely as he sat down opposite me for conversation.
      “Ketched in the rain, be ye?” he greeted. “Glad ye was nigh the haouse en’ hed the sense ta come right in. I calc’late I was asleep, else I’d a heerd ye—I ain’t as young as I uster be, an’ I need a paowerful sight o’ naps naowadays. Trav’lin’ fur? I hain’t seed many folks ’long this rud sence they tuk off the Arkham stage.”
      I replied that I was going to Arkham, and apologised for my rude entry into his domicile, whereupon he continued.
      “Glad ta see ye, young Sir—new faces is scurce arount here, an’ I hain’t got much ta cheer me up these days. Guess yew hail from Bosting, don’t ye? I never ben thar, but I kin tell a taown man when I see ’im—we hed one fer deestrick schoolmaster in ’eighty-four, but he quit suddent an’ no one never heerd on ’im sence—” Here the old man lapsed into a kind of chuckle, and made no explanation when I questioned him. He seemed to be in an aboundingly good humour, yet to possess those eccentricities which one might guess from his grooming. For some time he rambled on with an almost feverish geniality, when it struck me to ask him how he came by so rare a book as Pigafetta’s Regnum Congo. The effect of this volume had not left me, and I felt a certain hesitancy in speaking of it; but curiosity overmastered all the vague fears which had steadily accumulated since my first glimpse of the house. To my relief, the question did not seem an awkward one; for the old man answered freely and volubly.
      “Oh, thet Afriky book? Cap’n Ebenezer Holt traded me thet in ’sixty-eight—him as was kilt in the war.” Something about the name of Ebenezer Holt caused me to look up sharply. I had encountered it in my genealogical work, but not in any record since the Revolution. I wondered if my host could help me in the task at which I was labouring, and resolved to ask him about it later on. He continued.
      “Ebenezer was on a Salem merchantman for years, an’ picked up a sight o’ queer stuff in every port. He got this in London, I guess—he uster like ter buy things at the shops. I was up ta his haouse onct, on the hill, tradin’ hosses, when I see this book. I relished the picters, so he give it in on a swap. ’Tis a queer book—here, leave me git on my spectacles—” The old man fumbled among his rags, producing a pair of dirty and amazingly antique glasses with small octagonal lenses and steel bows. Donning these, he reached for the volume on the table and turned the pages lovingly.
      “Ebenezer cud read a leetle o’ this—’tis Latin—but I can’t. I hed two er three schoolmasters read me a bit, and Passon Clark, him they say got draownded in the pond—kin yew make anything outen it?” I told him that I could, and translated for his benefit a paragraph near the beginning. If I erred, he was not scholar enough to correct me; for he seemed childishly pleased at my English version. His proximity was becoming rather obnoxious, yet I saw no way to escape without offending him. I was amused at the childish fondness of this ignorant old man for the pictures in a book he could not read, and wondered how much better he could read the few books in English which adorned the room. This revelation of simplicity removed much of the ill-defined apprehension I had felt, and I smiled as my host rambled on:
      “Queer haow picters kin set a body thinkin’. Take this un here near the front. Hev yew ever seed trees like thet, with big leaves a-floppin’ over an’ daown? And them men—them can’t be niggers—they dew beat all. Kinder like Injuns, I guess, even ef they be in Afriky. Some o’ these here critters looks like monkeys, or half monkeys an’ half men, but I never heerd o’ nothing like this un.” Here he pointed to a fabulous creature of the artist, which one might describe as a sort of dragon with the head of an alligator.
      “But naow I’ll shew ye the best un—over here nigh the middle—” The old man’s speech grew a trifle thicker and his eyes assumed a brighter glow; but his fumbling hands, though seemingly clumsier than before, were entirely adequate to their mission. The book fell open, almost of its own accord and as if from frequent consultation at this place, to the repellent twelfth plate shewing a butcher’s shop amongst the Anzique cannibals. My sense of restlessness returned, though I did not exhibit it. The especially bizarre thing was that the artist had made his Africans look like white men—the limbs and quarters hanging about the walls of the shop were ghastly, while the butcher with his axe was hideously incongruous. But my host seemed to relish the view as much as I disliked it.
      “What d’ye think o’ this—ain’t never see the like hereabouts, eh? When I see this I telled Eb Holt, ‘That’s suthin’ ta stir ye up an’ make yer blood tickle!’ When I read in Scripter about slayin’—like them Midianites was slew—I kinder think things, but I ain’t got no picter of it. Here a body kin see all they is to it—I s’pose ’tis sinful, but ain’t we all born an’ livin’ in sin?—Thet feller bein’ chopped up gives me a tickle every time I look at ’im—I hev ta keep lookin’ at ’im—see whar the butcher cut off his feet? Thar’s his head on thet bench, with one arm side of it, an’ t’other arm’s on the graound side o’ the meat block.”
      As the man mumbled on in his shocking ecstasy the expression on his hairy, spectacled face became indescribable, but his voice sank rather than mounted. My own sensations can scarcely be recorded. All the terror I had dimly felt before rushed upon me actively and vividly, and I knew that I loathed the ancient and abhorrent creature so near me with an infinite intensity. His madness, or at least his partial perversion, seemed beyond dispute. He was almost whispering now, with a huskiness more terrible than a scream, and I trembled as I listened.
      “As I says, ’tis queer haow picters sets ye thinkin’. D’ye know, young Sir, I’m right sot on this un here. Arter I got the book off Eb I uster look at it a lot, especial when I’d heerd Passon Clark rant o’ Sundays in his big wig. Onct I tried suthin’ funny—here, young Sir, don’t git skeert—all I done was ter look at the picter afore I kilt the sheep for market—killin’ sheep was kinder more fun arter lookin’ at it—” The tone of the old man now sank very low, sometimes becoming so faint that his words were hardly audible. I listened to the rain, and to the rattling of the bleared, small-paned windows, and marked a rumbling of approaching thunder quite unusual for the season. Once a terrific flash and peal shook the frail house to its foundations, but the whisperer seemed not to notice it.
      “Killin’ sheep was kinder more fun—but d’ye know, ’twan’t quite satisfyin’. Queer haow a cravin’ gits a holt on ye— As ye love the Almighty, young man, don’t tell nobody, but I swar ter Gawd thet picter begun ta make me hungry fer victuals I couldn’t raise nor buy—here, set still, what’s ailin’ ye?—I didn’t do nothin’, only I wondered haow ’twud be ef I did— They say meat makes blood an’ flesh, an’ gives ye new life, so I wondered ef ’twudn’t make a man live longer an’ longer ef ’twas more the same—” But the whisperer never continued. The interruption was not produced by my fright, nor by the rapidly increasing storm amidst whose fury I was presently to open my eyes on a smoky solitude of blackened ruins. It was produced by a very simple though somewhat unusual happening.
      The open book lay flat between us, with the picture staring repulsively upward. As the old man whispered the words “more the same” a tiny spattering impact was heard, and something shewed on the yellowed paper of the upturned volume. I thought of the rain and of a leaky roof, but rain is not red. On the butcher’s shop of the Anzique cannibals a small red spattering glistened picturesquely, lending vividness to the horror of the engraving. The old man saw it, and stopped whispering even before my expression of horror made it necessary; saw it and glanced quickly toward the floor of the room he had left an hour before. I followed his glance, and beheld just above us on the loose plaster of the ancient ceiling a large irregular spot of wet crimson which seemed to spread even as I viewed it. I did not shriek or move, but merely shut my eyes. A moment later came the titanic thunderbolt of thunderbolts; blasting that accursed house of unutterable secrets and bringing the oblivion which alone saved my mind.",True
"Spoonbill Village,
Northernmost Quang Binh Province, Socialist Republic of Vietnam
July 2, 2011
Two young adults walked up the path beside the bronze-casters shop to the barren hillside and the forest edge beyond. ""So, how do you like things so far?"" Marie asked as she and Joseph made their way up the rough-hewn stone steps. Their destination was the house of the village woodcutter and charcoal-burner, a place that also doubled as a furniture workshop and, importantly for this journey, the villages' firearms armory.
""Not that bad. I've been doing domestic work for the past few days but neither Noc nor his wife seems to really be a slave driver. Actually, they feel more like people who understand that they're training a new servant."" Joseph thought on something. ""I'm actually surprised that he and the other hunters allowing me to accompany them. They neither seem to respect me or anyone who would stoop to use a gun, so I wonder why they changed their attitude.""
It was here that Marie began ruminating on something, an old thought that had given her more than her share of bad dreams. ""There are some things worth surrendering pride for, Joseph. Tell me, have you seen those weird scars on the ankles and arms of Nocs wife?""
""You mean those marks that look like Giant Squid wounds? Yes, but what about them?"" Joseph suddenly stopped. ""What are they, anyway?""
Having stopped also, Marie sighed, a sense of foreboding covering her features. ""When I asked that myself, they didn't tell me much more than the stories I'd already heard when I was a kid: legends about ghosts, devils from the mist, 'shadows that drink blood' is what they called them sometimes. But what I got here is that those Shugoran priests that saved my people weren't just going to somewhere. They were running ifrom/i somewhere, someone or something, something that no one is willing to talk any further about."" Marie started forward again at such a pace that her boyfriend had to hurry to catch up.
Getting the feeling that nothing more was going to be answered on that subject for a good while, Joseph changed track. ""How are the others getting on? I've been stuck in the house most of the day and I haven't really had a chance to talk to either the Prof or my classmates.""
Happy to shift from thoughts of chilling horror, Marie chuckled with increasing mirth as she began going back up the trail. ""From what I've heard, Albert's been filming every step in the bronze making process that he can, not to mention all the casting processes and various uses of equipment. The only reason that he hasn't been thrown out yet is because the family's elder patriarch has taken a liking to… well, not just him, but all of you guys, just from the descriptions alone. Your Professor and his assistant have basically locked themselves in the temple: no word out yet, but I assume that they're observing normal operations. As for Tracy…"" Here, Marie began acting a little odd. ""She talks in her sleep, if you didn't know.""
""Really?"" Joseph responded interestedly. Not reacting the way that she had feared, Marie relaxed a little from the paranoia she had been wrangling with.
""Yeah, and the strange thing is that it's in… well, tree-ish. And then there's the tattooing on her back as well."" Marie went on talking, relieved that her fear seemed to have been senseless.
Before he could answer his girlfriends increasingly chatty descriptions, a thought crossed Josephs mind on exactly why such a thing might be mentioned. ""Why would you ask me if I knew…"" Then the realization hit him and he stopped cold. ""Were you thinking that… Tracy and I?""
Marie stopped as well. ""It's not unknown to happen, you know."" Marie answered the implied question almost defensively, as if trying to justify her momentary paranoia. ""Sweethearts get separated and sometimes… one finds companionship elsewhere. Especially with, you know."" Marie tapped the side of her head, indicating the ""visitors"" that had first cursed Joseph Claytons existence during High School.
Joseph snorted in an amused, disparaging way. ""Please don't give them that much credit. I've ignored, rebuked and insulted those jerks so many times that I've made a virtual bloodsport out of it. Besides, if I'd made any moves towards Tracy, Albert would have killed me.""
""Wait, those two… they're together?"" Marie asked, wondering how she'd missed that.
""Intimately so, yes."" This was all Joseph was willing to say, himself not wishing to examine too closely the memory of walking in on his dorm-mate and his girl when they had neglected to put a sock on the doorknob. ""Anyway, as to these voices, I went to the psychology department to see if I could discover just what was causing it.""
Marie waited a heartbeat before plunging into the vital question. ""And what did they say?"" If her boyfriend did indeed have Schizophrenia, then he needed help: drugs to control the symptoms and perhaps therapy to help him conquer whatever dark corners of his psyche were feeding these voices.
If it was something else… then perhaps the local sorcerers might need to be consulted before long.
Joseph sighed. 'Whatever is going on inside my head, the geeks with the scanning equipment are pretty sure that this isn't a case of medical Schizophrenia. They say that the symptoms are all wrong, the voices aren't persuasive enough… and that I don't have any of the telltale injuries on the brain that would suggest medical reasons. And then there was the time they hooked me up to the EEG during one of my 'episodes'."" He paused, wondering just how to proceed but, since he was already experiencing strange things, he decided just to press on. ""The guys swore that, before the equipment shorted out, at least two additional wavelengths were being read beside mine."" With a shrug, Joseph summed up his thoughts. ""Ever since I came here and heard all of the seemingly crazy stories from you and the others… I don't know, but what I've gone through just makes sense now, at least in knowing that it actually can happen.""
Marie smiled. Yes, we definitely need to consult the priests. ""Come on, we've talked enough and you need to get that rifle before you head out.""
And rifles there were, all secured inside a triple locked room in the back corner of the woodcutter's house. They looked like Berthier carbines, French bolt-action repeaters from the First World War… but they were not the only guns present. ""Is that a Hotchkiss?"" Joseph asked in a voice combining bemusement and astonishment. Among the rifles and a few, scattered revolvers sat a machine-gun still on its tripod and looking impossibly well-maintained for being kept in the back room of a house located in a tropical moist forest.
""An M1914 by the looks of it, if the pictures I've seen are at all accurate. There's a story behind it, but I only know that only the oldest elders know it."" Marie replied, having picked up of the Berthier Carbines and handing it to Joseph. The ammunition was kept in a chest under a trapdoor in the main part of the house as a safety measure so they'd have to go back to pick it up. But then she asked the question that she probably should have asked before they left the village proper. ""Speaking of guns, since when did you shoot?""
""There's a gun range in Arkham; Tracy and Albert invited me along for a few lessons before Thanksgiving. She's the one with actual hunting experience and I think he only came along to check out the engineering on the pieces. It wasn't that much fun, but I think what I learned in getting my license will help on this."" Joseph began inspecting the carbine he had been given, finding it oiled and well-maintained as any other firearm in the room. There was a question that had to be asked, however?
Where did they get all these guns?
b15 minutes Later/b
Marie walked up the stairs to her grandparent's house. She was supposed to act as a translator and informant for the expedition, having prior contacts inside the community and being a member first by blood and more recently by initiation. Truth be told, she had a feeling that old Tsan was really acting as gatekeeper in his interactions with Professor Andover while she was playing the part of a more convenient and mobile ambassador, Tsan having never left the temple save by palanquin in almost forty years.
Walking in the door, Marie was unprepared for another surprise. She saw Tracy sitting before the camera as her Grandmother and Aunt watched, waiting to begin filming the day's questions and activities, even making a short introductory statement... but not in English.
""And as soon as the translator gets here, we'll begin the second day of... Hey Marie, you almost scared me there."" Here was an audible note of guilt as Tracy hastily switched from the strange language that she had been using to the carefully modulated, Patsy Cline-accented English she had used since Marie had met her. Marie had heard it, and Tracy knew that she had heard... and Marie knew that Tracy knew.
""Yeah, I've gotten that reaction a few times since I got here."" Marie joked, knowing that humor had the power to break tension. ""So... what language were you speaking in anyway? I'm afraid I didn't recognize anything about it."" Her female elders watched closely, knowing that something had happened but being ignorant of other languages, were unsure of exactly what.
Tracy grinned bitterly. ""I'd be more surprised if you did recognize it. It's... well, it's not really a language per se, but a patois of a couple languages, with Early Modern English, Ohio Valley Shawnee, Coastal Algonquian, some Iroquoian loanwords having to do with ritual and bits of Eastern Siouan."" Tracy let out the deep breath she had been using to list all those languages. She was getting more comfortable now. ""I guess it won't do any harm if I told you, seeing as we're almost in the same boat.""
Tracy beckoned Marie to sit, turning off the camera as she did. ""The kids in my town learn it... well, sort of as a first language; English is really more of a first-and-a-half language for us. We got exposed to it through TV and then when we went to school, but most of our formative years were spent listening to and absorbing the patois around the house. Most of us never really let go of it as a language for our own private conversations.""
Marie reflected on this... but was also noting some of the features on Tracy's face: the high, rounded cheeks, her high-bridged nose, the way that her eyes were less the bright crystal blue of stereotype and more of a dark, cloudy blue resembling ultramarine. ""I hope you don't mind me saying this, Tracy but does your family have any Native American ancestry? I don't mean to pry, but you do kind of have the look.""
Tracy considered this for a moment before giving an affirmative nod. ""My father's paternal grandmother was from the Oklahoma Kiowa. My mother, as far as can be traced, is also about an eighth, this time one-eighth Shawnee, which seems to be the median for Longhouse."" She got an odd, contemplative look on my face. ""That's another one of those things that we try not to mention to outsiders, even though they tend to notice it anyway. Back in the old days, admitting it would have been a quick ticket to using a segregated washroom or worse. And now?"" Tracy shrugged. ""Now it's considered cool, while the inbreeding still makes us look like freaks.""
Marie decided to test something, just for her own sake. ""Albert doesn't seem to think you're a freak."" The more she thought about it, she had more in common with Tracy than first realized. Both of them had lived life right on the edge of themselves and their kin being recognized as something other, something foreign to the perceived natural order of the world. Both of them could sense the threat of possible revelation... and knew what it was to try to trust someone with these secrets.
""Hey, you're talking about a guy whose family has worked for alien mushroom bugs for the last hundred years. A bit of mild inbreeding is probably the most normal thing Al's ever experienced."" Here there was definitely affection to her voice, a cue that no matter what other strangeness they were involved in, there was a loving relationship between the two.
At this thought Marie smiled, thanking the ancestors for a little bit of normalcy in this year-long cavalcade of oddities that she had flung herself into. Then another question sprang forth. ""Did you know about the whole alien thing when you guys were at Miskatonic?""
Tracy shook her head. ""No, but then again, he was always kinda spacey."" Marie couldn't help but giggle at this bad pun. Tracy went on, the affection still in her voice. ""Seriously, the thing about Miskatonic is that, after awhile, you begin getting the feeling that almost everyone else is holding something close to their chest, thinking each word over before saying it. It's then that you realize that... you're not alone, that almost everyone else is as paranoid as you are, having something to hide."" She looked towards Marie. ""Everyone except for your Joseph, that is. The only thing strange about him that I noticed was that romance was nowhere on his radar at all.""
""You'd be surprised, actually."" Marie answered cryptically. Before Tracy could ask, she turned back the camera back on, signaling the beginning of the interview session.
That evening
Sweaty, hot, dirty and exhausted, Joseph Clayton exited the forest with Noc and the other hunters. Between all of them, the hunters had brought down a Sambar stag and three small muntjacs. Joseph, for his part, had escaped being gored by a wild boar only by dodging its charge, rolling into a hollow under a log and then shooting it in the head at point-blank range when it tried to go after him. For this feat, the hunters designated him ""master of the pit"" when they roasted it at tonight's feast. It had sounded like an honorable title, but Joseph could guess that they were making him little more than a cook, a traditionally female position.
Still, it was an in and it would probably be research gold.
He was entirely less enthusiastic about what else was coming back with them.
When he and the group of hunters came into the village proper, he saw Marie and the taller, paler form of Tracy coming towards him, having been up on the family terrace transplanting rice seedlings. Due to her fair skin, Tracy was wearing the largest hat she could while her arms and shins had been slathered with sunblock. Marie had already taken hers off.
As they neared him, Marie slowed to a stop, seeing the grim look on Josephs face. Tracy looked at her in confusion, then at Joseph and from his stony face understood that something was wrong. ""What is it?"" Marie asked her boyfriend.
Joseph sighed. ""When the hunters brought us in, were we supposed to be for any kind of important sacrifice?""
""Well, the Rhinoceros Festival is supposed to happen any day now. It's when we recharge the mist that surrounds the village to keep us hidden."" Marie looked around Joseph to where one of the hunters was leading a group of people into the village. They looked like quite a bedraggled bunch, many of them thin and in questionable health. There were also two women who may have been considered beautiful if not for the look in their eyes that they had been through several levels of hell before coming here.
But for all these conditions, they did not look frightened of their tattooed guides.
Noticing where Marie was looking, Joseph offered explanation. ""We met up with them about a mile down the trail. Apparently the government sent up street people as some fresh blood for you guys. And that's not all. Apparently..."" Here, he lowered his voice ""One of the families that were living incognito in Vinh got killed a few nights ago: Father, mother, twelve year old boy... from what I heard it sounded like some sort of animal tore them up inside their apartment... and no blood was spilled.""
Tracy looked like she was going to vomit at the news, while a look of dread overcame Marie, as old legends came forth out of the terrifying mist of childhood nightmare to become shadows in the waking world. ""Is there anything else?"" Marie asked quietly.
Now it was Joseph's turn to look back at the party coming out of the forest, which were now carrying a man by his hands and feet on a pole, his mouth gagged and his eyes blindfolded. ""Only that they also sent you a sacrifice. From what they said, he's a drug-runner, sexual slaver and a general bad example of low-level underworld scum.""
Marie, still in shock over the news of the murders, was perhaps not picking and choosing the words coming out of her mouth. ""Which mean he's gonna taste worse than the fish sauce.""
At these words, both gruesome and almost ridiculous, both her lover and her friend goggled at her.
","
I spent the next few days becoming acquainted with the town and its people. Personally, I did not find most of the locals as reticent as my companion had led me to believe. Actually, many of the people I met during my casual rambles about the town and its immediate environs seemed willing, even eager to converse about their community and its history, in spite, or maybe because of, my rather labored Spanish.
Especially interesting to me, as it turned out, was the fact that many of the local people were descended, in part, from Sephardic Jews who had settled in this once remote region to avoid, as far as possible, direct contact with Church authorities. They had maintained a façade of Catholic Christianity while secretly retaining their Jewish identity. Gradually, they had assimilated with both Mexican settlers and the native Indians, remaining, nevertheless, quietly proud of their Sephardic roots.
Rousseau had apparently overlooked this bit of history, or perhaps considered it of trivial importance. Nevertheless, I viewed this as the most obvious explanation for the presence of the Hebrew Necronomicon in San Facundo. Indeed, if some of those eighteenth-century crypto-Jews had been involved in dark magical practices, as the presence of the book might indicate, then rumors of similar activities among the Indian natives of this region could have attracted them to settle here in the first place.
This informal reconnoitering also brought me my first glimpse of the ""strange"" ones, which I call them for lack of a better name. Truly, Rousseau did not exaggerate concerning their physical oddity; indeed, his descriptions left me unprepared for the actual appearance of those people. They tended to be of medium height, on the average, but this was difficult to ascertain due to their characteristically stooped posture and odd gaits, which seemed to be a sort of shambling shuffle, as if a regular human bipedal locomotion were alien to their normal means of ambulation. Their physiognomies were, however, the items of greatest strangeness. The heads tended to be elongated and the faces very narrow. Eyes were large, roundish, and bulging, giving the impression of being nearly, or totally lidless. Their mouths tended to be extremely wide, reaching well around to the sides of the face, with thin lips drawn back somewhat to reveal gums and teeth. The teeth themselves were of utmost oddity, being uniformly pointed, even back into the molar area. My impression was of the saw-like teeth found in certain species of carnivorous fish or reptiles. The skin of these creatures was of a brownish-grey color, quite unlike that of a typical Mexican or Indian. Its texture, as best I could tell, was rough, almost horny in fact, and there was a disquieting suggestion of squamousness.
My first face-to-face encounter with these beings occurred late in the afternoon of my third day in San Facundo. I was strolling along a side street near the main plaza. The afternoon was hot and I was thirsty. Presently, I came to a small store, little more than a hole in the wall, set in a venerable but dilapidated building of heavy yellowish brick, probably dating from the middle of the nineteenth century. I entered and requested a cold soft drink from the proprietor, a short, pudgy man of late middle age. Scarcely had he handed me the bottled drink when two other men entered. I first noticed the frozen expression on the owner's face, then turned to see two of the ""strange"" ones, only a few feet away. One of them muttered, or almost hissed, something in unintelligible Spanish which sent the fat little proprietor scurrying behind a curtain in the rear of the store. Both men eyed me in a curiously sinister way but said nothing. A moment later the owner emerged, carrying something in a paper sack folded over at the top, which he handed to the nearer of the two men. One of the creatures extended a gloved hand, placed some bills on the counter, and left with his companion as silently as they had come.
I turned to the proprietor, whom I knew slightly, with whose brother I had already conversed at some length the previous day, and inquired, ""Quiénes eran? Who were they?""
""No quieres saber. You don't want to know,"" was his reply.
""But why do you say that?"" I persisted. ""I find your town fascinating and would like to know something about its more, shall we say, unusual side. Obviously, certain of your local citizens have characteristics that set them apart from the average person one meets on the street. What can you tell about them?""
""Yo no sé nada,"" was his curt reply, ""and it would be much better if you did not keep asking. There are things better not known.""
Puzzled, I left the store and continued along the street to the plaza. I noticed that the sun was sinking low and the first rays of what promised to be a glorious sunset were already painting the western sky in a riot of luminous color. I tarried about the plaza for perhaps another hour, until the last tints of purple, orange, and gold had faded into the gathering dusk. A sudden impulse caused me to turn my gaze toward the south, where the streets gradually sloped downward towards the narrow San Facundo River. There, beyond the low roofs of the town, beyond the tree-lined bluffs above the river, and across the rolling, dusk-shrouded plain rose the dusky shape of a distant outcropping. Starkly outlined against the darkling sky, I beheld El Tinieblo. Far more sinister, in view of the incident with the federales, a dark red glow seemed to emanate from its low, flat summit.


IV

The following days proved extremely interesting. Quickly, I found that gaining the friendship and trust of certain people in San Facundo opened doors to many other acquaintances. My own Portuguese-Jewish heritage and knowledge of the Cabbalah would turn out to be advantageous in this respect. I soon discovered that some Sanfacundinos were quite familiar with Cabalistic teachings and concepts, and were eager to participate in discussions with outsiders who were learned in these matters, apparently hoping to enrich their own store of knowledge. Nevertheless, my attempts to learn more concerning the ""strange ones"" were invariably met with evasion or rebuff. In a more disquieting vane, I was starting to develop a sense of being watched and followed.
Among my newly found friends was one Don Ramiro De Leon-Espinoza, a local land owner and businessman whose family had been among the original settlers in the region. One morning, well into my second week in San Facundo, Don Ramiro and myself met for coffee and conversation in a cafe near the plaza.
""You, who are erudite in so many things, what really brings you to San Facundo?"" he queried.
""Really,"" I replied, ""I came on an invitation from an old acquaintance. He told me that, let's say, interesting things have happened here in the past, and some influence from those occurrences may linger on into the present.""
Don Ramiro narrowed his eyes thoughtfully. ""And, of course, that acquaintance of yours is the gringo living in the house of Licenciado Santos Garza, is that not true?""
""Yes, as a matter of fact it is,"" I replied, sensing a certain suspicion in his tone. ""But I am here for purely academic reasons. As I've already told you, I am an anthropologist and the study of folklore is my specialty.""
My companion took a deep sip from his cup, eyeing me over the rim as he continued, ""I understand that, and it's a good thing. Otherwise, we wouldn't be having this conversation. You know, we don't appreciate that nosy bolillo, or Frenchman or whatever he is, prying into things that are none of his business. It is only because of our courtesy that we have not run him off.""
I knew then why Rousseau had found the local people so inaccessible. I also understood Don Ramiro's words as a message intended for Rousseau.
""Now, let us talk of things we both find interesting,"" Don Ramiro suggested enthusiastically, his mood seeming to shift abruptly.
""I know of a site near here that I am sure you will find fascinating. It dates back to pre-Conquest times; it may even be thousands of years old. Our legends have it that the place was already old before the Aztecs, or even the Toltecs. Anyway, it is located on land that I own.""
The prospect of visiting a largely unexplored pre-Columbian ruin truly excited me. ""How soon can we go?"" I responded with almost child like anticipation.
We drove out of town on a paved road for several miles, then turned onto another one of limestone gravel, known locally as caliche, which wound past alternating areas of cleared land and thick, spiny vegetation. We passed several ejidos, communally owned farms, and continued on into rolling uplands that manifested fewer and fewer signs of human habitation. Presently, the road degenerated into a mere track, little more than two parallel ruts running through thickly overgrown and rocky country. Fortunately, Don Ramiro's truck, a Ford utility-type vehicle with four-wheel drive, was adequate to the task.
""Is this area part of la zona maldita?"" I casually inquired.
""You know of la zona maldita?"" Don Ramiro answered with some surprise; then, anticipating my answer, continued, ""Ah sí, your friend Rousseau must have told you.""
""Rousseau,"" I corrected.
""Sí, whatever,"" was his curt reply. After a brief silence he volunteered, ""We are very much into the zona. The ruins that I am about to show you are one of its focal points.""
Abruptly, the trail ascended, topping the crest of a steep rise, then dipped slightly into a broad, almost level expanse. As my companion halted the truck briefly at the top of the rise, I viewed the scene extending out before us. There, jutting up from the thorny chaparral, I saw several low, truncated pyramids, along with what appeared to be a large conical structure and the jagged, broken tops of a number of walls. The structures appeared to be composed of a black basaltic stone, in rather striking contrast to the brownish-grey sandstone or pale limestone shale so abundant in that region.
""This is fascinating, Don Ramiro, but why hasn't this site been opened to archaeological study?"" My academic orientation made the question inevitable.
""I have a very valid reason for not wanting that to happen,"" he replied quickly. ""If the government knew of this place,"" he explained, ""they would declare it, and the surrounding area, a national archaeological zone.""
""But,"" I protested, ""wouldn't that allow for organized research into the true origins and age of the site, the identification of the ancient culture to which it belonged? You, yourself say that it may be older than the Toltec civilization. Why, this might cause archaeologists to rethink some of their present beliefs concerning ancient civilization in Mexico!""
""It would only give government bureaucrats an opportunity to loot the patrimony of our ancestors!"" he snapped. ""They would take the best for themselves, or sell it to foreigners, and put whatever was left in museum store rooms to be forgotten and eventually thrown out with the rubbish.""
I accepted his reasoning, which sounded sincere enough, though privately I suspected his real motive was fear of government confiscation of his property.
We left the truck and proceeded into the brush on foot.
""Be careful of snakes,"" warned my host. ""We have several very poisonous varieties around here.""
We made our way to the largest of the pyramids, scratching ourselves considerably on the thorny vegetation. I also noticed that my clothing suffered tears in several places. The pyramid, actually more of a rectangular structure with steeply sloping sides, rose some fifty feet from its base to a long platform. The platform itself was reached by means of a crumbling masonry stairway on the eastern face of the pyramid. Stunted mesquite and prickly pear grew from cracks in the basaltic blocks, and a tough wiry grass covered most of the platform surfaces, growing from centuries of accumulated soil and disintegrated masonry. Altogether, it was difficult to ascertain if the pyramid had ever served as the base for a masonry temple, as was usually the case with other ancient Mexican and Mesoamerican sites.
The top of the pyramid measured, in approximate terms, thirty feet in width by forty feet in length, and commanded an excellent view of the whole complex of structures. This large pyramid seemed to be situated near the western end of the city, for such the complex appeared to be. The crumbling remains of other buildings, including at least three smaller pyramids, stretched out for nearly three quarters of a mile to the south and east, though the tops of the structures were often barely visible above the thick, stunted vegetation. Obviously, the construction of such a center in this desolate and inaccessible site, with the primitive tools and technology probably available to the builders, had been no mean undertaking.
Of singular peculiarity among the crumbling stone edifices was the truncated conical structure mentioned earlier. As best as I could tell, its diameter was about one hundred feet at the base and it rose to an average height of some seventy feet, though the jagged outline of its rim suggested it had originally been much higher. Exploring entirely around the base, I could find no sign of a stairway or portal, or any other means of ingress or egress. Strangely, I noticed, the tower was devoid of any vegetation, with the exception of a sickly lichenous or fungous growth of a putrid grayish-green hue that spread in irregular patches up the sides of the structure. Also, notably absent were birds and bird droppings, nor were any of the swift striped-back skinks that abound in the area to be seen darting about the sloping sides of that mysterious black tower.
I abruptly noticed that Don Ramiro was nowhere about. Concerned that he had fallen, or otherwise injured himself in the crumbling stonework, I called out to him. After a few moments I heard his voice some distance away.
""Aquí estoy, aquí donde el ídolo.""
I was taken by surprise as I had not seen any idol in the place. After a few minutes of searching I found my host, standing with an awed expression before a large carven figure of black stone.
The figure itself was about fifteen feet tall, and at first glance appeared to be a representation of some deity fashioned in the typical, highly stylized Mesoamerican mode. Closer examination, however, sent me reeling with revulsion. The ""god,"" or whatever it was intended to represent, was actually some sort of fantastic sea creature, incorporating in its tentacled visage a grotesque parody of a face. Worst of all, the monstrosity was depicted employing its facial tentacles to force a human figure into its gaping, toothy mouth.
""What is it?"" I asked.
""The Great Kutulli,"" he replied, in a voice that sounded almost reverent.
The day was becoming late. Noticing this, Ramiro motioned in the direction of the truck.
""Time to go,"" he said without further comment. I felt fully in agreement. The prospect of remaining in this place after dark filled me with an overpowering dread . . . a dread I could scarcely explain at the moment.
The long, bumpy trip back to San Facundo was made in silence. My companion seemed unusually pensive and answered my few inquiries in grunted monosyllables. As for myself, I simply felt too overwhelmed, too overloaded with unanswered questions to give voice to my thoughts.
We reached town just after nightfall. My host dropped me off near Rousseau's place, though I still had to walk a long block up a steep, dark street to reach the house. In the gathering gloom I discerned several shadowy figures approaching me. For some inexplicable reason, call it primal instinct, I realized that these figures meant extreme danger, for me, now! I broke for the house, running as fast as my unaccustomed legs would carry me. Though I did not look back, I fully sensed the close pursuit of my assailants, could almost feel their searing breath on my neck. The dim light from Rousseau's study still seemed infinitely far away, and I caught a brief glimpse of something running, or loping just to my right side, almost close enough to grab me. I cried out, an incoherent scream of desperation and terror.
""Ay basta! Lárguense a la chingada pinches demonios encartados! Vámonos! Asquerosos chingados!""
I didn't see who was yelling, threatening, and cursing in a coarse female voice, and at the top of her lungs. I merely fell, exhausted, on my hands and knees. Presently, I felt a strong, thick arm help me back to my feet.
""Ay, pobre güerito. Por tantito te llevan a la chingada esos pendejos!""
I stared into the face of a copper-skinned woman of uncertain age, not unusually tall, but powerfully built, with a stocky, heavy-boned body. Her rugged Indian features and small bright eyes somehow inspired confidence.
""Who were they?"" I panted.
""They were nobody that you ever want to meet,"" she replied, adding, ""They know better than to mess with me; I know ways to make them curse their mothers for bringing them into this world. Ha!""
""But señora, who are you?"" I asked, beginning to catch my breath.
""Everyone calls me Doña Tencha. They say that I'm a bruja, a witch.""
""Are you?"" I asked, wondering.
""What do you think?"" she responded, half laughing. ""Ha, ha! Take care."" With that, she disappeared into a dark cluster of shacks situated just off the street.
I arrived at the house and fumbled for my key. Before I could insert it in the lock, Rousseau unexpectedly opened the door.
""My God, Shapiro! What happened? You look like you've seen the devil himself!""
""Maybe I have, or a close enough facsimile,"" I answered.
""But . . . but, how . . . what happened?""
Obviously he was taken aback by my state at that moment. I proceeded to give him as complete an account as possible of my recent peril.
Rousseau pondered for a moment, as if trying to make some sense out of what I was saying, then offered, ""I don't think it was a matter of common street ruffians. You say that they seemed to be terrified of the woman . . . what's her name? Tencha, did you say?""
""Yes, she said that's what people call her.""
""Funny,"" he replied. ""I had heard something about some kind of witch or sorceress living near here. I don't know why I never looked her up. She might be a good source of information.""
""She probably saved my life,"" I responded, rubbing my forehead.
My companion seemed to reflect for a moment. ""Do you think it was the freaks?""
""I'm sure it was several of them!"" I shot back, somewhat annoyed at his seeming failure to grasp the significance of the matter.
""And you say they were terrified of her?""
""That's what I said; but wait, you know, I heard her call them 'demonios encartados'.""
""Hybrid devils? Maybe just an epithet, but . . . ""
I cut off Rousseau's reply in mid-sentence. ""Did you ever read any of Lovecraft's works Carl?""
He shook his head.
""In several of his stories referring to the 'Cthulhu Mythos',"" I continued, ""Lovecraft described hybrid beings resulting from unions between certain strange sea creatures, apparently some sort of survival from an earlier, pre-human age, and renegade humans. Those hybrid beings were dedicated to the restoration to power of the extra-dimensional entity Cthulhu and his kind, called the 'Ancient Ones,' on our own earthly plane of existence. At least that's how the stories went.""
Rousseau's face manifested a mixture of revulsion and astonishment.
""So . . . you believe these freakish-looking people we see around here are some kind of alien hybrid? Good God, Shapiro . . . do you realize the implications of what you're suggesting?""
""Unfortunately, I do,"" I replied.
Now I knew, beyond any doubt, that my strange sense of being watched and followed reflected a very real danger. Quite in violation of my normal adherence to Ivy League conventions of ""political correctness,"" I was now applying the label of ""fish faces"" to the repellent beings that lurked about in the late afternoon shadows and darkness of night. After all, those creatures definitely had it in for us, or at least for me. Strangely, Rousseau had never been accosted, or even approached by any of the oddities, which seemed difficult to explain considering the length of his stay in San Facundo.


V

The following afternoon I met with Don Ramiro at a quiet local tavern. After providing him with an account of the previous night's events I queried, ""What do you think it means Don Ramiro?""
""Pues, I think it means you had better be careful,"" he replied, lifting his eyebrows in a kind of facial shrug.
""But, why do you think they jumped me while they've left my friend Rousseau alone all this time? Also, Don Ramiro, what can you tell me about those people, and who is Doña Tencha?""
""Please Profe, one question at a time. Now you ask why they attacked you and not Rou . . . whatever his name is; well, maybe it is because you have come too close to certain things that are better left alone. As for Tencha, she is a curandera, a folk healer who, maybe, practices a little black magic now and then.""
Unsatisfied, I continued to prod him.
""And the creatures themselves, who, or what are they?""
He paused for a long moment, as if uncertain how to answer my question. ""They go back a long time,"" he half whispered, then continued, ""The indios here, they practiced strange rituals, things that so horrified the priests that they killed hundreds, burned them alive, to cleanse the land of the abomination. That is how they saw it.""
""But the strange ones . . . ,"" I interrupted, scarcely able to contain my curiosity.
""Have patience, my friend; I am coming to that.""
He glanced quickly over his shoulder and leaned forward, obviously not wishing to be overheard. In a low voice he continued, ""This will sound incredible to you, with your scientific training, but the indios were in contact with very ancient beings, monstrous things from the sea."" My companion stopped momentarily, seeming to gage my reaction, then resumed his story. ""Those things, animals or devils, or whatever they were, demanded constant sacrifices, human sacrifices. They taught the Indians to do horrible things, to devour the sacrificial victims the same way that they liked to do it . . . alive and conscious!""
I recoiled at this. The very idea of a living, conscious human being torn apart and devoured by savages and the abominations they worshipped, while the poor wretch was aware of the hideous thing being done to him, seemed horrible beyond all imagining.
""They showed them how to tear the flesh away without damaging the main blood vessels or nerves. The victim would live on for hours while the flesh was being ripped from his bones. They did it with their teeth you know. That is how the sea demons taught them to do it. The pain suffered by the victim, along with his gradually ebbing life force, served as a kind of food for the others.""
Though gagging from my companion's horrible account, I still needed to learn more. I sensed that I was very close to receiving an important revelation. I urged Don Ramiro to continue.
""It only gets worse,"" he assured me, ""but if you wish, I will tell you what I know.""
He poured himself a double shot of brandy, took a deep sip, and continued, ""After a long time, maybe a century, the sea-things suggested to the Indians that they give their young women up to them, that they have their children. The beings assured them that these children would be as gods.""
""But, why didn't they just take the young women?"" I interjected. ""I mean, with the power those things held over the Indians . . . ""
""Perhaps they had to come willingly or it would not work."" This was my companion's answer. ""The reality is that I do not know. At any rate, the things from the sea served the others.""
""Others . . . but, what kind of others?"" I prodded.
""Things from . . . from outside.""
He took another sip.
""There are beings . . . or entities that we cannot see, cannot be aware of with our normal five senses, at least not unless they want, or allow, us to be. They exist in other dimensions from those we know . . . or between dimensions. Anyway, they are not subject to the laws of space and time as we know them. The greatest among them on this planet is called Kutulli.""
""That horrible idol we saw at the ruined city . . . you said it was the Great Kutulli.""
""Sí. The city was built by the ancient ancestors of the Indians the Spanish found here. It had fallen into ruins many centuries before those Europeans arrived here with their absurd worship of a crucified and dying god. The people degenerated; they lost their civilization but their beliefs continued. They carried out their sacred rituals of blood sacrifice for many centuries, always certain of the proximate advent of their god . . . Great Kutulli. Are you wondering from where came their cult? They brought it from the place of their origin . . . their legends told of a great continent in the place where the sun rises, the land that now sleeps beneath the sea.""
Ramiro's face took on a strange, distant cast.
""Their god, or his servitors, eventually took notice of this devotion. As you know, the coast is only about forty kilometers east of here. The people often went there to fish, even as they do now. At a spot on the coast known as Naniché, 'Place Where We Meet' in the language of the native Indians, the tribal priests summoned the beings from the sea. This contact confirmed their faith. They now could speak directly with the servants of Kutulli, even as their long ago ancestors had done, according to legend.""
""So, that was the beginning of the cannibal cult?"" I interrupted.
""Sí. Of course, the Indians had performed human sacrifice for countless centuries before, but never in so horrible a way as I described earlier. The sea beings taught the Indians many things, many rituals and magical chants said to be powerful in hastening the return of Great Kutulli and the Ancient Ones."" With this, Don Ramiro became unexpectedly silent.
I took advantage of my companion's prolonged pause to reflect on his words. Obviously, there was a philological relationship between ""Kutulli"" and the ""Cthulhu"" of Lovecraft's tales. Many other similarities were also apparent, too many for my comfort.
At length I inquired, ""Is it not true that the first Spaniards to permanently establish themselves in this region were friars of the Augustinian Order?""
""Yes . . . and no,"" he answered. ""Before the priests came there were others; they came here because they wanted to get away from the Church's lackeys, to a place where they could practice their beliefs without interference. They were all originally judíos, but among them were some who called themselves Cafanes. They were worshipers of a god called El Asuado. Their cult was taken from the writings of the Sepher al Azif. I think your friend has a copy. Several were made locally from the original, which is . . . where no one can lay hands on it. A few specially chosen ones from each new generation of Cafanes were taught to read the ancient writing, a tradition passed along to this day among their descendants, who are known as the Rabana.
""These people, the Cafanes, worshipped the same way the Indians did. They shared in the rituals and sacrifices, and taught the Indians new ones from their book. Everything went well for them until the priests came. They came to convert the Indians, but . . . ,"" he chuckled, ""the first to be sent here were converted themselves . . . when they saw the power of the conjurations from the book . . . and what the sea gods could actually do, something they could behold with their own eyes, not just accept by faith, they believed, and participated in the rituals of sacrifice. For this, they were punished by the Church.""
Now I understood the import of Rousseau's statement concerning the twelve priests who were blinded, mutilated, and imprisoned by the ecclesiastical authorities. A clearer, albeit terrible picture of San Facundo's secret past was taking shape in my mind. Here dwelt a tribe of Indians, probably believing themselves descended from ancient Atlanteans or some such. They had achieved a fairly high level of early civilization, then regressed to a primitive state, maintaining, through it all, a cult dedicated to the Ancient Ones, hoary and abominable entities from beyond all time and space as we humans understand those concepts.
At some later time, still long before their initial encounter with European civilization, the Indians had established contact with ancient and dreadful beings from the sea, beings that were dedicated, or bound, to the service of the Ancient Ones, especially to Kutulli. Much later, some of those same Indians had submitted to sexual congress with the sea creatures, and thus created a race of hybrids better able to function freely in the world of men. Eventually, this strange mixture had come to include certain apostate Jews, who, through their possession of the unspeakable Necronomicon, had come to share beliefs and practices almost identical to those of the Indians.
This ""Kutulli"" must certainly be the same as Cthulhu, who ""In his house in R'lyeh lies not dead but dreaming,"" according to Lovecraft's mythos. Incredible as it all seemed, that mythos seemed to be based, at least partly, on actual belief systems, and far more hideously, on actual occurrences. The implications filled me with a sense of primal horror and dread.
""You look pale, my friend. Perhaps the things I have told you are a little too much for your sensitivities."" Thus said Ramiro.
""The things you have told me,"" I answered, ""even if partially true, speak to man's worst and most primal fears. Merciful God, Ramiro! If this is true, then what implications does this have for the rest of us… for the very concept of humanity?""
That night I dreamed . . . dreamed horribly. I found myself standing before the strange black tower in the ruined city, though now it was not in ruins. The tower jutted up before me into the night sky. A great, gibbous moon gleamed overhead, casting its pallid light on the scene, which was also illuminated by the red glow of massive bonfires. I was aware of motion and the incessant throbbing of some huge drum. Presently, I saw that the tower was completely encircled by three concentric rings of celebrants, squat men and women with broad faces and prominent cheek bones, their straight hair matted and their naked bodies painted hideously from head to foot in red and black. Around and around the base of that menacing black truncated cone they leaped and whirled in their frenzied dance, to the obscene rhythm of that great unseen drum and to the high, monotonous whine of flutes. Some distance away, in the shadow of a hideous black idol, squatted others, hungrily gnawing the last shreds of bloody flesh from bones that I knew belonged to no four-footed beast. At that point I noticed the outermost ring of dancers, the one formed by other celebrants, those that hopped, flopped, and floundered about grotesquely, keeping time with the horrible thunderous beating of the drum and the maddening whine of flutes.
Suddenly, all was silent. An interval of time passed, impossible to measure in a dream state, and the drumming and piping began anew, this time accompanied by a strange low chanting that gradually rose to an almost deafening crescendo. The words, scarcely intelligible in themselves, seemed to reverberate in the very core of my brain: ""Ph-nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn."" Something compelled me to look high up, toward the rim of the tower. In the uncertain light and moving shadows I could make out that the rim was fashioned of a stone different from the rest of the edifice, something shiny and black, like onyx. It seemed to be covered with carvings. As the chanting reached an almost unbearable pitch, I saw several huge black snakelike objects rise out of the tower. Presently, these stretched out far in all directions, writhing in the night sky high above our heads. Then, something of singular horror took place: above the waving tentacles a sort of face seemed to be forming, or materializing. The head, in its upper part, suggested some grotesque parody of the human face, but below the eyes all similarity ceased. The lower part of this obscene visage consisted of a writhing mass of tentacle-like appendages surrounding a black gaping maw, I won't call it a mouth, from which drooled a nauseating yellowish ichor. As I stared paralyzed with horror at the blasphemous obscenity forming above the tower, I saw the hideous eyes look downward, focusing on me!
I awoke screaming in the predawn hours, bathed in cold, clammy sweat. My heart was pounding like the terrible drum which I had heard in my dream.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References to decline were few, though the significance of the later record was unmistakable. After the Civil War all industrial life was confined to the Marsh Refining Company, and the marketing of gold ingots formed the only remaining bit of major commerce aside from the eternal fishing. That fishing paid less and less as the price of the commodity fell and large-scale corporations offered competition, but there was never a dearth of fish around Innsmouth Harbour. Foreigners seldom settled there, and there was some discreetly veiled evidence that a number of Poles and Portuguese who had tried it had been scattered in a peculiarly drastic fashion.

Most interesting of all was a glancing reference to the strange jewelry vaguely associated with Innsmouth. It had evidently impressed the whole countryside more than a little, for mention was made of specimens in the museum of Miskatonic University at Arkham, and in the display room of the Newburyport Historical Society. The fragmentary descriptions of these things were bald and prosaic, but they hinted to me an undercurrent of persistent strangeness. Something about them seemed so odd and provocative that I could not put them out of my mind, and despite the relative lateness of the hour I resolved to see the local sample--said to be a large, queerly-proportioned thing evidently meant for a tiara--if it could possibly be arranged.

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

It took no excessive sensitiveness to beauty to make me literally gasp at the strange, unearthly splendour of the alien, opulent phantasy that rested there on a purple velvet cushion. Even now I can hardly describe what I saw, though it was clearly enough a sort of tiara, as the description had said. It was tall in front, and with a very large and curiously irregular periphery, as if designed for a head of almost freakishly elliptical outline. The material seemed to be predominantly gold, though a weird lighter lustrousness hinted at some strange alloy with an equally beautiful and scarcely identifiable metal. Its condition was almost perfect, and one could have spent hours in studying the striking and puzzlingly untraditional designs--some simply geometrical, and some plainly marine--chased or moulded in high relief on its surface with a craftsmanship of incredible skill and grace.

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

However, I soon saw that my uneasiness had a second and perhaps equally potent source residing in the pictorial and mathematical suggestion of the strange designs. The patterns all hinted of remote secrets and unimaginable abysses in time and space, and the monotonously aquatic nature of the reliefs became almost sinister. Among these reliefs were fabulous monsters of abhorrent grotesqueness and malignity--half ichthyic and half batrachian in suggestion--which one could not dissociate from a certain haunting and uncomfortable sense of pseudomemory, as if they called up some image from deep cells and tissues whose retentive functions are wholly primal and awesomely ancestral. At times I fancied that every contour of these blasphemous fish-frogs was over-flowing with the ultimate quintessence of unknown and inhuman evil.

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

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

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

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

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

","I repeat to you, gentlemen, that your inquisition is fruitless. Detain me here forever if you will; confine or execute me if you must have a victim to propitiate the illusion you call justice; but I can say no more than I have said already. Everything that I can remember, I have told with perfect candour. Nothing has been distorted or concealed, and if anything remains vague, it is only because of the dark cloud which has come over my mind—that cloud and the nebulous nature of the horrors which brought it upon me.
      Again I say, I do not know what has become of Harley Warren; though I think—almost hope—that he is in peaceful oblivion, if there be anywhere so blessed a thing. It is true that I have for five years been his closest friend, and a partial sharer of his terrible researches into the unknown. I will not deny, though my memory is uncertain and indistinct, that this witness of yours may have seen us together as he says, on the Gainesville pike, walking toward Big Cypress Swamp, at half past eleven on that awful night. That we bore electric lanterns, spades, and a curious coil of wire with attached instruments, I will even affirm; for these things all played a part in the single hideous scene which remains burned into my shaken recollection. But of what followed, and of the reason I was found alone and dazed on the edge of the swamp next morning, I must insist that I know nothing save what I have told you over and over again. You say to me that there is nothing in the swamp or near it which could form the setting of that frightful episode. I reply that I know nothing beyond what I saw. Vision or nightmare it may have been—vision or nightmare I fervently hope it was—yet it is all that my mind retains of what took place in those shocking hours after we left the sight of men. And why Harley Warren did not return, he or his shade—or some nameless thing I cannot describe—alone can tell.
      As I have said before, the weird studies of Harley Warren were well known to me, and to some extent shared by me. Of his vast collection of strange, rare books on forbidden subjects I have read all that are written in the languages of which I am master; but these are few as compared with those in languages I cannot understand. Most, I believe, are in Arabic; and the fiend-inspired book which brought on the end—the book which he carried in his pocket out of the world—was written in characters whose like I never saw elsewhere. Warren would never tell me just what was in that book. As to the nature of our studies—must I say again that I no longer retain full comprehension? It seems to me rather merciful that I do not, for they were terrible studies, which I pursued more through reluctant fascination than through actual inclination. Warren always dominated me, and sometimes I feared him. I remember how I shuddered at his facial expression on the night before the awful happening, when he talked so incessantly of his theory, why certain corpses never decay, but rest firm and fat in their tombs for a thousand years. But I do not fear him now, for I suspect that he has known horrors beyond my ken. Now I fear for him.
      Once more I say that I have no clear idea of our object on that night. Certainly, it had much to do with something in the book which Warren carried with him—that ancient book in undecipherable characters which had come to him from India a month before—but I swear I do not know what it was that we expected to find. Your witness says he saw us at half past eleven on the Gainesville pike, headed for Big Cypress Swamp. This is probably true, but I have no distinct memory of it. The picture seared into my soul is of one scene only, and the hour must have been long after midnight; for a waning crescent moon was high in the vaporous heavens.
      The place was an ancient cemetery; so ancient that I trembled at the manifold signs of immemorial years. It was in a deep, damp hollow, overgrown with rank grass, moss, and curious creeping weeds, and filled with a vague stench which my idle fancy associated absurdly with rotting stone. On every hand were the signs of neglect and decrepitude, and I seemed haunted by the notion that Warren and I were the first living creatures to invade a lethal silence of centuries. Over the valley’s rim a wan, waning crescent moon peered through the noisome vapours that seemed to emanate from unheard-of catacombs, and by its feeble, wavering beams I could distinguish a repellent array of antique slabs, urns, cenotaphs, and mausolean facades; all crumbling, moss-grown, and moisture-stained, and partly concealed by the gross luxuriance of the unhealthy vegetation. My first vivid impression of my own presence in this terrible necropolis concerns the act of pausing with Warren before a certain half-obliterated sepulchre, and of throwing down some burdens which we seemed to have been carrying. I now observed that I had with me an electric lantern and two spades, whilst my companion was supplied with a similar lantern and a portable telephone outfit. No word was uttered, for the spot and the task seemed known to us; and without delay we seized our spades and commenced to clear away the grass, weeds, and drifted earth from the flat, archaic mortuary. After uncovering the entire surface, which consisted of three immense granite slabs, we stepped back some distance to survey the charnel scene; and Warren appeared to make some mental calculations. Then he returned to the sepulchre, and using his spade as a lever, sought to pry up the slab lying nearest to a stony ruin which may have been a monument in its day. He did not succeed, and motioned to me to come to his assistance. Finally our combined strength loosened the stone, which we raised and tipped to one side.
      The removal of the slab revealed a black aperture, from which rushed an effluence of miasmal gases so nauseous that we started back in horror. After an interval, however, we approached the pit again, and found the exhalations less unbearable. Our lanterns disclosed the top of a flight of stone steps, dripping with some detestable ichor of the inner earth, and bordered by moist walls encrusted with nitre. And now for the first time my memory records verbal discourse, Warren addressing me at length in his mellow tenor voice; a voice singularly unperturbed by our awesome surroundings.
      “I’m sorry to have to ask you to stay on the surface,” he said, “but it would be a crime to let anyone with your frail nerves go down there. You can’t imagine, even from what you have read and from what I’ve told you, the things I shall have to see and do. It’s fiendish work, Carter, and I doubt if any man without ironclad sensibilities could ever see it through and come up alive and sane. I don’t wish to offend you, and heaven knows I’d be glad enough to have you with me; but the responsibility is in a certain sense mine, and I couldn’t drag a bundle of nerves like you down to probable death or madness. I tell you, you can’t imagine what the thing is really like! But I promise to keep you informed over the telephone of every move—you see I’ve enough wire here to reach to the centre of the earth and back!”
      I can still hear, in memory, those coolly spoken words; and I can still remember my remonstrances. I seemed desperately anxious to accompany my friend into those sepulchral depths, yet he proved inflexibly obdurate. At one time he threatened to abandon the expedition if I remained insistent; a threat which proved effective, since he alone held the key to the thing. All this I can still remember, though I no longer know what manner of thing we sought. After he had secured my reluctant acquiescence in his design, Warren picked up the reel of wire and adjusted the instruments. At his nod I took one of the latter and seated myself upon an aged, discoloured gravestone close by the newly uncovered aperture. Then he shook my hand, shouldered the coil of wire, and disappeared within that indescribable ossuary. For a moment I kept sight of the glow of his lantern, and heard the rustle of the wire as he laid it down after him; but the glow soon disappeared abruptly, as if a turn in the stone staircase had been encountered, and the sound died away almost as quickly. I was alone, yet bound to the unknown depths by those magic strands whose insulated surface lay green beneath the struggling beams of that waning crescent moon.
      In the lone silence of that hoary and deserted city of the dead, my mind conceived the most ghastly phantasies and illusions; and the grotesque shrines and monoliths seemed to assume a hideous personality—a half-sentience. Amorphous shadows seemed to lurk in the darker recesses of the weed-choked hollow and to flit as in some blasphemous ceremonial procession past the portals of the mouldering tombs in the hillside; shadows which could not have been cast by that pallid, peering crescent moon. I constantly consulted my watch by the light of my electric lantern, and listened with feverish anxiety at the receiver of the telephone; but for more than a quarter of an hour heard nothing. Then a faint clicking came from the instrument, and I called down to my friend in a tense voice. Apprehensive as I was, I was nevertheless unprepared for the words which came up from that uncanny vault in accents more alarmed and quivering than any I had heard before from Harley Warren. He who had so calmly left me a little while previously, now called from below in a shaky whisper more portentous than the loudest shriek:
      “God! If you could see what I am seeing!”
      I could not answer. Speechless, I could only wait. Then came the frenzied tones again:
      “Carter, it’s terrible—monstrous—unbelievable!”
      This time my voice did not fail me, and I poured into the transmitter a flood of excited questions. Terrified, I continued to repeat, “Warren, what is it? What is it?”
      Once more came the voice of my friend, still hoarse with fear, and now apparently tinged with despair:
      “I can’t tell you, Carter! It’s too utterly beyond thought—I dare not tell you—no man could know it and live—Great God! I never dreamed of THIS!” Stillness again, save for my now incoherent torrent of shuddering inquiry. Then the voice of Warren in a pitch of wilder consternation:
      “Carter! for the love of God, put back the slab and get out of this if you can! Quick!—leave everything else and make for the outside—it’s your only chance! Do as I say, and don’t ask me to explain!”
      I heard, yet was able only to repeat my frantic questions. Around me were the tombs and the darkness and the shadows; below me, some peril beyond the radius of the human imagination. But my friend was in greater danger than I, and through my fear I felt a vague resentment that he should deem me capable of deserting him under such circumstances. More clicking, and after a pause a piteous cry from Warren:
      “Beat it! For God’s sake, put back the slab and beat it, Carter!”
      Something in the boyish slang of my evidently stricken companion unleashed my faculties. I formed and shouted a resolution, “Warren, brace up! I’m coming down!” But at this offer the tone of my auditor changed to a scream of utter despair:
      “Don’t! You can’t understand! It’s too late—and my own fault. Put back the slab and run—there’s nothing else you or anyone can do now!” The tone changed again, this time acquiring a softer quality, as of hopeless resignation. Yet it remained tense through anxiety for me.
      “Quick—before it’s too late!” I tried not to heed him; tried to break through the paralysis which held me, and to fulfil my vow to rush down to his aid. But his next whisper found me still held inert in the chains of stark horror.
      “Carter—hurry! It’s no use—you must go—better one than two—the slab—” A pause, more clicking, then the faint voice of Warren:
      “Nearly over now—don’t make it harder—cover up those damned steps and run for your life—you’re losing time— So long, Carter—won’t see you again.” Here Warren’s whisper swelled into a cry; a cry that gradually rose to a shriek fraught with all the horror of the ages—
      “Curse these hellish things—legions— My God! Beat it! Beat it! Beat it!”
      After that was silence. I know not how many interminable aeons I sat stupefied; whispering, muttering, calling, screaming into that telephone. Over and over again through those aeons I whispered and muttered, called, shouted, and screamed, “Warren! Warren! Answer me—are you there?”
      And then there came to me the crowning horror of all—the unbelievable, unthinkable, almost unmentionable thing. I have said that aeons seemed to elapse after Warren shrieked forth his last despairing warning, and that only my own cries now broke the hideous silence. But after a while there was a further clicking in the receiver, and I strained my ears to listen. Again I called down, “Warren, are you there?”, and in answer heard the thing which has brought this cloud over my mind. I do not try, gentlemen, to account for that thing—that voice—nor can I venture to describe it in detail, since the first words took away my consciousness and created a mental blank which reaches to the time of my awakening in the hospital. Shall I say that the voice was deep; hollow; gelatinous; remote; unearthly; inhuman; disembodied? What shall I say? It was the end of my experience, and is the end of my story. I heard it, and knew no more. Heard it as I sat petrified in that unknown cemetery in the hollow, amidst the crumbling stones and the falling tombs, the rank vegetation and the miasmal vapours. Heard it well up from the innermost depths of that damnable open sepulchre as I watched amorphous, necrophagous shadows dance beneath an accursed waning moon. And this is what it said:
      “YOU FOOL, WARREN IS DEAD!”",True
"THEY were the brawlers and braggarts, the loud boasters and hard drinkers, of Faring town, John Kulrek and his crony Lie-lip Canool. Many a time have I, a tousle-haired lad, stolen to the tavern door to listen to their curses, their profane arguments and wild sea songs; half fearful and half in admiration of these wild rovers. Aye, all the people of Faring town gazed on them with fear and admiration, for they were not like the rest of the Faring men; they were not content to ply their trade along the coasts and among the shark-teeth shoals. No yawls, no skiffs for them! They fared far, farther than any other man in the village, for they shipped on the great sailing-ships that went out on the white tides to brave the restless grey ocean and make ports in strange lands.

Ah, I mind it was swift times in the little sea-coast village of Faring when John Kulrek came home, with the furtive Lie-lip at his side, swaggering down the gang-plank, in his tarry sea-clothes, and the broad leather belt that held his ever-ready dagger; shouting condescending greeting to some favored acquaintance, kissing some maiden who ventured too near; then up the street, roaring some scarcely decent song of the sea. How the cringers and the idlers, the hangers-on, would swarm about the two desperate heroes, flattering and smirking, guffawing hilariously at each nasty jest. For to the tavern loafers and to some of the weaker among the straightforward villagers, these men with their wild talk and their brutal deeds, their tales of the Seven Seas and the far countries, these men, I say, were valiant knights, nature's noblemen who dared to be men of blood and brawn.

And all feared them, so that when a man was beaten or a woman insulted, the villagers muttered—and did nothing. And so when Moll Farrell's niece was put to shame by John Kulrek, none dared even to put into words what all thought. Moll had never married, and she and the girl lived alone in a little hut down close to the beach, so close that in high tide the waves came almost to the door.

The people of the village accounted old Moll something of a witch, and she was a grim, gaunt old dame who had little to say to anyone. But she minded her own business, and eked out a slim living by gathering clams, and picking up bits of driftwood.

The girl was a pretty, foolish little thing, vain and easily befooled, else she had never yielded to the shark-like blandishments of John Kulrek.

I mind the day was a cold winter day with a sharp breeze out of the east when the old dame came into the village street shrieking that the girl had vanished. All scattered over the beach and back among the bleak inland hills to search for her—all save John Kulrek and his cronies who sat in the tavern dicing and toping. All the while beyond the shoals, we heard the never- ceasing droning of the heaving, restless grey monster, and in the dim light of the ghostly dawn Moll Farrell's girl came home.

The tides bore her gently across the wet sands and laid her almost at her own door. Virgin-white she was, and her arms were folded across her still bosom; calm was her face, and the grey tides sighed about her slender limbs. Moll Farrell's eyes were stones, yet she stood above her dead girl and spoke no word till John Kulrek and his crony came reeling down from the tavern, their drinking-jacks still in their hands. Drunk was John Kulrek, and the people gave back for him, murder in their souls; so he came and laughed at Moll Farrell across the body of her girl.

""Zounds!"" swore John Kulrek; ""the wench has drowned herself, Lie-lip!""

Lie-lip laughed, with the twist of his thin mouth. He always hated Moll Farrell, for it was she that had given him the name of Lie-lip.

Then John Kulrek lifted his drinking-jack, swaying on his uncertain legs. ""A health to the wench's ghost!"" he bellowed, while all stood aghast.

Then Moll Farrell spoke, and the words broke from her in a scream which sent ripples of cold up and down the spines of the throng.

""The curse of the Foul Fiend upon you, John Kulrek!"" she screamed. ""The curse of God rest upon your vile soul throughout eternity! May you gaze on sights that shall sear the eyes of you and scorch the soul of you! May you die a bloody death and writhe in hell's flames for a million and a million and yet a million years! I curse you by sea and by land, by earth and by air, by the demons of the swamplands, the fiends of the forest and the goblins of the hills! And you""—her lean finger stabbed at Lie-lip Canool and he started backward, his face paling—""you shall be the death of John Kulrek and he shall be the death of you! You shall bring John Kulrek to the doors of hell and John Kulrek shall bring you to the gallows-tree! I set the seal of death upon your brow, John Kulrek! You shall live in terror and die in horror far out upon the cold grey sea! But the sea that took the soul of innocence to her bosom shall not take you, but shall fling forth your vile carcass to the sands! Aye, John Kulrek""—and she spoke with such a terrible intensity that the drunken mockery on the man's face changed to one of swinish stupidity—""the sea roars for the victim it will not keep! There is snow upon the hills, John Kulrek, and ere it melts your corpse will lie at my feet. And I shall spit upon it and be content.""

Kulrek and his crony sailed at dawn for a long voyage, and Moll went back to her hut and her clam-gathering. She seemed to grow leaner and more grim than ever and her eyes smoldered with a light not sane. The days glided by and people whispered among themselves that Moll's days were numbered, for she faded to a ghost of a woman; but she went her way, refusing all aid.

That was a short, cold summer and the snow on the barren inland hills never melted; a thing very unusual, which caused much comment among the villagers. At dusk and at dawn Moll would come up on the beach, gaze up at the snow which glittered on the hills, then out to sea with a fierce intensity in her gaze.

Then the days grew shorter, the nights longer and darker, and the cold grey tides came sweeping along the bleak strands, bearing the rain and sleet of the sharp east breezes.

And upon a bleak day a trading-vessel sailed into the bay and anchored. And all the idlers and the wastrels flocked to the wharfs, for that was the ship upon which John Kulrek and Lie-lip Canool had sailed. Down the gang-plank came Lie-lip, more furtive than ever, but John Kulrek was not there.

To shouted queries, Canool shook his head. ""Kulrek deserted ship at a port of Sumatra,"" said he. ""He had a row with the skipper, lads; wanted me to desert, too, but no! I had to see you fine lads again, eh boys?""

Almost cringing was Lie-lip Canool, and suddenly he recoiled as Moll Farrell came through the throng. A moment they stood eyeing each other; then Moll's grim lips bent in a terrible smile.

""There's blood on your hand, Canool!"" she lashed out suddenly—so suddenly that Lie-lip started and rubbed his right hand across his left sleeve.

""Stand aside, witch!"" he snarled in sudden anger, striding through the crowd which gave back for him. His admirers followed him to the tavern.

Now, I mind that the next day was even colder; grey fogs came drifting out of the east and veiled the sea and the beaches. There would be no sailing that day, and so all the villagers were in their snug houses or matching tales at the tavern. So it came that Joe, my friend, a lad of my own age, and I, were the ones who saw the first of the strange things that happened.

Being harum-scarum lads of no wisdom, we were sitting in a small rowboat, floating at the end of the wharfs, each shivering and wishing the other would suggest leaving, there being no reason whatever for our being there, save that it was a good place to build air-castles undisturbed.

Suddenly Joe raised his hand. ""Say,"" he said, ""d'ye hear? Who can be out on the bay upon a day like this?""

""Nobody. What d'ye hear?""

""Oars. Or I'm a lubber. Listen.""

There was no seeing anything in that fog, and I heard nothing. Yet Joe swore he did, and suddenly his face assumed a strange look.

""Somebody rowing out there, I tell you! The bay is alive with oars from the sound! A score of boats at the least! Ye dolt, can ye not hear?""

Then, as I shook my head, he leaped and began to undo the painter.

""I'm off to see. Name me liar if the bay is not full of boats, all together like a close fleet. Are you with me?""

Yes, I was with him, though I heard nothing. Then out in the greyness we went, and the fog closed behind and before so that we drifted in a vague world of smoke, seeing naught and hearing naught. We were lost in no time, and I cursed Joe for leading us upon a wild goose chase that was like to end with our being swept out to sea. I thought of Moll Farrell's girl and shuddered.

How long we drifted I know not. Minutes faded into hours, hours into centuries. Still Joe swore he heard the oars, now close at hand, now far away, and for hours we followed them, steering our course toward the sound, as the noise grew or receded. This I later thought of, and could not understand.

Then, when my hands were so numb that I could no longer hold the oar, and the forerunning drowsiness of cold and exhaustion was stealing over me, Weak white stars broke through the fog which glided suddenly away, fading like a ghost of smoke, and we found ourselves afloat just outside the mouth of the bay. The waters lay smooth as a pond, all dark green and silver in the starlight, and the cold came crisper than ever. I was swinging the boat about, to put back into the bay, when Joe gave a shout, and for the first time I heard the clack of oar-locks. I glanced over my shoulder and my blood went cold.

A great beaked prow loomed above us, a weird, unfamiliar shape against the stars, and as I caught my breath, sheered sharply and swept by us, with a curious swishing I never heard any other craft make. Joe screamed and backed oars frantically, and the boat walled out of the way just in time; for though the prow missed us, still otherwise we had died. For from the sides of the ship stood long oars, bank upon bank which swept her along. Though I had never seen such a craft, I knew her for a galley. But what was she doing upon our coasts? They said, the far-farers, that such ships were still in use among the heathens of Barbary; but it was many a long, heaving mile to Barbary, and even so she did not resemble the ships described by those who had sailed far.

We started in pursuit, and this was strange, for though the waters broke about her prow, and she seemed fairly to fly through the waves, yet she was making little speed, and it was no time before we caught up with her. Making our painter fast to a chain far back beyond the reach of the swishing oars, we hailed those on deck. But there came no answer, and at last, conquering our fears, we clambered up the chain and found ourselves upon the strangest deck man has trod for many a long, roaring century.

Joe muttered fearsomely. ""Look, how old it seems! Almost ready to fall to pieces. Why, 'tis fairly rotten!""

There was no one on deck, no one at the long sweep with which the craft was steered. We stole to the hold and looked down the stair. Then and there, if ever men were on the verge of insanity, it was we. For there were rowers there, it is true; they sat upon the rowers' benches and drove the creaking oars through the grey waters. And they that rowed were skeletons!

Shrieking, we plunged across the deck, to fling ourselves into the sea. But at the rail I tripped upon something and fell headlong, and as I lay, I saw a thing which vanquished my fear of the horrors below for an instant. The thing upon which I had tripped was a human body, and in the dim grey light that was beginning to steal across the eastern waves I saw a dagger hilt standing up between his shoulders. Joe was at the rail, urging me to haste, and together we slid down the chain and cut the painter.

Then we stood off into the bay. Straight on kept the grim galley, and we followed, slowly, wondering. She seemed to be heading straight for the beach beside the wharfs, and as we approached, we saw the wharfs thronged with people. They had missed us, no doubt, and now they stood, there in the early dawn light, struck dumb by the apparition which had come up out of the night and the grim ocean.

Straight on swept the galley, her oars a-swish; then ere she reached the shallow water—crash!—a terrific reverberation shook the bay. Before our eyes the grim craft seemed to melt away; then she vanished, and the green waters seethed where she had ridden, but there floated no driftwood there, nor did there ever float any ashore. Aye, something floated ashore, but it was grim driftwood!

We made the landing amid a hum of excited conversation that stopped suddenly. Moll Farrell stood before her hut, limned gauntly against the ghostly dawn, her lean hand pointing sea-ward. And across the sighing wet sands, borne by the grey tide, something came floating; something that the waves dropped at Moll Farrell's feet. And there looked up at us, as we crowded about, a pair of unseeing eyes set in a still, white face. John Kulrek had come home.

Still and grim he lay, rocked by the tide, and as he lurched sideways, all saw the dagger hilt that stood from his back—the dagger all of us had seen a thousand times at the belt of Lie-lip Canool.

""Aye, I killed him!"" came Canool's shriek, as he writhed and groveled before our gaze. ""At sea on a still night in a drunken brawl I slew him and hurled him overboard! And from the far seas he has followed me""—his voice sank to a hideous whisper—""because—of—the—curse—the—sea— would—not—keep—his—body!""

And the wretch sank down, trembling, the shadow of the gallows already in his eyes.

""Aye!"" Strong, deep and exultant was Moll Farrell's voice. ""From the hell of lost craft Satan sent a ship of bygone ages! A ship red with gore and stained with the memory of horrid crimes! None other would bear such a vile carcass! The sea has taken vengeance and has given me mine. See now, how I spit upon the face of John Kulrek.""

And with a ghastly laugh, she pitched forward, the blood starting to her lips. And the sun came up across the restless sea.","On the wall hung a map of Mongolia, that indefinite region a million and a half square miles in area, vast sections of which have never been explored.

Turkestan and China border it on the south, and Tibet almost touches it, not quite.

Even in the twelfth century, when the wild Mongols broke loose and nearly overran the world, the Tibet infantry under Genghis, the Tchortcha horsemen drafted out of Black China, and a great cloud of Mongol cavalry under the Prince of the Vanguard commanding half a hundred Hezars, never penetrated that grisly and unknown waste. The ""Eight Towers of the Assassins"" guarded it—still guard it, possibly.

The vice-regent of Erlik, Prince of Darkness, dwelt within this unknown land. And dwells there still, perhaps.

In front of this wall-map stood Tressa Norne.

Behind her, facing the map, four men were seated—three of them under thirty.

These three were volunteers in the service of the United States Government—men of independent means, of position, who had volunteered for military duty at the outbreak of the great war. However, they had been assigned by the Government to a very different sort of duty no less exciting than service on the fighting line, but far less conspicuous, for they had been drafted into the United States Department of Justice.

The names of these three were Victor Cleves, a professor of ornithology at Harvard University before the war; Alexander Selden, junior partner in the banking firm of Milwyn, Selden, and Co., and James Benton, a New York architect.

The fourth man's name was John Recklow. He might have been over fifty, or under. He was well-built, in a square, athletic way, clear-skinned and ruddy, grey-eyed, quiet in voice and manner. His hair and moustache had turned silvery. He had been employed by the Government for many years. He seemed to be enormously interested in what Miss Norne was saying.

Also he was the only man who interrupted her narrative to ask questions. And his questions revealed a knowledge which was making the girl more sensitive and uneasy every moment.

Finally, when she spoke of the Scarlet Desert, he asked if the Scarlet Lake were there and if the Xin was still supposed to inhabit its vermilion depths. And at that she turned and looked at him, her forefinger still resting on the map.

""Where have you ever heard of the Scarlet Lake and the Xin?"" she asked as though frightened.

Recklow said quietly that as a boy he had served under Gordon and Sir Robert.

""If, as a boy, you served under Chinese Gordon, you already know much of what I have told you, Mr. Recklow. Is it not true?"" she demanded nervously.

""That makes no difference,"" he replied with a smile. ""It is all very new to these three young gentlemen. And as for myself, I am checking up what you say and comparing it with what I heard many, many years ago when my comrade Barres and I were in Yian.""

""Did you really know Sir Robert Hart?""

""Yes.""

""Then why do you not explain to these gentlemen?""

""Dear child,"" he interrupted gently, ""what did Chinese Gordon or Sir Robert Hart, or even my comrade Barres, or I myself know about occult Asia in comparison to what you know?—a girl who has actually served the mysteries of Erlik for four amazing years!""

She paled a trifle, came slowly across the room to where Recklow was seated, laid a timid hand on his sleeve.

""Do you believe there are sorcerers in Asia?"" she asked with that child-like directness which her wonderful blue eyes corroborated.

Recklow remained silent.

""Because,"" she went on, ""if, in your heart, you do not believe this to be an accursed fact, then what I have to say will mean nothing to any of you.""

Recklow touched his short, silvery moustache, hesitating. Then:

""The worship of Erlik is devil worship,"" he said. ""Also I am entirely prepared to believe that there are, among the Yezidees, adepts who employ scientific weapons against civilisation—who have probably obtained a rather terrifying knowledge of psychic laws which they use scientifically, and which to ordinary, God-fearing folk appear to be the black magic of sorcerers.""

Cleves said: ""The employment by the huns of poison gases and long-range cannon is a parallel case. Before the war we could not believe in the possibility of a cannon that threw shells a distance of seventy miles.""

The girl still addressed herself to Recklow: ""Then you do not believe there are real sorcerers in Asia, Mr. Recklow?""

""Not sorcerers with supernatural powers for evil. Only degenerate human beings who, somehow, have managed to tap invisible psychic currents, and have learned how to use terrific forces about which, so far, we know practically nothing.""

She spoke again in the same uneasy voice: ""Then you do not believe that either God or Satan is involved?""

""No,"" he replied smilingly, ""and you must not so believe.""

""Nor the—the destruction of human souls,"" she persisted; ""you do not believe it is being accomplished to-day?""

""Not in the slightest, dear young lady,"" he said cheerfully.

""Do you not believe that to have been instructed in such unlawful knowledge is damning? Do you not believe that ability to employ unknown forces is forbidden of God, and that to disobey His law means death to the soul?""

""No!""

""That it is the price one pays to Satan for occult power over people's minds?"" she insisted.

""Hypnotic suggestion is not one of the cardinal sins,"" explained Recklow, still smiling—""unless wickedly employed. The Yezidee priesthood is a band of so-called sorcerers only because of their wicked employment of whatever hypnotic and psychic knowledge they may have obtained.

""There was nothing intrinsically wicked in the huns' discovery of phosgene. But the use they made of it made devils out of them. My ability to manufacture phosgene gas is no crime. But if I manufacture it and use it to poison innocent human beings, then, in that sense, I am, perhaps, a sort of modern sorcerer.""

Tressa Norne turned paler:

""I had better tell you that I have used—forbidden knowledge—which the Yezidees taught me in the temple of Erlik.""

""Used it how?"" demanded Cleves.

""To—to earn a living.... And once or twice to defend myself.""

There was the slightest scepticism in Recklow's bland smile. ""You did quite right, Miss Norne.""

She had become very white now. She stood beside Recklow, her back toward the suspended map, and looked in a scared sort of way from one to the other of the men seated before her, turning finally to Cleves, and coming toward him.

""I—I once killed a man,"" she said with a catch in her breath.

Cleves reddened with astonishment. ""Why did you do that?"" he asked.

""He was already on his way to kill me in bed.""

""You were perfectly right,"" remarked Recklow coolly.

""I don't know ... I was in bed.... And then, on the edge of sleep, I felt his mind groping to get hold of mine—feeling about in the darkness to get hold of my brain and seize it and paralyse it.""

All colour had left her face. Cleves gripped the arm of his chair and watched her intently.

""I—I had only a moment's mental freedom,"" she went on in a ghost of a voice. ""I was just able to rouse myself, fight off those murderous brain-fingers—let loose a clear mental ray.... And then, O God! I saw him in his room with his Kalmuck knife—saw him already on his way to murder me—Gutchlug Khan, the Yezidee—looking about in his bedroom for a shroud.... And when—when he reached for the bed to draw forth a fine, white sheet for the shroud without which no Yezidee dares journey deathward—then—then I became frightened.... And I killed him—I slew him there in his hotel bedroom on the floor above mine!""

Selden moistened his lips: ""That Oriental, Gutchlug, died from heart-failure in a San Francisco hotel,"" he said. ""I was there at the time.""

""He died by the fangs of a little yellow snake,"" whispered the girl.

""There was no snake in his room,"" retorted Cleves.

""And no wound on his body,"" added Selden. ""I attended the autopsy.""

She said, faintly: ""There was no snake, and no wound, as you say.... Yet Gutchlug died of both there in his bedroom.... And before he died he heard his soul bidding him farewell; and he saw the death-adder coiled in the sheet he clutched—saw the thing strike him again and again—saw and felt the tiny wounds on his left hand; felt the fangs pricking deep, deep into the veins; died of it there within the minute—died of the swiftest poison known. And yet——""

She turned her dead-white face to Cleves—""And yet there was no snake there!... And never had been.... And so I—I ask you, gentlemen, if souls do not die when minds learn to fight death with death—and deal it so swiftly, so silently, while one's body lies, unstirring on a bed—in a locked room on the floor below——""

She swayed a little, put out one hand rather blindly.

Recklow rose and passed a muscular arm around her; Cleves, beside her, held her left hand, crushing it, without intention, until she opened her eyes with a cry of pain.

""Are you all right?"" asked Recklow bluntly.

""Yes."" She turned and looked at Cleves and he caressed her bruised hand as though dazed.

""Tell me,"" she said to Cleves—""you who know—know more about my mind than anybody living——"" a painful colour surged into her face—but she went on steadily, forcing herself to meet his gaze: ""tell me, Mr. Cleves—do you still believe that nothing can really destroy my soul? And that it shall yet win through to safety?""

He said: ""Your soul is in God's keeping, and always shall be.... And if the Yezidees have made you believe otherwise, they lie.""

Recklow added in a slow, perplexed way: ""I have no personal knowledge of psychic power. I am not psychic, not susceptible. But if you actually possess such ability, Miss Norne, and if you have employed such knowledge to defend your life, then you have done absolutely right.""

""No guilt touches you,"" added Selden with an involuntary shiver, ""if by hypnosis or psychic ability you really did put an end to that would-be murderer, Gutchlug.""

Selden said: ""If Gutchlug died by the fangs of a yellow death-adder which existed only in his own mind, and if you actually had anything to do with it you acted purely in self-defence.""

""You did your full duty,"" added Benton—""but—good God!—it seems incredible to me, that such power can actually be available in the world!""

Recklow spoke again in his pleasant, undisturbed voice: ""Go back to the map, Miss Norne, and tell us a little more about this rather terrifying thing which you believe menaces the civilised world with destruction.""

Tressa Norne laid a slim finger on the map. Her voice had become steady. She said:

""The devil-worship, of which one of the modern developments is Bolshevism, and another the terrorism of the hun, began in Asia long before Christ's advent: At least so it was taught us in the temple of Erlik.

""It has always existed, its aim always has been the annihilation of good and the elevation of evil; the subjection of right by might, and the worldwide triumph of wrong.

""Perhaps it is as old as the first battle between God and Satan. I have wondered about it, sometimes. There in the dusk of the temple when the Eight Assassins came—the eight Sheiks-el-Djebel, all in white—chanting the Yakase of Sabbah—always that dirge when they came and spread their eight white shrouds on the temple steps——""

Her voice caught; she waited to recover her composure. Then went on:

""The ambition of Genghis was to conquer the world by force of arms. It was merely of physical subjection that he dreamed. But the Slayer of Souls——""

""Who?"" asked Recklow sharply.

""The Slayer of Souls—Erlik's vice-regent on earth—Hassan Sabbah. The Old Man of the Mountain. It is of him I am speaking,"" exclaimed Tressa Norne—with quiet resolution. ""Genghis sought only physical conquest of man; the Yezidee's ambition is more awful, for he is attempting to surprise and seize the very minds of men!""

There was a dead silence. Tressa looked palely upon the four.

""The Yezidees—who you tell me are not sorcerers—are using power—which you tell me is not magic accursed by God—to waylay, capture, enslave, and destroy the minds and souls of mankind.

""It may be that what they employ is hypnotic ability and psychic power and can be, some day, explained on a scientific basis when we learn more about the occult laws which govern these phenomena.

""But could anything render the threat less awful? For there have existed for centuries—perhaps always—a sect of Satanists determined upon the destruction of everything that is pure and holy and good on earth; and they are resolved to substitute for righteousness the dreadful reign of hell.

""In the beginning there were comparatively few of these human demons. Gradually, through the eras, they have increased. In the twelfth century there were fifty thousand of the Sect of Assassins.

""Beside the castle of the Slayer of Souls on Mount Alamout——"" she laid her finger on the map—""eight other towers were erected for the Eight Chief Assassins, called Sheiks-el-Djebel.

""In the temple we were taught where these eight towers stood."" She picked up a pencil, and on eight blank spaces of unexplored and unmapped Mongolia she made eight crosses. Then she turned to the men behind her.

""It was taught to us in the temple that from these eight foci of infection the disease of evil has been spreading throughout the world; from these eight towers have gone forth every year the emissaries of evil—perverted missionaries—to spread the poisonous propaganda, to teach it, to tamper stealthily with the minds of men, dominate them, pervert them, instruct them in the creed of the Assassin of Souls.

""All over the world are people, already contaminated, whose minds are already enslaved and poisoned, and who are infecting the still healthy brains of others—stealthily possessing themselves of the minds of mankind—teaching them evil, inviting them to mock the precepts of Christ.

""Of such lost minds are the degraded brains of the Germans—the pastors and philosophers who teach that might is right.

""Of such crippled minds are the Bolsheviki, poisoned long, long ago by close contact with Asia which, before that, had infected and enslaved the minds of the ruling classes with ferocious philosophy.

""Of such minds are all anarchists of every shade and stripe—all terrorists, all disciples of violence,—the murderously envious, the slothful slinking brotherhood which prowls through the world taking every opportunity to set it afire; those mentally dulled by reason of excesses; those weak intellects become unsound through futile gabble,—parlour socialists, amateur revolutionists, theoretical incapables excited by discussion fit only for healthy minds.""

She left the map and came over to where the four men were seated terribly intent upon her every word.

""In the temple of Erlik, where my girlhood was passed after the murder of my parents, I learned what I am repeating to you,"" she said.

""I learned this, also, that the Eight Towers still exist—still stand to-day,—at least theoretically—and that from the Eight Towers pours forth across the world a stream of poison.

""I was told that, to every country, eight Yezidees were allotted—eight sorcerers—or adepts in scientific psychology if you prefer it—whose mission is to teach the gospel of hell and gradually but surely to win the minds of men to the service of the Slayer of Souls.

""That is what was taught us in the temple. We were educated in the development of occult powers—for it seems all human beings possess this psychic power latent within them—only few, even when instructed, acquire any ability to control and use this force....

""I—I learned—rapidly. I even thought, sometimes, that the Yezidees were beginning to be a little afraid of me,—even the Hassani priests.... And the Sheiks-el-Djebel, spreading their shrouds on the temple steps, looked at me with unquiet eyes, where I stood like a corpse amid the incense clouds——""

She passed her fingers over her eyelids, then framed her face between both hands for a moment's thought lost in tragic retrospection.

""Kai!"" she whispered dreamily as though to herself—""what Erlik awoke within my body that was asleep, God knows, but it was as though a twin comrade arose within me and looked out through my eyes upon a world which never before had been visible.""

Utter silence reigned in the room: Cleves's breathing seemed almost painful to him so intently was he listening and watching this girl; Benton's hands whitened with his grip on the chair-arms; Selden, tense, absorbed, kept his keen gaze of a business man fastened on her face. Recklow slowly caressed the cold bowl of his pipe with both thumbs.

Tressa Norne's strange and remote eyes subtly altered, and she lifted her head and looked calmly at the men before her.

""I think that there is nothing more for me to add,"" she said. ""The Red Spectre of Anarchy, called Bolshevism at present, threatens our country. Our Government is now awake to this menace and the Secret Service is moving everywhere.

""Great damage already has been done to the minds of many people in this Republic; poison has spread; is spreading. The Eight Towers still stand. The Eight Assassins are in America.

""But these eight Assassins know me to be their enemy.... They will surely attempt to kill me.... I don't believe I can avoid—death—very long.... But I want to serve my country and—and mankind.""

""They'll have to get me first,"" said Cleves, bluntly. ""I shall not permit you out of my sight.""

Recklow said in a musing voice: ""And these eight gentlemen, who are very likely to hurt us, also, are the first people we ought to hunt.""

""To get them,"" added Selden, ""we ought to choke the stream at its source.""

""To find out who they are is what is going to worry us,"" added Benton. Cleves had stood holding a chair for Tressa Norne. Finally she noticed it and seated herself as though tired.

""Is Sanang one of these eight?"" he asked her. The girl turned and looked up at him, and he saw the flush mounting in her face.

""Sometimes,"" she said steadily, ""I have almost believed he was Erlik's own vice-regent on earth—the Slayer of Souls himself.""

Benton and Selden had gone. Recklow left a little later. Cleves accompanied him out to the landing.

""Are you going to keep Miss Norne here with you for the present?"" inquired the older man.

""Yes. I dare not let her out of my sight, Recklow. What else can I do?""

""I don't know. Is she prepared for the consequences?""

""Gossip? Slander?""

""Of course.""

""I can get a housekeeper.""

""That only makes it look worse.""

Cleves reddened. ""Well, do you want to find her in some hotel or apartment with her throat cut?""

""No,"" replied Recklow, gently, ""I do not.""

""Then what else is there to do but keep her here in my own apartment and never let her out of my sight until we can find and lock up the eight gentlemen who are undoubtedly bent on murdering her?""

""Isn't there some woman in the Service who could help out? I could mention several.""

""I tell you I can't trust Tressa Norne to anybody except myself,"" insisted Cleves. ""I got her into this; I am responsible if she is murdered; I dare not entrust her safety to anybody else. And, Recklow, it's a ghastly responsibility for a man to induce a young girl to face death, even in the service of her country.""

""If she remains here alone with you she'll face social destruction,"" remarked Recklow.

Cleves was silent for a moment, then he burst out: ""Well, what am I to do? What is there left for me to do except to watch over her and see her through this devilish business? What other way have I to protect her, Recklow?""

""You could offer her the protection of your name,"" suggested the other, carelessly.

""What? You mean—marry her?""

""Well, nobody else would be inclined to, Cleves, if it ever becomes known she has lived here quite alone with you.""

Cleves stared at the elder man.

""This is nonsense,"" he said in a harsh voice. ""That young girl doesn't want to marry anybody. Neither do I. She doesn't wish to have her throat cut, that's all. And I'm determined she shan't.""

""There are stealthier assassins, Cleves,—the slayers of reputations. It goes badly with their victim. It does indeed.""

""Well, hang it, what do you think I ought to do?""

""I think you ought to marry her if you're going to keep her here.""

""Suppose she doesn't mind the unconventionality of it?""

""All women mind. No woman, at heart, is unconventional, Cleves.""

""She—she seems to agree with me that she ought to stay here.... Besides, she has no money, no relatives, no friends in America——""

""All the more tragic. If you really believe it to be your duty to keep her here where you can look after her bodily safety, then the other obligation is still heavier. And there may come a day when Miss Norne will wish that you had been less conscientious concerning the safety of her pretty throat.... For the knife of the Yezidee is swifter and less cruel than the tongue that slays with a smile.... And this young girl has many years to live, after this business of Bolshevism is dead and forgotten in our Republic.""

""Recklow!""

""Yes?""

""You think I might dare try to find a room somewhere else for her and let her take her chances? Do you?""

""It's your affair.""

""I know—hang it! I know it's my affair. I've unintentionally made it so. But can't you tell me what I ought to do?""

""I can't.""

""What would you do?""

""Don't ask me,"" returned Recklow, sharply. ""If you're not man enough to come to a decision you may turn her over to me.""

Cleves flushed brightly. ""Do you think you are old enough to take my job and avoid scandal?""

Recklow's cold eyes rested on him: ""If you like,"" he said, ""I'll assume your various kinds of personal responsibility toward Miss Norne.""

Cleve's visage burned. ""I'll shoulder my own burdens,"" he retorted.

""Sure. I knew you would."" And Recklow smiled and held out his hand. Cleves took it without cordiality. Standing so, Recklow, still smiling, said: ""What a rotten deal that child has had—is having. Her father and mother were fine people. Did you ever hear of Dr. Norne?""

""She mentioned him once.""

""They were up-State people of most excellent antecedents and no money.

""Dr. Norne was our Vice-Consul at Yarkand in the province of Sin Kiang. All he had was his salary, and he lost that and his post when the administration changed. Then he went into the spice trade.

""Some Jew syndicate here sent him up the Yarkand River to see what could be done about jade and gold concessions. He was on that business when the tragedy happened. The Kalmuks and Khirghiz were responsible, under Yezidee instigation. And there you are:—and here is his child, Cleves—back, by some miracle, from that flowering hell called Yian, believing in her heart that she really lost her soul there in the temple. And now, here in her own native land, she is exposed to actual and hourly danger of assassination.... Poor kid!... Did you ever hear of a rottener deal, Cleves?""

Their hands had remained clasped while Recklow was speaking. He spoke again, clearly, amiably:

""To lay down one's life for a friend is fine. I'm not sure that it's finer to offer one's honour in behalf of a girl whose honour is at stake.""

After a moment Cleves's grip tightened.

""All right,"" he said.

Recklow went downstairs.

",False
" English, my English!  
Assesing ones strengths and weaknesses in any situation is a hard task. 
Usually we are not so good at recognizing our strengths, instead we spend our time being critical of ourselves, thus we tend to present a much more detailed side of our flaws. 
I will try to give you a reasonable picture of my good and not quite as good sides, as I see them, in reference to the four skills that were mentioned in the guide-lines handed out earlier in regard of this essay.   y biggest weakness by far is reading in English. 
I most of the time find it quite boring, it probably has to do with the fact that I'm a very outgoing person and therefore I like meeting people and I prefer to converse with them. 
A contributing factor to my feelings about reading also has to do with the fact that I'm just not used to it, which makes reading a bit uncomfortable. 
It takes time to read and it is not by far as fun as actually talking with someone.
You miss out on facial expressions and the dialogue for example. 
It's not that I can't manage, I just don't find it all that amusing, at times. 
This leads too the fact that I more or less skim through anything written in English, which ultimately results in my misinterpretations. 
But I am indeed working on that partly since it is required in order to be able to teach but also for my own benefit. 
I have been known to read books in English on occasion though. 
Preferably novels taking place during the nineteenth century when in my personal opinion the English language was at its best. 
I think it's terrible that we've lost so much of the chivalry, the sence of class and style that one can encounter in for example Jane Austens' ""Pride & Prejudice"", or the vocabulary used in Shakespeares works.  
This brings us to the speaking, which I believe is one of my strongest features, not only when it comes to speaking English, but speaking in general. 
I admit that it sometimes does get out of hand. 
You see, in my previous English classes I've always been the one to speak my opinion and discuss things that are important to me. 
This might and actually has lead to the fact that others who are not as forward as I am just sit quiet and on top of that they're doing absolutely nothing to change or take any kind of initiative to speak. 
This annoyes me, should I keep holding back to suit them or should I allow myself the oportunity to improve and broaden my horizons!? 
In this class though it doesn't seem to be a thing that even needs to be discussed, since everybody is fairly good in English, and not at all shy.  
I do know how and when to use a very formal vocabulary, but I tend to disregard that at times when I get ""too comfortable"" with the person I'm addressing, it's not a lack of respect or anything of that nature, I just get too ""buddy-ish"". 
I think that speaking a lot helps me improve all the aspects of English, writing, reading, listening but most importantly to communicate in any given situation. 
My desire to communicate enables people in my everyday life to correct me when I'm wrong and vice versa. 
I believe there are two kinds of English students. 
The ones that learn the language by using grammar and dictionaries and school-English, not that there is anything wrong with that. 
In fact I think it's a good start, a solid base to begin at. 
And then the others, much like myself, who learn by actually speaking, conversing and therefore picking up a rich vocabulary. 
Both have advantages and disadvantages. 
I've learned my English by speaking, practising and perhaps mostely by listening to others.  
Listening is also one of my strengths. 
For this is where I learn and adapt. 
I like watching news, documentaries or whatever is on in English. 
If I'm lucky I might even catch one of David Attenboroughs' ""wild-life-documentaries"". 
He has an elegant vocabulary and intonation. 
Although I must say that if it were possible to choose I'd pick one of the people behind the series of ""The young ones"", preferably Rick Mayallik. 
But I'm not apposed to listening to sports either, as long as it is English.  
I've come to the last of the four skills, namely writing. 
I think I'm fairly good at that. 
It takes a lot of hard work though. 
When I took ""Business English"" last fall we got to do a lot of inquiries, and business-letters which I enjoyed very much. 
At times it is easier to write when you have a given assignment, than to just come up with an idea.
This forces me to try not to drift away, as I have a tendency to do just that. 
I've never had an English pen pal, so I've never really written on a regular basis other than when I've been in school. 
My knowledge of gramatical terms is terrible which might be detected from time to time. 
Although I seem to be able to communicate without any larger difficulties.   
In conclusion: It seems I've got my work cut out for me for at least the next two years ahead. 
Hopefully I'll learn to master things and tackle my weak spots quickly. 
After that there are other challenges that need to be attended to.
"," In the name of Religion, you can get away with anything!  
With this argumentative piece I've tried to shed a light on the consequences of religion. 
What goes on, apart from all of the good deeds man does in the name of religion. 
I've devided them in five headings, all regarding different aspects of the topic. 
I myself am not a believer. 
I'm a naturally born critic or sceptic, if you will. 
I firmly believe that it should be up to every man/woman to inividually process information and facts that are given or thrown upon us. 
Just because something has been going on for a long period of time doesn't necessarily mean it's alright.  
1) Religion is prohibiting.  
It compromises the person. 
Religion prevents individual thinking and persuades mankind to accept and ""buy the whole concept"" of its ideas in the scriptures. 
The scriptures compromise peoples prerogative to think for themselves, they roothlesly rob people of their natural ability to evaluate and act on their own intuition. 
Religion makes the individual fall in line and not to question anything it says. 
Is that a good thing, I ask? 
Is compromising yourself necessary, in the name of religion?  
2) Religion causes conflicts.  
Lets look at religion in a passed-present-future perspective.  
I don't think I'm going out on a limb if I point out that more or less all wars, some excluded originates from religious grounds and believes. 
The discontent of people who don't agree with you or don't share your believes causes conflicts in the name of religion.  
3) Religion prevents individual freedom.  
In the end of 1980, an Irish-catholic girl was brutaly raped and got pregnant. 
She suffered in agony for she wanted to have the foetus removed but her religion forbids abortion. 
Her case was globaly acknowledged in the media and many, myself included felt for her and witnessed the madness, in the name of religion. 
The bible, an ancient book of moral clauses and devises for a pure way of life, said she couldn't have an abortion. 
Luckely she could get help in England and have the abortion done there. 
Imagine if she hadn't, what life would that child have led!?  
4) Religion discriminates.  
Sure, it unifies certain people who share the same ideology. 
On the other hand it condems different genres even within the same religion and thus the people who don't agree with them. 
People who don't share their point of view or religious believes. 
Is it righteous to commit cruel actions as long as it is in the name of religion?   
5) Religious downpayment!? 
Even in the early days you were able to go to your church and seek repentance for your sins. 
You mearly went to a priest and confessed and he would gladly give it to you. 
He might suggest that you ought to do a few Hail Mary's and suddenly in an instance you had been forgiven. 
Back then you could even assure your place in heaven when buying a letter of indulgence. 
Buy your way into the Lords glory, heaven, kingdom or what ever you preferred. 
Today's version of that same phenomena is called Televangelism. 
The 80's way to repentance. 
Televised fundraisings, usually held by a spiritual leader of some kind. 
He would very convincingly encourage the viewers to support his ""cause"", by donating obnoxiously large sums of money to him and the ""cause"".  
The cause might be o an honest nature, to build evangelist churches or help the poor. 
But in some cases they were spend for personal gain by the so called prophet. 
Outrageous news of spiritual leaders spending their money on prostitutes and extramarital affairs. 
These people who are supposed to set an example to their followers. 
I guess their only human, but it can't feel all that to be good old Mrs Lewis in the south of California, who recently donated a large sum to ""reverend Chastity"", and learn that he has spent ""her"" money on questionable things, can it!? 
It's a strange world we live in where some people profits from other peoples misery.   
Conclusion: Imagine a world without prejudice of religion, race, colour or believes! 
Almost impossible to picture I know. 
Religion should be more humble and ""human"", it should serve as a medium that brings people together, not to discriminate. 
I'm not saying that it should be removed or terminated, because many people need to be able to put their trust in a supreme being. 
It needs to be altered/changed or modified, since everything else has been in order to fit in in today's society. 
Many vicious things have been done, is being done and will be done in the name of religion. 
It is not acceptable! 
TAKE ACTION!
",True
" English as a world language  1. 
Introduction    My intention is to describe the importance of English and give a brief account of its history and how it has spread all over the world. 
I will begin with defining what a world language is and then I will describe the way English has reached the position it has today. 
I will continue with some up-to-date statistics and then mention some different varieties of English and explain the terms Pidgins and Creoles. 
I find it important to investigate how it is possible for a language spoken by so few at the beginning to become a world language which is quite familiar to so many people. 
My sources are secondary, since it is difficult to find good primary sources on this subject.    
2. 
Definition of a world language    What is a world language? 
According to the Swedish Encyclopaedia Nationalencyklopedin (1996) it is a language which is spoken or understood by a considerable number of people around the globe. 
Thus languages such as Chinese (Mandarin), English and Arabic are world languages, but not Swedish or artificial languages such as Esperanto. 
To a large extent the position of a language as a world language depends on the literature (books, papers and scientific works) that is written in that language. 
English meets with these criteria and is the dominating world language of today. 
Seen from a historical point of view otherlanguages have occupied the position as world languages; in the 17th and 18th centuries French was the dominating language. 
Before that Latin and Greek dominated in the medieval and ancient Europe.    
3. 
The spread of English    At the beginning English was not a widely spread language. 
In Shakespeare's time the number of people speaking English was as low as a few millions. 
As the population grew the number of English speakers did as well. 
English gradually became the main language of Wales, Ireland and the Scottish Highlands. 
When the English commenced to explore the wide world outside the British Isles the first step on the way to English becoming a world language had been taken. 
The English began to colonise other continents in the 17th and 18th centuries. 
The British settlers spoke English, but there were many settlements in the New World from other nations, and they all spoke their native tongue. 
For a very long time English, Spanish, French and Dutch colonisers fought for the dominance of the Caribbean and by the early 19th century Britain had control of a number of the West Indian islands. 
This resulted in English becoming the most spoken language of the area. 
The English also took control over the Indian subcontinent and a few years later the British colonisation of Australia took place. 
British rule was established in Singapore, British Guiana, New Zealand and Hong Kong and later on also in parts of West Africa, East Africa and Southern Africa (Barber 1993:234-5). 
The English dominance is mainly due to political and economical reasons, e.g. the strength of the British Empire during the 18th and 19th centuries. 
After World War two the position of the US became increasingly more powerful as regards political, economical, technical, scientific and generally cultural areas.    
4. 
Statistics    English is used in over 70 countries as an official or semi-official language. 
According to Stora Focus (1987) the largest English speaking populations are found in the US (230 million), the UK (56 million), Canada (17 million), Australia (15 million), New Zealand (3 million), Ireland (3 million) South Africa (2 million) and Jamaica (2 million). 
English is the official language in all these countries and has an official status in over 50 more countries with approximately one milliard inhabitants in all. 
The largest of these are India, Pakistan and the Philippines. 
As a first language English is spoken by more than 400 million people all over the world of today. 
Another 350 million use it regularly as a second language. 
A further 100 million speak it more or less fluently as a foreign language and of the estimated 40 million users of the Internet the majority communicate in English. 
Since the middle of the 20th century English is the language that is most frequently taught at school in most countries all over the world. 
Its central position in the international communication is due to the fact that the majority of all scientific publications printed in the world are in English. 
For example 2/3 of the medical journals published in 1985 were in English. 
The main language of books, newspapers, airports and air-traffic control, international business and academic conferences, technology, diplomacy, sport, international competitions, pop music and advertising is English.    
5. 
Varieties    ""Although English has become an international language, it lacks any independent standard codification or description that adequately reflects its international character,"" says Samuel Ahulu in his article ""General English"" (1997). 
There are nowadays many varieties of English and to discuss them in detail is far too complex to deal with here. 
Some of the varieties are; British English (abbreviated RP; Received Pronunciation), American English (AE) and Canadian English as well as Australian, New Zealand, South African, and West Indian English. 
These varieties differ as regards pronunciation, stress, intonation and vocabulary.    
6. 
Pidgins and Creoles    There are probably well over two hundred Pidgin- and Creole-languages in the world today, and they are based on many different languages such as French, Portuguese and Zulu but the largest number is based on English. 
Between six and twelve million people are still using Pidgin languages and between ten and seventeen million are using languages descending from Pidgins, so called Creoles. 
A Pidgin is an auxiliary language used mainly by people trading with each other when they have no common language. 
The word Pidgin is thought to be from a Chinese Pidgin version of the English word business. 
You might say that the Pidgin is a simplified form of the dominant language. 
The grammatical morphology is simple and the vocabulary is limited. 
Maybe the most known Pidgin is the one of Papua New Guinea, called Tok Pisin, which even is acknowledged in the country's constitution, although it nowadays more accurately should be described as a Creole. 
When a Pidgin develops beyond its role as a trade language and becomes the first language of a social community, it is called a Creole. 
There is, however, no sharp distinction between a Pidgin and a Creole. 
(Yule 1996, Barber 1993)    7. 
Conclusion    It is most likely that English will continue to keep its position as a world language also in the future. 
No other language shows any signs of threatening English as the leading language. 
Especially as regards the IT-market, which is the most important field of exploration and development in the future, English is the dominating language of communication. 
This is due to the fact that the US is the leading state on the market. 
It is extremely advantageous that there is such a language as English by which you are able to communicate all over the world. 
English is in truth a world language.
"," The Decline of the Birth-rate in Sweden  A negative trend that can be observed in the Swedish society of today is the decline of the birth-rate. 
In 1990 the number of children born in Sweden was 120 000, in 1994 it was 110 000 and in 1998 it was as low as 89 000. 
The number of deceased persons was 95 000, 92 000 and 93 000 respectively - in other words, there is an excess of deaths over births. 
At the same time the total population of Sweden increased from 8,6 million people in 1990 to 8,8 million in 1994 and to 8,9 million in 1998. 
These statistics, which I have obtained from the homepage of the SCB, illuminate this trend very clearly. 
But what are the reasons for this phenomenon?  
The main cause of the low birth-rate is the economic situation. 
It is simply too expensive for many people to bring up children in our society. 
Therefore family planning has become usual. 
The possibility to avoid unwanted pregnancies through preventives or the alternative to go through a legal abortion has of course had a very great impact on the birth-rates. 
The child allowance far from cover the loss of income during pregnancy, maternity leave and all other expenses involved when raising a child. 
Many couples decide to become parents later in life after having obtained a good job and earned some money and paid off their debts. 
Sometimes the decision is made too late and others never reach the point in life when they decide that the time to bring children into the world has come.  
Furthermore, women's position in society has gone through a radical change. 
Formerly a woman was expected to give birth to children and take care of the household. 
These were her major tasks in life. 
Nowadays women have the opportunity of achieving the same positions in business and professional life as men. 
Consequently, this has influenced the female way of life. 
After compulsory school an increasing number of young men and women continue their studies, at university for example. 
The studies often take many years to complete and giving birth to a child during that time is not what most women desire. 
After the studies quite a few women want to make a carrier and when they intend to climb the ladder of success children are not considered convenient. 
Thus women neither have the time nor want to raise children. 
It has now become more socially accepted than earlier to have a carrier instead of choosing ordinary family-life if you cannot combine them.   
What may the effects of this decline of the birth-rate be? 
The most terrifying aspect is that it makes the economy of the country weak. 
This may need some further explanation. 
The number of people above the age of 60 was in 1990 18% of the total population in the OECD-countries (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) and statisticians have reached the conclusion that the number will be 30% in 2030. 
In other words, the number of retired people will increase and thus the state-budgets will have to be used to take care of old people instead of the younger generation. 
This will lead to reduced contributions as regards education and the consequence will be a deteriorated school-system. 
The result will be a generation of people without sufficient education. 
Swedish know-how will decrease and thus weaken the Swedish economy. 
Also other contributions, for instance means for the infrastructure and the military, will diminish and the country will slowly begin to decay.   
Nevertheless, the troublesome problem with unemployment will fade away when the workers of today retire and their professional posts must be filled. 
Provided that the school-system still is satisfactory the young people will have no difficulty in finding jobs. 
This will, hopefully, lead to a rapid development in society and Sweden will catch up with what was lost during the time of ""depression"". 
In the long run this decreasing rate of nativity might be very healthy for the economy of the country, but the change should take place at a slower pace than it does at the moment. 
Attempts have been made from the government to encourage people to have more children.  
In conclusion this trend of decline of the birth-rate is due to the difficult economic situation of the last years. 
Lately signs indicate that the economic situation is improving and if this is the case, the birth-rate most certainly will improve. 
The fact that women make carriers probably does not influence the birth-rate as much as the economic situation does.
",True
" PART-TIME FATHERS  When a relationship has irretrievably broken down and separation is inevitable, the children are more often than not the real losers. 
Traditionally the child has always lived with the mother after the break-up of the parents. 
There is new trend emerging in Sweden, however, part-time fathers are becoming more common, that is, the child lives alternatively with his/her father/mother, for example, every second week. 
I have isolated three different causes that I think could have caused this. 
Firstly, the law reforms that have enabled fathers to play a bigger role in their children's lives. 
Secondly, the fathers seem to be more willing to take on more responsibility in raising their children. 
Thirdly, both parents seem to have become aware of the importance of the father's role in the children's lives. 
I have based my essay partly on my own views as well as newspaper articles from Dagens Nyheter and the book Sverige En Ekonomisk och Social Historia.  
In 1960s and 1970s marriage and especially de-facto relationships became more common than ever before. 
During the 1970s law reforms took affect which gave men and women equal opportunity to work and take care of their children. 
Sweden was unique in that it enabled fathers to go on paternity leave, although, not many of the men took the opportunity to stay at home and look after their children (Sverige p.159). 
In October of 1998 another law reform came into affect which gave the courts the right to grant shared custody and alternate living for the child, even if this went against the will of either partner (www.dn.se). 
The present day situation have changed, however, and with the 1998 law reform more parents have shared custody than they did before.   
The 1998 law reform has given fathers equal opportunity to actively take part in their children's every-day lives and they now have equal say in how to raise their children. 
The upbringing of a child was almost an exclusive right that the mothers had before, the father normally only spent time with his child on the week-end. 
This created an unrealistic picture in the child's mind of what a father should be like, he became someone that you only did fun things with. 
For many fathers being a ""week-end-dad"" is not enough and with the new reform they can now play an equally important role in their children's lives if they want to.  
Another development is that both parents are thinking of what is best for their children. 
There seem to be an increased awareness that a child need both parents for his/her psychological well-being. 
Some experts argue, however, that alternate living can be detrimental and that it can cause these children to feel that they do not have a permanent situation in their lives. 
A solution to this would be that the child has only one home, and the parents would be the ones having to move back and forth. 
According to children living in these situations, constant moving and packing of belongings seemed to be the most negative aspect with having two homes. 
They said that they otherwise felt satisfied and it had not affected them emotionally(www.dn.se). 
It seems that the children appear quite content with living alternately with their parents, and conclusively it does not seem that this type arrangement would be harmful for the children. 
Shared custody seems to be a good solution to a difficult situation, it is an advantage if a child maintains a healthy relationship with either parent. 
The negative aspect, however, is as I said before that we all need a stable situation. 
Ideally would (of course) be if the family was one unit, But when this is not possible the model of alternative living seems to be a good solution, and it is apparent that these parents are acting in the best interest of their children.  "," ""Taboo or Not Taboo""  In the article ""Cleaning up the language"" by Shirley E Peckham, the author takes a clear stand on children who use swear words in their language. 
She has a very conservative view of language and wants it to be like ""in the good old days"" when she was a child. 
What she does not realise is that language is changing all the time; if it does not change it is dead. 
The part that seems to disturb her the most is that she becomes ""filled with disgust"" when she hears children use bad language. 
Furthermore, she is worried that allowing this kind of words will lead to bad language used by everybody in the future. 
She has strong opinions on the use of language but nevertheless she does not have any suggestions on how this matter should be solved.  	
One way for Peckham to solve this matter and make her feel better would perhaps be to try to talk with the children involved. 
Unfortunately, it seems like she is of the opinion that children are as disgusting as swear words so I doubt she will ever confront them. 
My experience though, is that it is often a good idea to talk to children about different problems that occur. 
If you talk to them on an appropriate level and do not patronize them you have at least a possibility to change a negative pattern. 
To use the method that Peckham is suggesting as solution, namely to box a child around his or her ears, is what I would call disgusting. 
Peckham has been raised in this manner and perhaps it is the only way she knows to demand respect and to make someone listen to her. 
But to my mind abusing a child by threatening or hitting him or her is not a very constructive or educational way of learning. 
I do believe that children learn better if they are secure and not scared of the people around them. 	
In her article Peckham also refers to this language as ""foul anti-social"". 
I would say that she has misinterpreted the situation completely. 
On the contrary, the language between children in a group is definitely a very social phenomenon. 
By using a certain kind of language it is possible for them to identify themselves with the rest of the group and this is of great importance while growing up. 
In addition I am convinced that most children have the judgement not to use bad language when it is not suitable, for example when they talk to older relatives. 
In contrast to Peckham, I do believe in children's ability to adjust to different situations.  	
This above-mentioned ability is also the answer to the author's fear of swear words becoming general practice in the future. 
Perhaps is it also a question of maturity. 
This kind of words may be common in children's language but when they grow up these words usually reduce in number or at least they are not used in public so frequently. 
Even Mrs Peckham admits that she swore when she was a child, even if she does it reluctantly. 
For her it seems to be a question about swear words being taboo or not taboo and maybe the reason to this is the way she was treated as a child when she swore. 	
To sum up I would like to say that it is not so difficult for me to accept children that swear or the words in themselves. 
But to Mrs Peckham and the likes of her I cannot emphasise enough the importance of verbal communication to solve a matter instead of using violence. 
Communication will lead to children feeling safe and is not that what we all want?
",False
" Why Are the Young Abandoning Party Politics?  
Today's youth is not as interested in party politics as were earlier generations. 
The parties' youth organizations have lost more than 60% of their members between 1984 and 1995 (Larsson 1995:17) and the political parties are held in low esteem by many young people. 
This is very serious according to some experts because the parties are the foundation of our political system. 
It used to be that joining a party was the natural thing to do if you wanted to get involved, but this is not the case anymore, according to the political scientists Bück and Müller (199?: 293). 
Many people are very committed to changing things, but they choose to work outside the party system. 
They will often join a non-governmental organizations, that focuses on the one issue that they feel is most important, such as human rights or the environment. 
Nevertheless, the parties are still the most important political organizations. 
Why is it that they are losing ground among young people?  
A possible cause is that young people do not like the working methods of the parties, which are often perceived as typical of the generation of politicians that are now leading them. 
The political scientist Anders Westerholm points out that it is important to differentiate between the interest in politics, which is actually increasing among the young, and the trust in politicians, which is declining (Forselius 1991:13). 
Many young people associate politics with bald middle-aged men who do not always have the best of the people in mind. 
The last years' scandals involving politicians spending tax money on foolish things, like porn clubs, have certainly not strengthened the trust in them. 
Moreover, politics is often perceived as stressful, unglamorous, and ill paid. 
The parties are hierarchically organized and it will take a long time to work your way toward the top. 
The older politicians are sometimes unwilling to let younger people into the top of the party. 
Some young members of Moderaterna complained about that recently when Bo Lundgren was elected the new leader of the party.  
Furthermore, there is a gap between the generations when it comes to what topics they consider most important, scholars claim. 
Young people are not as interested in classical political issues such as the fair distribution of wealth and resources, questions that have dominated Swedish politics for decades. 
Instead, young people tend to be more interested in ""heavy"" existential questions like environmental issues and their own inner growth (Forselius 1991:13). 
We are perhaps less materialistic, and the parties don't deal with the topics that we find most important.  
Another cause for young people to look to alternative ways of getting involved in politics is that they want to see results fast, and the political system cannot offer that. 
It is in its nature to work cautiously; proposals travel slowly through the political system before a decision can be taken. 
Changes do not happen overnight. 
With the new media technology information is spread around the world very quickly. 
Changes in politics and society often occur fast, and the political system cannot always keep up. 
Non-governmental organizations, so called NGOs, such as Amnesty International and Greenpeace are often considered more effective vehicles of change. 
The work of NGOs is often more visible and perhaps more ""glamorous"" than that of the political parties. 
Besides, it may be easier to stand behind the goals of a non-governmental organization than supporting an entire party program. 
Working for a NGO together with other people who also feel very strongly about a cause can create a sense of belonging and verify your identity. 
Bück and Müller point out that the political parties have lost their socializing function (Bück & Müller199?: 291). 
Someone who is interested in politics can turn to the media for information or join a non-governmental organization. 
There are many alternatives to the political parties.  
It is likely that the parties will remain the most important players on the political scene for many years to come. 
However, the fact that fewer and fewer young people choose to join a party is a well-established trend. 
It is impossible to make an exhaustive list of the causes of such a complex trend, but I believe that some of the most important ones are disregard for the working methods of the parties; the gap between the generations when it comes to what issues they consider most important; and the proliferation of non-governmental organizations that are perceived as better suited for dealing with the problems that arise in modern society.   
"," Granting Homosexual Couples the Right to Adopt  Recently an editorial that appeared in Svenska Dagbladet (1999-10-03) stated that homosexual couples must not be given the right to adopt children. 
According to the writer, adopted children are very vulnerable. 
They have been separated from their biological parents; they have often had several caretakers; and they have left their native country at an early age. 
Growing up in a family that differs from other families would be adding to their trauma. 
In this essay I intend to argue against this view. 
I do not think that having two parents of the same sex necessarily has to be a bad experience, which the author of the editorial seems to imply. 
People who are homosexual have experienced being cast as different, and that experience can benefit a child who feels rootless.  
The author of the editorial does not seem to think that homosexuals are worse parents than heterosexuals (or at least s/he does not say so); he is afraid that the child will be harassed for having parents that are homosexual. 
But according to Niclas Berggren, a member of RFSL's (the national organization for sexual equality) board of directors, research has shown that children growing up with gay or lesbian parents are not worse off than are children with heterosexual parents, and they are able to make friends as easily (Svenska Dagbladet 1999-10-07). 
It is cynical to deny gays and lesbians the right to adopt because their child may be teased; all children suffer the risk of being teased.  
We see then that having homosexual parents need not be traumatic. 
There is every reason to believe that homosexual couples can make just as good adoptive parents as heterosexual couples can. 
The Swedish authorities interview couples who wish to adopt and their suitability as parents is carefully considered. 
Assuming that homosexual couples will be given the right to adopt eventually, those that pass these tests may actually have advantages over many heterosexual couples. 
Berggren argues that their experiences of being homosexual in a society where heterosexuality is the norm will help them understand the feelings of alienation that their child may feel growing up. 
The ""coming out"" experience have afforded them maturity and knowledge of what it is like not to be completely accepted by society, and an adopted child may benefit greatly from this. 
Many Swedes who were adopted from another country feel rootless as children, and feel that they do not quite belong in the Swedish society. 
Because of this, Svenska Dagbladet's editorial argues, they must grow up in a safe and peaceful environment. 
I think that gay and lesbian couples are just as capable as heterosexual parents of giving them that.  
The editorial writer goes on to say that the gay and lesbian movement is trying to use children as tools for gaining legal rights and acceptance from mainstream society. 
This implies that people who are homosexual have ulterior motives for wanting the right to adopt, which I think is very unfair to assume. 
I cannot believe that a homosexual couple that wishes to adopt a child does so because they want to further a cause. 
They do it because they long for a child and know that they are able to provide a good and loving home environment for him or her. 
That must be the starting point, and it is in itself reason enough to give homosexual couples the legal right to adopt. 
If we accept that they can be just as good parents as anyone else, we must give them that right; and, in time, because they will be fairly common, families with two parents of the same sex will not be looked upon as abnormal. 
Naturally this process will take time, but I feel certain that it will happen. 
Today many households consist of a single parent and a child, or unmarried couples with children, all constellations that were judged inappropriate not long ago. 
Granting homosexual couples the right to adopt would be admitting that they are just as fit to be parents as are heterosexuals, and it would be an important signal to the rest of the world. 
The author of the editorial argues that it does not matter what Sweden decides; no country in the world will give up its children for adoption to a country that allows gays to adopt. 
This is unfortunate, but I still think that Swedish lawmakers should set a good example.  
If we accept that gays and lesbians are just as good parents as are heterosexuals, should we not focus on changing people's attitudes toward homosexuality instead of fiercely denying people who are homosexual rights that everyone else has? 
I agree that children should not be used to sway opinions. 
Gays should be given the right to adopt because they are able to provide a good environment for the child, not in order for them to gain acceptance by mainstream society. 
However, granting them that right would also have the good effect of normalizing families with parents of the same sex, and it would be a powerful statement to all homophobes.  
Summary In an editorial (Svenska Dagbladet 1999-10-03), the author argues that the gay and lesbian movement is trying to use children as tools for gaining legal rights and acceptance from mainstream society. 
S/he feels that adoption should be about what is best for the child, and not what is best for people who are homosexual. 
According to the author, adopted children are very vulnerable. 
They have been separated from their parents and natural surroundings at an early age, and growing up in a family that differs significantly from other families would be adding to their trauma. 
Furthermore, all adoptions have to be approved by the child's native country, and there is no country that would allow its children to be adopted by gay or lesbian couples in Sweden.
",True
" Why do Swedish Women Wait with Having Children until their Thirties?  
Today it seems that the Swedish woman waits longer and longer to have children; this is a development which has come to a visible peak in the 1990s when it is common that women are 30 or even 40 years old when they have their first child. 
Comparing to women of earlier periods of the 20th century women of today have greater freedom to choose when they want to have their first child, that is because they are more independent, both socially and economically. 
Women of today do not have the same pressure to settle down, as earlier, they do not have to marry and have children to secure her future wellbeing. 
Instead of having to stay at home with their children, like their grandmothers did, women of the 1980s and 90s have the opportunity, and also the pressure, to educate themselves and get a career. 
There are a lot of causes for this development of having children at a high age, and I will in this essay give some possible reasons which may have changed the views and the lifestyle of the contemporary Swedish woman. 
In the beginning of the century, the place of the woman was in the house, and not in the man's world of work. 
She was supposed to take care of the children (as well as the husband), and had a lot of demands from family, husband and society. 
In those years women could not choose their own way of life and when married, they often had their first babies at an early age, partially because there were no contraceptives, which there are today. 
This was just as natural to them, as it is for us today that we can choose when we want to have children. 
Today there is a different attitude towards women and the ideal of a woman has changed significantly since our grandmothers were young. 
The word 'woman' does no longer have the same meaning as 'wife' and 'mother', as it might have had earlier - it now has a meaning of an independent human being with the same rights as a man. 
Women are now given a more important role in society and can enjoy the possibility of creating their own happiness, whether it is with children or not. 
I think most women want, and need, to explore the world around them a bit more, before they commit themselves to a baby and they probably find support for this from their mothers and grandmothers, who were not able to choose. 
Not to forget they also have to find a suitable partner/father, as ""it takes two to tango"", and this might seem like an almost impossible task as the rate of divorces is awfully high nowadays.  
Furthermore, most women cannot rely on being taken cared of by men anymore; they have to build their own social status, whether they like it or not. 
Like in many other countries the pace of life in Sweden is fast, and anyone who wants to succeed in life has to get a higher education, which demands many years of study to get good job and a career. 
And after the long education they obviously have to find employment, where they have to stay for a longer period to make sure they have their position secured, if in the future they would like to have a baby. 
There have been some employment cases where women have been rejected a position because of their intention of having children in the future, and some have also been refused to come back to their jobs after the maternity leave. 
Having this in mind, it is not difficult to understand the women's decision to wait with children. 
I myself am a young woman and if I will ever have a child I will wait until I am sure I have all the necessary prerequisites for bringing up a child; a solid economic ground, a satisfying education and job, a suitable home, etc. 
In the 1990s the pressure and opportunities of a Swedish woman are different than women of earlier periods, and she seems to be more focused on getting an education and a good job than a good child. 
The child question has become a practical issue, and there is a lot of consideration to do before a woman can decide to have a child, i.e. she has to have a good ground for bringing up a child, financial issues, career issue, etc. 
And when she eventually realises she can and wants to have a baby, she is probably already about 35-40 years old and founds her biological clock ticking away.
"," Politics and Education  On numerous occasions during the last couple of years it has been argued that the Swedish school system is not working sufficiently. 
Many debates dealing with the school system have taken place and a number of changes aiming at improvement have been made. 
In an article on this topic two Swedish politicians present the Swedish Folkpartiet's view on today's school system, and what changes they consider necessary to make the Swedish school ""the best in Europe"". 
If giving reports is a good thing and, if so, at what age students should begin recieving them are two main issues dealt with in the article. 
The opinion put forward, which I certainly agree with, is that reports are an important part of a working school system and that these reports should be given at an early stage in the eduction.  
One important question when discussing reports is that of why it is so essential to do evaluations.. 
To decide whether a system is working sufficiently or not it has to be evaluated, and when evaluating something one has to be prepared for both positive and negative results. 
It is important though, not to be afraid of getting bad results. 
To be able to solve a problem one has to identify it; finding a problem is the first step towards a solution. 
This also applies to giving reports to students. 
Through evaluating students and their skills one can detect problems that might exist and come to terms with them. 
Unfortunately, in the Swedish school system, evaluation has got an ugly ring to it. 
In aiming for equality between students it has been emphasised that all students should learn the exact same thing. 
In practice this is of course impossible since all students are different and talented to different degrees. 
It is inevitable that some children will learn less than others. 
Although this is something every mature individual realises, it still seems as a fact many choose to pretend does not exist. 
One way of doing this is to simply not evaluate students. 
By avoiding evaluation the risk of getting any negative results on paper is abolished and no student has to worry about being pointed out as poorly talented in any subject. 
The thing forgotten though, is that no positive results are identified either, and in the long run some students will probably be shocked by their short-comings.  
Where the existence of reports in the Swedish school system is concerned, the article states that it is essential. 
Furthermore it is argued that the reports should be in written form, not verbal as they to a great extent are today. 
Getting a report card which clearly states how things are going for you in a specific subject is of great importance. 
I believe that for both the individual student and his or her parents this is a concrete way of finding out how things are working, or perhaps not working, in school. 
Of course, it could be argued that this information might as well be told verbally by the teacher and still have the same effect. 
However, the important difference is that a written report is a more direct way of knowing; it clearly states if you have done well or badly in a subject. 
In addition, when something is written down on paper it is more likely to be taken seriously than if it is verbally communicated.   
In my opinion evaluation is a very important aspect of a school system when it comes to identifying problems and coming to terms with them. 
With this in mind it should be obvious that it is important to get this type of feedback at quite an early stage. 
If problems are identified in time the chance to solve them is of course greater. 
In the article it is argued that the fifth grade is a proper age to start giving reports and that the eighth grade, when the first report is given today, is far too late. 
It seems probable that if a student in eighth grade, a fourteen-year-old, is made aware that he or she is doing poorly in school it is not likely that a sudden interest in improving the skills necessary will appear. 
Consequently, it would be better to start giving reports earlier in order to make students aware of their strengths and weaknesses in due time. 
This way they are given more time to solve possible problems and maybe even a chance to prevent them from arising.  
The fact that all children are different and have different strengths and weaknesses is perhaps the most important one when dealing with the constitution of a school system. 
The school exists for the children who attend it and consequently every aspect of it should be adjusted to them. 
They should all be given the opportunity to develop as best they can, and they should have equal chances to succeed. 
The crucial point, though, is that allowing children to develop equally is not the same as making them into copies of each other. 
Equality in school is to help students who have problems to learn how to deal with them and to encourage gifted students to keep up the good work. 
And the right way to go about this is to evaluate students and to do it early.
",False
" Cause document  A disturbing and, in my view, a democratically threatening trend in Swedish society today is the decrease in general election participation. 
The number of registered voters that use their vote has dropped from 90.7% in 1979 to as little as 81.4% in the 1999 election, (www.riksdagen.se). 
This means that approximately one out of five Swedes do not take advantage of the fundamental democratic right to vote. 
In my experience Swedish people in general are not interested in discussing party politics and among younger adults it seems to be terribly out of fashion to do so. 
In the latter circles it does not seem to be a question of not having an opinion, but rather that those opinions do not fit under the party political system. 
Since I am still a great believer in the democratic party system I will take this opportunity to explore some of the possible causes for the low interest in party politics as well as its consequence - the falling number of voters.  
When discussing politics in general I have found that most Swedes, whether they have used their vote or not, appear to feel that they cannot really make a difference. 
This sense of not being able to influence may have grown out of the fact that Sweden has been led by a number of different parties during the last couple of centuries, and the difference between them has not been that great. 
Another factor could be the Swedish electoral system which makes it quite difficult for one single party to gain complete majority, i.e. total control. 
This is one of the reasons for the fairly stable running of Sweden, however, it seems that more and more Swedes find it hard to tell the different parties apart. 
A further possible explanation to the nonchalant attitude towards voting may be that the Swedish people have become very used to living in a democracy. 
Therefore they have difficulties seeing the importance of being active in the voting process as a way to protect the democratic system as such. 
Hopefully this attitude will change now that we actually have a potential threat to our democracy through the steadily growing nazi-movement. 
Even so, this does not explain why the decrease in voting participation has not happened earlier. 
One possible explanation to why the drop in election participation has happened now could be the political issues discussed today. 
Since society as a whole has become much more complex in its social and economical structure the political issues discussed have become quite abstract to the common man. 
Politics today are not just a question of ideology where your instincts can guide you, but a jungle of information with which you need to keep yourself informed to be able to partake in the political debate. 
The fact that so many Swedes join non-party political organizations like Greenpeace, which only deal with certain issues and in that way become more tangible, would support this thesis. 
The low participation in the last EU election also points in the same direction. 
It is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to be updated on every political issue today - to distinguish right from wrong - and this may very well explain this downward trend of participation in party politics.  
Apparently Swedish voters are not the only ones having difficulty making the distinction between right and wrong. 
Swedish politicians have been involved in several embarrassing scandals where the tax payers money have been used in a wrongful way - paying for private parties, licquer, visits to brothels and so on. 
It has become evident that several of these government officials do not practice what they preach. 
Even though this may not be a new phenomenon it is not until recent years that their less attractive traits and stupid actions have been exposed by the media and therefore become known to the public. 
This of course, have damaged the trust towards them in a huge way and many Swedes feel cheated out of the equal society they thought they lived in. 	
When discussing the decline of interest in party politics it is hard to single out one of the above causes as being the dominate one. 
They all play a big part in this downward trend but to what extent they have influenced different individuals is impossible for me to say. 
People obviously have different reasons for not using their vote, but as I mentioned there are some changes that may turn things around. 
If the nazi-movement continues to infiltrate our democracy people will probably take their democratic participation more seriously and feel that they really can make a difference - which is what democracy is all about.
"," GIRLS BEGIN TO DIET AT THE AGE OF SEVEN  According to research a new trend is developing showing that more girls begin to diet earlier in life, some of them already at the age of seven. 
Klara Halvarsson is a researcher at Uppsala university. 
Her results prove that there are not more girls dieting today than five years ago, but those who start tend to be younger. 
In her interviews she found that ten percent of the first and second graders claimed that they were on a diet and that dieting is increasing most among girls between 9 and 13. 
This is a very disquieting trend since girls that are on close diets early in life are more likely to develop eating disorders which later on can lead to such illnesses as anorexia and bulimia. 	 
This shows us that something must be wrong in society. 
What makes children want to diet? ...
One reason could be the inability to cope with a stressful environment. 
Children are not allowed to do things in their own speed of action. 
They are exposed to long demanding days starting with school in the morning followed by the after-school center in the afternoon. 
Even their spare time is often planned with activities. 
Children are not able to put limits for themselves in the same way as adults are nor do they have the ability to analyze what it is that make them feel stressed. 
Wanting to loose weight can be a way for girls to show that the world is out of their control.  	 
Another reason could be that girls are more often suffering from a lack of selfesteem. 
They do not demand as much attention from their teachers as boys do and they are often quiet. 
It is easy for teachers to forget about them and easy for these girls to feel neither heard nor seen. 
They feel as if they were invisible and cannot compete with their more confident class mates. 
These problems are important for both parents and teachers to be aware of and watch out for. 
But according to the research they are not the main causes for why girls start dieting at a lower age. ...
The actual cause seems to be a combination of the idealized image of what girls should look like spread by the media and the influence dieting mothers have on their daughters. 
What is conveyed to young girls through magazines, commercials, tv shows and teenage popstars is that they must be thin and good looking in order to be accepted. 
Girls are bombarded with the message that having a beautiful body is necessary to succeed in life. 
Make-up and looks are very common topics of conversation even among the youngest schoolgirls. 
Negative feelings associated with the image girls have of their own bodies is even further reenforced if their mothers are either on or between diets most of the time.  	 
Since I am a mother myself and have a daughter at six it makes me think about what ideas I pass on to her. 
Perhaps it is about time to examine our thoughts before we decide whether we want to pass them on to our daughters or not. 
We might not be able to do much about the media but at least we are capable of changing ourselves and that seems to be as good a place as any to start if we wish to turn this negative trend.  
",False
" BE WARY OF THE NEWS  According to an estimation from 1990, the average Swede watches about 50,000 hours of television during a lifetime. 
This is as much as 30 years of full time work with today's working hours. 
Consequently, it is vital to be critical of what we are watching. 
One of television's tasks is to transmit news, and it is tempting to believe that what is communicated is the important events in the world, and that those are impartially conveyed to us. 
It is important to bear in mind that this is not always the case. 	 
To begin, the news is produced by people with values, prejudices, and various outlooks. 
They choose to present specific events in the world and give them news value. 
Thus, the news is interpretations of what the world looks like at a specific moment, and often the news comes across as objective and true.  	 
To further clarify, a piece of news given to us in Sweden might be put forward from a completely different angle, in another country's newscast. 
Also, what is news to us might not even be mentioned in another country. 
When visiting the Emirates I was reminded of this. 
There the news mainly dealt with events in that part of the world, and Europe seemed distant and only scattered news items occurred. 
This implies that we tend to consider what is happening closer to us as more important. 
We are not as emotionally affected by an earth quake in India, or even in Istanbul, as we would be if it happened in a European country that we could more easily relate to. 
For my part I was filled with fear though, on hearing about the severe earth quake that took many lives in Istanbul, but I lived there and have a connection to that country. 
Thus, events that occur at places we are emotionally attached to, affect us more, since we can relate to them, and they appear more real. 
Media take advantage of this though, and have a way of reinforcing this feeling. 
To exemplify, if we go back five years, to when the Estonia sank, many of us probably remember Kent and Sara who struggled together and survived the terrible ordeal. 
That night they decided that if they survived they would go out for dinner together. 
This became a tear-jerking story, which took us all to the ship that awful night. 
Is is of course an ingenious way of catching and holding our attention, but we need to be aware of the fact that we only get to taste what is happening out there, and that events are often distorted through what the reporter says, through different shooting angles, and through editing.  	 
Moreover, news is turning more and more into entertainment. 
It is no wonder, since it has to compete with the growing and fast spreading entertainment television. 
By being fun, thrilling, or exciting, news aims to reach us. 
Especially young people of today easily get bored and their attention span is very short. 
In order to create interest, newsmakers have been forced to change their way of conveying news. 
There are so many channels nowadays to select between that watching the news is hardly a first choice. 
It is sad that society doesn't take this more seriously. 
If children and adolescents are not encouraged and spurred on to concentrate on more serious matters than entertainment, they will surely bump into problems and situations in the future that they don't know how to handle.  	 
Furthermore, I would like to point out the fact that specific groups tend to be portrayed in different ways on the news. 
Politicians, for example, hold a prominent position in media. 
They show a standard behaviour, considered normal for that group. 
They rarely show human traits like happiness or anger, and when it does occur, the feelings are very contained. 
Top politicians need not even have anything of importance to convey. 
They can talk about the weather, or simply state that they have nothing in particular to say. 
Moreover, young people are often presented among startling events like crimes or accidents. 
Inventive youths who are active in theatre, music or sports are also shown. 
Occasionally they appear in connection with social issues, like unemployment. 
Then they can say if they are angry, worried or unhappy. 
But there are always some experts that analyse and say what they actually feel. 
Another group that we see little of is old people. 
When they do appear, we either pity and feel sorry for them, or they come across as a big bunch of complainants, worrying about low pension or bad care at the old people's homes. 
Sometimes though, elderly people are shown as individuals. 
Then they exhibit traits of cheerfulness, and are put forward as active and good old age people. 	 
To conclude, it is important to realise that television has great power and that we must be wary and critical of what the news intends to convey and in what way it does so, since it really isn't impartial and rarely tells the whole truth!
"," 		THE RIGHT SIDE THERE SHOULD BE MORE EMPHASIS ON ARTISTIC SUBJECTS AT SCHOOL  ost mental and physical abilities change and develop as people grow. 
It is a salient feature in our schoolsystem that a great deal is done to cultivate skills such as reading, writing and arithmetics. 
However, the development of artistic skills seems to come to a stop at quite an early age. 
Many grown-ups stay at a 14-year-old-level when it comes to expressing themselves artistically. 
One of the reasons why schools favour the more theoretical subjects is that it is a prevalent notion that what you learn in arts classes is of little use in daily life, which is not true! 	 
Firstly, in art classes we deal with the fact that we live in a world where we are drowned with impressions and images such as advertisements, commercials, musicvideos and news-images from various media. 
Commercials are often flashy, entertaining and inventive. 
But their purpose is to make us buy things and they do not reflect the society we live in today. 
Not even the daily news gives us a correct image of the world. 
People with values, ideas and prejudice choose events and make us think that these are the major happenings in the world, when in fact these images are interpretations of what the world looks like at a certain moment. 
Often newsflashes come out as objective and true, so it is vital to be critical and to understand images and their connotations and not just perceive them as the ""truth"". 	 
Moreover, according to experts' research the brain is divided into two parts - the left and the right. 
Reading, writing and arithmetics are skills that are usually located in the left hemisphere of the brain. 
This part is also considered as dominant and even tends to take over tasks which are more suitable for the right side of the brain to handle. 
The right hemisphere is generally seen as the subordinate one. 
It is alotted artistic abilities, thus good at things like music, drawing, creativity and perception. 
All these knacks seem somewhat forgotten in our schools, and although they are valued they are considered to be a natural result from using ones verbal and analytical skills. 
However, I will argue that this is not the case and that we need specifically to cultivate the right side of our brain, something that is hardly possible to do during one sixty-minute-lesson of art once a week. 	 
People in general are of the opinion that the ability to draw or perform other artistic activities is something that a minority of people are gifted with and if you can't already draw there is no use in trying to learn. 
It is like deciding not to learn a foreign language because you can't already speak it. 
Actually, the difficulty to draw lies rather in learning how to observe or being able to switch over to a particular way of seeing. 
From the time we grow up we are used to seeing things through words; a cat, an apple, a tree and so on. 
Consequently, the left side of the brain is activated and tends to put things into categories and to symbolise things. 
We all have a symbol for a face, an eye or a house, but this is not what they really look like. 
To draw is a process which demands careful observation and meticulous perception of details and all kinds of information. 
This can be trained in a number of ways and the trick is to give the brain a task which the left hemisphere either doesn't know how to perform or doesn't want to perform. 
This demands a lot of concentration. 
For example, you can study an up-side-down-image without having seen it the correct way first and try and draw what you see. 
When you focus on how the lines meet instead of what the image actually represents the left side becomes confused and since it can't compare the information to any stored memories it leaves the task to the more suitable right side. 
The majority of people are not aware of the fact that we actually neglect one side of the brain and its' capacity. 
Thus, the school has a huge responsibility in conveying the importance of exploring our whole brain, not just a part of it. 	 
What is more, the left and the right side of the brain actually cooperate in several areas. 
Psychologists, for example, use drawing as a method to release and understand hidden emotions. 
A drawing from the heart can be of immense help when solving an emotional problem and revealing what you actually feel. 
When the right side of the brain has shown the left side what the problem is the left side can solve the problem through language and logical thinking. 
In conclusion, to fully function as human beings there is a need for the revaluation of artistic skills and perception. 
Today the schoolsystem rewards the skills of the left side of the brain to such an extent that much of our childrens' inherent opportunities of the right side will stay undeveloped.
",True
" Fifth child  After having read the novel ""The fifth child"" by Doris Lessing, I am now to write an essay dealing with two aspects of literature: setting and theme. 
I will describe what I see as the main theme and the importance of the setting for that theme. 
I will try to make extra use of the section starting ""A happy Family"" and ending ""She had intended to sound humorous"". 
When referring to pages in the book they are from the Flamingo version.   
I think that the main theme in this novel is that if you are too naive and expect life to be perfect the consequences becomes harder, when life does not turn out the way you so strongly thought it would. 
The main characters in this novel, David and Harriet Lovatt think that they can handle everything and when Ben is born they realise that they cannot, which breaks their dreams. 
I think that the author want to tell us that every person must realise that he is only human and not think that if you only live well you will be protected from every bad thing. 
Connected to this I also think that, by listening to other peoples' advice and not only expect them to help when it is needed, you can avoid getting stuck in a bubble that makes you think that nothing will happen to you. 
There is simply no connection between wish to live well and avoidance of bad luck. 
Harriet even blames Sarah and William for causing their baby's syndrome. 
""Sarah said to David, privately, that she did not believe it was bad luck: Sarah and Williams's unhappiness, their quarrelling, had probably attracted the mongol child...
/"" (29)   The story takes place in their house, which is very big and often filled with people they like. 
People come there to ""immerse themselves in safety, comfort, kindness"" (30) I see this as a symbol for the island they live on. 
They never have to face reality; they choose who they want to meet and they have them in their own house. 
""Outside this fortunate place, their family, battered the storms of the world"" (29). 
They are not interested in what happens outside either; they want to bring the good things inside their house. 
""The young Lovatts made themselves read the papers, and watch the News on television, though their instinct was to do neither"" (p30) They are not only mentally isolated from reality but in some way also physically isolated. 
After Ben's birth the setting really changes. 
Family members not come to visit to the same extent and the outside world (Ben problems and his criminal friends) comes into their house at the same time as their other children look for better places do stay. 
They started off as a happy family (a word that comes back all the time until Ben is born) but if they had been more realistic and ""been outside"" their house more they would probably have been more prepared for what could happen.    
I believe that the fact that this story is set in the sixties and the seventies is important for the theme. 
They live in ""The greedy and selfish sixties"" which could have condemned them but they had been stubborn and guarded their individuality and chosen the best of lives. 
They are really out of line with the fashion of the 60s; they still have the opinion that the family should help each other and that it is natural to have many children. 
They say themselves ""Perhaps we ought to have been born in another country"". 
But when Ben is born they realise that the ""Ben problem"" is nothing that the family really talks about. 
In the 70s let-go raising was the normal way to raise the children. 
Their problems are not taken seriously; nothing is done to change the situation. 
Instead the family, little by little, falls apart. 
Harriet struggles to love her baby but finds herself in the middle of a world she so strongly rejected. 
The family loves them but are not willing to help when it really is their own choice to have all those children.   
I think that their dreams of the perfect family stem from their backgrounds. 
David has divorced parents, and even though they both are married David wants to do better. 
Harriet knows what she wants after having seen and experienced David's family. 
""The Lovatts were a happy family. 
It was what they had chosen and what they deserved"" (28) Even though he never really complains you can feel that he is a bit critical sometimes, for example on p 37 where he says ""My room - that was home.  
I find the setting important in this story. 
The story would have been different if taken place in another country and in a different time. 
They live in a time when this way of thinking about the family has disappeared. 
They have experiences of families, which has made them aim at something better and this has definitely made them too narrow-minded and naive.
"," Stop women's right to an abortion- to save whom?  
It is a frightening thought that people around the world spend all their energy trying to stop one of the most important features of modern society, free abortion. 
I will here defend the right to decide over ones own body as not everyone is convinced about the importance of free abortion. 
Of course I would like to live in a time were women only got pregnant when wanting to, but as a matter of fact, women do get pregnant even if they are careful. 
Of course rules about abortion are necessary, it is only a possible option as long as you can be sure that the foetus does not feel any pain and does not have the brain capacity to know what is going on.   
Every born child should have the right to be a longed-for baby, but this is only possible if the parents are allowed to make that decision themselves. 
If they, or more often she as most abortions are done by young women without a boyfriend to be there for her, feel that there is no possibility to take care of the future child, it is better if she makes this decision. 
I think that many foetuses now aborted, if the had to be born, would live a life that nobody would wish it did. 
People with handicaps are as valuable as I am, but I understand those parents-to-be that make a non-selfish decision to do an abortion when receiving the news that their child will live a life full of pain. 
Abortion is never used as contraception but as the final way out. 
Women that have gone through an abortion are not bloodthirsty and they wish there had been a better expedient. 
It is not an easy decision to make so why should she have to fear other people's reactions, when she probably fears her own guilty feelings more?  
Abortion is a question of equality between men and women. 
It is a fact that many men are against abortion and I state that it is because they want to retake the power over their women, sometimes hidden under the opinion that it is against God's will. 
I am absolutely sure that if there is a heaven aborted foetuses will be let in. 
When an abortion is considered it is probably because the woman will face the parenthood alone, with or without a boyfriend, and therefor she should have the last say. 
Men's deciding over women is nothing that can be accepted in a modern society. 
Women are educated enough to know what is best for them, especially as the men trying to stop her seldom is her own boyfriend but men that really knows nothing about her and her situation. 
Of course, there are exceptions where women are ignorant and careless and do not understand the importance of avoiding getting pregnant when she by no means will be able to take care of the baby, but they are in a minority. 
Will she be a good mother? 
What would that woman have done if there were no abortions?   
A very important reason why abortion must be legal is that a lot of desperate women needing and wanting an abortion will do one anyway, history will tell us the truth in that statement. 
No one can discuss the fact that having an abortion done by a bungler is a huge threat to the health of both the woman and the foetus as this solution made in panic not often ends well. 
We will end up with a woman with a destroyed inside and with a still living baby in her womb who probably will suffer from sever injuries for the rest of its life. 
It is thus better that this minor operation is done by a professional, in a clean operation room where psychologists are available to take care of the woman afterwards.  
Abortion is a necessary right if you call your country a modern one. 
An abortion can not be compared to murder, as the foetus is not aware of the reality and do not feel any pain. 
I wish that opponents of abortion would care as much about those children already in life, as they do about those who, for one important reason or another, will not face the world.
",True
" From Use to Abuse  When it comes to television, the first thing that has to be said is that people all over the worldare constantly using and abusing it. 
And in most cases it is hard to tell the difference. 
We can get important information from our TV, but is this information always to trust? 
We can have a 30 minute escape from reality, but shouldn't we focus on making something about our reality instead? 
I happen to believe the abuses are more and more taking over the uses, and I am truly afraid that television as we know it in our modern society is ruining mankind.  
Once upon a time television started out with the best prospects. 
It simply worked as an informationsource and as an excuse for social gatherings. 
TV only had a few programs to offer and it was turned on when they started and turned off when they ended. 
We can't call this anything but use, because this was healthy watching. 
It made people get together and maybe later discuss what they all had heard and seen. 
Of course this also made it harder to fool or brainwash people since they had a chance to reflect over what they had just been told. 
But the peace didn't last for long and that time is gone now. 
In only a few decades television has become one of the greatest threats to humanity.  
Today people watch TV for hours all alone. 
Often it doesn't really matter what's on, only it's something. 
All the time people of today are choosing to stay home with the TV, instead of spending qualitytime with other humanbeings. 
Everybody knows there's a lot of money in TV-business and also a lot of competition. 
TV-stations are going out of their way to create news, and therefor we can seldom really trust what we see and hear on TV. 
Also there is no limit to what TV has to offer. 
In the United States the channels and stations are endless, and probably that's what the rest of the world is heading towards too. 
If you want to you can spend your whole life with your TV, and there are actually people trying that. 
You can get all your news, entertainment, education, religion etc. from this little (or enormous) box. 
Most terrible though, is that little children nowadays are placed infront of the TV for hours. 
This means people are not only being psychologically damaged but also physically. 
Because while the childrens' language skills are getting worse from all this passive watching and non-stimulating environments, their bodies are getting weaker from all staying still. 
And these children of today are the adults of tomorrow. 
All of this is nothing but abuse.  
I don't wanna judge to hard though, since I am using this medium myself. 
I like being able to get news several times a day into my own home, or to watch an interesting documentary every now and then. 
And it can be great to rent and watch a good movie with friends if I'm exhausted one evening. 
But this is where I want to draw the line. 
This is more or less what TV should be all about. 
What's actually going on in our lives should always be more important and interesting than what's going on in the TV of ours. 
Actual people preferable to actors, and traveling to traveling programs. 
But society of today is going on in the shadow of television. 
And that is real tragic.  
TV is taking over our lives and not many people are even complaining. 
Because it's hard to find reason to complain about something that can entertain you 24 hour a day, and that is what's so dangerous about it. 
It brainwashes people to believe it enriches their lives. 
Neil Postman writes in his Amusing Ourselves to death that television serves us most usefully when presenting junkentertainment and most ill when it co-opts serious modes of discourse. 
I say it's all as bad. 
Because when the real world is no longer to prefer to a visual one it doesn't really matters why or because of what. 
What is important is that something has gone so wrong.
"," Evaluation - My English  I think that my biggest asset concerning the Englishlanguage is my interest in it. 
It is that that hashelped me, not only throughout my time in school, but also when having met people from, and people living in English speaking countries. 
I have always learned English out of pure interest. 
But since I am not interested in everything regarding English, I have the weakness of totally ignoring the, often important, parts I am not equally interested in - such as grammar, for instance.  
LISTENING  I do not think I have ever experienced any major problems in listening to English. 
While watching English speaking movies (without text, of course) I always understand everything. 
There can of course be exceptions (like, for example, when the actors speak fast, quiet, with a (for me) strange dialect or if slang is used), but on the whole I, as I said, understand everything - with ease. 
Things are about the same when it comes to listening to people in real life too.	
I think I get quite a big inactive vocabulary by listening to people, meaning that I get a feeling how the words are used. 
I often think a lot while listening to native speakers, trying to understand and classify every word I hear.  
READING  Reading is something I am fond of, also in English. 
In fact, I do not find it much more difficult to read an English book than a Swedish one. 
Of course, there are many words I do not understand, but since I always (or almost always) get the main picture I can manage anyway. 
Mostly I even kind of understand the word, or at least get a feeling of the word's meaning. 
This sometimes makes me chose English books rather than Swedish ones - out of ""pure interest"" 	An exception was reading the novel Robinson Crouse by Daniel Defoe without having access to a dictionary. 
The use of many difficult words and the structure of the sentences (often very long sentences - sometimes stretching up to half pages) made it a very difficult book for me to read. 
I managed, though, something I am somewhat proud of, through hard work and with the assistance of my already mentioned interest. 
But as I pointed out, this book was an exception. 
An exception that unfortunately reduced the usual reading joy. 	
Another difficulty can be technical language. 
Almost all the technical language words are hard for me to understand, and when the frequency of them is too high the whole can sometimes get lost in the vast forest of technical terms and expressions.  
SPEAKING  I am divided concerning speaking. 
On one hand I havet he opinion that I am quite good at speaking English. 
I speak fluently and can vary my language a bit when it comes to unofficial meetings, such as brief conversations with travelling people in Youth Hostels. 
Since I then can make use of the slang expressions and phrases I have learned while listening to others, people (in this case from English speaking countries)sometimes have got the impression that I am an native English speaker - thought with a peculiar dialect they could not trace. 	
On the other hand I have never had the opportunity to use English officially, I therefore suspect that I am rather worthless in those occasions. 
A strange thing about my speech is that my accent changes depending on to whom I speak. 
When spending time in England or with Englishmen I automatically get an English (or something in that direction anyway)accent. 
Conversations with Americans tend to make me speak in a more relaxed and American way. 	
Not only my accent varies depending on to whom I am talking, but also my choice of words and structure of clauses. 
When talking to people I know are not as good as me in English, I - unconsciously - make the sentences easier by picking not so difficult words. 
I am somewhat afraid that these adjustments (if theyhappen too often) will affect my language.
QQWRITING Since I am rather inexperienced in writing, I do not know much about my strengths and flaws. 
The only English texts I have produced, except the few ones written in school, are letters to foreign friends. 
This means that I have the same problem as with speaking - the lack of official experience. 	
While writing texts I have often (if not always) been simplifying the language, using slang, and choosing the easiest words. 
I hope it has not made profound impressions...
",False
" ""MCMURPHY'S FLIGHT OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST "": A description of the protagonist character in Ken Kesey's One flew over the cuckoo's nest  Ken Kesey's One flew over the cuckoo's nest takes place in the early 1960's, and most of the time in one ward of a mental hospital in Oregon, USA. 
For many years, life on the ward has been calm and predictable. 
But when McMurphy is admitted, everything changes. 
McMurphy is the protagonist of the novel and he is a round character. 
I will give a description of him as we see him through the eyes of the narrator, Chief Bromden. 
The Chief is one of the patients on the ward, a big Indian who acts death and dumb. 
Having the story told by the Chief gives us an unusual, insider's view into a troubled mind and into the forces that trouble it. 
It also makes it easy for the reader to see the McMurphy as the imperfect but heroic character that the other characters see him as.  	
We see clues to McMurphy's character in the first sentence the Chief uses to describe him. 
""...
I know he's no ordinary Admission."" (p.14) He describes him in a way that shows how different he is from the other Admissions he has seen entered the hospital before. 
He is thinking that McMurphy talks too loud: ""He sounds like he's way above them, talking down, like he's sailing fifty yards overhead, hollering at those below on the ground. 
He sounds big."" (p.14-15) And then he shows up in the door, redheaded with long red sideburns, broad across the jaw, shoulders and chest. 
He has got a scare with the stitches still in it across his nose and one cheekbone. 
His face, neck and arms are the colour of oxblood leather from working long in the fields. 
He looks hard. 	
At first he is making everybody feel uneasy, with all his kidding and joking and especially with his big wide open laugh. 
Through out the book laughter is something really important, a kind of measurement of sanity. 
The other patients are unable to do more than snicker but McMurphy's healthy laughter shakes the walls. 
When McMurphy is laughing hard on the boat trip the Chief says: ""Because he knows you have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself on balance, just to keep the world from running you plumb crazy."" (p.194) After a while the other patients are all beginning to get a big kick out of going along with him. 
He tells everybody that his been sent to the hospital because: ""...
I got in a couple of hassles at the work farm... and the court ruled that I'm a psychopath."" (p.16) And the reader can easily understand that he came to the hospital only to seek an easier life. 
And at first the battles he fights are fought only in pursuit of that easy life. 
They may benefit the other patients, but first they benefit him: it is McMurphy who wants to play cards in the tub room, who wants to watch the World Series and so on. 	
McMurphy is a very dynamic character, he changes considerably during his time at the hospital. 
At first he just want to escape prison and hustle the other men in poker. 
But then he becomes their friend and starts to care about them. 
He demonstrates his humanity and kindness as he fathers and encourages the patients, such as when he allows Martini to stay in the monopoly game by always landing his game piece on his own property. 
His mere presence at the hospital has a therapeutic influence on the other patients. 
He supports them and absorbs the wrath of the head nurse while the men are building themselves up. cMurphy begins to see that, against his will, he has become a hero to men who desperately need a hero. 
And he starts to rise to that responsibility, teaching the other patients, through basketball games and fishing trips, not to let their fears paralyse them. 
He consistently places himself in jeopardy for the sake of the men, when he knows it will cost him. 
Like when he fight for George in the shower and when he doesn't want to flee before Billy had his date with Candy, and finally, suicidally, when he attacks the head nurse. 
When he realise that he is one of the few patients who are committed and that his destiny is in the hands of the head nurses, he also changes and seize the furious power struggle between him and the head nurse for a while. 
He starts to look tired and the only thing that keeps his worn out body and spirit going is the others patients need for him. 	
Despite the tremendous journey McMurphy makes throughout the novel, he remains a consistent character because his changes are carefully developed. 
They are balanced between self-servience and selfless concern for his comrades. 
The Chief had to kill him out of mercy and respect but his short flight over the cuckoo's nest has made influences on almost everybody there, and it will keep on doing it even after his death.
"," THE CAPITAL PUNISHMENT IS NEVER RIGHT!  	
Since the beginning of time the strong ones has oppressed the weak ones. 
It has not always been considered a crime to kill or torture a human being. 
But the time changes and so do mankind. 
This barbarian way became less usual and the killing were considered illegal. 
The struggle against capital punishment have been successful but only 100 of the worlds 193 countries have abolished or ceased to carry out the punishment. 
Sweden abolished the capital punishment in the year 1921. 
But several surveys in the last couple of years have shocked me and I also believe many others. 
Because the surveys show that an increasing number of people, and especially young persons, can consider to reintroduce the capital punishment. 
I think this is terrible and very frightening, and I hope this essay will show you why. 	
The right to life is the most fundamental part of the Human Rights Agenda. 
To claim the right to life for innocent people is not very difficult. 
It goes without saying. 
It is considerably harder to defend people with horrible crimes on their consciences; mass-murderers, war criminals, paedophiles etc. 
But that is how universal rights works. 
They applies to everyone, everywhere and during all circumstances. 
Argument from the point of view of usefulness, for example that one death of a mass-murderer is better than the future death of ten victims, ignores the most fundamental value - that killing is wrong. 
Since killing is wrong, the fact that some States' laws recommend public murders to prevent their citizens to commit murder, seems absurd and full of contradictions. 
How can you show that killing is wrong and try to administer justice by killing? 
It is totally impossible to achieve justice by killing another person. 
And there is nothing that indicates that the capital punishment prevents criminality. 
The crimes of violence follow a curve that is due to social and economical factors at a certain point of time. 
It is also independent of if the capital punishment exists or is abolished. 
Since the capital punishment was abolished in Canada has for example the brutal crimes decreased. 
But it has increased in the American states where it has been reintroduced. 
In all parts of the world this is a punishment that mostly affects the poor people, minorities and other oppressed or already outcasts of society. 
An execution of a human being is an act that is known to have a brutalising effect. 
The capital punishment has therefore a negative influence on the people in the society where it is used. 
If the State consider themselves capable of killing a person in their custody, other people can interpret the killing as something accepted and right in its connection. 
Another argument, which speaks for itself to abolish the capitol punishment, is that every year a number of totally innocent people are executed. 
That is mostly due to meagre and incorrect trials. 
My opinion is that this can never be aloud to happen. 
But it does, obviously, and an abolishment of the capital punishment is the only way to avoid it. 
The capital punishment is the ultimate form of torture. 
It gives the absolute power to a few men and women to decide if a person will live or not. 
That kind of power can not be accepted in a democracy. 
It is the same thing with the right to stop an execution. 
That power often lies in the hands of only one person that don't need to answer for the decision to anyone. 
The capital punishment is irreconcilable with the Human Rights. 
It is also unnecessary and totally unacceptable in a state governed by law, especially a democracy. 
To speak for abolishing the capital punishment is not to accept cruel crimes. 
It is to say no to deadly violence, even the killing that takes place in the name of the law. 
I think, as I hope this essay have shown, that the capital punishment violates every person's right to live. 
And I think it is an ancient way of punishment, I like to think that mankind has developed. 
The question is if I should have the same view of the matter if somebody would kill a member of my family or one of my close friends. 
I hope I will never find out.
",True
" The Mandelbaum Gate  The novel The Mandelbaum Gate, is a story about Freddy, who is working at the British foreign government office in Jerusalem in the early 1960's, and Barbara Vaughn, an English woman who wants to go on a pilgrimage in Jordan. 
We follow Freddy and Barbara before, during and after the pilgrimage and we learn to know both them and many of the characters they meet. 
It is from the interaction between people in the story and from what is going on in their minds that a theme in The Mandelbaum gate is revealed. 
The theme could be called ""nothing is what it seems to be"", but I have chosen to call it identity. 
Identity in terms of what and who we think we are, what and who others think we are in addition to what and who we think others are. 
Also, identity in terms of how we judge and label people because we want to place them in the right category (if they surprise us by not acting accordingly to their category we re-label them). 
Identity is also a question of how specific expectations may be raised upon someone, because others identify him as, for instance, an Arab.  	
Who am I, what is my identity? 
is certainly the question when Barbara Vaughn realises that ""her self-image was at variance with the image she presented to the world (p 39)"" This became clear to her when her friends did not see the obvious; that she was having a love affair with a man. 
""She understood that, to them, she was a settled spinster of thirty-seven, by definition a woman [. . .], one who had embraced the Catholic Church instead of a husband . . ."". 
With the insight of the existing gap between her self-image, and the image she presents to others, she takes a look at herself in the mirror and sees herself ""almost through the eyes of others"". 
Thinking her appearance in the mirror really to be ""quite neat, prim and unnoticeable"", she wonders: "". . .but who am I? 
(p 39)"" Well, who is she? 
At a convent, where she later hides for a night, she thinks of how the nuns ""estimated her type"" on her arrival, how she passed their judgement and was welcomed. 
Barbara, knowing she is ""a wolf in the raiment of a sheep (p153)"", feels a little guilty because ""there had been a decided element of false assumption in her reception at the convent the previous day. . .(p 152)"" But, tired of being judged by her ""face value (p 152)"" she thinks that people ""believe what they want to believe (p 152). 
When others might have their fixed ideas about Barbara, Freddy has a problem with how to label her. 
His first impression was of Barbara being a ""pleasant English spinster (p 16)"", three weeks later he senses her ""dangerousness (p17)"" and later on ""it had begun to gnaw at Freddy's mind that, for all he knew, Miss Vaughan might be an Israeli spy"". 
Freddy ""knows"", however, what type of person Miss Rickward (Ricky) is, and he ""knows"" what she would not do, as he says; 	 ""'Well, he wouldn't be sleeping with Miss Rickward, if she's the woman Barbara's trying to avoid. 
Miss Rickward is the head of an English school, if you know what that means.' 	
'Miss Rickward is in the bed with my father this moment, if you know what that means,' Suzi said (p 248)."" 
Also Barbara has ideas of what kind of person Ricky is, and why. 
After having received a weird letter, in which Ricky expresses her ""horror"" over the prospect of Barbara getting married, Barbara is confused. 
The Ricky-person does not make sense anymore. 
For Ricky to make sense again, Barbara must re-label her, and thinks to herself; ""Ricky must be a latent Lesbian. . . (p 158)"". 
There are also examples in the novel of how some people do not identify themselves as a certain type of individual, belonging to a certain type of society. 
Accordingly, they act differently to what their society demands. 
There is Abdul, older then he says he is, who whenever the situation requires, is a Muslim or a catholic ("". . . 
Abdul had found, too, that most people took a man, in all respects, for what he said he was. (p 92)""), who lives in Israel to be free from his fathers ideas of who he should be:  	""Are you a nationalist?  
'Nationalist of what, Father? 
What territory, what people?'  	
'I don't understand you. 
Don't forget you're an Arab. 
Are you a monarchist?'  
'Which monarch do you refer to Father? 
(p 89)'""  Abdul and his friends are "". . . the young or the young at heart who belonged to nothing but themselves, for whose temperament no scope existed in any society open to them, and who by day enacted the requirements of their society. (p 101)"". 
If his father knew, he probably would not call Abdul an Arab. 
Then there is Suzi, Abdul's sister, who is so unlike arab women spiritually that her father "". . . felt he might eventually lean on her, as on a son, in his old age. (p 209)"" Obviously, Suzi does not make sense as a daughter, but as a son she does. 	
However brilliant the theme is treated in The Mandelbaum Gate, I find Muriel Spark's way of using several styles in her writing just as fascinating. 
A phrase like, "". . . as Freddy pushed up the street towards modernity and his hotel (p 15)."", contents a lot of information without being rich in details. 
It reveals that Freddy is returning (his hotel) and it gives an idea of how Freddy feels, (pushed up the streets). 
Finally, ""towards modernity"", tells as much about the place he left, as the place he is going to. 
The opposite to the uncomplicated and few worded style would be, for instance, the two paragraph description of Barbara's state of mind; ""By constitution of mind she [. . .] and the evidence of things unseen (p23)"", the last sentence of fifty-some words. 
Another example of complicated style is ""In the year [. . .] remained in force"" (p 92)."" 
Then Spark uses a detailed but uncomplicated style when she both describes how Freddy flushes down some letters, and his thoughts as he is doing it; ""Freddy tore up first the letter from his mother [. . .] 
The last of Harrogate relics disappeared (p 138)."" 
Describing in detail both what is really going on, as well as the character's thoughts, creates a sensation of presence. 
More than that, Spark manage to create a thriller type atmosphere in her one and a half page description of Barbara and Freddy going down some stairs; ""He lifted the case, whispered, 'We're off!' 
and opened the door. 
[. . .] the thought of being discovered [. . .] 
She glanced behind and upward, [. . .] 
They had got away (p152).""  	
But for different styles, Spark also uses different structures and techniques in her writing. 
On page 51 and a bit forward, when Freddy is writing a letter, she (once again) creates a feeling of presence by going back and forth between the letter, and the description of Freddy's surroundings and his thoughts. 
The main characteristics of her structure, however, are the flashbacks (from the second last paragraph on page 31 till half down page 37, we meet Barbara as a 16 year old) and the telling of events yet to take place. 
On page 120 (""I am told very privately. . .""), Freddy is at Joanna's place in Jordan, but not until page 127 "". . . 
Joanna met him at the Jordan end of the Gate and drove him to the house."" 
Spark is at her best when she describes a moment in the future in which Barbara remembers something that has not happened yet; ""'What I remember most vividly of all,' Barbara told her cousins later on, [. . .] was when I went into the wrong room at the house at Jericho and found Ricky in bed with Joe Ramdez. . . (p 191*)"". 
Spark's way of revealing events before they have happened keeps the reader is an almost constant state of surprise. 
But she also withholds information to give us the whole truth later on. 
We have ""known"" Suzi Ramdez (mainly through others perspective) for quite a while when we suddenly get to hear her own story; ""Suzi Ramdez always said that the main thing about herself. . . (p 208)"". 
Again we get surprised, because new and supposedly true information is added to Suzi's character. 
We thought we knew her. 
We did not. 
We thought we knew Abdul, waiting for him to get Freddy or Barbara in trouble, and at the same time prove himself to be an unreliable self-benefiting jerk of an Arab, and we did not. 
Abdul turned out to be a rock. 
As a matter of fact, we did not know anybody.  	
The way Muriel Spark manipulates us, how she lets us know that we have been ""wrong"" about chatacters is the true brilliance of her novel. 
It makesus part of the story. 
We are there, judging and labelling people. 
""Listening"" to others. 
All, with good use of our prejudice. 
At the same time, the structure of the novel, in which she is even telling of events as flashbacks in moments yet to come, becomes to much to handle, and you end up wondering when what happened to who, and where.  	
I wonder. 
Nothing is what it seems to be. 
Maybe that is the theme after all. 
The Mandelbaum Gate itself, a giant beautiful gate of stone. 
Full of ancient inscriptions, full of memories. 
It had to be. 
All the years of people passing under it. 
All the secrets passing with them. 
The messages. 
The relief. 
The fear for something going wrong. 
Muslim? 
Catholic. . 
No. .? 
You! 
a S p y!  
"". . . he came to the Mandelbaum Gate, hardly a gate at all, but a piece of street between Jerusalem and Jerusalem, flanked by two huts, and called by that name because a house a the other end once belonged to a Mr Mandelbaum (p 304).""  * see above, dialogue between Freddy and Suzi (p 248)
"," NEW AGE a Trend in Our Workplaces.  
The NEW AGE movement has become very popular in Sweden, during the 90s. 
Even trade and industry have interests in what the supporters of NEW AGE call ""universal"" old wisdom. 
Background. 
Any interested person can find the roots of the NEW AGE movement in nature religion and oriental tradition, according to Bra Bockers Lexikon, 1988. 
The explorer(ess) Helena Blavatsky established in the end of the 19 th century the Theosophy during a period when the Romanticism, with exotic strains and mysticism were prevalent. 
The Theosophy is a utopian, religious comprehensive faith with strains of esoteric Gnosticism, Buddhism and Hinduism. 
The Theosophy defines, according to Bra Bockers Lexikon, conceptions which are essential in today's NEW AGE movement: reincarnation, karma, aura, and the ego. 
Gabriella Ahlstrom writes in ""NEW AGE Vetenskap eller bluff?"", Akademiker 3-1999, that there arose two breakaway groups from the Theosophy in the 30s. 
It was the anthroposophy led by Rudolf Steiner and the Arcane school established by Alice Bailey. 
Bailey was the first person who talked about NEW AGE.   	 
After the Second World War the activities of the NEW AGE movement decreased. 
Science and technical progress were the most important items in society, according to Ahlstrom. 
On the other hand were peoples' interest in the 50s in California, USA, growing towards: Buddhism, gurus and human psychology. 
The NEW AGE movement caught the hippies' attention in the 60s. 
The hippies were seekers. 
They were interested in astrology, Zen Buddhism, tarot, mediums and alternative medicine. 
The NEW AGE movement reached Sweden in the beginning of the 70s and its signification has increased during the 90s. 
The NEW AGE movement is today more popular than ever.  	 
The central items in the NEW AGE movement are the personal experiences and emotions. 
Your feelings are always right. 
Likewise, another characterization of the NEW AGE is the item of spiritual guidance.  	 
The NEW AGE movement is not occupied with evil. 
According to Ahlstrom there is no devil or hell, there are only positive or negative vibrations. 
Mainly, women are supporters of the NEW AGE movement. 
NEW AGE in Our Workplaces. 
Trade and industry have, according to Ahlstrom, adopted the ideas of the NEW AGE movement about positively thinking. 
Your thoughts have influence on your life. 
Many employer proffer their staff courses which are developing personality. 
The Swedish banker Jacob Wallenberg says in Ahlstrom's article that his company proffers their staff a kind of ""mentally training"", something that already has been practising in the athletics. 
It can for instance be to walk on glowing coal, to split plank with help of mental energy, or to listen at an astrologer or to a witch.  	  	 
Trade and industry are interested in good leadership. 
They want to develop the individual ability to lead. 
Consequently, they see a connection between development in spiritual life and professional economic development. 
Ahlstrom writes further that Telia proffers their leaders retreat courses in Vadstena because they want to give them the opportunity to experience silence and communication among fundamental matters in life. 
The courses are arranged in beautiful surroundings where the staff has the opportunity to meditate and talk about ethics and philosophy of life. 
In Ahlstrom's article Wallenberg says that we all need a connection between body and soul. 
It is important with emotions in trade and industry. 
He also says that it is possible to strengthen individuals from the inside. 
Once upon a time NEW AGE was looked upon as a subculture. 
Nowadays it is better to call it a mass culture. 
From Subculture to High culture. 
Why are the banking and other profitable companies in Sweden interested in staking money and energy on lectures by witches or to let company leaders split plank with help of mental energy? 
Several factors, I believe, can be important when you try to get an answer to the question. 
However, there are, in my opinion, two main important items;  -the companies want to strengthen the individuals from the inside. 
When your employer stakes energy on your personality it hopefully will make yourself do the uttermost back.  -the companies want the staffs' thinking to be positive. 
Positive vibrations are good because they make all individuals efficient. 
The more efficient you are the better your concentration is on your work. 
We have during the 90s in Sweden acquired acquaintance with crises of economy. 
We have also heard a lot about fusion of companies. 
It seems as if we have harder times economically. 
We have nowadays a stiff competition and only the strongest survives. 
Whether your company is competitive or not depends sometimes on the human factor. 
Anyway you could say that if NEW AGE is good for General Motors it is good for mankind.
",False
" Is the Swedish Language replaced as Main Language in Sweden in 100 years?  
The question is relevant to ask. 
There are an increasing number of fields in the society where Swedish is not used as the nomenclature. 
It is also common that existing Swedish words are replaced by English words in areas where it is not necessary. 
There are tremendous risks with a native language being undermined, risks which will not be discussed here, but instead the causes of this trend will be discussed.  
I start with the main cause since many of the other causes depend on it. 
As I see it the main reason is the globalisation. 
People around the world need to communicate with each other. 
All kinds of business areas are increasingly depending on the whole world as a market. 
People, universities and companies live in an international world where there is a need for a common language and English has become this universal language.   
As a consequence nomenclature that is related to specialised professions often is English. 
Here we can see several examples, for instance, within journalism we find words like Public Service and stringer; we can see worlds related to economy and finance such as controller, day trader and revenue; and within Medicine words like stroke, whiplash, frozen shoulder etc. are used. 
Yet another example is the widely spread terminology used in relation with Information Technology. 
Fewer and fewer Swedish academic theses are written in Swedish. 
And technical and other specialist literature produced in Sweden are nowadays often written in English. 
Here it is reasonable to suspect that there is not only a demand for professional communication that can be seen as the reason, but also that there is an economic reason. 
It is cheaper to write in English since the translation costs then can be excluded. 
When technical and other specialised nomenclature propagate outside its faculties it the foreign words are most commonly accepted in the society.  
We also see lots of examples where Swedish is abandoned for English in areas directed to people and their consumption. 
Such as Lindex, and other multiple chain stores, abandon rea for sale. 
Many of us are also familiar with commercials for diapers where we have seen words like Baby Dry, Up & Go and Boy / Girl. 
Further examples are Refill, Wash & Go etc. 
How come English is used in areas where there does not seem to be a need for English? 
Once again the answer surely is economic reasons. 
Since, for instance, commercial campaigns are simplified if the same product names can be used wherever the products are sold. 
Thus, I assume this is a phenomenon we have to get used to.   
It is also interesting to reflect on why people so eagerly accept and adopt English. 
Is it because people think Swedish expressions are watered-down? 
Is there a need for freshness and modernisation, which the Swedish language cannot provide? 
Because of the enormous influx in areas like music, movies and idols it seems to be a tendency, especially among young people to adopt not only the language but also the culture. 
When the foreign culture, especially the American, is accepted also the language is accepted. 
A good example of this is the newly imported Halloween tradition. 
The acceptance is not likely to decrease since children nowadays also get used to English very early. 
I am thinking of the use of computer games, TV set games and the TV programmes for children that are not dubbed to Swedish. 
Whatever the reasons might be, the Swedish people's willingness to frequently use English instead of their native language must also be seen as a cause for the discussed trend.   
Within parenthesis it can here be appropriate to mention that there are lots of efforts made in Sweden in order to nurse the language, for instance, the work done by the Swedish Datatermgruppen. 
This is a voluntary society without ties started by Svenska. 
They make an effort to find Swedish terms for the nomenclature related to Information Technology. 
Even though their work is vigorous it is doubtful whether they, together with other actions taken so far, will succeed in stopping the on-going progress.  
To summarise, even if it is too early to say definitely that the Swedish language will have been replaced as main language in 100 years, one can however, definitely see that there is a trend of the Swedish language being undermined in area after area in the society. 
Because of this trend it could also be interesting to reflect on the risks with this trend and hence also consider which actions that might be needed. 
But I leave that out for the moment!
"," THE GROWTH OF NAZISM IN SOCIETY  During the last couple of decades the nazi - ideas have got new strength in societies all over Europe. 
Extreme right-wing parties have got new, stronger position in political life and win more and more voters. 
The latest example is the Austrian FP party's entrance into the government through its extreme leader Jorg Haider. 
It got 27 percent of the votes.  
Sweden has not been speared from this trend either, though there are not this kind of political parties that have gained any power in Sweden. 
Because nazism is getting stronger even in Sweden it would be interesting to try to find out what possible reasons can explain this trend in society.   
The reason which I will present first because it seems to be the most obvious is unemployment. 
The argument is often used and according to it during an economic crisis people tend to see strangers as a threat, because they are consider to take the jobs from the people who were born here. 
It is probably the most used argument by nazis themselves when trying to justify their believes and actions. 
The same argument was used in Nazi German before and during the Second World War, but was mostly direct toward the Jews. 
It was claimed that they were taking money and work from the Germans.   
Nevertheless, this explanation, namely that the lack of job opportunities should be the cause of increased nazi sympathies, is not completely satisfactory. 
For example, the newspaper Expressen has investigated the spread of nazi organisations in Sweden and discovered that they are most numerous in the southern and central parts of Sweden, where job opportunities are biggest and the rarest in the northern part of Sweden where unemployment is greatest.  
Though the unemployment and the economic crisis can be considered as an important cause of growing nazism there must be further causes of it. 
The hatred of foreigners could be another cause. 
It is often hidden and difficult to see but is probably more spread than one could think. 
This hatred is a germ of deeper and more dangerous feelings and thoughts that can often be identified as nazism. 
It is human fear of strange, unusual and unknown things that lies behind it. 
And foreigners tend to be strange and unusual, at least in some peoples' opinion.  
But there has always been foreigners in this country, as well as in all others countries. 
On the other hand, the number of people with nazi sympathies varies and is now increasing. 
So this single reason cannot give the complete explanation of the phenomenon.   
Although the hatred of foreigners cannot give a complete explanation of the growth or nazism it cannot be ignored. 
The belief that foreigners cost the state a lot of money is widely spread, as well as the belief that they do not want to get a job and are simply taking advantage of the social assistance system. 
It is not difficult to understand why these beliefs are so common - foreigners do have difficulties to get a job because of the lack of education as well as the poor knowledge of the language. 
Besides, they are easy to discern from the rest.  
Like the most of the arguments this one has its counter-argument as well. 
The statistics shows that those beliefs are completely baseless and are in fact nothing else but prejudices. 
However, this information based on the statistics is often spread via media and most of people are familiar with the true facts. 
Therefore one could argue that this could not be a reason for the growth of nazism.  
Clearly it is difficult to identify the reasons of the increasing number of nazi sympathies and organisations in society. 
The most probable reason is in fact the combination of the reasons mentioned above. 
Both the unemployment, hatred of foreigners and prejudices are the parts of the trend that is observable in today's society.
",False
" STATE CARE CANNOT REPLACE FAMILY CARE  Society has failed of taking satisfactory care of the elderly. 
Municipals are not able to provide its old inhabitants apartments and even as I write, some five thousand of them stand without proper living arrangements. 
It's also known that this group is steadily growing in our society. 
More and more money and recourses are needed. 
At the same time the number of those being in working life declines. 
I think that the best solution to this problem is that families themselves provide care for their older members, at least in some extent. 	
Would you like to spend the last years of your life sitting in a closet-size room, only having the next bingo session to look forward to? 
I assume you wouldn't. 
This is however reality for many elderly today. 
Growing old is something one almost ought to feel ashamed of. 
Perhaps if we spent more time with the elderly and took care of them ourselves, maybe then we would once again learn not to be afraid of ageing and instead we might, just might, realise that good things also come with it, namely experience and wisdom. 	
The benefits this would bring to the elderly themselves are easily imagined. 
Every one of us has the basic need for feeling useful, preferable to some other human being. 
Grandma could assist in some lighter every-day chores, such as minding her grandchildren. 
It would certainly be nice for her to now that someone still needs her and enjoys her company. 
A very nice side effect of this would be the children then being able to stay a little longer in a warm and safe home environment instead of being sent away to day care institutions as early as at the age of one, not to mention all those things they could learn from the older generation.  	
Let's return to the closet-sized rooms and the obvious lack of something to occupy the residents with. 
I'm sure that those who work at these institutions and homes are very capable craftsmen and that they do the best they can. 
They are indeed able to provide for their customers basic needs. 
Still, there simply isn't enough time for social interaction such as sitting down for a talk, mainly due to the lack of staff. 	
To make it possible for families to have their parents at home, the time spent at work ought to be shortened. 
Regarding the situation today there isn't even enough time to spend with ones children after a long eight- hour day at work. 
If this was done there would automatically be more openings in the job- market and unemployment figures would go down. 
Society would save that huge amount of money that goes to maintain all these institutions and could preferably transfer some of the saved money to the equally huge healthcare costs. 
As long as any diseases don't trouble the old member of the family, care at home is to prefer, but professionals of course better give medical care.  	
As I have shown so far there are great benefits both individually and socially. 
I'm sure though, that you already have formed some counter arguments in your mind. 
One of them might be how we are supposed to manage economically if we only work six hours per day? 
With more mouths to fill there has to be an increase in income as well. 
But then again, one might wonder if we really need to consume as much as we do today? 
Couldn't we try lowering our cost of living? 
Surely it's not all that important to have the most expensive house, car and so forth?  	
I'm well aware of that in order to make these suggestions come true we would probably have to go some hundred years back in time. 
We have somehow lost our feeling of belonging together as families. 
Partly I would like to blame the society we are living in for that; the haunt for money and success has made us greedy and egoistic. 
However it's extremely important for preserving humanity that we once again start taking care of each other!
"," Democracy, a delusion? 
A short critique of present-day liberalism  Introduction 	Once democracy was considered a tool for changing people's hard life conditions to the better. 
It was seen as the ultimate instrument to attain political power from the ruling classes. 
To be allowed to vote was one of the primary goals in the working class struggle for social justice.  	
It has been more and more apparent that democracy has lost its attraction as a means of fighting against injustices in society. 
Democracy has nowadays proved to be a very insufficient method to achieve and fulfill what people need and wish to become true.  	
Why is that so? 	
Maybe a hint to the answer could be found at Marshall Berman, the author of the book ""All that is settled and established evaporates"", where he discusses the conditions of life in modern society. 
His main point and leading idea is that ""the dynamics of modern economy, and the culture that emerges from this economy, annihilates everything it creates - physical environments, social institutions, metaphysical ideas, artistic visions, moral values - in order to continue its creation, with the purpose of incessantly recreating the world."" 
""This striving is pulling all modern men and women into its circle and will thus force us all to struggle with what is essential, meaningful and real in the whirl in which we move and live.""  	
What is then ""The Good Life""? 
A human being needs to live in a generous social context all his life in love and fellowship. 
He or she might also need to develop and create freely, both intellectually and artistically. 
However, the basis for all this is what nature offers to man, if it remains unspoilt: Fresh air, clean water, nutrients, food, clothes, housing, warmth and shelter, and possibly a means of transportation as well as medical cures and medicins. 
In a market economy material products could be bought, if enough money is available but only then. 	 	
The details of what ""The Good Life"" is likely to be, may be disputed, but I want to argue that ""The Good Life"" is approximately the way I have just pictured, and that the premises of this good life is endangered if not spoilt by the system we have to live in.   	
Does the present economic and political system allow for a realisation of ""The Good Life""? 
What social relations follow from the working conditions? 
Do they contribute to ""The Good Life"" or do they on the contrary counteract the realisation of man's self fulfillment. 
During some decades after the great depression in the beginning of the 1930's, the economic growth had hardly any earlier equivalent and the social change was enormous after the preceding decades with the full emergence of democracy.  
Democracy in crisis 	From the 1970's onwards it has become evident that the institution of democracy has suffered heavily from successive degradation, as a parallel and simultaneous process to the deregulation of markets and the breaking up of what was called the ""welfare state"". 
The democracy institution is more and more falling short when it comes to the remedy and relief of human suffering, poverty and social exclusion, a constantly growing segregation, ill-health and lacking well-being as well as growing social isolation. 
It is increasingly impossible to get rid of politicians that persist in implementing harmful policies. 
Politicians and other important decision-makers cannot be held responsible with the help of the ballot-paper. 
People in general have to resign as mere lookers-on, passive witnesses to the present degeneration of politics. 
The result is stress, frustration, illness, crime, drug abuse and a gigantic environmental disaster.  	
Other manifestations of this decay of politics and democracy is the dismantling of the pension system and different social insurance systems. 
People have paid for their pensions and other social security benefits during their whole professional life and are now deprived of the fruits of their hard labour. 
Instead they are now requested to pay a second time by means of private insurance systems. 
We are also expected to play Russian roulette with our pityful rests of the state pensions on the stock market!   	
The decadence of politics is also espressed in the tax system. 
While decision-makers feather their nests at people's expense, every serious attempt to save money is hampered by new and increased tax duties. 
The state has a ravenous and almost unlimited appetite and people are thus forced to work like mad to earn their living.  	
I contend that ""democracy by now is dead"" in the sense that it would be an instrument for real improvement of all the shortcomings that is inherent in the present political and economic system. 
The programs of the political parties have converged into a limited set of empty dogmas that, when brought into practice, seem to entail no responsibility concerning their consequences. 
To cut down inflation and reduce politics to nonsense stereotypes on television appear to be the common denominator for the political parties. 
The parties on the right-wing call for ""freedom of choice"" and ""tax reductions"", but they carefully avoid to discuss how poor people would be able to finance their pensions, health insurances, loss of income insurances, dental service insurances and all other necessary insurances that less poor people consider indispensable. 
The socialdemocrats and their political supporters of different colours are on the other hand presenting another formula, ""Public medical service, eldercare and school resources"", but the problem seems to be the same: How will it be possible for low-income people to save enough money for their living, when the enormous taxes and charges undermine vital savings. 
The so-called citizen is squeezed in a Moment 22: The more he or she is trying to save, the faster the savings are eroded. 
The less he or she is able to keep, the more they will fall down into dependence of the whims and fancies of the state or wither away into the faceless flock of political cattle. 
Whatever party the man in the street is voting for, he is voting against himself. 
In exactly this meaning democracy is well on the way of dying. 
There are no obvious political alternatives to the present neo-liberalism, even though the rhetoric may differ in the parliament and elsewhere.  	
The gap between the reality of your own wallet as well as your own life conditions and the empty stream of words that flow out of the politicians' mouths is widening with a terrifying speed. 
In Encyclopedia Britannica modernity is depicted as follows: ""Since its inception, modernity has worn two faces. 
One is dynamic, forward-looking and progressive, promising unprecedented abundance, freedom and fulfillment. 
The other, equally visible face is grim, revealing the new problems of alienation, poverty, crime and pollution.""  	
What does this Janus-face-description stand for? 
Already in 1776, when Adam Smith had his Wealth of Nations published, the foundation was laid for the theory that ""the mechanism of the invisible hand"" will eventually lead to the best of worlds, as long as each individual strived the hardest he could for his own good. 
Is this really a good theory? 
It rather seems as if ""the mechanism of the grabbing hand"" is the root of the modern world.  	
Modernity implies a job splitting process that has developed to the degree that people more and more live in subcultures, despite the revolution of the massmedia and the information technology. 
The greater the number of subcultures and the more different they are from one another, the more alien people might become before each other. 
The question is, if irresponsibility and indifference follow from this process and what the consequences are regarding democracy. 
What happens to people when they aren't able anymore to understand other people and feel the way they do? 
It is almost as when an air-craft pilot in battle fires-off his bomb-load by simply pressing his button. 
He will never see the direct consequences of his action and therefore possibly loses his ability to feel pity for his victims. 
In somewhat the same position the powerful people find themselves in modernity as well as their theoretical liberal strategists within the political and economic disciplines.   	
A restoration of democracy would call for a revival of empathy and a renewed ability to denominate ""the actors of the world scene and its course of events"" in a true way. 
The schizofrenic split between the theory and praxis of liberalism of today is, I venture to say, one of the most fatal questions of the future of mankind.
",False
" Reflections on the V chip - problems, questions and hope  In the article ""Locking Out Violence"" Ginia Bellafante writes about a possible solution to one of the big problems of today - violence caused by watching TV. 
Children see too much violence on TV and they start to think that it's reality and the proper way to act. 
The violence, which is often exaggerated, blunts them and they get difficulties in keeping reality and fiction apart. 
Also in Sweden many crimes today can be related to this lack of understanding for the difference between what happens on TV and film and in real life.   
I think this V chip is an exellent idea. 
It wouldn't solve everything that goes wrong in the world but it would help a lot of people and more importantly, it wouldn't do any harm. 
So I don't see any disadvantages with it, but I do however see problems. 
One of those is the problem of judging different films and putting them on a scale. 
The article mention the two films Terminator 2 and Schindler's list. 
The V chip wouldn't be able to tell the difference between these two films although they are very different indeed. 
They both have violence but there is no way they can fall into the same category. 
There is a big difference between glorifying violence like in Terminator and using it in a more educational purpose to create understanding and sympathy like in the film about the Holocaust. 
So I suppose there are different kinds of violence. 
And who are by the way the right persons to do this judgement?   
The V chip has however been critizised for other things than the problems of how to carry through with this. 
I can't help but thinking, when I read the article, that some people have to make objections to a new proposal like this just for the sake of it. 
No one, except for the broadcasters who might lose some audience, seems to be able to point out something that can really be shown as a bad effect of this.   
There is the discussion about if it is another form of censorship for example and a senator says in the article that the V chip would bring us ""one step closer to government control of what we see on telelvision"". 
I can not understand what censorship has got to do with it. 
The only censoring would be done by the parents and that is really the same as to say to the children ""No, you can't watch this."" 
Now surely, that is every parent's right, isn't it? 
And all the Government do is to offer the people to buy this. 
It's not as if they are forcing anyone to buy and install it. 
There is no control in offering a possibility. 
The broadcasters have also opposed to the V chip pointing out that they have already got a system that warns parents when there is an unsuitable show about to start on TV. 
But as the article so rightly points out the parents can't control what their children are watching when they're not at home.   
One question is of course if it will work. 
There is nothing in the article about how the suggestion has been met by the public. 
Are the parents positive to this? 
Would anyone actually buy it? 
Those are things I would like to know. 
And if someone does buy it then will it stop the children from watching too much violence or will they just go to a friends house or rent a video? 
Perhaps, but then at least it's not so easy anymore for them to watch violent films.  
In the article another person points out that most homes have more than one TV and that parents surely won't replace every one and that the only way then would be to chain the children to the sofa in the room with the V-chip-equipped TV. 
Well, yes. 
Or perhaps more easily lock the door to the room with the other TV. 
But then I wonder has it really gone this far? 
Why is not a no enough anymore? 
I just find it very sad that something like this is necessary today to be sure that our children do not become violent criminals because they have been watching too much violence on TV. 
And naturally all violence can't be blamed on television either. 
Not all people become violent criminals after having watched it on TV. 
Something else must be wrong too I'm sure. 
The president of Showtime Networks says in the article: ""We have some serious societal issues here. 
The V chip seems like an overly simple solution to a very complicated problem."" 
Maybe that's true but if it does help someone then why not?
","	When Harriet and David meet they know that they've found what they've been looking for. 
Someone with whom they can create what they've both been dreaming of and hoping and waiting for all their lives - a big happy family. 
But when the fifth child comes along things change and their happiness falls to pieces because Ben is not like them and he doesn't fit into their lives. 
They say he's different. 
But is he really different? 
And if so, then what is he different from? 
The main theme of this text is the meeting of two worlds, the normal and the abnormal, the known and the unknown, the civilized and the foreign. 
These worlds are represented by the family on one side and Ben on the other. 
By studying the setting of this text we can see how these worlds relate to eachother and to their surroundings.			  
David and Harriet are different. 
That is stated from the very first page in this text. 
They are two oddballs who find in each other exactly what they have been looking for to spend their future with. 
They share the same dreams and beliefs. 
Their definitions of happiness are the same. 
But it must be sorted out - what does differet mean in this case? 
A contradictive sentence to what I've just stated in the first page is ""They defended a stubbornly held view of themselves which was that they were ordinary...""(p.7). 
Ordinary. 
Isn't that the direct opposite of different? 
We must make clear that different in this case means not like most people in their surroundings while ordinary means old-fashioned.  
Then comes the fifth child and slowly tears the family apart with his violence, hate and cold, evil eyes. 
He is different too. 
But from what? 
There are several things in the text that show that the world outside this family bliss is changing: ""[...]the greedy and selfish sixties[...]"". (p.29) ""The little town[...]had changed[...]. 
Brutal incidents and crimes, once shocking everyone, were now commonplace."" (p.29) ""Two peoples lived in England, not one - enemies, hating eachother, who would not hear what the other said."" (p.30) Ben is greedy and selfish. 
Whenever he speaks it is to say things like ""Give me this"" or ""Ben wants that"". 
And he is selfish because the only reason he is controllable to a certain point is Harriets threat to take him back to the place that scares him. 
Later on Ben takes to crime and violence, robbery, rape etc. 
Without defending it in any way I have to say that it isn't uncommon, it doesn't take an alien to do it. 
The two peoples that populated England can well be represented by Paul, the youngest child who is the one who gets mostly effected by Ben's presence, and Ben. 
They hated eachother. 
So if Ben is part of this world, what he really is different from is Harriet's and David's family life. 
Maybe that's why everyone outside the family fails to recognize what Harriet so badly needs confirmed - that Ben is different. 
He doesn't fit in to their odd life but maybe he is just a contemporary figure that ends up in an anachronism.   
Their is another exaple of how David and Harriet are different from other people on page 8. 
David and Harriet are watching people at the dance enjoying themselves. 
""Both had reflected that the faces of the dancers [...] could just as well have been distorted in screams and grimaces of pain as in enjoyment"". 
They see the world in a different way. 
They do not fit in. 
And they get a child that maybe does fit in to the rest of the world, but not in their lives.   
Harriet and David are different from each other too in some ways and that is also important for how they react to Ben and deal with him. 
They have for example different backgrounds. 
His parents are divorced while her mother seems to have everything she wants. 
Maybe that explains why David doesn't leave, although he thinks his wife has let him down. 
And Harriet blames herself for Harriet calls Ben an alien and spends hours trying to figure out where he comes from, who are the ones of his own kind. 
She tries to these two worlds to go together but David doesn't. 
They deal with this matter in different ways. 
Harriet wants to learn what is going on inside Ben's head, how he sees the world, what he thinks about. 
She also tries to make Ben more like them. 
She wants to teach him by making him watch her and Paul play and then play the same game with him. 
David just wants to get rid of him. 
He accepts the thought that Ben will never be like them. 
On page 13 it says ""his wife must be like him in this; that she knew where happiness lay and how to keep it"". 
When Harriet failed him in this matter by going back for Ben she made him very angry and disappointed. 
But instead of leaving her he burried himself in work which kept him from home all day. 
Why? 
Maybe because he knew that the damage was already done the moment Ben came in to their lives. 
Leaving him to die in that place wouldn't have their happiness.
",True
" Shakespeare's Julius Caesar  After ""A very pleasing night to honest men"" (I.3.43) - a night of thunder - Cassius comes to Brutus's house in the company of Casca, Cinna, Decius, Trebonius and Metellus. 
It is early in the morning the day for the assassination and they have come to discuss and plan the murder of Caesar. 
Brutus has just received a letter exhorting him ""To speak and strike"" (II.1.56). 
He thinks this is an urgent request to him from the people of Rome, but in fact it is Cassius writing: in this way he tries to persuade Brutus to join the conspiracy. 
The passage this essay is based on is Act II, scene 1, line 112-191.  
After a discussion about were the sun actually rises, Cassius wants all the conspirators to swear an oath. 
Brutus immediately oppose to this and his cause is clear:  		If not the face of men,  	The sufferance of our souls, the time's abuse - 	If these be motives weak, break off betimes. ... 
(114-16) 	... 	
What need we any spur but our own cause. ... 
(123)   The only oath that Brutus want is ""honesty to honesty engaged"" (127), because to Brutus, their reason for murdering Caesar is so strong and obvious that it does not need an oath in its real meaning. 
For him, the reason for the murder is the Roman people's state - they suffer - and he does not want them to live under these hard conditions. 
To him, the reason for the murder is that it is the common good and he wants the other conspirators as well as the public to believe that as strong as he does. 
This is also why he turns down the suggestion, by Decius and Cassius, that they should kill Mark Antony too. 
Cassius fear a ""A shrewd contriver"" in Antony (158) and he also trembles at the thought of what power Antony could get if they do not kill him. 
He is not aware of the fact that he ""looks | Quite through the deeds of men"" (I.2.201-2) twice, nor is Brutus, who says to him, both times, that he should ""not think of him"" (184). 
No one seems to understand, at this point, that Cassius justly feels the threat from Antony. 
If they kill both Antony and Caesar, their ""course will seem too bloody"" (162) and that is not the intention.  		
This shall make 	Our purpose necessary, and not envious; 	Which so appearing to the common eyes, 	We shall be called purgers, not murderers. 
(177-80)  There is also a discussion about whether they should make Cicero one of them or not. 
Again it is Cassius that proposes and Brutus that rejects. 
Brutus always has long elaborated answers to Cassius's short, concise questions Cassius thinks that ""he [Cicero] will stand very strong with us"" (142) and Casca says: ""Let us not leave him out"" (143) and Cinna and Metellus agree. 
Brutus does not want him to join the conspiracy ""For he will never follow anything | That other men begin."" (line 151-52) Maybe Brutus thinks that not even he would be powerful enough to make Cicero a conspirator, for he makes it sound as if he had doubts about his own qualities as a leader, but he might not be aware of the others understanding it like that. 
Then Cassius thinks they should ""leave him out"" (line 153) and suddenly Casca sound as if he has never been of any other opinion than that of Brutus's and Cassius's: ""Indeed he is not fit."" (line 154). 
Cinna and Metellus do not comment on this, but contrary to Cicero, Casca is easily 'manipulated' and does not contradict the man he sees as the leader.  
Both these discussions reveal a great difference of opinion between Brutus and Cassius. 
They agree on one point and that is the killing of Caesar, but they have quite different reasons for wanting his death. 
Brutus loves Caesar as a person: if there were some other way of making away with the spirit of Caesar - what Caesar stands for - and, with that, the 'general suffering', Brutus would have chosen that solution to the problem, but as it is now, Caesar has to die, even though this means that Brutus will kill a friend, and a very good one, because he does not want the whole people to suffer because of one man's dictatorialness. 
The general good thus gets the upper hand in Brutus.  	
We all stand up against the spirit of Caesar, 	And in the spirit of men there is no blood. 	
O, that we then could come by Caesar's spirit, 	And not dismember Caesar! 
But, alas,  	Caesar must bleed for it. ... 
(167-71)  The major difference between Brutus and Cassius is that Brutus is an idealist. 
He feels as though it is his duty to kill Caesar, since so many people are suffering under his reign. 
It is 'cold logic' to reason like this - to kill a friend in order to relieve the suffering of a whole people - but this does not stop Brutus from murder Caesar.   
The picture given to the reader of Brutus suggests a very cold and determined man, but in fact, he is not as sure as he appears to be. 
The way he speaks about the conspirators as ""sacrificers"" rather than ""murderers"" (176 and 180) is a way to keep his bad conscience, for murdering a friend, at a distance. 
However, it does haunt him in the ghost of Caesar, which he sees before going out on the battlefield. 
(IV.3.279) Cassius, on the other hand hates Caesar on personal grounds. 
He has the opposite reasons for the murder compared to Brutus: he does not think of anyone else's good, but that of himself. 
However, he does say, when speaking of Antony:  	A shrewd contriver; and you know his means, 	If he improve them, they may well stretch so far 	As to annoy us all. ... 
(158-60)  This hints that he might be considering the good of them all when proposing that they murder both Antony and Caesar, but it is not very obvious. 
Brutus is the altruistic one and this creates his anguish: he does know the wrong in murdering a friend, but at the same time he wants to relieve the burden from the people.
","Introduction 	 Geoffrey Chaucer is one of England's most famous authors. 
His work the Canterbury Tales, is written in the East Midland dialect which was to develop into the English of today. 
(Burnley, 1983:145) Around 1387 (Skeat, 1965:5), when Chaucer wrote his Tales, the language - Middle English - had been and was under the influence of foreign languages (Barber, 1993:140) and in this essay I intend to study the different types of loan-words in the 'Prologue' to the Canterbury Tales. 
I will try to find patterns in the loans, for example if a majority of the verbs are of French origin or if there are semantic peculiarities, such as if all words about household come from Scandinavian. 
The concentration will be on words of Germanic origin to see if there is some connection with present-day Swedish or Icelandic. 
Then, if a loan-word is still in use in English today and also in, for example, Swedish, I will compare the two meanings and see if it is possible to show patterns in the development of the meaning of the words in the different languages. 
The part of the 'Prologue' that I have as a basis for this essay begins on line 118, where the Prioresse comes in. 
The acronyms PDE, ME and OE stands for Present-day English, Middle English and Old English respectively.   
1 Method  The first lines of the 'Prologue' is something which is known to most students of English at a university level: Whan that April with his shoures soothe / The droughte of March hath perced to the roote, / And bathed every veine... 
Therefore I have chosen to begin my reading of the 'Prologue' some hundred lines further down. 
I have looked up each word down to line 192 in an etymological dictionary (Chambers's, 1967) where I have found most of the words in the tables, even the foreign ones. 
Finding the meaning of words that have a totally new form in Present-day English (PDE call and ME clepen) would have been difficult without the help of George H. 
Cowling's glossary. 
The result of this can be seen in Table 1 (Appendix 2), where I have listed words from the 'Prologue'. 
I have also read chapter 7, 'Middle English' in Charles Barber's The English Language: A Historical Introduction (1993) to get material for the passage about Middle English. 
I have also visited some sites on the internet. 
(See references for address)  2 Previous Research on Middle English   2.1 Vocabulary  The language around Chaucer was a language under strong influence of, above all, French. 
(Barber, 1993:151) However, the French of the Normans who invaded England in 1066 (The Battle of Hastings) was not the 'standard language' of France, but a dialect called Anglo-Norman. 
(Wilton) When studying texts written closely after the Norman Conquest (12th century) and texts from Chaucer's days it is easy to see the difference between Old and Middle English. 
The most influential language before the Normans came with their French was also a Romance language, namely Latin, which came together with Christianity in the seventh century.(
Barber, 1993:107) The loan-words at that time had to do with the new religion - priest, mass and vicar, (Wilton) but since the Normans became more influential in society as a whole, their language came to spread out French and/or Anglo-Norman words in many vocabulary areas. 
(Barber, 1993:134) Some examples of these are the army (the word army, soldier, navy, enemy and peace), law (bar, judge, sentence, ransom and felon), fashion, meals and social life (coat, button, jewel, taste, appetite, toast, recreation, music and tournament), government and administration (crown, state, empire, royal and parliament) and art, medicine and learning (painting, image, anatomy, pain, story and prologue). 
(Baugh, 1993:165-168) As the language of the conquerors gained in prestige it became indispensable for the aristocracy (which is also a French loan-word) to know French. 
(Barber, 1993:134-5) However, the conquered people's language did not die under this pressure. 
The working class and the farmers - those who did not have much direct contact with the upper classes - continued to speak English (Barber, 1993:136) and these classes grew in impotrance after the Black Death that killed one third of the British population. 
(Wilton) Traces of this can still be found; one example are the words mutton and sheep. 
Mutton derives from the French mouton which also means 'sheep', but this hints that it was the Anglo-Saxons who tended the sheep and the French-speaking upper class that prepared and ate the animal. 
(Wilton) Other examples of pairs like this are wish - desire and doom (G) - judgement (Fr), but these words are more synonym-like. 
(Wilton)In the sheep/mutton example both words live on, but then there are other cases where the French word has replaced a Germanic one, for example crime (Fr) and firen (G). 
(Wilton) Then there is a third kind of change and that is when a French word has been put together with a Germanic one like gentle + man to form a new word. 
(Wilton)  3.2 Morphology  The largest change in morphology, during the Middle English period, is the great loss of the Old English inflections. 
(Barber, 1993:157) Partly, this was due to phonological changes such as the dropping off of unstressed syllables at the ends of words. 
(Barber, 1993:157) The result of this development was that the speakers 'ended up' with many nouns and adjectives looking the same in nominative, accusative and genitive, cases which had had their own forms earlier. 
(Barber, 1993:157) However, there are some of these older declensions of nouns still living on, for example the plurals oxen and children and the mutated plurals feet and men. 
(Barber, 1993:158), but there is no trace for the plural -e added to adjectives (fair - faire). 
(Barber, 1993:160)   3.3 Syntax  The vocabulary change, in turn, meant that the order of the words in a sentence became more important. 
Since it in Old English was possible to tell from the endings of the words which function each word had in the sentence, word-order was not very important. 
Old English had about the same freedom as Latin when it came to placing the words in a phrase, but when these endings disappeared users of the language had to begin to rely on word-order. 
(Barber, 1993:161) It was at this time that S-V-O word-order became the dominating one (Barber, 1993:161), but the V-S word-order (without an object) can still be found, as in: - I have already done it, said she. 
(Barber, 1993:161)  3 Discussion  3.1 Nouns  If we look at the nouns having to do with eating we see that words like flesh and milk are of Germanic origin and oistre and sauce (App 2, p 12) are Romance (oistre originally from Greek). 
(Chambers's, 1967:444) ME flesh (App 2, p 12) meaning 'meat' is PD Swedish 'flosk', but the meaning has narrowed to now denoting only meat from pigs. 
An interesting words is mete (App 2, p 13) which has given 'meat' and 'mate'; two words nowadays denoting two totally different things. 
During the ME period mete could mean both 'food' (cf. 
Swedish 'mat'), and also the companion you shared it with, but now we have 'meat', meaning only a certain kind of food, and 'mate', friend. 
The first set of words is an example of narrowing. 
The mete encountered in the 'Prologue' means 'mealtime'.   
Words having to do with the parts of the body are of mixed origin, for example herte, mouth, brest and hand are Germanic and the Romance ones are lippe, eye and nose. 
(App 2, p 13) The animals mentioned are hound, fish, mous and fowel (App 2, p 13) and they are all Germanic, but the first three have connections with Romance languages. 
The word fowel is 'bird' in PDE, but the original word still exists in Swedish and Icelandic, with the same meaning.  
Almost all nouns concerning religion and learning are Romance: cloistre, nonne, monk and preest as is scole, (App 2, p 14-16) but not the book the pupils read in school. 
The explanation is that the Germanic peoples first wrote on pieces of beech (cf. 
(App 2, p 14 and 16)  3.2 Verbs  The Germanic verbs are numerous. 
Examples of these are be, have, make, say, speak and see. 
The verb 'hunt' has the same form in ME as in PDE, but when Chaucer describes a monk's interests (line166) he uses the Romance word venerye (App 2, p 12) for 'hunting' (noun). 
This can be compared to PDE 'venison' meaning 'game' like in 'stock of game' (Sw. viltbestund).
Verbs used in connection with the nonne and the preest are Romance and not very many compared to the Germanic ones. 
Romance examples are reserved and served (App 2, p 15)  3.3 Adjectives  Examples of adjectives of Germanic origin are new, brood, old, deed and good. 
(App 2, p 10) Coy, simple, divyne, amiable, tender and charitable are Romance ones. 
(App 2, p 10 and 14-16) Swedish and Icelandic has preserved its counterparts to old, but only in the form of nouns: 'ulder' and 'aldur' meaning 'age'. 
PDE 'good' is 'bra' in Swedish. 
'God' in Swedish is used in expressions like 'god mat' and not like PDE 'good car'. 
PDE coy means 'shy' (talking about a woman) and it comes from the French 'coi'. 
'Simpel' exists in Swedish, but has a negative tone. 
The same goes for the Swedish counterpart of divyne which is 'diva', meaning the same as in PDE. 
Three words connected to each other (collocation) are poure, cost and spare. 
(App 2, p 15)The two first ones are Romance and the last one is Germanic, however they all have relatives in Swedish and Icelandic has 'spara'. 
'Seemly' is a word that English only has in common with Icelandic, the same meaning in both languages. 
(App 2, p 10) The three colours, grey, reed and grene that occur in the text, are all Germanic. 
(App 2, p 10)  3.4 Prepositions  All prepositions are Germanic, but on, in, and for has connections with Romance languages and Greek(on = ana). 
(App 2, p 9)  3.5 Pronouns  The pronoun hir is 'hennar' and 'hennes' in Icelandic and Swedish. 
His is 'hans' in both languages. 
Hir derives from OE 'heo' meaning 'she'. 
(App 2, p 9)  4 Conclusions/Results  When looking at the nouns that concern food it is easy to see that words denoting frequent parts of meals are Germanic (milk and flesh), while the less frequent ones are Romance (oistre and sauce). 
In this way it is possible to see what kind of food that was 'English' versus 'continental'. 
Of nouns concerning the body are also of both origins, but I think it is possible to say that the most important parts have Germanic words: herte, hand, brest and mouth. 
Other important words like ooth and world are Germanic too. 
The verbs follow about the same pattern as do the nouns - the most frequently used verbs are of Germanic origin and the less frequent ones are Romance. 
Marginal verbs, those which can be both main verbs and auxiliaries, are Germanic: be, have. 
Romance verbs are used when the author talks about one of the monks (served and reserved). 
Like the previous word class, the adjectives follow the nouns in the loan pattern: adjectives that are found often are of Germanic origin and uncommon ones are Romance. 
Coy is an interesting loan-word. 
Considering the meaning of the word - shy (said about a woman) - and the French and Scandinavian temperament respectively it would have been more logical to borrow a word with this meaning from a Scandinavian language. 
Nor is it very surprising that adjectives like amiable, tender and charitable are Romance when thinking about the different cultures and temperaments in France and the Nordic countries. 
Short, but not less important words, like prepositions and pronouns are all of Germanic origin.  
Having read and looked closer into only a smaller part of the 'Prologue', it is possible to do this summary: words that the Anglo-Saxons 'needed' before the Norman conquest are Germanic and words denoting something unknown up until the Conquest are borrowed from the language of the Normans. 
However, as we have seen, some Germanic words were pushed out of the vocabulary by French ones and at other times, the two words coexisted and still do. 
Swedish and Icelandic words that resemble their English cousins often have the same or similar meaning.  
5 References Barber, Charles. 
1993. 
The English Language - A Historical Introduction. 
Baugh, A.C. and T. 
Cable. 
1993. 
The Language of Chaucer. 
Chambers's Etymological English Dictionary. 
1967. 
Edited by A. 
MacDonald.  
Chaucer - The Prologue & Three Tales. 
1969. 
Edited by George H. 
Edited by Walter W. 
",True
" Taboo or Not Taboo  The subject of swear words is always a hot issue to discuss and it seems to me that most people have something to say in the matter. 
Shirley E Peckham has written an article on the subject called ""Cleaning up the language"". 
In this article she clearly state her disgust with the language of young teenagers, which she believes contains too many words not suitable for her ears. 
I too feel that some swear words are not the prettiest words and that they are sometimes better left out when speaking or writing. 
What I dislike and oppose myself to is Peckham's attitude towards teenagers and their language and the method she implies is the most suitable for a ""cleaning up"". 	 
To begin with I must say that it seems that Peckham has no understanding of language as a process, she has at least not taken this in consideration in her article. 
Since language is a process and it develops concurrently with society and its conditions, the way we speak is also bound to change. 
New words constantly enter the lexical arena which means that old ones have to retire, some of the new words are widely recognized and are put in our dictionaries and others only stay for a decade or so. 
The impact and meaning of words also change; words that were hard and rude 50 years ago might not be that today. 
Thus can not Peckham expect children of today to speak as she did when she was a child and if they did their friends would probably think of them as a bit different. 
And we can not get away from the fact that some words will always be considered more obscene than others and the fact that some people will use them. 
This leads me to the methods that Peckham suggests are the most effective to use in order to get rid of this horrendous thing called swearing. 	 
In her article Peckham state that when she was young ""specific instructions, firmly expressed, meant exactly what it said, to the letter"". 
She also states that as a child she knew her place and was very steady because ""she was boxed around the ears, well not quite, but the impact was the same"". 
With these two statements, as I interpret them, Peckham therefore implies that since firm instructions today are not firm enough and not obeyed by those who receive them, a beating would have the same impact today as the firm instructions she got. 
This is in my opinion totally wrong for educational purposes. 
Any punishment, physical or verbal, are of no use unless the person to be punished really understands why the thing she/he did was wrong otherwise it will not have the effect a punishment is supposed to have. 
Proper explanations concerning the benefits in not using swear words and the disadvantages in using them combined with acting as a good role model and not use them yourself are the best solutions in order to do your part in this matter. 
Threatening and scaring children into doing what you want them to do will most likely have the opposite effect since children who do not feel secure will not do as you say but as you do and they to will end up bitter and with aggressive attitudes. 
Perhaps this is what happened to Peckham. 	 
In any case I think Peckhams worries are exaggerated and ignorant because her only concern seem to be her own interest in the matter and not the one of the teenagers. 
So if you hear young people swear you do not have to worry, and I will tell you why. 
First of all, just because you use a lot of swear words as a teenager it does not necessarily mean you will use them when you grow up. 
Secondly lots of people, young and old, adapt their language according to what situations they are in, amongst friends a more casual language is used than during a job interview for example. 
But if you are confronted with someone that has a bad language out of the ordinary and you feel that it could become a problem, explain why it can become a problem instead of telling him/her off. 
That will be much more appreciated and you will feel better yourself if you do not let it get to you.
"," DISCO'S OUT, MURDER'S IN.  
I have, since a tender age, been very interested in the Second World War in general and the Third Reich in particular. 
Besides having read a lot of books about the subject, I can honestly say that I've seen most of all TV-programmes broadcasted about it for the last 15 years. 
As far as I can remember there has never been such a multitude of programmes about WW II and the Third Reich, especially the Holocaust, on various TV-channels as for the last 1-2 years.  
In addition to that, we can also mention Primeminister Persson's Stockholm Convention and the Historic Museum's exhibition ""The Holocaust Project"". 
Why this enormous interest, both from the media and from the authorities, in WW II at the moment?  
Undoubtly, the reason that most people would give you is the cliched yet very true phrase ""if we forget, it will happen again"". 
Mr. 
Persson himself has stated on many occations that the reason he took the decision to order the printing and distribution of the book Om detta miNi Beretta (a basic, yet fairly well-written book about the Holocaust) was because a survey showed that Swedish schoolchildren had little knowledge about the Holocaust. 
Although the survey later was said to have been misinterpreted and that Swedish schoolchildren indeed had pretty good knowledge about the Holocaust, the book was a good initiative. 
Still, it doesn't give a full explaination to the question. 
In fact, we might ask ourselves why there haven't been any surveys of that kind before, why was it conducted at this point of time when the Holocaust-topic has gotten so much attention? 
Furthermore, it doesn't give an explaination to all the TV-programmes, many of them produced abroad. 
Does the Swedish Primeminister have such an impact on, for instance, BBC? 
No, hardly not.  
However, in a recent Swedish TV-documentary about the dubious ""historians"" that denies the Holocaust, prof. 
Jerzy Einhorn (survivor of the Holocaust) expressed his fear of what will happen when all of the survivors are gone, which inevitably will happen in 10-15 years, and there will be no-one alive to tell the story. 
This could of course be one reason for all the new documentaries, to record testimonies from the victims before it's too late, to prove the so called revisionists wrong. 
While this is yet another honourable cause, we cannot deny that over the years probably thousands of testimonies have been recorded on tape and film, all telling the same story about the Nazi-atrocities. 
With all due respect to prof. 
Einhorn, in which way will a testimony recorded in 1999 be more convincing than one made in, say, 1954?  
Yet another aspect that might explain this situation is the argument that there is still much left unsaid and that we still can find new and undiscovered material from the war. 
For example, in the decree of the Stockholm Convention that was held this month, the participants stated that they will work for and support that all archives from the war will be opened and research will be done. 
Eventually, there are still a lot of material tucked away, collecting dust in archives all over Europe, mainly in Russia but even in countrys like Sweden, for instance records of Swedish citizens serving in the Waffen-SS. 
Still, these demands about the opening of archives could be seen as another spin-off effect of the newly found interest in the Holocaust. 
So far, very few demands have been risen for the opening of archives until now, most people have settled for the huge bulk of information that nevertheless have been available. 
We must of course remember that for political reasons it was impossible to get hold of information from Russian archives until just recent times, and, for example, Swedish archives about Swedish participation in war-crimes are still classified top secret for another 15 years, but still, why is now the right point to rise these demands?  
Let's look at the situation from a Nazi-propaganda view, maybe at this point of time the international Zionist movement, together with the Zionist Occupation Governments (ZOG, a Nazi-term used to describe the western democracies) are disturbed by the awakening of racial awareness by European patriots and it is time to crush ""The Storm"" (a term frequently used by Nazis for the racial awareness that will inevitably lead to the race war) with even more lies and propaganda. 
Total idiocy, of course, but this might actually be the case - but the other way around of course. 
Look at what's happening in Europe right now, not only have the underground hardcore Nazi-movement gained in strenght, to the point where they actually can pose a lethal threat to individuals whom they dislike, but also to the parliamentary situation in Europe. 
As everybody knows, we have a scenario in Austria where, through a democratic election, we have right-wing extremists in the government. 
This, I believe, is the reason why we have this newly found interest in the Third Reich and the Holocaust. 
After having said for many years: ""we must remember, or it will happen again"", we are now forced to say: ""we must ACT, or it will happen again"".  
In conclusion, we are now facing a situation where the horrors of the Third Reich seem not so distant as they have been. 
At this point of time, Fascism is on the rise in Europe, most people are concerned and awareness about this things are, fortunately, spreading. 
This leads to a general interest in things that have been.
",False
" Restrained by absurd rules?  
""TV4 is restrained by absurd rules"" was the headline of an article printed in the debate section of UNT on 12 October. 
Its author, Jan Nordling, managing director of TV4 Uppland, argues that it is about time that television politics of Sweden were radically changed. 
When, at the turn of the year 01/02, a new agreement will be settled between TV4 and the state he wants to see less retarding requirements on commercial television. 
In his opinion, the main goal with the new settlement must be to assure a definite rise in profitability for TV4. 
Personally, however, I want to assert that it is highly impreferable, in a wider perspective, to promote a development where market forces get to dominate the basis of all decisions.  	
Jan Nordling wants the present rules that regulate commercials within TV4 to be adjusted so that they are much more similar to the ones that regulate Swedish satellite channels. 
He claims that it is utopian to avoid commercial breaks in a commercial television channel and suggests shorter, but in turn more frequent, interruptions. 
According to Jan Nordling, this would be more attractive to the people who are watching, but I am not convinced. 
The main reason why he wants to see this change is undoubtedly the fact that it would be more attractive to advertisers and hence boost TV4's economy.  	
The managing director of TV4 Uppland is also of the opinion that TV4 should be allowed to follow international custom in its advertising. 
He claims, for example, that the Swedish prohibition of commercials aimed at children is completely unfounded. 
""Children are not that gullible and have not got the economic force necessary for such prohibitions to be motivated"". 
If the goal is not to manipulate these children, then what is it? 
Children are just as easily influenced as everyone else is. 
The difference, that motivates the present rule in Sweden, is that they cannot be expected to have the same knowledge about potential effects of commercials as grown-ups have. 
Small children can sometimes not even distinguish commercials from normal programs and hence cannot, in the same way as adults very often do, actively choose not to be manipulated by simply stop watching. 
When it comes to the economic force then it is quite evident that it is their parents' force that has to be considered here, not their own one.  	
Jan Nordling thinks, furthermore, that the Swedish ban on advertisements for pure opinions or viewpoints is a much awkward exception to the more general rule we have in Sweden about freedom of speech. 
He takes the discussion one step further by also questioning why political and religious commercials should be banned. 
These reflections are interesting and quite understandable in a way, but since the effects of commercials have been proved, more than once, these prohibitions are justified. 
If they were not there we would very likely face a situation where we were almost daily exposed to pure propaganda. 
Jan Nordling recognizes, certainly, that ethical considerations in many cases are motivated, but is of the opinion that it from case to case should be up to every company itself to make the judgements and decisions necessary. 
Personally, I think that it is better to be safe than sorry in this sort of situation. 
I would like to assert that no matter how strict the present rules may be it is better to keep them than to run the risk of facing a disastrous development. 
The only reason why Jan Nordling wants it to be up to every company itself to make the ethical judgements is that he realizes that it would be a way for TV4 to bring in more money. 
Why, I am quite convinced that they would choose to be much less strict than today.  	
According to Jan Nordling, the main reason why it is important to assure a definite rise in TV4's profitability is that domestic production of television programs must be ensured. 
""To assert Swedish culture in the world of television is important, but perhaps even more important is that television in more ways than today depicts a Swedish multi-cultural reality"". 
This sounds all very nice, but exactly what Swedish culture is it that TV4 will depict through its broadcasting of an even greater number of soap operas and other forms of light entertainment? 
Are these types of program really essential for us in the way that he wants us to believe? 
Furthermore, in what way would they depict a multi-cultural reality? 
Would minorities in Sweden be better represented if TV4's main goal is to ensure as high a profitability as possible?  	
The managing director of TV4 Uppland is also of the opinion that the company's concession fee should be done away with. 
He finds it absurd that TV4 in this way pays for some of the programs broadcasted by SVT, which very clearly reveals his double standard of morality. 
He has just paid a warm tribute to the types of program that SVT actually produce by, among other things, saying that it is essential to depict a multi-cultural reality. 
How can it then be absurd to support the activities of SVT? 
To me, such an utterance makes his previous statements ring even more hollow.  	
To summarize, the main goal with the coming settlement between TV4 and the state must, in Jan Nordling's opinion, be to ensure a definite rise in profitability. 
By simply analyzing his main ideas, presented above, we can see clearly for ourselves that it all boils down to money. 
I think that we should be proud, rather than anything else, of the present rules that regulate the activities within TV4. 
They are there to protect individuals and to consider them being absurd is, to me, quite absurd in itself.  
Summary  Jan Nordling, managing director of TV4 Uppland, asserts in the article ""TV4 is restrained by absurd rules"" (UNT Oct. 12, 1999) that it is about time that television politics of Sweden were radically changed. 
In his opinion, the main goal with the new agreement, that in the near future is to be settled between TV4 and the state, must be to assure a definite rise in TV4's profitability. 
In order to boost their economy he believes that it is essential to change the rules that regulate advertising within the channel. 
He also finds it necessary to abolish the concession fee that TV4 presently is obliged to pay to the state.
"," Would a Spelling Reform of the English Language be an Improvement?  
It is only in recent years that linguists have grasped what considerable differences there are between our two channels of language. 
To a large extent their improved knowledge has been promoted by the tape-recorder (Milroy & Milroy, 1985). 
To give some examples of differences that may cause confusion we still, as is well known, preserve letters in our spelling that represent sounds which long ago ceased to be pronounced, such as -p in the word receipt. 
Distinctions are commonly made in spelling where there is no longer a distinction in pronounciation. 
The pairs sea/see and meat/meet are only two out of many of the same kind. 
On the opposite side we have got distinctions that have emerged in speech without any trace of it to be seen in writing. 
Think for example of the spelling -ng in singer and finger. 
It is the exact same. 
When it comes to diphthongs we can often see them represented by a single letter, such as -i in mice. 
Conversely, modern phonemes that are definitely pure vowels can sometimes be represented by so called digraphs. 
An example of a digraph would be the -au of author (Barber, 1993).   
As we have seen then there is a great number of inconsistencies to be found in the English spelling system and one result of those inconsistencies is the prevalence of so called spelling-pronounciations. 
These arise when a word is given a new pronounciation through the influence of its spelling (ibid). 
One example of this is the rather common re-introduction of -t in often. 
According to Barber (1993:202) spelling-pronounciations are particularly likely to appear when ""universal education and the wide dissemination of books and newspapers introduce people to words in printed form which they have never heard pronounced in their home environment"". 
In other words it is quite likely that foreigners will pronounce words in the 'wrong' way, whereas natives on the other hand are more likely to have difficulties when in comes to spelling, since there are so many inconsistencies in it. 
The latter group of people are continuously exposed to the 'correct' ways of pronouncing words.   
Due to all the potential difficulties there are then, it has sometimes been suggested that a spelling reform of the English language would be an improvement. 
In this essay my intention is therefore to discuss whether such a reform is preferable or not and why. 
I will put forward arguments both in favour of and against a spelling reform, even though the latter ones are going to dominate. 
I find it important to reflect upon implications of actions taken in either direction. 
What happens in the short term as well as in the long term perspective if we decide not to change the spelling system? 
What happens if we do? 
Before I proceed to a discussion I will, in the following paragraph, give you the reader a brief historical background. 
Hopefully that will make things more interesting and easy to follow.  
Today, in the twentieth century, spelling is almost absolutely invariant. 
Earlier on though, in both Middle and Early Modern English, a limited number of alternatives were acceptable. 
Informal spelling was actually fairly common as late as in the eighteenth century and rather surprisingly different spellings could be seen even within the work of each writer (Barber, 1993). 
Milroy and Milroy (1985) both stresses the fact that the idea of an absolutely fixed spelling system is recent. 
They state that particular spellings of words nowadays are regarded as uniquely acceptable and that other possible spellings are being rejected as 'errors'. 
It is important, they mean, to bear in mind that the accepted forms are arbitrary and fixed by convention. 
No spellings are in themselves more logical than others. 
According to Barber (1993) a ruled language is one in which acceptable usage is explicitly laid down. 
He describes in detail how certain linguists in the past used to believe that rules and regulations would prevent the language from changing. 
However, as is generally known today, every language that is being used is in a perpetual state of change. 
In comparison with pronounciation spelling is here, naturally, the most uniform level of language usage (Milroy & Milroy, 1985).   
Since, then, the above discussed perpetual motion of the English pronounciation has led to a vast quantity of inconsistencies in our writing, it is getting increasingly hard for people to aquire proficiency in spelling. 
This should be taken seriously in a society where great emphasis is placed on literacy. 
It is regarded as highly important today being able to spell correctly. 
Looking upon this aspect in isolation a spelling reform of the English language could be motivated. 
As previously established there is, however, nothing that can prevent pronounciation from continuously changing and accordingly you should ask yourself whether it would actually be that much of an improvement.   
In one way it might be good for us in the future to recognise radical changes in pronounciation, since writing would make much more sense that way. 
As long as the present spelling system works out fairly well a reform would, however, in my opinion, be a disservice rather than anything else. 
As Milroy and Milroy (1985) much importantly point out our access to history is mainly through writing. 
In order for messages to be transmitted over time and distance in a clear and unambiguous manner it is essential that the spelling system is as uniform as possible. 
In other words it is dangerous, in the long run, to obstruct interpretation of preserved documents, books and so on. 
We have got to look after our cultural inheritance.   
There are some practical problems as well with a spelling reform that should be taken into consideration. 
First of all people from different generations would almost certainly have formed different opinions about the new rules. 
For quite a long period of time we would very likely see a mixture of different kinds of spelling, which is all rather ironic since it would make spelling even more difficult. 
The result could probably be compared with the non-standardised spelling systems of the past, which I have previously accounted for. 
Assuming that the younger generation would be more likely to welcome the new system, it would also be more difficult for them in the future to interpret and use old books, articles and documents. 
To take that discussion one step further it could also create unnecessary gaps between different groups of society, which I think is highly impreferable.   
Barber (1993) describes how the many differences in pronounciation that we have can be explained by both geographical, social and situational factors. 
Taking this into account it would be rather difficult to decide on exactly what changes that would be made in the event of a spelling reform. 
Who is to have the authority to make decisions about what particular pronounciations that are to be recognised in writing? 
How is it possible to arrive at a conclusion about what is 'correct' without being subjective? 
What we would witness would be a recognition of the pronounciations used by a rather large, but selected, group of society. 
This could be compared with the fact that Standard English in the late Middle Ages was the language of a small minority. 
The higher the socio-economic level of the speakers, the nearer their speech was likely to be to Standard English (Barber, 1993). 
It is from that period that we have inherited the prescriptive attitudes towards language, that today ought to be regarded as highly influential (ibid). 
The problem should not be exaggerated, since many changes in pronounciation are widely spread, but should not be neglected either. 
People's use of any language is highly complex.   
It is often stated that the English language is highly conservative, but there seem to be a lot of good reasons why. 
If we sum up what I have discussed in this essay there are obviously more problems than there are benefits with the suggested spelling reform, so for everyone's sake, let us stay conservative.  
References  Barber, Charles. 
1993. 
The English Language. 
A Historical Introduction. 
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.   ilroy, James and Milroy, Lesley. 
1985. 
Authority in Language. 
Investigating Language Prescription and Standardisation. 
London and New York: Routledge.
",True
" TELEVISION, OUR BEST FRIEND AND OUR WORST ENEMY  Television has a central and important part in our lives. 
Television provides us with company if we are lonely, something to talk about, a babysitter, entertainment, excitement and happiness when Sweden scores the winning goal, good and bad news, an escape fromreality, a visual journey around the world and lots of other things. 
Television can give uswhatever we want and since it can supply us with these things in sound, text and vision television is the ultimate form of media. 	
Most of us watch TV everyday. 
Some more and some less than others. 
We can relax infront of the TV after a long day or we can associate with our family or friends in front of the TV cheering for the Swedish football-team. 
We can watch a documentary on the life of the African elephant or the political situation in China and learn something about the world outside our living-room. 
Television can also provide us with traditions. 
Christmas wouldn't be the same without Baloo the Bear singing and dancing through the jungle or Ferdinand, the pacifist bull, humiliating the proud and macho matador. 
Television can be a quitegood thing if we use it wisely and don't let it take over our lives. 
Television can also cause trouble. 
Trouble that can be serious or a little less serious but still trouble. 
I remember what it could be like in my family when we were going to watch TV together. 
This was in the early eighties and we were five family-members and we only had two channels and no remote-control and we argued quite a lot about what channel to watch or who would get to change the channel or the sound. 
I realise that the situation has changed since then but I do think that we still argue about what to watch. 
We can become fat and/or lazy by watching too much TV and not exercising enough. 
Then we get miserable and depressed when we compare ourselves with the slim and beautiful soap-opera stars. 
Our ability to separate reality from fiction is also at risk of deteriorating. 
The choreographed and designed violence doesn't seem to hurt that much despite all the bloodshed. 
I think that it is better to stimulate our imagination by for example reading a book and creating the pictures in the head. 
It is better to create our own individual fantasies and dreams instead of letting a tv-producer do it for us. 	
When we sit there in our sofa staring at the TV we are an easy target for political messages, propaganda, shady beauty-ideals, commercials and other things that can affect our lives. 
But it is up to us to choose what to watch and to be selective and listen with critical ears. 
We can't just sit there and absorb the information and then blame television for all problems in society and for messing with our and our children's heads. 
We have all an individual responsibility for our own minds.  	
TV-watching can quite easily become a habit. 
But that habit is easy to break. 
When I moved to Uppsala in August I didn't bring my TV. 
I missed it in the beginning, of course, but now two months later I don't miss it at all, not even ""the X-files"".
"," THE SWEDISH MONARCHY A NICE TRADITION WORTH KEEPING?  
In dictionaries the word democracy is defined as ""a system of government in which everyone in the country can vote to elect its members"" and as ""a situation in which everyone is equal and has the right to vote, make decisions etc"". 
The word monarchy is defined as ""a system in which a country is ruled by a king or a queen"". 
Sweden is paradoxically both a democracy and a monarchy and the way I see it a country cannot or at least should not be both.  
Some of the main arguments I have heard from people who wants to keep the monarchy are that ""Sweden has always been a monarchy"" and "" it's such a nice tradition"". 
Yes, Sweden is one of the oldest monarchies in Europe and we have a history full of fascinating stories about royal war-heroes, conspiracies and mysteriously murdered kings. 
But those arguments aren't relevant to the issue. 
Today's system and society can't be compared with for example the eighteenth century and our present king Carl XVI Gustav can't be compared with Carl XII. 
The word is constantly changing and today monarchy is an old-fashioned system which doesn't fit into a democratic society such as ours. 
To use history and tradition as arguments in this serious matter is just a naive and ignorant way of trying to avoid discussion and debate. 
We have to eliminate the romantic and sentimental image that surrounds the royal family and the monarchy as a system. 
We have to look at our society from a logical and practical point of view.  
I mentioned the word democracy and it's meaning earlier. 
People around the world are fighting for it. 
People sacrifice their lives for the right to vote and choose their leaders, the right to speak their mind and the right to be treated as equals. 
Democracy is not as obvious to everybody as it is for us. 
In a monarchy the regent is not elected. 
The Swedish monarch is not chosen by the people and he/she does not have the same rights as everybody else. 
He/she does not have the right to vote, he/she is not free to choose his/her religion and despite the fact that he/she is the head of our state he/she has got no political power. 
But still he/she ranks above everybody else and he/she requires to be addressed as ""his/her royal highness"" or ""your majesty"". 
And all that because he/she was born a crown-prince/princess and through inheritance became head of a state. 
Sweden is a democracy.   
The Swedish people want to be treated as equals and with respect. 
Men and women, homosexuals and heterosexuals, natives and immigrants etc. 
Then why do more than 70% of the Swedish population accept this kind of class-difference and segregation where a small, limited group of people are treated as if they were more important and worth more respect than the rest of the people just because they were born by royal parents? 
Is it because ""it's such a nice tradition""?  
Another argument that I have come across is the royal family's popularity. 
People seem to love reading and talking about their romances and other private matters. 
The media's coverage of the royal family has increased and the interest among the population has also increased because of that.. 
That argument would become very weak if today's media-situation would change and that is exactly what the royal family wants. 
They are beginning to complain about the lack of privacy and the media's interference of their lives and that is understandable. 
But their popularity depends completely on the media. 
So, is their popularity totally based on the fact that they are a never-creasing source of gossip and would they be as popular if the monarch had the power?  
History, tradition and popularity are all quite weak arguments pro-monarchy. 
But they are also very difficult to ignore. 
These things are deeply rooted in the Swedish people. 
We have become used to the monarchy and a habit is always difficult to break. 
But the society of today is in need of a change. 
Today's monarchy is an old fashioned and reactionary system where the monarch's only function seems to be waving at people from a balcony, cutting ribbons and throwing champagne-bottles at boats. 
Do we really need that?
",True
"This essay focuses on my ability in speaking, writing, reading and listening to English; what my strenghts and weaknesses are, and how I feel about my competence. 
First, I'd like to discuss my strengths and weaknesses: 	The area in which I feel I could better myself the most is attitude. 
My gravest mistakes in writing or speaking comes from when I think that I already know something, and consequently don't have to study it. 
I am blessed with a good head for studying, but that fact has also lead me to neglect doing the studying that I should have done, because ""I already know that"". 
This trait is at its peak when it comes to identifying paragraphs from grammar books, or citing rules for applying certain linguistic features. 
I tend to use my feeling for language in those situations, and, even though it works in most cases, it's not without its hitches.  	
This behaviour probably comes from a combination of laziness and haste, but sometimes it's hard to motivate myself to spend hours trying to learn something that I feel that I already know the principles of. 
I want to move on, and get to the good stuff. 	
Another of my weak points is not a credit to my listening and reading skills. 
I tend to think that I know more than I actually know. 
I have misinterpreted words for years and then, by chance, I have looked something up near one of them in the dictionary and discovered that a word I thought I knew, meant something entirely different, or at least not quite what I thought it meant 	On the other hand, when I'm using my English, I get very conscientious. 
I watch my language, and try hard to get it right. 
That's my orderly side, and it causes me from time to time to get frustrated when I make simple mistakes, such as pronounce words I'm familiar with wrong. 
I take pride in knowing the right prepositions when I speak and write, and understanding verbal humour, for example. 
However, this is not a feature without it's downside, as I may make a pretentious or quaint impression, in my effort to use as much of my vocabulary as possible.  	
I have read English books, both fiction and non-fiction, for a long time, because I've found myself interested in things that was written in English, and that training has made me a quick reader - I read English almost unimpededly, but it has also improved my writing skills - I write in English with nearly the same speed as I write in Swedish. 
My interests has influenced my speaking too, as I frequently watch English-speaking movies or television shows, and have modeled some of my speaking patterns after fictional characters. 
I believe it has been for the better, as I have chosen characters with eloquence and great speaking voices. 
I regret that I'm not more often in positions where I would have to use English, as I think that I'm a bit rusty.  
I have always been proud of my pronounciation, with an inclination for going in the British direction. 
That is also the case in spelling. 	
Something that I think is weak in my background is the ability to listen to different dialects, and still ""get"" everything. 
It's not only then, but mainly with dialect-speaking individuals. 
I find it hard not to ask every once in a while what the other person just said when in contact with native English speakers, and that's a nuisance for both of us.  	
The overall impression, to conclude this essay, of my English competence is that I could use some training in the oral part - I feel somewhat unsure now and then of how I sound. 
Also, I think that my writing as a whole is adequate, if not entirely satisfactory: I would like some exercises in composition, but I feel that my fluency is all right. 
I think that maybe I feel more competent about my English than I actually has reason to be. 
On the other hand, if I think that I'm that good, then perhaps I'm not so bad.
"," Why the paragraph that regulates the right to claim for damages ought to be revised  In theory, in Sweden, even a burglar is able to claim for damages if getting injured on private property. 
This is morally and ethically wrong and something needs to be done to make it impossible.   
If a burglar, for instance falls and breaks a leg due to the owner of the house having omitted to sand his/her icy driveway and doorstep during a cold winter, the housebreaker can thus claim for damages from the person(s) responsible for keeping the driveway safe, the very person(s) the burglar attempted to steal from. 
Maybe a thief is about to break into a house through the roof hatch and one of the steps on the ladder snaps causing him to fall to the ground and get hurt. 
Say that someone is trying to break in through a window but the hinges are so rusty that the window falls out and cuts the thief badly, making him bleed so heavily that an ambulance is needed, should the owner then have to pay the thief damages for his sufferings?   
It 's not very likely that a person who has entered someone elses premises with committing a crime in mind, would risk giving him- /herself away by turning to the legal system in order to claim his/her so called rights. 
Nevertheless it's still appalling that it is in fact possible. 
My opinion is that it shouldn't even be feasible in theory for someone with criminal intentions to make capital out of the property owners unability or neglect to keep the house and yard/garden up to a certain standard.   
Even if it is desirable that the grounds are safe to anyone who might enter it, an individual should have the right to decide over his/her own property. 
The case might also be that the weather has been variable with snow and minus degrees, then thaw with a following cold snap turning the driveway into an ice-rink over night. 
This can make it difficult to keep up with the sanding for instance. 
The owner might not even deem it necessary since he/she is aware of the problem and therefore take precautions.   
One might also think that if you enter someones private property, you do it at your own risk, especially if you are uninvited.   
Some might argue that the uninvited person falling on the icy driveway may be the childminder bringing your sick child home, or that the person falling from your roof is the chimney - sweeper. 
Shouldn't these honest people have the right to expect being able to perform their duties in a safe environment? 
Shouldn't they have the right to claim for damages if they are injured on your property? 
Yes they should! 
This means that the discussed right must remain included in the law but the fact that it's possible for a criminal to benefit from it and recieve money for getting injured in the above described situations, indicates that the paragraph needs to be revised. 
Although it might be considered difficult to write a legal paragraph that excludes persons with shady intentions, without violating the rights of the general public. 
Another problem is to be able to prove that this person who got injured on your doorstep was in fact there for suspicious reasons. 
One can only hope that this right doesn't apply to people on the way out from your house, carrying off your new stereo in their arms while slipping.   
Can you then call a person who hasn't yet committed a crime a thief or a burglar? 
Yes I believe you can if he/she went there with the intentions of stealing, if he/she brought tools to use for breaking and entering, if he/she happends to get injured before accomplishing the theft is beside the point, he/she is still a criminal and should thus not benefit from the right to claim for damages. 
One might even go so far as to say that it serves the burglar right to break a leg for trying to break the law. 
Maybe an icy driveway could be considered an excellent safeguard to prevent someone from walking of with your valuables.
",False
"About twenty years ago I knew two boys who lived in London, John and John. 
We met at a party in Stockholm and after that we became friends. 
We started to write to each other and continued doing that for about two years. 
I also went to London with a former boyfriend to visit them on two separate occations. 
This friendship became very usefull for my English vocabulary and to all of the subjects I am going to write about in this essay, that is; speaking, writing, reading and listening in English. 
Unfortunely John and John just disappered after those two years, I continued writing to them, but there was no reply. 
My relationship to English nowadays is just that I am very fond of the language, that is mostly the British English language, I am not as fond of American English though. 
And I have two editions (!) 
of the ""Complete work of William Shakespeare"", that I read out aloud from, sometimes when I am all alone at home. 
The reason that I have got these books is that when I went to school in the ninth grade, me and my friend Helene played in a schoolplay and the name of the play was ""Richard III "" by William Shakespeare. 
After that our interest in the English language was awaken and has been more or less ever since. 
Helene and I formed a sort of club were we looked at old English and American movies from the fortieth, fiftieth and sixtieth, and our favorit actor was the great Laurence Olivier who spoke English like no one else. 
We also used to write to all sorts of actors, in English of course, and ask if they could please send us their autographed photos and we did get quite a lot of replies. 
But time passes by, you get older, Helene and I grew apart and formed our seperate families, so now I have no one to speak English with anymore.  	 
Four years ago I went to Skeppsholmens in Stockholm, were I, among other different subjects, studied the third year of highschool English. 
We had a teacher called Yngve who was very enthusiastic and inspirering to us who went to his English lessons. 
We sang Christmas carols and read aloud from all sorts of poetry. 
It was a very fruitful time for me, I hope that I will become as inspirering as an English teacher as Yngve was.  	 
As I mentioned earlier in this essay I unfortunetly don't come in contact with the English language nowadays. 
The last book I read in English was ""Brave new world"" by Aldous Huxley but that was four years ago, but of course I recite Shakespeare, in front of a mirror at home, from time to time, though the Shakespearian language is very tricky to understand sometimes. 
If I had the time I would translate the parts I read at the same time. 
One of the things I like about Swedish television is that they have the translation of foreign teveprogrammes at the lower part of the television set and that they don't dub like they do I many other contries. 
In that way both children and adults learn to listen and understand other languages than Swedish, even if most people you talk to nearly always look at the translated text and so do I. 
But I have started to think about it since I began this English course at Uppsala university, and if I lived alone I would probably put a tape over the former mentioned text. 
The thing I want to say is that I have learned much from just listening to English on teve and since there are so many British programs and also British movies with such a high quality it is so interesting and so much fun to watch those.  	 
I have not the same experience of English as many of the other students I have spoken to at Uppsala university, many of them have been for example in the United States as exchange students and of course you learn so much more by being ""forced"" to speake English since no one or very few speak Swedish there. 
But it feels like a have a little grasp of the English language that I like so much.
","Looking back through my years at school, thinking about English as a subject, the very first memory I have is from 7:th grade. 
In the beginning of that first semester in junior high, my teacher asked the class if anyone was interested in having a pen-friend from an English speaking country. 
It sounded very exciting to me so I put down my name and address on the application.  	 
I ended up with four pen-friends from different parts of the world. 
Two of these girls I kept writing to until I reached my twenties. 
I actually met them both, too! 
One girl was from Jamaica, and I visited her as a part of my third year project at ""gymnasiet"". 
The other girl was from California. 
I had the chance to meet her when I was working as au-pair and I was lucky enough to be there at the time of her wedding.  	 
Apart from writing English in school, these letters to my pen-friends are the only training I've had in writing. 
It probably helped improve my written English but what it mostly contributed to, was to enhance my interest in English as a language. 
It was not a favorite subject up till then. 
Anyway, improving my written English is what I think I most of all need to focus on this semester, especially the grammar. 	 
When it comes to listening to English, on lectures, television, radio and so on, I think I do understand most of what I hear. 
Of course there will always be a few words that I am not familiar with but when I hear them in a context it's usually not a problem to understand. 
When I watch English or American programs on TV, I always listen to what they are actually saying in English instead of only looking at the subtitles. 
There are many shades of meaning that gets lost in the translation. 	 
As I mentioned above, I have been able to practice my English skills abroad. 
My longest period of time in an English speaking country was when I worked as an au-pair in California for 14 months, 1982-1983. 
I didn't take any English classes during that time, unfortunately, but I think I improved my vocabulary quite a bit, which is now being very helpful when I have to listen to English lectures and read a lot of English literature.  	 
Reading has always been one of my favorite things to do. 
I have the ability to get lost in a book to the point where I am totally unaware of what's going on around me! 
To my husbands annoyance sometimes... 
But I believe, that ability is what makes me enjoy it so much. 
When you let yourself go, and really disappear into a book, you get a much deeper experience out of your reading.  	 
Reading is probably the skill I feel I am the most confident in, so literature is my favorite course this semester. 
The best part is that you get to read authors that you otherwise may not have read. 
The lectures that follows each book and also the small group discussions afterwards gives a deeper understanding that you never get when you read a book by yourself. 
I really look forward to these lectures and seminars.  	 
I said in the beginning that having pen-friends made me take a larger interest in English as a subject. 
After the 8:th grade, that growing interest made me convince my parents that I had to go to Wales on a language course for four weeks. 
Those weeks, in Colwyn Bay, made an even bigger difference. 
My friend and I stayed with a very nice family and since we were surrounded with the English language 24 hours a day, it really helped improve our English. 
Before that, I had been rather quiet in the English classes but when I got back from Wales I wasn't afraid to speak English anymore. 
That made English even more fun. 
Later, my year as au-pair gave me additional experience. 
But it is irritating that I don't have the same vocabulary when I speak, as I have when I read or listen. 
I often feel frustrated when I have things to say but not the correct words to express it. 
As an au-pair I often felt I couldn't discuss certain subjects, like the Swedish welfare system for instance, because I didn't know the words. 
That made me feel both younger and less educated than I really was. 	 
I hope that I, during this semester, will improve my English so that I can feel more confident in my speaking and writing.
",False
" Time for a law against Tobacco  One of the most powerful methods of getting rid of dangerous threats to society, is to make laws for protective purposes. 
For instance, we have laws to make traffic safer, and we have laws that forbids ordinary people from carrying guns. 
We also have laws that makes a clear statement regarding narcotics. 
And yet we have no law protecting us from the most popular, and therefore perhaps the most dangerous drug of them all, and that is of course tobacco. 
There can be little doubt, that a law that makes the sale and use of every form of tobacco illegal, is of the utmost importance.  
It is a well known fact that tobacco is hazardous to people's health. 
But there is not only the commonly known riscs of cancer and severe heart conditions that should cause worry. 
I once saw a list of the damage that tobacco may inflict upon a human body. 
At least a hundred deceases were listed, and almost every part of the body was mentioned. 
Furthermore this list showed that tobacco is not only causing physical illness. 
A person might also get various psychical disfunctions from using tobacco, such as sleeping problems and depression to mention a few. 
Needless to say perhaps, the healthproblems that comes from tobacco, are not of the kind that can be cured overnight. 
Every year more people die from deceases directly related to using tobacco, than from anything else. 
And before they die these thousands of people suffering from tobaccorelatd deseases occupies already overcrowded hospitals, making it not only a healthissue, but a financial matter, as well.  
There is of course a considerable amount of taxmoney to be saved here. 
At the present, we have an ongoing debate over the shortage of healthcare money, and still we allow a great deal of that money to be eaten up by costs caused by tobacco. 
This gives us an equation that is easy enough to solve. 
With a law against tobacco there would be no such expense. 
And we all know that the money is well needed elsewhere in a country's healthcare system. 
We also have endless expensive goverment campaigns advicing us not to use tobacco. 
Again money that could be easily saved simply by a law prohibiting tobacco. 
There are people arguing that the state actually have a taxincom on tobacco. 
Such arguments are of course complete and utter nonsense. 
The money the state gain on taxes from the sale of tobacco may be the equivalent of a mere few percent of what the tobacco is costing in healthcare.   
Finally I would like to emphazise on the thought of our forthcoming generations, and their growth in a society were a drug like tobacco, that really has no purpose apart from being a danger to their health, still has not been made illegal. 
A common answer to the question, why a person is using tobacco, is simply that the person for some reason once tried it and from that day is unable to stop. 
That only shows that by passing a law that bans tobacco, we can take away the possibility of that fatal first try to be exposed to our children. 
Every day passing is another day, where thousands of young people take up ""the bad habit"". 
And every such day should be considered a failure on our part, in terms of showing proper respect to the next generation.  
The next generation deserves this law. 
Arguments concerning health and finance clearly says that we should have one. 
So let us not hesitate any longer. 
Let us in the name of common sense, by law state that we have understood the folishness of allowing tobacco. 
Let us show the responsibility one has the right to expect from a civilized society. 
It is, and has been ever since tobacco was first tried by man, time to pass the law that bans tobacco.
","In this essay I am going to write about my relation to the English language. 
I will try to assess my strengths and weaknesses in the four skills of listening, reading, speaking and writing. 
I say try, because this is the first written exercise out of four I have to perform during this course in English. 
Right now this task feels insuperable but I will try my best. 
I will start with listening to English. 
I think listening is the easiest part for me out of the four skills mentioned above. 
If there is something I don't understand I ask if possible or look it up in a dictionary. 
I don't think it is difficult to grasp the connection while I am listening to English. 
I probably have some weakness in this area but I can't think of any right now. 
When it comes to reading I have to say that I don't have so much experience from that for the last ten years or so. 
I am thirty-four years old so it has been a while since I went to school and besides reading a few novels I haven't read anything in English since then. 
My strength in reading is that I really like to read especially novels. 
The only thing is that I usually read these books written in Swedish and now I have to read them in English instead. 
I don't mind, I actually enjoy it! 
My weakness in reading is my lack of understanding some words and I do hope my vocabulary will increase during this semester. y skills in speaking English are not very good, but perhaps normal for a native-born Swedish with no experience of living in another country. 
I have been to England twice on vacation but really, how much English do you speak while you're visiting Big Ben, Madame Tussaud's and The Tower?! 
And we shouldn't talk about visiting The White Hart Lane to look at Tottenham Hotspurs Vs Coventry City, because there you just need body language and a good singing voice. 
The most difficult thing about speaking English is that it's sometimes hard to find the right words and the words often seems to stumble on my tongue. 
I guess a lot of practise would make it better. 
In my job as a post-office clerk it sometimes happens that I have a chance to speak English, both with tourists and immigrants which haven't learnt Swedish yet. 
I really enjoy these moments despite all my lacks, because I think it's funny to speak English and I want to learn more.  
About my skills in writing in English I am sorry to say that it's bad. 
I have none experience what so ever since senior high school. 
The grammar test I did on the first day of this semester didn't go so well, especially the translation part was difficult. 
I guess this is the part, which I have to make an effort and work hard with. 
During the former semester, while I was studying Swedish, I discovered a lot of new skills in my own writing. 
It was gratifying to see the progress I made in my writing during the course and it became more fun to write. 
I hope this course will turn out the same way. 
The first test was this assignment and the biggest problem was to get enough words in the text. 
In conclusion I would like to say that perhaps I don't have so many strengths in my English skills but I am very determined that I can go through whit this course, even if it's going to cost ""blood, sweat and tears"" and of course a lot of hard work. 
If that is the price, I'm going to pay it!
",False
"Since I started studying English in the fourth grade, back in 1965, I have always felt that English was an easy language to learn, and therefore I felt pretty competent throughout my school years. 
I don't believe I'm over-confident about my abilities, since I always got the highest grade in English. 
As every non-native speaker of a foreign language I have my weaknesses (and hopefully strengths as well), although this is the first time I ever thought about them. 
When dividing my knowledge of the language into the four skills of listening, reading, speaking and writing, the assessment will be quite different in all of these areas. 
Starting with listening, I feel comfortable that I will understand, not everything, but usually the main parts of what is said in a conversation with an English speaking person. 
It is of course easier in a person-to-person situation, when you can ask for clarification of certain unfamiliar words, than when you listen to the radio or watch TV. 
Then there is no one to ask and no time to consult a dictionary. 
Recently I have started to watch Euro News more frequently in order to get more training in listening and understanding. 
I also feel capable of spotting the mistakes in translation from English to Swedish that often appears in films and TV shows. 
There is always room for improvement, and I would certainly need a larger vocabulary.   
In my opinion, the best way to achieve that vocabulary is to read a lot, and make use of the dictionary. 
When I read novels I find more words I've never heard before, than when I listen to English. 
Novelists tend to use more unusual words in their writing, than we normally do in speaking. 
My biggest problem in this field is that I forget the new words the first two or three times I look them up, so I have to rub them in. 
Generally, I seem to understand the content in written English fairly good, but need to develope more speed and fluency in my reading.   y pronounciation, when I speak English is rather satisfactory, in my own opinion anyway. 
A problem for me is that I sometimes mix British and American pronounciation. 
My guess is that it depends on in which of the two accents I first heard a new word, or perhaps who I am talking to. 
I try to stick to the British way of pronounciation as much as possible, though. 
I felt a bit rusty in speaking and pronounciating when arriving at the Department of English, since it's been a rather long while since I used my English orally, but my confidence is building nicely and it feels like it's getting better every day.  
I find that the most difficult part in any foreign language is to write correctly and with any fluency, and this applies of course to my writing in English as well. 
This is probably due to the fact that we never had any, or very little, writing training in school. 
Swedish schools tend to focus on the spoken language. 
This is actually the first time I ever tried to write something coherent in English, and I am afraid a lot of mistakes may appear.   
One area which affects all of the above mentioned skills is my rather poor knowledge of grammatical rules. 
I think I have a gut feeling that helps me to choose the correct expressions in talking and writing, but without the real know-how I can never be quite sure. 
The only thing I can remember from grammar lessons in school was learning the different forms of the irregular verbs. 
We had about five verbs each week as homework. 
I guess we must have done other areas as well, but my memory in quite blank here. 
I see now that a theoretical understanding of the language is important, and the main reason I have choosen English in my teachers education is to learn these elements. 
Naturally, my aim is to get better in all different aspects of English as well as through the didactics learn how to teach English to the next generation of young Swedish pupils. 
I'm pleased to say that I've already found out that writing more in school is essential, and we have not yet had a single didactic lesson.
","English is one of the major languages, widely spoken by many in today's sociaty, actually in all over the world. 
I don't believe there has been anyone that somehow hasn't been exposed to the English language, either from watching TV, reading magazines or simply by listening to music. 
However, the actual knowledge and confidence of using the language is much different from person to person, no matter how much they have learnt at school or practiced it. 
This short essay will be about me and what I believe my weaknesses and strengths are, toward the English language in the following four skills: listening, reading, speaking and writing, in comparision with each one of them.  
First skill I will discuss is listening. 
Listening is farmore, one of my better skills compared to the other three. 
I have, from young age, been exposed and dealt with many different people and cultures as my family has acquiantances from a wide range of different nationalities. 
Also from being in Asia, working for more than 7 years, I have gained much knowledge and experience in the differences of speech and pronounciations of the language. 
It happens, that when talking to people with a different dialect or pronounciation, I was the only one who actually understood the whole conversation. 
Difficult and different English pronounciation is specially common among people from Thailand, India and Japan.   
I have also, as many thousand others, been an exchange student in the USA. 
This was where I initally was exposed to the the English language, and needed to use it on a daily bases. 
It is very valuable when dealing with native speakers. 
You learn things you normally cannot be taught in school, such as, understanding the different tone and emphasis on different words or phrases and also simply to be able to feel and taste the languange itself.  y second skill I will bring up is reading. 
I read somewhat extensively. 
Unfortunatly, mostly magazines and litterature that is less litterary such as fictions and autobiographies. 
Many times, reading improves your understanding and meaning of a word. 
This is because you see the unfamiliar word in a phrase or a sentence in a situation or text you already understand or know. 
After finding the word in the dictionary, I somehow always seem to forget them so when it comes time or situation to use them, the word is usually at the 'tip of the tongue' since you remember the meaning of the word by remember the text or article you last saw it but you just cannot recall the word for it. 
Is there a way of improving your memory, otherwise learning new words would be meaningless for me.  
The third skill is speaking. 
I dont believe I have much difficulties in speaking since oral communication has been a daily approach for me while working only with foreigners for many years. 
However, I believe speaking in front of groups, is a major problem. 
I can be well prepared with my presentation or speech but I get very nervous and say things (or don't say) things I should say and fumble or stammer my whole presentation. 
Although, I speak quite fluent, or I should say, I am fully capable of expressing what I want or feel, I find my language and vocabulary very 'simple'. 
I, not only need to expand my word vocabulary but also find ways of being able to recall and use them when situation occurs.  
And my forth and last point will be about writing. 
Unfortunatly writing is my weakest point. 
Maybe because I never was a creative person in terms of essay or story writing. 
I disliked all forms of writing and whenever courses in writing was offered I tend not to choose these. 
Therefore basic knowledge such as setting up texts correctly, how each sets of paragraphs should be written, the proceedeure of the text content etc. is very poor.  
But how important is writing skills? 
Nowadays, many companies have their own formats for writing ex memos, quotations or different kind of reports so in actual work I believe writing is making less importance unless professions such as journalist or critics etc.  
Conclusion is, out of the four skills in English language, listening skill is my major strength whereas writing skills is my major weakness. 
By participating in this course I hope to be able to firstly, improve my written English and grammar but also to expand my general knowledge towards the English language in all aspects.
",False
" Television- good or bad?  
There are not many homes in the industrialised world that do not include at least one television set. 
You often hear people comment that they would be much better off without television or that they are addicted to it. 
Some people feel it is a very important medium to receive information and to get new ideas while others believe it is detrimental to your health. 
Reflecting on these issues, you realise that there are both positive and negative effects from watching television.  
Television as a means to provide people with information can be seen as both positive and negative. 
I think most people would agree that information in the form of news and documentaries are important and educating. 
When we are enlightened about what goes on in the world and in our own country we can also act for or against these things in one way or another to make a difference. 
However, we cannot really know weather what we see and hear is true or not. 
I am convinced that some of the information we receive has been twisted for us to sympathise with one side or another. 
Now that computer animation has become very advanced we face the danger of being totally deceived. 
There are already techniques to make video clips of people that were actually never filmed. 
Photos of a person can be animated to make that person look like he or she is speaking and moving. 
For entertainment and even educational purposes these techniques can probably be useful. 
Information tends to be more interesting and stick better in our minds when several senses are stimulated at the same time. 
Pictures, text and sounds on the television screen can help us create a positive atmosphere for learning.   
If we are to use television both for entertainment and educational purposes we need to look at the health aspects of doing so. 
Too much time spent in front of the television is damaging to our health in many respects. 
Just sitting down watching makes us both passive and physically unfit and I sincerely believe that the multitude of images in very short sequences will shorten our attention spans in the long run. 
We get used to everything happening really fast and outside in the ""real world"" it is not always like that. 
Besides, there is a risk that watching too much television will make people neglect, voluntarily or not, other important work that has to be done and some even use television to repress a problem instead of dealing with it, which I would call very unhealthy. 
On the contrary, comedy shows in a moderate amount can have a positive effect since laughter is said to prolong your life.   
Apart from comedy shows there are other programmes to enjoy, programmes that affect your creativity. 
Travelling, cooking and home decorating tips shown on television can work as a good source of inspiration and challenge you to try new and creative ideas. 
Often these things seem very simple on the screen while they take some practise in real life, but once you get started you may develop a new creative hobby. 
Unfortunately, I believe that most people who watch these shows do not actually use the ideas they get from them. 
Creativity in general probably diminishes because you choose to watch rather than do. 
How many people do not end up in front of the television after dinner when having guests instead of socialising? 
However when you choose to socialise with family or friends, you can always use programmes as foundation for discussions and such discussions may impact your creativity in a positive way.  
From personal experience and from what I hear people say, television is abused and takes up too much of our time. 
There are many negative effects but in moderate doses, and if you choose carefully what you watch, television can be very useful.
"," Should the family look after the elderly?  
It has been proposed that the family, and not the state, should look after the elderly. 
It seems like a natural thing to do when you first think about it. 
The children would grow up with their grandparents nearby and perhaps the understanding between old people and youths would improve. 
However, the society we live in today can not really be called natural and such heroic deeds do no longer fit in with people's lifestyles. 
It sounds to me just like a way for the state to save money and place a lot of extra work on the already overworked people and therefor I'm against it.   
The main reason why I don't agree with the proposition is that people in today's society have enough problems to worry about. 
Many men and women already feel overloaded with work, which includes both of them managing a full-time job, taking care of a home, a relationship and possibly of children. 
Apart from these chores, time has to be set aside for personal well-being in order to prevent collapses and other stress symptoms that are increasingly common these days. 
Therefore, I see no possibility in managing yet another task, especially one that demands a lot of work and responsibility.  
Taking on the responsibility to care for one's elderly means that geographical mobility is out of the question, something that many people, including me, saw as an advantage when joining the European Union and a matter of personal freedom. 
Due to their task and their conscience, people would have to live their lives in the same geographical area as where they grew up. 
Let us look at an example: Ellen is a Swedish girl and an only child from a small village in the south of Sweden called Nottraby. 
She wants to become a French teacher and to improve her French she goes off to work in Paris for a year. 
While waiting tables in Paris she falls in love with Guillaume, a French cook. 
She decides to stay, marries Guillaume and they later have twins. 
When the children have reached the age of 10, her mother dies and her retired father has difficulties taking care of himself due to back problems. 
Since Ellen is the only family left and the family carries the responsibility to care for the elderly in Sweden, she feels obligated to return to Nottraby to look after her father. 
I strongly oppose the idea that Ellen or any other people would have to choose between their present family on one hand and the parents on the other, when there are state institutions with adequately educated staff to do so.    
If the state leaves it entirely up to families to look after their elders, what happens to the elders who don't have a family? 
Because of expenses of having children many women prefer to get a good education leading to a well-paying job first. 
This may mean they do not have children at all since there is not enough time to find a life partner and have babies before the menopause. 
Many women and men are also unable to have children due to physical or even mental reasons. 
Thus, there would have to be some sort of institution anyway to take care of the childless elders. 
Institutions for the elderly is something we can not live without in our modern and demanding society.
",True
"y relationship to English has generally been about talking and listening. 
It was when I first came to read at KOMVUX I actually first started to do the writhing and reading. 
At compulsory school it was just boring, hard work and dull teachers, who actually made the lessons quit boring. 
Although we had stand-in teachers from time to time, they made the lessons more interesting. 
It was quite fun at school at those occasions. 
When I left the Compulsory school I guess I knew that much English I could make me understood if ever necessary. 
I didn't go to Upper secondary school after Compulsory school; I started to work instead. 
My English was in a deep sleep through the years until I decided to start working in the Swedish merchant navy. 
It was the first time I actually had the opportunity to practice my school English. 
I improved my English during the years at sea, but only when it comes to talking and listening. 
I can't say that my vocabulary very big. 
I guess I stick to the words I'm familiar with. 
But don't we all  Do that from time to time. 
Hopefully we don't make to many mistakes then.  
All through the years at sea I did never reflected about that I could read an English book to improve my English. 
I don't think we even had any English books on board. 
Well if we did I didn't look for them. 
After spending seven years at sea I decided to change career and went to a Folk high school to get an Upper secondary school competence. 
During my year at the Folk high school I had English at the schedule. 
As I can remember it we didn't do much reading or writing. 
It was more off talking and listening comprehension.  
This year I learned one thing, as I never reflected over before, the different between British English and American English. 
It was mainly because we first had an American teacher who taught us the American way of speaking. 
The next semester we got a Swedish teacher who preferred the B.E. 
He had a hard time to teach us the British pronunciation. 
At this very day I'm rather convinced that I still have a mix of both B.E and A.E.  
After my year at the Folk high school the life went on ashore. 
One day I felt it was time to do something about my situation as an unemployed and I went to KOMVUX to, ones again, get an Upper secondary school competence. 
The other one from the Folk high school was too old. 
At KOMVUX, for the first time, I got in touch with the written word in book form. 
Well that's not really true, I have had tried to read a novel before but I gave it up before finishing it. 
This time I had to finish it and review it to the class. 
From the beginning it was hard work but I learned to enjoy it, and I still do. 
But I don't read that much English literature I must admit. 
During the English course at KOMVUX we had to hand in essays as well. 
From a start I had no bigger problems with that but at the B-level I had a teacher who wanted us to hand in essay after essay about different subjects and so I did. 
My essays was always marked whit red all over, but I never got any explanation about all the mistakes I did, so I could chance them It went from enjoy writing to something I disliked. 
After KOMVUX I haven't been writing one word until this very moment. 
And I still have the problem when it comes to writing English as you obvious can see And I'm still unsecured when it comes to writing, thanks to my teacher at B-level at KOMVUX Now when I look back at my evaluation about my English all through the years I realise I could have improved my English by reading and writing more than I have done, but I didn't. 
I actually didn't know I was going to become a teacher one year ago, but now I'm here and I haven't got cold feet yet.
"," The Steam of Courage  	According to Catholic doctrine, to think evil towards others is punishable. 
But in Ellen's case it is quite understandable and acceptable when she produces such horrible plans about her family, relatives and even her surroundings. 
She did not get any moral support from her father, which was her prime protector. 
Nevertheless, as we go on further reading the literary history, we will encounter all sorts of actions that Ellen is bound to react emotionally and sensibly. 
Her ideas were gorgeous, brilliant and enormously great, that she succeeded in the end.  	
Ellen Foster is from childhood surrounded and dominated by the coarse-grained dead or crazy people, but according to her she figured out that she was pretty good considering the rest of her family. 
Sometimes it is hard to believe that it happens to her. 
She is the pacifier in her family. 
She was very strong and determined what she wanted to do. 
She tried her utmost best to save her mother from taking an overdose pills. 
She said to her ""vomit them up mama, I will stick my finger down your throat and you can vomit them up. 
I got her suitcase in my hand and I carry it to the bedroom. 
What can I do but go and reach the tall things for her. 
I help her get herself laid in the bed and then I slide in beside her. 
I will stay her with you, just for a nap. 
I get up and go in there and tell him (her father) to get up that folks got to come in here and do their business. 
(P. 
5) It is really excruciating indeed on her part to take care of two old grown up people who act like children which are supposedly her mentors. 
But here it is the other way around. 
She does the chores which are meant for her parents, just to please and satisfy them.  	
There has been a systematic effort and braveness in her which precisely the mechanism to remedy her turbulence life. 
When she lived with her grandmother she did not expect that she would be working in the field without being paid, just like the black people. 
But even her grandmother treated her like a slave she was not an ill-regulated little girl. 
She showed respect and kindness in spite of her grandmother's rudeness. 
She worked on the field under the heat of the sun. 
Al-though she gets sick from the start because she is not used to do such things when she lives together with her parents. 
A passage that strengthen her braveness.""
I had to sit down and every time I tried to stand up I just had to sit back down. 
I can hardly stands it my own hot self. 
The next morning I got straw hat out of the garden shed and wore it all day. 
I felt cooler all over and did not get sick anymore. 
While I worked I mainly counted in my head or recited the poems I knew good to myself. 
You can keep time with the hoe chopping around a plant. 
By July I was like a boy. 
When I started out both my hands were a red blister but then I toughened up good.""  	
Nevertheless, she has the courage to be funny, which maybe one of some reason why Starletta and her new mama liked her. 
Some passages that fortifies her funny traits. 
""She could not help getting sick but nobody made her marry him. 
You see when she was my size she had romantic fever I think it is called and since then she has not had a good heart."" (p. 
3) ""I would go off by myself and imagine turning my buddy Starletta loose in here. 
She could have a rampage in one room and out the other, or maybe I will invite the whole family that eats off records. 
They can visit while you are at the beauty parlor I thought and I felt better to imagine it all."" (p 62-3) Unconciously she thinks of funny things just to tease and let her grandmother realize that those collectibles are not so important in life. 
Ellen is longing for love attention and affection from her grandmother but unfortunately she did not get them.  
Beyond Ellen's limitations she conquers the misty and steamy moment inher life. 
She coped with the unendearment sequence that made her the luminary in the atory. 
And considering the fact that she confines herself to such miserable surroundings still she manages to be thoughtful, affectionate and considerate her ralatives and others, like Dora, Nadine, Starletta, her new mama and her grandmother. 
Considerate when she assisted her sich mother, grandmother. 
Very thoughtful to Dora and Nadine, when she drew cats for them as christmaspresents. 
Very affectionate to Starletta and to her new mama. 
She could not hardly wait not telling her new mama about Starletta coming to visit her on weekends so that they could play and spend together. 
""Come on and crawl up here and rest with me for while. 
This is the way I always do. 
Well I came to your house because I like you so much."" 
(P 124)
",False
" Learning English at the Age of Six  Younger Swedish school- children are not capable of understanding the English that surrounds them, unless they have a linguistic instinct and a large amount of interest or have very ambitious parents. 
The Swedish schools do not encourage English learning until grade four, when it becomes one of the basic subjects. 
This is something to be taken seriously.
Children have the right to know some English, much earlier than what is the case today. 	
Nowadays, Swedish children are exposed to the English language long before they begin learning it in school. 
Television-cartoons and films, computer-games, pop-music, Poke'mon-cards and all sorts of toy-instructions are in English. 
They also meet English-speaking persons more often than older generations. 
Therefore, it is obvious that our children definitely have a need for English, at least passively, long before they learn the language in school. 	
The Swedish curriculum suggests that the schools teach English in a way that they can make use of the child's own interests and curiosity, such as pictures, music, moving around and creativity. 
There is not a set age, when the schools are obliged to start the English education. 
Most schools however do not begin properly until grade three or four.
I would say that most teachers are not in the position to make use of their pupils' interests, since the teaching often starts in grade four. 
At the age of ten, pupils already have to know some basic English to manage to use their interests in language-learning. 
Therefore, it would be much better to introduce English as early as at the age of six. 
Then teachers and pupils can make use of the supply of English and American material for pre-school children, such as books, games, tapes and films. 
Consequently, one obtains interested pupils who practise English just because it is so much fun.
To enjoy the subject is the best start in the process of learning a new language.
Having received a keen interest in English, children can more easily get interested also inother cultures. 
They understand that Sweden is one small part of our big world and that new languages are nothing strange.  	
Many teachers and parents think that children should learn one language at a time. 
They are afraid that they will get confused when they are introduced to English at the age of six.
Their worries are certainly understandable, but many children are the proof that this is not the case. 
They are brought up in a bilingual environment, and they learn both languages. 
My brother in law's daughter, who is three years old, speaks Swedish like a four year old. 
She understands English and is in the state of beginning to use it actively. 
She is also surrounded by Arabic. 
At the age of three she has reached the point where she is able to distinguish the three languages and translate from English to Swedish when her both grandmothers talk to each other. 
She has a good ear for languages and her parents are indeed very much aware of the fact that it is important to work actively with giving their daughter all three languages.
Not all children have this exclusive background, but at the age of six most Swedish children have such a good knowledge in Swedish that there is nothing dangerous in introducing a new language. 
Actually, at the age of six, children are very receptive to new languages, and they are not afraid of doing mistakes, like in pronunciation. 	
Some persons concerned with the preservation of the purity of Swedish want to protect our mother tongue from English influences. 
They want to keep it as it is. 
Swedish has however already been under the influence of several languages e.g. 
French and German. these influences are connected to our history.
So Swedish is constantly evolving. 
Accordingly, we can never protect our language fully from the influences of other languages, but early English-learning is not the cause of the changing of the Swedish language. 
Instead this can raise awareness about distinguishing the two languages and it may lead to a deeper sense for the mother tongue.  	
Applying my thoughts right into the teaching-system of today will probably not work. 
We need teachers comfortable with speaking English. 
A professional attitude is of importance. 
Working with younger pupils should demand almost as long university education as working with older ones. 
Although the main thing is of course that the teacher's knowledge is applicable to younger children. 	
Finally, I am looking forward to see the next generation having confidence in using English in Sweden or abroad earlier than our generation, and having the possibility to apply English to their interests. 
This can be the truth if we begin the English learning at the age of six.
"," Shorter working hours - Higher quality of life for everyone  We live in a time, when most people are pressed for short of time. 
Many of us, I am sure, feel like they are running in a treadmill that never stops. 
My suggestion to solve this problem is a change-over from an eight-hour working day to a six-hour day. 
I believe that such change is relatively easy done. 
All that it takes is some schedulechanges, and maybe a slightly different distribution of the work. 
I am sure that a shortening of the working hours would give many advantages, both to society and to the individual.  
As a result of the shorter working hours, the individual will have more spare time, to do whatever he wants. 
For example, if he has a family he can spend more time with the children, who can get more help with their homework. 
And i am sure that everyone who has children, feel that they never have as much time to just sit down and talk to them as they would like. 
People will also get time to exercise their hobbies. 
I believe that a lot of people feel that they do not have time to do the things they really want to do. 
They keep thinking: ""I will do it later, when I get time "". 
Doing things you really like to do is, as we all know, an important part of life. 
With the introduction of a six-hour working day, we will get more spare time and a higher quality of life for everyone.  y second argument for a shorter work week is that it will lead to an increased number of vacant jobs, which means that many of the unemployed will get a job. 
That means that it will be a more fair division of labour and in a time when so many are unemployed, I think that it is only fair that we share the burden of work. 
Because just as well as it can be hard to find time when you have a full time job, it can be tough to be unemployed, with a constant lack of money and a feeling of being unneeded. 
There is no doubt that getting a job leads to a higher self-esteem and a higher quality of life. 
If we can attain this just by shortening the work, I can see no reason why we should not do it.  y third argument for shorter working hours is that the number of repetitive strain injuries will be reduced. 
That will lead to fewer certificates of illness, which will be good, both for the companies and for the individual. 
The companies will save money, because they will not have to hire so many stand-ins. 
Furthermore, the companies will become less vulnerable because the staffs will be larger, and it will be easier for them to cover up for someone missing because of illness. 
The individual will probably get a fuller, healthier old age, if the body is not jaded. 
The queues to surgical operations, on for example hip joints, will be shortened. 
And that is, of course, a major advantage for society in general. 
Shorter queues in the medical service is, as we all know, a goal for all the political parties.  
I know that this labour market measure has been up to discussion several times, at least here in Sweden. 
Strangely enough, it has not come to a decision yet, but I am sure that it will happen soon. 
The advantages are, as anyone must understand, so overwhelming, that everybody must see that shorter working hours are inevitable in the future. 
Let us just hope that everybody involved in decision-making will soon make the only right decision on this issue.
",False
" Television can be a big resource as long as we use it right  The question of how television affects our lives touches both the uses and the abuses of television. 
After first showing you the background to this debate, I will tell you about both sides and my opinion of how you can control the abuses and instead turn them into uses of television.  
First I would like to describe the difference between television's influence previously and currently. 
Earlier television reflected and returned outer reality. 
Television today is in contrast more like a reality of its own right. 
This reality reaches and forms us wherever we are. 
The recent tragic happenings in USA illustrate this fact very clearly. 
Furthermore, all the TV-series that are running in most countries is a good example of the change of television's position in society. 
Series where real people are forced to act on the television's conditions, would have been out of the question earlier.  
For this reason the series reflects an actual change. 
TV is no more an object which we can stand beside and look at, instead we have become TV's objects. 
It is owing to this that I think it is important to give the background to why we are discussing this matter at all. 
Nobody would be wondering about the uses or abuses of television if this change of TV's influence had not taken place. 
As a result of this change has television become the most real thing we have, accordingly to that TV is so usual and obvious nowadays. 
You can like TV or not, but you cannot any longer take it out of our lives.  
Now when I have described the source to this discussion I am going to give my reflections. 
To begin with, most of us are in some way involved in television's language. 
We communicate with each other by talking about TV-shows and the specific happenings in them. 
Television is as well as weather a very ordinary topic that people with no relation to each other can discuss without any fear of making any serious mistake. 
Therefore TV is a medium which breaks all the barriers between people with cultural and social differences.  
Television is moreover a indispensable source which provides us with many elementary facts. 
It is one of the most important ways for people to know about all the current situations in the rest of the world. 
TV can also be educational in many ways, especially for the children as long as somebody adult is present and responsible of what the children are watching. 
Television has of course not just good sides. 
It can inspire people to choose completely wrong directions in their lives, it can create opinions which are real dangerous to society. 
TV can also give people inspiration to carry out actions that otherwise would stay in their imaginations. 
In addition to all this, can the children learn irrelevant things. 
They can also start to think that the TV-behaviour is the right form of behaviour and that the actions on TV are justifiable.  
It is always easy to pick or point out the negative aspects in every medium or idea, but in this case I think it is just as easy to tell how to avoid these negative developments. 
Concerning the children, the answer is as I mentioned above. 
The adults have to take their responsibility and have the children's TV-habits under attention. 
And in that way turn their watching to be something educational rather than something destructive. 
In all the other issues I just mentioned as negative I believe that the solution is named selection. 
In society today, I think that every individual is equipped with a common sense and an ability to be selective.  
So this ability together with the common sense should lead to that people would avoid useless shows or series, which neither are educational or giving any information of importance. 
Unfortunately this is still just a utopia. 
And it will not be easy to convince everybody of the fact that TV is a positive element if you just choose programs after some consideration.  
Television has undoubtedly developed to become a big part of our lives. 
And I cannot see any reason for why it will not be the same in the future. 
Therefore is it of great relevance that everybody who dislike TV must notice how much it offers and how easy it is to avoid the junk-parts. 
But it is even more important that TV stays as a part of our lives instead of controlling our lives.
"," Give the elderly a decent treatment  The whole idea of having the elderly at their respective families instead of having them at a home for the aged is absurd. 
Although if the two alternatives may give an equal amount of arguments I can't see why there can be any doubt of which side to take in comparison of the two options.  
To begin with, who in each family should be responsible of taking care of that the elder will be getting the right medicine at the right moment. 
On the other hand, you can always educate people in general medicine. 
But, you will never reach the same trust like you do if a real nurse is taking care of it. 
Moreover, accidents come whether you want them or not. 
And in situations of that kind you can count on a proper behaviour when it comes to solving it, if your elder is surrounded by professionals instead of amateurs.  
Secondly, how can a family have a twenty-four hours control as you have in state care. 
Of course, it is just to split the hours between the familymembers and go on with this schedule every week. 
As a result of this solution comes the inevitable question of how much each familymember are willing to sacrifice to secure this twenty-four hours control. 
You can't guarantee that everyone always will be able, or want to follow a schedule like that. 
In contrast, if you just use persons who are educated and trained for a specific task, they will do all that is required from them. 
Because why would they otherwise choose it as their profession. 
Therefore it would be wrong to even think that a family can be as reliable as a home for the aged. 
Relationship is indeed something valuable, but it is simply not just enough in this issue.  
In addition to how it will be for the familymembers to give up a certain bit of their spare-time to manage to solve it, you must look on the other side of the coin. 
No one can possibly come and say that any elder, who has been brought up to get things done, would like an situation where he or she would be a burden instead of an asset for the family. 
The elderly will with no doubt feel that they are limiting the other familymembers wills to do stuff which they get more satisfaction from, when they have to be stuck at home watching them instead. 
These two statements may assume to that any kind if sickness has to be involved to create this understanding. 
But, in fact that is not necessary at all. 
Just the thing that the elderly can't be home alone even though that they are in great condition is enough to describe why it is like that. 
For who can you blame if something happens to your old relative when you or someone else not are present. 
This fact is just another thing you can avoid if you leave it to the professionals.  
Next problem which will appear if we let the elderly become a family matter is unemployment. 
Homes for the aged is one of the largest working places in our current society. 
Because if the families should look after the elderly they can't hire anyone else to do it for them. 
And then there won't be any similar place to go to for all the people who are working at any home for the aged at the moment. 
For this reason they won't be out of options but it is not easy to find something else to do just like that. 
Everyone will not have the will or the potential, which is demand if they want to avoid unemployment.  
Thus, the elderly deserves to feel that they can contribute with something and that they fill a function without interfering some other person. 
The elderly must get good treatment at any time and they should feel confident that they are in safe hands if something happens to them. 
This is not an illusion, it is how the reality should look like when everyone reaches an higher age. 
But it will just be an illusion if the elderly becomes a family matter.
",True
" The Americanisation in Sweden  The trend in society that I have chosen to describe is the Americanisation in Sweden. 
We can all agree, more or less, that Sweden has been influenced by America. 
The Americanisation has occurred in some areas more than others. 
If we are in doubt if Sweden is Americanised or not, we can only imagine what it would be like in Sweden if we had imitated Russia as much as we have imitated America. 
It is almost unthinkable, but Sweden would then be a totally different country. 
Americanisation means that America has gained influence over Sweden in terms of culture and society. 
American ideas, values, food and companies are seen as something of high value in Sweden today. 
When we in Sweden look up to America we also start to imitate. 
An example of this is Halloween, which is an American celebration that has come to Sweden. 
It is celebrated on the Swedish ""allhelgonadagen"" in Sweden now because we have seen it in American movies and in TV- series and thought it was a funny tradition that suited us. 
However, it wouldn't be celebrated in Sweden unless American traditions weren't seen as something positive. 
Another example is the American hamburger chain McDonald's, which is currently establishing more and more restaurants all over Sweden. 
A lot of people are choosing McDonald's instead of trying local Swedish specialities, so McDonald's are winning on behalf of smaller specialised restaurants in Sweden.   	
We are looking up to America and imitating Americans because USA is a leading nation in economy, media and also a political power. 
America is the dominating country in certain areas as movie production, television, and music. 
When we get interested in a culture we learn more and more about it and then we are influenced by it. 
We do see a lot of American movies and TV-series and also listen to American music. 
We also get interested in speaking English, out of economic and cultural interest. 
We need to know English because it is a global language. 
English is the language that is dominating in technology, international politics, diplomacy, finance, air traffic, IT, media, entertainment and so on. 
The variety that is taught in Swedish school is most of the time British English, but we hear American English all the time because of the American domination in media, so it is impossible for us here in Sweden not to mix the accents or speak more and more American English. 
When a language is often heard or spoken it is spreading ideas, because a language is a way of thinking. 
Americans stand for 70% of the English that is spoken in the world.  
On the other hand, some people don't see America as a prestigious country. 
In fact, some people among the highly educated or older in Sweden look down on American culture and it is devalued, because it is seen as cheap and not as good as European. 
Nevertheless, I think that it's safe to say that the majority of people are influenced by America even if not everyone is totally impressed.  	
This essay was about the fact that America has influenced every day life in Sweden. 
This is because we look up to America mostly due to international economy and media. 
Because we value American things high we imitate them and like them.
"," Homosexual couples should have the right to be tried as adopting parents  When I was younger I was against the proposal that homosexuals should be allowed to adopt children. 
I was opposed to it, just as Linden, because I was thinking about the children and the problems it will cause for them, in school and among their friends. 
Maybe I have become older and wiser now, but I also believe that society has changed to a more tolerant view of homosexuals. 
Now I can't see any major problems with a family constellation with two mothers or two fathers. 
They already exist, with or without difficulties, exactly as any ""ordinary"" family has. 
I also think that if we change the rules in our society there will be a change of what is seen as acceptable and the public norms. 
If we take steps towards a more tolerant society by allowing ""gayadoptions"", it will encourage people to be more open and proud of their sexuality, which is positive. 
It is not your sexual preferences that decide if you are a good parent or not. 
We should carefully examine other qualities such as ability to love and responsibility when we decide if someone is appropriate to adopt a child or not. 
And there is nothing that suggests that homosexuals and heterosexuals shouldn't be equal in these categories. 
It is our qualities as humans that are important, not what sexuality we have or what sex for that matters. 
The first argument that I will counter is the one that homosexuality and ""gayadoptions"" is supposed to be unnatural. 
Homosexuality has existed for as long as we know and it exists everywhere in nature, so I don't see what is so unnatural about it. 
We allow people with difficulties having children to have inseminations and hormones and all kinds of manipulations. 
There is hardly anyone that objects to these ""unnatural"" things. 
It is of course always difficult to decide where we should draw the line between what is allowed and what is not. 
When we think about what is right and what is wrong we must also consider the issue of discrimination. 
The doctors want to do everything in their power to help people and us ordinary people should also try to help each other and not discriminate each other for different reasons. 
Imagine growing up and realising that you can never have a baby just because you happen to be born homosexual. 
Being homosexual is not a choice you make. 
It is something that chooses you. 
And the issue that is at stake here is not concerning everyone's right to have a baby but concerning everyone's right to be tested if they are eligible adopting parents. 
Secondly, I have come across another heavy counter argument saying that children who are put up for adoption are often traumatised by earlier experience, and should therefore be treated in the best possible way, which is absolutely true. 
Some people argue that we should avoid further complications in adopted children's life by putting them in a family consisting of two fathers or two mothers and that children have the right to have one father and one mother when they come to Sweden. 
However, it is better to live in a homosexual family in Sweden than to live in the streets or in an orphanage. 
There are a huge number of children that would benefit from coming to Sweden. 
And it is far from every child that has a mother and a father in his/her life. 
Thirdly, to answer the objection that other countries won't allow their children to be adopted to Swedish gay families: Of course we won't force people to give their babies to homosexual couples when they are against it but I don't see that as a problem. 
We can control which baby goes to which family and I am sure that some people in some countries will allow their children to be adopted by gay parents. 
In places such as Iceland and California they have already consented that they could send children to gay couples. 
And if this proposal to allow ""gayadoptions"" goes through, there is nothing that implies that there will be a huge demand for babies from homosexual couples. 
In the beginning there will be few ""gayadoptions"" so there will surely be enough babies. 
A fourth counter argument that I will deal with asserts that there is no research saying that it isn't harmful for babies to be adopted by homosexual parents, and we shouldn't use babies as guinea pigs to experiment on. 
""Gayadoptions"" is a new thing and for that reason there hasn't been much research in the subject. 
Nevertheless, we can study adopted children in Sweden and children living with two people of the same sex. 
We can get hold of much more information than they could when they first started adopting children from other countries, to Sweden.  
Briefly put: I used to think that the adopted children to gay parents would suffer because of their parents but now I think that the Swedish people are ready for this. 
A main reason to why I think ""gayadoptions"" are a good thing is the fact that there are so many children in the world that would have a better life if they were living in Sweden with homosexual parents, compared to the way they live their life now.  
Uppsala Nya Tidning, 13 February 2001  Thomas Linden says in his letter that homosexuality and homosexuals having children is something unnatural. 
He implies that adopted children to homosexual couples will suffer. 
Linden says that the man's role and the woman's role will be very confused within these families. 
Another problem is that other countries will not send children to Sweden if we will allow homosexuals to adopt children. 
In the end he turns towards the reader to ask: what do you think?
",True
" Let homosexual couples adopt children!  
In the Dagens Nyheter 99-09-27 there was an article that argued against homosexual couples having the right to adopt children. 
The arguments that were used concentrated on what was best for the child that was to be adopted, a viewpoint I completely agree with, but I found their arguments to be invalid. 
Firstly, that children shouldn't be adopted since they will have difficulties in their lives, if adopted by homosexual parents. 
Secondly, that legitimate adoptions to Sweden might decrease since the majority of the biological mothers or representatives for orphans don't want to give their child up for adoption to homosexual couples. 
Thirdly that there should be no more experimenting with the lives of children that are adopted. 
These arguments might seem valid when out of the context, but I will argue against this article in order to show that homosexual couples are not less suitable to be parents than heterosexual couples are. 	
To begin with, it is argued that it is not right to let homosexual couples adopt children, since these children would go through hard times. 
It is not specified in the article what kind of problems and obstacles these children would encounter, but I believe that this argument concerns problems in society, such as mobbing or other kind of negative responses from society regarding the configuration of the family of the child. 
Nevertheless, every child can face hard times and problems in every kind of family, it doesn't have to be a family where the parents are homosexual. 
Joakim Anrell writes in the Internet magazine that it is an exaggeration to blame all the problems in a family on the fact that the parents are homosexual. 
He also points out that there is nothing that indicates that problems, when there are some, are caused by the child's parents being homosexual and not by some other factor. 
Furthermore, if it is in the child's best interest that society shouldn't put it in a situation where it can go through hard times how can then the adoption of coloured children be justified? 
They too can go through hard times and even be harassed, since there are racist opinions in Sweden today. 
Since it is clear that it is not only children that live with homosexual parents that can go through hard times, how can it then be used as an argument against adoption by homosexual parents? 	
The second argument concerns what might happen if homosexual couples would be allowed to adopt children. 
It is argued that the chances of legitimate international adoptions to Sweden might decrease, since homosexual couples are not accepted as parents by the countries that give up children for adoption and the majority of the mothers or representatives for orphans don't want to give a child up for adoption by homosexual couples. 
It is important to keep up good relations with other countries, but it is equally important not to discriminate a minority that can and want's to help take care of the less fortunate children of the world. 
A solution to this problem, to both prevent a possible decrease in international adoptions and see too the best of the children by providing them with a good home and a loving family, could perhaps be accomplished by allowing homosexual couples a limited right to adopt children. 
This could be done in such a way that the persons that give up a child for adoption may decide whether they want the child to be adopted by hetero- or homosexual parents. 
The number of children given up for adoption by homosexual couples would of course be limited, but this way a few more children could get a good home. 
Perhaps the limitation wont prevent the countries from stopping adoptions to Sweden, but it would be an acceptable compromise, at least for the time being. 
This limitation could later be removed when society has accepted families that consist of homosexual parents. 	
The third and final argument states that there should be no more experimenting with the lives of the children that are adopted. 
Since the argument isn't further developed it is hard to see what is meant by it. 
I assume that giving a child homosexual parents is what in this case is meant by experimenting. 
In a motion to the Swedish Parliament Andreas Carlgren writes that in a study conducted by the university of Gothenburg concerning children growing up with homosexual parents concluded that it is not the configuration of the family which affects the child most, instead it is how the children are raised and what kind of support they receive in society.
This argument also suggests that it has been accepted to experiment with heterosexual parents - These have all been different individuals who have been investigated thoroughly before being allowed to adopt a child. 
There is no way of knowing what happened to those heterosexual families after a few years, perhaps they couldn't take care of the child properly or perhaps they became abusive, still the child and the parents were given a chance. 
Homosexuals are not even allowed to apply for adoption and be examined and I believe that that right should apply to everyone. 
Only this way it is possible to find the best possible parents to a child.  	
In conclusion, homosexual couples should be allowed to adopt children but that right should perhaps be limited in the beginning. 
Every child in every kind of family might go through hard times and this argument can therefore not be used against homosexual couples. 
Decreasing chances to adopt children also for heterosexuals could be the result if homosexual couples would be allowed to adopt children. 
That is a risk society should be willing to take. 
There are mothers that agree to their child being adopted by homosexuals and letting these children live with to people of the same sex wouldn't be to experiment with their lives. 
A study made by the university of Gothenburg shows that the constellation of the family is less important than how the child is raised and how it is supported by society. 
The right to apply for adoption and be examined should apply to everyone. 
If the homosexual couple is denied an adoption because their financial situation isn't satisfactory, it would be acceptable. 
If they are denied an adoption because their home doesn't look suitable for a child to live in, that too would be acceptable. 
It would not be acceptable to deny them the chance of adopting a child simply because they are homosexual. 
In an article in the Dagens Nyheter 99-11-27, it was argued why homosexual couples mustn't be allowed to adopt children. 
What is best for the child is what is most important, it is also important for the child to know later in life that the adoption was carried out in an proper way. 
International adoptions to Sweden might stop if a law was introduced, granting homosexual couples the right to adopt children, since many countries don't want to give children up for adoption by homosexuals. 
The right for homosexual couples to adopt children internationally would have to be preceeded by working for the homosexuals' rights in other parts of the world.   
"," The Growing Number of Students In Private Schools  The education system is always an interesting topic of discussion. 
Speaking as a future teacher it is even more interesting for me to reflect on this matter since I'm soon going to be confronted with this reality. 
There are a couple of trends that you can find if you look at the present situation. 
The most striking is that nowadays more and more parents choose to put their kids into private schools instead of putting them in public schools. 
The question that we now have to ask ourselves is of course, why is that?   	 
The most important cause for this is that parents are not content with the local public schools. 
This isn't surprising as there have been numerous reports about the decline of the public schools. 
Bad social conditions in the schools and the fact that classes now consist of a greater number of students are reasons for concern. 
Parents are worried that their children are being distracted by this and that it interferes with their achieving in accord with their potential. 
Their solution to the problem is to put their kids into private schools and the result is that more and more students now go to private schools. 
In order to get a better view on the matter we must look at a few things that make private schools a better option than public schools. 
These features are also important causes why private schools appeal to so many students.   	 
The working conditions in private schools are better than in public schools. 
Whereas funds are cut in public schools private schools maintain have a better financial situation. 
Private schools have a smaller number of students and that results in a calmer environment for the students and helps them concentrate on studying. 
Another thing that improves the working conditions in private schools is the fact that most pupils in private schools want to study. 
They are aiming for an academic future and therefore they try their best to keep their grades up and don't cut classes or disturb the classroom work. 
This is very important since the working conditions are a vital part of how the students perform. 
Even though the general conditions of the schools are very important another essential part is the quality of the education, which is said to be of a higher standard at private schools.   	 
Could it be that private schools attract better teachers? 
Of course it's very hard to determine who are the best teachers but private schools can often handpick their teachers from a larger selection. 
This is because they have larger salaries and it means that when they are hiring new staff obviously more teachers will apply for the job and then they get a larger selection to choose from. 
Naturally the better working conditions affect the teachers as well making them more harmonious and let them focus on their teaching. 
There is also a pressure from the parents of the children attending the school to have really competent teachers since they are paying large tuition fees and obviously want the standard of the education to be very high.  	 
The tuition fees are one of the reasons why the number of students in private schools is not increasing more dramatically. 
It's just too expensive for an ordinary family to send the children to a private school. 
Even though the tuition fees are quite large you have to understand that the money obtained is used to maintain a high quality of education. 
But as more and more private schools are being started the fees will get smaller and the number of students in private schools will continue to rise.   	 
In conclusion you can say that private schools are definitely on the rise. 
This is mainly because there is a need for another form of education. 
With the continuing decline of public schools there is no wonder that parents choose to put their kids into private schools. 
This is a development that will continue in the future if something isn't done about the present situation in public schools. 
Something has to be done fast because after all everybody should have the right to a good education.
",False
" Increased Quality of Life-Something for You?  
Are you one of those who work eight hours a day five days a week and come home almost exhausted in the evenings? 
More and more of working people are under stress at work and several even have to take psycho-drugs to cope with it. 
Not many are able to work until retirement age, our need of rest is not provided for. 
While many working people are suffering from burnout there are also about four hundred thousand people that are out of work. 
A solution to these problems could be to introduce a thirty hours' working week in Sweden.  
Thirty hours work a week would be six hours a day, which is two hours less than today. 
These two hours the employees could spend with their family or by themselves to rest. 
With shorter working-hours there would be more time to look after close relationships and families would have time to other things together than the usual everyday duties. 
Time is a commodity in short supply in many families, which affects the children above all. 
Less working hours would perhaps even contribute to prevent divorces when people have more time for each other. 
More spare time would give people opportunity to devote themselves to hobbies or to exercises as well. 
When people feel that they have time to do other things than duties they will become more positive in general and we would get a more harmonious and healthy people.  
Less working hours would also contribute to increased equality in society since it would even up the difference in working hours between men and women. 
Today women often voluntary work part time to have time to take care of the housework. 
Over eighty per cent of part time workers are women. 
If six hours' work a day will become standard in Sweden, men and women could do equal work at home and women would get better positions on the labour market.  
Labour market would also offer more jobs that form from shortening of work. 
If all three million working people would shorten their workweek with ten hours, seven hundred and fifty thousand new jobs would be available. 
Those who have been out of work could then get a job and lighten the work burden for the others.  
It is obvious that work shortening favours the individual, but what about the employers and the society? 
It might be difficult to count the gains of work shortening in money, but in the long run I think everybody will make a profit on it. 
Just think about the redundant twenty per cent of the population that are unemployed and would get a chance to get into the labour market.  
Another example is that less tired and healthier employees lead to fewer people being put on the sick-list. 
This would result less sickness benefits having to be paid by the company. 
The employees will presumably also find more pleasure in their jobs and work more efficiently. 
During the short day they would not have time to be so tired or bored.  
Working hours and occupational injuries are connected. 
Most occupational injuries take place in the later part of the day when people are most tired. 
Many occupational injuries never pass and result in high costs for society in form of medical treatment and rehabilitation. 
A shortening of working hours would very likely imply that accidents at places of work would reduce and fewer people would be absent due to long time illness.   
The environment would also benefit by work shortening. 
To transform Sweden into a more environment friendly country requires time and commitment from the individual citizen, time that would be gained from work shortening. 
People might consider they have time to take the bus instead of the car to work, or sort garbage at home.  
It is about time that shorter working weeks are introduced in Sweden, it would be a gain for society in general in form of reduced costs for unemployed, early retired and sick people. 
For the people less working hours would signify quality of life, time for the family, increased equality and a chance to contribute to a better environment.
"," English, my English  For me, English is a language and a subject in school that always has been present. 
Like most of Swedish youth, I have daily been hearing English language since I was a child, on the television, the radio and in music. 
English has been a natural part of my everyday life. 
I have according to this not been considering it so much. 
Until now I have just done my homework in school (most of it at least), but I have never worked very hard or intensive with English. 
I guess I have to do that this semester.  
The first time I was in England, when I was fifteen, I felt very insecure of my capability of expressing myself in English. 
I was for example very nervous to speak at the dinner table at my host-family's. 
Today I feel much more confident in speaking but I find it much easier to speak in an informal situation than in a formal one. 
If I get nervous I can feel like all words just have blown away from my head and I can hardly say anything. 
I believe, though, that I have a pretty good pronunciation for someone who hasn't been staying in an English-speaking country for a long time. 
If I have had much contact with English during a couple of weeks, for example when I have visited England, it easily happens that I have a word in English, that I know exactly what it means, which I can't find the Swedish word for. 
I think that is to be due to that I even begun to think in English during these periods. 
Although I feel that I sometimes have problem to find the correct expression in English because there are a lot of words that I don't know and feel that I need.  
This problem with expressing myself is of course coming back in writing. 
Sometimes I have to write something in another way than I wanted from the beginning and sometimes I have to leave it out. 
During the process of writing I also have to check a lot of words in the dictionary and this makes me feel a bit limited in writing. 
Writing isn't something I do with pleasure, I really had to force myself to writing this essay for example. 
I never feel proud or satisfied with a piece I have written and I rather don't show it to anybody. 
Though, I think this depends more on writing itself than the English language. 
It easily happens that I slip from the subject and when using the computer for typing I easily go blind for my own writing mistakes because the text looks so proper on the screen.   
When it comes to listening to English it is something that I feel divided about. 
I enjoy listening to British English and I find it easy to understand. 
Even if there are words that I don't know I can guess what they mean from the context. 
If there is a person talking with a very uncommon and strange dialect, slurring his words or has a bad pronunciation I often find it very difficult to understand especially if the subject doesn't interest me.  
Also when I am reading I find it difficult to understand and keep my interest if the subject is boring. 
But otherwise I find pleasure in reading. 
I am very eager to learn new words while I am reading and I use to note them and look them up in dictionaries. 
This often tends to get me out of track and I easily loose the story line. 
Therefore I often have to force myself to ignore the words I don't understand and concentrate on the story. 
I sometimes have some problems to get started with a book, but once I have got into the story I think I am a pretty fast reader.  
In all I think I am an average Swedish English student and I can't say that I am better in one specific area than in another. 
I find it difficult to say what my good and bad sides of English are since I haven't been able to try my skills for a long period in an English speaking environment.
",True
" Test the mental health of the police force  The last couple of years the reports about police officers being too violent while making an arrest or supervise an event have increased dramatically. 
Before I moved to Stockholm I did not know much about this and had never met anyone who had been exposed to this. 
But now almost half of my male friends have some experience from police brutality. 
And to tell the truth, I'm scared of the police. 
I don't know if this is a phenomena only found in big cities. 
But on the other hand that should not matter. 
Because of all this I think the policemen should have to be mentally tested, not only when they apply to the education, but also at least every fifth year during their professional career.  
Last weekend there was a demonstration in Stockholm against police brutality, because of an incident the weekend before that, when a lot of youths were beaten and arrested by the police for blocking and painting the street. 
It might be that it was necessary for the police to interfere but the police is supposed to use the least violent method, which they could not possibly have done.  
Another example of police officers being to aggressive is one of my boyfriend's experiences. 
It happened at a soccer match. 
The policemen pulled two of his friends in to their bus and beat them with truncheons, although Swedish police is not even allowed to use these any more. 
And may I point out here that all these boys had done was to refuse to leave the cue to the mobile shop where they were standing. 
When they refused the police provoked them, by calling them names, to yell at the them. 
Hardly something you deserve getting beaten for! 
About a year ago a young girl was molested and by policemen treated in an inhuman way at a police station after she was arrested. 
I do not think this is the way it's supposed to be! 
But on the other hand we can't take away the police officers. 
They are after all here to make the citizens feel secure and to protect them and stop criminal activity. 
And we need them. 
Before accepted to the police academy the applicants are mentally tested to make sure they are suitable for the job. 
You would think that this would mean that the police officers are mentally stabile, but obviously something is happening over the years that makes them more aggressive. 
I think it is very hard to find out what that something is, and until someone does and the problem with violent police officers can be solved, I think all police officers mentality shall be tested at least every fifth year. 
Society have a lot to win by doing so. 
First of all people like myself, who hear a lot of scary examples about police brutality can stop being afraid of them and get some respect back instead. 
And if the police stop provoking youths to be violent there would not be so many fights all the time between young people and the police. 
Now, it's almost as if the police are creating their own jobs by causing disorder. 
As it is now, many youths have no confidence in the police force and every now and than you hear young people say that they hate the police, and I don't think that's something they just say to act cool in front of friends. 
The police need to regain some respect and the best way to do so is to stop provoking people, stop using more violence than necessary, and for this to be possible the quality of the police men has to be higher. 
Those who abuse their position has to be told not to do so or be removed from work. 
We can not have a society were people are afraid of it's lawmen. 
Therefor we need to test the mentality of our police, so that we have a chance to find those who are not suitable for the police work.
"," Evaluation - English, My English!  
Recently, not much more than a month ago actually, a thrombosis was found in my brain. 
And as if that was not bad enough, the thrombosis had caused several cerebral haemorrhages. 
Part of the reason to why this was discovered was that I lost my ability to speak and write - I simply didn't know the words, or the letters for that matter, and I could not spell at all. 
I'm not completely healed from this yet, but I am much, much better. 
Luckily neither the thrombosis or the haemorrhages has done any lasting harm to my brain, according to the doctors. 
But because of this it's kind of hard for me to say how good or bad I am in the different areas of the English language right now. 
But I know that I've always loved words and sentences, stories and text, and not just the English ones. 
Since I was fourteen, I've been wanting to move to England. 
And I know that before this illness of mine I used to think of myself as a pretty good English speaker, when it comes to pronunciation and finding the right words - at least for someone who has never been to England or the US. 
But most of the time I'm a bit too shy to speak as much as I ought to, I think. 
So, you'd think that a person who speaks quite good English also is good at listening, but I'm not. 
It's not that I don't understand, more like I don't hear what people are saying. 
I have bad hearing, I'm aware of that, but this might be because of something else. 
I don't know. 
One thing I'm sure has been effected by my thrombosis is my spelling. 
I've gone from being a person who makes few mistakes when it comes to spelling to being a person who's really bad at it. 
I loose letters and sometimes even whole words. 
The same thing happens when I read, I just don't know the words in front of me sometimes, not even the most simple ones. 
And I'm absolutely sure it wasn't this way before I got ill. 
But enough about my illness!  
No. 
I've never been a good reader, not even when I read swedish text. 
But still I love books. 
Unfortunately I don't seem to be able to find the time to sit down and read. 
But I do realise I need to do that more often. 
Don't get me wrong here. 
I'm not what you'd call a ""bad reader"". 
I understand the text perfectly well, perhaps better than some other people, who would consider themselves to be good readers, it's just that I read very slowly. 
But I don't think that is that much of a problem. 
So, what have I got left? 
Writing of course! 
I love to write! 
I've written three and a half full length books, in swedish though. 
But I also love to write in English. 
I have a homepage on the internet and on one of the pages there, called ""stories"" my boyfriend and I write a new shorter story every week. 
It's so much fun and to judge from the comments we've been getting from our visitors, we're pretty good at it too. 
And yes, I agree. 
I'd like to think of myself as a good author, at least when it comes to fiction. 
Essays, like this one, are a bit harder to write, but I have not had that many chances to practice, and nobody has shown me what it should be like. 
When I said I thought of myself as a good writer I didn't necessarily mean that my grammar is good too, because it's not, not always. 
I just happen to have studied a some swedish grammar, which I try to apply to the English language, and sometimes the two don't really match. 
But in total I guess you could say that I'm one of these mediocre students who wants to become a teacher in English because of a genuine interest in language rather than high skills. 
And therefor, I guess, will have to work hard to pass this education, but who, for the same reason, will find that it's worth it.
",True
"I have lived one year in an English-speaking country and during that period of time I learned many new things about the English language. 
But I'm not yet satisfied with what I know, there are still many aspects of English that I can and wish to improve.  
I regret that I don't have a chance to listen to English being spoken more often. 
Since I don't have cable-TV at my house I don't get the chance to watch American or British TV-channels like CNN, BBC and such, which I believe would be a very valuable asset for anyone who wishes to improve their English. 
There are always subtitles on Swedish television, and it is almost impossible to both read the text and have full attention for the listening-part. 
I have once or twice borrowed some audio books narrated in English at the library, just to hear the language, but I found it rather dull and prefer to read the book instead. 
I have no problems understanding spoken English and I think this might be a natural effect from having spent a long period of time in an English-speaking country in which you hear the language around you all the time. 
When I first came back from the United States I found it easy to speak English. 
But as time went by and as I spoke less English I discovered that my fluency and security about speaking English did in some sense decrease. 
And now after being back in Sweden for three years I have noticed that when speaking to somebody in English it takes me a while to get my accent and fluency back. 
I have discovered that it doesn't matter how much I read or how much I watch American TV-shows, but to improve and retain the American accent I once had I have to practice talking. 
It's certainly not fun to talk to yourself, but I think it could be practice enough to just read something out loud every once in a while. 
Sometimes when I speak English I realize that I don't have the exact words for a specific thing I want to say. 
I know I have a very limited vocabulary and this can be a problem at times, even though I suffer from this mostly when I'm writing. 
It seems that even though I do read a lot in English, I don't learn that many new words that I wish I was. 
I know I need to put more time and effort into learning new words, but when I read a book I don't want to put it down to look a strange word up all the time, even though I know this is a good way of learning new words. 
But the effort that this demands takes away the amusement about reading the book. 
I really wish that I had a better vocabulary, and regret that it is so difficult for me to expand it.  
I don't come across that many situations where knowledge of English is required in my everyday-life. 
I have been writing letters in English for many years and started writing to some American people when I was around twelve. 
I think this was a good way for me to get to know another side of the English language from the one I heard on TV or learned in school. 
I still write to some of them and this is, apart from reading some novels in English once in a while, the most active contact I get with the English language in my everyday life.  
Since writing includes so many different kinds of areas e.g. spelling, grammar, vocabulary etc. this is where I think you can discover whether a person is good in English or not. 
At times I find it very difficult to write in English, it might be hard to now the exact expression for a certain thing or uncertainty about grammar and spelling.   
Even though I'm not satisfied with my knowledge in English as it is today I know that my spending a year in the United States has helped me quite a lot, in the sense of fluency and vocabulary. 
And some of the words I learned there might not be of any valuable use in an everyday conversation in any other country but the United States. 
But it's fun to know these words and different kinds of American brands or makes when they are mentioned on TV or in a context of any other kind.
"," More Swedish pop groups should sing in Swedish  Pop groups and pop stars play very important parts in teenagers' lives. 
They identify with artists or groups in many ways, for example by paying much attention to the lyrics of the songs. 
Increasingly more Swedish pop-acts gain success abroad and as a result to this more Swedish pop groups tend to start singing in English.   
Unfortunately it is practically obligatory for pop groups to write their lyrics in English, if they want to become worldwide famous. 
Those who sing in Swedish might be successful in other Scandinavian countries, but not in the rest of the world. 
When a Swedish pop group does gain success abroad, other Swedish artists realize that it's possible to come from Sweden and at the same time have worldwide success. 
And since it is essential to write English lyrics, they do. 
I believe that this development is bad for the young people in Sweden who need various musical role models. 
Since their Swedish idols don't sing in Swedish, they might feel that English is more ""cool"" and that the attitude towards Swedish might get worse. 
Swedish teenagers need music in Swedish since the language, among other things, helps them to feel connected to others and increases the feeling of belonging somewhere. 
Just as much as they need role models in real life, they need other forums where they can find guidance and identify with others, through magazines, TV-series, books and music. 
When trying to find people and opinions to identify with, music-wise, I believe it is important to find lyrics that they really understand and speak to them in their own language. 
Teenagers need young role models from their own country who have been growing up under the same circumstances and have same experiences. 
Listening to an American rap about American society couldn't be the same thing as listening to a song about the Swedish situation.   
The many new Swedish pop acts that have aroused lately support this argument. 
The need for good music in Swedish has been obvious this winter, when Swedish pop charts have been crowded by new, young Swedish music. 
Groups like Lok, Petter and Kaah express anger and frustration that have been recognized by many Swedish teenagers and probably wouldn't have had the same penetration if the lyrics were in English. 
The need for this kind of music is obviously enormous. 
These artists have had the same upbringing and sing or rap about the same society as Swedish teenagers live in and know. 
Groups who sing in English, and have the urge of gaining success outside of Sweden most often sing about things that people in different countries can rely to.  
Unfortunately many Swedish pop groups don't seem to put that much of an effort into writing idiomatic English lyrics for their songs. 
They seem to write what they think sounds like good English, even though in many cases it don't. 
The English they perform, and which teenagers adopt, is not as good as expected. 
The demands for a lyric in Swedish to be perfect are much bigger than the demands for the ones in English. 
Many artists have been complaining over the years that writing lyrics in Swedish is too hard, and that English words have a better sound. 
But I believe that it just takes longer time to complete a good Swedish lyric and those who has been worked on usually turn out quite well.  
It is however more or less legit nowadays to spice up Swedish in general with some English words and expressions every once in a while. 
I believe that the penitration of English in Swedish society is too rapid and unnecessary. 
The loanwords from English might lead to an impoverishment of the Swedish language and it might be used as a shortcut; instead of inventing new words we borrow English words. 
This development might arouse even more since teenagers today are used to having English around them all the time. 
They watch American TV-shows more frequently than Swedish ones and they listen to music in English. 
These are just two examples of the big flood of new English influence. 
English has become an increasingly common input in Swedish society; Swedish people don't even seem to react to this fact anymore. 
Teenagers are used to Swedish ice hockey teams with English names, companies and different brands are other examples. 
The message they get is that English is a better language than Swedish and that English should be used preferable. 
As long as the cool music is sung in English and the not so cool music is sung in Swedish, this situation strengthens. 
Perhaps the government or some other department should in some way encourage young people to write more music in Swedish. 
It's not up to me to say exactly how this would be preformed, but I think that much could be done to make the Swedish music-scene more various and vivid.  
In short, the Swedish teenagers of today need to feel that their language is just as good as English. 
One good way to strengthen this opinion is to provide good Swedish music for them, with artists with the same background and with similar experiences. 
They need role models from the music industry that they can rely to.
",True
" Is English a Germanic or a Romance Language?  
1. 
There are people like Jean-Marc Gachelin, the Professor of English at the University of Rouen, asking whether English is a Romance language or not, while ""English behaves like a Romance language"", according to the article ""Is English a Romance language"", English Today, July 23, 1990. 
Anyhow, researches as, (Barber,1993 and Baugh & Cable,1993) have accounted clearly that English is a Germanic language.  
2. 
If you want to describe a language completely you need to analyse its morphology, phonology and its syntax. 
The aim of this essay is to give a picture of the English vocabular, by means of 200 lexical words found in the article ""Eyes on the Eclipse"", NEWSWEEK, August 1999, and to analyse the origin of the words. 
Consequently, the article from NEWSWEEK is the primary source of the investigation. 
The secondary sources are research made by C Barber, A Baugh & T Cable and J Williams. 
The secondary sources are used to picture up a background in receiving a description of the grammatical structure of the English language  3. 
Initially it is useful to narrate the development of the English language and to consider about all the influences that the language has passed through. 
Secondly follows a description of structures of the English language. 
As the last part of the investigation the analysis of the origin of the lexical words is reported. 
Finally follows the conclusion about the origin of the English language. 
Some abbreviations are used such as:  F= French ME= Middle English OE= Old English ON= Old Norse  IE= Indo-European MHG= Middle High German OF= Old French OS= Old Saxon L= Latin OC= Old Celtic OFris= Old Frisian PIE= Proto-Indo-European  Du= Middle Dutch O Dutch= Old Dutch OHG= Old High German T= Teutonic  4. 
The English language is an Indo-European language, (IE), like Latin, (L), and French, (F). 
They have developed out of the Proto-Indo-European, (PIE), language that was spoken thousands of years ago, (Barber, 1993). 
The PIE expanded from their homeland, some research-worker say eastern Anatolia, (Turkey), and ended up in Iran, India and most parts of Europe 7 000 BC or later. 
The first people in England about whose language we have definite knowledge are the Celts, (Baugh & Cable, 1993). 
The Celts came from central Europe about 400 BC. 
Their language derives subsequently from the PIE language. 
During the Roman invasion AD 43 to 449 AD Latin was used among military and official classes in England but it was not widespread. 
Latin did not replace the Celtic language.  
5. 
The Germanic Conquest in 449 AD conveyed that settlers migrated from the Danish peninsula and the area Schleswig-Holstein, (Angles and probably Jutes). 
The Saxons came from the area between the Elbe and the Ems and probably as far as the Rhine, (Baugh & Cable, 1993). 
They also believe that the Frisians, inhabitants of a narrow string along the coast from the Weser to the Rhine came to England about the same time. 
The language of the new settlers was Germanic, derived out of the PIE language. 
The Anglo-Saxons became founders of the English nation. 
Their Germanic language remanied the dominant one. 
The Celtic language decreased in importance. 
The language of England changed to what we call Old English, with a huge vocabulary and high inflected words.  
6. 
Scandinavian Vikings invaded England between 750 AD and 1050 AD. 
The Vikings were mostly Danes but some of them were from Norway, (Barber, 1993). 
Their language was also Germanic, north Germanic. 
The Scandinavians left 1 000 words which were adapted as loan words in the English language, (Williams, 1975). 
The Norman Conquest in 1066 brought French into England as the language of the higher classes and much of the Old English vocabulary appropriate to literature and learning died out and was replaced later by words borrowed from French and Latin, (Barber,1993). 
At about 1100 AD the Old English language changed to Middle English. 
The Normans did not learn the English language, but French did not remain as the dominant one in England because the Normans did not speak Parisian French which was the standard. 
The Hundred Years War and the Black Death helped the English language to survive. 
French was officially abandoned in law-courts in 1362, (Williams, 1975).  
7. 
All these invasions of different groups of people had influence on the English language. 
English has since the Anglo-Saxons been a Germanic language and still is. 
The PG language had inherited strong verbs from the PIE language which showed change of tense by changing the vowel of their stem. 
Alongside these strong verbs the PG invented a new type of verbs called the weak ones, (Baugh & Cable,1993). 
Sometime between 1 000- 500 BC a great consonant change took place, called Grimm's law or the First Sound Shifting, when bh, dh, gh became voiced b,d,g and those voiced consonants became voiceless p, t k. 
The voice-less consonants changed to the fricatives f, 0, h. 
Verner's law is another change in the PG language. 
It changed the predominantly pitch accent to predominantly stress accent, i.e. the fixing of the accent on the first syllable of the word. 
The PIE had free accent such as Greek still has, (Barber,1993). 
A third change in PG was Ablaut/Gradation which implied a change of vowels in related forms, especially the strong verbs for instance sing, sang, sung was i OE singan, sang, sungon derived out of the PG change seng, song, sng. 
PG developed into two tenses, the present and the past. 
It got even e-grade in the past tense, o-grade in the past singular and zero-grade in the past plural and past participle. 
A simplification of the inflectional system of the weak declension of the adjective took place, but it did not survive in Modern English and was replaced by the use of auxaillaires  8. 
In Old English as in most of the German languages the Umlaut/Front/I-mutation took place. 
The PG diphthongs were changed in some front vowels in major parts of England, i,i or j disappeared or changed to e, fronting of back vowels before i/j and short a, ae, o changed to e, (Barber, 1993). 
The definite article and the adjective played a large part in the old English marking out distinctions of case and number. 
The loss of this function by the end of the Middle English period, 1500 A D, implied a major change in the structure of the language. 
Grammatical gender disappeared and was replaced by natural gender. 
Word order became important, S-V-O became the dominant one during the Middle English period. 
Middle English is often referred to as the period of weakened inflections while many endings became identical, (Barber, 1993).  
9. 
By the decay of the inflectional system was the use of separate words to perform the functions formerly carried out by word-endings. 
Prepositions as in, with, by became more frequently used than in Old English. 
The English language developed from a synthetic language to an analythic language, called Modern English about 1500 AD. 
An analythic language uses very few bound morphemes such as prefixes, suffixes and inflections in nouns and verbs. 
Weak verbs became the dominant verb-forms in Germanic languages. 
Many strong verbs have changed over to weak ones. 
The Latin noun has six different cases with separate inflections for the singular and the plural. 
The PIE language had eight, English has only two. 
As has been told earlier the Romance languages, Latin and French, have inflected the English language, but even the Germanic people have. 
Let us have a look at that matter.  <table removed>  14. 
According to the analysis of the 200 lexical words it is clear that 108 of them have Romance origin, the adverbs mostly. 
The Romans and the Normans influenced the English language with 10 000 words which were adapted in the English language as loan words, (Baugh & Cable,1993). 
The Romance influence of the English vocabulary implied that the English language was supplied with a number of educated words. 
Due to what is earlier described about the English language and its grammarian structure English is a Germanic language, with stress on the first syllables. 
Finally it must be obvious to any one that the English language is a Germanic language although history has had flux on the language it still remains a Germanic language with the characterizations: a simplified inflectional system inherited from the PG, the development of a increasing amount of weak verbs and the change from predominantly pitch accent to predominantly stress accent. 
The English language has become an analythic language.  
References.  
Barber Charles. 
1993.
The English language. 
A Historical Introduction., Cambridge University Press  Baugh Albert &Cable Thomas. 
1993, Fourth edition. 
A History of the English Language.,Hartnolls Ltd Klein, Erich. 
1966. 
A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language. 
Elsvier Publishing Company, Amsterdam Williams, Joseph. 
1975. 
Origins of the English Language.
The Free Press, New York English Today,""Is English a Romance Language"", July 23,1990 NEWSWEEK, ""Eyes on the Eclipse"", August,1999
"," NEW AGE a Trend in Our Workplaces.  
The NEW AGE movement has become very popular in Sweden, during the 90s. 
Even trade and industry have interests in what the supporters of NEW AGE call ""universal"" old wisdom. 
Background. 
Any interested person can find the roots of the NEW AGE movement in nature religion and oriental tradition, according to Bra Bockers Lexikon, 1988. 
The explorer(ess) Helena Blavatsky established in the end of the 19 th century the Theosophy during a period when the Romanticism, with exotic strains and mysticism were prevalent. 
The Theosophy is a utopian, religious comprehensive faith with strains of esoteric Gnosticism, Buddhism and Hinduism. 
The Theosophy defines, according to Bra Bockers Lexikon, conceptions which are essential in today's NEW AGE movement: reincarnation, karma, aura, and the ego. 
Gabriella Ahlstrom writes in ""NEW AGE Vetenskap eller bluff?"", Akademiker 3-1999, that there arose two breakaway groups from the Theosophy in the 30s. 
It was the anthroposophy led by Rudolf Steiner and the Arcane school established by Alice Bailey. 
Bailey was the first person who talked about NEW AGE.   	 
After the Second World War the activities of the NEW AGE movement decreased. 
Science and technical progress were the most important items in society, according to Ahlstrom. 
On the other hand were peoples' interest in the 50s in California, USA, growing towards: Buddhism, gurus and human psychology. 
The NEW AGE movement caught the hippies' attention in the 60s. 
The hippies were seekers. 
They were interested in astrology, Zen Buddhism, tarot, mediums and alternative medicine. 
The NEW AGE movement reached Sweden in the beginning of the 70s and its signification has increased during the 90s. 
The NEW AGE movement is today more popular than ever.  	 
The central items in the NEW AGE movement are the personal experiences and emotions. 
Your feelings are always right. 
Likewise, another characterization of the NEW AGE is the item of spiritual guidance.  	 
The NEW AGE movement is not occupied with evil. 
According to Ahlstrom there is no devil or hell, there are only positive or negative vibrations. 
Mainly, women are supporters of the NEW AGE movement. 
NEW AGE in Our Workplaces. 
Trade and industry have, according to Ahlstrom, adopted the ideas of the NEW AGE movement about positively thinking. 
Your thoughts have influence on your life. 
Many employer proffer their staff courses which are developing personality. 
The Swedish banker Jacob Wallenberg says in Ahlstrom's article that his company proffers their staff a kind of ""mentally training"", something that already has been practising in the athletics. 
It can for instance be to walk on glowing coal, to split plank with help of mental energy, or to listen at an astrologer or to a witch.  	  	 
Trade and industry are interested in good leadership. 
They want to develop the individual ability to lead. 
Consequently, they see a connection between development in spiritual life and professional economic development. 
Ahlstrom writes further that Telia proffers their leaders retreat courses in Vadstena because they want to give them the opportunity to experience silence and communication among fundamental matters in life. 
The courses are arranged in beautiful surroundings where the staff has the opportunity to meditate and talk about ethics and philosophy of life. 
In Ahlstrom's article Wallenberg says that we all need a connection between body and soul. 
It is important with emotions in trade and industry. 
He also says that it is possible to strengthen individuals from the inside. 
Once upon a time NEW AGE was looked upon as a subculture. 
Nowadays it is better to call it a mass culture. 
From Subculture to High culture. 
Why are the banking and other profitable companies in Sweden interested in staking money and energy on lectures by witches or to let company leaders split plank with help of mental energy? 
Several factors, I believe, can be important when you try to get an answer to the question. 
However, there are, in my opinion, two main important items;  -the companies want to strengthen the individuals from the inside. 
When your employer stakes energy on your personality it hopefully will make yourself do the uttermost back.  -the companies want the staffs' thinking to be positive. 
Positive vibrations are good because they make all individuals efficient. 
The more efficient you are the better your concentration is on your work. 
We have during the 90s in Sweden acquired acquaintance with crises of economy. 
We have also heard a lot about fusion of companies. 
It seems as if we have harder times economically. 
We have nowadays a stiff competition and only the strongest survives. 
Whether your company is competitive or not depends sometimes on the human factor. 
Anyway you could say that if NEW AGE is good for General Motors it is good for mankind.
",True
" The Decline of the Birth-rate in Sweden  A negative trend that can be observed in the Swedish society of today is the decline of the birth-rate. 
In 1990 the number of children born in Sweden was 120 000, in 1994 it was 110 000 and in 1998 it was as low as 89 000. 
The number of deceased persons was 95 000, 92 000 and 93 000 respectively - in other words, there is an excess of deaths over births. 
At the same time the total population of Sweden increased from 8,6 million people in 1990 to 8,8 million in 1994 and to 8,9 million in 1998. 
These statistics, which I have obtained from the homepage of the SCB illuminate this trend very clearly. 
But what are the reasons for this phenomenon?  
The main cause of the low birth-rate is the economic situation. 
It is simply too expensive for many people to bring up children in our society. 
Therefore family planning has become usual. 
The possibility to avoid unwanted pregnancies through preventives or the alternative to go through a legal abortion has of course had a very great impact on the birth-rates. 
The child allowance far from cover the loss of income during pregnancy, maternity leave and all other expenses involved when raising a child. 
Many couples decide to become parents later in life after having obtained a good job and earned some money and paid off their debts. 
Sometimes the decision is made too late and others never reach the point in life when they decide that the time to bring children into the world has come.  
Furthermore, women's position in society has gone through a radical change. 
Formerly a woman was expected to give birth to children and take care of the household. 
These were her major tasks in life. 
Nowadays women have the opportunity of achieving the same positions in business and professional life as men. 
Consequently, this has influenced the female way of life. 
After compulsory school an increasing number of young men and women continue their studies, at university for example. 
The studies often take many years to complete and giving birth to a child during that time is not what most women desire. 
After the studies quite a few women want to make a carrier and when they intend to climb the ladder of success children are not considered convenient. 
Thus women neither have the time nor want to raise children. 
It has now become more socially accepted than earlier to have a carrier instead of choosing ordinary family-life if you cannot combine them.   
What may the effects of this decline of the birth-rate be? 
The most terrifying aspect is that it makes the economy of the country weak. 
This may need some further explanation. 
The number of people above the age of 60 was in 1990 18% of the total population in the OECD-countries (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) and statisticians have reached the conclusion that the number will be 30% in 2030. 
In other words, the number of retired people will increase and thus the state-budgets will have to be used to take care of old people instead of the younger generation. 
This will lead to reduced contributions as regards education and the consequence will be a deteriorated school-system. 
The result will be a generation of people without sufficient education. 
Swedish know-how will decrease and thus weaken the Swedish economy. 
Also other contributions, for instance means for the infrastructure and the military, will diminish and the country will slowly begin to decay.   
Nevertheless, the troublesome problem with unemployment will fade away when the workers of today retire and their professional posts must be filled. 
Provided that the school-system still is satisfactory the young people will have no difficulty in finding jobs. 
This will, hopefully, lead to a rapid development in society and Sweden will catch up with what was lost during the time of ""depression"". 
In the long run this decreasing rate of nativity might be very healthy for the economy of the country, but the change should take place at a slower pace than it does at the moment. 
Attempts have been made from the government to encourage people to have more children.  
In conclusion this trend of decline of the birth-rate is due to the difficult economic situation of the last years. 
Lately signs indicate that the economic situation is improving and if this is the case, the birth-rate most certainly will improve. 
The fact that women make carriers probably does not influence the birth-rate as much as the economic situation does.
"," Is exercise getting trendy?  
During the last few years of my living in Uppsala I have noticed a change in the way students, and I believe others, get their exercise. 
About four years ago there were not that many different alternatives for people wanted to get fit. 
Friskis & Svettis and the reverend Svettis were the main alternatives, both quite cheap then. 
But several other fitness centres began popping up, or rather began marketing, rebuilt and asked higher prices. 
The students who earlier were hard put to pay 350 Swedish crowns for their exercise now pay from 900 up to 1200. 
Svettis is rebuilt into Stallet, the old Centralbadet into Nautilus and Friskis & Svettis have enlarged their organisation. 
My Ju-Jutsu beginners' course was, according to the teacher, the largest in several years, and almost everyone stayed the whole course. 
These changes must be caused by a greater willingness of the inhabitants of Uppsala to get fit and pay for it. 
It may be that this is caused by some trend in society at large but as all my observations emanate from Uppsala I have to treat it as a local trend albeit affected by the environment.  
Could it be that suddenly, because of the reports of the dangers of being fat when older, like heart failure, students start thinking of their future old age and start exercising. 
Or the reports on the ever higher percent of the young which is overweight combined with advice on how to loose weight? 
That would mean that we read the newspapers, believe in the journalists' and experts' conclusions and follow their advice willingly in the hope of living into a healthy old age and in the bargain lower the statistics. 
Unfortunately, or not, it does not really fit our mindset to react that way. 
Where it so, we would use only half our allotted students' loan, drink not at all, go to bed at ten and eat eight to nine slices of bread a day, which we don't. 
Therefore it is probably not the influence of the newspapers that is the main cause. 
On the other hand, it could be another kind of paper that has finally reached through and got us to follow their advice; the tabloids with their tips on how to get thin. 
But that is probably not correct either as those tips usually only include eating less, not exercising more, and if training is included, it does not extend over more than ten minutes a day. 
It also seems like the training trend includes male students, who supposedly would not be as affected the tabloids, since they are mainly read by women.  
Several decades ago, e.g. in the forties, it was usual for people, male and female both, to carry clothes or undergarments which worked like a corset to keep an untrained body looking fit. 
Nowadays, however, we wear scanty clothes which mercilessly reveal if fitness is lacking while at the same time the beauty ideal is to be thinner than ever, most believe (I believe it looks rather like the 1400th - century). 
Owing to this it is probably more important than ever to be able to show a torso not only without fat but also lined with muscles. 
Even the female photo models are starting to look more trim than thin. 
At the same time it gets more usual for men and women to bodybuild. 
It is possible that feminism is one of the reasons. 
It is now possible for a woman to be strong and still beautiful and it is possible for a man to be vain. 
I am sure these are important reasons for the fitness trend but probably not the most important. 
It is still possible to starve into clothes, even if it probably is less fun.   
There is another health aspect in this matter. 
Studies have shown, at least according to the students' health organisation, that exercise increases the concentration span and thereby it should make it easier to study. 
It is probable that at least most students who start exercising discover that they get more energised and can study for longer time periods without tiring. 
The reason for the trend is probably a combination of the causes listed above, together with another interesting factor. 
It has finally become fashionable to exercise, the fitness centres are meeting places and people like to speak of and discuss where and what they do for exercise, and they want to spend money on it. 
It is also interesting to note the counter reaction: people that are so tired of the fitness talk that they refuse to exercise at all and simply don't care. 
One thing is certain; as long as this health and training wave continues it will probably be possible to ask ever higher prices of us and the only effect is that more people will attend exercise facilities. 
Or, as the marketing rule goes according to Kotler, there are certain goods that more people buy when the price goes up, and this might just be one.
",False
" Mind your language  I agree with Shirley Peckhams article ""Cleaning up the Language"". 
Children should not swear and neither should adults. 
In this article I will deal with three reasons why cursing is superfluous. 
The first reason is that it prevents our vocabulary from growing. 
Secondly it offends a lot of people to hear swear words. 
And thirdly, when offended people might not listen to what you have to say and the message that you had will not reach them.   
We do not need the swear words because there are other words that we could use instead of them. 
Using these words would extend our vocabulary and that would give us a language with greater variations. 
This extended and varied language would help us to be more precise in expressing ourselves. 
And it is really very helpful to have the right words in many situations. 
Swear words are actually not so useful, since they do not carry that much of a meaning. 
What these words do is mainly emphasizing or strengthening another word and that could be done in other ways.  
Another reason not to swear is that we should be considerate towards other people. 
Hearing a person swearing frequently is offensive to a lot of people, Shirley Peckham is one of them, as she wrote in her article. 
Therefore, I think that out of respect for other people we should be careful about what words we use. 
This is the same kind of respect as the one we show by not walking around naked even though it is a hot summer day. 
We do not undress in public because it would offend a lot of people, and I think it is the same thing with swearing. 
To spare people from feeling disgusted, as Shirley Peckham, we should search for other, less offensive words when we speak.   
The third reason why we should not swear is mainly for our own sake. 
If we offend people with our language they might not listen to what we have to say, that way the message that we have will not come through to them. 
And the purpose of speaking is to be heard and understood. 
Furthermore, we do ourselves a favor by not swearing since a person with a pleasant and varied vocabulary seems more reliable than someone who needs swear words to explain what he or she thinks. 
Therefore, if swearing makes people stop listening, then what is the point of speaking at all?  
Swearing is completely unnecessary. 
That is what I wanted to say with this essay and I have used three arguments to convince you. 
I think that if we do not use swear words we will have to search for other words, and that would increase our vocabulary with words that are more useful to us. 
Useful since it makes it easier for us to explain what we mean in different situations. 
As swear words is regarded as unpleasant by several people we should use other words in order not to be inconsiderate and rude to them. 
When we swear we make these people stop listening, and in order to make as many persons as possible listen we must have a vocabulary used by the majority, and swearing is not accepted by most people. 
Besides, whatever your message is it is easier to convince others that you are right if your language is decent.
"," SCOTS; A DIALECT OR A LANGUAGE  INTRODUCTION  When looking at Scots it can sometimes be a bit confusing. 
Is it a language of its own or is it just a dialect of English? 
The answer to that question may differ depending on who you ask. 
Among linguistics the view is rather ambiguous, one person may argue convincingly for both opinions and it is easier to get a clear cut answer if one turns to the various organisations promoting Scots. 
In their opinion there is only one answer; Scots is not and never was a dialect of English.  	 
My aim in this essay is to take a closer look into the Scots language, why this ambiguity exists, how it started and if there is a tendency for the future of Scots. 
I will use the word Scots for the traditional Scots language, as compared to the other two languages that exist in Scotland; Scottish English and Scottish Gaelic.  	
I have mainly used material provided by the linguistics Charles Barber, The English Language, David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of The English Language, and J.C. 
Wells, Accents of English 2, but I have also consulted various Internet sources for additional material and a closer look into what is happening to Scots today.   
ORIGIN AND HISTORY  Regardless of how one may treat this ambiguity it all goes back to the fact that, compared to other dialects of English, Scots has a very special history. 
Scots has been a language of its own and at that time it was used as the first language in Scotland.  	 
The history of Scots begins in the fifth century with the conquest of the Anglo-Saxon tribes. 
Quite a few of the Angles settled in southern Scotland and their Germanic language is the origin of Scots.1 By the eleventh century Scots was a language of its own, separated from English2, and it reached its peak in the sixteenth century, but the decline began shortly after.3 	 When James I of Scotland became James VI of England in 1603 and moved southwards the English influence in Scotland gradually increased since ""London [now] became the centre from which patronage radiated.""
4 The strong literary tradition that existed in Scots diminished and by the time the parliaments in Scotland and England were united, in 1707, it was virtually non-existent.5 With the Union of the Parliaments English became the official language in writing, leaving Scots to be, more or less, a spoken language. 
In the eighteenth century there was a revival of literature written in Scots, but England had by then had such an impact on Scotland that the outcome was quite the opposite. 
English spelling conventions were more and more being used for Scots and this further contributed to the belief that Scots just was a dialect of English.6 The resurrection of Scots in our days has been more thorough and it has been augmented with magazines, books, dictionaries etc; but I will return later to Scots present day position. 
First I will turn to differences between Scots and English.   
DIFFERENCES  Here I will present two examples of written Scots from different time periods. 
Due to lack of space I can not investigate them as thorough as I would want, but they will clearly show how distinct written Scots is from written English. 
First, an example of Scots written by Robert Henryson in the fifteenth century: This wylie tod, quhen that the lark couth sing, Full sair hungrie vnto the town him drest, Qhuair Chantecleir, in to the grey dawning, Werie for nicht, wes flowen fra his nest. 
Lowrence this saw, and in his mynd he kest The ierperdies, the wayis, and the wyle, 	 Be quhat menis he micht this cok begyle.7  This was written in the prime days of Scots when it was the main language in Scotland. 
Compared with an example of English literature from the fourteenth century by Chaucer one can see that Chucer's text is closer to present day English.  e thinketh it accordant to resoun To telle you al the condicioun Of eech of hem, so as it seemed me, And whiche they were, and of what degree, And eek in what array that they were inne: And at a knight thanne wol I first biginne.8  The example by Chaucer is easier to read because many of the words resemble their present day form. 
Words like 'thinketh' and 'biginne' present no difficulties, and even though the syntax is slightly awkward to us we still understand what Chaucer means. 
Henryson's text is a bit more difficult to comprehend. 
The English spelling wh- is spelled with quh- in Scots and words like 'tod', 'kest' and 'wyle' does not correspond to their English counterparts 'fox', 'ponder' and 'stratagem'. 
However, many of the words in the extract by Henryson are not difficult to understand. 
Words like 'hungrie' and 'toun' may seem misspelled to us, but we still understand them.  	 
Finally, an example of Scots written this year, taken from an Internet site promoting the language:   Aa richts is pitten by. 
Nae pairt o this darg shuid be   doobelt, hained in onie kin o seistem, or furthset in  onie kythin or bi onie gate whitsomeiver, athoot haein  leave frae the writer afore-haund. 
A hae nae pleens  whan the abuin is duin for tae fordle the Scots leid  in eddication, sae long's naebodie is makkin siller  oot o't. 
9  This example, a text on copyright, is perhaps quite different from the Scots example from the fifteenth century, but the spelling of -ch, corresponding to the English form -gh, is used in both extracts in the words 'micht', 'nicht' and 'richt'. 
Furthermore, the spelling is now very different from English; and words like 'darg', 'leid' and 'siller', meaning 'work', 'language' and 'money', have no affinity with their English counterparts.  	 
These examples show, though briefly, that written Scots, as any language, has changed over the years, but that it always has distinguished itself from English. 
With the Anglicisation, the English domination, written Scots also started to alter within Scotland. 
It lacked a unified way of spelling and this further contributed to the dispersion of Scots. 
Its position as a language was weakened and it became treated more and more as a dialect of English.  
SCOTS OF TODAY   ""Scots must be re-created [...] and de-Anglicised"".10 This comment was made by a man named Hugh MacDiarmid in 1926 and he can perhaps stand as the founder of the revival of Scots in our century. 
The spoken forms of Scots had survived the Anglicisation although pronounciation had changed over the years creating several dialects of Scots. 
The absence of a standardised way of writing Scots led to a spelling that followed the pronounciation, and, thus, varied within the country.11 However, the revival initiated by MacDiarmid aimed at creating a standardised way of writing Scots and thereby made this revival more than just literary. 
When the linguist Charles Barber writes about this he says: ""having a dialect literature [...] is not the same as having a standard literary language: when Middle Scots was a standard literary language, all written transactions (if not in Latin) were carried out in it. 
But since the eighteenth century this has not been so: there have been works of literature in Scots, but the history-books and the contracts and the chemistry-books have been written in what is essentially the southern literary language"".12 	 The result of the recreation became known as 'synthetic' or 'plastic' Scots because it was a reconstruction of the language. 
It has also been called Lallans because it ""looked to previous literary and dialect usages from the Scottish Lowlands for its distinctiveness"".13 Lallans stands for Lowlands. 
Nevertheless, the 'Scottish Renaissance' had started and today it is stronger than ever. 
In 1983 the New Testament was translated into Scots. 
In 1985 the Scottish National Dictionary Association had put together the Concise Scots Dictionary and there is also a larger, 10 vol., Scottish National Dictionary. 
In education the trend is also noticable. 
Both Scots literature and language are encouraged in education policies today, some universities teach in Scots and in 1996 the Kist was finished. 
It is an anthology on Scots and it also contains guidelines for teachers. 
The Kist was set up by the Scottish Consultative Council on the Curriculum. 
Scots is also promoted by several other organisations, and the General Register Office in Scotland estimated the number of Scots speakers at 1.5 million in 1996. 
However, according to the European Bureau of Lesser Used Languages the language retains no legal status or protection14 and it has ""not so far been able to make inroads into the use of Standard English as the language of power and public prestige""15. 
J.C. 
Wells says, quite appropriately, in Accents of English 2 that ""Scots, according to one's point of view, can be considered either a group of dialects of English, or a distinct language"".16 It seems, that for Scots to be a language unconditionally, it has to standardise, or at least harmonise, spelling and writing and, moreover, it has to regain the areas where English has been the dominante language for the last four centuries.  
CONCLUSIONS   Languages will always affect each other. 
England once borrowed heavily from French, but today English is a world language supplying the rest of the world in many areas. 
Scots may never be a world language, it has been struggling to survive under the pressure from English for a long time, but today more groups than ever are promoting Scots. 
This quotation is from one group; ""for a nation to regain its soul it must also regain its language"".17 If true, one can perhaps say that Scotland lost its soul for four hundred years, but that today the people of Scotland are eagerly trying to restore it.  
REFERENCES  Barber, Charles. 
1993. 
The English Language. 
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press    Crystal, David. 
1995. 
The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. 
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press   http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/k27/whits.htm (992309)   http://www.eblul.org/uk-gb.htm (992309)  Todd, Loreto & Hancock, Ian. 
1986. 
International English Usage. 
Kent: Croom Helm  Wells, J.C. 
1982. 
Accents of English 2 The British Isles. 
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press  1 Todd, Loreto & Hancock, Ian. 
1986. 
International English Usage. 
Great Britain. pg. 
410-411 2 Avaliable at http://ourworld.compuserv.com/homepages/k27/whits.htm (992309) 3 Todd & Hancock. 
1986. pg 411 4 Barber, Charles. 
1993. 
The English Language. 
Great Britain. pg. 
174 5 Barber. 
1993. pg. 
174 6 Avaliable at http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/k27/whits.htm (992309) 7 Taken from Barber. 
1993. pg 173 8 Excerpt taken from a handout from the Department of English, Uppsala 9 Avaliable at http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/k27/walcome.htm (992309) 10 Taken from Crystal, David. 
1995. 
The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. 
Cambridge. pg..333 11 Barber. 
1993. pg. 
174 12 Barber. 
1993. pg. 
174 13 Crystal. 
1995. pg. 
333  14 Avaliable at http://www.eblul.org/uk-gb.htm (992309)  15 Crystal. 
1995. pg. 
328 16 Wells, J.C. 
1982. 
Accents of English 2 The British Isles. 
Cambridge. pg. 
393 17 Avaliable at http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/k27/walcome.htm (992309)
",False
" The Increasing Number of Swedish People Living in England  When I first came to England nine years ago I was, if not unique, certainly a curiosity. 
Well this is not entirely true, since it was my first time to England without my family maybe the curiosity was all on my behalf but there were not as many Swedes living in London, nor other parts of Britain, as there is today. 
If you walk around in central London for a while you will hear someone speak Swedish sooner rather than later. 
They might be tourists, depending on where you are and what time of the year we are talking about, but nevertheless there is a large, ever growing contingent of Swedish people in England today. 
The Question one might ask is why would anyone, apart from the Vikings and Ulrika Jonsson who went to conquer, move somewhere where your water comes in one pipe for hot and one for cold?  
I can however acknowledge a few reasons for people like myself moving to the United Kingdom. 
In my case I went to study, maybe not as much at the University I was enlisted at but more like studying the culture/people and also improve my English and learn more about myself. 
More and more people though decide to study abroad for all kinds of reasons and England is the most popular choice since we all know at least some English. 
We also have similar education at higher level which makes it easier to synchronise whatever it is that we study.  
Some of my friends took voluntary jobs or worked as nannies so that they also could experience living in a culture that interested them. 
We are very well regarded abroad and a lot of people do not mind being paid less than they would be back in Sweden because they see it as a temporary thing or more like a vacation. 
All of them recognise England as the place to go to if you are interested in things such as football, music or fashion. 
London has always attracted young people from all over and since British culture and society is similar to Swedish it is not that a big step to take, it is also fairly close and not very expensive to go there.  
There is also an increasing number of Swedish businessmen working in England. 
This is due to both 1) Swedish companies moving their offices so they can get closer to their markets and/or escaping Swedish Tax laws or 2) the general internationalisation of the work force which results in that qualified personnel move to wherever they can get the best terms. 
It also helps that the economy in Britain has been booming for the last few years.   
For all the different kinds of people mentioned above it has become a lot easier to move and work within Europe since we joined the European Community. 
This is possibly the biggest reason for the increase of Swedish Citizens in the UK and it is a noticeable change just over the last 5 years. 
In fact all people I know who lives or have lived in England moved there in 1995 or after.  
Definitely not the biggest reason and a reason which I do not have any hard evidence of but what seems to be the case is that a lot of Swedish girls get involved with English guys. 
This can also explain the marginal but noticeable increase of English men in Sweden.  
The more integrated Europe will get the more we will travel and move within. 
Since there is so much for us to do and see in Britain and as long as the economy stays strong then I can not see any reasons for it not to continue. 
In the end I guess we will take over where the Vikings stopped and turn the whole place into a colony.
"," MEAT-CONSUMPTION IS DECREASING  ore and more people in Europe chose not to eat meat or they eat less meat than before. 
The amount of vegetarians and vegans and the hesitation towards meat as food has increased severely during the last decade. 
In Sweden, according to are cent poll performed by SIFO, 40% of the population is hesitant and 20% has stopped eating meat as a result of the recent debate. 
I know you are probably fed up with this issue by now since it has been discussed and debated in media and amongst us for quite a while now, I know I am. 
But is this just a trend passing through our society and our minds like a fashion-whim or is it a development sprung out of a deeper and more complex context? 
Why are we eating less meat? 
The most obvious reason for this development is all the reports about the meat-industry and BSE or ""the crazy-cow decease"" as we call it. 
That is a terrible name by the way. 
The poor cows are not crazy they suffer from a deadly and humiliating decease. 
We don't call it ""the crazy-human decease"" when it infects people. 
In 1994, in Great Britain, the first human was diagnosed to have the human variant of BSE, Creutzfeldt Jacobs decease, and in 1996 the connection between this and BSE was established by scientists and that eatingmeat from infected animals was the means of contamination. 
This put the meat industry in focus and frequent reports in media about emergency slaughter in Britain with pictures of piles with dead cows about to be burned, reports about the terrible conditions under which the animals were transported or kept and how the animals were treated only as an inanimate part of a money-making murder-machine and not as individual creatures able to feel pain. 
Naturally this makes people upset and makes people think about what there is they are eating, about the ethic aspect of the issue and whether to keep on supporting this system or not. edia's part in this development is of great importance. 
Media is providing us with the information that we otherwise wouldn't have access to. 
The power-position media has in today's society is not to be underestimated. 
Sometime ago there was a documentary broadcasted on Swedish television. 
It was about how animals were treated in Belgium. 
I should mention that I haven't seen this particular film myself but I have been told about it and I have seen other films also dealing with animal-treatment. 
You could say that this film was the trigger to the current debate that has been taking part during the past months. 
The newspapers have been filled with articles and letters to the editor about this horrible documentary and about the question whether to eat meat or not. 
People were naturally upset and media continued to arouse the people with articles, editorials and by collecting names by publishing lists where several celebrities already had signed their names in order to stop the cruelty to animals. 
I am not saying that this is bad I am just pointing at media's part in the development that I am discussing. ore and more people in Sweden chose not to eat meat. 
The previously mentioned causes is of course important aspects on this issue. 
But this is not something that has happened now all of a sudden even if now is when it is discussed. 
This development has been in progress for a long time. 
The number of vegetarians has increased, mostly among younger people. 
Our awareness of the world surrounding us, the environment and our fellow-earthlings, has increased and we now realise that we can't go on living as if we were the absolute rulers of the Universe. 
We have learnt that there are consequences of our actions that affects everything and that we can't ignore anymore. 
The human intellect has taken us so far in our development as a species. 
We know how our bodies function and we also know a lot more about the food we are eating. 
Food has a central part in our lives. 
Of course it has. 
We would die without it. 
But now we know about vitamins, about minerals, calories, fat, fibres and all the other things our food contains of and we also know what we need. 
We know that meat no longer is a necessity for the human body to survive. 
We can replace it with other foods without missing out on important proteins and other substances that our body needs and where meat has been a main-source. 
We are no longer predators that hunt for our survival. 
We have turned the hunt into an industry. 
We are enlightened with knowledge that we didn't have before and we have probably lost a lot of our old instincts. 
What I am trying to say is that this can be a natural step in our evolutional development as human beings. 
But I am no scientist and to prove this theory I would have to be able to look into the future, a couple of hundred thousand years or so. 
No human being can do that. 
Yet.
",False
" The flying trend  I have no figures on it, but I think you will agree with me when I say that travelling has increased the last few decades. 
Swedish families fly to The Canary Islands like never before and young people take trips around the world just like that. 
Older couples go on charter trips and teenagers go on travels in the purpose of language-learning. 
I bet that you know one or two who really enjoys travelling and for whom it is almost a necessity to go somewhere every year. 
What are the causes to this increased frequency in Swedes travelling abroad?   
First of all it has become easier in different aspects. 
The development of communication has gone very fast the last decades. 
Planes can almost take you anywhere with their frequent take-offs. 
The time it takes to reach the different places is decreasing and so the world has come closer. 
I'm aware of the delays in air traffic, but they are not in any way a matter that would in itself argue against travelling. 
It is also easier to book your ticket. 
You can either go to an agency and they will arrange everything for you or book the trip yourself on the internet. 
Everything is arranged in advance as long as you want and can pay for it.   
There are however horrible things that speak against the increased travelling. 
Plane crashes have become more frequent, or at least are given more attention on the news. 
There are few or no survivers at all from such an occurrance. 
Still you take a greater risk by driving the car to the airport than when you are sitting in the airplane.   
Because of the many travelers the tickets have become cheaper and therefore more people can afford to travel. 
It has been an up going cycle. 
Travel agencies have established themselves on the market and increased the competition and lowered the prices. 
Of course it is not really cheap to travel, but if we compare prices over the last five to ten years they are less expensive today. 
Even less expensive than travelling within Sweden in some cases.  
People today have also more money to spend that they had only two decades ago. 
An example here are my parents. 
They have not traveled much abroad before because they did not have the money. 
In the last ten years they have been to Italy, Greece, Cyprus and the US. 
I know that not all families have got the same possibility like a middleaged couple, but we do things in certain times in our lives.  
It is naturally also a question of priority. 
A friend of mine counts money in how many trips she can take, while other's first priority is to buy a new car. 
Has travelling then become a higher priority over the last years? 
I believe so. 
The different experiences are today of higher value than that of material things. 
Maybe it is through commercials and TV-programs about travelling.   
There is also the climate of internationalization that I think have effected the travelling. 
Employees for international companies travel a lot and even national companies does when trying to build up new communications and cooperations. 
There are furthermore many students who choose to go to school abroad for some period in their education or they take a brake for one year and do some travelling.   
In today's society it is almost looked upon as a sort of status to have been abroad. 
By that I don't mean the Canaries, but more exotic places like Sumatra or Japan. 
Someplace that no one else in your social environment has ""discovered"". 
It gives a sort of satisfaction to be able to say where you have been and done. 
A pretty immature way of boasting but still a fact of life.   
We also have different motives for going abroad and what we like to achieve with it. 
For somebody it is only the experience of a new environment in stead of the gray ordinary everyday life that is tempting. 
For someone else it is a specifically warm or cold climate. 
You can go for the purpose of learning a new language or for satisfying your curiosity. 
You maybe want to meet people who have an other lifestyle and mentality. 
The newest thing is the adventure travels which turn to those who want experiences of the unusual sort and sometimes even of the dangerous sort. 
Thanks to the great supply of different kinds of travel it can attract very different sorts of people, even those who did not go before.   
It can be a sort of drug, at least for me. 
When I have been to one place and come home, it doesn't take long before I have an other place that I dream of going. 
A place I haven't been. 
This is of course nothing that happens for all but I have spoken to people who often feel the same way. 
Surely there are other ways than travel to get satisfaction but in order to experience faraway places, there are not so many other things to do.   
In short, travelling has increased for a number of different reasons. 
It is today cheaper, easier, and has a bigger variety of destinations to offer. 
People have got more money to spend and are giving priority to travels in a new way. 
It is also sometimes seen as a sort of status to have been somewhere special. 
The internationalization has also done a lot in the field of increasing travelling. 
So no wonder that people are travelling more!
"," It is OK to be religious  When I was a teenager some ten years ago, it was still not absolutely socially accepted in Sweden to talk about religious matters. 
If you had a belief, you kept it to yourself. 
In recent years, however, the attitude towards questions about religious issues, such as the meaning of life and the existence of some kind of God, has become more open.  
Something that I believe is of somewhat greater importance to the development I am describing, I think is the commonly discussed separation between the Swedish Church and the state. 
This separation, which took place when we entered the new millennium, was prepared for and frequently debated in media during the 1990s. 
It was feared by some that many people would choose to resign their church membership when it was no longer something compulsory for every citizen. 
Some people even argued that there would be a great economic advantage involved in resigning which would appeal to the Swedes. 
In spite of this, time has shown so far, that people in general tend to keep their memberships and statistic figures even show that more people than ever, both children and adults, are being baptised into the Swedish Church and thus making a new and free commitment to this old religious institution.  
In addition to this widespread participation in religious activities, all kinds of media nowadays surround us with advertisments and discussions about an old religious document, namely the Bible. 
Only a few weeks before we entered the new millennium, a new translation of this ancient text was launched on the market. 
Actors read parts from it out loud on the radio as well as on the television and newspapers published series of articles about the Bible and the difficult task of translation, along with advertisements from churches and bookstores. 
The Bible 2000 was appointed Christmas Gift of the Year almost before the stores started selling it. 
All over the country, people of all kinds started talking about the Bible. 
Of course, not everyone is interested in its religious message, but the fact that the Bible is now open for discussion at all, makes it easier to be religious in Sweden today. 
Today, it is just as accepted to talk about the Bible when there is a coffee break at work, as it is to talk about a television soap opera or last night's game of hockey. 
As a result, this new openness makes it easier for those who do believe in something beyond this world to gain respect from others for the standpoint they are taking.   
However, although more people are being baptised than ever before, there are still those who claim that religious activities are boring and that the church service has not been adjusted to fit the needs of the modern human being. 
Nevertheless, near the end of 1999, the Professor of Religious Sociology at Uppsala University, Thorleif Pettersson, could show statistics that proved something completely different. 
According to his survey, more Swedish people take part in some kind of religious activity every weekend than those who go to watch some game of sports or even those who go to the cinema in the same weekend. 
Indeed, this is a sign of the trend I am investigating. 
The more people participate in religious activities, the more socially accepted it will be to be religious.  
Immigration might be one cause of this rise in interest in religious matters. 
Alongside with the growing number of immigrants in Sweden, the need for education about religions has increased to make a deeper understanding of the new Swedes possible. 
It is only natural that we wonder about those who look differently or dress in a different way from ourselves. 
Many of the differences between old and new Swedes' way of living have their grounds in religion, for example the fact that muslims do not eat pork. 
We need knowledge of religious issues in order to be able to reach an understanding of that which is different. 
However, I doubt that this is the main reason for the average Swedes' growing interest in discussing religious dilemmas  Finally, one may ask oneself, if this new openness is only a fling of millennarian nervousness, a concern for the continued existence and wellbeing of the world in a new century? 
I hope not. 
I think that what has now become commonly accepted, to talk about different religious issues, would be a good thing for all of us to remember and to keep alive. 
It is no longer odd to be a believer in Sweden and it is not strange to confess to something which is on everybody's lips. 
It is okay to be religious in Sweden today.
",False
" Everyone Will Benefit from a Shorter Working Week.  
In an article in the Dagens Nyheter 00 03 01 representatives of the National Agency for Government Employers argue that a legislation concerning a shortening of the working hours will harm the state economy. 
I believe that they are wrong. 
In modern society, more and more people are becoming overworked and consequently, sick leave and early retirement related to stress are increasing. 
I argue that a shortening of the working week to 35 hours would help decrease these problems. 
In this essay, I will show that this legislation has the ability to pay for itself. 
I will start by showing how it will affect the working population and continue by showing how the state will benefit from it. 
I will also show how it can be financed without harming the state or the individuals concerned.  	
Sweden's unstable economy with increasing unemployment and major cuts on welfare has made the workload heavier for many people. 
Fewer people are supposed to do the same amount of work as before and they feel that they have to accomplish even more to be sure of keeping their jobs. 
This has been a strong contributor to the increase of stress-related-illnesses during the last few years. 
Today, more than 250.000 people are on psychopharmacological drugs2 and people take sick leave due to stress. 
I am not suggesting that shorter working days would solve these problems but it would surely lower the pressure. 
People will get more time to spend with family and friends and more time to relax, they will not feel as stressed out and can thereby be more effective at work. 
Furthermore, many presently unemployed can get jobs and through that, more stimulating lives. 	
However, I do not think that the National Agency for Government Employers disagree with me on these points. 
Their main concern is the financing i.e. how much this law would cost the state and the employers. 
In the article they claim that it would be vary expensive and that it has to be paid either by lowering or by making major cuts in the public sector. 
I argue that this will not be necessary. 
The initial costs can be financed by the state using the current budget surplus. 
However, in the long run I am convinced that a general shortening of the working hours will pay for itself, both by decreasing the state's expenses and by increasing its income. 
The state will not have to spend as much money on healthcare and medicine for overworked people. 
Furthermore, fewer people would depend on state benefits, such as sickness-, unemployment- and supplementary benefit. 
The fact that people are employed has a positive effect on the national economy in several ways. 
Firstly it saves money otherwise spent on benefits and secondly people who work pay taxes and they also tend to spend more money, which is important in order to keep the economy in good shape. 
Furthermore I argue that everyone; employers, employees and the state, will benefit from shorter working weeks, since the employees will have more energy and consequently be more effective the hours they do work.   

Summary of the article: The National Agency for Government Employers1 in Sweden says no to legislation about a 35-hour working week. 
They argue that such a law would hurt the state as well as the population and say that this is a question that should be solved within the individual workplaces. 
According to them a general shortening of the working-hours would be very expensive and would have to be financed either by lower salaries or by major cuts in the public sector. 
They also believe that shorter workdays would lead to recruitment problems, especially within the public sector where there is already a shortage of staff. 
Their conclusion is that there is no way that this legislation could come through without severe damages to the state economy.
"," Lily Bart- Destroyed by Society  Lily Bart is a woman whose primary goals in life are marriage and money. 
She has reached the age of 29 and can no longer afford to be choosy, she has to marry for money and not for love. 
In this essay I will discuss the reasons behind her goals and I will also look at why she fails to reach them.  	
If we want to find explanations of Lily's behaviour we can start by looking at the setting. 
The House of Mirth is set in and around New York at the beginning of the 20th century and Lily is in many ways a product of this milieu. 
This was a time when money and prestige were very important features and when a woman's role was to be her husband's most precious jewel. 
Lily has been brought up as an upper-class girl but when she is nineteen her family goes bankrupt and soon after she looses both her parents. 
The fact that she has no money of her own and therefore has to depend on allowances from her aunt does not change her way of life, but it does change her prerequisites. 
In order to continue to be a part of the upper-class society she has to marry for money. 
Her upbringing makes it impossible for her to change her habits and live simpler than she is used to, her mother has thought her that there is something heroic in living as though you are richer than you actually are. 
Lily's worst fear is to be forced to ""live like a pig"" (p 30) and she would rather marry someone that she does not love than to submit to the fate of the poor:   She had been bored all the afternoon by Percy Gryce-the mere thought seemed to waken an echo of his droning voice-but she could not ignore him on the morrow, she had to follow up her success, must submit to more boredom,...and all on bare chance that he might ultimately decide to do her the honour of boring her for life. 	
It was a hateful fate-but how escape from it? 
What choice had she? 
To be herself or a Gerty Farish.... 
No; she was not made for mean and shabby surroundings,...
Her whole being dilated in an atmosphere of luxury; it was the background she required, the only climate she could breathe in.  	 
Lily spends her time amongst upper class people and sees them as an image of what she will become once she is married. 
In their society it is important to have money and to show that you are rich through your clothes and your jewellery. 
At first Lily longs to be as them but after a while she sees them with new eyes: ""they had symbolized what she was gaining, now they stood for what she was giving up"" (p 53). 
Although Lily sometimes feels that she would be better of somewhere else, perhaps in a life with Selden, she is incapable of breaking free, incapable of a life without the luxuries she is used to. 
She cannot escape the life she has been created for. 
She has no training to survive in another form of existence: 	 Inherited tendencies had combined with early training to make her the highly specialized product she was: an organism as helpless out of its narrow range as a sea-anemone torn from the rock. 
She had been fashioned to adorn and delight; to what other end does nature round the rose-leaf and paint the hummingbird's breast. (p 301) 	 	However, sometimes Lily is carried away by her emotions and when she does it upsets her plans. 
At one instance her emotions lead her to take a walk with Selden instead of going to church with Percy Gryce, and during this walk Selden presents a different kind of life to her, a life with him, with independence instead of money. 
However, Lily is way to conscious and planning to let her emotions carry her away to such lengths, she still intends to marry Mr Gryce although she has more feelings for Selden. 
However, this incident makes Mr Gryce change his mind about Lily. 
She has unconsciously destroyed her chances of marriage. 
Lily is tempted by the thought of a life with Selden at several occasions but always realises that ""in the world as it was, such a privilege was likely to cost more than it was worth"" (p 88). 
Lily's problem is that she is neither controlled by her emotions nor able to completely resist them. 
She lets herself be carried away by them at the worst possible times and this has more than once destroyed her chances of marriage. 
Maybe she does this because, as Mrs Fisher suggests, ""at heart, she despises the things she's trying for."" 
This is an interesting and possible thought. 
Deep inside Lily wants something else but she does not have the strength to consciously break free so she does it unconsciously, hoping that something better will present itself to her.  	 
Selden, who represents this other kind of life, works to trigger her emotions and to make her see the society she keeps in another light. 
He works as a contrast to Percy Gryce and as a window out of her secluded circle. 
The things that Selden says have a great impact on Lily, but not because she loves him or because of the fact that he is a man but because he strikes a nerve in her. 
Lily is the kind of woman that makes her own decisions; she is not controlled by men and has never had any strong male role models. 
Her father was very suppressed by her mother, in fact all the married men in The House of Mirth seem to be more or less ruled by their wives. 
In my view, Lily sees men as something necessary, a provider of money and status, but nothing more. 
The only man that has control over her is Gus Trenor during the period when she owes him money otherwise the men rather seem to be under her control. 
However, she lives in a world ruled by men, where women should be beautiful and decorative and this affects everything she is. 
She has been brought up to please men in order to get married because there is no other solution to live respectably. 
Furthermore, the fact that she cannot speculate with her own money makes her loose control over her debt to Mr Trenor. 	
In my opinion Lily is a woman that controls her own life. 
She is very conscious of what she does and what she wants; everything she does is part of a bigger plan. 
However, she is what she is because of her upbringing, the time in which she lives and the society which she is part of. 
She has been taught that money and beauty are the most important things in life and that her role in life is to be ornamental. 
The problem is that she, somewhere deep inside, longs for something else, another kind of life. 
When she looses her self-control and lets her emotions carry her away, even if only for a moment, she unconsciously upset her own plans. 
She does it when she takes the walk with Selden, that I have mentioned earlier and when she borrows money from Mr Trenor that is also a decision made on an impulse. 
It is those impulsive emotion based decisions that make her fail in reaching her goals and finally destroys her but above all she is a victim of the corrupted society which she is part of.
",True
" Watchfulness Will Avoid Children Falling Into the Hands of Paedophiles.  
Last week we could read about ten children, from three to eleven years old, who had been sexually abused by a 22-year-old man. 
I guess that we all reacted negatively and felt powerless. 
How could this happen? 
Many adults were nearby this catastrophe, but none of them reported it to the police. 
They claimed that they didn't know it was happening. 
Perhaps they didn't want to know. 
There were neighbours who had suspicions, they heard screams from the five-year-old boy, the paedophile's steph-son, but they just rang at the door. 
If a neighbour reacts on a child's scream, that he or she must ring at the door, then the scream is not a normal scream. 
They also observed that the paedophile always had the curtains drawn and that the little boy was never out playing with the other children.  
We've been aware of paedophiles before this case. 
Nobody wants them to destroy more lives than they have already done. 
If we have children ourselves, it feels very unpleasant to leave them at the nursery every morning. 
As adult, and fellow-being, I think it is important to react and be aware of this problem and not close our eyes and believe in fairy-tales. 
We live in the real world, and things aren't always so decent.  
If we see something that possibly can be about sexually abused children, we ought to report it at once, before it is too late, before it has hurt the child completely, for life. 
Even if we have slight evidence, or none, even if we only got some suspicions, I think it is our obligation to report it to the police. 
It is our resposibility, as adults, to stop a possible paedophile for the child's sake, for its best. 
We can never report it to early, but unfortunately, we can report it too late. 
So, for the child's best: observe, and don't be afraid of interfering (which we Swedish people usually have difficulties with).  
If we report someone because we have our suspicions and it turns out that this reported man or woman is innocent, he or she would presumably feel offended. 
But, I want to claim this once again, if the whole matter is not reported at all, a life of a child can be totally ruined, and that is not easy to repair, if it can be repaired at all.  
The second argument of reporting to the police in the above matter, is that the person who reported it should feel better, and be proud of him- or herself, that he or she took the initiative instead of the opposite: being quiet and let the whole thing go on. 
Of course we all want to help, don't we. 
I wonder, how do the neighbours feel today, those who didn't report it even if they knew that they should have done it.  
The third argument is that if we all are more aware, and awake, and dare to report, the paedophiles would hopefully feel more watched and observed, and know that we are concerned about our children's security. 
It should be a warning effect with people's engagement and that could frighten the paedophiles. 
If we don't report cases with paedophiles involved, then they can do whatever they want to do, because then they think that we don't care, that we are afraid of knowing the truth. 
Of course we don't want to know what a paedophile can do with our children, of course we can't see at a person that he or she is a paedophile, but we can be more vigilant.  
Children do trust in us adults, and we must let them continue trusting us. 
Be watchful and talk to your children, ask them, tell them, inform them. 
If they know that we are open-minded, that we can report sick people, then they probably will tell us if there is a paedophile in the nearby.
","I will now write an honest essay about my English and how I assess it. 
First of all, I love to write! 
I got very happy when I heard that we, the students in this A-level course, are going to write many essays! 
When I see a piece of blank paper, I immediately want to fill it with letters. 
I seldom have any problems with spelling. 
Once I have read a word, I usually know how to spell it. 
I think it's easier to write than to speak in many situations. 
When I write, I can stop writing for a while and just think about what I want to write further on in the text. 
When I talk it's not that easy to stop and think about what I am supposed to say, because then the people I'm talking to continue to speak, and the very important thing I was thinking of will never be discussed. 
When I write, I can go back in the text and change and I can change several times, so it's very different from speaking. 
Maybe that is why I love to write, because I can think in peace and quiet. 
I guess I've always loved to write, ever since I was a little girl writing in my diary every evening. 
When I was eleven years old our class found another class, in Great Britain, and they were about our age and we got penfriends. 
I think I learnt quite a lot by writing in English to my penfriend for many years, and I still write letters, not to her though. 
When I studied at Komvux here in Uppsala, our English teacher told us to write an essay every week. 
It wasn't compulsory but I handed in one every week because I'm so fond of writing, and I thought that my teacher could evaluate my English by reading my texts.  
When it comes to speaking I must say that I am a little bit shy of speaking in a quiet classroom with all unfamiliar students surrounding me. 
In such situations my English doesn't sound like I want it to sound. 
It's difficult to speak fluently and spontanleously, but I know that I will practice talking in this course.  
You should visit me at home and spy on me when I'm doing my homework, because I practically always read aloud to myself to get the right pronunciation by reading the phonetics. 
It's a habit to read aloud, but I don't know if it's a good or a bad habit. 
Sometimes, when I'm reading a book in a public place, I think it's difficult to read quiet and I have noticed that I move my lips secretly. 
After writing comes reading, my second favorite in order. 
Naturally it depends on the text if it is readable or not, but most of the time I accept all kinds of texts. 
I do have to confess something, and that is that I think it's hard to read the paper, the news about politics and wars. 
I think that is like listening to the news on the TV or the radio. 
They use a different language from the language they often write in literature. 
But I am aware of my defect, so at the moment I subscribe to Newsweek where I can read international news about Clinton's counterattac and the Olympics scandal (That sounds boring, doesn't it?). 
Reading novels, short stories and magazines are very amusing but I find it tough to read in bed in the evening, because then I usually read the entire book which means I will be very tired the day after.  
I think it can be difficult to listen to English, but not in all situations though. 
I do understand the English when I attend a lecture or when I speak with a person, but when I listen to the news on the telly or the radio, I sometimes feel stupid because I don't receive the information. 
That is something I really must practise.
",True
" More and more people are becoming vegetarians in Sweden  Today an increasing number of Swedes choose not to eat meat. 
Instead many Swedes choose a vegetarian alternative. 
An increasing number of vegetarian cookbooks are making their way into the shop's bookshelves. 
On television we watch as chefs make vegetarian dishes and almost every magazine is full of vegetarian recipes. 
Today you will not find a single restaurant with self-respect that does not offer at least one vegetarian alternative. 
The offering of different vegetables for sale has increased. 
This is most likely a result of the increasing number of vegetarians. 
These are just some examples that show us that vegetarian food is making its way into Swedish homes. 
But what reasons may have contributed to that more and more Swedes are becoming vegetarians? 
Is this just a not last long trend or is this just the beginning of a trend that has come to stay? 
If we go back four years in time to 1997 when the first reports about the mad cow disease surfaced, we see what can be said to be the very starting point for this trend. 
All over the world people watched as terrifying pictures of animals suffering from the mad cow disease were being broadcast, Sweden was not an exception. 
Out of a fear for Creuzfeld-Jacobs disease many Swedes stopped eating meat. 
Media's focus ways often on what risks there were with eating meat and that in many ways contributed to that many Swedes no longer felt it safe to eat meat. 
It was as though pictures of animals suffering from the mad cow disease were drummed into people's minds. 
Many people argued that this was just a casual trend. 
But today we do see this as the very trigging point for the increasing number of vegetarians in Sweden. 
The number of vegetarians in Sweden is increasing rapidly. 
Today it is diseases like the foot- and- mouth disease that contributes to many Swedes fear eating meat; it feels safe to be a vegetarian. 
Another factor that has contributed to the increasing number of vegetarians in Sweden is for sure the news coverage that repeatedly has shown us animals that live under extremely poor conditions. 
Over and over people in Sweden have come to learn about how animals suffer during inhuman long transports. 
Pictures of mismanaged animals are also often shown in various media contexts. 
This has for sure stirred up a lot of feelings among many Swedes. 
To give up meat is a standpoint that many Swedes choose to make in order to show that they are on the animal's side. 
Pictures of so called monster-bulls have lead to negative reactions among Swedes. 
Many Swedes react to how the commercial interests seem to have completely taken over the meat industry. 
Many Swedes raise protests against this by becoming vegetarians. 
So one could say that a great number of Swedes choose to become vegetarians out of ideological reasons. 
By giving up meat many Swedes feel that they can make a difference. 
Some people may say that these people, who have chosen to give up meat because they feel that there is something wrong with how animals are treated, probably will go back to eating meat once media's attention is focused on something else. 
As long as we do not se any improvement in the way that animals are treated, more and more people will choose to become vegetarians in Sweden. 
This is an obvious trend in today's society in Sweden. 
One of the most important reasons for the growing number of vegetarians is of course the growing awareness among Swedish consumers. 
A lot of vegetarian recipes are presented b in both magazines and on TV. 
People have learned how to cook vegetarian food. 
Vegetarian food is no longer anything that is regarded with scepticism. 
Instead vegetarian food many times stands for quality. 
In today's Sweden a great number of people choose to become vegetarians simply for reasons of health. 
Many people do not eat meat because they feel that their physiological health benefits from not eating meat. 
As long as the consciousness of health will continue to increase we will also see an increasing number of Swedish vegetarians. 
How strong this trend really is becomes quite clear when we take into consideration that Sweden's Prime Minister Goran Persson has said that he feels better eating vegetables than meat.  
That more and more people are becoming vegetarians in Sweden is trend that has just begun. 
In the future we will probably see even more vegetarians in Sweden. 
The cause for this trend is that Swedes out of ideological-, physiological- and health reasons choose to become vegetarians. 
That people choose to become vegetarians is a trend that has come to stay.
"," Things could be worse than hearing children curse  In Shirley Peckham's article she wants to clean up the language after having heard too many swear words from teenagers passing by her husband's shop. 
According to Peckham, the children ought to be ""boxed around the ears"". 
In this essay I will argue against the need of cleaning up teenagers' language, which Peckham argues for. 
Firstly, I will argue against Peckhams' problem with cursing children. 
Secondly, I will argue why cursing is a part of adolescence. 
Thirdly, I will argue how trying to change teenagers' ways of communicate will not do any good. 
Lastly I will sum up my paragraphs.  	
The issue ""cleaning up the language"" that Shirley Peckham introduces in her article and the problems it concerns I do not find very worrying. 
Peckham describes having heard several terrible swear words from children passing by her husbands' shop and a group of boys at a railway station. 
This observation might be considered interesting for some, but far from sensational for most. 
Just a few teenagers, who happened to curse while passing by Mrs Peckham, are not very representative for every teenager of Britain. 
Generalising will not give a fair overview of the situation. 
Peckham has obviously exaggerated the situation and created a problem, which does not exist. 
Concerning the language of those teenagers Peckham has observed I consider it being a part of adolescence. 	
Peckham has apparently forgotten everything of being rebellious during the years of adolescence. 
As I see it swear words are a part of adolescence, at least for some who are fighting through this period of life where many physical and mental changes occur. 
By using curse words teenagers express their attitudes towards school, grown-ups and society as a whole. 
Children at this age are tired of parents' and teachers' demands. 
They want to be rebellious and dissociate themselves from stiff, boring adults. 
Cursing is one way of doing this. 
I agree with Peckham to some extent. 
It would be preferable if teenagers use other words to express themselves instead of using swear words. 
However, teenagers' swearing is just a rebellious action, something they will get tired of and consider foolish and childish when they get older and more mature. 
As grown-ups they have more than likely changed and will only curse if getting upset. 
There might be some exceptions, but there always are. 
Therefore I believe that children using swear words is nothing to worry about. 
I do not see the need of searching for solutions of changing teenagers' ways of expressing themselves. 	
Trying to change teenagers' ways of communicate will not do any good. 
They are rebellions and are not willing to give up any rights of being rebellious. 
If for instance parents and teachers tell their children and pupils to watch their mouth and stop cursing it might lead to an opposite effect. 
As tired as teenagers already are of demands and complaints from adults they would probably curse more than ever. 
Peckham's method of changing children's language by boxing them around the ears, is definitely not an option when trying to change teenager's ways of communicate. 
I call this corporal punishment, which perhaps is legal in England, but is far from accepted. 
Peckham should be ashamed of such suggestions. 	
Shirley Peckham has observed some cursing teenagers and has drawn the conclusion that she has encountered a problem that needs to be solved. 
However, there is no problem. 
Peckham is just being confused of teenagers' ways of communicate. 
She is obviously not aware of how teenagers behave when going through adolescence. 
Cursing is a way for teenagers to dissociate themselves from grown-ups and their demands. 
This stage of childish action where teenagers want to be rebellions, which seems like a problem for Peckham, is something they are going to grow out when becoming adults. 
Therefore Shirley Peckham should not worry of matters she has no knowledge of.
",False
" Society benefits from decrease in working hours  Currently there is a vivid debate going on about wether a shortening of working hours from 40 to 35 hours a week should become law or not. 
The arguments, presented in the article, against the proposition are mainly economic ones, for instance the need for pay cuts corresponding to the decrease, while the arguments for the proposition to a greater extent deals with how we will gain quality of life. 
In this essay I claim that a law is necessary and to support this I will point to the fact that the arguments for it are important aspects we cannot ignore when it comes to every person's well being.  	
To start with the economic argument, I would like to state that this law would not necessarily have to lead to great cuts in the state activity or pay cuts for the employees. 
I realise that the reform in question will cost a lot, but I claim that there are other ways to finance it. 
After having read a debate article in DN2, I realise that this is evidently a question of priority for the state. 
The authors of this article claim that the money needed could and should be taken directly from the state budget. 
Today, after a long time of budget deficit, the budget is balanced, and furthermore, the excess is increasing. 
Accordingly, it is possible to use this excess and I agree completely with the authors' thesis that we ought to seize this opportunity to improve working-conditions when we can afford it. 
One could say that this reform would be very expensive for the state, but, undoubtedly, the prize is worth paying. 
This is exactly the conclusion drawn by the committee that was assigned by the government to investigate advantages and disadvantages of the reform.3 It is, however, probable that the increased amount of sparetime and richer quality of life, to which the law would lead and which I will comment on later, would stimulate the purchasing power in general and thus the money would return to the state.  	
Before I turn to look at that, however, I will focus on another argument for a shorter working week; that is, the statement that the unemployment rate would decrease, allowing us to look with revived hope towards the goal to have full ockupation for everybody. 
France, the first nation in the European Union to legislate for a 35-hour working week, is an excellent example of how this has turned out successful. 
During the last couple of years, the unemployment rate in France indeed has decreased. 
The reasons for this, however, can be discussed. 
Critics argue that the diminishing number of unemployed in France is more likely due to other factors, such as prosperous times.4 Here in Sweden it is also argued that a shortening of working hours would result in increased unemployment at long sight because it acts like a check on the economic growth. 
Nevertheless, no matter how uncertain the outcome is, I claim that it is worth trying, especially considering the positive effects a reform would have.  	
Lastly, let us look at my main argument, which is that working 35 hours a week will improve our quality of life. 
A decrease in working-hours would make it easier to cope with the day, especially in physically or psychologically demanding jobs. 
It would also provide more time for recreation and allow us to go back to work with a larger energy supply the next morning. 
In addition, the effect of this would be that fewer persons reported themselves sick and we would have less early retirements. 
Related to this are of course less work-related illnesses and a better health in general. 
According to a report from Miljepartiet, these positive effects have been shown when the idea of a shorter working week has been tried out. 
Likewise, more spare time equals life quality as it means more time with our children, and more time to develop interesting hobbies, which definitely makes us more harmonious and content with life. 
Our creativity is developed; something the whole society benefits from.  	
In short, this debate focuses on the choice between good economy, on the one hand, and a better quality of life, on the other hand. 
I think we all know which aspect is the most important in politics, and accordingly, I don't think a legalisation of a shorter working week is likely to take place at the moment. 
But why should economy precede health? 
Our health and well being is important factors not only for individuals but also for our society in general, regarding early retirements and, simply, the ability to cope with, and enjoy, our jobs and lives. 
As far as I am concerned, the good effects of the reform in question have not been given enough significance - we would profit from a 5-hour reduction of the working week.  
Summary of ""Kortad arbetstid skadar staten"" In this article, the head of the state employers' association claims that a law advocating a reduction of working hours from 40 to 35 hours a week would threaten Swedish economy and welfare. 
She states that there are two alternative, both negative, effects of this law. 
Either it would cause great cuts in state activity, such as education, research and police forces, resulting in an increasing load for employees, among other problems, or it would become necessary to cut their wages corresponding to the decrease in working-hours. 
This would mean a 12,5 percent deduction of their salaries, something that is not believed to be accepted without problems.   

"," Make-up at twelve increasing phenomenon  The society we live in today is obsessed with looks and weight. 
No matter how hard some people or philosophies try to make us appreciate inner qualities, we seem to be convinced that good looks equal success. 
All kinds of media provides us with infinite cures and diets which promise beauty, and cosmetic products are constantly improved to help us look even better and sexier. 
And what do we do? 
We buy their products. 
What is frightening is that this is no longer a market for grown up women and men, but also for younger and younger girls. 
Today many young girls cannot go to school without a layer of make-up and dressed in latest fashion. 
These appearances occur earlier and earlier. 
Of course it varies a lot from place to place and between individuals, but my impression is that it is more frequently occurring today that girls wear full make-up than it was five to ten years ago. 
Eating disorders is a common problem, and something which at first sounds unbelievable, is that eating disorders today appear among small children, down to 6-7 year-olds. 
This is a new phenomenon, that even children of that young age are affected. 
Why is it that in our society children are no longer allowed to be children, but have to deal with adult problems so early in their lives? 	
Firstly, I think one reason for this might be that our material standards here in Sweden are improving, since we live in a time of prosperity. 
The companies involved in this ""beauty business"" are growing wealthier at the same time as we, the consumers, have more money to spend. 
As I stated earlier, cosmetic companies develop more and more products - you would think there is a cream for everything by now, but soon they invent something new, and with help of media an interest and a desire for the product is created. 
These companies are continually looking to expand their market, and since young people are easily influenced they become a target group. 
This target group becomes younger and younger, and the market wider.  	
One possible objection to this argument is that there where lots of beauty products ten years ago as well, and that it provides no explanation for why young people tend to grow up faster in terms of how they dress and use cosmetics. 
I still think, however, that market expanding and increasing influence of media, for instance through TV and radio commercials, are contributing causes to this trend. 	
Another thing that has to do with how the market creates, or at least encourages a trend towards young people's eating disorders, is what the shops offer. 
First of all, fashion for young people today is more provocative than it used to be. 
There is a fashion that reveals a lot of the figure, indicating how important it is to have a neat figure. 
Furthermore, clothes are actually made smaller today. 
This is something that was brought up in the TV-program ""Rea"" a couple of weeks ago, when children, in the form of reporters, were sent out to try jeans and other clothes on. 
They found that for instance medium size is smaller now than it used to be. 
In addition, large sizes are produced in fewer numbers than small sizes are, thus making it harder for those with a large size to find clothes that fit. 
This contributes strongly to the growing number of eating disorders in early ages.  	
In contrast to the two mentioned causes, the next one deals with parental influence. 
It is a fact that most of the children who today are in the ages from five to ten have parents born in the 60's, and this is of importance for how they raise their children. 
To exemplify this I would like to point to the fact that they grew up in the 80's, used to high standards of living and to spending money on cosmetics, clothes and accessories. 
Now it is their turn to spoil their children, who learn to pay a lot of attention to how they look.  	
Still, the final and main reason for this trend is TV- and pop idols. 
There must be a clear connection between pop idols, with their very undressed and sexy images, and the growing obsession with looks. 
Pop idols today normally wear a lot of make-up and provocative clothes, and this gives the impression, that your success in life depends on how sexy you are. 
Consequently, the shape of the idols emphasizes the idea that a slim body is a sexy body and therefore the ideal.  	
In conclusion, all these causes have contributed to the development towards a more and more superficial society where children are forced to grow up earlier. 
Nevertheless, I think the main causes are media and role models, because children are easily influenced and do not have the ability and knowledge to look critically at their idols.
",True
" ""Miss Celie's Song""  In an article, The Only Reason You Want to Go to Heaven Is that You Have Been Driven Out of Your Mind (Accessed June 19, 2000. <http:/ /ehostgw15.epnet.com>), Alice Walker discusses among other things how her parents and grandparents, in the nineteenth and the beginning of twentieth century's United States, were forced to believe in white people's God, and to give up their ""belief in their own judgement and faith in themselves"". 
(Alice Walker, The Only Reason You Want to Go to Heaven...) 
We can see a certain manipulation to go on in Walker's novel The Color Purple, too. 
In different ways Celie, the principal character of the novel, is manipulated to believe herself being ugly, stupid and useless -not a human being at all. 
I will now discuss causes for the absence of Celie's belief in herself, and how she is, after all, still able to build up her non-existent self-confidence and gain self-respect as well as the respect of the others. 
The foundations of Celie being quite easily manipulated lie in the values of society in which she is brought up. 
The story takes place in the American South in the first half of the twentieth century. 
According to the ruling values of society, Celie is raised to believe in ""big and old and tall and graybearded and white"" (201) God who had made white people superior to black people. 
""...that's the [God] that's in the white folks' white bible. 
(...) 
You mad cause he don't seem to listen to your prayers. 
(...) 
I know white people never listen to colored, period. 
If they do they only listen long enough to be able to tell you what to do."" 
(201-202) According to the white people's bible men should also rule over women. 
""Unto the Woman God said: I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee. 
Genesis 3:16"" (Alice Walker, The Only Reason You Want to Go to Heaven...) 
Brought up in society that believes in men's superiority, Celie, trusting in her white God, accepts her fate as a part of God's big plan without questioning but being obedient to men of God. 
""Never mind, never mind, long as I can spell G-o-d I got somebody along."" 
(18) In Celie's life the ideas and values of society are embodied in two men especially, her Pa and her husband, both who brutally abuse her and totally trample her underfoot. 
By raping Celie, and getting her pregnant when she is only fourteen, her Pa, who then turns out to be a stepfather, robs her body, her innocence and her self-respect. 
""He never had a kine word to say to me. 
Just say You gonna do what your mammy wouldn't. 
(...) 
When that hurt, I cry. 
He start to choke me saying You better shut up and git used to it."" 
(2) After Pa selfishly spoils Celie's young body and mind, he makes clear that he can't stand her anymore. 
""Pa say I'm evil an always up to no good."" 
(4) He also convinces Celie that she is stupid and totally worthless by taking her out of school. 
""You too dumb to keep going to school, Pa say."" 
(11) Celie seems to lose all her rights as a human being. 
Emphasising her only being an object for others to use, Pa marries Celie to Mr.___, acting more as if he was selling cattle than giving away his daughter. 
""She ugly. 
(...) 
But she ain't no stranger to hard work. 
And she clean. 
And God done fixed her. 
You can do everything just like you want to and she ain't gonna make you feed it or clothe it."" 
(9) Pa also covers up for himself by warning Mr.___ that Celie is a kind of person that lies. (9) r.___, not being able to marry the woman that he loves but still desperately needing someone to take care of his children, finally content himself with Celie, although not literally. 
For Celie the marriage doesn't change anything. 
She just moves from one hell to another. 
Mr.___ abuses her sexually, punishes her for being a woman, being his wife but not the woman that he loves. 
He makes sure that Celie knows ""who got the upper hand"" (37), and that she is absolutely worth nothing. 
""Who you think you is? 
he say. 
(...) 
Look at you. 
You black, you pure , you ugly, you a woman. 
Goddam, he say, you nothing at all."" 
(213) Convinced by both her Pa and her husband, the two men of God, Celie seem to have no reason whatever to have any belief in or respect for herself. ore or less brainwashed to think low about herself, Celie doesn't question her situation until she meets two very strong women, Sofia and Shug Avery, who both refuse to be trampled on by men. 
Mr.___'s son Harpo to Celie: ""I want her to do what I say, like you do for [Mr.
___]. 
(...) 
But not Sofia [Harpo's wife]. 
She do what she want, don't pay me no mind at all. 
I try to beat her, she black my eyes."" 
(66) Celie is jealous of Sofia who can do what she cannot -to fight. 
(42) Celie hardly knows how to get mad. 
""All [she] know[s] how to do is stay alive."" 
(18) The crucial factor for Celie becoming able to change her view of herself is her relationship with Shug Avery, the woman that Mr.___ loves -his lover. 
Shug Avery doesn't only exemplify a strong woman who holds her own, but she is the only person, along with Celie's sister Nettie, who Celie loves and who loves her back unconditionally, and stands for her no matter what. ...
Shug spoke right up for you Celie, [Mr.___] say. 
She say Albert, you been mistreating somebody I love. 
So as far as you concern, I'm gone. 
I couldn't believe it, he say. 
(...) 
I tried to tease her. 
You don't love old dumb Celie, I said. 
She ugly and skinny and can't hold a candle to you. 
She can't even screw. 
(277) But [Shug] meant what she said. 
(277)  Shug is the person who patiently teaches Celie about the secrets of her body, to accept and even like her body -to enjoy being a woman. 
""She say , Here, take this mirror and go look at yourself down there,... 
What, (...) scared to look at your own pussy. 
You come with me while I look, I say. 
(...) 
It a lot prettier than you thought, ain't it? 
She say... 
It mine, I say. 
"" (82) Influenced by Shug, and all the things Celie goes through, she begins to question the white God who she, until then, has had a strong belief and trust in. 
""I don't write to God no more, I write to [Nettie]. 
What happen to God? 
Ask Shug. 
Who that? 
I say (...) the God I been praying and writing to is a man. 
And act just like all the other mens I know. 
Trifling, forgitful and lowdown."" 
(199) Celie's disbelief in God also makes her question the great injustice she has suffered from.  
Celie's situation climaxes when she, thanks to Shug Avery, gets to know that Mr.___ has hidden all Nettie's letters, that he during so many years kept her dear sister away from her. 
Finally Celie is able to feel pure anger and to give vent to that powerful feeling. 
""All day long I act just like Sophia. 
I stutter. 
I mutter to myself. 
I stumble bout the house crazy for Mr.___ blood. 
In my mind, he falling dead every which a way."" 
(125) Because of her new-found belief in herself, and her arising faith in God as everything -""Everything that is or ever was or ever will be."" 
(202-203), Celie is finally able to free herself totally from the control of men, and instead hold her own. 
""I'm pore, I'm black, I may be ugly and can't cook, a voice say to everything listening. 
But I'm here."" 
(214)  	""Dear God. 
Dear stars, dear trees, dear sky, dear peoples. 
Dear Everything. 
Dear God."" 
(292) There has always been greed, power-seeking people or groups of people who regard their political, religious, social, and other ideas and values as the best possible, and therefore want to influence and manipulate other people, stopping at nothing. 
The ruling ideas and values of society then often make the manipulation and the downright abuse possible and silently accepted by majority as a part of reality, as Celie in The Color Purple. 
""There is so much we don't understand. 
And so much unhappiness comes because of that."" 
(198) But as Celie says: ""...we all have to start somewhere if us want to do better, and our own self is what us have to hand."" 
(278) And I say, amen.   
Literature Alice Walker, The Color Purple (1982) Walker, Alice. 
""The Only Reason You Want to Go to Heaven Is that You Have Been Driven Out of Your Mind."" 
Accessed June 19, 2000. <http:/ / ehostgw15.epnet.com>
"," Long Live the school of knowledge  In order to respond the demands of the society of today, where various shifts and changes take place at a rapid pace, the Swedish Teachers' Education Committee (LUK), which mostly consists of people with no practical experience from the school, has proposed a restructuring of the Swedish teachers' education programs. 
In short, the idea of the proposition is to reduce the studies of the special subjects, and devote that time on other issues that the Teachers' Education Committee regards as more crucial and valuable. 
This proposal has given rise to a fairly large debate in Swedish media, and not in vain. 
As a future teacher I don't see a point in reducing the subject studies, but in fact I consider the reduction to be a great threat that would lead to a radical lowering of the teachers' competence and moreover the standard of the basic training at Swedish schools. 	 
The idea, which the plan of the restructuring is based on, is that the teachers would no more have the intermediary role in the classroom, but they would be there to guide the pupils to find their own knowledge. 
Therefore the Teachers' Education Committee thinks that it's unnecessary to have as much subject education for the future teachers as they have at the moment, but half the subject studies would be enough. 
Instead the teacher students would devote themselves to issues such as how the knowledge is formed and how it can be organized. 
As senior lecturer and teacher trainer Arne Hellden from Linkoping expresses in his article in Dagens Nyheter (May 10, 2000), the proposal appears very ill-defined and vague. 
School is still a place where pupils are supposed to learn things and develop themselves, isn't it? 
How can they learn anything if there is nobody to convey the knowledge to them? 
The view of the teachers being guides while the pupils explore and search out the knowledge by themselves certainly looks nice on a paper and sounds good in theory, but in practice it would lead to a catastrophe. 
There are too many pupils who are not ready to take the enormous responsibility for their own learning which the Teachers' Education Committee's suggestion requires. 
The pupils need a person, a teacher who conveys the basic knowledge that lays the foundation of their knowledge development, and creates opportunities for their further education.  	 
To be able to act as an intermediary, teachers will definitely need to know how to teach. 
However, it doesn't help to be professional in knowing how to teach without having something to teach. 
To half the subject education would drastically decrease teachers' competence, and make them incapable to fulfil the most important duty of a teacher as an ""agent"" between the pupils and the knowledge. 
Both the thorough knowledge of the subject and the know-how of teaching are important parts of the teachers' competence. 
The other should not exclude the other one, but a balance between them should be found. 	 
Teachers' education programs have in general a difficult duty to adjust to the changes that go on both in and outside of the school. 
At the same time the programs have an extremely important role in changing the teacher profession and thus developing the school. 
While weighing the proposal of the restructuring of the teachers' education, we should keep in mind from which quarter it comes from. 
We shouldn't make changes that have such disastrous consequences head over heels, and above all, the biggest voice should be given those who then afterwards should put the ideas into practice.
",True
" TELEVISION - A CURSE OR A BLESSING?  
Four years of my life have been spent without television. 
During those years I never felt that I missed anything. 
Rather I was happy and satisfied with my choice. 
Many times people wondered how I could manage to live without television. 
My response was always to hand that question back to them and a bit humorously ask how they could manage to live with it. 
Today my circumstances are different and I have no choice but to live with television. 
Of course I have the choice of switching the thing on or off, but what I mean is that the decision of its mere presence or not is beyond my power. 
If I could choose, though, I would stick to my determination of living without it. 
If you would ask me why, my simple answer would be that I don't want to waste my time. 
Because that is what I think television often is, a waste and a great time-consumer.  
Surely television must be seen as one of the very best among time-consumers. 
Recently I read a report made by the Swedish board of Education, which showed that an average pupil in classes 5-8 is spending about three hours a day in front of the TV. 
One must admit that it is pretty interesting to find that people still have time to watch TV in a society where effectiveness is measured in minutes and even seconds. 
How come students have so much time to sit in front of the television when they don't have any time for their homework? 
Or maybe that is the reason. 
Television has the capacity to get one's attention and then take the life and energy out of oneself as something like a big black hole. 
The weary person who only wants to relax a bit after a hard day's work easily finds himself even more tired after having been in touch with this ""screen monster"". 
Surely television is a master to create apathy and emptiness. 
One doesn't have to go further than oneself to realise that is true. 
How often have I not wasted hours in front of the television just because of tiredness and a need for rest before setting about my required tasks? 
What was thought to be a short time has often become hours and time has been wasted.  
Another interesting feature that I find when it comes to television is how we tend to build friendly relationships based on it. 
This might sound a bit odd, but believe me it is true. 
How many times have I not been invited to someone with the intention of spending an evening together? 
Tell about my surprise when I after a while realise that our time together is limited to our mutual starring at an electric box. 
Is that what one call fruitful relationships? 
Today television is about to create a whole society where people have strong difficulties to build deep and stable relationships. 
Why? 
The reason is lack of communication. 
Real fellowship is always based on good communication. 
And how can one build anything like that when one's time of active discourse is limited to the different commercial breaks and then tend to be all about the ongoing movie? 
Don't misunderstand me, though. 
Of course watching a film together with one's friends has its place. 
The big problem is when we make that all there is to our friendship. 
And today that has become a real danger.  
With this in mind it is easy to look upon television as a mere curse. 
That would be a strong generalisation, though. 
Surely our consumption of television carries many dangers. 
But television in itself should neither be treated as a curse nor a blessing. 
It is our consumption of it that determines what it will become. 
The challenge is therefore not so much to separate ourselves totally from all there is to television, as it is to learn to control our intake. 
As long as we let the TV master us it will be our enemy and always cause us a great deal of struggle. 
But if we learn how to rule over the television it will be a tool that will give us good assistance. 
The challenge therefore is to turn the curse into blessing by limiting and controlling the consumption. 
Our level of success of that will determine our future.
"," EU - THE WORLD'S CHANCE FOR PEACE  In recent times the whole debate about Sweden's membership in the European Union has revived. 
The riot in Gothenburg in the beginning of this summer was only one of many expressions of this and how some people argue that Sweden should now leave the EU. 
The sad thing, though, is that the same people, who think they are fighting for democracy and against a control of a sovereign power, might actually be the ones who are the greatest danger against democracy in our country. 
The thirteenth of November 1994 Sweden decided, in a democratic way, that Sweden wanted to be a part of the European Union. 
So if now Sweden, through a democratic election, has come to the solution that we want to join the rest of Europe and together work for a better world. 
How come then that some people want to break that up, through mainly peaceful actions but also actions of violence, and call that a defence of this same democracy? 
That is absolutely ridiculous. 
The question we also need to ask is; if now Sweden would leave the EU, besides the ridicule from the nations around that we would receive, what are we actually leaving and can we afford it? 
So often the resistance of the European Union is built on ignorance and a lack of knowledge. 
It's easy to be against something just for the sake of it. 
But what really are we against?  
The core thought of the European Union is peace. 
Just after the Second World War, when big areas of the European continent were in despair and collapse, some people from key-nations in Europe gathered together to find a solution and to hinder war from ever returning into the heart of Europe again. 
Out of this came the unity of nations that during history has changed its shape many times, but kept its core focus, and today is what we call the European Union. 
Through a political union of sovereign but united states Europe has the chance not just to hinder the outburst of war, but also to eradicate the very heart of conflict itself - division. 
I strongly believe that the European Union together with the United Nations is the strongest force at work today that is able and strong enough to be something of a key in the process of world peace. 
We must not forget that the two World Wars have taken place based on the European continent. 
Here the very force of evil itself has been centred. 
Surely the history has been cruel to Europe, but finally we seem to have learned from it. 
What was at that time caused by division can today be healed through unity. 
The European Union enables peace to be a reality and not just a good dream. 
With the European nations united as one there is no way that a new World War would break out, at least not with its centre on the European continent. 
So therefore for Sweden to leave the EU would be a big mistake and would also indicate that Sweden is against this very matter of peace on the European continent. 
It would not be the first time that Sweden did this kind of mistake. 
During the Second World War, instead of uniting with the allies to see an end to the war, we opened our boarders up to the Germans to let them pass by so that they could invade our neighbours and we go free. 
We called it neutrality. 
I do believe we don't want that to happen again. 
But outside and separated from the EU we would not be able to guarantee our standing against that, rather we would be weak, vulnerable and open for compromises of all sorts. 
To be alone has never meant to be strong.  
In the view of this our place in the European Union is pretty obvious. 
It shouldn't take that much effort for anyone to understand and see that. 
Sweden has always spoken warmly about peace, justice and freedom. 
These are ""our"" words. 
Therefore we also need to prove ourselves to be faithful those high confessions of ours. 
Now the world peace needs and is dependent on a strong Europe that is united and not separated and divided. 
Therefore also our decisions in Sweden must reflect that.
",True
" Sweden - out of the EU  Why did Sweden join the European Union in the first place? 
The answer is that a referendum was held in our country and the population voted in favour of the Union even though the result was almost 50/50. 
History tells us that all attempts to put people together with different ethnic backgrounds, different languages and religions, is a failure. 
My strong but negative standpoint against the EU is not only from an ideological point of view but also from a historical view. 
We should learn from history, but unfortunately it seems as if history is going to repeat itself. 
My opinion is that we should leave the union and I would like to bring to light the problems with the Union and to examine whether the Union is good for Europe or not.   
We should learn from the history. 
In the last years we have seen cruel and violent wars for independence in a few of our closest neighbour countries: Russia and Yugoslavia. 
These are two examples of countries with ethnic, religious and linguistic differences that could not live together. 
Everything ended up in chaos and a lot of people died a completely unnecessary death. 
We can just look at ourselves and our history. 
Sweden has dominated Finland and Norway for centuries and even though the history and customs are not so different each country wanted independence. 
I am of the opinion that the EU will end up in a disaster, some countries will not accept certain decisions made within the European parliament and withdraw their membership.   	
The romantic view of the European Union is the desire to create a peaceful and prosperous Europe among the 15 member countries. 
The true objective though, is to create a powerful military and political Union in order to be able to rule the world. 
Both the EU and EFTA were an attempt in the beginning to create a smooth system of transporting goods between the European countries.   
EFTA abolished the trade tariffs and supported a common agricultural cooperation and I am in favour to this kind of trade union. 
The difference between EFTA and the EU is that the European Union continues and continues to develop itself. 
EU tends to expand and wants more member countries, a common defence and a common monetary union. 
Today the EU account for 40 per cent of the world trade and I see a tendency of megalomania. 
The EU is not only a free-trade area, as the intention was in the beginning, but the fact is that the cost of the membership starts to retain each country's national rights and independence.  	
Sweden is a small country. 
Europe has been involved in two World wars in the last century. 
Sweden has always been neutral and my opinion is that we should remain so.  
EU law is superior to Swedish law and, in certain matters that might be important for our country might not be biased for other member states such as Greece and Portugal. 
So who are we? 
Swedes? 
Europeans? 
In my opinion there will occur and identity crises among our population, and it is dangerous to loose that sense of not having your roots somewhere. 
We are not in the same situation as the United States of America.  
At least they speak the same language, they built up their country together and they have a common history from their independence at the end of the eighteenth century.  	 
The European Union had a basic aim which I found quite reasonable but I am still very sceptical. 
I always look backwards when there is talk about the future, not because I am nostalgic but because we should study our history, on that basis we should make our decisions for the future. 
Today we do not know the outcome of the European Union but I hope it is positive of course. 
How it will come out and reach that aim, no one knows. 
The only thing I know is that the Union might be good for Europe in the short term, but in the long run it will end up in a disaster.
","I was watching a program on television the other day (which is very unusual actually, I am not very found of such) and I was lucky to see Monty Python. 
I was lucky because it is one of my favourite programs, but on the other hand I was very unlucky, or more correctly, I got very unlucky as I realized that my English comprehension was very poor, not very poor, but still quite bad.  
I started to count the years I have spent with my dear English books through my time at school, and I get it to ten years. 
It is a rather long time and still there is much to learn. 
Whereas I did not spend a longer period in an English speaking country I might find it hard to find the ""every-day-words"" that are so useful for the coherence in a language and in order to make it sound natural and relaxed to a native English speaking person. 
I have lived in Italy for three years and I started the other way around, which means I started to speak, and after I studied the language. 
I really do not know which of the two is the best way, but I cannot deny that making an experience in the country is very useful and a fast way of learning.  
As Swedish normally do, I point out my vulnerable spots. 
But I know that I am not shy and I don't mind making a fool of myself. 
In any language I have learnt I have always been very eager to try my wings.   
I found reading very interesting from different point of views, first because I am interested in literature and second because I want to acquire and increase my vocabulary, and I find reading an appropriate way to do that.   
I have lived abroad for five years, and even though I did not stay, as I previously mentioned, in an English speaking country, still I have had the opportunity to practice the language and hopefully improved my speaking skills. 
I master the language and the grammar, at least the basic grammar since I did not study English for a long time. 
I study Italian on C-level this semester and I find it helpful to compare and exchange differences in the languages and make comparative philology, sometimes it helps you and other times it overturns you. 
The word ""people"", for instance is considered as plural in English, while in Italian ""gente"" is singular, so, I have to pay attention to matters like that.   
I know it is a disadvantage not watching television that improves ones comprehension skills. 
It is positive that we do not dub the films, it is extremely good for improving your understanding and I think it is a great advantage that we have in Sweden and I have defended our system many times in Europe.  
I feel, though, that I would need a refreshment in grammar and the structure of the language. 
I have been working in Florence for three years and we were working mainly with American clients and that was a crises for me, because the Americans did not understand my British English, or let's say, they had difficulties in catching what I said, so, I sort of ""converted"" to American English during my time in Italy. 
When I decided to take the A-course in English I got confused because I did not know weather to speak American English or British English. 
Soon I found out that it was not of major importance but anyhow I decided to stick to my British English, the important thing, after all, is to be consistent.   
This course seems to be very well constructed and I have high expectations on myself. 
I want to improve my knowledge and skills in many ways, mainly the grammatical structure but also my writing and the way to express myself in a correct manner. 
Not only because I want to understand everything they say in Monty Python, but also for my future job-position where my English will be extremely helpful.
",True
" Lily - a woman dependent upon men and society  Nancy Walker claims that Edna in The Awakening "" is controlled by her own emotions, not by men or society"" (256) The character Lily in the novel The House of Mirth is almost the complete opposite of Edna. 
She is calculating and knows what she is doing, but at the same time she is dependent upon, and thereby controlled by, society and men. 
She knows what is expected of her and behaves according to that, using her eloquence and beauty to get what she wants, that is wealth and admiration. 
Lily is controlled by men and society for the following reasons: To begin with, Lily's upbringing has taught her to hate dinginess and crave wealth and also how to get what she wants, which are the features that will pave way for dependency. 
Secondly, since she has no fortune of her own she needs to ensnare a man whom she can marry in order to keep up her luxurious lifestyle, which will make her dependent upon, and thereby controlled by them. 
Thirdly, Lily is dependent upon society since it means everything to her. 
She needs the admiration of men and women in her presence in order to feel that she is someone. 	
To begin with, Lily is brought up in a world of luxury with a mother who hates dinginess and lives as if she is richer than she really is. 
She has ""been brought up in the faith that, whatever it cost, one must have a good cook, and be what Mrs. 
Bart called 'decently dressed'"" (Wharton 1993: 30). 
Lily needs expensive dresses and hats so she can show her beauty in society. 
She has the same opinion as her mother about keeping up appearances and applies this way of thinking for example to her choice of hotel where to stay for the winter period: ""The hotel being on the edge of a fashionable neighbourhood, the price of the few square feet she was to occupy was considerably in excess of her means; but she found a justification for her dislike of poorer quarters in the argument that, at this particular juncture, it was of the utmost importance to keep up a show of prosperity."" 
(Wharton 1993: p 246) When comparing Edna and Lily, they have been raised in almost the same way, but Edna, according to Nancy Walker ""is denying what she has been raised to believe"" (Walker: p 253). 
Lily does the opposite, she imbibes what her mother teaches her and makes those values into her own, Gerty once commented on her need of luxury in a conversation with Selden: ""You know how dependent she has always been on ease and luxury -how she has hated what was shabby and ugly and uncomfortable. 
She can't help it-she was brought up with those ideas, and has never been able to find her way out of them."" 
(Wharton 1993: 270-271) Lily's upbringing does not only give her a taste for refinement and wealth and make her scared of poverty and dinginess, but it also teaches her how to use her skills to get what she wants from men. 
Her mother has for example taught her how to charm her father: ""She leaned confidently toward her father: he seldom refused her anything, and Mrs Bart had taught her to plead with him when her own entreatises failed."" 
(Wharton 1993: 32) So, a craving for money and luxury is established already in Lily's childhood and is also nurtured through her life with rich people. 
As a child she also learns from her mother how she is to get what she wants, that is, by manipulating and snaring men. 
Through this lifestyle a 19th century woman will, if she doesn't inherit money, become dependent upon men and also the society which demands refinement and wealth. 	
Secondly, since Lily prefers a costly lifestyle she knows that she is dependent upon men in order to support herself, that is, she needs to marry a wealthy man. 
The fact that Lily is very calculative when she considers the persons whose wealth she might marry, shows how dependent she is of them. 
For example, when she sets her mind on ensnaring Mr Percy Gryce she advances very systematically. 
Lily knows that Mr Gryce's main interest is his Americana, she uses Selden to regain more knowledge of them and then she pretends to bump into Mr Gryce on the train and listens to his boring talk. 
She follows up this initial encounter at Bellomont and this is where we learn what she thinks of him and also how women of her class and time were thinking: ""She had been bored all the afternoon by Percy Gryce - the mere thought seemed to waken an echo of his droning voice - but she couldn't ignore him on the morrow, she must follow up her success, must submit to more boredom, must be ready with fresh compliances and adaptabilities, and all on the bare chance that he might ultimately decide to do her the honour of boring her for life"" (Wharton 1993: 25) Lily never considers marrying out of love, since only love cannot provide her with the necessary means to keep up her lifestyle. 
She is probably in love with Selden, but her emotions for him does not make her give up every thought of a rich husband. 
A few times her emotions have hindered her from reaching her goals, the best example is perhaps when Lily first talks with Selden and then takes a walk with him, instead of Mr Gryce, as she had promised to. 
Perhaps she throws away her chance to a rich marriage due to her interest in Selden and she comments upon it herself: ""While her friend reproached her for missing the opportunity to eclipse her rivals, she was once more battling with imagination with the mounting tide of indebtedness from which she had so nearly escaped. 
What wind of folly had driven her out again on those dark seas?"" 
(Wharton 1993: 77) That wind of folly was perhaps love, but she is far to calculative and understanding of her situation to follow her emotions. 
Instead she starts to think of new ways to escape poverty, namely by letting Mr Gus Trenor invest money for her. 
She cannot do this herself, both because she isn't familiar with financial matters and because women were not permitted to hhave an active part in business life, so she has to let a man do it for her. 
Lily is now forced to be nice and kind to a man who she does not like at all, but she is willing to do it because her desire for money is stronger than her reluctance for him, as is shown on page 85: ""Even the immediate one [demand that life makes] of letting Trenor, as they drove homeward, lean a little nearer and rest his hand reassuringly on hers, cost her only a momentary shiver of reluctance."" 
And in this moment, she is still calculating, as is shown a few lines further down: ""It was part of the game to make him feel that her appeal had been an uncalculated impulse, provoked by the liking he inspired [...]"" 
(Wharton 1993: 85) So, once more she has set her emotions aside and adapted to the situation, allowing herself to be controlled by a man in order to gain wealth. 
She behaves in the way that is expected of her, putting her own emotions aside and adapting to a new situation, but at the same time she is somewhat in controll, since all the things she does serves her own purposes. 	
Thirdly, Lily is dependent upon society since it means everything to her. 
The key into that circle in society where she wants to belong iss beauty. 
Since she has this feature ""these people whom she had ridiculed and yet envied were glad to make a place for her in the charmed circle about which all her desires revolved. 
They were not as brutal and self-engrossed as she had fancied- or rather, since it would no longer be necessary to flatter and humour them, that side of their nature became less conspicuous. 
(Wharton 1993: 50) Lily changes her mind about the persons in the rich world when she becomes a part of that world herself. 
This can also be seen a little further down on the same page: ""They were lords of the only world she cared for, and they were ready to join her to their ranks and let her lord it with them. 
Already she felt within her a stealing allegiance to their standards, an acceptance of their limitations, a disbelief in the things they did not believe in, a contemptuous pity for the people who were not able to live as they lived"" (Wharton 1993: 50) She adapts once more and behaves as a woman is supposed to behave. 
By letting this society become her life she becomes dependent upon them, because without them she has no life. 
Lily also yearns for the admiration of men and women in her presence in order to feel that she is someone. 
She knows that a women in her position will be judged by her beauty, and since she knows that she is very attractive she craves for admiration from everybody. 
Lily ""cared less for the quality of the admiration received than for its quantity"" (Wharton 1993: 136) She wants to be the centre of her world, which can be seen on page 60: ""All her plans for the day had been built on the assumption that it was to see her [italics mine] that Selden had come to Bellomont."" 
An example that shows how dependent Lily is of society is her behaviour when she has been excluded from it and strives to regain her lost place among those she knows how to interact with. 
Lily cannot start a new life since her upbringing has taught her to crave wealth and hate dinginess, and she cannot live without the admiring looks from those ""that matter"" in society. 
The only way of life that fulfils and where she knows how to act is the one that she is no longer part of. 
In an attempt to recover her lost position in society she wants to marry Mr Rosedale, but finds that he is no longer interested of marrying her, since she no longer has a role in the society he wishes to be part of. 
Lily finds that she cannot go back to her old lifestyle in any way, so she ends her life, consciously or not, in a suitable, lady-like way, by committing suicide when the problems grew to heavy for hear to bear. 
This shows very clearly how dependent she is upon society, since she can not go on living and not being a part of the rich society.  	
In conclusion, Lily's upbringing is what has caused her appetite for wealth and fame - she has learned to hate dinginess and strive for money and a polished lifestyle. 
She has been provided with the right tool to succeed in the society she wants to be a part of, namely her beauty and she is well aware of how people in her presence are affected by it and she uses it in a very calculative manner in order to try to get what she wants, that is money and admiration. 
This hollow life has made her dependent upon society as a mean by which she can define herself and she has also become dependent upon men, since the only way for her to gain wealth is by marrying a rich man. 
Lily does not consider marrying for love, marriage seems to be only a tool to obtain wealth, a tool to serve her purposes. 
She can put up with being bored the rest of her life if she has enough glamour and money. 
Lily's dependence of society can also be seen in her behaviour when she has been excluded from it- as an outcast she does not know how to live, and instead of trying to cope with her new life she tries to regain her lost place in society. 
Her values are those of a 19th century woman, her behaviour in order to achieve her goals are so too and she adapts in order to fit into the society everyone longs to be a part of. 
The bottom line is that Lily craves for wealth, she also needs money to be able to cling to society and in order to get that she considers marrying for money - the only way she knows to get wealthy. 
Lily is indeed a woman of her time.  
Walker, Nancy: Feminist or Naturalist? 
In: The Awakening by Chopin, Kate,1994: 2nd ed. 		
Norton & Company Inc. 
Wharton, Edith, 1993:The House of Mirth Penguin Books Ltd
"," Let homosexual couples adopt children!  
In the Dagens Nyheter 99-09-27 there was an article that argued against homosexual couples having the right to adopt children. 
The arguments that were used concentrated on what was best for the child that was to be adopted, a viewpoint I completely agree with, but I found their arguments to be invalid. 
Firstly, that children shouldn't be adopted since they will have difficulties in their lives, if adopted by homosexual parents. 
Secondly, that legitimate adoptions to Sweden might decrease since the majority of the biological mothers or representatives for orphans don't want to give their child up for adoption to homosexual couples. 
Thirdly that there should be no more experimenting with the lives of children that are adopted. 
These arguments might seem valid when out of the context, but I will argue against this article in order to show that homosexual couples are not less suitable to be parents than heterosexual couples are. 	
To begin with, it is argued that it is not right to let homosexual couples adopt children, since these children would go through hard times. 
It is not specified in the article what kind of problems and obstacles these children would encounter, but I believe that this argument concerns problems in society, such as mobbing or other kind of negative responses from society regarding the configuration of the family of the child. 
Nevertheless, every child can face hard times and problems in every kind of family, it doesn't have to be a family where the parents are homosexual. 
Joakim Anrell writes in the Internet magazine that it is an exaggeration to blame all the problems in a family on the fact that the parents are homosexual. 
He also points out that there is nothing that indicates that problems, when there are some, are caused by the child's parents being homosexual and not by some other factor. 
Furthermore, if it is in the child's best interest that society shouldn't put it in a situation where it can go through hard times how can then the adoption of coloured children be justified? 
They too can go through hard times and even be harassed, since there are racist opinions in Sweden today. 
Since it is clear that it is not only children that live with homosexual parents that can go through hard times, how can it then be used as an argument against adoption by homosexual parents? 	
The second argument concerns what might happen if homosexual couples would be allowed to adopt children. 
It is argued that the chances of legitimate international adoptions to Sweden might decrease, since homosexual couples are not accepted as parents by the countries that give up children for adoption and the majority of the mothers or representatives for orphans don't want to give a child up for adoption by homosexual couples. 
It is important to keep up good relations with other countries, but it is equally important not to discriminate a minority that can and want's to help take care of the less fortunate children of the world. 
A solution to this problem, to both prevent a possible decrease in international adoptions and see too the best of the children by providing them with a good home and a loving family, could perhaps be accomplished by allowing homosexual couples a limited right to adopt children. 
This could be done in such a way that the persons that give up a child for adoption may decide whether they want the child to be adopted by hetero- or homosexual parents. 
The number of children given up for adoption by homosexual couples would of course be limited, but this way a few more children could get a good home. 
Perhaps the limitation wont prevent the countries from stopping adoptions to Sweden, but it would be an acceptable compromise, at least for the time being. 
This limitation could later be removed when society has accepted families that consist of homosexual parents. 	
The third and final argument states that there should be no more experimenting with the lives of the children that are adopted. 
Since the argument isn't further developed it is hard to see what is meant by it. 
I assume that giving a child homosexual parents is what in this case is meant by experimenting. 
In a motion to the Swedish Parliament Andreas Carlgren writes that in a study conducted by the university of Gothenburg concerning children growing up with homosexual parents concluded that it is not the configuration of the family which affects the child most, instead it is how the children are raised and what kind of support they receive in society.
This argument also suggests that it has been accepted to experiment with heterosexual parents - These have all been different individuals who have been investigated thoroughly before being allowed to adopt a child. 
There is no way of knowing what happened to those heterosexual families after a few years, perhaps they couldn't take care of the child properly or perhaps they became abusive, still the child and the parents were given a chance. 
Homosexuals are not even allowed to apply for adoption and be examined and I believe that that right should apply to everyone. 
Only this way it is possible to find the best possible parents to a child.  	
In conclusion, homosexual couples should be allowed to adopt children but that right should perhaps be limited in the beginning. 
Every child in every kind of family might go through hard times and this argument can therefore not be used against homosexual couples. 
Decreasing chances to adopt children also for heterosexuals could be the result if homosexual couples would be allowed to adopt children. 
That is a risk society should be willing to take. 
There are mothers that agree to their child being adopted by homosexuals and letting these children live with to people of the same sex wouldn't be to experiment with their lives. 
A study made by the university of Gothenburg shows that the constellation of the family is less important than how the child is raised and how it is supported by society. 
The right to apply for adoption and be examined should apply to everyone. 
If the homosexual couple is denied an adoption because their financial situation isn't satisfactory, it would be acceptable. 
If they are denied an adoption because their home doesn't look suitable for a child to live in, that too would be acceptable. 
It would not be acceptable to deny them the chance of adopting a child simply because they are homosexual. 
In an article in the Dagens Nyheter 99-11-27, it was argued why homosexual couples mustn't be allowed to adopt children. 
What is best for the child is what is most important, it is also important for the child to know later in life that the adoption was carried out in an proper way. 
International adoptions to Sweden might stop if a law was introduced, granting homosexual couples the right to adopt children, since many countries don't want to give children up for adoption by homosexuals. 
The right for homosexual couples to adopt children internationally would have to be preceeded by working for the homosexuals' rights in other parts of the world.   
",True
" Use your brain use a helmet  A bicycle is a cheap and excellent means of transport that takes you anywhere you like. 
It is not harmful to the environment as cars are and it is good for your health and it is an economical advantage to use as many people have discover over the years when prices on petrol is increasing. 
There is one thing though that not many of the cyclists have discovered, the cycle-helmet. 
It is an excellent protection and it is a cheap life insurance in case of an accent. 
The cycle-helmet is something all cyclists should wear, not just our little ones. 
When our little ones is about to learn cycling we teach them to wear a cycle-helmet as a protection in case of an accident on the staggering ride. 
That is what every protecting parent do to their children. 
But the children get older and they start to protest against wearing the cycle-helmet. 
Maybe it is just because that their friends do not wear one or, even worse, their parents do not. 
The question is why don't the parents wear a helmet themselves? 
Maybe it is because they claims that they know how to rid a bicycle and therefor will not be involved in an accident, or, as I have heard objections as, that a cycle-helmet will ruin their hairstyle. 
I admit that the hairstyle will be ruined by wearing a helmet. 
And most of the grown-ups know how to ride a cycle. 
But when do one know there should be an accident? 
And what is a ruined hairstyle in comparison with a destroyed life by an accident A cycle-helmet is a protection, which all cyclists ought to wear. 
We know that children not always do as they are told, they usually do as you do, whether you like it or not. 
So the best way to make them wear a cycle-helmet is to wear one yourself, despite of a ruined hairstyle.  
In spite of the fact that the bicycle is an excellent means of transport the cyclist is the only road-user that is totally unprotected in traffic. 
The driver is safe in his or her car, which have all the latest safety equipment as safety belt and airbags. 
The cyclist's only protection is a cycle-helmet. 
The National Road Safety Office has through the years had information campaign to pursued people wear a cycle-helmet. 
There have been film commercials and advertising bill all over the country about this matter We have had many chances to learn by this information that the head is the most fragile part of one's body and one single knock on the head can change ones life forever. 
A skull injury can mean everything from personality change to disturbance of balance, speech disorders or the worse, the death. 
But there are still a large numbers of people who are not wearing a helmet. 
Some of them are of the opinion that they look silly wearing one. 
Maybe it is not the prettiest headgear but it serves its purpose. 
If the adults set up a good example, to all children and start to wear a cycle-helmet in traffic it will turn out to be a self-evident thing to wear. 
Like it is with the safety belt, everyone use it now without any objections. 
Statistic shows that most of the cyclists that are injured in traffic suffers from skull injuries and if they had wear a cycle-helmet the injuries wouldn't had been that seriously.  
Why people does not wear a helmet after the information campaigns that have been run by the National Road Safety Office through the years are a mystery to me. 
It is time to ignore that you may lock silly in a cycle-helmet and that the hairstyle will be ruined as long as it may save your life. 
It is your only protection in traffic. 
And the unnecessary high cost of medical treatment could be spent on more important matters.
","y relationship to English has generally been about talking and listening. 
It was when I first came to read at KOMVUX I actually first started to do the writhing and reading. 
At compulsory school it was just boring, hard work and dull teachers, who actually made the lessons quit boring. 
Although we had stand-in teachers from time to time, they made the lessons more interesting. 
It was quite fun at school at those occasions. 
When I left the Compulsory school I guess I knew that much English I could make me understood if ever necessary. 
I didn't go to Upper secondary school after Compulsory school; I started to work instead. 
My English was in a deep sleep through the years until I decided to start working in the Swedish merchant navy. 
It was the first time I actually had the opportunity to practice my school English. 
I improved my English during the years at sea, but only when it comes to talking and listening. 
I can't say that my vocabulary very big. 
I guess I stick to the words I'm familiar with. 
But don't we all  Do that from time to time. 
Hopefully we don't make to many mistakes then.  
All through the years at sea I did never reflected about that I could read an English book to improve my English. 
I don't think we even had any English books on board. 
Well if we did I didn't look for them. 
After spending seven years at sea I decided to change career and went to a Folk high school to get an Upper secondary school competence. 
During my year at the Folk high school I had English at the schedule. 
As I can remember it we didn't do much reading or writing. 
It was more off talking and listening comprehension.  
This year I learned one thing, as I never reflected over before, the different between British English and American English. 
It was mainly because we first had an American teacher who taught us the American way of speaking. 
The next semester we got a Swedish teacher who preferred the B.E. 
He had a hard time to teach us the British pronunciation. 
At this very day I'm rather convinced that I still have a mix of both B.E and A.E.  
After my year at the Folk high school the life went on ashore. 
One day I felt it was time to do something about my situation as an unemployed and I went to KOMVUX to, ones again, get an Upper secondary school competence. 
The other one from the Folk high school was too old. 
At KOMVUX, for the first time, I got in touch with the written word in book form. 
Well that's not really true, I have had tried to read a novel before but I gave it up before finishing it. 
This time I had to finish it and review it to the class. 
From the beginning it was hard work but I learned to enjoy it, and I still do. 
But I don't read that much English literature I must admit. 
During the English course at KOMVUX we had to hand in essays as well. 
From a start I had no bigger problems with that but at the B-level I had a teacher who wanted us to hand in essay after essay about different subjects and so I did. 
My essays was always marked whit red all over, but I never got any explanation about all the mistakes I did, so I could chance them It went from enjoy writing to something I disliked. 
After KOMVUX I haven't been writing one word until this very moment. 
And I still have the problem when it comes to writing English as you obvious can see And I'm still unsecured when it comes to writing, thanks to my teacher at B-level at KOMVUX Now when I look back at my evaluation about my English all through the years I realise I could have improved my English by reading and writing more than I have done, but I didn't. 
I actually didn't know I was going to become a teacher one year ago, but now I'm here and I haven't got cold feet yet.
",True
" Julius Caesar Close reading, Act III.ii  After Caesars' murder Antony comes to the scene of the crime and faces the conspirators. 
Antony manages to convince them that he trust their motives for killing Caesar. 
Antony has been given permission to speak to the crowd on the premise that he is not to blame the conspirators, but only speak well of Caesar. 
After the conspirators disperse Antonys' vows to revenge Caesars' death. 
Brutus speaks to the crowd just after Caeser murder and the mob understands that Caeser died because he was ambitious. 
Antony comes out to speak to the mob they are hostile but on Brutus's request they allow him to speak.  
At this point we know only of Antony's love of music, and loyalty towards Caesar. 
Shakespeare takes this opportunity to demonstrate that Brutus has severely underestimated Antony. 
In the beginning of Antonys' speech he says: Come I to speak in Caesar's funeral. 
He was my friend, faithful and just to me; But Brutus says he was ambitious, And Brutus is an honourable man. 
(III.ii 85-88)   The irony can be heard in this first passage. 
We know that Antony does not mean what he says and you begin to see his cleverness. 
We begin to hear which path he will take. 
Not a direct one but one of simple deduction. 
He is not going to straight out tell them that Brutus was wrong but will explain why Caesar was not ambitious. 
Antony takes all of Brutus claims of why he killed Caesar and systematically eliminates them. 	 
Antony says in Act III, scene ii line101 ""I come not to disprove what Brutus spoke"", but that is just what he comes to do to refute Brutus, this reveals the other side of Antony. 
How with his passion and gift for words he will crush Brutus who although noble has done the worst thing of all in Antonys' eyes, the betrayal of a friend, expressing this in the following lines:  	For when the noble Caesar saw him stab, 	Ingratitude, more strong than traitors' arms, 	Quite vanquished him: then burst his mighty heart; (III.ii 185-188)  These words are Antonys' they come from him not Caesar. 
Thus leading me to believe that Antony must have known how Caesar would have felt being betrayed by a friend.  
At this point in the passage Antony has managed to persuade the mob that Caeser was not ambitious. 
We know this when the crowds yell out ""O traitors! 
This is not just a man that has lost a friend this is also a man with ulterior motives. 
Antony reveals not only his talent for persuasion but also his talent to lead. 
He is a skillful leader, he does not directly tell them how to react, but instead he insinuates by expressing what he would do in their situation:   Good friend, sweet friend, let me not stir you up To such a sudden flood of mutiny. 
(III.ii, 211-212)  In order to be a skillful leader you have to be a skillful orator and in this speech Antony with his rhetorical skills demonstrates his ability to get the mobs empathy. 
He appeals to their emotional side, he knows that the mob is stupid so he thinks for them as well. 
At the same time putting thoughts into their minds such as in Act III scene ii line 225; ""I tell you that which you yourselves do know"". 
But just before this line he tells them:   	For I have neither wit, nor words, nor worth, 	Action, nor utterance, nor the power of speech 	To stir men's blood; I only speak right on. 
(III.ii, 222-224)  It is precisely all these qualities that Antony does possess that allow him to take control of the crowd in a way that Brutus never could. 
Antony not only convinces the crowd of Caesars' innocence, moreover has a plan of action after the initial conquest of the mob. 
Furthermore I do not think he would have been able to get Brutus to allow him to speak if he did not have all these qualities. 	
It is the final show of his role as a leader that demonstrates why he was able to take power from Brutus. 
Antony realizes he has gained control but he doesn't stop there he has a plan. 
Unlike Brutus he takes this opportunity that has presented itself and uses it to his advantage. 
Once he has taken control of the mob he says:  	Why, friends, you go to do you know not what. 	
Wherein hath Caesar thus deserved your loves? 	
Alas, you know not! 
I must tell you then: 	You have forgot the will I told you of. 
(III.ii, 236-239)  This maneuver is skillful on Antonys' part in that he tells them what to do since they do not know what to do. 
Then he uses his wit to ask the Crowd what it was that Caesar did to deserve their love. 
He compliments the mob with flattery by pretending that they have always been loyal to Caesar. 
Allowing the mob to forget their rashness in their loyalty towards Brutus. 
Then not to reveal his own selfish motives for wanting mutiny he reminds them of the will. 
Making his altruism all the more believable. 	 
When the mob has gone to burn the conspirators' houses Antony finally speaks openly:  	Now let it work. 
Mischief, thou art afoot, 	Take thou what course thou wilt. 
(III.ii, 261-262)  His motives are revealed explicitly, and we know that here is a man that not only has the power of conviction but the means to pull it off.  	
Antonys' speech is essential to the play in that it reveals Brutus' lack of leadership as well as the reality of Caesars' death. 
Antony points out what Brutus seems to forget. 
That by killing Caesar he would not only save Rome but he would be a traitor. 
Another thing that Brutus forgot is the way in which he and the conspirators killed Caesar. 
Brutus allows Antony to speak; thus allowing Antony to use Caesars' blood trenched body to reveal the harsh and cruel way in which they murdered him. 
Shakespeare shows us Antony and at the same time reveals the over-idealistic world Brutus lived in.
"," Europe's growing trend  70 police storm techno club - 700 pills seized.1 Ecstasy culture approaches its 10th summer.2 ""Mad for it,"" headlines small and large over Europe's major cities all writing about ecstasy, Europe's latest drug problem. 
The fact is that the UN has marked this drug as a Global Trend, it's not just in Europe it's worldwide. 
Where did it come from and how did it get here?  
It started in Californian as a treatment for Psychoanalysis, it allowed the patient to open up and share their intermost feelings and talk about their childhood easier. 
It then reached into underground sub-culture and soon after became illegal. 
The sub-culture popularly referred to as Rave, can be compared to sub-cultures of the sixties and seventies, such as flower children and hippies. 
Rave is basically a dance party with loud techno and house type music. 
Odd lighting effects people dancing everywhere, and the use of synthetic drugs, mainly ecstasy are often present. 
Ecstasy started being used by ravers almost from the start of the rave, which began in the early eighties. 
It spread from the Chicago nightlife and New York black-gay scene to Europe under a very short period. 
There are many reasons why ecstasy has attracted such a large audience with its, social acceptance, accessibility and inexpensive production cost it has become the second most used drug in the European Union. 
Over 30 million users worldwide (4% of the world population), according to the UNWDP (e.g. 
United Nations General Assembly on the World Drug Problem). 
Lets look at a few of the causes for the increase of ecstasy.  
One cause is the social acceptance of the drug. 
Its side effects are not entirely known. 
People have regarded ecstasy as a relatively safe drug, but this is not the entire truth. 
There have been a number of deaths many occurring at clubs or raves where dehydration and over heating have been a major factor. 
The reason for this is that when on ecstasy one is given an euphoric feeling, which inhibits the body's signals, which in a normal situation would warn the person that they are thirsty and tired. 
In the case of the raver who is on ecstasy he/she keeps on dancing disregarding any warning signs. 
Drug abuse is often used by youths trying to cope with the problems of unemployment, neglect, violence and sexual abuse. 
This is not the case with ecstasy; it became popular by youths that were socially integrated, youths, whose parents would appear to be more tolerant towards the use of drugs. 
For many, ecstasy is perfect, it lasts a few hours, it cannot be traced once worn off and the price is right.  
Ecstasy and other synthetic drugs can be easily synthesized in makeshift labs, called kitchens and sold at relatively cheap prices. 
The easy production of the drug has allowed the drug pushers a cheaper drug to distribute with relatively little risk of being caught. 
Production procedures are spread via Internet along with information on how to obtain the raw materials and equipment for synthesis of ecstasy. 
One way to stop the outflow of synthetic drugs is to try and ban the sale of the chemicals, which are needed to produce them. 
However, with the lucrative business the pushers use other chemicals and fillers are used, that in the end make for a drug that can be more dangerous because it may have ingredients that are poisonous to the system. 
Resulting in ""impure"" dosages that can cause allergic reactions, psychosis, or death. 
Since the laboratories used to make Ecstasy can be anything from makeshift kitchens to sophisticated labs, production is increasing, allowing for easy accessibility.   
Accessibility has been one of the reasons for drugs spreading quickly, this holds true for ecstasy as well. 
The chemicals used in ecstasy are inexpensive and globally accessible. 
Synthetic drugs, such as ecstasy can be synthesized close to the customers therefore staying out of custom or border control. 
Moreover, today's surveillance technology does not allow sensitive detection of these drugs. 
For instance, dogs cannot trace artificially synthesized drugs such as ecstasy. 
Because of its potency, a small quantity is all that is needed to supply over a thousand trips, making it more difficult to trace by customs. 
The more accessible a drug is the more likely of it spreading to a larger fraction of the population.  
As long as the accessibility, acceptability, and low purchase price of ecstasy stays strong, there will only be a rise in the demand, thus increasing deaths and unknown side effects for our youth. 
This weekend drug will continue spreading on the dance floors unless something is done to make people aware of the dangers. 
Ignorance about the side effects of this drug should not make it more acceptable; nevertheless this is the case. 
Ignorance has become bliss. 
You get what you pay for and that is exactly the case, an unknown drug, cheaply produced with synthetic chemicals bought at a cheap price for the soul purpose of making profit.  
1 Hamburger Abendblatt (Germany) 2 The Guardian (UK), Collin
",True
" Having two mums or two dads must be better than growing up in an orphanage or maybe not growing up at all!  
On TV debates you often hear people who think that homosexuals aren't suited to adopt children say things like: 'A child deserves to grow up with both a mother and a father'. 
And of course that's something we all agree with, but that just isn't possible even if it is what we all want for our children. 
So to those with that argument I'd like to ask a question which I think is an important question to think about: Is it better to have spent your entire childhood in an orphanage rather than to come to a family with two mothers or fathers? 
To me the answer to this question is easy, no it isn't and here's why:  When you think about all the children around the world living in orphanages that can't even provide the most essential medications for their children when they get sick, you feel uncomfortable, because some of them even die before they reach their teens. 
All over the world there's orphanages with few means to take care of children in the way we all think that they deserve to be taken care of. 
But still, a homosexual couple in Sweden can't give one of them a better life and a family. 
There are so many children that won't have a family at all because of that. 
The number of children without parents around the world is enormous, adoptions might not make the problem go away, but if we allowed homosexual couples to adopt like other couples these numbers would at least decline. 
Even if it meant that only a small number of children got better conditions to live in, that should be reason enough to make us consider giving homosexuals the chance to be adoptive parents.  
Those against homosexual couples adopting says that children should have the right to grow up with both a mum and a dad. 
However the problem with that opinion is that children already live in Sweden without both a mum and a dad. 
Just look at the divorce rates, the number of single mums in this country is increasing every year. 
So I think that a child in a family with homosexual parents can have the same chances in life as a child who lives with just their mum or dad. 
People living in what's called 'nuclear families' are becoming unusual. 
That is a fact, so why does it have to be such a big deal that adopted children doesn't have that kind of families either?  
The importance of having both male and female role models while growing up is as often discussed as having both a mum and a dad, and the issues are of course linked together. 
I can see why a boy who's only male role models come from action series on TV might be a big problem. 
Therefore when it comes to a child to homosexual parents and the lack of role models I simply can't see that as a bigger issue than if it has to do with a boy living alone with just his heterosexual mother. 
Actually I suspect that a homosexual couple planning to adopt a child would be better prepared for this problem than a newly divorced mother to an eleven year old son. 
If you know that your child will have two parents with the same sex you're likely to look to other family members for support. 
You might for example have a great grandfather or brother who will be a perfect role model.   
You can have endless discussions about issues like this one. 
The problem is that while I am arguing with someone who might be against the whole idea of homosexuals taking care of children just because of his or hers own prejudice, children die because they don't have anyone to take care of them. 
Can it possibly be that hard to find a way to give children from orphanages good homes with loving parents, whether there are a mum and a dad, or two mums or two dads in the picture? 
Obviously it's a problem, but my point is that it shouldn't have to be this hard to take care of children who just want to have a family, any family.
"," English, My English!  
In third grade, I had my first contact with an English school book. 
I remember looking at a few words in the first chapter and quietly reading them to myself: ""Car, cat, Steve, ball, Susan"". 
I was thrilled - this was English? 
This was going to be a piece of cake... 	
A couple of terms later I had become somewhat wiser - I had realized that every time I was even close to thinking that I was in control of the language, the teacher would reveal yet another spelling rule, a linguistic term, or even a new word that would bring me back to square one again. 	
Today, I have moved a number of squares ahead, though. 
On TV I can hear English every day, I've read a number of English books and I've written some essays. 
I've been abroad - and there been forced to speak English in order to make myself understood. 
I'm getting more confident all the time. 
Still I know I have a lot to learn - for instance when it comes to speaking.  
Naturally, the only way to really learn how to speak a language - any language - fluently, is to actually speak it as often as you can. 
Of course, you'll have to learn a few grammatical rules first, but practice is still of great importance. 
I am a living proof of that: The last time I studied English was in Upper Secondary School, in 1990. 
Since then, I have spoken English only sporadically, a fact that I very much notice today. 
For instance in ""Samholla/Tal""-class, I feel ""rusty"" and I'm having problems remembering some words I know I have known before. 
But I hope and think it will all come back to me after a few months of practicing, and I am convinced that my vocabulary gradually will improve.  
In my opinion, listening to English is the ""easiest"" part of learning English. 
As I briefly mentioned in the introduction, television plays a main role in many people's everyday lives, as it does in mine. 
And as a major part of all TV-shows, and all popular culture for that matter, is American or British, listening to English has become an almost natural part of my life. 
The more I hear English, the more I get accustomed to it. 	
One drawback to ""learning"" English from television, is that that kind of language often consists of slang; you have to pay attention to be able to tell correct English from incorrect. 
However, it's clear that my knowledge of English is greater now than it would have been without the help of television, cinema, music, computers, etc. 
And to some extent I also have technology to thank for part of my English reading skill.  
I enjoy reading. 
The first novel I read in English was Agatha Christie's ""Endless Night"". 
Though I'm sure I didn't appreciate every single nuance of it, I enjoyed reading it. 
At first I felt a bit uncomfortable, having to look up unfamiliar words in a dictionary every now and then. 
But after a while I didn't bother, since I noticed that I didn't have to understand every single word to grasp the story. 
Since ""Endless Night"" I've read quite a few books in English, and since there are several great pieces of literature that never even get translated into Swedish, I'm glad I struggled my way through Agatha Christie's, at first seemingly endless, mystery. 	
Yes, and of course, thanks to technology in general, and the Internet in particular, reading in English on a daily basis, has become as common as hearing English on TV every day. 
And practice is, as I earlier stressed, of greatest importance. 
That, of course, applies to writing aswell, otherwise I guess this assignment would be unnecessary. 
Which takes us to the last part, namely writing.  	
I've been working as a journalist for a few years, doing quite a bit of writing - in Swedish, that is. 
I don't know if my vocational experience is going to be of any use now, as I study English. 
I know I can write, but I don't know if I can do it in English. 
Will I mix the two languages up ""in the heat of the moment""? 
That remains to be seen. 
Still, as I sit in the comfort of my own home, writing, I can for instance look up words in the dictionary, or I can make changes in my text after a few hours. 
And that's a luxury I can't afford when speaking English. 
So, in a way, writing is easier.  
I've always regarded myself as being fairly good at the English language, at least when it comes to listening, reading and maybe even writing. 
But the spoken part of the language requires a lot more practice than I've had so far. 
I hope that after this term I will have broadened my linguistic skills to including all four above mentioned parts. 
And not just simply because I want to pass the course, but because I'd love to one day really master the language.
",False
" It is all about finding a good balance  I'm not one of those freaks, neither one of those who think that it is totally unnecessary to have one. 
I guess I'm quite normal since I've got one and I spend everything from 0-3 hours a day in front of it. 
I think I could live without it but I wouldn't like to try! 
What I'm talking about is something that in a way has changed our lifestyle. 
It's an advanced technical invention that lots of us take for granted even though we haven't had it in our homes for more than about 40 years. 
What I am talking about is of course the TV, subject for eternal debates as it seems. 
Where is television culture taking us and is it good or bad? 
are questions that divide people in all countries where television is an influential power in society. 
I am probably somewhere between the two extremities in my point of view. 
I don't think that it has to be all or nothing because there is not just one good and one bad side. 
There is something in the middle that shows that there are both good and bad things about TV. 
That is what I will try to point out in this essay. 
I think it is all about finding a good balance.  	
My grandparents never have supper between 5 and 6 PM. 
They either have it before or after and you may wonder why. 
The answer is simple: my grandpa is a big fan of Sunset Beach and this is the time when it is broadcast. 
Is this idiotic or is it normal? 
Well, considering that my grandfather is almost 80 years old and doesn't have so many daily habits anymore, I gladly let him keep this one even though it is a quite stupid one and far from all those he have had earlier in his life. 
Even children have their special, important time in front of the TV. 
Even though many of them haven't learnt to tell the time yet, they know that Bolibompa starts at 6.15 PM. 
These are two very good examples of the enormous role that television plays in society today and how important it is for people in all ages.  
Television has got something that attracts a big number of people and there are actually lots of good things about many of the programs and shows that we watch. 
Television, for example, is and was from the beginning one of the most important way to spread news and information that concern us all. 
It goes quickly and it gives us a better picture of what has happened than any other media. 
It also gives us access to events where we cannot all be present. 
I'm thinking especially of sport events. 
What would the opening of the Olympic Games be if we couldn't see the fire being lit? 
And imagine when people saw Armstrong taking his first step on the moon... 
Don't we feel more participating when we watch something than when we can only listen to it? 
I think so. 
But lots of programs are good even though we are not participating in the same way. 
Many shows has the purpose of educating both children and adults, and they do it really good. 
There are lots of people who are not very fund of reading but who can get knowledge from watching TV and who get access to world literature thanks to the filmversion of many novels. 
I am not, of course, saying that it is the same thing to read a novel as it is to see the film, but at least it is better than nothing. 
Also, all programs want to give the newest and most interesting information and this actually gives that type of programs high quality. 
I think you can actually learn a lot from watching debate, culture, and nature programs. 
The bad things about television is that it in many cases makes us passive since we seldom have to think by ourselves when we watch a show. 
TV demands much less of its watchers than a book does of its readers. 
It is also easier, I think, to remain in reality when you read a book than when you watch a film or a TV show. 
I guess all young girls have sometimes dreamt of being one of the rich, pretty girls in the luxurious Beverly Hills. 
This, together with violence, is the biggest problems with TV today. 
We have to be aware of the fact that especially young people are very easily affected by television so maybe we have to be more careful with showing too much soaps where life is easy and perfect if you have only got some money. 
Some shows definitely need to come closer to reality. 
But if TV is going to stop being just good or just bad I think we have to learn to watch it the right way. 
We have to watch what is worth watching and to make TV part of our lives, not the only existing thing. 
As I mentioned earlier, this is a subject that has so many angles and that can be discussed over and over again since there are constantly new debates where you have to take stand and new shows to discuss. 
I've probably missed lots of good shows while writing this essay. 
Fortunately, I have got a video!
"," Old fashioned or the hottest trend?  
What was in the past something so natural for young people as wearing jeans is nowadays, wearing school uniforms is today often looked upon as something boring, old fashioned and something that deprives a child much of his or her identity. 
I disagree and think that school uniforms could serve as an effective weapon against problems related to increasingly differences in children's culture, background and social status. 
I think that there are so many good arguments for making school uniforms compulsory and I'm surprised that so few schools in Sweden today consider wearing school uniforms as an important step towards less bullying and more equality. 
I can't count the mornings during my years in school that I was standing in front of my wardrobe searching for something nice to wear. 
And none of these days were any special, except for when photographs were taken. 
All the other days were just ordinary school days. 
And who doesn't remember worrying about not wearing the same type of clothes as everybody else, about being too different from all the others. 
This is, I think, something that lots of children carry with them from their first year in school till they graduate. 
And that is something we have to change. ore and more Swedish schools today experience increasingly bullying often when cultural diversity grows. 
There is obviously a need among children of being a group, not just mentally but even more important, in appearance. 
And what would suit better, in a world where fashion is as important as it is in society today and when the fashion trade direct more and more advertisement towards younger and younger people, than start wearing uniforms in school. 
I think this would make fashion more of a personal interest, something you as an individual could choose if you want to support or not and that would change the situation in school.  
Because someone wearing old clothes, bought five years ago and that two or three older brothers or sisters have already worn for a couple of years, is often an easy victim for bullies. 
And a child being bullied for a thing like this is something that we should really make an effort to stop. 
And why not doing it in such a simple way as to introduce school uniforms. 
We live in a multi- cultural society where conflicts not seldom arise because of differences in manners and customs and but it's still our will to create an harmonious unity for children in schools and during their social activities. 
We want all to have the possibility of keeping their own traditions and culture but there is also a fight for equality, for all being the same and for all having the same possibilities. 
School uniforms would much correspond to these aims and would make it easier, especially for the most vulnerable in society. 
Unfortunately, there are still huge differences in economic status among Swedish families and this is of course followed by big differences for children in the same class. 
A single child with well- paid parents has no problems in always following the hottest trend and always having the right newest clothes and things. 
The situation for another child in the same class with three brothers and sisters and with parents earning just under the average income is of course totally different. 
This, the economic aspect, is another important one of introducing school uniforms. 
Not only would children be in need of fewer sets of clothes since there would be no difference in appearance (with ordinary clothes, both children and parents feel that the child can't wear the same clothes all the time), but it would also make it easier for a child to wear old clothes that doesn't fit an older brother or sister anymore since the style hasn't changed.   	
People against school uniforms say that the uniforms make children lose their identity and that introducing school uniforms would be a bad way of trying to control things. 
But young children's identities are reflected much more in their behaviour and in what they say. 
Contrary to make less identity, I think that children would feel it assuring, knowing that they've all got the same clothes not depending on if they are rich or poor, black or white or if they come from two totally different countries and cultures.
",True
" On the verge of a crisis.  
Is it high time to raise the teachers' salaries? 
This is a statement that has been discussed in many parts of the country. 
It is a topic that is frequently debated on the news and in various TV and radio programs. 
The most frequent arguments for the raising of the salaries are: to improve the teaching profession's standing in society, to motivate the teachers and to increase the percentage of male teachers. 
On the other hand, there are counterarguments such as the long holidays, the short workdays and the spending of money on other areas of school than on teachers have been heard.  
By raising the teachers' salaries the profession would first of all improve its current standing. 
To know about your future economical situation is of great importance for young people who have not yet decided their future careers. 
This knowledge would attract more students to the teacher training and also to actually finish their degree. 
Many students do not graduate at present, due to lack of belief in their future as a teacher. 
If we manage to solve the present problem with too few actual teachers in school, this would help us to keep up the standard of Swedish education. 
The low wages of Swedish teachers make many of them leave their jobs to be replaced by young substitutes. 
Many of these do not have a degree and are often not competent enough to teach certain subjects. 
In the long run this has the effect on the pupils that they are not being taught enough to be able to cope with society, further education and future careers. 
To motivate the teachers to stay, they must know that they will get credit for all the hard work. 
Knowing this, they will give us enthusiastic teachers that in turn will generate with the pupils' improved skills and grades.  
Female staff dominates the Swedish school at present. 
The profession seems to have taken a different turn, being more of a caring kind. 
Children need caring, but they also need discipline and most of all they need role models for their future life. 
This is because of their tendency to not do what they are told by adults, but instead imitating them in their behaviour. 
If the teachers' wages are raised, it will attract more men to school. 
This is essential since all children need role models, both boys and girls.  
When it comes to the counterarguments, there is the myth of too long holidays. 
Usually people in Sweden have five weeks of vacation per year, while teachers have not only summer holidays of ten weeks but also Christmas, Easter, autumn- and spring-break. 
Considering the length of their vacations, the teachers should be satisfied with the fairly low wages. 
A second argument is that teachers in most cases spend a fairly low number of hours at work. 
Besides, one could argue that the teachers' profession cannot be that strenuous, considering that they work with children. 
Compared to other regular workers in society the teachers' wages are not extremely low.  
All the money that would be spent on the teachers could be of better use, for example to buy new and more current books and to improve the environment in the school.   
The Swedish school system has been very well functioning for a long time. 
To be able to maintain this reputation, something must be done and according to my opinion the first step should be to raise the teachers' salaries: at present they are a joke. 
The people who argument against this do not realize that we are on the verge of an educational crisis. 
This is what has happened in the segregated parts of America, children (mostly in the state/public schools) not learning enough to be able to cope with their lives when they get older. 
The result of this has been not only that many American inhabitants seem to lack general basic knowledge but also in an increased rate of crime and drug-abuse. 
Hopefully the Swedish educational system will not go as far as the American has, but in order to prevent this to happen, something has to be done now.
"," Do you live your own life?  
Ever since the arrival of television there have been discussions whether it has good or bad influence on people. 
I believe that TV in itself is a fantastic way of reaching people world wide, providing them with entertainment but also with current information regarding political as well as cultural news. 
Yet there has over the last few years occurred a large concentration on TV programmes with vague content regarding connection to reality, such as talk shows and endless series. 
This concentration is in my opinion the most serious threat to the positive use of television. 
In order to lead a good life, internal as well as external, you need to make some effort by yourself, it is not enough to sit in front if the TV and receive your life through images. 
The talk shows and series mentioned above are what I would like to refer to as bad TV. 
Much of this derives from American television and has lately had a immense influence on Swedish broadcasting. 
Besides the fact that it is a source of useful information TV has become some sort of 'friend' that you can spend an entire day together with. 
For some people it goes as far as to almost become a substitute for their own reality. 
Still I believe that TV is an enormous opportunity for people to get information about the world that surrounds them.  
In Sweden we know that watching channel 1 and 2 probably gives us a wider range of serious information regarding news items, cultural events and entertainment while channel 3, 4 and 5 have more of a superficial character. 
These channels are rather new and ever since they started broadcasting they have had a large influence of American TV and as far as I am concerned they are the prototype of bad TV. 
Examples of this so-called bad TV are talk shows, romantic series filled with intrigues and films that show a lot of violence. 
The violence in these films tends to give people a very unrealistic image of the damages physical abuse and the usage of weapons can cause. 
Children and young people might get a somewhat distorted image of these consequences and this in turn gives them a false feeling of being immortal.  
The broadcast of talk shows and romantic series also provides people, both younger and older, with an imaginary picture of what your love life and also sexual relations should be like. 
If you have this image of reality I believe that it is difficult for many people to be content with what they have. 
They get problems with settling down and they always have a wish to rush off towards something new and different as soon as life gets a bit too regular. 
Their external, made-up world presides over their inner world and they do not take the chance to explore what they have got within. 
This inner world I believe needs nourishing and you will not be able to get this nourishment through bad TV. 
Naturally all TV, good or bad, does encourage passive behaviour but my opinion is that in order to nourish your inner self you must use your own mind. 
This you can do by reading a book, go to the cinema or, why not, sit down in the sofa to watch a good film that is on TV. 
What can be more relaxed than to enjoy a film at home or together with friends? 
What I mean is that it is up to you to nourish your own head, you have the possibility to choose what to watch, then it is your choice if it will be Ricki Lake or Dokument. 
If you wish to live your own life you must make these choices but obviously this is also a question of what you are offered. 
In Sweden we still have a choice to watch programmes of higher quality or, as Postman expresses himself, junk-entertainment. 
In order to not live someone else's life, you must start to nourish your inner world and it is only up to you how it should be done.
",True
" Little Women By Louisa M. 
Alcott  An ideal female world without any unsolvable problems. 
This is the setting of Louisa M. 
Alcott's novel Little Women. 
The novel presents a romantic picture of a tranquil home where the family members love and care for each other more than anything in the world. 
With the father absent t is the mother who stands as the head of the family, a woman who represents the perfect woman. 
Mrs. 
March raises her four daughters to become happy and morally good women. 
Teaching them the right values and manners of a woman we follow the sisters development in life and turning into truly little women.  
The four sisters grow up in an almost only female surrounding ""She [Jo] liked the ""Laurence boy"" better than ever and took several good looks at him, so that she might describe him to the girls, for they had no brothers, very few male cousins, and boys were almost unknown creatures to them"" (p. 
28). 
In this male lacking environment Mrs. 
March plays an enormously big role even though she is not as much present in the novel as her daughters are. 
She seems only to appear in the novel when the children need help or when there are any problems or uncertainties. 
Exaggerating a little bit, one could say that she is the ""source of truth"". 
She has all the right answers to life's problems and the key to how a woman should behave in these days. 
Her daughters turn to this fountain of wisdom to learn how to behave to become better women. 
The girls admire their mother very much and idolize her, a mothers word is the truth they seem to believe. 
How the children look upon their mother is well described in Amy's thoughts when she looks at the picture of the Virgin Mary and comparing it to her own mother ""...and Amy's beauty-loving eyes were never tired of looking at the sweet face of the divine mother, while tender thoughts of her own were busy at her heart"" (p. 
179). 
Mrs. 
March, who represents the ideal female figure of this time with a good morals, a happy life with a wonderful husband, though he is absent at the moment, four beautiful daughters, she knows what a woman should be like to be happy and lead a good life. 
She tries to teach good values to her children so that they will live up to her dreams about them one day becoming good persons ""I want my daughter's to be beautiful, accomplished, and good; to be admired, loved, and respected; to have a happy youth, to be well and wisely married, and to lead useful, pleasant lives, with as little care and sorrow to try them as God sees fit to send...
I'd rather see you poor men's wives, if you were happy, beloved, contented, than queens on thrones, without self-respect and peace"" (p. 
92). 
In this speech she mentions money, which she tries to teach her children is not the most important thing in the world. 
The girls often complains about how poor they are and how many nice things their friends have and they do not, at those times the mother steps in preaching about how much richer they are who are so much loved by each other and their family, and that money does not automatically mean happiness ""Money is a needful and precious thing-and, when well used a noble thing-but I never want you to think it is the first or only prize to strive for"" (p. 
92).  
The four girls in the novel Little Women are four very different characters. 
They each represent one kind of a typical woman figure during this time in history. 
Women were supposed to like art, music and sewing, and these sisters are not any exceptions. 
They spend their time painting, writing reading, playing the piano or sitting together sewing.  eg represents the beautiful and romantic woman who wants to be a person like her mother. 
She likes dressing up in beautiful gowns and being appreciated for her beauty ""But it is nice to be praised and admired, and I can't help saying I like it"" said Meg..."" (p. 
91). 
Her younger sister Beth is the girl who spends her time taking care of everybody else, humans, animals or dolls, it does not make any difference for her. 
She is also the sister who enjoys music, and she loves to play the piano and sing. 
Amy has also got typical interest for girls of that time, she is the one who loves art and paints a lot. 
While three of the sisters are very girlish and behaving in a womanly way, the fourth one Josephine has other things on her mind.  
Josephine is the sister who rebels against this typical woman figure who enjoys a tranquil life filled with beauty. 
Although she also sews and writes a lot she has troubles in growing up to a women and sometimes wishes that she was a boy ""If I was a boy, we'd run away together, and have a capital time; but as I'm a miserable girl, I must be proper and stop at home"" (p. 
196). 
She sees herself as the male person in the house now when their father is away ""I'm the man of the family now Papa is away..."" (p. 
6). 
One specific thing she does to rebel against the female ideal picture is to ""change"" her name to Jo, which is a little more boyish ""I hate my name, too-so sentimental! 
I wish every one would say Jo instead of Josephine"" (p. 
27). 
She sometimes uses a language that is not appropriate for a girl and the picture painted up her mother of the ideal woman with beautiful dresses and being modest does not appeal to Jo. 
She does not bother much about what other people say about her or what to wear, like other girls were thinking of at that time ""I hate to think I've got to grow up, and be Miss March, and wear long gowns, and look as prim as a China aster! 
It's bad enough to be a girl, anyway, when I like boys' games and work and manners! 
I can't get over my disappointment in not being a boy..."" (p. 
5).   
One of the most important things they learn from their mother is that one should always take care of one another. 
The girls follow this advice very carefully. 
Meg and Jo are both working with taking care of other people, little Beth nurses her poor doll in a very touching way, and the way the take care of each other is remarkable. 
It really shows how strong their love is for each other and how important the family is ""We can't give up our girls for a dozen fortunes. 
Rich or poor, we will keep together and be happy in one another"" (p. 
36). 
The four sisters hang on to each other at all times. 
They sew together, have secret clubs and they play together, they cry together. 
How close they are to each other is obvious in Jo's jealousy towards Mr. 
Brooke and his plans of marrying Meg ""I just wish I could marry Meg myself, and keep her safe in the family"" (p. 
187).  
To listen and learn from one's mother seemed to be important during that time. 
Mrs. 
March learned many things from her mother, and now she is passing her knowledge along to her own children """"My good mother used to help me-"" ""As you do us-"" interrupted Jo, with a grateful kiss"" (p. 
76). 
The things the girls do and the things they say are all a result of their mother's teachings. 
Mrs. 
Marches motherly feeling towards her two oldest children makes them take on the role as a mother to their younger sisters ""The two older girls were a great deal to one another, but each took on of the younger into her keeping and watched over her in her own way-""playing mother"" they called it-and put their sisters in the places of discarded dolls with the maternal instinct of little women"" (p. 
39).   
The world the girls live in is a very secure place for them. 
It consists of only female characters with the right values. 
They rely on their mother and each other for love and protection. 
The mother is so important to the four girls that they have her on equal level with God ""...all day Jo and Meg hovered over her [Beth], watching, waiting, hoping, and trusting in God and Mother"" (p. 
174). 
When Beth is sick for a long period of time and the other girls believes that the end is near for her, they learn that their mother is on her way home, and everything changes. 
As a God or a supernatural being, she returns to her depressed daughters making everything well again ""A breath of fresh air seemed to blow through the house, and something better than sunshine brightened the quiet rooms. 
Everything appeared to feel the hopeful change...the fires seemed to burn with unusual cheeriness; and every time the girls met, their pale faces broke into smiles as they hugged one another, whispering encouragingly, ""Mother's coming, dear! 
Mother's coming!"""" 
(p. 
173).    
It is truly an idealistic world the four sisters are living in, where the mother is the protector and preacher, teaching her children to become good persons. 
Important values she teaches her daughters concern love, caring and happiness. 
Any obstacles that come along their journey through life they can overcome together as a family. 
This family March represents the perfect family, even though they live without their father for a long time, and the typical female characters of this period in history. 
Their time is devoted to sewing, music, art, literature and learning morals and good values ""...the amount of virtue in the old house would have supplied the neighborhood"" (p. 
162).
","1. 
Introduction  English is one of the most spoken languages in the world. 
There are many varieties spread around the whole world, of which British English and American English are the two largest groups. 
Many young people today chose to spend a year or more in the United States to either study or work. 
Since we Swedes have been taught English in school since the fourth grade the language should not cause any big problems. 
Nevertheless there are differences between the school English, which is most often British English, and the American variety. 
I was myself a foreign exchange student in Minnesota and have experienced the variation in vocabulary. 
In some cases it would have been nice if I had known the correct word, it could have saved me from embarrassing moments. 
Therefor I think it is interesting to see what words and how many that are different in the two languages. 
Are there any word classes that differs the most and within any special areas?  
1.2. 
Material and method  I have used the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English and International English by P. 
Trudgill and J. 
Hannah. 
To find out how frequent it is that words are different I took out the first 1,000 words of the letters A, B, C, and D, a total of 4,000 words from Longman. 
I looked at the words to find out which ones that had different forms but the same meaning in the two languages and also which words that only exist in American English respectively British English. 
This method may not be completely accurate though. 
First because Longman Dictionary comes from the British National Corpus, and even though it contains many American words I believe the result would look different if I had used an American edition of a dictionary. 
Secondly, many words that are different are slang words and all of them are naturally not represented in this dictionary. 
It does however show the frequency of different words in more formal written and spoken English.  
When I looked at different areas of words where there were differences between the two languages I used both Longman and International English by P. 
Trudgill and J. 
Hannah. 
In this investigation I only included words that are different not ones that exist in one only one of the languages. 
I have not all included every word that is different, and this investigation is based on my own associations with the areas so if someone else would have done it it would probably not have looked te same.  
2. 
Result of frequency investigation  Of the total number of 4,000 words I found 248 that differed in some way between AmE and BrE. 75 words had different forms with the same meaning in the two languages (Appendix 1). 73 words existed only in AmE (Appendix 2), and 100 in BrE (Appendix 3). 
The rest were words can could be used in both AmE and BrE.   
Figure 1  Figure 1 shows the percentage of the kind of different words I found. 
Out of the total number of 4,000 words 1.88% had different forms but the same meaning in the two languages. 
1.83% of the words were only found in AmE and 2.53% in BrE.  
The results of the study of frequency of different words in AmE and BrE shows that there are not so many words that are different, at least not in a dictionary. 
I believe though that there are much more words that differ in the everyday speech in the two countries, if one include slang words and dialect differences. 
The investigation shows though that a British person can communicate with an American without any problems.  
When I looked at what word classes the words belonged to I found that 85.5% of all words were nouns, 6.5% adjectives, 6% verbs, 1.2% adverbs and 0.008% interjections. 
The nouns are obviously the most common word class that differs between the languages. 
It was also the case when I looked at the letters individually. 
Of the 73 words that were only found in AmE 78.1% were nouns, 8.2% verbs, 7% adjectives, 2.7% adverbs and 1.4% interjections. 
Also of the 100 only BrE words the nouns were most frequent, 87% nouns, 8% adjectives, 3% verbs, 1% adverbs and 1% interjections.  
Figure 2  Figure 2 shows clearly that the nouns with 85,5% are the word class that differ the most in the two languages.   
There are several factors that tribute to the change in vocabulary between the two languages. 
When Britain colonized North America new words and experiences had to be named and they did that by taking already existing BrE words or invent new ones, also technological and cultural developments have caused differences in the vocabulary. 
A third reason is the influence of other languages (Trudgill and Hannah, 1985:75-6). 
This is, I believe, the most important cause today, since many people from all over the world immigrate to the United States. 
There they are mixed up with several nationalities and have to learn to communicate with each other, in that way many new words arises, many of which are loan words from their native languages.   
3. 
Words in special areas   If one look at words from different areas one can see that there are many words with the same meaning but not the same form. 
In many fields the vocabulary is quite different. 
I looked at three areas where the vocabulary differs, education, food, and clothing.  
3.1. 
Education  In the area of education there are several words that are different in AmE and BrE. 
Since the two countries do not have the same school system there are naturally words that only exist in one of the languages and not in the other. 
Therefor there are many AmE words for which one can not find a corresponding word in BrE and vice versa. 
I believe many foreign exchange students may have had some problems in an American high school.   
3.1.1. 
Table 1 - educational word that differed  AmE			BrE Eraser			Rubber Semester			Term Principal			Head teacher Class			Course Vacation			Holiday Bulletin board		Notice board Freshman			Fresher Grade			Mark Field day			Sport day Drop-out			School-leaver Grade			Form Prom			Ball Sophomore			Second year student  Table 1 shows words that have the same meaning but not the same form in the AmE and BrE,  There are also a few words that are used in both languages but have different meanings. 
Junior and varsity are two such words. 
In AmE a junior is a student who is in his second year in high school, while a junior in Britain is a pupil in a junior school and between 7-11 years old. 
Varsity is a common word in the US used for the main team in a sport that represents the school. 
It is not a very common word in BrE but it exists as an old-fashioned word for a university, especially Oxford or Cambridge.		  
3.2. 
Food  3.2.1. 
Table 2 - food words that differed  AmE			BrE Squash			Marrow Zucchini			Courgettes Rutabaga			Swede Egg plant			Aubergine Cookie			Biscuit Biscuit			Scone Cracker			Biscuit Dessert			Pudding Jelly			Jam Potato chips		Crisps French-fries		Chips Wastebasket		Bin Silverware			Cutlery uffin tin			Cake tin Spatula			Fish slice Faucet			Tap  Table 2 shows words that are different in form but not in meaning in the two languages  3.3. 
Clothing   3.3.1. 
Table 3 - clothing words that differed  AmE				BrE Garter				Suspender Underpants				Knickers Smock				Overall Pantyhose				Tights Tuxedo				Dinner jacket Sweater				Jumper Undershirt 			Vest ock Turtle			Turtle neck Turtle neck			Polo neck Pants				Trousers Sneakers				Plimsolls  Table 3 shows words that are different in form but not in meaning in the two languages  4. 
Conclusion  After studying a total of 4,000 words in Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English I found only 248 words that were different in AmE and BrE. 
Some of them had different forms but same meanings, while some were only found in AmE and some in BrE. 
In the investigation on word classes I found that the majority of the words were nouns.   	
In my investigation on words in the areas of education, food and clothing, I found every day words that are different in America and Britain.   
This investigation is based on a dictionary taken from the British National Corpus. 
It did not show many differences between the languages, but I beloieva that if i had used an American dictionary as a complement I would have gotten a different result. 
Many o fthe words I found in Longman could be used in both AmE and BrE, but often a word that was common in for example AmE was not so frequently used in BrE. 
This means that even though a BrE word is not used in the United States, it is often understood anyway, it may just sound strange. 
A foreigner with knowledge of BrE can manage without any major problems in the United States of America.  
5. 
Appendixes  5.1 Appendix 1- Words that were different in AmE and BrE  AmE				BrE Rappel				Abseil Absentee vote			Postal vote Gas pedal				Accelerator Airplane				Aeroplane Age discrimination			Ageism Advice column			Agony column BB gun				Air gun All-around				All-round Allen wrench			Allen key Aluminum				Aluminium Football				American football Video arcade			Amusement arcade			 Baby carriage			Pushcart Formula				Babymilk Babysitter				Childminder Bachelor party			Stag night Back talk				Backcha Tease				Backcomb Band-Aid				Elastoplast Bank card				Cheque card Banker's order	 		Standing order Bar graph				Bar chart Bar hop				Pub-crawl Bartender				Barman/barmaid Barrette				Hair slide Baseboard				Skirting board Beauty mark			Beauty spot Beet				Beetroot Bellhop				Bellboy Bell pepper			Capsicum Beltway				Ring road Bias tape				Bias binding Ferris wheel			Big wheel Billy club				Truncheon Garbage collector			Binman Caboose				Guard's van Cabstand				Taxi rank ooch				Cadge Cake pan				Cake tin Call-in				Phone-in Calling card			Visiting card Call letters			Call sign Campground				Campsite Can				Tin Canadian bacon			Bacon Candy				Sweet Cotton Candy 			Candyfloss Trailer				Caravan Card catalog			Card index Career canselor			Careers officer Janitor				Caretaker Parking lot			Car park Carryall				Holdall Portacrib				Carrycot Carry-out				Takeaway Slingshot				Catapult edian strip			Central reservation Certified mail			Recorded delivery Channel surf			Channel hop CPA				Chartered accountant Charter member			Founder member Talk show				Chat show AmE				BrE Checkerboard			Draughtboard Checking account			Current account Check-room				Cloakroom  5.2 Appendix 2 - Selection of words only found in AmE  Absentee ballot			All-fired All-nighter			Alum Alumni				Bad guy Beauty parlor			Bedroll Bare-assed				Bassinet Baggage car			Billfold Barfly				Barf Bach				Balky Cabin fever			Cakewal Candy cane 			Candy apple	 Candy stripper			Careen Caregiver				Care package Chaparral				Chap-book Dentine				Dang Davenport				Day camp Desk clerk				Dibs Deadhead				Diddly Dean's list			Deep six  5.3. 
Appendix 3 - Selection of words only found in BrE  Abattoir			About-turn Advert			Aerodrome	 Ambulanceman		Aftercare Aggro			Air hostess Airy fairy			Air letter Barmy			Barney Barrack			Baddie Barrow boy			Bathing trunks Batty			Banana skin Bap			Beef burger Cardigan			Caff Card vote			Cagoule Cakehole			Camiknickers Canoodle			Caravanning Carer			Chap Dab hand			Daft Des res			Derv Denier			Day tripper Desk tidy			Day pupil Did-dums			Dickybird  6. 
References  Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English. 
1995. 3rd edition.  
Great Britain: Clays Ltd.  
Trudgill P. and J. 
Hannah. 
1985. 
International English, pages 75-6, 79-80.
",True
" Is exercise getting trendy?  
During the last few years of my living in Uppsala I have noticed a change in the way students, and I believe others, get their exercise. 
About four years ago there were not that many different alternatives for people wanted to get fit. 
Friskis & Svettis and the reverend Svettis were the main alternatives, both quite cheap then. 
But several other fitness centres began popping up, or rather began marketing, rebuilt and asked higher prices. 
The students who earlier were hard put to pay 350 Swedish crowns for their exercise now pay from 900 up to 1200. 
Svettis is rebuilt into Stallet, the old Centralbadet into Nautilus and Friskis & Svettis have enlarged their organisation. 
My Ju-Jutsu beginners' course was, according to the teacher, the largest in several years, and almost everyone stayed the whole course. 
These changes must be caused by a greater willingness of the inhabitants of Uppsala to get fit and pay for it. 
It may be that this is caused by some trend in society at large but as all my observations emanate from Uppsala I have to treat it as a local trend albeit affected by the environment.  
Could it be that suddenly, because of the reports of the dangers of being fat when older, like heart failure, students start thinking of their future old age and start exercising. 
Or the reports on the ever higher percent of the young which is overweight combined with advice on how to loose weight? 
That would mean that we read the newspapers, believe in the journalists' and experts' conclusions and follow their advice willingly in the hope of living into a healthy old age and in the bargain lower the statistics. 
Unfortunately, or not, it does not really fit our mindset to react that way. 
Where it so, we would use only half our allotted students' loan, drink not at all, go to bed at ten and eat eight to nine slices of bread a day, which we don't. 
Therefore it is probably not the influence of the newspapers that is the main cause. 
On the other hand, it could be another kind of paper that has finally reached through and got us to follow their advice; the tabloids with their tips on how to get thin. 
But that is probably not correct either as those tips usually only include eating less, not exercising more, and if training is included, it does not extend over more than ten minutes a day. 
It also seems like the training trend includes male students, who supposedly would not be as affected the tabloids, since they are mainly read by women.  
Several decades ago, e.g. in the forties, it was usual for people, male and female both, to carry clothes or undergarments which worked like a corset to keep an untrained body looking fit. 
Nowadays, however, we wear scanty clothes which mercilessly reveal if fitness is lacking while at the same time the beauty ideal is to be thinner than ever, most believe (I believe it looks rather like the 1400th - century). 
Owing to this it is probably more important than ever to be able to show a torso not only without fat but also lined with muscles. 
Even the female photo models are starting to look more trim than thin. 
At the same time it gets more usual for men and women to bodybuild. 
It is possible that feminism is one of the reasons. 
It is now possible for a woman to be strong and still beautiful and it is possible for a man to be vain. 
I am sure these are important reasons for the fitness trend but probably not the most important. 
It is still possible to starve into clothes, even if it probably is less fun.   
There is another health aspect in this matter. 
Studies have shown, at least according to the students' health organisation, that exercise increases the concentration span and thereby it should make it easier to study. 
It is probable that at least most students who start exercising discover that they get more energised and can study for longer time periods without tiring. 
The reason for the trend is probably a combination of the causes listed above, together with another interesting factor. 
It has finally become fashionable to exercise, the fitness centres are meeting places and people like to speak of and discuss where and what they do for exercise, and they want to spend money on it. 
It is also interesting to note the counter reaction: people that are so tired of the fitness talk that they refuse to exercise at all and simply don't care. 
One thing is certain; as long as this health and training wave continues it will probably be possible to ask ever higher prices of us and the only effect is that more people will attend exercise facilities. 
Or, as the marketing rule goes according to Kotler, there are certain goods that more people buy when the price goes up, and this might just be one.
"," THE INCREASING NUMBER OF YOUTHS USING DRUGS AT LOWER AGES  Resent studies has shown that drug usage is increasing and that narcotics exist in closer contact with younger students. 
According to the CAN survey, 1 out of 10 students attending the 9th grade of the senior level has on one or several occasions used drugs. 
Compared with statistic surveys from 1995 this is an increase by 50%. 
The results are in line with other inquiries; for example, a study made by the social welfare service which is a 5 year long investigation series on students', in the second grade, upper secondary school, drug habits. 
According to the latter, 1 out of 5 pupils has tried narcotics. 
Of the ones that have used drugs, 40% were under the age of 16 and 11% under the age of 13 (1995: 3%) the first time they tried narcotics. 
Both studies show that the debut age for drug use has gone down and that the usage is increasing. 
They also demonstrate that the pupils' attitudes towards drugs and drug policies have become more liberal than before. 	
Why then, do more and more young students take drugs? 
One answer to this question could be the students more liberal and tolerant attitude toward drugs the youths ignore and disclaim the dangers with drugs (according to the police authorities). 
In an article about drug abuse, one could read about a seventeen-year-old boy using ecstasy almost every weekend. 
He described the information received in school, concerning narcotics, to be very one-sided and that he felt he couldn't relate to it. 
I think he is making an important point. 
The information you receive in school often describe worn-out drug addicts sleeping in street corners, and imply that that is where you will end up if you take drugs. 
Although it is not wholly unlikely that something like this could happen to you, if using drugs, it is very difficult for young pupils to identify themselves with this picture. 
There is a big difference between this and taking a few pills at private parties on weekends, many of these young users are often well behaved and very social, which makes the gap and differences between them and freaked-out addicts seem huge. 	
Another cause to the increasing number of younger students using drugs could be due to high group pressure and a desire to fit in. 
Youths are very vulnerable and easily affected when they are in their early teens. 
Most of them are trying to figure out who they are, how to act and are often deadly afraid of being classified as outsiders. 
It is commonly known that most people who start smoking do it because they want to fit in, to belong to a group or just want to be accepted, the same goes for drinking alcohol. 
Taking drugs is the third step some of us take in order to be accepted. 
Drugs have become the new rage and are used as a supplement to alcohol and smoking. 
You may think that narcotics are a considerable more dangerous mean of intoxication and that people can and do say no, but keep in mind that most youths get in contact with narcotics when they are very young and at such early ages, it is not easy to say no. 
The desire to fit in makes you do almost anything. 
Also, when living such in close contact with drugs where they are easy to obtain, which school pupils do nowadays, they are running a high risk of trying it themselves. 
The more that start using drugs, the more will follow.  
Some other factors contributing to this increase are, to begin with, the fact that it isn't very likely that you will be caught by the police. 
Most youths take drugs almost exclusively at private parties and usually know the person selling them their narcotics, from before. 
Another factor is that Sweden has not had that many problems with drugs in the past, it has not been one of the bigger social issues and I believe that is why this problem has been able to expand more freely. 
The number of ecstasy pills confiscated so far this year goes up to 150 000, compared with last years 75 000 pills.  
This trend will keep on getting bigger and bigger if we are unable to work out some sort of solution or way to stop it in the nearer future. 
The expansion of narcotics in Sweden is being made very fast, which makes this is a problem that needs to be paid attention to and to be acknowledged by society.  
",True
" Stub Out!  
The tobacco industry pleases its consumers by producing approx. 5 342 991 000 000 cigarettes for them per day. 
It is not difficult then to imagine what huge amounts of money this gigantic industry turns into cash on its product. 
How can that be, I wonder, when smoking is such an unhealthy and expensive thing to do? 
How long can it continue like this? 
Is the fact that tobacco companies are taken to court by individuals for having caused people's illness or even death, a sign of that we somewhere in the future will have a non-smoking world?  	 
In today's society, we are very conscious of what we eat. 
To keep your body fit and healthy is of great importance for most people. 
And I think everyone is aware of the risks for diseases related to smoking (both active and passive smoking) and how it affects your health and beauty. 
In spite of this there is yet a message of smoking as accepted and associated with success and glamour. 
Children learn from movies and commercials that it is cool to be a smoker. 
Try smoking is for young people a step into the exciting adult world. 
And of course the advertisers address to this target group. 
In Sweden 80 new smokers per day are claimed, to replace those who have given up smoking or even died from it. 
In the US this number is 5000 per day.  	 
Then there is the economy aspect of smoking (which is very much connected to the health aspect). 
It is a very expensive amusement both for the individual and society in large. 
For me as a non-smoker it seems very unnecessary having to count the expense for something that might contribute to shorten your life, in your personal budget. 
The causes of smoking that affect society's economy consequently also affect the economy of people in general. 
Diseases from smoking make people who normally should work, having to be on sickness benefit or even get early retirement pension. 
In the US many states are bringing actions against tobacco companies to get compensation for damages caused by smoking. 
The companies then argue that the individual smoker is responsible for his/her decision and should be aware of the consequences of smoking. 
One can then wonder to what extend the tobacco companies inform their consumers of the risks. 	 
My third and last argument against smoking is the one that feels most important for myself. 
It is the fact that you involuntary have to spend some time of the day in smoky surroundings almost everyday and often meet a lack of consideration for non-smokers among many smokers. 
The Swedish tobacco law from 1993, says that smoking is forbidden in all places of work, schools and other public buildings. 
(To have special ""smoking rooms"" is allowed.) 
I don't think I have noticed any remarkable difference since this law was introduced, though. 
The restaurants' and cafés' non-smoking areas for example, do not often make any sense since you are still in the same room and the smoke doesn't stay in the ""smokers' area"" just because there is a rule. 
I want to be able to sit in a café without having to bring the nasty smell from smoke with me home in my clothes and hair. 
In many public institutions, for example hospitals, the entrances turn into smoking areas with big stinking ashtrays and when going in you get ""welcomed"" by the disgusting smell from fag-ends.  	 
So, what is it then that makes people smoke despite everything, in my view, speaking against it? 
Perhaps it is a need, a feeling of being something more with that cigarette in the corner of their mouths or/and a lust that is stronger than the question of health and money. 
Whatever it is, it is something that I as a non- (and never-) smoker can't understand it and don't think I ever will.
","y first actual contact with the English language was in third grade in compulsory school. 
I remember I was really looking forward to it. 
I was going to learn how to speak and read in a foreign language. 
It felt like it made me grow up a little bit! 
I don't remember how many English lessons we had a week at that time but I remember that a teacher came to our little school only for those occasions. 
I suppose my ordinary teacher wasn't certificated for it or simply didn't want to teach English. 
Well, I liked learning some English words and I liked the English lessons for the rest of compulsory school as well. 
And it was pretty cool to be able to speak some when being abroad, in Greece for example. 	 
At senior high school though, I did of some reason lose my interest for English. 
I felt it like everyone in my class was doing much better than me. 
Many of my friends had been to England or the United States taking language courses during some weeks in the summer. 
Now when looking back at that time I don't think I actually was much worse than the others, perhaps instead bad self-confidence was the reason why I wasn't so active on the English lessons. 
Of course I did do the exercises in the books, read what we were supposed to read and answer the questions I got. 
But I didn't throw myself into discussions though, and speeches in front of the class weren't exactly 'my cup of tea'.  	 
One year after senior high school, I got to know about a one semester English course in Portslade near Brighton in Great Britain. 
It is a course you apply for through Visings Folk High School in Sweden. 
There are only Swedish students on the course but all teachers and staffs are Englishmen/women. 
And your accommodation during the course is with an English family. 
I went there hoping to improve my English and also to get a glimpse of British society and culture. 
This was accordingly the first time I was really forced to speak English. 
I was surprised how easy it was to get into the language. 
I surely did lots of grammatically mistakes but that wasn't so important at that moment. 
The main thing was that I actually dared to speak and put my trust in that people understood me. 
I think the best way of learning a language, is to stay in a country where that language is spoken, for a while. 
Of course we studied grammar, wrote essays and so on the course, but I think I learn most just by listening, speaking and constantly being ""surrounded by English"", written and spoken. 	 
Now, when going to study English again (and this time on a more advanced level), I feel a bit unused to it because I haven't practised it for a while. 
But I think, or at least hope, it will be quite easy to get into it again, at least the listening part. 
I think that is the easiest thing, unless the speaker has got some, for me unknown, dialect or anything. 
When it comes to reading I think it depends very much of what you are reading, whether it is difficult or not. 
When reading an English-written novel, I may not understand exactly all of the words, but I can get the story on the whole anyway. 
If reading specialist literature, though, it might be a bit more difficult, due to the fact that there may be lots of words that I normally don't get into contact with. 
According to speaking, as I mentioned before, I think it's a question of self-reliance for me. 
When I was in England I think I improved my speaking ability a lot, at least to use the language in everyday speech. 
I hope I will get into the language like that again now and also enlarge my vocabulary (in writing as well, of course). 
What I also would like to develop more is my pronunciation. 
At this moment I think there is sometimes too much a mix of Swedish-, American-, and British English in my language. 
My dream is to get a consistently British pronunciation and fluency in my speaking. 
(I think I have a long way to get there, though!) 
Concerning myself, I think, writing in English is the most difficult part. 
Maybe not spelling words right, but handling with the grammar right, knowing what expression or word fit where, and getting a clear structure in my composition, are, among other, things that I have to practise more. 
That's common for all of the four skills that I've mentioned - I have to practise a lot!
",True
" HOW TO BE A GOOD LITTLE WOMAN  In the novel Little Women by Louisa May Alcott we readers get to peek into the March family's household and follow the lives of its members for one year. 
It is a year of hardship but also a year of joy and wholesome experiences. 
What is so particular about this household during the year in question is that it exclusively consists of women as the father is away fighting in the war. 
Certainly, the absent father as well as other male characters in the novel are significant and present in their lives, but the focus of the novel is on the women, especially on the little women, of the March family, their individual roles in the family, their lives, their hopes and burdens, influences and values.  		
The four daughters in the family, the little women, Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy, are very different from each other, each with her own hopes and ambitions. 
Meg, the oldest, is very much influenced by romantic novels and the lifestyle of the upper-class. 
She wants to be rich and pretty, marry a handsome man and live a life in luxury. 
Jo is a hot-tempered tomboy who would much rather be a boy than a girl since girls have to be calm and well-behaved with their hair turned up. 
Jo, who also is the family's amateur playwright and story writer, has dreams of becoming an author. 
Beth is the most timid of the sisters, she loves helping others and wants nothing for herself but a piano since she lives for music. 
Amy is the youngest of the sisters but though she is only twelve years old she is very strong-willed and hates it when her older sisters tell her what to do. 
Her dream is to become an artist as drawing is one of her passions.(p. 
3-12, 69-70, 133) 		The four sisters are in other words regular teenage girls, fighting regular teenage problems and trying to find themselves as they are on the verge of bordering adulthood. 
In my opinion they are ""the perfect daughters"" personified as they are very well-behaved and hardworking girls, docile and obedient to their mother, loving and caring towards each other. 
Not to mention their many talents, their general knowledge and creativity. 
Yet, in the novel both they and their mother feel that they must put their ""selfishness and reckless whims"" behind them.(p. 
10-11) 		The governing idea of the book, namely ""how to be a good little woman"" is introduced in the very first chapter, and then all through the novel we get to follow the four daughters' journey towards obtaining that goal. 
Though it is a letter from their father which awakens them to self-examination and initiates this journey, it is the mother who holds the key position as the little women's unquestionable leader and mentor, confessor and soother. 
The mother's own emotional life we do not get to know as intimately as her daughters', but we get to know her and her values and influences through her guiding of the daughters.  		
Mrs March is neither strict nor punishing, but she is certainly ruled by strong convictions. 
Although there is a religious undertone in the novel it seems to be more a general belief in goodness, hard work and patience that rules her. 
The girls, ranging in age from twelve to seventeen, all have daily duties around the house. 
They help with the sewing, doing the dishes, the dusting and the like. 
The two older girls, Meg and Jo, also work during the daytime to help support the family's failing economy. 
Additionally Mrs March engages them all into helping a family poorer than themselves, trying to teach them the joy of giving. (p. 
15-16, 35-41) 		Seemingly, the mother does not just want them to work hard but she wants them to learn how to enjoy it too. 
She gives each of the daughters a copy of The Pilgrim's Progress, a Christian allegory, to be used as a guidebook to overcome their faults and be good little women so that they can reach their own Celestial City. 
It might sound rigid and extremely religious but Mrs March is neither, she is actually a very loving, understanding and patient mother who never scolds or punishes her daughters, but only wants them to be good so that they can be truly happy. 
However, given the fact that the daughters' ""bundles"" consist of them being regular teenagers, i.e. sometimes behaving irrationally and wanting to have some fun, one feels that Mrs March sometimes rather expects too much of them.(p. 
11, 90-91, 75-77)  		Nevertheless, Mrs March's method of teaching her girls about life is very effective. 
Instead of telling them what to do or what not to do she lets them experience things for themselves, make their own mistakes and come to their own conclusions. 
At the end of almost every chapter there is a lesson to be learnt and Mrs March rounds it up by listening to their confessions and giving her approval of their increasing insight. (p. 
110-111)  		There is a lot of love in the March household, love between the mother and the daughters, love for the absent father, love for their friends and neighbours, the Laurences. 
It is often mentioned that love and companionship are far more important than money, that motto can be said to be another of the themes of the novel as many of the lessons learned by the little women constitutes of them realising how contented they really are just having each other. (p. 
3, 78)  		When Meg suddenly gives some of her love to Mr Brooke, Mrs March again speaks of her belief that money is not as important as true love and a happy home as she tries to comfort Jo. 
Jo, however, is not concerned with Mr Brooke's economy but horrified at the thought of the family being disrupted. 
As I mentioned in the opening paragraph, it is in many ways a year of hardship for the Marches that is portrayed in the novel, and it is this strong connection between the March women that helps them pull through, so one can certainly understand Jo's feeling of insecurity and fear. (p. 
188-189)		 		However, despite the fact that the novel almost entirely features these strong and independent women struggling together, the mother being the little women's guide, it is yet somehow the man of the house, the absent father, who is the ultimate ruler of the family. 
It is the father who initiates the daughters' journey towards earning the name little women, and it is the father who finalises the journey by confirming that they have reached their destination and gives his approval. 
The mother has certainly praised and encouraged them, but the circle is not closed until the father returns and confirms the change. 
Even Mrs March tells that she learnt her gentle ways from her husband and that he made her into the woman she wants her daughters to copy. 
In other words he taught her what to teach them.(p.10, 76, 204-206)  		The constant eulogies to the noble Mr March feel a bit exaggerated and although he is put on a very high pedestal by his wife and daughters I think it is evident that that is much due to the mighty patriarchate of those times. 
The man was the head of the house. 
The fact that he fought in the war is also considered very honourable by his family, but I feel that the women of this household had their own war to fight, a war against poverty and against everyday problems. 
Growing up and helping your children to grow up are tasks as hard and as honourable as fighting a war for your country, that is plain to see for the readers of this novel. 		
That is why it is so unfortunate that Mrs March and her daughters do not seem to realise this about themselves, they just see it as their duty as good little women. 
What is even more unfortunate is that still in today's reality many women do not get the credit they deserve for their hard work raising children and running a household at the same time. 
They are the ones who deserve medals for valour. 
As Louisa May Alcott herself once said: ""Housework ain't no joke"" (xroads.virginia.edu).
"," LANGUAGE VARIETIES A study of vocabulary differences between British and American English  1. 
Introduction  The English language is spoken all over the world, it is the mother tongue of about 400 million people and about as many speak it as a second language. 
All speakers of English do not use the language in a uniform way though, there are many varieties of English. 
Of course there are more similarities than differences between the various varieties of English but the differences that do exist are still distinct enough to separate one variety from another. 
British English and American English are the two main standard varieties of English and differences between these two main varieties can be found within all areas of language use; in grammar, spelling, pronunciation, punctuation, vocabulary and style (Ilson 1985: 7).  	
The vocabulary differences are among the most numerous and they also seem to cause the most confusion. 
The purpose of this essay is to disperse some of that confusion and instead, hopefully, shed some light on vocabulary differences between British English and American English. 
I have chosen to limit the investigation to the culinary area, i.e. words related to beverages, food and foodpreparing. 
What I intend to find out is; how common the differences are, what types of differences there are and if one type is more frequent than the others. 	
My primary material consists solely of the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, from which I collected the first 200 words I found that are related to food. 
I chose to collect words beginning with the letters c and s because those two letters are given the most space in the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English. 
I collected 100 words from each letter and singled out those which showed a difference between British English and American English. 
Then I categorised them according to the classification used by Trudgill and Hannah (1985), which consists of four major categories: 1. 
Different word for the same concept or item, 2. 
Same word-different meaning, 3. 
Same word-additional meaning in one variety, 4. 
Word less frequent but understood in the other variety. 	
As I had expected the categorisation involved a few problems. 
Firstly, some of the words seemed to belong to more than one category. 
Secondly, since I am a non-native speaker of English and the relationship between British English and American English is quite complex it was very difficult to know which words to put where regarding the sub-types of the 1st category, and which words to put in category 4. 
To help solve the problems I used two British-American dictionaries; Britspeak and Richard Smith's Compendium of Britishisms. 	
After having done the classification I analysed the results and tried to put together a clear and easy to understand presentation which will follow in the next chapter. 
All definitions of the words are according to the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English. 
Abbreviations that will be used in the presentation of the results are; BrE for British English, AmE for American English.  
2 Results  Out of 200 words related to food 62 words, (33 beginning with c and 29 beginning with s), showed a difference between BrE and AmE. 
The table below shows the distribution of the words into the different categories, 8 words appear in more than one category:  		 Total number of words	 		 	 	62 	 Different word for the same item	 		44 Same word different meaning		 	10 Same word additional meaning in one variety	 	13 Word less frequent in one variety	 7  2.1 Different word for the same concept or item  According to Trudgill and Hannah (1985) the majority of lexical differences between BrE and AmE are of this type. 
That turned out to be the case also in my investigation, 44 out of 62 words belong to this category, though the 7 words marked with * appear in more than one category. 
The words in this category can be divided into two sub-types; one where the word is not widely known in the other variety, and another where the word is known. 
In the list below the words in bold type are words that are widely known in the other variety:  <table removed>    2.2 Same word - different meaning  The words in this category are without a doubt the most confusing ones for speakers of BrE and AmE. 
Luckily these kinds of words are quite few in number as opposed to the previous category (Trudgill and Hannah 1985: 77). 
In my investigation 10 words out of 62 belong to this category:  <table removed> 		  2.3 Same word - additional meaning in one variety  The words belonging to this category are words that are frequently used in both BrE and AmE, but in one variety they have an additional meaning not known in the other. 
Possibly these words are as confusing as the words in the category above, these types of words are quite common though (Trudgill and Hannah 1985:77). 
In this investigation 13 words out of 62 fit the description of this category:  <table removed>  2.4 Word less frequent but understood in the other variety  This category of words is the least confusing for Brits and Americans, it is also the category containing the least number of words in this investigation, only 7 words out of 62:  <table removed>  3 Summary  According to Ilson (1985) it is very common that figures concerning this type of investigation are misleading, even in greater investigations. 
The reason for that is the movement between, and the mix of the two varieties that many speakers of both varieties experience. 
Not to mention the numerous regional varieties within the standard varieties, that sometimes can be closer to another standard variety than its own. 
How you speak, which words you use and how much you understand of another variety is very individual. 	
Probably what would give more insight into the matter is to investigate why there are differences. 
We know that there are differences, that can easily be proven, but what do the differences consist of? 
Unfortunately, due to its restriction this essay will not be able to provide the answers to that question, but it would certainly be an interesting area to investigate. 	
To sum up the result of this mini-investigation I think it is safe to say that it confirmed that vocabulary differences between British and American English are very common. 
Out of the 200 words that I collected 62 words showed a difference between the two varieties, that is 31% or almost 1/3 of the words. 
Even though this investigation was limited to the culinary area and only consisted of 200 words I still think that one could assume that it reflects the vocabulary in general.  	
The majority of the differences belong to the 1st category, and the least common differences belong to the 4th category. 
Generally, the least common differences belong to the 2nd category, however, there is not a great difference in number of words between the 2nd, the 3rd and the 4th category in this investigation. 
Also, slightly misleading figures can be expected especially considering the great limitation of this investigation. 
The distribution of the words into the different categories hence proved to correspond quite well to the greater research made by Trudgill and Hannah (1985). 	
Accordingly, the intended purpose of this essay has been fulfilled. 
I have investigated vocabulary differences between British and American English and found out that they indeed are very common also within the culinary area, and that the vast majority of the differences are of the type where different words are used for the same concept or item.  
References  Barton, D.J. 
1997. 
Words that could be confusing & embarrassing in the UK & US 	 http://www.dur.ac.uk/~dg13djb/ukus_text.html Britspeak, 1997. http://pages.prodigy.com/NY/NYC/britspk/ukus4.html Ilson, R. 
1985. 
Diversity in unity. 
American & British English in English today No. 
4 - 	 October 1985, pp 7 - 11 Smith, R. 
1995. 
Richard Smith's Compendium of Britishisms  	 http://www.interlog.com/~richs/phrases.html Trudgill, P. and J. 
Hannah. 
1985. 
International English  <Appendix removed>
",True
"When I was eleven years old I started to study English at school. 
I didn't get a really good start because I didn't understand why I had to learn English and therefore I wasn't very eager to learn. 
The most important thing why I never was a good student in English, I think, was that I found it very boring. 
I couldn't understand what others found so fascinating about knowing a foreign language. 
Because of all these reasons, I was always behind in my English studies and when I graduated from senior high school my English marks were low. 
I realized that I had to do something about it to be admitted to the University so I went to Boston, MA to work as a nanny for a year.  
In the beginning of my year in the USA it was hard to be around people who only spoke English, but after a few weeks I could understand almost everything the family was talking about. 
The family I lived with was big, five children and their parents, so I always had someone to talk to or listen to. 
It was very good practice. 
Now I had a reason to learn how to understand English. 
The children I took care of told me things that had happened at school, etc. and I really wanted to understand every word they were telling me.  
Now I can feel comfortable when people are talking to me in English. 
What I still find pretty hard is to understand some English spoken by people from Great Britain because I'm so used to American English.  
What I found most difficult during my stay in the USA was to talk without sounding like a five-year old. 
During the first months my speaking really improved but after a while I found myself standing on the same spot, not improving at all. 
I wanted to be able to speak about serious things but couldn't find the words that said what I wanted to. 
I still feel that I can improve my English speaking a lot, but on the other hand I feel I can have an everyday conversation with English speaking people.  
Before I went to Boston I hadn't read one whole book in English. 
I didn't read very much when I was there either except for the books I read to the children, which actually was a lot. 
I think the reason why I didn't read so much when I was abroad was that I was so tired of English in the evenings and weekends. 
In my spare time I'd rather write letters in Swedish to my friends and family at home.  
When I returned to Sweden after a year in Boston it was nice to speak Swedish again but after a while I started to miss the English language. 
It was a very strange feeling because I never thought that could happen to me. 
I started to read some books in English and really enjoyed it. 
I'm still reading a lot more books in Swedish than in English but it's nice to know that it's not that hard to read in English. 
I also think reading is a simple but efficient way to learn the language better.  
I don't know if reading English will make me a better writer but I sure hope so. 
I would never advise anyone to work as an au-pair if their only goal was just to improve their writing skills because you don't have to write a single word in English, I didn't anyway. 
I feel like my writing is as bad as it was before I went abroad. 
I have always enjoyed writing in Swedish so I hope, with some help and a lot of hard work, I will improve my writing skills a lot.  
I think that the best way to learn a language is to stay in a country with native speakers for a year or so. 
It worked for me anyway, but I think I had improved even more if I went there to study. 
Than I would have been forced to write and read. 
A year abroad made me understand the reason why I have to learn English and, even more important, now I can find it enjoyable to learn a second language.
"," Evaluation  English, my English! 
So now I'm supposed to wright about my skills in English. 
One thing I can say is that I wish I was better. 
It's not that I'm terrible at it, but sometimes I just can't find the right words. 
I want to be able to use English just as easy as I use Swedish. 
I guess it depends on how much I use it, how much practice I get. 
When I was 17, I went to Hastings in England for four weeks of English studies, and my English has never been better than when I came home to Sweden again. 
Me and a friend stayed with mr and mrs Lewis and their baby Sarah, and mrs Lewis talked uninterruptedly from the moment we arrived. 
She asked all sorts of questions about everything, but I guess that was a good thing, because otherwise I might have been too afraid to speek at all. 
After a week I wasn't afraid to speak at all and when it was time to go home, it felt like I was born English.  
Anyway, that was a long time ago and I haven't been speaking much English since then. 
This means that I must have it all somewhere in my head. 
It's just that I don't know where. 
Hopefully I will find at least some of it during this semester.  
Listening This is something I find quite easy. 
English isn't at all hard to understand, unless the one who's speaking is from Scotland or something. 
It doesn't matter if there's one or two words I don't understant, because I usually understand the rest of it. 
I hear English everywhere around me. 
I hear it in music, on the television and when I go to the movies. 
I also like listening to recorded books and the ones in Swedish are really boring, so I go for the English ones. 
I guess that is good practice. 
It's nice to have lectures in English and find that I actually understand everything the teacher is saying.  
Reading y skills in reading are probably the same as in listening. 
In short I can say that I understand most of what i read. 
I really like books and if they are written by an English or an American author, I prefer to read them in the original language. 
Once in a while a word that I don't recognice pops up, and sometimes I look it up. 
But if I understand the context, than I almost always understand the word without having to look it up. 
I find reading and listening easyer than speaking and writing, and I guess that's because I can take my time and think, and I don't have to be afraid to do something wrong. 
Nobody will care if there's a word or two that I don't understand in a text or during a lecture, but if I say or wright something incorrect, everybody will notice it.   
Speaking The reason I find it difficult to speak English, especially if the one I'm speaking to is from an English speaking country, is that I'm afraid to say something wrong that will make me look stupid. 
I have a cousin in Ireland and he told me once that he had almost no English at all in school, and that my English probably was better than his so I guess I don't have that much to worry about, but sometimes it's so hard to find the right words. 
If I talk som someone out in a pub or in one of the nations, and if I've had a beer or two, than my English is great, but in the classroom, I just sound stupid. 
That's something I don't like at all, and I hope all the speaking in school will help me with this.  
Writing Now this is the tricky part. 
I can't remember half of what I learned about Swedish grammar, so how am I supposed to know about transitive verbs, complements and subordinate clauses? 
It's so easy to wright in Swedish, but when I do it in English I have to think about everything. 
I can think of something I really want to wright, and then i have to wright it in some other way because I don't know how to formulate it. 
This is really very frustrating. 
I guess practice is the medicine for this too.  
Finally I really like English and want to learn how to use it, without having to think and worry about everything I say. 
I guess it would be an exaggeration to say that my English is bad, but it could be a lot better, and I hope this semester of English studies will help me on the way.
",False
" Things could be worse than hearing children curse  In Shirley Peckham's article she wants to clean up the language after having heard too many swear words from teenagers passing by her husband's shop. 
According to Peckham, the children ought to be ""boxed around the ears"". 
In this essay I will argue against the need of cleaning up teenagers' language, which Peckham argues for. 
Firstly, I will argue against Peckhams' problem with cursing children. 
Secondly, I will argue why cursing is a part of adolescence. 
Thirdly, I will argue how trying to change teenagers' ways of communicate will not do any good. 
Lastly I will sum up my paragraphs.  	
The issue ""cleaning up the language"" that Shirley Peckham introduces in her article and the problems it concerns I do not find very worrying. 
Peckham describes having heard several terrible swear words from children passing by her husbands' shop and a group of boys at a railway station. 
This observation might be considered interesting for some, but far from sensational for most. 
Just a few teenagers, who happened to curse while passing by Mrs Peckham, are not very representative for every teenager of Britain. 
Generalising will not give a fair overview of the situation. 
Peckham has obviously exaggerated the situation and created a problem, which does not exist. 
Concerning the language of those teenagers Peckham has observed I consider it being a part of adolescence. 	
Peckham has apparently forgotten everything of being rebellious during the years of adolescence. 
As I see it swear words are a part of adolescence, at least for some who are fighting through this period of life where many physical and mental changes occur. 
By using curse words teenagers express their attitudes towards school, grown-ups and society as a whole. 
Children at this age are tired of parents' and teachers' demands. 
They want to be rebellious and dissociate themselves from stiff, boring adults. 
Cursing is one way of doing this. 
I agree with Peckham to some extent. 
It would be preferable if teenagers use other words to express themselves instead of using swear words. 
However, teenagers' swearing is just a rebellious action, something they will get tired of and consider foolish and childish when they get older and more mature. 
As grown-ups they have more than likely changed and will only curse if getting upset. 
There might be some exceptions, but there always are. 
Therefore I believe that children using swear words is nothing to worry about. 
I do not see the need of searching for solutions of changing teenagers' ways of expressing themselves. 	
Trying to change teenagers' ways of communicate will not do any good. 
They are rebellions and are not willing to give up any rights of being rebellious. 
If for instance parents and teachers tell their children and pupils to watch their mouth and stop cursing it might lead to an opposite effect. 
As tired as teenagers already are of demands and complaints from adults they would probably curse more than ever. 
Peckham's method of changing children's language by boxing them around the ears, is definitely not an option when trying to change teenager's ways of communicate. 
I call this corporal punishment, which perhaps is legal in England, but is far from accepted. 
Peckham should be ashamed of such suggestions. 	
Shirley Peckham has observed some cursing teenagers and has drawn the conclusion that she has encountered a problem that needs to be solved. 
However, there is no problem. 
Peckham is just being confused of teenagers' ways of communicate. 
She is obviously not aware of how teenagers behave when going through adolescence. 
Cursing is a way for teenagers to dissociate themselves from grown-ups and their demands. 
This stage of childish action where teenagers want to be rebellions, which seems like a problem for Peckham, is something they are going to grow out when becoming adults. 
Therefore Shirley Peckham should not worry of matters she has no knowledge of.
"," Swedish education in danger  In Sweden the Teachers' Educational Committee (LUK) has proposed a reform of the Swedish teacher's education programs and the Swedish parliament is soon to decide the future of Swedish school. 
The reform contains quiet drastic changes and has been intensively debated in Swedish media. 
One of the bigger changes is that less time will be spent on subject studies, an reduction from 120 academic points to only 40 possibly 60 academic points. 
In Dagens Nyheter Arne Hellden, lecturer at Linkeping University, gives the reader the main features of the reform and strongly argues against it. 
Unfortunately the picture of what LUK's reform consist of does not get very clear when Hellden is trying to explain the reform's main features. 
However I will as well as Hellden, and in support of his article, argue against LUK's proposal by explaining the absurdity of the reform and by arguing for the importance of having the present amount of subject studies.  
LUK's reform seems just like a desperate attempt to reduce the increasing number of failing students. 
Many alternations have been made in Swedish education during the last few years. 
The change that probably has been most controversial and most troublesome is the alternation of the Swedish grade system at the senior level of the nine-year compulsory school and at upper secondary school. 
Earlier pupils could receive grades from one through five, where five was the highest and one the lowest. 
In 1994 the grade scale was changed to grades failed, passed, passed with distinction, and passed with much distinction. 
Before the change the requirements for qualifying for upper secondary school was based only on the average grade, but then when the grading system changed it was also required to pass the subjects; Swedish, Mathematics, and English. 
The consequence was that many pupils failed one of the required subjects and could not move on to upper secondary. 
The situation has unfortunately grown worse and politicians are desperately looking for solutions. 
If believing great changes in education will solve the problem of failing pupils, this reform of teachers' education proposed by LUK could definitely be a solution to the problem. 
However, I do not believe that reducing subject studies will solve any problem, only create more. 
Those responsible for the reform do obviously not realise the importance of subject knowledge. 
According to Hellden the expert pedagogues that have influenced LUK are more interested in educating student teachers how knowledge is formed and organised rather than letting them acquire knowledge. 
This is presumably an attempt to add more pedagogic to teachers' education programs, which certainly is of great importance. 
However, I believe that the present teachers' education programs include enough of pedagogic. 
There is definitely no need for such a pedagogic form earlier mentioned, which seems more like mumbo jumbo than a serious suggestion. 
In school children learn basic knowledge for future studies at college and University. 
This basic knowledge is based on simple facts and uncomplicated structure, and does not require knowledge of how knowledge is formed and organised when teaching it. 
What is considerable, however, is that teachers know their subjects.  
If reducing subject studies to less than half of what the present teacher's education programs have, teachers might lose their authority as being an academically learned teacher. 
Pupils or their parents may question teachers' ability to teach if they do not have enough subject knowledge. 
Having authority is an essential part of being a teacher. 
Teachers must feel their pupils respect them and that they can share their knowledge and play an important role in their pupils' learning. 
Teachers of today has a base of subject knowledge, they know their subjects and feel secure about teaching. 
However, the future teacher role seems very worrying if LUK's reform is approved in the Swedish parliament. 
Teacher will not longer be teaching their pupils, but guiding them through the world of knowledge as experts in how knowledge is formed and organised. 
Some politicians might believe LUK's reform of teachers' education programs will solve the problem of failing pupils and other problems they earlier caused. 
However, hopefully most politicians will realise the absurdity of this suggestion.
",True
" ""The Swedish people are decreasing their meat consumption""  During the last decade, more and more people have stopped eating meat from cows and cattle. 
This development has taken place in a short period of time and can be read about almost every day in the newspapers. 
Statistics show that about 20 % of the Swedish people avoid eating meat from cows and turn to other alternatives instead; for example a vegetarian diet. 
This development has also occurred in the Swedish schools. 
In the upper-secondary schools the pupils who choose to eat vegetarian food have increased from 5% to 11 % in the last five years and most of them are girls. 
The decreased meat consumption worries the meat producers and others who make a profit from it, like farmers. 
How come the Swedish people, with a majority of young people, have started to avoid meat and especially the meat from cows? 
In this paper I will discuss the most reasonable causes behind this trend and finally I will give a conclusion.   
Today many people choose to eat food that is composed in special ways. 
Some choose to eat functional food that has the same effect as medicines, while other eat food that has been cultivated in certain ways. 
An example of this is eggs that come from hens that live a good life and do not live crowded in small areas, which was a common fact some years ago. 
To eat the right food has become a kind of fashion in our society, a way of telling people who you are. 
This new awareness of what is healthy has developed from the high demands that the society has raised on the Swedish people. 
You should look good and the body is for some, especially women and young girls, like a piece of art that one should design. 
To reach the goal of looking good, one has to have a healthy lifestyle, which includes eating healthy. 
Many have turned to believe that meat is not healthy and links it with death, slaughter and blood. 
According to the statistics in this new health society, meat has been placed on top of the list of food that people find unhealthy and often stop to eat. 
Some people connect it with heart diseases and hardening of the arteries. 
Foods like fish, chicken and vegetables have become popular alternatives to the meat.  
Another obvious reason for the decreased meat consumption in Sweden is the fact that the media and even politicians have started to make people aware of the cruel methods that are used when slaughtering animals, especially cows. 
Horrifying and upsetting pictures have been shown on television and new information about how the animals are bred has reached the Swedish people. 
People have been informed of the fact that hormones are sometimes used when breeding cows, in order to make them as big as possible before the slaughter. 
Many have become upset and have started to react against the cruel methods, especially the people who are struggling for the right of the animals. 
Furthermore, Swedish politics have lately been dealing with questions about how the animals are treated during slaughter and breeding and the Swedish prime minister recently made a speech in which he recommended the people to follow his advice and eat less meat. 
This speech got a lot of attention and could be read about in newspapers. 
It was welcomed especially by the organisations that are fighting for the animals. 
One of the Swedish newspapers made not long after the speech of the prime minister a questioning in which they asked the people if they were willing to stop eating meat. 
The outcome of the questioning was that 35 % said that they were willing to stop eating meat from cows. 
A reason behind this high percentage is the great impact that media has got on people in our country. 
People become affected from what the media reveals and its influence leads to my main cause.   
Lately, Swedish scientists and experts have made statements in television and newspapers about the likely relationship between BSE (Bovine Spongiform Eneephalopathy) and Creutzfeldt Jakob Disease. 
BSE is a slowly, progressive and ultimately fatal neurological disorder of cattle, while Jakob Creutzfeldt Disease is the human correspondence to it, a transmissible and progressive neurological disease resulting from infection. 
Sickness and diseases in all kinds have always frightened and worried people, and it is from this fear my main cause to why people have stopped eating meat has developed. 
People want answers and the question whether the BSE is connected with the human disease Creutzfeldt Jakob Disease is not yet answered. 
More and more cases of cows that are infected with the BSE virus are found every week in Europe and even if no cases are found in Sweden, people are worried. 
As a reaction many choose to avoid eating meat rather than risk getting ill.  
As long as no clear answers are given whether the BSE is connected with the Creutzfeldt Jakob Disease or not, the percentage of people who choose to stop eating meat will increase. 
The methods that are used when slaughtering and breeding in Sweden have to be improved so they will be less painful for the animals; otherwise more people are going to avoid eating meat as a protest.
"," IT IS ALL ABOUT MONEY  In a debate-article from the Swedish newspaper DN, a Swedish political party Folkpartiet presents a new program where they give examples of how to make the Swedish school more effective, and how to make it the best school in Europe. 
One of their proposals is to add an extra year to the nine-year compulsory school. 
In this essay I will respond to the article on this stance and discuss this proposal further.  
Folkpartiet suggests an extra compulsory year in school, and this to make it possible for a larger number of pupils to graduate with a G, equivalent with a pass in the English school-system, in at least the three basic subjects; Swedish, English and Mathematics. 
It is difficult to take a clear stand to this issue because it has never been practised in the Swedish school-system before. 
Nevertheless it is an interesting thought. 
We see and hear daily reports about the decline of the school, and that it does not reach the standard it had a decade ago compared to other schools in Europe.   
An extra year in school might improve the general knowledge for each student, but there is another angle of this proposal. 
I believe that the quality of the school today has sunk, not because of lack of interest from the students but, because of great economy measures which have been done during the last ten years. 
Adding an extra year to the nine-year compulsory school would cost a lot of money, and if it is possible to procure this large sum of money I would rather use them in the existing school-system. 
Efficiency is reached when things are working very smoothly and with extra money it is a lot easier to get a hold of the existing problems. 
The problems will be solved by using the extra resources, for instance auxiliary teachers, whose number must e increased on each level. 
Several auxiliary teachers were standard in Sweden before the economy cuts. 
Pupils with problems should get help faster and there should be an investigation to clarify the cause of the problem and also what measures that has to be taken for each pupil who has a problem. 
Specialist teachers would then be able to concentrate on their own subject instead of playing the role of nurse, school welfare officer, or extra father or mother. 
This distribution of work and responsibility would make it possible for the students to develop both physically and mentally.  
It is also important to have in mind that pupils with problems are not the only ones that need extra support or extra resources. 
I believe that clever students also need support to keep up their good work and to continue with their development. 
If talented students are not encouraged to keep searching for information and knowledge they might stagnate in their learning-process. 
According to me, an extra compulsory year with general subjects and no specialisation for smart students would rather have a restraining effect than a strengthening one.   
The Swedish Folkpartiet emphasizes the importance of efficiency, progress and extra help for students who require special treatment. 
To make this work they argue for a ten-year compulsory school. 
In this case I would say that, if they have a concrete plan of how to procure the needed money for this project, the problem with the inefficiency of the Swedish school is solved, and this without even adding an extra year. 
With money it is easy to employ the extra needed resources, with money it is no problem to create a nice environment for the pupils, and with money the quality of the school will increase. 
It is easy for politicians and people in general to complain and it is just as easy to come with proposals, but not to realise them. 
The biggest mistake ever done, of which we now see a result, was the reduction of school-economy.
",False
" Capital Punishment  In my essay I would like to argue about, if a person or the authority of a state has the right to decide weather a criminal should be deprived its life or not, and how this method does effect ordinary people and the society. 
I will also discuss what is the difference between criminals and the authority of a country that use capital punishment, as a legally punishing method, and what I thing would be a better alternative instead of this penalty. 	
Capital punishment is the execution of a criminal who's sentence of death has been decided by a court. 
Capital Punishment was once a common penalty throughout the world. 
And it was inflected for a large number of crimes. 
However nowadays this kind of punishment has reduced more or less, as a result of people's struggle against old systems and old regimes. 
The World is now divided between countries that have abolished death penalty like Sweden, and those countries that have retained it, for instance Iraq, Iran, many deferent Muslim countries and USA, the later one has employed this method more than any other countries in the whole world. 
Before arguing for or against this penalty we have to take in consideration that every single person has the right to be treated faire in his/her life. 
It is every individual's basic human right, no matter what. 
Justice in a person's life could signify two factors, that is, no man has the right take life of another person's, and that a murder should or deserve to die.  
Those who have abolished death penalty have long time ago come to the conclusion, that this method is wrong and not effective in the long ran. 
For instance in the USA, the crimes are increasing more and more in spite of using capital punishment. 
Still there are a lot of countries that use this extremely cruel and grim way of punishing to preserve the justice in a society. 
In contrast I personally don't believe that capital punishment has that much power to deter people from committing crimes. 
The reason is that statistically there is no evidence that indicate this statement. 
In contrary those who have killed a person, it is said, that are rarely committing any crimes when released or paroled. 
Otherwise there is evidence that those who have committed other crimes such as burglary, drug crimes and those who abuse children sexually are committed the same crime over and over again, as son as they are realest. 
I'm of strong opinion that capital punishment gives the wrong impression to the ordinary, likewise it even could effect their life in domestic matters. 
I thing also that people's behaviour reflect a country's policy. 
Specifically if we take USA as an example, that have retained capital punishment, has the highest rate crimes involving a person's death. 
As I understand people in this country believe that they have the right to protect themselves by possessing guns. 
In this case they act like the government of their country.  
I believe that there must other effective penalty than capital punishment. 
Violence never solve any problem. 
In min opinion there is no differences between people or government of countries that are in favour of death penalty, and criminals who has committed homicide on a person who is not in self defend, because they actually do the same thing, they commit the same crime. 
Although the first one, that is the authority of a country, is doing it legally, for the sake of justice, in purpose of deterring people, and to create a better society of safety. 
This is what I think, that they think is the benefits of having capital punishment.  
I believe that countries, that have maintained capital punishment, argue also that this way of punishing has a unique power to scare people from committing crimes. 
I am of strong opinion that this is not the case. 
I think capital punishment is used because it is cheap and it might avoid vendetta and also because the criminals are sometime considered as dangerous to the society.  
Thus I consider this whole system completely wrong and unnecessary when I think better of it. 
There must be other methods that not contend to the right of human, namely imprisonment for long time or imprisonment for lifetime. 
It doesn't gain a country to get ride of criminals. 
In well organised prisons, prisoners would be economic assets. 
These prisoners should be required to do unpaid work within the prison, which is for the benefits of a country.   
I think the consequences of capital punishment are that people lose confidence for the authority of their country. 
Citizens might think that if it is legislative for the authority to deprive a person its life, then it might be OK for them too to take the law in their hand if they find it necessary in a particle situation. 
In this way they create a violent society instead of bringing order and discipline to their countries. 
I agree with those who argue that criminals should suffer for what they have done, and I think that they would suffer enough, by being deprived of their personal liberty, when they are given lifetime sentence. 	
Finally I would like to emphasise that, to use force against a criminal doesn't preserve justice or create a better society. 
If capital punishment is used, the authority are criminals too. 
Furthermore violence doesn't solve any problems in the long run.  
Nobody should have the right to take life of another person, no matter for what purpose, and in any situation, because it stride against human right and it also insult human dignity.
","1. 
Introduction The population of Sweden, and the population of other developed nations, becomes fatter. 
Because of that people get more sick and besides it costs a lot of money in public service. 
To change peoples attitude when it comes to food and training, in order to stop the development, is almost impossible. 
In this momerand I will argue in favour of pretty dramatical changes which are, according to my opinion, necessary to solve the problem. 
The most important thing is to encourage children and teenagers to become more active and therefore physical training at school must be a high priority. 
Adults in the working life also need exercise and training to stay as healthy as possible, and I suggest compulsory training during working-hours.   
2. 
Injuries 2.1 The physical and mental health of children and teenagers If you are in a good physical condition you feel better both physically and mentally. 
A fat person or a person who is not in a good shape will always bump into a lot of situations were he does not feel comfortable. 
If you are in good shape it is easier to concentrate in school which leads to better results. 
The most important thing is that you like yourself and whatever people say, there is no one who wants to be fat.  
A fat person often gets a bad self-confidence because of his weight. 
To have a good self-confidence and to live in harmony is very important whatever you are supposed to do. 
You will always perform better if you feel good about yourself because of the mental parts but also because of a better physical condition. 
A big problem is that if a person get in bad shape the mood to go training gets even lower and it becomes an evil spirit. 
When you are young it is most important to have a good self-confidence. 
At that time you are vulnerable and then you have the best opportunity to build a self-confidence for the rest of your life. 
You do not have to be fat!  
2.2 Adult people When you grow up you will have lots of problems if your weight is to heavy. 
If you have been fat since you were young it will probably have characterised your life in a negative direction. 
Your body might be worn and the fact that you have lived as a fat person has probably lowed your self-confidence. 
With fatness comes problems with your legs especially your knees. 
Often it also leads to vascular disorder and problems with your heart. 
When it comes to work many people get problems with their back, they get tired and they don't have enough energy to do a good work.   
3. 
Measures As I said in the introduction dramatic measures are necessary if we want to stop the negative development. 
In the first place I think we have to defend the physical training at school. 
When it comes to adults it is harder. 
You can't force an adult to train but I think that you can force the employer to facilitate training during working-hours.  
3.1 More training at school The training at school is very important. 
That is why it is unluckily that training at school is being reduced. 
I think we should have three lectures of training every week. 
Unfortunately there are pupils who feel uncomfortable when it comes to physical training at school. 
Many pupils even feel agony when they know that it is time for the training lecture. 
Here the teachers have an important function. 
I do not think the biggest problem is that pupils do not want to train but the problem is that they feel ashamed for them-selves. 
You cannot require that everyone shall be athletes but those who exercise regular will feel better and therefor their dislike of training lectures will disappear.   
3.2 More training at work any people have sedentary jobs or jobs which are monotonous and do not exercise in the spare time. 
The reason why many people do not exercise after work is because they have a lot of other things to take care of when they come home, things that they prior higher than their own health. 
The only solution to this problem has to be that the training can be done at work. 
Even among the adults should three times a week be suitable. 
I do not know exactly how this should be solved in practise, but some form of legislation is necessary.   
4. 
Conclusion People are getting fatter, that is a fact. 
Fatness and overweight is bad for your health, that is also a fact. 
If we do not do anything or make changes that makes it even worse, for example reducing the physical training at school, it will become a large problem for the society. 
So, it is a fact that we got to do something. 
It cannot be hard to understand that exercise in school is extremely important. 
It should also be very good if people could train at their place of work. 
I know that you at some places of work have the right to train at working-hours but in those cases we are talking about maybe an hour a week. 
That is not enough!
",False
"In this essay I am going to describe my knowledge in speaking, writing, reading and listening in English. 
I'm going to concentrate on my strengths and weaknesses in speaking and writing, with some comments on my reading and listening competence, between school and now. 
I've always liked English and since I started studying English in the 4th grade I've always found it a fascinating and challenging language. 
Even before that I terrorised my mother and father with lots of questions about different English words and phrases, and when we started studying English I tried to learn everything at once. 
I've had good teachers in English who have taught me very much, and they've helped me a lot. 
After upper secondary school, I went to France for one year and then to England one year; I wanted to practise my language skills. 
In England I lived and worked in London, at first I worked at hotel and then in a clothes shop. 
It was a very educating period, I learnt a lot of English and I got a chance to improve my oral English, which had never been good. 
When I went to school I mostly sat quiet and didn't do much to improve my skills in speaking. 
I found it easier to express myself by writing, because then I had time to think what I wanted to say, instead of letting the words slip out of my mouth and embarrass myself by saying the wrong words. 
And we actually never got any real chances to speak English in my school, it was always the teacher who spoke and held lectures. 
So we didn't really have any discussions, where we both talked and listened.  
After a while in London the words came naturally and I felt I could express myself quite easily, without twisting my brain too much. 
It was a tremendous joy when people gave me compliments for my English and some even asked if I was British or Irish!  
When it comes to my writing, I'm not happy about the development. 
As I said I've always found it easier to write than to speak. 
I used to feel more comfortable when I had it printed, and it gave me time to think of the spelling, the structure of the sentences, etc. 
I never had much trouble with the spelling, it has been clear to me how to spell easy and difficult words. 
But now it's not that obvious anymore. 
Well, I know how to spell, but sometimes I get uncertain of even the smallest and simplest word. 
I guess it's because I haven't written much in English since I went in school, and now I have to pay for it. 
To say something about my reading and listening, I don't think it has changed drastically from when I went to upper secondary school till now. 
I would read more, if I had more time.  
I like reading newspaper and novels, and I don't see it as an obstacle if it's in English, I rather see it as an opportunity for me to practise.  
I didn't like it when we had to listen to cassettes as a listening comprehension in school. 
I suppose that it was because I found it easier when I had the text or the questions on paper in front of me so that I could read them again if I had to and think a while before answering. 
I think I would like it more now, maybe because I've become more confident in myself concerning English. 
To conclude this essay, I will sum up the biggest changes I've noticed about my English; I feel more confident in speaking now, I speak fluently and find it easy to communicate. 
My writing (and spelling) is unfortunately not as good as it has been but that's something I will work with. 
When it comes to reading and writing I don't think that it has changed so much. 
On the whole I feel confident in my English and I hope I will develop my knowledge even more during this course and be able to go deeper into the study of the English language.
"," People's fear of the unknown  As I see it, the main theme of The Fifth Child is that we people are afraid of matters that we are not familiar with, things we do not understand, it is about people's fear of the unknown and their different ways of dealing with it. 
What we are not familiar with, we do not like and sometimes the unknown scares us. 
In this book, Ben is the cause of people's fear. 
The setting is a small town outside London, England, and the period of time is between the 1960s and the 80s, a period of changes; there were attitude changes and more and more criminality. 
In England as in many other European countries, it is not common to have many children, as it is in other parts of the world, and people like Ben are certainly not common. 
In other parts of the world Harriet and David might be considered to be just like everyone else, not being looked upon as oddballs (even for their wish for many children) as they are in their current society. 
That is why the setting is important for the main theme of the book.  
Harriet and David want to have a lot of children, at least six of them, but none of their friends or relatives understand why, it is not common to have a lot of children in their part of the world, and what is not common scares people. 
Dorothy, Harriet's mother, fears that it would be too difficult for David and Harriet to bring up that many children and she says that they sometimes scare her. (p 22) She does not understand why they have to rush the pregnancies as if the chance to have children would disappear if they do not have all the children at once. 
Although David and Harriet are careful, Harriet gets pregnant straight after the birth of their fourth child. 
Their fifht child, Ben, is born. 
Ben is not like the family's other children; he grows very fast physically, but develops slowly mentally. 
No one likes Ben, not even his parents and he shows ho feelings at all. 
Naturally Harriet and the rest think there is something wrong with Ben, and they are afraid of him because they do not understand him. 
Ben represents the abnormal in the book and by his parents and relatives fear of him we are shown how people might react when they confront something they are not familiar with. 
Ben is what we all would be if we did not have any emotions or remorseful feelings. 
But Ben cannot be changed or manipulated, he is who he is. 
He is also symbolic or every person's ability and way of being evil.   
""Happiness. 
A happy family. 
The Lovatts were a happy family. 
It was what they had chosen and what they had deserved."" (p 28) This sentence seems to have two references; one to their life before the birth of Ben and the other to when he is born. 
It means that you get what you deserve. 
Before Ben was born, they were a happy family and they deserved to be. 
But then Harriet and David obviously challenge the ""normal"" family's destiny by having more children than the ordinary family, and maybe that's why they deserve to have a monster child like Ben. 
That is another theme of the book; people's wish for more, they are not contented with what they have. 
Harriet and David should perhaps have been satisfied with their four children.   
Another problem raised in the book is the different opportunities for children who comes from wealthy versus poor families. 
Molly, David's mother, wants David to understand how spoiled he and his family are when he says that everyone should have a room. 
Molly says ""Everyone in the world! 
Everybody!"" 
and we can tell she is being sarchastic about David's ungratefulness when we read that ""She had intended to sound humorous"". (p 31) She wants David to realize how lucky he is to be well and happy. 
She thinks of poor children which do not have the same economic prerequisite as children like David's.   
The setting is important for the theme, it would have been a different story if it had taken place somewhere else in the world. 
Something that is normal and well in one part of the world, might be considered as strange and scarying in another. 
What people do not understand or are not familiar with scares them. 
Ben is different from the other characters in the book, and he is the cause of the destruction of the family's happiness.
",True
" Please, show more about the starvation on the television!  
For about two weeks the television and the newspaper have had the terror attack against the US as their biggest news. 
You can't turn the television on without hearing about where bin Laden is hiding, how the US is going to find him and if the US is going to declare a war against the terror. 
It was almost 7000 people who died in the terror attack and everybody feels sorry for them. 
At the same time, 30000 children are starving to death, every day. 
There is absolutely no defence for what the terrorists did to the US, but it is time that we think about other problems. 
If you feel sorry for the relatives and friends to them who died in World Trade Centre and Pentagon, think about the persons in for example Buenos Aires, who has to go through a lost of a child maybe not only once, but twice. 
It is time that we fight against the really big problem; it is time that we fight against the starvation.  
In short, there is absolutely nothing you or I can do alone, to stop the malnutrition in the whole world. 
The hunger makes the children defenceless against every bacterium. 
But together we can give the children a better start of their lives, but people tend to forget about all the starving children in other countries. 
All we think of right now is the terror attack in the US. 
Things that are not shown on television we don't find as real. 
The starving children are just something we hear about, but we cant really imagine how it is like in the poorest countries.  
Therefore I think that all the countries that support the US should think twice on what they are spending their money on. 
If there are going to be a war, several innocent people will have to offer their lives. 
And what if this war against the terror turn out to be something much bigger, World War Three, for example. 
Do we want to offer innocent lives in a war against the terror, or is it better to try to save innocent life in the war against starvation? 
The children do not need much money at all to survive and I think that it is better to spend the millions this war will cost, to save these innocent children's life.  
All of you that send money to the victims of the terror in the US please don't. 
Or do at least send half of them to the poor countries fight against the starvation. 
If you are sending your money to the US you are helping them to build some new buildings. 
If you are sending them to children in need, you might save lives. 
We have to think about what the most important thing is: that New York will look the same as it did before, or if it is more important to save lives. 
My opinion is that there is nothing that could be more important than to save children's life, because they are our future. 
World Trade Centre was just a building.  
As I mentioned before, there is absolutely no defence for the terror attack against the United States in New York and Washington. 
But it could be an idea to think about that they that killed them and thousands of other people knew that this was going to be showed on the television. 
The murders knew one thing. 
This is going to be good televisions for several weeks.  
The ones who are starving to death are not thinking about the television. 
They are thinking about how they are going to find food to survive. 
After some they give up and die.  
Finally I would like to say that it would be good if the media could focus more on the starvation that continues in the poorest countries every day. 
As it is today, the starvation is set aside. 
The one who think that it is not real because it is not showed on the television need to think about what power the television has over our mind.
"," Evaluation - English, My English!  
It all started the first week in school after a long and joyful summer vacation the year of 1990.
We all knew that something new was going to happen this year, we were going to learn a second language, but we didn't think of it much until that Wednesday. 
I don't remember much of what we did that first English lesson but I know that we learned how to say hello and my name is Ross and how are you.  
In my diary I wrote that day that we had started to learn English, and that it was fun. 
My parents have told me that I walked around the whole evening of that first English-learning day, saying hello and how are you, to my family. 
Yes, I was enthusiastic and eager to learn more then, and I still am. 
The years that followed that first year, my fascination for and will to learn English didn't decrease, as it did for some of my friends. 
No, I understood that languages was something for me, but I wasn't sure that I was a ""language-person"" until I had learned both Spanish and French without too much difficulties. 
I don't mean that I am a genius for languages, not at all, but I am very much interested of them. 
I have a lot of weaknesses, and perhaps some strength, and about them I will write now, as I have been told.  
I guess that I can comprehend most of the things that is spoken to me in English. 
But not so much technical language and other things that you don't hear much about. 
Of course I can basically understand what is spoken, but I don't have the vocabulary to understand technical language. 
And then we have the dialects. 
When I was in the U.S., Wisconsin, for a whole summer two years ago I didn't find it so difficult to understand what they said because they had no apparent dialect, but they talked rather fast and a bit ""slovenly"".
But when I talked to a gang of youths from Leeds last fall I really had to concentrate on what they said, because they talked with a strong dialect. 
A ""careless"" dialect I would say, I had to ask them to repeat what they said plenty of times. 
Of course could that depend on that I'm not used to hear British English or other sorts of English, but American English.   
I like to read books in English. 
When I want to read a book written by a English author I try to read it in English, a book is better in its original language I think. 
Now I don't think I have any bigger problems with reading English, because I am rather used to it. 
But the first book I read in English, The lord of the Rings by J R R Tolkien, took me some months to get through. 
At the beginning I looked up lots of words in a dictionary, but then I stopped doing that, because you could understand the sentences meaning anyway and guess the meaning of the word. 
My strengths in reading is that I have read books in English for some years, so I'm not unused to it. 
The weaknesses I have in reading is that I tend to skip the parts in the book that I find boring, for example too long descriptions of something and technical things. 
I know that I might miss things good to learn about, but I have problems with reading those boring parts, I just skim through it.  
When I came home again after a summer in the U.S. 
I could speak fluent American English, or, at least, good fluent for being a Swede. 
(OK, I can't judge it myself, but the Americans I lived with were impressed.) 
But now when I haven't spoken English for more than 11/2 year, I feel that my speech is very rusty. 
I can't find the words and my pronunciation is terrible. 
But I hope I can make it work again, that's one of the reasons why I have chosen this course. 
I guess that I have a rather good vocabulary, but I want to make it bigger.   
And then we have the writing. 
I feel that writing in English isn't what I'm best at. 
I write ungrammatical and incoherent. 
That can be because I write a lot of letters, and they tend to be written in a more incorrect grammatical way and in ""speaking-language"". 
I don't really know why, but it's the same way when I write letters in Swedish. 
They tend to be more ""informal"". 
So I'm really in a need of learning how to write in a good English. 
If I have any strengths in English it must be that I dare to write, even if I know it might not be so good. 
I know that the person who reads it will understand, hopefully everything, what I mean, even though it's not a correct English. 
If I write essays like this I know it will be marked, and I want it to be. 
Because then I can see what I have difficulties with and do exercises so I hopefully have less problems afterwards. 
It's the grammar I have most problems with. 
I know that I have learned lots of grammar and that I practice some of it when I write and speak. 
But where the rest of the grammar I have learned is I don't know. 
It must be in a well hidden place in my brain. 
So, I need to find that place and I hope that the grammar lessons can help me with it. 
To refresh my knowledge of grammar.   
Yes, I have big hopes on this English course. 
I really need to make my English knowledge better. 
And I know that it is up to me how much I'm going to learn, I know. 
And I will do as good as I can. 
Because I need and want to get better.
",False
" The end of the monarchy  It is time to abolish the too long borne paradox of having a hereditary head of a democratic country like Sweden. 
How can it be defended? 
As I see it, and as I will show here, there are no reasons why the monarchy should not be dismantled as soon as possible. 
Firstly it is a hypocritical blot on our democratic to have a hereditary head of state. 
Secondly it is stupefying not to recognise that the reasons for keeping it now are simply a romantic admiration for aristocracy and thirdly that there would be no damages or affections in a hypothetical dismantlement. 
The most fundamental reason for abolishing the monarchy is of course the preposterousness of the post, as national and international representative for a democratic country, being hereditary. 
It is a paradox which makes the entire democratic debate loose credibility. 
The Swedish monarchy is of course no immediate threat to the democracy, but if no reasons are left for keeping it, then it seems strange not to follow the transition through. 
Some may say that the monarch is only the ceremonial leader - but is it not a matter of principle rather than actual power, since the king/queen has no political influence anyway?  
This lack of power makes the monarchy superfluous. 
Its uselessness and out-datedness can be seen through the screen of historic and fictional fascination, but in the real world this only leads to the kind of awkward position we are in today where a monarch without any power is still treated as superior because of old times sake. 
In role-plays and fantasies- fine, but it does not belong in reality. 
Keeping the monarchy shows a dullness and a stupidity. 
I say stupidity, because what else has possessed us to keep it? 
It is kept due only to a romantic notion of an aristocratic system which has not been up to date since the dark ages and even then it symbolised tyranny and feudal repression. 
It is time to take the step and admit that it no longer has a place in our society. 
Being thus stupefying, the monarchy has nevertheless kept its foot in through this romantic want for tradition and perhaps also a misguided protectiveness towards the people. 
But the truth is no one would really be affected, were the monarchy to repealed, except for the royal family itself, being deprived of the already humiliating task of cutting ribbons at openings, and parts of the older generation who enrich their lives with the latest society gossip. 
The former might experience a passing feeling of being at a loss, but some representative commission could be organised for them as a transitional solution. 
The latter group should be satisfied by all the new gossip ensuing from this upheaval of the family they associate themselves with to such an extent. 
On the international level the results of an abolishment would be even pettier. 
Seeing that these are very modest consequences, there is no real need for a substitute. 
As far as international matters are concerned, the monarchs neutrality already limit him/her to dealing with humanity questions, something which could be handled by the appropriate minister. 
In national matters the monarchs' role as ceremonial leader would have to go to either the prime-minister or some other (not necessarily political) Swedish authority, local or national, depending on the circumstances. 
There reasons for abolishing the monarchy thus carries far greater weight than any arguments for keeping it. 
There are, as I have shown, no defendable draw-backs to its dismantlement. 
Getting rid of this hypocrisy would strengthen our moral conscience and amplify our belief in democracy. 
Shall we allow a blot like this to make us if not liars, at least contradictory, simply because it is the way it has always been? 
The monarchy is long since outdated and remains now only as a romantic notion of past times. 
It is not unreasonable to ask weather it is not time to take an active stand in the question of the monarchy's future and breaking the long passive acceptance of such a bizarre institution.
","During almost my entire life i have been hearing lots of different languages. 
I was raised in Geneva, Switzerland witch is a very international city in a country with no less then three large official languages. 
Both my parents come from Sweden and thus i spoke both Swedish and French fluetly by the time i was six. 
Since Geneva is such an international city my friends came from a lot of different countries so apart from the French and Swedish i was ""exposed"" to a large number of languages like German, Italian, Portugese, Spanish etc. 
The summer I turned ten we moved back to Sweden (after 9 years) and settled in Uppsala. 
My english at the time was probably about as good as any Swedish child of the same age. 
After a few years in Sweden i finished the 9'th grade and went on a one month English-course in London. 
During this month i stayed in an English family together with two boys from Denmark, however since my Danish is far from great we usually spoke English with each other... 
After this I started senior school in a nature-science program. 
I kept on studying German (a subject I started to study during the 7'th grade) as well as English and graduated with good grades in the three English courses that i could choose (A,B and C) Then after a semester of French studies at the University of Uppsala i am now studing English. 	
As mentioned above i have been listening to a large number of different languages for large parts of my life. 
Allthough i did not speak or understand several of these languages i am certain that this has given me a good base for my spoken English as well as my understanding of foreign languages. 
Geneva is as I mentioned a part of the French speaking region in Switzerland and thus I was mainly exposed to french TV and music contrary to Swedish children that are usually exposed to more English TV and music. 
However the differance was probably not that large since a large number of the TV-shows intended for children are translated in Sweden as well. 
One thing that has probably been very good for my english is the one month trip i made to London. 
During that time i was more or less forced to speak and listen to english at all times and this together with good teachers resulted in a great impovement in my spoken english as well as my abillity to listen to and understand english.  	
My abillity to write has always been rated differentely depending on the teachers that i have had. 
My spelling in most languages has always been shall we say less then perfect... however my abillity to come up with ideas to write as well as getting these ideas down on a peice of paper has always been rather good. 
When it comes to vocabulary i have also always had a fairly large vocabulary in the languages that i have spoken (however as mentioned the spelling of these words was not always perfect...) 
During senior school i did start to improve my spelling and I intend to keep working with it during this course.   	
Reading novels has never been any of my larger interests, i have usually not considered it as a form of toture either but i have been more interested in other things. 
I have however always liked to read magazines that took up issues that did interested me. 
During the past few years i have been having a subscription to at least one english magazine every month (Focus and Airliner World are the most recent ones) I have also been reading magazines like ""Newsweek"" or ""Time magazine"" that my father has subscribed to. 
I would not say that i am a fast reader but i guess i am rather average in that area.   	to summ this up i think that the childhood in a ""multi-lingual"" environement as well as my brief journey to London have been very good for my english and that my main strenghts lay in speaking as well as in my abillity to understand spoken english. 
What i will probably have to work the most with will probably be the written english and then particularly the spelling and different writing techniques.
",False
"Introduction In this essay I am going to evaluate my ability to use the English language. 
I am going to assess my strengths and weaknesses in the four skills of listening, reading, speaking and writing. 
Eight years ago I moved to the US and I stayed there for two years. 
The evaluation of my English is based on how competent I feel today, at this point. 
I must honestly say that I have lost a lot of my confidence in the English language since my days in the US and that includes all four skills more or less.   
The four skills Listening, is the one of the four skills that I feel most confident in, as we are being exposed to it almost everyday, especially through television. 
I feel that I understand most of what's being said unless the vocabulary include to much technical terms, is too academic, or if it's spoken with a lot of dialect. 
For me it's easier to understand American English compere to Brittish English for obvious reasons. 
Some times it can be a little bit confusing when, the above, use different words for the same thing. 
Reading in English take a long time for me since I lack some sort of reading speed, it takes a long time and for that reason I find it pretty frustrating. 
I studied for the teachers exam before this and some of our litterature was in English, I wasn't too happy about it then but now I'm glad because it gave me some practice in reading English non fiction litterature. 
Even though I may not understand every single word I usually understand the big picture. y biggest weakness at this point is the speaking skill. 
I don't speak fluently and I have lost a lot of my former vocabulary.
That makes it hard to speak spontaniously since I have to stop to think all the time,in order to find the right words and not make so many gramatical mistakes. 
I also experiance some sort of confidence barrier that is hard to cross, it may also have something to do with the meeting of new people, new teachers and a new course, that sort of thing. 
I have the weakness of being a little bit shy when it comes to speak in front of a whole new croud of adults. 
I am aware though, that the only way to improve is to practice talking, so that is what I'm going to do. 
I think that it's going to be a lot easier when we get to know each other, at least in our groups. 
I still have some of my pronunciation skill left so it doesn't sound too terrible but I'm sure it could sound much better. y writing skill is about the same as my speaking skill, I have lost a lot of my former vocabulary. 
I also recantly descovered that my spelling was rather poor so that is someting I have to work on. 
Another thing is the grammar wich I sometimes don't feel too secure about. 
Fortunate I still write with my family and friends from the US and that has given me some practice throughout the years.  
Summary In this essay I have compered my strengths and weaknesses in the English language. 
I have devided my competence in four different skills, the skills of listening, reading, speaking and writing.
I came to the conclution that I need to expose my self to the language on all four skills in order to get a larger vocabulary, fasten up my reading, get more secure and fluent in my speaking. 
I also need to study the grammar rather thoroughly. 
I think I will have the opportunity to practice all of this in the upcomming course and I'm locking very much forward to it.
","As this is to be an essay on a given topic, how competent I feel about my English considered four specific skills, I will here in the beginning briefly mention these four skills or parts and why I decided to go through them in this order. 
The four parts are listening, reading, speaking and writing English and I will go through them in this order because it reflects my English pretty well. 
The two more passive parts of listening and reading I use more often and therefore have more to say about than the more active parts of speaking and writing. 
And since I've never written an essay like this and really don't know how it is supposed to be I guess I'll just write down why it is like that. 
So, to start with listening to English. 	 
In the early eighties a small group of neighbours got together in Bolsta where I lived. 
They bought a satellite dish and soon, Bolsta being a very small town, everyone who wanted could receive satellite television as the company expanded. 
For the first time I had use for all these unnecessary lessons I had gone through in school to learn a new language. 
Of course Swedish television showed programmes in English but as they always were subtitled, why bother to try and keep up with what they said when you knew that you surely after a while would miss out on something. 
There was always someone who talked to fast or to blurry, at least for me. 
But now I had to try and keep up and learn because there was no text and that I think is why listening to English is my biggest strength considered all these four skills. 
I have done it longer than the other three and you don't always have to understand every word to understand the general meaning of something. 
The same thing is probably my weakness, it doesn't really matter whether you miss a word or not. 
As long as it's not a very crucial word you can be lazy and leave it unknown. 
Listening while you are in a dialogue with someone is a bit different and usually gives you the possibility of asking or having things repeated to you. 
So, I'm lazy, which is a weakness when it comes to my reading English as well.  	
When I'm reading a novel or any fictional literature it doesn't matter to me if I skip over a word every now and then. 
If I just understand the, again, general meaning of the text I usually don't bother to look up a strange word in a dictionary. 
To often the word is never that important and if you are just reading for fun the dictionary is just an unwanted interruption. 
That is my biggest weakness when it comes to reading. 
My strength is on the other hand that I've done quite a lot of reading in English. 
I've studied Philosophy and Literature before this and especially in Philosophy most of the courseliterature was written in English. 
And since I was studying I couldn't just leave out unknown words and thus learned some new words, words that I honestly never use and many of them I'm not even sure how to pronounce. 
Which brings me to the third skill, speaking. 	
When I was 20 years old I went to Switzerland to spend the winterseason in a small skiresort. 
Two years later I went back for a second winter and both times I lived with English-speaking people. 
So I used the language every day and by time I lost the fear, shyness or whatever you might call it of speaking English. 
That is probably my strength when it comes to speaking English. 
Although I speak far from good English I know that I usually can make myself understood. 
The weakness is that I use the language to seldom. 
Except from an occasional vacation abroad now and then I never speak English. 
I have no regular contact with English-speaking people and this weakness is also true about writing. 	
Basically I never write anything in English. 
Except for what I might have written in English in ""high-school"" this is the longest text as far as I can remember. 
So I really don't know what my strengths and/or weaknesses could be. 
Writing this I have found out that I'm lousy at spelling but apart from that I don't know and therefore I guess I'll have to leave that evaluation to the person who will read this.
",False
" Doctor Spivey-a friend of the inmates  Through out Ken Kesey's novel ""One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"", the inmates' lives are controlled by the strict and non-accommodating Nurse Ratched. 
Side by side but in the shadow of the nurse is another member of the staff who always tries to comply with the patients and that is Doctor Spivey. 
The aim of this essay is to give a clear description of Doctor Spivey's character.  
Before Doctor Spivey was engaged on Nurse Ratched's ward her doctors had been of short duration, and that indicates that this man has something special; something that Nurse Ratched can manage. 
Doctor Spivey is a little man with a peculiar shape of his head; all parts of his face are small. 
His minute eyes are situated very close and his nose is tiny which means that he has a problem wearing his glasses properly. 
When Doctor Spivey talks he frequently has to turn his head to keep his glasses in the right place. 
He keeps his glasses on a string and he always finds it difficult to find them and to get them on in time. 
In contrast to Nurse Ratched, Doctor Spivey is always very polite towards the patients. 
He is interested in what they have to say and he expounds conversations with honest questions, which makes the patients feel good and important. 
Doctor Spivey is human.  
""He's smiling a little as he turns through the folder, just as tickled by this new man's brassy way of talking right up as the rest of us, but, just like the rest of us, he's careful not to let himself come right out and laugh."" (p.45) Doctor Spivey does not have the ability to hide his emotions behind a face of iron, like Nurse Ratched does. 
The patients can always tell if the doctor is happy, sad, or nervous. 
Doctor Spivey feels very insecure when he has to talk in front of the group and Nurse Ratched. 
He does not know how to handle a situation where he is in the center. 
""The meetings are uncomfortable for the doctor unless he's talking about his theory; he'd rather spend his time down in his office, drawing on graphs."" (p.53) Doctor Spivey understands the, and they understand him because they have a lot in common; Nurse Ratched is in control of all of them. 
""He's maybe got more to say, but about this point the Big Nurse usually hushes him."" (p.49) Doctor Spivey is very amendable and he never voices his opinions, and that is how he has been able to manage this long on Nurse Ratched's ward. 
The patients who have been on the ward for a long time do not blame the doctor because they know exactly how the situation is. 
""The rabbits accept their role in the ritual and recognize the wolf as the strong."" (p.60) Of course Doctor Spivey and the patients are the rabbits and Nurse Ratched is the wolf. cMurphy's arrival at the ward is an upswing for Doctor Spivey. 
At once McMurphy can tell that the doctor is the one member of the staff who will listen, and that he is easy to get along with. 
McMurphy makes the doctor laugh and he encourages him to be brave and to suggest ideas in front of the group and Nurse Ratched. 
Doctor Spivey's self-confidence grows when he realizes that the group is supporting him, about the idea of a carnival on the ward, and this makes him talk with eagerness and enthusiasm. 
Suddenly the doctor feels exhilarated and for a moment he really believes that this wonderful idea will come true. 
He speaks with such conviction like everything is already decided and settled. 
It takes one look from Nurse Ratched and the doctor's dreams are dead. 
""He describes games, booths, talks of selling tickets, then stops as suddenly as though the Nurse's look had hit him right between the eyes."" (p.98) Doctor Spivey is afraid of Nurse Ratched just like the patients are. 
He never talks back to her. 
She makes him feel like he is not worth anything, like he is dumb. 	
However, the doctor gets a new chance and also this time McMurphy is the cause of the doctor's interest in the patients' request about the radio and the old tub room. 
This time Doctor Spivey's idea becomes a fact and he is so pleased with himself that he seems to have forgotten that it really was McMurphy's idea. 
Doctor Spivey sees this as a victory. 
He feels that he himself has managed to do something important for the patients, and for himself. 
He made a decision that Nurse Ratched did not overrule. 
Doctor Spivey is scared and insecure but he can be tough too, and he always takes up for his patients.
","At the age of 20, I now look back at my English studies and it seems unreal that ten years have gone by since I was in the 4th grade, which was my first year of English. 
I can still remember how we sang ""John Brown"" and practiced the colors by writing a book. 
Everybody also had to choose a name from an English speaking country. 
Most of my classmates had a name from the American soap opera ""Dallas"", such as Pamela, Bobby, and Jenna. 
I was called Patricia, a name, which my mom came up with. 
These are my first memories from studying English. 
In elementary school, English was more a game than a subject and I loved it. 
In middle school I started with German and I felt that my English was neglected, which really worried me. 
German was hard but very logical and I knew and understood the grammar. 
I could tell the German prepositions in my sleep, whereas I did not know anything about the English prepositions. 
After middle school I began to dream of a school year abroad. 
I made up my mind as I started high school, not only because I was worried about my English skills, but also because I longed for adventure. 
Thanks to my parents this dream became true in 1996. 
After my second year of high school I left for Indiana, U.S.A. 
My question for this paper is: what have I learned during these ten years of studying English? 
Which are my strengths and weaknesses in the four skills of listening, reading, speaking, and writing?  
As a result of my school year in the U.S. my ears have become very familiar with the sound of the English language at an everyday level, especially American English. 
My time abroad forced me to really listen and pay attention to what people said. 
Since everything was in English I learned just by living there. 
I do not have a problem understanding spoken English at an everyday level, but I am very aware of the differences in levels and I know that I still have a long way to go.  
When it comes to reading the school in Sweden spent quite some time on that, at least at the high school level. 
Studying in the U.S.A. 
I also had to do a lot of reading, which I sometimes found difficult, especially in classes such as government and economics, since there were so many terms that I was not familiar with. 
I do fine reading novels and I have learned to use the context when there are words that I do not know. 
I enjoy reading novels in English, but I find it harder to understand shorter texts. 
Perhaps I need more information to really get it. 
A time limit stresses me and I tend to read too fast; that is probably why I have a problem with short stories, and I never did as good as I wanted to on reading and comprehension tests in high school.  
Due to my time in the U.S.A. with the Americans my spoken English developed tremendously. 
I did not realize how much my school English had changed until my sisters came to see me; I had then been in the U.S.A. for one semester. 
Listening to their English I understood that my English had been given an American touch. 
I learned to use new words and speak although I was not sure that it was correct. 
I came to the point where I allowed myself to make mistakes and I let people laugh at me. 
Sometimes my tongue really got twisted and I said the craziest things, yet my mistakes taught me more than I would ever have learned if I had been quiet. 
Speaking English sometimes makes me nervous, and in a strange way I feel more relaxed speaking English with, or in front of, English native speakers than I do with my countrymen.  
Writing is the skill in which I have not had very much practice, not even in the U.S.A. since the tests were always made up of matching or multiple choice questions. 
My third, and last, year of high school in Sweden I took a class called ""English C"" and there we actually practiced writing. 
We wrote formal letters, personal notes, leaflets, and book reviews. 
I get a lot of practice by my own since I have so many friends in the U.S.A. to whom I frequently write letters and e-mail messages. 
A big problem that I have when I write is that I neither feel comfortable with my spelling, nor my grammar. 
In other words: I really need more writing exercises.  
Finally, I want to point out that I have learned a lot during these ten years but still ten years is a long time and I feel that I could have learned more than I did. 
My year in the U.S.A. has given my English an American touch and it also gave me the willingness to study English at the university. 
I can listen, read, speak, and write English at an everyday level. 
I can survive and live a normal life in an English speaking country. 
However, I want more that that and I know that the way is long!
",True
" Television - Friend or Enemy  Do you let your children watch television rather than participate in a more useful activity, simply because it's so convenient to place them in front of the box? 
Without exaggeration I would like to say that television and the electronic media in a whole, has taken over our lives. 
In this essay I'm going to put forward my opinions and views, when it comes to the importance of the television in modern society, and in the family of today, and I will also look at some points and comparements of the present and the past influence that television has had on us. 
In my considered opinion there are both good and bad sides to the television media today. 
There is absolutely no doubt that television has defracted from the traditional family values that my parents know and love. 
In not too distant time the opinions of the older people in the community were listened too, valued and acted upon, due to the fact that these people were respected. 
Nowadays so little time is actually spent by parents educating there young in traditional values, that the message has been lost, the message to respect and listen to what your parents have to say and think. 
In many ways the advent of television could be blamed for this. 
It is now long ago, since the television was considered to be an amusement box only. 
The development has gone quickly, and on the way we have lost a lot of important values. 
I do not have to think long to be able to give an example, as my own family is a perfect one. 
I remember as a child, I was never allowed to watch much television at all, and now a decade later my twelve year younger sister is growing up, with only a few minor restrictions within the area. 
I do not think that the big difference in our upbringings in this particular matter, has been a specific intention of my parents, it has been more of a result of the changes in society and in particularly the impact of television as a media. 
Ten years ago it was still the parents who had the ""power"" to decide what the child was allowed to see on television and not. 
Today it is harder to be a parent, as the spectra of programs that have children as their target group is getting bigger and bigger. 
In addition to what I just mentioned, I also would like to point out what an extremely important role television plays in the early years of a child. 
When you think about how much information children of today take in from watching television, you realise the importance of the actual content of the programs. 
They are no longer there only to amuse but also to be a good, trustworthy and educating media, seeing as children do spend a lot of their time in front of the box. 
It is not easy though when you think about the hard competition there is in most modern countries between television channels today, to catch the eyes of watchers with an educating program and on the same time be interesting, funny and extraordinary. 
That is what the hard concurrence that rules nowadays is all about. 
If you have this in your mind that programs for children actually do get more and more educating and interesting you soon realise that there is not only a bad side of the story. 
Of course it's not good at all if parents use the television as a stand in baby sitter, but if the different channels follows the development in society and adjust their programs to the new target group, it can also be good.  
To sum up this discussion I would like to point out the enormous change that television has gone through over the last ten years. 
I believe that the development will go on, even if in a slower tempo during coming years. 
This fact should not only be looked on as being a bad development but we should also realise that the new technology brings us a lot of information that we never would have got hold on without it.
"," BOY SHOT DOWN IN SCHOOL!  
When did Sweden become a country like any other country in the world? 
When did we first start to worry about locking our doors while going away to the shop? 
When did we for the first time feel that we had to take an extra look over our shoulder while walking the dog, to make sure that their would be no one behind us? 
How did this happen to us in this country that used to be known as one of the greatest and safest countries in the world, and why did this happen? 
These are questions that one can ask himself when it's over and too late, but yet we have time to change things, it's not all over. 
My belief is that we have to start this process by looking closer into the school system, after all that is where it all starts. 
Recently we've been given shocking news about the situation in Swedish schools, both from media, like newspapers and television, but also locally through neighbours and local authorities. 
It's when it comes down to this level that people starts to wake up and realise that something isn't right. 
What is wrong with schools in Sweden today, and what can be done about the problems? 
Some people believe that the solution is to upgrade the laws that involves the way schools are ran today. 
To increase the personal safety people are suggesting to have metal detectors be installed in certain schools or let guards patrol the school area to make sure that everyone is safe within the premises. 
I don't think that is the right way to handle the problem. 
We have to believe that it's possible to go back in time and find an explanation to when and why things started to drift out of hand. 
I believe that we make an enormous mistake if we go down the same road as they have done in the US to solve problems, a system where peoples integrity is more or less gone and where the school has given up it's responsibilities to policemen, who now are responsible for the safety and well-being of the students. 
I do understand that school-boards in schools with difficulties do have to put up with an enormous amount of criticisms from parents and society. 
They are more or less forced to do something radical about the problems, as quick as possible. 
I also think that now is the time to stop and think not only one time but twice, before we make a mistake that will leave scars in our nation for ever. 
So now I've said that the easy solution is not always the best one. 
That was very easily said, but to give examples to what could be done instead is not as an easy task. 
I'm not saying that I know the best way to tackle the problem, but what I do know and what I think is the elementary answer to all the questions that are related to this problem, is that we have to start believing in the goodness of people again. 
Once we start trusting each other we can start solving the problems we have. 
To do something like installing metal detectors to make sure that no one goes to school carrying a gun or a knife might solve an indirect problem, that some students for different reasons, actually pass the school entrance with some kind of weapon on them. 
On the other hand it certainly will not treat the heart of the problem. 
If you can't trust, you will not be trusted, in this case only held back. 
To sum up the content of my message I would like to emphasise upon how important I think it is to not be influenced to much by other countries. 
We who live together in this country have to build up the kind of trust that we used to hold for each other, starting with that we have to feel good about ourselves. 
Tell me, who would feel good about themselves if they weren't trusted?
",True
" Should it be against the law to be a Nazi?  
Hatred of foreigners (xenophobia) has always excisted. 
People have always been afraid of the unknown, afraid of people and things they do not know. 
One of the big dictatorships during the twentieth century was Nazi Germany which was most powerful during the second world war (1933-1945). 
During this time millions of people were persecuted and killed. 
Those who managed to escape from the Nazis and the horrors of the war tried to find a secure place in the world where they could feel safe from antisemitism. 
Nazism is nowadays considered by most people to be an upsetting ideology that led to horrible violations against minorities and people of different ethnic origin. 
However nazism has not always been the prime subject of discussion and it has not always been clearly visible, but during the past few years the discussions about rasism and antisemitism have again been raised due to the violence and threats made by the neonazis of our society. 
The latest debate has been about the question of whether or not nazi organisations and their activities can and should be forbidden. 
My opinion is that nazi organisations should not be forbidden since banning these organisations would mean that not everybody would be allowed to have an ideology, an opinion or views of one's own and that is one of the human rights.   
Everybody should have the right to their own opinion, conviction and belief and they should also have the right to express them, irrespective of nationality, colour of the skin and religion. 
To ban an organisation would mean banning all their activities, such as demonstrations, meetings, concerts, distribution of music, magazines and information and thereby also the ability to express opinions. 
This would be a threat to democracy and human rights since we believe that everyone has the right to demonstrate and state one's opinion as long as one does not brake any laws by using force or offending anyone. 
According to our laws nobody is allowed to violate other peoples rights, and even if rasists have horrible views, they still have the same rights as long as they do not commit any crimes. 
Valid legislation must be used and interpreted so that society, people and their rights are protected. 
Legislation is for protection and therefore I believe that we should have a strict policy and not be afraid of using laws. 
These laws should protect everyone, except the criminals. 
Instead of banning the organisations and their activities it is up to all of us to show that nazism and antisemitism is not acceptable. 
Everybody has to follow the rules that are set up by society and the people in it. 
We all have the choice to listen to or to dissociate from nazi propaganda and information is the only way to enlighten people. 
Communication between ""us"" and ""them"", together with teaching history are tools for reducing xenophobia.   
If the organisations were to be banned there would be a big risk that they would go underground. 
They would grow under the surface. 
They would find ways to spread their ideology in illegal ways and authorities would not have any kind of control over them. 
Banning organisations does not make the problem of xenophobia and rasism disappear.   
Is banning nazi organisations the best solution for the society? 
I do not think so. 
If we use the argument that these organisations are not democratic we must remember that neither are we, if we prevent a particular organisation from expressing their opinion. 
Who gives us the right to decide which groups have the right to give their view. 
Even if these views can be horrible and disgusting, you still should have the right to state them. 
I become angry and frustrated when I hear nazi propaganda, but I still think they have the right to think and feel any way they want. 
If we were to decide that extreme nationalsocialism is forbidden, the next question would be: Are there any more groups that do not agree with ""our"" views?   
In conclusion I believe that these arguments are reasons enough for allowing any groups of people to gather and think/discuss/propagate their opinion, even if this opinion disagrees with that of the majority.
"," Fear of the uncontrollable  I will in my essay describe what I see as the main theme of Doris Lessing's novel The fifth child and I will also discuss the setting in which the story takes place. 
The main theme of the book is fear. 
Fear for the unknown, the unusual, the things you do not understand and fear of the things you can not explain or controll. 
Also the fear of loosing what you have been building up. 
The story takes place in a small town outside London in the 1960's and in the following 25 years.  
The story of the Lovatt family and their relatives and friends takes place in David and Harriet's large victorian house in a small town outside London, where all friends and family are invited to celebrate births, big holidays and to just enjoy the family life. 
The atmosphere is warm and friendly. 
Love and happiness is filling the house and the people in it, but there is always a sence of fear present.  
David and Harriet's dream is considered to be an odd idea. 
Family and friends are not very supportive, criticizing them and calling them old-fashioned, wrong-headed and mad for buying the house of their dreams. 
(Flamingo/Paladin pp 18) The lack of understanding and support can be interpreted as everybody feeling threathened, maybe by the self-confidence and determination David and Harriet are radiating or, maybe by the fact that this young couple is not like everybody else.  
We are all through the book reminded of the perfect family life where there is only love and happiness, but we are also introduced to unhappiness and fear of the unusual. 
We are given examples of different ways of handling and reacting to fear.  
Amy, Harriet's niece, is born with Down's syndrome. 
People react in very different ways to this child. 
Sarah, the mother tries to hide her: ""But the poor baby was in Sarah's arms, covered up so as not to upset everyone..."". 
(Flamingo/Paladin pp 33) We are given the impression that Sarah is ashamed of her and that there is something wrong with her. 
William, Amys father is keeping distance:   "".....
William, was not at all at the table, but lounging against the wall; and the little distance expressed what he felt his relation to the family was.......and his new daughter, the Down's syndrome baby, appalled him"". 
(Flamingo/Paladin pp 32)  I see him keeping distance as a reaction of him being afraid. 
Amy is not like the other children and he does not know how to take care of her, so he turns away. 
Harriet is looking for an explanation for Amy being different:  ""Harriet says to David, privately, that she did not think it was bad luck: Sarah and William's unhappiness, their quarreling, had probably attracted the mongol child......."". 
(Flamingo/Paladin pp 29)   Harriet is afraid. 
There must be an explanation for why Amy is born with Down's syndrome. 
If there isn't one it could mean that it could happen to them aswell. 
We get a picture of Harriet convincing herself that their happiness will protect them.  
Then Ben is born. 
David and Harriet's fifth child. 
The mood in the book changes. 
All the happiness and joy disappears and the happy family life is destroyed. 
Everything is replaced with fear, uneasiness and distance between people. 
Everybody is afraid of Ben. 
Harriet is coming up with different explanations to what Ben is. 
He is considered to be something out of this world, ""he is like a troll, or a gobbling or something"" (Flamingo/Paladin pp 61) Nobody is able to connect with him, he is not one of them and the fear for Ben destroying the family or hurting someone is growing stronger,   ""'But he is normal', said Harriet, grim. 
'The doctor says he is'. 
'He maybe normal for what he is. 
But he is not normal for what we are'"". 
(Flamingo/Paladin pp 79)  Ben did not fit into the picture of the happy family, so he is sent away. 
When the dream that David and Harriet were trying to fulfill was about to be destroyed they were ready to protect it with just about anything, even sending their child away. 
Feelings of guilt makes Harriet bring him back. 
They try to make him fit in, but it never works, maybe because the fear and uneainess they are feeling.   
The fear of the different and the fear of not being able to control or explain everything in life is what The fifth child is about. 
The characters are reacting to fear in various ways and they are trying to protect themselves from unhappiness by hiding, keeping distance to and by sending away the people that are making them feel uneasy. 
Fear is always present but also the desire to preserve the happiness and your dreams.
",True
" A three-course dinner  Violent behaviour and teenagers committing criminal acts against other teenagers have increased rapidly in the last few years. 
This development has a source somewhere and the blame has been set upon television. 
This is according to me to take a shortcut because it isn't the real source of the problem. 
Locking out the violence, as it is described in the article, is a step in the right direction but maybe not the correct way to approach this problem. 
It has been shown that things we forbid our teens from participating in are actually the things most exciting to participate in.  
News has become more of a shorted Hollywood-picture rather than ordinary news. 
If you are to be somebody important in contemporary society you have to make something really astonishing. 
This forces the criminals to commit more fearsome crimes than they used to.  
This development should be blamed within media. 
Teenagers can still be turned around earlier and I think that we are not focusing on the problem properly. 
The root of the problems lies within what sort of role models we feed our teens with.  
Stallone and Schwarznegger-pictures don't make blockbusters any more. 
People are fed up with the ordinary. 
A blockbuster today is something out of the ordinary, something really shocking. 
That development can also be seen in news reporting. 
Local news has become more of a shorted Hollywood picture rather than ordinary news. 
Today's main topics seem to be more towards disasters, violence, and crime rather than politics and other social issues. 
You can't make high ratings today by having the head of state saying something about the economic situation in the country, for example. 
If you want the highest ratings he, the head of state, has to be involved in something fishy. 
That makes people watch.  
This development has made a substantial effect on society. 
If you want to be somebody, so to speak, you have to make something out of the ordinary to be acknowledged as someone important. 
Rapists are nowadays more or less, I'm sorry to say, a part of society. 
We are not shocked if a young girl is raped and this development towards a sort of acceptance is extremely alarming and absolutely dreadful. 
Culprits who want to make big headlines have therefor been forced, I would say, to take their criminal activities up to a higher level. 
Maybe the rapist needs to commit manslaughter if his criminal act is to be on the front page of the morning paper.  	
If you were to ask a group of teenagers in the 1970's who their biggest role models were you would certainly get many pop-gurus or politicians as first priority. 
Ask the same category today and the answer might be more shocking. 
My guess is that many criminals are in the top 10. 
If you look at Sweden you will see that things like gang activity and muggings made by teenagers against other teenagers have increased rapidly in the last few years. 
These types of muggings, especially, are criminal acts that have spread like wild fire in the last year, within schools. 
This criminal behaviour originates in what sort of role models we give our teenagers. 	
Giving our teenagers more believable role models is a solution that will last in the long run that's my opinion at least. 
The places to start with are the schools. 
I can give you a personal experience. 
I had, in 8th grade, a teacher who was very inspiring. 
He didn't give up until everybody in the class understood what he meant. 
This made the whole class like his subject, maths, and he made everybody pass the course. 
You could see that he really enjoyed teaching, not something that you can say about many teachers today. 
He is still today one of my role models and a real source for inspiration, that I can tell you.  
If every teacher where more like him more kids would be interested in doing their homework rather than going out in evenings.  	
Teenagers have no proper role models to rely upon in contemporary society. 
Take a trip back to the 1970's and look a top ten of role models. 
Pop-gurus and politicians are likely to be found in the top spots. 
In contemporary society this list is more alarming, as it probably would consist of criminals and other bad role models for our teens. 
Today's focusing, in media, are more towards crime, violence, and disasters. 
This makes the teens to subconsciously receive a picture that this is the way to live if I want to be somebody. 
This also makes criminals commit more fearsome crimes than they used to. 
Locking out the violence is not the solution to teen criminals and violent behaviour. 
It has been shown that things that are forbidden are the things that are the most exciting. 
The V-chip, discussed in the article, would probably get the reversed effect rather than stopping the violence from increasing. 
It certainly is a step in the right direction, but I think we're forced to reconsider this alternative and focusing on the real problem here. 
Forming the proper type of role models could certainly begin within the schools. 
Making teachers more involved in their pupils is the right way start of with. 
Teachers can make a big influence on their pupils if they want to. 
Teachers that enjoy their work can easily turn around pupils that are going off in the wrong direction, but you have to see this development early if there is to be a chance for recovery. 
Teachers are substitute parents as well as teacher during the early years of school and this might easily be forgotten.
"," ""Why spoil a good mother to make an ordinary grammarian?"" 
Nineteenth century attitudes to female education  During the later part of the 19th century British feminists and other groups in society began to question whether British women were entitled to education in the same extent as men or not. 
A young woman's teens was nevertheless only a preparation for motherhood, at least that was the main opinion during this period in time. 
Schooling was considered a way for a young girl to get social rather than intellectual skills, and that was something that she could get at home. 
What these reformists didn't consider was the fact that in order to make female education possible they would have to change the common way people thought of women, as mothers.  
And let's be honest, there were more arguments against than for educating the British woman. 
Opponents used everything from medical conditions, such as brain capacity, to economic disadvantages to make their point. 
What came to be a turning point in female education was the question regarding the British woman's role as a mother for future Englishmen. 
In order for Britain to remain a role model for other countries the British woman had to be educated in skills other than needlework and music to be a satisfactory mother for the future sons of Britain, at least that was the arguments used by the reformists. 
Opponents nevertheless continued to claim that women couldn't study the same subjects as men and certainly not in the same pace because men simply were more intelligent than women were.  
Differences between women and men regarding intellectual skills were constantly debated when trying to reform women's right for education. 
What seemed to be a typical woman attribute was that she was insightful and sensitive, hence quick to catch a point. 
On the other hand she had no ability to concentrate or weigh evidence in making a judgement, hence she had no stamina for studying in higher institutions. 
Opponents to female education claimed that the world had not produced any women counterparts to great men like Mozart, Shakespeare or Raphael. 
There were two other arguments that the opponents used against female education. 
First, as education was very costly, only those with the highest potential should receive education. 
Men had higher status and thought to have higher potential than women and should therefor be prioritized to receive education. 
The second argument used was that the higher up one went the educational ladder the less value was there in educating women since they were not capable of great creative work and had less concentration skills. 
What opponents used, as an argument for this, was the medical condition that men had bigger brains than women did and therefor women were unable to comprehend, let alone share, the great creative powers of men. 
There was therefor no point in trying to make girls study the same subjects as boys; it was a waste of time and money. 
Those few women who possessed the necessary skills for higher education were said to be a poor example of womanhood. 
As Miss Becker puts it, ""They could hardly be considered well-developed specimens of womanhood"". 
Education for girls were, as mentioned before, seen merely was a preparation for marriage for young girls. 
They were taught only accomplishments suitable for their roles as good wives and mothers. 
Feminists claimed that women needed skills similar to men's if they were to remain unmarried. 
This argument was unfortunately not one that made much effect on the debate. 
What instead became the turning point in the discussion about female education was just the question about motherhood. 
What people (mostly men) began to understand that educating the women of Britain was important because ""they were to be the mothers of Englishmen"" (Sally Mitchell) and needed domestic skills in order to perform satisfactory in this situation. 
The reformists used the opponents' arguments about motherhood against them and tried to scare them into think that the British women were unable to perform satisfactory in their role, as mothers, if they hadn't received the proper education required for the situation.  
Women's colleges were put up as a result of this reform and it soon was acknowledged that women actually could study the same subjects and at the same level as men did.  	
So what made female education in Britain possible was the fact that the British became scared that they were gonna lose their position as role model country in Europe. 
Female education was during the later part of the 19th century considered as a waste of time and money partly because women were only seen as mothers and not people. 
They had less potential than men did to perform great creative skills, because of their lack of concentration. 
This assumption proved to be wrong when women finally got access to the institutions of higher education. 
As mentioned before, women had no trouble studying the same subjects and at the same pace as men.  
So the British population reconsidered their attitudes to female education, you actually can make a grammarian out of an ordinary mother.
",True
" The Swedish purchase of Gripen fighter planes.  
Introduction Sweden is right now in a process of upgrading the airforce with new Gripen fighter planes, which eventually will replace the old Viggen system. 
The idea of a new aircraft, to modernize the Swedish Airforce and later take over after Viggen, came in the late 70's. 
But it would take several years before the first prototype stood ready. 
The criteria was that it had to be smaller, faster, cheaper, lighter, harder to detect, with a better range and load capacity than Viggen. 
Another criteria was that it had to be nicer to the environment. 
After a lot of discussions and pie throwing, the contract for these new fighter planes to the Swedish Airforce were signed in 1982. 
The amount of aircraft in the order have been modified a few times and finally ended up at about 220 planes. 
The first operative division were placed at F7 in 1993. 
I think we needed this new Gripen system to replace the old Viggen, and to keep a modern airforce. 
Since Gripen is an instable aircraft it can turn in a smaller radii than most other aircrafts. 
And by instable I mean that it takes many cooperating computers just to keep the plane in the air, flying straight.  	
In the future we might be able to use it in peacekeeping missions, maybe under the UN flag. 
In that case I think it would be reconnaissance missions, such as photographing strategic locations and troop movement.  	
Since 220 planes are to many for the new military organization, we might be able to export the Gripen system to other countries and in that way make some money for the Swedish defense. 
South Africa have already bought a couple of fighters, and wemight have some other potential buyers in Austria and Chile, were we have been showing our new system. 
Austria have bought Swedish fighters before and they say that they are very pleased so far with the service and social contacts. 
As an answer to a possible counter-question I would say: -No, I don't think that every country who buy Gripen will use it for peacekeeping missions. 
But I still don't think that we, by exporting the Gripen system, encourage warfare and invasions. 
We only sell an airplane, not any special weapons, missiles or bombs for example. 
Those things they have to buy from other countries, just like we do, and that would be their job to stop unauthorized countries from buying these kind of weapons. 
I don't know if this is such a smart expression by the Swedish minister Goran Persson, but this is roughly what he said during a press conference: ""If we don't sell fighter planes to them, they will get it somewhere else"". 
That might be true. 
And in this case Sweden doesn't have anything to lose; we have to many Gripen planes, so why not sell them instead of having them standing useless in a hangar. 	
This plane will last for many, many years to come, since you just have to maintain the body of the plane and then simply upgrade the software in it, such as the guidance system and flight system as a whole. 
This is pretty easily done since the Gripen planes consists of about 40 computers. 
Since this is such an advanced aircraft it must be limited not to do more than 9 G:s, because the pilots can't handle so much more and certainly they can not take as much G:s as the plane can.  	
Due to all the crashes and delays many people think this whole project has become much more expensive than it was budget for, but they are so wrong. 
In reality, it became cheaper than expected. 
And since there have been a couple of crashes, people have had doubt about how good it really is. 
But, I say but again, almost every new airplane in the stage of development have crashed once or twice, because of so called teething troubles. 
You learn by you mistakes. 
Just look at the last Swedish system during development, Viggen, which made even more crashes than Gripen during it's first years. 
The first crash with the Gripen came when the pilot were going in for landing during the sixth flight. 
Another example is the American F-16 and the stealth fighter F-117, which have gone down a couple of times and still does. 	
Despite of the cost for the Gripen project, we still have a fairly modern defense in the army and navy. 
The navy has just got a new ship called YS2000 and a lot of new material have been bought in for the army. 
This might show the rest of the world that ""little Sweden"" can do it on our own.
"," Today on TV  This essay is supposed to show my reflections on the uses and abuses of television in society. 
I think that both television and computers have had quite a similar evolution through history. 
When TV first came, it was made for the wealthier families that could afford this new technology. 
This was also the case with the computer technology when it did break through. 
Today these kinds of technologies exist in almost every household and are a part of our daily life.  
The problem with TV today is that there are so many programs and news broadcasts to watch, almost twenty-four hours a day. 
For some people this is very devastating, because they might have problem getting their work done, for example schoolwork, preparing lessons etc. 
It's so easy just to sit down in the couch, to relax, flip through the TV-channels and simply get caught in front of the TV, instead of doing the things you should do. 
I know, because I've been there myself during the high-school years. 
Because of the fact that the selection of available TV-channels have increased, there is now at least one channel for all kinds of people, music, news, education programs, science programs etc, something for everyone to like. 
Because of this, TV has a big influence on our lives. 
Personally I think it's quite relaxing to study to the sound/music played on both MTV and ZTV. 
Because of the fact that these channels play a lot better and more various music than the radio does, my TV is on during the time I'm at home.   
TV is a great communication medium to reach a lot of people, with news, current events, science breakthroughs and a lot of other important information. 
But, unfortunately there are great deals of bad commercials shown too, some of them meant to trick people in buying worthless things. 
And many people do, maybe because it's so easy. 
It's just a phone call away. 
Lately, I think that Internet has gained ground against TV in several areas. 
You can see videos, moving pictures, read updated news, sports and learn about science in quite a funny way, purchase food, computers and so on. 
As with TV and computers in their early days, there was only a small part of the population that had access to the Internet a few years ago. 
Today almost every computer owner has access to the Internet in some way. 
I think that Internet will keep growing and affect our lives even more in the future. 
But still, TV isn't to be forgotten in the future.  
I think that TV programs and commercials influence children today more easily than it did ten or fifteen years ago. 
This may be because society today is more cruel and tougher. 
Some children programs show a lot of beating and violence in general, and they do it in a funny way. 
What kinds of impression do these programs give young children? 
They might think that it's OK to beat up their friends, just like the do on TV. 
And then they are surprised that he/she starts to cry or get hurt. 
It doesn't seem to hurt on TV. 
I think you have to teach your children that it's only a program, not real life, or don't let them see these kinds of programs at all until they are ready for it. 
At this point I'm just guessing, I can't speak from my own experiences because I'm not a parent, so please don't take it in the wrong way.  
Today there are a lot of soap/documentary programs, such as Big Brother, Villa Medusa, Mullvaden and many more. 
I don't know why these programs are so popular; maybe because todays stressed society don't allow ordinary people to do these kinds of things. 
Another possible cause may be that the viewers like to see other people in a worse situation than they are in by themselves. 
(I don't know, just guessing.) 
Anyway these programs have a very big audience that continuously follow the competitors ""progress"" on TV.   
As a conclusion I think that TV has affected our lives for as long as we have had access to it, and I think it will keep doing that for quite some time, even though Internet and computers will affect us more and more, whether we like it or not.
",True
"I've always been interested in different sorts of languages, but I think that english is the language that has been the most fun during my years in school. 
I must also say that all the teachers that I've had, have affected me in a very positive way. 
That might be the big reason to why I want to become an english teacher. 
I've always had enjoyable english lessons and I want my students to get the same experience as I've got.  
When I think of it, I don't think it is mainly the teachers that has affected me, wanting to learn some more about the language and how to use it. 
Through the years I've done some travelling, and I think its the excitement in wanting to get to know other people and cultures that has made me curious. 
Also when I look at all the yars that has passed, I find myself among all the other students, sitting listening to a lecture as it has been on swedish. 
I mean...its just such a feeling to know that the brain or whatever there is inside, can just switch from one langage to the other and we still respond in the same way. 
Maybe it sounds a bit fussy in the way I describe my feeling about it, but I think, or at least hope, that I have made myself understandable.  
That is by the way one of the things that I want to develop about myself. 
The way in how to make the right expressions. 
I think it is hard to find the right words when I'm talking, I often put myself in a position when I just simply loose the words. 
The thing is that it doesn't have to be very hard words, and that both annoys me at the same time as it makes me very frustrated because I feel in a way that I can't make myself heard in the way that I want to. 
Also I sometimes find myself a bit insecure wether I should make a point of view or not when I think something is wrong, just because I'm afraid that I can't find the words. 
Don't get me wrong when I say this, because I don't look at myself as a shy person. 
But maybe the explanation about this can be that It's easier to get into a new language just to listen, than to begin to speak. 
In one way I think that I learn something new everytime I speak english with someone else, but also everytime I go to a lecture or an english lesson. 
There's always a couple of words that are new to my ears. 
One of the best things that I've done, was to live in an english environment, where I was more or less forced to speak english every day, (if I didn't set up a meeting with a couple of my swedish friends of course). 
Then what did I do? 
Well, like many swedish girls do, I went abroad as an au pair. 
I fell for an advert in a swedish newspaper. 
And just for fun I answered it without expecting to get any response. 
Anyway, a couple of weeks after the family had responded, I found myself sitting in an aeroplane, heading for London, to where I had never been before. 
My stay in this wonderful city ended for six months, and I learned a lot about myself, english people, the culture and of course a lot about the language. 
This was a couple of yars ago, but since I was there I have tried more or less to keep the english langage alive with reading english books, newspapers and magazines, something which is very good practise. 
I've never had so much difficulties when it comes to writing, and I find grammar quite fun, but that is always something that I have to ""dust off a bit"".   
Nowadays we get so much free through all television, (and soap-operas unfortunately...) but I can't say anything bad about it, because when we live in such a country as we do, we have to get to know at least one more language to communicate with, and then I find english to be the most important, as it is spoken all over the world.
","Reader, my reader! 
I wish to invite you to follow my thoughts, when I try to put something down about the English language. 
I have studied this language for nine years, and now I have come to a point in my life, when I for different reasons have to ask myself: ""How competent do I feel about my English?"" 
The first thought that turns up to answer this question, is that I feel a lot more confident in reading and listening, than I do in writing and talking. 
(Even after second thoughts, I am sure that this is a correct and comprehensive answer.) 
To answer the follow up questions: ""Why is this so?"" 
and ""Exactly what is it that makes me feel unconfident in talking and writing?"" 
I now decide to make an assessment of my weaknesses and strengths in these four communicative skills. 
A good thing that will hopefully come out of this analysis, is that it might help me achieve a personal goal set up for this spring. 
The goal is simply to improve my English as much as possible. 
The analysis might be helpful, as I do not really know what is wrong; only that I often stumble when I speak, and that I apparently have overestimated my grammar skills. 
(The latter struck me when I got back a grammar test the other day.) 
I start with my most untrained skill - talking. 
Two things that I am aware of, and that I would like to change, are that I use a lot of ""Swenglish"" expressions, and that I often speak in a stumbling and monotonous mode. 
The first thing is a linguistic problem, and the second is a matter of fluency. 
(If you speak fluently, then by definition you do not stumble and then you may feel secure enough to speak in a more melodic way.) 
I have found out that my main linguistic problems are two: my sentence construction, which is influenced by my way of expressioning myself in Swedish, and pronunciation of certain sounds and words, especially the sounding s, which I often leave unsounded. 
I have also found two main problems concerning fluency. 
The first is my active vocabulary; I understand a lot of words when I read, which would never occur to me while talking. 
The second problem is the pronunciation of certain sounds meeting each other where two words meet, e.g. 
Changed to, catch the, realised that this etc.   
After these insights, I go on to the skill of writing. 
There are much of the same problems in my writing as in my speech. 
Word order is an example. 
All errors I ever do in writing, I most certainly even do in talking, although the reverse may not hold. 
The problem with active and passive vocabulary is not so serious when I write, because I then have a chance to look for words in a dictionary (a fact which should be immensely manifested in this survey of somewhat introspective thoughts). 
I am happy to say that I have also found a strength in my writing, namely spelling.  
I wish to conclude my assessment of the two extrovert skills by noting another problem that is present in my writing as well as in my speech: choosing the appropriate word. 
The difficulty is to feel the spirit of the word. 
In Swedish I have a very clear idea of how different synonyms are apprehended (or at least of how I apprehend them myself), e.g. if a word or a phrase sounds comic, sarcastic, snobbish, silly, childish, ambiguous, scientific, boring, negative, positive, demanding, romantic, poetic etc. 
But in English I have a very faint idea of such things, especially since I do not know many synonyms. 
Maybe this is evident in this essay, where I, on purpose, try to use a formal and a bit intricate way of writing; more advanced than I would normally write. 
However, I cannot decide whether it rather sounds affected.   
I now go on to list listening skills. 
I have no difficulties in following lectures, but it is a bit harder to understand a movie or, even worse, a song in English. 
How much I understand depends very much on the speed, the subject, the dialect etc.  
Proceeding to reading, this analysis draws to an end, since I can happily say that I have no problems in reading English, maybe except for some unknown words that might appear.   
So, finally I come to the conclusion that I should put most effort in writing and talking. 
Unfortunately this means that I have to offer part of the attention I pay to the great thoughts of authors and teachers, in favour of the expression of my own primitive single-tracked thoughts about food, sleep and the propagation of human race.
",False
"	David and Harriet want to create a perfect and happy family. 
In their future they see many children and a harmonic and happy family life. 
In this future there is no room for anyone or anything that is different. 
The main theme as I see it is: in the society and family David and Harriet live in, and in the family they want to create, anyone or anything which is different has no place. 
David and Harriet are different according to their family and closest friends, when they want to have a big family, and Ben, the fifth child, is different from everything everyone else ever has seen. 
The family represents the society in this novel and this is the most important setting. 
When David and Harriet decide that they want to have many children, the resistance from their families and friends is enormous. 
And there are other occasions when the relations think that they are strange. 
When Dorothy, Harriet's mother, says that the children always could sleep in the same room, David says that it is important that they have a room of their own, the book says: ""The family exchanged glances as families do when stubbing toes on some snag in one of them...""
1. 
During Harriet's pregnancy with Ben, she is acting in a way that the rest of the family is not used to. 
Not even the doctor understands, or wants to understand, that something is wrong. 
When Ben is born he is certainly not like the other children. 
The relations that visit do not want anything to do with this child who is so different and unpleasant, ""...it was painful to see how their faces changed confronting this phenomenon. 
Ben was always quickly handed back.""
2. 
David and Harriet can not realise that he is their son. 
He has no place in their happy, perfect family. 
Ben is only accepted by those who are a bit unaccepted themselves by society. 
John the boy who starts to help the family in the garden is unemployed and does not want to do anything except spending time with his friends. 
He is the first one Ben shows any affection for. 
John accepts Ben and among John's friends he has a place, even though it is just like some sort of a pet. 
But it is not just Ben that is different. 
When Harriet's sister's child, Amy, is born her parents want to hide her from the rest of the family because she has Down's syndrome, ""...the poor baby was in Sarah's arms, covered up so as not to upset everyone...""
3. 
This I also see, as an example of the family's difficulty to accept anyone who is different The time when the story takes place is also important for the theme. 
The novel takes place between the middle of the 1960s and the middle of the 1980s in a little town in England outside London, a time when it not seems easy to be different. 
This is exemplified when David and Harriet are thinking about their happy family just before Paul is born: ""It had been hard preserving their belief in themselves when the spirit of the times, the greedy and selfish sixties, had been so ready to condemn them, to isolate, to diminish their best selves.""
4 Their beliefs and wishes are not common in the time and the society the story describes, but David and Harriet stand for what they believe in. 
Ben is put in an institution but he is not the only child there. 
I interpret it, as there was more than one pair of parents who wanted to hide their children if they were not normal. 
It also seems like everyone is afraid of the different. 
None of the doctors who examine Ben wants to admit that he is not a normal child. 
Another example of the society's fear for things that are not normal is when Paul, the second youngest boy is going to a psychiatrist: ""Paul was sent to 'talk to someone' as the phrase goes.""
5 To talk to a psychiatrist is to be different and no one wants to be that. 
Another part of the setting, which supports the theme, is the social setting. 
David's mother's family is academic and his father's family has a lot of money. 
The money from David's father makes David's and Harriet's dream practicable and it is also these money that makes it possible to send Ben to the institution where he is supposed to die. 
This could not be possible in a family, which had not got the money to send him away. 
And it is more difficult to be different in a surrounding where the demands on a person to be perfect are high, which I think they perhaps are in better educated and rich environments.  
It can be difficult to preserve our own ideas and believes in a society where we are expected to live up to certain standards or act in a certain way. 
This is something David and Harriet realises when they start to implement their dreams. 
This novel takes place in a time where it seems difficult not to follow the pattern and be like everyone else.   
1 Lessing, Flamingo 1993, page 31 2 Lessing, Flamingo 1993, page 68 3 Lessing, Flamingo 1993, page 32 4 Lessing, Flamingo 1993, page 29 5 Lessing, Flamingo 1993, page 131
","	In an article by Ginia Bellafonte, Locking out violence, an antiviolence chip is discussed. 
This chip is supposed to protect children from watching TV programmes that are violent. 
But not even programmes that are intended for children are totally free from violence. 
What I am aiming at is animated films, which sometimes can contain very much violence. 
In animated films a character can be run over by a train and become totally flat, but in the next sequence the character is running around as usual again. 
Can children realise that this is fiction, and can they distinguish the reality from this fiction? 
And why do films that mostly are intended for children have to contain any violence at all? 
These are questions that I am going to discuss in this essay.  	
Can children make a distinction between fiction and reality? 
Can they actually realise that a lot of what happens in cartoons could not happen in real life? 
Well most children probably realise that some things can not happen in real life. 
But if they can make that distinction there and then when they are looking, what implies that they always can make that distinction. 
When they are playing with their friends they are creating their own fiction world. 
And if they have seen in cartoons, which is fiction too, that the characters for example throw stones at each other; then maybe the children throw stones at each other in the fiction world they are creating when they are playing. 
I have actually experienced a five-year-old boy jumping from the highest place on wall bars in a gymnasium, pretending he was Darkwing Duck. 
This little boy ended up with a concussion and perhaps a somewhat clearer picture of what is possible in real life. 
When this cartoon was broadcast in Sweden it was highly debated. 
The programme was considered to be very violent. 
This programme was eventually stopped because the opposition from the parents was too high. 
Perhaps most children can make a distinction between real life and fiction, but sometimes the boarder between fiction and real life can be a little bit unclear. 
I do not think that children should be left alone in front of the TV when they are looking at these kind of programmes. 
Children need an adult to talk to, someone who can help them distinguish what could happen in real life and what is just fiction. 	
Is it actually necessary with all this violence in animated films? 
There are very few cartoons that do not contain any violence at all, not even My little Pony, which is considered to be a cute girls film, is totally free from violence. 
In Tom & Jerry, which is considered to be one of the most violent cartoons, the whole story is based upon the fighting between the cat and the mouse, and them hurting each other. 
Is this what children want to see, or is it the filmmakers who want them to like this? 
I think children should be more involved in the movie-making process. 
Not as it mostly is today, adults who try to figure out what children like. 
If children sometimes were asked what they wanted to see, then it perhaps would not be so much violence in animated films. 
I know that I did not like the cartoons that contained too much violence when I was a child. 
I think filmmakers use violence to cover up a bad story. 
This is a method that is used in films for adults but I do not think it should be used in films for children.  	
Animated films are mostly seen by children. 
This should be a reason to make them less violent. 
I do not think that children can distinguish completely between fiction and real life, and if violence is allowed in these films it can be difficult for parents to justify to their children that they are not allowed to use violence. 
It is easy for us as adults to say that what happens in animated films could not happen in real life, but for children the boarder between fiction and real life is not as distinguished as it is for us.
",True
" Conflict as entertainment  At almost any time of day if you turn on the TV you can be rather sure to, at least on one of the channels, encounter a ""real- life-show"". 
These are shows where people have been put together in a confined space such as a locked apartment or a small deserted island and then are followed 24 hours a day by the cameras. 
We have gotten used to watching people turning them selves inside out in front of the camera, letting the viewers in on the most intimate details of their lives. 
But first and foremost we have gotten used to watching people argue on these shows. 
For the curious thing is that these shows evolve entirely around conflict- that is the whole concept behind them. 
In the book ""Amusing Ourselves to Death"" Neil Postman analyses how television influences public discourse. 
He presents the idea that television is extremely influential when it comes to directing our way of thinking and the way we interact. 
If Postman's conclusion is correct then these seemingly innocent shows suddenly become more frightening.  
It is easy to see that watching a group of people locked up in an apartment, who are all getting along just fine being supportive and respectful of one another would be dreadfully boring. 
In order to make these kinds of shows somewhat more ""watch-worthy"" you need to add some conflict. 
A ""Real-life-show"" without gossip, screaming and, if we're lucky, an occasional fist-fight is hardly worthy of the name. 
This is a fact well known by the producers of the shows. 
When casting for them they make sure to get people who don't seem to have much in common. 
Not because the participants then will complement each other and perhaps even learn something from one another but because they foresee conflict and that is what will sell the show.  
If the participants despite their differences would get along fine another element has been added to guarantee conflict. 
In almost all of these shows the participants have to vote for someone to leave the show. 
There are always people who don't measure up and accordingly have to leave the group. 
If you don't contribute to the collecting of food on a deserted island or fail to run a bar in a satisfactory way, you are being of no help to the group and you will have to pack your bags and leave.  
Yet another ingredient these shows simply cannot be without is gossip. 
Already a few hours after the participants have entered the house, bar, island or wherever it is they are being filmed, the gossip and the dividing up into different fractions have started. 
It is all about finding the right allies, who may change from day to day, and criticizing people behind their backs. 
The participants gossip wildly about each other and can, and most certainly will, say the most offensive things about one another because they will never be held responsible for anything they say. 
If any of the participants were to refuse to take part in this sort of un-constructive criticism of others or refuse to choose side, he or she would be sure to be the next one to leave the show.  
If Neil Postman is right in his assumption that television is such a powerful medium that it has the power to influence the way we see the World, then the ""Real-life-shows"" go from being merely a rather harmless and trivial form of entertainment to being much more influential and dangerous for the way we perceive ""reality"". 
Just think about the name ""Real-life-shows"". 
If this is what is being presented as reality then this is what we are going to expect reality to be like. 
If Postman is right these shows teach us to see the World in black and white, conflicts will be about who screams the loudest and we will learn that people who don't measure up to certain standards should be left behind.  
Let us just hope that Neil Postman is mistaken when it comes to the influence television has on our way of understanding the World. 
Because if he, God forbid, is right these shows point towards a rather gloomy future.
"," An idea on how to bring social justice to the school curriculum  In a time when racism is growing amongst young people and words such as social Justice seems erased from our vocabulary it is of great importance to look at what role the school plays in the discussion and creation of attitudes. 
I believe the schools can and should play a more active part in bringing back social Justice on the agenda. 
What I am proposing is therefore the introduction during the last year of junior high school of a compulsory stay in a foreign country. 
I suggest that all Swedish high school students spend approximately one semester in a foreign country preferably outside of Western Europe, taking part in social projects such as building schools, helping with irrigation projects, working with the homeless or in women shelters etc. 
I suggest this project be funded with tax money. 
This idea might at first seem overly radical and somewhat unrealistic. 
But I will here argue that the tax money spent on this project will pay back greatly maybe not so much in economical terms but in terms of gains for both the individual as well as for the society at large.  	 
With the risk of sounding as a hopelessly outdated idealist I will not start with the economical gains (if there indeed are any) or the gains for the society but with how the individual student would benefit from this proposal. 
The first individual gain that come to mind is the students own personal growth. 
What better way to learn about yourself, learn responsibility and improve your self confidence than to travel and meet people from other cultures? 
I believe it is the schools ambition not only to teach the students facts but also other skills such as being able to take initiatives and ability to work in a group. 
This is an area where, judging from the present school debate, schools seem to have difficulties and are in need of new ideas. 
I believe a compulsory semester spent abroad is an innovating idea worth trying. 
Apart from being exposed to a different culture the students would also be exposed to a different language. 
Today when a lot of stress is being put on language skills in order to get a job, I see it as a good investment both for the individual and for the society at large to early on learn high school students to communicate in a second language. 
Therefore I think it is essential to make sure everybody gets this opportunity.  	 
I will now move on to look at what positive effects this suggested proposal would have on society. 
One of the major gains that come to mind is that it would help in the fight against racism. 
This is of course only a speculation from my side but I see it as a rather logic result if people at an early age were to be confronted with other cultures and social situations. 
Not only do I think it would be an efficient way to meet the growing racism but it would hopefully also raise the awareness of the importance of social Justice. 
I am by no means suggesting this to be the only solution but I do think it to be one way of dealing with two substantial problems our society is struggling with today; racism and a lack of interest in global social Justice. 
Looking beyond our own country it would also be beneficial for the receiving country, taken that the students would not merely be spectators but would actively be taking part in the different projects.  	 
Since everything today in order to be trustworthy has to be measured in economic terms I will venture to speculate that this idea is not only good for the individual and for society at large but can also be economically sustainable. 
As good as every day we read about the scarcity of qualified teachers, the physical decay of our school buildings and the lack of updated schoolbooks. 
With a large number of students (everyone in their final semester of junior high school) abroad every year the demand for schoolbooks and teachers would decrease. 
There would of course still be a need for some teachers to keep in contact with the students while abroad and to follow up at home coming. 
But the actual number of teachers could be reduced. 
It is also my conviction that this last ""abroad spent"" semester would be a good incentive for students to finish junior high school and therefore the number of dropouts would be reduced. 
Which apart from being good for the individual students also would have a good effect on the economy since more people would complete their studies and be more attractive on the job market.  	 
As you have seen I believe there to be many good reasons, both for society and for the students to introduce a compulsory stay abroad for the students in junior high school. 
I have even suggested in what way this could have a beneficial effect on the economy, even though my lack of economic training makes these assumptions rather speculative. 
But I believe that even if we, in order to implement this idea, would have to increase the taxes both the society, the school and the students have enough to gain that it would be well worth it.
",True
"I have always had natural skills in learning languages although I have never put much work in it. 
I have always been interested in languages because there are so many different ways to use it. 
Almost every word has different meanings depending on in which context they are used. 
You can simply put it that I am fascinated by languages with their possibilities. 
When it comes to my English skills, right now it lacks because of not using it very often in a long time. 
It has gone ten years since I last studied English and then I lacked in motivation. 
Rules and grammar never reached me, I learned the long, hard way instead. 
Which means that I learned every phrase and word and so on separately, without putting them away with similar things. 
Although a lot of things feels natural when said, I always feel insecure when it comes to the use of pronouns, to give an example.  y listening skills I find good. 
I don't find it a problem to understand what others are trying to say to me. 
You don't have to understand every, specific word, you can reach understanding by getting the context. 
We are always exposed to the English language through television and music and that is a great help to our listening skills.  y reading abilities are also good. 
I haven't read that much English books/texts but it is the same as with the above-mentioned speech about words and context. 
You can fill in the blanks by understanding the context. 
I recently found out that I have got it easier to read loud for myself than reading loud in front of others. 
At the same time I noticed that I found it easier if I read it with an accent of some kind.  
Which leads us directly to the art of speaking. 
Like many, although many won't write it, it's so easy to speak English while being drunk. 
You tend to loosen up and it runs quite fluently. 
In my case it has to do with self-confidence. 
I feel a bit afraid of making myself ridiculous, and by being afraid it often becomes a ridiculous. 
It has to do with first thinking in Swedish what I want to say, and then saying it in English. 
Often if I can't find the words I talk in a round-about way, but it will surely be bettered during this five months, as well as the other skills. 
A problem due to the lack of words is of course to get into deeper, intellectual discussions in various matters. 
One of the goals which I have for this semester is to get rid of the ""Queen Victoria-style"" of English which was hammered in through my schooltime. 
When I was in Ireland for a holiday they wondered if I was trying to be someone special. 
Of course I weren't, but I think it says it all. 
In all I think I am good in pronounciating words and I think I am quite good in talking. 
But as I have already mentioned, when I learn my grammar better I will also be a better talker.  
When it comes to judging my writing skills it's hard to say something because it's the way in which I am expressing myself at this time. 
I can express one of my assets, while you right now is reading these sentences, shaking your head. 
But I'll try anyway. 
As I have always been interested in words and languages it have also affected my writing. 
I have always loved to play with words, trying to express myself differently. 
When I was younger I used to write poetry, often in English. 
But that is an other way of using the written language. 
At that time I tried to say as much as I could with as few words as possible, putting big meanings into every word. 
As a singer in a band I deal with the lyrics in the same way, short sentences with a big meaning.. 
I think I am a good writer, especially in Swedish, but hopefully in English as well. 
You have to know this text is improvised, no checking of the grammar, no looking in the dictionary, instead seeking after what feels right. 
The meaning with this assignment I hope is to get aware of what faults I make, and it will surely be seen in these pages, and then I will have a possibility to improve. 
And to cut a long story shorter I will end it now.
","This essay will deal with my strength and weakness in English in the four skills of listening, reading, speaking and writing, in my view of that matter. 
I was nine years old when I began to study English, which was one year before the intermediate level of the nine-year compulsory school. 
This first year was more of a preparation to the following ten years, up to high school. 
In the senior level of the nine-year school I went to a boarding school for a month in the summer. 
This was good for my speaking. 
I've never been strong in English, but I didn't really realise this until in high school. 
In a desperate attempt to improve my skills I took an excellent summer languages course in Cambridge for four weeks. 
After high school my contact with English has been moor in a passive manner, that is reading English textbooks, having lectures in English and now and then communicating in English both for fun and because of studies. 
(I have been studying for five and a half-year at the Agricultural University).  
With this background I should be rather good at English, but I'm sorry to tell that I don't get the feeling that I am. 
There are a lot of things to be improved, but you shall always begin with the good things, and therefore I'll start with the listening bit. 
I believe that my comprehension of listening to English is quit well, although I know that there are words that I don't know. 
It's often possible to figure them out in some way according to the subject or you may have the opportunity to ask someone. 
Pity enough I'm often too lazy to write difficult words down and afterwards look them up in a dictionary. 
Many people learn English when watching the television, but I'm sorry to say that I am one of those who always read the subtitles and hardly ever use my ears.  y listening goes hand in hand with my reading, I figure. 
I don't have a problem with reading English books. 
I understand English texts fairly well if it's an ordinary text and not a special technical one with a lot of technical terms. 
Instruction manuals can be little tricky. 
Although I mostly understand the text, I don't think that I can do a very good translation into Swedish as a translator. 
With reading I am a bit more ambitious in looking up words, but I suppose that it would be better if I also learnt them by heart, which I hardly do. 
I don't read many books in my spare time, but I don't avoid a book if it's written in English.  
Speaking is another chapter. 
To know a word passively is easier than to know it actively, that is to use it all by yourself. 
I'm not very shy person and therefor I've been speaking a bit, also thanks to the language courses I've attended. 
My pronunciation and grammar are not always correct, but at least I think that people understand what I am trying to say (or they are very polite not to ask me what I mean). 
Pleasure speaking is of course more easy than giving a speech or anything like that, but then you often get the opportunity to make preparations. 
There are times that I do not find the word that I am seeking for, the appropriate word, but often I find another instead, almost as good.   
The way I speak is reflected in my writing. 
You shan't write as you speak, but so I do, even if I try not to. 
My writing is bad in total I would think. 
The way I make sentences and my usage of words is a bit too Swedish. 
In writing I have the opportunity to look words up, to do grammar checking, but you don't look a thing up if you don't know that you're wrong. 
I think it's difficult to know when I'm wrong, and therefore I have this bad spelling, bad grammar.  
Over all I think that I can manage with my English today, but it's all about this making impressions on people. 
I don't want people to think that I'm nonchalant, not caring about their languages or their culture. 
Therefore I make this attempt to improve my skills further more in the English languages and try to take this course.
",False
" Premature Children  The question of life has long been a hot topic. 
The recent discovery that a foetus can be saved at the same week during the pregnancy when it is still legal to abort it has evoked the debate. 
In the article from Dagens Nyheter, January 30 2001, the paediatrician Hugo Lagercrantz argues that since there is a 50 percent risk that the premature child will get retardation, physicians in consultation with the parents should not try to save all premature children. 
Are there any causes that could affect a patient's value and the physician's obligation to give sufficient medical care? 
Lagercrantz seems to believe so, but I do not and in this essay I will present two arguments which proves this. 
Firstly the right of life and secondly the right of all human beings to obtain medical care. 
This is a topic that involves several different aspects such as whether the law of abortion should be changed, the question of euthanasia and the question of what is a worthy life. 
However, since this is a limited essay I will restrict myself to the two arguments mentioned above.  
Firstly, I believe that all human beings possess the same value and the same right to live, regardless of age. 
I believe that a person's human value and right to live does not correlate to his or her age. 
A seventy-year-old woman does not have a greater right to live than a baby born too early has. 
The premature child should therefore be judged according to the same principles as any other person, young or old. 
Strangely enough, as Lagercrantz seems to believe, premature children apparently do not have the same right to live as fully developed children have when there is a risk of getting a disease. 
However, according to present legislation, the foetus gains full value of protection when it is viable, that is when it outside the uterus, can accept the help modern medical care can provide, with a chance to grow into a human being. 
Therefore, the physicians must try to save the child. 
Moreover, I feel that we, ordinary people as well as physicians, do not obtain the right to rule over other people's lives. 
Life is a gift and is not something that we have power over.   
Secondly, Lagercrantz writes that there is a 50 percent risk of the premature child ending up with retardation and therefore states that the physicians should not try to save severely premature children when the risk of illness is so great. 
Yes, it is inevitable that a certain number of premature children will end up with retardation, however, as the physician Fredrik Serenius et al states in an article in Dagens Nyheter from February 18 2001; there is also a risk of retardation for fully developed children who have suffered from serious illnesses after their births. 
These children would never be denied the right of medical care, nor would adults with a severe disease, and of course, this should be the case for premature children as well. 
The main task of the physicians should be to provide best possible care and this care is not reserved for any particular person, but is a right of all human beings. 
Additionally, I believe that the paediatrician's attitude is important in order to save the premature child. 
As Serenius et al states, if the physician is quite sure that the child will end up with an illness, his attitude against the rescue will probably influence the staff in the delivery room which in the end could cause the child's death.   
In conclusion, I strongly object to Lagercrantz arguments of why the physicians should not try to save all premature children. 
As stated, my belief is that we all have the same value irrespective of age and therefore we also have the right to obtain equally good medical care. 
In addition, Sweden is a well-developed country within this field and has the resources to give retarded children and their families all possible help and care. 
I believe Lagercrantz's attitude to be élitist and fear that his ideas could lead to an even more segregated society in which people can reject retarded children, children which can give us another perspective on life.
"," The Increased Number of Young Offenders  In recent years, the violence among adolescents has increased in the Swedish society. 
According to the National Statistics Office of Sweden, violence among people in the ages of 16 to 24 increased severely between the years 1978 and 1995. 
The biggest increase was found among young men. 
According to an article in Svenska Dagbladet, young people in the ages of 15 to 24, are today responsible for 38% of the crimes involving violence in Sweden. 
Due to this, a number of organisations such as the Non-Fighting Generation have emerged in order to put an end to this trend and help the adolescents involved. 
There exist many examples concerning the causes for the increased violence among adolescents in Sweden, and in this essay, I will present the three most credible causes and give a conclusion.  
Firstly, the debate whether or not violent television programmes influence children in a negative way has long been topical. 
Some argue that the child is not affected whereas others argue that children are impressionable and cannot separate fiction from reality. 
I have to agree with the latter. 
Many children grow up in insecure home environments where many lack a satisfactory role model to teach them to distinguish between right and wrong. 
One could argue that only small children are affected and that older children can understand that the television programmes are not real. 
I agree with this, however one must take another aspect into consideration. 
Violent programmes only show one way of solving problems and giving vent to aggressions. 
According to Lena Brostrom at the Police Department in Eskilstuna, the children who are involved in criminality in Sweden today often come from families where a satisfactory role model who should give an alternative to the television's way of solving problems does not exist. 
Consequently the child does not learn other ways of solving problems than to use violence.  
Secondly, the society we live in today is far more internationalised than it was several years ago. 
The internationalisation has led to the entry of weapons and drugs, and the fact that this is easier to get hold of, has caused the violence to involve younger people. 
It is a fact that young people more than before possess weapons, and according to Lena Brostrom, children up to the age of 17 mostly use knives whereas young people over the age of 17 have guns. 
Drugs, such as cigarettes and alcohol are used by children at the early age of 12 to 15 and are easy to get hold of and once you have tried, it is often an easy transition to use harder drugs which often leads one into criminality.  
Furthermore, our society has become segregated, mostly due to the great unemployment years and Sweden is no longer the same welfare state. 
Society has become divided with areas consisting of people of limited means, often with one parent households. 
These areas often have high criminality rates. 
In addition to the segregation, society is also becoming more competitive. 
For instance, it is essential to work hard in school in order to do well in society. 
According to Lena Brostrom, the children who have grown up in families where the parents have failed to be good role models, have difficulties to cope both in and outside school. 
They have lost their confidence in adults, often coming from home environments where one or both parents are drug abusers. 
If they fail in school they give up, feeling that it is no idea to struggle. 
Of course, many would argue that it is easy to get a new chance of succeeding in school since Sweden has a well organised system of adult education, but these children do not see any possibilities and feel that it is useless. 
Moreover, it is essential for the entire family to take part and since the families are often faltering, many fail to succeed. 
Thus, the children end up outside in society and need to find an alternative way to hold one's own and gain respect. 
For many, the answer is violence and crime.  
In conclusion, the society of today is hard on adolescents, and if they do not grow up in secure home environments, they easily get into trouble. 
In my opinion, it is essential for society to react at an early stage in order to stop this negative development. 
The social services are insufficient in this field and the resources are too limited. 
I believe that we have to start helping the children already in the school environment since it is often clear what children will get into trouble. 
We must also improve the help for faltering families in need. 
It would lay in everybody's interest to put an end to this trend. 
Firstly, in order to help our adolescents and secondly, to diminish the rehabilitation costs.
",True
" Monarchy- an archaic tradition  Sweden has been a democracy since the 1920s but I believe one cannot consider Sweden to be truly democratically governed until the head of state is elected by the people. 
The time has now come to shed the archaic tradition of monarchy and realise the importance of democratic values.  	
Democracy is a cornerstone in today's society and most people would not want their country governed in any other way. 
Yet the people in Sweden are not allowed to elect the head of state, a person who represents our country in various situations. 
That fact violates the right of the people and to some extent also weakens our democracy. 
Today the Monarch merely serves as a symbol for our realm, a role that an elected head of state could play with equal or more success. 
If one also take into account the enormous amount of money the royal family cost the Swedish society, one have to agree that all taxpayers should be granted the ability to influence which person to spend that money on.  
Furthermore, one have to consider the burden forced upon the royal family.. 
To begin with, the firstborn, destined to be king or queen, have basically no other option than to accept the decision made for him or her while still in the uterus. 
Taking away someone's free will in that manner, cannot be considered otherwise than completely immoral and must be thought of as an abomination. 
Of course, one might argue that Victoria might very well grow up to be an excellent queen, who enjoys her job, but who can tell what path she would have chosen in life, if given the opportunity. 
Secondly, it is not only the monarch himself or herself who carries the heavy burden of not having the liberty to choose. 
It is, unfortunately, inflicted upon the whole royal family,. who are all being scrupulously exploited by tabloid media. 
The media examines every word the royalties utter and pays no respect to privacy. 
Surely one must agree, that the decision of being such a public person must be made of choice. 
Moreover, one can ponder about another duty forced upon royalties, namely the duty of producing heirs to the realm. 
In today's society it is not an uncommon choice to not have children, would it be possible for the monarch to make such decision. 
And consider a scenario where the monarch is unable to have biological children or if the firstborn child suffers a handicap. 
What would happen to the succession? 
Today the crown would probably be handed over to some other poor soul, who happens to share genetic patterns with the monarch.  
Having read all the arguments above, one might argue that the monarch of today has no real power, he or she does not rule the country. 
To a certain extent, however, there is some power conserved within monarch. 
The views and opinions of the royal family still influence the, luckily enough, decreasing number of royalists. 
The argument mostly used in this debate seem to be that we should not abandon our tradition, but since both good and bad tradition exists in the world today, it cannot be regarded as a good argument. 
After all, the main argument the people who opposed to democracy used, was that it was not the tradition. 
It might take some time to introduce a new system. 
One have to give much thought to what kind of responsibilities an elected head of state should have. 
Should it be the same ones as the former monarch or is it better if the person has more power? 
Finding a satisfactory election system will take time and effort as well, but even so I am certain that in a few decades Sweden will be a republic. 	
To conclude, the process of democratisation is enormously important and should stand, by itself, as a reason to abolish monarchy. 
The arguments for keeping it are far to weak and a inherited post of head of state must be recognised as a thing of the past.. 
Let us remove the heavy load placed upon the royal family and unite the Swedish people in a republic!
"," Unemployment jobs  Unemployment is an enormous problem in our society. 
But its not just a problem to society; above all its a problem of utmost importance to those affected by unemployment. 
Unemployment affects thousands of our citizens, not just the people who are unemployed, but their families and friends as well. 
The time has come to do something about this problem. 
There is a solution that is as simple as it is ingenious: unemployment jobs.   
It seems appropriate to begin this report on unemployment jobs with a definition of what they are. 
An unemployment job is a job in the public sector that is created to give work to an unemployed person. 
A person who has a job of this kind is called unemployment worker.  
There are several reasons why we should create unemployment jobs. 
First of all, unemployment benefits arent of benefit to anyone. 
They are a burden to society. 
We spend a large amount of the taxpayers money on unemployment benefits, but we dont get anything in return. 
At the same time they are a burden to the unemployed who become passive by receiving money without being expected to do anything at all. 
They often feel betrayed and rejected by society and cant see any possible way to change their situation.  
Secondly, unemployment jobs will be an effective means of reintroducing people into society. 
They will get used to get up in the morning and go to work. 
The feeling of doing something important will make them proud of their achievements and will boost their self-esteem. 
This will help them to find employment elsewhere, which is of course the main aim of this reform.  
Furthermore, society will benefit from the unemployment jobs. 
The previously unemployed are going to give something back to society; thus everyone will gain something as a result of the unemployment jobs. 
Its a well-known fact that the public sector is suffering from a great lack of manpower at present. 
This shortage is particularly acute in schools and old peoples homes. 
Unemployment workers will be of great assistance in these fields even if they havent got any formal education. 
For instance, an educated teacher will of course have the main responsibility for teaching his or her class, but an unemployment worker can help the pupils with their assignments. 
He or she can also help the teacher with keeping discipline in the classroom. 
Pupils will benefit from more adult help and a calmer school environment, more suited to effective learning.  
In order to make a success of this reform, introductory instruction will be available to unemployment workers and they will of course not get tasks they are incompetent to execute. 
They will also be given the opportunity to choose where they want to work when this is possible. 
Unemployment workers will be given time off to go to job interviews as well. 
To encourage the unemployed to participate, the salary for an unemployment job will be higher than the unemployment benefit is today while the unemployment benefit will be somewhat lowered.  
There are critics saying that we are going to create unnecessary jobs just to keep everyone occupied and that the unemployment jobs are the kind of jobs that no one would take if he or she had a choice. 
As mentioned above, these jobs are very important. 
It is true that the unemployment jobs arent the most prestigious and popular jobs available, but we must remember that these jobs are supposed to be temporary. 
The reform is aimed at helping the unemployed back into the ordinary labour market, not to create a second one just to fill the need of the public sector. 
An added bonus to this reform is that there will be a number of ordinary jobs created in addition to the unemployment jobs since the unemployment jobs has to be administered and supervised.  
Finally, the need for unemployment jobs has to be emphasized. 
They are going to fill an important gap in the workforce of the public sector. 
But whats most important is that they will make the unemployed feel useful and facilitate their re-entry into the ordinary labour market. 
The unemployment jobs are going to be of benefit to both society and the unemployed.
",False
" Do our living standards require that the state looks after the elderly people?  
This essay is mainly going to discuss whether we can take care of elderly people at home or if the best solution is to keep them in institutions. 
Firstly, the main reason of keeping grandparents in institutions is that our family attitudes have changed because of our different way of living, compared to the old society. 
Have we forgotten the social aspect with close family relations including taking care of our parents when they become old. 
Is this the fact because of lack of moral responsibility or is it a financial problem? 
These are questions hard to answer but still there are problems that can be solved by financial aid to elderly care and change in attitudes. 
Maybe the best way for caring about many elderly people is to put them into institutions. 
This subject will be discussed with the mentioned questions as topics. 
If this will not help you to see which is the best way to take care of grandparents, this can anyway give you suggestions of what could be done about it.   	 
If we compare our attitude today towards elderly care with how it was in the fifties we notice that the attitude towards old people have changed. 
A question can be asked whether we care less or not about elderly people today when the individual person is more stressed by all the choices and demands in the society. 
This lead to a generation gap which is a huge expanse between parent, child and the grandparents. 
It is said that young people and adults do not know each other. 
They live under the same roof, but they rarely see one another because at least one of the parents go to work before the children are awake. 
In this kind of family where a generation gap exists, it can sometimes be good to have a grandmother at home, giving the children some of the attention the parents do not give. 
On the other hand, if the grandparents are too sick and can not manage without a lot of care it can make the relations worse for this type of family.  	 
How we treat our old grandparents and children can be related to how we define life quality and good relations. 
Life quality today is usually having a good employment, friends, family and be rich enough to buy all the capital goods that an average income earner is expected to use. 
If the aim is to consume then we generally do have a high living standard but what about family values? 
The society has developed the humans to be more individualistic and self-centered. 
We have forgotten which happiness close relations in a big family can produce. 
We want to live with our nuclear family or spend time with our step-children or step-father. 
With the mentioned family-development there is no room for taking care of elderly grandparents, specially if they are sick. 
The moral responsibility for the family and parents that we used to have in the fifties, is history today in the Western European countries.   	 
The problem of not having the possibility to keep elderly people at home today is more of a financial problem than a question of responsibility. 
Living on one salary can be hard for bigger families if for example three children go to school and the family expenses are high. 
Then there are no financial means to spare for taking care of a grandmother. 
Institutions are good from an financial point of view, because today it costs often too much to be at home from work or keeping nurses at home to take care of your older parents. 
However, high-income earners should not have a problem with financing their elderly care. 
As long as they spend a lot of time at work they do not have the energy to take care of their grandparents.   	 
Now, as we know these problems for taking care of elderly people at home it makes even more complicated to find solutions to them. 
We can not go back to the fifties and think that we can handle the elderly care like the farmers did. 
The home care of elderly in old days also had disadvantages like poverty, even though it often was more social for the grandparents. 
It is difficult to change peoples attitudes. 
One thing that could be done for both families with middle and high incomes is building blocks of service flats for elderly in the families neighbourhood which could improve the social relations with grandparents. 
This would give the children and parents the possibility to visit them more often and also notice if there is something wrong with the service quality, so they could do something about it. 
The grandparents would also enjoy not to live to far from their children.   	 
An answer to if we do not have any moral responsibility over our grandparents can be that we are used to live our life on our own with our children. 
Nobody expects us to have time for taking care of our grandparents as long as we have service institutions for elderly and disabled. 
One way to make it easier to take care of grandparents at home can be giving financial subsidies to the families. 
Another solution can be to lower the fees for families keeping their elderly at service flats in the neighbourhood and letting the grandparents visit their home in weekends, if possible. 
On the other hand, I believe that the children having no interest in taking care of the grandparents should put them into service institutions. 
Then there is a major concern that the service quality should be improved, because today there are too little activities for the old people, mainly because of the institutions financial problems.
"," To evaluate my own skills in reading, writing, speaking and listening to English  For getting a perfection in the English language more than going for holidays to Great Britain is needed. 
When you have learned how to write, read, speak and listen to English, then you are much closer the goal to get perfection in the language.  
The difficulty in evaluating your own skills in English is not to think of what you do know but what you do not know. 
For instance, sometimes I do not know the tense of the verb in a sentence and if I am not aware of it then I can not correct it. 
One way of getting around the problem is to get aware by reading and learning the English grammer.  
1 Read  I started reading English at fourth class in compulsory school. 
At the time I was quite shy and did not talk much during class hour, except if I was asked a question. 
Much later in life after I had studied French in 1995, I did join a course in English at the Folkuniversitetet in Uppsala. 
The aim was to get a ""First Certificate"" in the English language. 
I managed the examination and got an average grade. 
The reading part of the exam included reading short stories and answering questions about the stories. 
I can not say that I have a problem with reading English. 
English and American literature is familiar from courses I have taken in business economics for 2 years now at the University.   
However, I could learn reading faster as I get to know more English words by looking more thoroughly in the dictionary. 
Another way to practice reading language is reading more English novels and quality newspapers.  
2 Write  The biggest problem for me when I translate from Swedish to English is that I think of how the sentence is written in Swedish. 
I consider the problem is that I translate the English sentence due to how I think in Swedish.  
I do sometimes have a problem with tense, mode and clause elements in the English grammer.  
For writing correct sentences it is essential to know the clause elements and other important grammer. 
The positive point is that technical terms in business economics have been enriched in my English language.  
One of my future goals is to be better in writing English. 
The main object is to have or take time for repetition of the English grammer and especially work with what I already mentioned having a problem with.  
3 Speak  I think I have improved speaking English since I took two business economics courses in Market System and International Marketing. 
I followed the International Marketing course before December and I had to talk English all the time. 
Most of the students could not speak Swedish so English was the only language the international exchange students could speak, except their mother tongue.   
Speaking English in a proper way need knowledge about sentence structure and the right English expressions that I am about to learn. 
Some years ago I bought a dictionary in a bookstore that helped to translate from English to French / French to English. 
Ever since I have thought that I some day will know how to translate without difficulty from one of the languages to the other.  
4 Listen  To understand a language other than your mother tongue is not so easy but it is easier to listen and understand than reading, writing and speaking it.  y skills in listening to British English are good but my understanding of other English speaking languages varies due to the accent. 
In the Market System course that I mentioned earlier, we had a man from California as our lecturer. 
The problem was that most of the Swedish students including me did not understand every tenth world he said because of his particular accent.   
Listening to another language also need a lot of patience. 
In return you can get a very nice English accent, if you listen carefully to British English.
",True
" Europe: Co-operation or every one for themselves?  	
It is the 7'Th of May 1945, Hitler has committed suicide one month ago and today Germany surrenders, the Second World War is over. 
The European continent is destroyed by the war that took the lives of around 50 million people. 
Today, a little more then fifty years later the former enemies are sitting side by side in Brussels and Strasbourg trying to steer Europe into the 21'st century.   	
Since the start with the Coal and Steel Union the European Union has been guaranteeing a stable and strong platform for peace and democracy in Europe. 
During it's short history the Union has kept evolving as the bonds between its members have become stronger and stronger. 
The European Union should be allowed to keep developing and it should be allowed to handle the things that are of common interest for the entire continent such as the Environment, fighting Crime as well as the Defence and Foreign Policies. 
The union should be given more powers in these areas, not less.   	
The protection of the environment is one of the most important issues of modern society. 
It is widely recognised by scientists that environmental issues can not be solved by any nation on it's own. 
The problem of air-pollution is a good example of this. 
Air pollution can travel great distances, thus affecting countries other then the one it originated from. 
It is financially very costly for companies to adapt factories etc. to become more environmental- friendly. 
National governments may therefore be reluctant to impose hard environmental legislation, since this might scare away investments. 
However, if all the countries in a region enforce the same legislation, then this problem is greatly reduced. 
The same argument can be used on almost all environment related issues.   	
Another area in witch the European Union has a lot to do is fighting crime. 
Researchers claim that organised crime is growing every day. 
This type of criminality rarely operates in just one country, but rather over large parts of the Union. 
If we were to introduce a federal court system with common laws to fight narcotics offences, smuggling, financial crimes etc. over all of the EU, assisted by a federal police force, it would be much easier to map out these organisations. 
Today the local police forces try to assist each others (with varying success) but the difference in the police organisations, laws and bureaucracies of the countries causes many problems when it comes to quickly arranging police operations between two countries. 
A federal police force that could perform these tasks would be very useful to fight crime and co-ordinate the national police forces.   	
The European Union of today is a Union of sovereign states, but states with common values and goals. 
The differences in religion and culture are not large and this has, in my opinion paved the way for the success of the Union. 
It is only reasonable for these countries to have a common foreign policy and military forces. 
Currently each member is defending there own border, if we were to decide to have a common military structure the amount of boarder lines to defend would be just a fraction of the old ones, and we would be able to greatly reduce defence costs for the member countries. 
We would also virtually have taken away the last possibility for another war in Europe. 
Recently the European countries demonstrated their common values by protesting loudly when Austria elected Jorg Haider's extreme right party to the Austrian parliament. 
The values and political traditions are very similar in the different countries and a united European voice would have a much stronger effect then the many small ones of today.   	
To conclude this brief argumentation for a stronger European Union, with more power to affect the questions that are important for the entire continent I want to stress that ""The European Union of today is a Union of sovereign states, but states with common values and goals"". 
This is very important to remember when discussing EU matters. 
We can decide to choose a path for Europe where everyone goes on their own (a way that would have it's benefits for some well developed states) or we can choose the path of co-operation, the path of working together, the path of a union with common human rights values that sets a good example to the rest of the global community. 
Together we can tackle the problems and issues of tomorrow, together we can build a strong, stable and prospering Europe.
","During almost my entire life i have been hearing lots of different languages. 
I was raised in Geneva, Switzerland witch is a very international city in a country with no less then three large official languages. 
Both my parents come from Sweden and thus i spoke both Swedish and French fluetly by the time i was six. 
Since Geneva is such an international city my friends came from a lot of different countries so apart from the French and Swedish i was ""exposed"" to a large number of languages like German, Italian, Portugese, Spanish etc. 
The summer I turned ten we moved back to Sweden (after 9 years) and settled in Uppsala. 
My english at the time was probably about as good as any Swedish child of the same age. 
After a few years in Sweden i finished the 9'th grade and went on a one month English-course in London. 
During this month i stayed in an English family together with two boys from Denmark, however since my Danish is far from great we usually spoke English with each other... 
After this I started senior school in a nature-science program. 
I kept on studying German (a subject I started to study during the 7'th grade) as well as English and graduated with good grades in the three English courses that i could choose (A,B and C) Then after a semester of French studies at the University of Uppsala i am now studing English. 	
As mentioned above i have been listening to a large number of different languages for large parts of my life. 
Allthough i did not speak or understand several of these languages i am certain that this has given me a good base for my spoken English as well as my understanding of foreign languages. 
Geneva is as I mentioned a part of the French speaking region in Switzerland and thus I was mainly exposed to french TV and music contrary to Swedish children that are usually exposed to more English TV and music. 
However the differance was probably not that large since a large number of the TV-shows intended for children are translated in Sweden as well. 
One thing that has probably been very good for my english is the one month trip i made to London. 
During that time i was more or less forced to speak and listen to english at all times and this together with good teachers resulted in a great impovement in my spoken english as well as my abillity to listen to and understand english.  	
My abillity to write has always been rated differentely depending on the teachers that i have had. 
My spelling in most languages has always been shall we say less then perfect... however my abillity to come up with ideas to write as well as getting these ideas down on a peice of paper has always been rather good. 
When it comes to vocabulary i have also always had a fairly large vocabulary in the languages that i have spoken (however as mentioned the spelling of these words was not always perfect...) 
During senior school i did start to improve my spelling and I intend to keep working with it during this course.   	
Reading novels has never been any of my larger interests, i have usually not considered it as a form of toture either but i have been more interested in other things. 
I have however always liked to read magazines that took up issues that did interested me. 
During the past few years i have been having a subscription to at least one english magazine every month (Focus and Airliner World are the most recent ones) I have also been reading magazines like ""Newsweek"" or ""Time magazine"" that my father has subscribed to. 
I would not say that i am a fast reader but i guess i am rather average in that area.   	to summ this up i think that the childhood in a ""multi-lingual"" environement as well as my brief journey to London have been very good for my english and that my main strenghts lay in speaking as well as in my abillity to understand spoken english. 
What i will probably have to work the most with will probably be the written english and then particularly the spelling and different writing techniques.
",True
" Monarchy- an archaic tradition  Sweden has been a democracy since the 1920s but I believe one cannot consider Sweden to be truly democratically governed until the head of state is elected by the people. 
The time has now come to shed the archaic tradition of monarchy and realise the importance of democratic values.  	
Democracy is a cornerstone in today's society and most people would not want their country governed in any other way. 
Yet the people in Sweden are not allowed to elect the head of state, a person who represents our country in various situations. 
That fact violates the right of the people and to some extent also weakens our democracy. 
Today the Monarch merely serves as a symbol for our realm, a role that an elected head of state could play with equal or more success. 
If one also take into account the enormous amount of money the royal family cost the Swedish society, one have to agree that all taxpayers should be granted the ability to influence which person to spend that money on.  
Furthermore, one have to consider the burden forced upon the royal family.. 
To begin with, the firstborn, destined to be king or queen, have basically no other option than to accept the decision made for him or her while still in the uterus. 
Taking away someone's free will in that manner, cannot be considered otherwise than completely immoral and must be thought of as an abomination. 
Of course, one might argue that Victoria might very well grow up to be an excellent queen, who enjoys her job, but who can tell what path she would have chosen in life, if given the opportunity. 
Secondly, it is not only the monarch himself or herself who carries the heavy burden of not having the liberty to choose. 
It is, unfortunately, inflicted upon the whole royal family,. who are all being scrupulously exploited by tabloid media. 
The media examines every word the royalties utter and pays no respect to privacy. 
Surely one must agree, that the decision of being such a public person must be made of choice. 
Moreover, one can ponder about another duty forced upon royalties, namely the duty of producing heirs to the realm. 
In today's society it is not an uncommon choice to not have children, would it be possible for the monarch to make such decision. 
And consider a scenario where the monarch is unable to have biological children or if the firstborn child suffers a handicap. 
What would happen to the succession? 
Today the crown would probably be handed over to some other poor soul, who happens to share genetic patterns with the monarch.  
Having read all the arguments above, one might argue that the monarch of today has no real power, he or she does not rule the country. 
To a certain extent, however, there is some power conserved within monarch. 
The views and opinions of the royal family still influence the, luckily enough, decreasing number of royalists. 
The argument mostly used in this debate seem to be that we should not abandon our tradition, but since both good and bad tradition exists in the world today, it cannot be regarded as a good argument. 
After all, the main argument the people who opposed to democracy used, was that it was not the tradition. 
It might take some time to introduce a new system. 
One have to give much thought to what kind of responsibilities an elected head of state should have. 
Should it be the same ones as the former monarch or is it better if the person has more power? 
Finding a satisfactory election system will take time and effort as well, but even so I am certain that in a few decades Sweden will be a republic. 	
To conclude, the process of democratisation is enormously important and should stand, by itself, as a reason to abolish monarchy. 
The arguments for keeping it are far to weak and a inherited post of head of state must be recognised as a thing of the past.. 
Let us remove the heavy load placed upon the royal family and unite the Swedish people in a republic!
"," Fantasy- an endangered species.  
In today's society, television is a great part of people's lives, mostly used for entertainment but also for civic information. 
However, as people, and especially children, spend an increasing amount of time in front of the television instead of turning to books or storytelling, it is time to be concerned. 
It is my belief that television endangers our imagination and that children of today, therefore, might grow up to have a somewhat poorer capability of fantasizing than we do now.  
About a hundred years ago, I spent every Monday evening baby-sitting my youngest neighbour, a four- year-old boy who loved watching television. 
When I arrived, he usually sat in front of it already but since I found Ducktales extremely dull, I grabbed every opportunity trying to persuade him to play any sort of game. 
One evening I got him engaged in a game of make-believe and we were pretending to be Robin Hood and Little John on a mission to free the lovely Lady Marion (need I mention that he was Robin). 
As the skilful sword-fighters we were, the villains were overpowered with ease and we were able to break into the dungeon (the bathroom) where the fair maiden was imprisoned. 
We entered and I stretched out my hand: ""Come Marion, let us leave"". 
The boy instantly let go of his fantasy sword, starred at me and said: ""Karin, that's a bathtub."" 
I was astounded and completely dumb-struck for a while, suddenly realising that the boy were not able to see the fantasy-world in his head, the way I did. 
I think of this episode with amusement but also great sadness. 
I believe it to reflect a matter of considerable concern for our entire society, namely, the risk of losing the ability to fantasize as a result of replacing reading and story-telling with television. 
When we read or get told a story, we are able to create an inner image around the events that take place. 
Thus, we can partially decide for ourselves what the characters in the fairy-tales look like, what the setting is like and, using our imagination, we are able to paint a vivid picture of this in our own minds. 
This process contributes greatly to the ability of creating fantasies. 
When we watch television, on the other hand, we do not get the opportunity to process the information the same way, using our imagination. 
All images are pre-made, not leaving much room for the valuable interpretation. 
In the end, this might lead to a decreasing need for imagination but also to damage on the gift of being able to fantisize. 
Obviously, all television programs cannot be considered harmful and maybe it is the amount of time spent on television, instead of creative activities, that constitutes the problem. 
However, much of the content on today's children's shows is violent. 
This might well be one reason why my neighbour was able to battle the villains, yet finding it difficult to visualize the ""dungeon"" and ""Marion"". 
I do not believe in vague explanations like little boys are born with an innate desire to fight. 
I believe they learn from society (as do little girls, in fact), and if so, violence on television should be avoided. 
Children are very impressionable and if they rely on television for giving them truths and facts about life, this might lead to less knowledge about human nature and an escalation of violence. 
To sum up, I believe it would be fantastic if the children's programs were filled with sensible messages with the intention of bringing up children to be intelligent and imaginative adults. 
Unfortunately, that is not case and the amount of time children spend watching television will probably turn out to be unhealthy for forming fantasies. 
Hopefully, the danger with television is just a figment of my imagination, but if the signs keep coming, we need to wise up and prevent this from happening. 
After all, fantasy is an amazing and powerful tool for keeping our existence vibrant and meaningful.
",True
" What can be done to reduce violent behavior?  
The amount of violence in society has increased in the US, as well as in Sweden. 
Is there a connection between what we watch on television and how we behave? 
According to many psychologists, there is a connection between if one has seen models with aggressive behavior, and acted aggression. 
This does not mean that if one sees a violent movie, one automatically becomes aggressive. 
According to Bandura one has to go through four steps first: ""They must attend to the aggressive action, remember the information, enact what they have seen, and expect that rewards will be forthcoming."" 
I will not go into the steps any further; the principle is that not all people are affected of what they observe. 
However, there has been found a clear connection between aggressive behavior, after watching an aggressive model, in the circumstances mention above. 
This is not the only explanation of the escalation of violent behavior, though, and probably not the most important one. 
If one compares the US and Sweden for example, there is similarities with the amount of violence people watch, but there is much more acted violence in the US. 
One reason for this difference may be the accessibility of weapons in the US. 
Not all violence includes weapons, though, so there must be even more explanations to the difference. 
If one looks at the groups in Sweden, which have the most violent and criminal behavior, there is an overrepresentation of young, males, from poor circumstances; often immigrants. 
They feel that they are not fully integrated in the society. 
These boys usually have bad grades from school and they know that there is not much of a chance of them making a career; in the conventional way. 
This may be an important similarity between the people in the US, and in Sweden, who have a violent, and often a criminal behavior. 
They feel powerless, in a society where they never really have a fair chance. 
To start with, we must create a society where all people have a fair chance, and where people get the support they need. 
Even people who hates paying tax may notice it can be money well used, even for them.  	
Even if one, hopefully, deals with the main cause of violent behavior; i.e. the segregation in the society, there are still more factors to deal with. 
There is a myth that we are not affected of what we see on television. 
As mentioned above, there is, under certain circumstances, a clear connection with what we see, and how we behave. 
Children are often at home without their parents. 
Research has shown that many youths watch a lot of violent movies, and also advanced pornographic films. 
The climate at some schools, in Sweden today, is very hard. 
The language mirrors this phenomena. 
Teenagers have a difficult period in life; they have to cut loose from the parents, and their friends play an important role in this phase in life. 
It is common with group pressure; teenagers usually conform to what they think is the prevailing ideal. 
I think many of their parents would be shocked and upset if they knew what their children are watching, how they talk and behave, and what they are going through. 
Parents, who hopefully know what is, and what is not, a good influence on their children, have little possibility to regulate what the children should watch on television, today. 
This does not only apply to violence, but also to pornography.  
There is almost unanimity, in most western countries, in the fear of censorship. 
The Freedom of Speech is the most ""holy cow"" we have. 
I do agree with that, what I suppose was its original meaning, it is the most important pillar in a democratic society: the right to freely express any political, religious, or any other views, as long as it does not hurt other people. 
Today, however, many people are getting hurt; by the influence of violence, and as a consequence; the rawness in our society. 
The opponents of censorship make parents impotent to control the influence on their own children. 
I think the V chip was an excellent proposal. 
I do not find any good arguments against it, and I hope it will come to Sweden as well. 
Not that I think the violence on films is the main reason to a violent society, but I think that, that too, affect people, and especially children and teenagers.
"," The Industrialization in Britain: Its effects on Women and Children  In the 18th and the 19th century, during the Age of Enlightenment, applied science led to many inventions which in turn led to the evolution of the Industrial Revolution. 
Examples are the steam power and the mass exploitation of coal; energy sources necessary for the industrial mass production. 
Coal mining thus became an important industry in Britain. 
Another important invention was the spinning machine, the so-called spinning jenny, which led to the growth of the textile industry. 
Many people moved from the rural areas to the emerging cities in the 19th century. 
They hoped for a better life, but the living conditions of the working class was very bad and they usually ended up in the slums. 
Women and children had been working before the 19th century but rarely outside their homes. 
The new industries suffered from shortage of labor, though, and everybody was needed. 
Women and children were often preferred, since their salaries were way below men's salaries. 
Laissez-fair was the doctrine of this time, i.e. it was believed that it was best with as little state intervention and regulations as possible. 
This facilitated the exploitation of the working class. 
However, as there were many reports of the horrible conditions, and as socialism expanded and trade unions grew stronger, there were many economical and social reforms in order to improve the lives of the industrial labor (Ideas and Identities, chapter 3 and 6).  	
In the beginning of the 19th century women were not supposed to work outside their homes (Culture Kit, p. 
121). 
They usually got married quite young and were economically dependent on their men. 
Nevertheless, it was the women who were to take responsibility of the family's economy. 
They often kept their husbands in the dark about the actual poverty, since they struggled to keep their men content (p. 8f). 
Working women were at this time seen as a threat to the husband's manhood. 
This eventually changed, and the textile industry was first to hire women on a large scale. 
However, to start with most women workers were unmarried, wives of disabled men, or widows (p. 
13). 
In the 1890s it was getting increasingly common for all women, from the working class, to be gainfully employed (p. 10f). 
It was a male dominated world, though, and women had much lower salaries than men. 
Although, many women often thought that the male supervisor's treatment was worse than the low salary (p. 11f). 
Because of women's lower salaries they were often preferred by employers, which could lead to the unemployment of men. 
Male-dominated trade unions organized strikes against women labor, and they wanted to achieve male monopoly on some trades. 
The trade unions did not accept women until the 1910s. 
Yet, there were special unions for women before this time, e.g. the Women's Trade Union League (p. 13, 21f). 
The so-called sweatshops where common during the 19th century. 
This was a complement to the more modern industry. 
Labor, usually women, was working under bad conditions; with low wages and in long hours. 
While industry workers gradually got better working conditions, some employers moved out their labor from the factories to the sweatshops where the unions still were weak. 
This continued until the early 20th century, when the legislation of minimum wage in Britain made sweatshop production unprofitable (p. 
22). 
There were many advantages of women working, though. 
By earning their own money women got a feeling of self-esteem. 
They often acquired some education and got married later. 
They got fewer children and there was also a declination in childbirth mortality (p. 6, 9ff). 
The latter led to expectations of the survival of the children, and the parents dared to give more emotional investment in each child. 
This among other things changed the view of children in the society during this time (p. 
8, 10).  	
Children were working hard even before the Industrial revolution. 
Most people lived in rural areas, and everyone - including the children - had to contribute for the survival of the family (p. 
24). 
During the 19th century, however, children were used as labor in a new manner. 
In the harsh realities of the Industrialization children from poor families were merely seen as a labor. 
Children were cheap to employ and easy to manipulate. 
They often worked very long hours under extremely bad conditions (p. 3f). 
In an interview one sweeper describes how young sweeper-boys were trained to inure the pain:  No one knows the cruelty which they undergo in learning. 
The flesh must be hardened. 
This is done by rubbing it, chiefly on the elbows and knees with the strongest brine, as that got from a pork-shop, close by a hot fire. 
/...
/ At first they will come back from their work with their arms and knees streaming with blood /...
/ Then they must be rubbed with brine again, and perhaps go off at once to another chimney (The English Social History, p. 
596).  
The workday for the children was usually 12 hours, and there was no chance of going to school. 
Children worked everywhere, e.g. in the mines, as chimney sweepers, as street hawkers, and in factories (p. 
4, 25). 
Many children started to work when they were five, but some were even younger. 
When the children were about 16 years old they were usually not wanted anymore. 
The employers had chosen the young children because of their size, their low salary and because they were easy to handle. 
As teenagers they then had a hard time to find a new employment, since they did not have any education or training (p. 
24). 
Many children did not survive at all. 
Fatal accidents and deaths were common, and it was not seen as something exceptional (p. 3f, 24). 
Children who had worked under these terrible conditions often suffered by crooked legs and humped backs as adults. 
They had to pay a high prize for the industrial development in Britain (p. 
24).  	
There were people who tried to change the hard working conditions for both children and adults, though. 
During the 1830s there were commissions which reported on the working conditions of the working class in the ""Blue Books"" (Ideas and Identities, p 141). 
There had been several factory acts before this time, but none of these had been effective. 
However, the  1833 Factory Act regulated the working hours for children to forty-eight hours per week (p. 
23). 
This legislation was preceded by the ideas of the factory owner Robert Owen. 
He improved the working conditions for his workers in many ways, and specifically stressed the situation of the child labor (Ideas and Identities, p. 
144). 
In 1947 there was a Ten Hour Act for some trades, but in the 1870s some other trades were still fighting for a ten hour day (p. 
20, 25). 
The British government reduced the working hours for their employees in the 1890s. 
In 1909 there was legislation concerning the eight-hour workday and the minimum wage (p. 
20, 22).  	
Women and children suffered hard during the 19th century. 
They entered the labor market, which thus far had been a male-dominated world. 
They worked under extreme conditions and were paid very low salaries. 
When socialism and trade unions gained more power at the expense of the prevailing laissez-fair, the working conditions gradually improved. 
The view of children changed dramatically, they worked less and were eventually offered education. 
The family pattern had changed profoundly in the working-class families. 
Women often spent more time outside their homes, they were more educated and they made their own money. 
All this probably led to a better self-esteem and demands for more rights in society overall.   
References Kit No. 5, in Culture course, English A level: Hibbert, Christopher, No One knows the cruelty (p. 1-5 in Culture Kit). 
In The English Social  History 1066-1945. itchell Hannah, A Fight for rights (p. 17-19 in Culture Kit). 
In The Hard Way Up. itchell Sally, (ed.), Working Hours (p. 20 in Culture Kit), Women's Employment (p. 21 in  Culture Kit), Sweatshops (p. 
22 Culture Kit), Factory Acts (p. 23 in Culture Kit), Child Labor (p. 24 -25 in Culture Kit). 
In Victorian Britain: An Encyclopedia. 
Vicinus, Martha, (ed.), Suffer and be still. 
Women in the Victorian Age (p. 6-16 in Culture  Kit). 
In Working-Class Women in Britain, 1890-1914. 
Almquist Norbelie, Barbro (1992). 
The Age of Empire and Industry in Britain 1820-1901. 	
In Lunden Rolf & Srigley, Michael (Eds.), Ideas and Identities. 
British and American  	Culture 1500-1945 (Ch. 
6). 
Lund: Studentlitteratur.  
Srigley, Michael (1992). 
The Enlightenment and Romanticism in Britain 1700-1832. 	
In Lunden Rolf & Srigley, Michael (Eds.), Ideas and Identities. 
British and American  	Culture 1500-1945 (Ch. 
3). 
Lund: Studentlitteratur.  
1 All references in this essay are from the Culture Kit No 5 if nothing else is specified.
",True
" The temptations of the Basque: A Revised Summary.  
In ""The Temptations of the Basque"" (Deia sept. 6, 1999), manuel de Unciti argues that the nationalist sector in Euskadi does not help Basque people reach a complete pacification there. 
He explains that the nationalist political parties would really like to set up a conciliatory dialogue between them and the central government in Madrid, but the truth is that they want to be in control of that dialogue and also impose the basic conditions for it. 
Moreover, the central government is doing its best to be in contact with both parts but it is the nationalist that refuse to the approach from Madrid. 
Unciti states that the independence of the Basque Country from Spain is now something unreachable, a ""utopia"". 
For him, it suggests an alternative nationalist ideology based mainly on the following motto: ""You cannot obtain anything without violence"". 
Finally, Unciti concludes that the nationalist refuse to say what they believe in publicly and he scarcely considers it possible to extend the supreme fatherland of Euskadi from its current borders to other areas such as Navarre, La Rioja and some southern provinces in France.  
Essay arguing against the article: Everybody agrees that ""The Basque problem"" has always been an untouchable question for many people living in Spain. 
Now that weapons are in silence and that there are not terrorist acts any more, it seems that people have suddenly started to talk freely and give their own opinions about this problem, mainly about a final pacification in the Basque Country. 
The absence of corpses on the pavements makes it possible for us to state our own beliefs not so cautiously as before, but with a great freedom longed so much by the Basque society. 
It is obvious that not everybody agrees with the rest of the people, but there are always many divergences. 
Above all, when we deal with the idea of independence and the right of self-determination for the Basque Country. 
Manuel de Unciti, a famous priest and journalist, does not support this idea and he blames the nationalist for not being able to set up a dialogue between them and the central government in Madrid. 
My aim in this article is to argue against this and other opinions of him and also state my own.   
To begin with, I really think that it is likely to establish an encouraging dialogue between the two parts that will lead everything to the right road. 
No blame attaches to the Basque nationalists when they are accused of not bringing this dialogue to a successful conclusion., but it is the central government who actually must shoulder the responsibilities. 
It does not show signs of raising ""the Basque question"" in its most radical causes and it keeps being stubborn with the idea that nobody can put a high price to peace. 
The current Spanish government led by José María Aznar, resists to accept that the matter pending between Euskadi and the rest of Spain is mainly of a political nature. 
All initiatives of advance from the central government, praised so much by many mass media in Madrid, prove ineffective. 
In a way, they sabotage the process of peace in the Basque Country since Aznar does not want to change the penitentiary politics and absolutely refuses to build up a meeting forum without exclusions. 
Even the violent ones (those who committed terrorist acts in the past) must be there. 
Everybody has to listen to what the others believe in and the political dialogue has to be carried out without any kind of pre-conditions.   
Secondly, I believe that independence from Spain is not a utopia, as Unciti asserts. 
On the contrary, it is something feasible. 
We, the Basque, constitute a single nation. 
We have our own culture, our own customs and above all, our own language (Euskera) completely different from the rest of the languages which are spoken in Spain. 
Thus, we should aspire to achieve a cultural unity. 
It is that the current European integrating political movements make independence from Spain difficult but at least, it would be possible for us to obtain the right of self-determination as a country including our own legislation in every field. 
In addition, I do not want here to take a radical and unreasonable attitude against what is Spanish. 
I accept that we still have many bonds with Spain, but it is obvious that we must defend what is ours. 
Independence will probably bring a final pacification to the Basque Country. 
A pluralist society will be established and the people living in it will live in harmony. 
Everybody will listen to what the others think and so, will accept all different opinions. 
What is more, violence will finish. 
It is once again a responsibility of the central government in Madrid to put an end to this situation that divides a whole nation and also puts the two parts living together face to face.   
Lastly and closely related to the idea of independence is the idea of a supreme fatherland for Euskadi. 
The latter has to be extended from its current borders to other areas such as Navarre, some southern provinces of France, La Rioja and Huesca. 
Unciti refuses to accept this suggestion. 
He says it is ""an stimulating dream"" of the Basque and he explains that few people believe this possible, In a way it is, though there are, of course, many difficulties. 
It is said that France will never give any province or territory from its fatherland to the Basque and besides, it is backed up by the European Community. 
It is also true that there is a minimal part of the population that cherishes independence in those French provinces, but I personally feel that a referendum should be done to know the opinion the population. 
If we look back on the past, we see that the old Basque Country consisted of all the previous provinces together with the current ones (Bizkaia, Gipuzkoa and Araba) which were linked by their own customs and language. 
Basque nationalists do not use demagogy as a political means or weapon, but they only try to bring up a future of grandeur for the Basque Country and its people.   
In conclusion, it is the great majority of the Basque people that wishes to work hard for a definite pacification in Euskadi. 
We are living a historical moment of peace right now and we must keep it forever. 
Everybody has to respect his opponent and make it possible to grant all the cessions needed. 
Now, pacification requires the establishment of a dialogue without pre-conditions and without exclusions. 
I am fully convinced that, with the passage of time and without violence, everything will be firmly put in its right place and problems will be given their true weight to discuss them more objectively.
"," Why has the level of alcohol taking increased so much in the Spanish teenagers?  
Alcohol taking in Spain is on a considerable increase as regards those who are under age in our society. 
The present situation has become almost untenable and now the time has come to do something as both the Spanish government and the media indicate continuously. 
However, this is not a problem originated just a moment ago, but we should find its stems in the basis of our own Spanish society. 
We have not realized yet what was happening very close to us. 
Now that the level of alcohol taking is without any doubt alarming, it would be reasonable to pick out some possible causes for this problem.  	
The media have suggested several causes and among them, one stands out against the rest: the government, they say, does not control neither pubs nor bars where they go on selling alcohol to the under-aged. 
The latter really find it easy to have a drink or two or even to get drunk for the first time in their lives. 
The owners of those places only look after their own interests and above all, they look after their economy. 
They would probably complain that they do not win enough money to pay everything they must pay as they are fully endowed with taxes. 
This is what many journalists in Spain have upheld in their articles.  	
Another reason that the media in Spain have also revealed as possible and that has been this time corroborated by those children' s parents is that of the more than probable unconcern the latter have with regard to their children's education, habits and manners. 
Many of the problems originated at home create certain confusions in the mentality of the affected ones, who really feel demoralized and find a refuge in the end. 
This refuge is obviously alcohol. 
Those parents do not realize that they have caused the problem beforehand and very often, ironically, they quit from their own blames and even say that they find it almost impossible to have their children under control all the time. 
The reason, they say, is that you can never know what your child is doing outside home and thus, whatever moment you can say: ""He' s done me!"" 
Still many sociologists indicate that it is about time to raise the conscience of the parents for a greater control of their children.  	
However, the main cause for this increase is, from my point of view, the desire to imitate, the desire to have a new experience (the first drunkenness), because they can see it everywhere and would like to feel as the grown-ups do. 
They want to feel superior to the rest of the people and thus, not being limited any more. 
This remarkable desire for freedom is due to: the presence of a society completely based on alcohol, the development of advertising campaigns concerning alcohol and again, the little consideration of the family towards their children.  	
First, just investigating in the past times of the Spanish society, we can find that it has always been eminently related to alcohol. 
Spain has always tended to have people who really like to have a good wine or a beer in a pub all nights or even our past banquets were full of wine and some other drinks. 
If we asked our parents what did they usually do when they were young, if they did the same or not, they would probably answer like this: ""Ok, Yes but not so young as it happens now. 
In fact, we were more innocent people."" 
Below this historic assumption, well -known by the tourists and foreigners in Spain, that urge for imitation and superiority is very well hidden in it.   
Secondly, the development of advertising campaigns on the TV which include alcohol in their sales, contribute to strengthen this problem even more. 
As many sociologists say, when that child sits on the sofa and watches the ads on the TV, that desire for knowing the taste of what has just been shown on the TV is really created in him. 
Perhaps, he has already seen his parents do that before. 
As a result of this, everything goes back again to that idea of the unconcern of the parents who do not know how to give their children a good education and bring it to a successful conclusion. 
A few solutions are of course needed, but now it is not the time to look for them. 
Maybe some special campaigns too should be done to help those parents!  	
In conclusion, as we have seen, there is an enormous increase in the number of the under-aged people in Spain drinking too much alcohol. 
It is a present problem without any sort of solution ahead, but a full study of this causes and, of course, a little bit of common sense will do the rest.
",True
" Public Service Television compared to private broadcasting.  
Until a couple of years ago only two channels on the television here in Sweden existed and those were the public service ones. 
Today there is an incredible number of channels, private and financed by advertisers they represent today the most watched; the public service channels have had to step aside. 
In these days of private owned broadcasting companies one has to ask oneself if this is something that affects what remains of public service television. 
During the last five years or so there has been a lot of debate about the quality of programs. 
The less serious programs shown on private owned broadcasting companies tend to attract a larger audience than the more serious ones shown on the public service channels. 
What does the public service broadcasting add to our lives in front of the television that the private owned broadcasting companies does not provide?  	
The debate about the so called quality of the programs shown on television seems to split into two camps whereas one is mostly concerned about the numbers of how many that actually watch a show; a program has to be profitable if it shall be sent. 
The other is mostly concerned about what is being shown; the message and the effects of the program. 
Traditionally, and perhaps correctly, one thinks of the second group as the defenders of public service channels and the first group as the ones who claim that free competition is the best way also when it comes to broadcasting.  	
When private owned broadcasting companies first appeared in Sweden a couple of years ago, the younger part of the population (from my experience) were mostly interested in these channels, maybe because the charm of the novelty, maybe because of their different choice of programs. 
The public service channels came to be considered as something boring reserved for very old people or for the very youngest. 
A short period then appeared when there were much talk about changing the public service channels; to make them more like the private broadcasting companies. 
This was probably because the public channels wanted to change their reputation of making programs only for elderly and children. 
However, any actual major changes in the programs were not noticed and everything continued very much in the same way as before. 
One thing that became different with the private companies introduced to the market was the task for the public service broadcasting; them being the only broadcaster directly connected to the state and therefore having another responsibility of the message sent by their programs but also having the responsibility of sending educational programs. 
This was not something new, but something that differed and still differs the public service broadcasting from the other broadcasters.  	
The public service channels receives its money from the state and is therefore not obliged to present any especially successful numbers to be able to continue their business. 
This is a privilege that the private broadcasters cannot enjoy since they are depending on money from advertisers that want successful numbers if to continue the support of the channel. 
This makes the private companies see it all in a much more commercial perspective compared to the public service broadcasting that must consider its programs in another perspective, as I have mentioned above, since not depending on money from advertisers but from the state.   
Today the public service channels represent in most peoples eyes not boring programs but good programs whereas the private channels that used to be considered to be the more entertaining ones still are so but does not have the same status. 
The public service channels have an important function as the only independent broadcaster in Sweden, that is; not paid or owned by a commercial company, they are dependent if you regard their relationship with the state. 
The wider range of the types of programs and of the subjects in the programs differ them from the commercial broadcasters and therefore makes them having a singular position in the Swedish world of television channels. 
Luckily the private broadcasters have not changed anything but the numbers in the audience of the programs of the public service channels.
","Words, words, words. 
What word could possibly describe the hard work of learning a foreign language better? 
I started to learn English as my first foreign language at the age of nine, and at that age the studies of language basically consisted of learning words. 
How to spell them, how to pronounce them and how to use them. 
We also learnt the most basic phrases, like ""My name is..."", ""What time is it?"" 
and so on.  
The teacher was always eager to tell us how important it was to learn lots and lots of words, but, speaking about myself, I know that this was something I did not quite understand until I first visited an English-speaking country. 
My first visit to England with my family learned me that when going to the supermarket, you cannot ask the staff for Swedish grocery-brands, like ""O'boy"". 
Another thing that also turned out to be almost always impossible was to use the Swedish word for a vegetable, for example, but pronouncing the word in an English way. 
So, at the age of ten I realised that words really were just as important as the teacher had told me at school. 
The phrases I had learnt was not really useful at that moment since I did not always understand the answers to the questions.   
After all the word practice, the English-classes tended to be some kind of concentrated word and translating sentences course. 
At the ""gymnasiet"", we had lots of grammar lessons, I could not tell you what we were up to all these grammar lessons, but I do remember having them. 
Every now and then, the teacher tried to make us speak as well, but most of the students (including myself) found it a bit ridiculous and artificial to make up a subject just for the aim of trying to discuss it in English. 
I suppose that it had to do with our age, since I do not find it that ridiculous today.  
So, for me it took some time before I actually spoke English, but once started I realised the fun in getting familiar with another extra language. 
Why only have access to one when you can have more than that?   
Lately, or the last three or four years, I think that my English has developed a great deal. 
After finishing the ""gymnasiet"" it was as if some kind of psychological barrier loosened up when it came to speak foreign languages. 
With the English but also with the French, it suddenly became a lot easier. 
When I went to England to visit my sister, who moved there a couple of years ago, I started to converse with her friends instead of just listening, hoping that nobody would start talking to me, mind you, I might would have had to say something. 
Anyway, the years of only listening to English, have made me good at following conversations, if I am to say something positive about it. 
I do not know if it has to do with increased simultaneous ability, but today I cannot only listen to a conversation but also take part in it. 
Some progress!  
As progress has been made in speaking and listening, I tend to read more in English as well. 
Maybe because I prefer to read books in their original language, if possible. 
What is good about reading in English, is the fact that you are exposed to many words, if speaking about that again. 
But it surely is useful to learn lots of them, as my teacher once said. 
And you are also exposed to many new expressions, which is funny, and good, to know. 
I cannot think of anything more irritating than being in the middle of a discussion and then, suddenly someone utters an expression you are not familiar with, or a word. 
I speak English on a rather frequent basis since my sister is settled in England but also because my parents have English, or Scottish, neighbours who I see a lot when I am at home. 
I guess the writing-part is the one I am the least good at, probably because I do not practice that very often. 
But since my experience of learning languages is, so far, that ""practice makes perfect"". 
I hope that this will apply to learning how to write well in English as well.
",True
" Is English a Germanic or Romance Language?  
Introduction  English holds a very special position in the Indo-European language family, being in part Germanic, in part Romance. 
Traditionally, it has been regarded as Germanic, due to its origin, but there are linguists who maintain that the number of French and Latin loanwords in English make it more Romance than Germanic. 
In this essay, I will analyse the statements put forth by professor Jean-Marc Gachelin at the University of Rouen, France, in his article 'Is English a Romance Language?', published in English Today in July 1990. 
Looking more closely at the complex history of English, I will also reflect upon what manner of words originate from Latin and French, what remain Germanic and why the division was maintained throughout the centuries. 
For this I will consult three works dealing with the linguistic history of the British Isles; Barber, C. 
The English Language. 
A Historical Introduction (1993:88-174); Baugh, A.C. and Cable, T. 
A History of the English Language (1993:105-153); Williams, J.M. 
Origins of the English Language (1975:52-90). 
I will not use any primary sources.  
A brief look at the history of English  To a great extent, the English tongue was forged by the various invasions that befell the island kingdom, as the languages of invaders and natives mixed and blended through daily contact. 
The first of these invasions was that of the Germanic peoples, i.e. the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes, which occurred around 450 AD. 
These tribes spoke West Germanic (Williams 1975:52), which in time would evolve into what we call Old English (OE). 
This language was to form most of the stem (i.e. basic vocabulary and pronouns and other non-lexical words) of modern English. 
Some four hundred years later, another Germanic-speaking race appeared on the scene: the Danes. 
These Viking raiders settled on the east coast of England and formed their own community, the so-called Danelaw, 'in which the Danes were free to live as Danes under Danish law' (Williams p. 
59). 
Apart from strengthening the already present Germanic vocabulary, the Danes introduced Scandinavian loanwords into English. 
Among these we find words to do with trading, (scales, egg, gift), kinship (sister, husband) and the pronouns they, their and them.  
The next great invasion, that of the Normans, could also be said to be of Scandinavian origin, since the Normans' ancestors were Vikings having settled in the fertile lands of western France. 
However, over time the inhabitants of Normandy (cf. 
Swedish Nordman 'man from the North) forgot their northern language and adopted the tongue of the natives, Old French, and it was this language that they brought with them to England in the eleventh century. 
The linguistic impact that the Normans had on English was immense. 
For centuries Norman French was the language of nobility and royalty as well as of the courts. 
As a consequence, middle-class families who hoped to improve their status, had their children learn French as well as Latin, the two languages of the learned. 
This trend lingered on. 
In fact, it was not until the reign of Henry IV (1399-1413) that English start appearing regularly in royal documents anew. 
However, one must not forget that English remained the language of the populace during this time, or that several major works (among them Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales) were written in English. 
This period brought with it a huge influx of words, among them words for nobility (prince, duke, count), religion (sermon, sacrament, virgin), food (fruit, mutton, stew), warfare (army, battle, peace) and the arts (music, beauty, colour). 
The use of French in England declined mainly as a consequence of two things (Williams p. 83): the loss of Normandy to France in 1204, which forced the English nobility with estates in both countries to chose nationality once and for all; and the Black Death in 1348, which killed approximately 30 percent of the English population (Baugh & Cable, p.139), forcing laymen who only spoke English into clerical positions. 
To these causes can be added a third: the nationalistic feelings that arose due to the Hundred Years' War (1337-1453) between England and France. 
Throughout history, the language of the enemy has seldom been well liked, and it is quite likely that kings and nobles started addressing the populace in their own language to gain in popularity. 
But a vast amount of French loan-words had already permeated English, and in spite of some purists' attempts to purge the language, the French element was there to stay. 
Another great influence in English, as well as in all other languages in the Christian world, has been Latin. 
Ever since England was Christianised (597 AD onwards), religious words such as alms, heretic and monastery have trickled in. 
Later on scientific terms and more 'learned' words were taken from Latin, adding greatly to the gargantuan English vocabulary.  
Is English a Romance language?  
I will now have a look at the views put forth by Professor Gachelin in the aforementioned paper. 
I wish to make it clear at this point that the Professor does not take a definite stand in this matter, but merely states some reasons why English could be regarded as belonging to the Romance languages.  	
One of the foremost factors in this issue, is of course the great number of Romance words that exists in English. 
Gachelin states that ""English is more than half Latin in its vocabulary"". 
However, the English vocabulary is enormous, due to the great amount of 'doubles' that exist-Romance words with a Germanic counterpart, e.g. lovely and amiable. 
In everyday life, a mere fraction of these words are used. 
Do the Latin words make up half of this quotidian (or daily) vocabulary as well? 
The Romance part of the vocabulary has, historically speaking, always belonged to the gentry, a division still visible today, albeit to a lesser degree. 
For although a great many words have found their way into everyday speech (such as exist, garden and, for that matter, language), many remain aloft and formal, often replaced by a more common synonym, be it Germanic or Romance, in informal situations (inquietude, 'anxiety', inebriated, 'drunk', sedulous, 'hardworking'). 
So can we really claim that English is Romance simply because more than half of its vocabulary stems from Latin, sometimes via French? 
Do we not have to take into account the frequency with which the words occur? 
I think that we do. 	
The situation which we are in also plays a very important part in our choice of words. 
As has been the case since the Norman invasion (see above), Romance words carry a formality which Germanic words lack. 
We are also more likely to see a person as learned, and thus authoritative, if he uses delinquent in stead of criminal. 
Gachelin acknowledges this fact when he says that ""[t]he sociolinguistic prestige of Latinate English is noteworthy"".  	
But although the Romance words in today's English are both numerous and regarded as prestigious, there is no denying the fact that the core of the tongue remains Germanic (Barber p. 
62). 
All the pronouns (my, his, they) are of Germanic origin, as are the conjunctions (and, or, but). 
Not to mention all the everyday words, such as window, grass, tree, man, leg and book, or verbs, including take, be, run, swim and eat. 
Gachelin, too, says that English is ""still basically Germanic"" and later states: ""It is easy to replace three of the five French words in the Lord's Prayer by Saxon equivalents (...) but it would be impossible to find Romance equivalents for all the Germanic words contained in this prayer."" 	
In English the Romance and Germanic influences blend very smoothly, and this is nowhere as apparent as in the formation of derivatives, which Prof. 
Gachelin says ""is itself hybrid"". 
A Romance stem can easily be fitted with a number of Germanic affixes, as in unquestioning, and the process works in reverse as well, Gachelin giving the examples delouse and debug.  
Conclusion  As we have seen, Romance and Germanic words combine to form the English language as we know it. 
A once purely Germanic language has had a vast number of its words replaced by Romance counterparts, which in turn have to rely on Germanic words to bind them together.  	
In short, English is neither wholly Germanic nor wholly Romance, but both in part. 
I think it is time to acknowledge it as the hybrid language it is instead of insisting that it fit into our carefully laid language models. 
As I stated in the first paragraph above, English holds a very special place among the Indo-European languages and in my opinion, that should be confirmed by linguists world-wide. 	
On basis of the material available to me, as well as the limited amount of both time and space, I have not been able to delve fully into this subject and my conclusion should be seen in light of this.  
I recommend further study, not only on which language group has influenced the greatest number of English words, but also the frequency with which these words are used by the English-speaking peoples, as well as the situations in which they occur.  
References  Barber, C. 
1993. 
The English Language. 
A Historical Introduction. 
Glasgow: Cambridge  Baugh, A. 
C. and Cable, T. 
1993. 
A History of the English Language. 
London: Routledge  Gachelin, J. 
1990. 
""Is English a Romance Language?"" 
in English Today, July 1990  Williams, J. 
1975. 
Origins of the English Language. 
A Social and Linguistic History. 
New York: The Free Press.
"," A study on English Synonyms  1. 
INTRODUCTION  In this essay, I intend to present a few of my most interesting findings in the area of English synonyms. 
After having taken a closer look at a modest number among the multitudes of them, I have selected a few examples of words, in order to illustrate some aspects of the complex phenomenon of words carrying similar meanings. 
The words I will bring up are exclusively lexical, and when it comes to geographical differences, I have concentrated somewhat on the American versus the British vocabulary. 
For each group of synonyms, I will mention what is valuable to know about the differences of the individual words. 
In some cases, the answer will lie in their emotional connotation. 
In other cases, the difference might have to do with the strength or degree of their meaning. 
After discussing the established synonyms, I will devote one paragraph to comment on the development of ""new"" synonyms. 
Eventually, a discussion will be presented on the question whether or not synonyms, in the strictest sense of the word, actually exist. 	 
The purpose of this essay is to illustrate the aspects in which synonyms differ, along with trying to give account for the reasons for this difference - however small. 
Hopefully, through the specific examples and the discussion that follows, the reader will gain a deeper understanding of the complexity and use of English synonyms in general.  
2. 
PREVIOUS RESEARCH  In Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, one of my main secondary sources, a synonym is defined as ""A word with the same meaning or nearly the same meaning as another word in the same language, such as 'sad' and 'unhappy'"". 
It is obvious that the areas of semantics and synonyms for a long time have undergone considerable explorations and studies. 
Apart from the one mentioned above, the main secondary sources of previous research that I have been using are Engelska Synonymboken along with The Oxford Dictionary, and Nordstedts Stora Svensk-Engelska Ordbok. 
When searching for illustrative and typical examples of synonyms to present in this essay, I have been using Engelska Synonymboken almost exclusively, the one and only exception being my very last controversial synonym-pair, which was found in The English Language A Historical Introduction (Barber, 1999).  
3. 
MATERIAL AND METHOD  Because of the very nature of my topic, along with my insufficient knowledge of the English language, I have, to a large extent, relied on secondary sources. 
Yet, although the actual facts are found in previous research, I have myself run a check-up using the corpus of the English Department at Uppsala University, as an attempt to verify the relevance and accuracy of what the secondary sources state.  
4. 
PRESENTATION AND DISCUSSION OF RESULTS  Try - attempt - endeavour - strive  
All four possible translations that I am about to deal with, Rende (1990) classifies as synonyms. 
Yet, as for the use of try, attempt, endeavour and strive, there is a gradual difference between them, going from spoken to literal language. 
'Try' is the most frequent word, most commonly used in spoken language, while 'attempt' is more formal and also stronger in meaning. 
Furthermore, 'endeavour' brings us to an even higher level of formality. 
Also, 'endeavour' is often used in ceremonial, solemn contexts, typically in written communication. 
In addition, 'endeavour' is mostly used when expressing a serious attempt to reach an honourable goal. 
To give an example, you may endeavour to raise money for charity. 
The word among the four synonyms mentioned above that has the strongest linking to written language, is 'strive'. 
This word is even more formal than the others, and it is to an even greater extent used in ceremonial or solemn situations. 
To 'strive' is to do your utmost to achieve something, fighting hard to make it come true. 
In conclusion, 'try', 'attempt', 'endeavour', and 'strive' represent a scale of increasing degree of formal meaning, which is a very common phenomenon among synonyms.  
Paternal - fatherly  Another common aspect of difference between synonyms, is their emotional connotation. 
As for the words mentioned above, 'fatherly' is an emotionally charged word, while 'paternal' is considered neutral. 
Within the word 'fatherly' lie the associations of a loving father, while 'paternal' simply states a relationship, as a matter-of-fact (Rende 1990). 
This is a typical case; the native word usually involves an emotional charge to a much larger extent compared to its lent equal.   
Childish - childlike Looking up 'barnslig' in a Swedish-English dictionary, you will find numerous possible alternatives. 
Two of them are 'childish' and 'childlike', (Petti 1997). 
What is interesting about these synonyms is that the former carries a negative sense, while the latter is more positive. 
The former is considered a shortcoming while the latter is a desirable personal quality. 
For a Swede, whose mother tongue supplies only one possible word to describe this characteristic, this is a vital aspect to know about its two English correspondences, in order to avoid misunderstanding. 
Imagine telling your English friend she is childish, in the belief that you are paying a compliment!  
Daft - dumb  A fourth way in which synonyms may differ, is the geographical area where they are used. 
In Britain, a silly person could be called 'daft', while in the United States, the same person probably would be labelled 'dumb'. 
The examples of this phenomenon are many, and a large number of them are a direct result of the colonisation of America back in the 16th century. 
As the new English-speaking society grew increasingly independent, so did its vocabulary. 
It is therefor quite logical that many of the geographically restricted synonyms express relatively modern concepts, such as the British 'motorway' versus the American 'freeway', although they also include many names describing topographical features specific for the different continents or habitats (Barber 1999).   
Still, similar to the group involving 'try', this group represents a scale - this time increasing in strength (Rende 1990). 
To have a 'scare' usually does not imply experiencing a trauma, but more likely a sudden fright, quick to approach, and quick pass by. 
The second alternative, 'fear', is the most common, widely used word, which can express everything from a light worrying to an overwhelming fear. 
Yet, since 'fear' is frequent in everyday speech, this particular word sometimes does not seem strong enough to depict to your listeners the intensity or depth of your unpleasant feeling. 
When that is the case, the third word in our group of synonyms comes in handy. 
'Dread' is stronger than the words mentioned so far, commonly used in the context of fearing something inevitable and evil. 
Still, there is one even stronger word, namely 'terror'. 
Legalistic - legal?  
One last aspect of the phenomenon of synonyms that I would like to bring up, is represented in the two words mentioned above, 'legalistic' and 'legal'. 
Now, hopefully, your puzzled mind was eased somewhat by the question mark that followed this particular word- pair. 
Barber's point of mentioning this particular example, is illustrating that due to the flux of language new synonyms are about to be created. 
As for today, the definition of a 'legal' person is simply someone who stays within the frames of the law, staying away from illegal actions. 
A 'legalistic' person, on the other hand, is someone who is fundamentally devoted to rules and regulations in general, probably by choice. 
Consequently, these words are at present quite different in meaning. 
Yet, as a result of people's confusion of the 'correct' definition or usage of these two words, their meanings may gradually approach each other. 
As Barber states, perhaps one day they will become established synonyms.  
Do synonyms exist?  
After having been taking a deeper look into the concept of synonyms, I ask myself the question of whether words of identical meaning actually exist. 
Off course, the ones I have concentrated on have all been lexical words, and they do not make a huge number, but still, the question remains. 
From the examples above, there always seems to be some sort of difference between synonyms, however small it may be. 
Still, even if people in general probably consider a synonym as a being a word with the exact same meaning as another word, this is not quite the fact. 
With the correct definition of what a synonym is - a word with the same meaning or nearly the same meaning as another word - the examples I have studied would certainly qualify as synonyms, after all. 
It is useful to keep in mind, though, that your choice of synonym in almost all contexts is vital for what the actual meaning of the message you are about to bring across.  
5. 
CONCLUSION  To conclude, there are many factors contributing to the meaning of a word, and all of them provide different possibilities of ways in which synonyms may differ. 
For many synonyms, one is more common in written language while the other is more commonly used spoken. 
Another way in which synonyms may differ is through having an emotional connotation versus being considered neutral. 
Still one aspect of the meanings of similar words is a latent positive or negative association. 
Also, different synonyms often have different geographical areas of frequency, the most obvious one being the American and the British differences in vocabulary. 
An aspect in which synonyms very commonly differ, is that of the strength or degree of their meanings. 
More formal and rare words seem to be considered 'stronger' than those of everyday use. y second last conclusion concerning English synonyms is that they are still developing, out of words that initially carried considerably different meanings. 
As for the question of the existence of true synonyms, I must admit that this particular question is indeed valid, and the answer is not too evident. 
Still, even though the examples I have studied differ in many ways, the meanings are still close enough to justify the individual words being classified as being synonyms.  
6. 
",False
" The Fifth Child a story of a perfect life falling apart  A perfect life, is not that what we all want? 
But is it possible to control everything that happens in it. 
Even though we try to control everything that happens around us, most things are out of our control. 
We can try to create the perfect life, but we are never safe from bad or evil things happening in it. 
The main characters of this story turn against their families and the values of the time they live in, to create what they think is the perfect life, but something happens that destroys their idyllic world. 
In this essay I am going to look at the main theme in Doris Lessing's ""The Fifth Child"", and discuss the importance of setting for this theme.  
This story can be seen as the story of a mother's love, or about guilt, but the most outstanding theme is the sudden change. 
The change that can turn the life of a family up side down, and destroy the idyllic life they have created for themselves. 
The main characters, the young couple Harriet and David, are determined to build the life and family they want. 
They go against their families and the society around them to do what they think is the right thing. 
When reading this book, one feels that something must happen to break this perfect idyllic life, and this something is the birth of their fifth child. 
This changes everything. 
Their perfect family falls apart. 
Their relatives and friends pull away, and their own children are afraid of this vicious new baby. 
The child is different, evil and violent, and suddenly a big part of their life is socially unacceptable. 
Their own child is unacceptable, and even Harriet and David can make themselves love him. 
Because this is a story about suddenly not fitting in, the setting is of big importance. 
The different settings that are relevant for this story are the time in history the story takes place, the scenery, and the moral, social and emotional conditions that surrounds the characters of the story.  
The time in history is the late 1960's.
The atmosphere in England at this time, is unconstrained and the idea of a big family is regarded as old-fashioned. 
Fewer women want to stay at home with their children and divorces are much more common than they used to be. 
This also shows in the social, moral, and emotional conditions that surround the main characters, and which is connected to the time. 
Harriet and David goes against their families and the values of the society they live in to create a perfect family and a perfect life. 
Harriet comes from a ""real family"" with a mother who stayed home with the children. 
Getting married and having children has always been the obvious choise for Harriet. 
Harriet's mother is not at all as happy about the idea as Harriet. 
She knows what hard work is involved in this. 
David's parents are divorced and he grew up with two families, of whom neither worked very well. 
He wants his family to be a perfect one, with a loving wife and a lot of happy children. 
His family is as much against the idea as Harriet's mother. 
But nothing they say can stop the young couple. 
Harriet and David turns against the ""greedy and selfish"" (29) spirit of the times with their version of a normal, traditional family.  
The next important part of the setting is the scenery, in this book a big old Victorian house in a quiet neighbourhood outside London, that Harriet and David buys to create the perfect life in. 
The door is always open for friends and relatives and the house is filled with warmth and kindness. 
In the book Harriet and David think of their house as ""their fortress, their kingdom"" (30). 
The house becomes something of a retreat and people look forward to spending their holidays there. 
Harriet and David are convinced that this perfect life and home is something they deserve. 
They shut the rest of the world out, and even though they hear about things happening in the world outside, this is something that really does not concern them. 
The use of a quiet little town and an old Victorian house with its many warm family gatherings to describe the idyll before the dramatic change in their lives, is very effective.  
As we have seen the setting is of big importance for the main theme of this book. 
It is important for us to know what is ""the normal"" thing to do at this time, and why Harriet's and David's idea of the perfect family is regarded as strange. 
It is also important to know what kind of moral and social conditions that surround them and their families, because from this we can understand the way they behave. 
Finally, the choise of scenery, the small town and the big old Victorian house, are effective to describe the idyll that is dramatically changed into a nightmare.
"," Evaluation  English, my English! 
So now I'm supposed to wright about my skills in English. 
One thing I can say is that I wish I was better. 
It's not that I'm terrible at it, but sometimes I just can't find the right words. 
I want to be able to use English just as easy as I use Swedish. 
I guess it depends on how much I use it, how much practice I get. 
When I was 17, I went to Hastings in England for four weeks of English studies, and my English has never been better than when I came home to Sweden again. 
Me and a friend stayed with mr and mrs Lewis and their baby Sarah, and mrs Lewis talked uninterruptedly from the moment we arrived. 
She asked all sorts of questions about everything, but I guess that was a good thing, because otherwise I might have been too afraid to speek at all. 
After a week I wasn't afraid to speak at all and when it was time to go home, it felt like I was born English.  
Anyway, that was a long time ago and I haven't been speaking much English since then. 
This means that I must have it all somewhere in my head. 
It's just that I don't know where. 
Hopefully I will find at least some of it during this semester.  
Listening This is something I find quite easy. 
English isn't at all hard to understand, unless the one who's speaking is from Scotland or something. 
It doesn't matter if there's one or two words I don't understant, because I usually understand the rest of it. 
I hear English everywhere around me. 
I hear it in music, on the television and when I go to the movies. 
I also like listening to recorded books and the ones in Swedish are really boring, so I go for the English ones. 
I guess that is good practice. 
It's nice to have lectures in English and find that I actually understand everything the teacher is saying.  
Reading y skills in reading are probably the same as in listening. 
In short I can say that I understand most of what i read. 
I really like books and if they are written by an English or an American author, I prefer to read them in the original language. 
Once in a while a word that I don't recognice pops up, and sometimes I look it up. 
But if I understand the context, than I almost always understand the word without having to look it up. 
I find reading and listening easyer than speaking and writing, and I guess that's because I can take my time and think, and I don't have to be afraid to do something wrong. 
Nobody will care if there's a word or two that I don't understand in a text or during a lecture, but if I say or wright something incorrect, everybody will notice it.   
Speaking The reason I find it difficult to speak English, especially if the one I'm speaking to is from an English speaking country, is that I'm afraid to say something wrong that will make me look stupid. 
I have a cousin in Ireland and he told me once that he had almost no English at all in school, and that my English probably was better than his so I guess I don't have that much to worry about, but sometimes it's so hard to find the right words. 
If I talk som someone out in a pub or in one of the nations, and if I've had a beer or two, than my English is great, but in the classroom, I just sound stupid. 
That's something I don't like at all, and I hope all the speaking in school will help me with this.  
Writing Now this is the tricky part. 
I can't remember half of what I learned about Swedish grammar, so how am I supposed to know about transitive verbs, complements and subordinate clauses? 
It's so easy to wright in Swedish, but when I do it in English I have to think about everything. 
I can think of something I really want to wright, and then i have to wright it in some other way because I don't know how to formulate it. 
This is really very frustrating. 
I guess practice is the medicine for this too.  
Finally I really like English and want to learn how to use it, without having to think and worry about everything I say. 
I guess it would be an exaggeration to say that my English is bad, but it could be a lot better, and I hope this semester of English studies will help me on the way.
",True
"This short essay will hopefully give you, as a reader, an overall impression of how I myself appreciate my general knowledge of English. 
I will try to give you the answer to the question: How competent do I feel about English?  
Well, a first reaction to that question is that I obviously don't feel too competent since I've chosen to attend this course in the first place, but at the same time I must feel at least a bit competent since I know that language studies at university level is very demanding and difficult which means that I probably regard myself as competent enough to cope with all that work or at least worth giving it my best shot.  
The answer to the question will be presented in a kind of listing of, and discussion around, my strengths and weaknesses in each one of the four parts of English that has with reading, listening, speaking and finally writing to do. 
Reading I've spent 4.5 years at the university, which means that I've come in contact with all kinds of English course literature. 
My main subject has been business administration and I would guess that around 80% of the literature in that subject are in English. 
I'm aware that there is a very big difference between reading course literature and fiction but also between course literature in different subjects. 
This means that I'm probably good at reading and understanding literature with business terminology but not as good when it comes to more fiction work like novels or short stories. 
Although it may sound, as I'm not very confident with reading English (other than course literature) I still consider that as my strongest side, perhaps together with listening. 
Listening. 
The development of my listening skills has been a long story involving school, T.V., films and friends. 
It probably started at the same time as I begun learning English in school for about 15 years ago and has been going on since then with highschool and some courses at the university, which has been taught in English. 
The most recent and probably, for my listening skills, most developing part happened during my time as an exchange student last autumn. 
I spent one semester in the Netherlands in a town called Tilburg, which lies in the very south of the country. 
All the courses were in English, which was also the language I used in my spare time with friends from all over the world. 
This has brought with it that I, as I mentioned earlier, consider listening to be one of my stronger skills in English.  
Speaking Speaking is a very important part but unfortunately I feel that this is not a very strong side for me. 
I think the problem is that I seldom get a chance to practice actually speaking English. 
Eventhough some courses at the university has been taught in English that doesn't mean that you practice speaking very much. 
Most of my speaking practice took place during my semester in Tilburg where I spent a lot of time with three British students. 
They would often teach me new words and expressions and correct me in a nice way at least most of the times if I pronounced some word strange. 
Writing This is the last part and probably also the least practised one of the four mentioned earlier. 
My experience of writing in English consists mainly of a few PM's in courses in Uppsala and a couple of larger essays in Tilburg. 
Nowadays I practise writing mostly when mailing and e-mailing with my English and Polish friends that I got to know during my stay in the Netherlands. 
As I mentioned earlier this is probably the least practised part and therefore I think also not a very strong side. 
This is rather difficult to decide since you seldom get response on your English when writing PM's and letters to friends which for me is the most common way of practising.  y overall impression of how competent I feel about my English is that there are sides that I feel I can manage with today, but there are also sides that definitely needs to be improved for me to feel that I'm competent enough. 
I believe that you can always improve your skills in all four parts but I also believe that you will come to a point where the marginal effect of more improvement is very low. 
I do hope to reach that point some day, hopefully soon.
","As long as I can remember I've always been a child and I will probably continue to be a child for the next decades or so. 
Being a child (although a bit bigger now) I've always been curious of everything and always had a will to know more and more, anxious and restless you might say, and it's true, I was and still is a very energetic person. 
Well what has this to do with the English language in listenign, reading, speaking and writing?. 
The following contious prose is supposed to shed some light on my specific relation to the English language. 
Because of my extrem curiosity as a child, I always tried to ask questions, make my point heard or just slap somebody with a quick joke this meant that I had to make my voice heard no matter what language. 
And the way I see it I have three main points to take up which has had influence in my English. 
They are: * My parents * My teachers * My current job as an officer in the Royal Swedish Navy Starting with my parents.  
They have always been a sort of amatuer-nomads, travelling around the world with me and my sister. 
All of that travelling forced me to speak all sorts of language but mainly English. 
As an example: when I was 12 years-old I was sent to Hastings, England on a language course in English. 
I had to live in a completely foreign family and manage on my own with only three years of English in school. 
My fellow comrades were 4-6 years older than, I mean, looking back it's pretty young being 12 years-old alone for three weeks in a non-Swedish speaking environment. 
But I learned some amazing things about England both cultural and social but especially about speaking to natives and listenign to natives. 
All this travelling has made me very confident in speaking and listening to the English language, as it is today I have no problem at all to communicate even fluently after a couple of minutes (even more fluently after a couple of beers). 
My teachers during my time has all to the extent of one been very good and supporting. 
Some of the encourageing writing, other forced it on their pupils, but almost always with good results in the end. 
I've always loved writing and has always been easy in writing. 
But somehow I didn't pay enough attention in the grammar classes. 
And now, looking back, that's one of my weaknesses, grammar. 
But I have told myself that I'm going to put down as efford as I can to grammar. 
Surprisingly I find grammar much more amuszing now than I did when I was younger, it's probably a question of maturity. 
My job has put me on the world scene once more in my life. 
Now together with my travelling in the past, I've been to every continent in the world accept the North and South poles. 
I've had lots opportunities to test my English. 
I remember one special event that put my English ability on the test. 
We were to board (a strike team consisting of 10 men, fast-ropes down from a helicopter and seizes the ship that is being supposed to be boarded in order to take control of the vessel and make it safe for a search- party to come onboard. 
They search the vessel looking for illegal aliens, drugs, weapons etc) a Polish landing-carrier of the Polnucha class (they carry marine infantry and amfibious assault tanks up to a company size) during a Partnership For Peace (PFP) exercise in the Baltic sea. 
When we came onboard everything was a total caos. 
Soon enough we had seized controll of the ship and started to interrogate the crew. 
It was my assignment. 
Soon I found myself in a tricky situation: the crew didn't speak a word of English and no other language, except Russian, for that matter. 
Since my Russian language abilities is a bit rusty (read: does not exist) I had a problem. 
After a while I managed to get hold of a man who could speak a little bit of English and a long and energetic interrogation of the crew could begin. 
When we had gotten what we wanted out of the crew my head was about to explode of exhaustion. 
My aceing need for some ""real"" American English was soon to be satisified, soon we were picked up by the US Coast Guard vessel USCG Tahoma on which we stayed for 24 hours as guests. 
Summing up this essay is easy: I love English and hope that my teachers and this course will help me reach a higher level of knowledge conserning listening, reading, speaking and writing.
",False
" A School System in Need of Changes  The Swedish school system is not working. 
It took some time before the Swedish politicians realised that fact, or rather, before they wanted to admit it. 
Recent figures show that twenty percent of all 16-year-olds have difficulties reading or writing a simple peace of text. 
Of course something is wrong, and of course something has to be done. 
The Swedish political party Folkpartiet presents a few measures that could help the school system getting back on its right course again. 
One is to increase the time pupils devote to school work, another is to give marks earlier and compulsory national exams in order to detect which pupils need more help. 
These suggestions, I believe, are very good ones and should be actualised as soon as possible. 	
By the example mentioned above, one can see that many pupils in the Swedish school need more help than they receive today. 
Folkpartiet points out that, as it is now, there is no time for the teachers to give that help. 
Swedish children have the shortest school day of all children in the industrialised countries, and more free days in a year than pupils in any other country. 
Besides, they have only nine years of compulsory school, from seven years of age to sixteen. 
So what can be done about this problem? 
The most natural thing to do would be to make the schooldays longer of course, but Folkpartiet does not stop at that. 
They also want to make the compulsory school one year longer, ten years instead of nine. 
The most important suggestions in my eyes are to give extra tutoring to pupils who need it, after class, and more homework to all pupils. 
This will make the school day even longer, in that sense that more time will be devoted to school work. 
Those who have problems with homework should be given the opportunity to do them at school with the help of a tutor.  
These are excellent suggestions; I would really like to see them in action right away. 
But if pupils will work more in school, so will teachers. 
And their burden is already heavy as it is. 
To make this suggestion work, schools must employ more teachers so there will be a tutor for every pupil who needs one. 
One of the reasons why pupils do not learn as much as needed is the fact that there is not enough teachers. 
And schools do not employ more teachers because they cannot afford it. 
So the question is how this could be done economically.  	
To prevent the problem with 16-year-olds who cannot read or write, we have to detect the weak pupils at an early stage, in order to help them. 
As it is now, Swedish pupils get marks from the 8th year and forward. 
The former national exams which were compulsory and were taken by all Swedish pupils at the same time, have become voluntary. 
This means that it is hard to evaluate a specific pupil's knowledge and skill compared to other Swedish pupils. 
Folkpartiet claims that giving marks in the 8th year is too late. 
If a pupil receives very low marks, this should be considered as a signal that he/she needs more help. 
But by that time, it will be hard to help a pupil with low marks to keep up with the other pupils. 
It will be devastating for him or her to always be behind. 
For that reasons, they suggest that marks should be given from the 5th year. 
Folkpartiet also wants the national exams to be compulsory again, in order to evaluate how much the pupils have learned during a certain period compared to other children throughout the country. 
This exam should also be taken from the 5th year and forward. 	
I believe that these changes would really make a difference, not only because we could detect the weak students earlier, but also because I think that more children would take school seriously if they were evaluated and ""rewarded"" for their efforts. 
Something that Folkpartiet discusses, and in which I agree, is that the Swedish school does not make demands upon the pupils. 
If nobody makes any demands upon you in school, you will probably not perform very well. 
As the situation is now in Swedish schools, teachers really have to make demands; there is much bullying and bad behaviour amongst pupils. 
If we could help them focus on the schoolwork, by making demands in the form of marks and national exams, maybe they would stop taking school for a big playground.  	
I have described the Swedish school system as a complete failure, and sadly enough, I believe it is. 
Changes have to be made, and the suggestions put forward by Folkpartiet are at least worth consideration. 
If we could make the Swedish pupils believe in themselves, by giving them opportunities to catch up if they are behind, and give them marks to reward them at an early stage, it would really improve both the quality and quantity of their education. 
The question about money to employ more teachers remains; Folkpartiet has no answer to that. 
After all, they are politicians! 
Great hopes, but no real action.
"," Taboo or Not Taboo  Shirley E. 
Peckham argues in her article ""Cleaning up the language"" that children of today are using swear words too much in their every-day conversations with each other. 
She is alarmed by this discovery since her own upbringing taught her that this is bad behaviour. 
She says that ""If children are to be allowed to continue this foul and anti-social behaviour way for much longer it will become general practice for all and everyone in future years to behave in like way."" 
I disagree with her; I really do not believe that our language is in any danger of becoming ruined by a frequent use of swear words. 
People have been swearing throughout time and that has not made our present language any worse. 
I am not concerned with children's swearing, I think that most children know when it is all right to use swear words and when it is not.  	
Peckham claims, as mentioned, that if children are allowed to swear, our language will in the future be ruined and swearing will become general practice. 
This cannot be true, since swearing is an old phenomenon and people of today use good language. 
Peckham does not seem to understand that swear words have a specific function in our society; people use them to show emotion and in some cases to state their identity. 
If a particular swear word is used frequently by a large group of people, the word will after some time lose most of its former ""power"". 
If that happens a new swear word will be created; taken from an area in society which is taboo. 
So there will always be swear words and people who use them. 
Just because swear words are indeed forbidden, some young people like to use them. 
Peckham believes that children swear in order to feel big by it. 
But children and adolescent swear as a sort of revolt. 
""To revolt"" is something most of us do at that age, and this kind of revolt has to be considered as quite harmless. 	
Peckham also says that ""children these days do not seem to know what speaking normally and decently is"". 
I believe they do. 
As mentioned, swearing has a communicative function as well. 
When children and adolescents talk, they like to ""spice"" their language with different sorts of effects, to really clarify the emotional content of what they are saying. 
This kind of talk is often used among peers, not when a child is addressing a parent, a teacher, or any other adult. 
Nor does a child use swear words in their written texts in school, because he or she realises that swear words do not fit in in that context. 
Peckham had over-heard a conversation between young boys at the railway station, she had not talked to any of them herself, nor did any of the boys address her when they talked. 
By this fact we can draw the conclusion that Peckham has no right to blame children of not being able to speak normally.  	 
I believe that Shirley E. 
Peckham is exaggerating; children's swearing is not really a big problem, and our language is not in any danger of becoming ruined by a frequent use of swear words. 
We have been swearing throughout time and will probably continue doing so. 
And I am not concerned with children's swearing as long as they follow ""the rules"". 
They know how to talk decently and they usually do. 
But if you over-hear a conversation between them full of swear words, you should not be alarmed, not even shocked. 
When they have grown up, they will talk just like you.
",True
"INTRODUCTION. 
I have been studying English during a long time, some way or another. 
But if I really wanted to assess my abilities and my competence when it comes to making use of my English skills - where would I find myself? 
How secure and confident do I find myself when I use my English in practice in the different fields of listening, reading, speaking and, of course, writing? 
How well do I perform and how do I manage when I use my English in real life?  	
This evaluation will be highly subjective, since it will give my own judgement about the question. 
I will try to evaluate my English skills and weaknesses in the areas mentioned above - listening, reading, speaking and writing. 
I will start with a short summary of my English educational background.  
Y EDUCATION IN ENGLISH. 
I started to learn English as a ten- year-old girl at school. 
I do not recall that I had problems with the language. 
I think I was quite an ordinary pupil and throughout my school-time I managed with the language fairly well. 	
I did not go to the upper secondary school. 
I married, worked and when I got my second child I studied English at Kom-vux, upper secondary level. 
Now I just loved it and I managed well with my studies. 	
The following years I used to read English books to keep my English skills in order. 
Last year I studied English, course B, upper secondary level. 
I also made the test to get access to university education and I passed the test quite good. 
That is my educational background, and it could be of some use to summon it up in order to evaluate the present state of my English abilities in the provinces listed earlier in this essay.  
HOW DO I COPE WITH THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN PRACTICE, THEN? 
When I l i s t e n to people who talk English I think I cope quite all right. 
I have no difficulties in understanding my teachers so far. 
I can listen to Euronews, for instance, and I understand most of what is said. 
Even though a single word could be unfamiliar to me, I get help from the other words and in this way I can follow the main theme. 
It can be difficult with different dialects but in general I think I can handle the listening part good. 	
How do I manage the r e a d i n g part? 
That is similar to the listening part, I think. 
Reading is even easier than listening because when I am reading, I have the asset of the word remaining in front of me, and I also have time to think - and there are other words, a coherence that can help me. 
I use to read such books as 'The street-lawyer' by John Grisham without problem. 
But Neil Postman's book 'Amusing ourselves to death' has a much more difficult language - the book will give me some difficulties to come to grips with. 
It is a question about vocabulary. 	
My talking abilities, the third province in this evaluation, what are they? 
This is the part I need to develop the most, since I have not had enough opportunity to talk to native English people. 
They do not grow on trees - not in Sweden, anyway! 
I still feel insecure when I talk to people.  	
My skills when it comes to writing, then? 
Perhaps my reader could give a better answer than I. 
If I would rank my skills I would say I am better in listening and reading than writing English, but better in writing English than talking English. 
But of course there are a lot of possibilities to do mistakes when you write English: The demands for accuracy are higher when you write than when you talk.  
Conclusion. 
When I use my English I am best at listening and reading. 
I think my writing skills are somewhat lower and my talking skills are the weakest part of my English competence. 
It will be thrilling to see how much I can improve during my first term at the University!
"," THE FAMILY, NOT THE STATE, SHOULD DECIDE WHAT SCHOOL AND CHILD CARE THEIR CHILDREN ATTEND!  
INTRODUCTION.  
Sweden has a long history of centralised power, even since Gustav Vasa and the other autocratic kings into present times with our strong central government in Stockholm.. 
Surely the situation with the very long period of social democracy in governmental position prepared the ground for the comprehensive school system we have today. 
The intention of providing all pupils with an equal and good education caused the government to impose the comprehensive system in the 60's. 
The government's aim was not bad. 
They wished that more people should be able to attend further and higher education. 
Earlier that was impossible for a lot of persons.  	 
Since a more conservative government got the power in the 80's the uniformity of the situation has altered. 
We now have a totally different situation. 
I wish to discuss why it is absolutely essential that the parents and not the government have the power and right of decision about what school their children shall attend. 
The same arguments are valid about the importance of parental freedom to decide upon what kind of child care they prefer.  
WHY, THEN, IS IT SO IMPORTANT THAT PARENTS CAN CHOOSE SCHOOL - AND CHOOSE ANOTHER SCHOOL THAN THE STATE SUPPLY?  	 
First of all, it is a human right to choose school according to your religious or philosophical belief. 
This is clearly stated in the United Nation's declaration of human rights and also ratified by the Swedish state. 
The elementary schooling should also be free of charge, says the same declaration.  	 
But of course, this is not the only reason why it is so important to have a possibility to select. 
Another reason is that when people feel that they can affect this aspect of their childrens lives, they feel responsibility too. 
They feel urged to attend parents meeting at school and take a greater interest in their childrens schooling.  
CAN'T THE FREEDOM TO SELECT A FREE SCHOOL CREATE A SEGREGATED SOCIETY?  
This is a very interesting thought you often hear from opponents to free schools. 
Could it be that such schools would consist only of rich and successful people's children? 
And perhaps - a even worse thought - only of white people, no immigrants and their descendants? 	 
No, I would say, whit the present system when the money follows the pupil every pupil has a chance to go to an independent school. 
When the money comes from the tax revenue, justice is maintained. 
It should NOT be a question of money if a parent wants to send his child to a non-state school. 	
The segregation in Sweden depends on housing policy. 
This is a greater problem for the state comprehensive schools since wealthier people just can move from a problem area while others just have to stay and have their children in a sometimes bad school - if they don't have a choice.  
CAN'T THE FREEDOM TO CHOOSE ANOTHER SCHOOL IMPOVERISH THE STATE SCHOOLS?  
This is a common question among defenders of state schools as the only alternative. 
I would say no, again. 
On the contrary, since competition will force the state schools to be better or at least as good as independent schools it will benefit the whole society. 
Monopoly has never been a good option. 	 
In a initial stage an independent school could cause a small increase of the education costs in a local place, if the classes are very small. 
But too small schools do not get permission to start. 
An independent school usually gets 85 % of a state schools budget in Sweden.   
CONCLUSION. 
The main reason why parents should be able to choose schools for their children is that this is a human right and a part of the freedom a citizen should enjoy. 
But it also good if the parents get more involved in their children's schooling and if they feel they can choose, this is a consequence. 
The competition between state and independent schools will create better schools and it would be stupid to go back to the previous situation.
",True
" slavery system of modern times  To force people to do unpaid work in the public sector to receive unemployed benefit, I think indicate a very cynical outlook of unemployed people. 
If jobs exists within the public sector people should be employed and get proper paid for their work. 
If on the other hand the jobs will be created just to serve the purpose of keeping unemployed people bussy and the assignments are not enough important to employ people to do them. 
That would be a even more condescending way of treating people. 
If the first condition is the applicable and you carry matters to an extreme, it would ultimately be to force people to reduce their own abilitys of getting a real job. 
Though in both the cases i think that coerce people to work in order to get their uneployment benefit would be a slavery system of modern times. 	 
Forcing people to take a unpaid job it's to questoning their ability to decide for their own good. 
I also think that it's a way of questioning peoples character, thinking that they would just lay back and don't make any efforts to improve their situation if they weren't forced to do otherwise. 
I think on the whole that the state should be very carefully with interfering to much within peoples life. 
Peoples which prefer to use their time they have when they are unemployed to search jobs, improve their skills in different areas, or just be thinking of what they want to do with their future, should have that ability. 	 
When you get unemployed you commonly loose a great deal of your selfconfidence and your human dignity, if you than are being forced to work more or less for free, with something that you doesn't feel happy with and which doesn't suit your personality, it doesn't exactly raise your self-confidence or inspire you in any positive way. 	 
I also believe that there's a risk, if the first thing you have to do when you become unemployed is to begin to work full-time in the public sector, that after a while you don't feel that you have the strenght of both working full-time and search for a new jobb. 
My own experience, of have being unemployed and worked for ""free"" in the public sector (My own choise), is that in a coupel of months you don't have the energy or motivation to search jobs very actively. 
And this observance also applys to other unemployed people I've met. 
Though I think that the unemployed people who wants to do unpaid work should have the opportunity to do that. 
But considering that it can be easier to search for jobs when you have more time for it, a legislation that you in order to get the unemployment benefit must work for ""free"", would make it even harder for some people to get a real job.  	 
The good thing about unemployed people working in the public sector would be that they get some work experience and references. 
But than again, if the work is really nessecary to be done why not employ unemloyed people instead of using them as free worker, and give them the money and security that comes with a real job. 
Otherwise It's like saying that the work people are forced to do haven't got any real value.  	 
To sum up I think the idea of forcing people to work in the public sector in order to get their unemployment benefit would be a encroachment that doesn't belong in a free and democratic society. 
You shouldn't underestimate peoples power of initiative and ambition to improve their situation. 
And you also have to consider that unemployed people are individuals with different needs so you can't apply just one solution to the problem with unemployment, it would be to simplificate a very complexed issue.
"," Children's access to violence in media  assproduced Disney series, strident content, no message and humour that applies to adults. 
Much can be said about today's children's programmes but the most urgent thing to pay attention to though I think is the increased rate of violence in the programmes and movies directed to children and the free access to adult programmes and films with violence in them. 
Maybe the worst thing isn't the violence itself but the romanticizing of it, the macho ideals and prototypes that might be entertaining at film but can not be seen as desirable ideals in real life. 
Emotional strongly simplifications can be necessary and good for children in order to create sense and coherence like in many fairy-tails were life consists of good and bad but it becomes dangerous when the setting applies to much to the real world and children are supposed to have the same ability as adults to sort out fiction from what's real.  	 
When children are more allowed to look at programmes made for adults the risk is that the children's programmes also starts to adapt to more violence scenes and a rougher outline to keep its number of viewers and there is also the compete among the commercial channels of their younger viewers. 
In effort to attract more viewers the channels increase the rate of violence in their programmes. 
If I compare my impression of television in childhood with the imression of today's television I've noticed that there is a great pressure among parents of today to allow their children more or less free access to television. 
To not allow children to watch adult movies it's beginning to be seen as being unnecessary hard and severe. 
With today's free access to violence in television is that children prefers the most violent films and it has become high-status to see the worst films and series.  	 
In USA the support grows for a so called V ship (for anti- violence ship) a technology that would allow parents to lock out programs previously identified by having a certain level of violence. 
To many legislators and others concerned about TV violence the V ship seems a neat solution to the problem asserting parental control and reacently a bill was passed in the Senate calling for broadcasters to devise their own rating system within a year. 
And although a risk can be seen in this form of increased government control of people's television habits It's has to be seen as a very effective and painless way of reducing children's access to violence in television. 
And even if we in Sweden still have two public channels with government control I think we have came to a point with all new commercial channels comming where theres's a need to reconsider a incorporation of the V ship system in Swedish television also.  	 
Considering what a big impact television has in the way it colour and shape our picture of life and whether we like it or not works as an education, in USA children per average spend more hours in front of television than in school, it's scaring that the offering rules of not by what's good for children but what's good for profit. 
A fact that become alarming when you consider the increased rate of violence and sexual outrage made by and to very young children in recent time. 
Children are much more easily affected by violence than adults, they haven't got the same ability to select among their expressions and their perception is more open and less selective. 
Parents and government stand in front of a great challenge when it comes to take responsibility for how the next generation is being shaped.
",True
"The aim of this essay is to evaluate my English. 
How competent do I feel about my English at the present time? 
Doing this I will estimate the four skills of listening, reading, speaking and writing in order to find out my strengths and weaknesses.  
Listening  Generally I do not find it difficult to understand spoken English. 
Living in Sweden you are getting used to hear English in different situations for example at television and in musictexts and it is not unusual meeting English-speaking people. 
So even if you are not practising English that often you are getting used to hear the language. 
However, there are situations when English is not so easy to understand. 
I find it rather difficult to understand if a person speaks very fast or has a strange dialect. 
Different types of English are more or less easy to understand, British English is, for example, easier compared to American English. 
There may also be a problem to catch what people are saying when many people are talking at the same time.  
Reading  One thing you do not have to think about reading English is the dialect or whether you are reading British or American English. 
This is partly why reading is even easier than listening. 
I do read a lot, both Swedish and sometimes English novels. 
Every now and then there has also been some course-literature in English. 
When I am reading novels I do it for pleasure. 
I do not consider it a pleasure to look every unknown word up in a dictionary. 
Doing that the novel does not get a whole. 
This is, of course, as long as I get the context from all the words that I do understand. 
If an unknown word comes up time after time I get curious and look it up. 
Sometimes, even if a single word is not important for my understanding, I want to know the meaning of it. 
It can simply be a good word, interesting because it looks nice or is nice to say or by any other reason. 
Reading is very good because it helps you to get into the language and get a feeling of it.  
Speaking  In a way speaking is the best part of the four skills probably because you interact on other people and there is an immediate response in what you are saying. 
On the other hand I feel that speaking puts me in an exposed position where my weaknesses become very obvious. 
Compared to reading English, which gives me a feeling of being competent, speaking English often makes me feel limited in ways of finding the right words (my vocabulary is not big enough), talking to slowly or getting unsure about the pronunciation. 
Another difficulty in speaking English is to get the proper word order and the correct prepositions. 
I am also considering my intonation a bit too Swedish (maby I speak like someone from the ""Muppet- Show"").  
Writing  	Except from letters I have not been writing in English since I went to upper secondary school (for more than twenty years ago!). 
I can not even remember anything that I have written in English. 
When it comes to writing my problems are very much the same as in speaking English. 
I have difficulties in finding the right words, getting the correct word order and the proper prepositions and other grammatical rules. 
However, there are some big differences between speaking and writing. 
Writing gives you more time for finding the right words, to check up the grammar rules and the rules of spelling. 
I also have the chance to read my text many times and to make revisions.  
Conclusion  The aim of this essay was to find out how competent I feel about my English at this point. 
I would say that my skills in listening and reading are quite good compared to the skills in speaking and writing. 
I hope I can improve my English (all skills) by continuing to read and listen and by studying grammar and practise the active parts (speaking and writing) of the language.
"," ALLOW BASEBALL CAPS IN THE CLASSROOM  There is a lively debate going on in Swedish schools whether to allow pupils to wear caps or whether to force them to take them off in class. 
The custom to wear a baseball cap has become very popular and many pupils do not take the cap off their heads when they enter the classroom. 
What young people wear has always been discussed by adults and teachers have even in the past reacted to how their students are dressed. 
Nevertheless, the discussion about the cap is much more upset than previous discussions. 
In some schools the debate is so intense that it has divided the school staff into two groups depending on the opinion on the matter. 	
This is a rather complex issue and I will take up just two standpoints for allowing pupils to wear baseball caps in the classroom. 
First, clothing is a part of a young person's struggle for identity, second, the cap itself is not the problem, there are other reasons why teachers get so upset when pupils do not take off their caps.  	 
In the first place, young people try several ways to find out and show who they are or would like to be. 
For instance, music and sports are often important parts of their lives which they, naturally, have a need to express in different ways. 
In other words, a cap, often with a logotype showing what music style or sports team the wearer likes, is a way to show identity. 
It is no news that teenagers want to dress differently from adults. 
Not too long ago this could be done by wearing jeans and a sweater. 
This is not longer possible because it is the way any teachers dress nowadays.  	 
Strangely enough, the reaction to and the feelings about pupils wearing baseball caps in class seem more upset than, for example, the reactions to punk-rockers in the 1980s. 
One explanation of this is that the cap is a religious and social symbol. 
Traditionally, men take off their caps in church in order to show respect and generations of simple men have gone ""cap in hand"" to beg for their survival. 
Undoubtedly, this humility is what many teachers seem to want from their students in the 1990s. 
They feel provoked and not respectfully treated by pupils who wear caps in class. 
Of course, both teachers and pupils shall be met by respect in school. 
However, it is lack of respect to demand this humility from teenagers. 
School has to look upon every single pupil as an individual and to let this individual develop in her/his way. 
People who do not want the pupils to wear caps in class might ask where this is going to end, what are young persons wearing in2050, are things getting worse and worse? 
I would say that this is not the problem and it brings me to the next argument for allowing caps in the classroom. 	 
The reason why teachers get upset when pupils do not take off the cap is unclear. 
It may be argued that it is rude and impolite or that the pupil's eyes can not be seen. 
Still, the baseball cap has just become a symbol for more serious problems. 
It is mainly boys in caps that cause the teachers' irritation. 
Even this has its explanation in religious traditions, thus, men traditionally take off the caps while women keep their hats on in order to show respect in church. 
Owing to this, girls in baseball caps appear less provocative than boys. 
Furthermore, boys behave, in general, more provocatively than girls. 
It is not to be said that teachers are careless about the real problems. 
However, some teachers are more likely to deal with the cap-problem than to search the origin to why things do not work out well in the classroom. 	 
In conclusion, the baseball cap has become a bigger issue than it deserves. 
To wear a cap is, in most cases, a rather harmless way for young persons to show who they are. 
When teachers choose to focus their attention on whether pupils take off their caps or not, they are neglecting more serious problems. 
Eventually, in order to deal with the pupils of today teachers have to get rid of old traditions and face modern society.
",True
" Thoughts about children and fictional violence.  
In this essay I am going to discuss the effect TV violence has on young viewers and why children are exposed to violence on television in the first place. 
There are different aspects of this issue and I will take up some of them, such as if children are effected by violence on TV, how lack of role-models can be a part of this problem and how parent's attitudes towards TV violence affects the child.   
Can children separate reality and fiction? 
Studies have shown that children find violence on the news scarier than the violence of action fictional violence. 
I think this is a healthy sign which indicates that children are able to distinguish between the two. 
Still the dividing lines between facts and fiction are more vague when you are a child than when you are an adult. 
Every grown up person knows this form experience. 
This is why I find TV violence so disturbing. 
Because children have lively imagination they to not always separate television and real life. 
Therefore there is a risk of them not understanding that the violent behaviour they see on television is not accepted by society. 
Since TV programmes seldom show realistic consequences of violence children do not get real insight of how destructive it is. 
In many TV shows the characters are divided into good and evil ones. 
The evil characters are always more violent and this teaches children that violence is wrong in a way but in many cases the ""hero"" of the programme also uses violence. 
As long as violence is used for a good cause it is all right, seems to be the message of a lot of shows. 
I have seen many boys who try to copy action heroes. 
An example of such heroes are the ""Power Rangers"" who have caused a lot of debates a few years back. 
I happened to be in the United States when this show was very popular so I saw how it effected young people there. 
A little boy I used to baby-sit wanted to be a ""Power Ranger"" and learned the different fighting techniques. 
When he and his friends got together someone often ended up getting hurt. 
This shows how violence on TV has influence on people.  
Now back to the subject of limits. 
It is the parents' responsibility to set limit for their children, in order to give them good values. 
The problem with television is that a lot of parents have lost control of it. 
One problem is that the parents have no control of what is being broadcast on television, another that they don not have time to be present at every moment the child is watching television. 
Television often becomes a babysitter when parents for example have to work a lot. 
If children do not have their parents as strong role-models they are more likely to find roll-models on TV. 
That is where TV violence comes in again. 
Since a lot of children watch action shows, the pattern they learn is that everything can be solved by violence. 
Even for parents who have strict TV rules at home it can be difficult to prevent their children from seeing violence since children often spend a lot of time at their friends' houses where the rules may be more liberal. 
Not all parents believe that their children are affected by television. 
My father is one of these people. 
When I complain about him letting my younger brother watching ex-rated films he just says ""Don't worry about it. 
He dosn't find it frightening."" 
This may be true, he may not find it frightening, but if that is the fact I think that that is equally disturbing. 
Even though the problem of children becoming violent because of television shows is more severe, I do think the blunting effect TV violence has also is troublesome.   
I have now mainly acknowledged the problem of violence being accessible to children through television. 
Since broadcasters do not take moral responsibility and censorship is not allowed it is completely up to the parent to set limits for their children. 
I have taken up how the lack of parental involvement and guidance is not only a problem since it allows the children to watch more TV but also because it makes the parents weaker roll-models, making the child more dependent on images of heroes and idols on TV.
"," The Only Good Indian Is a Dead Indian.  
This essay is a critical study of texts about Indians in the end of the 19th century. 
I will give account for both the positive and negative views white people had of the original habitants of the United States. 
The view point varies a lot in the different texts but most of them are written in the 1880s.  
The most negative attitudes towards Indians are presented in the text by Walker. 
He clearly sees them as inferior, primitive beings and in many ways almost like animals. 
This is mainly shown by his opinion that in the conflict between white settlers and Indians, Indians are not fighting for the same honorable reasons as the white, but rather because of their instincts. 
""They cannot entirely subdue the savage instincts to roam at will, to defy restraint, and to indulge their lawless appetites for blood and plunder."" (p.1) ""glutted their fiendish thirst for blood and torture"" (p.3) But he also thinks that they are acting out of evil and that they are deceptive enough to ""re-enact the role of good Indians"" (p.3) in order to get benefits from the whites. 
First and foremost Indians are seen as the enemies, the fiends. 
In the less violent encounters with Indians they have shown to be rude and disrespectful. 
Walker writes about one such meeting where a Peace Commission was sent to Sitting Bull. 
He says that the ""distinguished visitors"" were met with ""savage discourtesy"". (p.3)  Another, more positive view comes from Elisabeth B Custer. 
She has had many close encounters with Indians and their society and shows a lot of interest in the Indian culture. 
However in her text, negative attitudes are also revealed in the words used to name the Indians. 
She calls them creatures and savages in a way that makes you understand that those are terms normally used, but they still are words that have negative and demeaning content. 
They reflect the attitude of whites in general rather than her own opinions. 
Her fascination is apparent when she describes the Indians clothes and appearance. 
""The costume was simply superb."" (p.23) ""The Indians feet are usually very small; sometimes their vanity induces them to put on women's shoes. 
The hands are slender and marvellously soft considering their life exposure. 
Their speech is full of gesture, and the flexible wrist makes their movements expressive."" (p26.)   
When she describes the Indians and their ways her observations are always detailed, personal and focus on the emotions of the Indians. 
""The Indian kiss is not demonstrative; the lips are laid softly on the cheek and no sound is heard or motion made. 
It was only this grave occasion that induced the chief to show such feelings."" (p.24) ""No fear showed itself, but from the characteristically stolid face hate and revenge flashed out for an instant."" (p.21) ""the warrior understood the unusual sight of a smile from his people."" 
""The orator saw that the faces of the Indians showed signs of humor."" (p.27) ""The prisoner dropped his head to hide the look in his eyes that he thought ill became a warrior as brave as he really was. 
The bitter, revengeful thoughts with witch I had entered the room were for a moment forgotten and I almost wished that he might be pardoned."" ""the suffering among the Indians was very great."" (p.26) ""The Indians all seemed a melancholy people."" (p.31) These last quotes show that she has sympathy for the Indians.   
One par of eyes we see the Indians through are the ones of Graham. 
His texts are from the 1950s but it contains an interview from 1877. 
He has perspective on the conflicts between Indians and whites and he writes much more about how the Indians have been mistreated, which has become more common as time has gone by. ""those who had already bowed their necks to the white man's yoke had been cheated abused and made captives de facto whatever may have been their status de jure."" (p.10) He also acknowledges it here: To Moon was brave enough he says, but a great liar, who held that it was not wrong to lie to the white men, In view of the white man's record of mendacity when dealing with Indians, the old chief had something there!"" 
(p.9) He does not agree with the old terms used to describe Indians and Indian related matters. 
""The so-called hostile camp"" (p.10) One thing that is different in this text compared to Walkers, is that there is more interest in the Indians story and their side of the conflict.  
Now, lets move on to the interview I mentioned. 
In order to get an interview with Sitting Bull, a Major named Walsh told him that the news reporter was a ""great paper chief who talked with a million tongs to all the people in the world...
This is a man of wonderful medicine; he speaks and the people on this side and across the great water open their ears and hear him."" (p.11). 
It shows that they try to imitate the Indians way of speaking and reasoning to reach an agreement. 
The news reporter has a lot of respect for the Indian Chief. 
""After gracefully shaking hands ...
I bade him adieu."" (p.19) ""He leaned back and resumed his attitude and expression of barbaric grandeur."" (p.14)  As I stated the attitudes towards Indians vary a lot. 
This depends on by whom and when they are expressed. 
A dominating opinion is that they are violent. 
Otherwise the views span from aversion to annoyance to fascination and respect. 
A visible tendency is that the distance to Indians changes to interest in them, as time progresses.
",True
" Slavery is not dead!  
Although slavery is outlawed by several of the most widely ratified international Conventions and by legislation in almost every country, slavery is not dead. 
Estimates working for ILO (International Labour Organisation) and the United Nations put the number of child slaves into tens of millions. 
Children are regularly found working in manifestly hazardous and arduous situations. 
They haul wagons underground in coalmines, they draw molten glass in stifling temperatures, they squat on the workshop floor for many hours making carpets for example. 
This form of slavery, children working with there own lives at stake to almost no money at all, has to be stopped for several different reasons. 	
One reason is the fact that to hard work ruins a child physically. 
Children are susceptible to all of the dangers that are faced by adult workers when placed in the same situation, but they are more seriously affected because they differ from adults in their anatomical, physiological characteristics. 
The health effect can be devastating, causing irreversible damage to their physical development. 
To use unnatural positions or carry heavy loads at work can permanently distort or disable growing bodies. 
Children suffer more readily from chemical hazards and radiation than do adults, and children also have less resistance to diseases. 
Children are less aware of their rights and they have never got a chance to learn how to defend themselves, which makes it easier to hire children to do dangerous and laborious work  	But children doing hard work in poor working conditions to a disgraceful salary do not only suffer physically. 
They are also subjected to psychological suffer. 
Children suffer deeper psychological damage when they are denigrated. 
The expectations of the children working are often high and they work under hard pressure. 
In most cases far to high regarded to their age.  	
With all the information above in mind you ask your self why and how can so many children today, in 1999, be exposed to hazardous work? 
Poverty emerges as the most compelling reason why children work. 
Poor households need the money. 
But it can not be said, however, that poverty necessary causes child labour. 
The picture varies. 
There are regions in poor countries where child labour is extensively practised while in other equally poor regions it is not. 
Kerala State in India, for example, though poor, has in fact abolished child labour. 	
So irrespective of poverty in a country is it important that a lot of efforts are put to eliminate hazardous child labour, independently of poverty reduction. 
It is important that the children, with help from the government working through local organisations, are offered a choice. 
Otherwise it easily gets into at bad circle. 
If a child for example do not has the chance to attend school the possibility for him/her to get a well-paid job is almost impossible. 
The child grows into an adult trapped in unskilled and badly paid jobs. 
He/she later get children that he/she cant provide for...they have to work in order the stay alive or work off family depts. 
The children grow up whiteout education, get children...  	
To conclude hazardous work not only harms children physically, it also exposes the children to great psychological pressure and restrain them from getting an education. 
I completely agree with UNICEF's article 32 for children rights, abridged saying that: ""The child has the right to be protected from work that threatens his or her health, education or development"" It should be every child's right to develop in freedom and get the opportunity to education and a worthy life. 
We can not allow slavery!
"," Parental responsibility for children and there TV habits  	Today a lot of children spend so much time in front of the TV that it becomes their primary window on the world. 
Children can learn a lot of good things by watching TV and TV can be a source of amusement and comfort. 
But it can also be something frightening that introduces the child to a world of hate and violence. 
According to statistics compiled by the National Association of Attorneys General, published in a report on Television violence: ""A Review of the Effects on Children of Different Ages"", by Wendy Josephson, the average American child will see 8 000 murders on TV by the time he or she is 12. 
And have viewed more than 200 000 acts of violence by the time they graduate from high school. 
In just one hour, children can see five to six violent acts on prime time TV, and 20 to 25 violent acts during each hour of Saturday morning children's programs.  	
Today after a lot of studies on the topic its clear that there is a correlation between a lot of viewing on violent television and children's aggressive and violent behaviour. 
Violent crime among 15-years-old American males has increased by 264 percent between 1989 and 1993. 
And homicide is the second leading death for youths ages 15-24. 
(This also according to the study by the Vational Association of Attorneys General mentioned above). 
So before the young generation of today turn the world into the violent place they know from the TV responsibility need to be taken to decrease the amount of violent TV impressions that they meat every day.  	
Parents need to carry a lot of that responsibility. 
They are the ones who ought to live closest to their children and therefore also the ones who should be able to follow their TV habits. 
And there are a number of measures parents can do to reduce the hours their children spend in front of the TV.   	
First of all its important to set up rules about how much it is allowed to watch TV early in the upbringing. 
And another good thing is to watch what programs the children is watching. 
Parents can also try to motivate the children to other activities like playing games, read, go on picnics or take part in sports. 
Much when it comes reducing children TV habits is about trying to avoid that the TV becomes the focal point in their home. 
For example it's a good habit not to watch TV during mealtimes and even if we live in the end of the 20th century you don't have to have a television in each room and the access to hundreds of satellite chanels.  	
But even though it is a good thing to counteract that children watch to much violence on TV there is no way to control if and what children watch on TV when they are home alone or at friends. 
So perhaps even more important than setting up rules etc is to discuss violence on TV with the children. 
Make sure that the children don't confuse acts on television with how things work, ought to work, in reality. 
And perhaps also discuss different kind of violence, violence in historical movies in contrast to violence in science fiction movies, for example  	Those things mentioned above concerning how to decrease that children adapt bad, violent behaviour from what they watch on TV implies that parents are home a lot and spend a lot of time together with their children. 
Something that far too many parents don't have the possibility to do today. 
Many work from early morning until late evening, or live in separated relationships and alone have to provide for several children, which makes it impossible to give each child all the attention that it needs. 
Therefor parents need help to control the impact that TV gets on their children. 
For example there needs to be severe age limits at movies etc. 
Producers, advertisers and broadcasters also need to take their responsibility to obstruct that violence is too easily accessibly for children, even if it means that it reduces their potential audience and avenue. 
And with regard to the amount of hours children spend at a day nursery or in school a continuing discussion concerning violence and its effects is necessary there as well as at home.  	
To conclude, parents by a lot of different measures need to take a lot off responsibility to obstruct the negative impact that TV violence has on children. 
But since they can't be with their children night and day they need support from outside as well. 
We can't let the TV be a child's only window on the world unless we want a reality that reflects the wickedness so often exploited on TV.
",True
" ""What would become of them?""  
She was born in Scotland, she married a decent enough man, she emigrated together with him to a new land; away from the coal mines, away from the black coal dust, away from the gloomy faces, away to something new, something else, something that she thought must be better. 
Ellen McIvor represents the novel's caring character. 
She is the good wife that stands behind her husband, she is the mother of two daughters and a foster-child, she has seen two of her children die, a boy and a girl, but still she cares and takes care of her whole family but she also has room in her heart for the stranger and outcast of the book, Gemmy.  	
In David Maloufs book Remember Babylon we meet Ellen who is a good representative for the women who emigrated from the British Isles during the Victorian era. 
She is a product of the working class of the industrial revolution and her main worry in life is what will become of her children; her own two and the third, her brothers child, that she sees as a sacred thrust. 
Her will power is still strong and unbroken in spite of all the hardship she has gone trough. 
This fact does Malouf highlight with his references to her two dead children; ""She had left more of herself than she dared consider... in the two small graves she knew she would not se again,..."" 
The two small graves in the black soil represents both the fact that she can not go back neither to the place where she grew up in Scotland nor back in time to a time when she did not had so many worries and her future where brighter. 
But they also represent the circumstances that so many women in the 19-th century had to live under, the book takes place during the time period when the industrial countries of the world either went trough or just before they went trough the demographic transition, so children's mortality rates are high. 
Most women of this century, and women of the centuries before back trough time, followed one child or more to the grave.  	
It is the caring side of Remember Babylon that Ellen McIvor stands for. 
It is she who persuades her husband Jock to take him into their household ""'But Jock,' she said quietly, 'look at the puir creature!"" 
Sometimes late in the night when Gemmy cries out because of a night mare and the rest of the family starts to stir, it is she who makes them go back to sleep. 
""She would lay her hand on her husband's arm. 
He would settle, the child would settle."" 
It is not that she not worries, she worries a lot for her family and for their future but she has to live for the moment. 
If she would live in her memories she would not survive out in the harsh foreign landscape that she and Jock has settled down to farm.  	
Sometimes Ellen longs for Scotland but it is not for the life she once had. 
""But she had few regrets for the world she had left - perhaps because she had none at all for her youth. 
She lived in the demands of the moment, in the girls, in Lachlan, and was too high spirited, too independent, to care whether other women approved of her."" 
What she longs for are the signs of the generations who have lived and died before her; because the place, the little village in the middle of nowhere, where she lives, and probably will die, has a certain fearful loneliness. ""the absence of ghosts. 
Till they arrived no other lives had been lived here."" 
""They would be the first dead here. 
It made death so much lonelier, and life so much lonelier too."" 
This is what frightens Ellen, this and the thought of her children's future.  	
We never learns anything about Ellen's feelings when Gemmy moves from the McIvors to Mrs Hutchence but probably she felt that she had to put her own family's safety before Gemmy. 
We do not know if she died there in the village or what happened in her life after Gemmy moved out. 
But we do know that her daughter Janet becomes a nun and an expert on bees. 
Her foster-child Lachlan later in life becomes a member of the House and a minister. 
How Ellen ends her life we will never know, but we do know that her children did become something.  	
Ellen represents David Malouf's picture of the women who emigrated in the 19-th century. 
She is a good wife and a caring mother whit a big heart. 
But at the same time she is a tough woman shaped by life's rougher sides. 
She has a strong spirit and that is what makes her survive in Australia's backcountry.
"," ""Bread and entertainment"" - or McDonalds and TV-violence?  
In the old Rome the emperor kept the inhabitants of the city happy with bread and violent public entertainment such as gladiator contests. 
Today we go to the supermarket or McDonalds to buy our food but our television offers us the same kind of entertainment - Violence. 
Has anything really changed during two thousand years of evolution? 
This is a question that very well might be asked when the TV Guide is studied.  	
Violence is one of the most common elements in TV-programs, movies and above all the TV-news. 
What is it that makes humans so fascinated by violence? 
Probably it has something to do with power and safety, to sit home in the sofa in front of the TV and see Jean-Claude van Damme beat up another man gives us an adrenaline rush, a thrilling sensation runs down our spine, but it is a safe feeling because we know that the violence is not for real or at least that it is not happening to ourselves. 
I think that the fact that the violence is done to someone else is quite important. 
It is probably because of this fact that police programs which shows real killings and car chases are so popular. 
We can sit home and gloat in violence in safety and there is an extra spice added with the fact that this the real thing. 
We are at the same time repulsed by this fact and fascinated of it. 
Are there then anything that separate us from our Roman forefathers? 
Yes two things, we are more sophisticated in our taste for violence and we are also much more comfortable, we do not even have to leave our houses to satisfy our craving for violence.  	 
How does this then affect our society? 
The question is in fact: Does this affect our society at all? 
The number of murders, rapes and thefts in Sweden today are in fact on about the same level as it was a hundred years ago. 
The only difference is that the violence has changed its appearance, it is rawer today than it was a hundred years ago. 
Another factor that has changed is that the public are more aware of the violence today. 
Many rapes and other kinds of abuse were earlier kept in the silent, today it is instead on the front page of our newspapers. 
The violence is also closer to us, it has taken the step over our threshold into our homes. 
We can read about it in the morning paper, see it on the evening news and it has become rawer. 
Today the picture of violence is much more distinct than it has been. 
But it is the same violence that it has always been. 
The only difference seems to be that it is talked about in a different way today and brought out in the open to a higher degree.  	
Can there then be any connection between entertainment violence and crimes? 
There is no evidence of this. 
Of course the opposite can not be proved either. 
It seems to be more a question of social causes like poverty, family troubles and so on then to much TV watching. 
No, the real danger with TV-violence seems to be the blunting process which the viewers go through. 
The violence which twenty years ago would give the audience nightmares is today something shown on primetime. 
In the beginning of the last decade the movie Natural Born Killers was made, the director made it as a statement. 
It was supposed to be the most violent movie ever made until then and it should work as an eye-opener to the viewers, today it is just a movie among many others. 
The amount of violence needed to abhor us has been raised to a new level, the humans of today are blunted creatures. 
This is the real danger of TV-violence. 
It is because of this we should not allow our children to watch action movies. 
The question that must be raised is: Do we want to have blunted children or children with feelings?
",True
" My strengths and weaknesses in the English language  Ten years after finishing high school, I am now to study English again. 
This time on a much higher level. 
It is time to evaluate what my strengths and weaknesses are.  
Listening In general I'm a good listener. 
For instance, while listening to a lecturer, I don't have a problem to focus on what is being said (unless the person I'm listening to makes the subject really boring, or when I'm very tired), and I usually understand the lot. 
My weakness is my small vocabulary. 
I think I scored about average on the diagnostic test I took on vocabulary. 
Since I did a lot of guessing, picking out the right words, it is reasonable to assume that my vocabulary is even below average. 
I enjoy watching English movies and I pick up on the language just by listening to it when I make the effort not to look at the subtitles. 
And of course by reading, which is what the next part in this essay is about.  
Reading I like to read novels for the fun of it, but also other sorts of literature about various kinds of matters. 
Therefore I believe the literature course and the social studies will be easier for me than other courses. 
My weakness in this course is, once again, my lack of vocabulary. 
It slows down my reading a great deal, but the pace will increase the more I read, as well as my vocabulary. 
I think I'm fairly good when it comes to interpreting novels, short stories and poems. 
My strengths are the fact that I enjoy reading and that I usually understand the content, irony and humour.   
Speaking y strength when it comes to speaking English is that I'm not afraid to make mistakes. 
I'm here to learn and of course I'm not perfect from the start. 
Moreover, I believe that my speaking ability will improve rather quickly once I start practising on a daily basis. 
I find the rhythm of the language and the accent, more difficult to learn than the pronunciation is.  
I am very rusty though, I haven't spoken English since high school, like I said, and then it was almost just about answering questions. 
The problem is that there is a limitation to what I can talk about with my present vocabulary, and that I don't have the right intonation.  
Writing y writing skills are very difficult to evaluate; I don't really know what my strengths and weaknesses are. 
I know that I can't be that good at it, since my vocabulary is limited and my knowledge in grammar is bad. 
I think that grammar is very tricky, it is probably my number one weakness. 
I have some advantage though, since I studied Swedish grammar last year.   
My ability to focus on a subject is fairly good, but it can become better. 
I've written a lot in Swedish and maybe that is also an advantage to some extent. 
I find it rather difficult to write this essay and I imagine it will be even harder when I have an intricate subject to write about. 
My strength would be my ambition to learn and trying to get it right.   
Conlusion To bring this essay to an end, I will now summarise my different strengths and weaknesses in the English language. 
My lack of vocabulary has a negative effect on all parts of the language. 
My difficulty with grammar naturally has a negative effect when it comes to writing and in some ways speaking. 
(Needless to say it will give me a lot of work at the grammar course). 
I am not accustomed to speaking English, which of course will make it difficult from the beginning. 
My strengths are my faculty to learn languages and my ambition to do so. 
I hope that I will be able to transfer my writing skills in Swedish to my writing in English. 
My interest in reading will help me through the continuous work increasing my vocabulary, as my general interest in English will help me through all courses.
","To evaluate yourself is never easy, especially not your strengths. 
I tend to see my weaknesses much easier. 
That is why I see this essay as a bit of a challenge. 
I'm going to assess both my strengths and my weaknesses in the four skills of speaking, reading, listening and writing the English language. 
I think it is great that there is a language like English spoken in so many countries around the world. 
It is fantastic to travel almost to the other side of the world and still being able to speak with the people you meet. 
I have relatives that live in Barbados, West Indies, and sometimes I think about how it would be if I couldn't speak English. 
Awful, yes, it is very good to feel that they understand what I'm trying to say and to be able to tell them things about Sweden and so on. 
It is also good to find that you know the English word for something that you didn't think you knew. 
But I find it very hard to be spontaneous and funny in English. 
I worry too much about what I'm going to say and if it is going to come out correct. 
Because of that I think that people, English-speaking, doesn't really get to know the real me: a quite spontaneous and funny young woman but a quiet and dull young woman.   
I'm working on it though, and hopefully this term is going to make a big difference for me when it comes to speak more fluently and to get more self-confidence.  
Before I began to study at the institute of education I can't really remember reading any English books. 
Naturally I've read English texts and short stories but I don't think I've ever read a whole book. 
Consequently, my first exam was a big change for me. 
I had to read an English thick book titled Educational psychology and really understand and learn the contents. 
My result on that first exam was luckily gratifying and I felt really satisfied with myself for that accomplishment. 
I can't say that I've read many English books since then, but some course books have been in English and I was obliged to read those. 
At first it was very time-wasting to look up words in a dictionary but after a while I noticed that I often understood the word from the context. 
That discovery made a big difference and made my English reading much more efficiently and above all more fun. 
To read imaginative literature like Nice work by David Lodge is really fun and I liked that book very much. 
A reason why I liked it was that I thought it would be more difficult to read than it was and that helped to raise my self-confidence and made me look forward to start read the next book on the list for the literature course. 
I watch much TV, too much actually. 
But I defend myself with the fact that it helps me improve my English, because most of the films and TV-series are in English. 
They are of course subtitled, but I try to listen to the spoken English as well because otherwise you tend to miss jokes and other things that you can't translate to Swedish. 
When I visit my relatives in the West Indies, I think that I understand everything they say. 
If someone says a word that I don't recognize I can usually guess the meaning of it by the situation. 
However, my relatives speak English with a British accent that makes it really easy to catch what they are saying. 
The Bajan accent on the other hand, which most of the people on Barbados speak, is surprisingly hard to catch. 
You have to exert yourself to hear what they are saying. 
I think that different English accents will be easier to understand as my English improves. 
At this point I don't feel very competent about writing in English because it was a long time since I did. 
Of course I've been writing short E-mails to my relatives in Barbados but that is nothing compare to essays and similar things. 
My spelling is quite good but it's my grammar that worries me. 
I didn't need the diagnostic test to tell me that. 
I also think that I still translate the Swedish in my head and that sometimes makes the wordorder inverted. 
I'm quite sure that this term and especially the writing course is going to help me improve my writing skills. 
The most important thing for me about the English language is to be able to communicate with people. 
To listen and understand and to make myself under-stood by correct pronunciation. 
I know that I can manage those two skills quite good, but I want to get even better! 
I want to be able to be spontaneous and speak fluently with my relatives and other people. 
Above all I want to be a good teacher, and teach my students to communicate in English. 
I'm sure that I have every chance of succeeding, but I'm fully aware of the fact that I'm going to have to work really hard!
",False
" George Abbot - one of a kind  George Abbot is one of the characters in David Malouf's Remembering Babylon. 
He is a nineteen year old schoolmaster who doesn't really trust people after he has been let down by his godfather. 
The result of this is that he likes to be alone and has become isolated. 
When we first get to meet George Abbot (p.16) he seems to be an ordinary man at the age of thirty or thirty-five. 
The way he behaves in the company of other grown up people and how strict he is towards one of his students gives him this age in the reader's mind. 
After a few pages we are told that he is only nineteen years old and all of a sudden he is a totally different person. 
And when he starts to dream away through the window instead of concentrating on the people he was talking to, it seems as that he is not happy with his life, that he wants something else, far away from where he is now. 
As a schoolmaster George Abbot is strict and wants the full attention from his pupils. 
If one of them dreams away, the same way he does himself sometimes, he flings a piece of chalk at he pupil's head. 
He doesn't want to be mean to them but sometimes he loses his temper just to hide the disappointment about his own life. 
Once he beats them all with the ruler because they haven't done their homework satisfactory and immediately afterwards he feels good about it, but when he sees them hold back their tears he wants to cry with them (p.46).  
George Abbot was once a self-confident child with a charming manner. 
He grew up without a father and his rich godfather, Mr Robertson, paid for his education. 
George used to spend Easter and Michaelmas at the godfather's big house and was the servants' favourite. 
He charmed all the visitors at the house and Mr Robertson was proud of him. 
But George grew older and people didn't seem to notice him anymore. 
He tried his old tricks to charm them but everybody just said it was inappropriate for a boy at his age. 
Mr Robertson too didn't care anymore and George never really understood what had happened. 
He became bitter and had to fight hard not to end up in a state of permanent anger or become morose. 
Mr Robertson kept paying for the boy's education but George didn't visit the big house anymore.  
A few years later George returned to his godfather. 
He had once been promised a place to stay and now he wanted such that place. 
At first he didn't plan to tell the godfather about his dreams, about Africa, but Mr Robertson seemed so happy to see him so George confided in him. 
He thought that maybe the man would understand. 
But once again the godfather let him down and instead of understanding he gave George the suggestion to go to Australia, a country full of possibilities (p.50). 
George didn't want to go there but he did and became a schoolmaster. 
Marked by the godfather's treacheries he didn't dare to act like a youth anymore. 
It was inappropriate he had once learned so he started acting as an older man and let people think he was twenty-six or seven instead of nineteen. 
In Australia George Abbot is lonely and people don't really know who he is. 
He likes to be alone and usually spends the afternoons outside with a book. 
With no one around and with the book in his hands he can escape from his other ""I"", the schoolmaster, the misunderstood and lonely George Abbot. 
With the words in the book he escapes from reality and enters another world where he is loved and everything is easy. 
Even though George Abbot is very isolated from the rest of the people around him he hasn't really noticed it himself. 
Not until he, by accident, ends up in Mrs Hutchence's house and finds himself in the middle of a conversation with other young people (p.86 and forward). 
The mysterious Leona and seventeen years old Hector who would do anything to get her attention. 
They are both clean and civilised and know how to make the conversation interesting while George is dirty with wild hair and doesn't really know what to say. 
He feels like a savage in their company. 
Suddenly he realizes how isolated he has been and how nice it is to be around other people. 
He starts to open up and gives the others a chance to appreciate him being there. 
The event at Mrs Hutchence's house is a rebirth for George and he starts to look at the world from another point of view. 
He can accept the fact that he is a schoolteacher in a country he never meant to go to and that not all people want to hurt him. 
Maybe he will never come to Africa but as long as he keeps on dreaming everything is possible.
"," ""The only good Indian is a dead Indian.""  
There were many different ways to look at the American Indians. 
Many people were scared of them while some people were Indian friends. 
The many Indian wars made people hate the Indians because they killed whites, when in fact it was because of the white man's hunger for more land the wars were started at first. 
Elizabeth Custer stands for the first attitude to the American Indians. 
She was married to general George Custer who got killed during the battle at Little Big Horn in 1876. 
According to Elizabeth, George Custer was a great friend of the Indians and they came to him for advice in certain questions. 
Custer's office was filled up by Indians and they always smoked the pipe together. 
Elizabeth admired the Indian clothes and described the Indians in detail in her book ""Boots and saddles"". 
But at the same time she detested them. 
Every time she saw them she thought of the Indians that killed an unarmed white man. 
The man got shot when he was riding his horse but didn't die immediately so when he fell off his horse, one of the Indians ""beat out the last breath left"" of the man. 
Then, when the man was already dead, the same Indian shot his body full of arrows. 
Another white man came out of the bushes holding up his hands in peace and also gave the Indians his hat, another sign for peace, but the Indians shot him. 
At first with their guns and then with arrows. 
This incident had got caught in Elizabeth's mind and every time she saw the Indians she kept thinking of how they could do such a thing. 
She thought the Indians were savages which couldn't hold their temper and admired her husband George for his patience with them. 
Elizabeth Custer's attitude to American Indians can be summarized by two things: she enjoyed looking at their beauty and their clothes but at the same time she didn't trust them because of an event that might not even have taken place. 
Another attitude to American Indians is the Uncapapa Indian chief Sitting Bull's attitude. 
He was a great chief and medicine man in the Sioux tribe (Uncapapa is a branch within the Sioux tribe). 
In an interview he talks about his people and about being the one he is. 
All the Indians want is to live in peace. 
They were not born to fight against the white people, but when they are not allowed to keep their land they have to fight for it. 
They didn't choose to live side by side with the whites so they cannot really accept it. 
When Sitting Bull tells about how he became the great man he is, it's not difficult to understand why Indians and whites don't understand each other. 
He started study the world and his people before he was even born. 
Still inside his mother's belly he learned about medicine and the God Almighty told him to be the judge of his people, to decide for them and lead their way. 
When he trades with the whites he wants a fair deal and cannot understand why the whites want to give little and get much. 
And when he doesn't accept their offer they say that they will make the government fight him. 
This is not the Indian way so Sitting Bull doesn't want to trade with the whites anymore. 
When Sitting Bull talks about the whites it's obvious that it's not the Indians that are savages. 
It's the white people. 
Another example is why to hunt buffaloes. 
The American Indians hunt because they need food and clothes. 
They kill as many buffaloes as they need and leave the others for next time. 
White men don't need to hunt buffaloes. 
They kill for fun and leave the dead body without using it, they just remove the horns as a trophy.  
In the interview Sitting Bull also talks about the battle at Little Big Horn and how it really happened. 
At least how it happened through Indian eyes. 
No one can say if he really told the truth but he told about what he saw, his truth. 
He didn't make things up just to look more brave or put all the blame of what happened on the whites. 
That is something a white person could do but never an Indian. 
A third attitude to American Indians is the one Judson E. 
Walker describes. 
He thinks it's an honour to present the great Sioux chief Sitting Bull, a savage that always left blood behind. 
The Indians killed to feed their hunger for blood and didn't care if the victims were innocent people. 
They plundered the whites and anyone who came in their way had to pay with his life. 
When Sitting Bull and his people moved to Canada there were no fights for a whole year, but it didn't last long. 
The Indians began to plunder again and the authorities had to figure out how to protect the innocent white settlers.  
It's difficult to draw a conclusion out of this but one way could be that the Indians were forced to become savages. 
The white people came and took their land, forced them to live in reservations. 
The Indians tried to live in peace but the whites continued to take their land and when they couldn't have it they called the Indians savages and tried to kill them. 
When the Indians realized that they could not live in peace with the whites they did the opposite. 
They killed to save their own race. 
For a long, long time they had lived in peace with the nature and one day the whites came and destroyed it all. 
The whites kept pushing the limits and when the Indians couldn't take it anymore they fought for their existence, and their future. 
When it comes to saving the future anyone can become a savage, anyone.
",True
" 					 ADOPTION TO GAY COUPLES?  
I recently saw a documentary about children in neglected orphan homes. 
It was really awful and they lived under circumstances that no child should live under. 
Soon after, I read an article about gay couples wanting to adopt children but was not allowed. 
This was all a bit confusing for me because why not let them adopt this children, who are in a desperate need of care and love when there are people who would be approved to adopt if it wasn't for their sexuality?  
It is a very difficult question to answer yes or no to right away, because there are many aspects that need to be looked at. 
The first question that I think you should take side on is weather gay people are ""normal"" people or not.  
I'm not gay myself, but I am not against it and I don't think that a love between two human beings can be wrong if both parts really feel it.  
Some might be against gay people and there existence for the reason that God did not create the human being to be together sexually with another person of the same gender. 
It is written in the bible that it is against our religion and Gods will. 
Those who use that as an objection I can in a way understand if they really are a strong believer and follow everything that are written in the bible, but do they? 
If not, I don't find their objection as a good reason to not accept gay people and just a sign of fear to what is not the most common thing. 
I could have a discussion only about this, what I think about people being gay, but that is not the issue. 
The really issue here is if gay people are as good as heterosexual people to bring up a child and if they should be allowed to adopt children. 
There are a lot of counterarguments to why they should not be allowed to adopt and that is why it is not allowed right now in Sweden. 
As I wrote above there are a religious aspect that has to be considered. 
Some countries that generally have a very strong belief in their religion would most probably not allow an adoption to a gay couple. 
In the same time there are countries that don't have such a strong belief and might accept it, but this is not really something that Sweden can do so much about and it is not a reason for not allowing gay couple to adopt. 
If you look at the other objections one of them is that a child needs both a male and a female figure in their life when they grow up. 
That might be true, I'm not an expert in the subject. 
In the same time there are a lot of children growing up without both gender by their side without taking too much damage, I think.  
Some have said that these children, who would be adopted by gay couples, would have a very strange time growing up and they would have problems to find their sexual identity. 
I think that is just prejudices and there are no really proofs to confirm that.  
I don't think that their childhood will be so strange and difficult compared to other children's. 
The only reason that I can think of why it should be strange, is that other people would make it more complicated then it really is, for example children mocking them in school etc., but that is really up to the other parents how they teach their children to treat others.   y point of view to some of the objections to this question is that I'm aware of that it exist some reasons for not allowing gay couple to adopt children. 
In the same time I am, right now, convinced that it is a better solution then letting some orphan child being neglected and be let to grow up without any security in their life when they can come to a family that would love, care and help them to feel secure.
","I have always been one of these people who in most cases can hear what is the accurate thing to say or write, when using a foreign language, and have managed alright with that. 
I have now, however, reached a level of English when that is no longer possible for me. 
Though, having spent some time in English-speaking countries, I at least, consider myself to be fairly well aware of my strenghts and weaknesses in the English language.  
As, probably, most people who have been abroad my favourite part of the English language is the speaking part. 
Though, that does not mean that I have no difficulties talking. 
Something that I find quite disturbing, that many people might not see as a major problem, is that I have a very mixed accent.  	 
As Swedish is my mother tongue, of course, some of the problems with my English pronounciation, originates from that language. 
In school we were supposed to adopt the British English, but on the other side, most things on television are American. 
Most Swedish people of the younger generations tend to speak English with an American accent, so obviously television in Sweden has had a greater affect on Swedish people than school (,at least in this aspect). 
In 1997 I spent three months studying English in Dublin. 
At the end of my stay, my way of talking was quite influenced by the Irish accent. 
To make it worse, I last year went to work in Edinburgh. 
At that point a difficulty occurred; which accent should I make use of? 
Since I was in Scotland I, naturally, met a fair amount of Scottish people, but that was not all. 
Edinburgh is a University city, and people from all over the world, especially from England, go there to study. 
As a result of that most of my friends turned out to be English.  	 
What has happened is, that my accent has become a mixture between the Swedish, American, Irish, and English accent. 
I do not think I have picked up any of the Scottish accent, but however, I know for certain that I am prone to use some of the most common words in a Scottish persons vocabulary.  
Speaking is naturally in very close connection to listening, so that is something I have quite a lot of experience of too. 
From my point of view, the most difficult thing in listening to people speaking English are all the various dialects exist in the language.  	 
I do not want to generalise, and say that I, for instance, find the Scottish accent harder to understand than other English dialects. 
I merely think that I can say that some very local dialects, in every English-speaking country distinguish themselves to be less comprehensible for me than others. 
Before I went to Scotland, I had the image that all Scottish people were impossible to understand, and was rather surprised to find that the first Scottish people I made acquaintance with, were very easy to understand. 
On the other hand, I found most of the Scottish staff at the restaurant where I worked, next to impossible to comprehend.  	 
Although, I have had some practice, I still find many Scottish, English and other dialects hard to understand. 
There are also thousands of dialects that I have never even heard. 
So I think I just cannot listen enough.   
Another aspect on my ability to use the English language is of course the writing part. 
Many people drop to the conclusion that, just because I have a Cambridge exam in English (as a foreign language) I am also good at writing. 
That is however far from reality. 
The language course I went to did almost exclusively focus on exam practice, and accordingly, how to do that specific exam, was what I learned. 
The only really good thing was that my teacher focused very much on how to structure a text, and I believe that that is something I have been able to gain from.  	 
Something that I, on the other hand, feel very insecure of, when it comes to writing, is when to use commas, colon and semi-colon.   
At last, from the reading point of view. 
I have always been very fond of reading, but unfortuntely I have not read many books in English. 
The reason has simply been lack of time. 
However, before schoolwork started to take up too much of my time, I was a dedicated reader of Swedish literature. 
Although, that was a long time ago and in a different language, I still feel that I should have some use of it when now reading English literature.   
To round off, I would like to mention some general things that I think I need to work on. 	 
The most important thing for me, as I see it, is to regain and enlarge my knowledge of grammar. 
That includes not just advanced syntaxes, but also very basic things like when to use the gerund, and when to use which preposition.  	 
Another thing that I hope to accomplish with my studies is to broaden and increase my vocabulary. 
When you are living abroad, you normally learn words of the every-day language. 
Accordingly, what I would like to learn now, is words that you need, for example, when discussing literature, reading a newspaper, or listening to the news.  	 
As very final, I would like to say, that to learn more about different dialects, is something that for me is highly valued. 
Without generalising too much, I think I can say that there are some significant diversities in the language spoken in different English-speaking countries. 
To learn about those diversities, I believe, would be a great help in communicating with English-speaking people from all sorts of backgrounds.
",False
" Irresponsible spongers lost in an illusion of happiness  I am convinced that every human being dreams about happiness, about living a happy life. 
But what is happiness after all? 
What is a happy life? 
It is impossible to find just one right answer to these questions. 
As in Doris Lessing's book ""The Fifth Child"" all the characters are looking after happiness in different ways due to their own ideas of what happiness and a happy life is all about and how they can achieve it. 
But whatever ideas of the happiness we might have and however we are trying to attain it in our lives we will always be responsible for our acts. 	 
In my opinion the main theme of Doris Lessing's book ""The Fifth Child"" involves a lack of responsibility, and even a downright irresponsibility, that to my mind follows throughout the whole story. 
It appears mainly in the main characters, Harriet and David, and in their acts but to some extent in all the characters. 
They are all so anxious to find happiness, to be happy, that they ignore any consequences of their acts. 
For example Harriet and David think that the key to happiness is to set up a big family with a proper home and they realise this dream of them very stubbornly without taking responsibility for the consequences but in many ways throwing it on the other characters. 	 
Setting of the story is very relevant to the theme. 
A starting-point is Harriet and David's own backgrounds that affect their opinions and ideas. 
Harriet is brought up by parents who ""had taken it for granted that family life was the basis for a happy one"" (12). 
David, on the other hand, is a divorce child whose childhood home consisted of two rooms, one at his mother's and one at his father's. 
That is why David's idea of a happy life contains a family with a decent home where, according to David, ""'it's important,' ..., 'everybody should have a room'"" (31). 
His children will get everything he didn't. 	 
Harriet and David's first step towards a happy family life is to buy a house, ""Full of space for children ... they meant to have a lot of children."" 
(13). 
The house they buy is a very large one that they actually can't afford. 
""Even with David's quite decent salary, and Harriet's, the mortgage of this house would be beyond them. 
But they would manage somehow."" 
(14) They begin to live a life that they simply impossible can afford. 
""And how was all this paid for? ...people knew David's father was rich. 
Without that mortgage being paid for, none of this could have happened."" 
(27) Harriet and David don't take the economic responsibility for their lifestyle but throw it on David's well-to-do father. 	 
Temporally the story takes place in 1960-80'. 
A distinctive feature for the sixties and seventies is the sexual revolution. 
Concerning Harriet and David's attitude to sex they stand out from the rest by opposing the sexual freedom and questioning contraceptives. 
Because of their differing opinions they are considered as oddballs. 
""As for Harriet, she was a virgin. 
'A virgin now,' her girl friends might shriek; 'are you crazy?'"" 
(9) ""..., 'I am sorry, I don't like all this sleeping around, it's not for me.'"" 
(10) In spite of Harriet and David's attitude towards sex and their plans to wait two years before having children they still begin to have sex like ""rabbits"", ignoring any consequences. 
It is only afterwards Harriet is a little bit worried: ""'And how are we going to pay for it all if I am pregnant?'"" 
(16) Even if they seem to be aware of the big responsibility that comes with children, both for their upbringing and maintenance, they evade it. 
Economically they still rely on David's father and they take for granted that Harriet's mother helps with children and household. 
""...for if family life was what they had chosen, then it followed that Dorothy should come indefinitely to help Harriet, ..."" 
(20). 	 
In realising they dream of a happy family without taking responsibility for anything Harriet and David build their life on sand. 
They shut themselves up in their house and even if the world around them changes, and brutal incidents and crimes becomes commonplace in their neibourghoods (29), Lovatt's family lives in their own little, happy world. 
They create an idyll far from ""the storms of the world"" (29), far from reality. 
""The young Lovatts made themselves read the papers, and watch the News on television, ...to know what went on outside their fortress, their kingdom, ...safety, comfort, kindness."" 
(30) 	 However, when Harriet and David's fifth child Ben is born their perfect castle in the air is suddenly threaten by the reality and it starts to get cracks. 
In continuing to throw responsibility on other people they do themselves a disservice. 
Their happy life begins to break down when people that their whole life depends on turn aside one by one because the responsibility simply becomes too big for them to bear. 
Everything collapses when David's father stops paying for their house and living, when Harriet's mother leaves the house and finally when John, a young boy who Harriet engages to take care of Ben, leaves the town. 
Their happy family is totally fallen apart. 
Ben is left to his fate and various relatives answer all the other children. 
Harriet and David don't take the responsibility for their dream not coming true but again throw it on the others and, although they seem to know that they lived their life, their dream, like spongers on the others' expense, they still defend themselves with bad luck. 
""We took the responsibility for what we believed in, and we did it. 
Then -bad luck. 
That's all. 
We could easily have succeeded. 
We could have had just what we planned. 
Eight children in this house and everyone happy ...
And who paid for it?"" 
(142) Eventually they are even forced to sell their house -the true home of happiness. 	 
In my opinion Doris Lessing's novel is a warning to all of us. 
As I said before, whatever we regard as happiness and however we might try to reach it, responsibility is something we sooner or later have to take. 
If we don't take it we run a risk that our happy lives turn out to be just an illusion and instead of happiness we might end up living in a total misery.
"," TV violence's influence on children  Violence on TV and its influence on children have presumably been matters of concern ever since TV was invented. 
Throughout the decades this issue has come up again and again. 
Last time, in the end of 20th century, violence on TV was brought up in connection with the conflicts in some American schools where children opened fire on other children and teachers, and also with the cases in Europe and Scandinavia in which small children were killed by other children. 
But does TV really have such a powerful influence on children that might lead to such unimaginable, terrible acts as to kill another human being? 
And if it has such an influence is there anything we can do about it? 	 
According to many studies children experience and react to violence on TV in very various ways. 
Some children might get upset, shocked, frightened and stressed whereas other children might experience the violence entertaining, get excited and get used to it. 
The majority of adults believe that TV violence affects children in one way or another. 
However, research of the matter in question shows that violence on TV is not the main reason for increase of violence among children although it is a thing that contributes. 	 
Even though we can't entirely blame TV violence for the horrible incidents that have happened it is still important to pay attention to the influence TV has because it is, however, a factor that we can do something about. 
But, because there is no way for parents to control everything what their children are watching on TV and the broadcasters are most likely not going to reduce violence in their programs, the question is: what are we able to do? 	 
I believe that we would achieve nothing by trying to exclude children from all possible violence on TV. 
First of all it is impossible and secondly children would anyway meet violence, generally speaking everywhere, because, whether we like it or not, violence is and has always been a part of our reality. 
The only constructive solution in my opinion is to give children more information about TV, how the different kinds of programs are made and how they use a lot of tricks in films and series. 
Above all, children must be taught the difference between fact and fiction. 
In fiction violence tends to be excessively exaggerated and consequences, if any, are often nonexistent or far from reality. 
We have to make sure that children understand that even if the Ninja Turtles can be shot many times and still be alive, the consequences of the same action in reality would be totally different. 	 
I believe that schools have a very important role in informing children about TV and violence, in teaching them to estimate and select and, on the whole, to handle the tremendous amount of information that they get from TV. 
The most effective way for schools to do that, in my opinion, would be to introduce instruction in media.  	 
I think that even the broadcasters should take their share of the responsibility. 
Quite a lot depends on their own moral, that they make up rules for themselves for example concerning how much and what kind of violence they show at the time when children most likely watch TV. 
Above all, they should not misrepresent the consequences of the violence on TV, but to show the real ones. . 
In my opinion the biggest responsibility of giving children the education on these matters is still vested in parents. 
It is important that they discuss, both the realistic and the fiction violence and also their consequences, with their children, that they work up together any fears or suspense that children might have due to TV violence. 
In that way they would build up children's consciousness of the real consequences of the violent acts and further their basic values about what is right and wrong.  	 
Most people believe that violence on TV affects children somehow. 
I think that TV can have both good and bad influence on children mostly due to their ability to handle the information that they get from TV. 
It is schools', broadcasters' and, above all, parents' responsibility to make sure that children learn the difference between fact and fiction, that they get aware of the real consequences of violent acts, and to build up their sense of right and wrong. 
It is very important that children learn critically to estimate and select all the material they get from TV.
",True
" The dramatic change in the way kids dress  During the last five years a dramatic change has taken place in the way kids dress. 
If you visit a class in the fourth grade you will see girls wearing tight stretch jeans, pink hot tops with texts like ""I am a Barbie Girl"", five inch platform shoes and don't be surprised if several of the kids, although just 10 year of age, wear make-up. 
The boys in the same class would most likely wear baggy pants, baggy shirts and baggy hats, all of some expensive brand. 
All of these clothes are very fashionable and cool according to the fashion designers, but at the same time they make it very much impossible for the kids to play. 
So the kids should hate these clothes like they hate everything else that prevents them from playing. 
But they don't. 
So what are the reasons behind this trend?  	
Since parents have the ultimate responsibility for their children, they should be part of the answer we are looking for. 
Even if the parents aren't the driving force behind this trend, they must accept it, if not agree with it, in order for it to be a trend. 
They pay for the expensive clothes their children wear and by doing so they have given their consent. 
Can it be that parents like these clothes and want their kids to wear them? 
It may be so in a few cases, but most parents are not particularly interested in buying expensive clothes that are anything but durable and that prevent their children from playing. 
Consequently, it must be the kids that want these clothes. 
Why? 
In my own experience, kids hate everything that prevents them from playing and having fun for example bedtime, Sunday dinners and museum visits. 
So, who or what has so successfully persuaded these kids to wearing these extreme clothes?  	
The first and maybe most obvious answer to that is advertising. 
There has been an enormous increase in advertising aimed at kids in the last five years. 
Much due to this the kids in the fourth grade are much more aware of fashion and what is cool than their parents. 
Traditionally kids have worn very proper clothes based on durability, but today they wear clothes that their parents wouldn't be caught dead in, all in accordance with the latest fashion. 
Advertising aimed at kids has become smarter, more extensive and more daring. 
But there is still something missing, because advertising can convey a positive image of these clothes to the kids, but it takes more to persuade them to wear clothes that prevent them from doing most things that kids usually love to do. 
You can advertise for cereals all you want to but if they don't taste good kids will not eat them anyway. 
There must be a reason why kids find these clothes attractive. 
This leads us to the main driving force behind this trend.  	
Childhood is all about learning. 
The best way of learning is to imitate those who have, or rather those you think have, the knowledge and experience. 
You look for role models to imitate and learn from. 
If we look at who the role models are to today, and especially at how they dress, there is no doubt that this trend is all about imitating the people you admire. 
The girls want to look like celebrities like Brittney Spears or Jennifer Lopez and the boys like Eminem and the guys in The Offspring. 
The smaller kids who don't know much about these stars just want to look the older kids. 
Clothes play a very important role for the images these celebrities have. 
Accordingly, kids learn that you are what you wear. 
It goes to such lengths that the kids prefer have the right image to have fun.  	
To sum up, this trend couldn't exist if parents didn't accept and allow it. 
They are how ever not one of the main driving forces behind the trend. 
Advertising aimed at kids has had an enormous upswing in the last five years and has definitely had a great influence on the consumption of fashion orientated clothes for kids. 
But the main reason behind this trend is that the kids want to look like their role models who wear very extreme clothes as a part of their image. 
As long as the kids have these role models and as long as their parents allow it, this trend will prevail and even grow.
"," WHY YOUNG GIRLS FEEL THEY HAVE TO BE PROVOCATIVE  I have for a number of years noticed that young girls try to act older. 
They dress and act more sexually provocative than my friends and I did when we were their age, and that was not many years ago. 
These young girls use more make-up during an ordinary day than I use during a whole week. 
This is a trend that, in my oppinion, will not disappear but what could be the causes for it? 	
Well, there are many possible reasons. 
One could be the force of group pressure. 
Friends and class-mates consider someone to be un-hip if that person does not follow the current fashion or trend. 
Group acceptance is very important to young girls. 
Nobody wants to be visibly different giving the others something to pick on. 
There are those who dares to be different, but then it is a 'good' or accepted kind of different, and there are usually more than one girl daring to differ from the main group. 
But the fact is that young girls do not come up with these fashion trends by themselves and most of them do not even buy their own clothes. 
So group pressure is most probably not the main reason.  	
Young girls seldom have the money to buy their own clothes and therefore their parents and other relatives buy the clothes for them. 
This another reason that could be the casuse of this trend. 
Society at large accepts that these young girls dress the way they do. 
Firstly it is the parents that accept that their eleven-year-old wears make-up, mostly over-done mascara and eye-liner making the youg girls look like they have slept in it. 
But you cannot only blame the parents. 
Girls have been known to sneak out to put the make-up on on their way to school. 
Therefore some of the responsibility lies with the schools and the teachers. 
At least one school in Sweden has allready introduced a total ban of make-up on pupils before the age of thirteen. 
But many schools have not yet seen the attitude change in these young girls as a problem, they have accepted it. 
But you cannot blame them, Being constantly bomboarded with commesial pictures illustrating the way to look. 
Therefore niether parents nor the schools have created this trend and acceptance is a cause but it is also an effect of what I see as the main cause. 	
As mentioned above young girls do not get fashion ideas right out of the blue. 
They are influenced by different media, such as magazines and television. 
The current trend in the fashion world is to use very young models. 
Some of the larger agenies have a number of models that have not yet entered their teens. 
A very good example of such a model is Milla Jovovich who was on the cover of VOUGE when she had just turned twelve. 
To use young people as the front figure is not only common in the fashion world but something that can also be found in the music business. 
It is not uncommon to find that the front figure in a band or group is or tries to look as young as possible. 
A good example of this in Sweden is A-Teens and in Germany Blomchen, who tries to look younger to appeal to their main audiences. 
In England the 'inn-thing' is to create stars out of kids around the age of ten to thirteen. 
All these famous people are presented to the children through magazines and television shows. 
These media are commercial and are trying to appeal to girls by showing them the lives of the rich and famous. 
They also try to show girls how to become more like their favorite. 
But this was largely the case when I was coming into my teens too, the difference being that now the clothes and other attributes are available. 
Almost any larger store-chain has the kind of clothes the stars wear and they are not at all expensive. 
So what really causes the young girls to wear provocative clothes and use an extensive amount of mak-up is the big money they reprenent to the market-operators. 
Young minds are easily convinced that a certain product is what they need on their way to become stars. 
Therefore a fashion is created and artists and/or models paid to show it in various media creating a demand for the items, that the parents will have to buy to satisfy their young girls. 
All springing from the illusion that the children can become somebody they are not by dressing and acting like them. 
This trend will not disappear. 
It springs from the root of many evils; Greed. 
As long as the big companies make a profit on the young girls they will not change their concept. 
Allthuogh some model agecies has dared stand up and say that they do not allow girls under the age of sixteen anymore. 
The trend/problem has to be acknowledged before anyone is likely to try and do something about it.
",False
" HAPPY EVER AFTER INSIDE OF A BUBBLE  I can understand the problem violence on television causes the Americans. 
First of all because (believe it or not) there is more violence on television in The United States than in Sweden. 
While we in Sweden censor the violence scenes and leave the sex scenes the Americans leave the violence and censor the sex scenes. 
I will leave the question of which way is the best way for you to answer. 
Secondly there is the fact that Americans are great television viewing people and therefore the American children watch a lot of television. 
Thirdly, in the United States there is no concept of finishing work at four o'clock p.m. as there is in Sweden and the concept of dagis, daycarecenters is scarcely known. 
This means that children spend more time at home, alone or supervised, but with access to a television set. 	
With these three reasons in mind we now can start pondering over just how big of a problem violence is in the United States. 
My first reaction when hearing about this V-chip was a positive one. 
I believe that it is by far the best suggestion they've had over there for a while. 
Of course there could be other ways that are better, but until someone comes up with a concrete proposal this V-chip would serve its purpose.  	
Since I have played the part of a typical American youth in the play named Real lives of young Americans, I have lots of thoughts concerning young people and violence. 
The setting of the play was a High School in the suburban areas of Los Angeles where bomb threats, drive-by-shootings and guns in backpacks were a part of our daily lives. 
As were the bitterness among my classmates. 
The route had already been set for many of them. 
In freshman year, you were late to see your counsellor an suddenly you didn't get the classes you should have taken to stand a chance later in life. 
They were already picked by someone who were clever enough to go to the counsellor in the summer, before the semester started. 
Then, in psychology class, there were books only for half the class so you had to go to the library everyday to argue why you should have the one that just were handed in by someone who already dropped the class. 
This was in fact what happened most of the time, you just dropped the class. 
That was the easiest way to fit in, do like the majority, be indifferent. 
Indifference, that's the word. 
Indifference is what the air in the school was oozing of. 
The system worked against you and you responded by stopping to struggle and going with the flow, by being indifferent. 	
How does this connect with violence? 
When I was there, on scene, in the school, I felt the power of this indifference. 
It poisoned the air and made you see no hope or change of the situation. 
You stay where you are, with who you are and you do what your friends do. 
If your friends starts taking drugs, you are likely to do so too, if they are in a gang you would probably join them. 
And gangs, they know violence. 
That's how they show each other in the gang, love and respect and that's how they show other gangs and the public that they are to be respected and to be taken serious. 	
As, you see there are other factors then violence on television that play important roles when talking about violence in real life. 
But, my conclusion is that violence on television can only add more problems to the already troublesome situation in American society. 
When seeing lots of violence, in real life or on television, you become numb and need more and more to react or to get the same thrills. 
So, for me, this V-chip is a welcomed way to start fighting. 
As, Charlie, my American dad put it: ""We need to do something before our kids are all destroyed from the inside while we're not noticing it."" 	
The voices in the United States which are saying that this V-chip will reinforce government control, and that it endorses monopoly system are, according to me, nothing to care much about. 
They just signal the Americans fear for federal control and compared to how the situation looks like in Sweden with SVT, they don't have that much to worry about. 
What to worry about though, is the idea of closing out violence, locking out the violence which exist and putting yourself inside of a bubble. 
Is that the right way to deal with violence problems in society? 
Is it the right way to deal with any problem in society? 
I believe that this is only a way to postpone the problem, whichever it is. 
I do not believe that one can eliminate a problem by shutting it out, one needs to deal with the roots of the problem. 
You cannot make weed go away by cutting off what is above the ground; you need to look under the surface. 
The town of Celebration in Florida is an example of how people try to shut themselves out of the real world while living inside of a bubble. 
This is a town owned by Walt Disney Company which means that there is no public elected city council. 
The inhabitants get what they want: calm, peace no crime and violence at the cost of democracy and freedom of choice(Disney decides from which wallpaper one should have to how many your allowed to be in the bedroom!). 
Disney provides what the inhabitants want and earns money at the same time. 
Everyone is happy. 
On the surface.  	
This is, according to me, definitely putting yourself inside of a bubble and leaving the rest of the society to deal with the problems we are all responsible for. 
My only doubt concerning the V-chip is precisely this; closing out the reality and putting yourself inside of a bubble by excluding movies like American History X and welcoming the Disney classics But, as long as we try to deal with the violence problem on all levels in society the bubble will weaken and finally burst.
"," ""The new order of things proposed"": Vision and Reality in Robert Owen's New Lanark and New Harmony  Robert Owen cared for people's wealth, health and education. 
Having such an opinion today is regarded as something common, a normal ingredient in a person's character one could say. 
What is interesting is that this Mr. 
Owen possessed these revolving ideas 200 years ago. 
Even though at first ""regarded with suspicion,"" Owen was to become ""the forerunner of Socialism and the cooperative movement.""
1 His theories were put into practice in his two utopian communities: New Lanark and New Harmony. 
In this essay I will give you a taste of what Owen thought and how he applied his thoughts by opening the doors to these two worlds of his. 	
Owen was born and raised in Wales, England. 
He showed interest in business at an early age. 
At ten years of age he held a position as an assistant to a clothier in Lincolnshire. 
At nineteen Owen had attained a manager position of the Manchester mills. 
He continued his entrepreneurship in Scotland where he soon ran the New Lanark mills. 
This was to become the pride of his latter career as a socialist thinker. 
What Owen met at the New Lanark mills was terrible working conditions for the 2000 employees of which as many as 500 were small children. 
This was by far the worst the experienced Owen had seen in a factory. 
Child labour was widespread, crime was high and there were no real ethics among the workers.  	
As Owen believed that efficiency and Social reform should go hand in hand, he worked out a plan to improve the productivity of the factory by improving the living conditions for the workers. 
He cleaned up the factory, improved the housing, and set up stores where food could be bought at cost price and put the alcohol beverages under strict supervision. 
But most prominent of all his doings was his engagement for the children. 
Owen was not against child labour but he was much more humane than most in his view of using children in the working force: Owen refused to employ children under the age of ten. 
At New Lanark mills all children were educated, even the smallest ones, in one of the first kindergarten schools in the world. 
Owen's actions for children's rights were later to have a great impact on the creation of a law, the Factory Act, securing children's rights in England. 
Did these social reforms affect the efficiency of the factory, as Owen wanted? 
What is certain is that during these improvements the factory did have commercial success. 
If that was due to Owen's skilful inventions such as the use of the American sea island cotton, or his improvements for the workers is still to be proven.  	
Ten years of work at the New Lanark mills made it into a comparatively good place for workers, and it made Owen famous. 
People went on pilgrimage to see this miracle factory where the children were not filthy and the workers were not drowning their misery in alcohol. 
Now Owen turned his interest to a larger scale. 
He wanted his theories to affect not only New Lanark but also the rest of the society. 
In 1813, Owen published A New View of Society. 
In this, his most famous writing, Owen wrote down what had become his philosophy: the human character is formed by different circumstances which we, as humans, have no possibility to control and are therefore not to be held responsible for them.2 This differed from the general view of that time, when it was believed that certain people simply was bad by nature and under the spell of the 'existing evil'.3 A person born in poverty is not to be blamed for this personally but to be placed under right circumstances from a very young age and he will flourish. 
Owen strongly believed in his philosophy and thought that if only people got to know 'the new order of things,'4 they would approve of it. 	
Owen's next adventure was to buy a piece of land in the New World. 
In 1825 Owen had bought 30.000 acres of land in Indiana, which he named New Harmony. 
The people immigrating to this settlement were according to eyewitness A. 
MacDonald, both the ""industrious and well disposed of all nations"" and also some ""black sheep.""
5 This adventure in the New World was to be short and costly for Owen. 
After three years of trying to make the inhabitants get along Owen returned to England having lost 80% of his fortune.  	
How did New Harmony differ from New Lanark? 
To start with, New Lanark was there long before Owen's involvement, which was not the case with New Harmony. 
New Harmony had a few settlers there before Owen came, but most came after his arrival and promise of a utopian society. 
When Owen had set up the first government of the town, a middle way to adapt to his system, he left the town for Europe. 
During this time people were given medicines without having to pay, some 130 children were schooled, clothed and boarded all at the expense of Mr. 
Owen. 
This was not the case in New Lanark where Owen had never given anybody food or medicines for free, but only made it possible for workers to buy quality food at a low price. 
Another difference was the problems the inhabitants of New Harmony had with how they should govern the town. 
This led to a series of alternations of the Constitution of the town. 
All in all seven different ones were adapted and they contained everything from having Owen as sole head of town to having three men as dictators. 
In New Lanark the people did not have to bother with issues like who governed the town. 
They did not have to create a whole structure of society. 	
By the time Owen founded New Harmony he had developed his theories that he already had put in practice in New Lanark. 
Maybe this is where he went wrong; maybe he became too eager to ameliorate something that in fact was not in need of amelioration. 
Because fact is that New Lanark was a success, a large one. 
Owen altered some 2000 people's lives and he also played an important role as a pioneer in the socialist movement to come. 
He was a man who, unlike other philosophers, started out in small scale to continue into grandeur.  
1 Encyclopaedia Britannica, ""Robert Owen"", p., 32. 
Bronowski and Bruce Mazlish, The Western Intellectual Tradition: From Leonardo to Hegel. 
3 Robert S. 
Fogarty, ed., American Utopianism, ""Owenism"", p., 39 4 ibid. p., 39 5 ibid., p., 43.
",True
" ""The argument has commenced. ... 
Slavery will every where be abolished, or every where be re-instituted.""  
In 1619, the first Negroes arrived into America. 
They were not ""real"" slaves, but so called indentured slaves, which meant that their owners paid their trip to America if they in exchange worked for them some years. 
They then became free. 
Both blacks and whites where indentured slaves in the beginning. 
The whites soon found out that slaves were cheap labour and after the 1660s slavery became a fact. 
Since black slaves were cheaper to buy, they became more popular. 
Both the South and the North used slaves, but after the Revolution slavery became restricted in the North. 
The South, however, wanted to keep the slavery and argued that the system was necessary to maintain the agricultural society since it depended on its cotton. 
In 1808 the slavetrade was made illegal, but the Southerners still managed to keep their slaves. 
In the mid-nineteenth century slavery was a burning issue and both sides had a lot of arguments. 
In this essay I will give an account of the arguments presented in the articles. 
There were many more arguments for slavery than against, but on the contrary are the arguments against slavery much heavier, which might correct this imbalance.  
During an anti-slavery convention in Nantucket in 1842, Mr Frederick Douglass, a former slave, spoke about his experiences as a slave. 
Mr Douglass also wrote a Narrative in which he tells the reader about the ways he had been treated in as a slave. 
He explains how the most masters wanted their slaves to be as ignorant as possible, how children were taken away from their mothers and how the slaves generally were sold and treated as goods. 
In the preface of this Narrative there is a story about a white man who was kept in slavery for three years. 
After those years he had already forgotten his language and had lost all his reasoning power. 
""It (slavery) has a natural, an inevitable tendency to brutalize every noble faculty of man. ... 
So much for the humanizing influence of THE DOMESTIC INSTITUTION!"" 
(Garrison 3), Mr O'Connell has said according to Mr Garrison. 
They meant that it was not the slave who had a lack of intelligence (which some of the advocates of slavery said), it was the slavery that made him like that. 
Neither could Mr Garrison understand how a man who claimed that he believed in God and what Christianity stands for in the same time could argue for slavery. 
He said that anyone who is or sympathizes with the slaveholders is ""the foe of God and man"".  
In the mid-nineteenth century there where also people who said that slavery was not at all bad. 
On the opposite, they meant that the slaves should be happy for having the opportunity of being slaves. 
In his poem The Hireling and the Slave, William J Grayson lets us know the differences between those two characters. 
He describes how the hireling constantly must work to get food, clothes, and a home, how poor and near to be a Pauper he always is. 
The hireling, according to Mr Grayson, is always living on the edge despite hard work, gets no help from neighbours or charity and the women are even forced to prostitute themselves to survive. 
His description of the slaves are a bit different, he describes them as ignorant creatures who are lucky to have a master who supports them with food and a home, and all they have to do to get this is ""light daily labour"". 
The rest of their time they can sing, laugh, and dance.  
""The hireling white, without a pitying eye, Or helping hand, at home may starve and die; But that the distant black may softlier fare, Eat, sleep and play, exempt from toil and care,"" (Grayson 16)  The argument that the Negro has an insufficient intelligence and must be protected by a master for his own good is of frequent occurrence. 
I will once again quote from Mr Grayson's poem. 
This is his idea of what happens if a slave are emancipated: ""The negro freeman - thrifty while a slave, Becomes a helpless drone or crafty knave, Each effort to improve his nature foils; Begs, steals, or sleeps and starves, but never toils,"" (Grayson 16)  George Fitzhugh had the same thoughts. 
He defended Negro slavery by saying that only a highly moral and intellectual people can be governed by a democracy while the Negro who acts like a child must have a white master who should act as a parent. 
Those thoughts came from the white supremacy, an idea that says that the white race is superior to the Negro race. 
Mr Fitzhugh meant that if the Negroes wanted to stay in America they had to content themselves with slavery. 
The white race should try to civilise and christianise the Negro race, it is their duty. 
The advocates of slavery meant that the slaves of the South had the best lives since the slavery (or cannibalism) is much crueller in Africa, and as a free man in the North they would grow apathetic. 
As Mr Fitzhugh writes: ""The Southerner is the negro's friend, his only friend"" (Fitzhugh 13). 
He also claims that there would be no slaves if they only were sufficiently intelligent and had moral enough to take care of themselves.   
The inhabitants of the North did not, as mentioned above, support the Southerner's ideas about slaves and slavery. 
In 1861 the Civil War broke out, and its main issue was the slavery. 
Five years later the North won, which finally meant freedom for the slaves. 
But the racism and the idea of white supremacy have survived in both The South and the North, and are still today not extinct.
","In the secondary school I hated English lessons. 
They were always the same; glossary tests, reading a chapter aloud from the book and maybe some grammatics. 
Not hard work actually, but I didn't like it anyway. 
Sometimes we had to discuss openly in the classroom, and it was that part I didn't like, almost hated. y teacher in the 7:th till 9:th grade had made himself a very easy way to get off his teaching lightly. 
Mostly he just let us see some TV-programs in English. 
Preferably Mr Bean. 
Maybe we didn't learn to much about grammar and so on, but who cared? 
We loved the English lessons, of course. 
It wasn't until secondary school I noticed that my English weren't the best. 
I felt ashamed and didn't wanted to speak or do anything that showed my lack of knowledge. 
All tests turned out bad, and I who had very good grades in almost all of the other subjects found out that I strongly disliked English. 
If you're bad at something and don't like it (actually just because you're bad in it, I suppose) you won't improve, no matter how much your English teacher strains you and herself. 
She also taught Swedish, where I was one of the best, so she couldn't understand why I was such a disaster in English. 
Anyway, I survived secondary school, consequently avoiding speaking and reading English unless I really had to. 
Right after school I went to study biology at the university. 
Suddenly every course book was written in English, and there were no way you could shirk. 
It was simple: if you didn't understood the English, you wouldn't understand the course which in turn meant a failed exam. 
So I had to deal with my dislike for English. 
My first book ""Chemistry"" of a thousand pages ought to be finished within ten weeks. 
At first I had to consult my dictionary for every second word, and it took me a very, very long time. 
After a while I learned that I didn't needed to understand every single word. 
A few books later I found out that the English language wasn't that bad after all. 
Now, when I'm in my third year and have a lot of books behind me the reading isn't any big problem any more. 
As I mentioned above, I never liked speaking English, I really hated it in school. 
But the university indirectly helped me out here too. 
I met a couple of exchange-students. 
They were even worse in English than I was, but they didn't care! 
They just carried on talking and if we Swedes didn't understood what they were saying, which happened frequently in the beginning, they just tried with body language. 
We all had a lot of fun, and at the same time I discovered that they didn't care at all about my bad grammar or if I pronounced something in an incorrect way. 
They understood what I was saying anyway, and was pleased with it. 
That, I can tell you, was a relief!  
The English language now began to interest me. 
I've already discovered that I needed to improve, but now I actually wanted to learn more and make improvements. 
The literature on the biology courses helped me a lot with the understanding of texts, but they didn't taught grammar or pronunciation. 
I decided to take this English course. 
Listening is something I haven't trained since school and I have always thought that I was bad at that too. 
But after visiting the first lectures I discovered that I actually - without problems - did understood what the lecturers were talking about. 
The speaking is still my worst skill. 
I often feel uncomfortable and insecure. 
But that's what I'm here for, to change it! 
I always liked writing - in Swedish of course. 
It's so easy in Swedish; I have a feeling for which sentence that sounds right and which doesn't, but in English I don't have that little voice in my head. 
I've always found grammar very boring, and only remembered what I needed a short while to pass the tests. 
That's one of the things that I now regret. 
Still I think it's a lot of fun to create an essay.
",True
" The rich is getting richer while the poor are becoming more  I can still remember the first time I encountered a beggar in Sweden. 
After all it was not such a long time ago. 
What I remember most clearly, though, was the indifference most passengers showed on the train. 
Until then I believed that Sweden was a country that always offered a shelter for the poor and the needy. 
Until then I believed that homelessness and begging was something that belonged to other countries. 
Now ten years later the trend is well established; the rich is getting richer while the poor are becoming more. 
Aftonbladet recently published an article, which stated that the number of people living on welfare has doubled the last ten years. 
The article also revealed that another thing that has doubled during that period is the income of the five thousand richest Swedes. 
This trend is unfortunately applicable in a global perspective. 
What are the underlying forces behind that development? 
Are they intentional or can they be blamed on a disastrous political failure? 
The answer is one the manifestations many. 	
The capitalist system prevailing in the West has, in spite of the abundance of food and water in the world, repeatedly failed to remedy poverty in their own countries as well as in the developing countries. 
The lofty rhetoric from their leaders has little or nothing to do with the matters discussed inside the White House and the Westminster parliament. 
While Tony Blair, the British Prime Minister, declares war on poverty. 
The percentage of the total GNP of the members of the EU going to social welfare has gradually been cut. 
From 28.6% in 1996 to 28.1% in 1997 to 27.7% in 1998 according to, Eurostat, the statistics bureau of the EU. 
We should be under no illusion that all nations are interested in fighting poverty. 
Shortly after W.W.2 George Kennan, head of the State Department Policy Planning Staff wrote on one of the key state papers PPS 23 ""We can't afford the luxury of altruism... 
We should cease to talk about vague and unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of living standards, and democratization."" 
In UN's Human Development Report 1999 p.3 we can clearly see that the policy set out by the United States for the second half of the 20th century has been successful. 
""The income gap between the fifth of the world's people living in the richest countries and the fifth in the poorest was 30 to 1 in 1960, up to 60 to 1 in 1990 and 74 to 1 in 1997."" 
These oppressive nations represent the interest of huge corporations which only concern is how to make more money. 
There is much truth in the saying ""what's good for General Motors is good for America"". 
In order to achieve cheap labor and cheap raw materials the abolition of poverty is highly undesirable. 	
A second significant reason and necessity for the gap to continue widening is that people are ignorant or unaware of the situation of the world. 
The main apparatus to screen off the public from the truth is the media. 
There is a sector of the media called the elite media or the agenda setting media. 
It is called the agenda setting media because it sets the framework in which all other media operates. 
The elite media like the New York Times or Dagens Nyheter are major, very profitable, corporations owned by much bigger corporations like General Electric or the Bonnier sphere. 
They are way up at the top of the power structure of the private economy. 
And it would be very surprising if they went against their own interests. 
For these huge corporations it's better that the public is concerned with professional sports or sex scandals than worrying about that one out of seven human beings are starving in the world. 
They prefer that we leave those serious questions for the big guys. 
Not even schoolbooks are free from that indoctrination. 
To create a market for the corporations, materialism was invented. 
And the way to spread its message is through advertising. 
The advertising industry glorifies the materialist to heavenly highs and plants the seed for future greed. 
Thus assuring that the masses are kept in bondage by the chains of greed. 
And as generations grow up they embark indoctrinated and often well intentioned on the capitalist roundabout. 
From once being victims of greed they have succumbed to become servants of greed. 
The vicious cycle is complete. 
To sum up the industrial countries are culpable of intentionally keeping 15% of the world population in extreme poverty while accumulating material wealth for themselves. 
The big corporations are the prime movers in the impoverishment process. 
And their highly sufficient media apparatus indoctrinates the citizens to not only accept the uneven distribution of wealth but also to strive for material wealth themselves. 
Furthermore, greed is the eye of the capitalist hurricane. 
It is the core to all major actions that broadens the gap between the rich and the poor. 
And like a hurricane, it's in its nature to destroy everything that stands in its way. 
Including the raising of living standards.
"," Would anybody agree to be slaughtered in the name of art?  
Lars Holger Holm's article in ""Finanstidningen"" is surely aimed to raise a debate and agitate or shock the average reader. 
Unfortunately, it is clumsily written and it is difficult to follow, due to its illogical and incoherent argumentation. 
Since the content is so controversial, Holm should have put some more effort in making his stance clear. 
As it is now, it is impossible to interpret the content in any other way than as a defence for pederasts, on the condition that they are talented enough. 
I also object to the irrelevant use of pregnant words and hyperboles meant to stealthily induce the feelings he wants the reader to feel. 
That is an obvious sign of his lack of sufficient arguments for his cause.  	
And what is the cause? 
The heading ""The outcasts are silenced"" is followed by the introductory text ""Imagine if it was possible to eradicate all perversions of the human race. 
Would not that in itself be the worst of all perversions?"" 
But that is not what is being discussed. 
At least I can find no argument to support that thesis. 
What Holm asserts is firstly that the odd individual is rejected in society. 
That is true, at least when it comes to homeless, mentally ill, drug addicts, and prostitutes. 
A lot more could be done to improve their situation. 
But instead of mentioning them, Holm brings out the psychopaths and the pederasts on one end of the scale, and the geniuses on the other. 
That comparison is the spine of the whole article, but I can't see the similarity. 
A true genius' life and perception is totally unconnected to that of a psychopath. 
The geniality in a person is not in itself colliding with the values of society, and geniality does not necessarily make people outcasts. 
Holm describes how ""the citizens voluntarily understand that they must restrict themselves from mental intercourse with the odd individual"", implying that that the conform masses do not have an opinion of their own. 
When talking about psychopaths, it is a rather strange remark. 
One of the most basic desires of the human being is to avoid pain, threats, and death, and one does not need to be indoctrinated by a repressive government to stay away from people that may harm you.  	
From the general pity of the social outcasts, Holm arrives at one, according to Holm, particular ambiguous case. 
A conductor in New York has been fired for perennial child abuses, even though he generously compensated the victims economically. 
Holm asks: ""Should we in the future be prepared to sacrifice a person who deprave our children and youths... irrespective of the other, possibly indisputable, talents he has?"", and we are also told to remember that Sokrates was accused for the same thing. 
The statement Holm makes in the form of a leading question suggests that it should be acceptable to exploit and abuse weaker human beings, to possibly destroy their confidence and traumatise their own sexuality for a lifetime, on the condition that the perpetrator is talented enough, worthy enough, and important enough. 
That is a disgusting outlook on mankind, and it leaves a bad taste in its resemblance with the Nazi ideology. 
Who decides which persons are worthy, and which are worthless and unnecessary to protect? 
The use of the word 'deprave' instead of 'hurt', 'abuse', or 'injure', endow the sentence with the alarming sense of Holm being unable to understand that victims of sexual abuse suffer to a incomparable extent; many child victims testify that they never could have an normal relation with someone, and suicide is not uncommon. 
That is a popular aberration among child rapists too: that the children is not affected by the rape, and in one way or another agrees to have sex with the perpetrator. 
Holm is able argue in this way only because he knows he probably would not be the victim. 
Would he agree to be slaughtered in the name of art?  	
Lars Holger Holm is either mentally disturbed, or totally incompetent in conveying his own opinions. 
Either way, it is embarrassing that a serious paper like Finanstidningen should publish an article like this. 
Maybe it was meant to be brave, and sometimes it is good to start a debate on sensitive topics, but they should have asked a person able to write articles with a content worthy of discussion.  
Summary: The outcasts are silenced   Lars Holger Holm, Finanstidningen den 5/4 -01 Thesis: It is smug and wrong to punish odd individuals like pederasts without considering his other talents. 
The collective moral tenet should not dictate the conditions for the odd and socially offensive, but creative, person. 
To eradicate all perversions of the human race would in itself be the worst of all perversions. 
Summary: The concept ""a normal individual"" is a new construction but probably most communities have defined clearly which traits that characterises the valuable citizen and the outcast. 
The outcasts do not submit to the social and cultural duties that the governing masters impose on them, as the normal citizen does. 
The government allege that they are protecting the citizens from each other (by laws etc.), but in reality it is a disguise to find means to protect them from the enlightenment that the odd individuals conveys to them.  	
Society makes people to voluntarily distance themselves from the outcasts, who are looked upon as enemies to society. 
The concept that society would be better of without pederasts and geniuses is widespread, as an important step in the destruction of the odd elements in society.  
Some of our greatest minds are socially unacceptable persons. 	
One of the greatest conductors in the United States has assaulted several young boys. 
He has ""mitigated the consequences of his side-steps"" with abundant economic compensations. 
But unluckily he didn't see the ""need to repress his natural impulses"". 
Now he has got a notice to quit from the Metropolitan Opera in N.Y. 
Should we sacrifice a true genius on the base that they deprave our youth? 
Should the majority collective moral tenet dictate the conditions for the odd and socially offensive, but creative, person?  	
Wouldn't be the worst of all perversions to eradicate all perversions of the human race?
",False
" Children and violence on television  After having been an exclusive entertainment for a few, television is now a natural part of most people's lives. 
Television programmes are no longer broadcasted between six and ten o'clock at night, but shown round the clock. 
We live with television and through television, dreaming ourselves away to other parts of the world, to different lives, to better lives, while watching romantic films and soap operas. 
We watch the news and let war, famine, flood and injustice in to our livingrooms, but do not allow ourselves to further reflections after that the news is over. 
We watch action movies, and see how the hero survives after being chased by both the maffia and the police forces, whose number naturally has been reduced with a few dozens. 
Afterwards we switch off the television and turn back to reality. 
At least we often think so.  	
A question that has been widely discussed lately is how people and especially children are affected by what they see on television. 
An every day higher degree of violence in society is by many seen as an result of the violence shown on television. 
Others claim that it is the other way round: that television reflects the society we live in and that films and programmes containing violence only mirrors the real world. 
But even if violence on television is ment to show that evil actually exist, parents seems to agree in not wanting their children to discover this.  	
Broadcasters are often accused of not taking their responsibility when it comes to the question about showing or not showing programmes containing violence. 
But it seems like they are taking their responsibility as far as possible, at least in the Swedish channels. 
Action films and programmes containing violence are most often telecasted on late viewing hours, when parents usually are at home and their children have gone to bed. 
During the hours children are most likely to watch television violence is seldom shown.  	
Broadcasters are also taking their responsibility in the way they inform about the recommended age limit before a film starts. 
In the same way commentators and newscasters warn if programmes and news contain violent scenes. 
When it comes to the latter, it seems like there is a common acception not to show close-up pictures of people's suffering, or to detailed desciptions of victims of violence. 
This might not be an agreement for protecting only the children but rather to protect all viewers. 	
Naturally the cautions that violence is to be shown are not useful if parents are not around. 
It is not likely that a child itself switch channel after a warning like this. 
Therefore it seems obvious that the biggest responsibility for controlling what children are watching should be incured by the parents. 
It is for these to decide whether or not they want their children to face the evil of the times.  	
One problem is that of telling the difference between different types of violence. 
Parents must teach their children to distinguish between real violence and fiction violence. 
The dividing-line between them both is not always clear, and the task might therefore seem far to difficult to solve. 
How to explain for a child that the violence in 30 November actually exists, and that the message in Pulp Fiction not is that of bying a motor-cykle and start killing people on the streets. 
When is a child ready to face the true evil of the Second World War, and see a film like Schindler's List and at what age can one understand the underlying humour in Scream.  	
These questions must be for each parents to think about, when raising their children. 
It is to be hoped that a parental responsibility taken when the children are still young, gives the basis for a sound attitude towards violence when they grow up.
"," Regulate the Swedish import of American films  The United States has for a long time dominated the world's film production. 
The number of new American productions is constantly increasing, and many of its actors are well known all over the world. 
American culture and society has become part of many people's everyday life, in spite of the fact that they live in completely different countries. 
The youth of Japan might know more about the American school system, than about their own, as a result of the many hours spent in front of Beverly Hills. 
And if Europeans tend to know a lot about the judicial system, it is more likely about the American judicial system than their own, because of the large number of American successes dealing with laywers, as The Firm and Ally McBeal. 
In studios all over the world, native actors do their best to imitate the voices of American actors, with the aim to make the movies understandable to their compatriots. 
In the meanwhile, domestic productions are neglected, and non-american film producers find themselves struggling against a power, which is far too strong to challenge.  	
In 1991 a resolution of the Swedish Riksdag regulated the number of American productions in the state's television channels, in order to promote both the domestic and the European film and television industry. 
The result has been a greater variaty in the programs, and the creation of many high-quality Swedish productions made for television. 
But for the Swedish film-industry the problem remains intact. 
The Riksdag resolution should therefore be extended to include this domain as well. 
A regulation of American movies imported by Swedish cinemas would result in a more fair competition for the filmgoers. 	
Film as a medium is an effective way to disseminate ideas and knowledge about different cultures. 
With this as an aim, it is often used in the schools as an alternative to textbooks, giving the students a deeper and more nuanced knowledge than can be recieved only by reading or listening. 
While watching a foreign movie, the students are given the possibility to get an insight into a different country and its features, as well as into the everyday life of its inhabitants. 
In this way the film serves to increase the comprehension for other cultures and hopefully promotes a more positive attitude to immigrants and to the cultural diversity of our country. 
A regulation of the import of foreign movies would imply a reduced number of American films in favour of both Swedish and other non-american movies. 
This diversity at the cinemas would serve in the same way as in the schools, but reach out to more people. 	 
A regulation of the film-import would also be of great importance to Swedish producers and actors. 
By now only a few Swedish productions are up at the cinemas, because of the keen competition. 
Among the small number of films actually shown, many are seen only by a minority. 
A case in point is the film made by the Swedish producer Lisa Ohlin, Veranda fur en tenor, which was performed for the first time last summer. 
In spite of great and well known actors, a highly commended script and dazzling reviews, the film was shown only in a few cities and had a surprisingly small audience. 
This was the result of far too many bad experiences with similar films, which had been neglected by Swedish filmgoers, in order to favour one of the American productions instead. 
A regulation of the import would stimulate the Swedish film industry and give the native producers the opportunity to reach out to their audience. 
It would favour the cultural life of Sweden as well as promote more jobs. 	 
In the debate about a proposed regulation it has been claimed that a implementation of the same would conflict with the freedom of competition. 
It is true that the Swedish film industry then would not compete at the free market, and that a legalisation of regulation would be against the democratic rights. 
But what is even more dangerous for a small country like Sweden is actually the present situation; a situation where we find ourselves discriminated and brushed aside by a gigantic competitor, which nearly has a monopoly of the world's film production. 
For the individual the standardization of the present supply is a threat, even though it is a result of free competition and not of some totalitarian state's censorship. 	
A regulation would serve to give the Swedes a greater possibility to choose on their own what kind of film they want to see. 
It is the only way to combat the present standardization and to recapture the control over an important domain of Swedish cultural life.
",True
" There are those who maintain that the family, not the state, should look after the elderly. 
I think that this is a socio-political and ethical topic that concerns us all. 
I believe that everybody should have the right to be taken care of no matter if we are rich or poor and neither should the colour of our skin and political ideas influence. 
Moreover, today's society doesn't really allow us to look after our elderly relatives, as we have to make ourselves a career, work full-time, bring up a family, spend quality time with friends, etc. 
The geriatric care can best see to that they are given the best help possible, not the family. 
Here below I will account for the three main arguments against the privat care of the elderly. 
First of all I would like to claim that this is our right as taxpayers and we have the right to make use of what we have built up. 
Growing old is part of most lives, and to be taken care of is not only a social right that we have, it is also a service that we have the right to buy since this service has been established owing to our taxes (the elderly do pay for the help they are given).  
Secondly we have the juridical aspects of it. 
Who is to be hold responsable if anything should happen? 
Could I be responsable for my mother's medical care not being a doctor? 
Do I have the responsability to give my grandmother the intellectual stimulation that her age requires, not being a therapist of any kind? 
I don't think so, just as I can't hold a doctor responsable for the horrible buildings of the seventies. 
Since the geriatric care is a service that the elderly have to pay for, I believe that they have the right to get qualified help from people that have the appropriate education and know how to accomodate the service to the need of the elderly.  
The final and third argument considers the quality of their lives. 
There are those who think that we need to spend more time with our relatives, so why not spend time with them and take care of them at the same time. 
It is true that we have lost that nearness or connection within the families that was so common some 30-40 years ago, but to give them a bath or to help them whith their activity of daily living is not the same as spending quality time with them. 
With quality time I refer to the social and cultural interchange and profit of people sharing time together. 
Anybody could help the elderly to prepair their breakfast or to do their cleaning, but only the relatives are close enough to know what they appreciate to do, what they like to read, to see, etc. 
We, the family, should spend more time with them to show them that we care and leave the nursing to the qualified medical service.   
Before I sum up this essay, I would like to stress the old generation's work and it should not be taken for granted. 
They were the ones to develop the Swedish welfare state and yesterday 's values, for instance, today both men and women can think about their careers at first hand, their lives will not come to an end just because they don't have children or a family. 
There are many elderly without relatives today and I think that there will be many more when our generation gets there, but we should still have the right to know that we are going to be taken care of even if we don't have relatives or someone to plead our cause. 
I believe that it's not the same to care for the elderly and to take care of them. 
We do care for our grandmothers and we do take care of them if we let the state look after them, after all, they do deserve the best help there is to get as they have already paid for it.
","I am going to assess my strengths and weaknesses of listening, reading, speaking and writing the English language. 
These four skills go from easy to difficult for me and probably for most people trying to use a foreign language. 
If that is the general idea there are still areas within each and one of these skills that are easy or hard, that is my skills would be more or less good, and I shall try to explain why. 	 
My strengths in listening to English are, according to me, not only the ability to understand normal conversation, but also to recognise various accents or the ways that people with different backgrounds speak in England. 
I have by living in England begun to appreciate these variations and it has actually helped my understanding of the culture and society. 
I feel quite happy about my level of understanding spoken English, but there are of course areas that are more difficult - like some British satire on television for example. 
Sometimes I realise that I haven't understood a word, obviously because of the context and the amount of rhyming slang spoken. 
I would say reading a political article in the newspaper is often easier than understanding some English humour!  	 
Sometimes my listening skills aren't at all as good as I think. 
I remember working as an office temp getting a task of writing down names and addresses from an answer machine. 
I found it extremely difficult to identify the names not to mention the addresses. 
I hardly got anything right. 	 
When it comes to reading and my strengths and weaknesses there, I feel that I know enough words to understand most things that I read, but at the same time there are plenty of words that I don't recognise. 
This isn't so bad that I would call it a weakness but not knowing the word in front of me certainly isn't a strength either. 
I also find that no text is free of these words that go from vague recognition to total unfamiliarity. 
The context of certain written works make them harder to comprehend, but reading  Peter Rabbit to my fiancés four year old niece can also prove to be a hard task with the strangest words appearing in the text.  y speaking skills are generally good but they vary with the company. 
Sometimes I feel fluent, sometimes I go more or less mute - it depends on the situation. 
What are my strengths in speaking? 
This is much more complicated to assess than the other skills depending on what one really expects from oneself. 
Is it a strength that I speak English more or less every day with Jason at home? 
Day to day conversation is quite limited and really doesn't expand my speaking skills at all. 
Furthermore, it is so easy to slip in a Swedish word instead of the English one I didn't know. 
On the other hand I must not pretend I haven't got any strengths out of living in England for three years and having been in close contact with the country for seven years. 
(Time flies!) 
I speak English without a strong Swedish accent. 
That is a strength but only if it is coupled with the right words or expressions. 
Someone once said to me ""If you say something wrong people still won't know you're foreign, they'll just think you're stupid!"" 
This was supposed to be a joke, but it is a weakness of mine to take this seriously.  	 
A weakness of a more grammatical kind, is that which I touched upon earlier, a limitation of words and expressions to use. 
I, for example, am in desperate need of more adjectives for I am fed up with using ""nice"" all the time. 
Everything I like is ""nice"" but it is such a limited way of describing things. 
Another one is ""thing"". 
A hilarious example is when I worked myself into a state trying to explain to my boyfriend that I wanted my ""necessér"" brought to me. 
But what on earth is it called? 
Necessary...no... necessity...nec...
BRING THAT THING! -What! 
THE THING!! -What!! 
THE BLUE!!! 
(It was blue as a matter of fact, but I would have saved myself from getting upset had I then known what its English name was). 
This isn't at all a unique example of my lack of nouns by the way. 	 
Writing is not as frustrating as speaking but can still be the most difficult to master. 
I say that because a writing person must be self-sufficient enough to handle the language on their own. 
Having said that, writing can sometimes be easier than speaking since the writer doesn't have an immediate audience. 
It doesn't require the same quick thinking. 
The difficulties of writing depend upon the subject and who is going to read it in the end.  	 
I feel fairly confident that my grammar and spelling is all right but I don't feel totally sure that the language I use doesn't sound Swedish by the structure or wrong in another sense. 
What I assessed as my weaknesses in speaking, that is a lack of words to describe things, applies here as well of course, only that I don't feel the same panic about it when I write.  	 
I have tried to assess strengths and weaknesses the way I see them. 
I know it is possible that I might find more weak points as I go along, ones I have been too ignoran
",False
" What should children not be allowed to watch on television?  
In the article ""Television: Locking out violence"" in Time Magazine of July 24, 1995, an interesting issue is raised: What would we not like our children to watch on television? 
What is ""objectionable content""? 
Brutal violence might easily qualify for this label. 
But could not there be other things too, which maybe are not so obvious? 
Where should we draw the line?   
First of all, we must determine whether children should be allowed or not to watch everything on television. 
Sooner or later, children will anyway face violence, for example, in films and on television, so what is the point of hiding it from them? 
However, children are easily affected and often incapable of understanding fiction. 
In order to protect them from traumatic and frightening experiences, some kind of censorship is desirable.   
Total censoring of violence could be a problem too, because if every little bit of violence was to be removed there might be a gap between the children's world view and the adult one, or even between the children's worldview and reality... 
As the child grows up, the difference could be a shock. 
In this respect, it is better to accustom children to a certain amount of violence on television. 
It sounds absurd, but as violence does exist in society, it would be unreasonable to keep children from watching any trace of it.   
Thus, a line has to be drawn separating what is objectionable from what is not. 
This is hard enough when only physical violence is involved: should children be kept only from watching brutal, directly described violence, or also violence that is only suggested? 
Children have great imagination and hints and traces of violence might cause them considerable damage too. 
This leads us to asking what is really important: the degree of violence or the signification of it? 
Should a detective series and a documentary about war be treated equally? 
Is it not possible that the documentary is the ""worst"" because it is real? 
You cannot (truthfully, at least) tell your child that the war is only fiction, that it never happened, or that it never will happen again! 
Again the relation to reality is significant. 
If we look at the degree of violence there is also a question to answer: what kind of violence is too brutal for children to be seen? 
Opinions differ somewhat on this point. 
Some parents are anxious to keep their children from watching anything that could be the least cruel or horrid in children's eyes, while others seem much less troubled on this point.   
Now I would like to discuss the second aspect of the initial question, namely what else than violence might be regarded as ""objectionable content"" on television? 
Sex, many people would say. 
Pornography is obviously not suited for children, but sex scenes in ""usual"" films and programmes are not really a problem, I would say. 
But what about television as a model of behaviour and morality in general for children? 
Take a look at all the so-called ""soaps"" which are heaped upon us today. 
Here there is no violence, but something else that I find a bit objectionable: the characters. 
In many cases, they exceed all bounds with treachery, falsehood, greed, selfishness, and superficiality. 
It can be good entertainment, but is that the way children sees it? 
Do they understand that this is not how they should behave? 
I do not think that all children realise that what they watch on television is not always the real world. 
However, I doubt the effect of this kind of censorship. 
Would children be pure and unspoilt, or incapable of understanding these things when they meet with them in real life? 
You cannot really tell. 
Besides, if we go as far as to censor television programmes on moral and ethical grounds, the step to ideological censorship is not a very big one. 
What is objectionable content depends on who you are: in the article referred to above, we are told that a right- to-life group has already asked CBS for the possibility to censor programmes dealing with abortion. 
If this were allowed, what subjects would be censored next? 
This use risk being anti-democratic.   
What you should allow you child to watch on television is thus a complicated question to which there is no universal answer - ultimately it is you who must decide what is best for your children.
"," ""No one knows the cruelty"": Women and children of the Industrial Revolution  The Industrial Revolution brought many changes to British society. 
The ways of living of the lowest classes were slowly altered. 
In this essay, I will particularly explore the impact of industrialism on the lives of working-class women and children, and how their living and working conditions began to change during the mature industrial period of the late 19th century.   
Industrial production, which had begun to gain ground in the 18th century, superseded the working classes' traditional way of earning their living: through work in the home. 
These people now moved to the industrial cities for employment in factories. 
The vast urbanisation starting in the early 19th century led to housing problems (overcrowded dwellings without heating, ventilation and sanitation) and a fast-growing slum of poor factory workers. 
The working conditions in the factories were awful: ten, twelve, maybe thirteen hours of labour under extremely risky circumstances. 
Many workers were crippled or died young because of accidents or diseases due to the unhealthy conditions in the factories. 
Young children too were employed full-time, and their working conditions were at least as bad as those of adult workers.   
The traditional role of the working-class woman was confined to the home: raising children and take care of the household, while her husband worked. 
The money he earned he gave to her, who was given control over the household budget. 
This meant that the working-class wife had substantial power within the family. 
Many did not manage as well as they could have, though: there were reports of the incapability of many housewives to use the money wisely (Vicinus, 7). 
As the 19th century progressed, material standards improved somewhat. 
But all working-class women were not equally affected by these small changes, as we shall see. 
For some, the conditions in general deteriorated.   
The working-class population of this era could be divided into three categories: the relatively well-off artisans, who had middle-class aspirations; the average factory labour force (including textile and other industry workers, and miners); and the traditional poor, who constituted 1/4 of the urban working class. 
The lives of the women of the two latter groups were fairly alike during the beginning and the middle of the 19th century, but towards the end of it things began to happen. 
New attitudes arose among the average working-class women due to a number of things. 
Real wages increased rapidly from mid-century, and the slight improvement in living standards resulting from this was one thing; education was another - more and more women were becoming literate. 
The birth rate began to decline for the first time in working-class families. 
The lesser number of children, along with the Education Act of 1870 that stipulated that all children under the age of ten should go to school, resulted in more free time for the mothers. 
It was a time of break with tradition that caused considerable distress among these women: they had left the traditional resignation that the very poorest still felt, a resignation which both perpetuated the poverty and made it easier to endure (Vicinus, 9). 
What the women in working-class families above the subsistence level felt was expectations and hopes that were far from being satisfied, and because of this, a great despair and unhappiness. 
In about the same time, these women lost their important economic role in the family. 
The men began to take control over the family budget, but still expected their wives to manage as before, although they had less money to spend. 
Inflation in the early 1900s aggravated this problem.   
While the lot of many working-class wives remained the same or worsened towards the turn of the century, that of young, unmarried women changed for the better. 
Female employment rapidly increased from the 1890s onwards, and it was unmarried girls over the age of fifteen that made the difference. 
Their working in factories between school and marriage became quite normal; married women, however, were not supposed to work outside home. 
The young women enjoyed a relative economic affluence and freedom, which made it even harder for them to adjust to the life of a married woman - for they did marry, and at about the same age as their mothers and grandmothers. 
All traditional patterns were not dissolving.   
Child labour was widely extended in 19th-century Britain. 
Before industrialism, children had mainly worked as agricultural workers or domestic servants, or they had worked at home. 
Now, they too were included in the workforce of industrial production. 
Their low wages, obedience and small size made them very attractive to employers in, for example, the mining, the textile, and the steel- and iron industries. 
There are no figures to tell us how many children were exploited in factories and elsewhere, except that only the Lancashire mills employed some 30,000 children a year (Mitchell, 2)   Legislation in the early 19th century had little impact on the lives of the industrial workers. 
From the middle of the century, however, a public opinion against child labour was growing, which enabled legislation concerning the children's working conditions. 
In 1874, it was illegal to employ children under the age of ten full time. 
The Education Act of 1870, which I have already mentioned, was extremely important because it started the process which was to become the most important thing for the improvement of the conditions of the working class: its education and political awareness. 
As for working hours, legislation regulating the number of working hours for women was adopted between 1844 and 1850, for instance the Ten Hours Act (1847) which established ten hours of labour per day, and short Saturdays, in the textile industry. 
These regulations came to apply to the men too, and later other trades as well. 
In 1875 the working week was set to 54-56 1/2 hours, and 25 years later, the 8 hours workday was achieved by many British workers.   
The women's breaking up from traditional resignation was clearly a prerequisite for the improvement of their situation and therefore a good thing. 
However, it took a long time and a lot of suffering before anything was achieved, especially for the poorest. 
It almost seems that they did not realise themselves with what cruelty they were treated by society. 
The indirect reason for the non-improved or worsened social conditions for working-class wives was the Victorian view of women which was eventually gaining ground among the lower classes, and which would not change until the first decades of the 20th century. 
Legislation did play a part in the lives of the working classes, not least in regulating child labour, but their general situation, and the women's especially, depended much more on the prevailing values and ideas of society as a whole.
",True
" Why has the level of alcohol taking increased so much in the Spanish teenagers?  
Alcohol taking in Spain is on a considerable increase as regards those who are under age in our society. 
The present situation has become almost untenable and now the time has come to do something as both the Spanish government and the media indicate continuously. 
However, this is not a problem originated just a moment ago, but we should find its stems in the basis of our own Spanish society. 
We have not realized yet what was happening very close to us. 
Now that the level of alcohol taking is without any doubt alarming, it would be reasonable to pick out some possible causes for this problem.  	
The media have suggested several causes and among them, one stands out against the rest: the government, they say, does not control neither pubs nor bars where they go on selling alcohol to the under-aged. 
The latter really find it easy to have a drink or two or even to get drunk for the first time in their lives. 
The owners of those places only look after their own interests and above all, they look after their economy. 
They would probably complain that they do not win enough money to pay everything they must pay as they are fully endowed with taxes. 
This is what many journalists in Spain have upheld in their articles.  	
Another reason that the media in Spain have also revealed as possible and that has been this time corroborated by those children' s parents is that of the more than probable unconcern the latter have with regard to their children's education, habits and manners. 
Many of the problems originated at home create certain confusions in the mentality of the affected ones, who really feel demoralized and find a refuge in the end. 
This refuge is obviously alcohol. 
Those parents do not realize that they have caused the problem beforehand and very often, ironically, they quit from their own blames and even say that they find it almost impossible to have their children under control all the time. 
The reason, they say, is that you can never know what your child is doing outside home and thus, whatever moment you can say: ""He' s done me!"" 
Still many sociologists indicate that it is about time to raise the conscience of the parents for a greater control of their children.  	
However, the main cause for this increase is, from my point of view, the desire to imitate, the desire to have a new experience (the first drunkenness), because they can see it everywhere and would like to feel as the grown-ups do. 
They want to feel superior to the rest of the people and thus, not being limited any more. 
This remarkable desire for freedom is due to: the presence of a society completely based on alcohol, the development of advertising campaigns concerning alcohol and again, the little consideration of the family towards their children.  	
First, just investigating in the past times of the Spanish society, we can find that it has always been eminently related to alcohol. 
Spain has always tended to have people who really like to have a good wine or a beer in a pub all nights or even our past banquets were full of wine and some other drinks. 
If we asked our parents what did they usually do when they were young, if they did the same or not, they would probably answer like this: ""Ok, Yes but not so young as it happens now. 
In fact, we were more innocent people."" 
Below this historic assumption, well -known by the tourists and foreigners in Spain, that urge for imitation and superiority is very well hidden in it.   
Secondly, the development of advertising campaigns on the TV which include alcohol in their sales, contribute to strengthen this problem even more. 
As many sociologists say, when that child sits on the sofa and watches the ads on the TV, that desire for knowing the taste of what has just been shown on the TV is really created in him. 
Perhaps, he has already seen his parents do that before. 
As a result of this, everything goes back again to that idea of the unconcern of the parents who do not know how to give their children a good education and bring it to a successful conclusion. 
A few solutions are of course needed, but now it is not the time to look for them. 
Maybe some special campaigns too should be done to help those parents!  	
In conclusion, as we have seen, there is an enormous increase in the number of the under-aged people in Spain drinking too much alcohol. 
It is a present problem without any sort of solution ahead, but a full study of this causes and, of course, a little bit of common sense will do the rest.
"," Obesity- a New Endemic Decease?  
In the last thirty years Miss Sweden has grown four centimetres and lost fifteen kilos. 
At the same time, the average person has gained weight, a lot of weight. 
Half a million Swedes are suffering from severe overweight (Rossner1999)and WHO has defined obesity as a global epidemic and says that this is just the beginning of the problem (Greider1999). 
Children get medical problems that only used to strike adults and even though they are overweight, many children suffer from malnutrition. 
What are the reasons behind this new endemic decease?  
In recent years, genetic explanations have become popular for explaining all sorts of things, such as alcoholism and crimes. 
There is a belief that biology can explain anything. 
Perhaps, obesity can be explained in this way. 
Genes do affect a person's weight but they cannot explain the quick increase of obesity during the last decades. 
We have to look for answers in other areas. 
Could it be a reaction to the high pressure from society? 
We live in a world were beauty and fitness are desirable features. 
Different kinds of eating disorders have increased the last decade and perhaps obesity is another way of reacting to the same thing. 
The ideals are too high, we know that we cannot reach them so we give up and let ourselves go. 
Still, this cannot be the case for all the millions of people, all over the world, suffering from obesity. 
According to WHO obesity is an effect of the modernisation of our society. 
New inventions and technological improvements make it possible to achieve the same things as before with less physical effort. 
We move less, both in our work and in our everyday life. 
Modern society offers us a set of easy solutions: lifts, cars escalators and an endless variety of electric gadgets. 
All these little things put together increase our inactivity and, in the long run, make us fatter. 
Even children and young people are getting idler. 
The majority exercise a great deal but the group that does nothing at all is increasing in number. 
Young people sit in front of the telly, watching or playing games, instead of being outside, moving around in real life games.  
In addition to a more sedentary life, our modern society has provided us with a new kind of food. 
Food that is cheap, fast and easy to cook, but with low nutritive value. 
In many families, both parents work long hours and consequently there is no time to sit down together and eat properly prepared meals in the evenings. 
Fast food and sandwiches have replaced home cooking. 
It has become more important to get food on the table as fast as possible than to make it a nourishing and healthy meal. 
Furthermore, the lack of home cooking has decreased the awareness about food value, especially amongst young people.  
The lack of awareness about, and attitudes towards, food and exercise is a big part of the problem. 
This has been shown in study made at the University of Gothenburg (Oppenheim2000). 
The study also shows that there is a connection between social belonging and obesity. 
Children from social group one have a greater awareness about what they eat and exercise more than children from lower social groups do. 
As a result, they have fewer problems with their weight. 
In resent years unemployment and poverty have increased, at the same time cut downs have been made on health and sports lessons in schools. 
This could explain the increasing obesity especially amongst children, since we know that habits primarily are created within the families or schools. 
If you get used to junk food and sedentary games as a child, it is much harder changing this lifestyle later in life. 
Furthermore, food with a high value of energy but a low nutritive value is often cheap while many forms of exercising are quite expensive. 
If you don't have very much money, your priorities might be on other things.  odern society with its new inventions and technological solutions has made our lives easier but at the same time made us more passive. 
We can no longer count on getting enough exercise trough our every day life. 
We need to be aware of what we eat and how we should exercise. 
If we have this awareness, we can make our own choices about our health. 
Although the reasons lay in society the solution lays with the individual. 
Only you can change your way of life.  
",False
"This essay is about me, or more correctly; about my level of proficiency in the various aspects of the English language. 
I will try to assess my different strengths and weaknesses and convey them to you, the reader, in a manner as objective and sincere as I can. 
It is not easy, being completely objective, though. 
To give some perspective to my own qualities I have also chosen to elaborate, in some sections, on the general process of learning English itself. 
I will try not to be too cumbersome. 
I have no real difficulties understanding spoken English, especially not when I can see the person speaking, and definitely not when I am standing in front of him or her (as opposed to seeing said person on a screen). 
Speaking over the phone is more difficult. 
The quality of sound is poor compared to other mediums, and you have no eye contact. 
I should tell you that I am talking about the more common dialects of English, such as the American, Brittish, Australian, etc. 
I, as many others, may have some problems understanding people with very strong, or different, accents. 
You can usually comprehend what they say, but must pay more attention in order to do so. 
A friend of mine, for example, tried having a conversation with a drunken old Scottsman once, and wasn't able to recognize one single word (it has to be said that the situation was extreme, though, and that he had no problems understanding the rest of the population).  
Happily for us Swedes we are constantly bombarded with different kinds of English via TV and films, although primarily American and Brittish English (lots of variants in there, though). 
It does train us, but we do tend to have more difficulty without the subtitles. 
I, too, have this weakness, although I tend to have problems only when the sounds of speech is more difficult to make out, like in a gunfight, or someone whispering softly, etc. 
But it could be argued that when you don't get the full spectrum of sound your ability to understand speech in general decreases, and non-native speakers are the first ones to notice simply due to their lesser proficiency in the language.  
I have no problem in understanding written text other than odd expressions or odd words (I usually see to it that I have access to a glossary when reading, since I hate not understanding everything). 
I have read a lot of books in English, both fiction and non-fiction (mostly Computer Science-related). 
I also read quite a lot of articles concering different aspects of programming and Computer Science in general, thus having a pretty good understanding of the terms related to this field. 
All in all, I have to say that I am quite good at reading and understanding texts of various kinds.  
I also think I am quite a good speaker. 
I tend to be pretty fluent, especially when talking to native speakers. 
I usually adapt somewhat to their style of talking and pronouncing, often without really thinking about it. 
One time at work comes to mind, when I came across an American, newly moved to Sweden. 
We started talking (I was actually supposed to show him a computer system) and although I felt kind of rusty and slow the first couple of minutes I later felt rather comfortable. 
In about five minutes I had adapted to a more American pronounciation (he was from NY, I think) than my normal one (a mixture somewhere between the hopelessly American and a rather relaxed Brittish English), and he even complemented me on this and said that I had lost my accent almost entirely over the time we spoke (around 45 minutes).  
Here we also have the TV and film influence. 
Not having series and films dubbed to Swedish gives us the opportunity, wether we want it or not, to absorb the expressions and ways of the native speakers (although one might be slightly unsettled thinking about the influence of shows like ""the Simpsons"" if you are a follower of this theory). 
I sincerely believe that this is one of the main reasons for the poor mastery of English by some nationalities (not ""the Simpsons"", rather their dubbing of films and TV shows instead of using subtitles).  
I normaly don't write very much in English, but I think that my extensive reading of varied English literature has given me an eye, or a feeling if you like, for what is correct and what is not. 
I do prefer free writing (i.e. short stories), instead of the more strict layout of essays and such. 
There are always at least two aspects of writing though. 
The technical, or grammatical, part and the more creative part of actually composing something interesting to read. 
I am actually quite lousy at the details of grammar (terms and their ilk) and normally go on what feels and looks right as would a native speaker (and many Swedes do use this ""technique"", with various success). 
This does not always work, of course, but the constant exposure to this language helps a lot. 
I suspect that my grammar skills will increase greatly (at least on the terminology side) during my English studies at Uppsala University.  ost of my writing has actually been rather informal, like e-mails and such, primarily to English colleagues at my work. 
On a side note concerning e-mails; I fondly remember one I wrote a couple of years ago to an esteemed techical writer called Michael Abrash (famous for his books and articles on computer graphics programming and optimization) and the very long and detailed answer I received from him. 
Being able to communicate with people you admire is a wonderful thing, and I have my competence in the English language to thank for that (this not meaning that there are no Swedish people I admire, mind you).
"," EVALUATION  I will in this essay try to assess my knowledge in the English language in the fields of listening, reading, speaking and writing. 
I will try to evaluate what I consider beeing my strong and weak sides in these areas. 
Listening to English: I have, ever since I was a kid, been very interested in rockmusic and not only listening to the actual music, but also trying to listen to and understand the meaning of the lyrics. 
Since almost all contemporary rockmusic is sung in the English language I'm quite used to hearing it and can easily understand it. 
I have also many times tried to learn lyrics that I find especially good or interesting by listening to the song in head phones and trying to figure out the words, sometimes rewinding the tape over and over again at a particularly difficult word or phrase, and write it down on paper. 
I also very much enjoy watching films and have, also since I was a kid, more or less been forced to watch English-spoken films with no subtitles simply because they have not been relaesed in Sweden and there was no subtitles avilable. 
To sum things up; I'm used to listen to English being spoken, or sung, and I have acctually no problems with it, if there is a word I don't understand I can more or less figure it out by the context.  
Reading in English:  Well, it's basically the same deal here... 
Due to my huge interest in music I started very early to read various British and American music periodicals dealing with heavy metal and punk music, basically because back then (the mid-eighties) there was no such magazines available in Swedish. 
If you wanted to learn more about your favorite bands you had to try and spell your way through English-written litterature. 
I can say now in retrospective that it was very useful to stumble through these magazines since I now can read English pretty fluent. 
The only bad thing about that is that I sometimes becomes a little over-confident in my skill of mastering the vocabulary. 
I seldom take the time to actually look up a in a dictionary a word I may not grasp.   
Speaking English: I'm afraid I'm not as good at speaking English as I am at reading and understand/listen to it. 
I don't speak that much English in my every-day situation, sometimes I have to answer a phone-interwiev for my bands, talking to people at our record companies (based in France and Germany) and so on. 
I don't feel uncomfortable speaking English with another person that has English as a second language since I, in my humble opinion, speak more than well enough to make myself understood, but when I speak to a ""native"" I somehow feel uneasy, I get a feeling of ""inferiority"", so to speak. 
I do sometimes have a problem with finding the proper words or terms right away and I'm also a bit uncertain with word order in sentences and this becomes more evident when I'm speaking with someone that has English as their mother tounge.  
Writing in English: This part is what I feel is the most difficult. 
When I'm writing a longer piece in English, like this essay, it is with difficulties. 
As I mentioned earlier I sometimes have problems with using the correct words so the use of a dictionary is more or less a must. 
Also my problems with word order, correct grammar, punctuation, and most of all, spelling becomes almost embarrassingly evident. 
I write all the lyrics for my band ""The Unkinds"" in English and I think it's very fun to write in English for a change, it's a very useful and suitable language for rock lyrics with all the ""cool"" words. 
I have gotten a lot of aclaim for my lyrics in various underground music magazines from all around Europe but I think they would have been less favourable if our American bassplayer hadn't went over them before recording and corrected my spelling mistakes and grammatical errors. 
Hopefully I can improve my writing skills by writing essays like this one.  
I think this is just about everything I can tell about my competence in these fields. 
Some things I feel I master pretty well, other things I'm not so certain of and they need some more practice. 
It's been quite interesting to evaluate these topics and I have tried to be as honest to myself as I possibly could when writing this.
",False
"	Fifteen years ago I learned my first phrase in the English language. 
Since then I have done continous improvement and I would say at first thought that I know English pretty good. 
Altough, there is always room for more skills to be taught and these skills which I still lack can only be found through evaluating more in detail how good my English is at this point. 
Therefore I will here try to evaluate my English, breaking it into the four parts of speaking, listening, reading, and writing. 	
The speaking part is probably the one where I feel most confident. 
I made a lot of improvement in my speaking a couple of years ago, spending a year in Canadian High School. 
Of course, much of this speaking was normal day talk between friends and family, which have affected my language to be more simple than what was taught to me in Swedish school. 
Also, my accent went from the British school English taught in Sweden, to a Canadian midwest accent. 
I do feel though, that my speaking is fluently alright and at least in Canada accepted by most people. 	
Listening skills are very different depending on the situation. 
I would say I can have a one to one talk with any English speaking person rather easy. 
It is always easier when you are able to show in some way which parts you understand more and which parts have to be told differently. 
But when you do not have this contact with the speaker, it is much more difficult. 
I would think that my own listening skills are good though. 
I can understand the meaning of proper English and as far as American and British English, I can also catch the mood and sense the underlying message that might be showing not in words themselves but in the way they are said. 	
A skill which I have to admit that I have not practiced as much as needed is reading. 
I have not read many books in English and when I have attended English classes I managed to get by simply by listening carefully to what was said in the lectures. 
I am a very slow reader and that makes reading feel inefficient for me. 
This might be due to an eye problem, I have been close to getting glasses a few times. 
The fact that I have not read much has affected my word knowledge, which is not very good. 
In most books or texts I can understand the meaning without knowing all the words, but sometimes this can lead to big misunderstandings, which I have experienced a few times. 
I would therefore evaluate my reading as not very good, maybe even poor. 	
As for my writing skills I am, due to me not reading much, not that good a writer neither. 
I have written very little as far as essays, and I often use spoken English in my writing. 
In letters and personal notes, this is alright. 
But when it comes to writing essays and more formal kinds of writing, it is totally unacceptable. 
This has always been a problem for me, and I have never had a chance to really improve this skill. 
After all, in most subjects knowing how to write is something you are supposed to have already learnt. 	
My English is not the best. 
I have some considerable problems with insufficient word knowledge and bad grammar. 
My writing is in great need of improvement and I have to speed up my reading. 
On the contrary, my speaking and listening is alright, even though I need a warm up after not having used English in a couple of years. 
Even though I am aware of my weaknesses I am confident that I can manage to preceed through this course without to much trouble. 
I might have to spend twenty hours a week on pure reading, but that is the only way I can improve my reading. 
I will hopefully say in a few months that I am truly competent in English, but as for right now I would say I am ""competent with a doubt"".
"," ""The only good Indian is a dead Indian.""  
In the nineteenth century, the attitude among the white settlers towards American Indians was that of civilized people looking at savages. 
Indians were seen as some strange, rather wild savages. 
Still though, Indians were also admired as stoic and brave. 
The white settlers moved further and further west, taking over the land of the Indians. 
The white settlers cheated the Indians many times over and spared no land for them to live in. 
From giving them the whole western part of America, the white people altered to only allowing the Indians small territories, which by time became smaller and smaller. 
In this essay I will give an account of the attitudes that allowed for this to happen, as they are revealed in the writings of the white Americans living in the late nineteenth century. 	
In most of the texts written by white Americans at this time, it is quite clear that they did not see Indians as normal humans. 
They did not even believe them to be at the same level of civilization as white people were. 
The word they used when they referred to Indians was ""savage"". 
They saw Indians as barbaric and impossible to civilize. 
There was supposedly no way in which white settlers could possibly teach these savages the normal ways of living. 
The lifestyle that white people demanded must be the only way that could be right. 
In a text from 1881, Judson E. 
Walker wrote about the Indians: ""Try as they will, they cannot entirely subdue the savage instincts to roam at will, to defy restraint, and to indulge their lawless appetites for blood and plunder."" 
(Walker 67). 
This was the way in which Indians were normally described at this time, and nobody saw this attitude as strange. 
Rather it would be strange to believe otherwise. 	
However, there were also Indians who were seen as ""good"" (Walker 70). 
These were the ones who accepted the ruling of the white man and plainly let themselves be transported to whatever place the white man designated for them. 
There they gave up all their old beliefs of moving freely and being a part of nature. 
Instead they obeyed the laws of the white community. 
Whites believed, however, that these Indians were not friendly by choice or by nature. 
On the contrary, these Indians were forced to be friendly because of other reasons. 
This way of thinking is implied by Elizabeth Custer in her book Boots and Saddles: ""Two Bears had long been friendly to the white man; he was too old to fight,..."" 
(Custer 207). 
Rather than by choice, Two Bears was forced by old age not to fight. 	
The Indians who did fought, however, were seen as horrible warriors. 
The white thought the fighting spirit and the courage among Indians to be remarkable. 
Any Indian could bring fear to an ordinary cavalry recruit and this came to be of great importance in the famous battle of Little Big Horn. 
According to one of the Indian warriors who fought in the battle, nine out of ten soldiers committed suicide during this battle. 
Presumably, they did this out of fear of the Indian savages whose hatred they were facing. 
This shows that the white population were not only unknowing about the Indian life. 
They were also terrified of the way they thought these savages would torture any captured survivors of a battle. 	
Even though the Indians terrified most white people, the white also admired the Indians. 
In the above mentioned text by Elizabeth Custer, the following passage can be found: ""A New York Charity Ball could bring out no more antique heirlooms, nor take more time in preparations than the costumes of Indians prepared for council."" 
(Custer 210). 
The Indians were responsible for her husbands defeat in Little Big Horn. 
Still though, Elizabeth Custer did admire the traditions and customs among the Indians. 	
The Indians were also admired as great warriors. 
The cavalry feared the Indians, but also admired their courage and their offering towards their leaders. 
When the cavalry arrested and imprisoned Rain-in-the-face, two of the young members in his tribe asked if they could join him in his imprisoning (Custer 213), something that was then seen as extraordinary. 
Their action showed them to be brave and honourable, something that was common among Indians, but rarely seen among the white settlers. 	
The white also believed the Indians to be concerned as to get revenge. 
When Rain-in-the-face escaped the white justice, the white thought he would try to get vengeance for the imprisonment. 
Elizabeth Custer writes about his escape that: ""As it will be seen further on, the stained waters of the Little Big Horn, on July 25, 1876, told how deadly and fatal that was."" 
(Custer 215). 
This is contradicting to the statement of Wooden Leg, who says that none of the Indians who fought in the battle knew they were fighting Custer. 
Instead they thought they were being attacked by the soldiers they had previously fought on the Rosebud (Graham 106). 	
The white settlers often based their attitudes towards Indians on mistakes like the one above. 
The attitudes towards Indians have been divided into both fear and admiration. 
Especially the defeat of General Custer seems to have made an impression on the white Americans. 
The cavalry saw the Indians as savages and sometimes even as dumb. 
Although, when they faced the Indians in battle, moreover was defeated, the attitudes changed from malice to almost a kind of respect. 
The Indians also made great impression as they took their suffering with a kind of toleration. 
Sitting Bull did not give up for his own sake, but for his people. 
Sitting Bull, who was the last Indian to surrender (Walker 75), still kept his dignity and he held no hate towards the white man. 
It was this greatness that created the admiration to the Indians. 
This admiration was the only white attitude which the American Indians fully deserved.
",True
" English, my English!  
I believe that I always have enjoyed English. 
The language became my second tonuge in a very natural way, as my mother has been a teacher in English. 
She began rather early to encourage me to adapt the language by teaching me that our ""katt"" in English was a ""cat"" and that our ""hund"" in fact was a ""dog"". 
I found it very amusing to learn all these strange words and did my best to remember them.  
The first time I went abroad was at the age of eight, when my mother and I went to London. 
At that age, my knowledge of English was not all that impressing, but the trip inspired me and encouraged me to learn more. 
You might say that my appetite for English was whetted.  
During the years I and my family have travelled quite a lot abroad, we have for instance visited the US, Africa and Asia. 
When I was younger I did not feel confident enough to participate in the conversation, instead I was content with listening to all the disussions I heard around me. 
Quite soon I realized that I understood a great deal of what was beeing said, and as I grew older and got more experience I dared to open my mouth and make myself heard. 
Of course it felt rather awkward at first, talking without really knowing the right words, wondering over grammar and pronunciation and so forth, but I realized that the essential thing was that I commuicated whith other people and that nobody would penalize me if I did not speak absolutely correctly. 
When we went on our first safari in Kenya, for instace, I was more or less forced to talk English, because of the fact that the whole group travelling with us was British. 
During our latest holidays I have felt rather secure chatting and discussing in English. 
I have, though, no intention at all to declare that my English is perfect - on the contrary - there are many things left to correct. 
For instance, when you go abroad and talk to the native habitants of the country you are visiting, it is not very likely that they talk any better English than you yourself. 
The important thing is that you are able to communicate in a proper way, and that you have the confidence needed to talk and express your opinions.  
I gather that my pronunciation is a mix of British and American English. 
That is, first of all, due to the fact that most of the movies shown on television are American. 
I think that it is quite obvious that you adapt to what you hear every day on the telly. 
On the other hand speaks my mother with British accent, as she has lived in the UK a couple of years, and she has always tried to make me talk Britsh English. 
Our teachers at school have also mostly been speaking British. 
I must confess that personally I prefer the cool British accent to the American accent. 
Listening to British English makes me feel pleased in a strange way, I really can not explain it properly. 
Therefore I always try to follow the British series of superintendet Morse on the telly. 
Partly because of the wonderful way they speak, but also, of course, because of the staggering intrigues.  
I think that it is quite easy to understand spoken English, but there are of course different kinds of spoken English. 
I find it terribly annoying to listen to politicians because of their complicated language and all the twists and turns they make in order only to confuse their audience. 
Som dialects are also terribly hard to understand - take cockney, for example. 
I hardly get a word of it.  
Reading English has though hardly ever caused me any problems. 
I began reading in English at the age of fifteen and I have continued ever after. 
My favourite author in English is Minette Walters, I enjoy her subtle language and twisted intrigues. 
There are of course also many differents sorts of written English - interpreting documentary reports or scientific newspapers may sometimes cause me a great deal of difficulty.  
When it comes to writing in English - well, I can hardly stop writing when I once have got started. 
At school we were only allowed to write essays consisting of 150 - 200 words, limits which I found i terribly difficult to restrict myself to. 
I choose this course in order to get a more complex image of English and the English-speaking countries. 
I have no intention to become a teacher in English, but I have realized how terribly important the knowledge of languages is.
"," Fruit is evil  As we all know, bad health is one of the greatest threats to the wealth of the western world. 
Overweight, sickness associated with too high cholesterol values, constant tiredness and exhaustion are well-known problems most commonly caused by inappropriate manners in eating. 
Many blame fast food and lack of descent cooking for this, but I'd like to point out another, much worse felon: fruit. 
Most people claim that this is an essential part of a nutritious diet, but I will prove such is not the case. 15 months ago, I deliberately ceased to eat all kinds of raw fruit. 
The result: I feel great. 	
I do agree that fruits contain many vitamins that are necessary for physical well-being, but these could easily be found elsewhere (in vegetables and pills for instance; the latter is by the way a very rational source, since a pill a day is all you need to swallow). 
What made me an opponent to fruit eating, however, was a profound consideration of certain human aspects. 
Almost all fruit consumed here is grown in gigantic plantations, in many ways similar to Nazi concentration camps. 
Bananas and oranges are forced to grow up in a totally unnatural environment, where intoxication of both themselves and the people collecting them is common due to the implementation of chemicals. 
After reaching desirable sizes, the fruits are transported in such great misery it makes the shipping of slaves in the 1700s look almost luxurious. 
Apart from being intoxicated, plantation workers suffer seriously because of hazardous wages, working and living conditions. 
One might wonder whether those working at the plantations really have a choice. 
At the moment, I'm afraid they don't, since the countries they live in are mostly poorly developed ones.  	
The underdevelopment of fruit producing countries is of utmost interest. 
May it not be that these countries are poor because they grow fruit? 
You might think that this isn't a realistic thought, but I dare say, it is surely a thrilling one. 
Of course, all exporters of fruit aren't poor. 
New Zealand and Israel, for instance, are wealthy nations that sell a considerable amount of oranges and apples. 
I reckon this has two major reasons: most importantly, there are a lot of foreign workers here, who don't think getting well paid is a prerequisite (that probably goes for the typical Kibbutz worker). 
Furthermore, wealthy fruit-growers were already in possession of a highly developed infrastructure before they started exporting the controversial goods. 
Poor exporters have hardly got anything one could call infrastructure, and therefor get locked into a pattern. 
In order to break that pattern the country needs new industries, something that often requires foreign investments. 
Such are usually hard to attract if your infrastructure is poor. 
An evil circle, indeed, and fruit is to blame.  	
However, the actual sinner isn't the fruit itself, but us, eating it without having a thought of what we're really doing. 
Celebrating the suffering of others, that is. 
Undemocratic, corrupted governments get our support. 
In fact, we are paying for the imprisonment of fruits and workers. 
This is obviously unknown to most fruit-eaters; at least I hope so. 
Otherwise, nearly everyone in the western world has got a certain amount of fascistic sympathies. 
If that is the case, I am deeply terrified of what shapes this could take in the future. 
Who is nothing but a fruit-eater today, might be the Himmler of next decade.  	
This terrible future scenario could easily be avoided. 
Human beings do not need fruit. 
I know this for sure, since no fruit whatsoever has passed my throat for over a year. 
My intellect is at its peak, and I hardly ever get a cold. 
There might be people out there who couldn't give up fruit eating because of the taste, but as I recall, there are no tasty fruits. 
What strikes me is that many vegetarians have stopped eating cows because of the same reasons that stopped my eating fruit. 
I find this rather curious, since it's obvious that a cow pacing the rich fields of Scania suffers less than a trapped banana in a miserable Latin American plantation. 
By now, I really hope I've convinced you that eating fruit is simply wrong. 
There is no point in it, and it causes pain. 
Please join me in my struggle. 
Do not eat fruit!
",False
" Evaluation  In this essay I will try to assess my strengths and weaknesses in the English language and evaluate them. 
I will try to reveal my personal thoughts about my knowledge and understanding of the English language.  
Listening, is my biggest strength when it comes to the English language. 
During a one year stay in Australia I learned to be more relaxed listening to people speaking. 
I do not feel that I have a problem understanding the spoken language, not when attending lectures nor when listening to an English spoken TV-show or radio station. 
Of course there are some words that I do not know but that does not mean that I can not understand what is being said. 
Depending on the situation my understanding varies.  
Different English accents can be hard to understand sometimes, however I mostly understand what is being said if I am concentrated. 
Listening to a documentary about the industrial revolution I might not understand all terminology even though I get the context. 
Overall I feel rather confident about my ability to understand English.  
When it comes to writing, my self esteem is not very high. 
I do not have a problem with writing but I do think that it is quite difficult. 
I have very big demands of myself and even though I know I have improved my writing skills a great deal over the last few years I am not yet satisfied with my work. 
On the other hand I would not be on this English course if I already knew the language as if it was my mother tongue. 
I need to extend my vocabulary and I need a great deal of practice in order to improve my writing. 
I can write my journal and personal letters, but I would also like to know how to write formal letters, reports and articles in a proper way and what rules to apply.   
Similarly to my writing skills I am a bit insecure when it comes to speaking. 
I used to be able to speak relatively fluent after spending almost one year in Australia, yet after five years in Sweden, hardly speaking any English at all I have lost that fluency. 
Fortunately I think that the English language will come back to me when I start speaking more. 
I believe that I am sometimes too afraid to say something grammatically wrong or using the wrong word, that I do not say anything at all. 
I realise that this is a problem since nobody can learn to speak a language properly if just sitting quiet being afraid of saying the wrong things. 
I tend to think that everyone else knows the language perfectly, which of course they do not, I realise that but I only see my own weaknesses and tend too see other peoples good sides not the bad. 
When it comes to myself I far too often focus on my weak sides instead of the strong ones.  
Finally reading is a skill I feel rather confident in. 
I do not find it difficult reading literature in English although I know that my vocabulary is too small. 
Learning more words is something I need to do in order to be able to read faster and get a more precise understanding of a text..   y abilities in the four different skills in English varies, I feel confident in listening and reading but I need a great deal of practice when it comes to writing and speaking. 
No matter how I feel about my capacity I know that I have a lot to learn before I become proficient in these skills.
"," English, My English!  
When I started learning English at the age of nine I used to rank it as the absolute worse subject on the schedule. 
My dislike of the subject went so far my teacher one day told me, very harshly, it was quite enough. 
My comments and attitude influenced the other children in my class and I was to keep them to myself. 
Throughout my years in school I came to like it more and more. 
It never got to be one of my favourite subjects but nevertheless, I could endure the lessons and even appreciate what my first teacher had tried to taught me. 
Still today I can recognise the same feeling, I had as a nine year old, going through grammatical terms trying to understand the true essence of the language. 
I can fortunately ignore it since I know I will have a lot to gain learning it. 
I wish I one day can feel as though I am fully taught and that there is no obstacles in talking, reading or writing English and this is what I want to achieve this term.  
Having studying chemistry and biology at university for five years it seems to me I am well accustomed to the English language in certain situations. 
Most of the literature I have read has been in English and some of the courses I have had have been held in English so that students from other countries could attend. 
When it comes to listening I usually do not have any problems understanding what is said provided I am familiar with the subject. 
Yet, I can not guarantee I understand more than bits and pieces of a discussion between two physicist scientists. 
What limits me in my listening and understanding of English is my vocabulary. 
The same goes for my reading. 
I have read a substantial number of books in the fields of biology, environmental hazards, chemistry etc. 
Reading a book in either of these subjects do not trouble me since I already know the meaning of most of the words used. 
What I want to emphasize is my need to learn the meaning of more words used in all kind of fields, not just my own.   
Being from Sweden having, Swedish as mother tongue, inhibits me learning and using a new language. 
Writing and talking, I unconsciously use Swedish phrases and clause constructions. 
To an Englishman it becomes clear, perhaps not at the start of an conversation, but certainly after a while that English is not my language by heart. 
I often know how to pronounce words right when talking but frequently has to stop in the middle of a clause to get the word order right. 
In writing this is a even bigger problem since I then have more time reflecting over what I have written. 
Another thing I like to improve having to do with both writing and talking English is how to use the proper word for what I want to express. 
To explain what I mean I will illustrate it with an example. 
The year after I finished high school I went to England to work in a family as their Au Pair. 
My Au Pair mother used to ask me how my evening out had been and I usually replied ""It was funny"", meaning I had had a great time. 
She, after a couple of months, explained to me that that was not the correct way of saying I had a great time because to say that something is funny you mean it is kind of strange or odd. 
I assume that there is a lot of words like the one in the example in my vocabulary. 
That is, words I use in speaking and writing English without knowing their true meaning.   
The way I want to express myself writing and speaking English is frequently effected by my lack of confidence. 
If I hand in a paper and the teacher corrects it I usually rewrite it the way he or she wants me to. 
Very often it might not be necessary, the way I expressed myself might have been one way of doing it. 
The same goes for speaking English. 
I often hesitate getting involved in a discussion because I am afraid that what I say might sound wrong or contain grammatical errors. 
What I am trying to accentuate is that even if I know English quite well I still feel insecure using the language. 
By reading this university course I hope I will achieve a better knowledge of the language consequently will get more secure using it in different situations.
",False
"English, my English! 
How do I feel when I listen, when I read, when I speak and when I write? 
That is a difficult question. 
English is not my mother tongue so of course I feel a little bit awkward towards the English language, when I have not for example, written anything in English for almost two years. 
Well I have written a few letters to a friend in Israel but they do not exactly improve my English. 
However, down below I will explain how I feel about my English right now and assess my strengths and weaknesses. 
Listening is what I do all the time. 
I listen to music, in English of course, radioprograms, television etc. 
I like to listen to the English language. 
It is beautiful and I think it is more nuanced than for example Swedish. 
Sometimes I feel it is easier to express exactly what I mean in English rather than in Swedish. 
Listening is one of my stronger sides and I think my understanding is quite good too and maybe that is why I like it. 
But of course I like speaking even better.  
For me it is more to speak or not to speak rather than to be or not to be. 
I speak all the time, sometimes I wish I could keep quiet, but I like it so there is no difference if the language is English, Hebrew, German, Russian or Swedish. 
I am not embarressed of doing grammatical faults but I prefer not to. 
That is one of the reasons why I am becoming a teacher. 
I want to learn and then I want to help those who want to learn. 
Well, those who want to learn, I will be a teacher in the Swedish senior level so I guess my job will be more like making the language interesting, which it is, and make them understand how important it is to know other languages. 
For example how languages can prevent problems.   
When it comes to reading I have not read much in English the last two years. 
I do not know why because I like it and sometimes I prefer it but when you study another language course in the university you do not really have the time. 
I studied Hebrew last year and that took all of my time. 
The good thing though was that the course was English-Hebrew based instead of Swedish-Hebrew. 
The litterature was of course in Hebrew but the dictionary was in English. 
That was interesting and it made me realize some of the difficulties with languages and that it sometimes is very easy to misunderstand the meaning of words.  
Two and a half years ago I was in Israel and there I read quite a lot, which is obvious because I had the time. 
The lifestyle there is totally different from ours, much slower and more comfortable. 
I read both books and papers, mostly the Jerusalem Post. 
Unfortunately the language I read is not the one I heard or practised so I do not think that I have had any use of my reading there.  
I know that it is very important to read a lot if I am going to improve my vocabulary and my writing which are my weak sides. 
Therefore it is good that the litterature course continues during the whole term.  
Well, I have already written that I am not so good in writing and I really hope that this writing course will help me to at least feel more comfortable with it. 
In upper secondary school we did not write anything. 
If we had read a book or a text or had seen a film we discussed it instead of writing a review. 
Therefore I have no experience in writing essays or anything similar.  
I am certain that this course will help me and give me the right directions to be a good English teacher. 
I am sure that during this A-course I will develop my English and I am really looking forward to this. 
English is fun and to understand that you have to have an interest and I have.
","In the secondary school I hated English lessons. 
They were always the same; glossary tests, reading a chapter aloud from the book and maybe some grammatics. 
Not hard work actually, but I didn't like it anyway. 
Sometimes we had to discuss openly in the classroom, and it was that part I didn't like, almost hated. y teacher in the 7:th till 9:th grade had made himself a very easy way to get off his teaching lightly. 
Mostly he just let us see some TV-programs in English. 
Preferably Mr Bean. 
Maybe we didn't learn to much about grammar and so on, but who cared? 
We loved the English lessons, of course. 
It wasn't until secondary school I noticed that my English weren't the best. 
I felt ashamed and didn't wanted to speak or do anything that showed my lack of knowledge. 
All tests turned out bad, and I who had very good grades in almost all of the other subjects found out that I strongly disliked English. 
If you're bad at something and don't like it (actually just because you're bad in it, I suppose) you won't improve, no matter how much your English teacher strains you and herself. 
She also taught Swedish, where I was one of the best, so she couldn't understand why I was such a disaster in English. 
Anyway, I survived secondary school, consequently avoiding speaking and reading English unless I really had to. 
Right after school I went to study biology at the university. 
Suddenly every course book was written in English, and there were no way you could shirk. 
It was simple: if you didn't understood the English, you wouldn't understand the course which in turn meant a failed exam. 
So I had to deal with my dislike for English. 
My first book ""Chemistry"" of a thousand pages ought to be finished within ten weeks. 
At first I had to consult my dictionary for every second word, and it took me a very, very long time. 
After a while I learned that I didn't needed to understand every single word. 
A few books later I found out that the English language wasn't that bad after all. 
Now, when I'm in my third year and have a lot of books behind me the reading isn't any big problem any more. 
As I mentioned above, I never liked speaking English, I really hated it in school. 
But the university indirectly helped me out here too. 
I met a couple of exchange-students. 
They were even worse in English than I was, but they didn't care! 
They just carried on talking and if we Swedes didn't understood what they were saying, which happened frequently in the beginning, they just tried with body language. 
We all had a lot of fun, and at the same time I discovered that they didn't care at all about my bad grammar or if I pronounced something in an incorrect way. 
They understood what I was saying anyway, and was pleased with it. 
That, I can tell you, was a relief!  
The English language now began to interest me. 
I've already discovered that I needed to improve, but now I actually wanted to learn more and make improvements. 
The literature on the biology courses helped me a lot with the understanding of texts, but they didn't taught grammar or pronunciation. 
I decided to take this English course. 
Listening is something I haven't trained since school and I have always thought that I was bad at that too. 
But after visiting the first lectures I discovered that I actually - without problems - did understood what the lecturers were talking about. 
The speaking is still my worst skill. 
I often feel uncomfortable and insecure. 
But that's what I'm here for, to change it! 
I always liked writing - in Swedish of course. 
It's so easy in Swedish; I have a feeling for which sentence that sounds right and which doesn't, but in English I don't have that little voice in my head. 
I've always found grammar very boring, and only remembered what I needed a short while to pass the tests. 
That's one of the things that I now regret. 
Still I think it's a lot of fun to create an essay.
",False
" Television - loved by the people  Swedish television today is mostly consisting of Soap operas and docu-soaps and I've bin thinking about if that really is what Swedish people want to see. 
I do believe that it is far more dangerous to watch violent movies than to watch soap operas. 
Another thing to think about is whether the news on television is more or less affecting than the newspapers. 
I think that the television has turned into the focal point in the family and its usage increases. 	
I think that teenagers watch far to much television and I believe that it, in some ways, can be dangerous. 
Young people are often easier than older to influence and if they see a ""cool"" character on television that smokes, maybe they want to try it too. 
I personally think that young people should not watch violent movies, because they can be influenced and even worse: inspired. 
Of course people, no matter age, can be influenced and it would be better if this extremely violent movies weren't made to begin with. 
There are many violent movies, for example: ""Natural Born Killers"" and ""Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels"", that gives us meaningless violence, and people love it, that is scary. 
There have actually bin people who have blamed the television for crimes that they have committed and I think that that is really frightening. 	
Nowadays there is so much junk-entertainment, as Neil Postman calls it, on television. 
We have all these soap operas and docu-soaps which aren't ""good"" for anything, that is at least what I think. 
But I don't believe that they can affect you in a negative way, you watch it and laughs at the people who make a fool of themselves and then you forget about it. 
If you find it amusing, then it has fulfilled its aim, because all these soap operas and other entertainment-shows have only one purpose and it is to amuse you. 	
Everything on television isn't junk-entertainment, we have news-programs and documentary-programs that is supposed to be serious, but the question is: are they? 
That depends on how we look at it, of course the news are serious but there is much around that can distract the viewer. 
For example the host must look fresh and healthy and wear suitable clothes and a perfect make-up. 
The only reason for that is that the viewer actually cares about how the host looks, otherwise it wouldn't be necessary for the host to be well-dressed and good looking. 
I must say that we are superficial, but that is because we are used to see only ""beautiful"" people on television. 
If you read a newspaper instead of watching the news on television you will probably read more about things that you are interested in and less about things that you find uninteresting and that is a choice that you don't have when you watch television, but I do believe that television is the stronger medium. 
If you see a report from a war on television that often effects you more than if you read about it. 	
The usage of the television has increased, nowadays we can use it for almost everything. 
To watch teletext is only one of the usage, we can play games, listen to music in ""television-jukeboxes"" and surf on the internet. 
I think that the television is competing with the computer of being the focal point in the household. 
I believe that the usage of the television will increase even more in the future. 	
There is so much to say about television that you feel paralysed by the fact that you have only 700 words to use. 
That shows how big a deal television actually is, people have so many opinions about it, both negative and positive. 
Television can be both dangerous and scary and it do affect people which we must be aware of. 
But television can be funny and relaxing too, in its easy and light-hearted way, and sometimes that is exactly what people need.
"," Swedish students and their education  Isn't it wonderful that we in Sweden can go to universities without paying fees? 
But did you know that you only can get loans for six years (240 weeks) of studying? 
What about the loans, how long does it take to pay them back? 
What if you want to become a doctor and you also would like to study English for one year? 
That takes at least six and a half year of studying and you can only get loans for the first six years. 
How will you manage the last twenty weeks on the doctor's education? 
You can't study and work at the same time, not on a tough program like that. 
I thought it was good to have a wide education, so that you have better chances to get a more interesting job. 
I personally like to study and would like to do that for many years. 
I'm going to apply fore veterinary studies next autumn and then I need loans for 220 weeks. 
I also take loans to finance this English course. 
That means that I can't get loans to study, for example, English B this spring. 
I would also like to study a language abroad, but how can I finance that, when I can't take more loans? 
I personally think that it's important that people study on the university. 
It would be good if you could get loans for all the courses and programs that you would like to take. 
But you must, of course, pass your course/program to get loans for another one. 
At the moment the loans are up to 1062 SEK per week and the grants are 557 SEK per week. 
Can you actually live on that? 
Yes, you can, but it's often harder if you live in a bigger and more expensive city like Stockholm for example. 
We often hear people talk about their study loans that they still, many years after graduation, have to amortise. 
How much do you actually pay back? 
I did a simulation, on the internet at CSN's homepage (www.csn.se), to see how big my loan would be if I studied to become a vet. 
If I take the maximum loan (1062 SEK per week), that would, in the end of the education, be loans for 254 880 SEK and that would give me a dept to pay back at 284 041 SEK On this loan you have an interest that changes from year to year and you also have an interest that raises your annual amount with 2 per cent each year. 
This means that you lose money every year that you have never been given; unfortunately this frightens young people to go on and study at the university after upper secondary school. 
One idea is that you would get a salary from the state when you study at the university. 
But what if the students, after graduating, move to another country and work there? 
Then the Swedish state wouldn't get anything back through taxes, and would therefor lose on giving grants to the students. 
A better idea is to give loans and if the students, after graduating, work in Sweden for a couple of year, then they could write off the loan. 
I think that would make more people apply fore higher education. 
It also would make more students stay and work here in Sweden. 
For example many nurses have moved to other countries like Norway, because the salaries are higher there. 
I think that we on this way can get, at least, some of them to stay in Sweden. 
This autumn the number of people searching to higher education got lower. 
As I say; the state must do something to keep young people to search to the universities. 
If they can't raise the grants, then they at least could arrange so that your loan writes off if you work in Sweden for a couple of years. 
If a person would like to study for more then six years they must be able to get loans and grants for that. 
Don't we want more people to be educated? 
Then the state must do something about it, otherwise more and more people will be uneducated!
",True
" Raise the teachers' salaries!  
It is common known that today's Sweden, to a great extent, lacks qualified teachers. 
All too few teachers are being educated, and many who are certificated teachers choose to work elsewhere than in school. 
This should not be a surprise though, as both their status and salaries are low in comparison with other academics. 
If you in addition to this, consider how rough the teachers' working conditions are today, it is obvious that something has to be done to change their situation. 
It is absolutely necessary to raise the teachers' wages, in order to give them a salary that corresponds with their assignments, and make the profession attractive again. 
But is it then so hard to be a teacher? 
I claim that it is, and in this essay I'm going to try to convince you, that the teachers' salaries are much too low in addition to their contemporary working conditions. 	
The teaching profession has always been demanding. 
Teachers have always been expected to do a lot of extra work that not has been included in their scheduled working hours; lessons have had to be prepared and written tests and essays corrected. 
And today the working burden has become even heavier. 
A teacher's job is not any more only to make sure that its pupils pass their examinations and keep calm in class. 
Humanity and individualism have become a part of the Swedish schools, and even though this of course is positive, it has increased the pressure on the teachers.  	
Today, evaluation of the individual pupil's development and progress is a part of the learning process. 
The teacher has to organize conversations between teacher, parents and child regularly. 
This is not only taking a lot of the teacher's time with a lot of planning required and meetings have to be taken place in the evenings, but the closer contact with the parents also puts psychological pressure on the teacher. 
It is supposed to make all parts comfortable in the delicate situations that can arise when children's skills are being discussed. 	
However, the teacher's role as a psychologist doesn't stop at these specific situations. 
In its daily work, the teacher are supposed to catch all pupils' interest at the same time, and be able to handle all their different needs. 
Many pupils require extra attention and help and make this a difficult task. 
The teacher feels that it is not enough. 
Assisting teachers for pupils with special needs are rare and the teacher can't be there for everybody all the time. 
In a time when the classes are growing bigger this is getting even harder. 
Politicians seem to think that teachers are magicians. 
With less money, fewer lessons and more students, they are supposed to be doing miracles and reach a higher ambition level. 	 
The teachers' responsibilities do not either end with education in the form of school subjects as math and English. 
The teacher is an adult with whom the pupils spend their whole day, to which the small children look up to and imitate. 
It becomes a part of its students' upbringing, whether it likes it or not. 
The school is a social community, where children learn to act among other people than their family. 
And the school of today is not an easy world to live in. 
The teacher is supposed to guide the pupils through the jungle of social and emotional problems that can arise in school. 
It is supposed to discover if a child is feeling bad, if it is being treated badly in school or at home. 
The lack of welfare officers makes this task even harder.  	
But it is not only a question of children being treated badly and feeling bad at school. 
Today the school is not a safe place to be, for teachers as well as for pupils. 
An increasing number of students bear guns and bully their teachers. 
In many schools the pupils are ""taking over the classrooms"" and teachers are afraid of going to their jobs. 	
As you can see the teachers' working conditions are hard. 
They are supposed to act both as mentors and psychologists, but do only get paid for teaching. 
They have great responsibilities and it is time that they are being rewarded for that. 
They must feel that they are appreciated, so that they will have the strength to improve the Swedish schools. 
It is time that we invest in the teachers and raise their salaries, before we do not have any left. 
An investment in our teachers is an investment in our children, and thus an investment in our future.
"," Entertainment Television - Good or Bad?  
Television is now a part of almost everyone's daily life. 
It has existed for more than fifty years and most of us cannot imagine life without it. 
But still the role TV plays in society is being wildly discussed, and especially its function as an entertainer. 
In this essay I am going to reflect upon TV entertainment, what is good and bad about it and what part it plays in our lives.  	
People watch a lot of TV just to be entertained. 
There are soap operas, talk shows, comedy series, docu-soaps, game shows and movies. 
TV can take you to different times and places you otherwise only can reach in your imagination or it can just make you laugh. 
But this kind of entertainment is not really considered to be a good way to amuse yourself. 
That is especially the case when it comes to junk-entertainment as soap operas and talk shows. 
Society condemns people who watch these programmes, although a huge part of the population in industrialized countries do watch them. 
Even though you are being entertained, entertainment TV is seen as a waste of time.   	
But who can decide what is a waste for every individual and how much watching that is too much? 
Of course it is not good for your health to lay in front of the TV all day, but besides the health factor I personally think it is up to every single person to decide how much TV-watching that is too much. 
There are people who get addicted to soap operas and of course then it has gone out of hand, then it is not entertainment anymore then it is a must, but that does not make soap operas a bad thing in general. 
The important thing is in my opinion that you feel comfortable with your watching. 
Entertainment is never a waste; entertainment makes life worth living. 
No one knows why we live on this earth but entertainment surely makes life more fun.  	
But although entertainment TV is amusing there are unfortunately some negative aspects of it. 
Soap operas are filled with beautiful people who live glamorous lives, in music videos the looks are nowadays almost as important as the music, and beauty pageants like ""Miss Universe"" make little girls believe that you have to be at least 1,75 meters tall to be beautiful. 
Although entertainment TV does not exactly reduce the fixation on looks, it is not its fault that we have this view on the human being. 
Beauty is what people want to see and that is what they get.  	
Entertainment TV reflects this way our culture. 
And although television is not really accepted as ""culture"" in the same way as theater or literature, of course it today is a part of our culture. 
The TV has a given place in our homes and those who do not have one are actually seen as a bit peculiar. 
The fact is that it is hard to follow the public debate and act in society today without any knowledge of what is on TV at the moment. 
Many programmes have even become tradition. 
A good example in Sweden is the animated show ""Kalle Ankas Jul"" on Christmas Eve. 
For many Swedes this show is almost as important as Christmas presents. 
TV programmes can sometimes also be even more important to the viewers than that; many long-running TV series have for example their own fan clubs. 
An example of such a series is the drama series ""The Prisoner"", which is about the life of women prisoners at an Australian prison.   	
However I believe that the importance of TV is changing because of the new world of computers and other advanced technology. 
Children play computer games or surf on the Internet instead of watching TV, and a lot of information that TV provides can today be found on the Internet. 
You can for example watch the participants in docu-soaps as for instant ""Baren"", telecast by the Swedish channel TV3, throughout the twenty-four hours. 
I think that TV will, for a long time yet, play an important part as an entertainer, but that it will develop in other directions than now, the docu-soaps is an example of that. 
We can just wait and see what TV and its entertainment section will have to offer in the future, and see or watch I think is just what the whole world will.
",True
" Enrich life - become a teacher  Since the beginning of time one of human beings most important tasks has been to propa-gate their species and bring the descendants up to strong and intelligent young people. 
In my opinion the latter is still one of our main purposes of life and therefore I find it strange that only a few people think that their mission of life is to bring children up professionally as teachers. 
Even more strange is that so many are reluctant to work with education. 
I am of opposit opinion and have always known I wanted to teach. 
Notwithstanding that firm conviction I often find myself arguing for teaching, and defending my choice of a profes-sion to people around me. 
This is what I will do in this essay as well. 	 
These peoples first argument always tend to deal with money. 
They find it incredible that anyone with a common sense would study four years at a University for a salary of 15 000 Swedish crowns and with small chances of a great increase of wages. 
This argu-ment both puzzles and alarms me. 
It puzzles me because everyone ought to be aware of the present debate on teachers' wages which sooner or later must lead to the better. 
It alarms me because I think it is awkward that acquaintances of mine are that materialistic and think money is of such importance that they would rather have a boring well-paid job than an interesting less well-paid one, given that they can not have both. 
Naturally, eco-nomy is an important aspect of life but such is work, since you generally spend about half of your awake hours working. 
That sums up to quite some hours in a lifetime and therefore I prefer a vocation I really enjoy.  	 
Next counterargument is often that the school has an extremely hectical atmosphere, with pupils behaving like hooligans, which can give anyone a nervous breakdown in a few weeks. 
Admittedly such a scene is not impossible but I am inclined to believe that such a situation depends mainly on the teacher. 
If the teacher loves children, enjoy being with them and is experienced as well as prepared of some children being awfully mischie-vous it should not occur. 
Personally, I think dealing with all these different unpredictable young individuals is exciting and a charming part of the profession. 
Likewise, getting through the barricades and reaching the real restive and disorderly ones is a satisfactory kick without equivalence. 	 
Even though not always feeling satisfied with classroom performance, a teacher always feel needed which is a most important sense. 
While others are tearing their hair because of inability to change what is wrong in society, a teacher can actually do something about the so-called decadence of human morals and society. 
The mere becoming a teacher actu-ally means doing something valuable for the society because of the scarcity of teachers. 
Until the year of 2000, 62 000 new full-time teachers must be employed in Sweden.  10 000 of these will not be educated. 
That is to say, there will not be a problem finding a job because of the many vacancies and the fact that there is a school - which implies a potential place of work for a teacher - in every inhabited region. 	 
Being attractive on the labour-market, is a reason as good as any to become a teacher, but from my point of view the nonmonotonous and flexible method of working is of greater importance. 
I am aware of that being a teacher includes working long hours in a stressful and loud environment, but I am convinced that it will never get tedious and dull. 
As a teacher every single day is a new challange, one never know what will happen during the day and always need a plan B and C up one's sleeve.  	 
In conclusion I find numerous reasons for becomimg a teacher, but some people consider them only three: June, July and August. 
Undoubtly those are tempting, but the main reason for anyone to become a teacher ought to be the possibility to work with children, follow their development and bring them up to strong and intelligent account-able citizens. 
Teaching is hard work and will not turn anyone economically rich over-night, but I am sure it is a very enriching vocation when it comes to quality of life. 
For-tunately, one can always educate to be a teacher and then marry rich.
"," TV - a reliable educator?  
In an ordinary Swedish home, the importance of television is constantly growing. 
TV is often used as a baby-sitter and Swedish children are generally watching more than two hours of television a day without any possibility to question what they see, due to lack of parental presence. 
I think it is alarming that children are being exposed to impressions from TV on their own, and I will discuss the situation in this essay.  y eyes were opened to this problem the other day, when reading an article saying that, at the age of 18, the average child has spent more time watching TV than engaging in any other activity except sleep. 
Consequently, the average child of today, experience a lot more through various soaps and films on TV than they do in real life. 
A child's personality is developing in every minute in ensemble with the environment he or she lives in and the experiences he or she does. 
So, if TV answers for a majority of these impressions, one must revalue and look upon TV as an educator of the same importance as parents and teachers. 
I am not convinced that all parents and all teachers are reliable on giving children a true picture of the world, but I am convinced that they give a more realistic world picture than TV does. 
Most youths are able to distinguish between fiction and fact, but young children have certain difficulties deciding what is real and what is not on TV.   
Admittedly, the mere thought of a whole generation growing up with a distorted world view, frightens me and gives me a feeling of powerlessness because no one seems to know how to prevent that taking place. 
Obviously, there are suggestions for solutions. 
Thus, in various ways prohibit TV-watching and make an effort to engage children in other activities. 
An interesting suggestion is, the V chip, mentioned in Ginia Bellafante's article Locking out violence. 
The V chip is a computer chip installed in TV sets to make it impossible to watch programs that embrace a certain level of violence. 
This V chip would, probably, lock out the most violent sequences and decrease some children's time spent in front of the television. 
On the other hand, the V chip might lull parents into false security, resulting in children watching even more television. 
Undoubtedly, children do watch, and will keep on watching a lot of television in one way or another, and therefore one must act according to these conditions. 
Thus, parents should keep their children company in front of the TV, to be able to discuss violence, ideals or whatever might turn up. 
Second best, is to discuss these matters after the TV-program.   
Similarly, questions aroused from TV should be discussed in school, since TV plays an important role in children's every day life. 
What is more, emotional topics, such as relations, abuse or morals can sometimes easier be brought up in class if based on fiction instead of someone's own thoughts or experiences. 
That is to say, soaps and films might actually be useful in education, as long as followed up in adult presence. 
Moreover, there are actually people working as film-educationists, teaching how to use TV-programs and films in a didactic manner. 
I have read an interview on a film-educationist who asserts that it is a democratic right to get the possibility to learn the language of TV. 
He lectures on the influences TV has on the average child and on the tricks that film producers use to achieve the greatest possible effects, with feigned fights as well as artificial beauty - most of them attained with a computor. 
He tells the children that Arnold Schwarzenegger is always surrounded by midget actors and filmed from a worm's-eye view to give the impression that he is huge. 
The film-educationist continues with indicating that Julia Roberts' nude body in Pretty Woman is actually not her's but a transexual model's, since the producers thought Julia did not satisfactory fulfil the ideals of beauty.   
Eventually, children - with help from adults - will realize that the major part of what they see in soaps and films is nothing but illusions. 
Hopefully this fact will make children watch TV with scepticism and so, add less TV-inspired values and ideals to their own world views.
",True
" Abortion - a question of human freedom  To have the freedom to decide for your self, over your own body and life. 
Not all people have the ""right"" to do so. 
This is depending on where you live and/or what religion you belong to. 
Unfortunately this leads to people having abortions illegally, or in some cases they give birth to the baby and then abandon it. 
All people must have the right to chose for them self if they should have an abortion or not. 
Though it should be under control and not be used as a contraceptive. 	 
Abortion is not accepted all over the world. 
In the United States of America there have been wild discussions between Republicans and Democrats if abortion should be allowed or not ( right now it is allowed in the States). 
I think it is a human right to decide over your own life, if you want to have the baby or not.   
There should be no such thing as becoming pregnant and then have an abortion just because you do not care about using some kind of protection. 
But accidents happen; some see it as a great opportunity to keep the baby with the excuse it just happened. 
But there are also those who do not want a baby, are unable to care for a child, feel that there is not enough money to give the child a proper life. 
Most important though is that both persons involved agree on whatever decision they make.   
Here in Sweden we are lucky that it is fairly accepted and legal to have an abortion. 
It provides a freedom to the people, especially women.  
Lately there have been, in Sweden, many women who have an abortion because of their economic situation. 
Of course that is a very important aspect, it is very important to know that you are able to give the baby the support it needs. 
No one should be forced to bring a baby to the world if they feel they are not able to take care of it. 
Abortion can help a lot of people.  
Pregnancy, as I mentioned above, is not always planned. 
You really have to consider the consequences, taking the responsibility. 
If it was not legal to have an abortion there would be many cases of illegal abortion, and also unwanted children brought to life. 
No child should be brought to the world ""without"" parents. 
There have to be an agreement between the two, no woman should be forced to have a baby if she really don't want to, but she can't neither force the man to support the child if he really don't want to have a baby.  
There are not only these things as mentioned above that can be the reason for wanting to have an abortion. 
Today we have modern medical equipment that makes it easier to, in a rather early stage, examine the foetus and discover if there are any problems. 
Some babies are born with major heart failures, CP-injuries etc. 
Many of these problems we have medicines and equipment to handle. 
Though sometimes some are more serious than other, some incurable. 
In these cases parents also have a good opportunity to choose if they want to keep the baby.  
As mentioned, abortion is not legal everywhere. 
There are many countries that according to law it is forbidden to have an abortion and in many religions too. 
Even though you are carrying the baby of a rapist... 
Some people consider it murder to have an abortion. 
I would say it is not murder but common sense. 
In many parts of the world we have overpopulation, which is not always due to restrictions about abortion. 
But I think it can be more regulated if abortion was allowed in some countries.   
Unfortunately, as mentioned, it happens that women accidentally become pregnant. 
Although we have so many different kinds of protections to chose from. 
Abortions should of course never be considered as a contraceptive, but has to be accepted to help out in certain situations.  
Finally, abortion should be something that every person, all over the world, should be able to consider. 
No matter what country or religion, there always have to be the possibility to control your own life. 
There should be no children brought to the world ""without"" parents.
"," The entertaining and persuasive television  Television serves as a good entertainment form. 
Unfortunately it sometimes might not be that good for us since it can affect our health. 
We use the television for many good purposes, to spread news, educate, inform and amuse people. 
But there is also the abuse of television e.g. in programs where they try to fob on things on people.  
I think television is useful, there are just as many interesting programs as there are junk programs. 
The news programs are always very interesting, there are also many other interesting programs. 
But as mentioned above, there's a lot of junk. 
All these soapopra's, docusoap's, Ricky Lake talk shows (those where people discuss their problems with their loved ones and lovers etc.). 
I think these programs are so pathetic. 
All these desperate people, they seem to do almost anything to be on television. 
Lately there have popped up so many new talk shows and docusoap's etc. 
I think it is starting to get crowded among these kinds of programs but some people like watching them and of course there has to be a program for everyone.    
Today people watch much more television than some years ago. 
People exercise less nowadays. 
If you have been working all day or been in school many prefer to sit down in front of the television set when they are tired instead of going out exercising. 
And with all the series on television some get addicted. 
Of course I can understand people getting addicted to some series, I have also been there. 
This extended watching of television has had effects on people. 
In our society people are growing fatter, of course what we eat matters, but also the combination of watching too much television and not exercising enough can have negative effects. 
Mentally you can get affected from what you watch on television, not all people are affected but it happens. 
Though as mentioned earlier it is a good form of entertainment, because there is a lot to choose from, I think there is something for everyone (even dogs, my dog loves watching TV).   
When it comes to education, television has a lot to provide. 
News programs are of course very educational. 
But there are a lot of other programs with educational purposes, there are the children's programs which can be both educational and entertaining. 
There are different kinds of programs where you can learn and practise a language, how to do woodwork or cooking. 
Cooking, has become very popular on television over the past years. 
They have a lot of recipes and suggestions on dinner. 
This is very useful if you are out of ideas on what to eat or simply are not that good in cooking.  
A couple of years ago the commercials entered Swedish television. 
The Swedish channels 1 and 2 would not accept the commercials but TV4 and some other Swedish channels did. 
I liked the commercials in the beginning but nowadays I get annoyed when watching a movie and there is a commercial break every twenty minutes, though some might be fun but it gets repetitive when they run the same commercials over and over again.   
We use television mostly for good purposes but there is also an abuse of television. 
I think the abuse of television is when someone is trying to fool people to buy something as in commercials but particularly in TV shop. 
These programs, where they show e.g. a belt that will give you a muscular stomach in only one week. 
Everybody should be informed that it doesn't work that way. 
It takes at least six months. 
This is really abuse of television, actors are often used (probably to make it more convincing) to tell how wonderful this product is. 
Anyway the point is that many things they want people to buy are often just crap. 
This is abuse of television.   
Neil Postman writes in Amusing Ourselves to Death: ""Television, as I have implied earlier, serves us most usefully when presenting junk entertainment; it serves us most ill when it co-opts serious modes of discourse-news, politics, science, education, commerce, religion-and turns them into entertainment packages. 
We would all be better off if television got worse, not better.""
There are many ways to judge television and all the different programs. 
There is a point to what Neil Postman writes but everyone has their own opinion on what is good entertainment and how it should be formed. 
Maybe that is why we have such a wide range on programs, so everyone will be pleased.
",True
" Television, Entertainment or a Substitute for Absent Parents?  
Today it is very common that both parents in a family have to work in order to keep a roof over their heads, food on the table and clothes to wear. 
The idea of mothers staying home with their children is no longer just out of fashion, but rather impracticable, families can not afford it. 
Everything cost and many parents either have to work two jobs or a lot overtime. 
Then there are families where the parents are unemployed, and their economy is even more strained than that of the average Swedish working class family. 
The result of all this is a form of absent parenting, children who spend more time in front of the television than socialising with their families. 	
Television is a great tool to educate, entertain and spread news. 
What I find less satisfying, is the way it makes people passive. 
Children who are sitting on their bottoms and watching for say five six hours without interruption do not get much exercise. 
In combination with a fat diet, mainly fast food, the result is overweight. 
It has become a people's disease. 
The amount of people with weight problems is on the increase. 
I really think this problem should be taken seriously. 	
It is not out of malice that parents are using television as a baby sitter for their children. 
There are always exceptions to the rule, but most parents find no better alternative. 
At a curtain age children are too old to attend after- school-activities but often too young to be left home alone. 
Unfortunately some children do not like being home with only television as his or her companion.  	
Television has a tendency to alienate children from interact with others, but also keep those who do not have many friends from seeking contact with other children outside their homes. 
Instead these loners find it more comfortable to remain inside and avoid potential rejection. 	
Sometimes television can be scary. 
Even I as an adult am effected by what I see on it. 
I have learnt how to select what I am going to watch in order to feel good. 
I no longer watch horror films. 
If I did, I would probably be afraid of the dark, but since I do not I am not. 
When I think of all the children who are home alone watching God knows what, it makes me very sad inside. 
Maybe they are in need of explanations or comforting words, and have nobody to turn to. 	
I am concerned about these reruns aired all the time. 
Some programs are not suitable for children to see. 
They are not mature enough. 
Usually these shows are aired in the evenings because of the rate violence, blood and sex in them. 
I can not find any reason why it is all of a sudden appropriate to air them during daytime just because it is a rerun. 
The violence is not any less violent and the scenes are not any less provocative to a child's imagination than from it was first aired. 
I can take shows as ER and Melrose Place as examples. 
I would not want my ten-year-old to watch them, especially not by herself. 	
Another thing about television is that it ruins communication. 
I know that whenever I sit and watch, and somebody wants to talk to me, it is almost impossible to draw my attention to him or her. 
The television sort of absorbs me. 
Many families suffer from lack of communication. 
The dialogue is gone. 
By the time parents come home from work, their children have already eaten and are as for a couple of hours sitting in front of the television. 
Very often the parents are too tired to ask them about their day of school. 
In some cases the children have developed resentment towards the parents. 
Interpreting the lack of conversation as a lack of interest of their well being. 
Children's self-confidence is at risk. 
Too many children are feeling insecure and unloved. 	
As a future parent I will try to let my children to be children for as long as possible. 
Playing outside with friends as I did when I was little will be encouraged. 
If they then when they come inside would want to watch something I find questionable, I will try to watch it with them. 
I would not want television to take my place in my children's life. 
At the same time I hope I will not stand in their way of growing up.
"," Why the selling of JAS to South Africa is such a step back for humanity   I am going to discuss the Swedish government's policies concerning war materiel export and demonstrate why it is not morally defensible of Sweden to export to a country like South Africa. 
Sweden is the country with the most restricted export policy concerning war materiel in the world but is still exporting like there were no regulations. 
The war materiel in question is the aircraft fighter JAS 39 Gripen. 
The Swedish government hopes to sell fifteen of them to South Africa. 
In return, several Swedish companies will invest in the country, build new factories and employ lots of people 	According to Swedish and European law, export of war materiel is not recommended to a country in which human rights are being violated. 
In South Africa, during 1997, many cases of police violence were reported. 
Among accusations, were alleged torture, abuse and rapes inside prison walls. 
As many as one hundred and thirty four suspicious deaths were investigated, and one hundred and fifty guards were arrested for assaulting 155 internees so severely that they needed medical care. 
Unfortunately, the prison doctor denied them their right of medical attention. 
I would call this situation a clear violation against human rights.  	
Another guideline to either sell or not sell war materiel is if a country suffers with internal armed disturbances, or not. 
Everybody knows that South Africa is politically unstable, with high criminal density, and with wide spread access to weapons. 
More than nine hundred people died between 1996 and 1998 because of armed conflicts. 	
The third reason when not to export war materiel, has to do with if the recipients economic- and social development is at risk, by going through with a deal of this dignity. 
South Africa is a recipient of Swedish financial aid, and should not according to Swedish regulations be financially strong enough to buy JAS 39 Gripen, without jeopardising the economic and social growth in the country. 	
As a fourth argument restraining Swedish export, is if a purchase could effect regional peace and security. 
It does not take a genius to realise what it would mean to the African continent, if South Africa were to buy JAS 39 Gripen. 
South Africa's defence is the biggest and most advanced in the entire Africa. 
Their military expenditure, 2,506 million US dollars, is second only to Egypt. 
There are no immediate threats, but the neighbouring countries could take offence, and a regional rearmament would be a fact. 
It makes me think of last summer and the tension between the countries of China, India and Pakistan. 
Tension caused by nuclear tests. 
I have to admit I was a little frightened for a while. 
I know those nuclear missals serve as means to keep the super powers in the world in balance, but I do not trust the men in charge of such powers. 
Men have a history of making bad decisions.	 
I got really upset when I heard that Sweden is telling the South African side, that a purchase of the fighter aircraft would benefit the South African democratic development. 
I think it is outrageous that the Swedish government can talk about exporting war materiel and democracy in the same sentence. 
Money should be better spent by investments in food, medicine, housing and job opportunities. 
When I explained my standpoint to a friend of mine, he said that if we did not sell JAS to South Africa, some other country would and Sweden would lose a profitable deal. 
I am sure he is right, but I do not think we should go a head and do something so profoundly wrong as to sell JAS and thereby risk a peaceful future for Africa. 
I do not care if South Africa would buy a fighter from another country if Sweden would back out of the deal. 
At least our conscious would be clear. 
Two wrongs do not necessarily make a right. 
Sweden should instead serve as a role model. 
I hate to think I live in a country where profits are more important than human rights, values and quality of life.  	
Sweden has in the last three decades, in spite of its restrictive export policy, sold a lot of war materiel to countries in war like Singapore, India, Malaysia, Pakistan and Yugoslavia among others. 
The Swedish export of war materiel 1994 fetched 3,2 billion Swedish crowns. 
I think the signals we are sending out from Europe to the third world, as well as the fourth, are terrifying. 
We are making it harder for refugees and immigrants to enter any country in the EU and at the same time lessen our financial aids to their countries. 
It is a terrible double standard on the Swedish part. 
We used to work for solidarity. 
Where is that solidarity now?  
My fear is that the men in charge in Europe might have some devious plan to eliminate the third and fourth world by letting them kill themselves in war with each other, with weapons bought from Europe for a lot of money. 
Call me paranoid but these racist tendencies are frightening me. 
Sweden should instead work for disarmament support human rights.
",True
"""The world knows and feels the existing evil; it will look at the new order of things proposed-approve-will the change-and it is done"" Robert Owen wrote promoting his ideas for co-operative villages, his second social project. 
Owen was an idealistic man with many ideas of how to improve the world. 
He realized some of these, some sucessfully, others less so. 
In this essay I will compare two of his social projects and their underlying ideas: the factory reforms in New Lanark, Scotland, and the co-operative village of New Harmony, Indiana.  
In the beginning of the 19th century when Robert Owen became the manager of the mills of New Lanark, Scotland, he was struck by the poor condidtion in which his employees worked and lived. 
Of the 2000 employees 500 were children, brought from the poor houses in Scotland. 
In the town of New Lanark immorality, fornication, drunkenness and crimes were part of the everyday life. 
As Owen believed that man's character was formed for him by the environment in which he was raised and lived, he was neither surprised at the state of the town, nor did he blame the employees for their behavior. 
He saw the problems in the town as collective, not individual. 
He believed that the people could be changed by changes of the environment, and that this would not only benefit the people themselves, but also the factory, the mill. 
He compared the workers to the new machines: ""If, then, due care as to the state of your inanimate machines can produce such beneficial results, what may not be expected if you devote equal attention to your vital machines, which are far more wonderfully constructed?"" 
(Owen quoted by Arthur Bestor).   
By improving the conditions in New Lanark Owen hoped to improve the character of his employees. 
He provided the people with better houses and clothing, he opened a shop where products of good quality could be bought at very low prices. 
He encouraged the people to be clean and orderly and had the sale of alcohol restricted. 
Most importantly, however, he provided education for the children, the ""Institution Established for the Formation of Character"" (Arthur Bestor) as he called it. 
He also founded the first infant school. 
These changes had a remarkable effect on the town; there were now very little drunkenness and idleness, the people were clean and much healthier than before. 
The children were: ""...generally felt to be graceful, genial, and unconstrained; health, plenty and relative contentment prevailed"" (Encyclopedia Britannica). 
The project was a great success.  
Encouraged by the success in New Lanark Owen wanted to apply his theories in a wider scale. 
Turning his attention from factory reform to social reform, he formulated the idea of co-operative villages where the people would share everything and live in abundance, hapiness and harmony. 
These villages would have the right environment for creating the perfect man: ""He will be trained from earliest infancy to acquire only kind and benevolent dispositions"" (Owen quoted by Robert S. 
Fogarty). 
The villages would consist of 1000 to 2000 people living in a square at the centre of the land with shared facilities for education, health care, dining and amusements. 
Everyone would take turns at the different work tasks in the village. 
There would be such abundance no personal proprerty or possessions would be needed, there would be plenty for all. 
Owen was convinced that if he could create one of these villages, it would be so successful everyone in the world would want to live in one, and these villages would gradually replace all other towns and cities. 
He wrote that: ""... the only real practical difficulty will be to restrain men from rushing too precipitately from one to the other"" (Arthur Bestor). 
To realize this vision Owen bought a village which he renamed New Harmony, in Indiana, USA.  
Owen invited anyone who wanted to live the new society to come to New Harmony, and soon 800 people inhabited the co-operative village. 
The practical arrangements worked at first; food, clothes and medicines were free of charge, the children were educated and there were plenty of amusements for the people. 
However, things did not go according to Owen's plans: Everything was payed for by Owen himself, and not by the produce of the co-operative village, which seemed to be insufficient. 
Many of the people who had come to New Harmony were just fleeing poverty, and not very interested in the co-operative spirit. 
Soon, disagreements concerning the form of the village government occured, there were divisions among the inhabitants and different societies were formed. 
There were arguments about the disposal of property and eventually, after three years, the co-operative fell apart. 
Everything went back to the traditional way of life and Owen sold out individual property to the inhabitants in an attempt to cut his losses. 
The co-operative village was a complete faliure.  
There were many reasons why Owen's project in New Harmony was not a success like the one in New Lanark. 
One was his contempt for the knowledge of his forerunners, for all intellectuals and social theorists and consequently, he had no political philosophy or knowledge and therefore no means of solving the political conflicts in New Harmony. 
He simply believed that in the new society, the co-operative villages, man would be so happy there would be no disagreements, and no political problems. 
This had not been a problem at New Lanark, he was the manager and the employees did as he told them. 
Another reason was that of the people who came to New Harmony, few shared Owen's ideals. 
The village of New Harmony was dependent upon a co-operative spirit among the inhabitants but there was none. 
Consequently, the village was not self sufficient, and constantly needed more money, which came from Owen's own pockets. 
In New Lanark, the people were employed by Owen and could not afford to be idle. 
By improving their living and working conditions a higher moral and better work performance was accomplished without relying on their philosophical ideals.  
In conclusion, Robert Owen was a great success as a factory reformer at New Lanark, but less so as a social reformer at New Harmony. 
His belief that man is formed by and can be changed by his environment was proved true. 
His ideas of co-operating villages however, were too vague to be successful in creating a new society.
"," Young, beautiful and successful: The superficial portrayal of women in the media  Western society is becoming more and more superficial. 
People, women especially, are more often judged by their physical appearance than by who they are. 
This affects women in many ways, none of which is positive. 
I believe the media, in their often stereotypical picturing of women, could be blamed for having a great part in this. 
Therefore I think the media should change their approach to how they show women. 
In this essay I will discuss how women are portrayed, which message this gives and the effects of it.  
The potrayal of women in the media does not very much correspond to reality. 
The female characters in films and TV series, as well as the models shown in magazines, send out a distorted picture of the perfect woman. 
These people are supposed to be good role models, but the only characteristics they have in common are that they are all very skinny and very good-looking. 
Other qualities, such as intelligence, strength of character or kindness, do not seem as important. 
In the magazines the beautiful faces are accompanied by headlines about how to lose weight with the new diet, or how to make yourself more desireable with the latest fashion and make-up. 
It is very seldom that a plump girl or a mature woman, with wrinkles, are seen on the covers of these magazines. 
To make things worse, the pictures are retouched to make the models even more beautiful. 
Flaws, like wrinkles, moles or anything unwanted, are easily removed to make the perfect picture. 
If the top models are not good enough the way they are, how are the rest of us supposed to be?   
This message, of the importance of beauty, is very disturbing. 
By constantly giving advice on how to lose weight, what make-up to use or which exercises to do to get ""the perfect body"", the magazines are more or less saying: You are not good enough, you are not thin enough and you are not beautiful enough.
Why this focus on looks? 
Why is it so important to be attractive? 
Women tend to say it is for their own sake, because it makes them feel good, and they probably believe this to be true. 
But the underlying reason why is because they think that is how the men want them. 
It is what the media tell them every day. 
I do recognize that there are a few newspapers, magazines and TV shows that have a better approach, but this is not nearly enough. 
The majority of the media still need to change their attitude towards women, because what they tell us today is that a woman needs be thin and beautiful. 
Only then can she find a man and be socially accepted, happy and successful.   
This distorted picture of women are having severe effects, especially among young and insecure girls. 
Not realizing that what they are pesented with are products, manufactured by the media, and not real people, they think they are expected to look like the models and the actresses. 
Not too long ago a junior school in Stockholm had to impose a ban on cosmetics; the seven-year-old girls kept turning up late for class, as they ""had to"" put on their make-up. 
Another already common problem is young girls going on diets, and starving themselves. 
Sadly enough illnesses like anorexia and bulimia are becoming more frequent, and are affecting younger and younger children. 
Older teenagers and women are also influenced, spending thousands of pounds on cosmetical surgery; breast enlargements, liposuction and facelifts. 
However, these operations seldom make very much difference on what is important: The feeling of not being good enough, which probably caused the desire to change the appearance, will still be there. 
I believe if the media showed a more diverse and less superficial picture of women, these problems would not be as common.  
As the media have have so much influence on society, they also have a moral responsibility towards it. 
In presenting a stereotypical and superficial image of women, the media are giving the message that the physical appearance is what is important. 
This generates a feeling of inadequacy among many girls and women and creates many problems for them. 
The media can, and therefore should, change this by taking a different approach to how they portray women.
",True
"An introduction: This is an essay about our strenghts and weaknesses in the english language and to my suprise the hardest part was NOT to write it but to find my strenghts and weaknesses. 
To find the weaknesses was not TOO dificult but the strenghts? 
Often it is easier to say what you are bad at than to say what you are good at. 
When I wrote this essay I decided to write in four undergroups to make it easier to read and understand(and write). 
They are: writing, listening, reading and talking. 
The art of writing: Of all parts in the english language this is the part that I find hardest. 
My strenght here is that I am good at finding the right word and a talent to describe a situation so well that you can almost touch it. 
Then why do I say that I find it hard? 
That is becourse I am REALLY bad at gramma so the words and sentenses are almost always wrong. 
Another problem is that when I write I get som caught up in what I am doing so I do not think about spelling and so on. 
The art of listening: It is hard to say if I am good or bad at listening. 
Of course I prefere to think that I am good at listening and I base that on my understanding of the speaker and that I do not have to stop and think about the meaning of every word.  
The art of reading: I do love to read and I prefere to read books that is not translated becourse in many cases they loose a lot in the translation. 
That means that I read most in english. 
I think that I am good at reading, I do it a lot and I can grasp a hole sentence without knowing exactly every word. 
The problem is that most of the time when I am reading I am so caught up in the story that I forget to look up every word I do not know. 
The art of speaking: Here is one of my stronger parts in the english language. 
As always I thing about myself as a good speaker, both in Sweden and in English. 
My strenght here is that I am not afraid of trying to speak english and I really do not care if exactly every word is right but instead that we understand eachother and that is is a good conversation. 
I speak fluently and often and I know a lot of words. y weakness is that I have a tendency to not think throught what i am going to say before I do it and therefor I can stumble over words or put them in the wrong order (I do that in swedish too).  
These are my strenghts and weaknesses in the english language(and in the other languages). 
Then what can I do to get better in my problem areas? 
I have to study grammar very hard and I have to learn to think things throught before I do things.
","This essay consists of four main subjects, or you could maybe say four different parts, namely the four different parts of which my English consists. 
They are, which if you think of it is quite obvious, writing, reading, speaking and listening listed in no particular order. 
I will begin whit some thoughts about the subject reading.  
Reading, well the first book I read the whole of in English was ""The way to dusty death"" of Alistar MacLean and I think I was about fifteen or sixteen years old wen I read it. 
Then it took a couple of years before I read the next book. 
It must have been when I was around eighteen or so and I realised that English fantasy novels, which were then and still are my favourite kind of novel, comes out one or two years earlier in English and to half the Swedish price. 
That because the books, when they are translated to Swedish, normally are divided into two parts. 
Both parts, in Swedish, are of course sold separately at the same price as you would had paid for the whole book in English. 
So the response to the Swedish book sellers greed can be only one, buy them and read them in English. 
There is of course also other facts that makes you buy them in English. 
The translations to Swedish are mostly not so good, you might even say that they stink and a book is nearly always better in the original language. 
That far about reading... 
I must say that it is a hard job for my fingers to find their way over the keyboard. 
This is, or will at least be when it is ready, by far the most extensive text, and I must admit that extensive is not a word that seems to be appropriate at all when you look at this text, that I have ever written in English. 
So when we already are touching the subject why not also say something about it. 
I must say that I am surprised that its not harder than it is. 
When I sat down before the computer and started on this essay I thought it would be a hard nut to crack but I think the words flow out on the paper quite easily. 
The spelling is not a problem since the computer corrects the worst faults, the wonders of modern technique, what is the problem is instead the grammar which probably will result in a lot of big read signs when I get this essay back. 
When I write in Swedish I can in most cases feel what is right and what is wrong, to be frank I can not my Swedish grammar either. 
The problem goes back to the senior levels of the upper form when I had an teacher in both English and Swedish which I disapproved of. 
As a matter of fact I then thought he was more interested in telling jokes about Norway then learning out English. 
Retrospectively I have to admit that neither English or Swedish were what you might call my favourite subjects in school. 
And that way it went on when I went to the gymnasium. 
Good grades in Swedish literature history and not so good in Swedish language. 
Best reader of English text by far in my class, among those on the second part on the list of exam results.  
Speaking and listening then? 
Well, as most Swedes of my generation born in the 70's and raised by the telly I understand nearly everything I hear on the news or in English speaking programs. 
It is easier to understand British English than American English, I have to concentrate more when I listen to American programs. 
An interesting thing is that I still have very difficult to take out the words when I listen to a song on the radio. 
Its like the words blend in whit the music and becomes a part of it, I just can't separate them. 
I haven't yet had any bigger problems listening to English native speaker when I talk whit them on the other hand I have not yet met so many of them so I can make a real statement in the question. 
Speaking then, of course my active vocabulary is smaller then my passive, goes whit out saying, but I can make my self understood not as good as want to but I manage. 
An interesting point thou is that it takes a little while before my active vocabulary starts working. 
It's like the mind needs a little while to readjust and start thinking and communicating in a new language. 
During the time I have written this paper I have noticed that it is the same thing whit writing in English. 
It is much easier to find the words now in the end of the paper than when I sat down and started.  
I think that I as usual have overstepped the limit for the essays size so I'll stop here since it seems to be a good place to stop at, besides I think I have done a quite fair evaluation of my knowledge in the English language.
",False
" Why we should introduce free massage as a working benefit  Surely all of us have been struck by stress and exhaustion sometime during our lives. 
But these phenomena are getting more and more common and overwhelming. 
Many people today suffer a great deal from stress and from getting burned out. 
These problems do not only concern adults, but also many schoolchildren. 
Fortunately there are ways to help prevent these so called national diseases. 
For example, one easy way is through massage, which is a well-known means of relaxing and recovery. 
This method has been used by people in centuries. 
My opinion is that every employee should be offered free massage as a part of their working benefits. 
And since other forms of healthcare are free for people under the age of twenty, massage should be free for them as well. 
Thus how can everyone benefit from this idea, and how will this improve our everyday lives?  
To begin with, more and more people are having difficulties with performing a good job at their work, because of factors such as stress and exhaustion. 
This is not hard to understand since our society is a rapidly developing one, and as a result the demands on our efficiency increase. 
Many of us work so hard that we are totally exhausted when we come home. 
As if this is not enough there are a number of duties at home that many of us have to deal with after work. 
There is simply no time for relaxation. 
Now, if everyone were to be offered free massage, say once a week at the least, we would become much more relaxed and as a result we would be able to work more effectively. 
Less people would suffer from stress and, in addition to this, our working environment would become more pleasant and more people would enjoy going to work.   
However, I do not believe that adults are the only group in need of relaxation in the form of massage. 
Schoolchildren also suffer a lot from stress and this puts a strain on their concentration and learning ability. 
Massage, as we all know, not only makes us feel more relaxed, but it increases our blood circulation, and makes us feel more alert. 
Through massage we can concentrate better and we become more active. 
This will, in the long run, lead to better educated children, and they will not forget what they learn at school.  
Of course these massage treatments have to be financed. 
Nevertheless, in my opinion there will be no big problems financing this project, since the effects of the massage treatments in themselves will be moneysaving. 
This money can then be used to pay for the expenses. 
The companies will save money because they will have employees who are more relaxed and therefore can concentrate better and work more effectively. 
They will do a better job in less time! 
Furthermore, people will have a better health, and there will be less people on the sick- leave. 
Thus, the government will not have to pay as much sick benefits, and could instead use this money to sponsor the project.   
To sum up, I would like to se free massage in the form of a working benefit, because I believe that this would be one great step in the right direction in order to improve peoples health, both physically and mentally. 
What we need today is a form of relaxation in our stressful lives. 
As we all know, when we feel relaxed we see the good things in life, we are nicer to one another, and we feel good about our selves. 
For instance, the body as well as the mind will get stronger, and as a result of this we will be able to resist diseases and handle difficult situations a lot better. 
In addition to this we will perform better at work and at school.
"," Let homosexuals adopt  Something many people consider a matter of course is that homosexuals always should be equal to heterosexuals. 
However, many of them who first agree change their attitude when it comes to adoption. 
This change seems strange to me and if you read on I will explain why. 	 
Since homosexuality no longer was considered a sickness, the situation for homosexuals has very well improved, and rather quickly (although not as quickly as I would wish). 
We live in a modern and multicultural society, and we should know better than to be prejudiced when there are much more important things to do. 
In Sweden, as in many other countries, homosexuals are allowed to register partnership, which should mean that it has finally been accepted that love between homosexuals is worth as much as love between heterosexuals. 
The step between understanding that and that homosexuals also would make good parents should not be too far. 
We can't say that homosexuals and heterosexuals are equal if they are not given the same rights. 	 
Still, opponents often say that children with homosexual adoptive parents will be harassed by other children at school, sometimes making it sound as it would be most strange indeed if they wouldn't be so. 
I can understand that this is a common first reaction, yet this seems very odd to me as I find it hard to believe that children would condemn something like this without influence from their parents or other adults. 
Moreover, there already are children who live with a homosexual parent and the parent's partner, and there hasn't been proved that these children have problems caused by that. 
Besides, I think that as long as adoption isn't legal for homosexuals, children living with a homosexual parent with a partner may get the idea that there actually is something wrong with their situation, and I don't think that is what we want. 	 
Many people usually consider the main problem to be that all children need both their mother and their father both for love and to identify themselves with. 
Only, we know that there are many children who live with only one parent and not everyone identifies themselves with their parents or with their parents only. 
There may be a relative or a teacher the children look up to. 
I would say that what children need isn't necessarily one mother and one father, but they need love, care and security, and where they are given that, there is a good home. 	 
I don't think the question is if there ever will be a law that gives homosexuals the same right to adopt as heterosexuals, because there probably will. 
In Sweden, only two political parties have voted against the proposal, the Christian democrats and the conservatives. 
The question is when. 	 
Altogether, I think that until adoption is legal for homosexuals, people's attitude will not change. 
The sooner it becomes a law, the easier it will be for people to accept the whole concept. 
I must say I really am sure that children with homosexual adoptive parents will not have problems simply because of that unless other people think they should have. 
The problems only exist as long as people let them. 
Hence people must try to get rid of their prejudice and not concentrate on unnecessary problems. 
We should show that homosexuals and heterosexuals are equal!
",False
"As all swedes in my generation, I have a long history of studying english. 
Despite quite good grades, it feels that it's been 6 years since I finished school. 
Over the last years, as a member of an international youth oranisation promoting peace education and cultural awareness, I've had a lot of practice in both speaking and listening to english.   
A lot of talking with people from all over the world, that has english as their only common language, has given me the opportunity to learn how to shift relatively easy between english and swedish. 
Most of the times I have no problems making myself understood. 
There has never been any prestige in finding the right words, so I'm a master of talking around things to make people understand what I want.  
The fact that it's mostly non native english speakers in this organisation has both advantages and disadvantages. 
The disadvantage as I see it is that the accuracy isn't the best. 
The main thing has always been to be understood. 
The advantage, wich I find important to me as a person, is that I have no problems understanding what people say. 
I sometimes find it more difficult to understand native english speakers that has a dialect compared to other nationalities (except maybee for the Indians). 
Another thing that comes hand in hand with this lack of prestige, is that I have learned never to hesitate to ask again if there is something I haven't understood.  
As I recall it the english classes never had the emphasis on writing. 
Ever since I left school most of my writing has been limited to writing personal letters, and occasionally some more official texts in connection with this international organisation.  
As everyone else, I've learned grammar at school, but now I feel that I have forgotten most of it, so that's an area I'll have to put emphasis on now. 
The rules of grammar has never been transfered from sentences to longer texts, so that I have to discover the tools for working with. 
I also feel that I need to improve my spelling.  
Reading in english is something I've enjoyed doing for quite some time now, but it's not something I've done regulary. 
It has come as a naturall continuence from reading a lot in swedish. 
The litterature has gradually become more difficult, but I still haven't worked up any speed in my reading, and summary reading is only possible in very simple texts. 
When reading books I've always been more interested in the context rather than specific words. 
Today I feel this hasen't promoted the developement of my vocabulary.  
I hope this course will give me a wider vocabulary as well as a higer accuracy in my writing. 
Since all the litterature is in english, it will naturally help my reading skills. 
The listening part, as well as the speaking, is practised every day, wich makes it come very natural. 
I think that is a good way of improving a language.
","I used to think that since I had no problems understanding written or spoken English and furthermore had no real problems communicating my own thoughts and ideas using this, my second language, I was in no need of further studies in this particular field. 
Now I see that this was nothing more than a rather ignorant and indeed also quite smug thought. 
Today I am aware of both my strengths and my weaknesses when it comes to English. 
Obviously the weaknesses are a bit more depressing to ponder on, but nonetheless I feel that they are more important for me to be aware of than my strengths, for reasons that I will state further on. 
Let us instead begin with the bright sides of my skills in English. 
As I began studying literature at the university, my personal interest for English literature grew and I soon began to noticed that my English wasn't good enough to make the detailed text analyses I wanted to do. 
However my English has improved considerably since then, due to a massive exposure to written and spoken English. 
I have no problems understanding the meaning of a written text in English as long as it doesn't deal with a highly specialised field to which I am not familiar. 
Neither do I find it very hard to understand spoken English. 
Though I must confess that travelling around the Irish countryside gave me considerable doubts about whether I really had any capability at all to understand spoken English. 
Malicious rumours probably claim that any problems I might have with listening to and understanding English lies in the simple fact that I am a bad listener whatever language I'm being addressed with. 
I repel such suggestions strongly. 
When it comes to my own use of English I find, as stated above, that I have no big problems communicating with English-speaking people. 
I have no fears whatsoever for ever finding myself in a situation where I can't make myself understood in English. 
The grammar may not be perfect or even tolerable, but still I feel confident that the meaning of my grammatically incorrect inarticulate sounds will get across to whomever I'm talking to. 
After all the ability of making oneself understood in any case of emergency must be the primary goal when learning another language at a very basic level. 
So far my strengths while it comes to my skills in English at a basic level. 
Let us move on to my weaknesses. 
I mentioned earlier that I felt that my English simply wasn't good enough when I began studying at the University. 
As I have a great interest in English literature I wanted to apply my brand new skills at interpreting and analysing literary texts on the works I loved. 
Much to my disappointment I found that I was in a sense handicapped. 
I didn't have that good ear for the language that you so desperately need to determine the true value of words, and to be able to find the subtle differences of meaning. 
This is something that is crucial when analysing literary works, and indeed also spoken English in detail. 
I still suffer from this handicap and I hope that I will be able to improve my ear for the language soon. 
Another weakness that asserts itself when I write and speak English is my lacking grammatical knowledge. 
Most of the times I probably use the right forms, but then again most of those times I have no idea whatsoever why I chose the form I did. 
I used to think that this wasn't really important, but now I realise that this is something that you simply have to know if you want to get a deeper understanding of the language. 
Finally, I just want to return to what I said about the importance of knowing ones weaknesses rather than ones strengths. 
The main reason for focusing on weaknesses is of course that if you want to get better at something, in this case understanding and using English, you will inevitably have to work hardest on your weak spots. 
There is no other way. 
However you shouldn't forget your strengths, because they are what keeps you going when you feel that your weaknesses threatens to overpower you.
",False
"When I was eleven years old I started to study English at school. 
I didn't get a really good start because I didn't understand why I had to learn English and therefore I wasn't very eager to learn. 
The most important thing why I never was a good student in English, I think, was that I found it very boring. 
I couldn't understand what others found so fascinating about knowing a foreign language. 
Because of all these reasons, I was always behind in my English studies and when I graduated from senior high school my English marks were low. 
I realized that I had to do something about it to be admitted to the University so I went to Boston, MA to work as a nanny for a year.  
In the beginning of my year in the USA it was hard to be around people who only spoke English, but after a few weeks I could understand almost everything the family was talking about. 
The family I lived with was big, five children and their parents, so I always had someone to talk to or listen to. 
It was very good practice. 
Now I had a reason to learn how to understand English. 
The children I took care of told me things that had happened at school, etc. and I really wanted to understand every word they were telling me.  
Now I can feel comfortable when people are talking to me in English. 
What I still find pretty hard is to understand some English spoken by people from Great Britain because I'm so used to American English.  
What I found most difficult during my stay in the USA was to talk without sounding like a five-year old. 
During the first months my speaking really improved but after a while I found myself standing on the same spot, not improving at all. 
I wanted to be able to speak about serious things but couldn't find the words that said what I wanted to. 
I still feel that I can improve my English speaking a lot, but on the other hand I feel I can have an everyday conversation with English speaking people.  
Before I went to Boston I hadn't read one whole book in English. 
I didn't read very much when I was there either except for the books I read to the children, which actually was a lot. 
I think the reason why I didn't read so much when I was abroad was that I was so tired of English in the evenings and weekends. 
In my spare time I'd rather write letters in Swedish to my friends and family at home.  
When I returned to Sweden after a year in Boston it was nice to speak Swedish again but after a while I started to miss the English language. 
It was a very strange feeling because I never thought that could happen to me. 
I started to read some books in English and really enjoyed it. 
I'm still reading a lot more books in Swedish than in English but it's nice to know that it's not that hard to read in English. 
I also think reading is a simple but efficient way to learn the language better.  
I don't know if reading English will make me a better writer but I sure hope so. 
I would never advise anyone to work as an au-pair if their only goal was just to improve their writing skills because you don't have to write a single word in English, I didn't anyway. 
I feel like my writing is as bad as it was before I went abroad. 
I have always enjoyed writing in Swedish so I hope, with some help and a lot of hard work, I will improve my writing skills a lot.  
I think that the best way to learn a language is to stay in a country with native speakers for a year or so. 
It worked for me anyway, but I think I had improved even more if I went there to study. 
Than I would have been forced to write and read. 
A year abroad made me understand the reason why I have to learn English and, even more important, now I can find it enjoyable to learn a second language.
"," Arguments to take stand against capital punishment  Before I joined Amnesty International I had a lot of thoughts about the death penalty. 
I didn't know whether I was for or against the punishment. 
Now I know for sure that I am against the capital punishment. 
My conviction is based on three arguments against death penalty: the state can't show that it's wrong to kill by killing, someone that is not guilty can be convicted and death penalty does not act as a deterrent.  
I think that everybody can understand that the relatives of the victim want some sort of revenge on the person who might have killed their family member, but I don't think a state can show its citizens that something is wrong to do by doing exactly the same thing but in the name of the law. 
The Government must think in terms of right and wrong and shouldn't let emotions take over. 
People that is affected by a loss, on the other hand, aren't able to think clearly. 
Of course we must understand the feelings those people have but I don't think that the Government should show that they care about their citizens by killing some of them. 
We have to remember that we can't get someone we love back by killing someone else. 
I think it's important to stress that people who commit terrible crimes should be punished, but that should be done using other punishments than death penalty for example lifetime punishment.  
One argument you often hear from people who are advocating death penalty is that it is much cheaper to execute a criminal than to keep him or her in prison for life. 
That is not true, though. 
It has been proved that the trial that precede a death penalty is much more expensive than a lifetime punishment. 
Even if the trials are very thorough there are still people who are not guilty that get judged. 
In the USA the majority of the prisoners convicted to death are black men who have lived their lives in poverty. 
Poor people can't afford the best lawyer and because of that they can be wrongfully convicted. 
The possibility to kill an innocent person is reason enough to be against death penalty. 
The Government can't pay back the loss it has caused the innocent person's family. 
In these cases there is just another victim and no problems has been solved.  
People that advocates death penalty maintain that the capital punishment keeps people away from committing crimes. 
This argument is not true either. 
In countries where they still have death penalty people commit higher amounts of serious crimes than in countries that don't have this punishment. 
I think that this fact proves that the capital punishment doesn't work as a deterrent. 
I think lifetime punishment is much better than death penalty. 
I advocate lifetime punishment because I don't think a victim or its relatives who might have been harassed by a criminal should fear that it could happen again. 
I also advocate this kind of punishment because if it appears that the person who is convicted is innocent, he or she will still be alive. 
Even if you can't pay back for years behind bars, the innocent person can live the rest of his life in freedom which you can't let a dead person do. 
I think the best thing a society could do is not to scare people away from committing crimes, but to prevent crime. 
As an example this could be done by developing a better and more equal school system. 
This is of course very expensive, but if we put an end to capital punishment I think we could afford it.   
It is not always easy to be against death penalty. 
When you hear about people who rape and kill innocent children it is easy to feel that this person deserves to die. 
I also think it's quite normal to feel this way, but I still don't think the Government can show us what we do wrong by doing exactly the same thing. 
There are many more arguments to take a stand against the capital punishment, but for me the three I have presented here are reasons enough to stop this cruel punishment.
",True
" An Ocean of Choice  The last two decades can certainly be called the Age of Information because of the fantastic developments in all areas concerning information technology. 
Another possible denomination of this period could be the Age of Television since the explosive developments of television have come to affect our lives in many positive, as well as negative, ways. 
Our relationship with this square machine has, however, never been frictionless, even though the problems have taken different proportions over the years. 
Today there are more questions than ever raised about whether our relationship to television is good or not, and I am about to discuss some of the concerns people of today have about these matters, as well as possible solutions for making our relationship better.  
In order to understand how rapidly our television habits have changed, one does not need to go back more than a few years in time to point out significant differences in our way to look upon them. 
In my childhood home television was, unlike today, never a topic for discussion. 
It was simply seen as a nice complement to every day life; nothing more, nothing less. 
Only being able to choose between two channels and not having access to programs other than the ones listed shortly in one column in the TV-guide, there were very seldom conflicts about what to watch and when to watch it. 
Nor had my parents any reason at all for worrying about me watching programs not suitable for me since they had full control over what was shown on the screen. 
Our single complaint in those days may have been the lack of variety in what was offered, and we often wished there were more on television to be watched.  
This situation has however dramatically changed in a relatively short period of time. 
Today we have no reason to complain about shortage of programs. 
We have at present access to all categories of movies, cartoons, documentaries and newscasts twenty-four hours a day, at least if we are willing to pay an amount of money each month for cable television or television via satellite. 
Most Swedish households are today willing to pay this amount in order to take part of the seemingly unlimited ocean of television, which contains programs for all thinkable tastes. 
Adults as well as children have today opportunity to visit all corners of the world and by that learn about different cultures, languages and ways of living.   
But this new opportunity has proved not to be entirely positive. 
Another aspect of the enormous offer of programs is that television simply offers too much of everything. 
In addition to educational programs and well-made movies, television also offers a wide range of programs not very well made and often containing high levels of violence. 
This fact has developed into a very completed problem involving children's habits of watching them, to which there are no simple solutions. 
Because of the enormous offer of channels, children are today able to watch programs less suitable for them to a much greater extent than before. 
Many parents feel that they have lost control of what their children are watching. 
There are many concerns about the high levels of violence in cable television, and voices are being raised for introducing some kind of censorship of violent programs during daytime. 
This would however be unfair to adults who wish to watch these programs at whatever time of the day they like, and that is the major reason why networks are not willing to adapt their broadcasts to children's needs only.  
A possible solution to this problem is now being discussed in the US, a country that has been facing these problems perhaps longer than Sweden. 
A new technology in the form of an anti violence chip, that may be added to the television set, makes it possible to block out certain programs containing violence. 
The difficulty with such a technology is, however, how to determine what kind of violence that is considered to be the most dangerous for children. 
What do we want to protect our children from? 
Is it violence in cartoons, violence in action movies or violence seen on the news? 
Some children might find the exaggerated kind of violence in cartoons very frightening while others find it nothing but entertaining. 
Children are all different, some are more sensitive than others are, and it is hard to determine the effect violence has on them.  
It seems like our love and hate relationship will continue. 
Television has become a great part of our lives and maybe we had better get used to it. 
There is however no reason for not discussing what is shown on the screen, as there many programs both adults and children can manage perfectly well without. 
In order to keep parental responsibility for what our children are watching, parents must help each other out and have an open discussion about the complicated matter. 
The future might bring simple solutions that will allow us to pick only the good parts and reject the bad, but as for now we get it all in one package- good as well as bad.
","When I was given an assignment to write an essay, in which I'm asked to evaluate my strengths and weaknesses in the English language, it did leave me pondering over the matter a great deal. 
I haven't thought about my skills in English for many years and now I realize why. 
It's simply because I haven't practised them enough since I graduated from school which, I might as well add, I did ten years ago. 
I had at that point spent an additional year in the United States, as a foreign exchange student. 
Returning to Sweden after my stay there I was more confident than ever about my English skills being good, and for some unexplanatory reason I've kept that confidence throughout the years.  
Going back to school, to study English here in Uppsala, has however brought me rather abruptly back to earth, if not deeper. 
This first week at school has been the first confrontation with English for a very long time, and I've come to the conclusion that I do have forgotten very much. 
It's a shame that I've hardly spoken or written anything in English for such a long time, and that I've still expected my English skills to be good. 
Of course I've been abroad a couple of times which has given me the opportunitiy to have conversations in English, but a short conversation in a foreign language once or twice a year is not enough. 
A habit that I do have kept throughout the years is the habit of reading. 
I've always read a lot, mostly in Swedish but often books in English as well. 
Even though I usually tend to read ""best-sellers"", not very heavy literature that is, I consider myself a fairly good reader. 
It depends on interest, naturally, as it takes me much longer to finish a book I'm not interested in compared to one in which I am. 
Even ""best-sellers"" contain a great many words I'm not able to translate into Swedish, and I often have to look them up in a dictionary. 
More often, however, I don't look them up as you understand the meaning in the context of the text.  
I consider my skills in listening to spoken language as good as in written one. 
As long as the speaker has got an accent to which I'm familiar, I've got no trouble what so ever to follow. 
I've noticed, however, that I do have a harder time to understand a British accent than an American one. 
This becomes quite clear to me especially when I'm watching TV. 
Considering the fact that I've been exposed to the American accent daily for a year in my youth, and additionally watch American Shows on TV in much greater extent than I watch British ones, it does make sense to me. 
Talking of accents, I would like to cover my skills of speaking, in the meaning of my own ability to speak English. 
I remember coming back from the US with a fluency in spoken English I'd never had before. 
I went proudly back to school, as I still had one more year to attand before graduation, being proud of my improvement in English. 
The teacher, on the other hand, made it immediately very clear to me that she didn't approve of my American accent. 
British accent and spelling were all what she accepted, and was therfore on my back all the time. 
I was very unhappy about this, I still am, because it mixed everything up in a way. 
I'm still, at this day, confused in the matter. 
I've noticed, especially when I speak, that I pronounce words different all the time. 
I try so hard to get a British accent but I always end up speaking with a Swedish-British-American pronounciation which I'm not pleased with. 
Pronounciation and fluency in speech will be trained daily, among other things, at the University, and I look forward to recieve this training. 
I've realized that I need it.....  
Sitting here, writing the essay on the computer, makes this very moment a hitorical one. 
In what way, you as a reader might ask. 
Well, this is actually the first time ever I've written anything in English on the computer. 
I was introduced to IT rather late in my life, and didn't get the hang of it until a couple of months ago. 
It's not the computer alone I find a bit awkward, it's also the fact that I haven't written anything in English, especially not an essay, for many, many years. 
I honestly don't recall the last time I wrote.... anything. 
But once you get started it's difficult to stop as I don't mind writing at all. 
In fact I like it very much, and I'm positive about that my writing skills, and the other skills, will be improved during this term. 
Some things I've forgotten will come back to me, and other things I'll learn. 
There is no question about it. 
Or at least I wouldn't like to believe so.
",True
"I've always been interested in different sorts of languages, but I think that english is the language that has been the most fun during my years in school. 
I must also say that all the teachers that I've had, have affected me in a very positive way. 
That might be the big reason to why I want to become an english teacher. 
I've always had enjoyable english lessons and I want my students to get the same experience as I've got.  
When I think of it, I don't think it is mainly the teachers that has affected me, wanting to learn some more about the language and how to use it. 
Through the years I've done some travelling, and I think its the excitement in wanting to get to know other people and cultures that has made me curious. 
Also when I look at all the yars that has passed, I find myself among all the other students, sitting listening to a lecture as it has been on swedish. 
I mean...its just such a feeling to know that the brain or whatever there is inside, can just switch from one langage to the other and we still respond in the same way. 
Maybe it sounds a bit fussy in the way I describe my feeling about it, but I think, or at least hope, that I have made myself understandable.  
That is by the way one of the things that I want to develop about myself. 
The way in how to make the right expressions. 
I think it is hard to find the right words when I'm talking, I often put myself in a position when I just simply loose the words. 
The thing is that it doesn't have to be very hard words, and that both annoys me at the same time as it makes me very frustrated because I feel in a way that I can't make myself heard in the way that I want to. 
Also I sometimes find myself a bit insecure wether I should make a point of view or not when I think something is wrong, just because I'm afraid that I can't find the words. 
Don't get me wrong when I say this, because I don't look at myself as a shy person. 
But maybe the explanation about this can be that It's easier to get into a new language just to listen, than to begin to speak. 
In one way I think that I learn something new everytime I speak english with someone else, but also everytime I go to a lecture or an english lesson. 
There's always a couple of words that are new to my ears. 
One of the best things that I've done, was to live in an english environment, where I was more or less forced to speak english every day, (if I didn't set up a meeting with a couple of my swedish friends of course). 
Then what did I do? 
Well, like many swedish girls do, I went abroad as an au pair. 
I fell for an advert in a swedish newspaper. 
And just for fun I answered it without expecting to get any response. 
Anyway, a couple of weeks after the family had responded, I found myself sitting in an aeroplane, heading for London, to where I had never been before. 
My stay in this wonderful city ended for six months, and I learned a lot about myself, english people, the culture and of course a lot about the language. 
This was a couple of yars ago, but since I was there I have tried more or less to keep the english langage alive with reading english books, newspapers and magazines, something which is very good practise. 
I've never had so much difficulties when it comes to writing, and I find grammar quite fun, but that is always something that I have to ""dust off a bit"".   
Nowadays we get so much free through all television, (and soap-operas unfortunately...) but I can't say anything bad about it, because when we live in such a country as we do, we have to get to know at least one more language to communicate with, and then I find english to be the most important, as it is spoken all over the world.
"," Is television good or bad for children?  
Does children know that everything on the television is not real? 
Can we blame television for being one of the reasons for the increasing violence in society? 
Sweden is one of the countries in the world that have a large amount of television programmes that turns directly to children. 
The programmes are both educational aswell as fictitious.  
It is a fact that children learns a lot through television. 
Through their own fantasy, their non-real world and through medias non-real worlds, the children learns how to experiment with different identities and conflicts. 
They learn how to play with these fantasies in their own game or in real life, nad through their own action they will meet love, encourage, disappointments or other reactions.  
Of course television is good for children to a certain level and just as long as they have an adult that can give them some sort of guidance through the programmes and at the same time give them explanations to different events. 
It is not the television that has the responsibility to raise the children. 
Unfortunally parents of today have no time for ""quality time"" with their children and as a result of that many children end up in front of the TV.  
There is a lot of talk about whether television should transfer incorrect valuations and inspire to harmful actions. 
Does children really know how to create their own identity?  
I think that their own safety and certainty has a determining factor to whom they will identify themselves with. 
I also think that the social background and differences in knowledge and experiences really does matter when they choose a person they like. 
Children needs to get impressions from outside when they creating an identity, but I don't think that they should get as many impressions through television as they do. 
Children didn't have any problems to find their identity when there was no television.  
I don't think that children knows how to separate fantasy from reality when they are watching TV on their own. 
At least not when they are at a young age. 
For them the TV is like a magic window that reduces something that happens in real life. 
Programmes of today are fast and every now and then there is a commercial break. 
I think that film and television for children nowadays doesn't have the educational quality that is supposed to provide them with knowledge for a longer time. 
As a result of the high tempo and all the commercial breaks, they are not able to reflect and attach to all the features.  
I don't want to say with this that I think that we should stop children from watching TV, but as it is today I think that the focusing on violence has increased even in programmes for children. 
Film and television shows us too often how to solve problems and conflicts with violence and this, I am sure, has led to why society looks in the way that it does today. 
Of course we cannot blame all the troubles on media, but I think that a lot of it comes from there. 
We all live in a very demanding society and nowadays more people wants a career, it is more important, and at the same time we have less time for our children. 
But if we then want to use media as a ""babysitter"", why don't the media adapt the programmes in a better way. 
I don't think that it is the people that should adapt themselves to the media, it is rather the reverse.  
To prevent children from watching non- approved programmes there should be some kind of age limit when it comes to renting videos that has a more violent caracter. 
What I want to say with this is that this is solely a way to protect our children from getting the wrong impressions of real life. 
Their knowledge in how to behave should come from parents, relatives and their teachers in the first hand. 
Television has become too fictitious and should come in the second hand when the children knows how to separate fantasy and reality.
",True
" Why take the boat when you can fly?  
Ever since the human being discovered that you could travel to foreign countries by boat, the means of transport have been improved. 
The demand for fast transports has however increased. 
After some time you wanted to fly. 
You wanted to be free as a bird. 
The human being took the challenge to built airplanes and made it. 
The first ones were fairly slow and uncomfortable. 
By time has however the airplane's rapidity increased and the service to the passengers has been considerably improved.   
Today we live in a very stressed world and time has been much more important today in our society, then it perhaps was in former times. 
The current expression ""Time is money"" explains a great deal how we live today.   
To mention the medical treatment in the world the airplanes had had a positive influence. 
If it's an earthquake somewhere in the world doctors, medication and dogs can arrive very quickly to help. 
Many more people can be rescued thanks to the doctors' achievement at place. 
Another example is the transports of sick persons. 
People that have injured themselves abroad and have to come home fast for operation can do so if they can go by airplane. 
The same is for organtransports. 
These have to be transported incredibly fast so they still working when it arrives to the persons that are in great need of them.   
One negative thing about the airplanes is that the environment takes a lot of damage from the airplanes. 
This is something that should, even if it's hard, be improved. 
I don't know how but it should work, some how. 
At the same time the industrial boats leak out incredibly much oil in the world's oceans today and nothing good comes out of that either. 
Every ocean stops living, like the Mediterranean Sea already has. 
The world's environmentproblems got to stop!  
If you are a businessman with the whole world as your office you got to be effective. 
You have to make sure you get some contracts signed from different people all over the world, and to get those contracts signed you have to arrive to the different people and places pretty fast so they don't change their mind before you get there. 
You also have to come home to your company pretty fast so you keep the company's production rolling. 
You can't do this if you travel by boat. 
The boat is way too slow.  
A transport should go pretty fast. 
Especially if it's for example expensive goods that are transported to private persons. 
It won't do that by boat. 
Transports to electric companies that must have small electric products (ordering products) etc. has to be delivered to the company/ fabric quite fast so it wont stop in it's production. 
If that is the case people maybe loose their work just because the products hasn't been delivered in time.   
Fast transports are essential. 
By air the world's areas are shrinking and you have the possibility to have the kind of works that I have recently described, without the familysituation should be affected too much.  
The world's tourism has increased year after year. 
More and more people fly further and further away. 
Today you can travel to Australia by air at the same time what it takes to England by boat. 
Today you can travel by air over Europe and if you are headed to, for example, Greece you arrive at the same day. 
That's impossible by boat. 
This way you get a longer holiday. 
Now, some people say that they have their vacation at the boat. 
That's of course one way of spending your vacation but if you want a longer vacation abroad in a foreign country the airplane is the definitive solution!
"," EVALUATION English, My English  I have been studying English since fifth grade. 
I listen to English music every day, and almost every movie I watch is from Australia, the United States or the United Kingdom. 
So why can't I learn how to speak English properly?  
y accent is definitely my most significant weakness. 
I have more weaknesses when it comes to the English language, but I'm better at hiding the others. 
But sometimes I have to speak, and every time I sound terrible. 
I sound so Swedish. 
I haven't always been aware of my bad accent. 
None of my classmates in compulsory school could really speak English, and neither could I. 
But I was more interested in learning English then they were, so I felt pretty smart. 
But that changed. 
What was it then that made me realize I sounded like a lousy acter? 
I know exactly when I realized it and who the person was that told me. 
It was in upper secondary school. 
A boy in my class had written a poem in my calender. 
The first sentence was: "" Holy Mother Earth"". 
I liked the poem very much, so I read it to a friend in another class. 
Then a boy in her class started teasing me for the way I pronunced the first sentence. 
That was the first time I even thought about how I sounded. 
But since that day I have been trying to improve my pronunciation. 
I can't say I've succeeded. 
But I still try.  
It's much easier when it comes to reading. 
If I don't understand the meaning of a word, I always look it up. 
I think it's fun to learn new words, it doesn't matter in what language. 
I reacon I'll have use for them some day. 
I've never had any problems with reading. 
I read very fast, but I have to be concentrated. 
Otherwise I don't remember what I've read. 
But nothing bothers me if I read something interesting. 
(English or Swedish.) 
My mother had to deal with that many times. 
I just don't care about anything but what I'm reading. 
I don't even notice if the text is English or Swedish if the content is interesting. 
I guess that's proves that I'm used to the English language. 
If a text is difficult, I can't concentrate, I want to know the meaning of every single word. 
I can't just go on. 
What if the word is really important? 
I must learn the meaning of it! 
My vocabulary has increased a lot thanks to this. 
I've realized the best way to try to understand a word is to pronunce it to myself. 
Then I often recognize it. 
But it takes a lot more time for me to read an English text compared to a Swedish one, because I use the dictionary very often.  
What about spoken English then? 
Do I have any problems with that? 
I have never really thought about how I listen to English. 
I'm so used to it. 
I hear English most of the time. 
If it's not the music on the radio, it's the TV. 
If I just listen, it's the same as with reading something interesting. 
I don't recognize which language I'm listening to. 
After some of the lectures here at the University, I have to think"" Did he/she really speak English.?"" 
English is a part of the every-day life. 
For me, listening to English is no longer more difficult then listening to Swedish. 
But I have to admit I've had some trouble in the Grammar lectures. 
So many new words, and when I look them up, the Swedish translations are just as unknown to me as the English words. 
Except from that I need to concentrate more to understand all turns and jokes in English. 
It's easy to lose the thread if somebody changes the subject often. 
That is a problem I've never experienced when I listen to Swedish.  y difficulties with the English language can be solved nearly every time if I concentrate. 
I know the basics, and I learn something new every day. 
I wrote that reading has never been a problem for me. 
Neither has writing. 
I've written short stories in Swedish since I was a child, and I like to write. 
I have a great imagination, well trained when I was a child.(
= I made up rather unbelievable things.) 
I remember that I thought writing in English was difficult when I started upper secondary school. 
Probably because I didn't have the vocabulary I needed. 
But I had a great teacher that thought me very much, and she made us write a lot of summaries and essays. 
The best way to learn something is to practise, so I can't say I think writing is difficult anymore. 
There was one thing my teacher complained about. 
(Of cource I did more errors, but this always came up.) 
I often avoid difficult words. 
If I'm not certain of the spelling, and haven't got a dictionary, I prefer to exchange the word rather then to try spelling it. 
Maybe because I've never have had any problem what so ever with spelling Swedish. 
If I spell a word wrong, I feel stupid. 
It feels like I've been trying to show off with words I don't really know. 
There are some words I always spell the wrong way. 
I always throw in an ""e"" too much in ""being"", I just can't remember not to do it. 
I have problems with writing short things. 
And I don't keep to the subject. 
But I guess I can't blame English for that...  
My weaknesses are not unusual, just the problems that occur when one deals with a foreign language. 
But I admit I could kill for a better English accent...
",False
" The distribution revolution  A burning issue in the world of music distribution today is the existence and usage of the computer program Napster. 
With the help of this program it is possible to share music files with other users of the program. 
The company behind Napster provides a database in which the users can search for what they want to download. 
The download itself is preformed only between two ordinary computers connected to the Internet. 
As the music is shared between private computers it's hard to control if the copyright of the music is violated. 
This is where the record companies come in. 
They don't like the fact that their music is freely available on the Internet without their control. 
To protect their interests several record companies has filed a lawsuit against Napster in order to get the service stopped. 
It has not been stopped yet but Napster is probably going to get stopped in the near future. 
I don't think the record companies are doing exactly the right thing. 
I think that record companies should collaborate with Napster and use their technology as a new way to distribute music. y main argument for that the record companies should use this new technology is that it's impossible to stop this development with music sharing on the Internet. 
The Napster community has today about 51 million registered users and if it's suddenly stopped it will result in a huge demand for something to replace it. 
Programs with almost the same functionality as Napster already exist and it probably wouldn't take long before Napster would be fully replaced. 
Because of the reason that I just mentioned it's better to cooperate with Napster than just to stop it. 
I'm not saying that the illegal copying of copyright protected music is going to end but this is a very good opportunity for the music industry to reduce it and at the same time make profit form it. 
As Napster is such a widely spread program it makes it a good foundation for use as a new distribution channel. 
Napster would naturally have to be transformed into a membership-based community where the members either pays a membership fee or pay for the music that they download. 
Another side of the issue is the users, which I haven't mentioned yet. 
They will be forced to pay for something that previously has been free of charge. 
Naturally quite a lot of the users will stop using the service, but the ones who are willing to pay will see that it's not only a bad thing that they have to pay. 
If the users are forced to pay I think it's the record companies responsibility to make all their music available on the service. 
Then the users would have a much bigger selection of music that always would be available for download. 
In addition to that the sound quality of the music would be better as the only one who would publish music on the service would be the record companies which has access to better equipment than an ordinary home user. 
The scenario that I have pictured is actually beginning to happen. 
The big German media conglomerate Bertelsmann, of which a main part is the big BMG record company, has signed an agreement with Napster. 
This agreement is aiming towards a membership based community just as the one I have been discussing, but how this is going to be designed has not yet been decided. 
If this agreement becomes a success then Bertelsmann will drop the lawsuit that they currently have against Napster. 
I hope that all the other record companies will follow Bertelsmann's example and join them and Napster to create a community where all music is available for download. 
This would in the beginning only be a complement to how music is distributed today, but I believe that it's one step forward towards a different way to distribute music in the future.
"," The ""real life"" soap opera  A few years back a new kind of program appeared in Swedish television. 
At first there were massive criticism against the program. 
This was because of the fact that one participant in the program was voted out of the program in each episode. 
The other participants of the program made the outvoting and this was at first seen as offensive towards the person being outvoted. 
The criticism soon vanished and the program became very successful. 
The program I am talking about is ""Expedition Robinson"" which has been shown four times in Swedish public service television. 
Expedition Robinson is a program that can be classified as being a part of the new genre of documentary soap operas. 
In the last year Robinson, as the program usually is called, has been joined by several other programs in this documentary soap genre. 
Examples of programs are ""Baren"", ""Villa Medusa"" and ""Radio"". 
These documentary soap operas are my subject in this essay. 
I'm going to focus on different aspects of these kind of programs, namely who watch these programs - how does it affect them and also the very name documentary, is it really a documentary? 
I like to watch Robinson but I don't like the other programs that classify themselves as documentary soap operas. 
Maybe it isn't right to classify Robinson as a documentary soap I would rather call it a pure entertainment program. 
If we put the labeling of the programs aside it can clearly be seen that today's new documentary soaps have been inspired by ""Expedition Robinson"". 
They all have the same concepts with people applying in to be a part of the program and the fact that some sort of out voting and contests are performed. 
The thing that differ the programs is where they take place and what they do, it can be on an island or in a villa in the Alps. 
Now over to the question who watch these programs and how does it affect them? 
I have been giving this some thought and I have formulated another question that I will try to answer. 
Is it only stupid people who watch these programs or do these programs make people stupid? 
Or is this totally wrong? 
The reason that I ask this question is that I watched a part of the first episode of ""Villa Medusa"" and the one thing that struck me was that all the participants in the program acted idiotically. 
I didn't watch long enough to really find out if they were total idiots or if they just acted a bit silly in the beginning. 
I hope it is the latter one, but I'm not sure. 
The only answer I have to the questions that I asked before is that I probably am right in the last question. 
It' s totally wrong. 
It's not possible to label a person as stupid just based on what he or she watches on television. 
The second thing I don't like about these kinds of programs is that they are labeled as ""documentary soap operas"". 
I believe this is an abuse of the word documentary even though it is connected with the phrase soap opera, which is a much better label for the genre. 
To me a documentary is a film or television program that gives facts about something real like a historic occurrence not something constructed by a production company. 
I would like to rename the genre; a name like ""real life soap opera"" would be much better. 
As one might have noticed I don't like documentary soap operas very much. 
I think they are examples of bad television entertainment, which I hope will vanish as soon as possible. 
I don't think the genre has more to give, all the ideas appears to be too similar to each other. 
If this trend continues I hope that the ones who now are watching the programs will become enlighten and realize that it is bad television entertainment.
",True
" Is television dangerous for children?  
Is television dangerous for children? 
This is a question that has been discussed frequently for the last few years when the offering of television channels has increased explosive. 
Many people have probably reflected on questions like if we should protect the children from violence and if children can see the difference between video violence and real violence on the daily news. 
I think these questions actually don't have easy answers, but they are interesting to think about. 
Nowadays many films and television programs on TV are very violent. 
Video- and computer games can as well be very violent and nevertheless films on cinema. 
Today many Swedish families pay for cable channels that give a broad offering of channels day and night. 
Since the television channels have increased, more and more people are watching television. 
This is probably a reason for that people have started to discuss television violence. 
And many parents have probably thought this matter out and considered not letting their children watch everything on the television since they believe that it has a deleterious effect. 
In Sweden some animated films and series for children have actually been criticised for being too violent and shut off from Swedish television. 
Of course at many children's disappointment but at some parent's delight. 
But is television dangerous then? 
Should children be kept away from the fictive violence or even from the violence on the news? 
One possible risk with TV that has been discussed is that the children may imitate the violent people they see on TV. 
Most children at least identify themselves with the hero who takes action for good purposes and that may even learn them something good. 
I agree that television sometimes can be very violent and in many films shooting, fights etc. are what the whole thing amounts to. 
Considering this I don't believe that it could be stimulating or even fun to look at for any child. 
So I am of the opinion that we certainly need the censorship to avoid violent programs. 
On the other hand I think that most children know what is fictive. 
One positive way to look at this is that the children can conceal themselves behind the fact that this isn't real and that all these terrible things are only fictive. 
In that case violence wouldn't cause much fear among children. 
And the ""real"" violence on the news is actually something that can happen in reality. 
Children may understand this better than we think. 
And what create insecurity among children, real or fictive violence? 
If we shut off the children from the news then it would be like giving a polarised picture of the society. 
Anyhow, I don't think this is a big problem since most children not are interested in news programs for adults.   	
I think it is impossible to keep children away from television violence. 
The responsibility can not only be put on the television channels but also on the parents who actually have a very big part of the responsibility. 
As a parent or a teacher I think that the best thing to do is to talk about violence and explain why they use violence and the results of it. 
And if television is the main thing that triggers off the violence in the society we have a very hard thing to deal with. 
So we probably have to ask ourselves once again if there is a danger with watching television. 
And most important of all is to make children understand that using of violence is totally wrong.
"," ""The new order of things proposed"": Vision and Reality in Robert Owen's New Lanark and New Harmony.  
The Welsh manufacturer Robert Owen made several community experiments in the early 19th century. 
Two of them were the experiments in New Lanark, Scotland, and New Harmony, Indiana, in the U.S. 
New Lanark was Owen's first social experiment where he made a village with a cotton mill into a model community. 
New Harmony was a later attempt of Owen to create a self-contained community. 
In this essay I will present important aspects of these two experiments in order to compare them.   
In the early 1800's the Welshman Robert Owen, who was a partner in a Manchester firm, became a manager of the New Lanark mill in Lanarkshire in Scotland. 
Owen was confronted with bad living conditions as well as bad working conditions in the factory. 
Child labour was very common, theft was extensive, the workers had poor housing conditions in squalid surroundings and there was no education for children. 
Owen immediately turned the little village with the cotton mill as a nucleus into a ""welfare program"". 
Owen improved many conditions such as the workers' food, clothes, houses and the cleanliness in the factory. 
He prevented drunkenness by starting to sell alcohol under strict control. 
Best known is that he started an education for children.  
Owen agreed that all these improvements in New Lanark would promote the productivity of the cotton mill and thus the improvements fostered efficiency at the same time as they composed a type of social reform. 
Naturally the improvements of the community entailed expenses but Owen maintained that this would make the mill more profitable.  
Owen's main philosophy was that man's character is formed in early childhood, not by himself, but for him, and only by the environment. 
To create a good character man should be placed under good influences in the early years. 
Owen further believed that society had a responsibility to offer good living conditions and education for the people. 
By improving many bad conditions in New Lanark he offered the workers a better life. 
Owen agreed that he had changed the character of the New Lanark inhabitants by his alterations. 
The fact is that Owen didn't intend to change the New Lanark mill's basic character but he wanted to create new, better conditions in the mill. 
The children who were brought up in New Lanark were generally healthy and respected. 
The mill in New Lanark was very productive and became a success and a model community.  
New Lanark was consequently a mill that Owen turned into a community, which is in contrast to one of his later social experiments, New Harmony, which was rather a planned Utopia to which Owen gathered a number of people in order to put his theories, both social and economic, into practice. 
In this project Owen followed a new economic plan that he emphasised, where the size of the community was important from the point of view of production.  
In 1825 Owen bought a great piece of land in Indiana which he renamed New Harmony. 
His plan was to create a self-contained community, intending that the people would be self-supporting, producing their own products together with other co-operative villages. 
Owen believed that there was a special number of people (about 1200 persons) who could live in the community in order to keep it self-contained. 
Many activities in the community, such as eating and cooking, would be collective. 
Before the start Owen invited ""the industrious and well disposed of all nations"" to come to this community and be inhabitants. 
Many of those who came didn't turn out to be as willing to learn as the New Lanark inhabitants. 
The community soon ran into difficulties since people were at odds about the form of government and the role of religion. 
New Harmony was consequently a failure and didn't last long. 
Owen withdrew from the project in 1828.  
New Harmony was thus intended to be a model community which could live on its own and offer work to unemployed and people without housing. 
In this case Owen turned to more general problems of society. 
An aspect of this was to cure pauperism and unemployment. 
This was in comparison to New Lanark where more specific problems were in focus, such as improving factory conditions. 
However, both of the experiments were plans for social reorganisation, the later one being based on a self-supporting community. 
The social aspect was also apparent since Owen's experiments were focused on the lower classes of society. 
In his later experiment he wanted to decrease the widespread unemployment by setting up small communities; in New Lanark he improved the conditions for a number of lower-class people.  
Even if it was obvious that Owen was concerned with the economic aspects of his communities he always had in mind that man should have good living conditions. 
He believed that society had the responsibility to offer these conditions to the people. 
Since the factory is the dominant part in man's life it must be as good as possible so he can live in it, Owen maintained. 
However, his purpose of his experiments was upon the community and not on the individual. 
Owen's main philosophy, that man is formed by the environment and that he should be placed under a good influence, was something that he based all his work on. 
This was also something that Owen indeed tried to carry into effect by his social experiments. 
Happiness was a keyword for Owen's work: ""The object of all human exertions is to be happy. 
Happiness cannot be attained, enjoyed and secured, unless all men possess health, real knowledge and wealth.""
1 Owen experiments had a pragmatic way of working. 
He tried to form guidelines or propose reforms that would create a new social environment for lower class people. 
The fact is that his first attempt was a success while New Harmony didn't work in practice.   
1 Letter from Robert Owen to London Newspapers, August 7, 1817
",True
" ""The fifth child"", by Doris Lessing  I have read the novel, ""The fifth child"", by Doris Lessing; and I will discuss the theme of the novel; and also whether the setting is important to the theme or not. 
I will refer to certain pages when I discuss these questions, and the pages 28-31, will be very important. 
I will begin with the setting of the novel, and then move on to discussing the theme.  
The plot of the novel takes place in England, in a suburb to London. 
When the novel begins the year is 1965. 
Almost twenty years passes, and the novel ends in the beginning of the 80's. 
That means it starts out during the time of ""love, peace and understanding"", when people had a lot of hopes for the future. 
As the novel progresses, the times are changing. 
As we can see on page 29, the good times have gone. 
People start loosing their jobs, criminality is increasing and the world is becoming a scary place, where the cliffs between the rich and the poor are growing immensely wide. 
When turning to page 30, we can see that the Lovatt family, who are the main characters in the novel, as you know, are trying to protect their happiness by wanting to shield themselves from the scary world outside their fortress. 
Now, let us look into the social background of the setting.  
England was at this time very class-bound; and the norms that influenced the families, were the norms of he middle and upper classes. 
The extreme and the different was simply not acceptable, everybody was to live comfortably and in harmony, with nothing sticking out from the ordinary. 
David comes from a split-up upper class family. 
His mother and her new husband are both academics. 
His father is very wealthy, as well as the father's new wife. 
Harriet is also well educated, but her family seems to come from a ""lower"" social background than David's. 
When the fifth child was born, he did not fit in at all in the family or in the society; and therefore caused a crisis to which there was no solution, in many ways because of the setting that is intimately connected to the theme.   
The main theme of the novel, from my point of view, is what happens to the happy family when the fifth child is conceived. 
How Harriet goes against the norms of the upper and middle classes; and how the fifth child himself, and his gang, revolt against a society that has no room for them. 
Harriet and David's happiness is fragile. 
They are very eager to be happy, and are not prepared for anything bad ever happening to them, starting out as they do with the sense that anything is possible. 
Moreover, their happiness has been built up relying on others for financial support, paying for their life in the fortress of their house, coming from David's father and his wife, as well as help with the children, coming from Harriet's mother. 
They wanted to make a brake with the spirit of the times, as we can see at page 29, ""the greedy and selfish sixties"", but they do not really succeed. 
The theme reflects how a family can cope with the pressure put upon them by having a disturbed child, living in a society where there is no room for a disturbing element such as the fifth child, Ben. 
At page 31, we can see David saying like this: ""... everyone should have a room. 
Now, this is far from true, as David does not want to have anything to do with Ben. 
Molly says the same thing only we understand she does not mean what she says, which symbolises her values. 
The family falls apart and the only one who stands up for what is right, is Harriet, who gets blamed by every member of the family as well as by all the relatives.  
Harriet cannot except having her son rotting away at the institution; (an institution which very much reflects society's way of not giving room for people in need of help) and therefore she needs to go against the norms and sets of values within her family and with in the society. 
That is a society where the higher classes and the rich are in control, making little room for the less fortunate individuals, as I have already discussed when writing about the setting. 
By doing this she pretty much looses her whole family, who are unable to accept her decision. 
Ben, on the other hand, who really brakes with the norms of society, does actually find a room for himself among the other not socially accepted boys.  
In order to sum up these thoughts, I will now write a small conclusion concerning my main points. 
An abnormal child is born, which causes a crisis in the family. 
The family cannot handle the pressure this put upon them; and what makes it extra difficult are the norms that exist in the society, and within the family. 
These norms do not make room for individuals who are too different, or who have problems adjusting to the normal way of living. 
The scattering of the family is due to the society in which they live.
"," My strengths and weaknesses in the English language  Ten years after finishing high school, I am now to study English again. 
This time on a much higher level. 
It is time to evaluate what my strengths and weaknesses are.  
Listening In general I'm a good listener. 
For instance, while listening to a lecturer, I don't have a problem to focus on what is being said (unless the person I'm listening to makes the subject really boring, or when I'm very tired), and I usually understand the lot. 
My weakness is my small vocabulary. 
I think I scored about average on the diagnostic test I took on vocabulary. 
Since I did a lot of guessing, picking out the right words, it is reasonable to assume that my vocabulary is even below average. 
I enjoy watching English movies and I pick up on the language just by listening to it when I make the effort not to look at the subtitles. 
And of course by reading, which is what the next part in this essay is about.  
Reading I like to read novels for the fun of it, but also other sorts of literature about various kinds of matters. 
Therefore I believe the literature course and the social studies will be easier for me than other courses. 
My weakness in this course is, once again, my lack of vocabulary. 
It slows down my reading a great deal, but the pace will increase the more I read, as well as my vocabulary. 
I think I'm fairly good when it comes to interpreting novels, short stories and poems. 
My strengths are the fact that I enjoy reading and that I usually understand the content, irony and humour.   
Speaking y strength when it comes to speaking English is that I'm not afraid to make mistakes. 
I'm here to learn and of course I'm not perfect from the start. 
Moreover, I believe that my speaking ability will improve rather quickly once I start practising on a daily basis. 
I find the rhythm of the language and the accent, more difficult to learn than the pronunciation is.  
I am very rusty though, I haven't spoken English since high school, like I said, and then it was almost just about answering questions. 
The problem is that there is a limitation to what I can talk about with my present vocabulary, and that I don't have the right intonation.  
Writing y writing skills are very difficult to evaluate; I don't really know what my strengths and weaknesses are. 
I know that I can't be that good at it, since my vocabulary is limited and my knowledge in grammar is bad. 
I think that grammar is very tricky, it is probably my number one weakness. 
I have some advantage though, since I studied Swedish grammar last year.   
My ability to focus on a subject is fairly good, but it can become better. 
I've written a lot in Swedish and maybe that is also an advantage to some extent. 
I find it rather difficult to write this essay and I imagine it will be even harder when I have an intricate subject to write about. 
My strength would be my ambition to learn and trying to get it right.   
Conlusion To bring this essay to an end, I will now summarise my different strengths and weaknesses in the English language. 
My lack of vocabulary has a negative effect on all parts of the language. 
My difficulty with grammar naturally has a negative effect when it comes to writing and in some ways speaking. 
(Needless to say it will give me a lot of work at the grammar course). 
I am not accustomed to speaking English, which of course will make it difficult from the beginning. 
My strengths are my faculty to learn languages and my ambition to do so. 
I hope that I will be able to transfer my writing skills in Swedish to my writing in English. 
My interest in reading will help me through the continuous work increasing my vocabulary, as my general interest in English will help me through all courses.
",True
"Over the years I've come into contact with the English language in different ways; through school, traveling, lectures held in English, literature etc. 
Not to mention the everyday exposure from television and media. 
These factors all have affected my competence in using English in different situations. 
In this essay I'm going to evaluate my skills in the different areas concerning the English language. 
I'll begin with my listeningskills. 
I love listening to English. 
It's like music, so beautiful and dramatic and it's spoken in so many different ways throughout the world. 
I don't have any problems understanding everyday English, but of course it's harder when it comes to old English, some dialects and technical language. 
I think that watching television is a very good way of listeningpractice. 
(I do that quite a lot.) 
Not only do you get to hear the language spoken in many different contexts, but you also get to hear many of its variants meaning British-, American- and Australian English, dialects etc. 
This is something you can not get at school to the same extent where it's mainly your teacher's English you hear. 
Of course the best thing maybe to travel around talking to different people, but if you don't have that alternative television will do. 
Next I will discuss my readingability.  
Although I enjoy reading books in my spare time I have to admit that I haven't done much reading in English, at least not fiction. 
But seeing that I'm studying Biology at the university and all our courseliterature is in English I've got lots of practice reading scientific texts. 
I think there is a difference though. 
Once you've learned the necessary terminology of the subject you're reading (which can be quite heavy), it's not hard to understand the text because they usually use common words that you are familiar with. 
Fiction on the other hand has a much more varied and expressive language with many words meaning the same thing but having different intensity. 
Here not understanding the meaning of a word can cause you to miss a feeling or mood in the story. 
Therefor I tend to get stuck on single words in stead of just read and focus on grasping the content. 
On the whole I think I'm doing fine and I can only get better at it with all these books to read in this course. 
No I will come to my two weakest points; speaking and writing. 
Speaking first.  
I haven't got much practice speaking English. 
I was a bit shy at school so I didn't really say much in the Englishclasses. 
I haven't been to any English-speaking country either and the little English I've used in other countries doesn't count for much. 
So this is something I really feel I need to practice. 
I think I have a rather good vocabulary but I don't feel quite confident and comfortable when I speak English, so that's my main goal with the speaking-classes. 
Here too I think watching television has a positive effect. 
I've learnt many expressions and words through listening and then when I speak these can pop up without me remembering memorizing them. 
That's pretty fantastic!  
I've probably done more writing than talking in English. 
We wrote quite a lot at school and I think it's great fun. 
Even so I don't think I'm as good at it as I would like to be. 
I think they should be focusing more on writing at school because when you write you have to be more aware of things like grammar and sentence structure than when you talk. 
I think you'd become a much better speaker by becoming a better writer. 
As fore me, I think I have pretty good knowledge of grammar and as I said before a good vocabulary, but I'm really not good at spelling (I have the same problem with the Swedish language by the way). 
So that's something I'll have to work on. 
I know that writing will improve my spelling but I also think that by paying more attention to the spelling of words when I read I'll get better at it.  
Now I've done my first writing-assignment for this course, evaluating my Englishskills. 
Hopefully I'll learn a lot from it.
"," Exercise: Good for your body and mind  Great demands are made upon people today in form of long working hours, home and family. 
Many people burn themselves out and get ill. 
There are different ways of dealing with the stress we are exposed to and one of them is to exercise regularly. 
In this essay I am going to bring up some of the many positive effects exercise has on us physically as well as mentally but also discuss some negative aspects.  
Like I said there are both physical and mental advantages of working out although the physical may be what first comes to mind. 
The body consists of about 300 different skeleton muscles, some more prominent than others. 
Their functions are to stabilise the joints and of course to enable movement. 
If a muscle is not used it will eventually get debilitated and in the long run wither. 
Since we live in a world of convenience, where we really don't have to move much and tend to spend a lot of our time in front of the TV or the computer, training our muscles to maintain their strength is very important. 
To be able to handle our often quite sedentary jobs without suffering from sore backs, stiffness and similar problems we need strong supporting muscles. 
The heart is also a muscle, which needs to work to stay fit. 
When exercising we increase the capacity of the heart, that is the heart is able to pump more blood with each beat and that way it doesn't have to work so hard to keep the blood circulating. 
This and the fact that we by exercising can avoid overweight helps preventing cardio-vascular diseases which are getting more and more frequent among people today due to the fast food, semi-manufactured products and in many cases lack of knowledge about how to keep a healthy diet.  
Besides muscles we also have bones in our body, about 200 to be more exact. 
Between the bones are different joints that allow us to flex and extend for example our legs. 
If we don't get some exercise the joints stiffen and make it harder for us to move, we become less flexible. 
Our skeletons get strong and stabile from workout. 
The bones gets thicker and obtain a more efficient nutrient input due to the increased number of veins providing them with blood.  
Now I've pointed out some positive physical effects of exercising, but we are also affected positively mentally. 
Like I said in the introduction exercise is a good way to deal with stress which get more and more important in our fast moving society. 
Many people use exercise as a form of meditation since it is quite easy to let go of all thoughts while working out. 
So a good workout helps the body and mind to relax and afterwards we feel good about ourselves and we have got new energy to face our lives. 
The fact that we function better, I think, is a very good argument for companies to introduce the possibility for the employees to exercise during working hours.   
Even though most people know that exercising is good, there are still many who for different reasons don't exercise. 
Only 56 percent of the adult Swedish population workout on a regular basis. 
One reason people might have not to exercise, is that they feel they don't have the time. 
This argument is untenable. 
It's not necessary to go to a gym or to head out on hours-lasting runs. 
It can be quite small things like walking or taking the bicycle instead of going by bus or car. 
Using the stairs instead of the elevator and things like that. 
A negative side of exercising is that if it's overdone, done with wrong technique or if things go wrong we might get injured. 
But if we exercise in moderation, keeping our bodies fit actually decreases the risk of us getting hurt.  
So the advantages are greater than the disadvantages.   
I've tried to show some of the positive effects exercise can have on both our bodies and minds and that it can help us cope better with the every-day life. 
It's important to find a form of exercise that suits us and that we enjoy. 
The main point is that we should have fun while exercising otherwise it would just become another source of stress. 
I workout at 'Friskis & Svettis' three times a week and I enjoy every moment of it. 
I hope I have inspired someone to start exercising.
",True
" English, My English  Introduction This essay shows upon the strengths and weaknesses of my English, divided in four skills: listening, reading, speaking and writing. 
I have in certain areas presented a solution to my problems, my weaknesses. 
I've also mentioned what I want to acchieve with this course and what to do with my acquired English.   
Writing I've always been better expressing feelings and thoughts in the written form than in spoken word. 
I think the reason is that when I write I can take a break from the words and come back later and correct the wrongs, use different words and phrases, really think through what I want to say, one thing you can't while you are speaking. 
But as I write as I think, and think as I speak, the words doesn't always come out right, grammatically and spellingwise. 
When I write poems and lyrics a fluid language and knowledge of the words is very important. 
So, even though grammar is very difficult and sometimes incomprehensible, it is of extreme importance that I study it thoroughly.   
Speaking y heart throbbing at the speed of light, face turning red, and self-confidence getting weaker by each heartbeat. 
That is how I would describe myself minutes, seconds before I am to speak in front of a big crowd. 
Since English isn't my native tongue, my fluency, along with my limited vocabulary, is the bigggest problem. 
The lack of word knowledge, knowing the Swedish words in English and the right way to use it, I feel is very hampering when expressing my feelings and thoughts. 
I also found that my thoughts differ from my words, so the spoken word is something that I don't master at this point. 
I can only hope that it's something that I can improve, that I'm not stuck with this social handicap. 
To improve on my pronunciation I'm reading out loud from and old Time magazine, practising my accent. 
I have found that Swedes often tend to talk with an American accent, which I find sometimes irritating and sometimes amusing, imitating their heroes in Beverly Hills, 90210 or Days Of Our Lifes or some other TV-series. 
My goal is a mix of Peter O'Toole, Malcolm MacDowell and Alan Wilder (former member of Depeche Mode). 
You can call it a slightly overclass, old-fashioned English accent.   
Listening When the subtitle is removed and I have only to rely on my ears listening, instead of my eyes reading a text, I usually understand everything except for the odd word here and there that's not in my vocabulary. 
Where I'm staying at the moment there is a English newschannel that I've started watching, so I not only listen to English, I get up to date what's happening in the world from an English point of view. 
The best thing would of course to spend some time in an English speaking country. 
To really dig into the language, discovering the little nuances that separate the native from the tourist.  
Reading Except from one or two books read in high school, my reading habits has been limited to Swedish books. 
But as a part of the literature course, I've read two short stories and a novel and beginning on another. 
I've also borrowed three books by P.G. 
Wodehouse, finished one and halfway in on the other. 
Since the language in the latter books is old-fashioned and filled with lots of upperclass slangwords the big picture is rather clear, but the details that increases the understanding of the text is harder to grasp as they don't turn up in the dictionary, being short for something or having a different meaning than usual.  
Conclusion I have to improve my speaking, mainly in large groups. 
My writing must be improved upon so my lyrics and poems reaches the level of accuracy that I want. 
That is my primary goal with this course, to improve my writing. 
So grammar is something that I have to study with the utmost attention, how boring I may seem. 
To achieve a larger accuracy writing English, reading books and listening to English programs is a step in the right direction. 
Constantly being exposed to the country's language is the best way to acquire another language.
"," Money, a symbol of happiness?  
There is one main focus in the society of today and that is money. 
Getting more money, losing money, the use of money, the lack of money. 
So in this essay I will point to the different aspects of money, the use of it and what it can lead to. 
I will also point to certain things to start to change our views of money.  	 
It is easier to measure happiness and success when you have something that symbolises all of these things. 
Our symbol is money. 
We are constantly reminded of the importance of money when people in developing countries are starving and lack access to water, the number of homeless people in industrial countries is slowly increasing, hospitals not being able to give proper care to patients, schools suffering from lack of funds that interfere with teaching. 
All of this when executives of multi national companies collect sevenfigure paycheques. 
You can clearly see the shift in balance. 
What can you do with a salary of $5 million that you can't do with a $2 million salary? 
You may point out that there is much responsibility and stress in to top of large companies, therefor the large sum of money given to its bosses. 
But is it fair to give that much money to people that have made that choice of stress and responsibility, when other people don't even get the chance of choosing, and get little, if any, money? 
I don't think there is anybody that thinks different, from a human value point of view. 	 
But that point of view is not always used when looking upon money. 
All you can think about is what you can do if you had the money, or reversed, what you can't do because there isn't enough money. 
It permeates the entire society, or should I say Western culture society, although it has spread like a disease to other continents outside North and South America and Europe. 
Even into places not at all connected with money, like the Shoaling temple in China. 
Even those old institutions, one never thought would be adapted to capitalism, are being swept along in the tide that is capitalism.  	 
While these ancient pillars of wisdom are evolving into a money-based system, the society is being divided into three groups; a social elite at the top of the pyramid, more and more separated from the common people; In the middle of the pyramid you find the middle class; And the working class is situated in the lower areas of this power-pyramid. 
The distribution of money is reversed, with huge sums given to the top of the pyramid, the middle class taking what they can get their hands on, and the remains thrown to the masses like crumbles from the king's table. 
If this regression is to continue, we may in the near future equal money with life and prosperity and increasing crime and bad health with poor people, people fighting to get their hands on enough to stay alive, robbing from each other, killing each other. 
As the situation is now, all criminal activities can be linked to money, in a direct or indirect way. 	 
Crime is directly connected to money in that way that you either want money or something that is very valuable, something you can't buy. 
In that quest for money, people get hurt. 
Victims suffer both physically and mentally damages, while the criminals can be sentenced to capital punishment in many countries. 
All of this for pieces of paper that we decide are important. 	 
I think, that instead of dedicating our short lives to the search for money with all its hidden dangers we should pursue personal happiness oppose to the longing for more and more money that is generated. 
But as long as the symbol of money stands for success and happiness, we are stuck in old habits. 
We should try to distance ourselves from the money, realise that it's just a piece of paper, a symbol. 
That it's not in any way connected with happiness. 
Then, and only then, we can start to develop the idea of equality for all.   
Conclusion 	 We have to change the current system unless we want larger differences between rich and poor. 
If we want total equality for all we have to start by changing the view of money that most people have. 
That of ownership. 
You don't own your money, you're just borrowing it for a while.
",True
" English, my English!  
It has been two years since I last studied English, that was in the last year of upper secondary school. 
In some aspects it feels like I have developed my English since, while some other qualities I will mention later have declined somewhat. 
When it comes to terms of writing I really feel it has been a while since I composed for example an essay... 
Anyway, I will try to present to you shortly how I personally experience my skills in this beautiful language.   
To start with listening I have to say it varies a lot how well I perceive and understand English spoken around me. 
There is of course the difference of dialects depending on where you are or what television/radio programme you are listening to. 
Some times, while listening to the television since I have not had the opportunity to live in UK for any longer time, I find it very hard distinguishing the words in British speech. 
Probably this is due to the fact I mentioned above, that I have not spent enough time in a British environment. 
On the contrary, American English is, to a very large extent, what we hear on Swedish television and so it is ""easier"" to understand. 
Not that I am saying that I always grasp the connection anyway, but I think the occasions are more rare when I do not understand American English. 
Another contributing reason to the above mentioned is that I last year lived in an American family for a period of six months when I spoke English to them daily and watched English television. 
I think this affected my ability of listening, but even more it improved my speaking skills which I am now going to discuss. 
Speaking English in general I feel quite confident doing. 
I do not have any problems what so ever making contact with people using the English language. 
This confidence I have achieved mainly when I have been abroad and naturally forced to use the language. 
In school I often got cold feet when we were supposed to keep a conversation going. 
With my high demands I wanted it to come out perfect - I thought the fluency should be there only I opened my mouth. 
But of course it was not,- it never is if you do not practice the language. 
I think I learnt that being abroad, just the fact that it does not have to be perfect as long as people understand what you mean. 
So in that sense I am not as afraid of speaking any more.  
But in some situations that require more specialised vocabulary or just a broader range of vocabulary I can feel that I lack confidence a little bit.  
Vocabulary in particular but also grammar are weaknesses of mine, but the good thing about speaking is that you can more easily than when writing avoid what you do not master so well simply by choosing another way to say the very same thing. 
There is also a negative side to this, I have found studying myself, and it is that you easily stick to the words you already know without putting much effort into learning new ones. 
That is why I think keeping up with the reading is very important to learn new words.   
I have always been very fond of reading and actually consider it to be one of my best skills. 
Of course reading English literature results in a lot of looking up words, but I do not mind that because I know it is useful and I need all the vocabulary I can get.  
I think reading is in close connection with writing. 
That is, you benefit from having read a lot when you are supposed to try and express yourself in written context or when it comes to proper spelling, which is quite a tricky issue. 
I would like to call myself a quite good speller, but English is a language with queer spelling. 
Lately I found that my spelling is not as good as it used to be, an indication, I am sure, that I have read too little English during the last year. 
This is even more underlined by the fact that I found it pretty hard writing this essay.   
Finally I would like to say that it has been a pleasure writing this essay. 
It has made me bring up my weaknesses such as lack of vocabulary and certain grammar skills, but it has also reminded me of things that I am good at. 
Regarding the reading I am really looking forward to having to read novels instead of, as it often turns out, not having time to read them. 
I know that I need that as well, to practice reading in order to improve my skills.
"," Why spoil a good mother to make an ordinary grammarian?  
Until the middle of the nineteenth century female education in Britain generally took place at home. 
While the sons of a family mostly were sent away to school to receive costly education, girls were basically taught social skills in the home by the mother of the family or a governess or in some cases in local church schools. 
Anyhow, it was quite an informal education. 
During the last decades, though, an opinion had emerged among reform-friendly people that girls and women should be given formal education more or less equivalent to that of boys and men. 
Soon enough, this was possible owing to the new forms of secondary schools that were founded in the 1840s. 
This started other processes as well, such as a debate on whether women should be granted admission to universities and colleges or not. 
Accordingly, these reforms and suggestions to reforms provoked lots of discussions and many voices were raised over the subject formal female education. 
My aim here is to give you an overall picture of the different opinions on this matter. 
One group generally positive to formal education for girls and women was established middle class families. 
This because they could teach their daughters necessary social skills at home and also thought that the girls would need proper education to be able to become suitable wives and mothers capable of teaching their children good morals. 
This social group also felt the threat of the newly rich trying to join them on the social ladder, - they felt that they had to protect their social superiority. 
To be able to ensure this superiority, they needed excellent governesses to prepare their children, and especially sons, for school. 
This demand resulted in the founding of a college for educating governesses, and once this was established it was evident that also women teachers needed further education, and that the whole system for girls schooling was insufficient. 
Another category arguing strongly for formal female education was that of feminists and other reformers. 
They claimed that the superficial education given was completely useless. 
Women should have the right to the same standards of education as men. 
Society would benefit from educated women as well as it benefited from educated men. 
Another point they made was that an educated woman would be able to support herself if she never married. 
Even though these two groups had strong arguments and actually managed to develop female education, the greatest number of arguments represents the opinion against female education. 
To begin with, there were those who used this ethical argument that a woman's lot in life is to exist for the sake of others. 
Her aim should be to be the embodiment of unselfishness. 
Furthermore it was considered that education should ""prepare the individual whom it influences, for filling her appointed station in the best possible manner"" (Ellis, p.1) In other words, Ellis considered it completely futile to send girls to school to learn things they never would find use for later in life. 
She goes on explaining that in school we learn to compete and be selfish, while in real life (in the 19th century) qualities like that were hardly desired in women. 
Also when it comes to the achieving of social skills she gives a long explanation why the home is preferable to the school: ""In cultivating a taste for what is refined and beautiful, in the acquisition of general knowledge, as well as in that of easy and agreeable manners (...) it is impossible to imagine a young girl more advantageously situated than in a well-regulated home, and surrounded by an amiable and well-informed family (...) 
(Ellis p.6) Among all those ideas opposing that women undertake the same higher education as men there was the common belief that men and women had different, innate, intellectual qualities, and that women simply were not meant to interfere with politics or other things that demanded constructive thinking. 
Both men and women supported this belief, we can tell from this quotation from a woman: ""There is a natural inferiority of mind in women - of the intellect (...) we are under your feet, because we cannot stand upon our own."" 
(Burstyn p.15) It was also considered that women totally lacked creative powers. 
This was proved, they thought, since there were no great female artists like Shakespeare or Mozart. 
Because of this, it was very rare that women got the chance to receive higher education. 
People reasoned that since women still were not capable of doing any creative work, why waste money on educating them? 
Something else supporting this idea was contemporary anatomical studies, or perhaps even more the conclusions anthropologists drew from them, that intelligence was in proportion to the size and weight of the brain. 
This was obvious since children have smaller brains and undoubtedly are less intelligent. 
As we all know, men's brains are larger and heavier than women's and so it was ""proved"" that women were less mentally developed than men. 
By this argument they wanted to show that woman should not undertake the same education as men, because she did not have the capacity to do it.  oreover, there were arguments opposing higher female education based on the fear for what medical consequences it would lead to for the woman. 
It was said that ""The logical, philosophical, scientific woman is not the ordinary type; she frequently - we say it with all delicacy, and yet truthfully - departs from it in her physical as well as in her mental characteristics."" 
(Burstyn p.17) Note the indication on physical disabilities. 
This was a general understanding these days, that when women exhausted their brains, it had a negative effect on her health, and in fact, this could also make her infertile. 
There was of course no way this could be scientifically proved, but that fact was effectively disguised by the prudishness of this time, the Victorian era. 
It was not a topic suitable to discuss openly, and therefore it was supposed to be understood and accepted without further inquiries. 
Beneath all these arguments presented, there is one main, underlying thesis, namely that allowing women formal education would result in a change of the ideal of womanhood that existed during this time. 
This ethical argument is very basic, declaring that according to natural laws women and men had different premises, and women were supposed to have a moral and spiritual influence which would be destroyed by an education equivalent to men's.  
In conclusion, looking at these different aspects on the establishment of formal female education, it is evident that those fighting for it had a huge opinion against themselves. 
The arguments against female education were in many cases the reflections of this era, believing in the female role as the one of a house angel, with social and moral skills as the most cherished attributes. 
However, those working for female education gained ground, a lot owing to the tendency of middle class families to educate their daughters.
",True
" Echelon - Eavesdroppers Galore  Privacy, freedom of speech and freedom of opinion are some of the most jealously guarded rights of people in democratic countries all over the world. 
Democratic governments, at least those in the 'western' world, are presumed by their citizens to adhere to those basic principles of democracy. 
Citizens who have suggested that 'Big Brother is watching us', have generally been dismissed as paranoid conspiracy theorists. 
As it turns out, they may not have been too far from the truth. 
The last few years have shown news items about a global spy network, nicknamed Echelon, operated by the US National Security Agency with the co-operation of the UK, Canada, New Zealand and Australia.  	
Echelon is a fully automated intercept and relaying network that listens for certain keywords and catch phrases in Internet and telephone traffic, satellite communications and radio transmissions. 
If a transmission contains a keyword that the system is set to look for, it will be forwarded to a human operator for further scrutiny.  
The system was originally devised to gather signal intelligence from the east bloc during the cold war, but has grown enormously in scope since that time. 
It can be used today for completely different tasks, including industrial, financial, and political espionage against virtually every nation, business or individual on earth that has access to a communications network of some kind. 
The inherent dangers to such a system should be evident. 	 
The dangers lie not so much in the way Echelon is used today (although it is hard to determine the extent of its use; the nations involved are very secretive about its functions and how they use it), but in how it could be used. 
Claims are being made that the five nations trade intelligence information gathered through Echelon with each other, to the extent that they actually spy on one another's citizens. 
In effect, this would mean that in the case of the NSA, the fourth amendment to the constitution of the United States has been completely bypassed. 
A citizen of the United States should not be subject to investigation unless there is probable cause, and even then, he should not be subject to a search of his person or premises, nor should he be tapped unless so ordered by a court of law. 
Echelon taps everybody, all the time, and there is no one to turn to with complaints. 
The NSA does not spy on its country's citizens, but e.g. the UK does. 
The UK then shares the information with the NSA, leaving the issue of legal jurisdiction muddled. 
Should these allegations of crimes against the constitutional safeguards prove correct, one could argue that the totalitarian system of government in Orwell's '1984' is unpleasantly close. 	
We might not be controlled by Big Brother yet, but there are alarming tendencies. 
The only way to foil the Echelon network is to encrypt any and all information that is transmitted electronically. 
Strong cryptography is essential for online privacy. 
The best known cryptographic software available to private consumers is PGP, Pretty Good Privacy, written by American programmer Phil Zimmerman. 
PGP is free, easy to use, and offers good privacy for Internet communications. 
When Zimmerman first released PGP to the public, he was sued by the American government on the charge that releasing such strong cryptographic software to the enemies of the United States was a threat to national security. 
The charges were eventually dropped, but the international version of PGP does not offer as strong cryptography as the one for use in America and Canada.. 
Apparently, the NSA does not wish to be impeded in its eavesdropping.  	
Echelon is designed specifically to eavesdrop on everyone that uses any form of electronic communication. 
Its operators seem to be less than interested in following the laws of their respective countries. 
It is a serious threat to individual as well as corporate privacy. 
Should the allegations currently lodged against the Echelon operators turn out to be true, the only right thing to do is to move for immediate termination of the network in its current form. 
The violation of privacy inherent in the system far outweighs any advantage.
","This is an essay about my English competence at this point. 
As an introduction to the topic I'm going to give you some background information about my experiences with the English language through the years, from the start in Primary School and till today. 
Then I'm going to make a conclusion and evaluate the knowledge and skills that I have gained from my English education and experiences. 
The skills are divided into the following areas as writing, reading, speaking and listening. 	
I started to learn English in 4th grade in Primary School, and I remember that I was really excited about this challenge to get the chance to learn a foreign language. 
In the beginning we were learning English mostly by singing and playing. 
I liked it very much and it was a wonderful start to get acquainted with the language before starting to concentrate on writing and reading. 
Later when we had got some basic knowledge and could use some common phrases, we were able to set up sketches and scenes in the class. 
These scenes were often dialogues collected from our English Textbook or certain situations like for instance at breakfast, in the restaurant, in a shop, at the zoo etc. 
It was fun and we got the opportunity to learn to speak in an active and different way, which got us to see the clear context instead of only reading the texts in the books without any connection to real situations. 
Our teacher always spoke as much English as possible in the English lessons and that was also something that made us pupils more interested and trying to do the same.  	
In Secondary School the English studying was getting on a higher level and with emphasis on writing, reading and grammar. 
We read a couple of books and articles to write reviews on. 
The homework often consisted of a text and words, and the common way we got examined was of writing sentences with the words to show the meaning and get them in to context.  
This time was good practise for my reading and writing but I was lacking the speaking part. 
Our teacher didn't give us much opportunity to speak and use our English in the classroom. 
She was very energetic and ambitious, but I think she forgot the most important part - speaking. 
My experience tells me that you improve your skills and vocabulary a lot by discussing and explaining things to other people. 
I have been travelling some in Europe on holidays but I haven't spent any longer time in English-speaking environments, which involves that I have mostly been practising my English in school.  	
The English education in Upper Secondary School was primarily based on a lot of grammar, reading and writing. 
We worked often in pairs with grammar tasks and read texts aloud to each other. 
But now I have realised that we didn't really improve our English that much, because we just did the assignments automatically and didn't get any feedback from the teacher. 
Here was the speaking also the part that I lacked, because we didn't really speak that much English and that also included our teacher. 
This involved that I didn't improve my speaking much during this time, because I wasn't challenged to use the language in real situations.   
I have always liked learning languages and especially English, which was the first foreign language I got in contact with. 
I have also studied German and Spanish, which have helped me a lot to learn the grammar and then to compare the differences between the languages. 
So I think I have quite good knowledge of basic grammar in English, spelling and translating. 
But I'm not used to write essays. 
I have studied at the University for two and a half years and in some courses we have had literature in English. 
I like that and don't think that it's that difficult, maybe some terms. 
I'm used to read quite a lot of books, but not English fiction though. 
I thought it might be tough, but I like it and feel already that I have improved my comprehension a little and learned many new words only by reading some novels the latest month.  
I feel that my understanding of listening to English is pretty good, and one of the reasons is that we are surrounded by English most every day on television, radio, Internet, music etc.  
I can manage with my English today but I would really like to go abroad to improve my vocabulary, which would make me feel more comfortable and fluent in speaking.
",False
" Who is to take care of your children?  
When the days of maternity leave are racing towards an end it is time to make up your mind. 
Who is to look after your child now? 
There are plenty alternatives: you could for example choose to continue staying at home or, if you are dying to get back to work, maybe start off with part time? 
Other options are day care centres or child minders. 
The decision might not be as easy as you first thought. 
In this short arguing essay I am going to deal with the different matters of child minding with the main question: Stay at home with your child or use day care centres.   
Of course there are not always as easy as to only make up your mind. 
Maybe you have only got one or two options due to the supply or the standards of day care in your area of living. 
Maybe you have relatives or friends who are willing to help you out or maybe it is as simple as this: you do not have any work to go back to. 
There are as a matter of fact innumerable ways to solve this problem. 
As I cannot deal with them all here and now I will return to my main question at issue: day care or house wife (man). 
To me the answer seems clear but I will try to give you some of my arguments.  
At a day care centre (which by the way sounds much more institutional than the Swedish word ""dagis"") the child will automatically learn to manage without ""mummy and daddy"" but still look forward to being picked up by the end of the day. 
It is more fun to come home and find your own toys and books after a day away from home. 
At day care the matters of sharing things and playing together with other children comes naturally and, from my point of view, this makes the child more outgoing and open minded. 
This, as well as the fact that the child gets used to trusting other adults, are very strong pro-day care arguments.  
Even though there are no doubts as to my own opinion I can understand people who argue staying at home with your child is the only right thing. 
I can understand their views but I do not fully agree. 
One might not think it is fair to a small child leaving her in someone else's care, away from home. 
The home is a protected and secure place for a child, yes, but what happens when one day it is time to go to school and mummy will no longer be there? 
Is that fair to your child?   
Another point is that if you stay at home with your child you will get a better understanding and contact with her, being able to follow her every move and achievement. 
I agree but only because you do not see your little ones for seven hours it does not mean you are missing out on their childhood or that you are being a bad parent. 
You still have lots of time to spend with your child.  
When it comes to seeing other children one might argue a mother (or father of course) can attend lots of activities with the child were other children are included and in that way introduce ""playmates"" to the child. 
It is not the same thing though, as learning to deal with friends and not-so-good-friends on your own in day care centres. 
That brings up another good thing about day care; they also do lot of activities such as going to swimming pools, theatres or simply different playgrounds. 
How fun for the children and how easy for you!  
Of course nobody should choose day care only because it is easy. 
You have to feel confident about someone else taking care of your precious child and you must not have bad conscience when you finally have made your mind up. 
Fortunately different solutions suit different people and we all have to accept that. 
You never know what will happen in the future but I might become a proud house wife. 
I just want to kill the myth about mothers being obliged to stay at home nursing children in stead of making a career. 
You do not have to make the choice between your children and your work, not with the exceptional day care facilities we have in Sweden today. 
It might sound like day care is ""the hard way""; to find friends, taking turns, not getting all the attention but being one in the group and getting the help needed. 
The hard way so is it, but it will all come to use for the child in the future and in the end your child will be happier and more open.
","In this short essay I will try to give a brief outline of my knowledge and experience of the English language. 
I will assess my strengths and weaknesses in the four basic skills of speaking, reading, listening and writing. 
To make this easier to relate to I will start off with filling you in on some of my background details that has to do with English. 
I suppose I have always had a great interest in languages.  
In grade 7 to 9 I had an extremely good teacher who contributed with a lot of the enthusiasm I have for this language today. 
She was not a native speaker but no other languages than English were allowed in the classroom and she took her task of teaching very serious. 
After first year of Upper Secondary School I chose to take a break in my studies and go to England as an au pair. 
My year in London was superb and I learnt English almost without even trying. 
I attended two English courses during that time, one on the Advanced level and one on Proficiency level.  
Back in Sweden I started my second year of Upper Secondary in the Bilingual Social Science Programme at Ekeby school in Uppsala. 
I graduated in June 1998 and after spending the summer with my English family in France (in their summer home) I was offered to work as an English teacher for 9 to 12 year olds in Tierp. 
So, that is what I have been doing up to now.  
After all this practising I consider myself a good speaker of English. 
When I first came to London I felt rather unsure and made mistakes due to pure nervousness although the family I stayed with praised my speaking from the beginning. 
You know how it works, after a while you forget all about trying to speak correctly and it comes naturally to you. 
Other people I met in London thought my accent sounded South African or sometimes Australian. 
When my year had passed I went on holiday to Chicago and everybody there found my accent truly British. 
I quite liked that actually.  
I have also done a lot of speaking English in my two last years of Upper Secondary School as about two thirds of our lectures were held in English and all literature were English too. 
I don't believe I have any problems expressing myself or getting understood in English. 
I have had great use of this now when I was teaching. 
The pupils truly appreciated me speaking in English to them at all times and it was very fun to see how they understood more and more week by week.  
When it comes to reading I here too have a great use of the years in the Bilingual Class. 
I am now used to all sorts of reading English. 
Skimming through an article for information, studying hard for an exam, reading a homework or just reading for pleasure. 
Nowadays I prefer to read fiction in English at all times. 
I find it more exciting and sometimes a bit challenging. 
Reading English out loud is another thing. 
When I feel confident I almost like to hear my own voice reading and I fall right back into my Queens English accent. 
But, at other times I find myself sounding like a complete fool and that makes me feel like I lost everything. 
Anyway, I love reading but probably need to be more confident in reading out loud.   
Actually I love listening to English too. 
Good English that is, and sort of on my vocabulary level. 
I have to admit it is not very amusing to listen to a conversation from which you can only distinguish much more than a few words, although this must be a very good way to learn new vocabulary. 
I usually don't have to much trouble understanding people in everyday speaking but when it comes to listening comprehension tests it is not so obvious any longer.  
I find attending lectures held in English instructive but sometimes hard. 
An important thing is that you mustn't allow yourself to get stuck on a word enjoy it. 
I have a great imagination and the words just come so easily to my head. 
Writing is something I possibly would like to work with in the future so I guess it would be worth putting some effort in getting better.
",True
"INTRODUCTION  This essay is about my strengths and weaknesses in English. 
I haven't used my English for five years so feel a little bit rusty in every area, writing, speaking, listening and reading. 
There is one common theme in all of the paragraphs below, they will all going to mention my limited vocabulary, something I am working hard to improve. 
Another very clear problem is active use of the language. 
My passive skills are much better. 
Now let me introduce my English skills in the following paragraphs. 	 
LISTENING Listening is one of my strengths. 
That's mainly because one just can't 'avoid' English on television, it is part of everyday life. 
As long as the communication stays verbal I have absolutely no problems. 
I do have to admit that my limited vocabulary does cause some trouble every now and then, but only the words that are new to me, otherwise I generally understand what somebody is telling me. 
Although I don't have problems with listening, it's difficult to transfer the oral message into a written form. 
The problems caused by this problem will be demonstrated in the next chapter.  
WRITING Writing is one of the biggest problems that I have with English. 
My vocabulary isn't large enough. 
It's actually pretty embarrassing. 
That's why I use easy words. 
First of all I spell words terribly. 
I make very simple spelling mistakes. 
It's good that I have the word processor in my computer that picks out the worst mistakes, hopefully. 
Swedish disturbs even my written English. 
I can write really complicated sentences and then notice that there are words written in a Swedish way for example 'and' is written 'och'. 
Swedish grammar affects my word order, I am sure of that. 
I always want to put the verb in the second place in word order. 
It's kind of difficult to actually comment on word order at the moment because I've just started writing in English. 
I do forget write the subject or the verb of a sentence and I think that's because of my mother tongue Finnish or that I'm usually careless. 
The next paragraph will be dealing with a passive language skill and that is reading.   
READING Reading is one of my strengths. 
Although I have to skip over a lot of words, especially in academic books, I can quite easily follow the writer's ideas. 
I have to say that I don't normally have any troubles with reading probably because I've always been good at guessing the word because of the context. 
I've always read a lot of paperbacks in English, it's always a pleasure to relax with a good book.  
SPEAKING Speaking is one of my biggest problems. 
The problem is that I try to pronounce English with same rules that I use for Swedish. 
Because I've studied Swedish so much I know how important it is to have the right stress and rhythm when you're speaking. 
That's something I have to learn. 
I also have to learn the right quality of the vowels and consonants. 
Vowels cause me some trouble, especially if the word is long, I've problems finding the rhythm. 
One of my absolutely strongest sides is the courage to use the language even though it's not perfect. 
The only way to improve it is to use it. 
I haven't had so many possibilities to speak English in the past. 
I need to learn more words that I can actively use. 
The fact that my Swedish is so much stronger than my English leads to the fact that I can begin a sentence in English only to find that somewhere along the way I've changed to Swedish without noticing it. 
I hate it. 
They have so much in common, their vocabularies are so like and certain words are even pronounced in the same way. 
That distracts for me. 
It takes too long time for me to find the right word, and my speaking is not as fluent as it could be, mainly because of my limited vocabulary and partly because I haven't had the opportunity to use English as much as I would have liked.
","The ability to listen is probably one of my strengths in English and I think my listening skills are quite good. 
I don't feel there is any problem to follow the teachers thoughts in lectures and seminars. 
I haven't spent any longer time in England but there is a constant flow of English language on television here in Sweden and I think that is one of the reasons why I'm so used to hear English. 
Another reason can be that my parents are from Finland and when I was a child they spoke Finnish when they were talking privately to each other and didn't want me to understand. 
Quite soon I learned to understand what they were talking about and after finding that out my parents began to talk Swedish to each other instead. 
Maybe this experience taught me to learn by listening or at least made my more open to foreign languages.  
The next big part of the English language is reading, and I knew there were going to be a lot of reading the coming term so I thought that it would be a good idea to begin a little bit earlier with the recommended books. 
When I first started do read, I were convinced that I'll never make it through this course. 
It took me an enormous amount of time to get through just a few pages and I felt that I missed a lot in the text. 
After a while I noticed that it was getting a little bit easier and that it's the first pages that are the worst ones. 
After a while you get familiar with the vocabulary and the authors' way of writing. 
It still takes a lot of time for me to get through a text but I hope eventually that it will go faster and that I will feel more confindete in myself. 
One thing I have noticed is that things like irony and humour is very hard to detect. 
In an informative text it's just to read and understand the words but in a literary text I feel that I often miss the underlying motive. 
I understand the sentences and the words but I can't ""see and feel"" the text like I do when I read a Swedish book. 
I hope this is something that will occur to me in time.   
The part that is called speaking is a very important part in the teachers program and I'm well aware of the fact that this is one of the things that I find very hard. 
The words just don't pop up naturally and I find myself looking for the word I want to express but often it's just not there. 
I am also well aware of the fact that this is because of a lack in my vocabulary and the best way to help myself is to read a lot. 
My pronunciation is sometimes good and sometimes bad. 
Most words I know how to pronounce but when I'm speaking it's hard to keep the tongue right in my mouth. 
When I speak really slowly the problem does not occur but when I have to speed up for example in a discussion it's harder. 
I'm convinced that also this problem is a matter of training.  
Spelling, pronouncing, and grammar goes together hand in hand. 
I know that many of my spelling faults depend on the fact that I don't give it enough time when I'm writing something and also the fact that I haven't been using my English for years. 
I think I often write in a kind of ""swenglish"". 
Like I said before I'm sure this will change when I get more practice. 
The first weeks or maybe mount will be hard work and making a lot of faults but in time it will get easier.
",False
" Television-to be or not be?  
What is there to say about television or rather what is there not to say? 
How could we benefit to the utmost possible extent from the phenomenon of television? 
Since it is all but impossible to escape television and anything connected to it, we must learn to adapt to it and use it according to our own wishes and needs. 
When we hear what other people think about television it is sometimes easier to structure our own thoughts and opinions about it and that is what I have tried to do and I hope it may bring some new aspects and angles to your very own idea of television. 	
First of all I would like to stress the difficulty you find yourself in when having to decide whether television is a positive or negative phenomenon. 
Probably it is a little of both, because if that was not the case the discussion would probably have faded long ago after some authority or other had decided upon television's to be or not to be. 
Imagine television would be abolished this very day! 
The thought is rather awkward and seems very implausible. 
A television-free society must be like entering a bakery shop and only be offered a small piece of hard bread. 
Hard bread for all it's worth but a delicious cake once in a while could enlighten our day very much with very little effort. 
So may television. 
Of course, this ""once in while"" may easily turn into an abuse that would captivate us in front of the TV too much. 
Many people surely spend more than half of their time awake in front of their television set, which is hardly to recommend since watching TV naturally involves a very sedentary life with bad health and maybe overweight as an effect to it. 
It is also easy to be isolated from friends and social life if too much time is spent in front of the TV.  
Television also seems to have a tendency not to portray reality accurately. 
Documentaries and news are often modified, leaving out the unappealing parts. 
Thus, if television were the only source of information, it would be difficult to achieve an honest picture of the actual reality. 
Fortunately television has not yet the monopoly of conveying news, nor the monopoly of any other issue. 
At the time being it is up to each and one of us to choose how much and what we want to watch and depending on our own choices we may benefit from a television offering substantial and educational programs and shows. 
The positive aspect of television lies perhaps mainly in this possibility to choose. 
If we choose a program because it covers a topic we are specifically interested in it brings only good. 
There are also different kinds of courses; in language, IT, business and much else, which are also all part of a positive aspect of television.  
Education and other serious matters are of course very important but we should not overlook the fact that television is to a great extent an entertainment phenomenon and to many people that is television's only purpose, to entertain. 
Some people consider television as pure entertainment though it ought to be more serious and deal with questions concerning global and severe problems. 
Once again the diversity and possibility to choose may be stressed to show that there are entertaining and frankly pathetic programs broadcasted, whose appropriateness and existing might be questioned but again this is exactly why they do exist. 
After hours and hours of hard work and nothing but sad or terrible news we could use some sort of amusement that does not demand much more than our physical presence. 
What we actually choose to do does not really matter, so the television set might be an opportunity as good as any. 
If looking back at what has been said here it pretty much confirms the fact that the questions about television will remain unanswered. 
Probably there will never be any definite answers but we will always have a lot of ideas and opinions about this topic and I am positive this is only one of many, but still unique, opinion about television and its significance to society.
"," Let kids try the game before they have to spell it!  
For the past few decades the importance of good education has increased considerably and lead to decisions such as letting six-year-olds or younger attend school. 
The sooner they learn how to read and write the better!?  
That is most questionable, indicating the children's need to be children and not having to make faster progress or take greater responsibility than is actually necessary.  
Being a child of six years or less, much time is devoted to explore the closest surroundings and adapt to a suiting role in the family. 
It's hardly fair to put them in school, forcing them to sit still for long periods and obey their teachers, who are too few in numbers and thus not able to prevent or end the, more oftenly, noisy and unpleasant environment. 
To some children this can be very distracting and they get very worked up missing out on individual progress, as persons, as well as on apprehending what's taught in class.  
The actual knowledge achieved in class can also be discussed. 
Authorities want a complete curriculum with Swedish, Mathematics, Science, History and even English! 
Despite lack of literacy in Swedish they are meant to learn English. 
(Making sure they are familiar with the language, so a third language can be introduced as soon as possible.)  
This easily creates greater gaps between gifted and non-gifted children, which is already an extensive problem. 
For both groups the higher demands are often connected to more responsibility which at this age are simply too much to ask for. 
Self-criticism, low self-esteem, loss of faith and apathy towards education, are common effects on this, unfortunate aim for great progress.   
Thus, accounts must be taken for mental effects as well. 
So far it has all been focused on the educative aspects, but the children's ability to adapt socially, can by no means be left out.  
To start with, leaving the safety of the home can be very bewildering, as being away from the parents, who has been their only fixed point in life, so far. 
Put in school they're thrust into a miniature society with fix rules, expectations and set models. 
They are deprived their own chance to experience and explore this fascinating life itself.  
If they're given the possibility to spend more time at home with their parents, that would create a more harmonic and natural environment for all parts, the parents indulged in a well-needed brake from the hectic working life, as an example.  
A last aspect to this is the financial aspect, which is profitable as well, since expenses for education; teachers, materials, food, buses, will decrease and the individual family could profit from lower taxes, and possibly smaller amounts on fashionable clothes, contributions to school trips and other activities.  
This part might be contradicted by many, since a lot of people probably think there'll be a loss of income if the parents spend more time at home with their children, instead of working, but with active planning of ones' work that can be prevented.  
The opinion, of many opponents, that not attending to school and having too much freetime and lack of settled daily routine would invite them to adopt bad habits, can only be defended by the fact that the parents are present and regulate these factors.  
Knowing, most of us want the best for the children and their future it is quite clear that school attendance should not be commenced by the age of six or earlier. 
They would become more harmonic, distressed and happy if they could spend more time in their home environment together with neighbourhood friends and parents. 
Life is precious and should not be wasted or hasten through. 
Make it possible for kids to see what life is really all about, before it has passed them by.
",True
" DUTY-FREE IS VITAL FOR THE BALTIC SEA  I do not regret that I voted for EU and not against it but having said that there are many regulations that EU has conceived that I just cannot understand. 
For instance European Union has decided to cease the duty-free sale in the Baltic Sea. 
As far as I am concerned there are not any particular reasons for putting down the most important industry in the Baltic Sea except that this sort of opportunity is said to be unfair for the other EU-countries. 
Although mentioned above some drawbacks of EU, I would not have any hesitation to vote for it again but this argumentation is not about EU but the sea trade between Finland and Sweden.  
I have doubts that they have not considered the consequences throughout in Brussels. 
If the duty-free sale finish in 1999 like it has been planned it will be a catastrophe. 
To whom, might one ask, and the answer is to everyone, that is, Swedes and the Finns. 
First of all there has been a lot of emigration from Finland to Sweden and vice versa. 
So for us who has to travel back and forth, these ferries offer us a great possibility to visit our families and friends with a reasonable price. 
There are of course aeroplanes but the difference between the prices is enormous and for example for me flying is absolutely impossible despite the student loan.  
One can ask what has the duty-free sale got anything to do with travelling across the sea. 
Well, there is a logical explanation which is that the shipping companies make the profit by selling lots of duty-free products. 
Ferries survive because of the duty-free sale opportunity and not because of the ticket sale, tickets cost basically nothing.  
So, what will happen if people will not travel by ferries when losing the possibility to buy cheap items? 
Unemployment will increase. 
Employees lose their jobs, which would be a disaster for approximately 5000 workers. 
Shipping companies cannot afford to keep all of their workers if there are no passengers.  
The Baltic sea ferries are popular among the emigrants and immigrants but also among people who just want to relax for few days and cannot afford to travel all the way to Spain. 
Taking a cruise is a cheap way to get rid of the normal routine. 
Ferries offer lots of entertainment for all age-groups. 
There are for example restaurants, bars and nightclubs. 
Passengers can do some shopping, eat well and dance until four in the morning with help of cheap pints and fancy cocktails. 
Bearing in mind the employment situation, ferries also offer different sorts of jobs for the musicians and magicians, in one word entertainers.  
The alcohol consuming is quite high in Scandinavia. 
Finland and Sweden have their alcohol monopolies and prices are high. 
If EU refuse individual's privilege to buy duty-free alcohol it will lead to a situation that a home distilling will increase worringly. 
Also smuggling will grow which will develope certain problems. 
People will commit crimes first of all by smuggling alcohol and secondly by selling it forward.  
There are not any ways to close down the Baltic Sea trade. 
There are different solutions to keep this duty-free possibility by changing the routes. 
This means that if there is a route from Stockholm to Helsinki, which takes about twelve hours, they will change it in a way that the ferry goes to Tallin first and then to Helsinki. 
In that way people can buy duty-free products because Estonia is not a part of European Union. 
This voyage would take two or three hours extra but it would be worth it. 
Also Iland has a special situation being an autonomous island which helps ferries to retain the duty-free sale if pulling up to the harbour.  
Duty-free sale in the Baltic Sea gives a condition of ferries' excistence. 
It would be a disaster for everyone if a duty-free sale did not exist. 
It would be a catastrophe for me to lose this chance to travel in low-cost back to Finland. 
I do not have anything against aeroplanes but the fact is that living abroad for a year means that my luggage weight so many kilograms that I am not even allowed to enter the plane with all my stuff. 
Ferries also offer a great opportunity for the Finns to travel easily to Europe. 
I do not certainly want to lose ferries and the duty-free sale and believe me I am not the only one.
","According to the number of years that I have studied English, one could assume that I would be able to read, speak, write and communicate with other people without having any massive difficulties. 
I really do wish that it would be that simple. 
In a way it is true that my English is in a stable state where I am confident to use it in every day basis and also to be able to study dissimilar subjects in English. 
Regarding to the fact that I come from Finland and my mother tongue is so unlike comparing to the other languages explains somehow my incomplete knowledge from foreign languages. 
In my native language, Finnish that is, we do not have for instance any prepositions or articles. 
These grammar dissimilarities creates insuperable barriers for me that has perhaps something to do with my laziness and a lack of concentration. 
I presume that I have not even learned the basic things throughout even though language teaching is highly appreciated in Finland. 
I guess that learning a new language properly from the beginning, in this content English, would have helped me to achieve a firm and a strong standard that I would be able to use English in sort of a native way.  
If I start with listening I am happy to inform that this particular skill is presumably my strongest. 
During the few years I have had a chance to be in a sort of environment that people have used different accents and dialects that I have become accustomed to listen. 
Certainly I have to admit that even still today I have to apologize occasionally when I am not able to comprehend despite my background abroad. 
But then again it is quite logical that I have to ask people to repeat themselves because I am a foreign and I will never become a fully bilingual person. 
Besides one has to be really careful when listening for example to a strong Scottish accent or if having a conversation with a real Paddy. 
Separations between different accents are enormous.  
Apparently my reading comprehension is rather good as well. 
When reading a newspaper, a magazine or a book I do not need to reach out my dictionary although there are words which meanings I do not have a slightest clue. 
But that does not matter because one is able to guess their meaning of the context. 
Reading in English would be quite simple if having a vast vocabulary because the alphabets are normal if making a comparison to our Scandinavian alphabets. 
Usually what happens during the language learning progress is that it is much easier to imbibe passively everything new than produce the new language actively by yourself. 
Generally people might be afraid of using the new language or feel embarrassment if making mistakes. 
That does not happen to me because I seriously do think that as long as I am able to socialize with people with my incomplete English is all that matters to me. 
I do not bother when I realise that I have made some easy mistakes or my pronunciation has not been perfect.  y writing skills are rather insufficient which really annoys me because when ever I do write essays or even just letters to my mates abroad I feel myself disabled. 
My capacity is not adequate and I do not have any talent for writing and believe me this negativity has nothing to do with my low self-confidence. 
The weakest point in my English is the academic writing. 
I do not know how to use long and sophisticated words which would link a subordinate clause and a main clause easily together. 
The structure in my written English is poor which is sad to admit but that is the truth.  
After all these years of studying English and using it in practice and yet not having more fluency with it, leaves me disappointed with a great frustration. 
The fact is that English is a quite complicated language but still I should have learned it better. 
Unfortunately I have come to a conclusion that my knowledge of English will not come to improve. 
I have not given up yet and I refuse to do so in the future but I am sure that this enormous frustration will continue no matter what.
",True
" Why hunting is necessary  A never-ending discussion in Sweden these days is the question whether it is right to kill and eat animals. 
In the centre of this discussion is the production animals such as cattle, pigs and poultry. 
I am going to concentrate on another debate, a little more peripheral, which concerns the game and our right to hunt and kill it.   
Hunting has a long history in human evolution. 
We were hunters long before we became farmers. 
Today no one has to hunt to survive though. 
Instead hunters are often seen as a bunch of merciless murderers (primarily men) who kills innocent animals for their own pleasure. 
Even people who eat meat themselves can ask me how I can stand killing an animal in cold blood. 
The irony of that question sometimes makes me want to laugh since it is my opinion that all humans participate in killing the animals they eat. 
The only difference is that I, as a hunter, do it openly.  
One of the problems all hunters including me have is that we do it for fun. 
There is no denying it. 
For people who do not know hunting this may seem to be the same as enjoy killing. 
Before anything else this has to be straightened out. 
The killing of the game is only an extremely short moment of the whole hunt. 
The lifestyle of hunters includes so much more. 
I have a friend who crawled around on his stomach for several hours just so he could get a chance to shoot a goose. 
He failed and had to go home empty handed. 
If his only interest had been killing he could have chosen something easier to hunt. 
Bringing up a dog, watching it grow and training it to be able to use it as a hunting partner someday is also a part of many hunters life which involves no killing.  
Enjoying hunting may be an emotionally important issue in this debate, but practically there is something more important. 
While humans has taken over the land and used it for farming the predators in our land, bears and wolves for example, has been almost extinct. 
In many parts of Sweden there are no natural enemies left to balance the numbers of our bigger games such as elk and roe deer. 
Hunting is therefore an important part of the game-preserving. 
Economically it is very important because of the damages that wild animals make to the growing forests. 
Keeping an even and not to big fauna is also necessary to control different diseases, which can be spread both to humans and dogs.  
Practical and economical reasons are easy to discuss. 
The ethical part whether it is right or wrong to kill animals for food is harder. 
Personally I think we have that right. 
It has to be under good conditions though. 
In the society we live in today economy determines a lot of things and the value of a good life often comes in second hand, not only for animals, but in some cases even for humans. 
That is why hunting is very important for me. 
The animals I hunt have, for good or bad, lived their lives as natural as possible. 
My biggest responsibility is to kill them as clean as possible. 
That responsibility seems to be too much for some people to handle. 
There are always going to be persons who hurt animals when hunting because they are careless. 
The majority of the hunters in Sweden have a good education and a lot of common sense and care for their game, as they should.  
Personally I only hunt animals that I eat, but I do not object to people who doesn't follow this. 
The increase of tourist and business hunting frightens me because I am afraid those persons may not always have the right knowledge that is required for safe hunting. 
This argumentation will probably not convince the real anti hunters but I hope it can spread some light for the common people who never been in touch with the lifestyle of the hunters.
"," TV-the nanny of the 21th century  Since it's entry into our homes in the mid 20th century the TV's role in our lives has grown. 
Today it is the role model for many young people, who watch the world mainly via the screen. 
The TV, instead of parents, has become the one to tell us what is important, how to act and what to look like. 
As a result kids are getting fatter from lack of exercise, while anorexia is spreading. 
Children are getting killed by other children. 
How can it be that such a great instrument for learning and understanding has become our biggest enemy? 
any kids learn from a very young age to deal with the TV at home. 
They know how to handle the remote even before they've stopped using diapers. 
After a couple of years Nintendo and Playstation takes place under the TV, alongside with the video or DVD-player. 
Why do parents allow their children to spend so much time with television? 
The answer is quite easy. 
Kids who watch television don't run around and make a lot of noise and mess. 
The TV has become a nanny. 
The parents can do whatever they want to do while the kids watch TV or play videogames. 
I recently went to a party a friend was having. 
One of the guests had to bring her children along because she had no babysitter. 
To solve the problem she brought a video tape the children could watch so they wouldn't be in the way.  	
It may sound as if parents nowadays don't want to be together with their children. 
This is of course not true. 
The economy of a family often demands that both parents work full time. 
After work there is cleaning, cooking, washing and more that have to be done at home. 
Spending time with children becomes a low priority chore and family business has to wait until weekends. 
The question is does it really matter that kids watch a lot of TV? 
In America this question has been raised after a couple of serious crimes (murders) commited by young children. 
The blame is often laid on violent and bloody movies and video games, but is it really that easy? 
It is not right to assume that kids can distinguish between the real world and the world of TV and video games without someone to guide them. 
We have to remember that even if we are humans we are still animals as well. 
Just like other mammals our kids learn how to act by watching and mimicing grown-ups. 
There are other problems alongside the violence. 
TV very often has a narrow perspective of people's looks. 
On MTV, in soap operas and many other shows young people watch, the only way to look as a girl is to be thin, preferably with big breasts. 
For men it is important to be tall and muscular. 
As a result girls, not yet teenagers, want to operate their breasts, while boys are caught eating steroides.  
The responsibility for what kids watch on TV and how much they watch lies of course with the parents. 
To forbid the use of TV wouldn't really solve anything. 
One must not forget that TV is our biggest source of information. 
That makes it an amazing tool for doing things you normally could not do. 
Via the TV one can travel all over the world, meet all kinds of different cultures, learn languages, take trips thru time both to the past and the future and much more. 
When treated right it is a valuable tool in school as well as home. 
The problem is that our society today demands a lot from people. 
Everyone is supposed to do eveything everyone else does. 
There is no wonder kids are forgotten, since they seldom complain. 
If parents (and other grown-ups as well) take their responsibility and take better care for what children watch on TV and maybe even join them and explain things, the world might look different. 
It is worth a try because like it or not, we're stuck with TV.
",True
" Death Penalty - Legalized Murder  Death penalty is practised all over the world. 
Half of the world is still using it as legal punishment. 
It is mainly used in Asia and in Muslim countries but also in America. 
There are many reasons why the death penalty should be abolished. 
There are numerous arguments against the death penalty and it is difficult to point to any single fact or argument as the most important. 
Below are a number of extremely valid reasons why the practice of capital punishment should be eradicated. 
Capital punishment does not deter crime. 
There are several scientific studies that has failed to demonstrate that executions deter people from committing crime. 
People who commit crimes normally don't expect to get caught and therefore the threat of capital punishment hasn't got any deterrent effect. 
If someone wants to commit a crime severe enough to result in a death sentence he/she would be most unlikely to regard any consequences of such an act.  
Courts are unable to prevent accidental execution of innocent people. 
On several occasions innocent prisoners have been executed. 
There are countless cases where evidence has come up proving the executed person's innocence. 
An execution is irrevocable and should absolutely not be carried through unless the evidences are hundred per cent positive. 
Normally they never are. 
It has occurred too many times that evidence or some witness has appeared after trial or in worse, after the sentence has been carried out. 
Executions are sometimes torture. 
Prisoners who have been executed in the electric chair (in the United States) sometimes didn't die immediately. 
On some occasions the hair begun to burn or the eyes popped out of their heads. 
It has happened several times that a prisoner's heartbeat has continued even after the power had been switched off Race plays a role in who gets the death sentence. 
Death penalty discriminates. 
If the victim is black or white often plays an important role of whom being charged with capital murder or receiving death penalty. 
This means that those who murdered whites are more likely to be sentenced to death than those who murdered blacks. 
It's also proven that black murderers killing a white person runs a higher risk of being executed than white killers murdering a black person. 
Among the charged persons receiving a death sentence the majority are poor and they are usually members of an ethnic or religious minority. 
Executions are very expensive. 
It is actually more expensive to execute a prisoner than keep him/her imprisoned for life (which normally means 40 years). 
In Texas for example they can keep three persons in prison for life at the same costs as one execution.  
The alternatives are preferable. 
By ending a convict's life the state also eliminates the possibility of getting some important answers. 
What is it that transforms a man into a killer? 
How has the convict been affected by his surroundings such as family, neighbourhood, work etc. 
Maybe the answers would be to uncomfortable. 
Perhaps they would point at social injustice and racial discrimination? 
Maybe a long-term psychological investigation in some cases would show that the perpetrator is also a victim. 
Another argument for imprisonment instead of death is (maybe surprisingly) that it's an easy escape. 
It's agonizing and maybe painful during a brief moment but then it's all over whereas imprisonment for life under poor conditions with no chance of ever getting out seems far worse. 
Further, during the time of imprisonment convicts can be taught up as unskilled workers, giving them a chance to repay to society at least a small portion of the damage they've caused.  
It's my firm conviction that the death penalty is neither a humane nor an effective way of dealing with crime. 
It seems to me that this cruel punishment is a result of our desire of vengeance rather than to satisfy a need for justice and peace. 
The death penalty is nothing but an evident confirmation of the old saying ""violence begets violence"".
"," My most important piece of furniture  The most powerful influences in our communities is television. 
More people rely on TV than newspapers, radio and the Internet combined. 
In the following paragraphs I will discuss different ways television affects me and how the different programs make me feel. 
I will also reflect how it would be like having no TV in my life and speculate what I would do instead of watching television and weigh the pros and cons.  
I watch films, soap operas and talk shows first, because I love spending hour after hour in front of the television watching programs that in fact give me absolutely nothing but some kind of perverse satisfaction. 
Talk shows constitute a good example of this where peoples' personal problems make me feel good about myself. 
I feel good watching all the fat and dumb people in e.g. 
Ricky Lake and laugh at their problems and silliness. 
I also like dramas and Spelling-produced series where I can follow the glamorous life of rich and famous people and where I for an hour or two can enter into a world far away from the normal dull working day. 
However, these programs are plainly entertainment and I get absolutely nothing useful out of them and after switching the TV off I'm neither wiser nor dumber. 
I'm watching these programs only as a pastime. 
I have to admit that me watching mentioned programs is nothing I like other people to know. 
Therefore I only watch them when I'm home alone. 
When I hear the key in the door and someone is coming home I quickly swap the channel to the news or something else. 
I can't really explain this, it's just that I feel stupid watching junk. 
I watch news, documentaries and nature programs next, because in contrast to junk entertainment these programs after watching them, enrich me and make me feel that I learn some important things. 
Further more I also want to keep up with everything that happens in the world. 
I think watching TV is a good way of learning different things and get familiar to other cultures and ways of living. 
Almost everything I know about animals and nature for example comes from nature programs from all over the world. 
A good way of learning English is by watching TV which is something that can't be underestimated. 
When Swedes go abroad they often receive compliments for their good knowledge of the English language. 
Germans don't and the reason is -among others- that all foreign films on German television are dubbed. 
In Sweden this practice is nonexistent with the exception of some programs for children. 
Further more old and disabled people use television as a substitute for travelling thus getting a chance to explore the world from their living rooms.  
It's hard to imagine how my life would be without TV. 
What I would miss is firstly the news as I prefer watching them on TV rather than reading the news in magazines and newspapers. 
Pictures stick easier in the memory than text Secondly I would miss an easy way of relaxing and disconnecting my brain. 
Instead of watching TV I would probably read a book and that's not as relaxing as entertainment on television can be. 
However I must admit that I sometimes let the television control my life. 
If I for example follow a TV series, I can't plan anything else the day the series are on. 
The same thing may be said about films I don't want to miss. 
TV makes me very asocial. 
I don't think I would like living without television. 
Most topics of conversations revolve round things people have seen on TV. 
However it would benefit my studies having no telly in my house as I easy ""need a brake"" when I know something's on TV. 
To cope with all the daily stress and problems I really need to laugh at stupid people in Ricky Lake, dreaming away to the beautiful and rich in the soap operas and be carried away in some action or horror movie. 
My most important piece of furniture stays where it is.
",True
" Evaluation English, My English!  
When you write an essay in which you are to evaluate your personal strengths and weaknesses in a subject it's important to be objective and to admit that even though you might think you know that subject very well, there's always something that needs improving. 
In this essay I will discuss my knowledge in the English language pointing out what I'm good at and what I'm great at (sorry! 
I obviously mean not so good at). 
Well, let's get started then. 	 
I'm going to start off by talking about my ability to understand spoken English. 
I consider this to be something that I'm very good at. 
Of course it gets harder to understand if the one you're talking to has got a strange accent but that's a common problem I guess. 
As I've never stayed for any longer periods of time in an English speaking country and therefore not been exposed to hearing English day in and day out, I have tried to compensate this by spending considerable hours in front of the TV (watching television shows in English) and listening to a lot of English music. 
Some teachers might disagree with me when I give TV and pop music this much credit for improving listening comprehension saying that the language in the shows that young people watch is nothing but grammatically incorrect slang, not proper English. 
This might be true in some respects but I think that in order to successfully acquire a foreign language you have to be exposed to it as often as possible and that is where TV comes into the picture. 	 
The next thing that I'm going to talk about is my skills in speaking English. 
Having said earlier in this essay that I understand very well what people say to me I'll now try to figure out if I can answer them and indulge in conversation. 
My initial response when I asked myself whether or not I'm a good speaker of the English language was no, I'm not that good. 
I wouldn't say that I am terrible at speaking English though. 
I haven't got any problems in making myself understood but sometimes when I speak I get the feeling that my pronunciation slips up and my English gets a Swedish touch to it. 
In a spontaneous conversation it's sometimes hard to be grammatically correct when you are expected to respond quickly. 
I'm not worried about my ability to speak English though. 
I have no doubt if I just would spend some time in an English speaking country my accent would improve and I'd be more confident in speaking the language. 	 
Reading books in English is a great way to expand your vocabulary. 
Even though you might not know exactly what a certain word means you can always get a good guess of what it means by looking at the context in which it is put. 
This is one of the reasons why it is so fascinating to read books in English. 
I've always read a lot in English. 
When I was younger I read a lot of magazines (mostly comics and computer magazines) but as I became older and more interested in the English language I began to read more advanced literature. 
This has resulted in me becoming a quite competent reader of English.  	 
The last aspect of my knowledge in English that I'm going to talk about is my ability to write in English. 
I purposely saved this topic for the end of my essay because I thought I would then have an up to date feeling of how my writing is. 
This is the first essay I've written in quite a while so naturally I felt a bit awkward when I started to write it but as got into it I felt more comfortable. 
In the upper level secondary school we wrote quite a few essays in English and that has really helped me to improve my writing. 
I think it's a lot easier to write in English than to speak English because you can test different sentences and to a greater extent think things through. 
Writing is probably the area that suffers the most if you don't do it continuously. 
That's why your first essays of a term tend to be somewhat poorer than the latter ones. 	 
Hopefully this essay has managed to show my different skills in the English language taking up my strong and weak sides. 
As I've written this essay I have found that there are many things to improve. 
I can only hope that while I improve these weaknesses I'll find many more parts of the English language that will fascinate and interest me. 
So it's with great confidence that I look at my future studies in the English language.
"," Unhealthy Television  Almost 50 years ago, television entered our homes. 
The television came to revolutionize our living rooms, our habits and our life in general. 
A new level of entertainment was brought into our lives. 
A new way of understanding, a new way of being together and new way of thinking. 
Most people think of the television in a positive way. 
The TV is often seen as a relaxing entertainer, a demandless teacher and sometimes even as a beloved friend. 
But is TV-watching always positive to our lives or is there a higher end? 
That is what I would like to discuss in this short essay.  
The TV is by far the most popular medium. 
We spend hours and hours watching at it. 
Our children and our youth are watching more TV than ever. 
An evening in the sofa combined with a day in an office, which is a common work- or school enviroment, makes a day without much movement. 
Over time, this can seriously reduce your physical ability and make our body more fragile. 
Also, decreased energy consumption can cause fatness, which in it self will worsen your physical condition.  
Additionally, a passive life will cause mental tierdness. 
Tierdness car be really hazardous. 
It can cause physical problems, especially with your stomach and your metabolism It can even in some cases cause chronical musclepain. 
But more seriously, tierdness can cause serious mental problems like concentration-problems, decreased simultaneous-thinking ability and perplexity. 
Mental tierdness may even cause axiety and depression.  oreover, prevalent TV-practices can disturb your social life. 
Many people turn on the TV instead of calling friends. 
Instead of meeting and socializing with friends many watch TV on a Saturday night. 
This would not be a problem if the TV was an acceptable substitution, but it is not. 
Socializing is very important for our overall well-being and unfortunately, loneliness is an increasing problem. 
This often turns out as a negative spiral. 
Fewer friends means more TV. 
Furthermore, some debaters even claim that too much TV might lower the overall intellectual level.  
For instance, TV reports offer less analysis, less background facts and less information about the wider significance of news than newspapers do. 
Because of the TV-editors persuit of viewers they will give acion-news higher priority than news that is really relevant. 
The TV nature makes time more critical than papers in a book. 
Less will be said, fewer persons will be able to present their pespectives and the perspectives will be more abstracly explained.  
But after all, the viewer will be fully responsible for her/his own actions. 
I am not implying that TV-viewing should be forbidden or restricted. 
I just want to make you aware of the downsides of TV-viewing. 
With your reason, you will able to design your TV-practices for yourself.  
To sum up: Make sure that your TV-practice does not make you passive. 
Move, excercise and dance. 
Keep socializing with your friends. 
Use other mediums as a complementary to TV in order to gain better understanding of the world. 
Last but not least, if you have a healthy TV-practice, do not be afraid of watching TV. 
If you are aware of the risks, TV-watching should not be dangerous.
",False
"Some times I envy my mother. 
Not especially because her occupation is to teach - as a matter of fact, I am rather surprised that I could think about becoming a teacher, having grown up in a family full of teachers spending all their time preparing lessons, mark student essays and so on - but for her sense of learning different languages without any difficulties. 
I am certainly not like that myself! 
I have to get a real good sense of the language first and hopefully, after that, become able to learn more about the grammar rules and the structure of the language. 
During my time in school, I never particularly liked the English lessons. 
It was not that I thought it was unimportant and I would not had mind at all managing quite a few different languages, but I did not find it very exciting during the time I had to learn the language. 
I have tried to remember what we were taught during the English lessons, but I am sorry to admit that I can hardly remember anything except from a few fractions. 
I managed to get the grade ""3"", but I am sure it was not a very strong one. 
Listening to English was quite all right and I did not find it difficult to read English texts either, even if I almost never read any English books and would not have managed to read the daily newspaper with any great success. 
I do not think I was very much trained to actually speak the English language - at least not in a more freely way. 
Concerning the written English, mine was not very good either, even if I did write a few essays in school. 
I do not believe my knowledge of grammar was particularly good!  
I would not have been attending this English course if I had not been working in England as an au-pair. 
That time made me fall in love with the British English! 
It took its time, though. 
I know I improved my English quite a lot during my stay in England, especially in the speaking and listening point of view. 
I manage to speak fluently, even though it was not of course perfectly, and it was just on the phone that I sometimes still found it difficult to understand the spoken language. 
I was quite used to the English by the time I went back home to Sweden again and I remember that I was even using some peculiar expressions in Swedish the first days. 
My sister asked me where to put the tray and I answered, pointing with my finger towards the cupboard: because I had the English expression ""it goes there"" in mind. 
(In Swedish that sounds like the tray is walking away by it self...) 
I believe the situation confirmed that thinking in English was naturally to me by that time.  
I also attended an English course, ""the Cambridge First Certificate in English"" at the South Oxfordshire Technical College in Henley-on-Thames, where I was living with my au-pair-family. 
I believe it was a good idea to practice not just the oral use of the language, but also the written. 
I did not find it very difficult at that time - not even the written work - and I did not need to put very much effort in doing my homework. 
By the time I was going back to Sweden again, my English course was not finished yet. 
I joined the same international course in Uppsala when I was back in Sweden again, which made it possible for me to continue to get my graduation. 
At that time I met the next frustration; suddenly the English course seemed to be at another level - much more difficult! 
I had to work very hard to keep up with it. 
I was no longer surrounded by the English language 24 hours a day and I never used it myself either. 
No wonder I felt a bit anxious to open the letter with the results from the exam when it arrived in the letterbox. 
Never the less I did reach the highest grade - a big A! 
Ever since - it is almost 16 years ago now! - I have been convinced that my English is rather good and fluent (even though I very seldom get the opportunity to use it).  
Then, just recently, frustration number three occurred to me: I wrote the diagnostic examination to attend the English A-level course. 
I still can feel my selfconfidence shivering after the examination! 
I disappointingly found out that language knowledge certainly is not going to stay in your mind, like books in the bookshelf, if you are not using it! 
Of course that is so! 
How could I believe anything else?   
Well, at least I will not give up! 
I do want to learn the English language and I do want to become an English teacher even if I am very well aware of the fact that I have to work very hard to get there!
"," Legalisation of narcotics or not?  
The matter of whether to legalise narcotics or not has been lively discussed for many years. 
Despite that fact, it is still a current subject of importance not to be ignored, especially due to the lately increasing use of narcotics by the teenagers, as a ""weekend-ecstasy"". 
This is a rather complex topic to discuss, why I have chosen three main subjects to concentrate on:   Would the curiosity decrease and lead to less use of narcotics, if the drugs where legalised?   
Is it up to every single individual to make their own decision whether to use drugs or not - while no one else would have to suffer?   
The society already has huge costs referring to the use of alcohol, so why would alcohol be legal if narcotics are not?  
Personally, I find myself to be quite curious. 
I also want to make my own decisions as an individual. 
But still I am very determined that the legalisation of narcotics would lead to a terrible and unnecessary decay of the Swedish society.  
Even if I where curious enough to test narcotics, I do not believe I would be less curious if it was legal. 
On the contrary I think the legalisation would increase my possibility of trying narcotics, because it would be much easier to get hold of it. 
It would probably be considerably cheaper to. 
A legalisation would actually bring the message that ""narcotics can not be that bad - after all, it is accepted"", which would make even more people have a liberal view of narcotics. 
I am sure that would definitely lead to an increase of the use of it, according to many psychological studies.  
From another psychological point of view, it seems to be rather important that you, as an individual, feel that you have the possibility to make your own decision how to live your life. 
I agree, as long as your actions do not have a negative effect on other people. 
But this is just the point that makes the argument that ""every individual has the right to make their own choice whether to take narcotics or not"" is not a durable argument why narcotics should be legal. 
People might think that using drugs is really ""up to them"", no one else has to suffer. 
But that is certainly not true. 
The whole society suffers of many effects that could easily be referred to drugs. 
A considerable part of the criminality and health-care-costs and the costs of treating the lately escalating number of adolescent people who need psychological help due to the use of the rather new, and among youths very popular drug, ecstasy are just a few examples of the negative effects.  
The worst effect of how the use of narcotics effects people in the user's surrounding is the social one, I think. 
My best friend's brother has been using narcotics of different kind since he was about 13 (he is 36 today). 
He will never become a mature, responsible adult, even if he would succeed in getting rid of his addiction to drugs (one of the effects of hashish is that it stops the psychological development if used during the adolescent). 
His use of drugs has effected his whole family's life in many tragic ways, and it still does.  
Unluckily, the argument that every single person must have the possibility to make their own choice, advocating for legalisation of narcotics, is often considered to be one of the most attractive to the youths during their process to become free and independent individuals.  
One of the common replies to such an argument as I have mentioned above, is that alcohol also is one of the main reasons to this kind of problems. 
""So, if alcohol is legal, why should not narcotics be"", the advocates of the legalisation of narcotics would say. 
But, making one terrible mistake does not entitle us to make another one. 
It is true that we do already have a lot of trouble in our society due to alcohol, which is sad enough. 
But I do not believe in making alcohol illegal, though, because the use of it has such deep traditional roots in our history and I think this tradition with, for example, the ceremony to drink a toast to someone on a special occasion, would therefore be extremely difficult to change.  
Another point is that the decomposition of alcohol is much faster than that of marijuana for instance. 
Marijuana may remain in the body up to about 30 days. 
That would make it impossible to most people to actually use narcotics even in the weekends, if they are not going to be intoxicated during their time at work. 
If you drink alcohol in a Saturday evening, you can be pretty sure to be free from it in the Monday morning. 
But if you smoke a joint of marijuana, you will never know if you are going to have ""flashbacks"" any time in the following 30 days or not. 
I do not think that even advocates for the legalisation of narcotics would like to be operated by a doctor intoxicated by marijuana, ecstasy or any other drug.   
As I mentioned above, the whole society suffers already in many different ways due to drugs of different kinds. 
Legalisation of narcotics would make that suffering even worse, because it would increase the use of narcotics. 
It is also certainly not true that the drug-users do not effect any other people. 
The argument that narcotics ought to be legal because alcohol is legal can not be taken as a durable argument either. 
If we wish a society where most people are given the possibility to grow up in harmony and become empathetic and responsible adults who cares about other people, we have to make sure that narcotics will never be legalised here in Sweden.
",True
"So, now it''s the time for me to develope my English, and a good start from my point of view, is that I really love the English language both to speak and to write. 
I have noticed that when I listen to and just try to think in English, especially when I haven't done it for a long time, it almost at once feels familiar and (how shall I explain it?
;) funny, I just become happy to hear the language. 
English was one of my favourite subjects when I was in the senior level and that's probably one reason why I chose English as one of the main topic. 
And I really are looking forward to this time when I'm going to study English for about sixty points at the university. 
And as I earlier mentioned, I hope to learn a lot. 
In this essay, I will tell you a part of how I apprehend my strenghts and weaknesses in listening, reading, speaking and writing in the English language.  
To start with listening, I can describe my own opinion of my weakness when I for example listen to a tape, I can find it hard to follow when the speed is too fast. 
But otherwise when I'm listen to someone who just speeks directly to me or at least when it''s ""live"", I find it quite easy to understand. 
I remember when we in senior school and in high school did this hearings and were going to answer at questions afterwards and I found it difficult to remember every little thing, and I think that happened because I had some difficulties to follow, I felt like I needed more time to register what they said. 
But that's something I think is quite easy to learn by listen more in that form.  
Next skill is reading and to be better at it I think practise is what will be nedeed. 
Accordingly practise again. 
I haven''t read as much as I probably would have but now when I have started the first novel in this course, it feels good and I think I follow the content in it. 
By read a lot you learn lot's of new words because when something is unclear to you while reading, at least I have to check the words up, and it's therefore easier to learn. 
But it's the same problem in this skill as in the one before, I can find it difficult to understand while it's under pressure and there's a time limit. 
When you have to be ready in a decided time. 
Though I think this problem could be away by reading more and increase the vocabulary.  
About speaking, I have noticed that I use both the British English and the Ame-rican English in my talk. 
I prefer though the British English, it sounds much more real. 
To speak loud in front of new people, like now in the class when we don't know each other can be a little nervous but the solution might be found in more practise of speaking. 
Another ""project"" I have is to build up my vocabulary because I think I use the same words over and over again. 
It's kind of irritating when you really know what to say, but you can't find the word for it. 
But the positive part about me and my speaking is that I really think it's funny and I feel I develope all the time and that it goes pretty fast too.  
The fourth skill is writing, and maybe this was what I was most ""afraid"" of, comparing to speak and so on. 
But actually I find this funny too, and not as bad as I thought it would be, because when you haven't studied for a long time and not used the subject (for this occasion the English language) it seems to me anyway, be more difficult to write than just to speak. 
I can mention that I really love to write whatever it will be, in Swedish or in English, so therefore I'm very glad that this feels that ok that it really does, working with this assignment.  
This was a little about my strenghts and weaknesses in four skills within the English language, and to give you a short summery of it, it can be something like this. 
First I was telling you about listening in English, what problems I have doing it, and what I apprehend is positive. 
Secondly I brought up reading and what I thought was difficult and the opposite, a little easier, concerning it. 
Thirdly on the scedule were speaking, and the fourth and last, (eventhough not the ""worst in degree in difficulty"") according to me), was writing, in whom I likely the other skills, told you about my strenghts and weaknesses in this exciting, scaring, fascinating, sometimes lower your selfconfidense-feeling, but absolute in the end the greatest language in the world.
"," Let the girls talk  If you see a crowd with both boys and girls there are almost only the boys who are shouting at each other. 
It is also the boys who are laughing highly and loudly and do gestures widely. 
While the girls stands beside, just watching. 
But of course they are talking to each other as well but it is the boys who acts as the centre-figures. 
Some people think it is genetic that boys are more loquacious than girls while girls on the other hand are more sensitive, and emotional. 
I agree that we (men and women) are different in many ways and one could say that it depends on genetic results but I have also the strong feeling that this problem is built up by humanbeings decades back. 
I think one important issue in school today would be to encourage girls to stand up for their own beliefs and make their voices to be heard. 
This could be a step in the right direction towards equality among men and women. 
The equality of which the importance we are well aware about in the society of today. 
I think it has to start already in school. 
Otherwise there is a big risk for the boys to get indoctrinated that this lap between men and women is just as it should be. 
If the boys ever notices the lap at all.   
According to a study concerning this problem with silent girls (the book Goodmorning boys and girls by Jan Einarsson and Tor G Hultman) in which there is shown how the time is spent between teachers, boys and girls in school. 
The writers of the book says that the teacher talks about 2/3 of the time available in a class lection. 
The remain time approximately 1/3 of which the boys are talking 2/3 and the girls takes what's left. 
Actually only 1/9 of time is ""offered"" for the girls. 
The speak activity is also very unequal distributed between boys and girls. 
There is almost the same boys and the same few girls who takes speech in class. 
A couple of the girls doesn't say anything at all. 
That is a pattern what is reflected in grown-up life but as we can see it is borned during these early years. 
I think this problem is something for us adults to deal with. 
Parents, teachers, politicians, everybody have to be aware of this urgent problem and take it seriously if a change is going to come. 
To eliminate this discrimination against girls between the sexes.  
Another important clue to connect with this dilemma is when the teacher asks questions. 
In some way for any reason, to refer to the book I mentioned earlier, it is the boys who gets following questions after the question that was asked. 
It isn't very often it happens that the girls gets any following questions and that probably doesn't make them more open-wide either. 
Development demands training and that's also what excpects from school.  
To help the girls to get more of the boys self-confidence in school could be to let them talk much more than they do. 
Let the girls understand that their thoughts and knowledge are just as important as the boys probably seems to be for them. 
I'm aware of the fact that it is an procedure of patience to go through with this but I am convinced that it is definately worth the time it takes.   
If you did a summery of these factors I have told you about concerning how boys and especially the girls are acting in school. 
Unfortunately the girls are the subject of an expectating behavior from society. 
To remain as the well-mannered, nice presency being girls. 
What would be needed is an awakening within the common people to leed the thoughts into act. 
There is an obvious direction towards what the girls will meet in common society when they grow up. 
The clearly segregation and differences between the two sexes. 
I am certain that in most places of work the majority of the men are in higher salary than most of the women. 
This is happening even in the modern society of today.  
To create an equal society within the two sexes we have to start with pieces of the hole matter. 
Therefore it is a great opportunity for me as an future teacher to start this process in school. 
I also urge to already working teachers if not dealing with this to do so at once. 
Remembering the pupils are the future and we as adults have to do our best to let them in to it.
",True
" Social allowance are not for people who can work  In Sweden we have to many people who are living on social allowance and dont't need to do it. 
I belive that people who really need to have social allowance are going to have it, but it should be a much better check-up of who really needs it and who don't.   
Nobody in Sweden needs to be starving or don't have the opportunity to have anywhere to live. 
If we need to, we can get help from the social service. 
That is a good thing that we have that help because anybody could get in a situaion where they really needed help from the social service. 
Some people can't earn enogh money, or maybe not any money at all, to survive. 
For example single parents, people who who can't get a job or are not able to work for special reasons or having other sorts of problems. 
I belive that they are those who are going to get help from the social service in the first place.  
What I don't like is the fact that the social service in many cases don't check better who needs money and who is only using the system. 
There are for example a lot of young people who don't want to work and instead of trying to get a job, or maybe study, they go to the social service and get money. 
There are to many young people who are to lazy and are allowed to be lazy because nobody tells them that they have to do anything. 
They just make up a story that they have some sort of problem and the people who works for the social service belive them or don't care and give them social allowance.  
They can get social allowance and don't even need to apply for a job, they don't need to study or do anything they don't want to do. 
They can go around in the city and meet friends all day if they wants to or lay in the bed and do nothing. 
They don't have any physical or mental illnesses at all. 
I don't think that helps them in any way, that nobody cares if they do anything or not. 
In stead they get money for somewhere to live, for cloths, for food, for travelling expences and money to exercise. 
A single person without children get 2900 SEK/month. 
That is for food, cloths and bills. 
Then they can get more money for paying rent, homeinssurance etc.   
Often they still live at home with their parents or don't live anywhere, they just go around and stay with friends and don't have any big expences. 
In stead they by things that they don't really need and go out partying and just have a good time for the money. 
It's a lot of things the money they get could go to, like resourses for care of children or elder people or for school.  
I don't think that they would have a choise, they should have to get a job either they want it or not. 
And if they can't get a job where they earn enough money to live on they can get the rest from the social service, because then they are at least doing something for the society. 
They also get the oppertunity to up-keep their skills or learn new things. 
Often they don't even appriciate the money they get because they get them to easy, they know that they don't deserve the money.  
The people in Sweden who works pay a lot of taxees and some of those taxees is money who the social service get to give to people who really needs them. 
I don't think that the people who pays all these taxees like the fact that some people who are just to lazy to earn their own money live on others.  
I think it is terrible to see all these people who gets money from the social service when they can work to get it, and see other people who needs more money but can't get it, because some use the system in a wrong way. 
Social allowance is not supposed to be a permanent living.
"," Children watch too much violence on television  There are too much violence on television and a lot of children are watching it. 
There is probably no really good solution from 'saving' children from violence on television but there are many ways of preventing them to see too much of it. 
There are mostly a responsibility for parents but also a responsibility for television corporations.  
First of all children should not watch as much TV as they do, there are a lot of things that are much better for them to do instead, things that are more creative. 
Television is probably not bad for children in a surten amount and if they watch programs that are suitable for them. 
It has to be a control of what they are watching.  
Parents have to take the main responsibility, that they know what their children are watching and don't let them watch everything they want, but there is also a responsibility for television corporations. 
Programmes with a lot of violence don't have to be sent early and there could be advisories that warn of excessive violence. 
That can at least help parents a bit. 
When the parents are at home they can go and have a look at what the children are watching. 
If the parents are at work and their children are not old enough to see everything on TV they maybe shouldn't be left at home alone. 
There is probably someone they could stay with, relatives, neighbours or friends with an adult at home. 
There are also often too many televisions in some houses. 
A lot of children have their own TV in their rooms and that makes it more difficult for parents to know what their children are watching. 
Parents could also talk with their children about the programmes, ask them what it was about. 
It's important that children talk about what they have seen, because if they have seen something that they maybe shouldn't have seen their parents can talk and explain what violence do to people and that everything on the television are not for real.  
One reason why a lot of children watch too much TV is probably because their parents don't have so much time for them. 
They should let them play with friends or make more of their own time for them. 
Everything is not as important than to do things that develop children.  
In an article in the TIME Magazine,(TELEVISION: Support grows for the V-ship as a way to protect young viewers, July 24, 1995), one suggestion of protecting children from violence on television is to have a TV with the V chip. 
That could be help for parents to control what their children are watching, or what their children are not going to watch. 
Even if it isn't a perfect solution it is at least a help. 
One of the problems with the V chip, as the article reveals, is that there are problems with the technology, the V chip wont be able to tell difference between violence of different kinds. 
If the V chip is going to be an alternative it has to be well thought-out so it is more help than problem to have it.  
Because there is not one good solution for protecting children from violence parents and society have to try to control what children are watching as far as it is possible. 
It has to be adult people who decide what's good and what's bad for children to watch and make shore that they don't see too much violence on TV.
",True
"An essay about my English...hmm. 
The thing is, I can't make out whether I can or cannot make myself understandable in a, what you can call, a satisfactory way. 
The purpose of this essay was to write about both the strengths and weaknesses in my use of English. 
The four components that had to be written about were: listening, reading, speaking and writing. 
I'll start with listening, and if we are lucky, of which I have hopes, end with the last one on the list and that should be writing, shouldn't it? 	 
I'm quite satisfied with my listening capability. 
I have no problems to follow people when they talk ""normally"". 
(When I say normally I mean when people don't mumble or talk very quite. 
But that's another story...) 
I can have difficulty understanding if someone talks with a very strong accent, use (for me) unusual words or talk very fast. 
Sometimes I find it hard to follow teenager conversations, because they often talk fast and use slang, words which I never might have heard of. 	 
Reading. 
I try very hard to keep up with the reading habits I used to have. 
I've spent some time in England and bought quite an amount of books. 
But as time passes by I have become lazier and that has affected my habit of reading English literature. 
I don't have trouble in reading English prose, not at all, I'm just lazy... 
When this term started I was a bit worried about all the English literature. 
But now after I have had a good look at the books I don't feel at all worried. 
It feels more like a challenge and it's going to be fun to work with the ones they have chosen. 	 
To get further down the list, I'll start writing about my speaking skill. 
I would evidently rather talk about my speaking capability than write about it. 
But that's not what this course is about, is it? 
(Maybe I should save my chit-chat for some other time...) 	 
I consider myself as a very talkative person. 
I find it very hard to keep my mouth shut sometimes. 
In junior high I often got ""hushed"" so that the rest of the class could join the teachers conversation... 
After a while I stopped talking in class but talked even more outside the classroom. 	 
I speak English with a British accent, that is due to (as I wrote earlier) my stay in England. 
Some people find my accent quite sweet some do not. 
Nevertheless. 
I feel that when it comes to speaking English I am not daft. 
I've got many English friends and they don't often correct me when I talk. 
(Well, I can't say if that's good or bad...) 
Over the years I've worked longer periods with English talking people and one of them once asked me where in England I came from. 
That's one of the best compliments I have ever got actually. 
That was a few years ago but I still remember it like it was yesterday! 	 
To finish this essay I should write something about my writing. 
There is just one way for me to put this; I am a very bad writer. 
This is not only a problem for me in English, I find it hard to write in any language, including Swedish. 
(I was very pleased to find a writing course in the curriculum.) 
I feel that I'm going to spend a lot of time behind my dear word processor... 
With some guiding from You I hope that I will master even this problem, although it feels like I have an iceberg to climb over. 	 
That's what I have to say about my English in these four subjects. 
I think both you and I can agree upon that my writing only can get better! 
But we here to learn aren't we?
"," Speciesism -The racism against animals  This essay will show you why we ought to treat animals not as means to our own ends but as ends in them selves. 
I will start by giving you an explanation to why our attitudes towards animals are the way they are. 
After this I will reject two of the most common arguments of why we need and have the right to use animals as means. 
Finally I will give a superior argument which will force you to accept the fact that we have no right exploiting animals just to satisfy our own pleasures. 
I will plea for reason and logic, but this will not be sufficient if you are not ready to change your own attitudes. 
A person's attitudes have a tendency to overrun logic and reason, so please have an open mind, and think of what I just said. 	
With this in mind, consider women's position in history. 
In the late 1800's women were men's possession and no one questioned this. 
In fact, Thomas Aquino said that 'a female is a defect male', and he was one of the greatest thinkers in the history of mankind. 
Those were the facts, the truth those days, just as it is a fact nowadays that animals do not have any rights to claim towards humans. 
The same parallel could be drawn between the black slaves and the animal's situation today. 
What I want to say is that after every liberation movement people talk about it as 'the last remaining form of discrimination'. 
You should be very wary of talking about 'the last remaining form of discrimination' because, as I have shown, there are always some group of living creatures still being discriminated. 
Yesterday it was sexism and racism, today it is speciesism. 
What we today consider morally justified may tomorrow be regarded as a great injustice. 	
I assume you can not argue against this historical fact, and hence you have to admit that our attitudes today just might be immoral. 
The strength in my argumentation so far could, to some extent, be questioned if humans needed animals to survive, which is one of the most frequent arguments coming from speciesists. 
I agree there would be no immoral in killing animals and eating them in order to survive, but in many parts of the world this is not necessary, including our own. 
We can very well get all the nutritious substances we need from vegetables, different substitutes and additional vitamins. 
This argument is therefore rejected on basis of its incorrectness. 
Could the speciesist defend his position in another way than the statement that humans need animals to survive? 
Let us consider the second of the most frequent arguments given in favour of speciesism. 
It claims we have the right to use animals as means to our own ends, when it is, at the same time, claiming we do not have the right to discriminate women and black people. 
It goes something like this: 'Women and blacks are members of our own species, animals are not, hence we have the right to exploit animals'. 
If the first argument failed on basis of incorrectness this argument fails on the basis of both relevance and logic. 
If we discriminate animals just because they are animals, we might as well discriminate women because they are women, and black people just because they are black. 
This is called sexism and racism. 
We can not discriminate any living creature on the basis of characteristics such as sex, skin colour, intelligence or species affiliation. 
The question we need to find an answer to is: What is the one capability humans and non-humans share? 
This question is answered by the Supreme argument, crushing any possible argument defending speciesism. 	
Any living creature possessing the capability of having feelings of pleasure and pain, has the right of not being used as means but always as ends'. 
This is the Supreme argument. 
On the basis of this, it should be quite obvious why speciesism is wrong, why we do not have the right to use animals as food-machines or experimenting on them. 
Even if the two arguments in favour of speciesism somehow could be defended, this argument could not be rejected. 
It is as simple as that. 	
We now have a complete logical reasoning rejecting the speciesism in our society. 
The only obstacle now is your own attitudes. 
It may take some time to change them, and that is all right. 
The important thing is that you hopefully have started to reflect on your moral values, and eventually you will no longer find yourself on the side of the oppressors.
",False
" Gay parents are as good as any parents!  
In this essay I would like to discuss a very burning issue in today's political debate, the issue of gay adoptions. 
The most common argument as to why we should keep the legislation of today, which prohibits gay adoptions, is that it is in the children's best interest. 
Growing up with gay parents is considered harmful to a child. 
I am of the opinion that this is wrong. 
To show why I find it wrong I would like to take two examples of often used arguments as to why gay parents is a bad thing and discuss them. 
The two arguments I have chosen are the ones that I've found are most commonly used in the debate. 
The first is that a child needs parents of both sexes, so that it will have both a male and a female role model. 
The other argument is that a child with gay parents runs a much larger risk of getting bullied in school. 	
I will begin with the argument which most people consider to be the strongest: a child needs both a female and a male parent, since it needs role models of both sexes. 
I will not deny that a child is better off if it can find a role model of each sex, but I can't see why these role models necessarily have to be the child's parents. 
If a gay couple with a normal social network adopts a child it is true that the child will only find role models of one sex in it's parents, but then you have to consider that the parents are not the only adults in a child's environment. 
Almost every child has at least some uncles, aunts, grandparents and/or maybe godparents, not to mention teachers, friends, neighbours, etc. 
If I take my own childhood as an example I find that my female teachers in compulsory school were much bigger role models for me than my mother was. 
So what's actually important is that the parents have a normal social network, and of course that they give the child the love, care and attention that it needs. 
If the parents live up to that I don't think it will have any importance for the child's well-being if the parents are gay or heterosexual. 
An interesting thing in this context is that the Swedish government already have acknowledged the fact that a child does not need parents of both sexes, as singles are actually allowed to adopt.  	
As to the other argument I can't agree to that a child with gay parents necessarily will be bullied in school. 
Children are actually much more broadminded than we think. 
If only the adults in school are open-minded, talk to the children, inform them and allow them to ask questions about it, I think that they will accept that some children has two mums or two dads. 
But when I say that children are broadminded I don't mean to say that bullying isn't a great problem in school. 
But what I don't think is that the real reason as to a child getting bullied is that it differs from other children. 
Instead I think that a bully chooses a victim which is easy to bully, i.e. a child that is shy, quiet, lonely and won't cause the bully any trouble. 
If this child differs from the others in any way, maybe by wearing glasses, having differently coloured skin, or having gay parents, this is often used by the bully as a excuse to make this child an outcast. 
But that doesn't mean that this is the actual cause for bullying. 
I would say that a very shy and lonely white boy with married heterosexual parents runs a much larger risk of being bullied than a talkative black boy that finds it easy to make friends and has gay parents.  	
My conclusion is that a child won't take any harm from growing up with gay parents. 
As you have seen the two main arguments as to why the law against gay adoptions is in the children's main interest are very easy to dismiss, and therefore I hope that you will understand why I'm of the opinion that this law is an act of discrimination. 
It is a scandal that a law which is based only on prejudices and misunderstandings can exist in a modern and enlightened country like Sweden.
","I have not spent a lot of time in English-speaking countries - in fact, two weeks in Michigan is my only experience of that kind. 
Nevertheless, I feel rather competent about my English at this point. 
This is mostly due to the fact that I went to a bilingual upper secondary school class, a so-called English Class, where most subjects were taught in English. 
Still, I can't say that I feel completely unconstrained when using the four skills of reading, writing, listening and speaking. 
First, I would like to turn to the skill I enjoy the most: reading. 
I was about fifteen when I started reading novels in English, and since then I have been doing it on a regular basis. 
I wouldn't say that I understand every word in the books I read, but I understand the main content and I enjoy reading them. 
As for concentration, pace and so on, reading in Swedish and reading in English isn't all that different any longer. 
When reading for example the social studies books of this course, I appreciate the fact that words concerning government, education etc. are almost all familiar to me. 
Since I studied social studies in English for three years, I have managed to pick up most of the useful concepts. 
When it comes to writing, I am a bit ambivalent. 
I have always liked writing in Swedish, and it is something I have done throughout my school years just for fun as well as in class. 
Of course, this makes the fact that I by no means can express myself in English as good as I can in Swedish even more evident. 
I still catch myself thinking ""Oh, this would be so much easier to write in Swedish!"" 
every now and then. 
Still, I must say that writing in English has its advantages as well - it is so much classier than Swedish for example, sounds much more fancy. 
Turning to the skills that I don't appreciate all that much, I start with listening. 
I can assess by ability to listen like this: Sometimes I understand everything very well, and sometimes I feel like I'm not able to pick up more than a word here and there. 
Swedes speaking English are easy to understand, and the general American accent isn't difficult either. 
I have a much harder time with British English, however. 
There was a boy in my upper secondary class who was from a suburb just north of London. 
Not only did he use funny British words, like ""snooker""; he also had a way of swallowing the last syllable of every word. 
Sometimes I just had to nod and smile, pretending I understood. 
More than three ""Pardon?"" 
in a row is a bit embarrassing. 
I guess the fact that American English is easier to understand than British English is mostly due to the fact that American culture surround the average Swede in another way than British does. 
Music, television, movies...  
Finally, the skill I consider my worst - speaking. 
If I was to speak English in an empty room with only myself around to hear, I would do it so much better than I generally do. 
In my case, it all comes down to nervousness. 
Not that I speak absolutely perfect English when there's no one around to hear, but at least then I would never say ""both houses has..."", ""she were"" and so on. 
For some reason I get so nervous when I speak English that I tend to get even the simplest concepts wrong, even though I know them well. 
I also get a tongue-tie that makes some words and sounds extremely hard to pronounce. 
Still, I do have my moments of relaxed conversation in English. 
When I notice that the person I'm speaking with speaks even worse than I do, I tend to relax and my English improves remarkably rapidly. 
And under the influence of alcohol, my tongue-tie disappears without a trace. 
So, as a final conclusion I would like to say that I would be very glad if my reading, writing and listening abilities improve, but that is nothing compared to the great relief I would feel if my tongue-tie could disappear once and for all after this course.
",False
" CENSORSHIP- FRIEND OR FOE?  
Very few issues brought up to discussion cause so strong feelings as the issue of censorship. 
This is not surprising at all, since the censorship mostly has been used as a sophisticated and useful weapon by oppressors. 
However, in modern democracies censorship can be used for the sake of the good, mainly to protect people, children in particular, from visual impressions that are considered to be bad for them. 
Sweden for example has had the National Board of Film Censors since 1911, which has authority to select which films will be shown in cinemas, and to which age group they are advisable.   
The big question though, is if this at all is necessary. 
Are not people intelligent enough to choose themselves which films to see and not to see and intelligent enough to tell the difference between fiction and reality? 
After all, we all know that films like Die Hard and E.T. are fiction because this is the very nature of film, and we are grown up with that knowledge. 
Today's film could be said to correspond to the old story-telling by the fire, with the difference that in those days people made up their own pictures of what they were told. 
In view of this, maybe the fact that others produce the pictures is the reason why we would need censorship. 
When we create them ourselves our brain uses images that we have gathered piece by piece over a long time, which makes them easier to deal with, whereas the image we are exposed to which does not origin from our own imagination may be a visual shock hard to handle.  
Children are of course more receptive while they have less experience of life than adults, and I think there are few who cannot recall at least one occasion in their childhood when a frightening film scene or TV programme resulted in nightmares. 
Me myself had parents who firstly gave me comfort and secondly helped me to relate to what I had seen by explaining it. 
Moreover, they did not let me watch films and programs they did not think I could handle. 
Probably, Government censorship would not be needed if all parents took their responsibility and protected their children like mine did, but sadly all of them do not. 
This considered, I believe in censorship, at least in theory. 
In practice, on the other hand, the question is if censorship works like we would like it to work. 
The National Board of Film Censors may do a great job when selecting which films are suitable to which age groups, but what is the point when no one checks the ages of the cinema visitors? 
I have not heard of one single person who has been requested to prove his/her age when entering. 
Personally, I believe that the cinema owners are more interested in their profit than in the citizens' well-being. 
At home, which ought to be the place in need of censorship more than any other place because of the endless amount of channels, we do not have one. 
As mentioned in the article by Ginia Bellafante, the situation in the US is the same. 
According to Bellafante, the suggestion to introduce a computer chip which could be programmed to delete programs with a high level of violence was met with scepticism from people who see the chip as a threat to the freedom of choice. 
I prefer to think of it as an increasing opportunity for parents of choosing.  
To sum up, although the current situation in terms of censorship, neither here nor in the US, is ideal, there is no evidence that a society totally without censorship would be any better. 
For the same reason as we have a social welfare service, namely because we are striving for equality and justice, we should have censorship to protect those who cannot protect themselves. 
However, the mode of procedure must be improved, or it is useless. 
Ultimately, this is an issue of politics.
"," The Characteristics of Normality  I will here try to describe one of the main characters in Ken Kesey's ""One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"": Randle Patrick McMurphy. 
This energetic, happy-go-lucky, stereotypical man whose zest for life caused his tragic death, definitely makes a strong impression on the reader. 
However, I believe that a description of his personality requires more than one feature, namely three. 
Apart from the loud and macho McMurphy you find both a man who is intelligent and calculating, and one who is sensitive and careful.   
The most distinctive features of McMurphy; the boisterousness and the humour, are obvious to the reader the first time we meet him i.e. the morning when he arrives at the ward. 
He talks with a loud voice, laughs a lot and does not give the attendants one single opportunity to worry him. 
The style of language he uses is very informal and full of sexual allusions, and has always got a jocular undertone. 
This vivacious and gregarious style shows clearly when he introduces himself to the patients: ""My name is McMurphy, buddies, R.P. 
McMurphy, and I'm a gambling fool"" He winks and sings a little piece of a song: ""and whenever I meet with a deck of cards I lay... my money... down"" and laughs again. 
The fact that he takes up so much space indicates that he is self-confident and used to being in the centre with people listening to him. 
On the other hand it would be possible that he gets that confident only when he is surrounded by nervous and stammering mental patients. 
However, the situation at the gas station on their way to the fishing tour proves this to be wrong. 
Although you expect the doctor (who, together with Candy, is the only one in the group considered healthy), to be the one putting an end to the service-station men's attempt to take advantage of the patients, McMurphy is the one who does it, in a truly convincing way.   
The respect McMurphy commands brings with it power, and the fact that he does not take advantage of his natural position as a leader on the ward is a sign of him being a caring fellow creature. 
In several situations, for example the one where one of the black boys is forcing soap upon George in the shower, McMurphy takes the risk to get punished just to protect his friend from being humiliated. 
He also shows talants as a psychologist when he with sophisticated methods, not unlike those you use on children, makes the most insecure patients feel confident and strong. 
Chief Bromden, for instance, get promised"" McMurphy's special body-buildin'course"" and on Bromden's question how McMurphy is going to get him big again, he gets the answer: ""[...] 
Hoo boy, blowin' a man back up to full size is a secret you can't share with everybody, be dangerous in the hands of an enemy. 
You won't even know it's happening most of the time yourself."" 
Another example can be found in the passage on p. 103; during a Monopoly game it is implied that McMurphy has been cheating on behalf on Martini, just to make him equal in the game thus give him some confidence. 
Moreover, McMurphy seems genuinely happy at the sight of his fellow patients getting better. 
This shows clearly when they are out on the fishing tour, and McMurphy is standing at the cabin door just looking at the others and laughing.  
In both characteristics mentioned above, his intelligence is clearly evident; to be as quick-witted as he is you definitely need to be clever. 
Equally, gambling, which seem to be his main hobby, requires a great deal of thinking. 
Undoubtedly, you have to take into consideration the fact that he lives on a mental ward, among people whom anyone easily could fool. 
However, we know that his former life was quite a hard one, and he probably would not have made it if he had not got brains. 
One example of his calculating mind is given to the reader on p. 17, when he tells the others that he did not argue with the court when they told him he was a psychopath, because he thought a stay in a mental hospital would be much more comfortable than going back to the work farm.  
To sum up, the reason why Randy McMurphy's personality so clearly sticks out from the others' on the ward, nurses and attendants included, is that he has all the characteristics of a perfectly healthy human being. 
As one of the doctors muttered in the staff meeting where they were discussing McMurphy's ""planned violent acts""; ""Of course, the very nature of this plan could indicate that he is simply a shrewd con man, and not a lunatic at all.""
",True
" CHANGE THE AGE LIMIT FOR BUYING ALCOHOL  Have you ever thought about, just like I have, why we in Sweden have the odd legislation that people are allowed to buy alcohol in a bar the day they are 18 years old but they have to wait until they are 20 to go to ""Systembolaget""? 
it is very difficult for me to see the reasons why there should not be a change in the law in order to let people from the age of 18 buy alcohol at ""Systembolaget"".  
To obtain alcohol is not a problem when you are 18 years old. 
Almost everyone knows someone who is 20 and, even though it is unlawful to peddle liquor, it is not seen as a big crime if the one you peddle to is over the age of 18. 
Many of my friends had parents who acted like peddlers after the day their sons and daughters were 18 years old, some of them even before that. 
The parents did this because they in this way thought they had control over how much their children drank. 
I also think they tried to tell their children that they trusted them and show them that they, in the eyes of the parents, had came a piece of the way to the life as an adult.  
Another reason for parents buying alcohol to their children is the fear of illicitly distilled liquor. 
This is another motive for me to say that the age limit for buying alcohol at ""Systembolaget"" should be lowered. 
It is easy to get hold of home distilled liquor and if the youths can not obtain alcohol from ""Systembolaget"", which most of them prefer even though it is more expensive, they turn to the dangerous illicitly distilled liquor.  
I return to what I mentioned in the beginning of the essay; that people in the ages between 18 and 20 are permitted to go to a bar and have a drink, but are not allowed to go to the state liquor shop to buy a few beers. 
I think the main reason to why we have not already got a change in the law is the fear that youths will easier be able to obtain alcohol if the age limit would be lower. 
This might be true, to get alcohol is already quite easy for many youths. 
Nevertheless, I do not think a change in the law would make any major differences in the possibilities for the young people to obtain alcohol. 
Furthermore I do not think that youths will drink more than they do today.  
Look at France and Great Britain, for example. 
The age limit for buying alcohol is lower there than in Sweden, but young people do not drink more because of that. 
Can the reason be that a part of the excitement is taken away when it is legal? 
In Sweden, the youths tend to take every given possibility to get drunk, partly because it is unlawful. 
According to one of my friends who just came back from one year as an au pair in the United States is the situation much worse there than here in Sweden. 
In most states, it is illegal to drink alcohol before you are 21 years old, but many people drink before that age anyway. 
She says that the sad thing in the United States is that the youths are not sufficiently informed about the dangers that follows alcohol consumption. 
There are not many countries with so many car accidents involving drunk drivers as there are in the United States.   
Whereas the opposition argues that the reason for having different age limits in bars and at ""Systembolaget"" is that the consumption is under control when you are in a bar, the people who want a change in the law maintain that this is not the case. 
I have asked a few friends and they, just like me, had to admit that you rarely notice a bartender or a guard telling a guest not to drink more because he or she is too drunk.   
Not only would an age limit lowering for buying alcohol at ""Systembolaget"" make things easier for the young people between age 18 and 20, it would also make much more sense. 
I think we have to face the fact that young people will always drink, in Sweden as well as in other countries, even if we legislate against it or not. 
More information about the dangers may help, but I think that a part of the fun with drinking when you are young is that it is illegal...
"," TELEVISION IN OUR TIME  	Even though it is not more than fifty years ago since the television was officially introduced in Sweden, it is, for many people, impossible to imagine life without their television set. 
Since I, here in Uppsala, have not got any television set I have during the last few months thought much about whether it is important to own one or not. 
The introduction of television in our homes made remarkable changes in our lives and today, according to statistics, an average Swedish person spends approximately seven years of his or her life watching television. 	
One can wonder what I do with all time gained when not having a television set. 
Unfortunately, the time is not spent for any good purposes. 
While I was watching television before, I am now talking on the phone or surfing the Internet. 
One thing I have realised though is that I do not have to own a television set. 
Honestly, I only miss the news and the relaxing evenings I sometimes had seated on the couch watching soap operas. 
Still I am aware that once I get a television, I will soon be addicted to some of the television programmes I used to be watching.  
Furthermore, I have also noticed to which extent people around me are discussing television programmes. 
The discussions, as well as the topics of the discussions, seem endless. 
For someone in my situation, it is almost impossible to follow and be active in those. 
However, my grandfather once told me that in the beginning, when there was only one television channel, everyone was watching every programme and all discussions in his office the following day were about television. 	
When my mother grew up, she was looking forward to the Saturdays when the whole family went to their neighbour to watch ""Hylands herna"" on their black and white television. 
Not many families owned a television then and the neighbours were one of the first to buy one. 
Today, the situation is completely reversed. 
A living room without a television set is like a relationship not built on love. 
In fact, exactly the same thing is happening with the computer phenomenon today. 
There are hardly any families, at least not families consisting of teenagers, without a computer connected to the Internet. 	
The time spent in front of the television set today was the time spent on social activities fifty years ago. 
Nowadays, people claiming they can not go to the leisure centre or a dinner party is often heard. 
To miss only one episode of one of the several serial stories they use to watch feels unbearable. 
In addition, the way of socialising has changed radically in recent years. 
To have a night with the friends seated in silence with a huge bowl of sweets in front of a box with a screen does not sound odd at all. 	
On page 165 in the book ""Amusing ourselves to death"" Neil Postman writes: "" The problem, in any case, does not reside in what people watch. 
The problem is in that we watch. 
The solution must be found in how we watch"". 
This statement, I would argue, suggests that we should use a critical eye and not swallow everything seen on television. 
In my opinion, television is a good information resource if we are able to select among the information and form our own opinion. 
People have to start thinking about what they watch and if what they see makes sense and reflects real life. 
Whereas Postman writes ""we would all be better off if television got worse, not better"" (page 164) I would argue that it is enough if people are taught to be critical and selective when watching television. 	
To conclude, the television has definitely changed our lives completely. 
Slowly, almost unnoticeable, have people got used and addicted to life with television. 
People arguing that there have been radical changes in the ways of watching are right. 
The number of television channels has increased and the programmes are not about the same topics as they were fifty years ago. 
Some of those television programmes are notorious for not being serious or giving a sufficient reflection of real life. 
However, there are also numerous good ones as well. 
Still, in my opinion, seven years of our lives could be spent on something better...
",True
" Give the elderly a decent treatment  The whole idea of having the elderly at their respective families instead of having them at a home for the aged is absurd. 
Although if the two alternatives may give an equal amount of arguments I can't see why there can be any doubt of which side to take in comparison of the two options.  
To begin with, who in each family should be responsible of taking care of that the elder will be getting the right medicine at the right moment. 
On the other hand, you can always educate people in general medicine. 
But, you will never reach the same trust like you do if a real nurse is taking care of it. 
Moreover, accidents come whether you want them or not. 
And in situations of that kind you can count on a proper behaviour when it comes to solving it, if your elder is surrounded by professionals instead of amateurs.  
Secondly, how can a family have a twenty-four hours control as you have in state care. 
Of course, it is just to split the hours between the familymembers and go on with this schedule every week. 
As a result of this solution comes the inevitable question of how much each familymember are willing to sacrifice to secure this twenty-four hours control. 
You can't guarantee that everyone always will be able, or want to follow a schedule like that. 
In contrast, if you just use persons who are educated and trained for a specific task, they will do all that is required from them. 
Because why would they otherwise choose it as their profession. 
Therefore it would be wrong to even think that a family can be as reliable as a home for the aged. 
Relationship is indeed something valuable, but it is simply not just enough in this issue.  
In addition to how it will be for the familymembers to give up a certain bit of their spare-time to manage to solve it, you must look on the other side of the coin. 
No one can possibly come and say that any elder, who has been brought up to get things done, would like an situation where he or she would be a burden instead of an asset for the family. 
The elderly will with no doubt feel that they are limiting the other familymembers wills to do stuff which they get more satisfaction from, when they have to be stuck at home watching them instead. 
These two statements may assume to that any kind if sickness has to be involved to create this understanding. 
But, in fact that is not necessary at all. 
Just the thing that the elderly can't be home alone even though that they are in great condition is enough to describe why it is like that. 
For who can you blame if something happens to your old relative when you or someone else not are present. 
This fact is just another thing you can avoid if you leave it to the professionals.  
Next problem which will appear if we let the elderly become a family matter is unemployment. 
Homes for the aged is one of the largest working places in our current society. 
Because if the families should look after the elderly they can't hire anyone else to do it for them. 
And then there won't be any similar place to go to for all the people who are working at any home for the aged at the moment. 
For this reason they won't be out of options but it is not easy to find something else to do just like that. 
Everyone will not have the will or the potential, which is demand if they want to avoid unemployment.  
Thus, the elderly deserves to feel that they can contribute with something and that they fill a function without interfering some other person. 
The elderly must get good treatment at any time and they should feel confident that they are in safe hands if something happens to them. 
This is not an illusion, it is how the reality should look like when everyone reaches an higher age. 
But it will just be an illusion if the elderly becomes a family matter.
"," A world without television  Could you manage without your TV? 
Would your life be over if you had to get rid of it? 
You may feel that way, but, as I see it, it is not so. 
I want to, through my arguments and through this essay, show you that it is possible and even good to live without a TV. 
However, nowadays it is hard to find a home without a TV and it seems to be one important part of a good standard of living. 
For many people, watching TV is a natural daily thing as well as working, going to school, spending time with family and friends. 
Being aware of all this, I still maintain that it is possible to live your life without a TV, I do nowadays. 
I think it is even good for you and you will benefit from it. 
Let me tell you why through my three arguments and my conclusion. 	 
My first argument is about economy. 
The possession of a TV will increase your costs. 
First of all you need to have a television set. 
A new one costs several thousand Swedish crowns. 
Furthermore you have to pay about 400 Swedish Crowns each quarter of a year, just for the possession of it. 
Other expenses that might occur are for example: if the TV gets out of order it needs to be repaired. 
If you then do not have a warrant, the repair will probably cost you a lot of money. 	 
A TV costs you money, but that is not all. 
My second argument is that I think it can take more things away from you, like your imagination and your creativity. 
Let me explain this further. 
When you watch TV you are stuffed with a large number of images, fast clips and a lot of information, not always good information. 
It is like you do not have to think of your own. 
Everything is given to you. 
I think this is bad, especially for young children that watch TV too much. 
As a consequence of this, it is not strange that they might find school and reading boring because life outside the TV-screen can not be as intensive as the fast clips on MTV or on another channel. 
Moreover, by the fact that TV does not trigger their imagination or encourage them to think for themselves, I feel that they are not given the possibility to fully develop their own thinking in order to become strong individuals. 
As I just explained, I am of the opinion that TV can kill your imagination, in addition, watching TV can also be a time-killing occupation, which leads to my next argument. 	 
My third and final argument is that the TV does take valuable time away from you, that you instead could spend on something else or with someone else. 
In today's society, we all complain about that there is never enough time. 
We rush to work and to school, we rush home, we have to cook, clean, wash, do this and that. 
Still we can spend hours in front of the TV. 
Maybe some of you may say that it is a way to relax, to forget all the 'musts' of our lives. 
I understand that, but I think that there are other ways of relaxing, like for example taking a walk, alone or with someone, reading a book or just spending time with the ones you love. 
Look at Sweden today, so many relationships do not last because we do not take the time to cherish them. 
I do not say TV is all to blame for this, but I do say that the time we spend on watching TV we could spend as quality time with our family or with our friends. 
It is a good start for making the world a better place. 	 
Now you have read my three arguments concerning life with or without a TV. 
I have claimed that the TV does take money, imagination and time away from us. 
If you turn this around: a life without a TV, compared to other people, will give you money to spend on something else, hopefully restore your imagination and creativity to make life more fun and last, but not least, it will give you time that you can give yourself and other people.
",False
" MORE MEN ARE NEEDED IN THE CHILD-CARE SYSTEM  When I am writing this, it is the beginning of March 1999 and in one of the cities of Sweden, something terrible has happened, something that fills the whole country with horror. 
A twenty-two year old man who was working as a child-minder, has during a few years, abused several children sexually and also produced an enormous amount of child pornographic material. 
Of course, what everybody is asking themselves right now is; what kind of a sick creature is capable to do something like that? 
As always after such a scandal, people start to question the motives of the men working with child-care. 
Worried mothers might wonder if he really has to touch the children that much and what are his intentions of following them to the bathroom? 
I have understood, after reading some interviews in the morning papers, that many of the men working at the day-care centers today are feeling observed by suspicious eyes, as if there would be something abnormal of being a man working with children. 
I find attitudes like that to be in most cases absolutely unfounded and instead I do believe that it is very important to make a greater number of men start working in the child-care system. 
Here below I will give an account of my main arguments for thinking so.  
Today, the overwhelming majority, or 95 percent, of the people working with childcare in Sweden are women. 
This are usually quite low-paid jobs and I do believe that there is a connection between that and the fact that it is a work sector dominated by women. 
Sweden is said to be one of the most equal countries in the world, but still typical female jobs, like nursing and pree-scool teaching are paid less than typical male jobs. 
Why is this then? 
I would suggest that it depends much on the way it traditionally have been; the women were staying at home, taking care of the children while the men were working. 
Perhaps the women working in the child-care system today too easily have accepted being low-paid, just because they traditionally have been taking care of the children without being paid at all. 
Since most politicians and employers historically also have been men, they might have been favouring occupations dominated by their own sex. 
I am convinced that if more men were working in the child-care system, it would soon result in demands for higher wages and would in a long term view create a more equal working situation. 
I find the child-care system to be an essential part of our society and therefore I feel that it is of great importance that the jobs are attractive for well-educated people. 
I do believe that more men employed would make the politicians improve the situation sooner.  y second main argument is that I believe all children need reliable men in their every-day environment. 
Especially today, when there are so many children having an absent father, living with a single mother. 
I have no doubt that the majority of single mothers are doing a brilliant job, but they cannot be a father as well as a mother. 
Of course no man can replace a child's real father, but I am convinced that having good male role models around, help children in their own development and in future relationships. 
A better balance between the number of men and women working at the day-care centers would make the children grow up and see that childcare is not a duty reserved only for women, which would lead to children growing up with more equal attitudes.  
The debate lately about incest and pedophils has resulted in people becoming suspicious and several cases of suspected incest have been brought up both by media and in court. 
I believe a lot of people find it difficult to decide what is normal behaviour and what is not. 
Incest is one of the worst crimes anybody can commit and naturally we should all continue to be attentive if we have the slightest suspicion of a child being abused. 
What we can not do is allowing these suspicions to go too far, after all most men would not dream about hurting a child. 
I claim that more men are needed in the child-care system to show that it is perfectly normal for men to take care of children and that there is nothing perverse or strange about it. 
More men working as child-minders would probably make it easier to recognize abnormal behaviour and help us not to mix it with truly innocent contact. 
The few monsters abusing children should not be allowed to lay guilt on all men and scare them from working with and taking care of children.
","I can still remember the fascination I felt when I at the age of nine years was confronted with this new subject in school - English! 
There was a kind of mysterious glow around it; a completely different language, full with new sounds, new words and still, you knew that in a foreign country, far away from Sweden, people were actually talking like that all the time! 
I remember proudly bringing home my homework and practise with a loud voice: ""yes"", ""no"", ""this is Spot, he is a dog"". 
During my childhood, new English loan words were frequently used in the school yard, kabel TV came and practically drowned us in american soaps and even a small country girl like I had been at Mc Donald's. 
In many ways, I think, the English language came closer to us since you often heard it around you. 
Altogether, I have been studying English in school for nine years and thinking back about it now, it has all become a great blur. 
I don't remember when I learned what or why... 
Through the years I have had pretty good grades in English, but now I can't see why! 
Maybe because I was the nice girl who always handled her assignments in on time and usually spelled correctly. 
Or because I was one of the happy persons who had a certain intuition when it comes to languages, the kind of person who soon becomes very lazy of guessing right all the time. 
That is probably why I never got the highest grade in English, I found it too easy from the beginning and therefore I never worked hard enough in school. 
When I graduated from school my skills in grammar was not excellent at all, my way of speaking needed lots of training to be fluent and since my vocabulary was quite limited I sometimes found it a little bit hard to read and fully understand the content. 
However, when I graduated in 1997, the only thing I wanted to do was to go abroad to improve my language and stand on my own legs. 
Now, circumstances made me go to Belgium, where I had got a job, and I soon noticed that the Flamish parts of Belgium isn't a place where people tend to speak English very well, not the people I knew anyway. 
English was the language I used everyday at work but among the persons in my environment I was the best English speaker. 
I believe that was both good and bad for me. 
It certainly helped me to overcome my silly fear of making a fool of myself every time I opened my mouth and after some time I began to speak much more fluent. 
I'm afraid it also had the consequence of me becoming more careless with the way I was speaking, since nobody corrected my mistakes when I was wrong. 
I don't think that I actually improved my English much during my time in Belgium, but by using the language every day, I got a completely new confidence. 
In my job I met so many people of various nationalities and often there were stressed situations when I simply had to make myself understood quickly. 
Who cared about a small grammatic fault then? 
After some time though, I began to find my limited vocabulary quite frustrating and at the same time I had plans of leaving my job and go to England, where I hoped to improve my English more in a more effective way. 
My next destination was therefore London!  
Finally I was in an English-speaking environment and I enjoyed every minute in England's beautiful capital. 
It did not take long before I started to think and dream in English and the big change was that now I also constantly got new influences from the world around me. 
My new job was in a pub behind the bar. 
The first weeks there I had a rather difficult time getting used to the different accents around me and I always had to ask people please to repeat what they had just said. 
I felt hopelessly dumb for a couple of weeks and then, suddenly, like a miracle, I understood! 
I am convinced that working behind that bar, always hearing and taking part in various conversations was of a great use for my understanding of English. 
I think that the only way to develope a good listening ability is simply to train your ears in lively environments. 
While you are learning a language, the more you learn, the more you realize how little you know. 
At least I felt that way. 
I thought that I could handle every day conversations in a pretty smooth way, but still, there was so much missing for me. 
In intense discussions I very often felt that the tempo was to high for me, I could not put my opinions into words and express myself quick and clear enough. 
At breakfast time, when I was reading the morning paper I sometimes lost the content because of some words or expressions I did not quite understand. 
I found all those things very annoying! 
During my time in London I also attended a college course. 
When I was writing my essays I realized that my grammar skills left a lot to wish for and I know they still do! 
The problem is I think, that I trust my intuition about what sounds good too much, without really being aware of what I am doing and why. 
When I try to analyse the way I build up a sentence and in what ways I can improve it, I tend to stare myself blind at it and soon I don't know either in or out! 
I am positive that a wider knowledge of grammar will help me feeling more confident there. 
To sum up, I want to say that English is a language that lies very close to my heart. 
I enjoy very much hearing and speaking English and I love the sound of the different accents. 
I also think that English is so very useful in many aspects, it is a world language and it has so many synonym words which makes it easier to be exact and put your finger on what it is you want to say. 
It is also such a lively language, at least compared to Swedish. 
As I already have mentioned I think that my weaknesses lies in a vocabulary that is too limited and in insufficient knowledge of grammar. 
My strength is probably that I have quite easy to spell and that I am not afraid of trying to express myself, even when I risk being laughed at... 
Naturally I need lots and lots of practise, my good speaking skills for example, disappears very quickly when I don't use English regulary. 
I sincerely believe and hope that my time here at Uppsala university will give me a wider perspective on the language and that I will become a more qaulified user of it. 
Still, learning a language is a process that keeps going on during your whole life, isn't it!
",True
" When reading Postman's statement I realized that television has a great influence and power over humanity and it's a shame if we should not develop television only because it has been used for commercial purposes. 
I think it is important to understand that television has obtained the power it has today by our lack of selectivity, ignorance and credulity and I would like to present my reflections on these issues.  
To begin with most of our choices in life are based on our knowledge and many questions have been asked and answered before we make up our minds. 
In school we learn to read books with criticism to see what is in the text, what is the author trying to tell us and so on. 
We have to make many active selections, for instance we have to decide who will deliver our electricity, which telephone company to belong to and how to invest our pension money. 
These are selections that may be of great importance for our individual future, but there are other choices we have to make that may not seem so significant at the precise moment but in the end they do have an effect on our future. 
Still most of the television viewers never reflect on the purpose of television and somehow we are deceived to think that we make an active selection when we zap between the channels even though the offering of programmes on the diferent channels is almost the same. 
We cannot excuse ourselves for not being more selective when it comes to television as we do not know that we are not; besides, many times we are just too tired to even bother.  
To continue we could ask ourselves whether we are ignorant and credulous viewers or not. 
I had not realized that so many people believed in everything that had been said on television, as if it was the ultimate truth, until I saw a debate show on television in which a girl claimed that the show Expedition: Robinson had given the viewers the wrong impression of her by cutting off the parts where she was nice. 
The show producers maintained that they just couldn't show everything they had filmed and that they had to select the most interesting parts which were the ones where someone reacted in one way or the other. 
We just can't assume that everyone believed that the poor girl was angry by nature but we must recognize that she has not become as famous as other Robinson participants.  
I believe that all television is directed and censored, no matter if they present news, politics, education or science; television gives us its picture the way some few producers see things and according to the market forces. 
This is absolutely all right as long as we are aware of it and of course we must be active searchers if we want to get the whole picture and not just one part of it. 
I just wonder when and where we lost our selfconfidence to question what we see and hear.  
To sum this up we could, to some extent blame today's society for our lack of selectivity as we are often too tired and preoccupied with other matters. 
We could also blame the market for being so ruled by money but the point is not to find a scapegoat, the point is that as a result of our lack of selectivity, our ignorance and credulity television has the power to present whatever and how it wants and those who want more quality programmes must buy themselves a parabolic aerial and select between even more channels. 
I can't say I disagree with Neil Postman when he says: ""We would all be better off if television got worse, not better."" but I would like to add that we would all be better off if we were more selective when it comes to television and more critical to what we watch. 
We could start by asking ourselves: why am I watching this, what is its purpose and what do I get out of it?
"," There are those who maintain that the family, not the state, should look after the elderly. 
I think that this is a socio-political and ethical topic that concerns us all. 
I believe that everybody should have the right to be taken care of no matter if we are rich or poor and neither should the colour of our skin and political ideas influence. 
Moreover, today's society doesn't really allow us to look after our elderly relatives, as we have to make ourselves a career, work full-time, bring up a family, spend quality time with friends, etc. 
The geriatric care can best see to that they are given the best help possible, not the family. 
Here below I will account for the three main arguments against the privat care of the elderly. 
First of all I would like to claim that this is our right as taxpayers and we have the right to make use of what we have built up. 
Growing old is part of most lives, and to be taken care of is not only a social right that we have, it is also a service that we have the right to buy since this service has been established owing to our taxes (the elderly do pay for the help they are given).  
Secondly we have the juridical aspects of it. 
Who is to be hold responsable if anything should happen? 
Could I be responsable for my mother's medical care not being a doctor? 
Do I have the responsability to give my grandmother the intellectual stimulation that her age requires, not being a therapist of any kind? 
I don't think so, just as I can't hold a doctor responsable for the horrible buildings of the seventies. 
Since the geriatric care is a service that the elderly have to pay for, I believe that they have the right to get qualified help from people that have the appropriate education and know how to accomodate the service to the need of the elderly.  
The final and third argument considers the quality of their lives. 
There are those who think that we need to spend more time with our relatives, so why not spend time with them and take care of them at the same time. 
It is true that we have lost that nearness or connection within the families that was so common some 30-40 years ago, but to give them a bath or to help them whith their activity of daily living is not the same as spending quality time with them. 
With quality time I refer to the social and cultural interchange and profit of people sharing time together. 
Anybody could help the elderly to prepair their breakfast or to do their cleaning, but only the relatives are close enough to know what they appreciate to do, what they like to read, to see, etc. 
We, the family, should spend more time with them to show them that we care and leave the nursing to the qualified medical service.   
Before I sum up this essay, I would like to stress the old generation's work and it should not be taken for granted. 
They were the ones to develop the Swedish welfare state and yesterday 's values, for instance, today both men and women can think about their careers at first hand, their lives will not come to an end just because they don't have children or a family. 
There are many elderly without relatives today and I think that there will be many more when our generation gets there, but we should still have the right to know that we are going to be taken care of even if we don't have relatives or someone to plead our cause. 
I believe that it's not the same to care for the elderly and to take care of them. 
We do care for our grandmothers and we do take care of them if we let the state look after them, after all, they do deserve the best help there is to get as they have already paid for it.
",True
" CAPITAL PUNISHMENT: Judicial murder  This essay deals with a very controversial subject; capital punishment. 
I will argue against this ""cruel and unusual form of punishment"" ( the Constitution of the United States of America). 
Because of the fact that this is a very complex issue, I have chosen to discuss only the most important aspects of this matter.  
"" It is curious, but till that moment I had never realised what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. 
When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide. 
This man was not dying, he was alive just as we are alive.(...( 
In two minutes, with a sudden snap, one of us would be gone - one mind less, one world less."" 
George Orwell: ""A hanging"", Adelphi, 1931  The history of the death penalty speaks for itself in a way. 
In the 18th century, this was a spectacular event that took place in the town's square. 
Parents brought their children to see the criminal die. 
In the 19th century the prisoners were executed within the walls of the prison, with only a few witnesses, and today the executions are taking place inside the prisons with very few witnesses, and as secretly as possible. 
This change has occurred mainly because it is now established that capital punishment does not have an exemplary effect, and also because this is too cruel and horrible to show in public. 
During the 20th century more than one hundred million people have been killed by another person. 
This means that the human ability to kill has passed epidemics and natural disasters when it comes to extinguishing mankind. 
To me there is in principle no possibility of justifying capital punishment. 
There is something so cruel about the kind of death involved that it rules out any possibility of justification.  y main reason for not accepting this form of ""judicial murder"" is moral. 
There is never morally justifiable to kill another person. 
One of the most basic Human Rights is the Right to Life. 
To me no man or woman can take upon themselves the role of God, to wipe out someone else's life. 
Who is that person (or group of people) who think that they have the right to decide that someone has to die? 
How do these people make sure that they do not make the wrong decision in some way? 
What if the person on trial is innocent?  
Between the years of 1900 and 1985 350 innocent convicted prisoners were in ""Death Row"" in the United States of America. 23 of these innocent people were executed before they could be released. 
As long as such horrible mistakes can be made, justice should not allow capital punishment. 
To execute someone is irrevocable and, since we can not say for sure that someone is guilty, we can not risk that one more innocent could die.  
I believe that Society today is to blame for the increasing rate of violent crimes, but I also think that what we make wrong we have to correct. 
Nobody is a natural born killer, because a killer is a product of an unhappy childhood, possibly a scattered family, and a very disturbed mind. 
Of course this person has committed a horrific crime and there are no excuses for this, but maybe we can find an explanation in this person's past, and in Society as well.  
People murdering and committing other violent crimes are people with a mental disease, and as long as people like this will continue to exist, it is everyone's fault that things does not get better. 
We all have a responsibility for eachother. 
Everyone should feel guilty when a murder is committed, because something is wrong with our world, and who can fix it if we can not?  
Capital punishment is not going to make things better in any way. 
To violate the basic Human Rights in the way the death penalty does, will only make way for more violence. 
Capital punishment is a kind of legalised murder, and if the authorities in a country allow this, they might as well legalize murder on the street as well. 
Two mistakes do not correct one of them.  
This is a problem we all have to deal with, and we all have to take our responsibility to find a better solution than murder.
","This essay is dealing with my competence in English, assessing the four skills of reading, listening, writing and speaking. 
I will try to point out my strengths and weaknesses within these different fields mentioned above. 
I feel quite confident about reading in English, and because I have always enjoyed reading all sorts of books since I was a child, I have had a lot of practice as well. 
I guess that makes it a lot easier. 
I read a bit of English literature in my sparetime, mostly John Grisham's books, and even though they are a bit specialised, regarding the legal-terms and some American slang, I have never had a problem with them. 
I have also read a few poems, and they are much harder to understand, since they usually have a deeper meaning, which is harder to grasp if you have English as a second language, though in my opinion, a poem in English is easier to read then to listen to.  
If I am listening to a person giving a speech in English, I usually don't have much of a problem understanding what he or she is saying. 
If the accent is known for me, I don't have to concentrate much at all, if the person isn't talking exceptionally fast of course. 
1996 I was an exchangestudent in Australia. 
Their accent was new to me and fairly different from the American and British ways of speaking. 
I remember that in the first week of school, I used to go home having the most dreadful headache from just listening to the teachers, trying to understand just what they were saying. 
After a while I got used to it of course, and now that is the accent that I feel most comfortable listening to, even though I myself have gone back to a mixture between American and British accents.  
When speaking a different language, Swedish people are afraid that they will have a funny accent, or that they will pronounce the words wrong so that someone might find their way of speaking amusing. 
I am no exception. 
The schools that I have been to didn't put much effort into teaching us how to speak the languages that we were so good at reading. 
Up until High School, I had a pretty large passive vocabulary, but the active one was nothing to be proud of. 
Then I went to Australia and suddenly I had to speak English, because otherwise nobody would understand me, or be interested in getting to know me. 
I think this is the best way to fully learn a language, actually being forced to speak it, and also, in my opinion, as soon as you get over that basic fear of failing, you will see that the important thing is not to get every little word in a sentence right, but to actually say that sentence and make yourself heard! 
As long as other people understand what you are saying, there is nothing to be afraid of at all. 
Of course, I still find it uncomfortable to speak English sometimes, and I rather write my friends back there a letter, than call them, and that is not only because of the phonebill...  
I like writing, but that doesn't mean that I am very good at it. 
I learnt a lot from my exchange year, but there are all sorts of different rules how the essays should be outlined, that I don't have a clue about. 
In Primary School and High School, you just sit down and write an essay, and there are no certain rules or outlines that you are supposed to know about. 
I think that is one of my biggest weaknesses. y greatest strength regarding this, is that I enjoy writing a lot. 
I haven't done a lot of writing in English, but since about Grade 3 I have been writing short-stories and poems in Swedish. 
When it comes to writing an essay with a prepared headline, I guess I don't enjoy it as much, but it is a bigger challenge of course.  
To sum this up, I think my English is pretty good in these four aspects, but I guess I will learn a lot from this semester of University.
",True
"I have always thought I was quite good at English. 
After the diagnostic test, and while analyzing my skills afterwards, I realized that I am quite good but that I should put the emphasis on quite. 
In Sweden we are daily surrounded by the English language and for most people, such as I, it is easy to state: I understand English. 
But what kind of English is it that we hear and read every day, for example on the telly and on the computer? 
Pretty simplified English I would say. 
It is all about understanding, reading and listening. 
Our grammar skills are seldom put to a test and it is not a big thing if you have some difficulties in pronunciation.  	
During my brainstorming I found out that I wasnt't as good as I thought I would be. 
I can understand and use the English language in full, but I fall short when it comes to important details. 
I will try to explain this more thoroughly: 	For example, I am a good listener. 
I understand the context and can easily follow both general and advanced speech. 
But if you ask me to translate every single word I would most certainly fail. 
It is the same thing with reading, I fully understand the context but have some problems with a few words here and there. 
I know what these words mean in the current context, but I can't find the proper Swedish equivalents or perhaps use the most difficult words in a different context. 	
I am also a tolerable writer. 
I feel quite confident when I write and people can understand what I am writing. 
I have all my life regularly been writing to my cousins and friends in the US. 
This way I learned the every day speech and how to express myself in an other language but I admit, I am not an advanced writer. 
I like to write, preferably in Swedish, but I have a some what weak English vocabulary which makes it difficult to write more advanced texts. 
When I write personal texts I sometimes feel blocked and I fear that I sound plain and ordinary. 
I think I feel this way because I am used to expressing myself in a dramatic and more interesting way when I write in Swedish.  	
I don't think it feels awkward to speak English, my pronunciation is good and I think I have a pretty good flow. 
I like to talk in general and my communicative skills in English are therefore rather good. 
The good thing about speaking is that you can clear any misunderstandings and ask questions immediately, things you can't always expect when you read or write. 
I feel confident when I speak, knowing that I will get a respond and perhaps questions. 
But as I mentioned earlier, my vocabulary is weak in certain aspects, and in consequence of this it is sometimes difficult to really be able to explain what I mean. 
I have often experienced that I don't truly represent myself when I speak about my thoughts and more personal things in English. 
But this is only natural, the Swedish language is a big part of me and one of my best tools when I feel the need to express myself. 
When I use the English language I sometimes feel dishonest and that I'm not telling the hole truth. 
I simply haven't got all the words for it. 	
The people I have been talking English to have often been relatives and friends. 
I haven't always bothered to try my very best, knowing that they would understand anyway. 
Of course I have been trying to be as accurate as possible but I have also known that my friends don't care if I make a mistake. 
These conversations have helped and inspired me a lot, but they have also supported my ignorance about details and perfection.  	
I will, during this course, concentrate more on details and really try to improve my vocabulary. 
This evaluation has helped me; I have not only practised my writing and used a couple of new words, I have also realized a lot of things about my weaknesses - a pretty good start in other words.
"," Allow homosexuals to adopt children  Homosexuals in Sweden can not adopt children. 
It does not matter how loving they are or how much the child needs them; the law does not give couples of the same sex the right to adopt children. 
This must be changed. 	
The main reason I have for making this statement is that if you do not give homosexuals the same rights as heterosexuals it is discrimination and discrimination of any kind are against the law. 
Everyone should have the same rights to adopt a child; if you are gay or straight has nothing to do with your capacity to be a good parent. 	
Moreover it should be said that adopting a child is nothing you do over night, not even if you are a heterosexual. 
The process of adopting a child is long, you and your partner will be studied to see if you are suitable for becoming parents and you will not be approved if you have not thought your decision to adopt trough. 
Adoptive parents have planned and prepared a long time for their child, they will love and care for it, no matter if they are heterosexual or not.  	
Adoption, and the close study of you and your partner that comes with it, is for most homosexual couples the only way to get a child. 
Compare this with the fact that a lot of children today are brought up by parents who do not love them, who abuse them and who, in other ways, do not give their them what they need. 
In addition to this there are children all over the world that do not have a home, who are raised in orpanhages or in other terrible conditions. 
What would not these children do for a chance to be a part of a loving family, gay or straight. 
By not allowing homosexuals to adopt we let our prejudice get in the way of the welfare of the children. 
This is not the way it should be, and I think you all agree with me when I say that it is better for a child to grow up with homosexual, loving parents than to starve to death. 	
One thing that many people uses as an argument against homosexual adoptions is that the children being brought up in an environment like this runs a greater risk to be teased and harassed than children that are being adopted by heterosexual parents. 
In today's society that may be true, but we can not overcome the prejudices if we bend for them. 
Racism is a problem in Sweden, like in many other countries, but that do not stop us from adopting black children even though there is a risk that they could be victims of racism. 
We can not let the prejudices stop us from doing what is right. 	
Another argument that is sometimes given by people who do not want homosexuals to have the right to adopt is that a child needs both a male and a female role model in its life. 
This may also be right, but it does not have to be the parents playing this role. 
Far from all children today grows up with both a father and a mother, but that does not mean they do not have someone from both sexes to look up to. 
Role models in today's society can be grandparents, neighbors, teachers or anyone else that the child might have good contact with. 	
Finally I would just like to say that even if we can not stop inappropriate individuals, such as drug addicts, from having children, we can, and we should, stop the discrimination of the homosexuals and give them the same right as the heterosexuals to adopt children.
",False
" Educating the audience  In this essay I will argue in favour of the TV-programmes that have an educational value and encourage the viewer too seek new knowledge. 
The large extent of channels offer in as many ways different kinds of entertainment but few can actually offer us programmes that enable the viewers to learn something useful. 
What I am pointing towards are the documentaries and nature programmes that give us new valuable knowledge. 
When studying the TV-guide closely you come across very few nature programmes or documentaries. 
Instead, the table features channels and programmes with continuous game shows, sit-coms and talk shows that clearly lack an educational value apart from their less well-represented cousins. 
The various sit-coms and talk shows are perfectly suited for the viewers who seek little intellectual stimulation. 
The brain activity drops to zero. 	
On the contrary, nature programmes embark on inspiring and interesting journeys that take us to all corners of the world seeking knowledge about exotic animals and places not accessible to you and me. 
Fantastic colourful pictures of rare plants and species, small insects in amazing close-up photography and a majestic portrait of a female lion on the savanna of Africa stand in huge contrast to the living room based sit-coms and soap operas. 
The main purpose that nature programmes have is to help us explore our planet and to give us knowledge about different parts of the world. 
Whether it is about an animal, a forest or a tribe in Africa it helps us to broaden our horizons and get an idea of how life can be for humans or animals in different places of the planet. 
We can call it a living room globalisation. 
The documentary is the other sort of TV-programme that has an educational value. 
They come in many different ways as in-depth stories on current events, historical reviews or investigative reports on different matters in society. 
The daily news broadcasts sometimes fail to give the complete picture of a news item due to the lack of time. 
The documentary can in this situation follow up on the topic and give more in-depth stories and thorough analyses of current events.  
Documentaries and nature programmes are the sort of programmes that offer the viewers a chance to learn by watching, an opportunity to learn something new instead of watching a TV series that does not contribute with anything of importance. 
Surely, all kinds of entertainment on TV have a special meaning to everyone but its main purpose is simply to entertain for a short period of time. 
The question is what we get out of it except for a few laughs or a moment of excitement for some contestant trying to win the big bucks.  
Television has, however, taken its responsibility in an effort to try educating their audience as well. 
By showing documentaries of all kinds and nature programmes we get a doze of useful and stimulating entertainment. 
As a contrast to the various forms of soap operas, sit-coms and talk shows where the viewers' minds are inactivated due to lack of meaningful contents the documentaries have something valuable to offer.  
Firstly, documentaries almost always want to tell us something. 
Most often they have a message that needs to be told in order to awake a public awareness on a burning issue such as a threat of decease or a hostile situation somewhere in the world. 
Secondly, historical documentaries are important in order for us to see how we can learn from history and how it has shaped the world of today.  
As a conclusion I would like to point out that the documentaries and nature programmes that are shown on TV have the most educational value. 
In contrast to the game shows, sit-coms and other sorts of entertainment on TV they contribute to give new knowledge and insight into different issues. 
Documentaries give for example the whole picture of a news item and tries through thorough investigation to find the underlying problems while nature programmes help us to explore the planet we live on.
"," A modern monarchy  Sweden has been a monarchy for a very long time. 
In fact, our history is to a large extent connected with the different kings and queens that have ruled the country. 
Even though the boundaries have changed several times due to wars, conflicts and unions our monarchy has persevered. 
The role of the monarch has however seen a huge transformation over the last two hundred years and the powers of Gustav II Adolf or Karl XII cannot be compared with those of the present king Carl XIV Gustav.  
The parliament is today the main legislative and ruling body with the government being the second with the Supreme Court being separated from political influence. 
It does not deal with political matters or interfere with the laws passed by the parliament. 
The powers listed above all belonged to the monarch a little longer than two hundred years ago. 
The king or queen was the lawmaker, commander of the armed forces and the main ruler of the nation. 
Swedish kings are famous of their warfare with neighbouring counties and battles throughout northern Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries, however, the situation is completely different today where the monarch's powers have been reduced to none as a consequence of the parliamentary movements of the 19th century.  
In 1809, the first reform took place when dissatisfied generals set the king aside and the monarch's powers were reduced and shared with different ruling bodies. 
Fifty years later a reform was passed that changed the foundation of the class-based parliament to a parliament based on income and property. 
The monarch's power was not changed dramatically during these years but a process had started that would eventually relieve the monarch of his former duties. 
The new form of government had come to grow strong and it was now the parliament that became the new ruling body in domestic and international matters.  
As the parliament took over the responsibility of ruling the country it was expected of the monarch to stay neutral and not to express himself in political matters. 
Despite this fact king Gustav V chose in 1914 not to agree with the existing prime minister, as a result of this controversy the prime minister resigned. 
Since then there have been no further utterances in political matters form the monarch and we expect the him to keep a low profile, even in non-political matters even though it is claimed by some people that the present king and queen are strong leaders of opinion in different matters such as hunting and child-pornography.  
The king and queen of Sweden are today merely representatives of the country who appear on official state visits and also travel around the world creating good relations with other countries and putting Sweden on the map. 
There is no power at all to talk about and the monarch simply receives a salary that will enable him to carry out his duties as a representative of our country.   
The opposition, the critics of the monarchy, claim that it is old-fashioned and not equivalent with the modern society and also that it is expensive for the taxpayers. 
I don't find this sort of criticism very well considered. 
Firstly, Sweden is a very old country and the monarchy is a big part of our history as well as our identity. 
I think it is quite unique living in a country where we still have a monarchy because there are not many countries that are monarchies today. 
When it comes to the question of democracy and the modern day society the monarch does not have any political power as seen above, all those powers have been taken away from the monarch and been put in the hands of the people. 
This fact shows henceforth that a monarchy really can exist within the boundaries of a modern democracy. 
Secondly, the argument saying that it is expensive to uphold and support the royal family's living expenses does not seem to hold ground. 
Compared to other expenses it is a very small fraction of the tax money that is paid. 
Repairing or rebuilding the monarch's residences would add up to a big sum of money up front but it is hardly noticeable in the big economy and besides we pay so much taxes in this country that you would not be able to see the difference. 
Thirdly, and as a final thought, if we were to abolish the monarchy in Sweden, what would the tabloids write about?
",True
" McMurphy - a heroic rebel and a saviour  One flew over the cuckoo's nest is a novel about a psychiatric ward in an Oregon mental hospital in the early 1960's. 
The ward is efficiently directed by Nurse Ratched. 
She controls the inmates by subtle humiliations, punitive shock treatment and lobotomy. 
Everything is neatly organised and programmed in this grey and oppressive world. 
But one day a new patient arrives and breaks the monotony. 
His name is Patrick Randle McMurphy. 
This man is outraged to see how Nurse Ratched has reduced the inmates to passive and lifeless puppets. 
In this essay I will give a detailed description of McMurphy. 
I will also try to indicate in what ways his characteristics are conveyed to the reader.  	
The story is told by Chief Bromden, a half-Indian of immense stature who has pretended to be deaf and dumb for the last twenty years. 
His version of things is the only one to which we have access. 
Bromden's first impression of McMurphy is that of a very vital and strong figure. 
At first, the narrator is not able to see the new inmate, he can only hear his footsteps: ""He sounds big. 
I hear him coming down the hall, and he sounds big in the way he walks, and he sure don't slide; he's got iron on his heels and he rings it on the floor like horseshoes"" (p. 
15). 
Even before Bromden has actually seen McMurphy, he knows that this man is ""no ordinary Admission"" (p. 
14). 
It is above all his remarkable self-confidence that distinguishes him from the other patients on the ward.  	
McMurphy is a redheaded, loud and laughing Irishman who has had himself transferred to the hospital from a prison in order to avoid work. 
He is a crude, vulgar and humorous gambler. 
Furthermore he is also a very good observer. 
As a matter of fact, McMurphy is the only one who understands that Chief Bromden is only pretending to be deaf and dumb. 
Many of McMurphy's characteristics are actually suggested by his actions. 
One of his most significant acts is to persuade some of the inmates to accompany him on a one-day fishing expedition. 
They all have a wonderful day on the sea, drinking an laughing. 
During this trip he restores the men's happiness and joy of living.  
Throughout the story McMurphy serves as an energy source and an inspiration to the other patients on the ward. 
Bit by bit he restores some self-esteem in these men and finally he breaks the hypnotic spell which Nurse Ratched has over them. 
He challenges the sadistic authority and the rigid routine that she represents. 
It is quite obvious that McMurphy is a man who refuses to adjust. 
Consequently, he disrupts the neatly organised system and creates chaos on the ward. 
From this point of view, he is a true rebel. 
McMurphy and the Head Nurse are truly each others opposites. 
She is a real monster, a devil in the shape of a woman, who slyly hides her anger and frustration over the new patient's rebellion beneath the sweet face of an angel. 
He, on the other hand, is a good, warm and loving person. 
Eventually, the brutal struggle between McMurphy and Nurse Ratched become a struggle between life and lifelessness, between good and evil.  	
In the end Nurse Ratched finds an excuse to quieten McMurphy by repeated shock treatments an a lobotomy. 
After this he becomes a lifeless ""vegetable"". 
Chief Bromden cannot stand to see him like this. 
As an act of mercy, he smothers McMurphy with a pillow and then he escapes by throwing the massive control panel (a symbol of Nurse Ratched's power) through the window. 
It is McMurphy who has taught him to regain the use of his enormous strength. 
At this point, the entire ward has changed radically. 
All the patients have become able and willing to struggle. 
Many of the ""Acutes"" have signed themselves out or otherwise taken control over their lives. 
Nurse Ratched is beaten. 
Her authority is finally broken.  	
McMurphy embodies the belief that people are able to change, that everyone shapes his or her own life. 
But at the same time McMurphy himself cannot determine his own destiny. 
His destiny is to sacrifice himself for the other patients on the ward. 
He has to perform this hard duty whether he likes it or not. 
This is pointed out very clearly by the narrator when McMurphy is about to attack Nurse Ratched in the end of the book: ""We couldn't stop him because we were the ones making him do it. 
It wasn't the nurse that was forcing him, it was our need that was making him push himself slowly up from sitting, his big hands driving down on the leather chair arms, pushing him up, rising and standing like one of those moving-picture zombies, obeying orders beamed at him from forty masters"" (p. 
250). 
I see McMurphy as some kind of a Christ-symbol. 
He commit himself to the other patients on the ward and assumes their burdens. 
He succumbs while the others survive. 
By teaching the patients to laugh and to believe in themselves he leads them out into the real world, into the world of the living. 
It is obvious that McMurphy is their saviour.
","It is generally agreed that English is our second language in Sweden. 
Almost any Swede is able to communicate in English. 
As a matter of fact, we are highly dependent on English for communicating with the rest of the world. 
However, I think it is important to stress that there is a big difference between the younger and the elder generation. 
I have been studying and using the English language for a long time, more exactly since the fourth grade of elementary school. 
In this essay I will try to evaluate my own strengths and weaknesses in the four skills of speaking, writing, listening and reading.  	
Although I have been studying English for such a long time, I still do not feel comfortable when I speak it. 
There are several reasons why I feel this way. 
Firstly, I am not a natural speaker. 
I have always been quite a silent person in bigger groups. 
To give a speech in front of an audience is not easy. 
Secondly, after two years of French at the university it seems to me like my head is all filled with French grammar, French words and French pronunciation. 
Finally, I have not spent much time in English-speaking countries. 
I am well aware that I need more practise if I want my English to become fluid. 
Therefore I am planning a trip to England this summer.  	
On the other hand I feel that I write English better than I speak it. 
When you write you can take all the time that you need and besides you can always rely on dictionaries and grammars when you find it necessary. 
That suits me perfectly. 
After four years at the university, I am also quite familiar with the process of creating and structuring thoughts and ideas on paper. 
One thing that I find difficult when I write English is to find the adequate words and phrases. 
Though the problem is easily solved by having a good dictionary within reach while writing. 
Another thing that often bothers me is the English spelling, but maybe it is only a question of practice.  	
In our everyday life we listen to English all the time without even thinking about it. 
We watch English and American programs on television and we listen to music with English lyrics. 
When we go to the cinema it is often to see an American movie. 
My opinion is that this is the reason why listening to English seems so easy to me. 
In other words, it has been a part of my everyday life for such a long time that I do not even think about it any more. 
Since I started this semester I have noticed that I listen more carefully when I hear English. 
Nowadays I am more focused and concentrated while listening. 
I pay much more attention to what they actually say, what expressions and words they use and how they pronounce it.  	
One of my main interests is literature. 
During my spare time I like to read novels and short stories. 
I consider reading very important, and I think that children should be encouraged to read fiction at an early stage. 
What is important is not what kind of literature you read. 
On the contrary, everyone should be allowed to choose according to his or her own taste. 
The important thing is that you read instead of spending all your time in front of the television or the computer. 
The only thing that troubles me when I read an English text is that I do not understand all the words. 
It is clear that my vocabulary is not sufficient. 
The English language seems to be so rich in words! 
I come across new ones all the time. 
In most cases I understand the approximate meaning of the word by looking at the context. 
But most of the time I am eager to find out the exact definition. 
Therefore I try to look up all new words in the dictionary.  	
It is not easy to evaluate your own strengths and weaknesses in an objective way. 
At least, I made an attempt. 
During this semester I hope that I will improve my capacity in the four skills of speaking, writing, listening and reading in order to become a better communicator in English.
",True
" ""Why spoil a good mother to make an ordinary grammarian?""  
In this essay I'm going to describe the attitudes towards education for women in nineteenth-century Britain. 
During this period there was an enormous debate going on, if girls should receive any education at all and; if they did, what they ought to study and if it should be the same kind of education as for boys.  
Before the industrialisation, men and women more or less shared all work. 
But when machines took over, much of what the women used to do was no longer needed, and because of that, their education seemed even more unnecessary. 
But during the nineteenth century the debate started, as more and more women felt the need for education. 
Most girls received very little education, and what they learned was mostly what they would need as future wives and mothers.  
The main argument against female education was that women didn't work, and so didn't need to learn much more than what they could learn at home. 
School for girls was considered a waste of time, since they would never be working outside of their home. 
Mrs Sarah Ellis says in her book ""The women of England"", that what girls learned at school did not prepare them for their future life. 
At school they tried to be better then everybody else, and later in life they would have to make place for others and make others happy. 
There were some schools for girls, but what they learned there were things like dancing, conversation and playing the piano. 
They also learned reading and maybe some French, which according to Sarah Ellis, was a waste of time, since they would never speak anything but their mother-tongue. 
Social skills were more important for girls than intellectual ones, and for families who couldn't afford to send all their children to school, let their daughters stay home.  
Those who were against female education also had medical arguments. 
They said that the differences between men and women were innate and because of that it wasn't possible for them to learn the same things. 
Women were inferior to men both physically and mentally, and these were facts that one should not attempt to change. 
When they looked at ""primitive"" civilisations, where men and women were more equal, they saw this as a proof that the European had gone further in their development, that these ""primitive"" peoples had not yet reached this state in evolution, where the differences between the sexes started to show.  
Women themselves agreed to this. 
Several women have actually written that they know that are inferior to men. 
Sarah Ellis writes: ""I know that woman is naturally and necessarily weak in comparison to man;"" and Elizabeth Barrett has the same opinion: ""There is a natural inferiority of mind in women"". 
They do not try to argue against this, to them it is just the way it is, even the way it should be, and there is no way to change it. 
This was proved by the fact that although there were women who wrote books and painted, all great writers and artists throughout history had been men.  
Women were also more intuitive than men, they didn't think logically, but used their intuition, which made men superior, since they had the possibility of thinking more clearly. 
Since men and women didn't think the same way, there was no pint for boys and girls to study the same things.  
Scientists were sure that women's inferiority was a cause of their brains being smaller than men's. 
This was a proof that men had gone further in evolution. 
Children's heads were smaller, and because of this, they were less intelligent. 
There were of course also arguments for education for women. 
First of all, a well-educated mother could more easily motivate her sons to study, and provide a good environment for that. 
Secondly, many people thought that since women were intellectually inferior to men, they were also more easily diverted from what they were doing. 
They put too much emotion into their actions and their thinking, and this caused men to worry too much about them. 
Because of this they should be educated in a way that put them on ""the right path"", otherwise they would ""fall prey to the temptations towards which their nature led them"" (Burstyn, p 70.) 
Sarah Ellis says that girls are able to do almost everything their brothers do, for example, they need physical exercise just like boys, and are able to do almost the same things, although they should be protected from activities where they could get hurt. 
She also says it is possible for girls to study subjects having to do with nature such as botany, since they have the same ability as boys to ""admire the beautiful"". 
But the ideal way of educating girls was to do it at home, since that was where they would spend their lives.  
The way I understand the material that I have read, there doesn't seem to have been very many people in nineteenth-century Britain who thought girls shouldn't receive any education at all. 
But what they thought was that that boys and girls were different and that it would be unnatural to give them the same kind of education. 
It was even impossible to do this, since boys and girls didn't think the same way, their minds worked differently and there was no way for a girl to take in the same amount of knowledge as a boy, since her brain was smaller than his.  
A woman was supposed to take care of home and children and be a good wife and mother. 
All she needed to know she could learn without leaving home. 
Nobody seems to have thought women were really less intelligent than men, only that the male brain was further developed and because of that men had greater possibilities of learning.
"," Corridor or apartment, which is best?  
In May last year I moved into a student-corridor in Flogsta here in Uppsala after having lived in an apartment for about four months. 
It was quite a big apartment and I had shared it with a friend. 
I was used to having a big kitchen and a big living-room for just the two of us, and the possibility to invite lots of friends. 
Living in a corridor meant big changes for me. 
I would have to share kitchen and living-room with eleven people I didn't know from the beginning. 
If I was unlucky I would get neighbours who stole my food from the refrigerator or used my kitchen-tools. 
Now I've lived there for almost a year, and ny now I know that I actually prefer to live like this. 
It suits me perfectly, at least for the moment I would not like to go back to living in an apartment, and now I'm going to tell you why.  
If you live in a corridor with people you like, it's almost like getting a new, big family. 
There is always someone to talk to, if you're feeling lonely you can just go to the kitchen and if there's nobody there right at the moment, they will soon come. 
And if you feel that you want to be alone, you can go to your room and close the door. 
You have a choice that you wouldn't have if you lived alone in an apartment. 
I know I wouldn't be able to live in an apartment of my own right now. 
I would just sit staring out the window and feel lonely and miserable. 
But in the corridor I've always got some members of my ""family"" who wants to talk to me. 
Of course, I would probably study more if I wasn't tempted to spend so much time in the kitchen, but onthe other hand, if I felt sad and lonely I wouldn't get that much done either. 
What could be a problem, though, is that the people with whom you live know everything about you. 
They know when you leave and when you come home, and if you come home alone. 
There is much gossip in a place like that.  
I think veerybody ought to try living this way at some time in their lives. 
You learn a lot about how to get along with other people. 
For me, this is especielly important, since I'm an only child and 'm not used to having to compromise with brothers and sisters all the time. 
Now I learn to take my responsibility in another way, for example, I have to clena the kitchen every time I've used it, I can't just leave my dirty plate in the sink, because I know how irritating it is when the others do that. 
If I lived by myself, I wouldn't care that much, because it would only be my own dirty kitchen and nobody would tell me to clean up. 
Another thing you learn is of course to share things, and that makes it even more important to wash the dirty saucepans and plates, since someone else will want to use them.  
The way I see it, this kind of living is very good. 
I've already mentioned the main arguments, but there are of course others as well. 
If you forget to buy something there is always somebody in the corridor from whom you can borrow it. 
Or if you are ill and can't get out of bed, the others can take care of you and go shopping for you. 
If you live by yourself there is a risk that you can't get anything to eat for days if you're too ill to go out.  
I feel that I know quite well what I'm talking about when I say that everybody should live with other people like this for a period in their lives, because I've lived both in a corridor and in a shared apartment, and, before that, all by myself in a very small room when I studied in Paris. 
I don't think I can find a better way of living at this period in my life. 
I know that I need to be close to other people, or I would be depressed and lonely. 
I've learned a lot
",True
"Since I have always been interested in different languages, especially English, I do not think I have ever thought of my listening skills as very weak. 
Further on, I believe that it is so much easier to understand by listening than it is to speak in a different language. 
As for myself, I know that I may not understand a certain word when it stands on its own, but given the full sentence I have no trouble understanding the meaning of it. 
Compared to other countries in Europe, people in Sweden and Holland have better skills in the English language. 
I think that this has to do with television, partly because we import a lot of American and English TV-shows and movies, but the main reason is that these productions are not dubbed but subtitled. 
Since I have been raised in a generation that watches a lot of television, I feel that my listening comprehension has grown more and more for every day that has past. 
Another thing that makes me listen a lot to English is the music, which is either imported from English spoken countries, or made abroad but in English though. 
This has also helped me a lot to understand a certain word in the whole context, whether I wanted it or not. 
I mean, I listen all the time even if it is about something I really do not find very interesting, and therefore I have automatically picked up a few words that I never thought I would learn.  
Though it is hard sometimes to read in a different language, I believe that it gives you more knowledge, not just in the language it is written in but also about real life in another part of the world. 
From my own experience I can say that it can be difficult to get into a book, it often takes a couple of pages and then it starts to get easier to understand the connection. 
A book is also often easier to read than a newspaper for example, because the newspaper is written is so many difficult words and with many technical terms. 
But I think that it is a very good exercise to read the newspapers if you want to improve your English reading ability, which I feel that I do. 
Today I think that my reading skills are quite good after all but it would not hurt to enlarge it though. 
An example to improve the reading skills could be to correspond with a person in English, which in fact helps improving ones writing skills as well. 
The weakness that comes to my mind about my own skills in reading is that I find it a bit tough having to look up a lot of words that I do not understand in the context. 
A strength that I possess is that I find it exciting to learn how many ways there are of expressing yourself, to explore the meaning of different words and to add them to my own vocabulary. 
Speaking is more than just put the words in the right order, you have got to make it right grammatically as well. 
This is one of the things I find pretty difficult sometimes, because I realize it is easier to write grammatically correct since you have got more time to think it over then. 
When speaking I sometimes feel that I stumble over the words, and I wish I could correct them by rubbing it out as if it was printed on a paper. 
Maybe it has got to do with insecurity, that I do not think I have enough skills in speaking. 
I do need to work more on my vocabulary, I believe. 
Although I believe that I am not so extremely terrible in speaking English but now and then it just do not come out the way I had wanted it to from the beginning.  
Writing is a lot easier than it is to speak as I have written above. 
I think that it is an advantage that I enjoy writing because it gives me an opportunity to train myself in grammar and to extend my vocabulary. 
For me, this is a good way of focusing on the grammar part and that is something I really need for my own good. 
So, this course will hopefully help me to understand grammar in both English and Swedish better.
","Like every schoolchild in Sweden I started studying English in primary school and continued all the way trough secondary and upper secondary school. 
I have had time both to hate it and to love it. 
By the time I graduated from upper secondary school I was rather content with my knowledge of English, but in 1997 I was put to the test.   y friend Jenny and I went to Scotland to work for the summer. 
We were employed as chambermaids in a hotel in Fort William. 
There were many foreign employees there, but most of them came from other English-speaking countries, Canada, New Zealand, Australia etc. 
The time in Scotland made me see things about my English that weren't as obvious before considering listening, reading, speaking and writing. 
In this essay I will reflect on my discoveries about my skills and weaknesses in English. 
Listening I have never considered listening to English very hard. 
If there has been a word I don't understand I usually can derive it to some other language, or guess by the context.   
That was until that first day in Scotland when I met my employer Paul and the housewife Morag. 
The Scottish I had heard so far had been nothing compared to theirs. 
Luckily Jenny understood a bit more so I tried to do as she did, and not to look as stupid as I felt. 
That summer I learned that listening to English is not hard unless it is when I'm tired, or spoken with a strong regional accent. 
The first week I dreamed about words and phrases I had heard during the day, that was perhaps my way of process my learning.  
I worked in pairs with a girl from New Zealand, Cheryl (probably the most talkative person in the entire staff), and the first few days I mostly listened to her, but slowly I started getting used to my duties and could start to concentrate on speaking myself. 
Speaking Speaking I have always considered to be my strong side, I think it's fun and I'm not afraid to try. 
After a couple of days with Cheryl I even started to joke and use expressions and slang that I had heard the others say. 
The problem is that usually people doesn't say anything when I'm wrong, so I don't learn as much as I want to.  
I noticed that first week that my tongue gets tired after speaking a foreign language for a day, and I start to slur my words. 
Sometimes I even slur on purpose because I don't know exactly the right word or pronunciation, in some vague hope that people will interpret it into the right word.   
The greatest problem of speaking is the cultural and social differences, I make so many mistakes without even being aware of it. 
That is an area I'm eager to learn more about.  
Reading Every Saturday in Scotland Jenny and I, as soon as we had got our wages, went to the bookstore and bought a new book that we read and then swapped with each other. 
When I find a good book I devour it, and that is one of my strong sides in reading English, I don't look up words but try to understand by the context. 
Of course that could be a bad thing too since I don't learn some of the words and some of the meaning is lost to me.  y weakness in reading is more formal English, like instructions with many technical terms or tax-forms. 
It felt like a kind of rehabilitation tough, when some of the English-speaking people I worked with didn't understand how to fill in the tax-forms either. 
Writing Altogether I think writing is my weakness in English. 
I'm not good at grammar, not at formal English, and uncertain of the expressions I've picked up from somewhere. 
Sometimes it feels like I'm a completely different person when I write instead of speak. 
It was very frustrating when I got home from Scotland and tried to write my new friends, suddenly it felt as I was seven years old and not at all the same funny, casual Karin they had got to know. 
Perhaps I have got a bit better at it by continuing to write to them and to read their letters to me, but writing is the area I especially would like to improve.  
I am looking forward to learning more English this term and to improve my weaknesses. 
I know it will be hard work, but I want to read this essay and find it is no longer true.
",False
" TV Violence  	In the article Locking out violence, in TIME Magazine July 24 1995, Ginia Bellafante takes up a very important issue, how we can protect young viewers from violence on TV. 
It is important that a discussion concerning ethics continuos. 
Not only parents, but also broadcasters have a big responsibility to protect young viewers from TV violence. 
I also think that it is important to determine what sort of violence could harm children and what sort could actually be good. 	 	
Really young kids should off course not be exposed to any kind of violence. 
But when they get old enough to realise that the world is not free from bad things, we should focus on making them realise that violence is something bad. 
Therefore it might not be bad to let them see TV where violence is evil. 
If they for example would see news showing the devastation that war causes, they will probably not be impressed by violence. 
If they on the other hand would watch a TV show where the hero would solve a problem by using violence they would most likely be impressed by this and most parents do not want their children to solve their problems by using violence.  	
Only on TV is there violence without pain. 
Sometimes TV violence is even supposed to be funny. 
Grown-ups might be able to realise that violence causes pain and sadness, but young children probably thinks that what they see is true. 
I think that it is alarming that the level of violence exposed to young children are getting worse, especially in cartoons. 
When I was a kid I used to watch cartoons that had a low level of violence and the violence that existed was pretty far from reality. 
If a bear, Bamse who is the worlds strongest and also the kindest bear in the world, grabs a wolf in his tale and throws him up in a pine-tree, it is not likely that a kid would try to do the same. 
But if two cartoon characters, who are made to look like real human-beings, are in a fight and one would hit the other in the head with a baseball-bat and he would rise again and just walk away with some birds flying around his head. 
Kids could get quite a strange picture of reality. 
Children who watch lots of violence on TV learn to fight more and might even think that violence is fun, even in real life. 	
Parents can do a lot to keep their children away from TV violence, only by encourage them to take part in different activities, or limiting the time their children are allowed to watch TV. 
Another important thing would be that parents watch TV together with their kids. 
And afterwards they could discuss the program with the kids and talk about how TV characters solve their problems and see if they can find any alternative solutions. 	
Not only parents, but also TV broadcasters have a big responsibility to protect children from violence. 
In some countries there are laws saying when broadcasters can show programs involving violence. 
But also in countries where such law does not exist broadcasters should try not to show such programs at an early hour. 
They can also warn their viewers before the program starts that it contains violence and that way parents, who watches together with their children, can make sure that their kids do not watch it. 
I don not think that censorship is the right way to solve this problem because that would violate peoples freedom of expression, witch I think should be a right that every person in this world should have.  	
There is no simple solution on how we can solve the problem with children being exposed to violence on TV. 
But if the discussion about the problem continues more and more people might open their eyes to the problem. 
If parents and TV broadcasters all take their responsibility this might become a smaller problem in the future.
"," The only good Indian is a dead Indian.""  	
Most texts about American Indians written in the end of the nineteenth century are written by people who are clearly against any freedom for the Indians. 
These texts are trying to tell people how dangerous Indians are. 
There are only in a few texts where the Indians get to tell their story of what happened in the late nineteenth century; those texts are most of the time interviews. 
So it his basically impossible to get an objective interpretation on what it was like in this period of American history.  	
Judson E. 
Walker had an attitude towards Indians that probably was quite common in the late nineteenth century in America. 
He basically looks upon them as if they are not human beings but some fierce creatures. 
""The bulk of our adult aboriginal population were born in savagery, and have lived in savagery. 
Try as they will, they cannot entirely subdue the savage instincts to roam at will, to defy restraint, and indulge their lawless appetites for blood and plunder."" 
(1). 
He has quite clearly a subjective view when he talks about the Indians. 
After the battle of the Little Big Horn in 1876, where Sitting Bull and his men defeated General Custer and his men, the Indians fled to just north of the Canadian border. 
In the opening of the year 1879 some of Sitting Bulls men crossed the border again about this Walker says ""...crossing the line and committing depredations, killing the cattle of the settlers, stealing horses, etc."" 
(4). 
When some American troops were sent out to fight against the Indians they saw that they were outnumbered so they retreated and then Walker says ""Many Indians were captured in the retreat, and the operations of that summer were attended with gratifying results."" 
(4). 
When the Indians does something so they can survive it is described as an act of cruelty, violence, or destruction. 
But when the American troop captures many Indians who might not even have committed a criminal act it is described as a gratifying result.  	
In 1885 the wife of General Custer, Elizabeth Custer, wrote a book called Boots and Sandals. 
The book is written in a very effective way. 
She describes the Indians very detailed and in the beginning she makes you wonder whether she dislikes them or not. 
But then she suddenly puts in a small piece that proves how she feels about Indians. 
""... the stained water of Little Big Horn...told how deadly and fatal that was. 
The vengeance of that incarnate fiend was concentrated on the man who had effected his capture. 
It was found on the battle-field that he had cut out the brave heart of that gallant, loyal, and loveable man, our brother Tom."" 
(25). 
""I found him to be the ferocious-looking savage who had killed his enemy from another tribe and eaten his heart warm."" 
(31). 
She also uses sarcasm when writes about the Indian Running Antelope who has come to her husband to implore for food and she refers to him as ""...the venerable warrior..."" 
(27).  	
I think that what she is trying to do is to convince people that Indians are not to be trusted. 
That they are always trying to fool people into likening them and then 'stab them in their back' when they least suspect it. 
In one passage of her story, capture and escape of Rain-in-the-face, his friends and brothers come to the gaol to show their compassion towards him. 
Even though Rain-in-the-face is a brave warrior he shows feelings, and then Elizabeth Custer writes ""The bitter revenge with which I had entered the room were for a moment forgotten, and I almost wished that he might be pardoned."" 
(24). 
She herself uses the same technique to make people realise how she looks upon Indians. 
When you read what she has written you get a nice picture of the Indians and then suddenly she describes something terrible that they have done. 
And she describes them as bloodthirsty, hostile, and savage people. 	
Most American people in the late nineteenth century had a very unfriendly attitude towards Indians, but some people became their friends. 
Dr. 
Thomas B. 
Marquis became a close friend of the Northern Cheyennes. 
He has written down how the warrior Wooden Leg describes the Rosebud fight. 
In most other stories from this the fight would probably be referred to as a massacre but when Wooden Leg tells the story he says that when the Indians surrounded the soldiers they killed each other or committed suicide. 
It is told that the Indians hardly killed any soldiers, ""But they were surrounded and as all the others had done, they killed themselves. 
This ended the fighting on the ridge. 
The Indians had killed but twenty or thirty soldiers: all the rest had killed each other or had committed suicide"" (8). 
Wooden Leg also disavows some of the things that have been believed before. 
One example is that General Custer believed that the Indians was warned before the battle at Little Big Horn, since they had discovered an Indian near the soldiers camp. 
Bud Wooden Leg says that this Indian belonged to a small Cheyenne tribe that did not join the rest of the camp until after the first day of fighting. 
Also in the battle at Little Big Horn did most of the soldiers kill themselves or each other. 
According to Dr. 
Marquis only 10% of Custer's men were enemy inflicted.  	
Most white American people seem to have had a negative attitude towards Indians in the late nineteenth century. 
But it might be hard to get a correct picture since Indian friendly people did not write many of the text from this time.
",True
"How should I start explaining my strengths and weaknesses in English skills? 
Well it has been a while since last time I studied English, in upper secondary school that was. 
And as the years go by you seem to forget knowledge of foreign languages when not used except for a few times a year on vacation trips. 
Usually it is more a loss of words then of grammar skills. 
If you have managed to learn grammar and can understand it completely, you probably will not forget it. 
That is very fortunate since words, in my point of view, are a lot easier to relearn compared to grammar. 
Not getting to far from the actual topic I will change into discussing my own English skills. 
Listening I consider myself being rather good at listening to the English language. 
Of course it all depends to whom I listen to. 
Different dialects and accents can sometimes be really confusing. 	
I am more used to American English then British English after have been staying in the USA for almost one year and studying there at an American high school. 
I have never chosen the opportunity to go to Britain and listen to the pure sound of British English, if there is anything called pure British English pronunciation since its various dialects. 
Still my English teachers throughout Swedish comprehensive school talked British English so I am used to that version as well.   
Reading I suppose I am at an average level in reading English texts. 
Unfortunately it is unusual to find me reading an English book. 
But once and a while, after having more or less forced myself, I read an English novel and most of the times I enjoy it. 
I feel I can handle the English text in most novels, at least modern ones. 
But English non-fiction books are cups of tea I am not too familiar with and which I rather avoid, at least I have done that till now. 
This kind of text is way much more complicated to understand and I have to put a lot of effort to get through the text and to interpret its message.  	
Otherwise I find reading British music and fashion magazines quite amusing and I do that once a month or so. 
And perhaps it eases reading other texts in English.   
Writing Having plans of one day being a teacher I am aware of the importance of writing. 
Still this is the skill of English I am least competent in handling and which I consider being least amusing.  	
So why does writing feel difficult to me? 
Probably it is because whenever you write you have to express yourself more correctly compared to when you speak. 
The need of a large vocabulary is definitely necessary when writing essays or creating other sorts of texts. 
And since my vocabulary is poor, my writing is affected by that and the result gets mediocre. 	
I have not written a lot of essays in English, but I have been writing quite a lot of letters to American friends, even though it has been awhile since the last time I did it. 
And I know that the casual language of letters is nothing you would recommend using in essays. 
Still that is one way of practising your English in spelling, and you might learn a few new words too.  
Speaking The way I see it speaking is my strength and the reason I like English. 
By speaking foreign languages you have the ability to get to know other people and learn about their culture. 
In comprehensive school there is not much time given for speaking, mostly reading texts and learning words from wordlists. 
The first time you get to practice English by using your tongue is probably when being or meeting a tourist. 
My high school year in the USA made me start speaking English and gave me confidence in using it orally. 	
Even though I believe I speak English pretty well I sometimes have a hard time to choose what English I shall speak. 
I used to feel more comfortable with American English, but now I am not sure. 
At times I tend to mix American and British English, which teachers usually are not too fond of.
"," Abortion - a crime?  
Abortion is a burning issue these days, evoking many strong feelings. 
In Sweden there is a growing movement propagating for a law restricting the right to having an abortion, and consequently there is a simultaneously growing fear for such a law. 
Few people can honestly say they are indifferent to the matter. 
It is indeed a moral dilemma, and for a woman who is in the process of deciding whether to follow through with a pregnancy or to abort it, with or without support from the law, I'm sure it is terribly painful and difficult. 
But I am convinced that women should have the legal opportunity to end an unwanted pregnancy, and I will here argue in favour of this position  First of all it is a question of women's rights. 
A woman who goes through a pregnancy and becomes a mother is, physically and by means of social and cultural tradition, forced to make major changes in her lifestyle. 
Unlike the man, she cannot escape and disclaim her responsibility. 
Thus there is an inequality of opportunity between the sexes and the best way to solve this problem is to give women the right to choose.   
Of course I can't pretend to be unaware of the most obvious argument against abortions. 
I can fully understand those persons who feel an instinctive aversion to abortions. 
It is after all an extinction of what might have become a living human being. 
I want to very clearly point out that I do agree that abortions should be avoided to the greatest possible extent, and that they should definitely not be used as some kind of substitute for a contraceptive. 
But at the time of an early abortion the embryo is not capable of living by itself, so I think it is not unreasonable to call it a part of the woman's body and argue that she should have the right to make her own decisions about it. 
I also think it is important to consider what the alternative would be, that is, what would happen if abortions became illegal.  
It is not realistic to imagine that women would suddenly cease to find themselves in the situation where they do not want to carry through with a pregnancy. 
What I mean is that abortions would be carried out anyway, but under much more dangerous circumstances. 
Uneducated amateurs or quacks trying to perform the operation are likely to physically harm the woman, causing permanent injury or even death. 
In fact, thousands of women die from complications after illegal abortions every day throughout the world. 
If it comes down to a question of either aborting the pregnancy, extinguishing the embryo which isn't viable, and saving the mother, or having the abortion and at the same time risking a grown-up woman's life, I think the choice is not very hard to make.  
Obeying the law, that is, refraining from aborting the pregnancy, may also have disastrous consequences, not least for the child. 
Women in difficult life-situations may not have the economical, emotional or physical ability to take care of a child. 
Young women who become pregnant may simply not be ready to take the responsibility that is required for raising a child. 
A woman who has become pregnant after being raped may, for obvious reasons, not want to become a mother at that time. 
An unwanted child is likely to have to take the blame for its parent's unhappiness or to be neglected or abused, and lead a miserable life which it does not deserve. 
Innocent children have a right to be loved and cared for, emotionally and materially, and outlawing abortions would, I think, deprive them of this right. 
These consequences of a prohibition of abortions are rather obvious and too serious to be ignored. 
It is therefore important to keep them in mind when discussing the matter. 
Summarizing my views, I think that legislating against abortion would amount to a step in the wrong direction in the struggle for women's rights. 
It would also imply a direct danger to women's health if they break the law, and put the well-being of their children in jeopardy if they obey it. 
I think that these arguments are sufficient to show that the right to have an abortion should definitely not be removed.
",False
"It was two years since I listened, read, spoke or wrote anything in English. 
Because of that it is difficult for me to know my exact skills in the English language. 
But one thing that I know is that whatever I used to know it is a bit rusty by now. 
In this essay I will try to explain my strengths and weaknesses in the English language and I am afraid that it is going to be more weaknesses than strengths. 	
We are in contact with the English language all the time, for example when we look at television-programs from the United States or England. 
That means that I have practised my listening skills without knowing it and I think that it is a good way of practise listening. 
I am quite good at listening, there are only a few things that I don't understand, and if there are words that I don't know, I usually understand them in the context. 
But when people talk very fast I sometimes have a hard time to keep up with understanding what they say. 
It is also difficult to understand when the person who is speaking talks with a certain dialect, but it can be difficult to understand people talking Swedish dialect too. 
The listening part of the English language is one of my strengths although it is not perfect. 
But the more I practise the better I become in understanding, without needing to think too much.  	
I think reading is very fun and I read a lot in Swedish. 
To be able to read easy in English is one of the skills that I am most eager to be better in, because reading is such a big part of learning. 
I read very slowly in English, much slower than I do in Swedish. 
This entails that when I read something in English my eyes move much faster than my brain understands the content. 
That involves that I sometimes don't comprehend what I have read and I have to read the text all over again. 
Some books are of course easier to read than others are. 
A book written by Sidney Sheldon is much easier to read and understand, than for example Amusing ourselves to death by Neil Postman. 
Reading is definitely one of my weaknesses, my vocabulary is not big enough and I have to work hard with that. 
When we read we are much more dependent on understanding the words because we don't have someone to ask which we can do if we are talking to someone, and when we are looking at television we can understand by what the persons are doing while they are talking. 	
To speak English is not either one of my strengths. 
I think that it is due to the fact that I am afraid that it is going to sound awful and therefor I don't have the courage to speak. 
It is also due to my bad vocabulary which entails that I don't have words for all that I want to say. 
When I am with friends I can talk quite fluently because I don't have to think about how it sounds. 
My pronunciation could be better because sometimes it sounds very Swedish. 
I am not very good on speaking English right now but I will practise and I will be better. 	
Maybe it would be better if you told me what my strengths and weaknesses in writing are after you have read this essay. 
My strength is that I think it is very fun to write. 
In Swedish I write very fluently and I hope that I do so in English as well. 
I know I make some grammar mistakes and that I sometimes use the wrong word order. 
I also think that it is difficult to spell in English because the spelling rules are not the same in English as in Swedish. 
Writing is also part of my weaknesses but at least I think that it is fun to write and that is easier to work from. 	
I am aware that I have more weaknesses than strengths in the English language, but I am willing to work with them to be better. 
And I will always do the best I can.
"," English, my English!  
I have studied English for nine years at school in total and it has always been one of my favourite subjects. 
Knowing English is necessary in society today so I definitely think it is important to try learning it well. 	 
I actually feel very competent when it comes to listening and understanding the spoken English language. 
Since I have lived in England for two years I have had to learn how to understand properly. 
Things like getting a National Insurance number, a bank account and a job all demands a basic knowledge of understanding the English language in its spoken form. 
After a few months in England I discovered all the different nuances of the language and the accents that state your class, for instance. 
It is fascinating but a bit frightening that you can tell whether a person is working- or middle-class as soon as he opens his mouth. 
This is a phenomenon that we do not get in Sweden and it was totally new for me. 
I lived in East London and worked in Chelsea so I got accustomed to two different ""languages"" in the same capital - strange. 
There are some accents that I have difficulties understanding though, like thick Scottish and South African accents, but I am sure the best way to learn is to go and live in the country in question. 	 
Moving over to reading in English, something I have done for many years now. 
I regularly read British and American fiction in addition to the English music and fashion magazines that I am addicted to. 
Whenever I read fiction I do not tend to look up every word I do not understand in a dictionary, if I grasp the main context. 
I do not know if this is good or bad but it has worked for me so far. 
Of course I look up words occasionally but not every word. 
The language in music magazines is pretty simplified and much of it is jargon that I already know anyway. 
Reading non-fiction and complex political and financial articles in newspapers is slightly trickier for me and something I need to work on. 
While living in England I tried to read a newspaper three to four days a week to keep myself up-to-date. 
It has helped although I still feel that my knowledge of understanding formal political language is far from sufficient. 	 
Something in connection with my weak points in reading non-fiction and formal texts is my inability to write properly in English. 
You might have noticed this by now... 
I feel that it is tremendously difficult to write and express my feelings and thoughts in English. 
One reason might be a lack of practice - I have not written anything in English for years now. 
Even while studying English at Upper Secondary School I did not write much at all. 
Another reason could be down to the fact that my grammar is very unsatisfactory and could be improved, indeed! 
I always feel very conscious whenever I have to write something and when I finally do it takes me ages and so on. 
This is extremely annoying because I really like to write (in Swedish) and I have so many things that I want to say by writing. 
I hope this is something that can be improved by this A-course at Uppsala University. 	 
The last thing I am going to write about is the skill of speaking. 
I do feel confident speaking English, after all you would have to I suppose, living in England for two years and being such a talkative person as myself. 
All the words in English fascinate me (how many are there?) 
and the way one word can have lots of different meanings. 
Overall I feel that I am rather good at speaking, however, with a few exceptions including: * Discussing politics and legal matters; I guess I simply do not know all the terms regarding these subjects and feel anxious my (strong) opinions might get misinterpreted by my unawareness of this kind of language. 
* Arguing in English; this is very hard. 
Why I do not know but I never seem to be able to find the right words. 	 
I hope that this summoned up my strong and weak points in English and that it provided a more detailed picture of my knowledge (and lack of it!) 
of this intricate language.
",False
" Why Has the Amount of People Without a Driver's License Increased in Sweden?  
Various countries around the world have different laws and regulations about how and when a citizen can be a holder of a driver's license. 
In Sweden, the age of 18 has been effective for many years. 
A few decades ago it was a matter of course that a person's 18th birthday equaled a driver's license. 
However, something has changed in our society. 
Today there are many people a lot older that 18 who do not possess a driver's license. 
We become aware of this notable change when we realize that people in our surroundings cannot go on certain activities because they do not have a driver's license and they have to completely rely on the public transportation. 
Another obvious sign of this change is that people miss out on many jobs where a driver's license is required.  
There are plenty of possible causes to this apparent change in our society. 
One that is very likely is the fact that today even more people live in the cities and the suburbs where the public transportation has developed tremendously during the last decades. 
In places like our major cities, Stockholm and Gothenburg, there are buses and trains available almost 24 hours a day. 
Children who grow up with this service might later feel that it is totally unnecessary for them to get a driver's license since they are used to depending on public transportation. 
Not only has the public transportation developed in and around the cities, it has also increased in the country and it is not that important for people to have a driver's license anymore.  
Another cause of the recently decreasing number of holders of a driver's license in our country is that the driving education has been revised both theoretically and practically. 
Today it is very demanding and it takes a lot of time to prepare oneself for the two driving tests; one theoretical and one practical. 
People who are 18 years old in Sweden are either juniors or seniors in high school, depending on what time of the year they were born. 
No matter if they are juniors or seniors, school keeps them very busy, especially if they are on an academic program. 
Many students feel that they have neither the time, nor the energy to go to a driving school after the regular school day, since a driving school is just like a normal school where you have to take classes, do your homework, and study hard in order to pass the written exam. 
You also have to spend many hours on the roads in order to understand the language of traffic and pass the driving test. 
This takes a lot of time, time that people do not have or they have other priorities.  
The main cause, however, for this visible change in our society, is easily found in people's wallets. 
Throughout the 90s the entire economy of Sweden has been under a lot of pressure. 
People do not have as much money as they used to, and at the same time everything has become more expensive. 
Some two years ago a value-added tax was put on the driving lessons which led to a remarkable advance in price. 
Unless their parents pay for it, there are many 18-year old Swedes who cannot afford to pay for an education at a driving school. 
Of course there are other alternatives to the driving schools, but no matter how you do it you need to drive a lot and gas is very expensive in this country. 
Only a decade ago more students had a summer job and in that way they were able to pay for a driver's license. 
Due to the unemployment it is more difficult to find a summer job these days which automatically means that also students have less money. 
As a result, fewer people in Sweden have a driver's license.  
As we have seen there are several possible causes to the trend that less people in Sweden tend to get a driver's license. 
However, the causes mentioned above: more people in and around the cities, the effort that has to be made, and the economical issue, would probably together or alone, answer the question why the amount of people without a driver's license has increased in Sweden.
"," Causes of the increased number of overweight and fat people in Sweden  Since 1980, the number of overweight and fat people in Sweden has increased and those who have gained weight are both men and women and of all ages. 
It is well known that obesity can cause complications of various kinds, such as diabetes and vascular diseases. 
Consequently there are many people who are worried about this trend and efforts are made to reverse the development. 
In order to do so, it is necessary to find the causes behind the increase and that is what this essay will be about. 
Why is it that such a large part of the Swedish population has gained weight over the last twenty years? 	
There are several different reasons for why people gain weight, but not all of them can explain why the number of overweight and fat people is increasing. 
For example, some people blame genetic factors or pregnancy for the extra kilos they have put on, but none of these elements are new for our time period and can therefore not be responsible for why the number of overweight or fat people is rising. 	
What we have to look at are causes which have derived from patterns which have changed over the last twenty years and here we find that one of the most common arguments is that many people today don't get enough exercise. 
Today, work which require much physical effort is often done by machines and robots and what remains for humans are often very sedentary tasks. 
Many people sit still almost the whole day when at work and so do many children and adolescents in school. 
There are those who think that the amount of physical education in schools should be increased, but this subject has instead been cut reduced. 
According to a study made by the University of Gothenburg, this reduction has contributed to the fact that so many young people in Sweden have gained weight. 
Not only do many people remain sitting all day at work or in school, but most of our means of transport require very little physical effort and this is also true about many popular leisure-time activities. 
To watch TV and to play computer-games are only two examples of entertainment which leave us as rather passive spectators. 
There were certainly computers, cars and other electronic devices twenty years ago as well, but they seem to take up bigger and bigger parts of our lives and technology constantly increases the choice of products. 
Of course, there are many people who also like to do sports and exercise on their spare time, but those who do not, are not as likely to get exercise naturally to same extent as people did a only a few decades ago.  	
In connection with sedentary manners of living, you often find another factor which can contribute to obesity, namely bad food habits. 
According to an article called ""Kvinnors vervikt och fetma"", food habits alone cannot be held responsible for the increase of the number of overweight and fat people in Sweden, because we eat healthier nutrition now than twenty years ago. (http://www.niwl.se/hotell/ymednvso/rapport/1996-7.html) However, a sedentary lifestyle and a general faulty attitude towards healthy manners of living often come together. 
A combination of lack of exercise and unhealthy food can easily result in overweight. 	
Healthy manners of living are often class related and obesity is more common among the socioeconomically weak groups in society. 
Claes Annerstedt, who has done research on high school students' manner of living in some parts of Sweden, says in an interview that ""Students from social group one are more conscious in questions concerning health and [they] exercise and eat well."" 
Another example which supports this statement is that 10,9 % [text lost] Since 198f all female clerks in Sweden do not perform any kind of exercise, whereas the corresponding number among female workers in Sweden is 16 %. (http://www.niwl.se/hotell/ymednvso/rapport/1996-7.html) 	 	Now, an important question is whether the differences of attitude between social classes are of any importance for the trend that we are dealing with. 
Although I do no have any evidence which proves that it is so, there are factors which indicate that this may be the case. 
For example, the decline of the Swedish economy which started about a decade ago put many people in hard socioeconomical positions and as has already been stated, that is where obesity occurs most frequently. 
It is therefore possible that the economically hard times indirectly contributed to the increased number of overweight and fat people.  	
What we do know for sure is that lack of exercise and - to a certain extent - bad food habits have contributed to increase the number of obese people and we can also assume that if this trend continues, we will probably witness an increased number of people who suffer from vascular diseases, diabetes, and other complications.  
List of references: 1. 
",False
" Plastic money is taking over coins and notes  The use of credit cards has increased a lot lately and has slowly started to push away the traditional trading with notes and coins. 
From having been confined to the hands of well-off people who used more money than could fit into their purses and businessmen who spent the company's money, credit cards are now more or less in every man's hand. 
As good as every shop is nowadays equipped with machines that will get money out of our little plastic quadrangles. 
Big chain stores have their own pay cards and you get bonus points if you use them. 
There are people who think that within a few decades plastic cards will have replaced all money, and notes and coins will only exist as numbers on a bank account.   
The main reason behind this development is most certainly the new advanced technology and our computerized society. 
But I am going to leave this for a moment and see what other reasons there may be.  
Plastic cards are efficient and easy to use. 
They make shopping more convenient in many ways. 
We don't have to make sure that we have enough cash before we go out shopping, just that our bank account is properly filled up. 
And shouldn't that be the case there is always the credit to rely on. 
We don't have to worry about standing at the cash desk with a long queue of waiting people behind us and trying to count our notes and coins to the right amount. 
All we have to do is hand them the card and ID, sign the receit and that is it. 
I wouldn't say it is much quicker than paying cash, but easier.   
When we go abroad it is of course even better to be able to pay with a card. 
First of all we don't have to change our money into a foreign currency. 
And when we are there it doesn't matter if the cashier tells us in French or in Chinese how much it costs. 
We just give them the credit card and they will sort it out for us.   
It must also be mentioned how much safer it is not having to carry around cash all the time. 
If you get robbed or loose your purse you can always block the card and you are less likely to loose any money. 
And another thing concerning safety is that there are in fact people who are allergic to money. 
Perhaps you can get allergic to plastic too, but in any case it is more hygenic with plastic cards. 
Who knows what all those coins which have been passed on from so many different hands have been through? 
After all, your credit card stays with you most of the time.   
I also think that prestige can have quite a lot to do with the increasing popularity of credit cards. 
Doesn't it feel better to hand over a shining card instead of a bunch of creased old notes? 
Perhaps it makes us feel a bit like that business man or that rich person. 
And nobody around us actually knows how much money our card is good for, it could be millions for all they know.  
To finish off I would like to go back to the first thing I mentioned - the new technology. 
I think that the prospective disappearance of money is only a natural consequence of an increasingly computerized society. 
And perhaps that is not such a bad thing after all.
"," The Phenomenon of Splitting of Compound Words -a causal analysis  In English, we write fast food, summer sale, kitchen door etc, etc. 
One concept, put into two separate words. 
In Swedish, the system of compounding words is the opposite: we write snabbmat and sommarrea, always as one word, never as two. 
Anyhow, during the recent years, the number of split compounds has increased immensely in all areas of the Swedish language: mostly in advertisements and on signs, but even in running text, and the words come out as snabb mat and sommar rea. 
In these examples, there is no danger of ambiguity, but what if somebody writes leverpastejen ""the liver"" as lever pastejen - which means something like ""is the pate alive""?! 
As we can see, the results of split compounds can in Swedish become tragically hilarious. 
Why is it that this phenomenon has spread so quickly throughout our language?  
The Swedish language writer Siw believes that it has its origins in how we learn reading and writing at school. 
In children's books, long compound words are often hyphenated to make reading easier, and to make the pupil see and understand the different parts of the word. 
Later, pupils learn to avoid hyphens everywhere except at the end of lines, they just remove them - and the result is two words instead of one.  
There is also a graphic aspect of the problem. 
In advertisements, on shop signs and other places where the layout of the text must catch the reader's eye, it has always been more excused to split compounds. 
But why? 
Do advertisers think that the message is disturbed, or even lost, with a small hyphen? 
So it seems. 
Another reason of this misuse can be that sign makers want both parts of the word to appear equally clearly. 
For example, in Hamn Krogen ""the Harbour Pub"" the word Krogen, with a capital K, is more evident than in the correct Hamnkrogen. 
(But I promise, Swedes are not too stupid to understand such a ""long"" word!) 
Due to this, unhyphenated words in graphic contexts have been looked upon rather mildly, and as a consequence, we now find split compounds even in running texts.  
We must also bear in mind the great influence of English in our whole society today. 
Many students get to read their course books in English, and new technical terms are coined all the time. 
This is a main cause of the problem with split compounds in Swedish. 
As I stated, English puts most of its compounds as two separate words, (though there is also the one-word concept, as well as hyphenating). 
Many compound words and concepts that come into Swedish today are direct loans from English, and the English two-word system is easily transferred: ""fast food"" becoming snabb mat instead of snabbmat, and so on.   
As we see, there are several possible causes of this language phenomenon. 
One could think it seems rather weird; fluent speakers and writers of Swedish, do they not have the knowledge to decide what is right and what is wrong when using their mother tounge? 
The answer, in many cases, is - no! 
There has to be, in addition to the causes above, another aspect: Time. 
Nowadays people do not have time to think of language usage. 
Every means of communication has to be fast and effective, and as long as the message is conveyed without misunderstandings it does not matter how. 
People have other, more important, things to think of than if to write one or two words - it is the message that counts. 
And of course, it is. 
But this does not mean that we have to misuse our language! 
Especially the splitting of compounds can lead to very mysterious ambiguities and misunderstandings...
",False
" ""Why spoil a good mother to make an ordinary grammarian?"": Nineteenth Century Attitudes to Female Education  Education for women was a widely discussed issue in the nineteenth century. 
The main questions were whether female education was justified or not, and how it, if justified, should be implemented. 
These discussions mostly concerned middle- and upper-class girls, whose education was unsystematic and disorganised. 
Schooling for girls was often more of a social than of an academical nature. 
Girls were taught to be good hostesses and to be desirable for their future husbands. 
They learnt basic language skills, arithmetic, embroidery, dancing, and playing musical instruments. 
There were many opponents to extended education for women; people who wanted to keep things the way they were. 
Their adversaries were reformers of different kinds, established middle class families, and, of course, feminists. 
Both groups had much to say in these questions. 
The arguments were often based on ethical, social or medical ground. 
In this essay I will give an account of some different ways of thinking in the matter.  
It is necessary first of all to consider the ordinary woman's situation in the nineteenth century. 
She was merely supposed to be a beautiful, caring and supporting creature. 
She should get married and take care of her husband, their home and their children in an unselfish way. 
These facts made the basis for many of the social and ethical arguments against female education. 
For one thing it was said that girls would never find use for the knowledge they gained at school in the following life, with the womanly duties which would occupy their lives. 
In this sense female education was nothing but a waste of time. 
Regarding the self-denial which a woman should possess, schooling was an evil. 
Intellectual skills led to the process of raising oneself above ones companions, and that was certainly not what a good house-wife was expected to do. 
Also religious approaches to the matter were made. 
Attention should not be paid to a woman's well-doing. 
It should be done in love of God, and the reward she would get was knowing that she had done a good deed.   
The opponents of education for women stressed that the ideal of womanhood would be destroyed by education. 
From this point of view the best environment for learning girls what they needed for their future lives was in the home, and the best teachers were their mothers. 
On the other hand, those advocating female education argued that boys needed an educated mother in order to be encouraged in their mental development in a satisfactory way. 
But education was also a question of money. 
For families with financial difficulties for educating their children it was more important to send sons to school, and spend less money on their daughters' education.   
Disagreements arose also in other areas. 
In the British society of this time it was very hard for middle-class women to find jobs, and they were totally dependent on their husbands. 
This, among other things, made many people think positively about providing schooling for middle-class girls. 
One argument to do so was that some middle-class women actually needed to earn a living. 
The women's colleges that were opened in the latter half of the century, showed that women were capable of studying at the same level as men, without gaining any damaging effects. 
But many people, even among those who understood the importance of education for women, thought that the separate spheres for men and women should be kept distinct, and that women should therefore only work in their own sphere. 
It was feared that if these spheres were destroyed, this could create a disastrous turbulence in the relation between the sexes. 
It was also said that women should be protected from hard work, in order to give them their rightful treatment in a high civilisation.	
In addition to these arguments medical ones were also used. 
It was pointed out that women had a different way of thinking than men, and that they were physically the weaker sex. 
Women had a sensitiveness and intuitive power, they were insightful, but they lacked depth, ability to concentrate and power for reasoning. 
This was generally thought to be an obvious observation, and there were not many people who disputed this analysis. 
The debate that followed, however, treated the question whether this difference was inherited, or if it was acquired through different treatment in society. 
Studies were made in the field. 
This was often done by comparing brains from different people, and by weighing and measuring skulls. 
It was claimed that a small skull was a sign of less intelligence than that of a large skull. 
From this it was deduced that men had developed much more from the ape than women had done. 
Hence higher education was not valuable to women, and it could even be physically dangerous for them. 
Women could become incapable of producing children, it was said, and their beautifully shaped foreheads were in danger of being altered, all because of education. 
Other conclusions were that the differentiated roles of men and women were only evidence of a high civilisation, and that man and woman cannot be born equal, since women were not superior to men in any known human society.   
As we can see, there was a large controversy in the question of female education in Britain in the nineteenth century. 
We all know that the conditions for female education eventually changed, but it was not done without resistance. 
In an essay like this an imbalance might develop, as there seem to be fewer arguments for female education than against it. 
But those mentioned are important ones. 
The arguments of the opponents are easily noticed. 
They are very different from the views that most people hold today, which makes them interesting. 
The thought that women should compete intellectually with men was ridiculous to many people in the nineteenth century, but there were also those who stressed the importance of developing a better system for female education.
","	Just a few years ago I felt quite confident in my knowledge in English. 
I had read English in school since I was ten years old and I had travelled quite a lot. 
I thought that I mastered the language pretty well. 
But what has happened since then? 
How have my skills in the English language developed during the last three years? 	
Starting with my skills in speaking, I must say that I have hardly spoken English since I left school. 
This is something that makes me feel nervous and insecure every time I try to speak English. 
I always want the words to come out right and to be able to speak fluently - and probably just because I want to so hard to speak properly, I tend to stumble instead. 
I often can't find the right words and I have a hard time trying to figure out how to put things. 
I seldom know whether what I say is grammatically correct or not.  
I like making speeches, though, and using the language - both Swedish and English - to express myself. 
Despite this fact, I get nervous. 
I think it's because I'm a bit shy, afraid to show other people what I can and can't do. 
I have overcome this fear pretty much when it comes to speaking in Swedish, so probably it's just a question of getting used to the English language. 
Another thing is my accent. 
When I was in the eight grade I was in London for a weekend. 
At that time people said to me that it sounded like if I was born in England, - no wonder -, I had learnt British English ""all my life"". 
Since then, though, I have spoken English to Germans, Americans and people of several other nationalities during competitions and trainingcamps abroad. 
On the television I have mostly heard American English. 
I guess I'm quite confused - do I speak American English or British English, (I hardly know the differences,) or is it something totally different? 	
Also when it comes to writing I feel that I have forgotten about how it's done. 
I have the same problems with finding words and with seeing the linguistic correctness as when I'm speaking. 
Of course I don't feel nervous in the same way, because I know that I can always stop to think and to look up words.  
I'm sure that one can easily see in my writing that I'm from Sweden. 
I have a tendency towards thinking in Swedish and then trying to translate my thoughts directly into English. 
That doesn't always turn out too well... 
To my advantages, though, I can say that I'm a fast learner, and that I usually don't think that spelling is a very big problem. 
Listening to and reading English are two skills that I have used a little bit, also during recent years. 
I haven't travelled much lately, but I often hear spoken English on the television.  
I think that both my listening and my reading abilities are rather satisfactory. 
(That is, of course, when the language isn't too advanced.) 
Even if I don't understand all of the words, I can usually see the context, and understand most of what is said or written.  	
In high school I studied the A and B-course in English as compressed courses, which means that we only studied English for the three first terms in high school. 
I really think that one learns the language better if it's taken continuously during the whole three years of education. 
You need some time to digest the information and to practice the language for a longer period of time. 
The way we did it I felt that when I graduated I had almost forgotten ever reading English. 
I think that this is one thing that have affected my knowledge in English (words for an example) a bit negatively, compared with how it would be if I had read it for all three years. 	
To sum up I can say that what I need is to learn more words and grammar, to read and speak a lot, to get more secure, - in short terms; to practice. 
And I guess that practice is what I'm going to get this term, while reading English A1 at Uppsala University.
",True
"Introduction  In this essay I am going to try to evaluate my English, by looking separately at the four skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing.  
I do think that it is very hard to look at my own strengths and weaknesses in an objective way. 
Since I tend to be either very critical or too optimistic when it comes to my own abilities.  
Listening  I have had the opportunity to hear spoken English from different parts of the world in all my life. 
As I live in a country that does not use the opportunity to dub foreign movies, documentaries, talk shows etcetera. 
Another opportunity for me to practice my English, was when my fathers wife, an airhostess, came home from her trips to Bankok with pirate copies of popular American movies that were subtitled in Thai!  
y major problem related to my listen ability is that I sometimes get caught when the person that I am having a conversation with, or am listening to utters a word or an expression which meaning I do not understand. 
Naturally it is quite hard to listen to what this person has to say and at the same time try to figure out what he or she already has said.  
Overall I do feel quite confident as long as the speaker does not have a dialect that is too different from standard English.  
Speaking  The curricula which the Swedish English teachers are supposed to follow says that a pupil who wants good grades in English has to speak the language when he or she is in class.   
This has not, however, been the case at most of the lessons that I have attended. 
Approximately, I spoke English about five hours each year in upper school. 
Most of this time was linked to the obligatory oral presentations on various subjects that we did every year. 
All this has contributed to the insecurity which I have always felt when I speak English. 
And I do feel that this is my weakest part compared to the other three: listening, reading and writing. 
Reading  At the age of thirteen I went on a vacation to Wales with my parents, after one week I had read every single book that we had brought with us. 
There was nothing left to do but go to a local book shop. 
Eventually, I discovered that it actually was possible to read in English. 
A couple of years later I realised that the jokes in a book written by a English speaking writer were much funnier and better preserved in the original publication.  
Since 50 percent of the books in my bookshelf are written in English I have to consider my reading ability as good. 
Because to me the most important thing is not to know every single word in a book. 
Instead it is much more meaningful to understand the coherence. 
On the other hand I am aware of that this unwillingness to look up unfamiliar words is a weakness. 
But it is easy to lose the rhythm and flow if the reading is interrupted. 
And if the story is in the middle of something crucial, then it is absolutely impossible to stop.  
Writing  Reviews and reports of books were the most common ways of practising writing in my school. 
According to me the written word is the best way to express thoughts and feelings and therefor I would have liked to produce something outside the usual predestinated pattern.  
It seems to be very important to use a correctly written English. 
The reason for this is that a person who fully masters this skill, equally masters the most important components of the language. 
I can not say that grammar ever has been my strength. 
To cover this I used to claim that I learned every foreign language which I know by ear. 
This does work to a certain limit; then it does unfortunately not work anymore. 
I came to that point and discovered that I had, and still have, much to learn.  
I truly enjoy writing, it challenges me. 
And this is my strength, because if there is optimism in a text I think it shows.
","A lot of people have been asking me: ""Why are you taking an English course? 
You have been to America, you must know the language already!"" 
Well, for one year I have spoken and heard English every day but that doesn't necessary mean that I know everything about the language. 
I speak English almost fluently and I understand just about everything. 
But there is a lot more to learn... 
I divide my English learning into two phases, before and after my visit to America. 
For a year I worked as an aupair (nanny) in Hackensack, New Jersey. 
Before I came there my English was decent. 
My vocabulary was not that large and my pronounciation sounded like the average Swede; pretty good comparing to other Europeans, but not excellent. 
Then I made the best descision I've ever made; to go abroad and work in America.  
In school back home in Sweden the English teacher talked pretty slowly with a clear British accent. 
If you didn't understand what she was saying you could always ask her and she explained it in Swedish.  
Standing in the kitchen in Hackensack, New Jersey trying to understand what my mumbling, Brooklyn born, host dad Fred was saying while he was doing the dishes, was somewhat harder. 
Many times I just said ""yes"" and prayed that he didn't ask me if I was doing drugs. 
But, as time passed by, I learned more and more to listen extra carefully when he was talking. 
At the end of my year I understood nearly everything he said. 
Thanks to him I've become a more attentive listener.   
I've always read a lot of books but I didn't start to read English books until I was 19 years old. 
In America I was so tired of speaking and hearing English all the time I found out that I really required a Swedish book or a magazine before I went to bed. 
I didn't want to read books in English too.  
I've noticed that it takes me twice as long time to read an English book than a Swedish one. 
The reason why is because I have to look up words and sometimes read paragraphs more than one time to really understand.   
When it comes to my speaking skills I've adopted an ugly American accent. 
I would rather speak Australian English which sounds more beautiful or British English which, in my opinion, sounds more proper. 
But any accent is better than a Swedish accent!  
y vocabulary has grown, especially with words that are related to babies and household. 
For example; bib, pacifier, cupboard and sink are words I didn't know before I came to America. 
I remember one time, in the beginning of my year, when my mumbling host dad asked me to give him a paper towel. 
Since I'd never heard of paper towels (only towels) and was a little bit shy, I gave him a towel from the bathroom. 
He started laughing and I stood there, looking like a questionmark, with a towel in my hand wondering what was so funny. 
Everytime he met someone he never had met before he told him or her about his Swedish aupair, who didn't know what a paper towel was. 
I don't have much problem writing. 
I like to write essays and I've written a few essays in English. 
Spelling has always been one of my strong sides, both in Swedish, German, Spanish and English. 
My grammar skills, though, are not what they should be. 
The grammar course is hopefully gonna change that. 
I really have to improve my grammar!  
In America I didn't write much. 
I only wrote shopping lists and a few letters to my foreign friends. 
Before I left for the USA I planned to take a writing course besides taking care of the children. 
I ended up taking a self defense course... 
So much for those plans!  
I really like the English language and I think that I'm doing pretty well using it. 
Nine years of learning English in school and spending one year in America should be a good basis for future Englishstudies. 
I plan to take the B-course in English here in Uppsala and after that, maybe go back to America, this time to study. 
One of the many reasons that I want to learn more about the English language is that someday I want to work abroad and maybe even live in the USA, Great Britain or Australia for a couple of years - or a lifetime!
",False
" Smoking ban in restaurants, cafés and bars  Smoking is no longer a smokers own business. 
It has shown after several researches that passive smoking is almost as unhealthy as smoking a cigarette. 
Everyone should have the possibility to enjoy a smoke-free environment. 
Most places which are exposed to a lot of smoke are restaurants, cafés and bars where innocent non-smokers inhale the smoke. 	
Jobs in the food and beverage industry includes late hours and a smoky environment. 
If one could prevent the smoky working environment jobs in restaurants, cafés and bars would become more attractive. 
This would be favouring the catering trade. 
The food and beverage sector have always had a high turnover rate. 
This change could lead to an improvement in the restaurant's recruiting-problem. 
Since they could offer healthier working conditions.  	
The furniture in restaurants would last longer if they were not reeking with smoke and full of burn-marks from cigarettes. 
Restaurants could cut costs for new furniture purchases or having the furniture frequently re-covered. 
In regards to the cleaning issues the catering trade will save plenty of time when cleaning the floors which normally are covered in butts. 
The washing-up would also be easier if there are no ashtrays and butts in glasses and on plates.  	
The restaurants, cafés and bars would increase the sale of snacks since the smokers can not light a cigarette after dinner and have to order snacks or perhaps a dessert to prevent their restlessness. 
Purchases of ashtrays are not necessary. 
The guests of the restaurants would be more satisfied when they are walking home with lovely smelling clothes, and not as the present situation, when clothes are reeking from cigarettes.  	
A smoking ban would not only favour the catering trade but also the society. 
For many people smoking is an activity they do when they are socialising with other smokers in restaurants and bars. 
The prohibition of smoking would decrease the ""social smoking"" in public places and could also result in an increasing number of non-smokers. 
The society would be able to save costs spent on smoke related diseases. 
The allergy sufferers would perhaps not have any symptoms of the allergy if they were not exposed to smoke in public places and therefor many hospital visits could be avoided. 	
Of course it exists counter arguments. 
The government receives a lot of taxes from the cigarette sales and a prohibition of smoking in restaurants, cafés and bar could decrease the sale and would therefore decrease the amount of taxes to the government. 
But the money the government spends on medical cost related to smoke disease would probably exceed the money collected from taxes. 
Some smokers argue that it is their right to smoke if they want to. 
But when it is proved that passive-smokers also run the risk of getting diseases related to smoke, it is no longer the smokers own decision. 
The present situation makes it difficult for certain people. 
Instead of having a smoke ban in restaurants and letting the smokers go outside when they feel tempted to smoke, they keep out allergy sufferer, pregnant women and people who can not put up with smoke. 
Restaurants make small attempts to have smoke-free areas for the people who can not stand smoke. 
But it is difficult to shut out smoke from one room/corner to another. 
The smoke still bother the people in the designated non-smoking areas. 	
The city of Vancouver in Canada initiated the ban of smoking in western Canada three years ago. 
It is still an issue under debate, since the people have not gotten used to it yet. 
Spending two weeks in Vancouver gave a deeper insight of the smoking ban. 
Barowners argue that they have lost sales because people visits the bar less, since they can not enjoy a cigarette while having a drink. 
However, in the long run people will become used to the idea of smoke-free bars.  	
Since Sweden is such a health conscious country the idea to ban smoking in restaurants, bars and cafés should come as no surprise to the Swedish population.
","I have lived one year in an English-speaking country and during that period of time I learned many new things about the English language. 
But I'm not yet satisfied with what I know, there are still many aspects of English that I can and wish to improve.  
I regret that I don't have a chance to listen to English being spoken more often. 
Since I don't have cable-TV at my house I don't get the chance to watch American or British TV-channels like CNN, BBC and such, which I believe would be a very valuable asset for anyone who wishes to improve their English. 
There are always subtitles on Swedish television, and it is almost impossible to both read the text and have full attention for the listening-part. 
I have once or twice borrowed some audio books narrated in English at the library, just to hear the language, but I found it rather dull and prefer to read the book instead. 
I have no problems understanding spoken English and I think this might be a natural effect from having spent a long period of time in an English-speaking country in which you hear the language around you all the time. 
When I first came back from the United States I found it easy to speak English. 
But as time went by and as I spoke less English I discovered that my fluency and security about speaking English did in some sense decrease. 
And now after being back in Sweden for three years I have noticed that when speaking to somebody in English it takes me a while to get my accent and fluency back. 
I have discovered that it doesn't matter how much I read or how much I watch American TV-shows, but to improve and retain the American accent I once had I have to practice talking. 
It's certainly not fun to talk to yourself, but I think it could be practice enough to just read something out loud every once in a while. 
Sometimes when I speak English I realize that I don't have the exact words for a specific thing I want to say. 
I know I have a very limited vocabulary and this can be a problem at times, even though I suffer from this mostly when I'm writing. 
It seems that even though I do read a lot in English, I don't learn that many new words that I wish I was. 
I know I need to put more time and effort into learning new words, but when I read a book I don't want to put it down to look a strange word up all the time, even though I know this is a good way of learning new words. 
But the effort that this demands takes away the amusement about reading the book. 
I really wish that I had a better vocabulary, and regret that it is so difficult for me to expand it.  
I don't come across that many situations where knowledge of English is required in my everyday-life. 
I have been writing letters in English for many years and started writing to some American people when I was around twelve. 
I think this was a good way for me to get to know another side of the English language from the one I heard on TV or learned in school. 
I still write to some of them and this is, apart from reading some novels in English once in a while, the most active contact I get with the English language in my everyday life.  
Since writing includes so many different kinds of areas e.g. spelling, grammar, vocabulary etc. this is where I think you can discover whether a person is good in English or not. 
At times I find it very difficult to write in English, it might be hard to now the exact expression for a certain thing or uncertainty about grammar and spelling.   
Even though I'm not satisfied with my knowledge in English as it is today I know that my spending a year in the United States has helped me quite a lot, in the sense of fluency and vocabulary. 
And some of the words I learned there might not be of any valuable use in an everyday conversation in any other country but the United States. 
But it's fun to know these words and different kinds of American brands or makes when they are mentioned on TV or in a context of any other kind.
",False
" TV-violence and children  Violence has always fascinated people. 
During the earlier decades, violence has been used for entertainment, for example when executions were made in the public and crowds of people gathered. 
Today many people get in touch with violence through the medias, especially television. 
It has been discussed quite much whether the violence that occurs on TV affects children in a negative way. 
There are quite many persons doing research who think that that is the case, but there are also many persons doing research who do not believe so. 
The examinations that have been made on the topic do not give any clear answers to the question how violence on TV affects children. 
The only thing that can be determined about children and TV in general is that parents are recommended to watch TV together with their children. 
In that way the parents can explain violent situations and avoid that their children watch inappropriate programs.  
Violence on TV is increasing constantly. 
As mentioned earlier, the best thing for children is when they can watch TV together with their parents. 
Unfortunately there are not many parents today who have the time to do that. 
But they still want to protect their children fron watching TV-violence. 
In the United States the V-chip has been introduced as a solution to the problem. 
The V-chip measures the TV-violence on a scale from 1 to 4, and then it is up to the parent to decide which level of violence that will be permitted. 
In Sweden, the violencedescribing board also wants to introduce that kind of system. 
But the TV-channels are protesting against it. 
Opponents claim that it is a technically very complicated system which requires an enormous work of the TV-channels. 
And it is still not possible to say whether the system will work at all.  
I think that violence is something that will always exist in television. 
And television will always affect people in some kind of way, otherwise people would not watch television at all. 
Violence on TV does not always have to be a bad thing. 
Whether violence on TV is good or bad for children can certainly be discussed. 
I think that it could be a good idea to introduce a system that makes it possible to limit violence on TV for parents who do not have the time to watch TV with their children. 
But I think that TV-violence itself is not really a problem. 
The problem is that parents today do not spend enough time with their children generally. 
Television has become a cheap and always available baby-sitter in many households. 
The V-chip only makes it look like once violence can be taken away from TV, it is no longer a problem when children watch TV very much. 
To produce a chip is not really a solution of the problem with TV-violence. 
And with the grade-system, who will determine grades of violence in the programs? 
A computer? 
As a parent I would never rely on a chip to decide what would be appropriate for my children to watch. 
I do not think it is possible to make up different grades of violence either. 
Violence can not really be measured, especially not in television. 
Something that seems to be very violent to one person can seem harmless to another person. 
And children are individuals as well as adults. 
I think it is impossible to tell how a certain violent situation on TV affects children in general. 
Violence can certainly affect children, but to get the right picture of it violence has to be explained in the context where it occurs. 
And violence is not only used on television to frighten people or bring excitement to a story. 
It is often used to give a credible, realistic picture of reality, for example in documentaries.  
Should children be protected from violence in the first place? 
I think so, at least in some way. 
Movies made by adults, with very violent scenes, should maybe not be seen by children. 
It is the parents responsibility to see to that their children do not watch programs that are not good for them. 
Violence on TV appears in so many different forms and there are so many programs children should not watch until they are grown up. 
But it is very difficult to protect children from these programs. 
Violence will always be available for children, and if not on the TV at home maybe on the friends TV, or in newspapers, on the internet.  
If they would only be able to watch certain ""non-violent"" programs at their home, I think that they would still find out that there are also other exciting programs on television. 
And forbidden things of course make children curious. 
I remember when I was a child and my nephews were watching a horror movie on TV. 
They told me to watch it, too, and even though I was afraid of what I was going to see, I still could not let it be because I was so curios. 
I saw a horrible scene with a woman who had turned into some kind monster and lived in a basement. 
I was afraid of going down to our basement for months after that incident. 
Maybe it would have been a good thing if someone had stopped me from watching that movie. 
But it was an experience, and after a while I found out that there were no monsters living in basements.  
I think that more examinations should be made about how TV affects children. 
TV-violence was discussed a lot I think about two years ago, when a six-year-old boy was beaten to death by his classmates. 
It was discussed whether television was responsible for that tragedy. 
Many people thought that such a horrible thing would never have happened about a hundred years ago. 
Maybe the violence in television gives children a wrong view of the seriousness with violence? 
In animated films, the ""hero of the story"" usually never dies, no matter how much he has been hit. 
In reality, it is a fact that one strike can kill a person. 
But should television be made responsible for violence among children? 
I do not think so. 
I think it is of a much greater importance to try to talk to children about violence instead of trying to find someone to blame. 
Many children watch a lot of TV, but I do not really think that television plays a big part in childrens lives. 
If children become violent because they watch a lot of TV, the absence of the parents is probably the main reason rather than the violence on television.  
I do not think that it is possible to completely protect children from violence on TV. 
In the society of today children get in contact with violence in so many different ways, and home is no longer the only place where television can be watched. 
Television is available everywhere, and to prohibit TV-violence to protect children is probably not possible. 
Parents should take their responsibility and see which programs their children usually watch. 
I think that children of course should not be able to watch everything. 
Children should watch programs which are made for children, but not if violence is described as something harmless in them.
"," Grants instead of loans to go to university  Education is the key to a working society. 
Unemployment has been and still is a hard problem for a society do deal with.
The state quite often tries to get a better situation by encouraging people to get educated. 
The problem is not always the lack of vacant jobs but the lack of well-educated people. 
How come then that there are still quite few people who choose to go to university after high school? 	
One main reason is probably that the system with loans does not attract people to get higher education. 
In Sweden students usually have to take loans to be able to finance their studies, especially if they are young and go to university directly after finishing high school. 
As a student you get a small amount of money from the state, a study grant. 
It is not very much money and certainly not enough to make a living. 
The students who do not take loans usually either live with their parents or somehow have the time to work while they study and finance their studies in that way. 
But combining studies mith work is not very common, as the loan system does not allow you to have an unlimited income during the studies. 
Otherwise the grants will be lowered. 
It is about the same thing concerning the study loans. 
You will not be able to borrow the full amount of money if the income has been too high during a year. 
That amount was in 1998 about 55 000 crowns. 
The main problem with taking a loan to finance the studies is that the present system makes it impossible for many students to ever be able to pay back the loan. 
You start to pay back your loan about six months after the finished studies. 
At present you pay four percent of what your income was two years ago when you start to pay back the loan. 
The problem is that the rent, which is made up by the government, usually is higher than four percent. 
As a consequence of that your loan grows while pay it off. 
At the age of 65, the loan will be written off.  	
A lot of people presumably prefer to start to work after highschool instead of going to university. 
The problem with the loan system is probably one main reason. 
It is most probable that a lot of people prefer to earn their own money. 
That concerns especially young people who want to get a place of their own to live end become independent from their parents. 
A lot of people do not see the point in going to university and become indebted for the rest of their lives. 
Besides they miss their income during the time they study. 
Certainly, the loan does not have to be paid back in a way that it usually causes people financial troubles. 
But it must certainly be a psychological burden to be indebted and to be aware of that you will probably remain so for the main part of your life. 
Seeing it from another aspect, you can say that a loan is always a loan which has to be paid back. 
It gets more complicated when there is not only the studyloan that has to be paid back, but also other loans. 
The most common is that people take loans to buy an apartment or a house, maybe a car, furniture and other things. 
If then there is also a studyloan which has to be paid off, the financial situation can become very difficult. 	
The loans that are given to be able to study are supposed to make it possible for everyone to study. 
But the fact is that a lot of people do not go to university because they simply cannot afford it. 
Especially single mothers have problems with that, because they beside themselves also have a child or children to provide for. 
The fact that no grants or loans are given over the summer quite often causes students more problems. 
During the summer vacacion a lot of students have to work to be able to make a living. 
The loan system makes it hard for people to earn money while studying, because the grants and the loan is reduced after you have earned more than the permitted annual amount. 	
University students should be given grants, not loans, to finance their studies. 
If university students would be given grants and not loans, more people would probably choose to go to university. 
Now there are probably those who think that it is not the same thing to study at university as to work. 
It is not, but full time studies actually can be compared with a full time job. 
The only difference is that you are able to use your time more freely as a student and that you get occupation in a different kind of way. 
But there are always tasks which have to be done when you study, and you always have things to do. 
The conditions for working and studying are different, but there are also close points of similarity between them.  	
Why should more people go to university then? 
There are many reasons. 
Society is always in need for well educated people. 
Education leads to development in the whole society. 
If grants instead of loans were introduced, it would probably tempt more people to go to university. 
The attitude to higher education would probably change. 
University studies do not always lead to a well-paid job, but a lot of people do study because it is stimulating for the personal development.
In the long run it would favour everyone. 
If the loans were not a negative part of university studies university itself would probably be seen as more useful and accessible to everyone. 
The system of today does not work properly anyway. 
It should be an advantage to go to university and not a disadvantage, financially as well as intellectually. 	
I think that the whole system with the study allowences is in need for a change. 
Politicians always emphasize the importance of education, therefor higher education should not leed to debts. 
The unemployment would probably decrease if more people could go to university. 
It is never wrong of society to stake on education. 
Education is an investment for the future.
",True
" Sweden, just say No to the EU!  
In this essay I will present two of the main reasons why Sweden ought to leave the European Union. 
There are, as I see it, more reasons than those two that I'm going to deal with. 
But I'll concentrate on the two that I've considered to be the most important. 
Namely that, first of all the EU isn't a democratic union and second of all the countries that are supposed to work together have to little in common for them to be able to work effectively with governing the union. 
Both reasons are strong reasons not to continue being part of the union although the first is the strongest reason you could ever think of. 
The threats against democracy today are many, not all of them having to do with right winged fanatics with shaved heads and kickerboots. 
No, I believe that the biggest threat today is the EU. 
Because, if we examine the word, democracy stands for government by the people and/or social equality. 
Now people may say a lot of good things about the EU but it is not governed by the people although I might go so far as to say that when it comes to social equality, no country that I know of has ever been equal in every sense of the word. 
Therefor I will not complain about the EU not being equal. 
I will instead concentrate on the government by the people part.  
The EU today is a maze of red tape and do not enter signs, how will the public ever get an insight into the decisions if the people running the EU continue trying to keep much of what they do as secret as possible. 
For example, when an official in the EU leaked information to the newspapers about corruption in the European parliament. 
The people he worked for didn't exactly congratulate him on being so honest, no, they demoted him, he got a job as a cleaner in the European parliament, needless to say he soon thereafter quit his job. 
When this question was debated many argued that the decision to replace him was the right one, because he had gone to the press and not to the parliament. 
He went to the people living in the EU and not to the people who ruled the EU because he felt that the people had a right to know first. 
That is illegal. 
But so is, I fell, corruption. 
Therefor, I fell, he should have been rewarded not demoted in the way that he was. 
This is a very frightening example, and I would believe it scares a lot of people working in the European parliament and a lot of people living in the EU. 
I mean who wants to start sweeping floors just because someone else on his/hers job is being dishonest and he/she can't look the other way? 
And who wants to be governed by people that demotes honesty? 
I certainly do not want either of it, and I can't believe that anyone else wants that to happen. 
Now, some might argue that if you don't like the people making the decisions, you could choose not to vote for them the next time. 
But if you do not know what is going on in the parliament, How can you decide who is honest and who is not? 
And if you got demoted for telling the public the truth about some of your colleagues and what they did with the publics money. 
Who would dare to tell the truth? 
y second reason why I think Sweden ought to leave the EU is that the counties in the EU has to little in common with each other to be able to work effectively together. 
I'll try to be as brief as possible when explaining this. 
I'm not saying that because we have our differences we cannot work together at all in the EU, what I'm trying to say is that we cannot work the way we are doing it now. 
I mean how can someone who has been living in Spain or Italy all his life fully understand the problems facing the farmers in the north of Sweden or Finland, to take one example. 
The information they get is from the Swedish/Finnish representatives and they might not know or care enough about the subject to give the full picture. 
I would have liked to develop that thought further but the essay would become altogether to long if I did so I'll try to wrap this up now. 
The two reasons I have presented are to me strong reasons for Sweden to leave the EU, but of course I'm not impossible. 
If the problems that I have addressed are solved then I see no reason for us not to stay in the union, just as long as we don't join the EMU.
","As a child I would torment my environment, especially my parents, with questions, much as any other youngster. 
I am very grateful to them all for putting up with me. 
On discovering that there were in fact more languages out in the world than Swedish, a whole new world of knowledge opened up to me, still unexplored but exciting and tempting. 
That I primarily turned to English is no surprise, since I had heard it practically daily on radio and television and for some reason the fascination I felt for the English tongue has never faded. 
But how much do I really know? 
How well do I master English? 
In this essay I intend to give my account on what I think I do know in terms of reading, speaking, listening and writing. 	
It was in ninth grade that I first ventured to read an English book in my spare time. 
It was a science-fiction novel and just to make it through the first page took me half an hour. 
In time, though, I got sick of looking up every single word I did not fully comprehend and concentrated on understanding the contents of a sentence rather than the individual words. 
Since then I have continued reading books in English on a regular basis and nowadays it does not take me longer to read an American or British book in its original language than a translation to Swedish. 
My greatest problem in this area is that my vocabulary is not extensive enough and thus I occasionally still have to be content with understanding a sentence and not strive to know every word. 	
When speaking, I pride myself on my fluency, which is acceptable at least, and that I - to the best of my knowledge - do not make too many grammatical mistakes. 
However, I do not want to give you a false picture of me as some perfect English speaker. 
Since English is not my native tongue, I could probably never be. 
I sometimes stutter, have trouble finding the right words, use strange and old fashioned expressions, et cetera. 
I am also hopelessly bad at slang and modern phrases. 
Furthermore, I intend to work on my pronunciation and, hopefully, lose my Swedish accent. 	
I have no real troubles when it comes to listening. 
This is, after all, the area in which I have had most practise. 
Since childhood I have been subjected to English in music, on children's programs and in movies. 
It was inevitable that I would pick up a few phrases here and there. 
Today, listening comprehension poses no real difficulty. 
As long as the person I listen to does not have too heavy an accent or slurs his/her words beyond recognition I can normally follow a conversation or lecture. 
Again, my greatest disadvantage lies in a vocabulary understanding that is too small. 
Considering the number of words in the English language, though, I could study all my life without learning them all - as could pretty much anyone. 
But I will make an effort to extend my vocabulary while studying at the English department of the University of Uppsala. 	
We now come to the interesting question of my writing abilities. 
I would say that, along with my unfamiliarity with grammar terminology, writing is definitely going to be my Achilles heel on this course. 
My difficulties lie not in composition nor word order (I hope I am not proving myself wrong here). 
The problem for me is spelling. 
It is not a great problem, but it is annoying and... slightly embarrassing. 
Very often I know how to pronounce a word, but find myself unable to spell it. 
I make quite a few small, silly mistakes. 
I will try to improve, though. 
On the positive side, I write in a fluent way that - according to others - does not feel forced. 
As you might understand, it is very hard for me to judge my own writing in that way, since everything that I have written is very clear to me. 
So I am afraid that relating to you the opinions of others will have to suffice.
",False
" English, My English!  
As an opening I would like to say; have patience! 
I must say that you challenge one of my greater weaknessess immediately By saying write an essay on 700 words. 
I have close to never written essays, and when I have, it always tend to be shorter than it is supposed to be. 
I guess that I have a lack of fantasy, but on the other hand it is easy for me to let the imagination run away with me. 
Maybe that is because I have never heard the words coherence and cohesion before. 
That means that I often starts to write about irrelevant things. 
But I actually prefer to keep it a little bit shorter instead of going on and on about the same thing just to reach 700 words etc. 
Even though it is hard for me to write long essays, I find this an excellent way for me to express myself considering that I'm very shy. 
Another thing about writing is that I often make grammatical errors, but thanks to my relatively well-functioning ear for languages I sometimes manage to get things right! 
I am also pretty good at spelling. 
Concerning listening, I am able to concentrate on the lecturer and on what he or she has to say. 
I have the ability to take in a lot of information and I also have a good memory. 
Sometimes, when I get tired after three or four Lectures, then I have the ""skill"" to look very awake and interested even if I'm not! 
Though it doesn't help me in any way, it gives an good impression! 
My weakness is that I can not take notes at the same time. 
I can not decide what things to write down and what not to write. 
I just can't listen at the same time as I'm writing. 
And when I get home and I read my notes, well, it would be more correct to say that I try to read them, then it is impossible to understand them! 
So that is something that I really have to practise. 
One of my interests is to read books. 
Unfortunately, lack of time has been the mainreason that I haven't read that many the last couple of months.  
But when I look at the literature schedule it seems like I must find the time. 
Even thougt interest is not a skill, I have to say that I list that as my number one skill when it comes to reading. 
Without my interest I think that I wouldn't get very far. 
You must be motivated if you are going to go through all these books. 
I haven't read that many English books and I hope that this reading course will help me to increase my vocabulary. 
I always keep a dictionary near at hand. y weakness is that I occasionally have difficulties to understand how to pronounce the written word. 
Sometimes, when it is a seldom used word, it would be good for me to both see and hear the word. 
And, finally, speaking: I have never used my English on a day-to-day basis. 
I have never been to England or the States, or anywhere abroad for a longer period of time.  
The only English I have spoken is the poor English I was thought in upper secondary school. 
That makes me a little bit, not incapable, but insecure. 
As I mentioned before I'm pretty shy and I prefer to work in smaller Groups when it comes to speaking. 
I think that this is a question of self confidence and to have the guts. 
Once I have crossed that line I don't think that this will be a problem. 
Another weakness is that I tend to mix British accent and American accent. 
I had a British English teacher during comprehensive school and an American during upper secondary school. 
I think that this may have affected me. 
I know that I have to choose an accent, but I don't know which one! 
But I think that it will come naturally after a while.
"," English, My English  To assess one's ability of English is not an easy task. 
I will, however, try in this essay. 
The focus will be on the four areas of listening, speaking, reading and writing, these four being the essential core of language proficiency. 
If you master these you will be a very competent speaker of English. 
They are of course all over lapping each other. 
Although there are other things such as register, body language and so forth they will not be emphasised here. 
I will start with the listening part. 
There isn't very much to this in my opinion. 
All you can do is to listen when people speak English and try to be active. 
Which is to say that you should not just listen but also consciously memorise what you hear and ponder it. 
How good a listener am I then? 
Well, I can follow English speaking programs on television without need of the subtitles that being one criterion. 
Entering here is the issue of registers. 
I easily understand the language of say soap operas which is very constructed and for that matter not always very natural. 
When it comes to news broadcasts and debate shows for example some problems might arise. 
In these types of programs the language is often more academic and therefor not as easy to completely understand. 
On the other hand I am quite good at guessing the meaning of words I don't know out of the context. 
As for the 'opposite' of listening, speaking, I can only say that this is the part of my English that I tend to overrate the most. 
This, I would think, is because when I'm thinking in English it all sounds so perfect in my head. 
It's at the moment when I have to utter these thoughts that my short comings are exposed to the world. 
It seems at times as though my facial muscles have not been properly tuned for English. 
This has the effect that when I'm not speaking English on a regular basis I think to high of my self and once I start talking I feel sort of disappointed with my self. y accent of English is to a great extent influenced mainly by American television (something which we have extremely much of in this country). 
As mentioned above the language of tv is not always that natural. 
Not to mention movie language which is often very foul and gives many people the idea that this is the way English is. 
If you're unfortunate then you may get a lot of bad habits by watching the 'wrong' things on tv. 
The medium is, at the other end of things, an endless source of opportunities to practise both listening and speaking skills. 
I've come to discover that in to order to speak fluently you have to, in a way, disconnect your linguistic monitor, put it to sleep if you will, because if you're always wondering if what you're saying is correct it will hinder the fluency of your speech.  
So much for the spoken English. 
The two remaining main parts of this essay of course constitutes the written English. 
These are easier to work with, compared to spoken English, because when you're reading or writing you have time to correct your self and look up translations in a dictionary and so on.  
I would consider my own reading ability to be very good. 
I read a lot of books in English and also quite frequently magazines like Time. 
In the past year, due to, university studies, I've been forced into reading non-fiction literature. 
A thing that not only made me more familiar with these kinds of texts that are of a truly different type than novels, almost by definition harder to penetrate, but at the same time they widened my vocabulary in a very useful way. 
Finally writing. 
This part of the language is getting more and more easy as word processors are getting more and more clever. 
In the old days when essays were written on paper you had to be very careful with the spelling. 
Now that computers take care of that for you and immediately tell you when you misspelled something you can concentrate your energy on the more important thing namely the content of the essay. y writing has been affected in yet another way by all these spell checks. 
Errors that used to be very common in my texts are now almost non-existent due to the fact that my computer was constantly nagging me about them. 
Eventually I learned. 
A conclusion of this essay then might be to say that although by no means fully learned I have the necessary knowledge to, if not pass this course, at least live in an English speaking country.
",False
" ""Why spoil a good mother to make an ordinary grammarian?""  
Although many schools for women were opened during the 19th century and the educational standards improved, not everybody liked the idea of women going to school. 
It was not only men who opposed to this idea, but also other women. 
The following words are written by a woman who, like most of the population, believed that women were naturally inferior to men and had an innate tendency to make mistakes and to lack self-control: ""There is a natural inferiority of mind in women-of the intellect."" 
During the 19th century differences between the intellectual capacity of men and women were frequently discussed, resulting in arguments claiming that women were not suited for the same type of studies as men and should therefore concentrate on studying, if anything, how to behave as hostesses and how to find a suitable husband. 
I will try to explain what arguments were used for and against education for women.   
I would like to start with the medical arguments for and against female education. 
Although there was not much research done in the area of the brain capacity of human beings and even though many of the references were vague, there still were many medical arguments against education for women and girls. 
It was, for instance, argued that the intellectual capacity of a human being was completely dependent on the size of the brain and due to the fact that women generally were, and are, smaller than men it was fairly easy to assume that they also were less intelligent. 
This argument needed no medical evidence since the fact very easily could be proven; by comparing the brain of an adult to one of a child it was simple to see that: The larger the brain, the cleverer the individual. 
This was one of the main arguments for men being more intelligent than women.   
To be on the safe side and to once and for all prove that the size of the brain was an important factor when determining a persons intelligence quotient craniometry, that is cranial measurement, was used. 
The brains of well-educated and respected men were measured after their death, and when the weight of their brains were compared to the brains of people thought of as less intelligent it was discovered that the brains that belonged to the men considered more intelligent, were heavier. 
This time it was anatomically proved; intelligence was connected with the size of the brain.   
Another argument, for that this must be the case, was that women were assumed to lack the ability to be creative and to make judgements of their own. 
Since none of the great authors, composers or artists were women, for instance were men like Shakespeare, Mozart and Raphael mentioned, this fact was used as a strong argument for male superiority in thought and creativeness. 
Women were also said to be unable to possess inventive thoughts and since their minds were regarded as less original they could therefore not produce anything like, for instance, great art. 
Women were, on the other hand, considered being superior to men in areas such as sensitivity, imagination and intuition but since these qualities were not thought of as highly as, for example, creativeness they were not considered very useful and were certainly not an argument for studying.  
As a final medical argument against female education, I would like to stress the fact that it was also believed that women who studied had overdeveloped brains. 
Studying could cause illness and if the worst came to the worst, it could also lead to that a woman no longer would be able to have children.   
The arguments for formal education for women were usually fewer then the ones against, but there was one person who made his voice heard in favour of the women, namely John Stuart Mill. 
He did not believe that there was a connection between the size of the brain and a persons' intellectual capacity. 
He claimed that if that would have been the case, it would have resulted in that small men were less intelligent than large men and that the human being would be intellectually inferior to large animals like elephants and whales.  edical arguments were not the only ones used for deciding whether women should go to school or not. 
Since schooling was considered a way for girls to obtain social rather than intellectual skills, the issue could also be seen from a social and an ethical point of view. 
The 19th century woman was often referred to as ""the angel of the house"" and it was her duty to take care of her home and to look after her family; education was only seen as a waste of time and as something a woman would not have any use for in her married life. 
Mrs Sarah Ellis writes in her article from 1838: ""...how much do most young ladies learn at school, for which they never find any use in the after life..."" 
At the end of her article she stresses the fact that a woman's place is in her home or by ill people. 
Mrs Ellis continues by writing: ""There is but a very small proportion of daughters of farmers, manufacturers, and trades-people, in England, who are ever called upon for their Latin, their Italian, or even their French; but all women in this sphere of life are liable to be called upon to visit and care for the sick...""  
As a final argument against female education I chose one used by 19th century anthropologists, who had studied primitive societies. 
They had come to the conclusion that women were not as clever as men due to the fact that no societies were governed by women. 
""I look around to the varying conditions of all parts of the world, and in no race, nor country, nor tribe, nor remote island...do I find an instance of woman having the upper hand, and reducing all the males to subjection."" 
This phenomena was explained as a natural law. 
It was claimed that men and women had developed in different directions and should therefore stick to tasks that fitted their respective mental and physical abilities.  
Among those in favour of formal education for women and girls were, for instance, the newly-rich. 
These people considered education as something important since it made it easier for them to fit in into their new environment.   
These were the main arguments used for and against female education during the 19th century and luckily much have happened since those days.
"," The V chip - only useful on one kind of violence?  
Today it seems like most people have some sort of opinion about children watching television and whether we think it is good or bad, or educational or not, I think we all can agree on that the amount of violence received by many of the programs is much too high. 
To prevent young viewers from being affected by this type of unnecessary violence the so-called V chip will soon be launched. 
This computer chip, which is to be installed in the television set, will block out all unwanted programs and will therefore also help parents to control the TV-habits of their children. 
So, what programs will be rated as violent and is it really possible to give violence a number? 
In her article ""locking out violence"" Ginia Bellafante brings up this question. 
She says that the V chip would for instance not be able to tell the difference between films like Terminator 2, which is totally based on violence and Schindler's list, which also is a very frightful film, although in a completely different way, and would for this reason probably not be rated as violent as Terminator 2.   
First of all I would like to try to define violence which in my opinion can be many different things. 
Most people only see the physical side of violence and therefore associate it with weapons, blood and a violent use of language. 
Violence can also be of an other kind, namely; psychological. 
This sort of violence come in many forms, for instance when people are being threatened, ignored or put down. 
Psychological violence is usually much harder to recognize since there normally are no visible signs of abuse. 
People who are being subjected to this kind of violence are likely to have inner wounds, such as a low self-esteem, instead. 
To me violence can also be seen from a third point of view and by this I mean a disturbed, or violated, picture of our society. 
Many television programs today, mostly soap operas and talkshows, give a very distorted view of what life truly is about. 
Especially children are affected by this since several talkshows indicate that it is fully normal to have sex at the age of twelve, preferably with your best friend's boyfriend and that there is nothing wrong with lying and taking advantage of each other.   
What can we do to delete unnecessary violence? 
According to people in favour of the V chip this is not a difficult task, simply install the computer chip and you no longer have a problem. 
This might work very well and it will certainly block out films such as Terminator and Alien, but what about important and educational programs like the news? 
Our world is not always as peaceful and pleasant as we would like it to be and with wars going on in many countries it would be very hard to put a number on every single feature of the program.  
It would also be interesting to know how sports would be graded. 
Young viewers, especially boys, love to watch sports programs like boxing and wrestling and many of these children have idols among the sportsmen. 
Entertainment of this kind will give the wrong impression of how much you actually can hit a person without seriously injuring him or her. 
In Sweden these shows are not as common as they are in the US and I can only relate to how I, at the age of fifteen, reacted when I saw wrestling for the first time. 
Not until I had watched the show a couple of times I realized that these people were acting and I can only imagine how even younger children react to this sort of entertainment.  
Finally I would like to point out that violence does not only occur on TV but also in real life and it is not always possible to protect children from being exposed to it. 
They encounter violence in places like the playground, at school and also at home and what in my opinion is more important than the V chip is that the parents, instead of just blocking unwanted programs out without an explanation, try to explain to their children why people sometimes behave a certain way
",True
" Monarchy - obsolete in a democratic society  Today in Sweden the monarchy and its representatives, the royal family, are enjoying great popularity. 
But is there actually a place for such an institution in a modern, democratic society? 
I would say that there isn't, and below I shall seek to explain why this is so. 
A monarch is, by definition, someone who has inherited his or her occupation as the head of state of a country. 
This of course has not only purely professional implications; it also brings with it a certain status and a position as a national figurehead. 
Even a monarch without any actual power or political influence holds an important position as a representative of his country. 
It is therefore quite remarkable that someone is to be born into this function; in a democracy of today a job such as this should not be the private possession of a specific family and because of this the monarchy is in itself undemocratic. 
As this is obviously a matter of principle, it might be argued that such concerns are of little practical importance when it comes to a merely ceremonial regent such as the king of Sweden. 
On the other hand, when regarding it from the monarchs point of view, it is indeed very much a practicality; his personal freedom and his ability to choose his life is actually greatly limited from the very moment of his birth. 
He has the theoretical possibility, of course, to abdicate, but since this is not a very common event it does hardly present a realistic alternative. 
Such a restriction of individual liberty is not usually associated with a modern democracy. 
But, some might object, having a figurehead such as Sweden's ceremonial monarch is indeed important; our king is our countries main representative abroad, a national symbol. 
This is true in as much as having a representative person on an international level could well be said to be important. 
But because this actually is important, it is only natural to assume that we would want to choose for ourselves who is to represent us. 
A monarch, who has only inherited his representative duties, is obviously not necessarily the most suitable person for this office. 
An elected head of state, a president, could on the other hand to a greater extent than a monarch be said to actually represent the people. 
The duties of this elected head of state might still be mainly ceremonial; the president wouldn't even have to be a political figure and there doesn't have to be any danger of too much power being concentrated in one person, as some might indeed fear. 
Are there no advantages of having a monarch, rather than ceremonial president, then? 
Well, some people would perhaps argue that the institution of the monarchy and the circumstances surrounding it has a value in itself, that it adds a touch of glamour to the country and that reading articles in weekly magazines about the extraordinary lives of the royal family adds an indispensable joy to the dreary lives of the so called ordinary people. 
However, we may very well ask ourselves if such an attitude actually belongs in a modern society, and to this I must answer that it doesn't. 
The media hype surrounding the monarchy in general and the royal family in particular is horrifyingly reminiscent of times long since past, when humble respect towards the regent was demanded of the lower classes. 
The king of today is nothing but a curiosity, but is still sometimes surrounded by the attention bestowed upon his more despotic predecessors. 
This sort of public indulgence in the worship of royalty might be considered comparatively harmless, but does nevertheless preserve an image of a social structure that is no longer relevant.  
One might of course also consider this matter from the point of view of the monarch and his family; constant exposure to the public eye gazing through the distorting lens of the tabloid press is an attention that they have little choice but to accept. 
All together, this shows that a monarchy could not be said to belong in a modern democracy; not only is it undemocratic in itself, it is also unsuitable for the functions it is supposed to perform and severely out of date, perpetuating an old class system. 
An elected ceremonial head of state would clearly answer better to the demands of our time.
"," Aspects of televised violence  Violence in the media, and particularly in the television medium, is an issue of growing interest in a time when the amount of medial information is continually increasing. 
The more television channels that are made available to the viewer, the more difficult will it be to control exactly what programming is carried over our televisional doorstep and into the deceiving safety of our living rooms. 
Certainly, all of the material on offer might not be considered suitable viewing for all categories of viewers; what about, for example, the effects of broadcasted violence on the impressionable mind of a child? 
This is, however, no simple issue. 
Violence on TV falls into several categories and must therefore be discussed accordingly. 
The effect of televised violence is not a matter to be easily decided on.  
Some might for example argue that there exists an obvious connection between violence on TV and the increasing amount of violence among teenagers and children. 
However, blaming this violent juvenile delinquency solely on the influence of television is perhaps making things a bit too simple; other factors are bound to come into it. 
That is of course not to say that TV is completely without guilt in these matters; being an important part of the lives of most young people in our part of the world, television is presumably an issue as important as any in this context, and therefore well worth discussing. 
What kinds of violence might we as viewers encounter then, and to what extent should they be regarded differently? 
There is of course there is the obvious distinction between non-fictional and fictional violence; on one hand the violent scenes that might occur in daily news broadcasts and documentaries, on the other hand the dramatised violence shown in various movies or TV series. 
The non-fictional violence would, to some extent, seem to be a necessary part the function television is expected to perform; presenting news from a violent world could hardly be done accurately without displaying a certain amount of violence. 
However, this is not an altogether straightforward issue; in recent years the tendency in some parts of the world seems to have been towards news broadcasts including more and more explicit violence of a kind not occurring in such programs before, such as live broadcasts of dramatic crime situations or violent car chases. 
The public interest of showing this type of real-life drama could be debated, and one might argue that this is a clear example of unnecessary violence on TV. 
Here in Sweden however, this is not a very common phenomenon, but as we are nowadays able to view a large number of foreign channels broadcasted by satellite, we also have to consider matters such as this. 
If the non-fictional violence presents a somewhat complex issue, so does by all means its fictional counterpart. 
Not only are there variations in degree of violence, but we also have to take into consideration the different categories of violent content that is to be found. 
There is the ""entertainment violence"" of violence of the thriller, the action movie and similar genres, but also the category of fiction where the contained violence is not as much an end in itself as a part of a whole, not entertainment as much as a necessity of the story being told. 
In discussing these matters there are thus several important questions that we must ask ourselves. 
How should we for example treat different kinds of violent fiction, what should be restricted and how should we impose these restrictions? 
For instance, most people would probably agree that programs containing extreme or excessive violence should not be screened when young children are likely to be found within the audience, some might even argue that extreme violence on TV should be banned completely. 
However, the latter view could perhaps be seen as a dangerous simplification of the problem; even regarding the extreme one could actually distinguish between the meaningless excesses in entertainment violence of the low quality action film and those instances where explicit description of violence might be said to serve a purpose. 
Deciding what is to be shown on TV and what is to be kept out or restricted, and how these restrictions are to be implemented, is indeed not a simple matter, but one that requires much discussion and consideration. 
Anyone interested in restricting the televised violence would certainly have to make distinctions as exemplified above, difficult as they may sometimes be.
",True
" MIRANDA, A BUTTERFLY  The Collector by John Fowles, is a riveting story told from the dual perspectives of captor and captive. 
Frederick Clegg, a newly-rich clerk whose hobby is to collect butterflies kidnaps Miranda Grey, a twenty-year-old art student and he keeps her prisoner in the cellar of his house. 
This captivating story gives the reader an insight into the minds of the two characters. 
Frederick is a drab and meticulous person who suffers from feelings of inferiority and he tries to make Miranda understand him. 
Miranda on the other hand, has a love for life and is a very impetuous yet thoughtful girl who is full of hope. 
The themes of life against death and Miranda's personal development are in my opinion the main themes of The Collector. 
This is what I want to illustrate in my essay.   
In Miranda's diary entry on November 7, she talks about her unbearable situation. 
""How the days drag. 
Today. 
Intolerably long. 
My one consolation is G.P.'s drawing. 
It grows on me. 
On one. 
It's the only living, unique, created thing here."" 
Miranda sees her painter friend G.P. and herself as representatives of life and art. 
Frederick in her opinion is just a collector who is not interested in her as a person only her looks. 
She is only another specimen to add to his collection. 
On October 24, she writes, ""It's me he wants, my look, my outside; not my emotions or my mind or my soul or even my body. 
Not anything human. 
He's a collector. 
That's the great dead thing in him.""  
Clegg her kidnapper is such a dull colourless person who is suffering from a huge inferiority complex. 
The way he speaks is like Miranda puts it ""Cliché after cliché after cliché, and all so old-fashioned,"". 
He is always striving to be proper and he has a personality that is as dead as his butterflies. 
Miranda cannot stand people like Frederick, she thinks of him as being stupid, petty, selfish and mean. 
She thinks of herself and G.P. as belonging to 'the Few', the doctors, the teachers and the artists. 
They have the carry the weight of people like Clegg, and 'the Few' is the hope for the world, she writes, ""what hope there is, is with them - with us. 
Because I'm one of them.""  
'The Few' represents education, hope and creativity all of which Miranda's kidnapper lacks and she refers to him as Caliban, a sort of monster. 
""I love honesty and freedom and giving. 
I love making, I love doing, I love being to the full, I love everything which is not sitting and watching and copying and dead at heart."" 
This is Miranda in a nutshell, full of energy and a zest for life. 
Frederick has robbed her of her freedom and he keeps her isolated from the rest of the world.  
She is constantly thinking of ways how to escape. 
There is the episode when Clegg was nearly fooled by her act when she was pretending to have appendicitis. 
This episode and her temperamental behaviour makes him suspicious of her, which proves to be to her disadvantage when she eventually becomes very ill. 
Frederick, her kidnapper is always justifying his actions to himself saying that ""I thought I was acting for the best and within my rights."" (p.125). 
His dream is that Miranda would gradually come to like him and eventually marry him and have a family. 
He also refers to Miranda as his guest, thus justifying to himself that she is not his prisoner.  iranda's situation makes her realise that is thanks to Clegg that she develops, and in her diary entry on December 5, she talks about her personal growth. 
""I would not want this not to have happened. 
Because if I escape I shall be a completely different and I think better person. 
Because if I don't escape, if something dreadful happened, I shall still know that the person I was and would have stayed if this hadn't happened was not the person I now want to be."" 
Miranda learns through her suffering and she discovers herself and society. 
I see Miranda as a butterfly that goes from the pupa stage and then develops into a beautiful butterfly, and then just like a butterfly she dies.  
Frederick, Miranda's abductor spots another victim, a girl whom he looks upon as ""Someone ordinary I could teach."" (p.287). 
She looks a bit like Miranda, but she is not as pretty as her. 
He thinks he was aiming too high with Miranda, and he does not want to make the same mistake again, next time.   
Frederick and Miranda are two worlds apart. 
His dreary personality reeks of nothingness, he is like an unwanted weed in the garden. 
Miranda is so unlike him full of vitality and she stands out as a vibrant colour on the palette, and she never seems to lose hope. 
Her captivity makes her develop and mature, while Clegg her kidnapper stays the same without any personal growth. 
The Collector is in my opinion an extraordinary psychological thriller that I can read again and again.
"," ""The argument has commenced....
Slavery will every where be abolished, or every where be re-instituted.""  
In 1841 an antislavery convention was held in Nantucket in the USA. 
Frederick Douglass spoke about his life as a slave for the first time, after he had escaped from his bondage in the South. 
William Lloyd Garrison was at the convention and heard the runaway slave who spoke of his life in slavery. 
The speech made such a deep impact on Garrison, and the two of them became strong advocates for the abolishment of slavery. 
On the other hand there were George Fitzhugh along with William J. 
Grayson and Edward A. 
Pollard who argued for slavery, and they believed that it was necessary for the wellbeing of the blacks to be kept as slaves. 
In my essay I have presented the arguments for and against slavery, from the texts I have read. 
I would like the reader to bear in mind that the arguments for slavery outnumbered the ones against. 
This might have created an imbalance in my essay.   
When Frederick Douglass made his first speech at the antislavery convention he started off by apologising for his ignorance. 
Filled with embarrassment he reminded the people who were present that slavery was ""...a poor school for the human intellect and heart,..."" (p.1) Then he started to tell his life story of when he was enslaved. 
Lloyd Garrison was really touched by Frederick's speech and he became an even firmer believer in the abolishment of slavery. 
The way the slaves of African descent had been treated was in Garrison's opinion appalling and yet they had managed to endure their situation remarkably well. 
While being a slave one had to put up with being treated as a piece of property, and it was up to the master to do whatever he wanted to do to his slaves. 
The slave-holders could even get away with murder without legal repercussion. 
Garrison said that ""By the slave code, they are adjudged to be as incompetent to testify against a white man, as though they were indeed a part of the brute creation."" (p.5). 
He argued that how people could tolerate a society which treated people as if they were equal in status to that of a thing. 
""...when all the rights of humanity are annihilated, any barrier remains to protect the victim from the fury of the spoiler; when absolute power is assumed over life and liberty, it will not be wielded with destructive sway."" 
(Garrison p.4). 
This was one of Garrison's arguments why slavery had to be abolished, since it was his opinion that slavery was inhumane.   
Frederick Douglass was separated from his mother before he was a year old. 
This was common practice to prevent natural bonding between mother and child. 
His mother was a black slave but his father was a white man, he could have been his master but this was never confirmed. 
The slave owners often indulged in sexual liaisons with their female slaves. 
The offspring that were born from these liaisons usually had to endure more suffering than the other slaves. 
One of the reasons for this was because the white wife was constantly reminded of her husband's adultery, and these children offended her. 
As a result many of these children were sold off to other slave-holders.   
Douglass and Garrison wanted the blacks to be able to enjoy freedom and to be regarded as equals to the white population. 
On the other side of the fence were people like George Fitzhugh, who believed that the blacks should be regarded as children and treated as such. 
He thought that the slave was ""...but a grown up child, and must be governed as a child, not as a lunatic or criminal. 
The master occupies towards him the place of parent or guardian."" 
(Fitzhugh, p.10). 
He also thought that the blacks were not capable to look after themselves and that they lacked in intellect. 
This would then lead to the slaves becoming a burden to society, thus justifying for keeping the blacks as slaves.  
Another argument that Fitzhugh put forward was, how the whites were far more superior to the blacks and therefore they could not live together as equals. 
Fitzhugh also believed that God did not want the blacks to be like the white people and they did not have the capacity to, for example make money as the white people could. 
This was another argument which he thought was in favour of slavery.   
According to Fitzhugh were the black people only fit to be slaves, he also believed that the intellect of a black person was lower than that of a fourteen-year-old white child. 
He and other Southerners regarded themselves as guardians and teachers for the slaves, thus assuming the role of a parent, in loco-parentis. 
George Fitzhugh also thought that ""...slavery is only needed to protect the white man,..."" and white and black people could never be treated equally because the whites were superior to them.   
In William J. 
Grayson's The Hireling and the Slave, he said how a slave was much better off than a hireling (someone who worked for anyone who was willing to pay). 
If one was a slave one did not have to worry about food, clothes or shelter, everything was provided for. 
Whereas if one was a hireling these things could never be taken for granted. 
Even if the hireling was a free man he was much worse off than a slave, because he was really poor and often had to go without the basic needs. 
Grayson also said that the slaves were content and they could be heard singing in the fields while working. 
At night they enjoyed a social life with song and dance, and on Sundays they could enjoy the day off and spend it praying to God. 
The slaves were the property of their master who cared for them and they were at his mercy.   
Edward A. 
Pollard was of the opinion that the differences of the North and the South were because of them being politically different. 
The North were against slave-holdings while the South saw this as a part of life. 
They were forced together in a Union which was as Pollard said ""...the forced alliance and rough companionship of two very different peoples."" (p.20). 
He believed that people were more refined in the South and no matter how hard they tried in the North, they could never achieve the same in the North. 
Pollard even went as far as saying that the people in the North were inferior to the civilisation of the South. 
He meant that the South had a more serious attitude to life which made them superior to the people in the North and the slaves. 
It was his opinion that ""Slavery established in the South a peculiar and noble type of civilisation."" (p.21).   
Bibliography: William Lloyd Garrison, Preface to The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. 
Frederick Douglass, Excerpt from The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. 
George Fitzhugh, Excerpt from Sociology for the South. 
Grayson, ""The Hireling and the Slave."" 
Edward A. 
Pollard, Excerpts The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates.
",True
" CHANGE THE AGE LIMIT FOR BUYING ALCOHOL  Have you ever thought about, just like I have, why we in Sweden have the odd legislation that people are allowed to buy alcohol in a bar the day they are 18 years old but they have to wait until they are 20 to go to ""Systembolaget""? 
it is very difficult for me to see the reasons why there should not be a change in the law in order to let people from the age of 18 buy alcohol at ""Systembolaget"".  
To obtain alcohol is not a problem when you are 18 years old. 
Almost everyone knows someone who is 20 and, even though it is unlawful to peddle liquor, it is not seen as a big crime if the one you peddle to is over the age of 18. 
Many of my friends had parents who acted like peddlers after the day their sons and daughters were 18 years old, some of them even before that. 
The parents did this because they in this way thought they had control over how much their children drank. 
I also think they tried to tell their children that they trusted them and show them that they, in the eyes of the parents, had came a piece of the way to the life as an adult.  
Another reason for parents buying alcohol to their children is the fear of illicitly distilled liquor. 
This is another motive for me to say that the age limit for buying alcohol at ""Systembolaget"" should be lowered. 
It is easy to get hold of home distilled liquor and if the youths can not obtain alcohol from ""Systembolaget"", which most of them prefer even though it is more expensive, they turn to the dangerous illicitly distilled liquor.  
I return to what I mentioned in the beginning of the essay; that people in the ages between 18 and 20 are permitted to go to a bar and have a drink, but are not allowed to go to the state liquor shop to buy a few beers. 
I think the main reason to why we have not already got a change in the law is the fear that youths will easier be able to obtain alcohol if the age limit would be lower. 
This might be true, to get alcohol is already quite easy for many youths. 
Nevertheless, I do not think a change in the law would make any major differences in the possibilities for the young people to obtain alcohol. 
Furthermore I do not think that youths will drink more than they do today.  
Look at France and Great Britain, for example. 
The age limit for buying alcohol is lower there than in Sweden, but young people do not drink more because of that. 
Can the reason be that a part of the excitement is taken away when it is legal? 
In Sweden, the youths tend to take every given possibility to get drunk, partly because it is unlawful. 
According to one of my friends who just came back from one year as an au pair in the United States is the situation much worse there than here in Sweden. 
In most states, it is illegal to drink alcohol before you are 21 years old, but many people drink before that age anyway. 
She says that the sad thing in the United States is that the youths are not sufficiently informed about the dangers that follows alcohol consumption. 
There are not many countries with so many car accidents involving drunk drivers as there are in the United States.   
Whereas the opposition argues that the reason for having different age limits in bars and at ""Systembolaget"" is that the consumption is under control when you are in a bar, the people who want a change in the law maintain that this is not the case. 
I have asked a few friends and they, just like me, had to admit that you rarely notice a bartender or a guard telling a guest not to drink more because he or she is too drunk.   
Not only would an age limit lowering for buying alcohol at ""Systembolaget"" make things easier for the young people between age 18 and 20, it would also make much more sense. 
I think we have to face the fact that young people will always drink, in Sweden as well as in other countries, even if we legislate against it or not. 
More information about the dangers may help, but I think that a part of the fun with drinking when you are young is that it is illegal...
"," The Elderly Need the State  When a person gets older it is important for him or her to have someone to rely on. 
About a hundred years ago it was rather obvious that the family should take care of the elderly. 
Today, however, the situation is completely different because in our society it is difficult for us to look after the elderly. 
So, we need help and this is where the state comes in.  	 
There are many reasons why a family cannot take care of the elderly. 
Firstly, most families have small children to look after and they need all the time and attention they can get from their parents. 
We all know that children can be very exhausting and demanding, which makes it impossible to concentrate on another person. 
If you are not fully dedicated to give the old people your help, it can end with disaster. 
Also, it can be even more difficult to take care of a person if he is handicapped and cannot manage by himself at all. 
It is a responsibility that few people can handle. 	 
Secondly, most adults today need to work to make a living; therefore they cannot stay at home as often as they did before. 
Their work takes all of their time. 
Also, one thing that has changed radically if you look back in time is that some people have to travel a long time to their work. 
Maybe they have to work in a big city, or in another country. 
When they finally come home in the evenings they are often exhausted and need to rest. 
For an elderly person to ask for help can be difficult because he might feel that he is in the way. 
In such situations it is easy to start a quarrel, which can lead to anger between the family members. 
Such a relationship can be very stressful but above all not healthy. 
The elderly need someone who has time to spare. 
At an old people's home they often get the opportunity to relax, which means a lot to them.  	 
As mentioned before, it is a huge responsibility to take care of another human being. 
Imagine if something would happen. 
The elderly need special care, and you cannot offer that at home. 
It would be so much easier for you and them, but above all, safer if they stayed somewhere where help is close.  	 
The state can offer special care, which the elderly need so much. 
They have people who are educated and want to help the person that you love so much. 
Also, they have all the special equipment needed. 
Several old people's homes today can offer excellent medical care. 
It is something that they did not have a hundred years ago, and we should take advantage of that. 
There are so many people who care about the elderly and they can offer so much more. 
People can argue that families do not care about their elderly if they send them to a home with strangers. 
But it is actually the other way around. 
If you know in your heart that you cannot offer someone else your help, the best thing you can do is to let someone else step in. 
It is also important that the family tries to visit as often as they can because it means the world to old people. 
Regularly visits can actually improve the relationship between the elderly and the family. 
It is mentally hard for the elderly to know that they are dependent on someone else to survive because people do not want to rely on others. 
In other words, it is important to know that you can manage on your own, without causing concern for your family. 
We all need to feel independent in some way, both young and old. 
This is the way people work. 
To keep your head high and not give up are many people's philosophy today.  	 
All in all, elderly people need someone who can give them full attention, but most families today cannot do that. 
Therefore, it is not wrong to let the state take over. 
It is for the best, not only for you but for the elderly too.
",False
" Reflections on TV-violence  In this essay I'm going to discuss the influence TV-violence has on teenagers and the way we look at violence in general. 
I will focus on the teenagers since they are most likely to absorb the messages sent out by television. 
I will also discuss whether it is only TV-violence that has influence on teenagers behaviour or if other factors also should be considered as important in this issue. 
I will also provide you with some information about the history of violence as a form of entertainment   Violence has been part of entertainment since the days of the Roman Empire, when gladiators fought against each other and wild animals. 
In the ""cowboy era"" it was very popular to watch the hangings of criminals. 
Public executions are viewed to the public even today, which I think is wrong. 
First, because it's unnecessary violent pictures for young people to see. 
Second of all, because it is wrong of a state to murder if an individual isn't allowed to take other peoples lives either. 
Another example is boxing, which has been, and is still, a very violent sport, which involves blood, pain and broken jaws. 
However, these events are somewhat pale compared with today's horrible and bloody televised pictures, which brings me to my next subject, news-broadcasts.    
The news-broadcasts has made teenagers, and adults as well, almost numb to violence, in the sense that they don't take it as seriously as they should when they see pictures of dead children, starving people or war-victims. 
There are no happy endings in news-broadcasts, but we get used to that as well. 
One day we woke up and found ourselves in a vicious circle, the more violence we were shown, the more immunity we developed towards it. 
I say these words out of own experience, because this is how I feel it has become. 
I believe that technology bears no little responsibility to the way we have ended up looking at violence. 
Since the equipment has become smaller, more modern and easier to use, it makes it easier for journalists to take more realistic and thus, more horrifying pictures. 
For example, nowadays journalists are invited to the frontlines of war in order to make that specific side look like the better one. 
I don't suggest that bloody news-broadcasts should be banished from TV since I believe that there are more important factors that reflects teenagers behaviour.  
There is no doubt that teenagers are influenced by the violence they see on TV, this has negative effects on their concentration in school and the need to use violence in real life. 
But the question is. 
How do we know how much TV-violence that influences teenagers, and how much other factor influences them? 
Chances that an aggressive teenager has other social problems are pretty good. 
Maybe he/she was beaten or sexually abused during his/her childhood. 
Maybe his/her parents were alcoholics and he/she didn't get enough love. 
I think these social problems is far greater reason for teenagers to use violence to express themselves than all TV-violence in the world combined. 
I don't think that all teenagers growing up with some kind of social problem turn into an aggressive individual, it depends not so much on genes but more on the area that the child grew up in. 
I remember one specific example from school that illustrates this pretty well; it was when I studied Biology that I learned of this example that I'm going to tell you about. 
The example was about two twins, one (Sara) who grew up in a ""safe"" area with loving and caring parents. 
The other one (Emma) who grew up in the suburbs of a big city with one parent who was an alcoholic. 
Sara made a carrier in a respected law-firm and gave birth to two healthy kids. 
Emma had a more troublesome childhood with a criminal record longer than route 666, at one occasion she had beaten up a police officer. 
And by the age of 22 she committed suicide under the influence of some kind of heavy drug. 
How much TV they watched wasn't revealed to me by the teacher who told the story. 
This example proves that social background is a very important factor for teenagers' behaviour.   
I've come to the conclusion that violence and aggression among teenagers depend not so much on television but rather on their social background. 
And after all we always have the ability to turn our television of and read a good book instead. 
It's harder to choose where and with whom you want to grow up.
"," Swedish benefits from a membership in EMU.  
On the 24th of June 1994 Sweden signed a contract with the European Union, EU, which stated that Sweden would join the union on January 1 1995.  
This contract also means that Sweden is obligated to follow the different conventions that are part of the union. 
One of these conventions, called the Maastricht Convention, includes a project called EMU, European Monetary Union, which is an economic collaboration with the final purpose of introducing a common currency in EU by the year of 2002.  
Therefore we are, at least formally, obligated to join EMU. 
However, the Swedish government has not yet decided whether Sweden should join or not. 
I think this is a mistake and a typical example of the government's all too cautious attitude in this question. 
I will give a few examples that I think speak very clearly in favour for a Swedish membership.  
In my opinion, the most important reason is the fact that Sweden then will have a chance to get a larger influence on the future development of EMU as well as EU. 
If we choose not to join EMU, we will inevitably lose political power that will instead belong to the group of countries that already has the biggest influence, such as Germany and France.  
Beside the increased influence, Sweden also gets a chance to contribute to a deeper integration between EU-countries. 
Sweden has a duty in helping EU remain an insurance against wars within Europe. 
If the whole EMU-project would collapse, it would weaken the European cooperation, which would also lead to a weakening of the whole idea of EU as a peace project. 
What I mean by this is that if EU succeeds in their plans to expand EU to include also the eastern countries of Europe, the risks of a civil war such as that in former Jugoslavia, would be considerably smaller, since it would be easier to discover and react to the problems in time.  
One of the main arguments EMU opponent's uses is that they do not want the Swedish Krona to be changed to Euro. 
They feel that we should stick to our traditions and keep the notes and coins that the Swedish people are used to. 
I can partly agree on their arguments when it comes to the economic part, because the Euro has not been very stabile since it was introduced by the beginning of 2000. 
I can understand that many people get anxious when they see how the Euro is developing, even though I think its just natural that a currency is a bit shaky on its first years. 
What I have a harder time understanding is the sudden care for the - what it seems - esthetic look at this issue.  
I think it would be tragic if our cultural heritage lies in the money, we shouldnt make a big issue about how the money looks since its just metal and paper, a tool to enable us to buy and sell things.   
Another common opinion among EMU-opponents is that the question should be decided in an election, since they are convinced that the Swedish people would vote against a membership. 
According to the latest surveys they may very well be right. 
I think an election might be a good idea, but I have a couple of doubts: first of all, if there were to be an election, it would probably just be an advising one, like it was in the EU-election. 
Secondly, the clumsy way the government handled the EU-election, by providing the Yes-side with way bigger resources could very well be repeated.  
That would lead to a huge displeasure among the Swedish people if the Yes-side won, and the election wouldnt be considered a fair one.   
In brief, the question whether or not Sweden should join The European Monetary Union is a very important one, but the way the Swedish government is handling it does not help the Swedish people at all. 
Since the positive sides of a membership in my opinion are way bigger, I think we should join. 
We have paid great money to be part of the European Union and think we should make sure to benefit from it.
",False
" English, My English!  
Writing an essay about my relation to the English language and about how competent I feel about it at this point seemed like a very easy task at first, but now that I think about it the answer to these questions isn't that obvious. 
Why is that? 
I think probably it's because of the fact that this isn't something you ever think about having to evaluate. 
You hardly ever think about what your native language means to you, so when it comes to English it's even more difficult to find a good answer. 
I guess you'll just have to go back in time and think about your experiences of English. 
But one can already establish the fact that our native language is a necessity and that in the world today this isn't always enough. 
It's getting more and more important to master the English language aswell. 
Because whatever you do and wherever you go you find English. 
This language is universal and you need it whatever field you're in. 
In Sweden one has understood the importance of a good knowledge of English. 
You start studying it already at the age of nine in swedish schools.  	
I've always loved to travel and to get to know people from all over the world. 
I guess that's why I chose to study a lot of languages in upper secondary school. 
English was compulsory of course. 
But I also chose to study Latin, French, Spanish and Italian. 
Of all these languages I prefered French, so that's what I've continued to study here at Uppsala University and in France. 
I think that I master French really well at this point and it feels a bit strange to say that I speak French better than I speak English. 
But that's simply the truth today. 
Anyhow, from now on I'll concentrate on English for a few years and hopefully after this my mastery of English will be as good as my mastery of French, or even better. 	
When I was fourteen years old my family had an excange student from the United States staying with us for three months. 
This was without any hesitation a very good opportunity for both me and my younger brothers to come in contact with the English language. 
Her name is Leah and we became best friends. 
We've been corresponding ever since and in fact we met in France last spring. 
As I said, getting to know this girl helpted me to get in contact with English, but it also made me realize how wonderful and enriching it is to master a foreign language. 	
After finishing secondary school I went to England on a three-weeks language course. 
I hardly learned anything at all, but I guess I matured a bit anyway. 	
In upper secondary school I participated in all kinds of exchange programs just to get the opportunity to travel and to meet students from other countries. 
I went to Denmark, Poland, Czech Republic and Switzerland, and I received students from the respective countries in my home in Suderhamn. 
With all these people I spoke English, but I don't know if it always ameliorated my own English. 
I mean, speaking English with somebody from Poland for instance is not like talking with somebody whos native language is really English. 	
When I hear English on the radio, on TV or when I'm talking to somebody in English I feel that I can understand almost everything of what is said. 
I guess that an advantage in Sweden is that everything on TV for example always is in English and never dubed like in certain other countries. 
I think that reading isn't a problem for me either. 
As I said earlier, I've studied Latin and I feel that this often helps me to recognize word-stems and above all to know the meaning of prefixes and suffixes in certain words. 
My weaknesses in English at this point are speaking and writing. 
I think that has to do with the fact that I've been studying French and other Romance languages aswell for such a long time. 
I feel that I've got problems with pronunciation and spelling. 
When it comes to listening and reading it's an advantage for me if the words resemble the words in French. 
But when it comes to pronunciation and spelling it's rather a disadvantage. 
Hopefully all this will be much easier later on.
","y English education started early, as it does for most Swedes now days. 
Listening to music, watching American TV-shows.... 
I already knew a lot of English when the formal education kicked in. 
At that time it was when you were in forth grade, about 10 years old. 
Today they start earlier, which shows the importance of the English language in the Swedish society.  
As I've been listening to American English (I might point out) all my life, listening to English isn't a problem. 
I understand perfectly. 
I don't have a problem with dialects either in American English, but in British English it is harder when it comes to that. 
Watching the Scottish movie ""Trainspotting"" without any translation was quite hard. 
My British friend who were with me at the time had a hard time too actually. 
I don't always understand slang words in British, but I do in American English. 
I guess that comes from watching American sit-comes way to much.   
The way I learnt American has to do with my love for music. 
As soon as I could speak I started to sing along to songs on the radio and moms Abba-records. 
Even when the songs were in English and I had no idea what I was singing. 
That is where I got the ""rhythm"" of the language. 
When I was around five years old my biggest idols were Culture club (British English) and David Bowie (also British English). 
But after the age of seven (when the memory center in the brain starts to function properly) the idols was mostly from USA and Canada. 
I loved Bruce Springsteen, how much more American can it get?   
I've always loved to read. 
But most of my reading I've done in Swedish. 
When I entered Uppsala University as an anthropology student it changed. 
Basically all the literature was in English and even some lectures. 
I found it hard in the beginning, but it got easier and easier. 
Now I prefer to read fiction in English too. 
I think that a story is best told in the language of the writer (no offense to all the very talented translators). 
Two weeks ago I read ""animal farm"" by George Orwell (which was great by the way), and I think it would have lost some of the books funnier points if it had been in Swedish. 
That definitely goes for comedy. 
I remember when those insensitive bosses at TV 3 tried to change the language of the Simpson's family, from American English to Swedish! 
What a joke! 
People complained so much that they had to change it back. 
I don't think (and hope) they will try a stunt like that again. 
I don't want to have it like in Germany. 
Imagine ""Seinfeld"" in Swedish? 
Don't think so. 
I would stop watching the show (even though, as I've indicated before, that American sit-comes is a favorite of mine..).  
To speak American English isn't a problem. 
After I graduated from the gymnasium I went straight to the States to live there for a year. 
I was an au pair in an American family. 
I HAD TO speak American all day long, because of the kids. 
The kids were spoiled and behaved badly as kids tend to do sometimes, but they never said anything about that they didn't understand what I said or made fun of my accent. 
That helped me to naturally glide into the language. 
I taught them a lot, but they also taught me. 
After the first month we got along fine and I loved spending time with them. 
Playing with kids is an unusual fun way to learn a language better. 
The only problem I had with pronunciation was with the English ""j"". 
One of the little girls I was taking care of in Maryland was named ""Julia"", and I kept on saying ""Julia"" the Swedish way and she kept on reminding me of the American way ""Ddddjulia"".   
Writing English has always been my weak point. 
I spell badly and my grammar is awful. 
That's why I signed up for the English course here at Uppsala University. 
I have no idea WHY I say this and not that. 
I just chat. 
When you pressure me with two sentences and ask which one is the grammatical correct one, it is a big chance that I'm not gonna be able to tell you.   
That is all I have to say about me and the English language! 
Cheers!
",False
"I went to England this atumn and I went with an idea of being quite familiar with the languge. 
This showed not to be true as soon as I got there. 
I had thought that after that term I would be speaking rather fluently with a nice accent, and also understand everything that is said around me. 
My expectancies on my writing and reading improvements were not as high though. 
However, I learned a lot of English, but I also learned that English is a very big language and it takes more than a few months and a great effort to master it completely.  
I find the listeng ability to be the easiest to obtain, since you are exposed to spoken English daily in Sweden. 
Thanks to subtitling instead of dubbing on TV, musicians writing their lyrics in English and good education in school give most Swedes and Scandinavians a good command of English. 
Still, I have problems with Irish, Scottish and slang expressions, or any English spoken too quickly or with a strong accent.   
As I consider my problems with listening depend on the pronounciation it would mean that reading would be easy, as there is no pronounciation to interfere. 
Unfortunately, it does not seem to be that simple. 
That is probably because the vocabulary used in written English is much wider than the vocabulary used in speech usually is. 
Fortunately, there is almost always the possibility to look up unknown words in a dictionary. 
But I have a weakness when it comes to looking up words, and that is lazyness. 
When reading a text which is too difficult with too many new words I tend to get bored of looking them up. 
As a consequence the text becomes incomprehensible, and the result of that is I do not understand it and I lose interest in it. 
This problem decreases though, as I learn more words.   y spoken English is what I am most eagre to improve. 
In my opinion the speaking part is the most tricky. 
It seems that the more English I learn, the more difficult it is to speak. 
That is because I hear my own mistakes as I do them, and I get more and more concious about how I sound, and what impression people might get of me. 
That is obviously a great disadvantage since it can make me speak less just because of the fear of making mistakes. 
Also, I have noticed that my English is influenced by who I am talking to. 
If the person is a native speaker or someone with a good command of the language, I tend to speak better. 
On the contrary, if the person I am speaking to is on my level or lower, my English seems to get worse.  
Another aspect is the frustration that is experienced when I lack a word that is essential for what I want to say. 
Furthermore, I feel limited when it comes to discribing things or explain the meaning of a word. 
There are several words that I understand when I hear them or read them, but I am not able to use them myself. 
Of course it is natural to have a bigger passive vocabulary than an active, but still it can be annoying.  
Another natural thing is the fact that after having spent some time in an English-speaking environment, the language comes much easier. 
That is good, but the bad thing is that before having spent enough time in such an environment I feel totally incompetent and unable to speak a word.  
What speaking and writing skills have in common is the importance of grammar, vocabulary and choice of words. 
Though, it is even more obvious in a written text. 
There are a lot of things to concentrate on when writing. 
The content, the storyline, a varied and suited language, and correct grammar. 
This makes the risk to fail in some area rather big. 
I have had some experience of writing, but still I feel quite insecure. 
I have difficulties with the organisation and to keep a clear line through the essay. 
That includes both essays in Swedish and English. 
On the other hand, I have noticed that the slightly more formal language used in written but not as frequently in spoken English comes easier.   
To conclude, my weaknesses and strengths are quite equally spread over the four areas that are concerned here. 
At this point I feel that I am half the way where I want to be.
","Introduction In the following essay I'm going to tell you a little about my English skills. 
I'm going to point out my strengths and weaknesses in the four skills of listening, reading, speaking and writing.   
Listening: I have studied English in school since I was about ten years old. 
My listening to English probably started long before that though. 
I think so because I remember how my older brother always watched TV that I couldn't understand. 
I also have two cousins from England who came for a visit many years ago. 
I never dared say a word to them.  	 
Anyway, I believe it was good for me to get in touch of English as early in my life as I did. 
Because now I don't have any problems understanding English. 
Of course I have to really strain myself sometimes when a person talks very fast or have got an accent I'm not familiar with. 
All in all I really think I'm competent when it comes to listening to English. 
It's without a doubt my best side about the English language.   
Reading I enjoy reading English litterature. 
Sometimes I can feel that the Swedish language is very boring and then I usually find an English fiction book to relax by. 
Of course I find it easier to read a Swedish book, but I like reading books in their original language, and I guess most authors are American or English.  	 
My big weakness in this area is that the first minutes of my reading a book or something, I look up the words I don't recognize and I write them down. 
After a few minutes though, I get tired of interruppting my reading and I stop to look up words. 
I'm working on getting more patient in this area. 
This was all about fiction books, which I made clear that I like. 
When it comes to reading facts about something like America's government - thats what we are doing in social studies now, I'm not very enthustiatic. 
In those kinds of texts there are often words used that you don't see every day. 
And I already explained how I feel about looking up words. 
I still wouldn't say my reading is bad in this area, I'm just not very fond of that kind of reading.   
Speaking I can speak pretty good and fluent English, I think. 
When I go to another country I usually need a day or two to feel confident enough to speak when I don't have to. 
I don't really know if I have a good accent or not. 
So I'm looking forward to the speaking part this term. 
Then we have the part that makes me uncertain of myself; grammar. 
It's like I don't have time to think about grammar when I talk so I don't know what grammar mistakes I make, and they are probably quite many. 
I have always been thinking that I would hear if I said something grammatically wrong, and so I havent really bothered to learn the grammar rules. 
Now I understand that I will have to learn them.  
Writing Writing is what I don't like about English. 
I know exactly what I want to write but most often it doesn't go my way. 
I have troubles finding the right words, which makes me repeat myself. 
And very often as soon as I have written a sentence I erase it because it sounds wrong or simply looks wrong. 
In other words I really need writing practise. 	 
I never had much opportunities to practise writing in school, although I had a lot of spelling practise. 
So atleast now I feel pretty confident in spelling.   
Conclusion I would say that my English is good enough to get by on in a foreign country. 
However it's not good enough to teach from. 
What I need to study most is grammar and writing and then I think I can get by quite good. 
I think I have a lot of work to look forward to this term, but also a lot of fun.
",False
" English, My English  	My Relation to English has always been quite special. 
I have always liked the language and studying it, but still it has always been one of my weakest subjects. 
Since I started studying English in year three my teachers has always focused on improving our speaking and listening ability, and they haven't put that much effort into our reading and writing skills. 
That and the fact that I have spent a year in Australian high school has formed my English skills. 	
My strongest side in English has always been speaking. 
But when I was in primary school and my first year in upper secondary school I had pretty bad self confident and didn't like to use my English. 
Therefore I decided to go a year to a English speaking country as a exchange student. 
I ended up in Australia, and why I did that I don't really know I guess the country seemed interesting. 
When I first came there my self confident probably became even worse, because I realised that the English you learn at school and the English they speak in Australia is totally different. 
But being in a English speaking country not knowing anybody you had to start speaking, and after a while I started to feel more comfortable whit using my English and I started to understand the Australian accent as well. 
After my year in Australia I really enjoy using my English, even though I sometimes get a bit harassed because of my accent. 
It has also showed in my final marks from upper secondary school, where for the first time my English marks didn't put down my average mark. 	
Another strong side has been my listening skill. 
I think that is since we in Sweden get to hear English on television and cinemas already at an early age. 
I reckon that it's really good that we use subtitling instead of dubbing here in Sweden because the more you hear English the better your English becomes. 
Of course my year in Australia has improved my listening ability very much. 
The first couple of weeks in school it was really hard to stay concentrated for a whole lesson, but as my year went on it got easier and easier to stay focused. 
After about five months I even started to think and dream in English, and that did listening in English as easy as it is in Swedish. 	
The part that has made English one of my weak subjects is definitely my writing skill. 
Since my teachers didn't focused very much on writing it didn't really show until we had a test or had to write an essay. 
I have always found it hard to write essays though, also in Swedish. 
Actually the only time that I have done good in writing essays was when I where in Australia. 
I was really surprised how low expectations they put on their students, but I guess that also depends on which school you go to. 
My school had the lowest average marks in the whole state of New South Wales. 
So an essay that wouldn't pass in Sweden you could actually get pretty good marks for in my school. 
I was actually in the top third in English at my school and my teacher told that she was really impressed whit my English skills. 
I have always found grammar pretty boring, and of course that is one of the reasons why my grammar aren't that good. 
I thought that my year abroad would help me to improve my grammar, but unfortunately they don't have very good grammar in Australia. 
And being surrounded by Australians for a year certainly affected my grammar to be more like theirs. 	
To go back my strong sides again. 
I think that reading is pretty good. 
I find it quite easy to understand, but I'm not a fast reader. 
Reading was the part in English that improved the most during my exchange year. 
Before I went I found it hard read any longer texts, but now I have no problems reading a whole novel, and I really enjoy reading in English now. 	
I really don't have any problems pointing out my weak and strong sides in English. 
When I went abroad for a year I had hoped to improve my weak sides but didn't really get a chance to do that, and therefore I decided that I would like to study English at a university level and I hope that my weak sides can improve here. 
And also that my strong sides can become even better.
"," English my English  	 ""I hate English!"" 
This was my spontaneous comment after having English for the first time in fourth grade. 
Although I was quite excited about school at that time I had a hard time in English-class. 
Our teacher, Mrs. 
Buler, loved glossaries and the only thing we did was learning new words and translating them into Swedish. 
It wasn't until High-School I learned from my English teacher, Mr. 
Persson, that English is a far more complex language than just words and their Swedish translation. 
He taught me that English is to listen, read, speak and write.  	 
To begin with I would like to state that I am a very good listener. 
To me listening to English isn't as much listening to an English teacher as it is listening to TV- shows, especially ""Crosstalk"" at CNN. 
Most people my age have been brought up with English speaking TV-programs, everything from the shows at BBC to those at MTV. 
It is because of these television channels English is so integrated in my life since I can pick and choose a certain program of interest. 
When I go to the movies I often see movies that are romantic therefor I learn a lot of adjectives, mostly concerning people in love. 
On the other hand since my taste is so narrow when it comes to TV-shows and movies the most of the English I hear outside of school is the English spoken by politicians, newscasters or people deeply in love. 
This becomes a problem when I try to speak casual English with my American friends. 
Although, I have to admit, if it wasn't for my friends in America I would never have learned vital words like ""yeah man"" etc...  	 
Being the best way to pick up the written parts of a language, reading is something I do when I have got the time for it. 
The more you read the better you become at it. 
If I really like an English novel that I have read in Swedish I often want to read that book in English to see if it is as good or even better in its original language. 
One of the books that I have read many times, both in its original language and in Swedish, is George Orwells 1984. 
The problem I face concerning my reading skills is when it comes to concentration, or actually the lack of it. 
As soon as I loose the slightest of interest in what I am reading I often give up the whole book and do not care to complete it. 
Another problem I have with reading is that if there's a word I don't understand I look it up in the dictionary instead of trusting the general impression of the story. 
This becomes a major problem since it keeps me from reading smoothly and therefore I loose interest in the book.  	 
Since I lived in America for one year I now have somewhat of a flow in my spoken English. 
Because it is when you discuss in a certain language your oral skills are put to the test, I enjoy discussing issues in English. 
I also like Rhetoric and I try to excel at this part of the language, at least that is my goal to do so. 
After a year in America, speaking becomes the easiest part. 
When speaking you have to have the vocabulary there in your head to support the message you are giving out to who ever you are speaking with. 
Sometimes I feel that my vocabulary isn't enough to support my ideas when I speak. 	 
The toughest part of the English language is to write correct. 
The language structure is a part that I also have some problems with. 
For me it is hard to know if I have made myself perfectly clear or not when I have written something in English. 
Compared to speaking you do not get the spontaneous reactions of your structure in written language, instead the reactions come when you are done. 
Therefore it is hard for me to state my weaknesses and strengths when it comes to writing.  	 
In conclusion I believe that I am an average student at the English department. 
I think that I have a firm base to stand on, but I am also aware of that I need to work hard with some parts to become better. 
As long as I keep my attitude that I want to become better in order to teach others the skills of listening, reading, speaking and writing English.
",False
"This text will deal with my knowledge in the English language in four different aspects: listening, reading, speaking and writing.  
I never felt that I had a problem to understand the englishteachers in school and now when I listen to lecturers at the university, who use a higher level of the English language then what I'm used to, I still don't have a problem to follow even though they use many words that are new to me. 
None of the lecturers that I had so far had a dialect that I thought was difficult to understand. 
Certain dialects that are spoken in some parts of England are sometimes hard to understand. 
For example if I watch a English movie without Swedish text in which the actors speak a dialect that sounds very different from the English that I learned in school I can have difficulties to understand it. 
This problem I never had watching movies where the actors spoke any kind of American dialect.
I've been to the States for vacation and then I understood all the different kinds of American english that I heard. 
Unfortunately I never had the opportunity to go to England so I don't know how my understanding would be there but I met quite a few English people in other countries and they used so much slang that I felt rather lost! 
When it comes to my reading in English the biggest weakness is probably that I never read, it's not easy to relax and read a book if there are a million other urgent things to do. 
In the past two weeks I actually red more English then I did for several years. 
I thought that it was much easier to understand then I expected it to be and that includes both instructions and literary texts. 
When I speak of understanding I'm not talking about every single word rather the sentences as a whole. 
Normally you understand approximately what a word means if you have a circumstance to refer to. 
That doesn't mean that I don't think that I have to learn the word. 
To improve my English vocabulary is actually one of the two main challenges that I have to deal with this term.  
As improving my vocabulary is one challenge the other one is definately to get a better knowledge about the English grammar. 
I didn't study English for a long time and it's amazing how fast you forget things that you once knew. 
Actually I can't even remember having grammar lessons in the ""gymnasium"", instead my teacher forced us to read ""Hamlet"", written in a very old English. 
I can't say that anyone appreciated it then and I really don't think that I developed my knowledge of the English language in a positive way in those years.
Partly because of this but also the lack of practice in recent years made me suspect that I'm not very good at English grammar. 
According to my result on the diagnostic test that we had the first day of this term, my suspicions can be considered as confirmed. 
Especially the translation part wasn't very good, I really don't understand why the result on that part was worse then others.  
When I write a text like this, the most obvious weakness about my English is that my vocabulary isn't big enough. 
Actually it's not only unsufficient it doesn't include enough words that are considered as a higher level of English or more professional synonyms to the words that I use. 
If there is anything that I would call a strength about my writing that would be my lively imagination that makes it easy to come up with a story for essay or just to start writing, something that most people think is the worst part of the writing process. 
That is of course nothing special for my writing in English. 
To speak is what I'm best at in my knowledge of English. 
Of course I also have the problem with my insufficient vocabulary when I speak but normally I don't feel the need to use words of a higher level when I'm speaking.  
When I was in school, I didn't say a word more than necessary in the English lessons. 
I wasn't only shy but also ashamed and unconfident about my English. 
After finishing school I went abroad for a year, one of the purposes of that was to improve my ability to speak English. 
The country to which I went, wasn't a English speaking one. 
That may sound strange since I wanted to practise English. 
Anyway that was the idea, I spoke English every day with the people there and because of that it wasn't their mother tongue either I became more self-confident about my English. 
Now I like to speak English so I'm really satisfied with the out coming of that year. 
Now I feel ready to work hard to improve my vocabulary.
","At the very moment my competence in English is not too good. 
Right now you wouldn't believe that I've studied English at school in ten years, I don't. 
I'm also quite ashamed to tell to Englishspeaking people that I'm going to become a teacher in English. 
One of the comments on that information has been: ""Well, as long as you're not going to teach my children."" 	
I think that the fact that I haven't used English at all in quite a long time, and that during that time I've worked hard to improve my skills in Swedish, affects a great deal my capability to produce the language myself and also to understand it, both in written and spoken form. 
Although listening and reading feels easier than speaking and writing at the moment. 	
In this internationalized society, that we are living in, we can hear English everywhere: on TV, on the radio, in the streets, in the cafés and restaurants, in the shops and so on. 
I think that it's a reason why I feel that listening to English is easiest. 
I mean that even though I haven't been active and used the language I haven't been able to avoid hearing it every day. 
I also think that I listen to English more fluently because when I listen I don't have time to seize on every single word that I may not know but generally I can still follow what is going on. 	
Reading feels also easier because I have the text in front of me and somehow I can work on it more actively. 
I can check up words in a dictionary and I can go back to an earlier page to control that I've understood the text correct, for example. 
I've recognized that when I read a text I seize on single words that I don't know quite easily. 
The problem is that it takes so much extra time to check up the words in a dictionary although it would be good for me to do it considering the weakness of my vocabulary. 
But that extra time is something that I can't afford in order to manage to accomplish all the other things I'm expected to do. 	
The weakness of my vocabulary has effect on all the four fields, listening, reading, speaking and writing, but especially on speaking and writing. 
That's because I think that my active vocabulary is even weaker than my passive vocabulary. 
I mean that I understand more than I can produce. 
The fact that also complicates things for me is that I have to try to deal with two for me foreign languages, English and Swedish, at the same time. 
So even the weaknesses in my Swedish vocabulary affects my studies in English. 	
The most difficult field and at the same time the most effective way to learn the correct language in my opinion is writing. 
It's difficult because of the weaknesses in my vocabulary, like I mentioned before, but also because I've forgot the English grammar quite well. 
However I'm not so worried about the grammar. 
I think that the part that I've forgot comes back little by little while I'm working on the language. 
I also think that grammar is something that I can improve by grinding away at it, just learn it by heart, and exercising a lot by writing. 
Above all I have to try to learn from mistakes, avoid doing the same mistakes over and over again. 	
It's weird but it's always harder to find strenghts than weaknesses. 
There just seems to be weaknesses instead of strenghts and bigger weaknesses instead of weaknesses. 
Anyway, as a whole I have to evaluate my competence in English as weak at the moment. 
Nevertheless I try to think positive. 
I know where I am and I'm aware that it's going to take a lot of hard work to improve my English. 
I have to sweat blood but I'm ready for that. 
I'm going to do my very best and we will see if it's enough.
",False
"Introduction In this essay I will tell you about my skills in English regarding listening, reading, speaking and writing. 
I will try to be as accurate as I possibly can, but it has been difficult to evaluate my own skills. 
Even if I do not success in my evaluation of my skills, at least you will know what I think that I am good or bad at.  y skills  I think I have my best skill in listening right now. 
I can understand what is said at our lectures without problems. 
If I were put at a lecture for doctors though, I do not think that I would be able to follow, since there are a lot of terminology that I do not think that I would understand. 
But as long as the language is spoken without terminology in subjects strange to me, I think I can understand most of it. 
I can watch English movies and understand almost everything that the actors say, sometimes I do not understand a particular word, but usually I can understand the content anyway. 
Besides the problem with terminology I can have problems to understand if someone talks a broad dialect that I am not used to. 
But as I said earlier I think that listening is my strongest skill right now.  
Reading is not a big problem either, but it takes me a while to get used to read in English. 
I can read a book and understand its content even though I do not know the meaning of every word in it. 
My vocabulary is not great, but most of the time I can guess the meaning of the word I do not understand by looking at the whole sentence or paragraph. 
Of course there are times when I have to look up words in the dictionary to understand the content of what is written, but I enjoy reading and I do not at all mind doing it in English.   
When it comes to speaking I am afraid that it is obvious that I do not use my English that often. 
I have never been to England or any other English speaking country so I do believe that I have a ""school"" English. 
I can have problems finding the words and sometimes, for example if someone comes up to me and ask about directions in English it can sound as if I recently learned how to speak English when I try to answer. 
But my strength in speaking lies in that I am not afraid to speak. 
I will try to explain the directions as good as I possible can even though my pronunciation is bad and the words may come out in the wrong order. 
I do have another weakness regarding speaking though and that is, that if I am in a large group I do not like to speak, but as long as there are a small group I do not mind it.   
Then to the last skill, writing. 
This is another skill that shows how little I have used my English since the second year in upper secondary school. 
It has been nearly five years since I last studied English, and even then I did not write that much, so I am not at all used to write in English and I am afraid that a lot of my knowledge about grammar, that I once had, are now forgotten. 
I do not know the rules any more, I usually go on how it ""sounds"".  
As I have written I think that my strong skills are listening and reading, and my weaker skills are talking and writing, but I have great expectations that I will improve all of my skills in English during this semester. 
The skill that will be the hardest one for me to improve, I think will be the grammar part. 
But since there are a lot of grammar exercises and some writing assignments I think that if I just put my mind to it and work hard, I will be able to improve my skill in grammar enormously. 
As a whole I think that this semester will one of my most instructive ones.
"," Evaluation- an assessment of my skills in listening to, reading in, writing in and speaking the English language  The skills mentioned in the subtitle to this text are all, of course, influenced by each other. 
For example: words you hear you can use in your writing and when you're writing you are simontaneously reading what you produce and when you read it out loud, whoops, your speaking! 
Despite this - call it stubbornness if you like, I, myself, would like to label it convenient - I will treat my skills in these areas in seperate sections of this essay. 
I'll start off with my skills in listening to, then reading in, followed by writing in and finally my skills in speaking the English language will be discussed.  
Listening to English is something which is easily practised just by watching english-speaking movies or listening to the recently opened radiostation Right on radio (broadcasting in Stockholm, and Uppsala, I think). 
And this is what I try to do. 
When going to the movies I try to listen to what the actors are saying as opposed to reading the subtitles. 
I think I'm pretty good at understanding spoken English, especially american English, partly 'cause I spent some time in Colorado, five years ago as an exchange student. 
I still have trouble discerning if someone says peace or peas for example, though. 
I wasn't aware of the existence of this buzzing sound until I got to the US and it took some time for me to grasp it.  
Since my junior level of high school I've regularly read English novels and short-stories, along with Swedish ones. 
I think English sometimes can be more interesting to read since there are many more ways in which the authors can express themselves. 
I look up words occasionally when I read, but not as a rule. 
I guess the meaning of many words that are foreign to me, usually by the context they're in or from affixes I know of. 
I think I have a fairly good knack of reading english texts, probably more in respect of fiction. 
Though, I've studied Library and Information science the last two years, where I read some rather difficult texts concerning the organisation of information in general and the way Search engines on the WWW handle documents and their content in particular.  
In Colorado I explored writing in English in a much wider sense than before (or after; up until now, perhaps) much thanks to a class I took called ""Creative writing"". 
For one semester I wrote poetry, short plays and a short story. 
When I got back to Sweden I didn't study very hard in English the last two years of the upper secondary High school. 
I did a few writing-assignments here, which I thought turned out really good. 
I also have some unfinished short-stories lurking in the depths of my computer.  
When it comes to my abilities in spoken English, I think I have a very good understanding of how different words are pronounced, but I still have some problems with certain sounds; as in the buzzing ""z""-sound and in the ""th""-combination. 
I need to practise my talking skills a lot in the sense of coming up with the correct words for the feeling I want to convey or the point I want to make. 
I'm also used to Swedish slang and find it hard to translate certain expressions that I feel defines part of my person. 
This makes me feel awkward when I speak English.
",False
" Weaknesses and strengths, a background.  y English education started in the fourth grade, with the standard read and writes exercises. 
At this point I hadn't even learned to read that well in Swedish yet. 
So as predicted I started to lag behind. 
I did not do the words that were given in homework nor did I prepare that much for the exams. 
If it weren't for my friend and his big brother, which both loved English movies and songs, I would have given up English as a lost cause. 
Every time that I went to their house I was bombarded by English, if it wasn't on the Television it came from the stereo. 
They were always talking or singing along. 
So at the lessons I tried to keep up, even though I thought it was boring. 
It wasn't until when I started the Gymnasium that I began to see the point in learning English. 
Our new English teacher was a sweet old lady who keep on discipline but had some new ways of teaching. 
We watched short news flashes, and had to explain what it was about, we got to read books and write short essays about them, we had small group discussions, which she would sit in on. 
We did lots of fun word games and other stuff.  	
At the same time I made a new acquaintance, a school friend who loved to read English Fantasy and Science fiction. 
He loaned me some books I read them and then I was hooked. 
So I started to read English literature and have done so ever after. 
So the consequence of all this is that I am real good at understanding the context in writings, even though I might not understand every word in it. 
I tried to look up words in my dictionary, but I wanted to find out what was going to happen in the books, so I started to use the dictionary less and less. 
At one time I was going to read a book in Swedish and it took almost 30 pages before I got into reading and thinking in Swedish. 
It is always better to read in the original language.
My present vocabulary isn't that big and varying. 
When I'm writing I often know that I want another word, but I can't quite specify the word I want, so I have to settle with a similar word than the one I want instead. 
It also happens that I know what word I want, but I'm not sure how to spell it, in those instances I also write a similar word that I know how to spell to. 
So what happens then is that I can't make my meaning perfectly clear and I get a little frustrated, but that I'm used to. 
Also due to my unusual interests I have a little strange vocabulary, which contain seldom used words, and some old English words. 
When I write I try to stay with British English, but as almost all media that I consume is American English, my English tend to switch between British and American. 
Which can be annoying, but hopefully not disturbing.  	
When it comes to listening I have a slight disadvantage. 
I have a small hearing problem that is only noticeable when people talk fast, may it be English or Swedish it doesn't matter, the words float together and I have trouble hearing. 
If I hear dialects then I have trouble in the beginning until I understand their patois, and that can take awhile. 
Standard English is easiest, both British and American. 
People who talk quiet are also difficult, because they tend to speak quieter and quieter. 
But as I said normal speaking people usually aren't a problem as long as they speak in normal tone or start speaking in technical terms.
Speaking has always been difficult for me. 
I rather listen than speak in a conversation. 
I really like listening. 
I only speak when I believe I have something to contribute with or when I must. 
I don't like speaking to strange people, but I do it when I must. 
You can't live in a society without speaking. 
I have problems with the lisping sounds in English and long complicated words are a nightmare. 
If I have to repeat myself I usually mispronounce them the second time, get flustered and then I have to start over again. 
But I know that speaking is important in learning a language so I speak with the foreign exchange students that are members in my Student Nation. 
It is good practice, both verbally and socially.
","So, this is it. 
This is the moment when I have to confess all my previous errors. 
The moment to blame my teachers and to depict myself as an innocent bystander. 
The moment to tell the world how lousy I am at english. 
There is an old prayer whom I think describes my way to the english language quite well.  
From gholies and ghosties... 
Homework... 
Homework is Gods way of punishing children! 
I have never made any homework in my entire life! 
Oh, maybe one or two times, but that is all. 
I guess it is my way of telling the world that ""this is my life and I am going to make the best out of it"". 
I can asure you that homework not is the best way of entertaining yourself!   
And longleggedy beasties... 
Teachers, I have a theory about teachers. 
They are an alien race from outer space who lives of the agony of small, and not so small children. aybe not all of them, some teachers must be real life humans who likes teaching the errors of humanity to new generations. 
I can not decide if I like the first or the second group less than the other.  
I have had one good english teacher, the rest of them were quite bad. 
We had to correct their pronunciation, their ideas about teaching (reading a chapter from the englishbook and giving us homework) and their bad breath. 
Teachers should not be permitted to drink coffe before classes!   
And things that go bump in the night... 
All my friends are better at english than I am. 
My boyfriend have a bigger vocabulary then most englishmen, so does our best friend, I do not. 
I don't like being second best, or third, or fourth, so why bother?  
Good Lord deliver me Now you understand that it not is my fault that I am not that good at english, right? 
If you still holds me responsible for my shortcomings read everything from the beginning again till you have reached enlightenment. 
Othervise you might continue reading.  
No more prayers aybe the reason for me passing english in secondary school was that I am very good at understanding spoken and written english. 
It is easy finding the context of a sentence even though I don't know the meaning of every word. 
And it is way easier in spoken then in written english, and when I can see the person speaking then not. 
I guess that this is true for everyone.  
Reading english is easy, but not fun. 
It is allmost as fun as if reading a book about chemistry, a lot of text but nothing interresting, no feeling, no soul, just booring. 
There are a lot of soulless books out there, and most of them are written in english... but as soon as they get translated to swedish the translator finds a soul for allmost every book. 
I guess swedish translators are the greatest wizards on earth!  
But grammar... 
Is very hard to learn... 
This is where my knowledge about english is nonexistent. 
I write and says what I feel is right, not what I know is right, and my feeling for english is not so good. 
This, and my lousy vocabulary is the reason why I hate writing in english. 
I can never get anything the way I want it to be:(, and only getting the second best is most of the time not an option. 
And I really loves to write, so why should I write in a language I hardly knows? 
But still, if I never practise I will never get any better, and I really needs to get better.  
And if I get better my nightmares might disapear, all of them, except the things that go bump in the night... 
I will have to learn to coexist with them.  
Now you know, I hardly know english at all, (and it is not my fault!)
",False
" ""Gotta get grammar"".  
English is for me a way of communicating with a foreigner. 
Bringing two worlds together by mutual comprehension gives a satisfaction out of the ordinary.  	
I urge to understand, I urge to be understood. 
Somewhere in the background lurking are some tricky clause-elements just waiting to cause a stir. 	 	
I am well aware of my main weekness after one week of intense grammar studies. 
Most of it is not at all new to me, which leaves me trying to figure out where I once got the knowledge. 	
To be honest, I can not remember one single time where me and my classmate Emma had an instructive grammarsession. 
Our upper-secondary English teacher instead focused the lessons on current events, like in the BBC-world news broadcast. 
The type of subjects, for instance cloning, new tecnology, elections, always had the outcome of (to say the least) wild discus-sions. 
One got engaged whether you wanted or not. 	
Like many others I belive I experienced the English classes to be the least frightful ones among heavily weighing nature-science subjects. 
Therefore, in a relaxed non-pressuring environment I openmindedly enjoyed my language studies.  	
Graduated an free as a bird I decided to walk the same path as several of my fellownature. 
Illegally, with a bag of expectations and a skibag, I went overseas. 
Foremost to ski the Colorado ""Rockies"", next to broaden my vocabulary and last, sad to say, to work as a nanny. 	 	
With a touristvisa for six months I knew I would need preperation and a good portion of luck. 
The whole flight over there I practiced what I would answer the immigrant interrogator, I am (was...) a very poor lier even in my mother tounge.  	
Never have I been so nervous. 
I can't recapture one phrase I uttered, yet my fake Colgate-smile has forever engraved itself on my memory. 
Wait, perhaps I did finish of with a ""-Thank you and have a nice day!""...  	
Well the custom officer was the first in a long line of people with whom I would talk to. 	
I soon discovered how some Americans have a way of socializing with you. 
It doesn't matter if you, for a start, show no interest whatsoever.  	
In the beginning I wasn't that thrilled ending up in a chairlift with three talkative Americans. 
It did not take long though before I ruthlessly threw myself into conversations. 
The chairlift-dialogue did get sort of old after a while, so sometimes I spiced them up with downright lies (for the good cause of broadening my vocabulary). 	
Along the way my speach and communicating skills improved remarkably, but on the other hand I fear my spellig and grammar mostly got damaged. 	 	
It is one thing to read some books and magazines in English, but my writing for the last couple of years easily sum up to a couple of letters and e-mails.  	
The lack of productive writing and no constructive index finger pointing out my way leaves me in a vaccum. 
How good/bad am I?  	
Clarification in the matter will not linger...
","This essay is about my strengths and weaknesses considering writing, reading, listening and speaking English.
My friends whom I went to the gymnasium with all said:- English, only English? 
Then you will have a lot of spare time won't you? 
You already know everything about English. 
But this English course contains so much more than you are used to from the gymnasium. 
At the gymnasium we never even discussed the fact that we might have weaknesses. 
But if there is something that I've learned from this essay it's that everybody has weaknesses and that you are never through with learning a language.
I have always considered writing the part of the English language that I know best. 
I love to form sentences in English and I have never had any difficulties regarding writing, My strengths are that I have a good word suppliant and I don't make many grammar errors when I write. 
I also like to think that I use a fluent language. 
But I've discovered that since I left the gymnasium, two years ago, I've lost a lot of my skills and I don't spell as good as I used to. 
So I guess you could say that one of my weaknesses is the lack of practise or the lack of self-discipline to keep my writing fluent. 
Another weakness is that I am not very good at explaining grammatical rules in English. 
I usually know the consequences of them, but I can't actually explain them.  
I also love reading in English, because it has another flow of language than Swedish does. 
I can almost always understand the context of the books, even if there are words that I don't understand and once I start to read an English book I start to think in English and I soon forget that I'm actually reading a foreign book because I get so caught up in it. 
Something that I could improve about my reading is underlining the words that I don't know and look them up so that I will have a better vocabulary and understand all the words in the book and not just the context.   
I've always been interested in listening to the English language, because I like the sound of it. 
When I was about 8-10 years old and I wasn't allowed to stay up and watch a movie, a movie where they spoke English that is, I would lie in my room and listen to the sound of the television and I was amazed that I didn't need the Swedish translation, I actually understood what they were saying in English. 
This is something that I really think has helped improve my listening skills and my knowledge of words because you learn a lot of new words when you are trying to make out sentences by listening to the TV. 
I think one of my strengths is that I have had so much practising with both listening and speaking English, because my father is from Hungary so I have to speak English with my cousins, and I think that the best way of learning both how to listen and how to speak is to practise the language frequently   When it comes to speaking my weaknesses are that sometimes I don't think that I speak as well in English as I could. 
That is when someone stops me in the street and asks:-can you please tell me where the nearest restaurant is? 
I tend to get a bit shocked and even if I know that I could answer with a perfectly good English sentence, my answer often sounds something like: -over there! 
But that is mostly when I'm caught of guard otherwise I think that my spoken English is rather good actually. 
I can always find some word to express what I mean or how I feel.
But the greatest one of my strengths is the fact that I love the English language in every way. 
And it gives me great pleasure to take this course because I am very eager to regain and improve the skills that I once had, and I will, I am certain of it.
",False
" Stop smoking!  
Did you know that tobacco is one of the most common causes of premature death? 
Only in Sweden 8 000 persons every year die of diseases caused by smoking. 
Do you want to be a number in these statistics or do you want to get free from the devil that poisons your body? 
You may say that you cannot stop smoking, but I wonder why. 
Is it just because it is an old, bad habit, or do you actually like inhaling toxins, just as I once did? 
But, at last I did stop, and I will try to convince you in the following few paragraphs that you can gain a lot by stop smoking.	 	
I remember waking up with a terrible taste in my mouth and feeling the phlegm all the way from the bottom of my lungs to the tip of my tongue. 
I remember coughing all day long. 
Even when I tried to laugh the cough would stop me. 
I felt like an 80 years old lady whose best friend has been the cigarette for a quite some time. 
But still, I didn't quit.  	
I will try not to discuss one major disease related to smoking, and that is cancer. 
I suppose that you have already heard and maybe even read a lot about it. 
Instead, I will give you some scary information about other afflictions. 
It is not just coughing and the extra production of phlegm, but also a number of other lung related affections and diseases that you can catch. 
When you get the chronic obstructive lung disease, which is a combination of chronic bronchitis and tissue damages in the lungs and which makes it very hard to breathe so that you eventually need the oxygen, you might wish that you had never begun to smoke.  	
There are gases, particles and fumes in each puff from a cigarette that contain more than 4 000 different substances and chemical compounds. 
We can see only about five percent of the smoke and the rest is invisible to the eye. 
Some of the substances contained in the cigarette fumes were used to execute people in gas chambers (hydrogen cyanide). 
Others are used as cleaning agents and fertilizers (ammoniac), preserving agents (formaldehyde) and nail polish removers (acetone). 
I could round up a number of different substances, but I know that it would not mean a thing to you. 
It surely never meant anything to me.  	
If I cannot scare you with the diseases and substances, maybe I can deter you by making you aware of how ugly you become when you are a smoker. 
Take a look at your fingers, the ones in which you hold the cigarette so gently, and see if your skin is turning orange or yellow. 
I used to scrub my fingers with a lemon hoping that the stains would come out. 
Of course, they never did. 
One more thing is the bad looking discoloration of your teeth, which you get whether you want it or not. 
Last but not least when it comes to your appearance, I do not know if you have noticed, but you are followed by the big, stinking smoke cloud. 	
If you are still a smoker and you have not been discouraged, then my job is to continue by pointing out what you can gain if you quit smoking. 
After just a couple of days you will start to notice how your complexion is getting smooth and how the color comes back to your face, so that you do not look ill, pale or yellowish anymore. 
And you certainly do not go around dragging the big, stinking cloud and your breath is much fresher. 
If you sometimes felt that your hands or feet were cold, even if it was 25 degrees outside, then the reason to that might be the bad blood circulation. 
Without the cigarettes, all of a sudden, you can feel your toes and fingers even if it is cold outside. 
And it is such a pleasant feeling.  	
To round off my arguments, I will throw the following figures in your face: imagine that you smoke one pack of cigarettes per day at a cost of 36 Swedish krona. 
This would mean that in one year you would spend approximately 13 000 Swedish krona. 
Can you imagine what you could do with so much money?
"," English, My English  Introduction To study English has been both pleasure and pain for me. 
Lately most pleasure. 
Before I started to study English I studied geography here in Uppsala. 
The geography department gave me the opportunity to go to the University of Leicester in England for one semester to study geography as an Erasmus student. 
It was this experience that made me interested in the English language and that made me take this course in English. 
This essay will deal with how competent I feel about my English at this point. 
Therefore I'm going to reveal my strengths and weaknesses of listening, reading, speaking and writing the English language. 
I'm going to start to tell you about my ability to write.  
To be honest I feel that I'm not that competent in any of these areas but my five-month-stay in England made me more complete. 
Out of the four skills, I mentioned earlier, I think my writing is the strongest. 
During my stay I wrote about 20 000 words divided into eight essays. 
All my essays were passed but yet no one ever marked them according to the language therefore, I think this course will do me good. 
Nowadays it doesn't take me that much time to write as it did before but grammatically I still have a great deal to do, which I am aware of. 
Moreover I realised that my spelling was better than I thought. 
When I went to the lectures in geography I noticed that although I had to write very fast, to keep up with what the lecturer said, I was able to spell the words right. 
However, I couldn't always follow the lecturers arguments.  
According to the lecturers arguments my ability to listen to English and understand the meaning of what is said is quite good. 
I have noticed that I understand the language better when I'm not alone with an English speaking person. 
When I'm alone I tend to get nervous and tensed, I try too hard to listen to what this person has to say, which makes it difficult to get the point sometimes. 
If there are a group of people listening to this person I'm more relaxed and I understand so much more. 
When it comes to reading I can sit on my own and ponder about what the author has to say and I can take as much time as I want to understand.  
I guess that is why I read as slow as a snail walks. 
Well, it isn't that bad but it takes quite some time for me to read, for instance a novel. 
For this reason I have learned that it isn't possible to check all the words that I don't understand. 
It just simply takes too much time therefore I just check the words that are important fore the context but still it takes quite some time for me to read. 
As I don't read books in my spare time, which I will have to do now at this course in English, I know that my ability to read will be better. 
Let us turn to my ability to speak.  
Before I came to England I hadn't talked so much English but since I was there I had to speak. 
I used the English I had learn at school and I felt that it was a couple of years since I studied English, more exactly three years. 
Consequently, I had some troubles in the beginning but in the end I had improved my speaking and I even thought in English. 
So today I feel comfortable talking to people I know but when it comes to bigger groups my confidence fail me and the size of my vocabulary.   
Conclusion I have realised that I have improved the four skills of speaking, listening, writing and reading during my stay in England and today I feel more complete, both linguistically and as a person in fact. 
The two skills I developed most was my speaking and writing. 
My stay in England was a step closer to the English language, it made me interested, and my intention is to develop these skills as much as possible in the future.
",False
" English, My English!  
y history of English is not so unique or different. 
I have learnt my English mainly at school, and before the third form I could only say things like ""I buy pink sheets for a kiss"" and ""My name is Bettina"". 
I have not spent any longer time abroad, only shorter vacations, but even in Sweden you get in touch with English every day trough television and radio. 
English has never been a subject that I have thought of as a difficult one, it has always come easy to me. 
After I graduated from ""upper secondary school"" I feel that a lot of my English has been forgotten. 
For the last three years I have studied for a Master of Science and Engineering, and there I have both used my English and discovered that I want to improve it. 
Below I will try to describe my knowledge of English, as I think of it today.  
To listen to English is something I am quite used to do. 
As I mentioned above, in Sweden you hear English almost every day whether you want to or not. 
In my university studies I have had lectures in English as well as English speaking tutors (or not Swedish speaking). 
Usually I have no problems in following spoken English, but of coarse this depends on the speaker's vocabulary and dialect. 
I think that I could have a problem understanding British English with a strong dialect, since I am more familiar with American English from media. 
One weakness from my point is that it is easier for me to ""turn of"" an English speaking voice than a Swedish one.  
As for reading, I do not have any serious problems there either. 
My weakness is the speed, I do not read very fast, but on the other hand I do not do anything very fast. 
I am used to reading course literature in English, but there the problem is often to understand the phenomenon described instead of the language. 
Perhaps I will have developed my ability to read more rapidly by the time that I have finished all the novels in this course.  
The speaking part of my English is a part that I would like to improve. 
Still, I am not afraid of talking, not at all, and it doesn't stop me that I do not get it right all the time. 
I would like to improve my pronunciation, and I would like it to be more British. 
Also, I want to get a better flow in my language. 
This I hope will follow if I get a larger vocabulary, and of coarse if I use my spoken English more often.  
Now I will comment on my writing skill, which I have already exposed above. 
My feeling is that I have a lot to improve. 
This is also a part that I think I will have great use for. 
In my earlier studies I have written several laboratory reports and smaller essays in English, and there will only be more of them in the future. 
I need to get a better vocabulary and become better at expressing myself in English. 
Also, I need to improve my sentence structure. 
I do think that I am able to do some kind of paragraphing and linking, which I get from my ability to write in Swedish, but I do not have the correct words for it I guess.   
What you can conclude from these thoughts, as it seems, is that I want and need to improve my own expression in English, both in writing and speaking. 
I want to have a better vocabulary, and to be able to use these words correctly. 
I also want to have an English expression, and not a ""Swenglish"" one. 
On the other hand I am more pleased with my capacity to understand English, by reading and listening, even thou there are always things to improve.
","I have been studying English for many years, in fact for twelve years in school and then I've been to Ireland for a year. 
I didn't study English in school so much over there but I lived with an Irish family so I were speaking and listening to the English language every day. 
I've been learning a lot in school but even after twelve years in school I didn't want to speak it because I didn't have the experience of speaking it. 
When I went to Ireland I learned a lot, especially to dare speaking English, that it didn't matter if I said something wrong. 
I learn when I'm speaking not when I don't. 
Now I want to learn how to speak and write English better. 
In this essay I'm going to write about my strengths and weaknesses in the four skills of listening, reading, speaking and writing. 
Listening, I don't have so much problems with understanding what people are saying, if it's not about a special subject that I usually don't talk about or if it's words that I usually don't hear on TV, radio or use in a daily conversation. 
It can also be hard to understand what someone who have an unusuall dialect are saying. 
The English language is spoken over the whole world and sometimes the dialects are really different and hard to understand.  
Reading, I like reading books, but my vocabulary is not as good as I want it to be. 
I often understand most of the sentences anyway but I have to learn more words. 
I try to look in a dictionary if I don't understand a word or the meening of the word in a sentence. 
We didn't read much English books in upper secondary school but I have read some afterwards. 
I think that it is a good way of learning.  
Speaking, I can make myself understood in English and since I were in Ireland I've improved a lot. 
But my grammar is not so good and that results in that I'm probably doesn't speak correctly. 
I think that when my grammar is becoming better I'm going to speak better and enjoy speaking English more. 
It's fun to speak English when you are in an another country because it's not in so many countries that they speak a second language as good as many people do here in Sweden. 
I think that I pronunce words quite good when I speak, but not as good when I read for someone because then I havn't seen every word before and it's harder to pronunce them. 
I can't remember that we learned much phonetic transcriptions in upper secondary school but I think it's really important to learn it, because it's so much easier to learn how to pronunce words when you look in the dictionary and understand the phonetic transcriptions.  
Writing, As I wrote before my grammar is not very good and that makes my writing not very good either. 
When I'm listening or reading it's not a big problem but when I speak or write it becomes a bigger problem. 
I can't explain why I'm writing as I do, the grammar-rules. 
I'm not that good at Swedish grammar and I'm worse in English grammar. 
I havn't been so interested in learning the English grammar before, I just wanted to learn how to speak the language but now I want to be able to speak, write, listen and read it better. 
I have to work hard with it and I'm looking forward to understand it better. 
Because if I don't understand the grammar I can't learn to write or speak it correctly. 
Then it depend on what I'm going to write. 
I think that it's easier to write about a book or compare two books than to come up with something from my own mind.  
Now I have tryed to explain my strengths and weaknesses in the English language. 
And if I work a lot with my weaknesses I'm going to improve and enjoy the English language even more. 
It's useful in so many things. 
I'm really motivated to study English and learn it as good as I can. 
My biggest weaknesses is grammar and to make my vocabulary bigger. 
I think that thats what i have to study the most.
",False
" Down with the King  I claim the king together with the entire royal family do not belong in a democratic country as Sweden. 
Ever since almost anyone can remember we have had a king who in... some sense has governed Sweden. 
But times have changed. 
It is with no hesitation that I argue for Sweden to leave our monarchy influenced constitution and there will be no doubt you will agree with me after reading this essay.  
The king of Sweden does not posses any real power in that way he can make decisions on national or even local levels. 
The country of Sweden, so to say, employs him. 
On the surface you can easily believe he is just a face out towards the people of Sweden and other countries, holding speeches and cutting band at opening ceremonies. 
The powers possessed by the king are not that obvious. 
Our king possesses power. 
In fact he is one of Sweden's most influent opinion-makers. 
As a king he gets lots of attention from media, which makes him very powerful. 
The power he possesses is, without any doubts, due to the fact that he is king, a position that he has inherited. 
No matter if he likes it or not he influences the people a lot with his actions and statements; he is a powerful leader of peoples minds. 
The question is if whether a democratic country like Sweden can have a strong opinion-maker that inherit his power. 
It is with my biggest convention that I maintain that that this is totally against all thinking in a democratic country. 
It makes me feel ill at ease when I think of power that is inherited, and of course that cannot be acceptable. 
Just to emphasise this main and very crucial point, a hereditary position that entails great power over the people does not belong in a democratic country. 
We must never forget the importance of that, thus we cannot have a king who inherit his position. 
Of course there might be some people that do not see the issue. 
Some may say ""-Yeah, yeah. 
He might influence the opinion, but I like him though. 
He is nice."" 
The king is popular, especially amongst the elderly in our society. 
The king is a down-to-earth person with simple hobbies that many of the elderly can identify with. 
Hence it might be hard to see why anybody would have a problem with this harmless fellow. 
So let me give an example why I am concerned with the way he influences the thinking of people's minds. 
One of his hobbies is to hunt. 
Every year he goes hunting elk. 
I am one of those people who do not eat meat because I do not consider us humans to have any right to eat other animals. 
Every now and then we follow the king broadcasted on television, out hunting elk with his ever happy and smiling hunting friends. 
This portrait of the king and his habits strengthen the right to act in a manner, which I consider awkward. 
To hunt down and kill animals righteous many peoples habits of eating meat and killing animals. 
There is no way I just can sit back and watch this man, the man who should represent the whole country, without reacting. 
I do not want that man to represent Sweden, but there is nothing I can do about it. 
This argumentation essay is not about issues concerning eating meat or not, nonetheless I think I have maid my point clear. 
A man employed by the country of Sweden ought to express the opinions of the majority and hence has to be elected by the people. 
With this not said we would have someone we would all like, but that is the way it has to work in a democratic country.  
So to conclude my standpoint I have to say there can be no place for inherited monarchy in a democratic country like Sweden. 
A man in this position has to represent the people. 
It is not acceptable that a man possessing power as a direct cause by the fact that he is employed by the country of Sweden is not elected by us all.
","According to the number of years that I have studied English, one could assume that I would be able to read, speak, write and communicate with other people without having any massive difficulties. 
I really do wish that it would be that simple. 
In a way it is true that my English is in a stable state where I am confident to use it in every day basis and also to be able to study dissimilar subjects in English. 
Regarding to the fact that I come from Finland and my mother tongue is so unlike comparing to the other languages explains somehow my incomplete knowledge from foreign languages. 
In my native language, Finnish that is, we do not have for instance any prepositions or articles. 
These grammar dissimilarities creates insuperable barriers for me that has perhaps something to do with my laziness and a lack of concentration. 
I presume that I have not even learned the basic things throughout even though language teaching is highly appreciated in Finland. 
I guess that learning a new language properly from the beginning, in this content English, would have helped me to achieve a firm and a strong standard that I would be able to use English in sort of a native way.  
If I start with listening I am happy to inform that this particular skill is presumably my strongest. 
During the few years I have had a chance to be in a sort of environment that people have used different accents and dialects that I have become accustomed to listen. 
Certainly I have to admit that even still today I have to apologize occasionally when I am not able to comprehend despite my background abroad. 
But then again it is quite logical that I have to ask people to repeat themselves because I am a foreign and I will never become a fully bilingual person. 
Besides one has to be really careful when listening for example to a strong Scottish accent or if having a conversation with a real Paddy. 
Separations between different accents are enormous.  
Apparently my reading comprehension is rather good as well. 
When reading a newspaper, a magazine or a book I do not need to reach out my dictionary although there are words which meanings I do not have a slightest clue. 
But that does not matter because one is able to guess their meaning of the context. 
Reading in English would be quite simple if having a vast vocabulary because the alphabets are normal if making a comparison to our Scandinavian alphabets. 
Usually what happens during the language learning progress is that it is much easier to imbibe passively everything new than produce the new language actively by yourself. 
Generally people might be afraid of using the new language or feel embarrassment if making mistakes. 
That does not happen to me because I seriously do think that as long as I am able to socialize with people with my incomplete English is all that matters to me. 
I do not bother when I realise that I have made some easy mistakes or my pronunciation has not been perfect.  y writing skills are rather insufficient which really annoys me because when ever I do write essays or even just letters to my mates abroad I feel myself disabled. 
My capacity is not adequate and I do not have any talent for writing and believe me this negativity has nothing to do with my low self-confidence. 
The weakest point in my English is the academic writing. 
I do not know how to use long and sophisticated words which would link a subordinate clause and a main clause easily together. 
The structure in my written English is poor which is sad to admit but that is the truth.  
After all these years of studying English and using it in practice and yet not having more fluency with it, leaves me disappointed with a great frustration. 
The fact is that English is a quite complicated language but still I should have learned it better. 
Unfortunately I have come to a conclusion that my knowledge of English will not come to improve. 
I have not given up yet and I refuse to do so in the future but I am sure that this enormous frustration will continue no matter what.
",False
" THE IMPORTANCE OF SCHOOL GYMNASTICS  In the last couple of years you might have heard a lot about school gymnastics, whether we should or should not have it as a compulsory subject on the schedule in the Swedish comprehensive schools.   
When the schools unfortunately have been forced to do severe cut-downs amongst teachers and classes (mostly by economic reasons), it seems like gymnastics has been one of the most frequent classes to be cancelled. 
Most people have argued for the importance of maintaining this subject in school, but still there has been a few people claiming that compulsory gym-classes are unnecessary and a waste of pupils time.  
Today's living is far different from the way earlier generations have lived their life. 
Physic work were part of the ordinary day for them through labour and other daily occupations. 
Today it is not so, we live a far more lazy and convenient life and the food we eat contains about three times more fat than our ancestor's food did. 
As a result of this people have grown fatter and fatter through the years. 
Studies have shown that children in the ages of seven to twelve who do not have gymnastics at their timetable in school suffer a greater risk of being overweight when the are grownups, than children who do have gymnastics.  
It is also important to remember that it is in the early years of living you lay the grounds for a good condition. 
And often also the basis for a great interest! 
Because it is supposed to be fun too! 
Many children find their future hobby during gym-class. 
In fact, a study amongst children in the ages of thirteen to eighteen a couple of years ago revealed that sports (school's gym-class included) made the pupils feel healthier both physical and psychological. 
The test revealed that the students that were active in some kind of sport, believed that without their hobby they would probably be more interested in 'bad things', such as smoking and drinking. 
The test also revealed that girls of this age rather would date someone who was active in some kind of sport than someone doing such 'bad things'.  
As I said, schools have been forced to do rather big cut-downs, and people supporting cut-downs made in the gymnastics lessons in the schedule often claim that this is the least important part of the school system. 
Most of them feel that this physical part of the education is rather important, but also that it would be an even greater loss if we removed, for example, mathematics or biology from the schedule. 
Another argument is that in today's society you can find a local Gym almost anywhere, that parents should be responsible for their children visiting such places on a regular basis. 
(Like a school subject, but without any supervising teachers and no grades.) 
I think most parents will strike out this suggestion as soon as they have found out about the prices most these places have got.  
It is a well known fact that a whole week of sitting still and studying can make anyone crazy. 
By Wednesday no one will have the strength of focusing and concentrating. 
The pupils performances in the ordinary school subjects will get worse and worse and of course the average grade will drop to a lower level. 
If there should be a government decision to solve this problem, that only some schools should keep gym-classes in their education, pupils in the schools without it, would suffer from it. 
Their final grades would probably be much lower than pupils from the schools with maintained gymnastics and they would have a much harder time competing into higher education.  
I think we have got evidence enough that a removal of gymnastics classes from the compulsory schedule would be a great mistake, and that pupils would get affected by it in the long run. 
Therefore it is necessary to find alternative ways to solve this money problem. 
Maybe the compulsory schools should not be totally free anymore and there should be a small fee for every student. 
Or maybe it is up to the government to reconsider how they distribute the tax payers money...
"," Subject: The family, not the state, should look after elderly. 
A social problem.  
There have been a lot of discussions and debates for the last few years when it comes to question who are responsible of taking care of the elderly. 
Should it be the State or the family? 
It is a little bit complex because there is obviously a for and an against. 
Maybe the both sides are actually right but what I am going to do in my essay is to try to focus on these points and to analyse to see more clearly why the state should look after the elderly or on the contrary why the family has the responsibility of taking care of their parents when they grow older.  	 
In the first part I will focus on the state and see what it should be done to help making it easier for the elderly. 
Then in the second part I will concentrate on the family and the responsibility it has when it comes to looking after the elderly. 
Then in the third part, I will compare these two points and see if there is a way between these two cases to make the best for the elderly. 
Because the questions are: Is the family, nowadays ready to sacrifice their own life to their parents when they grow older? 
Does the state feel itself responsible for the elderly? 
There can be a kind of conflict between the family and the state when it has to deal with the elderly. 
But it has, of course to be assessed. 	 
This subject dealing with the elderly is really a social problem nowadays, people are much more independent. 
Obviously it depends on what countries we are talking about. 
I think that the south countries in Europe are much more attached to their family and in this case I think that the families take much more care of their parents. 
They have this Family notion in their culture; their duty is to look after their parents when they are old even if themselves have a family to take care of, according to this culture, it is evidence. 
It can be different in countries like Sweden. 
Swedish people are more independent and that's the reason why the family thinks at first of itself than of their parents. 
But this is just a hypothesis; in my experience, I have seen that the state takes generally good care of the elderly here in Sweden. 
They get a lot of help to find people who take care of them even if they stay at home. 
The care centre here in Sweden hire people as nurses, and home-help service who help the elderly with everything from nursing to laundry, keeping them company and so on. 
I think that the state here in Sweden feels responsible for the elderly. 
They maybe pay more attention to them comparing to the south of Europe where there, the state maybe relies to much on the family because it knows that they have a culture like this, their duty is to have this responsibility. 	 
Personally speaking, I think that we have to draw some limits when it comes to this subject. 
What I mean by that is that, I would and I will be ready to take care of my parents but as I say it has its limits. 
I think that I would be ready to take care of my parents if they became handicapped in some way. 
But I really do not know if I would be capable to have them in my home and if my parents would accept it either. 
It is easy to tell this when you do not have a family on your own. 
I really understand the persons who do not want to sacrifice their family because of their parents. 
But you can help them without taking the full responsibility for them; the state is present as well, to help the people in anyways. 
So in fact, there has to be a sort of cooperation between the family and the state. 
I think that the state has to help elderly in a practical way while the family has to be present to give love, consideration and support. 	 
I think that everyone has a duty to perform in relation with their nearest. 
But I don't think that we have to sacrifice everything when a parent gets worse. 
They have lived their lives and I think that they really understand that. 
The children do not need, according to me, to do the nurse's job, the main thing and the most important is to be there with them even if they live in a retirement pension or someplace else. 
The state does generally a good job here in Sweden and it is very difficult to say if I am for or against the family to take care of the elderly because as I can see, the state and the family has to collaborate.
",False
" Meat verses vegetables: arguments for a vegetarian lifestyle  Some people say that meat is murder. 
Is it? 
Whether you like the expression or not, you can not escape from the fact that meat comes from a dead animal and in one way or another the animal has been killed. 
If it has not died of natural causes which is quite rare when it comes to the meat that we eat. 
This essay will not further take up the discussion about murder or not murder but it will try to give you reasons not to eat meat. 
Because my conviction is that there are a lot of good reasons. 
I have been a vegetarian for about four and a half years and I have had to answer the question ""why a vegetarian"" quite a few times.  
Therefore I'm now about to give you some of my arguments. 
The first reason I want to share is that I don't want to support the meat industry. 
Because an industry is what it has become. 
The questions this industry seems to be dealing with are for example; How can we make a bigger profit? 
How can we produce a large amount of meat in a short time? 
How can we feed the chickens so they grow fat but still not so fat that they die of a hart attack? 
How can we fit in as many pigs as possible in one place without them dying of distress?  
So it seems like animals are looked upon as food from the day they are born until the day they die. 
People usually does not like to know about how animals are slaughtered or how they are treated during transportation. 
Some people does not even want to hear the word pig in connection with a meal consisting of bacon. 
To be able to eat meat with a clean conscience it seems like you have to keep the distance. 
I think that is a bit hypocritical. 
(Of course there are exceptions among public). 
Are we not able to take responsibility of our own actions? 
The meat industry is - like all other industries - about money. 
Almost no matter on what costs that means for the animals. 
Does the animals not deserve more respect from human beings who reckons themselves to be on a higher level? 
I definitely think that they do. 
This does neither mean that I think that animals and human beings are totally equal nor does it mean that I think they are supposed to have the same rights. 
What I do think is that we are abusing our position and treating animals in a bad way. 
I don't want to support that.   
In fact we don't need to eat meat to survive. 
Of course there are good things like protein and minerals in meat. 
But that is not something that you can not find elsewhere. 
Beans, chickpeas and lentils are all rich of protein. 
If you are a vegetarian but still eat eggs and drink milk you don't have to worry at all the lacking of protein. 
It is not that complicated to eat nutritiously. 
You just have to be observant that you have a varied diet.  
The thing is that it's not only ourselves as individuals that gets healthier with a vegetarian lifestyle. 
If we did not have to feed as many beef cattle as we do right now we could instead feed people that are starving. 
It is a real energy loss taking so many steps in the food chain. 
If the consumption of meat diminished we would not have to cut down parts of the rainforests to find more arable ground. 
Even though all people wouldn't turn vegetarians, everybody (including the animals) would gain if we did not eat as much meat as we do. 
This is not the time for only thinking about our own welfare and pleasure as most people seem to think that meat is a part of. 
We are not alone on this planet.  
Finally; animals are suffering, people are starving, inhabitants in the high-meat-consuming west world are growing fatter and becoming sicker. 
Even though there are a lot more to say on this topic I think these are arguments strong enough to stop or at least reduce our consumption of meat. 
They are enough for me. 
Are they enough for you?
"," Legal age for buying alcohol should be 18  	At the age of eighteen you are permitted by law in Sweden to drive a car, to vote and to take a loan at the bank. 
You are also legally responsible of your own actions, even allowed to get married, but you are not permitted to buy champagne to your own wedding. 
How can a person, who probably made the biggest decision in his or her life to love someone until death, not be old enough to have a glass of wine with some friends a Saturday evening?  
And how can it be that a country like Sweden treats a person as an adult from the age of eighteen on all areas except giving the freedom to buy alcohol? 
The law says that when you are eighteen you have reached a reasonable ripeness of judgement to handle the demands, which are connected to these. 
Obviously buying alcohol is not one of them. 
I disagree and state that buying and drinking alcohol should be legal at the same age.  1467 was the year when alcohol first came to Sweden. 
It was suppose to be one of the ingredients in the gunpowder production. 
In the beginning of 1900th century, alcohol was cheap and selling it was free. 
Never earlier or later have people been drinking so much as then. 
Men who had a physical hard job could get a part of the salary paid in alcohol. 
This entered into more drinking and injuries and less work. 
From 1917 the government controlled all import, export, buying and selling. 
The limited age for buying alcohol changed from 21 to 20 1969.  
I do not believe that alcohol is good for the health or that alcoholism should be more acceptable. 
I know that there is a connection between an early debut in drinking and alcoholism even though in many cases it is something already in your genes, but I will argue against the laws we have in Sweden. 
I think it is wrong to separate drinking and buying. 
It gives it a double meaning, which can very easily be confused. 
The Swedish legal system is unique when it comes to the laws about alcohol.  
Swedish drinking habits differs from many other countries in Europe. 
We do not drink every day, instead we drink a lot in the weekends. 
If we would hear about someone who drank daily we would all think he or she is an alcoholic. 
In France for instance it is a part of their culture to drink wine to the evening meal and drinking is seen as social thing and not as a dangerous threat to the young. 
In the States it is legal to drink at 21 but instead they face even bigger problems such as drugs.   
If we look at alcohol as a poison, something that is bad for your health and consequently made the laws based on that, smoking is just as damaging to you and to others and should also be treated with the same respect.   
The problem we face today, even though we have laws that do not permit buying alcohol under the age of 20, is that the alcohol consumption is higher then ever among youths and it is going even further down in age. 
Of all alcohol that the Swedish people drink 35% is privately distilled. 
It is not because it taste better, or because it has a higher percentage of alcohol that people drink it, but it is easy to get and a lot less expensive. 
Selling homebrewed liquor to teenagers should be followed by an unmerciful punishment, because for people under age this is usually their way to get liquor. 
If the legal age for buying alcohol was 18 and Systembolaget had complete monopoly, it would be under controlled forms and privately distilled would not be that attractive.  
Alcohol creates alcoholism I defiantly agree on that, but it is not the access on liquor that makes alcoholism. 
Alcoholism is in many cases something that is in your genes, like a congenital desire. 
Alcohol is more about culture and what we learn when we grow up. 
The majority of the population never becomes alcoholics therefore shall we not treat young adults as if they have not reached the level of awareness of the dangerous aspects in drinking. 
From the age of eighteen you are seen as an adult and should be able to make and take responsible decisions such as buying and drinking alcohol.
",False
" English, My English  Introduction This essay shows upon the strengths and weaknesses of my English, divided in four skills: listening, reading, speaking and writing. 
I have in certain areas presented a solution to my problems, my weaknesses. 
I've also mentioned what I want to acchieve with this course and what to do with my acquired English.   
Writing I've always been better expressing feelings and thoughts in the written form than in spoken word. 
I think the reason is that when I write I can take a break from the words and come back later and correct the wrongs, use different words and phrases, really think through what I want to say, one thing you can't while you are speaking. 
But as I write as I think, and think as I speak, the words doesn't always come out right, grammatically and spellingwise. 
When I write poems and lyrics a fluid language and knowledge of the words is very important. 
So, even though grammar is very difficult and sometimes incomprehensible, it is of extreme importance that I study it thoroughly.   
Speaking y heart throbbing at the speed of light, face turning red, and self-confidence getting weaker by each heartbeat. 
That is how I would describe myself minutes, seconds before I am to speak in front of a big crowd. 
Since English isn't my native tongue, my fluency, along with my limited vocabulary, is the bigggest problem. 
The lack of word knowledge, knowing the Swedish words in English and the right way to use it, I feel is very hampering when expressing my feelings and thoughts. 
I also found that my thoughts differ from my words, so the spoken word is something that I don't master at this point. 
I can only hope that it's something that I can improve, that I'm not stuck with this social handicap. 
To improve on my pronunciation I'm reading out loud from and old Time magazine, practising my accent. 
I have found that Swedes often tend to talk with an American accent, which I find sometimes irritating and sometimes amusing, imitating their heroes in Beverly Hills, 90210 or Days Of Our Lifes or some other TV-series. 
My goal is a mix of Peter O'Toole, Malcolm MacDowell and Alan Wilder (former member of Depeche Mode). 
You can call it a slightly overclass, old-fashioned English accent.   
Listening When the subtitle is removed and I have only to rely on my ears listening, instead of my eyes reading a text, I usually understand everything except for the odd word here and there that's not in my vocabulary. 
Where I'm staying at the moment there is a English newschannel that I've started watching, so I not only listen to English, I get up to date what's happening in the world from an English point of view. 
The best thing would of course to spend some time in an English speaking country. 
To really dig into the language, discovering the little nuances that separate the native from the tourist.  
Reading Except from one or two books read in high school, my reading habits has been limited to Swedish books. 
But as a part of the literature course, I've read two short stories and a novel and beginning on another. 
I've also borrowed three books by P.G. 
Wodehouse, finished one and halfway in on the other. 
Since the language in the latter books is old-fashioned and filled with lots of upperclass slangwords the big picture is rather clear, but the details that increases the understanding of the text is harder to grasp as they don't turn up in the dictionary, being short for something or having a different meaning than usual.  
Conclusion I have to improve my speaking, mainly in large groups. 
My writing must be improved upon so my lyrics and poems reaches the level of accuracy that I want. 
That is my primary goal with this course, to improve my writing. 
So grammar is something that I have to study with the utmost attention, how boring I may seem. 
To achieve a larger accuracy writing English, reading books and listening to English programs is a step in the right direction. 
Constantly being exposed to the country's language is the best way to acquire another language.
"," Evaluation English, My English  I remember my first lesson in English at intermediate level in school. 
We were told the most basic words and phrases, and my teacher wanted me to give her a pencil. 
So I did and said ""Here you are"" as we had been learned to. 
She said I had said it with a perfect accent. 
Walking home from school that day, fascionated repeting those phrases, I decided to learn this language well.  
Ever since intermediate level I've had pen pals from England/USA/Canada et cetera, and I still do. 
It's fascionating reaching people and making yourself understood, only by knowing/learning languages, especially English. 
This became very clear to me when I could write letters to a Greek girl in a language neither of us spoke every day, and still be understood. 
We still write to each other.  
I soon favoured the brittish accent, since I read and saw the screen version of the books by Jane Austen, Charlotte Bront et cetera. 
Therefore I hope to improve my accent and not speak American English too.  
In senior level we had a great teacher in this subject, who taught us a lot. 
I do think the teacher means a lot of your improving in this subject, as in any maybe, because in upper secondary school the teacher brought us nothing new and wasn't as enthusiastic for what she was teacing in and I didn't learn a lot from those lessons unfortunately.  y dream of going to England came true when the first year in upper secondary school was finished. 
My friend and I went to Kent and worked on a farm, picking and packing strawberries. 
It was awful work, but everything else was wonerful and more than I ever expected it to be. 
I remember the first conversations I had with English people.
I felt I had so much I wanted to say but it didn't come out of my mouth. 
It started with a few sentences, but soon it all went well, and in the end of three-week-period we naturally spoke English, even between us. 
But some words was of course in Swedish. 
I really loved beeing in England, talking to the other youth working there. 
There were English, Scottish, Irish accents. 
A few came from America, New Zealand, Australia and Canada. 
I was really improving my speaching there. 
We also went to London afterwords but there we questioned more than discussed.   
In the second year of upper secondary school we had a girl from New Zealand in our class who became a good friend. 
I learned more from her than from the English lessons.   
About my English today I would like to improve a lot of things. 
I love reading books in English, though I would like to check the difficult words now and than, because I want to improve my vocabulary. 
This takes a lot of time and interrupts the reading and when I don't find it very difficult understanding it without cheking the words I suppose that's the way I should go through books. 
Without using the dictionary all the time.  
The main reason I don't have a good vocabulary, I believe, is because I'm deaf in one ear. 
Therefor sometimes listening is a problem for me. 
People often learn words just by watching television, passive learning. 
I can't, because I need silence around the one who is speaking. 
The writening I really do like and maybe it would be an idea for me to change language in my diary to English! 
This course will hopefully ameliorate my writing, which is very important if you want to do a perhaps scientific essay or something. 
Acctually writing good will always favour you.  
I don't find it uncomfortable to speak with people in English, but I don't like to hold speaches. 
But holding speaches isn't what I like to do in Swedish either.   y expectations from this course are mostly to write good essays with a good English with good grammar, and to learn a great number of words. 
I'm sure I'll get a lot of other good things out of English A.
",False
" The West is responsible for environmental damage in developing countries  The state of the environment is a hotly debated topic and a part of this discussion is if the West is responsible for the environmental damage of the world that takes place in the developing countries. 
People who claim that the West got nothing to do with the destruction in these parts of the world forget to take into consideration that the key factors of their destruction are demands and economical pressure from the West. 
As to make up one's mind about this you also have to take in to account that these countries have not got the same knowledge as the West.  
It is often suggested by the media that the West is not responsible for the environmental damage that is taking place in the developing countries. 
Some people would argue that the fact that rainforests are being destroyed in Brazil is their responsibility not ours. 
The real situation is more complex. 
They cut down the rainforests on the strengths of demands from the West. 
We need material to be able to produce all gadgets and unnecessary stuff that we have in our society. 
The fact that we today have a threatening number of endangered species is a result of human beings will to own as much as possible. 
It is obvious that poaching would not exist to the same extent if people from the West did not buy coats, ivory etc. 
Destruction in these parts of the world is a direct consequence of demands from people in the West.  
A major reason for destruction in developing countries is that many of them owe money to western banks. 
They need economic growth, whatever its environmental consequences, to pay back on these loans. 
Another example of economical reasons that makes the West responsible for the damage caused in the developing countries is that the West sell second-hand products to the developing countries. 
Boats, aeroplanes and things like that. 
And what happens when these enormous metal products are impossible to use any longer. 
Well the developing countries have not got resources to take care of it so they just leave them to rust. 
Is that not the responsibility of the West? 
Demands in society today have gone totally out of control and the major cause of it is avarice. 
Many western companies make a mint by selling products which have run out of date in developing countries. 
They would be sued if they tried to sell these products in a western country so to make earn as much as possible they just send them to a developing country. 
In Thailand provisions that had best before use date one year ago can be seen in the stores. 
There are also cosmetic products that had run out of date with as much as four years.   
As to make up one's mind about who to blame about the damage of the world in developing countries we have to take into account that there is a lack of knowledge in these countries. 
The problem is that they are not aware of what actually happens when we tamper with the environment. 
The West, on the other hand, know for example that the greenhouse effect is expected to lead to changes in climate with more frequent floods, droughts and heat waves. 
For example an urgent environmental concern like endangered species needs us in the West to educate people in developing countries otherwise it will result in consequences like extinction. 
Owing to the fact that we have this kind of knowledge we are definitely as responsible as they are, or even more, for the destruction that takes place in developing countries.   
To sum up, people who argue that the West is not responsible for the damages in developing countries are far too narrow-minded. 
It is clear that the destruction depend as much on our demands and pressure as on their misbehaviour. 
We should show less self-interest and educate them instead. 
According to what has been taken up in this essay it is quite wrong to suggest that the West is not responsible for environmental damage in developing countries, on the contrary, the West is the cause of it. 
On the whole everyone is responsible for protecting the environment, even you and I.
"," A modern monarchy  Sweden has been a monarchy for a very long time. 
In fact, our history is to a large extent connected with the different kings and queens that have ruled the country. 
Even though the boundaries have changed several times due to wars, conflicts and unions our monarchy has persevered. 
The role of the monarch has however seen a huge transformation over the last two hundred years and the powers of Gustav II Adolf or Karl XII cannot be compared with those of the present king Carl XIV Gustav.  
The parliament is today the main legislative and ruling body with the government being the second with the Supreme Court being separated from political influence. 
It does not deal with political matters or interfere with the laws passed by the parliament. 
The powers listed above all belonged to the monarch a little longer than two hundred years ago. 
The king or queen was the lawmaker, commander of the armed forces and the main ruler of the nation. 
Swedish kings are famous of their warfare with neighbouring counties and battles throughout northern Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries, however, the situation is completely different today where the monarch's powers have been reduced to none as a consequence of the parliamentary movements of the 19th century.  
In 1809, the first reform took place when dissatisfied generals set the king aside and the monarch's powers were reduced and shared with different ruling bodies. 
Fifty years later a reform was passed that changed the foundation of the class-based parliament to a parliament based on income and property. 
The monarch's power was not changed dramatically during these years but a process had started that would eventually relieve the monarch of his former duties. 
The new form of government had come to grow strong and it was now the parliament that became the new ruling body in domestic and international matters.  
As the parliament took over the responsibility of ruling the country it was expected of the monarch to stay neutral and not to express himself in political matters. 
Despite this fact king Gustav V chose in 1914 not to agree with the existing prime minister, as a result of this controversy the prime minister resigned. 
Since then there have been no further utterances in political matters form the monarch and we expect the him to keep a low profile, even in non-political matters even though it is claimed by some people that the present king and queen are strong leaders of opinion in different matters such as hunting and child-pornography.  
The king and queen of Sweden are today merely representatives of the country who appear on official state visits and also travel around the world creating good relations with other countries and putting Sweden on the map. 
There is no power at all to talk about and the monarch simply receives a salary that will enable him to carry out his duties as a representative of our country.   
The opposition, the critics of the monarchy, claim that it is old-fashioned and not equivalent with the modern society and also that it is expensive for the taxpayers. 
I don't find this sort of criticism very well considered. 
Firstly, Sweden is a very old country and the monarchy is a big part of our history as well as our identity. 
I think it is quite unique living in a country where we still have a monarchy because there are not many countries that are monarchies today. 
When it comes to the question of democracy and the modern day society the monarch does not have any political power as seen above, all those powers have been taken away from the monarch and been put in the hands of the people. 
This fact shows henceforth that a monarchy really can exist within the boundaries of a modern democracy. 
Secondly, the argument saying that it is expensive to uphold and support the royal family's living expenses does not seem to hold ground. 
Compared to other expenses it is a very small fraction of the tax money that is paid. 
Repairing or rebuilding the monarch's residences would add up to a big sum of money up front but it is hardly noticeable in the big economy and besides we pay so much taxes in this country that you would not be able to see the difference. 
Thirdly, and as a final thought, if we were to abolish the monarchy in Sweden, what would the tabloids write about?
",False
" The monarchy - an archaic system  Sweden has traditionally been a monarchy ruled by a sovereign Monarch. 
This did not change until the 19th century when Montesquieu's ideas were adopted to the Swedish constitution and the king had to share his powers with the politicians. 
The question whether a democratic country like Sweden should be a monarchy or not has been increasingly debated throughout the past century and culminated with a reform of the government in 1974. 
Then it was stated that the Monarch should be Sweden's Head of State. 
This means that his powers are very limited and mostly of symbolic value. 
The monarch's greatest power is that he is the first representative for the Swedish defence force and that he holds the highest grades of the defence.  	 
One could argue that the Monarch does not have any real political power and is therefore merely to be seen as an ambassador who travels round the world as a representative for his country. 
But there are many aspects of the monarchicalsystem and even though the Monarch's powers are very limited his or her position as the Head of State is of principal matter. 
Because the Monarch is given his title by heredity and is consequently not chosen by the people. 
This is the antithesis to the main thought of democracy, that the power emanates from the people. 
Another disturbing factor which interferes with the thought that all individuals are equal is that the Monarch historically has been looked upon as a divine ruler, that is a ruler chosen by God. 
And he does still today in our modern society stand above the grey mass of working- and middle class people. 
The Monarch is part of and in a way a symbol for the class society which is advancing rapidly. 
He does not have to prove that he has any kind of qualifications at all for his office. 
And it takes at least eight years and two votes in the Parliament if a monarch is to be removed from his office.  	 
Another aspect that is related to the Monarch's lack of qualifications is the economical part. 
The grant from the state to the royal household is as much as 37 million kronor each year. 
This sum is supposed to cover the costs for the Monarch's representation and the 75 persons who are employed by the Earl Marshal office and the divisions for computers, economy and press. 
Furthermore does the tax payers pay for the Governor office, that is administration of the royal castles and parks, and the Royal Chamber of Household Utensil, which includes administration and preservation of equipment and art collections. 
These two offices receive about 35 million kronor every year.  	 
The main reason to why a majority of Swedes are in favour of the monarchy is the enormous amount of attention that is paid on the royal family in the press. 
Members of the royal family are to be seen on the front covers of various magazines and newspapers. 
But the headlines are not always flattering, whit the scandal press digging deeper and deeper trying to find out anything that presumably would sell. 
And this not, and has never been, the purpose of the monarchy.  	 
The monarchical system is in many ways archaic and does not have validity in a modern, contemporary and democratic society. 
It can not be denied that the Monarch has a symbolic value which is of benefit to his country. 
But this does not mean that this uniting role can not be shouldered by someone else, like the politicians. 
It would definitely be more democratic if the Prime minister, who is chosen by the people, would be the head of state for the period that he or she is elected. 
This would open up the possibility for the people to remove a Head of State that does not have the people's symphaties. 
And the sum of 72 million kronor for the Monarch's costs could be used in sectors like education, health- and elderly care to benefit the whole society.
","This essay is dealing with my competence in English, assessing the four skills of reading, listening, writing and speaking. 
I will try to point out my strengths and weaknesses within these different fields mentioned above. 
I feel quite confident about reading in English, and because I have always enjoyed reading all sorts of books since I was a child, I have had a lot of practice as well. 
I guess that makes it a lot easier. 
I read a bit of English literature in my sparetime, mostly John Grisham's books, and even though they are a bit specialised, regarding the legal-terms and some American slang, I have never had a problem with them. 
I have also read a few poems, and they are much harder to understand, since they usually have a deeper meaning, which is harder to grasp if you have English as a second language, though in my opinion, a poem in English is easier to read then to listen to.  
If I am listening to a person giving a speech in English, I usually don't have much of a problem understanding what he or she is saying. 
If the accent is known for me, I don't have to concentrate much at all, if the person isn't talking exceptionally fast of course. 
1996 I was an exchangestudent in Australia. 
Their accent was new to me and fairly different from the American and British ways of speaking. 
I remember that in the first week of school, I used to go home having the most dreadful headache from just listening to the teachers, trying to understand just what they were saying. 
After a while I got used to it of course, and now that is the accent that I feel most comfortable listening to, even though I myself have gone back to a mixture between American and British accents.  
When speaking a different language, Swedish people are afraid that they will have a funny accent, or that they will pronounce the words wrong so that someone might find their way of speaking amusing. 
I am no exception. 
The schools that I have been to didn't put much effort into teaching us how to speak the languages that we were so good at reading. 
Up until High School, I had a pretty large passive vocabulary, but the active one was nothing to be proud of. 
Then I went to Australia and suddenly I had to speak English, because otherwise nobody would understand me, or be interested in getting to know me. 
I think this is the best way to fully learn a language, actually being forced to speak it, and also, in my opinion, as soon as you get over that basic fear of failing, you will see that the important thing is not to get every little word in a sentence right, but to actually say that sentence and make yourself heard! 
As long as other people understand what you are saying, there is nothing to be afraid of at all. 
Of course, I still find it uncomfortable to speak English sometimes, and I rather write my friends back there a letter, than call them, and that is not only because of the phonebill...  
I like writing, but that doesn't mean that I am very good at it. 
I learnt a lot from my exchange year, but there are all sorts of different rules how the essays should be outlined, that I don't have a clue about. 
In Primary School and High School, you just sit down and write an essay, and there are no certain rules or outlines that you are supposed to know about. 
I think that is one of my biggest weaknesses. y greatest strength regarding this, is that I enjoy writing a lot. 
I haven't done a lot of writing in English, but since about Grade 3 I have been writing short-stories and poems in Swedish. 
When it comes to writing an essay with a prepared headline, I guess I don't enjoy it as much, but it is a bigger challenge of course.  
To sum this up, I think my English is pretty good in these four aspects, but I guess I will learn a lot from this semester of University.
",False
" The students of today is the future!  
In this essay I will give my arguments for giving university students grants instead of loans to finance their education.	
Let us start with the obvious, it is not very encurishing to start your working career in debts. 
That put a lot of pressure on young people to start earning a lot of money on an early stadge of thire career, and with todays problem of great unemployment and economical difficulties, it is not surtain that they will get a well paid job right a way. 
This is very dangerous, becouse it make it more difficult for young people to have the currage to go on with their studies at high levels. 
Students are, alreaddy afraid of not manage their studies at university level, as everybody else they are scared of trying something they might fail to do, and adding the fear of gettig them selves in debts, make it difficult to take the step into university studies, which is of sutch importants when appaying for a well paid job. 	
An other reason why university students should be given grants instead of loans is that they might not afford (knowing that they later will be responsible to pay the money back) to loan enuogh money to be able to manage without working during the school semesters. 
If they were given a grant they wouldn't have to work during school semester and they would have a mutch better chance of doing well with their studies. 
An other reason why it is so important for students to feel that they have enough money is that thay are grown up now, and it is important for themto have a home of their own. 
As it is now students consider living with their parents, instead of taking loans to finans their own living. 
This is serious becouse the parents home is not always the best imviorment to study, and living by yourself is a great way of developing both independencey and socisl skills since you are more isolated you are forsed to meet people.) 
A student might even considering a school near the parents home, so that she/he can live at home during her/his time of university studies, and in doing so exlude all education at universities away from her/his home town.	  
A third reason, is that giving grants to univesity students would economicly benifit the government, throuh not having to administrate all paybacks from former university students who have been given loans (usally this a very outdraw prosess since you only pay back a small part of your oan on every payback ocation). 
Society would also save money in healt care, since the students would be happier and therefor be more healty.	
One might argue that students would take their education more lightly if they did not have to finance it by themselfs, but today university studies are extreamly important if you wish to get a well paid and stimulating job in the future, and this is only getting more and more important among young people 	Young people are studying for more and more years of their life, this mean that the period they are lending money is getting longer and the period they are making money is getting shorter. 
This is perfectly natural, since employers need more and more educated employees in todays society. 
But one should be aware of the importance of young peoples possibilities to cotinue their studies at a high level, and not scearing them of by putting them in debts befor they even have had a chance of making any money. 	
My edvice to politicas is to give students grants instead of loans to finans their university studies so that they: will have the currage to continue their studies at a high level, are able to consentrate on their school work, and to save government money. 
Students are the future, they are important, politic leaders can not neglect the future.
"," Abolishing of the death penalty  In a lot of countries the death penalty is still in use. 
Many people are of the opinion that the death penalty is needed as the only right sentence for exceptionally cruel crimes. 
I do not share that opinion, mainly because I do not think that any person has the right to kill another human being. 
There are many reasons why I think the death penalty should be abolished. 
I will now put my arguments forward and explain why I feel the way I do. 	
To begin with I don't think that any person should have the right to execute anyone. 
We are all human beings. 
An execution, or a state killing, is colder and more premeditated than any of the crimes committed by the convict. 
Even if a person has committed terrible crimes, and doesn't deserve to live because of all the horrible things he or she has done, it isn't right for any other person to take a life. 
If we use the death penalty for people who have murdered others, we are as bad as they are. 
It's not excusable to commit dreadful crimes but neither to execute the one who has. 
Nobody, either individually nor as a society representative, has the right to take another man's life, even taken in to account the seriousness of his guilt.  	
I understand people, who are victims of cruel crimes wanting to see their attacker executed. 
I also understand relatives of the victim feeling that way, but I do not think that the death penalty is the right solution. 
When a person has committed a murder or anything like that, I totally agree on that he or she should be put away behind bars to pay for what they have done.  	
Secondly I think that a person who has committed a dreadful crime should be locked up for life. 
I think it's too easy for murderers to get away with being executed, because then they aren't being punished for life like the victim and its relatives. 
The truth and the remorse remain even when an exceptionally dangerous killer is executed. 
Also I think it would be better trying to re-educate and rehabilitate the convict morally and humanly. 
What rehabilitation will be possible towards a dead man?	  	
Thirdly the death penalty is the ultimate cruel and inhuman punishment existing and it violates the right to life. 
Not to mention that an execution is an act of violence, and violence tends to provoke violence. 
You can't prevent killing by killing. 
I also think it is the duty of every state to protect the life of all persons within its jurisdiction without exception. 
Executions, whether by governments or others, are equally unacceptable. 
Abolition of the death penalty is necessary for the achievement of declared international standards. 	
People who support the death penalty are saying that it is too costly for the taxpayers to have the criminals in prison. 
The critics, on the other hand, have mentioned the economy as a strong reason for abolishing of the death penalty. 
Economic studies have shown that it is a very costly procedure to execute people, the way they do in the US for example.  	
The cost isn't only financial, the imposition and infliction of the death penalty is brutal to all that are involved in the process.  	
My final argument is based on the fact that innocent people could be executed and that is a risk we cannot afford to take. 
There is always a possibility of miscarriages of justice. 
The possibility of killing an innocent person alone justifies the abolition of the death penalty. 
Sometimes people are falsely accused of crimes they haven't committed. 
It has happened that innocent people have been executed. 
We are depending on judicial system; a mistake made by an inexperienced lawyer, for example a minor delay in producing evidence for the defence, can cost the defendant's life. 
This we cannot allow.
",False
"I have always had difficulties with foreign languages, not only English, but also German and French. 
I think it is because I was too lazy in the beginning of language studies in school and lost the beginning stages. 
I had especially difficulties in writing and spelling, even in the Swedish language. 
It did not get better until about seventh grade. 
When I was about fourteen years old I went to England for a month one summer to learn English, but since I only had Swedish friends there I did not speak much English. 
Therefore it was good for me to go to America for a year, where I have learnt most of my English. 
Speaking is probably the area in which I improved the most during my year in America. 
I lived in a family, went to school all day and met friends in my spare time. 
Therefore I spoke English all the time. 
I think I am (or maybe was) fluently speaking, but not grammatically correct all the time. 
In America people find it important to know how to speak in an amusing, interesting way. 
That seemed more important than the grammar part of the language. 
In Sweden we usually do not want to speak about ourselves and what we are good at. 
That is something they seem to concentrate on in the American school, encouraging the students to speak freely. 
I found that they had many courses for that, like Speech and Drama for instance. 
Unfortunately I did not take any of the courses Speech or Drama in High School. 
I thought it would be scary, and when I found other courses I rather wanted to take, I took them instead. 
Now I wish I had taken one of those courses though.  
During my year in America I of course heard a lot of English. 
I heard the language all the time. 
Just to be in Sweden and listening to the radio or watching TV improves the listening skills I guess, but it is not the same. 
I listened to the radio and watched TV in America too, but I also heard people speak. 
I think that is the absolute easiest way to learn a language, to listen to real people talking about real things. 
If you do not understand something you just ask and get an explanation in English, which I find very educating. 
Listening and understanding is the other area in which I improved the most in America.  
I did some writing in High School, but it was not required that much, not even on tests that always were multiple choice. 
In the Swedish school we of course have had some practice in writing, especially for the national tests for instance. 
I find it difficult to write and see if it is correct and even if I sometimes can see that I have made a mistake some were, I do not know a better solution and I have to leave it. 
It is really frustrating at times!  
Reading was not a big part of the American school I went to. 
We did read some though, but I consider myself a very slow reader. 
I love reading books in Swedish, but when I try to read in English I usually get to tired and never seems to get trough the book. 
The books we read in the American school often were much simpler than the ones we read here in Sweden during the English education. 
The reading skills should be easy to practice just by reading books, but if I am going to read a book for fun, I of course take a Swedish one out of laziness. 
Hopefully my reading skills will improve this semester.  
Since it was five years ago I was in America I have forgotten a lot of my English. 
It is probably somewhere back in my head though, and I hope I will remember most of it during this semester of English studies.
","The task for this week is to write down some words about my experience of the English language. 
When I had the first contact with it, for how long I've studied English, how I feel about it and so on. 
There is, of course, no literature to account for so Ill just get down to business. y first memory of a language not familiar to me is, quite naturally, English. 
I can almost see myself sitting in front of the TV, watching The Muppet Show. 
Amazed and thrilled by the dolls but also with the strange language they used. 
My father read the white text with the black background (subtitles) just below Kermit, Miss Piggy, Gonzo and all the rest. 
I quite early understood that the text was somehow connected with the language the Muppets used but I could not really figure out how. 
I learned how to read rather quickly, because of my curiosity of what they were saying in that strange language on the TV. 
My father was relieved at not having to spend the whole Saturday night reading out loud and I was happy of understanding all by my self. 
When my best friends parents were away, I read for my friend instead. 
(Sometimes a little modified. 
Children are evil) Then the school started and we met the English language in 3rd grade for the first time. 
I don't really remember much of this first contact. 
I guess it was just like any other subject - an obstacle between the footballmatches during the breaks. 
When I bought myself a computer in the middle -80s I understood for the first time how important and global it was. 
Since I watched a lot of movies and TV-program plus studying in school it was no problem understanding the English used by the computer programs. 
I spent uncountable hours playing various games, which gave me a good sense, of how the English was presented in written form and it also gave me a quite large passive vocabulary. 
(I said I spent uncountable hours playing games. 
That is not true. 
I still do it and enjoy every minute.) 
There is something else that has taught me a lot of English and that is role-playing games. 
There was a time when we played several times per week, fascinated with rules, statistics, descriptions and battles. 
Everything written in English. 
I still can't understand how we could memorize a rulebook, which consisted of hundreds of rules and diagrams in a matter of days. 
And that is exactly what we did. 
We memorized the rules. 
I believe that I still can reproduce almost everything written down in the sourcebook of our favourite games. 
In these last years other interests have replaced the role-playing part, which has nothing to do with English but there has sprung up a new source of English training. 
The Internet. 
Almost every site is written in English, even the Swedish ones, which gives you a great opportunity to learn more in a fun way.  
I enjoy reading and studying English quite a lot compared to other subjects. 
And I know it is because I feel the necessity of being good at it, which I don't feel when learning about mathematics, physics and so on. 
I need to be really motivated to learn, maybe I'm even more dependent on motivation than most others. 
But sometimes even English becomes boring. 
Once my English teacher in upper secondary school told me and my deskmate that we were the laziest students she'd ever had. 
The following week our German teacher said almost the exact same words... 
But amazingly enough we were the only two who got the highest note. 
In English that is. 
Let's not speak about the German language. y real weakness in English is, like most people I guess, the theoretical grammar. 
I'm really bad at remembering different word classes and clause types. 
Unfortunately I can't keep them apart Swedish either so that makes it even more difficult. 
This affects my writing in a significant way, because the demand of completely correct written English is greater by far than the verbal presentation.  
If I had any real strong sides I would say my spelling. 
(Which is probably the only strong side in my whole academical knowledge.) 
I guess I'm quite good at reading and understanding texts too, due to my long history of playing English games, both on the computer and the role-playing games as I mentioned before. 
But I have not got any real experience with my English except some week long holidays at the Mediterranean but I know that I will, after a short time be able to speak and understand an almost completely correct English both grammatical and in pronunciation.
",False
" Why we need students grants  Being a student in Sweden means going through some hard financial years. 
The choice one makes though, does not only mean temporarily less income, but also a huge rate of the future income directly drawn to pay off the loans for years to come. 
This paper will deal with the problems connected to the issue. 
Firstly I will discuss the troublesome fact that a degree does not guarantee neither getting a job, nor an improved wage if one gets a job. 
Secondly I think that Sweden ought to show appreciation to those who are eager to learn, and realise how important it is to keep our intellectuality high. 
The third topic will be not risking people overworking themselves by having jobs and studies at the same time. 
I will sum up by presenting a possible solution to the following problem with people misusing the system if grants were to be introduced.  
I will start with what I hold as the most important reason of having students' grants. 
People who want money do best not going to the university at all. 
During the years of studies one has to cope with a lot less than what one could get at a low-paid job. 
Getting into the market after university studies, there is little difference in salary between jobs, which demand a degree and those not. 
Of course there are well-paid professions, but the overall difference is negligible compared with the situation in other countries. 
Including the loans, you end up at about the same level if you have a long education. 
This leaves us the reasonable conclusion that many of those studying, do it for pleasure and personal development, since the money profit is a joke. 
I do not imply that these are insufficient reasons, but I do feel that there ought to be some difference on the pay roll. 	 
I also think it is important to show the awareness of the advantages of an educated nation. 
If Sweden wants to stay at the top of the world in economic and social domains, we need to keep up intellectually with the other industrial countries. 
I think this involves increasing the salaries too, but I will not get into that discussion here. 
Giving people a chance to get an education without ending up in a difficult situation financially, should make a significant difference in itself. 	 
A risk that follows the economic disadvantage of being a student is the fact that many students both work and study at the same time. 
I can assert that it is rather tough to keep up in school, and in the acquiring of knowledge one does not have the time to become at all full-filled. 
I know that there are lots of students having problems grasping what they should in their education, and of course, having an income has to be the main issue. 	 
As a last topic, I would like to come with a suggestion how to solve one of the greatest problems of having students' grants instead of loans; removing the risk of people taking advantage of the system. 
If there were no demands on the students, many people would probably just fool around studying a little bit of this and a little bit of that. 
To make this impossible, there could be loans from the beginning, that were to be written off when a student got a degree. 
There could be a certain amount of terms paid for, as there are today, so that it would be impossible to stay in the system forever. 
For those never reaching a degree, the loan would stay as a good reason not to give up. 
Today if you move abroad and do not pay tax in Sweden, they do not draw money to pay off your loan. 
I suggest the opposite; those who take their knowledge away from the country, would have to pay for their studies even if they have received a degree. 
Why should the state pay for something that is not of use to the country? 	 
To sum up, I feel that Sweden would benefit in many areas by removing the only reason there is not to study: the loans. 
I think it is of great importance to keep developing your intellect to be able to develop psychologically. 
I therefore think Sweden would do best realising the need to show appreciation of those interested in getting an education by making the studies free with grants. 
To restrict the use of the grants, both to sift out the ones not serious in their studies and to reduce the expenses, I suggest that only those actually reaching a degree get the grants. 
To keep the country with what I reckon is one of the most aware people on earth, I think education has to be a central tool, available to everyone.
"," The Swedish purchase of Gripen fighter planes.  
Introduction Sweden is right now in a process of upgrading the airforce with new Gripen fighter planes, which eventually will replace the old Viggen system. 
The idea of a new aircraft, to modernize the Swedish Airforce and later take over after Viggen, came in the late 70's. 
But it would take several years before the first prototype stood ready. 
The criteria was that it had to be smaller, faster, cheaper, lighter, harder to detect, with a better range and load capacity than Viggen. 
Another criteria was that it had to be nicer to the environment. 
After a lot of discussions and pie throwing, the contract for these new fighter planes to the Swedish Airforce were signed in 1982. 
The amount of aircraft in the order have been modified a few times and finally ended up at about 220 planes. 
The first operative division were placed at F7 in 1993. 
I think we needed this new Gripen system to replace the old Viggen, and to keep a modern airforce. 
Since Gripen is an instable aircraft it can turn in a smaller radii than most other aircrafts. 
And by instable I mean that it takes many cooperating computers just to keep the plane in the air, flying straight.  	
In the future we might be able to use it in peacekeeping missions, maybe under the UN flag. 
In that case I think it would be reconnaissance missions, such as photographing strategic locations and troop movement.  	
Since 220 planes are to many for the new military organization, we might be able to export the Gripen system to other countries and in that way make some money for the Swedish defense. 
South Africa have already bought a couple of fighters, and wemight have some other potential buyers in Austria and Chile, were we have been showing our new system. 
Austria have bought Swedish fighters before and they say that they are very pleased so far with the service and social contacts. 
As an answer to a possible counter-question I would say: -No, I don't think that every country who buy Gripen will use it for peacekeeping missions. 
But I still don't think that we, by exporting the Gripen system, encourage warfare and invasions. 
We only sell an airplane, not any special weapons, missiles or bombs for example. 
Those things they have to buy from other countries, just like we do, and that would be their job to stop unauthorized countries from buying these kind of weapons. 
I don't know if this is such a smart expression by the Swedish minister Goran Persson, but this is roughly what he said during a press conference: ""If we don't sell fighter planes to them, they will get it somewhere else"". 
That might be true. 
And in this case Sweden doesn't have anything to lose; we have to many Gripen planes, so why not sell them instead of having them standing useless in a hangar. 	
This plane will last for many, many years to come, since you just have to maintain the body of the plane and then simply upgrade the software in it, such as the guidance system and flight system as a whole. 
This is pretty easily done since the Gripen planes consists of about 40 computers. 
Since this is such an advanced aircraft it must be limited not to do more than 9 G:s, because the pilots can't handle so much more and certainly they can not take as much G:s as the plane can.  	
Due to all the crashes and delays many people think this whole project has become much more expensive than it was budget for, but they are so wrong. 
In reality, it became cheaper than expected. 
And since there have been a couple of crashes, people have had doubt about how good it really is. 
But, I say but again, almost every new airplane in the stage of development have crashed once or twice, because of so called teething troubles. 
You learn by you mistakes. 
Just look at the last Swedish system during development, Viggen, which made even more crashes than Gripen during it's first years. 
The first crash with the Gripen came when the pilot were going in for landing during the sixth flight. 
Another example is the American F-16 and the stealth fighter F-117, which have gone down a couple of times and still does. 	
Despite of the cost for the Gripen project, we still have a fairly modern defense in the army and navy. 
The navy has just got a new ship called YS2000 and a lot of new material have been bought in for the army. 
This might show the rest of the world that ""little Sweden"" can do it on our own.
",False
" ENGLISH, MY ENGLISH!  
Evaluating my own English is definitely not an easy task. 
I cannot say I have spent much time evaluating my skills. 
All I can say is that I've always felt pretty good at each and everyone of the four skills we are asked to discuss in this assignment. 
What I have learned since I started this English course is that there is much more to it than just being able to make yourself understood. 
When I really start to think about it, questions arise in my head. 
Do I write in a satisfaying way? 
Are my speaking abilities as good as I believe they are? 
Am I good at following an English speaking person? 
When it comes to reading, what are my strengths and weaknesses? 
In this essay I'm going to assess my strengths and weaknesses in the four skills of listening, reading, speaking and writing.  
When I'm listening to an English speaking person, do I have any problems in understanding what is being said? 
I must admit that my listening skill is at a very high level. 
I am never completely at sea when listening to someone speaking English. 
Of course it might depend on the subject which is spoken about. 
Do I have poor knowledge in a certain subject? 
I'll probably have to concentrate a bit extra to understand. 
Being surrounded by English speaking people naturally helps the ability to listen. 
Because of the fact we are obliged to speak in English at this course, I know my listening skill will improve even more.  
What are my strengths and weaknesses when it comes to reading? 
The subject being brought up is again the factor that decides weather my reading skill is good or poor. 
A weakness has therefore to do with my vocabulary. 
I am able to read a text and get a quite good understanding of it but experience frustration over having to look up quite a lot of words. 
Reading a novel is hardly ever a problem because of my satisfactorily general knowledge in the English language, which is a strength in my reading skill, but when it comes to reading technical language for example, I immediately notice vocabulary as a weakness. 
Developing my vocabulary is a goal to strive for, and I can tell you I aim high. 
Not being able to read the financial pages in the Times without having to look up every other word is a weakness I have to get rid of.  
Are my speaking abilities as good as I believe they are? 
Speaking English is what I have always referred to as my most developed skill. 
Since I started this course I must admit I do not feel as I did before. 
Speaking to friends in US and England over the phone has never been and still is not a problem. 
But what I have started to realise now is that there is more to it than being able to talk about everyday things with people I know. 
My communicative competence becomes poorer when I speak about things I do not really know much about, the US government for example. 
Of course that would be the case even in Swedish if I spoke about quantum physics, but the main difference is that a part of my weakness in speaking deals with doing spontaneous translation in English. 
I need to improve my strategies to say things even though I do not know the words. 
Although my strength is my ability to make myself well understood when speaking there are things in this area in need of improvement.  
Do I write in a satisfaying way? 
Making myself well understood through writing is a strength of mine. 
I love writing, which I believe is a reason for my abilities to automatically be fairly good. 
My main weakness is grammar. 
I feel my grammar is not bad enough for my produced texts to be totally incomprehensible but for various reasons I believe my grammar is in need of improvement. 
One reason is that I believe that an improvement can lead to a development in my ability to vary my writing a lot more and that my writing will be more effective. 
Poor vocabulary is again in need to be mentioned as a weakness.  
It is important for me to realise I have both weaknesses and strengths in the four skills of listening, reading, speaking and writing. 
This is the only way to start improving them all. 
Through this essay it should be noticed that my strengths in all four skill is my fairly good knowledges in the English language, which I got from studying the English language, but also from living in two English-speaking countries. 
My weakness contains grammar which affects writing and speaking, vocabulary which really concerns all four skills. 
Not having the ability to do spontaneous translations is another weakness that affects my speaking skill. 
It remain to be seen whether I can improve both weaknesses and strengths. 
Like I said, I aim high.
"," What about Systembolaget?  	
I thought it would only be fair to give my opinion on the much discussed topic of ""Systembolagets"" significance, both considering the issues of alcoholism and free enterprise. 
Since the discussion is so hot right now, it is in everyones interest, to speak their piece. 
So in the name of democracy I will give you my piece.  	
Systembolaget is a great institution in Swedish culture, it has existed since somewhere around the 1950s and has always been trustworthy. 
I believe that keeping Systembolaget would be a favour to the Swedish nation, and to its inhabitants.  	
First of all I'd like to point out that hardly anywhere in the world, one can purchase alcohol with such great variety of quality spirits, beer or/and wine, as one can in the Swedish Systembolaget. 
This is so, due to the fact that Systembolaget is a monopoly franchise with a lack of competition. 
The market is then friendly and withholds great variety. 
The prices, however, can be thought of as to excessive. 
I very much feel that it is the price one simply has to pay, if the high quality is to be maintained. 	
I understand people who don't agree with me, people who argues that alcohol should be sold in ordinary stores. 
It is a fine democratic thought. 
It wouldn't be better though. 
Think about it. 
Wouldn't liquor become a commodity like any other? 
I believe it would. 
And by becoming that impoverish the market so almost only standard brands would be available. 
The lesser quality alcohol would be more common and even cheaper, and the alcohol of higher quality would be noticeably more rare, and naturally a lot more expensive. 
That's not the way I like it. 
Look at Denmark there they have very few brands in their supermarkets. 
Cheap? 
Yes!, good? 
Not particularly, not at all in the same league as the Swedish Systembolagets. 	
If we move forward to the question of whether alcoholism would increase if we turned to an open market or if, in fact, there would be less problems caused by alcohol in a more open environment. 
I don't think things would change at all. 
Why would they? 
The core of the problem of alcoholism lies in the fact that alcohol exists. 
Also that it's been drunk for thousands of years. 
It has been in our culture as long as we can date it back. 
The only thing that could decrease the consumption of alcohol is if it was made illegal. 
But then again that would never happen, since such a large amount of tax-money comes from Swedens strict alcohol policy. 
The whole Swedish society would anyway protest such a motion and it would never win any political ground.  	
If anything should be done about Systembolaget it is having it open on Saturdays. 
That is tried in chosen towns, but I think they should just keep it open in all towns. 
Otherwise Systembolaget is open Monday to Friday. 
People who don't like Systembolaget often uses that argument to make a point. 
The argument being, of course, you can not go there everyday, which restricts your individual rights, or something like that. 
I find that being a big heap of horse-manure, if you excuse the metaphor. 
Anyone with at least intelligence below average can plan the week so that time is set aside for the purchase of alcoholic beverages. 
559 	As a final subject there is the moonshine. 
Do people drink moonshine, well of course they do. 
Is that related to Systembolaget by any chance? 
In some aspects it is. 
However, I think that is the same as with the issue of alcoholism, it wouldn't really matter either way. 
Hearing me say that it wouldn't matter either way, may cause you to think ""then set it free, you have no argument"". 
Look then to my first argument and you will see that it is the only vital argument in this entire affair. 
The restaurants, night-clubs, pubs and such will still be there. 	
When you conclude this it's fairly easy to see where the common sense is. 
In this case of course, in the keeping of Systembolaget. 
Seeing it as an undemocratic institution can never be done with seriousness. 
With some planing you will have time to buy what you need during ordinary open-hours. 
Finally, the variety of flavours and brands will be uncompromised by the greed of, as the Americans say, the almighty dollar.
",False
"I started studying English when I was ten years old. 
It was a sign of growing up; you were old enough to learn English. 
We started off with some simple words as ""I, you, he and she"" and as the time went by the words became complete sentences. 
My friends and I used to try to speak English with one and other in our spare time, in spite of the lack of words it was really fascinating to communicate in another language. 
A hole new world opened up for me. 
I remember the feeling when I understood some of the words they were saying on the telly: I could understand what Laura Ingalls said in ""The little house on the prairie""! 
That was a satisfaction! 
Unfortunately the teachers I had in English weren't the best, the lessons were very traditional: listen to the tape, imitate, read the text and do the exercises. 
It grew quit boring after some years and my interest in English decreased. 
I wanted to learn from more authentic situations, like talking to each other, writing letters (to real people!) 
and watching movies without Swedish subtitles.  	 
When I was thirteen I went on a language travel, and it was then I started to appreciate the English language and see the opportunities in knowing the language. 
I didn't learn as much as I thought I would, but what I learned came from real situations and the greater part of my knowledge of English today is thanks to that trip. 
After my teacher exam I'm planning a new trip to the USA, to study or to work as an au pair.  	 
In school I've always been the typical average pupil in English. 
I've always got a grade ""3"", and I regret that I didn't spent more time to achieve better grades. 
I'm planning to change that during this English course. y ability in listening to English is pretty good when I'm having a conversation with someone, I don't have difficulties in understanding the person. 
If I'm listening for a longer time, for example a lecture, it demands more concentration and it's easy to loose attention. 
One thing that I'm hoping to improve is the ability of catching what the lyrics are about in English songs, this is something I found really hard. 
My reading skills, I think, are good. 
It takes a little bit longer to read in English that in Swedish, of course, but that is something I can work on by reading more English books. 
I can't read in English when I'm very tired either, because then I would loose the context. 
I try not to hang up on difficult words when I read. 
You may discover that my writing isn't the best. 
My spelling has always been terrible. 
I hope to improve in spelling and get a stronger self-confidence in writing. 
My lack of words becomes apparent when I'm trying to express myself, as you may discover in this essay. 
Writing is something you should learn early in school, I think, to be better in expressing yourself in a more variant way. 
My speaking in English is okay, I think. 
To speak English is what I've been practising the most. 
Not in school but to talk to people when I'm abroad. 
The talking I did in school come from the book and didn't have very much to do with real life, conversations that didn't make any sense. 
My pronunciation really improved in my stay in England, though I today mix British English and American English. 
Maybe that's a sign of to much watching TV, but I think I've learned allot from American TV-programs. 	 
Now, that I'm using the English language more than I used to, it comes to me how much I've lost during the years that have past since I studied English. 
I'm getting aware of how important it is to ""up-date"" your English all the time, because it still is ""the Worlds language"". 
It is a language that everyone should know and feel secured in.
","I think I am rather good at English, especially grammar and spelling. 
Perhaps I'm not so good at talking English. 
I think talking is the most difficult of the four skills: reading, writing, listening and talking. 	 
Reading I think is the easiest thing to do, mostly because then there is time to look up words and phrases I don't understand. 
Most of the times when I read something I don't understand I try to figure it out by looking at the context or at least try to get an idea about the meaning of it. 
If it is a keyword in the text I usually look it up in a dictionary. 
There is time to do that when I'm reading. 
Usually I try not to use the dictionary because it creates a distance to the text and I don't like that. 
So if I can't figure out the meaning of the word, and the word doesn't seem to be important for the understanding of the text, I just skip it and keep on reading, but if the same word appears over and over again I'll look it up. 
Sometimes when I don't understand a sentence it's because I've thought a noun was a verb and then the real verb doesn't fit in or the sentence sounds absurd. 
But after having reread the sentence I can see where I misunderstood.  	 
Writing is quite easy, too. 
Like when I'm reading I have time to use a dictionary. 
My experience from past writing is that I usually don't make so many spelling mistakes. 
Most mistakes I make have to do with the syntax. 
I often place words in the wrong order. 
Especially the adverbs, I don't know where to put them in the sentence. 
I either think they fit in nearly everywhere or nowhere in the sentence. 
Another thing I have some trouble with is the register. 
Sometimes it's difficult to find the proper word to use.  	 
The third of these skills, listening, I don't think I have any problem with either. 
I don't always understand every word or, to be honest, rather often I don't understand every word, but I don't think of that as a problem. 
I don't have to understand every little word to understand what someone is saying to me. 
This goes as long as the one who is talking to me isn't talking too fast or using a dialect. 
It's easy to understand British and American English. 
Australian English isn't that difficult, but Irish and Scottish English are very troublesome for me. 	 
Talking is the most difficult of these four skills, because it has to be fluent and accurate at the same time. 
My biggest problem is the fluency. 
I can talk to myself quietly inside my head and everything runs smoothly but when I try to say it aloud I stumble and loose endings and so on, but I guess it is because of nervousness and that I'll get better at it if I practise it a lot. 
Pronounciation of some words can be difficult, but I often avoid using words I can't pronounce. 
I know that I'll never learn how to pronounce them if I don't give it a try, but I still keep avoiding them. 
Sometimes I can't find the correct word for what I want to say, but most of the time I can go around it or explain what I mean using body language or words that mean nearly the same. 
And as I've written earlier I have problem with the register. 
It goes for both writing and talking. 
Many of these weaknesses I think have to do with my small vocabulary. 
I understand a lot of words but they belong to my passive vocabulary, they aren't in the vocabulary I use when I am talking.  	 
The things I need to work on are the syntax and my vocabulary. 
I need to learn to use more words and I need to learn when to use them. 
And last but not least I need to practise all four skills, especially talking.
",False
"I started learning English when I was about ten-eleven years old. 
I went to school in Germany by that time. 
I remember that me and my classmates had the opportunity to choose between French and English as the new foreign language. 
So I chose English, as I thought it would be the most useful language to learn. 
It was very exciting at the beginning to get to know a completely new language. 
One year later me and my family moved to Sweden. 
In my new class the pupils had been learning English for two years so I was one year behind. 
That wasn't too funny, but I did my best and at the senior level I had caught up with the other students.  	
English was my favourite subject at the senior level. 
I especially liked writing and reading. 
That was because I started reading fantasy-books in Swedish. 
It was a very excitig series and the continuation hadn't been translated in Swedish, it only existed in English so I started reading the English books. 
I quite soon realised that it suddenly became much easier to write in English because I was reading English books, so I enjoyed writing in English.  	
At the Swedish Gymnasium I sort of lost interest in English because there were so many other subjects to keep in order. 
I found the English workbooks boring and I wasn't that fond of glossery either. 
I remember that we had a national test once, I think it was in the second year at the gymnasium. 
Almost the whole class got very bad results, including me. 
We had got very little time for the test, I think nobody had been able to finish it. 
English was definetely not one of my favourite subjects anymore. 	
In march 1998 I went to England for the first time of my life. 
The students who were interested at my school got the opportunity to go to Wakefield as an exchange project. 
Every student stayed with a host-family and went to an English school for two weeks, either to a small compulsary school in a place called Ossett or to the college in Wakefield. 
That was a rather interesting thing as the English school system differs quite a lot from the Swedish system.  
However, coming back to the English language, it wasn't that difficult to speak English with the host-family, though I was very nervous at the beginning. 
But I got used to it after a while. 
One thing I noticed was that I sometimes had some problems with using the correct English phrases, like to say ""pardon?"" 
when I didn't quite understand something. 
In the beginning I translated things directly from Swedish instead, so I said ""sorry, what did you say?"" 
(which is not correct, I suppose, and probably even can sound impolite to Englishmen.) 
I also had some problems to understand when someone talked very fast, had an accent or used a more formal language. 
I felt most comfortable using the English language among people who were about the same age as me, and in situations when things were't focused on the language all the time. 
Most of the time it was no problem to understand what people were talking about, but as I mentioned earlier, it depended on the situation. 
When somebody asks you something and expects you to answer, in a way that makes sense, it's not enough to just have heard the later half of the question. 	
Thinking about the pronunciation, I don't really think that's a problem for Swedish people in general. 
I think it is a great advantage that films are shown in their original language in Sweden. 
I hear English every day, on television, on the radio, at the cinema. 
Every Swede does. 
I can compare with the Germans (as I still go to Germany every year) and I think their English sounds much worse than when Swedes speak English. 
Of course I'm no expert, but I think it makes a big difference that they among other things dub films to German in Germany.  
Talking of my pronunciation, I have problems to pronounce what I call ""difficult words"". 
And I can't speak fluid English, so of course I still have a lot to learn. 
I think that I mix up British and American pronunciation and that's probably not very good. 
In the media I think American English is more common and that's probably why I don't stick to the British English I learned at school all the time. 
I don't have very much problems to understand a text written in English, but there are always certain words that are new to me which I have to check. 
My weakness is that I don't always check the difficult words because I think it interrupts the reading. 
Usually, it's possible to understand what a text means anyway. 
But I would need to get to know much more formal words, and how to use them. 	
I actually don't really know what my weaknesses are in writing. 
I quite like writing in English but I don't do it very often. 
I suppose that I express myself incorrectly sometimes and that the direct translation from Swedish to English can be wrong in many situations. 
I don't think I use the grammar correctly either, but I'm no expert so I don't really know. 
There is probably always more to learn!
"," Park your car  Did you have problems finding a parking spot for your car this morning? 
Was the traffic intense and all you did this morning was standing in front of red lights, starring in the number plate of the car in front. 
I have the solution for your problems. 
I know it will not be easy but my advise for you is to leave your car at home and ride your bicycle to work instead.  	
The nature has taken a lot of damage the latest decades and scientists expect that man slowly kills the possibilities of future life on earth. 
The forests are dying and the polar ices are melting and many people believe that this is the result of too big industries and too much car use in the western world. 
Today we cannot survive without our cars - or can we? 
Think about all the people in the world that do not have any cars. 
Are they more unhappy? 
Of course not. 
People who live close to their jobs can easily and with great benefits take their bikes to work. 
Likewise can people with a long way to work travel collectively. 
Here thought I am going to concentrate on why people should use their bikes instead of cars when going to their nearby job.  	
A bicycle is very cheap. 
In Uppsala one can easily find a used bicycle in good condition for between 500 and 1000 Swedish crowns. 
One can use the bicycle at an unlimited amount of time without having to pay anything. 
It is practically free to go to work on your bicycle. 
The parking problem is another aspect you do not have to think about with your bike, parking places for bicycles is always free. 
There is no need to even mention how much more expensive it is to buy and own a car.  	
As a result of too little exercise people in the western world is becoming heavier and heavier. 
We know that we do not move enough to keep our bodies in good shape. 
Despite this facts most workers drive their cars to work in the morning without winning a great deal of time. 
If everybody would leave their cars and take their bikes to work everybody would become fitter and the air we breath would become cleaner, witch also would make us healthier. 
It is not just the single individual that would save money while using his/her bike. 
Think about how much money the government would save when everybody were healthier. 
When we talk about the money the government would save, think about all the car crashes. 
Indeed we would be forced to deal with more bicycle crashes but they are rarely mortal. 
Thousand of lives would be saved.  	
Eventually even the production in society would increase. 
If everybody were exposed to fresh air for half an hour each day before work, they would become much happier and could be able to work harder and more focused. 
We would become much more creative at our jobs and in our spare time if we saw more of our town and nature every day of the year. 
Today much talk is about thinking in environmental aspects. 
I believe we would feel pretty good with ourselves when we knew that each day we contributed to a cleaner world.  	
However some new problems would occur in a bicycle dominated world. 
Many bicyclists today do not follow traffic rules. 
There is a possibility that some sort of traffic anarchy could be the result if too many bikes covered the streets. 
This should not have to be a problem if bicyclists were informed of their responsibilities against each other. 
When the number of the cars in the cities would be dropping the cyclists could move to the streets and since a bike is so much smaller than a car the expected chaos would probably never occur. 
Another problem that many people would complain about is the fact that one cannot really pack so much things on a bike. 
This is really a problem if you have the habit of buying food on your way home from work. 
We solve this with the cycle cart. 	
Do you not feel tempted to let your car be tomorrow morning? 
Think about all the things you can do for the money you will save. 
Think about the nature you saves and think about all the fresh air you would be exposed to. 
Naturally there would be some problems if we left our cars, but the arguments for the bicycle is so heavy that at least my car will be left in its garage tomorrow. 
My advise is to dust of your bike, fill the tires with air and get out and stretch your legs.
",False
"In the following lines I shall try to evaluate my skills in using the English language, with respect to listening, reading, speaking and writing. 
I would say my ability to listen to and understand spoken English is generally quite good. 
At least it seems to me that way; I'm usually able to understand English dialogue on TV and in movies without reading the subtitles, if I want to. 
On the other hand I suppose that it might be quite another matter in a real conversation, where one is slightly more pressured to understand what someone is saying, without having any subtitles to occasionally glance at when difficulties arise.  
I like reading in English; fiction originally written in English I usually prefer to read that way, rather than a translation. 
Usually I am also able to understand what I read fairly well, as the occasional unknown word quite often can be understood in the context of those surrounding it. 
Generally I keep a dictionary at hand, but I use it mostly for words that seem very important and cannot be otherwise understood. 
Having studied mathematics and computer science at university for two and a half years, I have also been exposed to quite a lot of English non fiction texts, as most of the course literature has been in English. 
This usually didn't present very much of a problem either, the language of those books being generally quite simple and the difficulties one might have lying mostly in understanding the various technical terms occurring rather frequently.  
When it comes to speaking English, I suppose I have had more difficulties there than with listening and reading, at least when it comes to pronunciation. 
During some of my earlier years of school, I wasn't able to pronounce very well at all, words assuming strange and unpleasant shapes when entering my mouth. 
I suppose it was mostly due to nervousness about speaking in front of others; fear of not being able to pronounce words correctly obviously not helping very much. 
This problem did eventually decrease, and during my last years of school, I suppose, my pronunciation wasn't very much worse than anyone else's. 
My English teacher, however, claimed that I spoke with a clearly Scottish accent. 
I really don't know what to think of this; I do find slightly hard to believe as I haven't, as far as I know, been exposed to very much English spoken with a Scottish accent, and I suppose it might have been nothing more than a peculiar idea of my English teachers.  
Nowadays, since I think I've improved my pronunciation and ridded myself from most of my alleged Scottish accent, I do feel I'm able to speak quite fluently in English, even if I might still stumble on certain words and sounds, especially if I'm nervous or pressured.  
In school, especially during the last years, I used to like writing essays in English, always trying to use what I thought of as typically British expressions. 
However, my teacher occasionally complained that my sentences grew too long, my expressions too elaborate and my style of writing too academic and detached. 
Writing too long sentences has always been one of my weaknesses, no matter what language I write them in, but nowadays I find it easier control this violent urge of mine, and therefore one might perhaps say my writing has improved, in English and otherwise. 
I still enjoy writing in English, anyway, and don't find it too hard, even if I probably still have a slight inclination towards elaboration and long sentences. 
Writing this text though, it strikes me that it was actually quite a long time ago that I last wrote anything of some length in English, and perhaps I'm a bit more uncertain about spelling than I used to be, having to look words up in a dictionary every now and then.  
On the whole I'd say my English is fairly good today, but as I have received most of my practise in using the English language not as much from long time spent in an English speaking environment as from time spent within a classroom, and from reading books and watching television, I can mostly assess my skills in relation to those rather safe and undemanding situations. 
In a different environment my weaknesses would, no doubt, make themselves more evident, even to me.
"," SMOKING OR NON-SMOKING?  
Imagine a night out, you have had a few drinks, done a bit of dancing and are now in bed ready to go to sleep feeling quite satisfied with the evening. 
When you wake up next morning with (probably) a hangover and a smell in your hair, your clothes and bed, witch can be defined as tobacco smell., you do not feel as glamorous as you did last night. 
The hangover is (of course) your own fault, but the smell if you are a non-smoker? 
Is it really reasonable that other people has the power to endanger your health? 
Should you not be the one to decide about your own future? 
The right thing to do would be to ban smoking at night clubs and pubs all over the country. 
This might not be an easy task, so my aim would be the nations in Uppsala, since I know that it is possible.  	 
The main reason to why there should be no- smoking at the nations, is the danger that comes along with smoking. 
To begin with; smoking can give you several diseases, the most severe one being cancer. 
Secondly there is always the danger of fire. 
Most of the nations are situated in old buildings where the risk of fire are great. 
Just by flicking your cigarettebump not put out onto a couch or the floor, etc. could start a fire, and with alcohol, often consumed on a night out, comes poor judgment so this happens very often. 
Surely the nations are provided with fire- extinguishers but that is not enough protection, since the nations usually are overcrowded on a Friday night. 
Of course this is something the nations should take under consideration anyway and not just with the smoking issue.  	 
Furthermore what happened to the free will? 
It is said that each and every person has their own free will to make a decision, but this is not the case here. 
Diseases through smoking does not just affect smokers, but also non- smokers, who through inhaling the smoke from others can just as easily and sometimes easier get cancer or asthma This fact makes my statement even clearer thinking of the people working for instance behind the bar, waitresses, waiters and DJ's even. 
Although they might be smokers themselves they should be able to decide how much they want to smoke and the fact is that someone has to work in order to keep the place running. 
Let us not forget another important group of people- the people who is allergic to smoke and those with severe asthma. 
These people cannot go to these, places in order to stay healthy and alive and this is all because of the smoke which is not fair. 
Why should smokers make other people, although not on purpose, stay away? 
Oddly enough people continue to smoke even though they know that they are endangering themselves and others.  	 
Fortunately there is a solution to everything and of course to this problem as well. 
To begin with, why not just prohibit smoking at the nations? 
It has been tested in several cities and it has worked out beautifully. 
Norrlands nation in Uppsala has actually banned smoking in some parts of the building so that is a step in the right direction. 
Disregarding this as a solution at least have one room where people can smoke and no one else had to suffer. 
Although this solution might not be perfect at least it is better then the current situation. 
A few days ago my friends and I went to Stockholms nation to have lunch and left after an hour with the stench of tobacco in our hair and clothes even though neither one of us smoked during that time. 
The smell was probably there from the night before or even earlier. 
However, we still want to go back in spite of the smell, because the food is nice The question is, would someone allergic to smoke or with asthma be able to have lunch there if only just for an hour?  	 
In short banning smoking at the nations can only have a positive outcome regarding the health situation for non- smokers, which includes staff, visitors and of course for the smokers as well. 
I myself tend to smoke a cigarette or two sometimes on a night out and would be more than happy to smoke it outside.
",False
" English, my English!  
The English language has always been a matter of interest for me. 
Mainly because of the fact that you can use it almost everywhere in the world. 
To be able to communicate and to make yourself understood is the base in human relations. 
I was also inspired by a month-long vacation I spent with my family driving through Great Britain several years ago. 
In school, competent teachers have increased my interest and after graduation I worked in London for five months as a receptionist at a small bed and breakfast hotel.  
The first book I read in English was The castle of adventure by Enid Blyton a number of years ago. 
Since then I've come across several writers from different ages, all writing fiction or historical novels. 
When it comes to more advanced reading it is novels by Jane Austen that I've enjoyed most. 
Even though I don't know every word, I can still comprehend the context and sometimes I understand what the word means by seeing it in a situation. 
Reading articles in newspapers is a bit more difficult when they contain a lot of new and for me, unusual words.   
I don't have a problem speaking with people my own age, or adults, about common things like music, movies and every day life events. 
That kind of conversation feels quite natural and I can often speak rather fluently. 
I do have more trouble with difficult topics involving a lot of complicated words which can be hard to explain without knowing the exact meaning in Swedish. 
Talking in front of a group makes me uncomfortable and I'm aware of I need quite a lot of practise on that. 
It's easier if the group is small and if I'm well prepared for the task so I'll know what to say and know that what I'm saying is correct. 
I do believe that my pronounciation is acceptable with some minor mistakes. 
Of course, unusual and new words can be hard to pronounce when you rarely hear them or if you have never heard them before.   
Swedish people hear quite a lot of spoken English because of the frequent use on television and in music and understanding it comes rather natural as a result of that. 
I've no trouble comprehending standard English but different dialects like Scotish and Irish can be hard to follow. 
Another problem is swearwords which can be difficult to grade according to their strength. 
When you don't know how strong the curse is you don't know exactly what the person is saying about that certain thing. 
Slang is also something I can misunderstand and have a problem to interpret the right way, especially since that kind of words are continously developing. 
Understanding a conversation about a complicated subject can be hard, simply because I don't know enough words regarding that particular issue.   
I've written mostly letters in English, not very advanced, about common things to people my own age. 
In Upper Secondary School I've also made a couple of short essays and my special assignment was in English about Jane Austen. 
I like to write in English, trying to formulate the sentences the best way and chosing the right word for each situation. 
I can express what I want to say although my grammar can be faulty sometimes. 
Using certain phrases can be a problem when you can't translate them word for word but need to know the English counterpart. 
Coherence and cohesion is still a bit unclear and I believe I need to practise on that quite a lot.   y conclusions are that I'm able to read modern fiction novels and a bit more advanced books as well without major problems. 
I've no difficulties understanding spoken standard English or the most usual accents. 
My pronounciation is, I believe, accetable and I can communicate rather fluently in English and make myself understood. 
I've written some in English but I still need to develop my writing and learn how to write a proper essay. 
I also need to practise speaking in front of a group and learn to understand and distinguish the different accents. 
Reading more advanced litterature and articles is also something I need to do to broaden my vocabulary which makes it easier to understand persons who use many advanced words when they speak.
"," It has been stated that role-playing teenagers risk loosing contact with reality. 
This is said to lead to mental and spiritual crises and even suicide. 
Other critics are of the opinion that role playing can result in increased violence. 
Different religious groups say that the imaginative religions that are part of the game may lead to occultism and psychological disturbances. y opinion is that role playing is, not only harmless, but actually good for you and that it should be encouraged.  	
First of all we need to distinguish between role playing and other games that look similar but have a very different purpose. 
There are two types of role playing: lives, which can be compared to a play where the participants are the actors. 
You know which role you will play, but you don't know what the action will be like.  
The second type is conversation games which takes place in the players imagination. 
The leader of the game tells the players what their surroundings look like. 
The players then choose how to act.  
It is the ability to enter another character that makes the role playing special. 
You need to get to know the role you are to play and to know how this ""person"" will act in different situations. 
In conversation games you will also have to imagine the landscape surrounding your character. 	
This is role playing. 
It may contain violence, but the aim of the game is never to kill the other players. 
More often you need to cooperate to succeed. 
Often you'll find that diplomatics and tactics will get you further than violence. 
Other games that are sometimes confused with role playing are paintball, laser-tag and killer games. 
In these games the aim is to kill all the other players. 	
Most of the time role playing games mirrors problems from the real world in a fantasy or science fiction surrounding. 
This offers a nice background for discussing moral problems and solving logical puzzles. 
There are no easy solutions to problems and you have to use all your imagination and creativity to tackle them. 
A good strategy will help you in a fight and a clever scheme may keep you out of one.  
Role playing doesn't differ much from reality. 
There is violence in role playing, but every action has its consequences. 
You will never learn, as you may do from action movies, that the easiest way to deal with a problem is through violence. 	
There have been many stories about teenagers who commit suicide when something goes wrong in the game. 
After some investigation most of these stories proved to be untrue and that the persons in question didn't even exist. 
In all the other cases there where other more likely explanations. 
Thousands of people attend lives or play conversation games and like every major activity it has its percentage of persons with psychological problems. 
It is possible that role playing may act as a trigger, but there is a difference between triggering something and causing it.  	
The religions that are part of the imaginative society in a role-playing game are almost always copies of different religions in the real world. 
The contact with them can be no more dangerous than religion classes in school or reading antic myths or faerytales.  	
Everything in our surrounding influence us. 
Everyday we are exposed to a million different impressions. 
There is no way for us to know exactly how these impressions will influence everyone of us. 
So far there is no evidence that role-playing should be bad for you, only speculations. 
What is perfectly clear though, is the good sides of role-playing.	 
Role playing is a social activity; you have to be at least one player and one game leader. 
It promotes imagination and creativity as stated before. 
You will need the ability to make quick decisions and to find solutions to problems. 
Statistics tell us that intelligence among role players is above average.
",False
" Raise the teachers' salaries!  
It is common known that today's Sweden, to a great extent, lacks qualified teachers. 
All too few teachers are being educated, and many who are certificated teachers choose to work elsewhere than in school. 
This should not be a surprise though, as both their status and salaries are low in comparison with other academics. 
If you in addition to this, consider how rough the teachers' working conditions are today, it is obvious that something has to be done to change their situation. 
It is absolutely necessary to raise the teachers' wages, in order to give them a salary that corresponds with their assignments, and make the profession attractive again. 
But is it then so hard to be a teacher? 
I claim that it is, and in this essay I'm going to try to convince you, that the teachers' salaries are much too low in addition to their contemporary working conditions. 	
The teaching profession has always been demanding. 
Teachers have always been expected to do a lot of extra work that not has been included in their scheduled working hours; lessons have had to be prepared and written tests and essays corrected. 
And today the working burden has become even heavier. 
A teacher's job is not any more only to make sure that its pupils pass their examinations and keep calm in class. 
Humanity and individualism have become a part of the Swedish schools, and even though this of course is positive, it has increased the pressure on the teachers.  	
Today, evaluation of the individual pupil's development and progress is a part of the learning process. 
The teacher has to organize conversations between teacher, parents and child regularly. 
This is not only taking a lot of the teacher's time with a lot of planning required and meetings have to be taken place in the evenings, but the closer contact with the parents also puts psychological pressure on the teacher. 
It is supposed to make all parts comfortable in the delicate situations that can arise when children's skills are being discussed. 	
However, the teacher's role as a psychologist doesn't stop at these specific situations. 
In its daily work, the teacher are supposed to catch all pupils' interest at the same time, and be able to handle all their different needs. 
Many pupils require extra attention and help and make this a difficult task. 
The teacher feels that it is not enough. 
Assisting teachers for pupils with special needs are rare and the teacher can't be there for everybody all the time. 
In a time when the classes are growing bigger this is getting even harder. 
Politicians seem to think that teachers are magicians. 
With less money, fewer lessons and more students, they are supposed to be doing miracles and reach a higher ambition level. 	 
The teachers' responsibilities do not either end with education in the form of school subjects as math and English. 
The teacher is an adult with whom the pupils spend their whole day, to which the small children look up to and imitate. 
It becomes a part of its students' upbringing, whether it likes it or not. 
The school is a social community, where children learn to act among other people than their family. 
And the school of today is not an easy world to live in. 
The teacher is supposed to guide the pupils through the jungle of social and emotional problems that can arise in school. 
It is supposed to discover if a child is feeling bad, if it is being treated badly in school or at home. 
The lack of welfare officers makes this task even harder.  	
But it is not only a question of children being treated badly and feeling bad at school. 
Today the school is not a safe place to be, for teachers as well as for pupils. 
An increasing number of students bear guns and bully their teachers. 
In many schools the pupils are ""taking over the classrooms"" and teachers are afraid of going to their jobs. 	
As you can see the teachers' working conditions are hard. 
They are supposed to act both as mentors and psychologists, but do only get paid for teaching. 
They have great responsibilities and it is time that they are being rewarded for that. 
They must feel that they are appreciated, so that they will have the strength to improve the Swedish schools. 
It is time that we invest in the teachers and raise their salaries, before we do not have any left. 
An investment in our teachers is an investment in our children, and thus an investment in our future.
"," NO TO THE DEVELOPMENT OF XENOTRANSPLANTATION  Just a couple hundreds of the 90 000 people who die in Sweden every year donate their organs. 
This has lead to longer queues and time of waiting for transplantation of organs. 
And it is calculated that 15-20 percent of those on the waiting list will die before a suitable organ becomes available. 
As a solution to this problem are some scientists working on research on xenotransplantation, which means to move organs between different species. 
In this case to move organs between pigs and human beings. 
The thought is to gene manipulate pigs to get them suitable as donors of organs. 
So in future transplantations it would be possible to replace human tissue with pigs' cells and organs. 
But unfortunately there are to many risks and much unfairness connected with it. 
Therefor I think xenotransplantation is not the right solution on the lack of organs and it should not be developed either. 	
First of al I am against the development of xenotransplantation because it entails risks such as transmission of unknown viruses and other infectious diseases from the pigs to the human body. 
Of course, some complications could be acceptable though the receiver of a pig organ may get higher life quality, but an infection could be contagious for the people nearest the patient and possibly even to society. 
Therefore I would prefer another solution to the lack of organs. 
Public information about the lack of organs and discussions about the consequences of xenotransplantation would help. 
I think a lot of people would change their mind if they were informed. 
The problem with the lack of organs should also be presented for children at school so that they from an early age get used on the thought of donating their organs. 
That way more people would be ready to donate their organs and such need for organs that exist today would not exist. 	
Another reason to why I am against the development of xenotransplantation is the thought on how xenotransplantation could be used by the companies that have spent money on research on xenotransplantation. 
I mean that those who are going to be the sellers of the gene manipulated pig organs will try to make big business on them without carrying on the ethical consequences. 
One must realise that those companies are not charitable institutions, and that it is therefore possible that poor people in the third world would not have access to these organs, which would lead to an increase of injustice in our world. 
This make me wonder: Who would indeed be most benefited by xenotransplantation? 
Would it be the patient, the seller, the whole society or no one? 
I think the most benefited would be the seller and the less the patient, by being infected by viruses or similar diseases, and society with the increasing of injustice as a consequence of the greed of the sellers. 
In this case xenotransplantation does not fill any function and should not therefore exist.  	
Another thing that makes me critical against xenotransplantation is that the ""donator-pigs"" are exposed to a lot of pain. 
They suffer when they are used as patients in experimental transplantations with a lot of medicine that restrains the immune defence. 
Even genetical operations are painful for the pigs. 
The pigs used for xenotransplantation are not able to live a happy pig life either, as they are not allowed to root on the ground. 
I believe that humans do not have the right to change animals' genes and living conditions to get them suitable as donors of organ. 
We must think about how we would like to be treated ourselves and we should stoop utilising animals the way xenotransplantation does.  	
What I have mentioned above are some of the reasons why I do not like to see xenotransplantation as the solution to the lack of organs. 
The development of xenotransplantation is too dangerous since pig's viruses could infect people. 
It is unfair since the sellers' greed would lead to an increase of injustice in our world. 
It is unfair, also, because it causes much pain for the pigs. 
I believe that if people who do not want to donate their organs reflect on their decision and change their mind it would be easier to stop the development of xenotransplantation and all the bad consequences of it.
",False
"y first assignment has everything to do with evaluation. 
I am to evaluate my skills concerning writing, reading, speaking and listening to English. 
Could be that my former English-teachers would know my strengths and weaknesses better than me, but since they are nowhere near to turn to, I am on my own. 
As a future teacher myself, it will be my responsibility to make sure my students know enough English to qualify them for higher education. 
I will not be able to do that, unless I study English really hard. 
Through my living years, I have always been able to express my ideas, opinions and reflections without complications verbally. 
To write, on the other hand is much more difficult of a task. 
The grammar must be correct or the message could easily change into something quite different than from what first was intended. 
It has also been told to me how important it is to have a good structure. 
Structure is the backbone of every written and told story. 
Without structure, it is all a mess. 
I am working on that right now.  
This English course has made me think about my days in upper secondary school and the realisation that I seldom had the opportunity to write essays in English. 
If essays had been a regular part of the class, I do not think I would be so nervous having to write these essays now. 
It is both terrifying and quite exhilarating at the same time. 
I am to study English, which I have been interested in my entire life.  
Fortunately, I have past experience as an au pair and a little moonlighting as a translator (I was designated, I did not volunteer). 
My assignment was to listen and then make sure the audience received the main message from my lips. 
Hopefully I will not be in that situation in a near future again.  
I am not likely to get embarrassed having to stand in the spotlight even if I do not like it all the times. 
It is rarely an issue for me. 
An oral presentation would probably only give me an adrenaline rush.  
This English course involves more than writing, listening and speaking English. 
Reading occupies the most of my time. 
A large amount of books are to be read in a short period of time. 
According to my schedule, there are one short story and one novel per week to read. 
My only objection is the tempo really. 
To read, in particular, does not worry me much. 
I usually understand what I am reading. 
If I do not, I just look up the words or try to understand by the context. 
Further more, I am now reading books I never would borrow from the library on my own initiative. 
It is obligatory to read all of the books. 
Some of them are actually very good. 
All in all, I believe that if people put their minds into something, in this case listening, reading, speaking and writing English, there is nothing they can not accomplish. 
With a positive basic outlook, nothing can stop us from completing our education. 
Temporary setbacks are common among us students. 
It is by our mistakes we learn, and that is what I intend to do.
","I will try to assess my skills in the English language as clearly and thoroughly as possible. 
To do so I will start by giving a brief account of my English studies and my encounters with the English-speaking world. 
I find this relevant as it has greatly influenced my knowledge of the English language. 
I will then proceed to evaluate my skills in listening, speaking, reading and writing. 
While I was learning English at school I visited England on four occasions, all confined to the southern part of the country. 
This enhanced my English skills, and strengthened the RP I was taught at school. 
When I was in upper secondary school, I took a Cambridge course of Proficiency in English in which I practised all the skills mentioned above, but writing in particular. 
After that I went to Ireland, where I stayed for fourteen months, working in a racing yard.   y stay in Ireland made me quite confident in understanding the spoken language, having all the people in my surroundings, both at work and at home (I stayed with an Irish family), speaking English. 
I can follow most conversations without making a great effort. 
My passive vocabulary has become fairly extensive and covers many areas, and when I come across a word I don't know I can usually work out its meaning from the context in which it is spoken. 
On the other hand I can still have problems understanding when someone is speaking very fast or with a strong dialect like Northern Irish or Scottish. 
I also find that I have to concentrate in order to keep up with a conversation in a noisy environment.  y speaking skills have also been influenced by my time in Ireland. 
I speak English almost fluently but with a distinct Irish accent. 
Unfortunately my active vocabulary is not as extensive as the passive. 
As I spent most of my time with unskilled workers I did not very often find myself in a situation where difficult words or complex terminology were used. 
Although I use the words in Swedish and know them in English I'm not used to using them, but tend to express myself in uncomplicated words and sentences when speaking. 
I don't make very many grammatical mistakes, but I have acquired some dialectical expressions, which would not be considered grammatically correct. 
I sometimes mispronounce words with which I am not familiar. 
I'm a fast speaker by nature, therefore I don't always articulate the words fully, this combined with my accent can make it difficult for people to understand me. 
As I am aware of this I usually make an effort to speak slowly and clearly, but sometimes it slips my mind.  
Being able to read and assimilate a text written in English is a very useful skill. 
I feel one of my best attributes considering reading is that I enjoy it so much. 
Therefore I read a lot of books, preferably in English (if that is the original language), as I feel it gives me a more direct connection to the author. 
Consequently I have become a fast reader which is very advantageous when there is a lot of text to be covered. 
It has also enhanced my vocabulary considerably. 
And as for listening, I can make sense of most texts even if I don't know all the words. 
On the other hand, if a specialised terminology is used, or the text is discussing a field with which I am not familiar I can have difficulties understanding it.  
Writing is the skill in which I have had the least practice. 
I did do a lot of writing when I was at school, but that is more than three years ago, and since then all I've produced is a couple of letters and e-mails. 
Consequently I feel a bit rusty and I have forgotten much of the spelling and grammar I used to know by heart. 
On the other hand my stay in Ireland has given me a better feel for the language in general. 
I think I make better use of my vocabulary when writing than I do when speaking, as the former allows me more time to think through the best way to put my thoughts into words. 
However I am not quite confident regarding my choice of words, and I think I sometimes write too informal, the way I would speak.  
To sum it all up, I feel fairly confident in my English-skills, though I know I still have a lot to learn.
",False
" SHOULD ""SOFT DRUGS"" BE LEGALISED?  	
All over the world there is a discussion about narcotic politics. 
On one side there arethose who suggest a liberalisation or even a legalisation of the ""soft"" narcotics (marijuana and haschish), while people on the other side wants restrictive narcotic politics. 
I agree with the ones who believe in restrictive and preventive narcotic politics, and don't believe in a legalisation of drugs, not even ""soft drugs"". 
In this essay, I'll take up some of my main arguments againstlegalisation of ""soft drugs"".  	
First of all I would like to tear down one argument, used by advocators of legalising ""soft drugs"". 
They claim that ""soft drugs"" are harmless, but it's proved that even small dozes of for example haschish hurt the brain and use of ""soft drugs"" also lead to further experimentation on other drugs. 
They are often an entrance to heavier drugs.  	
Secondly, people who want a legalisation of the ""soft drugs"" can't answer questions on how they are planning to carry this out. 
For example I would like to know by whom the quality of the drugs will be checked, and who'll decide the strength and price of them? 
If drugs from society are lighter, and perhaps also more expensive than the ones on the street, no one will buy them.   	
Other questions which the followers of legalising don't have any answers to are for example if the State will have monopoly of drugbusiness or if private corporations will have access to it as well. 
And have they planned to have agelimits, or restrictions for people with sensitive and important jobs like drivers, doctors, teachers and pilots? 
How much and how often should you be able to buy drugs? 
Will ""drug-shops"" be open twenty-four-hour a day? 
If not, people who want drugs will buy them on the streets anyway. 
I haven't received any answers on these questions, but spokesmen for legalisation maybe have planned to release ""soft drugs"" without any regulations at all, because regulations only create conditions for a black market.
Besides that the campaign to legalise ""soft drugs"" gives non-satisfaction answers, or often lack out of answers on how they plan to carry out their ideas, there are more reasons against legalisation of the ""soft drugs"".  	
One of these reasons is that there's a connection between access to narcotics and use of them. 
If society decides to legalise ""soft drugs"" it becomes easier for people to buy them, and thereby they might end up in an abuse, because of the increased access to ""soft drugs"". 
This also effects the connection between supply and demand of these drugs. 
If there's a combination of easy access to large amount of ""soft drugs"" with liberal attitude from society about drugs, more persons will try the legal drugs, also those who wouldn't have tried if drugs had been illegal. 
This lead to higher demand and suddenly ""soft drugs"" have created a legal market with supply and demand. 
To decrease the number of (ab)users there must be a small access to narcotics and difficult to get hold of them. 
If there also are unpleasant consequences for using or dealing with drugs the amount of people who is taking them won't increase in the same way as if ""soft drugs"" were legalised. 
Left is only a group that run the risk of getting into drugabuse from the beginning. 
This group can society reach through support and treatment. 
Only then abuse can be defeated.  	
Society must take responsibility for its citizens. 
Abuse have to be seen in a social relation, not in a medical one. 
Society must prevent that young people gets into drugabuse, by preventive work, by not legalise drugs and by helping addicts through treatment. 
We must believe in society without narcotics, and not let ""soft drugs"" be legalised. 
It's when we give up our hope of a drugfree society legalisation movement can win. 
That's why many people supports ""harm reduction"" movement instead of supporting preventive work. 
Unfortunately ""harm reduction"" alone can't decrease the number of addicts. 
We need for example preventive work among young people to stop them from trying drugs.  	
If the number of addicts shall decrease, society can't declare that it's all right to use drugs. 
Then young people get a liberal attitude towards drugs and they are more likely to try them. 
If it also is easy to get ""soft drugs"" and that it's legal to use them, many more risk to end up in an abuse. 
When ""soft drugs"" no longer are strong enough, addicts will move over to heavier drugs, and this way society never will get rid of drugabuse and narcotics, and social misery will increase. 
We must declare a war against narcotics, instead of be resigned to drugabuse.  
","It all started in fourth grade. 
I was ten years old and about to have my first English lesson. 
How I enjoyed that. 
I gladly took home my books, in which I had written down the fifteen words that we had to learn for the next week. 
Since then I have been struggling with learning to be a better speaker, listener, writer and reader of English. 
It has not always been simple, as you will see. 
But I have had a lot of fun on the way.  
Throughout high school I did not have any bigger problems with listening and understanding English. 
To a certain degree I can thank TV for that. 
I watched many American shows and learned to listen and understand English. 
When I, after one year of high school, went to the United States to study I got to practice all that I have learned the past seven years. 
When I first heard my host father speaking, I was shocked and thought, ""What is he saying? 
What language is he talking?""  
But it did not take many days to learn to understand him, and everybody else for that matter. 
So listening was no problem. 
Until I was on my way home and we made an intermediate landing at Heathrow Airport, London.  
I was in a shop to buy something to eat, and it was my turn to pay. 
The cashier started talking to me and I did not understand one word of what she said! 
Not one single word! 
She must have thought I was an idiot standing there saying ""what?"" 
to everything that she said. 
It was a big difference from the American English that I had gotten used to.  
Now, though, when I have not been in the United States for several years I have no problem in understanding British English.  
In the ten years that I studied English in Sweden, I did not read many books in English, we never had to. 
But when I was in the U.S I discovered the joy of reading. 
It is not just fun to sink into an imaginary world and forget the reality, it is also a very good way of keeping up and learning a language. 
I remember lying in my bed reading an English book and thinking for myself. 
Wow, I am reading a book in a totally different language, and I understand everything. 
It was an amazing feeling.  
So reading is not a big problem for me.  
I do have problems with my writing though. 
My grammar is not the best, even though I think I write perfectly well. 
I feel quite competent in spelling, but of course there are many difficult words in English too, as there are in every language.  
One of my first writing experiences is when I was around ten or eleven years old. 
A friend and I were going to write a letter to ""DJ Cat"" on the ""DJ Cat Show"" on the Sky Channel. 
We liked his show very much so we wanted to write and tell him that. 
I remember one sentence in particularly. 
We were going to write ""we like you very much"", but we did not know how to spell the word much. 
We pondered and pondered upon how it was spelt. 
Finally we came up with a quite logic one, at least we thought so. 
We wrote ""we like you very match"". 
Hopefully I have improved my writing since then.   
I am certainly a better speaker after spending a year in the U.S. 
I have improved my ability to speak spontaneously. 
I love to speak English, even though I say many things wrong. 
Which happened a few times in the U.S. 
The English I had learnt in Sweden did not always work over there. 
I remember asking my host mother for a rubber. 
She stared at me and asked if I meant that I needed an eraser. 
She explained the difference, and I felt a little embarrassed, since the word rubber means ""suddgummi"" in British English but condom in Am. 
Eng.  
I still laugh about it and now I feel more confident in my talking, knowing that we all say the wrong things now and then.  
In conclusion I could say that I know English quite well. 
I can survive in an English speaking country without any problems. 
But there are also lots that I do not know about English, but that I am eager to learn about, to apply the grammar correctly, for instance.  
I am willing to work hard to achieve the goals I have set. 
And I know that if I do,  I will be a better speaker, listener, writer and reader of the English language.
",False
" Too Big to Be Beautiful - A glance at Swedish pre-schools  When I was recently working as an unqualified teacher in a Swedish pre-school, I found myself, alone, in charge of a group of 20 children. 
In the afternoons I was sometimes responsible for a group of 34 five- and six-year olds. 
Several of the qualified teachers were on sick-leave. 
They were burnt out. 
One afternoon, one of the children disappeared. 
When his mother came to pick him up, I had no idea where to find him. 
We looked for 30 minutes before he was found. 
His mother cried. 
The boy cried. 
My legs were trembling. 
At least nobody was hurt this time. 
I spent other days in the forest with 40 children and two substitutes, who were only there for the day. 
I made sure I brought a cellphone, in case something would happen. 
When working as a pre-school teacher, two eyes are not enough. 	
My experience tells me that the Government has to spend more money on childcare in order to reduce the size of the groups of children and to prevent the burning out of teachers. 
Groups of 20 children younger than six years old are far too often in the hands of inexperienced and unqualified substitutes. 
This is shocking and unacceptable. 
But luckily, it is not unchangeable.  
Ultimately, the responsibility lies with the Government. 
It is the Government that has been the driving force in the development of a society dependent on a state childcare system. 
It has been their policy to promote a system where all children receive equal education and care, as a part of the work for a society with equality of opportunity and equality between the sexes. 
The tax system has, for these reasons, been reformed. 
Today, taxes are supposed to finance childcare. 
As a result of this policy, it is impossible for many parents to stay home with their children. 
Many cannot afford to work part-time. 
As a result, most children at the ages of 2-6 spend several hours in institutions. 
Some children are left to the care of the pre-school teacher for over ten hours per day. 
It is therefore obvious that the childcare system has to keep a certain standard unless working class children and children with a single-parent, will yet again have different opportunities. 
The standard, however, cannot be maintained without funding. 
Despite its responsibility, the Government has carried out economic measures, which have had negative effects on the size of the groups and the quality of the childcare. 
A change of policy is necessary.  	
The economic measures taken by the Government have been said to be necessary to keep the budget in balance. 
This has been the main aim of the central government as well as of local authorities. 
The budget is usually an economic plan for a short period of time, a couple of years at the very best. 
The cuts in public spending will, however, have a different effect, in the long run. 
The impact on society can be disastrous, as the main object of pre-school education is socialisation. 
Children in pre-school are developing social skills such as empathy. 
They are supposed to learn to function in a group and understand the rules of human interaction. 
Small groups and educated teachers are vital to this process of socialisation. 
Children have to be seen and cared for in order to learn to see others and care about them. 
It is clear that the present situation in the Swedish childcare system will lead to social maladjustment, such as truancy, violence, criminality and drug-abuse. 
Society will sooner or later have to pay.  
The pre-school teacher is not only a role model, but also a guide. 
He or she is essential to help children solve conflicts and help to explain phenomena in everyday life. 
Children also need help to express thoughts and feelings. 
They need help to develop their language in order to become full-grown, independent, reflecting human beings. 
In pre-school this is done best by conversation in small groups. 
The early years in life are crucial when it comes to giving children a base to stand on for further education. 
In a society where education is continuously becoming more and more important, it seems peculiar that pre-school education is put at a disadvantage. 
Today, pre-school teachers are not only responsible for a large group of children, they are also occupied with cleaning, doing dishes, drying clothes etc. 
The children do not receive a pre-school education of any quality. 
The do not even get the attention they need. 
Meanwhile, teachers are becoming burnt out, and always feeling inadequate. 
This is all due to insufficient funding. 
I am therefore sure society would gain from spending more money on pre-school education, from an economical as well as an educational point of view. 
The most obvious point of view is, of course, the human one. 
We cannot treat what we value most as cattle. 
Pre-school education has become a way of storing children. 
The only way to deal with this and to secure the quality, is by reducing the size of the groups and increasing the number of adults, educated teachers, in pre-school. 
This responsibility lies with the Government. 
At present, it cannot even be guaranteed that parents will find their children, safe and sound, where they left them in the morning.
"," Television and our conception of society  Television has a powerful impact on many aspects of human life, both on individuals, family life and the society as a whole. 
It provides for a substantial part of all information we receive, thus affecting our conception of the society and our own roles in it. 
That is the topic for this piece of writing, and I will argue that television has many benefits when it comes to providing such information, but also that there are some negative aspects.   
Human civilisation has become increasingly more complicated during the last centuries. 
At least in the more developed regions, it is now more diversified and efficiently organised than ever before, both within countries and between them. 
We have seen an enormous technological development, but also a political and social development that is equally important. 
As a result, people are affected to a large extent by decisions taken very far from their own environment. 
I think it is more difficult today than ever to understand how the society works. 
This means that it is difficult to identify your own function in society, which might result in a feeling of detachment and a lack of interest in and responsibility for collective issues.  
The obvious remedy for this problem is information. 
As a provider of information, television has some advantages before other media. 
Television can bring the whole world to your TV-couch. 
It makes distances shorter, both in time and space. 
You can see important events live and watch in-depth interviews with prominent people. 
TV is also a good medium for showing the reactions of other people, and it can show demonstrations, riots, disasters, celebrations etc. in a way that written media cannot. 
It is a good medium for identification with people living under very different conditions than your own. 
TV-producers also promote this identification, for instance by using ""ordinary people"", often interviewed in the street, to comment all kinds of events on the news. 
Off course other media such as newspapers or books are also good and in many ways better than TV, but moving pictures provide strong experiences without requiring much effort from the viewers. 
That is probably an important reason for why television has such a great impact. 
Thus I believe that television is really helpful in creating understanding and a sense of belonging that is important both for individuals and for the society as a whole.   
Television, as well as other media, can also increase the feeling of detachment. 
This is to a large extent caused by difficulties with dealing with and understanding the large information flow. 
Specifically, I have two things in mind. 
First, TV-programmes are often focused on the most dramatic events. 
News and issues are chosen from a whole country or maybe the whole world, which means that there are always a lot of dramatic news and issues available. 
Second, TV-programmes are often focused on bad or negative things. 
This might lead us to some incorrect conclusions. 
First, our own lives might seem pointless if we relate them to everything that goes on in the world. 
Second, we might think that the world in a much worse condition than it actually is. 
As an example, most people have seen strong live transmissions about famine in a few African countries, but I don't think so many people know about the greatly improved standard of living in most other African countries. 
The overall wrong conclusion would be that everything is just getting worse, and that there is nothing you can do about it.  
I have only made a small number of reflections, so there is not much to sum up. 
However, I think that the positive things with television outweigh the negative ones. 
We get a lot of important information from TV about society, even though we might miss much of importance and we do not always understand what we see. 
One can ask what we would do without television - to what extent we would read or listen to the radio instead and to what extent we would do other things. 
I guess that we would end up less informed than we are today, if not other media such as Internet took over. 
It's also possible to do something about the problems we have with television today. 
One thing that I believe is important is that people become more familiar with how news and issues are selected. 
Maybe there should be a TV-program about this. 
Another thing, that is not only a TV-matter, is that we must be able to see things in the right proportions. 
Human beings are not designed for being engaged in all the problems of the whole world - there is so much worth dying for that it would be impossible to live.
",False
" The distribution revolution  A burning issue in the world of music distribution today is the existence and usage of the computer program Napster. 
With the help of this program it is possible to share music files with other users of the program. 
The company behind Napster provides a database in which the users can search for what they want to download. 
The download itself is preformed only between two ordinary computers connected to the Internet. 
As the music is shared between private computers it's hard to control if the copyright of the music is violated. 
This is where the record companies come in. 
They don't like the fact that their music is freely available on the Internet without their control. 
To protect their interests several record companies has filed a lawsuit against Napster in order to get the service stopped. 
It has not been stopped yet but Napster is probably going to get stopped in the near future. 
I don't think the record companies are doing exactly the right thing. 
I think that record companies should collaborate with Napster and use their technology as a new way to distribute music. y main argument for that the record companies should use this new technology is that it's impossible to stop this development with music sharing on the Internet. 
The Napster community has today about 51 million registered users and if it's suddenly stopped it will result in a huge demand for something to replace it. 
Programs with almost the same functionality as Napster already exist and it probably wouldn't take long before Napster would be fully replaced. 
Because of the reason that I just mentioned it's better to cooperate with Napster than just to stop it. 
I'm not saying that the illegal copying of copyright protected music is going to end but this is a very good opportunity for the music industry to reduce it and at the same time make profit form it. 
As Napster is such a widely spread program it makes it a good foundation for use as a new distribution channel. 
Napster would naturally have to be transformed into a membership-based community where the members either pays a membership fee or pay for the music that they download. 
Another side of the issue is the users, which I haven't mentioned yet. 
They will be forced to pay for something that previously has been free of charge. 
Naturally quite a lot of the users will stop using the service, but the ones who are willing to pay will see that it's not only a bad thing that they have to pay. 
If the users are forced to pay I think it's the record companies responsibility to make all their music available on the service. 
Then the users would have a much bigger selection of music that always would be available for download. 
In addition to that the sound quality of the music would be better as the only one who would publish music on the service would be the record companies which has access to better equipment than an ordinary home user. 
The scenario that I have pictured is actually beginning to happen. 
The big German media conglomerate Bertelsmann, of which a main part is the big BMG record company, has signed an agreement with Napster. 
This agreement is aiming towards a membership based community just as the one I have been discussing, but how this is going to be designed has not yet been decided. 
If this agreement becomes a success then Bertelsmann will drop the lawsuit that they currently have against Napster. 
I hope that all the other record companies will follow Bertelsmann's example and join them and Napster to create a community where all music is available for download. 
This would in the beginning only be a complement to how music is distributed today, but I believe that it's one step forward towards a different way to distribute music in the future.
","y favourite subject in school has always been English and I think that you can learn a lot of English during school, especially if you're interested in it. 
Partly because of my interest in English I went to London to work as an au-pair for half a year after I had graduated from high-school. 
This was in many ways a very useful experience. 
I have as I said, always enjoyed the English language but there are always things that you can improve and I think I learned a lot from my stay in London. 
Still, there are things I feel better at and things I'm worse at. 
When it comes to reading, writing, listening and speaking English I sure have weaknesses in all of these skills, but also strengths. 
Because of my stay in London I'm quite used to listening to English. 
After all, it is kind of hard avoiding it when you are living in an English speaking country. 
You talk to people, watch television, in fact you're surrounded by the language all the time. 
After a while you even begin to dream in English! 
I feel that there is no problem when it comes to listening to and understanding English. 
Not only have I practised it in London as well as in school, but the English language is everywhere also in Sweden. 
We watch a lot of English television programs, listen a lot to English music and so forth. 
Though I have to admit that I can find it really hard to understand people who talk Scottish or Irish. 
Especially if their accent is very distinct and if they are talking fast.  
Last year I studied Psychology here in Uppsala. 
All the literature was in English and it was hard in the beginning but after a while I got in to it and now it feels natural. 
The good thing about reading is that if you don't know what a specific word means, the context can help you understand it or otherwise you can always look it up in a dictionary. 
Things are always easier and more enjoyable if you're interseted in it and I have always enjoyed reading. 
When I was younger I lived in a very small village far away from my friends so you can say that books were my best-friends. 
It may sound horrible but I didn't suffer from it. 
I find it no problem reading English novels but nonfiction which sometimes consists of very technical language can be difficult to understand. 
If there are a lot of hard words it takes a long time to read the text and it's easy to become frustrated.   
Assessing my own abilities when it comes to speaking English I find rather difficult. 
You're usually not aware of the mistakes you're making when speaking. 
When I went to England I thought I was rather good at English, but I soon realised that I had so much to learn. 
A lot of people said I was very good at speaking English, as they say to most Swedish people but children are honest and the children I was taking care of pointed out all the mistakes I made when talking and there were a few... 
My problems consisted mainly of pronunciation mistakes I hadn't thought of before like the difference between how you say niece and knees. 
I think I have required a fairly good British accent now, but I know that there are many things still to learn. 
Things I have noticed now during our pronunciation classes for example. 
The thing about speaking English though, is that it is such tremendous fun! 
I prefer British English and love the sound of it. 
It's a beautiful language and there are so many good expressions in English that you can't find in Swedish.   
Writing is the one part of the English language I feel least experienced in. 
I have a pen-friend in Canada since eight years back so I'm used to expressing myself in English but I'm not at all used to writing essays and reports. 
Of course we did some writing during English classes in school, but not a lot. 
I have however always written a lot in Swedish so at least I'm not all that unfamiliar with the concept of writing. 
However I feel that these writing classes will be a good complement to my English knowledge and I'm looking forward to it. 
In fact I think the whole term will be useful learning, otherwise I wouldn't be here!
",False
"This assignment, to write about and evaluate my English, I find very difficult and very different from anything I have ever done before. 
Now I really have to think about what it is in the English language that makes it so hard, but yet so interesting. 
I have thought a lot about it, but I can't come to any conclusion. 
Though, I will try to explain to you how I feel about my English (not the English language in general), and which my strengths and weaknesses are. 
The English I have been learning over the years can be divided into four units; listening, speaking, reading and writing. 
I begin by telling you about listening.   
I like listening to English. 
It is a beautiful language, with many different dialects. 
Most of the listening I have done watching television or listening to music. 
I think all songs are better when the lyrics are in English, than in any other language. 
That is because English is such a flowing, gentle language without any strange sounds. 
I think that listening and understanding the spoken word is my best skill in English, that is of course because listening is what I have done most. 
Of course there is a difference between the English that you hear in an English-class, the English they speak on soap-operas, English-lyrics and serious programs on for example the CNN. 
The English you hear in class is often adjusted to the purpose. 
In the soap-operas and song-lyrics they often use slang and special expressions that all kids in Sweden recognize because a lot of these words or expressions almost have been adapted to our language. 
The most difficult English (and probably the most correct) you hear when you watch newsprograms or serious debateprograms on the English-speaking channels, like CNN. 
There they use a lot of terminology, that can be difficult to understand. 
But most important I think is that you understand the mening in general of what's being said, and I'm quite sure I do that in every situation. y experience of speaking English is nothing compared to my listening-experience. 
I haven't been abroad in an English-speaking country for more than a week, unlike most of my fellow students in the English-class. 
They seem to have been abroad for at least a year, all of them. 
I am impressed with how ""un-Swedish"" they sound. 
I feel like my very Swedish accent is one of my weaknesses. 
Most difficult I think it is when I don't know what to say, for example when someone asks a question, and I am supposed to answer it fast and in correct English.  
It's easier to get it right and to get a better pronunciation, when I know what I'm talking about and when I have a lot to say, then the words just pop out of my mouth and it probably sounds almost like I have lived in an English-speaking country.  
In school we didn't get the chance to speak a lot and the only real-life experience I've had is ordering food in restaurants on holidays abroad. y experience of reading is limited to the reading we had to do in school. 
I like to read books in Swedish and I often do, but reading in English requires much more work and too much time. 
If I have choice, I always read the book in Swedish. 
That's a weakness.  
When I read in English I always get irritated because I don't understand all the words, and I lose much of the thrill and pleasure of reading when I have to look up each and every word in a dictionary.  
I have got the exact same feeling when I'm writing. 
When I have found something to write about I get excited and just want to get it out, I don't want the extra time of looking things up in grammar-books or dictionaries. 
But unfortunately I have to, to get it right.  
Though, I like writing, both in English and Swedish, and that is something we did do a lot in school. 
Unfortunately I haven't got the time to write as much as I want in my spare time, but in my younger years I wrote a lot of poems and some song-lyrics in English. 
I'm good at writing in Swedish, it's easy because I write almost the same as I speak, but in English it's not that easy. 
When I write a sentence that feels a little strange I always think; ""is that how I would say it?"" 
or "" is that what they would say on TV?"", and often I come to the conclusion that it is, but then I always seem to have some vague memory in the back of my head, about some grammar-rule that says that it is supposed to be in some other way. 
I get insecure, and it's driving me nuts! 
There you have another weakness. 
But as I said I do like to write in English, I like to speak English (as long as I don't make a fool of myself), I really like listening to English and I like reading English (even if I enjoy books more if I read them in Swedish). 
It's the satisfaction of understanding an be able to express myself in an other language that I think is the thrill of English. 
This satisfaction and the fact that I really want to learn English I think are my greatest strengths.
"," English, My English!  
This is the story about my English. 
It will take you all the way from an English class in Sweden to a hamburger restaurant in Scotland, the road to the English language, in my heart.   
After eight years of English studies I should be quite good I think but the reality is different. 
I was always good during English class but I never had the chance to try my skill in real life until this summer. 
My friend and I took off to London in a big plane and landed safe on Heathrow. 
I hardly opened my mouth during the first hours because I didn't know what to say. 
As the day went by I realized that I had nothing to lose, so I started talking. 
Not as much as my friend but no one we met did. 
I didn't understand everything they said but they didn't understand my Swedish so I didn't really mind. 
We travelled a lot by train and we met these nice people all the time. 
They liked to hear our oppinion about the country and we liked to practice our English. 
The accent makes big differences in how much I understand. 
In Scotland for example, it was really hard to understand, especially when they spoke fast. 
I couldn't even order a hamburger without problems! 
The Wales accent was easier because sometimes they had a hard time with the English language too, since many people mostly speak their own language (Welsh).  
But I must say that it's not too hard to understand English by listening and it's getting better all the time. 
Television is big help I must say. 
Even if you read the Swedish translation you always listen to the voices too, to see how bad they translated. 
It's kind of fun.  
Problem number one when I speak English is my vocabulary. 
It's too small. 
Mostly I can find other words to use but I can't always discuss everything I want. 
Problem number two is that my tongue sometimes makes a big knot out of itself and I can't speak at all. 
Not even in Swedish. 
Something is a trouble word and I often happen to say thomething. 
I think it's easier to speak English in England than in Sweden because you hear it all the time and it goes into your blood, you start to think in English. 
Back home when someone speaks, it's not always pronounced correctly and then you fall into bad habits. 
Sad but true.  
Reading in English is a lot of fun I think and I always understand more than I thought I would. 
Sometimes it doesn't matter if the book is boring. 
It can become a good one just because you understand so much of what you read. 
It often helps to read a text twice if you don't understand it. 
There are always some words that you get the second time, and there are always dictionaries to help you. 
It's difficult though to read about something you don't understand even in your own language. 
A subject you're not familiar with. 
Then you won't even notice if you miss one or two pages.  
Writing in English should be easy if you only have a dictionary beside you but it isn't. 
You need to ""feel"" the language and be able to write correct sentences. 
I'm both good and bad at writing, it depends on what I'm writing about. 
It's always easy with something you like and everybody has their good and bad days. 
Too bad the good days mostly are when you're sitting at home and just write for fun and nobody gets to read it. 
But that's life.  
The conclution of all this is that I'm not very good at English in any way but I manage pretty well I think. 
I can read a book and explain to you what it's all about, I can watch a tv show and understand what they say, I can write an essay in, hopefully, 700 words about the English language in my life and I can make a conversation with someone in an English speaking country, I hope. 
So I'm kind of happy with that.
",False
" English, My English!  
Since I first came in contact with the English language, when I was six years old, I have always enjoyed having to do with it. 
My preschool-teacher was originally from the USA and she taught us children American nursery rhymes. 
I have always liked listening to English, in songs, stories being told or just general speech. 
Even though English is not an official language in Sweden we Swedes hear it every day, on the news, in music and movies etc. 
Considering this, we practice our knowledge in the language almost every day, but we might not be aware of it. 
Sometimes watching an English- speaking soap-opera can increase ones vocabulary as much as reading an English novel and at the same time teach pronunciation. 
You can say a language consists of four parts, listening, reading, speaking and writing. 
All these parts are integrated and when you make improvements on one of the parts it is noticeable in the other areas as well. 
Working on weaknesses where it is needed the overall impression will be strengthened.  
For me learning English started with listening. 
Today I mange pretty well in most situations where I listen to instructions, directions etc, as long as the speaker does not talk too fast or use a too specified vocabulary (like in a discussion about engine parts or the anatomy of a dinosaur). 
Having spent one year in the USA I have made progress in understanding varieties and different dialects in English, even colloquial differences. 
One mistake I make sometimes is that I am sure I understand something, but later I discover that I had misunderstood the whole idea - fortunately it does not happen very often. 
I think it is fun to listen to people speaking English and to try to figure out from where they are or where they have picked up their accent. 
I practice listening by watching English speaking movies and TV shows and avoiding reading the subtitles. 
By doing this I learn new words and idioms, which I later can use, for example, in my writing. 
To write has never been my strongest side, even though I don't mind putting thoughts into words on paper. 
One of my problems is that I almost always write the way I speak and by doing that it is easy to get stuck in a certain jargon that might not suit the assignment. 
I never hesitate to look up words in dictionaries and thesauruses. 
The fact that I read quite a lot helps to make improvements in this matter. 
To pick up different varieties of wording I try to read everything written in English I get my hands on, novels, newspapers, the back of cereal-boxes etc. 
Reading gives more time for exact understanding than listening, I think. 
When I read I have time to go back and re-read and to look up things I don't understand and ask questions about what I read. 
I am not too fond of analyzing texts, but I can work my way through almost everything with the help of a dictionary. 
I don't give up even when the task at first seems impossible. 
I think it is fun to explore the small differences between words, why some words can be used in a certain situation and others can't. 
The ultimate goal of learning a language must be being able to speak it - correctly. 
The reason I think so is it is a way of expressing opinions and beliefs in a more direct way than writing. 
When I write I can always go back and make corrections, but in speech what has been said has been said, there is no turning back. 
I often get frustrated when I can't find the right word or expression for something I want to say and I don't have the time to look it up. 
When it happens I can either get totally stuck and have to start all over again or take a long way around that particular word I can't find in my memory and still make my point. 
I don't hesitate to take longer time or use more words than necessary as long as the person I talk to understands and won't get lost somewhere in my babbling. 
English is a pretty language. 
I want to improve my language skills in all areas and I think that is my biggest strength. 
My biggest weakness is that I sometimes don't take the time to make the proper improvements - I want to learn as much as possible in as little time as possible. 
I know from experience that I make the best betterments by making mistakes.
"," English, My English!  
I feel so fortunate to have a second language. 
Having English as my second language I can be understood by billions of people throughout the world. 
I can understand people whose daily life and culture are very unfamiliar to me, and through English can be my closest friends. 
What a feeling! 
In the Spring of 1998, I was granted a scholarship to study at an American university. 
I studied photography, French, and Spanish, but I also took the opportunity to take English courses at different levels.  
Reading books in English was rather new to me before I left Sweden for America. 
Of course, I had struggled through Conrad's ""Heart of Darkness"" and other compulsory novels to read in upper secondary school, but I couldn't really enjoy a novel, or get the feeling of it, as I always fell into, what I would like to call it, the look-up-words-addiction. 
Spending half an hour reading one page in a paper back, looking up every single word I didn't get a satisfactory grasp of, I easily got tired of reading. 
Once I realised I didn't have to look up all words I didn't comprehend to get the context of the novel, I began to read with pleasure.  	
Reading and listening are two totally different components of a language. 
A word can sound so different from what you've seen it spelled in books. 
Leaving for America I was rather confident in listening at British and American English, that is the standard versions. 
I knew before arriving at Savannah Airport that Savannians tend to have a southern drawl. 
Everything seemed to go smoothly until that day when I tried to get access to my e-mail account at my school's computer laboratory. 
I had to ask an assistant for help. 
He told me to type in the password ""pine"". 
But that man did not pronounce pine as I would. 
I looked at him, put my fingers on the keyboard and typed p-a-a-n. 
He said, ""NO, NO, listen to me, PINE!""  
Once again he did the southern drawl with a noticeable impatience in his voice. 
My fingers started trembling as I typed p-a-n. 
""Oh, no"", he said, gave me an indication to remove my hands from the key board, and typed p-i-n-e. 
""Ya know, the tree!?!"" 
""Oh, you mean pine!"", I exclaimed triumphant. 
He mumbled ""Yeah"" and walked away. 
I could read his mind thinking ""those stupid foreigners"". 
As I've always imitated people, I truly enjoy listening to different dialects and accents. 
Walking through a market place in London, hearing men shouting in true Cockney-English or listening as two black women are having a violent discussion in Ebonics really makes my day.  	
As my listening skills are rather good, my writing skills are not as developed. 
Only writing one, two-page essay per year in upper secondary school, I never got enough training to enhance my ability to write good essays and papers. 
The previous year, I got to improve my writing skills through writing papers on current issues, such as affirmative action. 
Planning to write the essay one week in advance to make sure that I will have time to revise it once or twice, I often end up writing it the night before it is due, and typing it in the morning.  	
Well, sometimes you just can't postpone things. 
That is true when you're in a play. 
December 2 1998, it was time for me and my co-star to step out on the stage for our opening night. 
I did my first attempt to act in English. 
It was a one-act play called ""Ariel Bright"". 
(Ariel was the name of the leading role, and I was to interpret it). 
I spend many hours memorising lines and trying to get the right intonations at the right places. 
It wasn't an easy game, but I did good. 
Since I often forget to articulate as I speak (even in Swedish), I had to work on that. 
Even after the play I reminded myself to articulate and it gave results. 
I didn't have to repeat myself as often as I usually did. 
Spending my daily life in America I naturally learned to take part in relaxed conversations in English. 
That way I learnt new idiomatic expressions and words that I wouldn't be taught in school for various reasons. 
Only after a few days of living in America I started to think, dream, and react in English. 
If I suddenly got surprised a Swedish ""AH!"" 
didn't come out of my mouth, rather a HOLY COW!""  	
Though I think it is very important to keep one's native language closest to heart, (as culture and childhood memories are connected to language), I still want to become as fluent in English as I am in Swedish. 
That is my goal.
",False
"At the age of 20, I now look back at my English studies and it seems unreal that ten years have gone by since I was in the 4th grade, which was my first year of English. 
I can still remember how we sang ""John Brown"" and practiced the colors by writing a book. 
Everybody also had to choose a name from an English speaking country. 
Most of my classmates had a name from the American soap opera ""Dallas"", such as Pamela, Bobby, and Jenna. 
I was called Patricia, a name, which my mom came up with. 
These are my first memories from studying English. 
In elementary school, English was more a game than a subject and I loved it. 
In middle school I started with German and I felt that my English was neglected, which really worried me. 
German was hard but very logical and I knew and understood the grammar. 
I could tell the German prepositions in my sleep, whereas I did not know anything about the English prepositions. 
After middle school I began to dream of a school year abroad. 
I made up my mind as I started high school, not only because I was worried about my English skills, but also because I longed for adventure. 
Thanks to my parents this dream became true in 1996. 
After my second year of high school I left for Indiana, U.S.A. 
My question for this paper is: what have I learned during these ten years of studying English? 
Which are my strengths and weaknesses in the four skills of listening, reading, speaking, and writing?  
As a result of my school year in the U.S. my ears have become very familiar with the sound of the English language at an everyday level, especially American English. 
My time abroad forced me to really listen and pay attention to what people said. 
Since everything was in English I learned just by living there. 
I do not have a problem understanding spoken English at an everyday level, but I am very aware of the differences in levels and I know that I still have a long way to go.  
When it comes to reading the school in Sweden spent quite some time on that, at least at the high school level. 
Studying in the U.S.A. 
I also had to do a lot of reading, which I sometimes found difficult, especially in classes such as government and economics, since there were so many terms that I was not familiar with. 
I do fine reading novels and I have learned to use the context when there are words that I do not know. 
I enjoy reading novels in English, but I find it harder to understand shorter texts. 
Perhaps I need more information to really get it. 
A time limit stresses me and I tend to read too fast; that is probably why I have a problem with short stories, and I never did as good as I wanted to on reading and comprehension tests in high school.  
Due to my time in the U.S.A. with the Americans my spoken English developed tremendously. 
I did not realize how much my school English had changed until my sisters came to see me; I had then been in the U.S.A. for one semester. 
Listening to their English I understood that my English had been given an American touch. 
I learned to use new words and speak although I was not sure that it was correct. 
I came to the point where I allowed myself to make mistakes and I let people laugh at me. 
Sometimes my tongue really got twisted and I said the craziest things, yet my mistakes taught me more than I would ever have learned if I had been quiet. 
Speaking English sometimes makes me nervous, and in a strange way I feel more relaxed speaking English with, or in front of, English native speakers than I do with my countrymen.  
Writing is the skill in which I have not had very much practice, not even in the U.S.A. since the tests were always made up of matching or multiple choice questions. 
My third, and last, year of high school in Sweden I took a class called ""English C"" and there we actually practiced writing. 
We wrote formal letters, personal notes, leaflets, and book reviews. 
I get a lot of practice by my own since I have so many friends in the U.S.A. to whom I frequently write letters and e-mail messages. 
A big problem that I have when I write is that I neither feel comfortable with my spelling, nor my grammar. 
In other words: I really need more writing exercises.  
Finally, I want to point out that I have learned a lot during these ten years but still ten years is a long time and I feel that I could have learned more than I did. 
My year in the U.S.A. has given my English an American touch and it also gave me the willingness to study English at the university. 
I can listen, read, speak, and write English at an everyday level. 
I can survive and live a normal life in an English speaking country. 
However, I want more that that and I know that the way is long!
"," NUCLEAR POWER vs. 
NATURAL SOURCES OF POWER.  
The ongoing debate, on nuclear power vs. natural sources of power has never been such a burning issue as today. 
This question concerns all of us and it is our responsibility to raise people's awareness of this topic. 
Is nuclear power really the only and the safest way to get power (electricity) to the homes and industries of Sweden? 
Should we, in the 21th century rely on such an insecure source of power? 
Are we ready to risk our children's life getting electricity? 
Are the Swedish nuclear power stations really as secure as we are told? 
While presenting the pros and cons of different sources of power, I will state my side in the debate and try to answer these burning questions. 
In this essay I will argue against the use of nuclear power, in all-current methods of using. 
It might have been the best alternative at the time it was introduced, and voted for, but today we have developed more modern and environment-friendly ways of providing for Sweden's, and other countries, need for electricity.  	 
We are told that nuclear power is the most safe, cheap and reliable way of keeping Sweden running. 
But is it really so? 
If you see to the side effects, nuclear power is very much a defective source of power. 
First of all, nuclear fission in itself is a very insecure and inadequate method of gaining power (electricity); every single fission is indeed an uncontrolled explosion. 
For example, a computer programmer agency got commissioned to investigate the weaknesses of the safety system at a nuclear power station in Sweden and after some research they came up with some five-hundred different situations were the safety system would be inadequate and brake down. 
Secondly, there is the contaminated nuclear waste to take care of and store for hundreds of years in the bedrock. 
Everything that has contact with the toxic waste must be stored and kept safe form leakage. 
The thought of what could happen if the toxic waste got into our ground water or spread in the nature is disastrous, not to mention that the staff working with nuclear waste is at constant risk of nuclear radiation, which is a source of diseases and health problems. 
Finally, the economic issue is indeed important, and the price of electricity needs to be questioned. 
Nuclear power is a very expensive way of getting power; nuclear power stations are expensive to built, the Uranium that is most commonly used for nuclear fission is expensive, and you can only use it once. 
A way of financing this expensive source of power could be for Sweden to raise the price for electricity, as we are one of, not to say the, cheapest country for electric support. 
With a way of choosing the source from which the electricity to your home came, it is likely that many Swedes would be ready to pay a little more (that means a little more than 0.20-0.50kr/kWh) to be able to dismantle some nuclear power stations. 
I would, that's for sure, and I'm sure many with me.  	 
However, rather than raising electricity prices, an important step would be to investigate our need for electricity. 
If every sixth Swede turned off one lamp in every room he/she did not use at the moment, we could be able to shut down two of four nuclear reactors at Oskarshamn nuclear power station. 
The consumers' money could then be used to build up alternative power stations. 
For as the situation is today, Sweden is not ready to just shut down the nuclear power stations. 
Our alternatives are not good enough yet. 
The time of transmission will probably take many years, but the sooner we begin, the sooner we can turn to a totally changed system. 	 
Besides considering saving electricity, we need to develop alternative energy sources. 
Natural sources of power like wind, water and sun, are good alternatives. 
At first, water power does to some extent disturb the natural balance of a river, but it can naturally never be compared with the destruction that might be caused by nuclear power. 
The supply of hydroelectric power depends on the annual precipitation - rain or snow, and to be depending on the capricious weather is always a risk, and therefor an argument against the use of hydro power. 
But it is time introduce the best part of nature power recourses; they are all a complement to each other. 
That is to say, you need rain to get electricity from water power, but when it doesn't rain, it will, probably and hopefully, be sunshine, which means that we can gain power (and electricity) from the sun, which is indeed an inexhaustible source of power. 
To just rely on sun power is nothing that we should consider in Sweden, because of the cold and mostly rainy summers, but as a complement, it is both environmentally friendly and costly effective. 
Wind power is also an inexhaustible source of power.  	 
A common argument against the introduction of wind power is that the tall pylons destroy the landscape, but we have to ask ourselves if not that is a reasonable price compared to the shape and condition the landscape would be in if there were a nuclear power station brake down. 
Moreover, none of those natural sources of power; water, sun and wind, is one by one an alternative to nuclear power, but if we complemented, and developed, all those three together, would more or less cover the energy that we today gain from nuclear power.   
To sum up, while we cannot just dismantle all the nuclear reactors at once, we have to gradually decrease the use of nuclear energy. 
We have to be ready to work and pay for a future without nuclear power stations, even if the work just might be turning off lamps, TV sets, and toasters, knowing that the extra money saved is for building an alternative power future.
",False
"I think I am quite fluent in English. 
If a conversation is going on, the fact that that is the language in which it is being held certainly does not keep me from entering it - regardless whether it's a large number of people in the discussion or only a few. 
Nor does it impose any serious restrictions on what nuances I can express, even though of course I am not as exact in them as when I use my maternal language. 
What does bother me, though, is my accent. 
All too often I hear myself sounding like a ""Swedish politician"", which is not exactly my idea of the perfect accent. 
Especially when I give speeches (which, by the way, makes me very nervous, but that does not have very much to do with my English, as I have the same problem using Swedish), this detestable accent creeps up. 
Definitely something to work on during the self-labs...  
Writing, naturally, does not bring this problem of accent, but here instead I get the related problem of style. 
As you already may have noticed, I tend to get a bit verbose, and mix different levels of formality - faults not too uncommon, I guess. 
This shows when I try to write formal letters and realize that I have used far too informal language. 
Generally, both in speaking and writing, I often mix British and American ways of expression, which is something I would like to avoid as far as possible, or at least avoid mixing distinctively American and British phrases. 
In writing, as well as anywhere else, I would like to extend my vocabulary, make it more varied yet still natural.  
Reading, on the other hand, I do quite badly. 
Not only do I read English at merely half my ""normal"" speed, but worse is that I do not penetrate the text as deeply as I do with Swedish. 
This probably has to do with my relatively small practise of reading fiction in English, and will hopefully be a lot better after this term. 
Fortunately this does not mean I don't understand what the text says, but rather that I don't see what is going on below the surface in the same way as I do with Swedish texts. 
Not that I haven't read much of English text, but most of the reading I do is actually non-fiction, which doesn't require any deeper penetration of the text and it's style.  
And finally, let's say something about my listening abilities. 
As a matter of fact, the only native English-speaking environment I have visited, is south Wales, where I stayed in a family for a couple of weeks. 
Their accent is not the most clear and easiest to understand, I think you can agree with me on that. 
Thus I didn't understand a word of what they said when they were talking to each other, though when they wanted me to understand they let go of all that Welsh they mixed into their English, and suddenly understanding was as easy as anything! 
It's a pity I don't understand odd accents, but when does one even get to hear them? 
But since this is my only experience of an English-speaking society, nearly all my ""live"" experience of spoken English comes from communicating with non-native speakers, or teachers at school (I went to the Stockholm Secondary School of Music, which also gives International Baccalaureates and has programmes taught in English, though I took all subjects in Swedish, except for mathematics). 
But what I really like listening to, is BBC Radio. 
Here one can find accents and voices worth listening to, just for the sake of themselves!  
Well, I think this was all I wanted to say about my English, give or take half of the text. 
I hope it shows at least soemthing about where my strengths and weaknesses are, and what of them I see as most interesting to improve. 
Though what I wanted to say may be covered in a great deal of drivel.
"," Girls and boys in separate classes?  
During the last couple of years there have been discussions concerning separate classes for boys and girls in junior high school. 
This means that there would be one class for girls and one class for boys at each level. 
Despite this separation they will work according to the same curriculum and have the same subjects. 
Is this a good or a bad idea? 
Will this give them a true picture of what today's society look like? 
I believe that separate classes take away many important things from the students. 	
One of these things is different experiences and with that I mean different ways of looking at things. 
Boys and girls have various experiences due to the way they have been brought up and the way they have been treated by the people around them. 
Some children have good memories and some have bad memories but the thing is that the memories, or experiences, are not the same.  	
Why is this so important then? 
Well, I believe that this divergence gives the lessons a bit of nuance. 
Boys and girls can contribute with their own views and thoughts, their own peculiarities. 
The teacher can use these differences during the lessons as examples or maybe as a good basis in a class discussion where the students learn that there are differences between boys and girls but they also learn that they are all equally important in the classroom and also in our society.  	
For many years we have been striving for an equal society and we are on our way towards this goal. 
To join in on this journey you have to be able to co-operate with both males and females without any prejudice. 
Do you think this is possible if you have been attending a school in which boys and girls are separated thus taking away your chances to learn how to function in a situation which requires that kind of social competence? 
I would not think so.  	
I think that a school like this teaches the students that it is right to separate girls from boys, that there are differences between the sexes in the way they learn things. 
Maybe the students get the idea that, for example, boys are better than girls, that this is the reason why they are separated. 
Thoughts like these would only take us back in time and not forward towards the equal society that we are working so hard to achieve.  	
So why do some people advocate for this separation? 
They say that there are a lot of advantages with this kind of class. 
We all know that boys and girls are not the same. 
There is no point in denying that. 
The spokesman for this type of school says that the students are given more time to develop and find themselves. 
The boys do not have to ""show off"" in front of the girls. 
Instead they can put all of their time and effort into the schoolwork. 
The girls are also looked upon as winners in this system. 
They do not have to compete with the boys for the teacher's attention and they are given more room.  	
What I have to say about the arguments for this kind of school is that I do not believe all of them. 
You develop into one person in the all-girls class and then, when you go out into the society, you have to change into another person who can work with both sexes. 
And who says that a little competition between boys and girls is bad? 
I believe that competition is necessary for everyone in order to turn them into strong human beings.  	
If I were to give my opinion today on this question about separate classes for boys and girls at junior high school I would be against it. 
I feel that mixed classes have more to offer and teach students. 
They give them the opportunity to learn how to co-operate with people of the opposite sex. 
There is also a competition in the mixed classes that encourages students to develop and improve themselves and that is what school is all about, I believe.
",False
" My life, my choice  It is forbidden in Swedish law for doctors as well as other people to end a patient's life by purpose. 
What the patient feels is apparently not important. 
If someone helps a patient to die he is guilty of manslaughter. 
It makes no difference if the patient is suffering and wants to die. 
There is no such thing as ""mercy killing"" in Swedish law. 	
In this case even pets get better and a more human treatment. 
If your pet picks up a disease that is impossible or still difficult to cure, you bring him to the vet to give him a shot so the pet falls asleep. 
It makes me start thinking, why cannot we have the possibility to decide what to do with our own lives. 	
Many people are lying motionless in beds in our hospitals every day, where they are kept alive by machines. 
Don't you think it is right that a person in that situation, a person who only is waiting to die, should have the opportunity to ask his doctor for a lethal injection? 
I think the answer is obvious. 
Who would like to lay there just waiting? 
If I see myself in this position, I would not be able to think about anything else then the fact that death actually came closer every day. 
There would be too many things reminding me all the time, when the relatives come to visit with tears in their eyes looking extremely sad. 
I reckon that a human being who does not feel as if he has no purpose left in life and does not have any dignity left would be able to take his life, with some help by the doctor. 
Note that no one but the patient should be able to decide such a ting. 
No relative or close friend shall make the decision.  	
In our society suicide is not accepted, it is immoral. 
That is one of the reasons that some people are against euthanasia, but I do not think one can compare euthanasia and suicide in a fair way, it is two separate things. 
I see it as a natural thing to help shortening a painful life in bed.	 	
Religious people are often against euthanasia. 
They claim that life is something God gave us and he is the one who is going to take it back when it is time. 
But in my opinion that does not make sense. 
I mean, if God decides when to end my life he has not really given it to me, just lent it. 
If I receive a gift from someone, I decide what to do with it and if I borrow something from someone may I not say thank you and return it whenever I want to? 	
The persons who are in the situation where euthanasia is needed are often not able to commit suicide on their own. 
(In practical terms) By this I do not mean that only those persons should have the rights to do this. 
Everyone who has some kind of incurable disease where the treatment is incredible painful should have the right to decide what to do with his life. 
Cancer, AIDS or any other lethal disease, it makes no difference.  	
Because of the prohibition of euthanasia, the patients still get drugged but not by the purpose to help them die, even though the doctors are aware that it could lead to that. 
All that sneaking to avoid the rules could be stopped if we changed the law and active euthanasia possible to choose. 
Make the active euthanasia legal to make the dying people less suffering!
"," English, My English!  
Introduction: I must say that I am a little confused, having to evaluate my own English. 
There have been times when I have been (according to myself, that is) very good at it, speaking and writing mostly. 
And other times when my self confidence has been very bad. 
Nowadays I see myself somewhere in between extremely good and not so good at all. 
There are, in English, things I enjoy more though, thus I am better at it. y knowledge of English dates back to when I was six-seven years old and learned how to count to ten in English. 
Very soon I advanced to counting to one hundred, and eventually, my interest for the language increased.   
Result: I will structure my work in the way the task was given; comparing skills of reading, writing, speaking and listening. 
I will also write about the relation between enjoying something and being good at it. 
Roughly, I can divide the four areas into Reading and Listening as one thing and Writing and Speaking as another. 
This division is made only after what I find fun within a language, and what I don't. 
Writing: Usually, I am quite an impatient person. 
There are exceptions though. 
Like writing for ex. 
When I write, it can be essays, letters, made up stories or what ever, I go so much into it that I almost forget about time. 
I suddenly change from being a person with no patience at all, to this very ambitious writer, eager to learn more. 
I look up new words in dictionaries to get synonyms of my old repeated vocabulary, I usually spend a lot of time working out sly and clever conclusions and I put down much work to make it appear as a fine piece of work written by someone very intelligent.  
A weakness in my writing is connected to reading. 
I simply don't read enough. 
My best essays have been ones that I have more or less figured out myself, with my common sense and logical reasoning. 
I just hate ploughing my way through some book even though it might be a great source for me to use. 
Anyway, I am getting better at that too. 
After I have realised that my writing could be so much better, I am trying my utmost to go through sources about a subject before writing my own ideas about it. 
Nevertheless, this essay ought to be a favourite task for me, since the only source I have is myself. 
Reading: As I mentioned above, I have a slight difficulty concentrating on a text for a longer time. 
Especially if I don't find anything of interest in the novel or article, or whatever it is, that I am reading. 
I can get so bored that my eyes just move and my brain is left to do whatever it fancies for the moment. 
It is not only the subject of a text that can bore me to death. 
Also, if I don't understand the words in a text I have difficulties to go on reading. 
Not understanding the vocabulary makes me feel ignorant and, more or less, left out. 
As if I was not supposed to be within the target group. 
Even though it might be silly, I feel a bit ashamed and actually insulted. 
In spite of this highly ""defensive"" attitude of mine I understand that it is self-evident not knowing all words in a language I was not even born speak. 
After just having read the 400 page book ""Nice Work"" by David Lodge I notice that I feel much more updated on my English. 
Without even noticing it, the language gets stuck in your brain.  
Reading is probably the most efficient way to get to know a language, as a first step, and then in combination with speaking, listening and writing.  
Speaking: To speak is one of my stronger sides in the matter of English. 
Mostly because it's fun, and it is used in many natural situation. 
When you go to a English speaking country, you need to know how to communicate, and speaking is the simplest way to do that.  
I find it fun in the same way as I enjoy writing. 
I myself is the one producing something, and I am allowed to experiment with my language. 
I can try new words and expressions and hopefully there will be some kind of feedback, that I can interpret and through that realise if I have said something wrongly and ought to keep my mouth shut, or if the listener actually bought what I had to say. 
If the latter is the fact, then I can go on using that certain word. 
When speaking, I pretty much talk over my own head. 
I use words that I am not even sure the meaning of. 
But I believe that that is my own way of improving my English, and I have no intention of starting to write and speak on levels that are below the one that I am actually on.  
Speaking and writing is fun because I am the one saying things, but it can also be of use when discussing and analyse information you have obtained by reading and listening. 
The area of speaking also includes pronunciation, and I can only say that I have never ever had any troubles with it. 
I guess that is something that you're born with, since I have no difficulties to pronounce French or imitate dialects.   
Listening:  The talent of listening is also quite related to ones interest of the subject. 
Again, if something appears not to be interesting to me, I might not even try to listen, and that makes it hard to be comprehensive about the context. 
But mostly, when I take part in a conversation, I understand the most of it. 
Then there is a clear difference in vocabulary used if two young people are chatting about nothing of greater importance, than if for ex. 
Tony Blair is giving a political speech. 
Then there might be many words that go beyond my understanding, but I can still, hopefully, understand the main issue. 
What can be even more difficult to understand than politics or ""business talk"" is a conversation between two native English people who use their own slang and a, for me, strange dialect. 
Concerning my studies here at the university, I have no problems in understanding what is said on lectures. 
Even though I guess that the language is being adjusted to an agreeable level.   
Conclusions: After being forced to evaluate my own English, I have found out the following: y strengths in English lie in the areas of speaking and writing. 
This is mostly because I enjoy it more, and therefor it is practised more frequently. 
I realise that when I try to fool others that my essays are good by using difficult words and as many ""new"" expressions possible, still trying to make the text credible, I am not fooling anyone else than myself. 
The thing is that the essays I try to make look good, actually must be good. 
When putting down so much work in trying to improve the text, vocabulary and content, I practice without really being aware of it. 
Since they are the main components in a text: content and language, there couldn't be so much more to it, right?
",False
"When I first got this assignment I got really confused. 
I have written quite a lot during my school years but I have never been asked to evaluate my own skills in English. 
You can ask why though, because when I come to think of it, it might be a good method to find out how to use your better skills when practising your poorer sides. 
I am fairly sure that in my case my different skills are linked with the amount of practise I have done in the different components of the language: writing, speaking, listening and reading, that is. 
But another factor to bare in mind is that we all are different individuals and that we also have different ability to use the same different areas of the English language.  
I shall start this evaluation with the part that I think I do the best, speaking. 
I am a very talkative person and if only I am with people I feel comfortable with speaking English is nothing that bothers me. 
Another reason for me speaking English relatively well is all practises doing that. 
I spent almost a year in London and even though I was an Au Pair with lots of other Swedes around me I tried to meet as many native speakers as possible. 
Unfortunately, the discussion most of the time was in an informal way and with people that did not have perfect grammar themselves. 
Most people did not judge me for my grammatical mistakes or the choice of words but for what I actually said. 
If fluency is what you want to accomplish that is probably the best way, but I hope that this course will make my grammar and vocabulary better, which would make my oral language better as well. 
You should always aim higher, but I am glad that I feel rather comfortable speaking, because in most situations I reckon that fluency and the wish to express your thoughts are worth more than speaking correctly. 
Another thing that I am pleased of is that the year gave me a British accent.   
I think that I am quite a good listener, in the meaning of understanding what people say when speaking English. 
Listening, to me, is connected to speaking. 
As much as I have practised speaking I must have practised listening. 
I understand British English better than I do American English. 
Having lived in a suburb with a great many people with an Indian origin I sometimes think I even understand that accent better than the American accent.   
Writing is absolutely the part of the use of English that I lack the most. 
Most of the English that I know I have learnt from television and from discussions and in neither of these I have seen all morphemes, phonemes and spelling that show me how the same discussion would look like when written. 
But another reason for me lacking confidence in writing could be that the language gets more explicit and that is why it feels like nothing comes out right. 
Most of the writing I do nowadays is by writing letters. 
Unfortunately, you do not get the very useful feedback. 
And as the people that I write to are my friends I do not feel obliged to write grammatically correct and in a formal way. 
One thing to bare in mind is that I feel about the same in writing in Swedish. 
I am just one of those people that find it easier to express myself in speech than in writing. 
By reading more books written in English I hope to gradually improve my writing skill.   
Now to the last part of this discussion, reading. 
Reading pure literature is one of my favourite interests, and I do not mind reading in English. 
Most of the time I understand the context and do not have to look up words. 
I know that my passive language is greater than my active language. 
My aim is to read a bit faster but I know the reason why I do not; I just love the English language which makes me spend time to pronounce words and think of the expressions that I just read. 
Hopefully, this will do me some good in the long run.   
I am glad I was given this assignment, because it gave me a chance to pinpoint my skills in the four components of the English language. 
Thinking of and knowing my strengths can make me more confidant, and the strengths are useful to be aware of, as I want to improve.
","This an essay about my experience from studying English at school and in my spare time. 
In my early school years I did not pay much attention to the English language. 
I can not remember very much from these lessons. 
Only at the Junior High School could I remember the lessons. 
It was not too fun with a lot of small tests every week. 
My grade was better these days as the English exams were not too hard.  
Occasionally, at the Senior High School we watched movies with the Swedish subtitles covered. 
Otherwise, the lessons were like those at Junior High School but a little more difficult. 
My teacher's pronunciation was a little bit bizarre though we understood what she said. 
She was a Swedish teacher of Spanish too and probably Spanish was her best language. 
For me, the English language did not belong to the most important subjects because I was more concerned about my maths, chemistry and other science tasks so I did not study the language too hard. 
In fact did I study German a lot harder because the teacher we had was a lot more inspiring than our English teacher. 
It is very important with a funny and inspiring teacher to learn a subject.   
Of the four skills: reading, speaking, writing and listening I would say that reading is the least difficult followed by listening and speaking. 
The most difficult is writing. 
When I was younger I played role-playing games, most of them written in English. 
I think, though, that most of my knowledge of English comes from English films and programmes on TV.   
Unfortunately, most programmes are subtitled in Swedish, but I listen a lot to what they are saying. 
Most of the music I listen to is from the US. 
Because I listen two or three hours a day I learn a few new words. 
Maybe not so proper English but anyway I have learned some words from the lyrics. 
My father was reading to me when I was a little boy and I learned some words from that.  
In my spare time I don't read many books as I'm a slow reader. 
I have to look up quite a few words in a dictionary as well. 
Now at the university most of our books are written in English. 
Even some books we read at ILU are in English and of course all our science books are in English too. 
The problem is that you only try to understand what the text is all about and not how the sentence is structured. 
You only pay attention to the contents and not to the form.   
I usually don't speak English, only when I am at a party with foreign students and maybe sometimes when my mother invites friends from African countries or from other parts of the world. 
When I speak English I can make myself understood but the grammar is perhaps not always excellent. 
I have been to a English language course for three weeks on the Isle of Wight but I was young and did not pay much attention to the lessons, only to the girls. 
When I were at my host family's house I spoke most of the time with my friend in Swedish instead of English. 
I think you had better live on your own so you have to speak English all the time. 
As you may see I need to train speaking a lot more.   y experience of writing is very limited. 
I don't have any pen friends so I have only written English texts at school. 
There were not so many essay writings during my time in school. 
Most of the time we wrote short sentences and not longer texts at all. 
So I am prepared to study to improve my English in every one of the four skills.
",False
" Should the US bomb Afghanistan?  
The historical events that took place at the World Trade Centre in New York and in Pentagon only a week ago are still very hard to grasp. 
Now feelings of hatred and anger are spreading through the democratic world, especially in the US. 
Many want revenge and retaliation and the guilty to be punished. 
The US really seems to be preparing for war and seemingly the majority of the people in the country are in favour, though attacking Afghanistan may show to be a huge risk. 
People are in anger and many think that what happened on September eleven is like a declaration of war on the US. 
It is comparable to the attack on Pearl Harbour that led the Americans to go to war in 1940. 
This time the free world is not facing an ordinary enemy, though. 
The enemy this time is not as well defined and is not only a specific country. 
First of all we have to question whether the US has enough proof to be able to attack Afghanistan. 
The US has declared war against all terrorism. 
This includes everyone involved in terrorism and every country that either supports or protects terrorists. 
Right now the main goals are Usama Bin Laden and the Taliban regime. 
We have to realise that the US forces are out to fight a limited number of devoted enemies. 
It is not like they are at war with the entire nation of Afghanistan. 
The US are on the hunt for the terrorist Usama bin Laden and his followers, presuming he is quilty of the terror attacks, even though no proof of him being responsible has actually been shown clearly to the world. 
They don't even know whether he is actually in Afghanistan or not, all though most facts points to that he is. 
The US has also declared war against the Taliban regime because they are not willing to hand out Usama bin Laden and his followers. 
The Taliban regime refuses to do that because the US hasn't given any proof that his organisation is actually responsible. 
The US needs more proof! 
We also have to consider the fact that an attack doesn't assure that the US troops will be able to catch Usama Bin Laden. 
If the US attacks Afghanistan it will probably cause the death of a huge amount of innocent people, people who oppose terrorism and who oppose the Taliban regime will die. 
This will lead to even more hatred against the US. 
People related to victims will always relate the US with killing their innocent relatives and will feel hatred towards them, which itself will create new terrorists and fanatics with the US as the main target. 
It will also lead to even more hatred among people who already oppose the US. 
In the political and religious environment that Afghanistan represent, major attacks will only give terrorists and fanatics such as Usama Bin Laden even more reasons to attack the US.  
Right now the American nation demands that the rest of the world supports them in their fight against terrorism. 
This also puts pressure on the USA. 
The American government can't expect the rest of the world to support their fight against terrorism if they do it by killing innocent people. 
It would be better to show the world that the US really wants a solution to the Palestine problem instead of, like up to now, basically only support the Israeli side. 	
The US should realise that fighting terrorism is not only about military action. 
It will demand politic changes which goals should be peace in the Middle East and other critic areas. 
Money should be spent on economical development instead of military aid. 
The US should also be more willing to cooperate with the United Nations, which is something the US has tended not to in the past. 
The eighteen suicide Muslims in the attacks of September eleven were probably not stupid guys, they were probably intelligent, devoted and highly motivated after own experiences of violence to their own families, relatives and nations. 
It is most likely that these eighteen persons were not the only ones planning this attack but only ""the point of the sword"". 
There are probably more of the likes to perform more terrorist attacks in the future if the US retaliates blindly and in anger. 
There is probably also a lot of money in the Muslim world willing to back up such terrorist actions in the future if the Muslim world is bombed. 
The thing to do instead, to keep the sympathy up for the US cause, would rather be to isolate the terrorists politically, like NATO and England now for the first time in 20 years are doing, negotiating with the former enemy Iran, who's politics only a few years ago regarded the US and Nato as Satan. 
The other thing of course would be to seriously put pressure on Israel to produce a solution to the Palestine problem that will also be regarded as a reasonable and honourable solution to the Palestine nation. 
Otherwise there will be more terrorist attacks all over the world in the future. 
Violence will undoubtedly produce more violence. 
Since a military action against Afghanistan most certainly will create only more hate against the US in the Muslim world, bombing Afghanistan will only result in more terrorist attacks in the future. 
Therefore the solution to the Taliban problem and Usama bin Laden is not a military one but a political one.
","	Just a few years ago I felt quite confident in my knowledge in English. 
I had read English in school since I was ten years old and I had travelled quite a lot. 
I thought that I mastered the language pretty well. 
But what has happened since then? 
How have my skills in the English language developed during the last three years? 	
Starting with my skills in speaking, I must say that I have hardly spoken English since I left school. 
This is something that makes me feel nervous and insecure every time I try to speak English. 
I always want the words to come out right and to be able to speak fluently - and probably just because I want to so hard to speak properly, I tend to stumble instead. 
I often can't find the right words and I have a hard time trying to figure out how to put things. 
I seldom know whether what I say is grammatically correct or not.  
I like making speeches, though, and using the language - both Swedish and English - to express myself. 
Despite this fact, I get nervous. 
I think it's because I'm a bit shy, afraid to show other people what I can and can't do. 
I have overcome this fear pretty much when it comes to speaking in Swedish, so probably it's just a question of getting used to the English language. 
Another thing is my accent. 
When I was in the eight grade I was in London for a weekend. 
At that time people said to me that it sounded like if I was born in England, - no wonder -, I had learnt British English ""all my life"". 
Since then, though, I have spoken English to Germans, Americans and people of several other nationalities during competitions and trainingcamps abroad. 
On the television I have mostly heard American English. 
I guess I'm quite confused - do I speak American English or British English, (I hardly know the differences,) or is it something totally different? 	
Also when it comes to writing I feel that I have forgotten about how it's done. 
I have the same problems with finding words and with seeing the linguistic correctness as when I'm speaking. 
Of course I don't feel nervous in the same way, because I know that I can always stop to think and to look up words.  
I'm sure that one can easily see in my writing that I'm from Sweden. 
I have a tendency towards thinking in Swedish and then trying to translate my thoughts directly into English. 
That doesn't always turn out too well... 
To my advantages, though, I can say that I'm a fast learner, and that I usually don't think that spelling is a very big problem. 
Listening to and reading English are two skills that I have used a little bit, also during recent years. 
I haven't travelled much lately, but I often hear spoken English on the television.  
I think that both my listening and my reading abilities are rather satisfactory. 
(That is, of course, when the language isn't too advanced.) 
Even if I don't understand all of the words, I can usually see the context, and understand most of what is said or written.  	
In high school I studied the A and B-course in English as compressed courses, which means that we only studied English for the three first terms in high school. 
I really think that one learns the language better if it's taken continuously during the whole three years of education. 
You need some time to digest the information and to practice the language for a longer period of time. 
The way we did it I felt that when I graduated I had almost forgotten ever reading English. 
I think that this is one thing that have affected my knowledge in English (words for an example) a bit negatively, compared with how it would be if I had read it for all three years. 	
To sum up I can say that what I need is to learn more words and grammar, to read and speak a lot, to get more secure, - in short terms; to practice. 
And I guess that practice is what I'm going to get this term, while reading English A1 at Uppsala University.
",False
" EVALUATION  It is pretty ironic when you think about it - me, being interested enough in another language to study it at university level. 
I mean, as a child I was, without exaggerating, AFRAID of people who spoke a language that was different from mine. 
There was this Finnish girl on our block and every time she tried to say something to me in her mother tongue I would run away! 
Despite this, here I am now, half an eternity later, studying languages, devoting this particular semester to English. ost people's first experience of a foreign language, at least if it occurs at a very early age, is listening to it. 
This applies to me when it comes to English. 
Records were played in our home when I was a kid, and I managed to memorize the lyrics as foreign sounds, or as thousands of different phonemes if you wish, that meant nothing to me at the time. 
Today when I hear the same music, I notice that I still remember those sounds but now as meaningful words and I can therefore sing along! 
This I find rather amazing. 
I guess this means that I am fairly good at listening.  
Having spoken about singing (something, which I enjoy very much by the way) I would like to move on to (speaking about speaking"". 
I would say I have always been good at copying the way in which other people speak. 
When it comes to choosing between British and American English, besides one or the other being what you hear more often, it is sometimes a wannabe thing. 
My first idol of any kind (and of course in my case it was a musician) was American, which, I would say, naturally led to my wanting to speak that way too. 
But then how well you speak the English language does not necessarily depend on how well you know its structure or how many words you know. 
If you have difficulty in expressing yourself in your own mother tongue you surely will not do any better in English. 
I actually feel that I lack certain skills here. 
Is there a way of making your brain work faster? 
Reading the lyrics of musicians and reading an English book are two things that are worlds apart. 
Although it certainly depends on what kind of book we are talking about. 
But in general the English language is a very formal one compared to Swedish, whether it comes to politics or anything else. 
However, I am usually not intimidated by an English (well, I shouldn't say English really, it could, for example, be an American one too) text as I normally manage to get a good grip of its context. 
What does bother me a bit is not having the time to look up the meaning of every word that I am uncertain of. 
I am the sort of person that would like to be able to do just that, which might just be a case of my having high demands on myself. 
The only time you really have to know all the words that are being used is when you write something on your own. 
My experience is that writing was not being practised enough in my Swedish (upper secondary) school, with the emphasis on practised. 
When it did happen the teacher's attitude was something like: (Now you are going to write an essay, if it's good, good for you, if not - too bad!"" 
You never really got to work on your skills. 
So the question is, am I good at writing when it comes to the English language or not? 
That remains to be seen now that I am attending a university course in the subject. 
If my skills are not sufficient, now would be the chance for me to improve them. 
Now I have (said my piece"" about how I feel about my English, that is, how well I am able to use different aspects of it. 
My conclusion that I manage handling those parts the best, whose existance other people have created for me, that is, listening to what other people say as well as reading what they wrote, probably says something about how much (or rather how little) school teaches you to practise your own skills, speaking and writing. 
But, to those to whom this may not sound all too optimistic I would like to say: Don't worry, just keep playing that favourite music of yours and you will learn!
","When I went to school, I was especially interested in learning foreign languages. 
In upper secondary school I took every opportunity and studied English, French, German, Latin and Italian. 
The language that I had problems with though, was English. 
I liked it, but I began to think that there were too many words. 
In upper secondary school you also are supposed to know many words, since you then have studied English for such a long time. 
But I couldn't handle them.  	 
For about two and a half years ago now I finished school and had at that time studied English regularly for nine years. 
Since then I have read some English books, but unfortunately not spoken many words in English. 
This essay is about my present skills in this complex, but rather fascinating language. 	 
Spontaneous speaking is one of my weaknesses. 
I don't have a big vocabulary and when I open my mouth I often get stuck at words and find it hard to find a new way out. 
Sometimes I can't think any more. 
So above all I'm nervous about speaking. 
I feel that I'm not used to speak and I feel rather unexperienced. 
I haven't been in a country where English is spoken for more than a few days and there been forced to speak, which must be so useful. 
In school when you spoke you often read the words from a paper. 
So I am uncertain of speaking, and psychologically most uncertain when many people are listening and I have to speak about something I don't know much about. 
That problem is connected with my personality too. 
I think I can pronounce most of the words right though, and get my English to sound quite well. 
I'm good at phonetics but maybe it mostly depends on that I'm good at imitating other languages.  	 
The other communicative skill - writing - suits me better. 
It differs from talking as you can take your time and reflect over the grammatical construction of a sentence and look up the difficult words. 
I have always found it amusing to write in English. 
I get quite careful when I'm writing and I want the text to be grammatically correct. 
I have always been one of the few who think that grammar is fun. 
But I also get uncertain rather often and have to guess, especially about prepositions and word order. 
I think that I can count spelling as one of my strengths too. 	 
As I don't have a big vocabulary, I'm a slow reader. 
Always when I'm reading I stop and think about that there are so many words that I don't understand. 
But actually you don't have to understand every word. 
If I just concentrate and exert myself I use to understand the whole. 
Some words I also understand with help of the context.  	 
I have realised that it's just to keep on reading. 
Words come back and finally you understand them. 
If I would look up all those words, that I don't understand, I would forget what the text was all about. 
And that is something important when you're reading, I suppose. 
But when I find the text especially interesting I use the dictionary a lot. 
Words that seem important and words that keep coming back I also use to look up. 	 
When you listen, you can't stop the person who's talking in the middle of a sentence to look up words though. 
Then it's just to concentrate, to look like you understand and nod. 
(Or shake your head if the person begins to look strange at you.) 
I often feel rather stupid. 
If a person speaks just a little unclear or fast for example, I get problem to distinguish the words. 
Also words that I really know run into each other and I don't catch them. 
And when I get stuck at some words, I sometimes stop listening. 
Then I don't get the point of course. 
American English is also harder to understand than British English I think.  	 
Now it seems like I only have problems with understanding spoken English, but actually I do understand most of what people are saying. 
And if I just continue to listen, read, speak and write, I can only get better.
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